Reader's Choice

IN an essay on Shakespeare, Walter Bagehot, quoting an account of hare-hunting in Venus and Adonis, observes: “It is absurd to say that we know nothing about the man who wrote that: we know that he had been after a hare.” This hazardous line of reasoning informs a little book on Shakespeare by Alfred Duff cooper, who sets out to prove that Shakespeare served as a soldier in the Low Countries under the Earl of Leicester in 1585, and that he rose to the rank of Sergeant. Deduction of the same order leads William Bliss — a gentleman endowed with awesome erudition and a capricious imagination — to advance (he contentions that Shakespeare, at the age of thirteen, sailed around the world with Drake; that later he made a trading voyage to the Mediterranean, was shipwrecked in the Gulf of Trieste, and was taken by his rescuers to Venice; that he must have committed several murders; and that he did not, as traditionally supposed, earn his living as an actor (“The speech of Hamlet to the players is not the speech of an actor; it is the speech of an author whose withers have been wrung by hearing his lines mouthed”). A third new book about Shakespeare, by Marchette Chute — a refreshingly down-to-earth biographer — pictures him as a working member of the London theater throughout most of his life; and, I might add, makes no mention of soldiering or foreign travel.

Miss Chute’s Shakespeare of London (Dutton, $4.00), a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, differs from other biographies in that it is based solely on the documents of Shakespeare’s time: the latest source material used dates back to the second decade after Shakespeare’s death, and no biographical deductions are made on the basis of “internal evidence” within the plays. The book is presented as “an attempt to show William Shakespeare as his contemporaries saw him, rather than as the legendary figure he has become since . . . an attempt at a life-sized portrait.”

This estimable venture has been conscientiously executed and achieves very worth-while results, but I can’t quite subscribe to John Mason Brown’s comment on the jacket: “She captures a man and brings him back alive.” No biographer can hope to play Frank Buck to William Shakespeare: the tracks he left behind, though not as scarce as commonly supposed, are far from sufficient for anyone to bring back to us the living man. Wliat Miss Chute does bring to life in multifarious detail is not Shakespeare of London but the London of Shakespeare — its sights and sounds; its religious outlook, laws and mores; its court; its brutal amusements; its reading tastes (anthologies and self-help books were the favorites); and, above all, its immensely vital world of the theater. Fitted into this painstakingly recreated background, Shakespeare’s career certainly takes shape in clearer perspeetive.

Whether any of Miss Chute’s biographical facts will be new to Shakespearean scholars I cannot judge; the point is a minor one, since this is clearly a book written for the general reader. It tells us a good deal about Shakespeare’s family and his father’s rise to gentility. It weaves into a connected story the fragmentary data about Shakespeare’s long and close association with Burbage s eompany. and enables us to glimpse the considerable standing he enjoyed in London and, in later years, in Stratford. It documents his numerous investments in real estate, which show that he became decidedly affluent. Among the clues to Shakespeare’s character, perhaps the most substantial are the indications that he was a careful, judicious man in business matters; his will is one of the most meticulous of the period.

In a brief appendix on the Sonnets, Miss Chute concludes as Leslie Hotson did in his article in the Deeember Atlantic—that the rigid social distinctions of the time make it inconceivable that the publisher’s dedication to “Mr. W. H.” should refer to the Karls of Pembroke or Southampton (Miss Chute has no candidates). A second appendix attacks various Shakespearean legends, among them the story that when first he came to London, ho held horses for the customers outside the theaters; and the persistent legend that he left Stratford because of trouble over deer-poaching—Duff Cooper suggests that this is what caused him to join the army.

Miss Chute’s diligent curiosity and solid good sense are not matched by any distinction of style; and, while I’m no zealot on the subject of fool - notes, I found it disconcerting to encounter so many quotations wandering around unidentified. All in all, though, Shakespeare of London is a valuable and absorbing chronicle. It should please and enlighten a great many readers.

William Bliss’s book, a ehoiee exemplar of the fancy speculations in which Shakespearean commentators have indulged, is whimsically entitled The Real Shakespeare: A Counterblast to Commentators (Macmillan, $3.00); and it purports to rescue its subject from the extravagances in which he has been engulfed.

I have already noted some of the extravagant claims made in the course of Mr. Bliss’s rescue operation; the reasoning behind them is ingenious and plausible bill, to my mind, highly inconclusive. The book is written in the form of a dialogue between the author and his learned Doppelganger Eugeni us, both of whom are given to a pedantic jocularity which I found inordinately painful.

Mr. Bliss’s intellectual virtuosity enables him to deduce with confidence the games that Shakespeare played as a boy; bis taste in women: bis foreign travels and a good many other matters, such as the fact that in a less bigoted age he would have been a practicing Catholic, This author unquestionably captures a man and, quite literally, brings him back alive in the last chapter, attired “in Elizabethan doublet and hose, very pointdevice, and with lace about the neck.

1 would lay ten to one that bis man is not “the real Shakespeare.”

Alfred Duff Cooper’sSergeant Shakespeare (Viking, $2.50) is likewise an exercise in ingenious speculation, which ends, however, on the disarming note: “I have almost convinced myself.” The author, a former British Cabinet Minister — be has been said, by the way, to be a better scholar than politician —credits Shakespeare with a year of campaign service across the Channel, and adduces some amusing arguments to prove that he must have been a Sergeant. Duff Cooper’s book, which touches on several other points about Shakespeare, is a rather engaging if unsubstantial item.

In a long essay on writ mg that prefaces his latest collection of short stories— The Assyrian (Hareourt, brace, $8.50) — William Saroyan talks about taking chances and playing it safe. “To do good writing,”he says, “is the easiest thing in the world for a writer provided he is willing or able to stay firmly located, or in other words play safe. . . . The more a niiin grows, the more he tries to grow . . . the more difficult it becomes for him to do work that satisfies him.” Another writer who belongs among the risk-takers is Green’s compatriot, Rex Warner, whose boldly imaginalive novels— The Wild Goose Chase, The Professor, The Aerodrome — have tackled the largest issues of the past two decades. Warner’s last book dramatized the pragmatic advantages of the philosophy of power and its terrible perversion of human life. In Men of Stones (Lippincott, $2.75), Warner again focuses on the authoritarian idea, but now the argument advances further into theology.

The argument, in effect, is that arrested development is conducive to good writing, a notion which — as evidenced by Saroyan’s career and that of several other prominent American writers — may be valid in the short run but eventually exacts severe penalties. for even Saroyan has found it impossible to arrest development indefinitely; and, having too long remained “located” as the mindless young man on the flying trapeze, at lorly-two he is thoroughly unsettled by the first, belated twinges of maturity. Saroyan is now tired of playing safe and is clearly troubled about his writing.

He made his name, of course, as a writer who took chances, an innovator. Into the heavy atmosphere of the mid-thirties, he projected an exuberant vision of life, a tender, spontaneous gaiety, and a highly personal style. But his outlook hardened, rather rapidly, into a formula. And as time went by, the formula began to look increasingly juvenile and sentimental; at its worst, intolerably “cute.”In nine of the ten stories in this volume, Saroyan tells us, he played safe, stuck to the formula. Seven of the nine, however, remained unsold and it’s easy to see why: they just aren’t part ieularly good. Two or three, especially “The Parsley Harden,” show pleasant traces of Saroyan’s special gifts, and that’s about the best I can say.

The trouble with writers who play safe too long is that when they got ambition, when they reach out for what Saroyan calls “the tough stuff,” they aren’t equipped to cope with it meaningfully. John O’Hara’s A Huge to Live was a case in point. Applied to a large canvas, his patented toughguy truculence — effective over a limited range betrayed its poverty of mind and imagination, its tastelessness and essential naïveté.

Naïveté is also Saroyan’s undoing in the one story in The Assyrian — a novelette with that title—which, as he puts it, “takes a real chance.” The Assyrian is a study of a famous, fifty-year-old American writer of Assyrian descent — boozy, unsuccessful in his third marriage, and generally washed up — who is shown gambling away his last dollars in Lisbon and is left boarding a plane for the land of his forefathers, knowing that his heart is ready to give out. The tale has Its good points, but the “tough stuff” in it — the writer’s attempt to understand himself and the world Is not one of t hem. 11 is reflections are for the most part a banal mixture of glib cynicism, sentimentality, and sententious nothings, such as: “He knew they (the intelligent posers) had failed even more profoundly; he did not feel superior; and he did not feel pity for them; he simply felt that it was all right, they were all right.”When his truck overturns on the bend of a mountain, the Lieutenant decides to look for a short cut back to camp through the jungle and gets lost. Emerging into a clearing, he comes upon a young native girl bathing in a pool. He is a conqueror, a signore, and there is no obstacle to his desire. Profoundly stirred by the girl’s beauty and primitivism, he lingers with Mariam a second night, during which, firing at a prowling shadow, he hits her sleeping body. If he is found by the natives beside the dying girl, they will surely kill him: to take her to an Italian hospital would involve him in serious trouble. and, anyhow, the wound is clearly fatal. He shoots her through the head, carefully buries her, and goes back to camp.

One novelist who has always taken risks is the English writer Henry Green. Each of his eight novels has been a bold departure from its predecessors, and most of them have been utterly unlike anything else being written. First published in this country at the end of the twenties and then lost sight of, Ilenry Green — in private life Henry Vincent Yorke, a very successful businessman — was reintroduced last fall with Loving, one of the handsomest literary products of 1949. Now we are offered a new Green novel with, as always, a oneword title, in this case a startling one: Nothing (Viking, $3.00). Green modestly describes the book as “a frivolous comedy of manners,” and certainly it is the least ambitious of his works: the lightest and the nearest to being conventional in its plotting and subject matter. I had better add right here that it seems to me an unqualified success, an entrancing performance that should win Henry Green new readers.

Loosely speaking, Nothing might be described as a sequel to the sociological reports authored by such connoisseurs of Mayfair as Michael Arlen, Noel Coward, and Evelyn Waugh. Henry Green has turned an acute and mischievous eye on young love and middle-aged liaisons in the Mayfair of 1348, where the impoverished rich can only just afford such essentials as luncheons at the Ritz, and can’t do much to help out their sons and daughters who, coming of age under Socialism, have gone to work as drudges in the bureaucracy. With delicate irony, Green registers the accompanying changes in the moral climate, and these changes are decidedly piquant.

Now the older generation, in the eyes of its offspring, is frivolous, selfish, and “absolutely unbridled" about sex. The young people are earnest, public-spirited, and distinctly prudish. They are also loyal to their filial responsibilities, though frequently disgusted by their elders’ disheveled morals. “They ought to be liquidated. Every one of our parents’ generation,” exclaims a twentyone-year-old, otherwise devoted to his mother. “They’re wicked . . . they’re rotten to the core.” His mother, for her part, worries about her son’s high-principled attitude toward young women, and before leaving for a week-end brazenly presses him to take advantage of her empty house and stock of Chianti.

The plot is one that might well have, been devised by Noel Coward, but Green’s handling of it is further proof that here is an authentic artist with an altogether distinctive touch. John Pom fret, a widower of forty-five, is the lover of Liz Jennings, a goodlooking spinster of twenty-nine. Jane Weatherby, a widow who once had a considerable love affair with Pomfret. is now in possession of Dick Abbot, a Blimpish type susceptible to choking fits in moments of deep feeling. John’s daughter, Mary, and Jane’s son, Philip, who work in the same office, fall in love and become engaged. At this point Mrs. Weatherby — a matron whose fluttery speech belies her guile — starts to play an extremely devious hand, and plays it with such finesse that by barely noticeable stages all of the amorous relationships are drastically revised.

In studies of the previous era, it was customary for the bright young things to win the day—often, admittedly, at the cost of self-destruction. But in this, too, times seem to have changed: Philip and Mary are the losers, and the “wicked" parents are left cozily and complacently entwined in each other’s arms.

Of course, none of this really conveys the book’s excellence, which lies in the freshness and “rightness” of Green’s vision — he simultaneously surprises and convinces — in the subtlety of humor which stems from this vision and the unfailing felicity of the writing. Green’s gift for description is much less in evidence here than in Loving, but the dialogue is marvelously amusing. The novel’s surface ripples throughout with comedy that is never mere verbal virtuosity. Comedy that is intimately bound up with the revelation of character.

This politico-religious novel, so immensely of our time, is attired in the vestments of weird melodrama. The setting is an island prison of an unnamed European country which has just emerged from civil war; and the novel’s dominant figure is the prison Governor, a satanic, spellbinding genius who aspires to “organize the Good Life throughout the world” by making himself a new incarnation of God. “The Good Life, the good citizen,” he says, “are byproducts of faith,” but faith has been destroyed in the name of progress, leaving man burdened with uncertainty and guilt — “Mankind is happy only in submission to a superior power.” Like the executioner in Kafka’s story. The Penal Colony, the Governor argues that men worship “precisely that which is not bound down to standards of thought and behavior which are familiar to them.” By a program of arbitrary cruelty and arbitrary benevolence, he has succeeded, before the novel opens, in becoming God to his prisoners. And now he is almost ready to set this hand of disciples free to proselytize throughout the world.

The story gets under way with the arrival on the island of Mr. Goat, a member of a foreign cultural mission, who has been invited to stage a performance of King Lear by the prisoners, and is swept into a passionate love affair with the Governor’s wife. Halfway through the book, Warner introduces the Governor’s younger brother, Marcus, who, after abominable experiences in a foreign concentration camp, returns to his homeland a fearless mystic in the company of the worldly Captain Nicholas, an epicurean humanist. Warner’s comment on these various viewpoints is articulated in a chain of fantastic and horrifying events, which it wouldn’t be fair to go into.

If I understand the book rightly, il dramatizes the belief that the source of evil is man’s ambition to be more than man, his hubris or overweening pride; that evil is inescapable; and that it is the ground stuff of philosophies of power —all of which looks rather like the doctrine of original sin. Warner has a good deal more to say which I won’t attempt to paraphrase, since the crux of a novel is not its ideas but the effectiveness of their symbolic presentation.

Men of Slones, I’m afraid, left me with awkwardly mixed feelings, The novel’s theme is arresting, its conception audacious, and it has stretches of brilliant argument, an undercurrent of excitement, and a powerfully suggested atmosphere of the bizarre. But the book is seriously flawed. High expectations are aroused in the first encounters with the Governor; then Warner loosens his grip by introducing, at mid-point, a considerable subplot centering on Marcus. And thereafter the book tends to become diffuse; its meaning is blurred by seeming irrelevancies. Granted this weakness, Men of Stones remains one of the more interesting of the recent novels.

The problem of evil also constitutes the “inner life” of an Italian novel. The Short Cut (Pellegrini & Cudahy, $3.00); here, however, the problem is not subjected to intellectual analysis but remains hauntingly implicit throughout —a felt presence, powerfully evoked by the novel’s sinister setting, the landscape of Ethiopia. This book by Ennio Flaiano, fluently translated by Stuart Hood, can be added to the list of superior titles which have reached us from Italy since the war. The time of the action is just after the conclusion of fighting in Ethiopia, and the story is pinpointed on a young Italian Lieutenant who finds himself projected into a nightmare sequence of crime.

From this starting point, Ennio Flaiano has fashioned an impassioned tale — saturated in terror, mystery, and hallucination — of a man who tries to escape from his guilt only to encounter it wherever he turns: in the person of an old man, with something of Mariam in his eyes, who seems to be following him; in the words of a doctor who casually alludes to miraculous recoveries from wounds that seem fatal; in the feel of a letter in his pocket from his sweetheart, which reminds him of another betrayal; and, most appallingly, in the appearance of a leprous-looking nodule on his hand, which convinces him that his crime has condemned him to a living death.

Wholly possessed by the bare idea of survival, he robs the man who befriends him, lays a death trap for a fellow officer, and then, when escape to Italy is within reach, he finds himself impelled to turn back and takes the short cut into the jungle. There he comes to accept his weakness and his guilt. Ready to forfeit his life, he eventually returns to camp to find that his terrible journey through Limbo has, finally, been “touched by grace.”

An Essay for Our Times (Knopf, $2.75) by H. Stuart Hughes, Associate Professor of History at Harvard and grandson of the late Chief Justice, fortifies a suspicion that’s been creeping up on me that, in ratiocinative works or “think pieces,”the density of sound thought is apt to vary in inverse ratio to the length — the shorter the book, the larger the yield. Mr. Hughes’s book—“a modest effort to situate our current dilemmas in their broader historical context” — runs to only 188 pages or roughly 47,000 words. The ground he manages to cover and the amount he manages to say are quite astonishing.

The book opens with a compact survey of the new irrationalist temper in thought and the growing doubts as to the survival of Western civilization: here the author discusses some of the main ideas of Spengler, Toynbee, Freud, Jung, and others. He then relates this concisely to the “nightmare” picture that emerges from the works of the novelists — Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Woolf, Mann, Sartre. Part II is political and deals with the transmutation of Marxism into Stalinism; the “tottering” of the center parties in Europe, especially France and Italy ; and the continuance of fascism “under new forms,” a topic (of) readily by-passed by political analysts nowadays. The third part is devoted to the position of the United States.

The prevalent belief that the baited Stales is moving in the direction of Socialism is sharply contradicted in Hughes’s analysis. He suggests that pretty soon the direction of both parties will be in the hands of “sophistieated ” (“ enlightened ”) conservatives. He stresses, too, the essential conservatism of U.S. union leadership: the tendency is for the leaders of business and labor to “reach mutually favorable agreements at the expense of the public.” The present relations between business, government, and the labor leaders, Hughes argues, represents a drift toward a kind of Corporatism.

In writing about Communism, Hughes reminds us of the fallacy of thinking of Communism as simply a Russian disease. It is one manifestation of the disease from which our society, too, is suffering: the Western and Orthodox (Russian) civilizations are now in what Toynbee has called the “time of troubles.” This is a sound enough point, but I feel that elsewhere, in his striving for objectivity, Mr. Hughes lends to be rather “soft” on the subject of Russian policy.

One of the most valuable aspects of this little book is that each topic is discussed in the widest possible (not simply the historical) context. Mr. Hughes is not just damning the politicians when he so tellingly remarks: “The characteristic statesman of today is a conscientious mediocrity crushed under the weight of responsibilities to which he feels himself unequal. In the place of thoughts, his public utterances offer pious hopes and sentimental generalities.” Hughes’s point is that knowledge has become so specialized in every field, and the pressure of daily affairs so great, that most people have given up the struggle to master the intellectual currents of the age. The lowering of university standards has further encouraged the trend toward mediocrity. Mr. Hughes concludes that a nation which must take the lead in world affairs needs special educational facilities for training an elite.