Reader's Choice

Stronia. Texas (Houghton Mifflin, 2 vols., $10.00) a Texas businessman’s contrbution to gigantism in the American novel — is neither very good nor very bad: the most notable thing about it is that it is very, very long. It runs to 840,000 words, whirh makes it the longest American novel ever published. It is almost twice as long as Gone with the Wind one and one-half times as long as War and Peace, and slightly longer than the Old and New Testaments combined. The author, Madison Cooper, took all of the correspondence courses in creative writing offered by Columbia University, and then devoted eleven years to the composition of his magnum opus.

Mr. Cooper has chronicled the happenings in a small town in Texas from 1900 to 1921. Sironia’s life is closely knit but, from the social standpoint, rigidly stratified, The town is in effect ruled by the. “Hill Families,” the descendants of its founders. Their poor relations rank as second-string nobility. All the other whites, however substantial their professional place in the community, remain “outsiders.” To the Hill Families, birth is what counts most in life. Skeletons rattle in their cupboards, scandals continue to occur, fortunes shrivel — but nothing is allowed to diminish family pride. This family pride, which forbids a Haydn, a fbaxton, or a Storrow to marry an outsider, is the central mol it in most of the novel’s many dramas.

The author unquestionably has an exceptionnlly vigorous narrative gift his interminable slorv just keeps rolling busily along: and his characterizations, though not notable for depth or finesse, usuallv have a solid reality about them. The net result is a huge canvas of small-town life done wit h a great wealth of vivid observation, but not with any real literary distinction.

Those who agree fervently enough with Somerset Maugham that the modern novel has become too philosophic, too psychological, too namby-pamby in the storytelling department, may possibly find their heart s desire in Sironia, Texas. They will certainly find in it gobs and gobs of unadulterated narrative.

Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence (Knopf, $5.00) is an intriguing, in parts brilliantly entertaining, volume. Put as Shaw himself observed, the letters do not give one a very precise idea of what his “idyll with the great actress was like; and I do not simply mean whether or not they were lovers (the evidence suggests that they were not).

This is a ease in which the reader would benefit from all the supplementary information he could get, and it seems to me that the editor of ihe correspondence, Alan Dent, has done an unsatisfactory job. His preface is skimpy and coyly avoids discussing Shaw’s personal relationship with Stella Campbell. His explanatory notes are annoyingly inadequate on a number of points—they do not oven make it clear whether Shaw and Mrs. rampbell saw relatively little of each other or whether they spent a great deal of time together.

The bulk of the letters they peter out in 1989, a year before Mrs. Campbells death—date from 1912, when the actress was forty-seven and just past the crest of her career; and Shaw, at fifty-nine, was in the ascendant as a world celebrity. In September, 1912, Shaw wrote to Ellen Terry that he had gone to read Pygmalion to Mrs. Campbell — “and, as I am a living man, fell head over ears in love with her in thirty seconds.”Many-years later, Mrs. Campbell reproached him with never having loved her. and said that her tender nickname for him. “Joey,”represented “the traged’ of baffled sincerity.”How much of sincerity and how much of play-acting there was on Shaw’s part remains an elusive puzzle.

The first letter in which Shaw speaks of adoring, ends wit h the ineffable remark: “ I must now go and read this to Charlotte [Mrs. Shaw]. My love affairs are her unfailing amusement.” There are indications that the love affair, such as it was, ran heavily to talk. Shaw begins one of his letters: “If looked into your eyes without, speaking for two minutes . . . I might see heaven,”and he adds in parent hesis— ”Silent for twoo minutes with an audience of even one! impossible . . . And Mrs. Campbell writes, at the mosl fervent period in their relationship: “Oli dear me it’s too late to do anything but arrepf you and love you —but when you were quite a little hoy somebody ought to have said ‘ hush “ just once.”

The letters preceding Mrs. Campbell’s second marriage in 1914 refer to her as “adoredest,”“O beautiful Illustrious,” and once as “the woman I still love beyond all reason.”but all in all, they are probably the most unromantic love letters ever wrillon. It would be possible to cull from Shaw’s part of the correspondence a sparkling little handlook on dramaturgy and theatrical management, but the tender sentiments expressed would hardly fill two pages.

In her latter years, Mrs. Campbell was desperately in need of money, and her letlers have a great deal of pathos. Shaw’s, in this period, seem rather unfeeling and occasionally cruel. The heart of the matter, I think, is that for Shaw intellect was his one and only grande passion — in the most literal sense. He was a man, one suspects, to whom no woman could be as interesting as an idea.

The fame of G.B.S. as a playwright has rather obscured the fact that in the Standard Edition of his works there are nineteen volumes of prose (exclusive of the play prefaces) as against fourteen of drama. An anthology of Shaw’s prose writings has been compiled by Diarmuid Russell — The Selected Prose of Bernard Shaw (Dodd, Mead, $6.50) — and it is an eminently worth-while enterprise.

Shaw’s passion for the intellect, coupled with the fact that he was a considerable artist, gives great energy and brightness to his prose, even where his ideas have lost much of their original impact. Of course, in a 1000-page collection such as this, each reader is bound to find material which seems to him less memorable than it did to the anthologist. I can’t share Mr. Russell’s view that Shaw’s writings on Socialism still constitute a first-rate presentation of the Socialist case — Shaw ‘s economics are both creaky and dated. The extracts from two of Shaw’s five novels are of interest mainly in that they show how wooden and tiresomely preachy a novelist Shaw remained throughout the nine years he devoted to fiction writing. But in the rest of the omnibus, there is no end of lively stuff — 100 pages of autobiographical pieces; spirited and unconventional music criticism; a sizable section on the theater; and a number of Shaw’s “Pen Portraits.”

Jay Monaghan’s Lincoln Bibliography, 1830-1939 lists 3958 books and pumphlets written about Lincoln, and the output has shown no sign of diminishing — in the past few weeks alone, live new Lincoln titles have come my way. The astounding thing is that, though many more distinguished books have been written about Lincoln than about any other American, there has been no outstand ing single-volume biography since Lord Charnwood’s, which dates back to 1917; and in the thirty-five-year interval, research has unearthed a great deal of new material.

This queer deficiency has now been remedied by Benjamin P. Thomas, whose compact Abraham Lincoln (Knopf, $5.75) incorporates all the recent findings of Lincoln scholars. Mr. Thomas, formerly executive secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association and the author of several specialized books on Lincoln, has been immersed in Lincoln studies for the past two decades. His book is authoritative— a whole posse of Lincoln specialists have glowingly endorsed it: and at the same time it is highly readable, forceful in its portraiture, and comprehensive. The author has managed to assimilate vast knowledge without letting it blunt his sense of which, among thousands of lesser details, are of the greatest interest. His handling of great and complex issues, despite the necessity for compression, is scrupulous and well-balanced.

Perhaps the greatest merit of his book is that he has by and large resisted the twin infections to which even scholars are sometimes prone when writing about national heroes — cant and hero-worship. Mr. Thomas has served the general reader so well that his book seems destined to remain the standard one-volume biography of Lincoln for quite some time to come.

Stefan Lorant’s l.incoln, “A Picture Story of His Life (Harper, $6.00), may well remain the definitive pictorial biography ol Lincoln. Mr. Lorant is a master in this field, and his publishers have done a line job of bookmaking. The 500 illustrations include all of the known photographs of Lincoln; photographs of his family, associates, and important contemporaries; photographs of where he lived and of a wide assortment of Lincoln documents; and magazine sketches describing events in his life. The pictures have been imaginatively grouped, and the expert combining of pictures with a-substantial text results in a dynamic narrative.

Impressions of Lincoln and the Civil War (Random House, $2.75) is an unusual and entertaining addition, only recently discovered, to the eyewitness literature on Lincoln. It consists of the news-letters which I InMarquis Adolphe de Chambrun, a visiting Frenchman who became an ardent partisan of the North, wrote to his wife from Washington in 1865. The oilier two new Lincoln items are major works of scholarship which only a specialist can properly discuss. Lincoln Finds a General (Macmillan. $7.50) — the third volume of Kenneth P. Williams’s richly detailed study of the Civil War — turns back to the opening of the conflict and focuses on Grant’s first year in the West. J. G. Randall’s Lincoln the President, Vol. III: “Midstream” (Dodd, Mead, $7.50) is a close-up of a critical year in Lincoln’s career, 1863, and devotes special attention to his foreign policy.

André Gide’s Madeleine (Knopf, $3.00) — originally entitled Et Nunc Maud in Te and not released to the French public until after Gide’s death — illuminates the one area of his life about which he was reticent: his relationship with his wife, Madeleine Rondeaux, referred to in the Journals as “Em.” This small book, translated by Justin ’Brien, consists of an essay written shortly after Madame Gide’s death and of passages concerning, her which Gide withheld from the published editions of the Journals. In his most vibrant prose and with an eloquent directness, Gide unfolds a strange and tragic story.

Though knowing himself to be homosexual, the young Gide married his cousin, for whom he had long felt an ethereal love, naïvely imagining that their union would be all the more beautiful for being divorced from the flesh. It was some time before he fully understood how cruelly he had warped her life; she herself never once mentioned his anomaly. The extraordinary thing is that between Gide and his wife—Gide who never stopped explaining himself to the world — there was “never the slightest explanation.”

The sexual question is but one facet of the drama of Gide’s relationship with his wife, who, it now becomes clear, stood at the center of his life and work in a way that was fraught with terrible ironies. The girl Gide married flawlessly personified those qualities which he fell compelled to break with in order to be true to his “real” self: she was selfeffacing, puritanical, orthodox in her piety, and profoundly respectful of convention. Gide was aware — t hough she made no complaints or reproaches — that every step in his development wounded her deeply. He could not alter his course; and. persisting in it, he could not even try to convince her that he loved her with the same intensity. With anguish he saw her, little by little, detaching herself from the interests they had ardent ly shared until finally she detached herself from him completely and withdrew into aloof religiosity.

As one reads these poignant pages, at once self-accusing and self-excusing, it becomes easier to understand Gide’s tormenting love for his wife and her importance to him. The singularity of this great nonconformist was that, while preaching revolt and self-assertion, he remained immensely attracted to the idea of selfloss and submission to authority. Madeleine represented the voice in the Gidian dialogue which censures the “immoralist” - hero and warns that untrammeled freedom breeds defeat; she represented to Gide, in an idealized form, a part of himself. When, in November, 1918, she burned all of his letters to her, what grieved Gide so terribly was the thought: “It is the best of me that, disappears; and it will no longer counterbalance the worst.” As Justin ’Brien says in his Introduction: “Throughout his life his wife appeared to Gide as his refuge, his anchor to windward, his link with tradition, his protection against everything in himself that he feared. . . .”

The state of dialogue in which Gide lived is also curiously illustrated in The Correspondence of André Gide and Paul Claudel (Pantheon, $4.00), extracts from which appear in this month’s Atlantic. The correspondence (translated by John Russell) stretches from 1899 to 1926. A good deal of it deals with literary matters, but Claudel’s efforts to bring Gide into the Catholic Church form a sustained leitmotif.

It is clear from several tart entries in Gide’s Journals, which contrast with the effusiveness of his letters, that there was much in Claudel’s personality that Gide found repellent. What attracted Gide and had a powerful impact on him was the fervor and intransigence of Claudel’s faith. The restless Protestant and live rigid Catholic had a common obsession: that il was an absolute duty to seek virtue.

Robert Mallet’s Introduction, though an elegant and informative one, overplays slightly the issue of conversion in Gide’s life. During the years in which this issue periodically recurred, Gide was, one must remember, continuously venturing further afield into audacious nonconformity — traveling away from everything that Claudel stood for. Unquestionably, Gide was at times greatly stirred by Claudellauck’l, but his unshakable conviction that each man must seek virtue according to his own lights always kept him at a certain distance from Catholicism. In fact, there was almost certainly an element which might, be called coquetterie in Gide’s relations with Claudel: one suspects that he rat her enjoyed having so formidable a missionary battling for his soul.

The distance which separates André Gide from Katherine Anne Porter may seem prodigious, but Miss Porter s new book, I he Days Before (Harcourt, Brace, $4.00) — a collection of her art ides writtten during the past thirty years — reveals an artistic credo which, on certain points, has striking similarities to Gide’s. In the Foreword, Miss Porter says she hopes the reader will find in these diversified articles the “connective tissue of a continuous central . . . preoccupation.“ This central preoccupation appears to be “the passion for individual expression without hypocrisy.”The artist, she indicates, should reach for the inner truth that is personal and particular to him — that is embedded in reality as he knows it. Her glowing tribute to her model artist, Virginia Woolf, concludes: “She was what the true believers have always called a heretie. . . . She lived in the naturalness of her vocation.”

True art, Miss Porter remarks in her essay on Willa Cat her, is “provincial” in the most literal sense in that it must have a province, a time and a place. And for that reason, she admires artists who have a strong sense of the importance of place; it keeps them closer to personal reality. “All the things I write of,” she says, “I have known and they are real to me.”

I have put last things first and have spoken of the “central preoccupation, because with this “connective tissue” one sees consistency and design in what might seem to be a potpourri, but actually comes close to being a self-portrait.

In the first section, there are twelve critical essays in which Miss Porter reveals herself obliquely in her evaluations. The article on Ezra Pound, while it brings out his aberrations, shows that to Miss Porter the crucial fact is his artistic perfectionism; she views him with sympathy because he was “a God-sent disturber of the peace in the arts, the one department of human life where peace is fatal.” The first two books of Gertrude Stein elicit a favorable essay because they seem fresh, personal, and (to use Miss Stein’s phrase) “everybody is a real one.” Years later, Miss Porter writes a long, elegantly gossipy article, which says with infinite wit that Miss Stein, wishing to play the Genius, has deluded herself into monstrous selfindulgence. Without a trace of violence, it does to Miss Stein’s literary pretensions what the executioner’s crowbar did to the victim broken on the wheel. There are also pieces on Henry James, Eudora Welly, Katherine Mansfield, and others.

In the second section — “Personal and Particular” — Miss Porter speaks to us directly. This panel includes Three Statements About Writing; a “Portrait of the Old South” from which she hails, and other articles on places; and two discussions of the heaven and hell of marriage.

In the final section, “Mexican,” Miss Porter writes about a people whose feeling for art she finds “cosanguine with my own,” and whose struggles for freedom have stirred her.

It is common knowledge that Miss Porter is a beautiful writer, but in the intervals between her books, one is apt to forget what an extraordinarily fine art ist she is. In these articles, there is an intelligence that races along; there is sanity, charm, and a love of the world. I have read much of the book twice, and I expect to reread much of it again.

Edmund Wilson’s The Shores of Light (Farrar, Straus & Young, $6.50) differs somewhat in intent from Classics and Commercials, which reproduced the best of his literary articles of the forties. His aim, now, is to present “a kind of panorama of the books and the ideas, the movements and the literary life, of a period that was very much livelier . . . than ... the forties.” To this end, he has reprinted youthful stuff whose interest is that it is representative of its time, and he has included dialogues, satires, short sketches, personal letters and articles that do not deal with writing. The resulting collection of around one hundred pieces — though it is the kind of book one is apt to pick and choose from rather than march straight through — is of broader interest, and covers more exciting ground, than Classics and Commercials.

The one element which by and large dees not, I feel, stand up too well is the humorous material, possibly because humor of the highbrow sort is so intimately bound up with the Zeitgeist. The non literary items are about such varied matters as Houdini; the Burlesque shows at the National Winter Garden; a rowdy week-end with the Scott Fitzgeralds; or the need “to take Communism away from the Communists” — for a time Wilson was a highly unorthodox revolutionary who wanted American liberals to salvage the Communist ideal from the contamination of Marxist doctrine and Stalinist strategy.

The hard core of the book is, of course, the literary criticism; and it is remarkable how consistently well Wilson called his shots. He recognized instantly the talent of an unknown apprentice called Hemingway. He judiciously defended Lady Chatterley’s Lover, discovered André Malraux; forcefully defined the strength and weakness of Fitzgerald, O’Neill, and Dos Passos. As an epilogue, he signs off* with the very fine memoir he wrote of Edna St. Vincent Millay after her death.

Mr. Wilson’s criticism through three decades has now been re-exposed in book form, and it brings home the fact that today he occupies a unique position in the literary scene. There are critics more imposing than Wilson, but I know of no other who for thirty years has continuously turned out criticism that is both informed by the authority of a wide culture and at the same time is lucid and readable. Wilson’s work, moreover, projects an exhilarating sense that he really cares, disinterestedly, about literature; and he seizes every opportunity to hit out at literary hueksterism. His favorite term of praise is one that he himself lias surely earned — “honorably independent.”