Reader's Choice

Far from the Customary Skies (Random House, $3.75) by Warren Eyster is a first novel, a war novel, and good on-both counts. Mr. Eyster served in the Navy, and writes of men aboard a destroyer with no intention beyond recording their reactions and adjustments to each other, the ship, and the sea.

The book begins with a training cruise on which the green hands are rattled by the loss of two practice torpedoes (“After all,” says the captain reasonably, “in battle we won’t chase torpedoes and put them back on the deck”), works through two years of action in the Pacific, a short, violent visit to California, and ends with the battle in which the Dreher goes down.

The men range from the professional Malone, a bad hat but a fine bos’n, down to Pogey Bait, incapable of tying knots and therefore hopeless. Most of them are good temporary sailors, rugged individuals who refuse to be altered by the Navy. Polock remains an inspired impresario and liar. Oklahoma continues to think like a farmer. Ham, the overconscientious intellectual, never gets the weight of the world off his back. A bad painter swears off art, and a man with a grievance takes to the bottle, but both these things could have happened ashore. Mr. Eyster has no truck with the theory that war obliterates or distorts human personality.

With no plot and no individual hero, the book is held together by Mr. Eyster’s ability to make every character and incident count. He does it with consistent skill. The battles are full of tension, a storm claws at the reader’s nerves as it does at the crew’s, and the midnight expedition in the whaleboat, with Malone and Ross quarreling over the wisdom of swimming in shark territory to cut loose a row of Japanese range markers, is a masterpiece of suspense. These are the big scenes, where the author has plenty of material to stir up excitement. It’s remarkable that there are no dead spots between them. The eternal poker games never lose their vitality. Mr. Eyster can make Oklahoma’s tirade on the uselessness of dictionaries positively absorbing.

Aside from his ability to evoke particular men in a specific setting, Mr. Eyster is notable for a resilient, widely sympathetic point of view. He likes sailors, officers, ships, the Navy, and the sea, in spite of their various defects, and while he cordially dislikes war, he bears it no romantic grudge. He has the sharp, uncensorious reporter’s eye, which gives to all of Far from the Customary Skies an exceptional persuasiveness and immediacy.

Richard Wright’s new novel, The Outsider (Harper, $3.95), is his first since Native Son, published thirteen years ago, and his first book of any kind since his autobiography came out in 1945. If anyone wonders how a writer manages to keep out of print for eight years, the answer is clear in The Outsider. Mr. Wright has been meditating, or rather brooding, on mankind and Western civilization. He doesn’t see much hope for either of them.

Mr. Wright’s conclusions on the nature of humanity and the future of society run piecemeal through his novel, involving a good deal of repetition and ramification. In simplified terms, he holds that science and industrial society, by destroying the restraining power of traditional religion, give men of sufficient courage the opportunity to feel, and act, as gods — that is to say, with complete moral irresponsibility. Since Mr. Wright also holds that man is a chronically terrified animal, and the condition of self-elected divinity is fearlessness, he does not foresee a world full of acting gods. The number of men capable of facing life entirely out of spiritual context will always be small and Mr. Wright believes that their activities will be directed either to the control of a totalitarian rank and file, well doped with noble-sounding slogans, or to the gratification of random impulse.

Understandably alarmed by his own reflections, Mr. Wright has undertaken in The Outsider to display what might be called ultimate twentieth-century man in action. Cross Damon is an outsider in every sense of the word. As a Negro he is outside the majority pattern of American life; as a shrewd, self-oentered cynic, he is outside the claims of family and friendship; as a casual atheist, he is outside the morality demanded, if not enforced, by religion. When a subway crash gives him the chance to be officially dead, he takes it, and gets outside even his own identity. There are no strings on Cross. Without being aware of his own state of mind, he descends on New York like a tiger on a new stretch of jungle.

There he becomes entangled with the other type of outsider, the men whose absolute freedom of conscience has focused on power over other men. They are, naturally, Communists, and the party has a hard time with Cross, suffering anxiety and the loss of several valuable members before getting the upper hand.

Cross is no gallant crusader against Communism. He refuses to accept systems, and Communism happens to be the system in his way at the moment. If Cross is a better man than his Communist victims, it is in a very slight degree. He comes to realize that godhood is uncomfortable and impractical. “Tell them not to come down this road” is his final comment on his career of impersonation, arson, and murder. Since the only other road Mr. Wright acknowledges is that of totalitarian politics, The Outsider may be fairly described as a pessimistic novel.

It is also a very disappointing novel, for the qualities of sympathy, directness, effective detail, and mordant humor which distinguished Mr. Wright’s earlier, more personal books seem to operate at cross-purposes in The Outsider. The best sections of the book arc dominated by one or another of these elements, but they are so little integrated with its theme that Mr. Wright is obliged to let Cross state his case in a fourteen-page monologue of no plausibility whatever. Remove the monologue and Cross’s conversations with a district attorney who seems to have been borrowed from Dostoevski, and The Outsider becomes blood-and-thunder adventure, Cross an opportunistic thug with some intelligence, and the Communists mere caricatures.

Whether Mr. Wright nailed his grim thesis to a plot already in his mind, or concocted his plot, which is full of coincidence, accident, and blind luck, to fit his thesis, the book shows a hiatus between means and ends. It’s a pity that the two halves of The Outsider never fused, for the novel Mr. Wright saw in his own mind must have been far better than the one he has actually written.

In his introduction to Henry James: The Untried Years (Lippincott, $5.00), Leon Edel quotes Percy Lubbock on the futility of any attempt to write a biography of James. “Looked at from without, his life was uneventful enough. . . . Within, it was a cycle of vivid and incessant adventure. ... So much of it as he left unexpressed is lost, therefore, like a novel that he might have written.”

“This is a resounding challenge to the art of biography,” remarks Mr. Edel, and he takes up the gauntlet. Well written, well documented, sympathetic, and painstaking, The Untried Years is the first volume of what should end as a major biography. It covers Henry James’s childhood and youth, early writing, first independent visit to Europe, and leaves him back in Boston, still under thirty. James’s life was indeed uneventful by the usual standards, but by interweaving his own insights and comments with letters and memoirs, Mr. Edel makes James’s early life as vivid an adventure as anyone could ask.

He sensibly makes no attempt to explain how or why James became a writer. What he does do is relate incidents to one another and supply a perspective that James, in his reminiscences, did not. The elder James dragged his family back and forth to Europe, shifting his children from one school to another while they were abroad. Henry, describing these educational upheavals years later, gave them more coherence than his father’s projects ever had, even to changing dates. Henry admitted that as a boy he felt overshadowed by his older brother, William. Mr. Edel has discovered that in his twenties Henry, well enough while William was away at school, enjoyed poor health whenever his brother came home.

On the question of Henry’s health, his biographer has come up with new facts. Young Henry was somehow damaged during the operations of a volunteer fire company, and eventually described the accident in such obscure and portentous terms that one or two critics have assumed that it amounted to castration, which would certainly open wonderful vistas for psychological speculation. Mr. Edel submerges these in a flood of reliable evidence. What Henry had, it appears, was a back injury of the kind that produces occasional anguish and gets its victim very little sympathy because he looks, and in general is, as strong as a horse.

The other matter on which Mr. Edel has done a great deal of research and some discreet speculation is James’s attitude toward women in general and especially his cousin Minny. He showed a tendency, probably unconscious, to equate marriage with death, and also used the theme consciously in his fiction. He seems to have felt, at the least, a sentimental admiration for his lively, charming cousin, but when she died of tuberculosis quickly converted her, with a faint suggestion of relief, into an image of woman, unattainable but a suitable heroine of novels.

One of the great fascinations of this biography is Mr. Edel’s ability to reveal, without becoming dogmatic, the tenuous connection between the things Henry did not do and the themes and people of his fiction. The other is Henry James himself and his relatives, who emerge as a most likable group and oddly devoid of Victorian ideas on most subjects. It is not surprising that James’s formulation of the novel still stands; he seems to have been born about two generations ahead of the game.

The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New Directions, $3.75) were written, according to the author’s note, “for the love of Man and in praise of God,” a capacious phrase which is actually a very precise definition of the core of the poet’s work. It is probably as precise a definition as could be achieved, for Mr. Thomas is a lyricist, unequnled among contemporary English poets, and lyrics are notoriously impervious to definitions and analyses.

To say that the poet feels he cannot adequately express his sense of unity with the world clearly has nothing to do with a poem beginning

and ending with

A grip on Freud and Jung may make quicker reading of “Into Her Lying Down Head,” but the power of

is independent of any formal psychological theory.

Mr. Thomas scoops up symbols and metaphors from the sea, the Welsh countryside, the Bible, psychology, and a few other things, tossing them together as he pleases. They all become his own and follow his rules, assuming double meanings and triple connotations if he requires it.

In “Lament,” an old rogue recalls the days

He took up virtue late, in default of other employment, and got the wrong kind.

Here a series of farmyard images reinforces a logical time scheme and statements as direct as prose, though far more striking. The poem called “In the White Giant’s Thigh” is a huge metaphor in itself, with images raying out from the central concept like the petals of a flower.

All this is actually of small moment, for Mr. Thomas is a warlock, as a poet should be, and no matter how he chooses to construct his poems, when he takes hold of an old theme — love or joy or the fear of death or the reach for God — it turns magically new and flashes like the phoenix.

With a Quiet Heart (Viking, $4.50) is Eva Le Gallienne’s autobiography, chiefly concerned with her long fight to establish a classical repertory theatre at popular prices. Miss Le Gallienne has made several starts toward this goal during her career as actress, director, and producer. The first attempt, the Civic Repertory Theatre, lasted eight years and is still remembered with admiration. Later attempts foundered fairly quickly, but Miss Le Gallienne is not a woman to accept defeat. It’s clear that she hankers for another try.

Some twenty years back, Miss Le Gallienne wrote the story of her life up to that point, so With a Quiet Heart does not include her early triumphs on Broadway or the period of the Civic Repertory. It begins, surprisingly, with a shocking accident in which she was badly burned, then takes us through a long convalescence and her gradual return to the theatre.

Neither crippled hands nor devotion to Ibsen and Chekhov ever prevented Miss Le Gallienne from doing the unexpected. She once hired out as an equestrienne in a French circus, to which she had gone to get a close look at the great clowns, the Fratellinis. Although the approach of her mother soon got her out of the ring, her memories of backstage circus life and the Fratellinis in action are crisp and pleasant. She had a brush with the Federal Theatre, which came to nothing but filled her with speculations about politicians. She was part of a vaudeville program organized and mismanaged by Frank Fay in his pre-Harvey days. She played Hamlet in summer stock, and regrets that she lacked the bravado to take the production into New York.

Miss Le Gallienne writes pleasantly but with no great force. The book’s charm, and it has very real charm, lies in the author’s attitude. She loves the theatre too much to let any historical dust creep into her record of plays and players. She is herself indomitable, good-humored, full of enterprise and obviously willing to try anything.

While she regrets a few risks she didn’t run, she hasn’t a word of complaint for the gambles that didn’t pay off. Her friends and colleagues, drifting through the book, are familiar to almost any theatregoer, and the ultimate effect of With a Quiet Heart is rather that of a party where the hostess, excellent company herself, has collected a remarkably engaging group of guests.