Reader's Choice

IT MAY be a crying shame that Melville is not better known in Ethiopia or that the leading poet of Liechtenstein has not been published in America; but some of the things which are happening in the field of intercultural relations impress me much more than many of the things which the inveterate viewers-with-concern think should be happening.

A group of foreign newspaper critics from thirteen countries recently toured the United States at the invitation of the State Department, and my meetings with them left me with fresh evidence of the continuing rise of interest abroad in American writing. An Italian critic from Genoa wanted to know about the very newest talents in American fiction; he was already familiar with the principal figures of the Mailer-Capote generation. An Icelandic critic was anxious to be briefed on the new developments in American poetry. A Turkish critic told me that the state-subsidized theater in Ankara — having already produced (in addition to Broadway hits) one avant-garde American dramatist not seen on Broadway — is seeking to enlarge its American repertoire with other experimental works.

Similarly in the United States, foreign fiction has lately occupied an increasingly conspicuous place on publishers’ lists. South African writers have made an impressive entry into our reading world; and the Japanese, after a long absence, are re-entering it. The Indians have increased their representation; so, too, have the Australians. These days, in fact, the assiduous reader of current fiction is the busiest of armchair travelers.

Written in 1928, Some Prefer Nettles (Knopf, $3.00) is said by American authorities on Japanese literature to be one of the major works of Japan’s foremost living novelist, Junichiro Tanizaki. The story focuses on a husband and a wife who, though neither has anything against the other, have recognized that their marriage has gone dead. The wife, Misako, is a stylish young woman drawn to foreign ways, but her modernity is still a pretty thin veneer. The husband, Kaname — a well-todo, sophisticated bourgeois — has also cultivated Western tastes, but in his unhappiness he is beginning to be attracted by the old Japanese way of life. The cultural conflict, between the old and the new is the real theme of the novel, and Tanizaki implies — in the best Japanese tradition, he shrinks from the explicit — that the dilemma is more or less insoluble.

The novel’s ending leaves everything unsettled. The presumption is that Kaname will henceforth try to be as Japanese as the times permit, but there is a melancholy suggestion that his reversion to the Japanese past cannot help being a kind of reversion to childhood—a course which will not be possible much longer. The Japanese, Tanizaki said as far back as 1934, “have met a superior civilization and have had to surrender to it.“

Tanazaki’s prose — elegantly rendered into English by Edward G. Seidensticker — is beautifully limpid and flowing; nonetheless his artistry calls for a special kind of coöperation on the part of the reader. Its goal is to suggest much more than it says; and while the descriptive scenes are sharply drawn and brightly evocative, the characterization leaves the reader to draw inferences and form conclusions which the Western novelist would normally supply. Despite the resulting indefiniteness, Some Prefer Nettles has a compelling quality. It is a delicately composed and subtly shaded work of art.

From Australia there comes to us a big family saga, The Tree of Man (Viking, $4.50) by Patrick White. This is the story of Stan and Amy Parker, who as newlyweds start out on the hard life of farming in the wilderness at the turn of the century; of their son, Ray, who grows up to be a petty adventurer and comes to a bad end; and of their daughter, Thelma, a prissy and emotionless creature, who achieves her dream of gentility by marrying a stockbroker and settles into a mold of desiccated snobbery. Mr. White, who has three highly praised novels to his credit, is obviously a writer of considerable talent. But the people in his present book seemed to me a drab lot, and their story has a rather dreary coloring.

If isn’t often that this department puts in a good word for a historical novel, but salaams are in order for The Twelve Pictures (Putnam, $3.95) by Edith Simon, an Edinburgh writer who won acclaim some years back with The Golden Hand. The book is a reworking of the medieval epic, the Nibelungenlied, which should not be confused with the story running through Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung. There has been a good deal of scholarly controversy as to whether the Nibelungenlied had its origin in historical events to which mythical elements were added or vice versa. Miss Simon adopts the former view, and her intricately patterned novel is an imaginative reconstruction both of the historical nucleus of the epic — the overthrow of the Burgundian kingdom by the Huns in the year 436 — and of how the epic itself, with all its fancies, might have come into being.

Two aged Queens, Uta and Brunhilde, surviving in the ruins of Lorsch, are weaving a tapestry of twelve pictures depicting the events which led to the downfall of the Burgundian kingdom. In these pictures, they are molding the facts into a poetic legend which, they believe, will convey more truthfully than the literal truth the fatalities of the Burgundian drama. Their story tells how the heroic Siegfried, husband of Uta’s daughter, Queen Kriemhild, was treacherously murdered by Kriemhild’s own uncle and brothers, the rulers of Burgundy. It unfolds, in flashbacks to Siegfried’s youthful adventures, the sources of this murder. And it relates how after her marriage to Attila The Hun, Kriemhild relentlessly sought vengeance against the killers of Siegfried.

The Twelve Pictures is a superbly imagined panorama of a world that is half legendary and half real, half Christian and half Pagan. But what is specially notable about it is a psychological depth in the characterization which is rarely encountered in historical fiction. Miss Simon’s legendary figures are fascinating human creations.

Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Other Stories (New Directions, $3.50) contains all of the tales by the late Dylan Thomas which have not previously appeared in book form (or which appeared in books now out of print). By far the most impressive item is the title piece, which is not really a short story but a fragment of an abandoned novel. It follows the movements of a dingy youth who leaves a dingy middle-class home with the vague idea of getting a job in London, and who there drifts distractedly from one zany situation into another. This freewheeling tale is a fine example of Thomas’s wildly original humor. “ Wildly original,” in fact, are the operative words for all of Thomas’s fiction, with its vein of deep poetic feeling and its sometimes surrealistic vein of grotesquerie, its chilling intimations of horror and its earthy, ribald sense of fun.

Many of the pieces in this volume are not top-drawer Dylan Thomas. Many are definitely slight. All remind us by their language that we are in the presence of a hugely gifted artist.

Even in letters devoted to bewailing his insolvency, Dylan Thomas startles and delights. His correspondence with the American poet, Oscar Williams, who did so much to promote the sale of Thomas’s work in this country, is one of the highlights of the seventh issue of New World Writing (New American Library, 50¢). In their sampling of foreign prose and poetry, their sponsorship of young American writers, and their choice of essays, the editors of this lively collection have succeeded in maintaining a high standard of freshness and diversity. The current number contains, among other things, five Brazilian poets and a group of new British poets; a section of John Lehmann’s autobiography; a striking short story by a hitherto unpublished American writer, Valerie Worth; a fine story of Dublin by David Marcus in which an Irish Jew, a Catholic priest, and a pretty girl are drawn together in a peculiar drama of love; and William Jay Smith’s wonderful drawings of “Literary Birds” such as the bigbarreled Papa Piper — “I sing like crazy, I fly like hell, / I crash boomboom, get Prix Nobel, / My luck she is running very good!”

Two of the best books ever written about American society have been written by Frenchmen. One, of course, was Tocqueville’s classic, Democracy in America (now available in Knopf’s “Vintage” series of paperback reprints; 2 vols., 95¢ each). The other was André Siegfried’sAmerica Comes of Age (1927), which H. L. Mencken described as “so good that it seems almost incredible.” M. Siegfried has now written a fresh appraisal of the United States, America at MidCentury (Harcourt, Brace, $5.75); and it seems to me by and large a discerning piece of work. I have the impression, however, that the author’s contacts with the American scene have not been quite as intimate and extensive as they were when he wrote his earlier study. An error such as the statement that in the 1952 election ‟most of the papers, even the Republican ones, upheld Stevenson” can hardly be dismissed as an inconsequential slip.

M.Siegfried’s presentation is staidly methodical — Part I, The Geographical Aspect; Part II, The American People: Formation, Composition, and Psychology; Part III, The American Economy; and so on. His style is serviceable but undistinguished and singularly lacking in Gallic esprit. What is valuable about his book is that it enables us to see ourselves from a provocative perspective: it is written with a degree of detachment which no American could possibly achieve, and with a good-tempered objectivity which few foreigners have succeeded in achieving. M. Siegfried neither accepts any of our self-congratulatory pretensions nor does he indulge in scornful debunking. His tone is consistently calm and courteous; and though some readers will find plenty to quarrel with in his analysis, his unpalatable judgments have patently not been arrived at because of any anti-American bias.

Loosely speaking, M. Siegfried’s overall viewpoint is that in the development of America, geography has triumphed over history and heredity — the links with Europe. American civilization is growing away from European civilization, in which AngloSaxon practicality was balanced by the critical, individualistic spirit of Mediterranean culture. With no suggestion of disdain — indeed with repeated emphasis on the blessings our society confers on its citizens — M. Siegfried argues that the American genius for large-scale organization is causing the individualistic and contemplative spirit to be progressively submerged in the collective practice of high output: we are moving toward a new and more social idea of human dignity. Immense though the differences are between the United States and Russia, M. Siegfried believes that they have one important point in common: both are inclined toward a technical conception of civilization.

This is not a novel line of reasoning, but there is a good deal of novelty and bite in M. Siegfried’s development of it. His book is not one of those whose interest lies in a dramatic thesis: what is rewarding, here, is the multitude of trenchant observations about every aspect of American life.

Prince Bismarck sardonically observed that there was a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States. With rather different feelings, Oscar Handlin — a Harvard Professor of History who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Uprooted - also believes that chance has played an important, and on the whole favorable, role in the development of this nation. His new book, Chance or Destiny (Atlantic—Little, Brown, $3.75), recounts and analyzes eight crucial “turning pints” in American history, among them Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown; the Fourth of July at Gettysburg; the sinking of the Lusitania; and Pearl Harbor. In his two concluding chapters, Mr. Handlin puts forward the view that, while history is in part determined by ‟intractable forces” — the evolution of institutions such as the family and the churches; the exigencies of economics and geography — history also contains an element of contingency which makes it impossible to chart its course in terms of general laws, as Marx, Spengler, and (with recourse to theology) Toynbee have attempted to do.

Mr. Handlin sees history as “a line made up of a succession of points, with every point a turning point” at which human passions, the weather, or a mechanical accident can decisively influence the direction of the turning. Without the avarice of the Queen of Spain, the miscalculations of Napoleon, and the sudden freezing of a harbor in Holland, Louisiana might long have remained foreign soil and impeded this nation’s thrust to the Pacific. The haunting face of a young Spanish girl in California played a crucial role in the strange events which finally led to Russia’s sale of Alaska. The Civil War might possibly have been averted, Mr. Handlin believes, had not an explosion aboard the man-of-war Princeton in 1844 killed President Tyler’s Secretary of State, whose replacement by Calhoun led to an aggravation of the cleavage over slavery.

The two theoretical chapters give us no more than an outline of Mr. Handlin’s thesis, for the problem of chance and inevitability in history is certainly not one which can be seriously explored in twenty-two pages. Mr. Handlin, however, is a scholar who knows how to make the reading of history a seductive affair. His eight illustrative chapters — some of which have appeared in the Atlantic — strike me as masterly examples of dramatic exposition, incisive analysis, and felicitous writing.

Somewhat belatedly, I’d like to pay my respects to Party of One (World, $5.00), a selection of the writings of Clifton Fadiman. The book consists of 1) a few autobiographical pages; 2) a large miscellany of pieces about cartoonists, conversationalists, actors, teaching, musical comedy, radio and television, deathbed remarks, and so forth; 3) “Lead-Ins” (Introductions) to books and authors — Moby Dick, War and Peace, Dodsworth, Henry James, Dickens; 4) other literary essays, which Mr. Fadiman places in the category not of criticism but of what the French call causerie; 5) “Puzzlements” — two pieces which state, modestly but with lapidary force, Mr. Fadiman’s reasons for dissenting from the cult of Gertrude Stein and Faulkner. These last and the “Lead-Ins” belong among the highlights of the book. Other notable items are “On Being Fifty”; an essay on the lost art of conversation; and three perceptive reviews of the author of Appointment in Samara, which might all have been headed “Disappointment in O’Hara.”

It is well known that Mr. Fadiman is an exceedingly clever, witty, and nimble writer; that he has read widely and remembered well; and that he is wonderfully adept at communicating his appreciation to others. What may have been obscured by Mr. Fadiman’s renown as a suave master of ceremonies is a core of fundamental seriousness which, together with his good sense, good disposition, and the lively assets previously referred to, makes him at his best a really admirable essayist. What is distinctive about him can best be suggested by listing some of the things which he is not. He is not cantankerous, sour, spiteful, parochial, or fanatical; not arrogant, patronizing, or reactionary; not sanctimonious, glibly inspirational, nice-Nellyish, or mushy. In this distempered age any literary commentator who is none of those things is something very valuable.