Reader's Choice

In JAMES JONES’S first novel, sheer intensity of feeling triumphed over crudity of style and mind: the author was so powerfully possessed by his experience of the peacetime army, an area new to American fiction, that he was able to give his roughhewn story an elemental vitality. In his new novel, Jones is no longer working with materials as fresh or as highly charged as those of From Here to Eternity, and he is even more prolix: SOME CAME RUNNING (Scribner’s, $7.50) stretches to about 650,000 words, the length of six average novels. The net result is that the author’s deficiencies as a writer force themselves on the reader with painful insistence.

His prose — besides being riddled with such ungrammatical atrocities as “she had brought out some . . . medieval-looking candles which she liked to turn off all the lights and light and eat by the light of” — is plodding, clumsy, and repetitious; it has a drabness as dispiriting as the “eats” on the counter of a sleazy beanery. The savage passion which energized From Here to Eternity is muffled, and there remains the yammer of self-pity, to which is now added the earnest drone of portentous banalities. Out of the author’s hope chest of ideas come tumbling all the fuzzy bits and pieces of thought solemnly cherished by an essentially primitive mind — a half-baked theory about the relation of love to writing; palaver about “Karmic attachments”; commonplace conclusions about the discrepancy between reality and the illusions men live by; and sententious inanities about “being a writer.” The effect of all of this is to make Some Came Running an outsize example of the hick novel.

The action takes place in a small town in southern Illinois between 1947 and 1950; and the story revolves around a familiar theme — the heavings and gruntings and churnings of the provincial writer who is “contortedly” and “self-tormentedly” struggling to come to terms with life. Jones’s hero, Dave Hirsh, is a thirty-six-year-old war veteran who has just returned to his home town, Parkman, which he left nineteen years earlier. He falls in love with Gwen French, a woman of his own age who teaches “creative writing” at Parkman College. Gwen’s faith in his talent draws him back to writing and she becomes his devoted literary mentor — but refuses to become his mistress. Having spread the impression that she has had a clutch of lovers, she cannot bear to let any man discover she is still a virgin. This sustained physical rejection heightens Dave’s sense of his unattractiveness and his obsessive belief that all “respectable” women are inhumanly determined to deny men what men most desperately need: sex.

Meanwhile, he has taken quarters with a professional gambler, who lords it over the local chippies; and, while somehow working away at his writing, he settles into a routine of interminably boozy low life, in which his bedmate is the worst-looking and most promiscuous of the ”pigs" from the brassière factory. Eventually, he marries her in the belief that she will give him “the safe calm productive life” he longs for, and he is deeply shaken by the discovery that here, too, he has succumbed to an illusion. We are asked to believe that this colossal slob is a superior human being; and further, that he is potentially a “great writer,”though he cannot even speak correctly. “ The Communists aint human. I seen them in Germany” is a sample of how he expresses himself.

The central strand of the novel, it is only fair to stress, is the worst part of it. The surrounding picture of small-town life contains a good many first-rate characterizations — Dave’s elder brother, with his mixture of hardness and weakness, his secret lecheries, his cagey advance from modest storekeeper to millionaire businessman, is a masterly creation -and there are enough forcefully realized episodes or scenes to suggest that Jones might do a lot better if he were to conquer his thousandpage-or-more complex. As it stands, however, his novel represents the dubious victory of six years’ perspiration over lack of inspiration.

The late JAMES AGEE was a writer at the opposite end of the literary spectrum to James Jones. He had a poet’s sensitivity to and mastery of language; a depth of awareness which rescued ordinary happenings from banality and drew out of them their universal significance; the capacity to be tender without being mawkish, to celebrate life without sententiousness. His posthumous novel, A DEATH IN THE FAMILY (McDowell, Obolensky, S3.95), has a plot so simple that it can be accurately summed up in a sentence: it describes the closely knit Follet family in the Knoxville of 1915, and the impact of Jay Follet’s sudden death (in a motor accident) on his wife, his two small children, and his close relatives.

The book moves along slowly, building, note by note, a symphony of feeling: Mary Follet’s immense desolation, her courage, her struggle — she is a deeply religious woman — to accept God’s will without complaint; the bitter anger of her brother and her father, both agnostics, at the senseless cruelty of fate; tiny Catherine’s bewilderment and her touching efforts to come to terms with her mother’s explanations of death; and the varied reactions of six-year-old Rufus, who at moments understands how great is his loss, is gratified at the consideration shown him by his schoolfellows, and has pangs of guilt about enjoying his new-found importance.

James Agee died of a heart attack before he had given his novel its final polishing. But its blemishes are secondary — some sentences that grow too intricate, some passages in which the pace drags. What stands out is that A Death in the Family is an original and moving work of art.

In his latest collection of stoiries, A BIT OFF THE MAP (Viking, $3.50), that economic and fastidious writer, ANGUS WILSON, explores the new social geography of England, where peaceful revolution has blurred the traditional lines of class. These stories are first and foremost masterly character studies, but most of Wilson’s protagonists are concerned, in varying ways, with getting their true bearings on the map of a changed society. Wilson’s eye sees beyond the topical surface phenomena to a basic and inescapable dilemma of man-insociety — the dilemma that social standards are a product of the elemental appetite for a better life and as such are deeply felt realities, and yet they are also a source of artificiality and pretension by which life is impoverished.

This double-edged insight is dramatized in the story “Higher Standards,” which focuses on a girl who has risen above her origins by winning a scholarship and who is now disgusted by the coarseness of her parents and cut off from the young men of her village. “Once a Lady" shows the reverse of the coin — the price paid by a woman who has become an outcast by marrying for love far beneath her station. “A Flat Country Christmas” registers a mordant comment on the new anticlass priggishness. The setting is a dreary development town, and the characters are two young bureaucrats and their wives, all of different backgrounds, whose friendship is based chiefly on their pride in having achieved complete emancipation from class-consciousness. The truth revealed is that they work so hard at being emancipated that they have sacrificed their identity and spontaneity. In the climax, one of them looks into a mirror and suddenly becomes hysterical — he has seen himself as Nothing.

Two of the longer stories are masterpieces of comedy. “A Bit off the Map” is a hilarious study of a cretinous and beautiful Teddy Boy — proud wearer of the tightest of jeans (striped), the most richly studded of belts, the most swirling of coiffures luxuriantly scented with Pour les Hommes — who has attached himself to a group of young intellectuals of the Colin Wilson school and who hangs on their every word in the expectation of suddenly discovering “the truth of it all.” The combination of the Teddy Boy portrait with a devastating parody of Colin Wilson’s ideas is a tour de force. Equally funny in a different key is “More Friend Than Lodger” — the firstperson account of a publisher’s wife who has an affair with the snobbish young “genius” her husband has discovered and emerges as the only one of the trio who has made the best of all worlds. In this new collection, Angus Wilson is in brilliant form — subtle, sharp-eyed, and unfailingly entertaining.

The publication of art books, in which the United States until recently lagged behind Europe, is now flourishing as never before in this country. The 1957 fall-winter season has, I am sure, established a record on all counts — quantity, quality, and variety.

Three separate volumes focus a powerful spotlight on twentiethcentury German art, of which no overall surveys have hitherto been available in English. The story of men and movements told in these books is an absorbing and important chapter in the history of contemporary art; and among the illustrations there are a great many remarkable works which have not been made familiar by widespread reproduction.

GERMAN ART OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (Museum of Modern Art and Simon & Schuster, $9.50) is a companion volume to the big exhibition recently on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Edited by ANDREW CARNDUFF RITCHIE, the book is the most comprehensive survey of German art of this century to be published in English, and it is a thoroughly satisfactory job — lucid and readable, scholarly, and handsomely produced. Painting, sculpture, and prints are discussed by three different authorities; and there are 178 illustrations, 48 in color. GERMAN EXPRESSION ISM AND ABSTRACT ART (Harvard University Press, $8.75) contains a catalogue of the works in the various collections of Harvard University, preceded by two general essays on modern art by CHARLES L. KUHN and JAKOB RosENBERG. The illustrations are of fine quality, but (with one exception) they are in black and white. MODERN GERMAN PAINTING (Reynal, $7.50), with its 60 superb color plates (plus reproductions of graphic work), is visually by far the most exciting book of the trio. HANS KONRAD ROETHEL, director of Munich’s Municipal Art Gallery, has written an illuminating though sometimes awkwardly translated text; and he complements it with biographies of the artists and quotations from their statements about art. These three books confront us vividly with a body of artistic achievement whose great richness comes as something of a surprise — a surprise because (with exceptions: Klee, Kandinsky, and one or two others) the major figures in German art have been heavily overshadowed by the École de Paris.

Most art has international, supraregional elements and at the same time special qualities which give the work of a particular country its individual character. The modern movement in Germany was highly cosmopolitan — “culturally omnivorous” as Mr. Kuhn puts it. It absorbed the arts and crafts movement in England and its offshoot, art nouveau; the dark, emotional painting of Norway’s Edmund Munch; the successive innovations of the French School, the Dadaism of Switzerland, Russian Constructivism, and no end of other influences. Yet out of all this there emerged a German art which has distinctive characteristics — a psychic restlessness and nervous compression which are incorporated into the formal structure, a deepening of the expressive range, and a romantic idealism. The Germans conceived of the picture not as a selfcontained entity but as a metaphor of spiritual experience, an illustration of man’s relation to the universe. A manifesto of 1912 proclaimed: “Color is a means of expression that speaks directly to the soul”; and the hugely gifted painter Marc (killed at thirty-six in World War I) spoke of “sensing the underlying mystical design of the visible world.”

American painting, broadly speaking, has affirmed its individuality through its subject matter. It opens — writes ALEXANDER ELIOT in 300 YEARS OF AMERICAN PAINTING (Time Inc. and Random House, $13.50) — “a thousand windows on the American heritage and home. . . . No other nation’s painters have so consciously drawn their inspiration from their native land.” Mr. Eliot’s volume covers the lives and works of 147 artists; and with its 250 excellent color plates, most of them of generous dimensions, it offers us the most representative conspectus of America’s greatest paintings published to date.

Mr. Eliot was assisted by a team from Time magazine, of which he is art editor, and his text reflects that institution. The opening chapter sets the whole enterprise in a chauvinistic key, making the exaggerated (and surely unnecessary) claim that the work of the American masters from Copley on “ranks with that of their contemporaries anywhere”; and the treatment of each artist is strong on anecdotal biography but rather undistinguished as criticism. The limitations of Eliot’s middle-of-the-road conventionality stand out particularly when he is dealing with the controversial abstract expressionists. His cursory and superficial commentary dismisses in a line that greatly talented artist, Arshile Gorky, and says of the persistently inventive Hans Hoffman that “his art ‘expresses’ very little beyond a debt to Kandinsky.” Despite its lack of any challenging ideas, Eliot’s text has merits which make it highly inviting. He is extremely skillful at describing pictures and suggesting their particular qualities lucidly and evocatively. And his book is attractively stocked with the findings of energetic research — wonderfully readable throughout.

In the text that JAMES THRALL SOBY has written for BEN SHAHN (Braziller, $10.00) — a volume containing more than 100 reproductions, 8 in color— Mr. Soby justly says of Shahn: “It would be hard to think of an American artist whose signature is more his own.” During the Depression, Shahn reacted against the aesthetic preoccupations of the European masters whose work he had seen abroad in the nineteentwenties, and he aligned himself with the satirical tradition that comes to us from Hogarth and Daumier. His satire has seldom been overstated. “Most important,” he once remarked, “is to have a play back and forth, back and forth. Between the big and the little, the light and the dark . . . the serious and the comic.” Shahn’s concern, as Mr. Soby neatly puts it, has been “to thread protest through the needle of reality,” the realities that have absorbed him most being architecture and the human figure. Among the drawings reproduced in this collection are a contemporary “Susanna and the Elders,” in which Shahn has wryly epitomized modern vulgarity; a portrait of Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, made during his political ordeal, which hypnotically conveys the torment of an uncompromising intelligence; and an unforgettable cartoon of the 1948 presidential candidates — Dewey grinning wolfishly atop a piano, Truman grinning at its keyboard as he hammily performs a flourish.

The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures which BEN SHAHN delivered at Harvard have been gathered into a book, THE SHAPE OF CONTENT (Harvard University Press, S4.00), and it discloses that Mr. Shahn is an artist in whose hands the pen is as cogent as the brush. His invigorating discussion of nonconformity appeared in the September issue of the Atlantic. “Biography of a Painting” is a fascinating exploration of the creative process, showing the whole stream of experience and associations that went into the picture “Allegory.” Other chapters deal with the education, in the largest sense, of the artist and with his situation in the colleges and universities.

The title piece is a crystal-clear and forceful analysis of a central problem in aesthetics — the relation of form to content. (Form, Mr. Shahn argues, is “the manifestation, the shape of content.”) All in all, this is a remarkably interesting book, which puts the reader in rewarding contact with a questing mind and a humane spirit.