Reader's Choice

There exist two flatly contradictory schools of thought about summer reading—the Catcheruppers and the Unwinders. The former hold that summer, with its leisurely vacation days, is a period of grace in which to plug some of the distressing gaps in one’s serious reading, whereas the Unwinders take the view that summer, with its surrender to torpor on the beach and in the hammock, calls for reading that is light and refreshing. Catcher-uppers, of course, need no advice from reviewers; all they need is will power. To Unwinders I can commend two recent items which have given me considerable pleasure: THE DUD AVOCADO (Dutton, $3.50) by ELAINE DUNDY and COCKTAIL TIME (Simon and Schuster, $3.50) by P. G. WODEHOUSE.

Elaine Dundy is an American girl who is now the wife of the British theater critic Kenneth Tynan; and her novel — subtitled “The Vie Amoureuse of Sally Jay in Paris” — is a cheerfully uninhibited (some will find it scandalous) variation on the venerable theme of the Innocent Abroad. If Messrs. Kerouac, Salinger, and their cohorts are reliable guides to the temper prevalent among the younger generation, then Miss Dundy’s twenty-year-old heroine, Sally Jay Gorce, is a throwback to an earlier and more exuberant era. She isn’t beat or gone; she doesn’t play it cool; she has come to Paris with the old notion of being naughty in the normal ways, and she has a whale of a time reeling in and out of love and trouble.

Very soon Sally Jay, skipping a grade, has graduated to the status of Second Year Tourist Disorganized. She has dyed her hair “a marvellous shade of pale red popular with Paris tarts” and has been seduced by a diplomat who impresses her fearfully with the fact that he already has a wife and a mistress. At one point, she wanders around for days in an evening dress, having sent all of her other clothes to the laundry. She loses things, among them her passport. (This has sinister consequences.) And occasionally she carries wildness à la Fitzgerald so far that a friend remarks: “Take it easy, Zelda, Scotty’s been dead for years.” But we know all along that Sally isn’t, and never will be, “lost.”

Her adventures carry her to Biarritz, where she becomes an extra in a seedy cosmopolitan company that is making a movie starring a bullfighter. This whole sequence is riotously funny. And even when Miss Dundy is working with well-worn matetials — Left Bank Americans ”d’après Hemingway” or the raffish aspects of Paris night life — she comes up with fresh and spirited comedy. Above all, her heroine is an entrancingly amusing creation: Sally Jay’s private brand of Franco-American patter ("A tough cookie, a real oeuf dur”) and her reflections (“How can Life be so contrary to — never mind Art—just to general information”) are an unfailing delight. Miss Dundy’s plotting is marred by her effort to work up to a dark surprise, which turns out to be corny, and by a cinematic ending. But the pertinent point is that her novel is enormous fun — sparklingly written, youthful in spirit, and exquisitely gay.

The story of the Wodehouse novel, Cocktail Time, is set in motion by a Brazil nut catapulted from the window of the Drones Club by the Earl of Ickenharn, who is disconcertingly bumps-a-daisy for a peer in his fifties. The nut strikes the top hat of the eminent barrister, Sir Raymond Bastable, who, ignoring the identity of his assailant, is provoked into writing a sizzling novel exposing the depravity of modern youth. Published pseudonymously — in order to safeguard Sir Raymond’s political ambitions — it becomes a sensational succès de scandale. Sir Raymond is then blackmailed with the threat of exposure by his nasty nephew. Whereupon Lord Ickenham, whose mission in life is to spread sweetness and light, embarks on a stop-at-nothing campaign to put things right.

Mr. Wodehouse’s cast includes a dotty old publisher; a formidable Nanny from whose lips pour admonitions from Ecclesiastes; and an amateur butler who falls in love with the unmarried lady of the house and courts her via their mutual interest in rheumatism. Wodehouse has long since established a record for staying power as a writer of farce, and in Cocktail Time he is still in magnificent form. His plotting is infinitely ingenious; his language is as funny as ever; and his characters are hilarious.

Three years ago, a collection of short stories entitled The Black Prince introduced a writer of strong and original talent, SHIRLEY ANN GRAU; and now she has written her first novel, THE HARD BLUE SKY (Knopf, $5.00). It belongs in the category of novels which are essentially evocations of a little-known region or place — in this case a small, primitive, storm-swept island off the Louisiana coast on the edged of a dangerous swamp. The people on the Isle Aux Chiens are of mixed French and Spanish descent, and their curious speech is peppered with eroded bits of French. Nearly all of them are related. And all are fishermen.

The story chronicles the events of a characteristically steamy summer: the arrival from the mainland of a sailboat which has lost its way; the disappearance of a crazy young man who ventures into the dangerous waters of the swamp: a fierce vendetta with the inhabitants of a neighboring island; the affair of a sixteen-year-old girl, who longs to escape to the mainland, with the captain of the marooned sailboat. Through these and other episodes Miss Grau recreates in all its dimensions the singular life of an inbred, almost isolated little world. She is a fine artist, but she has stretched her material too far; it could have been handled more effectively within the compass of a novelette.

JEROME WEIDMAN’S big new novel deals with a somewhat neglected aspect of the problem of religious and racial prejudice — anti-Gentilism. THE ENEMY CAMP (Random House, $4.95), a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, has all the ingredients that make for popular success, but the level of its insight is commonplace. Mr. Weidman works in broad strokes and bold colors, and his effects tend to be crude.

Weidman’s story, which commutes between present and past, is a highly charged affair, packed with feeling, dramatic action, and a large assortment of characters. The heart of the matter is the struggle of George Hurst with the obsession instilled into him as he grew up on New York’s lower East Side: hatred of the Gentile world. The girl he marries, however, is a beautiful Gentile from Philadelphia’s Main Line, who overrides her family’s strong objections to a Jewish son-in-law. They become happily established in a Connecticut town relatively free of bigotry. But George is secretly hounded by the feeling that, in countless minor ways, he is forcing himself to conform to his wife’s world, is making concessions to “the enemy camp.”The climax brings home to him, with the force of Revelation, that fear is the current which feeds his hatred and distrust, and that it lies within his power to turn it off.

The life of Horatio Nelson is one of the best documented of his time his own letters and dispatches filled seven large volumes — and dozens of books have been written about him. The latest biography of Nelson, OLIVER WARNER’S VICTORY (Atlantic - Little, Brown, $6.50), docs better than its predecessors on several major counts. It strikes an exceptionally fine balance between the two commanding aspects of its subject — Nelson the great sea captain, and Nelson the romantic figure, centerpiece of a near decade of international scandal—one or other of which has usually been given special prominence by biographers. Mr. Warner steers clear, too, of the traditional tendency to play down Nelson’s failings. He has added to the record unpublished material from Nelson’s Baltic campaign; he has discovered a love affair with a certain “dolly,” which took place in Leghorn in 1794-1795; and, most importantly, he has quoted his subject’s correspondence so copiously and so aptly that Nelson reveals himself in his own words to a greater extent than in any previous portrait. All this makes Victory a clear-eyed and remarkably interesting as well as a highly readable biography.

It has, however, its deficiencies. The lack of historical background sometimes has the effect of dimming the importance of Nelson’s achievements; and Mr. Warner fails to make sufficiently clear what precisely were the innovations that Nelson brought to naval warfare. Finally the writing, though fluent and sound, does not have the luster and the verve required to do full justice to its subject.

Nelson’s affair with Lady Hamilton — the daughter of a blacksmith who rose in the world as a kept woman and who appeared, to Nelson’s eyes, “a saint . . . the pattern of perfection” — is certainly one of the more curious grandes passions which have found a niche in history. Mr. Warner’s treatment of it has a convincing realism and acids many telling details to the familiar story, He rates equally high marks for firmly presenting Nelson’s shortcomings without obscuring his grandeur. An intensely vain man. Nelson was overeager for publicity and honors. He made himself ridiculous by always appearing laden with medals and decorations. He was touchy and quarrelsome, especially about prize money. And he did deep injury to his devoted wife and to his most loyal friend, Lord Hamilton. But in the overall view he appears the reverse of callous, petty, or grasping, and his attributes of greatness loom large: total devotion to his country’s service, genius as a tactician, solicitude for his men, and enspiriting qualities of leadership which made him the idol of British sailors in an age when mutiny was rife. By the example of his own awe-inspiring bravery and endurance, he brought, as Joseph Conrad put it, “heroism into the line of duty.”

THE DEMOCRATIC VISTA (Doubleday, $3.95) by RICHARD CHASE is “A Dialogue on Life and Letters in Contemporary America.” The setting is a summer place on the Massachusetts shore, and the characters are supposed to illustrate “the different facets of the . . . state of mind which has typified the last ten or fifteen years of American life.” Among them are Ralph Headstrong, a middle-aging professor who speaks for the author; his weekend guest, George Middleby, “solid citizen of the new generation"; and their wives and numerous children. At one point George observes: “How much more gracefully and less grimly the Europeans wear their literature,” and Mr. Chase, though he has interesting things to say, forces one to agree. The tone and mise en scène of his “dialogue" are sometimes of an almost farcical stiltedness and solemnity.

The position which Ralph develops might be baldly summarized as follows: The last decade has been a time of cultural retrenchment and retreat following a thirty-five-year flowering of creative and critical activity. American intellectuals, having migrated on a large scale into universities and foundation work at the expense of their independence, have joined the conformist drive toward some sort of middle ground of taste and opinion; even the more recondite — those who worship at the shrine of myth or of the New Criticism — are seeking for a “mystical centrality” which will resolve contradictions and quell the self’s spirit of adventure. But American culture, the mirror of a democratic society, has always been marked by sharp contradictions and conflicts — between conservative feeling and liberal ideas, romanticism and realism, the highbrow and the lowbrow. And our writers and thinkers have been at their best when they were most mindful of the contradictions; when they exulted (as Whitman did) in a world of experience “that is felt to be open, disruptive, skeptical, novel, emergent.” The impetus behind the advances in our culture are traceable to the radical spirit, whose values are critical truth-telling and the liberal heritage of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Thus in Ralph’s view, the present trend toward conformity and the spread of a tame middlebrowism run counter to what is most vital in the American cultural tradition.

George, for his part, holds that Ralph’s cultural critique is framed in terms of an America which no longer exists; an America in which the radical spirit had clearcut enemies to campaign against (such as Calvinism, reactionary capitalism, Babbitry). Moreover, as George sees it, the leading radical ideas of the nineteen-twenties and -thirties proved to be too abstract and too ambitious. The age of Ideology and heroic formulas is over: what the problems of today call lor is a growth of wisdom, an increasing mastery of the human arts of life. And in reply to Ralph’s thesis that middlebrowism is the great corrupter of culture, a spreader of complacency and anti-intellectualism, George argues that it is becoming steadily more serious and more adventurous, and is creating an evergrowing cultivated minority.

I happen to agree with Mr, Chase’s overall view that our time is one of cultural retreat, but his book betrays an attitude, characteristic of the professional highbrow in this country, which is one of the things that is wrong with American culture. Chase writes about culture not as something that enriches human life but rather as the highbrow’s exclusive property and harassing burden, for which be has to wage unending warfare against the grasping middlebrow.

MAXWELL GEISMAR, while he is not a critic who adopts the Mandarin stance, shares Mr. Chase’s distaste for the present cultural situation and his faith in the radical spirit. “I venture to speculate,” Mr. Geismar writes in AMERICAN MODERNS: A MIDCENTURY VIEW OF AMERICAN FICTION (Hill & Wang, $3.95), “that in retrospect the period of the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties will appear even more benighted and self-destructive than the giddy epoch of the nineteen twenties that we are now celebrating as our golden period.”

Mr. Geismar’s book is a collection of reviews and essays, of which those in the first section are concerned, loosely speaking, with the spirit of the times. One of them makes the interesting point that the New Criticism reflects, in the spiritual area, the worst aspects of the American society it so disdainfully repudiates — emphasis on techniques rather than on human values; conspicuous consumption (ofscholarship); “otherdirected” stress on aesthetic concepts and laws. The theme which stands out in the second group of essays is the failure of so many important American writers to advance beyond the achievements of their youth. Mr. Geismar examines the decline in the later work of Sinclair Lewis, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck; and he argues that in each case the weaknesses that have become damaging are the product of an immature view of life.

Part III deals with novelists who made their mark during or after the Second World War. It includes a fine appreciation of William Styron and an astringent appraisal of Saul Bellow. Being considerably less sympathetic than Mr. Geismar is to naturalism and to the novel of contemporary history, I find that he is too generous to James Jones and overestimates John Hersey. Like all critics, Mr. Geismar writes best when he is doing a hatchet job. His liveliest pieces are about the shabby values and slick fakery of Herman Wouk and the recent emergence of J. D. Salinger as a “Zen Buddy” who has found in Oriental philosophy a path back to the mindless world of childhood.