Reader's Choice

W. S. Gilbert once gave the title of his latest libretto as “Not as Good as The Mikado,” and this phrase sums up the position in which HONOR TRACY has suffered ever since she wrote a rib-cracking masterpiece called The Straight and Narrow Path. No one who read that almost unbearably funny book can open any other work by Miss Tracy without hoping that she is about to repeat herself, or can fail to feel a certain disappointment at discovering that she had no intention of doing so. This attitude is unfortunate, for A SEASON OF MISTS (Random House, S3.95), Miss Tracy’s latest novel, is too good to be overshadowed by an entirely different predecessor.

The new book is tart high comedy about middle-aged romance, recording the astounding effect, upon a gentleman of admirable taste and virtuous character, of infatuation with a silly eighteen-year-old secretary. Poor Ninian suddenly becomes a friend of Beatniks, an insulter of the county gentry, a frequenter, by demand of the authorities, of police courts and jails, and an advocate of radical avant-garde notions.

Miss Tracy has a fine time spoofing both Ninian’s normally wellregulated life and the gaggle of geese with whom he becomes involved. Ninian himself, however, is something more than a caricature. Selfish, obtuse, and ridiculous, he is still recognizably an intelligent, decent, able man, and his unsuitable fling at youth is appealing as well as comic. Most of Miss Tracy’s characters share something of this same quality, a blending of inconsistencies. If the light, fast, fancifully absurd tale has a serious underlying purpose, it is a plea for more appreciation of the magnificent irrationality of human nature. Ninian, momentarily exasperated with the local church, thanks God that he is an atheist.

MILA 18 (Doubleday, S4.95) is also comedy, but not by the author’s conscious design. LEON URIS has written 500-odd pages of melodramatic hoop-la about a small group of beleaguered fighters making a determined stand against superior forces. The characters are string and old celluloid, the geography is confused, the conversation is either an interminable exchange of passwords or prattle in the idiom of America in 1960, which is not the story’s setting. Mr. Uris would do well to read Beau Geste, for P. C. Wren offers a good elementary lesson in the conduct of a literary siege.

Despite its demerits, Mila 18 has one memorable distinction: it contains unquestionably the worst prose that I have ever seen in print. Mr. Uris consistently uses “lay” for “laid,”not in dialect but in plain third-person narrative; for example, “he lay the grenades on the table.” This would pass once, as a proofreader’s oversight, but when it occurs half a dozen times, one can only assume that the author has decided to reconjugate the verb “to lay.”

There is a certain wild charm to this sort of writing. The ordinary landscape of English prose becomes infested with strange little monsters that squatter from the underbrush, producing a stimulating series of surprises. “Flushed with bloodless victories, certain that America, France, and England would not fight, the Nazi cancer spread.” How many authors can cram two clichés and pathetic fallacy into one sentence? Mr. Uris is an exceptional man.

The actual subject of this peculiar volume is the gallant, pitiful rising of the Warsaw Jews against the Nazis in 1943. With no hope of success, a few hundred poorly armed men and women fought a battle that should be remembered with awe as long as human courage is held in any regard. It is to be hoped that Mr. Uris’ travesty of their achievement will be quickly forgotten.

Lafcadio Hearn, the Americantrained journalist who at the end of his life was professor of English at a Japanese university and a recognized authority on the country, is the subject of a biography by ELIZABETH STEVENSON, LAFCADIO HEARN (Macmillan, S6.95). The book is scholarly, well written, and may persuade the unwary to reread Hearn, the many quotations being deftly chosen to show him at his best. Hearn reads best in small doses, and if Miss Stevenson presents him that way, she is also fair in her estimate of his ability and accomplishment.

Hearn’s life is a story worth telling. His Greek-Irish origin was romantic, his childhood odd and unhappy. He was, thanks to the early loss of one eye, impressively ugly. At the age of nineteen, this myopic youth was bundled off to the United States with hardly a farthing in his pocket and with a letter of introduction that proved quite useless. He nearly starved before he contrived to find work with a newspaper, where he quickly developed into a first-class reporter of freaks and disasters.

He also developed into a very strange man. One former friend — Hearn had no other kind — in later years carefully listed all his merits, giving due credit to his wit, his ingenuity. his energy and conscientiousness. his love of learning, and his excellent critical judgment, and concluded that he was, taken altogether, impossible. This was true. Hearn was one of those unfortunates who expect their friends to be father, mother, psychiatrist, and banker, and fly into a rage when they discover that the friends cannot play all these roles.

Hearn’s taste for exotic places, and the plain necessity of finding new ones to write about, led him eventually to Japan. He seems to have been happier there than anywhere else. Poverty drove him to teach English, but he proved to be a natural wizard at it and came to be highly regarded in his new country. Japan suited him. For one thing, the country was drawn to his scale; Hearn stood very little over five feet. For another, the traps and betrayals that he discovered in every association seemed somewhat less offensive when practiced by the Japanese. For a third, a Japanese I friend of truly godlike astuteness arranged his marriage to the daughter of an impoverished Samurai family. It worked well. Hearn would never have had the courage to catch himself a wife, but when given one, he was delighted, and supported his innumerable Japanese in-laws uncomplainingly for the rest of his life.

Miss Stevenson’s reconstruction of this tormented, irritating, dauntless little man is an admirable piece of work. As far as possible, she lets Hearn reveal himself, avoiding speculative commentary and keeping his eccentricities firmly in their proper Victorian setting.

MALCOLM LOWRY’S posthumous short stories, HEAR US O LORD FROM HEAVEN THY DWELLING PLACE (Lippincott, $4.95), are so intensely introspective and so limited in theme that it is perhaps a mistake to consider them as stories at all. They are rather elaborations of mood and revelations of the workings of the author’s disintegrating mind, with the intensity and egocentricity of lyric poetry; and. like poetry, they demand a degree of empathy that not all readers will be able, or willing, to supply.

Involving symbolic voyages, confused identities, and inexplicable Nirvanas, the stories are held together by the fisherman’s hymn of the title and the sound of the ship’s engines chanting Frère Jacques. Between the dream of paradise embodied in the former and the mundane racket of the latter, Mr. Lowry’s character (there is only one, although he has several names) hovers, lost and uncomprehending, in a limbo of his own creation. He is an artist, this fellow, usually a writer who doesn’t know why he writes and continually gets mixed up with his own characters, so that he hardly knows whether his latest hangover is his property or that of X. The workings of the world are a mystery to him, a series of hideous threats and amorphous dangers, although many of his troubles could be mitigated by such mild precautions as remembering the name and address of his publisher. He is alienated, to use the fashionable term. The only consolations in his wilderness of difficulties are the beauties of the sea and the Canadian landscape — both of which Mr. Lowry describes with immense skill — and love, which he interprets as the possession of a mattress which can cook and make pretty remarks about the scenery.

The sense of suffering in these stories is acute and at times moving, but it is the suffering of a mind closed in on itself, of an extreme neuroticism for which no cause is ever given. Mr. Lowry implies that the world is mean and man uncouth, but why this well-known fact should have reduced his hero to such a state of cowering withdrawal is not explained. Indeed, there is no evidence that this introverted man has ever looked at the world long enough to see what it is, or become acquainted with any man but himself.

Mr. Lowry’s prose has brilliance and vitality, but whole paragraphs can be lifted out as pure James, pure Melville, pure Conrad, and even, heaven help us, pure Kathleen Norris. As a record of private experience, the stories are interesting, if incomplete. As a comment on the experience of humanity in general, they are of debatable relevance.

The Fall River irregulars will be interested, and possibly annoyed, by EDWARD D. RADIN’S reinvestigation of LIZZIE BORDEN (Simon and Schuster, $4.50). Mr. Radin has discovered that Edmund Pearson. the standard authority on the case, believing Lizzie guilty, minimized or ignored any testimony that suggested she was innocent, and denounces him for it. Mr. Radin, believing Lizzie innocent, minimizes or ignores the evidence that suggests she was guilty.

If Lizzie didn’t take an ax and give her stepmother forty whacks, it’s obvious who must have done it, but the rules of this game forbid me to name Mr. Rad in’s candidate. Barring motive, his case is as possible as the one against Lizzie. That is, it could have been done, but there is no proof that it was. The main weakness of Mr. Radin’s argument is his preoccupation with time. He seems to be unaware that in 1892, before electric clocks and continuous radio announcements, timepieces offered a happy variety of opinion, and that the fourth day of a vicious August heat wave does nothing for the accuracy of those who, unfortunately, have to endure it.

Mr. Radin also assumes that because Lizzie could describe, approximately, the contents of a box of odds and ends in the barn loft, she must have been up there looking at it instead of giving her father forty-one in the living room, To anyone acquainted with the packratting habits of New England families, the conclusion simply does not follow. That box was the place where the Bordens kept broken locks (Mr. Borden brought home a fine specimen that very morning), old doorknobs, and bits of metal that might come in handy someday, and Lizzie could have described it even if she hadn’t seen it for a year.

THE STONE AGE (Crown, $5.95) is the latest volume in the Art of the World series, covering “forty thousand years of rock art,” with many black-and-white drawings and a generous supply of color plates. The text is by a number of experts, under the general editorial supervision of DR. HANS-GEORG BANDI. Dr. Bandi’s introduction emphasizes that each writer is responsible only for his own opinions, a stand that suggests controversy behind the scenes.

The first three sections of the book seem entirely peaceable, however. Abbé Breuil, the great veteran authority in the field, and Dr. L. Berger-Kirchner describe the painted caves of France and Spain; Dr. Bandi describes cliff paintings in the Spanish Levant; Dr. Henri Lhote covers rock art in the Sahara.

Up to this point, the authors have displayed nothing more belligerent than an occasional courtly difference over dates (trifles of 10,000 years or so) to justify Dr. Bandi s introductory complaint that one of the dangers of prehistoric studies is “excessively speculative interpretation.” It is Dr. Erik Holm’s piece on South Africa which elucidates what must be quite a lively specialists’ row.

The rock art in Dr. Holm’s province is not a thing of the remote past, although it began there. He maintains that the Bushmen of the Kalahari not only understand the old carvings; they can and do continue to make sculptures in the same style and with the same intention. He has found that these Bushmen’s sculptures are not at all simple magic designed to promote successful hunting. They are illustrations of a cosmic myth by which the sculptors account for the workings of the universe, and the delightful animals are not animals but symbols of the motions of the sun, the moon, and the seasons.

In comparing the works of his Bushmen with those of long-gone European rock artists, Dr. Holm perceives a strong similarity of motif. The European painted a bison, where the Bushman paints an eland, but the animals are involved in identical situations. Certain peculiarities of representation common to both areas and generally passed off as naïve drawing are interpreted by Dr. Holm as deliberate devices, indicating, for example, the waxing or waning of the moon.

He concludes from these observations that the same cosmic myth prevailed throughout Stone Age Europe and Africa, where it still survives, and that Stone Age art everywhere was devoted to illustrating it. The exquisite bison of Altamira were not painted, then, to assist the tribe’s hunters to kill bison; they were religious abstractions as sophisticated as the ornamentation of a Gothic cathedral. Lest it be argued that the Stone Age was hardly sophisticated, Dr. Holm quotes an elderly Bushman. Some meddlesome white man had asked his age, mostly out of wicked curiosity as to how the old gentleman would count when he ran out of fingers. The Bushman scorned to count at all. He was, he said, “as old as my keenest disappointment and as young as my boldest dreams.”

The book’s final section, pleasantly written by Dr. Andreas Lommel, concerns rock art in Australia, another area where the Stone Age has lasted into our own time. Australian rock art is charmless compared with that of Europe and Africa, but Dr. Lommel indirectly supports Dr. Holm by reporting that his aborigines still keep the old carvings and paintings in repair and explain them as illustrations of the structure and meaning of the world.