Reader's Choice

JOHN O’HARA’S ASSEMBLY (Random House, $5.95) is a collection of short stories of remarkably uneven quality. A few of them, like the tale of the retired boxer and His ambitious wife, are as good as anything Mr. O’Hara has ever done — sharp economical presentations of individual people moving in a specific milieu. Others appear to be oddments left over from novels Mr. O’Hara has written, or outlines of novels he once intended to write but gave up on, or works specifically designed for those men’s magazines in which any plot is accepted as reasonable, provided the characters engage in adultery or murder — or, preferably, both.

When Mr. O’Hara is in good form, he can tell a quite complex story entirely through action and dialogue. He conveys sufficient background to account for his characters, reveals what they think as opposed to what they say, and pins down what it all means without resorting to long explanations or putting in a single speech that doesn’t have the ring of a living voice. When he is not in good form, he writes dialogue that no human tongue could utter, hangs motivation on supernatural premonitions, sets his stories in unnecessary frames, and then removes the action still further from conviction by having it described by some extraneous narrator. These old devices, worn out by Kipling fifty years ago, have not been improved upon by Mr. O’Hara.

The cause of the schism in Mr. O’Hara’s work appears to be money. If he is writing about a second-rate prize fighter or a barkeep, things happen directly to that character, who then reacts directly to them and speaks his mind about the business in suitable language. But the instant Mr. O’Hara endows one of his creatures with an income of more than $30,000 a year (unless it is Hollywood money, which evidently doesn’t count), or membership in a good club, or a degree from an Ivy League university, he becomes unable to write about the fellow except at long distance.

The barkeep carries on a flirtation, disguised as a quarrel, at the elbow of the lady’s official owner, and every word of it crackles with reality. When the cub reporter hankers after a society woman, the story comes in retrospect, told by the journalist thirty years later to a friend in one of those clubs that weigh so on the author’s mind, and all the tale amounts to is a description of a luxurious shooting lodge of the 1920s, a piece of nostalgia to which the club, the friend, and even the narrator himself are quite irrelevant.

None of Mr. O’Hara’s respectable, prosperous characters can talk. They speak prose, and take it a good deal harder than Moliere’s man did. So does Mr. O’Hara. One woman remarks, apropos of a tiresome old sweetheart of her husband’s, “we’ve got to that age when we don’t have to like our friends,” a good line which the author immediately ruins by pointing out its merits to the reader twice over.

It is curious and exasperating that a man as incapable as Mr. O’Hara shows himself to be of discovering either meaning or truth in the actions of people with money should persist in writing about them, especially when he writes so well of people whose financial status does not cloud his mind.

BAGARA (Abelard-Schuman, $10.00) is the record of a trip into French Equatorial Africa by the photographer ED VAN DER ELSKEN. The pictures are extraordinarily good, for Mr. van der Elsken has an eye for what matters, and consequently, a knack of catching his African subjects in poses that imply more about their lives than the action of the moment literally reveals.

In the first half of the book, there are pictures of hairdressing and hunting and cotton harvesting. The cotton is toted to a great market, where it is sold, and the sale is followed by an orgy of shopping, tax collection, and litigation. The pictures of the court in session are fascinating, and so are those of pets, toys, games, fetishes, funerals, and dances. There is a charming color plate of a dignified African lady in a cotton dress of European fashion, a very unusual item, displaying her French sewing machine and her pretty little boy, who is decorated with an enormous and totally superfluous hat. Conspicuous consumption in East Ubangi Chari. The other economic extreme is represented by the corpse of an old man who hurried so far and so fast to beg some elephant meat that he died of exhaustion when he reached the kill.

The book’s later pages are devoted to several safaris, and these pictures are more dependent on the text than those of the expressive African people. One wounded buffalo in a thicket looks just about like the next wounded buffalo in a thicket, and it is only on reading what happened between the shots that one discovers Mr. van der Elsken is of two minds about hunting. He enjoys the excitement and suspense, but he is also aware that the skill involved is primarily that of the African trackers and is frankly uncomfortable about some of the things he did and saw done.

The text that accompanies all these handsome pictures is informal, conversational, and seems, in fact, to have been talked by Mr. van der Elsken to his colleague, Jan Vrijman, who then wrote it down and adjusted it to the actual book pages. What this method of composition should be called, I do not know, but the result works very well.

T. H. TETENS, author of a number of books about his native Germany, has written a study of conditions under Dr. Adenauer’s government called THE NEW GERMANY AND THE OLD NAZIS (Random House, $4.95), The resurgence of this or that follower of Hitler has been noted in the papers occasionally, and Mr. Tetens does not maintain that the survival of a Nazi is in itself news. What he considers noteworthy is the total number of these cases, and the positions and influence involved.

Mr. Tetens reports that the Bonn government, the judiciary, the various provincial police forces, and the new German Army are peppered with former Nazi officials whose records arc just as unpleasant as those of their comrades who were hanged. He blames this alarming state of affairs on the Allied authorities, meaning primarily the United States, and he is probably right. He does not, however, produce any evidence that the decent and civilized non-Nazis, to whom he believes the country should have been entrusted, would have been capable of controlling it. He grants that these people had no influence under Hitler. He does not mention that they had no effective influence under the Emperor, either, or during any of the various attempts at governmental reform that sprang up, and failed, during the nineteenth century.

It is hard to trust the doings of a government riddled with unreconstructed Nazis; it would be equally hard to trust one riddled with men who had never done, or persuaded anyone else to do, anything at all. In any case, the opportunity for making this choice is past, and Mr. Tetens offers useful information on one aspect of what the world now has to deal with in Germany.

Among other innovations, TOM KAYE has chosen to title his novels with their opening phrases. The new one is called DAVID, FROM WHERE HE WAS LYING (Abelard-Schuman, S3.95), and since this is a contemporary story, David is, naturally, upon a psychoanalyst’s couch.

The theme of Mr. Kaye’s previous novel was that the self-conscious intellectuality of modern society makes love an impossible burden, or, to be simpler about it, takes all the fun out of the game. The theme of his second novel is exactly the same, and so are the names of the principal characters, but the setting and the style are completely different.

This time, love runs its hampered course through the lesser faculty of the University of Singapore, an institution which, Mr. Kaye cannily admonishes prospective libelants, docs not exist. If it did exist, it would be worth visiting, for activities among the learned of Singapore are quite wonderfully funny.

Mr. Kaye describes a six-hour departmental meeting at which the lone woman member, sticking to a fine point of parliamentary law while her male colleagues dream of amorous conquests, successfully prevents any business at all from being transacted. He records the conversation at a cocktail party, never bothering to identify any of the speakers, but letting the increasingly idiotic prattle do it for him. All these scholarly topers prove to be as familiar as old shoes. Poor David suffers through one of the most ridiculous seduction scenes ever concocted, gets a cramp in his elbow, gets scratched by mysterious hardware, and finally suffers a defeat by corset so humiliating that he cannot bring himself to confess it, even to his psychoanalyst.

The crisp high-comedy manner of this novel is so far from the ornate and rather affected style of It Had Been a Mild Delicate Might that it would be hard to believe the same man wrote them if certain basic ideas were not common to both. Mr. Kaye is reported to have a whole series of novels completed. On the evidence of the first two, he means to preach the same text throughout, with new illustrations for each volume. This is what many authors do, but few are so pleasantly candid about it. As long as Mr. Kaye can rewrite his triangle of the reluctantly ethereal lady, the diffidently uncommitted lover, and the old Adam as amusingly as he has done in David, From Where He Was Lying, he need not worry about finding another subject.

MARI SANDOZ’S LOVE SONG TO THE PLAINS (Harper, $5.95) is regional Americana, a mishmash of information about the old Nebraska Territory. Miss Sandoz loves everything about this country, from murderous weather to harmless butterflies.

Since it is hardly possible for an author with such catholic affections to follow a straight narrative, Miss Sandoz leaps backward and forward, north and south, in a way that is not always easy on the reader. It cannot have been easy on the author, either, for some of the history she undertakes to explain, like the military dynasty which sprang up in the wake of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, is difficult to get a grip on and sprawls like an octopus.

Despite its ramblings, Love Song to the Plains eventually covers most of the Missouri Valley, from prehistoric times through exploration, fur trade, settlement, Indian wars, cattlemen’s feuds, irrigation, and reforestation, ending neatly in the present. All this gaudy history is enlivened by the author’s enthusiasm and reinforced with amusing or terrifying anecdote and helpful information on such matters as starting a backfire and foretelling a blizzard.

By calling his English versions of the work of assorted foreign poets IMITATIONS (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, $4.50), ROBERT LOWELL has escaped the demands for metrical and verbal accuracy that are the curse of orthodox translators. This deliberately unscholarly approach enables him to deal successfully with poets as diverse as Homer, Villon, and Pasternak.

The pedantic can amuse themselves for hours in cataloguing the liberties taken by Mr. Lowell, and undoubtedly will. It is no matter. Mr. Lowell has turned the work of previously inaccessible poets into English verse that is truly poetry and speaks to the mind and heart of a modern reader, a result seldom achieved by mere grammatical conscientiousness.

ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN: LEGEND COME TO LIFE (Chilton, $7.50) is somewhat of a freak, for IVAN T. SANDERSON has devoted nearly live hundred pages to a subject that officially does not exist. Mr. Sanderson’s point is, of course, that something does exist, although it may be only mildly abominable and almost certainly does not live in, or even care for, snow.

Mr. Sanderson has collected reports from all over the world, in which responsible, sober citizens describe their collisions with creatures who are apelike but clearly not apes. The best of these stories come from our own Northwest, where something called the Sasquatch is so enterprising that one kidnaped an Indian girl but returned her to her family after a year because, as she put it in her old age, she “aggravated it so much.”

The stories Mr. Sanderson has assembled are necessarily somewhat repetitious, but when he has them all fitted together, he draws some interesting conclusions. The localities where Snowmen stories originate are scattered all around the world, but they turn out to have similar characteristics — high mountain forests, undesirable by human standards and thick enough for almost anything to hide out. The failure of various expeditions that looked for Snowmen in the Himalayan snows was foreordained, according to Mr. Sanderson, because they were looking in the wrong place. Whatever the creatures are, they must actually live farther down, where they can find food and cover. Mr. Sanderson does not offer to lead an expedition in pursuit of Sasquatches and the like, and professes to prefer the mystery to any advance in zoology, but he is clearly itching to have somebody do the job right, and it is hard not to itch with him.

With its borrowed title and contents partly retrieved from earlier books, WILSON’S NIGHT THOUGHTS (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, $4.50) has the air of being a minor item in the formidable total of EDMUND WILSON’S scholarly and creative writing. Does the title indicate that this collection of essays, poems, and sketches is the residue of a lifelong battle with insomnia? The book cannot be offered as a soporific for readers, for very few people can fall asleep while laughing, and Mr. Wilson has no intention of encouraging excessive sobriety with this work.

Wilson’s Night Thoughts includes some sketchy, lyrical, distinctive descriptions of coastal scenery and resort towns, fragments about dreams, reminiscent essays in which the author tries to relate memories of his childhood to a general concept of American character, a few tartly funny pictures, and a lot of poetry.

It is the poetry of a witty, intelligent, cantankerous literary man who understands the structure and function of poetry perfectly, although his natural habitat is prose. As usually happens in such cases, the best of ii is irreverent or satirical. Mr. Wilson sums up garden statuary as “lap-dog lions,” describes “one of those damn squint-windowed grit and brick New England towns,” demolishes advertising and patriotism, turns Nero into a nursery rhyme, and tosses off a parody of MacLeish that reads like something Longfellow thought better of writing. Turning to international linguistics, he observes, “The English always give a nasty wrench To anything they’re forced to take from French.”

Mr. Wilson’s metrical experiments are determined and ingenious. He has a taste for reverse rhymes “devil” rhymes with “livid,” by this system — and indulges it for more pages than one would think possible, given the difficulties involved. He also likes to tinker with elegiac meter, to which he has devoted care i and study and which he writes as well as anybody ever has in this language. His efforts prove that English, that thieving, unprincipled, mongrel old Autolycus, does cling immovably to one commandment: Thou shall not write quantitative verse.