Reader's Choice

BY WILLIAM BARRETT

Did last year’s centennial make us reflect any more deeply about the meaning of the Civil War? I doubt it. There were some moving pageants, but for the most part we seemed not so much to be remembering a national tragedy as re-enacting a costume ball. After so much froth, it is a sobering experience to come upon a book as harsh and abrasive as EDMUND WILSON’S PATRIOTIC CORE (Oxford University Press, $8.50), which attempts to get at the complex human truth of the Civil War through the writing of the men and women who were caught up in the tragedy. Mr. Wilson’s conclusions will be shocking to many people, but, disagree with him as we may, it is refreshing to come upon a mind so free from cant and so doggedly resistant to the bluff of specious idealism.

Why were the Southern states not allowed to secede in 1861? The Northern myth is that the Civil War was a crusade against slavery. In fact, most Northerners were indifferent to the existence of slavery and were capable of mobbing the Abolitionists, while a good many Southerners, who had seen slavery in the flesh, were thoroughly sick of the whole evil. The mystique of the Union could not permit secession. But this mystique, in Mr. Wilson’s view, has to be understood as part of an aggressive and expansive phase of our history. Like the French under Napoleon, and the Russians after 1917, we had had a successful revolution and were in the process of consolidating and expanding its influence. Here Mr. Wilson offers a bold comparison between the secession of 1861 and the Hungarian revolt of 1956. The Hungarians wanted to secede from the Soviet empire, but were crushed and eventually denounced by their masters as reactionary and feudal. The South was backward in comparison with the industrial North — the two regions had grown so far apart that they were virtually different countries, as much as Hungary and Russia — and it, too, was forced into an unconditional surrender.

These views are stated in a slashing, forthright, but somewhat rambling introduction, which is the most sensational but least satisfying section of the work. However, the book does not stand or fall with such theses. Patriotic Gore is not primarily a polemic, but a work of the historical imagination, and, as such, a monumental achievement. Mr. Wilson traces the impact of the Civil War on the lives of many individuals, Northerners and Southerners, famous and obscure. Whether he is treating us to an adult reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, evaluating anew the much-misunderstood characters of Lincoln and Grant, or threading his way through the intricate diaries of Southern ladies, he is continually exciting. As a critic, Mr. Wilson has always been at his best when he could illuminate a literary work in relation to its historical milieu or to the life of its author. Writing now as a historian, he is therefore in a thoroughly congenial medium; the literary record, after all, is the most intimate expression of how human beings are affected by history.

Of the many fine biographical portraits with which the book abounds the re-evaluation of Lincoln is perhaps most striking. The whimsical Lincoln — folk sage and rustic simpleton — is, in Mr. Wilson’s view, a superficial caricature. Lincoln, as he is revealed in his own writings, was a man of cool and precise intelligence, powerful will, with the ambitious and dedicated conviction that he was the servant of the historic process. If we allow for differences of background and culture, the comparison of Lincoln to Lenin does not seem inappropriate.

In previous books Mr. Wilson has written about major figures in literature, from Sophocles to Henry James. The miracle of the present work is that in dealing with Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sidney Lanier, John W. DeForest, as well as a host of lesser lights, he is no less interesting or significant. He has perhaps never been so deeply and personally involved with his material. And if this is, as I tend to believe, Mr. Wilson’s richest and most rewarding book, the reason may very well lie in the depth of his involvement.

A frequent criticism of Britain’s Angry Young Men is that it is not always clear what they are angry about; or, when clear, the object of anger seems rather picayune — like being at a provincial university, for example, rather than at Oxford or Cambridge. ALAN SILLITOE arrived a little too late to be included in this posh circle of young authors — his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, appeared in 1958 — but he could not have been classed with them anyway, for he was really angry and had something to be angry at. Mr. Sillitoe is of the working class, and his first novel was choking with anger at the whole system.

In KEY TO THE DOOR (Knopf, $5.95) Mr. Sillitoe has returned to the Nottingham slums of his first novel. His hero, Brian Seaton, is in fact the older brother of Arthur, the caddish protagonist of Saturday Night. But Brian is much more sensitive than his younger brother, and consequently the tone now is less that of anger and protest and more of sympathetic involvement with the industrial poor. Not since the early D. H. Lawrence has the life of the British working class been rendered with such vividness. Though living in slums and imprisoned by the dull routines of the factories, these people retain some unkillable earthy and peasantlike quality, a caged but not altogether crushed animal vitality.

Key to the Door is the story of Brian’s growing up — in great part, one suspects, autobiographical. We are carried through scenes of his boyhood, schooling, and his courting of a girl. Eventually conscripted, he is shipped to Malaya, where the climactic scene of the book occurs. Out on patrol, he encounters a Communist guerrilla, and instead of killing the man he sets him free. The act by which he has entered manhood is to have given life to another man. not because of his own leftist sympathies but simply because the other was a human being.

On the boat bound back to England, Brian thinks with warmth and affection of the life in Nottingham to which he is returning. When another soldier makes a scurrilous jibe at England, Brian remarks that he does not mind so long as Nottingham is not included. Brian Seaton is not yet able to say my England; but he can say my town, my home, my family. And with this, Mr. Sillitoe himself has passed beyond the novel of social protest, with its abstract anger, into the concrete evocations of poetry.

Mr. Sillitoe is one of the most powerful talents among the younger English novelists. Yet, with all its power, there is a monotonous quality about the present book, as if its author were struggling to cast off a personal burden from which he cannot quite get free. The “key to the door” that Brian has found at the end of the book seems an image of Mr. Sillitoe’s own condition. Brian feels that he has found the key to his future, but, he warns himself, he must now strain every muscle to turn the key and open the door. It will be interesting to see what lies on the other side of the door for Mr. Sillitoe himself.

Living in Paris, the home of nearly every avant-garde movement of our century. MARCEL AYMÉ has always insisted that he is merely a bourgeois writer whose business is to entertain. In THE CONSCIENCE OF LOVE (Athcncum, $4.50) M. Aymé is as brilliantly witty as ever; but the story is more baroque, involved, and surrealistic than anything he has done before. Perhaps even this resolute entertainer has not been able to escape the avant-garde winds that blow about the French capital.

A young Parisian named Martin comes home one day to find his fiancée in bed with his brother Marcel. Discreetly withdrawing, as a proper Frenchman should, he bumps against a neighbor on the stairs; they fight, and the neighbor is accidentally killed. When he is released from prison two years later, Martin moves back into the apartment with the brother and the fiancee. (The French believe in keeping these things in the family.)

This strange beginning is but a prelude to stranger things to follow, It is not always easy to tell exactly what M. Aymé is up to, and sometimes one feels the novelist’s inventiveness here has exceeded his control. Through all the mazes of his story M. Aymé is in pursuit of a new theory of love. This theory is being developed by brother Marcel, who declares that since he has never been in love himself he is the right man to make a detached study of the subject. The saving force of love in human society, Marcel and M. Aymé hold, is not found in the maundering male, who is likely to lose himself in intellectual fantasies about his beloved, but in the harddriving practical woman who is hunting for a socially suitable mate.

In the light of this very bourgeois and orthodox theory, we can understand why the sexual escapades in the book never seem shocking or really immoral. Blasphemy, we have been told, is only possible for those who have faith. M. Aymé blasphemes, but underneath it all we know that his is the heart of a true believer.

For a faculty wife, love has a colder climate in the setting of a small New England college than in Paris; but the experience as depicted by ALISON LURIE in a pleasant first novel, LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP (Macmillan, $4.50), seems to be just as bewildering.

The stones of our colleges have been raised by the unpaid toil of the young faculty wife. Mother and housewife, she is also called upon to be her husband’s intellectual companion. listen to his complaints about Hum C (Humanities for freshmen), and turn over her surplus labor to the college by helping to grade papers. No wonder Miss Lurie’s heroine falls out of love with her husband, and in a mood of momentary emptiness is ready to drift into dalliance with a good-looking young teacher in the music department.

The plot of this novel is small, and its world tiny, but Miss Lurie’s wit, like Jane Austen’s, is wicked and delicious. In Emmy Stockwell Turner she has caught a faculty wife whom we all must have seen on one campus or another. A handsome gangling girl, educated and intelligent, Emmy is the product of an overprotected middle-class life, and consequently as naïve as a teen-ager on her first date. Letting herself drift halfway into seduction, she suddenly sits bolt upright and exclaims to her startled suitor: “But I’m married!”

At the end Emmy pays a farewell visit to a neighbor, and together they watch the children playing in the yard. The game is supposed to be blindman’s buff, but all the children are blindfolded. “They like it better that way,” the neighbor explains crisply. Their parents, though they may not have liked it quite so much, have been playing the same game.

RANDALL JARRELL’S first essays seemed to be hilarious vacations from his more serious work as a poet. They were fun to read because the author himself seemed to be having the time of his life writing them. Though this same exuberant wit runs through his latest collection,

A SAD HEART AT THE SUPERMARKET

(Atheneum, $4.50), it has been toned down, for Mr. Jarrell is dealing here with large social themes and he has a serious message to preach.

The supermarket of Mr. Jarrell’s title essay is the symbol of a society overflowing with consumer goods. But the goods have built-in obsolescence and are always being replaced by newer models. The supermarket, in short, is dealing in perishables. The poet and humanist, on the other hand, are searching for imperishables — the values that tie the present to the past in civilizcd continuity. Inevitably, these values get pushed aside by the glittering novelties of technology. Mr. Jarrell’s recurrent theme is the estrangement of intellectuals, artists, and poets from the broad stream of American life.

This theme is by now fairly trite. But Mr. Jarrell is valuable not for his general ideas as much as for the wit and detail with which he can embroider them. Even as an essayist, he seems to be writing fundamentally as a poet. His essays do not seem to have a precharted course, but wander spontaneously and effortlessly through the wide fields of the author’s reading.

Out of this reading he can always come up with some surprising nugget — for example, the rediscovery of Appleton’s Fifth Reader, which is discussed in an imaginary dialogue between an old-fashioned uncle and his modern nephew. The Appleton reader had authors like Milton, Gray, and Wordsworth, with whom the nephew acquired only a passing acquaintance in his sophomore year in college. These authors were daily bread to the uncle when he was in the fifth grade. The nephew belongs to the world of the supermarket, whose reading habits, Mr. Jarrell is warning us, are rapidly sliding downhill toward illiteracy.

ALFRED KAZIN is distinguished by great versatility and energy of mind, and in CONTEMPORARIES (AtlanticLittle, Brown, $7.50) he has given us an important and lively book that ranges over almost the whole held of modern letters. The contemporaries he starts with are not writers now living, but our own American classics — Melville, Thoreau, Emerson — because these authors are still a living part of the modern mind. Coming closer to the present, he gives us notable essays on Faulkner, J. D. Salinger, John O’Hara, Saul Bellow, and a great many others; there is some highly perceptive and interesting travel reportage on Russia, Israel, and Puerto Rico; and, for political analysis, an appreciative but shrewdly skeptical discussion of the intellectual tone of the new Kennedy Administration.

This extraordinary range is no casual accident, but the deliberate project of a mind passionately enmeshed in the life of its time. Much in this time is troubling to Mr. Kazin. By temperament his own deepest leanings are those of traditional humanism, and many modern works seem to be at war with such values. But as a critic he has great generosity of spirit — not to be confused with softness, for he can come down like a pile driver on a writer, like John O’Hara, whom he dislikes — and he can expend himself generously on writers whose values are not his own. To my mind, it is just this fine tension between a lively sense of tradition and an acute feeling of modernity that forms the unity of Mr. Kazin’s critical vision and makes this book so distinguished a contribution to current criticism.

Though most novel fanciers prefer their stories in conventional form, there is always the occasional addict who, recognizing that the novel is the most flexible of literary forms, is willing to watch it being bent into all sorts of odd shapes, and will even add the pleasure of solving a puzzle to the delight usually derived from fiction.

For this type of reader two recent novels can be recommended as worth deciphering: THE MARQUISE AYEXT OUT \T FIVE (Braziller, $4.95) by CLAUDE MAUHIAC; and WALL TO \\ ALL (Grove, $3.95), a second novel by a young American, DOUGLAS WOOLF.

C laude Mauriac, son of the famous novelist Frangois Mauriac, has already had two of his books translated and published here: 7 he New Literature, essays on contemporary French writers; and a first novel, The Dinner Party, which was something of a puzzle too, but child’s play beside the present work.

Where James Joyce in Ulysses dealt with the life of a whole city during one day, The Marquise Went Out at Five is the story of only one hour (5:00 to 6:00 P.M.) in the lives of various individuals passing through a square near the center of Paris. We are plunged directly into the minds of the characters, and switched from one to another without explanation or the help of external descriptions. All this is very bewildering at first; but if you persist, you will find that certain rhythms begin to recur and define themselves, and the characters detach themselves from the flux of words. The pleasure of deciphering then becomes exhilarating. like the game played at a Paris sidewalk café, in which you watch the people pass and guess what kind of life each one leads.

Some of the quality of Douglas Woolf’s Wall to Wall can be suggested if you try to imagine one of Jack Kerouac’s cross-country odysseys cut by nine tenths, the connecting links between episodes eliminated, and imagination substituted for stenography. Mr. Woolf writes as if he were moving a sharply focused but oddly angled camera abruptly from spot to spot. Each successive image is clear, but the reader has to work at filling in the gaps. Gradually, we make out that the young hero, Claude Squires, is working as an attendant in a mental hospital; that he goes to a strange used-car lot and buys a jalopy for a long trip, lands in the desert, has a fling with a girl he knew when he was in the army, returns home to father and mother.

This material may not sound very promising, but Mr. Woolfs powers of sharp visualization and grotesque imagination are so considerable that they impart the vividness of a nightmare to this little story. In my judgment, he is the most gifted writer who has yet appeared in the ranks of our much-publicized beat generation.

The Behan family of Dublin, it seems, has been holding out on us. They have given us Brendan, the well-known playwright, but they have been hiding a youngest brother — not younger, for several other Behans got in between — who is a pretty fair hand at writing himself and now at last has emerged from the shadow of big brother. In TELL DUBLIN I MISS HER (Putnam, $3.50) DOMINIC BEHAN has written a rollicking, raucous, and altogether heartwarming account of life in the Dublin tenements that not only can stand comparison with his brother’s work, but for sheer gusto might even make Sean O’Casey turn shamrock with envy.

Mr. Behan subtitles his book An Autobiography, but it is autobiographical only by fits and starts, and is mainly about the neighbors on Russell Street. In a Dublin tenement the neighbors keep knocking on the wall to get in, so that you could hardly go in for soul-searching autobiography with all that racket going on. And they do get in; there are enough vivid and colorful characters in this book to stock several novels or plays.

Mr. Behan’s story begins with the Easter Rebellion of 1916, which had to be held on a bank holiday because the rebels, being workingmen, could assemble to make a revolution only on their day off. Mr. Behan did not take part in the rebellion, for he was not yet born (that happens in a later chapter, entitled “Come in, Dominic, We Know Your Knock”); but the rebellion does set the stage for the violent time that followed, in which young Dominic passed his boyhood. Those were the days of civil war, when the Irish, to paraphrase Yeats slightly, were blind men battering blind men. Now living in London, where he writes for the BBC, Mr, Behan has come to know the English, and he is more than a little skeptical of the fanatical patriotism of his youth. What Ireland needs now, he tells us, is not fiery patriots but sober planners who can develop the country economically. This is sober and sensible, and I suppose it would have to be labeled as progress if it happened. But the thought of a planned and standardized Ireland must give one pause. Irish writers would lose the great advantage of belonging to a backward country.

Besides, Mr. Behan’s old neighbors on Russell Street might be a bitrecalcitrant to planning. When the De Valera government built a new housing development, it had to use force to get the people out of their crumbling Georgian tenements — the only slums in the world with mahogany staircases — and every time a family departed, the rest of the block held a solemn wake.