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This, year is the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation: to mark the occasion JAMES WIN, in THE FIRE NEXT TIME (Dial, S3.50), has written a proclamation of his own, a manifesto on the Negro question so eloquent in its passion and so scorching in its candor that it is bound to unsettle any readers who might be satisfied about the progress we have made in race relations.

Such progress is real, no doubt; but in the century since Lincoln it has moved at a snail’s pace. Mr. Baldwin is no sociological bookkeeper totting up a balance sheet of rights gained against rights still in abeyance. As a novelist and a writer of uncommon talent, he plunges to the human heart of the matter: the fact, quite simply, that any Negro now born in the United States enters a world that belongs to the whites, and that, in consequence, the Negro is branded from the start with the mark of inferiority. To Mr. Baldwin this situation is humanly intolerable, and his anger and resentment, which are just, know no bounds.

Indeed, for most of this book he leaves the impression that the wounds of past and present injustice rankle too deeply ever to be healed, and that this republic, forever divided between whites and blacks, must always stand as a house divided against itself. Yet, when he visited the Black Muslims, who want an independent Negro nation within the United States, he found that, though he shared the feelings of this group, he could not believe in their ideas. He was still bound to the white world and a few people within it whom he could call friend. So he concludes, surprisingly enough, with a hope for a reconciliation, but he is under no illusion that this will be easy. The Negro will have to forgive, which is always hard, but the white will have to do something harder still: he will have to search painfully his own soul and find out what he wanted to vilify in himself when he chose to look down on the Negro.

“The world on the verge of its catastrophe was very brilliant,” wrote Winston Churchill of the years before World War I. “Empires crowned with princes and potentates rose majestically on every side.” In THE FALL OF THE DYNASTIES (Doubleday, $6.50), an account of the collapse of Europe’s royal houses from 1905 to 1922, EDMOND TAYLOR agrees, but only partly, with this bit of Churchillian nostalgia. Beneath all the pomp and circumstance there were undercurrents of misery and unrest that were later to gather head in the tides of war and revolution, and inundate the old dynasties.

Before 1914 social legislation was very meager. Homeless masses of people camped in the parks or slept in shifts in furnished rooms. It has been estimated that, in a glittering capital like Vienna, a third of the children born were illegitimate.

And as for the princely personages themselves, what emerges from Mr. Taylor’s narrative is less the impression of regal grandeur than of tragic mediocrity in the face of the historical crises with which they were confronted. Francis I of Austria was a doddering old man presiding over a patchwork empire. The Russian Czar was an inept little man, a puppet in the hands of a hysterical and power-crazy Czarina. The Sultan of Turkey, scion of the once powerful Osmanlis, was a ravaged and impotent captive of his own harem. And the Kaiser himself, who publicly affected the mask of imperial warlord and Teutonic beast of prey, was in his private life only a dull and stuffy German paterfamilias with very limited capacities of imagination. Only the British royal family had ties with its own people. The other European dynasties, having outlived their usefulness, were like dead leaves ready to be blown away by the winds of revolution.

Mr. Taylor has woven all these stories into a unified and superbly readable chronicle. He writes with unobtrusive elegance and the professional reporter’s sharp eye for significant detail. He has a grand theme, and his performance lives up to it. The First World War was the pivotal event of our century, from which all subsequent upheavals and conflicts issued. All of us who survive, Mr. Taylor concludes, have been scarred, at least emotionally, by it.

Like Mr. Taylor, HANNAH ARENDT believes that war and revolution are the central facts of our time. But while war may become obsolete through nuclear terror, revolution seems likely to persist as the order of the day, and those who understand revolution may well be the masters of the future. ON REVOLUTION (Viking, $6.00) is a remarkable study of two classic models of revolution — the American and French as a possible key to this future.

On the face of it, there is a curious irony in the fate of these revolutions for posterity. The American Revolution produced political stability and was brought to completion under the direction of the men who started it. The French Revolution, on the other hand, gave way to terror, chaos, and dictatorship, and ended by devouring its own children. Yet, the latter was to serve as model for the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and apparently for the continuing revolutions of the emerging nations. “The sad truth,” Dr. Arendt sums up, “is that the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.”

What accounts for the difference in these two revolutions? America found itself in the privileged position of launching a revolution without any great mass poverty. (European visitors to the Colonies in the eighteenth century were amazed not to find hordes of beggars in the streets.) The decisive difference in the French situation is symbolized by the fall of the Bastille, when the oppressed masses of Paris suddenly swarm upon the stage of history for the first time. A revolution that turns to curing mass misery becomes social rather than political in its preoccupations, and it can even lose altogether the sense of politics as an affair of checks and balances and the legal safeguards for individual liberty. In the name of compassion it can become self-righteously cruel and dictatorial. “Out of pity, out of love for humanity, be inhuman!” the Parisian Commune counseled the members of the National Convention, and it could just as well have been addressing the leaders of the Russian and Chinese revolutions.

No schematic summary can do justice to the richness of detail and insight to be found in this book. Dr. Arendt’s mind has always seemed to me something of an eighth wonder; an erudite and disciplined thinker, she still retains the ebullient intuition of a woman able always to come at things from a fresh and unusual angle. This is a study to which the thoughtful reader can return again and again for both intellectual delight and profit.

Laughter, observed the philosopher Bergson, is like spray rising playfully to the surface of the ocean; but when we come too close to it we may find that, like spray, it has a bitter and salty taste. Perhaps no more apt cases in point for the tradition of the sad clown can be cited than our own American humorists Mark Twain and Ring Lardner— the former in old age, the latter throughout the whole of his brief and mordant life.

The pieces in MARK TWAIN’S LETTERS FROM THE EARTH (Harper & Row, $5.95) were edited by the late Bernard De Voto as early as 1939, but publication was forbidden by the author’s daughter, Clara Clemens. By her own lights, of course, she was being perfectly consistent; these late papers and sketches arc so bitter and uncompromisingly misanthropic in spirit that they would have been an outrage to the genteel tradition represented by the author’s wife and daughter. Mark Twain was not one of those old men who, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “go gentle into that good night”; he preferred to rage like a wounded but still unconquered lion. It is a horrible thing, he had once declared, to be a “professional funny man.”

Yet, with all his cantankerousness, what magnificent bite and vigor he still retains in his pen ! “Letters from the Earth,” the title piece, purports to be written by Satan himself to the archangels Gabriel and Michael about the follies of the human race on this tiny and unimportant planet. In “Papers of the Adam Family,” Mark Twain audaciously writes as our first parent, giving his own hairraising, unorthodox interpretation of events in Eden and afterward. Wherever he turned, Mark Twain was struck by human absurdity and pretense: in preposterous books of etiquette, French civilization (which he allows to be just about equal to that of the Comanches), in the impossibly artificial style of his old chopping block Fenimore Cooper. If nothing human was alien to him, nothing human seemed to please him; yet he never attempted to play any Olympian role, and he included himself, too, in that “damned human race,” for whose absurdities, one feels, he never ceased to feel affection.

THE RING LARDNER READER, edited by Maxwell Geismar (Scribner’s, $7.50), contains no hitherto unpublished writings, but it is put together in such a way that it sheds a new light upon a writer whose reputation appears to be steadily on the increase. It is, first of all, much more inclusive than any previous Lardner collection. Mr. Geismar has taken selections from those two muchneglected works Gullible’s Travels and The Big Town — only the most extreme Lardner addicts would want them whole - and wedged them unobtrusively, according to subject matter, among the short stories. Finally, he has arranged all the selections under a number of categories — “Provincial Life,” “On the Make,” “Success Story, U.S.A.” —so that what emerges from all this material is a renewed impression of Lardner not merely as a funnyman but as an extremely accurate social historian of American life in the teens and twenties.

This historical picture, to be sure, is not a pleasant one. Lardner’s characters, as Mencken noted, for the most part resemble so many broken-down Model T Fords. Lardner dealt with the same America as Booth Tarkington, but he chose to daub in all the shadows that had been left out of Tarkington’s idyllic portrait.

Though Mr. Geismar does bring out, as has never quite been done before, Lardner’s power and scope as a social historian, the sheer bulk of this collection serves to intensify one’s feeling of the grim and unrelieved monotony of the Lardnerian vision of things. This deadpan humor, fired at point-blank range, unerringly hits its target between the eyes; but the targets themselves — boobs, boors, heels, and respectable cheats — become in the end an appallingly tiresome lot. Though Mark Twain may have been bitter in his later years, in his early life he had known the exhilarating freedom of life on the Mississippi, and in a book like Huckleberry Finn he had been a true poet touched by the Muse. Nothing like this ever happened to Ring Lardner.

Writers, according to the classic dictum of Juvenal, are a high-strung and irritable lot, and they tend to be most quarrelsome of all where other writers are concerned. It is a remarkable feat when two of the tribe can maintain a mutual adulation of each other unbroken over the years, and well-nigh incredible when these two happen to be such prickly individualists as Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller. Yet, believe it or not, LAWRENCE DURRELL AND HENRY MILLER: A PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE, edited by Professor George Wickes (Dutton, $6.95), spreads before us just such a love feast of admiration and friendship over a span of thirty years. Only once does Durrell confess himself very disappointed by Miller’s writing (the book is Sexus), and he wonders whether Miller may not have gone to seed since leaving Europe and settling among the California beatniks. But this harsh verdict is modified in a later letter.

The letters make very lively reading, and they clarify many of the ideas and literary values of the two authors during the difficult years when they were without very much public recognition. Yet it is a rather impersonal exchange, in the sense that it lacks those homely and nonliterary details that are often the special charm of letters written without any intention of publication. This may be because the two knew each other for many years only by correspondence, and they tend to address each other as literary minds rather than as real, flesh-and-blood persons.

The exchange began in the early 1930s with a fan letter from Durrell on the Tropic of Cancer. (He was then twenty-three, unpublished and unknown; Miller, forty-three, had been published but was little known.) The Tropic, writes Durrell, is the great book for our time; and Miller, with a detachment that transcends egotism, calmly replies that this is exactly what he himself would say of the book if he were not its author. He suspects that Durrell may be a writer too, and asks to see a manuscript; in due course he receives a copy of The Black Book, and now it is his turn to exclaim that, by God, Durrell too is a “stinking genius.” And that about sets the tone from there on.

Yet for all this unbuttoned praise of each other, the letters demean neither man. In this very private exchange they remain men of stature, and their correspondence is in fact a moving testament to the dedicated literary life as each has practiced it.

When the Japanese take over Western forms of art they never quite abandon their own native style and sensibility. At first glance there might seem to be a certain naïveté about AFTER THE BANQUET by YUKIO MISHIMA (Knopf, $4.00), as if the author, in writing a novel, were imitating an alien idiom. But this initial reaction (as in our first exposure to Japanese films) quickly vanishes; the apparent naïveté turns into a style all its own, direct yet allusive, poetic without being gushing, and we realize that the author has accomplished the amazing feat of making his novel entirely successful by Western standards and yet never losing contact with his own great tradition of Japanese poetry. This is Mr. Mishima’s third novel to appear in English, and it seems to me that it establishes him as an outstanding writer, not only of Japan but of the world. He is fortunate, too, in his translator, Donald Keene, who has outdone himself in turning the original into felicitous English.

Kazu, a middle-aged woman who believes that love has long since been put out of her life, is proprietress of a highly successful restaurant in Tokyo that is much frequented by retired diplomats and politicians. One of the latter is Noguchi, a slightly threadbare but haughty aristocrat. Kazu, on the other hand, is a woman of the people who harbors a very romantic heart beneath the veneer of a successful professional woman. The opposites attract each other, fall in love, and get married. But the austere moralism of Noguchi, highminded but hypocritical, grinds romance into dust. When he attempts a comeback in politics, Kazu throws herself into the campaign; but her methods in going directly to the people scandalize her husband, and the marriage breaks up.

The plot is slight; the novel triumphs as a character study of a couple past their prime caught in the toils of a hopeless marriage. In Kazu, particularly, Mr. Mishima has caught the pathos of the middleaged woman fluttering in love with the impulsiveness and abandon of a young girl as we have not had it in fiction since the best of Colette.

In the usual thriller we find respite for a few moments from the cares of the world in the company of the superhuman hero, master of judo and assorted mayhem, as he outwits spies and casually seduces beautiful women. However, in THE LIGHT OF DAY (Knopf, S3.95), ERIC AMBLER proves conclusively that the formula can be turned around and yet provide just as good an escape. Taking an altogether unattractive and disreputable protagonist, Mr. Ambler plunges him into a maelstrom of international intrigue, and before long we are hanging on with bated breath. When the story is good, we can identify with the mouse as well as the lion — perhaps even better, for we are able to release some of our own less desirable qualities.

The unheroic hero is Arthur Abdel Simpson, son of a British officer and an Egyptian mother; and Mr. Ambler, with a delightfully sardonic irony toward his own countrymen, leaves it a moot point whether the shady streak in this character comes by way of paternal or maternal ancestry. A short exposure to an English public school, which is supposed to foster character, has in fact encouraged Arthur in all the wiles of the petty sneak. Hired under rather unusual circumstances to drive a Lincoln Continental from Athens to Istanbul, Arthur runs afoul of Turkish customs. Thence begins a chain of improbable adventures in the course of which he becomes simultaneously an arm of Turkish counterintelligence and a confederate of international thieves.

Arthur always does the wrong thing; but somehow the mouse, hurled into these dangerous waters, splashes around and floats. Not only does he keep several jumps ahead of Turkish intelligence; he also is able to outwit the thieves. In the end he has turned out just as effective an agent as any James Bond — and a good deal more human and likable.