Reader's Choice

BY WILLIAM BARRETT

GRAHAM GREENE’S short stories have usually been by-products incidental to his work as a novelist. In the last few years, however, he has been devoting himself exclusively to the writing of stories; and the fruit of this effort, the four stories that make up A SENSE OF REALITY (Viking, $3.95), suggests that this hardy veteran of letters may be about to venture forth in some new directions, perhaps to add dimensions of fantasy and myth not present in his earlier work.

Purely as stories, however, these are only of middling success. The art of the short story, the ability to compress the whole life of a character into a single moment or situation, is alien to Mr. Greene’s real gifts. His fictions have always turned on some abstract theme or problem around which he could spin a web of melodrama. A Roman Catholic, he has turned his faith to good use in the novel by fictionalizing those intricate crises of conscience usually treated only by theologians. So, too, the present stories are interesting, not as pictures of people in ordinary life but as elaborations of moral and intellectual themes that haunt the mind of the author.

One theme here, and a persistent one throughout Mr. Greene’s writings, is the paradoxical struggle for faith — whether in God or in any meaning to life — on the part of a character who has come to an absolutely dead end. In two of these stories the heroes are dying of incurable diseases. One story presents us an octogenarian brooding over his doubtful faith. In the last story, which rings with echoes of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a group of stunted and childlike people are wandering the face of the earth after some great disaster (the deluge of Noah or an atomic holocaust?) in which the older and taller inhabitants have vanished. For Mr. Greene’s imagination, man’s extremity appears to be God’s only opportunity.

As a literary experiment, a long story, “Under the Garden,” combines fantasy and realism in a bold and striking manner. A man dying of cancer returns to the country home of his childhood. The grounds and house appear to be strangely small and shrunken from what he remembered them to be. He finds a story he had written as a boy in which the house had seemed like an enchanting castle, and he remembers a dream in which the gardener and housemaid, uncanny children of the earth, had lived in a cave underground and talked a mysterious language. The dream and waking worlds are presented side by side, as if to suggest that the fantasy of childhood may be no less true than the shrunken vision of maturity. Now, in the short span of time left to him, the man must decide whether his life has miscarried because his dreams became too shriveled.

For readers attracted by the theological niceties of Mr. Greene’s work, “A Visit to Morin” may be the most interesting story here, though it is little more than a dramatized intellectual discussion. Morin is a French Roman Catholic novelist whose books have always been considered paradoxical. Attending a Christmas Eve service, he does not partake of the sacraments. He had given these up twenty years ago because he was adulterously in love with a woman and could not, in honesty, promise his confessor to renounce this sin. The woman is now dead, but Morin is afraid to return to the confessional and the sacraments, for if he did return and his belief did not also come back, he would lose all faith in the Church. As it is, he can view his present disbelief as the result of cutting himself off from the sacraments; and so, at bottom, he still believes in their efficacy. The paradox, so neatly contrived, is impeccable — Morin’s very disbelief is the proof of his faith. The original of Morin might be François Mauriac; but then again, especially for those readers who have suspected the religious orthodoxy of his writings, it might be Graham Greene himself.

A Long and Happy Life byREYNOLDS PRICE was one of the most moving of recent first novels, and it is happy news to report that his second book, a collection of stories, THE NAMES AND PACES OF HEROES (Atheneum, $3.95), shows that the novel was no fluke. To be sure, Mr. Price lacks here the sustaining narrative structure of the novel, so that some of the stories go soft at the edges and become drenched with too much sensibility. A few are quite slight. But despite such reservations, Mr. Price’s talent is as certain here as in his first book, and he shows the same gift for writing from inside his people.

Mostly his characters are backwoods folk from his native North Carolina, but though he often draws some quiet humor from their rustic ways, he does not patronize them or turn them into grotesques. Out of their simplicity he is able to distill a wonder and awe at the most commonplace situations of life. In his world the whites and Negroes move at ease and peace with one another; one of the more moving stories, “Uncle Grant,” tells about a Negro handyman who has become too old to work but still finds a place of honor and affection with the white family he has served.

Mr. Price is particularly felicitous in handling the tender intricacies of family affection, as in the story “A Chain of Love,” which renews our acquaintance with the Mustian family and that charming heroine Rosacoke. Papa Mustian has fallen sick, and when he is taken to the hospital, the family camps around his bed, virtually surrounding him with a chain of love. Even so, he will choose to go home to die in his own house; across the hall, however, is another man, without home or kin, and Rosacoke cannot keep from slipping into his room to attend the last rites. The whole story moves carefully to this moment of grave and tender revelation, when the young girl stands for the first time in the presence of death.

Unfortunately, the title story does not succeed nearly so well. In trying to evoke a boy’s awe and love for his father, the author strains till his prose becomes much too labored and pseudopoetic. Mr. Price can usually convey feeling so simply and delicately that one wonders why in this particular case he should have had to overlay his writing with so much syrup.

Doctors are a fitting subject for LILLIAN ROSS’S surgical talents. Miss Ross, you will remember, is the lady who in a notorious profile in the New Yorker once dug her scalpel neatly into Ernest Hemingway’s back. The piece established her reportorial gifts but left the question of her good taste very much open. In dealing with fictional people, however, she is on more solid ground. The novelist is free to create any kind of people she chooses, and if they are contemptible, then her contempt is perfectly in order. In VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL (Simon and Schuster, $3.95), a first novel and a really superior satire, Miss Ross has created a number of pretentious people, mostly from the medical profession, who overtax even her powers of cattiness. And her hero, Spencer Fifield, is so awful a creep that he fully deserves the author who has spawned him.

Spencer is what is known in the local parlance as “a Jewish prince,” a young unmarried doctor who has already set himself up in a thriving practice. Ordinarily the girls would come running, but they don’t, and that has Spencer worried; he just can’t seem to “relate to” girls. At thirty-eight, the doom of perennial bachelorhood hovers over him, and five times a week for years he has gone to his analyst, Dr. A1 Blauberman, for help and guidance.

Not that Dr. Blauberman does not have troubles of his own. A boy from Brooklyn, he has to compete with those polished refugees who once studied under Freud, and he is even compelled to touch up his Brooklynese speech with Middle European intonations to suggest professional sagacity. The relationship between the pair is both personal and professional — “vertical” when they are standing man to man, “horizontal” when Spencer is on the couch. Weaving a counterpoint between the vertical and the horizontal, Dr. A1 tries to get Spencer to “feel” rather than “over-intellectualize” so that he can truly “get with it.” In the end he succeeds, for at last Spencer is able to “relate to" Barbara (“Bobby”) Kirsch, a wellto-do young widow.

Or is he? To announce his engagement to Bobby, Spencer goes to call on an old acquaintance, Annie Melvin, the only really likable character in the book. At first, Annie feels sorry for him; the same old Spencer, she thinks. But then she is alarmed; it is the same old Spencer, as neurotically self-absorbed and self-dramatizing as always, trying to deceive himself that he had some kind of past with her. Though Miss Ross’s materials are drawn from a fairly narrow locale, medical and analytical circles in midtown Manhattan, her characters have universal implications. Some may find her satire too broad, I think not; if you have ever attended a congress of psychoanalysts, you have surely run into Dr. Blauberman. And as for Spencer Fifield, variants of him are to be found everywhere these days.

In the style of the sick comedians, currently so fashionable, JULES FEIFFER has already established himself as one of our more original cartoonists. His usual device is to place two people face to face and have them talk on and on, either clawing each other in possessive love or lamenting their failure to communicate. Frequently the words are far more important than the drawing, and in HARRY, THE RAT WITH WOMEN (McGraw-Hill, $3.95), Mr. Feiffer has dispensed with the drawings altogether, let the words gallop ahead as they will, and produced a freewheeling fantasy that looks a little bit like a novel. Novel or not, it is pretty good entertainment for two thirds of its length, as long as the torrent of words and fancies keeps flowing.

Harry had been loved by all ever since he was a baby. He grows up beautiful and perfect, and “sightseeing buses could have made a fortune driving around him.” In a college debate, even Harry’s opponent throws his arms around him while the audience cheers; silencing them, Harry takes the opponent’s position, and the crowd is just as rabidly fanatical for this cause too. It is not the issue, it is Harry they love.

Naturally, he cuts a wide swath among the ladies. Some whom he has wronged vow to get him by pitting him against a female “love object,” Eugenie Vasch, just as devastating and monstrous as Harry himself. Harry’s downfall begins on the day that, taken suddenly with the idea one should “give, give, give,” he buys a bunch of roses for Eugenie. Having burst the cocoon of his selfishness, he wakes up the next morning with his first pimple. Slowly, he becomes uglier, older, more ordinary; finally he is so shy that he cannot even make a pass at a woman.

Whatever his intentions, Mr. Feiffer has actually written a variation upon Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. As Dorian’s beauty remains unimpaired through a career of vice, so Harry grows visibly uglier in the flesh as he becomes more human and virtuous. His decline begins with the first spark of love, and his degeneration into being human proceeds until in the end there is nothing left for him but to die. Before that happens, Mr. Feiffer’s fantasy has begun to decline too. Despite all its fireworks, the comedy of sheer verbal hyperbole, without a base in ordinary characterization and plot, subsides in the end like a spent skyrocket.

While economists tell us Italy is in the midst of a boom unparalleled in its history, Italian films and novels go on declaring that emptiness and desolation lurk beneath all the glittering prosperity. THE AGE OF MALAISE by DACIA MARAINI (Grove, $3.95) could be a scenario for one of the earlier and more modest Italian films in the “realistic” style of De Sica, with the same flat, bleak story of humble people carrying on with a forlorn stoicism under oppressive circumstances. Neither its material nor its mood is appealing, but the spare and unrelieved veracity of its telling establishes Miss Maraini as one of the younger Italian writers worth watching.

Enrica, a seventeen-year-old Roman girl, is the only child of an impoverished lower-middle-class family. Her mother supports the family as a clerk; her father spends his time building birdcages in the shapes of Italy’s famous cathedrals, but he can never get the doors to work. Enrica attends business school, but her mind is on the men with whom she casually makes love.

Miss Maraini is a literary protégée of Alberto Moravia’s, and her novel bears some resemblance to the latter’s Woman of Rome. But for Moravia, sex is still a value, and his Woman, however sordid her entanglements, remains an archetypal Venus celebrating the rites of the flesh. For Enrica, her sexual encounters are as meaningless as all the other prospects life holds before her. All values, except that of survival, have disappeared from her world. Yet she is a touching and pitiable figure, for there is no streak of malice in her.

For this novel Miss Maraini won the much-publicized International Formentor Prize of $10,000 in 1962. The publicity following the award created a sensation in Italy, where older readers had already been shocked by the frankness of Miss Maraini’s revelations about the love life of their teen-agers. The fact that the author herself was only twentysix years old, and a beautiful young woman to boot, added sauce to the simmering scandal. The Italians need not have been so alarmed; any young girl reading this novel would more likely be turned to the convent than to the streets, detesting all men as brutes, and without the least glimmer that sex has anything to do with pleasure.

On vacations we are commonly supposed to be footloose and fancyfree. Yet Americans never seem to get more embroiled in the problems of real estate and houses, of prestige of tenure and social status than in some of their older summer colonies.

In THE SUMMER HOUSES (Macmillan, $4.95) JAMES STEVENSON has drawn an engaging picture of one such summer colony, identified as Great Heron Island, which in fact could be any one of a dozen places on the New England seacoast, located north by northeast from New York. The inhabitants of this tight little island are a close-knit and happy breed, among whom the prestige of really belonging comes only to those families who have spent fifteen summers there. Of course, some people may drink too much, and there are the usual flutters of extramarital dalliance, but only enough to assure us that, all things considered, Great Heron Island is basically a wholesome pleasure-dome for solid middleclass Americans.

Real trouble arrives in a rowboat out of the ocean one dark August night just as the long weekend party is getting under way. From the rowboat steps a mysterious Mr. McKinney, who finds the island to his liking and begins to buy up the old houses. The islanders feel threatened, torn between their liking for Mr. McKinney’s fat checks and their nostalgia at seeing the old landmarks disappear. Some doughty inhabitants, in a brave show of community spirit, band together to resist the forces of change and protect their island paradise. Will integrity triumph over greed? Well, it does; but it has a generous assist when McKinney’s shady fortune collapses and he himself has to disappear as mysteriously as he came. Even those who sold their ancestral birthrights get them back, and everything is normal on the island again. Fathers will now worry whether Junior is going to get into Yale, mothers whether they can hold the cook for the whole season, but the old Victorian Gothic houses will still stand. Before they have been rescued from the McKinney threat, nearly all the islanders have had some uncomfortable moments of truth in their own private lives.

Mr. Stevenson’s touch is light, but his satire is observant enough to stir some uneasy tremors on the island — as you may observe if you are anywhere near there this summer.

Like his own brash hero of an earlier book, SHEPHERD MEAD not only succeeded in business without really trying, he has gone on succeeding in the business of writing funny books as easily as if he were not raising a sweat. ”DUDLEY, THERE IS NO TOMORROW!” “THEN HOW ABOUT THIS afternoon?” (Simon and Schuster, S4.95) proves, if nothing else, that Mr. Mead is now the undisputed master of the long title. The book happens also to be a breathless and zany farce that retains its pace and fun right to the end.

Dudley Bray is a light-headed and light-hearted hero who has a habit of tripping gaily into catastrophe. He has arrived in Queensport, on the North Shore of Long Island, in order to protect his ex-wife, Gloria, whose second husband, Tom, has just driven his Cadillac into the Sound and been drowned. If this already seems hardly comprehensible, just wait. The center of intrigue, again, is a bit of real estate — an abandoned railroad station which, for reasons known only to summer colonists, has now become a precious historical landmark. In his six crowded days on Long Island, Dudley becomes a self-appointed private eye, discovering the true circumstances of Tom’s death and saving the railroad station for his ex-wife’s use. Most of all, he and Gloria discover that they may not be divorced until death do them part.

As an appropriate style for this mad charade, Mr. Mead has concocted a prose as lightly tripping as Dudley himself, whose rhythm I can only describe as a lilting dogtrot.