BY PHOEBE ADAMS
When a Soviet citizen writes a book denouncing the Communist regime and takes the trouble to get the manuscript smuggled out of Russia and published in English, the temptation is to hail the work as a literary masterpiece and a sign of imminent rebellion on the steppes. I mistrust this reaction, on the grounds that Western authors have complained of capitalism for years, at home and abroad, in books which are good, bad, or mediocre but as one in producing no very noticeable manning of barricades. At present, there are available two books by disaffected Russians: THE MAKEPEACE EXPERIMENT (Pantheon, $3.95) by ABRAM TERTZ and WARD 7 (Dutton, $3.50) by VALERIY TARSIS. The first is a pseudonymous novel describing a temporarily successful exercise of government by hypnotism. As an extension of government by propaganda, hypnotism is a workable burlesque notion, but Mr. Tertz carries it so far into the realm of grotesque fantasy that it is hard to take The Makepeace Experiment seriously as political criticism. However, since the introduction by the translator, Manya Harari, indicates that a number of topical references and overtones from history and folklore have proved impossible to retain in English, it is believable that in Russia, where it will not be published, this book would have a genuinely vicious bite.
Valeriy Tarsis does not write under a pseudonym, which accounts for the factual nature of Ward 7. His earlier book, The Bluebottle, was published abroad and so irritated the Soviet authorities that the author was tossed into a mental hospital, although the none-too-parallel case of Ezra Pound should have been warning against this course. Released, the indomitable Mr. Tarsis came out mad as a hornet and wrote a second book, this time describing his stay in a hospital section where almost all the patients were sane, suffering merely from what an honest doctor called “an allergy to the Soviet climate.” Ward 7 starts slowly, is much less ingenious and artful than The Makepeace Experiment, indulges in self-pity and editorializing, but is in the long run the more compelling of the two books because it concentrates on a single, not exclusively Russian problem: the collision between individual intelligence and a social system dedicated to considering only masses of bodies. Translated by Katya Brown.
ESAU AND JACOB (University of California Press, $5.00), a novel by the Brazilian MACHADO DE ASSIS, who died in 1908, has a certain lack of immediacy as political allegory, which was its original purpose. As tart social comedy, however, it is still lively, and the author’s aphorisms on the enduring idiocies of human conduct still hit their targets. Translation by Helen Caldwell.
KENNETH E. READ’S THE HIGH VALLEY (Scribner’s, $6.95) is an odd book which may well fascinate readers interested in ethical introspection. I myself found it, except for some handsome descriptive set pieces, infuriating. Mr. Read is an anthropologist, and his book concerns two years spent studying the savages of the New Guinea hills, about whom he contrives to tell very little, being hopelessly preoccupied with worry over the rightness or wrongness of his presence among people whom he could neither understand nor help.
ROGUE’S PROGRESS (Houghton Mifflin, $5.95), rescued from oblivion and edited by John L. Bradley, is the work of a nineteenth-century Londoner who began as a pawnbroker and ended as a producer of dubious entertainments. In between, he inadvertently became a positive connoisseur of jails. (Pardon, gaols.) RENTON NICHOLSON seems to have liked it all, and his autobiography is a gossipy, garrulous, amusing, eccentrically written chronicle of outrageously un-Victorian activities.
Ironic and ambiguous, JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI’S novel DIARY OF A MAD OLD MAN (Knopf, $3.95) may be taken as a tribute to the persistence of life, or the triumph of death, or even of both. The diarist, an absolutely convincing creation, is a rich old crock preoccupied with doctors, ailments, drugs, food, and pills. He is also ludicrously and ambitiously in love with his daughter-in-law. His journal of the affair is disgusting, unconsciously funny, and ultimately appealing simply because it is impossible not to sympathize with a hopeless last-ditch fighter.