Page 2
University Daily Kansan Friday, November 10. 1961
The Book World
By Charles E. Staley Assistant Professor of Economics
THE HORIZONTAL READER, edited by Mel Evans, Doubleday and Company, Inc. $4.95.
"The Horizontal Reader" is the book you are looking for if you need a Christmas present for someone who enjoys light reading. It contains about fifty selections, mostly short stories, in a charming mixture of humor, mystery and suspense. The humorous selections, which outnumber the others slightly, come mostly from such old reliables as James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Damon Runyon and Ambrose Bierce. In this category I enjoyed particularly "The Superior Bostonian" by An Opera Goer, who is identified by the editor as a rankled and anonymous New Yorker of a century ago bent on ticking off the nature of man in the Hub of the Universe, and "We Just Came to See the Baby" by Shirley Jackson.
The mystery and suspense tales are taken from Dorothy L. Sayers, Saki, W. W. Jacobs, and include a science fiction story by A. J. Deutsch. Several true accounts of murders, bank robberies, and medical detection are mixed in with the fiction.
I had previously read about one-fifth of the stories in the book, not a bad ratio for an anthology mostly taken from standard authors. Most of these were worth re-reading except for the two which I believe should be prohibited from all future anthologies forever and ever: Woolcott's "Entrance Fee" and Stockton's "The Lady or the Tiger?" Surely these tales should be retired to their well-carned rest.
★ ★ ★
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
SOUTH: MODERN SOUTHERN LITERATURE IN ITS CULTURAL SETTING, edited by Louis D. Rubin Jr. and Robert D. Jacobs. Doubleday Dolphin, $1.45.
The uniqueness of the South is the theme of this collection. Louis Rubin and Robert Jacobs present an excellent, well-unified study of the literature of the South. And they make us see what has characterized the South in the years since Reconstruction ended and the New South began to emerge.
Southern literature, we see here, has been a diverse thing. It has included the Mississippi saga of William Faulkner, the story of the decline of Virginian aristocracy of Ellen Glasgow, the fantasies of James Branch Cabell, the sharecropper smut of Erskine Caldwell, the tone poems of Carson McCullers, the decadent heroes and heroines of Tennessee Williams.
Throughout run the twin themes—retrat and acceptance. In retreat we find, paradoxically, Thomas Wolfe, who left the South for Yankeeeland, and the Southern Agrarians who wrote their "I'll Take My Stand" manifesto in 1930 (and for whom Wolfe had nothing but contempt). The agrarians are especially important to the story of southern literature, for they have been both creators and critics—Tate, Warren, Ransom, Donald Davidson and so on.
Some southern writers have accepted 20th century "progress," others have called for a return to antebellum values. Some have dealt with the crisis of the Negro. Some have confined themselves to criticism in little-read quarterly reviews.
The literature has been of many kinds—the turnip-eating Lester clan of "Tobacco Road," the hero-venerating "Ode to the Confederacy Dead" of Allen Tate, the Gothic horror of Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" and the wild humor of his "Spotted Ponies," the Gants of "Look, Homeward, Angel." Willie Stark of "All the King's Men," the bereft heroes of "Pale Horse, Pale Rider."
Where is southern literature headed? One would gather that it continues to thrive, that in William Stryon and Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor there is hope. The authors, and those whose writings they anthologize, write off Richard Wright and Hamilton Basso, they are not too sure of James Agee, they scorn Truman Capote, they wonder what has happened to Ralph Ellison.
★★★
THE GOLDEN BOWL, by Henry James. Grove Press, $2.95.
That extraordinary style which characterized the latter books of Henry James is the hallmark of "The Golden Bowl." This was his last completed novel, a monumental work that deals with a simple theme in considerable complexity.
This is a story of adultery, but James never calls it by such a blunt term. Maggie Verver, an American heiress, marries an Italian prince. The prince's mistress, an old acquaintance of Maggie's, though Maggie does not know of the woman's relationship to the prince, arrives on the scene. And, with the connivance of a mutual friend, the woman becomes married to Maggie's father, for whom Maggie feels responsibility following her own marriage.
Here is the Jamesian theme of an American innocent, unwittingly in the toils of sinister Europeans. Maggie is as innocent as Isabel Archer and Milly Thecale of earlier James Novels, and she is as ingenuous. But she also is contriving and self-sufficient, a good Emersonian heroine for Henry James, and she solves her marital problem.
"The Golden Bowl" presents a set of polished people, speaking in epigrams, using the intricate language that James devised in his later years. These are polite and refined folks, but underneath the veneer of refinement lurks evil—the kind of evil that Henry James so brilliantly deals with.
By Raymond G. O'Connor Assistant Professor of History
PRESIDENTS OF THE U.S.A.: PROFILES AND PICTURES, by Cornel Lengyel, Bantam, $1.25; and THE CIVIL WAR AS THEY KNEW IT, Bantam, $1.25.
The welcome deluge of paperbacks at modest prices is now enriched by these two offerings, which provide both text and pictures for the hurried reader:
"Presidents of the U.S.A." contains brief biographies of the nation's chief executives from George Washington to John F. Kennedy, illustrated by contemporary drawings, paintings, or photographs. Though the brief treatment encourages a factual emphasis, the author has made an effort to portray the complexities and responsibilities of the office of the presidency, often in the words of the occupant himself. The illustrations are chosen with an eye for the dramatic, and though the reader might quarrel with the overadulatory approach in the text, the book does serve as a reasonably accurate introduction to the subject.
"The Civil War As They Knew It" is an attempt to recreate the struggle for Southern independence through the words of Abraham Lincoln and the photographs of Mathew Brady. Arranged in chronological and topical order, each picture is accompanied by a short description and a pertinent quotation from the President's dispatches, letters, or addresses. Here, again, the emphasis is on the dramatic, and the effort appears reasonably successful.
Civil War buffs may be disappointed by questionable interpretations or oversimplifications, but they can scarcely criticize this work for lack of enthusiasm. Of course the Brady photographs are well worth the price, and most of them are beautifully reproduced. One finds both the nobility and utter deprivacy of war interspersed with magnificent character studies of the protagonists.
★ ★ ★
By Doug Farmer Pratt Junior
WHAT EVERY BACHELOR KNOWS, by Corey Ford, Doubleday. $2.95.
An insight into the life of the common bachelor is given in a delightful manner by Corey Ford with a look into his own life of bachelorhood. Throughout the fast moving book all the wit and thoughts of a typical bachelor seem to be portrayed. A bachelor's life is depicted as a precarious existence and a life of one long pursuit by the female section of our society.
How does a bachelor avoid togetherness, face the new-born child of a friend, react to his nonbachelor friends' comments, and how does he describe himself? These are all questions answered by the nation's number one bachelor-humorist.
From the moment of birth to the moment the bachelor realizes he is a bachelor forever. Mr. Ford gives us his - experiences- and pointed advice on Bachelorscraft; the Lore of Staying Single, habits of bachelors, marriage and, as expected, definite views of the opposite sex.
Corey Ford has written many articles and short stories as well as a group of books. Among these are "The Day Nothing Happened," "Has Anybody Seen Me Lately?" and "How to Guess Your Age."
The important thing is that those who see an injustice do not remain silent—Edwin Wilson
Worth Repeating
The softest heads containing the murkiest thinking are found lodged between cap and gown—Fred Hale
The minority must always be heard. There have to be avenues for them to express themselves, or their voices will go unheard. — Edwin Wilson
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
A FAREWELL TO ARMS, by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner's Modern Standard Authors.
Most of the many appraisals of Hemingway that have appeared in newspapers and magazines since his death single out "A Farewell to Arms" as his best work. As a beautiful work of art, isolated from contemporary meanings, it is that. If I prefer "For Whom the Bell Tolls" it is merely that to me the later book is a work of art that takes what to me seems a more important position in terms of the time in which it is written.
"A Farewell to Arms" is in the anti-war tradition and the lost generation tradition of the twenties. It is shot full of disillusionment; the mood permeates it. We are entirely with Frederic Henry when he deserts in the midst of the retreat from Caporetto, and in 1929 we would have backed his stand even more.
National moods had changed by 1940, when Hemingway's great novel of the Spanish Civil War appeared, and Robert Jordan was fighting it out in Spain alongside the loyalists. Just why he was doing so had not been fully articulated, though Jordan had progressed a stage beyond Frederic Henry.
"A FAREWELL TO ARMS" CONTAINS THE THEME AND stylistic devices that have come to be identified with Hemingway. There is little wasted here. The language is seldom ornate. The descriptions are superficially matter-of-fact, though the Hemingway trick was to present deep meanings that emerge from under that cold style.
We can still believe in the plot. It has been 20 years since I first read the book, and my memories were mixed somewhat with recollections of the two generally unsuccessful films made from the novel. Though I grow impatient with the mess Frederic and Catherine have got themselves into (after all, they did have plenty of time to get married), it was their choice.
There are beautiful passages and vivid characterizations. "A Farewell to Arms" remains convincing, to me, because I see why Frederic Henry was in Italy, I see why he hated war, I see why he loved Catherine Barkley, I see why he fled to Switzerland. The aimless wanderers of the author's "The Sun Also Rises" and Fitzgerald's various stories never really get to me with the impact of Frederic and Catherine.
BY LOVE POSSESSED, by James Gould Cozzens. Crest Giant (Fawcett), 75 cents.
Some famous novels have a way of flashing across the literary sky like a meteor and then being forgotten. For a few weeks in 1957 one just wasn't in it unless he had read (or read about) "By Love Possessed." Somehow it doesn't matter much in 1961.
In fact, "By Love Possessed" seems to be standing chiefly today as a title on lists of erotica and the source of a very bad film that extracted from the novel the "Peyton Place" elements and ignored the philosophy. (The film also ignored the style, which is just as well, for "By Love Possessed" never was easy going.)
IN TELLING THE STORY OF ARTHUR WINNER, LAWYER, and 48 hours in his life (and other folks' lives, too), and of the varieties of love. Cozzens indulges in a style that frequently compares with both James and Faulkner for its obliqueness and opaqueness. It is a discursive and sometimes confusing story.
Yet it is an important book, though Cozzens' characters never really do much for, or to, the reader. And in what ways are we "pessessed" by love, and what are the varieties of love? Many are here—parent for child, child for parent, sister for weak brother, married love, extramarital love, the love of friendships.
★ ★ ★
TWELVE SHORT NOVELS, selected by Thomas B. Costain. Doubleday, $7.50.
My suggestion is that University students give serious thought to this book as a Christmas gift. It is a big, attractive volume that provides short novels of many kinds. Some (Hilton's "Goodbye, Mr. Chips") are almost too familiar. Others (Tolstoy's "Father Sergius") are not well known.
One can always start by carping about books that weren't included. Probably rights to "The Old Man and the Sea" are hard to obtain. And "The Turn of the Screw" is almost too familiar, and is readily available elsewhere. My own tastes prefer Wharton's "Ethan Frome" over "The Old Maid."
But this is Costain's collection. There is quite a range here, from the solemn Biblical tone of Mann's "Young Joseph" to the breezy suburban chatter of Streeter's "Father of the Bride." Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" is balanced by Nathan's fragile "Portrait of Jennie."
The other novels are Conrad's "The Duel," Saint-Exupery's "Prisoner of the Sand," de Hartog's "The Lost Sea" and Steinbeck's "The Short Reign of Pippin IV." Eighteenth century Peru, ancient Egypt, Napoleonic times, New York in the 1850s, Russia at the same time, an English country home of late 19th century, a Paris-to-Saigon airplane flight, an English boys' school, New York and the New England coast in depression days, the Dutch east country, suburban America, and an imaginary French court—these are settings and themes in this interesting anthology.