Hanover Browsing
I HAD the privilege of reading Charles new novel The Fall of Valor (Rinehart) in manuscript, and was tremendously impressed with it as a genuine work of art in fiction. After reading a copy of Aristotle's Poetics, Jackson got the idea of the tragic hero, and the concept of literary form; he rewrote all he had written under the inspiration of. this classical piece of criticism and he subdivides his novel into beginning, middle, and end. This is something other novelists might profit by, as the formlessness of modern writing is something shocking. Jackson's story of a tragic marriage, more common than most men and women would care to admit, unrolls with all the certainty of a Greek tragedy. Jackson is a writer of immense integrity; he is highly skilled because he works on his writing. Unlike the author of The Hucksters, he does not turn out a novel in a month. He sweats it out and his second novel (The Lost Weekend was the first) reflects the amount of creative effort Jackson puts into his work. I foresee for this truthful book a tremendous success. It will be praised for the wrong things, and damned for the right. Briefly it tells of the tragedy inherent in the situation of a man around forty, married with two children, who discovers he is homosexual. He discovers this flaw while on Nantucket trying to make something of a marriage that has obviously slipped into the dull routine of most marriages. This novel probes the depths of human psychology, especially in the aspect of sexual relationships, and reveals truths most people refuse to recognize. A really topflight effort.
Another very competent novel written by a friend of mine and concerning marriage and life in our time is Ernest Brace's Buried Stream (Harcourt). This book had, I believe, no popular success though it is far better than most of the successful fiction of the last few years. There is no moralizing and the story of David Rayney, Lucy, and Nan could be the story of people you know well; you may even recognize something of yourself in them.
Robert Penn Warren's All the King'sMen is one of the few works of fiction of major stature to come out of the South in recent years. Some reviewers seem to think that Warren was writing a biography of Huey Long, which he wasn't though obviously he had him in mind. The hero, through the devious methods of modern American politics, becomes drunk with power and dies finally of a worthy assassin's bullet. The book never loses its intense interest. The writing is sometimes slick, never dull, and once in a while the author, who is also a poet, achieves real beauty. Highly recommended.
The Yale University Press recently published John William DeForest's A Volunteer's Adventures, which is a Union Captain's record of the Civil War. The high spot in the book to me was his description of the Battle of Cedar Creek. These experiences were woven into DeForest's novel Miss Ravenel's Conversion.. reissued in 1939. He was a man of courage and modesty, a keen observer, and he wrote with the economy of a practised writer.
I have found Bergen Evan's The Natural History of Nonsense an entertaining and sparkling book. The author is writing a kind of anatomy of human credulity and his findings will astonish you. If you come through unscathed you may consider yourself a highly civilized man. In these times of seeming human imbecility this book may help restore your balance and help restore a saving grace of humor. I wish I could put this book into the hands of every reader of this column.
And to the many who dream of buying a farm in New England and really making a go of it. I beg you to buy and read carefully Samuel R. Ogden's This CountryLife (Barnes). The author knows of what he writes as he has lived fifteen years in Vermont and has farmed the hard way with no swimming pool and beach umbrellas nearby. Good photographs.
Speaking of photographs reminds me to mention Henry Bugbee Kane's Thoreau'sWalde?i which consists of remarkably sharp and beautiful shots of Walden Pond and of the birds, bees and flowers which live in the region, with quotations from Thoreau's book to illustrate the pictures. The real site of Thoreau's cabin has now been found and the interest in this great man increases every year. The other day while sitting in Robert Frost's hillside cabin in Ripton, Vermont, I noticed he had a copy. You ought to have one too.
