The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy
The friendship of the two writers began in their early teens and continued until Percy’s death in 1990, at age seventy-four. Their correspondence would seem to offer interesting reading, but several aspects make this book unsatisfying. One is that Foote didn’t save Percy’s letters until 1970, so from 1948 til then we get only Foote’s letters. The editor, Jay Tolson, entitles this first section “Master to Apprentice.” Foote took the role of master because, though the men were the same age, Foote began writing fiction first. By nature he was a pontificator, and he doled out advice on writing and espoused the nobility of the profession. He went on at length about his work (plot outlines, etc.). He also gave urgent suggestions as to what Percy should read (the names of Proust, Dante, and Dostoevsky must appear well over a hundred times). He comes across as a didactic dispenser of knowledge. When we finally get responses from Percy (his first letter appears on page 128, close to the midpoint of the book) it becomes clear that he wasn’t a compliant pupil. And it’s interesting that he turned to Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate for help with his first novel. Foote was adamantly against this: “. . . they are to be avoided as you would avoid something contagious.” I think Percy liked Foote, but took him with a grain of salt – he may even, like me, skimmed much of what Foote wrote him (and, also like me, never got around to reading Proust). Even when both men’s letters are included, they’re spotty – a half year will go by without any correspondence. Percy’s letters are better – short and often humorous. As for insight into the personalities and lives of the two men, there’s some of that, but not a whole lot. I think Tolson did a shoddy job with his footnotes. He’ll give us a street address, but he leaves us in the dark about matters that are important (who is this person being discussed, using only his first name?). Still, a long relationship like this generates some feeling. Which makes the ending of the book both odd and sad. Tolson includes the very short eulogy Foote gave at Percy’s funeral. In it Foote throws in the following names: Dostoevsky, Proust, Faulkner, Schopenhauer, Maupassant, James, Dante. But not one personal word about his old friend.

Four Short Novels by D. H. Lawrence
I’ve admired some of Lawrence’s short stories – “The Odour of Chrysanthemums,” “The Rocking Horse Winner,” “Tickets, Please.” But his novels are another matter. Though I liked the first third of Sons and Lovers, in which he examines his parent’s marriage, it falters badly when he turns his attention to himself. I couldn’t stick for long with The Rainbow and Women in Love. He loses me when he beleaguers some abstract point about life or explores inexpressible states of being. I feel the characters and the plots are being stifled by an agenda. The short form almost forces him to be succinct and grounded. I took up this volume in the hope that the “short” aspect would prevail. This was true in Love Among the Haystacks (the briefest of the four), in which two brothers find women that they will marry. It was simple and generous, and it left me feeling satisfied. The other three novellas – The Ladybird, The Fox and The Captain’s Doll – were all about male/female relationships, and all had an enigmatic quality that initially interested me. But my interest turned into incredulity. If people act strangely, the reader must still believe in them. But the obscure and shifting emotions of these characters not only became unbelievable, but ridiculous. The feeling I had could be summed up with “Who are these people and what’s their problem?” I don’t think Lawrence had a clear idea. I quit The Ladybird halfway through, but finished the others to their inconclusive endings (with The Captain’s Doll it was a struggle through twenty pages of descriptive prose). Someone should have made Lawrence recognise his strengths and weaknesses. Ambition – which, for him, took the form of conveying Deep Ideas – was a killer for him as a writer of fiction.

Flesh Is Heir - Lincoln Kirstein
In the first chapter, “Flesh is Fear,” Roger Baum is fourteen, attending a boys’ boarding school. Initially he’s on friendly terms with a new arrival – Andrew Stone – but soon Andrew embarks on a campaign of psychological warfare against him. Roger is susceptible to Andrew’s tactics because he’s imaginative; he comes to feel as if he were being “extinguished in the pityless blackness of an influence that fitted him like a strait-jacket.” Andrew is creepy and his actions incomprehensible; but Roger is the subject of the chapter, and his fear is convincing. Also of merit is the atmosphere of a boys’ school, with its rivalries and jealousies and cruelty. The boys were real boys, the writing was direct and forceful, the narrative lean and unencumbered. I found this opening to be highly promising. But the second chapter, “Flesh is Work,” was just okay, and in the next five a steady decline takes place. They have Roger growing into his early twenties, drifting in and out of posh surroundings in Europe and America, interacting with various characters, none of whom made an impression on me. The emotional impact conveyed in the opening is never duplicated in any form. The falloff can be explained by the fact that the author was twenty-five when he wrote Flesh Is Heir. Only in his encounter with Andrew Stone had he attained the distance to make convincing fiction. For the rest of the book what we get is pretentious posturing. In an Afterword, written when he was sixty-five, Kirstein seems bewildered that the Lost American Fiction series had chosen to reprint the book. He notes its faults and states that he had second thoughts after its acceptance for publication and was relieved when it was totally ignored by critics and readers. He never continued as a novelist; his primary fame came as co-founder of the New York City Ballet. Maybe his longtime prominence in Big Apple artistic and intellectual circles made him a candidate to be “rediscovered.” But a more deserving – and appreciative – choice could have been made. As a writer of fiction Kirstein should get credit for writing one very good long story. And that’s it.

Angela’s Ashes – Frank McCourt
On the opening page McCourt claims that of miserable childhoods (the only ones worth writing about) none can equal the misery of an Irish Catholic childhood: “the poverty, the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father, the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters.” This is a despairing book, filled with death and suffering and filth; only a bitter humor ameliorates the heaviness. A character, in speaking of the English “quality” (those with money), says that they wouldn’t give the likes of him “the steam off their piss.” But even family members are mean and grudging toward one another, and city officials exhibit a callous indifference to the needy. As for Catholicism, all it breeds is a prejudicial hatred. Frank’s memories begin when he’s three, and his main concerns are getting food in his stomach and staying warm; these concerns will hold sway over his entire childhood. One sea change in his attitude occurs, and it involves his father. The boy loves him for his inherent kindness; but when Malachy gets paid for his intermittent periods of work he heads directly to a pub, where he drinks the money away. Meanwhile his wife and children live on the verge of starvation; it comes to the point where Frank finds this unforgivable, and his heart hardens toward the man. McCourt’s depiction of life in Limerick has a sensationalistic aspect, and I sometimes wondered if he was leaning heavily on exaggeration. That I didn’t pause to give my skepticism much attention was due to the book’s entertainment value. Unfortunately, McCourt moves us far past the point where his story should have ended. Most likely an editor saw a gold mine in these ashes and wanted to set things up for a sequel. So we follow Frank into his late teens, skipping years along the way; I found the young man who occupies these pages (in which we’re subjected to his sexual awakening) to be unappealing. And the final scene served to revive my doubts about the memoir’s authenticity. Immediately after Frank arrives in New York he and some companions go to a party where five bored American housewives (their husbands are off hunting) are ready for an orgy. Maybe McCourt was trying to express the freedom he’d find in the new world as compared to that in repressive Ireland. But, whatever, it’s never a good thing for a reader to finish a memoir thinking, “Yeah, right, in your dreams.”

A Hazard of New Fortunes – William Dean Howells
Reading this, I could visualize an author who’s aware of his preeminent position in American letters and is carefully, and with confidence, plying his craft. Trouble is, a reader should never see the author behind the words. For all its expertise in individual scenes, and its good depiction of life in New York in the 1890s, this novel is overpopulated and unfocused. Howell posits an interesting premise: a new literary magazine will take a different approach to submissions: “Look at the way the periodicals are carried on now! Names! names! names! In a country that’s just boiling over with literary and artistic ability of every kind the new fellows have no chance. I don’t believe there are fifty volunteer contributions printed in a year in all the New York magazines. It’s all wrong; it’s suicidal. Every Other Week is going back to the good old anonymous system, the only fair system.” So the “fellows” who don’t have impressive “names” are to be given a chance. But near the end of the book (when I abandoned it) the magazine exists and is doing quite well, yet not one word has been expended regarding its content and quality. Like everything else, Howell introduces a situation and leaves it undeveloped. And his efforts at recreating vernacular became ridiculous. We get ignorant country folk (“Then what are we goun’ to do? She might ’a’ knowed we couldn’t ’a’ come alone, in New York.”), Southerners (“Ah’m so much oblahged. Ah jost know it’s all you’ doing, and it will give papa a chance to toak to some new people.”) and a German (“I ton’t tink we are all cuilty or gorrupt, and efen among the rich there are goodt men.”).

The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
The first person narrator’s voice – the way he thinks, his observations of people – gives this novel a sharply-etched noonday brightness that’s as fresh and and original as it was when I first read it, decades ago. Binx begins by describing his uneventful existence in Gentilly, a suburb of New Orleans. He’s quite happy in a movie, even a bad one: “Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives,” but what he remembers is “the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.” Binx gets mild pleasure from making money as a stock and bond broker; his affairs are uncomplicated by emotional entanglements. He has carefully structured his life in such a way as to avoid being engulfed by despair (a feeling that he is intimately acquainted with). His cousin Kate does not fare so well; she has no defenses to the onslaught of her emotions. Though Percy suggests the acrid whiff of desolation and emptiness which can creep upon us in the most mundane situations, we never plunge into gloom. What keeps us afloat is the artfulness of the writing: “At last I spy Kate; her stiff little Plymouth comes nosing into my bus stop. There she sits like a bomber pilot, resting on her wheel and looking sideways at the children and not seeing, and she could be I myself, sooty-eyed and nowhere.” *

On Leave – Daniel Anselme (French)
France’s war in Algeria was a quagmire that dragged on for eight years and involved, at its height, a half million young men. In this novel there are no battle scenes, just brief flashbacks – images of a heap of bodies, a burned village. It opens with three soldiers on a train; they have a highly-anticipated week’s leave in Paris. Though we follow Lachaume (a sergeant), he meets up with the other two men. For all of them the leave turns out to be devoid of pleasure. They’re unable to slough off their anger at being asked to fight a war they don’t believe in; they can’t express how they feel to anyone who hasn’t experienced what they have; they know they can’t change things politically. They’re isolated souls in the midst of a city that has turned its back on them. Their only release is in getting drunk. This makes for glum reading, but that mood is the only honest one to convey. The book ends with the men again on a train, this one taking them back to the front. Anselme’s depiction of the state of mind of soldiers in such a situation is one that our Vietnam vets could surely commiserate with.

A Confederate General from Big Sur - Richard Brautigan
For a while I enjoyed the book’s brisk pace, its simplicity, its surprising juxtaposition of odd images, its fresh way of stating things. Though its glibness made me wonder “How hard did this guy work at this?” I read on until it was clear that the author had a bag of tricks and nothing of real value was coming out of it. An interesting style though, very engaging. I can see why young people were so taken with Brautigan.

My Search for Warren Harding - Robert Plunket
A deft touch with comedy. The best kind, humor that comes from the characters and the situations they’re in; no jokes necessary. And then Plunket blew it, lost all my good will. The book turned mean, and it couldn’t survive that (maybe some books could, but this one set up a gentle, likable quality that it needed to retain). First the word “faggot” is continually used. Then the main character has an affair with a woman who he puts down in an ugly way, and he keeps on doing so to the point of alienating me. In changing the tone of this book the author not only ruined it, he revealed some unpleasant aspects of himself.

Love In the Ruins - Walker Percy
I’ll bet Percy enjoyed the hell out of writing this. And he took the effort to keep the prose polished, the descriptions fresh. Even the premise is good. But he simply dawdles around with a few of his favorite things. The novel is static. No drama, no purpose in sight; maybe some philosophical point emerges, but I never got to it (I stopped reading halfway through). Percy has an irritating tendency to get enraptured by female charms – that gets icky, when an author tells how he loves a woman’s elbow. Maybe too much craftsmanship, too much indulgence, without bothering (or being able) to tighten the nuts and bolts that build a strong storyline.

The Long March - William Styron
A novella about a military march, but it concentrates on thoughts, ideas. It’s an exploration of the psychology of two different sorts of men. Though interior monologues prevail over action, there’s plenty of forward momentum. I’m not sure if the ending – an offhand, trivial remark – is weak or strong. Maybe, after so much contemplation, Styron wanted to plop us rudely back to earth. Anyway – a good book.