A Writer's Eye Part 4

William Sansom is a young British writer already published in England by the Hogarth Press. 46 Fireman Flower contains twelve short stories, all distinguished by good writing and by their curious subject matter and intensity of treatment; but the t.i.tle story is the master story of the volume. "Fireman Flower," the longest as well as the most concentrated piece of work here, has in plenty the qualifications of an imaginative writer of deep talent.

It will be seen at once that these are stories of the spirit. Although they often employ familiar symbols and are often moral, their symbolism is in turn penetrated by, or overridden by, an imaginative search toward abstractions lying beyond morality. To our greater pleasure, there is more of poetry than of allegory in Mr. Sansom's ideas.

Along with their fantastic or dreamlike quality, the stories are extraordinarily vitalperhaps, for one thing, because they are visually concrete and startling. It is the essentially wonderful or terrifying thing, which is at the same time commonplace, that Mr. Sansom uses for his material. Many man-created thingslighthouses, mazes, buildings on fire from air raidshave become familiar and commonplace, and Mr. Sansom seems to be attempting, on one level, to restore their essential mystery or terror.

In "Fireman Flower," the author has written a fable of complexity and power out of a Brigade Regulation for the Home Guard: "First proceed straight to the seat of the fire." The story, taking place within a burning building, is the story of search. The burning building continuously changes Page 67 its aspect like the edifice of a nightmare; indeed, the whole story is nightmarish and in the end the fireman comes out of it as one throws off a dream, Castle, cathedral, goods warehouse, a simple burning house ("the traditional fire of hearsay"), a chaos ("with fearful vertigos of infinity"), an arena, a familiar home with an old friend ensconced, a pleasure bath, "a t.i.tivation of the senses,'' are some of the changes the burning edifice undergoes in the eyes of the searcher for the fire's core. "How many matters composed the fire," Flower is brooding, experiencing as he goes its havens, seductions, deceptions, exhilarations, its pure beauty, its menace. He finds himself in a mirror at one point, as he finds the story of his life in the fire and its spell of past and future in the rooms, the long corridors with vistas like streets in Chirico's paintings. 47 Finally escaping the nightmare itself by running up the long stair through the burning building and surveying the extending world from the rooftop, Fireman Flower is consumed inwardly by a vision of lovea quiet love for all he sees and knows through the greater vision of the world, "so that he loved a single rusted nail as he loved the Gioconda smile, the factory's timeclock as he loved the mould of autumn leaves, a mausoleum as he loved the creche, a cat's head in the gutter as he loved the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of Joan."

These adventures are set down with the questioning and slow motion with which the pa.s.sionate energies of a dream are regenerated and recalled. The use of startling and beautiful images is unforced and effectivethe giant golden c.o.c.kerel which a great machine on fire seems to turn into, which Fireman Flower climbs and on whose head he sits, is a fine example. Observations such as, "Compared with the bite of fire, the eyeless munching of a dinosaur seems thoughtful and tender," taken outside the story, show how startling is Sansom's power to surprise; yet they seem almost inconspicuous in the context.

An energy reaching degrees of urgency seems to propel this book, and produces an abundance of surrealist effects, wonderful and explicit and authentically "sur-real." But it would be incorrect and misleading to call the stories surrealist. It must be remembered that these effects come from an energy at work not for its own sake, in free-a.s.sociation or in any form of irresponsibility, but altogether purposeful and highly in control. The tales are moral and spiritual. Their power and intensity make them notable, and Mr. Sansom's talent is an exciting matter for the new American readers of his stories.

Page 68 Names On the Land:

A Historical Account of Place-Names in the United States

By George R. Stewart Place-Names and Our History:

New York Times Book Review 6 May 1945: 1, 1415

Outlaws X-Roads, Shiloh, Schenectady, Santa Fehow did we get these names? And when?

The record of our place-names is of course the skeleton story of our nation; in that array the intrinsic and underlying structure shows. Exploration and claimingCape Fear, Louisiana; colonizationJamestown; immigrationNew Roch.e.l.le; RevolutionLafayette; expansionDeadman's Gulch. Our names tell us everything if we can read them. But every name has a name behind thata one more story, a sea-change. The ambition of this book is staggeringlike a demonstration of our national character in itself. Mr. Stewart uses the X-ray method on his material, but he has the zest of a Fortyniner, and what he makes is not a case, but a strike, and his book is a beauty. Only a pa.s.sionate lover of facts, of facts rooted in the country and the people and the history of the land, could have written it. Mr. Stewart of course has written a meteorological novel (Storm), and a factual account of the Donner party. 48 But what facts are closer to people, more revealing of people's hearts, than the names they bestow?49 The scope here is so large, and the details so minutetaking in the whole country from the beginning on (with a nod at the Ice Age) and from one end Page 69 to the otherthat the story would collapse under its own weight in the hands of a man less deft at organizing ita problem which was only one to tempt Mr. Stewart, one imagines, and lead him on. The lay reader such as the present reviewer has no way of knowing what degree of accuracy the work reaches, but will bet that it is good and high. Mr. Stewart has a reputation for getting data. In dealing with this material there must be guesswork and deduction in addition to the mountainous research; indeed, part of the fascination of the book lies in its ingenuity. A knowledge of languages including the Algonquin, a familiarity with American history from the earliest times on, a clear geographical grasp of the country from all four corners, a knowledge of law and land-grants, miner's slang, Indian beliefs, agricultural developments, Mormon saints and weathera sizable background appears behind this book.

In the United States (Mr. Stewart does deplore that makeshift name for our country) are places named for battles, for a lost comrade, for the day of a saint, for a homesick moment, for a lure to bring neighbors, for kings and queens; places named for the namer, for a dead pony, for Lafayette, for a tavern sign, for a future wife, for a murder, for a deer in the creek, for a night of bad cards, for a rock that looked like the bosom of a lady, for a c.o.c.kfight, for a poem in Scotland. Tradition, hope, love, pride, delight in the romantic, the bawdy, the beautiful, hope of gain, a keen and seeing eye, and likely a strutting fancythese went into the naming of places in America. All Europe and Asia gave us namesand Puritans, Huguenots, Mormons and Quakers, miners, missionaries, outlaws, fishermen, scholars, traders, trappers, surveyors, priests and planters' wives.

The astonishing variety of our names is to be expected, Mr. Stewart holdsafter all, four centuries of changing peoples and changing aspirations went into the naming. Variety comes too, because in giving names to places we cherished their strong link with actual persons and events, gave names "which seem to have stories of life and death behind them." "Variety also sprang from democracythat stubborn local pride in the local name, and the feeling that I have just as much right to give and keep a name as you have." Chicken Bristle, or die. So we have Lexington and Union and also Sweet.w.a.ter, Marked Tree, Gunsight Hills, Cape Disappointment, Broken Bow, Roaring Run, Ma.s.sacre Lake. And we have always loved a revolutionary, Mr. Stewart points out, and honored him, no further questions asked, with a town nameKossuth, Kosciusko, even Ypsilanti did not stop us.

In the beginning the French were hunting a pa.s.sage to the South Sea; the Page 70 Spanish were looking for treasure in a fabulous kingdom and the elixir of life; the British were nosing for present holdings; the Dutch seeking trade. In all these pursuits, naming a place was an important point, a gain on the rivals. The differences in naming were clear-cut from the start. The Spanish always named places after the saint's day on which they found them, so that their maps are really calendars on which voyages can be read like diaries. The Dutch gave a practical name to each little kill and hook of the river they settled on, but they never did name the Hudsonit was simply "the river"the English reproached them. The English of course drew upon courts and houses in England, gained favors or obeyed the king.

Ranging over four centuries, with pages packed with names and events, the book remains clear in trend, felicitous in pictures of the times which build along the way. We see the whole complexity and confusion of that early time when Joliet and Pere Marquette with their boatmen, in two birchbark canoes, set off down the Mississippi: At last, near the middle of June in 1673 they came to the great river, which was already known by name. They wrote the word as Mississippi. But Marquette, it would seem, called it also Conception, and Joliet called it Buade, after the family name of Count Frontenac, the Governor. Thus all at once the river had three namesan Indian name for the boatmen, a religious name for the priest, and a political name for the officer.

In all the conglomeration of detail, the major design is not lost sight of, and we are shown panoramas of the nation as a whole at a given time, as . . . in the reign of Charles II, new great names arose, until twelve colonies and the Province of Maine were well established. In addition some cities and all the great rivers and capes and bays and islands of that coast had their names. Inland, the French had scattered names as far as Lake Superior and Kansas and Arkansas, and the Spaniards even further to the southwest. Since 1607 almost every year had seen the establishment of some new great name. In 1681 La Salle first used Louisiane; within a year Pennsylvania and Philadelphia were established; about the same time the Spaniards were beginning to use Texas. But the next two generations of men were to give few great names; instead they would fill in with thousands of little names, and establish new habits.

As he proceeds, the author shows how habit of life determined the kind of name. In the Virginia colonies, towns took the names of plantations, of little private chapels and churches, which were often named with Elizabethan Page 71 fancy (Orphan's Gift, Chapel Hill, Chaplin's Choice, Jordan's Journey, Flower dieu Hundred). In the middle colonies, especially in Pennsylvania, towns took the names of the tavern signs, whose pictures survived as village names (Bird-in-Hand, Broad Axe, King of Prussia, Red Lion). When the Mormons went west they had a whole private holy book to draw names from and their own population of saints, and needed no dim-memoried dragon-killer to name a town St. George after. When the Forty-niners went West they were in such a hurry that big things like mountains and rivers got names that were simple pinning-down affairs, the explicit "West Fork of the South Fork of the North Fork of the San Joaquin," so they could be found again. It was in the naming of the mining camps that they gave vent to their real enthusiasm and high spirits, for "No censorship restrained them; society was of men only. Most of them looked upon their sojourn in California . . . as temporary and riotous adventure . . . Doubtless the more sophisticated often invented the most outlandish names; two Harvard men named Shirt-tail Canyon."

Mr. Stewart pays close attention to the change of temper and mood of the country as reflected in its styles of names. In the eighteenth century the Yankee name ascended over the Puritan. A town in Vermont was named by honest combat, fought out on the hemlock plank floor of a new barn, the winner rising full of splinters to shout, "There, the name is Barre, by G.o.d!" Canton, Ma.s.s., was named "at the instance of a prominent citizen, who maintained that his Ma.s.sachusetts town was antipodal to the Chinese city," and all around, other prominent Yankee citizens came to the conclusion that they were antipodal to Canton, too, and Cantons sprang up thickly. "Actually, such an opinion was startlingly wrong . . . The very perversity of the story is almost an argument for it. It seems just what a crotchety Yankee of 1798 would be likely to maintain." He points out how ''Illogically, as the religious fervor of the Puritans declined, biblical names grew more numerous. Perhaps they began to seem less holy." A town in Connecticut could be named Borzah in spite of Jeremiah 49:13. ("I have sworn to myself, saith the Lord, that Borzah shall become a desolation, a reproach, a waste, and a curse.") And he points out also, in defending, for example, an Alabama schoolmaster who named a muddy little river in his neck of the woods the Styx: The cla.s.sical interests of the later eighteenth century are as much part of the history of the United States as the existence of the Indian tribes or the Page 72 Revolution. To maintain, as many have done, that Rome and Troy are mere excrescences on our map is to commit the fallacy of denying one part of history in favor of another partor else to be ignorant of history. The ideals and aspirations of the Americans of that period deserve their perpetuation.

There are accounts given of all the great expeditions, full of flavor and detail, always contributing to the general picture of growth, of changing habits of thought, of the great surge westward. The Lewis and Clark expedition flowed with the indulgence of proud and extravagant fancy, heralding the great day of the West ahead, as when Captain Lewis commemorated his lady love: I determined to give it the name, and in honour of Miss Maria Wd, called it Maria's River. It is true that the hue of the waters of this turbulent and troubled stream but illy comport with the pure celestial virtue and amiable qualifications of that lovely fair one; but on the other hand it is a n.o.ble river.

while Captain Clark was writing down: "This rock which I shall call Popy's Tower is 200 feet high and 400 paces in sec.u.mpherance." This grandiose spirit led straight to the times when a camping party, sitting around a fire at night, would get up a hilarious game to name some mountain range. And they named mountains differently from the mountains of the east: instead of Sugar Loaf and Haystack were Saddle Mountain, Two Top, Rabbit's Ears, Nipple b.u.t.te and Coffin.

The book deals constantly with the Indians, of course, and manages to correct many an error about Indian names. Transference, translation and false etymology are the three ways in which a place name can be pa.s.sed from language to language, Mr. Stewart points out. So the Indian names enduring as such are of course not the actual, original Indian namesthey are what the French priests wrote down, what the Spanish thought they sounded like, what the English thought they undoubtedly meant, what the Dutch made sound as nearly Dutch as they could. Schenectady, for instance, is an anglicized form of the Dutch conception of a New York State Indian word. Mr. Stewart points out the important difference in the ways an Indian and a white man named a river. The European conception of a river was of a stream with a source, to which it and all its branches could and should be traced, and it had a single name. "What is the name of this river?" excited explorers would ask the Indians. "Big Rock," the Indians would answer, pointing to a big rock in front of them. "Big Rock" was the name of the river Page 73 there. At the bend it would be named "Little Bend." Mississippi, a French version of an Algonquin word, probably means "big river," but could never mean "Father of Waters" as the geography books told usan abstract term no clearheaded Indian would ever give a river for name. In the same way, the Indians running out to greet the white man in the southwest yelled ''Techas! Techas!" This meant simply "Friends!" The Spaniards immediately thought the Indians were referring to some wonderful kingdom lying just back of themTexas. But the Indians were hardly ever referring to anything except what was up at the moment.

The book abounds in the modest tale along with the mighty, telling how places were named: Once a surveyor named Strange became separated from his comrades and hopelessly lost in the forest. Years later, forty miles from where he last was seen, men found his bones beneath a great beech tree. Against it leaned his rifle, the shotgun pouch still dangling. In the smooth bark could still be read the carved words in plaintive doggerel: Strange is my name, and I'm on strange ground,

And strange it is I can't be found.

So the stream once known as Turkey Run became Strange Creek.

Mr. Stewart deals with the great namers, John Smith, Pennperhaps the greatest, Col. William Byrd (who decried the first Lover's Leap, naming the Blue Ridge) and many more. He enumerates the towns named after Washington, Lafayette, Lincoln, Jackson. He writes also: Of all Americans to have their names preserved in large cities, John Young is the most obscure. He came as an early settler in 1798. Untroubled by modesty, he named the place Youngstown; then, according to tradition, he traded a deerskin for a quart of whisky, and celebrated his immortality.

He was a man of no importance. But why should not John Young stand as a symbol? If he was a man of little note, so also were nearly all his fellow frontiersmen. They died; their wooden grave-markers (if they had any) rotted into dust, and they were forgotten. But if we believe in democracy, why should not John Young, whisky and all, stand as their symbol, with the blast-furnaces of Youngstown flaming to their memory?

This book is a labor of love, such as few people would have had the energies, much less the abilities, or the pure courage, to undertakeand Page 74 finish. The whole is written with a grace and engaging humor belying the work behind it. The nation from Seldom Seen to Possum Glory, Hog Eye to Bug Tustle, does owe Mr. Stewart a debt of grat.i.tude for getting the tremendous material here between the covers of a book. "As the train announcer calls out the stations for a Philadelphia local, half the past of the nation unfolds." "It is a rich and poetic heritage," indeed.

Page 75 True and Untrue, and Other Norse Tales Edited by Sigrid Undset Russian Fairy Tales Translated by Norbert Guterman French Fairy Tales By Charles Perrault Fall Harvest for the Young Reader:

New York Times Book Review 11 November 1945: 7

Here are three beautiful fairy tale books. Sigrid Undset has made a collection of Norse tales which she presents with a warm, informal introduction showing her own pleasure in the tales. 50 They are delightful. The old Norse magic of trolls, of feats East of the Sun and West of the Moon is here, a native magic. As Sigrid Undset points out, it makes the fairyland of these people not so different from the world they live and move in every day. There is an interesting male counterpart of Cinderella in the Ashlad and other creations American children will be charmed to meet.51 The ill.u.s.trations, black and white, are on the conventional side, but very pleasing, and distinguished in one unusual respect, at least,52 in that all the magic swords, fairy horses and the rest were drawn by the artist in interludes from fire while in combat overseas.

In the preface to the Russian Fairy Tales it is explained that the tales Page 76 endured for centuries by word of mouth, in a country and time when only sacred, orthodox matters were put down on paper. Their vigor was undiminished, for the tales were everlastingly popular among the poor, and there was a custom for rich and n.o.ble persons to keep in constant touch with story-tellers (usually old blind men, and often in threes) to put them to sleep at night with tales.

Afanasiev, the man who finally made a collection of the stories about the time the brothers Grimm worked in Germany, happened to be a lawyer. The hundreds of stories in this book come from his exhaustive collection and are translated, many for the first time, by Norbert Guterman.

These Russian tales are rambunctious, full-blooded and temperamental. They are tense with action, magical and human, and move in a kind of cyclone of speed. They are full of priests, firebirds, little uncles and old women, Ivan the Fools and Baba Yaga the Golden-leggedthe world and the fairy world are simultaneously rich here.

Mr. Alexeieff's ill.u.s.trations are witty and individual; they might confound a child because all the people and animals look to be made of tin with cutout designs in themlike cookie cutters. 53 They are amusing in themselves and royally plentiful, with hundreds of small black and white pieces and thirty-two full color page ill.u.s.trations. Ought a fairy tale book be expensive? Or weigh too much for a little girl to hold up? These questions occur to any reader who insists on loving both children and fairy tales. Perhaps this is quibbling, as is a faint feeling that the "folkloristic commentary" is a little too mighty, too learned and long, coming in front of these gorgeous tales themselves.54 The present edition of Perrault is glorified with the marvelous Dore ill.u.s.trations.55 One's instinct says that these are what the child longs to see in fairy tale picturesthe stuff of serious enchantment, the woods deep and multifoliate, the giants and beasts literal, the fairies beautiful and fairy-like. Puss in Bootsin rampant pose, with his sure-enough boots on and a murdered mouse tied to his belt, towering there and imperiously stopping the King on his ride for the pursuance of a little scheme of his ownreally looks the magnificent, magical cat, fierce beyond resistance and wholly believable as a fairy character. The stories are the real Perrault, the Wolf actually gobbles up both the Grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood and never gives up either one. Here is one reader who grieves for the omission of Bluebeard, but otherwise has no feeling but joy in the book.

Page 77 Gumbo Ya-Ya, A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales Edited by Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, and Robert Tallent Creole Get-Together:

New York Times Book Review 30 January 1946: 5, 14

"Gumbo Ya-Ya" is a dish made of left-overs, pretends to be no more, and like many left-over dishes has the luck to be seasoned highly enough to get by. Evidently, the WPA Writers' Project of Louisiana, after finishing the admirable Louisiana Guide, had many an unused bit it would be a shame to throw awaystories, legends, gossip, interviews, write-ups of special stuff. 56 So why not? Here's a book called Gumbo Ya-Ya. The expression refers typically to a gathering of Creole ladies for an afternoon and means "Everybody talks at once." The subt.i.tle, A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales, is not troublesomely accurate, the book being a casual collection of almost everything else WPA writers gather.

The Creoles and Cajuns, the Voodoo priestesses, the slaves, the ghosts, the madames, the racetrack boys, the pirates and hoodlums and sports and saintshere they all are. The way the Catholic saints' days are celebrated, what the street criers called, how to play the numbers, how to get a three-day burial in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, for looksyour coffin in on Friday and out on Mondayall varieties of information are here. Much of the text is direct quotationinterviews with some of the original people on this earth, surely.

The book opens with a rather potent account of Mardi Gras time, enti- Page 78 tled "Kings, Baby Dolls, Zulus, and Queens." The sections following are also out of the common range as to content but make less invigorating reading; they are not edited sharply enough, perhaps, to escape being ordinary and long-winded at times, and toward the end the material seems still somewhat uncla.s.sified. The book peters out like some wonderful evenings of conversation about some delightfully curious subjectso much rushes to be said that it ends talked out, with babbles, sighs and yawns.

Gumbo Ya-Ya is fresh, colloquial and easy-going in approachis no "study" at all. Now and then a kind of master-of-ceremonies att.i.tude toward the things they are telling dulls what some of the narrators sayso that the curious, even the unG.o.dly, turns self-conscious or facetious.

There is an abundance of original material, in Louisiana, and it was a good idea to gather it, but there is a feeling that if one man had really pondered on the whole and then written a book which did more than stir everything up together and dish it out, there would have been more value to the work. But then it woudn't be Gumbo Ya-Ya, and it is beside the point to wish of any book that it had been another. At any rate, the material here is uneven in its powers of fascination. The reader finds himself wondering if the editors discriminated often enough between what was indigenous to Louisiana and what was simply interesting in human nature and its vagaries. Much of the ghost-story section, for example, could find its obvious parallel everywhere in the world, the stale old Headless Horseman has been much farther afield than the Bayou Country. Many of the ghost-seers, cult leaders, etc., presented with the master-of-ceremonies style mentioned above, still appear what they would be anywhere, rather pathetic neurotics of wellknown types, adding glamour to n.o.body's geography.

The book is like an old desk belonging to no-telling-who, so outlandish, occasionally, are the stuffings of the pigeonholes; the acc.u.mulation is curious and interesting, but only some of it worth keeping. Still, there is a romantic, or a hilarious, or a wild note here and there that justifies your looking through the book. And there is one idea the book gives, perhaps beside its purposethat Louisiana, different from everywhere else in many ways, is still part of the rest of the world, the same old ghosts are stalking it, human beings when investigated come up with curious but not wholly unprecedented answers.

Page 79 Westward Ha! Around the World in 80 Cliches By S. J. Perelman, ill.u.s.trated by Al Hirschfeld High Jinks Travelogue:

New York Times Book Review 8 August 1948: 5

It was years ago that a certain writer filled the pages of Judge with simulated woodcuts of agile characters ("'Back to the mines, men, there'll be no strike today,' hissed Boss Dismukes") and under them some very reproachable jokes about ladies, cads, and la vie Parisienne. 57 He was cherished then by this reviewer who (like thousands of others, no doubt) used to carry his work around in high school hidden in the back of Silas Marner. Today, S. J. Perelmanfor it was indeed hehas rewarded that faith and followed Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge with Strictly From Hunger, Dream Department, Crazy Like a Fox, Acres and Pains and the rest.58 It's our same Perelman who writes the prose of Westward Ha!

Westward Ha! began when the editor of Holiday magazine commissioned writer Perelman and artist Al Hirschfeld to go around the world and send back funny copy for the subscribers.59 They visited and traveled and tracked down persons from Suez to Malibu, but they didn't have a very good time. That the book is amusing despite all that was, of course, inevitable, considering the talent involved. Just as inevitably, it must be cla.s.sed with Messrs. Perelman and Hirschfeld's minor efforts.

In the course of travel the collaborators look up personages of various kinds and converse with them in Berlitz-imbibed languages. "To put him at his ease," Perelman tell us as he meets Bao Dai, "I inquired sociably wheth- Page 80 er the pen of his uncle was in the garden." 60 He turns his deadly gaze on every travel-book convention on earth. "It must have been an off-night in Macao, for when I reached my room and undressed, there was not a single haft of a knife protruding from the small of my back."61 The eighty cliches referred to in the subt.i.tle is the page count.

Every now and again Mr. Perelman pulls back a moment from his high jinksand, with a candid gaze that alarms us by being the real thing, delivers an aside that is barefaced fact. Coming out of his seizure, he addresses us as a citizentells us that Bangkok is "indescribably pleasing." It's ungracious to react with a "Who? What?" Yet we only feel at home again when we meet the Tungku Makhota, for example, and he stands there "preening himself with a small jade preening knife."62 Perelman prose at its pure best, as everybody knows, is highly concentrated stuff. Every line and word count; it is as deadly accurate, as carefully organized and as impressionistic as high comedy or poetry. When this special stuff is given us in its natural formthe set pieceit is wonderful. But when it's made to cover a world journey, it loses its charms with its shape. When writing that's really a high comic performance has to serve for a long sustained account of a trip, taking us over actual hill and dale and following true-life narratives and the known maps, not to mention keeping two strange charactersPerelman and Hirschfeldalive and in recognizable human guise before us, then the demand on the prose is not a fair one.

Mr. Hirschfeld's drawings are apt, plentiful, amusing, and telling, and go well with the text. The book is attractive and gay to the eye. We ought not to look for anything unmitigated in this day and time, they tell usespecially joy. But it would have been nice to have our Perelman straight, not constricted by a job to fulfill.

Page 81 Our Gifted Son By Dorothy Baker Somnolence and Sunlight, Sound of Bells, the Pacific Surf:

New York Times Book Review 15 August 1948: 5

Mrs. Baker's third novel, like her first, is about a musician, this time a gifted young Mexican composer. 63 The novel is laid in a coast town in Mexico, a scene Mrs. Baker has done beautifully. Somnolence and stir, moonlight and sunlight, the streets, the Pacific surf, the cool large interiors, the sounds of bells and of fountainsthese things provide the pleasure of the book. Otherwise, it seems unreal, contrived, and mannered.

The plot is the gradual exposure of a rotten situation. It's like peeling away layer by layer an apple which looks browner and browner toward the core. If the story is one of those which are possible only owing to people's not telling one another the right answers to questions before it's too lateand it isthen the characters have to be people who won't talk, either through perversity or being slowed down through love. I don't think it's fair, though, for all the characters to be holding their tongues or lying until the plot signals green, or rather red. They are following the demands of a romantic and arbitrary thinga plot, but not life.

The gifted son is Jose Richter, a Harvard student who comes back to his home town, Las Palmas, to spend his vacation finding out about the several mysteries which have twined about his boyhood and, as coincidence would have it, intertwined about each other. All is entwined yet again with the Page 82 solenmity of his attaining his full manhood. So the plot is not too lenient a one; the conspiracy is cut to order.

The compound mystery of his mother's death and his father's stubborn silence (but he is a German) and of the American lady's strangely besmirched reputation bedevils Jose's mind and blocks his clear, shining road into the future. The mystery does not seem so deep to the reader, but Mrs. Baker has held back its solution to provide a fair amount of suspense. However, in giving the solution she stamps the story with final superficiality; for she doesn't "solve" Jose's life at all. If it is implied that now he can create his music in an unfettered way, this overlooks the fresh fact that his unfettering has cost the persons closest to him their lives. It's not surprising that the story ends in violence, death, goodbyes, and a single note struck very softly on the piano by the hero's finger.

Just as in real life, it seems too bad in fiction for a whole handful of people to have to give up everything as a matter of course for one person who happens to feel he is chosen and picked outtalentedand who is able to take the sacrifice for granted, if not to hurry it up. Jose hurries it up, and his pity at the tragic turn of events seems a little late, like everything else.

The fact of the matter is that Mrs. Baker has created some promising characters, full of interest, and then not let them do anything on account of the plot. Jose seems likely as an artist and as an attractive young Mexican; but he must busy himself on attaining manhood, as if it were a certificate. The father speaks in sentences of translation-German and seems (perhaps on account of his immovable cruelty) the one person least likely to get up from his seat and go riding in a car, which he has to do in order to get killed.

The heroine is gallant in almost the old Michael Arlen tradition, and flings herself away with pensive abandon, bearing her anguish with independence and a nice set of sport clothes. She has appeal and interest too, partly for being 40 years old, but she is made to perform so foolishly that only the climate seems any reason for her behavior. The American school friends of Jose's and Jose's sister are both pleasant and intelligent, doing what minor characters are always doing, showing up the other characters. But it doesn't matter to the plot what happens to them, they have inferior futures.

Mrs. Baker's style has a deliberately offhand, tomboy quality, which under its surface swagger, is soft, blurred, and rather sloppy. Her indistinct, often careless, sometimes ungrammatical sentences show a disregard for accuracy and clarity in the interest of manner and mannerism. She seems to give a Page 83 kind of imitation of simplicity. Instead of being disarmed, the reader is likely to arm at once. It strikes one as too bad the author didn't let the characters in this novel take it over more. It wouldn't matter so much, even, if Jose couldn't begin a symphony precisely on the last page, if he'd just begun to be and to feel outside the strictures of the pages preceding.

Page 84 City Limit By Hollis Summers Innocents in the Wood:

New York Times Book Review 19 September 1948: 18

Here is a touching and original novel. It is the story of the Babes in the Wood, except that the innocents do overcome the enemy in the end of City Limit, and convincingly, though almost miraculously. The author has set the story in a small Kentucky town, in the high school, one or two interiors and a country spot just outside the city limit.

The story is of two high school students who play hookey one fine day to go to the country, of their discovery that they are in love, and the consequent and immediate bearing down upon them of all the ugly suspicion and authority of their elders. This drives them to running away in earnest and living in a little house, hiding. They are inevitably routed out again. Meantime, they preserve their innocence, in an intuitive strugglenot without confusion, terror, some dreadful enlightenment and blind reckonings, and their love is pushed into a strange, triumphant and touching maturity in a little matter of days.

Would young lovers love and be really innocent? It never occurs to any of the powers of the town that automatic suspicion might not be as correct as it is self-righteous. All the frustrated anger, revenge and general busy-bodiness of the world of grown people, and the holding over influence of the dead, too, must turn upon the children to rout them out, charge and punish them.

The children are treated in the round, are real persons. They are admirably done and eminently believable. Ignorant and intuitive, sensitive and Page 85 absurd, stubborn and inconsistent, the high school mind is presented as the material of precious innocence in the world, which can somehow endure. Widely different from each other, the two young people between them raise up a st.u.r.dy tenderness under our eyes, like a little plant, and it is known to all that this is their protection. But it's a matter of suspense until the end.