A Writer's Eye Part 5

The complete account of this little adventure goes unemphasized. There is not a hysterical word in this story of youthful love. The unit of Mr. Summers' style is the simple declarative sentence. Perhaps it is over simple at times, but thereby is its eloquence too. The quality of the writing is certainly one of monotone simplicity, which at proper moments is able to trans.m.u.te thoughts anything but simple.

A play-by-play account of behavior, the story is told and the scene described in the very opposite of poetic images. Instead, we have here, described meticulously, a factual world, which at moments of expanded imagination on the author's part, and without abandoning the factual account, suddenly becomes a metaphysical one. There are almost no adjectives or adverbs. The explicit verb tells the story. But the fear of death can hover over the heroine in the being of a bird with a wing spread of a certain number of feet, and the girl and the field, and the bird and the world are still real, but death itself is flying over.

To state it another way, this factual account has intensity, which distinguishes it, and the intensity comes from a quality of meditation. It is a story of knowing and learning. ''Everybody was tied to himself and everybody had to die." Harriet, the girl, knows this: the boy learns it, and learns thereby to comfort her. The people in City Limit are as unpoetic as they are unimportant; the world about them is not a lyrical one, but Mr. Summers shows that it's the commonplace that best bears the strange moments of illumination.

Everybody in the book experiences moments outside himself, even Trudy Bates, the Dean of Girls at the high school and the true villain of the book. Her moment comes, appropriately and realistically enough, when she is surrounded by "the girls" on her day to have the two tables of bridge; it comes as a transforming anguish for the harm she has tried to do the young lovers. Thus the achievement of moments when the everyday event, the monotonous word, and the familiar landscape suddenly fuse with the pa.s.sionate idea. Fate, ident.i.ty, love, pa.s.sion, G.o.d, take outward shape with the mundane, even obnoxious surroundings.

It is correct to say this is a psychological novel, but it is the reviewer's glad Page 86 impression that the story was written not following after Freud no matter where, 64 but out of observation and intuition and study of behavior down to its smallest manifestations, and a conception of it on the general scale. It succeeds because of the author's honesty and care for his work. It could be improved uponfor instance, the beginning of the book is not as well done as the rest, and has an overlong prelude in italics which endeavors to "place" it, a service it does not need. But it stands as it is a very respectable piece of work. The author has compa.s.sion, a good eye not conditioned by anything, a good ear conditioned by some worthwhile anger, and a view of youth and innocence that is fresh, dignified, and rewarding.

Page 87 Intruder in the Dust By William Faulkner In Yoknapatawpha:

Hudson Review Winter 1949: 596598

What goes on here? Grave digging. "Digging and undigging." What's in the grave? One body or maybe another, maybe nothing at allexcept human shame, something we've done to ourselves. Who digs? Who but the innocent, the youngand the old and female, their burning-up energy generating a radiance over Yoknapatawpha County and its concerns? Not forgetting the Gowrie twinslike the vaudeville team that follows behind the beautiful stars with its hilarious, mechanical parody, the Gowries from the hills dig too. 65 Intruder in the Dust is a story of the proving of innocence, this proof a maddening physical labor and a horrendous, well-nigh impossible undertaking, full of riddles and always starting over. The real innocents are the provers, the technical innocent is old, black Lucas Beauchamp in danger of lynching for murder of a white manand Lucas is a lightless character, high-and-mighty and gorgeously irritating, who would be so temptingly guilty if he weren't so irrevocably innocent, just the kind of man to get in just this kind of fix, who has been building up to it all his life, and now, by hints, condescends to be saved, offering cash fees, and requiring a receipt. The provers, exhumers that they have to be, are Miss Eunice Habersham, "a practical woman" in her seventies, who "hadn't taken long . . . to decide that the way to get a dead body up out of a grave was to go out to the grave and dig it up," and the sixteen-year-olds, Charles Mallison, white, Aleck Sander, colored, who end up dog-tired and a step along in man's wisdom.

Page 88 Gavin Stevens, the articulate uncle who by his character partly forecasts and foretells for Charles, and the sighing motherwonderfully doneare near at hand, summoned or pushed back, and beyond and dipping down is the menacing fringe of the Gowries from the ridges of wild Beat Four. Out of the digging comes a solution and an indictment, defining a hope, prayer, that we should one day reach that point where it will be Thou shalt not kill at all, where Lucas Beauchamp's life will be secure not despite the fact that he is Lucas Beauchamp but because he is.

The action of Intruder is franticand meditative, not missing a minute. The more-than-possible failure of the task overhangs it like a big cliff. The suspense is of the chasesometimes slow-motion, sometimes double-time; leg-work, horses, mules ("unspookable" for this business), pickup trucks, on up to a fast Sheriff's auto, bear the characters toward their grave-robbing with greater and greater urgency. The setting is the open country at night lighted by "a thin distillation of starlight," and a few dusky interiors, smelly. (How Faulkner can show us that making things out in the dark is a quality of perception as well as a quant.i.ty!) In counterpoint is the Square, back in Jefferson, with the Face of its crowd, the immobile, inflexible crowd around which sentience strives and threads and skirts, until the crowd's final whizzing away like a battery of witches on brooms. Even when old man Gowrie gets his Vinson back, brushes the quicksand off and takes him home to bury again tomorrow, is this story going to stop? ''This time Hampton and his uncle could go out there tomorrow night and dig him up" is the boy's sleepy valediction that night.

Intruder is marvelously funny. Faulkner's veracity and accuracy about the world around keeps the comic thread from ever being lost or fouled, but that's a simple part of the matter. The complicated and intricate thing is that his stories aren't decked out in humor, but the humor is born in them, as much their blood and bones as the pa.s.sion and poetry. Put one of his stories into a single factual statement and it's pure outrageso would life betoo terrifying, too probable and too symbolic too, too funny to bear. There has to be the story, to bear itwherein that statement, conjured up and implied and demonstrated, not said or the sky would fall on our heads, is yet the living source of his comedyand a good part of that comedy's adjoining terror, of course.

It doesn't follow that Intruder, short, funny, of simple outline, with its detective-story casing, is one of the less difficult of Faulkner's novels. Offering side-by-side variations of numerous words, daringly long, building ever- Page 89 working sentences (longer than The Bear's, maybe, if anybody is counting), moods and moments arrested, pulled up to peaks, wilfully crowned with beauty and terror and surprise and comedy, Faulkner has at once reexplored his world with his marvelous style that can always search in new ways, and also appeared to use from beginning to end the prerogatives of an impromptu piece of work. 66 It could be that to seem impromptu is an illusion great an can always give as long as profundities of theme, organization, and pa.s.sionate content can come at a calling, but the art of what other has these cadenzas? Even the witty turns and the perfect neatness of plot look like the marks of a flash inspiration. If Intruder did come intruding in a literal way, shaped from the dust into life before the eyes, then we have a special wonder here; but it's none of our business, and the important thing is the wonder, special or not.

Time shifts its particles over a scene now and then, past and future like seasoning from a shaker, and Yoknapatawpha County we know now too, while the new story in its year, month, and ticking hour of day and night, emerges in that illumination and shading which Faulkner supplies to the last inch and the ultimate moment. The political views in Intruder, delivered outright as a speech, are made, rightly enough, another such shading to the story.

As in all Faulkner's work, the separate scenes leap up on their own, we progress as if by bonfires lighted on the way, and the essence of each scene takes form before the eyes, a shape in the fire. We see in matchless, "subst.i.tuteless" (Faulkner's word for swearing) actuality and also by its contained vision: "Miss Habersham's round hat on the exact top of her head such as few people had seen in fifty years and probably no one at any time looking up out of a halfway rifled grave." Every aspect of vision is unique, springs absolute out of the material and the moment, only nominally out of "character" or "point of view," and so we see hats and happenings and every other thing, if not upwards from a half rifled grave, then down the road of the dark shuttered cabins, or up a jail stair, from the lonely ridge where Gowries come; or see in accompaniment with the smell of quicksand (a horse is there to get the smell and rear up), by the light even of impending conflagrations. Old Man Gowrie turning over a body that's the wrong body, not his son's, becomes ''only an old man for whom grief was not even a component of his own but merely a temporary phenomenon of his slain son, jerking a strange corpse over onto its back not in appeas.e.m.e.nt to its one mute indicting cry not for pity not for vengeance not for justice but just to be sure he had the Page 90 wrong one, crying cheery abashless and loud, 'Yep it's that d.a.m.ned Montgomery d.a.m.ned if it ain't!'" The boy's feverish dream of Miss Habersham trying to drive around the mob to get back to her own house, a vision of How the Old Woman Got Home, is this writer's imagination soaring like the lark.

Of course it's a feat, this novela double and delightful feat, because the mystery of the detective-story plot is being ravelled out while the mystery of Faulkner's prose is being spun and woven before our eyes. And with his first novel in eight years, the foremost critics are all giving cries as if (to change the image) to tree it. It's likely that Faulkner's prose can't be satisfactorily a.n.a.lyzed and accounted for, until it can be predicted, G.o.d save the day. Faulkner's prose, let's suspect, is intolerantly and intolerably una.n.a.lyzable and quite pure, something more than a possum in a treewith its motes bright-pure and dark-pure falling on us, critics and non-critics alike. 67 Page 91 The World Next Door By Fritz Peters Vets' Mental Hospital Is Site of Moving Novel:

New York Post 18 September 1949: 16M

Most of us have been at some time in our lives touched closely, at least fairly closely, by the presence of mental illness. The World Next Door is an account of such an illness as told by one who experienced it; the illness is a world, and it's not very far away. A note in the front of the book says this is "based on actual experience"; with names and characters fict.i.tious, it is presented in the form of a novel told in the first person. 68 David Mitch.e.l.l, a young war veteran returned home, is taken by force in Chapter I to the veterans' psychiatric division of a hospital in the East. There, in timea comparatively short time, one gathershe is cured. What the book attempts, and I think, succeeds in doing to a startling degree, is to tell the interior story of what happened.

It discloses horrors and cruelties and violence in plenty, but nothing remains as horrible and cruel as the inner life of the patient through whose eyes we see things. Mr. Peters' book does not seek to be sensationalto the contrary; on the other hand, through its very "interior" quality, it is one of the most sensational novels to come out in recent years.

This is one way in which The World Next Door differs from other books of its general subject matter. With uncompromising honesty and unsparing revelation, it describes a level of experience deeper, darker, further down than the other books have gone, a level more personal and yet Page 92 strangely more impersonalso abstract does suffering render "the world next door." It reaches points of wild and terrifying humor. There are some pa.s.sages of peace and beauty there, too.

It seems that even while he suffered, this patient was concerned with thought itself, with suffering itself, with delusion itselftheir processes, in peace and in violence, during the course of mental illness. And the book is addressed to the intellectual understandingthere are no emotional appeals, no sensational exposes for exposing's sake.

The book has logic, it is written logically, and in its way it is dealing with logic itself. The belligerent, ingenious and heartbreakingly lucid a.s.saults and compromises and trickeries and bargains the mind makes with what has so distressed itthese make present to an excruciating degree the narrow margin that lies between insanity and pure logicbetween simply, the sick and the well.

This book is the revealing doc.u.ment it is by its intense focussing on what is personal and firsthand. In dealing with mental illness this book is about the individual's problem first, and society's problem by the way. It does not preachdirectly, at any rate. In its anguished and brilliant progress it examines and implicates man himself. It is in part dedicated "to the veterans, of war and society, in all psychiatric inst.i.tutions."

As a performance of writing, The World Next Door is an astonishing example of what must be almost total recall. How could it help being of high value to doctors? It is certainly of absorbing interest to the general reader, to whom the development and cure of the illness of David Mitch.e.l.l become a matter of highest suspense. There is the excitement of a detective thriller in its powerful, penetrating and unequivocally sincere account of a journey into madness and return. 69 Page 93 South By William Sansom Fireworks in Italy:

Sat.u.r.day Review of Literature 23 September 1950: 1617

South is the Mediterranean world. These are stories of Ajaccio, Nice, Naples, Monte Carlo, Florence, Siena, Milan. 70 First of all, Mr. Sansom, who takes joy and sustenance from the physical world, can communicate that world and that joyno mean achievement.71 Here is the impact of the South on the sun-starved North, personified in Mr. Sansom with a notebook, for all this overwhelming detailfresh, instant, exact, inhumanly brilliantmust have been put down on the spot, or Mr. Sansom is a wizard twice over.

This author in three books has already proved he can make you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell to his order: ride in a bus, put your head under water, anything he likes.72 Here you see the street dealers in Ajaccio: "one tall Senegalese walking slowly from restaurant to restaurant like a priest in his red fez, a single blue-black crayfish weaving its worried feelers from his purple-black hand." He leads you down boulevards "straight, leaf-shaded, with shop windows glinting darkly in the night of high noon" into ''squares so s.p.a.cious and beaten flat by years of the changeless, flowery sun." He shows you the trees on the Florentine hills "like darts thrown at random into the brown earth by a fond divinity." He can take you under waterthere's "a hermit crab pouring out its soft body to pull the sh.e.l.l a labored inch along the floor." He can give you Monaco and a hangover at the same time: "The yellow extraordinary terraces broke over him with mad impactthis place could not be true! He felt as if small birds were pulling Page 94 cotton strings from each side of his forehead, his head was expanding dangerously."

Mr. Sansom's descriptive power is a steady fireworks. 73 Like fireworks, part of its necessity is contrivance, an occasional "set-piece." These are stories wholly evoked by places, limited by the evocation, and purposely so: "Aspects and Images" Mr. Sansom calls them on the t.i.tle page. For the most part the "native'' characters are personifications or figures in a landscapethey do not enjoy private lives apart from the purposes at hand and so are not very near us or quite animated. (But some of Mr. Sansom's animalshe has several for characterscould make you stand on a chair.) All but one of the stories take place in a public placepark, museum, casino, the square of a townwith a visitor as protagonist, more accurately as witness, for he seldom acts for other reasons than, ultimately, to sight-see. "Poseidon's Daughter," the exception, is told from within, but develops an a.n.a.logy between incident and myth, and so once again the story appears at a remove.

In "Afternoon" two old Florentines feud back and forth between the Boboli Gardens and the Pitti Palace. In "Landscape with Figures" an escaped snake wanders into the Galleria Vittoria Emanuele in Milan, where he is charmed by one of those girl bands "in pajamas of viridian satin" playing outside a cafe. "Three Dogs of Siena"highly amusingconcerns visitors, too, dog-sight-seers, confronted with the statue of the wolf-mother of Romulus and Remus.

The most highly developed story is "My Little Robins," for it is concerned more specifically with human situations and reveals aspects of people while it gives images of Ajaccio. It tells of the little dealers of the streets, specifically of one, tracked downliterallyby our observer; we see him morally, too: an odd sort who shoots robins for selling, one of "the breed of the loving hunter." "Here was the predatory esthete, a fine mind if a dark one"; "he faced up to the cruelty of life and lived his part of it."

But the towns remain the real characters; it is they that enjoy the moods and the motives, are comic or tragic, cut up antics, threaten or bewitchthe square, the crowd, all the abundant and wasteful life of the Mediterranean, with its espresso machines, plane trees, and palms, octopi, mistrals, casinos, fireworks, and that old refrain "Qu'est-ce que c'est que ca?" "For private tragedy no city stirsonly perhaps, like some immense impa.s.sive beast, listens inwardly for a moment wondering where over all its great hide the tic has bitten."

Page 95 The "aspects and images" remain the brilliant products of a remarkable vision, of eye and intuition, historical embellishment, a beautiful and formidable amount of on-the-spot detail. They are lacking in the overtones, the ragged edges of Mr. Sansom's prouder stories which deal with human beings in the stress of self-devised problems.

The stories are surely what Mr. Sansom intended them to be and they succeed. The limitations suggested are in a measure another proof of the author's virtuosity; he evidently enjoys a challenge, and he has already shown in other books that he can go deeper and further than South when he takes the notion.

Page 96 The World My Wilderness By Rose Macaulay Wise and Witty Novel of Europe Now:

New York Post 12 November 1950: 16M

In her first novel in ten years, Miss Rose Macaulay 74 applies the gifts for which she has long been valued toward a work of acute contemporary significance.75 We follow Barbary, a young girl whose English mother Helen has brought her up, or let her bring herself up, in France during the Resistance, a child who has learned her mores from the Maquis, to the very proper London household of the mother's divorced barrister husband and his new wife.

But it is rather in the ruins of the old merchants' rows around St. Paul's that Barbary unerringly finds her true dwelling. Her French half-brother, subjected to the same transference, says of the wild-flowered ruins, "'This is more for us. It is chez nous'."

Through this wilderness the driven Barbary carries her own despairs and secret horrors, finds her solace, nourishes her terrible dreams, grows into a consuming life of black marketing and thievery, rushes pell-mell toward downfallit is all like an acted-out nightmare.

She is the living comparison of one physical wilderness with another in the war-ruined world, of both with the wilderness of the spiritshe is more than its comparison, indeed, she is its ident.i.ty.

Page 97 But she is not the heroine. The real heroine is Helen, not Barbary; for it is the mother whose great full figure stands behind that of her daughter, casting it into its more temporary proportions.

She is almost THE Helenlastingly beautiful, wise and learned, a woman who is forever the lover and the pagan.

It is Helen who would beg the question of Miss Macaulay's bookthe moral question of what is one to do, for oneself and for others, what should one have done, with this shattered world on our hands? Standing outside the question and taking a not uncruel advantage thus, as Helen initially does by reason of her personal endowments and convictions, she is not loth to be a cause of turmoil, its center rather than its resolution, as in myth her prototypes have been.

The characters, of great variety and charm, contribute as they can and must to Miss Macaulay's searching theme. At one end of the scale, which could be described as that of human perception, is poor Pamela the second wife, at the other, Helen.

(Who would ever not know Pamela, with those proper answers and those clothes of the kind that are "cheaper in the end!") A closer pair of opposites are Gulliver, Helen's divorced husband, and Barbaryborn enemies, both strongly endowed but limited by the circ.u.mstances of their worlds so as to see only the single extremes they tend toward, wrenched, but relentlessly holding on, each with a violently active integrity.

Nearer the center, more nearly alike, are the two Frenchmen: Helen's lover, one more of that whole knowing, charming, tired, but still amused Mediterranean world; and her son Raoul, whose French father has been set in an equivocal place before him and has been murdered as a collaborator, which, actually, he wasn't.

Just outside this dangerous line-up, and pushing and working at it with a most domestic zeal, is the old nursethe hold-over from other days, other kinds of days, and even other kinds of novels, helping everything along, providing footwork and warning cries for action, the bosom for the refuge from it, and tears for its denouement. She keeps up a chorus of comment, and sees that all respectably takes a turn for something, if not for the better, with a nannie-like love of crisis.

The settings are impeccable choices for their own supporting rolesthe French Mediterranean Coast, haunt of Helen; bombed and unbombed Page 98 London; wild Scotland with its shooting boxes where still the right clothes are being worn for shooting properly at each wild creaturea place Barbary can't bear for longer than a single day.

The a.s.sembling of these contemporary complexitiesof personality, place and time, and of the larger poetic shadows which haunt them allis a brilliant a.s.sembling, and not an answerMiss Macaulay has given us high honesty and unswerving clarity, which are the best a writer can give. There is no facile answer to be found in this novelknowing, poetic, witty, terribly melancholy as it is, and a joy as it is to read.

Page 99 The Witch Diggers By Jessamyn West A Search, Maddening and Infectious:

New York Times Book Review 14 January 1951: 5

This is a good, long, warm, generous and curious novel. Its detail rounded and rich, an enormous number of vigorous characters abounding, it is a physical panorama concerned morally with man's infatuation with plans and calculations, from the n.o.blest of them to the maddest, and most useless and hopeless, and how this infatuation distorts, ruthlessly opposes, and even dooms his powers of love.

The scene is a Poor Farm in rural Indiana at the turn of the century, the characters the Conboy family who run the inst.i.tution and those who come into relation with them. The t.i.tle refers specifically to a brother and sister, inmates of the Poor Farm, who believe that the truth is something as actual and literal as a piece of paper, actually and literally buried in the ground somewhere, to be unearthed by diggers if they dig long enough, then to set mankind free. A curious splendor is in these witch diggers, maddening and infectious.

This novel about love, responsibility, fate, is presented in a physical world of earthly beauty and ugliness, of vigor, fecundity, and general stir, in many scenes, a number of them expansiveholiday groups and community gatherings. The Witch Diggers could be Indiana, 1899, Breughel. 76 The characters are alive and vividly struggling, explained fully and yet remaining, I thought, opaque to a degree, as real-life people do, but this gains them a curious wholeness in the context. We see that the characters are sometimes ignorant, sometimes innocent but never simple; they have Page 100 the makings of complexity without the tools for its expression. In another guise the witch diggers might have been poets.

All are charged with the business of living, strongly opinionated, strongly s.e.xed, acting for the most part in good faith toward one another and sometimes (as they are able) toward themselves. Their conflicts are, hence, simply their differences as individuals. Placed in the uncontroversial times, in the simple setting, within the order only of the seasons, the novel is left free for its characters to move under their own stars. Some of thesethe Poor Farm inmateshave been relieved even further of worldly impediments; and these are the characters who run to the greatest extreme of all in variety of personality and in actionfrom the catatonic to the frenzied. Stripped to the utterly physical, the physical of the Poor House pigs at times, the book reaches here its moral bonewhich is Miss West's triumph.

How responsible for each disaster to another human being do our separate sins make us, how do they combine? What is the limit of the harm we inflict on other peopleall too often "for their own good"? How far is ignorance to blame? Could these people, indeed, have escaped their own doom?

Link Conboy, superintendent of the Poor Farm, a man of scruples and conscience and n.o.bility, is essentially inarticulatehe who had the best chance not to be. And this is the key, I think: so is every other character in the book inarticulate, from whence stems his fate and his disaster. Not that everyone in this countryside does not talk all the timewise men, fools, fanatics, lovers, and just womenbut n.o.body is able to communicate at all, except when it is possible through s.e.xual behavior or strangely ritual symbolic action, as the witch diggers do.

If The Witch Diggers is a novel of the distinction it is because in dealing with the pa.s.sions, Miss West is dealing also with pa.s.sion itself. Charades is a favorite game in this Indiana locality. In a sense all the action in the novel is a charade, the characters moving on the scene in sides or teams or alone, to present their allotted syllable the best they can. It is calculation which futilely and frantically turns over the earth in a vanity of witch digging, ignoring, fatally ignorant of, the simple and revelatory power of love.

Page 101 Short Novels of Colette By Colette A Collection of Colette:

Six Novels in One Volume:

New York Post 30 December 1951; 12M

Here are six short novels by a major French writer too long known to most of us only by name and reputation, presented in one fat volume of translations, by various hands, extending over a number of years; one was made by Janet Flanner, in 1921. 77 The novels are: The Indulgent Husband, written in 1902; Cheri, 1920; The Last of Cheri, 1926; The Other One, 1929; The Cat, 1933 and Duo, 1934.

Colette's life and her writing are presented us here by Mr. Glenway Wescott, who has enjoyed both a long familiarity with all the large output by Colette, and her friendship.78 It is good to have the information and the special illumination given out by this essay, which is brilliant, loving and long. Mr. Wescott's fervor, always informed, is still uncontained and catching, like that of an audience waiting for the curtain to go up on some surprising and beautiful experience; it is doubly pleasing for being so justified.

Colette, born in 1872 in a village in Burgundy, is today confined to her bed in an apartment in the Palais-Royalstill writing, by night, under a light shaded by blue paper, one of the familiar sights of Paris to strollers in the gardens below. She has enjoyed not only length of life but an enormous variety of it, including a period on the stage.

How strangeor is it?that she first wrote as a drudge; taken off into Page 102 the country by her first husband, a journalist and hackwriter known as w.i.l.l.y, she was, a girl in her teens, "locked in her room for four-hour stretches while she inked up a certain number of pages." But it was her joke: she liked writingmercifully for her, and for us. Eventuallyand releasedshe was writing with a kind of genius.

It is in her writing itself, not in the separate pieces as novels, that I find her greatness. In the best of it, her virtuosity, even seen through the veils of translation, shimmers marvelously. Colette is instantly recognizable as a master. Authority, rightful authority, is apparent with every sentence, every word.

Colette is an impressionist surely more kin to the great [painters than to the] great writers who were and are her contemporaries. 79 She uses light and reflection as purposefully as Monet or Renoir. The senses can read her paragraphs as clearly and uninterruptedly as the mind can, with an even more certain, even more immediate, understanding, disturbance, delight. In exactly seen interiors and exteriors her novel's characters (always few in number), perfectly lighted, are marvelously exhibited in motion and repose alive with illusion.

There is one quality which I find in Colette's writing by power of its absenceheart. She writes indeed of loveof loves, pa.s.sions, infatuations, cat-loves, strange lovesa perfect rainbow of loves. But she writes not with her loveor so it seems to me, reading her for the first time here. She writes frequently out of a force which is much more explicit, cryptic, arbitrary, witty and undismayed.

Look not for compa.s.sion in Colette; yet it is this withholding (I do not say lack) which is in some way a part of her strange power. There is nothing vulnerable about her writing, as there is nothing clumsy. Dazzling it is, but not daring. Its material, its matter, is somewhat ba.n.a.l and shabby; its profundity is in its treatmentby intention so, and by the genius of achievement.

For brevity, for wit that began back in the observation of the eye which produced it; for the loving openness, almost transparency, of all the senses to the moment pa.s.sing, its time and place; for a recognition of the essence of that tension (of whatever name or quality) existing between and among the human beings and sometimes the cat in a room together; for a recording of feeling as strict as a seismograph's; perhaps best of all for a real gaiety, a real laughing gaietyfor these things we will value, honor, study, and above all delight in Colette.

Page 103 Don Camillo and His Flock By Giovanni Guareschi When Good Meets Bad:

New York Times Book Review 17 August 1952: 4