A Writer's Eye Part 12

Jill Faulkner Summers gave Blotner access and permission to publish Page 209 letters in her possession, a number of which he'd drawn upon or already published in the biography. Some recipients of letters withheld theirs, in whole or in part. Mr. Blotner doesn't say what proportion of the existing body of letters this absence represents, or name any of their recipients, if indeed he knows all these facts himself. In the letters published, a row of dots indicates where something is omitted, though without a clue of how mucha sentence or half the letter; we aren't told whether it was the recipient or the editor who has cut it. (Blotner says he has excised some things.) "The editor and biographer must take what he can get," he says. The letters are in chronological order, but not numbered, and not bracketed in any way; there is no sectioning by period of time of life or placeit's Oxford to New Orleans to Paris, Hollywood, New York, Stockholm, Egypt, Virginia and all the rest, and home again, from page 3 to page 465, all without an extra one-line s.p.a.ce between. 158 If this plan lacks something in imagination, still it is uninterfering.

Faulkner's letters are not "literary" but they are very much letters about writing. They are the letters of a man living in the midst of his own world and his own society and kin, a man who was ardently and all by himself trying to do the thing he most pa.s.sionately wanted to do, and by necessity earn the family living by it. The greatest number of the letters we have are those to his publishers and agents. "Yours to hand," he customarily begins them. Intimacy was no part of them; they were factual business letters, as telegraphic as an S.O.S., which they often were. We cannot miss the sound of desperation so often underneath: these were letters of life-and-death, about the wherewithal to survive, to keep alive his genius; he was so pressed that he often sent them off without signing them.

In 1932 to his agent Ben Wa.s.son: "I hope to h.e.l.l Paramount takes Sanctuary. Dad left mother solvent for only about 1 year. Then it is me."

In 1934 he is working on two novels, and writing one short story each month, trying to sell to the Post. "As I explained to you before," he writes to Harrison Smith, "I have my own taxes and my mother's, and the possibility that Estelle's people will call on me before Feb. 1 and also my mother's and Dean's support, and occasional demands from my other two brothers which I can never antic.i.p.ate . . . Then in March I have . . . insurance and income tax. . . ."

To his agent Morton Goldman, in 1935: "The man who said that the pinch of necessity, butchers' and grocers' bills and insurance hanging over his head, is good for an artist, is a d.a.m.ned fool."

Page 210 From the start Faulkner could look at his work, and thought an artist ought to, with the objectivity of (as he liked to say) a carpenter who'd built a henhouse. What he thought and felt, had worked in anguish to convey, must make its appearance in the work itselfit was the hen in the henhouse. But he had to look at all he wrote with recognition of its earning possibilities. "By G.o.d I've got to."

He stepped up his pace to two short stories a week"I don't know how long I can keep it up"and prophesies that his insurance premiums "will be difficult to meet and perhaps even impossible, unless I should produce a book which the movies would wantwhich G.o.d Himself could not promise Himself to write."

Through all this, when a publisher's comprehension of his problems was so vital, Faulkner's editors at Random House met these letters with unfaltering willingness to advance him money against the future. Faulkner appreciated his luck, which brought him in the course of time to Smith, Robert K. Haas, Saxe Commins, Bennett Cerf, and Albert Erskine. In Hollywood, where he'd go to buy himself time, he wrote the Harold Ober: "If they [Warners] had any judgment of people, they would have realized before now that they would get a d.a.m.n sight more out of me by throwing away any d.a.m.ned written belly-clutching contract and let us work together on simple good faith and decency, like with you and Random House." Ober, it ought to be said, must have been the most understanding of agents, as well as the most patient.

By 1940, Faulkner writes: "But maybe a man worrying about money can't write anything worth buying." To Haas he says, "I had planned after finis.h.i.+ng THE HAMLET, to try to earn enough from short stories by July 1 to carry me through the year, allow me six months to write another novel. I wrote six . . . the sort of pot-boilers which the Post pays me $ 1,000.00 each for, because the best I could hope for good stories is 3 or 4 hundred . . . but only one of them has sold yet. Now I have not only wasted the mental effort and concentration which went into the trash, but the six months . . . as well as the time since March 15, which I have spent mortgaging my mares and colts one at a time to pay food and electricity and was.h.i.+ng and such, and watching each mail train in hopes of a check. Now I have about run out of mules to mortgage."

Then he replies to Harold Ober in 1941 that no, he has no carbon of the story he'd sent. It was a story rewritten from a novel under way and sent "first draft and in haste because I need some money badly.

Page 211 "In hopes that Post will take it and I can get a check next week, I am trying to make the revision desired from memory, without waiting to get back your copy. If it does not fit, please return your copy, and this revision AIR MAIL and I will get it back the same day. Please sell it for something as soon as you can. I am in a situation where I will take almost anything for it or almost anything else I have or can write."

The Post found the rewrite acceptable and it appeared in May 1942. It was "The Bear."

But threats of oblivion were increasing, and it was during the course of his being rescued from it that Faulkner put down the best things he ever said about his writing in a series of letters to Malcolm Cowley. The correspondence between the two men, later good friends, who had then never met, began in 1944 when Cowley put to Faulkner his idea of a Viking Portable Faulkner, to be compiled and edited by him. The story, like all of Faulkner's life, is well-known now, but it remains wonderful. Had it not been for the reemergence of Faulkner's work in the triumphant organization Cowley made of it for this volume, and Cowley's fresh literary insight, which called forth Faulkner's composition of the Compson genealogy called "Appendix/Compson 16991945," all Faulkner's work, already out of print then, might be worse than only out of print nowit might be half forgotten.

"I would like the piece," Faulkner initially writes Cowley, "except the biography part. You are welcome to it privately, of course. But I think that if what one has thought and hoped and endeavored and failed at is not enough, if it must be explained and excused by what he has experienced, done or suffered, while he was not being an artist, then he and the one making the evaluation have both failed."

Then to the letter that's the masterpiece: "I'm trying primarily to tell a story, in the most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive. But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do . . . I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world . . . I am trying to go a step further [than Thomas Wolfe] . . . I'm trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period. I'm still trying, to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead. I don't know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep on trying in a new way. . . . Life is a phenomenon but not a novelty . . . Art is simpler than people think because there is so little to write about. All the moving things are eternal in man's history and have been written before, and if a man writes hard enough, sincerely enough, Page 212 humbly enough, and with the unalterable determination never never never to be quite satisfied with it, he will repeat them, because art like poverty takes care of its own, shares its bread."

On April 28, 1946, he has the book: "Dear Cowley: The job is splendid. d.a.m.n you to h.e.l.l anyway. But even if I had beat you to the idea, mine wouldn't have been this good. By G.o.d, I didn't know myself what I had tried to do, and how much I had succeeded."

We have to fillet this story from where it lies embedded in the chronological pages, spread over a section 51 pages long. It's alongside letters like the kind one to Miss Lida, his mother-in-law, about the flowers in California, their likeness to and difference from the flowers in Mississippi, just because it comes nexttelling us something about Faulkner's character but holding us up when we want the next letter to Cowley. The letters, the best in Blotner's book, can better be read in Cowley's own 1966 Faulkner-Cowley File, where they appear, along with the other side of the correspondence, in uninterrupted sequence, and where, read thus, they can move you to tears.

But there are values in the chronological order of a special kind, too. When you read the letters above, of all Faulkner has taught himself about what he's doing, you can remember those he wrote back in 1925, when he walked over Europe in the greatest exuberance, planning to make his reputation abroad. He writes his mother, "I have just written such a beautiful thing that I am about to bust2000 words about the Luxembourg gardens and death."

There are of course other letters in this book, but I have reported mostly on those that have to do with Faulkner's writing, because Mr. Blotner says in his Introduction that "The main purpose of this collection is to provide a deeper understanding of the artist, to reveal as much as possible what one can see in the letters about his art.i.ts sources, intentions, and process of creation. . . ." Those letters that directly speak of his work are marvelous, and so are others that say things obliquely. They make clear that it remained the giftnot its cost in the work or its anguishbut the gift he had that came first with him.

He writes to the novelist Joan Williams in 1953: ". . . And now, at last, I have some perspective on all I have done. I mean, the work apart from me, the work which I did, apart from what I am. . . . And now I realise for the first time what an amazing gift I had: Uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made Page 213 the things I made. I dont know where it came from. I dont know why G.o.d or G.o.ds, or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel. Believe me, this is not humility, false modesty: it is simply amazement.''

Neither was it self-centered. Faulkner's marked sensitivity to others, to their pain, their needs of affection, encouragement, moral support, might have been taken for granted from the evidence of his work. What might not have been so easily guessed was that their gifts as artists brought about a profound response in him.

In the occasionaleven rareletter to a literary peer, his feeling for, appreciation of the writer's giftnot shop talkis almost sure to be the subject. Just as it is to a young unknown black poet whose ma.n.u.scripts Faulkner read and helped him with: "Put the pa.s.sion in it, but sit on the pa.s.sion. Dont try to say to the reader what you want to say, but make him say it to himself for you. I will edit the second one and send it to you when I get it right . . . Your idea in both is all right." ("All right" emerges in Faulkner's letters as his strongest, surest term of praise.) He apparently fell in love with Joan Williams, but the very touching letters to her all carry the current of a continuing wish to encourage her talentshe was in her twenties, just beginning to try to break away from the constrictions of family and write. He gave her his handwritten ma.n.u.script of The Sound and the Fury,a different sort of present from a bunch of roses.

Faulkner's letters show honesty, fairness and largeness of mind, genuine consideration for others, and compa.s.sion; also exhilaration and also despair. They pull no punches. They are in turn funny, sad, angry, desperate, tender, telegraphic, playful, quick in arithmetic and perfect in courtesy, unhappy. But these qualities, in one combination or another, can be found in the letters of a lot of human beings who didn't write The Sound and the Fury, "Spotted Horses" and "The Bear." It would deny the author's whole intent, in a lifetime of work and pa.s.sion and stubborn, h.e.l.lbent persistence, to look for the deepest revelations he made in his letters.

No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there. The writer offered it to us from the start, and when we didn't even want it or know how to take it and understand it; it's been there all along and is more than likely to remain. Read that.

Page 214 The Never-Ending Wrong By Katherine Anne Porter Post Mortem:

New York Times Book Review 21 August 1977: 9, 29

As this is being written, the Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts has issued a proclamation calling for a memorial day on Aug. 23, the anniversary of the electrocution of Sacco and Vanzetti in the Charlestown Prison for a holdup and murder, and his legal counsel has cited "the very real possibility that a grievous miscarriage of justice occurred with their deaths." It has taken the law exactly 50 years to acknowledge publicly that it might have made a mistake. But after that same 50 years, the renowned short-story writer and novelist Katherine Anne Porter has written a book, The Never-Ending Wrong, also to be published on Aug. 23; and it seems to her that she still believes and feels today the same as she believed and felt at that time, on that scene.

This book of 63 pages, a "plain, full record of a crime that belongs to history" as she states in a foreword, was not intended to establish the guilt or innocence of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, but rather to examine the guilt or innocence of those on the outside, all those gathered there, like herself, to see the final scene played out.

"I did not know then and I still do not know whether they were guilty . . . but I had my reasons for being there to protest the terrible penalty they were being condemned to suffer; these reasons were of the heart, which I believe appears in these pages with emphasis."

Her own partic.i.p.ation was outwardly of little substancea matter of typing letters Sacco and Vanzetti wrote to their friends on the outside, of Page 215 showing up in the picket line and going through the motions of being arrested, jailed and bailed out. She knew herself to be largely in the dark about what was really going on. Questions rose out of personal feelingdeeply serious questions. She made some notes. This book, their eventual result, is a searching of a personal experience, whose troubling of the heart has never abated and whose meaning has kept on asking to be understood. The notes of that rime have been added to, she says, "in the hope of a clearer statement," but the account is "unchanged in feeling and point of view."

The picket line in which she marched included the poets and novelists Edna St. Vincent Millay, John dos Pa.s.sos, Michael Gold, Grace Lumpkin, Lola Ridge. 159 "I wouldn't have expected to see them on the same street, much less the same picket line and in the same jail."

By today's standards, the conduct of these exercises was almost demure. "I never saw a ladyor a gentlemanbeing rude to a policeman in that picket line, nor any act of rudeness from a single policeman. That sort of thing was to come later, from officers on different duty. The first time I was arrested, my policeman and I walked along stealing perplexed, questioning glances at each other; . . . neither of us wished to deny that the other was a human being; there was no natural hostility between us."

She made notes: "Second day: "He (taking my elbow and drawing me out of the line; I go like a lamb): 'Well, what have you been doing since yesterday?'

"I: 'Mostly copying Sacco and Vanzetti's letters. I wish you could read them. You'd believe in them if you could read the letters.'

"He: 'Well, I don't have much rime for reading.'"

On the day they were all aware that the battle was lost, she said to him, "I expect this will be the last time you'll have to arrest me. You've been very kind and patient and I thank you." "Thank you," he replied.

They were bailed out by the same kind soul every time they were put in jail. Edward James, Henry James's nephew, invariably appeared and put up the money for all of them, even those who did not wish to be bailed out, "getting us set free for the next round."

But, it appeared, Sacco and Vanzetti did not trust their would-be rescuers. "Many of the anxious friends from another cla.s.s of society found [it] very hard to deal with, not to be met on their own bright, generous terms in this crisis of life and death; to be saying, in effect, we are all brothers and equal Page 216 citizens; to receive, in effect, the reserved answer: No, not yet. It is clear now that the condemned men understood and realized their predicament much better than any individual working with any organization devoted to their rescue." They "knew well from the beginning that they had every reason to despair, they did not really trust these strangers from the upper world who furnished the judges and lawyers to the courts, the politicians to the offices, the faculties to the universities, who had all the money and the influence. . . ."

What they may not have known, says Miss Porter, was that "some of the groups apparently working for them, people of their own cla.s.s in many cases, were using the occasion for Communist propaganda, and hoping only for their deaths as a political argument. I know this because I heard and I saw."

It was a certain Rosa Baron who made this clear through her own words to Katherine Anne Porter, who had expressed the hope that even yet the men might be saved. This "grim little person" headed Miss Porter's particular group during the Boston demonstrations, and what Miss Porter remembers most vividly through the 50 years of time are Rosa Baron's "little pinpoints of eyes glittering through her spectacles at me and her shrill, accusing voice: 'Saved? Who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?'"

"In the reckless phrase of the confirmed joiner in the fight for whatever relief oppressed humanity was fighting for, I had volunteered 'to be useful wherever and however I could best serve,' and was drafted into a Communist outfit all unknowing."

The account of her experience is clear and has the strength of an essence, not simply by virtue of its long distillation. It is clear through candor, as well. Miss Porter says of herself at this time: "I was not an inexperienced girl, I was thirty-seven years old; I knew a good deal about the evils and abuses and cruelties of the world; I had known victims of injustice, of crime, I was not ignorant of history, nor of literature; I had witnessed a revolution in Mexico, had in a way taken part in it, and had seen it follow the cla.s.sic trail of all revolutions. Besides all the moral force and irreproachable motives of so many, I knew the deviousness and wickedness of both sides, on all sides, and the mixed motivesplain love of making mischief, love of irresponsible power, unscrupulous ambition of many men who never stopped short of murder, if murder would advance their careers an inch. But this was something very different, unfamiliar."

Page 217 "There were many such groups, for this demonstration had been agitated for and prepared for many years by the Communists. They had not originated the protest, I believe, but had joined in and tried to take over, as their policy was, and is. . . ."

Being used! The outrage she had found unbearable for the men on trial in court she realized was also the outrage being inflicted on those who had tried to help them, and on others more vulnerable than picketers in their line.

Through Miss Porter's eyes we see their wives, Rosa Sacco and Luigia Vanzetri, being marched through the streets at the head of a crowd ma.s.sing at a rally, on the night before the scheduled execution.

". . . and the two timid women faced the raging crowd, mostly Italians, who rose at them in savage sympathy, shouting, tears pouring down their faces, shaking their fists and calling . . . 'Never you mind, Rosina! You wait, Luigia! They'll pay, they'll pay!' It was the most awesome, the most bitter scene I had ever witnessed."

But the crowd a.s.sembled to await the execution itself was in contrast "a silent, intent a.s.sembly of citizensof anxious people come to bear witness and to protest against the terrible wrong about to be committed, not only against the two men about to die, but against all of us, against our common humanity. . . ." The mounted police galloped about, bearing down on anybody who ventured beyond the edge of the crowd and rearing up over their heads.

"One tall, thin figure of a woman stepped out alone, a good distance into the empty square, and when the police came down at her and the horse's hoofs beat over her head, she did not move, but stood with her shoulders slightly bowed, entirely still. The charge was repeated again and again, but she was not to be driven away." Then she was recognized as Lola Ridge, and dragged to safety by one of her own; the strange, poignant, almost archetypical figure Miss Porter describes must remain indelible. 160 After that night was all over, the picketers themselves were given a trial; that is, "simply our representatives" (Edna St. Vincent Millay was one) "were tried in a group in about five minutes." The judge "portentously, as if p.r.o.nouncing another death sentence, found us guilty of loitering and obstructing traffic, fined us five dollars each, and the tragic farce took its place in history.''

The aftermath was numbness, silence; disbanding and going home. Miss Porter writes: "In all this I should speak only for myself, for never in my life Page 218 have I felt so isolated as I did in that host of people, all presumably moved in the same impulse, with the same or at least sympathetic motive; when one might think hearts would have opened, minds would respond with kindness, we did not find it so, but precisely the contrary."

Katherine Anne Porter's fine, grave honesty has required of her, and she has given it to this account, a clarity of statement, a respect for proportion, an avoidance of exaggeration, a watchfulness against any self-indulgence, and a regard for uncompromising accuracy.

But the essence of the book's strength lies in its insight into human motivations, and the unique gifts she has brought to her fiction have been of value to her here as welleven in the specific matter of her subject. The theme of betrayal has always run in a strong current through her work. The worst villains of her stories are the liars, and those most evil are the users of others. Elements of guilt, the abandonment of responsibilities in human relations.h.i.+ps, the betrayal of good faith and the taking away of trust and love are what her tragic stories are made of. Betrayal of justice is not very different from the betrayal of love. 161 And a nation is a living human organism. Like a person, a nation sometimes needs years to comprehend the full scope and seriousness of some wound that has happened to it or some act it has brought itself to perform. Though an experience in its history may have hurt it deeply, left a scar and caused it recurring discomfort and bad dreams, yet only slowly may its meaning grow clear to the sufferer.

"The never-ending wrong," says Miss Porter, "is the anguish that human beings inflict on each other," which she p.r.o.nounces at the end "forever incurable." And she finds that "The evils prophesied by that crisis have all come true."

As no concerned citizen can argue, this book she has written out of her own life is of profound contemporary significance.

Page 219 Essays of E. B. White By E. B. White Dateless Virtues:

New York Times Book Review 25 September 1977: 7, 43

"As a writing man," E. B. White says in one of these essays, "The Ring of Time," "I have always felt charged with the safe-keeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost."

This collection, chosen by himself, grouped under heads of "The Farm," "The Planet," "The City," "Florida," "Memories,'' "Diversions and Obsessions" and "Books, Men, and Writing" has managed in many ways to carry out that charge.

The pieces range over something like four decades; there are 31 (8 have never appeared in book form), chosen as "the ones that have amused me in the rereading, along with a few that seemed to have the odor of durability clinging to them," he writes in a foreword. 162 So we come back in this volume to the timeless story of his two young geesethe sisters Liz, the laying fool, and Apathy, who laid three eggs, then quit, and the old gander and the young gandera story f.a.n.n.y, fierce and sad. We are happily back with some of the author's friends we don't want to forget. Here's Mr. Strunk, the author of The Elements of Style, delivering his oration on brevity to the cla.s.s: "Rule Thirteen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!" And here's Fred the dachshund in his act of birdwatching, "propped luxuriously against a pillow, as close as he could get to the window, his great soft brown eyes alight with expectation and scientific knowledge. . . . Spotting a flicker or a starling on the wing, he Page 220 would turn and make a quick report. 'I just saw an eagle go by,' he would say. 'It was carrying a baby.'"

We can have a reunion with the St. Nicholas League of our youthmotto: "Live to Learn and Learn to Live"a thinning crowd of whose graduates still carry on in the world of arts and letters today. It receives an affectionate tribute from the author, who won his Silver Badge and Gold Badge as an essayist from the start, although his honorable mention was for a drawing called "The Love of a Mother Rabbit." 163 "Farewell, My Lovely!""my lovely" is the Model T Fordtakes many of us back, and it's a joyride, but nostalgia is not its destination. It is a celebrating piece, and what it celebrates is man's pristine relations.h.i.+p with his car. There was no automatic transmission or automatic anything else in the Model T; in sole charge was the owner with a crank in his hand, the throttle waiting for his finger, the low-speed pedal for his opening stomp.

"The driver of the old Model T was a man enthroned."

"The last Model T was built in 1927, and the car is fading from what scholars call the American scenewhich is an understatement," says Mr. White, "because to a few million people who grew up with it, the old Ford practically was the American scene."

It had, in fact, a domestic status. It demanded the care of some creature of farm life. "A Ford was born naked as a baby, and a flouris.h.i.+ng industry grew up out of correcting its rare deficiencies and combatting its fascinating diseases." The Jiffy patching kit came "with a nutmeg grater to roughen the tube before the goo was spread on. Everybody was capable of putting on a patch, expected to have to, and did have to."

Man could handle its habits. When you Got Results with your crank, as it was called, "Often if the emergency brake hadn't been pulled all the way back, the car advanced on you the instant the first explosion occurred and you would hold it back by leaning your weight against it. I can still feel my old Ford nuzzling me at the curb, as though looking for an apple in my pocket."

The odor of these pieces is not the stale one of nostalgia, but the fresh one of evocation. It is thus that he calls up those summers when his father took the family to camp on a lake in Maine: "Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fadeproof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end. . . . It seemed to me, as I kept Page 221 remembering all this, that those times and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving."

In this collection, Mr. White has made such scenes as the summers of "the American family at play" fadeless for us. The fact that the essays are not presented with chronological order in mind is its own evidence that indelibility of memory is not something attached to dates, is not dependent on the grudging mercies of change. It has to do with the meaning at the core of remembered experience. The losable item.

In his fine piece on traveling by railroad, he writes: "If our future journeys are to be little different from flashes of light, with no interim landscape and no interim thought, I think we will have lost the whole good of journeying and will have succ.u.mbed to a mere preoccupation with getting there. I believe journeys have value in themselves, and are not just a device for saving timewhich never gets saved in the end anyway."

The writing is itself dateless as a cloudless sky, because the author has dateless virtues. For one, he sees so well. We owe the beauty of the reports from Maine, of land and sea, of season and hour, and particularly of animal and bird, to his remarkably accurate eye. (He also, of course, has an accurate inner eye, out of which he looks at man.) Describing a physical act in the happening can daunt or even stop many a writer, but E. B. White brings before our eyes a boy carrying a two-handled cauldron of boiling stew down the swaying vertical ladder, from the galley of a s.h.i.+p going to Alaska during a storm at sea. It's a double triumph for E. B. Whitefirst carrying the cauldron down without spilling it (for he was the boy) and then describing it by some equally tricky feat of balance and daring. (As he says, he writes by ear.) He also brings a c.o.o.n down a tree at twilight: here, the result is poetic: This performance "has a ritualistic quality, and I know every motion, as a ballet enthusiast knows every motion of his favorite dance. The secret of its enchantment is the way it employs the failing light, so that when the descent begins, the performer is clearly visible and is a part of day, and when, ten or fifteen minutes later, the descent is complete and the c.o.o.n removes the last paw from the tree and takes the first step away, groundborne, she is almost indecipherable and is part of the shadows and the night. The going down of the sun and the going down of the c.o.o.n are interrelated phenomena; a man is lucky indeed who lives where sunset and c.o.o.nset are visible from the same window."

Page 222 One of the biggest losable items was a city. "Here Is New York," written in 1948, Mr. White brackets among the essays in this collection that "have been seriously affected by the pa.s.sage of time and now stand as period pieces." "The last time I visited New York," he writes in his 1977 Foreword, "it seemed to have suffered a personality change, as though it had a brain tumor as yet undetected."

The piece brings us the band playing in the Mall in Central Park on a summer night, the listeners "attentive, appreciative," while the strollers pa.s.sing to and fro "behave considerately respecting the musical atmosphere." "It is a magical occasion, and it's all free."

Harlem is "a racial unit," like the other units of the city he enumerates, happy in remaining intact. "The Bowery does not think of itself as lost; it meets its peculiar problem in its own way. . . ." "In the slums are poverty and bad housing, but with them the rea.s.suring sobriety and safety of family life." He speaks of "the nightly garden party of the vast Lower East Sideand on the whole they are more agreeable-looking hot-weather groups than some you see in bright canvas deck chairs on green lawns in country circ.u.mstances. It is folksy here. . . ."

"The city has to be tolerant," he concludes, "otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry. If the people were to depart even briefly from the peace of cosmopolitan intercourse, the town would blow up higher than a kite. In New York smoulders ever race problem there is, but the noticeable thing is not the problem but the inviolate truce." And "The city at last perfectly ill.u.s.trates . . . the perfect demonstration of non-violence."

Indeed, what New York was once able to do, able to promise and bestow, able to seem and to be, const.i.tuted a feat, and had the breathtaking quality of a feat. Mr. White might almost have been summing it up in a symbolic way in his description, in another essay, of the young bareback rider he watched working out in the winter quarters of John Ringling North's circus in Sarasota. Just as he thought "It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible," of the young rider circling her ring in "the balance of the performance" seeming superior to the laws of gravity, he thoughthe knew"She will never be as beautiful as this again."

E. B. White wrote of New York as a lover, not as a prophet, but he always had that gifted eyesight. He saw the loved object in the motion of time, and he noted along with the glow the shadows and some foreshadows.

Page 223 We know now that the future itself is a losable item on this planet. "I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority." This is Mr. White in his garden, in a spring when the nuclear test bans were being broken: "The character of rain has changed, the joy of watching it soak the waiting earth has been diminished, and the whole meaning and worth of gardens has been brought into question."

He finds pertinence and timeliness in Th.o.r.eauit is Walden's hundredth birthday: "In the brooding atmosphere of war and the gathering radioactive storm, the innocence and serenity of his summer afternoons are enough to burst the remembering heart, and one gazes back upon that pleasing interludeits confidence, its purity, its deliberatenesswith awe and wonder, as one would look upon the face of a child asleep."

What joins all these essays together is the love held by the author for what is transitory in life. The transitory more and more becomes one with the beautiful. It is a love so deep that it includes, may well account for, the humor and the poetry and the melancholy and the dead accuracy filling the essays to the brim, the last respects and the celebrations together.

There is a melancholy running through nearly all these pieces, at times surfacing, at other times running deep like Alph the sacred river. 164 It is not the kind of melancholy that leaves us in the end depressed. This may be due to the lyric quality irrepressible in Mr. White's writing, it may be due also to its prevailing sanity. Also to the author's recognition of nonsense, which occurs in the world and shows up in his writing as naturally as melancholy runs alongside humor. We welcome the appearance of his wanton parenthesis as we would a bird that alights on the windowsill. (Wanton parenthesis sounds like a bird's name, might be a bird seen by one of Mr. Forbush's tipsters for the "Birds of Ma.s.sachusetts" celebrated in an essay.) Finally, Mr. White is our best authority on humor, in addition to being its pract.i.tioner, and his essay "Some Remarks on Humor" is durable by double rights. It deserves to stand for many more years ahead, not least because it hitches humor to truth-telling. Rereading it this time, though, I paused at the end, where Mr. White agrees with Mark Twain that "we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead. . . . People ought to start dead, and they would be honest so much earlier." I Page 224 didn't really agree with these experts. It's by living on, it seems me now, that the way of real honesty lies. The realest possible honesty is come by, attained, earned if you like, by continuing. I'd put up these essays in evidence. Honesty is of human birth: it must breathe, and keep restoring itself. It seems to do quite well in the salty air of Maine.

Page 225 Selected Stories By V. S. Pritchett A Family of Emotions:

New York Times Book Review 25 June 1978: 1, 3940

This great and fascinating writer is about the age of our century and has written short stories most of his way through it. 165 With their abundance, they are of equally remarkable variety. Where would one look for the typical Pritchett story? But one always finds thisthat any Pritchett story is all of it alight and busy at once, like a well-going fire. Wasteless and at the same rime well fed, it shoots up in flame from its own spark like a poem or a magic trick, self-consuming, with nothing left over. He is one of the great pleasure-givers in our language.

Pritchett himself has said that the short story is his greatest love because he finds it challenging. The new collection makes it clear that neither the love nor the challenge has let him down.

As ever, the writing spouts with energy. Dialogue, in constant exchange, frisks like a school of dolphin. These are social stories: Life goes on in them without flagging. The characters that fill themerratic, unsure, unsafe, devious, stubborn, restless and desirous, absurd and pa.s.sionate, all peculiar unto themselveshold a claim on us that is not to be denied. They demand and get our rapt attention, for in their revelation of their lives, the secrets of our own lives come into view. How much the eccentric has to tell us of what is central!

Once more, in the present volume, the characters are everything. Through a character Pritchett can trace a frail thread of chivalry in the throatcutting trade of antique collecting. Through a character he finds a Page 226 great deal of intrigue in old age. The whole burden of "The Spree" is grief and what his character is ever to do with it. Paradox comes naturally to Pritchett, and he has always preferred, and excelled in, the oblique approach; and I think all these varying stories in today's book are love stories.

One is called "The Diver." Panicking as his initiation into s.e.x confronts him in the middle-aged French-woman lying "naked and idle" on her bedwho mocks him with "You have never seen a woman before?"the young English boy is surprised by his own brain beginning to act: He hears himself begin answering her with a preposterous lie. He is into another initiationhe is becoming a story writer as he stands there quaking. "It was her turn to be frightened." All being squared, the woman back in her earlier character of "a soft, ordinary, decent woman,'' that is when his heart begins to throb. "And everything was changed for me after this."

Of these 14 storieschosen from four volumes published over the last nine years"The Diver" is not the only one here to suggest that, in times of necessity or crisis, a conspiracy may form among the deep desires of our lives to subst.i.tute for one another, to masquerade sometimes as one another, to support, to save one another. These stories seem to find that human desire is really a family of emotions, a whole interconnectionnot just the patriarch and matriarch, but all the children. All kin, and none of them born to give up. If anything happens to cut one off, they go on surviving in one another's skins. They become something new. In fact, they become storytellers.

In "Blind Love," when Mr. Armitage employs Mrs. Johnson, two people have been brought together who have been afflicted beyond ordinary rescue. Mr. Armitage is blind; Mrs. Johnson has a very extensive and horrifying birthmark. Beneath her clothes, "She was stamped with an ineradicable b.l.o.o.d.y insult." When she was young and newly married, her husband had sent her packing for the horror of its surprise, for her having thus "deceived" him. Now, "as a punished and self-hating person, she was drawn to work with a punished man. It was a return to her girlhood: Injury had led her to injury." In the love affair that grows out of this doubleness, blindness and deceiving are played against each other, are linked togetheras though each implied the other. How much does each really know? We watch to see what hurt does to visionor for vision; what doubt does to faith, faith to doubt. These two magnetized people have selves hidden under selves; they have more than one visible or invisible skin. After they reach and survive a nearly fatal crisis of ambiguous revelation, the only possible kind, we see Page 227 them contentedly traveling in tandem. "She has always had a secret. It still pleases Armitage to baffle people." But they are matched now in "blind love": They depend on each other altogether.

"The Marvelous Girl" is a double portrait. One side is blind love, love in the dark. The obverse side is a failed marriage in clear view. (It failed because "even unhappiness loses its tenderness and fascination.") A husband, from the back of a large audience, can see his wife seated on a stage in the glare of the light and the public eye, ''a spectator of his marriage that had come to an end." She looks "smaller and more bizarre." When the lights suddenly go out in the auditorium, the darkness "extinguished everything. It stripped the eyes of sight. . . . One was suddenly naked in the dark from the boots upward. One could feel the hair on one's body growing and in the chatter one could hear men's voices grunting, women's voices fast, breath going in and out, muscles changing, hearts beating. Many people stood up. Surrounded by animals like himself he too stood up, to hunt with the pack, to get out."

On the stairs he comes by accident up against his wife: "He heard one of the large b.u.t.tons on his wife's coat click against a b.u.t.ton on his coat. She was there for a few seconds: It seemed to him as long as their marriage."