BOOKS
Halper is a younger writer than Farrell.
In
On the Shore
he is
not yet free from the self-consciousness of his own development.
The book records people of the same years, the same city, and
the same social stratum with which Farrell deals.
The writing is
uneven, extending from the intensely poetic and effective to the inept; it
is the work of a writer serving his apprenticeship.
Because he is a less
sophisticated writer than Farrell, because he has approached his characters
more tenderly, he has succeeded in revealing integral aspects of a per-
sonality that the oversimplifications of Farrell do not allow.
In such
stories as
The Feud in the Rotunda,
which relates what happened to post
office employees when the government put a stamp selling machine into
the postal station, and in
Going To Market,
a story relating the murder
of a Negro by two white fellow workers, as it is seen by a nine-year-old
child, Halper, beside recording the futility, degradation and misery of
lower class life, has revealed social implications that Farrell does not
touch.
The Penny Divers, The Race, Hot Night On The ff/est Side,
are other stories in the Halper book worth reading.
Such Is My Beloved
by Morley Callaghan is the story of an earnest
priest just out of the seminary who learns painfully that there is as un-
bridgeable gap between Christian Charity and the institutionalized practice
of the Catholic Church.
His attempts to rehabilitate two streetwalkers
who accost him one evening bring him into conflict with his parishioners
and his Bishop and drive him finally to an asylum for the mentally un-
balanced.
Mr. Callaghan has indicated beyond a doubt the economIC base for
prostitution as well as the class interest to which the church is bound.
He has forged a novel that is striking in its simplicity and has drawn
with certain, unaffected strokes the character of Lou, the pimp, Ronnie
and Midge, the girls, and Mrs. Robison, a wealthy parishioner.
How-
ever, he has cut his theme and his people from the surrounding world.
Instead of relating them to the city where they lived, he has chosen to
evolve them empirically.
No more than ten or twelve people are con-
cerned in his story, one of whom,a medical student thinking about joining
the Communist Party, is a close friend of father Dowling, the earnest
young priest. The Cathedral to which Father Dowling is attached and the
hotel around the comer where the girls ply their trade are both part of
a large city and its life. In the novel this never comes through.
About
the book there is a wistful aura that obscures the harsh, city atmosphere,
the brittle,
neon lighted streets, the tight, self contained people. Because
Callaghan has not related his characters to the city, because he has not
enlarged the problem of these two streetwalkers to contain the many other
women in a similar predicament,
Such Is .lJ;ly Beloved,
despite its fresh-
ness, simplicity, and excellent workmanship remains a slight book.
But, Callaghan, too, with this book has taken a stand.
He is now
part of the ferment that is changing the young
Werther
literature into
49
