BOOKS
483
ever, no one here approaches Ira Wolfert, whose story "My Wife The
Witch" (like his novel of a year or so ago,
Tucker's People)
proves him
notable; he is exac without being hard, com assionate without being
~entimental,
and hasi sustained, for all his naturalism, a serious vision of
what can onlY' be called the poetry and drama of the soul
;~perceives
and ro "ects without pretension and with complete authority. Perhaps
mention ought also to be made of Christopher Lazare's "Last Visit,"
a knowing, if derivative, psychological study.
In Martha Foley's collection the stories from
The New Yorker
and
Harper's Bazaar
run neck and neck this year, with PARTISAN REVIEW
slow but strong in the rear. Carson McCullers, set squarely in the centre
with the longest story of all, running to some sixty pages, has written an
interesting piece, in her strictly dazzle-for-sensation mode. She has called
it a ballad, which was sensible, since she has, in such a title, a precedent
. /
for the kind of strangeness and arbitrary violence of which she writes in
\':l
?
this tall story, riddled with perversity, irrelevant if engagin color n.on-
tifical and self-conscious remarks about human nature; all the evil told
with a kind of cute and terribly
cleve~
reasonableness.
....__ Apart from the superficial liveliness of Miss McCullers's story, per–
haps the three most serious and superior pieces are those that appeared
in PARTISAN REVIEW: Lionel Trilling's "Of This Time, Of That Place,"
Saul Bellow's "Dangling Man," and H.
J.
Kaplan's "The Mohamme–
dans," all revolving about the theme of disinheritance and dislocation.
Bellow's consists of excerpts from a novel already thoroughly examined
in the critical press, and is best considered in its proper and intended
frame; Trilling's is the quietly competent, telling account of a doomed
struggle between good and evil perhaps, the plight of a rich, disordered
intelligence in a academic world which can find no place for it;
Kaplan's~'ii
a brilliant-if too strikingly Kafkan story,_tichly in.venti.ve full of
des~r, ~
rage and humor, and the expected attitudes of the master.
- Helen Eustis has a sure hand with delicate feelings, in a rather con-
ventional story which brings her far from the realm (also Kafkan in
which she first aroused one's interest and pleasure; V atlimu abo ov
-is represented by a story in his best Continental style, the whole bri h!Jy
unreal; George Stiles by a heavy story from the
Kenyon Review,
over–
~ritten
and highly pretentious, but with indications of much ability;
Dorothy Canfield by some Frenchmen-in-the-hands-of-Germans..scbmaltz.
which is nevertheless fairly effective. The rest of the stories fill out the
book nicely, with sentimentality, local color, contrivance and
New Yorker
pedestrianism.
GERTRUDE BUCKMAN
