FICTION CHRONICLE
A LONG FOURTH AND OTHER STORIES. By Pater Toylor. Horcourt,
Broca. $3.00.
UNDER A GLASS BELL AND OTHER STORIES. By Anois Nin. Dutton.
$3.00.
NINE STORIES. By Vlodimir ·Nobokov. New Directions. $1.50.
There is no proper relation between the stories of Peter
Taylor and Anais Nin and yet, forced to read the collections together,
I could not help but shudder at the odd hostility between the two gen–
erations, the unnatural reversal of temperaments which makes the older
writer seem promiscuously immature and the younger one prematurely
middle-aged. Anais Nin, who has been publishing since 1930, persists in
an ostentatious and desperate youth, an agitated and sometimes ad–
mirable truancy; Taylor, appearing in book form for the first time, is
even now a kind of A student, modest, corrigible, and traditional. There
is a toll to be paid by both sides. Taylor has more talen:t than ambition;
he is too serene, too precocious. In his stories one longs, now and then,
for 'harshness, indiscretion, that large, early ugliness a young writer can
well afford, a battle with the inexpressible. In Anais Nin the attraction
to the inexpressible is fatal and no writer I can think of has more pas–
sionately embraced thin air. Still, she has nerve and goes on her way
with a fierce foolishness that is not without beauty as an act, though
it is too bad her performance is never equal to her intentions. I sup–
pose it is true that nothing is so boring as intransigence that does not
lead to art superior or even equal to that which is dramatically snubbed.
The dreary, sour side of programmatic purity-egotism, piety, boastful–
ness-annihilates what was meant to be joyful and releasing and leaves
only the vanity, like that outrageous pride one sees on the faces of
the more interesting American derelicts, those who know they can, if
they pull themselves together, still go into the family business.
No doubt this middle-class bum is vanishing; martyrdom and the
illusion of righteous protest are just as "dated" on the Bowery as else–
where. In the same way Anais Nin, one of our most self-consciously un–
compromising writers, seems old-fashioned. She is vague, dreamy, merci–
lessly pretentious; the sickly child of distinguished parents-the avant–
garde of the twenties- and unfortunately a great bore. Nevertheless, her
weakness has its highest appeal when placed beside the competence, cau–
tion, and gentility of most of the serious young writers of the moment.
But to go on with Peter Taylor and to relieve both writers of an
impossible union, the stories in
A Long Fourth
are sincere and always
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