BOOKS
THE MIRACULOUS AYME AND OTHERS
MAN
&
BOY. By Wright Morris. Knopf. $3.00.
THE TWILIGHT OF THE ELEPHANT. by Elio Vittorini. New Directions.
$1.50.
CONJUGAL LOVE. By Alberto Morovio. Forror, Straus, and Young.
$2.50.
ALL ABOUT H. HATTERR. By G. V. Desoni. Farrar, Strous, ond Young.
$3.00.
AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS. By Flonn O'Brien. Pontheon. $3 .00.
THE WATCH. By Carlo Levi. Farrar, Straus, and Young. $3.75.
THE MIRACU LOUS BARBER. By Morcel Ayme. Harper
&
Bros. $3 .00.
The attack on the American Mother attains a new intensity
and dimension in Wright Morris'
Man
&
Boy.
Mrs. Ormsby, the mother
of the novel, rules with an iron hand not only in the region of emotions
and
mores)
but she commands and transforms language as well. Mr.
Morris has dramatized the extent to which much of her power comes
from a mastery of language, an aspect of the American mother which
has been neglected in most descriptions of her. Mrs. Ormsby uses lan–
guage to make her own values devastating tabus. She
is
the absolute
monarch, through her fund of formulation, of decorum, rectitude,
prohibition, inhibition, and permission. She has at ready hand and for
all occasions any number of Latin tags, Biblical maxims, and glittering
generalities, distorting them invariably to suit the purposes of her own
overwhelming and annihilating femininity. Once we remember how
often the mother has first been a schoolmar'm, we recognize the clever–
ness and the justice with which Mr. Morris has exhibited the perfidious
alliance of maternal tyranny and verbal glibness.
Man
&
Boy
deals with a single important day in the life of Mr.
and Mrs. Ormsby, the day on which the mother is going to launch a
ship named by the Navy in honor of their dead son,
In
restricting
himself to one day, and in his use of a modified interior monologue,
Morris makes a fine and original use of some of the leading techniques
in
Ulysses_
Indeed the father resembles Leopold Bloom as well as ,
Caspar Milquetoast, and the climax of the book is his meeting with a
young soldier who adopts a filial role toward him and who protests with
