346
PARTISAN REVIEW
puzzle. While the boys talk, the girls preen, and if one of the latter
had not been so inane as to get herself pregnant, the four might have
gone on showing off for each other indefinitely. Faced with a possible
heir, one young couple marry and the other two move into a cold
water flat together. All four egos are now so disrupted that there is
nothing to do but write a book about what has happened. Which
character wrote the book? asks the author, Mr. X, in a note at the
end. Unfortunately, anyone of them might have.
Mr. Willingham has a sharp pen when he wants to use it, and
if
he
had maintained a comic distance from his characters, perhaps by the use
of the third person instead of the first, he might have been more success–
ful. As it is, the tone is one of tendentious self-contempt, and the narrator
repeats himself or herself too often. The author seems to be afraid to
give the reader an opening for any remark such as: Look! Your emo–
tions are showing!
In
No Name in the Street,
a first novel by a young Greek writer
living in Athens but writing in English, there is a wide range of emotion.
Miss Cicellis is a fine prose stylist as the reader can judge for himself:
In spite of his new leisurely pace, he had no time for the town now;
he could not be vagrant and vague, for all the warm evening and the
spreading, flowering variety set free by the lifting of the daylight rule.
At school, when the boys got together at recess in the courtyard, in the
cold : that was the first time he began playing about with his future.
This book is so beautifully done that it is only by placing it in a context
wider than its own that one can criticize it at all. For the existentialist
terms in which the book has been conceived seem often to have hindered
rather than furthered a full exploration of the subject matter.
The first half of the book is about Gregory, a young man about to
depart from his past in Athens and enter his future, a job with an
uncle in northern Germany. Gregory raises existentialist questions: Will
his past exist without him? Will he be remembered? Will he have left
no name in the street?
But if Gregory hasn't discovered his identity, the reader has; and
Gregory's existential status is not the real theme of the book. For by
the second half, Gregory has managed to break into a tightly knit band
of young people who seem to him to have creative vitality and a dra–
matic sense of their own existence. Miss Cicellis is at her best in creat–
ing the subtle and shifting moods, the atmospheric changes, the currents
of despair, hysteria, beauty and excitement which charge these individ-
