692
PARTISAN REVIEW
Mr. Tutuola comes to us highly touted; his book is supposed to be
"primitive" (whatever that may be), subliminally disturbing, violent. I
suppose it is just barely possible that
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
might make a convinced Jungian shriek and clasp his hands in ecstasy;
I thought it was either an elaborate leg-pull or a piece of wholly mis–
guided experimentation. Chiefly, the book is dull. When we have had
one of Mr. Tutuola's ghosts, we have had them all. There is nothing
of the legendary, the suggestively symbolic in the behavior of these spooks,
nor can I for one find freshness in the curious style, which I must say
I find absurd, inept, self-consciously cute. This, I daresay, is the source
of much of the talk about the author's "naivete." In my opinion, he
is
no more naif than Grandma Moses; he knows a good thing when he
sees one, as he tells us in his final sentence, to the effect that there is
a lot more where this came from. I can well believe it. For all the
sententious comment to the effect that this book is right in there with
Alice in Wonderland,
Grimm, etc., etc., one shattering deficiency strikes
the sensibilitYJ at once: the author hasn't the faintest idea of what he's
talking about; he just knows that the publishers will buy it. To that
extent Mr. Tutuola may be considered a "primitive"; some people seem
to like the stuff and why not give them what they want? The author
has no art, nor do unconscious, racial images emerge strikingly and
compel interest. The book just goes along, a bald narrative of the
preposterous.
But it is useless to argue such matters; some people will like the
book in any case. In a wholly different way, some may insist on liking
Mr. Bowen's
Sidestreet.
To one who has read the author's
The Weight
of the Cross
and
Bamboo,
this third novel comes as a considerable disap–
pointment. For all the ineptitudes of style the former novels contained,
for all their crude introspection, they had a somber power altogether
unusual in a young writer. The first named novel in particular seems
to me to retain its vital force long after most of the successful war novels
have been seen for what they are. Yet
Sidestreet
seems to me to isolate
and dwell upon those areas of Mr. Bowen's preoccupation which were
least rewarding in his prior work; the drab, vicious anonymity and ptr–
version of lower-middle class family life in an eastern city. The author's
attempt at psychological-cum-environmental determination in
Bamboo
is
the least cogent part of that novel; in this latest book it is the whole
work, and I have to say that the author fails.
True, Mr. Bowen has learned a lot. The style is smoother, the
vocabulary both more elaborate and more precisely used. The note of
self-pity that occasionally mars the earlier work is here rigorously ex-
