trivial-it is
most
important; in
fact, even the important is merely
trivial; the trivial tells us all we
need to know. They soothe us with
sociology. They lay us to rest with
details of tailoring and brand
names. Their predominant cast of
mind is a sentimental passivity to–
ward the dead weight of facts,
which are seen quantitatively, and
the contents of a closet are given
the same loyal inventory as the
two-headed contents of a bed.
The Outer-Essence Girls:
Tru–
man Capote and the chattering
poets of decoration. A paragraph
is
a hammock in which words
copulate prettily. Society is a
meeting of birds on the wing. Put
more formally, they do what bad
poets do: They use words as
if
they are things and not signs rep–
resenting acts and things. They
drop the object of narrative prose,
which
is
to make sense about hu–
man action, and replace it with
a prettifying function. They are
interior decorators for sentences.
We can't all be William Faulkner,
Katherine Anne Porter, or even
Carson McCullers, but each and
every one of us can aspire to be
Speed Lamkin.
The Daintily Involved Observ–
ers of Aspects:
This is the
New
Yorker
fashion, although its best
writers, such as John Cheever and
Robert Coates, do something more.
I t is a variety of corporate prose
less solemn-chuckly than the
Time-Life
product, but no more
able to bear the full weight of ex–
perience: The
New Yorker
stylists
457
are marvelously shy about the
world. They blush before exper–
ience, but have learned graceful
ways toward it, with shrewd not–
ings of intonation and the vagaries
of expression. Parts stand · for
wholes, although there seems to be
a law of expression-the smaller
the part, the larger the hole. Fi–
nally summoning up their courage
before fleeing, these writers offer
a pox on life in the last paragraph.
The Common-Style Fellas:
Her–
man Wouk proudly claims to
write "the common style." This
cottony diction, also worked with
varying degrees of efficiency by
Sloan Wilson and Cameron Haw–
ley, is the great current success.
These people are the just-plain–
Bills of literature, producing an
upper-middle-class soap opera for
the readers of Luce magazines and
subscribers to the Book-of-the–
Month Club's service. They love
what-is, whether it be the Navy,
the suburb, or the corporation, and
come forward to swear their
al–
legiance without quaver or quib–
ble. There may be some touch of
Religious and Social
Interaction in an
Industrial Community
By KENNETH UNDERWOOD
"The most detailed
exploration ever done
of Protestant and
Catholic relations in
an American city ..."
H. E. Luccock. $6.00
FOR COMPL.!:TE CATALOG
BEACON PRESS
BEACON HIL.L., BOaTON
I
