1M
PARTISAN REVIEW
very least,
Wright can remember,
and what he remembers other Ne–
groes must also remember. Perhaps by now the terror, violence and hu–
miliation that swirl through his pages are things of the past, even in
Mississippi; but men whose lives have been scarred by suffering have
to live with their past, so that it too becomes part of the reality of
the present.
Despite obvious faults,
The Long Dream
contains many pages that
merit admiration on strictly literary grounds. The talk is often superb.
There are vivid scenes: Negro boys edging into a circus, the central
figure, Fishbelly, collecting rents on a Saturday morning in a Negro
slum, a bang-up burial for victims of a dance hall fire. And Wright
has created one superb and memora:ble figure, Tyree, a Negro under–
taker who half the time is a shuffling good nigger and the other half
rages with hatred for everything white.
Raw and bruised as it is,
The Long Dream
satisfies the first re–
quirement of fiction: it lives, it affects the shape of one's emotions.
There may be two or three other Negro writers in America who are
more polished than Wright, but beside him they seem, inevitably, like
boys looking up to a man.
Niki
is the first work by the Hungarian writer, Tibor Dery, to
be
translated into English. It is a slight fable a:bout the sufferings of a
dog transported from the freedom of the countryside to the constrictions
of the city; in the background the dog's master, a "liberal" Communist,
is gradually humiliated and then jailed by the Budapest authorities.
Dery is clearly a writer of intelligence; his casual remarks, undercutting
the whole Communist ethos, are very clever; and he has managed, with
some finesse, to preserve the surface integrity of his fable. Still, the
book is disappointing. Unless you happen to be a fanatical animal lover,
it is hard to accept the implied equivalence between the troubles of a
dog and the imprisonment of a human being. Perhaps the difficulty
is that the order of reality behind the novel is some sort of secret com–
pact between Dery and his readers, to which outsiders cannot gain entry.
During the Hungarian "thaw"
Niki
achieved an enormous success, and
the knowing Budapest reader must have found many thrusts against
the regime that escaped me. In any case, nothing in the book is as
moving as the fact that its author is at present serving a nine year
prison term for his part in the Hungarian revolution.
Alain Robbe-Grillet's
The Voyeur
is an example of the "anti-novel
novel," and as such it comes with an elaborate theoretical equipage.
Robbe-Grillet writes
(Euergreen Reuiew,
#3) that he wishes to dismiss
"the old myth of 'depth,'" the assumption that a meaning
is
to
be
