FICTION CHRONICLE
RADITZER. By Peter Motthiessen. Viking. $3.00.
THE BEAUTIFUL GREED. By Dovid Modden. Rondom House. $3.95.
CLEM ANDERSON. By R. V. Cossi ll. Simon
&
Schuster. $5.95.
THREE NOVELS : Summer in Williomsburg, Homoge to Blenholt, Low
Com pony. By Doniel Fuchs. Bosic Books. $7.95.
SELECTED TALES. By Nikoloi Leskov. Tronsloted by Dovid Mogorshock.
Forror, Strous
&
Cudohy. $5.00.
What makes the first three otherwise quite different pieces
of writing so flat? I think the answer is quite simple: their authors' lack
of talent as storytellers. These men may be writers, but they aren't story
writers, not in these books. It is often said that there is never any lack
of talent, every generation has as much of it as another; the difficulty
is
to bring the talent to fruition. Well, the difficulty here, it seems to
me,
is
lack of talent.
Peter Matthiessen's
Raditzer
concerns a scrawny Thersites of the
wartime Navy whose bottom-dog shamelessness, defiantly asserted against
the contempt of those around him, forces his fellow men "to face their
own frailty as represented in himself." The one person he exempts, with
half-mocking idealization, from his worm's-eye view of human motives
is an upper-class shipmate and unwilling friend; but the only result of
this is that the latter's tidy spiritual world and all too "suitable" mar–
riage, which he has already begun to question, come crashing down the
harder at the end. This is a perfectly good idea, but
it
never gets to be
a story. We don't
see
the meanings that the author tells us are being
enacted, we just hear about them from him. Although Raditzer possesses
a certain ratty-pathetic animation, he falls far short of the kind of reality
that the idea of him requires; the other characters don't exist at all.
But I don't think Mr. Matthiessen's trouble is that he can't draw char–
acters. Some storytellers create an overflowing life (Daniel Fuchs, whom
I take up later, is one of these) ; others-and perhaps they are the best
ones-get along with very little in the way of character life, only as
much as their story absolutely needs (the last writer on my list, Nikolai
Leskov, is a good example here). The action, if it is conceived with
truth and force, carries everything else along with it. Mr. Matthiessen
falls down in his
story;
the failure of his characters follows that.
The title of David Madden's novel,
The Beautiful Greed,
is from
Lord Jim
(the greed that is meant is for sea adventure) and the hero
