120
RICHARD HOWARD
hard it is for a novelist to produce short stories that do not seem like
abortions of novels-Lawrence, farewell!). She writes vividly about
South Africa (one of her finest achievements is certainly the early
Johannesburg novella, "Hunger," published in the Penguin collection
Five);
wittily about herself; and is on the way to establishing a new
vocabulary, as Lawrence failed to do, for the Act of Kind ("she felt his
smallness, writhed free of him, thinking, 'the only way to get this over
is to make him big again' "). But surely these are irrelevant virtues in a
writer whose courage suggests those seemingly nerveless chauffeurs who
take you on death-defying (death-seeking?) drives in the mountains that
slope down to Caracas: it's a bumpy ride, but who else knows those
roads?
Richard Howard
PRETENSION AND PERFORMANCE
THE TESTAMENT OF MUSIC.
By
Ernest Newmlln. Alfred A. Knopf. $5.95.
The three recent collections of Ernest Newman's writings
in magazines and newspapers-From
the World of Music, More Essays
From the World of Music,
and now
Testament of Music-have
offered
only a small amount of the journalism that won him his international
reputation as a critic while he was winning his reputation as a scholar
with the books that culminated in the four-volume
The Life of Richard
Wagner.
The reputations represented the public's acceptance of the
claims that Newman made for his work; and though the first im–
portant and damaging challenge to these claims was made almost
thirty years ago, it was only when I read the three collections that
J
realized how large the discrepancy was between Newman's pretensions
and his performances, and how much his writings were overestimated.
Faced with the awesomely documented text of the first volume
of
The Life of Richard Wagner,
readers like myself accepted what they
were in no position to question-Newman's claim to be replacing
earlier
fable convenue,
as he called it, with fact established by ex–
amination of the documentary evidence; and a little later they ac–
cepted his further claim to have done the same thing in
The Man
Liszt.
But Carl Engel, reviewing
The Man Liszt
in
The Musical Quarter–
ly,
demonstrated that instead of allowing the documentary material
to
