BOOKS
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ignore the provocations of a jazzy, doctrinaire cntlclsm, plucked
from psychoanalysis, and thrown foolishly, accusingly, sometimes with
unbridled sanctimony at the lives of writers or the characters of their
books? Here is Mr. Jacobson on Huck and Jim:
By any definition of the word, the relationship between Huck
and Jim on the river is considerably more "civilized" than any
relationship which they can enjoy with anyone else or with
each other, on the shore. The relationship between the two on
the raft demands from them both the sacrifices which civiliza–
tion demands from us all, and which we frequently find most
burdensomt! to make: it demands mutual responsibility, self–
abnegation, and moral choice. . . . The tragedy of the book
is that the fineness of Huck's relationship with Jim is im–
permanent; it cannot survive on shore, as the last chapters
dismally demonstrate. Though he did not realize it, this is
the saddest and fullest judgment that Twain was ever to make
of "the damned human race."
The essays are very much like Orwell's in their clarity and
warmth. And their author's mind is both sensitive and sensible, an
unusual combination these days.
Robert Coles
PROUST: REMEMBRANCE AND RECOGNITION
PROUST'S BINOCULARS. By Roger Shllttuck. Rllndom House. $3.95.
Amid the spate of biographtcal literature on Proust, it is not
very often that one comes across a book that raises the really fundamental
critical issues about his incomparable masterpiece,
A la recherche du
temps perdu.
Roger Shattuck, however, has written such a book (it is
actually a long essay) in his
Proust's Binoculars.
This little work goes
right to the heart of the major questions involved in any interpretation
of the structure and meaning of the novel. It is a book that everyone
interested in Proust will have to read; but it is also a book that must
be
read with a great deal of caution. Mr. Shattuck's admiration for
