BOO KS
147
"That's a nice twist. ... You plan to take the twist out of the boy,
or out of the wind?"
"Twister weather. Potential killers.... Does he plan to take the
twist out of the wind? No, he does not. He plans to duck it."
"Only connect the prose and the passion," E. M. Forster enjoins in
Howards End,
suggesting the inherent grandeur, in art and in life, of
our own acts of imagination. We feel rightly deprived by Morris who
insists on giving us
all
the connections ready-made. How often he ruins
his perceptions with ideas from a writer's notebook. The high school
dropout is described as he leaves town, "... the blob of his face, the
eyes gleaming like gems in road signs. Hodler has seen such faces before,
crawling from the sea at Anzio, the obligations stripped away." Un–
relenting Morris adds, "the choice residing in a twist of the wind."
It's all too contrived - where but in academic novels do we find the
owner of an Army-Navy Surplus Store delighted when he is cut down by
a phrase which he knows to be lifted from Gertrude Stein? And the
picture of Charlotte dancing is studded with English Department wit.
Her mood " . .. does not burn with a gem-like flame, but whatever it is
that burns loves the fire.... Charlotte dances. Alan sits with his book.
Is it possible to say he no longer sees the dancer, only the dance?"
Yes, it's possible but exasperating. Life, in Wright Morris' novel, how
it does imitate art.
Established writers can be arrogant in their reliance upon old
tricks. In
The Knightly Quest
(a collection of stories and a novella)
Tennessee Williams is consistently uneven. There is something touching
and special about his failure because he has always been aware of his
genius for creating lives and his difficulty in knowing what to do with
them. He is possessed by his material: stories are turned into plays,
one-acters are reworked as full-length dramas or as screenplays, as
though in search of an alchemy to unite his characters to an
el~sive
artistic intention.
The title novella is full of the shimmering old razzmatazz, as badly
faulted as
Camino Real.
And like
Camino Real
it leads Williams to
untried and slippery ground. It has wonderful speeches (at his best he
often has an actress in mind) and great scenes ready to be staged–
scenes betrayed by a lot of high thinking. A comic fable with an espionage
plot,
The K nightly Quest
is as purposely simpleminded as a Peter Sellers
movie. Gewinner Pearce returns to America from a young gentleman's
European tour, nineteenth century in style, to find that a mysterious
operation, "The Project," has transformed his home town into a cross
between Cape Kennedy and Johnson City, Texas. Directly across the
street from the family mansion the Laughing
Boy
Drive-In has been
