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MAUREEN HOWARD
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
EXI LE. By Peter Weiss. A Seymour Lawrence Book. Delacorte Pr,ess. $5.95.
ABOVE GROUND. By Jack Ludwig. Little, Brown and Company. $6.95.
TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN'S BEEN GONE. By James Baldwin.
The Dial Press. $5.95.
NUMBERS. By John Rechy. Grove Press, Inc. $5.00.
GRASSE 3/23/66. By Nicholas Delbanco. J. B. Lippincott. $4.50.
ONWARDS! By Nat Hentoff. Simon and Schuster. $3.95.
NIGHTMOVERS. By Jack Dunphy. William Morrow
&
Co., Inc. $5.95.
LES BELLES IMAGES. By Simone de Beauvoir. G. P. Putman's Sons. $4.95.
Autobiography is one of the staples in the novelist's cupboard,
a deceptively simple ingredient. As a way of ordering the external world,
personal history has the immediate value of substituting for more com–
plicated structures the plotless, often illogical story of a life. Since there
is no arguing with the life that lies beneath an autobiographical fiction
our judgment is directed to the sensibility of the writer - his observation
and above all his honesty.
Exile
by Peter Weiss is a brilliant example of
the tension which can be set up between a highly personal voice and
public events - a tension which becomes the dramatic force of the novel.
There is never a moment when the outside world of political exile and
alienation becomes mere window dressing for the young man's personal
quest for identity and freedom. The Storm Troopers marching in the
street, the screaming over the loudspeaker are a part of the scene, but
only a part, for history is entangled with his memories of daily life and
private disaster. With an expert sense of pacing, Weiss shifts from the
deliberate consideration of the boy's Jewish heritage to an impassioned
account of his sister's death.
I still only grasped my lostness, my uprootedness. I was still far
from taking my fate into my own hands, and making the fact of
my not belonging a source of power for a new independence. Before
we left the country and began our journeyings across many frontiers
Margit died. On the day her dying began our house was like a
greenhouse in the muggy heat before a thunderstorm.
