BOOKS
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and historical characters - here Thoreau, Kafka, Kierkegaard, and the
boy Jesus - and links them in subtle ways. The second offers reports from
imaginary communities, usually Dutch or Scandinavian and inspired by a
Scandinavian enlightenment of values. They envision a "maximum
possibility of frictionless cooperation" among friends who have re–
nounced the destructive forces of the century. The greatest statement of
this theme is the story "Apples and Pears" (from the collection
Apples and
Pears,
now out of print) which is both a meditation on the nineteenth
century and a record of a small Fourieriste community consisting of a
philosopher, an artist, children, and strays. The community is designed, in
the words of the philosopher, to breed meanness out of human nature,
to
be a place where its members find harmony in their affections, where
the body is returned to its beauty and the mind to tranquillity. The
other utopian stories, loosely connected to "Apples and Pears," are simi–
lar explorations in which plot is reduced to the essentials of learning,
loving, painting, and high-spirited sexual escapades.
Discordant and somber notes are more insistent in
A Table oj Green
Fields.
The four parts of the first story, "August Blue," form a complex
and compact whole. In the first part, the boy Jesus talks with friends and
animals on his way to school and then in the classroom produces figs,
takes over the lesson, and instructs us in
alef,
the harmony between God
and his people. In the second, James Joseph Sylvester (1814-1897), a
Jewish mathematician, is hounded out of the University of Virginia by
drunken, violent, and contemptuously ignorant students. After an
oblique reference to Wittgenstein in the brief third section, its last scene
recalls
T.
E. Lawrence's visit to the artist Henry Scott Tuke and the boys
Tuke painted. (His work "August Blue" is one of his best-known.) The
connections among the individual stories become clearer at the end, but
even at the start we know that something is being said of true education
- friends teaching or drawing each other, as with Jesus or Tuke. But
such genuine learning is fragile, and vulnerable to the crassness of
American education, where the child's intelligence is lost in doltish and
inebriated self-absorption.
The Second World War, foretold by Lawrence at the end of
"August Blue," meant not only the loss of idylls like Tuke's but also the
murder of Janusz Korczak and his orphans by the Nazis. A doctor,
writer, and philosopher, Korczak ran an orphanage in Poland along en–
lightened and humane principles. In "Gunnar and Nikolai" the sculptor
Gunnar designs a work to recall Korczak and the children on their
march to death. His young model and friend Nikolai learns about
Korczak from him, and also about Michelangelo, Rimbaud, Martin
