r SIX THE MICHIGAN DAILY Pre-Christmas Book IGHT BANK, LEFT BANK: Newspaperman Depicts French Life Lists Offer Varied Gift THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1951 Suggestions 1 RIGHT BANK, LEFT BANK, ~by Joseph A. Barry. (Norton) A PRACTISING newspaperman usually has a slightly differ- ent outlool on things than the or- dinary writer. He is used to think- ing in terms of what would make an interesting story, and tends to achieve an "angle" by writing fea- ture material, rather than taking the broad view and being impres- sionistic. He bases his writing on facts immediately at hand; for the most part avoiding the "mental" approach. Though the results of his technique are more often than not temporary,, and become dated in a short space, they are thoroughly interesting while they are new, JOSEPH BARRY is at present chief of the Paris Bureau of the Sunday New York Times, having graduated from the University of Michigan in 1939. His knowedge of the country is as detailed as one would expect from a man working intimately with the people of France, learning their institutions and appraising them with quick and interested eye. The book falls naturally into chapters which have the appearance of being able to exist separately as self contained' articles. While there is to be found in some sections enough to satisfy the general run of travel book readers-poetic touches about the quays in Spring, discussion about how free life is in Paris, and so on -Barry tends to focus on specific topics: "The Clown and the Peo- ple of France," "The Chapel of Henri Matisse," "French People. Politics, and Premiers." Actually, though the title would lead one to believe other- wise, this book is not so much about Paris as it is about certain phases and personalities in French life as a whole. Inter- view is piled upon interview in an effort to nail down such hazy topics as "French Communists," with the writer's aim always to CARNIVAL by Paul Cezanne. The spirit of France may be epitos mised in her love for clowns. Their buffoonery has fascinated all Frenchmen from Rabelais to Picasso. A galaxy of these gay and sorrowful talents are presented by Joseph Barry in a chapter of his book Right Bank, Left Bank, recently published by Norton. * * * U> * * * A I CHICAGO COLLEGE of (Nationally Accredited) An outstanding college serving a splendid profession. Doctor of Optometry degree in three years for students enter- ing with sixty or more semester credits in specified Liberal Arts courses. REGISTRATION MAR. 3 Students are granted profes- sional recognition by the U. S. Department of Defense and Selective Service. Excellent clinical facilities. Athletic and recreational activi- ties. Dormitories on the campus. CHICAGO COLLEGE OF OPTOMETRY 350 Belden Avenue Chicago 14, Illinois present current facts in the most interesting way. In the chapter on the Commun- ists, for example, we find Barry interviewing types all the way from the husband of his concierge to top officials of the party and intellectuals. He succeeds remark- ably well in enclosing the topic, and by concentrating on person- alities against a supplementary background of fact, lays it out in an extremely appealing form. Or try "The Flea Marketeers."f "Unquestionably the greatest mar- ket of the great village of Paris is the Marche aux Puces. This fam- ous Flea Market sits, or rather sprawls, past the butte of Mont- marte on the wasted palins of Saint-Ouen, a northern suburb thirty-seven steps from Paris' Porte de Cignacourt." And here Barry has spread the color and eccentricity of that great market- place as it can be seen right now, and has interviewed several of the "merchants" themselves. He even takes a crack at ex- plaining Sartre's position as an in- tellectual power. Actually this brief sketch is part of an attempt to tell who is being the most subtle on the Left Bank today, and why. The philosophy is left to somebody else, but the color is all there, in the finest newspaper sense of the word. For other tastes, there is a glimpse backstage in the "Big Fashion" business, and a short tour of the "pleasure spots" in current favor. Barry is a clever writer, and knows his market well. He picks his subject matter with a fresh eye and approaches it with con- sistent originality. These facts alone should make his book one to be read by anyone who is at all fascinated by the fact that there should be such a place as France. -Chuck Elliott Book Features UP FolkColor BETWEEN THE IRON AND THE PINE, by Lewis C. Reimann (Privately published) LEWIS C. REIMANN, one of Ann Arbor's more illustrious citi- zens, has recreated in this book much of the romance and legend of Michigan's Upper Peninsula in its pioneer days. Brought up in surroundings of lumberjack camps and newly opened iron mines, Rei- mann fills his pages with anec- dotes of the land and the people. He manages to employ a zest in his writing that inclines us to overlook occasional rough spots in the prose. Whatever else he has accomplished in the way of enter- tainment, Reimann has most cer- tainly made a colorful addition to the body of American folk litera- ture, grown from the common- places and eccentricities of the people themselves. --C. E. Who Launders KYER MODEL Shi s Best? LAUNDRY Unexplored Sea Offers Exciting Tale THE SEA AROUND US, by Rachel L. Carson. (Oxford) THE SEA, it would appear, is not merely a saline body of water conveniently provided so that man may use it as a means of getting from one bit of land to another-it is variously a nemesis to man, a treasure-house of information for science, the mother-protector of countless forms of life, and a hot- bed of intrigue. Most of the publicity for scien- tific research during the past de- cades has been allotted to outer 3pace, especially the possibility of inter-stellar travel. Miss Carson makes us intensely conscious of the vast, unexplored regions of the deep, and of the mysteries con- founding us both above and below the surface. ACCORDING TO statistics three-quarters of the globe's sur- face is under water, of which area only one-third has been investi- gated to any extent. The deeper, unexamined portions amount to half the earth's surface. In 1949, a record descent of 4,500 feet was made off California by Barton; this doesn't amount to much when one considers that the average depth of the ocean is nearly three miles, and that in at least two places there are trenches well over six miles deep. There are, of course, certain difficulties to be overcome before scientists can make any sort of extensive tour of the premises. Water pressure, for example, in- creases at the rate of 2,400 pounds per square inch per mile of depth. Visibility is zero below 2,000 feet, where the inky gloom is only occasionally relieved by a luminous denizen. New scientific apparatus has greatly facilitated narine re- search. Slowly, ships equipped with echo-sounding fathometers a r e collecting data that will some day make it possible to construct a fairly accurate contour map of the gigantic mountain ranges, can- yons, and plains on the ocean bed. An overgrown apple-corer has been developed to extract deep layers of silt, the bottom layers of which were deposited millions of years ago. Marine archaeologists and geologists are having a field day with the -contents of such tubes. Hydrophones record strange screeches and yowls, many of which have yet to be identified. Once in a great while, a fisher- man's net will yield a rare species thought to have been long ex- tinct. And so the good work pros- pers. * * * MISS CARSON has lavished much care in the compilation of scientific data; she has consulted most of the leading authorities, andshas made use of the most re- cent information available. The opening chapter of the book deal with the origins of the sea and the beginnings of life, and lack of evidence is freely admitted. We must be content with what appear to the author to be the most rea- sonable of the proposed hypothes- es. The facts have been well-co- ordinated, so that the reader is made acutely aware of the order inherent in the existing rela- tionship between the myriad forms of marine life. Since thef THE END OF THE AFFAIR, by Graham Greene (The Viking Press) A BRILLIANT technique is not always an unqualified literary asset. There comes a point when craftsmanship of the intense and deliberate variety, given a great subject, ceases to celebrate its ma- terial and begins instead to con- strict it; when, instead of liberat- ing its great potential, it begins to render it diminutive. System pre- vails over vision and, in extreme cases, machinery over spirit. At the risk of oversimplifying it may be said that the material is not permitted to assume its own form and so achieve its full and ". . . anything left when we'd finished but You. For either of us. I might have taken a life- time spending a little love at a time, doling it out here and there, on this Aran and that. But even the first time, in the hotel near Paddington, we spent all we had. You were there, teach- ing us to squander, like You taught the rich man, so that oned ay we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him peace-he needs it more." --from The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (The Viking Press) natural scope. It is rather beset by a form. This procedure, peculiar to literary psychology today, betok- ens, in a sense, an emotional or imaginative failure; technique standing as cerebral substitution. The brilliant craftsman, in most unDostoievskian fashion fearing, or refusing to trust, or incapable of sununoning, his vision, falls back upon system, writes withthe top of his mind foremost-with the result that his book does not live beyond its final page. It has been given the kiss of death. In murder-mysteries of the first order (Brighton Rock) and more recently in Catholic analyses of good and evil (The Heart of the Matter), Graham Greene has es- tablished a reputation as one of the most dazzling technicians now writing. His success however has subject is of a somewhat techni- cal nature, it is positively amaz- ing to note that the reader is never submerged in technology. Neither does Miss Carson em- ploy the slightest bit of condes- cension in her explanations; she works them in easily and na- turally., The Sea Around Us is 4 fascina- ting acount of life. Practically any sentence, taken at random, makes the reader want to go on to the next one, and the next, and so on, indefinitely. No one has a right to expect y more than this of any author. -Siegfried Feller - - - - - heretofore been depressing in that his books have tended to stop when they have ended. They were re- membered, of course, but as one remembers the funeral of an aunt one did not love and will not miss. Technical excellence was won at the expense, or in the absence, of passion and compassion. IN THE MOST recent of his published fiction, however, The End of the Affair, Greene has achieved something more than a tour de force. It is, of course, a complex and brilliantly composed book, a first person narrative that fuses, in a process of revelation of tremendous dramatic force, past, present and future; and in a prose, keen, incisive,, and so true to the matter that it is barely noticed. But it is also a passionate and compassionate novel that both contains itself and transcends the limits imposed by the dangerous talent. It disturbs, in other words, long after it is read. The book is, quite simply, about love human and divine. The narrator, whose love can only express itself in terms of hate, describes an unhappy af- fair with a woman of great and generous feeling. Perversely jeal- ous, he employs a private inves- tigator to determine the identity of her new lover and to his anguish discovers not only that he has alienated a genuine and abiding love but also that his rival is no less a personage than God to whose love she has been. driven by the terrible imperfec- tion of his own. The book does not end, even in the circum- stances of her death, with his easy submission to God; he con- tinues bitterly to oppose his for- midable antagonist. But it is LONDON'S TOWER BRIDGE-A BACKGROUND OF GRAHAM GREENE'S INTENSE NOVEL Greene Studies Human, Divine Love - - - - with the hate that is also love' and the unspoken suggestion at1 the book's close is that this tor- tured resistance must end in a saving surrender., The subject is thus intrinsically1 a great one. It asserts that human love is not enough, that it must end and the desert of lovelessness resume itself, and what is left then but the love of God which does not diminish and which an- nihilates the desert forever?'But a' bare statement can give no resem- blance of the almost preternatural poignancy of the human action (an action almost purely of thought and feeling, that is) in terms of which it is given full emo- tional authority. It is about the anguish of three principals who wrestle pitiably for happiness with the materials of imperfect loves and who in their necessary failure struggle towards or against the love of God. But this does not say what it is. We may define it best by saying that it escapes the ne- cessities of craft to become some- thing fabulous or legendary of hu- man experience. For it is irrelevant to the cen- tral issue of the novel that the narrator, eager to love but cap- able only of hating, is also a novel- ist disenchanted by the nature of his own art. For by his own tor- mented confession, his is a craft unmoved by love, a human art as little free from imperfection as human love. It is too much like contrivance, too little like reli- gious vision. In this sense, the book is Greene's confession of fail- ure. But if our estimate has been correct, it can be said that he has' in a manner been saved by his own confession just as, as we sus- pect, the narrator has been saved by his. -John Paterson Canby Views Lives of Two U.S. Authors TURN WEST, TURN EAST: Mark Twain and Henry James, by Henry Seidel Canby (Hough- ton Mifflin) USING PLUTARCH'S Parallel Lives as his model, Henry Sei- iel Canby has produced a critical tudy of the life and art of two of 9th century America's great lit- rary figures, Mark Twain and EIenry James. By comparison and ontrast, dealing alternately with the successive stages in the life of each writer, Canby has created a double portrait designed to set off the virtues, faults and significance of the two men. But the deeper purpose of the parallel device is to present two ife-time inquiries into what it means to be an American. At a ime when the United States has turned both west and east beyond this hemisphere to assume a dom- inant role in world affairs, it is worth pondering the 19th century theme of American innocents both at home and abroad as revealed in he art of Mark Twain and Henry James. MARK TWAIN treked west as a youth for adventure, freedom and the eldorado of quick wealth. As an older man he turned west in imagination to transmute his early experiences into two iIylls of boy- hood, Tom Sawyer and Huckleber- ry Finn. Tom is naive, romantic, egotistical, but highly imaginative and inventive. Huck is the youth- ful picaro with a zest for life who lives by his wits; a keen observer, a tolerant cynic, endowed with common sense and a passion for freedom. In his own day Twain became the embodiment of the American West, expressing in his person and writing its self-reliance, crude- ness, love of adventure, and its burlesque humor of exaggeration. In Innocents Abroad the American picaro roars at class, tradition and culture in old Europe. In A Con- necticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Boss is the prototype of American technical know-how up- turning the old regime and saving the world for democracy, Twain's America. was a ro- mance of space and mobility. It Americans were crude, they were also honest. The danger was that in the loss of innocense a sense of intferiority and lack of cul ture might yield not growth but the pessimism and misanthropy such as embittered Twain's last years. Henry James turned east to find in Europe what he felt America lacked: culture, social graces, so- phistication. His novels are, with Jew exceptions, varitions on he theme of the unsophisticated Am- erican encountering the culture of the Old World. His innocents are candid, warm, fresh, moral nd in- telligent; his situations are com posed of the impact upon such characters of tolanguage and re- finements, the art and traditions, and, incrgasinglyras he grew older, of the subtle poisons and moral aecay of the European upper class. James' Americans are pilgrims seeking life who in losing their in- nocence either go under or obtain awareness and insight into them- selves. They discover that warmth and generosity mean more than refinement in the art of living. WITH AMERICAN innocence as the unifying theme in this double portrait, Canby gives considerable attention to the formative back- ground of the two writers, the chief experiences of their lives, and, of course, analysis of _Vheir works. While I do not thinV.that the student of James or Twain will find much new material or origi- nal interpretation of their art, the treatment is balanced and scho- arly. The style is urbane and in- formal, but the flow of thought is frequently interrupted by par- enthetical remarks that are either extraneous or germane enough to stand without paren- thesis. In keeping with the current mode of stuyding personality from a psychological point of view, Can- by makes many sound inferences and avoids extremes. Yet I wonder how thoroughly he understands the terms he uses, as, for example, inhrh c .- +la+ mNIAin.. . I, J A 4 MARTINI TIME: Whiskey, Grenadine Clash In Brilliant Liquid Warfare Let us help you doE your X-mas shopping 0 We will gift wrap your purchase * We will wrap any purchase for mailing * We will mail all purchases, Postage free COON'S BOOK STORE In the Arcade "Large enough to serve you -- Small enough to know you" .9 1 if ____ I THE HOUR, by Bernard De- Voto (Houghton Mifflin). WE ARE a pious people but a proud one too, aware of a noble lineage and a great inheri- tance. Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which by far the worst is rum. Nevertheless we have improved man's lot and enriched his civilization with rye, bourbon, and the martini cocktail. In all history has any other nation done so much? Thus Bernard. DeVoto begins, .and in fact sums up, his treatise on the art of liquor drinking, which throughout flows with the sophistication of a properly mixed martini ("a gin of 94.4 proof and a harmonious vermouth may be generalized at about 3.7 to one"), and at the same time has the lyric rashness of a Kentucky colonel's favorite. THERE IS no doubt left as to where the author stands on the subject of any drinks other than his six o'clock martini and his slug of rye or bourbon ("Scotch drinkers want Scotch and you've got to give it to them. Never touch the stuff myself"). To him there are only two cocktails. The rest are "slops . . . fit to be drunk only. in the barbarian marches and mostly are drunk there, by the barbarians. "The most ominous of these was probably the Bronx. The Bronx had orange juice in it. It spawned the still more regrettable Orange Blossom. And then swiftly came the Plague and the rush of the and would really prefer white mule; if female, a banana split." And of the oenophilists-"good men, not to be dispraised but vain- gloriously claiming more thanwe can allow"--he says "their vin- tages do indeed have many beau- ties and blessings and subtleties but they are not superior to ours, only different." This place of equality surely should be deemed, one of honor by the lover of the grape. But pity the beer drinker: to him not even a word of scorn. HERE IT MUST be noted that the publishers warn that DeVoto has sown the seeds of a contro- versy not soon to be resolved. There is little doubt about this. But it doesn't seem probable that the main complaint will arise from the author's tirades against orange juice, rum, grenadine, olives in iartinis, and imported gin's lack of value. There will be plenty of squabbles over these points. There will be others over his claims that too much candy in youth makes for drinkers of slops; his stand on the fight be- tween the old-time priesthood (distillers) and their modern, scientific counterparts; his re- medies for hangovers; his feel- ings about bars, fancy cocktail glasses, and the desirable num- her for a cocktail party-"it needs a wife, -or some other charming woman, of attuned impulse and equal impatience and maybe two or three friends, but no more than two or three." Surely no one can take argu- ment with DeVoto's style, which allows him to get slightly notted no~I' I TFIME PLEASURE 0 If you come and do your laundry with us. An 8 lbs. load . /,> for 60c. * Just drop it off .. .We wilFWA H, DRY, and Fold your READ and USE ... "