Manhattan Islanders
The Way We Live Now. By Warren Miller. (Seeker and Warburg, 18s.) Discourse with Shadows. By J. E. Malcolm. (Gollancz, 13s. 6d.) A Mirror for Magistrates. By Richard Gibson. (Blond, I 2s. 6d.) UNLESS you like to see novelists appointing themselves your spokesmen, you may he irritated by the title of Warren Miller's new book, The Way We Live. Now: that inclusive `we,' that pre- sumptuous generalisation. And it is a valid objection. The book is less a novel than an anthropological study of the Manhattan Islanders, their marital customs, their totems and taboos, their chances of surviving the encroachments of civilisation; and it is assumed that the reader will recognise his own condition reflected in theirs. Rootless, disenchanted, oversophisticated, in- capable of acting naturally : that's the way we are, all of us, now. Fortunately Mr. Miller is clever and amusing enough to divert our atten- tion from the fact that he is making these assumptions on our behalf.
One winter's night, Lionel Aldridge, press officer for an insurance firm, decides to leave his wife, not as a consequence of any scorching quarrel but the accumulation of minor irritations; 'there was almost nothing she did that he did not wish she did otherwise.' He moves into a bachelor apartment in Greenwich Village and the welcoming freemasonry of ex-husbands; the queers who have tried marriage and found it wanting, the men who have got fed up with being classified as 'sexual partners' by their wives' analysts. the husbands who have themselves been run out on. They are highly organised for the enjoyment of their freedom, and for the most part hate it: and so very soon, in spite of a suc- cession of mistresses and a return match with the woman he had once meant to marry, Aldridge begins to hate his. But for the author it is a means of introducing a large cast of supporting players and incidental scenes to demonstrate the vacuity of their lives. He goes out of his way to be amusing. The oblique conversations about their unhappiness between Aldridge and his best friend Nicholas, each of whose remarks commands the deepest respect from the other, are among the funniest passages in a book improbably crowded with entertaining talkers; and the description of men's day in the laundry room of Aldridge's building is brilliantly done. But its dry percep- tiveness in small matters is worth more than its panoramic view.
To read Richard Wright's introduction you would imagine that Algren, too, was attempting something more than a novel in Never Come Morning. 'Nelson Algren's innocent, bold, vivid imagination,' he says, 'has long brooded upon the possibility of changing the social world in which we live.' Well, so it may have done, but there is no hint of it here. Algren has traced, with what seems a phenomenal effort of imagination and verification, the progress of Bruno, a teenage Pole of the Chicago slums, from delinquent to hoodlum, from robbery to murder and his arrest. . . . 'Knew I'd never get t'be twenty-one anyhow.' But although Algren shows
a decent compassion for his hero, explaining the gradual corruption of a stupid mind, he is not making out a case. The nearest , Bruno conies to idealism is to doubt strongly whether he should have let the gang rape his girl friend, whether he shouldn't have come to her aid even at the risk of being thought soft. The story speaks•for social change, not Algren.
The hero, of Mario Soldati's The Confession is a fourteen-year-old Italian boy whose belief in his vocation for the priesthood has been en- couraged by the Jesuit teachers at his school and then disturbed by his inability to curb his sexual fantasies. HaVing self-dramatised his conflict he overplays his confession to the Spiritual Director at the school, and the latter, fearing to lose such a promising recruit to the Jesuit order, comes down hard on him. The results are unforeseen and unfortunate; but since the writer doesn't hint at them before the end of the book I must not do so here. Soldati visualises the various stages of the boy's bewildering experience with extra- ordinary skill, but how far he condemns the actions which produced it, the mild. ironic nature of his criticism prevents one from guess- ing. The navel could be taken as an attack on the Jesuits, but the author could just as easily deny that it was.
Kathleen Sully's Burden of the Seed deals with a boy's strange upbringing in the house of two decaying aunts and its influence on his relation- ships with women later in life. The concentrated. day-to-day first half is macabre and original, but the story loses much of its power as it gathers pace. Discourse with Shadows is a description of the return of a German refugee to trace missing members of his family and of his tragic involvement with four survivors of a concentra- tion camp. It is honest and well meant, but the telling of the story by each character in turn makes it something of an obstacle race. A Mirror for Magistrates is a gentle, elegiac story about a Negro's temporary stay in Paradise, which is how he sees his job as a school janitor, and his banishment when he falls for the Eve on the staff. Rachel Cecil's first novel, Theresa's Choice, weaves itself in the conventional romantic manner round the first loves of a pleasant young woman of the upper classes in London in the 1920s.
GEOFFREY NICHOLSON
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