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Sunday, September 15, 1963 /* BOOKS iiig BR' - Mary McCarthy ... Author Os "The Group The Vassar Crowd', Thirty Years Later THE GROUP. By Mary Mc- Carthy. Harcourt, Brace and World. $5.95. 378 Payee. By NANCY GRANT The much-talked-about new novel by Mary McCarthy seems to be pleasing no one except Gil bert Highet, who manages to de tect both warmth and compas sion in a book described else where, and more accurately, as “cold and clinical’’. There is always something ra ther frightening about a destruc tive woman, and when she turns her hand to writing a merciless satire upon her own sex, the re sult is apt to be pure invective. Unfortunately, “The Group’’ seems to fall into this category. Although wit and cleaverness abound, the basic lack of sym pathy with her characters has led Miss McCarthy into writing gross caricature rajther than brilliant satire as she surely in tended. The novel is simply construct ed; it traces the activities of a clique of girl graduates, class of ’33, from Vassar. The thread of plot is the mar riage of a healthy red-cheeked young woman from the Mid- West, Kay Strong, to a would be playwright in New York. The reactions of “the group” to this marriage and the gradual decay of the union form the small core of the book, with deviations into the private struggles of the other members of the group. The fact that Kay is the one member of the group who plunges whole heartedly into living out the pre vailing maxims of the set, to which the others give more lip service than obedience, is rele va tory; for it is she who ends up first in a mental hospital with a breakdown and then as a sui cide. The time span of the novel is therefore from her wedding in the first chapter to her funeral in the last; both ere caricatures upon the traditional forms. Girlish bohemianism is the or- Hp CURRENT BEST SKIJ.ERS Fiction 1. The Shoes of the Fish erman . . . West 2. Elizabeth Appleton .. . O'Hara 3. The Collector ... Fowles Non-Hotion 1. The Fire Next Time . . . Baldwin 2. The Whole Truth and Nothing But . . . Hopper 3. My Darling Clementine . . .Fishman WILLS BOOK STORE Lakewood Shopping Center Shop Monday, Thursday Friday night* til • EVERYTHING 111 BOOKS IK MM EXAMINE "The South’* largest ad moat complete Book Store’* AT FIVE POINTS DURHAM, N. C. der of the day, and the fact that Miss McCarthy must have earn estly subscribed to the code in her own youth (she herself, of course, was Vassar ’33) perhaps explains the cruelty with which she exposes the group, for one is always inclined to deride the person that one was. “Memory’s impure Doppler effect”, to quote Fred Chappell, has left her with only a cynical wisecrack for the illusions of her youth. Else where she is kinder; apparently to be the girl that she was is better than to be the girl that now is, for in her essay entitled “The Vassar Girl” (published in “On the Contrary") Miss Mc- Carthy wistfully concludes that “the good old days” of self-ques tioning and intellectual stimula tion at Vassar have given way to docility and moderation in all things. Thus her final statement in the present novel, as spoken by Kay’s husband (“You’re dead. You’ve never used your mind except to acquire sterile knowl edge. You're a museum para site. You have no part of Am erica. Let me out!”) is apparent ly applicable also to the present generation, and this is precise ly the sterility of this book, and any book so harshly unredeemed by any glimpse of a better way; she can only say “Let me out!” Such a devastating view of wo man and her institutions is more than unpalatable. Men, if they bother to read “The Group,” will merely laugh; women will be furious. It is a good thing that Miss McCarthy is living in Paris. Doubletalk From Doubleday And William Goyen THE FAIR SISTER. By Wil liam Goyciu Doublcday. 10b Pages. $3.50. By RON LEVIN William Goyen has devoted some thirty thousand words to the telling of a talc that reminds one more of a short story than a novel. In fact, it is a short story—or was. The publishers dutifully tell us on the back of the title page that some of the material originally appeared in story form—doubletalk from Doubleday. However, it is on qualitative not quantitative grounds upon which this reviewer wishes to examine “The Fair Sister.” How ever slight it may be in the measure of length, it is more sorely lacking in the dimension of depth, and even such a skill ful writer as Mr. Goyen cannot conceal this shallowness in 104 Pages- • THE LAST LOVE. By Thom . o* B. Contain. Double day. 53$ Pages. $5.95. By JOAN BISSELL “There's a quay behind that iron arch,” he said in a low tone. "It is filled with people. They are waiting for a sight of the man who might have been their master. I suspect they think I'll be taken ashore in chains. ... I shall refuse to go until nightfall. They are not Gwyn’s Bold, New Idea Mercy In The Courtroom By W.H. SCARBOROUGH Justice tempered with mercy looks nice in a document, but it is rarely seen in the dockets of our criminal courts. The law is an either-or affair, both as writ ten and administrated, and in theory it serves to diminish crime, to protect society and ex act payment of the guilty. How poorly criminal law and traditional criminal punishment does what it is supposed to do is illustrated daily in a crime rate that nationally is outgrow ing the annual population in crease five times. Most judges would snort at the notion that the law itself as dis pensed in our courts is one of the culprits directly involved the increase. But not all judges would. Allen H. Gwyn, Superior Court judge of Rockingham County is, with one important difference, representative of the men who occupy our judicial benches. Homespun, canny, a lawyer tem pered by years of practice both as solicitor and judge, he is com mitted to what modern sociolo gists and cultural critics call the Protestant Ethic—a thoroughgo ing believer in the virtues of thrift, hard work, prudence, re ligion and charity as the foun tainhead from which flows the good life. The laws he adminis ters were drawn to guarantee these things to all men and to punish those who abridge the rights of others. The difference between Judge Gwyn and most of his colleagues is a matter of emphasis: the people to whom the law applies are more important than the sanctity of the laws themselves. For better than ten years, while sitting on the benches of North Carolina’s Suerior Courts, he has attempted to make law do what it was intended: to pro tect society. Society in his defi nition includes the defendant, Who has erred from the path or never been on it. Classically, the defendant who has been convict ed is no longer a part of society; he is removed from the company of good men; a penalty is exact ed from him, whether or not he has never before offended, regard less of his means to pay, or whether his imprisonment will cause untold misery to his family —a family that was not party to the crime. Judge Gwyn started as humbly as ever a Judge started. He has set down the outcome of his be ginnings in a book entitled “Work, Earn and Save,” publish ed by the Institutes for Civic Education of the University’s Ex tension Division, and printed by Colonial Press in Chapel Hill. Whether his book will result in profound reform of North Ca rolina’s penal system, it is too We are given to believe that one Savata, a light skinned, ex tremely nubile Negress, gives up hoofing it on the night club circuit and turns high-low priest ess in a Brooklyn church. This switch from belly to baily before the book has hardly begun seem ingly has its cause rooted in the force and form of Ruby Drew, dark sister to the fair sister. Ruby's only fault is that she is fat, and with sufficient time and impetus, one might probe more deeply into Ruby’s mo tives. Though blessed with an abundance of the first commod ity, after finishing the book, this reviewer found himself wanting in the latter. Perhaps Savata turns to the pulpit because she has seen the light Prince o’Light, to be exact, who imagines himself to be the Black Jesus, but whose real problem is that he can’t decide whether or not to go The Adventures Os Napoleon And Betsy At St. Helena going to exhibit me like a train* ed bear!” The year is 1815; the people are residents of St. Helena; the speaker is Napoleon. The once emperor of France, now an Eng lish prisoner finds that his no toriety is both a bleeding and a curse: owing to his eminence, he is allowed to bring with him his household staff, his grand marsall, his amanuensis, and several “ladies,” accompanied by their husbands; owing to his previous escape from Elba, he is guarded by English soldiers who remain at a “discreet" dis tance, but whose presence would discourage most men from at tempting to escape. It is clearly understood that Napoleon has sympathizers; it would never do for the English to “lose” him, or to have re THE CHAPEL HILL WEEKLY early to say. But (here is no doubt that he has turned out a brilliant, sensitive approach to one of the gravest problems of our times, or that his is a superb example of the creativity and imaginativeness of a man who refuses to be dwarfed by the role he plays—a role feared and re spected, a role whose power makes it capable of great harm or great good. “(Once) I dreamed of convert ing criminals to a life of honor and rectitude by imposing pun ishment. As usual, I awoke to find the realities different. The first offenders I sent to prison for correction were not correct ed. The same faces returned later, hard and bitter, requiring longer terms for more serious crimes,” Judge Gwyn wrote. After a number of years, he began to dislike his work intense ly, and to lose faith in the pow er of the judiciary to correct the behavior of people who ran afoul of the law. Particularly wrench ing to him was the process of sentencing a young, impoverish ed first offender to a term in prison or on the roads. Most of them, deprived by poverty or poor environment, had never nad either chance or incentive to be come productive members of so ciety. Insecure, oeuant, confus ed, they erred and came before him to be sentenced to penal in stitutions which refined, polished and hardened a pattern it was supposed to eliminate. "Correc tion" meant, in effect, modifica tion for more efficient, devoted wrongdoing. This should not be, Judge Gwyn decided. “First of all I decided to take a look at my own picture. This I did, and what did I see? 1 saw a judge who pretty nearly fitted the description which my mother had warned mo against: ‘man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured, . . . plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the an gels weep’ ... It is difficult to avoid becoming callous and hard ened where one’s daily task for years is to seek vengeance for social wrong, and where the rem edies applied are what we call retributive justice.” In sum, Judge Gwyn didn’t see too much difference between himself and those who came be fore him for sentencing. The major differences, in his words, were that “most of the defend ants brought into court are dead broke. They have no money with which to pay a lawyer to defend them or to pay fines or costs. The chances are that many of them do not have any clothes other than the ones they arc wearing. They have not been ac customed to work and to enjoy the fruits of honest toil. They straight. If Prince o’Light is not enough, Mr. Goyen offers us other equal ly far out and fetched names: Canaan Johnson, Cubsy Hall and the Lady of Blanc manges. Pudding it is some thing Thomas Wolfe described years ago as “taffy, slop, mush and goo.” Hie sweet taste of money ef fects a change in Savata, and she goes the way of all cash up. Finally, she sees the error of her ways (something this re viewer did not even catch a glimpse of) and returns to the heaving, expansive bosom of Ruby, hires out as a domestic, then one afternoon . . . vanish es. The book ends with Ruby’s saying: “Thank you, Jesus." The discriminating reader would do well to join Ruby in her ex pression of gratitude. The blurb on the jacket tells ports circulated to the effect that the illustrious prisoner is being shabbily treated. Conse quently, when he refuses to move into rat-infested Longwood, his living quarters on St. Helena, the governor allows him to live as a guest at the Briars, home of the Balcombes, while Long wood is being renovated. Hera, be meets Betsy, fourteen-year old daughter of William Bal combe. Betsy’s earlier years with a French nurse enable her to act as interpreter for Na poleon. Betsy is an avid reader of history and currant events, and one who is capable of talking with Napoleon on an adult level. He finds himself telling her of his early life in Corsica, his lif' & Mil I ■■■ i?,, JUDGE ALLEN H. GWYN have never known the satisfac tion which comes from the con sciousness of a job well perform ed. .. . For years I regarded it as no responsibility of mine to look into their background to see what - brought them to their sorry plight. But how can we help lift them out of their dis tress unless we know something about the cause of their dis tress. . . . many defendants are victims of poverty, or illiteracy, or disease, or lack of opportun ity. Nobody cares about them and they know it. ... we too often proceed upon the assump tion that all defendants charged with crime are completely re sponsible mentally and emotion ally and are not willing to live by the rules which govern so ciety. . . . The truth is that many lack the mental and emo tional stability we normally ex pect.” After deciding that something had to be done, he drew up a form of sentence for young first offenders. Essentially it provided that the penalty for his wrong doing would be suspended on condition that he become gain fully employed, broke no laws and each week deposited a set amount of his earnings with the clerk of court. A portion of the money would be considered bond, and in the event the offender fell from grace would be for feit. Die remainder would be held for the length of his sen tence’s suspension. All the mon ey would be returned to him at the end of the suspension or upon decision that he had been he habilitated. Judge Gwyn carried the sen tence in his briefcase for two weeks before he gathered cour age to invoke it. He knew that law enforcement officers and his fellow jurors would snort in de rision and would accuse him of “having gone soft.” They did, but this did not deter him. As us that "The Fair Sister” pro vides opportunity for Mr. Go yen’s “unspoken comment on good and evil, right and wrong, sin and pleasure, godliness and ungodliness.” A modest aim, right enough. (Strange, nothing was mentioned about the subtler craft of fiction writing.) The present reviewer can re call another book, a bit longer, but dedicated toward the same end. Like Mr. Goyen’s book, it, too, was peopled with charac ters possessing biblical names. Unlike Mr. Goyen’s work, it was an unequivocal success. “The Fair Sister” is, to be brief, badly written. The prose skips where it should sing and plods at the moment it should pounce. Mr. Goyen is cute where he should be comic and dispensing wisdom where a little wool gat tiering would suffice. The total effect is rather like courtship of Josephine and his marriage to her, and his second marriage to Marie Louise of Austria. ‘Because of Betsy's ten der age, Napoleon's extramarital activities <are presented in the form of reminiscences when ,he is alone; for example, while strolling in the garden, he may recall another garden, another - man's wife, and naturally for Napoleon another love af fair.' Although the book's Jacket refers to the work as “a novel about Napolen in exile," Betsy Balcombe receives equal atten tion. In a postscript. Costain ad mits to having fallen in love with Betsy. It would help the reader if he, too, could fail in love with Betsy. Otherwise, he may find Betsy’s adventures a bit tedious, despite his early experiments paid off, he worked in a number of re finements: arrangements with probation officers,- a system of "voluntary” probation officers —private citizens who would undertake to aid and counsel young offenders in their attempts to meet the conditions of their probation. At times he encountered re sistance from other judges in his attempts to secure coopera tion. Clerks of court rebelled at having to bother with collect ing small weekly payments and keeping an account of them. But many young men who had never before had a chance to become self-sustaining citizens found themselves saving money that would give them a running start toward genuine success. The deputy sheriffs, the patrolmen must often have raged against the Judge after having a pain fully apprehended "criminal” set free under terms that didn’t even resemble a slap on the wrist. But concrete results of work, earning and saving, rein forced the conviction that he was preventing a confused young man from becoming a parasite, a menace and an expense to So ciety. After a-time, Judge Gwyn be gan trying the plan with hard ened offenders. With.modifica tions, it worked with them, too. Prison, used as a meaningful threat, is more effective than imprisonment itself. It would not be a good guess to say that Judge Gwyn’s think ing on crime prevention is going to be bought by our judicial and penal institutions overnight. But Judge Gwyn is aiming to effect reforms in more courts than his own, and his book is a testament to what native intellience and human compassion can do. Judge Gwyn’s thanks for his labors come most often in pen cilled letters in which the spell ing is a bit awry, but with the new morality intact and palpable . . . letters such as this: “My first break came when you gave me a chance to go on probation rather than serve time. The road was rough, but I kept right in there because I knew that the law was law and it meant what it said. I had to save $5.00 a week and I had to be of good be havior too. The money I saved was what started me to have what I have got and plan to have. It showed me how to be a good citizen and that if you do right, you can get along.” For a man who is not a crim inologist, Judge Gwyn has pos sibly perceived more than two hundred years of common law tradition. It may be predicted that the gratitude he has earned will be expressed in a sweeping overhaul of the manner in which criminal law is used. standing under a shower of pretty pieces of colored glass all very nice but to what end save the drain. Having spent the past decade of his life in close working as sociation with people of Savata's ilk night people all, whether dispensing Jesus or gin this reviewer can only conclude that the author has failed to capture the feel and sound and smell of this particular world. The material is there. Savata is only one among a host of clerical cons black and white, male and female whose ex ploits if chronicled would form a story to make Beat poetry read like Clarissa Harlowe. The unholy writ of one of these hustlers Daddy Grace, Fath er Divine and company would make quite a tale. Someone should write a book about it. , . . the author’s attempts to make them exciting. When not badger ing Napoleon her favorite taunt is "Waterloo!” or chas ing his amanuensis with a sword (shades of slapstick comedy!), she visits the Veiled Lady, a young, mysterious, semi-recluse who s-l-o-w-I-y reveals her rea - son for leaving England and tak ing up residence on St. Helena. Betsy’s wild ride on her fath er's horse, Monmouth, comes too early in the book to arouse the reader’s fear of a cata strophe. (Remember, Betsy is needed as an interpreter; how would Napoleon converse with the English during the next 200 pages?) Because of a scurrilous report that Betsy is more to Na poleon than a mere friend and interpreter. Governor Lowe, harsh successor of lenient Govs In The Margin By W. H. SCARBOROUGH A Writer To Teach The Written T ' V It might be safe but not very descriptive to call Wil liam Hardee a literary engineer. Fifteen years ago he was purely an engineer, teaching at Duke University, and it is doubtful that he had the faintest glimmer of a notion that he would ultimately publish five noyels— or come to Chapel Hill to teach creative writing. But he did, and Mr. Hardee shows little amazement at the transformation. He will assume the position in J ' hti'i' „ 5 WRITER BILL HARDEE Normally he is at) associate professor of speech and drama at Purdue University. As a novelist he has done well, too. Bill Hardee started writing in Chapel Hill, after he had abandoned Duke, taken a Master’s in Dramatic Arts here and was casting about for something to do wih a mystery story he started during the summer of 1954. By chance a friend told him to contact a literary agent, the late Rogers Terrell, who coincidentally was until his death last year, agent to John Ehle and Rich ard McKenna. Terrell, whose uncanny ability to match publisher to manuscript and author to subject is leg endary, took him in tow and guided him through the writing of both mysteries and war novels. The war novel, “Wolfpack,” a story of .submarine warfare in the South Pacific, was re-published by Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Another war-under-the-sea novel, “Time of Killing,” did very well in hardback, and was picked up by the paperbacks. As with the great percentage of contemporary writ ers, Bill Hardee is by temperament and design a part time writer. “I find really, that as much as I’d like to pretend oth erwise, I get more done working on several things at once,” he said. “Everything I’ve written so far came about as the result of a process of getting a basic idea and developing it. Only my last book was concerned with any kind of philosophical conflict. . . . the conflict of a submarine commander in the last few days of the War in the Pacific. “Once I have my basic idea, that is it, more than characterization. I think I’m improving in characteriza tion I try now to figure out where I’m going and who can get me there. The hardest part is getting down to the beginning. After that I write when I have time. When I’m lucky I do five pages a day. You’ve got to have some kind of discipline, too. Unless you do you find yourself up against the writer’s greatest enemy ‘l’ll put it off until tomorrow and maybe it’ll be better.’ “Once a book is under way I am drawn more and more to it, it achieves a sort of will of its own. You keep wanting to go back to it to see what happens. This is not a pleasant thing. It’s a very lonely existence.” But if writing is the lonely art, Bill Hardee doesn’t think it should be for him. “I’m a better writer when I’m working with people. I’ve tried isolating myself, and it doesn’t really work. By and large a reasonably healthy social existence for me goes better hand in hand with writing than going somewhere and hiding.” He should be a welcome addition to the Department of Radio, TV and Motion Pictures, whose attention to writing and its production is now more dynamic, pro duces more exciting promise and encourages the act of writing more than that of any other part of the Uni versity. ernor Wilks and arch-enemy of Napoleon, vitupcrously attacks Mr. ißalcombe for allowing Betsy too much freedom. Betsy herself heroically sug gests that she absent herself from Napoleon’s company for a year or two. This tear jerking de cision does not particularly af fect the reader, but it docs allow Betsy to attain the age of six teen without putting a blot on the family escutcheon. Thus, Betsy has grown up behind Na poleon's back, and the reader can be “thrilled” when Napol eon sees her for the first time as a woman, not as a mere girl. For the most part, Costain presents Napoleon as an in telligent man, capable of devis ing an ingenious escape plan and capable of arranging to receive communications from sympathis- the Department of Radio, TV and Motion Pictures normally occupied by au thor John Ehle, who has been on leave of absence for the past year to hone up the cultural image of Gov. Terry Sanford and the State. The nice thing about Bill Hardee is that he can’t be identified as an author by manner or ap pearance. He looks for all the world like a man fond of designing sound struc tures, one who carries it off with ease and savoir faire and never has diffi culties with the building inspector. Os course he has very much to do with structure that of plays. ers, in spite of Governor Lowe’s rigid censorship and intricate spy system. Even when describ ing "Boney s” deviousness such as cheating at cards or planning to seduce the wife of one of his lieutenants Cos tain is simply reminding us that this is a story about Napoleon the man, oot Napoleon the im age. Although “The Last Love” fluctuates from absorbing chap ters about Napoleon to trite epi sodes in Betsy Balcombes life, readers will be impressed with the sensitivity with which Cos tain has treated a unique rela tionship between a hero and an youthful admirer. The combina tion of Costain and Napoleon would be sufficient to make the book a ringer, Page 3-B
The Chapel Hill Weekly (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
Sept. 15, 1963, edition 1
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