A Writer's Eye Part 10

The author of this book and its present reviewer grew up in the same home town. 138 One night, the magician cameThurston; or was it Blackstone?to the Century Theater, and waiting for the curtain to go up, the Jackson, Miss., audience was fairly wild. Near me, on the front-row balcony, little boys were swinging like monkeys from the railing. Then I saw, stepping down the aisle of the orchestra, a handsome, stylish little boy about my own age, 7 or 8, who showed nothing but aplomb. Escorting his party of three beautiful little girls to their seats, he took his own on the aisle, where he sat looking entirely self-contained. I thought: that little boy knows how the magician does it. He may even be in on it. My intuition was working ahead of time.

Lehman Engel knows how the magic is done, all right, and he is as completely in on it as any one man could possibly be. He has had a long and exceedingly versatile career in the theater world, after getting an early start as musical director for the Group Theater. He has been most visible as a conductor, in a mult.i.tude of shows ranging from The Cradle Will Rock to Li'l Abner, and every theatergoer in New York knows him from the back at least.

He is also known as a serious composer of orchestral and choral works; and there is the incidental music he's written for dozens of plays from Page 172 Murder in the Cathedral to A Streetcar Named Desire, and notably for the Shakespearean productions of Margaret Webster. He's also a conductor of symphony orchestras and choirs, the author of books on music for the theater, and a born teacher. For the last several years he has conducted his own Musical Theater Workshops in New York, Los Angeles, Nashville and Toronto, on a regular flying circuit. This book is dedicated to his students.

Words With Music is the Compleat Musical Manual, in which everything his young writers and composers need to know is set forth. What works and what doesn't work and why is made specific, and nothing has been come by, or is offered, at secondhand. The same virtues that will make it of lasting importance to them are what make it of interest to the general reader, who can take pleasure in the company of an expert writing with penetration on the subject he knows best. In doing so he conveys a world, and we are struck by his force of feeling for the theater itself; we respond to the contagious exuberance of a man who really knows and really loves what he's doing. And believes in it, because the musical at its best, he holds, stands in a unique position in the theater: it may quite possibly be the form that "most truly represents our time."

The musical is brought about only through collaboration. How is a work the least bit related to art ever accomplished that involves at the same time "writers, composers, lyricists, designers, musicians, singers, dancers, publicists, a light designer, a stage manager with a.s.sistants, and, not the least, one or two stars and a producer"? How is it even begun?

Mr. Engel will tell you. The chapter called "The Needs of the Musical" is 104 pages long, and is the heart of the book. To attain its best, the show must have its roots in feeling, and through its performance the audience must be caught up in that feeling and become involved. Always sensitive to this basic need, Mr. Engel converts it down the line to the specific.

The characters must be what they seem and what happens to them immediately understood (it's different in plays): particular people, in a particular time and place, in a particular situation. There should be romantic characters"romantic," Mr. Engel beautifully says, means "that they contain the element that enables them to sing." There should be comedy. (Comedy, "an absolute essential,'' was in the pre-thirties "kept like a contagious disease far away from the pure young romancers," but now it's learned to spring out of character and situation rather than out of jokes.) Music, of course, by expressing any dramatic need in song, furnis.h.i.+ng the springboard for dancing and the background for pantomime and the spoken Page 173 word, is "one of the least perishable of the theatrical elements." Comedy songs, Mr. Engel engagingly points out, are the most personal of all songs by reason of being songs of complaint, "more humorous when delivered in the first-person singular" because ''the audience experiences something felt as opposed to something observed."

The need for particularity extends from the characters to the lyrics of the songs they sing, and the songs need to function as integral parts of the plot. Only then can be brought into focus the feeling that the show is all about and which the show must impart. In explaining how we have learned these needs, Mr. Engel furnishes a running history of the musical and sketches in its family tree. Guys and Dolls, for example, goes back to The Beggar's Operawhich, the author remarks, we have never topped for "style, humor, and workability."

The libretto, of course, is the thing. So far, we have had "no truly successful and lasting librettos that were original." Mr. Engel considers in detail half a dozen adaptations from plays, pointing out why some work (My Fair Lady, Pal Joey) and others don't (Candide: though it had a wonderful Bernstein score, its characters were not flesh and blood but philosophical conceptsatheatrical). He tells how some adaptations of masterpieces succeed and still don't matter (Man of La Mancha: "pure Woolworth") and how some failed exactly as they deserved (Billy Budd: "it discarded elements of the original which defined the core of the idea"). He suggests how Caesar and Cleopatra, which was made into a poor musical (Her First Roman) might have been made to work ("History is meant for alteration when it interferes with theater"). 139 An adaptation carries no guarantee of success even though made by the party closest to it: "The book by Truman Capote [House of Flowers] could not have been more ruined by anybody than by its author, who demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that he knew nothing about the requirements of a libretto."

It is West Side Story that he puts forward as a superb lesson in intelligent, meaningful adaptation. The parallel with Romeo and Juliet (which he supplies by act and scene) "is basic. Its change of time and place are clear and valid and of course strongly pertinent. Because it elides or deletes certain elements that were present in the original so successfully and with such excellent taste, it has been brought closer to our life and time and given a shape as a libretto which works and requires music."

He is not in agreement with those who hold that there is no American Page 174 opera; there has been for some time, he believesbut not at the Met. "Porgy and Bess (1935) is by definition and in spirit an opera. It began on Broadway, has gone through revivals everywhere, and has succeeded in opera houses as a repertory piece all over Europe and the Middle East and here and there in Asia and in fact just everywhere but at the Metropolitan Opera House, which is located in the United States of America." (Mr. Engel himself opened Porgy in Ankara at the Turkish State Opera in 1968.) He sees Carousel and West Side Story, too, as "operas in the same sense that Carmen is." Finally, Mr. Engel thinks that those who want to create opera might do worse than take lessons from Broadway.

The musical as we've known it, which entered into its golden age in the forties, has already reached full development and is not likely to go further now without new forms, Mr. Engel believes. He sees as dead-end streets librettos with non-characters and non-plots and music that, "in spite of its wide and even frantic acceptance . . . has retrogressed. . . . Its harmonic spectrum, melodic profile, and rhythmic patterns are as limited as the music of Protestant hymnology a century ago, and its dynamic range is from loud to loudest." Rather than Hair, it is Company that gives him hope at the moment, with its new way of using romance, "a s.h.i.+ft in emphasis."

He deplores the waste of time, talent, youth and money on worthless projects and pa.s.sing fads. He's impatient with those who cast blame on "the theater" itself for our inept.i.tudes, the lack of the intelligence and courage to learn from experience. When he blows his safety valve, it's on a critic: Mr. Clive Barnes, who, holding the power of life and death over an opening, can d.a.m.n a promising new show with faint praise. 140 When some new growth capable of development appears, we must recognize and encourage it, he says, reminding us that the tap root of any new form still has to reach down to human feeling to take its nourishment.

This book demonstrates that Mr. Engel's investigations and his carefully-come-by advice to his students have their own roots in feeling. His love for the theater extends to the admiration, respect, and a benevolence, too, for his fellows in all branches of that composite world. In that, or in any world, where weariness, contempt, greed, despair, cynicism have a better-than-even chance to corrupt the human sympathies, Lehman Engel is an incorruptible man. I ought to add that years have now pa.s.sed and this is not a judgment from the balcony. After 40 years of friends.h.i.+p, I am here on firm ground.

Page 175 The Life to Come and Other Short Stories By E. M. Forster A Collection of Old New Stories by E. M. Forster:

New York Times Book Review 13 May 1973: 2728, 30

"The Life to Come" is the t.i.tle of a short story that was written 70 years ago by E. M. Forster and is receiving its first publication today. The author himself valued it: it "came more from my heart than anything else I have been able to turn out," containing "a great deal of sorrow and pa.s.sion that I have myself experienced." But because the sorrow and pa.s.sion had a h.o.m.os.e.xual nature, the story has gone unpublished. Upon Forster's death, not quite three years ago, it was bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge, along with his other unpublished papers: two novels in "substantial fragments" (in addition to Maurice), and stories, plays, poems, essays, letters, notebooks, diaries. Of the total work of Forster, who lived to be 91, the reading public saw during his lifetime no more than perhaps one-half. Now, ''The Life to Come" is giving its t.i.tle to one volume of what is being published in England as a new and "as nearly as possible" complete edition of E. M. Forster.

Oliver Stallybra.s.s, who is editor of the Abinger Edition (so named for a place of long a.s.sociation with Forster's family) has included in this book all the completed stories that Forster did not include in The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and The Eternal Moment (1928). Of the 14, only two have been Page 176 published before; the rest were rejected by magazines or withheld by the author. They range in date of composition from 1903 to 1958; seven were written after the publication of A Pa.s.sage to India; 141 upon completing that novel, Forster said in a letter, "My patience with ordinary people has given out."

For the texts here, the editor has followed as scrupulously as he could Forster's "latest intentions"; the ma.n.u.scripts he has found to be in an untidy state. The handwriting is puzzling, the punctuation slapdashForster so rarely remembered to close his quotation marksand more than one version turns up of most of the stories, "The Other Boat" in variations Mr. Stallybra.s.s had to label from (a) to (g). At least one story seems to have risen from the ashes. What writer could live with his unpublished pages and let them alone?

And "How dependent on approval!" Forster wrote of himself in his diary. Going unpublished, he tried out his stories on a circle of his friends. How much did they help matters, we wonder? While Lytton Strachey thought "The Life to Come" was good, T. E. Lawrence gave it a laugh. Goldsworthy Lowes d.i.c.kinson's disgust at a "Rabelaisian" story was enough to put Forster off his work on Maurice. The young William Plomer, allowed to read a story and not caring for it, was never shown another.

Forster, wors.h.i.+per of sylvan places and the sunlit open, of freedom of every kind, felt obliged to keep his work put away in the drawer. But works of fictiongrowths of the mind, the green shoots of feelingneed air and circulation to give them nourishment. They need the world. These stories often show cramp and strain, understandably for not having reached the good light of acceptance.

All the stories in The Life to Come, like the familiar ones, are fantasies. The form suited Forster's temperament and was flexible to his needs. The t.i.tle story, laid in a savage country, tells of the mistaking by "the wildest, strongest, most stubborn of all the inland chiefs" of an erotic pa.s.sion that he feels for a British missionary for the love of Christ. "Dr. Woolacott" is the story of an ill young man, who suffers from daydreams "of the kind forbidden"; in spite of Dr. Woolacott, "who treats everybody," he is in love with death and longs for its coming. But when he has received a portentous visitor at last, "he was left with a human being who had somehow trespa.s.sed and been caught, and blundered over the furniture in the dark, bruising his defenceless body, and whispering 'Hide me.'''

Page 177 This story, too, meant much to Forster; and in it comes a touching pa.s.sage in which the genius of all these stories might be musing: "A violin had apparently been heard playing in the great house for the last half-hour, and no one could find out where it was. Playing all sorts of music, gay, grave and pa.s.sionate. But never completing a theme. Always breaking off. A beautiful instrument. Yet so unsatisfying . . . leaving the hearers much sadder than if it had never performed. What was the use (some asked) of music like that? Better silence absolute than this aimless disturbance of our peace."

"Arthur s.n.a.t.c.hfold" is less mysterious, a straightforward account of the "netting" of a jolly young milkman in a yellow s.h.i.+rt. It opens with a view of the conventional world characteristic of all these stories, here as a country house on a Sunday morning, "with so much ahead to be eaten, and so little to be said": something is missing, which has left the world empty or asleep or simply waiting. It appears at the turning point in ''The Other Boat"the best story in the book and, one is glad to note, the latest-written, dated 1958. Young Lionel, after an exhausting scene with his young native lover "Cocoanut" down in the cramped cabin of a P & O liner, has come up on deck "to recover his poise and his sense of leaders.h.i.+p": "The deck was covered with pa.s.sengers who had had their bedding carried up and now slept under the stars. They lay p.r.o.ne in every direction, and he had to step carefully between them on his way to the railing. He had forgotten that this migration happened nightly as soon as a boat entered the Red Sea; his nights had pa.s.sed otherwise and elsewhere. Here lay a guileless subaltern, cherry-cheeked; there lay Colonel Arbuthnot, his bottom turned. Mrs. Arbuthnot lay parted from her lord in the ladies' section. . . . How decent and reliable they looked, the folk to whom he belonged! He had been born one of them, he had his work with them, he meant to marry into their caste. If he forfeited their companions.h.i.+p he would become n.o.body and nothing. The widening expanse of the sea, the winking lighthouse, helped to compose him, but what really recalled him to his sanity was this quiet sleeping company of his peers."

But this recalling is the herald of the murder and suicide with which the story ends. Like most of the stories, it is carrying a heavy burden of emotion with nowhere to go. As Forster saw, the stories were h.o.m.os.e.xual daydreams; like all daydreams, they go rus.h.i.+ng toward the sanctuaries of extremes, and can end only in violence.

Page 178 According to Forster's biographer, P. N. Furbank, it was the facetious h.o.m.os.e.xual stories rather than these serious ones that caused him misgivings. 142 Mr. Stallybra.s.s quotes Forster's diary entry for April 8, 1922: "Have this moment burnt my indecent writings or as many as the fire will take. Not a moral repentance, but the belief that they clogged me artistically. They were written not to express myself but to excite myself. . . . I am not ashamed of them. It is just that they were a wrong channel for my pen."

Without being able to account for their coming through the flames, Mr. Stallybra.s.s has produced three for this book. "What Does It Matter? A Morality" is one, moving at slapstick speed, about a mythical kingdom with an agent provocateur, winking policemen, doors popping open onto mismatched lovers, a concealed microphone under the mattress. The old facetiousness dances like a skeleton.

Clearly, nothing has got away from Mr. Stallybra.s.s, and I consulted Forster here, turning to what he had to say about the Chapman Edition of Jane Austen, a writer whom he loved as much as I love Forster.143 Yes, he says, all sc.r.a.ps are for bringing forth, because they "throw light." Print anything, however trivial, that will help in the "final estimate." (And Heaven knows, it was having to keep his work away from view that had been the affliction of his life.) And so we have "Three Courses and a Dessert: Being a New and Gastronomic Version of the Game of Consequences," an outstanding example of a sc.r.a.p. It's a composite story written by four friends for a magazine called Wine and Food; it saw print in 1944 and never did anybody any harm. Forster contributed the fish course.

But one misses comedy (as distinct from glee), so familiar a part of his fictionto see at once the reason for its absence: when the women went out of his stories, they took the comedy with them. (And they were also a cause of much of the beauty of his work; they afforded him a good deal of his irony; and he has not got a thoroughly good sounding board without them.) Those women allowed to remain can be got down in a phrase ("that vengeful onswis.h.i.+ng of skirts . . .!") or by a tag ("She was one of those women who behave alternately well and badly.") Perpetua, in "The Torque," belongs to the familiar sisterhood of Forster old maids, though she is the only one he disposed of by reducing her to ashes with a bolt of lightning. (Her brother "duly mourned his distinguished sister and collected what could be found of her in an urn. But what a relief not to have her about!'') Page 179 Central place is perhaps occupied by Lionel's mother, in "The Other Boat," not in person but seen in Lionel's thoughts: "Blind-eyed in the midst of the enormous web she had spunfilaments drifting everywhere, strands catching. There was no reasoning with her or about her, she understood nothing and controlled everything. She had suffered too much and was too high-minded to be judged like other people, she was outside carnality and incapable of pardoning it."

There are flaws in these stories, and they show; but they are never flaws of feeling. Herein lies their relations.h.i.+p with Forster's other stories.

None have attempted the broader proportions of "The Road From Colonus," nor do they reach that story's n.o.bility. When the traveler in Greece, who had felt only that "something great was wrong" and, vowing that "I will pretend no longer," steps inside the hollow tree, it is to find that "from its living trunk there gushed an impetuous spring." What all these stories say in part is here said perfectly. Here, Forster is writing about all human desire, and its epitome in the defiance of one half-helpless old man: he would cling to life at its most meaningful point, just where he had found it, never willingly to let himself to be torn away.

It will be sad if the aspect of h.o.m.os.e.xuality, which kept Forster's stories from reaching print in his own day, turns out to be their only focus of interest for today's readers. It will be sadder if it reanimates the "re-evaluators," who, upon the debut of Maurice, a novel then aged 57, wanted to go at the whole of Forster's work on the basis of news freshly received by them concerning his private life. 144 Have we been as ready for Forster's honesty as we thought we were?

Forster, whose greatness surely had root in his capacity to treat all human relations.h.i.+ps seriously and truthfully, has Clive in that novel speak of h.o.m.os.e.xual love as "a pa.s.sion we can direct, like any other, to good or bad." And of course, the best realized of the h.o.m.os.e.xual stories dovetail perfectly into the best of all his work. Even the earliest and most ephemeral of them will be recognized as the frailer embodiments of the same pa.s.sionate convictions that made for the moral iron in his novels.

What engaged Forster was not the issue of respectability vs. h.o.m.os.e.xuality, but that of respectability vs. Apollo. The weights in the balance are always spiritual life, spiritual death.

As for the light thrown by the present volume, it has given us more knowledge about a writing life of immense fidelityit was to be the truth or nothingthat from its beginning was difficult and sad, though lit with Page 180 comic glints. It is much along the lines of a Forster novel, which continues to unwind itself after his death and is now heading for its ironic conclusion.

Since "The Trustees of the Late E. M. Forster" have been listed as the author's copyright holders, two new publishers have been added to the American publishers of his lifetime: Norton brought out today's book and Maurice; and Liveright, in between, brought out Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings, edited by George H. Thomson, a sort of grab-bag of 191015 ephemera containing the one prize. The reader, noting in the American Introduction that The Life to Come corresponds to Volume 8 of the Abinger EditionMr. Stallybra.s.s foresees 20 in allwonders at this point how much more we can expect to see of the complete, and how we shall see it, and when.

The Abinger Edition will not be the measure of Forster's achievement except in pound-weight; the complete is not answerable to standards, is as blind to excellence as to the lack of it, and pa.s.sion counts for exactly the same as punctuation, although the latter can be corrected. But the complete has its own excuse for being. Knowing that it is to exist, Forster readers here will find it hard to settle for the occasional parcel. We must hope.

If Forster himself could have the last word on the destination of his books, that word might well be "Eternity." He spoke of Eternity often and in familiar terms, and it was indeed upon her that he placed his reliance for that final estimate. And will there be a reader who won't see, in each of these books being launched, the paper boat in "The Longest Journey"? It is being lighted and set into the stream at last, taking the current, going under the bridgeto be watched, from wherever we stand, "still afloat, far through the arch, burning as if it would burn forever."

Page 181 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek By Annie Dillard Meditation On Seeing:

New York Times Book Review 24 March 1974: 45

"I am no scientist," says Annie Dillard, "but a poet and a walker with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts." In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she offers "what Th.o.r.eau called 'a meteorological journal of the mind.'"

The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. A blind child the author happened to read about saw for the first time after cataracts had been removed from her eyes. "When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw 'the tree with lights in it.'" Annie Dillard had found the central metaphor for her book; it is the vision, the spiritual conception, that she will spend her days in solitude tramping the Roanoke creek banks and the Blue Ridge mountainside in search of for herself.

A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled. It is this intensity of experience that she seems to live in order to declare.

There is an ambition about her book that I like, one that is deeper than the ambition to declare wonder aloud. It is the ambition to feel. This is a guess. But if this is what she has at heart, I am not quite sure that in writing this book she wholly accomplished it. I don't say this, though, to detract from her declared intention in laying herself open to the experience of seeing. It is a state she equates with innocence: "What I call innocence is the Page 182 spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration."

But apparently it is an unself-consciousness that can be consciously achieved and consciously declared. And part of her conception of seeing is that in the act of doing it she is herself, in turn, being seen.

"I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell. I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. . . . I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood."

What happens to that paragraph is what happens to her book. As the episodes begin, we can imagine an appealing young woman standing alert in a meadow, dressed in s.h.i.+rt and pants, holding her field gla.s.ses and provided with a sandwich: she is waiting to see, being very patient and still. By the chapter's end, we realize or suspect we are watching a dervish dancing. Receptivity so high-strung and high-minded has phases of its own. The author shows us that it has its dark side too.

"The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. . . . The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without s.p.a.ce, and s.p.a.ce is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. . . . This is what we know. The rest is gravy."

I honestly do not know what she is talking about at such times. The only thing I could swear to is that the writing here leaves something to be desired. "What's going on here?" is one of the author's refrains. "The creator loves pizzazz," she answers herself.

She is better at stalking a muskrat: "Stalking is a pure form of skill, like pitching or playing chess. Rarely is luck involved. I do it right or I do it wrong; the muskrat will tell me, and that right early. Even more than baseball, stalking is a game played in the actual present. At every second, the muskrat comes, or stays, or goes, depending on my skill." This is admirable writing.

So is her account of the polyphemus mothfirst in its coc.o.o.n, then emerging, then crawling away in the presence of a roomful of school-children. It has been directly experienced at what I should say is eye-level. Her account of the migration of the monarch b.u.t.terflies, which makes the Page 183 reader see what they looked like coming, how they went over, what they left behind them, what the author learned from the whole event, is precise and memorable.

She can also write straight narrative, showing what the book would have gained in point, direction, and shape from being given a little more of it. She takes us through a flood on Tinker Creek and I think she sees truly when she says: "Tinker Creek is out of its four-foot banks. . . . It looks like somebody else's creek that has usurped or eaten our creek and is roving frantically to escape, big and ugly, like a blacksnake caught in a kitchen drawer." She walks out into the flood on a wall and on the return trip meets a young boy who's going in the opposite direction. "The wall is one brick wide; we can't pa.s.s. So we clasp hands and lean out backwards over the turbulent water; our feet interlace like teeth on a zipper, we pull together, stand, and continue on our ways." There's grace and quickness of writing. It also marks the rare appearance, momentary as it is, of another human being in her book, and the closest any human being comes into the presence of the author.

Annie Dillard is the only person in her book, substantially the only one in her world; I recall no outside human speech coming to break the long soliloquy of the author. Speaking of the universe very often, she is yet self-surrounded; and, beyond that, book-surrounded. Her own book might have taken in more of human life without losing a bit of the wonder she was after. Might it not have gained more? Th.o.r.eau's wisdom had everything to do with the relations.h.i.+p he saw between nature and the community of man. She read Th.o.r.eau, including of course his own meteorological journal of the mind.

While spending her days stalking, the young author was spending her nights reading. She read everything she could get her hands on that would elucidate and expand what she was finding out for herself. She copied long pa.s.sages into her journal, and many excerpts appear in her booknot only from Th.o.r.eau, Fabre, Darwin and so on, but from novelists, artists. (An odd bit, unattributed, is tantalizing me: Who said, "Gravity, to Copernicus, is the nostalgia of things to become spheres"?) Her search for a vision has been at firsthand and at secondhand; a dual search.

There remains something about her wishes which is not quite related to the human world. She remarks somewhere, "I am interested in Alice mainly when she eats the cooky that makes her smaller. I would pare myself or be pared so that I too might pa.s.s through the merest crack, a gap I know is Page 184 there in the sky. I am looking just now for the cooky." (Contrariwise, she will need to be looking for a little bottle, tied around the neck with a paper label with the words "DRINK ME" beautifully printed in large letters. And eating the "little cake"if this is what she means by a cookywill only result in her having to say, "Goodbye, feet!") Actually, and not unlike the characters Alice herself meets in Wonderland, the author is given to changing style or s.h.i.+fting moods with disconcerting frequency and abruptness. "Thanks. For the Memories." "This oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed as by Pliny." "The cottage was Paradise enow." You might be reading letters home from camp, where the moment before you might have thought you were deep in the Book of Leviticus.

The relations.h.i.+p between the writer and the reader is fully as peculiar and astonis.h.i.+ng as the emergence of the polyphemus moth. It too has got to leave the coc.o.o.n, has got to draw breath and a.s.sume every risk of being alive before the next step, real understanding, can take place.

But a writer writes as a writer sees, and while the eyes are rolled up, what appears on paper may be exactly what it sounds like, invocation. "Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate as the shape of the air in time." This is a voice that is trying to speak to me out of a cloud instead of from a sociable, even answerable, distance on our same earth. And if I ask, as I do too at times in this book, "What's going on here?" the author would be likely to invoke the voice again, and we'd be told as we were before: "The creator loves pizzazz."

She concludes her book by saying, "And then you walk fearlessly . . . like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part. . . . The giant water bug ate the world. And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says 'Glory,' and my right foot says 'Amen': in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise."

And that's the way Annie Dillard goes. Is the Pilgrim on her right road? That depends on what the Pilgrim's destination is.

But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give youand other peopleany trouble. 145 Page 185 The Last of the Nuba By Leni Riefenstahl J'Aime Paris:

Photographs since the Twenties

By Andre Kertesz About Russia By Henri Cartier-Bresson Africa and Paris and Russia:

New York Times Book Review 1 December 1974: 5, 22, 28

Of the three new photography books, lying on my desk, Leni Riefenstahl's The Last of the Nuba (Harper & Row, $ 18.95) is unique; and the making of it is a story. 146 Mrs. Riefenstahl, a well-known film maker and actress in Germany before and during the Hitler years (she directed The Triumph of the Will and Olympiad),147 was seduced into going to Africa by reading Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa. A projected doc.u.mentary on the slave trade served to get her there, but didn't point her to the tribe of perfect human beings still living in innocence and harmony that she came to find. On the day she was leaving, she chanced upon a photograph of a magnificent naked athlete riding the shoulders of another, with the caption: "A Nuba of Kordofan." She would have to come back.

To suppose that convictions of romantic affinity are killed off early in life is folly. It was 1962, and Mrs. Riefenstahl was 60, when she was able to Page 186 return and follow up her Nuba clue. Attaching herself to a German expedition to the Congo, then finding the rest of her way by compa.s.s bearing, she drove her Land Rover high into the southernmost hills of Kordofan, until she came in sight of some very strange houses: they were circular and clinging to the side of the cliff like bird's nests. And there they were.

The affinity proved out. Mrs. Riefenstahl found in the Mesakin Nuba the people she'd been looking for and they shyly made welcome the first white woman they'd ever seen. There in the hut they built for her, during visits over the next 10 years, she put together out of her deep commitment this extraordinary picture record.

Her 126 photographs, many in color, have an absorbing beauty and a c.u.mulative power. Following a 72-page introductory set of pictures, "Land and People," she groups the rest about the four big occasions on which their lives center: the harvest; the cattle camp called the zariba; wrestling; and death. She has photographed them all from their point of view.

She uses the light purposefully: the full, blinding brightness to make us see the all-absorbing blackness of the skin; the ray of light slanting down from the single hole, high in the wall, that is the doorway of the circular house, which tells us how secret and safe it has been made; the first dawn light streaking the face of a calf in the sleeping camp where the young men go to live, which suggests their world apart. All the pictures bring us the physical beauty of the people: a young girl, shy and mischievous of face, with a bead sewn into her lower lip like a permanent cinnamon drop; a wrestler prepared for his match, with his shaven head turned to look over the ma.s.sive shoulder, all skin color taken away by a coating of ashes.

Moving details of their lives emerge from the photographs of their houses. They were built as they were in defense against the slave raider. The entrance hole, only 14 inches wide, which the Nuba "flick themselves through like . . . fish," is set five feet high in the wall to keep out snakes and scorpions. The main entrance to the walled-in cl.u.s.ter of houses, the only door that reaches the ground, has the shape of keyhole so the women coming in from the fields can walk through with those big loads on their heads. And the blue sheen we see on the inside mud walls is achieved by rubbing in graphite for a very long time with the ball of the thumbthe Nuba love beauty.

We see them at work on their stony landthey harvest millet, but there is no plough, no wheel. Tools are the axe, the knife, and the hoe. There are a few ancient guns, hereditary treasures, fired off mostly as salutes at wres- Page 187 tling matches and funerals. Hunting is often done with sticks, and can go on for hours without the luck of so much as a rabbit; old men die of the effort. Their diet is sorghum twice a day (the wrestlers at the cattle camp get all the milk); meat is rarely eaten, the cattle being slaughtered only in sacrifice at funerals.

It is in the zariba where the young men attain their maturity, in which the real meaning of life lies for them; and for the whole tribe this meaning is epitomized in the wrestling match. The Nuba's deepest emotions come into expression here, only exceeded at the funerals of the wrestler heroes. Mrs. Riefenstahl has made extraordinary photographs of these dramas of joy and grief, as always, seen from within.

Contemplating their photographs we might see in these people a magnificent unselfconsciousness and at the same time a tender self-regardas paradoxical as if they wore clothes like us. Mrs. Riefenstahl's word for their nature as she came to know it is "introspective." We can see that by the way they make music for themselves. Every Nuba, though he owns little else, owns a lyre. Each makes his own. Each has his own songs, which he composes and plays, and the lyre is the first thing he reaches for when he wakes up in the morning. The Nuba, who also laugh a lot, enjoy singing about themselves, about one another. While Mrs. Riefenstahl was in residence, they sang about her. They love round dancing and at the full moon may dance the night away, to their own singing.

There is hardly any crime, "except for the traditional goat-stealing." Punishment for breaking taboos is not imprisonment but contempt; even the children point and scoff at the adulterer. In 1969, though, the Nuba "found out about money." Before, barter had sufficed: leaves of tobacco swapped to the Arabs for steel lyre strings. We gather that some of the innocent ways have suffered change. Leni Riefenstahl got there just in time.

But she made timeless photographs. They give us fresh comprehension of man in, as might be, his original majesty and acceptance of life, in his vanity and courage, his beauty, vulnerability, pride.

n.o.body had ever seen that Nuba village; everybody has seen Paris. If his photographs of the Paris he loves are very often cliches in J'Aime Paris: Photographs Since the Twenties (Grossman/Viking, $ 22.50), it's hardly Andre Kertesz's fault that thousands of amateurs have stood in his shoes to photograph the same barges in the Seine under the same leaning trees.

They have their own value, in their loving preservation of scenes now gone (Les Halles, for instance) and of now-vanished callings in lifethe Page 188 street venders and barrel organists, the midinettes, the clochards, the coal sellers, the camping Gypsies, the saltimbanques, the goat's milk man and his goats set up in business on a busy street corner. For this reason, though the collection is subt.i.tled ''Photographs Since the Twenties," the best are the ones that date the farthest back, when white-silk-stockinged girls in a bistro in Montparna.s.se were dancing with customers in caps and one longap.r.o.ned waiter, and the Moulin Rouge could be photographed lit up for "La Revue Mistinguette."

There are happy events recorded which memory may have forgotten ("Celebration in Montpama.s.se after the first futurist ballet," 1929) and some yet remembered people. We see Marie Laurencin photographed in a velvet suit seated at a spinet, playing to a silky Pekingese (I think it's a spinet, and think it's a Pekingese). And here's "the famous model Kiki" (1927), whose amazing face under the black bang is like a Benda mask that has at last given in and completed the smile.

Most of the views of the city are romantic"The Seine from Lady Mendl's Apartment"; "Rue de Grennelle"a caressing study of the facade of enchantment in its flaking away. But not allnot the Ca.n.a.l Saint Martin with the old fellow was.h.i.+ng his feet in it. And very somber and powerful is his "Under Pont Notre Dame, 1925," in which for once we don't see through the arch of the bridge, and are not to make out either the men or the river, but only shapeless bundles of rags and rugs, conveying an extraordinary feeling of dampness and cold.

The photographs of most lasting interest seem to me the interiors, especially when selected detail is focused on and allowed its authority: the rack of waiting mail at the Cafe du Dome; the stout, short-haired working dog belonging to the guard of Notre Dame, at sit with nose laid to the ring-load of Cathedral keys; "An artist's studio, 1927," with batik coverlet, ballet poster, scattered espadrilles, bidet, and four live hens pecking.

In Atget's time exposures, it's as if the camera, having fixed on some street, would not let go until it had extracted some essence of Paris from it, which the photograph is still able to suggest is there. 148 Atget might have pursued the spirit of the place, M. Kertesz the sentimentin which I see nothing wrong. In photography, as in other arts, what one finds is often quite exactly what one seeks: Mrs. Riefenstahl too, pressing her Land Rover up the hill to the Nuba.

If his photographs of Paris are somewhat over-familiar, this will never trouble those for whom clearly the book was madethose who remember Page 189 M. Kertesz's Paris with his same love, who will greet them with the right romantic gratification, all the more so for so many of them having been taken in the rain. A charming portrait, "Elizabeth and I in a cafe in Montparna.s.se. A self-posed, self-timed picture, 1931," closes this personal and loving book.

Cartier-Bresson has sought all over the world to put his shutter-finger precisely on the world's pulse and to reproduce its pattern in black and white for our eyes. The reviewer should be able, as I am not, to study side by side Cartier-Bresson's 19-year-old earlier book on Russia 149 and the one appearing todayAbout Russia (Viking, $ 18.95). The biggest change must surely lie in the faces: there doesn't seem to be a worried face on the whole map of Russia any longer. The young faces show only bright curiosity, the old only resignation, while the middle-aged are as broad as possible with satisfaction.

The 141 photographs are grouped geographically, in four parts: Leningrad, Moscow and the Federal Republic of Russia; The Republic of Estonia; the Republics of the Caucasus; and the Republic of Central Asia. Cartier-Bresson, who has given his book the peripheral t.i.tle About Russia, declines to generalize about his pictures: "What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life . . . to note a number of significant facts, applying the strictest visual standards possible." As for their significance, the camera "questions and answers simultaneously."

His camera does. His subject and its moment are one, the composition undistractedly telegraphing its central fact, with its questions and answers adhering. There is no waste.