A Writer's Eye Part 6

These are thirty-four stories or sketches about Don Camillo the priest and his adversary, Peppone the Communist Mayor, laid in a small village near Milan in the valley of the Po. 80 The Little World of Don Camillo is the t.i.tle of an earlier book by Mr. Guareschi, and in the preface to the stories he bounds the Little World and explains that the happenings to follow grew in its atmosphere.81 The stories are all brief, around six pages long, and are cheerfully alike in nearly every other way as well. Being moral in their intention, Italian in their nature, and playful in their habit they attempt not much more development than anecdotes, which essentially they remain. Their pleasure for the general reader is likely to lie in the warmth with which they are written. Each takes the form of a battle of wits or fisticuffs between the good (the Roman Catholic Church) and the bad (the Communist party) to see who gets the better of whom, and it doesn't take long to get this settled until next time.

"You have a trick up your sleeve" is the motif, and the level, of the book's conversation. It is the truth, too. One reason the stories must be such cheerful, possibly speedy, work for Mr. Guareschi, who writes with plenty of zest, is that there is a deus ex machina in Jesus, who, speaking up in the vernacular of the Po from His crucifix on the wall, carries on helpful conversations with Don Camillo when things get too tough; so an occasional Page 104 miracle helps out the good side. At other times, mere foxiness does the trick, or mere force of arms.

In the pattern of these tales, a problem arises (there is never a dull moment in the Little World), there is a contest of prowess, with matching feats of wit or strength, an aside if necessary between Don Camillo and Heaven, and the punch ending, with Peppone going off with his tail between his legs. The stories are set out to be as innocent as Peter Rabbitthough in this their taste may not indeed be as faultless, or their charm as great. The cards are a good deal more stacked in the Little World than in Mr. McGregor's garden. But the stories are kindly, and sometimes engaging.

The fillip to the tales is of course meant to lie in the st.u.r.diness of Don Camillo and the innately soft heart of misguided Peppone. Don Camillo is in there using fisticuffs, kicks, guns, disguises, slams with pitchfork handles or brickbats to achieve his ends, and Peppone on his side and with equal exuberance is doing the same. The difference between adversaries so evenly matchedwho seem really inclined to like each other in their warm, Italian wayis in their backing. Stalin is too far away to do Peppone any good.

Page 105 The West Pier By Patrick Hamilton The Seeds of Evil:

New York Times Book Review 5 October 1952: 5

In The West Pier Patrick Hamilton tells of the formative years and early manhood of Ernest Ralph Gorse, born in 1903 in Hove, England, and introduced to us as, practically from that year, a member of ''the criminal cla.s.s." At the novel's conclusion, the young Gorse has successfully sown his seeds of evil in Brighton and is just setting out for London, with a trophy of youthful and petty crimes all undetected or unpunished, presumably to carry on in the future on a grander scale. 82 His ruthless spoliation of a young love affair is his most serious and significant act. This bears on the rather curious image which dominates the novel and gives it its t.i.tle.

The West Pier, sticking out in the water at Brighton, is seen as "the battles.h.i.+p of s.e.x." On this pier the four chief characterstwo young couplesmeet by chance in the opening chapters, picking one another up as happens every day, the author points out, on the West Pier. Young Gorse, almost lacking in such human feelings, being wholeheartedly preoccupied with the inhuman, proceeds to make use as he can of the human feelings of others.

Mr. Patrick has organized his novel with calmness of purposethat of sober, thorough investigationand with patience toward what he finds always staring back at him, the character's ultimate inscrutability, and its ubiquity in the world as well. It follows that a certain quality of fatalism pervades the work.

To its credit, The West Pier is never sensational. It is unadorned and strict Page 106 as a lecture, the style plain and in its plainness foreboding. Set down in a laudable attempt at dispa.s.sion, it is, however, without pa.s.sion. It is true that a curious effect of reality does somehow result from sheer acc.u.mulation of fact: the drearier the facts, the more acc.u.mulation it takes, and sometimes the heavier the going. The novel is warmest, or only warm, in the depiction of the secondary characters. The young lovers are appealing, but helpless as a pair of baby chicks under the shadow of a hawk.

The character of the poisonous young villain is never gone into much below the surface of his behaviorfor the reason the author gives that it is opaque. Will this do? n.o.body knows, says Mr. Hamilton outright, what makes his Ernest Ralph Gorse the way he is. This is the way he appears. Take a look at him, listen to his dreary words, see how meanly he acts, and know there is a whole "cla.s.s" like him.

There is little humor, except what lies in mordant reporting of schoolroom and seaside repartee, and little sensory feeling in the scene, these not being Mr. Hamilton's tools here. But the reader feels that the use of them at moments, in treating of life however sordid, might not come amissand might even bring light to bear on this work, which promises to extend beyond the present volume. 83 Page 107 Charlotte's Web By E. B. White 'Life in the Barn Was Very Good':

New York Times Book Review 19 October 1952: 49

E. B. White has written his book for children, which is nice for us older ones as it calls for big type. 84 Most of the story takes place in the Zuckerman barn through the pa.s.sing of the four seasons. "Life in the barn was very goodnight and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days . . . with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the pa.s.sage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything." The book has liveliness and felicity, tenderness and unexpectedness, grace and humor and praise of life, and the good backbone of succinctness that only the most highly imaginative stories seem to grow.

The characters are variedgood and bad, human and animal, talented and untalented, warm and cold, ignorant and intelligent, vegetarian and blood-drinkingvaried but not simple or opposites. They are the real thing.

Wilbur is of a sweet naturehe is a spring pigaffectionate, responsive to moods of the weather and the song of the crickets, has long eyelashes, is hopeful, partially willing to try anything, brave, subject to faints from bashfulness, is loyal to friends, enjoys a good appet.i.te and a soft bed, and is a little likely to be overwhelmed by the sudden chance for complete freedom. He changes the subject when the conversation gets painful, and a b.u.t.termilk bath brings out his beauty. When he was a baby he was a runt, but the sun Page 108 shone pink through his ears, endearing him to a little girl named Fern. She is his protector, and he is the hero.

Charlotte A. Cavitica ("but just call me Charlotte") is the heroine, a large gray spider "about the size of a gumdrop." She has eight legs and can wave them in friendly greeting. When her friends wake up in the morning she says "Salutations!"in spite of sometimes having been up all night herself, working. She tells Wilbur right away that she drinks blood, and Wilbur on first acquaintance begs her not to say that.

Another good character is Templeton, the rat. "The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything." "Talking with Templeton was not the most interesting occupation in the world," Wilbur finds, "but it was better than nothing." Templeton grudges his help to others, then brags about it, can fold his hands behind his head, and sometimes acts like a spoiled child.

There is the goose, who can't be surprised by barnyard ways. "It's the old pail-trick, Wilbur. . . . He's trying to lure you into captivity-ivity. He's appealing to your stomach." The goose always repeats everything. "It is my idio-idio-idiosyncrasy."

What the book is about is friends.h.i.+p on earth, affection and protection, adventure and miracle, life and death, trust and treachery, pleasure and pain, and the pa.s.sing of time. As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done. What it all provesin the words of the minister in the story which he hands down to his congregation after Charlotte writes "Some Pig" in her webis "that human beings must always be on the watch for the coming of wonders." Dr. Dorian says in another place, "Oh, no, I don't understand it. But for that matter I don't understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But n.o.body pointed out that the web itself is a miracle." The author will only say, ''Charlotte was in a cla.s.s by herself."

"At-at-at, at the risk of repeating myself," as the goose says, Charlotte's Web is an adorable book. 85 Page 109 Nine Stories By J. D. Salinger Threads of Innocence:

New York Times Book Review 5 April 1953: 4

J. D. Salinger's writing is original, first rate, serious and beautiful. Here are nine of his stories, and one further reason that they are so interesting, and so powerful seen all together, is that they are paradoxes. From the outside, they are often very funny; inside, they are about heartbreak, and convey it; they can do this because they are pure. The whole nine have an enchanting ease about them, a deceptively loose-appearing texture, a freshness and liveliness which might bid fair to disarm the reader, as he begins, say, the remarkable "For Esmewith Love and Squalor." Nothing could be further from what Mr. Salinger is about to do to him.

The stories concern children a good deal of the time, but they are G.o.d's children. Mr. Salinger's work deals with innocence, and starts with innocence; from there it can penetrate a full range of relations.h.i.+ps, follow the spirit's private adventure, inquire into grave problems gravelyinto life and death and human vulnerability and into the occasional mystical experience where age does not, after a point, any longer apply. Mr. Salinger's worldurban, suburban, family, mostly of the Eastern seaboard is never a clue to the way he will treat it: he seems to write without preconception of shackling things.

He has the equipment of a born writer to begin withhis sensitive eye, his incredibly good ear, and something I can think of no word for but grace. There is not a trace of sentimentality about his work, although it is full of Page 110 children that are bound to be adored. He p.r.o.nounces no judgments, he is simply gifted with having them, and with having them pa.s.sionately.

The material of these stories is quite different, again, from his subject. Death, war, the flaws in human relations.h.i.+ps, the crazy inability to make plain to others what is most transparent and plain to ourselves and nearest our hearts, the lack or loss of a way to offer our pa.s.sionate feeling, belief in their full generosity, the ruthless cruelty of conventional social judgments and behavior: the persistent longingreaching sometimes to fantasyto return to some state of purity and grace; these subjects lie somewhere near the core of J. D. Salinger's work.

They all pertain to the lack of something in the world, and it might be said that what Mr. Salinger has written about so far is the absence of love. Owing to that absence comes the spoliation of innocence, or else the triumph in death of innocence over the outrage and corruption that lie in wait for it.

The feeling may arise from these warm, uneven stories (no writer worth his salt is even, or can be) that Mr. Salinger has never, here, directly touched upon what he has the most to say about: love. Love averts itself in pity, laughter, or a gesture or vision of finality possibly too easy or simple in stories that are neither easy nor simple in any degree. 86 Mr. Salinger is a very serious artist, and it is likely that what he has to say will find many forms as time goes byinteresting forms, too. His novel, The Catcher in the Rye,87 was good and extremely moving, althoughfor this readerall its virtues can be had in a short story by the same author where they are somehow more at home.88 What this reader loves about Mr. Salinger's stories is that they honor what is unique and precious in each person on earth. Their author has the courageit is more like the earned right and privilegeto experiment at the risk of not being understood. Best of all, he has a loving heart.

Page 111 Marianne Thornton:

A Domestic Biography

By E. M. Forster The Thorntons Sit for a Family Portrait:

New York Times Book Review 27 May 1956: 5

Miss Marianne Thornton of Battersea Rise, 17971887, had the good fortune and good sense characteristic of her family in having for a greatnephew Mr. E. M. Forster. Her benevolence, characteristic too, gave him a comfortable start on his way toward becoming a writer. Here is fresh cause for rejoicing: a "domestic biography," the perspicacity, the virtue and the persuasion of which could hardly be overestimated. The subject: Marianne.

The daughter of Henry Thornton, M. P., and Marianne Sykes Thornton, she was born the eldest child of nine into a household characterized by "affections, comfort, piety, integrity, intelligence, public activity, private benevolence; and transcending them all an unshaken belief in a future life where the members of the household would meet again and would recognize each other and be happy eternally." Marianne's Papa, a prosperous banker and a man of outstanding intellect, "was fertile in devices for improving her." He had provided for her happiness before she was born by building Battersea Rise, in Clapham Common; the house is the heart of the book, as it came to be the heart of Marianne. 89 We see the house with its beautiful oval library that William Pitt designed, with the garden beyond its gla.s.s doors, and its thirty-four bedrooms Page 112 and the nursery upstairs br.i.m.m.i.n.g with life and good spirits. Here is the family a.s.sembled for prayers; here they are at table. ("Prayers before plenty, yes. But plenty.") The neighborsWilliam Wilberforce, the famous abolitionist; the Zachary Macaulays (little Tom was a terror in tableaus), or some of the "able and alarming Stephen family"are likely to be guests for the evening, for we are very much in the thick of the Clapham Sect.

Conversation races around the tableforeign missions, abolition, education, infant education, politics, the Apocrypha, Napoleon. And the irrepressible young daughters of the house are going to take the best of it down in diaries before they go to bed. "To distinguish six maidens is never easy, especially when the sound of their laughter is gone," says Mr. Forster, but he knows that any of them can call up Jane Austen today. "On the whole the way of life they discovered worked, and they could pursue it to the glory of their G.o.d without self-torture or torturing others."

Marianne grew up with a first-rate mind and an affectionate heart, and inclined to accept the responsibilities of both. She had seriousness, gaiety, exemplary judgment in conduct, faith in reason and G.o.d: she was unsuspicious of a world that could do so well with improvement, and unshocked and unscared by its bugbears. She rose to a crisis, she rose higher into detachment; she came down to earth and enjoyed fun and nonsense; she could throw herself into the joys of travel; she gave and received love.

She took her understanding from the domestic orbits, none more instructive or demanding; she could reason out from those into the wider circles of society and human nature which she saw as reaching toward heaven. Really a child of the eighteenth century, she lived almost the length of the nineteenth, and the numerous acts of her good life, indeed each of her letters, she launched like so many little lighted boats on the stream of Continuity, going confident into the night. They would be safely received at the other end.

The Clapham Sect could have hardly failed to be a primary force in her life. "Wherever she walked the child found herself surrounded by a.s.sorted saints." "The friend of friends," William Wilberforce, is given a full-length domestic portrait in these pages; no public portrait of any man could be half so remarkable. "It is with the saintly, gay and innocent side of his character that [Marianne's] Recollections deal; they ignore the cleverness and astuteness which are evident in his public life and sometimes remind us of Gandhi.''

When Wilberforce went as one of a deputation of three from the House Page 113 of Commons to persuade Queen Caroline to give up being crowned and the lady "all but kicked them downstairs," it was to the garden of Battersea Rise that he repaired for the sight of a moss rose. "'Oh the beauty of it. Oh the goodness of G.o.d in giving us such alleviations in this hard world. . . . And oh how unlike the Queen's countenance.'"

Hannah More, "that bishop in petticoats," when she was not at Battersea Rise, could be descended upon in Somerset, "where the two cats called 'Non-resistance' and 'Pa.s.sive obedience' were fed by us all day long . . . crowns of flowers were made for ourselves, garlands for the sheep. . . . We were fed with strawberries and cream and told to lie down in the hay whilst Charles the coachman made us a syllabub under the cow." "Unlike Wilberforce," says Mr. Forster, "she never married and so she never altered. Childless herself, she became the family life that does not die with death.'' And so, we are brought to feel, did Marianne.

We move with Marianne through her successive phases of daughter, sister, aunt, great-aunt. "She pa.s.ses into spinsterhood without regret." The crises of her long, full life were few in number; its daily animation and its depth had purer, less accessible sources. The fabric of the family (for others married, and often had ten children) remains strong, consistent in quality, the same on both sides, and exactly what it seems, goodness itself. It is given a variation in sheen by the occasional introduction of rainbow threadsfor example, the Rev. Charles Forster, who married Marianne's sister Laura and turned out to be E. M. Forster's grandfather.

It is toward the end of Marianne's life that Imagination, with a radiant, inquisitive 5-year-old face, takes its first real look at the family. Edward Morgan Forster, that dragonfly of a little boy, the son of Edward Forster and Alice Clara Whichelo, darted across Marianne's last days and with the evident satisfaction he brought her (he had to wear corkscrew curls for her pleasure) was borne some inkling perhaps of what she was not to see for herself in this life. She left a bequest. This made possible Cambridge, then travel, "which inclined me to write." It was while staying with "Aunt Monie" that the little boy had made at the age of 4 at least one discovery that would have confounded a Thornton: he was already able to read to himself. "From that moment I never looked back . . . . No one taught me to read and no one managed to teach me to write."

The family papers on which this work is based are copious, varied and descended from a number of hands old and young; they date from about 1750 to 1900, and only those of a domestic nature have been drawn upon; Page 114 there are others of a different importance. Framed by the rest are Marianne's owna lifetime's letters and her Recollections, which she began writing out for young Edward Morgan Forster when she was an old lady. Time, kins.h.i.+p and the female human heartformidable combinationhave not now held out against him. Marianne appears, a human beingwaving whatever useful domestic implement she happens to have in her hand, possibly her quill. We shall never forget her. So, while he has been about it, have appeared a great many other vigorous, attractive and irreplaceable people out of Marianne's world.

Mr. Forster has created them all out of, or in spite of, what might almost be called an embarra.s.sment of riches. What the choices must have cost him! On every hand he produces the tangible, the direct, the explicit, the spark that catches fire; he shows the letter, high-minded or gossipy, with the spirit still intact like the gentian that was folded in Marianne's letter from Switzerland, still blue.

The reader, who has fallen in love with Marianne on account of the book, can only feel how beautifully she persists in pages so thronging with all that signified life to her: her family around her and extending in both directions, Battersea Rise and the tulip tree that Napoleon never succeeded in invading England to cut down, the beloved friends, the visits and parties and jauntings, the letters and sketches and books and babies, everybody who ever was drawn into the whirl and sweep of the Thornton galaxy, from Nurse Hunter to the Mohawk who was persuaded to dance and sing when he happened in to pay his respects one dayall in a marvelously ordered account of cloudless focus, felicitous and witty and wise.

To the Thornton mind, imagination threatened a danger a good deal less calculable than that of Napoleon; neither did the Thorntons possess the sense of mystery or of poetry. Mr. Forster's best gifts are not mentioned here to belittle theirswhat could be more inappropriate?but to observe for our own improvement that our foremost writer of fiction is exactly who is needed to comprehend human beings who have been real as well as those who are going to be. 90 He is doubly valuable if they have been both real and good; triply valuable if they are receding rapidly in time but are still able to give evidence through their effects and if the effects are miscellaneous.

Mr. Forster has employed powers Marianne might not knowingly have countenanced, but she has not been hurt: she has been celebrated and loved. Continuity has been taken care of; and we are the gainers.

Page 115 The Green Hills and Other Stories By Walter Macken Ireland with Figures:

New York Times Book Review 5 August 1956: 4, 12

The author of several novels of Irish life published in this country, 91 Walter Macken has written here a group of short stories with a dedication to his home town, "the Citie of the Tribes."92 With the location in common, they are otherwise mostly independent of one another, but from the whole one gets a picture of a little town of the west of Ireland facing the Atlantic, with a beach of yellow sand between mountains and sea, slopes of heather with mountain lakes and blue bog holes, stony fields, salt-laden winds, mountain streams full of poachable salmon, and the little frail currachs going out to brave the sea for the catch.

Of the people, one sees sides of their independence, vigor, pride and a certain Western recklessness of spirit, but the picture is less clear because, oddly enough, it is more general. Some of the characters come curiously close to types. Perhaps this is the price any author pays for the too-close view; outlines long familiar tend to blur.

Some of the characters, like Gaeglers, and the two old brothers in "The Gauger" for example, seem alive and kicking. Others, like the "atheist" who lived apart on the mountain top and gave his life to save a little boy lost in the storm on his way to see him, didn't strike me as half as real, and I wondered if that was because this kind of character belonged not to the story itself so much as to old and established tales of the family fireside. It gives rise to a question of whether the stories here could be perhaps of two categoriesone group experienced (in the artist's sense), the other in some Page 116 form grown up with, heard told, their sharpness and unconforming edges rubbed away like a stone's in the sea.

Mr. Macken can indeed tell a very good storywitness "Gaeglers and the Wild Geese," "The Currach Race" and "The Gauger," to take the very first three in the book. The vitality of the telling is attractive and has a certain momentum of its own. The style is a close approach to the spoken word. "After last ma.s.s on St. Patrick's Day in the village there were hundreds of people gathered on the two necks of land which embraced the sea on either side of the strand." (This is for "The Currach Race.'') " . . . The sun was cold looking and there was a good breeze traveling from the direction of America. You would swear that the sea was clapping its hands because somebody had told it there were four fools who might otherwise have remained out of its grip at this time of the year."

A few of these stories are too patpat because the anecdote and the symbol lie in wait for them, as of course they always lie. Mr. Macken doesn't estimate them as dangerous. He apparently trusts them as the friends of Ireland that they are, and once or twice has turned his story over to them and they have gobbled it up. This is a pity, for the least of the stories opens full of promise. All any of them need do, one feelsfor one responds to the attraction of the place and the exuberance of the authoris be allowed to follow their own inherent direction and bear out their implications.

The lone English lady who comes to live in a shack on the edge of town and takes her national walk in rain or s.h.i.+ne on the wild lonely Irish road, sounds full of provocation, but all she does is accept a kitten, and beam at us, beam away her mystery; it is forgotten for sentimentwasted, and Mr. Macken could have done a real job on her. Perhaps he is an author who hesitates to let his characters grow real without the scope of a novel; as it is, in the stories it's the place of their origin that has the towering reality.

Page 117 Last Tales By Isak Dinesen A Touch That's Magic

New York Times Book Review 3 November 1957: 5

The Danish-born author (Baroness Karen Blixen) 93 who writes under the pen name of Isak Dinesen has the straightout gift for performing illusion, and the resources of mind and heart of a great lady who has lived for a good many years in many different parts of the world. In her tales, one of the extraordinary things is that the spellfor they lie in the realm of magic and romancegets done by the speed of wit, takes its turn within the circle of morality, and keeps its hold, through irony, which usually attends on learning and experience, not enchantment. But I haven't found anything out, for the spells work, too, through the pure delight of the senses.

Isak Dinesen has, of course, a long time ago made herself master of the tale and her three previous books, Seven Gothic Tales, Out of Africa and Winter's Tales, are well known in this country.94 Austerely objective in their execution, true to her credo of the storyteller's story, her tales are also extremely personal in their point of view, in their great style. They have a vigor which persuades us that vigor perfectly solves the secret of delicacy, for her stories are the essence of delicacy.

She has a marvelous gaiety, and what makes it more marvelous still are its transpositions, true gaiety's other key. Her tales are glimpses out of, rather than into, an extraordinary mind. Sometimes one feels that Isak Dinesen's stories come toward one like the flashes and signal-beams from a lighthouse on a strange and infrequently sighted coasta coast beautiful and precarious, for it may be the last outreach of magic, but resting on bedrock.

Page 118 Like all her tales, these twelve (her first collection in seventeen years) are like no other tales. They range from country to country, the North to the Southfrom point to point in time, from here to there in reality. There are tales joined onto other tales, tales inlaid in tales, and one long, disturbingly beautiful, unfinished Gothic tale called "The Caryatids." What is their inner relation and their true domain?

In "Night Walk," a story happening in Italy some centuries ago, a betrayer of his friend, who afterwards cannot sleep is told that if he walks through the streets of the city, proceeding always from the larger street into the smaller and narrower, until he can turn no further, he will find sleep at the end. He reaches the place: "This moment was a return and a beginning. He stretched out his hand, took care to draw his breath lightly twice, and opened the door. By a table in a little, faintly lit room, a red-haired man was counting his money." Who was the red-haired man? That's the story.

Her tales all have a start in other talesfor a tale must have its "start," as good bread must; as good flowers must, proliferate how they may. Her "starts" are the fables, the fairy tales, stories from the Bible and the Arabian Nights and Ancient Greece and Rome. Sometimes they can be felt to be pa.s.sing, like a procession not more than one street over; sometimes we see their old rich banners and colors, catch their songs and sight their retinues of seraphic or diabolic origin, and sometimes that procession and the procession of her story cross and mingle, they may even dance, and all the queens and lovers then, the magicians and children and beasts and hunters and wives and gypsies and country G.o.ds and artists and angels are of a company together.

Are these tales human? Whatever they are not, is irrelevant.

"The divine art is the story," a storyteller says in one of these tales. "In the beginning was the story. . . . Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. . . . We, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence."

Remembering her Out of Africa, surely one of the most sensitive personal accounts written in our time, we are moved to think how it is the same eye that saw the Giant Forest Hog on the path in the Ngong Forest that sees the primeval boar in the Gypsy's spell of the water wheel in her tale "The Caryatids." And we realize so clearly that they are visions both, even perhaps of the same thing, one life gave to her and one a story gave to her. Both visions she has let us see, but kept them two.

Page 119 It is enough to open this book and start reading: "It was a lovely spring day, and the almond trees were blossoming. . . . From the terrace at the top there was a wide view over the landscape, and all the shapes and colors within it . . . in the cool of the evening were as beautifully harmonious as if an angel had stood behind the shoulder of the observer and poured it all out from his flute."

"Are you sure," a lady asks a storyteller in this book, "that it is G.o.d whom you serve?"

"The Cardinal looked up, met her eyes and smiled very gently. 'That,' he said, 'that, Madame, is a risk which the artists and priests of the world have to run.'" 95 Page 120 Granite and Rainbow By Virginia Woolf Uncommon Reader:

New York Times Book Review 21 September 1958: 6