A Writer's Eye Part 8

New York Times Book Review 7 February 1965: 4, 4445

The story of Karen Blixen's life is almost as well known as the stories she wrote under the name of Isak Dinesen: her birth in Rungstedlund, near Elsinore, where she died in 1962, her long sojourn in Africa during and after her marriage to a cousin. 118 When the coffee plantation failed, she went home with her life in ruins. Robert Langbaum in The Gayety of Vision, writes: "She liked to tell how she asked her brother Thomas to finance her for two years while she found something to do. There were only three things, she told him, she could do better than average. She could cook; . . . she could take care of mad people; she could write. They settled on writing, and she produced Seven Gothic Tales two years later. The story is amusing," says Mr. Langbaum, but it doesn't really do, for "it has become apparent since her death" that there were "four soft-covered notebooks apparently bought in Nairobi" and "another kind of notebook, hardcovered, bought in Copenhagen'' in which she had jotted notes and fragments of stories.

At any rate she published her first book at 49. Three years later came Out of Africa, then after five more years Winter's Tales. During the Occupation she published The Angelic Avengers under the pseudonym Pierre Andrezel, and Mr. Langbaum says you may have it. Then, in her seventies, Isak Page 137 Dinesen published in rapid succession Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, and Shadows on the Gra.s.s. Ehrengard was published posthumously in 1963. 119 A great lady, an inspired teller of her own tales, a traveler, possessed of a learned and seraphic mind, her health was extraordinarily frailbut she was not stopped. After an operation on her spine, she wrote Last Tales by dictation, lying on her back on the floor; and she was a writer given to doing a story 15 times over.

Mr. Langbaum, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, writes that after Last Tales and Anecdotes of Destiny were published in 1957 and 1958, "a number of literary people in this country, myself included, came to feel that Isak Dinesen had now produced an oeuvre and was ripe for serious critical consideration." He says he undertook his study to express his admiration for her work, to find the reasons why we like it, and to suggest that she is an important writer. He will show the high quality of her stories, he says, by explaining them.

He has accomplished his three aims usually by way of, but at moments in spite of, his method. His explication is stimulating because it is so learned, so remarkably allusive; this reader likes it better when it is far-flung than when it sticks too close. His a.n.a.lysis stays with each story episode by episode, point by point, sometimes it seems line by lineyet of course the a.n.a.lysis is not the story. It is like the negative of the positive of a time-exposure of a flying snow-crystal. I admire his study and have learned from it, and at the same time I found it fantasticalperhaps fittingly so.120 "In the beginning was the story," says Isak Dinesen's character, the Cardinal, talking about Genesis. "But you will remember . . . that the human characters in the book come forth on the sixth day only-by that time they were bound to come for where the story is, the characters will gather!"

The meaning of the story, "The Roads Round Pisa," he says, is in the t.i.tle. "The truth is in Pisa, the heart of life is there. But the story that reveals the truth is played out on the roads round Pisa. . . . The point is that you don't get at the truth about the world or yourself by going straight to it. You get at it by seeming to move away to an esthetic distance. You get at it through artifice and traditionby a.s.similating your particular event to a recurring pattern, your particular self to an archetype."

Mr. Langbaum calls Seven Gothic Tales in the long run "a great book about Europe." He goes on to say that this is "because Isak Dinesen's experience of Africa stands behind it; and Europe stands, in the same way, Page 138 behind every word of Out of Africa. . . . For the imagination works by just such a reconciliation of opposites."

"The Deluge," in Seven Gothic Tales, he thinks her best story "because it is her wittiest. It combines the greatest number of her characteristic themes, and the most widely opposite effects. The wit fuses all these into a story that manages at every point to be both tragic and comic."

I find Mr. Langbaum brilliant throughout in his appreciation of his subject's wit, her lyric intensity, her highly organized and highly complicated artistry; in his treatment of the themes she carries farthestthe mysteries of ident.i.ty, the vicariousness of experience, the polarities of experience, the myths of fall and redemption, her employment of characters as agents of destiny, her devices of the mask and marionette. How close he seems to come to her when he says, "Her wit is amazing in that it exalts and magnifies and never diminishes its object," and he remarks on "the quality of an amorous exchange between souls that is characteristic of [her] greatest conversations." What a delight to learn from him that the nom de plume Isak means "laughter."

She told Mr. Langbaum that she used the word "tale" not in the sense Hans Christian Andersen did, but in the sense Shakespeare did in A Winter's Tale, or "in the naive view of a child or primitive who sees a story as neither tragic nor comic but as marvelous." He says, "Isak Dinesen works by condensation rather than by the novelist's expansion." She writes "without the remotest reference to psychology and anthropology. [She] seems to contain and avoid our knowledge, to have access to it through some older source."

She is "dealing with the way in which relative or human motives are unconsciously at the service of absolute or divine intention. . . . [In] her latest two volumes of stories . . . the best . . . come closest to being perfect fables or myths or parables." Indeed, she typically "offers the form she is using, the story, as the solution to the problem posed in the story." "Her stories are fantastic in the way wit isin the jubilant freedom with which possibilities are stretched and ideas combined."

"Not by the face shall the man be known, but by the mask," one of her characters says. "Because," as Mr. Langbaum points out, "You do not find out who you are by . . . looking into a mirror, but by putting on a mask." This allows you to play out your unrealized potentialities . . . to step from a human story into G.o.d's story." Also, "An ident.i.ty is a work of imagination."

Page 139 And, "The end of life is not safety but self-realization." Finally, "The lie becomes truth because they represent a truth deeper than the obvious one."

"'What an overwhelming lesson to all artists! Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution. Be brave!'" says the Cardinal in "Deluge," having already spoken of "the tremendous courage of the Creator of this world." The author points out that Isak Dinesen "considers tragedy to be fulfillment. It is in fulfilling one's destiny that one meets a completely tragic end, which is why traditional tragedy is a triumph, not a failure."

There is s.p.a.ce here only to suggest what erudite and far-ranging and always explicit references Mr. Langbaum makes on every page. When a character says, "Keep always in your heart the divine law of proportion, the golden section," he is here with the reference: the 1469 treatise by a friend of Leonardo's, "De Divina Proportione," which in turn calls to his mind a theory of Jung's, and then is applied to Isak Dinesen's diagrammatic construction of plot. To speak of only the religious references, he has had to be familiar not only with the Bible but with theologies from Roman Catholic to Unitarian; with not only the Christian G.o.d but with the Greek G.o.ds and the Wendish. 121 As his author writes stories within stories, so Mr. Langbaum has set her work as a whole into the cl.u.s.ter of traditions, mythologies, affinities and archetypes in which he feels it belongs. Indeed I think he has honorably explored all the roads round Isak Dinesen.

When she brings it off he is so pleased, so proud of herperhaps a little proud with her in explaining her victories. Does he become the least bit possessive? She ventures to introduce Ibsen as a character in a storyhe wishes she hadn't. He toys with the thought of transposing Parts IV and V in her autobiographical Out of Africa. He finds the origin of one of her stories in Kierkegaard: and "though she did not consider herself an existentialist and disclaimed any extensive understanding of existentialist philosophy," nevertheless "it is safe to say that [she] is an existentialist. . . ." Safe for whom?

This reader is chilled by Mr. Langbaum treating Out of Africa as he would as if it were fiction, although he can then say some penetrating things about this superb book. He feels it in place to comment as a literary critic of Isak Dinesen about Karen Blixen's living of her life, since "Isak Dinesen . . . made her life a part of her oeuvre. . . . It is because [she] had courageboth Page 140 courage in the ordinary sense and the existential courage to be one's self and to follow the logic of one's own naturethat her life and work are all of a piece: that she was able to write stories distinguished by the courage that in art we call style, and to create for herself a life and personality as audacious, extravagant, surprising and, yes, as shocking, too, as her stories."

Isak Dinesen was amused to think of herself as a Scheherazade. 122 And what if, instead of only holding death over her head night after night, the Sultan had waited until she had an oeuvre and then, taking the voice of the critic, had put it to her: "Now, how would you like me to tell you what you have just said?" Whatever Scheherazade might have answered, we have the Sultan's interpretation.

But Mr. Langbaum has produced a fascinating study of this fascinating and enigmatic writer. "One admires before one knows why," he says at the beginning. I suspect that his own first response to her stories was "That's beautiful!"before it was "That's important." He has demonstrated that they are important, and also acclaimed them for being marvelous. "Marvelous" is the relevant and better word, is it not?

Page 141 Martha Graham:

Portrait of the Lady As an Artist

By LeRoy Leatherman Movement Never Lies:

Sewanee Review Summer 1967: 52933

Martha Graham, we read here, has said she learned her first dancing lesson from her fathera doctor. He had learned it from observing the behavior of his mental patients: movement never lies. From the beginning, says LeRoy Leatherman in his informative and beautifully mounted Martha Graham: Portrait of the Lady as an Artist, "Martha aimed for . . . ways of moving that would communicate varieties of human experience which the art of the dance had never before attempted . . . and ultimately for dramas that would be acted through movement alone."

An American from away backMiles Standish is an ancestorthis bold and down-to-earth innovator is "a peculiarly American genius of whom Americans know very little." Before she was grown, she had gone with the Denishawn Company, dancing as a j.a.panese boy. (This was her role on stage; off stage she was being their bookkeeper.) She did an Apache number with Charles Weidman in the Greenwich Village Follies, taught after that at the Eastman School, where, said Rouben Mamoulian, who hired her, she came upon the scene "like John the Baptist." But when, in 1926, she gave her first performance as an independent artist, it was on the stage of a Broadway theater, the Forty-Eighth Street, and it has always been the theater, not the studio, that she has made her boundaries inside, performed in, created for.

Page 142 Mr. Leatherman goes so far as to call Martha Graham not a ch.o.r.eographer but a dramatist. He is equipped to speak. Since for twelve years he has been variously a.s.sociated with Miss Graham as her company manager, personal manager, and the director of her School, we may take this as officialor if not quite that, then as an opinion due respect. Since also Mr. Leatherman is a novelist, he is further equipped for translating story and movement onto the page without having his head go round. He has written what must have been, nevertheless, a difficult book to write: a book about the one artist from whose works all words, all "intellectualizations," have been specifically and warmly banned by the subject of the book. Yet he has done his job well: a sensitive portrait emerges; he has insight and wit; and where, in his world, he must be the only one who is standing still, he has kept his equilibrium as well as his firm affection.

The Graham ideas come from where all original and undeniable ideas in art come fromwithin; perhaps they are intense forms of human insight. She must mediate alone. But her work "begins to be cooperative the moment she hands her script to the composer and it becomes increasingly so until, by curtain time on opening night, a hundred or so people are involved."

Her script must be indescribable: "deliberately open and evocative," it is yet a working sheet; and for the composers she sends her scripts to, they do work: Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Norman Dello Joio, William Schuman, and others. When the music arrives, she never questions a note or asks for changes (she is not overly fond of music for its own sake); what she has to do is get "the pattern of the composition in her sinews." Once she's done that, she ties the handles of her studio doors together with a strip of red jersey, "and everyone on the premises knows what that means. From now on, no one unasked enters until the knot is untied."

Of her set designers, it is Noguchi with whom she has always worked best. 123 He did Appalachian Spring, Cave of the Heart, Night Journey, Seraphic Dialogue, Clytemnestra, Alcestis, and Phaedra, among others. "There is a perfect understanding by each of the other's art, a perfect agreement about the use and power of symbols and about the design and use of stage s.p.a.ce." These are of course the fundamentals of her work. Noguchi makes her a tiny model that he can bring her in a shoe box. But they neither one can foresee quite everything from this: the finished set for Seraphic Dialogue (the s.h.i.+ning, abstract structure in tubes which was to suggest Joan of Arc's cathedral, and which might have been made by Merlin out of Tinker-toys) Page 143 would, Noguchi thought, fit into a good big suitcase; it somehow requires five crates "and some mechanical genius to erect."

Mr. Leatherman's book, of necessity loosely organized though explicitly worded, takes us from the beginning of a Graham work, which may, or may not, start with a scriptClytemnestra (which Mr. Leatherman considers her highest achievement) was achieved without a scriptup to curtain rise on opening night. He supplies an account both affectionate and touching of the final hectic weeks before an Opening, and shares with us the cries heard from the great artist through the pandemonium: "Why did I ever get myself into this? Cancel the season." "I haven't had a minute to work on myself. Clear the building. Get the company out of here, they've rehea.r.s.ed enough. I've got to have some time alone." "I cannot think about that now." There's no time to eat or think about food, and besides "It is better always to eat the same thing." "Money? Money's nothing. If we need it, we'll have it.'' "Don't push me!" And, "I'm being nibbled to death by ducks!"

Then, on the night, the lone meditation to which she has returned for a last hour over with, she waits in the wings transformed. Before, in the weeks of work, "she was in her own eyes a drudge; now she is ready for the conquering . . . alert for the cue and the wash of light to bring her out to be Clytemnestra or Phaedra or Alcestis or Judith . . . or the comical, but most moving and understandable, artist in Acrobats of G.o.d."

"She started, and her art starts," he writes, "with basic facts, on the ground; the floor, equivalent to the hard, resistant but cultivatable earth, is her element as surely as the ballet dancer's element is clear empty air." The drama she then builds he sees as essentially Greek: it must "move, purge and elevate the spirit." "Martha's best works are always models of poetic density, economy, and compression. She can convey more in twenty-five minutes than most playwrights can manage to do in three acts." I think he can say that again. When she works with history, myths, the ancient tragedies, "there is no guessing . . . how she will re-mold them." What is certain is the originality of her insight and of her approach. "She will . . . take full liberty with the events . . . but she never violates her source and never debases it. In fact she elevates her protagonists by bestowing upon them . . . a richer humanity." "She has never, as she says, been interested in anything small." Rather, her work is "an affirmation of man. Her art insists upon the meaningfulness of human experience, even the darkest."

"Dancing, she is an actress; 'ch.o.r.eographing', she is a dramatist." This is interesting, it is descriptive, and certainly the distinction matters, but does it Page 144 matter a great deal, one may wonder, by what name we call a truly original artist of the first water? The unique might just as well go free of all tags. The Graham genius is, past argument, itself. Rather than hover over its definition, let us seize the day and testify to its force.

She is an artist whose work is inseparable from her life, whose art and whose being are one, as this book well brings out. In the presence of such integrity as hers the audience feels it like a blaze. Furthermore, to those of us who have filled her theaters since the early days of what she now calls her "long woolen period," the excitement of her work has been increasing with time; it has performed its own drama of change and growth. 124 It is as though her theater itself were a moving boat on a river, and we on the bank were running beside it to keep up with it and to celebrate with it where it is going. Not only are the performances new experiences, but the river is uncharted, no telling how deep, full of the dangers of a strong, unpredictable current; and the boat itself is homemade, as was the Ark, and like it based on a personal idea, a loyal company, and help from above. Martha Graham has acknowledged the impracticalities and impecunities and the dangers of her life's work with exhilaration, with many a joyous manoeuvre, many an astonishment clapped upon our eyes.

And in invention and in performance, she is consistently working in the line of magic and legend from which her characters spring. She calls up a spell and she uses it. We follow what she is doing on her stage because we are under enchantment; we are its subjects, or should I say its calculated objects? Circe had other plans for people, but were her working methods very different?125 Martha Graham, a strong-minded genius, whose new season this spring introduced her hundred and fortieth and her hundred and forty-first new work, has no plans of leaving the stage to begin with, and no intention at all of leaving it her notations. She has had an enormous influence on the dance, but she will not pa.s.s on her secrets: this would mean putting them into abhorred words. She abhors also reviving a work; Clytemnestra can not go back to being the Bride of Appalachian Spring. No film has successfully recorded her. Her art belongs to us who see her now. Its indelibility is offered only to the memory of lucky people.

There is no other way. An art in which the spirit of the artist is translated into the body, the dance belongs to the living present in which it moves. In fact, isn't its transience one of its awe-inspiring properties? If the same physical law applied to all the arts, we would need to have lived after 1787 Page 145 and before 1791, and to have known the right people, and then not to have had a cold on the night of the invitation, to have heard Don Giovanni once.

Twenty-seven pages of stunning photographs lead off this book, twenty-seven pages more parade at the close, and dozens of others appear throughout its text. They are by Martha Swope, made during performances of the last five years; they are beautiful in themselves and invaluable as records. Included also is a complete chronological list of the dances composed by Miss Graham from 1926 through 1965, along with the names of the musical composers. 126 Page 146 The Little Man and the Big Thief By Erich Kstner Otto and the Magic Potatoes By William Pene du Bois Knee-Knock Rise By Natalie Babbitt Four Riviews by Eudora Welty 127:

New York Times Book Review 24 May 1970, Part II: 45, 45

The Little Man and the Big Thief Maxie Pichelsteiner, the hero of an earlier book, The Little Man, is a Bohemian gymnast and acrobat two inches high, who sleeps in a matchbox.128 He is famous now, and his life story is being made into a film for television. He lives in his own house, Villa Glowworm, a gift from King Bileam the Nice, with everything made to his own scale down to a tiny dial telephone. (When he's on the ordinary telephone, he has to dash from earpiece to mouthpiece and back.) Maxie lost his parents when he was only six, but he is fortunate in his friends. Professor Hokus von Pokus, the circus magician, has brought him up, teaching him Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic and another compulsory subject, Doing Nothing, which comes every day from three to four, Page 147 Sundays included. The warm-hearted trampoline acrobat Rosa Marzipan is equally devoted to his comfort.

Into this new adventure comes Miss Emily Simpson, Maxie's same size, wearing a tiny ponytail hairdo with a red velvet ribbon. It's a case of "instant friends.h.i.+p."

There's lots of excitement, plenty of speed and a satisfactory plot of wheels-within-wheels. Reappearing from the earlier book is the powerful villain Senor Lopez. He's the richest man in the world, with a castle and a vertical take-off jet. He's the kind of menace who collects odd people for oddity's sake and keeps them in "a kind of zoo for rare human beings." His earlier try for Maxie was foiled, but he will never give up, and, now under scrutiny by detectives, is being made the subject of a film himselfa doc.u.mentary, which would run as a second feature with the movie about Maxie.

The spirit of the Continental circus, the techniques of today's film and television, and the old, old sense of magic in story-telling, are all together in this novel and the combination sounds perfectly natural.

"'How much do I eat and drink in a day?'" (Maxie's being interviewed by the press.) "'Approximately I should say I consume about a couple of square centimeters of brown bread, a knifepoint of b.u.t.ter, a teaspoonful of cocoa, a thimbleful of lemonade, one small b.u.t.ton mushroom, one tenth of a new potato, two morsels of sausage. . . .'

"'What! No cheese?' exclaimed the forward young miss.

"'Oh, yes, yes. But only Swiss cheese. Lots of it, though! Every day twenty to thirty holes!'"

The book is about performersbut it's also about behavior and manners, the way people of any age and any size treat one another. Its touch is light and its world one of gaiety, but the story never says there's no sadness in experience.

In a press conference, a forward Miss, in the style of her kind, asks Maxie how he felt when his tiny parents were blown off the Eiffel Tower to their deaths. "'Did you cry very much?'" Maxie in a flash jumps right into her beehive hairdo and starts pulling it to pieces for all he is worth. "'There!' he said afterwards. 'And now I shall give you your answer. Yes, at that time I did cry, very much.'" Bravo for Maxie!

There is nothing sugary, no talking-down from Mr. Kstner toward his two-inch-high hero nor toward his young reader. Rather, he tells the story as though he's sharing in a common pleasure with them both, with an occasional remark addressed straight to the reader, "Have you ever tried to Page 148 pack a conjurer's magic tails into a suitcase? No? Well, it takes at least an hour and a half." He tells the story, too, with its proper vocabulary; words like "confounded effrontery" are not left out.

And although nothing has been underlined, it's there for the young reader to observe for himself: in a human being, no matter if he is only two inches high, feelings may lie too deep for words, and actions may reach up to giant size in courage and high spirits.

Stanley Mack's ill.u.s.trations are lively black-and-white drawings that will bear interested scrutiny. There's one that shows the Sergeant-Major and the Alsatian dog Pluto (both detectives) asleep side by side in identical positions, heads cus.h.i.+oned on arm and front leg respectively.

Otto and the Magic Potatoes Clearly, unusual size is a sign of magic powers. Otto, the famous dog, a little over two-and-a-half stories tall and loved by everyone in the world, wins his famous medal for breeding in this his new adventure. He is kidnapped by a millionaire, Baron Backgammon, who likes to grow things as big as possibleparticularly roses and potatoes. What bad luck it is that the sound of a gong causes the vast roses to s.h.i.+ver into fragments and that at a single prod, the potatoes weep so strenuously from every eye that they're literally reduced to tears, till there's nothing left of them but their skins, like collapsed tents. Since Otto's big, too, it seems only natural to the Baron that he should get hold of him, and try out a few scientific experiments on him to find the answer to his problem. In spite of Otto's master putting up a good fight, the Baron performs his experiments and tells why afterwards: "I had to find out, you see. He doesn't collapse, he doesn't empty out. He's big. He's perfect. THERE'S HOPE FOR MY ROSES! THERE'S HOPE FOR MY POTATOES! THERE'S HOPE FOR THE WORLD!"

The town catches on fire, then, and Otto runs to the rescue. He puts out the fire when the firemen fail, finding the tearful potatoes just the thing, and is awarded a medal from the villagers for his bravery.

The bland Baron had only wanted these monster roses and potatoes for the good of the people. "'GATEMEN, LOWER THE DRAWBRIDGESAND CUT THEIR CHAINS!' Baron Backgammon shouted. 'My home is YOUR home!'"

Mr. du Bois's magnificent ill.u.s.trations are, of course, the main reason for this story. They are executed with his usual bravura and have been supplied Page 149 with a generosity splendid as that of the Baron himselffull color, doublepage size, and irresistible.

Knee-Knock Rise A little boy named Egan goes to visit relations in Instep, a village at the foot of a strange cliff called Knee-Knock Rise. On top of this cliff is a cloud of mist, and "from somewhere in that mist, on stormy nights when the rain drove harsh and cold, an undiscovered creature would lift its voice and moan. It moaned like a lonely demon, like a mad, despairing animal, like a huge and anguished something chained forever to its own great tragic disappointments."

n.o.body knew what it wasn.o.body had ever gone to see and come back again, not in a thousand years. No wonder n.o.body in Instep sleeps well. All the same, there's a Fair held here every year and the inhabitants say, "Come and eat and dance; be entertained and spend your money; andhear the Megrimum for yourselves." For the monster is a cause for local pride. "Megrimum" is a name calling up Grimm, mirage, maybe Moloch, but in essence it seems a sound-word for a power that's mainly all mouth, making a noise and reputed to devour.

Before the day of the Fair is over, Egan climbs the cliff to find out the secret for himself. Uncle Ott had disappeared before Egan's arrival"Uncle Ott ran off up there and the Megrimum ate him," says his cousin Ada, and "she smiled rapturously." And once Egan reaches the top, who's there to greet him but Uncle Ott?

Uncle Ott, who's qualified in that he writes poems about Kings and Fools, says, "Boy, listen to me. There isn't any Megrimum. Never was. It's all been just a lot of nothing all these years." And he points into a cave. "It's only a natural spring. Sulphur. Nasty, but not unnatural."

Egan says, "They'll be glad when I tell them the truth. I did slay the Megrimum, in a way. Or at least I'll slay it now." He throws a rock into the spring and the moaning stops.

"There's always the possibility that they're happier believing," warns Uncle Ott.

Egan, safe down below again, waits to be called "a hero, or a savior," but n.o.body believes him. He begins to question his own experience. "Is there a Megrimum up there, or isn't there?" His Uncle Anson says, "I think it doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is whether you want to Page 150 believe he's there or not." And the chandler avows that the Megrimum is still there, all right, but "he's got his own ways." And then it storms again, and what is heard but another booming, another howling shriek, and the moaning once more?

This story is thoughtfully written and written to provoke thought. To an extent it will succeed. It does not, however, touch the feelings very deeply, beyond arousing uneasiness. There's a coldness about the treatment of the characters, who are not an altogether rea.s.suring company to begin with. They represent att.i.tudes. Egan is given more warmth and more reality than the others.

I felt a morbid quality in the insistent irony about the "intense satisfaction" the villagers took in the Megrimum, how "happily scared" they are to hear its moans. There's an almost punitive note, too, to the final revelations. "The only and lost and greatest terrible secret in the world" is ''just a lot of megrimummery," says Uncle Ott, "just a hole in the ground."

The child reader will be aware that in the long run the Megrimum is symbolic. The story is about the mysterious, but more than that it's about belief in the mysterious. Do we believe in the Megrimum, or don't we? By placing the burden of final judgment on the child reader, the author may be wiser than she thinks. Children do know well some things that we have forgotten.

The drawings by the author are a good deal more serene than her story. Their gentle, flowing line has created lovely animals in particular; beside them, the human beings look curiously static.

Page 151 No Flying in the House By Betty Brock For Young Readers:

New York Times Book Review 16 August 1970: 22

What child hasn't wondered, "Who are my true parents?" Annabel, 6, has honest cause for wonder, for she doesn't remember her parents and their whereabouts is a mystery. 129 She is being very well taken care of in Mrs. Vancourt's big, comfortable house, but the one who really mothers her is a little dog, only three inches high and three inches long, named Gloria. Gloria is wise, fiercely protective, she knows 369 tricks, and she can talk. In short, Gloria is a fairy.

The question is, is Annabel part fairy? No Flying in the House is the story of a little girl who can kiss her elbow and, after a few false starts, can fly around the roomand comes to believe that part-fairy is exactly what she is. She will be required to choose with which side, the human or the fairy, she will lead her life.

Pressure is brought to bear from all sides. There is a wicked fairy, of course, to oppose the good Gloriaa fairy cat, talented, hard and dangerous, named Belinda. The solid presence of Mrs. Vancourt, rich and wellintentioned but with no foolishness about her, is made-to-order contrast against fairies. "No flying in the house" is her edict. ("Vancourts do not fly.") The quality of fantasy is unstrained. Betty Brock's short novel is gentle and imaginative, with a genuine atmosphere and a warm humor.

The book is especially commendable for the quality of its fairies. They're no saccharine, pastel-tinted mites coming when called and granting wishes, but beings of an inhuman race, glittering, intense, unpredictable, capable of Page 152 fairy good and fairy evil, of going to pieces and coming back together again, of flying to the stars, or of shooting steam out of their ears if you trap them. 130 Mrs. Vancourt is reliably obtuse about either children or fairies, but in the end she is changed by the wandnot that of the fairies, but the real wand of human affection. Fairy magic is wondrous but may be chill. Warmth comes only from the mortal side, from the human heart. Annabel chooses well.

Page 153 Baby, It's Cold Inside By S. J. Perelman S. J. Perelman Should be Declared a Living National Treasure:

New York Times Book Review 30 August 1970: 1, 25

It can do no harm to tell it now. At the age of 15, this reviewer fell hopelessly in love with S. J. Perelman. It was from afar, for I was sitting in Jackson (Miss.) High School, in Cicero cla.s.s. While the others were studying "How long, O Catiline, must we endure your orations?" I was taking in "'Gad, Lucy, You're Magnificent!' Breathed the Great Painter," drawing and caption by S. J. Perelman, from a copy of Judge on my lap. 131 S. J. Perelman filled the whole copy of that now forgotten magazine every weekdrawings, sketches, playlets. I didn't guess he was just a jump ahead of me in school himself at the time. I only knew what any child with a grain of prophecy would knowthat here was one of the extraordinary wits of our time, who would come to be known, loved and feared by all. Well, it happened, and I didn't have to wait more than a minute.

What I predict now could really be put in the form of a nomination: that S. J. Perelman be declared a living national treasure. This would be a good time for it. He has a new book today, and we need the treasure.

"If I were to apply for a library card in Paris, I would subscribe myself as a feuilletoniste, that is to say, a writer of little leaves. . . I should like to affirm my loyalty to it as a medium. The handful of chumps who still practice it are as lonely as the survivors of Fort Zinderneuf; a few more a.s.saults by television and picture journalism and we might as well post their bodies on the Page 154 ramparts, pray for togetherness, and kneel for the final annihilation. Until then, so long and don't take any wooden rhetoric."

S.J. Perelman wrote this in 1958 in the preface to a collection made from 30 years' work, The Most of S. J. Perelman. 132 We didn't take his advice. But he's still holding the fort. Thirty-two new reports ring out today. The annihilation is all at the other end, and the glory is still his.

In Baby, It's Cold Inside you'll meet Shameless McGonicle (the Irish poet), Monsieur Trompemari and Monsieur Libidineux (lovers of Madame Perdant), Lascivio (a Filipino houseboy), Charlotte Russo (a shapely young colleen), Lothar Perfidissich ("noted Hungarian playwright and plagiarist"), "a Miss Haldeman-Julius, related to the book people" (a dinner companion), Umlaut, the Times theater critic, Urban Sprawl the architect, Miss Kathleen Mavourneen (selling cable-st.i.tched sweaters, mittens and tamo'shanters in County Mayo), and Nards and Becks and Reedsworth Smiles (a trio of electricians). Also watch out for Crosspatch's (a luggage shop off St. James's), the Bon Ton Shoe Repair ("Hat Blocking Our Specialty, Crucifixion Our Portion''), and All-Gaul Airlines, and the dusty little bookshop on Fourth Avenue "where every prospect sneezes and only Mann, the owner, is vile."