The Literary Humor of the Urban Northeast, 1830-1890; Edited by David E. E. Sloane; Louisiana State University Press; Baton Rouge. Chicago’s Public Wits; Edited by Kenny J. Williams and Bernard Duffey; Louisiana State University Press; Baton Rouge. It is a commonplace that humor arises from the amused recognition of the disparity between the ideal and...
Edward Albee: An Interview and Essay; Edited by Julian N. Wasserman; University of St. Thomas; Houston, TX. Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Don Quixote; Edited by Fredson Bowers; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. We often hear that language is under siege in America today, that it is being assailed on all sides by people who, either...
Harrison E. Salisbury: A Journey for Our Times: A Memoir; Harper & Row; New York. A Journey for Our Times is a frustrating, almost schizophrenic book. One approaches it with anticipation if only because the author is an experienced journalist with a unique fund of knowledge about the Soviet Union. But ultimately, Salisbury manages to...
Thomas Mann: Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man; Frederick Ungar; New York. The true artist living in a time dominated by politics finds himself traversing a path that is both arduous and dangerous. He begins with a search that is committed to life rather than to just the intellect; that search is replete with ambiguity and...
Paul Johnson: Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties; Harper & Row; New York. Impresario Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballet Russe rose to give his address. The year was 1905. “We are witnesses to the greatest moment of summing-up in history,” he declared: in the name of a new and unknown culture,...
Tadeusz Konwicki: A Minor Apocalypse; Translated by Richard Lourie; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. Contemporary Poland, for many reasons, disquiets the West. To those who nurture visions of a painless and peaceful accord between the Soviets and the United States against the supposed “common enemy” of nuclear weapons, the squashing of Solidarity to placate...
Gore Vidal; Duluth; Random House; New York. Gore Vidal has spawned another repulsive novel. Having experimented with historical travesty (Burr, Julian, 1876) and fag chic (Myra Breckinridge), Vidal has turned his fictional abilities to the world of soap operas and drugstore gothic novels. He has not risen above his material. Even the publishers do not...
Martin Seymour-Smith: Robert Graves: His Life and Work; Holt, Rinehart & Winston; New York. Douglas Archibald: Yeats; Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY. Although the era of “High Modernism” is well in the past, the pantheon of modern literature still seems to many a palace of confusions. The paradoxes and contradictions, the conflicting impulses that informed...
Walter Walker: A Dime to Dance By; Harper & Row; New York. Geoffrey Norman: Midnight Water; E.P. Dutton; New York. Existence — which is all there is, to answer Peggy Lee — consists of little things: there was only one Big Bang, and should there be another, none will be around to record it. Toe...