Books in Brief

O’Neill, by Arthur and Barbara Gelb (Harper, $12.50). This 970-page biography is one of the most detailed studies ever given an American author, and one of the few eminently readable, balanced biographical and critical studies of any author. O’Neill’s plays and his life are as intimate as lightning and thunder, action and reaction. The plays are now emerging into that necessary second life (those that can weather resurrection) which a work of art enters when it has real strength and universal interest. O’Neill wrote with energy alone, for the most part, counting on sheer kinetics to sustain meaning and impact. Why this was so becomes clear as we look at his life: as Greek a curse as Euripides ever conceived was upon it, an onslaught of the Furies. The authors trace the conception, writing, and staging of each play as they chronicle the events of a fiercely energetic life. Their biography is so detailed that one can recommend the book also as a fine record of O’Neill’s world and as a theatrical history of his time. A major study in American literature and certainly the definitive biography of O’Neill. g. davenport

Starting from San Francisco, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (New Directions, $2.95). The Beats made a great mistake in permitting a label to be glued on them, especially after they started believing what it said. Every moment Ferlinghetti expends on the hairs of Fidel’s “beat beard” is snatched from the service of an underdeveloped gift. He is, or could be, a comic writer with a curiously neutral idiom, whose ability to pass through translation doubtless helps explain why he is “being published in England, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, Peru, Chile and Puerto Rico.” On the predictable themes —Castro, Euphoria, Pot dreams, Journeys across the continent, Nausea, Negative sanctity — “i,m afraid / i don’t want to die”—he is portentously dull. But no stereotyped Beat has the wit for “The Great Chinese Dragon,” exalting it into the type of the orgiastic apocalypse, but not failing to note that the feet walking beneath it wear Keds. Nor does one’s sharp dissent from the politics of hysteria diminish the wit of “Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower,” nor one’s preconception of propriety damage the 98 lines which take for their subject “Underwear” and stick to that

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O’Neill, by Arthur and Barbara Gelb (Harper, $12.50). This 970-page biography is one of the most detailed studies ever given an American author, and one of the few eminently readable, balanced biographical and critical studies of any author. O’Neill’s plays and his life are as intimate as lightning and thunder, action and reaction. The plays are now emerging into that necessary second life (those that can weather resurrection) which a work of art enters when it has real strength and universal interest. O’Neill wrote with energy alone, for the most part, counting on sheer kinetics to sustain meaning and impact. Why this was so becomes clear as we look at his life: as Greek a curse as Euripides ever conceived was upon it, an onslaught of the Furies. The authors trace the conception, writing, and staging of each play as they chronicle the events of a fiercely energetic life. Their biography is so detailed that one can recommend the book also as a fine record of O’Neill’s world and as a theatrical history of his time. A major study in American literature and certainly the definitive biography of O’Neill. g. davenport

Starting from San Francisco, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (New Directions, $2.95). The Beats made a great mistake in permitting a label to be glued on them, especially after they started believing what it said. Every moment Ferlinghetti expends on the hairs of Fidel’s “beat beard” is snatched from the service of an underdeveloped gift. He is, or could be, a comic writer with a curiously neutral idiom, whose ability to pass through translation doubtless helps explain why he is “being published in England, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, Peru, Chile and Puerto Rico.” On the predictable themes —Castro, Euphoria, Pot dreams, Journeys across the continent, Nausea, Negative sanctity — “i,m afraid / i don’t want to die”—he is portentously dull. But no stereotyped Beat has the wit for “The Great Chinese Dragon,” exalting it into the type of the orgiastic apocalypse, but not failing to note that the feet walking beneath it wear Keds. Nor does one’s sharp dissent from the politics of hysteria diminish the wit of “Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower,” nor one’s preconception of propriety damage the 98 lines which take for their subject “Underwear” and stick to that