Three Miscellanies

These three books are miscellanies, short stories for the most part, plays, essays, a reminiscence. From James Purdy, making his fourth book, ten stories and two plays; from John O’Hara, twenty-three stories; from the late Sicilian Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard, part of an autobiography, a story, and a sketch thought to be the beginning of a second novel. All contain brilliant examples of the short story, the healthiest and most versatile of modern prose forms; only Mr. O’Hara’s collection is of an even goodness. But all are good reading.

The substance of grief in John O’Hara’s stories is time. In “The Father,” an assistant foreman and head mechanic at the Clinton Motor Company, Trenton, N. J., weeps for his daughter’s future, “the years ahead.” His wife, an old newspaper photograph reminds him, had been a bobbysoxer wowed by Sinatra; his daughter is under the spell of some analogous idol. For a cruel moment, beer can in hand, leaning on the refrigerator, he sees what time is, and how, unawares, it implicates human life in its nature. This theme is a commonplace of literature, but trickily inaccessible (only poets and sophomores think about the mottoes on sundials), and one age’s grasp of it is inapplicable to another’s. The artist interpreting for the living must show them that the real impact of their banalities, and mortality, is in the kitchen.

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Guy Davenport

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These three books are miscellanies, short stories for the most part, plays, essays, a reminiscence. From James Purdy, making his fourth book, ten stories and two plays; from John O’Hara, twenty-three stories; from the late Sicilian Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard, part of an autobiography, a story, and a sketch thought to be the beginning of a second novel. All contain brilliant examples of the short story, the healthiest and most versatile of modern prose forms; only Mr. O’Hara’s collection is of an even goodness. But all are good reading.

The substance of grief in John O’Hara’s stories is time. In “The Father,” an assistant foreman and head mechanic at the Clinton Motor Company, Trenton, N. J., weeps for his daughter’s future, “the years ahead.” His wife, an old newspaper photograph reminds him, had been a bobbysoxer wowed by Sinatra; his daughter is under the spell of some analogous idol. For a cruel moment, beer can in hand, leaning on the refrigerator, he sees what time is, and how, unawares, it implicates human life in its nature. This theme is a commonplace of literature, but trickily inaccessible (only poets and sophomores think about the mottoes on sundials), and one age’s grasp of it is inapplicable to another’s. The artist interpreting for the living must show them that the real impact of their banalities, and mortality, is in the kitchen.