Bad Characters, by Jean Stafford. Farrar, Straus, $4.95 Chaos and Night, by Henry de Montherlant. Macmillan, $4.95 Little Big Man, by Thomas Berger. Dial Press, $5.95 The imagination, as our century has had to relearn, is an enterprise unto itself—not a subservient quality of mind, or an ingredient to spice thought, or mere sprightliness to give a gay touch to action otherwise dull. It is even convenient to think ofitasan organism with an embryology, genetic destiny, and ripe maturity. The imagination of the storyteller has a biological identity as rigorously clear as a shark or a coconut tree. Scholars tend to its ancestry, critics to its ecology and health; devoted readers follow its growth.
The three works before us illustrate nicely Middle, Late and Early in three engagingly hardy imaginations. Jean Stafford (Mrs. A. J. Liebling) is mid-career; it is her seventh book we are looking at (though one of its stories is two decades old) and her imagination has come to a mastery of its life. Henry de Montherlant has been writing for fiftyeight years, relentlessly fostering a talent bordering on genius. Thomas Berger’s imagination is but three novels old, but it came before us— and has remained—a whopping, wild, hilarious wonderment, beyond classification or systematic scrutiny.
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