And a Cool Drink by the Hammock

End of the Game, by Julio Cortazar. Pantheon, $5.95 May We Borrow Your Husband? by Graham Greene. Viking, $4.50 It’s an Old Country, by J. B. Priestley. Little, Brown, $5.95

A BLONDE with an air of the professional about her is about to be picked up by a hesitant but determined teen-age boy. Anyone watching them, such as the amateur photographer a few benches away in the park, might find them the apt subject for idle philosophizing or for a candid shot. So the photographer makes his picture. The blonde wheels on him. The boy runs away. A man emerges from an automobile and draws near. The photographer asserts his right, in the face of their protest, to make pictures of public places. He develops the picture and finds it strangely interesting. He enlarges it and puts it on his wall, to study while he translates a lengthy book. Slowly the picture changes. Was the boy trying to pick up the woman, or the woman the boy? And who was the man in the car? Was the woman his pawn? Did the woman know the man was there? At this point, the story, which is by the Argentine novelist Julio Cortazar, ends. All of Cortazar’s stories end so—just at the acceleration of momentum. To make a brilliant movie of this story, which is called Blow-Up, Antonioni had to rewrite it as if it were by Henry James (the plots of novels are usually about fifty years in advance of the plots of movies). The mystery of the photograph had to be penetrated, and the photographer had to become a detective rather than a man _ permanently puzzled by a split-second of human behavior which his camera had frozen. ‘Cortazar—fifteen of whose stories are here translated by the poet Paul Blackburn—deals in the inexplicable and the unexpected. His stories are strangely asymmetrical, lacking a beginning or an end. As with his countryman Jorge Luis Borges, the conundrum is the essence, and the writer is not the explainer but the discoverer of the conundrum. A family retreats from room to room of its house, and finally into the street with a handful of possessions. A woman has a strange experience on a bridge, and has known all her life that she would have it. If Cortazar were not a poet, these puzzles would seem gratuitous and a bit cheap; but he is a poet and can manage the weather, the odd slant of light, the unfamiliar pace that make these stories so readable. Sefior Cortazar is fifty-three. We should have known about him before this. THE EPIGRAPH for Graham Greene’s new collection of short stories is an exhortation by the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Sami-as-Sulh: “Cling to the virtues normally manifested by all Lebanese.” Which leaves the judicious Lebanese to ponder what is virtuous, what is normal, and what is. distinctly Lebanese. In these “comedies of the sexual life,” as their author ealls them, various English outside England cling to the virtues normally manifested by all Englishmen, with diverse results. Graham Greene wrote these stories in as frolicsome and bemused an attitude as the best English comedy can strike, and he has struck with éclat. Comedy arises from the claims of nature on convention. That is one reason why these stories are about Englishmen at Mediterranean and 812 National REVIEW Caribbean beaches, where the sun keeps sentiment within its oratorical mode, and nature that was so pharmaceutical, shy, and wrapped in English wool, seems to be as easy, and as serious, as a Rossini aria. The slightest of these stories happens to be a diagram for them all. — We are shown a turbaned and very nervous lady of the sun-tanned rich. The apple of her eye is her Pekingese, Beauty. In an unguarded moment Beauty escapes and makes for the more interesting streets of Antibes, where he inspects the trashcans, finding a prize beyond price, a length of gut well seasoned in swill. He even finds beneath a vortex of flies a pile of ordure in which to roll ky way of celebration. THE COMEDY of the passions is precisely that for the English mind they involve the depths. Brave them, and the spirit has her wings. Two honeymooning English, as beautiful as racehorses, are miserable, the one virgin, the other impotent, until the bridegroom is seduced by two interior decorators and thus apprised of his abilities. The story ends triumphantly; even the decorators have a commission to renovate the ancestral nursery. Greene has built his reputation on a knowing compassion, but it has always been his rich resourcefulness that has kept us reading him. It’s sheer fun to see the author of The Heart of the Matter writing as if he were that chuckling old pagan Norman Douglas, producing as ridiculous a tale as he dare and with as straight a face as he can keep. Here is an Englishman killed by a falling pig, a policeman disguised as a German housewife, and much more, and all with a wide and very human grin. J . B. PRIESTLEY (born 1894) keeps up up with the times. This new novel, his o5th book, is as sprightly and informed an account of mod London as one might expect of a novelist fifty years his junior. If it sometimes sounds like what Arnold Bennett might write about the Deutero-Elizabethans, it is plausible that Bennett would also have seen the new Corinthians as essentially a positive force. Froth settles in time, and ferment precedes distillation. “Mr. Priestley’s plot is as old as Nabuchodonosor: a son searching for his father. But it works, and the search threads its way through God’s plenty. Priestley’s ear is as sharp as ever, ditto his eye. Here is English vulgarity as distinct in taste as a half best bitter, and eccentricity, villainy, sentimentality, love, surprises —all the tried and true Schmalz of the novelist’s cookery, done and seasoned to a turn, and thoroughly satisfying. There is even one solitary naughty word, the sight of which in print would have turned Arnold Bennett raspberry, just to show the young whippersnappers. It has been said (with wild inaccuracy) that the Victorian novel had everything but sex and the modern novel nothing but. It is nice to have a Victorian — still amongst us to even things out with an authoritative hand.

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End of the Game, by Julio Cortazar. Pantheon, $5.95 May We Borrow Your Husband? by Graham Greene. Viking, $4.50 It’s an Old Country, by J. B. Priestley. Little, Brown, $5.95

A BLONDE with an air of the professional about her is about to be picked up by a hesitant but determined teen-age boy. Anyone watching them, such as the amateur photographer a few benches away in the park, might find them the apt subject for idle philosophizing or for a candid shot. So the photographer makes his picture. The blonde wheels on him. The boy runs away. A man emerges from an automobile and draws near. The photographer asserts his right, in the face of their protest, to make pictures of public places. He develops the picture and finds it strangely interesting. He enlarges it and puts it on his wall, to study while he translates a lengthy book. Slowly the picture changes. Was the boy trying to pick up the woman, or the woman the boy? And who was the man in the car? Was the woman his pawn? Did the woman know the man was there? At this point, the story, which is by the Argentine novelist Julio Cortazar, ends. All of Cortazar’s stories end so—just at the acceleration of momentum. To make a brilliant movie of this story, which is called Blow-Up, Antonioni had to rewrite it as if it were by Henry James (the plots of novels are usually about fifty years in advance of the plots of movies). The mystery of the photograph had to be penetrated, and the photographer had to become a detective rather than a man _ permanently puzzled by a split-second of human behavior which his camera had frozen. ‘Cortazar—fifteen of whose stories are here translated by the poet Paul Blackburn—deals in the inexplicable and the unexpected. His stories are strangely asymmetrical, lacking a beginning or an end. As with his countryman Jorge Luis Borges, the conundrum is the essence, and the writer is not the explainer but the discoverer of the conundrum. A family retreats from room to room of its house, and finally into the street with a handful of possessions. A woman has a strange experience on a bridge, and has known all her life that she would have it. If Cortazar were not a poet, these puzzles would seem gratuitous and a bit cheap; but he is a poet and can manage the weather, the odd slant of light, the unfamiliar pace that make these stories so readable. Sefior Cortazar is fifty-three. We should have known about him before this. THE EPIGRAPH for Graham Greene’s new collection of short stories is an exhortation by the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Sami-as-Sulh: “Cling to the virtues normally manifested by all Lebanese.” Which leaves the judicious Lebanese to ponder what is virtuous, what is normal, and what is. distinctly Lebanese. In these “comedies of the sexual life,” as their author ealls them, various English outside England cling to the virtues normally manifested by all Englishmen, with diverse results. Graham Greene wrote these stories in as frolicsome and bemused an attitude as the best English comedy can strike, and he has struck with éclat. Comedy arises from the claims of nature on convention. That is one reason why these stories are about Englishmen at Mediterranean and 812 National REVIEW Caribbean beaches, where the sun keeps sentiment within its oratorical mode, and nature that was so pharmaceutical, shy, and wrapped in English wool, seems to be as easy, and as serious, as a Rossini aria. The slightest of these stories happens to be a diagram for them all. — We are shown a turbaned and very nervous lady of the sun-tanned rich. The apple of her eye is her Pekingese, Beauty. In an unguarded moment Beauty escapes and makes for the more interesting streets of Antibes, where he inspects the trashcans, finding a prize beyond price, a length of gut well seasoned in swill. He even finds beneath a vortex of flies a pile of ordure in which to roll ky way of celebration. THE COMEDY of the passions is precisely that for the English mind they involve the depths. Brave them, and the spirit has her wings. Two honeymooning English, as beautiful as racehorses, are miserable, the one virgin, the other impotent, until the bridegroom is seduced by two interior decorators and thus apprised of his abilities. The story ends triumphantly; even the decorators have a commission to renovate the ancestral nursery. Greene has built his reputation on a knowing compassion, but it has always been his rich resourcefulness that has kept us reading him. It’s sheer fun to see the author of The Heart of the Matter writing as if he were that chuckling old pagan Norman Douglas, producing as ridiculous a tale as he dare and with as straight a face as he can keep. Here is an Englishman killed by a falling pig, a policeman disguised as a German housewife, and much more, and all with a wide and very human grin. J . B. PRIESTLEY (born 1894) keeps up up with the times. This new novel, his o5th book, is as sprightly and informed an account of mod London as one might expect of a novelist fifty years his junior. If it sometimes sounds like what Arnold Bennett might write about the Deutero-Elizabethans, it is plausible that Bennett would also have seen the new Corinthians as essentially a positive force. Froth settles in time, and ferment precedes distillation. “Mr. Priestley’s plot is as old as Nabuchodonosor: a son searching for his father. But it works, and the search threads its way through God’s plenty. Priestley’s ear is as sharp as ever, ditto his eye. Here is English vulgarity as distinct in taste as a half best bitter, and eccentricity, villainy, sentimentality, love, surprises —all the tried and true Schmalz of the novelist’s cookery, done and seasoned to a turn, and thoroughly satisfying. There is even one solitary naughty word, the sight of which in print would have turned Arnold Bennett raspberry, just to show the young whippersnappers. It has been said (with wild inaccuracy) that the Victorian novel had everything but sex and the modern novel nothing but. It is nice to have a Victorian — still amongst us to even things out with an authoritative hand.