Books in Brief

Street Without Joy, by Bernard B. Fall (Stackpole, $4.95). A truly indispensable book likely to get scant attention, this is the first study of the Indochina war in English. The author, a French citizen, chose for his doctoral thesis the little-understood revolutionary warfare being waged in the jungles of Southeast Asia; his field research, perhaps unique in the annals of scholarship, included longrange patrols far north of Dien Bien Phu. In lucid, urgent prose, he points the unlearned lessons that led to the crushing of that encircled fortress and the collapse of French power. As its successor, the U. S. must learn what France did not: that the right kind of tactics, applied with appropriate political awareness and resolve, can win in the “wrong” places. R. whalen

Clem Anderson, by R. V. Cassill (Simon & Schuster, $5.95). An excessively long, and sometimes languishing novel, but anyone who sticks with it will have read some of the canniest pages ever written about the creative personality. “A genius,” said Dr. Johnson, “was never destroyed, except by him-self,” and this chronicle of the early promise and hectic decline of a poet-novelist something like Dylan Thomas traces the progress of just such a self-destruction. But what Mr. Cassill understands surpassingly well, and is a good enough novelist to let us, in turn, see developing in his hero, is that prideful extremity at which a creative man is tempted to go beyond his gifts, his ability merely to make a poem or a novel, and to try instead to embody his vision in his own acts—to be, for instance, a good man, or an evil one, or one who (like poor Norman Mailer’s ideal) must methodically expose himself to all the human possibilities. As Clem Anderson reveals, this is fatal, for it is an artist’s final duty not to be, but to make. He can be a fool, a stinker, even a decent citizen; but he must not be more concerned with what he is than what he makes. Otherwise, he has sold his birthright, and no matter how sincere or subtle his intentions, he will have been only a failure—brilliant maybe, a myth perhaps, but not a shelf of printed works in which his flesh has been made words.p. melik

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Street Without Joy, by Bernard B. Fall (Stackpole, $4.95). A truly indispensable book likely to get scant attention, this is the first study of the Indochina war in English. The author, a French citizen, chose for his doctoral thesis the little-understood revolutionary warfare being waged in the jungles of Southeast Asia; his field research, perhaps unique in the annals of scholarship, included longrange patrols far north of Dien Bien Phu. In lucid, urgent prose, he points the unlearned lessons that led to the crushing of that encircled fortress and the collapse of French power. As its successor, the U. S. must learn what France did not: that the right kind of tactics, applied with appropriate political awareness and resolve, can win in the “wrong” places. R. whalen

Clem Anderson, by R. V. Cassill (Simon & Schuster, $5.95). An excessively long, and sometimes languishing novel, but anyone who sticks with it will have read some of the canniest pages ever written about the creative personality. “A genius,” said Dr. Johnson, “was never destroyed, except by him-self,” and this chronicle of the early promise and hectic decline of a poet-novelist something like Dylan Thomas traces the progress of just such a self-destruction. But what Mr. Cassill understands surpassingly well, and is a good enough novelist to let us, in turn, see developing in his hero, is that prideful extremity at which a creative man is tempted to go beyond his gifts, his ability merely to make a poem or a novel, and to try instead to embody his vision in his own acts—to be, for instance, a good man, or an evil one, or one who (like poor Norman Mailer’s ideal) must methodically expose himself to all the human possibilities. As Clem Anderson reveals, this is fatal, for it is an artist’s final duty not to be, but to make. He can be a fool, a stinker, even a decent citizen; but he must not be more concerned with what he is than what he makes. Otherwise, he has sold his birthright, and no matter how sincere or subtle his intentions, he will have been only a failure—brilliant maybe, a myth perhaps, but not a shelf of printed works in which his flesh has been made words.p. melik