Novelists: Victorian and Vulgar

OUIDA was as popular, at one time, as Dickens. James Jones sold four million copies of From Here to Eternity. The stock romanticism, and the stock naturalism, of two different periods made the manufacturers of each commodity successful. Not that either novelist cynically pandered to the popular taste; both sincerely shared all its weaknesses, as two new books make clear.

Mr. Jones’ Some Came Running (Scribner, $7.50) is a caricature—not intended, and not funny—of all the techniques of the recent novel from Ulysses to Peyton Place. It is written with an illiterate hatred of periods and commas, which is supposed to show the stream of several conscienceless persons’ thought. It is as ostentatiously masculine as the author, who substitutes a gymnasium and knife for Hemingway’s jungle and muleta. It is a “serious” literary refashioning of the back-alley raconteur’s material, done in the manner of Steinbeck. But naturalism, as everyone knows, has moved from Southern hovels to the white-clap- boarded small town—to Peyton Place, Brocton and the Parkman, Illinois of this story. This is a sensitive novel, we know, because the author says there is an El Greco sky over Park- man.

GW

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Garry Wills

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OUIDA was as popular, at one time, as Dickens. James Jones sold four million copies of From Here to Eternity. The stock romanticism, and the stock naturalism, of two different periods made the manufacturers of each commodity successful. Not that either novelist cynically pandered to the popular taste; both sincerely shared all its weaknesses, as two new books make clear.

Mr. Jones’ Some Came Running (Scribner, $7.50) is a caricature—not intended, and not funny—of all the techniques of the recent novel from Ulysses to Peyton Place. It is written with an illiterate hatred of periods and commas, which is supposed to show the stream of several conscienceless persons’ thought. It is as ostentatiously masculine as the author, who substitutes a gymnasium and knife for Hemingway’s jungle and muleta. It is a “serious” literary refashioning of the back-alley raconteur’s material, done in the manner of Steinbeck. But naturalism, as everyone knows, has moved from Southern hovels to the white-clap- boarded small town—to Peyton Place, Brocton and the Parkman, Illinois of this story. This is a sensitive novel, we know, because the author says there is an El Greco sky over Park- man.