Francis Bacon, by John Russell (Oxford, 175 plates, 192 pp., $12.95). When I saw my first Francis Bacon in 1948—the Museum of Modern Art’s frightening Mussolini-faced butcher under an umbrella in front of a “crucifixion” of slaughtered beasts—I felt as many must have felt: that here at last was an artist with the imagination to symbolize what the world had just passed through and (perhaps) even to transcend that nightmarish experience. Now, thirty years older, and a much better painter, Bacon treats, essentially the same theme. Expanded—or compressed and generalized, if you like—to include not merely war and fascism but crime, sexual perversion, and what Conrad called “the heart of darkness,” that theme in no way transcends all that is corrupt in our world. To the Establishment critic—and John Russell, late of London and now of the New York Times, is one of the best of them—this is irrelevant. Our world is decadent, is increasingly corrupt, is tending toward murderous anarchy, is sliding on the grease of its accumulated wealth and fat to inevitable self-destruction. So Bacon is simply telling the truth about his times, in painterly terms, with the same intense “objectivity” as, say, Velasquez was in his times. By the same token it would be irrelevant for Russell to tell us anything significant about Bacon’s life— to try to explain what makes him focus so relentlessly on deliquescence and horror, why joy, grace, compassion, hope have no place in his psyche. To do so would be to have reservations about whether Bacon’s art expresses the whole truth. Neither artist nor critic has any such reservations. Selden Rodman
In Guilt and in Glory, by David Hanly (Morrow, 323 pp., $10.95). A romp through Ireland’s countryside and cities (with plenty of time spent ducking into a pub for a pint) by an American television team and their Irish escorts offers a modest, and often amusing, portrait of Ireland in the late 1970s. This novel—Hanly’s first —is not full of the familiar peat, porter, and other stock items of nostalgic books on Ireland. What it is full of is talk—and pretty serious stuff at that. The Northern Ireland question gets talked about, as does the clash between the simple ways of old Ireland and the complexities (and shallowness) of the new. We hear the pros and cons concerning industry, history, education, emigration, the Roman Catholic Church, politics, civil service, the dole, the IRA, sex, young people, aesthetics, writing, painting, etc. It is, in all, a very balanced report. However, there is virtually no characterization in the novel —only props to convey dialogue, which has its glorious moments: a priest explaining why he is leaving the Church; a young man from Northern Ireland making a passionate speech concerning the plight of the Catholic minority in Ulster; a novelist disclosing that he cannot manage to keep pace with the new Ireland. In fact, all the talk among the Irish is quite good, often humorous, although somewhat predictable. As Hanly says at one point in the novel, the Irish love words. This has been a blessing which has given us some of the best poetry, fiction, and drama in the English language. Hanly’s novel attempts the best, though it falls short by being filled with too much empty space. But because of the moments when Hanly is so good in this novel, I look forward to his next. Thomas Bridges
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