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Fairies, in the best and worst sense of the term, are the theme of Authoress Kay Boyle's far-from-unadorned tale. She handles her emotional subject with a cold greenish brilliance that is perhaps its own justification but that will make her book antipathetic to readers who like to warm their hands over something more human. In Gentlemen, I Address You Privately she writes, with what seems an almost deliberate avoidance of charm, about people who cannot be said to exist, who would hardly matter if they did. Authoress Boyle, nearly as far astray from normality as Faulkner, has clothed her fairies in human guise, but they remain fairies.
Munday, an unfrocked priest living peacefully with his piano in Le Havre, France, meets a young cockney sailor, Ayton, an attractive weakling who has deserted ship. It soon turns out that Ayton is completely untrustworthy and has done worse things in life than deserting. But by that time Munday, though not blind to his faults, is hopelessly involved with him. When there is danger of Ayton's arrest the pair take refuge with a poverty-stricken farmer and his wife. There, visited occasionally by three friendly Lesbians, they lead a simple life, and Munday has hopes of Ayton's settling down. But when he discovers that Ayton has seduced the farmer's wife, sold Munday's piano and gone off to Italy on the proceeds with the three Lesbians, Munday realizes that his hopes were in vain.
Literary Life
YESTERDAY'S BURDENS—Robert M. Coates—Macaulay ($2).
Last week, as in all weeks round Christmas time, few U. S. books were published. Far & away the best of those that were is Author Robert Melvin Coates' Yesterday's Burdens. Too far to the left for many a middle-of-the-roader, this novel is squarely in the centre of the modern experimental path—a path broad enough to accommodate Ulysses and the books of John Dos Passes, but on which such backtracking behemoths as Anthony Adverse never set hoof. Fated to be overlooked or judged "queer" by the general reader, Yesterday's Burdens will excite the attention of those who are more interested in whither the novel is going than in whence it has come.
For the benefit of those who might object that his book is not a novel at all, Author Coates defines his aim: ". . . Perhaps one might better describe it as a Jong essay discussing a novel that I might possibly write, with fragments of the narrative inserted here & there, by way of illustration or example." His "hero," one Henderson, is a wraithlike Manhattan Everyman who appears only by snatches and never long enough to establish his identity. He is shown seeing his wife off to Europe, bringing another man's wife to the narrator's house in the country, making a drunken speech at a Manhattan party. His story has three endings. The reader is left with the impression that any or all of them may be true, and that it hardly matters. What does matter is the way Author Coates handles his kaleidoscopic but cunningly patterned "narrative." Each of the book's four sections introduces a theme sentence and develops this simple melody into complex harmonies and discords.