(4 of 5)
For 18 years off & on Author Paul lived on the rue de la Huchette and watched with interest and partisan passion the political schism that split the side street, like the rest of France, into two great hostile camps. But Author Paul's political concern lacks the gusto of his human ribaldry. There is a suggestion that the citizenry of the rue de la Huchette are somehow symbolic of democracy everywhere and that, if they had run things, the Nazis would never have got to Paris. But in view of all that goes before, their pathos in the war and the Nazi invasion is less pathetic than grotesque, less like the end of Man's Fate than the end of A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go. When the cat and her kittens come tumbling in and pounce on the rat, the mouse and the little frog-gie, it is still just gamins and spinach. For Author Paul is guilty of one of the oldest of demagogic fallacies: he confuses democracy with its lowest common denominators.
Sixteen Fancy Dives
RAZZLE DAZZLE-William Saroyan- Harcourf, Brace ($3.50).
In his preface to one of these 16 short plays William Saroyan compares himself to George Bernard Shaw. The comparison is not altogether presumptuous. He shares with Shaw a fearless, sassy gaiety, and like Shaw he holds naturalism, heavyminded-ness and the theater in general in contempt. Both, in Saroyan's words, believe that the theater "all theater-should be fun. . . ." Whatever else they are, these plays and prefaces are fun.
The plays are a bright, shifty blend of parable, poem, ballet, vaudeville, dream and relaxed ad-libbing. At their worst they contain, as Saroyan confesses, "careless and cheap feelings . . . cleverness and petty bitterness, spoofing and kidding, vulgarity here and there perhaps. . . ." At their best they meet Saroyan's requirements for art: "The surprise of art is not shock, but wonder. . . . The excitement it creates is not that of fear or loathing or irritation, but the excitement of revelation, understanding, love, and delight." Now & then Saroyan's spontaneity has the revelatory abruptness of a magnesium flare.
In Elmer and Lily, a revue for Negroes, a little boy walks "like a good prize fighter returning to his corner . . . after a round in which he has done very well" and says: "Harry Walker, that's my name." ^ Talking to You, a straight dream, constructs a context of strange beauty in which the following lyric occurs:
The tiger I see is a man who is blind
And cannot see me.
I can see the man but not the tiger.
Tiger, poor tiger,
Angry and blind.
From the tree in the graveyard
The Crow calls your name:
Tiger, poor tiger.
Saroyan's prefaces are not by any means he glittering mirror-mazes in which Shaw shows off his plays, but he delivers limself of some nobly arrogant lines.
On the theater: "I am opposed to practically everything in, and connected with, the present American theater, including its methods, purposes, and people. [ am even opposed to the third-rate public t has created. I am waiting for the people of the present theater to die or retire. I shall not be grieved in either event."