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...ENCYCLOPEDIA by Richard Horn. 157 pages. Grove Press. $4.95. The hapless love affair of hopeful Poet Tom (Americana) Jones and wealthy, bohemia-bound Sadie (Britannica) Massey is cross-referenced in brief, satirical, encyclopedic passages from ABORTION to zoo CAFETERIA. What you can't look up, you can't put down...
Born in Australia, Lee cut his teeth covering "the everyday humble-bumble of police courts," worked briefly for an encyclopedia but never got much beyond "Fleas, Performing." He believes that writers of fiction and poetry often give a truer picture of this world than sociologists, historians, scientists and politicians. "After all," he says, "who thinks of Queen Victoria in terms of Gladstone or the warehouse full of bureaucratic bilge? No. We think in terms of Dickens, as today will be thought of in terms of Koestler, Auden, Mailer and Waugh...
Cohesion, however, need not preclude a little eclecticism. It has long been my intention to compile, someday, an encyclopedia of plot formulas, so arranged that a mere gloss would be sufficient to reduce even the shaggiest tale to several digits, say a "234 with a half-twist." Thankfully no such volume yet exists, for whole weeks might be lost in the effort to enumerate Good Art It, which far from being plotless, abounds with the treasured moments of myriad plots. On short count, the following old dependables seem to have resurfaced for the occasion: (a) slightly neurotic actress has stormy...
...catalogue of individual American shapers would fill an encyclopedia. Margaret Sanger advocated contraception in the face of laws that branded her a criminal. Novelist Upton Sinclair sanitized Chicago's abattoirs with his 1906 shocker, The Jungle. Henry Ford wheeled a nation and established the principle of a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. All these and a host of others were evolutionaries who worked change without revolution. Ralph Nader, for all his abrasive qualities and puzzling motives, is very much their inheritor...
ALDOUS HUXLEY, by John Atkins; THE HUXLEYS, by Ronald W. Clark. Human being or controlled experiment? Guru or walking encyclopedia? The often contradictory legends left by this brilliant member of a renowned intellectual family are examined by two biographers who almost find the missing link...