Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When you mention Vigeland to somebody in Oslo, his face brightens quickly and he asks: "What do you think of him?" Nobody in Norway, as far as I can tell, knows exactly what to think. But when outlanders like British Novelist Evelyn Waugh attack their favorite son, Norwegians are shocked and depressed. "The most heathen thing I have seen in Europe," Waugh recently told an interviewer. "A subhuman zoo in bronze and granite . . . more terrible than the ruins of Hiroshima...
...first time since Henry James put his hand to it, in 1879, the task of writing Hawthorne's biography has been undertaken by a born novelist of distinction. James wrote in England, in all the panoply of his handsome prose, and with a good deal of Old World "side"; but he did not have much to add to the story of Hawthorne's life. He knew it, and called his book a "critical essay...
...Spencer handles this theme with genuine skill. The things this young writer can do with the novel form are astonishing. But all too often she writes like a bright student mimicking the best models. She is especially irritating when she adopts the frenzied style of the sort of "woman novelist" who worries her subject and prose to death by merely vibrating portentously when she should be letting her narrative move along. If Elizabeth Spencer, a writer of large and natural talents, can find her own voice, she may develop into an important American novelist...
Joyce Gary is an Irish-born and English-educated novelist whose work deserves to be more widely read than it is. Unlike so many of his contemporaries who mount the novel as if it were a rostrum, Cary works in the major tradition of English novel writing. He tells a vivid story, creates characters as credible as if they were stepping on one's toes, and uses the English language with beauty and wit. Why he is not therefore a favorite on this side of the Atlantic is something of a mystery...
...Novelist Maugham had also contributed prefaces to each volume revealing "intimate and startling details of the romantic and domestic side" of each author. The first two of these treasures will be published next week, entitled W. Somerset Maugham Presents Charles Dickens' David Copperfield and W. Somerset Maugham Presents Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. The $3.50 price tag might seem high, though, to readers who could get the same books entire-without Mr. Maugham's abridgments...