A Second Look

Publishers flooded the market with more than 30,000 fiction and nonfiction titles during the past year. Inevitably, many worthwhile volumes were passed over by readers and critics, TIME'S reviewers included. Some of the books deserving a second look:

WILLIAM JAMES by Gay Wilson Allen. 556 pages. Viking. $10.

For all that has been written about William James, psychologist, philosopher, teacher and author, nothing as good as this full-length biography has appeared before. Author Allen, an English professor at New York University and a skilled biographer of Walt Whitman, presents James's complex character with the ease and clarity that distinguished his subject's own style. There is no understanding James's skeptical temperament without understanding his extraordinary family. Using unpublished papers, Allen weaves a rich account of the restless, tightly knit clan. As for William, his character is best expressed in his own words: "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power." That power was constantly being sapped by physical and mental illnesses. That he overcame them to produce such works as The Will to Believe, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism and A Pluralistic Universe seems almost miraculous--even with such an excellent guide as Professor Allen to offer explanation. As for James's influence today, Biographer Allen notes that after a generation of neglect, psychologists are making sympathetic re-evaluations of James's belief in the need for values and disciplined thinking.

FIVE YEARS by Paul Goodman. 257 pages. Brussel & Brussel. $5.

What William James called the "rich thicket of reality" is thoroughly explored in this book, which is subtitled "Thoughts During a Useless Time." Its author, Paul Goodman, is a novelist, poet, essayist, psychologist and social critic whose book Growing Up Absurd gave him guru status with a large segment of American youth. Five Years is a self-analytical journal of random thoughts, jotted down from 1955 to 1960, when Goodman was between 45 and 50 years old. It is a ruthlessly honest confession in the manner of Rousseau: Goodman recounts how he scrounged for food, sex and love while materially and spiritually down and out. During that period of his life, he was, he remarks, "a citizen of nowhere, but an animal of the world." Nothing stands between the reader and Goodman's loneliness and despair, his frank involvement with homosexuality, his yearning for "a very bread-and-butter kind of paradise." Goodman's moral utopianism and his commitment to rectifying personal and social ills have been encountered many times in his numerous works. Five Years offers a harrowing look at the dark and anguished roots of that commitment.

THOMAS BECKET by Richard Winston. 413 pages. Knopf. $10.

Few historical figures have captured literary imaginations as thoroughly as Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered 800 years ago at the instigation of his King and former friend, Henry II. T. S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral and Jean Anouilh's play and film Becket examined the irresistible character who, upon slipping into clerical garb, warned his King that he would serve his new divine master as faithfully as he had served his old human one. He became a devoted protector of church rights and, inevitably, a resolute enemy of his monarch. Richard Winston, a translator who has also written a biography of Charlemagne, has produced an exceptionally clear and precise account of that momentous confrontation. In his hands, the antagonists emerge not only as complicated personalities who fall victim to situations of their own making but also as resonant symbols of the bitter struggle between church and state--a struggle that was to significantly alter Western history.

CHILDREN OF CRTSISA STUDY OF COURAGE AND FEAR by Robert Coles. 401 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $8.50.

Since 1958, Robert Coles, a research psychiatrist at Harvard, has studied the reactions of both blacks and whites who were involved in the desegregation of Southern schools. His findings are compelling evidence of the psychological damage that can be caused by virulent racism. A small Negro girl, Coles notes, drew pictures of white people as larger and more lifelike than Negroes; when she drew Negroes, their bodies were disjointed. A white boy depicted Negroes as more animal than human. By the time they are three years old, Coles says, black children are already learning the values and fears of the color caste system. Yet Coles found that, in general, those Negro children who were thrust into the front ranks of the integration crises came through their experiences without serious emotional wounds. In fact, many seemed to gain strength from their awareness of the historical significance of their roles. Acts of courage by ordinary people were common. Coles could find no definite correlation between certain psychological types and civil rights activists. Rather, he feels that it was some interaction between person and situation that determined what form behavior took. What raises Coles's book far above the level of an interesting series of case studies is the warmth of tone, the freedom from specialist jargon and the understanding of differences. Although he is a strong supporter of civil rights, Coles also shows great respect for the traditions of the South.

THE CHINESE LOOKING GLASS by Dennis Bloodworth. 432 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

Near the end of this remarkable guided tour of the Chinese mind, the author observes that Peking has become the proper subject "not of the political mathematician but of the sympathetic psychologist." As just the sort of observer he calls for, Bloodworth, who was the Far Eastern correspondent of the London Observer for twelve years, ranges deftly and wittily through Chinese history and literary legend to find the ideas that shape Communist behavior today: the ancient maxims for guerrilla warfare expounded by the 4th century B.C. strategist Sun Wu ("Do not fight a static war, and do not besiege cities"); the Robin Hood-like legend of Men of the Marshes, dating from the 13th century, that justifies Mao's own role as the righteous bandit against the evil established order when he was waging civil war from the caves of Yenan. The puns and purposeful ambiguities of the Chinese language are explored, illuminating the Red Guards' raucous wall posters. China's hostility toward the outside world is as old as the Chinese sense of superiority. As a result, in China's foreign policy, the nation's pride is always in conflict with its innate pragmatism. It should be no surprise, Bloodworm says, that a Chinese Communist still feels closer to a Nationalist Chinese than to a foreign Communist. And sooner or later, Bloodworth suggests, Peking and Taiwan will reach some sort of accommodation, discovering that they have not been "really enemies but just bad friends."

THE PUZZLEHEADED GIRL: FOUR NOVELLAS by Christina Stead. 255 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $6.95.

Until The Man Who Loved Children was republished to considerable acclaim in 1965, Australia's Christina Stead was relatively little known and appreciated in the U.S. The four novellas in The Puzzleheaded Girl should firmly establish her reputation as a writer who can make the familiar meaningful without gimmickry. It is not without some reason that her work has been compared to that of Nabokov and Isak Dinesen. Her essential theme in The Puzzleheaded Girl is rootlessness. Her characters are continually trying to flee themselves. Europeans come to America only to find that they and their new country are incompatible; Americans go to Europe and dream of coming home. Miss Stead also fences with the discontents and ambiguities of big-city life. In one story, an alcoholic who has buckled under urban pressure "longs for the simple rest of a child or a woman or a dog." Yet he knows that "a man wants more, much more." Wit, satire, views on social, moral and intellectual history --the author offers them with a refinement and subtlety that provide fresh insights into the daily experiences most people share.

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF JANE BOWLES. 431 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

Another woman who was re-established as a significant writer this year is Jane Bowles (wife of Author-Composer Paul Bowles). In her Collected Works, the most prominent entry is Two Serious Ladies, which was first published in 1943 and highly praised before fading from public attention. It is a deceptively simple novel of two women trying to change their way of life. One, a sheltered spinster, seeks salvation by becoming a prostitute and does manage to achieve a heightened sense of herself. The other woman sets off to find sin and excitement and discovers in stead spiritual narcosis and boredom. Most Bowles characters seem to suffer from a total lack of motivation; they must be seen and interpreted solely in their relation to one another. The poker-faced prose is distinguished by a dry irony and deadpan humor that make Jane Bowles a kind of Buster Keaton of literature.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION RECONSIDERED by Richard B. Morris. 178 pages. Harper & Row. $5.

Columbia University's Richard Morris disputes the view of a good many historians that the American Revolution was merely a colonial struggle for independence. Morris sees the events of 1776-1783 as not only ending England's hegemony but also giving birth to a moral, social and intellectual revolution that is still continuing. "From its inception," Morris writes, "the American Revolution was pitched on a moral plane. The patriots were concerned not only about mankind's good opinion, but, as Tom Paine felicitously phrased it, believed it to be in their power 'to make a world happy.' " Morris sees the willingness of contemporary Americans to shoulder global responsibilities as an outgrowth of that revolutionary vision. The greatest lesson of the Revolution, he says, is a tolerance for change: "To that radically reshaped world in which we live, the message of the American Revolution is as relevant as its meaning is profound."

THE FALL OF JAPAN by William Craig. 368 pages. Dial. $6.50.

With Nagasaki flattened by an A-bomb (code-named "Fat Man"), Emperor Hirohito gathered his ministers in an underground shelter and asked them to sue for peace. Such intervention by the Emperor was extraordinary, and, since Hirohito was believed to be divine, his request was also presumably a commandment from heaven. But his military advisers resisted surrender; a group of fanatic staff officers made a futile attempt to seize the palace and overthrow the government when they learned of Hirohito's decision. These and other chaotic events leading up to Imperial Japan's capitulation are arranged with precision in The Fall of Japan. Author Craig, a former Manhattan adman, unfolds the story in the you-are-here fashion of popular history. Yet his documentation and use of original sources reflect first-rate scholarship. Among other topics, Craig traces the origins of the kamikaze suicide squadrons, General Curtis LeMay's plans for a low-altitude fire-bomb attack on Tokyo, and the success of Japanese intelligence forces in learning the details of the U.S. plan to invade the home islands.

ON THE YARD by Malcolm Braly 344 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

In writing about convicts, as in writing about anything else, there are few substitutes for experience. Malcolm Braly did a stretch for armed robbery at San Quentin, and knows only too well that prison is the only world a convict has. Cons either adapt to it or it destroys them. In On the Yard, this inescapable fact is driven home by the sadistic breaking of "Chilly Willy," a boss con who traffics in cigarettes and Benzedrine inhalers. Prison officials frame him in a homosexual plot, and he is shunted into the psychiatric ward. Though a swift, engrossing narrative in its own right, Braly's novel stands as a caustic indictment of the American penal system. From Dostoevsky to Genet, writers have used prison as an effective metaphor of the human condition. Braly strips away the literary conceits and makes life on the inside painfully real.

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