BY PHOEBE ADAMS
THE PLANT, THE WELL, THE ANGEL (Knopf, $5.95) contains three longstories by the young Greek author VASSILIS VASSILIKOS. They concern, respectively, a plant, a well, and an angel; they are written in a pseudomatter-of-fact style with a wealth of corroborative detail; and they are the most exuberantly fantastic, inventive, resourceful, and surprising tales I have read in a long time. The plant puts an entire shoddy apartment house out of commission. The well, an object of sinister reputation, proves a fraud. The angel writes his rueful memoirs while learning to use his wings in a training camp that is a parody of all earthly military establishments. All of these objects — if an angel can be counted an object — of course represent something else: the empty forms of a dead society, the force of youthful rebellion, the isolation of the artist. But regardless of the symbolic meaning that can be read into them, these tales stand first of all as stories, in which things keep happening with beguiling rapidity and conviction. They have the true mythmaking magic, in that the impossible following the improbable merely increases the reader’s belief in the whole.
RANDALL JARRELL’S THE BAT-POET (Macmillan, $2.75), with amusingmisty pictures by MAURICE SENDAK, is a small book in the tradition of The Wind in the Willows. Written for children, it can be read with pleasure and profit by adults. Mr. Jarrell’s bat is a positively touching study of a beginning poet — earnest, bewildered, doubtful of his talent, and ignorant of technique, but having, as his verses prove, a touch. He confers with the mockingbird, an established poetical authority. What happens is just what happens to people in such a situation, and the more the reader knows about authors, the funnier this book becomes. It is really much too sly and clever to be confined to juveniles.
PORTRAIT OF A GENERAL (Knopf, $8.95) by WILLIAM B. WILLCOX, professor of history at the University of Michigan, is a solid, straightforward biography of Sir Henry Clinton, the British general who got stuck with the last years of the American Revolution. Clinton was something of a wit, but he was neither a notably successful commander nor particularly interesting in other respects. In one way, however, he may be considered Britain’s revenge for John Adams. The man never threw away a piece of writing in his life. He therefore left a mass of records, all fearsomely illegible. These papers Professor Willcox has patiently decoded and converted into a biography of considerable interest — although the interest derives from Clinton’s circumstances rather than from his own character. At the end of the book, which is a perfectly orthodox factual job up to that point, Mr. Willcox, with the assistance of Professor Frederick Wyatt, chief of the Psychological Clinic of the University of Michigan, has attached a psychological interpretation of the quirks in Clinton’s mind which led him to quarrel with most of his colleagues, push at the wrong moment, and relax when he should have bustled. This appendix adds nothing genuine to the understanding of Clinton and is based on no documentation worth mentioning. One could argue, on more solid evidence, that Clinton, who played the fiddle and spent a surprising sum on the latest and best music of his day, was a chamber music addict. This is a real disease, as anyone who has ever encountered a case will agree. It is conceivable that Clinton’s periods of military languor coincided with the availability of a cello, a viola, and a second fiddle, while his periods of exacerbation resulted from the lack of these necessities. Aside from this objection, Portrait of a General is good work and good reading.
THE AFRICAN PAST (Atlantic—Little Brown, $7.95) is an anthology of African writing collected and edited by BASIL DAVIDSON. Mr. Davidson, an authority on African history and an enthusiastic admirer of African achievements, has undertaken to prove that precolonial Africa was no illiterate backwater but rather an energetic, well-organized network of differing societies which produced, either locally or through the reports of Arab travelers, a body of writing of general international interest. He succeeds well in this aim, turning up among other engaging authors a Muslim religious authority who sounds as agitated as any Victorian missionary.