Messiahs

THE HEART Is A LONELY HUNTER--Carson McCullers -- Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

JOY OF MAN'S DESIRING--Jean Giono --Viking ($2.50).

WARTIME LETTERS OF RAINER MARIA RILKE-- Translated by M. D. Herton Norfon--Norton ($2.50).

Published last week were three books which, utterly divergent in most respects, all operated in a common, powerful, magnetic field. Each centred in a Messiah.

First Novel. Slightest of the three was The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the talented first novel of 22-year-old Carson Mc-Cullers, Georgia girl.

In a deep-southern mill town a half-mad anarchist, a Negro doctor desperate to free his race, a girl who loves music, and a quiet, watchful cafe owner all come to share a mystical admiration for deaf-mute John Singer. Out of Singer's stunned face and his silence, each of the four constructs an image of absolute understanding, a godlike sounding board for prayerlike confessions. The fact that Singer himself is coolly puzzled by them, is himself even more piteously dependent than they, escapes them. The fact that no one of them can understand the other they scarcely realize. But when they lose John Singer, three of them lose the mainspring of their precarious spirits. Only the restaurant owner remains relatively intact.

The book is such a study in the relationships of human Christs and semi-Christs to a suffering world as Dostoevski made into the most annihilating literature of his century. As a candidate for high honors, however, Mrs. McCullers flunks out flat on a crucial matter. As a writer of words, she is never distinguished, never in one glint verbally original.

Prose Poem. Jean Giono was arrested last September (TIME, Oct. 23), to prevent his leading a band of his French peasant neighbors in a flat refusal to go to war. (He was released in November.) Last fall the innocent movie version of his innocent novel Harvest was shown at a few U. S. theatres. Joy of Man's Desiring, published in France in 1935, though in form a novel, is about as intense and unabashed a poem as any prose could be.

A serene wandering acrobat named Bobi settles for a couple of years among the farm people of a lonely plateau in Southern France. All he cares about is joy--in useless beauty, in the purity of animals. Carried away by his precept and example, the farmers reduce their planting to what they can eat, turn their animals loose, crowd their fallow land with narcissi, make friends with a stag and his doe. Having set up his earthly paradise, Giono regretfully proceeds in his closing chapters to knock it to pieces. He does so none too logically. Jean Giono has a genius for observing, and recording, the splendors of the natural world, the beauty of natural tasks and pleasures. The book has been given an excellent translation.

Thumbprints. The third Messiah is no fable; he struggles with fact. Rainer Maria Rilke was one of the most devoted, most profoundly endowed religious artists whom this century has produced. As such he was, for his generation, one of the focuses of human consciousness. Of what happens to a bearer of such consciousness in time of actual war, this volume of letters is a direct record.

The effect of war upon the sources of Rilke's poetry was simple enough: they were so atrophied that they did not recover full life until 1922. But he kept a virtually blind knowledge that a past had existed in which that high form of consciousness was possible; that a future must ultimately emerge in which it might live again; that during war "one's deepest obligation seemed to be to give up nothing of what mankind had previously gained and acknowledged after honest search. ..."

Sometimes Rilke's letters seem like the handwringings and idle thoughts of a safe, sickly gentleman, sometimes like definitive statements of truth:

"Why is there not one who cannot endure it any more, will not endure it any more; did he but cry out for one night in the midst of the untrue, flag-hung city, cry out and not let himself be pacified, who might therefore call him liar?"

"The whole of distress is always in use among men . . . only the distribution varies."

"Fearful as the war is in itself, it seems to me still more dreadful that the pressure of it has nowhere contributed to bringing man out more distinctly, to forcing him . . . face to face with God, as great tribulations in earlier times had the power to do. On the plane meanwhile cultivated, on which the newspapers are able to give a conscienceless verbal cross section of all that happens ... an incessant equalizing of all tensions is created and humanity becomes accustomed continually to accept a world of news in place of realities which no one has time or is minded any more to let grow large and heavy within them. I never was and cannot any longer become a newspaper reader. ..."

"The intellectual would of course have to be ... an opponent and disavower of revolutions; he of all people knows how slowly all changes of lasting significance are accomplished, . . . how inconspicuous they are and, through their very slowness, almost imperceptible, and how Nature, in her constructive zeal, hardly anywhere lets intellectual forces come to the fore."

The letters of the three years following the war are a record of slow convalescence. In them it becomes clear that the years of silence, of daily absorption in horror, despair and death, contributed incalculably to those continuously illuminated days in 1922 during which Rilke completed the Duino Elegies, those poems through which he felt his existence had been justified.

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