Monday, Jan. 12, 1959
Strange Fruit
THE SLEEP OF BABY FILBERTSON (190 pp.) --James Leo Herlihy--Dutton ($3.50).
In the passage from Winesburg, Ohio which James Leo Herlihy takes for his text, Sherwood Anderson remarks that the unmarketable apples that the pickers disdain to harvest are actually choice: "Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples." But times have changed since Anderson's masterpiece appeared in 1919. Nowadays it is precisely the twisted fruits of humanity--as plucked from the tree of American life by such as Eugene O'Neill, Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams--that command the commercial market, leaving the rosy, chubby ones to go hang. Indeed. Author Herlihy (a TVeteran and co-author of last season's Broadway near miss, Blue Denim) might seem to have arrived in the twisted-apple orchard a decade too late. But in the seven short stories of this collection, he shows a talent that is not only twisted but robust, humorous and original as well.
The title story opens with a "baby" lying in bed. He is 19 years old, and so fat that he has "groups of toes like uncooked sausages." Baby lives with his neurotic Mom; they rove from city to city, endlessly drowning their despondency in capsules of phenobarbital. The Sleep describes how Baby takes a brief waddle down Broadway, stumbles half-comatose into an automobile, weaves back home unscathed, and collapses into the miseries of natural sleep (he dreams that a fat gypsy squaw castrates him with a silver-bladed bread knife). Finally, he swallows the magic "pheeny" that returns him to the blissful, dreamless condition of "some giant foetus."
The Sleep sets the tone for most of the other stories by introducing Author Herlihy's obsessive interest in the "foetal" world of prehistory, when the "gray vapor-covered earth" was ruled by "giant serpents and tiny-headed monsters." Weeping in the Chinese Window describes the cruel seduction by a tiny-headed monster in human form of a spinster who has never suspected the existence of primeval, serpentine masculinity. A Summer for the Dead features a lusty gal who is rejected by a man dead from the waist down and settles for one who is only dead from the neck up--totally blind and nearly stone-deaf.
In two of the remaining tales, Author Herlihy comes up, relatively speaking, for a breath of fresh air. One of them is just a simple study of a female lunatic. Evident in all these tales is the hand of a writer for whom the short story is not only a form in itself but a steppingstone to what may well be "twisted" theater of impressive quality.
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