Current & Various

THE ACCIDENTAL CENTURY by Michael Harrington. 322 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

"I got a lot of good ideas through participation in the radical movement," says Michael Harrington. One of his best ideas became The Other America, a compelling study of poverty in the U.S. that caught the attention of President Kennedy. In his new book, Author Harrington abandons sociological reportage and essays a sweeping analysis of 20th century culture in crisis. His theses are all too familiar. Proliferating technology has transformed Western civilization: "The chasm between technological capacity and economic, political, social, and religious consciousness has unsettled every faith and creed in the West." Economic collectivization is inevitable. But it has begun in America without conscious planning, and the power of economic decision now rests with bureaucratic corporations rather than with the democratic mass most profoundly affected. Slogging his way toward these conclusions, Author Harrington quotes everyone from Hannah Arendt to William Butler Yeats, analyzes the novels of Thomas Mann, the philosophy of Nietzsche, the mysticism of Dostoevsky. Curiously lacking are any references to Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Jaspers, who have already covered much of this embattled ground.

KNIGHTS & DRAGONS by Elizabeth Spencer. 169 pages. McGraw-Hill. $3.95.

"Hatred is too much for me," confesses the disturbed American woman who is the heroine of this novel, "I can't face it." She means hatred for her ex-husband, a middle-aged philosopher who is a venerable pooh-bear to everyone else in the world but a dragon to her. To escape his continuing attentions she runs away to Italy, takes up with a pushy, pragmatic American. Alas, she finds she is tied to both men. In the end, the ties are suddenly severed: the lover leaves her, her former husband dies, and she is left with nobody to hate, nobody to love. "I am gone, she thought; they have taken me with them; I shall never return." Few readers will miss her. In her fifth novel, Elizabeth Spencer (The Light in the Piazza) demonstrates a delicate attention to the shifting, uncertain boundaries between illusion and reality. But her characters are merely attitudes or intuitions, and her sensibility a romantic smog that muffles all the harsh realities the author and her heroine cannot bear to face.

TALES FROM THE JAPANESE STORYTELLERS collected by Post Wheeler, edited by Harold G. Henderson. 139 pages. Juttle. $4.95.

The European jongleur and minnesinger have their parallel in the Japanese hanashika, whose tongues have wagged incessantly for some 800 years. Diplomat-Scholar Post Wheeler, who was stationed at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo for six years, determined to safeguard the huge literary and oral tradition of the hanashika, spent 25 years talking with the storytellers and collecting, translating and annotating their tales. His ten-volume work has never been made available to the general public largely because he refused to allow the publication of any edition that did not meet his exacting standards. Wheeler died in 1956, and Editor Harold Henderson (former Nipponologist at Columbia University) has now dipped into Wheeler's collection and selected 24 gracefully wrought, highly polished little gems. A favorite hero is the trickster figure, who appears in many guises (as a taciturn bumpkin, a crafty samurai, a modest wife, a voluptuous virgin) and unfailingly triumphs. But the Japanese joker is a special breed. A blend of Socrates and Till Eulenspiegel, he serves as gadfly to his ritualistic feudal society, sits in judgment on its fools and fakers. These stories establish him as a considerable literary creation.

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