Sherwood Anderson by Brom Weber, and: Tennessee Williams by Gerald Weales, and: Arthur Miller by Robert Hogan (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SHERWOOD ANDERSON, by Brom Weber, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis , 1964. Price $0.65. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, by Gerald Weales, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis , 1965. Price $0.65. ARTHUR MILLER, by Robert Hogan, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis , 1964. Price $0.65. Three excellent short studies in the series, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, present three quite different insights into the quality of American life. Brom Weber tells how Sherwood Anderson, rejected by the critics and his early discoverers, thought that he had achieved only one minor classic, Winesburg Ohio, when, in fact, he influenced a generation of American writers. The elegiac form and the tone of the Winesburg tales, influenced by Spoon River Anthology, A Sportsman's Sketches, as well as a number of nineteenth-century American precedents, are modified by Anderson's own theory of the grotesque: having rejected the sense of multiple and contradictory truths for one particular truth, man has made of this exclusive truth a falsehood and of himself a grotesque. Prose poet and master of irony, Anderson communicates through suggestion, implication , and indirection, rather than realistic detail, how modem man has become incapable of love. Unfortunately Anderson turned repeatedly to the novel form rather than the prose poem or the lyrical short story where his talent found its best expression. Gerald Weales describes Tennessee Williams the romanticist as autobiographer and playwright, the "poet" whose writing is a form of therapy as well as a bid for financial success. For twenty years after "The Glass Menagerie" in 1945, Williams has averaged a play every two years, has written a novel, two volumes of short stories and a collection of poems. Williams' ambiguity of characterization and his extensive use of theatrical devices have been widely criticized, but his reputation has increased in European theaters and American schools. Weales has effectively assembled in a brief study the themes, characters, and scenes repeatedly used by the playwright, has commented on the favorite Williams' type, the fugitive man, on the nature of his pursuer, and the dramatist's predilection for violence. Weales faces the problem of a narcissistic writer who has had much to say about himself and his work, whose real talent lies in the realistic delineation of character, but who has resorted to pseudo-poetic devices because of his aversion to realism. Robert Hogan's study of Arthur Miller suggests the deepening skill and perceptiveness of a writer whose After the Fall may become recognized as a masterpiece in American tragedy. This dramatist has evolved through slow, painstaking steps from the early radio pieces through the intellectually probing studies of human relationships as in plays like All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, or The Crucible. From the beginning he has felt that a play should be a significant statement, and like Ibsen and Dostoevsky, he has forced his audience and his readers to listen. After the Fall, a "triple condemnation of SOciety, the fa~ily, .and 318 1967 BOOK REVIEWS 319 the individual" for the way each has sacrificed others for its own survival, is his strongest statement to date about man's failure to love; his one last hope is his ability to perceive this awful truth about himself and others and to continue to live. In his perception of the human condition Miller is more akin to Anderson than to Williams whose plays are an "extension of one man's individual psychology." SIGNI FALK Coe College A GUIDE TO CRITICAL REVIEWS PART I AMERICAN FROM O'NEILL TO ALBEE, by James M. Salem, New York, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1966, 181 pp. Price $4.50. Professor Salem's Guide is the first of a projected four-part book which will include reviews of musicals, British and Continental drama, and screen-plays. The present volume lists the reviews of plays by fifty-two dramatists and is com~ plete with the exception of plays by playwrights whose work appeared before 1920, the beginning date of the bibliography. Professor Salem's sources are American and Canadian periodicals and the New York Times. The limits are thus established and the productions reviewed, therefore, primarily New York productions . There is no reference to scholarly journals...