Books: 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.