Modern Drama

1964 BOOK REVIEWS 107 when he wrote De Profundis, every interpretation of his life reveals afresh. That he over-valued himself and his contributions to literature seems obvious, but who is to blame him for this? And that he fought a good fight against the hypocrisies of nineteenth century respectability, which deserved every epigram he hurled against it, who can object to? If, then, he has passed into legend, has become "oral biography," not only on the stage but in our memory of him, why not? If he sacrificed much that he might have been because of his idolatry of style, if he over-estimated the ultimate importance of art (a common failing of literary men), are we not, nevertheless, in his debt? Our business is perhaps to adopt a generous charity toward him, as Douglas, to his credit, did in his last decades. But more than this, ought we not also adopt a generous charity toward Douglas? Shaw may have been right: in the Wilde-Douglas relationship the tragic role (in a minor key, we might add) belonged to Douglas, who could never have lived up to Wilde's ideal of him. The comic glory remained with Wilde, even in the last desperate, cadging yeaTS in Paris. WALTElt N. KING Montana State University THE THEATRE OF GARCIA LORCA, by Robert Lima, Las Americas Publish· ing Company, New York, 1963, 338 pp. Price $5.00. One emerges from Mr. Lima's book exhausted and a little perplexed. Who is he writing for? A reader new to Lorca will hardly want thirty pages on the puppet plays, yet if we have read Lorca what are we to do with the interminable paraphrase of Blood -Wedding? Thoroughness, evidently, is the aim, a kind of dogged trek through every scene of every play. A great deal of work has gone into the book, and not all of it has been wasted. Each play (except the puppet plays) has a chapter to itself and each of these has an informative note on the writing and first production. There are quotations from Lorca's lectures and press interviews. There is an admirably full bibliography. The trouble is the criticism, the body of the book. Blood Wedding, we are told, 'has been the recipient of many notions of comparison'; when Leonardo confronts the Bride before her wedding, 'Each's pride no longer points out the other as guilty for the negation'; two characters in When Five Years Pass embrace 'with much impetus'; a comparison of Lorca with Brecht concludes 'It is behaviour , human complexity made rampant by life-a mixture of reality and Fatethat interests Lorca.' Through this haze of words can be discerned, from time to time, elusive shapes, like the threadballs of Peer Gynt, crying 'We are thoughts, you should have thought usl' Then the haze drifts gently over the page again. Something, of course, comes through; in particular, the account of the strange, surrealist When Five Years Pass is helpful, though nothing is offered to support the surprising claim that this is possibly Lorca's most important single work. The frustration of life by the restrictive code of honour is traced through Blood Wedding , Yerma, and The House of Bemarda Alba, and a short concluding chapter attempts to relate the other plays to this theme. What is missing from the book is a grasp of the distinctively dramatic quality of Lorca's imagery, a response to the convincing originality of his forms (for example , in The Love of Don Perlimplin), and a readiness to discriminate inferior 108 MODERN DRAMA May work like Dona Rosita from the major achievement of the rural tragedies. As criticism , therefore, the book is ineffective; as a collection of facts and summaries it could be useful. RONALD GASKELL The University, Bristol, England NOTEBOOKS I935-I942 of Albert Camus, tr. from the French and with a Preface and Notes by Philip Thody, Knopf, New York, 1963, 225 pp. Price $5.00. The appearance of the first volume of Camus' notebooks (of three to be published ) poses again the literary problem that has become in our day more and more acute-the justification of publishing every scrap that is in a...