Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 160

A Ramble Through Literary Landscapes "A BRITAIN: Landscape in by rm Margaret Drabble photographs by Jorge Lewinski (Knopf 281 pp $2250) Reviewed by Valerie Brooks gable Although hardly a passionate evocation of nature equal to those of Emily whose characters in Wuthering Heights "grow out of its scenery as naturally as the trees and rocks this early Celtic poet obviously had a profound and developed love of place However the formal garden dominated British literature before stony crags and desolate moors eventually took over gardens were artificial and says Drabble charged with allegorical significance and sexual innuendo Flowers also The rose garden was a central allegory of all medieval literature and later lovers were to be entrapped in similiar places heroines are of- ten seduced in arbors Jane Margaret Drabble does exactly that The word Drabble points out is relatively new dating from the end of the 16th Century the word is newer a product of the late 18th Century Enjoying scenery for its owm sake may be as new as the language used to describe it For some reason the British seem particularly good at it And the faculty did not begin with Wordsworth An Irish author of the 10th Century writes "I have a hut in the wood none knows it but my Lord an ash tree this side a hazel on the other a great tree on a mound encloses it The size of my hut small yet not small a place of familiar paths the she-bird in its dress of blackbird colour sings a melodious strain from its Imagine being led across Britain up hills down dales to the sea over moors to the lakes by a superb teach-who gives fascinating bits of ry quotes astutely from the major and minor writers and shows how landscape characters emotions and history combine in their work Here the English novelist and critic in shubberies adulterous lovers in The Forsyte Saga meet in botanical gardens By the mid-17th Century a fashionable garden was one that appeared untamed The love of the natural for its own sake came to be associated with a return to innocence But until the 18th Century most preferred to view nature through a draw-ing-room glass window Then Wordsworth in one decade replaced antiquarian aestheticism with passionate urgency Drabble ruminates: Was Wordsworth so affecting because he drew on a deep primitive animistic view of the world? Like a child or a peasant he saw inanimate objects and natural forces as possessing a life of their own She compares him to Freud who was able to restore an essential contact with the primitive Such insights give ramble a lot of sparkle And how nice to have this combined with splendid photographs of for instance family home Beatrix farm a Cornwall church where Thomas Hardy met his future wife and the mountains and lakes of Snowdonia where Gerard Manley Hopkins sensed Welsh rhythms Drabble does not ignore the industrial landscape with its pollution slums factories and uniquely debilitating poverty Dickens Lawrence George Orwell Evelyn Waugh and contemporary writers Kingsley Amis Alan Sillitoe Nell Dunn among others deal with it The Beatles made Liverpool the stuff of poetry Adrian Henri views cities as good-hearted jostling jumbles though few share his views Escape to childhood fantasy the past appear more hence the popularity of Beatrix Potter Tolkien Laurie Lee Early on Drabble says one of the attractions of landscape is that it is both changing and unchanging Places usually change less than people and nothing evokes the past more than a visit to a remembered place of childhood This is why book is so effective if one loves the literature she recalls it is like returning to a place visited long ago and having it shed with brilliant light Valerie Brooks is an editor at Newsweek Books Alexander Pope on Blenheim Palace: "7 never saw so great a thing with so much littleness in it a most expensive jOutside the Mainstream: The Yore I "EMERGENCY by Clarence Major 258 pp "CHEZ CHARLOTTE AND by Jonathan i Baumbach 211 pp 5 "LONG TALKING BAD CONDITIONS by Ronald Sukenick 114 pp (Fiction Collective! distribut- ed by George Braziller $995 A each $495 paper) Reviewed by James Polk fers the irrefutable logic of nightmare A revolution has failed "who knows whether for better or for Everybody "made love to everybody a couple of and "everybody kept breaking up with everybody and kept getting together Scenes pile up and connections disappear into "a sort of demoralized Doctors seek a vaccine against death: "the idea was to administer small doses of death before the It ends with a celebration of the Brooklyn Dodgers as we are led through landmarks such as Robinson Square Snider Drive the Gilliam Impasse and Reese Park vision of the future finally lands us in the past and we are given as little reason for being there as for any stop along the way Prose like this is not for everyone However readers interested in the techniques of non-narrative fiction may find that novel-while not precisely is just what looking for James Polk teaches writing at New York City Community a textbook on the craft of fiction Emergency Exit would have been more successful if he had just concentrated on giving us a novel Jonathan Baumbach plays with us in Chez Charlotte and Emily He tells the story of Francis famous editor caught in an undertow off a Cape Cod beach and rescued by two peculiar sisters named Charlotte and Emily After living with them a while he moves in with a prostitute-turned-au-thor becomes a spy (or does he?) and discovers himself the husband of an unknown woman Finally there is a lonely and possibly fatal reunion with Charlotte and Emily Through it all Francis is "reluctant to commit himself wary of the irretrievability of mistaken Yet somehow commitment follows him and forces him into the choices he has tried to avoid Much of this comes uncomfortably close to John Fowles and The Magus but still is often impressive Baumbach slides in and out of narrative in and out of dream Most of the time when not straining for effect it all works There are delicious scenes and a good many passing delights Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues is less delightful Ronald Sukenick of gladden the hearts of writing students across the land but is a needlessly heavy burden for any novelist The weight of it judging from the present examples whose publication marks the fifth anniversary sometimes overloads and confines the fiction Yet each of these three volumes exhibits values that could be appreciated more widely if only given the chance In Emergency Exit Clarence Major is occasionally guilty of graduate-school finger exercises but beneath the games he has constructed the bare bones of a fine novel The story centers in the suburban Connecticut town of Inlet where Julie daughter of the black middle class who speaks of meaningful trips to Africa is involved with Al a product of Harlem the Army and radical politics Major uses new local ordinance requiring men to carry women across thresholds as a continuing backdrop before which he piles a loosely connected series of images and reflections leading toward a structure that is humorous affecting and architecturally very nearly impressive The trouble is that in addition to everything else Major tries to give us The Fiction Collective is a group of 25 writers who publish each work while bemoaning the tyranny of commercial publishers who live in fear of anything innovative daring or outside the mass-market mainstream of paperback sales movie rights and magazine experts There is enough truth to their com-(0 plaint to make one wish the collective 2 and its supporters would be less strive dent in voicing it Collectivists do not merely write books they feel obligat-t- ed to "reinvent the This may.