Books: Idyll

THE WELL OF THE PAST (221 pp.)—Charles Norman—Doubleday ($2.75).

This is a simple story of a New York boy of middle-class background who becomes a poet, sails to South America and back on a freighter, has a love affair with a girl in Greenwich Village, and goes to Paris. It is one more report on that special subdivision of the American Dream in which poets, artists, musicians and other emancipated spirits defy the Philistines, have love affairs without tears, and go forth alone to meet a hostile and uncomprehending world.

Author Norman’s story is a tale of Greenwich Village innocence, before Stalinism and Sartre, when, by his account, the villains were no worse than money-making poetasters, when there was lively talk in gay Bohemian cafés, and when a hero could stalk wrathfully from a meeting of the Poetry Association.

Charles Norman pretty certainly knew the kind of people he has written about in this, his first, novel. At 44, and New York born-&-raised, he has produced six small volumes of poetry himself. The Well of the Past is a gently idealized version of the Manhattan ’20s; yet Author Norman writes so carefully of the quiet life of David Gerald, and follows his simple and unpretentious thoughts with such detached sympathy, that the portrait ends by being impressive. This, he seems to say to the reader, was all that the Greenwich Village-Paris rebellion, in most cases, amounted to; in retrospect, it was nice people living a sensible existence of good taste and moderate pleasures.

Probably Novelist Norman’s hero also had reserves of character somewhere, but nothing ever quite happens to prove the point, one way or the other. In this, as in the effectively drawn picture of David Gerald in love, the book may be true to its time and place; the result, nonetheless, is of David Gerald in a partial vacuum.