Books: The Duelists

TWENTIETH CENTURY PARODY (304 pp.) —Edited by Burling Lowrey—Harcourt, Brace ($5.75).

Parody is the sincerest form of literary flattery and one of the highest forms of criticism. It must duel with the creator on his own ground, and when successful, is calculated to make the Cyrano de Berge-racs of the arts feel that it is not just their noses but their swords that are comic. The true parodist must do more than spoof superficial oddities and quirks of style; he must reach the deeper eccentricities of attitude, summon the author’s familiar spirit and transform it into a Halloween mask.

Few of the pieces in this compilation meet this severe test. Even so, the book is very funny indeed, particularly when Paul

Dehn rewrites Oklahoma! in the Chekhov manner (“0 what a beautiful mournin’ “) or when S. J. Perelman asks once again, “Odets where is thy sting?” and proves the superiority of one who knows that he is a clown to one who does not. College instructors should perhaps prescribe the book as esthetic therapy. Not that even today’s sophomores are likely to lose their critical faculties over a ghost of the ’30s like Clifford Odets; nor. as E. B. White proves in a one-page version of Somerset Maugham, is the jejune quality of the Old Party’s dinner-jacketed one-upmanship likely to delude the young. The wonder is, Twentieth Century Parody suggests, that there has been so much style in the last 60 years to be worth parodying.

Deliberate Confusion. Parody shows its proudest paces when matched with the trend-setting writers. Thomas Wolfe’s uncapped autobiographical gushes (“I, or me, the youth eternal, many-visaged and many-volumed”) are shown in all their wonderful but wobbly workings by Clifton Fadiman, whose irresistible caricature should make any further sheep think twice before they don Wolfe’s clothing.

The case of William Faulkner is more baffling, since those involuted, parenthesis-clogged sentences at times make the greatest tragedian of modern U.S. letters seem barely literate. For an artist of Faulkner’s high purpose, the canebrake confusion of manner can only be deliberate—an esthetic and philosophic ruse to exclude reason from the genetic and historical workings of man’s fate. Peter De Vries’s brilliant parody takes account of this and gives fair warning to those who attempt to write Sartoris Resartus; it may be easy to fake the Spanish moss but not the tree it grows on.

Fancy Needlework. Ernest Hemingway, unfortunate in that his vices have been imitated while his virtues remain his own, is perhaps most vulnerable of all to the parodist’s pic. Under the muscular stoicism and the man-of-the-world expertise, there is a vein of provincial naivete, and the celebrated bare style is really an elaborate piece of purl and plain knitting, learned in part from that fancy needlework artist, Gertrude Stein. Far from being economical, it is in fact more prolix than, say, Thomas Mann’s high mandarin, a fact proved some years ago by parodists in the New Statesman and Nation, who vainly attempted to translate a passage from Death in Venice into 150 words of Hemingway. It could not be done.

Despite such opportunities, H. W. Han-emann’s A Farewell to Josephine’s Arms fails to wound the Hemingway bull, and Gilbert Highet’s Thou Tellest Me, Comrade does only slightly better. Not included is Wolcott Gibbs’s excellent redoing of Death in the Afternoon with automobiles rather than bulls. In default of this, Hemingway remains master in his own arena; in Across the River and into the Trees he proved that he could be his own best parodist.

As Nathaniel Benchley might have pointed out in his perfunctory introduction, both the greatest writers and the worst defy parody; clever schoolboys discover this every year about Shakespeare.

In a parody of James Jones, Peter De Vries demonstrates the corollary: you just can’t keep down with the Joneses. The same is true of Robert Benchley’s Dreiser, a skilled piece of bore-baiting, but one which leaves out of account the shambling power of the American tragedian tangled in his own ill-fitting language. It is like putting a paper hat on a shaggy dog.