Books: The Sound of the Seashell

IMAGES OF TRUTH (310 pp.)—Glenway Wescott—Harper & Row ($6).

Like the pre-Ship of Fools Katherine Anne Porter, Novelist Glenway Wescott is a somewhat melancholy yet tantalizing literary figure. His novels—including The Grandmothers (1927) and The Pilgrim Hawk (1940)—earned him a special reputation as a prose craftsman and subtle prober of the wheels and springs of emotion that turn the clock of character. But he has produced little fiction (only five volumes since 1924) and, though he has started some projects, has published nothing for the past 17 years. Through all that time, a faithful coterie of Wescott admirers has continued to hope not only for a new book but for the kind of large complex novel they believe he has the ability to do.

Images of Truth is not their long-awaited work of fiction, but it is an eloquent, at times fascinating, celebration of the arts of fiction writing. Wescott, while offering appreciations and portraits of six important modern writers, indirectly produces a memorable insight into how his own complex fiction-writer’s mind savors the world. “Nothing is more original, nothing truer to oneself,” he quotes Paul Valery, “than to feed on others’ minds. Only be sure you digest them. The lion consists of assimilated sheep.”

Magical Power. At first glance, the six objects of Wescott’s literary affection—Katherine Anne Porter, Somerset Maugham, Colette. Isak Dinesen, Thomas Mann and Thornton Wilder—seem to have little in common. But all illustrate Wescott’s passionate belief in the magical power of a story to hold those brooding truths about human behavior that cannot be abstracted as philosophy or illuminated in the swift lightning of poetic metaphor.

With that belief established, Wescott lavishes high praise on the storytelling insights of Somerset Maugham and cheerfully states that Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain would be improved by pruning 300 pages of extraneous erudition out of it. Wescott’s main critical contribution, however, is his experienced literary sightseer’s infectious enthusiasm. “Let me not bully you about this novel that I love,” he says engagingly of Christmas Holiday, a little-known book of Maugham’s that he thinks is the best novel ever written about Europe just before World War II. His account of his old friend Katherine Anne Porter is touched with a fondness amounting to love.

Silence Will Speak. Wescott describes the late Baroness Blixen-Finecke, better known as Isak Dinesen (Out of Africa, Seven Gothic Tales), as she seemed when she visited New York four years ago— already at death’s door, already moth-frail like “a fever-wasted child; but her eyes as lively as the diamonds in her ears. She really did no more than haunt the dinner table.” No writer could ask for a better epitaph than Wescott’s use of a line from one of her own characters: “Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak.”

There is no clue in Images of Truth as to whether or not, after his own long silence, Wescott will speak as storyteller again. In the end he is left waiting, perhaps for some miraculous intervention when—in the words of Thomas Mann, which Wescott wistfully quotes—”some new work can begin to struggle into being, giving out light and sound, ringing and shimmering, hinting at its infinite origin, as in a seashell we hear the sighing of the sea.”