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BOOK REVIEW  HAIRSTON

no future for man, foresees nothing but chaos and disaster - but firmly scorns all forms of positive faith in man and his capacity for regeneration and organization for his own betterment. Despair, alienation, nightmare, all these provide much ghoulish delight to our latterday Romans in the dizzy spin of their dolce vita.

Keeping within the latest literary fashion Wright does not allow a single normal human being or human relationship to intrude into his story. Ordinary male-female or parent-child relationships are hopelessly passe`.  To be allowed in they must be represented as essentially nightmarish-as Albee demonstrated in Virginal Woolf [italics] and The American Dream [italics]. Even Baldwin, for all his social insight, weakens his position by championing homosexual love as somehow superior-emotionally, esthetically, even morally-to heterosexual love. It is curious that this Platonic concept, which might have been natural enough n the days when women were ignorant chattels, should be back in fashion today!

Some years ago Norman Mailer stated that sex was all that was left for the American writer to write about. He might have said the Western [italic] writer, and to sex added horror and insanity. If it is true that literature and the arts reflect the condition of the society in which they develop, then the degenerating state of Western civilization becomes clear.

It is therefore a tragic event when a black writer in present day America falls victim to the general epidemic. If Albee and Genet, Camus and Henry Miller are telling the truth about their [italics] societies, this cannot be said for the greater majority of mankind and for the Negro American community, who are now in the throes of a very real, very un-pathological [un - italic]ferment and revolution. For Charles Wright to have succumbed so eagerly, so readily, to the leprous condition of the "master group" is shocking and disturbing. While real life men, women and children in their millions are struggling for their lives, did he have to place his talents at the disposal of the horror merchants to peddle goods of despair?  Loyle Hairston [bold, smaller font]

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