The Pure in Heart

THE HUMAN COMEDY -- William Saroyan--Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

A lot of people have wondered whether William Saroyan had it in him to write a whole, continuous novel. The Human Comedy, though it inevitably leaves its grandiloquent title looking like a half-inflated blimp, is a very nice novel indeed. It is, unfortunately, too nice to be as good, as it might have been if Saroyan were capable not only of goodness but of a concern with evil.

The Human Comedy is the story of a happy family in a small town in wartime. It is William Saroyan saying that life is not only worth living, fighting and dying for, but can be an almost unmitigated pleasure. As Mrs. Macauley tells her son Homer, if the world seems to a man "richly sad and full of beauty, it's the man himself so, and not the things around him. And so it is, if it's bad, or ugly, or pathetic --it is always the man himself, and each man is the world."

Homer, at 14, runs into little which might obstruct his capacity for love. At the telegraph office where he works, the manager is incapable of disliking anything, and the operator, Grogan, soaks away in whiskey the sadness of the messages he gives & takes. Homer's history teacher talks to him with a democratic wisdom and kindness which, if it were true of teaching in general, would long ago have left nations incapable of war. On the job, to be sure, Homer has to carry messages of death in war to mothers in the town, and in these more complicated scenes Saroyan is deeply affecting. Homer finally gets such a message for his own mother. His dead brother's crippled, discharged comrade at arms brings the book to a precarious yet beautiful ending.

Little brother Ulysses, meanwhile, has made himself, in his four-year-old wanderings, the most delicately engaging character in the book. Saroyan seldom manages to embody emotions, but his lyric talent can brilliantly suggest even very subtle ones: Ulysses waving to a singing Negro on a passing freight; or handing his mother an egg as importantly as if it were the Eucharist; or, with a half-witted friend, scanning the books in the Public Library; or, before a robot in a shopwindow, first realizing death.

Saroyan shapes such moments in words of almost primer lucidity. Among his still-pursuing faults are glints of Tarkingtonian facetiousness, sometimes boring and unreal sententiousness, excessive sentiment. His essential limitation--which is also his cardinal virtue--is perhaps incurable. That is his chronic ecstasy, his almost Franciscan loving kindness and optimism. It clearly transfigures the world for him and, for a time, is bound to. transfigure any sympathetic reader. Saroyan is one of the few contemporary writers who can articulate, in terms of common life, the indispensable text, Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God. The pity of it is that they are seldom able to see, very clearly, the devil and the man caught in the middle.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.