Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 23

DETROIT FREE PRESS Sunday. Nov. 29, '64 7-B i BSE B38 rftfS SS CHAPLIN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY is TramD and Charlie About $Books MORE BOOKS q) CHAPLIN ON THE TRAMP: "You know, this fellow is many-sided a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure. He would have you believe he is a scientist, a musician, a duke, a polo player. However, he is not above picking up cigarette butts or robbing a baby of its candy tr Every kind of commentary about books and their authors will appear in this column during weeks to come.

This week's column is written by the Free Press art critic. BY MOKLEY DRIVER One of the most impertinent, inaccurate and annoying books is "The Wounded Land" by Hans Habe (Coward-McCann. You guessed it the wounded land is the U.S.A. and we are as sorry a collection of uncultured, illiterate, insensitive, bloodthirsty money-grabbers as it is possible to contain between the covers of a 310-page book. Hans Habe is German and served in the U.S.

Army during World War II, received and keeps his American citizenship while living abroad and styling himself "a European." Every once in a while he writes a book and comes to his California sunshine that bathed Mack Sennett's Studio, Charlie Chaplin knew how the Tramp felt. 'Charlie Chaplin, the rich kid, might not have tried to escape his creation in the way Charlie Chaplin the poor kid tries and never does. For example, Chaplin mentions the name of every rich or important man or woman he met in Europe; even those whom he met casually, he name-drops, if the name is important enough. Napoleon conquered all the armies of Europe, smashed them, made himself Emperor, but when he married the Austrian princess he said to his brother, "Joseph, if only our father could see me now." Smashing the Hapsburg armies Is one thing, but marrying a Hapsburg princess is something else again. As great as this book is, we need to know much more about this amazingly ambivalent genius.

For Charlie's Tramp was charitable and Charlie rarely is; Charlie's Tramp was moral and Charlie often falters; Charlie's Tramp sought champions and Charlie never. BY HARRY GOLDEX Specia! to the Free Press George Bernard Shaw once wrote that the movies had produced three geniuses D. W. Griffith, Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin is the first of these to offer his autobiography which he appropriately titles My Autobiography (Simon and Schuster, It is a great book and will be around for a long time.

The first half of the book about his boyhood and his mother achieves the flash and inci-siveness his genius achieved before the cameras. Charlie Chaplin was a part of my life in the way that Babe Ruth rould bo part of another man's life or a college: could. There are several things I feel I ought to say about Charlie Chaplin. He is a unique man, yet the realization that he affected millions of wople all over the world must in some way make him pical. At the moment, I would like to confine myself to his youth, more, he said, we shouldn't have to work so hard to get rid of it.

The amazing thing, of course, is that out of this background Chaplin could conceive a fictional character that could make the whole world laugh. It is true that Charlie Chaplin the rich kid might just as well have created the Tramp. The essential idea of genius is that it surmounts environment. I have recently felt that Lyndon Johnson has the same sort of compulsion about poverty Chaplin has. Had John F.

Kennedy lived, undoubtedly he would have mounted the War Against Poverty but he would never have had the emotional fervor to call it that. When Charlie Chaplin, the product of London poverty, created the Tramp in the adopted land and lends his presence to the well-paying lecture circuit. Around 40 years ago nearly every visiting European went home and wrote an insulting book. We used to buy them by the thousands, and take them seriously. That day, Mr.

Habe, is over. Habe knows about as much about the United States as a garbage collector does in Kuala Lumpur. The ugly untruthful picture he draws rould be tossed off were it not for the fact that it was first published in German. Habe came to get what he got. All these imaginary people he talks to clothe his peg and fit the outline he had made out before he arrived to lecture, to promote a book and see if Hans ww tiabe A Farewell to Mr.

Fleming, A Farewell to Mr. Bond Can Man Have A 'Patriotism' Toward Mankind? I' Vr- 'sir -V I C-xk VJ he could get a play produced. This reviewer Is also maddened by Habe's use of the Kennedy tragedy. For this event Is, Habe. says, "what revealed to him the shocking meaning behind the troubles besetting every part of these 'dis-United States'." He regales us with tales of our boastful materialism, anti-intellectualism, racial prejudice and political naivete.

Go home, Mr. Habe, go home and leave that passport behind. Minimizing Lloyd George THE PAST FIVE YEARS have been vaguely enlivened by a whole gaggle of books by statesmen or about them, by generals or about them and their times. Nearly all of them are stamped with the word "official," a terribly popular word with book publishers. What is wanted desperately- is something unofficial.

What writers and ghost-writers need to do is stop trying to be historians. Historians are an interesting group but one can stand only so many histories of this and that. Historians deal with farts, what, In fart, happened. They are not concerned with why the general had an off day, but with what happened on that off day. Anyone who wants to read history can read it and I am all for it.

What I am not for is the biographer with an ax to grind, who selects facts to suit his premise, intertwines them with love affairs and tops it all off with personal dislike as the leit-motif. This is what Donald McCormick has done with "Merlin" a biography of David Lloyd George (Holt, Rhinehart Winston. $6). Lloyd George was a perfect kaleidoscope of a man and he lived in a kaleidoscope of event3 of which he was the epicenter. The history of the period has been written and rewritten from a political, economic, military and philosophical point of view.

What we still need Is the story of Lloyd George a man and how he shaped himself out of the things that shaped him. McCormick has written a book about a small man which Lloyd George wa3 not. He has written about this extraordinarily brilliant man as though he were not part of a whole procession of important events, or failed to understand them or, what is worse, fobs him off as an appeaser (which he was not). Every man has petty moments and public figures have never been renowned for their lack of conceit. But to suggest that this was all of Lloyd George one has to hone the ax pretty fine and wear blinders.

BY PR. JAMES H. LAIRD Fret Press Columnist In this new work, "The Heart of Man" (Harper and Row, Dr. Erich Fromm probes into the human psyche to examine man's capacity for evil. "It would be difficult indeed for anyone who has had a long clinical experience as a psychoanalyst to belittle the destructive forces within Fromm offers this volume as a counterpart of his popular, "The Art of Loving," and it perhaps should be read in company with that book so as not to have distorted ideas about his concept of human nature.

Contending that any theory which remains unchanged for 60 years is merely "a fossilized repetition" and no longer the original theory of the master, Fromm reworks three of Freud's theories the Oedipus complex, narcissism, and the death instinct separating them from Freud's philosophical premises and placing BY MARK ETHRIDCE, JR. Fre Press Associate Editor To some, such events as a presidential election, a Chinese nuclear blast or a Russian revolution might have seemed the major news of the world while we were gone. But to the cognoscenti, the adult of the world, The News Story was the death August 12 of Ian Fleming, and with him James Bond, Her Majesty's intelligence officer 007. Fleming hardly died as he would have wanted to go. He was felled by a heart attack, brought on, his doctor said, by too much golf and too many cigarets.

Rut these were only a small part of the package of James Bond. There were no disturbing and malleable blondes, no fine white wines, no sands of Jamaica at his death. The Beretta .25, which Bond's boss always thought inadequate, was holstered away. Fleming would have liked to have all these with him, because Bond was what Fleming wanted him to be. "It's what you expect of the adolescent mind," Fleming once confessed, "which I happen to possess." But if Bond had to go, he went in style.

The nth full-sized novel (plus a book of vignettes) about the adven- the best part of the book by far. Charlie Chaplin's boyhood was more than dreadful, it was terrifying. It wa3 spent In workhouses and in slums attending to a mother who slowly went insane from malnutrition and despair. Chaplin is very matter of fact about it; his description of his childhood includes none of the pathos another poor English boy, Dickens, managed. Chaplin rather treats his boyhood as normal.

It may be that if he dwelt with longing and clarity on this boyhood, he would long ago have succumbed to its terror. For poverty if endured consistently not only breaks the body but the spirit; it humiliates and it deprives. As our friend Shaw pointed out, it all too rarely inspires. If only it Inspired a little Bond, to order twisted plot. Bond, shattered by the death of his wife of a few hours (a beautiful blonde killed, of course, by the villain of the last book), is about to be sacked by the Secret Serv-1 ice.

But good old decides to give him another chance. And Bond, lo, is promoted from 007, which carries a license to kill, to he ratified atmosphere of diplomacy, with a serial number of 7777. The change makes no difference. The villain is a familiar character, but this time he's raising poisonous flowers, vegetables and animals in a vol In what seems like quick succession, David discovers his mother 'with her lover, fails to stop the suicide of the pregnant girl friend of the school's athletic hero, falls in love with a sophisticated flirt, and gets accused of being a homosexual by his not-alto-gether unsuspect housemaster. This is certainly enough to make a virtuous young fellow stop and re-examine his moral values.

But it is not enough to make David an object of affection or even concern on the part of the reader. Mr. Douglas-Homte's novel sheds heat but no new light. IAN FLEMING: tures of 007, "You Only Live Twice" (New American Library, $4.50) is a good one. The title comes from a 17th century Japanese poem "You only live twice One when you are born, and once when you look death in the face." After transporting us through the Balkans, Switzerland, France, the Carinbean and Fort Knox, Fleming has taken us this time to Japan, with bis usual mastery of the country and the customs.

It is, typically, a wild and cano-loaded corner of Japan. The idea, if you can buy it which only Fleming fans can is to take advantage of the high Japanese suicide rate by making suicide convenient. The villain, Blofelt, isn't making money at it. He just likes death. So anyway, Bond goes through the usual rigors of being forced to live with a beautiful Japanese girl poarl diver for a while, finally makes it into the garden -grounds and takes rare of the problem with his usual violent dispatch.

Onre Bond buried a villain under 20 feet of guano. This time he blows him to his ancestors by plugging a volcano. And in the aftermath, Bond disappears. His obit appears in the London Times lost, presumed dead. But we know that he's back there with that pearl diver, running the sands of time and the strands of her long dark hair through his fingers.

And we know too, that while the obit of Ian Fleming has also appeared in the London Times, he is also on some island shore, sifting the of a full life through his fingers. The Nation's Best-Sellcrs FICTION HERZOG-Saul Bellow. THE RECTOR OF JUSTIN-Louis Aucfiincloss. THIS ROUGH MAGIC Mary Stewart. CANDY Terry Southern and Mason Hotfenberg.

THE MAN Irvlrwj Wallace. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE-lan Fleming. JULIAN Gore Vidal. THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD John Le Carre. ARMAGEDDON Leon Urls.

THE LOST CITY-John Gunttier. A SONG OF SIXPENCE-A. J. Cronln. AN INFINITY OF MIRRORS-Richard Condon.

NONFICTION REMINISCENCES Gen. Douglas Mac-Arthur. CHARLES CHAPLIN My Auttobioq-raotiv. HARLOW-lrvirtg Sholman. THE ITALIANS Luigi Bsrzint.

A MOVEABLE FEAST Ernest Hemingway. THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT David Wise and Thomas B. Ross. NOT UNDER OATH: RECOLLECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS John Kieran. A TRIBUTE TO JOHN F.

KENNEDY Ed. bv Pierre Salinger and Sander Vanocur. THE OFFICIAL WARREN COMMISSION REPORT ON THE ASSASSINATION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY. THE KENNEDY WIT Ed.

bv Bill Adler. FOUR DAYS-Amerlean Heritage and United Press International. John Ciarcli to Speak Vt U-D on Wednesday ART DETROIT them in erence. a new frame of ref- Fromm is always stimulating and one is tempted to quote him at length. "The most important condition for the development of the love of life in the child is for him to be with people who love life." "If mankind, the entire human family, could become the object of group narcissism instead of one nation, one race, or one political system, being this object, much might be gained.

If the individual could experience himself primarily as a citizen of the world "Incestuous wishes are not primarily a result of sexual desires, but constitute one of the fundamental tendencies in man: the wish to remain tied to where he came from, the fear of being free Fromm seems to side with Socrates that man need only be made aware of the difference between good and evil and he will choose the good. Alas, if it were only so. One can disagree with Fromm, the philosopher, theologian and political scientist, and still admit that as a psychiatrist he has much to teach us. lished four books in 1961), his works include "Dialogue with an Audience," published in 1963. and a child's book of verse, "You Know Who," published this year.

Books of All Publishers Christmas Is the Time for Giving Books CHARGE ACCOUNTS INVITED Gordon's Bookstort 1228 GRISWOLD Detroit 26, Mich. 962-7878 9 TO 12 TO I LivernoU A Manzu Sculpture to Enrich Us John Ciardi, poetry- editor will of Saturday speak at the i ity of Detroit Wednesday. Ciardi, who also writes a weekly column in the magazine, received the Avery Hop-wood Award Review Ciardi in poetry when he was doing graduate work at the University of Michigan in 1939. He holds a number of other awards, the most recent being the Prix de Romp, American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1956. A prolific writer (he pub- j' P'p On View and Upcoming EXHIBITIONS: Paintings and graphics by James McNeill Whistler at the Detroit Institute of Arts through Dpc 27, including "Arrangement in Grey and Blark" (known as "Whistler's Drawings and prints by kaethe Kollwitz at Little Gallery, 915 E.

Maple, Birmingham, through Dec. 31. Lithographs trom the Tamarind Workshop. Los Angeles, at Cranbrook Academy of Art, through Dec. 13.

"Print Making in Retrospect," student exhibition at Community Arts Gallery, Wayne State University, through Dec. 15. Water Color Exhibition at the Scarab Club, 517 Farnsworth, through Dec. 4. Drawings, paintings and sculpture by Arthur Lerner at Werbe Galleries, 194S8 Livernois, through Dec.

19. Work by Peter Paone, Edward Hill and Charles Wells at Detroit Graphic Arts Society, 109 W. Warren, through Dec. 6. CHRISTMAS SHOWS: Christmas tree ornamented with Italian Baroque figures at Detroit Institute of Arts, throug Jan.

5. Art for Christmas at Detroit Artists Market, 1452 Randolph, through Dec. 31. Student exhibition and sale at Cranbrook Academy of Art, through Dec. 6.

Faculty and student exhibition and sale at Michigan State University, Krespe Gallery, to Dec. 23. SPECIAL EVENTS: Art Auction for African Art Gallery, at International Institute, 111 Kirby, Dec. 3 at 7 p.m. "Th Last Stop," Polish film at Instituts of Arts auditorium, Dec.

1, 8 p.m. FOR CERTAINTIES' Days for Virtue BY MORLEY DRIYER Free Press Art Critic 'A short while ago an Italian freighter left home port on its last trip of the season through the Great Lakes its destination, Detroit. In the hold was probably the most valuable cargo it had ever carried. In many ways the cargo was alive, lying quietly, monumentally and magnificently, awaiting the welcome, love and homage due a true work of art. Here, after two years, is a monumental sculpture by a monumental artist, Manzu a gift to the people of Detroit from the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company and the first major work by a major artist In a public place in.

downtown Detroit. By the greatest fortune this glorious figure of a woman will find her home in front of what has just recently been termed the only architectural gem in a sea of new Detroit buildings "one of the few great contemporary buildings in the United States." It was architect Yamasaki who suggested the name of Manzu to Ralph T. McElven-riy, the Company president. Arts Commissioner McElven-nyj brought Manzu to Detroit to "discuss the project that has finally brought this great bronze nymph of the water to Detroit. She comes from th family of the nymphs of the rivers, lakes, brooks and springs.

The an- ment, has always followed his own star, never been a part of a sometimes chaotic avante garde. All his work is hallmarked with unmistakable harmony and contemplative tone. His various themes have shown a consistent and almost prophetically passionate call to man. Above all, he seems to desire a response from man to the spiritual gauntlet thrown down in this time of conflict and confusion. Manzu is a perfectionist and by his own clear expression of order he opens a door for all of U3.

'HOT Tough BY JIM DANCE Free Press Reviewer Confronted with the old saw about virtue being its own reward, Some wag once quipped, "That is all It deserves." This is pretty much the philosophy of Robin Douglas-Home, nephew of Great Britain's ex-prime minister, as expressed in his recent novel, Hot for Certainties (Dutton, The virtue endangered is that of young David Melrose, whose pure, eager mind Is being cultivated at one of F.ng-land's best (I.e. worst) public (Le. private) schools. The not-very-subtle physical and emotional bullying he receives Holiday Sale and Exhibition Paintings, Graphics, Water Colors Sculpture, Drawings Through Dec. 24, 1964 Special Room For Art under $100 MANZU cients thought them endowed with prophetic powers able to inspire all men.

MANZU'S monumental (lG1 feet in height including base) sculpture is an eloquent and indescribably beautiful bronze figure of a dancer. Superb in' carriage with arms upraised, intensely, brilliantly alive in expression, she stands uniquely and triumphantly alert to the new life around her. Her face reflects feeling and a kind of joyous wonder. The surface has subtle and strange interplays of light and shadow that give the whole work a refined and pure intensity of spirit. Manzu has been called a man of the Rennaissance but he brings to this art new life, strength and emotional force.

He has a deep understanding of nature and his work is pervaded by humanness a though to show man's spiritual ascendency in an age of anxiety. Manzu belongs to no move 361 OPEN DAILY SUNDAY ctii fm -Iff Christmot) sZy 20208 Garelick's Gallery ROBIN DOUGLAS-HOME at school is reinforced by holidays shared with his divorced parents..