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A Change of Scene droll, quirky, occasionally wicked de by Elizabeth Cullman scriptions of people; her sojourn in Paris; W. W. Norton, 192pp., $10.95 finally marriage to Hughes. But the most revealing passages come later. With the ELIZABETH cuLLiNAN's second novel deepening urgency of her literary ambi tells of a flighty, somewhat dreamy, tions, her darkest moods sharpen. She is young woman who flees her native New able to diagram them with increasing York to live for a while in Dublin. Alter precision and remove. nately charmed, baffled, and exasper Regrettably, this is where the journals ated by the city and its disheveled, end. Records did exist of the last prolific colorful inhabitants, she falls in with a months of her life, in which she produced succession of eccentric Irish archetypes. her most disturbing, incandescent poems, More generally, she becomes the quintes often at the rate of two or three a day. sential innocent abroad who searches for Hughes destroyed one of these journals GENERAL TOURS legends that don't quite exist, finds only to protect Plath's children (and, one sus mixed blessings or cross-purposes, and pects, himself); the other disappeared. takes you to returns home slightly sadder but wiser. But perhaps this is as it should be. The CuUinan's stories appear in the New harsh brilliance of her final poems over Yorker, and she writes in that magazine's whelmed her urge to live. Autobiog distinctly mild and strenuously casual raphy—a life outside her work—had CHINA already ceased to matter. manner. Preferring discretion to discrim ination, her novel is plotless and pressure- —ANDREA BARNET IN less. Often it resembles a meandering travel-diary in which detailed observa China: Alive in the Bitter Sea GREAT STYLE tion and callow reflection never fully by Fox Butterfield 14-19 days mesh. The book must therefore rely upon Times Books, 429pp., $19.95 the boisterous Dubliners for all its energy from $1099* to $1825* "YOU SHOULD IMAGINE China as a giant and life. The narrative itself is diffident to plus airfare flight of stairs. There is a person on each a fault, quiet almost to the point of extinc FANTASTIC VALUE - step. Each person knows only what is on tion. A Change of Scene is at best, per - MODERATE PRICE! his step. No one sees the whole stairway haps, a portrait of a superficial girl; and at General Tours now offers FIVE from top to bottom. It is too vast. "This is worst that girl's superficial portrait of a CHINA PROGRAMS for 1982 but one of many aphorisms recorded in city that forever eludes her. —PICO IYER PLUS Southeast Asia exten Fox Butterfield's portrait-survey—a sion to Bangkok and Singapore book long on anecdote (it is admittedly on our Grand Orient Tour. patterned on colleague Hedrick Smith's • wide-body jets Nonfiction 1976 best seller. The Russians), rich in • American tour manager cultural fact, and heavy with gloom. • easy pace for maximum enjoyment Briefs Butterfield arrived in Peking in 1979 as • all meals in China the first New York Times correspondent • full sightseeing The Journals of Sylvia Plath in China in 30 years. What he found—or • East/West Coast departures edited by Ted Hughes and was able to ferret out and view from his • outstanding itineraries- Frances McCullough step—was a very poor, rigidly stratified many featuring Xian and The Dial Press, 384pp., $16.95 and disillusioned nation of a billion "sur Kweilin vivors" still in trauma from Mao's hor • Unique Russia-China combo IN THESE JOURNALS, which begin as rendous Cultural Revolution. The *per person double occupancy from NY Plath enters Smith College and close just people, Butterfield reports, are "chas MVVIL before her separation from poet Ted tened, cynical, and numb." Police spies L ίίαΚΛΙΜΙΟΊ Member ol the First Family o( Travel Hughes, it is Plath's stoic face that we are everywhere in this book, and most of see—her poise, balance, and restraint. Butterfield's conversations with Chinese What A Way To Go! She is confessional, but never out of are clandestine, with identities disguised. control; narcissistic, but not yet close to The terror has abated only enough to GENERAL TOURS, INC. self-annihilation. She swings between allow corruption. Officials have their 711 THIRD AVE. ^^^ radiant self-assurance and bitter self- Red Flag cars and other privileges. Pov ΝΥ,ΝΥ 10017 ** disgust. Yet there is nothing to recoil erty is rampant. Much daily business is 212-687-7400 ^^'^'^^ from in her journals. Her suicide transacted extra-legally. The regime is YES! TAKE ME TO CHINA IN attempts, shock therapy, anger, and out of touch with the young, many of GREAT STYLE! Please send recriminations seem to have been neatly whom want to get out. my free copy of excised. Nonetheless, a haunting record THE CHINA BOOK Yet Butterfield also reports that China of Plath's inner struggle remains. was ever thus, that individualism was Most varied are the early entries: her always subservient to the group—the address pragmatic student years at Smith, then position on the stairway—and that Com zip. Cambridge; her openly expressed eroti munism is simply the latest phase of an my travel agent: cism, infatuations, envy of men; her authoritarian/totalitarian ethos that 62 PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG Saturday Review/May 1982 ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED goes back to Confucius. Thus the book is shy, methodical man who felt ill at ease at policy. However, in her determination to both dour and inconclusive. It is also at his own lavish parties and who carefully reveal the substance of Nast's work apart times engaging, touching, and insightful sustained his glamorous exploits with from his public images, Seebohm sacri —and for any China-bound traveler, a "an uncompromising underpinning of fices some entertaining flourishes. I found useful if repetitive primer on the nether facts and figures." myself wishing for more detailed descrip "coping" side of Chinese moods and Caroline Seebohm painstakingly illus tions of his extravagant parties, his rela manners. —ELIOT FREMONT-SMITH trates Nast's obsessive list-making, his tionships with tlie famous, and, more assiduous gathering of statistics, his con importantly, his personal involvements. Poets in Their Youth stant analysis of advertising and circula Omissions like these leave Nast a shad by Eileen Simpson tion figures, and his vigilant evaluations owy figure. Nevertheless, Seebohm's his Random House, 227pp, $15.50 of the quality of his magazines. This gives tory of his magazines is a solid account of the reader a clear sense of Nast's uncanny the medium that changed the way Ameri "WE MUST TRAVEL in the direction of our ability to be simultaneously conservative can women look at themselves. fear," wrote poet John Berryman. Unwit and visionary in establishing business —CAROL VERDERESE tingly, he voiced the credo that's come to be the hallmark of his generation of post war American poets. Eileen Simpson, Berryman's first wife, herself a writer, chronicles the heavy price of that journey. A cross between Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Cyril Connolly's Enemies of ,;· :>v-> ;.>^.-. Promise, Simpson's book exposes the pathology of writing. While the narrative centers on Berryman, its wider focus takes in Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, and their mentors—Allen Tate, Edmund Wilson, and W.H. Auden. A therapist by training, Simpson offers harrowing psy chological portraits: a depressive Del- more Schwartz crippled by early fame; a manic Robert Lowell ricocheting be tween electroshock and Benedictine retreats. Riddled with writer's block or insomnia, each poet succumbed to a lethal litany of sedatives and stimulants, alcohol and adultery. Poets in Their Youth reels with abor tive suicides, bad seductions, disinte grating marriages. Yet it is deeply moving. An invaluable first-hand wit ness—and survivor—Simpson has writ INCIDEN-A NOVEL BY- T ten a sensitive, sharply observed memoir. —ALEXANDRA JOHNSON MDMHEY The Man Who Was Vogue: Oiicoldic l2lH-sll)o<.ksi)n«)8l."· The Life and Times of Conde Nast —Hie \t'lr )orki iiiii's hook Itcrieii· .Idhii Wasliin^oii is a brilliant yoiin^ black liisloriaii wbo by Caroline Seebohm has clioscii lo bury liis own pasL I iitil. siiinnioiu'd home The Viking Press, 316pp., $17.50 lo care or his (lvni<; guardian. 1 e IS compelled bv a slorv the old man tells him lo iinra> el his familv's eni^'inalii "EXCLUSIVITY, AFFORDABLE LUXURY, liistorv. ll is the l>e^innin^ot'a (| lesl that weaves back aiK forth th roufili lime and fienerali ons. Was there a coniiec- and the highest quality" were the tenets lion be ween his father's viol» nl death aixl bis <;real- on which Conde Nast built his publishing ^raiulf'a titer's mvslerious <lisa| pearance';* W hv are lb< empire during the first half of this cen town's 1nos i prominent eilizeiis now afraid of ΙιΙηΓ;* Λη< tury. His deliberate effort to appeal to a whv ha s his mother never lolil him of a lefracv that w il clianfjc his life? small but elite segment of American society made his magazines—Vogue, "Λ nox 1 lo be reckoned with, aii d one thai is snre lo havi a Dowct fill effect on its readers.' -.loiialliaii )αηΙΙΐ'\ Vanity Fair, Glamour, and House and •"So strikingly orif^inal. so shockingly [lowerful... a book Garden—required reading for those who which will have a remarkable effect on fteneralions lo aspired to belong to the beau monde. Yet come." -Charlc.'i It. Ijir-ion. J)rlroil \<>irs despite Nast's role as an arbiter of AVAN Ι'ΛΙΊ.Ι{Ι5Λ(.Κ S:{..")0 .