the characteristics of the crabs, spiders and serpents they resemble.

The matter-of-fact treatment, the gently regretful but fatalistic attitude. toward man and his innumerable follies, make this story seem, for all its nightmarishness, not only a possibility but a probability. M. Gary seems to be saying three important things here. First, that fear of conformity can result in worse disasters, second that a mute acceptance of whatever alleged advances science proclaims can mean the end of us, and third that we ought to have worthy goals as a society if we are to be asked to make immense sacrifices to achieve them. The space race does not appear to qualify in M. Gary's judgment.

"Speaking of Heroism" might appear at first glance to be a slight story. Its central character is a successful lecturer who comes from France to address a Haitian audience on the subject of courage and then is asked to prove his own courage and-in a wryly oblique way-does so. This is a marvel of understatement on an important theme. Other interpretations are possible, but it seems to me M. Gary is gently deriding the exaggerated importance intelligent people in our time attach to physical courage, an attribute as natural as breathing among those whose daily life requires it.

"A Humanist" is Gary at his best. Irony is the heaviest element in this story of an amiable Jewish toy manufacturer in Hitler's Germany, who is hidden away by his two Aryan servants and carefully, even tenderly looked after by them throughout the war. But when the war has ended they do not tell him. They go on caring for him while they live in his handsome house and profit from his business. This in its terrible simplicity is not an indictment of Germans as a nation so much as of human vulnerability to greed and

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of man's saddest genius, the ability to deceive himself, to rationalize his weaknesses into strengths, his cruelties into acts of mercy.

"The Lute" will be of particular interest to readers of ONE. It is certainly the most elegantly written piece in the book, and it reveals M. Gary's fine understanding of two subjects, which are sometimes one-love and loneliness. A diplomat in Istanbul, a man of sixty with four grown children, has a wife who loves him with her whole being. Outwardly cool and withdrawn. she has carefully managed his life and career for him, protected him from disagreeable contacts, prayed for him. His life has been good, his career successful-though as we enter this story he has begun to wonder if he might not have done something more worthwhile with his years and his abilities.

Always a connoisseur of fine art. the diplomat has lately taken to spending much time in the shops of antique dealers. But dissatisfaction, even with the most beautiful objects, a sense of incompleteness about them, mars his pleasure and prevents him from buying. At last, in fear that he will gain a reputation for stinginess, he forces himself to make a purchase. What he buys at last and how his feelings of incompleteness and dissatisfaction with beauty are brought to an end, must not be told here. But the curious love and devotion of the wife who has created this man whom she adores and who is not thanked nor understood by him, and does not even ask that she should be, makes "The Lute" a study in human nature of first quality.

Buy Hissing Tales and read it. You will find yourself drawn to it again and again. It performs the function of the finest works of literature-it makes more real and vivid and comprehensible the world around us and the lives we lead.

-James Colton

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