As Cocks and Lyons Focund

LAST month Mr. Julian Green, in the midst of being astonished at the number of beggars in New York as compared with Paris, spoke to a Times reporter about his ambition as a writer. He is now far more concerned with style than he used to be, and his concern is to render it invisible. What he wants is "a style that is not only unseen but utterly unperceived. A complete negation of style...Give the reader a fact, not a phrase." This ideal, which implies a drastic cleavage between style and content, is shared by most of his contemporaries. They are all experts with a scalpel, and most of them are eager that their art should be popular; the combination of function and desire calls for an adroit but unobtrusive style.

Among U.S. writers who share this ambition, Dorothy Parker is one of the best artists, as she is one of the most popular. From the first story, "Horsie," in which she creates a feeling of pathos in the reader by firmly withholding it in herself, to the derisive portrait of an actress called "Glory in the Daytime," her objective skill never falters in making vivid ordinary conversations motivated only by busy curiosity and vapid malice. No one else has her ability to make casual human types seem abysmally fatuous. Just as good in their way are the three or four lighter pieces included in the book. Nothing could be funnier than "The little Hours," an account of Mrs. Parker's midnight rendezvous with La Rochefoucauld. The late Elinor Wylie, who sometimes wrote in a similar vein, was apt to betray her consciousness of the aristocratic stylist at work, but Mrs. Parker betrays nothing except her sense of derision.

Julian Green's "Invisible prose" as a categorical imperative is a delusion: the most ornate style conceivable might be as perfect and "invisible" a projection of the narrative fact as a stripped style. But considering the atmosphere which contemporary writers have to re-create or be silent, it is probably the best available medium. For her mastery of it Mrs. Parker ought to be remembered with Ring Lardner. It is true that absolute objectivity, for all but the greatest writers, is an impossible attitude to maintain, and Mrs. Parker does not always maintain it. But by the time the reader becomes conscious that Mrs. Parker is grinning derisively at her characters as she writes, he realizes that he is grinning derisively himself.