LIVING BEYOND THE PALE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 818, 1 April 1955, Page 12

LIVING BEYOND THE PALE

THREE MEN, by Jean Evans; Victor Gollancz, English price 15/-. /HAT makes a misfit in societysociety or the misfit himself? For those who believe that the fault lies exclusively on one side or the other, Jean

Evans’s Three Men will be both illum- | inating and disturbing. Mrs. Evans has made three personal and factual studies, one of a man at war with society, one of a man whose dreams are an escape from society, and one of a homosexual. She has broken down the life of each into its sound and unsound elements, from the imagined slights of childhood to the very real ones inflicted by an unthinking adult world. Then, in short follow-up studies, she shows us the men as they are today, struggling. both with themselves and their environments, tragically aware of their shortcomings and striving, so often fruitlessly, to overcome them. But this is not a psychological textbook. It uses no jargon, neither has it the specifically clinical approach of the case-history. Mrs. Evans has sub-titled her work, "A Study in the Biography of Emotion," and biography, in the best literary sense, it certainly is. Moreover, by being biography it is able to achieve more than a textbook ever could. It allows us to understand the means by which the emotional attitudes dominating each of these men flare up in the type of behaviour that we call antisocial. We are allowed freely behind the scenes in each subject’s mind, and if we have a farthingsworth of compassion we can feel, with them, the stresses that build up and build up until, under the present-day restrictions of society, they become intolerable, This is a profoundly uncomfortable book, not only because it shows by what a hair’s breadth normal behaviour is separated from abnormal, but also because it can suggest no way in which that hair’s breadth can be made more sub‘stantial. It draws no conclusions, save the one that is implicit from the first page to the last, which is that until society is prepared to come to new and more humane terms. with its misfits, misfits can never come to terms with it.

Peter

Cape