Moralist’s Progress

Part of the Truth: An Autobiography by Granville Hicks. Harcourt, Brace and World, $5.95.

Granville Hicks’s Autobiography is more about the small town and its function in American life than it is about his experiences as a radical in the ’30s. A reader who comes to this work in the hopes of having the complexities of that epoch illuminated is doomed to disappointment. Nothing new about the ’30s is revealed and some of what we know does not emerge. But it is something to get the account of one person who is honestly trying to understand and explain his mutations through six decades. There are moments in his narrative when his homeplace at Grafton, N.Y., on a hillside looking toward the mountains of Vermont, becomes the one solid structure in a shaking world, and at other times it is transformed into an idyllic vision of a Muse. In the midst of chopping events, Hicks could be faithful to his Muse without warping his conscience as his Muse was faithful to him.