And yet Gorky was possessed by a rare sympathy for people. Such work as “Cain and Artyom” and even the rather superficial “Red” and the delightful “Going Home” would be impossible if this were not so. But his sympathy did not lead him to that peculiar position of being at once identified with and detached from the humans that he studied. He is never criminal, judge, and hangman simultaneously—and yet indubitably Gorky. His failure was that he did not speak as a criminal but spoke for them; and operated, consciously or not, not as an artist and a prophet but as a reporter and a judge.
It seems to me that in Gorky’s failure can be found the key to the even more dismal failure of present-day realistic novelists. For as a school they do not even have that sympathy which activated Gorky. They do not ever indicate what Gorky sometimes succeeded in projecting—the unpredictability and the occasional and amazing splendor of the human being. It is a concept which today—and this is understandable, if alarming—is dismissed as mystic or unreal. Without the insight into the mainsprings of human needs, desperations, and desires, the concern with squalor remains merely squalid and acts to brutalize the reader rather than to purge him. If literature is not to drop completely to the intellectual and moral level of the daily papers, we must recognize the need for further and honest exploration of those provinces, the human heart and mind, which have operated, historically and now, as the no-man’s-land between us and our salvation.
(1947)
Mother by Maxim Gorky
MOTHER, ACCORDING TO THE JACKET and the reverent introduction by Howard Fast, is Maxim Gorky’s most notable achievement; the most beloved of his works in his native Russia, the novel most often and most widely translated, the novel most reread and treasured by people everywhere. In a word, this is Gorky’s best-seller.
And, indeed, though I have not read this book before and am scarcely likely to enter the fellowship of the faithful now that I have, the reasons for this resounding popularity are evident on each brave and bitter page. With some ideological concessions and the proper makeup Mother would make an impressive vehicle for, say, Bette Davis. It is rich in struggle, tears, courage, and good old-fashioned mother love. Reading it is a little like a rereading of the beloved, dog-eared classics of our childhood: how musty it is now, how brave it was then, what a pity we cannot believe it anymore!
Mother, as I gather a great portion of the world’s population knows by now, is that novel dealing with the Russian workers just before the October Revolution. The story is that of a Russian mother’s relationship with her revolutionary son; and we watch the mother as she becomes “step by step, a fighter for justice.” The characterization of Nilovna is, in fact, done with a great deal of skill; she is by far the most fully realized character in the book, even though, so accustomed have we become to the proletarian novel, she is entirely predictable, and her development proceeds along lines since grown monotonous. When first written and published, this novel must have had that same splendid fire and impetus characteristic of all battle hymns when people are in the midst of a struggle, and their blood, as the saying goes, is up. Much of the atmosphere of struggle is captured here—the rage, the wretchedness, the heroism—and reading it now, wise after the event, one is also aware of a terrible futility, a sensation of constriction and waste. The battle betrayed becomes, in retrospect, more terrible than the battle itself, the most especially when the betrayal of the battle can be seen to have been caused by those very elements which gave the battle purpose. In the urgency of battle barricades are set up, issues are defined, the intermediate colors disappear. We have instead the verities of our childhood, the contrast of night and day. It is no place for Hamlet.
Gorky, not in the habit of describing intermediate colors, even when he suspected their existence, has in Mother written a Russian battle hymn which history has so cruelly and summarily dated that we are almost unwilling to credit it with any reality. In spite of the monstrous sentimentality of this tale, the resolute repetition of words like “truth” and “justice,” and the romantic unreality of almost all of its people, there is an ugly, hard truth under it: this did happen, not very long ago; these people really believed in a better world and struggled to bring it about. Nilovna’s last words have a ring of doom and despair which could hardly have been intended: “You heap up only wrath against yourselves, you unwise ones! It will fall on you—you poor, sorry creatures.”
We poor, sorry creatures have not yet, for all our struggle, made this planet a fitting habitation, nor have we learned to live on it at peace with ourselves or with each other. “For us,” cries Andrey, “there are only comrades and foes.” Indeed; and this formulation, with its implicit challenge to engage in perpetual battle, is not likely to change; nor, on the other hand, is the battle likely to grow any simpler, particularly when the distinction between comrades and foes has become so faint as to reduce us all to a state of incipient schizophrenia.
Fast, in his introduction, makes a good deal of the fact that Gorky never severed himself from the people, that he was active in their cause always and was highly revered by his nation. He was the foremost exponent of the maxim that “art is the weapon of the working class.” He is also, probably, the major example of the invalidity of such a doctrine. (It is rather like saying that art is the weapon of the American housewife.) The phrase has always brought to my mind the image of a soldier rushing into battle waving a volume of Shakespeare on the point of a bayonet. Art, to be sure, has its roots in the lives of human beings: the weakness, the strength, the absurdity. I doubt that it is limited to our comrades; since we have discovered that art does not belong to what was once the aristocracy, it does not therefore follow that it has become the exclusive property of the common man—which abstraction, by the way, I have yet to meet. Rather, since it is involved with all of us, it belongs to all of us, and this includes our foes, who are as desperate and as vacuous and as blind as we are and who can only be as evil as we are ourselves.
(1947)
The Amboy Dukes by Irving Shulman
EQUIPPED WITH PERFECTION AND ECONOMY and an impressive narrative power, Irving Shulman tells the story of Frank Goldfarb and the boys who were members of the Amboy Dukes, a street gang in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn during the late spring and summer of 1944. This was when the war hit Brownsville and other slum sections like it with a terrific impact and, suddenly, in the midst of the squalor and congestion, people began making money and spending it, and—remembering the years of Home Relief investigators, food tickets, shabby clothes, and all the incessant humiliations which grind down the poor—grabbing desperately at every chance to work overtime and double time in order to sustain this new solvency for themselves and their children. But the improved financial status, though it brought them more and better food and new clothes and bank accounts, did nothing to release them from the acid, overcrowded ghettos which had conditioned their lives. Rather, this tantalizing, ultimately powerless spending power intensified the violence and frustration contained in their personalities for so long. The children, responding to the complicated drives of adolescence and the electrifying onslaught of global war, were left to their own devices: devices always violent and sometimes lethal, like petty or grand larceny, gang wars, beatings, and rape.
The year that Frank was bar mitzvahed, his family had been too poor to give him anything; but when he was fourteen, in 1942, they made up for it by giving him a beautiful, expensive wristwatch, a symbol of their new prosperity and his new status as a man. Two years later, when the story begins, his membership in the Dukes is of central importance in his life: he has an identity and the security that comes from the knowledge that he is “solid with the right guys.” But during the summer he and his sidekick, Benny, in a drunken fight, shoot and kill their high-school teacher, the unendurably goaded and frustrated Mr. Bannon, who has never been able to control the hoodlums in his class and who baits them at the same time that he is forced to realize that they are as helpless as he is himself. Frank
and Benny are trapped together now, and neither dares to trust the other. When the alibi they have fashioned is broken, Frank squeals on Benny and tries to escape. But at the last moment he is cornered on his rooftop by a member of the Dukes, the dull-witted, desperate Crazy Sachs, and killed.
It is an unsubtle, ugly story and Mr. Shulman has not attempted, and has certainly not produced, a literary masterpiece. In retrospect I am forced to admit that some of the story devices are contrived (that is, rather transparently contrived), that much of the minor characterization is perfunctory, and that, in one instance, his study of Frank’s younger sister, Alice, he succeeds only partially in bringing a potentially significant character to life. But Mr. Shulman, at his best, exhibits a narrative skill that a depressingly large number of his more pretentious colleagues lack, and by some miracle of sympathy he has captured with disturbing accuracy the urgency and restlessness and danger of his locale, the inimitable flavor of speech, and the relentless, inarticulate underache of anguish which culminates in the violence he describes so well. His skill and sensitivity are nowhere more apparent than in his moving sketch of Mrs. Goldfarb, his unfaltering probing of Frank, his realization of the monstrous, sardonic tragedy personified by Crazy Sachs. Here rage is constantly illuminated by pity; even his brutal, shocking climax is saved from being lurid by the painful figure of Crazy shouting, as he pounds Frank’s body, “Now I gotcha. I gotcha for everything!”
Mr. Shulman offers no blueprints, no panaceas, which, I imagine, puts him under the stigma of having written a “pessimistic” novel. He does not say, but seems to know, that recreation halls and basketball games, that first resort of the civic-minded, is a procedure about as effective as the application of Vaseline to a syphilitic lesion. The danger and squalor and personal desperation studied in The Amboy Dukes is not the peculiar property of displaced, thwarted adolescents. In one sense, at least, it is the inevitable byproduct of a way of life which disregards—and therefore violates—the impulse of the individual to dignity and freedom.
(1947)
The Sure Hand of God by Erskine Caldwell
THIS, CALDWELL’S TWENTY-THIRD PUBLISHED VOLUME, is almost impossible to review, largely, I suspect, because it is almost impossible to take it seriously. One wonders why it was done at all. Certainly there is nothing in the book which would not justify the suspicion that Mr. Caldwell was concerned with nothing more momentous than getting rid of some of the paper he had lying about the house, resurrecting several of the tired types on which he first made his reputation, and (incidentally) making a few dollars on the deal.
The story, such as it is, is laid, predictably, in the South, and to no one’s surprise it concerns some poor whites struggling to get along. We have the blowsy, aging prostitute, Molly; her carelessly spawned daughter, Lilly, sixteen, and growing swiftly into a willowy and blindly attractive aphrodisiac; a notably uninspired Jeeter Lester type, here named Jethro; a minister and his sex-starved wife; sex, of course, overlaid with squalor and shot through with what here becomes a curiously revolting humor and a snobbish kind of love. For a story line we have the recently widowed Molly’s attempt to find a man and to make money and keep Lilly pure until she finds a good husband for her. Hoping, perhaps, to have this described as a tragicomedy, Mr. Caldwell thwarts his characters at every turn. The story stops where it began and in the same key. Lilly, to be sure, is no longer a virgin, but no one expected that she would be.
Still, this is a curious book; curious because of its effortless tone and absolute emptiness. Mr. Caldwell, it would appear, knows these people so well that he is no longer even interested in them. He sets them up and they strut their stuff and go back into darkness until it is time for another book. Here, the sure hand of Mr. Caldwell is everywhere apparent. He has not written a single sloppy sentence (nor a single interesting one) nor created (within his own familiar framework) a single unlikely character. This must be fun for Mr. Caldwell, and there is no reason why it cannot go on forever.
It is something of a pity, though. Mr. Caldwell’s gifts may never have been profound, but he was once—as in God’s Little Acre and in some of the short stories, notably “Kneel to the Rising Sun,” and in the honest, well-controlled rage pervading You Have Seen Their Faces—far more valid, far more concerned with human beings and the terrible circumstances of their lives. Mr. Caldwell’s strength lay in his skill as a storyteller, which—and almost regrettably—he has not lost; his concern with and knowledge of one of the unlovelier aspects of the Southern scene, which has become mechanical; and his passion, which to all evidence has died. His career is almost a study in the slow conquest of immobility. Unless we hear from him again in accents more individual, we can leave his bones for that literary historian of another day who may perhaps define and isolate that virus in our organism which has thus far proved so deadly to the growth of our literature in general and our writers in particular.
(1947)
The Sling and the Arrow by Stuart Engstrand
THE SLING AND THE ARROW is the carefully documented study of a schizophrenic personality. From the first page to the last it is a masterpiece of correct and faintly disturbing detail; the progress of the disease is recorded with cold and merciless accuracy. This novel escapes the grisly gaiety of The Snake Pit and is better written and more convincing than The Fall of Valor, without, however, being, in any way, a better or more profound piece of work. Mr. Engstrand writes in a curiously flat and bony prose which seems perpetually on the verge of a climax; his characterization is apt even if his people are uniformly uninteresting; his story is very slickly contrived indeed, and Herbert’s downfall as final—and as right—as any of our psychiatrically conscious millions could wish. To talk of perception here or compassion or eloquence is quite beside the point: the jacket intimates that Mr. Engstrand kept [Wilhelm] Stekel* continually at his elbow and could, presumably, forgo creative intuition for scientific fact.
And Herbert Dawes’s case history does, in fact, have a grim and clinical interest. When the book begins he is a top West Coast dress designer, seemingly well adjusted and secure, placidly married to a spineless and spectacularly unperceptive girl named Lonna—who, apparently, ceased going to movies shortly before Hollywood discovered Freud. Herbert has molded Lonna into what his neurosis makes him desire in a wife; she is unobtrusive, mannishly dressed, useless about the house, and in their lovemaking Herbert’s passivity has forced her into the dominant role. But the security of this structure is abruptly challenged when Lonna insists on having a child. (“To the male part of you she was a wife,” probes the inevitable psychiatrist. “But to the inner female self of you she is your husband—how can a husband become pregnant, nurse a child? Suddenly she had become your enemy.”) While swimming Herbert tries to murder his wife with a spear, believing her shadow in the water to be a shark. Even the tranquil Lonna is upset by this and runs off to a psychiatrist, who diagnoses the root of Herbert’s trouble as a fiercely repressed homosexuality. This, apparently, is too fantastic for anyone in the book to believe, most of all Herbert. Lonna frets over her childlessness, the while her husband is feverishly spying on the lovemaking of a brawny sailor and his girl. Herbert eventually sleeps with the girl—in lieu of the sailor—and when the sailor deserts her, Herbert deserts her too. But the sailor, meanwhile, has begun an affair with the unhappy, sex-starved Lonna; whereupon Herbert falls in love with Lonna again, trying hard to hide his jubilance at having his lover-by-proxy back. Lonna, prepared to risk their marriage once again, sends the sailor off; Herbert, whose mental battle is breaking through into physical symptoms, becomes sufficiently ill to stay home from the factory, sends Lonna to take his place, does all the housework, and is about to make this precarious adjustment work when Lonna finds she is going to have a child by the sailor. Herbert breaks completely, kills her, is caught trying to escape dressed in a woman’s suit with no memory of what he has done. The book ends with him in prison, his fantasy complete, dreaming of a male Lonna about to possess h
im.
This is done with considerable adroitness; indeed, in the hands of a major novelist, The Sling and the Arrow might have been a genuinely moving study. But Mr. Engstrand, for all his skill, never succeeds in cracking the surface of the tragedy or causing, in at least one reader, any sense of identification. His failure is not that his people are unbelievable or his situations unreal. One is simply not interested in his people or in what happens to them. The book reads like a plan—here is a schizophrenic, this is what he does, here is the reason for it. In Herbert’s case, the reason, relentlessly tracked down, stems from his relationship with his father, who according to Herbert loved his wife and daughter more than he loved his son, and who rejected Herbert when he was twelve because he found him in homosexual play with a young neighbor. Herbert’s life was a kind of expiation and flight, an obsession to prove to his dead father that he was masculine entirely and had been cleansed of his sin. Here is a dilemma known to all of us: Herbert’s terrible guilt, the compulsion to be accepted, his helplessness in the face of the war within him. The contemporary sexual attitudes constitute a rock against which many of us flounder all our lives long; no one escapes entirely the prevailing psychology of the times. Perhaps the failure of The Sling and the Arrow can partially be traced to its implicit acceptance of the popular attitude. We are not asked to consider a personality but an abnormal psychology, not a study of human helplessness but a carefully embroidered case history. This has, then, ultimately no more reality than any one of the recent spate of films dealing with psychiatric problems. Here is no illumination, no pity, no terror. One closes this neat and empty volume untouched, indifferent, leaving Herbert floundering in his irrelevant hell, knowing that this happens seldom and can never happen to us.