(1947)
*Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1942) was an Austrian physician and psychologist. He was an early disciple of Sigmund Freud.
Novels and Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by V. S. Pritchett; and Robert Louis Stevenson by David Daiches
UNTIL THIS NECESSITY I had not read Robert Louis Stevenson since my childhood. I had read then, and in some corner of my mind remember with pleasure, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Kidnapped, and Treasure Island. I especially remembered the poetry, without, of course, ever thinking of rereading it. It was something designed for my friends’ children on their birthdays. I had, in fact, relegated Stevenson to that dusty and diverse gallery of my childhood, a gallery which also included Horatio Alger, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and almost all of Dickens. Childhood, I decided, having safely survived it, was a period of light and sunshine, and in Stevenson these elements were contained in profusion; he was perfect for childhood, because his stories were so simple and he told them so well.
Thus, rereading Stevenson was something of a shock, almost a betrayal. It was not that he had become less delightful, but that now there stirred for me beneath this brave adventure an element faintly disturbing of which I had not been cognizant before. Treasure Island, it is true, remains perhaps the best boys’ book I have ever read; but not even this masterpiece quite escapes the transformation effected by time.
The most enduring delight offered by Stevenson is contained in his prose; he could write superbly well, a virtue for which we should all be grateful now that the clotheshorse, the fisherman, and nymphomaniac have been equipped with typewriters and entered the world of letters. The admirable study by David Daiches dissects Stevenson’s style in some detail and skillfully traces Stevenson from his “sedulous” aping of the styles of other men to the Stevenson who produced Kidnapped and The Beach of Falesa and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston. Daiches does some extremely careful detective work here and achieves a rare effect: he makes Stevenson grow and strengthen before our eyes. Perhaps this is not the definitive study of Stevenson, but it succeeds within its limits perfectly. Whoever attempts such a study hereafter will be greatly in Mr. Daiches’s debt.
The Pritchett volume—which is badly printed on bad paper and with an inaccurate table of contents—includes Weir of Hermiston, Kidnapped, Travels with a Donkey, The Beach of Falesa, The Master of Ballantrae, and The Suicide Club, and contains an introduction by Mr. Pritchett. Pritchett, rather less sympathetic than Mr. Daiches, notes that Stevenson was too mannered and too clever and too vain and was, for much of his life, not so much of an artist as a charming and irresponsible vagrant; and that even Weir of Hermiston might never have become the great novel it seems to promise because Stevenson does not, at any other time in his career, seem capable of so sustained an effort on such a mature level. Mr. Daiches, in consideration of this aspect of Stevenson, anatomizes the conflict within Stevenson between a bourgeois and a bohemian morality, a conflict related to his father and accounting in part for his unevenness as an artist and his frequent inability to achieve or sustain adult insights.
Stevenson is always a master storyteller; and his failure, when he fails, is not the inability to tell the story but an inability to handle a theme. It is this failure which mars his two most ambitious efforts for me: the murkiness and indecision and unevenness of characterization in The Master of Ballantrae and—in spite of the considerable impressiveness of Weir of Hermiston and the sometimes brilliant handling of the father-and-son relationship—a lack of unity in this fragment, which indeed I doubt that Stevenson could have finished.
Stevenson is at his absolute best, however, in a narrative like Kidnapped, an exceedingly skillful novel and a far less simple one that I had supposed. (According to Mr. Daiches it is only one-half of the novel its author intended, having been sidetracked midway and become something quite different. It has a sequel, David Balfour.) All of Stevenson’s warm brutal innocence is here, the sensation of light and air, the nervous tension, the chase, the victory. And the preoccupations he later pursued in more ambitious novels give Kidnapped an impetus which makes it a good deal more than an adventure tale. The story of David Balfour’s struggle to attain his birthright is told with a strange lack of directness and is emphasized by an indefinable sense of guilt, sometimes almost terror, which makes his victory, when it comes, less than it was in anticipation. He has paid for his victory with himself and has become a different person. The novel, in fact, ends on a restrained and terrible note of melancholy:
It was coming near noon when I passed in by the West Kirk and the Grassmarket into the streets of the capital. The huge height of the buildings, the foul smells and fine clothes struck me into a kind of stupor of surprise so that I let the crowd carry me to and fro; and yet all the time what I was thinking of was Alan at Rest-and-be-Thankful; and all the time (although you would think I would not choose but be delighted with these braws and novelties) there was a cold gnawing in my inside like a remorse for something wrong.
Again, in Kidnapped the relationship of David and Alan, on which much of the book turns, is far more than a friendship and is certainly not the traditional Anglo-Saxon friendship. Alan is for David a father image, a lover, a foe, a child, and, over and above all, a symbol of romance. In spite of Daiches’s reservation that the characterization of Alan is not entirely successful, it seems to me that Stevenson exhibits in the relationship of these two a richness and complexity of insight which does not anywhere—until Kirstie and Archie in Hermiston—characterize his studies of men and women. Pritchett, observing this, concludes, and I agree, that this does not at all indicate that Stevenson was homosexual; for Stevenson men were less of a riddle. They represented no challenge, they were the makers and the movers of the world and more fitting subjects for romance. Here, probably, is one of the keys to Stevenson’s continuing popularity with the young, and one of the reasons it took him so long to become an artist. He is innocent—or asexual—in the same manner that preadolescent youth is asexual. In Treasure Island as in Kidnapped, women and the challenge women represent are only vaguely intimated; it is an element projected into the future and which allows the protagonists, meanwhile, to live as though this challenge will never have to be met. Later, when the challenge must be taken up, it is an awkward and unhappy battle; this bright world is darkened and roughly disoriented; at this time David would be almost willing—if he could—to surrender his birthright, to be hunted and threatened all over again if he could thereby return to Alan at Rest-and-be-Thankful.
(1948)
Flood Crest by Hodding Carter
FLOOD CREST, by HODDING CARTER, is yet another addition to the overburdened files of progressive fiction concerning the unhappy South. We are asked this time to consider the career and character of Senator Cleve Pikestaff, a most reprehensible old man, who, as is made abundantly clear, is not in the least worthy of his great office. For years his political career has been managed for him by his sharp-witted, strong-willed, seductive daughter, Sudie—who frequently makes Cleve feel bad because she cannot bear his lack of social grace. (Cleve is given to spitting in the fireplace and scratching his bottom in public.) These symbols of corruption are surrounded by various familiar excerpts from the Southern landscape, a landscape which is not, apparently, ever going to change. We have the liberal old Southern professor, fortitudinous and patient, fighting, as one of the more rhetorical characters—perhaps the professor himself—remarks, “to keep change within a channel.” In this he is aided by his sharp-witted, strong-willed, seductive daughter, Bethany. They are eventually joined by Sudie’s ex-lover Floyd, young, attractive, confused, and—ultimately—Progressive. There are others: a lusty young killer and prison trusty named Clyde; two dreadful Caldwell cretins, Georgie Mae and her man, Pud; and the Mississippi River, which rages fearfully throughout the book, threatening to drown them all—a finale, however, which Mr. Carter avoids, since he is concerned with Progress and flatly opposed to Defeat.
This, like most of it
s predecessors, effectively resists all attempts at intelligent analysis. It cannot, of course, be criticized in literary terms at all; whatever Mr. Carter’s convictions, his notions of trenchant characterization are shallow, not to say antique. The book, presumably, is meant as a study of public corruption feeding on public apathy; its moral is as neat and timely as the subway posters “Freedom Is Everybody’s Job.” The trouble is not specifically with the moral, which is fine as morals go, but simply with the painful vacuity and indecisiveness of Mr. Carter’s story. Mr. Carter manages to say about all of the right things, none of them very strongly, none of them clearly; it is, indeed, made increasingly obvious that he does not quite know what to say. Mr. Carter is concerned with Change, which he equates with Progress, and he is against Violence. Progress must, of course, be made; but it must be made neatly, wisely, there must be no messy unforeseen edges to trim. And it must be made in the American Way by all the Common People, acting, as they seldom do, in unison. This metamorphosis demands—naturally—an heroic patience and a fairly transparent condescension towards the Masses. Proving, perhaps, his point, Mr. Carter’s Common People—led by the uncommon Floyd—hold back the Mississippi, thus avoiding extinction. Senator Cleve Pikestaff, on the other hand, by a series of wild improbabilities, is assured of re-election, which is, I suppose, the same thing as saying that Rome was not built in a day. Novels and novelists of this genre serve no purpose whatever, so far as I can see, except to further complicate confusion. Mr. Carter knows, I hope, that holding back the Mississippi is not nearly so difficult as striking a bargain with time, which is neither polite nor predictable and refuses to be labeled in advance. And if he means to suggest that there must be men of wisdom and good will in the vanguard, he might also suggest that the wisdom be less vague and the good will less sentimental.
(1948)
The Moth by James M. Cain
A REVIEWER handed a James M. Cain novel to discuss finds himself confronted by several problems, not the least of which is the necessity of squaring with his conscience the fact that he is discussing Mr. Cain at all. What, after all, is one to say about such persistent aridity, such manifest nonsense? Mr. Cain is no novelist: he has, indeed, his first sentence still to write; he has yet to achieve his first valid characterization. For me, at the top of his amazingly overrated form, as in The Postman Always Rings Twice, in Double Indemnity and Serenade, he was, when not downright revolting, obscurely and insistently embarrassing. Not only did he have nothing to say, but he drooled, so to speak, as he said it. It seemed much kinder, really, to take no notice of him, to adopt with him that same fiercely casual, friendly air, assumed, let us say, when visiting two otherwise harmless people who are, however, shamefully addicted to early-morning drunkenness.
Mr. Cain, of course, strongly resists such treatment; he stands, in the first place, by no means alone. He has, moreover, a following described by the publisher’s blurb as “vast”; and, what is perhaps more important than any of this, he is himself convinced of his importance. He writes with the stolid, humorless assurance of the American self-made man. Rather a great deal has been written concerning his breathless staccato “pace,” his terse, corner-of-the-mouth “style,” his significance as a recorder of the seamier side of American life. This is nonsense: Mr. Cain writes fantasies, and fantasies of the most unendurably mawkish and sentimental sort; his pace is simply that of the gangster motion picture; and his style is more pretentious but no more rewarding than that of Terry and the Pirates.
The Moth is Mr. Cain’s most ambitious novel; the publishers advise that it will “surprise and delight” the aforementioned formidable following, a sentiment endorsed by Mr. Cain himself, who shyly confesses a hankering to tell tales of a “wider implication than those that deal exclusively with one man’s relation to one woman”—an ambition which, since I have yet to meet either a man or a woman in Mr. Cain’s pages, seems rather premature.
Apparently the great distinction of The Moth lies in its exhausting and desperate diversity: it involves boy sopranos, oil wells, oil fires, theft, hoboes, the Depression, the inevitable woman (hard and dangerous), and the inevitable husband (dull and well-meaning). The happy ending is economically assured by an appalling and all-too-likely scheme of frozen dinners shipped to housewives all over the country by a plan known, happily, thus far only to Mr. Cain’s hero. The happy ending also involves the culmination of a curious and breathless romance between the hero and an extremely brittle child of twelve, who becomes, at a more seemly age, his wife. This affair, it is worth noting, is not in the least unconvincing; it operates perfectly within Mr. Cain’s framework and sums up for me something intrinsically tawdry and ugly, something very literally nasty, which pervades all of his work.
It occurred to me while reading the earlier and less ambitious Mr. Cain that his ruthless protagonists and their fearful sweethearts were actually descendants of the Rover Boys and that the only thing wrong with them was the fact that they were still reeling from the discovery that they were in possession of visible and functioning sexual organs. It was the impact of this discovery that so hopelessly and murderously disoriented them; they were thenceforth at the mercy of their genitalia, the power of which they were endlessly compelled to prove. Mr. Cain surveys these dull, untidy adolescents with a moist, benevolent fascination, betraying in these novels, the novels in which the tradition and jargon of the American tough guy have been pushed to their furthest limit, the hypocrisy, the horror, and the loneliness from which this tradition sprang.
(1948)
The Portable Russian Reader, edited by Bernard Guilbert Guerney
ONE OF MY CONTINUING and more respectable prejudices has always been, not altogether justly, against anthologies. “Not altogether justly” because an anthology can, I suppose, be very exciting on occasion, and at least as handy as those other indispensables of the earnest middle-brow American, Barlett and Roget’s Thesaurus. Anthologies are apparently designed to make life easier for the inveterate sampler and rereader and to fire the neophyte with an urge to more fully discover the authors who have been obligingly edited and presented to him by some zealous editor. It appeals to me usually about as strongly as watered whiskey; but, of course, even watered whiskey is better than none.
Mr. Guerney’s watered blend is better than most. His self-avowed determinations to indicate to American readers that Russian literature is not all epileptic melancholia—which hardly seemed likely—and that Russians can be gay as well as gloomy, of which I, for one, received overwhelming evidence from the deluge of Moscow-Sings-Moscow-Dances movies during the recent war. Nevertheless, Mr. Guerney has set out to deliver Russian literature from under “Dostoevsky’s somber cape.” This is admirable, perhaps, though of the work printed here (in spite of an occasional, tight, nightmarish humor), none is precisely lighthearted, and most of it is quite strenuously grim.
Mr. Guerney apparently feels that of all literary instruments, the Russian language is the mightiest and most profound, a belief which I, naturally, would not dare to challenge; moreover, according to him, almost all translations from the Russian have been at best weak infidelities or downright profanations. It is something of a blow to discover that one has never really read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky at all but has been merely titillated by irresponsible pastel corruptions. Since Mr. Guerney at no point indicates that he will translate the major works of these men himself, one is left with the rather despairing alternatives of buying a Linguaphone or sticking close to Shakespeare. In spite of all this—or quite possibly because of it, since here each translation has Mr. Guerney’s guarantee—The Portable Russian Reader is a moderately fascinating grab bag. It is quite dreadfully comprehensive, including fables from the eleventh and seventeenth centuries and aphorisms and proverbs from the Lord knows when. More familiarly, there are short stories and excerpts from Pushkin, Gogol, Krylov, Garshin, Turgenev, Gorky, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Ehrenburg. Much of these I have never read before and I am glad to have found them now; som
e are slight or so completely Russian idiom that they have little relevance; later on, with Ehrenburg, for instance, the grim revolutionary simplicities become rather hard to take. But as a matter of fact, Mr. Guerney’s taste, if not irreproachable, is sound, and he has included nothing which could be called mediocre. There are some things which are unforgettable: Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6,” for instance, and Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” and Garshin’s “Four Days.” It includes one of Gorky’s most successful sketches, “Birth of a Man,” Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (there is an unwritten law, Mr. Guerney claims, that every Russian anthology must include it), and the understated, bloodcurdling “Specters” by Turgenev. Mr. Guerney went hog wild, it seemed to me, with the aphorisms and proverbs, but that is undoubtedly the privilege of an anthologist. In this book, in spite of Mr. Guerney’s irritating tendency to sound as though he alone understood the Russian psyche, there is evidence of much loving care, a genuine determination to do the best job possible. But precisely because it was meant to be both portable and comprehensive, it is pretty much of a failure. It is never a critical study, though Mr. Guerney sometimes sounds as though he wishes it were; nor yet is it a history, though it tries to be; and there is no sense of development, though that, presumably, is what Mr. Guerney was aiming at. Since we have no sense of a growing literature, the earlier selections—the fables, etc.—seem charming but irrelevant, conceived in a vacuum. Beyond discovering that it has been going on for a devilishly long time, we do not have any greater understanding of Russian literature than we did before. We have, as I say, a grab bag: diverse, portable, suitable for journeys and after-dinner table conversations.