A Writer's Eye Part 3

In these 883 pages of supernatural writing there are not enough moments when a soft, careless chill, or even a feeling much apart from the mundane, is likely to steal over the reader. The kind of reader who expects much to happen in ghost stories might even be tired out by the time he gets to the end of the book, from a surfeit of ghostly talk and a scarcity of the real ghost article.

This volume of the handy Viking Portable Library includes: The Beleaguered City, 37 by Mrs. Oliphant, published 1880; The Return, by Walter de la Mare, published 1910,38 The White People, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, published 1917; The Terror, by Arthur Machen, published 1917; Sweet Rocket, by Mary Johnston, published 1920, and Portrait of Jennie, by Robert Nathan, published 1920.39 The dates are given as evidence of an interesting and inescapable idea that what const.i.tuted the supernatural in 1880 or even 1920 has undergone not so much a change as a new style. There is style even in the kingdom of ghosts, and the whole world of psychology has opened up since the date of Mr. Wagenknecht's latest inclusion. These novels are old, and old-fas.h.i.+oned, and this is no crime. But they are, several of them, a little shallow, and this is fatal. The old-fas.h.i.+oned doc.u.mented story, in content and method, has a reputation as a good hotbed for flagrant horrors; but the spirit of this whole collection is mild and faded as a pressed flower. Some of the novels were, under their supernatural cast, sentimental to start with, as Page 47 might reasonably be looked for from the authors of Little Lord Fauntleroy and To Have and to Hold, and they seem suspiciously included here for sentiment's sakeso as not to be forgotten.

Mr. Machen's fine story, The Terror, seems the purest example of the truly supernatural story, and of all in the book its method of narration seems equal to its idea. It is certainly the most satisfactory novel of the six, for this reader, from the simple point of view of a good story. It is good on any account. But while The Beleaguered City and Sweet Rocket may be good as supernatural stories, they fail except by the definition of being supernatural. Dullness is the complaint I would make of this book.

All anthologists write little notes in the front of their books in which they beat you to the charge that they have left out your favorite stories. Mr. Wagenknecht says he knows you will expect The Turn of the Screw and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but that with only six choices possible he has "been compelled" to leave these out. This sounds dark, and what compelled him to put in The Beleaguered City and Sweet Rocket is not very clear. The collection would have been better with them out and James and Stevenson in, it must go without saying. And notice: their dates don't matter at all. It's true, Mrs. Oliphant's tale may be less familiar than Henry James'; but there could be reasons for that. Besides the quality of the writing itself, there is another way these stories fall below their peers in vitality. A supernatural story must have that too, even though its characters might all be ghosts. These stories languish too often, they droop and faint. There is a feeling of resuscitation, not rediscovery, in reading old stories which cannot touch us emotionally, even with fright.

There is wide variation in content here. The Beleaguered City is predominantly religiousit deals with ritual practice, the miracle, with formal belief, and the setting is French Catholic. Sweet Rocket, laid in Virginia, is an almost unrelieved transcendental tract, a round table of resonantly earnest talk which the characters utter in turn and all in agreement. Nothing happens, for crisis would naturally be discommoded in this setting of sweet accord.

The Return is in actual fact psychological, but also vague and whimsicaltwo curses at birth to set on a psychological story, and it proceeds in constant peril of utter confusion, like the White Knight with ditches on both sides. Surely Mr. de la Mare wrote this in yearning youth, and it seems hardly fair to print it now, for it is not a good sample of his imaginative and fastidious work. Its idea is played with overlong (270 pp.) and plays out.

Page 48 The White People is a modest tale of second sight on the Scottish moors, and its serenity is nice and rather disarms you of your discomfort at its morbid quality which comes probably from its being sentimental.

Mr. Nathan's novel is the one in the collection which will be recently familiar to most readers. Its tinkering with time, lightly and expertly done, is valid supernatural material, and is done with the kind of imagination with which we are more akin. Yet it is first of all a love storyin intention too, one feels.

Some of these stories lay themselves wide open to the home psychologistwhich seems a cheap and unfair fate for them. Somehow, for all their naivete, they should have been spared something worse than being forgottenthe indignity of being seized by that certain kind of glib Modern reader who can connect the plugs to mother-complexes and this phobia or that as rapidly and probably as carelessly as a telephone girl. "Man has not learned all the laws of nature yet," says a character in The White People, and that is a legitimate theme which should be honored whenever it appears, and be sympathetically received. It is only a pity that the present stories do not scare us more into the notion.

Page 49 The Western Journals of Was.h.i.+ngton Irving Edited by John Francis McDermott Skies Without a Cloud:

New York Times Book Review 24 December 1944: 3

Delightful mode of lifeexercise on horseback all the fore part of the daydiversified by hunting incidentsthen about 3 oclock encamping in some beautiful place with fall appet.i.te for repose, lying on the gra.s.s under green treesin genial weather with a blue, cloudless skythen so sweet sleeping at night in the open air, & when awake seeing the moon and stars through the tree tops such zest for the hardy, simple, but savory meats, the product of the chasevenison roasted on spits or broiled on the coalsturkeys just from the thickethoney from the treecoffeeor delightful prairie tea. The weather is in its perfectiongolden suns.h.i.+nenot oppressive but animatingskies without a cloudor if there be clouds, of feathery texture and lovely tintsair pure, bland, exhilaratingan atmosphere of perfect transparencyand the whole country having the mellow tint of autumn. How exciting to think that we are breaking thro a country hitherto untrodden by white man, except perchance the solitary trappera glorious world spread around us without an inhabitant.

Thus Was.h.i.+ngton Irving in the Wild West of America in 1832, and though it is dubious if he himself had made the camp, ridden the chase, rounded up the turkeys or stirred the brew, a.s.suredly he was under a green tree, and writing it down momently in a journal.

That the original New Yorker ever had the experience of was.h.i.+ng his own Page 50 clothes and eating stewed polecat for breakfast was more or less a happy chance. It was just after his return from seventeen years abroad; at the time he was probably weary of the lavish welcoming fetes accorded him in New York, and certainly highly curious about the new world opening up at home. An opportunity came for him to join Bean's Rangers on a minor military expeditionone gathers, as a kind of combination guest artist and responsibility. 40 He rode horseback and sat on rafts, met the Indians and lived the life for three monthscovering land and river from St. Louis across to Independence, down through the present States of Missouri and Kansas to Fort Gibson, then a big loop over the Oklahoma prairies and back.

The five extant Journals kept by Irving were copied by Mr. McDermott, who provides also an interesting introduction. The book is charmingly put together; Mr. McDermott makes excellent correlation of this and contemporary material into some amusing counterplay. There are maps and reproductions of Irving's casual and fluent pencil sketches, and a sample chapter from the Tour of the Prairies resulting from the notes, for comparison's sake, rounding out the book in a satisfying and scholarly manner.41 That Irving spent his days in delight is evident everywhere. He seemed to meet new things, new people, the excitements and pleasures of a strange life with an emotion somewhere justly between intoxication and amus.e.m.e.nt, between curiosity and pleasant objectivity. The notes are set down with an un-selfconsciousness that is still elegant. Their directness and spontaneity have the charm which Irving himself would probably shrink to consider achieved until his writing was ''finished"and prevaricated on and romanticized, says Mr. McDermottas in the Tour.

Chances are, such delicacy seldom went West. The writing that was to spring out of the West would never be like this; and Irving's work is unique in Western annals because it is not robust nor rambunctious nor raw; there is not any smartness or swaggering in any word of Irving's writing any more than there was in any bone of his body.

Perhaps the most appealing thing about Irving here is his marvelous eye for detailthat dateless quality. He takes time to note: "Intense curiosity with which an Indian watches Dr. ODwyer while he shaves," and "Little dog looking on at shoeing horse as if studying the art or waiting for his turn." The notes are generally pictorial, often beautifulhe remarks ahead the "blue lines of untrodden country." He is swift to compose a whole little landscape; then fill it with action: Page 51 A ground near natives houseshow boat on the Illinois sh.o.r.e with flaggroups a.s.sembled thererifle shootinghorse race along sh.o.r.enegro laughsunsetparty breaks upsome in boat across gla.s.sy river singing balladothers on horseback through the woodssome on footsome loiter on sh.o.r.ebeautiful, clear evening skymoon nearly fullrising over the Kentucky sh.o.r.e above tufted forestnight hawks.

Camp-fire-meat roasted on stickssavoryour salon of trees lighted up by firesky and stars in centerbat flitting acrossfaces of men & black boy roasting meatgreyhound with spectral facewe sit on bear skins & the meat put on spits before uscut it off with knife & eatcoffee.

These word-pictures, set down in their immediacy, make valuable records of their time. They prove that Irving was a good reporter. 42 Especially, he was fascinated by Indians, as he always was by the romantic and legendary in American life which related it to the Old World. He seems never to have caught sight of a new Indian without noting it.

Pa.s.s several Creeksone with scarlet turban and plume of black feathers like a c.o.c.k's tailone with white turban with red feathersOriental looklike Sultans on the stagesome have raquet with which they have been playing b.a.l.l.some with jacket and s.h.i.+rts but legs and thighs baremiddle sized, well made and vigorous. Yesterday one had brilliant bunch of sumach. They look like fine birds on the Prarie.43 He was equally meticulous to enter little bits of Indian legends when he ran across them: "An old squaw left alone when her party had gone hunting prayed the Great Spirit to make something to amuse herhe made the mosquito." But there is marked absence of any of our own Western tall tales in this book, samples of our wild humor or ways of talking. One single bit of laconic speech is set down, "Old Genl Nix used to say G.o.d made him two drinks scant."

It is apparent that Irving never identified himself with all this. He remained ever the detached gentleman and observer, seeing the pageant through urban eyes. When the Western scene threatened vulgarity, he suddenly saw it romantically, instead. Thugs heightened to Gypsies, and Mason and his gang, Irving understood, gave back money to poor people, like Robin Hood.

Before daybreak howling of wolvesat daybreak imitations of c.o.c.ks crowing, hens cackling, among youngsters of the camphorses driven in Page 52 breakfastWhistlingsingingdancinghallooing after horsesjoking, laughing, scampering after horsesBugle sounds. . . . Cries of "Who has seen my horse? & c"

These are like stage directions for a spectacle. They are not a partic.i.p.ator's words. Irving does not consciously condescendand is a great defender, of course, of the Indiansbut he does refer to the guides and such in the party as "servants" and the Frenchman Antoine as "the half-breed," and there is a quiet impression that everybody else waited on Mr. Irving. There is appraisal without rapport.

The West was a curiosity; Irving was the visiting New Yorker. He rather expected to find things romantic, and he did: "Fires lit in delllooks like a robbers' retreat." He enjoyed himself. He never did learn to spell "prairie," though.

Page 53 Three Who Loved By Edita Morris Fine-Spun Fantasies:

New York Times Book Review 18 February 1945: 45

In "Kuhlan," a bouncing servant girl from the North Country of Sweden hires out to a depressed family in town, where she transforms the house to gaiety and the sad daughter to an ambitious one, and after taking three lovers several rounds for May Day goes back to the North Country.

In "The Melody," a little boy is born and grows up in a gloomy, gossipy village and transforms it to a village of painted houses and flower gardens and sweet spirits, melts the heart of the mean rich man, and inspires the silent fiddler to compose a song.

In "A Blade of Gra.s.s," a Catholic sister who literally follows her feet, goes from an island to a large dirty town, where she goes up a stair and takes charge of a poor children's creche. She transforms the dirty, evil children to clean, good ones, and the particular love she has for one child she crushes, after which she is content as before.

It is disconcerting for a reviewer when a book has been read and put down to find no vivid after-impression haunting the memory, no image of a character to cherish. This is an unusual book, by a talented writer. Yet it is as if these Three Who Loved ended when the book ended, and never had life of their own. Why is this? Mrs. Morris, the author, does not normally lack the power of charming story telling, and her two little girls of My Darling From the Lions are surely remembered as freshly as ever for their distinct, lively quality. 44 We wish through the whole book for the flesh-and-blood gaiety that was Page 54 in My Darling, the rambunctious energy and candid play, the imagination and the humor. Here the glowing Scandinavian setting of Mrs. Morris' other stories is muted, stylized, or symbolic. The action is just so, for the stories are really fables, set and molded from the start. All is stillfresh winds do not blow except when allowed by the author for a specific, hushed purpose.

How abundant the similes are in these stories! Kuhlan is "an apple, a red, red apple." The child of "The Melody" is ''like a white candle with a bright, bright flame." Moreover Kuhlan, besides being an apple, is, in her various bodily parts, "like" an orange, a radish, a cat, a clapper in a churchbell, and more. She is like so many things we never get a long enough or straight enough look at her to understand for ourselves anything deeper than her surface and her symbol; she is as "made" in this respect as a rag doll. Indeed, with constant references to her "two legs," "two eyes" and "ten fingers," she seems peculiarly doll-like, for people, we take it for granted, have the usual number of legs and eyes.

In all three stories the emphasis is on the difference between the main characters and the others around them. The "Three Who Love" are extraordinary human beings, not actually very human at all. They "seemed to live according to different laws from otherslaws of animals and plants, maybewhose movements were guided by powers outside [themselves] ," and they "made one wonder if [they] understood the ordinary happenings that went to make up other people's lives." The girl of "A Blade of Gra.s.s" is "incapable of unhappiness," "a stranger to emotions."

For the rest, the characters are all lumped together, and consist of our old friends from the folk tale and opera bouffethe Gossip, the Drunk, the Mean Rich Man, the Little Hunchback Seamstress, the Poor Servant Girl, the Poor Fiddler; Mrs. Morris seems through with these once they are typed, or invoked.

Perhaps this amounts to an unfair complaint against the very object or design of these storiesa design not to present people in the round, but more decoratively in the flat; not to tell a warm story warmly, but an elusive and flitting one in a lyrical way. But the longest story is seventy-six pages, perilously long to spin out the lyric form, until the elusive story or pretty fable is likely to seem somehow childish after all.

The author seems to be writing so delicately, in order to keep her distance from such extraordinary characters, that we seem specially to notice her tiptoeing. This is true around the little boy of "The Melody" most of Page 55 all. What is he? He is some symbol of universal love. He has no root in natureno such one would run about holding his skirt over the crocuses blowing in the wind to "protect" themyet he can revive dead dahlias.

Somewhere in these fables there is n.o.bility and tenderness, but not enough vitality to support their thesis. For it must be paradoxically true that "selfless" love becomes empty of meaning in a story that does not make that self real to us. The characters live no lives of their own away from the stories because they are not equipped to do so. Afterward, so tenuous they were, so dependent on a phrase of the author's, they seem to have existed only as a part of her decorative style.

Page 56 Roger Conant, A Founder of Ma.s.sachusetts By Clifford K. s.h.i.+pton Salem and Its Founding Father:

New York Times Book Review 25 February 1945: 4

Salem, Ma.s.s., was settled so long ago that by the time Jefferson was President some six feet of earth had filtered over its first foundations. The man who in the main made Salem's foundations possible is the subject of Mr. s.h.i.+pton's careful and affectionate study.

Roger Conant, like most of the Ma.s.sachusetts founders, was a West Country man, son of a well-to-do yeoman of Devon. Like them, his motive for taking s.h.i.+p to the New World in 1622 was not a hot-headed one, though it was warm and burning; it sprang from neither adventurousness nor aggressive religious differences. Mr. s.h.i.+pton thinks Roger had simply come to a considered judgment that in a growing and changing world he would do well to become a useful part of the side which favored human rights and individual enterprise as against the side which didn't. It was this strength of character itself that was of such value to the Ma.s.sachusetts colony, and the reason why Roger Conantwhose doings are conflictingly recorded in the history books, whose appearance must be imagined from composite Conant features, whose letters and journals all have been lost, and whose very grave lies somewhere unmarkedremains for us a figure of force among the founders of New England. It is to Mr. s.h.i.+pton's credit (and our pleasure) that he has succeeded in making Roger Conant a real person in this first biography of him.

Page 57 From the four winds of contemporary letters, doc.u.ments, court and church records, notes on the weather and crops, the straws of the developing state of mind among the settlers concerning themselves, the Indians, and the mother country across the sea, and a warming a.s.sortment of domestic detail, the author has gathered the bits and put back together again an image of Roger Conant lively and circ.u.mstantial enough to give a good illusion of the "solid, useful, gentle, honorable man," he considered him.

Roger, young out of armada-touched Devon, in his London apprentices.h.i.+p as a salter was on hand not only to see Shakespeare fresh but to witness his countryman Raleigh's head roll from the block, and to listen to Capt. John Smith spin his New World tales in Salter's Hall. When he and his wife Sarah and his little son embarked in midwinter, 1622, he knew as well and as poorly as any man of his day what he was leaving and what he was going out to. The list of necessities he would take with him, ranging from medieval trappings to "nayles of all sorts," is both formidable and touching. Besides this he had the tales he heard to go byof the unicorns and rampaging bears of New England, "a deer whose horns extended backward to the rump and then forward again 'a handful beyond their Nose,'" and "Pond Frogs as big as a Child of a year old." On land the geographical knowledge was skimpy enough for many settlers to expect a glimpse of the South Sea with Spanish galleons on it over any next rise of ground. Till Conant's death it was generally believed that New England was an island. This continued ignorance was due not so much to lack of enterprise in exploring as to the press of time and the simple problems of survival. ''One speaks . . . of the 'lost colony' of Roanoke as if that had vanished into thin air, whereas actually Englishmen knew where Croatan was, but in spite of their eagerness to rescue the colonists, could not get around to it for three generations."

In showing us Roger Conant as settler, manager for the Dorchester Company, organizer of the Salem church, planter, selectman, juryman, judge and surveyor, Mr. s.h.i.+pton gives a picture of the Ma.s.sachusetts colony that is singularly whole and altogether lively. The career of Conant followed the pattern of the great number of Old Planters; he moved from Plymouth to Cape Ann and finally, and most significantly, to Salem, which he established with a little group of twenty souls. His special importance is that, aware of the larger and deeper forces at work on both sides of the sea, he was ever concerned with making ready a refuge against the day when the civil war threatening despotic England broke out and a whole new society Page 58 would move pellmell into the little colony. It was in clinging to and strengthening this refuge, the town of Salem, in spite of all hards.h.i.+p, that his greatest service was done and the greatest proof of his character was required and given.

The book is a scholarly piece of reconstruction, painstakingly fitting together not only the lockpieces of important history but minutiae of family and neighborly life. Mr. s.h.i.+pton's examination of the Puritan way of thought and feeling, revealing it in modern perspective as the radical and tolerant offshoot springing away from Old World absolutism, and carrying the seed of all we hold precious, shows how near to our own democracy their hope in its essence lay.

There are interesting comparisons in the book of Roger's Old Planters with the grim Plymouth Pilgrims and with the gentlemen-settlers of Jamestown. Luminous figures of the day gather in every chapter, and through the narrative run the names of Miles Standish, Roger Williams, John Smith, Endecott, Winthrop and many an enduring Ma.s.sachusetts name along with ConantBalch, Dodge, Lathrop, Higginson, Bradford.

It is the rich domestic background that makes us see the Old Planters best as human beings, of course. In Mr. s.h.i.+pton's warm descriptions we see the man of the house stepping to his door of an evening and emptying his bell-shaped gun at random, to bring down a dozen ducksthe wife with "her children foure or five" busy by the fire, the chickens protectedly feeding under the dining table, where also a stray Indian, after peeping through the window, may slip in and sleep the night and at dawn leave a gift, like the fairiesat any alarm the neighbors stalking the thickets in their heavy black armor in which they look "like black lobsters"the little pigs feeding on clams when the walnuts and acorns give out. And in the bitter winter we see Roger sc.r.a.ping the bottom of the meal barrel to feed the Indians, while the little Conants sternly bite their fists not to cry.

The houses of New England were no log cabins in which the settlers could have kept warmer, for the English were not axemen but sawyers. Before the saw pits could be built, families burrowed into the sides of hills and lived behind the thick earth walls. When the new little plank houses were built, there was no resemblance to a Western frontier settlement, such as Hawthorne represented. In fact, Salem looked like nothing so much as East Budleigh in Devon, the birthplace of Roger Conant.

From the first, when there was not cold and famine, there was exhilaration. In the New World all the Puritans felt better. "In this invigorating Page 59 climate, English hens promptly learned to crow and grew spurs with which they broke their eggs." There were also, to be sure, "Little Flyes called Musketoes," and pineapples growing on trees which looked familiar from Dutch engravings, but which when picked turned out to be wasps' nests. And the first beast encountered at Salem was "a squuncke." They wrote back to England a frequent message, "Here is good living for those that love good Fires.''

Page 60 Apartment in Athens By Glenway Wescott Told with Severity and Irony:

New York Times Book Review 4 March 1945: 1, 16, 18

After the warthe Helianos family in Athens thoughtthey would try to tell their friends who had got away from Greece what they had been through in the occupation, "but it occurred to them that they might not be able to. It is not easy to tell this kind of domestic ordeal and do it justice without either exaggerating it or making a mockery of it. . . . It should be told with severity, irony . . ." Glenway Wescott here states his own task and the conditions it imposes. It is not surprising, for the writer he is, that he has fas.h.i.+oned it well, with severity and ironyand that he has added also compa.s.sion. 45 His story of an Athenian family during German occupation is a fine study of humiliation and n.o.bility, and their culmination in tragedy and desperate resolve.

The Helianos family, occupying a small apartment in the center of Athens during the war, is conventional upper middle cla.s.s. Mr. Helianos is a liberal, an ex-publisher, intelligent, gentle, priding himself on his dialectic and his ironic observations. Mrs. Helianos, pa.s.sive, womanly, ailingher heart is weakdepends on his wisdom and her intuition. When the Germans come they are descended upon by an officer who seems the milder sort of tyranta middle-aged, quiet man of no bad habits. It would seem that this situation is not nearly so bad or horrifying as it might be, that the Helianos family might have reason to congratulate themselves on their comparative good fortune. It is the evil of this very luck, latent in this very mildness of situation, that Mr. Wescott has searched out and shown. The power of the Page 61 story lies in the dignity and middle-course position of the Helianos family and in the mildness of the invader.

The account of the German's stay with the Greek family is without violent incident: there is instead the threat or the parody of violencethe slight, almost accidental cuffings; the quailing fear of arousing anger; the sleepless, huddled nights; the dangerous fatigue of ceaseless anxiety to please; the infliction and endurance of hunger. Const.i.tutionally inept at servitude, inefficient in ministering to the invader, the family find the keeping of their house a make-believe by day, and by night a withdrawing into an animal-like intimacy among themselves to shut his nearness out.

The war has already softened the Helianos family for destruction. Cimon, the elder and promising son, has been killed in battle. Their surviving children are inferiorAlex, 13, uncontrollable, who has "a sense of evil rather than a dread of injury," is a perverse little creature; Leda, always silent, "a shameful child" but "an innocent," is "like a bird in a cage. She is both bird and cage, and forever shut." A cousin Petros, the family heroalways offstageis a cause for alarm to the Helianos in his desperate, extreme deeds. A brother on the other side of the family is a cause of disgrace for his suspected collaboration with the enemy.

To the little family of victims the German is a mysterious character. Helianos is led from intellectual curiosity to fatal conversation, prodding into the way this conqueror is made. The children embarra.s.s their parents by feeling the mystery as attractionLeda is charmed into fawning on the captain, Alex into tempting him mischievously to show his cruelty and spite. Mrs. Helianos finds him a domestic enigmahe does not relish food or any creature comfort, and for this she blankly distrusts him and hates him by instinct.

When Kalter arrivesa man whose asymmetrical German features were to the Greeks like sculpture where the hand of the sculptor had slippedthe Helianoses are oppressed, but it is when he comes the second time, after a leave in Germany, that they feel worse disquiet. Kalter comes back from his leave changed, a "freakish . . . kindness" in the place of his bullying. "It was not natural for him not to get his own way, it was not natural for him to control his temper, it would end badly," Mrs. Helianos thinks. For the humiliation the German inflicts has its own development. The family are to endure servitudethen inexplicable softening and toying condescensionthen an abject begging for pityand finally treachery that extends and acts even after death.

Page 62 Kalter carries the seed of death in him, and his secret is that personal misfortune has come to him and he cannot bear it. He himself has been bereaved by the war while on leavehis sons both killed in battle, his wife dead in an air raid. He dramatizes the story shamelessly as he finally tells it to Helianos. And though Helianos finds his threat of suicide "too sudden and incoherent for a Greek mind," he realizes and acknowledges the sincerity of Kalter's grief with a sincerity of sorrow, and in a moment of human recognition and pity cries out against the Fuehrer who has brought such a thing about. The human outcry is his doom.

Kalter has him arrested. From then on, evil opens upon evil, until the tragedy is resolved. In the end, the tragic mother will send her remaining son and daughter forth to avenge the death of their father.

The villain of the book destroys himself a little more than half way through the tragic story. This is significant of Mr. Wescott's purpose. "Forever and forever history will give us another chance," says Kalter of the Germans. Speaking of them as a people but also speaking for all intents of himself, he says: Although he dies, no matter; he lives in his fellow-German, his compatriot, his kind. For us Germans, I tell you, this is our immortality. What if one man is imperfect, still there is the type; and sooner or later the type will come to perfection. If you believe that, there is vindication and a remedy for everything. If the one man is defeatedone and then another, no matter how manythe triumph will come, nevertheless, in the end.

The Greek mind sees that The clever thing all Germans did was to get everyone talking in terms of the future, as if the present did not exist or did not matter; and for Helianos, with his Greek sense of the value of a lifetime and the absoluteness of death, there was something wrong in that.

This is illuminating as perhaps the reason for Mr. Wescott's choice of Greece as the scene for his story and its lesson.

Mr. Wescott's thesis is that all Germans are evilthat the world is doomed by this Hydra who can time after time be mutilated only to rear another live, ugly head, unless he is put down for good and all. The character of every German in the story develops alikean evil flower opening only to show deeper layers of evil petals, then its inward evil heart bearing prolific seed. "Good" Germans are the worst of all. Mr. Wescott puts this in Page 63 the actual form of a messagethe letter Helianos writes from prison which he wishes delivered to America.

. . . I would not listen, I forgave him, especially one midnight. I was sorry for him, especially that last afternoon. Therefore now here I sit in the evil old prison writing you a long, illegible, impotent letter. This is my story. I think there are millions of men as foolish as I, in every nation; and I want them to know what I know now.

It is something for us to beware of: the good moods of Germans, their suddenly reforming and seeking to please, the natural changes of their hearts. That is the moral of my story.

In fact the likable and virtuous ones are far worse than the others as it works out, because they mislead us. They bait the trap for the others.

Helianos predicts the return of health and virility to Greece: There will be a great pa.s.sion in Greece when the Germans depart, there will be wondrous children, oh my darling, like the Cimon of our youth, faultless and promising! There will be a little new generation begotten in a night, the progeny of our very pain and hunger.

But he warns: Germans mean to come back, to bludgeon our new generation into a psychopathic stupor, to set up their slaughterhouses all anew. . . . Greeks dying in battle to the last man cannot stop it; it will take the nations altogether to prevent it. . . . They will let us come up again for a season; then when the time is ripe for them, mow all our lives down again in a disgusting, useless harvest like this.

It is in delivering this impa.s.sioned message that the story ceases to follow a cla.s.sical form. Helianos is allowed to address us from offstage, from beyond his doom, and give us a moral message. It can break from the mold, for it bears the very essence of the book.

Except for this, the form of the novel invokes a traditional Greece. The use of myths, of place and character names (Leda, Eurydice, Mount Olympus), the cla.s.sic physical postures and attributes (Mrs. Helianos' serpentine locks tossing on her forehead in her disaster), all have their part in creating by suggestion and synthesis a background, emotional, decorativewhich is as much mood as actuality. The conversation is dialectic, oratorical or lyricalthere is consistent formality of speech, in telling contrast with the almost unbearable intimacy of the action. The novel is slow of movement, with the r.e.t.a.r.ded progress of the inexorable story, the plot bare and un- Page 64 adorned. The violence is all offstage; news of it is brought by messenger or (as in Kalter's death, which must take place in the apartment) by sound from another room.

Mr. Wescott thus keeps his story pure to the point almost of abstraction, he identifies his characters with the spirit of Greece. Here is Mrs. Helianos standing at the kitchen window, looking at the Acropolis, in her grief following her husband's arrest: Then as she stood and looked she a.s.sumed an att.i.tude which in physical sensation corresponded to her thought, her spirit. It was an att.i.tude prompted perhaps by unconscious memory of ancient sculpture that she had seen all her life (although without caring for it especially), or perhaps merely exemplifying a racial habit of body from which that style of sculpture derived in the first placea cla.s.sical att.i.tude: her fatigued thickened torso drawn up straight from her heels and from her pelvis; her head settled back on her fat but still straight neck, her soiled, spoiled hands lifted to her loose bosom. . . .

The author has also taken unostentatious but subtle advantage of the prerogative of the chorus to lament, to prophesy or to warn, now and then.

But we are constantly reminded that the drama here is not spectacle; it is confined, domesticwe are withdrawn from the general scene to the hearth of tragedy. The scene is intimate, the figures of the drama cannot be colossal, for they are low, aging, or they are children, bearing the little paunch of starvation.

Of these characters, that of Mr. Helianos is remarkably realized, subtle, appealing, and the core of the novel. He was "a civilized Greek." "Even fighting for his life, even (as it was in his case) having lost the fight, hoping against hope, a Greek ought to keep that moderation and strict sense of reality which, he reminded himself, Greeks had invented in the first place." He is doomed because "he was too sedentary and philosophical for the time of war."

For this reader it is in the character of Mrs. Helianosin many ways the most touching in the bookthat the faults that exist in the story come out. She is wholly believable as a "poor bereaved creature" who feels "uncompromising unhappiness," when "instinctively she stood on guard against the mystery of the German. It was her nature to be mistrustful." She sees clearly that while for her husband "the past was his hobby, and his weakness," for herself there is "no help for it, no refuge from it: her h.e.l.las was contemporary Athens, and what did that amount to, what had it been reduced to? Dust, stench, fatigue, disgust, fright, constant fright, and beggars and cadavers.''

Page 65 But believable as she is in her personality, when she acts especially in crisis, she seems unbelievable. Granted she is hopeless. But she lies down to keep from fainting, instead of going to her husband's side, when Kalter orders his arrest. When Helianos is thrown in prison, eight days pa.s.s before she feels she must do something about it; until then she does "her weeping, palpitating, fainting," and spends her time in "recollection of what a fine man he was and what great obscure, profound things he said." Instead of going herself to see what has happened to Kalter when the shot is fired, she sends little Alexbecause she has been "spoiled all her life." When at last a letter comes from Helianos written in prison on little bits of paper, she postpones reading it and then "once in a while she grew discouraged and was tempted to put it all away in a box or in a drawer as a mere keepsake, unreadable.''

Perhaps it is wis.h.i.+ng for a ruinous thing or a paradox to wish that all these charactersso subtly imagined and developed, embodying so muchshould be more human. They embody human virtues and faults and strivings and weaknesses, in delicately mixed proportions, but they are not human in themselvesthey seem not to have been conceived as live characters but put together first, then brought alive. Almost as if he would make up for this, Mr. Wescott has insisted overmuch, in his constant use of the words "dear," "little," "poor," "soft," "womanly" and "manly" and other compa.s.sionate adjectives, that his characters are thereby authorized to be human. But somehow they do not let us see it for ourselves.

The children, deficient in life as they are actually, from starvation, reach reality in the end. "[Leda] is not really psychopathic, I have decided," Helianos writes. "She is only horror-stricken and paralyzed by fright." As for Alex, we see that in this cla.s.sical story perhaps it was not for nothing that he was a pre-h.e.l.lenistic figure, his archaic "crescent smile" and mysterious liveliness held abated, with something prophetically as well as historically fierce, barbarichis future lies in the Underground.

Apartment in Athens is a shapely story, a work of art in the true sense. If it is synthetic, it is so through intense awareness and consciousness of purpose. It is careful work, by which a n.o.ble and original piece has emerged from its material. Its moderateness, lack of exaggeration, serenity are admirable as the Greek ideal they reflect and honor. Everywhere is the dignity of a style in which there is nothing wasteful and nothing wanting in saying an explicit thing.

Page 66 Fireman Flower and Other Stories By William Sansom Fireman Flower:

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