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MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY ' '
ELAINE MARIANNE McLEVIE

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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

THE HERO IN THE POST WORLD WAR II NOVEL:
SOME DIFFERENCES OF CONCEPT IN THE WORKS
OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN NOVELISTS

presented by

Elaine Marianne McLevie

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

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ABSTRACT

THE HERO IN THE POST WORLD WAR II NOVEL:
SOME DIFFERENCES OF CONCEPT IN THE WORKS
OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN NOVELISTS

BY

Elaine Marianne McLevie

This study investigates some of the ways in which the
concept of "hero" in the English novel after World War II
differs from that in the American novel of the same period.
Three English novelists whose work differed widely were
first selected, in the hope that similarities between their
heroes would be significant. Graham Greene, writing from
religious commitment, Alan Sillitoe, writing of working
class city life, and Lawrence Durrell, whose novels are set
in North Africa, were those chosen.

An American author similar in some way to each of
these three was then sought so that comparisons could be
made and any significant differences examined. Flannery
O'Connor, also writing from a Roman Catholic VieWpoint, was
selected for comparison with Graham Greene. Nelson Algren,
who writes of the inner city in New Orleans and Chicago,

was chosen for comparison with Alan Sillitoe. And Paul

Elaine Marianne McLevie

Bowles, who also sets his novels in North Africa, was
selected for comparison with Lawrence Durrell.

Each pair was first examined individually and the
characteristics of a typical hero of each author isolated.
From the initial comparisons of the three pairs, those
characteristics shared by the heroes of the three English
authors were discussed. These were then compared with the
characteristics shared by the heroes of the three American
authors.

Since they followed suppositions made initially after
a wide range of reading, the following generalizations were
made on the basis of this comparison.

For the hero of the Post World War II English novel
the most frequently recurring characteristics appear to be
his ability to draw others to him in love or admiration,
his awareness of his place in society, and his aim to dis-
cover himself in terms of that society or a modification of
that society which he will work to bring about. Those
characteristics which recur for the American hero of the
same period appear to be an ability to assume larger-than-
life proportions, and a self-reliance and intensity of
self-analysis which cuts him off from others, and which set
him wandering on a pilgrimage symbolic of his search for
identity in his own soul. His is a lonely search apart

from, or in spite of, society.

Elaine Marianne McLevie

Heroes from a wider range of Post World War II English
and American novels were then examined to see whether they
also followed the pattern established. Some form of this
pattern was shown to exist in novels by Kingsley Amis, John
Braine, William Golding, Phillip Larkin, Iris Murdoch, Muriel
Spark, David Storey, John Wain, Keith Waterhouse, John Barth,
Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, Edward
Loomis, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, James Purdy, Jerome
Salinger, William Styron, John Updike.

Some possible reasons for the differences in the
English and American View of the hero were then suggested
and the possibility of there being less noticeable difference
in future novels was raised.

This study, isolates some of those differences which
similarities of language and of background culture have
tended to mask. It thus represents a small step in the
investigation of the effect of cultural differences on

assumptions basic to the concepts illustrated in novels.

THE HERO IN THE POST WORLD WAR II NOVEL:
SOME DIFFERENCES OF CONCEPT IN THE WORKS

OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN NOVELISTS

BY

Elaine Marianne McLevie

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1970

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© Copyright by
ELAINE MARIANNE

1971

MCLEVIE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am especially indebted to Dr. Virgil Scott for
giving so unstintingly of his time and for his invaluable
advice in the preparation of this study. I also wish to
record my sincere thanks to Dr. Joseph Waldmeir, whose
insights into American novels were the initial impetus under
which this study was conceived, for his continuous support
over a period of two years, and to Dr. Victor Paananen,

Dr. Sam Baskett, and Dr. Clinton Burhans for their advice

as members of my committee. I am also grateful for the
consideration and support accorded me by Dr. James Pickering
as Chairman in charge of Graduate Students.

This study would not have been possible had it not
been for the continuous support and encouragement of my
husband John, and my three daughters Anne, Karen and Lyyne.

To them I owe a special debt of gratitude.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter

I. GRAHAM GREENE AND FLANNERY O'CONNOR. . . 10

II. NELSON ALGREN AND ALAN SILLITOE . . . . 55

III. LAWRENCE DURRELL AND PAUL BOWLES. . . . 98
IV. THE HERO OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL AND THE

HERO OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL. . . . . . 139

V. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . 214

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

iii

INTRODUCTION

The material out of which this study grew was col-
1ected over a period of six years. In teaching Contemporary
English Literature to Chinese students at the University
of Hong Kong, I found it necessary to explain some aspects
of the novels studied in the course, which among New
Zealand students had been taken for granted. I began to
analyse the structure of each work, looking at it through
my students' eyes. It was clear that two aspects puzzled
them. First the social structure, which was the explanation
for some of the action described in the novel, and second
the motives of the characters for certain actions. Had the
students been in the place of the protagonist, it was clear
they would often not have acted as he did. Since they came
from a society even more tightly structured than the
English, I began by concentrating on the first difficulty,
indicating some of the similarities and differences between
their own society, and the English society. As I was,
myself, neither English nor Chinese, they found it
relatively easy to discuss these patterns with me, and we
began to look at the novels again, taking into account
what we had discovered of the social background. Imme-
diately the difficulties over explaining motives began to
disappear, and those that remained, more often than not,

1

could be solved by further investigation of the social
assumptions of English society. I felt confident that the
connection between hero, motive and society was a basic one.

My contact with the American Twentieth Century novel,
begun at much the same time under the guidance of a visiting
Fulbright professor, put me in the position my students had
been in with the English novel, but with a different slant.
My initial problems also had to do with motive, but the
answer in this case was not so much an investigation of the
social structure of present-day America. It was concerned
with the quilts and ideals inherited from the past. There
was a whole new mythology to be absorbed.

The further I read, the more conscious I became of
the different effects produced on the reader by English
novels and American novels, and of certain strains of
similarity linking the novels within each group. Most of
the differences concerned with motive centered around the
hero. I therefore decided to investigate the typical hero
of three English novelists whose work I had discussed in
Hong Kong, and if possible to find an American similar in
some way to each of the three, by way of comparison. In
making the initial selection, I had looked for novelists
who were as unlike as possible, since then any similarities
between them would be significant. The three that most
fitted this requirement were Graham Greene, because of the

religious commitment out of which he writes; Alan Sillitoe,

because of his interest in the working-class city hero;

and Lawrence Durrell, because his novels are not set in
Britain, and his heroes therefore meet different stresses.
Three American authors immediately suggested themselves

as being similar to the three English authors in important
ways, and thus good yard sticks for observing the dif-
ferences of emphasis in which I was interested. Flannery
O'Connor, also writing from a Roman Catholic point of View,
was my choice for comparison with Graham Greene. Nelson
Algren, who writes of slum life in Chicago and New Orleans,
was chosen for comparison with Alan Sillitoe. And Paul
Bowles, who also is an expatriate, writing of the North
African scene he knows so well, was chosen for comparison
with Lawrence Durrell.

I hoped, by a study of these six authors, to isolate
some of those aspects of their work which would classify
them for the reader as distinctly English or distinctly
American. Although I had already formed some impressions
as to what those aspects might be, I did not wish to
impose them from without. Rather, I intended first to
investigate the three pairs of authors in isolation, so
that any differences would become apparent of themselves.
However, my impressions form hypotheses which will inform
the course of my investigation. They are as follows:

1. The English hero is the kind of person I might

meet any day, in a street in Britain, whereas the American

hero has something larger than life about him. He is
different from the people I meet in American streets.

2. The American hero is involved in a search for
identity which is carried out with little reference to the
society in which he is placed, or in spite of that society.
The concentration is more on the struggle within the hero's
own soul, than on the interaction of characters. With the
English hero the interest seems to be more on the inter-
action with others.

3. The American hero often seems concerned with
serious philosophical problems. The English hero is more
likely to be concerned with problems in his immediate
society. His disagreement with society, when it occurs,
is often put into a humorous form. Jim Dixon, the hero

of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, for example, however much his

 

problems may be paralleled by real life American college
teachers, would never be mistaken for the hero of an
American novel. This study will try to ascertain why this
is so.

A comparison such as this will inevitably raise
questions of differences of values and different connota-
tions attached to abstract words like "love," "duty" and
"responsibility." Walter Allen1 questions the possibility

of comparing English and American novels, except in the

 

lWalter Allen, "Novels English and American," The
New Statesman and Nation, Vol. 53 (February 23, 19575,

247-248.

 

broadest terms, on the grounds that what results will
probably be not a literary judgement, but a pronouncement
about national differences. I consider that the isolation
of some of these "national differences" would be of con—
siderable assistance in avoiding the kind of literary
criticism which so often appears, where novelists on the
one side of the Atlantic, or the other, are castigated for
what they are not, rather than appreciated for what they
are. Because of a distant heritage in common, and more
immediately because of a similarity of language, some very
real differences in interpretation have been masked.
Assumptions about what is "normal" made for one social
pattern, are not necessarily true for the other. The dif—
ferent role of women, or of the police, in the two societies
illustrates something of this dichotomy. The American
hero's motives seem as much in need of explanation for a
reader brought up in an English literary heritage as were
the motives of the English hero for my Chinese students.
Perhaps they heed even more, since the English and the tradi-
tional Chinese societies2 are much more rigidly structured
than is American society.

The English society which is pictured in the post

World War II novel has not changed very radically since the

 

2Like expatriates anywhere, the Chinese of Hong Kong
are probably more traditional in their social structure than
their forebears, the pre-Communist Chinese in China itself,
because they are consciously maintaining something which
they see as being in danger of being lost.

Nineteenth Century. There is still a definite aristocracy,
usually based on heritage, perhaps not now as wealthy as

in former times, but just as conscious of strict rules of
etiquette and propriety as ever, and of its role as patron
of the arts. The middle class has become more wealthy

than in former times. Its interests are still with trade,
its leanings toward the aristocracy, and its values and
rules of social behavior, like those of the upper classes,
fairly rigid. The working class have always considered
themselves separate from the rest of society, less dependent
upon rigid protocol. The significant thing, however, is

that this social structure has been established for so long,

 

that one can predict fairly reliably what the reaction of
someone from a particular social group will be, to certain
situations. For example, if someone were to swear in mixed
company a working class group would probably make no
comment; a middle class group would register disapproval,
not necessarily verbal; and an upper class group would
offer profuse apologies to the ladies present. Any varia-
tion, then, any unexpected reaction, will be at once
apparent. The English author can assume that his reader,
of whatever class, will understand the basic rules of
behavior appropriate to all classes, and will thus be able
to appreciate degrees of deviation in speech, dress or
behavior, without their being underlined. Subtleties of

this nature are difficult for the non—English reader to

appreciate in the same way. What may seem a minor, or
insignificant action, to him, may have much greater sig—
nificance than at first appears.

One might also point to upper, middle, and lower
classes in American society, but these do not have the
rigidity of generation after generation's experience.
Although sociologists would not necessarily believe in it,
the layman in America believes in equality of Opportunity
much more than does the Englishman. The American youngster,
of whatever social position,3 is encouraged to believe that
even he could possibly become President. Moreover, a
larger country, settled by groups with varying customs,
and encouraging the perpetuation of some, at least, of
those differences, America has a society described by Ihab
Hassan4 as seeming to be organized

on the principle of a fruit cake. It is full of

odd, sweet and incongruous things and full of

layers and pockets within layers. It contains
beliefs-—in God, democracy, the machine, the devil,
white supremacy, the almighty dollar, and vegetarian—
ism, to name but a few--that seem utterly unrelated,
unassimilated, and anachronistic.

Under such conditions a minor variation of speech,
dress or behavior, immediately noticeable in the relative

stability of English society, will go unremarked in

America. History has given the English hero a precise and

 

3With the probable exception of certain minority groups.

4Ihab Hassan, "The Way Down and Out: Spiritual
Deflection in Recent American Fiction," Virginia Quarterly
Review, Vol. 39 (Winter, 1963), 85.

 

well-known backdrop against which to move. The American
hero is still close to the frontier man with much less in
his background to be just accepted. For him breadth of
vision and larger than life proportions Will be easier to
assume than for the English hero.
For this reason I believe that Ahab and Huck Finn
may easily appear in modern dress, that there are still
causes for the American hero to adopt, whereas the English
hero is much more likely to agree with John Osborne‘s
Jimmy Porter, who says
I suppose people of our generation aren't able to
die for good causes any longer. We had all that
done for us in the thirties and forties when we
were still kids. There aren't any good, brave
causes left. If the big bang does come, and we
get killed off, it won't be in the aid of the old-
fashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the
Brave New—nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as
pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of
a bus.5

For him grand causes are not significant.

To ascertain whether these impressions are justified
I will go first to the six authors selected. By an initial
comparison of each pair I will isolate what is typical of
the hero of each author. My next task will be to assess
whether there are any aspects common to all three English
heroes, and to all three American heroes. My experience

leads me to believe that aspects common to a group as

widely differing as each of these would also apply even

 

5John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (London: Faber
and Faber, 1957), p. 84.

 

if the selection of novels were much wider. I therefore
will apply any categories arising out of the initial com-
parisons to a selection of other novels, English and
American; the selection will be random, but as representa-
tive of each group as I can make it.

I am aware that since I am neither English nor
American, I may fail to respond to some nuances in both
sets of novels. I hope that this disadvantage will be
offset by my being able to see each group of novels from

the different vieWpoint of an outsider.

CHAPTER I

GRAHAM GREENE AND FLANNERY O'CONNOR

My first aim is to see what aspects are typical of a
Graham Greene hero, and of a Flannery O'Connor hero, and
then to compare-these representative heroes to see how they
differ. These two novelists are both Roman Catholic, and
have written novels which have disturbed both critics and
churchmen. There is a strong recognition of the power of
evil in these novels, and violence, murder, and betrayal
are major ingredients. Both authors are interested in a
protagonist who is alienated, in some way, from society,
and who is far from perfect from an orthodox church point
of view, yet who proves, in contrast to those around him,
to have been nearer to the religious ideal than one would
have at first surmised. Yet the effect on the reader, in
each case, is of a different order.

Of Greene's nineteen novels, two, The Name of Action

 

(1930), and Rumour at Nightfall (1931), were subsequently

 

removed from those to be put in his collected works, and
have not been reprinted. I will accordingly exclude them

from consideration. A group of the remaining seventeen

10

11

have been divided off under the name of entertainments,l
by Greene himself, on the grounds that they are less
serious than the others. Since the hero of these enter-
tainments bears a close resemblance to those of the novels
proper,2 these will not be examined in any depth. In
particular I will concentrate on the heroes of the four
novels which are clearly from a Roman Catholic point of
View, since these novels, besides being thoroughly repre-
sentative of his work, also will have most similarity with
Miss O'Connor's. Consequently, the differences that appear
should be significant. These four novels are Brighton

Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and

 

 

The End of the Affair.

 

The heroes of the entertainments are the center of
psychological thrillers, swift in movement, full of
suspense, and with endings which, if not actually happy,
at least reconcile Opposites to some extent. In his intro—

duction to The Third Man,3 Greene records that he "held

 

 

lStamboul Train (1932), A Gun for Sale (1936), The
Confidential Agent (1939), The Ministry of Fear (1943TT—
Tfie Third Man and The Fallen Idol (1950), Loser Takes All
(1955), Our Man in Havana (1958).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2The Man Within (1929), The Name of Action (1930),
Rumour at Nightfall (1931), It‘s a BattlefieId (1934),
EnglandiMade Me (1935), Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and
the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End
of the Affair (1951), The QfiIet AmerIEan (1955), A Burnt
Out Case (1961), The Comedians (1966).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3Graham Greene, The Third Man and The Fallen Idol
(London, Melbourne and Toronto: Heinemann, 1950), p. 6.

 

 

12

the view that an entertainment of this kind was too light
an affair to carry the weight of an unhappy ending." He
goes on to state his aim as being "to entertain" peOple,
"to frighten them a little, to make them laugh." For this
reason, the heroes around whom the action centers are not
as complex as those of the novels, but themes dealt with
in the entertainments reappear in the novels, and there is
a close link between the heroes in these cases. Greene is,
for instance, interested in the character who verges on

the insane, like Harry Lime in The Third Man, Willi Hilfe

 

in The Ministry of Fear, and Sarah Miles in The End of the

 

 

Affair.

In the novels, though he does, on occasion, "make them
laugh," he is more concerned to make his readers think,
to re-examine concepts they may have accepted blindly. In
this concern he closely resembles Flannery O'Connor, as he
does in his concentration on moral heroism and moral
degradation and his dislike of cautious mediocrity. His
typical hero is one who has had a series of choices to make,
and whose present position is the result of a line of choices
already made by him, stretching back into childhood. In

The Power and the Glory, Greene comments, "there is always

 

a moment in childhood when the door Opens and lets the

future in."4 Because of this chain reaction, what the

 

4See also Graham Greene, The Power and The Glory
(New York: The Viking Press, 1950), p. 95.

 

l3

hero's childhood has been places him in a certain position
in society and limits his chances of attaining any different

social rank. Raven, in A Gun for Sale, bears with him the

 

crippling effects of a squalid, violent childhood. He
sees himself as ugly and unlovable, largely because of his
hare-lip, which is for him "a badge of class. It revealed
the poverty of his parents who couldn't afford a surgeon."
This, and the warping effect of his orphanage upbringing,
lead to the cynical View he has of life, illustrated by his
comments on the crib scene in the shOp window.
He stood there with his face against the glass . . .
staring at the swaddled child with a horrified
tenderness, 'the little bastard,‘ because he was
educated and knew what the child was in for, the
damned Jews and the double-crossing Judas and
only one man to draw a knife on his side when the
soldiers came for him in the garden.
He knows where he is on the social scale, and he determines
to gain financial security and an easier life for himself
by whatever means are available to one in his position.
The comment on the crib scene becomes an ironical comment
on his own fate. He accepts the task of assassinating a
diplomat. The pay he receives is stolen money, and so,
instead of being a key to easy living, it makes him a
marked man. He has been betrayed by those who employed
him as assassin, just as he was by society in general.
Whatever means he uses, he finds he cannot better his

position because he is trapped in the society of which he

is a part. Moreover, those who arrange the killing are the

14

ones whose wickedness is far—reaching. Yet society leaves
them unscathed, while for him there is no escape from the
route he has taken.

In this respect Raven is a prototype of the other
Greene heroes. They are men and women who are doing some-
thing unacceptable to the society, or to the church, which
functions in his novels as a society within a society. Yet
they are in the position they are because of the ways in
which that society works.

In Brighton Rock, Pinkie Brown, who is a Catholic
version of the atheist Raven, is also the product of a
miserable and ugly childhood. The teenage inheritor of the
leadership of a gang of thugs, operating from the Brighton
race track, Pinkie is involved in a series of murders, and
in his attempts to cover his tracks, makes choices which
lead to his own destruction. Pinkie is what he is, because
of the role society has accorded him at birth. He func-
tions within a code, not only of social and religious
rights and wrongs, but also of "honor among thieves."

The rules of behavior are laid down and he knows that
certain steps will have definite consequences. In View of
the different way in which the choices the hero makes

works in Flannery O'Connor, it is important to note that
Pinkie makes his decisions with his position as gang leader
in the forefront of his mind. He has, by this rank, a

responsibility to the gang members. The initial murder

15

was not on account of any personal vendetta; it was for
the survival of the gang. The other murders were unfor-
tunate but inevitable results of the first. Unfortunately
for Pinkie, his movements on the night of the first murder
were noticed by Rose, behind the bar. To prevent any
repercussions, he woos and marries her. His first Open
defiance of society comes in his marrying outside the
church. The church represents for him part of that order
which has always given him the rough row to hoe. He is
getting his own back on society by marrying a girl he does
not love, in a ceremony he believes to be unsanctified. It
is ironical that Rose genuinely comes to love him. He is
like other Greene heroes in being unable to see the posi-
tive side of himself, therefore being unable to accept the
reality of a love, either of this girl, or of God. Unlike
Flannery O'Connor's heroes, he is more conscious of his
own shortcomings than of the force that is in him.

It is again an accident beyond his control that Ida,
a friend of Rose, should have made the acquaintance of his
first victim, just before his death. Her enquiries become
a threat to him and he must counter them as he can.
Finally, when the police net seems to be closing in fast,
he decides he must get rid of Rose also. He organises a
suicide pact. Ostensibly they will die together, cementing
in death the marriage vows that never had had the blessing

of the church. This would constitute a second flouting of

16

church law, and put them both permanently beyond hope of
grace. For him, again, it is a kind of defiance.
Deliberately going against the tenets of church and

society registers a protest, a protest of the gentle kind
which in an American novel would be less significant. For
Rose it is a second affirmation of her loyalty to Pinkie.
She is prepared to give up even eternal life to be with
him. Here again we have a characteristic which is signifi—
cant. Unlike Flannery O'Connor's heroes, Greene's require
the sympathetic loyalty of another character close to them,
to make them sympathetic in the reader's eyes. Rose‘s love
and devotion to Pinkie show him to have something of value
about him, something which makes him the leader who is
looked up to, something which draws others to him, even if
he does not realize it himself.

But in fact Pinkie does not intend to die. It is an
accident which makes him the victim and saves Rose. He is,
as always, a victim of circumstances beyond his control.
His plan has misfired, and Rose is robbed at last, even of
that belief in Pinkie's love which had sustained her.

At no time does Pinkie Opt to remove himself entirely
from the restraints imposed by society. His concern is
survival in an everyday sense. He never becomes symbolic
or archetypal, though he is typical of many of his class.
He may go against the rules, as he does in living with

Rose without having married her in a ceremony their church

17

will recognize; he may be the leader of a gang; but he is
still quite a small cog in the wheel of society. Nor does
he finally remove himself from the church, that other
society in which he moves. He may object, by breaking a
rule, but the feeling of uncomfortableness that this
entails remains with him. He never bursts out of the
restrictions entirely. Nor does he ever turn his back on
the responsibilities for others that he has undertaken,
whether it be for his gang, or, in his own way, for his
wife. In these aspects he draws away from the kind of
hero in Flannery O'Connor's two novels.

Sometimes even at the point of the undertaking of
responsibility and commitment to a course of action, the
hero is vaguely conscious Of the agonies ahead if he is to
make his choice. Looking back on his marriage, Scobie, in

The Heart Of the Matter, recognizes that the vow he has

 

made will have repercussions beyond his knowledge at the
time.

He had always been prepared to accept the responsi-
bility for his actions, and he had always been half
aware too, from the time that he had made his terrible
private vow that she should be happy, how far this
action might carry him. Despair is the price one
pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is,
one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin
the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always
has hOpe. He never reaches the freezing point of
knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill
carries always in his heart this capacity for
damnation.5

 

5Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (New York:
The Viking Press, 1948), p. 61.

 

18

The choice made, the tragic stage is set. Like Sarah in

The End of the Affair, he will sacrifice himself to give

 

life and happiness to others, but it will be a quiet
gesture, without violence or self-dramatization.
Characteristic of Greene's heroes is what David
Lodge6 calls "the Judas complex," and with it a hounding or
pursuit. Sometimes, as in Raven's case, he is the one
betrayed all along the line, by society, his parents, the

girl he trusts. Harry Lime in The Third Man, meets his

 

death through his friend, and Fowler in The Quiet American

 

connives at the death of Pyle, the man to whom he owes his
life. At other times the hero is the betrayer, like Andrews

in It's a Battlefield, of whom Carlyon, the chief smuggler

 

says, "He's a sort of Judas." In this case the betrayal
is a kind of perverse self-assertion, as perhaps it is
with Pinkie, in his attempt to murder Rose.

Betrayal is to play a large part in Flannery O'Connor
too, but is used to give the betrayed something of a uni-
versal aspect; to make him more significant than just an
ordinary human sufferer. This is noticeably not the case

in Graham Greene. In The Power and the Glory, the betrayal

 

of the whisky priest by the half-caste parallels Christ's
betrayal closely. But it should be noticed that though

this is so, the priest is never raised to the position of

 

6David Lodge, Graham Greene (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1966), p. 9.

 

19

a savior himself. He is portrayed as just one small
unworthy cog in the big machine of the church, which will
go on from era to era, whether or not he exists. He is
merely a priest, not even a bishOp, much less a Christ.

He is one man doing what he can, and in this context only,
worthy of honor. It is clear in all these cases that the
hero is portrayed as a man like ourselves, full of
frailties, yet worthy of our sympathy. He has become
caught up in a process which he does not control, and which
it never occurs to him he might control. He does not see
himself as the great redeemer of mankind. He does not even
realize he has within him the seeds of his own redemption.

With Scobie, and with D. in The Confidential Agent,

 

we have yet another type who is both betrayer and betrayed.
Scobie feels very keenly his betrayal of Louise, of Helen,
and most of all, of God. Yet he comes to like Wilson, the
investigator sent out from London, and in so doing, makes
it possible for Wilson to disclose his suicide to Louise.
Scobie has decided to put himself in eternal damnation in
order to avoid causing continued pain to those he loves.
Because it would upset Louise to know this, he carefully
fabricates a fatal disease, knowing that Wilson can be
relied on to look after her. It is an ironical turn of
events that makes Wilson the destroyer of Louise's happi-
ness instead, since he uncovers the truth. Again coinci-

dence plays an important role. As Pinkie's plans go astray,

20

so do Scobie's. When he tries to control the process, he
is too much an ordinary mortal to succeed and in his
anxiety to fulfill responsibilities to others any idea of
responsibility to himself (or as in Miss O'Connor, to man-
kind), is irrelevant.

D.is even more conscious of his double role of
betrayer and betrayed. The confidential agent in whom no
one has confidence, and who can have confidence in no one,
sees betrayals of him and by him everywhere. As he
approaches England, on a mission, he thinks

You could trust nobody but yourself, and sometimes
you were uncertain whether you could trust yourself.
T§gy_didn't trust you . . . . He wasn't certain.
t at he wasn t watched at thlS moment. He wasn t
certain that it wasn't right for him to be watched.
. . . And the watcher--was he watched? He was
haunted by the vision of an endless distrust.7
But despite this feeling that one must rely on oneself
alone, all Greene's main characters define themselves in
relation to others. They act and react with others.
Though feeling cut Off from society, because of their
belief that they have offended against its tenets, they
are nevertheless part of it, and find their reality
through it. Here again we will find a different approach
on the part Of Miss O'Connoer protagonists.

The intricate web Of betrayals, like those noted by

D., indicates a close association between the hunter and

 

7Graham Greene, The Confidential Agent (New York:
The Viking Press, 1939), p. 4:

21

the hunted in Greene's View. To underline such closeness,
the hero is often paired with another character who
resembles him in some startling ways, so that the differ-
ences stand out in relief. The hero is noticeably lacking
in some quality usually associated with the "good" life.
He is perhaps inhuman and selfish, like Pinkie, yet his
betrayer Ida, on the surface a good member of society, and
acting from humane intentions, is revealed at last to be
far less worthy than at first appears. Scobie avoids mass
and confession, commits adultery, and fails in the carrying
out Of his duties as a police officer, and yet Father Rank
indicates to Louise, Scobie's chaste, rule—keeping wife,
that Scobie who has tried to help others and shown genuine
compassion is probably closer to divine grace than she.
The whisky priest has fed himself, rather than his flock,
has an illegitimate daughter and has to be carried to his
execution, while his pursuer, the lieutenant of police,
leads a life of self-denial, acts only according to the
tenets of his ideology and carries out what he sees as
his saving of the peOple, with ruthless determination. But
it is the priest who is shown to have reached self-
knowledge, and whose life is, finally, more significant to

the boy, and to those who follow after. In The End of the

 

Affair, the pair has become three. We have Sarah Miles'
love for Bendrix leading her to be able to love God totally,

and Bendrix's love for Sarah leading him to defiance of

22

God, as one comparison; as the other, Sarah's unwished-for
search for God, compared with Bendrix's careful following
Of clue after clue, in the end finding God, not an earthly
usurper of his place as lover. There is also a comparison
between the relentless search of Bendrix for a way back to
Sarah's heart, and beside it an equally relentless pursuit
of her by God, for unknown to her she had been baptized in
her infancy. Comparisons will also be used by Miss O'Connor,
but their effect will be rather to emphasize the repre-
sentativeness of the hero, than to indicate his human
individuality, as in Greene.

Another aspect of the novels which emphasizes the
individual load of responsibility the Greene hero is
required to carry, is the authenticity of the location.
The heroes are placed in a setting which is totally real
in an everyday sense, Greene visited lengthily all the
countries which provide backgrounds for his characters,
and the spirit of the place is part of the framework of
each novel. Whatever the society represented, it is given
a detailed treatment and the place of each character in it
made clear. It matters that the vultures Scobie hears on
the roof are in Africa; Pinkie is part of the heartless-
ness and gaudy brashness of an English summer seaside
resort; the priest can best be shown us in the cultural
upheaval and dusty heat of Mexico. Geographical location

is not used in this way in Miss O'Connor.

23

The Heart of the Matter shows particularly well how

 

the structure of the society in which the hero is placed
sets the limits of his horizons. Scobie finds himself in
a British colony in Africa. Here the sense of rank which
underlies the way of life in Britain itself is found in a
more extreme form. Scobie was expected to succeed to the
rank of Commissioner of Police. He is passed over. His
wife is mortified. She does not see how she can hold up
her head in "the club," the central point of social life.
What must have been a disappointment under any circum-
stances, in this setting where everybody knows everybody,
and seniority is well established, becomes a crushing blow.
The effect on Louise has its repercussions on Scobie. He
feels compelled to raise a loan to let her get away for a
holiday and this separation allows the actions which
follow to take a course they would not otherwise have been
able to. Pettiness and prejudice which breed in corners
where peOple are homesick for a different way of life also
force certain actions on Scobie. Because the Syrians are
suspect in the eyes of the British, it is assumed that
whenever he is talking to Yusef he is accepting a bribe.
And since he is clearly suspected, there are times when he
kicks out at this society by deliberately giving the
impression he is not to be trusted, as when he tells the

Commissioner that if anyone wants him he will be with Yusef,

when he had not in fact made any plans to see him. The heat

24

and the structure of this society provide the forces which
will alter Scobie, the only upright, sincere member of the
police force, into one who must tell lie after lie, and
whose only way out of the predicaments he piles around
himself is suicide under the guise of death from a heart
disease.

On the one hand Greene is putting the theory that the
outright condemnation of those who commit suicide may not
be religiously justified, that if a man's motives are
pure, he must be close to God's grace, in spite of having
acted on wrong judgment. On the other, he is examining

the double sidedness of pity. In The Ministry of Fear

 

Greene had already examined pity in the character of the
hero, Arthur Rowe. When Rowe kills his wife so that she
may be spared more pain, it is called by the newspapers a
"mercy killing." But later, when he is able to examine his
motives more clearly, he realizes

that it was he who had not been able to bear his

wife's pain and not she. . . . It was her endurance

and her patience which he had found most unbearable.

He was trying to escape his own pain, not hers.8

Ugliness serves as a producer of pity in both Rowe

and Scobie. It is the basis of the love they bear others.

It is not, to the same extent as in O'Connor, a symbol of

 

8Francis L. Kunkel, The Labyrinthine Ways of Graham

Greene (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1959), p. 69 citing

Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (London: Heinemann,

 

 

25

spiritual degeneration. Scobie even pities God, whom he
thinks Of as a failure. Both heroes are betrayed by their
sympathy for the suffering of others and their automatic
response to the pain of others, and both shoulder with
quiet deliberateness the whole burden of responsibility
for the happiness Of others. In Scobie the pity is
extended first to Louise.

He watched her through the muslin net. Her face

had the yellow-ivory tinge of atabrine: her hair,

which had once been the colour of bottled honey,

was dark and stringy with sweat. These were the

times of ugliness when he loved her, when pity

and responsibility reached the intensity of a

passion. It was pity that told him to go.9
He also pities Wilson because of his "puppy love" for
Louise. He is trapped into not carrying out his duty as
an inspecting Officer, by his pity of the captain of the
Esperanca. And he pities Father Rank, Helen and God.

Louise suspects Scobie's pity to be self-love. "Do

you love anyone Tiki, except yourself?" she asks.10 She
is also anxious that he should not let his pity for Wilson
cloud his judgment. "I shouldn't see too much of him.

11 But Scobie dismisses

There's something phony about him."
the warning. Whereas Rowe finds that pity in his case ii
the outer side of self-love, Louise's estimation of Scobie

is not quite accurate. It is not so much self-love, as

 

9Greene, The Heart of the Matter, p. 16.

10Ibid., p. 19.

llIbid., p. 101.

 

26

love of God, which is behind Scobie's pity. That is what
Scobie does not realize, and what Father Rank is trying to
convey to Louise in the last scene of the novel. Louise,
like Bendrix, expects an earthly rival to be the explanation
for the loss of joy in the future that she sees in Scobie.
But in both cases the rival is God.

In his relationship with the dying child, after the
torpedoing Of the 8545, we see Scobie's pity transcending
self-love as he makes the shadow of a rabbit sleep beside
the child for comfort.

"There's your rabbit," he said, "to go to sleep
with. It will stay until you sleep. Sleep."
The sweat poured down his face and tasted in his
mouth as salt as tears. "Sleep." He moved the
rabbit's ears up and down. Then he heard Mrs.

Bowles' voice, speaking low just behind him.
"Stop that," she said harshly, "the child's dead."

12
Mrs. Bowles is the wife of a missionary and lives according
to "oughts," yet she has no compassion and is an extreme
form of Louise, who is really the one to be accused of
self-love. So Scobie becomes a hero whose pity for others
brings with it a compulsion to do everything in his power,
and more, to help. From praying to God to give the dying
child peace, even if it means taking away his own peace for

ever,13 it is but a step to sacrificing his eternal life

by the act of suicide, in order to save Louise, Helen, and

 

12Ibid., p. 132.

13Ibid., p. 130.

27

more importantly God, from further suffering. Having
taken this latter decision he is suddenly aware

of the sense of exile. Over there where those

peOple knelt, was a country to which he would

never return. The sense of love stirred in him,

the love one always feels for what one has lost,

whether a child, a woman, or even a pain.14
The bitter irony of the close parallel of himself and
Christ at this point, and in the final sacrificial act,
lies in his being so oblivious of the closeness of God‘s
pity. In his final agony he does not recognize the voice
calling him, "appealing for help," "in need of him," as
that of God, and he becomes "the saint whose name nobody
could remember" on the medal he has carried with him. To
do the wrong thing for the right reason is his fate, as it
perhaps is for all tragic heroes. His suicide means
damnation, as he sees it, and as does the Catholic who
takes the rules literally. But Father Rank indicates that
a wrong choice for the right motives can perhaps be for-
given by an understanding God.

In the whisky priest and Sarah Miles, it is the
right choice for the wrong reason. Sarah prays to a God
in whom she does not believe to return her lover to life;
the priest chooses his vocation because it will give him
position and comfort, and chooses to stay in Mexico as a

priest, out of pride. Yet, these choices having been made,

the road is Open via intense suffering to salvation, for

 

l4Ibid., p. 235

28

the protagonist and for others. Like Scobie, the priest
falls far short of the ideal. Here the focus is on the
way in which the demands of the office of priesthood con-
flict with the very real feelings of the holder of that
office. At first he, too, feels pity to be a burden.

He is aware "of an immense load of responsibility: it was
indistinguishable from love."15 But it is only through
privation and suffering that he comes really to see those
to whom he ministers. Brought to humility he can have
compassion for them, and can sacrifice himself to bring
divine forgiveness to a condemned and godless gangster,
knowing he is being lured into a trap. This ability to
ignore his own best interests in concern for some other
person or persons, individually known, is a recurring
aspect of the Greene hero.

The direct source of the priest's persecution is the
lieutenant of police, an example of the frequent parallel
character to the hero, who seems at first so much more of
a priest-like figure. It is the lieutenant who is ruled by
pity. He has compassion for his flock. He is working for
a communistic earthly UtOpia, while the priest is urging
his peOple to practise self-denial on earth, in order to
gain a reward in heaven. For all his apparent worthiness,

and lack of transgression, the lieutenant cannot match the

 

15Greene, The Power and the Glory, p. 92.

 

29

priest in one important respect——he has no power to save
his fellow countrymen, while the priest has, simply by
being a priest, despite his state of sin. The fact that
such a lieutenant should be in his area is another
example Of the way in which coincidence, or fate rules the
lives of the characters. Greene's heroes are what they are
because of the community setting in which they find them-
selves. It is not a matter of their exerting tremendous
self willpower, though they must make choices. They are
contained within the circumstances of their situation.
As the priest tries to tell the lieutenant after his final
arrest,

That's another difference between us. It's no use

your working for your end unless you're a good man

yourself. And there won't always be good men in

your party. Then you'll have all the Old starva-

tion, beating, and get-rich-anyhow. But it doesn't

matter so much my being a coward--and all the rest.

I can put God into a man's mouth just the same--

and I can give him God's pardon. It wouldn't make

any difference to that if every priest in the

church was like me.16

Another anti-hero, the priest has many points of

similarity with Scobie. He cannot bear to see suffering
either, and his prayer, "0 God, give me any kind of death—-
without contrition, in a state of sin--only save this

child,"17 points to the humaneness we have seen in Scobie

when Mrs. Bowles objects to his rabbit. His self-knowledge

 

16Ibid., p. 263.

l7Ibid., p. 111.

30

and self-horror are constant features of the hero, and
cause for him, as for the others, a blindness to the possi-
bility of grace for himself. As he leaves for the last
time the town where Maria and their child, Brigida, live,
he is moved to explain to his daughter how much he values
and loves her. Her using the title "father," rather than
either a name or "father" in the family sense, makes it
clear to the reader that Brigida is as slow to understand
his words as the priest is to understand the love of God
for him. He is preoccupied constantly with the knowledge
of how far short he has fallen of the ideal priest. Like
Raven, Pinkie, Sarah, Scobie and the rest, he cannot see
any Of those things which are positive about his character;
the things we are gradually shown as we compare him with
the others among whom he moves.

He was a man who was supposed to save souls: it

had seemed quite simple once, preaching at

Benediction, organising the guilds, having coffee

with elderly ladies behind barred windows,

blessing new houses with a little incense,

wearing black gloves . . . . It was as easy as

saving money: now it was a mystery. He was

aware of his own desperate inadequacy.l8
Greene's hero often, like this, proceeds from feelings of
adequacy to those of inadequacy. The movement in Flannery
O'Connor is more likely to be in the opposite direction.

Like Scobie, deciding that the peOple at mass are in a

country he is leaving forever, the priest in his dream

 

l8Ibid., p. 111.

31

before his execution "sat on, just waiting, paying no
attention to the God over the altar, as if that was a God

"19 And he fills Scobie's

for other people and not for him.
description of a man capable of despair20 exactly. His
journey through this area has been an odd travesty of the
saint's life being read at the beginning and at the end
by the "devout" mother to her three children.

"And that one," the boy said slowly, "they shot

today. Was he a hero too?"

"Yes."

"The one who stayed with us that time?"

"Yes. He was one of the martyrs of the Church."

"He had a funny smell," one of the little girls
said.

"You must never say that again," the mother said.
"He may be one of the saints."21

In this novel the generality of the application of the
story is pointed out by the fact that neither the priest
nor the lieutenant are named, and the boy kisses the hand
of the priest's successor in greeting, before learning Err
name, indicating that the office transcends the petty
problems that really constitute martyrdom, rather than the
romanticized version read by the mother. It is also a way
of insisting upon the ordinariness of the priest. He is
not a super-human. The priest's failure, his sins, make

him a complete part of the human experience, something that

shocks those whose piety is really an abstention from life.

 

19Ibid., p. 283.

20See p. 17.

21The Power and the Glory, pp. 297-298.

 

32

The mother reading the saint's life and the woman with the
holy books in the prison, like Louise, have not known what
it is like to be tried, and are condemned by their own self-
congratulation. The mestizo, like Wilson, is recognized
as a possible danger, yet the priest too can be sorry for
the man who will be his betrayer. "It was really shocking
bad luck for the poor devil that he was to be burdened by
a sin of such magnitude." The line, as always, between
sin and sanctity has become blurred. In the other novels,
too, the reader recognizes that the overly pious are not
necessarily pure at heart, that suicide may not always be
anathema to God, that miracles are not the property of
saints alone. In this sense the heroes rise above their
single existence, but at no stage is there a suggestion
that any one of them is larger than life, or more than
human. The hero is made in God's image but he never aspires
to being God. Though parallels exist between his actions
and Christ's, he remains ignorant of those parallels. His
saintliness comes unexpected. At this point he resembles
Flannery O'Connor's heroes least. Her heroes see life in
a very different light and struggle with their saintliness
in different terms.

The typical hero of a Graham Greene novel, then, is
one who underestimates himself. He is loved by others, but
does not usually recognize that love, whether it be human

or divine. He is a man who has many human weaknesses, but

33

the strengths he has make us sympathize with him. He
belongs to a society which is clearly delineated, and which
exerts great pressures upon him, thus limiting his ability
to initiate his own roles. He is Often the victim of
coincidence, or fate, and so has very limited control over
his own destiny. What happens to him in the end can be
traced back through a series of choices to the situation he
found himself in, perhaps in childhood. He undertakes,
without hesitation, the responsibility for others as
individuals, but he is not, in so doing, embracing an
ideology or displaying any unusual idealism. However he
does tend to set himself goals beyond his reach, and then
castigate himself for not attaining them. At no time does
he become larger than life, even though he does illustrate
some basic human problems in the understanding of God's
ways. If he is seen by the reader as a sort of saint, at
the end, he himself would be the last to see this. His is
the kind of saintliness of which we all might be capable.
The "saintliness" of Miss O'Connor's heroes is of a
different type, one which sends shivers down your back.
Yet both her heroes and Greene's spring from a very con-
sistent point of View. In the work of a serious writer,

Paul Levine tells us,22 there will be a consistent honesty

 

22Paul Levine, "Intemperate Zone: The Climate of

Contemporary American Fiction," Massachusetts Review,
Vol. 8 (Summer, 1967), 505-523.

 

34

of vision, and this we find in the books of the two authors
under discussion. He goes on to say,

For the serious there can be no easy solution or
slick reconciliation. Moreover, there is for the
serious writer the problem of distortion: through
the lens of his singular sensibility he must create
for the reader a world at once real and illusory,
recognizable and foreign.23

It follows that the protagonists within such worlds will

bear the individual stamp of their creator. Wise Blood and

 

The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O'Connor's two novels,

 

bring together a series of characters often referred to as
grotesque, and the protagonists battle their way to sal-
vation through country which, despite its disturbing
recognizability, is very much Miss O'Connor's own.

The reader is more conscious of the "real" and the
"recognizable" at first in Graham Greene, because to
acknowledge that aspect of Flannery O'Connor's characters
is to be brought face to face with aspects within our own
personalities of which we might rather deny the existence.
This in itself points to a different kind of hero, one
with a more soul searching relationship to ourselves. The
context within which Graham Greene's heroes function is
one which readers of the Nineteenth Century novel would find
fairly natural. They meet what would appear to be "normal"
problems of a sensitive person in a world of narrow vision.

Those of Miss O'Connor demonstrate the deflection discussed

 

231bid., p. 207.

35

by Ihab Hassan.24 The deliberate distortion of the lens
she holds up to life is not, he feels, just a trick of

writing,25 but such a deflection is "a form of disavowal:
its true aim is to reject evil without the confidence to

propose a good." In Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It

 

 

Aggy, we are, then, being guided "down into the underside
of consciousness, where all true tests are faced."26
Hassan sees this as perhaps a means of eventually getting
beyond the threat of nihilism.

The pattern of pursuit, the betrayal that is a kind
of fortunate fall, and the hero who, though less than
perfect, turns out to have been closer to the ideal than
those who seemed to be keeping the rules, occur in Miss
O'Connor's novels as in Greene's. She too is concerned
with the close relationship of pursuer and pursued, but the
final emotional effect of her novels is different. Her

hero has an extra dimension, elusive but powerful. It is

suggested first by the backgrounds against whith the two

 

24Hassan, "The Way Down and Out . . . ," pp. 81-93.

25See also Lewis A. Lawson, "Flannery O'Connor and the
Grotesque: Wise Blood," in Flannery_O'Connor, ed. by
Robert Reiter (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., Christian
Critic Series, n.d.), p. 66. "The grotesque for her was a
form of religious hyperbole. There is always the danger
that an audience not attuned to the form will misunderstand
such hyperbole. That is a chance that Miss O'Connor must
have felt she had to take."

26Hassan, "The Way Down and Out . . . ," p. 82.

 

 

types of hero move. Where Greene's are depicted in a
setting of everyday realism, Miss O'Connor's protagonist
is placed in a surrealist nightmare landscape, like a
medieval tapestry, with utter simplicity suggesting a
detailed whole, the more intense because it is added to
by the imagination.27 He is real enough to capture our
sympathy but at the same time convinces us we are taking
part in a modern parable. Thus where Greene's heroes
were located precisely in Africa, Thailand or England,
Miss O'Connor's are not. To be sure the flavor of the
South is there and the characters reflect this, but while
the road, the View from the hill, the clearing in the
trees may be in Tennessee, they could just as easily be
anywhere. This gives to Tarwater and to Haze Motes a kind
of universality which is not apparent in Greene's heroes.
They become representative of mankind.

Tarwater, the hero of The Violent Bear It Away, is

 

one of the new breed described as "radical innocents" by
Hassan.28 This type of hero is "radical, first because it
is inherent in his character, and goes to the root of it.

But radical, too, because it is extreme, impulsive, anarchic,

troubled with vision. The new hero brings the brilliant

 

27Cf. Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn, lines 11, 12,

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter."
28Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1961).

 

37

extremities of the American conscience and imagination to
bear on the equable tenor of our present condition." The
radical innocent, then, is one who has moved beyond
innocence. By rejecting the values of the contemporary age,
he is valueless in terms of that age and is therefore
innocent. By asserting values which society does not
approve of, he becomes radical: hence "radical innocence."
As well as being of this group, Tarwater also has some of
the qualities of the traditional American hero. As noted
by Melvin J. Friedman,29 Tarwater is the modern version of
the American boy going through the initiation required of
him before he can become a man. In this regard, his
fumbling baptismal drowning of the idiot boy, BishOp, shows
the same kind of internal conflict as Ike McCaslin has in
his feelings about the bear hunt in Faulkner's The Bear,
and Huck Finn's uncertainty about Jim's destiny. In each
case, as Friedman points out, "the spiritual resolution
which turns the boy into a man is crucial."30 Faced with
this very personal initiation, and as a radical innocent,
fiercely free of society's claims, Tarwater is of a different
type from Scobie or Pinkie. His life is led determinedly

alone. Not only has he been forcibly removed from the

 

29Melvin J. Friedman, "Flannery O'Connor: Another
Legend in Southern Fiction," in Flannery O'Connor, ed. by
Robert Reiter (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., Christian
Critic Series, n.d.).

30Ibid., p. 21.

 

38

society of his birth by his uncle, but with his uncle's
death he is utterly alone and so, apparently free to
determine his own life in a way no Greene hero ever was.
Kidnapped as a boy, so that he can be brought up
apart to follow the footsteps of his uncle as prophet and
savior (through baptism), Tarwater is both repelled and
drawn by his calling. His uncle's sudden death at first
offers him release from bondage. He rejoices at being
able at last to decide what he will do with the property he
now assumes. As a mark of his new freedom, he deliberately
goes against the first injunction laid upon him by his
uncle, that he see to his burial. The defiance takes a
suitably violent form in the burning down of the house with
the corpse inside it. He is freeing himself from the bonds
of the past--a sort of ritual purification. But the old
man's spirit is not to be put by so easily. Try as Tar-
water may, when he goes with news of the old man's death
to his uncle Rayber, he cannot meet him uninfluenced by
what he has learned of him through his years of indoctrina-
tion, nor can he isolate himself in order to avoid carrying
out the second injunction--that he baptise Rayber's idiot
son. Again violent means must be sought to absolve Tarwater
from his appointed task. He drowns the boy. And as in the
former act of defiance, there is an ironical turn to events,
for the uncle's body does receive burial at another's hands,

and Bishop is baptised, for the words insist on slipping

39

out as the boy is immersed. However much he may later
explain them away, the ritual words have been spoken. Any
triumph at having broken free from his destiny is short-
lived, and again it is by violent means that his final
education is initiated, when he is raped on his way back

to the site of the funeral fire. By this traumatic experi-
ence he is brought to understand and accept his own destiny,
after he has passed through another sacrificial fire, and
been shown his uncle's burial duly completed. Only then

is he able to turn again towards the city "where the

children of God lay sleeping,’ this time not in rebellion,
or running away from responsibility, but as a man.

Who then is this Tarwater? He is a young man,
alienated, and set apart from society. He is one within
whose heart rages a conflict that will, like Ahab's, lead
to his own self-destruction and will have profound reper—
cussions beyond his own personal sphere. His name, and
that of Bishop, the simple son of a "welfare woman,"
indicate that his role is symbolic, his journeying of more
than surface meaning. Perhaps it is not accidental that
there is the same ambivalence in Ahab's feelings toward
the simple-minded Pip, as in the repulsion and attraction
Tarwater feels for Bishop. In each case there is an

opportunity offered the hero to turn to spiritual values

through the mediation of the simple-minded.

40

The double symbol of tar and water indicates the
internal conflict between the base and the spiritual, and
suggests to Hassan3l that perhaps in an era such as ours
the appropriate baptism is one with tar, rather than water.
The novel takes the familiar form of the preparation for,
and initiation into life. Despite the consistent attempts
Tarwater makes to turn from his spiritual heritage, to
deny its existence, it remains a fact that will burst
forth in due season. But it is more than this in the form
in which it is depicted. Tarwater is not just a rebel-
victim. He is himself a Christ figure, one whose final
sacrifice will, it seems, provide the saving grace for
those asleep in the city.

The difference of treatment of Greene's heroes and
Miss O'Connor's is particularly striking in this respect.
As has been noted32 even where the whisky priest, or Scobie
approach something like sainthood, they never become the
kind of figure who is clearly head and shoulders above the
human race. Scobie for instance is equivalent to the
saint whose name nobody could remember. But Tarwater is
made a kind of Christ. This is underlined especially in
the last two chapters. Granted this is a case Of the

religious hyperbole spoken of by Lewis A. Lawson,33 but

 

31Hassan, "The Way Down and Out . . . ," p. 83.

32See page 21.

33See p. 35, note 25.

41

the form of the hyperbole, even if Tarwater is not meant
to be literally a Christ, has the effect of making him
larger than life.

The scene after the violet-clad rapist disappears,
might be viewed as a small scale Calvary, with the deflec—
tive twist which by this time has become the "normal" view.

When Tarwater woke up, the sun was directly

overhead, very small and silver, sifting down

light that seemed to spend itself before it

reached him. He saw first his thin white legs

stretching in front of him. He was prOpped

up against a log that lay across a small Open

space between two very tall trees. His hands

were loosely tied with a lavender hankerchief

which his friend had thought of as an exchange

for the hat. His clothes were neatly piled by

his side. Only his shoes were on him. He per-

ceived that his hat was gone.34
The details here underline his position as a Christ figure.
The position of the body as if on a cross, between two
trees; the exchange of clothing, like the casting of lots;
and the clothes neatly piled, giving a suggestion of the
resurrection to come. Tarwater is to rise from this depth
of degradation, and be ready for visions and understanding.
That his shoes are on symbolizes the journey ahead, and
with his hat gone he has no protection from the light
filtering down, which his old uncle had told him he would

be better off under than in the city. The coming of spiritual

grace has been prepared for.

 

34Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960), pp. 231-232.

 

42

Already singled out as a victim supreme, Tarwater is
again linked with the crucifixion in a reference following

closely on the passage above.

The boy's mouth twisted Open and to the side as
if it were going to displace itself permanently.
In a second it appeared to be only a gap that would
never be a mouth again. His eyes looked small and
seed-like as if while he was asleep, they had been
lifted out, scorched, and dropped back into his
head. His expression seemed to contract until it
reached some point beyond rage or pain. Then a
loud cry tore out of him and his mouth fell back
into place.35

The cry, like Christ's on the cross, precedes the acceptance
of manifest destiny. Once it has been uttered the way is
clear for the coming of the power of prophesy, symbolized
by the falling of the mouth back into place. At the same
time this is reinforced by the comparison of his eyes
to seeds. The ability to "see" will grow from this point
forward and the seed image will be repeated just before the
vision of the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand.
At the end of chapter eleven we find him no longer able
to turn away.

He knew that his destiny forced him on to a final

revelation. His scorched eyes no longer looked

hollow or as if they were meant only to guide him

forward. They looked as if, touched with coal

like the lips of the prophet, they would never be

used for ordinary sights again.36

The question of seeing and perceiving, of vision simple and

inspired, is one Miss O'Connor will take up again in her

 

351bia., p. 232.

36Ibid., p. 233.

43

other hero, Haze Motes. Meanwhile this minor crucifixion
is but a necessary step along the way, an idea reinforced
by the picture of Tarwater stepping over a tree fallen
across his path and not stopping for a thorn vine which
caught at his shirt and tore it. There are further tempta-
tions to be met, and a further identification with Christ,
this time in the context of the temptation after the
fasting in the wilderness. At first when he reaches the
top of the hill and looks down at the site of the first
fire he sees what he had expected to see, a clearing

burnt free of all that had ever Oppressed him.

No cross was there to say that this was the

ground that the Lord still held. What he looked

out upon was the sign of a broken covenant. The

place was forsaken and his own. As he looked his

lips parted. They seemed to be forced open by a

hunger too great to be contained inside him. He

stood there open-mouthed, as if he had no further
power to move.

He felt a breeze on his neck as light as a breath
and he half turned, sensing that someone stood
behind him. A sibilant shifting of air dropped
like a sigh into his ear. The boy turned white.
GO down and take it, his friend whispered.
It's ours. We've won it . . . .37
And as we would expect,his "Get thee behind me Satan" is as
violent as his other determined actions. He shakes himself
free and with a burning pine bough brand sets fire to the
evil spot, as he had done to the place where the rape had
taken place. The voice inside himself that tempted him at

the half-dug grave, the voice of the truck driver full of

advice of how to get on in the world of business, the voice

 

37Ibid., p. 237.

44

of the rapist, are all brought together. Each is referred
to as the voice of a "friend," and one is reminded how
small the change is from "friend" to "fiend." Thus, his
temptation over, he can come to the final revelation that
his uncle has in fact been buried and that a cross hag
been raised over the ground he has been surveying. This
culminates in the vision of the feeding of the five
thousand and of the "red—gold tree of fire,“ the symbolic
cross of redemption. The final identification with Christ
will take place in the deliberate self-sacrifice presaged
by the last sentence of the book.

His eyes, black in their deep sockets, seemed

already to envisage the fate that awaited him

but he moved steadily on, his face set towards

the dark city, where the children of God lay

sleeping.
A transfiguration of a kind has taken place, as this hero
has taken on him all the trappings of prophet and sacrifice.
He has become, like Ahab, a figure larger than life--an
archetype.

It is this kind of one to one relationship with a
figure like Ahab or Christ that I have come to expect of an
American hero. It seems to be taken for granted to some
degree. In Tarwater we have an extreme case. We might
also notice that the position of prophet and sacrifice has
a certain ambivalence in it. The responsibilities involved
are responsibilities to himself to become what he must be,

rather than responsibilities to individual people, or to a

gang Of thugs, even to God.

45

A similar trancendence on a lesser scale befalls the

hero of Wise Blood, Haze Motes. He too is a symbolic

 

figure, as indicated by the two sections of his name. The
suggestion is that his vision is faulty, and our early
estimation of Haze will bear out our prOpensity to "behold
the mote" in the eyes of others. We are introduced to

the series of false prophets Haze meets on his journey of
initiation, resembling a pilgrim's progress through the
haunts of symbolic beasts, including Shoats38 and Hawks,
and come to realize that the mote in his eye is minute
compared to their "beam." At first, as his name tells us,

he sees as through a glass darkly." When the rain spatters
on his face in a kind of baptism, however, and he throws

his glasses out through the door, where significantly there
is no longer a fire-escape,39 he is being prepared for the
final scenes where his landlady, literally, and he,
spiritually, will "see face to face." Haze is presented as
an everyman, who by extreme penance, and the violent capac-
ity to feel that is a necessary part of his make-up, shows
what it means to be a Twentieth Century saint and is our
equivalent of a medieval exemplar, a way of life we might

follow if we have the courage. The message this time is

not as religiously optimistic as in The Violent Bear It

 

 

38A young pig, old enough to be fed.

39Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Co., 1949), p. 189.

 

46

Aggy, and so Haze does not become the giant figure of
allegory that Tarwater does. However he is raised well
above the ordinary by the parallels drawn between him and
Enoch Emery, and between him and the dried-up, yellow,
shrunken mummy, both of which are distorted mirror images
of aspects of himself, a sort of grotesque trinity. Where
Miss O'Connor is taking three characters and using them to
reinforce each other, thus emphasizing the universality or
symbolic nature of Haze, Greene in using characters as
parallels did so to contrast one with the other, to break
each one down to life-size as it were. Thus his characters
are noteworthy only in so far as they are more spiritual
than their parallels. Flannery O'Connor's are noteworthy
because they are like the parallel characters, but more
extreme cases. They are thus larger than life.

. The mummy is lifeless, less than man, horrible to
behold, and separated from the world by a glass case. It
is an extreme symbol of what Haze has made of himself
spiritually. As such, it speaks to him in a disturbing way
in the museum,40 a pattern which is repeated as he becomes
the mummy momentarily, after he has destroyed it.

[H]e was stopped by a cough. It was not much of

a cough—~it sounded like a little yell for help

at the bottom of a canyon--but the color and the

expression drained out of his face until it was

as straight and blank as the rain falling down
behind him.41

 

4OIbid., p. 99. 4lIbid., p. 189.

47

Enoch, too, is an inverse image of Haze, again cut

off from society, hungering for friendship and drawn to a
kind of ritual worship of the mummy. His name also suggests
parallels between himself and Tennyson's Enoch Arden, whose
quest, self inflicted was a deliberate cutting himself Off
from the world of society, its aim probably more selfish
than on the surface. Perhaps too, it is intended to carry
a reference to the patriarch, Enoch, who "walked with God."42
Here he symbolizes, by his lack of understanding, the
limitation of Haze's Spirituality, which he is interpreting
in the cold scientific light suggested by his buddies in the
army.43 For Enoch, the mummy is clearly the right occupant
of the shrine he has created out of a wash-stand,44 and
equally the right candidate for the "new jesus" called for
by Haze,

one that's all man, without blood to waste . . .

one that don't look like any other man so you'll

look at him.45
A literal fulfillment of all requirements for the center of
the Church without Christ, of which Haze is the founder, the

mummy signifies how devoid of spiritual understanding Enoch

is, totally incapable of grasping the idea that the new jesus

 

42Genesis, V:22, 24.

43O'Connor, Wise Blood, p. 24.

44Ibid., p. 131.

4SIbid., p. 140.

 

48

is "a way to say a thing," not a literal person or thing, as
Haze tried to explain to Hoover Shoates.46 By this means
the lack of spirituality in Haze too is indicated, since he
is a parallel. Enoch is alive physically but he has no more
spirituality than the mummy. He is the existential "hero"
determined to make himself--ready to act. His inability to
"see" is symbolized at the moment when, having heard Haze
preach, he thinks the mummy to be the answer to his call for
a "new jesus." Where Haze sees, but without clarity, Enoch
has no eyes at all.
He began to back away. He backed across the street
and over a piece of sidewalk and out into the street
and a taxi had to stop short to keep from hitting
him. The driver put his head out the window and
asked him how he got around so well when God had
made him by putting two backs together instead of
a back and a front.47
That Haze is linked in a very integral way with Enoch and
the mummy is illustrated by Haze's reaction to the story
told by Sabbath Lily Hawks, the far from innocent daughter
of the fake blind preacher, concerning the woman who
killed her child because it was ugly.
This child had Jesus and this woman didn't have
nothing but good looks and a man she was living
in sin with. She sent the child away and it
came back and she sent it away again and it came
back again and ever' time she sent it away, it
came back to where her and this man was living

in sin. They strangled it with a silk stocking
and hung it up in the chimney. It didn't give

 

46Ibid., p. 159.

47Ibid., p. 142.

49

her any peace after that though. Everything

that she looked at was that child. Jesus made

it beautiful to haunt her. She couldn't lie

with that man without she saw it, staring

through the chimney at her, shining through

the brick in the middle of the night.48
He exclaims in a mutter "My Jesus," completing the ironic
picture with this blasphemy. For just as he has strangled
and denied Jesus, and cut him out of his church, everything
he looks at is Jesus, and He continues to "shine through
the brick in the middle of the night."

Having broken away from Hawks and his daughter, Haze
pushes through the crowd that is coming out of the cinema
warning them to look out for the preacher below. As he
does so, someone cries, "make room for this idiot."49 We

see here a connection with the ideas of innocence and

nearness to God associated with BishOp in The Violent Bear

 

It Away, as well as with Melville's Pip. Ironically Haze
does speak a truth of Which he is unaware, like a simpleton
foretelling the future. This is further reinforced by the
constant argument as to whether or not Hawks, or Haze
himself can see. There is never any doubt of the latter's
capacity to see--after all he had "kept the glasses in

50

case his vision should ever become dim." The limitations

on his vision are self-imposed. The hat that he wears

 

481bid., p. 52.

491bid., p. 54.

50Ibid., p. 25.

50

points him out to those he meets as a preacher, but he
refuses to believe in the religious side of himself. "By
metaphysical ordination a man of God" and like Tarwater,

the grandson of a preacher,51 he resists the call within

him until he discovers God at last in a vision so tremendous
we are not given anything more than a suggestion Of what it
is.

In using this hyperbolic way of presenting her thesis,
as a means of drawing the readers' attention to what she
has to say, Miss O'Connor is making an unusual use of the
traits found elsewhere in American fiction. The pOint is
she is using them. This hero appears to have taken his
fate in his own hands, and for a considerable part of the
story he has succeeded in making of it what he will. He
has stepped outside society and as he moves from experience
to experience, has no real responsibility to anyone but
himself.

When Haze destroys the mummy which Enoch had expected
him to welcome, it is as if he is destroying part of him-
self by the act, the part that must go before real self-
knowledge can be established. Also in his killing of
Solace, the false double of him set up by Hoover Shoates
as a money making venture, he is recognizing, and ritually

killing his own assumed unbelief. He makes Solace take off

 

51See J. Baumbach, The Landscape of Nightmare (New
York: New York University Press, 1965), p. 88*et seg.

 

51

the clothes that represent his false identity, and runs
him down in his car. As Baumbach points out,52 the con-
fession Solace makes of his sins to Haze is an objectiviza—
tion of Haze's own confession, revealing to him his own
unadmitted evil. The slap on the back with which Haze
sends Solace, whom he has shriven, to eternal life is

thus not only ambivalent in the sense of perhaps being a
putting out of his misery, as well as a death blow, it is
also a brotherly greeting and an acknowledgement of a
common bond. By this act Haze takes his first step in the
journey to salvation. Then, with the destruction of the
car, the weakness in which he has always refused to
recognize, his pulpit and hiding place, giving him the
security Of hrs assumed identity, he can see the enormity
of his sin and make penance. The patrolman saw the Essex
to be "not a car" and in pushing it over the cliff shows
it to be no sanctuary or protection against Jesus either.
Though Haze does sacrifice himself, stage by stage, it is
with less widespread ramifications than in Tarwater's case.
Lewis A. Lawson53 sees clear parallels between Haze Motes
and St. Anthony in the unfolding of the story at a number

Of points. Also in the overall picture of Haze as possessed

 

521bid., p. 95.

53Lawson, "Flannery O'Connor and the Grotesque:

Wise Blood."

 

52

with an overpowering sense of the importance of religious
belief as the only force that will give order and meaning
to life, and in his use of self abasement to express the

realization of the gulf that separates the human from the
spiritual. As such a figure, Haze combines aspects of the
"criminal or demonic hero" and the "saintly or sacrificial

hero,‘ and as is often the case with the grotesque
character,54 shows that the tragic aspects of our experi-
ence are often simply absurd or pathetic. He also shows
something of the ambivalence which the self-dramatized
role of preacher and penitent that he has taken as his
own entail. Tied to the penitence is a pride not unlike
Ahab's.

Haze is also in the tradition of Huck Finn, in
exposing the corruption and mendacity of the world about

him, and finally making his escape from the society, which

in Wise Blood is symbolized by the uncomprehending landlady

 

who has the last say. Though he may be an everyman, he
does not attain to the same extent, the larger than life
quality that so distinguishes Tarwater.

Where Scobie and those like him show us the marvelous
ways of God in Man, in Haze and Tarwater we have been thrust

nearer the presence of God himself. These two are the

 

54Hassan, "The Way Down and Out . . . ," p. 90.

53

products of a vision almost at the limits of our meagre
earthly sight. To give them palpability calls for a
dramatization more violent and compelling. Beside the

violence of Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, the

 

 

murder and betrayal and persecution of Greene's characters
is a summer gale. For Greene's hero we summon up pity,
understanding and respect. The extra dimension added by
Miss O'Connor is awe.

There are special aspects of both Greene's and Miss
O'Connor's heroes which are due to the religious point of
View of the novels. There still remains, over and above
these, a general pattern in each type. Haze and Tarwater
are individuals. They are rebel victims and radical inno-
cents. The violence with which they act sets them apart,
and they are deliberately removed from society. They are
self-reliant to the extreme, and the symbolism and parallel-
ing that Miss O'Connor uses sets them up as exemplars,
special, not just men, but exceptional larger-than-life
characters. Despite the fact that this elevation to the
position of archetype is hyperbole and so not intended to
be read in the same way as the normality of Greene, the
very fact that it is used, points to a general acceptance
of such a view, an acceptance which Flannery O'Connor can
then twist to suit her own ends.

It would thus seem that already a polarization along

the lines of my initial suppositions is making an appearance.

54

Flannery O'Connor's heroes face trials which require them
to become larger than life. They have none of the support
of family and friends that Greene's heroes do, and their
place in society is not as important to them as their
search for their own identity and their carrying out of a
self-appointed task. The ways in which these differences
show themselves to be part of a pattern will be further

investigated in the first section of Chapter IV.

CHAPTER II

NELSON ALGREN AND ALAN SILLITOE

Nelson Algren and Alan Sillitoe are two novelists
whose work shows the heart of the city, and whose heroes
meet life head on in a setting of tenement housing, fac-
tories, dirty streets and violence. Both write in very
realistic detail, Sillitoe of Nottingham and Algren of
Chicago and New Orleans, and the central character of each
book is a man who makes the most of his situation at any
one time. Yet the difference between the two groups of
heroes is as great as the geographical distance which
separates their origins. Again the English author depicts
protagonists aware of their class. It is true they are
Often engaged in revolutionary activity with the ultimate
aim of destroying such a distinction, but they are un-
questioningly proud of themselves and the group to which
they belong. They aim, not to raise themselves to a
"better" social status, but rather to remove the arti-
ficial barriers that others have raised to keep them—
selves aloof, or to give their own class the power of
government, for which they feel themselves thoroughly
adequate. Algren, on the other hand, presents char-

acters who, like Flannery O'Connor's, are concerned with

55

56

what they are making of themselves, rather than with their
place in the scheme of society. They do not see them-
selves as part of a group, so much as individuals. As
with Flannery O'Connor's heroes, the element of self-
dramatization in their portrayal makes the reader's iden-
tification with them a more intense process than is the
case with Sillitoe's heroes.

Perhaps it is the basic class structure which is
taken for granted in Sillitoe's work which makes him
appear to critics like J. W. Aldridge, not to have ful-
filled the promise shown in his first two books. Aldridge

says of Sillitoe's first novel Saturdaeright and Sunday

 

Morning (1958) and the long story The Loneliness of the

 

Long Distance Runner (1960), that they were

 

both undeniably sincere works of some origi-
nality and force. But they were ridiculously
overpraised by a number of critics whose judge-
ment one had assumed until then to be trust-
worthy, while his second and third novels, The
General (1960) and Key to the Door (1961) suf-
fered the relative neglect they clearly merited.

 

To this list has now been added two parts Of a projected

trilogy, The Death of William Posters (1965) and A Tree

 

on Fire (1967), and although these are more ambitious in

their scope than The General or Key to the Door I doubt

 

 

they would alter Aldridge's opinion of Sillitoe's work.

 

1John W. Aldridge, Time to Murder and Create (New
York: Van Rees Press, 1966). P. 239.

 

57

It is those very aspects of his work which I felt
to distinguish most recent English fiction, which make
him insipid to Aldridge. Yet these same aspects are not
considered drawbacks by English critics, nor by his read-
ing public for his paperbacks have reached the million-
sale bracket. It seems that this is an example of the
applying of a set of assumptions based on one cultural
background to another. Aldridge, for instance, sees
Sillitoe as doing what has already been done to death by
Dreiser.

There is little virtue in repeating the discovery

or the mistakes of one's predecessors or in try-

ing to make literature out of a cultural lag that

merely social reform and the payment Of some

money can rectify.
He feels that the American novel has grown beyond the
themes of realistic social criticism, and implies that
this is all that Sillitoe's is, and that in not having
gone further he has achieved little. Sillitoe's heroes
do not move Aldridge. Perhaps the reason is that they
function so much within the framework of the English class
system that they cannot reach larger-than-life propor-
tions. The character under stress is still there, but
the stress is related directly to that class structure

which is taken for granted in English novels and therefore

lacks universality.

 

2Ibid., p. 242.

58

Realization of this is shown in a later statement by
Aldridge.

Americans . . . may well find what he [Sillitoe]
writes about rather hard to relate to their own
experience. There can be no doubt that working-
class life has a reality, a special kind of pres-
ence, in England that it has not had in America
for a very long time.3

 

It has indeed--and it needs to be explained not only to
Americans, but more specifically to the British of non—
working class origins. Sillitoe makes a plea for a work-
ing class perspective in literature, and so presents the
way people of this group really feel and behave, through
roistering, restless, thoughtful heroes.

Working men and women who read do not have the

privilege of seeing themselves honestly and

realistically portrayed in novels. They are

familiar with wish-fulfilment images flashed at

them in cliché form on television or in the

press, and the novels they read in which they

do figure are written by those novelists of the

Right who are quite prepared to pass on the old

values and who, unable to have any feeling for

the individual, delineate only stock characters.
It is these individuals in whom Sillitoe is most in-
terested, with all the fascinating complication of their
thoughts and actions. They have a wisdom all their own,
and the excitement with which his novels were received is

precisely because of this. Those outside the group could

see in his heroes what the working class man really

 

3Ibid., p. 239.

4Alan Sillitoe, in The Writer's Dilemma, ed. by
Stephen Spender (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).

 

59

thought, and by what process. The need Sillitoe saw for

the working class reader to see his real self in litera-

ture was at least equalled by the need of others to know

the intricacies of their thought, and to understand their
aggressive relish for life.

One characteristic which Aldridge did not comment
upon and which belongs to Sillitoe's heroes in particular
is the pride in being what one is. This pride is typical
of each class, but is more belligerently declared by the
working class. Money and social reform do not overnight
alter a way of looking at life. Sillitoe shows a very
particular way of looking at life. Within the framework
of its View, the social criticism aspect of the stand
Sillitoe's heroes take is limited considerably. The
criticisms his characters hurl at society are not all-
inclusive. They are often not intended to be taken
literally, an expression of exasperation against "the
establishment" but not a statement of political belief.
Expressions of exasperation will also be uttered by
Algren's heroes, but they are not directed against the
established society. His heroes do not see themselves
as firmly placed at a particular social level. Their
exasperation is levelled at anyone or anything which pre—
vents their progress, and they feel free to progress in

any direction which they may choose.

60

The general, who is the central figure of The General,

 

shows the characteristics of Sillitoe's other heroes in
a more extreme form. The novel, rather like Edward Loomis'

The Charcoal Horse, is existential in form. Removed from

 

the hurly burly of city life, an orchestra is travelling
by train to entertain troops near the front line. A
sudden military reverse plunges them into the battle zone.
They become prisoners, and their death is ordered by
high command. Defying this order, the general has the
orchestra play, arranges their get-away, kills Kondal,
his second in command and a blind follower of orders, and
refusing to escape himself or to plead guilty, goes delib-
erately to his own destruction.

Finally Evart took the gun. "You win," he said

to the general. 5

"Every battle except the last," he answered.

The irony here lies in the fact that in his elaborate
plan to save the orchestra, he triggers Off the counter-
attack that causes his own defeat. As he travels to his
death, huddled in an open carriage with the other pri-
soners he muses,

Despite the endless spaces of the world's conti-
nents--seen for the first time as something more
than matchless obstacles to the movement of
trOOps-—he viewed the whole world suddenly as a
tiny area of the brain, an atom making up the

total consciousness of any man. And life, he
thought, is like a prison cell we are slung into

 

5Alan Sillitoe, The General (New York: Alfred K.
Knopf, 1961), p. 181.

 

61

by our birth--a limited room we are penned in

and lifted from when we die. Who sentenced us

to such a life? We never even had an opportunity
of shouting and raving at the judge: "I didn't

do it, Your Honour. I'm innocent! I'm innocent!"
But we have to live out our sentence just the same,
grow to like it in fact so that faced with the

real freedom of death we become afraid and cower
back against the wall.6

He has broken free from "the system," and like the long
distance runner he has chosen to live meaningfully, and,
as is often the case, in so doing chooses to die.

The general's statement is the intellectual version

of the position of Arthur Seaton, in Saturday Night and

 

Sunday Morning, the runner, Brian Seaton in Key to the

 

 

Eggr, and Frank Dawley in the trilogy. The general has
found a meaning in his existence within the framework of

a military hierarchy. That framework is necessary if he
is to take a stand. His position as general separates

him in a sense from Kondal and his troops, but links him
firmly with them too. In the same way, the other heroes
are individuals, leaders of skirmishes against the estab-
lishment, prepared to take a stand eventually that may
mean some form of self-destruction, but sure of themselves
within, and because of, their class. This means that ris-
ing to archetypal heights is never required Of them and
would, in fact, be a denial of their very reason for

existence.

 

61bid., p. 188.

62

Frank Dawley, in The Death of William Posters and

A Tree on Fire, is also a development of the two Seatons

 

and the runner. In him one can see the effect of the end
of austerity in Britain, and the sharp rise in real wages
for large sections of the people.

Most of my mates wanted an easier job, less hours,

more pay, naturally. But it wasn't really work

they hated, don't think that. They didn't all

want to be doctors or clerks, either. Maybe they

just didn't like working in Oil and noise, and

then going home at night to a plate of sawdust

sausages and cardboard beans, two hours at the

flickerbox with advertisements telling them that

those sausages and beans burning their guts are

the best food in the country. I don't suppose

they knew what they wanted in most cases--except

maybe not to be treated like cretins.
Here the "gaiety, style and free-ranging capacity for
experience" which David Craig notes in the youthful char-
acters of Sillitoe and MacInness8 carry the hero from a
double existence, where he keeps becoming the persecuted
other self of his imagination (the William Posters of the
title), through the reality of being a freedom fighter in
Algiers, to a relatively settled life in a community of
radical idealists. Like the previous heroes he has no
illusions about the problems, the chaos, the work that

must be his lot. He even exults in them. This was the

basis indeed of that other self he Often became. From

 

7Alan Sillitoe, The Death of William Posters (London:
W. H. Allen, 1965), p. 44.

 

8See notes to Longmans Edition of Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning (1968), p. 220.

 

 

63

reading everywhere "Bill posters will be prosecuted," a
notice often seen on fences and places where one might be
tempted to put up an advertising "bill," he has created
the personality of William Posters, "The workman-underdog,
the put—upon dreg whose spiritual attributes he has been
soaked and bombarded with all through his school, home and
working life."9 This character, threatened everywhere
with prosecution, he identifies as part of himself.

It is significant that the daydreams of this hero
do not concern his being one of the upper classes, unless
perhaps he has risen to a very high place in the union and
can insist on higher pay and more representation for the
workers. Algren's heroes also have flights of imagina-
tion, but they entail having the central place in the lime-
light, and do not have social duties attached.

The relationship of the hero to the law is also one
which is to appear again, and which differs from that of
Algren's heroes. William Posters is to be prosecuted.
Like the long distance runner, Frank Dawley feels this is
unfair, that the law is a set of rules imposed by the
upper classes on the working class. When any of Algren's
heroes are faced with the prospect of running foul of the
law, they have much more confidence in their ability to
avoid it, but they also see being caught by it not just

as being "prosecuted," but as a threat of death.

 

9Sillitoe, The Death of William Posters, p. 16.

 

64

If Arthur Seaton and the long distance runner are
the prototypes for the other heroes, what are the char-
acteristics that distinguish them? The young runner has
been sent to borstal for robbing a bakery. The family had
almost no income, since the father was frequently out of
work, but when he died of cancer, the five hundred pounds
in insurance and benefits which the family collected gave
them a brief taste of prosperity.

[A]s soon as she got the money, mam took me and

my five brothers and sisters out to town and got

us dolled up in new clothes. Then she ordered

a twenty-one-inch telly, a new carpet because the

old one was covered with blood from dad's dying

and wouldn't wash out, and took a taxi home with

bags of grub and a new fur coat. . . . Night after

night we sat in front of the telly with a ham

sandwich in one hand, a bar of chocolate in the

other, and a bottle of lemonade between our boots,

while mam was with some fancy-man upstairs on the

new bed she'd ordered, and I'd never known a

family as happy as ours in that couple of months

when we'd got all the money we needed.
Happiness is, for him, money which will buy food, drink,
sex, and TV. But even when money is readily available it
is not an assured income, and the memory of days of want
is very clear. It is not surprising that there is a great
resentment against those who have money and who clap you
in prison if you try to get your "grabbers" on it. They
are never mentioned by the runner without the addition of

adjectives like "pig-faced" and "snotty-nosed." He

divides everybody up into "In-Laws" and "Out-Laws,"

 

loAlan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Lonngistance
Runner (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), pp. 20-21.

65

feeling that the law is designed by and for those who have
money, and anyone of his class is born an "Out-Law"--
whether one gets to borstal or prison depends merely on
whether one gets caught. "The police invariably stifle
and restrict the working man, bind him in laws that are
cruel and irrelevant"11 in the "Out-Law's" eyes. This
causes resentment, but it also shows up the positive
aspects that the runner displays. His confrontations
with the governor of the borstal convince him of the
Shallow worthlessness of the "In-Laws," and strengthen in
him the desire to display his own "honesty." He will not
play the game according to the dishonest rules set down
by the governor and the society he represents. The runner
recognizes that the governor's kind words and promises of
lenient treatment are a thin cover over his basic antag-
onism for the runner and what he represents. There is no
respect by either one of the other.

I know when he talks to me and I look into his

army mug that I'm alive and he's dead. He's as

dead as a doornail. If he ran ten yards he'd

drop dead. If he got ten yards into what goes

on in my guts he'd drop dead. At the moment

it's dead blokes like him as have the whip hand

over blokes like me, and I'm almost dead sure

it'll always be like that, but even so, by

Christ, I'd rather be like I am--always on the

run and breaking into shops for a packet of fags
and a jar of jam--than have the whip-hand over

 

llJames Gindin, Post War British Fiction, New Ac-
cents and Attitudes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1962), p. 21.

 

 

66

sompgody else and be dead from the toe-nails
up.

And so the runner determines to take a stand. He has more
respect for the policeman who arrested him than for the
governor, because the policeman did not conceal his hostil-
ity. He will get his own back on the governor and the
"In—Laws" by

letting them sit up there on their big posh seats
and watch me lose this race, though as sure as God
made me I know that when I do lose I'll get the
dirtiest crap and kitchen jobs in the months to

go before my time is up. I won't be worth a
threpp'ny bit to anyone here, which will be all
the thanks I get for being honest in the only way
I know. For when the governor told me to be
honest it was meant to be in his way not mine, and
if I kept on being honest in the way he wanted and
won my race for him he'd see I got the cushiest six
months still left to run; but in my own way, well,
it's not allowed, and if I find a way of doing it
such as I've got now then I'll get what-for in
every mean trick he can set his mind to. And if
you look at it in my way, who can blame him? For
this is war—-and ain't I said so?

Yet he realizes that this stand, and his story too, are
likely to be incomprehensible to anyone outside his own
group.

[E]ven if he [the governor] did read it though I
don't think he'd know what it was all about. And
if I don't get caught the bloke I give this story
to will never give me away; he's lived on our
terrace for as long as I can remember, and he's
my pal. That I do know.14

 

12Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner, p. l4.

l3

 

14

Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 54.

 

67

The system, then, remains. The hero cannot change it.
Even his stand for honesty will be meaningful for him
alone, or at best for some of his own class, and it will
take the form of kicking against those further up the
social scale and pointing out their lack of integrity.
This is also the case with Arthur Seaton in Satur-

day Night and Sunday Morning. Like the long distance

 

runner he is an Out-Law and thrives on it. He is not
weighed down by the work and drabness of his city life.
Despite his constant complaints about the sameness of
each day at the lathe, and his binding at the "system,"
he "gets his kicks" by showing how he can beat that
system; and familiarity with the scene, far from breed-
ing contempt, makes it possible for him to see the
beauty and excitement inherent in the city bustle, which
to the outsider is hidden under the initial impact of
grime and lack of comfort.

The bright Monday-morning ring of the clocking

in machine made a jarring note, different from
the tune that played inside Arthur. It was dead
on half past seven. Once in the shop he allowed
himself to be swallowed by its diverse noises,
walked along rows of capstan lathes and millers,
drills and polishers and hand—presses, worked by
a multiplicity of belts and pulleys turning and
twisting and slapping on heavy well-oiled wheels
overhead, dependent for power on a motor stooping
at the far end of the hall like the black shining
bulk of a stranded whale . 15

 

15Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(London: Longmans Green and Co. Ltd., 1968), p. 23.

 

68

Two minutes passed while he contemplated the

precise position of tools and cylinder; finally

he spat on both hands and rubbed them together,

then switched on the sud-tap from the movable

brass pipe, pressed the button that set the

spindle running, and ran in the drill to a neat

chamfer. Monday morning had lost its terror.l6

Arthur, who is not separated from his peers by a

borstal sentence like the long distance runner, shows in
detail the kind of support a man gets from his relations
and friends, the kind that is singularly lacking to
Algren's heroes. The fun he has regaling the factory
workers with stories showing how clever he is, and how
silly the foreman is, is one example. Another is the
Christmas party at Aunt Ada's with everybody singing and
being friendly and understanding of the visitor from
Africa, and of each other. The scene in the pub, when
Arthur gets drunk and falls down the stairs, indicates
this excitement at sharing, which is underlined by the
way in which Arthur and the waiter (who was to have
turned him out) become pals, united in their thralldom to
society. It is a similar feeling he has for the young
offender who is squirming under the hand of the law,
awaiting formal arrest, after having thrown a brick
through a window. Arthur tries to get him to run away,

but the youngster is too scared, and the law, that bug-

bear of the downtrodden, will not, it is suggested, treat

 

l6Ibid., p. 24.

 

69

the offender leniently. Craigl7 describes Arthur as in-
tended to be a typical working man, and emphasizes that
he is thus a type, but not Ere type. He embodies many
factors found in many members of the group, but it is
important also to notice his particular temperament, his
aggressive self-justification. The detail with which he
is drawn makes him an individual, like the general and
the runner. He is something of a leader, liable to
bursts of impulsive rebelliousness or aggression, anxious
to impose his ideas on his followers, and feeling confi-
dent of their acceptance of him.

Here is a man who recognizes the ugliness and the
squalor, but who also realizes the satisfaction in his
life. He comments on how much better off he is than his
father could ever have been. He notices the war, for all
its evils, did have positive values too, in that because
of it the working man's lot improved greatly. There are
many occasions when he suddenly boils over with aggres—
sion or rebelliousness, and he enjoys this feeling too.
The rebelliousness is nearly always sheer animal spirits,
rather than the expression of bitterness or anger. He
wants to blow up Nottingham Castle, but he has no real
gripe against it since it is now a museum (entry free).

It is merely a symbol. Similarly he talks of blowing up

 

17Notes to Longmans Edition of Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning, pp. 222 et. seq.

 

70

the factory, but adds, "Not that I've got owt against 'em,
but that's just how I feel now and again."18 Much of this
violence comes in daydreams. But there are also many
pleasant flights of the imagination.

It was marvellous the things you remembered while
you worked on the lathe, things that you thought
were forgotten and would never come back into your
mind, Often things that you hoped would stay for-
gotten. Time flew while you wore out the oil-
soaked floor and worked furiously without knowing
it; you lived in a compatible world of pictures
that passed through your mind like a magic lantern,
often in vivid and glorious loonycolour, a world
where memory and imagination ran free and did
acrobatic tricks with your past and with what might
be your future, an amok that produced all sorts

of agreeable visions. Like the corporal said

about sitting on the lavatory: it was the only
time you have to think, and to quote him further,19
you thought of some lovely and marvellous things.

This side of his personality is very important to him and
is best seen in his various fishing trips. The time to
enjoy nature is set aside with special care. He carves
fish-shaped floats and decorates them intricately, and
the fishing trip is the last thing he hangs on to as his
very own. When he shares this corner of his life with
Doreen, the girl he will marry, he is making the final
step in giving up his bachelor individuality. Yet even
this is not entire capitulation. He misses the excite-

ment of the danger inherent in his previous journeys

 

18Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, p.

34.

19Ibid., p. 33.

71

with married women but with Doreen he can create some-

thing new. He and she can become one with the fish.
Arthur's eyes were fixed into the beautiful earth-
bowl of the depthless water, trying to explore each
pool and shallow until, as well as an external
silence there was a silence within himself that no
particle of his mind or body wanted to break.
Their faces could not be seen in the water, but
were united with the shadows of the fish that

flitted among upright reeds and spreading lil-
lies, drawn to water as if they belonged there.

20
Later, on his own, he can identify with the caught fish,
for he sees marriage as a kind of trap, but he also sees
it as a challenge.

Arthur was subdued, his mind blocked with ques-

tions and unsatisfying answers, fighting the

last stages of an old battle within himself,

and at the same time feeling the first skirmishes

of a new conflict. But he was good in his heart

about it, easy and confident, making for better

ground than he had ever trodden before.21
This kind of closeness to anyone is not to be found in
Algren's heroes. They come to a point where such a rela-
tionship seems in View, but they have not understood the
true feelings Of the other person to whom they are trying
to relate, and so those hopes are dashed. Arthur, on the
other hand, knows where he and others stand; he can get
some satisfaction from his job, some from the regularity
of his pay packet, some from "working the system" and

knowing how to work at a rate which will convince the

factory officials he is doing his best, but will be slow

 

20 21

Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 209.

72

enough to earn just the fourteen pounds a week he finds
adequate. He can enjoy the fun of the pub, the fair,
fishing, illicit affairs, but he knows there is often a
day of reckoning if one is not lucky--this too is part
of life.

The exploration here, as in the later novels, is
of the intensely personal problems of men of deliberately
everyday stature. This is not to say they lack the kind
of universality which gives insight into more than just
their own individual crises. As with Charlie Chaplin in

Modern Times we are shown what it is like to work at a

 

repetitive job, with no feeling of pride in the total
finished product. Sillitoe depicts some of the results
of industrial society, dramatizing a need which Craig re-
minds us22 is always there, and every now and again be-
comes urgent. As he does so, he explains what it feels
like to be a young product of that society. The picture
is often not a pretty one, but I think that Leslie Paul's

23 that Sillitoe represents a far more genuine

estimation
protest against society than that of John Osborne and
Kingsley Amis is perhaps ignoring the similarities under-

lying all three. The "I'm all right Jack" attitude of

 

22Longmans Edition of Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning, pp. 233-234.

23Leslie Paul, "The Angry Young Men Revisited,"
Kenyon Review (Spring, 1965), 351.

 

73

Sillitoe's heroes is traditional. The criticism of the
hollowness of upper society is made without the aspect of
direct humor found in the other two authors. But the

imagination that blows up castles and factories is not so
far removed from that which upends stuffy professors into
the toilet.24

If Sillitoe's novels constitute social protest, and

the toast by Hanley in A Tree on Fire25 indicates that

 

they do, this is secondary to the major intention of show-
ing the working class life as it really is, not with
bitterness but with amusement, and a pride in the telling
which will not be put by. When Baker bids farewell to
England as he and the hero of Key to the Door, Brian
Seaton, leave for Malaya he says

England

This syphilitic isle

This seat of majesty

This lump of excrement
and Brian retorts, "As long as you don't include Notting-

26 He is true, not to England, but to that

ham in that."
corner of its society in which he can hold up his head
with pride.

All Sillitoe's heroes have this pride in themselves

and their group, and they all insist that they belong to

 

24See Amis, Lucky Jim.

 

25Alan Sillitoe, A Tree on Fire (London: Macmillan,
1967), p. 446.

26Alan Sillitoe, Key_to the Door (London: W. H.
Allen, 1961), p. 427.

 

 

74

the honest part of society. There is no doubt that they
realize where, within that society they fit, and they do
not avoid the retribution of that society by following
rules. Rather, knowing what the penalties will be, they
behave in such a way as to show up the weaknesses of
society, even though they realize that the lesson will not
be learned and that the only ones who will appreciate the
stand will be those like themselves. The hero can rely
on the support of others of his class completely, and
when he takes on the responsibility for individuals or
groups of individuals (like the orchestra), he will
sacrifice himself if necessary for their safety and com-
fort. Again he is a person who draws others to him, even
though he may not realize how much he is their strength,
and he finds his identity in interpersonal relationships.
He wants reasonable comfort, is distrustful Of the police,
and given to flights of the imagination. He has a zest
for life and love of danger but can find both beauty and
satisfaction, and even enough danger, within his working
class life to make him surprisingly settled in society.
It is quite a different situation with the heroes

of Nelson Algren's Never Come Morning (1941), The Man with

 

the Golden Arm (1949), and Walk on the Wild Side (1956).

 

 

They are Bruno Bicek, a prize fighter, Frankie Machine, a
drug addict, and Dove Linkhorn, a Jack-of—all-trades,

whose major success is an an initiator of "virgins" for

75

the pleasure of concealed onlookers. Each is isolated and
unable to communicate on any meaningful level with almost
everyone he meets. There is no suggestion here of class
or family solidarity. It is each man for himself. Each
is depicted in a sympathetic way—-an individual with

’ talent, and with the capacity for warm feelings; and to
each, life metes out blow after blow, with hopes for a
rosier future held out only long enough to make the dash-
ing of those hopes spectacular. It is not just their
integrity which is constantly at stake, but their very
existence.

Never Come Mornirg illustrates the longing for human

 

dignity, the feelings, the dreams, of the Poles Of
Chicago's northwest side, and in so doing pleads the
cause of dignity for minority groups in general. Not
quite eighteen, Bruno Bicek is the son of the owner Of
the Milk Depot and Half Price Day-Old Bakery. He is
divided in ambition between becoming a big-league hurler
and contender for the heavyweight champion of the world.
Such ambitions set him apart from Sillitoe's heroes
immediately. Constantly with him he has a small red
sponge ball with which he can exercise his fingers. In
some ways this ball makes a fitting symbol for "Lefty"
himself, for like it he is squeezed, pushed and manipu-
lated by manager, employers, and his associates generally,

but most of all by the police. It is clear that whatever

76

he says or does will not alter how the police will handle
him. Indeed, from the beginning of the book, where he has
had a jail sentence at fourteen, to the last episode, when
his victory in the ring brings him, not freedom and love
with Steffi, his childhood playmate, but another set of
handcuffs, he is squeezed, pushed and worked on. Only
Steffi has faith in him--more than he has in himself. But
another symbol indicates that this is not strong enough
to save Bruno from destruction. The first time he makes
loves to Steffi she resists strongly for some time. Then
she loses her fear and submits.
"I ain't got it in me to fight you off no more,"
he heard her confess at last.
Later the fly without wings returned. He saw it
against the screen and crushed it in his palm.
"You got blood out of him," Steffi said wistfully,
as though thinking of something else.
From her there had been neither blood nor tears.
Though inwardly she bled and wept.27
The fly without wings is Steffi, unable to escape her fate,
unable to fly from him, nor from his mates when they each
insist on having their turn with her at a later meeting.
Attracted to him like a fly to light, at every contact
she is bruised and hurt. He too is the fly, as trapped as
she. But his is a trap he has made for himself, it is

not society's doing. Whereas the Seatons or the long

distance runner are with their mates and against the rest

 

27Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning (New York and
London: Harper Brothers, 1941), p. 28.

 

77

of society, Bruno is on his own against everyone, except
Steffi, and her he does not regard as a support. He is
also on his own against inexorable fate. Even when he
does act from generous impulses, as he does to Steffi,
the results are appalling to him. Through him she is
forced into prostitution, is beaten by her "owner," and
once Bruno's final handcuffs are on, neither of them will
ever reach the bright light the fly sought. They will be
crushed, this time in the palm of the law.
As is the case with the other two heroes, Bruno is

prone to daydreams of a self-aggrandizing sort. He is a
forceful character, planning on going somewhere and be-
coming a holder of the limelight, but retains, almost
guiltily, a seldom seen gentleness and warmth beneath it
all. Alone in prison, having been picked up for the shoot-
ing of a drunk, he has one of these flights Of imagina-
tion. In it he performs fabulous feats in the ring and
wins the world heavyweight title. In this moment of
triumph he is borne aloft to the changing room on the
shoulders of Father Francis and the ref. and is reaching
out to touch the film-star heroine he has always associated
with these situations,

and he touched the cross at his throat as he rode,

stretching his arm toward her. As their fingers

touched, the lights flashed on like a lightning

flash, he caught a full glimpse of her face
against his and it was Steffi's face.

 

28Ibid., p. 94.

78

The moment of truth comes in a dream of something like
pontifical grandeur, and he wakes up in his dark cell.

The flights of imagination of Arthur, of the runner
or of Frank Dawley, are either light hearted escapism,
self-justification, or the satisfaction of present de-
sires. They do not single out the dreamer for great
public recognition. Instead they include him in a warm
group. Whether asleep or awake Bruno is cut off from his
peers even when he is not "in his dark cell."

The picture Bruno has of the chief of police may be
compared to the view the long distance runner has of the
borstal officer.

He had a small, fair mustache, but his hat was
too large, giving the boy the idea that he was
wearing it mostly as a place to make his badge
conspicuous. The cap's visor showed the upper
part of the face to the mustache; the lower half
was undershot. Without being able to see his
eyes, Bruno felt that the man was short sighted
or deaf: there was that lack of expression about
the lower half of the face peculiar to those
thus handicapped. When the captain tilted his
hat back Bruno saw that his eyes were equally
colorless, and equally lightless too; there was
that same expression, like a mask of flesh, of
unreceptiveness to sights and sounds.
This hero, like Flannery O'Connor's, sees physical dis-
ability as a symbol of personal limitedness--this is a
view tinged with the grotesque, which is more individual

and intense than is that of Sillitoe's hero. Where the

borstal officer is simply flabby and insincere, the chief

 

291bid., p. 81.

79

of police in the hero's eyes is deformed. Because of this
View, when at the end Of the novel Bruno becomes blind,
his situation, too, becomes symbolic. Because of tre-
mendous feelings of guilt, he has always looked at life
from a distorted viewpoint. The distortion of his face
thus makes him a fitting inmate of that world he has him-
self created.

Most of his guilt feelings are concerned with his
having wronged Steffi. He longs for punishment. He
wishes he had shot the man whose fate is ostensibly the
reason for his being in prison. Then he could suffer
something suitable as expiation of the enormous sin he
feels in himself.

If only the old man had been killed. Regardless
of who held the gun. Bruno B. would have been
guilty . . . and who, in Tenczara's wind, he
would have burned for, could have made no differ-
ence. For all his guilt was for Steffi R. What-
ever happened to him now was on her account. He
alone had killed her.30
But he is not to be allowed to expiate his major sin in
this way. He must do so in the end by having Steffi wait
for him in vain. Heaven was so near and yet, "'Knew I'd
31

never get to be twenty-one anyhow,‘ he said." His

life has illustrated what Lawrence Felinghetti speaks of

 

3°Ibid., p. 156.

311bid., p. 284.

80

as "all the other fatal shorn-up fragments of the immi—
grant's dream."32

The grotesque aspects of the life the hero sees
around him depend on his being an individual, not part
of those with whom he mixes; they also help to indicate
the ways in which he is self-reliant, and so able to re-
main unscathed by them. Similarly the added significance
given his actions by the use of symbols like the fly make
him appear battling more with some grand overall design
than with society. The use made of both the grotesque
and symbolism in Nelson Algren makes his heroes very

different from Sillitoe's.

In The Man With the Golden Arm, Frankie Machine the

 

dealer, is surrounded by those with physical deformities.
His wife has lost the use of her legs as a result of

his drunken driving, and he is torn by guilt on this
account. Older and more bitter than Steffi, she knows
how to use this quilt against Frankie. Then there is the
blind distributor of drugs, Pig; filthy, lascivious, with
a deliberately offensive manner and gums which were "gray

33

and lined with a livid margin of rawest red." The dog

which is produced for Frankie to give his wife is also

 

32Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind
(New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1958), p. 13,
poem no. 3.

33Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm (New
York: Fawcett Crest Co., 1956), p. 56.

81

grotesque, both bloated and ravenous looking, and continu-
ously breaking wind.34 And all these make suitable buildup
for the monster of them all, Nifty Louie, to whom Frankie
must go for his "fix." Louie has the whip hand over those
like Frankie, and can let them suffer at length, so as to
enjoy that power. He revels in the secret knowledge that
given time Frankie would be a "twenty-dollar-a-day man."

In his dealings with Louie, Frankie shows the same

35 He is too sure of

characteristics as Bruno and Dove.
himself and of his ability to rise to great heights. He
is at times very conscious of the suffering Of others,
but the possibility of sacrificing himself to avoid caus-
ing such suffering never occurs to him. In fact he ap-
pears to have an inborn need to suffer guilt. He remains
sure of his power, and of the necessity to make of him-
self what he will, and is unable, except at the end, to
accept the fact that he is a pawn, to be moved at will by
others. "'I think you're one of the weaker sheep your~
self,‘ Louie decided silently."36
The relationship between Frankie and Sophie paral-
lels that between Bruno and Steffi. In each case the girl

has really loved, and has had to suffer from the outward

indifference which masks a love for her too. Thus even

 

341bid., p. 59.

35In Walk on the Wild Side.

 

36Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm, p. 69.

82

in this kind of personal relationship Algren's hero can
make no complete communication, while Sillitoe's can. As
Louie and Sophie's friend Violet both recognize, the
drinking and the remorse that Frankie suffers while drunk
indicate "his heart's in the right place when he's
sober."37 But he is unable to show feeling more directly.
For this hero the broken crutch that appeared, ori-
gin unknown, at the bar where he and Sophie were celebrat-
ing, and again in the closet at the hospital where Sophie
was recovering from the accident, is the key symbol. And,
since crutches belong in pairs, it is for her also. The
memory of the first crutch recurs to her when, bitter and
alone, feeling that the whole city has become crippled,
she says,
"It was mine 'n I didn't even know it." She

felt a ceaseless wonder now. And a bottomless

sorrowing: "I shouldn't ought to have laughed

when I seen it."38
And the crutch symbol is connected to the grotesque. The
nightmare of the accident in which Frankie involves her
is heightened to a lurid extreme by the gawking crowd

lurching with age and skipping with youth, the

lame, the sick and the lazy, the fearful, the

cheerful and the tamed, recalling with laughter
other local disasters.39

 

37Ibid., p. 75. 38Ibid., p. 107.

39Ibid., p. 77.

83

It is also heightened by the policeman who is ready to arrest
the wrong person for the wrong reasons, and by the arrival
of everything but the ambulance. From Zigmut, the pros—
pector, who helps the poor gain more disability allowance,
in order to gain a large proportion for himself, to the
analyst at the peOple's clinic, the world in which Frankie
moves is full of twisted peOple, and those who are not
twisted become so in his eyes, because "only the blurred
image of a woman in a wheelchair remained to darken his
moods: that was the monkey's other paw."40

Though he may be strong enough to give up taking
morphine if it were not for SOphie, his guilt on her
account keeps him a slave to it and to her. And yet that
guilt and agony is something selfeimposed, as is the front
of being his own man. Both prevent his asking SOphie for
the help he needs, and she needs to give. In Molly he
finds someone to whom he can talk straight, something he
has never done before. Yet, like Bruno, he isn't ready
for trust. He knows he has never been really straight,
even with himself, and he also knows that the trust of
Molly is not strong enough to support him against the
monkey on his back. It too is a broken crutch.

Nor can he, as the runner can, rely on his close

friend, Sparrow. When Sparrow is taken away by the police

 

4°1bid., p. 124.

84

he knows that sooner or later the case against him over
the murder of Louie will be complete. There is no escape,
and no one on whom to rely but himself. We are shown
Frankie in a nightmare world. There are the terrible
fictions of his drugged imagination, and the no less
terrible drama of his daily life, culminating in the final
running away from the inevitable confrontation with the
police. To the nightmare horror of Frankie's world is
added the extra horror of knowing that one will not wake
up, that there is no escape.

A conversation recording the reaction of two real
drug addicts to The Man With the Golden Arm41 corrobo-
rates my feeling about Frankie Machine, and the way he
fits my pattern of an American hero. One addict had liked
the book, the other had not.

He says to the other guy, "You know it isn't like
that," he says. "I come on and I read three or
four pages of the book this guy is telling what
it's like." You know the part where the junkie

in the book, Frankie Machine, is talking, drama-
tizing the thing. This guy says, "Well you know
it isn't like that. We don't talk like that

about junk." The other guy, the guy who liked the
book, agrees that the junkie in the book was a
phony. "Yeah," he says, "that's right. But if
this guy knew what it was really like, he couldn't
have written the book. He'd be out in the county
jail. He'd be a junkie."

The key word here is "dramatizing." Frankie is drawn

larger than life as a junkie, so that the full impact of

 

41H. E. F. Donohue, Conversations with Nelson Algren
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 141.

85

the tragedy in his life and in those around him can be
felt.

There is attached to the flyleaf of the first two
novels the usual claim that no character or situation
depicted in them is drawn from life. Sucn an assurance

is not found in the front of Walk on the Wild Side. From

 

the conversations with Donohue it is clear that many of
the incidents recorded are from his own life, and that

to a large extent the hero, Dove, is Algren himself.

The similarity of the terrain in which Algren's heroes
find themselves, whether in Chicago or New Orleans, and
the closeness in the resemblance of each with the others,
makes many statements made Of one apply also to the others.
Dove is perhaps the ultimate Algren hero. He has more in
common with Miss O'Connor's Tarwater, Haze Motes and
Enoch Emery, than with the Seatons and the long distance
runner. Like Tarwater and Haze, he is the son of a small
town preacher of hell-fire and brimstone, and like them
he has periods of hallucination bordering on insanity

and periods of intensely clear vision during which he
sees into the heart of the society around him. As with
Sillitoe's heroes, we are given an insight into how the
moneyless class, more out of work than working, thinks,
feels and acts, but by a very different means. Dove and
Frankie and Bruno become symbols themselves in a way that

the Seatons and the runner do not. They are always on

86

the outside, moving through their society, but not be-
longing anywhere. They are rhg bum, and Egg addict and
£22 man alone against everything.

Like Flannery O'Connor's heroes there is something
of the grotesque in their world. This is underlined by
the physical deformity of some of the characters, and the
violent deaths suffered by others. It is further empha-
sized by the contrast often shown between the sparkle and
warmth of the brothel by night and the fag ends and
empty glasses in the cold light of morning. There is
also a great deal made of sexual abnormality and of dif-
ferent kinds of religious fanaticism. The situation for
Dove, Bruno and Frankie is therefore more dramatic than
is the world of Sillitoe's heroes, and will require more
of them.

Having left home where his preacher father and
elder brother spent hours in argument over beliefs, Dove
became Odd job man at the Mexican cafe in town. Here he
was initiated into both the art of reading, and of making
love, by the proprietress, Teresina. It was here that he
first heard about the tin soldier of Hans Christian Andersen.

Dove guessed right away that, of the whole army,
this was the very one who would get to see most
of the world, have the greatest adventures and

at last win the love that all the others wanted
too.42

 

42Nelson Algren, Walk on the Wild Side (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956), p. 31.

87

Immediately it is the ability to outshine others that he
seizes on as the characteristic Of a hero. It becomes
clear that this story is a kind of parable. He meets and
becomes the rival of one deprived not only of one leg, as
is the soldier, but of two. This broken man has the
girl's love, in spite of Dove's apparent success. And in
many other ways, too, Dove's incident—full life parallels
that of the tin soldier. He, too, is borne on the cur-
rent of life, must suffer and be beaten entirely before
he can return again to his first love. Dove is no Christ
figure, but he is the questor writ large. He is the
greenhorn who learnt rapidly and found out how to make
being a greenhorn pay. Then through suffering, and a
final frightful beating up, he has learned what he needed
to know and has returned, now broken and blinded, to the
girl who has haunted him ever since he left her.
But though we leave Dove outside the restaurant,

insisting he will find his own way upstairs, we sense
all is not to be perfect, for the story which affected
him so much to begin with was told in great detail, and
the ending underlined.

The soldier was so moved at all this, especially

at the sight of his beloved, that he was ready to

weep tears of tin joy. But that would hardly have

befitted a soldier. So he looked straight ahead,

a bit to one side, as one returns an Officer's

look; but she looked directly at him. At that

moment one of the little boys took up the soldier

and without reason or rhyme pitched him into the

fire, where he died, true to duty, looking straight
ahead but directly at no one.

88

Dove leaped up, slammed the book so hard he
caught Terasina's thumb - "Basta!"

Enough of fairytales. He hadn't liked an end-
ing like that, it appeared. For he raced to the
juke, tripped it and began to dance as though
trying to forget the soldier's sad end as soon as
the juke began to sing -

All of me
Why not take all of me

Raising one foot then the other, he began a slow

swaying with his head, arms hanging loosely in a

dance wherein, the woman saw, love strangely

mixed with despair.43
The use of the story of the tin soldier makes the reader
aware of the dangers and their outcomes before the hero
himself, and by this dramatic irony increases the ten-
sions which his story creates. Thus he becomes a fairy-
tale character himself, put into a category of people to
whom strange and wonderful things can happen. He is not
a man of ordinary stature because Of the ominous under-
tones of all that befalls him.

Within the story of Dove and Terasina is another
story of Dove and Hallie which also parallels part of the
tin soldier story. Thus by the same kind of reinforcing
parallel stories as Flannery O'Connor used, Algren makes
of his hero's fate something above and beyond the usual.
In a book owned by Hallie, who had once been a teacher,
Dove met the tin soldier again. Hallie had lost a lover

and his child, and had become a prostitute, more dead

than alive in soul. From this lethargy she was awakened

 

431bid., p. 33.

89

to love again by the human version of the Goblin nut-
cracker, Schmidt, the amputee. She had left the brothel
where she was known as Schmidt's wife because of indigni-
ties he made her suffer, and lived in an uneasy bliss with
Dove. She completed the reading education begun by
Terasina, and once again love was beginning to stir in
Dove's bosom. But when he awoke one morning she was
gone, and all his joys turned to despair. A smaller ver-
sion of the overall tragedy has occurred.
In his relationship with Hallie, Dove follows the

pattern of the other Algren heroes. In his excitement
at his own feelings he is oblivious of the ominous under-
tones to the passages Hallie reads him. Hallie has de-
cided she is pregnant and wants to return to her ancestral
home and possess the baby (probably the amputee's) her-
self, alone. There is no real communication. Even with
Hallie, Dove is an isolated soul. When he finds her gone
he is Off as the tin soldier once more.

He left in a ceaseless rain, the saddest that ever

fell. He went by streets both steep and narrow

and the rain fell all the way.

In that hour when tugboats call and call, like

lovers who have lost their way.44
And so at the end of part two he is being swept, as if in
his paper boat, down the gutter that should lead to his

being swallowed by a fish and restored at last to the

sight of his first love.

 

44Ibid., p. 284.

90

The story of the tin soldier allows a closer look
at the use of the grotesque by Algren. It is particularly
evident in the section in prison, which might be paral-
leled to the time spent by the soldier in the fish. Like
the meeting of the hero with the various false preachers,
in Flannery O'Connor, the meeting here with the various
prisoners shows the degradation of the common human lot,
and by contrast, the hero, grotesque as he is, is shown
to have more humanity than all the rest put together.
Just as Dove was not as cruel or deliberately underhand
as Fort and Luke, his fellow room mates in New Orleans,
so he is not as criminal, in the sense that the others
in jail with him are. He has merely been caught in a
brothel without his trousers and resisted arrest. Nor
has he, for all his oddities, the twisted mind of some
of the others, like Raincoat, who had organized his
clothing so that he could take a stroll
having, of course, taken the perfectly sensible
precaution of severing his trousers at the knees
and binding the bottoms to his calves with
rubber bands; lending an impression, to the
casual passerby, that he was fully clothed. Here
and there, passing some woman who appeared de-
serving, he would fling the raincoat wide for her
amazement and delight, then modestly button him-
self and modestly hurry on.

Or his cell mate, the natural whose wife had had him

locked up because he had made up his mind to have a baby

by their fifteen year old daughter, since she was a lot

 

451bid., p. 304.

91

better looking, and also much younger. But they are ex-
treme forms of aspects of himself. This is why he is
able to recognize the humanity within those twisted ex-
teriors. He is not one of them, yet from his greater
height he can understand them, so that he alone can re-
spond to the symbolic elements when Country, who has been
shot in the stomach, trying to escape, is being asked to

agree to an operation. This is not to save his life,

merely to clear the sheriff.46

Outside the rain began again, Dove heard the wind
blowing between the wash of it, trying to say
"Yes. Yes. Yes."

But no one heeded the brainless rain and nobody
heard what the wind tried to tell. For the wind
and the rain came every day and whispered like
two unpaid lawyers together all night, fixing to
say what, in the coming day, everyone wished to
hear said.

"It's awful when it's like this," Dove thought,
"and it's like this now."47

The tin soldier is on his way again--having learned of
Country's death and dreamed of Hallie's maimed cat, he
thinks of all he has seen and done until his mind is
directed back to the lonely Mexican restaurant.
"Terasina," the boy asked in a small awed wonder
of the woman who had once pitied his ignorance
there. "Are you there? Are you there in your

bed at the end of the world while I am here in
my bed at mine?"

 

46This is one of the situations drawn from his own
experience in jail. See Donohue, Conservations with
Nelson Algren, p. 43.

47

 

Algren, Walk on the Wild Side, p. 331.

 

481bid., p. 333.

92

There are three aspects of the novel in which we
see specifically the difference between Algren's heroes
and Sillitoe's. When Dove, Bruno or Frankie make love to
the various women in their lives their thoughts are
directed to the process, or to the release of tension in
themselves, or in Dove's case to display of prowess. Even
in this most intimate contact they are concerned almost
entirely with their own feelings, and experience little
emotional involvement. Sillitoe's heroes, by contrast,
make love as part of a warm friendship. It is not a
matter of forcing their attentions on an unwilling part-
ner, as it was at first with Bruno. There is a greater
understanding and companionship between Sillitoe's hero
and his current amour, than with Algren's. In the bars
and brothels as a second point of contrast, Algren's
heroes seek companionship but are always conscious of
themselves as not part of a camaraderie. They observe
or join in, but are never fully accepted with warmth,
or regarded with affection. Sillitoe's heroes, however,
find companionship and warmth too. For them pubs and bars
are meeting places for like souls and produce feelings of
belonging. Finally, when each hero is faced with a test
of endurance there is an added intensity in that faced
by Algren's heroes. More super-human strength is required
of them, and they do not escape without permanent maiming.

This is one of the ways in which Algren's heroes become

93

larger than life and removed from the world of everyday
existence. If we compare the fight between Dove and
Schmidt, in which both are permanently maimed, with the
attack on Arthur Seaton by the two hired thugs, we have
in miniature the difference between the effect Of the two
novels and of their heroes. Schmidt fights on a plat-
form on wheels, for he has no legs. He fights to kill,
though indeed Dove does not know where Hallie is, and he
succeeds in blinding and laming Dove. As for him, the
last we see of him is his platform wrapped round a pole
and his senseless form half on the roadway, perhaps
lifeless. By contrast Arthur, though unable to defend
himself adequately against two attackers, though bleeding
and battered, never really considers the possibility that
he may not survive and can still haul himself back to the
pub for a drink. Although he passes out on the way home,
he has the help of his girlfriend and after some time in
bed is able to return to his normal routine. There has
been no permanent maiming of either body or spirit, and
he is not left to suffer alone.
The quote which introduces Never Come Morning

I feel I am one of them -

I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself -

And henceforth I will not deny them -

For how can I deny myself?

Whitman

applies as much to Algren's other two novels, for as the

94

details of his life related to H. E. F. Donohue49 indi-
cate, he has personally witnessed most of what he de-
scribes. His heroes are partly autobiographical. Be-
cause of this there is little authorial distance in
Algren's three novels. The intensity which this situation
lends to the events related is further added to by his
stated intent of making inroads into the protective wall
the middle class had built around themselves to insulate
themselves against having to acknowledge the existence

of those about whom Algren writes.

Nelson Algren's innocent, bold, vivid and poetic
imagination . . . has long brooded over the pos-
sibility of changing the social world in which
we live, has long dreamed of the world's being
different, and this preoccupation has, paradoxi-
cally, riveted and directed microscopic attention
upon that stratum of society that is historically
footloose, unformed, maleable, restless, devoid
of inner stability, unidentified with class al-
legiances, yet full of hot, honest, blind striv-
ing. Algren's centering of his observations upon
the lowly and brutal strivings of a Bruno Bicek
is the product of his sound instinct and reason-
ing, for, strangely enough, the Bruno Biceks of
America represent those depths of life—-the realm
of the irrational and the non-historical--that
periodically push their way into the arena of
history in times of crisis, war, civil war and
revolution.5

In these words, Richard Wright gives an indication of

just those qualities about Algren's heroes that I have

 

49Donohue, Conservations with Nelson Algren.

 

50Richard Wright, "Introduction," p. ix, in Nelson
Algren, Never Come Morning (New York and London: Harper
Brothers, 1941).

 

95

come to associate with the American novel of the Twentieth
Century. Algren's imagination is "innocent" in the same
sense as Ihab Hassan uses the word:51 free from the guilt
of patterns which have meaning only in terms of a code of
behavior which is no longer relevant. He is thus able,
as are Sillitoe, O'Connor and Greene, to show us the posi-
tive side of those who might be rejected outright if
judged by commonly accepted behavior criteria. What sets
O'Connor and Algren apart from the English writers is
the "poetic" aspect of their imagination, which Wright
notes, and their recognition of the existence and force
of "the realm of the irrational and the non-historical."
Whereas Aldridge noted52 that the British have tradition-
ally taken a kind of proprietary interest in their work-
ing class, so that the reading public would be Open to
the ideas presented by Alan Sillitoe, Algren realized
that the American reading public were different. While
it was true that those about whom he wrote could be seen
in the street of any city, he saw that,

The people who didn't live in this world said,

"It doesn't exist; they aren't there, we know

that they aren't there, and if they are there,

it doesn't matter because we're here and we
don't live in that sort of world.53

 

51Hassan, Radical Innocence.

 

52See page 58.

53Donohue, Conversations with Nelson Algren, p. 94.

96

And he felt sure that by writing about the world of Bruno,

Dove and Frankie Machine, he would be able to "make a
dent" in this isolationism.

I didn't make the least dent, because there is

no way of convincing or even making the slight-

est impression on the American middle class that

there are peOple who have no alternative, that

there are people who live in horror, that there

are people whose lives are nightmares. This is

not accepted. The world of the drug addict

doesn't exist. The world of the murderer doesn't

exist. Nothing that does not touch the person

individually exists.54
Since his was an avowed attempt to instruct the middle
class, while Sillitoe's stated aim was to give the work-
ing class reader a person of his own kind with whom to
identify, it is not surprising that Algren's heroes are
"bold" and "vivid," a touch grotesque, and drawn with an
intensity which gives them a special stature. Then, be-
cause of the tendency of the middle class to ignore sec-
tions of the community of which they are not a part,
his heroes must also seize the attention completely.
They will not be immediately recognized as people Often
met, by those readers he hopes to reach, so they must be
given special emphasis, raised as it were, to the level
of a symbol. They must "touch the person individually."
Their treatment is thus not one which shows them first as

representatives of a class, and then as individuals.

Algren's heroes are individuals first and foremost,

 

54Ibid., p. 94.

97

isolated and alienated, struggling alone against a fate
of which society is only a part, and through this they
become symbols.

Even if in his brief career Sillitoe's Arthur
Seaton manages to get away with adultery, criminal as-
sault, and being drunk and disorderly, it is all within
the context of getting one back on "them," a real-life
game of cops and robbers. One is impressed with the
humanity of Sillitoe's heroes, but one does not feel,
as with Algren's, that the inner soul is at stake. The
tragic dimension, with its self dramatization, sets the

American author apart again.

CHAPTER III

LAWRENCE DURRELL AND PAUL BOWLES

Paul Bowles and Lawrence Durrell are both outside the
regular stream of Twentieth Century English and American
literature. Both are expatriates by choice, who write of
North Africa with deep insight and with a poetic vision,
and it is clear that each has been captivated by the warmth,
the violent beauty, and the primitive genuineness of the
area. The fascination with Eastern mysteries produces a
very different reaction in the two novelists, however, and
the view of humanity presented is startlingly dissimilar.
Bowles is primarily concerned with the person searching for
his identity outside his own cultural background. His
novels take the form of the quest, and the reader rapidly
singles out, and becomes especially involved with a clearly
delineated hero. To be sure, the existential dilemma in
which this hero finds himself allows him little Opportunity
to perform "heroic" acts, or to end up having reached his
goal. More often he attains his moment of truth in an act
of violence which will be the cause of his own destruction.
In all cases, even when he conducts his search from within
a group, he remains cut off from others in some way, and
there is never any doubt that he is the character on which

98

99

I

our attention is supposed to be focused above all others.
In Durrell's novels it is usually much less easy to deter-
mine just who the major character is. There are far more

of them who are Of importance, and they interweave in con-
stantly changing kalaedescopic patterns. While the major
characters of a Durrell novel all have periods of importance,
they are carefully controlled, so that no one outshines the
others permanently. There is therefore no hero in the

sense that there definitely r3 in Bowles' novels. The
separation between the hero concepts of the two authors is
of a different degree from that discussed in Chapters I and
II. It is, however, a further projection of the two stances
so far illustrated.

Durrell's novels are: Pied Prper of Lovers (1935),

 

Panic Sprirg (1937),1 The Black Book (1938), Cefalfi (1947),2

 

 

White Eagles over Serbia (1957), the four books that

 

together make up The Alexandrian Quartet, Justine (1957),

 

Balthazar (1958), Mguntolive (1958), and Clea (1960), and

 

 

finally Tunc (1968). Of these the first has claim to fame
only because of its extreme rarity. Neither the British
Museum, nor the network of American libraries can produce

a copy.3 For this reason, and also since its setting is

 

lPublished under the pseudonym Charles Norton.

2Reissued in America as The Dark Labyrinth (1962).

3See John A. Wiegel, Lawrence Durrell (New York:

Twayne Publishers, 1965), p. 153.

 

 

100

Bloomsbury, not North Africa, it will not fall within the
scope of this comparison. Nor will White Eagles over Serbia,
which G. S. Fraser describes as an entertainment rather than
a novel.4 This is an adventure story in the style of John
Buchan, with no sexual or sadistic elements, a code of simple
gentlemanliness, and an intense feeling for the wild scenery
of the Balkans, and for the toughness of the lone "masculine"
hero. It is a tribute to a literary convention much
admired by Durrell in his youth, and because of this the
attitude towards the hero is already set for him. In the
Quartet, and those novels that presage it, this is not the
case.

The beginnings Of those characters who peOple the

Quartet are apparent in Panic Spring, Cefalfi and The Black

 

Book. Of these Cefalfi is a transitional novel, taken from
the point of View of the hero it portrays, between that laid
down by the traditional form in which the novel is written,
and that which emerges as his own in the Quartet. Cefalfi
is described by Durrell in a letter to Henry Miller as

an extended morality, but written artlessly in the

style of a detective story. Guilt, Superstition,

The Good Life, all appear as ordinary people; a

soldier on leave, a medium, an elderly married

couple (Trueman), a young unfledged pair, a
missionary.5

 

4G. S. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell: A Study (London:

Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 127.

 

5George Wickes, ed., Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller:
A Private Correspondence (New York: Dutton, 1963), p. 20.

101

As it is a morality the characters are stereotypes. The
seven major ones enter the labryinth, located in Crete, in
a personal quest, each, as it were, working out his own
destiny. Each of the characters on the cruise is linked in
some way with the others--but the fate of each one is of
equal significance to the reader. The only possible
exception is Campion, whose leap into the sea with Virginia
Dale is "heroic" in that he cannot swim and is lost, while
she is saved (because of her innocence). He is thus the

"champion,' the hero in the romance sense of the word. Like
White Eagles over Serbia, Cefalfi is a special case, outside
the regular pattern of Durrell's work because of its
acknowledged basis in a previous mode, but it is transi-
tional in its view of the hero, since Campion is both the
hero of the morality, and also similar in many ways to
Darley in the Quartet. The beginnings of the typical
Durrell hero are apparent in his concern for Virginia Dale,
to the extent of being willing to sacrifice himself for

her safety; in his ability to inspire in her confidence in
himself; and in his recognition of the interrelatedness of
all the characters. It is also apparent that although
Campion has the heroic role to play, and is a stereotype,
he remains throughout a man, not a super-man.

Different views of the nature of love and life weave

in contrast through Panic Spring. Though Marlowe is the

 

first questor presented, and the one round whom the story

102

seems to revolve in the opening chapters, he soon becomes
just one of the several questors who have become the
"guests" of the eccentric millionaire Rumonades. Marlowe,
the gentle schoolteacher who has fled from England, and is
absorbed in philOSOphy and fascinated by words, is one
version of Campion, of Darley, and of Lawrence Lucifer in

The Black Book.6 Similarly Francis, the artist, the

 

subject of a long flash-back section, who rejects all
offers of love, and spends the novel searching herself for
herself, is an early version Of Clea. But then, as John
Weigle wryly suggests "most women in general are only pre-

liminary drafts of Clea!"7

An analysis of the Quartet
will therefore throw light on the author's View on these
characters.

Already in the early novels Durrell is setting a
pattern which illustrates why I see his major characters
as being a further projection of the usual English hero.
All his major characters are very much part of a social
group, so much so that they do not stand out from that
group in any very significant way. Clearly placed in their
position, and delineating themselves by means of inter—

personal relationships, they are at last shown to be so

much a part of that society that what happens to other

 

6And also, one suspects, of Durrell himself.

7Weigel, Lawrence Durrell, p. 43.

 

103

members of it is as important to the reader as what happens
to them. All the characters find their true identity
through and in their society, not apart from it or in spite
of it, as is usually the case with the American hero. Any
character, even if he is the central one around whom the
action moves, is so much a part of society, and so much
concerned with his responsibilities to other individuals,
that he is given no importance over and above them. This

pattern is carried through The Black Book and the Quartet.

 

Gerald Sykes8 sees The Black Book as predicting the

 

Quartet. "All of his favorite colors are already spread
out on the palette." A few of its characters have already
appeared in Panic Spring; others reappear in the Quartet.
Like the Quartet, it depends on more than one narrator,
dealing with the same material and the same characters in
different times. The narrators in this case, Gregory, a
forty-year-old Englishman, and Lawrence Lucifer, a teacher
in Corfu who has discovered Gregory's diary in a London
hotel bedroom, create the same interweaving of brilliant
colors and strange lives that distinguish the Quartet,
though not on so majestic a scale. It is on a miniature
scale that will develop in the Quartet. Thus it illustrates
how the lusty material which would find a place more

readily in the work of Flannery O'Connor and Nelson Algren

 

8"Introduction," The Black Book: American edition,

 

1960.

104

than in that of their English counterparts receives a very
different handling by this English author.

The characters, seen from the point of View of

both the young Lucifer and the middleaged Gregory,

are grotesques. Dusty and shifty, they are loaded

with adjectives and bright, tense phrases. They

tend to wither in the light of an explication or

synopsis.9
They are, then, not the material of which a Tarwater is
made, but something much more fragile. There will be, as
a result, no central character who becomes an archetype.
The characters may be regarded more readily as strands to
be woven into a rich tapestry, appearing here and there
with vividness and in other places subordinated to other
threads. Even more than Sillitoe's Arthur Seaton who was
found to be representative but not symbolic, the narrators,
and those on whom their story is focused, will each be 3
type rather than Eng type.

The tapestry design becomes more ornate in the four
books of the Quartet, singled out by critics as Durrell's
most important literary statement. They are designed in
such a way that each is an entity, and yet each gains
immeasurably from being part of the whole to which it con-

tributes. Who then is the hero of each book, and of the

Quartet as a whole? Justine, Balthazar and Clea are all

 

written from the point of View of Darley, the Irish school-

master narrator. In Mountolive the story is told largely

 

 

9Weigel, Lawrence Durrell, p. 44.

 

105

by an omniscient novelist, with Darley hardly figuring at

all. A careful look at Justine, and at Mountolive, will

 

indicate how these two narrative methods relate to each
other, and how Durrell views his hero. Then the placing
of these two sections in their larger context will throw
light on the major protagonist of the Quartet.

No name is given the narrator throughout Justine.
The reader is obviously intended to identify entirely with
Darley, and to this extent he is the hero, the questor,
whose search for truth we experience first hand. "What I
most need to do," says Darley, "is to record experiences,
not in the order in which they took place--for that would
be history--but in the order in which they became signifi-
cant for me."10 The quest is a double one. On the one
hand we explore the recesses of the narrator's own mind;
on the other we search also for the clues to unlock our
understanding of Justine herself. Of all the fascinating
peOple who surround Darley in Alexandria, she is the one
who stands out from the first meeting as of special sig-
nificance for him. She is linked throughout the book
with the goddess, Aphrodite, and also with the spirit of
the city itself. The Jewish wife of the Coptic banker and
businessman, Nessim Hosnani, Justine is beautiful in a
forceful, almost masculine way, and her impelling personality

has at one time or another touched all the major characters

 

10Lawrence Durrell, Justine (London, Faber and Faber,

1957), p. 115.

106

introduced. Symbolic of this is the search Darley makes
for the perfume she customarily wears. He cannot locate it
until he mutters her name in the hearing of the salesgirl.
She can then immediately pick out the right one.

The other two important characters are Nessim, and
the prostitute Melissa, who is Darley's mistress. These
two act as mirror images of Darley and Justine, in many
ways, as is clear from the frequent references to mirrors
and the analysis to which the narrator subjects the thoughts
and feelings he has towards the other three. As Nessim
says, when he grows to love Melissa, when they have been
drawn to each other by mutual sympathy, I "began to explore
and love Melissa as an extension of Justine . . . the four
of us were unrecognized complementaries of one another

11 To find out what kind of

inextricably bound together."
a hero Darley is we need thus look also at Nessim, but the
parallel does not end there. There is also Justine's first
husband Arnauti. Darley sees himself as a mirror image of
him.12 Again, he sees himself as a distortion of Purse-

warden, another Englishman and novelist. He is fascinated

 

11Ibid., p. 203.

lee met Justine just as did Arnauti, in the

vestibule of the Hotel Cecil, in the mirror (p. 65), and as
Arnauti had searched far and wide for a clue to the anxiety
check Justine experiences in her sexual relations, so
Darley seeks everywhere to find out what makes her what she
is. Arnauti had written a novel, the central character of
which was Justine, just as Darley will do in Balthazar and
Clea.

 

107

by Cohen's death, ugly as it is, because Cohen had loved
Melissa, and failed to buy her a coat and marry her, just
as he himself had, and in his death he feels he can study
his own. In his search for identity, Darley is thus cer-
tainly defining himself in terms of his relationships with
others, and those relationships all revolve round his love
for Melissa, Justine and the city of Alexandria, all three
as intricately interwoven by mirror images13 as are Nessim,
Arnauti, Pursewarden, Cohen and Darley.

Justine is close to mental illness, the victim of an
Obsession with sex, compelled to take lovers, according to
Arnauti, in order to recreate a traumatic rape in childhood.14
She fascinates Darley as she has many others. But through
all his physical attraction and mental fascination with
Justine, Darley never forgets his responsibility to Nessim,
her husband, for he values that friendship too. In this he
resembles Arthur Seaton, for just as Arthur is of Brenda's
husband, Jack, Darley is considerate of Nessim, and avoids
embarrassing or paining him. This is shown, for example,
when Darley and Justine first acknowledge their physical

attraction for each other, on the beach.

 

l3The motif of the mirror is important in indicating

the many interrelatednesses, as above. Justine is often
viewed by others in the mirror, and her love affairs are
symbolized in the many distorted images of Justine and
Arnauti in the mirrors of the Orient Express, as he searched
for a cure.

l4Durrell, Justine, p. 78.

108

She got up now and walked away down the long
curving perspective of the beach crossing the
pools of lava slowly, her head bent; and I
thought of Nessim's handsome face smiling at
her from every mirror in the room. The whole
scene which we had just enacted was invested in
my mind with a dream—like improbability.15
And his reSponsibility for Melissa is not forgotten in his
love for Justine, in fact it is through the depth of com-
munication with Justine that he comes fully to understand
his love for Melissa.
I took her face in my hands and examined it silently,
with a care and attention, with a sadness and hunger
I don't ever remember feeling before. She said,
"It is not me you are seeing, it is someone else."
But in truth I was seeing Melissa for the first time.
In some paradoxical way it was Justine who was now
permitting me to see Melissa as she really was-—and
to recognize my love for her.16
Relationships of this kind come to Bowles' heroes at the
moment Of death, if at all, and never occur with Algren's
or Miss O'Connor's heroes.

On the first level, this is the story of Darley's
search for love, and for understanding of Justine, the
symbol of love that lies just beyond knowledge. On another
level it is a story of a love affair between Darley and
Alexandria, for Justine is constantly pointed out to be the

personificaiton of the city. "In her, as an Alexandrian,

licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a

 

15Ibid., p. 47.

l6Ibid., p. 54.

109

travesty of freedom."17 She is "a child of the city which

decrees that its women shall be voluptuaries not of
pleasure, but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least
dare to find"18 whether it be the man who raped her, her
lost child, or herself. The parting with Darley at the end
of Part I makes him feel "as if the whole city had crashed
about his ears"19 and Pursewarden says that "Justine and her
city are alike in that they both have a strong flavour
without having any real character."20 The references to
Justine as being CleOpatra or a cat or a goddess, are also

21

part of the city personification. Yet frequent as they

are they do not remove her to a plane above the other

 

l71bid., p. 40.

l81bid., p. 47.

l91bid., p. 88.

20Ibid., p. 139.

21At the end of Part II she is going away a second

time, saying she is afraid and doesn't know why, and her
farewell is immediately preceded by a memory of a description
of her by Arnauti.

Like women who think by biological precept and without

the help Of reason. TO such women how fatal an error

it is to give oneself; there is simply a small chewing

noise as when the cat reaches the backbone of the mouse.
Clea speaks of her as "truly Alexandrian and verging on the
Goddess." Arnauti is described by Balthazar as "a sort of
minor Antony, and she a Cleo" and as she sweeps Melissa's
dressing table clear of personal things she is spoken of as
a leopard. The comparison, though made, is not dramatized.

110

characters. She remains a mere mortal, in spite of being
a mirror of Alexandria, the true object of Darley's love.
His quest is not yet over. At the end of this novel
Justine has gone to Palestine, where Clea writes that she
has lost her magnetic appeal and ceased to be a "goddess,"
separated as she is from the city.22 Darley is preparing
for a new episode in a teaching post away from Alexandria.

There is a calm with many questions left unanswered. In

this novel, as in Balthazar and Clea, Darley the questor is

 

central, therefore the hero, but Justine/Alexandria, the
main Object of the quest, is of equal importance. Both are
characters who draw others to them. Both have a definite
place in the Alexandrian society in which they move, and
make their progress towards self-knowledge by interpersonal
relationships within the framework of that society. Each
has human frailties which prevent either becoming permanently
larger than life. Even Justine, who as spirit of the city
has verged on such elevation, is firmly returned to the
ranks of the mortals at the end. And Darley, still looking
for answers, does not see himself as in any way more signifi-
cant than those around him. Nor is he called to fulfill
any grand design.

The hero of the second novel of the Quartet, Mountolive,

is destined to rise to head the British Embassy in Alexandria.

 

22This supplies the answer as to why she was afraid,
see note 21.

111

His is a position.in the Alexandrian society of high rank,
and as this is clearly recognized, it will affect his
relationships with those he meets. And again within the
framework of the Alexandrian society, and that of the
diplomatic corps, he finds himself through personal relation-
ships. At first a young cadet, Mountolive has been given

an introduction to the Hosnanis, and has become the lover

of the mystical Leila, mother of Nessim and Narouz, and

wife of a cadaverous, sensitive invalid. Mountolive

had been formally educated in England, educated

not to wish to feel. All the other valuable lessons
he had already mastered, despite his youth--to con-
front the problems of the drawing—room and the
street with sang-froid; but towards personal
emotions he could only Oppose the nervous silence
of a national sensibility almost anaesthetized into
clumsy taciturnity: an education in selected
reticences and shames. Breeding and sensibility
seldom march together, though the breach can be
carefully disguised in codes of manners, forms of
address towards the world. He had heard and read
of passion, but had regarded it as something which
could never impinge upon him, and now here it was,
bursting into the secret life which, like every
overgrown schoolboy, lived on autonomously behind
the indulgent screen of everyday manners and trans-
actions, everyday talk and affections.23

He is the "innocent" who is to be educated, initiated into
life by Leila, and into the ways of Alexandria. He is
immature, hampered by feelings of guilt, and amazed at
Leila's revelation that it is her husband who suggested

she become his lover, because of his own fear of losing

 

23Lawrence Durrell, Mountolive (London: Faber and
Faber, 1958), p. 18.

 

112

her. We learn through him, and since this book is the

most traditional in form, Mountolive is clearly its hero.
It is with mirror images again that the complex

interrelationships are shown.24 Leila, "the spirit of

Alexandria,‘ is associated, as is Justine, with Cleopatra
and the Sphinx.25 She is a reflection of Justine, but a
much paler one, and the extreme frankness of the relation-
ship that develops between her and Mountolive is another
example of a relationship available more to an English hero
than to an American.

As ambassador to Egypt, Mountolive must judge the

motives of the Alexandrians we have come to know in Justine

and Balthazar. His quest is therefore like Darley's but

 

more fraught with danger, since more is at stake than
personal enlightenment. Pursewarden provides the link

between the two heroes. The central section of Mountolive

 

 

4Mountolive takes Leila in his arms "stumbling
forward like a man into a mirror" and they meet "like
reflections on a surface of lake-water." Leila's husband
points a pistol at his mirrored reflection and swears to
shoot himself if Leila should really fall in love with
Mountolive. Leila writes of her thoughts about her feelings
for Mountolive, now in EurOpe, after having caught sight of
Nessim's naked body in the mirror. The symbol suggests
that the love of Leila and Mountolive will be more transi-
tory than those feelings which are reflected in mirrors of
glass.

25When she takes the crumb from Mountolive's lips
"he felt the small warm tongue of an Egyptian cat upon his
underlip for a moment" and when she retires to seclusion,
after her illness, she writes to Mountolive of reading and
writing "with only a snake for company, tame as a cat."

113

is a long letter from Pursewarden, whom Mountolive had met
at Leila's suggestion some time previously. He gives in the
letter much information about the intrigues of Alexandria,
since he has angered the diplomats in charge, and does not
expect to be there when Mountolive takes over as ambassador.
Darley, for all his professional jealousy of Pursewarden,
had held his opinion in high regard. Mountolive, too, is
prepared to back Pursewarden's intuitive reasoning against
the hierarchy of British Intelligence. He is thus an upper
class, more important, but less mature version of Darley.
Through him we can be given a political and diplomatist
view of the affairs which touch the other characters on a
more personal basis. It is another facet of the prism that
is Alexandria. This time the personification of the city
is less within the hero's grasp since, by his position, he
is unable to become utterly absorbed into the society.
Thus he keeps hOping to be reunited with Leila, but she
eludes him until the end. When she comes to beg for the
safety of her two sons she is repulsive to him, Old, ravaged
by disease, with nothing remaining of the magic of the first
innocent encounter.

Much Of this novel takes place out of Alexandria,
and the spirit of the place does not assume the same impor-
tance as in Justine. Mountolive is of the same "bright

stone"26 as those who have Alexandria as part of their very

 

26See p. 116, note 30.

114

being, as his sympathy with Leila and Pursewarden shows,
but the stone has had to acquire a different luster because
of Mountolive's position on the social scale. His educa-
tion and initiation into the life of Alexandria takes this
as an axiom. Though of it, he must of necessity be a little
apart from it. His story thus is more contained than the
other three. This hero is a man with frailties, who is
taught much, sometimes through mistakes. But he is not
destroyed by them, and he never becomes a symbol himself.
The people and events described in Justine are

recast in Balthazar. Darley has given Balthazar, the

 

prophet, his draft of a novel "Justine" and has had it
returned annotated with views that constitute a reinterpre-
tation of some of these events.27 In this volume Narouz,
Nessim's younger brother, and Mountolive as the English
Ambassador to Egypt, become significant, and Pursewarden

is more fully characterized. Thus Darley's quest for under—
standing of himself and of Justine is carried further and
he must come to terms with painful discoveries such as that
Justine did not really love him, but had used him as a
decoy since she really loved Pursewarden. He is constantly
reminded of the limitations of his own knowledge, not only
by these new revelations, but also by the enigmatic killing

at the end of the novel. Toto de Brunel, the homosexual, is

27The part played by politics in Nessim's marriage to

Justine, the part played by danger in Justine's acceptance
of Nessim, a new theory as to the reason for Pursewarden's
suicide are all suggested.

 

115

stabbed at a carnival ball. There are of course various
possibilities as to why he is killed by Narouz, jealousy,
politics, mistaken identity; none clearly more plausible
than the others.

In the final book of the Quartet, £133! Darley's
quest is carried to its conclusion. He is brought up to
date on Alexandrian doings by Balthazar and brings back
Nessim and Melissa's child, whom he has brought up in an
island retreat. Wartime Alexandria has its own kind of
beauty and its usual high quota of sexuality. Darley finds
he is no longer drawn to Justine, now like Nessim weak and
physically deteriorated,28 and learns that Capodistra's
death at the end of Justine had been faked. He is ready
now to begin a new reconstruction of the real Alexandria,
helped by Clea to whom he is now drawn, and by Pursewarden's
notebooks. Those who have been lowered in estate are being
reinstated. Clea, whose hand has been damaged can paint
again with her new steel one, and Darley begins the book
that starts "Once upon a time." It is his point in space
and time to find happiness with Clea.

What has happened to the hero concept? In SiEi
references are made to Nessim and Justine as playing cards,
when Darley is trying to create an image of them as father
and mother for Melissa's child; the revelation that Amaril

is the Syrian lover who has restored Clea psychologically

 

28Cf. Leila in Mountolive.

 

 

116

and now repairs her hand comes as no surprise to Darley.

He thinks of Amaril as "like a playing card which had
always been there, lying before me on the table, face
downwards. I had been aware of its existence but had never

turned it over."29

There is the suggestion of the Tarot
pack of fortune telling cards in many of the characters,
and hence the kind of two dimensional effect which makes
them part of a medieval tapestry rather than real flesh
and blood. Yet for all their originality they still fall
within the criteria expected of the English protagonist.
Durrell dramatizes a wide spectrum of the sensibility
but his cast of characters is of an exceedingly
special kind. All these fascinating and exotic
beings share a high degree of nervous intelligence;
they articulate their emotions with lyric power and
unfailing subtlety, they live life at a constant
pitch of awareness, more searching and vulnerable
than that of ordinary men. They are cut from the same
fragile stone and so reflect each other like mirrors
disposed in cunning perspectives.30
These heroes are a projection of the English hero so far
delineated with the additional factor of this "constant
pitch of awareness." For all their individuality they are
never more than a part of a whole web of society. Their
relative importance is laid down and accepted by an unwritten

code, a question of money, birth, politics and religion

within which each knows his niche. A newcomer like David

 

29Lawrence Durrell, Clea (London: Faber and Faber,

1960), p. 256.

0Harry T. Moore, ed., "Introduction," The World of
Lawrence Durrell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UnIversity
Press, 1962).

 

 

117

Mountolive must be taught the niceties of the system, must
be able to function within its limitations.

Darley is himself a character among others and he

is not held in especial esteem by his friends and

lovers; he never knows everything that might be

known and he is the victim of a most elaborate

deception practiced upon him by Justine and Nessim.

Yet he does what he can, he tells what he knows.31
As such he demonstrates very clearly how different Durrell's
view of a central character is from Bowles'. As Lionel
Trilling suggests, the crucial difference has to do with
the peculiar negative relation in which the Quartet stands
to the will. It is Nessim's display of will which finally
wins Justine in spite of herself, but such a firm stand is
rarely taken. Nearly always the characters are swept this
way or that by a will not their own. This is not to say
that loyalty and responsibility do not have an important
place in the relationships between the characters, not only
with regard to friends and loved ones, but also to nations.
In this way the national individuality of the various
characters stands in the same relationship to Alexandria as
class identity does to Britain. Pursewarden, for all his
criticism of British society, shows himself fond of it at
heart. Mountolive has the weaknesses and strengths of a

British public schoolboy. Darley seeks refuge from dealing

with problems with Melissa in the comfortable traditionalism

 

31Lionel Trilling, "The Quartet: Two Reviews," in

The World of Lawrence Durrell, ed. by Harry T. Moore
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962),
pp. 62-63.

 

118

of the British Council library. Pombal is by contrast
thoroughly French. Justine is declared typically Alexandrian.
Scobie is the Old British sea dog. Leila is the spirit of
Alexandria. And all are caught in the magic of the city
itself. Indeed it is in many ways Alexandria which is the
protagonist rather than Darley and Mountolive, for in the
Quartet it has "a being far more complex and interesting
than any Of its inhabitants, having its own way and its own
rights, its own life and its own secret will to which the
life and will of the individual are subordinate."32 The
characters move in a society ruled strictly by laws of
love and art, both of which fall beyond the reach of the
moral will. This means that they will never, as are Bowles',
be torn between two possible ways of behaving, nor will they
judge each other harshly. There will always be a hint of
possible happiness somewhere in the future, an optimistic
View Of human nature for all its shortcomings.

Thus, for all its patches of the cruel, the horrible,

the macabre, for all its maimings and deaths, its

transformations and reductions, The Alexandrian

Quartet is not a tragic novel like Anna Karefiina,

nor an epic one, like War and Peace; it Is aIIyrical

romantic comedy in which the working through of the

life-force, the It, is celebrated in its very

absurdity . . . nothing is a final consummation,
nothing is an end-stop.33

 

 

 

This then is not a tragic view of life, and no character

is permitted the tragic limelight for long enough to become

 

32Ibid., p. 60.

33Fraser, Lawrence Durrell: A Stugy, pp. 147-148.

 

119

self-dramatized. Each takes himself very much for granted,
though the search for motives goes on. "There is scarcely
a modern, or at least an American-style modern neurotic in

the entire tetralogy."34

In Bowles there are enough and to
spare.

The society in which Bowles' protagonists find them—
selves does not absorb them into itself. It is not one
entity with a personality all its own, in which those from
various national backgrounds find their own niche, as is
Durrell's Alexandria; instead there are groups of characters
from different cultures who do not merge, love or understand
each other. Bowles' heroes, exiles in a foreign country
which is hostile to them, show the "deflection" already

noticed in Flannery O'Connor.35

In contrast to Darley who
has experienced the many faces of love and society, and is
now ready to write "Once upon a time," the heroes of The,

Sheltering Sry (1949), Let it Come Down (1952), The Spider's

 

 

 

House (1955) and Up_and Above the World (1966) face martyr-

 

dom, madness, immolation or defeat. Their quest for self-
identity leads to a collapse of the civilized super—ego,
into a state of almost mindless primitivism, and in the

process of trying to wrest some meaningful personal

 

34George Elliott, "The Other Side of the Story," in

The World of Lawrence Durrell, ed. by Harry T. Moore
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962),
p. 91

 

35See Chapter I, p. 34.

120

relationships from life they accelerate their own doom.
Where Durrell was showing the many faces of love, time and
life in a cohesive society, Bowles is exploring man's
status in existence, and the reality of human personality
in conditions of lovelessness and isolation,36 and is high—
lighting the lack of understanding between man and man, and
culture and culture.

In The Sheltering Sky Port and Kit Moresby, an

 

American couple, travel in North Africa, ostensibly fleeing
from the after effects of war into an area civilization has
not yet destroyed. They really seek their own identity,

and also the bonds of warmth and communication between them,
which have been lost. Port describes himself as a "travel-
ler," not a "tourist," the distinguishing factors being
that he spends a considerable time in the country, and is
willing to reinterpret his own culture in the light of

what he learns from the new one. But it is clear he deludes
himself in this, for the quantity of luggage he brings,
including Scotch and English cigarettes, shows he has a

firm hold on the West. Another symbol is the maps over
which he pores by the hour. It is as if by studying them
he hopes to impose a civilized order on a land where roads
cannot be assumed to be passable just because they are on

a map; where one cannot even be sure of a final destination.

Here are two protagonists who are a further projection of

 

36Hassan, "The Way Down and Out . . . ," pp. 87-88.

121

the alienation and inability to communicate seen in Miss
O'Connor's and Nelson Algren's heroes.
It is not surprising to find that his passport means
a great deal to Port, for it too is a firm link with
civilization. The climax of the story is reached when
Port's passport is stolen. His comment to the French
lieutenant carries an ironic statement of self—knowledge.
"It's strange," he said with a deprecating smile,
"how, ever since I discovered my passport was gone,
I've felt only half alive. But it's a very
depressing thing in a place like this to have
no proof of who you are, you know."37
Up to this point this is what Kit and he both seek--proof
of who they are, both individually, and as husband and
wife.
Kit is a slave to a fear of omens. For her, until
Port becomes ill, other peOple have no significance except
in so far as they represent "harbingers of undesirable

"38

events. The two protagonists are both walled off, Kit

a prisoner of dread, and Port inside "the cage he had

39 Port's maps

built long ago to save himself from love."
irritate Kit a great deal. For her all that has signifi-
cance is the search for a way to regain closeness with Port.

Whereas his name is ironical for her, for he is the port

whose haven she seeks, to find it only at the time of his

 

37Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (New York: Belgrave
Press, 1949), pp. 159-160.

381bid., p. 45.
391bid., p. 100.

 

122

death, hers is ironical for him, for in many ways she is
just the baggage with which he travels. She does not share
his walks in the native quarters, nor his zeal for travel;
she simply goes with him, waiting for the time when he will
turn to her. Until he does she is barely alive. Even more
than Port she clings to the trappings of civilization,
especially the little handbag of cosmetics which gives her
support after her frightening ride in the fourth-class
railway carriage.4O As she rides on the back of the truck
away from E1 Ga'a, with Port sick and unconscious beside
her, "it gave her momentary pleasure to think Of that dark
little world, the handbag smelling of leather and cosmetics,
that lay between the hostile air and her body."41 And when
she is shut in with her dying husband in what amounts to a
prison cell, although she cannot see in the dim light she
moves over to the door and "made up slowly and carefully."42
There is one point after the loss of the passport when Port
comes in to find Kit unpacking all her luggage in their
tiny hotel room.

The room looked like a bazaar: there were rows of

shoes on the bed, evening gowns had been spread out

over the footboard as if for a window display, and

bottles of cosmetics and perfumes lined the night
table.

 

40Ibid., p. 86.

4lIbid., p. 195.

421bid., p. 202.

123

"What in God‘s name are you doing?" he cried.
"Looking at my things," she said innocently.
"I haven't seen them in a long time. Ever since

the boat I've been living in one bag. I'm so sick

of it. And when I looked out that window after

lunch," she became more animated as she pointed

to the window that gave on to the empty desert,

"I felt I'd simply die if I didn't see something

civilized soon. Not only that. I'm having a

Scotch sent up and I'm opening my last pack of

Players."

"You must be in a bad way," he said.
"Not at all," she retorted, but a bit too

energetically. "It'd be abnormal if I were to

adapt myself too quickly to all this. After all,

I'm still an American, you know. And I'm not even

trying to be anything else."43
Kit and Port are unable to communicate in a really meaning-
ful way with each other, much less with those in Africa.
Kit recognizes her inability to become part of the society
in which she is moving. Both she and Port must make their
decisions unaided. Neither has a recognized place in the
society. They must act apart from, or in spite of it and
so are a far cry from Durrell's Alexandrians.

All through the first part of the novel Kit has been
on the lookout for omens of disaster. She has been dis-
tressed at Port's recounting of his dreams, and while he
has looked on the sky as protecting, keeping out whatever
is above, for her it has been a symbol of the void she
continually tries to escape. Ironically the omens have
presaged destruction, but for Port not Kit, and just before

that destruction comes the union of feeling which, with no

sense of urgency, both had been seeking.

 

43Ibid., p. 161.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.—

Ikna" I

r‘imfik

124

"Kit, Kit. I'm afraid, but it's not only that.
All these years I've been living for you. I didn't
know it, and now I do. I do know it! But now
you're going away." . . .

"But Kit," he said softly. They looked at each
other. She made a slight motion with her head,
letting it fall onto his chest. Even as he glanced
down at her, her first sob came up, and the first
cleared the passage for others. He closed his eyes
again, and for a moment had the illusion of holding
the world in his arms--a warm world all tropics,
lashed by storm.44

And she weeps for the wasted years and because of the dread
within her, while "the wind at the window celebrated her
dark sensation of having attained a new depth of solitude."
There is to be no building on this communication, as with
Darley's loves, for it comes only with death.

Port meets death alone, because in her need for
release Kit has gone onto the roof, and then on impulse, to
watch a truck arriving, and has stayed beyond the time that
the gates are shut. His final delirium links him with
Camus' L'Etranger as he views his own death from the

outside.45 He is also like Sisyphus.

 

There was only the endless black wall rising ahead
of him, the rickety iron staircase he was obliged
to take, knowing that above, at the tOp, they were
waiting with the boulder poised, ready to hurl it
when he came near enough. And as he got close to
the top it would come hurtling down at him with
the weight of the entire world.46

 

44Ibid., p. 217.

45Ibid., pp. 231-232.

46Ibid., p. 232.

125

But with the important difference that he does not have
control of the stone, that no amount of effort on his part
will propel it towards the summit. His position is even
more absurd than these archetypes of the absurd.

The truck had brought Tunner, a young American with
whom the Moresbys had begun their journey, and who had
awakened Kit to some of her hidden sensuality by making
love to her on the train. Here is someone to whom Kit can
turn in her anguish at Port's approaching death. Since the
fort gate is locked they spend the night in the sand dunes.
Here the irony of the story reaches a climax for Kit clings
to Tunner, telling him how much she loves Port, at the very
time that Port is giving his death cry. She had been unable
to tell Port of her love, and it is clear that Tunner is
unable to understand how she really feels. Between her and
Tunner there is also incomplete communication.

Port's death culminates a build-up of omen after
omen.

His cry went on through the final image: the spots

of raw bright blood on the earth. Blood on excrement.
The supreme moment, high above the desert, when the
two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart,
merge. A black star appears, a point of darkness and
gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric
Of the sheltering sky, take repose.47

We have been prepared for this surrender to the elements

by the details of the red light of the sun shining on the

excrement in the pit toilet where Port was being sick on

 

47Ibid., p. 235.

 

126

his way to E1 Ga'a.48 The signs have foretold it. The sky
has not been so sheltering after all. This man in his
solitary agony is everyman, or more accurately every-
civilized-man, whose fate in the hands of a ruthless universe
is to lose his identity forever, just as he has found it.
He is the representative of the West, with its expectations
of logical eXplanations, unwilling to read the signs,
unable to feel the hostility of the elements. He is also
its representative in imagining he is in tune with the
Arabs from time to time, when it is clear they understand
so much more of the non-rational side of life than he,
with his maps and paSSport.

Kit now becomes the only protagonist. Returning to
find Port dead she eXperiences a state of non-being.
"Nothing moved inside her; she was conscious of nothing

49 And fate prepares to take over, with the

outside or in."
camel train gathering for departure in the courtyard. She
decides against Tunner, and taking her money, passport and
express checks, she escapes into the desert. All she had
lived for is now dead, and with a ritual immersion in a
moonlit pool she is reborn. At this point she loses her

watch, and is free to become part of the timelessness of the

desert. The prOper tourist is gradually stripped away. The

 

48Ibid., p. 185.

491bid.

127

money, passport and checks are of no value in the primitive
world to which she consigns herself. She has found again a
"joy of being" and after a series of adventures full of sex,
violence and difficulties of communication, she chooses the
desert freedom and madness, not the shackles of civilization.
She too is the civilized West, who must set aside suitcase,
cosmetics, money and passport, if she is to realize the full
potentiality she has as a feeling being--a discovery which
will bring madness. That she is symbolic of those who dare
to break free from the bonds of civilization is shown by
the reaction of Miss Ferry, the Official at the American
Embassy, who is sent to meet her when she has been "rescued"
from the desert.
"Damned old idiot!" she said to herself. This

was not the first time she had been sent to be

officially kind to a sick or stranded female

compatriot. About once a year the task fell to

her, and she disliked it intensely. "There's

something repulsive about an American without

money in his pocket," she had said to Mr. Clarke.

She asked herself what possible attraction the

parched interior of Africa could have for any

civilized person. She herself had once passed a

weekend at Bou Sadda, and had nearly fainted from

the heat.50

And on hearing that Kit has no luggage she shows how little

 

she understands. "The desert's a big place, but nothing
really ever gets lost there . . . Things turn up sometimes
weeks later."51 Miss Ferry, unable to converse in
5OIbid., p. 313.
51

Ibid., p. 315.

128

intelligible French with the mechanic and irritated by

his attentions to Kit, is the extreme form of what Kit was
before she was freed by the desert. Kit makes her decision.
Faced with what Miss Ferry stands for and the imminent
reappearance of Tunner, she escapes to the Arab quarter.
Like Port she becomes the Westerner in his existential
predicament. The lines from Kafka-—"From a certain point
onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the
point that must be reached"--at the beginning of Book Three,
Kit's book, set her up as an archetype. She is one of
Hassan's radical innocents, who is a tragic figure because
her final incoherence is due mostly to the inability of
civilization to understand, just when she has learned to
feel and to communicate.

The intense isolation of these two characters is an
extreme form of that found in Algren and Flannery O'Connor.
Their stand, which will bring their own destruction, is
tragic because their love for each other was there all
along, and their inability to communicate had driven them
both to lonely deaths, without the supporting warmth of
family or class, nor of friends and compatriots, as in
Durrell.

Dyar, the hero of Let it Come Down, is very like

 

Camus' Mersault. He, like Port and Kit, begins self-
alienated, someone to whom nothing has ever happened. For

the first time in Tangiers he really sees himself, and the

129

cage which confines him, a cage he has been unable to lose
simply by leaving the West. For the first time he is con-
fronted with real choices and in the process of making them,
like Kit, becomes alive. The Marquesa de Valverde tells
him he is not yet really alive, and comments, "We're all
like that, these days, I suppose. Not quite so blatantly
as you, perhaps but . . . ."52 Thus he too is symbolically
the ignorant Westerner, unable to communicate, or to feel,
in search of identity. He begins, as Kit did once she

was alone, in a state of non-existence, lying inert on the
bed in a box-like room, conscious of having made that
Kafkan step which cannot be reversed. And the reader, if
not the protagonist, is conscious of the continuity of the
falling rain, with its implication of inevitable doom.

The gothic qualities of the novel give Dyar's quest
for meaning in life something of the aspect of a fable.
The nightmare begins immediately he arrives in Tangiers.
He dines the first night, at the suggestion of his new
employer Wilcox, at the home of the Marquesa with its tank
of octopus, its sick cats requiring injections, its
tapestries and candles and its gothic setting on a stormy
promontory. Here, as in Flannery O'Connor, the grotesque
setting heightens our fear for the protagonist, and helps

us identify with him in the horror he feels and the fear

 

52Paul Bowles, Let It Come Down (New York: Random
House, Inc., 1952), p. 230.

 

130

for his own safety. He thus becomes the existential every-
man, having to make choices without having all the facts
available to him. As seen by Eunice Goode, the fat American
woman who had become "a full-fledged legendary figure in

the Zoco Chico"53 because of her lesbian attraction to the
lovely prostitute Hadija, Dyar is "not at all distinguished
in appearance. He did not look like an actor or a statesman
or an artist, nor yet like a workman, a business man or an
athlete. For some reason she thought he looked rather like
a wire-haired terrier--alert, eager, suggestible."54 Dyar
the everyman has stumbled into the lair of a dangerous
beast, only slightly less dangerous, one suspects, than the
Marquesa. '

The regular Sunday gatherings at the home of the
Beidaouis show that no love or understanding is to be found
between the various nationalities represented. It is a
society very unlike Durrell's Alexandria, bristling with
hostility and misunderstanding, with everyone out for what
he can get. Dyar is the victim, recognized by all the strong
characters as the greenhorn who can be used for their own
purposes. The Marquesa singles him out to arrange her a
hotel booking at another's expense; Eunice Goode sees him
as a possible source of international secrets; Wilcox

expects to arrange his shady financial deals through him;

 

53Ib1d., p. 97.

54Ibid., p. 99.

 

4441‘

131

and Thami, the disowned Beidaoui brother, also seeks to use
him. By the end of the Sunday party he attends it is clear
that Dyar is an outsider. Warned by the Marquesa of some
of the plots in which he may become embroiled, he has been
designated as the prey of both Thami and Hadija. The fates
are closing in and to indicate this cats become significant
again. An American couple who have left the party with
Dyar and the Marquesa hear abandoned kittens crying. The
wife wants to find and feed them. Her husband retorts

"Why in hell try to keep them alive? They're going

to die anyway, sooner or later."

Dyar turned his head sideways and shouted
against the trees going by; "So are you, Holland.
But in the meantime you eat, don't you?"
There was no reply. In the back, unprotected

from the wet sea wind, the Hollands were shivering.
The cats are mankind in general, and the hero in particular.
He must make his way on his own, outside of society, relying
on no assistance. In order to do so he must exert that kind
of will which was so noticeably lacking in the Quartet. He
realized

that his great problem right now was to escape

from his cage, to discover the way out of the

fly-trap, to strike the chord inside himself

which would liberate those qualities capable of

transforming him from a victim into a winner.

In this way he exerts his will as Durrell's characters do

not. He sees his responsibility to make something of

 

551bid., p. 139.

56Ibid., p. 172.

132

himself, and is not bound by responsibility to any other
individual. He feels awkward about the money he has accepted
from the Russians for spying, but rejects any thought of
reporting what he has done to the American legation. "He
knew that was the action of a victim. It was typical: a
victim always gave himself up if he dared to dream of
changing his status."57 To him, to function within the
pattern of society, signified by the legation, is to deny
his self-hood, to become a victim. He wishes instead to
take his fate into his own hands.
The central part of the book is the period he spends
lying on the sand, naked in the sun. As Kit had bathed
away her shackles and learned to live, in her moonlit pool,
so Dyar finds in relaxation within sound of the waves and
within sight of the sky, the key to being. From this point
on, as did Kit, he is able to take advantage of situations
as they arrive, and again with each choice he makes he
brings himself closer to his doom. Escaping with Thami is
to become Thami's prisoner. Escaping from him is to affirm
himself, to "escape being a victim."58
This hero withdraws, as does Kit, into insanity. His
murder of Thami is not, like Mersault's action, a great

gesture of defiance, done as it is under the influence of

hashish. Yet it is the carrying out of his unspoken

 

57Ibid., p. 266.

58Ihid.

133

desires and as such, an affirmation of his existence and a
declaration of a final separation between him and the
world of Western civilization, to which the Marquesa comes
to bring him back.
He stood there in the patio a moment, the cold

rain wetting him. (A place in the world, a

definite status, a precise relationship with the

rest of men. Even if it had to be one of open

hostility, it was his, created by him.)59
He has thus placed himself, not in any society, but in "the
world," and the relationship he sees himself in with the
rest of men does not involve responsibility for them in
any way, nor any meaningful communication. His is an
extreme isolation. Though Dyar does not, like Mersault,
reach that ecstatic moment Of knowledge, he demonstrates
Western man's hunger for "being," to be achieved only by
setting aside the Western ego. The threat of nothingness
links in well with gothic terror in Bowles' novel. They
reinforce each other, forming together what has been
called the novel of outrage. This kind of novel Ihab Hassan
finds in the works of Styron, Baldwin and Ellison as well
as in Bowles.6O Such a threat never seems to occur to
Durrell's characters. They take their existence very much

for granted. The combination of gothicism and realism with

which Dyar's situation is laid bare makes his struggle a

 

59Ibid., p. 311.

6OIhab Hassan, "The Novel of Outrage: A Minority
View in Post War Fiction," American Scholar, XXXIV,

 

A—

 

134

parable. His is the trapped situation of Twentieth Century
Western man-~one man against the universe.

Up and Above the World replays the themes Of the two

 

novels just discussed, with more accent on the gothicism
and less on fine distinctions of character. Thus we may
regard Grove as another version of Dyar. Stenham, in The

Spider's House, however, has a new dimension because of all

 

Bowles' heroes, he is the one who most clearly portrays

the theme underlying both the novels and the short stories.
Port had had limited contact with the Arabs and had been
full of mistrust. Dyar had travelled far with Thami, but
was unable to respect him fully. Stenham's relationship
with Amar is based on mutual respect. Because of this
respect, an unusual degree Of real understanding exists
between these two. The gap between the cultures is at
least partly bridged. Amar is a real noble savage, without
education, but having the gift of healing as had his father
and grandfather.61 His "innocence" makes him wise beyond
his fifteen years. Stenham is an intellectual in whose
home religion and sex could not be mentioned. He had at
one time been a communist, but had come to believe that

"there could be no equality in human life because the human

heart demanded hierarchies."62 He comes to value the simple

 

61Cf. Tarwater, Chapter I.

62Paul Bowles, The Spider's House (New York: Random

House, Inc., 1955), p. 195.

 

135

philOSOphy of Amar, who is in effect battling against the
sexual charms of Lee Veyron for Stenham's love. Stenham

is attracted to Lee physically, but her shallow under-
standing Of what she sees around her grates. Yet she
eventually wins, and in taking up his ties with the West,
Stenham sacrifices his chance for a meaningful, genuine
communication between himself and Amar. In so doing he
acknowledges no responsibility towards Amar, abandoning him
as he does at the tOp of the hill. This would not be the
reaction of a Durrell character, for whom responsibility in
friendship carried so much weight.

The native uprisings serve as parallels to the
clashes between individuals and provide a dramatic setting.
They also help to indicate the degree of understanding Of
the central characters. Both the French and the local
national party, a communist inspired group of terrorists
and the genuine fomentors of the revolution, want to remake
Morocco and destroy all the charm, color and simple integrity
of the people, including the very religion in whose name the
national party has taken up arms. Lee, in her blindness,
sides with the nationalists; Amar and Stenham are both
aware of the destructiveness in each rival, but Amar is the
one who stands out as the symbol of moral and religious

integrity. When Stenham chooses Lee, not Amar, we know

136

it to be a mistake, and as Oliver Evans puts it,63 it is
Stenham and not Amar who is finally the loser, for Amar
retains his integrity and virtue which render him
impregnable. The title this time is from the Koran:

The likeness of those who choose other patrons than

Allah is as the likeness of the spider when she

taketh unto herself a house, and lo! the frailest

of all houses is the spider's house, if they but

knew.
In Amar's genuine, child-like affection, Stenham had some—
thing of great worth. He chose to reject it for the values
of the West and he leaves in the car,64 choosing the fragile
world of appearances, not the world of the soul. Stenham's
place in the scheme of Bowles' work is made clear by a

later book, Yallah (1957).65

This is a book of photographs
with a text by Bowles, which is an impassioned plea for the
understanding and the preservation of what is best in alien
cultures. Distressed at the way in which civilization was
destroying beauty and tradition in the name of hygiene and
ease of living, Bowles is concerned to show that the
original state had values too, none the less valuable for

being less tangible. Stenham, then, is the hero who

represents Western man at his best, able to make more than

 

63Oliver Evans, "Paul Bowles and the Natural Man,"
M, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring-Fall, 1959), 43-59.

64Bowles, The Spider's House, p. 405.

65Paul Bowles and Peter W. Haeberlin, Yallah
(New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957).

 

137

surface contact with the East. He has so much to learn from
Amar, and is so needed to interpret these truths for the
West, yet he chooses instead to turn his back on those
values and face the West, with its hard, unthinking women
and its mechanization. This is a tragedy far beyond the
individual. Stenham and Amar are highlighted in order to
carry a message.

I disagree with Glicksberg, who states that it is an
inability to find a real self-identity that causes Bowles
to write as he does.66 In the heroes Of his four novels
Bowles shows that identity for the West is an artificial
code; that real feeling, compassion and understanding is
there underneath, but its uncovering may also be its death.
In our relations between cultures we mirror the absurdity
of modern life. The hero drawn by Bowles is pessimistic
and alone.

Richard Arlington comments that adultery, prostitu-
tion, sodomy, lesbianism, sadism, murder, suicide, incest,
gun-running--all these and eroticism

are as much a part of the Alexandrian scene as a
pea-souper fog and Sunday boredom are a part of

London. It would be absurd to present Alexandria
as having the physical climate of London, or the

moral rectitude of New York where business alone
needs a mere thirty thousand call girls.67

 

66Charles Glicksberg, The Tragic Vision in Twentieth

Century Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UnIver-
sity Press, 1963).

67Richard Arlington, "A Note on Lawrence Durrell," in
The World of Lawrence Durrell, ed. by Harry T. Moore
(Carbondale: Southern IIlinOis University Press, 1962), pp.
6-70

 

 

138

But different as is his material from that of his com—
patriots, Durrell moulds it in terms of class divisions
and a hero who belongs, even if he at times rebels, or a
being which is that society itself—~Alexandria. His hero
is entirely a part of the society, and concerned in a
very deep way with his responsibilities to individuals
within it. He makes his discoveries through meaningful
relationships with others, and remains throughout just one
of the group, never of supreme importance.

By contrast, from a background setting so similar,
Bowles makes a totally different structure. The setting
is treated realistically and yet as bizarre; and dis-
affinities become more important to the hero than corre-
spondences. The hero under the second set of circumstances
clashes with the environment. To the extent that he takes
a determined stand he resembles Ahab, for his fate is sealed
and yet he is driven to act as if it were not. The ambivalent
tragedy of the individual is Bowles' concern, as it was with
Melville. And, as Yallah indicates, each tragedy is not of
one person alone. The heroes are representative of
Western civilized man, and so each reaches more than indi-

vidual stature, as he finds himself alone and outside

society.

 

CHAPTER IV

THE HERO OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL AND

THE HERO OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL

I now turn to the examination of all three English
authors to see how far their heroes bear out the tentative
hypothesis formulated.l To what extent is the hero of
Graham Greene, Alan Sillitoe and Lawrence Durrell

l. a person of everyday stature, not larger than

life,

2. a person whose place in society is clearly

delineated,

3. a person involved in a quest which takes place

within and through the society in which he is
placed, rather than apart from, or in spite

of it.

Greene, Sillitoe and Durrell

 

The protagonist of Graham Greene's religious novels
is a person who has some position of authority. He is
Pinkie, responsible for the organization of a gang of

thugs; he is Scobie, police officer of some seniority;

 

1The word "hero" will be used in the same sense as
"protagonist" and will refer to both masculine and
feminine main characters.

139

140

Sarah Miles, wife of a respectable member of the middle
class and controller of the fate of her former lover; or
the priest, the last representative of the church, and so
responsible for the souls of all in the province. As such,
his place in society is shown in detail, and the pressures
that the society exerts on him limits his ability to
initiate his own roles. He spends the whole novel tearing
himself apart because of his responsibilities for others,
and troubled because of actions which he believes have put
him beyond redemption. He underestimates, or appears to
be oblivious of the traits of character that might be con-
sidered in his favor, and so although others love him he
is unable to recognize that love, whether it be human or
divine. Each of them feels himself responsible for others
and in the carrying out of these responsibilities often
falls victim to coincidence or fate. Sarah makes a vow

to give up Bendrix if he is restored to life, not knowing
that he is not dead at all. Scobie makes a vow to make
Louise happy, not knowing that he will also find himself
called upon to support Helen. The priest sets himself the
task of keeping the church going in Mexico, oblivious of
the single—mindedness of the lieutenant's search and
destroy plans. Pinkie makes a commitment to Rose and to
the gang; Scobie to Louise and Helen; the priest to his
"wife" and child and to his flock; and Sarah to her

husband and to Bendrix. Each in his own way has also a

141

commitment to God, which constitutes a further conflicting
loyalty, and, unable to ask anyone else's help, they are
much less able to seek God's. Each is a tragic figure,
because in his limited vision he is unable to make use of
the help that was there for the asking. He illustrates
some of the basic human problems in the understanding of
God's ways. In the end each is realized to be doing his
best in his own way. He is thus very much of everyday
human stature; if he achieves something like saintliness
his is the kind of saintliness which we might all be able
to attain.

Alan Sillitoe's heroes do not have a position of
authority immediately recognizable in society's terms,
but each has that air about him which draws others to love

and rely upon him. Arthur, in Saturday Night and Sunday

 

Morning, can hold the whole factory spellbound with his
stories, and captivates Brenda and Doreen. The long
distance runner is on his own because of his circumstances,
but his thoughts range back over the companions who were

not caught and put in borstal as he was. He is a leader
among them, and takes up responsibility for them in accept—
ing the punishment and not inculpating them. In his stand
for honesty as he sees it he is also a leader for all those,
like him victims of a legal system not of their making. The

general, in The General, has rank, but it is clear from the

 

beginning that there are plenty of officers more powerful

142

than he. His authority over the orchestra is established
by his rank but it is his personal strength of character

that defines his position in the end. Something about his
self-confidence allows others to trust his judgement, and

to follow his instructions. Brian Seaton in Key to the

 

299£_and Frank Dawley in the trilogy are both questors
who must leave their own country in order to find this
self—confidence. Yet both have a drawing power about them,
whether or not they recognize it. People are ready to
follow them; love them; or live with them while they are
there knowing it must finish sometime; or wait for their
return, despite the knowledge they may never come back.
Within the tenets of their class, all Sillitoe's
heroes show some responsibility for others. Arthur suffers
with Brenda who is trying to lose their baby. He does his
best to avoid hurting Doreen, or any of his friends. He
is understanding of the waiter who is sent to throw him
out of the pub when he is drunk. Even when he is estab—
lished as the lover of Jack's wife, he is considerate of
Jack's "rightful position." He feels some sort of
responsibility to him as well as to Brenda. The runner's
responsibility to others is less clearly defined since he
is in contact with no member of his class at the time of
his story. His sureness that the boy down the street would
help him, however, makes it clear that he too works within

the assumption of responsibility for others, and would if

143

need arose, help that boy or any other member of his class.
In a sense, by digging in his toes and refusing to go along
with the hypocrisy of the prison governor he is assuming
a responsibility to set an example for others. The general
feels so much responsibility for the orchestra that he is
prepared to jeopardize his own safety to obtain theirs,
as is Brian Seaton, to help his friend. Frank Dawley's
idealism carries him to fight in Algiers. He takes this
as a real responsibility. He also shows a responsibility
of a kind to his wife, for he does return to her directly
he is saved from the battle zone, and at the end is plan-
ning to have her and the children join him in the community
in which his other love is established.
Sillitoe's heroes are all from the working class.
They show greater pride in themselves and in their group
than do Greene's and unlike Greene's heroes they survive
and attain some sense of achievement. Because of the
basic optimism of the working class they are carried past
those moments which for Greene's heroes lead to despair.
Lawrence Durrell also writes his books around major
characters who have a kind of personality which marks them
as natural leaders. Justine has animal magnetism which
compels everyone towards her. Clea has the vision of an
artist and the aesthetic fascination that comes from it.
Mountolive has official position and also a significant

drawing power in his personal effect on Pursewarden, Lisa,

144

Leila, Nessim and many others. Balthazar knows more about
the various members of the society of which he is the hub
than any other character. He too has the kind of per—
sonality that brings others to him with their confidences.
People also seek Darley out; and Alexandria, that fascinat—
ing lure for all the Quartet characters, has more magnetism
than all the rest combined.

In Durrell's novels responsibility for others is
again one of the sources of conflicting allegiances. The
intricacies of the plot turn almost entirely on how the
characters' love, politics and family duties conflict.
Darley loves Melissa, and is drawn to Justine and Clea.
Nessim marries Justine for political reasons, owes a
filial duty to Leila, a duty of friendship to Mountolive,
and is drawn by sympathy to Melissa. And because of this
responsibility one for the other, the hero can expect the
support of friends when he is in need. He never feels
totally out off from society and is always part of the
group among whom he moves.

There are three constant characteristics that emerge.

1. In all three authors all the protagonists have
some personal standing in the eyes of the others around
them; something that draws others to them and gains their
love or respect.

2. The protagonists' place in the society of which

they are a part is clearly shown, and is the starting point

 

145

of their action. They either work to maintain that position,
like Pinkie, or they show how their position is superior to
another morally, by deliberately acting against the code of
another section of that society, specifically for effect,

as does the long distance runner.

3. While it is true they seek their own identity,
they do so with reference to the social pattern in which
they are placed. None of them desert that society com-
pletely and move permanently outside it.

The nearest anyone gets to doing the latter is when
Frank Dawley joins the c00perative society of like souls in
Southern England. Restless, he has joined the Freedom
Fighters in Algiers, and in sacrificing himself for others
there, has found his identity. When he returns he joins a
group dedicated to setting social change in motion through
their own example of harmonious communal living. So that
even in this case the dissatisfaction Frank felt with
society is dealt with by setting up this model community
within that society. The hero thus ends his quest for
identity within a group who love and respect him. He does
not come to his moment of truth alone and at the expense
of others, as does Ahab; he does so in relation to them,
and with their willing help.

One can see how these three aspects apply to the
English heroes and distinguish them from the American

heroes, by comparing the physical ordeal which each of the

146

heroes depicted by the three English and three American
authors has to survive in the course of his search for
himself.

Scobie faces death wilfully, to prevent any further
hurt to Helen, Louise and God. At the moment of his agony,
Louise is just upstairs and he is conscious of doing it for
her. At the same time there is a voice within him crying
out to him with words of succor. He does not recognize
the words as God's, but the reader does (and if he doesn't
Father Rank draws his attention to them at the end of the
book in his part-justification of Scobie to Louise).

Scobie had always worn a medallion on which was depicted a
saint nobody knew. In the death scene he is identified
,with that saint and his throwing of his own life away is
symbolized by the medallion falling off and rolling away
under the refrigerator. In his deliberate act of self-
sacrifice he has found his true identity.

Pinkie's carrying out of murders is one kind of
ordeal, made necessary not because of personal issues with
his victims, but ones concerned with survival in a community
with a set code of behavior, and ultimately with the pre-
servation of his gang. His death, itself, is unintentional
and it is the reverse of Scobie's situation. Where Scobie
intended to kill himself and make it look like suicide,
Pinkie intended to kill the girl who loved him in a kind

of euthenasia, and make it look like suicide. In both

147

cases the plan backfired, and again in Pinkie's death he
finds his true relationship with himself and with others.
Unable to accept love offered in life, he can recognize it
as he dies.

In hi§_ordeal, the whisky priest is given the oppor—
tunity of seeing himself clearly, and at the same time is
put into that close relationship with the boy, and with the
church members in general, and more important from his
point of view, with God. It is once again an act in a
social setting. Lonely as he is, he is in the "company" of
others.

Like the whisky priest, Sarah Miles has always seen
only the negative side of herself. Her ordeal is brought
on by her willful renouncement of the man whom she loved.
It gives her the opportunity to reach out to God, and
indirectly has an inspirational effect on Bendrix. She,
like Scobie, has sacrificed herself for others. Her act
is not a selfish one.

The ordeals of Sillitoe‘s and Durrell's heroes do
not have the religious overtones, but again from a physical
ordeal comes a strengthening of relationships with others.
Arthur Seaton gets beaten up by two strongmen, who set on
him at the instigation of the husbands of two women he
has made love to. He knew it could happen, because of the
unwritten code of his set. From the help and understanding

Doreen shows him at this time grows the love which allows

 

148

him to marry her and go to live in one of those housing
estates where every house is like the others. His re-
entry, beligerent as it is, into a stable society is
brought about by the physical ordeal.

The runner's ordeal is physical in a different way.
He brings upon himself six months of carrying garbage and
other unpleasant tasks, when he could have taken the soft
option. His ordeal has meaning for him, and for those he
hOpes will read his story, in terms of social protest. He
doubts the governor would understand, but his aim has to do
with relationships within society. It is not just a
personal defiance.

Brian Seaton suffers the loss of his close friend
as they stand side by side in a trench, during a battle in
Malaya. Again this suffering is the spark from which he
is able to see himself and his relationships with others.
He returns to society with more understanding and less
resentment, with more idea of how one can be an individual,
even within the restrictive limits set by social mores.

In the military hospital in Algiers Frank Dawley
nearly dies. He has done what he felt was necessary for a
cause in which he believed. He has got rid of the martyr
side of his personality, the role of William Posters, which
previously he had often assumed. A friend, at great per-
sonal risk, frees him and he is able to return to his own

society, ready to start from where that society is, and

149

work to bring it to a more meaningful point. As before
the ordeal in the battle zone has paved the way to renewed
relationships of more depth with those who love him, with
his wife, and perhaps also with society in general.

The interrelatedness of people is carried to its
greatest extreme with Durrell, particularly because of his
view of the many-sidedness of time and the open-endedness
of action. Justine suffers a partial stroke after having
to work in exile for some time, but at the end of the
Quartet, the way is paved to the restoration of Hosnani
rights and social position. Clea has her hand pierced by
a barb from an underwater shotgun. As she is an artist
this is a calamity. But in the end she writes of being
able to paint with the hand her former lover has recon-
structed for her. Her relationship with Darley, and
indirectly with the dead Narouz, whose shotgun it had been,
is brought to its fullness by this ordeal.

Mountolive must suffer separation from Leila; and
Balthazar illness and being reviled as preliminary steps
to self-understanding; and Darley must suffer separations
and painful recognitions before he can evaluate the relation-
ships of others, and of himself with them.

The self-understanding which the hero achieves is
always of significance in terms of inter-personal rela-
tionships. The existential attitude which permeates all

post World War II literature is expressed here particularly

150

in terms of human action, or engagement. The choices that
have to be made will be with limited knowledge; they must
be made nevertheless, and man is then caught in the web he
has woven for himself.

How far are these common trends reflected in the
American novels? What effect does the vastness and the
variety of the American scene have on the hero depicted?
Like the English heroes, Flannery O'Connor's, Nelson
Algren's and Paul Bowles' all face an ordeal. But where
those faced by the English heroes were shattering enough
from their point of view, the American hero‘s is cata-
strophic. Here is no problem that the "average man,"
illusive as such a concept may be, may find himself faced

with. In every case the trial requires superhuman strength.

O'Connor, Algren and Bowles

 

Tarwater goes through ordeals of fire, water and
rape. The choices he must make involve his "being" in more
than physical sense. He has the devil himself to contend
with. At no time is there anyone to whom he can turn for
help. Everyone at some time or other seems to want him,
but only to use him for their own ends. It is not a
question of loving him or of respecting him. His existence
depends upon his being able to recognize all advice he
receives as partial, and in most cases to act in spite of
it. He is, as it were, hounded consistently by his uncle's

spirit, which is more like a spirit of vengeance than a

151

saving grace. God is constantly reaching out for Sarah
Miles, but He never becomes a kind of other demon, as he
does for Tarwater. The whisky priest is betrayed and
killed in a Christ-like manner but he is never visited by

the devil incarnate, like the lavender man of The Violent

 

Bear It Away.

 

Haze Motes, too, is an utter loner. Others approach
him only to use him, not to follow. They may be fascinated
by him, but they do not love or respect him. There is no
one who could begin to understand what goes on in his mind,
and his ordeal, self-inflicted, ranges from walking in
rock-filled shoes and wearing barbed wire round him next to
his skin, to burning out his own eyes with quicklime. Like
Tarwater he is "possessed" by his visions and unable to
make really meaningful communication with anyone, for they
have minds appropriate to their feet of clay.

Nelson Algren's protagonists also suffer a physical
ordeal which reaches catastrophic prOportions. Agonies
undergone by Frankie Machine in his morphine addiction and
withdrawal are more than any mere mortal should be expected
to withstand. The spirit of evil shows its face constantly,
especially in the person of Niftie Louie, who is the devil
incarnate for Frankie. There is no one who is strong
enough to really help him. Molly comes close to it, but
she can do only so much and then is no further support.

His wife's self—pity makes her another cross for him to

152

bear, and he knows his friend will betray him, and that
there is no escape from the electric chair. This is not
a battle of conscience alone. It is not just a battle for
survival. It is a mortal combat with Niftie Louie and with
the police in which he must join and in which he knows he
cannot prevail. His heroism lies in his spirit to continue
against all odds his battle against his own white whale.
It is a contest terrible in its isolation.

Two other loners are Dove and Bruno, who attract
only those who wish to use them as did Tarwater and Haze
Motes. Again they face a physical ordeal of terrifying
proportions. Dove is blinded in a combat of animal
ferocity, and Bruno, having survived the battering in the
boxing ring, leaves handcuffed to face his death. In so
doing he suffers the other torment of being within a step
of a real life with Steffi, only to see her vanish for ever
as the police take him away. They are fully aware that the
tasks they face require Herculean strength but they do not
turn their backs. Anti-heroes as they may be in their
lack of beauty of form or manner, they still retain some-
thing of the old romantic hero about them. They will face
the dragon, even if it means death, and in that death they
have a tragic emminence we used to associate with figures
like Othello and Macbeth.

In Port, Kit, and the heroes of Paul Bowles' novels

in general, the ordeal takes on a more intense horror

 

153

because of its gothic associations. The pain and horror of
typhoid in a country with no hygiene or comfort makes Port's
solitary death an ordeal in the extreme. Kit, too, must
face physical torment and mental anguish. Her insanity
and isolation are tragic in their intensity. Dyar finds

himself pursued by demons, real and imagined, in a setting

All-I’m:
.
.

where survival itself is a tremendous task; and Stenham,

the most human of the group, must sacrifice something which

 

is really part of himself. His death is to be the night- ,~
mare "life in death," more lingering and therefore with 7
horrible implications. The nihilism that infuses all

these heroes makes their agony an extreme form of the
hopelessness the Twentieth Century reader feels in a world
where complete answers have ceased to exist. They there-
fore have an intensity of effect which "thicks men's blood
with cold."

If their ordeals are more than the English hero is
called upon to bear, the assistance they may expect in
making their decisions is even less. Since, as has been
noted, these heroes are loners, they do not, as does the
English hero, have that quality of leadership about them
which draws others to them with love and respect. Those
they attract come solely for their own advancement; others
they drive away by their odd behavior, even if they
should not wish to do so. Tarwater repels and is repelled

by all he meets (except the man in lavender, who, being the

154

wolf in sheep's clothing, seeks to devour, not love). Haze
horrifies his landlady, and drives away by his behavior all
except those who cling like leeches, not through love of
him, but to satisfy some gnawing need in themselves.
Frankie increases his wife's self-pity, and makes it impos-
sible even for Molly to help him. He does not make a depth
of friendship with anyone sufficient to save him from
betrayal. Even Hallie, the girl whom Dove has come to love,
is driven away by him. And Bruno cannot accept Steffi's
love for what it is, and is lucky to have retained her
interest in him, for everybody else has turned their back
on him.

Like Bruno, Port behaves in a way calculated only
to kill any love for him in Kit. In the end she cannot
even believe him when he tells her that he has always lived
for her. He is his own worst enemy. Dyar repels offers
of friendship from Thami, the Marquesa and Wilcox, and
cannot persuade Hadija that the emotion he feels for her
is any more than that of any man for a prostitute. Even
Stenham accepts the cold sexuality of Lee Veyron and cuts
off the genuine warmth of Amar.

The second point of similarity mentioned among the
English heroes was their recognizing their niche in society.
Such a View of himself is almost impossible for the American
hero. For Tarwater and Haze, society is equated with Sodom.

Life in the city is a battle against evil powers seeking

155

control of you. Tarwater will go to the city and redeem it,
but he does not see himself in any way as part of it. Haze
has seen what man is doing to man and has put out his eyes.
His being picked up, nearly dead, in a ditch by two police-
men who club him "just in case" indicates how far outside
society he is, even if he lives on its fringes. Frankie,
Dove and Bruno have beginnings that place them, but their
quest for personal identity takes them further and further
away from any sense of participation in a stable group.
They each become one man against the universe. There is

no place in society which they see as their own, and the
police are closing in—-society sees no place for them
either.

Since Bowles' heroes are expatriates, they find it
difficult to see themselves as belonging anywhere in the
foreign society. Here they provide an interesting contrast
to»the characters of The Alexandrian Quartet. Port, Kit
Dyar and Stenham remain American through and through,
‘Whereas Durrell's characters, while maintaining their
nationality, also acquire some degree of Alexandrianization.
'Phey do become part of this society, and unlike Bowles'
travellers, are there to stay. Stenham's return to the West
Cones about only by his leaving his true, feeling self
behind in the grieving Amar.

Because of this total alienation from society, the

moments of truth accorded the American heroes are intensely

156

personal ones. They are ngt_concerned with meaningful
relationships with others. They are moments of realization
of hidden depths within themselves. They have thus drama-
tized the other aspect of existentialism, not primarily the
choices that act and react with Others, though of course
these provide the means by which they reach those moments
of enlightenment, but the question of "being" itself.

"Being,' says Wesley Barnes,2 "is the beginning, middle, and
end of the existing which has meaning for an individual
only insofar as he wills, endures, decides, chooses, suffers,
and agonizes." It is this willing, enduring, deciding,
choosing, suffering and agonizing that we examine in the
American hero, while it is more the results of such actions
in their human repercussions that we see in the English
hero. If the novels indicate what it means to be an English-
man and what it means to be an American, then the two
experiences are of a different order of intensity.

Certainly the other post World War II novels which I
have read would bear out this impression. The English
novels not only support the generalizations made on the

basis of the three English authors discussed, but they

also differ from other American authors in the same way.

 

2Wesley Barnes, The Philosophy and Literature of
Existentialism (New York: Barrons Educational Series Inc.,
l968), p. 210.

 

 

157

Other Post World War II English Novels

The heroes of a large group of contemporary English
writers have been given by critics the label "Angry Young
Men." While the novelists who belong to this group have
received loud acclaim in England, American critics have
found it hard to account for the continued interest in this
group centered around Kingsley Amis, John Wain and John
Osborne.3 Kingsley Amis' Jim Dixon4 has become the hero
who has most caught the imagination among English readers,
and perhaps, caused most irritation among American critics,
because of his apparently irresponsible attitude to the
larger issues of life.

Jim has taken up Medieval History because it was the
easiest subject at his university. He does, however,
recognize good teaching and good scholarship. He works for
the ideals of "occupational integrity" and is impatient
with pretense among his colleagues. Unable to bring the
ineffectualness of others to public notice for almost all
the novel, he dissipates his irritation by means of elaborate
daydreams in which he says the cutting thing which society

does not permit him to say in fact, or in which he registers

 

3See e.g. John W. Aldridge, Time to Murder and Create,
p. 232; and Frederick R. Karl, "The Angries: Is There a
Protestant in the House?" The Contemporary English Novel
(New York: Farrar, Straus andTCudaHy, 1962Y, p. 220, who
feels that the word "snivelling" would perhaps have been
more appropriate than "angry."

 

4Kingsley Amis, Luckprim (London: Golancz, 1957).

 

158

revolt in some suitable act, like stuffing Professor Welch
down the toilet. On occasion, he allows these mental
pranks to carry over into real life in the anonymous
telephone calls he sometimes makes or the elaborate lies
he fabricates, like those intended to hide the hole he had
burned in his bed clothes.

Because he comes from the lower class Jim is conscious
of the hypocrisy and self-congratulation of the upper middle
class, among whom he moves as a college teacher. He under-
stands the social system, since he is a part of it, but
like Sillitoe's long distance runner, indicates that the
ways of classes further up the social scale are not honest.
Gore-Urquart and his niece represent the aristocratic class
and they too are able to recognize the pretensions of the
Welches and those of whom Jim makes fun. It is for this
reason that Gore-Urquart is able to empathize with Jim's
pranks and offers him a post in London, not because he has
the qualifications but because he "hasn't got the disquali-
fications—-and that's much rarer."5 Had he belonged to the
upper middle class, he would, I suspect, have automatically
had the disqualifications. Thus Jim has moved up the social
scale due to the lucky appearance on the scene of Gore-
Urquart, just at the point where otherwise Jim would have
been crushed by the organization of the genteel university

world. I do not entirely agree with James Gindin that the

 

SIbid., p. 238.

159

ending is "accomplished only by a shift into the realm of
fantasy" and not "the logical outcome of the moral issues
demonstrated by the novel."6 Granted it is a coincidence
that Gore—Urquart is there at the right time but he is
impressed with Jim because of his ability to see through
sham. This ability has also won his niece Christine's
admiration. The middle class in which Jim has been operat-
ing could only accept him if he conformed to it. The
upper class is able to accept him because he does not
conform to the upper middle class. There has always been
more room for individual idiosyncracy among the aristo-
cratic class than among those further down the scale (and
of course there is no guarantee that this young man
raised in the lower classes will have a successful future
in the aristocratic circle, either).

Besides winning the enthusiasm of Gore—Urquart and
Christine, Jim has also attracted Margaret, one of his
colleagues, and he has favorably impressed Professor Welch
and his wife until they become the butt of his pranks. He
thus is one who draws the love or admiration of others. In
a similar way to the English heroes already discussed, he
realizes exactly where he belongs in the History Department
hierarchy and in the wider social context illustrated by
the weekend parties at the Welches. The third common

aspect is also found, for he registers his protest at the

 

6Gindin, Post War British Fiction . . . , pp. 38-39.

 

160

section of society in which he moves, from within the
society itself, even to the extent of giving an inaugural
lecture which was purposely invented to expose what he
really saw around him, realizing that in so doing he will
call down retribution on his head. He does not find life
unbearable and so leave for foreign shores as Bowles'
characters do. He does not fight alone and unaided against
an unrelenting fate. He always has friends, and in
Margaret and Christine as well as in Gore-Urquart, friends
who are willing to cover for him or assist him in anything
he may wish to do. Furthermore, in Gore-Urquart‘s inter-
vention, fate deals with him kindly--he is not destroyed.
Jim Dixon fits the three categories of the other
British novelists discussed and so do the protagonists

of Amis' That Uncertain Feeling, I Like It Here, and Take

 

a Girl Like You. John Lewis in That Uncertain Feeling,

 

 

like Jim, is a great mimic and exposer of public nonsense.
He constantly debates and worries over his relationships
with others. Having come from the simplicity of a mining
town to the complex world of Aberdarcy, he attempts to
adjust to the new social setting and these attempts form
the real basis of the novel. "The social and the sexual
consume far more time and Speculation in Amis' novels"

than do problems of occupational integrity,7 and wider

 

71bid., p. 38.

161

issues involving man's position in the universe never occur
to his protagonists. Like Jim, John finds the structured
society of his new situation one to which he is unwilling
to accommodate. Both must move, Jim to London with its
greater social variety, John back to the mining town where
he can find his niche more easily among the lower class.

In Amis' later two novels the heroes are more socially

adaptable. Garnet Bowen, in I Like It Here, sets aside

 

moral scruples raised by his wife and investigates a
novelist for a publishing firm. He handles himself

adroitly in the society of Portugal. In Take a Girl Like

 

{23 there are two major characters, Patrick Standish and
Jenny Bunn. Patrick wants to seduce Jenny and succeeds
eventually, and Jenny learns that the pattern of behavior
she has brought with her from the small town in which she
grew up must be adapted. She learns how to keep Patrick,
and how to operate in the more SOphisticated town. For
Jim and John Lewis adjustment to the middle class way of
life would mean too much loss of the social values of their
past. For Garnet Bowen, Patrick and Jenny, adjustment must
be made to society in order for them to survive in that
class in which they wish to live.

In all the Amis novels, the hero as he moves in the
society in which he is placed establishes his own identity
by his relationships with others. We are not shown Jim

puzzling over his reactions to outside stimuli, as we are

162

with Algren's or Bowles' heroes. We are shown those
characters he approves of and gets on well with, and those
he thinks "stuffy" and makes fun of. By his interrelation
with others we come to know his inner mind. People of

everyday stature, Amis' heroes are seen against a range of

 

 

English society and work out their destiny within, and by 5?
means of that society. Though they may be placed in a part if
of the society to which they do not wish to adjust, they

are never utterly alone in their struggle to survive and i“

they find their niche in society and foreswear neither
English society as a whole nor Western civilization.

Joe Lampton, in John Braine's Room at the Top,

 

belongs to the same group of heroes as Jim Dixon, but
instead of just kicking against the middle class system

he has decided to make out well in it. He heads for big
money and a high class girl. The clashes for Joe are between
the values of his lower class upbringing, love, feeling,
temporary satisfaction, and those of the middle class,
money, reason and long-range ambition. His powers of
attracting others are chiefly with the women of the story.
They are definitely there. His position on the social
scale is clear to him, as his early conversations with the
aristocratic Susan show:

"I'm sorry for keeping you waiting,‘ she said,
"I couldn't find my engagement book. Saturday
evening will be all right, Joe."

The first dragon was killed, even if it was
only a small one. I tried not to sound too
exultant.

163

"Grand. I'll call for you at a quarter past
six, shall I?"
"No, no," she said quickly, "I'll meet you at
the theatre."
“A quarter to seven then."
"Golly here's Mummy. I must rush. Goodbye."
"Goodbye," I said, feeling a little puzzled.
Some of the gilt had already been taken off the
gingerbread.
Susan's use of the word "Mummy" categorizes her as upper
class immediately. Joe goes on to comment on his not
being good enough to call at her house. He has had his
brief moment of homesickness when he "had a childish
longing for the ugly rooms and streets where to be hungry
or lost wasn't possible; for the familiar faces which might
bore or irritate but never hurt or betray,"9 and has left
all this behind for a meteoric rise to the upper class.
He is making a new identity for himself in another section

of English society.

"Lucky Jim, Look Back in Anger, That Uncertain Feeling

 

 

and Room at the Top reveal that peculiar social displacement

 

of the working-class graduate, brought about by what
Geoffrey Gorer once called 'hypergamy' (where the hero of
working-class origin is married to, or having an affair with,

a woman of higher social status).' As Leslie Paul goes on
to say, "The process of graduation enables the male to hide

his social origin from almost everyone but himself. He may

 

8John Braine, Room at the Tgp (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1957), p. 69.

 

91bid., p. 11.

164

deceive others, even his girl; himself he cannot deceive
and knows fatalistically or angrily that he does not

belong."10

This hero, the young man who by his education
has become something different from his father, occurs in
novels by a number of English authors. While there has
always been an interest in the "social novel" in these
boys who "made good," the rash of them after World War II
indicates the sudden prominence of this issue, and gives
it a different significance. In Dickens, and earlier
writers in general, to have been strong enough to have
raised one's social position was spectacular. These
heroes were somewhat like the dragon-Slayers of early
legend. In the Twentieth Century, education is a key to
financial success, and perhaps to social prestige. The
parents encourage their children to gain both--for them
this has been an ideal beyond their grasp. When the
children do succeed, however, they automatically find
themselves in a different class, cut off in many ways from
their parents, who cannot bask in the kind of reflected
glory that was possible for an Eighteenth or Nineteenth
Century parent, but are merely left in a backwater. The
hero of the Post World War II English novel, as a result,
often has to deal with a generation gap. The ideals that

he has come to maintain are not those of his parents, who

 

OLeslie Paul, "The Angry Young Men Revisited,"
Kenyon Review, Vol. XXVII, No. 2 (Spring, 1965), p. 345.

 

165

are often unable to understand how such a state of affairs
has come about.

It is important to notice, however, that in this
finding themselves in a social group for which their
upbringing has not prepared them, the heroes of these novels
know the social bracket to which their upbringing is appro-
priate. They realize that their education has removed the
prejudices and hard and fast judgments that go with the
class of their upbringing. They must now View society
afresh and find themselves within it. In the reader's
concentration on the supports the hero has lost and the
unknown world he faces, it is important not to lose sight
of the fact that he is still one who is admired, like Jim
and the long distance runner, for strength of character.

He is still functioning in a group and finding out, through
personal relationships how he can function in society.
Because of his own willingness to accept responsibility

for others he may be too trusting of those of other social
groups and so be made by them a figure of fun, like John
Kemp in Phillip Larkin's gill; or be taken advantage of

like Margaret in Storey's Flight into Camden. But hg does

 

not desert his friends. His traditional supports in
parents and the customs of the class of his origins may
have been removed by education, but he usually still has
those who admire and support him. In any case, he is all

the more conscious of class and its values and limitations

166

because of the change. The heroes of this kind of novel
cannot return completely to the ways of their parents,
because they have seen more of the world. They do come to
realize that they cannot abandon entirely what they have
been born and brought up with. They judge themselves and
their relationships within society, not distinct from it.

John Wain's Hurry On Down also deals with a Univer—

 

sity graduate, one who refuses to join the middle class,

to which he belonged before his University days. Charles
Lumley takes job after job, each one of lower rank than the
one before, until he ends up as part of a team of script
writers for a radio comedy show (presumably even less
socially acceptable than that of "bouncer“ at a strip

joint). Like the two couples in A Travelling Woman, Lumley

 

lays bare some of the curious anomalies of the social scene.
In doing so he is always noticed admiringly by others, and
does his best for those to whom he makes commitments of
friendship, even at considerable cost to himself.

Similar to the University group are Keith Waterhouse's

Billy Liar and Storey's This Sporting Life. Like Jim Dixon,

 

 

Billy uses flights of the imagination to free himself from
the humdrum round of his life as an undertaker's assistant
in a provincial town. Here again social criticism is not
the main aim, the society is taken for granted, and the
place of the irregular individual attracts the novelist's

interest. But where more direct criticism may be intended,

167

as of inhuman treatment of players by sports promoters,

the criticism comes in much the same format. In This

 

Sporting Life we are shown the rise to money and elevation

 

in social rank of the football star. It is treated in
terms of the effects on his relationships with others,
particularly the women in his life. This time the per-
sonal standing usually associated with the English hero
comes from sporting fame, and also, perhaps allied, from
sex attraction. Art Machin is very clear where he has come
from socially, and has visions of where he is going, but he
is all through the pawn of the big business magnate. Even
though the illusion of freedom is there, he can never fully
escape the ties of his upbringing. Money can buy a better
hospital room for the woman he loved, who is as much caught
up in the web of her social standing as he, but it cannot
change his way of looking at life. As with the angries in
general, the interest centers around how he manages within
the framework of society, whether he will beat it, join it,
or be subjugated by it. In this case it is a double society,
that of the football hierarchy, within that of the pro-
vincial town.

Since Amis, John Braine, William Cooper, Thomas Hind,
Peter Towry, John Wain and Keith Waterhouse have all had

their protagonists labelled "Angry Young Men,"ll they all

 

11

See Karl, "The Angries . . . .

168

will be found to concern themselves with the unusual indi-
vidual in society and how he fares. This limitation within
social issues has been seen by some critics as "wilful
insularity, the new sincerity—haunted little Englandism of
settling (rather than rising) expectation and diminished
world position."12

Rubin Rabinovitzl3 singles out Durrell, Golding and
Murdoch as three writers whose novels differ significantly
in form and tone from those of the Angry Young Men.
Golding deserves careful attention in this study, because
of his great popularity among American undergraduates.

Since his Lord of the Flies "succeeded Salinger's Catcher

in the Rye as the book most often discussed in Student

 

Unions, English Literature classrooms, and literary seminars"
in the middle sixties,l4 it would seem that in this writer
some of the "little Englandism" has disappeared--that there
may be closer parallels between his work and that of his
American contemporaries.

While not enjoying this special notoriety, Iris
Murdoch and Muriel Spark have "not suffered the lapse of

critical interest that has overtaken gifted contemporaries

 

2Warner Berthoff, "Fortunes of the Novel: Muriel

Spark and Iris Murdoch,“ Massachusetts Review, Vol. 8
(Spring, 1967), p. 301.

l3Rubin Rabinovitz, The Reaction Against Experimenta-
tion in the English Novel, 195041960 (New York: Co1umbia
University Press, 1967).

14Paul Elmen, William Golding (New York: William B.
Eerdmans, 1967), p. ll.

 

 

 

 

169

like William Golding and Kingsley Amis: they have also
been very nearly the most productive."15 Their interest to
the critic may also suggest something less limitingly
"English" about them.

Interested in this same group, Robert Scholes lists
Durrell, Golding and Iris Murdoch among his "fabulators,"l6
also including Nabokov and "a host of younger men" among
the Americans. I would add Muriel Spark to this list,
for her novels too have a fable-like quality. According to
Scholes, the fabulators have returned to a "less realistic
and more artistic kind of narrative: more shapely, more
evocative; more concerned with ideas and ideals, less

concerned with things."17

Let us also examine their heroes,
therefore, to see whether they tend toward the American pre-
occupation with individual crisis, or whether they are
similar to the English hero so far emerging, the social
being.

The first of this group is William Golding. Like
Greene he writes from a religious commitment and his dis-
section of the motives of his characters makes his heroes

closer to the American group than are those of the other

English writers. Yet they still retain the same three

 

15Berthoff, "Fortunes of the Novel . . . ," p. 301.

16Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1967), p. 13.

l7Ibid., p. 12.

 

170

similarities which set them apart as being typically
English. They inspire love and respect in others, they
know what their place in society is and they function
within that society and through it, not in spite of it.

In Lord of the Flies the characters are a group of school-

 

boys, stranded by an air crash on an uninhabited island.
They are as completely out off from the society of their
upbringing as it is possible to make them, and they con-
struct their own society, based on the beliefs that they
have acquired. Each of the boys has a different dominant
trait of character, and it is the interplay of these which
forms the interest of the story. The two who represent
civilized society's values are Ralph the hero, and his
associate, Piggy. Against them is ranged brute strength
in the person of Jack. One key symbol is the conch shell,
which is blown by Ralph to assemble all the boys for con-
ference. It represents the power of government, and great
effort is expended to gain control through it. Another is
Piggy's glasses. He represents book-learning, for he is
the one who knows about survival and government, and is
thus Ralph's advisor. His inability to live without his
glasses parallels his inability to live by anything but
civilized means. With his glasses fire can be made.
Because of this they, also, are the object of much ambition,
and their loss is literally death to him. It leads to the

fire which nearly consumes all the boys, but is also the

171

means for summoning aid, for the glare brings a destroyer
to investigate. Ralph and Jack are the two key figures.
Each has his own leadership powers and his followers. Each
knows just how strong he is, and how much control he has.
By this means he recognizes what his position is in the
island society, just as surely as heroes of other English
novels do in theirs. Since the boys are all originally
part of a select school group, their origins are all the
same--all upper class.

The struggle for survival of civilization, against
the forces of animalism, which takes place is depicted
entirely in terms of personal relationships, and in terms
of collective fear of the "beast," that symbol of the
hidden fear in every man. Though the comment made on
civilized man can be applied much more generally, it is
focused specifically on British society by the final epi-
sode. Attracted by the fire, which has become ironically
the beacon Ralph wanted tended right from the first, a
destroyer comes to investigate. A British officer is rowed
ashore. He is horrified at what he hears of the behavior
of these children. "I should have thought," he exclaims,
"that a pack of English boys . . . would have put up a
better show." Notice that "the boys are being rescued by
[English] adults, but they are in this plight because of a

grown-ups' war, and the destroyer which rescues them is

172

. . . l
itself on a manhunt not unlike that organized by Jack." 8
This book too is a commentary on the society in Britain,

and its belief in the civilizing influence of a certain type

of education. As Paul Elman points out, Lord of the Flies

 

is directly descended from

the archetype of all such adventures, Daniel De Foe's
Robinson Crusoe (1719). De Foe drew the rough outline
that many lesser hands have filled in: there is a
disaster that spares a few survivors, there is a
lucky landing on an island that turns out to be a
place of safety but also a place of mysterious
danger, there is a struggle before the eventual
rescue. Crusoe is the quintessential Englishman, who
believes in God but who does not waste time in brood-
ing about Beelzebub and Gabriel. He busies himself
instead by turning his primitive acre into a copy

of a Sussex farm. Not only is his English common
sense on his side, but God is there too. More ready
than Golding to ascend the pulpit, De Foe tells the
story, as he explains in the preface, "to justify the
Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of our Cir-
cumstance."29

 

If Lord of the Flies has some parallels with Robinson Crusoe,

 

it is more directly descended from R. M. Ballantyne's The

Coral Island (1857), which it brings up to date. Ballantyne's

 

Jack and Ralph lead and explore as if to the manner born,
and his boys meet threats of pirates and savages undaunted.
He never doubts that

a public school discipline could subdue a native
disturbance, just as easily as Robinson Crusoe built
his rustic paradise and rescued Friday. What possible
threat could survive the combined attack of Anglo-
Saxon ingenuity, a tradition of justice impartially

 

l8Elman, William Golding, p. 14.

 

lgIbid., p. 13.

l73

administered, a stiff upper lip, and possibly also

a Providence anxious that goodness should win.20
Golding views the effect of education differently. He is
saying that English society is based upon suppositions
which are no longer relevant to the wider world in which it
is placed. The upper class, like the destroyer's naval
officer, expect certain types of behavior to result from
certain upbringing. (Perhaps they, with the officer, were
all boyhood readers of Ballantyne.) Yet they are engaged
in a war which resembles very closely the episodes on the
island, and the naval officer does not see it. It is
clear that Golding intended that his readers should. The
naval officer, then, is similar to the older generation
depicted by Amis, and those associated with him. The boys
with Ralph and Jack may grow up Charles Lumleys!

While Golding's subject here is the loss of innocence,
as it is for Faulkner, James, Twain and Conrad, and many
others, it still retains its peculiarly English flavor.
Again Ralph draws people to him. Even some of Jack's
followers still wish they were strong enough to side with
Ralph. Again his position, both in English society and
in that of the island, is clearly known to him, and he
strives within that framework to maintain what he believes
in--a set of values which themselves designate him as upper

class. He does not seek the beast alone, or pit himself

 

201bid., p. 14.

174

against this new world. His concern is in his relating to
others, and in maintaining values in his society.

In The Spire, Dean Jocelin unites in himself the

 

clashing Spirits of Ralph and Jack. He has a vision of a
mighty spire above his cathedral, and sets himself to the
realizing of that vision, believing it to be for the glory
of God. In the delirium that precedes his death he acknowl-
edges that such a spire was really for the glory of himself,
and that he has failed to recognize his own love for

Goody Pangall, and his real reason for arranging her
marriage to the church caretaker--Pangall's known impotence.
He is therefore responsible for Goody's falling in love
with Roger Mason, the builder who will erect the spire
simply out of regard for Jocelin. This means that he is
also responsible for Pangall's death, indirectly for

Goody's death in childbirth, and Roger's attempted suicide.
It is shown that even his rise to high position in the
church has not been on the basis of his spiritual fitness.
It came about because of the request of his aunt, mistress
to the king. He does acknowledge his true place in the
scheme of things. He suffers the expected physical testing,
and dies with the look on his face that shows he knows
himself redeemed, even before the last rights are performed.
He thus comes to understand himself within the society of
his town, and within the tenets of his church, not outside

or despite either.

175

If Lord of the Flies and The Spire fit rather curiously

 

 

into the scheme of the Contemporary British novel as I see

it, then Pincher Martin,21 Golding's third novel seems at

 

first glance to collapse the whole edifice. How can it be
suggested that a novel where there is only one human being
(ergo the hero, Geoffrey Martin), can be social in its
conception? The case seems even more lost when one discovers
that even that one human dies in the fifth paragraph. Yet
I maintain that this, too, is an English-type novel, and
that it fits the three requirements that label it as such.
The hero is one who draws others to love or respect him.
He knows what his position in society is, and he finds his
true identity through that society. Where Dean Jocelin
represents Jack and Ralph, Geoffrey Martin represents the
last stages of Dean Jocelin's facing up to what he had
called the "cellerage," those uglinesses which the dean
sublimated for as long as he could by apparently throwing
himself heart and soul into God's work. Martin is a
lieutenant on a destroyer (therefore reminding the reader

of the end of Lord of the Flies). When it is torpedoed,

 

he is thrown into the Atlantic. As the castaway clings to
a rock for survival, pictures from his past life pass

before his inner eye, building up in the reader's mind, and

in Pincher's too, a portrait of a "complete rotter,‘ to use

 

21Published in America under the title The Two Deaths
of Christopher Martin.

 

 

176

a phrase chosen carefully by Neville Braybrooke.22 The
choice of words places Martin in the social scheme, just
as much as Susan's "Mummy."23 He is upper class (further
emphasized by his naval commission), and he has been so
loved and followed by others that he has been able to use
the power of sex with women, men and boys, to promote
himself. "I climbed . . . over the bodies of used and

defeated people," he boasts.

If Jocelin's besetting sin was pride, Martin's is

“W. ‘1‘“...‘1'

greed, hence the suitability of his nick-name, Pincher.

His real name, ChristOpher, is thus ironical for he is no
Christ-bearer. He is no symbol of love, human or divine.
But he does become the lost sheep of the parable. Martin's
clinging to the rock is the study of a man who will not
accept death. His "ravenous ego invents a rock for him to
endure on . . . He is not fighting for bodily survival

but for his continuing identity in face of what will smash
it and sweep it away--the black lightning, the compassion
of God," as Golding himself has told us.24 Martin is a

man obsessed and alone. To this extent he is like Ahab.

But he is not like Ahab in his fuller characterization. He

 

22Neville Braybrooke, "William Golding," Notes on

Literature, Vol. 80 (March, 1968), issued by the British
Council, London.

23See p. 163.

24In a note to the Radio Times when his book was

adapted for broadcasting.

 

 

177

is Greed, as in a morality play (and indeed he had been
selected as an actor for just such a part), but he is no
doer of fantastic deeds. His battling to prevent God from
taking his ego is simply clutching with two giant claws to

a tooth-like rock, formed in his mind. He is no Christ
figure; he is pitiful, and while he may at times earn our
disgust for what he has done in the past, and eventually our
sympathy, he never inspires that awe which the American hero
carries with him to a greater or lesser extent, wherever he
goes. Martin becomes simply the maggot of the fable told

to him by the producer.

. . when the Chinese want to prepare a very rare

dish they bury a fish in a tin box. Presently all
the lil' maggots peep out and start to eat.
Presently no fish. Only maggots . . . . Next the
little ones eat the tiny ones. The middle—sized
ones eat the little ones. The big ones eat the
middle-sized ones. Then the big ones eat each
other. Then there are two and then one and where
there was a fish there is now one huge successful
maggot. Rare dish . . . .

Like Jocelin, in the seconds before his death, having
reviewed some of his life and acknowledged his real relation-
ship with others, he becomes the one sinner that repenteth,
and so may have brought joy to heaven even if, in fact, in
his fall he really did not have time even to kick off his
boots. He is placed within the hierarchy of the navy, and
of British society at the same time. He finds himself, in

review, in terms of social relationships, and so, lonely

and lost as he is, he too fits the three criteria.

178

Golding's novels have several characteristics which
at first make them seem of American stamp. They lack
direct female characters; they deal with men and boys in
an extreme situation, under stress; but they mix very
subtly the English characteristics and the less English.
The hero still has the respect and often devotion of those
who admire him, and the society of Britain is there giving
a solid base to all he achieves. At the deeper level these
books too, concern the English society from which they grow.

Where Golding is interested in man under pressure,
Miss Spark is involved with the eccentric. Her theme is
basically that there are some very curious characteristics
in quite natural peOple; that the world is filled with
demons, "and there is a vast reality not perceived by the

"25,26

ordinary man. Jean Brodie, the protagonist of The

Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is a teacher of history. Miss

 

Spark takes the bond of hero-worship that often does bind
pupil and teacher, and explores the tremendous effect this
can have. Jean Brodie can control the minds of her more
receptive pupils, and so lives through them. One of them,
Sandy Stranger, is writing a book, "The Transfiguration

of the Commonplace." It is the transfiguration of the

 

ZSAnn B. Dobie, "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:
Muriel Spark Bridges the Credibility Gap," Arizona
Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1969).

26In this respect she is doing for the novel what
Coleridge saw as his mission for poetry in the Lyrical
Ballads.

 

179

commonplace which is Miss Brodie's aim. She sees her goal
as leading the students to their "prime" when insight and
instinct meet in a "total life-gesture." Here is another
protagonist who draws others to her, and who lives very
literally through others.

In The Ballad of Peckham Rye Dougal Douglas performs

 

a similar take-over, this time of the minds of a whole
Welsh village, when he arrives "to help industry and the
Arts walk hand in hand" for a firm of Peckham textile manu—
facturers. It is fascinating to see how, stripped of their
code of behavior and really looking at each other through
the distorted lens Dougal holds out, these folk can get so
thoroughly at loggerheads. Siriol Hugh-Jones, reviewing

The Ballad of Peckham Rye for The Tatler, gives some idea

 

 

of the effect on the reader.

I have no words to describe the precise, wierd
spell Miss Spark exerts over me, nor to convey
the magic accuracy of her ear . . . her wild,
sly, glittering wit and the little way she has
of slamming you over the back of the head while
you are still laughing. You must and will read
The Ballad of Peckham Rye in one awestruck gulp.

 

Yes, the effect is scary, but not the key figure himself,
so much. He is a kind of deus-ex-machina, but not a fully
drawn figure, not someone you suffer with and for, not
heroic or archetypal, but a denizen of the land of witches
and fairies, a minor devil who exposes factory life as it
really is. But he is not The Devil. He comes into a

community and throws it askew, then leaves the whirlpool to

180

subside. Here the personal relationships which become
reinterpreted are those of others. It is still within a
very definite frame of social reference.

Something of the same fascination hangs about Iris

Murdoch's work. Her first novel, Under the Net, has a

 

hero, Jake Donaghue, who belongs to the same group as Jim
Dixon and Charles Lumley. As a writer he exists by
translating, rather than producing anything original. He

gets involved in many kinds of scrapes and minor law-

‘~.

 

breaking. After all these escapades and journeys between
London and Paris, Jake comes to realize that the impressions
he has had of peOple have been incorrect--warped usually by
distortions of language, the medium of the writer. From
this discovery, and the subsequent re-evaluations, he finds
his real self, and tells his landlady that he will begin to
write again. The society associated with the film world,
within the English society in general, is the means through
which he makes his progress. He has, in his realization of
the true relationship between himself and Hugo, Anna and
the rest freed himself to be himself. It seems the clue
to a meaningful existence is to hang on to something small
that one 222 attempt. Here is no Ahab, tempting fate.
Just a young man trying to make his way without losing his
dignity. .

Like Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch is able to maintain

a delicate balance between the serious and the ridiculous.

181

James Hall feels that she "attempts to synthesize opposing
values out of hand. At her best she shows a choice between
excess and sour grapes, with an undistributed middle. (In
these circumstances the absurd is as pOpular as it is

because it seems the only balancing system. It combines the
mixture of aggression and sensitivity with realistic aware—
ness. The facts would seem demonic—-and the absurd functions

7 This use of the absurd

to show that they are not.)"2
produces a different hero from the one which arises out of
the American use of the absurd. If Iris Murdoch uses the
absurd to play down the demonic, and Muriel Spark to show
how normal the demonic can appear, the absurd is often used
in American writing, as we have seen in Bowles, to play it
up.

The Sandcastle, Miss Murdoch's third novel, illustrates

 

her humanizing touch. The hero, William Mor, is a school—
teacher with political ambition. Into his life comes an
artist, Rain Carter, with whom he falls in love. Rain
becomes for Mor the object of a romantic quest. But there
is a very delicate balance drawn. Mor's wife and children
represent stability and society, but they have their
repelling aspects, however much we may from time to time

sympathize with them. Mor's love for Rain is rather

 

27James Hall, The Lunatic Giant in the Drawing Room,

The British and American Novel Since 1930 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 215.

182

ridiculous, but is presented in a sympathetic way. We
understand that he does want to run away with her and "live
happily ever after." Through seeing how he really feels
about his son and daughter as they perform feats intended
to bring him back to the family, Mor chooses not to run
away with Rain. He has his face towards a parliamentary
career once more and his family intact.

As she uses absurdity to normalize rather than to

emphasize the bizarre, so in The Bell she "borders on the
"28

 

edge of Gothicism," but "never steps over the line. The
symbols are part of the total effect and never become
conspicuous. In her protagonist she is exploring the con-
nection between illusion and reality, and between different
kinds of love. Dora is a lively young wife, who joins her
husband, a dedicated professor of history doing some
research in a lay community. Dora is a sort of female Jim
Dixon who, by the practical joke of substituting an old
bell believed to be connected with a legend for a new bell
the community is presenting to the near-by nunnery, is
puncturing hypocrisy. The inmates of the community are all
under illusions about religion, and their community is

corrupting, offering an illusion of innocence instead of

true vocation. Unlike the members, Dora is able both to

 

28Charles Shapiro, Contemporary English Novelists

(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1965), p. 69.

 

183

give and receive love, and so provides a commentary on the
community and a hOpe for the future.

Like The Bell, A Severed Head treads the difficult

 

 

margin between humor and terror, this time exploring the con-
temporary boundaries of freedom and restriction in love
relationships. The bell, the net, the sandcastle, the
severed head are all symbols around which the action turns.
They are all things after which the hero strives. But they
are not Moby Dicks, or any faint shadow of him. These

heroes are people caught in a web of coincidences, of

which our world i§_made, floundering and finding some

answer to the questions raised by personal relationships,

and relationships with God. Her heroes, like those of the
other British novelists, function within the community, the
society of their setting. They have some standing, they
examine their own relationships and force others to examine
theirs. By the knowledge thus gained, they come to a

partial self-knowledge. Her heroes are part of the tradi-
tion of tragicomedy which, as Hall has pointed out, "the
British developed before anyone had heard of the absurd."29
Iris Murdoch portrays a hero in a world suffused with a
sense of the unaccountable and the ridiculous. Her advice
is that one can find satisfaction with the particular. In
this respect she is perhaps a spokesman for the English

writer in general.

 

29Hall, The Lunatic Giant in the Drawinngoom . . . ,

p. 223.

184

Other Post World War II American Authors

 

To find a spokesman for the American point of view on
life, we might turn to R. B. Lewis who describes the new
kind of protagonist found in Post World War II American
literature as picaro and pilgrim-—an outlaw either literally
or spiritually, making an "eccentric pilgrimage" through a
mysterious, hostile world "towards some shrine of honor and

"30

value and belief. This hero, the walker, as Richard

Pearce calls him,31 can be linked through Henry David

Thoreau's essay "Walking,' to a "literary hero who appeared
in Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn, and then skipped almost
a century to capture the imagination of the best American
writers of the mid-twentieth century."32 He appears not

only in Nelson Algren's Walk on the Wild Side, but also in

 

J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, James Purdy's Malcolm,

 

Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, and in Saul

 

Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, and Henderson the

 

 

Rain King, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

 

 

Augie March is perhaps the best example. He seems to
wander without direction. He allows Grandma Lausch,

Einhorn, Mrs. Renling, Thea, Stella, Mintouchian, all to

 

3OR. B. Lewis, "Recent Fiction: Picaro and Pilgrim,"
in A Time of Harvest, ed. by Robert Spiller (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1962), p. 149.

31Richard Pearce, "The Walker: Modern American Hero,"
Massachusetts Review, Vol. 5 (Summer, 1964), 761.

3ZIbid.

 

 

 

185

organize him. He is shipwrecked, lost at sea, hounded by
the mad Bateshaw, and through all this he remains himself.
In the end he tells us that what keeps him an individual

through all his experiences is "the animal ridens in me,

 

the laughing creature, forever rising up." He calls
himself a "sort of Columbus of those near at hand"--he is
on a voyage of discovery. If we compare him to Charles
Lumley, who also sought to retain his identity in Hurry on
2932, we find in Augie something more "elemental." He
will remain his own man, whatever life's hostility and
absurdity. He has some goal, some ideal just beyond his
own comprehension, and it is concerned with developing him-
self. It is a question of finding out not where he fits
into society, but of who he is. His passion for self-
analysis shows that relationships with others are of
secondary importance. By remaining true to himself in
spite of others and in spite of society, he is sure he will
achieve whatever he must.

Going even further afield, Henderson in Henderson

 

the Rain King, leaves wife, family and pig-farm, and walks

 

in Africa seeking basic truths, which, in true romantic
style, he expects to find in those unscathed by civiliza-
tion.33 He is driven by some inner urge. In each of the

societies he meets he feels the necessity to be a kind of

 

33Cf. Port and Kit in The Sheltering Sky,

 

186

savior, though good intentions and technical knowledge do
not necessarily accomplish this aim. For example, finding
the Arnewi suffer drought because of frogs in their drinking
supply, he blows up the "tank" and so destroys water supply
€29 frogs. When it comes, at last, to the vast trial of

strength that he undertakes for Dahfu34

he is equal to the
superhuman demands made of him and so becomes rain king.
Henderson's relationship with Dahfu shows how this American
hero differs from the English. Dahfu is not drawn to love
and respect Henderson. He is chief of the tribe and there—
fore above all society including Henderson, but he does
understand and undertake the education of this outsider.

He also wants to use Henderson for his own ends. Henderson
finds he does admire Dahfu, and so is able to re-evaluate
himself in terms of what Dahfu teaches him. But he does
not, therefore, join Dahfu's tribe. He is unaware he will
become rain king and does not relish the idea when he finds
out. Moreover, when Dahfu dies, Henderson feels no responsi-
bility to the tribe as Dahfu's friend. He has learned what
he needed to know and will return home, not out of having
fitted himself into a niche in society where he belongs,

but because in the kind of universe we inhabit one might as

 

well made the best one can of what is available. "What's
the universe?" he asks. "Big. And what are we? Little.
34

One of the many uplifting masculine friendships in
American literature. See Conclusion.

187

I therefore might as well be at home where my wife loves
me. And even if she only seemed to love me, that too was
better than nothing."35 The possibility of a closer rela-
tionship with his wife or with society in general does not
really enter the picture. He becomes a symbol of the many
who see themselves as outside society—-alone.

Without such far journeying, Ralph Ellison's
invisible man has to discover how he can be at home in the
world, when no one, neither white nor black, sees him as
he is. He becomes in this way a symbol, not only of the
black in America, but also of man in the modern world. He
finally destroys all those papers which seem to give him a
personal identity, cuts himself off from the personality
society wants to make him, and settles for what he himself
can make of himself, outside it.

There is a curious link of another kind between

these three and Moby Dick and Huckleberry_Finn, and

 

 

Twentieth Century American fiction in general. That is

the escapism form they take. To read The Adventures of

 

Augie March, or Henderson, or indeed any of the "walker"

 

 

hero novels is to leave the humdrum and go on an adven—
turous holiday, such as travel posters assure us is just
around the corner. There is a need felt among American

readers to embark on such travels. Martin Green pointed

 

35Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King (New York:
The Viking Press, 1965), pp. 328—329.

 

188

out that where Lawrence Durrell was enjoyed by English
readers because Britain "was hungry for an artist who will
give her a world of mythical size color and complexity,
which yet needn't be taken seriously," for American readers
the enthusiasm was "a graduate-school vision of sin and
subtlety in exotic old Alexandria, where you can forget you
were brought up in Ohio."36 Here, then, is the final clue
I have been seeking. American literature still retains its
yearnings of idealism. Under the many guises it assumes,
there is still a remnant of the hopes attendant on the Newv‘
World, and faith in the American Adam still infuses the
hero this side of the Atlantic. "Bellow and Ellison
describe a reality that is senseless and threatening but

which does not deny human possibilities. It is just this

paradox that characterizes the world of Moby Dick and

 

Huckleberry Finn——and the "saunterer" who finds his Holy Land
37

 

in walking."
The majority of Post World War II American novels are,

like The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson and The

 

 

Invisible Man, quest novels. The most significant among

 

them are those concerned with the fate of people of minority

cultures, particularly Jews and Black People, since they

 

36Martin Green, "A Minority Report," in The World of

Lawrence Durrell, ed. by Harry T. Moore (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1962).

37Pearce, "The Walker: Modern American Hero," p. 764.

 

 

189

thus become symbolical of the modern American view of man,
as it appears in literature, as being alone in a hostile
world. The heroes of these novels personify the "suffering"
aspect of Being.38
Herzog is one of these questors, one given not so
much to walking as to journeys by taxi. Of all Bellow's
heroes he is the one who most resembles the angry young
University graduates of Amis, Wain, and their compatriats,
in background and in his feelings of alienation. Yet he
is, when completely drawn, not like tham at all. Like
Jim Dixon, Herzog has complaints about the life he leads.
Both are University professors. Both are victims of cir-
cumstances, but also bring upon themselves much of the
confusion that surrounds them. However, where we identify
easily with Jim, and feel him more "sane" than the hypo-
critical role-players among whom he moves, our identifica-
tion with Herzog is much more complex. For one thing
Herzog is well aware that he is balancing perilously near
the edge of insanity. There are even moments when such a
possibility has a suggestion of satisfaction or escape in
it, for he is not like Jim, struggling to maintain his
genuine self in a society to which such a self is anathema.
He is the victim of a struggle between two conflicting

aspects of his own personality. The battle is thus one for

 

388ee p. 156.

190

survival, and so carries far more anxiety. Where Jim
cheerfully amused himself by flights of the imagination,
Herzog is the victim of a compulsion to write letters.
They are addressed to the living and the dead. Many of
these have a face-saving function. They "explain," "have
it out," "justify," and "make amends." There is a satis-

faction for him in pointing out Shapiro's faults of per-
39

J‘V Fl

sonality and academic shortcomings, because Shapiro has

 

been able to fascinate Herzog's wife, Madeleine. He has ';~
been unable to express his anger in staff meetings, but i
is able to criticize with precision the evening-class

program and the lack of insight in its organization, in

his letter to Smithers.4O There are a number of other

letters to academic and political figures, all carrying

with them the idea that there is a serious flaw in the

thinking of the addressee, which Herzog, in his self-

appointed, all-seeing position is able to demonstrate.

The president has not understood the full import of his

income tax regulations; Edvig has not realized how he was

being used by Madeleine; Strawforth has put forth a ridicu-

lous defence of the risk involved in radioactivity;

Governor Stevenson has deserted the cause of the intellectual;

Commissioner Wilson's police force cannot control the parks.

 

39Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York: The Viking Press,

1964). pp. 74-77.

4OIbid., p. 28.

191

In the letter to Edvig41 which is begun twice, the necessity
to score a point is clear in the version: "My dear Edvig,

I have news for you." He goes on with bitter recriminations
against Edvig's unprofessional behavior.

Yet the letters also frequently indicate the other
side of the picture--the self-contempt which results from
neurotic pride. And it is this neurotic pride which reminds
one of Ahab, and which keeps him alone and unable to join
in any group situation. With the exception of Ramona,
Herzog never gets into a satisfactory personal relationship
with anyone, and as a result, is not able to see himself as
a unity.

"There is someone inside me. I am in his grip.

When I speak of him I feel him in my head, pounding

for order. He will ruin me."42
Herzog is caught in a series of compulsions of which the
letter-writing is just one. He cannot identify his real
self, and he is pulled apart by contradictory forces
within him. He does not have the one external focus for
his compulsion, as does Ahab, but the compulsion is there,
and the battle as soul-destroying. In some of his letters
he shows himself to be like Ahab, bent on self—glorification,
vindictive triumph and mastery of life through intelligence

and will power. This is the hero who pits himself unrelent—

 

ingly against the universe. "I_am Herzog——I have to be.
41Ibid., p. 53.
42

Ibid., p. 11.

192

that man. There is no one else to do it."43 He exults in

his ability to make clear judgments and at the same time
acknowledges that "his judgments exposed the boundless,
baseless bossiness and wilfulness, the nagging embedded in
his mental constitution." In the seclusion of his own
thoughts he can admit that his aim was "to wrap the subject
up, to pull the carpet from under all the other scholars,
show them what was what, stun them, expose their triviality
once and for all. It was not simple vanity, but a sense of

"44 The idea

responsibility that was the underlying motive.
of responsibility is one basic to Bellow's novels, and it

is important to note that the word has a different implica-
tion from the same word as used by Jim Dixon. Responsibility
for the Angries involved personal relationships, probably
with women. Jim was concerned lest he had assumed more
responsibility for Margaret than he could leave unaccounted
for if he transferred his affection to Christine. Responsi-
bility for Herzog (and it may also be noted, for Malamud's
Frank Alpine) means willingness to suffer. It is not a
matter of suffering for some person. It is more concerned
with the state of the hero's own being. Here again, as in

Flannery O'Connor, the protagonist assumes a kind of cosmic

responsibility, not for a person but more for "humanity."

 

43Ibid., p. 67.

44Ibid., p. 119.

193

It can be equated with the sort of self-dramatization
already noticed in the American hero.

"The Bellow hero takes little interest in anyone who
is not fabulous, who does not have his prime quality in
excess . . . . In the modern British comic novels eccen-
tricity ordinarily marks individuality; in Bellow, it
accentuates representativeness."45 Herzog, then, like
Augie and Henderson, is representative, a symbol of Man in
his plight in a hostile Universe, someone unable to place
himself in any society, and forced to "make" himself
despite his lone state.

If Bellow's heroes suffer compulsions, so does

Malamud's Frank Alpine. The hero of The Assistant is a

 

wanderer, an Italian brought up to dislike Jews, but drawn
to the family of Morris Bober with a strange intensity.

The names of the novel have symbolic significance, indi-
cating that this is not just a realistic account of life

in a city ghetto. Morris Bober has links with Martin Buber,
the Jewish religious existentialist, and his surname does
not include the sound of "boob" without cause. Frank is
linked with St. Francis; he is Italian and must sacrifice
himself like the saint if he is to prevail. "Alpine"
indicates the mountain he must climb, and links him with the

Ahab kind of quest, in the same way as Croft's insistance

 

45
p. 134.

Hall, The Lunatic Giant in the Drawing Room . . . ,

 

194

on climbing his mountain, in Norman Mailer's The Naked and

 

the Dead, includes him in the fraternity.

The compulsion in Frank's case is to transfer the
guilt he feels at having been part of a gang that robbed
Bober's store to other less serious crimes, so as to put
off confessing. He therefore steals from Bober and spies
on the naked Helen, his daughter. On each occasion he
feels a peculiar joy, as well as remorse, and in each case
the transfer of guilt is not completely satisfying, and so
he is compelled to keep doing it. This treadmill on which
he sets himself even enables him to feel very "moral"

because he is doing something about the original crime.

 

But he is not confessing. He is forcing himself to suffer.
Ironically it is the capacity of Bober (and Jews as a whole)
to suffer uncomplainingly that has most irritated him.

That's what they live for, Frank thought, to

suffer. And the one that has got the biggest

pain in the gut and can hold onto it the longest

without running to the toilet is the best Jew.

No wonder they got on his nerves.46
Gradually by a process over which neither has any control,
Frank becomes Bober, so that when Helen and her mother
return from Bober's funeral, they hear the till ring and
realize that Frank is now the grocer. Like Bober he has

"made himself a victim,"47 and by an expiation long and

 

46Bernard Malamud, The Assistant, Signet Edition

(New York: The New American Library, 1957), p. 71.

47Ibid., p. 181.

 

195

physically exhausting it is possible for him to reach
"salvation." It is noticeable that Frank is on his own
almost continually. He almost has a relationship worked out
with Helen, but at the last moment destroys it by forcing
her to let him make love to her when she would have giving
herself willingly, had he only let her. He is not part
of the family over the store, and is unable to fully under-
stand Bober, or explain his own feelings to him. His
attempts to make the business pay are to help the Bober
family, but they fulfill first the urgent necessity he feels
for expiation on his part.
To Malamud, says Norman Podhoretz,

The Jew is humanity seen under the twin aspects

of suffering and moral aspiration. Therefore any

man who suffers greatly and who also longs to be

better than he is can be called a Jew.48
In his hand, the novel becomes something more than realistic.
Like Flannery O'Connor's Tarwater, the hero becomes the
center of a parable or myth.

He has created a folk, partly out of what actually

exists and partly out of what his spirit demands.

You would not go to Bernard Malamud for a balanced

and reliable picture of the East European immigrant

Jew, but you would go to him for profounder truths 49

about human beings than mere observation can yield.

This "folk" is one created to explore the question of

culpability and responsibility. As in the case of Bellow's

 

8Norman Podhoretz, "The New Nihilism in the Novel,"
Partisan Review, Vol. 25 (Fall, 1958), 589.

491bid., p. 590.

 

196

heroes, the question is concerned with the salvation of one
character. The world in which he moves impinges upon him,
but we are not interested so much in his interaction with
that world as with the struggle within his own soul. Like
Sgt. Croft he must climb his mountain. "The mountain is
everything man must conquer before he can achieve omnipo-
tence, before he can become god."50

Also belonging to the quest group of novels are

Joseph Heller's Catch 22, and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the

 

Cuckoo's Nest, which have been found by Joseph Waldmeir to

 

be the only two cases since the second World War when
"serious American novelists [have] made a conscious effort
to transport the novel into the realm of the absurd."51

Waldmeir notes further that Henderson the Rain King,

 

Mailer's Barbary Shore and Ellison's Invisible Man approach

 

 

the absurd, but are caught up short by their adherence to
traditional forms. Heller's and Kesey's heroes may thus
differ from the other American heroes examined.

Lt. John Yossarian, the hero of Heller's Catch 22,
goes on a quest which has a sort of parallel with its

medieval forebears.52 His charm appears to be a mixture of

 

50Hassan, "The Way Down and Out . . . ," p. 87

51Joseph J. Waldmeir, "Two Novelists of the Absurd:
Heller and Kesey," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary
Literature, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Autumn, 1964).

52Of which Minna Doskow makes much in "The Night
Journey in Catch 22," Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 12,
No. 4 (January, 1967), 186—193.

 

 

 

197

the basic qualities of Huck Finn and Ahab. He is one of
the younger group of American heroes, homeless, caught
between a world they have rejected and another they cannot
accept. At the end of the novel he is about to escape to
Sweden. Sanford Pinsker sees Yossarian as refusing the
"traditional journey of learning in manhood,"53 and thus
he sees the ending as an escape from reality. I see his
final escape as similar to the compulsive journey after
Moby Dick, as a taking up of a yoke, not a casting of it
aside. I thus consider him as like the other American
heroes in that he is taking up his responsibility to "make
himself," a responsibility which has little to do with
particular people or societies. As noted before, it is
something more elemental.

At first Yossarian believes he can work within the
establishment and use their rules to his own ends. But a
night journey through the streets of Rome, a symbolic
visit to the underworld, gives him a new view of himself
and of life. In this journey he is an onlooker. He is
not communicating with those around him, though he may
sympathize or identify with them at some times. The
journey prepares him for a vision of self-knowledge, when

he is close to death in the hospital. In the light of

 

53Sanford Pinsker, "Heller's Catch 22: The Protest

of the Puer Eternis," Critique, VII (Winter, 1964-1965),
150-162.

198

this vision, his escape to Sweden becomes an alternative
rather than a running away from reality. He says, "I'm

not running away from my responsibilities. I'm running to
them." This is again "responsibility" in the sense of

duty to make himself into something, a sort of cosmic
responsibility not seen within society. The journey in
Rome has certain similarities in its effect with Tarwater's
through the city with his uncle, retraced later by night.
At first Yossarian is haunted by his surroundings, and

full of compassion, but remains an alien observer. He
grows fearful and tries to escape.54 He must go on
observing torments until he recognizes that the nightmare
world is his world. A shout by a victim of police brutality
shows him the forces that rule the world for what they are.
He ceases to be merely an onlooker, and feels that he, like
them, is a victim.55 Because he is thus one of them, each
a non-communicating lonely island, he behaves like the
passive crowd watching the child being beaten. He does
nothing. Now his flight through the streets reflects shame,
not fear. He shares in the guilt of those around him, he
has capitulated to the forces in control. From the depths
of misery to which he sinks after his chance of redemption

through Michaela is lost, he is set free by a vision, a

 

54Cf. existential angst.

55Cf. Frank Alpine.

199

glimpse of "the truth." His struggle is always to maintain
his identity, and with it something more than mere existence.

His is the quest "absurd,' the rational quest in an irra-
tional world, as is most of the questing of the Twentieth
Century. It is thus an inverted image of the quest "surd"
of the Nineteenth Century (the quest of Ahab for example),
which is the irrational quest in a rational world.56
Where Yossarian forces us to come to terms with
"responsibility" to mankind and ourselves (not necessarily

to others individually), Randal Patrick McMurphy and Chief

Bromden, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, make us wonder

 

about the possibility of the individual's survival in the
face of the "combine," which is the Chief's symbolic name

for the impersonal machine that society has become. "The
immediate motive for McMurphy's antics, in addition to a
simple sense of fun and a straightforward lust for life,
complemented by a hatred and fear of authority and discipline
. . . is a hard-headed self interest."57 He arrives at the
mental hospital having got himself committed to avoid hard
labor in prison. It seems he has jumped out of the frying
pan into the fire, for Miss Ratchet, Big Nurse, is seen

immediately to be a "ball-cutter, one of those people "who

 

56For a full account of these two forms of quest see

James E. Miller, Quests Surd and Absurd (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1967).

57
p. 200

 

Waldmeir, "Two Novelists of the Absurd . . . ,"

200

try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line."
What alienated, anti-social hero can do anything but resist?
And McMurphy enjoys resisting! The very choice of this
reaction, however, leads him to a role which he would
ordinarily have been the first to shun, that of savior of
the others in the "nest." Many of them are voluntary inmates,
there to avoid the challenge of the life outside. Apalled
by Big Nures's power over them, McMurphy in standing up to
her becomes a leader making men again out of these poor,
snivelling shells.
McMurphy is thus a Christ figure, underlined by his
being laid out as on a cross for the electric treatment
and lobotomy which constitute his "victory" through self-
sacrifice. He is also an Ahab.
. . . the bust, in conjunction with the whales
emblazoned on McMurphy's shorts, set her [Big Nurse]
forth as Ahab's nemesis, the evil in good which Ahab
must destroy and be destroyed by; and of course,
McMurphy is Ahab, good in evil, driving beyond hOpe
of return toward guilt and expiation.58
He begins as a modern anti-hero, and somehow remains this,
even though, because of the Christ-like role he assumes,
he also becomes a traditional hero. "In the modern world,
such a hero individualistic to the point of disaffiliation,

but at the same time altruistic to the point of self-

sacrifice, is by definition absurd." McMurphy must therefore

 

581bid., p. 203.

201

end in tragedy like Ahab or Jesus.59 That he has joined
the ranks of these larger than life heroes is shown by the
way Candy, the prostitute, always calls him "a McMurphy,"
just as I have been calling the American heroes I have
discussed "an Ahab," or "a Huck Finn," as if, as Waldmeir
suggests, he were a state of mind rather than a person. He
is a very clear representative of the state of mind which

I feel is basic in the American idea of "a hero."

Two other heroes who belong to the anti-hero group
like those of the quest novels, but are also cut off from
a normal American society, as are Bowles' heroes or
McMurphy, are Styron's Cass Kinsolving and Loomis'
Gillespie. They also demonstrate the elusive quality
which makes an American hero so often larger than life.

Gillespie, in The Charcoal Horse, is a soldier who has

 

accidentally been reSponsible for the breaking of the glass
on a family portrait in the colonel's bedroom. He is

afraid that owning up to this, accepting the responsibility,
will inculpate him in another more serious mishap under
investigation at the time, so he does nothing. Because of
his silence a murder is committed and the murderer is
sentenced to be hanged. Gillespie, haunted by guilt, goes
on a quest for expiation reminiscent of Frank Alpine's and

like Frank he is denied the solace of freeing himself from

 

59Or like Kafka's Joseph K. whom Waldmeir shows to be
a close parallel.

202

guilt by confession. He is told there will be no punishment,
and no public recrimination. The consequences and the guilt
are his alone, and there is no easy way out. The isolation
is thus not physical, but lies in having no support of
friends or family in facing himself. Like Henderson or

like Frank Alpine he has to learn to know and live with

what he is.

Similarly, Cass Kinsolving in Set This House on Fire

 

is denied the luxury of confessing and giving himself up.
He is an anti—hero, homeless American in Italy. His
solitary quest for self—knowledge involves him in the
murder of another American--the playboy, Mason Flagg--whom
he mistakenly thought responsible for the murder of an
Italian peasant girl, whom he loved. Mason Flagg is the
personification of those aspects of Cass's own personality
which he must expurgate. Therefore, his death at Cass's
hands is a way of redemption. Cass then goes to the police
chief to give himself up, but the load is not to be removed
by confession. The chief will not allow him that. Cass,
too, like Henderson or Herzog, is left with only the ability
"to be for a time . . . And that for a while would do, that
would suffice." In the case of these anti-heroes, there is
something about their terrible loneliness (whether or not
they are actually separated from others) which sets them up
as symbolic of the state of man in the present age. They

are not all super-human, far from it, but the demands made

203

upon them by the absurd universe (rather than the little
community in which they are found) require a super-human
struggle of them, for survival. They may have this struggle
underlined with Gothicism as do the heroes of Flannery
O'Connor, Bowles and Styron. It is then clear what an
enormity they face. When the violence is rendered, rather,
within themselves, it is not so eye-catching but it has

the spine-chilling effect which produces the awe noted as
part of the reader's response to the American hero. Under

these conditions, representatives of minority cultures,60

61 and those Hassan has called radical

or rebel-victims
innocents provide the modern American hero, since they
best symbolize the modern sense of isolation and estrange-
ment.

Two post World War II novels seem at first glance to
differ from those of the main stream since they belong to
social criticism more directly, and so their heroes may be

expected to approach the English variety more closely. These

are J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and John Updike's

 

Poorhouse Fair. The hero of the former, Holden Caulfield,

 

 

 

has been called by James Hall62 "the American Angry." Hall
60As John Aldridge notes in Time to Murder and Create,
p. 14.
61As Hassan notes in "The Way Down and Out . . . ,"
p. 86. '
62

Hall, The Lunatic Giant in the Drawing Room . . . ,

 

p. 75.

204

points out that Caulfield first developed the language of
revolt which we have come to associate with Jim Dixon's
associates. Though this may be so, the situation Caulfield
finds himself in is a far more isolated one than any of the
English Angries. Caulfield is impatient with the rigorous
adolescence which post—war hopes demand. His first drive
then is for at-once adulthood as he imagines it to be. He
does not want to spend years learning how to write English,
how to get along with girls or how to be liked by his
associates. He is a schoolboy version of Cass Kinsolving

or of Yossarian or of Herzog. He wants no part of society
as he sees it around him. He has an idealized vision of
what he wants to be, seeing himself with a crowd of children
in a rye field on the edge of a cliff. He is the one who
will catch them before they fall off. Notice this has no
relation to society as a whole, nor to any individuals as
such. It is a self-agrandizing role. Like Henderson and
Herzog, Caulfield has to come to terms with himself and with
life. His love for his sister is the saving power for him,
as regard for Dahfu was for Henderson. Any other relation-
ships are partial only, and unsatisfying. Holden, then,

as demonstrated by Hassan,63 belongs to the "great tradition
of Huck Finn," the adolescent who exposes the corruption

and mendacity of our world and withdraws from it. His fate

 

63Hassan, "The Way Down and Out . . . ," p. 88.

205

in the years ahead is ambiguous, as is Huck's, and inten—
tionally so. His wounded idealism makes him a more intense
figure than the English Angries with whom Hall associates
him, and he has some of the existential qualities that
adhere more readily to the American than to the English
hero. He removes himself from the school, from his ex-
teacher, and from society in general. His decision not to
run away entirely is taken because his sister wanted to go
too. He is not coming back to society to seek his prOper
place. He is going to make what he can of himself despite
it.

Poorhouse Fair, on the other hand, looks like social

 

criticism pure and simple, rather than the existential or
the absurd. If it had been written in the twenties or
thirties it would have been an honest and radical confronta-
tion with reality. But it is not. Connor is the 19305
Optimist cast forward when social ills will be fought on
logical socialistic grounds. He is the pragmatic social
reformer who is a victim of the social justice he is trying
to help. He is another version of Big Nurse, driven by more
generous impulses, but like her unable to see the inmates

of the poorhouse under his care as peOple. Nor can he, like
his predecessor, remove himself entirely from them, yet he
shows time and time again that he is unable to communicate
meaningfully with them, for their values belong to a previous

age. Connor would like a clean-cut end for the old people

206

in his charge, such as that provided for the old cat by
shooting. He sees them as a drain on society, and yet he
has not lost the last shreds of his humane feelings for he
is not yet like the ruthless Buddy, his assistant. He is
thus torn between two aspects of his own character.

A crucial point is reached when the inmates become
enraged and stone Connor (who becomes a sort of St. Stephen).
Like Frank Alpine's association with St. Francis, this
"elevation" has something in it of the deflection Spoken
of by Hassan. There is irony within irony, for Connor is
not Christian, yet he reacts to the stoning as if he were.
The inmates, on the other hand, are Christian, yet they do
not see Connor's reSponse as Christian; and even if they had
done so they would have been wrong.

Connor, like Hook and Gregg, is a symbol, an embodi—
ment of one way of looking at life. The poorhouse focuses
the attention on a recurrent problem in society, and one
that is increasing with advances made in medical science.

No easy answer exists, as Updike illustrates. And if in its
sterility, the final scene seems a far-fetched version of
what our present actions will lead to if carried to their
logical conclusions, there is the wall of the poorhouse to
consider as a symbol. It looks strong and a clear division
between the old way and the new, but when the delivery truck
backs into it it crumbles. It was hollow and no real

division after all.

207

The hero of this novel is a lonely Ahab figure as much
as any of the other heroes. He undertakes the task of run-
ning the poorhouse not realizing the forces ranged against
him. His is a pride based on things already accomplished,
as was Ahab's and like him, too, he has those who visit him

on his captain's bridge, asking like Starbuck for recon-

 

f"
sideration of action. Like Ahab he must follow his star, E
however destructive that course of action may be. Even if
it were not for the chilling pragmatism that makes Connor
an American through and through, his similarity to the L

lonely Ahab who must rely entirely on himself and has no
voice of comfort by his side marks him as in the main stream
of American heroes.

Norman Mailer is clearly linked to this traditional
hero not only by his novels, but also by the position he
himself holds as a writer. Aldridge calls him "a major
creative consciousness and conscience, the most annoying,
destructive, hateful, but altogether remarkable writer of
these undistinguished years."64 Although Hearn may have

been intended to be the hero of his The Naked and the Dead,

 

as the stand he takes against Cummings at the end would
imply, the real key figure for most of the novel is Sgt.
Croft. His similarity to Ahab in his assault on Mt. Anaka

has already been touched on. As an alter-ego Crofts is

 

64Aldridge, Time to Murder and Create, p. 163.

 

208

echoed by the character of Cummings who represents an
extreme form of one side of his own character. Both Croft
and Cummings refuse to "accept the limitations inherent in

any given situation as final."65

They are thus like Ahab,
totally unable to give up their task once they have under-
taken it. Because he could not come out finally on the
side of the Fascism these two represent, Mailer had to
"violate the emotional logic of his novel by destroying

them as best he could,"66

but it is too late. Croft, the
mountain's conqueror, is already Ahab the whale killer.
Sergius and Marion are the natural heroes of The

Deer Park as Croft and Cummings are of The Naked and the

 

 

Dead. While this novel is set in a desert playground for

 

the Hollywood set, it really proves to be as lonely a

place as only such a buzzing sea of humanity can be. Each
character is so wrapped up in himself that for him others
are mere objects. The talk of meaningful love relation-
ships is thus an ironic comment on the isolation of each
within himself. Where Sergius and Marion succeed in playing
the system, because they see through it and have the courage
of their convictions, Eitel, the director, gives in finally
to a Congressional committee which has been hounding him.

His reason is that he cannot turn himself into a ruthless

 

5Norman Podhoretz, "Norman Mailer," in Recent American
Fiction, Some Critical Views, ed. by J. J. Waldmeir
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963), p. 198.

66Ibid., p. 190.

 

 

 

209

egotist. It thus seems that while the character who
occupies the seat where we would expect the hero to be
sitting fails to rise to the ruthlessness of Ahab, one or
more of the other central characters does. It is as if
deflection for Mailer turns his hero into a travesty.

Leslie Fiedler Speaks of D. J. the hero of Why Are We In
..67

 

Vietnam? as a "grotesque neo-Huck. It seems that
Mailer, writing a new kind of novel, still has a distorted
Ahab and Huck along as central to his theme. Perhaps this
marks a turning point in the use of these archetypes,
future direction unknown.

If Mailer represents a larger than life figure as a
novelist, then John Barth, in his complexity, is something
even larger. Nothing compared with his intellectual
demand on the reader exists in the English novel. Scholes
quotes him as saying, "If you are a novelist of a certain
type of temperament, then what you really want to do is
reinvent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except

"68

he was a realist. Giles Goat Boy_is also a quest, which

 

involves playing with archetypes and word meanings both, so
that even the sex act is raised to a plane of being the

genesis of the universe. In his discussion of Giles Goat

 

 

67Leslie Fiedler, "Cross the Border, Close the Gap,"
Playboy (December, 1969), 154.

68John Barth, as quoted by Scholes, The Fabulators,
p. 136.

 

210

Boy, Scholes writes of the two perspectives on experience
which engage, in modern fabulation

like Yang and Ying in equal struggle for control.
This mighty tension is at the heart of Barth's
great fabulation and all the rest. Just as the
realistic novel was rooted in the conflict between
the individual and society, fabulation springs
from the collision between the philosophical and
mythic perspectives on the meaning and value of F“
existence, with their opposed dogmas of struggle '
and acquiescence. If existence is mythic, then ,
man must accept his role with eqfianimity. If not, i
then he must struggle through part after part trying
to create one uniquely his own. Barth and the other
fabulators build on the interinanimation of these
two views.69

 

Where realism predominates in the novels, with the delicate
balance that must be maintained, it would appear that for
the English author society has the edge over the individual;
for the American the individual prevails. And where the
novels fall within the fabulations discussed by Scholes,
the American fabulators give the philOSOphical more weight
than the English. If one is at heart an Ahab one must
continue to struggle whatever the odds.

This inclination to Fables, which is common to all

Men, is not the effect of Reasoning, nor does it

arise from imitation, or Custom; it is natural to

them, and is rivetted in the very Frame and
Disposition of the Soul

says Bishop Huet, in his letter on the origin of fiction.70
The interesting thing is the way in which the fables pro—

duced are molded by imitation and custom so that those of

 

691bid., p. 173.

70English translation 1720, quoted as "Preface" by

Scholes, The Fabulators.

 

211

each country bear the stamp of their origin, even if only
faintly. English novelists have always had a place for
eccentrics among their heroes as representatives of
individual whim, but not for Ahabs or Hucks who can get
themselves far out and still feel themselves representative
of true sanity.

I am not suggesting that personal and metaphysical
issues have no place in the English novel. Nor am I sug-
gesting that there are no permanent or widely applicable
theories to be found in them. Nor that the society in which
a character like Clyde Griffiths or Sister Carrie finds
himself is not significant in the way each acts. But I am
suggesting that the emphasis on these aspects is different;
that the English hero makes his stand or attempts to dis-
cover his true identity, within and through society, whereas
the American hero does so in Spite of society, or withdrawn
from it. While the English society is relatively stable,
it is easier for a working class or lower middle class
person to obtain education and break through social cate-
gories than it was for his compatriot of the Nineteenth
Century. Thus the contemporary English hero is not "a rare
Spirit who is inexplicable in terms that account for the
mundane majority, linked to the rest of us only as an
image of what we would like to represent. The contemporary

hero is rather himself the illustration of the central issues

212

71 In earlier centuries the social

of changing society."
values appeared to be more fixed and the writer could afford
to concentrate on the energy and exceptional quality of the
hero, characterizing the society in only a peripheral manner,
by the fixed alternatives that the hero faced. "But by the
end of the Twentieth Century, the fixed alternatives seem
far less fixed and the hero, neither exceptional nor
exceptionally virtuous, is himself both a product and a
problem of that society."72
The American hero, on the other hand, has become an
illustration of what the writer sees as the central issues
of the universe. "No one has succeeded since the age of
Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson in seeing an actual
American small town or a living member of the Kiwanis club,"
says Leslie Fiedler. "To be sure, we do not all relive the
legendary pattern, or even believe in it; but we have been
unable to imagine our choices in any other image."73 For,
as Ihab Hassan saw, "Deep down, man always disavows the

reality his hands touch and his eyes see. This too, is

innocence, the dangerous and outrageous kind conceived in

 

lGindin, Post War British Fiction, p. 90.

72Ibid., p. 91.

73"The Ant and the GrasshOpper," No in Thunder (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1960), cited by Aldridge, Time to Murder and
Create, pp. 81-82.

 

 

 

213

dreams. The anarchy of the American soul is nourished on
an old dream; not freedom, not power, not even love, but

the dream of immortality."

 

 

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

Some possible reasons why the hero of the English
novel now differs so much from that of the American novel
are found in the kind of society of which each is the
product. The relatively compact, relatively stable society
in Britain, based on a long history, provides the hero of
the Post World War II English novel with some degree of
security from which he can look out to others and judge
himself in terms of their reaction to him. The society
which produces the American hero is much more vast and
varied. Because it thus does not have an entity which an
individual can readily grasp, it does not provide that same
security. The hero of the American novel must turn to
himself. The reactions of others to him give no sure basis
for his judgment of himself. He must therefore dissect his
own motives without their aid.

Moreover the rate of change within society has been
made much more noticeable within America by the positive
value assigned by its citizens to democracy. "What has
happened in America is that Democracy has become more than
a mere political form, a positive gthgg permeating the whole
society from the bottom up, and therefore has also come to

214

215

involve a bold experimentation with life itself and with
the traditional human norms in which the life of the past
sought to contain itself."l American life, with its high
degree of technology and its emphasis on speed, is far more
intense and seems to produce higher levels of anxiety than
does British life at this time. And the kind of society the
author sees around him will influence the hero of whom he
writes. Philip Roth gives an indication of some of the
reasons for the larger than life aspect of the American
hero when he says,

The American writer in the middle of the Twentieth

Century has his hands full in trying to understand,

and then describe, and then make credible much of

the American reality. It stupifies, it sickens,

it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of

embarrassment to one's meagre imagination. The

actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and

the culture tosses up figures daily that are the

envy of the novelist.2
The English novelist does not appear to be in the same degree
of predicament.

The larger than life aspect of the American hero also

descends from the Ahabs and Huck Finns preserved in folk

lore. The Davy Crockets, Paul Bunyans, Daniel Boones and

the rest were rugged individuals, people who could survive

 

lWilliam Barrett, "American Fiction and American
Values," Partisan Review, Vol. 18 (November-December, 1951),
690.

 

2 . . . . . . . .

Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction," Cited by Paul
Levine, "Intemperate Zone: The Climate of Contemporary
American Fiction," p. 508.

 

 

216

outrageous odds without the help of others. They were
people who could get along without women altogether, if need
be. Perhaps to suggest, as Leslie Fiedler has,3 that the
friendships that resound in American fiction between two
men, Huck and Jim, Queequeg and Ishmael, Natty Bumpo and
Chingachook, Boon and Ike Macaslin, Show a homosexual F
tendency in the literary outlook is to go further than I 1
would wish to, but it does suggest an ability in the tra-

ditional American hero to do without the humanity which

 

was symbolically left behind with Aunt Charity's Bibles E
and tea, when the Pequod sailed.

What emerges from this study is that the English and
the American view of life as reflected in the heroes of the
Post World War II novels are very different. The common
origins and Similar language have disguised this to some
extent, and might lead one to expect a degree of similarity
which there is no reason to find. "AS a general verdict,"
says Elizabeth Bowen,4 "it might be fair to say that English
fiction at present, is at its most English: as an export,
its value should rightly reside in that. A good deal may

be germinating during this phase of apparent self-regard."

 

JLeslie Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in Huck

Honey!" cited by J. W. Aldridge, Time To Murder and Create,

 

4Elizabeth Bowen, "English Fiction at Mid Century,"
in The Arts at Mid Century, ed. by Robert Richman, (New
York: Horizon Press, 1954), p. 213.

 

217

We might also consider American fiction to be at a
particularly American stage. The view of each of the two
kinds of heroes who embody these differences is "normal"
from the standpoint of the group from which it grows.

Each presupposes a set of cultural values individual and
assumed. To judge one in terms of the values of the other
is to impose an arbitrary universal.

It may be that from the point at the middle of this
century when Elizabeth Bowen wrote, the paths of the two
types of hero may now begin to converge. If changes in
present British society become more rapid, or their build—
up has a greater effect, then the British hero may have to
take further stock of his own inner resources. While if,
as Paul Levine noted,5 in the early fifties with the publi-

cation of Invisible Man and The Adventures of Augie March,

 

 

American novelists are turning "resolutely, if a bit
warily, toward the distant drumming of a chaotic society,"
it may be that the distance will diminish--perhaps even the
chaos. The signs of such a convergence have not become
markedly apparent as yet.

For the hero of the Post World War II English novel
the most frequently recurring characteristics appear to be
his ability to draw others to him in love or admiration,

his awareness of his place in society, and his aim to

 

5"The Intemperate Zone," p. 515.

218

discover himself in terms of that society or a modification
of that society which he will work to bring about. Those
characteristics which recur for the American hero of the
same period appear to be an ability to assume larger-than-
life proportions, a self-reliance and intensity of self-
analysis which cut him off from others, and which set him E
wandering on a pilgrimage symbolic of his search for

identity in his own soul. His is a lonely search apart

 

from, or in spite of, society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

219

 

W‘V.‘ '

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Novels

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Crest Co., 1956. Reprint.

. Walk on the Wild Side. New York: Farrar Straus
and Cudahy, 1956f,

Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. London: Gollancz, 1957.

. That Uncertain Feeling. lst American ed. New
York: HarcourtIBrace, 1956.

. I Like It Here. lst American ed. New York:
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. Take a Girl Like You. London: Gollancz, 1960.

Barth, John. Giles Goat Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus.
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Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. New York:
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. Henderson the Rain King. New York: Viking Press,
1959.

. Herzog. New York: Viking Press, 1964.

Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. New York: Belgrave
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. Let It Come Down. New York: Random House, Inc.,
1952.

. The Spider's House. New York: Random House, Inc.,
1955.

. Up_and Above the World. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1966.

220

 

221

Bowles, Paul and Haeberlin, Peter W. Yallah. New York:
McDowell, Obolensky, 1957.

Braine, John. Room at the Top, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1957.

Durrell, Lawrence. Pied Piper of Lovers. London: Cassell
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. Panic Spring. A Romance by Charles Norden.
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. The Black Book, An Agon. Paris: The Obelisk ;
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. Cefalu. London: Faber and Faber, 1947. Reissued

in America aS The Dark Labyrinth. New York: Dutton,
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. White Eagles over Serbia. London: Faber and
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. Justine. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.
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. $332. New York: Dutton, 1968.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House,
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Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. London: Faber and
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222

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1943.

 

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“urn-.3:

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. The End of the Affair. London: William Heinemann,
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. A Burnt Out Case. London: William Heinemann, 1961.

 

. The Comedians. London: Bodley Head, 1966.

 

Heller, Joseph. Catch 22. New York: Simon and Schuster,
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Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. New York:
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Larkin, Philip. Jill. London: Faber and Faber, 1946.

Loomis, Edward. The Charcoal Horse. Denver: A. Swallow,
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Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead. New York:
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. The

223

Deer Park. New York: Putnam, 1955.

 

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1959.

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Malamud, Bernard. The Assistant. New York: Farrar,

 

 

Straus and Cudahy, 1957.

Murdoch, Iris. Under the Net. 'London: Chatto and Windus, f“
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O'Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. New York: Harcourt
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Straus

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London: Secker and Warburg,
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