.T. u -H 5-.--..4‘éx’ THE SENSE OF PLACE: PETER DE VRIES, J. F. POWERS, AND FLANNERY O'CONNOR Thesis for the Degree of Ph. D. MlCHlGAN STATE UNIVERSITY ARNOLD R. HOFFMAN 1970 NWNNNN % “499‘s u ”L\ :f’ ‘I t 7 , LIBRAR i i Dllichigah {fuse .f?‘ Univcmty 4.» H ~4MW‘”-”’"""‘ ‘ This is to certify that the thesis entitled The Sense of Place: Peter De Vries, J.F. Powers, and Flannery O'Connor presented by Arnold R. Hoffman has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Ph . D. English degree in U})Z6M X} /,//n//juu. K 171'" r /" Date August 5, 1970 0-169 :5 t r 2’“ 4's .qut] E 'Q’; Ch: ‘ 4 :W . (t (.5 ' l; g; m 9771 20m x APR 15 2010 l W 292m ABSTRACT THE SENSE OF PLACE: PETER DE VRIES, J. F. POWERS, AND FLANNERY O'CONNOR BY Arnold R. Hoffman The thesis of this essay is that the fiction of Peter De Vries, J. F. Powers, and Flannery O'Connor is informed by both Christian theology and a comic vision. Importantly, these two informants, often thought to be inimical to each other, are in the works of these three modern American writers inextricably associated. Further— more, the specifically theological orientation of De Vries, Powers, and O'Connor marks them as being at variance with a dominant strain in American fiction: humanistic absurdist literature. To facilitate the analysis, Chapter I defines the basic premises of Christian theology, both Protestant and Catholic, following primarily the tenets established by Randall Stewart in his American Literature and Christian Doctrine. The chapter also presents a definition of the comic vision, differentiating between superficial, overt laughter and inner joy. The comic vision sees man as an existential being, defined in time and space through his Arnold R. Hoffman finitude, but ultimately capable of ironically transcend- ing the concrete by an acceptance of it. The major con- formity of Christian theology and the comic vision lies in the fact that each climaxes in the high joy of a vision of home, or spiritual well-being, which Flannery O'Connor calls "the true country" when speaking of the Christian's final sanctuary. The Vision comes in a moment of epiphanic knowledge for the reader which is not always shared by the fictional character. Chapter II analyzes eleven of Peter De Vries' thirteen novels, and prOposes that De Vries has worked progressively toward an affirmation of the crucial nature of compassion and the necessity of hope, both within an acceptance of man's concrete limitations, reaching his clearest statement of this dual thesis in The Blood of the Lamb. De Vries' ostensible comedy, his surface funniness, should not be an obstacle to perceiving his ultimate--and, hence, in Tillich's terms, religious-- concern. Chapter III examines the much briefer canon of J. F. Powers, finding the concept of a literal and figurative home as the goal of a spiritual but seldom geographical quest thematic in both the short fiction andhis one novel, Morte D'Urban. The spiritual home is glimpsed by the character when he looks beyond solipsistic concern to perceive the imminence of grace. Arnold R. Hoffman Chapter IV discusses the fiction of the late Flannery O'Connor, with emphasis upon her ubiquitous theme of man's displacement from his “true country" because of his rejection of grace. The grotesqueness of her characters generally reflects the spiritual deformity of that rejection, and the violence of incidents is paradigmatic of the Good Friday-Easter sequence which brings the individual to an awareness of his fallen state and the fact that he has been redeemed. Not in any sense religious propagandists, all three writers dramatize the turmoil of existence when man displaces himself by an obtuseness to the manifestations of grace present in the concrete world. The failure in perception is particularly important because all three are Incarnationalists, emphasizing that the individual's redemption to infinite spiritual joy must be worked out within the confines of the limited world. THE SENSE OF PLACE: PETER DE VRIES, J. F. POWERS, AND FLANNERY O'CONNOR BY bl Arnold R. Hoffman A THESIS Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1970 I l r!" a ! ,4 6‘" 5 Viv-J “*3 -4 CC) Copyright by ARNOLD ROY HOFFMAN 1971 DEDICATION For Sonja ii AC KNOWLEDGMENT S Professor Joseph J. Waldmeir deserves more than the standard clichés of gratitude for his chairmanship of my doctoral committee and for his insightful, helpful, and kind direction of this thesis. Special thanks are also due Professor Virgil Scott for his many considerate sug- gestions on form and content. My last and unbounded appreciation goes to my wife, Sonja, for her patience and prayers and unnumbered days and nights of typing. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION O O O O O O O O O O O ACIWOWLEDGMENTS O O O O O O O C 0 INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . Chapter I. II. III. IV. V. CHRISTIANITY AND THE COMIC . . . PETER DE VRIES: WANDERING CALVINIST J. F. POWERS: CLOISTERED CATHOLIC FLANNERY O'CONNOR: "TRUE COUNTRY" CHRISTIAN . . . . . . . . CHRIST AND OTHER DISPLACED PERSONS BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . iv Page ii iii 34 88 144 217 234 INTRODUCTION To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; time to kill, and a time to heal; time to break down, and a time to build up; time to weep, and a time to laugh . . . mow --Ecclesiastes 3:1-4 (KJV) INTRODUCTION One of the narrator-protagonists in a recent Peter De Vries novel tells us that the source of laughter is the most intriguing of all the human mysteries. We need not accept his assertion in any dogmatic sense to nevertheless acknowledge that an interest in the roots of the comic is by no means either unusual or trivial. Yet to exercise an analytical curiosity about those roots as they function fundamentally for a portion of contemporary American fiction is to venture onto a path seldom and lightly trod. It seems particularly unfortunate that so little criticism has dealt with recent comic fiction, for I think that several modern authors write from a vision that sees comedy as serious - business, even crucially important. In The Mackeral Plaza, De Vries' protagonist quotes anonymously an apothegm of Richard Whately, a nineteenth century Archbishop of Dublin: "Happiness is no laughing matter." To say that comedy is serious business is not to mock the good bishop. Rather, it is to perceive the irony of his statement. And the fiction of these novelists dramatizes the premise that "happiness" is bound up at once with both the highest comedy and a conception of salvation. These writers argue that, ultimately, happiness--or perhaps better, joy, as that n term was given new dignity and intensity of meaning several years ago in C. S. Lewis' autobiographyl--is a matter of laughing in a profound way, betokening a human spirit that has placed itself. Unfortunately, the location of self, i.e., the under- standing of where one really stands in time and space, is rare in both life and literature, primarily because such a knowledge is akin to seeing oneself sub specie aeternitatis. And lacking that god-like perspective generally, man in his restricted vision finds very little in modern life that excites more than a hesitant smile or an ambiguous response from the throat. Indeed, the occasions for rejoicing are with an uncomfortable frequency overshadowed or even com- pletely eclipsed by a fear of one variety or another. In the last two decades Western man has come to fear, and live daily in the suppressed horror of, several very real perils, perhaps foremost among them a population explosion, racial war, and nuclear proliferation--including the unique holocaust promised by the latter. In William ' Faulkner's phrase, modern man asks only one question: "When will I be blown up?"2 And man's fears are the greater because as an individual he generally feels an utter help- lessness, even ocCasionally despairs, in the face of such unreason. Acknowledging the reality of these tremors, there is no element of surprise in noting that in this era many literary critics have attempted to illuminate what they see as absurdist and nihilist themes in the contemporary writing which, partly through these themes, bears a clearly demonstrable and vital relationship to this period. This criticism purports to show many of the major--and minor-- authors of our time portraying man as displaced, alienated from his total environment, standing in an isolation where traditional metaphysical systems of order are ignored, questioned, or--more often--denied. In more specific terms, Nathan A. Scott, Jr. observes that Even the most cautious commentators in contemporary criticism are increasingly recognizing that the truly significant particularities that characterize modern literature all speak in various ways of tragic losses, and of losses ultimately rooted in the loss of God.3 In this literature, the protagonist, often a persona of the author, implicitly or explicitly discerns a radical discrepancy between his need and ambition for order and meaning on the one hand, and the experienced chaos of cosmos, society, family, and even self, on the other. For Richard Kostelanetz, the contemporary artist with such a Weltanschauuinq beholds a "disjunction between values and behavior, intention and effect, belief and reality, so broad and irrefutable that the world is meaningless."4 Many other recent critics have articulated their conceptions of this "disjunction," but behind their work, when it does not reach back to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, lies Albert Camus' succinct dictum in The Myth of Sisyphus, written in 1940: that the act of the absurd man is absurd "solely by virtue of the disproportion between his intention and the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction . . . between his true strength and the aim he has in view."5 Whatever the precise working, meaning for these students of contemporary man is, in short, harder to come by than it has ever been before. The contend that beneath the glibness of a "now generation" or in spite of being "where it's at," man finds it exceptionally difficult and sometimes impossible to understand himself in time and space. However, in Thg’ Absurd Hero in American Fiction, working specifically from the typology of The Myth of Sisyphus, David D. Galloway traces the apprehension of Camus' "disproportion" and the existential response to it through the fiction of Updike, Styron, Bellow, and Salinger, and concludes that the pro- tagonists in these works derive a personal and individual value system from their experiences.6 Unsatisfied by conventional metaphysics, particularly the Judaeo-Christian tradition, these intellectuals see man as left to his own resources, and reason that his essence must be defined by his subjective choices during this, his only imaginable existence. This definition of self by purely temporal will and action without allegiance to any superimposed, not to say supernatural, value system, is, of course, humanistic existentialism--or, as Sartre would have it clearly noted, atheistic existentialism. For Sartre, existentialist philOSOphy can provide alleviation for any sense of loss such as Scott cites and can reason its own justification: it is "a doctrine which makes human life possible and, in addition, declares that every truth and every action implies a human setting and a human subjec- tivity."7 Later in the essay containing this essentially credal statement, Sartre elaborates on the existentialist's sense of loss: The existentialist . . . thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori God, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. . . . Man is condemned to be free. Condemned . . . because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.8 If the condition of God's non-existence may be termed a loss, Sartre's acknowledgment of a lack in the existen- tialist's world clearly relates to Scott's statement on the "particularities" of modern literature. But in the relationship, Scott's use of "tragic" adjectivally with "losses" demands that certain distinctions be made. In Sartre's theorizing there is no sense of tragedy, but rather only an admission of regret because the absence of God merely makes the task of living more difficult. In partial similarity, Scott's "tragic" also appears to be an expression of regret, but for him the regret is occasioned by man's loss in failing to recognize God's Being as a bulwark against despair. These two commentators, as clearly as any, represent the crucial polar positions on- the issue of belief and its corollary, man's place in the cosmos. However, theological argumentation proper is not the form of the literature of "disjunction," and the question eventually imposes itself as to how the artist conveys his vision of this felt discrepancy. Yet it is perhaps by having a real sense of the effective "death of God" that the formalistic problem in contemporary writing may be approached. Both Sartre, implicitly, and Scott, with a paradoxical vague explicitness, provoke one question or another about the use of tragedy as a mode for dealing with the reality of the times. But the uncertainty and infinite variety of the to-be-defined human essence which the existentialists meet with a subjective affirmation of the individual are not the circumstances for traditional tragedy. Classical and Renaissance tragedy depict the assumed stature of man in relation to something outside or beyond him which is both ultimately recognizable as there and animated in its Opposition to certain of man's actions. Tragedy does not pit man against what William Van O'Connor identifies as that against which many contemporary writers have man struggling: "cosmic pointlessness . . . a thick wall . . . emptiness and meaninglessness."9 The sublimity of man, to use D. D. Raphaelis term,10 does not emerge from the act of a man beating his head against a wall or even the case of one adamantly refusing to be so masochistic. As Galloway himself points out, the classic Sisyphus "was forced back to Hades and his hands placed against the rock by his gods." But "no absolute or higher power commands the labors of the modern Sisyphus." Camus revises the myth to emphasize Sisyphus' perpetual labor as "a defiance and negation of gods."11 Nor, for many, is comedy in anything like its tradi- tional form an acceptable means of dealing with reality. Peter De Vries himself has said that "You can't talk about the serious and the comic separately and still be talking 12 about life." O'Connor, taking his lead from Thomas Mann, argues that neither tragedy nor comedy is relevant or operative as a form in contemporary fiction. As his title-- "The Grotesque in Modern American Fiction"--intimates, l O'Connor believes the grotesque to be the viable mode. Leslie Fiedler, although quite another kind of critic, substantially corroborates O'Connor's viewpoint on the traditional distinctions: The vision of man shared by our greatest writers involves an appreciation of his absurdity, and the protagonists of our greatest books are finally neither comic nor tragic but absurd. To the modern writer, the distinction between comedy and tragedy seems as forced and irrelevant as that between hallucination and reality; his world partakes of both, and he would be hard put to it to say where one ends and the other begins. The conventional definitions of the comic and the tragic strike him as simplifications, falsifications of human life, appropriate to a less complex time. To insist that we regard man, even for the space of three acts or five, as either horrible or funny; to require us, through four or five hundred pages, either to laugh or to cry we find offensive in an Egg—When we can scarcely conceive of wanting to do one without the other.13 This blurring of distinctive lines defining the tra- ditional genres is evident in what the writers attempt, what they succeed in, and even in how they label their own works. Some writers try for tragedy, but succeed only in evoking pathos. Such, I think, is the result in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Both the narrator, David, and his lover, Giovanni, "become the passive victims of fate,"14 realizing too late and never realizing, reSpectively, the true nature of their relationship. Some writers, sensitive to the confusions of their mileau, try for tragicomedy, a genre perhaps more perplexing than those whose elements it borrows. In Albert Lebowitz' The Man Who Wouldn't Say No, the protagonist almost destroys his life when he rejects all his old values and, further, questions the rightness of having any new ones. But he salvages everything by adOpting illusions, quitting his job, and marrying a rich woman.15 But the perplexity plagues both writers and critics. On Faulkner's SnOpes trilogy, Percy G. Adams says, "It is tragi-comedy, but it is more tragedy than comedy."16 Yet from Adams' essay, one cannot be quite sure what he means by tragedy. Comedy he pretty well limits to incongruity and irony. Certainly there are many others who have at one time or another indicated an inability to distinguish the genres 10 or who have called the attempt at such definition an exercise in futility and irrelevance. One thinks of the dogmatic forcefulness of Richard Kostelanetz as he dis- tinguishes two types of contemporary fiction which he calls the only original and important recent writing: (1) that which in a sequence of absurdities ("nonsensical, ridiculous" incidents) demonstrates "the ultimate absurdity (i.e., meaninglessness) of history and existence" and (2) that which creates "realized internal portraits" of madness.17 But whether, in fact, nihilist and absurdist themes do con- stitute the artists' visions in the greater part of our major literature is not an easily resolvable question nor the principal interest of this essay. Rather, in spite of this demonstrated pessimism of outlook and the consequent confusion of genres, I want to submit that a blatantly heterogeneous body of contemporary fiction nevertheless coalesces to constitute an antithetical optimistic litera- ture. The terms of this dialectic are a bit uneven, for the non-absurdist literature is not ponderous in quantity and often exhibits formal deficiencies. But it is signifi- cant, for it gives us at once a hopeful view of man's potentialities in this life-~particularly the possibility of placing himself-~and a vision of something beyond man's subjective nature which denies that he is alone and helpless in this existence. 11 It is a body of contemporary American fiction at once deeply informed by Christian theology and manifesting a comic vision. In the course of establishing the signifi- cance of this literature and its coherence as a body of work, it will be necessary to consider what constitutes a "deep" informing, and to define or limit Christian theology for the discussion. The most difficult and tenuous aspect of the argument is the defining of "comic vision." Hope- fully in the process, the aspects of Christianity which are indigenous to comedy and yigg_ye£§a will emerge. Again, the conclusion already suggested declares that the litera- ture of comic vision constitutes a meaningful commentary on the mass of humanistic existentialist or absurdist litera- ture acknowledged above. There are at least three writers manifesting this vision: Peter De Vries, J. F. Powers, and Flannery O'Connor. Others--such as Graham Greene, John Updike, or J. D. Salinger--might appear to demand inclusion, but there are substantial reasons for excluding them. Green is an Englishman, not an American, and this study intends to examine American writers in part because of their theo-A logical heritage to be explained later. More importantly, though, Greene's fiction is not premised on the joy of high comedy under examination here. The whiskey priest of The_ Power and the Glory and Scobie of The Heart of the Matter are drawn in the lineaments of tragic figures who, even 12 without insight at the end, absorb all our attention. Working narrowly from Roman Catholic problems, Greene produces a humanistic literature. John Updike's fiction is also humanism, no matter how much he teasingly flaunts a knowledge of theology's questions and its rhetoric. Grace is not imminent in Updike's fictional world; all the help a character has is what he gives himself. Even characters like Hook in The Poorhouse Fair who have a distinguishable religious tradition neither have for them- selves nor produce for others (including the reader) epiphanic manifestations of grace. Nor do the moments of humor in Updike's novels merit him a place in the discussion here. However transitorily funny such minor characters as Gregg in The Poorhouse Fair, Kruppenbach in Rabbit, Run, or Freddy Thorne in Couples may be, they never rise above the laughter of a moment. Gregg is merely helpless and ineffectual, and Thorne is vicious. Salinger's fiction comes the closest to warranting his inclusion here, for as, James T. Livingston observes, such characters as Franny and Zooey a£g_sensitive to grace in the world and because of it are moved to "gratitude, joy and love." Sensitive and thus moved, they are faced with "the problem of living out what they already know,"18 a far different prospect than that of characters in the fiction of De Vries, Powers, and O'Connor who must fumble through a long period of unknowing. The difference lies in apprehending grace through an encounter 13 with the world or through contemplation of the world. There are surely more writers who should be specifically excluded, and perhaps others who should be included, but aside from peripheral comments, this essay confines itself to a con- sideration of Peter De Vries, J. F. Powers, and Flannery O'Connor. There has been almost no critical work on De Vries, although his fiction consistently receives good reviews. Aside from very brief mention in the eclectic A Mirror of 19 the Ministry in Modern Novels and the erratic A Voice from the Attic,20 the only critical commentary is Roderick Jellema's monograph in the Eerdman's Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective series.21 Although indeed much more, still relatively little has been done on J. F. Powers. His three published books received a number of misguided reviews. There have been a few critical essays, a representa- tion of them collected by Fallon Evans for the Herder Christian Critic series,22 and one book, J. V. HagoPian's 23 Although anthologized 1968 study for the Twayne series. frequently in literature texts, Powers has received very little attention in critical and historical surveys of American fiction. Chester E. Eisinger does treat Powers briefly although insightfully in his Fiction of theYForties,24 but William Peden's superficial commentary in his The American Short Story is an example of the much more usual approach.25 For Flannery O'Connor there is a rapidly l4 accumulating body of critical work. Most notable and impressive as tributes beyond their scholarly qualities are the Fall, 1958 issue of Critique and Friedman's and Lawson's The Added Dimension,26 a symposium of essays unfortunately gathered before the posthumous publication of Everything That Rises Must Converge, but for that all the more indicative of Miss O'Connor's great talent. In addition, there is Robert Reiter's Flannery O'Connor in the Herder series, a companion piece to Evans' collection,27 and Stanley Edgar Hyman's monograph for the University of Minnesota pamphlet series.28 Finally, there is Carter W. Martin's The True Country, an extended study of the "themes 29 in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor." But in this hastily reviewed commentary which does acknowledge the three as, in varying degrees, comic writers, there has been little manifest concern for the hog and ultimate why_of the comic vision. In general, comedy has long lacked a broadly appreciative audience, either among critics or laity. Such a comment as Robert Penn Warren's on William Faulkner is at one with the thinking applied to De Vries, Powers, and O'Connor: "Faulkner's humor is but one perspective on the material and it is never a final perspective."30 Warren's point even as it applies to Faulkner is arguable, but the important idea is that critics seem disinclined to grant comedy status as an ultimate VieWpoint for the structuring of art. Yet as 15 this essay hopes to point out, any artist who believes that man can "endure and prevail" holds an essentially comic view of life. By and large, commentators on the fiction of the three writers considered here, abandon their discussion of comedy after noting the ridiculousness of suburban man's predicaments in De Vries' works, the biting (or harmless) satire of Powers' lay and clerical portraits, or the grotesques of O'Connor because they feel that comedy simply does not have any substance in itself, cannot be an ultimate concern for the writer, and, hence, is not worth the criti- cal effort in deeply examining it. But this disdain simply belies the fact that most contemporary critics and some artists are far away--in time and thinking--from the theology that informed Dante's Comedy; that is the crux of the matter. In a New Critical preoccupation with the autonomy of the text and its coherence of structure and texture, or from a craving to be in the fore of the cul- tural perspective, where inevitably the literature becomes merely a tool and the literary man merely a sociologist, ’ or out of an allegiance to Susan Sontag's school of "no content for the sake of art," critics have largely neglected some basic patterns of thinking that were illuminated for us centuries ago and that are still utilized by some imaginative writers. Generally, those critics who do suspect the Operation of an ancient theology 16 feel ill at ease in discussing it. One of the latter group is J. V. Hagopian: at the very end of his book on Powers, he turns ostensibly to "Satire and Divine Comedy," but does ngt_substantially clarify what he intends to refer to by "divine comedy." Instead he hopes for his reader's intuitive ability to relate quotations from the fiction, Power's commentary, and Marie Swabey on comic paradoxes. Therefore, before turning to the discussion of specific writers, it seems advisable to attempt clarifica~ tion of the broad lines within which the following analyses will take place. NOTES lSurprised By Joy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955). 2"Address upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Litera- ture," The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley. Rev. ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1967), p. 723. 3"The Bias of Comedy and the Narrow Escape into Faith," The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 78. 4"The American Short Story Today," Introduction to $2. from the Sixties (New York: Dell, 1967), p. 17. For an interesting commentary specifically on the novel, see Kostelanetz' essay "The New American Fiction" in The New American Arts, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: CoIIier Books, 1967). . 5The Myth of Sisyphus, tr. Justin O'Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), p. 22. 6(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966). 7Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism," tr. Bernard Frechtman in A Casebook on Existentialism, ed. William V. Spanos (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966), p. 276. 81bid., p. 282. 9"The Grotesque in Modern American Fiction," College English, xx (April, 1959), 344. . 10The Paradox of Tragedy (Bloomington: Indiana Unlversity Press, 1960), p. 27 ff. llGalloway, p. 14. 12Quoted in Roderick Jellema, Peter De Vries (Grand RaPids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1966): P. 9. l7 18 1'3"Introduction," No! in Thunder (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), pp. 16—17. I have quoted Fiedler at length, not only for his clarity and the representative quality of his statement's terms, but also to illustrate a distinctive vitality, a kind of 'oie de vivre in a man of letters, that clearly does not ref ect an acceptance of the "commonplace"- ness of the soul that several years ago Joseph WOod Krutch blamed for the demise of powerful tragic literature. 14Howard M. Harper, Jr., Desperate Faith: A Stud of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, BaldWiny and Udeke (CHapeI HiII: University ofINorth Carolina; Press, 1967), p. 149. 15In a further specification of the crossing of lines, but in drama, Ionesco announces Les Chaises as a "tragic farce." Again in drama, there has been what by analogy to simplistic criteria for tragicomedy may be called "comi- tragedy." Such a piece is En Attendant Godot, despite Beckett's subtitle in his English translatiOn: A Tragi- comedy in Two Acts. 16"Humor as Structure and Theme in Faulkner's Trilogy," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, V (Autumn, 1964), 207. 17 The New American Arts, pp. 202, 203. 18James T. Livingston, "J. D. Salinger: The Artist' s Struggle to Stand on Holy Ground" in Adversity and Grace: Studies in Recent American Literature, ed. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (Chicago: UniverSity of_Chicago Press, 1968), p. 128. 19Horton Davies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). pp. 164—72. 20Robertson Davies (New York: KnOpf, 1960), pp. 241-42. 21Peter De Vries, cited above. 22J. F. Powers (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1968). 23 J. F. Powers (New York: Twayne, 1968). 4(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 172-77. 19 25(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), pp. 79-80. It seems interesting that in the Penney Chapin Hills and L. Rust Hills six pound anthology How We Live: Contemporary Life in Contemporary Fiction (New York: Macmillan, 1968), J. F. Powers is omitted from a list of "some three hundred" contemporary writers, although De Vries and Flannery O'Connor are included. 26Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson, eds., The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor (New York: Fordham University Press, 1966). 27(St. Louis: B. Herder, 1968). 28Flannery O'Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966). 29(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969). 30"William Faulkner," New Republic, CXV (August 12, 1946), rpt. in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and’Olga W. ViCkery (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960), p. 118. CHAPTER I CHRISTIANITY AND THE COMIC Because the man of comedy is essentially human, he is aware that only the serious man can really laugh; the rest only mock or giggle. --Nelvin Vos Dante called his great poem a comedy, though it is entirely serious--visionary, religious, and sometimes terrible. --Suzanne K. Langer 20 In the rapidly accumulating bulk of literary criticism from one theological perspective or another, far too often the critics have neglected to establish clearly the premises from which they are Operating. However, con- sidering the diversity in Christendom, it seems particularly necessary that any discussion of theological implications in a body of literature lay down its ground rules. An excellent example of a critic taking such care is Randall Stewart, and I shall take his caution as my guide. In the first chapter of his American Literature and Christian Doctrine, Stewart enumerates certain "basic assumptions" which he maintains serve as tenets for all Christian per- spectives. In common, Stewart says, Christians acknowledge (l) "the sovereignty of God"--that He is Love, infinitely wise, omnipotent, and just; (2) "the divinity of Christ"-- that He is "the only begotten Son of God"; (3) "Original Sin"--that "natural man is imperfect, fallible, prone to evil"; (4) Christ's Atonement--that man is saved through faith in it; and (5) the inspired Scriptures, The Revealed Word.l Obviously, the bases taken by Stewart are not to be confused with other, more famous "Five Point" statements of creed. One of these is, of course, John Calvin's set of tenets. But rather than pointing merely to "original sin," 21 22 Calvin emphasized man's "total depravity," contending not that he is fallible but that he is utterly corrupt. As for atonement, Calvin thought in limited terms, believing that Christ died only for the elect. Calvin's other three points dogmatized on unconditional election, irresistable grace, and the "perserverance of the saints." Likewise, Stewart's premises should be explicitly contrasted to the Five Points of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, "the Father of Deism." Even though Lord Herbert's "theology" was not Christian, his principles found their way into Unitarian doctrine, and a large number of Unitarians categorize themselves as Christians. Lord Herbert believed: 1. That there is a Supreme Power (. . . a benevolent God). . That this Sovereign Power must be worshipped. . That the good ordering or disposition of the faculties of man constitutes the principal or best part of divine worship. 4. That all vices and crimes should be expiated and effaced by repentance. 5. That ghere are rewards and punishments after this life. 2 3 The contrasts with both Calvin and Stewart are obvious, but it should be emphasized that the deist's statement omits specific mention of Jesus. The nature of Jesus is, even today, as it has always been, a theological problem rivaled in its complexity by, perhaps, only the doctrines of the Trinity and transubstantiation. Particular Christologies have united great masses of peOple, but they have also produced dissension often culminating in "heresy" and schism. In the eighteenth century Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine 23 called Jesus a wise moralist and equated his teachings with Socrates'. For that, many denounced them as atheists. The "Christian Atheism" of certain theologians in this decade is merely the contemporary manifestation of the com- plex issue, Man-Christ. Therefore, not to avoid a charge of Docetism, but to make the terms of this discussion as clear as possible, one point should be made. In addition to Stewart's second tenet--the divinity of Christ-- Christianity at large also affirms the humanity of Christ, and certain points in the following discussion require explicit acknowledgment of this dogma. The ease with which the "six points" here established could be accepted by millions of "Christians" indicates the existence of a strikingly broad common ground in spite of the manifest divisiveness in Christendom. The truth of this assertion is perhaps more shockingly--for some-- reinforced by a statement of Pr. Gustave Weigel, S.J.: Even though the fundamentalist is traditionally Opposed to the Scarlet Woman of Rome and her ways, yet he clings to certain positions which are as fundamental for him as for Catholics. He believes in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, the Virgin Birth, the objectively atoning death of Jesus and His physical resurrection. The liberals vacillate ambiguously in their adherence to these dogmas. In consequence, the Catholic feels sympathy for the fundamentalist in spite of the latent antipathy felt by that group toward Catholicism. The liberals are far more friendly and cordial but the Catholic is appalled by their radical reconstructions of Christianity. By way of amendment, as it were, Fr. Weigel adds the doctrines of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, but his 24 observation of the similarity between what are generally thought of as polar theological positions merely implies further that a critical discussion about literature informed by Calvinism and Catholicism is neither impossible nor unimportant. In brief, then, this present essay assumes as the standards of Christian orthodoxy the tenets outlined by Stewart and dramatically particularized by Fr. Weigel. To attempt any comprehensive inclusion of the idiosyncracies of the myriad Christian liberals or conservative eccentrics would be at once impossible and fruitless for this dis- cussion. However theologically complex any institution may be, the writers considered in this essay deal with part or all of the above premises as the essentials of Christian belief, whether in fact they dramatize that belief as accepted or denied. Man is not saved by candles or glossolalia. Examples are myriad of writers hammering on such non-essentials and then falling into oblivion. Finally, it is perhaps a truism that the "infinite variety" in Christendom is to be accounted for by the con— struction and interpretation of corollaries to the basics, but nevertheless it is necessary to recognize that certain amplifications do attach themselves to the crucial affirma- tions roughly outlined by Stewart. For example, acceptance of Christ's divinity and the efficacy of his atonement demands acceptance of his teachings: that we love 25 our enemies, turn the other cheek, pick up our own‘cross, etc. Or again, recognition of God's sovereignty presupposes the effort of subordinating one's own immediate gratifica- tions and aggrandizements to what is believed to be God's ultimate plan for man. Very importantly for what follows in this essay, this latter example points up the fact that Christians must ground themselves in eschatology and think on the Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. But of equal importance is the fact that the very prepara- tion for the Last Things will be the coming to an under- standing of man's position in the here and now. II Far more difficult than arriving at a basis for "standard" Christianity, that is, an agreed upon orthodoxy, is the establishing of comedy's essence, or in a more broad and useful phrase, the aspects of the comic vision. In matters of Christian theology there are a considerable number of authorities to whom one may appeal, and however apparently or really schismatic, one from the other, they do agree upon a large number of essentials. But the case of the comic is somewhat different. As Nelvin Vos says, "Both the history of literary theory and the nature of comedy itself . . . discourage formal definition."4 To confirm Vos' statement, one need only scan bibliographies of the generations' criticism or glance at the spatial 26 prOportions of commentaries on tragedy and comedy in any library. Quite simply, critics through the centuries have expended far more labor on tragedy and other "serious" types of literature than on comedy in any and all of its generic forms. To affirm from this that mankind has always found life's experience more often sobering and provocative of tears than offering occasions for rejoicing is sharply qualified by the sheer mass of imaginative literature that would generally be classified as comedy. However, there are two rather significant reasons for the relative scarcity of inquiry into the comic mode. First, comedy is elusive because of its mysterious and individual nature. If one asks of another why he is crying, and if the mourner is willing and able to verbalize, he can literally or figuratively point to the death of a mother, the loss of a wallet with a hundred dollars in it, or the shame for a misdeed. However, if one queries of another why he is laughing, the explanation-~if attempted-- frequently goes without understanding. Of course, jokes are repeated endlessly, evoking some degree of mirth at every telling, but laughter over a found quarter, a squirrel's antics, a father's exasperation with a stubborn two-yearéold is almost impossible to communicate. Too, this "laughter" may not reach the audible state; it may remain at the level of_a smile, a twinkling eye, or a jaunty pace. The point is, we "get a warm feeling“ or smile or 27 chuckle or shout exultantly most often on a purely sub- jective basis, whereas the aspects of sorrow or tragedy share a public quality. Despite the cliche injunction to "laugh and the world will laugh with you" or the Norman Vincent Peale-ish spothegm "laughter is infectuous," most sympathetic laughers would be hard-pressed to account for their mirth. On the other hand, conjoiners in sorrow share a recognizable, common object. Secondly, as Vos notes, critical tradition is quite simply against theorizing about comedy or attempting to apply some theory in an exercise of practical criticism. Perhaps a major key to the manifest difficulty (and some- times the simple lack of interest) lies in Aristotle's categories, or, more exactly, in the fact that we have his discussion of tragedy but only some vague fragments of his supposedly finished but lost dissertation on comedy. The following generations of critics have clearly taken some comfort in refuting Aristotle's poetics of tragedy or in constructing arguments modifying it, but at least in some way working with it. For example, in his much-quoted "The Bias of Comedy and the Narrow Escape into Faith,"5 Nathan A. Scott first at length reconstructs in hypothesis what Aristotle might have presented as a succinct definition of comedy, but he goes on to fabricate his own theory of comedy's crux, a theory which refutes Aristotle. In short, contemporary man may be post-Darwinian, post-Marxist, 28 post-Freudian, etc., but literary critics have always been overwhelmingly self-conscious of being post-Aristotelian,' even if Petrus Ramus did claim to have discredited the Stagirite. Partly in consequence of this tradition, although in every decade and generation artists produce what they or the world calls comedy, men of theory have been too often evasive or circumlocutious about the heart of the matter of comedy, either in "pure theory" or in practical criticism. And this is all the more strange considering the enormous expansion of critical practice in this century. Of particular significance to this latter observation is the fact that, however sparse proportionately to dis- cussions of non-comic modes, more is being written about comedy now than at any previous time; yet that commentary escapes wide recognition. When text editors compile state- ments on comedy either as a collection of theories or to accompany imaginative literature, even if they incorporate some modern commentary (the contemporary is most often strictly eschewed), they lean heavily toward older writers: Fielding, Lamb, Meredith, etc. An explicit and striking instance of this critical temper occurs in a recently published anthology of critical theories: W. K. Wimsatt's The Idea of Comedy.6 The book carries the subtitle Essays in Prose and Verse, but beneath that occurs a sub-subtitle, Ben Jonson to George Meredith. Admittedly, to argue with an editor's choice of scope, especially when he loudly 29 advertises his selection, is senseless. But one ought to note that Wimsatt proceeds in his "Postscript" editorial comment-~some twelve pages out of three hundred three--to very seriously and systematically attempt an inclusive and authoritative commentary-~really shorter than it appears, because of the lengthy quotations--on twentieth century criticism. Another point amply evident in Wimsatt's book and a number of others is that in the history of comic theory, each critic relies very little upon his predecessors or his contemporaries. While one might say this manifest independence holds for all good, original, important criticism, it seems especially true for comic theory. A fine example of the reluctance to work in another's mold offers itself in Scott's essay, already referred to, "The Bias of Comedy." Scott proceeds after the statement on the particular- ities of modern literature quoted at the outset of this essay to point out that in an effort to come to some kind of coherent understanding of his cosmos in the face of his loss, in an effort to "redeem the time," man in modern fiction often attempts to obliterate time or propose "some 7 "But," Scott goes on, "a strategem of rebellion." despairing rejection of time is hardly calculated to yield any fruitful advance in human affairs." Instead, we might well turn to the "radicalism of comedy."8 At this point in 30 his deveIOpment, Scott hypothetically reconstructs Aristotle's theory (or definition) of comedy, but only to finally disagree with Aristotle's premise that comedy depicts "men as worse . . . than in actual life." Rather, for Scott, the comic protagonist is the one "who is engage, who is intensely committed to the present movement and the present task."9 He is, in other words, firmly grounded in time. To probe the comic sense in the terms which Scott suggestsis to discern man in his limitations, to disclose him as a bounded, confined, finite creature. Naturalism and the absurd also speak of the smallness of man, but where naturalism at its starkest sees man as a mere pawn of larger forces and the absurd focuses upon the meaninglessness of man's existence relative to anything beyond himself, the comic vision intimates both the efficacy of man's will and his position within a surrounding framework. Tragedy, too, speaks on the issue of man's will and his stature in the cosmos, and, as Fr. William Lynch demonstrates,lo in its grandest achievements, tragedy is grounded in the finite. Fr. Lynch further suggests that in great literature the finite is ultimately transcended. However, the significant difference between comedy and tragedy is that when in the latter transcendence is achieved, it is for the glorification of man. Whether the tragedy be from Sophocles, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Melville, or William Styron, the tragic 31 protagonist alone has the glory. If he achieves "trans- figuration," his alone is the causal hand. Transfiguration is not the destiny of the comic pro- tagonist. He lives and moves and has his being under all the conditions of a "vulgar and limited finite."ll In fact, comedy's "image of the finite is the most concrete, the most dense, of all the images created by the act of man."12 The comic protagonist is singular because he recognizes his condition, accepts it, and joys in it. That at least would be the movement of the prototypical comic figure. More often he may merely suspect his condition, or merely be developing toward acceptance of it, but more importantly, for the differentiation of comedy and tragedy, his joy-- which finds an easy synonym in "salvation"--must be dramatized. If these limitations of finitude, the concept of an ultimately necessary acceptance of them, and the idea that a profound joy is their corollary are all granted, then tragedy's traditionally revered sublimity of man is sug— gested to be nothing more than illusion, or worse, delusion. And this conclusion suggests a-third, admittedly highly speculative reason for criticism's shyness about comedy. Critics are men, and as such generally prefer to exalt man and to see him exalted. But the fictional world of fini- tude, mirroring the real finite world, offers man as he is and must be. For many critics the acknowledgment of mere 32 humanity is plain disappointment. From there, attention to the work affirming that mereness wavers, falters, and finally falls off. But in the phrase of Ken Kesey's Chief Bromden, they "forget sometimes what laughter can do."13 To deny man the adequacy of a substantial place is to destroy him. Kesey's other protagonist, the ostensible one, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest sums up the problems of humankind when he tells his fellow asylum inmates, "man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing."l4 And the reverse is also true: when one fails to have a sense of place, one loses the ability to laugh. The following discussion, then, is of three writers Who are concerned with place, with the recognition of a need.for "footing," with what Flannery O'Connor meant in Part when she talked of a man's "true country," and not at EfiLl curiously, these three are writers of comedy. NOTES 1(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), p. 14. 2Rod W. Horton and Herbert W. Edwards, Backgrounds of American Literary Thought. Second Edition TNew York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967), p. 56. 3Faith and Understanding in America (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 69. 4The Drama of Comedy: Victim and Victor (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, I966), p. 11. 5In The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature (New Haven: YaIe University Press, 1966). 6(Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969). 7"The Bias of Comedy," p. 81. 8Ibid., p. 83. 9Ibid., p. 106. _ 10Christ and Apollo (1960; rpt. New York: New American Llbrary , 1963) . llIbid., p. 105. 12Ibid., p. 104. 13Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962; rEIt. New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 92. 14Ibid., p. 68. 33 CHAPTER II PETER DE VRIES: WANDERING CALVINIST You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you neces- sarily wise because you are grave. --Sydney Smith (One of the epigraphs in The Tents of WickedneEET’ However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more' 3 the pity. . . And the man that has any- thing bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for. --Ishmael,'Moby'Dick 34 Of the three writers examined in this essay, Peter De Vries is clearly the most prolific. At the time of this writing there are thirteen novels, a book of short "stories," and many uncollected poems and prose pieces in his canon. The short pieces are in two broad respects representative of De Vries' novels: they are heavily autobiographical (in the same manner as John Updike's sketches) and their quality, Often within the same piece, ranges from the bluntly and simply humorous to the provocative and even profound. But because they are for the most part anecdotal and do not reflect the major themes of De Vries' novels, they may be ignored here except for occasional references when the germ Of a characterization, incident, or idea seems worthwhile n0 ting in its early form. A synthetical analysis of the novels alone offers sufficient problems, both minor and maj or, for the scope of this essay. One difficulty, perhaps minor in complexity but certainly major in importance, is De Vries' narrative point of View. Several of the novels, including the most recent, have been criticized for being loose or even disjointed in form. This deprecation bases itself on the fact that De Vries has at times used more than one narrator-protagonist-- as in The Vale of Laughter, narrated in respective halves by Joe Sandwich and Wally Hines--or some other variety of m . . . . . . L1ltlple po1nt of View—-as 1n Reuben,‘ Reuben, in which 35 through three successive sections Spofford narrates his own story and McGland and Mopworth are portrayed by a third person voice. Trying to account for what seems to them an undeniable fragmentation, some critics have strained to deliver a compliment by calling the books grouped novellas. One might conjecture from this that De Vries is really a short story writer manque who has persistently neglected his true field. However, as I have noted, De Vries' major themes are simply not present or developed in the shorter pieces. Both the outright dismissals and the rhetorical compromises overlook the in fact manifest interrelatedness of structure and theme in each book with a multiple view- POint. Instead of fragmentation, this flexible perspective technique achieves a breadth of enlightening vision that the subjective narrowness of first person narrative or limited omniscience can never realize. To be sure, the result is far short of a vision sub species aeternitatis, but the aggregate examination of motivation and reaction distinctly transcends ordinary human attitudinizing, without recourse to narrative pronunciamento. As in the trio of De Vries, Powers, and O'Connor, Peter De Vries experiments furtherest with point of view, he is also at the extreme in sheer funniness. Where the lowckeyed humor of Powers or the black comedyof O'Connor may pass without an audible response from the reader, De Vries' hilarity on innumerable pages produces the gamut 37 of overt'laughter from chuckle to guffaw. In fact, his frequent mere funniness undoubtedly disturbs those critics who are hyper-sensitive to their own SOphistication. If this supposition of critical aloofness is valid, it surely in part accounts for major criticism's obliviousness to De Vries. Through compulsively comic characters "possessed" by a divine Comic Spirit, perhaps that holy ghost lyrically defined by Meredith,3 De Vries hurls at the reader a barrage of burlesque, farce, slapstick, caricature, and social satire (the latter never until lately even approaching a Caustic quality), all long before the essential comedy of the novel is evident. On a very superficial reading, it nlight seem that De Vries' forte is the two-liner, reviving the old black-face routine: "'. . . when I sat down to Play . . . I got a twinge down my whole back. ' "Possibly you has a lot more Struck a spinal chord. "'; "'Augie . caepth.‘ 'Only on the surface. Deep down, he's shallow."'; " 'What do you do when a child won't eat its food?‘ 'Send him to bed without any supper. . . . '" But every time, these jokes for the sake of a laugh are embedded in situa- tion comedy, structured for larger effects: an old woman absurdly reselling to gullible travelers the curio-junk she herself bought years ago at tourist traps; two middle-aged men attempting to prove each other's lack of virility by racing bicycles on a street "track" known to be hazardous for even agile youths; a suburban social-climber plotting 38 to revenge herself on a matronly enemy by tricking the latter into revealing her age on a charity questionnaire. And, as if De Vries were taking his principles of fictional structure from Chinese puzzle boxes, these minor scenes contribute to conclusions at once overtly funny and illumina- tive of the human situation. Indeed, throughout the sequence of De Vries' novels his characterizations and scenes are never finally wasted on witty interchanges or merely ludicrous situations. Although they may blunder through the apparently chaotic A rising action like Tom Sawyers playing at life, De Vries' characters ultimately live, or are at the verge of living, as Huck Finns--but sometimes articulating their awareness as Huck cannot-~in a world where life is crushingly real and earnest, offering terms that must be met by men who are not world-beaters. If these comments seem insistent on the point that these characters have an obscured depth, it is as Roderick Jellema suggests, that the crux of the Problem with De Vries "is not that he is too serious, but that he is too funny." For most readers, the surface comedy obscures the comic depth of a word, an act, or an , entire situation. This comic depth, this importance in De Vries' novels is tentatively suggested by Jellema in his monograph. Jellema speaks of the novels in sequence being unified by significant concerns," at the heart of which is a 39 "religious concern,“ surely not an unusual attitude for an artist with a Dutch Calvinist background. But, he adds, "It is more than 'concern,‘ finally; it builds to a delicately balanced, ludicrous, beautiful, terrible ambiva- lence toward the Christian faith and its bearing on the world in which we live."5 Much of the following discussion will constitute a substantiation of that abilvalence, yet in spite of Jellema's important and seemingly conclusive quali- fication, the unity and significance of De Vries' work are quite simply matters of "religious concern." If one can arrive at even the suspicion that De Vries is a serious Comic writer, Paul Tillich's definition of religion seems Particularly relevant: "Religion is the aspect of depth in the totality-of the human spirit. . . . Religion, in the largest and most basic sense of the word, is ultimate C_Or1cern"6 (my italics). To alter Jellema's statement Slightly, then, De Vries' ultimate concern generally can be, and at times must be, seen in specifically Christian terms. In looking for this concern in both the artistry of Character and setting and the develOpment of themes in the sequence of the novels, De Vries' three early novels may, with one exception, be ignored. While lacking the struc- tUral and thematic tightness and sustained comedy of the later novels, The Handsome Heart (1943) significantly pre- Sages the concerns which De Vries manifests later. 40 At the aesthetic level, one can understand the general desire to dismiss The Handsome Heart as unimportant. Much of its plot is easily predictable, very neat and satisfying in the mode of war-time fiction: when a man hitches a ride with a family leaving an insane asylum, beyond suspicion we know he is an escapee; when the protagonist's reckless and ruthless brother wheels and deals through business ventures, we know he will fall, at least to bankruptcy; when the pro- tagonist vacillates between two women, one an unmarried innocent and the other his brother's adulterous wife, we are sure that the former will be his final choice. Because The Handsome Heart is both unfamiliar and difficult to obtain, it may not be amiss to summarize it here. The novel's protagonist, Brian Carston, is an out- sider, an isolato in many of the respects De Vries uses for later characterizations. He is discovered to us initially as a mental institution inmate making a very smooth and UnsPectacular getaway with the unsuspecting family of another asylum resident. In the family group is Edith Braken, young, unmarried, and prone to skepticism about the Brian intentions of people and the worth of institutions. Stays overnight at the Bracken home, and a tentative romance begins. When it becomes clear that Brian is an escapee, he flees in the night with Edith's blessing. Stumbling across the countryside, Brian collapses at the shack of Morgan, a c . . . rewman on a cemetary excavation prepar1ng for a new highway. 41 Through Morgan, Brian gets a job, only to become embroiled in some ghoulish looting, more than faintly reminiscent of the greedy revelry in the exemplum of Chaucer's Pardoner. Brian accidentally kills the greediest plotter and runs again. Arriving in the city where we later learn his brother Charles lives, Brian deludes a hotel clerk into thinking him an incognito celebrity, registers as "Brian Charles," and, establishes himself in place to carry on an operation we do not fully understand until much later. At Brian's invita- tion, his old friend Woodie quickly, as if it were a matter of free choice, leaves the asylum and joins him. Very soon, too, Brian calls Irene, his old flame and now Charles Carston's wife, and they renew their affair. In the mean- time, Brian and Woodie set up a slightly illegal but increasingly profitable candy-machine business (a detail out of De Vries' own history and the occupation of the pro- tagonist in "Every Leave That Falls") . Edith comes to see Brian, that ember flares, and Brian takes Edith's virginity. Seriously trying to get her man all for herself, Edith CJonfronts Irene, and they fight. In the interim, Charles Carston loses his fortune and commits suicide. At Charles'~ death, Brian decides to go back to Edith, the murder charge, and the institution. They get Dr. Grimberg to say Brian is Sane, and go from there to Morgan's where the police arrest Brian. In a predictable peripateia, Dr. Grimberg must testify that Brian is insane to get him acquitted. With 42 his release imminent, Brian and Edith promise each other (and the reader) that they will begin a new life. In summary, The Handsome Heart seems very much a not always facile variation on "boy finds girl, boy must leave girl, boy returns to girl." However, there are important qualifications to this ostensibly formulaic writing. One the characterization of Edith. When first introduced is in the Bracken car on the way to the asylum (and, it might be observed now, mental institutions are to be visited by De Vries several times in the following novels), she does not arouse much sympathy. Her spinsterhood in spite of the féiczt that she is attractive, may be explained by the war-time Slic>rtage of men, but falls short of adequately explaining her pronounced cynicism toward the regular visits to Uncle ECig‘ar. Yet, in the asylum as she sits listening to the inmates' chatter, idiosyncratic ramblings that Ken Kesey Inight well have read before writing One Flew Over the znflict is a requisite existential force leading ultimately tr) a.self-recognition or a defining of essence seems to be tfhe point of the marked change in Chick's thinking and behavior at the end of the novel. Apparently, all Chick needed was to sow his wild oats, for in the final pages, reflecting on how Crystal is mellowing 9.112 of her former intellectual deficiencies, he suspects he, too, is mellowing, 51 and he finds himself "a much less severely divided man." All along he plays for verve, chasing "the romantic ideal, 12 But in the final the idea that life can have style." scene, he can get up and leave the presence of a provocative woman who has just sat down beside him. That kind of fantisizing is no longer for him. This ironic change may be only sadly funny until we realize that De Vries is not pessimistically denying that life can have "style." Rather, his denial is that style can be predicated on acts that upset or even destroy the home and genuine love and alienate a.man from his freinds. Leaving the woman, Dick moves from a moral--and, consequently, social--chaos that he mistook for freedom to the paradox of freedom and joy in a recogni- tion and acceptance of time and place. The Mackeral Plaza (1958), while not De Vries' most Ingroariously funny novel, is certainly his most ostensibly satiric, if satire should be thought of as a mode of cIiiticizing relatively well-defined subjects among the irrtellectual errancies. As its target the novel takes an esPecially recognizable figure of the 1950's: the ultra- LiJoeral "Christian." In fact, Andrew Mackeral is so out- rageously liberal, that it would be erroneous to narrow him down as a Unitarian. People's Liberal is gig church, modeled by his thinking. To indicate the direction of Maell-ceral's shepherding there is perhaps nothing better than th€3 .frequently quoted description of the church's interior: 52 Our church is, I believe, the first Split-level church in America. It has five rooms and two baths downstairs--dining area, kitchen and three parlors for committee and group meetings--with a crawl space behind the furnace ending in the hillside into which the structure is built. Upstairs is one huge all- purpose interior, divisible into different-sized components by means of sliding walls and convertible into an auditorium for putting on plays, a gymnasium for athletics, and a ballroom for dances. There is a small worship area at one end. This has a platform cantilevered on both sides, with a free-form pulpit designed by Noguchi. It consists of a slab of marble set on four legs of four delicately differing fruit- woods, to symbolize the four Gospels, and their failure to harmonize. Behind it dangles a large multicolored mobile, its interdenominational parts swaying, as one might fancy, in perpetual reminder of Pauline stricture against those "blown by every wind of doctrine." Its proximity to the pulpit inspires a steady flow of more familiar congregational whim, at which we shall not long demur, going on with our tour to say that in back of this building is a newly erected clinic, with medical and neuropsychiatric wings, both indefinitely expandable.l3 Like other De Vries characters, Andrew Mackeral labors along with a split personality. First of all, his religious life is divided, split between an honestly intended effort ftxr his parishoners' well-being and a concurrent denial that heelp for his task exists in a traditionally recognized Scrurce, at least in any orthodox conception. For Mackeral, "I?t is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not eécist in order to save us" (Mg, p. 10). In the second place, héa fancies himself a ladies man with thoughts his parish Ccruld not condone had they omniscience, but quite clearly hEB is drawn toward accepting a family relationship with Hester, his housekeeper and the sister of the six-months deceased wife. Perhaps again, as with The Handsome Heart, 53 the outcome of the romance is a bit too predictable, for T between the Molly Calico of many affairs and the Hester Pedlock of home there is never much doubt about who will have Mackeral's handsome heart in the dénouement. Like other De Vries characters, Andrew Mackeral is a daydreamer, pining to escape reality. He thinks of himself in many other roles, all more "glamorous" than the life he leads--in this he is very much a type of Powers' Fr. Urban. In fact, both clergymen tend to drift in their daydreams from irony to fantasy. But in the end, the daydreams are resolved into hard, ironic realities. Certainly not one of the novels' greatest moments, but nonetheless one of the incidents that work in concatenation to tell Andrew Mackeral Who he is, is the time when he has finally swept Molly away for an illicit weekend. The whole preparation of flight to another town and fictitious hotel registration has been fli'ought with the. perils of a needed secrecy, but Finally the door was closed. I squatted to peer through the keyhole, but there seemed no eye on the reverse side looking in. I locked the door softly and turned back into the room, and this was the moment round which all my ravenous daydreams—had wound: the moment when Molly would cryflAIone at last" and fling herself into my arms. Instead she flung herself into the only chair in the room and burst into tears (my italics). (Mg, p. 80) The incident remains to be finished but not consummated Wiirh Molly accidentally locking Mackeral out of the hotel r00m and then falling into unconsciousness from a combination 0f sedatives and whiskey. This episode insinuates the 54 realities of Mackeral's romantic life, but the cataclysmic event which suggests the instability of Mackeral's spiritual state to himself is the rainstorm manifestation which, however ambiguously intended by De Vries, is taken by Mackeral as the act of an imminent, providential God. In the midst of a drought, Mackeral in typical fashion eschews a prayer-meeting congregated to invoke divine relief. When the rain does come, Mackeral is crushed but indignant. "It's not that I resent finding there is a God after all who answers prayers," I said, speaking up to the ceiling. "That kind of personal God whose nonexistence was the mast to which I nailed my flag, and said Let's get on from there. It's not just having to face up to that possibility (as an alternative to pure fluke), it's that my position is no longer tenable. If this is his answer, I'm just not his sort. Because who were at those prayer meetings? All the bores, dullards and bigots in town--not a person of civilized sensibility was there. If that's the lot he gives aid and comfort to, so be it. But I cannot worship him. I can believe in him. But I cannot worship him." "When I was young, a student I mean, we used to debate whether Christ was the son of God. Now the question is whether God is the father of Christ. Is there a family resemblance, if this is the way _ he proceeds? We would argue long into the dormitory nights about the divinity of Christ. Now the question is the humanity of God. No, I have lost my faith." (ME, p. 188) Sympathetic Hester replies that, "They'll say it was a weak 'tflaing, that not even a miracle could save it." Mackeral's r133ponse must, of course, be a capper: "It's just the <>1iher way around. It was so strong it took a miracle to (Irfiish it." However, Hester will have the last word and the ”lost fundamental insight: 55 "Of course. This all—or—nothing idea. Whole hog. It's got to be one thing or another, splitting hairs right down to the finish. All right, not hairs—- essentials. This intolerance with other points of view, Dutch Calvinist stubbornness with peOple who don't agree with you. Even your anti-Calvinism is the most Calvinistic thing I've ever seen. . . ." (ME, p. 188) Happily for some, De Vries turns away from all this play with an obvious irony to a final scene where Mackeral and Hester are promising each other happy wedlock, tinged if not tainted by a premature consummation. This quirky finale parallels the "miraculous sickness" Tom Waltz suffers at Lourdes in Let Me Count the Ways, but in his traumas Mackeral has learned something: that his fantasies-- sexual, intellectual, and materialistic--were just that: illusions. Hester, a bit belatedly a fount of wisdom, sets things back down in the concrete world. "You go around Robin Hood's barn with your intel- lectual arguments, generation after generation, you men," she said, pouring us coffee, "and there isn't a religion anywhere in the world that can't be summed up in a phrase my mother was always fond of." "Let's have it," I said, bracing myself as ever. "What did your mother used to say?" "'To be as humane as is humanly possible.‘ That was the way she often put it. How we should try to be with one another." Was that it? Was all the back-breaking, skull- cracking thought of the ages to be summed up in that absurd piece of unconscious irony? Was that the fruit of human wisdom? Maybe so, I thought rather sadly. "And you can't say that there isn't design," she went on, gestur1ng with both hands. "You can't say you don't see that everywhere you look, everywhere in the universe. You can't say there isn't such a thing as a designing intelligence." ‘ "Well," I said, looking across the table at this woman, "I'd be a damn fool if I denied that." (M3, pp. 189-190) 56 One might read Mackeral's final sentence as an ambiguous one, albeit far less so than the final couplet of .Robert Frost's "Design." However, granting De Vries his ironic play with the male—female struggle, his at least theologically sound admission largely coincides with his "creed" stated early in the book: "I believe that a faith is a set of demands, not a string of benefits, that a man is under some obligation to better himself, not sit around as he is and wait for Jesus to save him" (ME, p. 26). Which is to say, Calvinist faith alone is not enough. Good works in the finite world of man are more than efficacious; they are necessary. Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: show me thy faith without thy works, and I will show thee my faith by my works. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? (James 2:18, 20). The Tents of Wickedness (1959) "brings off," according tr) the first edition's dust jacket, "a refreshing experiment .111 form." The "refreshing" is merely publishers hyperbole, IDLJt the novel is formally experimental for De Vries. Its iniirrator—hero is Chick Swallow again, but matured, one might Séty, from newsprint wit to amateur psychologist, and from sidewalk sophisticate to parlor and bedroom confidante and iéifiitérateur. The experimentation materializes as through a Seelries of counseling blunders Chick variously characterizes hiInself, sometimes in the third person, as figures out of S7 Marquand, Fitzgerald, Proust, Greene, Dreiser, Thurber, and Hemingway.. Nickie Sherman, Chick's brother-in-law, appears again, but in this novel Nickie is ostensibly the schizoid one. His yen for suavity and surprise and his predilection for amateur deduction are psychologized by Chick until Nickie's personality and actions split between crook and cOp, between "a raffles-type jewel thief and a Holmes-type detective."21 The psychic rift merely widens as Chick continues to "probe the unconscious" of his victim. Concurrently, Chick has renewed an acquaintance with an old flame, Beth "Sweetie" Appleyard, an erratic poetess who comes first to the Swallow home as a babysitter. Chick tackles her aberrant behavior and consequently propels her into real Bohemianism, illegitimate pregnancy, and a final reversion to tree-house Childishness and poetizing. One is surprised De Vries does IKDt sum up her adventures as a descent from "bed to verse." However, beneath it all, Chick reveals himself as also Seriously displaced. Unsatisfied with the lack of glamor 31nd importance in his job as a "Dear Abbey" for the Decency neuvspaper, he inflates himself to prOportions of the great Answer Man. With a self-styled competence for solving everyone's problems, he manages to confuse Nickie's and S“"eetie's lives along with his own. But finally coming to SEe himself after it has all gone wrong, he can reflect, "I: \vanted to kick myself. I couldn't stand me. . . . I'm 58 just not my sort."ls At the end, having found himself and understood others through fear and trembling, he can muse upon a poem sent by Sweetie in her "exile" from his world. "Still I was glad to see that rhymed salute from a free spirit to those of us who pitch our tents, as most of us, in the end, must, on more or less conventional terrain" (TW, p. 267). Does this mean that Chick accepts with resignation or defeat? No--his acceptance is a positive one. His last words, as he recalls having just resisted a provocative woman, one of those resurgent temptations, are: "'Thanks just the same,‘ I told her, 'but I don't want any pleasures interfering with my happiness'" (2W, p. 268). As if deciding to go the idea of one character masquerading as many a step better, in Through the Fields of Clover (1961), Peter De Vries employs more secondary Perhaps in part because figures than in any other novel. 16 (If that, John Wain calls it a Restoration comedy. The rc‘iucous scenes in bedroom, parlor, and garden do revive the Style of Congreve and Wycherley, but the idiosyncratic Chuaracters also make it a comedy of humors in the Jonson t3=‘<'3.c‘1:i.tion. In these aspects, it truly becomes, as Jellema SL1SIgests, too much a "mass of material" too much given to Sizexreotypes. Surely De Vries' most relentlessly funny IKD‘Ieal, its action revolves upon too many sub—plots--lines follLowing the humors characters, really--and far too little of Ea main plot, which if discernible at all, turns upon the 59 idea that Ben and Alma Marvel, after forty years of marriage, find themselves living in a world they did not make. They can only marvel at the panorama of domestic chaos that passes before them as they review their Spiri- tually and morally adrift children, gathered for the emerald anniversary. "Home" does not and seemingly cannot exist in the terms the elder Marvels would desire. Daughter Clara, twice married, considers sexual intercourse an unnatural act; son Cotton, divorced, has drifted into nihilism; son Bushrod, married, is an activist who will come back for the celebration only on the promise that the old home town now .has anti-Semitism he can fight and who convinces his wife Edie is prejudiced when she catches him kissing a Negro nuaid; daughter Evelyn, happily married and a bit of semi- Seerious relief, fulfills her obligations to this chain of