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Michigan State
University

 

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

MARITAL AND FAMILIAL RELATIONSHIPS
IN THE POST-WORLD WAR II AMERICAN NOVEL

presented by

Andrew T. Jefchak

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph . D. degree in English

 

 

 

 

Date OCtOber 27. 1970 ,9! 1:. CK :‘ififii -~ _.._

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ABSTRACT

    
 
  
 
  
 
 
    
   
  
   

MARITAL AND FAMILIAL RELATIONSHIPS

IN THE POST-WORLD WAR II AMERICAN NOVEL

By

-‘4 I Andrew T. Jefchak

‘fi§§:e thesis focuses on marriage and family in contem-

c,9;
‘a}"; y American fiction. By examining members of various I

fiat: or respect toward others. Through analyses of each
IuWnn,individua1 plays (sen, father. wife, daughter, etc.)
on this role sometimes clashes with the dreams the fam-
.;nhor or marital partner has for himself, the eternal

'15: individual vs. society is seen in microcosm: indi-

st. spouse-family. That is to say, the stress between

7 relationships.
igin body of this thesis is concerned with novels

evels which were also concerned with the period
"y Here written. Most of the major novelists I

inns in America are herein represented: Saul I

:‘b‘

 

  
   
  
  
   
   
  
 
 
   
   
 
 
 
 
 
  
   

Jaw» s-William Styron. John Updike, and Herbert Gold. to
_ afew. But the thesis is less concerned with chief
;rve-or with a survey of the literary climate than it is
isfhus-singlo thematic strand running through the works of
,1 no group of serious novelists.
v}: Ultimately the thesis shows that a largely negative at-
gflfitnde toward marriage and family emerges from the works.
gIgth a few exceptions, the chief figures of postwar fiction
V figpe the family as no longer a viable or helpful unit; cor—
;,ig3spondingly, they see marriage as a stifling, almost unnat-
igmql kind of existence. The secondary figures in the works
vfipnprolly tend to strengthen this view. In a number of the
(leaks there are individuals who possess neither confidence
5' the themselves nor secure involvement with their families.
_1\;%{; In the final chapter a few examples from noteworthy
~I%§nufioan writing in the 19603 - works of Elliott Baker,
' {on Jay Friedman, Norman Mailer, and Saul Bellow —- show

gyetions that is to say, the concern of the American
list has gone from the individual-society struggle to

 

‘ MARITAL AND FAMILIAL RELATIONSHIPS
IN THE POST-WORLD WAR II AMERICAN NOVEL

By

Andrew TJPJefchak

A THESIS

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

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

1970

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
1

 

AKZ‘UIVIBANDMOTHEBS.............. 79

s‘.

.3“ _
x'faonsmmnomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

189

8
§
5
t3
a
E
33
E

 

INTRODUCTION

This group of essays about marriage and the family in

    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
  
 

American fiction covers a score of novels written in and
about the period which Eric Goldman designates "the crucial
decade, and after."1 19#5-1960. I do not presume to survey
postwar fiction, for my interest lies solely in an important
aspect of the works of a group of writers who first attracted
critical attention during those fifteen years. Despite many
stylistic and methodological differences among them, they
share an interest in ordinary. fundamental experience. A
common ground within that shared experience seems to be what
Bene.Hellek and Austin Warren write about in their discussion
of the ggsnes of a novelist:

...his world, though not patterned or sealed

like our own. is comprehensive of all the

elements which we find necessary to catholic

.soope or, though narrow in sccpe, selects for

inclusion the deep and central....
By examining the "deep and central." by showing individuals
struggling within the basic unit, the novelist of the 19503
indirectly caste important light on the whole of society.

. lightrwhieh has seldom caught the eye of Alfred Kazin and

 

11 , ,
5 ’12. 9.13212; .Dneads- ans. as; (New York: Alfred Knopf.
19 5 e

2',
:zhgagt f Literat (rev. ed.; New York: Harcourt,
Brace. ti orig: . p. 21#.

1

'I

1";

"I

'-'/L

.' I

no

  
  
   
 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
 
   
 
   

2

other formidable critics of modern literature.3 Social con-
cerns are evident in these works within the "resonant micro-
seen.“ as it is termed by Richard Kostelanetz. the microcosm
that "illuminates the macrccosm.”u

I am not suggesting that marital and familial relation-
ships have not been deemed important in past American.fic-
tion. Certainly some of Hester Prynne's strength grows out
of her full acceptance of responsibility for Pearl. In
Dreiser's én American Tragedy the opposition of one Griffiths

 

family to the other produces all the social questions and
answers that Clyde can know. And Steinbeck's Joad family.
the embodiment of unity in adversity. is as much a personna
as is any single member on his own. But after World War II
the relationships themselves seem to change in the fiction.
In the microcosm there is a lack of real human interaction,
a preponderance of selfishness, and a failure by individuals
1. to relate intimately to others. "The impossibility of one
person to know another is advanced as an undying truth of

 

See especially Kazin's essay ”The Alone Generation."
LIQEIIISI azine. CGXIX (October, 1959), pp. 127-131. "I
ng for compassion instead of pleasure."
'a iilezin writes. "In novel after novel, I am presented with
'jf' epde who are so soft. so wheedling, so importunate, that
actions in which they are involved are too indecisive to
2. .ie interesting or to develop these implications which are
' wen. lifeblood of narrative. The age of 'psycholcgical man.‘
. the herd of aloners, has finally proved the truth of
13 3i aetille's observation that in modern times the average
“- is.ehserbed in a very puny object. himself. to the point
tiety.‘ (p. 127)

o

,

steeperary Literature." 0n Contemporary Literature.

‘39 Iostelanetz (New York: —Avcn Bee 9 . p. xx.

 

   

;.
-1
!
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3

 
   

Vlife.

 

3
'5 states Sidney Finkelstein in this connection. And

  

Irving Howe perceives in the same period a loosening of once-
streng ties:

Traditional centers of authority, like the

family. tend to lose some of their binding-

pcwer upon human beings; vast numbers of

people now float through life with a bur-

den of freedom they can neither sustain nor

legitimgtely abandon to social or religious

groups.
That is to say. the survival-struggle by the self which
critics such as Chester Eisinger7 see at the center of mod-
ern life and literature has gradually become an isolated
activity; loneliness is perhaps the price one must pay to
gain the freedom that Howe refers to.

Even so, members of individual families in the liter-
ature of this time can be seen struggling as well to retain
a bit of security, an ounce of human warmth more quickly
associated with traditional family roles than with the new
independence. In many of the works to be examined here,
such as Uilliam Styron's Lie Down in Darkness. George P.
Elliott's zarktilden Village, and J. D. Salinger's The
Q;§ghgg_;g the gig, sensitive individuals rebel against the

confining effect of marriage and family relationships. yet

 

‘2 5
ate t al In and Alienation in Amer can Literature
(new ILrin Intérnatiofifil FESIisfiir. T56 . p. 13. 1
. Irving Howe. "Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction."
mm. XXVI (Summer. 1959). p. l#27.

' g: the Zorties (Chicago: University of Chicago 2
v P0 :5- i

 

     
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
   
 
  
   
  
  
   
 
  
 
  

4
belean the loss of comradeship and the good love that might
have been. 1
Thus the topic is worth extensive consideration because y;
it involves a group of faces in the contemporary social land-
scape. These faces need not refer to. nor reflect upon,
public survey or private statistic. Instead, they collec-
tively make up an aspect of the times in the minds of the
writers. I have chosen the novel rather than other literary I
terms because, although the meaning derived from poetry or

the drama is more immediate, the novel is that form of Amer-

ican literature in which "one sees the full force of the

writer's alienation from his society.” as Prof. Eisinger ‘
states it.8 A play by Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams

cannot easily project for very long the intellectual and

natural intensities in human relationships. Because of the

elasticity afforded writers of fiction. the novelist can ex-

-tend to a far point the physical and emotional vicissitudes

and inconsistencies which help explain family relationships. 1
‘ At the risk of stating the obvious. I will add that.
because of my preoccupation here with marriage and family in
the literature, I have disregarded a number of excellent
novels of the period which are otherwise significant social-
ly. politically. or aesthetically.

.L Hhile ruling out critical acclaim as a EELEEEZ consider-

ru‘zw 11*. new»?

afien in selecting novels for this thesis. I nonetheless have

".0

 

E

'U

V O

H

\O

0
WMV :-

D

 

5
not been totally numb to the Judgments of scholars and re-

viewers. I have not used Peyton Place. for example, despite ’

 

its thematic kinship to my paper. I have, however. discussed .
briefly or used in passing comparison to important works a
few best-sellers of the fifties which "isolate a popular
dilemma of the times,“ in the words of Ihab Hassan.9

Beyond matters of time, genre. and critical estimate, I
have further narrowed the scope of the essays by choosing
not to attempt an extended critical analysis of a single
author. Even important novelists such as Saul Bellow, John
Updike, and Hilliam Styron are represented herein by only one
or two books. I wish in this way to emphasize that my aim is
not to survey and evaluate the post-World War II novel but
to examine a single aspect of it, a single thematic strand
running through a number of fine books.

The novels included in these essays are to a large de-
gree concerned with a familial conflict. Consequently, at
least one participant in the conflict is presented in depth.
very personally and intimately. Without exception the list
(see Section I of the Bibliography) includes long works of
prose fiction written after the second World War, written
about the period in which they were written (with slight de-
viation), and written by individuals whose writing careers,
in the opinion of most critics. developed progressively in
this period. The novels are "family novels” in the sense 7

 

9 L
Bg%%cal nnocence. (Rev. ed.: New York: Harper 6010- i
Dhen Bee . 9&3}. p. 36. .

a.” ..

 

r:

 
 

  
 

. 6

that these highly important roles which help define indi-

. vidual lives are underlined and stressed: men are salesmen
vand politicians. but chiefly they are husbands, lovers, and
fathers.

I have chosen them also because they have in common a
certain realism of presentation: a generally broad use of
referential and descriptive language. an insistence upon
oontemporaneity, a disregard for fantasy except that which
functions in such a way as to cast new light on a previously-
'defined real situation. Bellow's Africa in Henderson the
ggig'gigg is unreal. but the circumstance of it and conse-
quence of it are mimetic comedy. rather than absurd comedy
or comic allegory. Gold's prose style is frequently diffi-
cult to slash through, but within it, and within the lives of
Burr Fuller of The Optimist and Reuben Flair of Birth 2; 5
Eggg. the pattern of fictional presentation is clearly ex-
pressive rather than expressionistic.

It is against a "realistic“ backdrop that the reaction
to marriage and family as societal manifestations can best
i be examined. "The survival of self"10 is done most convinc-
ingly in an authentic setting. The struggle of the self
' gaging; the self - that is, the war within a character be- i
} tween the chaos of unbelief and a ridiculous, orderly set of

values - in which even the social pressures represented in

. spouses and children are disregarded, makes up the ultimate

.v .

‘w‘r'r-vcv‘m-n . - 'w‘

10 ,.
lininger. p. 20.

 

7
phase of individual alienation. Beginning with John Barth

   
 

and J. P. Donleavy in the late 19503 and running through the
1§19608 to include Elliott Baker, Thomas Pynchon, and others,
there has developed an unannounced union of writers whose
ostensibly realistic and contemporary plots and settings
0' are, in Alan Trachtenberg's words, "only grist for their
metaphysical mill.“11 I hope eventually to show that this

0

writing attitude, called ”fabulism” by Trachtenberg and
.'b1ack humor” by Conrad Knickerbocker12 has indirectly de-
veloped from individual reaction to marital-familial pres-
sures. But since it does not throw immediate light on an
understanding of my topic, I will withhold discussion of it
until the final chapter, when it will fall into chronologi-
cal order.
In much of the literature of the fifteen-year span to
be discussed first, human affairs are afflicted with increas-
ing anguish and characterized by difficulty in communication
’ between members of a family. Marital problems provide the
subject matter for much of the literature, and sexual inti-
. lacy seems largely reserved for situations not involving
: husband and wife. At any rate, sexual matters usually figure
quite prominently, and the failure of the modern American

  
   
 
   
 

“L writer.which Leslie Fiedler at length points out - a

‘—

.I " ‘ .11. ‘
’ _ mth and Hawkes, Two Fabulists,” Critigue VI (Au-
‘ l.“ me 1363) o P0 90

_—. X
_.‘2 i2
, 7 see Douglas M. Davis (ed. ). The world of Black Humor
,3 3161-15. 3.1:. Button, 196?). pp. 2‘9‘7-9 .

       
 

 

 

 

W‘s-own”. w

  
 

  
 
 
 
  
  
    

3..
f *Vhiprally tolerated whether we approve or not.”

 

8

timidity in presenting adult heterosexual love in a meaning-

ful fashion13 - is not a wholly sound indictment if one con- {

-siders briefly the descriptive aspect of recent fiction or I
its thematic preference for sexual entanglements. Censorial ‘
limitations were not removed until the Judgment on D. H.

Deerence's Lady Chatterly's Lover in 1958, but the report of

 

Judge Frederick Van Pelt Bryan at that time emphasized a so-
cial and fictional change that had been evolving since the

14 I do not mean

Kinsey reports on human sexual response.
that the shift toward frank sexual attitudes and description
is literature's "answer to” and use of Kinsey's material.

0n the contrary, what should be stressed is that the focus on
the microcosm in these novels demands such material. The
self which dominates this literature is a yearning, anxious
thing whose needs begin with sex and frequently are grati-
fied by sexual acts. Sex is a major step in the direction of
intimacy, and quite often it can be achieved, says the mod-
ern.Americam writer, only through pain, struggle, and dis-

appointment. “Sex is the one area of man's life," Norman

 

13 . _.
ve 59% Death in the American Novel (New York: Cri- ',
terion figois. 9655. a

it .5
Judge Bryan's report is partially quoted in Howard

Whitman, Sex A e (New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 6#. t
Bryan wri es ,‘VThL one best selling novel after another frank f.
rdeseriptien of the sex act and four letter words appear with .9
frequency. The trends appear in all media of public expres- f’
lien. in the kind of language used and the subjects discussed I
In polite society, in pictures. advertisements and dress, A
viii in other ways familiar to all....Today such things are

 

 

 
  
  

.‘~.'

)W

m-
P’e-c- up" \4

9
Bedhcretz writes. ”in which he can achieve a certain indivi-

   
 

I
‘, duality of expression. Everything else belonging to him, de-
fining him, identifying him, comes from the environment and

returns to it. bit by bit, through the years."15 In the sex

act man gives and takes: he asserts his powerful singularity

' while he simultaneously combines with another. In presenting
the sex act some writers. like John Updike, show it to be a
paradoxically lonely thing by means of which the self is fed
and nurtured. Others, such as the Styron of gig 223g in
Darkness, show it to be the modern symbolic act through which

. we see more clearly, more intelligibly, the death of love and
the loss of trust. /

More important than individual authors', or characters',

attitudes toward sex, however, is the use of sex as a refer-
ence point, or exact center around which all fictional acti-
vity spins. I say more important because most novels writ-

: ten during the fifties had sexual conflict at their core.

*, Ewen ostensibly non-sexual, non-sensual books such as wright

‘ lorris's The Deep Sleep and Bellow's Seize the Day owe their

 

conflict to a sexual problems impotence, inadequacy, 'momism.” ,

   
  
    
 
 

All in all, it would not be an oversimplification to
say that my interest is in those novels which show a "slice 1
of life.“ or “moments.“ in that sense of the word which David
Stevenson uses when he says of post-World war II writers,

.“thei ‘novels exist in the individual intensity of a series

‘1' A "x‘l'r wr-

--v *-

.‘~ Milan Pedheretz, Del s and Undoi s (New York;
‘V-Strauss. & Giroux. ), p. .

d

10

    
  
  
  
   
  
   

I _ ts in the lives of their characters rather than in a
7— seion of events toward a sharply defined denouement."16
novels at midcentury magnify and explore “subtle psychic
«stint. as John Aldridge puts it,17 and matters of trou-

,' filed sex and Personal weakness; but they make few generali-
Jifliems, few sweeping movements with their study-eye. We

' ire presented instead with modern moments, in depth.

01:32
r1 I
I

 

6
”Fiction's Unfamiliar Face," The Nation (November 1,
' 1:958): PO' 3070

‘I l" 17

s i? 11 E §earoh g; Heresy (New York: McGraw-Hill. 1956),
»‘ r 9‘."-
l

 

 

 

.m.‘ "4" 2‘-

CHAPTER I
HUSBANDS AND FATHERS

In order to draw a more informed conclusion about the

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 
 
  
  
 
 
 
  
  

femily unit in these post-World War II American novels, I
will examine first the separate roles which each member '
plays. It seems fitting therefore to begin with men, for in

meat of the long works of the fifteen-year period the male

adult is more frequently central than the female. In this

Ichapter I will discuss men with respect to their relation-

Bhips with wives and children, and other women. The strengths

and weaknesses of these men sometimes seem more pronounced

‘Uhen they are brought into focus within their own self-

nreclaimed sphere of influence and responsibility. His be-

hawior as spouse and parent define the protagonist or other

lilo as much as do his most secret passions and fears. It ‘g
is important to see the man within the reality the novelist 5
has forged; the man must be looked at 25 father, 22 husband, 3”
:gypregenitor of something, and even the child or marriage 1;
-(tbe products) must be examined, before the whole self can I
3‘3-eeid to have been laid bare by the writer. (
a 1‘ u-There are those husbands and fathers in recent American

r 0‘

t
3
«-?t§e§ien who adventure or escape, temporarily. both in a sym- i
11 l

 

12

they have not really examined completely what they have; they
find, oddly enough, something meaningful in a traditional
relationship. By this I do not mean to say that they sur— u
render to superficial domesticity, but rather that they say

”yes“ to life when they say "yes“ to living with wife and/or

children. Their existence is affirmative in that they agree

to continue as husbands and fathers. In different ways the

chief male characters of the following novels are nonethe-

less similar in this respect: §gt Tttg Egggg 22.22220 Eggtt

LI 5 gm, federigo, and Henderson thg Rain EE-

 

 

There are those who remain within the marital-familial

  
  
  
  
  
 
  

unit unconvincingly, for insufficient reasons. The connec-
tion between their private failures as individuals and their
Public successes as husbands and fathers is notably acute;
umuflfle to achieve any real satisfaction within themselves,
they grasp at any sure thing, any possession, and the near-
est possessions are wives and children. The adult males of
253,92t1nist and Egg Disgtises g; tgzg are similar in this
lay.

Finally. there are those who do not stay within the
Bonfines of marriage and family. They are either thrust
out, or ignored, or disowned, by other members, or they
Gheose isolation or detachment. Perhaps breakup does not
always equal tragedy; but the fact remains that in the
cases of Egbbit. 223- The Hound 2; Earth, ttg 2233 $3 223;; E

 

 

£331. the fietze the Dal, the net result is negative: some-
.; this; has definitely died.

 

  
 

..
O

   
 
 
 
 

13

harbors of each of the three preceding groupings consi- /
der the marital—familial state stifling, something maddening,

and enslaving in its imposition of limitations on human V
ilagination. Charles Glicksberg notes that characters in ‘
lidcentury fiction see promiscuity as the honest relations

1 Even so, there are

ship and monogamy as the dishonest.
significant instances -— most evidently among those who ad-
venture and/or escape -— in which marriage apparently be-
comes honest and in which the family seems to be strengthened.
In the first part of this chapter I will examine different
kinds of resolution which show in effect that marriage or
family do not necessarily act as barriers to independent
fulfillment, but rather that they may reflect a positive
otuectivity, a way of thinking which accepts the challenge
or living with other people.

get This House 2; Fire is about America despite its

 

 

largely Italian locale. In the tradition of Tender is the

 

”—1.592 and 1h; .SJE L183 M, Styron's novel concerns Ameri-
cans out of their native habitat but reflecting nevertheless
the extent to which their social background follows them.
The opening sections in which Peter Leverett remembers po-
litical discussions with his father seem to herald both this
Alerican-ness and also the importance that family relation-
lhips carry throughout the novel. Leverett gets the feeling ,
that he is inspired, he says, fl

 

i
. "Sex in Contemporary Literature.” Colorado Qu uterly,
Winter, 1961) . p.281 0 1':

‘w

 

14

...by my father's old sweetness and decency I
and rage, but also by whatever it was within
me--within life itself, it seemed so in-
tense--that I knew to be irretrievably lost.
Estranged from myself and from my time, ‘
dwelling neither in the destroyed past nor {
in the fantastic and incomprehensible pres-
ent, I knew that I must find the answer to
at least several-things before taking hold
of myself and getting on with the job.( )2
22

The book can be approached from several different di-

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 
  
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
  

rections because of the narrative variety which Styron dis- 3
plays. He mixes first and third person narration with long
interviews, and he uses flashbacks that overlap and some-
times repeat earlier recollections. As readers we discover
lainly through Leverett, although the other two male char-
acters are much more involved in the action variously traced.
Irithe course of Leverett's reminiscences, sometimes nostal-
81c and sometimes mysterious, he brings to the surface a
series of events which had taken place a couple of years
Brevieusly, in Sambuco, Italy. In the sense generated in
the preceding quotation from the novel, it can be looked
upon as an unravelling of the incomprehensible present in
light of the destroyed past. In it we meet a troubled, al-
coholic painter named Cass Kinsolving who once murdered a

wealthy hedonist named Mason Flags: he killed him because of

.e.‘

"hat he thought Flagg had done to a beautiful peasant girl.
With-the girl Cass had conducted an idealized, chaste

 

2
‘Hillian Styron, Set This House 25 Fire (New York. New ;

‘; can Library, 19605, p. 5 . Page numbers in parentheses g;
W'te this edition. '

 

   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
    
    
 
   
 
 
  

15
fLrellnoe which vied with his real life with Polly, his wife,
. 9 and their five children. We also discover in the end that
Case has not been arrested for the crime, and that further- y
lore he is now a less-troubled individual.
Before we come to Cass‘s own point of view, however, we
get to know a great deal about Mason. Leverett passes along
information about the Cass-Mason relationship which is valu-
able during the early stages of the flashback. As a young
Ian, leverett recalls, Mason was a careless brat. He had
been expelled from a number of schools, yet his alcoholic
nether, "Wendy dear" - the formative influence in his early
life - guarded him with immature, even incestuous affection.
The heritage of perversion which Mason brings forth to his
relationship with the Sambucc set and especially with Cass
is a key element in the "destroyed past" which Leverett lays
bare.
0f the three major characters in the novel, Cass Kin-
‘selving is centrally significant. He is not central because
he is so thoroughly drawn but because with him the novel
traces a specific pattern of degeneration to regeneration.
.Hfld we followed only Mason Flagg, in the eyes of Peter Levy
Brett, we would have had a case study of degeneration, with ,
S horrifying ending. The king of rebirth that Cass undergoes
his been questioned critically, notably by Philip Both in
x ‘hie frequently anthologized essay, "Writing American Fiction."3

,‘ ; .geggintary, xxx: (March, 1961), pp. 223-33. Roth 2
its ' compatibility of any sort of existence with
\J»tury American society. U

 

 
  
  
  
  
 
  
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  

16
"!et it should be agreed upon that Cass's final choice, made
after experiencing human viciousness first-hand, to hate and
to destroy, signifies a turning away from self-defeat or
self-destruction, and a turning toward peace and reconstruc-
tion. That choice is made known to Leverett by Cass:
I can only tell you this: that as for being
and nothingness, the one thing I did know was
that to choose between them was simply to
choose being, not for the sake of being, or
even the love of being, much less the desire
to be forever -— but in the hope of being
what I could be for a time.

(476—77)
It signifies also a decided re-casting of the "Nothing!"
climax in Styron's first novel, Lie Down in Darkness. Sid-
ney Finkelstein calls Cass's words "a completely existen-
tialist statement,” and explains the murder as an act which
asserts his identity.” The comparison between Cass's state-
Ient and the recurrent theme of Styron's first novel is
drean by David Galloway, who writes, "both Peyton and Loftis
had chosen to lie down in darkness while Cass Kinsolving, his
body shaken by fires and fevers, learns that such fires are
Preferable to exile from whatever power rules the moral uni-
Vtrse.'5 Each critic points out the importance of that ulti-
Ilte ”option" that Cass takes, but each uses a Case who is
Predominantly intellectual. It seems to me that the Cass
the wants to be something “for a time” is the Cass who is

“Pinkelstein, p. 219.

r '. 5David Galloway, The Absurd Here in American Fiction
a'§‘flltins University oT—Texas 55..., 15365, p. 33.

we ‘ f' '

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1?
harried and has a swarm of kids; anything he asserts must be
prefaced with the indisputable fact that they will be titt
ii; for the time.

It may be significant that Leverett meets Poppy before
he meets Cass. The order of introduction indicates that she
is more important to Case than her comparatively minor role
would cause us to suspect; it is only through Cass that
Ieverett finds out anything about her. She is a burden to
her husband, but a sufferable one. If she is dreadfully
sloppy in her housekeeping, Case's own personal habits do
not allow him the howling insults he constantly gives her.
If she is unbelievably inept at handling finances, it is
Cass who shows himself to be greedy and dollar-conscious.
Game is aware of his own guilt in their relationship; in
fact, at least some of the despair that leads him into ha-
lon's-web of dependence is rooted in his inability to give
himself to Poppy. Though she helps bring him out of the
Ibupor caused by drunkenness and humiliation at the hands of
Mason's crowd -— he calls her his “little girl," ironically
Oneugh, at that time - Poppy is for Cass (as are his chil-
dren) simply too real, too sensually alive to attend. It is
inch less painful to cultivate his weaknesses with liquor
and with Mason than it is to seiza the responsibility for
‘Furplying a need in his family. ,

But then he kills Mason. With this act, along with the

jgfigeumstanees surrounding it, Cass clears the way for his

' to the real "force of life." He fundamentally accepts

 

e e .

A.

N‘Tawu-é r“ — »

18

  
  
  
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   

the counsel given him at an earlier point in the ordeal by
the sentimental Fascist, Luigi Migliore. Luigi had said:
...the primary moral sin is self-destruction -
the wish for death which you so painfully and
obviously manifest. I exclude madness of course.
The single good is respect for the force of life.
Have you not pictured to yourself the whole hor-
rible vista of eternity? I've told you all this
before, Cass. The absolute blankness, ii niente,
it nullita, stretching out for ever and ever, the
pit o kness which you are hurling yourself
into, the nothingness, the void, the oblivion?
Yet you are unable to see that although this is
in itself awful, it is nothing to the moral sin
you commit by willing yourself out of that life-
force so celebrated by D'Annunzio, and by will-
ing thus, to doom your wife and children to the
hell of fatherlessness, to the unspeakabde.
- (190)
Luigi's advice is relevant to human need in general, and to
Cass Kinsolving's need in particular. It is in a sense
comic, yet dramatic. Because Luigi espouses a benevolent
Fascism, Cass is inclined to laugh it off; but surely the
kinship between what Luigi advises and what Cass ultimately
proclaims is readily apparent. Professor Galloway writes,
in this connection, ”It is chiefly Luigi who reminds Cass of
his responsibilities."6 In addition, the link that Luigi
makes between the life-force and husband/father-foroe punc-
tuates the aspect of Cass which is most important. While I
am not insisting that Case's surname be narrowly interpreted,
the syllable 'Kin-' seems to be a reminder of his primary
obligation. Not much of Case's art is detailed - to compare

one side of his life with another. “Curious to relate"

 

Galloway, p. 70-

 

19

II the pertinent chapter on Mason' 8 confusion of Cass

     
   
   
    
  
  
  
   
   
   
   
  
 
 
  
  
   
  
  
 

_ 'l

3.».h,a more notorious painter named Waldo Kasz. Cass' s

lgfifinting-is otherwise noted only at the very end and where

5%EV1takes a place in Mason's collection of pornography.

.4“ The novel is about the Journey from empty dreams,

h.§$mough shock and horror, to the assertion of self as pro-

:}~§eniter of life. The Cass that quotes Elflfi Lag; in the Epi-

'51egue letter - "ripeness is all" -— is the real Cass, the

'”ene that champions organic essence, which to Luigi is life-

'g'force; the procreative power. In the same Epilogue letter

",he means, staccato;

‘1. Overpopulation. Race-suicide. Poppy is hav-

- ing another baby next June & I've been walk-

_ a?' ing around Charleston like a wounded elephant,
staggering with the usual pride and despair.

‘ (1W8)
sue that later reference to a king who also was besieged
filth family woes which are largely of his own making, belies
tfihfisifidespair” and colors "pride" in a certain way. To fully
L lige "ripeness" is to understand what Professor Hassan
_ “the intolerable ambiguities of love."7 His life with
z .3“ infuriating to him, but it is also somewhat enjoy-

'f.; The most meaning—filled sustenance for Cass is the
fihfiial-ef life with his exasperating wife and their flock
1.; It is his curious retention of faith in ordinary
Aenship and domesticity that prevents him from commit-

.thoide. At one point early in the novel he says to
v-y- -

 

I 72.

 

 

 

 

 

 

20
Interett, “Suicide?...It don't take courage, guts, or any-
thing else. You're talking to a man that knows." It 9225
take guts to live, however, and try to disengage himself
from a Hephistophelean pervert like Mason, and to pick up
the reins of responsibility toward Poppy and the children.
Lewis Lawson points out the strong link between Cass and
Kierkegaard's man of despair, especially notable after he
impetuously drove away, for a time, Poppy and the children
in Paris. Professor Lawson points to the sickness which
overcomes Cass - a sickness borne of his inability to take
up the burden of life.8 The burden is that which utilizes
the life-force which Luigi had told him about. Again, what
Cass essentially is is husband to Poppy and father to his
tribe.

But he also is an adventurer, a weak drunkard, and a
would-be tumultuous lover. The other two influences who in
the course of the novel affect his conduct, Mason and the
Italian girl Francesca, bring out in different ways a dis-
tinctly romantic side of him. Francesca is largely unreal,
two-dimensional, desirable only to Cass and Mason because
she is more an idea than a sensual peasant girl. She attains
true womanhood only as a ravished corpse, yet she is for a
long time the living symbol of highest excellence for Case.
leach, on the other hand, is Case's evil of evils. His

 

g . 8"Cass Kinsolving: Kierkegaardian Man of Despair," His-
1i§fi§§l ess in Contemporary Literature, III (Autumn,
PPS

'1

0_P.

21

  
  
  
  
  
 
  
  
  
  
  
 
  
  
  
  
  
 
  
  
  
  
 
  
   

eperverse.sensuality is all the more despicable to Cass be-
cause Cass must depend on him financially. While these two
influences are alive, they pull Cass in opposite directions,
.and they exist in his life because of each other. They no
longer exist in Cass or £2; Cass after they perish. The

girl becomes an actual unattainable (rather than the Bea-
trice-type unattainable she had been) and Mason becomes in
death an actual physical grotesque to match what he had been
all along in Cass's mind.

Beneath the ugly surface that Cass presents through much
of the book, we periodically see evidence of a man who gen-
uinely loves his wife. There are moments during his frequent
arguments with Poppy that point to Cass as more than a bel-
lowing young man angered by his spouse's incorrigible fertil-
ity and maddening ignorance. "Marry a Catholic and it's like
being retired to stud," he tells Leverett, and surveys their
rooms with a sweeping arm movement and analogy: ”Did you
ever see anything like it? I'll swear before Christ nothing
exists like it west of the slums of Bangkok.” (195) Invar-
iably his outbursts are followed by remorse of self-aware-
ness, an awareness of his own lack of understanding. ”I
guess I used this religion of hers," he says at a later
point, "as a sort of scapegoat for all my meanness. Actual-

ly'I had quite a religious background myself, and I'd fore-

' ‘ o
, 7 ‘E'
‘
or"

.
e
I

 

inns...” a-J-

Mal-II o‘ogqp d

   
  
   
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
  

22

‘Cass is on the surface is not what Case is in reality. With-

in.-he has enough qualities buried (periodic honesty and
humility, for instance) to make him one who would be called - ’
a “good man." His very raging shows that he holds strong
feeling and concern for things that are real. Without, how-
ever, he wears like a glowing tattoo his incurable romanti-
cism. People such as Mason and Francesca bring out the more
dramatic aspects of it.
Late in the novel Cass tells Peter that he had never '
made love to Francesca; this is believable enough, for all
ideal women must remain strangely chaste. He goes on to re-
late, in a story which reeks of self-conscious mysticism,
sentimentality, and cliche, how she had nonetheless posed
in the nude for him. Rather than describe the electricity
and passion existing between her body and his eye, he pre-
serves the alleged vision and instead speaks a “still life"
of the background where they had met:

Anyway, there was a place down in the valley
where I'd take her - one marvelous little
secluded grove where there were willows and
a grassy bank and a stream flowing through....
He'd sit there in the afternoon and I'd sketch
away. She'd chatter on about this and that
and grab for flowers...and finally she'd set-
tle down and grin a bit and then look gravely
toward the sea, and we wouldn't say a word,
Just sit there sketching and posing and lis-
tening to the water flowing over the rocks and
the crickets in the grass and the cowbells on
the slopes. She'd have taken off her clothes
and let her hair down -— fantastic hair, it
came down to her waist. Anyway, we'd sit
there and it seemed as if we were under a
spell. .n
(#18) g

1v ’2'

 

.mm- ’3‘» . C‘

 

  
 
 
  
  
  
  
  
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  

w,‘ '

23
The sound of the sea, the flora and fauna, the long hair let

‘dewn to her waist: Cass, like many romantics, tells a story

not so much the way it happened, but the way it should have

 

happened. It is noteworthy that he never discusses intimacy
as it concerns him and Poppy, for it is something authentic,
done in a musty closed room, frequently resulting in preg-
nancy. Case's capacity for idealism and sentiment spills
over into his thoughts on fatherhood. Along the way he comes
to suspect that Mason is homosexual, and one of the proofs
that he considers is that Mason has never been a father:

He'd probably be much happier if he'd Just

go on and admit he prefers sailors. And when

such a man don't produce any offspring -—

like Mason - you've got to be especially

suspicious; men that claim to get that much

in the sack would be bound to slip up once

in a while, Just out of pure statistics.

(419)
This implies, importantly, that for Cass sex and paternity
are inseparable. It is surely understandable that he should
hold to this attitude. He has been through the "trial by
sperm" many times and has been found effective by any objec-
tive observer. Not so with Mason.
Pinally, Case's romanticism is linked to the American

dream of hard work done mutually and enjoyably, perhaps with
no reward other than that of companionship. During an after-

neon reverie over cocktails with Mason. Case's mind drifts

. far away:

I was carried back to a time many years be-
fore, when I had come up from the South and
Poppy and I were starting out in New York,
in a drab little apartment on the West Side,
where I was trying to be a painter and Poppy

 

24

  
 

would go out each day to work at some damn
Catholic youth club or something. Yet,
strange, it was not Poppy and me I was
dreaming of, but something else - of others,
of other young married people of whatever age
and time, other young kids I had never known
nor would ever know. Before the babies come.
Pretty young wives named Cathy or Mary or
Barbara, and guys named Tim and A1 and Dave,
' all of them in these sort of cheerless little
.0 apartments all over America - and the perco-
lator boiling, and a rainy Sunday morning,

. and the guy in his underdrawers and the girl
‘ in curlers, feeding the goldfish. Or the two
.' of them nibbling each other's ears and then
’ going back to bed. mad with love, or then on
the other hand Just quarreling...mainly Just
these brave and pretty girls, and the brave
boys they married, all hurried toward the
same weird impossible destiny.

(424—u25)

Cass yearns to be the hero, or at least the embodiment, of
all those brave boys and girls. But the thought is impos-
sible, Just as the "weird destiny" of young Americans is
impossible. what he has with Poppy is different from what
' ' he had with her; the surge of life embodied in five small

‘ . children eventually precludes the power of dreams and idea-
lized visions of the past. Cass can't bring back the past,
and by the end of the novel he doesn't want to bring it
back? What was once beautiful or ugly can only have value

for him insofar as it was once. When he makes his choice in

 

favor of "being for a time“ he has put time, it seems to me,

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 

in realistic order. He has opted for life-force rather than
C. .5deathpwish, for messy Poppy rather than ethereal Francesca.

at the end he has ruled out romanticism as a governor of his
a

. h
K
Y

lure. henceforth he will exist in the "ecstasy“ of flesh and

H‘“

laced He writes to Peter: ,

I (Lu.
. ;
I‘m ,

  

I
A ,.
A»;
, '-
. ‘I.
O.‘ '

   

 

25

who was it in Lear who said ripeness is all.
I forget, but he was right.
Buona fortune,
Case

(#78)
Perhaps a clearer picture of a husband-father moving

  
   
  
   
    
   
  

s
.j- Efrem romance to reality is that in Herbert Gold's early
’ novel, girghlgg,g £232. Although the term “here” is in this
novel practically metaphorical and sometimes the obJect of
the author's apparent derision, it nonetheless indicates the
‘ _ idealistic bent of the central character, Reuben Flair. The
story concerns Flair's twelve-month quest for something ex-
traordinary, something heroic. There is a villain in the
piece, although he is not referred to as such; Larry For-
tiner embodies a direct contrast to the pitifully “straight”
life that Reuben is at middle age trying to break away from.
He is mysteriously unattached to any way of life or duty -
or at least he seems to be so. Yet Larry's frankness and
rudeness shake Reuben. Because of the unnerving aspects of
the contrast, Reuben fights the villain eventually, reneunces
‘ his heroic quest, and ends up a husband and father again.
In the beginning he is forty-five years old, bored with
the annual birthday party but armed with secret, powerful
dreams: visions of himself as anti-lawyer, anti-husband,
anti-fathere He becomes anti-lawyer by withdrawing to a
:2? yprld where necessity has more meaning than law. He becomes ‘
J';}jflnti-husband in the brief ritual in which he cuts himself 4
E; Elle slicing the birthday cake, and is then “favored“ and '

flilplimented by Lydia -— Lydia Fortiner, as he later finds 6'

 

26

. I

:qgt. And he becomes anti-father while looking in his mirror

   
   
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
   

and ignoring his son's pleading for simple recognition:
David Flair heard his father moving in bed,
yawning and clapping his mouth against the
morning taste, and then getting out, his heels
flat across the floor as he slouched toward
the bathroom. ”Hello, Dad," he said, but his
father did not hear him although he had left
the door of the bathroom open behind him. "I
see you," said David Flair, but his father did
not listen. Reuben Flair, who had had a sad
and lonely dream which he was trying to remem-
ber, stared into the mirror to see if he had
been changed during the night. 9
(100)

The meaning of the pseudo-dream is two-fold. It expresses
_ancther facet of romanticism: heroic deeds must sometimes be
achieved in a melancholy state. And it more importantly
shows something true about Reuben: that his self-imposed
alienation (of which we have here an illustrative montage -—
father, mirror, son) only serves to make his life genuinely
sad and lonely. what he wishes to see in the mirror is also
a part of his overall quest for heroism. He wants to be
changed, to be given a new dimension, and he hopes even to
see-physical manifestations of this dimension.

In his affair with Lydia he consistently expresses the
lily to 93 something, and she consistently exhorts him not

telwish but to choose:

 

'May I touch your mouth?‘

 

.»9_ Q ,

, .pnerbert Gold, girth g; a Here (New York: Viking Press,

«fig; jg p. 100. Page num rs in parentheses refer to this
thin. .

 

   
   
  
  
  
   
   
    
    
 
  
  

2
V
y

I
. \

0.-

Q

, ‘

 

2?
She smiled at him._

'May I?’

'Ask me, Reuben, by doing it. That's
always the way -— learn this! -— to ask me
anything, because I don't like questions,
my friend.‘

LP?)

He accepts this as a rallying call, an invitation to boldness
and zeal, and hence it contributes to an increasingly quix- ‘1
otio picture of the future. If he was essentially bored with 1
his wife Ruth, he now becomes emotionally independent of her.
while Lydia surges forward at all times in his mind as the
compound of sexual bliss and understanding, he thinks of his
life only as a warm body that encourages sleep on a chilly
night, the mixture of unexciting kindness and plain simpli-
city.

Just as Lydia (whose marriage to Larry is unknown to
Reuben through most of the novel) floats into his life a mys-
tical neighbor erotically heeding his every word and action
the way a love goddess should, so too does Larry suddenly
materialize in Reuben's rocking chair one day, and in fact
invade Reuben's home. If it is Lydia who awakens Reuben to
life's beautiful possibilities, it is Larry who makes him
°hlrish life's definites. Lydia helps Reuben discover him-

lilt. andheceme a better husband and father, according to

_ Gm‘nrille Ricks, who adds that the spark of life in other-

1'13' anti-social Larry "plays an essential part in the de-
"1en-ent of Reuben's heroic poaeibilities.~1° Part I of

-‘L‘

1°~Generatiene of the Fifties: Malamud, Gold, and Up-
'74Nena Balakian and Charles Simmons (eds.). The Crea-
e ent (New York: Doubleday, 1963), p. 226._

 

 

.
e
t'.

'u‘

28

 
  
  
  
  
 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
  
 
  
  
  

Iéihfi novel closes with Larry's anti-heroic pronouncement on
..fipenen, his reaction to Reuben's having slept with Lydia:
'“Aren't they filthy creatures? Aren't women disgusting?"
He then overrides Reuben's angry obJection and continues, I
”Aren't we all Just filth? -— clean filth, young filth,
pretty filth...Look at me, Flair!" (178) Larry shows Reu- 1'
ben that all Faustian games —- even the trivial ones, such in
‘as sleeping with a neighbor -— must be paid for. And he
shows Flair that certain feelings exist within him without
his knowledge - such as indignation. When Larry discloses
that he has slept with the Flair servant Athelia, it is in
Reuben's mind tantamount to sacrilege. "In this home you
' dared to--!" he exclaims, and Larry mocks with surprise the
cry of “sanctity in the home." (246) But this is only a
passing example of the waking power that is Larry's in the
novel. Most importantly, he draws out of Reuben affection
fox'Buth and attention to David.
Before his father makes his dramatic return to the fam-
ily, David looks upon Larry as the hero that Reuben wistfully
1' trying to become. In David's eyes Larry already has what
Reuben socks, and has it in a more believable way than his
father might. The boy even begins to dream of someday losing
SF! of his own eyes, so that he can be physically more like
. ‘1‘313‘ For Ruth, Larry is an unfortunate drifter who seems
'11. knew something about her husband. As with Reuben, Larry's

,fli'r'enality brings out something special in Mrs. Flair, but
‘iéifltgit reflects beneficially on the family unit. The v

a. 7 '
('1, a
”I. ‘
._ ‘ .
. ,.
‘ ¢
0' ‘ ‘ o.

 

 

29
understanding and love that Ruth shows in the face of Larry's

  

occasional bestiality further reflects Reuben's growing lack,
or loss, of love and understanding. we can see both gain
and loss in the following:

She had tried to surprise Reuben Flair in

little ways, by the manifestations of loving

him --the Jokes about the apple butter she

learned to make, for example -— but these ‘R

dissolved in the stew of commonplace devo-

tion she had always kept simmering for him.

Such accidents of love would be enough to

astonish a man who was loving and therefore

open toward astonishment; her husband, through

fault unnecessary to assign, had closed to her,

as she knew.
. (312)

“Commonplace devotion" is, of course, non-heroic in the most
readily accepted definition of the word; but her refusal to
assign guilt raises Egg above the ordinary level of inJured
wife, and indeed even makes of Reuben something other than
a muddle-aged philanderer. And when she finds out that
Lydua is really Larry's wife, and that in fact Reuben has
been.sleeping with her, she presents an even further pic-

ture of great tolerance and endurance, setting off the com-

 

Pflratively violent reaction by her husband when Larry im-

. plies that he and Ruth had also shared a bed. Reuben doesn't
1’1- Fetllq'believe this, but the words anger him, because they
.’-. 3°“! to attack an instinctive depth in him. Just before
1191r’climactic fight, Larry repeats the inference, and

 
 
  

‘19ub08's fury is even more pronounced, because this time p
;. 1"?! adds a word about his influence on David: 1
'éa.eupposing we're all a little craZy, and

ens like me myself and yours truly is enough

 

    

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

30

to set everybody off except maybe the kid,
who needs a little of my kind of craziness
to push him along awhile, but he's got it
himself...Just supposing there was Ruth and
me, see, and you should have known it but
you didn't, because you didn't want to know
or because you were too scared to know it,

see.“
(338)

in the fight Reuben learns that he is still father to his
son, if not hero to him. David's fears and cries for his
safety make Reuben aware that he must lizg in the real world
(that is to say, he must be a father) and suddenly the knife
in his hand becomes a weapon of defense. Although Larry
eventually takes his own life, his suicide does not diminish

‘Reuben's victory; in the knife-act Reuben supremely recog—

nizes the worth and goodness of what he not only must be,
but what he i3, essentially. father.

_Before that fight Reuben is a man to whom things are
done, a vaguely sketched figure whose longings and fears are
Pointed out by other characters -— by Larry, by Lydia, by
1h. members of his family. Not until he lashes out with the

knife against the villain does he show that he has "essence,"

‘3 his friend Mark Rowenberg had phrased it early in the
nDWBla The scratch on Reuben's finger at the birthday cake

1ntroduced his quest for heroism; the small stomach out that

1‘ SOts from Larry in the fight takes him back to paternalism.
f’flth he stood before the glass he denied his son's words and
111912.10” voluntarily isolated himself; but now after the

7 315111- he listens. and David walks happily next to him. The

A QIBedzmot worry about extraordinary strength, for "having

A}

 

  
   
  
  
   
   
  
  
  
  
   
  
   
   
   
  
  

_, 31

_ ia’c‘tfifler, he could become a child again." (368) Flair says,
;I§fliiactiea11y, “We were nothing...now we will be.” (372)

' v Reuben Flair's achievement is not heroic. He has
tested himself and has found weakness, but in his family he
can be weak and still be chief, for the other members seem
to have extra strength to lend him. And since he is head of
the family he in his turn must have had at least a token
hand in their acquisition of strength.

Both Styron and Gold write their books seriously; nei-
ther work is characterized by lengthy comic passages or light
frivolity or satire. Since nothing is attacked or ridiculed,
the predominant attitude toward marriage and family can be
easily identified as affirmative, despite the adventurous-
ness or rebelliousness of the central male figures. Two
other novels of the fifties which focus on men with self-
Eroelaimed romantic destinies also arrive at a positive view
or Inrital or familial life, but they do so generally with
“mlor or comic irony. While they explore fields of strange-
nose, Saul Bellow's Henderson the 53in_§igg and Howard Nem-
9207's zederigo have nothing to do with grief or terror or
070n.sadness, although the subtitle of Nemerov's book, "The
P‘Wer-of Love,“ suggests that the relationship between the
’°¢§tral figures should be taken seriously. Nemerov uses his

} fi'lio sense as well as his symbolic propensity to punctuate
.fi _

. "'- 12.“ ..rious and real theme. the recession of marital affection.

~iޤ93fhi1ure of intimacy, yet the eventual survival of mar-
‘ .9933‘1‘1

‘ .

A 32
.C31.
T¢fl1fi calls it "a brilliant novel that resolves itself in

  
 
     
   
 
 
 
   
 
   
   
   
  
 

 

 

;; em AI in Birth of a Here, the first paragraph of Federigo
‘ \

QIIGribes in a thematic way the territory ahead, and the
,iyportance of paradox and contrast:

'u;; Young men in our country are brought up to
. believe that they have a destiny, a guiding
r ‘ idea shaped like a star; most of them pass
- their lives in unawareness that this destiny
.LJ; . is gradually becoming the sum of everything
that has happened to them, and need not have
Vin. . been represented by a star in the first place,
being perhaps more like the false beacon set
?‘ up by smugglers to direct a vessel toward a
convenient disaster. Disaster, deg, from,
is’ astro, star. ( )12
3

fii striking paradox in the novel is that the hero loses con-
‘yiéel of his immediate existence once he becomes aware of it.
V.€i$ is empty, and he perceives the emptiness now simply be-
ganse he has never before stopped to perceive. The direc-
ifion of the novel is based on his investigation of a “false
. Macon.

“gay ;
Julian Ghent, though nine years younger within this

    
  
   
  
 
   

1 than Reuben Flair was in his, begins in dissatisfac-

‘ul 1
3 «son of a similar kind. He sees himself as he sees many

'3s: a dull, inexpressive face to match a dull, unexciting

 

- ard Nemerov, Federigo (Boston: Little, Brown, a.
3. p. 3. Page numbers in parentheses refer to this

 

i.
I
i

 

 

    

    

33
situation. Wherever he looks - in a mirror, in a martini,
in the steam from his shower —- he sees the essential flat-
ness of his life. At the same time, he rhapsodizes the
essential excitement of unattainable things. An advertising
copywriter by day, he is an imaginative daydreamer, another
romantic who defines adventure as anything done without the
wife: robbing banks, smoking opium, defying policemen, voy-
aging anywhere provided it is a great distance away, and
committing mutual suicide with a mistress in a hotel room.
Yet Julian‘s imaginary world contains a separate channel of
possibility; one in which he can "discover again in his wife
that essential strangeness which was the beginning of love,
and which is never lost but only gets forgotten, not re-
placed but overlaid by a number of dangerously familiar de-
tails." (16) Each channel of his imagination is governed

by the same motifs mystery.

Reaching into his partial-consciousness Julian puts to
’werk a genie named Federigo, who is in reality Julian's'
internalized self, brought to life for him only. Federigo
subsequently creates an imaginary possibility for Sylvia by
writing notes which imply that Julian knows she is cheating.
.Sylvia is not an adulteress, although it must be noted that
she has had an abortion in the distant past; this fact ex-
plains at least some of Julian's foolishness. But regardless
of his wife's past, Julian wants to convince her that he 1
thing; she is currently unfaithful.-

In the meantime Julian begins taking regular walks to

.
e-x

 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
 
  
  
  
   
  

3b

£323,2ee and te museums, in search of his enchanted deliv-
ygipss. One is called Bianca; she is poor and beautiful and
-3gfi-an evil uncle, she says. But Just as Julian is gorging

{ w-

! fidnself en the enormous possibilities of this romance,

. ;l Blanca leads him to a dark area of the park, where some male
'4. friends of hers beat him up and take his money. '"Go over

' him good,” she says, "the bastard's married." This brutal
irony does not, however, prevent him from continuing his
I'quest." Undaunted, he has an almost conventional affair
With an artist named Elaine. Julian's involvement is in-
tense as long as they meet in the museum near medieval armor
er Chinese.Jade or some other exotic background. But when
she suggests that they simply go to bed, he begins making
exnuses.of various sorts; she therefore is led to believe
that he wants only to "be in lgzg, with all the serious,
irrevocable and somehow disccnsolate connotations of the
idea.” (203) Thus the atmosphere of romance is the ”false
lx‘beacon“ that leads him on.

. Throughout all the adventurousness, the games and the
plots, it becomes increasingly apparent that the essential
)~3 s.trangeness is easy for Julian to find, and that neither he
1%.:ggeIVlevia want to break up. While dressing for a party one
{Z'igfienins and talking in matter-o f-fact tones, the strangeness
. 3" Impdenly lalnfests itself in new clothes, perfume, and shave

" '*”tien, and they impetuously make love. At another time

,
.i .' .

 

 

  

  

 

35
realize that the strangeness is itself the sum total of
their relationship, as was implied in the first sentences
of the book.

At the end of a ”very old story," Sylvia asks Julian
who Federigo is, and he tells her that Federigo “died during
the war, in the Coral Sea." (26“) The distance of the time
and the place, the answering with a lie that Sylvia herself
had told earlier in the novel, and perhaps even the unlike-
lihood of the word “coral” - conjuring up as it does museums
and travelogues - emphasizes the finality of the adventure.
Julian had put his relationship with Sylvia on trial in or-
der to come back to it. And what Marcus Klein says of
"right Morris's ghe 2222 gheep can apply here also. "Mar-
riage is the comic metaphor of their resolution," he writes.
“Between these two worlds there should be a fight to the
death, but instead, in fact, in their struggle they balance
each other out, and in their struggle they define the con-
tinuous life of the human world, the life that really does
go on."13

§2£E£££22.222.§2l£ £225 is not a novel ghee; marriage
and the family, but in it these institutions indirectly
clarify Eugene Henderson's attitude. It is a novel filled
‘with people, places and things that are not completely real -
the animals, Africa, Henderson's size, and so forth - yet

these in’their occasional vividness help form the character

 

13
Marcus Klein, After Alienation (Cleveland: Meridian ‘-.

Books, 1962), p. 224.

 

 

 

  
  
    
  

36
Via-Henderson, both as rain king and as man. And the sum of
""a ' parts of Henderson's character can be seen in the way he
responds to women and children.
The movement of Henderson _th_e gage m is out-and-in,
"fl. or perhaps up-and-down. By this I mean that Henderson
v starts in a disillusionment not unlike Reuben Flair's, "among ‘
clutter, boredom, distraction, things."11+ He then Journeys l
to a land of dreams and returns to basically the same point
at which he had rebelled. He adventures only to be able to
return. To look at the process with another set of images,
Henderson puts "an end to his becoming and enters the realm
of he_ihg, the only realm in which love is possible."15
Henderson is a compulsive, restless romantic, and he
' has all the equipment to be that way successfully. Re is
} large, educated, and rich, and like many of Bellow's heroes
3 he is.capable of making humor, of squeezing comic irony out
. of many situations. He is also somewhat offensive. fre-
quently speaking before he thinks. Nor does he care much
about-the homeland of his riches, for he sees it as a

16

“cursed land“, lower than the pig farm that he keeps. He

. - cares about Henderson. His ego is large at the start of the

 

 
  
 
 
   

11+ '
EL;- P- “5- 5

15
i ‘. - Ihab Rassan, “Saul Bellow: Five Faces of a Hero.”
W. 111 (Summer, 1960), p. 35.

i6

Saul Bellow, enderson t_h_e R____ain Ki (New York: Popu-
fiery, 1959). age num umbers in paren heses refer to

‘I
r.
r. i ‘
._ 4
L, ’ n
4 JV. ‘
. '- ‘
'- .79. ,

___... -‘M... '

   
   
   

37

;§pvei. so large that he wants to wipe from his consciousness
hell that is non-Henderson. Somewhere in the deep recesses
et.his mind a tireless voice chants, ”'I want, I want, I
.uwantaf' (13) The voice promises not to be silent until he
tweaks with the present, from the age of madness where "the
earth itself is corrupt“ (i7), and where his wife preys thus ‘;
on him: ' I

From Start to finish Lily had Just this one
topic, moralizing: one can't live for this
but has to live for that; not evil but good:
not death but life; not illusion but reality.
Lily does not speak clearly; I guess she was
taught in boarding school that a lady speaks
softly, and consequently she mumbles, and I
am hard of hearing on the right side, and the
wind and the tires and the little engine also
Joined their noise.

(30)

'3“Is it any wonder,“ he asks silently (the novel is filled

_ with these first-person pleas), "Is it any wonder I had to

', go to Africa?" He goes in order to find again that primi-
tive, natural spirit so dreadfully lost in machine life. He
’39" also to re-awaken the corresponding primitiveness in

-i? rhis own lake-up:

?* Well, I've always been like this, strong and
. ' healthy, rude and aggressive and something
,J}.. of a bully in boyhood; at college I wore

‘ gold earrings to provoke fights, and while I
, got an M.A. to please my father, I always be-
:' haved like an ignorant man and a bum. ( )
' 22

...fidfitheugh he has been able to beget children and money in

 
  
   

[3*gfifibaethe voice within ("'1 wantl'“) has assured him that
‘ an ‘ '
..Iggterial er paternal begetting can not satisfy the great

fl. 1

 

38

Henderson's adventure in pseudo~Afrida, "an Africa of

  
  
  
  
  
   
   
   
  
  
  
   
  
  
   

the soul,'17 represents an elaborate ritual involving natives
that frequently are more intellectual than he is in episodes
correspondingly bizarre. Near the end of his stay he sits
down to write a letter to his wife which, despite the fact
that it is written under the influence of ”pombo," makes
clear a few things about him. The first thing it makes clear
is that, by virtue of his writing to Lily, he acknowledges
that she makes a difference in his life, and that he has come
to.Africa not to get away from her but in order to get back

 

he her, to re-achieve that unromantic but nonetheless real
feeling that exists between them. "He resolves to return to
his Lily," writes Joseph Waldmeir, "and to her theory that
one should live not for evil but for good, not for death but
for life."18 The second thing he displays is a marked,
though still befuddled, awareness of himself as fool. He
Irites to Lily:

I met a person who is called the Woman of
Bittahness. She looked like a fat old lady,
merely, but she had tremendous wisdom and
when she took a look at me she thought I
was a kind of odd ball, but that didn't faze
her, and she said a couple of marvelous
things. First she told me that the world
was strange to a child. But I am no child.
This gave no pleasure and pain, both...0f
course there's strangeness and strangeness.
One kind of strangeness may be a gift, and

-. J 17Robert Gorham Davis, "The Individualist Tradition:
"j Bellow and Styron,” The creative Present, p. 129.

 

 

13mm” Without Faith, ~ T_h_e Nation (November 18,
961). p. 395.

 

’

 

 

39

anether kind a punishment. I wanted to tell
the old lady that everybody understands life
except me -— how did she account fer it? I
seem to be a very vain and foolish, rash per-
son. Row did I get so lost? And never mind
whose fault it is, how do I get back? ( )
250

,Re is not lost eh.Africag rather, Africa has shown him that

  
  
  
  
  
  
   
 
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
 
  

. he he lost. The strangeness of his behavior and the impul-
eiveness of his decisions. like the surface of the novel's
adventures, are much less important than the strangeness of
a man who seeks with muscle and noise and bombast but not
with heart. "Never mind whose fault it is" may not be humil-
ity but it is a large advance from the relentless criticism
of all non-self in the early pages of the novel.

Third and quite significant, the letter makes clear that
thenderson has a sense of intimacy. He will not call it love
because that word for him is full of "bluff." He feels him-
self "too peculiar" for marital love, because he is clinging
to the last strands of the Byronic hero in himself. But he
wants to regain intimacy with Lily now that he has told the
‘veioe within him to shut up:

I had a voice that said, I want! I want? It

should have told me she wants, he wants, hhey

wants And moreover, ”It's love that makes re-

’i1l; , ality. The opposite makes the opposite. ( 251)

i-fif '1 don't think it is reading too much into that last sentence
ff fit say that for Henderson the pursuit of the primitive, the

 

find the meaning in the civilized world. And as Profes-

.e

\
as.

_e

"I e.
'

 

>.

 

 

a
l

   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
 
 
  
   

to
which is selflessness."19 Henderson brings a bit of this
back, leaping high in a man-made sky with a lion cub, an
orphan and a stewardess who reminds him of Lily.

I think the preceding four works represent in the trial
and error of four men a positive attitude, but not one which
is epoch-making. Marriage as a goal, marriage as an end in

itself dates back to Richardson's Pamela and comes forward, as

 

Leslie Fiedler reminds us, to Marjorie Morningstar. Senti-
mental novels like those of Fannie Hurst and one-shot house-
wives proclaim that marriage and family in themselves are e
EElSEl values to gear lives by. The novels above do not be-
long to that attitude; rather they stand squarely on the
goodness and grace of one individuals' attraction for another
individual: the institution of marriage is strengthened after
the fact, if it is strengthened at all. Love is the chief
motivator. The men in these works do not represent alle-
lsiance to false gods or special interests; they do not seek
to ”save their marriage" or "preserve the family" because of
law or custom; they seek love from start to finish. Ironi-
cally, what they find is simply a configuration of what they
have had all along.

‘ There is another kind of novel in the fifties also un-
attached to sentimental readership which deals with much the
same situation and problem within the family unit that is
dealt with in the preceding section. But the reasons that

 

19 -
Klein, p. 6#.

 

R

 

41
the father or husband, for instance, renews his effort to
fulfill responsibilities and extend the life of his institu-
tion are not in this kind of novel very persuasive or morally
sufficient. The decision 222 to resign as husband or father
seems prompted, oddly enough, by generally personal or sel-
fish considerations. In a sense this kind of novel reflects
the apathy, complacency, or conformity which dwells within
ostensibly ambitious or adventurous men. In its best-written
form it traces effectively the moments from dissatisfaction
to surrender, as in Herbert Gold's The Optimist and Robie
Macauley's The Disguises of £212.

In order to etch more sharply the figures of Burr Fuller
and Howard Graeme, I will take a brief look at two less mov-
ing but more naked examples of how social conformity extends
into the private lives of husbands and fathers. One is Sloan

Wilson's The flan in the Gray Flannel Suit, the other is

 

James Jones's §gmg Gage Running. structurally sound, Wilson's
book develops three things in parallel fashion: (1) Tom

Bath's growth from an underpaid assistant for a charitable
foundation to a well-salaried corporation man, (2) the family's
change from semi-poor, anxious discontent to middle-class,
complacent satisfaction (the extent of this is evident even

in the television habits of the children), and (3) Tom Bath's
re-living of, disclosure of, and solution to, the problem of
his wartime adultery and subsequent paternity. What happens

in the novel, dubious as it may seem, is that a disenchanted,

guilt-ridden man with a rotten Job turns into a satisfied,

#2
affectionate husband and father who is making good money.
At the heart of it all is a hurrah for the conditions im-
posed by social or material forces and a stern-faced faith
in the indomitability of the husband-wife relationship.
'It's not an insane world,’ Betsy said.
'At least our part of it doesn't have to be.'
'Of course not.‘
'We don't have to work and worry all the
time. It's been our fault that we have.
What's been the matter with us?‘
'I don't know,‘ he said. 'I guess I ex-
pected peace to be nothing but a time for
sitting in the moonlight with you like this,
and I was surprised to find that this isn't
quite all there is to it.‘ 20
(282)
But for the Baths there lgla great deal of moonlight at the
end: they go up to Vermont, ”a thousand miles from nowhere,"
and develop, we must presume, even further complacency. The
meaning of reconciliation is for Tom Bath closely dependent
on one's material status and social outlook. In William H.
Whyte's terms, Bath has "no sense of plight but rather a
sense of ultimate harmony."21
In Some Came Running, Frank Hirsh's married life is de-
veloped in a similar scheme as Bath's, but with one major
exception: he becomes increasingly miserable, even degenerate,
as the novel goes on. A pillar of the community, Frank is

equipped with wife, family, and mistresses, and with the

 

20
Sloan Wilson, The Man in theG Flannel Suit (New
York: Pocket Books, Inc., T 95-7,~ p. 232. Page numbers in
parentheses refer to this edition.

21
The Organization Man (New York: Doubleday, 1957),

1+3
knowledge that he has cut his own swath in life. Frank was
the only breadwinner the large Hirsh family ever knew, and
the excessive pride he shows in his accomplishments, even
to the extent that at first he largely ignores his wife and
kids, is almost forgiveable. But he is also perpetuating
the pattern of what Maxwell Geismar calls "absentee parents...
and sibling hatreds."22 The coldness which his parents
helped cultivate in him he passes on to his own.

The recently completed war had created in the small
Southern Illinois town conditions favorable to the dream of
a businessman like Frank - a dream in which his identity
would be painted everywhere, even at a new shopping center
with a "tremendous blacktop-marked-off-in-yellow-paint 150
car parking space.”23 On his way to achieving this he sheds
any surviving feeling for his frigid wife, and takes up with
a string of mistresses, notably Geneve Lowe, the wife of his
clerk, and Edith Barclay, another of his employees. But
when his wife can take his stepping out no longer, she
leaves him, and he suddenly feels socially naked before the
townspeople. He realizes that his wife and children help

maintain his powerful image: he is unable to continue the

 

22
American Moderns (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958),

P0 2350

23 A

James Jones, Some Came Runnigg (New York: Scribner,

1957), p. 113. Page numbers in parentheses refer to this
edition.

#4
pose all by himself. He promises Agnes, his wife, that he
will virtually give up sex; he makes an agreement with her
that he will not sleep with anyone - her included -— if she
will return. The combination provided by her presence and
the childish affection given him by his son Walter is thus
the stabilizing force in his external world, advertising as
it were that he has achieved materially most of what he set
out for. It is important also that he have an heir to fol-
low him. The appearance of contentment is quite important
to this successful man, and the "Hirsh Block” empire he is
so preoccupied with would be a provisional thing without a
son to eventually take it over. In this sense Frank does
not see Walter as son, but as an extension of himself.

What Frank terms the ”real marriage,” the insufferable
relationship with a wife who knows she has the upper hand,
<nm who in fact becomes even more exasperating to him when
she has a bladder operation, is presented at the very end of
Book Five of the enormous novel:

He would come home, dead beat and dead
tired...and Agnes - back on her feet and
in good shape now (except when she wanted
to be sick) -— would be there to meet him
and stare at him accusingly. Or else,
which was worse, would suddenly burst forth
over nothing....So he would put up with it.
What else was there to do? He had to get
drunk, every night, to do it, but he put up
with it. And this was his life. She had
taken everything, destroyed everything -—
both him and herself. He was making more
money than he had ever made in his life be-
fore - was, in fact, well on his way to
becoming - magic word -— a millionaire _-

and yet what did it avail him? He had not
slept with a woman in almost a year.
(1198)

1+5

With no one to turn to an an intimate basis, Frank must
retire to his own private perversion which is, we find out at
length, peeping-tomism. He ”possesses" women by watching
them disrobe. The utter lack of warmth that has marked his
life, or the lives of everyone in this loveless book, are
emblemized in his touchless fetish.

My purpose in discussing Tom Bath and Frank Hirsh is to
show - through one ”happy" man and one "miserable" man -
clear instances of self-deception, of active and passive
surrender to fatherhood and husbandry as the least of evils,
or because nothing better is around. Bath's increasingly
corporate mind and his search for a contentment measured in
acres and dollars mark him as a less intelligent but none-
theless material brother to Burr Fuller of 223 Optimist.
Hirsh's ultimate return to his wife despite his inability to
communicate with her, and his general surrender to self-in-
dulgent perversion, show him to be an exaggerated but char-
acteristic relative of Howard Graeme in Thg_pi§guises 2;
£012.

Burr Fuller is rationally confident and self-reliant,
yet he believes in individual miracles. He is a man who
needs the love of others but who can get by on his own. He
is a paradox spawned by ambition and economic pressure. 0n
the fourth of July, at age twenty-one, he advises himself in
systematic, mock Franklinese:

War is not the only war. Parents love their
children, Just don't know how. Drink orange

46
Juice, hand-squeezed when available....
Treasure kindness. Forgive Mother and
Dad: it is not necessary to count on them.
Love Laura, Mike, children soon. Make mark
in world, but remember that ambition is
only hunger and desire. But love is salt,

not mere spice, necessary for life itself
else we perish.

Try best. (177)2u
Like many young men Burr sets broad goals and outlines wide
responsibilities for himself, while simultaneously he yearns
for intimacy, gentleness. He constantly charts his progress
and alots time for future activities while the present is in
disorder and time is racing forward toward despair. In re-
ality he is not unlike the busy stereotype who cherishes the
Lgpgg of wife and children but who thinks very infrequently
about either. Granville Hicks writes, "Burr is perhaps a
typical young man of his times, intelligent but essentially
Superficial, always asserting the self and never really
understanding it, not irresponsible in any gross way and yet
incapable of recognizing his true responsibilities.“25 The
finale of the novel, with Burr disconsolate yet definitely
rmt suicidal, shouting inwardly ”'More!‘" is as brutally
cynical as the end of Bpgpp.p§_g.§gpp was poignant. It is
cynical because it is a political solution -— politics being

Burr's chosen road to ”making a mark," or establishing a

 

24
Herbert Gold, The Optimist (Boston: Little, Brown, &
Co., 1959), p. 177. Page numbers in parentheses refer to
this edition.

25
Hicks, p. 229.

#7
distinct identity, in the world. "The art of the possible"
-— which is also the title of part four of Egg Optimist -—
cannot be practiced in a chamber of frankness or honesty.
Bunr.Fuller is always a politician in that he implicitly
consents to banality, untruth, and corrpution as being "part
of life." He doesn't gplpy;accepting, but he nonetheless
accepts, Just as he earlier gave a passive ygg to the non-
sense of fraternity life and the cruelty of military servi-
tude.

In one given to tactful assent, it is therefore predic-
table that he should have a correspondingly moderate, self-
Imoclaimed tranquil life at home. Many passages in the
early pages of part four bear this out. Even though he is
Jubilant over his political prospects, he thinks unexciting
thoughts - perhaps even lifeless thoughts:

5%."232dsifi-Egafis‘3r—Hininey"%§¥e“§§§d22dd1§$fi:

he would then p§§§,ppg,p;pg with his wife.

(1823 my italics)

More generally, he regrets how uninspired his married life
has been so far:

He found himself heavy with too much sitting,

his children one day older, and his wife fraz-

zled with boredom and unwillingness to be that

Young Mother toward which every fact of her

olife doomed her.
(182)

Laura, whom he once pursued insistently as the best of all
Possible girls, has become the bored American housewife, ex-

himated by children, deceived by tranquillizers, imprisoned

by routine :

48

Meanwhile, how had Laura's day been spent?

It had passed. She had sent Dan, the older

boy, off to nursery school in the car pool.

One day a week Burr took the bus downtown

and she took her turn at chauffering the

pack of four-year-olds.

(184)

In.each of the cases cited above what seems emphatic is that
tmth Burr and Laura are aware that their family life is un-
glorious, even unimportant. Yet neither of them evidences
any real capability of changing it, because they are victim-
ized by excessive self-love. Burr seeks a change, but it is
a.vocational one, a change in which only‘pg plays a role.
“'It'll look good,'“ he tells Laura, referring to the Demo-
cratic congressional nomination, "'to have Young, Forward-
thinking -— you know.'” The images he applies to obligation
and responsibility are drab and lackluster: those to self-
advancement are vigorous and exciting.

Burr's political adventures are essentially unimportant,
but they do provide an in-depth picture of his self-interest,
and they also provide the context for his reJuvenated sense
of sexual desire.

Like all Americans, Burr made much of sex. He
made love of sex, either in Puritan denial or
Protestant expectation, as if the hard little

burning light focussed through the magnifying
glass were really the whole of the sun.

g (336)
The ”focus" is his self, identified more readily in sex.

POIitics withdraws him from his disenchanted home and he
quickly, easily falls in love with Barbara McKinley, the
dauShter of a Democratic leader. Beautiful and responsive.

Barbara reaches Burr's erotic sense. Having been under

49

analysis, she relates to Burr her abnormal life with her
father -— that she was still, in fact, the<iominated daugh-
ter, seeking in married men a bit of both husband and father.
Burr is only slightly interested in this disclosure, for even
his extramarital sex has a selfish root: but it should have
signalled to him her purpose in their affair. On the other
hand, Burr perceives Barbara only in sensual responses that
she can create. This becomes obvious very early in their
relationship: "Burr felt her warmth catching along the whole
side of his body, her face and its dark hair burning him as
they leaned together, leaned against each other, looking.”
(278) Barbara warms nerve-ends and makes supple his ambi-
tious yearning. Their affair is told quite often in terms
cf‘ppppp, specifically the touch-reaction in Burr. Although
rm dreams of an all-perfect love with her, and dreams it
frequently, the dream has no pictorial substance. Their
£32; life together, on the other hand, is a compound of sen-
sory stimuli and response: the strip of skin he sees through
the sleeve of her blouse is "like the trapped miner's dis-
covery of sky": (314) a soft kiss on her appendix scar is the
only reaction he gives to her relating that long-ago opera-
tion: her lips give the sense of a “healthy hot fruit, a
squeezed dark plum squirting sweet Juice into his mouth.”
(346)

With Laura love has become ”mortal conflict" in which
together they kill love -— "an efficient assassination.”
(3h1) Yet in either case -— with Laura or with Barbara _—

50

it is Burr who is being served, rather than serving. The
maJor insight of the novel is, in Professor Hassan's words,
that ”the death of love and the disease of politics both
stem from the same kind of excess, the deeperate blandness
which is the other face of isolation."26

Burr "uses" other people and things, also. His sons
rflay only the role of political asset for him. To go on a
picnic with his family is for Burr something that might
tuing votes from the otherwise distrustful blue-collar family
men. From Mike Murray (the "Mike” of his earlier ledger-
entry), his longtime friend, he receives the service of a
listener, one who always listens carefully to Burr's endless
Iflans, one whom Burr can count on to be honest and straight-
forward in his reactions. The crashing blow to Burr is
struck when the ”tread” is gone from their friendship. Dis-
covering that Mike is sleeping with Laura, Burr slowly re-
members the parallel pattern of break-up and break-down that
has marked their lives since his own early acquiescence in
college and in the army. Because he has been blind to all
else save his own fulfillment of plans and satisfaction of
desires, Burr has failed to notice the consequences that the
selfishness has had on others: he has turned Laura into a
neurotic bitch and Mike -— the impractical moralist - into

a cowardly cynic:

 

26

Hassan, Radical gnnocence, p. 183.

51

He blamed himself very much. He blamed him-

self for driving Mike and Laura together,

and moving that triangle of lead into Mike's

belly, that same cold disdain and longing into

his own belly where it weighed heavily, the

worst kind of sexual excess, Jealousy. And

he felt once again that sick lurch of long-

ing, and the combination of fury and bore-

dom, perverse desire and turning away, which

Laura's image aroused in him now.

(392)

He admits to himself that he was ”unwilling to accept unhap-
piness as a part of marriage." (390) But this does not seem
to be to the point, because he is evaluating only the recent
adulteries and not the long-standing shallowness of their
relationship. He votes against suicide, because death would
only bring an end to desire, and he does not want desire to
cease. Only through endless lust can Burr make any strides,
either as an individual or as a social figure. But the
”'More!’“ that he is opting for is to a degree composed of
his functions as lover of wife and father to children: both
require perseverence but not much desire - he has proven
that. Both wife and children make up a layer of his politi-
cal campaign - that part of his ambition which has detached
him, ironically, from even a superficial family relationship.
At the end, when he cries out for more, he is a puzzled
sensualist, a walking urge which can be momentarily satisfied
but which constantly returns. The distressing part of it is
that when he reaches for his cloud, when he asks for excess,
he simultaneously admits that the relationship between him

and Laura cannot be bettered. Yet he returns, apparently

without conviction.

52

Howard Graeme, in Robie hacauley's Egg Disguises 2;
£213, is a notably different husband-father from those we
have looked at so far in that he has a grown son with whom
he can potentially interact and communicate. The novel
(traces the effect which an affair between a psychology pro-
fessor and a student has on the professor's wife and son,
and on the family as a whole. It is a slow, deliberate
tracing, for Helen and Gordon Graeme know nothing except
the effect through most of the book. Fatherhood is an im-
portant aspect in the book also: the generations may com-
municate, but they do not comprehend. And like Frank Hirsh,
though to a different extent, Howard has pgpg of his son,
and this need is a factor in his decision to remain within
the family unit rather than take a plane after his mistress.

The novel is written from an alternating, threefold
point of view, and Howard as father is first presented through
the mind of his son. In Gordon's way of thinking, Howard is
a half-hearted father, a lukewarm critic, an equivocating
bore. "My father never said that I lied,” young Gordon nar-
rates, "or that I was stupid or that I had cheated him out
of the kind of son he wanted: he said I did him no credit."27
A psychologist would know that a touch of indifference in-
vites more rebellion or a more complete withdrawal by the
child or adolescent than does a touch of hatred. In Gordon

 

2?
Hobie Macaulay, The Disgpise p£,Love (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1952), p. 3. Page num rs in parentheses refer
to this edition.

53

the reaction is one of withdrawal and distaste. His father
begins to explain “split personality“ at the dinner table,
and his mother obJects to this on grounds of vague indecency.
Gordon relates the situation, and also his feelings about
the dullness of his father's conversation:

To her the whole subJect was rather indeli-

cate, while to me it was only a bore. As

Howard's conversational range wasn't very

wide, we managed to establish a fair amount

of silence during meals. 6)

Chapter II, in which Howard is the first-person narra-
tor, begins with the same sentence that began the novel -
that Gordon is no credit to the family. It is followed in
this new vantage point by an inordinately cold and technical
survey of son Gordon. Howard's prose is that of interested
detachment, that of a scientist reporting the findings of
his laboratory subcommittee:

He showed very early signs of alertness and

ability to learn....The first tests I gave

him showed exceptional results....Without

any question, he showed an unusual celerity

in speech development, in vocabulary and in

reasoning ability....An edged mind cuts

beautifully, but it can Just as easily wound

its owner, or be turned and broken by the

hard surfaces that a duller one simply saws

away at.

(19)

Despite the aloofness that these “findings" betray, and des-
pite the academic self-consciousness of that last sentence,
Howard nevertheless does show also that there was a time
when his son was the single unifying agent in their depres-
sion-born family. And later in the novel, prior to the

revelation of his unfaithfulnoss, he and Gordon spend a

5H
pleasant week fishing. "Pleasant“ is appropriate, for both
Howard and Gordon emphasize cordiality and warmth in their
respective narrative parts of the chapter. Near the end of
the section Howard accidentally falls in the water, and the
ensuing events are "unpleasant." Howard re-assesses his
early data concerning Gordon and finds it hopelessly mis-
leading. Notwithstanding the splash and the reassessment,
however, Howard's willingness to enjoy himself with his son
indicates a concern that is no longer especially scientific
or cold. The chapter serves as an idyll of sorts before the
confused finale.

As is the case with many of the previous characters
discussed in this chapter, Howard Graeme is bored by his
wife. As he relates it:

As a younger man, I had never thought I would

reach that point in marriage when the morning

newspaper seems more alive than your wife

across the table. Without my realizing quite

how, it had happened.

(25)

ifind, once again similar to many other post-World War II male
characters, he seeks new excitement for his life elsewhere.
A student of his named Frances is his passport, and any motel
13 his promised land. Macauley does not draw an especially
good picture of the girl, even though Howard is so taken
‘1 th the idea of having her as a mistress. The reason he
d°es not might have something to do with Helen. To stress
tn3l? as a dull woman encouraging the dull life, it is neces-
a‘UPyto make the other woman a comparative ideal.
But Frances is a realizable entity, rather than a

55
manifestation of beauty or figment of Howard's mind. His

imagination is not especially fruitful; he admits that his
once naive belief in the systematic world represented in
Sherlock Holmes stories was simply a comfortable untruth,
and any untruth must be held suspect. It is unlikely that
he would choose to invent anything about Frances. Near the
end she tears up the airline ticket that he was to have used
in Joining her on their getaway flight. At this point she
has made a choice for both of them which, though not irrevo-
cable, is nevertheless dramatic enough to dissuade Howard
from extending the life of their affairs for at the climac-
tic moment it seems to him a sad untruth, no longer to be
considered. For a few minutes he stands and hits his hands
on the guard rail, then he Joins his wife and son, and sud-
denly things are back the way they were before: they are
together and bored. But they do realize the “disguised mo-
tives” that have surfaced because of the affair, and hence
they know the boredom now as a sad, collective truth.
What the four men in the novels discussed in the pre-
c"ruling paragraphs have in common is a picture of the future
tluat is, eventually, maddeningly colorless. It is colorless
because they have not sought to rejuvenate or strengthen the
I‘1bre of meaningful family unity: Hath only thinks he has.
3:11 addition, none of them really knows why they are where
'trnby are. The romanticists discussed earlier achieved some
r°rm of honest realization, but the men here undergo a loss

or vision, a depletion of spirit. Yet all remain within the

56

framework of the family.

But among the husbands and fathers in.American novels
of the post-World War II period some of the most convincing
characters are those involved - one way or another - in
the break-up of the family unit. They are cast out, locked
out, or they run away. The central male characters in Vance
Bourjaily's The E222§.2£.§2££2 and John Updike's RabbitI 322
both choose alienation: the former out of wounded humanitar-
ianism, the latter from self-driven mysticism. The chief men
of‘William Styronds Iég_22§g in Darkness and Saul Bellow's
£114}: 213 93.1 suffer the painful effects of making wrong
choices and loving the wrong way. They are shut off in
every sense.

The main setting of Thg_§gggg.g£_§§g§h is a department
store at Christmas time in the postwar years. Because of
the seasonal employment, the number of characters actively
involved in the novel is large; most of them indulge in some
curious perversion, and together they make up a microcosm of
'hfithl Pennington calls ”'history's first neurotic nation.”28
Pennington,.a military deserter being pursued by a benevolent
FBI man named Usez, withdrew from family and from life be-
°‘u8e he discovered that the special project on which he was
'°1‘king was the atomic bomb. He makes it his way of life

simply u, run .. from one place to another - and take upon

\

28
Vance BourJaily, The Hound of Earth (New York: The
1“"1 Press, 1955), p. 211. Page —_nmbers in parentheses re-

391‘ to this edition.

57
himself the troubles of the world, in mock atonement for
what he feels is his unpardonable sin. .Al Pennington is
modern man magnified: he carries the nuclear dilemma around
with him, calls it is own, and begs almost Christ-like for
the sins of others. He wants to suffer alone, yet he also
wishes to serve in some way the society he has helped de-
stroy. He doesn't so much lggzg his wife and children as
he gives them the opportunity of being someone else's. He
doesndt want to share his pain with them. He feels that he
alone should carry the awful burden of having been one of
those who began the end of the world. In this way he is not
a.deserter of his family.» He deserts social institutions
tncause he has been duped by society, because he has been
used as its pawn. He is a seeker after the greater family,
that group of distinct individuals whom he can serve anony-
mously and one at a time. There is considerable evidence in
tho novel of Al's carrying his paternalism far beyond his
°'h door.

Al is a man that others gggg‘tg, a father or even a
father-confessor. He exudes humanitarianism so much that
‘Vfin the government agent, who has never laid eyes on him,
rqlarks to himself after reading a letter which the FBI had
1‘ntercepted on its way to Mrs. Pennington:

Pennington was a warm man for all his nihil-
ism....Pennington-Barker might - might he
not? - have been reaching out for a sort of
universal communication, so that in saying
”My dears...‘ he was trying to get through,
somehow, to all his countrymen and country-

women, to put himself in a general, transcen-
dent touch which would take the place of the

58
simple, individual touch so soberly self-
denied.
(36)
In addition to his reaching out for a universal family, Al
simultaneously engages in the "simple, individual“ relation-
ship despite his efforts to dissuade the involvement of
others in his life. He engages in them because his paterna-
lism attracts the interest of others. Nickie Moore, beauti-
ful, pregnant, and hoping to earn enough for an abortion,
becomes sick from bubble-blowing, which is her Job: Al helps
her and comforts her. For any man to help a beautiful woman
needs no explanation, but Al's case is quite different. .As
if in guilt, or in reassurance to his distant wife, he had
been chaste during the first weeks following his departure;
then briefly unchaste: then, realizing that self-denial has
to be a part of his crucifixion, alcoholically indifferent.
Nickie is attracted to him, but he discourages her because
he believes it is not his prerogative any longer to love or
be loved. ”King Al,” as he refers to himself as if to evoke
simultaneously the Christian parallel and his universal
servitude, can only help maneuver Nickie back to her Job,
give her encouragement, and acknowledge her friendship. He
also wants to take the blame, later, for the theft of a bunch
of toys, done actually by Sally Malinkrodt, an easily-aroused
young woman whose husband is impotent. .And he hopes for
leniency toward Evans, the department store Santa Claus, by
telling authorities that he was the one who had given whis-

key to the old man, a compu'sive drinker.

59
The sickest person of all is Dolly Klamath, the ser-

vice manager of the toy department and self-appointed warden
of employee morality. while appearing to be an overly-
prudish moralist; she is in secret an aggressive lesbian, a
psychotic almost-nun who eventually commits suicide by suck-
ing strychnine-enriched milk out of a baby bottle. Although
she has spied on Al and although he is aware of her home-
sexual attack on another salesgirl, he treats Dolly gently
and with understanding, for she is to him another child. Her
trust in him is underlined in the fact that she tries to
contact him on Christmas eve, Just before she takes the
poison.

As it turns out, the holiday season is tragic. In
addition to Dolly, Evans dies, and a small party in the toy
department turns into near riot. Al sees that even his
efforts at kindness and attempts to help others have turned
into chaos, and that his contribution to the great family
seems only to aggravate an advanced sickness. He is final-
ly taken into custody by Usez and later sentenced to the
federal penitentiary at Leavenworth. From then on he con-
tinually requests transfer to Alcatraz, presumably because
of the isolation it conjures in his mind: he will risk no
more part in destruction - physical, emotional, spiritual.
As an actual husband and father, Al Pennington.wants to be
considered a cipher. His request for.Alcatraz is a request
for the maximum penalty: to be forced to live only with
himself.

60
A similar pattern involving a vastly different person-

ality, can be found in Updike's novel of the former basket-
ball ace with a careless, drinking wife and a Job selling
multipurpose kitchen tools. Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is
like.Al Pennington in that he flees £2 alienation. But for
Harry to be alone is to realize fully the present. when
Rabbit is with others he must share, but when he is by him-
self time and motion are consecrated. The present tense of

the novel is significant in this way: for Rabbit, immediacy
. is all. ”Harry's intention,“ writes David Galloway, ”is to
find that world in which he can again experience the sacred-
ness of achievement....He longs for total absorption in the
present moment, for an opportunity to express his compassion
for the human race.'29 The essentially static nature of his
quest-flight is emphasized by Professor Waldmeir: ”Harry's
search is no search at all: for all his moving, he stands
stock-still: the more he wriggles, the deeper grows the
hole which he digs for himself.“30

Related to the above points is the way each character

runs, but in opposite directions: King Al only sought to
serve, but Rabbit seeks to be served. And although both
seem to be celebrants of ritual, Rabbit's is far more in-
stinctive, more primitive, more self-contained. {At the end

of the novel he is stripped emotionally bare. His wife and

 

29
Galloway, p. 31

30
Waldmeir, The Nation, p. 393.

luv

‘e

61
surviving child will make do: he has very little doubt of
this.

Ritual in RabbitI Rug involves the shedding of other-
ness and the taking on of singularity - but not as in.ghg
ggggg‘g£_§§g§h, for Harry does it with speed and lust, Al
reluctantly, with admitted despair, for Alcatraz would be
his end of the line. The force of RabbitI 333 goes unal-
tered to the “sweet panic” of the last page, which functions
as an epigraph: ”Funny, how what makes you move is so sim-
ple and the field you must move in is so crowded."31 "What
makes you move” is the force, the instinct on which Rabbit
relies so heavily, from the start of the book to the end of
it. “The field" so crowded is of course the territory occu-
pied by all the otherness in the novel. It is made difficult
for the runner by rules and conventions, and more so by the
reverence with which these rules and conventions are held
by others. “The world is a forbidding place in which to
grow up,” Sidney Finkelstein writes in connection with the
novel, ”and having had a taste of adulthood, his reaction is
a frantic urge to flee."32

At least five people in the novel attack Rabbit in a
related fashion: at one time or another his wife Janice, her

mother, Mr. Angstrom, the minister Eccles, and even Ruth _-

 

31
John Updike, RabbitI Run (New York: Fawcett Crest,
1960), p. 254. Page numbers in parentheses refer to this
edition.

32
Finkelstein, p. 2““e

62

with whom he shares a great deal of intimacy -— all say that
Rabbit has no concern for his family nor sense of familial
responsibility. The words come out violently, indicating
the seriousness with which, for example, even his mistress
Ruth indicts him: "'You're Mister Death himself," she says
after he informs her that it was not his but Janice's fault
that their infant daughter had drowned. “'You're not Just
nothing, you're worse than nothing,'" Ruth says. ”'You're
not a rat, you don't stick, you're not enough to stink."
(251) The intense emotional pain that she suffers, detest-
ing him yet carrying another of his children, pours out
against his alien notion of purity and goodness. Reverend
Eccles, who follows Rabbit as if the young man's soul were
the greatest challenge of all, a ticket to the highest ring
of paradise, cannot restrain himself. At one point he
shouts, with womanish excitement, “'You're monstrously sel-
fish. You're a coward. You don't care about right or wrong:
you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.'” (112)

RabbitI R32 is not the story of an emotional rebel or
an anti-hero or a distraught youth seeking identity. It is
the story of an adult male who has a wife and a child, and
another on the way, and who has a relatively small among
of intellectuality as central characters go, but who has
a rather large amount of physical energy and faith in that
energy. J. A. Ward calls Rabbit “an irrational man,” but

one who comes close.to "living an honest and 'clean' life."33

 

33"John Updike's Fiction," Critigue, V(Spring-Summer,
1962): P0 35-

63
It is honest and clean, however, in a decidedly unconven-

tional way.
His first "run" is in a car, but during it he is thrust

at hundreds of highway images and signs which in his mind
generally boil down to non-mechanical, non-travelogue recol-
lections: sexual or athletic, or both. For instance:

The first road offered him he turns right

on. A keystone marker in the headlights

says 23. A good number. The first varsity

game he played in he made 23 points. A

sophomore and a virgin.

(25)

As husband, as father, as drifter, as drifter, as celebrant,
Rabbit is what his name implies and what the above few sen-
tences indicate: an athlete who is essentially the same
ballplayer who scored 23 points in his first game, the un-
spent youth eager to experience as much as life consists of.
Going back even further, to the opening scene in the novel,
in which he thrills himself with his scoring prowess among
a few small boys, we see Updike emphasizing the point about
athletic ability, and the seizing of a moment as an every-
‘thing. At another spot he explains to Ruth, who had chided
him about his boastfulness, "I was great. It's the fact.
It mean, I'm not much good for anything now, but I really was
Escod at that.'“ (64) Even the past tense is deceptive here,
1J1 light of the introductory scene with the young boys. And
Gus for his current attitude toward sportsmanship, we need
‘3lily turn to the early scene in which his old coach, Tothero,
aSke if he ever drank with his wife: Rabbit answers with the

nulive pride of one whose voice has not quite completed its

64

change in pitch: "'No, sir, never. I can't stand the stuff,

I Just don't like the taste.'” (39)

Evidence of his sexual zeal can be spotted most easily
in the scenes with Ruth, rather than those with his wife.

He eventually returns home from his interlude when his wife
is in the hospital having a baby. But Janice's physical
condition after giving birth to their daughter forces Rab-
bit to behave in a manner to which he is unaccustomed. For
a time, he interprets his own self-denial as a form of "wor-
ship” of his wife. (195) But this wears off, and soon his
lust returns.

With Ruth, however, the limitations of the marriage
bond do not apply, so his youthfulness can be fully reborn.
Their first act of love - committed during his first ”flight,”
before the birth of his child - is explicitly detailed be-
cause the details are extremely important to Rabbit. Her
primitive purity should not be soiled, neither by extraneous
clothing nor contraceptives. Significantly, coitus with
Ruth reminds him of the early days with his wife, and he
Inrceives that ”Janice was shy of his eyes so Ruth heats in
Ids darkness.“ (7“) In his mind Rabbit ties each movement
<of their bodies with a higher law, with great profundity:
“She feels transparent: he sees her heart.” (75) The moment
of orgasm is essentially religious, cataclysmic. The ela-
tnarateness of the descriptions and the intensity with which
Rabbit makes each step contrasts the anguished stealth that
nuirks his later attempt at love-making with his yet incapable

‘r.

£1

’4‘-

65
wife.

In fact, Rabbit's relationship with Ruth generally con-
trasts his home life. As a married couple Rabbit and Janice
do not in the course of the book show themselves to be es-
pecially compatible. Their most peaceful moments are spent
in front of the television set. The first time we see them
together, the "Mousketeers" program is on, and they watch
quietly. After Janice has the baby and Rabbit is visiting
her in the hospital, they enjoy, in mutual silence, an after-
noon give-away program. But most of the time they argue,
and the most telling argument takes place after his perverted
efforts at making love to her fail. ”'Why can't you try to
imagine how I gggl?" she says. “'I've just had a baby.'“
Rabbit shouts back at her, "'I can. I can but I don't want
to, it's not the thing, the thing is how';.feel. And I feel
like getting out.'” (207) He speaks the words in a moment
of angry tension, yet they are important as the most “honest“
statement he makes. "How I feel“ furthermore is a voicing
of instinct, and Rabbit is too instinctive to be tied to the
feelings of his wife.

As father, Rabbit also reacts according to instinct or
urge. His moments with Nelson, his son, as well as those
with the boys on the basketball court at the opening of the
book, indicate the importance of touch -— basic, primitive
communication - to relationships between children and a
childlike adult. Nelson is not enough to keep him from run-
ning, however. He isn't even enough to affect the imagina-

tion of his father, for what Rabbit wants is not so much to

66
haze a boy as to 22.3 boy, with strong legs to make him move
and a cute face that makes people serve him. Rabbit has no
desire to mature: he tells Eccles, "as far as I can make out
it's the same thing as being dead." (90)

Harry Angstrom is a disturbing character in a different
light, also. He "sheds” the people with whom he comes in
contact: they are made better by his withdrawal from their
lives, and‘hg knows it. The process makes him strangely
'clean', as Mr. Ward states, he realizes this in his "sweet
panic” at the end:

Standing on the top step he tries to sort his
worries, tries to analyze the machinery be-
hind him in the house, put his finger on what
makes it so loud. Two thoughts comfort him,
let a little light through the dense pack of
impossible alternatives. Ruth has parents,
and she will let his baby live: two thoughts
that are perhaps the same thought, the verti-
cal order of parenthood, a kind of thin tube
upright in time in which our solitude is
somewhat diluted. Ruth and Janice both have
parents: with this thought he dissolves both
of them. Nelson remains: here is a hard-
ness he must carry with him. On this small
fulcrum he tries to balance the rest, weigh-
ing opposites against each other: Janice

and Ruth, Eccles and his mother, the right
way and the good way....He tries to picture
how it will end, with an empty baseball
field, a dark factory, and then over a brook
into a dirt road, he doesn't know.

(251+)
He becomes more and more along because eventually everyone
finds him deplorable. The finale shows, however, that he
might very well have willed the deploring - that he might
have purposely discouraged them from anything but a super-
ficial service to him, a moment here and an hour there.

The full achievement of a man like this is pure loneliness,

67
actually a state of happiness to the runner.

If Harry runs, Tommy Wilhelm, in Saul Bellow's Sgigg
thg_ggz cowers, isolated against his will. Because of Tom-
my's constant helplessness and his periodic childlikeness,
there are really two fathers to be considered in §2$22 the
221. Tommy, or Wilky Adler as his father refers to him,
must be evaluated as husband and father because these roles
are factors in his emotional condition as much as is his
being a disowned son. And Dr. Adler, Tommy's father, is
especially important as the figure who helps complete the
picture of the past. His false pride and distorted sense
of paternalism also accentuate Tommy's corresponding self-
pity and helpless sentimentality.

Family relationships dictate everything that happens in
this short novel, and the most important of these - ”the
psychosenter,” as Maxwell Geismar calls it, is the father-

son pair, Tommy and Dr. Adler.3u

The latter is about eighty,
his son about forty. The Doctor is, not surprisingly, a
financial success: his son, on the other hand, is in debt
and out of a job. Money is used as an important prop in the
story: action and dialogue in the present and past transpire
in an atmosphere cluttered with money and money-problems.

Tommy needs help, and indeed says to his father, ”I expect
help!"35 What he means, at least in the beginning, is that

M

BuGeismar. pe 219 e

3SSaul Bellow, Seize the Day (New York: Fawcett Crest,
1956), p. 60. Page numBErs in parentheses refer to this
edition.

68

he needs money. The doctor wants no one dependent on him:
“carry nobody on your back," he tells Tommy. What he means
is give no money, owe no money. But Tommy has many bills
to pay, not the least of which is court-ordered support to
his wife Margaret and their sons. He seeks time and under-
standing frcm her: she demands payment. The circularity
that rises out of the need-refusal repetition gives the
story a kind of endlessness, even in the world in which
cash - "that most refined of all abstractions -— rules in
place of the natural affections."36

In an ideal father-son relationship some things, it is
reasonable to assume, would remain constant: concern, sym-
pathy, respect. Between Adler and Tommy none of these
exist. For Dr. Adler they were wiped away by his son when
he changed his name and left home to seek his own way, and
was then chewed up and spat out, first by Hollywood and
later by big business. In his old age Dr. Adler can only
look at the forty-year-old man that used to be his son but
now is an utter failure, begging for subsistence. The el-
derly man thus expresses in his feelings the sad paradox
in the cycle of life: when his son was young he needed his
father simply to exist, and this was good: then, by growing
up, by going out into the world, he said he no longer needed
to depend on his father. Once that bond had been broken, the

doctor drifted away emotionally, and when the forty-year—old

36
Podhoretz, p. 221.

69
Tommy asks for help he is trying to re-achieve that old bond,
which the Doctor out of pain does not want to do. As the
father of an adult son he feels obligation only to be proud
of the adult son's success or, as is the case most of the
time, ashamed of his adult son's failure. He even feels
compelled to express that pride to Mr. Perls, a neighbor in
the present of the novel: "Wilky used to be with the Rojax
Corporation,” he tells the man. ”He was their northeastern
sales representative for a good many years but recently
ended the connection.” (#0) Rojax represents a special sore
spot for Tommy, since it was there that he lost out to a son-
in-law. At any rate, there is a kind of parental boasting
here, which is made curious by the fact that Tommy is pres-
ent. "Wilhelm let his father do the explaining," (40) Bellow
notes. What seems most notable about this scene is the com-
plete willingness that Tommy shows to be a dependent son for
just a moment, and the corresponding willingness on the part
of the doctor to be the providing father. The presence of
the neighbor necessitates a facade, but it is nonetheless a
facade that is quickly, easily shaped.

During the entire novel, Doctor Adler never acquiesces,
never gives help. In his farewell to Wilky he calls him a
slob, and he refuses to pick up the "cross" held out to him.
What Adler sees before him.ig a slob because the other era
ended when the son went, with no blessing, to Hollywood.

The doctor stands now like the mocking god of irrevocability,
both shameful and ashamed.

70
As a father Tommy is oddly enough also of the past. He

is not actively cruel, although it should be noted that he
has no longer the opportunity to be so, since his sons are
far away with Margaret. When the doctor recalls that he,
unlike Tommy, stayed at home and took care of his children,
Tommy begs understanding: ”It's true the movies was a false
step. But I love my boys. I didn't abandon them.” (57)
Despite what he says, though, he did abandon them, in the
sense that he grieved for his own loss more than he did for
theirs. The only touch of sincere paternalism that Tommy
expresses in the book does not really come across to the
bone: his communication is blocked by self-concern. He
recalls a time they spent together recently:

When he went to fetch them, to go to Ebbets

Field, though, he was not himself. He put on

a front but he felt as if he had swallowed a

fistful of sand. The strange, familiar house,

horribly awkward: the dog, Scissors, rolled

over on his back and barked and whined. Wil-

helm acted as if there were nothing irregular,

but a weary heaviness came over him. On the

way to Flatbush he would think up anecdotes

about old Pigtown and Charlie Ebbets for the

boys and reminiscences of the old stars, but

it was very heavy going. They did not know

how much he cared for them.

(102)

The last sentence is beautifully ambiguous, since “them”
could just as easily stand for either "the old stars“ or
the sons themselves: it works with meaning both ways. The
boys do not know, because Tommy has not let them know, that
their father is concerned about them: they do not know be-
cause their father is really unsure himself. They do not

know how much the old stars, the old days, another time,

71
another place, meant to their father, because he cannot ex-
press the irrevocability of its pastness. He can only judge
it in comparison with the present, and the present falls far
short in enjoyment. In this he is like his father.

His dealings in the novel with his wife Margaret resem-
ble those with Dr. Adler in that she turns her back on his
most fervent pleas for patience and help. Her advice to him
is to go back to Rojax and beg for his job. He in turn
pleads with her to get a job herself and support the boys.
The repetition of these two sides begins once again the cir-
cularity involved in the Tommy-Dr. Adler arguments. He
blames her for any indifference the boys might feel toward
their father: she blames him for making real the possibility
that the boys will be caught up in ”street-gang" activity.

It should be noted that Margaret refused‘to give him a
divorce: this too he has begged for in the past, when he was
in love with another woman, but to no avail. Nor can he
bring himself to go back to her, for he walked out because
he ”had to,” because of some great pressure. As people "have
to” get married, Wilhelm "had to" leave, despite his children,
because he could give them nothing when his own needs were
unfulfilled.

In sum, Tommy Wilhelm is a failure as husband and father
because he is too much a son. He never was given the oppor-
tunity to move gracefully away from his father, and we sus-
pect that he would not have done so even if given the oppor-
tunity. Death itself will not free him. Should his father

72

die, conditions will be worse, and he admits as much to Tam-
kin. ”When he dies," he says, “I'll be robbed, like. I'll
have no more father.” (101) We might also recall at this
point that Wilhelm knows the exact moment when his mother
died: even so, it is the father-figure that he seems to have
the greatest affinity for, and Daniel Weiss notes this: ”the
other figures on whose mercy he throws himself, are in de-
clining series, fathers —- Maurice Venice, Rojax Corporation,
Tamkin, Mr. Perls, and Mr. Rappaport.” Weiss traces the
possible motivation for such surrender: "In Wilhelm it is
the masochistic necessity to fail, to be destroyed at the
hands of the punishing father...."37 It is M, £13,
finality that surge forward in the last pages of the novel:
his grief in the final scene - weeping openly and furiously
at the casket of someone he had never before seen - im-
presses upon the reader the enormous weight of death on
Tommy: whether the death of a stranger, or a mother, or a
father, or himself, the ending represents a shattering of
repressions, to paraphrase Weiss.38

When the family as an entity shatters, when it breaks
up, it is not unreasonable to presume that the father had
something to do with the break-up. In the novels by

37
Daniel Weiss, "Caliban on Prospero: A Psychoanalytic

Study on the Novel Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow,” The Amer-
ican Ima o, XIX (Fall, I962), p. 287.

38
lbide. p. 282e

‘ .D

‘p

“I“

73
Bourjaily, Updike, and Bellow this is clearly the case. But

he may also be victimized, the way Wilhelm is, or the way
Milton Loftis is, in Styron's Lie 2232 IELDarkness. Loftis's
position is unenviable, but his failure as family head goes
beyond what one might expect even under the trying condi-
tions in this novel. gig 2222.12 Darkness is a book about
the slow dissolution of a family: perhaps it is also about
the end of a war, and the end of a world, for it has almost
no light moments. Loftis himself is one of the most miser-
able characters in modern fiction. His wife Helen can only
love a cripple, and when the crippled child dies she realizes
how deeply she hates even herself. Daughter Peyton can only
sense happiness in strange dreams.

The economic conditions that contribute to the despair
of Tommy Wilhelm also figure significantly here. Loftis is
not a breadwinner: the debt he owes his wife pulses malig-
nantly in his consciousness. The money to be dispensed with
is Peyton money, the heritage of Helen's stern military
father. Of his own father Milton remembers only pompous
verbosity, or, in his father's own words, ”the driblet turds
of angels."39 Milton can love only a dead father, and even
then it seems more like pitiful reminiscence. Helen brought
into their marriage, besides money, semi-fundamental protes-

tantism - more sternness and regulations. This oppresses

William Styron, Lie Down‘ig Darkness (New York: Vik-
ing-Compass, 1951), p. 17. Page numbers in parentheses re-
fer to this edition.

 

 

7h
Milton's moral instinct as much as the Peyton inheritance
had injured his ambitious pride. Religion for Hilton is
that which politicians bow to before large gatherings:
church is little more than a refuge for fearful prudes and
young women with bad breath.

Milton's life within the flashback of the novel - in
other words the entire middle, for Peyton's cortege is at
one end and her actual dying moments are at the other -— is
essentially a life of reaction against Helen. It is a series
of victimizing episodes involving matrimony, alcoholism, and
self-love. The reaction ultimately explodes in hatred, but
at one time it might have been tenderness, perhaps even
love. In the early days -— the pro-children days - Milton
at least yearned for her. Even so, while awaiting his
daughter's corpse he remembers that he had been inwardly
elated when Helen had told him that upon her mother's death
they would inherit one hundred thousand dollars. For him
the prospect of so much money had preempted the fact of de-
pendency: in the course of their marriage, however, Helen
makes the dependence a tool of irritation.

Since it appears that his wife's love is strongest when
accompanied by pity, Loftis takes to drinking, unconsciously
seeking that pity. But Helen only scorns him, turns further
away from him. She loves most of all her helpless daughter
Maudie, and against this love Loftis has no match. He gives
excessively, to balance things, to their other daughter,

Peyton, who is exquisitely beautiful. The parents thus pit

75

themselves unconsciously against the children, and although
Milton cannot muster any sort of feeling toward Maudie,
Helen grows to detest Peyton. The distorted loves and un-
natural hates grow. Peyton has her ”bunny," while Milton
looks upon her as a "wingless bird." Incestuous attraction
and familial hatreds develop simultaneously. But ultimately
only the gel: in each character, rather than a union of
selves, is destined to matter. As Professor Galloway states
it, "all of the characters are somehow doomed to play out
their fates without external interference. They do not, and
Styron seems to say cannot, achieve any personality integra-
tion, can never reach full or complete identification....”uo

Milton's responsibility in all this is not diminished
by the fact that his wife is a bitch. "He is married to a
woman who," according to Professor Galloway, ”is incapable
not only of loving but even of being loved except in the
make-believe, idealistic world of childhood which is kept

#1 Against Helen's

alive for her in a demented daughter."
sternness and indifference he thrusts lazy dissipation and
loud vulgarity: against her religiosity he flaunts, after a
while, a sordid affair with a voluptuous but frivolous
floozy, Dolly Bonner. For a time he seriously desires

Dolly, but eventually she represents for him only what

 

#0
Galloway, p. 55.

#1
Ibide . Pe 56o

 

76
liquor represents: a way to lash out at Helen without actu-
ally leaving her. The major scenes in the novel are scenes
in which Milton is drunken, or angry, or both. At his
daughter's wedding he is stupefied, saddened, and ashamed:
during an air raid he gets drunk and makes love to Dolly on
Helen's bed: at his daughter's funeral he rages at his wife's
coldness and actually tries to strangle her. He is as much
a victim of the situation as is Peyton, because he has a
reservoir of love and no one to give it to. His beloved ob-
ject is his daughter, and his most anguished moments are
those in which he realizes that she is forever forbidden to
him. (His feelings for Dolly are never more than sheer lust,
or perhaps hopefulness that she will become Peyton: in the
final scenes it is clear that he is weary, if not sickened,
by the woman.) When Peyton kills herself the love no longer
has even a forbidden channel to drift into. Thus he attacks
Helen and shouts, "God damn you! ...If I can't have...then
you...nothing!“ (The ellipses are Styron's.) (388)

Loftis goes out from himself as a last resort. There is
"nothing left,” so he turns to Helen, but then he realizes
traumatically the chasm between them, and recognizes in hor-
ror that a marriage which is empty while children live will
not suddenly become full when they die. We see at the end
that Milton has never really been a husband, because he has
not received the recognition of a wife. Helen, not inter-
ested in marital salvation because she has the salvation

dictated by the minister Carey Carr, cannot give the sexual

77
kind of love that Milton seeks. What Milton has wanted all

along has been a wife who would take him for what he was,
then weigh every ounce of it and say “you're my man," and
hand him another drink. One might say that Dolly fits this
bill, but he only wants her once in a while, like liquor,
when things get rough. He doesn't want to change for Helen
because he cannot change. The "nothing" that he shouts at
Helen as he encloses her neck in his hands is indeed one of
the most desperate moments of recent literature. It repre-
sents even more than a last striking-out against the denial
of love. It represents Loftis's admission of failure, com-
plete and all-encompassing. The close proximity between
this tragic finale and the symbolic triumph of Daddy Faith,
a Negro revivalist, underlines the simple success of the
black ”father." As Ihab Hassan puts it, "The white girl
does not find the father and lover she so desperately needs,
but the black congregation finds both: 'You, Daddy! Daddy
Faith! You loves us! You, Daddy!'”u2 The contrast is
sharp, perhaps even brutal. ”Milton is no Daddy Faith,”
writes Maxwell Geismar. "Just as he has pinned all his
stability, his desire, on an unreal vision of the love for
his daughter, so, too, even his alcoholism is an oral and
infantile regression, a desperate evasion of the unpleasant

'facts' of life.”3 Perhaps there lg a bit of reversal in

 

1:2
Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 129.

“3
Geismar, 2M.

78
his development, a bit of mother-seeking in his reaching out

for Helen.

Judging from the dozen novels analyzed in this chapter
it seems reasonably clear that marital and familial strife
are important as subject-matter in post-World War II Ameri-
can fiction. The adult male -— the husband and father -— is
the chief prisoner or compromiser or escapee from this unit:
he is weighed down in all the instances herein illustrated
by psychological and social burdens which constantly threaten
to pull him down to despair if he decides to depend on tradi-
tional solutions and value-systems. The fact that he sees
the necessity of transfiguring the marital or familial insti-
tution in order to make it sensible to a modern self, and
the fact that he fails at this in various ways, is a col-
lectively negative-leaning response to the question, ”do
husbands and fathers make the family a viable institution in
post-World War II fiction?”

CHAPTER II

WIVES AND MOTHERS

Not many married women in American novels published
during the years 19h5 to 1960 persist in memory as espec-
ially full, well-developed characters. This ostensibly
secondary importance might be explained via a traditional
route: that is, a wife's fulfillment is necessarily reached
through the fulfillment of her husband and her children.
They frequently act as prop or support for the important
male character -— ordinarily husband or son, sometimes
lover. Secondary or not, however, some of the women who
appear in novels already discussed and in others about to
be introduced are motivated both by familial-marital de-
mands and by the demands of their own individuality. "In-
dividuality” is quite elastic, but usually it embodies a
deeply-felt fear that the ordinary life is one which drains
without reward. I have already cited an exception - the
case of Ruth Flair, the enduring wife of Herbert Gold's
B331}; 93 3 £29. With the sincere hope that her family was
worth saving, Mrs. Flair sat painfully through her husband's
romantic engagements and ultimately saved the marriage.
Gold did not burden her with any conflict separate from
Reuben's. Often, however, the adult female character's own

personal fulfillment may well be at odds with that of her
79

'Fe’

3.5

80
husband or the rest of her family. The solution of the con-
flict is then sought through independent means: financial,
psychological, sexual. The fruits of her independence are
understandably manifested in the behavior of her husband or
her children: indeed, the wife-mother helps determine the
funcamental social attitudes of husband, child, and lover
through her own fulfillment or non-fulfillment of marital or
maternal responsibilities.

In this chapter, then, I will discuss different kinds
of fulfillment: the directions they take and the complex
personalities beneath them. The fulfillment is sometimes a
great task, requiring strength which few of the women actual-
ly have, requiring flexibility which even fewer have. Al-
though these fictional women do not lend themselves easily
to categorization, I will make a rough division in this chap-
ter between those who aggressively seek and those who struggle
against.

Perhaps Laura Fuller's task -— in Gold's ghe Optimist -
is greater than Mrs. Flair's. Laura's husband seems pre-
occupied with his own individual development in the political
arena. Generally Laura has been part of Burr's grand design
for achievement: back at college, it was her coyness and un-
availability which moved Burr to discard the "townie” Lucille,
despite the latter's warmth and understanding. In the early
chapters of the novel, before they are married, Lucille was
in fact Burr's ideal. However, Burr does not seem very cog-
nizant of the fact that Laura clutches her own idealized

vision, one involving less tangible things in comparison to

81
Burr's, but an equally insatiable one nevertheless. "She

dreams of a love she is powerless to sustain,"1

writes
Professor Hassan.

As is the case in much of the literature of post-World
War II America, the hope of the young adult grows into the
dissatisfaction of the mature adult. Laura the exciting
coed becomes Laura the housewife and mother: a package of
boredom and frustrated anticipation. Her relationship with
her two sons involves, it seems to her, little more than the
responsibility for making them presentable and chauffering
them to nursery school. She had wanted a girl - perhaps
one in whom she could recapture her past self-image -— but
instead she had had two boys who, along with Burr, now sapped
her strength without giving any psychological reward in re-
turn. She tries to persuade Burr to let her have a minor
skin operation to ward off the wrinkles and blemishes that
are slowly becoming more evident (she can notice the slow
speed of their color development because she spends quite a
lot of time in front of the mirror). Burr, knowing that
unnecessary surgery would cut up their budget, argues that
2322! women, even Marilyn Monroe, accept and derive benefit
from facial maturation. This response only makes Laura more
adamantly self-concerned:

She had refused to be wheedled or cajoled

back to good humor although as always he had
given in to the idea of the operation. His

 

1
Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 181.

82

hopeful, sacrificing, indulgent tone en-
raged her. 'They've had something from
life,‘ Laura said referring to the other
women 'I haven't had what I want yet.‘
Give l2.£2.220 her turning away profile
said. L’want.

(186)

 

I am reminded her of the voice within Henderson's head in
Bellow's novel. But it is a vague reminder because Laura is
as much controlled by her emotional limitations as she is by
her dreams. She takes sleeping pills, tranquillizers, medi-
cine for nervous eczema, and other cures, because marriage
and motherhood have provided her with an enormous amount of
insecurity. She wants to somehow strike out on her own, but
she isn't sure how, nor is she confident in her capability
to make do, independently.

After a while, as Burr begins to take greater notice of
another woman, Laura's emotional tension mounts: her head-
aches, skin ailments, and general hypochondria become more
pronounced symptoms of the dying love in their marriage. Her
need for sex becomes almost angry and she longs for the
”thrill of mighty assertion,” the stirring of ”the mighty
powerhouse in her.” (3“?) She wants to be less the mother-
wife, for her husband and sons continue to drain her, to sap
the life from her. With Mike Murray - ironically enough
Burr's lifelong friend - she can speak, indeed pour out,
some of the things that otherwise come to surface only as
grotesque disfigurations of her skin. She has an affair
with Mike, giving physical evidence to that which her husband

her perceived in her earlier, that “only in driving sex -—

83

she knew no other kind - could she get her joy of muscling
and also let loose her belly like a, a little like a woman."
(347) ”Driving sex” brings to mind the image of a creature
ordinarily governed by repressive conditions suddenly surg-
ing forward with a gush of individuality. With Mike's gen-
tleness and concern her sexual appetite is allowed the luxury
of beautiful form.

Yet the independence she sought and found is usurped by
the responsibility she is not quite ready to relinquish.
Near the end of the book, when Burr is very ill, Laura gives
up sleep and food to be with him and care for him with alco-
hol rubs and small talk. Perhaps it is her sense of duty:
but Burr thinks to himself that caring for a sick husband
"is not the wife's first duty. She must care for him well,
too." ”Care“ has two meanings in this connection: comfort
and love. The meanings form the thematic setting for the
last scene between husband and wife within the pages of the
novel. He says, despite the prominence of Barbara in his
thoughts, that he needs desperately to have a hege. To this
she ultimately answers, "Mike! Mike! Mike! Mike!" (376),
as if to emphasize her newfound possibility, certainly her
own need. Happiness as she can have it does not seem to be
relevant to marriage, perhaps not even to life. For Laura
as individual woman there is only need, and if one thing
does not supply that need, another must. For Laura as wife
and mother there is no possessing, there is only hehhg pos-

sessed. Therefore her last plea, "Burr, I only wanted you,”

84
is definitely a lie. Her strength, the power of whatever
aggressiveness she has, is directed against her role of
mother and/or wife. Ahead of her lies the possibilities of
extramarital, extramaternal relationships.

A picture of a strong, feminine intellectual is pre-
sented by Mary McCarthy in.h.Charmed hege. If Laura Fuller
broadens her perspective by seeking beyond the familial
boundaries, Martha Sinnott achieves through seeking within
herself. She finds a semblance of what had been foreign
when she sought without. Martha moves within the course of
the novel from emotional passivity and inaction to fertile
decisiveness and self-awareness. Her uniqueness is that she
achieves independence of the people that seek intimacy with
her, and an indirect dependence on the idea of the foetus
developing inside her - indirect in the sense that it forces
her to make major reconsiderations of herself and the way of
life in the arty colony called New Leeds, where the action
of the novel takes place.

In the beginning Martha and her second husband have re-
turned to New Leeds ostensibly to "make a better life.” She
also wants to finish writing a play. New Leeds represents a
trial for Martha as wife and ex-wife. She feels concerned
about indifference between her and her husband: “she had
caught herself several times forgetting John's existence....

They did not even quarrel the way they used to.“ (9)2 In

 

2Mary McCarthy, e,Charmed Life (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & Co., 1955), p. 9. Page numbers in parentheses refer
to this edition.

85
addition, she must cope with the presence of, and eager
availability of, her first husband, Miles Murphy. And des-
pite their clear purpose of rejuvenating their stagnant life
together, the Sinnotts are fully aware that many who come to
New Leeds ”go to pieces,” and that some even come back with
different spouses. Clearly it is a trial, and the power of
the novel generates in the opposition of glib conversation
and conflict-filled activity. Despite the endlessness of
the intellectual debates that fill the novel, it is ulti-
mately unprovoked action which holds fort: she consents to
make love with Miles only after admitting the act was to be
a ”grasping for a morsel." Early in the process of seduc-
tion she recalls having divorced Miles because he had failed
to open the door for her when she was taking out two pails
of garbage. The silliness of the charge provides an ironic
introduction to the stark seriousness resulting from their
sex act: Martha becomes pregnant, cannot determine the
father, and ultimately chooses to have an abortion. :And she
is eventually killed in a collision with a car driven by a
woman named Eleanor Considine, ”a cautionary example of
everything Martha was trying not to be." (312)

Martha's decision to have an abortion is rooted in her
fear that Miles is the father, and surely Louis Auchincloss
is right when he speaks of this possibility as ”insemination
from the real world."3 Simply by being the possible father

 

Louis Auchincloss, Pioneers and Caretakers (New York:
Dell Publishing Co., 1965), p. 180.

86
of the unborn child, the beastly Miles reawakens in her the
Spirit of emotional involvement. By actively engaging empti-
ness in the person of Miles, a thing begins to grow in her
which serves as her passage to self, her exit from Leeds and
the world. The last scene —- the car accident in which she
is killed - is thus quite climactic, for it freezes in an
everlasting tableau Martha and the substance within her:
the only things that matter. It no longer matters that she
had chosen to abort.

Martha is a two-time failure at being a wife because
her intellectual and moral independence offends her men.

She is, as John Chamberlain writes, "a rather repellant
enigma.'u But at the end she nonetheless has experienced a
true picture of herself as woman: in despair she finds hope.
She can breed, but this is less important than what the
breeding seems to stand for: capability, fertility, human
richness.

In one respect Federigo is the inversion.of.e_Charmed
pegs: Sylvia begins with abortion and ends with ”starting
anew." Trifling infidelity is here employed beneficially:
marriage is strengthened through trial. Once again the early
portion of this novel shows the couple to be in agreement
only on the sober fact that their marriage is faltering.
Neither of them seems to be satisfied with conditions as they
exist: both feel that somehow new life must be instilled,

 

L:
”The Novels of Mary McCarthy,” The Creative Present,

Po 2520

8?

cooperatively or separately. Julian devises the pernicious
letter suggesting that she is unfaithful: this awakens an
angry fire in Sylvia, and dangles before her the hope that
perhaps its contents ("your wife, sir, is too much alone,”)
will scare him into paying more attention to her. She is
not aware that this and subsequent letters are parts of a
game that Julian is playing.

Whereas Julian combats marital stagnation with this
bizarre scheme and a romanticizei concept of himself, Sylvia
responds more instinctively. Her needs appear to be more
urgent and earthly: she wants to go to bed with someone new.
She really he "too much along," almost as she had been when
Julian was off in combat. In the early years of their mar-
riage, when Julian was at sea, Sylvia's needs apparently
surfaced with a rush, for she engaged in an ill-patterned
love affair with an acquaintance of theirs, Hugo Alter. He,
in the present action, attempts to ”begin again" also: but
to Sylvia he is a former lover, therefore unacceptable. In
the past he had gotten her pregnant: she underwent an abor-
tion while Julian was still in the service. At that time
her ability to conceive again was put in doubt. She told
Julian everything when he returned -— everything except who
the father had been. She said instead that he had just been
a man, and that he had died in the Coral Sea.

Although she now spurns Hugo's advances she does take
up with Marius Rathlin, a well-mannered, formal-languaged,

ostentatious Catholic (at least he says so in the beginning.)

88
Whereas in Julian's case it is he who shies away from con-
summation of his affair with Elaine, his wife is the aggres-
sor in her own episodes. She tells Marius that ”marriage is
an organized game,“ (66) and that as an institution ”it is
as if nobody believed in it anymore.” (87) She insists that
hers is a "modern marriage” that can withstand the brief en-
counters that threaten it yet make singular life more
endurable.

Her relationship with Marius reaches a comic climax at
his apartment. When it appears that the proper frame of mind
exists in both of them and that they will go to bed, Sylvia's
passion is dulled by the presence of a crucifix on Marius's
wall. Perhaps in silent deference to the religiosity that
Marius flaunts, she confesses a chill at the possibility of
desecrating the image. Then, in a strange twist, Marius con-
fesses that he is not a Catholic, but only wishes he were
one: he then shuts the crucifix in a drawer, says further
that despite his great love for ritual and ceremony he in
fact does not even believe in God, and returns to the bed
and Sylvia. But the game which Sylvia herself had begun is
now so absurdly confusing that all she can do is laugh, ”un-
controllably,” and Marius retreats to his shell.

Her search bears no fruit but it helps reassemble the
pieces of her marriage-picture. The final stages of the
novel, despite a mock break-up scene, serve only to return
Sylvia to Julian and vice-versa. She thinks, "He can't live
without me, after all....When he comes to heel, after a few

days, I shall outline exactly what can be permitted." (243)

89
Such is not to be the case: however, they do reunite. "With-
out being altogether certain why” (263) the Ghents begin
again their lives. Nine months later their son is born,
and all pasts are laid to rest.

Essentially Sylvia Ghent seeks her husband in a new
skin, or a new suit of clothes. She views change coyly,
with sophistication, as a game. But between her and Julian
is a single mind that games, romanticism, or mockery cannot
totally misconstrue.

The institution of marriage is itself symbolic in Paul
Bowles's The Shelterihgq§hye As it involves Kit and Port
Moresby, marriage is initially seen in its expiration, em-
blematic of a dying nation. The Moresbys journey across the
Atlantic to Arab North.Africa, seeking somehow to shape in
that desolate background the substance of a new life, one
unfettered by civilization. In the postwar world it is one
of the few places anyone can get passage to, and anyway it
is close to Spain and Italy, ”a damned sight better,” as Port
puts it, ”than back in the United States." (15)5 What they
find, rather than a panacea for ethical and moral decay, is
the same thing in a new package, one with more depth and
natural profundity. Port realizes slowly the hopelessness
of trying to love Kit, or love anyone, for that matter: he

dies slowly in the desert, of typhoid, unaware of his last

 

5
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (New York: New Direc-

tions, 1949), p. 15. Page numbers in parentheses refer to
this edition.

9O
moments with Kit.

hKit carries the novel in an important way. She is the
one who develops, who perceives that the emptiness of their
marriage is not something which geographical pinpointing
has made any worse. She sees in their lives that “for so
long there had been no love, no possibility of it." (100)

She engages in a generally shallow, flighty affair with
another American by the name of Tunner: the results of it
serve only to point out the lack of vibrance in her marriage:
”One year was like another year. Eventually everything
would happen.“ (133) At one point Port becomes unnerved
because their lives do not seem to be changing for the bet-
ter and he tells her, ”I know why I'm disgusted....It's some-
thing I ate. Ten years ago.” (168)

Their marriage changes, however, when Port's health
takes a disastrous turn. After a time he is almost totally
uncommunicative, speechless. Yet at this same time Kit be-
gins to evaluate life as she has lived it with her husband.
She concludes that misery is the only thing that will make
them interact. Her husband dying, she perceives misery and
shares misery: and she gains an insight into the "depth of
solitude." These are the closest things to love in the
book. Port's helplessness and demise tend to bring out more
forcefully the potential, necessary strength of Kit -—
strength largely wasted prior to the typhoid epidemic. Death
wins a sweeping victory here, for the picture of marriage

yields something irremediable.

91

The last stage of development in this novel takes place
after Port dies, but is nonetheless retrospectively meaning-
ful to a discussion of the marriage. Kit undergoes a rit-
ualistic desert baptism, followed by a savage but equally
ritualistic desert rape. She is carried off by the nomads
who have raped her, then becomes a somewhat willing prisoner
of one of them, and ultimately achieves a state of mind in
which the only thing that matters to her is frequency of
sexual intercourse. In other words, without the defined
limitations of the marital state, a woman like Kit will sim—
ply give herself up to total and all-encompassing sensuality,
obsessively sexual surrender. She loses her mind because, as
Richard Lehan explains, she tried to possess the joys of
pure sensuality while retaining civilized consciousness.6
Oliver Evans comments further on her lustful acceptance of
being kept by the nomad Belquassim.7 Such abandon is not
possible in the civilized world, Bowles implies, certainly
not in marriage to Port or in a feeble affair. The last
section is also meaningful retrospectively in that the stark
contrast it shows between Kit's mad lust and her earlier
passive resignation. She discovers in the last year that

she is a creature capable of wildly accepting life: during

 

6

”Existentialism in Recent American Fiction: The Demon-
ic Quest,“ Texas Studies Th_hiterature and Language, I (Sum-
mere 1959): P0 18 0

”Paul Bowles and the 'Natural Man'," Criti ue, III
(Fall: 1959): P0 “50

‘U

92
the marriage she would not allow this potential to surface.
The utter irretrievability of those years surely precipi-
tates her final madness.

The failure of love and marriage need not be pictured
as crazed activity in an arid land far away, however, It
can be traced in a lifeless, excitement-free place such as
rural Nebraska, or in quiet emptiness between two people in
an unreal city. Nor does sexual reawakening by the wife/
mother need to accompany the exposition of failure. Famil-
ial importance in Wright Morris's fiction is strong in his
earlier novels, such as heh ehe hey. Despite its title, the
novel is about an all-powerful “mom" identified throughout as
Mother. She is always Mother, nothing else.

The book concerns the naming of a Navy Destroyer in
honor of the Boy of the title. We see him as a boy only as
he is remembered by the Man, Milton Ormsby. Mother domi-
nates both past and present action: censuring her little
son for shooting birds with the B-B gun Ormsby had bought
him, and incurring the wrath of the Navy department with her
eccentric demands on the day of the christening of the war-
ship. As Professor Klein writes, ”her connection with her
dead son is entirely formal except when it is exploitative.

8

Her relationship to her husband is imperial." Leon Howard

calls the book ”a comic prelude to a drama of the fall of

 

8
Klein, p. 213.

93

man."9 When he writes that he intends an application to
Milton, but the phrasing can as well apply to the matriarchal
power wielded. David Madden notes the ceremonial form of
the novel and, more important to the present essay, the fact
that it is Mother herself who presides over it.10 VUltimately
it is she who christens the ship and she who undergoes sym-
bolic rebirth through the ritual. If she ”rises" to victory
in the christening scene it is only the final step in a long
process which began with her laying down the law concerning
the B-B gun: it is also a fulfillment of her first scene in
the novel, wherein she relates the danger of the homefront
and declares that "Modern man is obsolete." (37)11 The vic-
tim of this cold comedy is the grown son that we never see,
for he had made his choice for the danger of a distant war
over the near one between a clutching mother and a weak
father.

Mother's power as a figure, rather than as a human, is
emphasized through Ormsby's inability to remember her name:

If anyone had told Mr. Ormsby that he didn't

know Mother's name - his wife's name, that
is -— he would have called the man a liar to

 

"Wright Morrgs,” Universit of Minnesota Pamphlets on
American Writers ( 9 (Minneapolis:— University of Minnesota
Press, 1968), p. 30.

10
Wright Morris, (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 84.

11
Wright Morris, Man‘andB Boy (New York: Alfred Knopf,

1951), p. 37. Page numbers in parentheses refer to this
Odi ti on.

94
his face. But now, for the life of him, he
couldn't think of it....He kept his head in
his hands -— what else was there for him to

do with it, a man who didn't know his Moth-
er's, that is, his wife's, name.

(143)
Note that he stumbles two times in stating the relationship,
thus emphasizing its unhealthiness. Although this relation-
ship is different from another unhealthy one that Morris
draws in his later ETeTe e£_Vision, to be discussed further
on, the same lack comes through each. To paraphrase Profes-
sor Eisinger, love fails because the wifeémother is "enemy"
to it.12 But in heh_ehe hey the dominance of the woman ex-
tends out from the home, which she frequently likens to a
battlefield: it extends to the subjective aura surrounding
the christening of the USS Ormsby in honor of the dead son.
Mother is an aggressive despot.

A stranger mother but one who shares with Mrs. Ormsby a
strong self-image and firm though false convictions is Bever-
ly Guinevere, the landlady of Norman Mailer's Barbary ghehe.
Yet strange as she is she manifests Mailer's keen interest
in female characters. Harris Dienstfrey notes that Mailer
is ”one of the few American novelists to concern himself
directly and convincingly with the experiences and feelings

of women."13 The complete extent of her role is not

 

12
Eisinger, p. 335.

13
”The Fiction of Norman Mailer,” in Kostelanetz, eh
Contemporary Literature, p. 433.

95

disclosed to the reader until the novel is almost at an end.
One side of her is introduced to Mikey Lovett, the war-
scarred central character, by way of another tenant. ”'If
she gets alone in the same room with you, you won't be safe,'"
he tells Lovett, ”'Guinevere's a nymphomaniac!" (11)1l+ This
bit of information cannot, however, be accepted fully, for
although Guinevere gives plenty of evidence that she is ex-
tremely sensual, there is also enough to indicate that she
responds thus to gain information or political advantage, or
simply to self-nourish her vanity. After arousing Lovett to
feverish lust, she backs away, warding him off, and says,
”'What the hell is it I got?...Boy, you guys can't leave me
alone.'” (54)

Yet her sexuality teaches her to taunt rather than act,
whenever possible. A frustrated starlet and former burlesque
performer, Guinevere is long accustomed to heThg herself, and
she intends to live again the possibilities of stardom by
heThg her daughter Monina. ”'I've got it all figured out,'“
she says to Lovett, ”'in another year or two, I'm going to
have enough money put together to head for Hollywood, and
Monina's a cinch. Only she's got to remain a kid. There's
not so many roles for kids five years old as there is for
infants, you know, one year old and up. So I want her to

stay young.'” (48) That this is not conventionally maternal

 

14
Norman Mailer, Barbary Shore (New York: Grosset &
Dunlap, 1951), p. 11. Page numbers in parentheses refer to
this edition.

EU

96
needs no comment: all that is left for Guinevere is her
daughter. An overripe creature of instinct whom the world
has thwarted too many times, Guinevere thinks that she can
defy time through the little girl, and by further keeping
the child young, she too can stay young. Therefore she
stays close to her little girl: she is even protective, and
the girl seems to thrive on her attention, even when it
takes the form of crude scoldings or spanking. There are
very few instances in the novel involving Guinevere which do
not also find Monina lurking somewhere in the background.
The dream floating in the foreground of Guinevere's mind
necessitates the constant presence of the child. Whatever
Guinevere's obvious unfitness as a mother, she is a decided-
ly strong, conscientious protectoress.

Still, Monina's final words in the novel, heard by
Lovett, are "'I want my daddie.'“ (308) Daddie is McLeod,
the fatalistic ex-Communist who has a "little object"-— a
State department document, presumably -— wanted by Hollings-
worth. The real tension between Guinevere and McLeod does
not materialize until the novel is well along. He wants to
go somewhere and start anew with her, regenerating their
once-good relationship which has since deteriorated into the
anonymous marriage. Guinevere is not especially scornful of
this idea, but she wants something in addition - financial
security, such as that which would be derived from the sale
of the "little object.” She retains always the dream, the

'Barbary' she and Monina will someday have in Hollywood:

97
only cash -— only an offer comparable to the ”many" she has
had - will bait her enough to go with him. McLeod, a man
of principle, will not sell. Perhaps it is this principle
which endears him to Monina and causes her to say "'I want
my daddie,'“ despite the fact that she spends all her actual
time with her mother.

For Guinevere marriage and motherhood are negotiable.
She is partially a primitive and partially a corrupted cap-
italist. She exudes passion and apparently enjoys sex, but
not so much that the sale price gets crossed out. Life for
her is something to be seized, then taken advantage of.

The demands made upon the women in the above novels are
in one way or another great. Whereas the aggressive woman
appears to fulfill her role in energy and search, even if
these lead outside the home and even if these do not make
the family or marriage any better, the non-aggressive woman
-— the struggler -— doesn't necessarily live up to anyone's
standards.

Nonetheless, I think it not inappropriate at this point
to discuss one who defies most generalizations. Among the
female characters in the novels included in this study, none
is more vividly maternal than Poppy Kinsolving of Styron's
is; Thie M251, Fire. It is difficult to put her in any
category except that of sloppy housekeeper. She appears to
be not unlike Ruth Flair, of Gold's §T32h_e£_e’h2£2, in that
her innocence and naive love help bring about an essential

improvement in her husband and ultimately preserve the

98
marriage from total breakup. But she is also similar to
Janice Angstrom in that she is an intellectual inferior.
Whatever, there is something insistently domestic that
clings to her wherever she goes.

Styron's emphasis throughout is on Poppy's childlike-
motherlike qualities, frequently maddening to Cass. Even
her Catholicism, of which Cass makes much and to which he
attributes some of his woe, is a childlike brand. In an
early scene, Poppy reacts characteristically to Leverett's
explanation of the car accident he has been in: she asks him
three times if Luciano, the Italian injured in that acci-
dent, has received the last rites. At the time, she has
with her three of her children, and the view Leverett points
out combines two of Poppy's natures:

The cloud of steam swarmed away on the air

and Poppy's face appeared at the window be—

side me.‘ Hardly larger than her little

children, and so resembling all three that

she seemed like their big sister, she propped

her grubby hands on the door and gawked

around the inside of the car...'Stop it,

Nicky!' She swatted lightly at her youngest

child, a towheaded little boy of about two,

who had begun to whine and tug at her skirts.

(41)

If the child at her skirts helps sketch her as a secular
madonna, the first part of the passage streses immaturity,
even to the extent that she has grubby hands and that she
gawks. Likewise her description of Mason to Leverett ac-
hieves a further delineation of her own character, rather

than that of Mason: "'He's just wicked and terrible. A
wicked and terrible, phony creep!'" Perhaps he is precisely

99

that, but no one else in the novel, except another child,
would state it in quite that fashion. Consistently in the
novel Poppy's speech is dotted with ”creep,” "golly," and
"stuck up,“ and others that point out her closeness to her
children. She is dreadfully untidy, but she is still a good
mother because of the feeling she shows toward her children.
Superficially it is difficult to see how the man that
Cass is in Sambuco could have ever married the woman that
Poppy is. His dissipation, his temper, his vulgarity, and
his irreverence all separate him sharply from Poppy's sort.
Except, that is, when he is yThh_her. Beneath the surface,
Poppy's attraction is strong. The essence of Poppy as wife
is her reaction to the terrible way that her husband is
treated by Mason. ”'Why eye you such a mean, evil person!'”
she shouts at Mason, protectively. She displays at times
the same infantile dismay that her children do, and Cass
recognizes this: ”My little girl,” he calls her both before
and after his humiliating routine for the benefit of Mason's
guests. (180 and 186) She is that - a little girl, someone
he must keep from harm, someone to whom he must give father-
ly love: but she is also protectress to him, for it is she
who receives him and heals his physical and psychological
wounds, balancing the pain of his self-disgust with the
purity of her instinctive life. In a sense, he is another
of her children: ”'heavens sakes alive, Cass!'” she scolds
him one morning-after. Dramatically speaking, Poppy's role

in Set This House eh Fire is not large, but the influence

100
she wields on Cass's conduct of ordinary life is formidable.

Most of all, however, Poppy is fertile. Her fertility
represents a real contrast between the life that throbs in
veins and that which weaves through disturbed minds, be-
tween the life Cass assents to and that which he has des-
troyed. .At any moment POppy may ovulate, may conceive, may
involuntarily begin another generation. Her literary fore-
bears are Lena Grove and Mrs. Micawber, and her devotion to
the stuff of life gives her a unique place among the female
characters of post-World War II American fiction.

But other women in these works do not share the domestic
ethic with Mrs. Kinsolving, or the lust for power, sex, or
independence with the women that preceded Poppy in this
chapter. Some of them must be designated ”strugglers" rath-
er than “seekers.” They fight to keep the self partially
buried because they fear it as an unknown. Consequently
they cannot truly love anyone else. They watch the family
slowly dissolve. Because they do not actively seek a new
life or a rebirth, they do not find one. They shy away from
crises: when forced to take decisive action, they usually
undergo fruitless self-examination or self-pity.

Such is the case with Eleanor Devereux, in Elliott's
Parktilden Village. She is married to man who is ”success-
ful" in his own way -— certainly the invitation by Cambridge
to deliver six lectures on any topic must be looked upon as
a mark of success. But he is not vain, nor fond of fuss,

and Eleanor implicitly wishes he were. One of the first

101
things we learn about him -— through Eleanor's viewpoint -
is that he does not engage in pillow-talking intimacy with
her. Since it is through her that this subject is brought
up, it probably means that she would prefer that he eye en-
gage in pillow-talking intimacy.

She looks back nostalgically at the early states of her
marriage to Jefferson when it wore the aspect of initiation
into adulthood. A ceremonial carry-over to the present
time, she has not removed her wedding ring for fifteen years.
Even so, this represents a kind of negative symbol -— "not
removing” is like ”not hating” instead of “loving."15

Eleanor is not an active sort. She and Jefferson are
intellectually stiff and uneasy with each other, never inti-
mate within the pages of the novel. We feel that we know
more about them than they know about each other. Only rarely
have they ever talked intensely to each other: once when
their son had died of meningitis, and again when the bomb
had been dropped on Hiroshima.

As a mother, Eleanor gives the impression of concern
without understanding. Surely our current, and incessant,
use of the term “generation gap“ could significantly be
applied to the relationship between her and Jackie. She
feels, in her own words, “vaguely deficient as a mother.”

(57) But we know more than that about her. Years ago Peter

 

15
George P. Elliott, Parktilden Village (New York:
Beacon Hill, 1958), Page numbers in parentheses refer to
this edition.

102
Hazen - the central male figure - had been a student of
Jefferson's, and had spent some time in the Devereux house-
hold. He had in fact nursed a strong crush on Eleanor dur-
ing his adolescent agonies. Her "vague deficiency” can
date back to that earlier time. Once Hazen's fly had gotten
stuck, and the detached amusement with which she fixed the
errant zipper contrasted sharply with the unbearable embar-
rassment Hazen had felt while she worked. She did not under-
stand the problems of the young initiate then, and she does
not now understand the problems of her daughter as a physi-
cal and emotional organism. Eleanor is too concerned about
hotrods and strange dress habits with which her daughter
might be coming in contact. Perhaps she has not fully grown
herself: perhaps the ceremonial wearing of the ring is not
matched by any actual adulthood.

In order to reassure herself about the propriety of her
daughter's behavior, Eleanor reads her mail and determines
that the girl is in no special danger. Yet Eleanor herself,
is, ironically, headed toward a kind of disaster. Although
Hazen is infatuated with Jacqueline, Eleanor can only think
of him as her own admirer. While talking to him of Jackie's
impending trip to Juilliard, she begins to lose the drift of
the conversation because of the playful but sensual way that
the prone Hazen is holding her leg.

This introduction - or re-introduction, if we recall
the episode with his zipper - of touch into the relationship
is actually the beginning of Eleanor's erotic preoccupation:

103
this sexual involvement with the young man not only signals
her own sexual potential but it also pulls her interest away
from the role which is most properly hers, mother to Jac-
queline. This particular strand of guilt, rather than the
guilt from being unfaithful to her husband, is alluded to in
a rather strange fashion when, just prior to her first love-
making episode with Hazen, she asks him if he had slept with
Jacqueline. He lies to her and says he has not, but it is a
lie which at the moment is necessary, for it is clear that
Eleanor will not accept the truth if painful, especially if
it points out her daughter's fornication -— a more grievous
thing to her than adultery.

Thus Eleanor achieves temporary sexual awareness at the
same time her daughter does, and in fact with the same cele-
brant. After the "luxuriance" of the initiation wears off,
she tells Hazen that Jefferson should know. "'We do not love
each other,'” she tells Hazen, referring to Jefferson and
her life together, ”'but he is my husband. I do not have
the right to hurt him, but I am doing it anyway: even so,
there is one thing I refuse to do - betray him.'" (133)
Despite the protests by Hazen that such a disclosure would
be idiotic, Eleanor goes ahead and tells Jefferson, rather
dramatically. His reaction is predictably cold, stiff, and
bloodless in contrast to her emotionalism. She is unaccus-
tomed certainly to speaking with import to her husband. But
Jefferson's only requests are to keep away scandal and to

guard Jacqueline from the truth.

104

But if her scene with Jefferson turns out acceptably,
her final moments with Jacqueline seem traumatic. By means
of a complicated combination of gesture, word, and innuendo,
Jacqueline and Eleanor become aware that they have slept
with the same man - Hazen. Jacqueline rides off on Hazen's
motorcycle, and the theme of break-up rushes to the surface.

In the final chapters of the book, Eleanor begins to
examine and re-examine her own ”culpability” for her daugh-
ter's departure: she even turns toward God, because she
knows no other hope. She can only struggle now, at middle
age, against the punishments of the unfulfilled life. The
only unabashedly real picture of Eleanor is the one presented
at the last moment of the novel: Eleanor in despair, shar-
ing this despair with her husband. ”'We all love her," she
says to him, "'and none of us did the right thing.'” (200)

At least the older Devereux could share with each other
the misery of loss. And in a different way, so could the
Moresbys. Milton and Helen Loftis, in hTe,hethTh Darkness,
are violently epeyh in their misery. As I tried to point out
in the essay on Milton in Chapter II, Styron traces from be-
ginning to end the divergent paths of husband and wife, and
the cost therefrom to the family unit. In the case of Helen,
the tracing in fact goes back even further, for her conduct
as wife and parent is based on her own bringing up, a com-
bination of military and religious repression. To invert
the James "experience“ concept, Helen is one of those people

on whom much is lost: she conducts her life obsessively,

105

inwardly battling desire and instinct. Maxwell Geismar calls
16

her ”tragic, wounded, vain, and vicious.” At a point in

her life which closely approximates the time Milton begins
sleeping with Dolly Bonner, Helen takes a long look at her-
self in a mirror which is both literal and symbolic:

Sunlight fell upon her cheeks: she was a little
past forty, but she looked much older. Some-
where long ago she had surrendered up most of
her beauty, which had been considerable, to the
passing of time, but a whisper of loveliness
still lingered on her face. It was a face full
of discontent and now, in repose, of sullen-
ness, but there were fine lines in it, gentle
arcs and swerves, prominences beautifully re-
covered into one agreeable symmetry. As she
sat there, never allowing her eyes to stray
above their level, but gazing only at waists,
skirts and the mirror, her expression from time
to time became unpleasantly clouded over:
thoughts, ugly things, wrinkled her face. Yet
now and then it would relax: a bright impromptu
content would appear, and a sweet and casual
loveliness.

(78)

The passage says a great deal more about Helen than would
seem apparent at first glance. It is filled, for example,
with a cluster of "then's" and ”how's”, some of which are

in contrast, some in continuum. To look "much older" than
forty is indeed to look old for a woman. Without doubt Helen
does not concern herself with this particular evidence of

the passage of time, for it is her straight-laced morality,
made more convincing by a maturer appearance, that she uses
most effectively as a weapon against her husband's dissipa-

tions. Once she had shown to Milton "considerable" beauty

 

16
Geismar, p. 240.

106
-— untouchable beauty, certainly. But her wealth made up
for the prudishness of her behavior and her girlish sense of
propriety. The ”discontented sullenness” of her face repre-
sents years of not having her dream come true: if her beauty
and money had not been able to significantly change the life
of the indulgent Loftis, she had no middleaged means to do
so, no other human methods to draw him away from liquor and
Dolly Bonner. Eventually all she has left is her scorn,
her sullenness. Peyton's drinking at her sixteenth birthday
party (during which this mirror-scene takes place) only
serves to transform the scorn into tyrannical adamance: she
will listen to no words of explanation or pleas for under-
standing from Peyton. Punishment alone will serve. At the
end of the novel, her scorn has become more subtle, and she
answers Milton's horrified anguish with coldness and self-
interest, which she terms at that time ”pride.” The last
few lines of the passage seem to emphasize the simultaneity
of outward grace and inward ugliness: the ”agreeable sym-
metry" which she presents while staring straight ahead is
nonetheless a clouded symmetry, for the balance is between
placid exterior and turbulent interior.

The piety of churchgoer Helen, the madonna-likeness of
mother Helen with freak-child Maudie: this, as ideal, is
indeed clouded by the inner portrait Helen betrays, in her
dreams of furiously killing Dolly either with a knife or
with the sharp hooves of her father's horse, or in her

dreams of naked Carey Carr forcing God into her with a

107
phallic cross. Indeed, whenever she thinks of Peyton after
the older daughter has grown it is always in an imagistic
mixture of sex and violence, a mixture representing the in-
cestuous love of which the mother is both cause and victim.
In the chaos of her mind ”she saw Peyton, her gestures her
sinful hips, as round as moons. She saw Milton and Peyton
together, and the tender corrupt solemnity of their caresses:
a multitude of red, soft lips, Milton's hair, Peyton's
breasts, the torture of twenty years.” (300—301) Only the
minister Carr ever sees evidence of this tortured side of
Helen, and he is incapable of doing anything about it.

Helen never relents in trying to apply empty principle
to the family situation, especially as it involves Milton
and Peyton. Refusing to bend emotionally, her attitude to-
ward them throughout the novel is one of unchanging cold-
ness and disapproval: she peers out, as into the mirror, in
a straight immobile stare. Her last words, that horrible
reiteration of Milton's despair, reflects the sum total of
marital and maternal affection that she has felt: "'Nothing!
Nothing! Nothing!'” 4

Helen promotes the family split more than either of the
others. She does so not because of her inordinate coddling
of Maudie but because her idea of love is so inflexible. She
says to them at one point, ”'Love! Neither of you will ever
know what that means!'" (217) But they do know e love: one
involving sexual attraction, laughter, and fun-filled mutual

escape through liquor. Helen's love denies the existence of

108
these things except as they turn ugly in her dreams and in
angry loneliness. Helen's love is founded upon sacrifice
and restraint, pity and prayer. Like Hawthorne's Endicott
she opposes gaiety with severity, maypole with whipping-
post. Not long after the above—quoted assertion she tells
Milton and Peyton the sad facts about Maudie: "'So she's
going to die....Now you know. About love. Why don't you go
home. It's too late now to see her.'" She refuses to share
the moment of sadness, the brief martyrdom. When they try
to console her, or give test to words of understanding, she
lashes out at both, decrying Milton's constant drunkenness
and Peyton's carelessness in the past, when she let Maudie
fall. Life is a willful fast for Helen, not a dish to be
savored and tasted. Death facilitates escape from the
dreadfully irresponsible, those who would not fit themselves
to her mould. The death of Maudie is all Helen needs to
martyr herself away from the other two: the death of Peyton
will be the loss of all hope and structure.

While out drinking with a young man, Peyton accurately
appraises Helen's effect on the family: "'If it just hadn't
been Mother he married, we all might have made out all right.
She's been too much for him. So we're lost.'” (235)

No one is more lost than Peyton, however. What little
adult life she lives bears the weight and pain of her moth-
er's accusations. To Helen she is a whore, a bitch, a tramp:
Peyton lives these terms, as if they were genuine condemna-

tions and judgments. She marries an artist named Harry Miller

109
a sensitive, perceptive young man who loves her. Perhaps
Peyton loves him also, but her prior exposure to the matri-
monial bond -— that is, as witness to the strife between
Helen and Milton - has distorted her sense of values enough
to make marriage less than a piece of paper. She takes up
with man after man, not to hurt Harry but to destroy the
long-standing marriage whose actual dissolution might, iron-
ically, have saved her. Saved her for what, or from what,
she is not sure. Nor is Harry, but in a moment of exasper-
ation he once says to her, ”'I'm Just not your father.'"

If Peyton's extra-marital behavior strikes out only
symbolically at the Milton-Helen marriage, it succeeds in
actually destroying her own. Her life, as violent and pas-
sionate as Helen's ugly dreams, cannot ultimately be caged
by permanence. The long monologue with which her life ends
is spun through with images of freedom, escape: particularly
naked ramps and birdlike flights. Her suicide, the actual
moment of nude flight, breaks the bonds of all marriages,
all desires, all hopes, all propriety. Her final thoughts
underline this break, ironically chanting simultaneously the
past strands of restriction and release:

Come then and fly. And they move on past me
through the darkening sands, awkward and gen-
tle, rustling their feathers: come then and
fly. And so it happens: treading past to
touch my boiling skin -— one whisper of feath-
ers is all - and so I see them go —- oh my
Christ! - one by one ascending my flightless
birds through the suffocating night, toward
paradise. I am dying, Bunny, dying. But you
must be proper. I say, oh poo. Oh pooh.

Must be proper. on most proPer. Powerful.

0h most Powerful

110

Oh must
(386)

The opposition of images in this passage also points sym-
bolically to the two antithetical ways in which the women of
LEE.QEEEH;B Darkness destroy their marriages: Helen by non-
aggression, withdrawal, retirement to motherhood and self-
pity: Peyton by fearful groping, purposely immoral revolt
and tremulous self-expression.

In novel after novel during the po t-World War II era
there are female romanticists who dream emptily, making of
life more than it contains, certainly more than they can put
into it. Eleanor Devereux is like that, but even sharper
examples are Helen Graeme of Macauley's 223 Disguises of
£213 and Lois McKee of Morris's §;2;9,2§ Vision. Helen is a
stupid bore in the eyes of her husband and son. I have al-
ready noted that Howard finds his newspaper more interesting
in the morning, and that Gordon spoofs her understanding of
psychology - her husband's professional area —— as something
”indelicate.” Further evidence is Gordon's disclosure of
her knowledge of history while he is trying to guess the
name of the man he thinks she is having an affair with. He
writes:

ITEM: It's not the man in the Classics de-
partment. They'd have nothing in common.
Helen thinks Cicero was the founder of a

city in Illinois and that the Augustan age
was a period of particularly long summers.

(57)
Gordon is a humorous young man, and might be expected to say

something like the above. Nevertheless, we cannot help but

111
keep his analogy in mind when we analyze his mother's later
behavior.
Although Helen's sections of narration are written in

a choppier, less erudite hand, she displays in them a pecu-
liar, if not pregnant, imagination. Early in the story she
spots Howard on the top steps of the entrance to a building:
he is with a girl, but what Helen conveys instead of our-
iosity is a cameraman's interest in the height and position-
ing of the man's figure.

...I had a funny sensation. Howard standing

there all alone at the top of that long flight

of steps, with the stillness all around and

the gray sky overhead, looked like the hero of

some tragic moving picture, meditating on some

desperate problem. His face looked lined and

set and he gazed into the distance with a kind

of noble, questioning look.

(#4)
Howard is no tragic hero, and Helen's scene-setting does not
say much for her perceptivity. 'It only points out a roman-
tic preoccupation. Her "secret vice" is going to the mov-
ies. She even sneaks out to them, perhaps in order to pre-
tend something reckless. She enJoys most of all the tempes-
tuous, erotic films entitled Flesh and the Devil, and The
Blue.Angel, or ones such as Anna Christie, with whom she can
live vicariously, or simply ”the old ones and the foreign
ones." She even privately confesses that she thinks about
the marriage scene in the silent film Greed more than she
does about her daily life.
Naturally, the reason for her movie-life is rooted at

least partially in her relationship with Howard. There is

112
little evidence to show that, up to the time she finds out
about Frances, she is aware of the man as anything more than
a fellow-occupant of the house. For a while she convinces
herself that his frequent nights out and surreptitious dis-
appearances are for the purpose of writing a book. She even
contemplates the possibility of writing something herself,
with the subject matter to be the emotions of a woman whose
husband is writing a book. Helen is a very self-conscious,
self-concerned person for whom the external world and its
inhabitants serve only to reinforce the comedy and tragedy
of her own internal world. Her own disguise of love is dif—
ficult to recognize, for she is so willfully self-deceptive.
But by the end of the novel even her self-deception cannot
hide the complete surrender to self that she has made.

The affair that Howard conducts with the young student
does not come to Helen's attention until two-thirds of the
novel has passed. When she finds out she begins, perhaps
compulsively, to read late and even smoke: she goes out more
often, obviously trying to drive Howard's existence even
further away in an attempt to heal her wounded pride. In
the meantime her son goes unattended and poorly-fed.

While Howard and Gordon go on the fishing trip which
seems nearly to give new birth to their relationship, Helen
goes with a friend to New York, not to seek but to escape -
and temporarily, at that. She returns with a new wardrobe
and an appraisal of herself as the wronged woman, as poten-
tial tragic heroine. The faculty wives strengthen this role

and Helen becomes totally wrapped up in it. She narrates:

113

...I went to the kitchen for something and
when I was coming back again, I stopped in
the hallway just outside the door, thinking
I had forgotten something. I heard several
of the girls talking in low tones.

One of them said, 'Isn't she amazing?
She's just like a heroine with her tragedy.
But you'd never know. You'd never know for
a moment.‘

And somebody else said, 'Yes, it's just
wonderful the way she takes it. She's a
wonderful woman. And who would ever have
known if this hadn't happened?'

I felt a special glow. I had to go back
and sit down in the kitchen for a few min-
utes and I guess I cried a little -— I was
so happy. And when I went back into the
living room I was smiling, but there must
have been just a trace of a tear left on my

cheek.
(2h8-49)

These are cheap feelings, certainly, and her easy acceptance
of a Hollywoodized situation reflects her great love of ro-
mantic motion pictures. But this is her high spot, her
shining hour -— above all. When the focus is on her, noth-
ing else matters. Doubtless she envisions the coup de grace
to her feminine honor (which should be, she must think, an
even greater triumph): Howard running away with Frances.
Only then can Helen's "pain” be genuinely transferred to the
other wives, thus assuring her a kind of sentimental immor-
tality. This is not to be, however, for Howard's mistress
decides at the last minute to go alone. Howard stays with
the family: the dead marriage is born again. ”You! What do
you matter?" Helen shouts at him, her ideal shattered by a
husband who like her just isn't very strong.

Helen Graeme ends in hysteria, thus achieving fully all

the emotions that are not linked to passion -— she does not

114

love, nor does she hate, nor lust, nor fear. And although
she dreams often and of great things, she is essentially
even a failure at being a romanticist, because she doesn't
appear to assign any value to human intimacy and affection.

In Eiglg_p£ Vision Lois McKee forms her present out of
bits and pieces of the past. Specifically, she nourishes
herself on the memory of the kiss she got long ago from yet
another romantic, Gordon Boyd, who at one time had torn off
Ty Cobb's back pocket and at another had tried to walk on
water. Yet Boyd is still a hero to Mrs. McKee because his
personality is so different from that of her husband. She
disregards the fact that he is a failure. ”His life has
been a series of poor but meaningful gestures," Professor
Klein writes.17 She prefers instead to see him as a poten-
tially romantic figure who has the audacity to squirt soda
pop at a fighting bull in the ring where the present action
takes place. Lois has never had much emotional choice, and
the kiss in the past was indeed, as Norman Leer states it,
her ”one transcendence of drabness."18

Few things happen in Morris's book, but the bullring
scene generates power through the intensity with which each

character feels the past -— again and again. Lois is

 

17
Klein, p0 2400

18

”Three American Novelists and Contemporary Society,"
Wisconsin Studies 1p,Contemporary_§iterature, III (Fall,

19 oPc7o

115

married to an unquestioning, decidedly unheroic man who had
been on hand when Boyd got Cobb's pocket. If Boyd has been
one who acted and failed, Walter McKee has been one who
watches, or ”witnesses”, as Morris later terms this kind of
action by a character. McKee is not relevant. In a sense,
Lois is not unlike some of the bored husbands I discussed in
Chapter I. She is married to a kind man, but he is one who
"never saw more, when he looked at her, than whether she had
migraine or goosepimples.” (31)19

Lois's world, made somewhat larger by her presence at a
bullring, is nevertheless dependent on the brief moments of
passion way back when. She is a struggler against life in
the sense that she retreats from dull reality. She appears
to be a distorted manifestation of certain ideas in Morris's
essay ”The Territory Ahead,” which says that truth for modern

man might well be found in a reconstructed past.20

She gpgg
reconstruct, time and time again, almost painfully, every
blessed moment of that time when a brash boy she had never
before met suddenly came up on the porch and kissed her.

She reconstructs also - a reconstruction facilitated by a

long dull life with Walter -— the physical aspects of the

 

19
Wright Morris, Field pf Vision (New York: New Ameri-
can Library, 1957), p. 3i. Page numbers in parentheses re-
fer to this edition.

20
Reprinted in C. W. Litz, (ed.). Modern American Fic-
tion (New York: Oxford Galaxy, 1963), pp. §§8:365.

116
passion which Boyd ignited in her. Without provocation she
can retrieve some of her dormant sensuality even in connec-
tion with her grandson Gordon, whose father was also named
Gordon, and who is in effect an extension of Boyd. When she
faints after little Gordon jumps into the bullring during
the present action, she experiences the same physical sensa-
tions she had felt years ago, when Boyd had kissed her. Her
children and even her grandchildren are nostalgic springs
that thrust her into the long ago:
It had affected her - now that she had made
it - like the pyramid climb. Queasy in her
middle. Her legs trembling when she was ly-
ing down. Just to be witty Boyd had said the
arms of girls made him think of folding chairs,
the easy way they would bend backwards, and
for weeks she had suffered from the notion
that her own arms might. This habit she had
of hugging herself dated from that time.
(29)
Physical passion is emphasized here, but so - perhaps more
- is self-indulgence. The utter privacy of her feeling has
resulted in dependence on the original moment, or anything
which reminds her of that original moment. Sometimes her
nostalgic preoccupations seem almost perverse. In any case,
the big bullring cannot make her forget the arena within, to
which she has retired somewhat fearfully, somewhat patheti-
cally. It is not an honestly-met self that she surrenders
t0.
For some there are dreams: for the unimaginative there
is work: for others there is alcohol. Janice Angstrom is one

of the more incapable women of modern fiction: rather spoiled,

a trifle stupid. Always dependent on her mother, she had

117
gotten married to a basketball star: and when neither of the
young people knew the rcpes yet, the mother of the girl
filled in whenever necessary. This continued dependence is
surely one of the things that makes Rabbit run, but its im-
portance is even more directly relevant to Janice's conduct
as wife and mother. It would be necessary for the wife of a
man like Rabbit to have strength, and an ability to be de-
cisive: Janice has neither of these, nor is she an outgoing
sort, capable of functioning non-domestically, in a world
beyond the kitchen or bedroom. She is generally a passive
girl, waiting for time, sometimes fearing it. Because she
is pregnant, but not solely because she is pregnant, she
hardly gpgg'anything, in the sense of a performance. We see
her sitting down in front of the television set, lying down
on the couch, lying groggy on a hospital bed, stumbling
drunkenly, and so forth.

The ”running” undertaken by the husband is in categor-
ical opposition to the inaction of the wife. We first see
Janice as mother in her living room, reclining effortlessly,
telling Rabbit to go to his own mother's and get Nelson,
their son. After an argument, he leaves, and for an instant
the divided family is pictured clearly: a faceless son,
someplace without a home: a restless father, getting ready
to take a long drive: a helpless mother, passing time in front
of the MouSKeteers. To mother a small boy is an action, a
natural life-participation, even when the woman is pregnant.

Janice is simply not capable of forging her way through

118
difficulty. Her inability to act reaches a horrifying cli-
mas in a brief speck of time -— ”only a moment, but a mo-
ment dragged out in time" (220) - when, numbed with liquor,
she accidently drowns her baby daughter. It is fitting that
the tragedy should befall her in an alcoholic stupor, since
it assumes much more of a force of necessity or destiny, as
if in judgment of her marriage and its fruit. It is an pp:
controlled act, which also seems in keeping with her
character.

As I indicated in the section on Rabbit, husband and
wife here tolerate each other only in front of the television
set. Regardless of the banality of the programs, the Ang-
stroms relax and stop arguing. Janice is not capable of
fostering more than a superficial understanding with her
husband as animal. During the trying days following the
birth of Rebecca, the genuine effort that Rabbit makes to
bring about comfort and peace between them is not matched by
a corresponding effort on Janice's part. Instead, she goes
in the other direction: rather than life-stimulant, she
accepts alcohol-depressant, and the process of Rabbit's
abortive act of love seems directly attributable to her
moral surrender to the bottle. To be wife, as to be mother,
would here require resourcefulness and energy, and ingenuity
to channel the strange search that Rabbit conducts. Janice
can only accuse and insult. It is therefore not very easy

to understand the critics who see Rabbit's running as

119
something not sufficiently provoked.21

In this light the killing of Rebecca is less accidental
than sacrificial. Janice has no power, no hold on anyone:
she is seldom seen with Nelson. The fissures between them
are as much her doing as, perhaps more than, Rabbit's. Thus
she is responsible for the final act of destruction, the
answer to an unsaid prayer. And typically she does it some-
what involuntarily, under the influence of alcohol. It is a
way out of life - away from an unstable husband, with whom
no communication seems possible.

The last woman I want to discuss is the wife of Tommy
Wilhelm in.§gigg 323 Day. I have placed her at the end not
because she is the weakest or worst of the lot, but because
more than any of the others her purpose is to do nothing ex-
cept make life harder for her husband. Her role is directly
significant only in terms of the anguish it brings about,
or adds to.

As it appears that Milton and Helen Loftis use the
affection they give a child as a weapon against each other,
Margaret Wilhelm uses the responsibility she must bear for
their sons as a revenge weapon against Tommy. In her un—
bending fashion she disregards his disastrous financial con-

dition, insists that he drum up some support money by

 

21
Most recently, Bryant Wyatt in ”John Updike: the
Psychological Novel in search of Social Structure," Twen-
tieth Century Literature, XIII (July, 1967), pp. 89-96.
.At one point Wyatt writes, ”one is left with no convincing
motive for his deserting Janice.“

120
getting back his old job at the Rojax Corporation. She
serves to emphasize all of her husband's weaknesses, all of
the things in his life which make it difficult. ”'You still
think like a youngster,'” she says. "'But you can't do that
any more. Every other day you want to make a new start.
But in eighteen years you'll be eligible for retirement.
Nobody wants to hire a new man of your age.'" (121) In one
fell swoop Margaret makes a threat and points out to him the
limited possibilities available. He must beg back to Rojax,
the implication being clearly that in so doing he will also
be begging back to her in an indirect fashion. The para-
doxical emphasis on his childishness and his advanced age
forces on him an inescapable, inexpressible pain which she is
surely aware of. Tommy himself relates her effect on him in
terms of metaphorical violence: "She hit him and hit him,
beat him, battered him, wanted to beat the very life out of
him.” (123) Having paid for her education, Tommy now ex-
pects her to bear at least part of the financial brunt, but
by the end of the novel she looks back at the academic de-
gree only as something which seemed practical at the time,
but is really not what is needed now. ”'Growing boys need
parental authority and a home,'" she tells him, and she
doesn't give an inch. When he appeals to her sympathies, or
sensitivity, by bringing in the love that once existed, she
explodes, and tries to ”make him feel pains like those she
had to undergo" when he walked out and when he had conducted

an affair with a woman named Olive. "'Now we're coming to

121
it," she says with not a little satisfaction, ”'How did you
imagine it was going to be -— big shot? Everything made
smooth for you? I thought you were leading up to this.”
.(12#)

Margaret's sternness contrasts the weakness and de-
featism evidenced in Tommy throughout the novel, yet she is
not unlike her husband in terms of ends: gglg-interest,
gglgepity. Obviously if Margaret were purely interested in
the welfare of her sons she would find some way to serve
them as both provider and authority-figure. The tensions of
an ill-wrought marriage are dramatized in this opposition of
self-interests. In Margaret's case the pain of entering
into matrimony with someone like Tommy is psychologically
eased whenever she can transfer it to him. The perpetuation
of the marriage is a not unenjoyable struggle for her be-
cause through it she gains vengeance of her husband.

In his introduction to Saul Bellow and the Critics,
Irving Malin writes, “I am troubled by the absence of any
lengthy discussion of Bellow's women. Critics assert that

they are stylized or unreal."22

Perhaps they are, and yet
Malin's lament about the rareness of in-depth studies of
Bellow's women can very well be expanded to include most
female characters in the post-World War II American novel.

Many are very real, very important. In terms of the

 

22
Irving Malin, ”Introduction” to his Saul Bellow and
the Critics (New York: NYU Press, 1967), p. ix.

 

122
the cohesiveness of marriage and family the woman's burden
is as heavy as the man's: and through personal pressures in
the novels discussed above it becomes apparent that the

blame for dissolution weighs heavily on their shoulders.

CHAPTER III
sows AND DAUGHTERS

There are young people present in almost all of the
novels thus far discussed. But only infrequently are they
the subjects of in-depth probing. A novel not yet written
about here, J. D. Salinger's Egg Catcher 1p ppg_fiyg, is an
important exception, as is Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus,
also yet to be discussed. In this chapter I shall not include
a few characters referred to in previous chapters, about
whom nothing else need be said. For example, to say that
David Flair is a sensitive and impressionable lad who none-
theless aids his father in regaining his moral equilibrium
would essentially repeat the significance I pointed out in
Chapter I. The same sort of thing can be applied to the
young Burr Fuller. However, to clearly focus on Peyton Lof-
tis and Jacqueline Devereux, who also have been mentioned
previously and are major characters, I must shift the point
of view from parent-to-child to child-to-parent: sometimes
this new viewpoint presents new details and an entirely dif-
ferent picture. To make a distinction between a married
young adult and an unmarried young adult -— as in the case
of Peyton - is not as specious as it may seem. After seri-
ous considerations of age, maturity, and so forth, I realized
that the most important aspect to this section of my study is

123

124
their dependence on, or independence from, parents -— pro-
vided that they themselves (the sons and daughters) are not
parents. The designations ”dependence” and "independence”
are deliberately loose: the first could be applied to an
unborn child or a thirty-year-old spinster, the second to
both a runaway adolescent and a discharged soldier. But let
me repeat that I am conducting not a census but a search for
important indicators in the novels, indicators which will
help create an ultimate statement about the American family
in post-war literature.

Children - old and young -— in post-World War II Amer-
ican literature are not simply manifestations of parental
concern or indifference. Just as frequently they embody
reactions against the earlier generations. This rebellious-
ness is referred to by W. Tasker Witham as follows, ”In
novels of the forties and fifties, the adolescent is not so
likely to be represented as the innocent victim of an unsym-
pathetic home environment, who revolts when pushed to the
limits of endurance: the rebellion is more likely to be the
result of a complex interplay of characters....”1 The char-
acter-interplay that goes on between parent and child in
some of these novels is the substance of the drama of post-
war living. With Neil Klugman and Jacqueline Devereux, the

reaction is strong, vigorous, as much because of ethical

 

1
The Adolescent $2 the American Novel, 1920-1960 (New
York: Fe Ungar, I96E). Pa 714‘.

125
strength as because of age and (relatively speaking) broader
experience. These two and Holden Caulfield seem to say and
live most importantly among the young in these novels: they
are critics who evaluate the reality they encounter and
judge it in terms of their own value system, which is more
instinctive, more primitive, than any they are taught or any
which is thrust at them by society at large. At times they
even accuse others in their own generation of having assimil-
ated too much parental authority.

Peyton Loftis shares with these critics the victimiza-
tion by misunderstanding elders, but she is less a critic
than a young person imprisoned by impossible relationships
with her parents. Her inability to evaluate and her emotion-
al dependence also mark Brenda Patimkin of Goodbyg; Columbus
and Gordon Graeme of Tpg Disguises pg Lng. In each case the
blood relationship, as might be expected, is a prime factor
in determining the course of the character's life. It is
interesting to note, however, the different ways in which
each of these three young people -— as well as the three more
rebellious ones - culminates the experiences he undergoes
1n the novels.

Quite a few of the novels focus on adults with small
children. These little ones are necessarily minor figures
who generally lack individuality, who instead act out briefly
their roles as reflectors of personality and authority. For
the purposes of this study, the real importance of these
children lies in that part of the family temper which they

126
make more clear. It is necessary at this point also to
state that in certain instances the child, like his parent,
sometimes has a double role: son and brother, daughter and
sister. Holden Caulfield is the most interesting illustra-
tion of this.

Family relationships motivate much of the action in Th2
Catcher7ip‘phglgyg. Each episode or anecdote involving Hol-
den carries with a recollection by the young man of some
family event in his past: usually the event also involves
his dead brother Allie. "Holden does like some things about
the world," writes Hugh MacLean.2 ”It is, however, signi-
ficant that the thing he likes best is ppp in the world:
his dead brother Allie.” Even when he thinks of Jane Gal-
lager he thinks almost immediately of the strained, some-
times horrible life she lived with her stepfather. Past and
present action frequently derive specificity through refer-
ence to D. B., another of Holden's brothers: Holden is in a
hospital not far from Hollywood, where D. B. is, “prostitut-
ing"3 himself by writing motion picture screenplays. Some of
Holden's stops during his New York wanderings seem easier for
him to identify if he relates how D. B. had once taken a

girlfriend there, or if he meets one of D. B.'s ex-girlfriends

 

2
”Conservatism in Modern American Fiction,” College

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher ;p the Rye (New York: Ban-
tam, 196h), p. 1. Page numbers in parentheses refer to this
edition.

127
and she herself does the relating. And certainly his sister
Phoebe, despite a small role in terms of space or active in-
volvement, is the single living human being toward whom Hol-
den extends warmth. Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield, who
barely materialize within the pages of the bock,.represent
distance, coldness, and that heart of society most fearful
to Holden -— the heart which necessitates his looking to
formless digression and aimless travelling in order to satis-
fy his adolescent yearnings.

The people, young and old, that Holden meets are gen-
erally active proponents of the same uninvolved life espoused
by his mother and father. His encounter (as ”Rudolf Schmidt”)
with Mrs. Morrow, the mother of an ex-schoolmate that he
hates, serves to point out the superficiality of mothers,
and the ease with which they can be gulled, especially by
flattery or appeals to false pride. Likewise the movie ver-
sion of Hamlet remains vivid and special in his mind for the
Laertes departure scene. Holden relates that, while Polonius
drones on, “old Ophelia was sort of horsing around with her
brother, taking his dagger out of the holster, and teasing
him and all the while he was trying to look interested in
the bull his father was shooting.” (17?) The brother-sister-
father configuration indirectly shapes the situation within
the Caulfield family: Holden and his father a world apart
(not even appearing together within the pages of the book),
Holden and Phoebe playful and close. At another spot he
hears a little kid singing "if a body catch a body comin'

128
through the rye,” the mistaken lyrics that give the novel
its title. More relevant here than the song is the scene
itself, as Holden presents it:
This family that you could tell just came

out of some church were walking right in

front of me - a father, a mother, and a

little kid about six years old. They looked

sort of poor. The father had on one of

those pearl-gray hats that poor guys wear a

lot when they want to look sharp. He and

his wife were just walking along, talking,

not paying any attention to their kid. The

kid was swell.

(115)

This stays within.Holden's mind for some time, a picture
which seems decidedly split: noisy traffic, parents con-
tented with themselves, and a child isolated in his own pri-
vate world. To Holden, parents are people who exist apart,
both physically and in spirit. They are peOple whose concern
survives moments of inconvenience and little else. He says,
in this connection, "I didn't want to go home or anything
till they got it and thoroughly digested it and all.” (He
refers to his most recent expulsion.) "I didn't want to be
around when they first got it. My mother gets very hysterical.
She's not too bad after she gets something thoroughly di-
gested, though.“ (51)

Through these examples it seems clear that as a son Hol-
den has accustomed himself quite thoroughly to the idea of
having parents who don't give a damn. He doesn't bemoan their
lack of concern, however. On the contrary, he counts pp it,

now that he has been kicked out of yet another school. The

only thing he needs which they might have at some other time

129
been able to supply is intimacy. This particular need is a
spring to his odyssey in the city, and an explanation to
some of the more curious observations that form the body of
the last section of 223 Catcher ip_ppg_gyg.

His rebelliousness as a son is never really a matter of
question: partial proof of this is that he never for a moment
considers either of his parents as anything but wielders of
potential doom for him. Holden is more actively, more con-
scientiously, more sincerely, a brother than he is son,
friend, chum, etc. Of the four relationships that he most
often mentions, three of them are those in which he serves
as brother -— to D. B., to Phoebe, and to Allie who, though
dead, lives on through a baseball mitt that provides material
for an essay as well as for remembrances. The glove even
helps point out the seriousness of the fourth relationship,
that with Jane: Holden says that Jane was the only non-
Caulfield that he ever showed Allie's baseball mitt to, "with
all the poems written on it.” Young Allie had written them
in green ink on the glove in order to have something to co-
cupy his time during dull moments in the outfield.

Even in the present action of the novel, Jane Gallagher
is important to Holden. She is the good thing that is ap-
parently tarnished by Stradlater, his egotistical roommate.
But she is also the girl whose personality and beauty in-
directly relates to an attitude of his mother: ”My mother
didn't like her too much. I mean my mother always thought

Jane and her mother were sort of snubbing her or something

130
when they didn't say hello." (77) He goes on, "My mother
didn't think Jane was pretty, even. I did though. I just
liked the way she looked, that's all." (78)

Except for the glove, nothing hauntingly explicit grows
out of Holden's memory of Allie. He was a younger brother,
and he smiled a lot. Smiling, friendliness, honesty: these
are the things which rate high with Holden. It is important
to note that D. B. is not revered the way the dead Allie is,
not because the latter is dead, but because the former writes
”dishonestly,” cheapening himself with moronic screenplays
for escapist films which Holden finds greatly depressing.
Holden finds many adults depressing often because of the
label itself -—adult—- rather than for what they have said
or done to him. For instance, he calls Jane on the tele-
phone after a somewhat comically abortive date with an insipid
girl named Sally. When Jane's mother answers, he hangs up,
not because he is afraid of her, but because he cannot bring
himself to talk to the mother of anyone, let along the
mother of a girl who means much to him.

Balancing the practical fear he has that his parents
will see him and find out that he has been expelled from
Pencey Prep is the solace he gains from his very extraordi-
nary relationship with his precocious sister Phoebe.
Throughout the novel it is apparent that Holden prefers the
profundity of small children, of which Phoebe is a most
excellent purveyor. As if to emphasize where emphasis is

not really necessary, Holden describes Phoebe fully: no

131

other individual in the novel is afforded such description:

You ought to see old Phoebe. She has this

sort of red hair, a little bit like Allie's

was, that's very short in the summertime.

In the summertime, she sticks it behind her

ears. She has nice, pretty little ears. In

the wintertime, it's pretty long, though.

Sometimes she doesn't. It's really nice,

though. She's only ten. She's quite skinny,

like me, but nice skinny.

(67)

Were it not for the cheapness and unnaturalness of other re-
lationships Holden enters into throughout The Catcher lg the
Rye, this description might be seen as incestuous -—as some
critics, such as David Leitch, have wondered indeed about
the relationship in general.“

In addition to the special sort of intelligence that
Phoebe has, she shares the impetuousness of Holden and, we
might add, the creative impulse of pre-prostitute D. B. Late
in the novel, when he informs her in a surreptitiously-deli-
vered note that he is off to the west, she meets him at the
designated farewell Spot not to collect some money that he
had borrowed from her - the ostensible excuse - but to go
along with him, packed bags and all. And it is Phoebe who
provides him with a pleasurable 23 revoir in that last grop-
ing hour of sanity before the end of his odyssey. She is
his blood-link to innocence, purity, honesty: she literally

provides his only warm caress in the entire work.

But the relationship between Phoebe and Holden goes

 

z:
“The Salinger Myth," Twentieth Century, CLXIII (Novem-
ber, 1960). p. “310

132
beyond this, I feel. She is the sole person in the book
who, aside from Holden, actually listens to what another has
to say, and she is also the only one who comes alive as both
human being and symbolic being. She and Holden cling to
each other —- not out of repressed sexuality, as Leitch
suggests5 -— but out of familial devotion, the kind beyond
parents and authority. They also cling to each other as re-
placements for that which otherwise is being painfully de-
nied them. In a short span of eight or nine pages, they
play house: they engage in a mother-father game. In the game
Phoebe provides the opportunity for Holden to become the
father he does not really have, and Holden in turn provides
Phoebe with a chance to be motherly, something which we may
judge to be generally lacking in her life. She has the part
of Benedict Arnold in a school play. After explaining it to
him in detail, she then expresses childlike ecstasy that he
actually wants to see her in it, contrary to her actual
father, who must be in California on the day of the play.
Since California is a constant symbol in this book for sell-
out, Holden's reaction represents on the other hand the
genuineness she seeks. Not long after this he tells her of
his dream - to be a catcher in the rye, a crazy saint-
father, protecting all the innocents from business men and
fuck-you signs. During the same scene, little Phoebe be-
comes, although on a lesser scale, a corresponding mother-
figure. To his disclosure that he has been expelled from

Ibid.

 

133
Pencey, she responds not with gay danger-love but with fear-
ful caution: "'Daddy's gonna kill you!'" she shouts a few
times, then resorts to maternal scolding: "'I suppose you
failed in every single subject again,'" (167) and "'Don't
swear so much.'" (168) She insists that he name at least
one thing that he likes, to go along with the legion of
things that he does p23 like. He can only think of other
things that nauseate him, such as the sordid suicide of a
former schoolmate. He settles for the immediate moment. "'I
like it now,'" he tells her. ”'I mean right now. Sitting
here with you and just chewing the fat and horsing -—'"
(172) Although this is unacceptable to Phoebe-mother, it is
nonetheless the only intimate statement Holden makes to any-
one in the novel. It leads through his ”catcher” dream, and
through to the tear-filled scene in which Phoebe becomes his
"provider," giving him eight dollars and sixty-five cents of
her own money.

In outline, the society of this novel is the parental
authority only alluded to and periodically cited. From the
beginning of his journey Holden is the critic: everything
strikes him as bestial, perverted, moronic. His relationship
with his parents is something that he speaks of in rare
equivocation: the rest of the world helps define it clearer.
Irving Malin tightens the link between perversity and parent-
hood when he writes of Holden's belief in ”one strong, good
parent in Mr. Antolini." But of course Holden awakes during
his late-night rest at the teacher's house to find his "fa-

ther's” hand on his head: he can only view it as a sign of

134
perversity - and he is probably correct in this view. Malin
goes on, "parental love is viewed as unnatural, scary. Is
Mr. Antolini evil? The question disturbs Holden so much
that he renounces him and flees back to children."6

Phoebe is a future as Allie was a past: and the fact
that the blood of these two runs also in Holden's veins, and
that he finds this an agreeable, even cherishable circum-
stance, is enough evidence to prove how much Holden still
values humanity, on a small scale.

Honesty and purity are also thematically significant in
Parktilden Village. In Elliott's novel we become quickly
aware that Jacqueline Devereux, an.only child -— at least the
only living Devereux child —— is a musically-talented young
woman in her late teens, and has a rather exuberant person-
ality to go with her buxom figure. We get information on
her in intermittent bursts, since the novel is never told
from Jacqueline's point of view but rather from that of her
mother, her friend, and especially from that of the family
friend, Professor Peter Hazen. Jacqueline inherits her
musical capabilities (clarinet) from her father, an oboist.
In those few scenes during the first two-thirds of the book
which isolate Jefferson and Jacqueline the most understanding
or communicative moments involve discussion of music. Other-

wise Jefferson is mute, indifferent. ”'Jacqueline is nearly

 

6
Irving Malin, New American Gothic (Carbondale, Ill.:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), pp. 61-62.

135

grown up now,'" he says to Eleanor, "'and we must not try to
restrain her.'“ This perception is thin-surfaced, however,
for as the narrative goes on:

But even when he said this he was declaring a

fact, and facts to him were like stones, ly-

ing around to be ignored or studied as you

wished and some even to be shaped into gems

to be admired but none, certainly, to be re-

proached or thanked or regretted.

(10)
The indifference rarely shows up in Jacqueline: for the most
part her reactions to experience are candid, picturesque.
She speaks in a straightforward manner during a discussion
with Hazen on the subject of his dissertation, comic strips,
and Jefferson criticizes her for her candor. She tells the
young professor that she doesn't believe in the study of
models as a means of predicting success. "There are more
polite ways to let him know it," Jefferson tells her. (16)
This is a minor scene: however, it brings out the subjects
of honesty and purity, which ultimately come to be identi-
fied with Jacqueline in a more dramatic fashion. I
Jacqueline is somewhat closer to her mother: we see this

both directly and indirectly in the book. Only at one point
- at her going-away-to-Juilliard party - does Jefferson
seem to wonder about the safety of her virtue. Contrarily,
the subject frequently plagues her mother. She watches the
girl suspiciously with young men, and even reads her mail.
That Jacqueline has some inkling of her mother's prying there

is little doubt. When pressed for details on her activity

of a given night, she mentions only the briefest pieces of

4,.f.

‘1‘ ‘

‘o

I 'i
In"

an

at.

e:

“P-
nil

f
A3

S3

136
information, such as how good the movie was, or what it was
about. In Eleanor's own words, Jackie presents a "tone of
off-hand indifference,“ (22) a smirkless secrecy. Still in
the early pages, Eleanor perceives in extended glances and
physical frivolities between her daughter and Hazen a rela-
tionship going beyond playfulness. Jacqueline makes no ef-
fort to hide these signs, and in fact she seems to enjoy
their very overtness. .And when alone with Hazen her enjoy-
ment is lengthened by her sovereignty over his ill-controlled
emotions. She arouses him, aggravates his lust, and then
leaves him frustrated. A creature of instinct, Jackie guides
the progress of the early chapters.

We can consider the move by Eleanor to send Jacqueline
to Juilliard to be motivated at least partially by her fear
that something serious will develop between her daughter and
Hazen. Only after making preliminary inquiries on the mat-
ter does she ask the advice of her husband, an accomplished
and learned musician. What makes the mother-daughter rela-
tionship a more strained one, however, is the odd suspicion
that Jacqueline herself betrays about Hazen and her mother.
During a characteristically heated petting incident she won-
ders aloud about how upset her mother would be if she could
see them at that moment. He asks her why her mother doesn't
like her to go out with boys. She denies this, and adds
that Hazen is different, and baiting him, that Helen thinks
he is different, also. After becoming angry with him for

comparing Eleanor to a cactus, Jacqueline expresses an even

137
further side of emotional complexity in the following inter-

change :

'My mother is not in any way like a cactus.‘
'She is, the way I think of her. Saguaros
are solitary and stand out splendidly from eve-
rything else, and they're thorny, but if you're
perishing of thirst you can get water from them.

Birds nest in them sometimes. They endure
through the worst difficulties. They are the
most striking things I ever saw in the desert.’

'Well,‘ said Jacqueline, and settled down
again, 'so long as you like them.‘

She guided his hand to her belly and put her
head back so that they might begin kissing
again 0

'Furthermore,' he said, his lips at the lobe
of her ear, 'a saguaro doesn't bloom for long
but when it does you never saw anything more
beautiful in your life.‘

'Don't go getting ideas about her,’ she said.

'Getting ideas?‘

'You know what I mean. Don't play dumb.‘

(52)
The girl's ambivalence about her mother is intensified through
her relationship with Hazen. She seeks to displease Eleanor,
yet at the same time remain loyal to her: furthermore, she
recognizes her mother's feminine power. The whole of this
feeling explodes in the last segment of the novel, when it
is Jackie who sees beyond an amorous glance and long-held
hands to the heart of a love affair between two people who
had occupied her thoughts so much.

But Hazen's responsibility for the tension that grows
between Eleanor and Jacqueline is more extensive than this.
ThrOugh his sexual conquests we see both similarity and con-
trast in mother and daughter. Through him Jacqueline under-
goes the universal change from girl to woman. Because of

her sexual encounter with Hazen, she developes from a "young

138
chick" whose large breasts swing “irrelevantly, as though
they had been added onto her without her consent" (15) into
a knowledgeable woman of love, free and strenuous in her
nakedness. Eleanor, on the other hand, though also free and
uninhibited, is nonetheless so only after a long period of
weep-filled guilt: she is free and physical also within
limitations - the thing must take place within a romantic
vision, one which ultimately crumbles and dissolves to a
god-filled prayer upon the disclosure and the return of
guilt.

Jacqueline's freedom in sex is not dealt any repressive
defeat by the discovery of the Hazen-Eleanor tryst. Rather
it is her sense of purity and love that are shattered. Home
on vacation, lonely, hungry for intimacy of any sort, she is
met by very puzzling welcomes. Hazen, his passion cooled,
his sense of honor stirred, his social experiment over, feels
some of the same guilt that wracks Eleanor, and decides to
propose marriage to Jackie. She considers it, but not en-
thusiastically, because Hazen has been cold toward her since
her return and has moved out of Parktilden Village. Eleanor
responds strangely, also, periodically laughing and breaking
into tears. And Jefferson, though he pays attention to
Jackie more than he has in the past, nonetheless incurs her
suspicions by speaking disparagingly of Hazen. These cold,
confusing behavior patterns create the proper climactic con-
ditions for Jacqueline's departure. Running from the apart-

ment after ascertaining that her mother and Hazen have slept

139
together, she tries to get sympathy from her grandmother:
but the old woman is trying to sleep and she dismisses the
girl without listening to a word.

The last section presents the sad irony of parents be-
ing concerned after concern is relevant. We don't see Jackie
in this section, for she has gone off with a hot—rodder named
John Henry. Shetells her father that, as daughter, she will
materialize only on emergency: that is, she will inform them
if she has a baby, if she moves, etc. They are to contact
her only if someone is ill or dead. If they try to bring
her back, she will marry John Henry. Jacqueline's rebellion
is bitter, powerful.

A less likely candidate for this chapter than Jacqueline
in that he is 23, an ex-G.I.. and living away from his par-
ents, is Neil Klugman of Philip Roth's Goodbye1 Columbus.
Except for the age, however, extenuating circumstances prompt
me not only to include him but to use him as a counterpoint
to the glib Radcliffe student of the novel, Brenda Patimkin.
As a son Neil does not really rebel, at least not within the
present action of the novel. His mother and father live in
Arizona because of their health. He lives in Newark because,
as he tells Brenda, he obviously is not a child anymore.

His aunt Gladys tries hard to recreate what life at home
might be if it had not moved Southwest. Neil himself is
kind to her, even respectful, but whenever she shows motherly
anguish at his coming late or forgetting Jewish holidays, his

response reflects annoyed amusement.

140

It is not against his own family that he must decide,
however: the real umbilical cord has been severed. What the
novel represents is his turning away from another family that
he nearly becomes part of. Narrated in a way that makes Neil
appear to be a mature, cynical Holden, the story traces a
love affair from the very beginning to the very end. The
dialogue between the principals is never weighty or extended,
perhaps so as not to detract from the largely sexual nature
of their relationship. Neil works in the public library and
Brenda is the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer. As a so-
cial confrontation it is not, however, overplayed. The op-
position of the little Negro boy in the library and the rich
girl, which Stanley Edgar Hyman objects to as a ”consider-
able overmatch,“7 is really not an opposition but rather a
parallel. The boy is fond of a book containing Gauguin's
Tahiti paintings: he sits and stares at them for hours.
”Ain't that the fuckin' life?“ (1:8)8 he says to Neil. The
boy's visions are affiliated with Neil's physical desire for
Brenda. When the Gauguin book is borrowed from the library
in Neil's absence, his relationship with pppp the black kid

and Brenda are signalled at an end.

 

”A Novelist of Great Promise,“ The New Leader, (June
11, 1962). Reprinted in Kostelanetz (ed.), pp Contemporary
Literature, p. 533.

8

Philip Roth, GoodbyeI Columbus and other stories (Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin & Co., I959). p. 38. Page numbers in
parentheses refer to this edition.

1A1

The attraction between Neil and Brenda, announced early
in the novel, is quickly consummated. It reaches marital
proportions when Neil stays at her home during his vacation.
And it ends, for all practical purposes, with the end of the
summer, for when Brenda returns to college she leaves her
diaphragm in a conspicuous enough place that her mother
finds it and is greatly upset. Neil reasons that she did it
on purpose, so that their affair would die. Brenda does not
convince him otherwise.

Keeping in mind that Neil is an emotionally mature, in-
dependent young man, we can understand why he is less than
impressed -— certainly he is not overwhelmed, at any rate -
by the affluent world of the Patimkins, represented by four
cars and twenty-six unopened, dustfree bottles of Jack
Daniels. He ridicules, albeit with light sex appeal, the
proclivity of the younger Patimkins to have their noses
bobbed. But his affection for Brenda largely blinds him to
the symbolic aspect of nose-bobbing. When any of the Patim-
kins are troubled -— by an unsightly nose, or an insufficient
wardrobe, or an only partially-stuffed stomach - the trouble
is soon blotted out, or consumed. Money stops most of their
troubles in the seedling stage. Led by Mr. Patimkin, the
progenitor of ”Patimkin Bathroom and Kitchen Sinks,” the
family devours life's materials deliberately and systemati-
cally, not unlike the way they eat.

Mr. Patimkin was tall, strong, ungrammatical,
and a ferocious eater. When he attacked his

salad - after drenching it in bottled French
dressing - the veins swelled under the heavy

142
skin of his forearm. He ate three helpings

of the salad, Ron had four, Brenda and Julie
had. tWOIOOO

(31)
The scene emphasizes the voracity of the family and the con-
trasting reluctance of Neil to eat in the same fashion. ”'He
eats like a bird,'" Patimkin says of him. Neil's eating
habits foreshadow his reluctance to seize a larger portion
of what the Patimkins have. Mr. Patimkin believes strongly
in giving to his children: he is both possessive and per-
missive. That Patimkin is possessive is evident in that
pictures of the others (p33 his own) are scattered around
the house as in a gallery. On his permissiveness, perhaps
he does not want his children to struggle even a fraction as
much as presumably he had struggled: thus he lets them have
their way -— in games, in shopping, in eating. The result
of Mr. Patimkin's attitude is evident at times in all three
children, but nowhere more clearly than in Julie, the eight-
year-old daughter. Circumstances force Neil to be her baby-
sitter early in the book. In no time at all he perceives
that she is spoiled beyond belief: witnessing a basketball
game between her and her father had already led him to sus-
pect this. In that game Julie insisted on every possible
break and concession. Since he is angry at having to be a
nursemaid, he takes the opportunity to vent his wrath now in
a ping-pong game against her. He plays to win, not allowing
her to take anything over again, not slowing up his serves
or returns to compensate for his advantage in age and

strength. It is a short but memOrable scene in which the

1&3
touch of childlike vindictiveness exhibited by Neil is more
than offset by Julie's hysteria, as she runs out of the room
before the game has ended, threatening to tell her parents
that he had been stealing fruit from the refrigerator in the
den.

In terms of victory and defeat the ping-pong episode is
linked to the first act of love between Neil and Brenda.
For, although he is gentle as wellas passionate, Neil none-
theless asserts, "It (making love to Brenda) was so sweet, as
though I'd finally scored that twenty-first point.” (56) In
this juxtaposition we can see that Neil's attitude toward
Brenda is ambiguous. He feels tenderness as well as lust,
and in addition a sense of real achievement.

Likewise when he spends his vacation at their home,
Neil's experience is not purely sexual. He discovers, for
instance, that Mrs. Patimkin dislikes him and that there
exists a great deal of tension between her and Brenda, and
that Brenda cherishes money almost as if it were a religious
icon: she is grief-stricken when she can not find the bun-
dle of money her father had once stuffed in an old sofa,
money that only she and Patimkin were supposed to have known
about. And Neil finds out, through a variety of experiences
culminating in the wedding of Ron and his Wisconsin girl-
friend, that the combined effect of ostensibly close tradi-
tional family, Jewish Orthodoxy, and living the American
Dream, does not in any way meet the needs of youthful sensi-

tivity or life-challenging. Amid the chaos of a long, loud

inn
Patimkin family argument, he retires to the four walls of
his guest room: "I sat down on my Brooks Brothers shirt and
pronounced my own name.” (76)

When he insists that Brenda get a diaphragm, he is
really hoping that she become a more complete individual and
more independent of her mother. When she carelessly if not
purposely leaves it in a bureau drawer while she resumes her
Radcliffe education, she is proclaiming independence from
pig, and announcing re-entry into the Patimkin world. She
reasons that they can't go back to her house together any-
way, since she would not now be able to face her family with
him.‘ Neil is correct in saying to her, ”'You can go home -
your father will be waiting with two coats and a half-dozen
dresses.'” (1&3)

The novel can also be examined as the course - beginning
to end -— of Brenda's divertissement. And, judging from the
broad display of Patimkin affluence that is immediately pre-
sented, we could not be far wrong in saying that her diver-
tissement, conducted as it is with a relatively poor young
man who has a job in the public library, is directed against
the affluence in some way. Brenda feels that her mother is
jealous: jealous of her athletic skill (mother had once been
a champion in tennis), jealous of her health and beauty, and
jealous of her youth. She favors Ron, the buffoonish son,
and this weighs even more on Brenda. Her father, she tells
Neil, is sweet.

But she doesn't feel that either of them knows her well

1&5
enough. She is, the novel makes eminently clear, the daugh-
ter of her parents and little else. ”'Since my freshman
year,'” she tells Neil, "'I think every conversation I've
ever had has always wound up about my parents and how awful
it is.'" (36) She adds, "'It's universal.'” But little
threat of open revolution exists, since the grounds for
their disagreement, the setting for their arguments, is al-
ways the heart of Patimkinism: goods, food, points, negotia-
ble matter. Their arguments on the subject of Bonwit's ver-
sus Ohrbach's take on cosmic proportions in Brenda's mind.
Neil phrases it, in his narration, "her life, which, I was
certain, consisted to a large part of cornering the market
on fabrics that felt soft to the skin, took on the quality
of a Hundred Years' war...” (36) Even Neil assumes the
dimensions of commodity in her life, in the sense that she
cares not a bit about his background -— his own independent
humanity. She never asks him a question about himself until
her mother becomes curious. Neil's stay at the house is an
important cause of the most heated daughter-mother argument
in the novel. Its importance is further stressed in that it
takes away some glitter from Ron's impending marriage. Mrs.
Patimkin seems, to Brenda, abnormally upset by Neil's pres-
ence. Brenda, in her turn, exPresses a bit of jealousy to-
ward Harriet, Ron's fiancee. She tells Neil that her mother
will be even less sympathetic to her now that "goody-goody
Harriet” is around. (77)

The moment of break-up between Neil and Brenda results

1&6

from two letters, one each from mother and father. Both con-
cern the left-behind diaphragm. A passage from each should
illustrate the different segments of Brenda's character that
are being spoken of. First father's, then mother's:

Don't pay attention to your Mother's Letter

when you get it. I love you honey if you want

a coat I'll buy You a coat. You could always
have anything you wanted.
(138)

Why you should reward us this way is a ques-
tion I'll carry with me to the grave.
About your friend I have no words. He is

his parents' responsibility and I cannot

imagine what kind of home life he had that

he could act that way. Certainly that was a

fine way to repay us for the hospitality we

were nice enough to show to him, a perfect

stranger.

(141)

Security and guilt: these are strong cords to break, and
Brenda is unwilling to do so, probably because she is in the
long run what Joseph Landis says she is, a coward.9 She dis-
likes the authority and conservatism inherent in the family,
but she cannot get along without the security it affords or
the willingness of her father to take on everyone's burden
of guilt. Neil presents her with a revolutionary alterna-
tive, but she can't accept it. Whereas Neil's family back-
ground has evidently prepared him for the moment when he
could say, as he did to Brenda, "I'm not a child anymore,"

Brenda's family has been there to serve, on the one hand,

 

”The Sadness of Philip Roth,” Massachussetts Review,
III (Winter, 1962), p. 261.

1&7

and to coerce on the other. These provide something for
her, end she cannot give Neil the total girl. The family
knot is tight and, as far as she can see, she would rather
have the new coat than the guy with the job inua library.

Critical like Neil yet easily assimilated like Brenda
is Gordon Graeme, the sixteen-year-old son of the ill-married
psychology professor and his daydreaming wife in Macauley's
Egg Disgpises p: prg. Gordon functions both as a commenta-
tor on his parents' marriage and as a product affected by it.
From the start we realize that what the older Graemes think
their son is and what he actually is are two different things
which do not necessarily fuse, or even overlap. We also

know shortly that the young man mistakenly thinks it is his

mother who is having the extra-marital affair. Interestingly

enough, however, the parents never achieve a genuine picture
of their son within the framework of the novel, whereas Gor-
don very definitely develops a new and in some respects
authentic view of them, especially of his father.

Gordon's narration begins the novel with a visual image
of the family as tripod -— on three distinct, separate legs.
The dinner scene projects, as he puts it, “all the intimate
charm of the Arctic Circle.” (&) Gordon sees his father,
who had just made a familiar comment on his intellectual
development, as an ugly burden. Gordon thinks:

His picture was tattooed in my memory with
ten thousand distinct and painful needle
pricks, punctures of that bare skin we all

find so rare and tender in our childhood.
Eventually all of us become tattooed men and

(Q

1&8

women, I guess, marked from head to foot, and

the skin gets horny and the new designs won't

take very well over the old ones. Well, well,

I might say some time in the future, looking

over the album of my flesh, here's an odd face,

half obliterated. It must be my father's.

(3)

Gordon's criticism is visualized in another way. He des-
cribes the dinner table in terms of its immensity and the
positioning of each of them at a non-familial distance from
the others. The effect of this on his relationship with his
father and on his own self-image seems projected in his
mirror:

I dated my independent life from some three

years back, from one day when I looked in

the mirror in my bedroom and asked the mys-

tifying question, 'What am I?’ The mirror

might have answered, 'What are you? You're

a son. You're an imitation. You're a chip

off the old block. As a matter of fact,

you aren't anything.’

(5)

The last disclosure is true at least in the early stages of
the novel. If he is a chip off the old block then he is in-
deed nothing, for his father is a sum total of nothing to
him, a deadly bore who betrays no emotion, no tendency how-
ever slight of understanding what it means to be young. To
combat Howard's stuffiness Gordon has projected a distinct
anti-intellectualism. When his father tries to convince him
that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde represents a foreshadowing of
20th Century psychological theory, Gordon laments that he
wasted his time: to him it had read only like a bad detective

novel. As far as his father is concerned Gordon has built

up an impermeable wall against certain forms of learning,

1&9

eSpecially books. He thinks of past Christmases when his
toys were always "educational” ones, such as an Erector set
or a quiz-game. Mostly his parents gave him books, which as
objects took on villainous proportions to the growing boy.
”Never in my life," he says, "will I read Washington Irving,
Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, or Daniel Defoe. I saw
their names on the book spines and I thought of them as per-
sonal enemies who had swindled me out of my bicycle and my
air rifle.” (9)

Again, this is for the inner battle against his father,
a defense against stuffed-shirt-ism. Gordon is not really a
slob, but he seems so to Howard. The first line of the novel,
“You're no credit to the family," is, in addition to being
an ironic comment on the sense of family as projected in
the book, an illustration of how easily the father accepts
the son's feigned ignorance. In actuality Gordon is quite
literate, even sophisticated: he is more verbally skillful
and imaginative than either of his parents. And, despite
his war against Irving, Twain, et al., he reads extensively:
"I have been reading plays,” he says, "I gulp them down:
Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov, Webster, Gogol, Moliere." (&9) He
even makes the observation - no doubt indirectly influenced
by his father's profession -— that the aforementioned play-
wrights did not share in what in all pseudo-cases was an
occupational disease: constipation.

While Howard is so numbed by professional preoccupations

that he fails to see his son's intellectual growth, Gordon

150
is not without a corresponding myopia. To him his father
possesses no emotional self. He thinks of Howard ”as being
something like a bottle with nothing inside it.” (53) He
begins to suspect Helen of having an affair, for even if she
is vapid and dull her personality at least stirs his curios-
ity. Furthermore, he finds it easy to look at her objec-
tively, or at least without the venom he bears for Howard.
The affair Gordon thinks Helen is having becomes an organiz-
ing force in his day-to-day routine. Although never more
than a ratiocinative dream, it still shows in a way that the
kind of dissatisfaction he feels for her necessitates a
change in her character, which if she will not precipitate
he will daydream into existence. Her attitude toward him,
if we look at those sections told from her point of view,
seldom adds up to anything but superficiality.

Gordon discovers, through a colleague of Howard, that
it is father instead of mother who is stepping out. This
comes very late in the book: as a matter of fact some in-
teresting things develop before it. Prior to the disclosure,
Helen has been herself apprised of the real situation and
has gone off to New York on a more or less vengeful shop-
ping spree. Frances, Howard's mistress, is also out of town.
The situation is thus open to an isolated meeting between
father and son. This materializes in the fishing-trip,
which in its presentation from alternating vieWpoints serves
to emphasize more than ever the broad gap between the two.

Gordon has a premonition that Howard is going to make a

'0

151
statement on the marital problem: but Gordon thinks he will
say that he has been cuckolded rather than adulterous. This
illusion-reality is carried forth dramatically by means of
the necessities of camping and outdoorsmanship: while How-
ard goes out of character and displays somewhat show-offishly
his ability to discern nature-objects and his newfound author-
ity on fish, simply for what he thinks is Gordon's benefit,
Gordon in fact is not even amused by it all. Bored, he de-
cides to daydream out of it, admitting that even if he and
Howard were someplace else he would daydream, and enjoy it.
Gordon doesn't realize that his father is playing outdoors-
man for pig sake - the only magnanimous gesture in the en-
tire novel. In fact, Howard feels that "comradeship" has
been born during the outing.

At the moment Howard wrings his soul for the right
words to say to his son, Gordon is reminiscing about past
April Fool's jokes. Thus when Howard loses his balance and
falls out of their boat into the water, Gordon laughs,
though not directly at his father. Howard, furious, strikes
Gordon and decides against telling him about Frances and the
impending break-up of the marriage. As a last reiteration
of the gap between father and son, Gordon finds out the
truth from another professor.

Ultimately Gordon lg drawn by his father's ingenuity:
near the end he even expresses a certain degree of admira-
tion for him:

...I was beginning to like Howard. I had to

152

admit that he had fooled everybody in a most

ingenious way. Some people have no dignity

simply because they are so thoroughly dull

and colorless. I'd made that mistake about

him. He must have thought me dull, too.

That was why we never got together or said

anything to each other that mattered. My

God, all that fumbling with the fishing tack-

le must have been done to amuse 23!

(252)

Gordon's notion of intimacy involves a sense of adventure,
a gameness about life to help raise it from its natural
state of boredom. In this way he carries forward Helen's
romantic streak, but with infinitely more intelligence and
spirit. His mother behaves dreadfully at the end, but he
probably will not react any differently toward her: it is
not she but his father who initially provided the spur to
his quiet rebellion. And now that Howard has shown the boy
a different side, or shall we say that since Gordon has
sought out a different side of the man, he feels less left-
out of the family misery.

In Lie Down Ag Darkness the children actually represent
the family misery. The two Loftis children are not alike in
any way. The ”mystery of birth," referred to by the kindly
old Richmond physician who delivers Maudie, is tragic in one
case, glorious in the other. Throughout her life Peyton is
beautiful, desirable: throughout hers, Maudie is crippled,
feeble-minded, a burden. As Helen's coldness begins to af-
fect him, Milton hopes for warm love through the second child
(Peyton), on its way. He remembers his feelings toward Mau-

die the infant: "He loved her, he longed for an affection

that could never really blossom, but those eyes —- those

153
sometimes he could hardly bear. Until Peyton was born,
bleak doubt assailed him." (&9) The affection Maudie is
denied by her father is made up more than sufficiently by
her mother. "Ex.£i£s£: gy dearest," Helen thinks of her.
Similarly Milton's love for Peyton grows into something
excessive, and hence the situation I have described in pre-
vious chapters: parents using different children as weapons
against each other.

It should be emphasized, however, that Maudie is not a
character who develops at all. The doctor said of her that
at birth she no doubt knew all she would ever know. She
does not even progress to a stage of play, for one of the
crises of the flashback occurs when Peyton and another child
bind and gag the crippled girl, nearly killing her. They
say it was just a game, and they apparently meant no real
harm, but with Maudie there can be no fun, no games. Used
symbolically rather than strategically, Maudie is a physical
grotesque who stands for the unnamed awfulness that keeps
the older Loftises from loving each other or, paradoxically.
from leaving each other. Helen tells Milton, when he asks
after the gagging incident if she still loves him, “I don't
know...If it weren't for Maudie. If it weren't for Maudie-—"
(66) Maudie becomes Helen's raison d'etre. And even earlier,
Milton had recalled arguments with Helen against a background
of dripping faucets, hot weather, and infant Maudie crying.

Peyton, on the other hand, is very real, very interest-

ingly developed. Indeed the long midsection of the book is

15&

as much a tracing of her path to irrational surrender as it
is anything else. Both as child and as young adult, Peyton
never gains a clear understanding of her mother's coldness
or her father's warmth. A passionate girl, she knows of no
outlet for her yearning except a weak father. Despite her
beauty and intelligence, she is also greatly confused in her
relationships outside the family. In fact her young beaux
find her attractiveness matched by enigmatic attitudes and
obscure motivation.

When Maudie dies Peyton's grief is exhausting, for she
shares some of the vacuum that must have been the sum of the
dead girl's existence. But whereas even at the end Maudie
was a child, calling Helen "Mamadear," Peyton must grow up
and go out into a world which she has not been effectively
prepared to meet. As a little girl she had been called "a
devil“ by her mother, so she behaves more demonically as
time goes on. During an adult confrontation Helen called
her a tramp, and so she is, after marriage. And she writes
to her father a letter which Milton ponders at the beginning
of the novel, a letter that she had written just prior to
her fatal plunge:

0h, Daddy, I don't know what's wrong. I've
tried to grow up - to be a good little girl,
as you would say, but everywhere I turn I seem
to walk deeper and deeper into some terrible
deSpair. What's wrong, Daddy? What's wrong?
Why is happiness such a precious thing? What
have we done with our lives so that everywhere

we turn -— no matter how hard we try not to -—
we cause other people sorrow?
(38)

The emphasis on despair clearly links her last moments

155

with the frame of mind that Milton displays throughout the
book. Paradoxically there is a massive difference in that
Milton has had options along the way, and has been able to
subdue some of the pain through alcohol. For Peyton there
has been only the bitch—mother and the sweet yet weak father.
Her beauty has not given her any advantage in obtaining that
"precious thing." When she goes off to college and later
marries, it is less the natural action of the young initiate
off toward independence as it is anguished escape - para-
doxical escape in that any kind of happiness receivable by
her will grow out of a solution of (1) mother's hateful in-
difference, and (2) father's excessive love. Peyton's last
letter implies this. She knows also that solutions are
impossible, because they have been impossible in the past,
and because her mother and father are limited by the events
of the past. She is, as David Stevenson writes, the victim
of the driving moral disorientation of the generation which
came to maturity after World War II.”10

To conclude this chapter I wish to cite briefly a few
aspects of novels previously discussed, aspects involving
children who are either minor characters or not characters
at all in an actual fictional sense but who nonetheless high-
light an important familial or marital consideration through

their potentiality. For example, the Kinsolving children in

 

10
"Styron and the Fiction of the Fifties," Critigue,
III (Summer, 1960), p. &9.

156
§_e_t_ M W 93 £133. They have no role in the story, yet
they represent Poppy's uncontrollable fertility and they
seem to show up, frequently "bewildered," just when Cass is
in his deepest state of dissipation. In this way they "ad-
vertise” something about their parents. Also used repre-

sentationally are the drowned Angstrom infant in Rabbitl Run

 

and the foetus that Martha Sinnott decides to abort in.§
Charmed Life. In each case human life is used as a concept
in order to motivate the destructive impulses of the women:
one accidental and depressing, the other (theoretically)
intentional and uplifting. Finally worth mentioning is
little Monina, of Barbary Shore. She isa fearful, uncer-
tain child, quick to surrender to a temper tantrum. She is
a cute girl, but thus far talentless, deSpite Guinevere's
dreams of getting her into Hollywood. One cannot help but
be reminded of Adore Loomis, another mother-pushed youngster
who does an obscene dance number in Nathanael West's Day 2:
the Locust. Harris Dienstfrey's appraisal of Monina is
worth noting:

She is obviously a token of the generation to

come, a child of the mass media as Mailer sees

them. Hardly able to speak, she nonetheless

is a consummate narcissist, brilliantly aware

of the most delicate sexual nuance. Like a

celluloid vamp, she can counterfeit the full

ceremony of seduction with appalling intensity

- and then burst into hysterical tears. She

lives in fantasy and emerges into the real
world only to be shocked into fright.11

 

11
Dienstfrey, p. &27.

157

Monina is afraid, just as many of these post-World War
II kids are afraid. They grow old faster, they become dis-
appointed quicker. Their parents, they discover, have really
been ignoring them for some time, shutting them off without
any usable values. The children are interesting to look at,
individually. They seem to be on the whole less concerned
about the ascendancy of self and more concerned about mutual
love and happy simplicity. The exceptions -youngsters such
as Brenda Patimkin and Gordon Graeme —— yearn for independent
individuality but do not yet have the strength of conviction

t0 walk Outs

CHAPTER IV
THE FAMILY-SOCIETY

What statement, or statements, emerge from this collec-
tion of individuals? What does the novelist writing in.Amer-
ica during the years i9&5-1960 perceive in those most funda-
mental of all social units, marriage and family and how does
the process take place in his fiction? Can, in other words,
a sensible generalization be formed from evidence in the
novels discussed in the preceding chapters? Despite the
variety and diversity in character and environment within all
the novels discussed, the answer to the third question (which
is actually stuffed with the other two) is yes. The gener-
alization, or at least the beginning of one, is this: de—
spite a few recognizable exceptions, the American novel
written about and during the post-World War II period, con-
cerned with marital and/or familial problems, presents in-
dividuals permanently rebelling against spouse and/or fami-
ly. The rebellion can be graphically exemplified in many
different ways: for instance, in various dinner scenes -—
from the Graeme's in T32 Disguises p£.prg,to the Patimkin's
in Goodbye, Columbus. The family is around the table, united
in breaking bread, yet each individual is preoccupied with
something to the extent that he disregards the others -—
preoccupied with excessive lust for another woman to

158

159

excessive lust for another chicken leg. And this is not the
sort of unity-in—multeity that Coleridge offered in aesthetic
explanation, but rather one of disharmony and voluntary iso-
lation. The stress on ”self" cited by many observers of re-
cent American literature is not yet completely implemented
in the works heretofore considered. What we seem to have is
rather a step in the process of rebellion, an increase in
the distance between the world at large and individual man.
He is still seen in reaction to the world -— but not speci-
fically to the army, nor big business, nor the church. In-
stead, he tries to sever the nearest ties that bind him:
marriage and family. With once again few exceptions the
reaction is negative: he rejects domesticity as any or all
of the following: unworkable, ineffective, insufficient, or
unnatural.

Having focussed on individual members, I turn now to
the aggregate. By way of clarification I should say that
in much of the fiction discussed in the preceding sections,
the reactions and rebellions are not necessarily the actions
of 223 character, for this has not been a paper on protago~
nists alone. Therefore what any one novel has collectively
to say on the subject of kinship and matrimony is not solely
the product of what the chief character finishes with. What
it has to say is instead a composite of negative, positive,
and indifferent. To begin, I will sketch composite from most
of the novels mentioned thus far in this study, taking them

in the order that they first appeared on these pages. I

160
will then take three novels not included in the composite -—
‘Lig'gggplip Darkness, Rabbit, E23: and §El§2.£§2.2§1 —-and
present a lengthier discussion on the family as a social
unit in each. Some of the sketches or syntheses which imme-
diately follow will show that the novels they derive from
are more conclusive than others.

The generalization drawn at the start of this chapter
is subject to exception in at least four cases. They are
exceptions in that they appear to present a positive case
for the survival of familial relationships. Yet the four -
Sgp_2p;§_gpp§g_pp_Fire, Birth p§_g_Hero, Federigg, and Egg:
derson Egg Rgip y; gl- are something less than whole-
hearted affirmations of the viability of the family. De-
spite the fact that they end on an upbeat, with shall we say
a kind of optimism, the four are nonetheless marked by un-
resolved conflict not completely smothered by the decisive-
ness of the major characters. There is no direct confronta-
tion between husband and wife, for example, on important
matters such as trust, affection, or forgiveness. Indivi-
duals decide unilaterally, as it were. And since intelli-
gent communication would appear to be necessary for a lasting
re-commitment we must wonder ignOrantly about the future of
the relationships. The reservations I have about these ex-
ceptions should become more clear in the succeeding compos-
ites.

There is a solidarity in the Kinsolving family not ap-

parent in many other works. Set This House on Fire is in a

1. 61
way about a headless family that somehow manages to cohere.
Cass's drinking and moral defeatism affect both his sense of
individuality and his sense of responsibility: Poppy tries to
keep each of these alive. We cannot say that she is strong-
er as a mother than she is as wife because her emotional
concern is slotted equally. The family's return to the
United States, and the impending addition of yet another mem-
ber, signifies - to paraphrase Cass's important statement
just earlier in the last part of the book -— that the soli-
darity is what they "can be for a time." Cass's role as
husband is, in the long run, the one which directs his con-
sciousness. That is to say that eternity and universality
become blurred in the face of love and closeness.

The basic, primitive health of this family and even of
the Cass-Poppy marriage stands out more sharply because
Mason Flagg's degeneration is partly measured through cor-
responding roles. Mason's own family, as it becomes known
to us by way of flashback, was infiltrated by drunkenness
too, but also by incompatibility, incest, a generally per-
verted notion of initiation to life. Mason carries forward
the possibilities inherent in the perverted life and indeed
lives without commitment to woman, and as Cass reminds us,
fatherhood to child. Cass opts for unity, but he alone
chooses the option, without consultation with his silly
wife. He chooses it in reaction to the ugliness of another
man's life and in fear of what his own life can become.

The end of Birth p£_§ Hero also finds a reunion in body

162
and spirit among members of a family. Mr. Flair says to
Mrs. Flair, ”We were nothing...but now we will be.” (372)
This statement is another clear-cut end, an announcement that
the trial is now over. Looking backward we can see that
only Flair himself had drifted off, romantically. In the
meantime his wife held down the fort with rare patience and
understanding, and son David exhibited an intelligent enough
brand of sentimentality to assure us that he hoped Rueben
would soon return to the fold. The Flair family is thus not
in much danger of dissolving so long as Ruth and David re-
tain hope. The contrasting presence of Larry and Lydia,
married yet free, demonstrates to Mr. Flair the beautiful
but mostly the ugly aspects of that freedom. Despite the
happy ending it should be pointed out that Reuben and Ruth
do not project much mutual understanding. The boredom out
of which his adventure develops seems attributable to si-
lence and quiet routine, and there is little indication that
this will change. Reuben and Dgyyg have definitely under-
gone something more than a provisional shift: but between
Reuben and Ruth no new foundations have been discovered. It
is conceivable that other break-ups will occur.

Family in Federigo is resolution more than it is con-
flict, ironic dissatisfaction more than it is occasion for
serious break-up. At the end we are told that Sylvia has
given birth to a child conceived on the night on which re-
union took place. Therefore intimacy has definitely been

achieved here -— at least the sexual part of it. Yet husband

163
and wife are not totally intimate, for neither is completely
honest with the other. The marriage survives not through
some deeply-felt decision mutually arrived at, but rather
because both seem disposed in the direction of survival
"without being altogether certain why," as Nemerov inter-
jects. (263)

Within each of these central figures there is the voice
that he listens to and obeys. He does not listen to spouse
or child because, like Henderson the Rain King, the "I” got
him into the fix and it therefore must find its own way out.
Bellow's novel is yet another which traces the path of a mari-
tal escapee back to the place from which he had started. But
this is a very non-specific book, loaded with indirect state-
ment and literary innuendo. Husband and wife are to be unit-
ed because of what has happened to, in, and from Africa:
however, it must be stressed that that which has happened
has happened to the husband only. At the end Henderson
undergoes a self-reappraisal and a reconsideration of the
worth of mankind. But we are forced to wonder how much of
him Lily should accept. Although he says in his letter to
her, ”it's love that makes reality," (251) we have to pose
the question to ourselves as to what part of Henderson's
reality is marital intimacy and what part lonely intellec-
tualism.

In the two novels used for purposes of comparison, Tpg
Map,;p,£pglgggy Flannel §pi§_and Some Came Runnipg, there is

a superficial unity achieved. In the former, the Raths stay

16&
together as a corporation dedicated to the pursuit of com-
fort. In the latter, the Hirshes are condemned to live with
each other. Jones's novel is somewhat of an exaggeration in
its picture of misery, but it nevertheless points to a com-
mon characteristic of all the other works: marital-familial
relationships are not happy ones.

The Fullers in Gold's The thimist are a family only to
the extent that they have children which make it so. That
is, neither he nor she present themselves enthusiastically
inclined toward raising children or even tolerating them.
The children themselves do not clearly take shape in the
novel: we can only guess what they must be like. The mar-
riage between Burr and Laura Fuller seems in the end to be
that to which there is no known alternative. They engage in
extra-marital relationships, but do not intend to dissolve
the marriage. Since their marital life takes up only part
of the novel, it is important to recall that earlier it was
a union looked forward to in camelot-like dreams, as a cul-
mination of romantic pursuit. Hence "they lived happily
ever after" occurs early here, relatively speaking, and they
proceed to discover the illusory nature of the happiness in
the advancing years of their marriage.

The very arrangement of things in Tpg Disguises 23 £213
-— inexpressive dialogue, multiple point of view, shallow
characterization - stresses the fundamental lack of communi-
cation within the Graeme family. Each of the members oper-

ates with false information about, and false impression of,

165
the other two. All wear disguises. All exhibit imaginative-
ness on occasion, but only to the extent that they conjure
up untruths about the others. Truth, it seems, cannot be
dreamed up, or Hill not be so. Truth is in the opinion of
each member a dull commodity. Husband and wife, insufficient
to each other by far, venture out to new worlds, actual or
fantasized. With almost no respect for either father or
mother, the son gives them new roles in the imaginary plays
of his mind. The final scene dramatizes the emptiness of
all their dreams and the real pain that they can bring about.
The scene implies that the way to make marriage and family
survive is to live quietly in singular worlds. Then the
anguish brought about the disclosure of the truth is really
pleasure in disguise.

It is necessary for All Pennington-Barker, in Bourjaily's
Egg,gpppg_p£_§gyph, to wear an actual disguise in order to
encounter securely the universal family. He has left his
real family: it no longer exists for him. But if by wiping
away his actual marriage and fatherhood he seeks to pave his
way toward a reconciliation with general humanity, his dis-
covery is not morally reassuring. The difficulties his fel-
low workers individually project to him are unsolvable, and
the weight on.Al's mind is made heavier. Indeed, the pic-
ture at the end of the Christmas rush is frightening and
chaotic, showing that despite even the best of intentions
during the best of seasons, human beings resist coming

together and harmonizing.

166

This lack of harmony among people and between husband
and wife in particular is brought out by Mary McCarthy intg
Charmed Ligg. The self-satisfaction Martha Sinnott feels
just prior to the ironic collision that kills her stands a-
part from the bored dismay she feels toward herself as wife.
And her attitude toward marriage is in keeping with the New
Leeds set, from which every year many emigrate with new
partners. The colony displays bored intellectuals ostensi-
bly seeking rebirth but actually trying to shed some part of
marriage, the source of their boredom.

In Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky we encounter an-

 

other fruitless marriage, here shifted across the ocean in
an attempt to escape the personal and historical past. The
formal aspect of the Moresby's marriage dies appropriately
enough in an arid climate rife with uncontrollable disease.
And only when Port's death is imminent do they approach
something like understanding. In other words, normal condi-
tions merely isolate the purposelessness of the marriage and
the ennui that husband and wife feel toward each other. The
typhoid-caused inability to communicate in the last moments
of Port's life is further ironic commentary on the marriage.
The juxtaposition of past and present gives shape to

the stark imbalance within the Ormsby family in Morris's Map
Egg Bgy: Mother is all-powerful, father is weak, son is
manipulated when young, and dead when older. The family is
one in which there simply is no interaction. The death of

the hero-son does nothing to change the marriage. Mother

167
presides over the decoration ceremony as she does over life
with Ormsby. She seems to exist so that she can dominate
things, and her husband offers no resistance to her domina-
tion of their continuing relationship.

In Mailer's Barbary §pppg the lack of interaction be-
tween people is emphasized by the fact that the novel is
well under way before we even discover that Guinevere and
McLeod have ever been married. They are separated by just
a few floors, but the distance is more accurately measured
in attitude. Their marriage was, at least in her eyes, a
purchased stock whose price on the market only lost. Sub-
sequently only speculative ventures rather than the perma-
nent re-commitment (and probable disappointment) with McLeod
have sustained her. The child Monina gets used as bait for
better things: her life in the family is frightening be-
cause Guinevere doesn't fully recognize her humanity.

The Devereux adults do fully recognize their daughter,
and in this way Partilden Village is unusual: but more im-
portant is Mrs. Devereux's admission at the end that "'none
of us did the right thing.'” The situation is made more
complex because mother and daughter share the same lover,
but even without that complexity their attitudes toward each
other are hostile: mother is suspicious of daughter in all
her relationships with young men, and daughter does things
purposely to spite mother. Mr. Devereux has, in some in-
direct way, bestowed upon Jacqueline a capacity for music,

and not much else. The daughter runs out on the domestic

168
scene in tears, but one cannot help but suspect that wher-
ever she goes independent life offers her much more.

The Devereux marriage is typical of those considered
in this study. Nowhere are they intimate with each other.
Only in a moment or two of crisis, in fact, do they seem to
do more than tolerate each other. With their daughter gone,
they possess each other by default. The heritage of Elea-
nor's adultery and Jefferson's marital lethargy exists for
the duration, apparently. And although their life together
is not potentially explosive as is the Loftis's in L13 prp
ip Darkness, they could very well punctuate it with "nothing!"
as Styron's people do.

In Morris's Egglg,2§ Vision he deals again with a sit-
uation which appears to be emotionally out of order. Mrs.
McKee displays more vitality than her husband does, even
though she lives in the past. Her whole character appears
to be.attached to what happened long ago with another man
and it lives on in a grandson named after the man: this
speaks a great deal to the point about her motherhood and
marriage. She seldom concerns herself with McKee in thought
or in deed. Their marriage represents a moment in the now
of things, against which the past -— any romantic ounce of
it- is measured.

In the two other works remaining to be discussed in
this part of the chapter - Salinger's Egg Catcher lgLEhg
Hyg and Roth's Goodbye; Columbus, a sense of family is quite

strong. In the former, parental concern is totally absent:

169

in the latter, parental domination is the chief issue. We
get the impression from Holden that the Caulfield children
are very close. His feelings for his dead brother and his
living sister are everywhere quite warm, even intimate. The
relationship between Phoebe and Holden shows a willing de-
pendence of each on the other. And Holden's memory of Al-
lie, with poem-filled baseball glove and uncorrupted inno-
cence, certainly insists upon a special love beyond mortal
boundaries.

Yet we must keep in mind the absence of the Caulfield
parents, as we must recall Holden's fear upon being ex-
pelled and the corresponding fear of Phoebe -— for her
brother's sake -— on hearing that he has indeed been ex-
pelled from Pencey. A ”cross-section" of the book shows
that the parents lurk as a childish nightmare -— fearful and
unseen, in the dark shadows of night while the little ones
sleep; a parent-like spectre materializes briefly in.Antoli-
ni's evident infatuation. The net result of Salinger's
novel, in terms of what it says about the family, is some-
what mixed, very positive on the side of brotherhood, criti-
cally reserved toward the meeting of generations.

I Marriage is coldly institutionalized in Roth's novel in
that the picture of Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin shows financial
success not matched by anything stronger than emotional tol-
erance. But whatever their feelings toward each other, they
are both possessive and permissive toward their children.

The opposition through children we encounter in such clear

170
terms in gig ngg in Darkness —- that is, parents using chil-
dren as weapons against each other - finds its way also
into the Patimkin household, though not so violently. A
subtle exposition of the Mrs. Patimkin-Mr. Patimkin cohabi-
tation can be seen in the differing letters sent to Brenda
after her diaphragm is found. The very fact that the couple
sends not one but two separate letters says much about their
inability to have meaningful consultation.

The Patimkin family is a successful financial invest-
ment. Mr. Patimkin has "worked hard" to get his position
and to accumulate all the objects and human beings around
the house. The Klugman family - traceable indirectly
through Neil and somewhat directly through his relationship
with Aund Gladys -— seems to be one in which independence can
be tolerated or even rewarded.

Looking at the preceding sketches, or syntheses, set
side-by-side in widescreen panorama, the negative reaction
stands out discernibly. Whereas in the between-war period
smalltown America, corrupt capitalism, and corrupt militar-
ism had come under indictment by the American novelist, wri-
ters of the 1945-60 period dolly in and find the individual
at war even among his own. Alienation, the death of love,
the struggle against blind conformity, the heartlessness of
the world: these are themes which the writer, especially
social critics such as Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and Sinclair
Lewis have long dealt with. But in the body of literature

here studied the themes float through a social structure

x:

171

which has not broad but narrow outlines. The fictional con-
flict generates not within large,diffuse groups of people
picked at random from growing towns or bristling cities,
but within a small number of related men, women, and chil-
dren. In many cases the individual has difficulty extricat-
ing himself from the bonds of family and matrimony even when
he E§2£§.t° get out. The reason for the difficulty is that
he simultaneously retains the hope -— as the Flairs and
Ghents do -— that things can be different, that somehow the
idea of living in human community is a good one, the best
one, maybe. In some cases an individual is denied the usable
values he should get from the family because the other mem-
bers are thinking of themselves and do not share his faith
in the possibilities of the unit as a place of learning.
Further, and paradoxically, the individual seeks ways out,
since out equals freedom. To some extent family and to a
great extent marriage are curbs to freedom and development.

But two things seem even more noticeable and prevalent
among the works discussed. First, the fact that marriage is
presented as a real drag, as a vow to be violated because of
the freedom it prevents and the tyranny it perpetuates, but
even more because it is dull, lackluster, shallow, as much
a rut as an unliked Job. Even in those cases where settle-
ment is made, no general overhaul can be perceived —— over-
haul in the sense of new understanding or new commitment.
Second, a persistence of coldness within the family -— the

lack, with already noted exceptions, of space devoted to

172

ordinary conversation among members. Within the pages of the
novels the generation of children and the generation of par-
ents are either physically separated from each other or sep-
arated in terms of communication - in that they argue and
disagree from convictions held firmly prior to the argument
and unchanged by it. The disagreements themselves are not,
it should be stressed, presented for a rounder or more genu-
ine picture of familial or marital life, but rather as symp-
toms of disintegration.

The mental image of society as an unfightable, impersonal
force is one which certainly contrasts the image which in
general we wOuld attach to a married couple or to a family.
The closeness of the unit facilitates warmth and communication
obviously impossible on a large scale. Yet these novels are
strangely lacking in this marital-familial intimacy. Like
an American Dream promised but lost, love doesn't seem to
pan out for these people. By looking in a more broadly elab-
orate way —- working with more all-encompassing thematic
concerns —- at three of the novels, gig 29 n in Darkness,
RabbitI 322! and.§gi§§_thg,ggy, I would like to present the
family'gg society, as that larger body which makes meaningful
living for sensitive individuals an extremely difficult or-
deal. I realize that these three works do not "speak for"
all the rest, and I do not intend that they should; however,
the familial-social complex is the fullest within them.

"Nothing!" is the tortured finale to the dead marriage
between Helen and Milton Loftis, and that decisive word can

173
be used as a subject heading for the Loftis family as traced
in gig‘ggwg‘iprarkness. It is a road to nothing which takes
in a husband's drunkenness and lust for his daughter, a wife's
perverse anti-sexuality and hatred for the same daughter
that her husband lusts after, a child's physical and mental
disability, and another's confused sensuality, promiscuity,
and eventual suicide. Each of these seem, in retrospect,
out-growths of a marriage filled with strife and void of
love. Husband and wife live together without intimacy or
understanding, and because of this the healthy daughter be-
comes as emotionally afflicted as her sister is physically
afflicted.

By different standards Milton Loftis is a failure. But
the one which is most telling, to him at least, is that in-
volving money. To be fully the head of the family, which
the father is as society dictates, he must earn. There must
be leadership, and the money earner usually assumes that
leadership. When Milton contemplated Helen's money so un-
ashamedly before they married, he was beginning already to
abdicate leadership to her. And when he allows his legal and
political aspirations to consequently disappear because of
the abdication, he makes Helen's assumption of leadership
much easier.

However, Helen does not wish to accept the role in its
entirety. Her task, as she sees it, within the structure of
the family has less to do with leadership than it has with

guidance and guardianship. She is legislator rather than

174
administrator. But what she brings to the family - the
“laws", as it were —- have been handed down like the money
with very little modification from her father. Thus the
legal foundations of the Loftis family are buried in puri-
tannical severity and militaristic narrowmindedness. Such
foundations Milton cannot uphold. He himself does not carry
forth parentally-given values so strongly as Helen; in fact,
he carries forth nothing that can be used as an alternative.
Nor will he leave, for Helen's money is something he grows
to depend on.

Thus the Loftis family exists on very tenuous grounds,
like a dying nation, and the weakness becomes more apparent
as the book goes on. It is without unified leadership and
without unified law, and instead of the things one would
ordinarily hope to find in a family - stability, warmth,
personalism - one sees instead the things by which society
at large is usually characterized -— complexity, coldness,
impersonalism. Factions arise, enemies and allies are es-
tablished, and each party thinks he is in the right. The
new generation sprung from this ill-joined pair manifests
Judgment of it: a senseless cripple, a promiscuous neurotic.
And every possible custom, law, or expectation, whether based
on tradition, society at large, or necessity, is thereafter
shattered. The shattering takes the shape of alcoholism,
adultery, physical and mental cruelty, perversion, suicide,
and attempted murder.

This is not all. As a small seminar facilitates in-depth

175

understanding of subject matter, a small group such as a
family is afforded special Opportunities to deal with their
problems, opportunities which the larger group, such as an
entire society, finds impossible. These special opportuni-
ties oan be realized, common sense dictates, through the
natural intimacy born of kinship and the ease with which
personal feelings can be communicated. Yet individual feel-
ings, as I indicated in the previous chapters, are projected
with excruciating difficulty or not at all in.;g§_22wn i3
Darkness. The feelings have nowhere to go but within, and
the condition which I have earlier labelled "self-love" takes
shape.

The demands of each personality in Styron's novel are
in different ways blocked by the unit itself. Simultaneous-
ly -— and paradoxically —— the blocking is lamented by each,
because each suspects —- consciously or subconsciously -—
'that only by being integrated with the others (that is, only
by finding a reasonable way by which society can be accom-
modated) can a purposeful life be lived. By following the
dictates of the self at the expense of the others, the indi-
vidual -— be he Milton or Helen or Peyton -— rebels from the
microcosm. It is a rebellion in bewilderment, sadness, even
agony. Each rebels differently and yet the same in the sense
that each runs away from that which he seeks: the necessarily
mutual foundations of love. Each individual tries to fulfill
only his own personal kind of intimacy: Helen does not allow

herself to satisfy any appetite, Milton sees love as appetite-

176
satisfaction and little else, and Peyton places too much
emphasis on pity and sentimentality.

Like ethnic groups within a tight geographical zone,
the Loftises conduct an existence that not only seems void
of purpose and direction, but filled with tension, growing
hatred. They are, John Aldridge writes, "provincial peo-

ple, culturally limited people."1

And what Jonathan Baum-
bach perceives to be "a decayed and decaying paradise"2
actually never was a paradise at all: it began as possi-
bility and ended as impossibility, for the members never got
around to saying the essential thing to each other. No sig-
nificant lines of communication are utilized by anyone, not
even between Peyton and her father. In the latter relation—
ship what appears on the surface to be love in excess is
actually anguished clutching. By relying on pet names and
by withholding from each other the essence of what they
feel, the clutching eventually develops into a form of in-
cest, a perversion which compounds the nature of his drink-
ing problem. Certainly it would have been better for Milton
and Peyton to depend less on one another for sheer survival

and more out of gentle love. The need to survive emotionally

is borne of Helen's insufferable regulations and is yet

 

1 _
2122,32.fl2§§2§,§§§,£32229 (New York: McKay Co., 1966),
P0 38-
2

uThe Landscape pf Nightmare (New York: NYU Press, 1965),
p. 120

177
another spur to Milton's drinking and the confused seizing
of each day by Peyton. Helen's militarized code of conduct
causes her to deny affection to the beautiful, vibrant normal
child and give it to the inarticulate, crippled one. No
danger exists that a feeble-minded unfortunate will violate
her sensibilities, and communication with the congenital
accident is irrelevant. Maudie needs only to be given the
simplest of care: no misunderstanding is possible. How dif-
ferent is the line between Helen and the other two members
of the family, neither of whom plead or whimper, but instead
grope and hold. Enormous gaps exist in her relationship
with Milton because they never really communicate. Some-
where between Milton's anti-paternal hedonism and Helen's
pro-paternal austerity lies a workable matrimonial framework.
However, they never get around to talking about it, and hence
the inarticulate burning tension between them builds inces-
santly. And the friction between Helen and Peyton is one
which shows Helen unaccepting to youthful anxiety, given
only to safe pity.

The cataclysm of Styron's novel takes place when Peyton
commits suicide, a free bird floating insanely through the
dense city haze. Her suicide represents a destructive blow
to the Loftis family - the lggt blow, since with her death
only the original marital pair is left: in other words,
”nothing! nothing! nothing!"

A symbolic parallel runs through 2&2.22E2.12 Darkness:

the references to world events. The end of World War II,

178
the long period of bloody fighting, runs evenly with the
years of emotional havoc, now complete and finished in devas-
tation. The Loftis family has likewise either died or sur-
rendered. Maudie, never fully alive, is gone. Peyton,
physically bursting with apparent life, has ended that life.
And neither father nor mother have anyone to turn to except
their incompatible selves.

Whereas power is Juggled in Styron's novel, freedom is
the point in question in the society of RabbitI Egg. The
"run" of the title indicates the stress we need to put on
the matter of escape, or search, depending on Harry's frame
of mind at given moments. The thing sought by him is some-
thing pure, but something he nonetheless cannot pin down.

The thing escaped fggg is the sort of regimentation that one
must acquesce to within the modern world. The particular

for of the regimentation in this novel is the Angstrom house-
hold at a special time: another child is on its way, bring-
ing with it new demands of parents who consider themselves
already overtaxed. The world at large and the world at home
are very similar in that each requires the Angstroms to do
what they don't want to do, and prevents them from seizing
that which they desire. Harry wishes to be a boy again, but
he cannot be accepted as such by anyone because he has a boy
of his own who cannot see him as anything but a father. Jan-
ice wishes not to be pregnant but of course the world forbids
her to have an abortion: furthermore, her husband enjoys the

thought and look of her pregnancy and ironically wonders why

179
she doesn't appreciate being pregnant "the way other women
do.“ To act out their desires each commits an action which
is prohibited: Janice absurdly buys a bathing suit, a sym-
bol of a flat stomach, and Rabbit drives off aimlessly. The
family is, especially to Rabbit, an institution of "hypnotic

mediocrity,"3

wherein the automatic fulfillment of responsi-
bility is to Rabbit more despicable —- far more - than infi-
delity. His Opening revolt is both from society at large

and from the society which is manifested in his house and

all that is connected with it. It seems probable that part
of his attraction for the whore Ruth lies in the fact that,
notwithstanding all the ritualistic seriousness he attached
to their lovemaking, he is not pressed into anything by being
with her, or even living with her.

An awful lot of silent spaces, or gaps, exist among the
Angstroms. Nelson is seldom around: at the start of the
novel he is notably being Juggled from one grandmother to
the other. After she is born we see the new baby as an im-
portant character, or at least important in a representational
sense, in only one other scene —- in the bathtub, drowning.
Rabbit has Just run off again, and it might be said that
Janice is separated from the child, also, by her alcohol-
effected bad Judgment.

This divided aspect of the Angstrom family is stressed

in other isolated scenes. The opening of the novel finds

 

3
Galloway, p. 28.

180
Rabbit locked out of the house (an apparent mistake) while
Janice watches the Mousketeers. At the same time he is de-
nied the use of the car, which she has left at her mothers.
Nor can he make use of Janice's body, since she is at that
point well along in pregnancy. The social tableau is clear:
he is chained to responsibility while being denied his
rights. She carries new life but blasphemes it by watching
an insipid television "family." Through it all Nelson is an
apparent obstacle to both parents. First he has been farmed
out so his mother can go on a shopping spree. Then Rabbit,
who soon gets the car, looks upon Nelson as a hindrance to
his spontaneous urge to flee. He peeks into Grandmother
Angstrom's window and sees the boy feeding healthfully: ”this
home is happier than his," (22) Rabbit says to himself, and
drives away.

The dissolution of intimacy between husband and wife is
readily apparent. Notable is the scene which I have already
cited a couple of times, his abortive attempt to make love
to her a short time after she has had the child. Neither
Lperson at that point makes any attempt to understand the
<>ther: they see no hope in common deliberation. By not de-
llitmrating there is little chance that the essence of one
willbe recognized by the other. The primitivism that spurs
rfinch of Rabbit's impetuosity is unknown to Janice: she sees
19t»as rash selfishness. What emerges out of this instead of
8eJrual intimacy is independent appetite, and because of their

:111dependent appetites, they do not take advantage of the

181
marital situation. What once might have been an emotional
challenge has become an intolerable pain to both.

The intolerability reaches its symbolic end in the bath-
tub scene. It is not murder, but in Janice's dizzied state
of mind what strangely pours forth is confused self-pity:

A contorted memory of how they give artificial

respiration pumps Janice's cold wet arms in

frantic rhythmic hugs: under her clenched lids

great scarlet prayers arise, wordless, mono-

tonous, and she seems to be clasping the knees

of a vast third person whose name, Father,

Father, beats against her head like physical

blows. Though her wild heart bathes the uni-

verse in red, no spark kindles in the space

between her arms.

(220)
Surely this is one of the most horrifying moments in modern
fiction, but for all its emotional power it presents also an
emotional distance between the mother and the creature she
has first given birth to, now destroyed. The infant is only
a ”space,“ a wet limp thing, and the projection of Janice's
shock in terms of an anonymous "Father" underlies a search
for the kind of authority directed to a child -— a sinning
child, not a drowning one. Like Rabbit earlier, she seeks
the security and unwashed irresponsibility of childhood.
{Thus in the critical moment of her life she resigns from
(Bonscious motherhood and seeks the comfort of being someone's
(laughter.
What they both seem hurt by, however, is not chiefly

ESelf-appetite but rather the ease with which they can shift
Jen and out of the marital-familial state. Almost as if they

‘Yere playing a game which suddenly is interrupted by a

182
thunderstorm, the Angstroms can at will or at random shift
the kids and the burden to a grandparent, or someone else
willing to spoil them further. This is a cynical pronounce-
ment against the preparation for independence which those
grandparents gave them. They opt out at times without a
statement on their own lost responsibility. "A better home,"
as Rabbit said earlier. During his first flight he refers
to Tothero, his former coach and a kind of father-figure,
and to his mother, as "forces“ in his life. He sees them as
forces because they evidently made things less painful for
him, because they took some weight off his shoulders. Rab-
bit himself does not, however, bring this kind of force into
the family of his own making.

Finally, I should say that Rabbit's ultimate flight at
the end of the novel is prepared for effectively by the
domestic reflection he made much earlier:

He crosses around in front of the car, the '55
Ford that old man Springer with his little yel-
low Hitler mustache sold him fcr an even thou-
sand in 1957 because the scared bastard was
ashamed, cars being his business he was ashamed
of his daughter marrying somebody who had noth-
ing but a '36 Buick he bought for $125 in the
Army in Texas in 1953. Made him cough up a
thousand he didn't have when the Buick had just
eighty dollars' worth of work. That was the
kind of thing. They deserve everything they
EStO
(23)
Springer is Janice's father. The passage occurs right at the
start of his first flight, during which he daydreams about
the past —- the past of athletics, youthful sex, and also

his financial non-aptitude. That he is no breadwinner is as

183
evident early and late in the novel. He runs from the fi-
nance of things. To be the free man he wishes to be, he must
throw aside all financial preoccupations - leaving behind
the thoughts about the thousand, the hundred-and-a-quarter,
the eighty, leaving them to old man Springer. Once again
the persistent image of the novel is that of loss. Rabbit's
freedom can be measured by the loss of cohesiveness in the
social fabric of the family.

Different from El; 2233 ip Darkness and RabbitI 332 in
scope, but similar in theme is Saul Bellow's Sgl§§,£hg_ggy.
Here again two different generations of family figure promi-
nently. In each case lggg is emphatic, and also irrevocable.
What happened when a son left home, or when a father left
his sons, cannot be changed here: the burden of the past is
insistently painful when its particulars are examined and
re-examined in front of a hostile parent. Nothing can bring
back the moments prior to renunciation and self-indulgence.
Each character, especially Dr. Adler, seems to dramatize this
irrevocability: each seems to say over and over again that
failure and loss can only be contemplated and brooded over,
never altered or redeemed. The family here, in other words,
is something that Egg, not something that gap pg.

The Specifics which tie together the familial society
and its larger counterpart in fiction -— money, custom, expec-
tation, sexual attitudes, and generational influence, are all
clustered within Bellow's novel. It is a novel about gpdg:

the end of Wilhelm's financial rope extended to his wife,

184
the end of his savings on worthless commodities, and the end
of his ties to humanity. He cites it when he and his father
are quibbling over the year of his mother's death. "'That
was the beginning of the end, wasn't it, Father?'" he says
to Adler, and the old man thinks fairly pointed thoughts:
Beginning of the end? What could he mean -—
what was he fishing for? Whose end? The end
of family life? The old man was puzzled but
he wouldn't give Wilhelm an opening to intro-
duce his complaints.
(33)
Evident here is not only the father's propensity to deny his
son opportunity, but also the father's own now-hidden parti-
cipation in the process of loss, alienation, rebellion. It
introduces the thematic threads of removal: removal of the
individual from a social framework, especially from family
ties.

In.§g;gg‘thglggy money is used in four ways: first, to
convey the goal which originally took Wilky out of the fami-
ly. Second, as the means by which he feels he can take an-
other crack at success, or at least to circumvent future
failure. The natural irony here is that he simultaneously
seeks re-entry into the family (via asking his father for
help) in a role similar to the one he had long ago given up.
Third, it is used to tie closer the relationship between the
social whole and the social part: specifically, Dr. Adler
as successful man, looked up to, living out his years on a
formidable income. While Wilky tried to duplicate his fa-
ther's financial success, he took the wrong path and that,

to Adler, has made all the difference, Fourth, in its

185
application to the delinquent support payments which Margaret
is demanding of her husband, in represents the inescapability
of work, the mandatory nature of earning: that is, Tommy
cannot get out of his predicament by giving up, he cannot
rejoin anything by simply asking or begging. By law he must
retain his fatherhood through alimony. For Tommy, to be is
to pay. For Margaret it is to demand. For Adler it is to
possess.

Tommy's pain and frustration at this state of affairs
is expressed most stridently as he comments on a conversa-
tion between his father and Mr. Perls:

Uch! How they love money, thought Wilhelm.

They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful

money! It was getting so that peOple were

feebleminded about everything except money.

While if you didn't have it you were a dum-

my, a dummy! You had to excuse yourself from

the face of the earth.

(41)

The last two sentences say a great deal about the whole novel
in that Wilhelm's failure with money matters parallels his
failure in human matters.

None of the special communicative advantages of family
and marriage are invoked here. As if these were ideals gone
up in smoke, each individual pulls away, seeing that the
promise of the family microcosm is much more than its deliv—
ery. To achieve unity and love they would have to go out to
each other, giving up some thing in order to achieve the
cherished intimacy. But what actually holds true among the
members of the Adler and Wilhelm families is division, and

an almost vengeful attitude by one toward another. We are

186

witness to conversations between father and son which in-
volve only error and fault and pain —- all inversely related
to love. When Adler gives Tommy his final rejection of a
loan, and he finds out that his son has been taken to the
cleaners by Tamkin, he says very authoritatively and con-
descendingly, “Well, I won't remind you how often I warned
you. It must be very painful." (118) The doctor's words
must also be painful. At this point Tommy has nothing, be-
longs to neither of his families, and is in debt to many.
And what Margaret says later certainly adds to the disinte-
grative nature of the book's end. When he insists that he
had no possibility of getting hold of any money with which
to pay her, she simply says over again, "you better get it,
Tommy.” (121) The idea of marriage and family has failed
here because the individuals themselves do not know how to
handle failure. It is almost as if -— speaking cynically -—
they might have succeeded had they all subscribed to the
reversible gray flannel notion that togetherness means money.

In any event, the last scene provides a fit epilogue to
the whole sombre affair and emphasizes -— through death as
metaphor - that genuine feeling, though it is something we
expect to ally with kinship - can really only be generated
within one's own self, and only toward one's self. The
scene takes place before the coffin of a dead man, no one in
particular yet everyone to Wilhelm, all his failure and pain.

He, alone of all the people in the chapel,

was sobbing. No one knew who he was.
One woman said, 'Is that perhaps the cousin

187

from New Orleans they were expecting?‘

It must be somebody real close to carry
on so.‘ .

'Oh my, oh my! To be mourned like that,’
said one man and looked at Wilhelm's heavy
shaken shoulders, his clutched face and
whitened fair hair, with wide, glinting
jealous eyes.

'The man's brother, maybe?‘

'Oh, I doubt that very much,‘ said an-
other bystander. 'They're not alike at all.
Night and day.’

The flowers and lights fused ecstatically
in Wilhelm's blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-
like music came up to his ears. It poured
into him where he had hidden himself in the
center of a crowd by the great and happy
oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank
deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and
cries toward the consummation of his heart's
ultimate need.

(128)

What appears to be in focus here, as far as Tommy the
individual is concerned, is that he can only attain the con-
cern of others through accidental or bogus means, and through
imaginative self-pity modified by that ultimate failure of
all men, the inability to defeat death. He lives vicarious-
ly through the corpse, through the tears which are the domi-
nant image in the passage, and through the curiosity of the
other people. He is ”night and day" from the dead man, how-
ever, not a relative; this pronouncement works in retrospect,
also, for we need only witness the enormous differences be-
tween him and his own relatives, whom he contacts during the
story.

He might also be crying for all who attach themselves
t0 special human ralationships only to discover that those

relationships do not go beyond stages - that is, they are

provisional.

188

The family functions in these novels as a microcosm of
society. The macrocosm is too unwieldy, too unreal; the
only actuality is that sphere in which individual man Oper-
ates, the marital-familial unit. Man engages the universe
through it. Clearly it is generally a sad engagement, for
in order to make sense out of the universe, in order to sur-
vive in meaningful marital-familial unity, he must shed his
self. This he is extremely reluctant to do. What he sheds,
instead, is intimacy and the power to love.

As beginnings in these works are shadowy, endings are
perplexing. We rarely see in the post-World War II novels
here discussed those moments of familial Joy -— weddings,
births, christenings, bar mitzvahs: even marital sex is
hardly represented in comparison to adulterous sex. Along
with the absence of joyful beginnings we have, as a number
of critics have pointed out, no more happy endings. With
Wilhelm's inward surrender the tangled pattern becomes more
difficult to speak of in realistic or social-critical termi-
nology. The currents of division, loss, and removal which
run like numb pains from the individual to his wife and kids
and father and sister eventually disappear -— though not at
a precisely discernible moment or year. What remains to
supply the “heart's ultimate need" is a lonely creative self.
Which was, after all, what started the disintegrative process
in the family in the first place.

CHAPTER V

POSTSCRIPT: THE SIXTIES

In very recent times1

the mainstream of American fic-
tion has generally drifted away from the kind of novel con-
sidered in the preceeding chapters. Therefore it is with a
great deal of caution that I follow through to the sometimes
wildly comic work done in the 19603, work that nonetheless
lg an outgrowth of sorts from the score of books already
considered. Again the few books I will pay attention to
deal with post-World War II people in marital—familial situa-
tions. These newer works are different in texture, tending
toward that aspect of "fabulation" which Robert Scholes
elaborates, "tends away from the representation of reality
but returns toward actual human life by way of ethically

controlled fantasy."2

The subtle differentiation he seems
to make between "representation of reality" and "actual hu-

man life" is based on order and direction, rather than

 

1

For convenience in this paper, the term "very recent"
will signify something published no earlier than the late
fifties. The chronology is not exact. For example, End of
the Road, mentioned briefly here, precedes Rabbit, Run, ”but
only“ in publication date.

2
The Fabulators (New York: Oxford, 1967), p. 11.

189

190
substance. As I see it the subject matter of the newer works
is not the struggle to assert individuality, but rather the
consequences of the assertion, in many forms. That is,
marriage and family function not so much as parts of the
social framework nor as society itself against which rebel-
lion is examined, but rather as a ridiculous something
against which rebellion as such is irrelevant. The ridicu-
lousness is presupposed; what unfolds in the novels is bet-
ter understood if we realize that writers 82532 with the
non-viability of the marital-familial unit. This non-viabi-
lity is treated in various degrees of humor, ranging from
angry strength to self-pity. In each case there also seems
to be a preoccupation with madness -— perhaps because of the
insanity of normality.

Critics are in accord in saying that most of the impor-
tant new fiction written during the late fifties and sixties
has been the absurdly comic sort variously known as Black
Humor, Apocalyptic Comedy, or Fiction of the Absurd. One of
the most noticeable tendencies of this fiction and one cited
by Douglas Davis is its undiminishable disregard for limita—
tions, eSpecially those imposed by the traditional past.3
In the earlier chapters of this paper I pointed out among
other things the familial-marital conflicts arising out of
the Opposition of self and social unit. In works such as

J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, John Barth's The End 23

 

3
Davis, p. 17.

191
thg_§2§d, and Elliott Baker's é Eigg Madness this opposition
is still present, but the conflict ensues within the indivi-
dual character, since external manifestations of social
pressure such as responsibility, affection, and order are
radically scoffed at. I shall examine Baker's novel be-
cause it approximates some of the situations considered in
previous chapters, while projecting a good deal of the wild
irreverence that marks the new fiction.

Samson Shillitoe is a hZ-year-old poet living with a
stupid young woman named Rhoda who is frequently referred to
as Mrs. Shillitoe, although she and Samson have never been
through a ceremony. Rhoda provides her explosive poet-lover
a body on which he can purge himself of sexual lust and
violence. He is in financial woe for different reasons:
he makes almost no money off his poetry, his temperament
and extraordinary attractiveness to women make it difficult
to hold down even petty Jobs, and his ex-wife Beverley, in
the tradition of post-World War II fictional divorcees, is
relentless in her demands for alimony.

é_§$gg Madness is built with episodic blocks featuring
people whose interlocking relationships within ladies' clubs,
psychiatrists tape recordings, rest homes, and whore's beds
provide a broad comic plot that complicates the study of
Samson. The most important of the subplots is the faltering
marriage between the psychiatrist Oliver Wren and his wife
Lydia. They find themselves in Samson's world coincidentally.

Rhoda takes the money that Samson has earned from a lecture

192
which appalled the members of Mrs. Wren's ladies' group and
gives it to Dr. Wren to "cure“ the violent poet. At first
unaware that his wife knows Samson, Dr. Wren accepts the
case, promising not to return the money to his patient, re-
gardless of the eXpected appeals. In the meantime Bever-
ley's demands grow more legally threatening: Samson's ef-
forts at raising new money succeed only in getting him
chased by the law. He then agrees to become an inmate with
sanctuary at Para Park, a home with which Wren is associated.
There one day he encounters Lydia in a ripple bath, and
without much ado she seduces him, unaware that her husband
is watching.

Subsequently Samson escapes to Cob City, Indiana, his
old home town. There he sees an old perverted policeman
with whom he had once been acquainted,,as well as his father,
who is as stingy with words as Samson is flamboyant. This
relationship is more warmly human than others that he enters
into, but his fairly cold rigidity when the father dies late
in the book more than negates what first appeared to be a
possible shift toward sentimentality. A prefrontal lobotomy
performed on Samson provides the conslusion to his adventure.
The decision to perform the operation was not his but, iron-
ically, that of stupid Rhoda and prejediced Dr. Wren. The
operation fails to alter his ego one whit; if anything it
seems to help unlock, ironically, his poetic vision.

The chief relationships of the novel are in some way

connected to marriage, although none of them say as much

193
gpggt matrimony as novels considered in earlier chapters
here. Rhoda and Samson are not married, yet certainly Rhoda's
behavior makes it seem as if they were. Samson and Lydia
are also of course not married, and in fact meet only in
the ripple bath, but in that meeting Samson functions as a
wedge in the final emotional split between the Wrens. Even
so, the essential estrangement of the two is from the start
punctuated by the alignment of their personalities: objec-
tive versus subjective. Oliver seeks total detachment in
his psychiatry-life, while Lydia's most exciting moments as
wife are those which take place in her daydreams. The Wren
marriage is mocked throughout, and destroyed through Samson's
help. This marriage and Samson's earlier fiasco with Bever-
ley provide the background against which the tangled tale of
Samson unwinds. In this way, marital split-up as environment,
éflfiigg Madness departs from those earlier novels and instead
represents a more comically negative attitude toward mar-
riage and family. The marital background is variously scoffed
at, ridiculed, made to appear ridiculous. It is shown to be
the enemy of art, the enemy of sex, and the inepiration to
lobotomy. It is the enemy of art in Rhoda's stupidity,
Lydia's leadership of the ladies' guild, and Beverley's ugly,
defiant, pregnant domesticity. It is enemy of sex in the
widespread dissatisfaction of husbands and wives, and in the
extra-marital yearnings of each. We need only witness the
violent change in Samson's Beverley from an excruciatingly

desirable woman when single to a monster when married: ”If

194
nature grows hair to protect its weaknesses, that first night
must have made her weak all over. Overnight the butterfly
became a caterpillar. Within twelve hours she sprouted steel
wool from her shins and thighs and armpits and six other
places, veins swelled on her ankles, the commode started
flushing and dandruff snowed down." (57)“ Coming forward to
Rhoda and even briefly to Lydia, we can see different ways
in which Samson has even failed as a sponge. This failure is
further mockery of not only his ability to direct power, but
of the idea of familial power in general.

Also helping to fill out the picture of mockery and
shattered intimacy is Baker's use of violence. Brutality and
angry argument are presented clearly and overtly in the
Samson-Rhoda pairing and below the surface, with strained
objectivity, in the Oliver-Lydia scene. In each case, re-
gardless of the technique, subtle or heavy-handed, the possi-
bilities of intimacy are clearly destroyed. Perhaps in al-
legiance to the witlessness of his common-law wife, Samson
responds to her in a sharply physical fashion: time and again
in the book she must duck and dance to avoid his "jabs."
Sometimes she is not quick enough, and his "downward chop"
lands right on target. One such clout leads her to Wren's
office with the whope that he might be able to cure her vio-

lent man. Another is thrown with mistaken accuracy near the

 

1:
Elliott Baker, §_Fine Madness (New York: Signet, 19Gb),
p. 57. Page numbers in parentheses refer to this edition.

195
end of the book —- this one she had asked for, for old time's
sake. Her seeming ambivalence is shown in her disclosure to
the psychiatrists that theirs is a perfect sadist-masochist
relationship. Samson must approve of the summary, for he
takes Rhoda along with him at the end. Yet it seems certain
that she is servant and not companion.

Although I can't understand why Richard Noland considers
Oliver Wren a "sensitive and humane" individual,5 he does
make an astute observation to the effect that a psychiatrist
is especially fitting here as a dramatic embodiment of social
cruelty toward the artist. I think Oliver is a parody of
professionalism and a stark opposite to Samson; it is not
really clear whether he has any feelings toward Lydia not
promoted by clinical motives. On the occasion of his Speech
to a group of colleagues, he lumbers along repeating the same
bad jokes that are perennially told, while Lydia sits day-
dreaming lustfully about crisp cool linens, no pajamas, and
new positions. It must be pure self-arousal, a self-satisfy-
ing fantasy, for Oliver betrays nothing akin to sensuality
in the entire novel. In fact, while his wife is working her
mind to a sexual peak, he can think of nothing other than
the probability that he has left open his office door, there-
by jeopardizing his professional privacy. Ironically, this

is so. Samson Shillitoe himself has found his way in, and

 

”Lunacy and Poetry: Elliott Baker's é Fine Madness,
Critique, VIII (Winter, 1965) pp. 71-79.

196
his subsequent intrusion between the Wrens serves to point
out with comic outspokenness the emptiness of the Wren re-
lationship. It should be noted in connection both with the
Wrens and much of the time with Samson that even sex is re-
ferred to in comic context, sometimes to enhance a charac-
ter's ridiculousness, in the fashion of Henry Fielding.

Over and above the marital elements, family considera-
tions are slight and are even employed sardonically. Samson
"used” Beverley's pregnancy as an excuse to leave her, in
the sense that his suggestion to abort is not what she
wanted to hear. And he uses Rhoda's pregnancy at the end in
a poetically conceptual way, denying her substance but
affirming his own creative power:

A tug, a whisper, of uneasiness. Something
was screwed up. But the plane was steady. He
tracked the blinking danger light and came to
Rhoda's glow. Her mouth was still flapping, but
she was drowned out by the turmoil inside him —-
swelling, buffeting him, stretching his skin
until it screeched. Then the fourth part of the
poem broke free, its wild wind carrying him
higher and higher. And the words, like hard-
brined fists of fire, beat back at the sun.

(251+)
Clearly Samson leaps off from the notion cf Rhoda's pregnancy
to reshape his imagination.

Another ironic comment on family in g Fine Madness grows
out of the fact that the Wrens have two sons, but the boys
are mentioned only by Samson, who merely guesses that Wren
is the ”type” who would have them. Lydia becomes again

mother-wife at the very end, when she discovers that Samson

has no special interest in her as a continuing mistress:

 

197
nothing is left except domesticity. And Samson himself pro-
vides here evidence that the only family mentioned in the
book that would have had any real conflict-base, any hope
for warmth, was his own —- that is, the one in which he is
son. But the hope was destroyed eighteen hours after Sam-
son's birth, when his mother died. Thereafter his father
had little to say, and when he dies, his son Samson thinks
of it in this way: "He'd died. No, even that wasn't accu-
rate. He'd finished the dying he'd been doing most of his
life.” (239) Samson feels rather dull about the matter.

The madness in Baker's novel is fine in that it is
creative, unallied. Samson Shillitoe leaves town with a
half-witted bitch and poetic fury which has won victory over
the psychosurgeon's knife, and wife. The marital-familial
relationships he has touched during his trial seem all the
more silly and small because of him.

An assessment that Professor Scholes makes of John
Hawkes - that he "seems to obliterate his humor with his

blackness"6

-— could apply also to the Norman Mailer of fin
American Dream. Even so, it seems to be a novel born of the
same impulse as Baker's. The uncompromising savagery of

Black Humor that Douglas Davis discusses is nowhere more

glaringly apparent than in Mailer's 1965 novel.7 Stephen

 

6
Scholes, p. 40.

7
Davis, p. 14.

198
Richards Rojack, an intellectual convert to instinctive life,
engages the world in fierce combat and emerges with a kind of
victory. That is to say, he kills his wife, has passable sex
with her German maid and good sex with a nightclub singer,
challenges successfully a buried urge to commit suicide, and
eventually travels westward alone, free from the murder
charge. It is a violent book, in support of Harris Dienst-
frey's contention that Mailer's recent work argues implicitly
that to live in the modern world is "almost always to be more
violent."8 Rojack is likewise not an easy character to sym-
pathize with.9 But he is certainly intelligible in light of
Mailer's 1959 essay, "The White Negro," as Allan J. Wagen-

heim relates at length.10

Rojack is a fictional representa-
tion of what Mailer in that essay called "the hipster," an
intellectual rebel and philosophical psychopath. The title
of the novel, as a matter of fact, with its social evoca-
tiveness, is made clearer via a passage at the beginning of
the fourth section of that essay. At that point Mailer
writes, ”like children hipsters are fighting for the sweet,

and their language is a set of subtle indications of their

 

8
Dienstfrey, p. #36.

9

Even so, Grace Witt interprets him in terms of fron-
tier typology, as a courageous pioneer transformed into a
bad man. See "The Bad Man as Hipster," Western American
Literature, IV (Fall, 1969) pp. 203-217.

 

10
"Square's Progress: An.American Dream," Critique, X
(Spring, 1968), pp. 45-68.

 

199
success or failure in the competition for pleasure. Unstated
but obvious is the social sense that there is not nearly e-

11 The "sweet" in other words is

nough sweet for everyone."
strenuous gratification, apocalyptic orgasm. He fuses the
personal, the self, with broader, social considerations:

"At bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks
love. Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the
search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which
preceded it. Orgasm is his therapy...."12 He throws in the
distinction between the love ordinarily thought of in con-
nection with human life and that which is generated out of
sexual self-assertion. It is noteworthy that Mailer speci-
fically projects in the essay "not love as the search for a
mate.” Rojack dramatizes that stipulation also.

As in other instances, in this novel it is made clear
at the start that the marriage once entered into has become
dismal and filled with hate. The parties are separated.
Stephen thinks of Deborah as a Great Bitch who seeks to mafia
him, even at a distance, by means of some psychic grip. Be-
fore marriage they discussed sex openly: after leaving the
convent which for some reason she had long ago gone to,

Deborah had had lovers, and she subsequently would detail

the affairs to Stephen. "She had even given me a sense of

 

11
Reprinted in Advertisements for Myself (New York:
Berkeley Medallion, 1966): p. 32?.

12
Ibid., p. 321.

200
what was good in the best of them, and I had loved her for
it,” he relates. (28)13 The openness he refers to as a
covenant. Even during marriage her affairs are not a prime
consideration by Rojack in his judgment of her, except inso-
far as he envies someone else's orgasm with her. Against
the premarital attitude, against the foundations laid by
their courtship, the conglomerate image projected of their
married life is sordid, evil-oriented, cancerous. On the
night of the murder, Deborah greets Rojack's visit with an
immediate "you look awful." Carrying it forward, in what
Rojack later says was characteristic fashion, she adds, “you
really are a contemptible-looking creature this evening."
(21) This effectively keynotes their meeting, for Rojack
has only recently vomited all over an acquaintance's apart-
ment and Deborah has been drinking angrily: their conversa-
tion is almost totally devoted to sadistic accusations and
scatalogical references. A quick glance down any of the
pages of their meeting will reveal a plurality of words such
as “malignity,” “shit,” "stink," "poison," "ugly smears,"
”hatred,“ "detestation," ”swamp," "stench," and so forth.
It is almost as if Mailer is approaching the ultimate bru-
tality of the meeting in slow snatches, paralleling sex-play
with titillating violence. Eventually she "seduces him into

killing her" by expounding on the enormous pleasure she has

 

13
Norman Mailer, fin American Dream (New York: The Dial
Press, 1965), p. 28. Page numbers in parentheses refer to
this edition.

201
been giving her lovers recently. Rojack's anger is stirred.
She is not passive in the confrontation; fulfilling the role
that Wagenheim designates as hers, "the overpowering, case
trating mother,"14 she grabs for his genitals Just before he
reaches out for her neck. At this point strangulation and
orgasm begin to weave together in his brain; the severing of
their relationship permanently and the severing of her neck
superimpose. He kills her, releasing all the stench of the
apartment since he had come in. The feel of her death is
referred to also in sexual-release imagery: "I was through
the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness
as well, rot and pestilence, nausea, a bleak string of salts.“
(31)

The killing of a spouse in terms of sexual intercourse,
to the extent that death and orgasm are fused, is the last
word in the ordering of the death-knell for that relationship.
But Mailer actually carries it beyond this, for Rojack en-
gages a live body to correspond with the nearby dead one.
While he has been killing his wife, and thereby achieving a
philosophical orgasm, the German maid has been masturbating
in another room. Hardly a word is said before Rojack sets
to work -— emphasizing the continuum from violent to sexual
passion. A kind of psychopathic sanctity is attempted in
the ritually—described sex act, a purification which weaves

together life and death, holiness and pleasure:

 

14
Wagenheim, p. 45.

202

-— I chose her cunt. It was no graveyard now,

no warehouse, no, more like a chapel now, a

modest decent place, but its walls were snug,

its odor was green, there was a sweetness in

the chapel, a muted reverential sweetness in

those walls of stone.

(46)
And even though this is not the apocalyptic orgasm he seeks,
for he withdraws from the "chapel" at the last moment to
ejaculate non-ecstatically, the fusion has been clearly
made.
Yet Deborah's presence -— 23;; presence,at that -— is

not rubbed out by strangulation. She represents more than a
bad wife, and it is in her "haunting" that we realize the
full impact of "Bitch Mother.” Through references drawn by
mutual acquaintances and through Bojack's successful wrig-
gling-free from the murder charge, we discover the preoccu-
pation Deborah had with magic, voodoo, extra-sensory percep-
tion. She knew she would be murdered, according to one of
her lesbian friends; she had a knowledge of those things.
And after death, as a splattered corpse on the street below
their apartment, she awakens superstitious fears in Ganucci,
a Mafia figure; he refuses to leave the area until the body
has been carried off. Further, when Rojack hears the song
”I've got you under my skin,” he thinks immediately of Debo-
rah, not in nostalgic terms, of course, but as a relentless
plague. “You're bitching me still," he says to her in his
mind. And even his step-daughter Deirdre feels some of the
inexplicable persistence of the ghost as she recalls for him

how Deborah had once showed her the scar from the Caeserian

203
Operation which had brought Deirdre into the world. Whereas
the display had not before meant much to the girl, the fear.
grows out of some equally persistent attachment to the con-
cept of Deborah.

The close psychic juxtaposition of killing and sexual
intercourse is further exemplified by a couple of suicidal
moments in the narrative life of Rojack. Most dramatic is
that which occurs on a parapet outside the expensive quar-
ters of his father-in-law, rich Barney Kelly. Rojack feels
the urge to defy once and for all the memory of the limp
body he had thrown off another ledge earlier, and also to
fully assert his own psychic independence of the undying
Bitch Mother. Kelly's presence and murderous inclinations
are added attractions for the moment. Rojack walks it one
way, and - to Kelly's surprise, succeeds. In Rojack's mind
he reviews the splattered dead body of Deborah, especially
her ”green eye," perhaps a sardonic allusion to the light at
the end of Daisy's dock that drives Gatsby on. He feels
compelled to fulfill the curse-challenge and go back across
the parapet again. Defiantly, however, he chooses not to.
”By God, I've done enough," he says to himself. "I've lain
with madness long enough." (260) In order to grasp the last
statement the reader must consider at least briefly the in-
sanity of the marriage, the ugly perversity which Rojack
rebelled against, and the nausea of accommodating a hateful
world.

Later, Cherry herself is murdered, and Rojack is free

204

from yet another wifely entanglement. 5g American Dream de-

 

picts a segment in the life of an enraged individual who
destroys the physical vestige of marriage with as much fury
as that with which he penetrates through the veneer of women
in order to rid himself of their grip and to attempt some
further understanding of his own self. It is his own self
that Rojack must serve and come to terms with —- and apothe-
osize, through orgasm. Good orgasm cannot readily be achieved
within the limits and laws of marriage. Love for Rojack is
possible only by way of an arduous route. Richard Poirier
traces it as a "desire that involves implicitly and without
cant, the acceptance of guilt for the nature of his own life
and for the ruinous life around him."15 The tensions in

the novel exist not between Stephen and his wife, but within
Stephen alone. The universe in which many of the events of
the novel take place is that of the isolated self, removed
-— her violently - from the social segment in which it had
begun.

In previous chapters, the novels appeared to deal with
emotional ambivalence: to sustain the family 22$ to divide
it. This is not the case in the very recent novels, although
it can be said that the ambiguity of the individual self
creates inner conflicts more difficult to perceive and re-
solve, yet real nonetheless. For example, Bruce Jay Fried-

man's Stern. Stern is simultaneously a serious and a comic

 

15Richard Poirier, "An American Dream," Commentary,
XXXIX (June, 1965), p. 91.

205
novel, fulfilling both the categorical definition of "black
humor" and that of marital-familial stress which I presented
in the introduction. As such it is transitional, dealing
with marital and familial tensions yet projecting them and
solving them in ways peculiar to the very recent American
novelist. The thought and style throughout the book mix
fantasy and actuality together by means of juxtaposition and
superimposition: Mr. Stern acts, speaks, reminisces, and
imagines in jumbled order. Everything appears to matter to
him. Douglas Davis says that "Stern is as close as you will
come in Black Humor to a hero who cares,“ but he adds that

16

he does not care as a reformer. The focus of the book,

Stern's strange incapacities as husband, father, man, and
conglomerate, is projected in this kind of mixture, as in
the first paragraph of the short prologue:

One day in early summer it seemed, miracu-
lously, that Stern would not have to sell his
house and move away. Some small blossoms had
appeared in one of the black and mottled trees
of what Stern called his Cancer Garden, and
there was talk of a child in the neighborhood
for his son, a lonely boy who say each day in
the center of Stern's lawn and sucked on
blankets. 17

(7)

The pace of the generally compact hook is set through these
images clustered in the mind of this broad-hipped, Bh-year-

 

16
DaV1S’ p. 250

17
Bruce Jay Friedman, Stern (New York: New American
Library, 1962), p. 7. Page numbers in parentheses refer to
this edition.

206
old Jewish man: sure instability ("miraculously...not have
to sell"), an incurably diseased environment ("Cancer Gar-
den“), dramatic though covert exaggeration ("there was talk
of a child...”), and introverted sensitivity in the family
("a lonely boy who...sucked on blankets."). This sort of
exaggeration or overstatement characterizes Stern's role as
husband or father. He swallows up the woes and brief joys
that his wife and son disclose to him, and internalizes them.
He internalizes them to the extent that his fantasizing about
them becomes parallel: as a result they lose some of their
actual substance and exist largely as identities consumed by
Stern. They become his doubles, or stand-ins. Certain pe-
culiarities lead the reader to think this way, such as the
fact that Mrs. Stern is never referred to as anything but
"she," ”her," and "Stern's wife": she is never spoken to,
or of, by name. And the son Donald is referred to by name
only once in the entire work. Other signs will emerge as
this discussion progresses.

The rest of the prologue expands Stern's propensity for
dreaming, dream-living, and sharing fantasies with his son,
as well as introducing the incident that gives the novel its
structure. It should only loosely be termed "incident," for
rather than shaping the work in a dramatic sense it instead
shapes each fear and hope that Stern wrings from his con-
sciousness. The "child in the neighborhood" who is mentioned
in the first paragraph has been visited by Stern's wife and

son. However, the father of the other child spurns their

207
visit, saying "no playing here for kikes." He then pushes,
shoves, or nudges Stern's wife (the exact nature of the move-
ment is something she is not sure of) to the extent that she
falls down. She relates to Stern that since she has not
been wearing panties, it is highly possible that the unfriend-
ly neighbor saw her pubic hair. The three aspects of the in-
cident: the use of the word "kike," the violent behavior,
and the accidental exposure of his wife: each generates new
worries in Stern's active imagination. He sees the ”kike.
man", as he begins to think of him, as his nemesis, an ugly
bigot with whom he must battle someday in order to preserve
his own integrity. He also sees him in other, diverse ways:
as an understanding, singular embodiment of the United Na-
tions, as the leader of a vast horde of DeLuccios that will
be unleashed should Stern be victorious in the struggle, and
as constant rapist of his wife. Yet each way owes much less
to actuality than to Stern's mad conceptual powers.

Through batches of flashbacks we get to know Stern's
predicament in full. The son of an outSpoken, loudspoken,
sex-driven mother whom he refers frequently to as "great-
breasted," Stern met his wife while he was recovering from
a rejection by a blond girl whom he had unwisely refused to
sleep with. Before he met her he had been living with "an
old man of dangling pelvic supports," and before that with
a group of fellow Jewish students in a boarding-house "where
the air was thick with self-consciousness," (50) After a

while it becomes clear that these are the kind of unusual

IHJ

u

208

inhabitants we would expect Stern to become acquainted with.
Regretting his past chastity, he and the girl who is now his
wife quickly engage in a relationship based greatly on sex.
And after a predictably unusual crisis involving a rich Vene-
zuelan, they marry. Looking back, Stern thinks, "he knew he
was bound to her for a hundred years.” After relaying quick-
ly this courtship Friedman presents the Sterns in close,
intimate situations only once or twice more in the rest of
the novel. Most noteworthy of these is a strained bit just
prior to his going away for a while. His son doesn't want
him to go away for a long time. Stern says he'll be back
soon. ‘"'I can't wait till soon,'" he says. Stern ignores
him, fearing instead imaginary hordes of Gentiles forcing
his boy to go to church. Later his wife, nervously aroused
by him in bed, seems forgotten in the very detached private
course of his thoughts while they make love:

He went at her with a frenzy, as though by

the sheer force of his connection he could

do something to her that would keep her quiet

and safe and chaste for two weeks, but when

he fell to the side he saw with panic that

she was unchanged, unmarked, her skin still
cold and unrelieved.

(91)
Sexually unsatisfied, his wife beckons, "Can you be a man
again, my darling?" Stern, again preoccupied with private
worry and the world within him that hurts like the ulcer,
answers, ”I've got something inside me. I've got to get up
to that home." (92)
His wife exists solely in terms of what she has been

established within Stern - being shoved, dress lifted,

209
panty-less, taking dance lessons from a satyr, etc. She has
no name.

Stern, employed as a label-maker for various consumer
products, tires of living an apartment life and decides to
move to suburbia. The house he purchases thrns out to be
afflicted in some Hawthornian fashion, incurably, Stern finds
after they have moved in. An army of caterpillars invades
and devours half the green on the land after Stern has paid
$800 to an Italian gardener whom Stern feared because the
gardener had worked on the grounds of nobility back in his
homeland. One of the neighbors speaks to him in unemotional
monotone about the dreadful state of the house since he moved
in. He hires a handyman named Old Crib to tile the kitchen,
and in just a few days the tiles buckle and "great crevasses,"
as Stern refers to them, appear. He is discouraged from
painting by a mustic-salesman who tells him to wait for just
the right moment before doing anything so rash. Stern buys
paint but leaves the cans in a corner of the living room.
Above all this, Stern must, in order to get to and from his
train each day, out across a large estate, apparently inhab-
ited only by the two large dogs who grab his wrists and
escort him through.

Puzzled and discouraged, then made fearful by the kike-
man incident, Stern gets his ulcer, Donald begins sucking a
blanket, and Mrs. Stern gets bored and starts taking dance
lessons. The second half of the novel concerns Stern's bat-

tle with the ulcer. At first he cannot accept it: he asks

210

the doctor to get rid of it immediately because he doesn't
want it. Then he is sent to the Grove Best Home for several
weeks, where outwardly he is exposed to a variety of deviant
behavior and inwardly he struggles with fears of the kike-man
and his wife's infidelity —- even while he himself is commit-
ting adultery. The pain gradually goes away and the ulcer
begins to heal, but when he returns home he finds that noth-
ing else has been cured while he was away: despite all his
hopes and distant dreams, things are the same. He becomes
actually maddened by this:

The thought that he had come back to find his

situation unchanged was maddening. It was as

though he had been guaranteed that the treat-

ment would heal the neighborhood as well as

his ulcer -— and that the guarantee had turned

out to have secret clauses, rendering it worth-

less. The man was still there. The hospital

had not had him removed. His wife had not

somehow arranged to have him eliminated. His

father had not gone down the street to thrust

his scarred nose up in the man's face. No

hand had reached down from the heavens and

declared that the man had never existed. He

was Still right there in his house, not even
seriously sick.

(139‘)

Now the ulcer does not noticeably return. Instead he has
what he feels later is a nervous breakdown. He fears every-
thing yet trusts everything. He stops people on the street
and asks them simply to listen to him. After listening to
their advice, which is invariably hackneyed and aphoristic,
Stern responds with great thanks and hopefulness, even if
the bits of advice are contradictory. Before long he comes
out of it, not understanding what it was, though suspecting

that his make-up was creating "diversionary troubles" to

['W-

"

211

cause him to forget the ulcer, the kike-man, and his wife's
"infidelity.” His last act is to go to the kike man and
force him to apologize for what he had said eighteen months
previously. Not surprisingly, DeLuccio soundly defeats him,
nearly tearing off his ear in the process. Stern ends up
still afraid of the man, but feeling as if some unknown thing
had nevertheless been accomplished.

It seems to me that what the novel does is to trace the
development of Stern's particular kind of self-consciousness:

the kind that assimilates or distills all experience into a

 

crazy, inexpressibly internalized whole. In the beginning
he is worried about Specific problems: by the end he has 222:
£2229 them all, and like an absurdly masochistic protector
he goes on, confident of his diffidence. The superficial
advice given him by his egotistical friend Battleby,18 a
black artist, is something that he not only considers but
puts into effect —— in reverse, however, Battleby says to
him, unconvincingly yet meaningfully nonetheless, "you have
to abstract yourself so that you present a faceless picture
to society." (79) Stern slowly effects a facelessness upon
everything else, everyone else: they exist in his world only
as he has moulded them into it through fantasy, fear, and

guilt. Even his orgasms are solitary, much to the annoyance

 

18
The artist's name immediately evokes Melville's
scrivener with a slightly different spelling: the allusion
helps create a further condition whereby identity-doubling
is accentuated.

212
of his wife and later the Buerto Hican girl. Stern's world
is one of profound irrationality, as M. F. Schulz has sug-
gested, wherein "the line between fantasy and reality, thought
and action, impression and object, is forever wavering and
blurring."19 And what some reviewers objected to in the end
as fabrication or unjustifiable denouement is actually the
predictable end to Stern's process of internalizing. A few
of the details cited in the preceding summary and others will
bear this out. The details show how domesticity emerges as
components or aspects 2§_Stern: the house and land in subur-
bia, his son, and his wife.

The house and land are symbolically associated with the
Stern family itself, specifically with the weakening and ul-
timate dissolution of it. The prologue speaks of a furnace
man almost as if he were a physician administering advice and
medication: "A saintlike man in brown bowler had come to
Stern with a plan for a new furnace Whose efficient ducts
would eliminate the giant froglike oil burner that squatted
in Stern's basement, grunting away his dollars and his
hopes. (7) The ugly oil burner correSponds to the ulcer
that Stern develops, "grunting away" painfully on excess
stomach acid. To achieve his hopes of peace and kindness he
must add ”'warm,'" in the language of Feldner, one of Stern's

fellow inmates later at the Best Home. "Warm" is achieved

 

19
M. F. Schulz, "Wallant and Friedman: the Glory and
Agony of Love,” Critigue, X (Winter, 1968), p. #6.

213
in one sense by obviously shutting out "cold," by shutting
out the rest of the world, the world represented in the be-
ginning by the imagined "squadron of voyeurs” peering into
his previously uncurtained windows, and at the end by the
kike-man, making his ear bleed and the cold air shoot up his
back. On the in-between pages we perceive the process of de-
terioration of the property that ceases only when Stern inter- H
nalizes it into an ulcer: I speak of the tile crevasses, the
loose banister, the shrubs and trees half-devoured by cater-

pillars immune to a spray administered by Stern. Eventually

 

the Stern habitat becomes an infected place that he does not
want to look at or touch or stay in, except for the bed, and
there not to love but only to sleep. The association between
Stern and inanimate things - the internalization by him of
these things -— is further signalled by the support furni-
ture consistently gives him during the dizzy "nervous break-
down." His ability to "communicate" with the desks and
chairs shows the parallel that has grown within him.
Likewise the "infections" of the family -— his son's
loneliness, his wife's potential adultery, their discomfort
at living in the new place —- are consumed by Stern. Even
his preoccupation with the kike man becomes a brief interna-
lization of home in that Stern, at the end of his work day,
thinks not of the "ride home," but the "ride home to the
kike man." (75) The scene of ostensible togetherness at the
end -— with Stern, his wife, and his son collected in the

same room -— is actually a tableau of what he had just

214
called "a crazy house." (158) His mind could be called the
same thing.

Stern's internalizing is signalled in eXplicit symbolism
connected with his wife and son. In trying to clarify for
himself precisely what the kike man saw, Stern asks his wife
to re-enact the fall. When she refuses to do so, Stern him-
self goes through the motions, using his topcoat as her dress
and her as the kike nan. He falls down clumsily and he even
becomes excited by the re-enactment. He imagines the kike
man being mellowed by the news of his ulcer to the extent

that he "would never do anything to him again." (76 —— my

 

italics) This comes right after yet another re-hashing of
the shove incident, and despite the fact that the kike man
has not yet done anything to him. Evidently Stern has ab-
sorbed into his own experience what had in reality happened
to his wife. Prior to entering the rest home he watches his
wife, coming home late from her dance lesson, kissing her
instructor. He says to her that he "saw tongues," although
he could not really have seen them. he admits, however,
that they had been french-kissing, and Stern's ulcer acts

up in his fury. The point here is that his imagination per-
ceives the incident and it develops accordingly, like the
ulcer that he cannot see yet can see in his mind's eye.
Finally we can cite the brief sortee from the rest home to
the bed of the sexy Puerto Rican girl. He carries along the
weight of what he fears in his wife:

Stern had a sudden feeling that his wife, at

215

that very moment, sad-eyed and chattering

with need, was hoisting her own sweater a-

bove her head in the rear seat of a limou-

sine, that there was a strange sexual bal-

ance wheel at work, and that for every in-

discretion of Stern's his wife would commit

one too, at best only seconds later.

(127)

He brings this parallel up again shortly after, thus juxta-
posing and internalizing an adultery by his wife which has
only indirect, imagined substance because he himself is
committing the same ac t.

Stern as a character overlaps Stern's son as a charac-
ter, eSpecially in terms of fantasizing. The comedy of the
novel, as well as much of its more austere meaning, derive
from Stern's thoughts -— far-fetched, sometimes incredible.
Likewise his son is highly imaginative; practically every
time the reader sees him he is shouting for help from an
imaginary rooftop or sucking distantly on a blanket. He
talks to himself, and sometimes the voice that answers him
is that of his father. His father's leg becomes, by mutual
agreement, a villain named Billy One-Foot. They frequently
share fantasies, but judging from Stern's capacity to fanta-
size on his own, their joint fantasies are really manifes-
tations of the father's mind. The boy's blanket—sucking has
a precedent, we see through Stern's Air Force flashback, in
Stern's "four hours of capacious bosom-sucking," (57) with
never-to-be-forgotten Naomi, the bovine daughter of a watch-
maker. And finally, the strange swelling and equally strange

subsiding of the child's skull corresponds to the worry'of

moving into a new neighborhood and also to the coming and

216
going of Stern's own "nervous breakdown," and probably also
to the ulcer.

Stern wishes to serve his family less than he wants to
re-mould them in his own image; this ironic omniscience is
reflected in his reaction to the "God-things" told to the
son by his babysitter. Stern's role as husband-father has
little to do with tradition and responsibility, a great deal
to do with his self. Stern is a self-deprecating, idiotic
man at heart, one who must, therefore, bring his family with-
in him before he can feel strongly in any way. Through this
strange process his self becomes the family, and the other
members lose much of their reality. It might be argued that
the internalizing I have stressed here can be as well the
externalizing of Stern, when viewed from different angles.

I can only say to this that there are no different angles.
There is not even a family, in the ordinary sense of the
word. There is only Stern and the participants in the comic
drama of his neurosis. The inseparability of form and sub-
stance in this novel seems evident.

A longer, more tangled novel than Friedman's is Herzog,
by Saul Bellow. Yet in each novel a similar process is
undergone. The self functions as a sponge, soaking up the
form and experience of others. In this situation Herzog's
consciousness is made known both through the regular narra-
tive and through interspersed "letters" that he writes to
individuals, living and dead. He does this for different

possible reasons, one of which is that he is a professor of

I 'I,

‘v.

217
history recording his immediate connections, including
thoughts about the past. Another is that he seeks by so do-
ing to patch up the humanism wounded by harsh encounters with
his second wife Madel-ine, and others. No longer the scholar
he once was, Moses Herzog nonetheless utilizes the scholarly
spirit and concern for record-keeping to trace life in the
various aspects in which he knows it. The letters he writes
will never be sent nor received except in the vault of his
mind and heart: a humanisihg endeavor only in the sense that
it makes his reminiscences at times less painful. Herzog is
unique among chief figures considered in this dissertation
in that he is an intellectual; thus his letter-writing to
people such as Nietzsche and Heidegger provides also an out-
let for his curiosity, his "commitment to ideas" which John
Aldridge sees as actually an impediment in the modern world.20
He is intelligent and sophisticated, yet animal enough to
forge an interesting world out of the stuff of his experi-
ence. Parenthetically the novel reads, "he might think him-
self a moralist but the shape of a woman's breasts mattered
greatly." (25)21 While Herzog seeks to communicate through
the letter-writing with all time and with all men, he simul-

taneously seeks gratification within the present: peace, sex,

 

20

21
Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York: Fawcett Crest, 196a),
p. 25. Page numbers in parentheses refer to this edition.

 

218
revenge, pity.

There can be no summary of Herzog because it defies sec-
tioning or the isolation of episodes. The novel seems to
Keith Opdahl to be a portrayal of ”a state of mind rather
than a story of a significant event.“22 One must, as For-
rest Bead advises, ”discover its form."23 Let us say it is
about a funny, intelligent man whose two wives have gone and
'whose children - one by each wife -— alternately stir in
‘ him love and burden, for though "his duty is to live,” (38)
and live to the fullness of his individuality, he is peri-
odically moved by both the idea and the actuality of his
children and some kind of obligation. His "duty" is illus-
.trated everywhere in the novel; his eagerness to taste life
in its various aspects is reflected in the widely diverse
array of characters that are drawn to him. His paternalism
shows no stronger than when he sings to himself his daugh-
ter's favorite song, and grins and thinks:

His face wrinkled tenderly at the thought of
his children. How well kids understand what
love is! Marco was entering an age of si-
lence and restraint with his father, but
Junie was exactly as Marco had been. She
stood on her father's lap to comb his hair.

His thighs were trodden by her feet. He em-
braced her small bones with fatherly hunger...

(68)

 

22
The Novels of Saul Bellow: An Introduction (Univer-

sity Parmnk' ,' Pe"nn"'sy1'€?a.'n1a',""1'9'67'S, p.743".

23
"Herzog: A Review,” Epoch 14 (Fall, 1964). Reprinted
in Saul Bellow and the Critics, Irving Malin (ed.) (New York:
NYU Press, 19575, pp. 183-207.

219
And when he sees his friend/alteraego/enemy, Valentine Gers—
bach, his second wife's evident lover, in the act of bathing
his daughter, the sight mellows his will to destroy. Ulti-
mately he gets arrested for carrying an unregistered loaded
pistol which he had planned to use on Mady and Valentine.
What the children do is bring out his active humanity, rather
than his fatherliness; the pistol manifests his anger, the
kids his kindness.

As far as we can discover in Herzog's relating of the
past, he has effected a greater sense of warmth and kinship
outside of marriage than in it. His mistresses -— Japanese,
Polish, Italian -— are projected with humor and zest, while
his wives are referred to only in the ways that they brought
about changes in him. Ramona Donsell, his mistress in the
present action, engages him in a time-smothering sexual re-
lationship, but one which nonetheless does not black out the
pains of the marital past. "The idea of marriage made him
nervous, but he thought it through. Bamona's instincts
were good, she was practical, capable, and wouldn't injure
him." (249) The injury which at this point comes to his
mind is actually what Herzog perceives in marriage. Marriage
is the incident of injury. Symbolically, it is the ritual
of the knife, in whose reflection the would—be castrator
Nady examines herself, checking her make-up. Herzog even
imagines a knife strapped to naked Hamona's thigh as she
swaggers toward him during a scene of affection.

In both of his past marital situations Herzog has been

220
involved with injury -— once as perpetrator, once as victim.
He had taken advantage of Daisy's practicality, and he had
been subjugated and run down by what he perceived to be
Madeleine's emasculating urge. Marriage is thus a condition
before break-up, as much as fatherhood is something tempor-
ary, visiting-day love. The marital-familial complexity is
important to the novel, but like the larger social and phil-
osophical spurs to his pen, important only under the selec-
tive guide of his self; that is, we find out less about the
relationships or about the philosophy than we do about Her-
zog himself. Alluding to Emerson, Earl Hovit sees Herzog as
"an immovably centered man who exists on separate levels,
using his world of ideas to celebrate his soul, to upbraid

himself, to pity his ignominies."24

And, we can add here,
to disregard institutional commitments such as familial re-
sponsibility in order to expand the whole self. Herzog does
not consume his entanglements in the manner of Stern, be-
cause they exist, not only in the crowded world of his mind,
but also in the bits or scribbling that he stuffs into his
pockets —— that is to say, in both his regard and his dis-
regard. Herzog's self is a collection of attitudes and mes-
sages spiralling toward the "Nothing. Not a single word."
of the last page.

Herzog is the epic-like story of a giant prophet and

 

24
“Bellow in Occupancy," The American Scholar, XXXIV
(Spring, 1965), reprinted in Malin (ed.). Saul Bellow and
the Critics, p. 180.

 

221
leader, Moses Elkanah,25 who Opts out of the lesser world
for the greater one in his mind. It is partially a tracing
of the moods that activated that option. It is also about
the women he married, opposite each other from the stand-
point of behavior and what they bring out in Moses. Pro-
fessor Read adds, "Herzog has a domestic ex-wife who is
thought to be promiscuous but isn't, and a bluestocking ex-
wife who is thought to be a model mother but wants to be
promiscuous."26 When he thinks of writing a letter to Daisy,
his first wife, he engages in self-intimidation and he shows
their life to have been a world apart from that which he
would experience with Mady. "By my irregularity and turbu-
lence of spirit I brought out the very worst in Daisy,"
thinks Herzog. ”l caused the seams of her stockings to be
so straight, and the buttons to be buttoned symmetrically.
; was behind those rigid curtains and underneath the square
carpets." (158) With Mady life seemed only chaos —— sense-
less spending, a disarrayed house, checks bouncing, vulgar-
ity flying. As time passed with his second wife he felt
the emotional danger of castration: he was losing his grip
on his most priceless entity, self. He began to doubt his
sanity -— the book begins "If I am out of my mind"..(7) -—

and started in fact to see Mady as a psychopath herself, one

 

25
David Galloway explains the names: "the one whom God
possesses,“ Absurd Hero, p. 126.

26
Read, p. 187.

222
whom Herzog ironically felt compelled to serve, even love.
After hearing her say that she didn't love him, he nonethe-
less told her that he loved her. In the present action of
the novel he relates to Ramona evidence of a distinct streak
of perversity in Madeleine. He tells the young woman that
after he has intimated his knowledge that she (Nady) and
Valentine Gersbach were sleeping together, Mady said to him,
"'Kow don't be a fool, Moses. You know how coarse he is.
He's not my type at all. Our intimacy is a different kind
altogether. Why, when he uses the toilet in our little Bos-
ton apartment it fills up with his stink. I know the smell
of his shit. Do you think I could give myself to a man whose
shit smells like that!'" (238) Apparently Mady fed Moses'
compulsions to serve her with an intensely ugly disposition.

Yet just as Ramona fulfills Herzog's erotic need, which
as he says "must be admitted to its rightful place, at last,"
(206) we cannot help but suspect that Daisy and Madeleine
manifest simply parts of Herzog's own make—up, own self;
that his world within is indeed inhabited by a fastidious,
fuss-budget Herzog, and by an anal-erotic Herzog who had
secretly enjoyed being molested by that pervert long ago,
and by a sadistic as well as a masochistic Herzog. To quote
Forrest Read again, "he exists in his world so that both he
and it are simultaneously alive."27

The pace of Bellow's novel changes considerably in the

 

27
Ibido, p0 1880

223
very last part. Herzog and his daughter June get in an acci-
dent, during which the Chicago police discover his unregis-
tered pistol. Unknown to the police, herzog had planned to
use the pistol on his wife and her lover. During this time,
the last 15% or so of the novel, Herzog contemplates the
universe, re-tells his daughter an absurd fable, gets into
an equally absurd hassle with Madeleine, who has come to the
police station to fetch June, and engages the world in a
courtroom filled with horrifying specimens.- ”Death is God,"
he tells himself in a private alteration of hietzsche, and
continues, "History is the history of cruelty, not love, as
soft men think....If the old God exists he must be a murder-
er." (353) Obviously his mood is exceedingly morbid, and
for this reason it is well that he has his daughter along
with him to ask, ”tell me about the most-most." In a novel
of relentless image-making, character-delineating, and pro-
found meaning-seeking, June's request for a story that has
tied the two of them together before represents a continuity
of sorts, a calm sortee into genuine, rather than *potato",
love. The most-most fable involves the sort of opposites
dealt with from time to time in the novel. Herzog and she
reminisce about a contest that might be held: in it if one
can tell the hairiest bald man from the baldest hairy man,
he wins a prize. But soon Madeleine arrives at the police
station and takes the girl with her and the idyll -— Herzog's
only one - is over. In light of this finale we might look

back not too many pages to a noteworthy admission by Herzog

224
concerning the specifics of his fatherhood: "I seem to
think because June looks like a Herzog, she is nearer to me
than to them. But how is she near to me if I have no share
in her life? Those two grotesque love-actors have it all.
And I apparently believe that if the child does not have a
life resembling mine, educated according to the Herzog stan-
dards of "'heart,'" and all the rest of it, she will fail to
become a human being." (315) That is to say, he admits his
paternalism is to a large part ego, as much evidence of sel-
fishness as the ejaculato praecox he appears to be so self-
conscious about. Dwelling in the universe of ideas, he
wishes actually to be a most-most combination to his daugh-
ter. In analogy to the bald-hairy fable, we might see Her-
zog as either the most lovable invisible father in the world
or the most invisible loving father in the world.

After Madeleine arrives and almost wreaks havoc upon
him, in addition to taking June, Herzog more or less drifts
singularly to the end of the novel. He ultimately decides
not to write any more letters after directing one to him-
self. ”‘But what do you want, Berzog?'” he asks. "'But
that's just it,'" he answers, ”'not a solitary thing. I am
pretty well satisfied to be, to be Just as it is willed, and
for as long as I may remain in occupancy.'" (414) I cannot
agree with John J. Clayton that Herzog here feels "ready, as

did Henderson, to return to community.”28 What he occupies

28§§El Efillgfl; In Defense 2: Man (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1968)T'ET'IB7.

225
seems to be a world of provisional attachments, since the
self is so dominant as to require all else to get its approv-
al. In the entire novel only one entity outside himself
genuinely seems to make a difference to him: his daughter
June. but he is less a father to her than he is a posses-
sor, and when she leaves whatever regret or dismay he feels
is quite guardedo At best he has, without June, "no mes-
sages for anyone. Nothing. Lot a single word." (416) More
convincing, or at least more bullet-proof, is Opdahl's argu-
ment about the paradoxes of Bellow's professor: "Cured of
passivity, personalism, and solitude, he finds joy while
thinking about himself."29 He adds later, "however much
Herzog pleads for social service, the novel is about his

"30 And in an early review

internal and private experience.
of the novel Irving Howe seemed to concur in this view when
he called the environment of the work "hermetic."31

What is unravelled in Herzog is less argument against
or indictment of marriage-family than it is disregard. Moses
Herzog does not bewail any loss or moan over defeat at the

hands of Mady and Valentine. hor would any such attitude

carry much force, since we know Mady through Herzog's

 

29

Opdahl, p. 154.
30

Ibldo. p. 1550
31

"Herzog (A review)," The New Republic, 151 (Septem-
ber 19, 9 , p. 2“.

 

226
imagination, someone similar to Stephen Rojack's Bitch-Mother.

Herzog, however, chooses not to kill.

What I hope emerges from the juxtaposition of Chapters
Four and Five is an at least partial view of the movement
from social criticism in the fiction to fiction which, once
again echoing Chester Eisinger studies "the survival of
self." I have no argument with this terminology but I do
feel that the survival-study, the rebellion, the declaration
of radical innocence, have not directly gone from social
criticism to Black Humor, for example. I feel there was an
intermediate step, and that it dealt with the marital-
familial conflict in a special way. Before seceding from
the functioning world, in order to protect his precious
life-spirit, the individual in modern American fiction first
had to test the final possibilities of traditional intimacy.
By looking closely and from different angles at novels writ-
ten in this post-war period and about this familial strife
we can see a general dissolution of the unit which paves the
way for the self—made ex-"heads of the family," Rojack,
Shillitoe, and Herzog, and the self—made her of his own

universe, Stern.

6-"

BIBLIOGRAPHY '

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Library, 1964.

 

Bellow, Saul. Henderson the Rain King. New York: Popular
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, . Seize the Day. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1956.
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Bourjaily, Vance. The Hound pf Earth. new York: The Dial
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Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. New York: New Directions,
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Elliott, George P. Parktilden Village. Boston: Beacon

Friedman, Bruce Jay. Stern. New York: New American Li-

Gold, Herbert. Birth of g Hero. New York: Viking Press,

 

 

 

 

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6-3:

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