The Unwon Victory
The Steeper Cliff.
by David Davidson.
New York, Random House, 1947. 340 pp. $3.00.
Within a few weeks of publication, this first novel about the Military Government in Germany is already on the best-seller lists. Superficially it is easy to see why: David Davidson’s style is fluent, he handles dialogue well, and tells an exciting story. It is worth guessing that a long apprenticeship on newspapers and radio scripts has given him an ease rarely found in young novelists. (Unfortunately, however, his background has left a residue of crudities: ease at the expense of exactness. Words like angelic, radiant, wonderful, horrible, are used rather indiscriminately.) The novel, like many of today’s best-sellers, also has a sentimental love story, in which a young woman is continually being compared to the Virgin Mary.
But beneath all this, what is it about the subject of the book that attracts readers? Everyone knows that war stories no longer sell, although it is hard to say why. For the same reason that we no longer want to read about heroic American soldiers, pilots, sailors, apparently we now want to read about an American who is unheroic in the conventional sense.
Perhaps the answer is that as long as the hostilities lasted we could overlook the damage our armies were causing by concentrating on the damage done by the other side. Now, as victors in possession of the ruins, we are left with the guilt of destroyers.
If this is true, David Davidson’s The Steeper Cliff throws an interesting light on the situation. His story is about a guilty American in Germany. Andrew Cooper, who has been a desk soldier all through the war, is sent to Bavaria with the occupation troops and assigned to set up non-Nazi newspapers. While nervously interviewing candidates for editorial positions, he hears about a liberal writer named Lorenz who has disappeared. Almost at once Cooper decides that this man is his spiritual double; and the rest of the book is taken up with his search for Lorenz in order to find out how he, Cooper, would have acted had he been a German.
As a conqueror, Cooper is completely uneasy. Ruins upset him. When he denies a German his licence to write he worries whether he, Cooper, would have stood up against the Government after twelve years. His elbow twitches, and he remembers how when he was beaten up by toughs as a little boy he cried and begged for mercy. He accuses himself continually of cowardice, and he is afraid of his superior officer, who is a conceited fool. Thus the victor, owner of incredible force, can no longer identify himself with his weapons. As Samuel Butler once prophesied in Erewhon, the machine now exists independently of man and without his real sanction.
Cooper’s guilt is the guilt of the intellectual who has defeated force, but has done it only with superior force, by using the enemy’s own weapons. Towards the end of the book there is a scene in which he meets a young Jewish boy on the train and hears about the violent revenge the inmates of concentration camps had taken on their guards at the liberation. The young Jew’s attitude is not anger, only a kind of sad acceptance, and Cooper at once identifies himself with him:
It struck Cooper, with sudden clarity, that on the subject of violence he was absolutely as a Jew himself: defensive, on guard, outcast and self-outcast. . . . But that was not the whole of it. To say that there was a special Jewish attitude toward violence was to put the cart before the horse. It was the attitude of sensitive men the world over. . . .
Throughout the book Cooper projects himself into the minds of the Germans he meets. He is the turncoat writer, the unhappy Jew, the shabby patriot. In the last pages a final switch is made: Cooper, by breaking army rules, becomes the victim of the machine in actuality. He goes off to trial and imprisonment: happy (and how well the author realizes this I am not sure) because he has broken his uneasy relationship with the conquering machine and become its victim: he can now make his final identification with the conquered:
This too had to be granted, that we were the creatures of the history into which we were born. Had the seventy million Germans been born in America, they would have lived out their lives drinking soda pop. . . . It was history which exposed or concealed our capacities . . . the history into which helplessly and accidently we were born.
_____________
