Four Novels
The Journey Home.
by Zelda Popkin.
New York, J. B. Lippincott Co., 1945. 224 pp. $2.50.
The Lonely Steeple.
by Victor Wolfson.
New York, Simon and Schuster, 1945. 260 pp. $2.50.
The Pine Tree And The Mole.
by Ezio Taddei.
New York, Dial Press, 1945. 289 pp. $2.50.
By The Waters Of Babylon.
by Stephen Lister.
New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1945. 252 pp. $2.50.
It is perhaps a mistake to regard the typewriter solely as a machine, merely neutral, an instrument. Frequently it seems to achieve autonomy and in the course of a long association with a professional writer it is apt to follow its own will. Whenever it does it imparts to what is written the glitter and clatter of the assembly line.
The Journey Home belongs to this class of writing. Its action takes place on a streamlined train rushing from Florida to New York through bright and dark, sun, mist and rain, the rhythm of wheels and rails sometimes matching the heartbeats of the passengers but much more often the ticking of Mrs. Popkin’s Underwood. This is unfortunate, for her subject—the guilt of civilians in the presence of soldiers—is a good one and she brings to it a great deal of emotion; her warm-heartedness at times creates a glow that is distinct from the metallic shine of her product. Many readers, however, will be surprised by her assumption that civilians are guilty, somehow, and need to expiate their fault in suffering before they can be reconciled with fighting men. Civilians require something as violent as a catastrophe to restore their sense of the real and good. There is a hint of envy in Mrs. Popkin’s attitude toward soldiers. They confront horror and death, but they also have fullness, inwardness, heroism, and by comparison the civilians appear frivolous, levelled to a uniform smallness by self-interest. Suffering, directly experienced, can make us change and grow if “we have the stuff.” “The thing they used to call character. The thing we call guts.” That people frequently fail to learn by suffering is a tragic theme that has profound possibilities. But Mrs. Popkin and her typewriter do very little with it.
Curiously influenced by fashion-writing, she invariably uses clothing as a means of characterization. She is fascinated by styles, almost professionally minute in her observations. Critical of the trappings of vanity and feminine power, she is nevertheless constantly drawn to them, drawn, occasionally, a little too far.
“Her light hair, fluffing out, her round, china blue eyes, gave her an appealing air of fragile femininity. Her cheeks were pink, without obvious rouge. She didn’t wear earrings. Her tweed suit bespoke quality.”
Why no earrings? Well, why not no earrings?
The Lonely Steeple is a set piece which restricts Mr. Wolfson’s talent. “My name is Addie Eldredge,” it begins. “I’ve been here for eighteen years. Yesterday someone came to me and said I was wanted downstairs. No one’s ever wanted to see me downstairs.” Addie Eldredge is too small a vessel for Mr. Wolfson’s outpourings. They run over. Some very admirable things are said in his book but it is frequently hard and sometimes impossible to conceive of Addie’s saying them. And because Addie is a creature rather than a person, wholly of Mr. Wolfson’s somewhat careless making, the story of her dismal marriage does not fill us with so grand a horror and pity as he hopes to inspire.
If The Lonely Steeple is too small, The Pine Tree and the Mole is too large a vessel, which Mr. Taddei fills to a fraction of its capacity. He tells in a fragmentary fashion of the coming of fascism to Livorno in Italy, introducing a large number of characters—lawyers, prostitutes, thieves and other underworld characters, returning soldiers, anarchists and peasants—and taking them away just as they begin to grow interesting. His method, described by the publisher as new and brilliant (actually Jean Malaquais, Ramon Sender and Ilya Ehrenburg have employed it before), is really a distraction. The scenes shutter by swiftly; the characters flit out and vanish, and the book is all the more dissatisfying because it is serious and worthy in intent and tone.
By the Waters of Babylon, the story of a Jewish agricultural experiment in French Morocco, is uneven in quality, a mixture of popular romancing and grave discussion. Mr. Lister argues that Jews are what Christians have made of them, “moulded by circumstances in order to survive.” Such a view of the Jews is not very flattering to them because it assumes that they are passively acted upon and do not contribute much to the formation of their traits. Gentile have argued, with as much plausibility and greater resentment, that they are what Jews, through Christianity, have made of them.
