The short stories in “America’s best-loved magazine,” Robert S. Brustein finds, have displayed lately a new—or, rather, renewed— preoccupation with religion, and a religion of a peculiarly American quality.
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The publishers of The Saturday Evening Post Stories: 1952 (Random House) tell us that it was produced for no other purpose than to illustrate the “infinite variety” of “one of America’s best-loved magazines”—and to entertain. These are modest aims, and when the stories are adept and professional—as they are in the comic tales—they make very good entertainment indeed. Apart from their one occasional affectation, a love affair with the tradition of folk humor which slightly mars their spontaneity, the stories in the comic genre are uniformly amusing. Furthermore, they derive their humor from legitimate comic sources: from the outrageous gap between the real and the imagined, and from misunderstanding. In Paul Gallico’s “The Secret Ingredient,” a French chef creates a chicken dish with such magnificent flavor that he earns both a high Michelin rating and the boundless admiration of his entire household—the “secret ingredient,” however, turns out to be nothing more than catnip. In “The Scandal at Mulford Inn,” we are entertained with a comedy of mistaken identity occasioned, like the errors in Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale,” by a great many people in one bed. Edwin McCourt’s “Dance for the Devil” is a comic ghost story in which an irascible chunk of ectoplasm is less occupied with spooking than with manufacturing bootleg whiskey.
Unfortunately, however, only these three stories offer pure entertainment. Most of the others—romances, fantasies, “serious” matter—range from good to horrid, but they are rarely amusing. If indeed these stories were chosen to illustrate the Post’s “infinite variety,” then there is little variety to be found other than in variations of plot and locale. It is a law of popular art that a work cannot possibly be appealing unless it evokes a large response; and since, in the catalogue of large responses, the only alternative to laughter seems to be tears, the non-comic authors lay on like butchers—I cannot remember such a concentrated assault on the same emotion since The Fireside Book of Dog Stories.
But we expect this also. None of these things really differentiates a Post story from, say, a story in Collier’s—neither the excess of sentimentality nor the tired writing (more tired in stories by reputable authors), nor even the rather surprising fact that most of the stories are variations on a single theme. What gives Saturday Evening Post fiction its particular quality is rather the special kind of theme to which most of the stories adhere, and the fact that this theme is emphatically moral and even religious.
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The theme is adoption. A man has been forced to put his dog to death because the animal has developed cataracts. After a certain length of time the dog appears again. Just at the point when the man is beginning to assume that supernatural forces have intervened on his behalf he discovers that the newcomer is not really his dog at all but an identical twin donated by a homeless waif who “couldn’t stand to see a grown man cry.” In gratitude, the man calls up the governor (with whom he is on intimate terms) and, with a remarkable lack of legal complication, the boy is adopted.
In this synopsis of “The Boy Who Gave His Dog Away” we can discern the outlines of the theme: a powerful person experiences a difficulty which is resolved through the generous impulse of someone weaker; by his own considerable power or through mysterious intimacy with “higher-ups,” the stronger then rewards the weaker, and the weaker is subsequently adopted. Though the adoptions are often actual legal arrangements between adult and child, they are more commonly not so literal. In relations between the sexes, for example, the gruff superior male offers the female, after she has shown herself worthy, shelter from the world and its brutalities. “Oh Kevin,” cries the heroine of “Not What She Wanted,” “tell me—tell me I’m safe home.” In “Desperate Journey,” a stag which has been freed from a trap by a child watches over the father of its benefactor, climactically “adopting” him by “accidentally” pulling him from danger. A wooden carousel horse, in the fantasy “The After-Hours Visitor,” adopts a dying child and takes him on an imaginary trip around the world. A fleet commander (in “The Bloodstained Beach”) adopts a sailor who has made a heroic attempt to save the commander’s son in Korea and who once, in civilian life, had fixed the commander’s car. A colonel and a captain (and later a whole regiment) adopt a Negro who has proven himself brave though “The Dumbest Man in the Army.”
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It is the weaker character—the adoptee— who is the central hero with whom the reader is meant to identify, and his face is featureless so that the reader can substitute his own. Though the adoptee is virtuous, he may sometimes appear, through misunderstanding, to have undesirable qualities. The boy in “The Boy Who Gave His Dog Away” seems to be a “bad one” who runs away from orphanages, and his adoption is therefore in jeopardy, but we later discover he has been running away only to be near his dog. In “End of the Line,” a romance between a gruffly sentimental bus driver and a girl is endangered by the fact that the girl seems to have stolen a pocketbook and to have come from a reformatory—but this is only a misunderstanding which the bus driver clears up through his friendship with a police chief.
Since the authors seem to assume a correspondence between the adoptee and the reader, there must be a similar assumed correspondence between what the hero ultimately acquires and what the reader presently desires. It is therefore especially significant that the highest reward the authors will bestow on their heroes is not money or fame or power, as we might expect, but the security of a cloistered and protected life under the guardianship of a higher authority. And just as there could have been no Garden of Eden without a personally implicated God, so can there be no effective security, in these stories, without the benevolent adopter to give it meaning and efficacy. Indeed the resemblance of the adopters to the Creator is often striking—they are “gruff” and “severe,” and endowed with the ability to reward virtue swiftly and without complications; in short, they are gods that walk like men, preventing evil before it occurs and insuring that good will triumph with uninterrupted regularity.
Companion species to the gods that walk like men are the great number of sentient animals and inanimate objects with ethical standards which crowd these pages, sometimes assuming the role of the guardian-father (like the previously mentioned stag in “Desperate Journey”) but more often serving to impress faith and morality on a wavering hero. A ship “commits suicide” by sinking (in Nicholas Monsarrat’s “The Last Days of M.G.B. 1087”) because its captain is smuggling contraband and dope aboard; in Conrad Richter’s “The Marriage That Couldn’t Succeed,” a blind mathematics teacher (mathematics is equated with atheism!) grows into faith when a wounded pigeon comes home to roost, signalizing the return of her missing, similarly wounded husband; the carousel horse in “The After Hours Visitor” makes incisive comment on Communism. Thus Nature has none of the blind fortuity we usually attribute to it—it is Eden minus its serpent, heedful, benevolent, and planned along lines more coincident with the reader’s hopes. (“They were all the one family,” writes the author of “Desperate Journey,” “man and beast.”)
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If The Post was once an emporium of entertainment, we must judge from these stories that it now sees itself as a citadel of faith, and even—such is its intensity of tone —faith’s last outpost. The most striking qualities of the stories—euphemism, wish-thinking, a sentient Nature, a hovering grace—reveal the quality of the religion that the magazine preaches: it is a religion that must, above all, operate, and operate quickly, a religion in which God must work in totally un-mysterious ways. Like the adoptee hero, this religion is featureless—or rather dogmaless—and permits each reader to substitute the faith of his choice; but the constant insistence on the religious call is no less clear. From this we may assume not so much a radical new change in the tendencies of our popular culture as an attempt to return to older forms, more specifically to the comforting religiosity of the 19th century, a significant indication of the direction in which the fantasies of at least some Americans are tending.
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