An “Anti-Fascist” Fable
Bread From Heaven.
by Henrietta Buckmaster.
Random House. 309 pages. $3.00.

Very possibly Miss Buckmaster thinks she has written a realistic novel, but Bread from Heaven comes closer to being a fable. It is a fable with certain characteristically modern ingredients, and if it fails to seem pertinent to our present situation, that is Miss Buckmaster’s fault rather than the fault of her basic idea, her donnée. Self-conscious nobility of purpose, sentimentality, and deep-seated literary ineptitude combine to turn the idea into mush.

The idea might be stated as an entry in an author’s journal: “To confront a typical American community with victims of the worst outrages of fascist evil.” The victims turn out to be a nineteen-year-old Czech, Karel, who has survived three years of concentration camp horrors, and Nikky, a one-armed child whom Karel rescued after an American air raid near Buchen-wald. Brought to the United States by a benevolent American soldier, the young refugees are not so well received by the soldier’s wife, and when she plans to separate them, Karel takes Nikky and flees. They come to rest in an unnamed town in western Massachusetts.

Of the account of what Karel endured in concentration camps one can say only that it has to be believed because any literate person knows that such things happened, and if Miss Buckmaster fails to give Karel’s sufferings any true reality for us, it must be admitted that better writers have failed at the same task. (This part of the book is no better and no worse than Remarque’s Spark of Life, which, in its abbreviated way, it resembles in theme as well as content.) Of what happens in the New England town, on the other hand, this reader is deeply skeptical.

Let us look at a few of Miss Buckmaster’s contrivances. Soon after his arrival in the town, Karel goes to the library, and the first book he picks up is a volume of Walt Whitman, which he opens to an appropriate quotation. The person who most truly befriends Karel and Nikky is an aged and philosophical Negro odd-job man, who is ultimately martyred. Karel falls in love with the daughter of the richest woman in town, who is full of social and racial prejudices. The political boss, small and self-important, not only is a small-town Hitler; he is capable of thinking, “Maybe Hitler hadn’t been so wrong.”

It is, in short, a fable. Not that Miss Buck-master doesn’t manage to give some sense of the actual mixture of kindness and cruelty, insight and prejudice, responsiveness and indifference that one finds in a small town—or anywhere else. But that hasn’t been enough for her, nor has she the knowledge and patience to bring her small town to life. The principal ingredients of the tale are invented to conform with a priori patterns in her mind.

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The first of these patterns is an old-fashioned one: the idea that the evil in the world, the enemy of all righteous people, can be adequately described as fascism. Karel triumphs over the horrors of overt fascism in Europe only to be confronted with embryonic fascism in a New England village. The second idea, more in the current vein, is that the love of life is in a constant struggle with the love of death and that life will triumph. The themes merge, however, for the good people, the anti-fascists, are also the living people. The final scene, when Nikky gets his artificial arm in the presence of all the good, anti-fascist, life-loving people, crowns the whole with a happy ending of pure Victorian sentimentality.

It is perhaps to Miss Buckmaster’s credit that, unlike the proletarian novelists of the 30’s, whom in so many ways she resembles, she subordinates the political to the philosophical theme. But if she must be congratulated for trying to transcend her limitations, the outcome is less than happy. The proletarian novels, by and large, were moving only insofar as the reader brought to them his own emotions, giving a kind of reality to what was in fact so imperfectly realized. Bread from Heaven demands exactly the same kind of cooperative reading. This fable of life and death can have meaning only for the Henrietta Buckmasters of this world, who are probably still numerous.

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Certainly the quality of the writing is unlikely to encourage anyone who approaches the book in anything but a sympathetic mood. Take a descriptive passage, one of far too many: “It was Sunday and the bells were ringing. The hawks were wheeling. In the farther pastures and the ridges of the hills the mists were rising. In the nearer pastures the cows were moving like slow water.” As Dr. Johnson said of Ossian, “Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.” Not only the description but also a good deal of the narration has that sort of mushiness, and the dialogue bears little resemblance to the way people talk.

What Miss Buckmaster is trying to tell us is both true and important: we in our comfort are horribly, unpardonably indifferent to the evil and the misery in the world. But, if one may ask the question without flippancy, who is Miss Buckmaster to preach to us? Her own vision of the evil in the world is, if not partisan, then certainly narrow, and to the rendering of that vision, such as it is, she brings slight talents. The book is synthetic, and its ingredients are ersatz. It is the kind of book that has given the novel of social problems its present low reputation.

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