Five Novels
The Season’s Difference.
By Frederick Buechner.
Knopf. 303 pp. $3.50.
The Beetle Leg.
By John Hawkes.
New Directions. 159 pp. $2.50.
The Spirit And The Bride.
By H. J. Kaplan.
Harper. 245 pp. $3.00.
The Catherine Wheel.
By Jean Stafford.
Harcourt, Brace. 281 pp. $3.00.
Lie Down In Darkness.
By William Styron.
Bobbs-Merrill. 400 pp. $3.50.
Gone are the days of the novel as a confessional; the equation of author and hero does not work any longer: Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees was, at least for the time being, the swan song of those who were both the victims and the executioners of their own imaginations. Detachment has now become almost an obsession. The age of the authors of the books at hand—roughly between twenty-five and thirty-five—has ceased to be the age of their heroes and heroines; children, adolescents, and people beyond their prime now fill the scene.
The writers of the Lost Generation knew exactly what they were talking about; they were their own problem; and although they were ultimately unable to solve that problem, they could state it with the directness of immediate experience. The writers at hand fumble with structural problems in order to camouflage the fact that they move in unfamiliar territory, in areas they do not know from their own experience.
Their younger characters are distorted by too much objectivity; most clearly, Jean Stafford’s Victor, in whom this distortion congeals to physical deformity, and Frederick Buechner’s two adolescents, whose “ugliness” induces in them ideas of grandeur and the pride of outcasts. It is as if these novelists wanted to prove their own maturity by denouncing, albeit in a very subtle way, the age of innocence. Again we see the writer involved in a recherche du temps perdu; except that now he can no longer recapture the full meaning of a youth that he seems never to have possessed in all its range and depth. Consciously or not, the source of this half-psychological, half-mythographical presentation of youth is Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. And the two writers whom we see concentrating most strongly on this motif, Stafford and Buechner, are also definitely post-Jamesian in style.
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On the other hand, there are the characters who are older than their authors in age and experience: H. J. Kaplan’s American in Paris; William Styron’s Milton Loftis, the Southerner; Buechner’s visionary school teacher and the whole set of adult vacationers surrounding him; Jean Stafford’s genteel Katharine. Even John Hawkes’s Cap Leech, who pioneers beyond the frontier of death, belongs in this age group. All of them move over despair as on a frozen stream; some skate, some plunge through the broken surface, but all slide from “unreality to unreality” and end up in more or less real disaster. Styron’s young heroine oversimplifies the situation: “Those people back in the lost generation. . . they thought they were lost. What they were doing was losing us.” But they lost not only their relation with their children; they lost contact with their own existences, and with life in general.
Certainly, an older person’s fatal insight into the purposelessness of his life has been a literary stock subject since Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyitch. But only with Death of a Salesman has this subject become a specific form of protest—the protest of the younger American writers against the generation that preceded them in life, literature, and politics. The crisis of our civilization is defined as the spiritual climacteric of the generation of one’s fathers and mothers. By withdrawing from their parents, as well as from their own childhoods, writers try desperately to arrive at a position of their own. Many a deficiency, especially in the structure of their novels and in the use of language as a means of communication, stems from the fact that their detachment is purely negative. They are ashamed of the too great directness of their predecessors, they are suspicious of the soul, and of their insights into psychological mechanisms; they are intent only on forming myths out of a basically unmythical material: the present. The creative ego is in a panicky Sight before itself; what remains is the exercise in style, with the level—of quality, of seriousness—as the ultimate goal. The subject matter is understated in varying degree but with an obstinacy common to all; the task seems now to lie in a manner of presentation increasingly aware of its own virtues, as remote from autobiographical reference as. possible, and—if anything—indifferent to the reader. In the near distance looms the ivory tower of l’art pour l’art, an astounding sight in the literary landscape of mid-century America.
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What renders a book like H. J. Kaplan’s so hopeless is the author’s patronizing attitude toward his own hero. Throughout the narration Kaplan displays a condescension which he would like to think is irony but which springs from the arrogance of self-hatred, and from the lack of any fixed point from which he could approach the figure he has created. He feels insecure, as does Styron toward his Helen Loftis, a Strindbergian monster with overtones borrowed from Faulkner, O’Neill, or directly from Freud.
Both Kaplan and Styron make abundant use of the flashback technique. Kaplan’s hero finds himself on page 25 “in a scrofulous building off the Place Maubert, in a grimy cell-like room under the eaves of what must have been the most ancient and dilapidated hotel in Paris, with a strange woman sleeping on the bed within reach of his arm and—outside, in the pitch-black corridor—a man mad, drunk or doped, breathing on the latched door, holding a bare knife, waiting for Clifford to emerge and be murdered. . . .” On page 243 he discovers, after reviewing his history and writing his will, that he has “O irony—a future. . . . I have nothing to do but decide what to do.” The rest of what the blurb calls “an intellectual thriller” is taken up by the account of how Clifford has come to this unexpected situation, a report broken up by aphorisms in the cold jargon of the intellectual Smart Set. All this leads Clifford eventually to accepting his position and himself as authentic. Thus, in orthodox existentialist fashion, the deadlock is resolved and the way out of the conflict opened. But Kaplan’s “good message” only reveals the brilliance of a dissecting mind, which is exclusively interested in the operation it performs and completely neglects the hero who is exposed to it. Life is doomed to die under these sharp, glittering, and sterile sentences.
William Styron’s book, on the other hand, is all but brilliant, though its message is exiguous and its New York scenes provincial. Its theme is set by the return to her home in Port Warwick, Virginia, of the body of a young girl named Peyton Loftis. Her story, ending with her suicide, is picked up by flashbacks, and flashbacks set into flashbacks already in progress, a technique that tends to blur the action without making it any more interesting. But Styron does know how to transform the mud of life by sheer power of narration into the music of style. The background is American, complete with Daddy Faith, the Football Game, and the Cocktail Party, with the car drive to the end of the night and the Puritan shame of the morning. And there is a beauty both ancient and promising in the downfall of his hero, Milton Loftis, inextricably in love with his daughter’s fixation on him, the narrow and middle-sized man from the South, and as such not quite convincing, not quite “experienced,” but still something more: a man in anguish and mystery, giving up on himself, smitten by what he loves most.
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In some respects Jean Stafford’s Katharine is the man from the South translated into a Boston lady. Like Milton Loftis, she is conditioned by her reminiscences, and has made a philosophy of them: “There is only one time. . . and that is the past time. There is no fashion in now or in tomorrow because the goods has not been cut.” Like Loftis again, she is exposed to the aimless activity of youth, and the anxieties, equally aimless, of her own contemporaries. But her summer house stands outside the village of Hawthorne in Maine, and her roots extend deep into the traditional and adventurous soil of Boston and its hinterland, from which she gains a strangely completed passion, and finally gains even her own death (the other books here reserve tragedy for the younger generation alone). Like Styron’s and Kaplan’s novels, Jean Stafford’s picks up momentum only in its second half. By a thoroughly decomposed composition, by very slow narrative rhythms, by detailed description that out-Prousts Proust, so that the texture of the writing becomes like refined needlework—in short, by a sort of magical boredom, Miss Stafford draws her reader closer and closer to the center of her story. It is the children who take shape first; they belong to the heroine’s best friend and first cousin, Maeve, who becomes visible in turn, and transparent; she is married to the man to whom Katharine has devoted the past that is her life. Suddenly, these now familiar characters spring into action, and Katharine goes to her ironic doom.
Jean Stafford, standing between the world of children and that of their parents, gives no indication as to where she herself is to be placed in the succession of generations. As a writer, too, she remains outside her story, brandishing the magic wand of style—a wand that often becomes unwieldy and unnecessary—appearing arbitrarily here and there, but withdrawing as soon as she has succeeded in making her presence felt. In spite of its elaborate smoothness, her narrative is uneven and disquieting. Only in the last few lines of the book does the author unveil her face: the hard and wise features of a writer who, like fate, sums up in one stroke the ambiguities and complexities of the human scene.
Frederick Buechner’s book follows, obviously, hard on the heels of a successful first novel. It shows, with equal obviousness, signs of exhaustion, reading like a pastiche of its predecessor. It is interesting mostly for its effort to break through a pattern of imagery carried over from the first novel. There is a Gothic, almost Teutonic, fury, a violence of vision and grasp that Buechner has obviously inhibited and smoothed over so long that by now it gives off a hollow sound. The impact of a basic experience like the school teacher hero’s vision on a group of people gathered at random could have yielded a character study of relevance. But the author is not interested in his plot, which is negligible, or in his characters, who hide their triteness behind over-sophistication. The novel is, at its best, an almost abstract experiment in human relations, but completely out of focus; its few dramatic incidents are immediately wrapped up in reflections and lyricism, their point quickly blunted beyond recognition. All that is left is a gossamer of small talk, allusions, and witticisms, and a nearly complete breakdown of intelligibility.
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To some extent John Hawkes stands apart from the foregoing writers. Like Styron, he is a young writer, whereas Buechner and Jean Stafford are heirs of tradition, with all the refinement and fragility of late descendants, and Kaplan wants us to believe that he is as old as the Bible which he so abundantly quotes. Like Kaplan, Hawkes deals with the American experience of Europe. But Kaplan’s Europe is the Paris of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and George Gershwin, a Babylon revisited and brought up to date. The Beetle Leg is firmly set in the American West, and its author, who was an ambulance driver in Italy and Germany, brings to his setting the atmosphere of Europe on the morrow of the war—recent Italian movies like Paisan, Shoeshine, and especially Bitter Rice are felt in it.
Hawkes’s subject is one that Pietro di Donato had left hanging in mid-air in his Christ in Concrete of 1937. “A man lay buried just below the water level of the dam. He was embedded in the earth and entangled with a caterpillar pump engine and a hundred feet of hose, somewhere inside the mountain that was protected from the lake on one side by rock and gravel and kept from erosion on its southward slope by partially grown rows of yellow grass. . . .” The theme appears first in its nuclear smallness—a construction worker who had to be sacrificed during the building of an irrigation dam—but by following up the effects this one death had on the survivors, the book concentrates in slow progress on the natural pain, and dignity, of man. The technological universe recedes and Man takes over again, until, on the last page, the theme of the victim is repeated triumphantly, yet modestly. The narrative is blurred and broken up by stylistic experiment, by a quest for artistic integrity in the avant-garde tradition. And yet, there is fresh air, and a savage beauty that verges on the archaic and the primitive. Here, for once, the accepted standards of modern American letters, of Henry James, Proust, and the other masters, have been tentatively replaced by a voice through which echoes the timid-daring stammer of contemporary European civilization.
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