The Art of Exhaustion
Seedtime.
by Leo Katz.
New York, Knopf, 1947. 381 pp. $3.00.
Seedtime is a parable of passivity. Its plot is tangential to a sequence of events which dominate and loom over it: a Rumanian peasant rebellion in 1907 spurred by the most terrible misery but soon suppressed by the regime of the boyars. This rebellion coincides with the proclamation of universal suffrage by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a concession forced by the Viennese workers. The two events mesh: the Rumanian authorities try to deflect the peasants into pogroms and some Austrian officials hope to intervene “in behalf of the Jews” as a means of winning international acclaim for the Dual Monarchy. But both pogroms and intervention are forestalled by considerations of international politics, as well as by some novelistic devices contributed by Mr. Katz.
Against this sequence of events from without, the little town of Sereth, on the border between Austria-Hungary and Rumania, is helpless. Its predominantly Jewish population lies passive, aware that it is merely a pawn but hoping somehow again to squirm out of danger. That in this instance the pogrom is aborted is not crucial; the pattern of pogroms—of, so to speak, the pogrom-as-such of modern society—is accepted by the Jews as given. How the petty officials, the Jews, and some Rumanian peasants react to these events, when things happen to them, is the core of the novel.
I may as well say bluntly that this seems to me a bad and confused novel. Yet it raises certain interesting questions about the general state of the modern novel as well as offering still another comment on the situation of Europe’s Jews. One is not merely indifferent to this sort of bad novel. One cares; one suspects that an explanation of its failure may be of larger significance than the book itself.
Seedtime is a novel of literary echoes. The peasant scenes recall Gorky, but without his generous rebellious passion; the Jewish genre scenes recall Sholom Aleichem, but without his universal comic grasp which involved not merely eyes and ears but a first-rate mind as well; and the burlesque of petty officialdom recalls Hacek, but without his special gift for logical inventiveness which made logic itself seem ridiculous and bare as bleached bones. In a word, Katz does not merely place his story in 1907; his novel is a pale reflection of the literary consciousness of 1907. For a contemporary reader, this makes for an unsatisfactory novel; the tensions, the ambiguities, the modes of perception—many of the idea-moods that are distended by the Existentialists into universal human attributes—which we expect in a modern novel, are absent from Seedtime. We feel that a writer cannot regress to a simplicity of means and vision involving a rejection of contemporary attitudes without risking the loss of relevant communicability—not merely to this critic, but to most thoughtful readers of our day.
However, Seedtime must be judged a bad novel on more obvious grounds. It contains a mass of material sufficient for several novels, but the author’s curious creative inertia seems to prevent him from selecting what he considers central and what is to be subordinate. Without directed emphasis, there is no art; for then the material is merely lumped together, not shaped into a form. That is why the novel’s potentially interesting characters are never realized—Mr. Katz is too busy juggling the unwieldly apparatus of his too complex plot to give it centrality and direction. His novel is like an army forever maneuvering but never going into battle.
Hence its dominant tone: a weariness that suggests the quality of automatic writing, as if the product of some extraneous compulsion rather than an inner creativity. It is as if the material were given, antecedent to the writer’s attention, and he merely funneled it, disorganized and disintegrated, through his. neutral style. Since he does not mold his material, the author exists parallel to rather than in interaction with it. This absence of the strong creative personality—the maker, transforming experience into art—gives the writer a curious distance from his work.
As a comment on the plight of Europe’s Jews, Katz’ concert of the Jew as passive victim is ultimately /?/, though I suspect one may question it as. a specific description of the Austrian Jews of 1907. His implicit suggestion that the Jews should have allied themselves with the rebellious peasants is acceptable in general, but allows him too easy an out as novelist. For his peasants don’t react to anti-Semitism; his peasant leader sagaciously rejects it as a diversion from the true goals of the rebellion. In Seedtime anti-Semitism is mainly a policy manipulated by government agents. No doubt it was that, no doubt it was directly planned; but such planning was possible only because its initiators could tap the anti-Semitism rooted in the East European peasant’s consciousness since childhood. Had Mr. Katz explored the more difficult problem of the indigenous subterranean anti-Semitism of the masses, in addition to viewing it as a mere provocation of reactionary politicians, he would have had a more vital and dramatically tense subject. What would have happened if they had acted on the traditional identification of the Jew with the bourgeoisie? That would have been a real nut to crack.
Since this review has been so speculative, I shall close it with yet another speculation. One wonders to what degree Seedtime’s novelistic and intellectual weariness is the result of a catatonic numbness in the face of the experience of the European Jews since 1907. From 1907 to 1947—only forty years, but a different world; seldom has history been bent into such a twisted arc. One wonders if the contemporary imagination can span that distance.
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