Primer of Complexity
An Act of Love.
by Ira Wolfert.
Simon and Schuster. 577 pp. $3.95.
The “act of love” is a blind run by an anonymous little American soldier into the face of Japanese machine guns, for the purpose of diverting a threat to the rest of his group. A dissociated act—with recognizable moral value, but with no past, future, or identity for its actor—it is used in this novel as the moment of insight, the transforming vision which gives the meaning of life; and it is the concrete therapy for the distraught hero. This choice of symbol is the key to Wolfert’s quality.
There is a corresponding sense of isolation and drift in the hero’s situation. Sole survivor of a torpedoed American ship, Harry Brunner, in his physical and emotional disablement, sees the island natives who nurse him back to health only as instruments of life. The family of an American planter with whom he stays are instruments of escape from the war; and the women, native and white, instruments of a corrupting sexuality. The plot from here on is subsumed under the conflict between a “regressive” mother attachment and a “progressive” urge toward maturity—fought out in a prolonged free association. The battleground is Harry’s wavering relationship with the planter’s daughter, who is simultaneously a pawn in the tension between her parents. American reconnaissance forces intrude into the civilian crisis, and the narrative erupts into a climax of heroism, violence, and catharsis.
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Mr. Wolfert seems to have written his book under the pressure of several immense though misunderstood obligations. The greatest of these is the need to be a Jew, to regard Jewishness as a major condition of life. Harry Brunner studied to be a lawyer because “when you have a profession you have something ‘they’s cannot take away from you”; he would have liked to be an architect, “but Jews find success difficult in that field.” He sees the ghetto everywhere. His “torpedoed ship is the Jew made to feel he must not be Jewish,” the actual waves of the sea demand that he yield his individuality. Harry is a Jew not so much in experience or aspiration as in the violated spirit, an imaginary and inauthentic Jew: the anti-Semite makes him.
It should be pointed out that the author treats Harry’s feelings as compulsive. Wolfert believes that the main enemy of those Jews who tried to “prove” themselves in the war was their self-imposed acceptance of an inferior status; he himself regards such conformity to the anti-Semites’s universe with disdain, and is indeed outwardly hostile to all conformism. Nevertheless, in differentiating himself from Harry’s defensive Jewishness, Wolfert drops his protagonist into a void. A phrase places him—“he was a middle-class boy, growing up in a middle-class home in a middleclass city.” But we never see the closets of the home or hear the machinery of the city. Harry rejects his world before he inhabits it. He discovers that he is an underdog by reading the newspapers, and what is wrong is that he gets his education from the hindsight of the editorial page. Thus, his neurotic life is the only life he has, and it constitutes his Jewishness.
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Wolfert’s second obligation, learned from Freud, is to show that the nature of reality is ambiguous and contradictory. Here, in intent, he is so close to the real function of the novelist, that it is almost impossible to explain the sort of glamorous irrelevant confusion that he finally generates. One explanation is that breaking the stereotype of good-versus-evil is for him simply a way of keeping up with the avant-garde Joneses, and Freud becomes the source of capsuled complexity: “Women were a cave to him . . . he had invented this cave to protect himself from the world of warring life . . . he was afraid of life.” The psychoanalytical vocabulary, which can induce precision and a reverence for specific fact, here only creates the unwholesome allure of Salvador Dali’s collapsing watches and pregnant machines. In An Act of Love you are face to face with the Id in one easy lesson. Love equals passion equals anxiety equals repression, and all roads lead to the womb. The humility that accompanies true insight here turns into equal parts of self-hatred and self-love.
There are some ways of telling the truth that partially transform it into a lie, just as it is possible to be ingenuous and give the impression of vulgarity. Wolfert has fallen into both those traps, and perhaps this is due to his dissatisfaction with the simple naturalism that he handled very competently in his earlier novel, Tucker’s People. That naturalism, which showed a wonderfully alert familiarity with the manipulations and characteristic language of urban business and with the knot of dependence and rejection of two Jewish brothers, is not to be confused with the talent for war reporting which won him a Pulitzer prize. There is a good portion of such bright, imagist, Time-molded, and far from simple reporting in An Act of Love. Though this writing deals presumably only with sensations, there is no literary objectivity about it. It uses death, not as an integral part of life, but as the extreme stimulant, and one senses behind it an understandable but still frightening exultancy at survival (as soldier or Jew?), as when Harry Brunner screams to himself, “’I’ll tell you, I’m the boy who can tell you now about flying with the seat of the pants . . . .’s He was a drunken boy all alone two miles high in the sky. ‘Hot damn!’ he cried out loud to the cockpit,” etc. And as the guns of his ship begin firing, a different stage of intoxication takes hold, a frenzy of pity for the Japanese:
“You if you avail yourself of our service . . . . will find that no human hand will touch you. There is no fumbling . . . You are dead before we can say take that!”
Harry’s bitter pity is one more caprice in a novel of dissociated acts, persons, and feelings. But to some extent it prepares the reader for the ultimate obligation that Wolfert imposes upon himself and his hero. Harry, armed with his own “act of love,” the logical sequel to Irwin Shaw’s “act of faith,” joins the brotherhood of man. “Harry was no longer a minority of one on earth, seeking a cave in which to hide from both organic and inorganic life, from the hostility of man and of nature. The whole society of man became a cave for him. He was not of a warring herd any longer, warring within itself and on other herds. He no longer had to be of a herd to feel secure. He had only to be of the human race. There was nothing hostile to him any more in human life. He was one with it, and so his fears ended.”
At every point the rhetoric of autohypnosis violates the assertion of fraternity. No trace remains of the struggle and incongruity that are elements of any real commitment; we are offered in one hysterical stroke the solution to all problems. Mr. Wolfert’s confected ardor melts man and the world into a standard gelatinous mold.
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