Two First Novels

A Length of Rope.
by Monroe Engel.
Random House. 246 pp. $3.00.

The Closest Kin There is.
by Clara Winston.
Harcourt, Brace. 244 pp. $3.00.

Two fine first novels, by two writers in their early thirties, these books have little in common but their mature seriousness, their competence, and a most moving tragic integrity. Thus in a supposedly dry season, when the review supplements and the literary magazines cry woe up and down ten octaves about the feeble state of fiction, Mr. Engel and Mrs. Winston provide formidable contradiction. It is probably not the job of one reviewer to quarrel with earlier judges of a book, but this is written after the two novels have been given their supposed due in the Sunday reviews. In one of the more powerful book sections, where a stumbling duck called fiction-in-general is so often and easily mourned, these books were paid small, almost grudging attention: a nudge from behind the cracker barrel for Mrs. Winston, who’d better watch out for her future as resident of Vermont; a hurried, impatient dismissal of Engel’s “obscurity.” Do those who write about Fiction read novels?

The intelligence of A Length of Rope gives it immediate stature, controls the subtle, thoughtful pace, sustains the weight of its complex morality without ever weighing it down. The separate worlds in which Engel’s characters move—a small, depressing mental hospital on the western bank of the Hudson, an Italian slum in downtown New York, the changelessly comfortable apartments and country houses that stand for success—are all presented with skilled visual authority, and the moral pressure within and upon each of the characters is controlled with great openness and energy, with an unmistakable certainty of direction.

For twelve years Ratcliff Pippin has come to the asylum, Greenwood, in pursuit of a desolate, unchanging failure—concentrating all his energy on his idiot son, Edgar, in a weekly plea for recognition, and receiving nothing in return. Having fathered this inert flesh, Pippin has forfeited all other humanity to his one guilty, obsessive responsibility. But he in turn becomes an object of obsession for two other people who are spelling out their private desperations at Greenwood. To Sheila Braun, a promiscuous and perpetually disappointed nurse, Pippin and his son promise, and for a time even fulfill, a need for status, for a stability through giving, which has evaded her before. To Alexander Forward, who dominates the novel symbolically and actually through his enormous size and the raging pitch of his restless pride, Pippin becomes the target of an unholy determination. Forward (the name has a brilliant irony) has thrown everything away—success, wife, children—in the attempt to match his lust for the absorbing boldness of violence. From the thoroughness of his rejections he derives a pride that permits him to make for others, like Sheila and Pippin, those decisions of violence which they have not chosen to demand of themselves. Even after Sheila and Pippin marry, taking Edgar away from the abnormal safety of Greenwood, Forward must stalk them to kill Edgar and thus annihilate the proof of their dedication. Engel controls this stern struggle without forcing it to a sleek or abstract conclusiveness; the enormity of Forward’s error is given the controlled movement it needs to come alive in the full scope of disaster.

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Mrs. Winston’s softer p/?/ch makes for a different kind of tragic intention, which she fulfills as admirably as Engel does his. Her world—the bleak, ingrown life of a Vermont farm, a place where the heart seems to shudder in the cold of perpetual winter—is more carefully bounded, brilliantly distinct in the imagery and detail of the place and the people within it. She faces this pleasureless Vermont with an excited familiarity, and turns if about in a knowledge streaked with cautious love. And it emerges with great certainty of language, a sparing purposefulness of metaphor that brings the thing seen (a calf, the clothes of a farmer, the icy turn of a country road, the evil grimace of a gypsy at the county fair) into precise relation with the thing meant.

All this is used with decisive intent. Mrs. Winston drives the consequences of farm life, the relentless turning of earth, animals, and season, straight through to the heart of her story. The narrative is not, as some have tried to label it, simply “about incest.” The incestuous love of Phyllis and Lloyd Dary is the climax of their life in the book, not its beginning or total depth. The people are all proud, innocent outcasts, who can oppose their bitterly narrow, circumscribed world only by driving themselves further beyond the pale. The mother is driven by the fanaticism of a steely love to keep her son out of the war; the father’s workbound, rock-bound life has its final harvest in madness; the daughter returns from a brief freedom in the outer world to face a gnarled and hostile native place which is nonetheless her only home. Only the son, whose resources have the iron of habit and a muscular simplicity of instinct, seems able to escape, in part, the doom which encloses the others of his family.

But for all the loveless and bleak finality of its action, Mrs. Winston’s novel has an inescapable ring of life. The world she knows is there—it is never assumed, never hinted. The fiction that matters is always an examination, no matter how it is conceived or done, of human responsibility. And because Engel and Mrs. Winston know what to do with such difficult challenge, they have both written novels that matter very much.

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