Three First Novels

A Long Day’s Dying.
By Frederick Buechner.
Knopf. 267 pp. $3.00.

The Cannibal.
By John Hawkes.
New Directions. 272 pp. $1.50.

The Sheltering Sky.
By Paul Bowles.
New Directions. 318 pp. $2.50

Here are three first novels by young writers; the youngest, as the book-jacket proudly states, is twenty-three. These are not the customary immature products to be jabbed with rusty critical knives. They show strict control, with none of those qualities of youthful ebullience and sentimentality which so often pervade the work of first novelists. Yet the admirable restraint, the scrupulous attention to craftsmanship in Frederick Buechner and Paul Bowles seem only to disguise a basic lack of creative energy, especially when juxtaposed against an imagination as rich and overpowering as that of John Hawkes. Both their novels have the same basic theme—the anguish of the modern intellectual, who, unable to communicate his need for love, is condemned to isolation in a world which he can only analyze and endure. But the tragic significance of this theme is never captured, for the human beings who move through these novels are merely the shadowy backdrop against which the real hero, entitled perhaps “The Modem Dilemma,” is illuminated.

Nevertheless, from a literary perspective as dim and vacant as the present, the critic must award them whatever honors go to failures of the highest order. Certainly no recent novel has come so close to technical perfection as A Long Day’s Dying, and it is amazing to witness such skill in a young writer. Somehow one would expect that, with the best of intentions, obsessive early experiences would intrude to jar the total harmony. But Buechner has not sought to scotch the tormenting ghosts of childhood, nor is he bound by external political or religious pressures.

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A long day’s dying is a study of gentle decay, in which the characters seem to shrink from the pressure of reality. Presumably, it is with Leander Poo/?/ that the novel is most concerned. A young college student, he is threatened by the disease which destroys all those about him, a disease that has its roots in the moral emptiness of contemporary sophisticated intelligence. His mother Elizabeth is courted by two men: Tristan Bone, who moves through his dilettante world with the ponderous grace of a leviathan, and George Motley, whose art is merely the charming guise of a precocious and wicked child. Their lives, based upon the “undesired grotesqueness of a physical relationship,” are closed off from each other. What little plot there is concerns itself with Elizabeth’s “seduction” at the hands of her son’s friend, and the subsequent emotional poverty it reveals as she refuses to accept the implications of this action. Desiring each other’s love, the characters are nevertheless filled with the dread of genuine feeling, so that their mutual need finds expression only in the language of self-betrayal and hate.

The very perception of this theme demonstrates Buechner’s great talent. He has written some magnificent scenes—the episode at the Cloisters, Tristan awaiting a train at Grand Central; his combination of fantasy and objective detail is often wonderfully effective. The difficulty arises when Buechner persists in a private, oblique imagery which is unable to sustain the load it is meant to bear. For example, Elizabeth lying in bed “would fold her pillows again and again like letters asking not for love but only for understanding.” This nebulous over-refinement crops up in the treatment of the characters, who seem to be constantly standing aside from a situation, neatly summing it up and leveling out its complexities in such a manner as to maintain the movement of the novel upon an unnecessarily monotonous level.

The chief failure, I think, lies in the fact that the highly wrought and sometimes meticulous style is pushed to extremes that do not permit maintenance of its ballet-like balance. The characterization, though brilliant in its external finish, is never penetrating, and the big scenes suffer from a lack of genuine intensity. The people who move through the novel are bloodless, without a certain contradictory human quality which might save them from emerging as mere intellectual abstractions. As a result, much of the symbohsm is neither rich nor penetrating, but slightly grotesque. When Tristan’s pet monkey slits his throat in imitation of his master’s pantomiming gesture of self-destruction, the episode appears contrived, lacking the irony that might have given it the force of a superb parable.

It is strange to observe the lack of daring in a writer so young as Buechner. By sounding his theme on a minor key, he has avoided many of the commonplace errors in craftsmanship and demonstrated a great deal of critical intelligence. But somehow one feels that his world is filled with brittle museum pieces that tend to disintegrate even under the careful hand of the connoisseur.

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The cannibal is a far more experimental venture than A Long Day’s Dying. On the most simple reading, it is the story of one day in the history of a small German town, told with utter disregard for orthodox chronology and sequence. The year is 1945, and the life of the town is as diseased and sluggish as its choked sewers. (“The undertaker had no more fluid for his corpses; the town nurse grew old and fat on no food at all.”) It is policed by one American soldier on a motorcycle, who represents the authority of the Occupation. When the day ends, he has been ambushed and assassinated.

Tormented by memories, the characters are passive, somnambulistic victims of history. Their world is distorted and hallucinatory, haunted by grotesque specters from the past; even as one of them strangles a chicken, the face of the old Kaiser is dimly seen pressed against a window; another runs wildly down a street in pursuit of an open carriage, shedding his identity with each step and emerging finally as Princip, the young assassin of Sarajevo. Vague childhood fears become a terrorizing reality as decayed bodies assume obscene gestures that mock the living, as ghosts clamber out of the turrets of rusted, overturned tanks.

Hawkes does not focus the novel upon a single character. He attempts rather to portray the obsessions of many different minds submerged in a nightmare. The seeming ludicrousness of many of his images serves only to heighten our sense of horror as we perceive their full import—the dead monkey rising from the heap of bodies, tail coiled about his neck, screaming “Dark is life, dark, dark is death,” children sliding down staircases on their stumps—these symbols serve to concentrate our vision upon a scene of desolation as terrifying as anything in modern literature. We cross the border of fantasy into another universe: the tiny village becomes not a microscopic representation of Occupied Germany and the rest of the world; instead, it is these larger entities that assume the dimensions of Spitzen-on-the-Dien.

Hawkes gives the impression of a talent rich, diffuse—and virtually uncontrollable. His preoccupation with filth and decay is extreme. (“All during the day the villagers had been burning out the pits of excrement, burning the fresh trenches of latrines where wads of wet newspaper were scattered . . . where pools of water became foul with waste that was as ugly as the aged squatter.”) The macabre aspect of his humor is sometimes overworked, and the cocoons undulating in the mouths of corpses give one the feeling of a malevolent child displaying a boxful of worms. Nevertheless, Hawkes is a cold and brilliant writer, with a superb eye for visual and olfactory detail. He has succeeded in carrying off the prize which has up to now eluded the grasping fingers of the Kafka cult: namely, the achievement of truth through distortion.

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Of the three novels under consideration, The Sheltering Sky seems the one most likely to succeed. (As of this writing, it is eleventh on the best-seller list.) Bowles owes much to E. M. Forster, attempting, one suspects with a high degree of consciousness, to use North Africa in much the same way that Forster used India—a curved mirror that distorts even as it reflects the dilemma of Western man. But despite his seductive skill which captures the glittering outlines of Arab marketplaces, wine shops, and sulky prostitutes, the novel is never able to rise above a certain tourist level. The characters seem to move in a comatose state from one baroque elliptical scene to the next, never coming to life or generating dramatic tension.

Bowles has taken Lost Modem Woman and opened the sores of her Sickness Unto Death. We perceive the decay of a marriage—the meaningless chatter and fatigued politeness, the painful separateness in sex, the lost ability to love. The tortuous journey she undertakes with her husband only heightens the profound barrenness of their mutual lives. The surroundings are mysterious and threatening, even as they hold out the secret promise of a redeeming Nature, wherein, as Sir Thomas Browne wrote, “the greatest Balsams do lie enveloped in the most powerful Corrosives.” For the husband, the Corrosive is too powerful, and the exotic atmosphere brings only death.

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In a state of shock, the heroine goes off on a strange adventure, wandering out over the desert sands, where she is finally picked up by a camel train. Some of the scenes that follow are like the films of Rudolf Valentino. It is the same Sheik, garnished with camel dung and flies, who sweeps her off to his desert stronghold. A simple child of nature, he is able to satisfy not only the heroine, but the three other women of his harem. His sex life is distinguished by a sense of workmanship and efficiency that can scarcely be matched by any character in recent fiction, unless it is by one of the dashing swashbucklers of the historical romance.

“Raped” twice on her first encounter with the potent nomad, the heroine is able to abstract herself from the experience and this vicarious aspect sets the tone of the entire episode. Before her adventures have run their course, she is thoroughly purged of her sensibility, and succeeds in finding salvation through violation. At the end, we are left with the image of a small desert bird parading in the feathers of D.H. Lawrence’s plumed serpent.

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