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The Moving Why


ISSUE:  Winter 1941

Father and Son. By James T. Farrell. New York: The Vanguard Press. $275. For Whom the Belt Tolls. By Ernest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. $2.75. Sergeant Lamb’s America, By Robert Graves. New York: Random House. $2.50. Embezzled Heaven. By Franz Werfel. New York: The Viking Press. $2.50. The Beloved Returns. By Thomas Mann. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.

The actualist in fiction enjoys the primal satisfaction that humankind takes in its ability to confer and use names, a pleasure revealing itself in such diverse ways as the pomp of rituals, the prattling of babes, and the incremental repetition of folk ballads or, for that matter, of wholehearted profanity. Words that can summon absent things to mind have a certain talismanic force; and to name something adequately is to face toward an understanding of it and so toward its mastery. Full measure of this dominance over things that be we find in novelists who are great; and we are sure that “the moving why they do it” is to let us share their power.

This is perhaps a slightly pompous prelude to the discussion of contemporary novels, but it shapes itself naturally after the reading of such a book as James T, Farrell’s “Father and Son.” Here is actualism, a circumstantial account of O’Neills and O’Flahertys in South Chicago from 1919 to 1923. There is no acknowledged thesis, no story in the formal sense of the word, and no comment by the author. In a sharply subdivided sequence of brief episodes and situations, Danny O’Neill, the son, passes toward manhood and Jim O’Neill, the father, passes toward death; with them, toward less exactly indicated destinations, throng an ample and vociferous relationship and connection.

Mr. Farrell accomplishes a record of life comparable in vividness to a reader’s own more elaborated memories, and not limited by squeamishness. Spades are called and some of them are mucky; but they had to be named if truth were to be told as Mr. Farrell elected to tell it. In all, he does thoroughly what an actualist must do first and foremost.

There are other achievements for the actualist, however, in which Mr. Farrell is not uniformly successful. He is not sure in his management of the implications that start up when a thing is named on paper. Thus the importance that he attaches to the relationship of Danny and his father and its true quality remain a bit vague; and there is similar uncertainty in what is suggested about Catholicism. On the other hand, Mr. Farrell speaks with clarity about adolescence; and he builds up a firm concept of Irishry, blending expertly warm-hearted affection and screaming family rows, all with no trace of the conventional rollicking Mike-and-Molly pattern. Among the Hibernian characterizations the best is that of Lizz, Danny’s mother, who is (as Handy Andy might have put it) not merely Irish but more merely a woman.

There is, then, in “Father and Son,” vivid authenticity and considerable but not unfaltering mastery of actualities. Mr. Farrell gives the impression of assuming that his mere naming of things is their completed conquest. Such indeed it would be, if it conveyed a sufficient sense of life’s sweep and wonder and terror and pathos; but all that calls for clairvoyance in the depiction of men and moments; more of it, at any rate, than this novel reveals.

There is a greater potency in the actualities of Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” a sharper note of immediacy, a more far-spreading, better controlled overtone of emotion and meaning. It is a story of high country, of Spanish mountains, where all things stand forth in alpine clarity; and danger adds vibrance to each moment. There, to the consummation of love and to death, goes Robert Jordan, a man who thinks. This book makes one feel what it is to be a brave man and a bridegroom and in each capacity to know the ideal; it also makes one feel what it is to be caught in the very mind-stir of another. Fortunately that mind is an intelligent one. Using it and his own competence in the bare naming of things, Hemingway has given “For Whom the Bell Tolls” not alone the power of experience but also the power of significance.

He speaks for the Republican cause in Spain with dignity and deep conviction. And his revelation of Spanish nature is even more effective because it is firmly part and parcel of the problems Jordan must solve on his mission behind the Franco lines, and part of his finding and loving Maria, despoiled waif of civil war. Hemingway’s Spaniards are convincingly varied and yet are all of a piece in their inconsistencies, kindly and cruel, revolting but ingratiating and admirable. “There is no finer and no worse people in the world,” thinks Jordan; and again, “Spain has never been a Christian country.” Spaniards, Hemingway demonstrates, unite savage primitivity and an age-old sophistication, qualities showing in both deed and word, as witness his translation of their talk with its mingled artlessness and formality. Spaniards he depicts thus with unvarying excellence, and similarly, to add another complexity, Spanish gypsies; and the greatest of them all is the woman Pilar. Fierce and tender, maternal and bawdy, veritably both masculine and feminine, she is a triumph of robust creation.

It must be admitted that Hemingway’s comment upon Republican military weaknesses is not so well managed. Here he changes his narrative method and so seems to introduce chapters from another book. Better presented are the larger implications about war, Spanish or otherwise, and about dying for a cause but without heroics. In this, and indeed in all other phases of his book, Hemingway writes more maturely than ever before.

He shows no trace of adolescent exhibitionism; he is not toying with death of an afternoon or bearing it to green hills far away. Yet he is thinking about death, and in living terms, in terms of pine fragrance and mountain peaks, the smack of bullets, the strain of danger, the salt of Maria’s tears on Jordan’s lips, and the feel of her cropped head under his caressing hand. Hemingway is upon the skirts of a revelation about death met in full stride: an agency of intolerable grief it may be but, thwarted by the needs of wedded bodies and wedded souls, little more than a divider of generation from generation, the marker of a great rhythm in life.

For relief from the intensities of Mr. Hemingway’s novel, one may turn to Robert Graves’s “Sergeant Lamb’s America.” Its account of the American Revolution is well-nigh devoid of immediacy. Guns go off but they make no sound; blood flows but it has no color. For Sergeant Lamb’s safety in his remote perils, no one need be concerned; for his success in a blandly improbable love affair one can wish but tepidly. Moreover, the book is loaded with whole chapters of unpersonalized history frankly pro-British in most of its generalizations.

And yet—the book has a saving grace that disarms the irate critic. There was an actual Sergeant Lamb, much of whose career as set forth in the novel Mr. Graves is ready to authenticate. Beginning with the known facts and with the one document left by Lamb, a letter written in old age, Mr. Graves has constructed not only a fictitious autobiography but, by implication, a Sergeant Lamb who would write just such a book.

This man was an eighteenth century Englishman (never mind that he was born in Ireland), of more sense than sensibility. There is an amusing savor of Gibbon about him and more than a savor of Defoe. Needing money in his advanced years, he amplified his own journal of American campaigns by borrowings from history and from credulous early travelers in the New World; he seems also to have read certain novels of his day. He gave his book the only tone of which he was capable, that of the eighteenth century true-story with all the jokes properly labeled. In short, this is an interesting book because it is so everlastingly uninteresting. Mr. Graves has skill, persistence, and courage.

Sergeant Lamb leaves us facing toward a novel thoroughly unlike his save in one respect. In his “Embezzled Heaven” Franz Werfel coaxes us to believe that he writes of an actual person, Teta Linek, an elderly Austrian serving-woman concerning whose later days he knows certain facts. The rest is fiction. And when all is done, Mr. Werfel tells in an epilogue why he has written of Teta: she had an indomitable, unforgettable personality; and her simple religious faith compelled the thought that the general lapse of such faith is “the absolute primal cause of all our misery.”

Franz Werfel is incapable of failing in either of these purposes, but one may question whether Teta’s larger significance is sufficiently unmistakable while the book is being read. To be sure, we make her acquaintance when disaster portending the close of an era falls upon the household of her employer; and leaving that scene, she goes forth vaguely invested with an aura of vast dolors and solemn allegory. Soon, however, our interest in Teta as Teta obscures symbolism and allegory. Moreover, the search on which she proceeds, the quest for an assurance of salvation after death, is so instinct with naive selfishness that it will not serve comfortably as the type of religion for more discerning souls. Faith is needed—but there are faiths and faiths.

The force of this book is rather in the kindly, meditative, and penetrating depiction of Teta as an individual. Werfel contrives, as only an artist can, to immerse us in the character and yet to hold us aloof and give us space for the comprehension of what we see and feel. Certainly he makes us very fond of this waddling, often selfish, almost fanatically determined old woman with the incongruously youthful and unquenchable blue eyes. She deserved a chance to develop the self-forgetfulness of maternity. Saying to ourselves, “What’s a heaven for,” we take it as a token that Teta should die at the high moment of a pilgrimage to the Vatican, and as no more than her earthly due that, just prior to this, she should have come under the amused, loving care of a veritable fairy prince of young clerics to compensate her for an apostate nephew who had darkened her days and all but tricked her into an eternity of woe.

An inquiry upon personalities far more complex and renowned than Teta’s is Thomas Mann’s “The Beloved Returns.” It is also an essay in high comedy almost too elevated even for laughter of the mind. It carries the air of great wisdom and, to use one of its own phrases, of all-embracing irony. And when the play is done there is dropped upon it the curtain of metaphysical idealism.

In 1816, Mr. Mann tells us, the elderly, sensible, and but normally sentimental Charlotte comes to Weimar seeking the man she has not seen since he made her the heroine of “Werther.” After more than forty years of bewilderment she is determined to find out what manner of man this is— and whether she may not be wrong in feeling that he never loved her. Sycophants and infatuated dependents of Goethe tell her much about him and, in certain long passages of masterly dramatic monologue, much about themselves. Finally Goethe speaks for himself, indeed, thinks for himself in one of the most full-freighted streamings of consciousness in modern letters. Charlotte at length departs, knowing and not knowing, but forgiving and, if the truth be told, pitying, the man of genius.

All characterizations in this book are admirable, but that of Goethe is as dominant and all-embracing as Goethe’s genius. Indeed the major concern is the relationship of that genius to the personality of Goethe himself. Genius and personality, Mr. Mann seems to say, constitute a duality in which the former uses the latter without regard for its happiness or its ultimate welfare. Genius has had much to do with making Goethe what Charlotte finds him, a versatile, charming, but self-centered old man content to simmer in the pettiness at Weimar, a man who has never been able to use his vast energy in wholehearted living. He has spent himself getting copy for the genius, sometimes to the great detriment of other persons.

For justification of the genius, Thomas Mann resorts Sergeant Lamb leaves us facing toward a novel thoroughly unlike his save in one respect. In his “Embezzled Heaven” Franz Werfel coaxes us to believe that he writes of an actual person, Teta Linek, an elderly Austrian serving-woman concerning whose later days he knows certain facts. The rest is fiction. And when all is done, Mr. Werfel tells in an epilogue why he has written of Teta: she had an indomitable, unforgettable personality; and her simple religious faith compelled the thought that the general lapse of such faith is “the absolute primal cause of all our misery.”

Franz Werfel is incapable of failing in either of these purposes, but one may question whether Teta’s larger significance is sufficiently unmistakable while the book is being read. To be sure, we make her acquaintance when disaster portending the close of an era falls upon the household of her employer; and leaving that scene, she goes forth vaguely invested with an aura of vast dolors and solemn allegory. Soon, however, our interest in Teta as Teta obscures symbolism and allegory. Moreover, the search on which she proceeds, the quest for an assurance of salvation after death, is so instinct with naive selfishness that it will not serve comfortably as the type of religion for more discerning souls. Faith is needed—but there are faiths and faiths.

The force of this book is rather in the kindly, meditative, and penetrating depiction of Teta as an individual. Werfel contrives, as only an artist can, to immerse us in the character and yet to hold us aloof and give us space for the comprehension of what we see and feel. Certainly he makes us very fond of this waddling, often selfish, almost fanatically determined old woman with the incongruously youthful and unquenchable blue eyes. She deserved a chance to develop the self-forgetfulness of maternity. Saying to ourselves, “What’s a heaven for,” we take it as a token that Teta should die at the high moment of a pilgrimage to the Vatican, and as no more than her earthly due that, just prior to this, she should have come under the amused, loving care of a veritable fairy prince of young clerics to compensate her for an apostate nephew who had darkened her days and all but tricked her into an eternity of woe.

An inquiry upon personalities far more complex and renowned than Teta’s is Thomas Mann’s “The Beloved Returns.” It is also an essay in high comedy almost too elevated even for laughter of the mind. It carries the air of great wisdom and, to use one of its own phrases, of all-embracing irony. And when the play is done there is dropped upon it the curtain of metaphysical idealism.

In 1816, Mr. Mann tells us, the elderly, sensible, and but normally sentimental Charlotte comes to Weimar seeking the man she has not seen since he made her the heroine of “Werther.” After more than forty years of bewilderment she is determined to find out what manner of man this is— and whether she may not be wrong in feeling that he never loved her. Sycophants and infatuated dependents of Goethe tell her much about him and, in certain long passages of masterly dramatic monologue, much about themselves. Finally Goethe speaks for himself, indeed, thinks for himself in one of the most full-freighted streamings of consciousness in modern letters. Charlotte at length departs, knowing and not knowing, but forgiving and, if the truth be told, pitying, the man of genius.

All characterizations in this book are admirable, but that of Goethe is as dominant and all-embracing as Goethe’s genius. Indeed the major concern is the relationship of that genius to the personality of Goethe himself. Genius and personality, Mr. Mann seems to say, constitute a duality in which the former uses the latter without regard for its happiness or its ultimate welfare. Genius has had much to do with making Goethe what Charlotte finds him, a versatile, charming, but self-centered old man content to simmer in the pettiness at Weimar, a man who has never been able to use his vast energy in wholehearted living. He has spent himself getting copy for the genius, sometimes to the great detriment of other persons.

For justification of the genius, Thomas Mann resorts chiefly to metaphysics. Poets, says Goethe to Charlotte, are indispensable because they negate time and change and serve the All-in-One. This is impressive; for descanting thus while he lowers the curtain upon the book, Goethe is permitted to speak with the tongue of his genius. Yet one could wish that a defense of poets had been offered that was more consonant with Goethe’s reputation in his art. His designation of the AU-in-One sounds rather blank and frustrate. Why could it not be something apocalyptic, something touched with the glory that blind Milton visioned in a Heaven energized and radiant with the essence of light? Perhaps the all-embracing irony spread too wide a shadow.

Whatever we feel about the Goethe of this novel, we can rejoice that into the making of him has gone an infinite worldly wisdom and a knowledge of art which can come only from the possession of a great gift and its proper, though no doubt often wearying use. “The Beloved Returns” is a book for rereading and annotation. It should be imbibed slowly, for it offers the double-distilled essence that art can derive from life and the things of life.

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