The Cross of Redemption (38 page)

And Herbert Dawes’s case history does, in fact, have a grim and clinical interest. When the book begins he is a top West Coast dress designer, seemingly well adjusted and secure, placidly married to a spineless and spectacularly unperceptive girl named Lonna—who, apparently, ceased going to movies shortly before Hollywood discovered Freud. Herbert has molded Lonna into what his neurosis makes him desire in a wife; she is unobtrusive, mannishly dressed, useless about the house, and in their lovemaking Herbert’s passivity has forced her into the dominant role. But the security of this structure is abruptly challenged when Lonna insists on having a child. (“To the male part of you she was a wife,” probes the inevitable psychiatrist. “But to the inner female self of you she is your husband—how can a husband become pregnant, nurse a child? Suddenly she had become your enemy.”) While swimming Herbert tries to murder his wife with a spear, believing her shadow in the water to be a shark. Even the tranquil Lonna is upset by this and runs off to a psychiatrist, who diagnoses the root of Herbert’s trouble as a fiercely repressed homosexuality. This, apparently, is too fantastic for anyone in the book to believe, most of all Herbert. Lonna frets over her childlessness, the while her husband is feverishly spying on the lovemaking of a brawny sailor and his girl. Herbert eventually sleeps with the girl—in lieu of the sailor—and when the sailor deserts her, Herbert deserts her too. But the sailor, meanwhile, has begun an affair with the unhappy, sex-starved Lonna; whereupon Herbert falls in love with Lonna again, trying hard to hide his jubilance at having his lover-by-proxy back. Lonna, prepared to risk their marriage once again, sends the sailor off; Herbert, whose mental battle is breaking through into physical symptoms, becomes sufficiently ill to stay home from the factory, sends Lonna to take his place, does all the housework, and is about to make this precarious adjustment work when Lonna finds she is going to have a child by the sailor. Herbert breaks completely, kills her, is caught trying to escape dressed in a woman’s suit with no memory of what he has done. The book ends with him in prison, his fantasy complete, dreaming of a male Lonna about to possess him.

This is done with considerable adroitness; indeed, in the hands of a major novelist,
The Sling and the Arrow
might have been a genuinely moving study. But Mr. Engstrand, for all his skill, never succeeds in cracking the surface of the tragedy or causing, in at least one reader, any sense of identification. His failure is not that his people are unbelievable or his situations unreal. One is simply not interested in his people or in what happens to them. The book reads like a plan—here is a schizophrenic, this is what he does, here is the reason for it. In Herbert’s case, the reason, relentlessly
tracked down, stems from his relationship with his father, who according to Herbert loved his wife and daughter more than he loved his son, and who rejected Herbert when he was twelve because he found him in homosexual play with a young neighbor. Herbert’s life was a kind of expiation and flight, an obsession to prove to his dead father that he was masculine entirely and had been cleansed of his sin. Here is a dilemma known to all of us: Herbert’s terrible guilt, the compulsion to be accepted, his helplessness in the face of the war within him. The contemporary sexual attitudes constitute a rock against which many of us flounder all our lives long; no one escapes entirely the prevailing psychology of the times. Perhaps the failure of
The Sling and the Arrow
can partially be traced to its implicit acceptance of the popular attitude. We are not asked to consider a personality but an abnormal psychology, not a study of human helplessness but a carefully embroidered case history. This has, then, ultimately no more reality than any one of the recent spate of films dealing with psychiatric problems. Here is no illumination, no pity, no terror. One closes this neat and empty volume untouched, indifferent, leaving Herbert floundering in his irrelevant hell, knowing that this happens seldom and can never happen to us.

(1947)

U
NTIL THIS NECESSITY
I had not read Robert Louis Stevenson since my childhood. I had read then, and in some corner of my mind remember with pleasure,
A Child’s Garden of Verses, Kidnapped
, and
Treasure Island
. I especially remembered the poetry, without, of course, ever thinking of rereading it. It was something designed for my friends’ children on their birthdays. I had, in fact, relegated Stevenson to that dusty and diverse gallery of my childhood, a gallery which also included Horatio Alger,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, and almost all of Dickens. Childhood, I decided, having safely survived it, was a period of light and sunshine, and in Stevenson these elements were contained in profusion; he was perfect for childhood, because his stories were so simple and he told them so well.

Thus, rereading Stevenson was something of a shock, almost a betrayal. It was not that he had become less delightful, but that now there stirred for me beneath this brave adventure an element faintly disturbing of which I had not been cognizant before.
Treasure Island
, it is true, remains perhaps the best boys’ book I have ever read; but not even this masterpiece quite escapes the transformation effected by time.

The most enduring delight offered by Stevenson is contained in his prose; he could write superbly well, a virtue for which we should all be grateful now that the clotheshorse, the fisherman, and nymphomaniac have been equipped with typewriters and entered the world of letters. The admirable study by David Daiches dissects Stevenson’s style in some detail and skillfully traces Stevenson from his “sedulous” aping of the styles of other men to the Stevenson who produced
Kidnapped
and
The Beach of Falesa
and the unfinished
Weir of Hermiston
. Daiches does some extremely careful detective work here and achieves a rare effect: he makes Stevenson grow and strengthen before our eyes. Perhaps this is not the definitive study of Stevenson, but it succeeds within its limits perfectly. Whoever attempts such a study hereafter will be greatly in Mr. Daiches’s debt.

The Pritchett volume—which is badly printed on bad paper and with an inaccurate table of contents—includes
Weir of Hermiston, Kidnapped, Travels with a Donkey, The Beach of Falesa, The Master of Ballantrae
, and
The Suicide Club
, and contains an introduction by Mr. Pritchett. Pritchett, rather less sympathetic than Mr. Daiches, notes that Stevenson was too mannered and too clever and too vain and was, for much of his life, not so much of an artist as a charming and irresponsible vagrant; and that even
Weir of Hermiston
might never have become the great novel it seems to promise because Stevenson does not, at any other time in his career, seem capable of so sustained an effort on such a mature level. Mr. Daiches, in consideration of this aspect of Stevenson, anatomizes the conflict within Stevenson between a bourgeois and a bohemian morality, a conflict related to his father and accounting in part for his unevenness as an artist and his frequent inability to achieve or sustain adult insights.

Stevenson is always a master storyteller; and his failure, when he fails, is not the inability to tell the story but an inability to handle a theme. It is this failure which mars his two most ambitious efforts for me: the murkiness and indecision and unevenness of characterization in
The Master of Ballantrae
and—in spite of the considerable impressiveness of
Weir of Hermiston
and the sometimes brilliant handling of the father-and-son relationship—a lack of unity in this fragment, which indeed I doubt that Stevenson could have finished.

Stevenson is at his absolute best, however, in a narrative like
Kidnapped
, an exceedingly skillful novel and a far less simple one that I had supposed. (According to Mr. Daiches it is only one-half of the novel its author intended, having been sidetracked midway and become something quite
different. It has a sequel,
David Balfour.)
All of Stevenson’s warm brutal innocence is here, the sensation of light and air, the nervous tension, the chase, the victory. And the preoccupations he later pursued in more ambitious novels give
Kidnapped
an impetus which makes it a good deal more than an adventure tale. The story of David Balfour’s struggle to attain his birthright is told with a strange lack of directness and is emphasized by an indefinable sense of guilt, sometimes almost terror, which makes his victory, when it comes, less than it was in anticipation. He has paid for his victory with himself and has become a different person. The novel, in fact, ends on a restrained and terrible note of melancholy:

Again, in
Kidnapped
the relationship of David and Alan, on which much of the book turns, is far more than a friendship and is certainly not the traditional Anglo-Saxon friendship. Alan is for David a father image, a lover, a foe, a child, and, over and above all, a symbol of romance. In spite of Daiches’s reservation that the characterization of Alan is not entirely successful, it seems to me that Stevenson exhibits in the relationship of these two a richness and complexity of insight which does not anywhere—until Kirstie and Archie in
Hermiston
—characterize his studies of men and women. Pritchett, observing this, concludes, and I agree, that this does not at all indicate that Stevenson was homosexual; for Stevenson men were less of a riddle. They represented no challenge, they were the makers and the movers of the world and more fitting subjects for romance. Here, probably, is one of the keys to Stevenson’s continuing popularity with the young, and one of the reasons it took him so long to become an artist. He is innocent—or asexual—in the same manner that preadolescent youth is asexual. In
Treasure Island
as in
Kidnapped
, women and the challenge women represent are only vaguely intimated; it is an element projected into the future and which allows the protagonists, meanwhile, to live as though this challenge will never have to be met. Later, when the challenge must be taken
up, it is an awkward and unhappy battle; this bright world is darkened and roughly disoriented; at this time David would be almost willing—if he could—to surrender his birthright, to be hunted and threatened all over again if he could thereby return to Alan at Rest-and-be-Thankful.

(1948)

F
LOOD
C
REST
, by
H
ODDING
C
ARTER
, is yet another addition to the overburdened files of progressive fiction concerning the unhappy South. We are asked this time to consider the career and character of Senator Cleve Pikestaff, a most reprehensible old man, who, as is made abundantly clear, is not in the least worthy of his great office. For years his political career has been managed for him by his sharp-witted, strong-willed, seductive daughter, Sudie—who frequently makes Cleve feel bad because she cannot bear his lack of social grace. (Cleve is given to spitting in the fireplace and scratching his bottom in public.) These symbols of corruption are surrounded by various familiar excerpts from the Southern landscape, a landscape which is not, apparently, ever going to change. We have the liberal old Southern professor, fortitudinous and patient, fighting, as one of the more rhetorical characters—perhaps the professor himself—remarks, “to keep change within a channel.” In this he is aided by his sharp-witted, strong-willed, seductive daughter, Bethany. They are eventually joined by Sudie’s ex-lover Floyd, young, attractive, confused, and—ultimately—Progressive. There are others: a lusty young killer and prison trusty named Clyde; two dreadful Caldwell cretins, Georgie Mae and her man, Pud; and
the Mississippi River, which rages fearfully throughout the book, threatening to drown them all—a finale, however, which Mr. Carter avoids, since he is concerned with Progress and flatly opposed to Defeat.

This, like most of its predecessors, effectively resists all attempts at intelligent analysis. It cannot, of course, be criticized in literary terms at all; whatever Mr. Carter’s convictions, his notions of trenchant characterization are shallow, not to say antique. The book, presumably, is meant as a study of public corruption feeding on public apathy; its moral is as neat and timely as the subway posters “Freedom Is Everybody’s Job.” The trouble is not specifically with the moral, which is fine as morals go, but simply with the painful vacuity and indecisiveness of Mr. Carter’s story. Mr. Carter manages to say about all of the right things, none of them very strongly, none of them clearly; it is, indeed, made increasingly obvious that he does not quite know
what
to say. Mr. Carter is concerned with Change, which he equates with Progress, and he is against Violence. Progress must, of course, be made; but it must be made neatly, wisely, there must be no messy unforeseen edges to trim. And it must be made in the American Way by all the Common People, acting, as they seldom do, in unison. This metamorphosis demands—naturally—an heroic patience and a fairly transparent condescension towards the Masses. Proving, perhaps, his point, Mr. Carter’s Common People—led by the uncommon Floyd—hold back the Mississippi, thus avoiding extinction. Senator Cleve Pikestaff, on the other hand, by a series of wild improbabilities, is assured of re-election, which is, I suppose, the same thing as saying that Rome was not built in a day. Novels and novelists of this genre serve no purpose whatever, so far as I can see, except to further complicate confusion. Mr. Carter knows, I hope, that holding back the Mississippi is not nearly so difficult as striking a bargain with time, which is neither polite nor predictable and refuses to be labeled in advance. And if he means to suggest that there must be men of wisdom and good will in the vanguard, he might also suggest that the wisdom be less vague and the good will less sentimental.