Pompey's Head and the Middle Class Hero
Swados, Harvey
The American residing in Europe seems always to be confronted with the perennial attempt to sum up America in a word. The word used to be gangsters or skyscrapers; today it is often...
...by his children, who are not people at all but only occasions for worry about the expense of their upbringing, the adequacy of their conveyance to school, and the necessity for social relations with the parents of their playmates...
...And not only this...
...Basso finds the present life of Anson Page (and therefore of all the Anson Pages) so staggeringly dull and fictionally hopeless that he can bring himself to do no more than indicate it, while saving his literary powers for the evocation of a presumably richer past...
...Gaby Carpenter's house had steps like that, and so had the Johnsons', but the Hanbys...
...by his apartment, which is not a home but a price tag...
...The fact is that Anson recognizes the impossibility of the past as a way of life while he is at a party given by Dinah and her nouveau-riche husband, where "everybody was talking at once about cars and money and trips to Europe and the Cliftons' new station wagon...
...The novelist may attempt to encompass only a small and perhaps "unrepresentative" fragment of the American scene, but still it is to him that one turns for news of what America is about, rather than to the special pleaders who parrot ghost-written speeches out of Washington, or the polemicists who preach to the peace congresses, with one eye over their shoulder, the sermon of an infected America...
...As naggingly conscious of status as a J. P. Marquand hero, Anson has left Pompey's Head after his father alienated the community by defending an old Negro drunkard...
...The View from Pompey's Head, by Hamilton Basso, is in the main concerned with serious matters...
...and while we know that he admires her grit and her liberal politics and is puzzled by her disdain for her own past, we are not sure whether they are perhaps mismated or merely genially argumentative ("He smiled at Meg and she smiled back . . . 'Now and then I wonder if I married the right girl,' he said...
...When he attempts to buy Anson with a fat annual retainer Anson refuses coldly but cannot prevent himself from falling "hopelessly" in love with Dinah . . . and we have arrived at the climax of the novel...
...The family prepares to search for a Connecticut "farm" which will only be an extension of its over priced apartment...
...The Hanby house . . . which the guide said was now an antique shop—did it have curved sandstone steps at either end of its front stairway or didn't it...
...Dinah of course has "always" loved Anson, despite her vulgar husband and her three children...
...The shift in the nature of European misconceptions about the United States has been accompanied by a shift in the status of those holding them, from the working classes to the "educated" classes...
...Anson is faced with the question that confronts so many liberal-minded middle-class Americans when they reach the point of having gained possession of all the things that they are supposed to want: has it all been worthwhile...
...He gave me unshirted hell," recalls Cain in Colliers, September 2, 1955...
...In his case, the problem is thrown into sharper relief by the business trip to his home town which has haunted him ever since he left it...
...One is forced to conclude, not that the author has loaded the dice in favor of the past— for we learn at the end that this was not his intention—but that he feels the situation of Anson Page and his family in the American present to be so fairly typical that it can be immediately recognized by means of the shorthand employed...
...Anson reflects that his wife is prettier than ever after twelve years of marriage, but we are left to wonder about their marital relations until nearly the end of the book...
...Presumably returning to his home town on business, Anson Page is actually on a voyage of rediscovery, to see if the past—as exemplified in the attractive southern town where he grew up— has more to offer than the present in New York City...
...After a while one begins to wish that the latter had ready access not just to Communist falsification, or to Hollywood movies, or even to Faulkner, Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett, but to some of the popular novels now being digested by their American opposites...
...The apartment does not seem to be worth the rental...
...ALL THIS BEING SO, why must Anson in the end leave Dinah, Pompey's Head, and all the past, for Meg, New York City, and all the future...
...It seems to me that the answer reveals a good deal about the present situation of those readers who have pushed The View from Pompey's Head to the top of the best-seller list...
...You understand this problem better than I do, but this is a team and you're expected to play on it...
...I do too...
...The glamor of the past wears off as he discovers that almost without exception those of his boyhood friends who should have risen, or maintained their positions in society, have fallen, and those who were not entitled to, have risen...
...And the stifled accompaniment is the truly pathetic voice of the husband who, turning wearily from the talk "about cars and money and trips to Europe," wonders just how different is the talk that he will be able to hear in the sad, rich years ahead...
...WE ARE NEVER REALLY INTRODUCED to Anson's children...
...Anson, then, accepts the present not as something challenging, but as a lesser evil than the past...
...whereas the American past as typified by Pompey's Head has already faded so from the common memory that it must be recapitulated in nearly endless detail...
...Yet Anson, on the brink of middle age, is again as unhappily aware as a J. P. Marquand hero that somehow life is not working out as it should...
...the roader who has never spiritually graduated from Bennington and has "moments of wishing she were back on the news magazine" for which she had been a deliriously happy researcher before her marriage...
...and by his wife, who is not a woman really but an animated Stevenson (or Eisenhower) fan, a fanatical middle of Team...
...The word used to be gangsters or skyscrapers...
...In the course of this journey to the end of the past, Anson Page does more than recall adolescent experiences...
...Not only now and then, though...
...He belonged with them even less than he belonged with Meg's friends from the news magazine...
...by his future country house, which is only a bigger price tag...
...today it is often McCarthyism...
...The American residing in Europe seems always to be confronted with the perennial attempt to sum up America in a word...
...By contrast with these bare bones, the flesh of Pompey's Head is not merely filled out—it is padded and bustled too...
...What is odd however about this opposition of past and present is the poverty of detail with which Mr...
...Mingling his footprints with Dinah's on the beach, Anson reflects: "He knew all the faults of Pompey's Head and the things it could do to people, and yet, since he knew, he might have been able to work out his own solution...
...Second because while still dazed with their nation's power they are now grievously afflicted with the nastiness of those frustrated neurotics in their midst who, not knowing how to love, would rather hate...
...But this _is a judgment which can only be made subjectively, and must therefore be left to the individual reader...
...After ex-Senator Harry Cain of Washington gave his speech criticizing the Attorney General's Subversive List, he received a phone call from Sherman Adams, executive assistant to the President, asking him to stop by his office...
...We know that his job is pleasant but dull, but we are never told what he and Meg do with their evenings: apparently it is assumed that we can guess...
...And third and most important because the actual present in America is more closely approximated by the life of Anson Page (at a lower economic level, to be sure) than it is by McCarthyism: by Anson's job, which is not a way of life but an income provider...
...Pompey's Head was the only place he ever belonged, and not once since he left had he felt that he belonged anywhere...
...Then perhaps he might more readi• ly extend to the American people not the suspicion which he now accords them but rather the sympathy to which they are entitled on three counts...
...The job itself is no longer challenging, but is only a safe harbor, respectable and dull...
...First because they extended the same sympathy to Europe, if crudely and distortedly, at a time when it was sorely needed...
...for what remains after all the mooning is a definitive rejection of what Europeans even more than Americans regard as the trappings of a hateful reactionary past...
...He has made good...
...I wonder all the time...
...On the eve of the successful accomplishment of his mission, Anson takes Dinah to bed with him in the very room of the mansion where he had slept as a boy: " . . . at last he possessed her, in a wholeness of possession he had never known or dreamed, past and present came thundering together and he was master and owner of it all...
...There is more to it than the mere recognition of the fact that you can't go home again—although this has its appeal to millions of Americans who have left the farm forever for the city and are now leaving the city forever for the suburbs...
...She somehow represented the lost security of the house on Alwyn Street, together with all else that was lost, the whole lost world of Sonny Page, and she promised comfort and release...
...If it means little to him that even Eisenhower could not be President without subscribing to the principal planks of the New Deal platform, perhaps he might ponder the implications of a milieu in which it is all but impossible to conceive of a bestseller hero (and therefore of a movie hero) who is a McCarthyite, or a pseudo-conservative, or an anti-Semite or a Negro-hater, or of one who, faced like Anson Page with the choice between the conservative stereotype and the liberal stereotype, would opt for the former...
...We need not be misled by what may be called the misplaced pathos of Pompey's Head (by which I mean only that what is pitiable about the Anson Pages, whether or not they understand, is not their renunciation of the riches of the past but their acceptance of the poverty of the present...
...And what he rejects about the past is the fact that the old values of conservatism— the concepts of family, of the gentleman and the lady, of the ancestral home and ancestor worship—are not only inapplicable today, but have degenerated into sterile chatter "about cars and money and trips to Europe...
...For hundreds of pages we are regaled with minutiae about houses, streets, neighborhoods, schools, hunting, fishing, traditions, customs, history, soldiers, battles, statues, girls, dates, necking—everything that meant anything to Sonny Page and still means something to Anson Page, the returned voyager...
...For hers indeed is the voice of America, if only Europe could hear it through the jamming of the Communists and the McCarthyites: equally angry with Harry Vaughan, Franco, McCarthy, Stalin, the children's teach ers, and Chiang Kai-shek, it heralds a different kind of conformity, calling for concerted action towards better school transportation and swifter progress towards "that home in the country...
...To be sure, there is an alternative possibility: that Mr...
...Team, Team...
...1 tried to explain the merits of my criticism of the security program, but he snorted: 'To hell with the merits...
...This central fact has not yet become apparent to the European intellectual who is understandably bemused, even after Roosevelt, Truman, Stevenson and Eisenhower, by the ugly sounds and evil deeds of that confused but potent minority known as McCarthyites, and perhaps better described by Richard Hofstadter (after T. W. Adorno) as pseudo-conservatives...
...This insistence on reducing the irreducible to an easily digestible quantity has changed since the war in at least one major respect...
...It was a long time since Anson had felt so completely out of things . . . It was not that he thought he was better than they, or more intelligent, or endowed with deeper sensibilities...
...The children do not seem to benefit from their private school...
...In New York he is taken into an old law firm even though he did not go to an Ivy League college, marries a handsome midwest girl with whom he has a son and a daughter, and at the age of thirty-nine is renting an apartment in the East Seventies for $375 a month...
...His girl friend from the wrong side of the tracks has become a placid housewife, but her aggressive brother is now a millionaire who has bought and refurbished the decaying ancestral mansion of Anson's boyhood pal, Whit Blackford, and has even bought and married Whit's little sister Dinah...
...There is no way of knowing whether the impact of these words was intentional, but consider what a sudden, blinding light they cast upon the hero's hitherto chastely undiscussed twelve years of married life...
...and I suspect that a new best-seller may very well have done for post-war middle-class America what The Caine Mutiny did for the America of the war years...
...To this day there is no single document which affords, consciously or inadvertently, more revealing insights into the middle-class attitude toward war and militarism than does The Caine Mutiny...
...He simply did not belong with them...
...Basso invests the present in contrast to the overwhelming, suffocating mass of incident and description with which he furnishes the past of Pompey's Head, down to the very stones of the houses...
Vol. 2 • September 1955 • No. 4
