THE EXPENSE OF SPIRIT
BARDIN, JOHN FRANKLIN
The Expense of Spirit Reviewed by JOHN FRANKLIN BARDIN fHE CHRISTMAS TREE. By Isabel Bolton. „New York, 1949. Charles p Scribner's Sons. 212 papes. $2.75. « * 189 BOLTON HAS ATTEMPTED in The...
...Why Crime...
...depressed, the acquisitive, the wanton, the lonesome, the tormentor — seem to invite certain types of crime...
...The character is robbed of its full symbolic richness...
...Danforth's remembrance 'of things past Too often she is authorial and explicit, breaking the boundaries of her apostrophic style...
...exigencies of technique, to fail irmhe way she did gives me hope for this kind of novel in English...
...Danforth stands as believable...
...The novel ends with an ambitious scene, told through Mrs...
...John F. Bardin, author of several books, it a frequent contributor to The Xew Leader Literary Section...
...The novel is told from Mrs...
...I believed that she was an Edwardian and that once the immorality of the world broke in on her, she would have to try to adjust her access of sensibility...
...461 pp...
...By Hans von Hentig...
...Most interesting is the section on the victim...
...She uses inappropriate techniques borrowed from the realistic novel instead of rendering each important scene in Mrs...
...Danforth's consciousness...
...but she imagined them only partially...
...Danforth's intelligence is supposed to have derived from the Edwardian era in which she was raised, and to have adjusted itself to our own disastrous times...
...948...
...Since these characters comprise the point-of-view, the events reported, emotions felt and ideas deliberated must occur reasonably in their consciousnesses...
...The closed form in which she writes is a concentration of James' flights of sensibility...
...and especially the study of the part the victim plays in the genesis of crime...
...I did not believe the son capable of murder—I did not believe the mother shared enough in the modern consciousness to have the insight to know her own feelings...
...The weakness of Mrs...
...The reporting consciousness ot-the- grandmother, a Mrs...
...Danforth's eyes, during which the son meets his alter-ego, the taciturn, extroverted, Ar Force pilot, and murders him...
...Gangs, occupations, degree of religious concern, even aspects of criminal slang, are presented in a survey that makes an excellent introduction to the subject for the layman, while surveying the field thoroughly for the professional...
...Danforth's point-of-view—only a few sections are experienced through the mind of her son...
...This scene has a Flaubertian justness...
...It is subtitled "Studies in the Sociobiology of Crime...
...I believed that the son would be her victim, psychologically and spiritually...
...Danforth's consciousness and commented upon by her, a child of six, even if monstrously influenced by our violent artifacts, is not an adequate substitute for what the novelist did not give us...
...AN INTERESTING APPROACH TO the problems of crime is made " in The Criminal and His Victim, which examines these two "partners in iniquity" mainly from the psychological point of view, without neglecting the environment...
...Here is the point of Miss Bolton's book: the many-leveled exposition of the managainst-himself destructiveness pf our youth...
...Her choisen^poJnt-of-view is Jamesian: the consciousness of f grandmother who, like a James heroine, has experienced two conflicting ways of life...
...The novel begins in the present...
...The book begins with an analysis of physical characteristics of criminals, such as red hair, left-handedness...
...Yale University Press...
...Words of ugly scandal -float onto the scene, abstractly^ overhead...
...Danforth's character is supposed to be her great capability for sensuous experience: she strives to make up for her poverty of spirit by inflicting her moral and aesthetic ambitions on her son...
...She remembers her flight to Europe, the infancy of her son, her gradual realization of his homosexuality, and the insight she gained into her own selfish innocence at the sight of the corruption her poasessiveness had caused...
...The reader, who has been made one with the child in her sensuous experience, how feels once and for all how ill-equipped this personality is to cope with the stuff of ideas, beliefs, morality, and how well-equipped to delight fully in the sensuosity of the instant, the here and now...
...The resultant pf their conflict must then be a recapitulation, if a thematic and narrative variation, of the total form...
...Drawing widely on statistics and* wisely^ on Illustrative examples, The Criminal and His Victim abounds in information and fruitful thoughts about the causes and perpetrators and objects of crime...
...as well as more directly questioned matters such as stuttering, and mental disorders, and the use of drugs...
...As a product of the upper middle class in New York City before the first World War, Mrs...
...The scene, ajthough powerful, is not wholly, completely "there...
...Miss Bolton told me these things, talked to to me about these complex characters...
...Price $6.00...
...AS I HAVE INDICATED, this novel is successful to the degree that its point-of-view, an especially complex one, is rendered...
...Miss Bolton does not represent enough of Mrs...
...And this total form is shaped out of the representation of the conflict of consciousnessv The success of such a novel depends on the symbolic perfection of its protagonists...
...She embodies the failure of a class, at a time and in a special place, to attend to the needs of both mind and nature...
...Miss Bolton tried to find in the dialogues 'between the grandson and grandmother a substitute for the representation she had avoided...
...Danforth recalls her own childhood as she trims the tree— the luxury of her home, the bankruptcy and suicide of her father, the violent death by accident of her husband...
...Danforth's consciousness...
...189 BOLTON HAS ATTEMPTED in The Christmas Tree to refract vL/M the moral effects of societal revolution through the symbolism of ffpJM novel...
...So the marital catastrophe occurs offstage, much other important material occurs in synopses or asides that are forced into the interior discourse...
...The vlct tim of a sharper, for example, of a "confidence man," is almost always some one who wouldn't mind making a little money on the shady side of the law...
...The novelist has failed to achieve these difficult goals, although her failure is honorable and, occasionally beautiful...
...The fact that Miss Bolton is suffi• ciently aware of the requirements of the novel Of,.sensibility, * and of tha...
...This character's Consciousness should have been enacted injboth its levels of being, as an,Edwardian chilcT and a modern parent-— and the changes that occur in the character under the stress of the novel - istlc conflict should have reflected the changes in Mrs...
...And the novelist wished to render it through the mind and feelings of a woman who knows that she has mothered this corruption, that this split-personality began with her...
...Danforth, is a diminution of one aspect ofthe entire form, as the reporting consciousness of her son is intended to reflect In miniature the other aspect of the form...
...Although this is a dramatic device, and the child's sayings are refracted through Mrs...
...The child is fascinated by the limitation of her perceptions, she can almost envision herself a jirasshopper...
...Miss Bolton accepts Henry James as her master...
...But I did not believe her presence in the present...
...Reviewed by J. T. SHIPLEY THE CRIMINAL AND HIS Victim...
...This part of Miss Bolton's social and psychological parable comes off...
...The scene in which she, as a small girl, lies in tall grass amid the world of insects and hears her mother talk scandal is admirable...
...By means of the dialogues, she intended to depict the grandmother's alienation in the modern world...
...Certain types of victim —this...
...The grandmother is tending her grandson, a horrible child who revels in the bloodiest comic books and most macabre movies, while awaiting the arrival of the child's mother and her new husband for Christmas...
Vol. 32 • April 1949 • No. 18
