AN AMATORY INVESTIGATION
BARDIN, JOHN FRANKLIN
WRITERS and WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION An Amatory Investigation THE MELODRAMATISTS. By Howard Nemerov. Random House. 338 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by JOHN FRANKLIN BARDIN "Here one...
...As in M. de Sade's Justine or The Misfortune of Virtue, this satirical novel is about the adventures of two young girls setting out to live diametrically opposite lives...
...Einman tells her that decision and self-destruction are one and the same...
...Unfortunately Susan cannot demur because the butler, Hogan, has been blackmailing her about her affair with the psychiatrist...
...Claire, who is the Justine of Mr...
...By George Creel...
...In the greatest love there is hatred...
...Creel has compressed an enormous amount of useful material and comment on Soviet activities in China...
...As expounded by many, but not all, Freudian revisionaries, It is a false simplification and a dangerous one...
...Susan considers humanity to be victimized by its own pretenses and society consisting of individuals who are only "blind activities started by two blipd activities having what they call fun...
...Once these are found...
...He "is not much interested in this love business . . . more interested in the value in it, the price people are willing to pay to carry it on...
...also displavs a function of love, the romantic phase...
...Susan and he are to be married...
...Father Meretruce, as his name leads one to expect, is insincere, and also the author's whipping boy...
...His concept of live is symbolized by a photograph of a foetus which he gives to Susan...
...Recognize the hate in our love, the love in our -hate, and become epicures of it...
...It is difficult to accept unemotionally a policy which blocks the Soviets from advancing in Greece and Turkey, but which applauds their advance in China as being in the best interests of democracy...
...to tear everything to pieces...
...The nuns arrive at the home of the Boynes, a Boston mansion...
...The psychiatrist's confidential assistant, John Averist...
...So important is the subject and so essential are the proofs of Russian-Chinese communist identity that it seems a pity this book is not more detailed...
...Nemerov is doubtless engaging in irony when he urges this view upon us...
...Susan considers the aging psychiatrist to be somewhat like a Roualt clown and Claire's initial distaste for the priest is summarized by the fact that he had "the hands of a capable dentist...
...Susan, despite her fatalism,—and, as I have shown, because of it—must try to make life come to a decision, make "life do something absolute...
...I AM NOT INCLINED to agree with the author on his central premise, yet I find this one of the most affecting novels in years...
...Neither Dr...
...He tells her that she wants "crisis, decision, fulfillment...
...the object we have all these years has lost its affective power over us...
...After the breakdown ef the Boyne f amity — papa, a good Boston brahmin, goat,-mad, locks himself in the bathroom and sails a model of the U. S. S. Constitution in the tub, announcing that he is going to bathe and sail forever—Susan meets Dr...
...Nemerov adds, her interest in life "to her meant in the possible, which paradoxically amounts to something as an overwhelming hatred of life...
...I have always liked a big bang though and this is a proper firecracker of a book...
...The nuns are illiterate and dirty...
...However, all literature, art and science have for centuries sought the meaning ef our existence, the exact nature of reality...
...Susan, however, is finally a success in her own terms: "I want to know who and what I am...
...Since, the night before, Hogan had demanded Ills ultimate price from her—and she at last knew who and what she was—the ending is feat...
...He says, "To me there is a majesty...
...in an attempt to forestall the inevitable conclusion of her way he confides that he is dying in the hopes that her pitf for him will be stronger than her will to death...
...The communists and their friends have so sold their legend to the American public through innumerable books and articles that more lenghty and detailed a/uUysis of the fact would be necessary to destroy it Nonetheless, this small book should mark the path for otheres to follow...
...Nemerov's paradox explodes, as do all paradoxes when we know all their components...
...ALL THAT IS HUMAN IS FRAGMENTARY and imperfect...
...EINMAN, IS A QUACK, and also the author's spokesman...
...Psychoanalytical science, as opposed to existential philosophy and Sadistic epicureanism, works to reveal the origins of resentment, the true objects of hate...
...We are all cruel part of the time {when was the last time, you, yes you, who are reading this, hurt someone...
...This book is highly recommended to any person interested in American foreign policy...
...Finally, in an ambiguous accident, Susan decides: she is killed' when Hogan's gun goes off...
...Nemerov's philosophical novel, is virtuous and pious, if frigid, and has as her goal the love of God...
...Within this small book, Mr...
...but to recognize and refine our sadism is not enough...
...he seems to be saying that all of us who are determinists like Susan in our craving for contingency must hate our own processes...
...But something goes wrong with the hierarchy's plans for the home for protistutes—which the Boyne mansion was to become as Claire'.- proof of charity—and it turns into a select bawdy house...
...From a book, covered in browti paper, lying on Dr...
...A Madame, Mother Fosker—she has ill-fitting dentures—arranges an imbroglio for the elite of Boston, including in her net Susan's and Claire's brother and their selfrighteous politician, Uncle Fred...
...Harold J. Noble has served as Far Eastern correspondent for the "Saturday Evening Feat...
...She has prayed for "the power to( accept" God and she sees the image of Christ on the Cross: "she felt throughout her body the surge and strain of his weight, his life upon the bloodied nails in his hands...
...The Bobbs-Merrill Co...
...our cruelty becomes unnecessary...
...SB...
...When the Father brings his Bishop around to request that Claire turn the house into a home for prostitutes, Claire supinely agrees...
...Creel shows how the myth of Chinese communism as an agrarian reform movement apart from Russian communism was carefully cultivated by clever communist propogandists and their dupes among writers and government officials...
...John Franklin Bardhvs new novel mm be puhlnaad this fan...
...The implement of hatred is cruelty, but it can also he pest of the eouippent of Jove...
...264 pp...
...The almost incredible record of error and blunder on the part of those concerned with making American China policy, especially since 1944, is here to be read...
...2.75...
...Blunders in China RUSSIA'S RACE FOR ASIA...
...Claire is contrite and when the Father proposes that she take some destitute Hungarian nuns into her household, she cannot refuse...
...Einman's desk...
...This'qualiflcation of Susan's lust for life is of crucial importance to an understanding of The Melodramatists and as a point of departure for an ethical...
...I want to de-„ cide...
...Acceptance of that fact," says George Creel, "is the one sound base for a new China policy...
...the worst thing, I believe, would be if we became eonneseieurs...
...The author rails at the psychiatric conception of adjustment...
...Susan, "the surrender of whose chastity is the price of admission into the wasteland", is an admirable heroine...
...The psychiatrist exhorts Susan: "You don't love one another enough...
...In the meantime, Claire hasr been endeavoring to have a religious experience...
...but, Mr...
...WhUe rapidly tracing Soviet activities in China from the early '20, Mr...
...Susan uses his sentimental nature to persuade him to buy off Hogan, but Hogan succeeds in buying oft the romantic...
...The strange American policy which has worked steadly to the advantage of the communists and the Russians in China even -to the present time here lies exposed...
...Einman nor Father Meretruce present a fair case for psychoanalysis or religion, but their pretence of their arguments and devices is typical of these aspects of our society...
...know, or feel, that there is a right rhythm, a pace, a tempo, a way of life to go...
...It is as though it cried, 'I would be possessed by' or 'I would possess that which is Human...
...Unman, an analytic psychologist, and Claire meets Father Meretruce, a proselytizing priest...
...Hogan is in on the conspiracy: he holds all the principal characters imprisoned in the attic room at the point of a g*.in while the rout proceeds downstairs...
...By dint of praying on her knees for an entire night—"physical pain aided in the way of perfection . . . the effort not to regard (it) was in itself a powerful incitement to the spirit"— she does have an halluncination...
...Perhaps the book should have been written more dispassionately since it is intended to persuade others to escape from their mesmerism with the communist story, but it is difficult for the non-commuist observer of the American approach to the problem of China in the past few years to write calmly and without anger...
...antidote to its didactic poison...
...Reviewed by HAROLD J. NOBLE " A OOMMOtflST CHINA is Rus- aia's China...
...in the most refined pleasure there is L pain...
...Reviewed by JOHN FRANKLIN BARDIN "Here one finds men and women who love those who rob them or beat them, as though the soul were intoxicated by its discover]/ 0/ human nature, or found even a secret delight in the shattering of the image of its desire...
...a contempt of the life which he enters, a* sure knowledge of the death which will be the end, a—a feeling for one'e own powers, a selfsustaining pomp that is sullen because it is self-sufficient, yet a brooding quality, an inwardness" about the foetus, his statement, and the one that follows, clarify the doctor's attitude towards life, which he sees as a river, "flowing with unobtrusive speed calmly," and whatever the individual does —sink, swim, try to drink it up—will not change its course...
...Einman warns her that "life proceeds by control, modification, grasping, and letting go...
...For a time the doctor's maneuver works...
...LIKE ALL THE OTHER personalities in the book, Hogan expresses an aspect of love, the material one...
...There is certainly hate in love and pain in pleasure, and we shall do well to face this evil, this fragmentary imperfection that is our humanity...
...Nemerov is pleading for an enlightened sadism...
...Certain voluptuaries of a metaphysical turn of thought—it is not accidental that the most consistent of them, the Marquis de Sade, was alive during the Enlightenment—have preferred pain to pleasure, because pleasurable sensation is finite while pain is infinite...
...Father Meretruce denies her the vision, saying that she is proud and lacks charity, that what she deemed a mystical experience was more likely the devil's work...
...He reminds her of Nietzsche's adjuration: "Evasion, love of irony, suspicion and joyous mistrust...
...Susan, who stands for the libertine Juliette, sees life from a deterministic point of view, "built like a trap . . . that way from the beginning...
...at least, this will lead to control and order, instead of chaos and corruption...
...What do I care if ii is good or bad?' There is no 'disillusionment,' for they have found that which they hav'e sought and found it a fragment...
...It is the first which traces the growth of communism in China as an extension of the Russian system from the beginning to the present...
...She has an overwhelming interest in life, as opposed to her' sister's pious denial of life for God...
...the attic must be remodelled to contain them...
...So Mr...
Vol. 32 • August 1949 • No. 32
