ART AS A CROSSWORD PUZZLE

...Bergler's fomula, echoed by Worm* houdt), says in effect: "See, I cant possibly resent my mother's withholding nourishment...

...The high points of Captain's Beach reach the timber-line of poetry, if that is not too nruch of a paradox...

...The story (if I may call it that—It is more a poetic growth, a convolution and development of ideas and images) is interrupted and emphasized by three chorlc characters, distant relatives of the mother, who relate in detail each incident of violence that occurs in the slum neighborhood...

...It (the albatross, described else where as not a song-bird and therefore one which denies sounds-milk) flies in circles to suggest the circular shape of the breast...

...The book must be read to be believed, but since I find myself unable to recommend its reading to anyone, I suggest that its failure be taken on faith and on the basis of one quotation...

...girl questions herself chaotically as to the epistemology of her love, a search through rain-swept streets for the prodigal substitute son —and these scenes are more nearly tropes than dramatic entities...

...The artist by turning himself into A mother ("words equal milk" to Or...

...The first is the-intimate and, one is tempted to say, necessary connection of the two from the moment that Freud prevailed upon the Oedipus of Sophocles to yield up his well-kept secret and verified what he found in Diderot's Remeeu's Nephew...

...Leslie A. Fiedler teaches at Montana State University, He contributes to Partisan Revirw and Commentary...

...I myself am a provider of milk...

...The primary technique of an analytical cure, the rescue of repressed material from the unconscious and its verbalization on the daylight level is scientized Rousseau-ism, and one is not surprised to discover, combined with a certain kind of admiration, an essential jealousy, a feeling of rivalry on the part of the analyst toward the poet, when poetry refuses to wither away after the Freudian revelation...

...The janitor's family mourns the death of a son, some years ago...

...Here I was a stone that was not a stone, a plant that must be jjninistered to, for I had no roots of my own...

...Indeed, insofar as Freudianism is rooted in the Romantic Movement it is a kind of meta-literatuie, that is an attempt to do what the artist has always blindly and inefficiently achieved (at least what the Nineteenth Century understood him to be aiming at: selfcatharsis through expression) in a more controlled and rational way...

...Even the earlier definitions in analytical terms of the function of literature have come to seem to latterday Freudians not "exact" enough, and there have been various attempts to replace Freud's gent.-alizations on this subject (that literature is essentially a wish-fulfillment process, that it is a "harmless and beneficent" way of maintaining adjustment, half-way between the deep self-knowledge that comes out of analysis, and the flight from reality that leads to neurosis) with more "scientific" ones...

...228 pp...

...This is the way the narrator experiences life: he is thrust into it, submerged by it, then withdrawn...

...3.00...

...Wormhoudt's attempt to find specifically in every work of art, imbedded in its imagery, subject and texture, a detailed symptomology of what Dr...

...The father is a ghost of a man, long ago shrunken to this state by the obsessive will of his wife...

...but I do want to emphasize the presence at the very heart ef all Freudian theories of art (and especially those of the new, "scientific" echelon) of a basic hostility, a threat to the autonomy of poetry, here egregioualy, elsewhere mere sensitively, exemplified...

...Miss de Lima's book is predictable in the nature of its Anal experience from its prologue...

...The ice splits (perhaps a reminiscence of the birth trauma...

...Lfttej^Jn_tiie--iKrvtrproper, the same character—although now a young man with some sort of responsibilities in New York—rents a room from the janitor of a large tenement...

...He lies on a beach, is picked up and thrust into the sea by his companions...

...he is submerged in it, not through his own volition, and when he escapes it he feels himself "a weak swimmer treading dry land . . . down the only direction, the only motion of a stone...

...The most ambitious attempt along these lines has been made by Edmund Bergler, who contributes a foreword to Mr...

...THE NARRATOR experiences this life in the course of a season...

...This metaphysical concept is a possible source of great art, indeed it hi rather like the early lyrics of John Donne...

...at the end he is back on the beach, stranded...

...The illumination has been Largely a one-way affair, though there are a very few cases in which analytical vocabulary and technique have actually served the ends of increased aesthetic pleasure...

...In the first generations of psychoanalysts, there seems to have been an undeclared but inescapable obligation for the aspiring healer to do a full-scale study of a literary subject (the outstanding pieces are Hank on the Incest Motif and Jones on ffamlet) and to this day the Freudian journals are heavily loaded with analyses of writers and their works, even occasional reviews of novels, a little absurd and ponderous, tucked away among the notices of technical works in the field...

...He rernatnsr^andT the~noveT as an experience cannot rise above the central reality of its narrator, an inert area of awareness, a still center of pure mind and sensation in the midst of a hurricane of passion and violence...

...it has been inflicted upon .-him...

...The love in the book is abortive: it is...

...Throughout the remainder of the book she adds a terrible metaphytic to this essential predicament, yet except in a few fugue-like passages the protagonist never deviates from the key experience with which his life In the book began...

...In a brief prologue we meet the narrator as a child afflicted with infantile paralysis...

...Bergler takes to be the artist's endemic disease...

...but not before an involved and ritualistic courtship is forced upon him...

...born out of death, thwarted by death—in the end it creates death...

...The novel progresses by episodes—a game of bridge at which the malevolent force of the mother's love is roa^eJtnowh, a ^wajk^tg^ti^wharf-Tm^a^rdght in midsummer during which the...

...A former boarder had escaped, and ultimately so does the narrator...

...A novel should begin here, and promise to set out for there—but should it not tarry, wander, or better yet get lost along the way, the there is not worth the journey...

...This novel is about love and death and their co -existence and seeming collaboration...

...It is in no sense of the word a life in which he has participated...

...It is Mr...

...Interested readers can find Dr...

...Wormhoudt's extraordinarily bad book, and whose work is the theoretical basis for the discussions of various Romantic poems in The Demon Lover...

...A novel digresses...

...A daughter, young and nubile, is used as bait by her mother to seduce some young man into entering into the life of the family and living in surrogate the fantasied career of the long-dead son...

...In feet, there vfllV be few novels this or any year thai will attempt as much, or come as close to success...

...WHATEVER THE MERITS of this over-all analysis of the motivation of the writer (and one senses in it a disquieting desire to put the writer in his place, to disinfect his mystery by making it merely an interesting sickness), it seems to me in no way to justify Mr...

...At a first novel^ft ie outstanding...

...Ithink Captain's Beach fails to be more than on incomplete representation of its author's intentions—which, of course, were probably only partly apprehended by Miss de Lima and only partly worked out in the writing of her book —because of a failure of imaginative projection of character and because of an unfortunate rendering of the setting and its minor characters...

...There would be little point In discoursing at length en the faults of critical analysis of one who limply tacks all •erne of what literature ie about, as well as the simple ability to oonstrue a text Bat it is neither simple stupidity or motiveless snalignity which prompt* these scrupulous mis-readings...

...Of Love and Death CAPTAIN'S BEACH...

...The passage, by the way, purports to describe the Ancient Mariner" (teems of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Byron are subjected to similar indignities) and is typical of the eeieetofcjaf expenditure of effort on irretovaagtos that Is the special triumph of the beak...

...Bergler's position summarized in the January 1944 issue of the Psychoanalytical Review, where he asserts that all writers are motivated essentially by a desire to come to terms with the sense of guilt arieing from their feelings of aggression toward their mothers, feelings that inevitably arise in the course of weening...

...A child drowns after falling off the dock, a shopkeeper's wife is burnt to death by a disgruntled employee — whatever disaster has struck within these women's ken, they report and elaborate...

...That is the dilemma I find myself in as I attempt to review Miss Sigrid de Lima's Captain's Beach...

...3.50t Reviewed by LESLIE A. ELEDLER THERE ARE TWO noteworthy facts about the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis...

...when they feel that the invalid has bathed enough, they bring him out again...

...the close analysis turns out to be a sharp eye for spotting, say, all twigs, oars, pencils, etc., and neatly labeling them phalluses in a sort of frensy, born of the naive belief in a fixed and unvarying vocabulary of symbolism...

...Setting is rrnajor problem in the novel today, especially if its vision of experience is to be on as Intense a level as it is in Captain's Beach, There must, of course, be a relaxing of the extremist pitches of sensibility, yet this relaxation, this falling-off into commonsense reportage must dot shock the reader by plunging him into s previous, prosaic tradition...

...The mother, an obese and subtly malicious woman, restricts her humanity to the filial sentiment...

...John Franklin Bardin is a frequent contributor to The New Leader...

...By Sigrid de Lima, diaries Scribner's Sons...

...There are many versions rampant these days of criticism as the solution of the work, but none is more popular or dangerous at the moment than the Freudian variety...

...Then there is a progression of death and accident among the principal characters of the novel, beginning with the death of the mother's pet dog after he has gorged himself and continuing through the father's being struck by a bus and the mother's eventual demise as the result of a heart attack brought on by a final conjugal embrace...

...I SHOULD HATE to seem to deny the possibility of insights Into the process of composition and the interrelationship of the experience and formal achievement of the artist in psychoanalytical terms...

...All the while, the moon . . . glimmers through the mist, which, by some long leap of association, may allude to the most famous of mythological homosexuals, Achilles, whose name is associated with the Greek adjective for misty...

...Reviewed by JOHN FRANKLIN BARDIN IN MY EXPERIENCE as a reader I do not believe I have ever encountered an author whose style and technique were good, whose content was serious and who had the knack of narrative—and who managed to coordinate all these qualities of the novel in the work to be reviewed— and who yet left me with a feeling that the parts did not equal the whole, that the novel as read was not what it should have been, considering the art with- Which it had been written...

...It Is perhaps from this essential sense of literature as a competitive discipline, that one can explain tha second notable fact about the liaison between poetry and psychoanalysis, namely, that literature has done a good deal more for Freudianism than has Freudianism for literature...

...Wormhoudt's boast that he combines for the first time "close analysis" and the Freudian approach...

...What pathos there is in the plight of incompletion is enacted beautifully within a few pages...

...To the reductive critic who comes prepared to ten him that what he has made is "really" something else, and who offers to solve for him his own work, the writer must be prepared to give the answer of Hamlet to Roeencrantz and Guildenstern, when those two bad critics came to pluck out the heart of his mystery: "Go pluck yourself...

...It is rather a theory which understands a work of art as a problem to be soimsd, and assumes its formal achievement and fable to he the stare concealments of a more ultimate and "reaUtr" meaning, scientifically ascertainable...