Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS Is 'Technique' the Magic Ingredient That Produces a Work of Art? By Granville Hicks You hear a story that strikes you as enormously funny, and when you repeat it, it goes flat....
...Bardin is a sophisticated critic and this is not, by and large, a sophisticated novel...
...What matters is what has gone before...
...The question is hard enough to answer with regard to a simple anecdote...
...Yet, it seems to me that what distinguishes the novel is the quality of its insights, not the technique that makes these available to the reader...
...Laid in the Middle West in the 1870s, the novel has as hero a 12-year-old orphan who runs away from the mean and pious people who are taking care of him...
...Like its great models, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the book appeals to children and adults alike...
...I suppose one would have to say that the novel is about a man who shoots his wife and her lover, but the shooting scene is one of the shortest and quietest in the book...
...And what of Grant...
...The absence of inner support that impels him to his external aggressiveness...
...Schorer's technical skill shows itself most clearly in the ever-deepening revelation of what these states of mind are...
...As Grant points out, Freddie is a temperamental as well as a political Fascist...
...There is, as Mr...
...Some people, obviously, have a gift for telling a story and others haven't...
...X tells a story, and you don't even snicker...
...At some other party, you shudder as Y begins the same story, but suddenly you are guffawing along with everybody else...
...The climax of the story is reached when George, who has at last found a home, has to choose between the Gaits and Milo...
...Much of the time, the parents are credible, too, but some difficulty arises when Mr...
...Grant's mother is an alcoholic...
...The remainder of the novel describes Grant's efforts to save first Milly and then Dan from a situation that seems to him morbid and sinister...
...Grant, in the meantime, having known poverty and having acquired an interest in social and political problems, has become a more or less typical progressive of the period of the anti-Fascist front...
...If the novel seems rather tepid, that is not because Mr...
...Scott lacks the technical skill to do with it what he wants to do...
...We have all read and wondered about such situations, and up to a point Mr...
...It is the story, to begin with, of the friendship of two schoolboys—Patrick, the narrator, who is the son of a seedy schoolteacher, and Alastair, an orphan who has grown up in a proletarian environment...
...The writer capable of the most exacting technical scrutiny of his subject-matter," he went on, "will produce works with the most satisfying content, works with thickness and resonance, works which reverberate, works with maximum meaning...
...It is Grant, the narrator, who breaks away, first in a psychological and then in a physical sense...
...Separated from Milo after a rip-snorting camp meeting, George comes to rest with a storekeeper and his wife, the Gaits...
...Jamey himself is quite believable, and there is a fierce and brilliant scene in which his older sister figures...
...Milly, for her part, is betrayed by her refusal to grow up, her insistence on maintaining an adolescent relationship that she has found satisfying...
...Catherine is a child of the newly rich...
...Perhaps, however, we can see the problem more sharply if we compare The Wars of Love with The End of an Old Song (Knopf, $3.50), a novel by an Englishman of some reputation, J. D. Scott...
...Readers of The New Leader are familiar with John Franklin Bardin as a critic, and his new novel, Christmas Comes But Once a Year (Scribner, $3.00), may come to some of them, as it did to me, as a surprise, for Mr...
...and his novel, like Schorer's, is written in the first person...
...Since Mr...
...The attempt to save Milly is a pleasure, for he is in love with her and she becomes his mistress...
...Dan's parents are cold and withdrawn, yet overprotective...
...He is our old friend the anti-Fascist progressive, certain that he has the answers, not only willing but eager to rush in where angels would not think of treading, acutely conscious of the faults of others and blind to his own...
...These are large claims, and I could not help thinking about them as I read Mr...
...Bardin tries to make us believe that the experience transforms their lives...
...If the hero were a man rather than a boy, Helen Eustis's The Fool Killer (Doubleday, $2.75) would be called a picaresque novel...
...The novel, I hasten to say, is not an allegory...
...Bardin offers us a convincing account of the experience...
...Through several summers, the three maintain their intimacy, despite the changes that take place so rapidly at that age, but at last the quartet is broken up...
...and, like most such books, it has in it some element of legend...
...He probes, to be sure, but with none of Schorer's relentless energy...
...In the beginning, we see four young people, three boys and a girl in their early teens, in a small summer resort...
...Is it a trick or is it a matter of seeing what the story is really about...
...Particularly impressive is the craftsmanship with which he lets us arrive at an understanding of the narrator, who must not disclose to us until the proper moment what he learned about himself after the tragedy had taken place...
...When at last he understands how deep their guilt is, he turns directly to Dan, and the result of his interference is tragedy...
...Thematically, the novels are quite comparable, for Mr...
...He goes on: "Dan and Freddie together—Dan's like a small, highly cultivated, peace-loving country that's just been moved in on...
...Each of the three visitors has problems: Milly's father has remarried...
...it foreshadows a grim experience...
...Milly, he discovers, has married Dan, who has inherited the art gallery owned by his parents...
...Dan Ford, Milly Moore and Grant Norman, who is the narrator, are summer visitors, and Freddie Grabhorn is a local boy who has attached himself to them...
...Scott is also writing about a relationship that began in adolescence...
...Schorer's latest novel, The Wars of Love (McGraw-Hill, $3.00...
...Later, Alastair marries Catherine, and much later, after all sorts of complications, he defies her family and takes her to America, It is a story of class relations: Patrick belongs to the decaying middle class...
...Dirty Jim's story of the great tall feller with an axe, the Fool Killer, not only haunts George's dreams...
...In the background is Captain Keith of Kingisbyres, an eccentric aristocrat who, it turns out, is Alastair's father...
...George's search for his true home could not be more realistically described, but its meanings are not all on the surface, and some of them, as one would expect in any legend, are rather somber...
...Mark Schorer, for instance, said in an essay a few years ago: "The difference between content, or experience, and achieved content, or art, is technique...
...I feel that some kind of discipline might have saved Mr...
...When Catherine, whose father has made a fortune in biscuits, comes on the scene, Patrick makes love to her first, but he is pushed aside by Alastair, and thereafter relations become complicated...
...The emotional ruthlessness," Grant explains to Milly...
...It does not shock or surprise us, and it is not intended to...
...But if it has nothing much that can be called form, it has a lot of skill...
...Nine years later, in 1938, he meets Milly again in New York, and a new relationship is established among the four...
...The parents died in a shocking automobile accident, and Dan has never recovered from the effects...
...the characters are not symbols but simply people whose states of mind are representative...
...Schorer, in the article I have mentioned, later qualifies his statements to such an extent that he seems virtually to identify insight and technique, the distinction may be unimportant as well as elusive...
...Freddie is to all intents and purposes managing the gallery, and he and Milly are in a vigilant conspiracy to protect Dan from a world that seems too much for him...
...it is, rather, because he has chosen not to get too far away from the surface...
...Dan is just that—the mild, unworldly esthete whose longing to be protected betrays him...
...It is the story of a little boy who has an incurable disease and who is brought home from the hospital by his parents so that he may have a last Christmas, some weeks ahead of the calendar...
...and in Milo, in spite of his occasional black moods, he finds companionship and great wisdom...
...Schorer says, a great difference between content and achieved content, between experience and art, but I am not satisfied that the intervening process can be adequately summed up with the word "technique...
...For Grant, it is easy to cast Freddie in the role of villain, if only because the latter is a Fascist sympathizer, but in time he is forced to recognize that Milly is as guilty as Freddie...
...The trouble with generalizations about technique such as Schorer's is that the novel is not one thing but many, and there is a kind of novel in which the appearance of artlessness is highly desirable...
...But, though she welcomes the relationship with him, she is determined that her relationships with Dan and Freddie shall not be changed...
...A national association that raises funds to combat this particular disease convinces the parents that it should be allowed to exploit Jamey's Christmas, and it is with this exploitation that the novel is largely concerned...
...Alastair is an ambitious proletarian...
...Presenting the experience in these terms brings him close to sentimentality, and there is a corny grandmother who pushes him right over the edge...
...One thing happens after another, and that is all the form it has or needs...
...Yet, some people are convinced that they know...
...Bardin from the lapses that weaken his novel, but it does not seem certain that technical discipline is what he needed...
...We begin and end with Patrick and Alastair in the present, the larger part of the story being told in a series of well-constructed flashbacks...
...It is clear that the novel has political implications...
...But in what does the gift consist...
...He falls in with Milo Bogardus, a Civil War veteran suffering from amnesia...
...That is the point at issue...
...George Mellish, who tells his own story, first encounters a happy widower, Dirty Jim Jelliman, and then escapes from the ferocious respectability of the Fanshawes...
...Why Miss Eustis, who has previously written sophisticated short stories and a brilliant mystery, The Horizontal Man, decided to write The Fool Killer would be hard to say, but we can be happy that she did...
...Is it technique or is it insight or is it both...
...Miss Eustis handles the vernacular with beautiful ease, and George's account of his adventures is right at every point...
...it is impossible to be sure of the answer when one is concerned with the complexities of a short story, to say nothing of a novel...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 11
