Living With Books:

...It may be said, of course, that change is the theme of virtually every novel that was ever written, and that is true, but here our attention is focused on change as a mystery...

...What Most Likely to Succeed fails to do, as I have said, is to take account of that process of change...

...have become ridiculous, but they seem nevertheless to have produced some admirable results...

...Anson rather regretfully follows the path of duty back to New York, his job, and his wife and children...

...Looking back, I think that Brooks's novel is a solider piece of work than Basso's, but both raise interesting questions...

...The satisfaction that she takes in her children, her home, her garden and her woodcarving is deep and apparently abiding...

...John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, Jessamyn West's Cress Delahanty, Frank Rooney's The Courts of Memory and John Bell Clayton's Walk Toward the Rainbow are all laid in that state, and so are the first part of Wright Morris's The Huge Season and the latter half of John Dos Passos's Most Likely to Succeed...

...We move, and meanwhile history moves at a constantly accelerating pace...

...Other novels are also concerned, though less immediately, with the contrast between two ways of life...

...In the typical Marquand novel, the hero has escaped from his home town but thinks of it fondly and believes he would like to return...

...Schorer, Matthiessen, Newhouse and Basso all offer instances of the crossing of class barriers...

...The books, however, end on contrasting notes...

...Again it may be objected that the changes that take place in most novels are unexpected, that that is why most novels are written...

...But let us return to the novels that are concerned in part with New York City...

...He spends sixteen years in unhappy exile, trying one place after another, and finally returns to Chicago to discover that the Drexell affair has been forgotten and that he can resume his old life...

...Rooney's emphasis falls...

...Freed from both hatred and nostalgia, he can lead his own life...

...Half of the action in Dos Passos's Most Likely to Succeed takes place in New York, as do some crucial episodes in Wright Morris's The Huge Season...

...Schorer and Matthiessen, on the other hand, are concerned with purely personal transformations, and they find the seeds of the present in the past??as, of course, up to a point Morris does, too...

...Brooks and Mr...

...Morris is quite specific about this: He is not only portraying a group of people at two stages of their lives...

...In still other novels, we find contrasts handled in less orthodox ways...

...Between the time when the young men in The Huge Season find themselves together in college and the time when the book ends lie the Depression, the triumph of Hitler in Germany, the emergence of Communism as a significant influence in American life, the Second World War, the cold war.and the rise of McCarthyism...

...Peter DeVries's Tunnel of Love and Edward Newhouse's Temptation of Roger Heriott are set in the suburbs, with important scenes in the city, and Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution portrays a women's college near New York and is oriented toward the city...

...Such a hook would seem highly relevant to our theme, but in fact its relevance is of a negative sort, for the book makes very little of the changes in the American intellectual atmosphere, and that is one of the chief reasons why it is a poor novel...

...it is the heart and soul of each one...

...The Huge Season moved from California to France to Philadelphia and New York, and The Lizard's Tail carried its hero to North Africa...

...Not only in Basso's The View from Pompey's Head but also in Mark Schorer's The Wars of Love, Peter Matthiessen's Race Rock, John Brooks's A Pride of Lions, and William Fain's The Lizard's Tail, the action shifts between New York and some other place...

...Tom, on the other hand, by coming to terms with his home town, has at last achieved emancipation from East Bank...

...Finally, we might speak of John Dos Passos's Most Likely to Succeed, which carries its central character...

...The scene of Faulkner's A Fable was France in the First World War, and James Michener's Sayonara portrayed contemporary Japan...

...Charles Lawrence in The Huge Season is what he is in part because his grandfather found a way of making barbed wire...

...Louis and Cleveland...

...but, given her nature, the simple act of getting on a train for Detroit cannot fail to lead to tragic consequences...

...In the time it takes to write a novel, the very shape of the world may be altered...

...As I observed in reviewing Wright Morris's The Huge Season [THE NEW LEADER...

...Gertie's misery stems from her inadequacy and from the fact that she has known what is for her the good life...

...Both Tom Osborne and Anson Page have revolted against what is narrow and repressive in their communities, and both are led to revise their views...

...October 4], there are some interesting parallels between that book and Mark Schorer's Wars of Love and Peter Matthiessen's Race Rock...

...In Edward Newhouse's Temptation of Roger Heriott, we have only brief glimpses of Roger and his wife in their earlier years, but these are enough to suggest why they are holding so tenaciously to the degree of suburban stability they have achieved...

...I came across only two war novels??Ira Wolferl's revised version of An Act of Love and Leslie Dodson's Away All Boats, both of which depict the war in the Pacific...

...The theme of all three novels is the contrast between then and now...

...Arnow knows what she is writing about and she hates it...

...She has none of the skills needed for survival in the city, and the skills she once employed so joyfully are useless...

...invites reflections on both mobility and stratification...

...What surprises me, as I look back on all these books, is the fact that a degree of homogeneity can be detected...

...half of which is laid in Chicago...

...though Schorer and Matthiessen seem to be saying that it is what they had to be...

...What The Huge Season does deal with directly is the change in the intellectual atmosphere between 1929 and 1952...

...Basso, like Mr...

...But in all three the emphasis is on change...

...Here" is New York City ??impersonal, competitive, uninhibited...

...Many of Dan's friends are among Drexell's victims, and so much blame falls on Dan that he leaves Chicago...

...As for social mobility, no 1954 novel that I have read deals directly with it, but it is taken for granted in most of them...

...What these people are is not what, in terms of what they were, one would have expected them to be...

...As we have seen, neither Tom nor Anson behaves in quite this fashion, but Mr...

...The traditions of both communities??they are much alike, though hundreds of miles separate them...

...He returns to New York, makes a conventional adjustment, and then suddenly runs away again to Africa...

...But she also recognizes that the conditions she is describing, bad as they are, are not a source of acute unhappiness for many of those who live among them...

...Frederick Manfred's Lord Grizzly in the Rocky Mountains, and Helen Eustis's The Fool Killer presumably in the Middle West...

...Home" for Dan is not the scene of his youth but the scene of his successful maturity, and he is happy when, thanks to the passage of time, he can go home again...

...And in The Courts of Memory something more seems to be involved than the ordinary attrition of time, though it is on that that Mr...

...Morris begins with four young men in a California college in the late Twenties, carries three of them to Paris, adds a girl and another young man to the cast, and then brings four of the survivors together in New York in 1952...

...It is interesting, in the first place, to see what parts of the Country have been written about...

...If The Dollmaker is, as I believe it to be, a novel of truly tragic stature, its tragedy is peculiarly a tragedy of our times, for it is made possible by the fact that two very different ways of life can exist only a few hours apart...

...Herbert Gold's The Prospect Before Us, set in Cleveland: and James Yaffe's What's the Big Hurry...

...I know of a few others that I ought to have read, and probably I have missed some books that are worth reading, but I have a fair idea of what American novelists have been up to...

...The March novel, however, is not in any sense regional and the Boles novel only incidentally so...

...Or there is William Fain's The Lizard's Tail, to remind us of the classical adage that when we change our skies we do not change ourselves...

...Tom Osborne, watching his father's quixotic struggle against change, learns to respect him, and Anson Page is charmed by a way of life against which he had once rebelled...

...And what The Wars of Love does is to illustrate it.for this is, among other things, the judgment of 1954 on the attitudes of the late Thirties...

...Of three novels about Negroes, two??Earl Conrad's Gulf Stream North and John Killens's Youngblood??are wholly located in the South, while Chester Himes's The Third Generation moves from Georgia and Mississippi to St...

...The hero of Walk Toward the Rainbow is trying to make a new life in California, and we have to be told about his old life in Virginia in order to understand this effort...

...If at the end of the book he is beginning to come to terms with life, that has nothing to do with the change of scene...

...Hamilton Basso's The View from Pompey's Head is divided between New York and a Southern city...

...he has been away for years and no longer has relatives in the city, and he has written a book satirizing the ancestor worship that dominates the life of Pompey's Head...

...There are no values that he can be sure his readers accept, it is said, no body of ideas that he can lake for granted...

...he is also contrasting two historical periods...

...If Gertie were a different kind of person, needless to say, the outcome would not be tragic...

...Both novels are variations on a theme that has been developed many times by J. P. Marquand, and neither book would be quite the same if Marquand had not written his novels, especially Point of No Return...

...She is unable to prevent the disintegration of her family, and one resource after another is stripped from her...

...To give an accurate picture of the variety of the year's fiction, I should point out that Harvey Fergusson's Conquest of Don Pedro is set in the Southwest, Richard Bissell's High Water on the Mississippi...

...The world of well-to-do Jews portrayed in What's the Big Hurry...

...Both books, as I have said, contrast not only now and then but also here and there...

...Schorer shows us three boys and a girl in an upstate New York summer resort in the mid-Twenties, and then shows the same characters in New York City in the late Thirties...

...The drama of change is peculiarly the drama of our times...

...No one, so far as I know, has painted a blacker picture of contemporary urban life than Mrs...

...In both East Bank and Pompey's Head, the life of the upper classes is shaped by a body of venerated traditions...

...With none of this is the book immediately concerned, but all of it is there in the background...

...There" is a community in which personal relationships count for more than anything else and the present is firmly rooted in the past...

...Prejudice and hypocrisy flourish in East Bank and Pompey's Head, and common sense is flouted, but the making of money is not the sole aim of life, and such words as "dignity" and "honor" have meaning...

...John Brooks's A Pride of Lions and Hamilton Basso's The View from Pompey's Head tell about young men who have come to New York from other parts of the country, and each describes the hero's return to his native community...

...Basso's Anson Page, on the other hand, made a decisive break when he left Pompey's Head...

...Thanks to our geographical mobility, the bright young men and women concentrate in New York, Southern Negroes move north, Kentucky mountaineers flow into Detroit, and Americans can be found in North Africa or Japan or anywhere else on the face of the globe...

...Arnow has given us: the shoddy, noisy, dirty, gloomy housing project, the crowded schools, the dangerous streets, the greedy, violent people...

...Aside from New York, the great cities of America are not very frequently written about, but in 1954 we had Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker, nine-tenths of which is set in wartime Detroit...

...Yet, he is eager to return, and his visit gives him many satisfactions...

...Here a character is picked up, against her will, and transferred from an environment to which she is wonderfully adapted to one in which her virtues become liabilities...

...goes to Chicago as a young man early in the century, prospers greatly, and is very well satisfied with himself and his life...

...he is anything but a hero??from the early Twenties to the Middle Forties...

...As we first see Gertie Nevels in Kentucky, she is not only a heroically resourceful woman but also one whose happiness is beyond the common lot...

...But when her husband goes to work in a Detroit factory, Gertie falls from something like paradise to what, for her, is hell...

...A similar contrast is more directly and more dramatically presented in Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker...

...As for New York, of the novels I have read only Dawn Powell's The Wicked Pavilion is laid exclusively in that city, but it figures in nearly a dozen novels...

...Ml this is true, but it is also true that change is a challenge, and one to which many novelists make vigorous response...

...But we should note that each of our three novelists has chosen a form that underlines the contrast between then and now...

...That contrast is not an incidental element in any of these books...

...A lost soul in one place, he is a lost soul in the other...

...There is, to be sure, a great deal of variety, but certain patterns recur...

...The hero of James Yaffe's What's the Big Hurry...

...That this is a singularly unstable world has.of course, been said many times, and it has also been frequently pointed out that its instability creates problems for the novelist...

...What the Osbornes are fighting in A Pride of Lions is an upsurge of newer comers to East Bank...

...A person in the same position as Jed Marlowe could have been a good guy in the Twenties and a bad guy in the Forties, but Dos Passos, by making Jed a heel from start to finish, lost his chance to capture the drama of change...

...Sooner or later, however, he discovers that return is impossible and is more or less reconciled to his present way of life...

...The contrast between Greenwich Village and North Africa is sharp and picturesque, but it makes no difference to Robert Macy...

...Matthiessen also portrays three boys and a girl in a summer resort, this one in New England, though he begins with the characters in the present and lets us see as he goes along what they had been in an earlier period...

...Brooks's Tom Osborne, though he escaped to a job in New York, did not succeed in breaking the ties that bound him to East Bank??a city that might be Wilmington, Delaware...

...When I arranged the thirty novels according to the regions with which they deal, I discovered that California has become an important place on the literary map...

...I am not, I hope it is clear, saying that change is the only subject a novelist should write about, or that a novel about change is necessarily a good novel, but I do find the response to the challenge of change a good omen...

...Then in 1930 a financier with whom this Dan Waxman has been associated??a man very much like Insull??goes into bankruptcy and is exposed as a crook...

...The South, though less conspicuous in 1954 than in some recent years, is the scene of Eudora Welty's novella, The Ponder Heart, of William March's The Bad Seed, and of Paul Darcy Boles's The Beggars in the Sun...

...In two other novels that are partly laid in New York, the contrast between then and now is also emphasized but is subordinated to the contrast between there and here...

...Probably fewer novels than usual had foreign settings...

...We are a mobile people, moving not only through space but also up and down on the social scale...

...Marquand, have contrasted two ways of life...