Man and the Bedtime Prayer:
HALE, HOPE
Man and the Bedtime Prayer The Humbler Creation. By Pamela Hansford Johnson. Harcourt, Brace. 346 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Hope Hale Contributor, "New Yorker," "Red Book," "Town and...
...Libby herself expresses her own need when she begs Maurice to "speak to" her marvelously adolescent nephews...
...Later, after the rest of the family have displayed some of their less endearing traits, Maurice and Libby prepare for bed...
...head-of-the-family-vicar speech...
...But Maurice Fisher is a far more important person than any in these lesser works, which now seem valuable chiefly as preparatory exercises for The Humbler Creation...
...But now comes the conjugal bedtime prayer, and then, as usual, frustration...
...In the only scene in which Maurice rises to true nobility, he expresses very movingly his belief in God...
...He is sitting in the park enjoying the evening and the undemanding male company of his young curate...
...He began to fondle her, but she pulled away...
...Unfortunately it is too much out of character for him to try again...
...How effectual he is in his career we can judge only from the report to Alice given by the crotchety but friendly choirmaster: "He is dreary...
...It was a relief to hear the didactic flow of his own voice, to see the puzzlement on their faces...
...Libby shows by increasing excesses of vanity that her skin fairly itches for the whiplash...
...He need not try to master his life and control the quality of his relationships because, after all, every intelligent man knows that it is neither possible nor, in a certain modish and subtle sense, quite manly...
...With this promising beginning, 20 years would seem an adequate time to develop in her the taste and talent for giving him what he needed...
...His parishioners gossip, the boys' club gets out of hand, church officials threaten, and Maurice meekly permits his love to languish unfulfilled as he goes about his duties...
...So for 20 years he went on kneeling every night, reluctantly and miserably, Libby's hand in his, resentment smouldering ever hotter within him...
...he does not realize that in this failure he is denying satisfaction to others as well as to himself...
...And as usual Maurice bottles up his resentment, rationalizes his passivity in a revel of inner torment and self-questioning which never gives him the true answer, and goes on his sorry way, letting other people bring about the events of his life...
...The author seems to have intended to give us a real hero, beneath whose thoughtful, gentle mien lies a hidden strength which enables him to wrestle with the devil and finally to choose eternal spiritual harmony with God against the possibility of carnal joy or even of any earthly happiness at all...
...But he could not very well object, considering his vocation...
...Only once, at a meal, a time Maurice normally spends listening to wrangles, he stumbles into giving the family a taste of what they hunger for...
...When he married he was disconcerted by his bride's idea that they should start a nighttime ritual of kneeling together and praying before climbing into the marriage bed...
...Because this novel does tell an honest story of what human beings are like, its central character takes on a rather shocking significance...
...In the end, the role Pamela Johnson regards as obligatory—the destroyer of the favorite's chances for happiness—is finally played by Kate, the most dependably decent person in the story...
...He returns to see the rectory blazing with light...
...I would not dream of offering her guidance or even vigorous persuasion...
...His wife and her family, who share his household, have still one more night of their vacation at the seashore...
...otherwise they would not accept as hero the sensative sufferer who makes his masochistic way through the pages of our most sophisticated publications...
...He had a moment's hope, too swift to be consciously developed, that she might save something for him out of this wreck by letting him sleep with her tonight...
...What she has actually given us is a devastating picture of an all-too-prevalent literate type in England and America today: the weak man at the mercy of the doubly armed post-feminist female...
...Libby Fisher is as irritating a hypocrite as ever impersonated a devoted parson's wife...
...He addresses them with authority and gets respectful attention...
...His first reaction is pure disappointment...
...Maurice Fisher is presented to us for our sympathy...
...She must be free to develop in her own way, as a liberated equal...
...He is described as a man of intense sexuality...
...Maurice might answer, if he could step out of the pages and defend his passive ways: "But I am a 20th-century man...
...At home Maurice acts like a dim and patient backroom boarder who has somehow been persuaded to pay the bills, while his family are obviously longing for a real master of the house...
...And he dared not ask her...
...He was drenched by it, as by a booby trap...
...At the opening of The Humbler Creation he finds to his horror that he is blaming this bedtime prayer—and Libby—for the disastrous pass to which their love life has come...
...A deeper insight has created its fascinatingly varied cast, which is not to say that most of them would be lovable in real life...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Contributor, "New Yorker," "Red Book," "Town and Country" MAURICE FISHER, vicar of St...
...The faint hope revived...
...As they talk he is looking forward with pleasure—pleasure which might seem a bit disproportionate in a dedicated man of God—to the prospect of a drink and a detective story alone before the fire...
...The title itself, coming after the others, suggests a change of spirit in the author...
...Nobody cares...
...There are clues in the introduction of Maurice Fisher which might give the alert reader the measure of the man, though Miss Johnson shows him with the most sympathetic earnestness...
...Somebody go somewhere by one route rather than another...
...But like all literary stereotypes this one works two ways...
...Because he exists he is written about, and because he is written about he exists still more...
...This is the dreadful irony of man's abdication of the masculine role...
...They haven't got a father, and it is your place...
...Maurice does exist in real life...
...Only belatedly does he feel any husbandly worry...
...denied its tingle she turns on him even more spitefully...
...It is easy to imagine a graduate student, say, who reads all the literary magazines, drawing unconscious but quite real comfort for any tendency to inertia from the tacit conviction that he is in good company...
...He preaches awful sermons on absurd minutiae...
...And I respect my 20th-century woman...
...Lawrence's, had always had a good deal of trouble integrating his sex and his religion...
...even she has moments of unhappiness about her faults, while the other villains are either forgivably fallible or wonderfully comic in their villainy, or both...
...He enters the house and, while he hears his wife's trivial reason for hurrying home, we have our first glimpse of their relationship...
...Complicated geographical matter thrown in...
...book-speech...
...But later, when Alice reports the old man's death to him, "She did not say if he had died comforted...
...Some such code must be understood by today's readers...
...And though Pamela Johnson has often demonstrated her amazing expertise in showing a homosexual's special mixture of venom and winsomeness, the only harm done by the pair in this book is to embarrass everybody by wanting so very much to hold a sort of joint church office...
...Or why some temple or other had a certain number of bricks and not half a dozen more...
...In laying the blame for his troubles squarely on other shoulders than his own, Maurice Fisher is following a pattern set by Pamela Hansford Johnson's characters in earlier novels...
...Her most brilliant portrayals in the past have been of unpleasant people, such as the virago in An Avenue of Stone, a book whose characters were all described by the London Times as "detestable...
...But we should perhaps spare a pang or two for the wife whose husband brings to his wooing only "a faint hope...
...Alice Imberley, a perceptive and intelligent widow, asks Maurice to comfort her dying father, an unbeliever...
...he did not often (if ever) speak to them like this and it gave him a secret satisfaction to do so...
...While Kate, who has tried for years to fill the void in his domestic life, tires of the thankless task and goes off desperately into the arms of a man who is nothing if not masculine...
...It was a speech out of character...
...He had been deeply in love with Libby when they married, and at first she seemed responsive...
...The vacuum of Maurice's life is filled, almost automatically, by love for Alice...
...He is bored, so is the congregation...
...She might even be feeling differently about him, after so much absence...
...I am too noble, and too proud...
...The Humbler Creation is warmed by a new compassion...
...But she is the more maddening for being genuine...
...Kate's defection gives Maurice the excuse he apparently needs for relinquishing his dream...
...why did St...
Vol. 43 • June 1960 • No. 25
