Styron's Appointment in Sambuco

...In fact, Styron goes back to that essential knowledge so frequently forgotten, ignored or deliberately set aside, Socrates' "Know Thyself," and distills from Cass' anguish the shards of human and personal wisdoms that are life's most precious and painful possessions and achievements...

...And if it is also, in those terms, a bitter book, "disenchanted," it remains a book intimately concerned with understanding and evaluating the individual and social consequences of human experience...

...Writers of novels attempt to impose pattern and meaning on life, or to put it another way, though probably conveying the same thing, they attempt to perceive pattern and meaning in life, and then to communicate it, endow it with passion and artistic vitality...

...where Cass Kinsolving, a lower-class, almost white-trash Southern Methodist, is supposed to be painting and is instead drinking himself to death, and through love— for an Italian girl, Francesca—and compassion—for her father, Michele, who is dying of poverty and tuberculosis—through violence and error, comes to his true self...

...And there are the collective evils of politics, economics and religion...

...I would like to reply with Hemingway's pithiness that one pitcher should not tell any batters about another pitcher's curves, but that would be presumption on my part in more ways than one...

...But the novel is far more than that...

...denying Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man," presumes to scan God— ". . . God was not even a lie, but worse," Cass says, "that He was weaker even than the evil He created and allowed to reside in the soul of man, that God Himself was doomed...

...His people, speaking to each other in normal discourse, are more stilted than when his characters pour out (in what is really monologue) their stories...

...There are other weaknesses too: Styron cannot create a real woman character...

...the dog, half-crushed in the street, with the audience watching it die...

...Too many incidents, too many characters, too many descriptions, too many incidents, too many emotions, and too many words, words until the ones that count, that are meaningful, are lost...

...And Styron...

...Styron's book has shortcomings, flaws, even serious faults, and if the book is not a masterpiece, quite, but only a magnificent attempt at one...

...In each Jew resides a frustrated mother...

...The story told straightaway, without flashback and digression and Leverett interpolation, by Cass Kinsolving...

...And these are but a few...

...But the book's value is in its human scenes, moving and beautifully rendered: Cass in Paris finding the final edge of joy, then terror, in drunkenness...

...the incredibly touching interchange in jail between Luigi, the Fascist policeman, and Cass, when Luigi refuses to permit Cass the indulgence of guilt, self-destruction and martyrdom in a magnificent act of Christian charity...

...Set This House On Fire is rich in description of American scenes, brilliant description, and swarms particularly with "southern weather, southern voices, southern scenes...

...as are the other two, is prey to all four...

...The three expatriate Americans meet in a small Italian town, Sambuco, where Mason Flagg, a rich, upper-class Yankee, is supposed to be writing a play but is instead moving swiftly through his vices to his death...

...His women—Poppy, Cass' elfin wife, the succession of Mason's pneumatic mistresses, the primitive perfection of Francesca— are failures and sentimental fantasies, and hence his man-woman relations are always slightly unreal, melodramatic and oversimplified, lacking the passionate contradictori-ness of his man-man relations...

...And his country...

...Whether it's a sickness like cancer, something that can be cut out and destroyed, with maybe some head doctor acting as the surgeon, or whether it's something you can't cure at all...

...All too often, Styron is overwhelmed by things, by words, in that old Whitmanesque tradition (and not one confined only to him and to American writing) in which instead of artistic selection, there is enumerating, inventorying, cataloging...

...Mason taking Peter to a "gang shag...

...With those two other splendid postwar American talents—Mailer and Ellison—Styron shares the strange difficulties that Jews, Negroes and Southerners who write in our country have in common, perhaps because they are all "oppressed minorities," or "defeated," or perhaps because those groups more than others were nurtured on the Bible (although I doubt that): those four horsemen of the literary apocalypse: self-pity, sentimentality, rhetoric and melodrama...

...Peter Leverett, the narrator, who is unsuccessfully and uninterestingly projected, and perhaps 200 pages of unnecessary material which, if cut, would have given a swiftness of pace and tension which, as is...

...And I do not say this to record Styron's indebtedness—for if he has borrowed, what he has borrowed he has made his own and imprinted it with his own singular signature (that essential token of the genuine talent)—but to place him in the mainstream of American letters...

...And this inadvisable combination led Styron into using one major unnecessary character...

...Norman Mailer...

...Styron has genuine feeling for scenery everywhere—Paris, Rome, Sambuco, Tramonti, New York— but he is at best in his own Virginia setting...

...whose story it truly is, would have made a firmer, finer book...

...He would of sympathized with cancer if he thought it was a la mode...

...I shit on Him because I do not believe...

...you may sentimentalize sex by confusing it with love, and still be read, but if you equate sex with unpleasurableness...

...vou may expect your audience to be obscure, whether your bias is puritan or pornographic...

...Most important, he is able—neither pompously nor apologetically—to speak openly of evil (that term we have almost "understood" and "tolerated" and "explained" out of existence) and he has Cass say it clearly: ". . . this business about evil— what it is, where it is, whether it's a reality, or just a figment of the mind...

...There is even the small flaw of an inappropriate title to the novel, from a beautiful and appropriate epigraph chosen from a John Donne sermon, a title which sounds like a mystery or detective book about arson...

...Michele denouncing God...

...Here one is in the presence of a great talent setting itself a great artistic task, and in its smallest sparks struck one can see more light and more illuminated than in the perfectly modulated beams of lesser talents who seize on lesser tasks...

...Then all the time He sends the tax collector from Rome...

...There is a flaw in the dialogue...

...the Italian women, like beasts of burden, bearing their loads of fagots...

...it is magnificent and it is an attempt...

...often slacken...

...He loves only the rich men in Rome...

...A man cannot live without a focus," Cass Kinsolving says, and this book is the search for a focus of three men —Cass Kinsolving, Mason Flagg and Peter Leverett—as they seek it in themselves, in others, in sex, in drink, in violence, in art...

...there are a myriad such...

...And there is the power of the language, a complicated, sinuous and sometimes even tortuous, prose style filled with expletive and coarseness, subtlety and delicacy, libertinism and puritanism, simplicity and complexity, a whirling gyre of language which deals with art and literature, landscape and character, ringing the discreet changes necessary and appropriate for each, and moving easily from humor to seriousness, from humble to grand, from irony to candor...

...Then after draining us dry—of everything—at last He throws us away, as if we had cost Him nothing, and for a joke He punishes us with this pain...

...an artist and an alcoholic, a man of dignity, courage and intelligence, and a man debased, a trained seal, a drunken cowardly fool, an impossible father and husband, who even in his deepest degradation struggles for a virtue and probity he wishes for but cannot apprehend...

...Perhaps most grievous is the form Styron has chosen to tell his tale, half involuted detective storv with information deliberately withheld about a murder, half Greek tragedy with inevitable doom descending like a mushroom cloud and rising up out of character, a stink in the nostrils and a miasma under the sky...

...Styron sees man's miserable condition and exemplifies it both in the misery of the Southern Italian peasant and the Southern American Negro, and has Michele—Francesca's dying father—cry out against God in the accents of Job: "He is evil, is He not, to put us down in this place where we work and slave for fifty years, making ninety thousand lire a year, which is not even enough to buy pasta...

...but have to stomp on like you would a flea carrying bubonic plague, getting rid of the disease and the carrier all at once...

...Ciphers without mind or soul or heart...

...The only true experience," Cass says, ". . . is the one where a man learns to love himself...

...Peter Leverett, the character who tells the story, says that the book is about "a murder and a rape which ended, too, in death, along with a series of other incidents not so violent, yet grim and distressing...

...of Cass Kinsolving (is the name symbolic kin-solving...

...a fusion of Beverly Hills and Bohemia, who is a sadist and a faddist, an exhibitionist and a pornographer, a rapist, an incipient homosexual, an intellectual dilettante—altogether a psychopath who destroys wife, mistresses and friends...

...And finally out of the awareness that everywhere, in persons as in politics, in Italy as in the United States, there is power and corruption, nepotism and graft, stupidity and blindness Styron can ring his faith (and Cass') out of Cass' (and his own) despair in a Job-like affirmation: "man's own faith, vain perhaps, but nonetheless faith in his hardwon decency & perfectability & his own compassionate concern with his mortal, agonizing plight on a half burnt out cinder he didn't ask to be set down on in the first place...

...But these are genuinely motes in the literary eye...

...it is a story in which these three who might be three aspects of a single man, or three American "brothers Karamazov," move (to paraphrase Styron) through dooms of love, through griefs of joy, in the lonely search for meaning, for virtue and for identity, as they struggle not only with their own anarchies but with the political, economic and spiritual anarchies of our time...

...Reviewed by Abraham Rothberg Contributor, "Antioch Review" "Best American Short Stories" OF THE AMERICAN writers who emerged after World War II, three stood head and shoulders above their contemporaries in talent...

...This is a magnificent book, whose pages—at least for me— echo with Melville and Faulkner and Fitzgerald (literature makes stranger bedfellows than politics, and if that be double entendre, make the most of it...

...All three of Styron's characters do—though one in a coffin— and all three have that strange ambivalence expatriates have for America: a hatred of the people, the culture (or lack of it) and the products (or the plethora of them...

...and a moving, nostalgic love of the landscape...

...The answer is, of course, yes...

...Cass' seduction of Vernelle Satterle, the juvenile Jehovah's Witness...

...Ralph Ellison and William Styron, and they wrote three of the most promising contemporary novels: The Naked and the Dead, The Invisible Man and Lie Down in Darkness...

...Now, almost a decade after the last, William Styron has written a new book, Set This House On Fire, which further fulfills the promise of his talent...

...As with the scenes, to take just a few random well-turned examples does Styron no justice, but it is worth doing nonetheless: "I saw him doing the mambo on countless Grace Line cruises to Brazil, with women forever taller than himself...

...And William Styron sees and communicates a contemporary life shot through with corruption, guilt, sin, remorse and envy, and he uses those magnificent old words (and concepts) in a passionate and continual discernment and dissection of betrayals of self and betrayals of others, and of individual betrayal and collective betrayal...

...Ninety thousand lire...

...he does not avoid studying mankind, and he does not presume...

...There are the personal evils of Mason Flagg (is the name symbolic of America...

...As the "Lost Generation" of the '20s fled prosperous Babbitry America, so many of the generation of the '50s also seemed to be fleeing the materialism, machine and new prosperity to Europe (and some— like the "Beat Generation"—are in internal emigration from them), but if it is in Europe that they "find" themselves, it is to the United States that they return with their "changed selves...

...He is evil, I tell you...

...Cass wildly drunk in the PX...

...The single good is respect for the force of life, Luigi, the Fascist (and most Christian) policeman, says, ". . . the primary moral sin is self-destruction...

...Nowhere with men and women does Styron reach the heights of artistic characterization as he does with the relationships between men: between Cass and Michele, Cass and Mason, Cass and Luigi, Cass and Lonnie, and even between Cass and Peter— which is perhaps the least successful of all...

...And Styron devotes the same scalding scorn to fat, prosperous Americans, "a bunch of smug contented hogs rooting at the trough...

...I shit on Him...

...Styron's torrent of talent has still to be disciplined by levees of fictional control to run swifter, deeper and truer in course...

...If Styron...

...And, the discerning reader will now ask, did not even Homer nod...

...where Peter Leverett, good middle-class Virginia gentleman, a lawyer who has been working in Europe for an American "aid agency," has come to vacation with his boyhood friend and schoolmate, Mason Flagg, witnesses a tragedy, but fails to understand it or his own role in it...