Who am I? in Wales
MALOFF, SAUL
Who Am I? in Wales ASK AT THE UNICORN By Norman Thomas New Directions. 222 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by SAUL MALOFF Contributor, "Commonweal," "Studies in Modern Fiction" No relation, Norman...
...This is how the great themes of identity and community become banalized when one makes of them a string of clichés to hang the baubles of purple prose on...
...Morgan Johns, though it is the least of his flaws, is a bore...
...Thomas has everything to learn about writing a novel...
...that uncontrolled figurative writing is more likely to be purple than poetry...
...And Morgan, a flute-playing Pan, is nothing if not hip...
...that the self, thus isolated, is a problem not a given, a process not a fate—all this is hardly news...
...You are instruments, that's what you are: something sings through you...
...And there is an inn named "The Unicorn" in that land of legend and the little people...
...Now the "quest for identity" is one of the great subjects of the novel-as-genre, just as the "search" is one of its more familiar modes...
...As one after another the characters speak with this gift of tongues, it soon becomes clear that it is the style itself which constitutes the wisdom Johns putatively seeks, as though wisdom were a matter of upper register and faulty syntax...
...When the pressure threatens to erupt into an event, Thomas prevents it with strong hands—one of them holding movement back while the other raises high some paste-gems of style for our rapt admiration...
...But as such quests, being inner, require visible objects and signs (one's self, after all, is not some tangible buried treasure), the occasion of Morgan's voyage across a continent and ocean is to find an old man whom he remembers, dimly though resonantly, from his childhood as a sage and saint of the Welsh kind...
...Only squares will not know that "Bird" is an allusion to the late Charlie Parker...
...The villain is a dour, puritanical tyrant...
...Thomas appears to believe, for example, that there is something irresistibly winning about speaking in North Beach hipster ("Crazy, man...
...that in a novel cadenced lines, sometimes with internal rhymes, are not better than good prose...
...Morgan Johns is afflicted with that most familiar of literary maladies: He does not know who he really is or where he really belongs...
...Reviewed by SAUL MALOFF Contributor, "Commonweal," "Studies in Modern Fiction" No relation, Norman Thomas is a first-novelist who was born (1926) and grew up in Wales, came to visit the U.S...
...and so little is Thomas aware of this that he would have us think Johns most attractive when he is in fact most insufferable...
...Immediately, the vibrato and head-tones assert themselves as the prevailing idiom of the book...
...He has most of all to learn that garrulity is not of itself literature...
...He is, moreover, a nasty, churlish bore...
...The central figure of his first novel, Ask at The Unicorn, is a young man, Morgan Johns, who came from Wales to the U.S., and returns to the Welsh fishing village of his origin, where the scene is set, in search of—well, in search of his identity, I'm afraid...
...That society is no longer available to the novelist as a fixed point of reference...
...Nothing can happen, not even a kiss, as in old Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy movies...
...that sort of thing) to old Welsh villagers...
...This, though, is true of good and bad novels alike, and great subjects do not make great novels...
...In Ask at The Unicorn, everything—character, scene, action, encounter—is drowned in a breathless, highlycolored "lyricism," as though the novel were to be sung in a literary equivalent of Welsh tenor...
...There is an object lesson here: Merely talked about in this way, there is no way of distinguishing a great from a trivial subject...
...The fishermen are good, simple, lusty folk...
...The girl who (literally) scrubs his back while he bathes is everyone's idea of an Earth Mother...
...Indeed, nothing else is permitted to happen...
...in 1950 and, apparently charmed by what he saw, has been here ever since...
...Art is all, and the ground the masters conquered is now anybody's business, even themes for first novels by apprentice writers...
...California, it would appear, has been ruinous, both for Thomas and for Johns...
...The old man, presumably, will teach him some immemorial wisdom such as old men in traditional communities still in possession of the ancient tongue and perennial vision are said to command...
...As lips touch, this is what we must endure: "And then the birds began to sing...
...Are you welcoming the day, or merely laughing at the night...
...Birds sing like Bird sang...
...If Morgan plays the flute, the old man he seeks (let's call him Tiresias) is blind and a harp-player both...
...Before we can care about the search, however, we must care about the searcher...
...Birds, where have you been to learn such song...
...Now a citizen, he lives in California...
Vol. 46 • September 1963 • No. 18
