Raids on the Inarticulate
CURLEY, DANIEL
Raids on the Inarticulate THE MARCH-MAN By Keith Botsjord Viking. 214 pp. $4.50 Reviewed by DANIEL CURLEY Author, "A Stone Man, Yes" The virtues of The March-Man are so many and so clear,...
...As the action shifts from Europe to the United States, it becomes clear that the theme is a man's attempt to discover values in a society which has failed to give him any inner values to live by...
...She is far too deeply involved, for one thing, although she is trying for perspective through the use of third-person narration...
...The book undertakes to give a full-length portrait of Franklin Carey, an American who has married an Italian woman and lived in Europe for 20 years before feeling compelled to return home to reestablish his American identity...
...Harry is the first-person narrator of this section, but the controlling intelligence is actually centered in his Italian greatuncle, whose story of Franklin 20 years before takes up the entire section...
...The first section actually proposes the quest for the father as a formative idea...
...The marches seem to be literally that part of Italy that is the seat of Harry's mother's family of marchesi, but as we go on into the other sections of the book, we have to revise this impression as we begin to suspect that the march-man is really Franklin and the marches are America...
...In this section most clearly—but in all sections actually —Franklin is presented as a man terrified by the thought of death...
...His detached understanding is half of Harry's own heritage, and the narration of this section is very different from that of the other two, "American," sections, which represent the remainder of Harry's heritage...
...Now "form" is a word which is frequently meaningless, but in the case of The March-Man one can show quite specifically what it means...
...This section has all the brightness of style and all the color of character which would make for a purely slick telling of the story of a young American revisiting the family past...
...Harry, who could be the unifying factor, drops out of sight and with him goes the possibility of total organization...
...Europe has come to mean for him stagnation, white suits, boredom, and his wife, a contessa...
...In Part One, Harry Carey, Franklin's son, is visiting his mother's family in Italy...
...She is the person who has known him longest and most deeply...
...The story is full of marchesi and eccentrics, but the somber concern for identity makes it more than a mere exercise in nostalgia...
...What remains is a fine story and two documents...
...He tells us that he has with him in his luggage the manuscript of his Aunt Flo's version, and his own knowledge of his father is similar to his mother's account...
...Each view is consistent within itself and each technique is appropriate to the circumstances and the view-point character, but the essential question about the book involves the effectiveness of the parts taken as a whole: Is it a portrait or a tryptich...
...He tries constantly to hide behind ideas of youth, energy, ambition and independence...
...This is still not entirely accurate, however, for the function of the European-American background seems to be to suggest that all the world's a march and all the men and women merely marchdwellers...
...Uncle Max sees Franklin from the vantage point of another century— another world even...
...Yet the book, despite its flaws, is an exceptionally interesting one and creates an almost intolerably potent image of our time...
...The ItalianAmerican Harry travels with the warring versions of his own life, but he travels only with their physical form...
...The white suit is the enchanted armor of custom and ceremony against boredom...
...At the beginning of the book Franklin is already dead, but the burning need to understand the significance of his life still torments certain people who are bound to him—his son, his wife and his sister...
...A march-man, we are told, is an inhabitant of the border regions or marches...
...The third version of Franklin is written by his sister, Flo...
...In the three sections of the book, Franklin is seen from three distinctly different points of view, and each section employs a different narrative technique...
...We are never allowed to see a focusing intelligence at work on them...
...Sickness, weakness, and aging destroy his universe...
...To Franklin's wife...
...The documents amplify and modify the vision of the story, but they do so from outside...
...Its virtues are important ones: a richness of character, an honest and complex understanding of the lives people actually live, a virtuoso command of the techniques of prose fiction, and an eminent readability...
...The second version of Franklin is narrated by his wife...
...She is a writer and her version takes the form of extracts from her journal and recollections long after the event...
...As we begin the book, it looks as if the march-man is going to be Harry...
...His own time gave him a largeness and a security denied both Franklin and Harry...
...4.50 Reviewed by DANIEL CURLEY Author, "A Stone Man, Yes" The virtues of The March-Man are so many and so clear, it does so many of the things we demand of the novel, that discovering it is not a novel comes as a distinctly unpleasant surprise...
...America means change, adventure, California sports clothes, and a young American mistress, ex-drum majorette, ex-toast of the soda fountain, juniorgrade Hollywood love goddess sans merci...
...Her version is not at all old-world in the manner of her uncle's...
...Marzia, values are reversed...
...Botsford's novel is really the description of three such raids, each with the ostensible purpose of capturing the identity of Franklin Carey, who has himself been defeated on all his own raids and who is left finally with only one action he can truly perform, one decision he can truly make, one moment of identity he can truly claim—his own death...
...Its principal defect is one of form...
...The problem of form in this book is clearly to find a device which will contain and focus all three versions...
...Part One contains Flo's manuscript only as an unopened box, which is never opened within the story of Harry...
...The sports shirt is an invitation to meaningless change, to disaster, to boredom not mitigated by good manners...
...He retreats from the shelter of European convention into the illusion of a fabulous California...
...The device of perspective is part of her therapy, for it is on the advice of a psychiatrist that she is writing out her reaction to Franklin's shifting allegiance from the time of her arrival in the United States to her breakdown...
...The march is a terrible, wild, and desolate place, which must be defended at all costs against attacks by chaos and darkness and from which raids on the inarticulate may sometimes be launched with no great hope...
...It is she who remembers the face of the child Franklin as he awakes each morning to hope and wonder, and it is she who can add a final insight into the character of a man watching his life fade into the light of common day...
...To her Europe represents civilization...
...He puts his faith in the physical and the orderly...
...Harry is searching in Italy for the meaning of his father's life —and, of course, his own...
Vol. 47 • August 1964 • No. 16
