Marking Time
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing MARKING TIME BY PEARL K. BELL A CASUAL GLANCE at the jacket copy for Richard B. Wright's impressive first novel, The Weekend Man (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 247 pp., $6.95), could...
...I myself just drift along, hoping that the daily passage will deliver up a few painless diversions...
...It is far more sensible to submit to the numbness of the daily passage...
...But the mood of Miss Bolton's book is uniquely her own, one she has evoked with skill in earlier fiction —old age invaded and conquered by memory, refiguring the past as proof against the creaking present, against that lurking horror, the "immense, annihilating, and unimaginable catastrophe" of the future...
...Before their meeting, the old people summon up the remembrance of a past only they still hold in life—childhood parties and friendships, marriage and adultery, death and abandonment...
...New York and its denizens have seldom been viewed in literature with so precise and loving an eye, at once mocking and celebratory...
...She writes of a vanished America at the turn of the century...
...With her new book in hand, it is intriguing to think back on the sensation Isabel Bolton's brilliant novel Do I Wake or Sleep...
...stirred in the literary world just after the War...
...All this musing on the mystery and wonder has only set up a wild howling in the soul...
...Now, through the aggressive kindness of his father-in-law, who is at once bewildered by this hapless young man and deeply fond of him, he is working, in characteristically self-defeating ways, as a salesman for a textbook publisher in Toronto...
...Listen—I once paid several hundred dollars for a German telescope to study the stars and another time I sent for a brochure on a short-story writing course...
...Their bittersweet recapitulation is the reward and the pain that fall to survivors...
...again recently, I was as dazzled by its astute, witty, compassionate observations of sophisticated New York as I had been 25 years earlier —and this does not often happen when one reads a long-ago sensation...
...In his kitchen he keeps two peanut-butter jars filled with slips of paper...
...And while he waits to see what will happen to his marriage—pretending an indifference that is really a most febrile detachment—he looks and waits for diversions...
...Surely there has been a suffocating excess in the last few years of novels about young men of no will, good or bad, caught in a vise of indecision and disdain, shambling their way through a dreary succession of erotic episodes that are meant to depict a larger design of insight and irony, but rarely do...
...Without the faintest gesture of insistence, by the spuriously effortless juggling of vaudeville postures and pop-culture metaphors, Wright persuades us of his protagonist's authenticity and poign-ance...
...He is really more interested in what happened to him twenty years ago or in what is going to happen to him next week than he is in what is happening to him today...
...Unable to shake off his perpetual bemusement with "the thundering ironies," Wes works out his own odd and funny ways of simulating the healthy enthusiasm of certainty...
...None of these things is as good as television...
...While neither as radiant nor far-reaching as Do I Wake or Sleep?, it is delightfully written, and its melodramatic story is told with a richness of feeling and detail that never gets out of hand...
...Miss Bolton not only brought fresh insight to the familiar Jamesian theme of the relations between innocent American generosity and desperate European self-interest, but she conveyed the seductive chemistry of metropolitan New York as it was just before the War with rare illumination...
...Wes Wakeham's declarative statements and wisecracks are anything but vacant, and his self-effacing banter hides a sensibility racked by complex and insoluble urgencies...
...In the course of the four frantic days before Christmas that the novel covers, we learn just how this cunningly placid young man squints at the world, how he learns to contain the insults of its stupidity and malice, its insufferable ordinariness...
...Reading Do I Wake or Sleep...
...When this first novel appeared in 1946, it was praised by Edmund Wilson and Diana Trilling, the most exacting and influential fiction critics at that time, as few new novels are ever praised, and the identity of its pseudonymous author was a favorite literary-party puzzle for months...
...And I know that sooner or later this would sneak up and get me in strange ways...
...IN CONTRAST TO Wes Wakeham's aching insubstan-tiality...
...Though life has dealt this contemporary Oblomov one very dirty hand—his young son is Mongoloid—Wes Wakeham knows that his acedia, what his estranged wife with exasperated inaccuracy calls his incurable "cynicism," has more deeply pervasive causes than that one grim accident of nature...
...But the force of feeling through The Weekend Man, despite the order of its events, is precisely the opposite of submission...
...in a world reduced to the nursery allegories of television and the brand-name cartography of supermarkets, Isabel Bolton's new novel, The Whirligig of Time (Crown, 191 pp., $5.95), has the solid-oak actuality of Victorian time past, the gravity of great wealth, high society, fine houses, grand passions, melodramatic entanglements...
...Perhaps it is only fair to remind the world, without making any patronizing allowances, that Mary Britton Miller, who signs her novels Isabel Bolton, is now 88 years old...
...a person who has abandoned the present in favor of the past or the future...
...Assaulted by unsentimental but ineffectual longing, he wears the fixed grin of desperate amiability as the sign of his soul's disorder...
...Three years later, Miss Bolton dealt boldly in The Christmas Tree with the sources of homosexuality, then regarded as a taboo subject...
...The famous art historian David Hare has returned to his native New York after an absence of 50 years, and calls his cousin Blanche Willoughby, with whom he played in the park at the corner of Park Avenue and 34th Street so many decades ago...
...Yet those two brilliant novels are quite forgotten now, and it is dismaying to think how little important notice will probably be taken of The Whirligig of Time...
...Most of the time, however, I am quietly gritting my teeth and just holding on...
...Though she keeps shifting the time from present to past somewhat mechanically at the start of each chapter, Miss Bolton tells an ardent, old-fashioned but thoroughly credible story with vigor and finesse...
...there is a subtle terror in the creeping inevitability of his surrender to his job, his wife, and a life void of all the equivocations and enigmas...
...Through his whimsical devices of variety, Wes Wakeham is trying to deny his sardonic identification with that archetype of modern humanity, "the weekend man...
...At 30, Wes Wakeham has for years been in the grip of disabling irresolution, and has left a trail of halfheartedly ruined jobs behind him—advertising-copy writer, night watchman, gardener's assistant, junior business executive...
...I even sought out people who were interested in talking about such things as the role of the individual in a technological society...
...There is an air of mischievously deceptive simplicity about The Weekend Man which may deprive Wright of the praise and attention he deserves...
...One knows that in all the important interior ways...
...I used to read books and in my day I've subscribed to a few rough-papered quarterlies too...
...Writers & Writing MARKING TIME BY PEARL K. BELL A CASUAL GLANCE at the jacket copy for Richard B. Wright's impressive first novel, The Weekend Man (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 247 pp., $6.95), could stop most fiction reviewers dead in their tracks...
...Can we stir up even the slightest interest in yet another feckless narrator, empty even of the nastier originalities of the so-called antihero, spending "his life marking time, taking each day as it comes...
...Can we really bear reading about still another "deliberate under-achiever," the clever but spineless homme moyen sen-suel of the 1960s, who has no "desire to make it within the system...
...What makes Richard B. Wright's book worth reading (he is white, Canadian, 34 years old, and of course no relation to the author of Native Son), and blessedly different from all the other portraits of the artist as young schlemiel, is the comic originality of his nonhero in making his own peculiarly fragile sense of the daily-routine nonsense he is embedded in...
...Wes declares, with a hollow assurance that fools no one, that "I have managed my own life rather badly...
...one jar contains different breakfast menus, the other alternate routes to the office (which he could in fact reach in a three-minute walk...
...Every morning, eyes closed, he gropes in each jar: "If I didn't leave my choice to the impersonal decisions of Chance, I know I would end up doing what my father did every working day of his life: sitting down before a bowl of cornflakes and two pieces of white toast...
...the place and class are Edith Wharton's and Henry James' New York of money and manners...
...If the truth were known, nothing much happens to most of us during the course of our daily passage...
...Wes Wakeham's life can never change, that gloom will continue to settle on his shoulders "like chimney soot," that his troubles are not trivial and his customary drollery anything but gay...
Vol. 54 • June 1971 • No. 12
