SOMETHING FOR ALL
Emerson, Donald
Something for All The Hands of Esau, by Hiram Haydn. Harper. 784 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Donald Emerson T^he book club people believe their A summer offerings should bulk large enough to last the...
...Herrick's existential trial takes place within a richly peopled world...
...He embarks on self-analysis, and he traces the history of his forebears to discover what the family pattern has meant...
...Letters, journals, and transcripts of hearings are placed in evidence...
...It alternates with passages of family history, Herrick's youthful experience, and the more lively scenes from the few months of the action...
...He resigns his job...
...The Hands of Esau is not autobiography, though Haydn has drawn deeply from within himself...
...The time is 1953, when Haydn would have been the age of his, Walton Herrick...
...Psychological analysis and lively sex, along with family chronicle and personal history, are laced to a framework of Biblical myth...
...He is to be understood as the product of race and nation, heredity and experience...
...Apparent solutions push him deeper into self-discovery because each poses a new dilemma...
...His friends are given substance...
...By the end of the novel Herrick is committed to Haydn's career in publishing, having had similar teaching experience and work with a foundation much like Haydn's service as secretary of Phi Beta Kappa...
...Only perseverance and the summer's leisure will get the reader through...
...Reviewed by Donald Emerson T^he book club people believe their A summer offerings should bulk large enough to last the season...
...Haydn is generous with allusions, as befits a literary man...
...His real triumph is to combine an imagined pageant of the Jacob and Esau myth with the witches' sabbath from Faust and the heath from King Lear, especially when he makes Herrick discover his heath in the midtown excavation for a New York skyscraper...
...Herrick reaches his personal crisis the summer the Russian bomb heightens the world's problem of survival...
...He is to be Man typified in an American of forty-five at the crisis of his life...
...Conversations are reported as though scenes from a play...
...Nothing is clear, nothing is simple...
...Herrick's painful self-analysis is detailed, repetitive, and frequently tedious...
...There is similar variety in the narration, as though Haydn were also sampling the possibilities of style...
...In the end, he is reduced to the shell of himself, with nothing but the stirring of life to give him hope...
...to be seen in struggle with himself, his family, and his career...
...It is a strain to follow the history of two families, the detailed experience of Herrick up to his first marriage, the complications of his crowded present, and his thrashing about in his inner maze...
...His wife Julie is touchingly real...
...He is...
...This one will...
...The forebears and Herrick's parents are firmly drawn, and the social scale is marked off by the diverse characters who come into his life...
...He reverts to the pattern of old love affairs with a new mistress...
...They have birthplace, background, and college in common, and their careers are closely parallel...
...But it is a bold attempt to seize the texture of modern life through the dilemmas of a self-doubting man enmeshed in the universal problems and the difficulties peculiar to the times...
...Besides, it has something for everyone...
...Haydn has set himself so difficult a task that it is small wonder the novel repeatedly sags...
...He passes a summer apart from his wife, who has reached her limit of tolerance for the evil moods which wreck every interlude of happiness...
...It is evident that in the volumes to come Haydn intends to philosophize further on Herrick and Man...
...Although this is but the first third of Hiram Haydn's projected work, the intent is clear...
...As a novel it probably suffers most from the very introspection which makes its form possible...
...A representative man of our time is to be drawn to the life...
...Even Herrick's inner self is allowed its monologue...
Vol. 26 • June 1962 • No. 6
