The Devil Gets His Due, page 31
In Faulkner, imagery is used obsessively; his images are in the first instance fully, almost “Homerically” developed, and they are repeated over and over at points of pressure strategically chosen, like the recurring end-words of a sestina, to give the effect of an attempted flight brought up again and again on the same snag of feeling and terror. Two of the best stories in the current collection, “Barn Burning” and “Death-Drag,” provide striking instances of his skill with metaphor. The images of the “depthless man” in the former, the man without a shadow, the stamped-out man of tin in the iron coat, cluster about a boy’s reluctant recognition of the evil of his barn-burning father; they are images that exist by their own right inside of this single piece, but that gain in force and texture when one knows them in Faulkner’s other work, as applied to Popeye or the later Snopeses. In “Death-Drag” it is the double image of the man who is a shark in the plane that is a ghost which helps specify an obsessive vision of the defiance of terror become itself a more ultimate terror. In Faulkner the larger story symbol controls the minor tropes, but he never, like the anti-stylists, confines all his figurative impulses to one neat central symbol; his objective equivalents of horror remain always stubbornly frayed around the edges, give a final feeling of controlling rather than being controlled. Faulkner is different from the more resolutely “high-brow” writers like Miss McCarthy or even Aiken in devotion to plot—reinforced by a life-time of writing and re-writing his pieces for the slick magazines that demand the apparatus of action. Indeed, it is often the function of his language, musical and figurative, to defend him from the consequences of that devotion, countering the impulse to make of the story a machine by leaning too heavily on stock surprise or suspense (as in “A Courtship”) or by depending on the gimmicky double plot twist that almost ruins “A Rose for Emily” in the last sentence.
Raymond Chandler is, in the field of metaphor, the poor man’s Mary McCarthy. It is hard to get past his own motions of what he is doing, especially since he has published in four separate places an essay called “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which he claims to have rescued the detective story from commercialism and the “flippers of the trained seals of the critical fraternity”—for “Realism” as defined by Hemingway and Hammett. Taken on his own terms, Mr. Chandler is a little ridiculous in that sentimental, back-room vein that has come to be called “hard-boiled”; but understood as a popular pastoral poet, the creator of a world of the incredibly drunk and lush, and the untiringly nymphomaniac babe, through which the wise-cracking Swain as Private Eye walks to the inevitable beating he so richly deserves, Chandler has contrived the most successfully atrocious prose style since Lyly’s Euphues, but one which, we should realize, does for the reader to whom literature comes flanked by ads, for sure cures for piles and correspondence courses in becoming a detective, the work of poetry. “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel-food cake.”
Despite the best efforts of Chandler, however, the detective story seems to have failed for its public, as much contemporary writing is failing for other more “serious” publics, in domesticating terror, at a moment when, from within and without, horror is threatening to engulf us. Politics have failed to stem the tide; the only hope is the imagination. I suppose that the mass reader feels with the most cliquish of us, that no “naturalistic” literary genre which fails to pay sufficient respect to magic and myth can survive among us; so that, just as we turn from Hemingway to Kafka, or from Horney to Wilhelm Reich, the pulp-reader turns from the detective story to Science Fiction, or STF as its devotees prefer to call it.
Surely there has never existed in America such a “movement” in the full European sense of the word, right down on the most popular level. STF satisfies a fundamental hunger for the merveilleux starved for a long time. Commercial interests have taken advantage of the fervor, and middle-brow muddlers have moved in with various inappropriate vocabularies, but one senses beneath it all the only lively spontaneous manifestation in the contemporary short story. The actual level of writing remains still quite low, often not much above the primitive effort not to use the same word too frequently in the same sentence, despite the almost frenetic critical fervor of readers, who fill page after page with letters of sub-aesthetic comment, and despite the flood of genuine little magazines in the field, called “fanzines,” apparently completely unsubsidized, and sporting such titles as Amoeba, Eusifano and Spacewarp. The advantage of the popular genre lies in the opportunity it provides for the writer and reader to remain unaware of what is really at stake in the developing form. It remains to be seen whether STF will be able to stand up under the strain of slumming expeditions from the high-brow world, or the efforts of founders of Dianetics and advocates of non-Aristotelian semantics to “raise its level.” At the present moment, much irrelevant chatter is going on, directed at separating out the truly “prophetic” STF piece from the story of gadgetary interest, and the Bug-eyed Monster thriller. Meanwhile the writers, a rather gloomy bunch, must attempt as best they can to fit their neo-Orwellian, anti-Utopian apprehensions into a formula which demands a reasonably happy ending. What counts, of course, is not what is demanded of them, but what they can get away with—and what they are getting away with is the exploitation of pure terror and the revival of magic, all under the honorific rubric of “science.” They are redeeming science for the imagination by mythicizing it, and immunizing the spirit against the indignities of the concentration camp and atomic mutilation by popularizing horror in its most up-to-date avatars.
It is the business of more serious writers, I feel, to be moving into this field in an attempt to redeem neo-Gothic horror for the total, subtle mind, as Poe redeemed it from the early German exponents of schrecklichkeit. I do not think the way is to allegorize it blatantly as C. S. Lewis has done in his popularizing novels; Charles Williams has come close to a legitimate metaphysical use of the new terror and magic, but his work was confined to the novel and he has left us no exemplars in the short story. “The Portable Phonograph,” of Walter Van Tilburg Clark, represents an essay in the right direction, with its STF theme of the cave-huddling remnants of humanity, just after the final war, defending the remnants of culture with a lead pipe. Clark, however, has only a dim sense of magic, preferring to move downward from the human toward the brute animal experience, and his special talent lies in the tour de force of articulating the inarticulate aspiration of the bestial, the hunger of the hawk.
It is Paul Bowles who does for the intellectuals what STF has done for the pulp-reader, compels from us the shocked, protesting acceptance of terror as an irreducible element of being. The whole impact of his work is the insistence on the horrible, and his stories seem only literary by accident, despite their having appeared in very little magazines, and despite the astonishing ease and rhythmical beauty of the style. Like the tales of the science-fictionist, his work denies the world of our everyday living for landscapes more easily allegorized for his purposes; his mythic North Africa and Latin America has its reality in the nightmare, like the trans-galactic worlds of space fiction. He suffers from two basic faults, however, which keep him from achieving the effect upon us he seems always on the verge of attaining. The first arises out of his speaking to intellectuals; driven to deal with ideas, he soon reveals his total inability to make intellectual notions as real as feelings, to specify men thinking as convincingly as he can specify men undergoing castration. The second is a fault endemic to this whole new enterprise; like Chandler and the writers of STF, with their endlessly sapped heroes and their victims stripped of all skin and screaming forever in a saline solution, he is a pornographer of terror, a secret lover of the horror he evokes. It seems to me that he suffers in this latter respect because of the breakdown of a tradition.
Historically there have been only two subjects for the short story proper and one of them is terror (the other is isolation)—but the recent collapse of our long-honored Western attitudes toward force and suffering in the face of concentration camps, compulsory confessions and mass bombing, have left us in a situation much like that in which we found ourselves not long since in regard to sex. We are waiting, I suppose, for a Lawrence of the world of horror. Our more venerable models seem absurdly inadequate. One gets the notion from the Gothic Novel that the Monk Lewises could not really believe in pure terror, but only wanted to; and Poe with his heavy costuming and pseudo-antique décor seems to have suffered from the remarkable delusion that horror had to be protected against the encroachments of a world of progress and machinery. Our own need is to make the clean, oiled machine a terror in a tale like the witch or the Inquisitor.
But we cannot seem to strike the right note. We vacillate between censorship and pornography. Here on the desk before me lies an ad for The Happy Mother Goose, an expurgated collection in which the famous three mice are not blind but kind, and the Farmer’s wife cuts off not their tails but a slice of cheese to feed them; it is all meant, of course, to assure our young that there is no brutality or unkindness in all the world. Beside the new Mother Goose lies a copy of Bowles’s Delicate Prey, open to the dedication: “for my mother, who first read me the stories of Poe.” Having already been twice through the title story in which a young Arab has his sliced-off sex thrust into an incision in his belly, I can only see the tender childhood the dedication evokes in terms of a Charles Addams cartoon—the happy vampire and son at home over the “Cask of Amontillado.”
We must, somewhere between the limits of squeamishness and abandon, learn to come to terms with horror; one way is, perhaps, to move again toward a belief in mystery and magic, to a mythic apprehension of reality, to the realization that, in a quite real sense we have not appreciated for a long time, the old gods of darkness are not dead. But to play at such a belief, while forgivable enough in cozier Victorian times, when one had to try to shudder, is for us unpardonable. To write the “ghost story,” evoking with coy ambiguity antique versions of what haunts us, Wandering Jew or magician or sea nymph (as in Conrad Aiken or Faulkner’s “Doctor Martino”—or even Mr. Sansom’s almost successful “Poseidon’s Daughter”), is to be insufferably beside the point. Nor will it do to evoke the terror of war or politics or personal relationships in the muted style based on the assumption that sociology or psychology or even common sense could explain it all. It is not true that with a (revised) Marx and Freud under one arm, one can easily hold the burden of mystery in his free hand.
I suspect that for terror to be truly redeemed, humanized for use in moving and substantial human fictions, it must be understood as real evil; without such a belief, the evoked evil one will remain our good old unconscious in a child’s false-face. Miss McCarthy comes close to this sort of metaphysics (which entails the denial of the well-behaved style), but she refuses to make the next step that would bring her insights to their final point. She will not recognize the world of innocence, and she is left with the snob’s religion: a devil and no god. William Faulkner, in great, clumsy exasperation, makes the final leap—or rather, one regrets to say, made it once, for his latest trivial sentimental stories indicate that he has lost the terrible full vision of his greatest work. It is easy enough to ask from the comfort of the reviewing stand for so terrible and committed an awareness, but it is not easy to live by it full time, much less to make of it beautiful fictions.
It is Faulkner’s own region that he has so redeemed, the region of us all in so far as it represents that nightmare encounter of black and white from which we all strive to awake, but other areas remain to be redeemed for myth and style and understood terror. The whole of the last war evades us still; we have not yet chewed through the clichés of expectation with which we protected ourselves against its fact; and we have scarcely begun to approach in terms of its inner terror the experience of a whole generation in the Communist Party (Shaw in various places and John Cheever, in a story called “Vega,” touch this area with aggravating superficiality—and Williams feints at it several times). If only a talent might arise capable of dealing with these polar experiences with all the cold, precise control of horror that a Bowles squanders on symbols of irrelevant sadism in an exotic landscape; and if only that talent could find a metaphysics and a style able to seize our own parochial terrors in all their rich local involvement with ideas and baffled innocence and stuttering love, the short story might truly flourish among us. Surely it is permitted to believe that the form will rise to its terrible obligation as the unforeseen poetry of our perhaps ultimate hour.
*During the past two or three years a body of short-story texts have been appearing, anthologies intended for college classes, but edited by critics and writers, Tate, Scherr, Heilman, etc. These seem to me to be attempting to establish a canon based primarily on the practice of Joyce and Chekhov, but they are mainly pedagogical in intent.
The Higher Unfairness
I am sure that a good deal of the pleasure I find in reading Mary McCarthy arises out of my sense of how offensive she is (and cannot help being) to a certain kind of reader whom it is important that somebody offend. There is a particular kind of “right-thinking” mind that is reduced to a frantic rage not only by what she says, but by her tone, her metaphorical habits, the very shape of her sentences. I should say that it is impossible to have voted for Henry Wallace in 1948 and to admire the cold, underground wit of Mary McCarthy—the wit from which she seems recently to be unhappily relaxing; but which made her drama reviews in Partisan Review and her earlier stories so painfully attractive, and which flickers fitfully in The Groves of Academe.
Her original gift seems compounded not only of the traditional detached virulence of the satirist (with its roots in self-hatred, and its hostility to pride), but also of the special bitterness of the rebel, grown hard and cagey in his fight against a society which he cannot even persuade to listen to his declaration of war. If in the past Miss McCarthy has often turned her cold eye on the individuals and types on her own side of the (theoretical) barricades, it has not mattered finally; since she has flayed and pilloried them from a point of view impossible for the “soft” liberal or literate philistine to share, even for the sake of rejoicing in the discomfiture of a despised category of intellectuals. Mary McCarthy’s appeal has been a snob appeal of a particularly fortunate sort, since the group for whom she has written, far from considering themselves a “happy few,” have prided themselves on being a very miserable minority indeed—and she has represented with rare agility and grace the ability of that group at once to despise themselves and the society from which they have withdrawn.
The proper milieu for such a mind was provided by the avant-garde magazines and their readers; and it seems to me that both Miss McCarthy and that milieu have suffered since their separation from each other. As a kind of Apostle to the Gentiles, mingling unnoticed among the contributors to The New Yorker, and expounding to its readers (not a few of whom have, of course, always found Partisan Review, for example, “negative and Trotskyite”) the vagaries of “one side of contemporary American intellectual life,” Miss McCarthy has tended to lose precisely those troublesome spiritual qualities, once her greatest asset.
I think it becomes (alas!) more and more possible to read her with the sense that someone else is always being satirized, and without the acute and embarrassing awareness of the indignity of being human which she once so masterfully controlled. There are basically two kinds of satire, I suppose: the kind that attacks eccentricity with the comfortable feeling that the writer belongs to the group which embodies a true center and norm (this is preeminently represented among us by The New Yorker); and the kind that finds the human condition essentially ridiculous. The first kind is often rooted in a smug, conservative sort of optimism (confusingly known in our world as “liberalism”), while the other kind usually tends toward a religious point of view (often concealed in our world under the rubric of “radicalism”). There had always seemed to me the possibility that Miss McCarthy’s wit might flower into such a Christian-Swiftian sort of satire, when its bitterness had recognized itself as a sign of humility; but I do not find such a flowering in her most recent work.
The Groves of Academe has found a subject which seems especially apt as a vehicle for Miss McCarthy’s insights and hostilities, dealing as it does with the confrontation of the Liberal and the Underground Man (just such a confrontation as Mary McCarthy’s own work provides a certain kind of reader). The scene is the campus of a small “advanced” college; the antagonists Mulcahy, a seedy Machiavellian and self-despiser, obviously “chosen” by his immense unattractiveness to be the Victim of a hundred minor persecutions, and Maynard Hoar, a handsome, loved, earnest and empty Liberal with no sense of how complicated it is to be human. These two have come to seem by now almost archetypal figures, confronting each other over and over again in Congressional committee rooms and before the bench, in the tragi-comedy of revelations about Communism that have filled the columns of our daily newspapers for the last several years.
But Miss McCarthy with a rare comic twist (it is the first successful gimmick she has ever come on, having no essential talent for the machinery of fiction) has made Mulcahy falsely accuse himself of having been a Communist, in an involved strategy to hold on to his job as professor of literature in the school of which Hoar, a pledged friend of freedom, is president. The book does not quite live up to the promise of its device, though there are, indeed, many delightful and telling passages—in particular, the description of a poetry conference, that typical cultural event of our time, heretofore not memorialized in fiction. In a sentence here and there, a turn of phrase, an unexpected metaphor, there is a touch of the old wit, but what is lacking in the style is the excess that once characterized Miss McCarthy’s work, the overloading of each sentence, the lovely vicious gags thrown away out of the sheer fertility of her malice and invention.
