Post-War America

HERE are two novels — The Foundry, by Albert Halper (Viking, $2.50) and We Accept with Pleasure, by Bernard DeVoto (Little, Brown, $2.50) — which provide a very striking contrast both in material and in the way they are written. DeVoto writes with respect and sympathy of intellectuals at Boston, Harvard, and Chicago, and Halper about workmen and their bosses in a Chicago foundry. As far as life in America after the war is concerned, the pictures they present are as opposed as the two sides of a coin. If you read these two books together it will be hard to accept ever again the fiction that there is just one great middle class in America.

We Accept with Pleasure is a long and very ambitious book. It deals with that generation that went to war, intellectuals mainly, and returned and were a little bewildered by the necessity of adjusting themselves to American life. All the principal characters, Jonathan Gale, Loring Gale, Julian Gale, and Ted Grayson, have this in common: they were at Harvard, they went to the war, they had their deepest experiences at the war, and when they returned they were up against somewhat the same problems. The book has a certain scope; there is a sweep to it and considerable variety; there is a fine and moving story of the love of Ted Grayson and the girl who became his wife; the dialogue is sharp and full of an engaging frankness. But when all is said and done it is pretty hard to say anything that is fresh about that generation— the most over-publicized and the most selfconscious generation in American history. While DeVoto does not quite subscribe to the well-known notes of the chroniclers of the after-the-war embitterment of the spirit, — the despair of Eliot in The Wasteland, or the desperate gayety of Fitzgerald, — he offers instead a kind of ironic acceptance of the life of the time which amounts really to a further preservation of that too long preserved futility. DeVoto, too, has great respect for his Harvard intellectuals. You might almost think he felt a little self-conscious about them. Perhaps that is why the writing in this book is always so selfconscious, why he gives the impression of trying so hard with his prose.

The characters in Halper’s book, The Foundry, have little time to be brilliant, or to have attitudes which amount to sophisticated negations of life. These men work and sweat and think in terms of their work. There are about thirty characters, such as the three partners, the foundry workers, the bindery girls, the sweethearts and secret lovers. In an astonishingly natural way Halper creates a world within the foundry. The work of the men is of compelling interest. Halper gives a world that has warmth and some yearning and the blood and bones of sweating men. Perhaps the most remarkable gift that he has is the faculty of being nearly always entertaining. Unlike most authors who have tried their hands at proletarian novels, he is able to see that workers, like any other human beings with aspirations, are often actually funny, and yet he is never laughing at them.

What prevents this book from being a truly first-rate job is that its faults are almost as glaring as its rare qualities are striking. Halper too often creates characters in terms of the picturesque; he gives them ready surface distinctions which make for easy reading but do not contribute to the profundity of his analysis. For example, he has a workman rolling his one eye almost every time he comes on the page; the senior partner has a physical ailment which bothers him every time he appears in sight; Duffy, the youngest partner, always talks like a Shakespearean actor; Max’l, the big boss, always sweats, and we are always reminded that he weighs away over two hundred pounds. There is no chance of being confused by these characters. Then, too, the novel has practically no form at all, because little or nothing is resolved in terms of the characters, who are pushed through a kind of Grand Hotel technique. The stock-market crash at the end is really outside the book: it fits in with many of the sociological implications that are in the book, but it comes almost like an act of God and was in no way made inevitable by Halper himself. And if DeVoto, writing about his intellectuals, seems to try too hard, one wishes that Halper often tried a little harder, for his prose abounds in clichés.

But, no matter what criticism is launched at this book, nobody can take away from Halper his fine and striking qualities, his honesty, his sympathy, his teeming alundance, and his zest, for life.

MORLEY CALLAGHAN