American Novels

To readers unfamiliar with the work of Anne Parrish there might well be something disconcertingly old-fashioned in the opening chapters of her new book, Golden Wedding (Harpers, $2.50). All the familiar figures of the ‘success story’ are here: the earnest young man from the country; the rich girl toward whom he has matrimonial yearnings until her country cousin appears and he falls in love with her at first sight; even the charming but wastrel son of his employer whom he saves from disgrace by lending him his hard-earned savings. But it is not long before we become aware of the irony inherent in this conventional opening and realize as the story develops that we are witnessing something quite different from the Horatio Alger story which such a beginning might lead us to expect.

Dan Briggs, with whose rise to fortune Golden Wedding is concerned, is a kind of Dodsworth, but a harder, more ignorant and less human Dodsworth, a man with only one ruling passion in his life: his business. From humble beginnings he rises, in true success-story fashion, to the heights of wealth and power. He is at once ruthless and sentimental, scrupulously honest, yet not averse to evading the income taxes with which the ‘thieving pack of Socialists in Washington’ is trying to throttle Free Enterprise. At home lie forces his will on his family in the same way as he forces it on his employees in his factory and office — sometimes with results which shock and surprise him. He has the Midas touch, and the lives with which he comes in contact harden beneath it. At the end, fabulously wealthy and powerful, surrounded by children, grandchildren, and assorted adoring dependents, he is a lonely and bewildered man, bitter in triumph.

Admirers of Miss Parrish’s very marked gifts of subtle irony and neatly malicious wit may be disappointed in not finding in Golden Wedding such characters as Christabel Caine, the languishing but intensely practical poetess of All Kneeling, or any one of the world-cruise passengers of Sea Level. In her choice of a subject, however, Miss Parrish has necessarily set the tone of her book, and, while we may regret the Otis Robinsons and their boys (who always won the shufHeboard competitions on shipboard), it is, after all, the author’s privilege to choose his subject and his approach, and not the reader’s.

The scene of James T. Farrell’sA World I Never Made (Vanguard Press, $2.50) is the same as that of his Studs Lonigan trilogy: the Chicago of the Irish, with, on the outskirts, the Dagos, the Hunkies, the Kikes, and the Niggers. But whereas Studs was a tough guy, a hard fighter and drinker whose family is, relatively speaking, well off and respectable, the main character of A World I Never Made is a sensitive and imaginative little boy, Danny O’Neill, surrounded by a family which is poorer and considerably less respectable than Studs’s.

Because of the fact that this book is really a collection of sketches rather than a complete novel in itself, one assumes that it is the beginning of a series which will do for Danny O’Neill what the earlier books did for Studs Lonigan. Danny himself, however, is of less interest than the characters which surround him, and it is their stories, rather than Danny’s, which give the book its force. There is his Aunt Margaret and her love affair with the married Mr. Robinson; his Uncle Al, a seriousminded shoe salesman who dreams of some day having a store of his own; his grandmother with her fine gift for round and sonorous invective; his father, Jim, a teamster struggling to support a relentlessly increasing family; Ins slatternly, superstitious, and kind-hearted mother; and a host of little brothers and sisters. Each of these characters has an individuality of his own, but through them all, as a common denominator, runs the fact that they are all Irish. Improvident, sentimental, drunken, laughing one minute and weeping the next, brutal and tender, continually being swept away by their own powers of self-dramatization, they could not possibly belong to any other race. They drink to celebrate and they drink to drown their sorrows. They beat their children and they weep when they are separated from them. Grandmother O’Flaherty pronounces her final mother’s curse on the head of her ungrateful daughter and, shortly after, makes her a cup of tea because she looks tired. Danny’s Aunt Margaret, separated from her lover, desperately unhappy, nevertheless feels an inward glow of pride in the fact that she is being followed by detectives and is a glamorous figure.

This is not a book for the hyper-fastidious. It is filled with dirt and poverty and brutality, and the euphemism, as a literary form, is nonexistent. But in all the cursing and foulness that come from the mouths of these people there is a kind of innocence, and the peculiarly Irish quality of the language touches the coarsest scenes with its own particular beauty.

In writing sympathetically of a man who passionately espouses Naziism in Austria, Kay Boyle is doing a courageous thing, since no profound degree of sympathy with that cause has to date marked the attitude of the majority of our critics. It would be unfortunate, however, if her new book, Death of a Man (Harcourt, Brace, $2.50), were to be judged according to our sympathy or lack of sympathy with the Nazi ideal — as unfortunate, for instance, as if André Malraux’s Man’s Fate were to be condemned by an anti-Marxian because of the fact that its protagonists are working for Communism. Indeed, there is a certain similarity in this re-

spect between the two books, each of them telling of whole-hearted devotion to a cause whose rightness or wrongness is of less importance to the reader than the emotions of the people involved.

Into the life of Dr. Prochaska, Miss Boyle’s Nazi, Chance brings the American girl, Pendennis. She is wealthy, hard-boiled, cynical, and, apparently, completely self-assured, but beneath the hard veneer of her surface she is lonely, unhappy, and afraid of life. In her love for the doctor and in his blind devotion to a cause she now finds, for the first time in her own essentially hollow and purposeless life, something to which to give and in which to lose herself.

Miss Boyle is able to give a sense of life and reality to her characters, not only to the girl and Dr. Prochaska, but also to the many minor figures of the book, the Tyrolean villagers, the nurses and the patients in the hospital of which Dr. Prochaska is head. Also, she is able to tell a story which, without ever being overexplicit, is nevertheless a rounded anti integrated whole and — strange as it may seem nowadays — runs only to some three hundred pages.

Throughout, there is an admirable feeling for the natural background of mountains and valleys against which the action is set. Miss Boyle has a real gift of observation for the minutiæ of nature, and her descriptive prose is sensitive and vivid. There are times when one feels that the unusual word captivates her perhaps a trifle too readily, such as when someone takes up a paper cutter ‘to incise the mail.’

BENEDICT THIELEN