Cone of Silence

THIS Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship novel is the pilgrim’s progress of a young intellectual of the generation which came of legal age at the start of the last decade. It may not be said, however, that Cone of Silence either is or is intended to be a definitive portrait of this generation. If it were, it would have a good deal more value than it has. Like his contemporaries, Mr. MacLiesh’s young man came of age with little but the baggage of the precious twenties in hand. Unlike his contemporaries, he not only didn’t cast it off, he didn’t really try. At the start of the thirties when both Europe and America were no longer arguing in the parlor, Mr. MacLiesh’s protagonist was, and neither the quality of his argument nor his conclusions are convincing.

The hero of this journey presumably represents the pursuit of a creative, changing, moving world: the girl may be taken as the symbol of the drive to surrender freedom for the security of fixed, rigid, lifeless formulas. The trouble is that through five hundred rather pretentious pages this hero’s search is not very honest. He himself ends up an escapist, and he does so by a process of eliminating all current systems of thought — organized science, organized politics, organized church, the good, the bad, the indifferent — on the ground that they have an attraction for ostriches. As though one could understand and judge any structure by the fact that, being a structure, having a form, it will attract some who are simply looking for shelter.

The relativist point of view is buttressed with just such sophistries as this. As an intellectual pilgrimage, Cone of Silence is neither valid in itself nor valuable as a historic document of a generation which faced its world with a notable lack of wishful thinking. Houghton Mifflin, $2.75.

LUCY TOMPKINS