Reader's Choice
BY
IF THERE is such a thing as a beautiful justice (and William Faulkner meant precisely such a tiling in his wonderful story called A Justice), it is the Melville revival. That Herman Melville is being read again and written about is “a justice” in as profound a way as when people began to listen to Bach again, or to look at the art of Giotto. It is more than that an abstract, esthetic balance has been restored: it is as though a wound has been healed as well.
Melville had once written: “I love all men who dive.” He had gone deep both downward and upward —in Mohy-Dick, in his great book that was at once his sea epic and his cosmogony. America in 1851 had been indifferent-and Melyille had been sorely hurt. How else explain the writing that came after, the difficult and angular Pierre, the brilliant short pieces that yet were lacking in heart? In truth, Melville no longer dived; he had gone underground.
A sea change
A few times over a subterranean period of some thirty years Melville breached: there were The Con - fidence Man, The Encantadas, Benito Cereno, and — a few months before he died-the very great Billy Budd. But it is to Moby-Dick that the critic and critical reader voyage again and again. It is the magic, the work of art, the one American novel that in scope, in weight, in depth, in drama, has no master, not even when it is measured byt the immensities of the art of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And what comes to the most definitive work of its kind on Moby-Dick is the book by Howard P. Vincent entitled The Trying-out of Moby-Dick ( Houghton Mifflin, $5.00). “Of its kind” because Mr. Vincent does not try for a critical evaluation, nor does he engage in literary analysis; for the author of The Trying-out these are points of departure-Moby Dick belongs in the true and momentous realm of great art. What Mr. Vincent undertakes is a study of the transformation in Melville “of actuality into truth,” the specific artistic process that transforms the unformed experience into the formed work of art.
For many of us the findings of Mr. Vincent will be revelatory. Like all great art, Moby-Dick pos-
During Charles J. Rolo’s absence abroad the Atlantic has asked Harvey Breit of the New York Times to act as its guest reviewer.
sesses the quality of unencumbered creation, of the expression of the powerful imagination at work on the raw experience. But Mr. Vincent says no;
and though other writers on Melville have said no — in particular Charles Olson in his brilliant Call Me Ishmael —no writer has said it so authoritatively and with so much documentation. Mr. Vincent demonstrates beyond any measure of doubt that Melville leaned heavily and consistently on at least five books: Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale, Bennett’s A Whaling Voyage Round the Globe, Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, Cheever’s The Whale and His Captors, and Scoresby’s An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery.
T. S. Eliot once wrote that the immature poet imitates and the mature poet plagiarizes. Goethe to Eckermann, before Eliot, said: “If you see a great master, you will always find that he used what was good in his predecessors, and that it was this which made him great.” Melville, when he wrote Moby-Dick, was both mature and great, and so acted: he borrowed and lifted, plagiarized and used. But Melville look his predecessors’ science, their celology, and stretched it, made it taut with meanings and moral significances that the borrowees never dreamed of. Mr. Vincent brilliantly gives the proof.
Or, again, as Mr. Vincent writes: “Melville could take an inch of suggestion and make a yard of dramatic narrative.” From Bennett’s simple “Nothing satisfactory is known about the duration of pregnancy in the whale,” Melville reconstructed one of the most fabulous seascapes, which included his famous passage: “Some of the subtlest secrets of the sea seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.”
Mr. Vincent shows that the magic of Moby-Dick is not only that. There is deep satisfaction in such a discovery. We salvage something from the irrational, the unknown, when we realize that the mystery is based on hard work, on conscious study and deliberate planning. We learn to enjoy the fact that “mad” William Blake wrote many versions of a poem, like any sound craftsman; that Shakespeare “reworked” old dramas, perhaps those of Thomas Kyd. Man may thus become less divine, but he becomes truly immortal. The wonder in Moby-Dick is that Melville took so much of the literal, made so sound a vessel from which he could dive so deep.
This is not the entire story of The Trying-out. Mr. Vincent makes other points: that Moby-Dick had been begun as pure whaling; that somewhere in the middle of his traditional tale, most likely through the interactions of Shakespeare and Hawthorne on his sensibility, Melville changed his plan and over his original, as it were, mounted his moral drama.
The first sections of The Trying-out, dealing with these points, are the weakest : other authors had dealt with them, and Mr. Vincent, through lack of documentary evidence, tends to become overzealous, repetitious, overanxious even. And he exhibits in these parts a curious failure of proportionate values. He can state: “It was Melville who was destined to write the whaling equal of Dana’s masterpiece [Two Years Before the Mast],” though he says somewhere else that Moby-Dick is “rich and complex above any other novel in American literature.” This failure, or defect, is visible in small ways: in bringing to bear on the giant Melville such artists as César Franck, Prokofiev, Epstein. It is a kind of literary gallantry in Mr. Vincent that, nevertheless, gives one a feeling of uneasiness.
None of this is true in the subsequent, and more important, sections. When Mr. Vincent advances from speculation to the documentary, he is richly at home and his defects are shed. And the scholarly work takes its place as one of the most important and deeply entertaining illuminations of this greatest of American novels.
The critical Gather
Willa Cather, who undeniably wrote exquisite novels, has been brought out in an unusual self— that is, not as a novelist but as a critic — in a small volume called Willa Cather on
Writing (Knopf, $2.25). In her preface to The Best Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, Miss Cather wrote: “If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once: The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and The Country of the Pointed Firs.
I can think of no others that confront time and change so serenely.” “Serenely” may well be the word for the last of these novels; though I should say Miss. Jewett’s novel hasn’t confronted time and change at all.
It is to me a mark, though not a fatal one, that Miss Cat her does not mention Moby-Dick. It is not a surprise. Miss Cather was indeed a highly “ personal" writer, and she exercised taste of a highly personal sort, rather than critical acumen. And yet one would prefer to see taste and discernment grow together. I do not think they did in Miss Cather. Her preoccupations in these brief pieces—four letters, an essay called “The Novel Demeuble,” four prefaces, “On the Art of Fiction,” an appreciation of Katherine Mansfield, and so forth — do not confront time and change serenely; they confront time a little garrulously, and change has all but passed them by.
Miss Cather, for one thing, was waging a war against realism. In “The Novel Démeublé,” her most considerable essay in the collection, she observes: ” I here is a popular superstition that ’realism asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. ... Is the story of a banker who is unfaithful to his wife and who ruins himself by speculation in trying to gratify the caprices of his mistresses, at all reinforced by a masterly exposition of banking, our whole system of credits, the methods of the Stock Exchange?”
Up to this question Miss Cather is playing a strong hand: she is singling out those boring minutiae, and heaping ridicule on the Zolaesque notion of transforming quantity into quality. But then she grows overconfident and asks: “But are the banking system and the Stock Exchange worth being written about at all? Have such things any proper place in imaginative art ? ”
Melville himself gives the answer. Mr. Vincent, in The Tryiny-out, grasps what Miss Cather failed to know: “ In a strange and remarkable way, our quickly and easily acquired information about harpoons and lances, whaleboats and lines, blubber and bones, the pursuit of the whale and the flight from the whale, informs us so thoroughly and profoundly concerning whaling life that we identify ourselves with the Pequod crew as they abandon themselves to the delirious pursuit of the albino whale so soon to destroy them.” It is a fact that readers are tied a strange world aboard the Pequod: renders are also tied to fever charts and lung phenomena in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In both cases the cataloguing, the explanations, the methods, contribute vitally to the construction of a world and, equally vitally, to our understanding of the persons who inhabit il.
Surprisingly, Miss Cather persisted in her “sophistication.”She cites Balzac as a possible refutation of her thesis, and then repudiates the possibility. Balzac, she says, needs to be blue-penciled, and adds: “But where is the man who could cut one sentence from the stories of Mérimée?" Then, docs Miss Cat her take Merimee over Balzac? Miss Cather rejected D. H. Lawrence for a similar reason. It is to be doubted that Miss Cather had her critical eye on the main problems.
She reacted to what was an obviously temporary excess as though it were a crucial and permanent dilemma of literature. In her preface to Stephen Crane, in one paragraph she gets off the following related phrases in her war against “realism”: “I doubt whether he ever spent a laborious half-hour in doing his duty by detail-in enumerating, like an honest, grubby auctioneer,” “but he never tried to make a faithful report of everything else within his field of vision, as if he were a conscientious salesman making out his expense account,” “and they have been doing it ever since: accounting for everything, as trustees of an estate are supposed to do.”As to Crane himself, Miss Cather writes: “He is rather the best of our writers in what is called ‘description’ because he is the least describing.”Is this, one wonders, the best she can do for Stephen Crane, or is it, rather, the best she can do for a particular melancholy crotchet of hers?
That Marlowe man
One wonders what Miss Cather would make of Raymond Chandler, who, after a number of difficult years for the thriller-with-elegance aficionado, comes up with a most chandleresque work, entitled The Little Sister (Houghton Mifflin,$2.50).
There is no cataloguing in it, at any rate. Mr. Chandler is far on the other side, using a kind of cryptic shorthand to make his points; and I daresay only the inoculated and inured can follow him out in all the details. Though Mr. Chandler offers more than the usual whodunit manipulator. Along with solutions, he displays a highly colorful prose, an air of quiet poise, and a number of the best-looking women in America.
In the controversy a few years back that raged around the question of the thriller and that brought into the arena some of America’s leading literary critics, I found myself as nearly on Edmund Wilson’s side as I could be on any. He had exclaimed: Who cares what happens to a charaeter when the character has never been brought to life! Mr. Chandler’s virtues, from Mr. Wilson’s “ post of observation,” are merely diversions, thrown in to entertain and amuse. They are embellishments; they are not intrinsic elements that transform the genre. Mr. Chandler is skillful, but his characters are still puppets, and Mr. Chandler is still a puppeteer. And Mr. Chandler, over and beyond his avowal that Dashiell Hammett is his master, is immensely indebted to Hammett and the whole genre. He rings all the conventions, including the Hammett-Chandler ones; and where he has no room for a “fat man ” and his punk “gunsel,” he brings it in as a gag, signature-wise.
If one has to undergo an operation in a primitive area where there are no anesthetics, I can recommend no better substitute than a good thriller in general, and Mr. Chandler’s The Little Sister in particular. The genre at its best is an efficacious annihilator of time, a silencer of the chariot wheels (which at one’s back one always hears), and Mr. Chandler’s contribution is simply that he mutes time’s clocks a little more than most.
The outside world
I did not read Constantine Fitz Gibbon’s earlier novel, The Arabian Bird, which was acclaimed as more than highly promising. He has nowpublished The Iron Hoop (Knopf, $3.00), and I don’t think it could be said that this new work is a realization of high promise— though the author still promises. It is a strange little novel of a great nation that has been defeated in a war and the life in it during an occupation. “The Iron Hoop” has reference to the ruined remnants of a city, which it are out of bounds though adjacent to “the new city,” and in which still lives a mixture of the citizenry of the country — idealists who hate the occupation, gangsters, and old folk who are unable to change their ways.
Mr. Fitz Gibbon plays out a strange love story against this double background of the new city and the iron hoop: an apparently cold, competent, very much married Captain, newly arrived and the nephew of the General in command, who immediately becomes infatuated with a native girl, aged about eighteen, devastatingly innocent and beautiful. The Captain, as far its one can tell, is immaculately uninfluenced: he goes about his business, whatever it is, unhampered by wife or military superiors; the girl has a powerful god, a man called The Hero, an idealist who is hopelessly plotting against the occupation and who has brought Anna up from childhood. (Quite decently, it should be added.)
The relationship between the Captain and the girl (he gets her a flat in the new city) apparently is as happy a time as either of them has known. The breakoff is rather inconsequential, and leads one to believe that Mr. Fitz Gibbon was too intent on writing from the tragic view. His novel contains it not a shred. Just why it doesn’t is at the heart of she book’s strengths and weaknesses.
To write a tragic novel is, I believe, to create destiny, some form of relentlessness, which is character, the human being living out his life in his destined way. At one time if was thought that the tragic hero had to be a noble or heroic man and thus had to be of noble birth. Melyille, for one, showed that a man could be a tragic hero no matter from what class he sprang, so long as he possessed, or was possessed by, a destiny. Ahah, in Moby-Dick, may be cited as such an example (though even he is debatable for other reasons).
Mr. Fitz Gibbon fails even to get close to this fundamental requisite of tragedy. His Captain is an uninteresting— and unintended, I am almost certain—enigma. Nothing he says, nothing he does, no act, no gesture, gains him feeling, sensibility, or intelligence. The reader simply does not know about this Captain; Mr. Fitz Gibbon has not fixed him. As a consequence, what he does has no kind of necessity behind it, and certainly no urgency. His separation from Anna at the end of the story does manage a kind of pathos, chiefly because of an extraordinary at mosphere that Mr. Fitz Gibbon very nicely has exacted from his labors.
This atmosphere establishes itself as something as close to a toy world atmosphere as I can imagine; and it has relevance and pathos because the heroine is a little like a lovely toy doll. I do not intend this as minimization: there is something right about it, something toylike or dreamlike about the world of a protracted occupation, particularly at its margins — and it is at such a world’s margins that The Iron Hoop is played out. In some respects the story is that of the outsider living in an outside world. There is justness in what Mr. Fitz Gibbon has done; but there is no justness in thus claiming for his dramatis personae a gratuitous life. It is the problem of the artist that he reconcile disparates and even opposites; in this case, that he sustain his dream atmosphere and yet construct machines of necessity.
There are touches in Mr. Fitz Gibbon that are admirable. At the outset of the story, for example, the Captain hears the train’s wheels: Oh kiss me please kiss me please kiss me oh kiss me please kiss me please kiss me. It is an irony that one only dimly suspects: the Captain is sitting alongside of his wife, whom he really loathes. And at the story’s end, again, the Captain beside his wife, and the wheels: Oh kiss me oh kiss me oh kiss me oh please kiss me please kiss me, and so on; and all that has gone between, the happiness he had so briefly experienced in kissing Anna, asserts itself in a bitter-sweet irony that is really splendidly effective. As a painter I knew used to say: “Ah, if only I could carry out this part through the whole canvas.”
Constant the inconstant
It has remained for Harold Nicolson to write the definitive life of the fabulous, the wretched, the quite brilliant Benjamin Constant (Doubleday, $4.00). How extraordinary that Constant once said thgt he was the most real of men: he is! He possesses all the weaknesses of the ordinary man and, though Mr. Nicolson does an amazing detective job in discovering the inner life of the writerstatesman, he is most real in that he is the raw lump of experience itself, without shape or form — until transformed from the potential work of art that men are into the realized work of art. That is to say, Mr. Nicolson achieves, without gross distortion, a credible coherence in the chaotic and weak-willed M. Constant. That, after all, is the biographer’s main task: to see into his subject as the subject, given impossible objectivity, would sec into himself. Mr. Nicolson sees with a balanced and decorous nicety; above all, he is convincing. It is also reassuring to see M. Constant from the inside instead of from the outside as an unfortunate aspect, of Madame de Staël.
Mr. Nicolson’s thesis, or disclosure, is that Benjamin Constant possessed a “compelling intelligence” that was tragically unaccompanied by a “decisive will.” Mr. Nicolson demonstrates Constant’s intelligence as he demonstrates his indecision. Not only ihat: Mr. Nicolson shows Constant’s rationalizations of his will-lessness, and how circumstances — specifically the women in his life, and more specifically Madame de Staël — ensnared him and would have made will-less a far more intransigent character.
As Madame do Staël remarked to Constant’s wife, Benjamin has the talent of pity. How much was pity, how much weakness, how much was altruism, how much sloth, is a fascinating quandary in Constant. Surely no one had his hands so full as Constant when he “ took on ” the amazing Madame do Stael, who, when she discovered Constant’s desire to make an exit, threatened him, threatened herself, made public scenes, had her son challenge him to a duel, sued him for money in the law courts, and created a fearful slander about him. And yet to behold a powerful woman reduced to pathetic weakness is not an easy experience — particularly for one who had the “talent of pity.”
And so Constant’s life dragged itself out : women he could not flee from, women he could not possess; duels (twenty of them; the last, when he was in crutches, from an armchair); pamphlets—for the Bourbons, against them, but always for liberty (at least this was consistent); against Napoleon and yet, a week after, drafting for Napoleon the famed Additional Act.
What sort of man was Benjamin Constant? Tall, thin, ungainly, with red hair and green spectacles and an undiminishing taste for British parliamentarism, one must conclude — even from Mr. Nicolson’s splendid account — that the indecisive will dominated the life more than the compelling intelligence. He left behind two works of some lasting interest — a brief novel entitled Adolphe, and his Journal Intime — along with his numerous distinguished political pamphlets.
As Mr. Nicolson accounts the story, M. Constant wasted an appalling amount of time; he was also led into ideological alleyways by the women he was enamored of. One has the regrettable feeling that Constant failed by far to realize his talents. He had impressed Goethe during his Weimar visit. And he wrote letters at the age of twelve that Sainte-Beuve stated were too adult to be authentic. Here is one to his grandmother:—
“ Do you know that I am now going out into society at least twice a week? I have a smart suit, a sword, my hat under my arm, one hand on my chest, the other on my hip. I can hold myself upright and play the big boy as well as I can. 1 walch, I listen and up to now I do not envy society its pleasures. People do not appear to care for each other very much. But I do get a certain amount of emotion from watching the gaming tables and seeing the gold coins spin.”
No, the literary man never quite measured up to the boy. But the gaming man did: all of Constant’s adult life was dominated by the gambler, both literally and spiritually.