40
PARTJ,SAN REVIEW
of Gide, of Proust, of Romains, of our best literary people, it is that
aristocracy nowadays can't be taken
s~riously.
The attempt becomes a
patent hypocrisy. Mr. De Voto's people do not really accept with pleasure
the terms of their existence. For the most part they accept them with the
New Englander's determination not to lose his teJ;Ilper, which means that
on occasion he will do so dreadfully. The consequence is that Mr. De
Voto's detail is not analysis but repetition. The simple accumulation of
the superficial does not by sheer weight become the profound, but only the
boresome. Mr. De Voto has given us to the full this world of survival
values that are not recognized as such but have taken on the quality of
wish-fulfillment, this world of emotions that are decorous even when they
are bohemian and will rarely admit their prejudice and their secret intensity.
And, taking them only at their face value, the novel cannot stand the
strain. As he repeats in one context after another the same types of polite
boredom, of the great renunciation, of amiable chit-chat, the same sort
of humor or the same sort of dignity, the same style of conversation, his
narrative must grow more and more monotonous save, perhaps, tor those
who, habituated to this sort of life have lost their perspective, and come
to believe the Sacco-Vanzetti case is important to them because they do so
much talking about it.
But there is another reason besides this social one for Mr. De Voto's
garrulity. His detail is needed to conceal his uncertainty about the theme
of his novel. He began it probably under the inspiration of Virginia
Woolf's
The Waves.
But his attempt to escape the imitation debased the
intended theme. There is considerable value implicit in Mrs. Woolf's
revealing of the way in which childhood attachments may survive into and
govern the relationships of maturity. But the psychological significance
of this idea cannot survive its transfer to the temporary superficial attach–
ments of young men in war-time, when the groundwork of personality is
already formed and the whole environment abnormal. I cannot help feel–
ing besides, that it is abhorrently superficial to romanticize these as the
good old days one longs to see return even if the emphasis is wholly laid
on lost personal relationships. But the real theme of the book is the
curious unrecognized translation of this intended one. What Mr. De
Voto's ancient families of New England long for as they mope about the
greenery of their estates or peer from their exclusive clubs into the dreadful
foreign reality of the streets, what they crave when they turn to cursing
Sacco and Vanzetti, is to put their lives on the only safe foundatiun . They
know that their financial support by the lower classes is not enough. What
they crave is the spiritual support of adoration. They miss the scenes
from the old novels, the lord smiling down upon his cheering peasants.
If
they think they 'accept with pleasure,' it is that they know they must make
the best of a situation they are unabl e accurately to recognize. Their
·pretense of liberalism and of justice is only another groping for their
necessary support in public esteem. Neither they nor Mr. De Voto sees
the significance of the fact that the minority among them who have some
primitive frankness left, the lawyers who are still adding to the family
