BOOKS
41
fortunes, far from 'accepting with pleasure,' have taken the more direct
and desperate course and are legally lynching a poor fish peddler who can
scarcely speak English. Mr. De Voto keeps such characters in the back–
ground. But they are there nevertheless to show that when his aristocrats
become frank and serious, they leave his verbosity behind and act, as far
as the historical moment will allow, like any other fascist.
Mr. Halper's failure is less complete, for he has at least written a
readable novel. But it has the same source in an unrecognized intention.
I do not doubt that he thought he was writing in
The Foundry
a proletarian
novel while the very legs of his desire were carrying him into a bourgeois
one. At the present time one cannot write a proletarian novel, even though
he has Sinclair Lewis' eagle eye for detail, if he has been intoxicated by Mr.
Priestly's good nature. What Mr. Halper has written is an interesting
bourgeois novel of what went on in a foundry during the bustling days of
prosperity. It simply doesn't count that the boss is a tyrant. Not only
is his tyranny accepted, but it is compensated for by glimpses into his
family life, by his heart disease, by his rare moments of generosity, by the
important fact that there are no wage disputes. He is a Victorian figure
treated in the Dickensian manner that makes tyranny amusing by emphasiz–
ing not its consequences but its grotesque appearance. The foundry is not
precisely one happy family, but it is a place where ineffectual grumbling
is an a<;cepted practice which leads to nothing more serious than occasiOnal
sabotage. The men arc wage slaves, and knowing it, they make the best
of it by the distraction of love affairs and picnics and by accepting it as
the way of the world to which some of their superiors even have to submit.
The only dissenting voice is a dour workman of the wobbly persuasion, the
most improbable character in the book, who is kept in the background,
almost like the villain of Gothic romance. Now all this was once true
of American industrial life. But readers will hardly take Mr. Halper's
novel in the historical sense when he has not himself frankly taken it as
such. Yet if they don't, if it is regarded as a transcription of the present,
it becomes a romantic delusion for boss, workmen, and reading public
alike.
If
the critic escapes, it is that the style has already aroused his
suspicions.
...
'Zeke!'
"The older man becomes petrified. In a flash he remembers
(oh, how he remembers!) that he has forgotten something very im–
portant which should not have been forgotten. And what terror can
be instilled into that word-Zeke! His legs, alas, are already knock–
ing together."
It is the offensive picaresque of an author who has his eye not on the
life about him, but upon a melodramatic 'effect.' Mr. Halper has walked
quite through and away from Union Square.
The same comment will not apply to Farrell's
Calico Shoes.
These
are short stories that reach in a variety of directions.
Meet the Girls
in the direction of Dorothy Parker's romantic cynicism,
Helw I
Love
You
of Caldwell's frank reporting of adolescent sensuality,
Twenty-five
