58
PARTISAN REVIEW
O'Brien and
Story
magazine. Here we have that cataloguing of types
which, if rural, gets dignified with the pitiful epithet of regionalism and
which proves only that the writer's awareness is not much more profound
than that of his (usually sub-mental) characters. In "The Ginsing Ga-
therers," for example, Howell Vines' attempt to preach a poetic manner
of living is towed under by his endless haphazard accumulation of detail,
so that one is left with nothing but a messy impression of how a certain
kind of people live in a certain place. William Faulkner, whose story
here is hardly indicative of his true quality, also represents this limitation
and its antithesis: the attempt, by means of brutality, to get out of the
intellectual straight-jacket of his regionalism. And the effect of Caldwell's
very successful story "Kneel to the Rising Sun" (successful within the
pattern that he has proposed) is cut off by the same incapacity, the very
horror that he evokes being as local as a bam-dance, without principle
and therefore without real compulsion. This is not to say, of course, that
the writer must "stretch" his material to give it significance. The fault
is one of consciousness, or aversion to it: "The Horn That Called Bam-
bine," though suffering from the tendency toward illiteracy developed
by the regionalists, derives its quiet power precisely from the fact that
Miss Godchaux has perceived her characters from a firm set of values,
and therefore has not needed to make them grotesque.
Such shortcomings are less, I believe, a reflection on Mr. Warren's
editing (He has made the
Southern Review
one of the few magazines
in this country worth serious attention) than on his definitions, and,
more pertinently, on the general situation of creative writing at the
present time. The dilemma is not regional, nor has the answer been
found in one place rather than another. Katherine Anne Porter, for in-
stance, is of the South, but this does not give her measure or affinities,
which are more with Katherine Mansfield and the tradition of French
realism than with her fellow-Southerners in this volume. It would he
hard to find a better illustration of this, among her shorter work, than
"He." In this story, by means of cadence, innuendo, and seemingly care-
less dialogue, she has gradually built up the whole emotional and eco-
nomic complex of a family torn by affection for their idiot son, poverty,
and the desire to keep up some last shred of social front. She has avoided
the sentimentality always so close to such material and apparently so
dear to her compatriots, and what emerges as a dominant quality is
simply completeness of understanding and expression: a quality that she
holds in common with any great writer, and that is surely far more
worthy of critical thought than any allegiance, however well-intentioned,
to the regional present or the long-lost swan-decorated past.
ELEANOR CLARK
