BOOKS
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of what Mr. Harrison talks about. But the fact is unconsciously admitted
by the author himself when, little more than half way through his
"story" he finds himself compelled to abandon novel structure for play
structure. That this section (some sixty pages) is the best part of the
book artistically proves my contention further and suggests that Mr.
Harrison might have been more successful in turning his theme into a
play altogether.
Plot there is no semblance of. Simply, there is a P. Herbert. Simpson
who is an oboist, has a wife who plays bridge and severely limits his sex–
life, and who indulges in remarkable daydreams. These daydreams form
the substance of the book and in themselves are so real as to make the
dreamer and his life totally unearthly. Thus, while we find vivid descrip–
tions of fighting in Spain as credible as any press dispatch (though
infinitely better done) and Captain Pedro Seemson quite tangible a part
of this fighting, it is impossible to realize that such grand visions are
figments of the imagination of an innocuous little liberal-minded oboist!
Mr. Simpson also meets with more success than any of us in daydreaming
a conversation with President Roosevelt on Fifth Avenue (cleverly amus–
ing and satirically anti-Stalinist) ; in envisioning an altercation between
Browder 1932 and Browder 1937; in conjuring up Lenin, unable to
sleep for Stalin's crimes, shot trying to escape from his grave; in creating
a dream-lover, Natasha, who spurs him on to participation in the
October Revolution; and takes him to a Czarist bacchanale where she
jilts him (evidently symbolic of the betrayed dreams of the world
proletariat. )
There is an Ascaso, a Spanish revolutionist of 1917 turned violinist
who launches off into such involved, factional politics as the tragedy
of Spanish anarchism and the
P.O.V .M.,
the difference between a united
front and a popular front, the Stalinist murder of the revolutionary
leaders Andres Nin and Camillo Berneri, almost as the Anarchist
Van–
guard
or the Trotskyist
New International
would describe them.
And a third gentleman, a cynical novelist named Darrell, who
delivers a whole (not to say posthumous) phillipic against Third Period
"proletarian literature" theories, pOOl' ghosts!
Now these three cross all the proletarian battlefields of the last
quarter of a century. In the end, Ascaso, refusing to succumb to the
widespread disillusionment in revolution, predicts that the workers will
again "take to the road of revolutionary struggle" (in which we agree) ;
Darrell ironically laughs that "the dialectical method is completely sub–
stantiated. . . . The revolutionists have killed the revolution" for good
apparently; Mr. Simpson merely goes home to die in a nightmare not
having said anything except that he is very bewildered and depressed.
Which seems to re-unite the conflicting three Misters Harrison in the
one; and which seems to indicate emphatically that had the author
called his protagonists Misters Harrison 1, 2, and 3, and the book, A
Political Trialogue-if an outright Shavian satire was unsuited to him
-he would have been more honest with himself and with the reader.
DANffiL JAMES
