110
PARTISAN REVIEW
novelist who is telling the story appears only to have slept with
his
wife, an inhibited and extremely unattractive woman, and once with
a London bitch, a stage designer, whom his son speedily wins away
from him. (Indeed, if there is any trend to be observed in these three
best-sellers, it is a trend toward sexual purity.)
Aside from its energy, the book has another element which has
doubtless endeared it to its public. That is, its double-barrelled plot.
It is a success story which suddenly goes into reverse. Thus the reader
is allowed to identify himself with the Man Who Gets Ahead, and
also to revenge himself on that Man for being exceptional. As in the
David-Absalom story from which the book gets its title, the hero is
raised up to almost godlike heights, and then, as a punishment for
his pride, quickly, brutally cast down to the level of common hu–
manity. It is interesting that in both the popular Biblical story and in
the popular modern novel the revenge is visited on the person of the
son and only indirectly on the father. This is, I suppose, because the
reader has so thoroughly identified himself with the father that the
father must not be permitted personally to fail: only a certain part
of him, a projection of the "bad" side of him, his son, can be shame–
fully laid low.
Of these three best-sellers, all are escapist in the sense that they
offer the reader a vicarious life. But in this sense all popular literature
is escapist, and, indeed, all literature can be said to contain an element
of escapism. Yet in the sense that the word is being used today, none
of these novels quite meets the bill. None of them offers the reader a
one-way ticket to a glorious, adventurous and remote past where pres–
ent-day problems dissolve in the mist of romance. These best-sellers,
judged by what is inside them rather than by their subject-matter or
milieu, are just about what best-sellers have always been. When one
compares them to the best-sellers of five and ten years ago, only one
important difference is apparent. Five and ten years ago, many of the
best-sellers exuded cultural pretensions. The "literary," decorative,
and pseudo-philosophical novel had a great vogue:
The Bridge of
San Luis Rey,
and, more recently, James Hilton's
Lost Horizon
ex–
emplified the type. Today, the best-sellers (and this applies not only
to the three current leaders but to the whole list) are singularly unam–
bitious. Mrs. Rawlings' book is well written, but neither it nor any of
the others gives the book-buyer the notion that he is improving
him–
self by reading it. This is a step in the direction of greater frankness
on the part of both author and audience, but what it portends I can–
not say. It may be that the gap between the popular taste and the
cultivated taste, which the women's clubs, the book supplements, the
daily reviewers; and the book clubs once attempted to bridge, is again
widening, and a return to the era of Elinor Glyn, E. M. Hull and
Zane Grey is being foreshadowed. Or it may be that nobody takes
fiction very seriously any more.
