340
PARTISAN REVIEW
but their follies like our own and those of every generation will mainly
effect their judgment of their present which is always so much more
'interesting' than the silly old past.
Miss Bogan, I fancy, is then going to be paid the respect she deserves
when many, including myself, I fear, of those who now have a certain
news value, are going to catch it.
W.
H.
AUDEN
ALL FINGERS AND NO HANDS
The Grand Piano; or, the Almanac of Alienation.
By
Paul Goodman.
Colt
Press. $2.50.
"I trust," says the author, "that certain readers will enjoy a pleasure
appropriate to mine. I trust there is nothing fundamentally unobjection·
able." Modest aims, not difficult of fulfillment if one is clever. But here
the fulfillment falls not quite flat. Except for the delightful hero, a brat
named ·Horatio Alger, this novel is overcast by an irritating inadequacy.
It contains brilliant inventions, piquant comments, neat phrases: "Horace
was neither an adolescent nor an adult and therefore he did not have to
unmake his entire life every time he had to make a sensible judgment."
"The toasters that cast their bread on high and ring the joyous bell." "In
the dead of spring." Many such plums, but the cake?
The plot is delectable. A fabulously wealthy man, a Volpone
a
Ia
Hearst, whose home is a freight-station of art objects, sends a grand piano
to the Algers, a family living on relief. The Alger girl is absorbing the
affections of the man his daughter loves; by the devious psychological
routes Goodman delights in, this and other things lead the miser to get her
in trouble with the relief authorities. Various other alienations and enter·
prises are affected at long or short range by this sly gift: a Society for the
Protection of Vice, a literary movement called Bombism, an interview with
a draft board, a visit to the opera, a dash of incest, etc. In the end, dis·
gusted with his centrifugal offspring, the miser decides to make little
Horatio his heir. While Horatio's elder brother is playing the piano in a
contest for its ownership he is arrested by the draft authorities. The nar·
rative ends as Horatio, who has learned to his grief that the enterprises
of life "day by day let one down to flat conclusions," wires the B-flat
below middle C to an explosive.
This is all very engaging, but hardly a "comedy of humors," as the
author calls it, citing Ben Jonson, of all people. Rather-also in his own
term-it is a "sociological abstraction," as "arid and schematic" as he
feels life itself to be nowadays. This sounds imposing in a preface, but it
turns out to mean that the tale itself is too willed for comedy, too volatile
for satire, too sad for extravaganza. Attacking on all these fronts, it breaks
through in none.
It
has a dream's absurd logic, but not its corporality.
The author seems to be playing a cat-and-mouse game with styles and
attitudes, constantly intruding to quote the Right People from Anacreon to
