BOOKS
539
tial decision; that is, the idea that a decision is possible is necessary
if
one
is to be human ("merely human," for the last words of the book are: "she
did not believe in God") even though the price paid for holding that idea
may he destruction. The conclusion then would seem to be a somewhat
more modest version of the lines,
0 God of our flesh, return us to your wrath,
Let us
be
evil could we enter in
Your grace, and fatten on the
sto~
path!
But perhaps this interpretation does not reckon with the Foreword:
"For the search is not conclusive: there is no deciding which of these per–
sonalities is the 'real' one; the home address of the self, like that of the
soul, is not to be found in the book." But how serious, or how coy, is this
disclaimer? At what level are we to take it? Does
it
merely apply to
Margaret Sargent, the "case," or are we to take it in its extensions? But
can it
be
said to apply to the Margaret Sargent who speaks the last lines of
the book? For if that Margaret Sargent asks to he preserved in disunity,
she is affirming the value of the quest for "moral identity," and if there is
a "quest" there must
be
a "quester." And this quester is another self pre–
sumably, different from the six selves previously described-a kind of
Over-self, should one say, who survives all the transformations and masks.
If
the hook does not give the address of this self, it seems, as has been
indicated a paragraph hack, to express, nevertheless, some faith in its
existence. But the Foreword may he denying faith in the existence of
that self-or is it?-who, after all, may he taken to be the leading, though
un-nanied, character in this novel, as in all novels. There seems to be
some difficulty here in resolving an irony, an ambiguity.
Perhaps if this leading character had been named, the hook would
have had a greater degree of unity in the ordinary fictional sense. But if
that leading character had been named, the irony implicit in the method
might have appeared more edged, more central. As matters stand, it may
be that the basic unity is one of tone-a dry, analytical, satirical tone which
is maintained with rarely flagging expertness from beginning to end. The
satire, the analysis, is applied impartially to the heroine and to the various
worlds through which she passes-the world of Mr. Sheer, of the man in
the Brooks Brothers shirt, of the genial host, of the intellectual as Yale
man, of the psychoanalyst. Those worlds are left in tatters, and the reader
is certainly inclined to say, "And a damned good thing, too." But on
second thought the reader may be inclined, without surrendering any of
his satisfaction in the destruction accomplished, to ask a question about
the origin of the blast which did the job. What are the premises of the
satire? What are the standards implicit here? Does the satire originate
merely from a lively distaste for fraud and imposture?
If
so, ·by what
norms are these to be determined? Or does it originate from a vigorous
appetite for breakage? Does one have a sense of the terms on which the
author would pick up the pieces and put them back together again? Per–
haps here the reader is left with the sense of an ambiguity similar to that
