Books
WASTEAND CASTE
THE LOST WEEKEND.IYy
Charles Jackson. Farrar
&
Rinehart.
$2.50.
CHRONICLE OF DAWN.
By Ramon J. Sender. Doubleday, Doran.
$2.50.
THE HUNTED.
By Albert Guerard. Alfred A. Knopf.
$2.50.
STRANGE FRUIT.
By Lillian Smith. Reynal
&
Hitchcock.
$2.75.
T
HESE FOUR
novels, selected simply because they looked interesting, turn
out to have striking similarities. All describe the regression or restric–
tion of the self in weak and defeated men (three of them writers) . In
two of the novels the defeat is the significant result of significant social
experience. In the other two it is, dramatically speaking, causeless, but
permits the author or reader vicarious satisfactions of an understandable
and unpleasant kind. Each of the four "heroes" is loved by an admiring,
cherishing, rather unbelievable woman, selfless and good, a woman who
is more than the mother sought by those rejecting maturity. With her
loving repose set against the limitless cruelties and aggressions of the
outer world, she seems to represent a turning away from masculinity itself.
Despite this, two of the books,
The Lost Weekend
and
Chronicle
of Dawn,
can be read with almost light-hearted wonder because of their
authors' illusive skill in substituting an interior world for the real one.
As
in comedies, fairy tales and dreams, plausible events occur in exag–
gerated form and with abnormal inconsequence, the demands of society
can go unheeded, our anxieties are relieved, and the hero-pathetic,
weak, ingenious, lovable, boastful-survives moral or physical violence
that in our world would surely destroy him.
The vision of
The Lost Weekend
is completely infantile. Don
Birnam makes parents of his brother Wick and the girl Helen. They
feed and clothe him, give him money, tend his wounds, protect him
from temptation. Unlike parents, they never reproach or punish, they
demand nothing from him, not even the retum of their love. It is the
ideal neurotic situation, shaped and justified by abandonment to drink.
When Wick and Helen do try, tactfully and intelligently, to prevent
Don's drinking, they become authorities to be tricked and circumvented;
the quest for liquor becomes a glorious game without rules or penalties,
but with enough hazards and difficulties to make it exciting. The reader,
accepting the premise of alcoholic irresponsibility, seeing the situation
entirely from within Don Birnam's mind, not allowed to know enough
