200
PARTISAN REVIEW
of Wick and Helen to feel their unhappiness, joins freely in the thefts,
deceptions and betrayals. When the effort is successful and the liquor
obtained, an orgy of ecstatic self-love begins, of medicated euphoria,
of fantasied omnipotence. Here the companionship is less agreeable.
Neither in learning, imagination nor style is Don Birnam-or Charles
Jackson-a De Quincey.
The book would not make such easy and conscienceless reading
if there were any
perspectiv~
by which Birnam could be see'n as object.
He has a college English major's taste for literature, but no acquaintance
with politics or ideas. His plight is explained casually by a couple of
traumatic shocks coming very late in his development. He has not even
the dignity of his approaching doom. The reader can feel superior to
him
without fear or pity. The book is obviously autobiographical and so
much better than might have been expected from Don Birnam that we
know, without having to go through the anguish of it, that he must have
made a magnificent recovery in the same miraculous way that money
is
always turning up for
him
in the book.
Only two valid fears haunt his dream. One is the memory of Portu–
guese fishermen at Provincetown who, polite and subservient in the
summer, came, after the season was over, to torment and threaten
him
at night in his lonely shack. The other is the possibility of his losing his
mind. Both threaten his only real value, a protected, secure world in
which he can enjoy the self-contemplation of narcissism, and the imagi–
native realization of all wishes.
This fear of the impairment of the self from within parallels (but
with how much less emotion and drama and meaning!) the threat of
impairment of the self from without in the real world of the concen–
tration camps, where the chief effort of the prisoners who escape physical
destruction is to will the retention of the self with which they entered,
and the chief purpose of the camp is to degrade and transf-orm that self.
The character whose boyhood Ramon Sender pretends to record
in
Chronicle of Dawn
is interned in a French camp after Republican
defeats in the Spanish war. As long as resistance to Franco lasts, he
studies his artillery textbook and prepares to return to the fight. But
when Madrid and Valencia surrender, he loses interest in the present.
Giving his chances to escape to others, he spends his time writing
the reminiscences of his childhood. When the book is finished, he lets
himself die, since he feels that men of virtue and dignity can no longer
I
live in the European present without being corrupted.
This attitude seems unnatural to the vitality and self-confidence of
the boy whose adventures are related and in whose experiences Sender
must have shared. The narrator, with whom Sender expresses disagree–
ment, is apparently used to explain the unworldly detachment of these
memoirs, which in turn are credible only as the narcissist fantasies of
a defeated man, for they attribute to the delightful Pepe, a favored
