BOOKS
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upper-middle class boy, constant good fortune and inner freedom that
are characteristic not of life but of a sharp selecting and transforming
memory.
In this respect the experiences of
Chronicle of Dawn
are surprisingly
like the experiences of
The Lost Weekend
with the important differences
that Pepe is an imaginative boy and not a sentimental man of 33, that
he is well and not sick, and that he is genuinely admired and genuinely
capable of outgoing love, the only protagonist of any of these four novels
of whom this is true. But he is constantly in trouble, constantly per–
forming aggressive and prankish stunts of the most destructive kind,
yet nothing really disturbs him, he always escapes serious punishment,
and always retains the warm love of the girl Valentina and the pro–
tecting, astonished adults.
Pepe has the same dreams of omnipotence as Don Birnam, but he
actually accomplishes them in an apparently real world. His goal, picked
up from a hymnal, is to be "Lord of Power, Love, and Wisdom," and
with the other boys, whom he leads, with Valentina, and with his exami–
ners, he is these things. But the book goes far deeper than
The Lost
Weekend
in dreaming away burdens. Sender seems deliberately to take
the most disquieting symbols and give them a counter-Freudian inno–
cence. One scene, for instance, perfectly represents the castration fear
which is supposed to haunt boys. In showing off before Valentina, Pepe
wounds his finger with a gun. He conceals this from his father, who
thinks he is going insane, and takes him off to the doctor who finds a
bullet embedded in the joint. The doctor praises him extravagantly for
his courage, and wins over the father. Pepe comes home a hero, un–
disturbed.
Pepe is a Spanish Tom Sawyer, with none of Tom's fears, regrets,
moral scruples. He is always confident, naive and high-spirited. He
"immolates" pigeons and sprinkles their blood on Valentina; he finds
his way through underground passages near an old castle among ancient
coins, manuscripts and the bones of the long dead. After telling a peasant
that the doctor would pay for such bones, if cleaned, he comes upon
him
stirring in a boiling pot the fresh corpse of a woman. But this horror
is taken as lightly as the excitement of keeping bullfrogs in a hotel
bathroom. His world receives his every impulse and transforms it to his
greater glory. Only in the last sentence does the shadow fall again.
Albe1
t
Guerard does not give the iiiusion of freedom in a private
world. John Richmond in
The Hunted
is seen from the outside, shrunk
to something less than his natural dimensions. His is not the irrespon–
sibility of the alcoholic or the spiritual withdrawal of a defeated hero.
He is a responsible person in a real world, contemptible but unimpor–
tant. Like Don Birnam, he is infantile, incapable of anything except
self-love and living in daydreams of power. Don Birnam looked con–
stantly in mirrors; John Richmond makes records of his own readings
E:.
