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PARTISAN REVIEW
and plays them over to himself. Don Birnam imagined himself a great
pianist or Shakespearean actor; John Richmond, locked in his office,
stages fights between pieces of paper. On one is written his own name,
on the other the name of the reigning heavyweight champion. John
always wins.
Why should Guerard have undertaken once again to demolish this
familiar figure of satirical novels and college campuses, the futile,
af–
fected, middle-aged poet and teacher, still trading on the promise of
some early verse? His is hardly the figure that threatens us in the
present world. Guerard's intensity is understandable only if it is inter–
preted as rebellion against those qualities in himself-sensitivity, imagi–
nation, culture, learning-that seem to have failed him or to have
made present realities that much more difficult to bear. There is a good
deal of masochism in the elaborate public humiliation of one of the least
admirable possessors of those qualities.
Like Don Birnam, John Richmond has a lovable woman completely
devoted to him, a singing waitress in a nearby milltown whom he married
in a moment of desperation and took back to live at the college with him.
She accepts his values, tries to conform, loves him for the child he is.
But full of neurotic jealousies and the need to hurt, John betrays Claire
in more ways than Don Birnam did Helen. The dissolute students and
prying faculty wives hasten the destruction of the marriage, which
breaks up against the grandiose background of a flood and a manhunt,
grotesquely unsuited in their violence to the pettiness of the principal
character.
Guerard sets up no counter-values to the ones he degrades, unless
they are in the line of army trucks that come roaring through at the end.
Not only are there no ideas or social implications, but the explanations
of how the characters came to be are even more sketchy than in
The
Lost Weekend.
John Richmond and the Bomber, the hunted man, who
is a pathological liar, a rapist, a swindler of college students, are each
given a few disturbing memories like those of Don Birnam, gestures
toward case histories which are part of the formula of fashionable novels.
Why the symbolic heroine, with a highly pathogenic history of state
farms and degrading employment, turns out to be so completely healthy,
loving, unselfish, is left a wishful mystery.
In
Strange Fruit
by Lillian Smith, which is the most serious, though
not the best, of these novels, the history is complete and terrible, and
· fully involves the responsible reader. Tracey Deen, an upper-middle
class Southerner, was nursed at the breast of a Negro mammy who loved
and cared for him, and whom he loved. A grown man, surrounded by
white women, wife, sister, and sweetheart who wish to shape his life,
women who are frigid or incomplete, he continues his long romance
with a Negro girl who completely satisfies him in the moments he is
with her. But the social pressures of his daytime life finally conquer
