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PARTISAN REVIEW
and must contribute to the working out of such themes, passion; or
irony, or wisdom. Wallace Stevens has said it:
That's it, the more than rational distortion,
The fiction that results frpm feeling.
Passion is conspicuously lacking here, and it is this which makes it
possible to put this book down feeling, at the end, like the rather doubt–
ful hero, a "deathly weariness," not because what has been dealt with
is decay, disillusion, disappointment, the death of the spirit, but because
these inescapable horrors have not been illumined in an adequately af–
fecting way.
It
is difficult to be concerned with characters whose actions are
motivated by compulsions neither of the mind or the heart. The wife
who flees from the discovery of her husband's infidelity, does so blindly,
and takes a lover of her own and at the end deserts him with the same
kind of sentimental capriciousness; the husband who becomes a woman's
lover from some quirk of feeling that his understanding should have
forced him to disregard, and leaves her in the same spirit of wanton
irresponsibility, follows his wife (apparently mostly from dread of the
ennui of spending the ten days remaining to him before a trip to Europe,
alone in New York), and thinks to himself as he goes: "I do not know
why I am going."
Miss Gordon has, from the highly unreal relationship of this Jim
and Catherine Chapman, hung the rest of her novel. Since it is not
straight narrative, she has employed, like the good writer that she is,
the devices of rapid transition in time and sensibility, elision, evocation,
all darting and circular techniques, to enrich her novel. It is the poet's
method, and given the essentially static situation, a suggestive and useful
one. It provides a series of events otherwise only arbitrarily connected,
with a genuine unity, although it fails to draw the characters, often
violently involved, out of their complete spiritual isolation from one
another.
In Catherine's childhood-home there are three women relatives,
who, though recomposing on the same stem, fall separately to the
ground; the aged grandmother whose mind is caught entirely in the
past, her pathetic daughter, whose life time and drudgery have gnawed
meaninglessly; the homely cousin, who long ago suffered too great an
emotional shock. On the next farm, where things are somewhat livelier,
live a group of people of a more modern stamp; Cousin Elsie, rich,
discontented, wordly ex-expatriate who in defiance of tradition has
razed the ancestral home and set up an imitation Mt. Vernon, her
friend and guest, the urbane and homosexual architect, her son, bel–
ligerently a farmer, who hates his mother and despises her friend and
his predilections. It is this man, this arch-adolescent, to whom Catherine,
having smarted at the hands of her too-intellectual, rootless husband,
turns, without love.
