BOOKS
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contrary its virtues are precisely the reverse: its style is highly wrought
and meticulous, its plotting-with the careful planting of clues and
the almost ballet-like balance of its characters-is carefully contrived,
and its imaginative creation, though it has the advantage of coming from
a real involvement in the Boston world, is invention rather than recol–
lection. Its weaknesses, as well, come from the defects of contrivance
and invention. The characterization, though brilliant in its external
finish, is not often very dense, and the big scenes and big emotions rarely
come off with much real intensity. So Hopestill's, catastrophe is perhaps
the least authentic sequence in the novel, and when Sonie tells us that
she was "ignited with jealousy" she does not remind us of Swann's pas–
sion for Odette, or Marcel's for Albertine. It is perhaps difficult to
create passion out; of invention alone.
Yet where the theme lies within the range of the muted style and of
the natural insight which arises from Sonie's tone of critical resignation,
I do not think that the scenes could be much better done. So for my
money the quiet desperation of the final scene, its calm presentation
without underlining and without self-pity, is infinitely more terrifying
than Hopestill's disaster. Nothing happens, except that we are able to
share Sonie's own clear but despairing view of her future. It has been
long
prepa~;ed.
She has furnished out of random scraps from her memory
a red room which she sees in moments of almost will-less trance. She
describes the red room as a sanctuary for her spirit, but it is a sanctuary
with the capacity of turning to nightmare, one which even in its com–
forting aspect terrifies her with the recollection of her mother's split–
witted mania. So we see her at the end with Hopestill dead, with her
confidant Nathan Kadisch departed, without friends, with no escape but
mania from the grasping and indestructible Miss Pride. The last words
have an admirable but deadly restraint:
"She looked again as she had done when I was five years old in Chichester;
her flat omniscient eyes seized me, grappled with my brain, extracted what
was there, and her meager lips said, 'Sonie, my dear, come out of the cold.
You'll never get to be an old lady if you don't take care of yourself.'"
Certainly Sonie's reaction to circumstance is not to be explained
as that of the .ordinary person subjected to extraordinary social pressures;
it is that of the extraordinary person for whom any society might provide
the particular arena of her suffering. In that sense hers is a private
world; but it is a private world whose doors remain open at least to co -
..-mon sympathy. And at its best the private world is a whole and consistent
one,unified by style, by tone which arises from character, and by the
faithfulness of character itself to circumstance. It is at least another way
of recommending a book to say that its best insight is independent of
Boston, or even of any wider dilemma of contemporary society.
ANDREWS WANNING
