BOOKS
481
way-though fully appreciative of its ambiguous effect on both creator
and audience. He would allow marriage. He would disallow' most action
since even the best intended action leads to harm unless the doer of
good is all good himself. At one point Sebastian considers "the excru–
ciating problem of sound, honest better-than-averag
oodness" and
ough he supp1ements t e problem with well founded observations,
though one readily enough allows a Bernard Iddings Bell to declaim
that moral goodness does not in the east._ruake u
ru:...
s.ep~u:ati.on
U;om
God-still, a good deal more affronted than amused, one calls a halt.
~
suppose the difference is that one credits Mr. Bell with some
knowledge of and belief in this goodness that he derogates. Huxley has
~ver
been able to crcat a character of e.ve animal healtb His notable
attempts with Mark and Mary Rampion iQ
Point Counter-Point,
for all
the documentation and description, cry aloud their author's disbelief.
His efforts at giving simple goodness its due in the present work con–
stantly run afoul of his conviction that good morals presuppose bad taste
and vice versa. And his versions of sin, a good back door to anybody's
conception of virtue, are
'!\0
singularly lacquered and contrived, so con–
fined within class moulds that they affect one more like the faces of the
devil in old Italian confessionals where there were strings on the inside
the priest could pull to contort the face-curiosities neither edifying nor
titillating and remarkable chiefly for the fact that somebody once was
scared of them.
Allowing for all improvements on his later novels, one is forced in
1944 to underline what
~
wrote of
Point Co.unter-Point.
Also a
novelist, also a moralist and, one might add, an artist Gide wrote, "But
what can I think of a book whose first seventy pages I read attentively
without finding a single character firmly drawn, a single personal thought,
emotion or sensation-not the slightest bait for the heart or the mind
c....vJ_.;
which might invite one. to continue." Though his trap has become
~
progressively more exalted and is not lightly to be denied, Huxley's. bait!)
V..
f
remains what it has always been, aestheticism and methodological sen-'. •
suality.
1- -
-
KATHERINE DE M. HosKINs
LIE
DowN IN DARKNESS.
By
H. R. Hays. Reyna[ and Hitchcock.
$2.50.
B
ERNARD DE voTo has charged the older writers with conspiring to
. represent American life as bleak and terrible whereas it is really
beautiful and fine. Nobody, however, seems to pay any attention to Mr.
DeVoto. To judge by such recent examples of American fiction as
The
Hunted, Strange Fruit, The Lost Week End
and
DanglinR Man,
the new
writers are as grim-sighted as their elders. In
Lie Down in Darkness
an–
other young novelist submits to the influence of Lewis, Faulkner, Cald–
well, Fitzgerald and Nathanael West as readily as if De V.oto had never
thundered. Mr. Hays even discovers terrors in an area of the national life
