482
PARTISAN REVIEW
which has been little exploited by the more furious realists. His novel is
about a New York suburb, the mere stuffiness of which is made to flare
suddenly into outright violence. Hays shares with Faulkner and Caldwell
a joy in extravagant caricature and deliberate outrageousness; like them
he operates in a curious borderland of sensibility, half serious, half
burlesque.
Lie Down in Darkness
is written out of a frank loathing for its
milieu and its characters and is therefore pure melodrama; it has all
the intensity and well-known limitations of that approach. Margaret
Schuyler, who murders her best friend in order to come into her fortune,
is actuated by self-seeking malignancy and hasn't a virtue to her name.
Yet her aggressiveness, her cruel snobberies and prejudices, make her a
believable and even rathe11 fearfully familiar type of woman.
If
she car–
ries her special form of unpleasantness to the point of actual crime, that
is because, as I take it, she is intended to represent the middle-class un–
conscious. By boldly working this principle, Mr. Hays succeeds in raising
Margaret from a common case of the mean-spirited bourgeoise to the
stature of a murderess without violating the credibility of her character.
It
is true that
L ie Down in Darkness
is noG quite a first-rate novel; but
its shortcomings spring from the author's defective brilliance and not,
as De Voto would probably say, from his pessimism. Writers today are
seldom sufficiently free from intimate anxieties to see life steadily and
see it whole. In Mr. Hays' rude version of suburban life there is some
truth-enough, at any rate, to make a good novel.
F. W. DuPEE
CRoss-SECTION.
A collection of new American writing. Edited by Edwin
Seaver.
L.
B. Fischer Publ. Corp.
$3.50
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, 1944,
Edite,d by Martha Foley.
Houghton Mifflin Co.
$2.75
B
ETWEEN these latest collections of the "best" and the "new" in Amer–
ican writing, there is not much difference in either tone or quality,
which is perhaps not quite as it should be, but probably, alas, no more
than we can expect. The ambitions evident in either are fairly on a level;
the "new" writers are by no means voices in the wilderness; they
~
not daring, experimental, or rofound; scarcely any are not could-be,
fia;e-been, and will:Oe pu lished writers, and published, what is more,
in the very periodicals in which, "for one reason or another,"' they were
not getting a hearing at the moment when Mr, Seaver sent out his call
for the "worthwhile writing" he figured was around somewhere.
It
is
still around somewhere, and a hundred fat bedside miscellanies like this
could be sifted through for one small volume of real distinction.
This is not to say that this collection fails conspicuously; there is
some robust emotionalism (especially on behalf of the Negro) , able and
sometimes even sophisticated writing. For power and imagination, how-
