256
PARTISAN REVIEW
Ramuz's failure to provide the essentials of narrative and characterization
(if such a theme can bear novelistic development) leaves his story at
the level of a ·tour-de-force. He dissipates his opportunities for poetry
in a purple flood, but nevertheless achieves some remarkably vivid de–
scriptions of human suffering.
A book which is not about the war and at the same time not
"escapist" enjoys real distinction these days. First novels by writers who
are not war correspondents frequently fall into this category.
The Ghostly
Lover
by Elizabeth Hardwick is such a novel, an apparently autobio–
graphical or self-oriented story in which the author is free from external
political or moral pressures, but suffers the cramp of the narrow range.
Miss Hardwick takes her heroine, Marian Coleman, through girlhood
and young womanhood, describing her life with her brother and grand–
mother in a southern town, her shiftless adolescent parents, her educa–
tion in N(;w York and her escape from the oblivion of early and
ill–
advised marriage to which her brother has succumbed. First novels are
the hardest: one is under constraint to say something new, but obsessive
early experience, not yet lived down, insists on fidelity, and early experi–
ence is usually the same old thing: sex, parents, love, adjustment, etc.
Miss Hardwick's success in balancing her story between her own demands
and the demands she is trying to meet as a novelist is moderate. Her
skill at characterization is, however, considerable.
Cannery Row,
I should imagine, is the most successful of current
escapist novels, and certainly the least pretentious. It is quite a problem,
incidentally, to explain how novels of this type-sentimental, sugary,
tending toward the level of the pulps--can possess charm and delight.
Steinbeck tells an old story, one which he, together with Saroyan, 0.
Henry, the movies, the folk-lore of capitalism, etc., have been telling for
a long time. All successful men have ulcerated stomachs. Money ain't
everything-fact is, it's nothin'. The only
real
successes are the guys who
enjoy life-the ones who live in boilers, in shacks and shanties, who
booze and whittle and lie around in the sun: Mack and the boys, and
Doc, good old Doc who runs the marine laboratory, plays Gregorian
chants on the gramophone and recites poetry translated from the San–
skrit-to say nothing of good old Dora who runs the local brothel and
her good old girls, and good old Lee Chong the grocer, and good old
everybody and the dog. This sort of thing, rather than Prokosch's cosmetic
journalism, is "the very stuff of myth and fable." It is, in fact, the Great
American Fairy Tale, the bedtime story with which the materialist puts
to sleep the suspicions of his heart. The sad thing is not that Steinbeck
believes in it, for he is in his own way one of the boys, but that he
should find it so easy to confuse literary success with the other American
varieties and admit that it, too, amounts to nothin'.
IsAAc RosENFELD
