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P A R T
I S
A N R E v ·1E W
are interpolated with great technical skill by Mr. Wilson and furnish
increased knowledge of the past-I should say
documentation-and
taken together symbolize the alternate and negotiable levels of conscious–
ness on which we live. The principal conflict takes place in "The Prin–
.cess With The Golden Hair," which is the only one of the six stories
that is occasionally moving. But it is caught up so repetitiously on the
narrator's rigid design of all its meanings that it loses the advantages it
has gained by awakening the mind with symbols. Nothing emphasizes
this so well as the now-famous fullness of Mr. Wilson's descriptions of
fornication. These are really pathetic, and the shop girl I once saw
blinking
in
the IRT at the rush-hour, leafing through Mr. Wilson's
book
in
the hope, was really in for a disappointment. Lawrence at least
idealized what is so misleadingly, in modern times, called the act of love.
Mr. Wilson's narrator is so locked up in his own mind that he seems
to
have his encounters only for what he shall think of them. Nothing could
be further remo¥ed from passion; or even from neurotic conquest; or
even from mechanical lechery. These scenes are thoughts masquerading
as acts, and are not even the similes of acts; ai'ld they are·not thoughts
but the waverings of a mind weighing its social loneliness and confusion.
The sex act here is the cosmetic of a philosophy; and I do not know
what I dislike more in these scenes-the fact that the narrator is such
a worm or the clutter with which Mr. Wilson conceals his distance from
human intimacy. Yet Anna, whom Mr. Wilson has tried so hard to
document in all her esoteric lowliness that she lives near something
called
The
King's Highway in Brooklyn, and amid an assortment of no–
goods drawn from every imaginable Sudetenland in Brooklyn-Anna
does come through, for the narrator wants so hard to reach her world
that he brings her alive under the pressure of his real emotion.
In three stories, "The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles," "Glimpses
of Wilbur Flick," and "The Milhollands and Their Damned Soul," Mr.
Wilson describes vicious, idle, and deliriously acquisitive sides of Amer–
ican life--the eccentric cruelties, the lack of standards, the scintillating
phoniness. There are fine satiric strokes
in
them all, especially in the
last, concerned with literary politicians. More important, after "The
Princess With The Golden Hair," are "Ellen Terhune" and "Mr. and
Mrs. Blackburn At Home." In both dream sequences are used; in the
first
to
recreate the troubled life-cycle of a brilliant woman composer,
which the narrator, very close to her in his alienation from
their
social
class, does through uneery sequences of her early and middle life. It is
characteristic of Mr. Wilson's talent, which has great underhand force,
that the machinery for this recreation and the late nineteenth-century
interiors among which Ellen Terhune's tragedy is imagined, should be
so much more lucid than the figure of Ellen herself. It is not Ellen
whom we get to know in easy human detail; it is the sense of time, and
