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its cruel undertow forever dragging us back into the past we blame; of
the pathos of the family and its genteel heartlessness. Ellen's suffering is
vivid, but she has been created not for what she is, but for what she
concentrates, to Mr. Wilson's imagination, in the facts of her class and
her type of career.
In "Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn At Home" Mr. Wilson pulls off his
last feat and really gives us some of his inner thoughts. "Ellen Terhune"
is the story of the late twenties and of the new intelligentsia that sought
fresh thought in Europe. The Blackburn story begins on Europe in Amer–
ica, the refugees, the American dragging into war, and already reading
something of the struggle in the refugees. The narrator goes to a party
at the house of a vaguely European man of all affairs called Blackburn.
The episode falls into a dream, interpolated in such a way as to blend
the distinctness of sleep and the stupor of awakening, the symbolic depth
of dreams and the hesitant shallowness of consciousness. Blackburn begins
a conversation with 'the narrator on art, and suddenly going off into
French, reveals himself disconsolately as the Devil. He has turned to
French because events have become so irrational that only the neatness
and precision of French can put them in order. He indignantly des–
cribes the Soviet purges, the forthcoming horrors of the Nazi terror, and
ascribes them to the decay of organized religion-that is, of the Catholic
Church. Ever since the Reformation, he complains, the diminishing belief
in sin, in the reality of any struggle between good and evil, has robbed
him of his occupation. The new nihilism has dispensed with God-"my
distinguished opponent"-and therefore with him. He now sees his last
opportunity in America, where there remains some deposit of religion,
·of belief in sin, and therefore in him.
A hit, a hit: but where are we with it? Dostoevsky needed to believe
in the Devil, and finally convinced himself that he did. Mr. Wilson's
Devil is brilliant, and the whole episode is an instructive tour-de-force;
but his handling of it is frivolous. A generation ago writers divulged in–
timate details of the body only to those who knew a little Latin-your
cultivation was the admission of your respectability. Mr. Wilson has
similarly confined his full loathing of Stalin's Russia to those who are
also a little
deracine,
like the Devil-the intellectuals without dogma,
the homeless radicals; those who have paid, like Mr. Wilson, for their
freedom of thought. But even from the point of view of the sympathetic
reader, it is clear that the Devil serves only to dispose of Mr. Wilson's
rather complicated irony and exasperation, since he cannot resolve them
himself. The darkness of the moon over America in this story is very
thick. What Mr. Wilson really feels like saying is, "The Devil take it!"
And it is significant that the Devil is a European. Not the least of his
uses here is to point up Mr. Wilson's disgust with Europe and to make
a claim on America deeper than he makes out.
It
is not that he is Ber-
