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sex, and human injustice. One would like to think Mr. Farrell always
deliberate in his naivete and to assume that the novel's heavy-handed
romanticism, the incredible carelessness, were aspects of a satiric picture
of the follies of a literary youth. That complete charity is impossible,
however, because of the seriousness with which the author approaches
his character. The ending seems to imply that Bernard Clare has been
magically matured by his bouts with life and is ready to become a writer,
a prognosis not at all indicated by our knowledge of his condition.
And yet as one reads along in this novel it begins to have an ironic
validity doubtless not intended. Bernard Clare's history, if it does not
hold out the promise of literary fulfillment, exposes the roots of the
ultimate failure of many of our novelists now in the prime of their crea–
tive life, a failure that makes us await their work with little enthusiasm
or hope.
If
this story
is
a portrait of the artist as a young man, then
Farrell's artist has sensation without intellect, honesty without subtlety,
energy without discrimination. But this view of an American literary
man is not the work of a youth; it is the work of an established writer.
Suffice it to say that
in
the lazy clumsiness of the style, the banality of
the incident, tl1e poverty of the insight,
Bernard Clare
would be more
appropriate as the hero's first fumbling effort than as James T. Farrell's
eighteenth or so published book. The old artificer has not stood this
author in good stead.
Erskine Caldwell also has more than a score of publications to list
on the back of book jackets, but the relentless crudity of his new work,
A Hause in the Uplands,
will astonish no one who has followed the fall
of Mr. Caldwell from heights never breathtaking into the pit in which
he has been trapped for so many years. This mercilessly fatuous story of
Grady Dunbar, a plantation owner in an already well-documented state
of agrarian decay, and his wife, Lucyanne, paradoxically defies comment
because it is presented with an unrelieved ineptitude that makes judgment
rather beside the point. One does not think about a book of this sort that
it might have been done better or differently, but only that it shouldn't
have been done at all. Infinitely slothful, since nothing of the slightest
difficulty has been ventured, that which emerges has not even been given
· the kind of solicitude, whether futile or otherwise, we expect from the
very slightest of writers. Consequently the novel, brief as it is, strikes
one as padded word by word, sentence by sentence, until it reached its
final unenviable state. The framework of the story-the great house
now dilapidated, the arrogant son of a once respectable family, the
beautiful octoroon leading her lascivious life back in the servants' quar–
ters, the guitar strumming through the night- gives a good idea of
this
anesthetized novel in which neither black nor white, poor nor rich, the
·evil nor the good, ever awaken.
A first novel by Eleanor
Cla~k,
The Bitter Box,
has in abundance
