392
PARTISAN REVIEW
the homely, barefoot girl in blue jeans whose soul, however, is as fas–
tidious as an angel's. With the somewhat embarrassing refrain, "they are
the we of me," Frankie tries to overcome her isolation by identifying
herself with her brother's wedding. Where Miss Welty uses the tradi–
tional rural retting, Carson McCullers delights in an equally familiar
Southern small town background, particularly in cafes, juke box joints,
and freak shows. By now the scenic effects in Southern fiction are begin–
ning to have no more vitality or originality than calendar art. What is
needed is not the abandonment of this fine feeling for locale, but a
fresh use of it; the Southern scene is not so much exhausted as hope–
lessly stylized. Carson McCullers has a worthy sense of humor and a rich
gift for characterization. These two qualities give
The Member of the
Wedding
a certain amount of appeal, but they cannot make it any more
than a very elementary exercise.
Bernard, the fourteen year old narrator in Isaac Rosenfeld's
Passage
from Horne,
seems rather sluggish by comparison with the striking sen–
sibility of the usual adolescent character in fiction. One suspects this may
be due to the fact that the adult world, rather than a whimsical and
exclusively childish world, impinges upon him with more seriousness and
urgency than is ordinarily the case. In this novel it is not the meticulous
recapitulation of early experience that is significant, but that the experi–
ences recounted involve the boy in his first importunate choice between
different ways of life. On the one hand Bernard has his robust, but un–
worldly, middle-class Chicago family, and on the other he has in his
'aunt, a modern, rebellious woman, the syll\bol of independence and per–
sonality. When he discovers that his aunt's life is empty and unhealthy,
her independence imaginary, her personality thin and rather cold, he is
more .or less shocked into maturity and into a recognition of his own
needs and spirit which can be satisfied neither by conventional Jewish
family life or by self-conscious, destructive modernism.
Passage from
Home
is creditably written, but it lacks vigor and fictional inspiration
and seems more the act of an intelligent will than of a compelling imagi–
nation. Unfortunately the subject matter and the youth of the central
character make it impossible for us to have more than a hint here and
there of Isaac Rosenfeld's intellectual gifts. They are of the sort that
may, if he finds the right theme to utilize them, make him an exciting
writer.
The Snake Pit
by Mary Jane Ward has the distinction of making
a nervous breakdown a rather jolly affair. It is actually a light book about
insanity, written in a tediously coy and gagged-up style. This novel has
been energetically praised for the author's good taste in not attempting
to indicate causes for the central character's mental relapse. I take these
encomiums to represent an underhanded repudiation of Freud, a trium-
