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Goodman goes that far; but what he does have in common with the other
attitude is a shrill arrogance that frequently brings his seriousness into
question. In
The State of Nature
one comes away with a single clear im–
pression and that is that Goodman feels the world would be redeemed if
it would only listen to him. This oracularity is probably shared by every
writer, but it is expressed through the various persuasions of literature,
through characters, crucial situations and themes. The nakedness of
Goodman's plea for attention, exposed to us in this book without creative
illustrations of his point of view and even without a novelistic situation,
is the final immodesty, tedious in innocents, but unforgivable in a sup–
posedly complex mind.
It is disheartening to have to report that another political novel,
Godfrey Blunden's
A Room on the Route,
which commands none of
Goodman's literary sophistication, is nevertheless much more worth read–
ing. -The very existence of this novel critical of contemporary Russian life
is something of a feat. Such a novel could only be written by a non–
Russian, but in a country which does not allow the foreigner to get to
know the Russian people the whole novelistic impulse
i~
frustrated. An
idea novel, an intellectual exercise like
Darkness at Noon,
might be
written far away from the scene, but the traditional novel, showing the
day-to-day life of a people, arises out of a leisurely absorption of setting,
a certainty of one's characters, and a great store of experience shared
with them or their kind. Probably the only person who could produce
a fictional criticism of Russian life would be a journalist like Blunden,
who is, so far as I can judge, not a sectarian intellectual, but simply
an intelligent observer, aware of the former promise of the Revolution
and appalled by the results. Apparently the notes for the book were
taken in secret while he worked as a newspaper correspondent in Russia.
And if one has to say immediately that the book is badly written and
awkwardly constructed, is that not inevitable? An experienced novelist
would not have been allowed in Russia.
The story concerns some people who live on The Route, a street
close to the Kremlin and therefore swarming with political police.
Blunden's characters, chosen to give the widest possible picture of
Moscow life, are just what you might expect: the despairing wife of
an old revolutionary who represents the dignity of the past, a nonintel–
lectual peasant still not completely brutalized, an American girl who
married a Communist, numerous party functionaries, some of whom
are cowardly cynics and others ruthless bureaucrats to whom ideals are
unknown, and then the young Soviet citizens, provincial, bored, and
ignorant, to whom all that "Marx-Lenin stuff is dry as dust." The
bestiality of existence
in
the Soviet Union is well portrayed, the horrid
living conditions for which a word like
OZJercrowded
is hopelessly
in–
adequate, the hunger that can, upon occasion, turn into cannibalism,
