MUCH OUTCRY; LITTLE OUTCOME
speculates that what
is
really wanted is a book about a man who would
not
leave Warner Brothers, NBC, or
Time
and who remained so unalter–
ably "corrupt" he never got around to writing that novel his college
friends expected of him. Unfortunately, most of the books about these vast
items of popular culture are seen through the eyes of a feeble writer–
hero who assumes that the most important thing is to break with it
all and go into a small, independent business; that is, fiction writing.
The Radio City mountains tremble, great advertising barons are terri–
fied, the public is in a state of shocked anticipation-and out comes a
mouse, free and smug, dragging his mousy typewriter behind him.
It is this aspect of Merle Miller's
That Winter
I find most reveal–
ing: the hero's revolt from what seems to be
Time
and his rejection of
an offer from a periodical similar to
The New R epublic,
in favor of the
life of a novelist. About the rest of the book, the post-war generation,
the veteran's adjustment, the experience of war, Miller has so little
gift for social analysis and generalization that one is unable to discover
what, except the memory of many of Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's
notions, he had in mind about his three soldiers. One of the soldiers
commits suicide, another overcomes his pretensions and accepts his
family and his name, but it is the third, Peter, who dominates the plot.
And the plot is: will Peter give up his job and become a writer?
Recently John Steinbeck explained to the Russians that in America
the writer was considered "just below acrobats and just above seals."
This seems to me the most whimsical form of self-deception, indeed a
rather touching moment of modesty, possibly to be understood as the
payment of a man suffering from the guilt of too much attention and
fame. The real secret of the writer's position in America is best ex–
posed in a book like Miller's which can assume, without qualification
or defense, a clear-cut moral opposition between the vice of non-writing
and the virtue of writing. In such novels it is considered apparent that
the general verbal talents which enable a man to be a successful copy
writer or journalist also present him with a profound, almost religious,
dilemma.
If
he is decent and honorable he will accept the challenge
and become a novelist. As a reward for his virtue, the right girl will
turn up, his mother will love
him,
his old school friends will no longer
accuse
him
of moral depravity, and he will find peace within himself.
It is the simple morality tale of the libertine who becomes a saint.
And this typically American story is becoming more and more eerie,
a sort of play within a play, since the denouement is accomplished by
the fact that the reader is holding a book in his hands. In
That Winter
the physical existence of the novel, published and packaged, is the true
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