1052
PARTISAN REVIEW
serves as a link with the bourgeois world; he is also one of the few
Stalinists, real or imagined, I have ever met who is an interesting human
being.
But it is in ideas that the book does not satisfy its needs. Weller des–
pairs of both sides in Greece, which while a good premise is in itself not
enough for a political structure. His mind is too American, too em–
pirical; he admires the Greek talent for endless political discussion but
does not understand that without a total involvement in such a frenzy
of dialectic a first-rate political novel cannot be written. And some–
times he is simply conventional, as in his view of America as an udder to
be milked or an ingenue to be wised up.
The political novel must deal with ideas, but while they should be
left inviolate at the novel's base they cannot remain mere abstract lumps
of thought once it begins to move. The successful political novel generates
such emotional heat from situations of conflict that the ideas beneath
it are, so to speak, melted into its movement, fused with the experience
of its protagonists. In
The Possessed
Dostoievsky did this to perfection.
More recently,
Man's Fate
was fired by the heroism of revolutionary
commitment,
Bread and Wine
warmed by the pathos of revolutionary
doubt. But Weller has neither commitment nor doubt, only anguish and
integrity.
It is hardly his fault that he is an American, the best kind of Amer–
ican, and that anguish and integrity are about all the best kind of
American can offer the world today. But they are not enough, these
liberal virtues, and they cannot be leaned on as heavily as Weller does
if a novel adequate to modern political experience is to be written. Per–
haps no American can write such a novel because no American cares
enough as yet about the idea of politics.
About Henry Green's novel there need be no qualifications at all;
it is a completely successful minor work, very funny and yet moving as
one plays with it in memory. I do not know Green's other books and
therefore can't discuss
Loving
against his total achievement; right now,
it doesn't matter. But if, as Philip Toynbee has written in these pages,
Green is a "terrorist" of language, then
Loving
represents a post-ter–
rorist phase, the campaign won and peace sealed.
Loving
is composed
in unstrained and unmannered prose, fresh because it is not meant to
convey
ennui,
disillusion or any other fashionable attitude.
"Once upon a day" begins the book, and "they were married and
lived happily ever after" it ends. These are clues to a fairy tale, and
they are worth following. But in
Loving
the fairy tale is what actually
