TO SAY AND SAY NOT
THE MELODRAMATISTS. By Howord Nemerov. Rondom House. $3.00
THE GIRL ON THE VIA FLAMINIA. By Alfred Hoyes. Horper
&
Bros.
$2.50.
If
Howard Nemerov has not written an autobiographical first
novel in the usual anecdotal sense, he has at any rate written the life- or
case-history of his tastes, attitudes and imagination. His book reminds me
of Dewey's definition: "That which distinguishes an experience as aesthetic
is the conversion of resistance and tensions, of excitations that in them–
selves are temptations to diversion, into a movement toward an inclusive
and fulfilling close." Mr. Nemerov's excitations are irresistible and
charmingly autonomous, which makes this novel-brilliant and provo–
cative though it is-a technical "failure."
Studded with Rochefoucauld-like definitions, maxims and epigrams,
The Melodramatists
is nothing less than an allegory of the collapse of
bourgeois society. The Boynes are a Back Bay family; when Mr. Boyne
goes mad, he and his wife move to a sanatorium, and his ungoverned
daughters and son begin their unimpeded search for a Way of Life.
One daughter becomes the mistress of a voluble psychoanalyst (the
scientific way); the other proposes to join the Catholic Church (the
theological way); and the weak son joins the Canadian Air Force (dis–
cipline, bureaucracy, channelized aggression: the totalitarian way). The
theologically-inclined daughter is persuaded by the Church to rehabilitate
twenty whores in her house. These whores are made to represent the
undirected love loose in the world, a dangerous cargo in the bowels of
the Ship of State, one whose unmoored shiftings can throw the ship off
course or even sink it. They are supposed to be under the supervision
of two nuns, but they are actually controlled by one of their own group,
an old madam, Mrs. Fosker, who is a modern Machiavellian. In a
coup
d'etat,
Mrs. Fosker locks the son and daughters in a room under the armed
surveillance of her accomplice, the butler. Here, imprisoned by Love,
together with a priest, the psychoanalyst, a romantic young historian,
and the son's wife who has turned whore too, they hold a Huxleyan
seminar on love, while downstairs Mrs. Fosker stages an orgy of com–
mercialized love for the first citizens of Boston. The scientifically-inclined
daughter forces the butler to shoot her (suicide of the ruling class via
the confused and involuntary revolt of their servants) . After her death
(through the insufferable intensity of love-for-its-own-stripped-sake), and
after the wrecking of the family mansion (the bourgeois structure) by
the incidental ravages of run-amuck love, the other sister, converting her
