552
PARTISAN REVIEW
religious impulse into art, sits at the harpsichord and plays a fugue amid
the tinkle of T. S. Eliot's broken glass on the keys.
Misdirected love is a destructive force according to Mr. Nemerov,
and in his own case his love of ideas and the embroidering of them
often manages to destroy the structure of his novel, to say nothing of
his syntax. And as one ever-so-slightly inclined toward the scientific way,
I find his psychoanalyst-hero much too profligate in both his behavior
and his turns of though
t.
After Mr. Nemerov, Mr. Hayes seems aphasic, but his silence is not
so modest as it appears. With it, he is trying to say so much more;
it is Hemingway's heavy aposiopesis, the deafeningly tacit. When he
uses phrases like "she was good to be with," "it was going to be all right,"
the vagueness of the expressions carries a connotation of ineffability as
well as a presumption of archetypal familiarity. There is ostensibly no
need to define how or precisely why she was good to be with, or exactly
what was going to be all right in which sense. We are supposed to rec–
ognize these phrases as denoting basic and immediately felt instinctual
gratifications. The awkwardness of "good to be with" derives-acci–
dentally, like so much of literary convention-from H emingway's skill–
ful translations of Spanish and Italian syntax into English; the "it was
going to be all right" from his emergency atmosphere of wounded sol–
diers, big game hunters, or matadors. Mr. Hayes's usage of them amounts
to an annoying substitution of misappropriated literary conventions for
the rendition of experience.
The Girl on the Via Flaminia
is about an American soldier in Italy
who "buys" an Italian girl. It is supposed to be a love story with political
overtones. Actually, it is an inadvertent study of the conflict between a
passionate, world-wide xenophobia and the American soldier's compul–
sive need for female companionship under the guise of affection. To be
in a clean room, in a bed with "real pillows" and an ostensibly loving
girl with "wonderful shoulders" is for him not love, sensuality or even
comfort, but a kind of paradigmatic situation, symbolic of security, ac–
ceptance and belonging. And to say that the Italians hate him as a con–
queror is putting too fancy an interpretation on it. They hate his senti–
mentality, and they hate him reflexively, just like that, for simple differ–
ences, just as he, in turn, hated them, as well as the French, the British,
the Russians, and everyone else he encountered abroad.
Anatole Broyard
