580
PARTISAN REVIEW
-something more than that, something resolutely indefinable, un–
predictable. In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity-which
is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves-we are
diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, para–
dox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves
and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of
revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward
a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims.
What is today parroted as his Responsibility-which seems to mean
that he must make formal declaration that he is involved in, and
affected by, the lives of other people and to say something improving
about this somewhat self-evident fact-is, when he believes it, his
corruption and our loss; moreover, it is rooted in, inter-locked with
and intensifies this same mechanization. Both
Gentleman's Agreement
and
The Postman Always Rings T wice
exemplify this terror of the
human being, the determination to cut him down to size. And in
Uncle Tom's Cabin
we may find foreshadowing of both: the formula
created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth
has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terribJe
power.
It is interesting to consider one more aspect of Mrs. Stowe's novel,
the method she used to solve the problem of writing about a black
man at all. Apart from her lively procession of field-hands, house–
niggers, Chloe, Topsy, etc.-who are the stock, lovable figures pre–
senting no problem-she has only three other Negroes in the book.
These are the important ones and two of them may be dismissed im–
mediately, since we have only the author's word that they are Negro
and they are, in all other respects, as white as she can make them.
The two are George and Eliza, a married couple with
.a
wholly
adorable child-whose quaintness, incidentally, and whose charm,
rather puts one in mind of a darky boot-black doing a buck and wing
to the clatter of condescending coins. Eliza is a beautiful, pious hybrid,
light enough to pass-the heroine of
Quality
might, indeed, be her
reincarnation-differing from the genteel mistress who has overseered
her education only in the respect that she is a servant. George is
darker, but makes up for it by being a mechanical genius, and
is,
moreover, sufficiently un-Negroid to pass through town, a fugitive
from his master, disguised as a Spanish gentleman, attr.acting no at-
