TWENTY-SEVEN STORIES
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sex, and his life has meaning only as it provides the material of sin and
fosters the adult's need of believing in sin. But this is confessional
writ~
ing at its worst; it not only conceals, it obliterates. Only that which
has been touched by guilt survives in the memory; everything else of the
child's world is lost-and the loss is not even noticed by the man.
But why
confession?
It
is only a man with a neurotic distaste for life
who can find something to confess (in the sense distinct from telling a
story) about childhood. This has made him suffer as a writer; it has
robbed his scenes of richness and given his style a puckered quality, with
neither warmth nor a generous rhythm. (His characteristic use of the
colon, which is meant for crispness but suggests something withered, is
a half stop for a pinch of alum to keep his writing wry and dry.) Save
for a few unconscious lapses into vitality, Greene's whole manner is a
courtship of death, and he must support himself in it only because it
suits both an inherent unease of soul and an acquired one, laid on him–
self in a need to overcome mediocrity. He would very much like to show
a depth of anguish
in
his work, and on his forehead the star of the
damned. He succeeds in doing neither. For all his concern with morality,
sin, guilt, crime, retribution and Catholicism, he remains a middlebrow
with a good location-a frontage on Crisis Theology.
Capote is not even that much. All that remains when the confetti
and fluff have been carted away is the question, How can writing be so
empty? The mere physiology of this art, the fact that the setting of
words on paper calls certain reflexes into play should insure at least
the physical presence of a person. You won't find him here. There is a
sophistication worse than any leprosy for eating away the body. The
good writer is always
in
one respect naive-his feelings are what count,
his perceptions, the stuff of his own life, and like a child in the nursery
he leaves his traits scattered all over his work. Nothing of the sort grows
on
A Tree of Night.
When he is not drearily imitating Eudora Welty's
cockeyed manner ("My Side of the Story") or her Southern pathos, with
a touch of Carson MacCullers ("A Jug of Silver," "Children on Their
Birthdays"), Truman Capote seems to be saying that he is quite at home
among the terrors of the unconscious ("MIriam," "The Headless Hawk,"
"Shut a Final Door," "A Tree of Night") and who the hell is Freud?
("Master Misery"-an ignorant and snide parody of psychoanalysis).
Some writers can get away with this, but it takes more than a
sophistication which, far from being the measure of the wisdom and
experience of the person, is rather the disease in which he rots.
Isaac RosenfeJd
