FICTION CHRONICLE
GERALDINE BRADSHAW. By
C~lder
Willingham. VanguMd. $3.50.
THE DEAD OF SPRING. By Paul Goodman. Libertarian Press. $3.00.
THE WALL. By John Hersey. Alfred A. Knopf. $4.00.
THE WORLD IS A BRIDGE. By Christine Weston. $1.50.
THE CANN IBAL. By John Hawkes. New Directions. $1 .50.
THE SUNNIER SIDE. By Charles Jackson. FMrar Straus. $2.75.
THE WRONG SET. By Angus Wilson. $3.00.
Geraldine Bradshaw
sounds as if it were written to the
prescription of all the attacks on the naturalist novel that recurred
ritualistically through the 'forties.
It
is good that an occasional example
still appears to give point to these attacks, for though they say nothing
in a literary way that was not said repeatedly before 1885 by French
and German critics of Zola, the satisfaction they continue to give grows
out of real political and religious need. On the one hand, the world battle
with Stalinism keeps alive a bad conscience over some literary simplifica–
tions of the 'thirties; on the other hand there is an interested attempt–
making very broad assumptions indeed-to turn the reaction against
literary naturalism into a reaction against philosophic naturalism of
any kind, as if
The Life of Reason
by Santayana, for instance, had its
inevitable imaginative consequence in
Geraldine Bradshaw
or
Bernard
Clare.
Geraldine Bradshaw
certainly is more to the point than
Germinal
or
La
Debacle.
Already in the late nineteenth century Brandes and
other critics had decided that Zola was really a Hugoesque romantic, a
Wagnerian symbolist, energizing and transforming his materials by force
of temperament,
«un coin de nature vu
a
travers un temperament."
Calder Willingham, however, writes as if he had no temperament, and
it was still the days of Therese Raquin, and he had the preface open
before him, following its false medical analogies in a wryly observant
but inhuman fashion, with everything devotedly kept as dreary and
banal and somatic as possible.
Geraldine is a teaser, and the drama of the book, its series of agons,
consist of the persistent efforts of the hero and one or two other people
who don't hold their liquor well to get successfully to bed with her.
What makes the book serious is the fact that none of this is any fun.
"A solid horrible hour was required to separate her from her stockings
and panties. She removed the stockings herself, but a mortal battle was
fought over the panties. Several times Davenport almost gave up from
