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the banalities of the "stifling ambience." Goodman's apparent play of
spirit and his sociology actually seem to hide a fear of approaching
experience qualitatively, of realizing imaginatively the varieties of
human possibility and giving them imaginative order and even beauty.
I mention these two books in these terms because the same question
arises with a much more serious book; John H ersey's
The Wall.
In
describing the fate of the Warsaw Ghetto, Hersey is trying to imagine
something which occurred but which he did not experience. His docu–
mentation and recreation of it are respectful, patient and as complete as
he can make them, in the manner of Defoe rather than Zola. Warsaw
during the German occupation is a terrible corner of nature, but it is
not seen through a temperament. In the
Journal of the Plague Year
Defoe was not only writing about an extreme social experience which
had never been photographed or reported in newspapers or reproduced
in such detail, but one which had begun working directly on his own
imagination when he was still a little boy.
The Wall
follows in time
not only a vast amount of other documentation of the extreme human
situations of the war, but also such accounts as those of Rousset which
reported at first hand unpredictable and hitherto unimaginable kinds of
human experience in these situations. By putting his novel in the form
of a chronicler's notes, H ersey acknowledges the second-hand character
of his findings, and scrupulously never goes farther than he feels he
safely can in reproducing direct experience.
However, this too great degree of imaginative control in the in–
terests of justice to history gives an effect always of calculation, of pro–
portional representation rather than imaginative order. There must be so
many unsympathetic characters who show themselves strong, and not
quite so many sympathetic characters who show themselves weak; there
must be unexpectedly good moments and unexpected love affairs even
in the midst of suffering and ruin; a baby must be born but at an almost
predicatable point in the book it must also die. H ersey does this with
high craftsmanship, but the work is sustained by a sense that some–
thing like this did actually occur rather than by the sense that if some–
thing like this did occur, this is the way it would be. The real excitement
comes in the underground battling toward the end, which is in a very
old adventurous tradition.
The Wall
does not reveal unexpected qualities of experience, be–
cause Hersey avoids a real imaginative commitment which would
lead to a transformation and revaluation of his material, and make up
for the lack of direct participation in the events as history. He doesn't
enter into the full emotional and even unconscious relationship with
