ON TWO FRONTIERS
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(who apparently assumes that those who will choose to read
him
will
have been already sufficiently briefed in such matters) to give the
proper tension to the novel's original and witty insight.
The unexpected element in
The Plenipotentiaries
is its gaiety. The
tradition to which it belongs is an anti-tragic one, whether in Hawthorne
or James or Hemingway, but the triumphs of the earlier books were more
stoical and melancholy, the difficult triumphs of realized humans over
impotence and the fear of experience. Mr. Kaplan's victories, in a book
where no rich living being is projected, are victories of style, the gaiety
of language triumphing over the resistance of his material.
If
Mr. Kaplan suffers a little by invoking comparisons with Henry
James, Mr. Warren is victimized by calling up the presence of Thomas
B.
Costain. The novel of our other Frontier necessarily turns back to the
past, and the past has become in our literature the property of the
egregiously sentimental and hackneyed "historical novel." Indeed, the
quasi-historical romance scarcely exists any longer as a novel, its book
form representing a half-archaic transitional form on the way
to
be–
coming a movie. Having chosen a "historical" subject, Mr. Warren
must endure the rewards and punishments proper to that form. In
automatic reflexes, the Literary Guild has damned
World Enough amd
Time
by selecting it, and the
New Yorker,
in its middlebrow insecurity,
has blasted the book as bristling with busty heroines (an error of fact),
coon-skin caps and dialect "thick as b'ar grease." In both reactions
there is the platitudinous assumption that non-urban retrospective
books cannot be really serious or sound; and many more or less sophisti–
cated readers seem to be so busy looking over their shoulders to see
what MGM is going to do about it, that they do not really read the book.
When they do, they will discover, that for a conventional Romance,
WorM Fmough and Time
is distressingly slow in getting started, full
of irrelevant poetry and philosophy, and worst of all, not "true to facts."
Mr. Warren's contempt for the recorded "truth" about the Jere–
boam O. Beauchamp case, which is the
donne
of his book, should give
the game away; for the
lumpen
Frontier Romance, having lost long
since any grasp of fictional truth, attempts to justify its falsities of lan–
guage and sentiment by referring to certain officially verifiable facts;
there is no more indefatigable researcher than the best-selling hack. Mr.
Warren's recent assertion that his book is not at all an "historical novel"
means, I suppose, simply that its locus of truth is in the imagination and
not in recorded "fact."
Nevertheless, it is one of Warren's ironies, in a book essentially
ironic despite its machinery of period costume and its romantic fable
