742
PARTISAN REVIEW
of a lover who murders the seducer of the woman he marries, to use
the appearances of historical research (in a way already hinted at in
the Cass Mastern episode of
All The King's Men)
as a device for
attaining a double point of view and for realizing formally the leading
theme of the ambiguity of the past.
Far from being a conventional, popular novel,
World Enough and
Time
is a polysemous
fiction
in the Dante-an sense, with a literal fable
(the freeing of the imprisoned Princess by the slaying of the Dragon)
capable of philosophic extension
without
the loss of
its
narrative appeal.
It
is
typically modern in that the cement of its interconnectedness
is
not faith but irony; author and protagonist alike are able to realize that
the Princess may be a neurotic girl and the Dragon a gentle father, but
they realize too the uses of assuming Princesses and Dragons. Of the many
levels of meaning
in
Mr. Warren's book, political and metaphysical, I
can treat here only one: Its critique of the American myth of the West
as Innocence, and of the basic tenets of Romanticism, pantheism and
the Noble Savage, which sustain that myth.
It
is
Mr. Warren's
tour de
force
to have achieved this critique inside of a form universally assumed
to be based on the naive acceptance of all he subtly challenges.
Whereas Mr. Kaplan's ironies do not challenge the traditional
civilized sentimentality of the "International Theme" (everyone
is
successfully
saved
from innocence: Tony learns wisdom, and Pat
charm), Mr. Warren's irony unde.r;-cuts utterly the beautiful lie of
James Fenimore Cooper. All through his attempts to substitute for, or
impose on life itself a sentimental dream of life, Jeremiah Beaumont has
presupposed the existence of a paradisal West as a final refuge; until
finally (in Warren's completest departure from Fact), he escapes hang–
ing and flees to that essential wilderness, where, before his own murder
and the suicide of his withered and despised beloved, he finds what has
all along waited in the ultimate womb of time: no noble and immaculate
Natty Bumppo, but a humped monster, dying in sensuality and filth,
la
Grand Bosse,
river pirate and nightmare, the visible shape of original sin
and the grandfather of us all. "Gammer and gaffer we're all his gang–
sters."
Simply to know this, is a tragic illumination; and, indeed,
World
Enough and Time
represents the triumph of the tragic vision America
has habitually denied over the anti-tragic myth of the West by which
it
has sentimentally lived. From the most decadent of popular forms, the
dregs of contrived melodrama, Warren has rescued an archetypal story,
the long dishonored devices of reversal and recognition, and redeemed
them to their authentic tragic uses.
