364
PARTISAN REVIEW
individual psychology. Democracy, psychologically, is a much queerer,
more radical and dangerous experiment than
is
customarily realized.
Where no real delegation of cultural or moral power is possible, every
individual is compelled to grow
his
own set of values wild, so to speak.
This self-fertilization process has been going on, in accelerated fashion,
for some decades now with only the merest breaths of it reaching our
literature. Now, quite suddenly, Mr. Jones has written a novel per–
meated by
this
special atmosphere released by a throng of individuals
who seem like bundles of nervous discriminations even when they are
engaged merely in scrubbing pots or collecting garbage.
The difference is most apparent in the dialogue. In most American
fiction, particularly that of the more prominent writers, the dialogue is
apt to be a squeezed, semi-metrical embodiment of the author's private
obsessions crystallized in a manner adequate to poetic drama or fantasy
but lacking in the flexible rapport with ordinary speech one expects in
broad, more or less realistic, work. Reading the words supposedly spoken
by a Henry James heiress, a Hemingway boxer, a Jerome Weidman
dress-salesman, a Hammett detective, a Faulkner farmer, or even, to a
lesser extent, a Warren politician, one's first primitive reaction is apt to
be
simply: "My God, people don't talk like that! At least not for more
than one per cent of the time!" Some obsessive, poetic rhythm seems to
have captured and fettered their tongues. The effect is hypnotic, almost
unbearably inhibited and claustrophobic. After a while one accepts it
with a puzzled shrug. Perhaps it's the price of narrative. You can't ex–
pect them to get everything in without destroying the unity of mood
and it has a certain power, etc. Nevertheless, some obscure craving
remains unappeased as if some elusive vitamins were lacking in our
literary diet.
Mr. Jones is far from the superior of these authors and in many
ways
far from their equal but he does supply some of the missing in–
gredients. In
From Here to Eternity,
American speech seems to have
broken out of its imprisonment,
to
have a freedom and mobility cor–
relative to the environment because it is not hemmed in by the author's
limited social maneuverability or overspecialized training and tempera–
ment. Put three of Mr. Jones's soldiers in an orderly room discussing a
transfer or in a latrine playing poker and the language expresses a play
of
shifting moods and thoughts emerging out of the interactions of
sharply defined personalities against a background of normalcy that
you cannot quite find duplicated elsewhere. Each character seems to
fall quite naturally into his native rhythm and idiom because
his
sen–
sibility is allowed to unfold itself autonomously instead of being crushed
