356
PARTISAN REVIEW
be presented with any force. These problems Mr. Jones, with the aid of
a host of literary stratagems, simply avoids. He allows his enlisted in–
surgents to carry their rebellion past the point where it has a base in
circumstances and, consequently, they get humiliated, persecuted,
brutally beaten and killed in an almost complete vacuum of feeling.
Little suspense, hope, pathos, or disappointment is generated because
the situations are not defined from any point of view that would enable
the reader to anticipate a favorable or unfavorable outcome. Indeed,
one's sympathy finally turns away from them toward the officers who
are meant to be the scapegoats of the piece. Since no radical critique
of American society is offered and the rebels are shown to be more
competent than the officers, why shouldn't they accept the commissions
obtainable by many of them? Simply for the joy of remaining one of
the boys and avoiding the stains and pains of power? Then what com–
plaint have they left? They won't obey, they won't command, and they
have no plans for changing anyt11ing. They, and the author's conception
of them, are, in fine, the last splutters of a long tradition of romantic
rebellion and what remains genuine in it has become heavily adulterated
by deliberate muddle, hypocrisy, Hollywood heroics, and the per–
verseness and degeneracy of an artificially prolonged, swashbuckling
adolescence.
Angus Wilson and James Jones are so antithetical in every aspect
of their work that it is difficult to believe any longer in the unity of
Anglo-American culture. Since both are sharply in touch with the
compelling realities of their respective societies, they highlight the in–
creasing divergence between the two countries as well as pointing
up
each other's vices and virtues. Mr. Jones is prodigal of space, reckless
with
his
craft, multifarious, intellectually adventurous in an uneven
fashion, and paradoxical. In no other country, I imagine, could a
novelist write in such a schizophrenic fashion that he seems, at times, to
have one eye fanatically searching the clouds for
God
and the other
cocked cunningly on the best-seller lists. Mr. Wilson seems so perfectly
and soberly dedicated to his craft, contriving economies of narrative
art that would be the salvation of British society if they could be trans–
posed, that he has nothing to spare for the metaphysical and ethical
explorations that have been at once the stimulants and corrosives of
modern fiction.
All the escape-valves of fiction, poetry, cosmic speculation, even
judgment of characters as it finds a vantage point above them, seem to
have been stopped up by Mr. Wilson in order to confine his stories to the
human scene at its most oppressive. So effectively and with such rel-
