BOOKS
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about himself, so guilty that satire (like the social habit of tearing
down all absent friends and acquaintances) provides some relief and
pleasure. But this unfortunate state of mind is clearly to be avoided.
As
Brendan Gill remarked in his review of
The Groves Of Academe
(a review which made a noble effort at kindness), if human beings
are characterized as swine, the distinction between human beings and
swine, which I assume exists, seems to disappear.
The Groves Of Academe
has an important theme which also dis–
appears, the theme of a teacher who pretends to be a Communist
when he thinks that he is going to lose his job. This is, at the high–
est level of generality, the dramatic subject of how vicious and de–
structive human beings abuse and make the most of the noblest human
values and motives. But as the book proceeds, the reader has to pinch
himself to remain aware that this is what the book is supposed to be
about. It is really about how almost everyone is, at best, ridiculous.
It remains to be said, nevertheless, that the book is also very funny
and it is also full of news about what the intellectuals are doing and
thinking. Miss McCarthy, as a friend of mine observed, writes in–
tellectual journalism masquerading as fiction and asking to be un–
masked. She is, I think, one of the cleverest women around; but there
is
an ancient and little-remembered maxim that to be entirely clever
is to be half a fool. Miss McCarthy is certainly not a fool, but her
writing seems to come from some region of the mind in which clever–
ness becomes foolishness. For if her point of view is accepted, there
is no reason for cleverness, for writing, for reading, or, in fact, for
existing.
There is a point of view in Chandler Brossard's
Who Walk In
Darkness
with which the reader can identify himself with an ease
which is all too easy: the point of view of self-righteousness. The self–
righteousness of the hero appears on the very first page and in the
very first page and in the very first paragraph: "People said Henry
Porter was an illegitimate. . . . I suspect that it was supposed to
explain the difference between the way he behaved and the way the
rest of us behaved." And soon after, on the third page: "I had re–
cently been fired from a job because I had not been able to hide my
feelings that the place was no good. I should have been smarter
about it, I guess, but I was not interested in being smart that way."
And thus continuously and increasingly until the end of the book, the
hero is engaged in showing how most of the human beings he knows
are evil while he is good, which is as boring as the blacks and whites
of all melodrama. Moreover, the influence of Hemingway on Brossard's
