356
PARTISAN REVIEW
style is so literal that one might suspect him, in certain pas–
sages, of writing a parody of
The Sun Also Rises,
merely shifting the
scene from Paris and Spain to Greenwich Village and Fire Island
and moving the time forward by twenty years.
Who Walk In Darkness
does have some of the information one
expects to find in a document, and anyone who suffers from a vulgar
curiosity about what hipsters are like can gratify his desire by reading
this novel. But one can get the same information with a greater degree
of exactitude in other quarters. As in much of Mary McCarthy's
work, Brossard draws directly from life and often the prototypes are
so unmistakable that the reader must feel that only
~ne
thing is lack–
ing: the telephone numbers of the human beings whom the novelist
has in mind (which can be found in the telephone directory). This
recognizability is of course an eternal problem of the novelist, since
he must so often draw upon his own experience and the human
beings he has known. And it has been argued with trite sophistry
that even Dostoevsky, in
The Possessed,
certainly drew a malicious
and recognizable portrait of Turgenev, in the guise of Karmazinov the
novelist. But if such malice and recognition were typical of Dostoevsky,
if this were his fundamental motive, we would not regard
him
as one
of the greatest of novelists. And apart from malice, which is unfortun–
ately sometimes necessary, and recognition, which is often unavoidable,
the reader of any novel which is too literally a transcript of the lives
of actual human beings is distressed by a confusion of attitude and
expectation: he does not know whether at any given moment he ought
to
be
looking at the page as a genuine piece of fiction Or the inside
lowdown dirt of someone's private life and the author's opinion of
it. Another important difficulty is that of the reader who knows
nothing of the actual human beings, for his ignorance is bound to
make any novel with a key full of opaque passages. Moreover, moral
questions apart (apart, that is, from the question of whether the novel
is ever meant to be a vehicle of character assassination), fiction is
supposed to be something more than gossip; if it were not something
more than gossip, America would be full of great novelists and there
would
be
little need for novels.
When the reader arrives at Paul Bowles's
Let It Come Down,
after reading the books by Mary McCarthy and Chandler Brossard,
he is likely to feel that innocence and experience have much to do
with the substance of a novel. Miss McCarthy and Bro3sard appear
to be innocent (unaware or ignorant) of the essential motives which
govern them in the writing of their books. Paul Bowles is innocent in
