BOOKS
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still another way, he is an innocent abroad in Morocco and his hero's
inexhaustible innocence is so inclusive that no matter what happens,
no matter how often he is shocked, he remains capable of being
shocked all over again in the same way by some new form of un–
innocent behavior. Although much is made of the fact that the action
occurs in Morocco, nothing happens which does not also occur in
Greenwich Village and Harlem, or in the corresponding areas of most
major American cities: drugs, crime, pan-sexuality, desperation,
bore–
dom, adultery, and various other forms of compelled self-indulgence
make the hero shudder with an equal and unvarying intensity. And
when at the end he commits murder--only to find that it is
wrong!–
and is left as desperate, lost and alone as ever (the wrongness of
murder is the final insight of the book) one must conclude that in
this novel naivete has disguised itself as nihilism. Dostoevsky's Ras–
kolnikov was possessed by a set of ideas about existence which seemed
to him to justify murder (and he suffered from a situation which
forced his emotions and his ideas to collaborate or conspire); and in
the end, he discovered the wrongness of his ideas by committing
murder and undergoing its consequences. Bowles's intention is quasi–
Dostoevskian, but his hero not only engages in viciousness, concluding
in murder, in order to discover some idea of existence and of the self,
he also fails to discover anything whatever. The reader can certainly
identify himself with the hero of
Let It Come Down
insofar as he
finds existence full of silence, darkness, hopelessness, and meaningless–
ness. But the identification is painful without being rewarding, and
meaninglessness in itself illuminates nothing.
Innocence is the theme of Wright Morris' new novel,
The Works
Of Love.
The hero is the truly good and truly pure man who is doomed
to give all that he has and to love all that he can without receiving
gift or love in return. Morris has a beautiful sympathy for this kind
of human being, and he masters more and more, in each new book,
the gift of a colloquial poetic style. Unlike Sherwood Anderson and
Gertrude Stein, who often wrote from the point of view which Morris
has adopted in this book, he is always vivid and concrete (he has a
wonderful eye for the purely American detail) where they tended to
become increasingly vague or abstract or private. But something goes
wrong in the middle of
The Works Of Love:
the innocent hero is too
weak and too passive to be entirely admirable, at least in the way in
which the author wants us to admire
him.
We have only to compare
Morris' prairie saint with Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin, a comparison
which Morris' intention and ambition suggests, to recognize how there
