710
PARTISAN REVIEW
this is the more regrettable because Mr. Goodwin, whenever he can
forget the ruin he has planned for his characters long enough to look
at them or at the Haitian social scene, is amusing and wise. Though their
local color is designed to shock, their excursions into it locate Messrs.
Bowles and Goodwin quite as much among the heirs of Sarah Orne
Jewett and George Washington Cable as among the imitators of Law–
rence and Douglas.
The Bold Saboteurs
is also fashionable, the most recent evidence of
what is happening to autobiographical fiction in America. For forty
years and with minor variations portraits of artists as young men and
records of sentimental educations have been exceedingly common among
us. Mr. Brossard's publishers are perhaps mistaken when they announce
that he has "extended the limits" of the novel. He has merely added
the devices of surrealist fantasy to a rigidly conventionalized design and
has made his hero tough where twenty years ago he would have been
delicate. Surely this must be the easiest kind of writing to write. Put
down as much as you can remember or imagine of what it was like
or might have been like to grow up on the streets of Washington in
the '20s and '30s and, by the deceiving light of fantasy, mere recollection
or mere imagination turns up with one more vision of the decline of
Man in the Western World.
So far-I am thinking of novelists so dissimilar as Joyce and Ray–
mond Queneau, Genet and the Dylan Thomas of the entrancing
Adven–
tures in the Skin Trade-this
kind of writing
has
been memorable when
it has been comic, as if the metropolitan nightmare, whether dreamed in
Dublin, in Paris, or in London, were supportable only when it provides
matter for guffaws. Mr. Brossard is never funny. In his fact and in his
fantasy he is violent and rather dull.
The Bold Saboteurs
is informative
about what used to be called low life, but whatever Mr. Brossard really
intended is not here.
After these enterprises in fictional chic it is pleasant to think of
Elizabeth Taylor. No violence and no meaningless artifice stand between
her and her reader. Her unspectacular people and her commonplace
English seaside town in the off season can be felt and seen, sharp and
clear.
If
there is nothing to distinguish her writing notably from that of
Elizabeth Bowen or of the earlier Rosamond Lehmann, it is still, with
its evidence of a cultivated, delicately judging moral sensibility, one of
the best kinds of writing there is nowadays. So beguiling, indeed, are
Mrs. Taylor's felicities that the excessive contrivance of her novel be–
comes only slowly apparent. This entirely promising tale of a middle–
aged Siegfried who awakes to life a Brunnhilde cast into emotional
