342
PARTISAN REVIEW
liberalism as his ancestors might have worn their plumed hats. That
even today he finds this intellectually tattered and morally bedraggled
garb a respectable, even dashing costume is a tribute partly to his inno–
cence-he has written a period piece without knowing it-and partly
to the curious vitality of liberal mythology.
The story begins one evening in 1938 when Louis Baron, who re–
sembles Henry Luce right up to his shaggy eyebrows and who is the
new publisher of
Beacon,
a news magazine not wholly unlike
Time,
con–
fers with five of his top editors. They are liberals-using the term as the
novel does, as meaning
pro
TVA, labor, Spanish Loyalists, and
anti
lynching, Huey Long, big business, and appeasement (of Hitler's Ger–
many, that is, appeasement of Stalin's Russia being just good common
sense) -and they have come to talk politics with their new boss. They
leave reassured. The rest of the book takes the story up to 1950, telling
how Baron's increasing conservatism wrecks the lives and careers of the
five who met with him in 1938.
The Death of Kings
is thus a political
novel, a novel of ideas.
2
To write a successful novel of ideas, an author must have (1)
ideas, or at least the ability to deal with them, and (2) a level of con–
sciousness superior to that of his characters. As to (1), the following
is a fair sample of Mr. Wertenbaker's intellection, which is as woolly
as his Harris-tweed prose:
The bright dome had passed from his sight, and so had the other
domes of the Pantheon and Val de Grace, squashed by a perspective
that stunted even Notre Dame, and he thought it was a sacrilege to look
down on Paris, as it would have been a sacrilege for God to look down
on the hopes of men knowing their unfulfillment. But no.
If
God was
the sum of human hopes (and what else could He be?), then He
had
looked down, as the war was ending, and had glimpsed the dimmest
reflection of Himself-enough to keep men believing and striving, as
they had been put on the face of the earth to do.
As
to (2), when Stendhal anatomized obscurantist reaction in post–
Napoleonic Parma or when Dostoevsky made Nihilism the theme of
The Possessed,
they stood apart from and above their characters and so
were able to penetrate into the ideas those characters lived by and
2 Even the sex, of which there is a saleable amount, is heavily politicalized.
Two lovers talking in bed sound like a branch meeting. "Don't you believe the
world
will
have to go socialist?" asks the girl. "Something like that, eventually,"
concedes the man, but adds that he prefers the 1776 kind of revolution to the
Marxist kind. "And what about the colonial people?" counters the lady.
"If
I
ever have to choose between the people anywhere and what I think is good
for me as a privileged American, I hope I choose the people," he replies with
the smugness the author often confuses with political virtue. "Then you're one
of us," his inamorata sums up, "and that's why I 'm in your bed."
