LIBERAL SOAP OPERA
What a museum of outworn liberalistic cliches! And how extraordinary
that a political novel expressing the crudest illusions of the "Popular
Front" psychology of the '30s should today be reviewed sympathetically
and seriously even in so sophisticated a journal as
The New Yorker!
The
liberal myth is indeed a tough old bird. Myself, I found the deplorable
Louis Baron generally right on Communism as against his progressive
but woolly-witted antagonists. He shocks them in 1939 by wanting to
criticize
both
Hitler and Stalin, and in 1945 by suppressing a story by '
Berkeley about "democracy and Communism working together in Czech–
oslovakia" and by damning the Yalta conference. I can even sympathize
with his annoyance over "the pressure of 'Communist' members of the
New York Newspaper Guild," for I remember that when I worked for
Luce in the early '30s, there
were
Communists in the Guild, notably one
who helped me organize the Time-Fortune unit. s "Even if the great
majority of the Chinese people are for the Communists-the ignorant
Chinese people, mind you-that's no reason for us to
be
for 'em," Baron
sensibly observes to Berkeley, who replies with his usual fatuity, "It strikes
me as a pretty good reason." According to liberal mythology, The
People are always right, except for the Germans under Hitler.
It's not considered sporting for a reviewer to comment on a writer's
professional competence-at least I assume this is why so few reviewers
pay any attention to the matter-but the fact is that Mr. Wertenbaker,
although a journalist since the age of twenty-one and the author of
nine books, is a most amateurish writer-clumsy, long-winded, bumbling,
and pretentious. He overloads his descriptive passages with details, but
somehow omits the one that would make the scene vivid. He can linger
longer over lighting cigarettes, pouring drinks, and the exchange of al–
legedly significant looks than any author I know and with less result.
He expresses the sensibility of cheap women's-magazine fiction in prose
as turgid as the most high-falutin' avant-garde writing, an unhappy
combination. His ear for dialogue is of purest tin-"Oh what comic in–
gredients our sadnesses are made of!" one character remarks-and he
has no ear at all for plain English, the phrasing being so chronically
"off'
as to give the effect of a bad translation, as: "Berkeley had grown
deeply fond of Dick without getting through his reticence, which often
summoned youthful banter to the defense of a nature almost solemn."
Or: "Although he had no other job as yet, he refused to accept a
3 That Mr. Wertenbaker puts "Communist" in quotes shows simple ignor–
ance of the left-wing milieu, I think, rather than bias. He just doesn't know
his way around there, as when he makes the girl in bed already cited, allegedly
a party-liner, refer to "the colonial people" instead of the standard Marxist
usage, "the colonial peoples."
