BOO KS
is indispensable to such a novel; Mr. Greene should know that since
he is a master of it. In this particular case, however, I was most forcibly
reminded of Saul Bellow's
The Victim.
A reading of that after
The
Midnight Patient
would do more than any criticism to show what I
mean. Mr. Bellow is a writer-the real thing.
In a sense, as much should stand to Mr. Leatherman's credit. He
is a writer, though as far as I can tell he has not yet found a subject.
The Other Side of the Tree
makes me uneasy with its vaguely evoca–
tive "sensitivity" somehow nowadays part of every Southern novel. Or
do I merely imagine this? Jim Daigre, Mr. Leatherman's hero, is as
sensitive as you please though the author has sufficient tact to thin out
the laying-on of perceptions from time to time. Still and all, there are
far too many "as ifs"; "A gray rabbit hopped across with its long
shadow,
a.£
slowly as
if
it were being dreamed about"; or, ... "driving
away in the buggy he had kept on glancing back, as if at a golden
chariot ..."; or, ... "then she raised her arms and her fingers moved
across her shoulders as if to feel the shadows on them...." One wants
to say, I don't believe it was as
if
it were that way at
all.
Yet such a
device, such an excuse for metaphor, is fashionable and by no means
wholly destructive; rather it is part of Mr. Leatherman's tendency to
fine writing, to "poetic" style, to evoke or suggest so insistently that the
reader finally doubts that the author is doing more than showing off
his language. A fault in itself, this tendency involves Mr. Leatherman
in a technical impasse: Ed Hatheway tells the tale of Miss Ida and the
others, yet his idiom is the idiom of the author, or at least when it at
rare moments seems to start to become Ed's, one flinches from the in–
congruity. The idiom cannot change because the story is by and about,
and in the voice of, the author, by no means an inadmissable technique
but a delicate, chancy one. Mr. Leatherman has to depend on his vo–
cabulary, imagery and the three-dot punctuation-mark suggesting the in–
enarrable because he has not been able to contrive an action demanding
both a muscular prose and varied characterization. His people are
ciphers; his big scenes shadows on the cave's wall. The mandatory, the
obligatory jobs remain undone-not shirked, because one feels Mr.
Leatherman has talent and potential, but simply missed because the
author did not know he had them
to
do. The symbolic rituals, the rites
of initiation, the emblematic motifs like Blake's bones-all these are
very well in their way, but I for one want to see some full-blooded people
doing something of high significance and drama. What use is it to me
to hear that "the past is held in eternal and lively suspension" when
Mr.
Leatherman simply gives me a couple of parallel situations and then
