360
PAR.TlSAN R.EVIEW
he pretends through most of
A Walk on the Wild Side
to be rendering
his world through such a character; though before the book is over
one realizes that the feelings and thoughts attributed to his protagonist
are, of course, his own. "All I found was that those with the hardest
ways of all to go were quicker to help others than those with the
easier way."
It is hard to believe such limp banalities, much less be moved by
them; but it is these thoughts and feelings, or more exactly, such feelings
profferred as thoughts, sentimentality pretending to be politics, which
are the real point of Algren's book. We must not be misled by his decor
and his protagonists; the whores and panders, cons and railroad cops,
brothels and freight cars are only the entertainment which draws us
in to hear the sermon, like the quartet or the guitar players at a
revival meeting.
Algren and Hersey are, in this respect, not unlike. As a matter of
fact,
A Walk on the Wild Side
and
A Single Pebble,
beneath certain
striking superficial differences, define a common literary tradition–
an important one in America. In both, the role of the imagination has
been yielded up on the one hand to documentation and on the other,
to sentimentality; in both, the purpose of the novel has been converted
from revelation to liberal uplift; in both, the cliche of the common man
is celebrated once more, the nobility of the lost memorialized; in both,
that is to say, the writer on the make, the man aiming at success,
blubbers ceremonially over the virtues of failure.
Hersey's brief fable of an American engineer's trip up the Yangtze
in the 1920s and of his learning to respect the wisdom of the illiterate
and the heroism of the brutal poor-takes up once more the new re–
vised version of the White Man's Burden: his need to demean himself
in order to atone for his former conviction of superiority. I must confess
in all frankness that I find Hersey's sentiments so piously unexception–
able as to be intolerable. There is something maddening to ordinary
sinners in being told so mildly and firmly that we must be humble,
that we must close the gap, that we must bring to the Orient not
merely techniques but understanding, and not merely cold understanding
but the comprehension which includes a lump in the throat. "Elations
with despair," Hersey calls the sentimental indulgence he takes for
wisdom, "a palpable ache that somehow gave me comfort." The mild–
mannered masochisms behind his high-minded fa«ade, like the more
strident sadism behind Algren's politics, ends by making me queasy;
though, indeed, I am never sure who should be despised, Hersey for
being so pious or me for being appalled by that piety.
