BOO KS
361
I am sure, at any rate, that he is not a novelist; that he writes
fiction (or pretends to) only as a strategy for getting his point of view
before more people. There is in him no poetry or invention, only the
patient, slick exposition of facts, plus the desire to stay on the side
of the angels of the latest headline-Warsaw Jews or Japanese peasants
or Chinese boatmen. But the writer, as Kierkegaard somewhere pointed
out, casts out devils only by the aid of the devil. For reporting of a
superior order, however, for restrained but effective descriptions of the
wild Yangtze gorges, for little observations on the Chinese character
(on a popularizing level) the present small book has a certain value.
And yet one surely has the right to feel offended at being told once
more that the Chinese find offensive our habit of blowing our noses
into little rags that we put into our pockets. This is the standard example
one gives to a twelve-year-old in a first "adult" discussion of cultural
differences and prejudice.
If
one does not object to being lectured at
like an intelligent adolescent, and finds quite inoffensive the journalist's
pretense to be writing a novel (by sketching a love affair in lightly
against the moralizing and the scenery) there is no reason why he
should not enjoy Hersey's book.
.
Algren's narrative is not as perfunctory as that of
A Single Pebble,
but it, too, flickers to life only intermittently among the lay sermons
and the miscellaneous information about jails and whorehouses.
A
Walk on the Wild Side
is also documented, out of the same sense, I
suppose, which compels popular magazine fiction, the notion that
"truth" resides in avoiding inaccuracies : in knowing, for instance, ex–
actly what equipment a New Orleans prostitute of the '30s would have
had on her table. It is all part of the long retreat of the imagination
before science, of our surrender to information. Moreover, like Hersey,
Algren beneath his show of facts and his avowed devotion to "real
life" actually appeals to the romantic yearning for the exotic, though
his interior China is a southern Skid Row. You can hardly tell the in–
habitants of Algren's country from those of Hersey's without a program.
One has the impression that they are played by the same bit actors:
old Noble Savages dressed in the appropriate costumes.
With what a difference, however, this common neo-Romanticism,
this homage to democracy, is rendered. Algren is apparently after a
kind of folk poetry, which aspires equally toward the anti-literary and
the cheaply arty, a cross between what Sandburg and Hans Christian
Andersen mean to him. Only a quotation can give a sense of the thick–
ness, the twitchiness, the self-indulgence of his style, which sneaks all
the external trappings of verse (including rime) into a form that finds it
