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PARTISAN REVIEW
black a curtain as the gloomiest modern novel, but which is nevertheless
only an elaborate novelistic device for saying that the famous English
genius for compromise may also be a tragic weakness for evasion.
Wilson seems to share Fiedler's view that horror and heartbreak are the
norm of life these days; but the point I want to make is merely that
the classical virtues of plot are as available and useful to this view as
to any other.
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
has little moral surprise and no
peripeteia
to speak of. The only moral judgment of any weight is the
plot itself. This can be regretted; one can sympathize with Kingsley
Amis when he finds the hero too much fleshed out with cliche and
his actions too much explained. Yet this is a real novel by grace of
its author's humanity and wit. It boasts at least two very funny scenes,
along with much substance and moral passion. The novel is learned,
radical, deep-going farce and a literary geometry of virtues, vices, char–
acters, and passions as satisfying as any genuine feat of the mind.
C. P. Snow is a far less expert plotter than Wilson. His book is
really two novels rather flimsily joined. But the part that interested
me-how a provincial bureaucrat fares at the hands of his hard-boiled
London superiors-has a modicum of suspense. Snow still lives precari–
ously in the world Valery described "where seeming commands being
and where being is held in a noble restraint which changes all of life
into an opportunity to exercise presence of mind." True, the presence
of mind of Snow's bureaucrats is seldom noble and Snow's own heart
has mostly turned against them. But there
is
the subtle relish for ap–
pearances and their power to control events.
In Bellow and Baldwin, plot is negligible. In
Seize the Day
we
know
that lard and rye will fall; from the opening sentence we know
that Wilhelm is doomed, his character consumed by his fate. Bellow,
the most austere of minds, accepts and accepts and accepts, down to the
smallest crack in the pavement. The things of the world are destiny,
not decoration. Expression, revelation,
wisdom-play
is all. And the
same should be equally true of
Giovanni's Room,
but isn't. Here what
might have been a masterly novella of the modern Parisian underworld
is almost lost in the special-pleading of a psychiatric case history.
"What escapes documentation," writes Fiedler, "and is available
only to the imagination is what moves us these days in the mass horror
that has succeeded politics and the private terror that threatens to
supplant love. We have pretended too long that our experience cor–
responds really tQ the order of plot-logic or of formal analysis." Now
I can't very well pretend that he means the same thing by "formal
analysis" that I mean in praising Wilson and Snow. Still, when all
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