BOO KS
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the most part not persons but stereotypes clothed in obsessions.
Given the state of letters in America,
Voss
will probably succeed at
the expense of Andrew Lytle's
The Velvet Horn,
which is published
about the same time; I hope the event will prove me wrong, but I
have sad doubts.
I am not without objections to Mr. Lytle's procedures. In par–
ticular, to somewhat windy sentences, which in attempting a continu–
ousness and natural fluency appear merely at times as overwrought. Ex–
amples are too long to quote, but after one speech he finds it appropri–
ate to note that the speaker "was breathing like a wind-broke horse."
Also I object to certain abrupt transitions between the fictional past
and present, which perhaps I might have met more alertly, but which
struck me as affected.
These traits, however, seriously disturb only in the first quarter
of the book; some allowance must be made for getting acquainted with
the style, as well as for the author's occasional awkwardnesses in begin–
ning a tale which he has resolved to tell in the most difficult way of
all, and the one in which success will be most rewarding. That is, to
tell the story as it becomes known to the principal person, here a
young man, Lucius Cree; to tell, in effect, how the story came to be
a story, not merely how the past lives again in the present, but how
the present comes to know the past which continuously determines it,
and how accident progressively reveals itself as design. In the beginning
of the story a felled tree kills a man; by the end, this isolated and ap–
parently accidental event is seen as one tragical result of the weavings
of many lives through many years, a result which itself enters into the
determination of other lives.
As in chess, all combinations, especially the most beautiful, are
sacrificial; about this kind it has not been enough noted, I think, that
its penalties and weaknesses come at the beginning, with nearly a hun–
dred pages of this novel given over to rambling discourses about family
relations among persons not yet introduced, which I think even a more
patient reader than myself might find unmemora:ble, but a great deal
of which is essential to the understanding of the story. I had to go back
a number of times from much further on, mainly for genealogical
reasons but also to pick up identifying information about people who
did not even appear, much less assume any distinctive individuality,
until far into the development.
Granting that this happens, that some of it is my fault for reading
carelessly and that some of it is indispensable to the form, there still
seems a good bit too much. And even about the results of so much
