604
PARTISAN REVIEW
measures also of a gracefully accepted slightness at the best, triviality
at the worst.
If
Mr. Pinfold in his illness is forced to be "the horrified
witness of a scene which might have come straight from the kind of
pseudo-American thriller he most abhorred," if some of his sufferings
also, though remotely, remind us of what Bloom suffered in Nighttown,
it is understood all the while that these extremes are equally products
of hallucination; capable of causing pain, but not
real.
Considered later,
in health, and brought under the domination of a good wit and a better
style, they will entertain many. As the prefatory note says of Mr. Waugh:
"Since his disconcerting voyage he has learned that a great number of
sane people suffer
in
this way from time to time. He believes this record
may amuse them."
Of these three comedies, the one I enjoyed much the most was
Wright Morris's
Love Among the Cannibals,
despite two difficulties, one
minor and the other, if not major, at least more continuously disturbing
than the first. The minor one is the love story, which even through
the parody or satire, or because of this, seems somehow to be reflected
from the one in
The Last Tycoon,
as though Mr. Morris were pointing
out, on the one hand, what a joke that was, and on the other what a
joke this is, the punch-line of both jokes being that all of it is true,
and terrible, and sad. The other difficulty is with the first-person nar–
ration, which is not, like that of Mme. Yourcenar's book, in the style
of a memoir, but free, wise-cracking and dramatic, and which runs woe–
fully close, in everything but earnest dullness fortunately, to the man–
ner of numberless detective novels in which the personal I has relentlessly
been debased into the private eye, greatly to the detriment of character
in fiction and perhaps elsewhere as well. Mr. Morris cannot be held
responsible for the detective novels, but nevertheless there they are, on
the scene-all over it, in fact-and they have made some tones of voice
very near impossible. Where for Stendhal the problem of the "I" was
its egotism, the current problem may be that no individual ego is
reflected at all.
These objections are in considerable part overcome by Mr. Morris's
book, which though slight and occasionally sentimental in its romantic
toughness, is alive as well as lively, and has sustained episodes of savagely
funny fable. The story is of a not quite first-rate song-writing team and
their two girls (not girls:
chicks),
who go on an odd junket to Mexico,
or Nature, or Eden, or anyhow Back There, where, as their immobilized
car is gradually stripped down (to be reassembled only when they have
abandoned any claim to own it), they too become as naked as Lear
on his heath.
