580
PARTISAN REVIEW
A renewed sense, then, of the loss of values is beginning to impose
itself, only this time it seems to be taking the form of a recognition that
in losing our taste for ideology we have also lost our capacity for pas–
sion. But though one can decide which values to defend, and though
one can try on ideologies like suits of clothes, one cannot choose to
be passionate. It is impossible to will oneself into powerful convictions;
something from the outside has to take over the mind and spirit, has
to "startle this dull pain, and make it move and live." The dilemma
today is that nothing seems to
be
left in our world to set an honest
man's feelings on fire.
Three recent novels by young American writers bear discussion
in
this connection as different responses to the new mood which has been
developing in the past year or two. The most recalcitrant of the three,
and the least interesting, is Frederick Buechner's
The Return of Ansel
Gibbs,
l
a terribly solemn little book about a patrician statesman who
runs into trouble with a know-nothing midwestern senator when his
appointment to a cabinet post comes up for confirmation. The contrast
between Gibbs and the senator is much too crude to yield anything sig–
nificant, and to make matters worse, Buechner drags in a contrived and
wholly unconvincing bit of complicated business involving the hero's
daughter and the son of a man for whose suicide many years earlier
Gibbs still feels responsible. None of this is any good at all, but in the
portrait of Ansel Gibbs himself, Buechner gets hold of something real;
he handles it ineptly, but it is something real nevertheless. Gibbs is a
rather stuffy and pompous man (one wonders whether Buechner
is
aware of the extent to which he has endowed his hero with these un–
attractive qualities), but he has breeding, cultivation, and intelligence
(or anyway a reasonable facsimile of intelligence-the breeding and cul–
tivation seem authentic enough). His political enemies accuse him of
having once responded to the question, implausibly put to him by an
irate soldier when he was in Washington during the war without a
uniform, "Well, my friend, and what are you doing to save civilization?"
with the calm reply, "I am civilization." Civilization, we quickly dis–
cover, means for Buechner a consciousness of the "tragic ambivalence"
of life, and being civilized exerts a severe toll: Gibbs suffers from a
certain deficiency of feeling, a certain remoteness from the natural pro–
cesses and the elemental emotions. He is almost incapable of passion
(sobriety, judiciousness, detachment, moderation, tolerance being the
civilized virtues), and he can no more satisfy his old teacher's demand
that he become a prophet than he can prate sentimentally like the sena·
1.
Knopf.
$3.75.
