178
HOWARD NEMEROV
poems, a strong, almost religious sense that he is telling a parable,
not just a story in which we may find more or less meaning; this
sense he betrays in a portentous anxiety lest we miss the profound
import in what is going on. At the same time, though, he has an
immense, almost uncontrollable gift for those details which bring
to the rea'der the conviction that what is going on is, after all, noth–
ing more nor less than "real life" itself : to hear
him
describe, as he
does to begin with and thereafter again, a pair of boots ("They
were number X-362 in the Monkey Ward catalogue ..." and
though I haven't looked, I bet they are), is to feel oneself at once
in · the real, trivial presence of everyday American life. But even
before the beginning Mr. Warren's other side has got
in
by prefiX–
i~g
.to the whole an epigraph from the Allegory of the Cave in
The
Republic,
whence we understand that we are
in
the presence not
only of everyday American life but also of something a good deal
more serious and
profound-Myth.
I am sorry to find myself responding in this way, for I think
Mr. \Y'arren a vastly gifted writer ; a good poet, and a novelist
whose only problem seemed to be the management of those great
powers of the imagination which enabled him to produce
Night
Rider ·
and (not ·less admirable)
All T he King's Men.
But it is my
response, and I am stuck with it.
The Cave
seems to me to repre–
seI\t his specific virtues as having reached a point of over-ripeness:
his ·tragic concern with the search for identity becomes a kind of
mass-produced mechanism, his ear for dialogue and eye for detail
a glib sleight-of-hand, and his meditative lyricism an embarrass–
ment.
It ought to be said that with all this he is still terribly good,
and this remark has no idea of condescending: he is simply not as
good as he has· shown 'himself able to be. He tells an interesting
story, perhaps too many interesting stories. The situation at the
center-the young man in the cave-involves him, before he can
arrive at it, in a number of life histories which tells in character–
·istic fullness (even with a very minor figure far from the action
and related to it mostly
by
telephone, we have to hear, as a prelude
to his slight involvement, a page and a half about his housing prob-
