FICTION CHRONICLE
179
lems, the bourbon he drinks, his acid stomach, his dead daughter,
his wife's varicose veins ... ) ; consequently the drama itself some–
times gets left in rather ridiculous postures. The book opens at the
mouth of the cave, it is over a hundred pages and several life
stories later before we hear why one of the major persons is con–
cerned ; a girl who starts running to town with news of the disaster
is left running for chapter after chapter while the sight of her pro–
duces the full-scale portraits and biographies of several persons.
There remain qualities which reveal some of the reasons for
Warren's being, at the best, so convincing a novelist: for one, his
sympathetic recollection of the pains of adolescence, for another,
his
feeling for the sorrow in people, and their terrible isolation,
even, or especially, when they are ludicrous people. Of this latter
trait, a quotation may serve to show both the extent of the virtue
and the extent to which it has become a mannerism:
He was so burly he always seemed on the verge of popping a
seam. His thighs were so tight-packed with muscle that he wore
slick places on his trousers, halfway between knee and crotch, where
the bulge of muscle on one leg wouldn't clear the bulge on the other
when he walked. You knew he would have a black
pelt
on
hi.
belly
like a buffalo
robe,
and have a scrotum like two doorknobs stuck in a
chamois bag. His hands were excessively white- as though the dish–
water of the years of his apprenticeship in his chosen vocation had had
permanent efficacy-and were sprigged with coarse black hairs, with
square-cut nails, strong and sharp-edged like the business end of a
three-quarter-inch chilled-steel
wood
chisel.
And in that deep,
dark,
angry secret center of his being tears fell without ceasing.
The book in fact is full of Il"..annerisms, though the name of them
is "real life" : for example, the endlessly repeated leitmotiv of Jack
Harrick's holding up the head of the slain bear; the stereotype
comic figure of the henpecked husband who as a result of the
main action turns on his wife; such passages as the following:
He must have been aware, for
if
he was aware now he was aware
without looking, and the looking must have occurred some other
time,
and the awareness that came with the looking must have been there,
somewhere, all the time. In any case, the awareness
wu
here now . . . .
