754
BENJAMIN DEMOTT
power to shake the heart cannot be trusted:
every
effort to describe
the commonplace in commonplace tone is ruined by some unpre–
dictable splinter of rage ("The cry of being human was the most
commonplace cry in Service. I heard it daily. It's the spatial cry of
the beggar. Look the next time you see a beggar. The successful
beggar always suggests he too is human. I don't know why we
should have beggars. But beggars beg you to look on their face.
Almost like the anger of a god.")
The desperation of this voice, as is clear, is that of the man
whose life is a nightmare of impotency, and it lifts the novel at hand
well above the level of the treatise on urban blight. That despite
this elevation the book falls short of coherence, that Mr. Horwitz
cannot make art out of his truths, his observation, his choked ef–
fort to reflect and to formulate, is a comment not on his talent but
on the immensity of the disorder that he confronts. Mastery of the
disorder (and of the uncontrollable potencies that leer through it)
cannot be asked for; consciousness of it is, even when close to
hysteria, as in
The Inhabitants,
an item to be prized.
That Wright Morris has a measure of this consciousness seems
at first glance doubtful. The Nebraska plains and towns where
much of his fiction is situated have little of the capacity of metrop–
olis for suggesting the uncontrollable. On those occasions
(The
Deep Sleep
or
Man and
Boy
are examples) when Morris ap–
proaches the city, he does so only to concentrate on middle figures
whose awareness of crisis ranges from minimal to non-existent. And
as for his voice: it is invariably relaxed,
wry,
patient. "Come to the
window," his new book says quietly as it opens:
The one at the rear of the Lone Tree Hotel. The view is to the
west. There is no obstruction but the sky. Although there is no one
outside to look in, the yellow blind is drawn low at the window, and
between it and the pane a fly is trapped. He has stopped buzzing.
Only the crawling shadow can be seen. Before the whistle of the
train is heard the loose pane rattles like a simmering pot, then stops,
as if pressed by a hand, as the train goes past. The blind sucks
in–
ward and the dangling cord drags
in
the dust on the sill.
The tranquility of tone, the care of the composition, the evident
desire to make even the most trivial event occur-these seem to
stand in themselves for a total withdrawal from urgency.
