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parently obscene) Gypsy name, Murshkar, and with this gesture in the
direction of a redeemed if not retrieved sexuality, a completion of seIf–
hood, the novel releases us, the diptych completed, nothing resolved,
though everything, as in a painting,
represented.
My only quarrel with the book is that in both panels, radical evil–
not the evil of the gas chambers, nor the evil of modem social life in all
its banality, the evil Wordsworth describes in the London crowd:
The slaves unrespited of low pursuits,
Living amid the same perpetual flow
Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity, by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end
-but rather the evil that comes from
within
the self, the private evil,
is identified by the emblem of sexual heterodoxy: Moon's damnation, like
that of Paul Speer, and even like Barbara Speer's, is that the self has
tried to evade the agony of incommunication by sexual means, has tried,
unforgiveably, To Sleep With Stefan! In a book whose imagery is else–
where so finely administered, I find it difficult to acknowledge--amid
the desolation of the environing, stilI-smoking death camps-the validity
of this image of homosexuality as wrong-heartedness. The
noli me tangere
view of the sexual event is too suspect for us to credit its sanctity
nowadays-in Lawrence, in Salinger, here.
In design, though, and in the expression of that design through
feeling,
The Sun's Attendant
is a splendid achievement-though first
published in England, it is, astonishingly, by an American-and I can–
not decide whether it is more flattering
to
the author to assert that one
needs no more proof of his gifts than to reread it, or that one wonders
what he will do next, with a confident impatience. The only American
novel I know which offers an equivalent achievement: the orbit of a
self-limited, unavailing, absurd-also managing to offer the theory of a
whole people, the ideology of a doomed culture-is Glenway Wescott's
The Grandmothers.
Such books are the mirrors of a literature.
Richard Howard
