468
STEPHEN DONADIO
mixed-up kid ("She did not want to take care of
anything,
including
herself" ). When the news from Dallas breaks, however, she realizes how
trivial her own attempt to shock the world has been, and concludes
that "We all killed him.
If
anybody
did it, we did it." This revelation
is, if possible, even more shallow than her protest.
Still, the novel improves every time it escapes its intention. Mr.
Morris is much more reliable in close-range observations, and his greatest
strength is his ability to pin down a character in a nest of immediate
associations, e.g., Evelina: "She would be sitting on her Om-peer bidet,
straddle-legged, fanning her thighs with somebody's souvenir menu."
And much novelistic energy is spent in flashbacks of the lives of
characters; the best of these deal with Luigi, Wendell Horlick, and
Cowie. In an atmosphere of matrons who "had voices that were pitched
to
speak to their pets," they realize a conception of the individual as
the captive of society: who is, nevertheless, at times "possessed from
within by
another
person," someone "seen inside, peering out." These
sections, especially those relating to Cowie, are imaginatively so far
superior to anything else in the book that they seem out of place.
Cowie, potentially the most substantial character, is conceived of
as "the maverick who never leaves the herd." "The loner who does not
want to be alone"-but one is heartily offended by the author's over–
bearing over-explicit insistence on tying up these traits with those of
Lee H. Oswald. Far from increasing Cowie's significance, this virtually
nullifies it, and reduces him to the level of superficial message bearer.
Ultimately, the demands of the author's misguided intention are ruinous
to his fiction; but one has the feeling that his chances for success might
have been greater had he only let his characters speak for themselves.
Stephen Donadio
CRITIC'S CRITIC
MUSIC OBSERVED. By B. H. Haggin. Oxford University Pren. $6.50.
Though
B.
H . Haggin has written several books, most of his
music criticism has appeared in the magazines and newspapers he has
served as a regular contributor at various times during the last thirty
years or so. In 1949 some of his columns for the
Nation- the
publica-
