348
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
has written a novel "in the manner of Richardson," the great WASP
Father of the genre.
It
is not as an author, however, that Balso lusts
for Mary, but as the archetypally desirable
shiksa.h,
who-at the very
moment
his
tongue is in her mouth- disconcertingly becomes "a
middle aged woman, dressed in a mannish suit and wearing horn–
rimmed glasses," which is to say, Potiphar's wife turned schoolmarm.
Once revealed, however, Miss McGeeney proves even less of a prob–
lem to Balso than her earliest prototype to Joseph: "He hit Miss
McGeeney a terrific blow in the gut and hove her into the fountain."
Mter which, she stays inside the limits of his fantasy, returning
"warmly moist" to make possible the sexual climax with which the
book ends, turning a dry dream wet.
More troublesome to Balso than his Gentile foster-mother (to
whom he can play Joseph or Oedipus, turn and turn about, with no
real strain) is a kind of archetypal Jewish father, who disconcertingly
appears in the very bowels of the horse, a self-appointed kibbitzer in
the uniform of an official guide, from whom Balso has finally to
wrench himself "with a violent twist," as the paternal busybody howls
in his ear: "Sirrah! . . . I am a Jew! and whenever anything Jew–
ish is mentioned, I find it necessary to say that I am a Jew. I'm a
Jew! A Jew!"
It
is the last such explicit declaration of Jewishness
anywhere in West's work, on the lips of a character or in the words
of the author himself; for after the exorcism of
Balso Snell,
his dream–
ers dream on, presumably free forever of their aggressively Jewish
censor. But the dreams that they dream-of Sodom burning, of the
destruction of ever purer Josephs by ever grosser Potiphar's wives-we
must call Jewish dreams.
Even the madness which cues them, we must call (more in
sorrow than chauvinistic pride) Jewish madness; for just such mad–
ness, cuing just such dreams, we discover in that other great novel of
the thirties, this time frankly Jewish in language and theme, Henry
Roth's
Call It Sleep.
How aptly the ending of that book manages
to catch, more in the rhythm maybe, the phrasing of the words than
in their manifest content, that ambiguous moment at a day's end
when it is uncertain whether the spirit is falling toward sleep and a
dreaming from which it will wake with the morning, or toward a
total nightmare from which there
is
no waking ever. The cadences
of that close and their hushed terror stay in my head, more than
