PARTISAN REVIEW
39
parents and children and the infinite abyss that separates them,
that especially separates the immigrant generation from its "Amer–
ican" offspring. "America! America!" is about the declining for–
tunes of the Baumann family, which devolve from the father's
prosperous importance in the immigrant social world to the
chronic failures of the clever, maladaptive, ne'er-do-well sons. As
in Joseph Conrad's novels, however, half the interest of the story
comes from its teller, in this case Mrs. Fish, Shenandoah's mother,
to whom he seems to be listening for the first time, thunderstruck
by the complex world from which he came (and which lies accus–
ingly outside his ken as an artist), struck too by the sensitivity of
the speaker, whose intuitive insight into "the difficulties of life"
shames him for his arrogance and self-importance. "Shenandoah
was exhausted by his mother's story. He was sick of the mood in
which he had listened, the irony and contempt which had t(J.ken
hold o f each new event. He had listened from such a distance that
what he saw was an outline, a caricature, and an abstraction. How
different it might seem, if he had been able to see these lives from
the inside, looking out."
The whole sto ry is brilliantly punctuated by such notations,
by the undulations of self-awareness in this writer as he is flooded
by the past and by the alien world of the middle class. "He re–
flected on his separation from these people, and he reflected that
in every sense he was removed from them by thousands of miles,
or by a generation, or by the Atlantic Ocean.... Whatever he
wrote as an author did not enter into the lives of these people,
who should have been his genuine relatives and friends, for he had
been surrounded by their lives since the day of his birth, and in an
important sense, even before then.... The lower middle-,class of
Shenandoah's parents had engendered perversions of its own
nature, children full of contempt for every thing important to
their parents.,,2
2. Compare the following reminiscence by Alfred Kazin:
"It
was not for myself that I
was expected to shine, but for them -- to redeem the constant anxiety of their
existence. I was the first American child, their offering to the strange new God ; I
was
to
be the monument of their liberation from the shame of being -- what they were....
Our families and teachers seemed tacitly agreed to be a little ashamed of what we were."
--
A Walker
in
the City
