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PARTISAN REVIEW
suicide, the quintessential theme of modernist, existentialist thinkers.
There is a good deal of evidence, both internal and external, that
Wright was reading T. S. Eliot with close interest in the late thirties,
and while one need not insist on any direct influence, there is an eerie
thematic similarity between what Wright was doing and these two pas–
sages from Eliot. The first is Sweeney speaking in
Sweeney Agol1istes:
I knew a man once did a girl in
Any man might do a girl in
Any man has to, needs
to,
wants to
Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.
In "Eeldrop and Appleplex," Eliot observes:
In Gopsum Street a man murders his mistress. The important fact is
that for the man the act is eternal, and that for the brief space he has
to live, he is already dead. He is already in a different world from
ours. He has crossed the frontier. The important fact is that some–
thing is done which cannot be undone - a possibility which none of
us realise until we face it ourselves.
Just as he was exploring modernist techniques, so too Wright was
exploring peculiarly modernist themes throughout his career. One can see
this in the way he attempts to elevate the realistic narrative of
The
Outsider
to a philosophical, conceptual level not only through various
meditative passages but, more starkly, in the epigraphs from Blake and
Job he chooses to introduce the novel, and his enlistment of separate
epigraphs for each of the six parts: from Kierkegaard for Book One
("Dread"); from Hart Crane for Book Two ("Dream"); from St. Paul
for Book Three ("Descent"); from
Macbeth
for Book Four ("Despair");
and from Nietzsche for Book Five ("Decision"). This is like a reading
list for the person who would aspire to make himself into a modernist
writer.
And Wright did it; he made himself into just such a writer, but what
is the most particular quality of his writing? Wright, it seems to me, was
the most "masculine" (or masculinist, if one prefers that inflection of the
term) writer in the American tradition. The words that come immedi–
ately and inevitably to mind to describe his writing have all to do with
power and strength and force - the compelling power of his narrative
