The Cross of Redemption (39 page)

(1948)

A
REVIEWER
handed a James M. Cain novel to discuss finds himself confronted by several problems, not the least of which is the necessity of squaring with his conscience the fact that he is discussing Mr. Cain at all. What, after all, is one to say about such persistent aridity, such manifest nonsense? Mr. Cain is no novelist: he has, indeed, his first sentence still to write; he has yet to achieve his first valid characterization. For me, at the top of his amazingly overrated form, as in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
, in
Double Indemnity
and
Serenade
, he was, when not downright revolting, obscurely and insistently embarrassing. Not only did he have nothing to say, but he drooled, so to speak, as he said it. It seemed much kinder, really, to take no notice of him, to adopt with him that same fiercely casual, friendly air, assumed, let us say, when visiting two otherwise harmless people who are, however, shamefully addicted to early-morning drunkenness.

Mr. Cain, of course, strongly resists such treatment; he stands, in the first place, by no means alone. He has, moreover, a following described by the publisher’s blurb as “vast”; and, what is perhaps more important than any of this, he is himself convinced of his importance. He writes with the stolid, humorless assurance of the American self-made man. Rather a
great deal has been written concerning his breathless staccato “pace,” his terse, corner-of-the-mouth “style,” his significance as a recorder of the seamier side of American life. This is nonsense: Mr. Cain writes fantasies, and fantasies of the most unendurably mawkish and sentimental sort; his pace is simply that of the gangster motion picture; and his style is more pretentious but no more rewarding than that of
Terry and the Pirates
.

The Moth
is Mr. Cain’s most ambitious novel; the publishers advise that it will “surprise and delight” the aforementioned formidable following, a sentiment endorsed by Mr. Cain himself, who shyly confesses a hankering to tell tales of a “wider implication than those that deal exclusively with one man’s relation to one woman”—an ambition which, since I have yet to meet either a man or a woman in Mr. Cain’s pages, seems rather premature.

Apparently the great distinction of
The Moth
lies in its exhausting and desperate diversity: it involves boy sopranos, oil wells, oil fires, theft, hoboes, the Depression, the inevitable woman (hard and dangerous), and the inevitable husband (dull and well-meaning). The happy ending is economically assured by an appalling and all-too-likely scheme of frozen dinners shipped to housewives all over the country by a plan known, happily, thus far only to Mr. Cain’s hero. The happy ending also involves the culmination of a curious and breathless romance between the hero and an extremely brittle child of twelve, who becomes, at a more seemly age, his wife. This affair, it is worth noting, is not in the least unconvincing; it operates perfectly within Mr. Cain’s framework and sums up for me something intrinsically tawdry and ugly, something very literally nasty, which pervades all of his work.

It occurred to me while reading the earlier and less ambitious Mr. Cain that his ruthless protagonists and their fearful sweethearts were actually descendants of the Rover Boys and that the only thing wrong with them was the fact that they were still reeling from the discovery that they were in possession of visible and functioning sexual organs. It was the impact of this discovery that so hopelessly and murderously disoriented them; they were thenceforth at the mercy of their genitalia, the power of which they were endlessly compelled to prove. Mr. Cain surveys these dull, untidy adolescents with a moist, benevolent fascination, betraying in these novels, the novels in which the tradition and jargon of the American tough guy have been pushed to their furthest limit, the hypocrisy, the horror, and the loneliness from which this tradition sprang.

(1948)

O
NE OF MY CONTINUING
and more respectable prejudices has always been, not altogether justly, against anthologies. “Not altogether justly” because an anthology can, I suppose, be very exciting on occasion, and at least as handy as those other indispensables of the earnest middle-brow American, Barlett and Roget’s Thesaurus. Anthologies are apparently designed to make life easier for the inveterate sampler and rereader and to fire the neophyte with an urge to more fully discover the authors who have been obligingly edited and presented to him by some zealous editor. It appeals to me usually about as strongly as watered whiskey; but, of course, even watered whiskey is better than none.

Mr. Guerney’s watered blend is better than most. His self-avowed determinations to indicate to American readers that Russian literature is not all epileptic melancholia—which hardly seemed likely—and that Russians can be gay as well as gloomy, of which I, for one, received overwhelming evidence from the deluge of Moscow-Sings-Moscow-Dances movies during the recent war. Nevertheless, Mr. Guerney has set out to deliver Russian literature
from under “Dostoevsky’s somber cape.” This is admirable, perhaps, though of the work printed here (in spite of an occasional, tight, nightmarish humor), none is precisely lighthearted, and most of it is quite strenuously grim.

Mr. Guerney apparently feels that of all literary instruments, the Russian language is the mightiest and most profound, a belief which I, naturally, would not dare to challenge; moreover, according to him, almost all translations from the Russian have been at best weak infidelities or downright profanations. It is something of a blow to discover that one has never really read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky at all but has been merely titillated by irresponsible pastel corruptions. Since Mr. Guerney at no point indicates that he will translate the major works of these men himself, one is left with the rather despairing alternatives of buying a Linguaphone or sticking close to Shakespeare. In spite of all this—or quite possibly because of it, since here each translation has Mr. Guerney’s guarantee—
The Portable Russian Reader
is a moderately fascinating grab bag. It is quite dreadfully comprehensive, including fables from the eleventh and seventeenth centuries and aphorisms and proverbs from the Lord knows when. More familiarly, there are short stories and excerpts from Pushkin, Gogol, Krylov, Garshin, Turgenev, Gorky, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Ehrenburg. Much of these I have never read before and I am glad to have found them now; some are slight or so completely Russian idiom that they have little relevance; later on, with Ehrenburg, for instance, the grim revolutionary simplicities become rather hard to take. But as a matter of fact, Mr. Guerney’s taste, if not irreproachable, is sound, and he has included nothing which could be called mediocre. There are some things which are unforgettable: Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6,” for instance, and Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” and Garshin’s “Four Days.” It includes one of Gorky’s most successful sketches, “Birth of a Man,” Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (there is an unwritten law, Mr. Guerney claims, that every Russian anthology must include it), and the understated, bloodcurdling “Specters” by Turgenev. Mr. Guerney went hog wild, it seemed to me, with the aphorisms and proverbs, but that is undoubtedly the privilege of an anthologist. In this book, in spite of Mr. Guerney’s irritating tendency to sound as though he alone understood the Russian psyche, there is evidence of much loving care, a genuine determination to do the best job possible. But precisely because it was meant to be both portable and comprehensive, it is pretty much of a failure. It is never a critical study, though Mr. Guerney sometimes sounds as though he wishes it were; nor yet is it a history, though it
tries to be; and there is no sense of development, though that, presumably, is what Mr. Guerney was aiming at. Since we have no sense of a growing literature, the earlier selections—the fables, etc.—seem charming but irrelevant, conceived in a vacuum. Beyond discovering that it has been going on for a devilishly long time, we do not have any greater understanding of Russian literature than we did before. We have, as I say, a grab bag: diverse, portable, suitable for journeys and after-dinner table conversations.

(1948)

I
T IS DIFFICULT
, if not impossible, for anyone not a Catholic to properly comprehend and discuss a Catholic philosopher. The gin-soaked, Benzedrine-ridden children of our violent age are inclined—not without some reason—to hold philosophers in some doubt as being irritatingly serene watchers of a bloodbath; their rules and their conclusions may all be rather impressive, but of what relevance are they, how can these presumably hard-earned precepts do anything to enrich or make more bearable the daily, difficult, urgent life? In addition to the above qualifications one might also add that in the case of Maritain, one would need also to be an impassioned and convinced theologian—and, alas, not many of us are.

In
The Person and the Common Good
Maritain poses, as the title might suggest, some exceedingly pertinent questions; in some ways, the most pertinent questions that there are. It is a pity, then, that at least for this reviewer, the answers are either entirely unacceptable or so obscured by dogma—“revealed” to Maritain but, unhappily, not to me—that this groping with the problems of the human condition becomes, in effect, unintelligible.

The trouble, perhaps, lies in the extreme rigidity of Maritain’s definitions. One must agree with him about such concepts as “good,” “divine,” “absolute,” and, of course, “God.” It is not possible to extract from this organism sections of the meat and leave the skeleton. Maritain’s concepts are as indivisible and as complete within themselves as the peculiarly compelling and circular structure he evolves out of the notion of the personal—or human—and the common good.

The person, informed and cohered by spirit, is ordained, by the fact of its existence, to the absolute and must refer itself and all that it is and has to God, and it is therefore absolutely superior in worth and importance to the temporal society of which it is a part; and at the same time, since it is a part of this temporal society, since in a temporal fashion, it owes all that it is and has to it and, indeed, could not exist without it, it is subordinate, and the needs of the community transcend its human needs. Again, and at the same time, the community has betrayed its responsibility, its raison d’être, so to speak, if it does not everywhere and always respect the human dignity of the person; if, indeed, it is not absolutely devoted—within “numerous restraints”—to the expansion of that dignity. This formulation, if exasperating, is expedient, as almost all of the contradictions attendant upon being alive can be contained within it. Thus, man “finds himself” by subordination to the group, and “the group attains its goal” by a realization of and respect for the great riches of the human spirit. This circle works perfectly, even admirably, within Maritain’s framework and prepares us to be told, later on, that it is a crime to kill an innocent man—but who is to judge the guilty?—and that the social body has the right in a “just war” to oblige its citizens to risk their lives in combat; and that, moreover, in this combat, it is as “master of itself” and “as an act of virtue” that the human being faces death. (Maritain does not inquire into the right of the social body to oblige its citizens to murder and is, apparently, quite unconcerned with the problem of what these obliging citizens are to do thereafter with their enormous weight of guilt.)

All of the foregoing, of course, is made possible, even plausible, by Maritain’s “here below” ace in the hole. This will be changed up above, and since we are related first to God, that is where we are headed, willy-nilly. (The social body is empowered to make war and punish the guilty, but at no point are we given an inkling as to what the Divine Community is prepared to do with the hopelessly, willfully reprobate.) This by-and-by-it’ll-all-be-over exhortation is not likely to deliver many from the dreadful
conviction that our life on earth may be quite drastically foreshortened and that it is, in any case, a rather desperate gamble. It is unhelpful indeed to be assured of future angels when the mysteries of the present flesh are so far from being solved.

(1948)

V
ISHNU
V. O
AK’S
The Negro Newspaper
is an absurd and hysterical little pamphlet, published—quite justly—at the author’s expense, which could easily have been written the day after Booker T. Washington made his “Separate but Equal” speech at the Atlanta Exposition. It is the first volume of a projected series of four concerning Negro business and argues, so far as I can wrest any meaning from Mr. Oak’s stammering prose, for a segregated economy. Mr. Oak, apparently, considers this a desirable, if temporary, solution for most problems faced by Negroes, and one which will, in addition, prepare them in some degree for their future splendors and responsibilities when America finally comes of age. He waxes rather petulant concerning the failure of the race to rise—within the limits set by segregation—to that lucrative position Americans so highly esteem; one can
almost hear him saying, “They got no git-up, they don’t stick together.” “They” also have no money; and as to where, in this complex economy, the money for a self-sustaining Negro economy is to come from, Mr. Oak is valiantly vocal but not very lucid. It will—presumably—be donated by philanthropic organizations (who tend anyway to unwise investments) and wealthy Negroes, unsuspected hordes of whom are, at present, pettishly investing their gold in Cadillacs.