I have taken an uncomfortable amount of space to get this worry off my chest, the worry, that is, that Mr. Sillitoe sometimes plays “tails” to Nancy Mitford’s “heads.” The comfortable duty remains of praising the author’s artistry. It is great. The least of his nine stories is better than fair; the best are splendid. Monologues like “On Saturday Afternoon” and “The Disgrace of Jim Scarfedale” have a rasp, a comedy, a casually callous acceptance of misery that would be remarkable even without the poetic swing, snap, and surprise. They have a wonderful way of going on, of not stopping short (for instance, Mrs. Scarfedale’s maternal tirade when her son threatens marriage) that lifts us twice, and shows enviable assurance and abundance in the writer. Now and then he fusses too much with why his narrators are telling the story, and occasionally (as in “The Fishing-boat Picture”), seems embarrassed for an ending. To write endings worthy of these beginnings and middles must have been a technical challenge: the “turn” is too complacently bourgeois and the “dying fall” too languidly aristocratic. I liked best those endings in which the boy-narrator stood right up in his shabby shoes and explained what lesson he had learned, as if he were assembling a personal Bible out of scraps blowing in the gutters.
In the third-person stories, the language is not always appropriate to the subject. “Mr. Raynor the School-teacher” is a sequence of words in perfect adjustment. The futile confusion within a classroom and the brutal fate of a pretty girl—“timide et libertine, et fragile et robuste”—glimpsed from the window work in effortless parallel to convey the brooding over-presence of a slum. I was grateful, too, for “The Match”: a piece of Saturday afternoon fog bottled for keeps. But in “Noah’s Ark” the incident is smothered under rather aloof phrase-making, and “Uncle Ernest” is marred by intermittent niceties.
The dust jacket mentions hundreds of poems and a hundred-thousand-word novel that Mr. Sillitoe has destroyed; and in the last story, “The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller,” we discover the author himself, wearing his own name of Alan, glumly contemplating the books he has read (or not read):
And so on and so on, items that have become part of me, foliage that has grown to conceal the bare stem of my real personality, what I was like before I ever saw these books, or any book at all, come to that. Often I would like to rip them away from me one by one, extract their shadows out of my mouth and heart …
So would we all. The lack of connection between the experiences, usually accumulated by the age of twenty, that seem worth telling about, and the sophistication needed to render them in writing, is the Unmentionable at the root of the mysterious Fall of so many auspicious beginners. For a moment, the two intersect; the memories are fresh, the new tools are sharp, and a vivid imitation of life is produced. Then the memories recede, and the writer is left holding the tools. It may be merely distance, simplifying distance, that makes the long-distance runner seem a little too pure to be true. But Mr. Sillitoe’s achievement is the measure of his shortcomings, and in his battle with his books he is well-armed with intelligence, humor, and (my guess is) stamina.
SNOW FROM A DEAD SKY
THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF CONRAD AIKEN. 566 pp. World, 1960.
When I had finished reading this big book, I closed it, and looked at the back, and my tired eyes, without my willing it, went out of focus, placing, to the right of Aiken’s face and slightly lower, a dimmer duplicate. Eerily, this secondary image, though less sharp, seemed more real than the image it echoed. The shadows around the mouth called into relief muscles potentially expressive of humor and wrath; the cheekbones and eyelids seemed curved and tactile; the hornrim spectacles perched forward dimensionally on the stout, white, pugnacious nose. The photograph was just a photograph, but the photograph’s ghost was a man—a man who, when I tried to study him closely, of course vanished. And I wondered if these forty-one stories might best have been viewed, by some hypnotic relaxation of the cerebrum, in the same way; for their truth seems to exist, invisibly, to one side of their vivid surfaces.
Perhaps this author so obsessed with accident and unfulfillment has been himself slightly misplaced. If he had been born a German, his morbidity might have deepened into Kafkaesque prophecy. If he had been born (preferably at the tag end of the Age of Reason) a Frenchman, his aptitude for erotic psychology—his tender, particularizing concern for things female—might have blossomed abundantly. As it is, in our small, ill-tended garden of native Olympians, he seems a somewhat stunted and tenuously elegant growth, putting forth branches in all directions, yet of whose presence—as Mark Schorer tactlessly points out in his introductory appreciation—we need, after more than four productive decades, still to be reminded. He evokes comparison with the very best; and then suffers from the comparison. Just as his poems, compared with, say, Wallace Stevens’, seem formless and wan, his short stories, compared with Hemingway’s, seem stylistically indecisive, and, compared with Faulkner’s, insufficiently material and grasping.
Love and death, those two organic imperatives, are Aiken’s all but exclusive subjects. The stories about death—conceived as an ethereal incoherence bombarding our humanity from all sides—are the more strikingly original, and account for his reputation as a teller of sophisticated shudder stories. But he is poles removed from a spook-monger like H. P. Lovecraft; the horror of Aiken’s fiction lies not in the possibility that other worlds exist but in the certainty that they do not. The cosmic vacuity, the central nihil haunts him; “the great white light of annihilation” illuminates his scenes and to an extent bleaches them. In retrospect many of his stories seem black-and-white film clips from the twenties and thirties. His characters wake from comic dreams and, singing empty little snatches of song to themselves, move through a world crowded with ticking clocks and seething snow and visual details (“dead matches, a rusty horse-chestnut burr, a small concentration of eggshell, a streak of yellow sawdust which had been wet and now was dry and congealed, a brown pebble, and a broken feather”) observed with an intensity befitting an insane universe. Aiken’s world is so morally insubstantial that hallucinations effortlessly permeate it. In his famous “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” thickening snow becomes the sensible manifestation of an uncaused apathy which closes over a young boy and lures him to death. In “Mr. Arcularis”—a superb fantasy that must be read to be believed—a shipboard romance, rumbling engines, the threat of icebergs, fog, a coffin in the hold, and a sleepwalking exploration of the frozen stars give body and form to a man’s progress toward death on an operating table.
“The fair page of the world, thus reset, becomes a brilliant but meaningless jumble of typographical errors”—this from “Gehenna,” Aiken’s most concentrated and dense explication of a “world of which the only tenable principle is horror.” The horror is not Hitlerian but Einsteinian; crime seldom and war never intrude in these stories, but the interstellar gulfs, the chasms in subjectivity, and the atomic near-void are translated into sensual acrophobia. His compulsion to give shapelessness shape does generate, by backwards thrust, a kind of supernaturalism. “The Disciple,” more than any other American story I have read, breathes life into Christianity considered as local European folklore; Judas and the Eternal Jew meet and talk in an atmosphere supercharged à la Isak Dinesen and Dostoevsky. But in the end, Aiken himself backs away, leaving the reader suspended between realities and doubtful of the author’s good faith. Metaphysical fantasy, lacking the conviction of delirium, subsides into allegorical gossip; “Smith and Jones,” for instance, reminded me too much of those dental pamphlets in which Irving Incisor and Max Molar debate fluoridation. Perhaps, indeed, Death (as opposed to dying, which is a species of living) is a better subject for meditation than for fiction, since it is, however conceived, unknowable, and emotional effects aimed from one conception of it can too easily, by a slight shift of philosophy, be evaded.
More affecting, on the whole, are Aiken’s stories of love. He moves with ease in the swimming minds of women willing to fall in love (“Brin
g, Bring,” “All, All Wasted”); he tastes the uncanny innocence of promiscuity (“Thistledown,” “West End”); he conveys, in the tiny interval before the spangled curtain of good taste descends, a strong sexual flavor—“Tom took her gloved hand, inserted his finger in the opening, and stroked her palm. A delicious feeling of weakness, dissolution, came over her.” Not that, under the skies of heavenly apathy, seduction is either very difficult or very rewarding. “We came together as naturally as leaf touches leaf or the grass bends to the wind,” one adulterer says. In “Hey, Taxi,” a cabdriver and a girlish tramp drift into each other’s arms like two snowflakes in the universal descent. Such energy as is needed, the women provide; their aggression can be monstrous (“Spider, Spider”). But men are feeble beasts, preoccupied with themselves and their wives, and they send their mistresses alone into howling trolley cars (“The Night Before Prohibition”), betray them to satyrs (“Thistledown”), and begrudge them even the present of a dollar print (“Field of Flowers”). Small wonder, since boredom and abuse invariably follow the scattering of the pollen, that the most moving and ecstatic of these love stories are those in which nothing—physically speaking—happens. The flower opens, the bee hovers, and that is all. In “Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!” an Irish maid and a young architect exchange one kiss. In “Your Obituary, Well Written,” nothing is exchanged but some childhood memories about the rain. It is well-written; the poet trembles up out of the prose and the page is solid with sensation. Aiken is impressive when he snows, but nutritious when he rains; I wish that somehow the climate had permitted him to rain more.
FRANNY AND ZOOEY
FRANNY AND ZOOEY, by J. D. Salinger. 201 pp. Little, Brown, 1961.
Quite suddenly, as things go in the middle period of J. D. Salinger, his later, longer stories are descending from the clouds of old New Yorkers and assuming incarnations between hard covers. “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” became available in Stories from the New Yorker 1950–1960, and now “Franny” and “Zooey” have a book to themselves. These two stories—the first medium-short, the second novella-length—are contiguous in time, and have as their common subject Franny’s spiritual crisis.
In the first story, she arrives by train from a Smithlike college to spend the weekend of the Yale game at what must be Princeton. She and her date, Lane Coutell, go to a restaurant where it develops that she is not only unenthusiastic but downright ill. She attempts to explain herself while her friend brags about a superbly obnoxious term paper and eats frogs’ legs. Finally, she faints, and is last seen lying in the manager’s office silently praying at the ceiling. In the second story, Franny has returned to her home, a large apartment in the East Seventies. It is the Monday following her unhappy Saturday. Only Franny’s mother, Bessie, and her youngest brother, Zooey, are home. While Franny lies sleeplessly on the living-room sofa, her mother communicates, in an interminably rendered conversation, her concern and affection to Zooey, who then, after an even longer conversation with Franny, manages to gather from the haunted atmosphere of the apartment the crucial word of consolation. Franny, “as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers,” smiles at the ceiling and falls asleep.
Few writers since Joyce would risk such a wealth of words upon events that are purely internal and deeds that are purely talk. We live in a world, however, where the decisive deed may invite the holocaust, and Salinger’s conviction that our inner lives greatly matter peculiarly qualifies him to sing of an America where, for most of us, there seems little to do but to feel. Introversion, perhaps, has been forced upon history; an age of nuance, of ambiguous gestures and psychological jockeying on a national and private scale, is upon us, and Salinger’s intense attention to gesture and intonation help make him, among his contemporaries, a uniquely pertinent literary artist. As Hemingway sought the words for things in motion, Salinger seeks the words for things transmuted into human subjectivity. His fiction, in its rather grim bravado, its humor, its privacy, its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present American life. It pays the price, however, of becoming dangerously convoluted and static. A sense of composition is not among Salinger’s strengths, and even these two stories, so apparently complementary, distinctly jangle as components of one book.
The Franny of “Franny” and the Franny of “Zooey” are not the same person. The heroine of “Franny” is a pretty college girl passing through a plausible moment of disgust. She has discovered—one feels rather recently—a certain ugliness in the hungry human ego and a certain fatuity in her college environment. She is attempting to find her way out with the help of a religious book, The Way of a Pilgrim, which was mentioned by a professor. She got the book out of the college library. Her family, glimpsed briefly in the P.S. of a letter she has written, appear to be standard upper-middle gentry. Their name is nowhere given as Glass, though some “brothers” are mentioned—once—in passing. Her boy friend is callow and self-centered but not entirely unsympathetic; he clumsily does try to “get through” to Franny, with a love whose physical bias has become painfully inappropriate. Finally, there is a suggestion, perhaps inadvertent, that the girl may be pregnant.
The Franny of “Zooey,” on the other hand, is Franny Glass, the youngest of the seven famous Glass children, all of whom have been in turn wondrously brilliant performers on a radio quiz program, “It’s a Wise Child.” Their parents, a distinctly unstandard combination of Jewish and Irish, are an old vaudeville team. From infancy on, Franny has been saturated by her two oldest brothers, Seymour and Buddy, in the religious wisdom of the East. The Way of a Pilgrim, far from being newly encountered at college, comes from Seymour’s desk, where it has been for years. One wonders how a girl raised in a home where Buddhism and crisis theology were table talk could have postponed her own crisis so long and, when it came, be so disarmed by it. At any rate, there is no question of her being pregnant; the very idea seems a violation of the awesome Glass ethereality. Lane Coutell, who for all his faults was at least a considerable man in the first Franny’s universe, is now just one of the remote millions coarse and foolish enough to be born outside the Glass family.
The more Salinger writes about them, the more the seven Glass children melt indistinguishably together in an impossible radiance of personal beauty and intelligence. Franny is described thus: “Her skin was lovely, and her features were delicate and most distinctive. Her eyes were very nearly the same quite astonishing shade of blue as Zooey’s, but were set farther apart, as a sister’s eyes no doubt should be.…” Of Zooey, we are assured he has a “somewhat preposterous ability to quote, instantaneously and, usually, verbatim, almost anything he had ever read, or even listened to, with genuine interest.” The purpose of such sentences is surely not to particularize imaginary people but to instill in the reader a mood of blind worship, tinged by an envy that the author encourages with a patent leer of indulgence.
In “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (the best of the Glass pieces: a magic and hilarious prose-poem with an enchanting end effect of mysterious clarity, like a koan), Seymour defines sentimentality as giving “to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it.” This seems to me the nub of the trouble. Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation. “Zooey” is just too long; there are too many cigarettes, too many goddams, too much verbal ado about not quite enough. The author never rests from circling his creations, patting them fondly, slyly applauding. He robs the reader of the initiative upon which love must be given. Even in “Franny,” which is, strictly, pre-Glass, the writer seems less an unimpassioned observer than a spying beau vindictively feasting upon every detail of poor Lane Coutell’s gaucherie. Indeed, this impression of a second male being present is so strong that it amounts to a social shock when the author accompanies Franny into the ladies’ room of the restaurant.
“Frann
y,” nevertheless, takes place in what is recognizably our world; in “Zooey” we move into a dream world whose zealously animated details only emphasize an essential unreality. When Zooey says to Franny, “Yes, I have an ulcer for Chrissake. This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age,” disbelief falls on the “buddy” as much as on “Kaliyuga,” and the explanatory “the Iron Age” clinches our suspicion that a lecturer has usurped the writing stand. Not the least dismaying development of the Glass stories is the vehement editorializing on the obvious—television scripts are not generally good, not all section men are geniuses. Of course, the Glasses condemn the world only to condescend to it, to forgive it, in the end. Yet the pettishness of the condemnation diminishes the gallantry of the condescension.
Perhaps these are hard words; they are made hard to write by the extravagant self-consciousness of Salinger’s later prose, wherein most of the objections one might raise are already raised. On the flap of this book jacket, he confesses, “… there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I’m very hopeful.” Let me say, I am glad he is hopeful. I am one of those—to do some confessing of my own—for whom Salinger’s work dawned as something of a revelation. I expect that further revelations are to come. The Glass saga, as he has sketched it out, potentially contains great fiction. When all reservations have been entered, in the correctly unctuous and apprehensive tone, about the direction he has taken, it remains to acknowledge that it is a direction, and that the refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.