Praise and prejudice

The greatest novel of the year. Reviewed by George Dangerfield

George Dangerfield

■ WAR VERSUS FICTION.—I was sitting down to write a peaceable little eulogy of Thomas Wolfe, when the news came through that our amiable Herr Hitler had put up the Versailles shutters with an iron clang. The reverberations of this sinister deed are, at the moment of writing, creating a good deal of well-deserved vertigo among the chancelleries of Europe and the corridors of Washington: but it is also an occasion upon which, I believe, the critic of literature may be allowed to give vent to his own particular lamentation. For the last two years fiction, and particularly American fiction, has begun to look on the bright side of things: and fiction, after all, profoundly reflects the contemporary mind. Gone are the days when our more literate novelists counted, with fantastical fingers, the maggots which crawled in and out of the human psyche, gone are the days when they were grimly gallant—dear God, how grim and how gallant—about being damned; gone, but for Herr Hitler, gone for ever.

Just when our novelists are beginning to register a centennial surprise at the richness of human life (the writers of a hundred years ago were equally overcome by the same fact), Herr Hitler has positively decreed that this same richness shall, within five to ten years, be once again shattered, gassed, gashed, gutted, and otherwise un-made in the image of its maker. It's very discouraging.

■ OF TIME AND THE RIVER.—And it is specially discouraging to think that, into the middle of this unequal argument—invention saying one thing, economics and diplomacy saying another—should arrive so superb and vital a piece of invention as Thomas Wolfe's Of Time And The River. I do not mean that Mr. Wolfe's novel is overflowing with optimism: he indulges in a good deal of scorn and disgust. But Mr. Wolfe's intention, as I understand it, is to celebrate the valuable, the extraordinary fact of ordinary living: and when you have finished his 912 pages, you passionately believe that human life, at its very worst, is far too exciting to be casually obliterated by pieces of stinking steel which bear the plutocratic signature of the Messrs. Vickers and the Herren Krupp.

■ GREAT IN SPITE OF HIMSELF— I should like to call Mr. Wolfe a great writer, and be done with it: but the greatness of a living author largely depends—so Mr. T. S. Eliot tells us—on the moral and social ideas of posterity. And whether posterity, apart from its moral and social ideas, will be able to stomach the odd three million words which Mr. Wolfe proposes to bequeath to it (Of Time And The River is only the second of six mammoth volumes) who can say? None the less I believe that Mr. Wolfe is potentially destined to survive the Dreisers, Hemingways, Lewises, and other writers who have—from time to time —sent the critics off into loud premonitions of immortality.

Yet never did a contriver of possibly deathless fiction (unless it was Charles Dickens) commit more mistakes than does Mr. Wolfe. His most ambitious passages of prose are drenched with purple, and constantly canter off into the rhythms of poetry; his characters suddenly disappear from the novel like the animals in Alice In Wonderland; his dialogue repeats itself; his important images recur with pompous regularity; his tricks to hold your attention are things most novelists would shy at.

I wish I knew the secret. How does a writer actually get away with what looks like an autobiographical novel concerning his youthful wanderings from the South to Harvard, from Harvard to New York, from New York to Oxford, from Oxford to Paris? When I was in the publishing business, I used to read dozens of this sort of disguised reminiscence—packed up in large cardboard boxes, as I recall, and loaded to the scuppers with self-conscious nothing. But Mr. Wolfe takes this worn pattern and makes it new. Perhaps the secret is that, almost for the first time, we have in Mr. Wolfe what we have desperately needed here—a writer released from the dead hand of tradition.

The dead hand has released him with some violence. Suddenly hurled into the vastness of unexplored material which is America, he plays Old Harry with precision and form; but what do precision and form count for, in the face of this rhetorical, this unreasonable, this almost physical genius? You feel in his work—and I say this without exaggeration—the vigor of Dickens and the intestinal ecstasy of Rabelais, and you feel that these qualities have come to him unbidden. His characters bulge out of the page, they are so full of life; and his situations, miraculously undrowned in his enormous spate of frequently irrelevant words, preserve in immortal detail the mortal experience of human living. Which is why I maintain, adding my somewhat belated hallelujah to the general chorus, that Of Time And The River is the most remarkable American novel since Moby Dick.