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Content THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FAMILY NOVEL
i t
A STUDY IN METAPHOR
by-
Doris Lowene Nelson
m
A Dissertation Presented to the f
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1970
UMI Number: DP23043
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© Copyright by
DORIS L O M E NELSON
1970
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALI FORN1 A 90007
Jio
N 4-2.5
T h is ^ s s e rta tio n , w ritte n by
under the direction of A ...© ? . Dissertation C om
mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by T he G ra d u
ate School, in p a rtia l fu lfillm e n t of require
ments of the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
D a te jJ u x U9 L . . I92Q .
D IS S E R T A T IO N C O M M I T T E E
■Chain
TABLE OP CONTENTS
INTRODUCTIONt FAMILY NOVELS, OLD FORMS AND NEW , .
PART ONE. THE USE OF TRADITION
Chapter
I. THE FAILURE OF THE AMERICAN MYTH ....
Ceremony In Lone Tree, the Failure of the
Pioneer Tradition
Lie Down in Darkness, the Failure of the
Southern Aristocratic Tradition
The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot
Scandal. the Failure of the Yankee
Sea-going Tradition
II. THE FAILURE OF RELIGIOUS MYTH ......
Go Tell It on the Mountain, the Need for
a Sustaining Myth
PART TWO. THE HUMAN CONDITION
III. LOVE AND SEPARATENESS . . ..............
Delta Wedding, a Formula for Human
Relationships
The Member of the Wedding, the Need to
Belong
-IV. THE HUMAN CONDITION ....................
A Death in the Family, the Continuity
of Human Experience
The Centaur, Man's Place in the Universe
AFTERWORD .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ii
1
■ - i
'vj
Page
2
23
132
165
219
276
278
INTRODUCTION
FAMILY NOVELS, OLD FORMS AND NEW
1
INTRODUCTION
American fiction since World War II has shown a
greater variety in subject matter and method of treatment
than perhaps any other period in our history. The many
different kinds of novels that have made their appearance
since 19^5 reflect the widely different responses of their
authors to contemporary society, each author choosing the
form for his novel which best expresses his philosophy.
The general trend among the newer writers has been to move
away from the conventional social novel, so firmly a part
of our tradition since Henry James, toward the frankly
experimental novel, in which the non-literal elements
carry the meaning and significance of the novel. At the
extreme end of the scale lie novels like William Burroughs
Naked Lunch, which actually has no literal level, its
surrealistic nightmare account of a drug-hallucinated mind
serving as the author*s metaphor for a chaotic world. The
vast distance between novels of this kind and the well-
ordered, If Imperfect, social world in the fiction of
writers like Louis Auchincloss, who finds the conventional
3
novel of manners still useful for social criticism,re
veals the broad spectrum of contemporary fiction and of
the authors* ways of commenting upon our times.
Much of the significant modern fiction, however, lies
between these two very different forms of the novel, com
bining features from realistic social fiction and non-
realistlc experimental fiction, Saul Bellow*s protagonist
in Henderson, the Rain King, for example, leaves his real
istic New England life for a journey to a mythical Africa,
metaphorically, a journey of the soul through its "heart
of darkness" into an affirmation of life. Herzog conducts
a similar, soul-searching journey in a more domestic set
ting. This in-between form, the fusion of realism and
metaphor, finds a particularly effective mode of expres
sion in one special group of contemporary novels, those
which use a family as their central focus, both as the
social unit to be portrayed on the literal level, and as
a metaphor through which the theme is expressed.
It is the intent of this study to demonstrate that
•i I
■^Lionel Trilling finds the novel of manners capable
of examining values at many levels, including moral ones,
as he makes clear in his definition of the novel as "a
perpetual quest for reality, the field of its research
being always the social world, the material of its anal
ysis being always manners as the Indication of the direc
tion of man’s soul" (The Liberal Imagination [New York,
19503, p. 212).*
k’
writers of this new kind of family novel have created a
special kind of fiction with particular relevance to the
contemporary literary scene, both in form and theme, and
that their use of the family rather than a single protag
onist or "anti-hero" typical of so much contemporary fic
tion gives these novels their distinct qualities. An
example will illustrate these qualities in general.
Herbert Gold's Fathers, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of
Augie March, and Bernard Malamud's The Assistant all fea
ture Jewish protagonists who come from families of
European immigrants, a subject that lends itself readily
to social analysis. Though all three novels can be said
to represent the Jewish experience in America, only Gold
restricts himself to the literal social level in his story
of a Jew's confrontation with American society. In
Bellow's novel, by contrast, the social texture begins to
thin after Augie leaves his life in Chicago and becomes
more and more like the anti-hero of modern fiction, a con
temporary Everyman seeking his own identity, confronting
and testing experience in order to find its limits.2
2Irving Howe, speaking of Augie March and other nov
els like it, states* "the connection between subject and
setting cannot always be made, and the 'individual' of
their novels, because he lacks social definition and is
sometimes a creature of literary or even ideological fiat,
tends not to be very individualized" (**Mass Society and
Post-Modern Fiction," Partisan Review. XXVI [Summer, 19591 ,
P. ^33).
5
Malamud, like Bellow, extends the meaning of his novel be
yond Its literal level by considering his protagonist,
Martin Bober, a metaphor for the condition of man in the
modern world, but Martin Bober fulfills both his roles
simultaneously, never departing from his social role as a
family man to become totally a symbol.
The close fusion of realistic and metaphorical levels
is made possible in The Assistant and other contemporary
family novels in part because the family functions effec
tively on both levels, as a social unit to be viewed as a
part of society, and as a self-contained unit functioning
as a kind of miniature laboratory for the study of human
relations. In general, the authors employ the family as
a microcosm, with the symbolic or representative nature of
each family growing out of its social nature. For exam
ple, Wright Morris's Midwestern family In Ceremony in Lone
Tree becomes a microcosm of postwar American society,
James Baldwin's Harlem family In Go Tell It on the
Mountain of the Negro in America, James Agee's family in
A Death in the Family of the human institution of the fam
ily itself.
The major difference between contemporary novels of
this kind and other family novels, especially those of
earlier decades, lies in the author's methods of imple
menting their theme. In conventional social novels, the
6
authors explore values by placing their characters in
interaction with society, examining social institutions as
well as human relationships. Society in all its aspects
becomes the testing ground for characters (Babbit, The
Rise of Silas Lapham). for society’s values (An American
Tragedy). for social classes (The Age of Innocence. The
Late George Apley). Even a novel like The Grapes of Wrath,
in which the Joad family takes on a representative,
larger-than-life quality, is grounded in the literal level
as social protest.
Similar examples can be found in European family
novels. Writing nearly a century apart, Jane Austen and
John Galsworthy (especially in The Forsyte Saga) are both
concerned with social classes and human values as they are
exhibited through a rather structured society. George
Eliot, in Adam Bede and Mill on the Floss, explores moral
ity through the moral values of the family and society.
These family novels, like many other social novels of the
nineteenth century, portray society and its effects upon
people’s lives, finding their values, as Lionel Trilling
suggests (footnote one), in the social world and its
manners.
A writer like Faulkner, on the other hand, does es
tablish metaphorical levels of meaning for his novels
through the construction of a microcosm, the method used
7
by writers of contemporary family novels. Faulkner*s
social myth, however, is backward looking in the sense
that it is used to analyze present failures in terms of
the past. Further, Faulkner restricts himself to an
analysis of one tradition and one part of our culture.
In contrast, contemporary writers tend to expand the mean
ing of their themes by suggesting their universal appli
cation, even though the novels may be portraying extremely
narrow corners of our social culture. In this way, con
temporary family novels combine personal and universal
values, and in so doing they tend to bypass purely social
values.
However, the metaphorical family novel is not ex
clusively a contemporary phenomenon. Even so constant a
social critic as Charles Dickens departs occasionally from
purely social analysis to present a more abstract concept
in social terms. In Dombey and Son, for example, he uses
the Dombey family and its satellites to exhibit the sin of
pride and its effects, a theme united with the attack on
materialism in the novel. In similar fashion, Henry James
constructs a moral fable and gives it expression in his
social myth. In The Golden Bowl, for example, the moral
life and aesthetic life are placed in opposition, and
Maggie Verver must assume the burden of redeeming her hus
band and Charlotte without creating an open rupture in the
8
social fabric. The underlying theme is somewhat more
difficult to detect in a novel like Buddenbrooks. in which
the dense texture of the social level almost overwhelms
the metaphorical meaning. Thomas Mann gives his themes—
the conflict between human will and spirit, between prac
tical vitality and the artistic temperament, the inevita
ble decay of all living things— such close parallels in
his social construct that the novel can almost be read
like a German Forsyte Saga. On the other hand,
Dostoevsky*s metaphysical questioning in The Brothers
Karamazov pervades the story so thoroughly that the reader
cannot possibly view the novel merely as the portrait of
a family.
These particular earlier novels, then, employ the
family as a vehicle for meanings more or less independent
of the social context in which the characters are placed,
a method similar to that used in The Assistant and other
contemporary family novels, though the theme takes on a
different dimension in' contemporary fiction, a matter to
be discussed later.
Nine novels have been selected for analysis in this
study as representative of this kind of contemporary fic
tion, and as significant in their own right as novels
whose authors have achieved critical reputations of some
9
importancet A Death in the Family by James Agee, Go Tell
It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, The Wapshot Chronicle
and The Wapshot Scandal by John Cheever, The Member of the
Wedding by Carson McCullers, Ceremony in Lone Tree by
Wright Morris, Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron,
The Centaur by John Updike, and Delta Wedding by Eudora
Welty. In addition, these novels represent a fair cross
section in subject matter, that is, in the kinds of fam
ilies being written about. There Is great variety in the
size of families and the ages of the children, in the en
vironment and geographical location, in the economic and
cultural backgrounds of the families. There are wide
cultural differences, for example, between Eudora Welty*s
Southern plantation clan and Baldwin's Negro family living
in near poverty in New York City, or between John Cheever’s
rural New England and Carson McCullers* Southern small
town life.
Ihab Hassan calls such examples of cultural diversity
in contemporary fiction "subcultures which society fur
tively sponsors.He contends that manners have not dis
appeared from the novel, but rather "that in becoming more
diverse, they have also become more fragmentary." He goes
on to qualify his statement.
^Radical Innocence (Princeton, New Jersey, 1961),
p. 108.
10
This Is not to say that manners . . . have dis
appeared. . . . This is rather to say that the Jewish
society of Bernard Malamud may be as incomprehensible
to the Southern characters of Flannery 0*Connor as
the hipster gang of Jack Kerouae may be bewildering
to the Yankee protagonists of John Cheever. Better
then to say that manners and gestures have not died
but that they are,there to betoken the death of a
coherent society.
Hassan believes that these sub-cultures are "pockets of
resistance" to our mass culture* that they indicate the
distinctions which still exist in our society between one
group and another (an appropriate subject for the study
of ^manners").
Yet, these contemporary family novels are not novels
of manners in the traditional sense, not having as their
primary purpose the analysis of social behavior and social
values.- 5 Social novels are still being written, though by
comparison with more experimental novels, the writing of
authors like J, P. Marquand and Louis Auchlncloss seems
old-fashioned, even quaint. Somehow, the affairs of the
established families in their novels lack the immediacy of
the subject matter found in most contemporary fiction. A
^"The Character of Post-War Fiction in America,"
English Journal. LI (January, 1962), p. 2. Based in part
on material in Hadical Innocence.
^The traditional novel of manners describes the
"social customs, manners, conventions and habits of a
definite social class at a particular time and place"
(William Flint Thrall, Addison Hibbard, C, Hugh Holman,
A Handbook to Literature [New York, i960], p. 32A).
11
writer like John O'Hara, though he handles material of
more current interest and of wider scope than Marquand or
Auchincloss, never manages much more than a superficial
portrayal of our society.0
Various reasons have "been offered for the declining
interest in the social novel since World War IIt the
breakdown of old values, the horrors of World War II and
the threat of the nuclear age, our trend toward a mass
society on the one hand and toward cultural diversity on
the other in the form of the "subcultures" described by
Hassan. A writer who chooses to acknowledge our pluralis
tic society, as authors of family novels seem to do, can
perhaps reach some kind of accommodation with society by
selecting a particular aspect of our culture through which
to foster personal values. In contrast, writers who ob
serve the mass culture primarily will, in all probability,
adopt a more pessimistic view. In such cases, old forms
of literature seem no longer adequate to deal with new
forces in the culture. As Joseph Waldmeir says, social
criticism in the traditional sense no longer works in a
society which is "amorphous, all-pervasive, uncontrollable,
^Alfred Kazin says of From the Terrace that "the
transformation of our society has proceeded beyond the
power of a commonplace mind to describe it deeply" ("The
Alone Generation," Harper's Magazine. GCIX [October, 1959'],
p. 131).
12
capricious, • . . invulnerable."'
The most pessimistic of the contemporary writers re
spond by creating works of fiction in which both theme and
form mirror the chaos of the world as they view it. The
dislocation of time, fragmented consciousness, and night
mare sequences of John Hawkes' The Cannibal describe his
version of a world caught in the madness of war. Some
authors construct bizarre comic myths which are no less
grim in their themes. The insane asylum in Ken Kesey*s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the conspiratorial world
with its allegorical names in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying
of Lot ^9 are the author's fictional equivalents for a
modem society which conspires against the individual, one
in which only power prevails.
Even some novels which begin realistically with what
seem to be logically developed stories of characters in a
rational world end as allegories of evil, symbols of man's
inability to function in a non-rational world. John
Hawkes* novel Second Skin is such a novel in which the
"rational" characters, the Skipper and his daughter, are
faced with and eventually defeated by the unmotivated evil
of the group of Maine fishermen. In Paul Bowles* novels,
Quest Without Faith," Becent American Fiction, ed.
Joseph J. Waldmeir (Boston, 19^3), p. 53.
13
the characters, American travelers engaged in some kind of
personal quest in more primitive lands, find instead only-
evil and destruction in some irrational forms mental
breakdown in The Sheltering Sky, drug-induced madness in
Let It Gome Down and Up Above the World*
Not all novelists who completely reject society do so
with such nihilistic themes, some of them suggesting a re
treat into privatism as the answer. Truman Capote*s vi
sion of the private life is achieved in Other Voices.
Other Rooms partly through his subject, which seems to
recommend a turning in toward the self (through a homo
sexual relationship between relatives),^ and partly
through the style which is a reflection of the author’s
own special sensibility. Jack Kerouac’s world, though not
so extremely private, represents a Romantic rejection of
the "rational• • public life, as his novel, On the Road, re
veals. The formlessness of the narrative, the spontaneous
unstructured prose parallel the uninhibited, self-
indulgent life-style his characters lead, all of it a re
flection of the "Beat" philosophy.
Given the temper of our times, writers find it diffi
cult to take an affirmative position. Though writers have
Q
^Ihab Hassan uses the term narcissism to discuss this
novel (Radical Innocence, p. 23^)•
14
always been critics of society, never before has the loss
of faith in human institutions, even in the ability of the
human race itself to make sense of the world, been so per
vasive. This situation, perhaps more than anything else,
has created a milieu for the contemporary writer (post
World War II) different from his predecessors. Admitted
ly, writers like Dostoevsky or Thomas Mann even in his
early novels (Buddenbrooks. 1901) were investigating the
darker side of human nature, but systems of belief were
still available at that time, whether or not they were
accepted. In contrast, more recent novels, even one like
Isaac Bashevls Singer's The Family Moskat, which uses as
its subject matter pre-World War II history and an old
religious tradition, reflects contemporary thinking in its
tenuous ending and in the constant questioning of Asa
Heshel Bannet. When a contemporary writer does refuse to
submit completely to nihilism, he must do so with full
awareness of the tenor of our times, In such circum
stances, even a limited affirmation is an act of faith.
Many kinds of novels are being written today which
show the authors* various attempts to capture the quality
of our times, but the brief survey given here will help to
reemphasize the vitality of the contemporary fiction which
chooses some kind of middle ground, rejecting complete
separation from society or from rational forms of fiction
15
on the one hand, and foregoing the blandness of some so
cial fiction on the other.9 in the face of the complexi
ties of contemporary life, this in-between kind of fiction
which includes family novels, searches for values which
transcend conventional social morals, values at once more
personal and universal. These values operate through the
themes of contemporary novels, themes which may be ex
pressed as a search for self-knowledge or personal iden
tity, as a search for love and vital human relationships,
or as a search for a kind of personal integrity as the
highest form of morality. What unites these themes is the
insistence upon human values above everything else, the
assertion of the importance of the individual and his re
lationship to others. Social issues have given way to
concern with basic human values. Joseph Waldmeir, in his
discussion of novelists like Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger,
John Updike, Bernard Malamud, and Norman Mailer, gives in
his summary a perceptive statement of the way these
novelists work.
^Joseph Waldmeir calls such authors as Sloan Wilson,
Herman ‘ Wouk, Dos Passos of Midcentury "apologists of ex
pediency and affiliates of the status quo" ("Quest Without
Faith," p. 53).
16
They are not . . . social critics in the traditional
sense— the value and order they seek exist beyond
causes and ideologies; but they are certainly
social critics in the broader sense that the quest
itself is implicitly a rejection of society’s values.
To seek a new approach and a new answer to the prob
lems of the human condition is to criticize the old.
And to reaffirm the most ancient of answers, love and
individual responsibility, is to make that criticism
explicit— to make it at once an accusation, a chal
lenge, and a demand for reform. - 1 - 0
When these themes appear in family novels, they are
necessarily treated differently than in novels with single
protagonists. For example, the search for identity in
Augie March or in Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man is a
more individualistic, even solipsistic one than in family
\
novels like Go Tell It on the Mountain, in which the young
boy must try to find his true identity within the family
before he can understand his role in the outside world.
Similarly, the theme of personal integrity becomes more an
individual matter in a novel like Herzog, in which the
protagonist finds his way back to wholeness largely
through his own mental and psychological processes. In
contrast, Jay Follett, in A Death in the Family tests and
proves his character by his actions toward his family and
others around him.
In summary then, while these family novels share cer
tain features with other contemporary fiction, they combine
10Ibid., p. 62
17
subject matter, theme, and form in a special way to pro
duce some of our more interesting and significant fiction.
First, in spite of their new direction, these novels do
offer some social content. The characters are engaged
with society to a certain event, their destinies affected
by their social environment and by the kinds of families
to which they belong. The social scene in the novels is
often a narrow one, restricted to the family’s immediate
environment and given authenticity through descriptive
detail. For example, John Updike in The Centaur vividly
creates the atmosphere of rural and small town
Pennsylvania in 19^7* His characters never leave their
restricted environment, moving between the farm and the
communities of Alton and Olinger, engaging in ordinary
activities and occupations. Yet, in spite of the limited
social context, the reader is given a vivid sense of the
time and place and the feeling that this is really the
way it was for many such communities and their local high
schools in semi-rural America.
In addition to realistic social background, these
novels offer character analysis in the traditional sense,
with psychologically motivated behavior and normal social
relationships, to create characters as memorable as any to
be found in conventional social fiction. In novels like
James Agee’s A Death in the Family and John Updike’s
18
The Centaur, for example, the protagonists* character be
comes a central part of the novels* meaning* Again, this
feature is not exclusive with family novels * but, in more
extremely experimental novels, the character*s allegorical
nature may take precedence, Oedipa Maas in The Crying of
Lot 4-9« for example? or, as in Naked Lunch, the character’s
interior mental processes may dominate to the exclusion of
any real character development.
Finally, though the plot may be rather static in
these novels, the "action" generally has sufficient causal
ity and completeness to constitute a story. The charac
ters are involved in situations which have meaning on the
social level of the novels as well as on the thematic
level. In other words, the presence in the family novels
of these standard features of realistic fiction provides
the basis for a satisfactory reading on the literal level,
though their limited nature requires other levels of mean
ing to make them truly significant contemporary novels.
Ihab Hassan recognizes something of this when he discusses
"manners" in the contemporary novel.
The formal consequence of this cultural fact [the
cultural diversity exemplified in contemporary^ fictionj
is that some contemporary novels are forced to create
within the structure of their narrative a self-
sufficient world of motives and manners that have
little resemblance to the motives or manners a gen
eral reader may recognize. The structure of fiction,
in other words, becomes more autotelic than the struc
ture of the classic nineteenth-century novel. A
19
fictional world created largely from within relies
more heavily on the resources of organized form and
universal symbols to attain dramatic objectivity?
it is self-made, sometimes self-conscious, and not
always self-evident. Its manners tend, therefore,
to be self-reflexive. But this is not to say that
its characters move in a vacuum— or that an American
society does not really exist.H
This very accurately describes the formal qualities
of the kind of contemporary fiction that includes family
novels, taking into account the narrowed focus and self-
sustaining social myths which distinguish it from earlier
social fiction. Hassan attributes these differences to
those aspects of our culture discussed by other critics,
primarily the fact that our mass society drives writers
to seek values outside the system and to find new forms
of fiction in which to express them.
This is accurate as far as it goes, but an additional
point must be made in regard to contemporary family novels,
a point which leads the discussion back to the thesis of
this study. The authors of family novels, like other con
temporary writers, are "forced to create ... a self-
sufficient world" in their fiction, partly as a self
defensive measure against the mass society they reject,
as Hassan implies. But, more than that, these authors
have constructed their self-reflexive social worlds—
the families and their immediate environments— as
^Radical Innocence, p. 109.
20
deliberate, not merely necessary, choices of form, as an
effective and vital method through which to present their
views of contemporary American experience. In each case,
the social myth is converted into metaphor and into the
organizing principle for the novel, all functions working
simultaneously *
The authors of the novels included in this study have
set up their family groups to represent areas of experi
ence that go far beyond the specific and local signifi
cance of each family group. The novels can be divided in
to two general groupsi those that represent some segment
of American society, and those that represent the problems
of humanity in general, even though they may be domesti
cated through American family groups and American points
of view. There are distinctions to be considered in each
group, different thematic statements made by different
groups of authors.
The novels wllj. be considered according to the follow
ing pattern.
I. Some family novels employ their families as metaphors
for major American traditions.
A. Three of these novels reveal the failure of
American traditions to preserve the quality of
life in the twentieth-century.
1. Ceremony in Lone Tree represents the failure
of the Pioneer tradition.
2. Lie Down in Darkness represents the failure
of the Southern aristocratic tradition._______
21
'3» The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal
represent the failure of the Yankee sea-going
tradition.
B. One of these novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain,
portrays the failure of a religious tradition to
provide a sustaining, coherent myth for an ethnic
people.
II. Some family novels employ their families as metaphors
for the human condition in general.
A. Two of these novels explore, through the family,
the problems of personal relationships.
1. Delta Wedding creates a pattern of "love and
separateness" which can operate within a
family.
2. The Member of the Wedding reveals the essen
tial loneliness of the Individual and his
need to belong.
B. Two of these novels relate their families to the
nature of human experience in general.
1. A Death in the Family illustrates the conti
nuity of human experience through the family
itself.
2. The Centaur attempts to define man's place in
the universe as a creature between heaven and
earth.
Other themes are woven in with these, themes like the
search for identity, initiation of the adolescent, ques
tions of religious belief, all of which are effected with
in the family, but the ideas suggested above are the con
trolling themes and the motivating force for the metaphors
of the novels.
PART ONE
THE USE OP TRADITION
22
CHAPTER ONE
THE FAILURE OF THE AMERICAN MYTH
Ceremony In Lone Treei The Failure of the Pioneer
Tradition
Ceremony in Lone Tree is perhaps an especially approp
riate novel with which to begin a discussion of the con
temporary family novel. Wright Morris sets up as a micro
cosm a family group which captures much that is typical
and therefore representative of America! middle-class,
Midwestern, living ordinary private lives, fearful of pub
lic events, this Nebraska family gives clues to mid-century
America. Through his family, Morris is presenting what he
believes to be the essence of American character and the
centrality of American experience, a point of focus a-
chieved also through such technical matters as the handling
of plot and point of view. Using as the central incident
of the plot an event that brings little action— the gather
ing of the clan for a family reunion— Morris is able to
23
zk
hover over the event In order to reveal its full signifi
cance. 1 Further, by using a form of the fragmented point
of view, Morris allows each incident to be filtered through
the consciousness of several characters, out of which the
reader must find a central interpretation.2 As a corollary
of these elements, Morris makes much of the importance of
time in people's lives, the effect of the past upon the
present and the import of both for the future. The char
acters in Ceremony are unenlightened by the past, fearful
of the future, and consequently imprisoned in the inaction
of the present.
All of this points to the ultimate meaning of the
novel. America, like the Scanlon family, is caught at a
point in time with portent for the future, a precarious
balance which could give way to a more ominous state of
affairs. The recurring phrase, "Wake before bomb" (a ref-
■^Jonathan Baumbach-describes his method this way?
"Morris's novels are written as if perceived by a slow-
motion camera* ... almost nothing happens, but what does
is lingered over, seen in photographic close-up, illuminat
ing the patterned grain of experience. . . . Ironically,
his world is most active in still life" (The Landscape of
Nightmare [New York, 1965]» P* 152).
2David Madden aptly describes this aspect of Ceremony
in Lone Tree. "The characters in Ceremony, ostensibly
ordinary people in sun extraordinary world, are intricately
bound up with each other? and an intricately controlled
design of motifs relates the vision of each character to
every other, the past to the present, and Lone Tree to the
outside world" (Wright Morris [New York, 1964] , p. 133).
25
erence to the testings in Nevada), for example, becomes a
motif throughout the novel, one of several devices linking
the story of the Scanlon family to American society. This
point of balance is actually a state of tension between
forces that are operating in the family and, by projection,
in American society* tension between past and present,
Bast and West, private and public affairs, action and in
action. Though the novel proposes no specific answers, it
suggests that the question to be asked is, in what direc
tion is America heading?
The elements of the novel to be examined then are the
family and its American inheritance, the setting and its
symbolic significance, the effect of multiple points of
view, the repetition of ideas, Incidents, and phrases as
motifs. All the elements of the novel combine to form a
pattern in which all the parts converge toward the center
to provide a commonality of meaning. Wright Morris’s own
words, as he describes the artistic process itself, show
k°w Ceremony works. The author, Morris asserts, must es
tablish "a field of vision," a center to which he returns,
"a navel of experience from which the author has never de
parted, and now uses as a magnet to order the iron filings
of his separate lives." By this method, Morris continues,
"the writer, using fragments of disorder, seeks to impose
order on the world around him, that otherwise immense
26
panorama of futility and anarchy.”3
The novel is set in Nebraska, the physical ’ ’ navel of
the world." By beginning with a section called "The
Scene,” a description of Lone Tree, the town which gener
ated the Scanlon family, Morris establishes the importance
of Place in the novel. Morris has this to say about his
Midwestern setting!
I am not a regional writer, but the character of the
plains has conditioned what I see, what I look for,
and what I find in the world to write about. . . .
*n Ceremony, while set in a specific region, the na
ture of the environment works itself out in terms of
character.
Nebraska, the geographical center of the United States,
stands as a crossroads between East and West, an inter
section in time as well as space. Looking from one of its
borders toward the urban and industrial Bast, symbolic of
twentieth-century America, and from the other toward the
open and sparsely settled Great Plains, symbolic of the
frontier spirit, Nebraska represents for Morris, not a
blending, but a mid-point between opposing forces, or, as
Madden says, "conflicting extremes in American land and
^"National Book Award Address, March 12, 1957."
Critique. IV (Winter 1961-2), pp. 7^-5.
^Cited by Granville Hicks in "Landscape of the
Lonesome Plains," a review of Ceremony in Lone Tree.
Saturday Review. XLIII (July 9, I960), p. 11.
27
character.”5
Two of the Scanlon daughters, Lois and Maxine, in
their married lives have chosen to move eastward from their
birthplace, but only as far as Lincoln, the state capitol,
where they have settled into the impasse of middle-class
existence. They have chosen the present by rejecting the
past, but the present, at least for Lois and her husband,
Walter McKee, is merely a life of mindless comfort, as
Morris suggests in the description of their house, a split-
level home which insulates them from inconvenience with
gadgets like an intercom system and electric garage doors.
However, luxury in physical surroundings does not always
provide a comfortable living relationship between people
and their house, as Lois observes to herself.
In the thirteen months they had been in the house
the dining room had been used three times, twice at
Christmas and once at Thanksgiving; all the other
meals she had to serve in the kitchen, where the
coffeepot sat on the table and McKee felt, as he
said, it was all right to push back his chair.6
Though Lois has given up the past, her husband, Walter
McKee, finds nostalgic pleasure in his visits to Polk, just
down the tracks east of Lone Tree, the childhood home of
McKee himself and his friend Gordon Boyd, who is invited to
• ^Wright Morris, p. 25.
^Ceremony in Lone Tree (New York, i960), p. 68. All
subsequent references will be to this edition.
28
the reunion. Here, past and present exist side by side,
often in ironic Juxtaposition. The house where McKee was
born still stands, a barrel at the corner of the porch to
catch rain water from the roof as McKee remembers from the
old days, but now "a TV aerial, like a giant Martian in
sect, crouches on the roof as if about to fly off with the
house" (p. 9). The existence of the old grain elevator and
the new air-conditioned motel in the same town suggest the
paradox of a place trying to straddle both past and present,
as McKee does on his visits to the old barbershop which is
still in operation.
As the images indicate, this is not a romantic pic
ture. Nostalgia belongs to the characters, not to the
author, who shows the crippling effects of nostalgia upon
those who are trapped in the past. Similarly, through the
symbolism of gadgets and other shiny new products of tech
nology, Morris indicates the hollowness and superficiality
of the present. Chester Eisinger states Morris's attitudes
succinctly in a general comment about his fiction.
The quest for the real America and the real American
in Morris's work involves the stripping away of nos
talgia, of sentimentality, of the optimistic myth of
success and progress that has maimed the American
psyche.'
Though Polk is caught between the past and the present,
^Fiction of the Forties (Chicago, 1965), p. 331.
29
Lone Tree, site of the family reunion, is completely a
ghost town, a symbol of the death of the American pioneer
tradition. Once a part of the route west for the Pony
Express and wagon trains, later for the railroad, Lone Tree
now bears as signs of its once active life only weather
beaten relics like the cigar-store Indian and the firehouse
wagon, or old buildings like the jail and the livery stable,
now merely store fronts. Lone Tree has become merely a
caricature of its own history, like a movie set of a fron
tier town. Tom Scanlon, an inhabitant of Lone Tree for
most of his life, has always preferred his own version of
the town, filling it with the "scenic props of his own
mind" (p. *0, a buffalo grazing near the tracks, an Indian
body propped in a tree for burial, a Pony Express team stop
ping for water, "but most of the things he remembers took
place before he was born" (p. 17). By preempting his fa
ther's history, Tom Scanlon refuses to acknowledge the pres
ent, actually predating himself and his own generation. His
long sojourn in the Lone Tree Hotel, surrounded by arti
facts from the past like the flowered nightpot and the old
wood-burning stove, does not serve to preserve the past but
merely to fossilize it, to show its lack of connection with
the present. On the day of the reunion, as if to symbolize
his death-in-life existence, Tom Scanlon sleeps through the
festivities of his ninetieth birthday celebration.
30
While old Tom Scanlon holds stubbornly to a past not
his own and to only that part of Lone Tree's history that
he wishes to acknowledge, the town does provide other clues
to a more recent, less imaginary past, one which is perti
nent to the middle generation. The objects they stumble
across, from their own past or from the once public life of
Lone Tree, are reminders of the passing of the decades.
The razor blade which shaved William J. Bryan during his
stopover at the turn of the century, an old circus poster,
an unopened letter addressed to Miss Lois Scanlon and dated
May, 1920, a newspaper from 1927 giving an account of
Lindbergh's flight over the Atlantic, a map of Nebraska on
which someone had punched a hole at the dot marked Lone
Tree compose a series of unrelated objects which supply
points of reference in time the way towns along the tracks
east and west of Lone Tree do in space. As Gordon Boyd,
McKee's friend, muses when he sees the map and the news
paper and the old hotel clock with its hands stopped at
11*37* "Lone Tree, that place where the dreams crossed, a
point in time rather than in space, a hole in the map where
the artifacts were stored" (p. 232).
Certain moments of time, like certain incidents, carry
great significance. Morris has said about his writing*
31
The notion that life, like a zipper, runs along a
straight track is alien to modern sensibility. Today,
the artist breaks into the tape and examines the exact
nature of reality at that point.°
The time and place coincide to make the reunion a poten
tially significant occasion. Before the day ends, Tom
Scanlon, the only member of the oldest generation, will die
on his own birthday, and two members of the younger genera
tion will elope. The cycle of the family will continue,
but the occasion of the reunion offers the family, partic
ularly the middle generation, a chance to take stock of
themselves, individually and collectively. The place, with
its memories and mementos and its history, provides the
appropriate environment for this significant pause in the
family*s regular routine of living. The "field of vision"
established by the author is narrowly prescribed in time
and place, but one which reveals the central core of
American experience.
When Jonathan Baumbach describes Morris's Nebraska
(like Faulkner's Mississippi) as a "self-contained mythic
world in which the universe can be dissected and examined
in miniature,he is enlarging the scope of the novel be
yond Morris's intention. The Scanlon family are meant to
be a microcosm of America, being peculiarly American
^Saturday Review (July 9» I960), p. 11.
9Landscape, p. 15A.
32
through their history and their characteristics. David
Madden recognizes this when he too compares Morris to
Faulkner•
Perhaps Morris's microcosm, being midwestern, is more
representative of contemporary America, more evocative
of the dynamics of its history, of the nature of its
land and its character.10
Morris's theory of fiction (as stated in Saturday Review)
and his purpose help to explain his particular effect.
Morris selects certain incidents and moments of time of
particular significance to use as recurring motifs,
counterpointing one against the other, rather than building
the Intricate and complex patterns of relationship that
Faulkner creates. Morris constructs a map of intersecting
points rather than a tapestry like Faulkner's, where all
the details are filled in to provide rich texture. Since
Morris is representing what is typical in America through
his microcosm, he extracts out of the mass of data that
forms our contemporary society those things of particular
Import. Morris does not reconstruct an entire society, he
represents one.
The family is, of course, the center of interest. It
covers four generations! Tom Scanlon and his three married
daughters with their husbands, their children and grand
children. In addition, Walter McKee's lifelong friend
1QWright Morris, p. 30.
33
Gordon Boyd provides an extra point of view, one disengaged
from the family and consequently capable of irony. Morris
concentrates upon the middle generation for a purpose.
Like the time and place setting, they are at a point of
intersection, adults in between old age and youth and
accountable to both, in between past said future, awed by
events of the world around them, yet caught in the pattern
of their private existence. Marcus Klein describes their
situation as an illustration of the "impossible polarity as
the principle of ordinary life." Klein goes on to describe
the position of this middle generation.
They look into the long past and the long future, but
their center is in this middle age in this middle place
between and informed by the extremes. It is the tense
middle vision that is productive of life.1- 1
0r should be productive of life, Morris himself might add.
The novel investigates what is missing and needed in order
to make more productive the lives and culture of Americans.
The youngest of Scanlon’s daughters, Edna, and her hus--
band Clyde Ewing illustrate Morris’s theme and his analysis
of American character. Their married life is an uncon
scious parody of a fruitful marriage. Their wealth, de
rived from the discovery of oil on their Oklahoma ranch,
is unearned, and it spawns their interest in owning expen
sive things (a by-product of our technological "progress").
i:LAfter Alienation (Cleveland, 1964-), p. 238.
34
In spite of their big modern house the Ewings spend much of
their time as transients in their equally luxurious trail
er, Vjust a few feet shorter than a flatcar,”12 which has a
special room for their expensive, pedigreed dog. The dog
Shiloh is their substitute for children, and they measure
their esteem for him in terms of his financial worth, as
they do with their prize horses.
The Ewings illustrate one type in Morris’s portraits
of failures in American life. Edna and her husband are
drawn almost as caricatures, their crudities exaggerated to
point up their insensitivity and their distorted values.
Edna denies her feminine nature by adopting a bold mascu
line manner to suit her way of life, a direct contrast to
the inhibited, ladylike manner of Lois McKee,
"I’m a big girl now and live in a trailer with a
man and a bull dog. Would you like a drink? . • «
Shiloh the dog loves it. My God, darling, you should
see him when he’s tights He’s a lover! He growls at
Clyde and sleeps with me himself.” (p. 154-)
With her heavy smoker’s cough, her manners and her appear
ance, Edna repels and embarrasses Walter McKee.
Would Boyd ever believe this whooping crane was the
sister of Lois Scanlon? Her mouth all teeth, yellow
as com, her scalp chewed up where she dug at it with
the hairpins, (p. 155)
Clyde Ewing is pompous and phony, an offense to the
modest, unassuming Walter McKee. He affects a pose, cre-
•^Ceremony, p, 19.
35
ating a'role for himself as his claim to history and wear
ing his identity as he does his military uniform. The
family generally supports his self-image.
Maxine said, "Mr. Boyd, Colonel Ewing is part
Cherokee Indian, Is it on your mother's side,
Colonel Ewing?"
"Yes indeedy," said the Colonel, fooling with the
leash. "Mother had a touch of the dark-"blood in her.
Will used to say— that's Will Rogers, Mr. Boyd— that
the whitest man had some dark blood in him." (p. 153)
Appropriately, Colonel Ewing expresses himself in
cliches. He, like Scanlon who "knew" Buffalo Bill, picks
a headline figure from history with whom to align himself,
and then, like Scanlon, adopts a role to suit this image.
The history and vitality of the West is reduced, in this
family, to the cliche of the wooden Indian still standing
in Lone Tree. For example, a newspaper story about Tom
Scanlon before his daughter rescued him, against his will,
from his lonely existence in the Lone Tree Hotel reveals
how the public as well as Scanlon himself turns history in
to mere cliches. The headline— "Man Who Knew Buffalo Bill
Spends Lonely Xmas" (p. 19)— has aroused a flurry of inter
est among museum keepers and historians, who exploit the
old man's garbled history. Americans, in general, the
author suggests, do not know how to use their own history,
refusing its vitality, reducing it to matters of mere curi
osity.
36
Wright Morris, discussing the writer in America, makes
this comment.
We are no longer a raw-material reservoir, the marvel
and despair of less fortunate cultures, since our only
inexhaustible resource at the moment is the cliche.
An endless flow of cliches, tirelessly processed for
mass-media consumption, now give a sheen of vitality
to what is either stillborn or secondhand. The hall
mark of these cliches is a processed sentimentality.
The extremes of our life, what should be its contours,
blur at their point of origin, then disappear into the
arms of the Smiling Christ at Forest Lawn.3
He is saying, in effect, that not only our traditions but
our modern values have suffered a loss of vitality, a re
duction to simplicities by means of which we confront the
hard facts of reality with easy slogans. This is the sig
nificance of the impact of the past upon the present as
Morris explores it through his characters. David Madden's
comment sums it up. "The cliche is symbolic of the dream
defunct, and it is with this 'dead* language that Morris
depicts the sterility of modern life."^
The evasion of reality is illustrated in a different
way in the marriage of Scanlon's second daughter, Maxine,
and her husband, Bud Momeyer, a mall carrier in Lincoln.
This marriage is considered by the family to be the least
successful. Bud Momeyer refuses to be concerned with his
family, preferring instead to become absorbed in the lives
13The Territory Ahead (New York, 1957), p.12.
^Wright Morris, p. 121.
37
of the people on his mall route, or to indulge in the lat
est of his many hobbies. Maxine, caught in the domestic
trap, burdened with a perennially adolescent husband and a
rather difficult teenaged daughter, resents what life has
done to her.
Bud Momeyer*s failure is the failure to grow up.
Gordon Boyd and Walter McKee try, at the reunion, to re
capture their boyhood through nostalgic reminiscing, but
Bud has never lost his childlike nature, as Maxine is well
aware. "If anyone should ask Maxine . • . why it was that
Bud never grew old, she would have to reply that first he
would have to grow up. But he hadn’t" (p. 75)* Lone Tree
with its relics is a natural playground for Bud, as it is
a natural environment for the illusions of Tom Scanlon, a
similarity that does not escape Maxine. At the sight of
her husband, wearing his ever-present mailman's hat, carry
ing a bow and arrow, his latest fad, "she knew why it was
that her mother, faced with her father, would gather up her
apron and throw it over her head" (p. 79)• Bud Momeyer,
like Tom Scanlon, prefers to create a world of his own
rather than face the real one. He too had abdicated his
position as a family man, finding it more interesting to
live vicariously the experiences of the people on his mail
route.
38
Although he was married and the father of a daugh
ter, which were things he had in common with so many
people, Bud had more in common with their families
than he did with his own. His opinion was asked. Was
it the uniform? It helped. , • , He certainly knew
their kids better than his own kid, * . . Their prob
lems seemed to be the ones he could help, (p. 111)
Maxine's role is that of a domestic martyr, her major
emotion, self-pity. She feels enslaved by endless house
hold chores, even at the reunion in Lone Tree, where it
falls mostly to her to prepare the old hotel and do the
cooking for the group. The contrast between her life and
her sisters' seems inescapable to her; their nice homes,
their new automobiles represent the kind of luxury her hus
band has never been able to give her. Maxine seems to re
sent most of all the fact that she has grown old before her
time, a fate she wants her daughter Etoile to avoid.
Of Scanlon's three daughters, Lois, the oldest and the
only grandmother among them, is the only one to maintain
the image of what the American women are supposed to be,
"the American Dream Goddess."1- * Though Lois is a pampered
and dominating woman, McKee considers himself fortunate in
his marriage to '!God*s loveliest creature" (p. 228), and he
assures Gordon Boyd that "Mrs. McKee and me couldn't be
^ The Landscape of Nightmare, p. 157*
39
happier."1^ The cliches point out the nature of their mar
riage and way of life, its blandness, its security, its
split-level style of living, most of all the lack of aware
ness in the McKees themselves. Morris gives the McKees the
major emphasis in the novel to underline their typicality.
Once again, Morris*s own comments upon American society
illustrate what he is getting at in the novel.
The isolated monuments, the isolated efforts, that
characterize the American imagination, symbolize the
isolation in which Americans live. Connections are
missing. The whole does not add up to something more
than the sum of the parts. ... We are joined by
highways, networks, and slogans, not by imaginative
acts. . . . The Everyman in America will soon be the
one who has Everything.1'
Walter and Lois McKee suffer from this lack of connection,
as Alan Trachtenberg points out. "Happily married in
appearance, they are ironically the least connected of the
entire group. They fail to see each other."1®
Lois had first confirmed her retreat from feeling and
awareness when she chose Walter McKee for her husband, not
changing the pattern of her life since that time. Walter,
her quiet, safe husband who does nothing to disturb the
^Wright Morris, The Field of Vision (New Xork, 1956),
p. 57• This novel, a predecessor to Ceremony in Lone Tree,
uses the same characters and develops many of the same
incidents,
1^The Territory Ahead, p. 28.
l8"The Craft of Vision," Critique, IV (Winter, 196l-2)„
P« 53. ___
kO
evenness of her life, has always been the bystander, the
one to watch while others acted. As a young man, Walter
had proudly presented his friend Gordon Boyd to his fian
cee, Lois Scanlon, whereupon Gordon had promptly kissed her,
something which Walter himself had not yet accomplished.
This incident from the past, revived by the reunion,
becomes one of the recurring motifs, like the cliches and
headlines, items given special significance. This partic
ular incident gives a clue to the suppressed emotions typ
ical of these adults and of the American middle class.
Gordon’s kiss had aroused Lois’s sexuality, though she
had admitted it only to herself at the time. A typical
member of her generation, she feared sexuality in herself
or in anyone else, and adopted what was for her the only
reasonable course. "She had just enough wit to do what she
could. She married McKee" (Field, p. 35) • Lois has, to a
certain extent, been able to control her personal life, to
preserve its tranquility, by controlling her husband.
If Lois has, as Morris suggests, deliberately chosen
her role, Walter McKee falls into his by his own nature.
Morris portrays him as a typical sort of adult male, a
natural product of our culture with its Lois McKees.
Lois’s sister Maxine remembers his unassuming manner back
in the days when he became Lois's suitor.
41
He was quiet and well-mannered . . . a nice local boy
who liked to be friendly, but not in any way that had
to be taken seriously. He was just handy to have
around when the girls had a picnic or a lawn party,
since he liked nothing more than to let Lois pin an
apron on him and help eat up whatever the others had
left. (Ceremony, pp. 220-1)
Marriage to Lois has not changed Walter. He and Lois have
produced children and grandchildren. They have become
prosperous enough to live in a big house in Lincoln. Yet,
in his sixty-first year, Walter is still somewhat awed by
life and, at times, by his wife, though he has learned to
accommodate himself to her nagging, little ways of domi
nance.
"McKeeeee!" Lois called, • • • "you want to help
father?" as if McKee had a choice in the matter. . . •
"McKee— " Lois called, but McKee timed it so the
garage door closed on the rest of it.
(Ceremony, pp. 51-2)
But in general, McKee accepts his life, performing his
errands like a dutiful husband, going along with Lois's
ideas, like her plans for the family reunion. If Lois is
a castrating female, as Jonathan Baumbach calls her, Walter
McKee is a Babbit, a name given him by David Madden.
"McKee, like Babbit, keeps the faith; he does not question
anything, especially his own life,"1?
Gordon Boyd, as a character, is meant to be both a
foil and a complement to the McKees. Of the same back-
1?Wright Morris, p. 146.
42
ground and the same generation, he too is ineffectual in
dealing with life, but, unlike the McKees, he is fully
aware of his ineffectuality, calling himself the "first and
last of the completely self-unmade men" (p. 302). The var
ious careers he has tried, the audacious acts he has per
formed, like trying to walk on water or squirting soda pop
at a bull in a Mexican bull ring, are symbolic gestures of
defiance against the world, his attempt to impose his own
image upon his life. Boyd, like Scanlon, represents a dis
tortion of the pioneer tradition. But instead of locking
himself in the past, he tries to recreate the past by the
acts meant to establish him as a hero. However, they are
childish and purposeless gestures which leave him as much
a failure as Scanlon, and as lacking in vitality as his
married friends. There are no heroes in this middle gen
eration, and, Morris suggests, no heroism possible in
twentieth-century America.
The McKees and Boyd represent two opposite kinds of
failures in Morris's fictional world* the cliched exist
ence of average, middle-class American marriage, and the
attempt by an unsuccessful hero to make life more challeng
ing through daring feats. The passive characters like
McKee need the active characters like Boyd as an antidote
to an inactive life.
43
As a kid he (McKee) had done very little. • . . What
had he done? Watching Boyd, after all, was what he*d
been doing all his life. (p. 56)
At the reunion, Gordon Boyd considers it his mission to
challenge Lois and Walter McKee into awareness and acknow
ledgement of their feelings, but he succeeds only in em
barrassing them.
'•Boyd,” said McKee, "I hope you didn’t come back
just to stir up old feelings.”
"Or is it new ones, McKee? Not the past but the
present. In the good old days we both had feelings.
How is it now? On good authority I have it that you
and Mrs, McKee couldn’t be happier. You couldn’t be
so you haven’t been. What scares you pissless is not
the fear of death, but the fear of exposure. The open
fly of your feelings. You know why? You might not
have any. What can one do? Keep the upper lip firmly
pleated.” (p. 181)
To his fundamental question, "You awake or asleep?” there
is no answer.
This middle generation, in retreat from life, ls^ by
extension, mid-century America. The question, "You awake
or asleep?" becomes the admonition, "Wake before bomb,"
with its larger implications. Like the early years of the
adult generation, America, too, held promises. Morris
establishes the connections between these two levels of
meaning through his pattern of motifs, criss-crossing past
and present, public and private events, to give them both
symbolic meaning. The personal Incidents remembered by the
characters, like the artifacts from the past in Lone Tree,
represent the pregnant moments, those full of promise and
44
possibilities. After Lone Tree’s last real day of glory,
the celebration ushering in the twentieth century, the
town, like its distinguished guest, William J. Bryan, and
his silver cause, diminished in vigor. Heroic individuals
like Buffalo Bill, Charles Lindbergh, even Will Rogers
appear now only in spurious imitations or self-conscious
failures like Gordon Boyd. Lois and Boyd, by refusing to
acknowledge the effect of their kiss all those years ago,
chose instead their separate, unfulfilled lives. All the
adults have chosen some substitute for real involvement
with life.
However, the problems of dealing with the present
still exist, and the interweaving of forces, one act im
pinging upon another, operates in the present as it did in
the past. Morris creates two contemporary news stories as
public events which have some impact upon the characters'
private lives. The separate incidents involve two Nebraska
teen-agers, Charlie Munger who shoots ten people during the
course of a week, and Lee Roy Momeyer who runs down two of
his classmates with his car. As with other incidents in
the novel, Morris implants references to these events
through the consciousness of several characters so that
their impact is constant and sharp. Additionally, the var
ious reactions reveal the ironies present in contemporary
America. These acts of violence inspire fear largely be-
^5
cause they appear to be without motive. McKee is reminded.
of his encounter with some young hoodlums who, equally
without a reason, deliberately damaged his car.
What troubled him was not what he saw, but the name
less appetite behind it, the lust for evil in the
faces of the beardless boys. McKee felt more life in
their life than in himself. He didn't want a show
down. He felt himself beaten at the start, (pp. 50-1)
Morris provides an Ironic counterpoint to these inci
dents and the reaction to them in the account of Boyd's
overnight stay in a motel in the middle of the Nevada
proving grounds.
In Mexico he had forgotten about the bomb. It seemed
strange to hear about it in a wilderness of slot
machines, from an elderly woman who twisted the apron
tied at her waist. The radio at her back played old-
time hymns. She was white-haired, motherly, and pinned
to her dress like a brooch was a piece of metal about
the size of a dog tag. . . . "That's to check the
fallout," she said. . . . "Everyone who lives here
wears one," • . ,
As Boyd signed the register she added* Did he want
to be up for the bomb?
For the bomb? He saw that it was a routine
question. . . •
"You better be up for it," she said, and after his
name in the register she added*
WAKE BEFORE BOMB (pp. 30-1)
Morris's meaning is clear. A nation in which citizens do
not understand the implication of their government's be
havior, indeed, do not make connections between an action
and its consequences, produces the non-thinking citizen
46
like the motel keeper as well as the frustrated man of
violence like Charlie Munger, Morris's interest lies not
in attacking the government or any system, but in analyzing
our contemporary society and the people who make up that
society. He injects violence into the novel to complete
his analysis of the major strands in our culture. If peo
ple lack connections, Morris suggests, or any real engage
ment with life, they cannot function in a vital way, as he
illustrates in his characters, McKee, for example, bewil
dered by the violence of the two young men, tries to deter
mine for himself whether such things have explanations.
In more cases than he cared to remember what was de
scribed as an accident was the most important event
of a man?s life, . . . An accident? • . . People
took it for granted like the weather because of some
thing called insurance. If you had it, that is, the
accident made sense, , . , And then Charlie Hunger.
If he had raised his gun and leveled it at McKee,
which McKee could well imagine him doing, would the
death of McKee have been an accident? If it was,
then McKee would like to know if there was anything
in this world, except Insurance policies, that claimed
to make any sense of life, (pp, 246-7)
Actually, the two young men have been provided with
motives of a sort, and, in addition, Morris explores the
potentiality for violence in other characters and the rea
sons for it, Charlie Munger had said that "he wanted to be
somebody," Lee Boy Momeyer, that "he was tired of being
pushed around" (p. 21), reasons which mystify the adults
but which the younger generation can understand. Etoile,
Maxine's daughter, shows a reaction quite different from___
^7
her parents*, almost an Identification with the two young
Killers.
"You want to know why?" she yelled. "It’s because
nobody wants to know why, . • . Everybody hates every
body, but nobody knows why anybody gets shot. You
want to know something? I*d like to shoot a few dozen
people myself!" (p. 11?)
Etoile realizes that connections are missing in contempo
rary society.
The adult generation, whose lives have not equipped
them to confront such strong reality, would prefer to be
lieve other explanations, that Charlie Munger is really not
a "mad-dog killer," that Lee Roy Momeyer (actually, Etoile's
cousin) had "lost control" of his car in the slippery snow.
The deliberate and violent assertions of identity which
really motivated the killers, though frighteningly compat
ible with other forces in contemporary culture, as the
author shows, can only bewilder adults who have retreated
into passivity and sublimation of their feelings.
Morris gives an ironic illustration of these forces
and contradictions in Maxine's husband, Bud Momeyer, one of
the adults most bewildered by his nephew's behavior. As a
man who lives vicariously through the lives of people on
his mall route, while he abdicates responsibility for his
own daughter Etoile, as a man who "would walk around ants
he saw on the sidewalk" (p. 70) and never say anything
worse than "Gee Whiz, What the Deuce, and Dang" (p. 76),
48
Bud seems to be the least connected person in his genera
tion and one least likely to express himself with any
forcefulness. Yet, his latest hobby, hunting with a bow
and arrow, has led him accidentally to a secret pleasure,
killing cats.
The weight of the arrow turned the tom half way around.
Bud could see the arrow on one side of him and the
feathers on the other, just before he stepped off the
roof and fell to the ground.
Not a sound. Not a whimper. Now was it in any way
messy. Bud did not feel bad. He did not feel much of
anything, (pp. 114-5)
He does not admit the link between an action and its con
sequences.
This incident is another illustration of the author's
method of working. Not a part of the linear development of
plot (very little exists in the novel), this seemingly
isolated incident is one whose significance intersects with
other things in the novel, another peg in the author's map
of America. Bud's engaging in his hobby illustrates on the
personal level what the Nevada bomb tests illustrate on a
general level, tests whose possible consequences are dis
missed by merely pinning "fallout check" tags on the local
citizens. Bud's behavior is linked also in its implication
to the acts of the two boys, whose conscious rebellion
against the frustration of their lives is a more extreme
form of his unconscious reaction against his own existence.
h-9
Both are symptoms of the tension in society arising
inevitably when the quality of life is distorted in some
way. These symptoms exist in the family in a milder form,
the younger generation asserting themselves, not in open
rebellion so much as in resistance to the life style of the
middle generation. Their resistance takes on two dimen
sions which especially disturb the adults, open sexuality
and a tolerance for violence.
Not surprisingly, Morris uses sexuality as a symbol
for vitality in life and in human relations, and, converse
ly, the repression of sexuality as a symbol for a sterile
existence, or, in some cases, for misdirected energy. Most
of the women in the family prefer a controlled domestic
life as their Insurance against a disorderly world, a kind
of tranquility they can achieve with placid husbands. Con
sequently, when the younger generation show signs of in
tractability, the women unite to domesticate them, as they
do by encouraging the elopement of Etoile with her cousin
Calvin.
Etoile differs from the women in the adult generation
not only in her strong will and uninhibited manner but also
in her unabashed sexuality, of particular alarm to her
mother, Maxine.
Maxine had gone through the drawers of Etoile's
bureau . . . and read two months of the diary she
kept. . . . On Tuesday, November 8, she had written,
Ran down the stairs just to feel my breasts bobbing. . . .
50
In her pencil box . . . pinned to the lid was a snap
shot of a boy without a stitch on, his back turned to
the camera, that Maxine recognized as Etoile's cousin
Calvin because he was wearing his stirrup boots.
(PP. 73-^)
Her open pursuit of the bashful Calvin includes planned
seductions, a reversal in the usual pattern of female
dominance-male submissiveness. Etoile is trying to arouse
rather than repress Calvin's sexuality.
Calvin too is in rebellion, but his rebellion takes
him back to the mythical past of his great-grandfather, Tom
Scanlon. A true inheritor of the timidity of the males in
his family, his grandfather Walter McKee and his father
Gordon McKee (Walter's son), Calvin seeks to identify with
the more masculine and heroic traditions of the Old West.
After Etoile's first seduction of him, he runs away to the
mining country, which resembles so closely the world of his
great-grandfather's tales that he feels completely at home
until a twentieth-century uranium prospector invades his
sanctuary (an obvious symbolic connection with the bomb
tests).
Without having seen the face of this man he hated him.
If he had had his gun along he might have taken a few
pot shots at him. This was his grandfather's
country . . . and it was now Calvin McKee's country to
be defended from those cheaters the way you'd scare off
cattle thieves, (p. 99)
It is this stubborn male resistance to more conventional
life that his mother Eileen does not understand or trust,
and which she fights with a woman's weapon, domesticity.
51
More than that, Calvin’s fondness for guns seems to
the family to link him potentially to the violence going on
around them. Calvin, whose stutter indicates the extent of
his frustration with the present world, Lee Roy Momeyer,
whose small stature and unmasculine appearance make him the
butt of jokes, Charlie Munger, even smaller and more re
sentful, Etoile*s father, Bud Momeyer, whose hunting of
cats is to him just another of the games he plays, are all
examples of males, who, in one way or another, are denied
their natural roles. Jonathan Baumbach sees this primarily
as a problem of masculinity.
The gratuitous eruptions of violence which shatter
the Nebraska stillness are, Morris suggests, mis
directed assertions of male potency in a society
dominated, smothered, and emasculated by the female,20
However, Wright Morris extends the implications to larger
forces operating in society. By linking all these to
gether, the author establishes the connection between the
frustrations in people’s personal lives and the frustration
produced by a technological society, which through its de
structive capability, renders itself impotent as a creative
force.
In a later novel, One Da.v. Morris puts these words in
the mouth of one of his characters trying to explain the
significance of acts of violence}
on
^ Landscape, p. 159.
52
The assurance that nothing said, nothing written or
cabled, nothing accepted or rejected, nothing suffered
or felt, nothing now up before Congress or still in
the blueprint, nothing dug out of the past or pre
scribed for the future, would restore to a man his
belief in his power to affect the course of human
events. He might exert it, but believe in it he did
not.21
If a man living today does not turn in desperation to vio
lence to assert himself, he must choose the unconscious
life. As this same character says, "To be fully conscious
was to be fully exposed. ... As a matter of survival
one gave it up" (p. 365)*
Most of the Scanlon clan has chosen the non-consclous
life as a matter of survival. Or, to put it another way,
the family turns inward, closing its ranks when trouble
threatens as if to withdraw from the outside world. By
encouraging the two young cousins to marry, the adult gen
eration, particularly the women, attempt to maintain a de
gree of control over the future. The marriage itself as
a symbol of the future reveals many of the ironies inher
ent in the family. With Calvin, so painfully shy that
Etoile has to "take the words right off his lips like a
parakeet" (p. ?7)» the marriage will be woman-dominated.
Calvin, dressed always like a cowboy, will keep alive nos
talgia for a dead past, insisting, in fact, that their
elopement reenact part of Tom Scanlon's history, with
21Wright Morris, One Day (New York, 1965), p. 366.
53
Etoile dressed like the Samantha of the wagon train
Scanlon has concocted in his memory.
The end of the day's ceremonies, a bizarre comedy
scene, is both a wrapping up of all the family*s affairs
and a confirmation of the continuing pattern of their
existence. Etoile and Galvin return from their elopement
in a mule-driven wagon, which rouses the old man to full
wakefulness just before he drops dead. Calvin has succeed
ed so well in bringing the past back to life that the old
man cannot survive the shock. As Gordon Boyd says later,
"You missed the bomb, my dear; . . . the past is dead, long
live the past" (p. 28*0.
Lois McKee, roused also by the noise of the team and
wagon, performs the first impulsive act of her life. Grab
bing her father's gun which she earlier had taken from her
young grandson, she fires it out of her bedroom window,
causing the mule team to rear and run.
What came over her? . . . McKee would probably
think the events of the evening had stirred her up a
little and she had been sleepwalking. What did she
think? She had never been so wide awake. . . . If
the only way to leave an impression was to do some
thing crazy like Boyd, she would do it— she would
leave them with one they would never forget. (p. 267)
The gun shot, by precipitating the runaway which awakens
Tom Scanlon, is the "bomb" that kills the past. But, as
the author shows, not even a moment of shock can jolt the
family out of their cycle, Maxine, as she observes her
5^
daughter Etoile and Galvin driving the wagon, looking like
a reproduction of her father so many years ago, can only
ask herself, "Had Etoile just married something like that?
With her father dead, was it all to start over again?"
(p. 292).
Another precipitate action in the final scene contrib
utes both to the comedy and the irony of the ending. Bud
Momeyer has mistakenly killed the Ewings* expensive bull
dog with his bow and arrow. This second death in the fam
ily arouses more consternation in Edna and Clyde Ewing than
Scanlon's death does with the rest of the family, a con
trast which is made evident as the two funeral processions
prepare to leave Lone Tree, the dog being borne away in the
expensive, Chrysler-driven trailer, Scanlon in an old mule-
driven wagon. The past is truly dead; the present is un
committed.
The wedding and the funeral procession, which would
normally represent an ending and a beginning, is, in this
novel, another point of intersection, a point of tension
between past and future. What the characters achieve can
best be described as a holding action, a position of being
in dead center. As they prepare to leave, McKee tries to
talk Gordon Boyd into settling down in his old home town,
giving Boyd a booster speech about Polk, about its business
opportunities and its advantageous location, "just off the
55
center of the country, best place in the world for light
industries serving both coasts" (p. 302). One of the char
acters turns to Boyd to ask, "You ever been away?" (p. 303)•
Even Gordon Boyd, the adventurer, the one adult who tries
to rouse the family from dead center, has never really been
away, something he has always known.
WAKE BEFORE BOMB? How did one do it? Was it even ad
visable? The past whether one liked it or not was all
that one actually possessed* the green stuff, the
gilt-edge securities. The present was that moment of
exchange— when all might be lost. Why risk it? (p. 32)
Ceremony is Wright Morris's confrontation with mid
century America, an America caught in dead center. Pub
lished in i960, the novel, through its sampling technique,
effectively suggests the fabric of life in the 1950's.
References to popular fads— five-year-old Gordon McKee's
Davy Crockett hat, Etoile*s pictures of Marlon Brando,
Jayne Mansfield and Christine Jorgensen, Lee Roy Momeyer's
slogan adapted from a TV western— Have Guns— Will Lubricate
(p. 50)— reveal the cliches of the culture, while the ref
erences to uranium prospectors and bomb tests, and to un
motivated acts of violence reveal the deeper levels of the
culture. Superficially, Ceremony might seem to resemble
Mid-Century by John Dos Passos published in 1951, a novel
(or trilogy) also concerned with the post-war American
society. Dos Passos, however, is writing direct social
criticism, with easily identifiable social problems, with
56
even a cast of heroes and villains (in the style of his
earlier trilogy U.S.A.). Ceremony, in contrast, does not
attack specific social institutions, looking instead at
more basic human relationships, especially as they exist in
the family. Further, by employing the family as microcosm,
Ceremony represents the culture as a whole, rather than any
specific institutions.
The two novels differ in method too. Dos Passos, re
lying on his earlier method, creates the atmosphere of an
era by using newspaper headlines, minute biographies, and
other samplings of the culture. But Dos Passos, unlike
Morris, presents his images in clusters, unconnected with
the plot, like added authorial comments. Morris, in con
trast, selects his sample items from the popular culture
very sparingly, using them as cross references for the few
incidents of plot that exist in the novel. In Ceremony.
Morris represents American culture as a whole by distilling
its essential qualities.
The important difference between these two novels,
both dealing with contemporary America, lies in their
effect. Dos Passos is trying for an impact on the social-
political level, using his anger to attack and expose those
aspects of our society which he feels need changing. Ef
fective at one time (with U.S.A.). his method as applied to
the 19^0• s and 50*s seems to dissipate rather than to
57
create the kind of moral indignation he wishes to arouse.
Wright Morris seeks to reach deeper levels of our culture
and of our national character, using some of our estab
lished traditions in order to discover those qualities that
have helped create the American character. Morris exhibits
compassion rather than anger, arouses concern rather than
indignation. In Mid-Century. it is easier for the reader
to stand outside the characters and events, even to feel
morally superior to them. In Ceremony, the reader recog
nizes the commonality of human nature represented in the
characters and feels some degree of complicity in the
America the author is portraying. By being more universal
in his implications, Wright Morris is also deeply concerned
with individual, personal values. This is the particular
value of the more contemporary kind of novel represented
in Ceremony in Lone Tree.
Lie Down in Darkness: The Failure of the Southern Aristo
cratic Tradition
The problems of defining the nature of William
Styron*s Lie Down in Darkness are somewhat different than
with Ceremony, even though both novels are making similar
use of their fictional families and of the traditions from
which they spring. The problems arise from the very dif
ferent nature of the two traditions, Midwestern and
Southern, especially as they have appeared in literature
58
in the twentieth century. Midwestern literature has been
more diffuse than Southern literature, adaptable to a wide
variety of interpretations. It has produced urban novel
ists as diverse as James T. Farrell, Nelson Algren, and
Saul Bellows novelists of the small town or provincial
city, like Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Peter
Taylor; and, though increasingly rare, novelists of rural
life, like Willa Gather, 0. E. Bolvaag, or Hamlin Garland.
Wright Morris, using some of the traditional Midwestern
materials, has, through his special use of these materials,
produced a unique Midwestern novel in Ceremony in Lone Tree.
Lie Down in Darkness, in contrast, appears at first
glance to resemble other Southern fiction completely, to
share in that special ambience which seems to surround most
Southern novels regardless of their individual qualities.
The South, unlike the Midwest, has been represented in lit
erature as a self-contained, unique region, whose history
has generated a complex system of values, attitudes, and
relationships that has persisted into the present. These
qualities reside in the setting and atmosphere, in the
characters (often through social class and race), but par
ticularly in the characters* awareness of the South's his
tory and the remnants of traditions that remain in their
consciousness. Novels by authors like Robert Penn Warren,
Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Carson
59
McCullers all possess qualities that stamp them as
Southern.
William Styron, in Lie Down in Darkness, does employ
the South as a special region Kith special traditions, but
he, like Wright Morris, uses these elements as part of the
microcosm which he relates to contemporary society. Be
cause Lie Down in Darkness obviously borrows certain fea
tures from Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury— a suicide, a
mentally defective child, family hatred, Negro servants
used as foils to white characters— some critics have deter
mined that the novel is merely derivative and unoriginal,
or that it is primarily a regional novel. William Van
..V:
O'Connor states that Styron "simply has no subject," that
Lie Down in Darkness, though "beautifully written, . . .
remains pastiche."22 Maxwell Geismar believes that the
novel, "a remarkable and fascinating" one, has no thesis,
that it is "simply a domestic tragedy" in which "the nu
ances of intimate relationships are used to convey the
meaning and texture of a society."23
22”John Updike and William Styroni The Burden of
Talent," in Contemporary American Novelists. ed. Harry T.
Moore (Carbondale, Illinois, 1964), p. 2lS.
23”Domestic Tragedy in Virginia" (rev. of Lie Down in
Darkness), Saturday Review of Literature. XXXIV (September
15, 1951), P. 12.
60
John Aldridge, on the other hand, attributes nearly
the full range of Faulknerian elements to Lie Down in
Darkness, thus assigning the novel fully to the tradition
of Southern literature. The disintegration of the Loftis
family, Aldridge says, results from more than domestic
tension.
Behind Milton’s father-guilt and incest-guilt is the
whole Southern blood-guiIt. Behind Helen’s Jealousy
and Puritanism is the timeless Southern gentlewoman
madness, the madness that comes from too much inbreed
ing, too much Negro fear, too much sexual neglect.
Behind Peyton’s father-complex is a century of pater
nalism and man-hatred and sexual masochism.2^
These comments and others indicate the wide variety of
interpretations possible for the novel, a disagreement
which William Styron's own comments do not necessarily
settle, though he does make clear his intention to avoid
being limited to regionalism. Styron makes some of these
points in an interview with David Dempsey.
"I wanted to write a novel that has more than re
gional implications. I wanted to avoid the ancestral
themes too— the peculiar, inbred, and inverse types
that Faulkner, Caldwell and other Southern writers
have dealt in. At the same time I didn't want to ex
ploit the old idea of wreckage and defeat as a pe
culiarly Southern phenomenon. Elements of this are
in the book, but they’re part of the people rather
than the place."2*
o /l
In Search of Heresy (New York, 1956), pp. 146-7.
2^David Dempsey, "Talk with William Styron," New York
Times Book Review (September 9, 1951), p. 27.
61
Each of the family novels In this study has some kind
of plot, a "story" upon which to hinge the meaning. When
the plot develops a complete action— beginning, middle,
end— around characters with powerfully portrayed motives,
as Lie Down does with its tortured Loftis family, the story
may seem to dominate the book to the exclusion of other
levels of meaning, as Maxwell Geismar believes, or it may
lead to many different theories about its meaning, as in
dicated above. In addition to the implications from
Southern history suggested by the setting and tradition,
the story itself, involving a beautiful girl driven to
suicide by her mother’s neurotic behavior and her father’s
incestuous love, suggests parallels to other mythologies,
primarily to the Electra story or to the loss of Eden.2* *
It is perhaps a tribute to Styron's ability to create a
compelling story of a doomed family and to evoke so power
fully a sense of time and place that the critics are able
to find evidence to support their various interpretations,
many of which do, in fact, enrich any reading of the novel.
Jonathan Baumbach detects the presence of the "trag
ic condition of the house of Atreus" in the novel, and
suggests an interpretation of Peyton’s behavior as a "some
what perverse sublimation of the Electra drive" (Landscape
of Nightmare, p. 130). Jerry Bryant Interprets Lie Down in
Darkness as a lost paradise, a civilization which has
turned away from "the bliss of the Garden of Eden, or the
reign of Saturn where innocent simplicity prevailed" ("The
Hopeful Stoicism of William Styron," South Atlantic
Quarterly. LXIII [Autumn, 1963] , p. 5^1)* ________
62
The central fact about Lie Down, however, must be its
contemporaneity, its relevance in theme and method to other
post-war fiction that attempts to make significant state
ments about our society. Like Wright Morris, William
Styron draws a parallel between the fate of his family and
the direction of American society, using references to con
temporary events as thematic motifs. Like Morris, Styron
places his emphasis upon the present, using the family*s
historical tradition as an ironic rather than fruitful in
heritance from the past. Further, Styron as well as Morris
portrays the family's way of life, not merely to character
ize their place in society, but to lead to more fundamental
questions about human relations. Other elements like mul
tiple points of view, introductory chapter to set the scene,
symbolic use of time and place appear in both novels as
part of the authors' technique, but in other ways Lie Down
is quite different from Ceremony. Styron, as part of his
Southern inheritance, provides a thick texture for his nov
el, partly through the detailed completeness of setting,
story, and character analysis, and partly through his rhe
torical style, which supplies any nuance of meaning that
may otherwise have been missed. The effect of these dif
ferences is that Lie Down possesses a richness of surface
with every part of the picture filled in, while Ceremony
remains a pattern in which selected events are highlighted.
63
In addition, the emphasis upon story and characters in
Lie Down, as previously mentioned, give this novel a closer
tie to the conventional novel where these elements are
given that kind of full development.
The Southern tradition which provides the background
for Lie Down is that of Virginia rather than the Deep
South, the Virginia of gracious living and Negro servants,
where the members of the established class hold prescribed
social and political opinions, where they enter the gentle
manly professions and send their children to the right
schools to acquire the same social values as the parents.
Unlike the pioneer tradition of Ceremony which brought a-
bout a repression of the natural emotions and a retreat
from life, the Southern tradition, by placing its modern
inheritors in a position of unearned privilege, renders
them incapable of living in the present through self-
indulgence, a surrender to emotional needs which are usu
ally immature or unhealthy. In neither case does the tra
dition (a parallel to American society) produce individuals
living mature and vital lives.
Tradition is presented in Lie Down through the re
collection of middle-aged Helen and Milton Loftis as they
remember their parents, an indication that Styron, who goes
back only one generation into the past in the novel, is
interested in present implications of the past rather than
6k
a full exploration of Southern history.2' ’ ’ Milton remembers
his father as a man who was an anachronism even in his own
time, a person who had tried to pass on a tradition by
uttering platitudes in the pontifical manner of a Southern
gentleman.
An old man in whom obscurity resembled solemnity often
enough, and solemnity wisdom, but who nonetheless—
through a stew of dogmatism and misinformation,
through the scraggle of archaic Edwardian mustache in
mild, uncomprehending protest at a world that long
ago had passed him by— 2°
The old man's code, as expressed in one of his speeched,
reveals the fundamental weakness of the tradition itselfi
form without substance, ideals without moral integrity.
My son, . . . being a Southerner and a Virginian and of
course a Democrat you will find yourself in the unique
position of choosing between (a) those ideals implanted
as right and proper in every man since Jesus Christ and
no doubt before and especially in Virginians and (b)
ideals inherent in you through a socio-economic culture
over which you have no power to prevail; consequently
I strongly -urge you my son always to be a good Democrat
but to be a good man too if you possibly can. (pp. k7-8)
Milton Loftis represents the conventional form of the
2?Louis Rubin contrasts The Sound and the Fury to Lie
Down in Darkness, both of which "symbolize the plight of
human beings in the modern world," on this basis. "Where
Faulkner saw it in historical terms, involving the blood-
guilt of generations, Styron saw it in social terms, an
indictment of modem society" (Writers of the Modem South
{^Seattle, I963J, p. 203).
Z^Lle Down in Darkness (New York, 1951). p. kS» All
subsequent references will be to this edition.
65
Southern tradition and its erosion through weakness stem
ming from the lack of connection between privilege and
responsibility. Having acquired all the usual accoutre
ments of the tradition of a Virginia gentleman without any
effort on his part— University education and legal career,
officer rank during the "Great War," expensive home and
leisurely manner of living— he assumes his role without
commitment, preferring the pleasures and dissipation of the
Country Club to'any possible challenge of his legal career.
Even his vague stirrings of ambition through the years,
like a career in politics— "Nation Hails First Southern
Chief Since Wilson" (p. ^4)— or a prestigious military
position during World War II are merely daydreams, shallow
and romantic extensions of his personal vanity and further
examples of the lack of reality in the Southerner's concept
of life.
War was a young man's job and the young man got all
the glory. But once long ago he had been young and
had owned a uniform with shining bars. Nothing could
ever persuade him that he hadn't liked his authority,
because he had, and he wished he possessed It now.
Not for authority's sake, really, but for romance;
there is something about a soldier, and once he had
worn his pride like a medallion past the pretty young
girls, • . . only that was long ago. (p. 181)
Milton does not perform any essential function in society,
as Robert Gorham Davis points out when he calls Milton "a
dangling man" (like Bellow's Joseph), who fulfills only a
"passive and feminine" social role in which no "strength or
66
meaning abides."^
Milton's wife Helen represents other aspects of the
Southern tradition, namely a fierce pride and self-
righteousness formulated by her father, an Army man, into
a personal code of honor which she has inherited,
"My father was on Pershing's staff during the war.
His own father had been a chaplain and Daddy was very
religious. 'Helen,* he'd say, 'Helen, sweetheart.
We must stand fast with the good. The Army of the
Lord is on the march. We'll lick the Huns and the
devil comes next. Xour daddy knows what's right'—
and go swaggering off in his jodhpurs and riding crop,
and I thought he was just like God. The men loved him.
He put fear of the Lord in them. .They called him
Blood and Jesus Peyton." (p. 114)
Helen, "an amalgam of two corrupt traditions, the Southern
and the military," as Baumbach describes her,^° distorts an
already inflexible code of behavior to suit her own needs
rather than using it as a source of strength to help her
relate to others. Helen, like the woman of Southern tra
dition, is inward looking and selfish, wanting life to be
like "a nice, long, congenial tea party, where everyone
talked a little, danced a little and had polite manners."
Instead, "everyone misbehaved and no one had a good time"
(p. 273).
Stryon represents the Southern tradition as a weak and
2 Styron," in The Creative Present, ed. Nona Balakian and
Charles Simmons (New York, 1963), p. 131
^ Landscape of Nightmare, p. 127.
67
shallow way of life which fails to provide moral strength
for the twentieth century, a view less grounded in history
than John Aldridge's suggested interpretation involving
"Southern blood-gullt" (quoted on page 60), and less chari
table them Louise Gossett's explanation of Southern tradi
tion. She suggests that the Loftises have failed to assim
ilate the true Southern code, "a sense of duty, kindness,
and decency," choosing Instead to act out the "leisure and
ease of planter aristocracy" without assuming "any of the
moral strength of a once orderly society."31 Miss Gossett
does emphasize the contemporaneity of the theme, however,
when she accurately points out that the characters, living
in a contemporary, urban South, have no other values to
sustain them, that "the only ideals and manners available
to this world come from the past."32 Styron dramatizes the
failure of contemporary society as well as of tradition.
In general, then, William Styron, like Wright Morris,
uses the outlines of the tradition to represent symboli
cally what he wishes to say about his contemporary family
and their meaning in our culture. Like Morris, he is am
bivalent about the tradition, regretting its failure to
produce lasting values, showing concern for what is happen-
3^violence in Recent Southern Fiction (Durham, North
Carolina, 1965), p. 122.
32lbld., p. 118.______________________________________
68
ing to America in the present, and suggesting a relation
ship between the two. The connection between these levels
of meaning— family, tradition, and society— is given meta
phorical expression in one passage in the novel, a remark
by a young man in New York City to Peyton Loftis, daughter
of Milton and Helen, who on occasion rises to the defense
of the South. The young man, a New Yorker, challenges her
defense.
I am a student of people* it is symptomatic of that
society from which you emanate that it should produce
the dissolving family* ... .1 know you say symptomatic
not of that society, but of our society, the machine
culture, yet so archetypical is this South with its
cancerous religosity, its exhausting need to put man
ners before morals, to negate all ethos— Call it a
husk of a culture. (p. 363)
Ihab Hassan finds three circles of meaning in the
novel, social, domestic, personal, each exhibiting its own
level of corruption.33 This becomes a useful statement if
some qualifications are made. For one thing, the personal
and domestic levels can hardly be considered separately
since the characters are almost totally defined by their
roles within the family, their personal problems arising
from failures in the family itself, failures of love and
responsibility, of parents toward each other and toward
their daughter Peyton. In a moment of despair, Peyton says
to her father, "Oh, I feel so sorry for us all, If just
33Radical Innocence, p. 126.
69
she'd had a soul and you'd had some guts" (p. 269). The
social level Hassan refers to is the South, the society of
Tidewater Virginia country and the Loftis family's way of
functioning within that society. However, by implication
and by actual reference, the novel includes as well the
larger national scene in its circles of meaning. For exam
ple, each major crisis in Peyton's growing up is placed
against some event taking place nationally. Realigned
then, Hassan's three circles of meaning can perhaps be
stated more accurately as domestic, social (Southern), and
national (or modern America), Out of these three levels
Styron develops a multiple layer of thematic strands as he
explores values that have failed to give meaning to modern
man, among them, tradition, social position, religion,
family relationships. Overlying all of these and unifying
the novel is the fact of death as the final negation,
Peyton's suicide being the last desperate act of a person
whose final attempt to give and receive love has failed.
This abundance of possible themes can best be understood by
relating them to the three circles of meaning, to the fam
ily as a product of a tradition and further as a microcosm
of the entire culture.
Through the setting of Lie Down. Styron reinforces
many of the thematic elements of the novel, the decline and
decay of the old, its replacement by the ugliness of in
70
dustrialism, contrast in social classes. The opening para
graph of the novel establishes immediately the fact that
Port Warwick, Virginia will not be presented as part of a
romanticized South.
Hiding down to Port Warwick from Richmond, the train
begins to pick up speed on the outskirts of the city,
past the tobacco factories with their ever-present haze
of acrid, sweetish dust and past the rows of uniformly
brown clapboard houses which stretch down the hilly
streets for miles, . . . the hundreds of rooftops all
reflecting the pale light of dawn; past the suburban
roads still sluggish and sleepy with early morning
traffic, and rattling swiftly now over the bridge which
separates the last two hills where in the valley below
you can see the James River winding beneath its acid-
green crust of scum out beside the chemical plants and
more rows of clap houses and into the woods beyond.
(p. 9)
Port Warwick is described as a shipbuilding city, busy with
World War II industry, divided into distinct areas which
reflect the characteristics of the inhabitants: the work
ers* district with "clean cheap clusters of plywood cot
tages springing out of the woods like toadstools," giving
way to suburban areas with "the gray anonymous streets and
the supermarket signs" (p. 11); also areas of tawdry enter
tainment like the strip along the asphalt highway "occupied
by decrepit garages and hot-dog stands and the . . • tents
of itinerant palmists" as well as "neurotic women, astray
from God, and the monthly raids of the county sheriff"
(p. 108), or the region down by the ferry, "an atmosphere of
coal dust, seedy cafes, run-down, neon-lit drug stores where
sailors buy condoms and Sanitubes and occasionally ice-____
71
cream cones" (p. 31^)• Characteristically, this region,
close to the railroad tracks, lies adjacent to an area
where Negroes live in cabins lighted only by oil lamps. As
Styron makes clear in his imagery, blight accompanies the
modern industrial society as much as it does an older world
in decay.
The contrast between this description of the city and
the environment in which the Loftises live and play has
symbolic significance. The boundaries of their lives are
narrowly prescribed, both physically and socially, limited
to the kind of home and church and social club that will
insulate them from any intrusions upon their way of life.
Descriptive details suggest this protective environment.
The Country Club, "vaguely Gothic in style, complacent and
splendid" is enclosed in grounds overlooking the river
(p. 70). The Loftis house, "Virginia Colonial in style,"
"substantial" and "elegant," needs only the ivy climbing
the rainspout to "lend a touch of permanence, possibly even
of tradition" (p. 50). As Milton Loftis surveys his home
with its expanse of lawn leading to a private beach, shel-
tered by a border of cedar trees, he feels "secure in his
misty Eden" (p. 55).
The "misty Men" is a flawed paradise, as unreal as
*
the alcoholic haze through which Milton surveys it. The
Loftises are, in a sense, cut off from life and from self-
72
recognition. In their tragedy, Styron dramatizes the death
of the spirit in a society which offers no life-sustaining
values, only evasion and self-delusion. The novel is the
story of the Loftis family's Inevitable drift toward dis
integration and of their painful process of self-discovery
which comes too late to prevent the tragedy of the daugh
ter's suicide.
The structure of the novel creates the process of dis
covery by using the limited present action of the funeral
procession to generate the flashback scenes recalling the
family's history. On one level, the funeral procession is
Helen's and Milton's confrontation with their present real
ity, the fact of Peyton's death growing upon them from
their numbed despair at the railroad station where the
hearse picks up Peyton's body to full recognition some
hours later at her burial in the cemetery of the finality
of her death and the horror of their own lives. At the
same time, the slow procession through town is a journey
into the past, revealing through the sequence of remembered
incidents leading up to Peyton's suicide the pattern of
events which destroy the family.
At the very outer edge, the novel is framed by the
arrival and departure of the train which brings Peyton's
body from New York City, the same train which, during her
life time, had been Peyton's link to the possibilities of a
73
new life in the North. Through the use of an anonymous
passenger on the train viewing the approach to Port Warwick
from the window, Styron brings the reader into the South
and into the specific environment for the story. The de
scriptive images of the train crossing the James River,
"burrowing through the pinewoods," passing through the
“desolation of the marshland" to reach a "slow shuddering
halt at the station dock" on the edge, of the bay (pp. 9-11)
suggest the physical isolation of Port Warwick, a symbol
for the spiritual isolation of its inhabitants.
As the next level of the story takes over, the setting
continues to play an Important role, supplying physical
points of reference for the progress of the procession
through town, but also providing links between the external
and internal levels of the story. For example, a scene
designed to evoke Images of decay or desolation may also be
used to suggest the emotional state of a character. In one
such scene Milton’s mistress Dolly Bonner, as she senses
his despair, feels sudden panic at the thought of losing
him.
He was gazing out of the window with misty pre
occupation. ... A lonely willow tree swept by, and
beyond, following his gaze, she saw half a dozen gas
storage tanks, rusty and enormous, rising up out of
the wasteland like the truncated brown legs of some
awful assembly of giants. They were still far off
but the car was approaching them steadily, and for
some reason the prospect of nearing them . . . filled
her with anxiety and horror. She began to weep a
7^
little, silently in the corner, engulfed in a bleak
gray fog of self-pity? small tears drained slowly
down her cheeks, (p, 69)
Sometimes the links are ironic, a contrast between the
character’s state of mind and his surroundings. Milton,
for example, full of his own misery, does not notice the
peacefulness of one area they pass through, a vista of bay
and river and sea, Milton can only feel that "his deposit
... on all life's happiness had been withdrawn in full and
his heart had shriveled within him like a collapsed bal
loon" (p. 102). The rest of this scene illustrates the way
Styron’s method works. The meadow they pass is the site
for a Negro revival- meeting for which people are already
assembling. The two processions are going in opposite
directions, the Negroes toward the sea for a baptismal
service, the funeral cars toward the cemetery. The Negroes
are singing or chanting their faith, Milton seeking in his
thoughts for some shred of hope.
He was not philosophical, he had never been trained
that way, nor had he ever wanted to be. Emergencies
had been things to get shut of quickly and to forget,
and because in the past he had always been able to
create some gratuitous hope, he had never had to be
lieve in God. But hope. Yess of course. Helen--
she will come back to me. (pp. 102-3)
The scene ends contrapuntally, both in images and in theme.
Salt air blew through the car? from the floor arose
a thousand motes of dust. The gas tanks swept past.
The Negroes reappeared, singing.
75
Happy am I
In my Redeemer!
Oh, Helen, come back to me. (p. 104-)
In addition to the irony, this scene illustrates an
important thematic link between the internal and external
levels of the story, the lack of connections in the charac
ters' lives, a theme which is illustrated on several lev
els. On the most obvious level, there is no real connec
tion between the Negroes and those in the funeral cars who
see the crowd merely as a nuisance around which they must
detour. The Negroes, secure in their faith, represent a
wholeness of spirit not possible for Helen and Milton
Loftis or Dolly Bonner, for whom neither religious faith
nor human love seems possible. These three adults are as
separated from one another as they are from the community
through which they have been riding for nearly three hours.
In summary, then, the funeral procession as a struc
tural device to control the boundaries of the story works
also as a thematic device to present the environment that
controls the lives of the characters. Port Warwick is both
a literal and a metaphorical place, like the family, repre
senting the remnants of tradition in contemporary society
and the resultant loss of moral strength.
Styron uses references to public events to supply the
outer circle of meaning, to relate the nature of the family
76
metaphorically to America as a whole. The major events in
the family's history take place against the backdrop of
national affairs. Milton's and Helen's wedding takes place
at the end of World War I, a family crisis over the two
children at the beginning of the Roosevelt years, Peyton's
birthday party in August 1939 on the eve of war in Europe,
Maudie's death and Peyton's wedding during World War II,
and Peyton's suicide during the bombing of Hiroshima. The
Loftis marriage, born in one war, disintegrates at the end
lit
of another.^ These events, like the scenes along the fu
neral route, provide reference points in the larger back
ground and often act as ironic comments on the affairs of
the family. There is no direct interaction between charac
ters and public life as there is, for example, in a social-
political novel like Gore Vidal's Washington. D.C.. which
also encompasses the Roosevelt years. Rather, in Lie Down,
the family bears the same relationship to society as it
does in Ceremony, that of microcosm to macrocosm, each ex
hibiting the characteristics of the others.
Several of these factors are Illustrated in the first
J David Stevenson finds this significant. He believes
the novel expresses the "mood of a generation, hovering, in
its daily lives, between a drugged conventionality, a face
less and soulless identification with the formalized pleas
ures of a class, and a terror of the meaninglessness of
existence" ("William Styron and the Fiction of the Fifties,’
Critique. Ill l_Summer, i960], p. 48).
77
flashback scene, Hilton’s memory of his wedding during
World War I. Milton privately recognizes the "sham and
fakery" of nearly everything he has attained* his military
rank gained through influence, which "nonetheless sent
through him a fierce adolescent upsurge of exciting arro
gance/' his wedding with the "bright hollow panoply attend
ing such military affairs" (pp. 16-17), above all, the news
that a former acquaintance had been killed overseas, a re
minder to Milton that he was only playing at war. The gulf
that exists between Milton and the realities of war is an
ironic metaphor for his life as the wedding ceremony with
its "sham and fakery" is for a tradition without substance.
The elements for failure are already present in the begin
ning of the marriage, though they do not come into full
operation until Helen’s inheritance provides the final in
gredient in the pattern.
Styron dramatizes the problem of the family through
Helen’s and Milton’s different reactions to the social
facts of their existence and to their personal conflict
arising from psychological needs. Helen’s inflexible moral
code and her concept of the genteel, aristocratic life con
flict with Milton's dissipation and his Country Club way of
life. On the personal level, Helen, whose repressive na
ture prevents her from expressing natural love and affec
tion, demands a pure and unchanging love of the kind that
78
she finds with her defective daughter Maudie, the only re
lationship in which she feels completely fulfilled.
My'first, my dearest. She sat down with the child and
soon contentment began to steal over her like a warm
and loving flame. She felt peaceful and young, very
strong, as if she could go on being a mother forever.
(p. 30)
David Galloway describes Helen as incapable of love "except
in the make-believe, idealistic world of childhood which is
kept alive for her in a demented daughter."35
Milton, on the other hand, with his inability to cope
with any serious problem, can only feel unease and bewil
derment about his crippled and retarded daughter Maudie,
turning instead to his bright and beautiful child Peyton,
appropriating her for his own.
Anyway, he would always remember that moment on the
lawns picking Peyton up with a sudden, almost savage
upwelling of love, pressing her against him as he mur
mured in a voice slightly choked, "Yes, my baby's
beautiful," with wonder and vague embarrassment paying
homage to this beautiful part of him in which life
would continue limitlessly. (p. kS)
Helen, conversely, grows increasingly jealous of the love
between Milton and Peyton, a relationship which she cannot
control and which seems to exclude her. Through the years,
weakness remains pathetic, Helen's incapacity becomes psy
chotic, with Peyton the real victim of both parents.
The episodes which dramatize the family crises reveal
3%*he Absurd Hero in American Fiction (Austin, Texas,
1966), p. 56. ~~~~~~~ _______________
79
these personal conflicts as well as the social patterns of
their lives. Peyton's birthday party, a watershed in fam
ily affairs, displays the manners and values of the society
to which the Loftises belong at the same time as it reveals
the traumatic hostilities that divide the family. The set
ting, a festive formal affair in the Country Club with many
guests both adult and adolescent, belles the deep trouble
of the Loftis family. Styron supplies the further irony of
current affairs as a background.
Now here at the country club in August, 1939— • • •
Peyton had had her sixteenth birthday which, to call
back ancient history, was the day before the war began.
There was talk about a Corridor— and what was that?—
but in Port Warwick, attuned to a mood the papers all
called "festive," thirty thousand people waved flags
and cheered as the nation's largest pleasure ship slid
down the ways, soon to transport well-to-do folks to
Rio and Prance. There was prosperity on that afternoon
in Port Warwick, and on the terrace where they danced a
five-piece band was playing and Negroes in white jackets
hovered in doorways, behind columns, as from any of a
dozen scattered lawn tables one could hear the chilly
laughter of beautiful young girls and the sound of dis
tant, captivating music, (p. 77)
By end end of this day, Peyton has taken her first
drink and been ordered home by her mother, Milton and Dolly
have actually begun their affair, something which Peyton
discovers, and Peyton herself has crystallized as the focal
point of the conflict, both cause and effect in a way,
though the full realization of this comes later. Whatever
their rationalizations, Helen and Milton find in their
daughter something for which they both yearn. Helen's
80
disapprobation of the drinking and flirting, especially
Milton*s and Dolly’s, though ostensibly a moral position,
serves as a cover for yearnings toward the lost promise of
youth, and for a simpler world of her own making. "The
club, the noise, the music, as they always did, filled her
with anxiety." The sounds she hears are "all young, all
happy" (p. 80). As she scolds her daughter for drinking,
she is really thinking something quite different about
Peyton. "She was beautiful, she was young, and these two
things together caused Helen the bitterest anguish" (p. 82).
Helen’s private, unhappy thoughts take her back to the
early, happy years of her marriage when she and Milton
"hadn’t had to grow up to things (p, 31)» or further back
to memories of her father in uniform, "longing . » . to be
surrounded by those strong and constant arms" (p. 82).
Helen’s neurosis forces her further into her rigid moral
istic posture through which she can justify her feelings,
especially to Milton. "I love mg God? . . . you don't have
any God at all" (p. 95)•
Milton too regrets his lost youth and wasted years,
and seeks escape, even renewal of his youth, through his
affair with Dolly, and through his pleasure in his daugh
ter’s youth and beauty. However, on the day of Peyton’s
sixteenth birthday, Milton’s feelings toward her begin to
take on a new dimension. Peyton’s gestures, as she seeks
81
physical comfort from her father, "begin to intrude into
Milton's drunken consciousness as something stronger than
the father-daughter relationship.
"What's the matter, "baby?"
Peyton began to cry. She let her head fall in his
lap. "Mother says I have to go home." . . .
He took a large gulp and stroked her hair before
saying uneasily, "Why, baby?" . . .
. . . She looked as if she might cry again, so he
drew her toward him, feeling her arm against his leg.
He held her close. A damp, morose fog, part dark
ness, part alcohol, part his own bewilderment, drifted
across his vision. He felt that he loved Peyton more
than anything in the world. He kissed her. (p. 84-85)
Peyton, caught between her father's excessive, un
natural love and her mother's obsessive and equally un
natural hatred, must put aside the luxury of innocence as
she begins her own compulsive search for the love and se
curity that she can no longer expect from her family. Her
birthday party and her departure for college mark the point
at which she comes into her full Inheritance, a compound of
weakness and corruption on the one hand and neurotic sick
ness on the other.
The strong psychological basis for the characters*
personal conflicts persists throughout the novel, giving
rise to such interpretations as Jonathan Baumbach's sugges
tion of the Eleotra story (footnote 26). However, social
factors are always present in the scenes as an important
82
part of the characters* lives. Styron is concerned with
the total effect upon people of the lack of meaningful
values, in their personal lives, in their relations with
others, in their social roles. Peyton, vulnerable on the
personal level, is also inevitably a product of the times.
College scenes of football celebrations and fraternity
drinking parties suggest a more frenzied form of Milton's
days at the University a generation earlier, where he was
"a sot even by fraternity standards who drank not only be
cause whisky made him drunk but because, away from his
father, he found the sudden freedom oppressive" (p. 15).
Milton never learns to fill the vacuum of his freedom,
but Peyton feels the emptiness most directly, as the in
evitable progression toward her generation brings a sharp
loss of direction as well as a loss of values. When she
expresses such thoughts to Dick Cartwright, a college boy
friend, she is widening the implication of her own status
to include the entire generation growing up in the war
years.
"Those people back in the Lost Generation. Daddy,
I guess. Anybody who thought about anything at all.
They thought they were lost. They were crazy. They
weren't lost. What they were doing was losing us."
"Us?"
83
•'Yes. They didn't lose themselves, they lost us—
you and me. . . . He lost me and all of his friends
lost their children. I don't know why, but they did.
At least they had a chance to live for a while. But
they didn't care and they lost you, too, and now you're
going off to war and get killed." (p. 235)
There is no mistaking the fact that Styron is drawing
parallels between the family and its traditions and the
whole society, as the repeated references to the War make
clear. For example, after Milton quotes for Dolly one of
his father's cynical comments about departed Southern
glory, Milton can see its parallel to the 19^0's.
"We lost our lovewords. Not the South or the North,
or any of those old things. 'S the U.S.A. We've gone
to pot. It's a stupid war but the next one'll be stu
pider, and then we'll like my father said stand on the
last reef of time and look up into the night and breathe
the stench of the awful enfolding shroud." . . .
"We've lost our lovewords," he went on wildly, "what
are they now? 'I am the Resurrection and the Life.'
What does that mean?"
"Milton!"
"What have I got? I'm perverted, religion's per
verted— look at Helen. Look at how religion's per
verted her. What have we got left? What have I got?
Nothing!" (p. 185-6)
The parallels are meant to be symptomatic rather than
literal, a loss of genuine beliefs and moral direction be
ing the most obvious of the similarities between family and
society.
The outward social forms are retained, however, as
patterns of behavior more than convictions, something char
acteristic of this society, as Styron Illustrates, and
8 ^
perhaps of American society as a whole. Peyton*s wedding
scene dramatizes some of these social patterns and the
difference between form and meaning. The description of
the ceremony itself suggests the irony of the church and
religion as a system of beliefs no longer operable except
as a part of the social pattern.
To most people it really doesn't matter how they are
married, except to Episcopalians, who are often par
tial to the home and always partial to the poetic
quality of their service. The service does have con
siderable poetry in it, and an observer at this wed
ding who happened to be keen on aesthetics would have
been a little awed by Carey's performance. (p. 269)
The minister given to platitudes* "It the wedding
is the symbolic affirmation of a moral order in the
universe" (p. 2^8), or a wedding guest making a comment
she believes is a serious one* "I mean what with war
and all I think people are more and more getting back to
religion" (p. 292), suggest the irrelevance of religion.
The war has even less reality, a few guests in uni
forms , a few others, very young, realizing "there was a war
on and some of them must go away" (p. 260), but otherwise
easily dismissed. Milton "had performed the necessary
miracle with the ration board" (p. 2?6) and Helen had care
fully planned this day as her triumph, her public demon
stration that "Helen Loftis was . . . a successful
mother, • . . that suffering woman who had brought together
the broken family" (p. 27*f).
85
The wedding as a successful social event and as a
symbol for a reunited family— Reverend Carr confides to
Helen, "I felt I was joining those fine children in a union
that was somehow • . . more significant • » . and mean
ingful. ... I'm sure you know what I mean" (p. 272)—
cannot perform its deeper function of healing the family.
In a nightmarish postlude to the wedding, Milton reveals
his lust for Peyton in a drunken embrace, Helen calls
Peyton the unnatural seductress of her father, Peyton
gouges deep scratches in Helen's face before leaving home
once more in despair. Peyton is destined to complete the
family cycle by destroying her own marriage. Like Maggie
in Arthur Miller's After the Fall, Peyton compulsively
tests her husband by demanding unqualified love, a haven of
perfect understanding and forgiveness. Peyton is searching
for something she can never finds innocence and security.
Peyton's long interior monologue on the day of her
suicide has been compared— and rightly so— to Quentin
Compsom's in The Sound and the Fury. Both characters re
count their wanderings and encounters on the day of their
suicide, both carry time pieces which have great symbolic
significance for them, both go through a ritual with their
clothing as if to put everything in order for their death.
Jonathan Baumbach describes Peyton's suicide as a
"ritual ... of purification." By stripping off her
86
clothes, Peyton returns to nature "in the state of Inno
cence in which she came” her way of seeking redemption.36
This is, of course, part of Hassan's interpretation of Lie
Down as a novel of “sin and guilt, guilt and death,” a
theme which he ties directly to the South, to Port Warwick
as "Paradise Lost.”37
Again with this last scene, the problem of interpre
tation arises, owing to the abundance of themes. Similar
elements exist in Lie Down and The Sound and the Fury,
primarily the fact of a family and a tradition in decline,
both of them Southern, and the representation of the end
results of that decline in the despair of young members of
the families. In spite of these and other similarities
existing in this long ending scene, as they do in the novel
as a whole, differences in emphasis and treatment make Lie
Down a different sort of novel from The Sound and the Fury.
Faulkner portrays decadence in his family almost without
relief. Mrs. Gompson, Jason, Candace and her daughter
decline into petulant selfishness or greed or promiscuity
3^Landscape of Nightmare, p. 129.
37«port Warwick, Virginia . • . is a decayed and de
caying paradise, haunted by Illusions of a glorious past.
With the progressive deterioration of its romantic ideals,
the aristocracy of Styron's South falls from innocence into
decay, from decay into guilt, and finally from guilt into
redemption through death" (The Landscape of Nightmare,
p. 123).
87
almost without effort or conscience. Quentin alone carries
the burden of guilt for his family, and his distress
springs from a rather quaint concept of the family honor.
The decline of the Loftises, on the other hand, is
tempered with awareness of guilt and self-doubt on the part
of the characters (Maudie excepted), even Helen when she is
not totally controlled by her madness. The reader senses
also the great despair that grips all the characters, and
perhaps a greater compassion for them expressed by the
author. In spite of similar uses by both authors of in
terior monologues which involve the reader Intimately with
the characters, Faulkner achieves greater ironic distance,
showing us characters from a once proud tradition now taw
dry and pitiable in their present state. Styron seems more
subjective and involved with his characters, presenting
them in spite of their inept and pathetic lives as crea
tures with whom we must all identify to some extent. They
are as much a part of our contemporary society as they are
of the South.
Peyton dies in New York City away from home and fam
ily. John Aldridge contends that the urban North, "the
world of discontinuity^ loneliness, psychoanalysis, nervous
breakdown, . , . the world in which the environment has
88
nothing to do with the self or with feeling or with
life,"^8 is primarily responsible for Peyton's ultimate
breakdown and suicide, thus supporting his interpretation
of Lie Down as a novel strictly of the South. This inter
pretation ignores the complexities and consequent implica
tions Styron provided in the account of Peyton's path to
destruction. Nowhere can Peyton find sufficient moral
strength for her salvation, not with her family or in the
traditional South, nor in her marriage and life in the
urban North. Incapable of moral regeneration, her parents
represent the failure of the past and the consequent debil
ity of the present. Harry as an urban and contemporary
man represents the present and the possibilities for the
future, in himself a sensitive and compassionate man, but
powerless to save Peyton, whose problems are beyond his
understanding•
Styron adds to the three circles of meaning— family,
region, nation— the implication of time— past, present, and
future. Like Wright Morris, he concentrates upon the
present, examining rather more pessimistically than Morris
the nature of contemporary America. Styron's use of the
atom bomb as a symbol, a recurring motif in Peyton's long
interior monologue, completes the pattern of contemporary
38In Search of Heresy, p. 1^8.
89
references and reinforces the pessimism of the novel.
Peyton hears many references to Hiroshima in the course of
her final day's wandering, but probably the most signifi
cant is Harry's comment to her just before he refuses a re
conciliation, not realizing the depths of her private de
spair.
"Do you realize what the world's come to? Do you re
alize that the great American commonwealth just snuffed
out one hundred thousand innocent lives this week? . •
I don't know what good it'll do anyone but me, but I
want to paint and paint and paint because I think that
some agony is upon us. Call me a disillusioned inno
cent, a renegade Bed, or whatever, I want to crush in
my hands all that agony and make beauty come out, be
cause that's all that's left, and 1 don't have much
time— " (p. 377)
Harry's painting, the beauty of which Peyton recognizes,
expresses what he is sayings a portrait of an old man, "an
ancient monk or a rabbi lined and weathered," against a
background of a ruined city, "a landscape dead and forlorn
yet retentive of some glowing, vagrant majesty, and against
it the old man's eyes looked proudly upward, toward God
perhaps, or just the dying sun? (p. 37*0*
Jerry Bryant finds this painting important to the
meaning of the novel. The Jews, like the Negroes, repre
sent man's ability to endure, the message which Harry has
put into his painting. Mr. Bryant believes that the
Negroes are presented in the novel as "counter-points to
the Loftis despair," that their religious belief, "a joy
90
known only to the simple and the pure," represents the re
turn to innocence desired by all the characters, especially
Peyton, and that Styron suggests a stoicism based upon
"innocence, faith, simplicity" as a way to endure the
"miseries of our century."39 Bryant maintains, however,
that Styron*s suggested solution is too easy, "too pat" an
answer for our times.
Not only is such a solution too simple for the prob
lems Styron raises in the lives of his characters, it is
too simple an explanation of the novel's theme. Bryant is
confusing the characters* attitude with the author,*s. The
Loftises may desire a return to a simple, pure life, an
expunging of all their guilt and hatred, but by the end of
the funeral procession, both Milton and Helen realize the
full despair of their situation. Milton's final plea for
reconciliation has the desperation of a drowning man, who
can no longer evade full recognition of his situation.
"Why have I wanted you? he shouted. Because you're
the only thing left! That's why. My God, don't you
see? We're both sick, we need to make each other— " . . •
"Milton," she said over her shoulder, "don't make
a scene." • . •
"Scene* Scene!" Loftis shouted, ... "don't you
see what you're doing! With nothing left! Nothing!
Nothing! Nothing!" (pp. 387-8)
39«The Hopeful Stoicism of William Styron," pp. 5^0-1,
5^3-^*
91
It takes his sudden physical attack upon her "before he
rushes out to shock Helen into full consciousness of her
own loss.
Then Helen steadied herself against Carey, and she
pressed her head next to the wall. "Peyton," she said,
"oh, God, Peyton. My child. Nothing! Nothing!
Nothing! Nothing!" (p. 389)
Neither the simple faith of the Negroes nor the lifeless
rituals of their own church could have supplied the answer
for the Loftis family. Reverend Carr finally realizes him
self that his usual ministrations would no longer do,
For a predicament, overwhelming and hopeless, such as
this one, couldn’t "be helped by piety or prayers,
either; it was the human condition alone that he must
minister to, and by slimsy human means, (p. 105)
Religion, tradition, social values, the conventional sys
tems of belief are all inadequate for what David Stevenson
calls "the flight of coherency in our time."^0
This is Styron*s essential message, pessimistic but
not quite nihilistic. By showing the effect of empty
values in his characters’ lives, he asserts the importance
of more genuine ones. Further, by showing his characters’
struggle for meaningful lives and the agony of their final
recognition, Styron asserts the necessity of a struggle
rather than surrender. This is quite different from the
nihilism of a novel like Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to
^°"William Styron and Fiction of the Fifties," p. ^8.
92
Brooklyn, In which each episode chronicles the lives of
people degraded beyond the point of consciousness.
Lie Down is different from the conventional novel of
manners as well, despite statements and comparisons by some
of the critics. Both Maxwell Geismar and Louise Gossett
find a resemblance to Ellen Glasgow's The Sheltered Life.
Geismar claiming a similarity in tone, "highly civilized,
without histrionics," and in the use of personal relation
ships to "convey the meaning and texture of a society."^1
Miss Gossett finds similarities in subject and theme. Both
authors, she states, chart "a shift in mores," revealing
in their novels "a similar corruption of the strength and
loyalty which Southern families once represented."^2 Ob
viously, the comparison does not go far enough. William
Styron begins with the social level and its lack of moral
strength in order to explore larger values and wider im
plications. Miss Glasgow's characters are restricted to
their social roles in a time of changing social values.
Styron's family carries metaphorical as well as social
meaning, representing a tradition and symbolizing our cul
ture.
in
"Domestic Tragedy in Virginia," p. 12.
l i p
Violence in Recent Southern Fiction, pp. 123-if.
93
The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal; The Failure
of the Yankee Sea-going Tradition
John Cheever, in The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot
Scandal, evokes the Yankee sea-going tradition in order to
extoll its virtues, primarily a relish for life and sense
of individuality, and to present this way of life as a
desirable alternative to life in a modern technological
society. Like Wright Morris and William Styron, John
Cheever shows the tradition and its physical setting (St.
Botolphs, Massachusetts) in decline, not capable of pre
serving this special quality of life in the twentieth cen
tury, and, like the other two authors, he employs a family
that represents the tradition, embodying the major charac
teristics, yet living in the modern world with its very
different circumstances. Cheever*s two novels, published
six years apart, bear some difference in tone, The Wapshot
Chronicle offering a joyous though nostalgic account of the
family in their native environment and in their early ven
tures outside it, The Wapshot Scandal continuing a more
wistful, even somber account of the changing fortunes of
the Wapshots, both in and out of St. Botolphs.
Of the novels already discussed in this chapter,
Wapshot Chronicle and Wapshot Scandal are the least novel-
istic (as Lie Down in Darkness is the most), depending less
upon conventional elements like linear plot development and
9 ^
fully rounded characters than upon other devices which
Cheever uses to construct his modern day fable of New
England village life and to Illustrate its uniqueness.
The episodic structure, the digressions offered as gratu
itous examples of the author's wit, the cameo character
sketches of eccentrics, the fortuitous selection of inci
dents which put his main characters on display, often with
%
more whimsy than realism, are examples of Cheever*s method
which has led some critics to charge the author with lack
of seriousness and the novels with lack of unity. David
Stevenson, for example, calls The Wapshot Chronicle "a
specialty number, an adult entertainment tenuously but
amiably held together by its author's unit.Carlos
Baker maintains that the novel "is held together largely by
spit and wire," that as many virtues as the novel possess-
t i b ,
es, "one of them is not architectonics."
The Wapshot Scandal receives similar criticism.
Cynthia Ozick charges that Cheever, in spite of his
attempts at social criticism in this novel, succeeds only
in being a fantasist, not a satirist, that he "can look at
nothing in society, without drawing a halo around it with
I t ' S
-'"Four Views of Love* New Fiction" (rev. of The
Wapshot Chronicle). The Nation. CLXXXIV (April 13, 195?),
P. 329.
^"Yankee Gallimaufry" (rev. of The Wapshot Chronicle) .
The Saturday Review. XL (March 23. 1957T. p. 1A.
95
his golden crayon.Elizabeth Hardwick also finds
Cheever weak in this regard, the romanticism and sentimen
tality of the novel making his "moral rebuke to the present
world" more an "attitude than an observation."
Some of these charges can be admitted. In these two
episodic novels, Cheever does present his special world and
its inhabitants through a heavy glaze of sentimentality; he
does often ignore plausibility in plot and psychological
motivation in character. Other faults appear as well, if
one must judge the novels only by conventional standards,
as these four critics seem to do. Hather, these two novels
must be accepted on their own terms and be evaluated on
that basis.
The fact that John Cheever wrote The Wapshot Scandal
as a sequel to The Wapshot Chronicle changes the implica
tions of the original story and adds a new significance to
the entire effort. Though the nostalgic charm of Chronicle
still inhabits Scandal, the progression in the two novels
has been toward a gloomier view, as Cheever brings the
second generation of Wapshots into a more direct confron
tation with society outside their native village. The
^"America Aglow" (rev. of The Wapshot Scandal).
Commentary. XXXVTII (July, 196*0“ p'r' 67. '
" T h e Family Way" (rev. of The Wapshot Scandal).
The New York Review of Books. I (February 6, 1964), p. 5,
9 6
combination of the two novels produces an overall pattern
and a purpose by which the novels can be interpreted, an
interpretation which can be stated briefly as follows:
First, Cheever creates his New England world as a
metaphor for the highly personal and individual kind of
life he cherishes, allowing himself great latitude in his
methods of presenting his story, or "romantic fantasy," as
Elizabeth Hardwick calls it,^ in order to make as vivid
as possible the values he wishes to illustrate. Second,
by showing signs of change and decadence in his mythical
world, Cheever calls attention to the erosion of personal
values in our increasingly depersonalized society, a proc
ess which he makes more evident in the second volume. To
summarize briefly, Cheever sets up his fable, examines it
lovingly, and then proceeds to show its disintegration,
using the Wapshot family as the central focus, John
Cheever asks the reader, not only to share his regret for
the passing of this way of life, but also to recognize
values that need to be preserved, no matter how difficult
this may be.
To emphasize the timelessness of these values, Cheever
deliberately creates a slightly make-believe world, free
from the exigencies of the actual world outside St.
^7"The Family Way," p. 5
97
Botolphs. In a letter to Frederick Brucher, John Cheever
makes this comment about The Wapshot Chronicle.
"I have carefully avoided dates In order to give my
characters freedom to pursue their emotional lives
without the interruption of history. . • .A sense of
time that revolves around the sinking of ships and
declaration of war seems to me a sense of time de
based. We live at deeper levels than these and fic
tion should make this clear.
Not until the two Wapshot sons leave home to seek their
fortunes (about one-half the way through the first volume)
do references to actual situations in contemporary America
appear in the work. From then on, the juxtaposition of the
two cultures become part of the pattern of the novel.
Cheever is not above intruding himself into a passage
in order to create atmosphere or extract meaning for the
reader. For example, after a description of St. Botolphs
early in the novel, he adds his own note of nostalgia for
the time and place.
But it was difficult, from the summit of Wapshot
Hill, not to spread over the village the rich, dark
varnish of decorum and quaintness— to do this or to
lament the decadence of a once boisterous port? to
point out that the Great Pissmire was now Alder Vale
and that the Mariner's Jug was now the Grace Louise
Tearoom. There was beauty below them, inarguable and
unique— many fine things built for the contentment of
hardy men— and there was decadence— more ships in
bottles than on the water— but why grieve over this?
Looking back at the village we might put ourselves
into the shoes of a native son (with a wife and family
^8In a letter to Frederick Brucher dated July 15, 1962,
cited by him in "John Cheever and Comedy," Critique. VI
(Spring, 1963)» p. 72.
98
in Cleveland) coming home for some purpose— and swing
ing through the streets in good weather what would it
matter that the blacksmith shop was now an art school?
Our friend from Cleveland might observe, passing
through the square at dusk, that this decline or .
chatoge in spirit had not altered his own humanity.^9
Or, Cheever may invoke a feeling of serenity by placing his
characters in a static scene, like a Currier and Ives print
designed to capture and preserve a way of life. One such
scene shows the Wapshot family together on a typical eve
ning, a picture deliberately idealized.
Spread them out on some unglven summer evening on
the lawn between their house and the banks of the West
River, in the fine hour before dinner. Mrs. Wapshot
is giving Lulu, the cook, a lesson in landscape paint
ing. They have set up their easel a little to the
right of the group. . . . Leander Lhe*1 husbandj is
drinking bourbon and admiring the light,' ... He is
proud of himself, proud of his sons. . • . Coverly is
burning tent moths out of the apple trees. Moses
folds a sail. . . * Cousin Honora Is a redoubtable
old woman in her seventies, dressed all in white. . . .
Her money has saved the family repeatedly from disgrace
or worse and while her home is on the other side of
town she gives this landscape and its cast a proprie
tary look , , .
How orderly, clean and sensible the world seems;
above all how light, as if these were the beginnings
of a world, a chain of mornings. It Is late in the
day, late in the history of this part of the world,
but this lateness does nothing to eclipse their a r d o r .50
Cheever*s use of the cast indicates his intention and
his method, In general. He opens the curtain on his
^9The Wapshot Chronicle (New York, 1957). PP. 17-18.
All subsequent references will be to this edition.
5°The Wapshot Scandal (New York, 1963), pp. 20-21.
All subsequent references will be to this edition.
99
special part of the world and then contrives scenes and
situations for his characters which most effectively dram
atize what he wants to say, deliberately creating a slight
ly make-believe effect in order to make a contrast between
St, Botolphs and the outside world. Cheever draws the
opening curtain upon a bit of Americana, an Independence
Day Parade with floats, both auto and horse powered, show
ing patriotic themes and red, white, and blue bunting, with
fife and drum corps, and a grand marshal, The parade in
troduces the Wapshot family: the two boys, Coverly in his
late adolescence and Moses of college age, who have started
the holiday early by forcing a church window to ring the
bell? their mother, Honora Wapshot, founder of the Woman's
Club, riding in her usual place at the head of the Club's
float,
Cheever describes Mrs. Wapshot as an organizational
woman devoted to civic improvements, whose talents are not
always in line with her husband's view of things.
She was more admired among the ladies than the men and
the essence of her beauty may have been disenchantment
(Leander had deceived her) but she had brought all the
resources of her sex to his infidelity and had been re
warded with such an air of wronged nobility and lumi
nous vision that some of her advocates sighed as she
passed through the square as if they saw in her face a
life passing by. (Chronicle, p. 7)
The boys* father, Leander Wapshot, does not participate in
the parade, preferring instead to fulfill his usual summer
role as captain of the Topaze. a pleasure launch carrying
100
passengers across the hay to an amusement park. Cheever
shows Mr. Wapshot to be a man of many interests but little
practicality.
He had been many things in his life? he had been a
partner in the table-silver company and had legacies
from relations, but nothing much had stuck to his
fingers and three years ago Cousin Honora had arranged
for him to have the captaincy of the Topaze to keep
him out of mischief. The work suited him. The Topaze
seemed to be his creation? she seemed to mirror his
taste for romance and nonsense, his love of the sea
side girls and the long, foolish brine-smelling summer
days. (p. 5)
The other member of the family, Leander's cousin
Honora, holder of the family fortune, is portrayed as a
true eccectric and individualist who cannot be bothered
with mundane tasks like opening her mail or signing offi-
cial papers, or paying bus fares, preferring to send the
bus company an annual check. Her spirit of independence is
strong, especially in regard to the male sex. In her
youth, Honora had tried marriage briefly but had given it
up after eight months, dismissing this part of her life
with the comment, "I was once married to a foreigner and
was greatly disappointed in my expectations" (p. 37).
Cheever also Introduces many minor characters to il
lustrate what he calls the "versatility of life" in St.
Botolphs and intended to show a cross section of the pop
ulation. These background characters include solid and
prosperous citizens like the banker, Theophilus Gates, who
puts on a display of poverty to demonstrate himself as a
101
"poor, gloomy, God-fearing and overworked man"} and farm
ers like the Pluzinskis, unable to speak English, main
taining their farm, "rectilinear and self-contained," with
efficiency and independence. There are eccectrics like
Reba Heaslip, antivivlsectionist, who announces her con
victions on a sign nailed to her door, or "Uncle Peepee
Marshmallow" who runs naked through the gardens and is not
arrested or sent away. As the townspeople would say,
"What could the rest of the world do for him that could not
be done in St. Botolphs?" (p. 21).
Like these sketches of minor characters, the numerous
digressions that appear throughout the novels have no di
rect connection with the story of the Wapshot family, and
are designed to supply part of the background for the kind
of community in which the Wapshots can thrive. Wapshot
Scandal opens with a Christmas Eve scene designed like the
Independence Day parade in Wapshot Chronicle to Introduce
the village, its inhabitants, and its flavor to the reader.
The only Wapshot to appear in this scene is Honora, who
entertains the Christmas carolers with rum and her recital
of "Snowbound" in its entirety. The scene presents more of
the town’s inhabitants, some of whom have secret lives,
like the young church acolyte, who has summer picnics in
the nude, or the Episcopalian minister who performs all his
ministerial functions through an alcoholic haze.
102
This passage Includes static scenes as well, used to
enhance the mood of a snowy Christmas Eve, the pageant of
a family decorating their tree as viewed through the window
by a passer-by, for example, and the description of Honora
Wapshot's house as the carolers approach it.
At the foot of the street was old Honora Wapshot*s
house, where they knew they would get buttered run,
and In the storm the old house, with all its fires
burning, all its chimneys smoking, seemed like a
fine work of man, the kind of homestead some greetlng-
card artist or desperately lonely sailor sweating
out a hangover In a furnished room might have drawn,
brick by brick, room by room, on Christmas Eve.
(Scandal, p. 14)
These extras can be called Cheever*s stage effects,
peripheral to the central drama but supportive of its
themes. The qualities exhibited in St. Botolphs are large
ly those traditionally associated with New England village
life* insularity from the pressures of the outside world,
freedom from conformity, pride and sense of dignity in its
inhabitants, their insistence upon following their own in
clinations. Cheever grounds most of these qualities more
specifically In the Yankee sea-going tradition to which
both the Wapshots and St. Botolphs trace their origins.
Though St* Botolphs bears no visible evidence of its
earliest days as in inland port for the Yankee sailing ves
sels, the author supplies signs of later stages in the
town*s history, like the old churches with their original
bells from 1780 and 1870, the Civil War cannon with its
103
list of war dead, "a reminder of how populous the village
had been in the 1860's" (Chronicle, p. 3). There are other
signs of the town's decline as well. Shipyards in this
once boisterous port have given way to tableware factories,
blacksmith shops, to art schools. There are now "more
ships in bottles than on the water" (p. 17).
The Wapshot's house shares the history of the town as
well as its decadence. Having been started before the
Revolution, the house has grown through haphazard additions
until it seems "not to be a house at all but a random con
struction put forward to answer some need of the sleeping
mind." Conveniences added later, like the primitive water
closet that sometimes function by itself with a "loud roar
of waters" (p. 28), seem ill at ease in the old house, but
the family relics, old furniture and portraits, and old
family journals seem perfectly at home, especially in the
attic, where the collection of relics "spread out at one's
feet like the ruins of a vanished civilization" (p. 11).
With humor and sentimentality, Cheever has created in
St. Botolphs a nostalgic myth of small town New England
life against which to measure the intrusions of the present
world. Frederick Brucher calls it "a ready image for the
mythology of our rural and maritime past ... an ideal
10k
parochial background. "51
The decline that has already set in indicates the
weakening of the maritime tradition through the genera
tions^ a tradition representing an active and challenging
way of life, surviving in the present only in the sailing
of pleasure craft and the selling of nautical souvenirs to
tourists. This decline is graphically portrayed in the
Wapshot family through three generations. Leander*s
grandfather, one of the sea captains, had commanded a
square rigger sailing to Ceylon and beyond, his father,
only a small schooner, Leander himself reduced to ferrying
passengers on a launch owned by a female relative.
The general decline of St. Botolphs is portrayed
largely as a result of the gradual feminizing of the once
vigorous, masculine seaport. Leander ruefully observes the
evidence of decline, some of it taking place during his
lifetime. The only sanctuary left for men is the Niagra
Hose Company, now patronized only by sleepy old men. He
remembers the Horse Guards and the boat club of not so long
ago and recalls in his journal the earlier days when sa
loons like the River House bar sold "good liquor" at ten
cents a drink. "Hard stuff. You got the bottle. Custo
mers poured their own," Native rum was also sold. "No
51"John Cheever and Comedy," p. 7k*
105
cocktails; no mixed drinks served" (p. 100). Above all,
Leander objects to gift shops, and to tearooms and bars,
"where people drank their gin by candlelight, surrounded
sometimes by plows, fish nets, binnacle lights and other
relics of an arduous and orderly way of life of which they
knew nothing" (p. 139)*
Like many things in the novel, Leander*s reaction
serves as an indirect comment on Cheever*s central concern,
the quality of life that needs to be cherished. Leander,
by objecting to the souvenirs and coy imitations of the
maritime profession, is protesting against the distortion
of values. In the way that objects converted from their
original purpose into souvenirs lose their real function,
so too do human beings suffer a loss of vitality when they
are cut off from true sources of life. This is what
Cheever symbolizes in the maritime tradition. At one time.
New England seamen followed a profession that demanded a
complete response from them, both mental and physical, thus
supplying the vital connection between men and their en
vironment. The diminishing of this tradition and the sub
sequent loss of vitality in human lives apparent already in
St. Botolphs becomes more strongly evident when Moses and
Coverly leave St. Botolphs. Symbolically, the farther they
get from their home and their tradition as it is preserved
in their father, the farther they are removed from the
106
source of their strength.
Cheever proposes sexuality as another source of vital
ity, and its denial, particularly by the women, as a dis
tortion of the life force. For this reason, the two sons*
sexual adventures and the struggle between Leander and
Sarah over their sexual prerogatives assume greater impor
tance than the humor of the episodes might suggest. When
David Stevenson, for example, discusses the sexual episodes
in Chronicle, he admits the humor and Cheever*s "wry and
compassionate view of human behavior," but he describes the
novel itself as a "rather aloof look at the fretful anxi
eties and the pleasant rewards of sex."^2
This is certainly a much too limited view of the
author's purposej though Cheever*s zest in the humor of sex
is apparent. Cheever uses the contest between male and fe
male dominance in the family as he does in the village, to
suggest the contest over the preeminence of certain values.
As mirror images of each other, the Wapshot family and St,
Botolphs exhibit the same qualities, the themes merely
suggested in the background of village life finding full
development in the Wapshot family.
Leander*s wife Sarah, feminist and club woman whose
civic improvements range from installing traffic lights to
52,,pour Views of Love," p. 329.
107
planting the community horse-trough with petunias, repre
sents the feminizing, civilizing Influence that works best
by undercutting the vigor of masculine traditions. Sarah's
stubborn insistence upon carrying out her activities takes
place in the family as well as the community. When she de
cides to take a job in a gift shop, Leander's objections do
no good, though he realizes that the fact of having his
wife work raises "the fine points of sexual prerogative."
As a further irony, the ornaments she sells and delights in
as a part of her "natural longing for sensual trivia", are
the nautical souvenirs he despises. What excites Sarah's
"will to live" arouses Leander*s bitterest scorn"
(pp. 138-9).
Leander, in turn, Jealously guards his role as captain
of the Topaze as his way of preserving the tradition of
seamen in his family and of expressing his independence
from his wife and her community role. He is asserting his
own masculine’ role as well as protecting a tradition. The
unevenness of the contest is dramatized in the episodes in
volving the Topaze. When Leander nearly loses the Topaze
to Cousin Honora after a family Incident, he faces both the
capriciousness and the power of prerogative in the feminine
world. As a woman, Honora is too ladylike to listen to the
honest swearing of an indignant man, and, as a matriarch,
she takes advantage of the rights of ownership. There is no
108
way for Leander to fight against such weapons.
As soon as she opened the door he stormed into the hall
and roared, "What in Christ*s name is the meaning of
this?"
"You don't have to be profane," she said. She put
her hands over her ears, "I won't listen to pro
fanity." . . .
"I'm not swearing," he shouted. "I've stopped
swearing."
"She's mine," Honora said, taking her hand down from
her ears. "I can do anything I want with her." . . .
"She's my usefulness, Honora." . . . He was still
shouting. "You gave her to me. I'm used to her.
She's my boat."
"I only loaned her to you."
"Goddamn it, Honora, the members of a family can't
backbite one another like this,"
"I won't listen to swearing," Honora said. Up went
her hands again, (p. 79)
The final loss of the Topaze in a storm represents
the further erosion of a tradition and of masculine author
ity. The town itself seems to conspire in their destruc
tion. Bank loans are made available to Sarah to convert
‘ tiie Topaze into a floating gift shoppe but not to Leander
for making it seaworthy again. The sight of the Topaze on
the day of the opening ceremonies filled with ladies drink
ing tea, the ship that he had guided "through gales and
tempests," makes him feel "ghostly and emasculated"
(P. 203).
109
The wreck of the Topaze quite obviously symbolizes the
end of the Yankee sea-going tradition, a tradition already
emasculated by the encroachments of the twentieth century,
as evidenced by the changes that have taken place in St.
Botolphs. These changes and the loss of the Topaze in one
way represent the physical and external losses that are in
evitable with the passage of time. What Cheever hopes to
extract from his fictional world is the more internal
spirit of the place, which is all that can be resurrected
from the tradition.
Cheever dramatizes this spirit in the story of the two
sons, allowing Leander some success in this area of his re
sponsibility. As male head of the family, Leander*s most
important commission is to pass on the Wapshot tradition to
his sons, who are charged with carrying on the family name,
a project both visionary and practical, since Honora*s will
stipulates that Moses and Coverly must marry and produce
male heirs in order to inherit the family fortune. This
part of the story, with its possibilities for comedy, forms
the central core of the first volume. The gusto with which
Cheever relates the comic episodes, incidents like Moses
Wapshot*s crawling naked over the roof of an ancient house
to reach his fiancee*s bedroom, is part of his celebration
of life, on one level an exuberance for physical and sen
sual pleasures, on a deeper level an appreciation for sex
110
as the most direct expression of the life force itself.
But Cheever proposes not only sexuality but total involve
ment in life with full consciousness of its savor, a phi
losophy which Leander expresses as he thinks about his
sons* inheritance,
Leander would never take his sons aside and speak
to them about the facts of life, even although the
continuation of Honora*s numerous charities depended
upon their virility. ... It was his feeling that
love, death and forniflcation extracted from the rich
green soup of life were no better than half-truths,
and his course of instruction was general. He would
like them to grasp that the unobserved ceremoniousness
of his life was a gesture or sacrament toward the ex
cellence and the continuousness of things. He went
skating on Christmas Day— drunk or sober, ill or well—
feeling that it was his responsibility to the village
to appear on Parson's Pond. . . . The cold bath that
he took each morning was ceremonious— it was sometimes
nothing else since he almost never used soap and got
out of the tub smelling powerfully of the sea salts in
the old sponges that he used. The boat he wore at
dinner, the grace he said at table, the fishing trip
he took each spring, the bourbon he drank at dark and
the flower in his buttonhole were all forms that he
hoped his sons might understand and perhaps copy. He
had taught them to fell a tree, pluck and dress a
chicken, sow, cultivate and harvest, catch a fish,
save money, countersink a nail, make cider with a hand
press, clean a gun, sail a boat, etc. (pp. 53-^)
Though this passage is essentially light-hearted in tone,
in part, a spoof of the New England, frontier tradition,
Cheever intends Leander*s philosophy of life to be accepted
as something worthy of preservation. Frederick Brucher
understands this when he comments on Cheever*s writing,
Ill
It is true that the moral weight of Cheever*s
writing has been on the side of affirmation. But his
celebration of life is not achieved by a facile
ignoring of man’s limitations and dark destiny. On
the contrary, it is his pervading sense of the fragil
ity of li£§ that makes his moments of illumination
possible.53
Cheever*s awareness of the fragility of life and of
the values he cherishes motivates his approach to his sub
ject and explains it, especially the nostalgia which cre
ates a romantic rather than strictly realistic portrait,
and the suggestion of make-believe which allows him to
present possibilities, rather than mere probabilities. As
an illustration, the stories Leander reads in the journals
of his sea-going ancestors are given a legendary cast,
larger-than-life quality in stories of heroic men visiting
exotic places and battling the elements, like the forbear
"who rode spar in Java Sea for three days, kicking at
sharks with bare feet" (p. 9?).
Though the heroic life is no longer possible for the
Wapshots, Cheever does suggest the possibilities for adven
ture in the episodes that take Moses and Coverly through
their initiation into adult life. Both Donald Malcolm and
Maxwell Geismar consider this part of Chronicle picaresque,
Gelsmar Insisting that as a consequence "the two parts
->3"John Cheever and Comedy," p. 68.
112
don't hang together.These episodes do have the qual
ities of the picaresque, but other elements suggest an
interpretation more in line with the qualities of fable or
legend that appear in the novel as a whole. The story of
the boys* initiation and later adventures very loosely
follows the formula of the European fairy tale or legend
in which several brothers in a family, usually three, set
out one by one to seek their fortunes or to prove them
selves worthy of Inheriting the kingdom (or whatever the
reward might be). Usually the bumbling youngest son proves
to be the most enduring. Moses and Coverly Wapshot must go
through several tests before they fulfill the terms of
Honora*s will, and, more importantly, before they can carry
on Leander*s tradition— his appreciation for life in all
its aspects.
The various stages of the testing Moses and Coverly
must go through include enduring a ritual fishing trip in
the wilderness, learning about sex, leaving St. Botolphs
to make their way in the outside world, courting and win
ning the girls of their choice, and producing male sons and
heirs. By the conclusion of all these stages (the end of
volume I), the reader is made aware that Leander's kind of
world, a fabled world by twentieth century standards, is
"End of the Line" (rev. of The Wapshot Chronicle),
New York Times Book Review. LX1I (March'237 195V). p. S.
113
slipping away, and that what he had to pass on to his sons
will have to be zealously guarded to survive at all.
In some of the early tests, those with a sexual cast
and those which take on the nature of a contest between the
feminine and masculine worlds, the Wapshot women offer sub
tle opposition. When Leander decides to take Moses on his
regular spring fishing trip, he is exercising his right to
initiate his older son into the strictly masculine world of
the wilderness. On this occasion Sarah’s objections are
futile, and Leander and Moses make their trip into the
wilds near the Canadian border. Moses has sense enough to
realize that he is undergoing an ordeal and that it has a
meaning. He can see that this wilderness is the other side
of the world from St. Botolphs. Here are the lakes and the
mountains, the old guide, the dirty camp, "the smell of
earthworms and gut, kerosene and burned pancakes, the smell
of unaired blankets, trapped smoke, wet shoes, lye and
strangeness" (p. 56). Back in St, Botolphs are the river
and the valley, the house with fresh flowers in vases,
"furniture with claw feet, . , , the silver on the side
board and the loud ticking of the clock in the hall,"
Moses realizes for the first time "how securely conquered
that country was by his good mother and her kind— the iron
women in their summer dresses" (pp. 56-57)• Here in the
wilds, the absence of women is conspicuous, and Moses can
Ill*
visualize them cleaning up the camp and domesticating the
landscape. Leander and Moses return triumphantly from the
trip with enough fish (the trophy) for all their friends
and relatives. The rites of initiation have been success
fully completed and Leander has won this skirmish against
his wife's world.
When Coverly goes with his father the following year,
he fails the test, not so much by design as by his own
nature. Sarah has not objected openly this time, sabotag
ing the plan Instead, maybe in all innocence, by giving
Coverly a cook book to take into the wilderness. Coverly
senses, after his father throws the book out, that not only
was the cook book a mistake, also "he had profaned the
mysterious rites of virility" (p. 60),
Coverly* s next test is more*, openly sexual in nature.
This time Leander takes Coverly to visit the "cooteh" show
at the fair. Coverly can watch, fascinated, as the naked
girl dances in these "rites of Dionysus," but the sight of
her doing "something very dirty" sends him out of the
tent (p. 63). Once again he knows he has failed, feeling
"that his human responsibilities had been abnormally en
larged by Honora's will" (p. 60). Coverly eventually seeks
his first sexual experience in the obvious way. "Everybody
in the village knew about her and she was a widow" (p. 126),
115
In these early tests, Coverly is the inept younger
son, Moses the true inheritor of his father's nature. He
has discovered sex on his own and loses no opportunities
for affairs. When a young lady is brought to the Wapshot
house after an accident, he woos her directly and with
quick success, not realizing that cousin Honora has been
rummaging in the closet of the guest room on the day that
he wins the young lady's acquiescence. After witnessing
the consummation of the affair from her hiding place in
the closet, Honora is shocked enough to want to punish the
males in her power. John Cheever portrays Honora as a
woman who can value, even display in her own character,
certain masculine virtues like independence of spirit,
pride in family, desire for male heirs, yet she is dis
turbed by overt signs of sexuality as if this is something
4f
she cannot cope with. Honora's temporary decision to sell
the Topaze is her way of punishing Leander for the sexu
ality of all men, perhaps including her husband of so many
years ago. She sensibly compromises by deciding that Moses
should go out into the world "to prove himself," and this
begins the boys' adventures away from St, Botolphs.
Cheever often uses the elements of legend or fable to
underscore the irony of man's situation in the twentieth
century. In this case, both Honora and Leander remember
the Wapshot tradition and realize its impossibility in the
116
modern world, "All the men of the family had taken a
growing-up cruise— Leander* s father included— rounding the
Horn before they shaved, some of them" (p, 88). Honora can
only suggest, as a pale imitation of such a voyage, that
Moses go to "someplace strange and distant," a city like
Washington or New York (p. 86), As William Esty points
out, the Wapshot men have lost their ability to cope with
the world in the traditional manner, to be tested on the
seas, and the two sons "must seek their fortune and their
manhood away from this woman-dominated town."5$
For Moses and Coverly, who runs away to make his own
mark in the world, the only adventures available are those
of being suddenly plunged into the absurdities of govern
ment bureaucracy and cold-war psychosis in Washington, D.C.
or of depersonalized business world in Hew York City, The
two brothers are bound to fall in their first exposure to a
world so different from St, Botolphs. Though Cheever con
tinues to relate episodes with a rollicking good humor, his
irony becomes sharper as he exposes the falsity in the
modern world's methods of judging the worth of an individ
ual.
-^"Out of an Abundant Love of Created Things" (rev. of
The Wapshot Chronicle), Commonweal. LXVT (May 17. 1967).
p. lS7. “
117
True to his own nature, Moses enters Washington and
his government job with confidence, already imagining his
future career in this challenging city, a job "perhaps in
that marble building . , . with a desk, a secretary, a
telephone extension, duties, worries, triumphs and pro
motions" (p. 104). Also true to his own nature, Moses
seeks out sexual adventure, finding it with a bandleader*s
wife, an affair which eventually costs him his job in
security conscious Washington. With his abrupt dismissal,
Moses receives his first lesson in disillusionment.
The anonymity of his discharge gave it oracular pro
portions, as if some tree or stone or voice from a
cave had put the finger on him, and the pain of being
condemned or expelled by a veiled force may have
accounted for his rage. He was far from the green
pastures of common sense. He was angry at what had
been done to him and angry at himself for having
failed to come to reasonable terms with the world.
(p. 184)
Coverly, with his natural diffidence, enters New York
City humbly, "a country boy in the biggest city in the
world" (pp. 104-5)* observing with some trepidation the
fast pace, the noise of the city, the anonymity of people
on the streets. Coverly's first failure comes even before
he gets a job as he fumbles his interview with a personnel
tester. In his naive desire to please the psychologist,
Coverly confesses all the unsavory things he can dredge up
from family affairs and from his own thoughts. John
Cheever presents this sketch in absurd, almost burlesque
118
terms to show that the test and testers are sick rather
than Coverly or his eccentric family.
"Now would you like to tell me about your dreams?"
"I dream about all kinds of things," Coverly said.
"I dream mostly about sailing and traveling and fish
ing but I guess mostly what you*re interested in is
bad dreams, isn't it?"
"What do you mean by bad dreams?"
"Well, I dream I do it with this woman," Coverly
said.
"I never saw this woman in real life. She's one
of those beautiful women you see on calendars in
barbershops. And sometimes," Coverly said, blushing
and hanging his head, "I dream I do it with men.
Once I dreamed I did it with a horse."
"Do you dream in color," the doctor asked.
"I've never noticed," Coverly said.
"Well, I think our time is about up," the doctor
said. (pp. 126-7)
Cheever presents these early experiences as failures
in the depersonalized system rather than in the two young
men, and, though he grants them success in finding new
positions, Moses with a brokerage firm, Coverly as pro
grammer on a missile base, the author suggests a sense of
loss, as their father's world is left farther behind.
Coverly realizes this when he first comes to the city.
119
To create or build some kind of bridge between Leander*s
world and that world where he sought his fortune seemed
to Coverly a piece of work that would take strength and
perseverance. The difference between the sweet-smelling
farmhouse and the room where he lived was absymal. They
seemed to have come from the hand of different creators
and to deny one another, (p. 118)
For both Moses and Coverly, the city is the testing ground
for the survival of their tradition, at least for its
spirit.
The brothers* quest for wives is a more personal,
joyous mission and a spontaneous one in spite of the face
that this is a necessary stage in the fulfilling of their
destiny and Honora*s will. In true story book fashion,
each brother rescues his maiden to make her his bride,
Coverly very modestly, Moses with his usual exuberant man
ner in affairs of the heart, Coverly finds Betsey
MacCaffery working behind the counter in a sandwich shop.
A small town girl from Georgia, lonely and out of place in
the city, she draws him by her helplessness, her lack of
pretensions or sophistication, "Coverly*s feelings about
her helplessness were poetic and absorbing, ... a mixture
of pity and bellicoseness. She was alone and he would de
fend her" (p. 162). He would take care of her, he was the
lover, the pursuer. Coverly need no longer fear that he
might fail in his destined role as a Wapshot man.
The episode relating Moses* courtship of Melissa best
illustrates Cheever*s celebration of life, particularly of
120
a natural and spontaneous sexual relationship between a man
*
and a woman. Cheever removes this scene from the city as
if to find a more congenial atmosphere in which to explore
basic human emotions undiluted by conventional social con
trols, whether sexual passion, tyranny, or jealousy. The
fairy-tale atmosphere given the episode further heightens
the effect and reminds the reader, in Cheever*s terms, that
the "real" world tends to deny the validity of intense and
personal emotions.
Melissa actually does live in a castle on the Hudson
carefully watched by her wicked guardian Justina,, an old
woman "whose distrust of men was even more outspoken than
Cousin Honora*s" (p. 215)• Justina has none of Honora*s
redeeming traits and all of her worst ones, magnified to
the point of tyranny, Honora is often unpredictable with
her money and power, but never malicious. Justina uses
her power relentlessly to control people. When Honora
found marriage not to her liking, she left her husband.
Justina stayed with hers, rendering him Ineffectual as a
husband. She has the same thing in mind for Melissa and
Moses.
"Mr. Scaddon and I slept in separate rooms whenever
this was possible. We always slept in separate beds."
(p. 223)
Moses must overcome a series of obstacles, most of
them devised by Justina, before he can rescue Melissa from
121
the stronghold and take her away to the city. These es
capades form the high point of the author*s comedy in the
novel* Moses* nightly excursions over the roof to
Melissa’s bedroom, Justina*s substitution of hard, narrow
twin beds for Melissa's big soft double bed, Justina*s
giving away all Moses* clothes to a rummage sale, her par
simony with food and liquor. The accidental fire which
destroys the castle comes like a deus ex machina to release
Moses and Melissa from bondage so that they can leave for
their new home.
The boys marry, dutifully produce male heirs, and are
rewarded with Honora’s money. Leander is pleased. His
sons had "gone out in the world and proved themselves and
found wives and would be rich and modest , . . and would
have many sons to carry on their name" (p. 304).
The proper ending for a tale of this sort should in
clude the restoration of the father to his former position?
but Leander*s world is drawing to a close, and this
"chronicle" of the Wapshots ends with his death by drowning,
an incident left deliberately ambiguous. ^ Moses and
Coverly, coming home to buy Leander a boat, arrive instead
56
Frederick Brucher calls Leander a kind of sea-god,
whose "disappearance from earth is mysterious and ceremoni
ous" ("John Cheever and Comedy,"I , Critique [Spring, 1963j»
p. ?6). This interpretation reinforces the legendary
quality of the novel as a whole.
122
for his funeral. Coverly, as he looks once more around the
old Wapshot house, reaches an understanding of what his own
life means.
The old place appeared to he, not a lost way of life
or one to he imitated, hut a vision of life as hearty
and fleeting as laughter and something like the terms
hy which he lived, (p. 306)
John Cheever employs Coverly; the more sensitive of
the two brothers, in the second volume as a conscience
character, using him to point out many of the absurdities
of contemporary society and the contrast between it and
Leander*s world. In The Wapshot Scandal, Cheever places
Moses and Coverly with their families in contemporary
communities as testing grounds for the second generation of
Wapshots. As Cheever moves toward more contemporary sub
ject matter, his tone becomes darker, his humor more often
sardonic, even grim. In a symposium of writers held in
October, i960, a date falling between the publication of
the two Wapshot novels, John Cheever made this rather
strong statement: "Having determined the nightmare symbols
of our existence, the characters have become debased and
life in the United States in i960 is Hell."57 Though The
Wapshot Scandal is neither so harsh nor so direct as this
■^Quoted by Robert Gutwlllig in his account of the
symposium, "Dim Views through the Fog," The New York Times
Book Review (November 13, i960), LXV, p. 68.
123
statement, the indictment of society is present in the
novel. Many of the episodes of this volume are designed to
extract the essential quality of contemporary society, not
to present it in its entirety or to engage in social anal
ysis.
The reviewer for Time Magazine suggests, very approp
riately that Cheever presents three kinds of communities as
images of Americaj St. Botolphs as a colonial village,
suburban Proxmire Manor where Moses and his family live as
a contemporary community, and the Talifer missile base
where Coverly lives with his family as the community of the
future.58 cheever demonstrates that neither of the modern
communities produces genuine community or family life.
In essence, the communities serve as testing grounds
for the second generation of Wapshots, whose inheritance
turns out not to be the kingdom in the legend after all,
but their proportionate share of the modern world. Subur
bia and missile bases are microcosms of the modem world
which everyone has Inherited and which is hard to escape.
St. Botolphs, as a microcosm of an earlier America and its
possibilities and a symbol for the liberation of the human
spirit, hovers reproachfully in the badkground. Coverly in
5B„^he Ghost of Chlcville" (rev. of The Wapshot
Chronicle), Time (January 24, 1964), LXXXIII, p. 68.
12k
particular, as he observes another missile test, or notices
the abandoned farm which forms the site of the missile
base, is haunted by his father's ghost* "Oh, Father,
Father why have you come back?" (Scandal, p. 36), The
natural world seems far away.
Moses is tested in a more conventional setting. In
suburban Proxmire Manor, prosperity is assumed, and Moses
must hide his financial indebtedness. As a matter of sta
tus, wives do not work and as a consequence are driven into
desperate measures to escape ennui, some into adultery,
even lesbianism, a few into neurotic breakdowns. Surface
adherence to a moral code unites the community to ease out
the woman caught in an impropriety, after she has served
her time as an object of gossip. In such an environment
Melissa faces temptation and succumbs to it, entering into
an affair with Emile, a nineteen-year-old grocery boy who
accepts her attention in exchange for the expensive pre
sents she buys him.
This episode presents a contrast to the healthier
sexual adventures of the first volume, and Cheever allows
no easy rationalizations. Emile is typical of his genera
tion, exposed to the cheapening of sex in the popular cul
ture. "The times were venereal, and Emile was a child of
the times" (p. 115)• Melissa condemns herself.
125
She had hoped to be a natural woman, sensual but
unromantic, able to take a lover cheerfully and to
leave him cheerfully when the time came. What had
been revealed to her was the force of guilt and lust
within her own disposition. She had transgressed the
canons of a decorous society and she seemed impaled
on the decorum she despised* (p. 231)
Moses cannot forgive Melissa's infidelity, which strikes at
the very basis of his relationship with her. He ends the
marriage, and with no reserve strength to sustain him, he
escapes into alcohol. Moses is not successful as a con
temporary man.
Cheever does not make the contrast between Proxmire
Manor and St. Botolphs an absolute one. There are secret
affairs in St, Botolphs and drunkenness, loneliness as well,
but the mutual tolerance among its inhabitants and the
stronger personal bonds between people are portrayed as
infinitely preferable to the mask of morality and conform
ity worn by the quietly desperate suburban dwellers.
The Talifer missile base, however, represents the kind
of existence at the opposite pole from St. Botolphs. To
sharpen the contrast, Cheever makes the missile base a
futuristic fantasy world to oppose to the quaint legendary
world of St. Botolphs. Both are deliberately created fan
tasies interlaced with realities and designed as metaphors
for different kinds of human experience, Cheever fills his
future world with images of impersonality and disconnected
ness. It is a non-human rather than an inhuman place.
126
The horizon is lined with silhouettes of gantries for the
launchings of the missiles, with the "mosque-shaped atomic
reactor," and the "two-square-mile computation and admin
istration center" which is actually a blind for the labo
ratories six stories underground. Security demands that
the base have "no public existence" (pp. 32-3)• Coverly is
more than ever haunted by Leander*s ghost as he hears sci
entists debate the consequences and inevitability of nucle
ar warfare, or discuss which of the earth-destroying
weapons could be most economically produced. Coverly asks
himself, "What attitude could he take, what counsel could
he give his son? Had his basic apparatus for judging true
and false become obsolete?" (p. 179).
The rigid .and sterile environment of a missile base
offers little chance for friendship among people who must
live there. An artificial community that stages regular
Saturday afternoon rocket launches as family entertainment,
that separates its residential neighborhoods according to
the hierarchy of the base, providing underground shelters
only to scientists (the highest caste) necessarily pro
scribes social relationships as rigid and unnatural as
other aspects of life on the base. As a character, Cover
ly* s wife Betsey serves effectively to dramatize the per
sonal life of this community as Coverly does its profes
sional life*. Open in nature, completely without guile,
127
Betsey offers her friendship and confidence to everyone in
the style of the small town from which she comes. When her
abortive attempts to gather all her new neighbors together
for a social evening fails completely because she naively
neglects protocol, she cannot accept or understand their
rejection of her.
Her spirit seemed about to break under the cruelty of
the world. She had offered her innocence, her vision
of friendly strangers, to the community and she had
been wickedly spurned. She had not asked them for
money, for help of any kind, she had not asked them
for friendship, she had only asked that they come to
her house, drink her whisky and fill the empty rooms
with the noise of talk for a little time and not one
of them had the kindness to come. (pp. k\~kZ)
Betsey is an unconscious critic of her temporary home,
Coverly a conscious one. He always carries his past with
him, even into the unlikely world of computers and missile
bases. Earlier, when Coverly had returned to St, Botolphs
after his mother's death, he had experienced both a renewal
of his feelings about the place "where he had awakened to
the excellence of life" and a sense of loss at the passing
of time, which he recognized as the "instinctual foolish
ness that leads us to love permanence when there is
none" (p. 27). His next visit to St. Botolphs to see
Cousin Honora before her death is really his farewell to
the visible forms of his tradition.
Honora, always the most indomitable of the Wapshot
clan, is defeated finally by her own stubbornness and spirit
128
v.
of independence. The promise once given to her uncle that
she "wouldn't give any of his money to the govern
ment" (p. 62) brings her inevitably into conflict with the
twentieth century, and to a disgrace she cannot bear to
face. Coverly realizes that she is willing her own death
through liquor and starvation and that she knows it is time
for her to die. It will be up to him to maintain Honora's
real legacy, which is not her fortune, but her spirit.
She would stop breathing and would be buried in the
family lot but the greenness of her image, in his
memory, would not change, ... The goodness and
evil in the old woman were imperishable, (p. 296)
Ultimately, then, John Cheever is saying by the end
of this second Wapshot novel that the world of St. Botolphs
and the Wapshots can exist only in memory, and that its
loss is irreparable. Gerald Weales, as he contrasts the
two novels, takes note of the change in The Wapshot Scandal
toward an emphasis upon death and upon the destructiveness
of the basic human activities that were natural and healthy
in The Wapshot Chronicle. Love has degenerated into
Melissa's lust and Emile's casual exploitation of his body?
personal involvement in one's work has given way to the
depersonalized world of finance or missile bases? death,
the "natural end of man" in the first volume, is the un
healthy, pervasive atmosphere of the second volume. Mr.
Weales contends that the change is unfortunate, that con
129
fusion has entered the form of the novel as it has the
lives of its characters, that without a central image like
that in Chronicle— young men going out into the world to
make their way— The Wapshot Scandal has no unifying force
to sustain it,59
In defense of Mr. Cheever, it is only necessary to re
view the patterns of both novels and to compare them. In
The Wapshot Chronicle. St. Botolphs is nearly always in the
foreground. The episodes in this novel illustrate what Mr.
Weales calls the "natural world” of love, work, and play.^0
The Wapshot boys* odyssey is both a testing and corrobora
tion of this way of life, and Leander*s death at the end of
the novel, the first stage in its decline. In The Wapshot
Scandal. St, Botolphs is less in evidence even though its
presence is felt throughout the novel. Both novels begin
and end in St. Botolphs. The opening chapter of Scandal.
the Christmas Eve scene, recreates St. Botolphs in the way
that the Independence Day scene In Chronicle first intro
duces the village and its inhabitants* Honora*s death at
the end, paralleling Leander*s death in Chronicle, marks
^"Wapshot in the Dark" (rev. of The Wapshot Scandal).
The Reporter. XXX (January 16, 196^), p. 51.
6oIbid.
130
the final decline of the Wapshot tradition.
In contrast to the traditional rites of initiation in
to the adult world of work and love and marriage that take
place in Chronicle, the central episodes of Scandal repre
sent the odyssey of contemporary man, searching for perma
nence and human dignity, which the characters fail to find
in the community life of Proxmire Manor and Talifer or in
the fruitless journeys in search of peace that some of them
take. For example, Melissa ends up in Home as an exile
with Emile, and Moses travels from place to place seeking
numbness in liquor and cheap sexual encounters. Only
Coverly, his family intact, emerges as a character strong
enough to survive in the modem world on his own terms.
Coverly*s thematic importance in Scandal is reinforced
by the pattern of the episodes; his appearance in separate
incidents with Honora and Moses and in the St. Botolphs
scenes at the beginning and end of the novel serves to link
all the episodes dealing with the Wapshot family and to re
late them to the first volume. Admittedly, the relation
ship between the St. Botolphs chapters and the other epi
sodes is more tenuous in Scandal than in Chronicle, but it
does exist through Coverly, for whom the concept of the
Wapshot tradition remains in memory even as it fades from
actual existence. The tradition of St. Botolphs and its
embodiment in the Wapshot family provides the actual
131
unifying element of the two novels, both separately and to
gether, existing as a metaphor for a way of life. The
village of St. Botolphs is home base to which the charac
ters return for emotional sustenance, either in person or
in memory. The farther they get from home base, the less
emotionally satisfying their lives become. The St.
Botolphs way of life, already more legend than reality in
The Wapshot Chronicle, becomes even more elusive in The
Wapshot Scandal, a ghost haunting the present.
This is not the method of a social analyst like J, P.
Marquand, to whom John Cheever has been compared.^ In the
decline of the Wapshot family, Cheever is not charting the
conflict between social classes and changing social insti
tution, but rather the decline in spirit, in the ability of
man in the modern world to experience beauty and freedom in
in his life. The Wapshot tradition provides an inner
spirit more than an outward social pattern. George Apley
is quite a different fictional character from Leander
Wapshot.
At
oxFrederick Brucher contrasts the two authors in rela
tion to The Wapshot Chronicle ("John Cheever and Comedy,")
and William Barrett in connection with The Wapshot Scandal
("New England Gothic" [jrev. The WapshotScandal] , The
Atlantic Monthly. February, 1962TTT Both Hr. Brucher and
Hr. Barrett concede that John Cheever is not writing as a
social analyst, that he goes beyond realism into the legen
dary (Brucher) or the fantastic (Barrett).
CHAPTER TWO
THE FAILURE OF RELIGIOUS MYTH
Go Tell It on the Mountain: The Need for a Sustaining Myth
Wright Morris, William Styron, and John Cheever have
all attempted to capture something essential in the
American character by using traditions which have played a
large part in our history. By transmuting these cultural
myths into literary metaphors, these authors have sought to
reveal the myths by which Americans have explained them
selves and to explore, through representative families, the
effects of these myths upon the quality of life in con
temporary America. James Baldwin has necessarily created
a different kind of metaphor to represent the ethnic tra
dition of which he writes in Go Tell It on the Mountain.
In essence, the myth is a religious one, a combination of
Old and New Testament theology which his Negro family have
adopted as a means of accepting the historical conditions
of their existence. By thinking of themselves as a chosen
people living in bondage who will find deliverance through
salvation, the Grimes family have found a sustaining myth
by which to live. Baldwin has chosen in the Grimes family
132
133
living in Harlem in the 1930*s the last generation of
Negroes for whom this myth would, be operable to any great
degree, and in whom all the traditional elements in the
history of the Negro are still possible as actual facts*
their roots in the South and in slavery, their part in the
Great Migration,3' their life in Harlem and the store-front
church. This fusion of history and religion produces the
tradition which forms the basis for Go Tell It on the
Mountain,
James Baldwin, in an essay discussing the failure of
literature to deal adequately with the American Negro, ob
jects strongly to the Negro protest novel which tends to
isolate the character as a stereotype, to cut him off from
the "depth of involvement" with others, Mr, Baldwin ex
plains the effect of this kind of literature.
It is this climate, common to most Negro protest nov
els, which has led us all to believe that in Negro life
there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no
possibility of ritual or intercourse, such as may, for
example, sustain the Jew even after he has left his
father's house. But the fact is not that the Negro
has no tradition but that there has as yet arrived no
sensibility sufficiently profound and tough to make
this tradition articulate. For a tradition expresses,
after all, nothing more than the long and painful ex
perience of a people? it comes out of the battled
Arnold Rose in The Negro in America (New York, 19^8)
discusses the Great Migration during World War I and its
effect on Negroes.
13^
waged, to maintain their integrity or, to put it more
simply, out of their struggle to survive.2
Go Tell It on the Mountain is James Baldwin*s attempt to
articulate a tradition that has shaped the lives of many
American Negroes, including his own. Albert Murray, how
ever, believes that Baldwin fails in his writing to come
to terms with Negro tradition, that presenting the "mate
rial plight" of Harlem is not really showing life in Harlem
at all. Baldwin, Mr* Murray contends, is guilty of the
same excesses of which he accuses Richard Wright and
Harriett Beecher Stowes
For, in spite of what he [Baldwin} once declared about
raging near-paranoic novels of oppression actually re
inforcing the principles which activate the conditions
they decry, he himself has found it expedient to degrade
U.S. Negro life to the level of the subhuman in the very
process of pleading his humanity— something he once said
one had only to accept13
To refute these statements, it is necessary to refer
to another of Baldwin’s essays in which he summarizes his
objections to the protest novel.
O
"Many Thousands Gone," Notes of a Native Son (New
York, 1955)» PP- 35-6. This essay first appeared in
Partisan Review. November— December, 1951, before the pub
lication of Go Tell It on the Mountain.
^"Something Different, Something More," in Anger, and
Beyond. ed. Herbert Hill (New York, 1966), pp. llS-9.
135
The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejec
tion of life, the human being, the denial of his
beauty, dread, power, in its Insistence that it is
his categorization alone which is real and which
cannot be transcended.4 .
In spite of Mr. Murray’s charges, the situation described
by Baldwin does not obtain in Go Tell It on the Mountain.
The poverty which envelopes the Grimes family as well as
the distant but ominous reality of white oppression are the
given facts of their existence, conditions which explain
the characters and which the characters in turn have to ex
plain in terms which will not deny their humanity. This
forms the rationale of their religious tradition, the bur
den of which is to transcend the categorization imposed up
on them. Par from being Instruments of the author’s propa
ganda, the characters develop complex lives of their own,
with motives both personal and racial for following their
religious tradition.
It is James Baldwin’s moral earnestness which accounts
for critical opinions like Albert Murray's, who adds to his
initial charge by saying that Baldwin fails to capture the
"high style" of Harlem, its "cultural flexibility," its
"fantastically knowing satire.?5 Anthony West, too, would
like Go Tell It on the Mountain to be a different kind of
^"Everybody's Protest Hovel," Notes of a Native Son.
p. 23. ~
5"Something Different, Something More." p. 119._______
136
novel than it is, charging rather bluntly that the lack of
humor in the novel robs it of potentially greater signifi
cance, that "its perfections are wooden and it is without
vitality in spite of its realism."0 Mr. West makes a com
parison to Balph Ellison*s The Invisible Man. a novel that
West finds "rich in comic invention" of the kind which any
serious novelist must employ to give "a rounded picture of
the business of being a man." To illustrate, Mr. West
suggests that Gabriel Grimes, "Baldwin’s God-intoxicated
lecher," be treated farcially in the manner of some of
Ellison’s characters, the Reverend B. P. Rinehart, for
example, who practices a grotesque kind of religion called
Spiritual Technology, an obvious subject for farce. Mr.
West’s suggestion for the treatment of characters finds its
justification in his assumptions about the religious basis
of Go Tell It on the Mountain. He describes the church as
"one of those enthusiastic and declamatory Bible-thumping
tabernacles characteristic of religiosity in decay," and
the novel itself as "an extraordinarily vivid picture of
the intellectual seediness and poverty of this kind of re
ligion. "7
"Sorry Lives" (rev. of Go Tell It on the Mountain).
The New Yorker. XXIX (June 20;"T£337". p” 93.
7Ibid.
137
There are several matters to consider in this very
limited view of Go Tell It on the Mountain, not merely to
refute Mr. West, but to establish the kind of novel James
Baldwin is writing in order to measure his achievement.
That Baldwin chooses to write a serious rather than a comic
novel hardly needs defending. He is creating a metaphor
which represents symbolically the Negro's relationship to
America, a relationship which he explores in a serious con
text. Mr. West's assessment of the theme is even more
shortsighted, his dismissal of the meaning of religion in
dicating his superficial understanding of the novel.
Baldwin is not writing to expose the "Intellectual seedi-
ness and poverty of the religion," as Mr. West suggests, or
to portray Gabriel Grimes, head of the family, merely as a
"compulsive lecher." The church, whatever its quality, is
the central core of the characters* lives, for Gabriel
Grimes, the only justification for the bitterness of his
life. It is, moreover, a means of self-definition, not only
for the individual and the family, but for the Negro race.
This is Baldwin's essential thesis which governs the form
of the novel as well as its tone.
The comparison to Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man
helps to demonstrate the nature of Baldwin's Go Tell It on
the Mountain and its method of working. Ellison, by
adopting the form of the picaresque novel with a single
138
protagonist, allows himself great latitude, combining real
ism and surrealism, comedy and pathos, viewing everything
from an ironic stance. Using Invisibility as the control
ling metaphor for the black man's position in America,
Ellison puts his hero through a series of adventures, each
requiring a different kind of role-playing for the black
man, as a way of exploring black-white reality and illusion
in all its various guises*
Go Tell It on the Mountain, on the other hand, is more
firmly anchored in realism and more closely restricted to
a single metaphorical treatment, primarily that imposed
through a religious myth. The Grimes family, a representa-
J
tion in miniature of the Negro race in America, embodies
all the elements of the myth, the contradictions of their
situation reflected in the paradoxes of their religious
belief. The oppressed black race parallels the Israelites
in bondage, each a chosen race with visions of the promised
land. Salvation for the Negroes, however, comes from a
denial of the flesh, rejection of sin and darkness, through
theological imagery which seems to reaffirm their unworthi
ness. "Wash me • . . and I shall be whiter, whiter than
snow."® The Grimes family exemplifies the myth in personal
terms. Gabriel, part time preacher, envisions himself as
®• • Everybody's Protest Novel," p. 21.
139
the spiritual head of his family as well as a prophet for
his race. As one of God*s annointed, he suffers bitter
disappointment when God’s promise is fulfilled through the
conversion of his stepson John, in Gabriel’s eyes the
usurper of his real son’s place. "Only the son of the
bondwoman stood where the rightful heir should stand.
Richard Bone suggests that this Biblical allusion
carries the full implication of the entire reference, the
casting out of Abraham’s bastard son Ishmael in favor of
his real son Isaac as a parallel for Gabriel’s relation
ship to his son and his stepson.-*-0 James Baldwin has
called himself, as a Negro, "a kind of bastard of the
West, a metaphor which he reinforces with another, the
concept of being a "stranger." With no real roots in
Western culture, cut off from any usable African past, he
feels alienated in his own country, in the words of the
Negro spiritual, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless
12
child." These concepts, along with Biblical and spiritual
allusions, are incorporated into Go Tell It on the Mountain
^Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York. 1953), p. 1^9.
All subsequent references will be to this edition.
10The Negro Novel in America (New Haven, 1965), p. 222.
11hAutobiographical Notes," Notes of a Native Son, p. 6,
12"Encounter on the Seine," Notes of a Native Son,
p. 122.
140
to become part of the controlling metaphor, the religious
myth, which lies at the novel’s center.
By structuring the novel on the framework of the
prayer meeting, Baldwin enhances the basic metaphor and
emphasizes the centrality of religion. The trip between
the Grimes’s actual home and their spiritual home in The
Temple of the Fire Baptized is short, but beset by all the
dangers of Harlem, as it seems to the boy John when they
pass the "sinners along the avenue,” The church at the
end of the walk is the haven, the security against such a
fate, a place where ordinary people are transformed into
"Saints".
They sang with all the strength that was in themi
and clapped their hands for joy. There had never been
a time when John had not sat watching the saints re
joice with terror in his heart, and wonder. Their
singing caused him to believe in the presence of the
Lord; indeed, it was no longer a question of belief,
because they made that presence real. , , , Some
thing happened to their faces and their voices, the
rhythm of their bodies and to the air they breathed;
it was as though wherever they might be became the
upper room, and the Holy Ghost were riding on the
air. (Go Tell It on the Mountain, pp, 8-9)
The prayer meeting itself, through the "prayers” of the
three adults, reconstructs the history which forms John’s
inheritance and which he implicitly accepts with his con
version at the end of the meeting.
The prayer meeting, as an examination of the charac
ters* lives, brings together the personal and racial facts
141
of their history and the infusion of religion into every
part of their lives, even when individually some of them
seem to be fleeing from religious commitment. Each
"prayer," Gabriel's, his sister Florence's, and his wife
Elizabeth's, is the story of the individual's search for
freedom, of his attempts to escape his own history only to
be pulled back again by its inevitability. The prayer
meeting represents the completion of the circle, a return
to acceptance of the realities of existence, transmuted,
however, through the religious tradition which promises
freedom but imposes restrictions. For the adults, the
cycle of their lives has been a personal as well as a ra
cial struggle, and each brings to the church meeting the
quality of his own bitterness or acceptance, all of which
reflects upon the fourteen-year-old John, John's mother
Elizabeth and his Aunt Forence will guard his new life, his
"deliverance," while his stepfather will secretly nourish
his bitterness that his own son Roy has not been on the
"threshing floor."
Of all the characters, Gabriel Grimes most fully em
bodies the tradition portrayed in the novel as it repre
sents the Negro's relationship to America, a fusion of
history and religious myth. For Gabriel and his sister
Florence, the essential fact of their lives has been the
attempt to escape their inheritance. Children of a woman
142
born in slavery and further imprisoned by the poverty and
psychology of the South, Gabriel and Plorence in their
early lives take separate steps away from their mother's
passive and pious existence, Gabriel through sex and
liquor, Plorence through her determination to leave the
South and to better herself. The "Great Migration" repre
sented to this and the following generation the myth of the
Promised Land, a promise which Plorence follows in 1900 and
Gabriel nearly twenty years later. Their eventual return
to religion indicates the fraudulent promise of the North
and the need of a sustaining myth by which to live.
In both the conscious and unconscious choices Gabriel
makes in his life, he reenacts some phase of the Negro tra
dition, Through his youthful dissipation, he finds escape
from the role imposed upon the Southern Negro and at the
same time he acts out the degradation of that role as if to
confirm his self-loathing. He thinks of himself in images
which suggest dirt and darkness and enslavement, ideas
common to all fundamentalist Christian sects, but poig
nantly vivid to Negroes whose concept of themselves has
been tainted by the white man's definition of their race,
Gabriel thinks of his condition as one of "blind, and
doomed, and stinking corruption," of his sinful ways as
constituting a burden "heavier than the heaviest mountain?"
he fears going to his death "unwashed, unforglven," and
143
longs to be released from "the cruelty of his
chains" (pp. 118, 121). His sermons, after his conversion,
carry similar images, often Biblical allusions, offered as
exhortations to his congregation* "I am undone? because I
am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a
people of unclean lips" (p. 131)* "He which is filthy, let
him be filthy still" (p. 181).
Underlying these images runs the symbol of the Negro
race as a "bastard people." When Gabriel goes out "into
the field" to preach* he sees his people wandering far from
God in their sinfulness, but more than that, he sees the
white man’s oppression driving the black people into degra
dation.
There seemed no door, anywhere, behind which blood did
not call out, unceasingly for blood; no woman . . .
who had not seen her father, her brother, her lover,
or her son cut down without mercy? who had not seen
her sister become part of the white man’s great whore
house, who had not, all too narrowly, escaped that
house herself? no man; • . . who had not been made to
bend his head and drink white men’s muddy water; no
man whose manhood had not been, at the root, sickened,
whose loins had not been dishonored, whose seed had
• not been scattered into oblivion and worse than oblivion,
into living shame and rage, and into endless battle.
Yes, their parts were all cut off, they were dishonored,
their very names were nothing more than dust blown dis
dainfully across the field of time— to fall where, to
blossom where, bringing forth what fruit hereafter,
where?— their very names were not their own. Behind
them was the darkness, nothing but the darkness, and
all around them destruction, and before them nothing
but the fire— a bastard people, far from God, singing
and crying in the wilderness. (pp. 182-3)
1 £| 4
Sinfulness and racial oppression are indissolubly linked,
as are their opposites, salvation and escape from the black
man's fate, above all, legitimacy as a people— the opposite
of bastardy. This is the driving force in Gabriel's life,
the reason for his conversion.
For he desired in his soul . . . all the glories
that his mother prayed he should find. Yes, he wanted
power— he wanted to know himself to be the Lord's
annointed, His well-beloved, and worthy, nearly, of
that snow-white dove which had been sent down from
Heaven to testify that Jesus was the Son of God. He
wanted to be master, to speak with that authority
which could only come from God. (p. 120)
Gabriel superimposes his personal needs upon the con
cepts of the church to produce a rather compulsive view of
his new role. The Christian concept of spiritual rebirth
carries special value, even secular meaning, for Gabriel as
it does for the other characters. Gabriel sees his conver
sion at the age of twenty-one as "the beginning of his life
as a man" (p. 125), a sinner raised by God out of the
"dungeon" of his former existence when he was "wrapped in
darkness" (p. 118). When he begins his preaching, he prays
to God to work mightily through him to show men that he was
not a mere boy but truly the "Lord's annointed." Gabriel
wants validity not only as a man but also as a leader.
All Gabriel's needs, personal, religious, racial, con
verge in his consuming desire to perpetuate his line, to
have a "royal" son. One of his texts suggests the religious
145
motivation for his desire. "And if ye be Christ’s, then
ye are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the
promise" (p. 135)• In a complete renunciation of his form
er life, when he wasted himself with harlots, "having
spent his holy seed in a forbidden darkness where it could
only die" (p. 121), Gabriel conceives of himself as a link
in the holy line, the line of the faithful, the chosen peo
ple. He believes his marriage to Deborah, a drab and sex
less woman once raped by white men, to be a holy one,
sanctified by her devotion to the church and by his desire
to release her from dishonor. When Gabriel falls into sin
again, his vision of himself demands that he refuse to
acknowledge his illegitimate son, "It was in the womb of
Esther, who was no better than a harlot, that the seed of
the prophet would be nourished" (p. 1?1). In spite of his
mental turmoil, he holds fast to his vision, "He would
not go back into Egypt-for friend, or love, or bastard
son. . . . One day God would give him a sign, and the
darkness would be all finished" (pp. 183-4). In Gabriel’s
rigid theology, he must rid himself of sin by rejecting
the fruits of the sinful act, a process which brings him
bitterness throughout his life. When his legitimate son
Roy rejects the church and curses him, Gabriel can inter
pret it by his light in only one way, as the failure of
Roy’s mother Elizabeth to repent truly for her bastard son
146
John.
As a character, Gabriel has been variously analyzed by
critics, each one interpreting him through a special em
phasis. George Kent believes the key to Gabriel's charac
ter to lie in the sexually repressive Christianity that
Gabriel adopts. Gabriel's marriage to the sexless Deborah
and later to the fallen Elizabeth represent his "flight
from dealing with his humanity," Mr. Kent says, "since sex,
for Baldwin, is obviously a metaphor for the act of break
ing one's isolation and, properly experienced, responsibly
entering into the complexity of another human being.
For Colin Mac Innes, Gabriel is a King Lear without en
lightenment, a puritan guilty of a spiritual pride so great
that "his hatred for any of God's creatures who do not bow
before him is vengefully malevolent."^ Richard Bone's
analysis is more complex, recognizing the racial basis for
Gabriel's religion. As Mr. Bone points out, Gabriel adopts
the psychological mechanisms of the white man, who purifies
himself by projecting his sins upon a scapegoat, usually
the black man. Gabriel rejects his own "blackness" by re
jecting his bastard stepson, who is not really his,
• ^ " B a l d w i n and the Problem of Being," CLA Journal. VII
(March, 196^), p. 206,
^"Dark Angels the Writing of James Baldwin,"
Encounter. XXI (August, 1963), p. 2^.
l b?
conversely elevating himself into one of God’s elect. As
Mr. Bone comments* "Prom self-hatred flows not only self-
righteousness but self-glorification as well."^5
All these elements exist as part of Gabriel’s charac
ter, but the explanations need to be deepened in order to
encompass the total complexity of his significance in the
novel. First of all, Gabriel accepts without question the
theology of the religion he was brought up in, believing
in his mother’s faith even as he fought against it in the
days before his conversion. His personal agony at his
first son's unreclaimed life and death in a barroom fight
is intensified by his firm belief that Royal died in sin
and is literally damned according to God’s justice. Simi
larly, whatever his personal motives, Gabriel actually
fears for the soul of his son Roy, and tries "to put him
self between the living son and the darkness that waited
to devour him" (p. 1*4-9).
This kind of religious belief, which operates for all
the characters, gives the abstract concepts of Christianity
concrete and practical form in the need to avoid sins of
the flesh which corrupt the individual or destroy the sanc
tity of the home. Additionally, through its promise of
eternal salvation for a chosen people, the church offers
^ The Negro Novel in America, p. 22*4-.
148
ultimate justice almost In direct proportion to suffering
here on earth (for Gabriel Grimes an Indirect method of
gaining revenge upon the white world). Given the alter
natives, either in the South or In Harlem, life in the
church offers the better choice, one which all the charac
ters except Hoy have made.
The more subtle aspects of religion and its bearing
upon the characters' lives lie in the contradictory, almost
perverse way in which it offers them psychological support.
Oppressive in its demands, the church ritualizes the
oppression which pervades their daily lives, though unlike
their outside existence, the church confers a sense of dig
nity upon those who voluntarily submit to this harsh disci
pline. For Gabriel, this is a highly personal matter.
For God had promised him this so many years ago, and
he had lived only for this— forsaking the world and
its pleasures, and the joys of his own life, he had
tarried all these bitter years to see the promise of
the Lord fulfilled, (p. 151)
Similarly, the ritual and language of the church offer
ambivalent support for a rejected race. By adopting the
church's imagery of purification, the characters must sym
bolically reject their own blackness to be washed "whiter
than snow." Characteristically, the women of the congrega
tion dress all in white as if to anticipate joining the
white-robed angels of heaven. To be saved, sinners must
pass through the "powers of darkness" into the "glory of
11*9
the light." The darkness which they must escape is partly
their own flesh, the body and its sins which must be re
jected. Gabriel, when he decides to marry Deborah, does
so in part to deny his lust and save his soul. "A baser
fire stirred In him also, rousing a slumbering fear, and
he remembered, . . . 'It is better to marry than to
burn*" (p. 1^2).
Yet, the process of purification and the ritual of the
church often involve intense, even sensual physical exper
ience, as if the body must parallel the struggle of the
soul to become liberated. Elisha, the young man whom John
admires, dances in religious ecstasy, the members of the
congregation supporting him with their own rhythm and music
until Elisha drops moaning to the floor.
The tarry service moved from its first stage of steady
murmuring, broken by moans and now and again an iso
lated cry, into that stage of tears and groaning, of
calling aloud and singing, which was like the labor of
a woman about to be delivered of her child. On this
threshing-floor the child was the soul that struggled
to the light, and it was the church that was in labor,
that did not cease to push and pull, calling on the
name of Jesus, (p. 148)
Elisha, possessed by the "Power of God," has danced "before
his King," something which Gabriel had prophetically sug
gested for John when he first met Elizabeth and her infant
son.
150
"Got a man In the Bible, son, who liked music, too.
He used to play on his harp before the king, and he
got to dancing one day before the Lord. You reckon
you going to dance for the Lord one of these days?"
(p. 2^9)
Symbolically a spiritual rebirth, the physical exper
ience, whether a dance like Elisha's or the kind of seizure
that John undergoes, is also interpreted as a journey, a
prominent symbol in the religion of a race who identify
themselves with the Jews wandering in search of the prom
ised land. The congregation prays and sings Elisha
"through" his struggle in spirituals that express these
aspirations.
"I want to go through, Lord,
I want to go through.
Take me through, Lord,
Take me through." (p. 14-8)
"Lord» I'm traveling, Lord,
I got on my traveling shoes." (p. 192)
When John lies on the threshing floor, he recalls Biblical
passages that seem to reproduce the history of his own
race.
Thrice was I beaten with rods, once I was stoned,
thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I
have been in the deep. . . .
"In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in
perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen,
in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in
perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in
perils among false brethren." (p. 2?4)
151
He too is taken through his ordeal with the help of spirit
uals from the congregation.
"Lord, I ain*t
No stranger now!"
“Lord, I been introduced
To the Father and the Son,
And I ain't
No stranger now!" (p. 280)
Salvation, presented symbolically in the spirituals as
the end of a journey, must be accepted on faith, a promise
to be redeemed in the life to come; but in a practical
sense the church offers its members a social home and an
identity in this world, second in importance only to their
own home, since the entire family is involved. A link be
tween a former life in the South and a new life in the
urban North, the storefront church provides the comfort of
the familiar, and shelter, for a time, from the other
Harlem. For Gabriel, who continues his profession in the
North, the Temple of the Fire Baptized offers a part time
pulpit and small duties as deacon, a necessary identity for
him.
These are the elements then, both actual and symbolic,
that comprise the myth and tradition by which the Grimes
family lives. For Gabriel, adopting the myth has brought
only bitterness, but psychologically, he had no other
choice. He fails to achieve self-recognition, as the
152
critics point out, tut the essential fact is that self
recognition would destroy him by destroying the meaning he
has given his life. To deny bastardy is to rid himself of
the stigma of rejection? to maintain his unyielding view of
himself is to assume a legitimacy which the outside world
withholds from him. The small world inhabited by Gabriel
Grimes and his family has to be created out of the larger
world and protected as a more viable existence than the one
usually assigned to Negroes by the white society, Gabriel,
according to his nature, has drawn heavily upon the myth in
such a way as to preclude self-enlightenment, but other
family members as well have been pulled back into the tra
dition after futile attempts to escape.
Florence's path has been a secular one, beginning with
her decision as a young woman to create her own destiny
apart from her mother's tradition and away from the South,
a decision that ultimately brings only bitterness. By
leaving her dying mother to go North, Florence disavows her
entire life up to that point? her mother's religion and
values, subservience to the male; domestic drudgery as her
proper role, concubinage to the white Mmaster." Her hatred
for her brother Gabriel actually represents hatred of her
life of blackness and the obstacles she faces in the South,
knowing that, to her mother, only Gabriel's future mattered,
"to which, since Gabriel was a manchild, all else must be
153
sacrificed” (p. 89). Florence especially hates her broth
er's dissolute behavior, a confirmation to her of the life
of a ”common nigger" and of men's baser desires, which she
resists.
Florence is, in essence, denying anything which re
lates to her blackness, a complex which sends her to the
North and which eventually destroys her marriage. The
middle-class standards she tries to impose upon her husband
actually represent white standards* her "Uplift meet
ings . • . about the future and duties of the Negro race"
(p. 103)» her scorn for her husband's improvidence and his
"ragtag" friends, even her refusal to acknowledge fully her
own sexuality, always at war with her feelings during the
ten years of her marriage. Having gained nothing in the
secular world and having lost love, Florence comes back to
God only in the desperation of her incurable illness. She
has come full circle, back to her mother's religion, but
since she comes only in fear and bitterness, not in humil
ity, there is no healing for her in religion.
And the thought filled her with terror and rage;
the tears dried on her face and the heart within her
shook, divided between a terrible longing to surrender
and a desire to call God into account. Why had he
preferred her mother and her brother, the old, black
woman, and the low, black man, while she, who had
sought only to walk upright, was come to die, alone
and in poverty, in a dirty furnished room? (p. 115)
Florence has tried to evade the full implications of her
15^
tradition only to find herself facing them at the end of
her life. All that remains to her now is to see that her
brother no longer escapes the consequences of his life.
"I going to tell you something, Gabriel," she said.
"I know you thinking at the bottom of your heart that
if you just make her, her and her bastard boy, pay
enough for her sin, your son won’t have to pay for
yours. But I ain’t going to let you do that. You
done made enough folks pay for sin, it’s time you
started paying." (p. 292)
None of the characters ever doubts the theology of his
tradition, even when he fails to follow it. However, only
Elizabeth among the adults accepts the theology as it is
without the compensatory factors that motivate Florence
and Gabriel. She denies neither her blackness nor her hu
man fallibility, and accepts the necessity of repentance,
though she cannot bring herself to regret her youthful love
for Hichard or the birth of their son John. As Elizabeth
sees it, the heart and the soul sometimes carry a person in
opposite directions, away from God. But the "terrible,
living God" is everywhere and inescapable.
And, therefore, there was war in Heaven, and weep
ing before the throne* the heart chained to the soul,
and the soul imprisoned within the flesh— a weeping,
a confusion, and a weight unendurable filled all the
earth. Only the love of God could establish order in
this chaos; to Him the soul must turn to be delivered.
(p. 237)
Given her theology, Elizabeth can accept the facts of her
life and can attend the prayer meeting in a spirit of hu
mility and without bitterness, praying that God spare her
155
son "the sin-born anguish of his father and his
mother" (p. 237). If Go Tell It on the Mountain could be
reduced to the simplicity of allegory, Elizabeth might
represent the essential humanity of the Negro people that
persists in spite of the conditions of their lives.
Elizabeth, like Faulkner's Dilsey, endures. In this novel,
Elizabeth is the buffer between her children and the
forces (both real and psychological) arrayed against them.
She is the focal point for love, as Gabriel is for the hate
that exists. George Kent calls the mother, Elizabeth, "the
ethical and moral center" of the novel, a character less
burdened by the "religious illusions" of the others and
consequently better able to maintain a "strong, quiet sense
of her Integrity.,,AD
The history which Baldwin provides for Elizabeth
brings the widest attack from the critics, an attack pri
marily upon the sentimentality with which Baldwin treats
the young Elizabeth and her lover Richard, the real parents
of John. Baldwin portrays Elizabeth as a moral young wom
an, conscious of the sinful nature of her relationship with
Richard, yet unable to deny him her love, "a self-
sacrificial, life-giving love," in George Kent's words.
"Baldwin and the Problem of Being," p. 206.
17Ibid., p. 207.
156
Richard is endowed with all the qualities that could give
a Negro his full manhood, warmth, intelligence, pride,
ambition. He is further provided with martyrdom when he
kills himself in response to the brutality of white in
justice*
Marcus Klein accuses Baldwin of a kind of self-
indulgence in his creation of Richard, of using the face of
Richard’s earlier existence to exact John’s revenge upon
his hated stepfather, though without John’s knowing any
thing about it.-^ This, Mr. Klein maintains, is part of a
weakness in the drama of John’s initiation into an identity,
a process that is thwarted, not on racial grounds but on
personal grounds in a kind of Oedipal conflict. Mr. Klein
believes that the Biblical allusion through which Baldwin
tries to establish a connection between the racial and
Oedipal dramas are "at best a local cleverness." As a vic
tim of his stepfather's irrational hatred, John "is trapped
in his childhood. He can’t be a Negro or any
These charges involve matters of structure as well as
theme and tone in the face that the flashback scenes reveal
the circumstances of John’s inheritance to the reader but
not to John himself, a situation which Klein calls "a
na
After Alienation, p. 18^.
19Ibld., pp. 183-*!-.
157
technical fault” and which leads Ihab Hassan to say that,
"The novel does not entirely succeed in uniting the fate of
its two main characters, Gabriel and John, within a common
dramatic structure."2*0 if a novel must be held to a lit
eral kind of logic, this "technical fault" might assume
some importance. A similar charge can be made against Lie
Down in Darkness. By using the present tense device of the
funeral procession to generate the memory scenes, William
Styron logically could use the view points only of the sur
vivors, which would exclude Peyton*s scenes and her mono
logue. Bather than on such a literal and logical level,
these novels must be judged on the basis of their whole
intent in which the metaphorical meaning plays a large part,
Go Tell It on the Mountain achieves its larger purpose,
to encompass in the personal story of the Grimes family a
representative history of the American Negro family and to
find in their religion a coherent myth through which to
portray their apparent relationship to the white world and
to each other. All the frustrations, the contradictions
and ambiguities of that relationship which find expression
in the lives of the adults are implicit in John's inherit
ance. John, on his fourteenth birthday, has reached a
crucial stage in his life, a time of decisions which will
70
Radical Innocence, p. 83.
158
indicate his future direction. Though his spiritual con
version at the end of the prayer meeting implies an appar
ent acceptance of his own tradition, the novel suggests
that John has reached only a plateau in experience from
t
which he will go on to enlarge his own life beyond the
dimensions of his parents' lives. Though Baldwin's essays
make clear that this was the pattern of his own life, using
the church as a stepping stone out of Harlem,21 the novel
is sufficiently self-contained to provide this kind of
reading independent of the author's autobiography.
In the long personal history which lies in back of the
Grimes family, Elizabeth represents a middle generation.
Nearly thirty years younger than her husband and conse
quently farther removed from the Civil War generation and
life in the Old South, she personally bears less of the
historical burden of slavery than Gabriel or Florence. In
Baldwin's mythology, Elizabeth has a shorter distance to
travel toward emancipation of the spirit than Gabriel or
Florence. Viewed on the literal level of the story,
Elizabeth and Richard may be somewhat sentimentalized,
Richard as a young man totally a victim, Elizabeth as a
young woman sinning only through love, but even on this
21Baldwin says that every Negro boy in Harlem looks
for a "gimmick to start him on his way." For him, the
gimmick was his.career in the church (The Fire Next Time
[New York, 196*0 , p. 38). ------------------*
159
level, Elizabeth as a character can be psychologically
justified. Less driven by oppressive conditions in her
early life or by personal guilt, never having betrayed any
one except herself, she can maintain her yielding and for
giving nature. Moreover, Richard is exactly the kind of
young man who would earn her loyalty.
Sentiment aside, Richard can be justified in metaphor
ical terms as a necessary link in John's tradition. Richard
is a prefiguration of John, a person who resists his fate,
though unsuccessfully, by nourishing his uniqueness.
Richard reaches out beyond the confines of his life when he
cant he accumulates knowledge, he takes Elizabeth to mu
seums, he refuses to acknowledge her God. His suicide is
his final resistance to a humiliation he cannot accept.
John too, a generation later, cherishes his uniqueness and
nourishes secretly a resistance to his apparent destiny,
but his future will lie through an acceptance of his tra
dition rather than through overt rebellion like his brother
Roy's.
John approaches his parents* tradition with ambiva
lence, sensing the contradictions in both its secular and
religious aspects. The obvious contradictions between the
spiritual life with its emphasis upon "the glories of
eternity" promised to his people and the material comfort
apparent in the white part of the city, where, John has
160
been told, "perdition sucked at the feet of the
people" (p. 36), reinforces his private resistance.
In the narrow way, the way of the cross, there awaited
him only humiliation forever? there awaited him, one
day, a house like his father*s house* and a church like
his father’s, and a job like his father*s, where he
would grow old and black with hunger and toil. (p. 37)
The consolation offered by the church, "the first shall be
last and the last shall be first," fails to satisfy John,
whose aspirations are more secular and more immediate. He
creates a fantasy world which answers all his frustrations.
In this world John, who was, his father said, ugly,
who was always the smallest boy in his class, and
who had no friends, became immediately beautiful,
tall, and popular. People fall over themselves to
meet John Grimes. He was a poet, or a college presi
dent, or a movie star, he drank expensive whisky,
and he smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes. (pp. 15-16)
Though material comfort would naturally be part of
John’s aspirations, the important thread that runs through
all his daydreams is the desire for identity and the search
for love, particularly a father's love. He clings strongly
to the knowledge of his intelligence, "his individual
existence" as a "power" that he could use "to save himself,
to raise himself," that with it he "might one day win that
love which he so longed for." John considers his intelli
gence "if not a weapon at least a shield" (p. 17) against
his otherwise inevitable destiny. However, Ms discovery
of masturbation in response to his emerging sexual in-'
stincts causes him great uneasiness and tarnishes the image
161
of moral superiority which has- helped him sustain a sense
of his own individuality. In spite of John's resistance
to his (step) father's world, he cannot completely escape
either the sense of personal sin or the inherited sin of
his race, as the mythology has taught him.
Was this why he lay here, thrust out from all
human or heavenly help tonight? This, and not that
other, his deadly sin, having looked on his father's
nakedness and mocked and cursed him in his heart?
Ah, that son of Noah's had been cursed, down to the
present groaning generations A servant of servants
shall he be unto his brethren, (p. 267)
Just as John's earlier resistance to the church meant
a holding out for his own "individual existence," so too
does his eventual conversion represent a need for different
kind of identity. By being born again, John feels he would
be raised up.
Then he would no longer be the son of his father,
but the son of his Heavenly Father, the King. Then
he need no longer fear his father, for he could
take . . . their quarrel over his father's head to
Heaven. . . . Then he and his father would be equals,
in the sight, and the sound, and the love of God.
(p. 19*0
Salvation means for John both a yielding and an assertion
of himself. On the personal level, he has accepted his
father's religion and yet defied him by becoming his spir
itual equal. Though John uses theological language to ex
press his new sense of himself, he is really Issuing a
challenge to Gabriel. "I'm going to pray to God . . .
to keep me, and make me strong ... to stand ... to
162
stand against the enemy • • . and against everything and
everybody . . . that wants to cut down my soul" (p. 282).
On the racial level, he has identified himself with the
"dark army," "the despised and rejected" who will one day
find God’s promise fulfilled. "The light and the darkness
had kissed each other" in John’s soul (p. 277), By accept
ing both the discipline and the liberation of his reli-.
gious conversion, John is preparing himself for a greater
freedom in the future. As he says to his mother, "I’m
coming. I’m on my way" (p. 308).
James Baldwin, in one of his essays, expresses the
ambivalence which the black man feels and with which he
must come to terms.
It began to seem that one would have to hold in the
mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposi
tion. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance,
totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as
they are* in the light of this idea, it goSs without
saying that Injustice is a commonplace. But this did
not mean that one could be complacent, for the second
idea was of equal power* that one must never, in one’s
own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but
must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight
begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid
to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and
despair.22
22
"Notes of a Native Son," Notes of a Native Son,
pp. 113-1** • Ihab Hassan refers to this quotation to
suggest that Go Tell It on the Mountain "makes the fate
of the rebel-victim exemplary of the fate of man" (Radical
Innocence, p. 8*0,
163
The religion of the Grimes family is their way of coming
to terms with their history. Baldwin suggests in the
novel that John will more successfully reconcile the
opposing elements of his tradition than anyone else in the
family.
PART TWO
THE HUMAN -CONDITION
164
CHAPTER THREE
.LOVE AND SEPARATENESS
The novels considered in Chapters One and Two speak
directly to the American experience, employing native
American traditions as metaphors for their comment on our
society. The four novels to be discussed in this chapter
relate their families metaphorically to human experience
in general, though the families themselves are thoroughly
American in character and setting. Eudora Welty in Delta
Wedding, Carson McCullers in The Member of the Wedding.
James Agee in A Death in the Pamlly, and John Updike in
The Centaur offer their families as microcosms of the
human condition, a wider application of theme than in the
first four novels but not different in nature, all the
authors being concerned with values more basic than those
established through social, political institutions,
Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers concern themselves
with problems of loneliness and communication between peo
ple, Eudora Welty choosing to explore these problems
through a large family with its many possibilities for
family relationships, Carson McCullers through a small and
165
166
incomplete family in which loneliness is hard to overcome.
Though both authors have, in some of their other fiction,
presented human loneliness in its extreme form, these
novels represent their most affirmative statements about
the possibilities for human love and relatedness, Miss
Welty speaking more positively in Delta Wedding, however,
than Carson McCullers in The Member of the Wedding.
Delta Weddingt Formula for Human Relationships
Essentially, Eudora Welty is portraying in Delta
Wedding the complexities of human nature, both in the pri
vate aspects of the individual personality and in the
social aspects of people in their relationships to others,
a thematic interest which runs through much of her fiction.
In the short story, "A Still Moment," for example, one of
the characters, a self-appointed man of God, speculates on
the facts of human existence, on Love which brings people
together, on Separateness which keeps them apart. He asks
himself why Separateness seems so often to prevail, why God
had not given Separateness first and then given Love "to
follow and heal in its wonder," rather than the other way
around.1 Hobert Penn Warren, in a study of Eudora Welty*s
short stories, takes special note of these terms, calling
"Love and Separateness" the central theme in her short
3-The Wide Net (New York, 19^3)» p. 93.________________
167
fiction.2 Delta Wedding explores this theme in its many
aspects, offering through a few central characters a kind
of ideal formula for human existence based on a balance
between the privacy of the Individual (Separateness) and
his relatedness to others (Love). Miss Welty creates in
her Southern plantation clan a self-contained social unit
which operates as a kind of laboratory for the testing of
this formula, the characters functioning as a "control
g r o u p . To read Delta Wedding in this way, as a model of
human relationships which transcends the particular social
world depicted in the novel, rather than merely as the
story of an enviable way of life no longer in existence,
explains certain features of the novel which might other
wise raise problemsi among them, the use of the past
rather than contemporary society, the Isolation of the
family, the ignoring of large social issues, the static
plot, the self-conscious sensibility of both the author and
her characters. A further examination of the novel will
show that Miss Welty has deliberately created the kind of
social myth which best allows her to abstract from it the
kind of statement she wishes to make about human nature.
2The Love and Separateness in Miss Welty," The Kenyon
Review. VI (Spring, 19W, pp. 2A6-59.
^This is a term used by Ruth Vande Kieft in her study,
Eudora Welty (New York, 1962), p. 110.
168
Though there Is a great hustle of activity throughout
the novel, very little happens by way of plot. The story
covers only a few days in the lives of the Fairchilds dur
ing the 1920*s as they make elaborate preparations at their
plantation home for a family wedding. A second incident
which has already taken place, a near train accident in
volving some of the Fairchilds walking across a trestle,
is added to the wedding as a focus of attention, both
events functioning as devices to reveal the nature of the
family. The method is somewhat similar to that of Ceremony
in Lone Tree. Providing little forward movement, the
author hovers over her material, examining each character
and each incident from several different perspectives.
Much of the texture of the novel is provided through the
characters* discussion of things that happen, through their
reflections upon events and upon each other, a feature
which prompts Isaac Rosenfeld to charge that "it is not
really a society that she £Eudora Weltyj is dealing with,
but the sensations of one. . . . The density of atmosphere
and the many family details do not serve to establish a
b ,
true connection." Delta Wedding is not designed as a
strictly social novel, however, and to judge it by conven
tional standards as Mr. Rosenfeld wishes to do suggests a
^"Double Standard" (rev. of Delta Wedding), The New
Republic. CXIV (April 29, 19^6), p. 63k.
169
failure to understand Miss Welty's strategy.
By endowing the polnt-of-view characters with extreme
self-consciousness, Miss Welty involves the reader more in
tensely in the investigative process through which she ex
plores the nature of human relationships. She chooses as
her favored center of consciousness Ellen Fairchild,
Virginia-born wife of Battle Fairchild, mother of eight
children, and mistress of Shellmound plantation. Miss
Welty endows Ellen with the ability to be both a detached
observer and a character deeply involved in the family's
affairs. In this way Ellen performs a double role, as an
important character in the social scheme, the one best
equipped to reveal the nature of the family, and as an in
strument of the author's sensibility, a character through
which Miss Welty can project her own Insight into human na
ture. For example, Ellen's reflections about the very
different natures of her two oldest daughters reveal some
of the various aspects of personality that the author is
presenting in the novel for examination. Ellen's reflec
tions about her oldest daughter Shelley reveal the eighteen-
year-old girl to be extremely withdrawn, an example of too
much "separateness."
Ever since Dabney had announced that she would marry
Troy, Shelley had been practicing, rather consciously,
a kind of ragmuffinish. Or else she drew up, like an
old maid. What could be so wrong in everything, to her
170
sensitive and delicate mind? There was something not
quite warm about Shelley, her first child. Could it
have been in some way her fault?5
Ellen realizes that Dabney, on the other hand, is rebel
lious and independent, "almost greedy" in what she asks
from life. Ellen knows that Dabney's marriage to the over
seer is no more acceptable to the family (the clan) than
the marriage of George Fairchild (Ellen's brother-in-law)
to someone "beneath" him had been. But Ellen's understand
ing carries her beyond the family's purely social judgments,
though she shares them to a certain extent, to a deeper
awareness of both George's and Dabney's character.
Ellen's hope for Dabney, that had to lie in something,
some secret nest, lay in George's happiness. . . .
She felt consoled for the loss of Dabney to Troy Flavin
by the happiness of George lost to Robbie. . . . She
loved George too dearly to seek her knowledge of him
through the family attitude, keen and subtle as that
was— just as she loved Dabney too much to see her pros
pect without its risk, now family— deplored, around it,
the happiness covered with danger. (pp. 25-26)
As this example illustrates, Eudora Welty has created
in Ellen, a woman with a sensitive and introspective nature,
an acute observer of the family from within the clan. Per
spectives from outside the family are provided through
characters like George's wife Robbie Reid, or Laura McRaven,
a nine-year-old cousin of the Fairchilds, with her child
like but precocious observations. One such observation,
^Delta Wedding (New York, 19^6), pp. 211-12. All sub
sequent references will be to this edition.
171
formed, a few days after Laura*s arrival, reveals her in
sight (perhaps too precocious for a child) into the nature
of the Fairchild establishment.
Laura generally hesitated just a little in every
doorway. Jackson was a big town, with twenty-five
thousand people, and Fairchilds was just a store and
a gin and a bridge and one big house, yet she was the
one who felt like a little country cousin when she
arrived, appreciating that she had come to where
everything was dressy, splendid, and over her head.
(p. 9*0
In addition to providing insight, Miss Welty's use of ex
tremely self-conscious characters creates a hint of arti
ficiality through a slight removal from strict realism, an
effect deliberately contrived by the author to establish
the Fairchilds as a "control group." When John Crowe
Ransom uses the metaphor of the theatre to discuss the
novel, he recognizes something of this element, though he
does not follow through on the implications of the method.
Nevertheless, Mr. Ransom's comment is interesting.
The Fairchilds have so much self-consciousness along
with their naturalness that it is as if they were
actors, and their common life the drama they enacted
daily. . . . Each actor must Improvise his lines,
since the development of the action is never wholly
of his determination and cannot be forseen.°
The Fairchilds are actors, in a sense, fulfilling roles
assigned by the author to demonstrate various aspects of her
formula for human relations.
^"Delta Fiction" (rev. of Delta Wedding), The Kenyon
Review. VIII (Summer, 19*4-6), p. 505. ................
172
Miss Welty creates a further sense of removal from
social realism in the setting, isolating her characters
sufficiently in time and place to focus completely on those
aspects of human nature which she wishes to examine. In an
interview with Ruth M. Vande Kieft, Miss Welty explained
that she chose the year 1923 as one in which there were no
large catastrophes like war, flood, or depression, thus
affording her the opportunity to discover, as Miss Vande
Kieft phrases it, "what the possibilities of human love are
under the best circumstances." Miss Vande Kieft explains
the effect of the author's choice.
In this small, closely-knit society there are no ex
tremes of poverty or wealth, no sense of rootlessness
or insecurity which are by-products of competitive
urban society, no serious racial or social disharmony.7
By freeing her characters from serious external problems,
Eudora Welty can give them the idyllic existence necessary
for the kind of fable she is creating. And by using a
child's point of view at the beginning of the novel, the
author adds a further touch of make-believe to the story,
allowing the reader to be Introduced to the Fairchilds
through the eyes of Laura McRaven, who brings with her as
she comes to Shellmound for her cousin's wedding, a sense
of wonder at the splendid way of life the Fairchilds lead.
As the train carrying Laura from Jackson comes into the
?Eudora Welty. p. 110. _______________
173
Delta country, the outside world is left behind and Laura
enters the Fairchild kingdom, almost an enchanted land.
In the Delta, most of the world seemed sky, The clouds
were large— larger than horses or houses, larger than
boats or churches or gins, larger than anything except
the fields the Fairchilds planted. , . . The land was
perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing
of a lighted dragonfly. It seemed strummed, as though
it were an instrument and something had touched it. , . .
Laura, looking out, . . . . . felt what an arriver in a land
feels— that slow hard pounding in the breast, (pp. ^-5)
Eudora Welty*s portrait of Southern life seems even
more remote from the present than its time setting would
suggest. Louis D. Bubln, in his study of Southern writers,
compares Eudora Welty*s Mississippi with William Faulkner's,
whose Mississippi, Rubin says, is a place of struggle,
where order and disorder are in constant battle, where the
families are dynasties whose individual members live and
die as tragic heroes engaged in epic struggles against
their human limitations.® In contrast, Eudora Welty*s
Mississippi is a very different place, as Mr. Rubin de
scribes it.
It is a tidy, protected little world, in which people
go about their affairs, living, marrying, getting-chil
dren, diverting themselves, dying, all in tranquil
pastoral fashion. . . . They do not contend with time*
instead they pretend that it does not exist. . , , The
Delta is not given to violence and to strident questing;
^Writers of the Modern South, p. 131.
174
it is a sprawling, accommodating countryside, and its
ways are lavish, somnolent. Time goes like a dream in
the Delta.9
This remoteness from the contemporary world leads some
critics to mistake Eudora Welty's purpose. When John Crowe
Ransom tentatively suggests that there may be "no strategic
conception behind this novel other than that Miss Welty was
nostalgic for a kind of life that already has passed beyond
recognition, and had to go back to it in imagination,"10 he
seems not to recognize the metaphorical nature of the novel
which coexists with the social level. On the other hand,
when Alain R. Jones reads Delta Wedding as a "study of
childhood innocence in contact and,often in conflict with
the authoritarian world of adult experience,"11 he too
misses some of the meaning of the novel as a parable of
human relationships.
In a way, the entire social establishment of Delta
Wedding exists in an age of innocence, oblivious to any
social inequities around them, preoccupied with themselves
and their own affairs. The child Laura, as the first char
acter to appear in the novel, helps the reader move back-
9Ibid.. pp. 131-2.
10"Delta Fiction," p. 507.
ll"World of Lovet Fiction of Eudora Welty," in The
Creative Present, ed., Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons
(Garden City, New York, 1963), p. 184.
175
ward in time and mood into this more innocent world and in
to the intimacy of the family. Viewed through her eyes,
the Fairchilds' way of life in the Delta country seems to
be a world set apart. Nearly everything carries the Fair
child stamp* the town which bears their name, the cemetery
where so many Fairchilds, including Laura's mother, are
buried, the family store where anyone in the family could
just "walk behind the counter, reach in and take anything
on earth" (p. 136), the three family homes, even the woods
and the lake where Laura goes with one of her cousins seem
to be part of the Fairchilds' special kingdom.
The Fairchilds live appropriately as heirs to the
kingdom, conducting their affairs with an easy grace and an
authority in their sense of the rightness of things, whether
in the daily routines, like the evening meal with the fa
ther, presiding royally over the family, teasing and com
manding his children as he serves them, or in larger events
like the seventeen-year-old Dabney's refusal to put off her
wedding until after cotton picking, as if the whole plan
tation should stop for her. Everything is done with style.
Dabney receives serenaders and goes nonchalantly off to one
last dance without her fiance. Her Uncle George rides all
the way from Memphis on the horse he has bought for her as
a wedding present, and her Uncle Pinck brings her a Pierce-
Arrow,
176
The Fairchilds* special sense of themselves is well
illustrated in the trestle incident, which continues to
arouse interest among the Fairchilds as a source of excite
ment and amusement. Though the train stopped in time (with
an apology from the engineer), the element of danger had
been sufficiently real to establish George’s heroism and
his place in the Fairchild legend. The fact that he risked
his life for the half-witted child of his dead brother
Denis increases the value of his exploit to all the
Fairchilds, but not to his wife Robbie, who interprets his
action as a choice for clan loyalty which excludes her.
As Ruth Vande Kieft points out, this incident seems related
to "all the Intangible, aristocratic loyalties which Robbie
cannot feel or understand and which she therefore deeply
resents.1,12
The Fairchilds possess all the necessary credentials
for an aristocratic Southern clan* possession of the land
for generations, memories of their own Civil War heroes,
graceful plantation homes exhibiting the family history,
a gracious way of living in the present made possible by
their inherited wealth and social position. Though these
characteristics are natural facts of life for the social
establishment Eudora Welty is portraying, one chosen
12Eudora Welty. p. 9?.
177
deliberately for its isolation from the normal pressures of
society, the Fairchilds* way of life does provide enough of
the social realities of plantation living during the 1920*s
for Delta Wedding to operate on one level as a novel of
manners, exhibiting the manners and snobbery of social
class which Lionel Trilling sees as the prime function of
the novel of manners.
Since Miss Welty does portray the class consciousness
and snobbery of the Fairchild clan, especially to "out
siders'* who marry into the family, she could logically be
expected to carry her implied social criticism into other
inequalities inherent in the social structure, particularly
the inferior status given to the Negro servants in this
society. The fact that she avoids this issue constitutes
a serious flaw in the novel, in the opinion of several
critics. Ransome concedes that the portrait is probably
accurate for its time, that "both races accepted the
Fairchild establishment," that "they had tolerances on both
sides, and made mutual accommodations." But he feels ob
ligated to state that the "handsome sensibility of the
Fairchilds was at the expense of the shabbiest kind of
moral obtuseness.This defect in the novel’s moral
vision forms the basis for Isaac Rosenfeld’s criticism of
13"Delta Fiction," p. 507.
178
the novel, for its lack of social connections. Events
occur, he says, as if the characters have no "ongoing, ex
tended relationship" with society, as if the author were
ignoring the strong "social contradictions" inherent in the
subject matter and dealing only with surface meanings.^
These are serious charges, difficult to explain away.
The Negroes occupy the lowest position in the social
scheme. The Fairchilds adopt a paternalistic attitude
toward the Negro servants, looking upon them as obedient
children whose lives must be directed by their superiors.
The Negroes are cared for in illness, admonished in their
fights, directed in their tasks. Many of them attend
Dabney's wedding. But some times the Negroes are spoken
of as commodities, as a work force to be allocated in the
most useful way possible. Ellen is admonished not to work
so hard with a "houseful of Negroes to do the first thing
she told them" (p. 20). Her husband Battle assigns a cer
tain number of them to prepare Marmion, another plantation
home, for Dabney and Troy and sends his fourteen-year-old
son to oversee the work, wishing he could "spare" more
Negroes to get the job done more quickly. Troy Flavin
thinks of his job as overseer primarily as "just a matter
of knowing how to handle your Negroes" (p. 95)# Everyone
-^"Double Standard," p.
179
in the social structure seems to accept without question
the inferior position of Negroes.
Budora Welty does not use Negro characters, as Faulknei'
does, to underline the moral dilemma of the South, or to
represent the wisdom and endurance of the race as Faulkner
does with Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. Eudora Welty
obviously is not writing social criticism in this area.
There is neither explicit nor implicit condemnation of any
thing other than the insularity and exclusiveness of the
Fairchild establishment. The reflexiveness of this estab
lishment— the family's setting up its own code of manners
and then being bound by the code--precludes any corrective
measure from the outside in the form of moral judgments
which society might impose. The Fairchilds are their own
moral guardians as well as social arbiters. As Louise Y.
Gossett says, the Fairchilds "know who they are to the
point of relishing their eccentricities and accepting their
manners without question. Their certainty is their vision
of social order.
Buth Vande Kieft defends the novel by stating that
Eudora Welty is not concerned with the "Southern problem"
but rather with the use of Shellmound as a "separate place"
for the testing of "every sort of love— romantic, conjugal,
-^Violence in Becent American Fiction, p. 10b,
180
-j Z
domestic, filial. "-LD However serious the moral shortcomings
may be, the Fairchild establishment does fulfill Eudora
Welty's requirements for a "separate place" as a testing
ground, a scheme which she employs is some of her other
fiction as well. In The Golden Apples, for example, the
place is Morgana, Mississippi, whose residents illustrate
the wide variety of human personality that Miss Welty finds
interesting. The fact that Morgana exhibits none of the
blatant inequalities of Shellmound plantation lies more in
its middle-class nature than in the presence of social
criticism. In both books, Miss Welty's interest lies more
in human nature than in social issues, the difference be
tween the novels residing in the kind of social scheme
adoptes in each and in the author's manner of controlling
it. The community in The Golden Apples represents a broad
er cross section of characters and events in a much longer
stretch of time over which to develop the characters*
lives. The tightly controlled microcosm of Delta Wedding,
in contrast, has been purified of all extraneous concerns
in order to produce a social unit that can be examined for
its most essential qualities. In the self-sufficiency of
the plantation way of life, in the size of the Fairchild
clan and their holdings, in their removal from the main-
l6Eudora Welty. pp. 108-110.
181
stream of life and the centrality of the clan In their
vision of themselves, the Fairchild establishment repre
sents a kind of American feudal society which provides
Eudora Welty with the separate social entity she re
quires.1?
John Hardy suggests that Delta Wedding takes the form
of a pastoral, that Eudora Welty adopts the formal quali
ties of the pastoral as the organizing principle of the
novel, using in particular the principle of paradox in
herent in the pastoral "formula" to underline the nature
of the society being examined.
The structure of the society, in the pattern of the
novel as well as in fact, clearly produces and supports
the kind of hyper-developed individuality which the
characters severally manifest. But it is one of the
basic paradoxes of the novel . . . that the strength
of the society to support is entirely the dynamics of
the personality's constant and tireless struggle with
it.18
Mr. Hardy believes the center of interest to be in "the
exercise of entirely private sensibilities," in "the single,
illuminating, still act of private perception."1^
^William Jones believes that Miss Welty's use of
names from Walter Scott's Mansion is deliberate,: Intended
to suggest a parallel between the manners of that feudal
society and the South of Delta Wedding ("Name and Symbol in
the Prose of Eudora Welty," Southern Folklore Quarterly,
XXII [[December, 1958J, pp. 173-85).
1®"Delta Wedding as Region and Symbol," The Sewanee
Review, LX (September, 1952), p. 401.
19Ibid., pp. 401, 404.
182
This Interesting and illuminating concept can be
supported up to a point. Apart from obvious pastoral qual
ities of the story and setting, the author's tone and man
ner of treating her material suggest conventions of the
pastoral. For example, in the wedding, which puts the
Fairchilds on display, the style of the ceremony is more
important than the doubtful social status of the groom.
The decor of the wedding itself symbolizes the nature of
this pastoral aristocracy, its self-conscious luxury, its
serious frivolity.
"I'm going to have my bridesmaids start off in
American Beauty and fade on out," said Dabney. . . .
"Two bridesmaids of each color, getting paler and
paler, and then Shelley in flesh. She's my maid of
honor. . . . Then me in pure white, (p. A3)
Dabney's bridesmaids, appropriately enough, will carry
shepherdess crooks and wear lacy mits, hand crocheted by
Dabney's Aunt Primrose. Flowers, shepherdess crooks, cham
pagne, wedding cake, ice cream "in shapes" are ordered and
brought in from the city. After the ceremony, guests will
dance outside under trees filled with colored lanterns to
the music of a Negro band. The Fairchilds are a "county
family" (Ransom's term), and the wedding naturally attracts
all the other "county" families, since this important so
cial event reaffirms the aristocratic pattern of their
lives. The official side of the wedding is quickly dis
pensed with. "Mr. Rondo married Dabney and Troy" (p. 214).
183
As John Hardy sayss
Mr. Rondo's status, the status of the church in the
Fairchild world, perfectly defines the more than ba
ronial self-sufficiency of the family, their superi
ority to any larger public institutional significance
of their affairs.20
Though Eudora Welty places many people at the scene of the
wedding, they are shadowy, unidentified and unnamed, a fur
ther indication that Miss Welty is not interested in the
larger social scene.
On the other hand, Eudora Welty gives the family full
attention, using the wedding as a vehicle to reveal the
full spectrum of the Fairchild character. The characters
perform double functions, each person's place in the social
pattern corresponding to and illustrating some position in
the author's formula for human relationships. In this way,
an abstract concept like the ability to relate to others
can be concretely illustrated in Dabney's social attitude,
which gives her the courage to marry someone outside her
social class. In general, the very special sense of family
and of social status which unites the Fairchilds as a clan
works also to give separate family members a special status
in their own right and a strong sense of their own indi
viduality, the paradox which John Hardy points out. How
ever, he overstates the emphasis upon the private
20Ibid., p. ^03.
18^
personality, a result of his Interpretation of the charac
ters* self-conscious introspection as the pastoral prin
ciple of sensibility. Miss Welty*s use of the characters*
sensibility, in part a by-product of the self-conscious
society, serves as a means of analyzing family relation
ships as well as individual personalities. She presents
many kinds of personalities and relationships (her reason
for employing a large family as her microcosm) offering the
balanced relationship as the ideal, not the private indi
vidual as such. A few of the major characters will illus
trate Miss Welty*s method and her theme.
Dabney's sister Shelley and her Aunt Tempe both find
their identity totally within the Fairchild clan, though in
different ways, Tempe through a kind of social arrogance,
Shelley through her strong need for security and personal
support. Tempe, one of the staunchest defenders of the
Fairchild ways, is proud, dominating, intolerant of out
siders, Even Ellen, Dabney's mother, herself an aristocrat,
fails to come up to Tempe*s standards for the family.
Tempe feels that Ellen, even after twenty years of marriage,
has never really been assimilated into the Fairchild way of
life.
Not that Ellen hadn't changed in recent years. . . .
Ellen had come far, had yielded to much, for a Virginian,
but still now a crowd, a roomful of people, was not her
natural habitat, a plantation was not her true home.
(p. 190)
185
Ellen, on the other hand, is disturbed by Tempe*s aggres
siveness, particularly in respect to her husband whom she
orders around like a messenger boy. "Nothing tired Ellen
herself more than the spectacle of marital bullying, but
it was the breath of life to Tempe, spectacle and
all" (p. 125). The Fairchild preeminence governs Tempe in
all her relationships, coloring her views of family mem
bers, of "outsiders," and of marriage partners. Disturbed
when her own daughter married a "Yankee," she is no less
upset by the other unpopular marriages in the family, hop
ing that the Fairchild attitude will prevail in these
marriages as it has in her own.
"Nell, one thing," said Tempe in a low voice to
Shelley, . . . "when people marry beneath them, it*s
the woman that determines what comes. It’s the woman
that coarsens the man. The man doesn't really do much
to the woman, I've observed."
"You mean Troy's not as bad for us as Hobble,"
whispered Shelley intently.
"Exactly!" (pp. 205-6)
Tempe, then, represents, on the social level, the kind
of snobbery which refuses to acknowledge human qualities
other than those defined by social class. Her kind of in
dependence is designed to perpetuate her privileged posi
tion and not to relate meaningfully to any one outside the
family. Translated into more general terms, Tempe repre
sents the kind of person who is unwilling to relate to peo-
186
pie who fall outside her narrowly defined limits of per
sonal worth. Paradoxically, she is independent in nature,
yet restricted by her own limited point of view.
Shelley, just as paradoxical in her role, illustrates
a different way of being too completely absorbed into the
family. She represents, in one way, the privacy of the
individual, the necessary separateness of people, espe
cially in a large but cohesive social unit like the Fair
childs where individuality could easily be smothered. She
sees in her Uncle George a person who recognizes this need.
I think Uncle G. takes us one by one. That is love—
I think. He takes us one by one but Papa takes us
all together and loves us by the bunch. ... I feel
we should all be cherished but not all together in
a bunch— separately, but not one to go unloved for
the other loved. (p. 84)
However, on another level, Shelley illustrates the kind of
person who is too separate, too withdrawn. She interprets
the rest of the family in terms of her own nature, which,
as an entry in her diary indicates, is sensitive and intro
spective.
Does the world suspect? that we are all very private
people? I think one by one we*re all more lonely than
private and more lonely than self-sufficient. . . .
Sometimes I believe we live most privately just when
things are most crowded, like in the Delta, like for
a wedding, (pp. 84-5)
Shelley is both private and lonely, refusing the chance to
establish any relationships outside the family. She goes
to dances with other young people, but rather reluctantly,
187
and refuses to go to any of the neighborhood bridge par
ties, which were, in her opinion, "just sixty girls from
all over the Delta come to giggle in one house" (p. 29).
Primarily, however, Shelley is in retreat from life, too
highly sensitive, too vulnerable even to the light shocks
life may offer. She worries about her mother’s pregnancy,
scolding her father for getting his wife into this "pre
dicament." Marriage, like that of her sister’s, seems too
bold a way of life for her, something she might retreat
from in the way she did from the sight of blood drawn in
a fight between two Negroes. As Shelley prepares for bed
the night before the wedding, she feels all at once "sick-
eningly afraid of life, life itself, afraid for
life" (p. 197).
Dabney, in contrast, is eager for life, willing if
necessary to rebel against family traditions in order to
confront life and take what it has to offer. In contrast
to Shelley, who has no real identity outside the family,
Dabney exhibits a strong sense of herself as an individual.
Sometimes Dabney was not so sure she was a Fairchild—
sometimes she did not care, that was it. There were
moments of life when it did not matter who she was. . . .
- Something . . . seemed to leap away from identity as
if it were an old skin, and that she was one of the
Fairchilds was of no more need to her than the locust
shells now hanging to the trees everywhere were to the
singing locusts, (pp. 32-3)
Dabney nurses this knowledge in private, for it "would kill
188 ,
her father— of course for her to he a Fairchild was an in
escapable thing to him." She is, however, proud of the
Fairchild ways and of her father's manifestation of them.
"The caprices of his restraining power over his daughters
filled her with delight now that she had declared what she
could do." Dabney has a more complete understanding of
Troy than does her family, realizing that his nature is
more complicated than they think, that marriage with him
will be a "whole other world" (p. 33)• Through her mar
riage to the overseer, Dabney asserts her independence
from the clan but not complete separation from it.
Dabney represents, in Eudora Welty*s formula, a rea
sonable balance between "Love and Separateness," illus
trating the necessary privacy and uniqueness of the indi
vidual, whether in marriage or in a family group, and the
ability to establish a meaningful relationship with others.
Dabney learns this kind of balanced relationship by moving
from within the family group outside it into her new life.
George's wife^Robbie, as an outsider, must achieve her
understanding in the opposite direction, moving from
childish resentment at the Fairchilds' exclusiveness toward
a clearer knowledge of her husband's nature and of her role
in their marriage, Robbie has to learn first that she can
not command her husband's loyalty, either by pleading with
him on the trestle, "George Fairchild, you didn't do this
189
for me!" or by running away to make him search for her.
George makes clear to her that he was acting independently
on the trestle, not as a Fairchild.
"I don't think it matters what happens to a person,
or what comes. . • . Only • . , I'm damned if I wasn't
going to stand on that track if I wanted to! Or will
again." (p. I87)
As an extension of his own nature, George recognizes the
individuality of others, taking no one for granted, assum
ing, as Robbie realizes during their reconciliation, that
with her he must "start all over with her love, as if she
were shy" (p. 161). Robbie's new understanding allows her
to distinguish between the family's way of viewing George,
"seeing him by a gusty lamp, ... by the lamp of their own
indulgence," and her own, seeing him "lighted by his own
fire, . ... a solid man, going through the world" (p. 191).
Robbie at last understands her own role— to offer George
uncomplicated love, "a love that could be simply beside
him," that could "hold him against that grasp, that sepa
rating thrust of Fairchild love" (p. 1A8).
Dabney and Robbie have achieved their knowledge within
a rather limited context, learning to balance loyalty be
tween their marriage and the family. George Gairchild, the
focal point of Eudora Welty's explorations into human na
ture, maintain a larger view of life as a man who retains
an unyielding core of independence but shows a great capac
ity for love, in his marriage, in his family, for the out-
190
side world. Of all the characters in the novel, George
best personifies the ideal accommodation between love and
separateness. In contrast to the other major characters
who reveal themselves through introspection as well as
action, George is revealed from the outside, through the
reflections of others. Several characters contribute,
through their private observations, to the portrait of
George Fairchild, for examples Shelley's diary notation
that George loves them "one by one" (p. 8^); Dabney's dis
covery that George "loved the world. . . . Not them in
particular"; Bobbie's new understanding of George as a man
"lighted by his own fire" (p. 191); Ellen's observation of
George as a man "infinitely complex, stretching the oppo
site ways the self stretches and the selves of the ones we
love . . . may stretch" (p. 222).
Eudora Welty's method of revealing George's nature
illustrates another reason for her choice of a self-
conscious society (pastoral) as the form her microcosm
should take. Through the gradual unfolding of character,
Miss Welty involves the reader in the same process of dis
covery that some of the characters undergo, though the
reader is absorbing both the abstract and the concrete
levels of the story simultaneously. As George's character
takes form, refracted through several points of view, other
key characters are learning, from their discoveries about
191
George, something new about themselves and their relation
ships to others. The reader in turn learns that the dis
coveries to be made are concepts about human nature placed
in the guise of social facts, that the problems which
arise for the characters within the social establishment,
struggling against the clan's snobbery, for example, or
against its stifling identity, must ultimately be resolved
in the larger terms of the parable as part of the author's
formula for both "love and separateness,"
The fact that Miss Welty so successfully blends the
characters in their double roles and so vividly portrays
the social establishment gives Delta Wedding the appearance
of a novel of manners from an earlier decade, a similarity
that operates only on the surface level of the novel. For
example, when Edith Wharton goes back to an earlier time in
The Age of Innocence, she does so to give an intense anal
ysis of a social establishment, to show the effect of its
values upon the members of the establishment. For her pur
pose, Miss Wharton necessarily provides a different kind of
emphasis from that in Delta Wedding. For one thing, she
encompasses a larger social scene, using an interlocking
group of families and institutions to supply the social
order and the moral code. Further, she presents a more
serious exposure of social snobbery and rigid traditions,
showing their effect upon a few individuals within the clan,
192
Finally, Miss Wharton’s portrayal remains completely in the
realistic tradition with no suggestion of a deliberately
isolated and contrived social world that is found in Delta
Wedding.
Eudora Welty*s portrait is essentially an optimistic
one, suggesting possibilities for the kind of human re
lationships which she believes are timeless. By subordi
nating the social implications of her family to their meta
phorical meaning, she gives proper emphasis to the theme of
Delta Wedding.
The Member of the Wedding» The Heed to Belong
Eudora Welty*s formula for love and separateness might
well be taken as a useful pattern for all human relations,
attainable perhaps only in certain kinds of societies, but
desirable for everyone. Carson McCullers, writing about
the contemporary scene, finds such ideal and reciprocal
relations difficult for humans to achieve, her fiction be
ing concerned primarily with alienation or "spiritual iso
lation," her own term for the aspect of existence which she
evidently views as central to the human condition. She
makes this clear in her preface to her play, The Square
Hoot of Wonderful.
193
I suppose a writer writes out of some inward compul
sion to transform his own experience . . . into the
universal and symbolical. ... I suppose my central
theme is the theme of spiritual isolation. Certainly
I have always felt alone.21
A prevailing theme in much contemporary literature, aliena
tion often takes extreme form in fiction, usually through
the use of such non-realistic elements as grotesque charac
ters, psychic rather than natural landscapes, dislocation
of time, the irrational behavior and motivation of charac
ters. Some of Mrs. McCullers* own fiction, novels like
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Reflections in a Golden Eye,
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, follow this pattern, fitting
loosely into the genre called Southern Gothic.22 However,
The Member of the Wedding pursues the theme of alienation
more gently, muting it by the use of more "normal" charac
ters and situations into an exploration of adolescent
loneliness. Further in this novel, the possibilities for
overcoming loneliness through communication with others
are not so emphatically denied as they are in Mrs.
McCullers' other novels where attempts to find love are de
feated by the characters' Isolation from other people. In
21«a Personal Preface, The Square Root of Wonderful"
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1958), p. viii.
22Irving Malin, in his study, New American Gothic
(Carbondale, Illinois, 1962), enlarges this "school" to in
clude both Southern and non-Southern writers, discussing
such authors as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Flannery
0'Connor, John Hawkes, James Purdy, and J. D. Salinger.
19^
The Member of the Wedding» love and separateness are
separateness are brought closer together, as are the real
istic and metaphorical levels on which the story operates.
Finally, the metaphor is more concentrated in this novel
than in the others, working through one protagonist and her
family, though the small town setting plays an important
part as it does in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad
of the Sad Cafe, and Clock Without Hands.
The restricted nature of Mrs. McCullers* microcosm
brings a response from Chester Eisinger, who objects in
general to the "narrow corner of human existence that she
[Carson McCullers] has chosen to exploit in her fiction."2^
He comments more specifically on The Member of the Wedding*
The limitations of the novel are in its focus on the
child*s self-centered world in which the macrocosm
plays no part. The contribution of the novel is to
state once more the universal need for human dialogue.2^ "
Whether the novel fails to relate to the outside world, as
Eisinger charges, depends upon how one views the social
world that Carson McCullers provides and the use to which
she puts it. By limiting the novel to the twelve-year-old
Frankie's point of view, the author precludes any direct
social comment or adult awareness of the implications of
some situations, forcing the reader to get at the social
23Fiction of the Forties, p. 258.
2^Ibid.. pp. 255-6.
195
realities obliquely as they undergird Frankie*s struggle to
belong, to become a "member." Frankie*s limited environ
ment, her home and neighborhood, her father's small jewelry
store, the small Southern town, are set against the back
drop of World War II, a constant reminder of the outside
world. Her limited circle of family and friends, her wid
owed father, her six-year-old cousin John Henry, the Negro
cook Berenice, is extended to the larger world through her
brother Jarvis, stationed in Alaska with the Armed Forces.
The pattern of Frankie's experience lies in the tension
produced by her attempts to reach beyond the confines of
her life to the greater world outside. This pattern can be
described as the process of initiation, as the "search for
identity, the paradoxical desire to escape, to experience,
to belong."25 Irving Malin sees it as a pattern of "expan
sion and entrapment,"26 an appropriate description since
Frankie meets both successes and defeats as she goes
through the various stages of her experience.
Carson McCullers makes effective use of the microcosm
which she relates to the human condition, particularly in
the way she blends the parts of the microcosm into a uni
fied metaphorical theme. For example, Frankie, a young
^ Radical Innocence, p. 219.
2%ew American Gothic. p. 115.
196
girl just on the verge of adolescence, baffled by this in-
between stage in her life, works well to represent the
theme. As Oliver Evans points out, "Adolescents do not
belong anywhere, and thus constitute excellent symbols of
spiritual loneliness.The family too works effectively
to illustrate the difficulties of communication. The fam
ily is "normal"2® but. limited and unfulfilling for Frankie,
each family member bound up in his own life. Her father,
a widower, self-absorbed and preoccupied with his small
business, can relate to her only on the routine level of
fatherly duties. Frankie's brother Jarvis is almost total
ly separated from the family, first by Army life and then
by his marriage, both of them worlds Frankie has dreams of
joining.
The vacuum left by Frankie's real family must be
filled by the two members of her surrogate family, her six-
year-old cousin John Henry whom Frankie alternately accepts
and rejects, and the housekeeper Berenice who acts as a
mother figure. But even the loyalty of John Henry and the
wisdom of Berenice cannot satisfy Frankie's longings. Few
27"The Theme of Spiritual Isolation in Carson
McCullers," New World Writing. No. 1 (New York, 1952).
2®This is rather unusual, since writers of Gothic
fiction often portray family members as odd, grotesque
characters as examples of isolation.
197
people in Mrs. McCullers* fiction can completely do this
for another person, and, consequently, she presents these
two characters also as persons caught in circumstances that
keep their lives separate from others, Berenice caught in
her blackness and John Henry, a serious lonely child,
doomed to die a painful death of spinal meningitis.
The author emphasizes the separateness of these char
acters additionally by attaching to them certain physical
oddities which suggest, but do not constitute, the freak
ishness of some of the characters in her other novels.
Interestingly enough, however, the physical oddities in
The Member of the Wedding are described through Frankie's
eyes and thus serve to point out her own feelings of in
security more than anyone else's. For example, her cousin
John Henry, small for his six years, "had the largest
knees that Frankie had ever seen"? ... he had "a little
screwed white face and he work tiny goldrimmed glasses."
Frankie observes "only one thing wrong about Berenice—
her left eye was bright blue glass. It stared out fixed
and wild from her quiet, colored face."2^ Frankie's con
cern with her own appearance amounts to fears that she will
become a freak like those she sees in the sideshow.
2^The Member of the Wedding (Boston, 19*1-6), p. 5. All
subsequent references will be to this edition.
198
This summer she was grown so tall that she was almost
a big freak, and her shoulders were narrow, her legs
too long. . . . Her hair had been cut like a boy*s,
but it had not been cut for a long time and was now
not even parted, (p. 4)
Frankie’s conception of herself combines with the
actual facts of her existence to make her useful as a dram
atization of the novel’s theme. Ihab Hassan states the
case accurately in his comment about Mrs. McCullers* char
acters.
Adolescents and freaks are her rueful heroes because
the first are as yet uninitiated and the latter are
forever unacceptable; both do not belong, and in both
physical incompleteness is the source of a qualitative,
a spiritual difference.30
When Chester Eisinger states that, "The world of the ado
lescent child is, after all, only a promise of life to come
in adulthood,"31 he is refusing to accept fully the sym
bolic values of the adolescent protagonist for the theme.
Frankie's "freakishness" can be explained on the realistic
level as the awkwardness of her age. Far more Important
are the other qualities of adolescence which accent her
loneliness and insecurity and intensify her search for
identity and love, qualities meant to serve as metaphors
for the human condition.
Time and place are part of the metaphor, suggesting
3QRadical,Innocence, p. 208.
^Fiction of the Forties, p. 258.
199
limited, possibilities but not absolute denial of communi
cation. The beginning of the novel describes Frankie's
situation in symbolic terms, though the literal facts are
closely parallel.
It happened that green and crazy summer when
Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer
when for a long time she had not been a member. She
belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in
the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person
who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid, (p. 3)
Her in-between age excludes her in actuality from some
groups she would like to join.
There was in the neighborhood a clubhouse, and
Frankie was not a member. The members of the club
were girls who were thirteen and fourteen and even
fifteen years old. They had parties with boys on
Saturday night. Frankie knew all of the club mem
bers, and until this summer she had been like a
younger member of their crowd, but now they had
this club and she was not a member. They had said
she was too young and mean. (p. 10)
She had earlier been rejected by her father for a reason
which she failed to understand and therefore resented.
One night in April, when she and her father were
going to bed, he looked at her and said, all of a
sudden* "Who is this great big long-legged twelve-
year-old blunderbuss who still wants: to sleep with
her old Papa." • . . She had to sleep in her up
stairs room alone. She began to have a grudge
against her father, (p. 20)
The period of time between that April and the follow
ing October, "when there were changes," is a time of tran
sition for Frankie, of physical and emotional changes nat
ural to her age and of growing experience with life. But
200
the summer is also a time of stasis, almost of stagnation,
a season for Frankie of inactivity and uninvolvement be
tween school terms. With only the childish John Henry and
the cook Berenice for companions, Frankie finds the summer
days sterile and stifling. "The world seemed to die each
afternoon and nothing moved any longer" (p. 1). The three
of them spend the hot summer afternoons playing bridge in
the kitchen, a "sad and ugly room" which "made Frankie
sick" (p. 5)• Everything about her life, her family and
limited acquaintance, her home and the small town, her in-
between age, seem constricting to her, designed to keep her
from full communion with life. Intended only partially as
a story of initiation, Frankie's reaching out for exper
ience suggests in addition the pattern of expansion and
entrapment which Irving Malin mentioned, (page 205), or, in
terms of this chapter's subtitle, Frankie's attempts to
break through her "separateness" into "love."
Even before Frankie creates her own metaphor for her
brother's wedding, that is to become a "member," she tries
to enact it, seeking to join herself to somebody or some
thing outside her own narrowly defined experience. Through
her brother Jarvis, stationed in Alaska, she vicariously
establishes a connection with the war and with the world in
general, an Imaginary relationship romanticized by her
geography-book conceptions of places.
201
She saw the snow and frozen sea And ice glaciers,
Esquimaux igloos and polar hears and the beautiful
Northern lights. When Jarvis had first gone to
Alaska, she had sent him a box of homemade fudge, * . .
and she had a vision of her brother passing it a-
round to furry Esquimaux. (p. 6)
Frankie views the soldiers in town with a "jealous heart,"
envying them the destiny she imagines for them, "going all
over the world . . . while she was stuck there in the town
forever" (p. ^7). She tries to identify places in the war
news, imagines the soldiers by their nationalities, offers
her blood to the Red Cross and is refused.
But this plan for donating her blood to the war did
not come true. The Red Cross would not take her
blood. She was too young. Frankie felt mad with
the Red Cross, and left out of everything. . . .
She was afraid because In the war they would not
include her, and because the world seemed somehow
separate from herself. (p. 20)
Frankie wants to leave town, to "light out for South
America or Hollywood or New York City," but she has no idea
how to implement her wishes.
The childish nature of Frankie’s daydreams and her
vague dissatisfactions with life are indications of her
innocence, not merely pre-adolescent innocence but a quality
which Carson McCullers uses thematically to represent human
nature. It is perhaps Mrs. McCullers* use of such charac
ters, young adolescents, cripples, neurotics, people who
have little or no control over their own destinies, that
leads to evaluations of her fiction like that of Louis
202
Rubin's when he calls it "limited in scope." For Mr.
Rubin, Mrs. McCullers' fiction stops "short of tragic, con
tending itself with a poignant exploration of surfaces."3^
The poignancy, even pathos, in Mrs. McCullers* fiction is
related to her view of human nature, that each person is
essentially lonely. That her characters naively maintain '
their search for some kind of love in a world doomed to
disappoint them may be neither tragic or heroic, but Mrs.
McCullers, like many other contemporary authors, does not
view our contemporary world as one which offers heroic or
tragic possibilities for man.
Mrs. McCullers endows her characters with this spe
cial quality of innocence in order to illustrate the nature
of their quest. In their persistent, often hopeless search
for love as the end to loneliness, the characters often
impose illusions upon themselves or upon the love object.
When the characters lose their illusions, as they must,
their innocence too is ended. Eisinger describes Mick in
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for example, as "the typical
adolescent struggling toward maturity, unaware that the
pain of alienation she now endures is the proper prepara
tion for later life."33 In Mrs. McCullers* philosophy,
32Writers of the Modem South, p. 195.
33Fjction of the Forties, p. 250.
203
this is the lesson that everyone must learn.
Frankie's innocence lies both in the nature of her
aspirations and in her reactions to experience. As she
struggles to become a member of some group or other, she
naively supposes that her offers of love are sufficient to
bring her the acceptance she craves. As she meets dis
appointments, she, like Mick, is learning necessary lessons
about life. But even the process of learning is, for
Frankie, a tentative, qualified experience, as it is for
all humans in Mrs. McCullers' view of existence. Frankie,
as a character, has been provided with a very limited en
vironment in which to test herself, with only limited pos
sibilities for success, a metaphorical way of portraying
the human condition. Every element of Frankie's environ
ment that should sustain her falls at some point, not
though deliberate design but from the very nature of human
institutions. With a father out of touch, an older brother
beyond her reach, a childish cousin as an unsatisfactory
substitute for a brother, a housekeeper as a surrogate
rather than a real mother, Frankie cannot find complete
fulfillment in her family. Though she reaches beyond her
family into the community, seeking a larger area for her
expanded vision of life, she finds no greater satisfaction
for her needs there than in her home.
204
Mrs. McCullers finds these basic human institutions,
the family in particular, natural metaphors for her pur
pose, which is to explore the individual's search for love.
Frankie seeks, within her family, for several kinds of love
relationships! parent and child, brother and sister, and,
obliquely, the love-sex relationship represented in the
wedding.
It is the sight of her brother Jarvis and his fiancee
on their visit before the wedding that generates Frankie's
major fantasy.
For a long time now her brother and the bride had been
at Winter Hill. They had left the town a hundred miles
behind them, and now were in a city far away, . . .
They were them and both together and she was only her
and parted from them, by herself. And as she sickened
with this feeling a thought and explanation suddenly
came to her. . . . They are the we of me. Yesterday,
and all the twelve years of her life, she had only been
Frankie. She was an I person who had to walk around
and do things by herself. All other people had a we
to claim, all others except her. When Berenice said
we she meant Honey and Big Mama, her lodge, or her
church. The we of her father was the store. All mem
bers of clubs have a we to belong to and talk about.
The soldiers in the army can say we, and even the
criminals on chain-gangs. But the old Frankie had had
no we to claim, unless it would be the terrible summer
we of her and John Henry and Berenice— and that was
the last we in the world she wanted. Now all this was
suddenly over with and changed. There was her brother
and the bride, and it was as though when first she saw
them something she had known inside of her: They are
the we of me. (p. 35)
In her innocence, Frankie does not fully comprehend the
sexual implications of the marriage or the feeling the en
gaged couple arouses in her, "a feeling that she could not
205
name, . . , like the feelings of the spring, only more
sudden and more sharp" (p. 22).
The wedding and Frankie*s discovery about it coincide
with her emotional needs at this stage of her life, a fan
tasy more "realistic" in a way than her earlier ones. By
attaching herself to her brother and his bride, she is ex
tending her natural family, looking for an identification
and completeness which she does not find at home. The
closeness that she senses in the couple actually exists,
unlike her mental picture of Jarvis with the Eskimos, or of
her blood flowing in the veins of soldiers of all nations.
The wedding brings Frankie's imaginary world closer to
home. Also, it furnishes a concrete symbol for a close
human relationship, but a relationship which necessarily
excludes other people. In this way, the wedding works well
on the metaphorical level of the story, a level of meaning
which Mrs. McCullers emphasizes by leaving out a detailed
account of the ceremony itself. Its importance lies in
Frankie's fantasies about it and in her reactions to her
shattered illusions.
As the central metaphor of the novel, the wedding
illustrates Carson McCullers' method of working and the
difference in emphasis provided in The Member of the
Wedding as compared to her other novels. The thematic
value of this "normal" marriage between "normal" people
206
lies in its exclusiveness, a natural fact of this kind of
relationship which Frankie does not understand. In
Beflections on a Golden Eye or, more obviously, in The
Ballad of the Sad Cafe, neither the marriages nor the mar
riage partners can be called "normal," the very fact of
their eccentricities serving thematically to represent the
inevitable separateness of people. This difference extends
to other features in the novels as well. Both the natural
and the surrogate family in The Member of the Wedding oper
ate as more natural metaphors than the microcosms of some
of her other novels. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and
Clock Without Hands, the cast of characters is rather large
and rather loosely connected, the problems that each one
carries as his badge of isolation so varied that the theme
is somewhat diffused, perhaps even contrived in the more
extremely eccentric characters. In contrast, The Member of
the Wedding, by concentrating upon a single family group
and by using natural situations to represent the theme, be
comes, not necessarily a more interesting novel than those
with strong Gothic elements, but a successful blend of
metaphor and realism particularly effective for represent
ing contemporary themes.
As a further illustration of the way Mrs. McCullers
uses the family rather than a group of eccentrics to sug
gest the difficulty of communication, she shows that even
20?
members of the same family often fail to comprehend fully
one another's needs. When Jarvis brings Frankie a doll
%
after his return from Alaska, he seems to be confirming her
in her childhood, an image she is trying to reject. Her
father successfully tunes out her attempts to communicate
anything other than routine matters.
"Papa, I think I ought to tell you now. I'm not
coming back here after the wedding."
He had ears to hear with, loose large ears with
lavender rims, but he did not listen. ... So she
sharpened her voice and chiseled the words into his
head.
"I have to buy a wedding dress and some wedding
shoes and a pair of pink sheer stockings."
He heard and, after a consideration, gave her a
permissive nod. (p. 43)
When she tries to express her sense of their coming parting,
he can think only of a scolding she needs for recent be
havior.
"Papa," she said, "I will write you letters." . . .
He would miss her in-the house all by himself when
she was gone. . . . She wanted to speak some sorry
words and love her father, but just at that moment
he cleared his throat in the special way he used
when he was going to lay down the law to her. (p. 44)
Berenice does understand Frankie, but without the
moral authority which a real mother would have, she can
attempt only to influence Frankie, guiding her away from
her fantasies toward more realistic behavior. Berenice
represents the opposite side of experience from Frankie's,
208
her wisdom and knowledge of human limitations a necessary
complement to Frankie's innocence and naive expectations
about life. Between them, Berenice and Frankie illustrate
and illuminate all aspects of the novel's themej identity,
separateness or loneliness, and love, and in each area,
Berenice represents the recognition and acceptance of human
limitations, Frankie, the yearning of humans who have yet
to learn those limitations.
Berenice, for example, helps Frankie understand the
nature of one's identity. In response to Frankie's ques
tion, "Why is it against the law to change your name?"
Berenice explains that "things accumulate around your
name," . . . You have a name and one thing after another
happens to you, and you behave in various ways and do
things, so that soon the name begins to have a
meaning" (p. 93)* The question of identity leads into the
*
problem of separateness, as even Frankie realizes.
"What I've been trying to say is this. Doesn't it
strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you?
I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie
Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each
other, and stay together year in and year out in the
same room. . . . And I can't ever be anything else
but me, and you can't ever be anything else but you.
Have you ever thought of that?" (p. 9*0
As a Negro, Berenice can effectively articulate the loneli
ness and separateness that Frankie has been feeling all
summer.
209
"We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or
that way and we don't know why. But we caught anyhow.
I born Berenice. You born Frankie. John Henry born
John Henry. Any maybe we wants to widen and bust
free. But no matter what we do we still caught. . . .
We each one of us somehow caught all but ourself. . . .
I'm caught worse than you is.” . . •
F. Jasmine understood why she had said this, and
it was John Henry who-asked in his child voice* "Why?"
"Because I am black," said Berenice. "Because I
am colored. Everybody is caught one way or another.
But they done drawn completely extra bounds around
all colored people." (pp. 113-11*0
Thus Berenice embodies both the specific problems of sep
arateness through her blackness and the possibilities of
love through the affection she offers to Frankie and John
Henry.
Berenice must often act in the role of mother to
Frankie, trying to curb her tomboyish nature and to help
her find a more feminine identity, above all to help
Frankie prepare for the disappointments she will encounter
as her daydreams fail. When Frankie develops her "crush"
on the wedding, Berenice counters with the practical sug
gestion that she find herself a "beau."
"You heard me," said Berenice, "A beau. A nice
little white boy beau. • . . Now you belong to change
from being so rough and greedy and big. . . . You
ought to fix yourself up nice in your dresses. And
speak sweetly and act sly." (pp. 67-8)
Though Frankie will not be dissuaded from her plans,
she does seek Berenice's reassurance about her appearance,
an interest which is on the surface a part of her desire
210
to fulfill her new role as P. Jasmine Addams, a complement
to Jarvis and Janice, but in reality a sign of her emerging
sexual nature.
Most adolescents in American fiction undergo an initi
ation into sex awareness, and Frankie is no exception,
though her experience is oblique and incomplete. For
example, she remembers with loathing the "queer sin" she
committed with a boy her own age (p. 21). More immediately
a problem, the ambiguity of sex as a part of identity
faces her. Chester E. Elsinger's statement about Mick in
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter describes Frankie as well.
The.adolescent girl, in Mrs. McCullers* fiction, has
the problem not only of sex awareness but of sex de
termination. It is not the responsibility of woman
hood that she reluctantly must take up but the decision
to be a woman at all that she must make. She is, then,
sexless, hovering between the two sexes, this girl with
a boy * s name.3^
Consequently, when the tomboy "Frankie" gives way to the
more feminine F. Jasmine, the adolescent girl is beginning
to become a "member" of her own sex, a necessary stage in
her development.
However, Carson McCullers is not writing the usual or
typical novel about the initiation of the adolescent in
America. The vagueness and incompleteness of Frankie's be
ginning of sexual awareness is merely a part of her larger
3^Flction of the Forties, p. 250.
2X1
initiation into the contemporary world, an ambivalent
process, as Ihab Hassan points out.
Yet it is characteristic of initiation in the con
temporary world that its course must be oblique and
its rewards ambivalent. . . . The sexual impulse , . .
is diffused through the novel; it acts as a faint,
persistent scratching on Frankie's consciousness;
and it is never really understood.35
It is the nature of Mrs. McCullers' protagonists, those
seeking some kind of love relationship, to be somewhat
baffled by experience, to aspire to more than life will
mete out to them. In this stage of her life, Frankie must
seek out people who will not deny her perceptions about
things, her world as she imagines it to be and as she
wishes it to be. As Ihab Hassan says, "If she dreams in
ordinately, it is because her dreams confirm her in the
illusion that she is enlarging her experience at the same
time that she is communing with the world at large,-"36
Since it is part of Berenice's function to deny Frankie's
illusions which interfere with her growth toward maturity,
Frankie very logically seeks confirmation for her emotional
needs outside the family.
The town, which has been the scene for Frankie's tom-
boyish exploits, must also provide her with experiences for
this next stage in learning about the world. As she reach-
35Radical Innocence, p. 220.
3^Radical Innocence, p. 220._____________________ _
212
es out to communicate her new, expanded sense of life, she
encounters new types of people and invades areas formerly
closed to her. For example, Frankie symbolically enters
the adult world when she enters the Blue Moon cafe where
the soldiers gather, the same soldiers she used to envy
for their potential involvement with the outside world.
There was no written law to keep her out, no lock
and chain on the screen door. But she had known in
an unworded way that it was a forbidden place to
children. The Blue Moon was a place for holiday
soldiers and the grown and free. (p. 48)
Frankie*s resolution to become a part of the world by trav
eling with the married couple after the wedding must be
implemented initially in the town as she seeks to enlarge
her circle of communicants, even to the bartender in the
Blue Moon Cafe.
It is far easier, it came to her as she remembered
Berenice, to convince strangers of the coming to pass
of dearest wants than those in your own home kitchen.
The thrill of speaking certain words— Jarvis and
Janice, wedding and Winter Hill— was such that F.
Jasmine, when she had finished, wanted to start all
over again, (p. 49)
Frankie interprets the indifference of strangers as inter
est in her plans, a kind of confirmation she did not find
at home. Consequently, it is both Frankie's romantic pro
jections and her innocence which keep her from recognizing
the real nature of her encounter with a young soldier in
the Blue Moon Cafe.
213
Not only did she feel that unexplainable connection
she was to feel between herself and other total stran
gers of that day, there was another sense of recog
nitions it seemed to F. Jasmine they exchanged the
special look of friendly, free travelers who meet for
a moment at some stop along the way, (p, 50)
When the soldier asks Frankie for a date and later tries
to seduce her, Frankie, as she escapes, can only think of
the word "crazy" to describe him. Though she does not
understand the incident completely, her uneasiness keeps
her from confiding in Berenice.
Frankie's experiences in town do not really enlarge
her knowledge, since she is imposing her own interpreta
tion upon her encounters, imagining "connections'* with
people as a projection of her new vision of the world. It
is in the family, however, that she must be brought back
to reality, since it was here that she seemed to find her
best chance to become a "member," to Join a natural love
relationship. Frankie must learn that even in the family
love can be one-sided. This fact, a part of Mrs.
McCullers' theme in most of her novels,^ is illustrated
3?Carson McCullers explains her theory of love in de
tail in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. "First of all, love is
a joint experience between two persons~but the fact that
it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar
experience to the two people involved. There are the lover
and the beloved, but these two come from different coun
tries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the
stored up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a
long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this.
He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing.
214
in Frankie as well as in other characters, for she too out
grows people when she no longer needs them, a situation
demonstrated by her relationship to Berenice and to John
Henry. This relationship is suggested in a kind of tab
leau at the end of a long afternoon of serious discussion
when Frankie climbs into Berenice’s lap and John Henry
comes close to share in the embrace. Symbolically, this
marks the end of Frankie’s childhood and of her dependence
upon Berenice, for, after a brief rebellious and childish
streak of behavior following her rejection at the wedding,
Frankie enters a new phase of her life. By moving to a new
part of town with her father and some relatives, and by
leaving Berenice behind, by beginning a new school year
with a new school chum, Frankie finds what she has needed,
a sense of belonging, in a manner much more real and pos
sible than her previous fantasies.
It can be argued that Frankie does nothing to achieve
her own maturity, that time and events merely bring her to
a new stage in her existence. Even the death of John
Henry, though it haunts her for a time in nightmare dreams,
and saying goodbye to Berenice do not long interfere with
her new life. She can even receive letters from her
He comes to know a new strange loneliness and it is this
knowledge that makes him suffer. . . . (The Ballad of the
Sad Caf€i The Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers
LNew York, 1951]» p. 25).
215
brother, once more in far*off places, without envy. Yet
she has known some of the experiences necessary to her de
velopment. Mark Schorer says, she settles "at last into
her own identity. . . . The materials necessary to that
discovery she already possesses* the painful inevitability
of separateness, the moderate mitigation to be found in
love."38
These facts illustrate the various aspects of human
relationships as Carson McCullers views them. Frankie's
first search for a love relationship cannot be reciprocated
because her need outweighs the couple's need for her. She
in turn can dismiss her old life when she establishes a new
relationship. It is her very innocence and vulnerability
that cause her to be careless with the affections of John
Henry and Berenice, characteristic of adolescence but also
an illustration of the capriciousness of human love.
Berenice also illustrates these ideas, though through ex
perience rather than innocence. She has known love in her
first marriage, and when Frankie tentatively recognizes it
in the engaged couple, Berenice's story of her first husband
Ludi takes on more significance to the young girl. Berenice
who has long offered Frankie a mother's love, tries at this
time to help the young girl comprehend the nature of married
38"McCullers and Capote* Basic Patterns," in The
Creative Present, p. 91.
216
love, something which Frankie has not been able to observe
in the natural process of growing up,
"Now I am here to tell you I was happy. There was
no human woman in all the world more happy than I was
in them days," she said, "And that includes every-
body. , • , It includes all queens and millionaires
and first ladies of the land. And I mean it includes
people of all color. You hear me, Frankie? No human
woman in all the world was happier than Berenice Sadie
Brown." (p. 83)
Through her subsequent marriages, all of them attempts to
recapture the happiness of the first, she represents the
human yearning for love and the almost accidental way it
appears or fails to appear in people's lives. She, however
much more than Frankie, understands human limitations and
the inevitability of disappointment, as she recognizes the
fact that Frankie no longer has any need of her. Ihab
Hassan*s comment sums up Berenice's significance in the
novel.
Her understanding of life is as tragic as Frankie's
misunderstanding is pathetic. Without her, the tor
tured sensitivity of Frankie, after all, which has
no correlative but the wistfulness of puberty— would
seem pointless and contrived. But between innocence
and experience only illusions can lie. And the
illusions of Frankie disguise the hopes of all man
kind even if her destiny falls short of what our
moment fully requires.39
Carson McCullers needs both innocence and experience
to present a full exploration of her theme. She presents
her novel as a parable of human aspirations, intended, like
39Radical Innocence, p. 223.
21?
Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, to transcend the social cli
mate in which the characters live. Mrs. McCullers* inter
est lies "beyond the social implications of character and
action, though critics like Eisinger do not completely
accept this fact in her fiction, as he makes clear in his
comment.
There is no room in her work for the consequences of
human action? there is no sense of the continuity of
life. She has succeeded perhaps too well in creating
an art form that is cut off from life, . . . from
society, from morality, from religion, from ideas, .
from concern with man*s burdens or with man's hope.^"0
Admittedly, Mrs. Cullers has chosen as her microcosm a
narrowly prescribed corner of humanity, but she uses it
effectively to illustrate a universal human need to be part
of the human community in general and to be a part of a
close love relationship in particular.
Though both Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers are
concerned with similar human problems, that is, with human
relationships on the very personal level, their different
approaches to the problem (at least in these two novels)
lead them to set up different kinds of families through
which to explore their themes. Since Mrs. McCullers views
the possibilities for complete fulfillment in human rela
tionships in more limited terms than Eudora Welty, she
necessarily selects the kind of microcosm which will
^ Fiction of the Forties, p. 258. ___________________
218
express these limited possibilities! a small, incomplete
family and an unformed, adolescent girl as the central
character. In The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers
presents a compassionate view of human beings whose search
for love is often painful, even when it is partially
successful.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE HUMAN CONDITION
Together, James Agee In A Death In the Family, and
John Updike in The Centaur present the most encompassing
view of human nature of any of the novels in this study by
adding metaphysical questions to their thematic considera
tions. Questions of life and death, of religious belief
and immortality which interest Agee and Updike in these two
novels appear in some of the other novels as well, Lie Down
in Darkness, for example, or Go Tell It on the Mountain,
but with more specific applications. When John Cheever
ends both his Wapshot novels with the death of someone in
the family, he is symbolizing the death of a tradition
rather than dealing with the larger existential questions
of human existence. Peyton's death in Lie Down in Darkness
and the Grimes family's religion in Go Tell It on the
Mountain are part of the social and psychological tradi
tions being explored in these novels and must be viewed in
this context.
James Agee and John Updike translate their families
into general human experience, Agee through a deceptively
simple story, Updike through a deceptively complicated one.
219
220
They go beyond the matters dealt with by Eudora Welty and
Carson McCullers, that is, the problems of personal rela
tionships, to explore the nature of man himself (The
Centaur) or the nature of the human family (A Death in the
Family).
A Death in the Family* The Continuity of Human Experience
As a posthumous novel, James Agee’s A Death in the
Family presents problems for the critic, particularly in
regard to the placement of the sections which lie outside
the time span of the forward narrative. The difference in
the style of these two kinds of writing adds to the prob
lems and to the temptation to speculate about the author’s
plan for the book’s overall structure.Peter Ohlin, for
example, describes A Death in the Family as a novel which
"shirks structure in favor of ’texture,'"2 even though he
does develop his own theories about the structural rela
tionship between the sections. Some critics look for unity
in the novel apart from its structure, W. M. Frohock
through Agee's visual method, a "technique of script-
w r i t i n g , ’^ Dwight McDonald through the theme, "the con
frontation of love . . . and death as the negation of life
3-Peter Ohlin mentions two recently discovered chapters
for A Death in the Family in the Introduction to his study,
Agee (New York. 1966). t>. 2.
2Ibld.. p. 7.
3The Novel of Violence (Dallas, I960), p. 228.
221
A
and yet a necessary part of it."
As these critics recognize, A Death in the Family
possesses qualities of style and theme that make it an ex
tremely effective novel in spite of an apparent lack of
unity. However, since the subject matter is in part auto
biographical, it is easy to conclude that the novel’s
meaning lies only in the personal story, something which
Alfred Kazin suggests when he comments that Agee wrote to
"externalize a private grief."5 David L. Stevenson- also
finds the novel primarily a personal story, one which
"lacks narrative thrust and intellectual excitement." He
insists that Agee "exploits only the emotional content of
his material, not its meaning,
In spite of the possible incompleteness of the novel
and the personal basis for the story, A Death in the Family
does present sufficient evidence to suggest a significance
beyond the personal level. In fact, some of the more ob
vious features of the novel, those which relate the per
sonal story, create this other level of meaning and provide
the unifying factor for the novel. The domestic quality of
A
"Death of a Poet" (rev. of A Death in the Pamilv).
The Mew Yorker. XXXIII (November 6 ,""1957), p7 227.---
■5"Good-By to James Agee," Contemporaries (New York.
1957). p. 187. --------------
"Tender Anguish" (rev. of A Death in the Pamilv).
The Nation, CLXXXV (December 1A, 1957), PP." A6o-l._____
222
the story, the use of both child and adult points of view,
the conflict in religious belief, the emphasis upon birth,
marriage and death as the basic facts of life are some of
the elements in the novel with which James Agee creates a
kind of paradigm of human existence through the family.
As Agee illustrates, the family, mankind's most basic so
cial unit, provides the individual with an identity and a
purpose for living, and establishes, through the birth of
children, a link in the continuity of the ancestral line.
Like Thornton Wilder's characters in Our Town, the family
in A Death in the Family illustrates basic and universal
human values and the cycle of human life, but unlike the
families in Grover's Corners, Agee's characters are highly
individualized, living intensely personal lives and located
specifically in time and place. In other words, the
Follett family in A Death in the Family serves as a meta
phor for the human family itself, a celebration of life and
domestic love as well as an exploration of the incompre
hensibility of death and renewal through each new genera
tion.
Though the time setting, 1915* is a literal, auto
biographical fact rather than part of a deliberately con
trived fable as in Delta Wedding, the removal of the story
from the contemporary scene and its social problems helps
to keep the focus on family life itself. In addition, the
223
social world inhabited by the Folletts is an extremely
private one, bound up primarily in the home itself with a
few excursions into the community and the country, and
limited to the immediate family, Jay and Mary and their
two children and close relatives on both sides* Neverthe
less, Agee very carefully provides tangible roots for his
characters and a social background which explains certain
factors in their make-up. For example, the description of
the neighborhood, given at the beginning of the novel, sets
the Folletts within their social class.
It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solid
ly lower middle class, with one or two juts apiece
on either side of that. The houses correspondeds
middle-sized gracefully fretted wood houses built
in the late nineties and early nineteen hundreds,
with small front and side and more spacious back
yards, and trees in the yards, and porches. . . .
There were few good friends among the grown people,
and they were not poor enough for the other sort of
intimate acquaintance, but every one nodded and
spoke, and even might talk short times. . . • The
men were mostly small businessmen, one or two very
modestly executives, one or two worked with their
hands, most of them clerical, and most of them be
tween thirty and forty-five.‘
Agee describes family routines in the neighborhood too,
mothers washing supper dishes before coming out to sit on
porch rockers, fathers watering the yards with garden hose,
and children playing outside on summer evenings until bed
time. Though a passing streetcar reminds the reader that
?A Death in the Family (New York, 1956), pp. 3-4. All
subsequent references will be to this edition.
224
this is a city, the kind of life described in this opening
passage suggests small town America.
The feeling of other parts of the city, just beginning
to enter the automobile age in 1915t is conveyed through
scenes like the one in which six-year-old Hufus Follett
goes with his father to a Charlie Chaplin movie. Their
leisurely walk home afterwards takes them through familiar
streets.
Gay Street was full of absorbed faces; many of the
store windows were still alight. Plaster people, in
ennobled postures, stiffly wore untouchably new
clothes. . . . They turned into a darker street . . .
and came into the odd, shaky light of Market Square.
It was almost empty at this hour, but here and there,
along the pavement streaked with horse urine, a wagon
stayed still, (pp. 14-15)
Ahead, Asylum Avenue lay bleak beneath its lamps. . . .
The stained glass of the L & N Depot smoldered like
an exhausted butterfly, and at the middle of the via
duct they paused to inhale the burst of smoke from a
switch engine which passed under. . . . Far down the
yard, a red light flicked to green; a moment later,
they heard the thrilling click. . . . They went on,
more idly than before. (p. 17)
These quoted passages reveal something of Agee*s
style, his method of creating "texture" through visual de
tail. Agee builds scenes this way not only to establish a
sense of time and place, but to capture the concreteness of
the physical world as his way of savoring existence itself.
In similar fashion, Agee creates the fabric of personal and
domestic life that characterizes his family through care
fully detailed accounts of daily activities and the
225
characters* response to them. For example, the scene in
which Jay takes Rufus to the movies has no direct function
in the plot, but serves instead to portray the relationship
between father and son, the nature of which is conveyed
through seemingly inconsequential details, like their stop
ping in front of a shop window which displays the kind of
grown-up cap Rufus wants but is too timid to ask for, or
Jay's visit to the saloon where he lifts Rufus up to the
bar in order to show him off, and the pact of silence be
tween them about Jay's drinking.
Throughout the novel, Agee affirms the value of life
by showing his regard for its most ordinary qualities,® a
theme similar to Thornton Milder’s in Our Town but imple
mented differently. Milder works through putative state
ment, Emily's return to life, for example, Agee through the
thickly detailed texture of his novel that displays his
relish for the physical, sensory world in which his char
acters live as well as his reverence for human life as it
is experienced in small activities, like the trip to the
movies, or Rufus's shopping excursion with his great aunt.
It is out of this pattern of daily life that the larger
questions arise, those dealing with sudden death and man's
belief about life, in one way or another, with the meaning
O
Ohlin calls this theme "the holiness of human
reality," Agee, p. 11.
226
of existence itself. Though no final answers are offered,
the novel takes its significance from the way Agee poses
this duality common to human experience everywhere, the
tension operating between man's absorption in his day-to-
day existence and his awareness of the finiteness of his
life.
Agee adds another dimension to his theme by exploring
the individual's place in the continuity of his family
line, a domesticated version of Thornton Wilder's theme in
The Skin of Our Teeth, which celebrates the endurance of
the human race. But in contrast to Wilder, who takes his
allegorical family galloping through the ages of man's
history on earth, Agee arrests time^ in order to focus on
a particular generation of a particular family and to show
their place in the continuum of human existence. This
theme is articulated in one of the flashback scenes in
which Jay sits in the dark comforting Rufus, a very young
child at the time, and recalls his own mother performing
the same service for him.
And before his time, before he was even dreamed of in
this world, she must have lain under the hand of her
mother or her father and they in their childhood under
other hands, away on back. . . .
^The setting helps to create this effect by providing
a quiet time and place in the life of an American family
and divorcing them from any major external concerns.
227
How far we all come. How far we all come away from
ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go
home again. . . . And what*s it all for? All I tried
to be, all I ever wanted and went away for, what*s it
all for?
Just one way, you do get back home. You have a boy
or a girl of your own and . . . it’s almost the same
as if you were your own self again, as young as you
could remember. (p. 9^)
As Jay realizes, the individual finds his identity within
the family and in his children, each generation thus re
establishing the continuity of the family. This theme is
further illustrated from Rufus’s point of view in another
scene in which Rufus is taken to visit his great-great-
grandmother, an ancient woman one hundred four years old
living in the hill country in a "great, square-logged gray
cabin with a frame second floor" (p. 233). This meeting
gains its significance from the actual physical confronta
tion between the child and the old woman, a purely symbolic
ritual since she is no longer aware of anything or anyone
around her. "Vague light sparkled in the crackled blue of
the eyes like some kind of remote ancestor's anger, and the
sadness of time dwelt in the blue-breathing, oily center,
lost and alone and far away" (p. 239 )• This meeting, Peter
Ohlin points out, "places Rufus as the last link of a long
chain, located in time and place, belonging somewhere
10Agee, p. 207.
228
Agee presents this part of his theme from two points
of view, the adults* and the child's, the double nature of
which is expressed in part by the stylistic differences be
tween the forward narrative scenes and the flashback scenes
which are written in impressionistic, sometimes lyrical
style. Since many of these sections project Rufus's point
of view from periods of time earlier than the main story,
they seem somewhat detached from the forward thrust of the
central narrative, almost as if the family were being pre
sented through two different perspectives. Actually, Agee
is relating these two perspectives to Jay's theory that a
man recreates himself in his own children, in Jay's words
"as if you were almost your own self again" (p. 94). The
narrative sections of the novel present the adult world in
which identity has been attained and life patterns estab
lished, primarily through the family. The lyrical sections
present the perspectives of a small boy as he develops an
increasing awareness of his world and his place in it.
Rufus's world begins in love and security and expands to
include the fact of death, a progression which brings him
at the age of six to an important stage in his inheritance.
This cyclical pattern of the generations forms the basis of
Agee's paradigm of the family and provides the thematic
unity for the novel.
Agee creates the child's world by beginning with very
229
simple family scenes which might stand out in a child's
memory, summer evenings on the lawn, for example, like
this scene from the prologue.
On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father
and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my
mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am
lying there. . . . They are not talking much, and the
talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, . . . All my
people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices
gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping
birds. . . . One is my mother who is good to me. One
is my father who is good to me. . . , After a little
I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling,
draws me unto her. (pp. 7-8)
The simple assertions made in this passage represent
Rufus's attempt to define the essential facts of his life
by identifying the members of his family and their rela
tionship to him. Rufus's consciousness of family is fur
ther expanded in later scenes, for example, the one in
which Jay comforts his son in the darkness. In one passage
from this scene, Agee adopts the language and rhythm of the
Bible to create a psalm to the family, especially to the
warmth and security it offers to a small child, as this
sample illustrates.
I hear my father; I need never fear.
I hear my mother; I shall never be lonely, or want
for love.
When I am hungry it is they who provide for me; when
I am in dismay, it is they who fill me with comfort.
When I am astonished or bewildered, it is they who
make the weak ground firm beneath my soul; it is in
them that I put my trust, (p. 82)
230
The scene ends with a further affirmation of the family
when Mary comes into the bedroom to tuck her child in for
the night and to stand for a few moments with her husband
looking down at the sleeping child. In this domestic tab
leau, the family circle is completed and home and family
are firmly established as the guardian of the personal life
against the outside world.
Agee uses his various kinds of style to advantage, as
these sections illustrate. His use of the present tense
for some of the passages representing early childhood makes
more emphatic Jay's theory that a man lives again through
his children. Agee gives Hufus's memory scenes an immedi
acy which suggests the constant and close connection be
tween an adult and his own childhood. Additionally, by
writing these passages in a subjective, impressionistic
style, Agee attempts to convey a young child's view of the
world as a blend of his feelings and his vaguely realized
concepts. As Rufus grows older, his feelings and impres
sions become more sharply defined, more responsive to spe
cific situations. To a certain extent, the difference in
style represents a difference between the instinctive
emotional world of childhood and the more rational world
of adults. However, the distinction is not an absolute
one, for the contrast between emotion and intellect exists
in the adult world as well.
231
Primarily, the sections outside the main narrative
present the earlier story of a child’s development through
experiences that help him gain his identity and his know
ledge of life. For the child Rufus, this means encounter
ing new experiences which are not always pleasant and which
must be bolstered by reassurance of his place within the
family. One such experience comes just before the birth
of his little sister Catherine* Rufus has been able to
sense but not to understand the special difference in his
mother and in the family.
For some time now his mother had seemed different.
Almost always when she spoke to him it was as if she
had something else very much on her mind, and so was
making a special effort to be gentle and attentive to
him. , . , There were other times when she seemed to
have almost no interest in him, but only to be doing
things for him because they had to be done. He felt
subtly lonely and watched her carefully. He saw that
his father’s manner had changed towards her ever so
little? he treated her as if she were very valuable.
(pp. 102-3)
His confusion is only increased by the evasive explanation
his mother gives him about the coming "surprise.”
He asked where it was, then and heard his father's
laugh; his mother looked panicky and cried, "Jay!"
all at once, and quickly Informed him, "In heaven;
still up in heaven." (p. 10A)
As Peter Ohlin points out, this incident brings Rufus his
232
11
first experience with alienation, especially since he is
sent away from home at the time to stay with his grand
parents.
Rufus’s second experience with alienation comes out
side the family circle and can therefore not be completely
resolved by the family’s love and protection. As a child
too young for kindergarten, he finds it fascinating to
watch older children on their way to and from school, an
•'enviable community," as Ohlin describes it, one which-
Rufus longs to join.^-2 His shy attempts to communicate
with the children are met only by teasing and by continued
betrayals as they taunt him about his "nigger" name.
It puzzled him very deeply. If they knew his name
all the time, as apparently they did, then why did
they keep on asking as if they had never heard it, or
as if they couldn’t remember it? It was just to tease.
But why did they want to tease? . . . Why was it that
when some of them were asking him, and others were
backing them up or just looking on, there was some
kind of strange, tight force in the air all around
them that made them all seem very much together and
that made him feel very much alone and very eager to
be liked by them, together with them? (p. 218)
That such betrayals are possible indicates the nature
of Rufus’s world, his innocence and trust in people being
13-Ohlin says of this incidents "His fRufus'sl lack
of comprehension and his confusion lead to a sense of
alienation which is symbolically presented by the fact
that he is sent away from home. Ohlin says further in
the incident with the school children "the theme of alien
ation is continued." Agee, p. 206.
12Ibid.
233
the measure of the love and trust in his home, a situation
which his mother expresses very forcibly on one occasion
when a relative has played a trick on Rufus.
"That’s just about enough of that, Ted. I think
it’s just a perfect shame, deceiving a little child
like that who’s been brought up to trust people, and
laughing right in his face!" . . .
"He ust meant it for a joke," his father and Aunt
Kate said together.
"Well, it’s a pretty poor kind of joke, if you ask
me," his mother said, "violating a little boy’s trust."
(pp. 2^5-6)
Violated trust as a theme unites these particular episodes
in the boy’s life, Peter Ohlin argues, and, in their cum
ulative effect, these instances prefigure the final huge
violation of trust in the death of his father, "an inci
dent so enormous and mysterious that it is beyond com
prehension. "^-3 However, to make such a direct connection
between these episodes and the father's death, as Ohlin
does, is to force them out of their context as natural ex
periences in a child's growing up. Rufus is learning to
move from the consciousness of self so natural to a young
child’s ego to a consciousness of others and an acceptance
of disappointments. Running as a counter theme to the
pattern of love and security in the boy's life, this theme,
a child's developing awareness, blunts the edge of too much
sentimentality and too easy affirmation of an idyllic life,
^ibid. , p. 208______________________________________
234
a double theme that Is apparent in the adult scenes as
well. However, both child and adult achieve identity in
and strength from the family, and this is the justification
of the sentiment with which Agee treats his family scenes.
The scene preceding Jay's accident illustrates the
quality of domestic life on the adult level, showing both
the mutual affection between husband and wife and the few
areas of discord between them. When Jay receives a tele
phone call in the middle of the night from his brother
Ralph, informing Jay of their father*s sudden illness, Mary
gets up too to show her sympathy and concern and to help
him get ready for the journey to his parents* home. Dif
fident with each other, they find indirect ways to express
their feelings, in this case, by Mary's getting out of bed
to prepare an elaborate breakfast for Jay, which he eats
without appetite just to show his appreciation. He in turn
straightens the rumpled bed for her to discover after his
departure. Through all their small talk about not waking
the children, about what Mary wants for her birthday, about
starting the noisy car in the middle of the night runs the
current of their feelings, which establishes on the adult
level the atmosphere of warmth and affection that has been
portrayed in the earlier episodes involving the child’s
point of view.
As an important episode in the plot and as the only
235
full scene outside the flashbacks between Jay and Mary,
this one must firmly establish the kind of relationship
that forms the basis of the family portrayed in the novel.
Even differences that do exist between husband and wife must
be viewed in the light of this relationship, which the
author presents as strong enough to overcome any potential
conflicts in the marriage. However, the strong sentimen
tality pervading this scene is tempered by differences be
tween Jay and Mary which lie beneath the surface but which
are not often expressed.
For example, though Jay senses Mary's condescending
attitude toward his family, he privately shares her feel
ings toward his father, "useless without ever meaning to
be" (p. 30)t and his fumbling drunken brother Ralph whose
good sense Jay cannot sufficiently depend upon to know whe
ther the phone call about their father's Illness is to be
taken seriously. When Mary suggests waiting until morning
to make sure, Jay, pricked by his own bad conscience, near
ly lashes out at her, but controls his annoyance.
Because, to his shame, he had done the same kinds of
wondering himself, he was now exasperated afresh. The
thought even flashed across his mind, That's easy for
you to say. He's not your father, and besides you've
always looked down at him. But he drove this thought
so well away that he thought ill of himself for having
believed it. (p. 28)
Mary, indulging in her reflections after Jay leaves, real
izes ultimately where her thoughts are leading her, and she,
236
also conscience-stricken, prays for forgiveness.
r She was sure that she didn't look down on him.
Clay's fatherj , as many of Jay's relatives all but
said to her face and as she feared that Jay himself
occasionally believeds • . . but she could not like
him, as almost everyone else liked him ... in spite
of his shortcomings. . . , And worse, at the bottom
of it all, maybe Jay's father was the one barrier be
tween them, the one stubborn, unresolved, avoided
thing, in their complete mutual understanding of Jay's
people, his "background." (pp. 50* 52)
On the social level, the marriage does represent dif
ferent backgrounds, a combination of social elements which
Michael Roe lists as opposing forces operating on deeper
levels* city and country, conscious and unconscious, even
"the civilized and the primordial,"-^ Leslie Fiedler adds
the opposition between instinctual and intellectual, and
religious conflict as part of the differences.*5 Both Mr.
Roe and Mr. Fiedler view the conflict suggested by these
forces as part of the novel's theme, as "major tensions"
which produce Rufus's 'latent personality," in Mr. Roe's
1
words. ° However, the family differences do not really
represent extreme polarities in the marriage, nor do all
the conflicts follow family lines, the matter of religious
"A Point of Focus in James Agee's A Death in the
Family," Twentieth Century Literature, XII (October, 1966),
p. 14-9.
^-5"An Encounter with Death" (rev. of A Death in the
Family), The New Republic. CXXXVII (December 9, 1957),
P. 25.
16"A Point of Focus," p. IA9.
23?
differences, for example, which actually divides Mary from
members of her own family. The conflicts actually cluster
around two central issues, religious belief and social
background, both of which contribute thematically to the
story as a paradigm of the human family.
Through the combination of urban and rural backgrounds
in the marriage, the author suggests a fusion of two tra
ditional ways of living in human society. These elements
are muted in this novel, used to represent certain traits
of character and to produce the blend of elements which
will emerge in Rufus*s personality, as Michael Roe suggests
(see page 2^6). Jay Follett represents, in a humble way,
the classic American story of a self-made man who rises
above his origins to join a different social level, inci
dentally gaining the acceptance of his wife’s family in the
process. Yet, Jay has retained many of the ways that re
veal his unsophisticated, rural background, in his speech
and manners, and in many of his preferences. He looks for
country men when he enters the saloon, men from the "Powell
River Valley," and he would have preferred, rather than
Mary's elaborate breakfast for his trip, a visit to one of
the night lunchrooms, "small, weakly lighted holes-in-the
wall, . . , which served railroad men," and where "you never
saw a woman" (p. kj).
The strong pull of Jay* s background becomes apparent
238
as he drives in the middle of the night away from the cen
ter of the city, past the edge of town, the "flea-bitten
semi-rurality which always peculiarly depressed him"(p. 44),
and into the country. He feels at home with common workmen
like the ferryman who takes him across the river.
"Hope tain’t no trouble, brung ya up hyer sich an
hour," the ferryman said. ...
"My Paw. Took at the heart. Don’t know yet how bad
tis."
The man clacked his tongue like an old woman,
"That’s a mean way," he said. (p. 46)
He feels an affinity with the farm couple he sees waiting
in a wagon for the ferry, noting "the dark deeply lined
faces of the profound country which seemed ancient even in
early maturity and which always gave Jay a sense of
peace" (p. 47). Crossing the river brings Jay actually and
symbolically to his home country.
He always felt different once he was across the river.
This was the real, old, deep country now. Home coun
try. The cabins looked different to him, a little’
older and poorer and simpler, a little more homelike.
( p . 4>8)
These passages Indicate a deeper significance in the
matter of background than the social status of the charac
ters, though that too is part of the portrait being pre
sented. James Agee is suggesting that Jay Follett's charac
ter derives from the basic, fundamental strength of simple,
rural people, and that this is part of his contribution to
239
his son*s inheritance. This concept is best expressed in a
speech given late in the novel by one of the minor charac
ters, Walter Starr, a family friend, as he talks to the two
children about their father at the time of the funeral.
"Some people have a hard, hard time. No money, no
good schooling. Scarcely enough food. ... Your
daddy started like that. ... He had to work till it
practically killed him, for every little thing he ever
got. ... I always thought your father was a lot like
Lincoln. I don't mean getting ahead in the world. I
mean a man. . • . There was never a man who tried
harder, or hoped for more. I don't mean getting ahead.
I mean the right things. He wanted a good life, and
good understanding, for himself, for everybody. There
never was a braver man than your father, or a man that
was kinder, or more generous. They don't make them."
(pp. 302-3)
Walter Starr's speech is his contribution to Rufus's know
ledge of his father, a way of helping Rufus understand his
< *
legacy.
Because the characters and personality of Jay Follett
emerge so strongly in the novel, it is possible to read
A Death in the Family primarily as a character study and to
miss other levels of meaning, as Alfred Kazin seems to do
when he comments, "The personality of the dead father
actually comes through better than any of the living for he
is the single fact outside them to which they all respond
as one."-*-? The father is a center of interest for his role
as head of the family as well as for his character. Jay's
-*•?" Good-By to James Agee," p. 187•
240
early death is a death in the family, a breach in the nat
ural cycle of human life, both for the individual who will
not fulfill his natural life span and for the family he
leaves. Rufus especially, forced to an awareness of death
at the age of six, must preserve the memory of his father
as a son must always do. The scenes from early childhood,
the scenes between Jay and Rufus, the testimonials from
Walter Starr and others recreate and intensify the child*s
knowledge of his father which must last a lifetime. The
story of Jay Follett thus carries double impact.
Mary's character is not fully developed until after
Jay's death. She is presented in the first part of the
novel as a young woman whose character (like her husband's)
is formed in part by her social background and in part by
her own ideas about life. Mary's smugness about her social
background (in comparison to that provided by Jay's fam
ily), her gentility and strong sense of propriety, her
moral earnestness suggesting almost an innocence about the
ways of the world, all these project an image of a young
woman brought up in the protective, middle-class urban en
vironment of the early twentieth century. However, Mary
has gone beyond her family's standards, extending some of
her individual traits into a rather rigid way of thinking.
Her sense of propriety really amounts to prudery, as is
illustrated in her disgust with the "vulgar'* Charlie
241
Chaplin., or in her reluctance at the time of her pregnancy
to explain to Rufus why"she is so fat.
Mary would like her own moral code to govern her fam
ily, and Jay's lack of religious faith is a serious problem
to Mary, who finds religious belief necessary to explain
life and to put it into an orderly, moral pattern. As
young as her children are, Mary is already giving them re
ligious interpretations to questions they ask. She tries
to explain the possibilities of their grandfather's death
and the nature of heaven.
"And if you can't get well again, then God lets you
go to sleep and you can't see people any more."
"Don't you ever wake up again?"
"You wake up right away, in heaven, but people on
earth can't see you any more, and you can't see them."
(p. 56)
Rufus is old enough to be puzzled and to want answers* why
bad things happen like dogs eating his pet rabbitj why God
does not just make people be good since he has the power to
do anything. Mary can only give answers likes "We just
have to be sure that God knows best," or "God doesn't—
believe— in the— easy— way* . . . God wants us to come
to Him, to find Him, the best we can" (pp. 56-7). Though
religious matters do not concern Jay very much or disturb
him much, Mary takes very seriously what she considers to
be her responsibility toward her children, a problem which
2k2
she does not discuss with Jay but resolves in her private
thoughts.
But God showed her only what she knew alreadyj that
come what might she must, as a Christian woman, as a
Catholic bring up her children thoroughly and devoutly
in the Faith, and that it was also her task, more than
her husband's, that the family remain one, that the
gulf be closed, (p. $k)
After Jay*s death, the matter of religious belief
assumes greater significance on both the story and thematic
levels in the novel, first, as a potential influence on
Bufus and his sister through their mother's strong depend
ence upon her faith, second, as the central issue in the
adults' attempts to come to terms with the fact of death.
Much more than Thornton Wilder in Our Town where Emily's
death is mourned but accepted as a natural event, Agee
allows his characters to explore the meaning of Jay's death
as an overwhelming event that must be dealt with in some
comprehensible manner. The characters' responses to the
tragedy reflect their attitudes toward the enigma of human
existence itself, representing in general the conflict be
tween natural and supernatural explanations of life and
death.
Mary's brother Andrew and her father Joel view life in
natural terms, accepting only logical explanations of
events. When the family has gathered after Jay's death,
Andrew gives a long detailed account of the accident, how
Jay was thrown clear of the wreckage, how he was killed
2^3
instantly and painlessly with no visible wounds to mar his
body, Andrew tries, in his account, to comfort Mary with
these details, to ease her mind about the way Jay met his
death. Michael Roe says of this account that it is
Andrew*s attempt to "put in order, in rational terms, the
meaninglessness of Jay*s death."3-® Mary*s father seems to
realize this, as the family discusses epitaphs.
That’s what they*re for, epitaphs, Joel suddenly
realized. So you can feel you’ve got some control over
the death, you own it, you choose a name for it. The
same with wanting to know all you can about how it
happened. And trying to imagine it as Mary was. . . •
Any poor subterfuge’ll do* and welcome to *em. (p. 1?^)
Mary’s father interprets his responsibility as family
head as that of helping Mary face squarely and realistically
what lies ahead for her. A rational man himself, he wants
others to act rationally as well. Though he comprehends
her grief and offers comfort as the others do, he challenges
her courage by describing her situation with deliberate
bluntness.
You’ll bear it because there isn’t any choice— except
to go to pieces. You’ve got two children to take care
of. . . . It’s a kind of test, Mary, and it’s the only
kind that amounts to anything. ... It's just a test,
and it’s one that good people come through." (pp. 156-7)
Essentially, Joel is offering his daughter a choice between
his philosophy and her religion, against which he issues a
gentle warning. "Only one thing! take the greatest kind
18"A Point of Focus," p. 153.
2kk-
of care you don’t just— crawl into it like a hole and hide
in it'1 (p. 156).
Mary's Catholicism is basically conventional, sup
portive of family values and the moral order of life as she
views it. But, faced by tragedy, Mary transforms her faith
into a personal badge of courage and a credo by which to
expalin the unacceptable. Even Mary's Aunt Hannah, also
Catholic, senses that Mary's desperate need may lead her
into an overdependence upon religion.
MI want so much to be worthy of it," Mary said, her
eyes shining.
"Don't try too hard to be worthy of it, Mary. Don't
think of it that way. Just do your best to endure it
and let any questions of worthiness take care of it
self," ...
There was a kind of ambition there, Hannah felt, a
kind of pride or poetry, which was very mistaken and
very dangerous, (pp. 133-^)
Agee.presents many aspects of the religious question*
Hannah's moderation and Mary's potential fanaticism, the
rationalism of Joel and Andrew, and even a suggestion of
mysticism. In a quiet moment, when several of the family
feel something odd, a kind of strange presence in the room,
Mary insists that it is Jay's apirit, and she goes into the
bedroom to take her farewell. She and Hannah interpret the
incident as a religious experience, offering prayers. "May
the souls of the faithful through the mercy of God rest in
peace," Hannah whispered. "Blessed are the dead," (p. 186).
2 k5
Mary’s father reacts with rational skepticism,
"But if I can’t trust my common sense— I know it’s
nothing much, Poll, but it’s all I’ve got. If I can’t
trust that, what in Hell can I trustI
"God, you’n Harmah'd say. Par’s I’m concerned, it’s
out of the question." ... (p. 19^)
Nothing is resolved, for in this central fact of human ex
perience nothing can be, as Agee suggests in this part of
the novel. The discussion among the adults represents
their earnest attempt to reconcile the ambiguities inherent
in man’s mortality and his aspirations to transcend it
through some kind of immortality.
The various viewpoints expressed on the adult level
are filtered down to the children in less philosophical
terms, but with no great clarity. Mary has given her usual
religious explanations to her two children by way of ex
plaining their father's death, that their father will not be
coming back, that he is in heaven with God and that someday
they too would go to heaven and "all be together again, for
ever and ever" (p. 286). In spite of Mary’s attempts to
provide reassuring explanations, which the children accept
since they come from her, Rufus and Catherine find it diffi
cult to absorb and understand the experience of their fa
ther’s death. For Rufus, the one fact which emerges is
that his father is dead. Catherine is merely bewildered.
246
Rufus saw a much littler child than he was, with a
puzzled, round, red face which looked' angry, and he was
somewhat sorry for her in the bewilderment and loneli
ness he felt she was lost in, but more, he was annoyed
by this look of shut-in anger and this look of incom
prehension and he thought over and over: "Dead. He's
dead. That’s what he is; he*s dead"; and the room
where his father lay felt like a boundless hollowness
in the house and in his own being, as if he stood in
the dark near the edge of an abyss and could feel that
droop of space in the darkness. (pp« 315-16)
Rufus is old enough, as his sister is not, to sense the
finality of death, and he is sufficiently trained to give
appropriate responses to his mother's religious explana
tions, but his perceptions are, nevertheless, those of a
six-year-old child.
By returning to Rufus's point of view after the funeral
scene, Agee provides a double perspective on the death and
reestablishes the importance of the family cycle, essen
tially the thematic base of the novel. With the death of
the father, the adult's world and the child's world are
fused, as Rufus is thrust prematurely into the guardianship
of his father’s image. In his earlier experiences, Rufus
was absorbing the necessary lessons of childhood: learning
to adjust to his parents* expectations for his conduct,
learning how to be part of a family, to react to a younger
sister and to adult relatives outside his parents, finding
that life brings disappointments and mysteries as well as
security and affection. At his father's death, Rufus is
suddenly Involved in adult problems and exposed to adult
2**7
questionings which he must sift through for some kind of
rationale within his ability to grasp. When he hears
Walter Starr praise his father or his Uncle Andrew denounce
the officious Catholic priest for refusing full Catholic
burial rites to Jay, "who*s a hundred times the man he*II
ever be in his stinking, swishing black petticoats" (p.33?)i
Rufus must store these impressions together with his actual
memories of his father in order that his father will live
on in him. Thus, the cycle of the family will continue
despite the intrusion of death.
A Death in the Family is both simple and complex in
its meaning. Dealing with both the mundane and the impon
derable facts of existence, the novel affirms the value of
human life by celebrating the most simple and basic human
relationships. Without providing absolute answers, Agee
suggests that what is known can at least be counted on and
cherished, that a person*s worth can best be measured by the
quality of his life. Follett*s real legacy to his son is
his character.
Essentially the story of one family, told primarily
through the relationship obtaining between a father and his
son, A Death in the Family celebrates the basic qualities
of all families, illustrating that the family, more than
anything else, gives order and meaning to human existence,
that the continuity of the generations is perhaps the only
ZkQ
kind of Immortality possible for human beings. Agee does
not attempt to formulate answers about the nature of death,
as Wilder does in the last act of Our Town, except as the
characters themselves in A Death in the Family speculate
in the ways human beings have always speculated, through
acceptance or nonacceptance of supernatural beliefs. More
over, Agee provides a fuller treatment than Wilder of man's
life cycle, particularly in his use of the child's world to
counterbalance the adult's world. By juxtaposing these two
visions, Agee shows the process of renewal from father to
son as it is actually happening, the Pollett family thus
providing a chapter in the larger story of the human family,
The Centaurt Man's Place in the Universe
Some of James Agee's family themes in A Death in the
Family appear in different form in John Updike's The
Centaur, namely, father-son relationship, revelation of
character through the father, the urban-rural conflict,
pleasure in the ordinary facts of existence, and the nature
of immortality. However, the two authors work quite dif
ferently in their novels, Agee by extracting the Everyman
qualities of human life and illustrating them in his family,
Updike by setting up an elaborate mythological structure as
a comment on the nature of man. Though there are many
possible interpretations of the mythological parallels (and
as many critical opinions about them), the essential point
2^9
of the comparison, that man is "the creature on the bound
ary between heaven and earth,m19 •underlies both the mythi
cal and realistic levels of the novel. Updike is asserting
i
the worth of the human being through his use of mythological
parallels.
The family is an important theme in Updike’s fiction,
the same family (his own) sometimes appearing in different
guises in separate novels, The Centaur and Of the Farm, for
example. In The Centaur, Updike chooses a small-town fam
ily in ordinary circumstances to implement his major con
cerns in the novel* the possibilities of a meaningful life
for mankind in the twentieth century and the influence of
one man’s character in particular. George Caldwell is por
trayed from several perspectives, but most reveallngly
through the eyes of his son, who offers both a contempora
neous and a retrospective view of his father, one formed
from present memory of a son’s adolescent years. George
Caldwell’s own deprecatory view of himself adds an addi
tional irony to the total perspective on his character.
The mythological superstructure of The Centaur is the
most controversial aspect of the novel, inviting comparison
to James Joyce’s Ulysses by critics, some of whom feel that
Updike does not really integrate the mythology well into the
quotation from Karl Barth which forms the inscrip
tion to the novel.
250
realistic story. Granville Hicks, for one, believes that
the mythological method does not necessarily enhance the
portrayal of George Caldwell*s character (the novel*s
strong point) and could, in fact, be dispensed with,20
Admittedly, The Centaur does not feature the close fusion
of myth and story so apparent in Ulysses, but perhaps it
does not need to. Though Updike, like Joyce, is presenting
through mythological parallels, an ironic comment on our
modern, unheroic age, it is true, as David Galloway says,
that "the significance of Caldwell*s experience and the
value of his struggle ... is undlmmed by this devalua-
pi
tlon."^ In fact, the very nature of the modem age makes
more heroic the life of an ordinary man like George Cald
well, whose persistent Integrity and humanity provide an
ironic contrast to the general conditions of his life.
The ironic contrast is applied unevenly in The Centaur.
George Caldwell rising in stature far above the circum
stances for his existence. In Ulysses. Stephen Daedalus is
cynically aware of the unheroic age in which he lives,
Leopold Bloom conscious only of his own plight, his rather
pathetic status increasing the irony for the reader. In
either case, the irony is reinforced in every episode of
20"Pennsylvania Pantheon" (rev. of The Centaur).
Saturday Review. XLVI (February 2, 1963), p. 27.
23- The Absurd Hero in American Fiction (Austin, 1966),
p. 46._______ ■ _________________________________________
251
Ulysses by the constant reminder of a more heroic age.
These reminders are present in The Centaur, though in
passages more easily discernible and separable from the
realistic level than is true in Ulysses. By suggesting
specific equivalents from the mythological world for his
characters, Updike provides overtones to their natures and
to their position in the scheme of things. For example,
Zimmerman acts out the role of a petty Zeus in his position
as high school principal, sometimes exercising his author
ity capriciously, often exhibiting his amorous nature.
Apollo is personified in Dr. Appleton, who for a time holds
the answer to George Caldwell’s life and death. Updike
employs mythological equivalents also to suggest archetypes
among the human family, such as various aspects of the fe
male principle exemplified in several characters* Vera
Hummel, the promiscuous gym teacher as Venusi the high
school girl Penny as Pandora, Peter Caldwell’s first glrlj
Mrs, Caldwell, happy on the farm, as Ceres or sometimes as
Gala, the Earth Mother. The mythological parallels provide
humor, irony, sometimes an interesting ambiguity as illus
trated in the minister Reverend March, represented as Ares
or Mars, ostensibly through his war record but subtly
through his "militantrather threatening Calvinistic
theology.
252
Whether or not the mythological structure of The
Centaur is necessary or even consistently applied, Updike
uses it to enhance character portrayal and to add complex
ity to his treatment of the human situation. George
Caldwell, the Centaur, serves well as a central figure.
A man with heightened responsiveness to life and people,
he represents the middle ground between human aspirations
and human limitations, standing symbolically between heaven
and earth. As the centaur Chiron, he senses "that Zeus
thoughtcentaurs a dangerous middle-ground through which
the gods might be transmitted into pure irrelevance."22 As
the man George Caldwell, he espouses his minister father's
belief "that God made man as the last best thing in his
Creation" (p. 63), a belief which he implements in a secu
lar rather than a theological fashion. George's exemplary
role is thus made more interesting by his symbolic role.
His double nature places him close to the gods but makes
him subject to the usual frailties of man, including that
of mortality.
Though the significance of George Caldwell's life is
reflected at every level of his existence, in his encoun
ters with strangers as well as with his high school
o p
John Updike, The Centaur (New Xork, 1962), p. 27.
All subsequent references will be to this edition.
253 .
students, his relationship with his son Peter forms the
core of the novel. This relationship is necessarily recip
rocal, George concerned with what he considers to be his .
failures as a father, Peter learning to know his father and
later to understand the sacrificial nature of his life.
George Caldwell’s sacrifice lies in his unremitting love
for the human race, his ability to persist in an often un
rewarding job and to give of himself to the point of ex
haustion, often to the undeserving. As a teenager, Peter
is sometimes jealous of his father’s expenditure of affec
tion, but as an adult living an artist’s life in New York
Peter realizes the nature of his father's gift, actually
the gift of his unequivocal character and response to life.
At that time Peter can admits "He puzzled me. His upper
half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs" (p. 269).
Such oblique references to the mythological basis for
the characters reinforce the symbolic value of the myths,
of special Importance in regard to the Caldwell family who
. i
carry the central meaning of the novel. George Caldwell as
Chiron surrenders his Immortality in atonement for
Prometheus’s theft of fire. Peter as Prometheus must prove
himself worthy of the sacrifice and must continue the pro
cess of bringing enlightenment to the human race, a mission
about which he, as an unsuccessful artist, has self-doubts,
as he thinks to himselfs "Priest, teacher, artist 1 the
25^
classic degeneration" (p. 269). Three generations of
Caldwells have chosen to commit themselves to bringing
enlightenment to people, Peter’s paternal grandfather as
a Presbyterian minister, his father as a biology teacher,
Peter himself as an artist. Man is a many-sided creature,
as the various characters and their mythological counter
parts illustrate, but men like George Caldwell lean always
toward man’s better nature with no assurance of reward or
immortality. This is what George Caldwell’s life means and
what his wife Cassie and his son Peter must understand.
George Caldwell and his son live in two worlds, their
family life on the farm outside Olinger and their lives as
teacher and student in Olinger High School. Small tensions
exist in both worlds, but ordinary rather than extra
ordinary events in the characters’ lives form the basis for
the larger Implications to be drawn. In later years, Peter
reflects on this phase of their family life, which, "for a IT
its mutual frustration, • . . was good. We moved, somehow,
on a firm stage, resonant with metaphor" (p. 70). For
Peter’s mother (Ceres), a farm is the natural environment
for a family, a natural and curative way of life which she
wants for her husband. She pleads hopefully with him*
"Get close to Nature. It would make a man of you." For
George, just the opposite is true. He does not find renewal
in nature. "It reminds me of death. All Nature means to
255
me is garbage and confusion and the stink of
skunk— " (p. 291). George, for whom nature is a reminder
of his own mortality, finds his vitality in active involve
ment with people. Though his students exhaust him, drain
the strength from him, they, keep him alive. Similarly,
George feels at home in the city, where, his son observes
he “conducted himself with a simplicity that was soothing.”
Alton, a neighboring city to Olinger, represents to George
the "great Middle Atlantic civilization . . . which was
his home in eternal space” (p, 1^5)*
Peter envisions a larger corner of the earth for his
future as bn artist. He too rejects farming as a way of
life, though he sometimes feels guilt in his exultation at
being occasionally out of reach of his mother's world.
I thought guiltily of my mother, helpless at her dis
tance to control or protect me, my mother with her
farm, her father, her dissatisfaction, ... my mother
with her wide tense face and strange innocent scent of
earth and cereal, my mother whose blood I was pollut
ing in the gritty inebriation of Alton's downtown.
(p. 138)
For Peter, civilization resides only in the cities where
culture and enlightenment are possible, not in the country
or with his fellow ^-H members whom he observes with dis
taste. "The dull innocence of some and the viciously de
tailed knowingness of others struck me as equally savage
and remote from my highly civilized aspirations" (p. 7^).
New York City represents to Peter in his adolescent years
256
the bright center of American culture and of his hopes for
his own career as an artist. Peter is attracted to art by
its ?firmness,” the “potential fixing of a few passing
seconds” which painting can achieve (p. 62). When, in
later years, he finds himself living the Bohemian life of
an artist, attempting to paint the "unsayable thing,” he
wonders about his life. "Was it for this that my father
gave up his life?” (p. 270). Peter has captured no great
truths or brought no special enlightenment to the human
race. Ironically, his father*s success at influencing
others can be objectively demonstrated, as Peter discovers
on a return visit to Alton where he encounters Deifendorf,
a former classmate and one of his father's more intractable
students.
He asked me, dared in all seriousness to ask me, an
authentic second-rate abstract expressionist living
in an East Twenty-third Street loft with a Negro mis
tress, me, if I was ever going to teach. I told him
no. He told me ... , "Pete, I often think of what
your Dad used to tell me about teaching. *It*s rough,*
he*d say, *but you can't beat if for the satisfaction
you get.* Now I'm teaching myself, I see what he means.
A great man, your Dad. Did you know that?" (pp. 102-3)
Updike employs paradox as well as irony in his use of
myth. George Caldwell's mission seems to have succeeded
better with other students them with his own son, and Peter
(Prometheus) can bring enlightenment to no one but himself.
As Jack De Beilis says, "He cannot find his artistic iden
tity or spiritual wholeness until he finds his father, and,
257
inevitably kills him."2^ Peter's search begins during his
high school years, though he does not put everything in
place until many years later. His retrospective account of
a few days in the Caldwells* family life helps him attain
the necessary self-knowledge through a better understanding
of his parents, particularly his father. The central three
days of the narrative are crucial ones, a separation of the
family imposed by the snow storm and car trouble which keep
George and Peter in town. During this time, George
Caldwell has X-Rays taken to check for cancer and waits
fearfully for the results, carrying on with his usual ac
tivities in the meantime. As Howard Harper says, for Georg«!
Caldwell, "it is a time for summing up."2^ It is equally
a time for Peter to see his father at close range, to find
his own identity through the insights he gains into his
father's character.
This episode provides a symbolic testing of the family,
actually a testing of influences. The separation occurs in
the dead of winter, a time when the mother (Ceres) temporar
ily loses her family as father.and son begin their minia
ture odyssey away from the farm. Though their adventures
include a series of minor misfortunes, the snow storm and
23"The Group and John Updike" (rev. of The Centaur).
Sewanee Review. LXXII (Summer, 1964), p. 535.
2^Desperate Faith (Chapel Hill, 1967), p. 177. _________
258
car trouble, for example, or their stay in the "old-time
flea-bug" hotel, or running low on money, both George and
Peter affirm their kind of life, electing to stay with the
world of men rather than the world of nature. It is after
their return home that George, in spite of health problems,
makes definite his refusal to give up teaching for farming
as his wife wishes, Cassie’s love for the farm, inherited
from her parents, seems to have reached a dead end with her.
"We could do like my parents, they were happy before
they left this place. Weren’t you, Pop?" • . •
"Nature," my grandfather pronounced in his stately
way, ... "is like a mother; she comforts and
chas-tises with the same hand." (p. 291)
Pop Kramer (Kronus), an old man no longer active, has only
platitudes to offer as solutions to life’s problems. Peter
describes his grandfather as "an ideal foil" for his father
because "as a very old man he imagined that ... he could
provide all answers and soothe all uncertainties" (p. 66).
Literally the senior member of the family. Pop Kramer is
more significantly the antithesis of George Caldwell. Pas
sive, satisfied with the simplicities of his platitudes, he
remains contented with his comfortable life on the farm,
reading newspapers rather than participating directly in
the affairs of men. George, in contrast, prefers involve
ment with the world, knowing that he can offer no definitive
answers to life’s complexities, mistrusting those who do.
259
Peter, who has chosen the way of his father, never
theless offers his father a way out as his own gift to him.
"If you want to quit or take a sabbatical or some
thing, don’t not do it on my account." . . .
"Don’t you worry about your old man, you got enough
on your mind. I never made a decision in my life that
wasn’t one hundred per cent selfish." (p. 292)
Though Peter identifies with his father more than anyone
else, he does not reject his mother or her part in his life.
He shares certain areas of experience especially with her#
their mutual Interest in art and culture, for example, or
their privately shared jokes at his father’s often foolish
demeanor, something which Jonathan Miller calls George
Caldwell’s "shambling heroism, fatigued and gullible."2^
When Peter’s mother refuses to play their little game, he
feels resentment. "It dismayed me that my father, that
silly sad man whom I thought our romance had long since ex
cluded, had this morning stolen the chief place in her
mind" (p. 63). On the other hand, Peter does not easily
accommodate his mother's invasion of his world in town when
his father calls her from the regular teen-age hangout.
Caldwell holds the receiver out to Peter. "Your
mother wants to talk to you."
Peter resents that she should invade this way the
luncheonette that was the center of his life apart
from her. (p. 211)
25«0ff centaur" (rev. of The Centaur). The New York
Review of Books (Special IssueT 1963), pT 28.___________
260
Peter has separate compartments for various parts of
his experience, his feelings for his girl friend Penny, for
example, which he keeps as private as his dreams for his
future. Peter knows, however, that at school he cannot
have an identity completely separate from his father’s.
"Being Caldwell’s son lifted me from the facelsss mass of
younger children and made me, on my father’s strength
alone, exist in the eyes of these Titans•" Here, as a
teacher's son, he becomes the “petty receptacle of a
myth" (p. 131), but in his home he fulfills his normal
identity as the son of both his parents, a relationship in
which he considers himself fortunate,
I enjoyed at this age a strange innocence about
suffering* I believed it was necessary to men. It
seemed to be all about me and there was something
menacing in my apparent exception. I had never
broken a bone, I was bright, my parents openly
loved me. In my conceit I believed myself to be
wickedly lucky, (p. 53)
When Peter interprets his psoriasis as a necessary
curse to balance his good fortune, he takes upon himself a
symbolic burden which will help him become a worthy human
being, God’s way of making him a man, as he sees it.2^
Though Peter's psoriasis is transmitted to him by his moth
er, a constant reminder to him of her part in his inherit-
cwThe signs of psoriasis on Peter's belly, marked "as
if pecked by a great bird" by "red scabs the size of coins,"
establishes the symbolic link to Prometheus, p. 52.
261
ance, his "curse" symbolically represents a milder form of
his father’s illness, the son assuming an illusory burden
while the father carries an actual one. Though any public
discussion of his "skin problem" embarrasses him, Peter can
privately romanticize his affliction into a badge of suffer
ing which he carries with him always, particularly in the
dead of winter when this "rhythmic curse" becomes most in
tense. By selecting his red flannel shirt to wear on this
particular day, Peter is, in effect, choosing the approp
riate costume for the "coming ordeal," a symbolic defiance
of his own fate.
But I would be safe if I remembered not to scratch my
head, and anyway a generous impulse brushed the risk
aside. I would carry to my classmates on this bitter
day a gift of scarlet, a giant spark, a two-pocketed
emblem of heat. (p. 55)
Peter chooses this particular time to expose his "humilia
tion" to his girl friend Penny as a test of her loyalty, a
test which she passes easily. "You can’t help it. It’s
part of you" {p. 2^6).
Most of Peter’s experiences at this time tend to con
firm the important things in his life, his family, his
Image of himself, his life in general, though many aspects
*>f this confirmation come through to him in ambivalent terms.
Peter must especially learn to reconcile the father’s out
ward demeanor, which can be misinterpreted, with his com
plex and unique character, an evaluation that becomes
262
clearer after the three-day excursion.
By using Peter*s point of view predominantly though
not exclusively, Updike can reveal George Caldwell’s na
ture at the most vital levels of his life, the central
face being his consistency of character. George Caldwell
carries the same capacity for concern for his family life
into the school, even into strange places with people he
does not know. The journey away from home, the three days
in town, the return to the farm ("My heroes," Cassie calls
them) operate as a kind of mock heroic with very fallible
human demigods playing the roles, but George Caldwell is
meant to be and truly is a human being worthy to challenge
to an unheroic age. In his somewhat Imperfect understand
ing of his father, Peter needs this "adventure" with him
to complete his education.
Peter’s adolescent affection for his father is often
mixed with embarrassed Irritation at his father’s constant
deprecation of himself, an aspect of his character most
vividly revealed in the two encounters with disreputable
strangers.2? George's exaggerated interest in the hitch
hiker they pick up, in the man's profession as cook—
2?Wllliam Van O'Connor suggests that George deprecates
himself "as an ironic stance to minimize opposition, but
also out of humility and kindness" ("John Updike and
William Styronj The Burden of Talent," in Contemporary
American Authors, ed. Harry T, Moore fcarbondale, Illinois,
19&Uf P- 213). .
263
"a wonderful profession”— and in his life as an itinerant—
"Like the birds”* — puzzles even the hitchhiker himself.
My father brought to conversation a cavernous capacity
for caring that dismayed strangers• They found them
selves involved, willy-nilly, in a futile but urgent
search for the truth, (pp. 82-3)
George can ignore the man's foul language, even his homo
sexual "emanations” toward Peter, to elevate him into a
"gentleman” and a worthy partner for conversation.
George Caldwell finds no human being unworthy of his
attention or unable to contribute something to his own
understanding. He is capable of turning an encounter with
a drunk on the streets into a philosophical discussion,
and of interpreting the man's threat of blackmail as a bid
for charity,
"I'd like to give you more, my friend, but I just
don't have it. This is my last thirty-five cents. • . .
I've enjoyed talking to you, though, and I'd like to
shake your hand. . • • You've clarified my thinking,”
he told the drunk, (pp. 159-60)
By representing the drunk as a disguised (and degenerate)
Dionysus, Updike turns the episode into a contest between
George and the Gods. The drunk's challenge, "Knock me down
when I want to save your soul. Are you ready to die?" re
minds George of his own fears and prompts a response from
him.
"I thought I was ready to die," my father said,
"but now I wonder if anybody ever is* . . . Are you
ready to die?” he asked the drunk. "What do you
think the answer is?" (p. 158)
264
George can overlook the man's obscene charges in order to
accept the challenge for self-examination. He passes
every test thrown at him, something which Peter does not
always understand at the time.
Caldwell's interest in people finds a natural outlet
in teaching, the only profession suited to him in spite of
any protestation he makes. "I wouldn't mind plugging
ahead at something I wasn't any good at ... if I knew
what the hell the point of it all was" (p. 131). The
necessity of finding the essential core of humanity in
every person he encounters, including strangers, becomes
a compulsion in George's dealing with his students, some
thing which Peter rather jealously observes in any of the
typical exchanges between his father and his students.
Caldwell can, in good conscience, hint away an entire
examination to a poor student whose father "bullied her
beyond the limits of her mental abilities" (p. 104). He
can turn the deliberate taunting from a disrepectful
student into a discussion of the boy's future, temporarily
disarming the boy who will, Peter feels, later turn the
whole thing into a joke. Caldwell saves his special
tolerance, even affection, for Deifendorf, an unruly stu
dent but an "ace swimmer" on Caldwell's swimming team.
The camaraderie between coach and swimmer during the swim
ming meet annoys Peter, who feels excluded from the world
265
of athletes and high school heroes. "Perhaps it hurt me
that Deifendorf had something concrete to give my father—
the breast stroke and the twotwenty freestyle— while I had
nothing" (p. 105). Peter, who plans a brilliant future
with which to reward his father "for his suffering," can
do nothing as a high school student except try to protect
his father from the predatory students, a mission he takes
upon himself particularly during the three days in town.
When he sees students like Deifendorf causing trouble for
his father at school, he interprets the boy as his fa
ther's enemy, "sucking the strength from him" (p. 100).
Caldwell's deference to his students makes him vulner
able to their exploitation of him as well as to his own
sense of failure and insecurity, a situation engendered
only„in part by external threats like the principal's bad
report on his teaching. Caldwell's questing nature pre
vents his ever being completely at rest or completely
secure in prescribed formulas for living. As he rejects
his father-in-law's proverbial wisdom or his wife's desire
for a simple life at home, he refuses in his teaching as
well to press absolute certainties upon his students.
Characteristically, when a student challenges the necessity
of learning the science of the universe, he responds, not
with scientific Justifications but with a different kind
of appeal. "Think about the earth. Don't you love her?
266
Don't you want to know about her?" (p. 107).
George Caldwell's humilityt often amounting to ob
sequiousness, belies the intensity of his search for the
meaning of life. David Galloway suggests that, since
Caldwell struggles for values in a world "from which value
seems to have abnegated," his struggle is absurd, though
he himself lacks any awareness of the absurdity of life.
Such an awareness is provided by Peter, who can observe
"the disparity between his father's intentions and the
reality which he encounters."2® Nevertheless, Peter under
goes an education as he observes his father under stress.
Peter, in his greater ironic awareness, must learn to
accept his father's naively persistent integrity in a
modern world which places little value on such qualities
of character. Further, Peter must comprehend the nature
of his father's humility as his way of apologizing for the
world as it is and for the fact that he can offer his son
nothing better.
Caldwell often refers to himself as a loser. He
attributes his swimming team's losses to his poor coaching
rather than their poor ability and introduces the rival
coach to Peter as "the kind of man you should have had for
a daddy" (p. 1* j4). In similar fashion, he derogates him
self as a teacher. He has no discipline, the students
280p. cit.. p. 46. ___________________ _
267
hate him, the principal has it in for him, yet he feels
himself "•unemployable" in any other profession. These
general attitudes take specific form during the stay in
town as his midadventures assume cosmic proportions in
Caldwell’s mind. He not only assumes sole responsibility
for their difficulties, he considers them external mani
festations of his fate, as his response to their car
trouble indicates.
"This is the kind of thing," he said, "that’s been
happening to me all my life. I’m sorry you got in
volved in it. I don’t know why the damn car doesn’t
move. Same reason the swimming team doesn’t win, I
suppose,"
He sums it up for Peter by his assertion, "You deserved a
winner and you got a loser" (p. 150).
As these examples illustrate, small incidents suggest
other levels of meaning. This is the way Updike works in
the novel, whether in the use of myth to enlarge man’s
significance or in allowing ordinary events to carry sym
bolic weight. On this occasion, for example, George’s
concern for his son involves external, temporary condi
tions, staying up late, tramping around in the snow,
sleeping in strange beds, in general, being without the
comfort of home, all trivial incidents but symptomatic to
George of his general failure to protect his son from the
vicissitudes of life, His concern Is for the future, for
Peter’s education and economic security if he himself
268
should die early as he fears, again, practical matters
hut indicators of a deeper concern, which he expresses in
his characteristically oblique hut pregnant phrases.
MHe needs me to keep him going, the poor kid doesn't
have a clue yet. I can't fade out before he has the
clue." (p. 223)
The "clue" for George obviously lies in values beyond
the practical affairs of existence, as his own life
illustrates. What he believes to be his imminent death
brings his quest into sharper focus at this time of his
life, giving even his ordinary activities a special
poignancy. When he spends the morning after the snow
storm at school bringing his records up to date, Peter
understands that his father is putting his life in order.
Some of George's remarks too suggest to Peter that his
father is "saying good-bye to all the things he had known
in this world" (p. 109), particularly his comments about
Peter's mother. When he describes his wife as a "real
femme" who should have been put on a burlesque stage, he
is paying homage to her femininity which has perhaps been
unfairly submerged in domesticity. His comment to Peter
contains both an apology for having failed his wife in
some way and a reminiscence about a life that may be end
ing for him,
"The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman.
That's one thing about your mother', she's never
269
been bitter. You won't understand this, Peter,
but your mother and I had a lot of fun together,"
(p. 109)
For Caldwell, this is also a time for metaphysical
questioning, for putting his soul in order as he does his
personal affairs. The drunk's question, "Are you ready to
die?"coincides with his speculations about life and death
and immortality, George sees his own fate mirrored in his
father's, a minister whose doubts were reflected in his
deathbed question, "Do you think I'll be eternally for
gotten?" (p. 92), At the height of all his worries,
George is tempted to accept as the gem of all wisdom that
"Ignorance is bliss," a temporary escape from serious
questions, which he soon discards. Above all, Caldwell
cannot accept formulized religion, especially of the kind
espoused by Reverend March, whose Calvlnistic theory of
the elect and the damned George finds wholly unpalatable.
To Reverend March's expostulation that the doctrine of
predestination is counterbalanced by the doctrine of
"God's infinite mercy," George answers in the tone of a
skeptical human who measures God by what he sees on earth,
"I can't see how it's infinite if it never changes
anything at all. Maybe it's infinite but at an
infinite distance— that *s the only way I can pic
ture it," (p, 253)
Morris Yates believes that the ambivalence expressed
in Caldwell's philosophy, the combination of "doubt and
2?0
faith," is a major theme running through Updike's fiction,
an "unresolved conflict" present in the author h i m s e l f .
Never sure of anything, experiencing serious moments of
douht, George Caldwell nevertheless lives as though he has
faith in the worth of life. When his fears of death prove
false, he responds with a rush of feeling for life, re
calling something his father had once said, "All joy be
longs to the Lord." Characteristically, his renewed faith
and joy is expressed in practical and personal terms, for
it is through his daily existence that George best illus
trates his philosophy.
Wherever in the filth and confusion and misery, a
soul felt joy, there the Lord came and claimed it
as his own. . • • And all the rest, all that was
not joy, fell away, precipitated, dross that had
never been. He thought of his wife's joy in the
land and Pop Kramer's joy in the newspaper and his
son's joy in the future and was glad, grateful that
he was able to sustain these for yet a space more.
(p. 296)
By accepting his own conclusion that "only goodness lives,"
George commits himself to his appointed task, the ex
hausting one of continuing to teach unruly, often ungrate
ful students.
This period of crisis in George Caldwell's life, then,
has been a time of testing for him and for his family. By
presenting the events in both realistic and symbolic
2 9 " T h e Doubt and Faith of John Updike," College
English, XXVI (March, 1965)# p. W . ______________________
271
terms, Updike has created a parable of the human condition
which transcends the significance of the particular family
in the story. The three days in the lives of the Caldwell
family represent symbolically the general struggle of the
human race to escape from the arbitrary circumstances of
their existence, an emblematic contest between man and
the Gods. The Caldwells win their struggle, not by es
caping from difficulties they encounter, but by asserting
values that lift them above the mere struggle for survival.
When George and Peter finally return home, walking through
the snow to their house, they see a star shining with
special brilliance, which George identifies as Venus.
Peter is curious.
"Is it always the first to come out?1 '
"No. Sometimes it's the last to go. Sometimes
when I get up the sun is coming up through the woods
and Venus is still hanging over the Amishman's hill."
"Can you steer by it?"
"I don't know. I've never tried. It's an inter
esting question." (pp. 284-5)
The Caldwells actually do "steer" by Venus, which, like
Eros, represents not only sexual love but love of mankind
as well. Mrs. Caldwell, in her symbolic role as earth
goddess, offers domestic love and reminds her husband of
its virtues. "You have a wonderful son, a beautiful farm,
an adoring wife" (p. 56). She also understands her hus-
272
band’s larger nature, refusing to accept his conclusion
that his students hate him. "Nobody hates you. You’re
the ideal man" (p. 49).
As the "ideal man," George becomes equal to the Gods
for his brief time on earth, his larger vision of the
world sometimes confusing the lesser mortals around him
who are made uneasy by his uncompromising character. In
spite of his fears of an early death, Caldwell will live
long enough- to give his son the "clue," a further way for
him to equal the Gods. Caldwell's future lies in his
students and in his son, all of whom inherit something
from him. Caldwell-Chiron muses at the end of his trials
about the future.
Yet even in the dead of winter the sere twigs
prepare their small dull buds. In the pit of the
year a king was born. Not a leaf falls but leaves
an amber root, a dainty hoof, a fleck of baggage
to be unpacked in future time. (p. 295)
Peter, who will replace his father, is just beginning to
learn how to follow his father’s path, his understanding
necessarily incomplete at this stage of his life. Though
his identity is beginning to merge with his father*s~
"We seemed from our shadow to be a prancing one-headed
creature with four legs" (p. 113)— be cannot yet achieve
his father’s stature. "The snow overwhelmed my ankles and
inundated my shoes. I tried to walk In my father's foot
steps but his strides were too great" (p. 284). Whether
273
or not Caldwell's heirs will rise to their inheritance,
he has helped to perpetuate qualities that elevate man
above his animal origins.
When Thaddens Muradian describes the surface story of
The Centaur as a vehicle for a "philosophy of life and
death," he is giving a very general but incomplete descrip
tion of the novel.3° Updike is actually writing a philo
sophy of mankind, particularly twentieth-century man,
using mythological parallels to portray man's place in the
universe. The novel's two accounts of the creation will
serve as illustrations. Caldwell's science lesson about
the age and development of the earth includes the account
of the organism that introduced reproduction and death in
to the "kingdom of life."
"For— while each cell is potentially immortal, by
volunteering for a specialized function within an
organized society of cells, it enters a compromised
environment. The strain eventually wears it out
and kills it. It does sacrificlally, for the good
of the whole." (p. k -2)
Caldwell ends his account with the appearance of man, "a
tragic animal. In Chiron's story of the "Genesis of All
Things," the central force is Eros, "double-sexed and
golden winged," under whose rule "the world was as har
monious as a beehive" (p. 99)* But even in the world of
30»The World of Updike," English Journal, LIX
(October, 1965). p. 579*
2 74
the Gods turbulence and disharmony intruded, as the reign
31
of Eros gave way to Uranus.
With his natural and supernatural parables, Updike
tries to portray man as a product of the natural world
who, nevertheless, possesses qualities of divinity. When
Venus, in her conversation with Chiron, asserts that,
though the Gods are perfect, "mortals have the joy of
struggle, the satisfaction of compassion, the triumph of
courage" (p. 28), she presents Updike*s case for man. Man
can become more heroic than the gods, who are immune from
death and other problems of mortals, by his stubborn con
tributions to the human race (the Prometheus theme). When
George Caldwell discovers that "in giving his life to
others he entered a total freedom" (p. 296), he gains a
kind of immortality and, moreover, makes it possible for
his son to find his own path to immortality. As David
Harper points out, "Immortality is not an indefinitely
prolonged physical existence," it is the "inheritance,
enrichment, and bequest of moral and spiritual values."32
Such a theme is difficult to implement in contempo
rary fiction, which exists in a world that seems to allow
only a limited kind of affirmation. Through mythological
-^David Harper statesj "Both stories are appropriate
metaphors for the plight of man" (Desperate Faith, p. 181).
32Ibld.. p. 178.
275
symbolism, Updike achieves Ironic distance from which to
survey the plight of modern man, and provides, at the same
time, a frame of reference with which to give his charac
ters universal significance. As archetypes, George
Caldwell represents *the ideal man beset with the imperfec
tions and mortality of the human race, Cassie Caldwell,
the eternal female principle offering sustaining love to
humanity, Peter, the rebel continuing man's defiance of
fate. On the literal level, George Caldwell is simply a
good man, sustained by a wife who understands his goodness
in the present and a son who will comprehend it more fully
in the future. Both John Updike with his symbolic family
and James Agee, with his representative family, deal with
the big questions of existence for mankind by working with
ordinary, easily recognizable characters who can take on
metaphorical meanings.
2 ?6
AFTERWORD
These nine family novels illustrate some of the more
interesting trends in American literature since 19*4-5» par
ticularly the efforts of contemporary writers to respond
in some meaningful way to what seems to be the disinte
gration of important human values in our society. The
most significant change in fiction lies in the decline of
strictly social fiction as writers no longer believe human
problems to be amenable to solution through social reform.
Consequently, writers feel compelled to turn away from
society and its institutions in their search for human
values that transcend society.
Writers of family novels, however, retain a strong
connection with society through their use of coherent
social patterns as microcosms, that is, conventional fam
ilies Interacting in some way with their immediate environ
ment. Thus, the family novels and their authors have the
best of both worlds* in subject matter, both the social
and priviate worlds? in method, the concrete realistic
story converted into an effective metaphor? in theme, the
denial of a too facile optimism on the-one hand and an
2?7
uncompromising nihilism on the other to produce a solidly-
based affirmation. Through the fusion of these elements,
authors of these family novels have attempted to define
twentieth-century man's experience and to state its sig-
nificance.
2?8
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