The matter and machinery of classical comedy is always deceptively trivial; what counts is the texture. In Doting this lies in Mr. Green’s phenomenal ear for the follies of talk. The scene is hardly described—two smartish London flats, an expensive restaurant, a bar, a couple of night clubs. The characters are types—a middle-aged couple, the raffish, cliché-uttering friend of the family, all in the higher taxation group: a son home from school, and two young girls. Plot: the casual-seeming but unsleeping intrigue of the wife, keeping both men off the girls and dishing everyone, with the naïve hypocrisy, the tender but relentless cunning, of the undefeatable English lady. The shocked ghost of Henry James will appear to the reader as he treads a world so superficially familiar but so shot to pieces. Society has vanished. The “young person” on the brink of life is still eager to begin, but there is nowhere to begin. She is innocent still, despite her heavy talk of “bed”; the game of innocence has not changed now all the cards are on the table.
Then, in default of values or personal security, we have “arrangements.” Mr. and Mrs. Middleton have their sacred arrangement about “going out” on their own. (Mrs. Middleton “never counts teas.”) There is always something someone doesn’t count. Annabel and Claire have their arrangement to meet so many times a week and tell lies about their love affairs. (Who knows when a poor girl will be asked out next? Only the middle-aged can afford it.) Addinsell, the old friend of the family—a considerable character—has a peculiar arrangement about death: the memory of his wife, who died in childbirth, is a sacred injustice. (“Not her fault, good God! If anything, might have been mine, or equally the fault of each of us, in actual practice.”) He relies on the defense of this singularity:
“You’ve never been left with a child on your hands.”
“Well, no, I suppose not.”
“So there you are.”
“But you mustn’t hold it against your wonderful Penelope.”
“Don’t know what you mean. No one’s fault when they die in bed, is it? Can’t see how that could be.”
“Then why not marry a second time?” Ann asked, in a bewildered voice. “Another mother for your child?”
“Might die again” the man replied with obvious distaste.
Naturally, he makes an ass of himself with a girl smart enough to say her parents are dead. We laugh, but the Middletons and Addinsell are worried hunters in the wilderness of middle age, bewildered by time and by their lost significance, condemned to be tragic as well as absurd. Their conversation is beautifully inadequate to their condition.
The Middleton couple have their love. Their double bed is the centerpiece of the book. But love itself is a habit constructed by eighteen years—Mr. Middleton calls it nineteen when he is in a temper—and to a young girl like Annabel it seems like an institution the middle-aged have made in order to escape from their private terrors. By a fluke, the brainless little piece is right; in all his novels Henry Green’s characters are eaten alive by time and are terrified of it. And time does not merely eat; it snaps like a shark. They see death, like a bad joke, everywhere—the scream of the cancer ward, the crunch of the road accident, old Arthur Morris in Nothing having his leg cut off bit by bit. Pain gives a maniacal edge to the wild laughter that lies between the absurd lines.
The consolation is doting. Doting may simply be the schoolboy angrily doting on his food; everyone, he snarls, is trying to starve him. Or doting may start with Arthur Middleton asking Annabel to open her mouth:
Her wet teeth were long and sharp, of an almost transparent whiteness. The tongue was pointed also and lay curled to a red tip against her lower jaw, to which the gums were a sterile pink. Way back behind, cavernous, in a deeper red, her uvula seemed to shrink from him. But it was the dampness, the cleanliness, the fresh-as-wet-paint must have made the man shut his lips tight, as, in his turn, he leaned over hers and it was then, or so he, even, told his wife after, that he got, direct from her throat, a great whiff of flowers.
“Sex!” cries Arthur Middleton, in a line of proper Restoration annoyance and brutality. “How they wave it about at you.”
Again, doting may start because, nowadays, with no hostesses, no dances, and no money, how else is a girl to meet people? Addinsell dotes girls into bed with his tragic face, after talking about wonderful dead Penelope. Mrs. Middleton dotes on people she intends to dish, because she is doing it “all for dear Peter,” her son. The comedy begins when doting leads to cross-doting, when the partners of the comedy of manners change and rechange. Here Mr. Green is superbly clever, quick, and surprising. In the jealous quarrels of Mr. and Mrs. Middleton, for example, he has Molière’s trick of the repeated or echoing line.
“But Arthur, your hand!” accuses Mrs. Middleton, as yet again she remembers the scene in her bedroom when she caught Arthur kneeling beside Annabel, who had taken her skirt off to wash out the stain of the coffee Arthur had spilled on her. We join in Mrs. Middleton’s incantation. “Your hand, Arthur!” we cry, too. Where was Arthur’s hand? Qu’est-elle allée faire dans cette galère? Arthur may deny. Arthur may explain. But no; once again “Your hand, Arthur—I saw it.” Arthur is as hypnotized by this invention of his wife’s as we are. How brilliant of Mr. Green, after this, to show Mrs. Middleton rushing off in the full glory of jealousy to go one better and tell old Addinsell, “I found them naked in my bed.”
As an oblique study of mœurs and a discreet exposure of character, Doting is as ingenious as Nothing was. It is true there is no scene as rich in folly as the ludicrous birthday party in Nothing, nor is Mrs. Middleton, who is a doting, respectable wife with her claws out, quite as deep in folly as that aging octopus of the twenties, Mrs. Weatherby. Taxation keeps down the tone. But Doting is both tenderer and more spirited, and each character comes to precise, foolish bloom. The boy Peter, public-school-stunned, is excellent; a minor character, he has three dimensions and pretty well kicks a hole in the book with his clumsy boots. Mrs. Middleton stops one of her wifely scenes dead to remark that Peter has caught his first salmon, and goes to bed with her husband at once. After eighteen years, marriage in the English upper classes is agreeably unlike The Kreutzer Sonata.
Mr. Henry Green is not a satirist like Waugh. He is not a conventional moralist off the peg like Maugham. He is not outside, he is inside the human zoo, preoccupied with it, and occasionally giving a sad, startled look at the bars he had momentarily forgotten. He is not—despite appearances in Nothing and Doting—a true artificial writer, for he is fundamentally sympathetic, and his real interest is in the blurred, the lethargic, inarticulate part of human beings, the wound that becomes their quotidian poetry. The groping soldier returned from the prisoner-of-war camp in Back, with his maimed memory; the mean servants of Loving, who nevertheless drool the poetry of self-interest like a collection of stumbling and deceiving doves; the woman dimming toward death in Party Going—these are people whose fantasies and inner fever he has invaded by way of the comedy of their muddled minds. He is a kind of psychologist-poet who begins to make people out of blots. In these books he has a compassion and sensibility that are cut down in Nothing and Doting, perhaps because the upper classes have a surface harder to penetrate, perhaps because, in contemporary Society, they have become too automatically the funny class that servants used to be. Certainly the people and their interests are trivial, when they are compared with the people in Back, but so are Congreve’s. The comedy of manners depends on the supply of idiotic, normal blanks.
ANTHONY WEST
MAY 31, 1952 (ON INVISIBLE MAN BY RALPH ELLISON)
ALPH ELLISON’S FIRST novel, Invisible Man (Random House), is an exceptionally good book and in parts an extremely funny one. That is not to say that it is without defects, but since they are almost entirely confined to the intolerably arty prologue and epilogue, and to certain expressionist passages conveniently printed in italics, they can easily be skipped, and they should be, for they are trifling in comparison with its virtues. What gives it its strength is that i
t is about being colored in a white society and yet manages not to be a grievance book; it has not got the whine of a hard-luck story about it, and it has not got the blurting, incoherent quality of a statement made in anger. What gives it its character is a robust courage; it walks squarely up to color the way seventeenth-century writing walks up to mortality and death, to look it in the face as a part of the human situation that has to be lived with. Mr. Ellison’s hero is a Negro of the South who starts out with the naïve illusion that what stands between him and the whites is a matter of education. He is given a scholarship to a Southern college that has been endowed by Northern philanthropists, and he goes to it in great delight, thinking that what he will learn there will pare away all his disabilities and disadvantages. He finds that the college cannot do that for him and does not even try to do it; it is concerned only with helping him make realistic adjustments to things as they are. He gets into a mess of trouble and is expelled. Before expelling him, the dean tells him just what the facts of colored life are:
“You have some vague notions about dignity.… You have some white folk backing you and you don’t want to face them because nothing is worse for a black man than to be humiliated by white folk. I know all about that too.… But you’ll get over it; it’s foolish and expensive and a lot of dead weight. You let the white folk worry about pride and dignity—you learn where you are and get yourself power, influence, contacts with powerful and influential people—then stay in the dark and use it!”
He is too young and too nobly stubborn to believe that this is the best that can be done with his life, and the rest of the book deals with his attempts to force the world to accept him on a pride-and-dignity basis, and with his final realization that he has to stay in the dark as an invisible man. This could easily be a glum and painful performance, but Mr. Ellison has the real satirical gift for handling ideas at the level of low comedy, and when he is most serious he is most funny. The technique is that of which Candide is the supreme example, but there is nothing archaic about the writing, which has an entirely contemporary vitality and a quite unexpected depth.
The first chapter is a little slow, but the second and third, which describe the trouble that leads to the hero’s expulsion, convince one that Mr. Ellison is a writer with much more than promise. The hero is asked by the dean to drive one of the white Northern patrons of the college on a brief afternoon airing. By an unlucky chance, he takes the man past the house of the most notorious Negro no-good in the neighborhood, a man who is the embodiment of what Negro progressives call, and with hatred, field niggerism. The Northerner insists on stopping and talking to the monster, and a scene ensues that is an extraordinary piece of comic invention. Even when it is read over in a cold, analytical frame of mind and its purely entertaining aspects are set aside, it stands out as a startlingly good piece of writing. The monster’s account of his misdeeds is in itself a tour de force—at once a brilliant parody of a kind of Southern genre writing about Negroes and an acute description of a psychopath’s feeling about his actions, which includes, in a couple of sentences, a deadly cartoon of the relations between a genuine psychopathic criminal and members of the more optimistic schools of psychiatry. But excellent as that is, it is nothing to what Mr. Ellison makes the passage do on a more serious level. The student’s reaction to the monster’s story takes one deep into the feeling of one sort of Negro about another, but his reaction to the Northerner’s reception of it takes one even further—into the heart of the very complex feeling between races. The Northerner’s philanthropic interest in Negro education is a cover for a form of prurience, a voyeur’s fascination. His real interest is in the Negro as an inferior kind of man, closer to the animal, more capable of letting drive on the lines of instinctive impulse and less restrained by civilized morality and patterns of conduct. Giving money to the college offers him a high-toned way of getting as close to these dark possibilities as he dares. It is easy to accuse Mr. Ellison of letting racial paranoia get out of hand in this particular character, and of producing an overdrawn caricature in consequence. But the attitude he is describing is a fairly common one, and is often given direct expression—even by writers of great delicacy and sensibility—despite its offensiveness. A poem called “The African,” in the Literary Supplement of the London Times a while ago, put it very flatly:
…I fell to brooding
On bronze-dark features facing me, the glazed
Soft shine of jet-black eyes; on what a London
His Congo-born, his secret vision gazed
So gently, mournfully; beyond his waking
Quiet behavior what still potent background
Vast and primeval worked, what violence
Ancestral under silences profound.
The poem, presumably toying with some symbolism about a gracious innocence, went on to compare the man to swans on a pond, but even so it is hard to think that it would be pleasant to be on the receiving end of this sort of thing. Mr. Ellison tries to show just what it is like to take it from behind bronze-dark features, and does so remarkably well.
A good deal of the book is concerned with penetrating to the unease and self-consciousness that underlie a great many earnest white progressive approaches to The Question. After the student is kicked out of college, he goes North to try to make his way in New York, and his adventures are told in a highly imaginative, picaresque story, but, though the storytelling is excellent, in the end the impressive thing is the analysis of attitudes that rises out of each situation; there are always such sharpness of observation, such awareness of shades of feeling, at work. The hero is caught up in what is clearly an agitprop apparatus of the Communist Party (Mr. Ellison does not, though, give it that name) that is exploiting the color situation in Harlem. He is a natural speaker and he is made use of in campaigns as a front for the white committee. There is not only perceptive writing about the feeling between Negro and white in this part of the book but there is also perhaps the best description of rank-and-file Communist Party activity that has yet appeared in an American novel. The endless committee discussions of tactics, and the post-mortems after the hero’s speeches, in which the nature and extent of his departures from “correct” lines are thrashed out, have an absolute authenticity. So has the picture of the way in which the interplay of personalities inside the movement, and the constant intriguing to use the Party disciplinary machinery to advance one clique and set back another, takes place. At last, the hero discerns the rank stink of falsity in the Party line about color, partly through catching on to the way in which a white Comrade who has married a colored girl makes play with the fact to strengthen his hand in policy discussions of district tactics, partly through a realization that the white Comrades have used him as a lure, as a Negro gull to gull other Negroes. He sees that his district leader, Brother Jack, is just as much Marse Jack as a field boss in a white-supremacy state. The description of his disillusion with the Party, a true agon, which is also his final understanding that there is no external machine that can produce any ready-made solution either to the color problem or to his own perplexities, is as moving and vivid a piece of writing on this difficult subject as one could wish to read.
The book ends with a second tour de force, as successful as the brilliant comedy scene in the Southern college town that is, in effect, the book’s starting point. The Party has lost control of its agitation campaign as a result of what at first seems to the hero to be a typical tactical blunder, and the mass support that it has won drifts over to a straight anti-Communist and anti-white agitator called Ras, whose wild speeches bring on a wave of rioting and looting. The drift into disorder and the spread of violence are astonishingly well described in realistic terms, and through it all Mr. Ellison never loses touch with his gift for comic invention. As the riot builds up, the hero realizes that not only have the Communists an unfriendly interest in him but that he is due for unpleasantness from Ras’s strong-arm men, who have him marked down as their enemy and a tool of the whites. He d
isguises himself in bourgeois finery, but the colored glasses and white hat he dons to put him across the class frontier also turn him into the double of a numbers racketeer called Rinehart, who is heavily involved in quite enough trouble for two men. The hero’s evasions as all Harlem comes apart have a real nightmare humor. And in the middle of it all, as the riot squads and the mounted police move in and shooting begins, he suddenly sees what is happening. The Party has not made a tactical blunder at all; it has deliberately surrendered its mass following to Ras in order to provoke violence, so that colored martyrs, shot down by the police, can be exploited in the next phase of agitation in the district. The hero emerges in his own identity to warn the innocents he has helped to fool what is being done to them. But Mr. Ellison has a tight grip on his satiric comedy, and he is not going to let his buffoon hero escape into tragedy; martyrdom is not to be his fate. A gang of white looters chase him up a dark street, and he falls through an open manhole into a coal cellar. The whites, enraged by this surprising vanishing trick, slam the manhole cover down and leave him lying there helpless while the riot burns itself out above.
Few writers can have made a more commanding first appearance. Up to a point, Invisible Man resembles Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan. Its humor recalls the jokes that hang on Céline’s fraudulent scientist, with his ascents in worn-out and patched balloons, his absurd magazine, and his system of electromagnetic plant culture, but Ellison’s jokes are on the whole funnier, and his satire is much more convincing because there is clearly visible behind it—as there is not in Céline—a positive alternative to the evils he is attacking, the knowledge of a better way without which all satire becomes merely an empty scolding. It is a pity that Mr. Ellison’s direct statement of the better way takes the form it does in the prologue and the epilogue, since they are the two worst pieces of writing. But the ideas toward which they fumble are as dignified as they are impressive, and it is perhaps unnecessary to have this direct statement, as they are so plainly implied in the rest of the book. It is not merely the Negro who has to realize that the only escape from the rattrap of worry about what one is or is not is to abandon the constant tease of self-consciousness. The Invisible Man of Mr. Ellison’s title is the unattached man of Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy, the man with courage to be utterly indifferent to himself and to his place in the world, the man who is alone free to be fully a man.
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