The twentieth century has been blessed with a number of excellent artists who have also been significant critics. The best of these have gone beyond the kind of activity which consists of mere apology or justification for their own work and have explored major questions of import to society as a whole in both their imaginative and discursive writings. Typical of this concern at its most intense among writers and critics of fiction is the work of Caroline Gordon, who has been emphatic in her insistence on the close unity between technique and vision, craft and moral implications in a work of art.

In an important study published in 1961, Wayne Booth takes Miss Gordon to task for arguing in favor of "showing" and against "telling." He is evidently an admirer of her stories; but he implies that her critical position is too narrow and arbitrary, too narrowly determined by certain vague principles to be an adequate account of the craft of fiction. Citing from her book How to Read a Novel, he notes that she insists on the necessity for certain "constants" to be found in "all good fiction, from Sophocles and Aeschylus down to a well-constructed nursery tale" and concludes that she remains on "the highest possible level of generality" when she contends that if "one is going to write or read fiction, it is of paramount importance to be able to recognize these 'constants' when one comes upon them, or, if they are not present in a work of fiction, to mark their absence." (p. 33)

Caroline Gordon obviously believes that the use of any given technique implies a moral position; she does not take the inhumanly "objective" stance that Booth attributes to the "realistic" movement in modern fiction. In The House of Fiction, for instance, she subscribes to the position that a "given technique is the result of a moral and philosophical attitude, a bias towards experience on the part of the author; and as the author begins to understand what it is in life that interests him most, he also becomes aware of the techniques which will enable him to create in language his fullest sense of that interest. Material and technique become in the end the same thing, the one discovering the other."… The subject of all great literature, she indicates, is the natural world; and the only attitude towards it which is possible in a truly great novelist is one of love. For this reason, the novel is often a tale of redemption or damnation. Even the damnation of a soul cannot be convincing if the writer has not provided us with the understanding that love and the world itself matter more than mere ideas about them. It is in this sense that Caroline Gordon is a "realist," but only in this sense. (p. 34)

In the light of this position, a piece like "Emmanuele! Emmanuele!" in Old Red and Other Stories takes on a peculiar significance. It is something more than a short story; it is perhaps a critical essay made flesh…. "Emmanuele! Emmanuele!" is hardly a short story of the same kind as most of her others; it is distinctly a "conte à clef," based on the life of André Gide. Indeed, the parallel is worked out in very great detail. "Emmanuele" was, in fact, the name that Gide used in his Journal and in The Notebooks of André Walter to refer to his wife, Madeleine Rondeaux. Moreover, the journal he kept, the letters he wrote to her which were burned, and the residence in Normandy are all aspects of the historical Gide's career. Raoul Pleyol, the poet-diplomat, is of course Paul Claudel; and the name itself would give away the identification even without the reference to the exchange of letters between the two men and certain actual passages, like "I grasp your hand," which are to be found in the correspondence. (pp. 34-5)

The central intelligence of the story is an American professor and poet, Robert Heyward, who is acting as secretary to the famous poet Guillaume Fäy [the Gide persona of the story]. In his adulation for the man he serves, he sees Fäy's every gesture and every word as great gifts to the world which he, as a near stranger, is privileged to witness at first hand…. Heyward is probably based on several young men who served as amanuensis to Gide during his career and this strategic use of a narrator allows Miss Gordon to pull together widely separated events in the life of the French writer and to make of them a compact symbolic whole. (p. 35)

Why did Miss Gordon choose to write so blatantly about the Claudel-Gide relationship and the peculiar battle between them?… It is as a living myth that Caroline Gordon adopts the biography of Gide. Just as Dante uses real persons in his poem not for personal but for symbolic statements, so she takes Gide as part of the cultural myth of the artist in the modern world. Fäy is that aspect of Gide which is living allegory, and her critique of the French writer is as sympathetic, in its own way, as Dante's reluctant admission that even the greatest of poets cannot be saved from damnation if he does not adhere to the right forms of human behavior.

However, it is not for his homosexuality that Gide is condemned. (p. 37)

Fäy's contemplation of his own mirrored image is the real sodomy which condemns him. By putting his "real" self into the letters to his wife he had hoped to turn her into yet another mirror of himself, but he did not count upon the possibility that the mirror itself might be shattered and that the image it held would be dissipated forever. It is Gide's narcissism, on the one hand, and his technical timidity, his inability to write with conviction on the other, which condemn him in Miss Gordon's view. (p. 38)

"Emmanuele! Emmanuele!" is not at all [a schematic allegory of a wrong-headed modern artist]. It is a demonstration of Miss Gordon's ability to write about ideas without losing touch with the solidity of the real world or rejecting the critical principles of fiction which require a convincing image of the universe in which characters may move. A regular progression of images and details organizes the story in terms of particulars and acts in counterpoint to the obvious procession of ideas.

Heyward's point of view is important for the story … because it allows the figure of Fäy to be elevated. Through the young man's eyes the events take on the look of the tragic. The quest for the abyss is something an American like him cannot truly understand, but his foreign and sincere eyes allow him to seize the force of Fäy's destruction with full impact. (p. 40)

Fäy's tragedy is that he has indeed destroyed himself by feeding on his own substance. But he does not go into the abyss without a witness, the young man through whom we have viewed the consequences of his love of the abyss. He goes to Mme Fäy for the key to her secretary, expecting at last to receive the long-awaited revelation of Fäy's true character and that of his wife as well. Paradoxically, it is not in the letters that he comes to understand; it is in the final dramatic encounter between the forces of piety and the demonic…. The revelation that Fäy hoped to give in the letters was not his true self; the real image of Fäy is in the Gadarene swine, as Heyward witnesses in the plunge towards self-invited destruction. When the image of himself that Fäy has sought to create is shattered, he has no alternative self to turn to other than the demon enclosed in darkness.

The striking technique of this story is evident in the skilful way that Miss Gordon handles the physical reality of her settings. Without softening the impact of her ideas, she produces a version of her own Counterfeiters that is neither inconclusive nor unreal. Two strands of imagery, one containing fruit, trees, and blossoms, the other eyes, water, and light, organize the story into something much more complex than a mere fictional presentation of an intellectual and critical point of view. We see both North Africa and Normandy through the experiences of Robert Heyward, and the more we delve into the contrasts in imagery, the more there is to enrich the basic tragic experience of the plot. (pp. 42-3)

["The Olive Garden" illustrates] a final argument I wish to make about Miss Gordon's critical point of view, not because it is set in France, because it is like the other story concerned with a young American poet in Europe, nor even because its Proustian texture is an interesting contrast to the more intellectual surface of "Emmanuele! Emmanuele!" Rather its present merit is as an illustration of Miss Gordon's flexibility and of her central beliefs. Both stories are concerned with a young man who finds himself not in terms of his own actions but as a result of understanding the actions of another, whether it be Guillaume Fäy or Deucalion and Pyrrha. These, for the purposes of their stories, are equally mythological characters, though the myth of Gide is one that is within living memory. Heyward, whose name suggests "wayward" and hence a certain amount of aimlessness, is only half-hearted in his attempts to imitate Fäy directly…. In the other story, Dabney's wandering also appears to be aimless, a potentially self-indulgent and tearful attempt to search out times past. In the end, however, both men discover themselves by discovering meaning outside themselves. Miss Gordon, meanwhile, never resorts to aimlessness in exploring the random, or seemingly random, nature of their rich experiences. (p. 47)

The key to both the criticism and fiction of Miss Gordon is in illuminative detail. Though there is evident in her work the influence of Ford Madox Ford, who was also somewhat instrumental in developing the very similar imagist technique in poetry, we would be mistaken if we supposed that Miss Gordon's term "rendering" is part of a simple opposition to "telling." The Deucalion story at the end of "The Olive Garden" is "told" and not "shown." Nevertheless, it is an instance of the illuminative detail which makes sense of the whole. More than that, this single myth draws together a number of important points. Replanting the bones of his mother, Deucalion releases the energies of his own creativity by seizing part of his own past and acting upon it. It is in the conjunction of the masculine principle of action and the feminine principle of receptivity or pure being that a new race is formed. "Rendering" the bones of his dead mother to the earth was a better action than all the telling and spells and charms could ever accomplish. By moving out of the confines of being, which is static, inert, and lifeless, and into the realm of action, he puts into operation the energies of creation. What Mr. Booth has failed to see is that Caroline Gordon does not reject the novel of ideas, but she does insist that those ideas have to become alive through actions. Her "constants" are based upon that central notion, whether she speaks of plot, narrative technique, or the character of the hero…. (pp. 49-50)