[Simons is a Roman Catholic priest and professor of English. In the following review of The Malefactors, Simons lauds the book's originality and successful rendering of religious themes in vernacular terms.]

Miss Caroline Gordon, whose novels and short stories have always been remarkable for their subtle poetic essence and vigilant craftsmanship, has never to this reviewer's knowledge attained the neon glories of best-sellerdom. It is barely possible that with the publication of her eighth novel, The Malefactors, she may be called upon to endure the wider success, for it deals with a theme which perversely attracts an age of almost official cynicism. It is the theme of conversion. The central figure of The Malefactors is a poet who, approaching middle age and seemingly forsaken by his muse, makes the discovery of Christ.

The poet, when we meet him, is forty-seven years old. For a dozen years he has written nothing of account. He is living on the income of his wealthy wife on a farm property in Pennsylvania's Bucks County—the penultimate of Eden, it would seem, of reflective or refuted artists. When the novel opens we are about to attend what the poet's wife calls a fête, a sort of middle-sized cattle-and-produce exhibit, of which she is patroness. The fête gives the novelist the opportunity to introduce the chief actors in her drama. In the meantime, through a series of deft throwbacks, we come to know the antecedent life of the protagonist, the seasons of his hopes and aridities, and something of the shape of his present disenchantment.

Tom Claiborne, a casually reared Southerner, was a highly intelligent, preternaturally gifted young man who, after he had left college and served his term in the first World War, decided on the career of poet. His early verse was enthusiastically praised by Horne Watts, an expatriate American poet of pronounced genius, who hailed the neophyte as "the new Laforgue." When circumstances arrange themselves, Claiborne accepts the invitation to join his circle in Paris. Horne the poet and Max Shull the painter are living, the newcomer discovers, in a homosexual relationship. Claiborne, though he himself is not "that way," retains the uneasy friendship of both. Later, after a period of mounting disorientation, Horne Watts, who had just completed his major poetic effort, Pontifex, "leaped to his death from the deck of an Atlantic steamer." Horne Watts is the literary evocation and transmutation of the actual poet Hart Crane.

Claiborne stayed on in Paris for some years editing an avant-garde literary journal called Spectra. In the meantime he had married Vera Vincent, daughter of a crazed painter, Carlo Vincent, who had, like Watts, taken his own life. Vera, deeply attached to her father, experiences a grave sense of insecurity. It becomes the more pronounced after her father's death, but she has an innocent confidence that Claiborne can redeem her from her inarticulate fears. He is incapable of meeting the exactions of her spirit, and their life together, on the surface at least, is one of sufferance rather than of love.

Tom Claiborne, accompanied by his wife, returns to New York, and for a time he continues to edit Spectra from that point. With the same abruptness, however, that he had quit Paris he withdraws from the journal entirely. These sudden and apparently inexplicable moves are indications of a profound malaise. But the move to Blencker's Brook has not solved anything, and the years pass by in idleness and sterility. The presence of Max Shull alleviates to some extent the boredom of his wife but only serves to exacerbate his own. During the time of the preparations for the fête Claiborne has a premonition that "something of enormous importance is about to happen." It is a premonition, none the less, which he hastens to reject.

We have arrived at the point at which the main action of the novel is set in motion. A reviewer, if he is to be sportsmanlike, must not attempt the complete—and inevitably traitorous—condensation. This is a special danger when the novel is as cunningly and curiously wrought as the one under consideration, where almost nothing fortuitous or gratuitous is allowed entrance. It is enough to say that Tom Claiborne, after a period of longueurs, futilities, and indirections, ultimately discovers God Himself. Or, to put it another way, he becomes the frantic victim of a Divine ambuscade, and, being caught, finds himself and his fellows. From the point of view of art, however, what matters is less what happens than the strategy by which it is accomplished—the power of poetry by which the originating vision is sustained and subdued, and through which the reader is compelled to a clear-eyed acquiescence.

Before commenting on this strategy it is only fair that the reviewer confess the difficulties he has always experienced in giving his assent to dramatizations of conversion. A conversion is admittedly a special invasion of Grace into a particular life. If the artist, in his effort to summon the mystery, gives a maximum plausibility to the motives and conditions leading up to conversion he risks an attenuation of the essentially free character of Grace. If he gives a maximum permissiveness to Grace he risks making his character seem the puppet of Grace. In this case it is the art which seems implausible, for God becomes an almost literal deus ex machina. Highly endowed artists from Corneille to Graham Greene have either foundered on the rock or been sucked into the whirlpool. Only Bernanos, for all his technical gaucherie, has come close to accomplishing the miracle.

Miss Gordon has her own resources, and they are of a quite superior order. First of all, there is the hint contained in her epigraph: "It is for Adam to interpret the voices which Eve hears." This text, taken from Maritain's essay "The Frontiers of Poetry," is to be understood as specifying the relationship between the practical or critical intelligence and poetic intuition—Claudel's animus and anima. Man's critical intelligence is situated between a lower and a higher intuition. These realms on either side of the practical reason can be mistaken for each other. The one has an obscurity "by excess of opacity"; the other, an obscurity "by excess of transparency." The poet is nourished by his intuitions, but it is the critical intelligence (Adam) which must decide on the authenticity of what the soul (Eve) experiences.

Tom Claiborne is a poet who has,—all poets have—his presences, illuminations, and voices. In his earlier life the illuminations and presences had been frequent, and his poetry thrived. In recent years they had become rarer and were of an increasingly ambiguous character. The voices, on the other hand, never entirely left him, but as his spiritual life deteriorates they become laconic, ironic, and cryptic. Claiborne's critical spirit has in the course of years gained ascendancy over the creative spirit; yet, by a strange irony, that critical spirit is powerless to probe his own malaise. He is congealed in his own ego and so misreads himself and those about him. He is not without his extra-rational intimations, but he has a vast amount of experience to unlearn before he can decipher them. Miss Gordon handles the voices superbly, locating each with its distinctive intonation.

Claiborne also has his memories and his dreams. Towards the end of the novel the dreams increase in number and terror, for by this time the poet is on the verge of nervous collapse. The stuff of his dreams is dredged from his past experience in life and literature, and they have a sort of higher coherence which is intractable to analysis. His father is in them. So are Carlo Vincent and Horne Watts. There are caves, corridors, cliffs, and water. The memories, too, assert themselves unsolicited. There are memories of places—Eupedon, Mio Sogno, Clermont. There are expressions—the "Feu … feu" of Pascal, the "Tolle, lege" of St. Augustine. There are recurrences—of the cave ("I saw it first, but George was the first to enter"); the offhand suggestion that Catherine Pollard join the Church. Things that Claiborne has done or said in one context make an uncanny reappearance in another. Once again the novelist exhibits an admirable virtuosity in the deployment of symbols and echoes.

Finally, there are people. It is they who, wittingly and unwittingly, bring Claiborne to the edge of self-realization. There are George Crenfew, his psychiatrist cousin; Catherine Pollard, whose heroic Catholicism will remind readers of a saintly woman still living; Cynthia Vail, Claiborne's ambitious paramour; Molly Archer, the lady of drunken candors; Max Shull, the painter of the St. Eustache legend (an operative symbol); Sister Immaculata, the formidable nun who is writing a critique of Horne Watt's poetry. And there is a host of minor figures, all of whom—even the somewhat superfluous Miss Golightly—have their function. The dead, too, possibly even more than the living, join in that skillfully discordant choir which, at one level of meaning, constitutes the Adam who interprets the voices of Eve.

When I had finished the history of Tom Claiborne—obviously and not too implausibly in the toils of Grace—I was more than ever in admiration of a novelist who had not only avoided with her usual consistency the clichés of her craft but had come closer than any vernacular writer to encompassing the elusive miracle.

It may be that the ghost of Hart Crane was over-intrusive. Is it the reviewer's fault if he equates Pontifex with The Bridge and finds the nun's exegesis, notmerely ingenious to excess, but unassimilable to the intent of St. Catherine's Dialogo Divino? Prescinding entirely from the matter of the poet's possibilities of redemption, there seems to be no way—unless, perhaps, one has a Ph. D. from Louvain—of validly interpreting the poet's bridge in the light of the saint's. Something has gone wrong in that important interview, where the hand of the artist trembled and the eyes filled with tears. But it was for the moment only. One who knows less about The Bridge than the novelist or the reviewer will be the safer judge.

John W. Simons, "A Cunning and Curious Dramatization," in The Commonweal, Vol. LXIV, No. 2, April 13, 1956, pp. 54-6.