SOURCE: "Good-bye, Wisconsin; The Babe's Bed; and Other Stories," in Glenway Wescott: The Paradox of Voice, Kennikat Press, 1971, pp. 83-111.

Good-Bye, Wisconsin, which appeared in 1928, one year after The Grandmothers, contains the title essay and ten short stories, written for the most part between 1924 and 1927.¹ If, as Kahn states, the stories were "lyrical and impressionistic dramatizations of the explicit reactions and grievances which appear in the lead essay," and "illustrate the reasons he (Wescott) cannot stay in Wisconsin," they would be simply regional works. Rueckert is more accurate in pointing out that though "all the stories are set in Wisconsin and are bound to the region by virtue of the details of the physical scene, only a few are regional in the usual sense of the word; most of them could have taken place anywhere in the Midwest or in any rural community; and some of them could have occurred anywhere." Three of the stories are regional in that they have as their material the lives of "uneducated farm people," "treated as representative types of the region." These three, "The Runaways," "Prohibition," and "The Sailor," are regional portraits in the same sense that "Bad Han" is. But both "The Runaways" and "The Sailor" are concerned with flight from the past and expatriation and can thematically be grouped with another story, "The Whistling Swan."²

In "The Runaways," Amelia Fox, who does most of the work on the failing, hopeless farm of her drunken father and lazy complaining mother, is released from a life of complete drudgery by the death of both parents. Unattractive, ignorant, slow of mind, she marries her male counterpart, Nick Richter. They set the old farmhouse on fire for the insurance money (so ineptly that they have no chance of collecting) and leave for the city, where, fascinated by two women they meet from a carnival, they join what to them is the glamorous troupe; years later they are still with them.

For Nick, the barker at the "Gay Paree" show, "the carnival had not been his salvation." And Amelia, the show's ticket-taker, now wrapped in layers of fat, is "soothed by movement, and noise, gorged with excitement . . . satisfied." Both, however, have "learned that romance is for those who see, never for those who do, and underpaid as a profession."

"The Runaways" is one of the lesser stories in the book. As for its being representative, it cannot be considered a straight piece of regionalism; none of these stories can. Although the symbology is often trite, and what seems to be the point—a moral one—is hammered home, some of the smaller symbolic details, so grotesque, are superb in their implication of moral vacuity and decay, and there is a constant unifying tone. Kahn says that the story "implies a criticism of expatriatism," but it is rather of expatriatism-for-the-wrong-reasons. The "Gay Paree" show is not "the reduced shabby symbol of Paris itself." It is a symbol of the debased romantic concept of Paris in the minds of such as Amelia and Nick. It is not so much a "warning to artists, adventurers, and dreamers who would take flight," as a parable of pseudo-artists, unimaginative adventurers and dreamers of the tawdry dream. The stupidity and naiveté of Nick and Amelia are different in degree only from the failure of wisdom in the much more intelligent who believe salvation can be found in erasing the past and seeking valueless excitement. The contrary example is, of course, Alwyn Tower of The Grandmothers.

Terrie Riley, the protagonist of "The Sailor," another ignorant semi-literate, also attempts to escape hopelessly depressing surroundings. But Terrie, who joins the Navy and spends some time ashore on the French Mediterranean at Villefranche, learns something different about life. Returned temporarily to Wisconsin after his hitch, he attempts to communicate what he has learned to his brother, Young Riley.

His formless accounts are entirely concerned with his drinking bouts and adventures with prostitutes in Villefranche. His vocabulary is pitifully inadequate; abstractions and generalities are beyond him. Yet in the supposedly formless pattern of his main adventure he senses a wisdom that for the most part eludes his grasp—hence the ironic symbol of the tattooed letters on the back of his fingers spelling out "Hold Fast." He tells of Zizi, the prostitute he asked to marry him, of his discovery of her involvement with the lesbian Minette, and the consequent complications of their triangular relationship. Feeling emotions he never felt before he, "thus, bit by bit, had become civilized, like a foreigner." As he performs his chores on the farm, Terrie's brother, Young Riley, listens and understands nothing: to him it is only a tale showing his brother's failing for liquor and wild women; he, himself, is one indication that such complexities in sex, passion, love, and hence the emotions that go with them cannot occur in Wisconsin, and, supposedly, America. Although he has had enough of women and drink, Terrie feels a "thirst . . . he would have to quench." He is "lonesome for temptation and regret, for sharp contrasts, for distinct good and evil—in other words, for Europe—but at the same time hated these things from the bottom of his heart because they had made a fool of him." The story rises above being a regional portrait to successfully explore the themes of love and expatriatism in an imaginatively compelling way.

"The Whistling Swan" does not deal with rural regional types, but in its themes of expatriatism and love and their relation to the region, it is like "The Sailor." The expatriate, Hubert Redd, is an artist, a composer, and in further contrast to Terrie Riley he is literate, educated, sophisticated and fully aware of the pros and cons of life in Europe and America. He has been called home after several years in Europe by his wealthy patrons who have subsidized him, but who withdraw their support because they disapprove of his morals and feel he isn't a satisfying enough bet in the talent lottery. In his small Wisconsin hometown he tries to decide whether to return to Europe or to marry his childhood sweetheart, who ceaselessly and uncritically praises him, and settle down to a teaching job in Wisconsin. His sweetheart is the actuality to whom he has addressed his letters of romantic idealism; his return has revealed to him the faults of his work and the limitations, he thinks, of his talent. Kenneth Burke perceptively summarizes the climax and comments on the method:

While walking in the woods, with a gun and his indecision, he comes upon a swan, which startles him and which he shoots almost before thinking. Indecision vanishes. He will remain. In the shooting of the bird, felled in a flutter of expert prose, he slays a portion of himself, that portion which was drawing him to Paris. Wescott suggests—we are at liberty to complete the psychology. An aspect of the hero's self is externalized, and he slays it. The event may be taken, not as the cause of his reversal, but as a paralleling of it. That which occurs within, by dark and devious channels of decision, he duplicates without as the destruction of the swan. Following the symbolic elimination he is prepared to remain, to marry and let our gentle girl become indispensable to him.³

It is not simply the death of the swan that has such importance, but its death cries, which Redd can hear although he cannot see the bird:

There was a terrific splashing. Then it screamed. He had thought they were dumb, all the swans, he had thought they were dumb. The scream went on and changed and did not stop. In despair at dying, it whistled, whistled, and took its breath. Broken open, a heavy stream of music let out—but it was the opposite of music. Now husky, now crude, what were like clots of purity often, the rhythm of something torn. Greater beating of the wings, greater agony of the splashes, whipping, kicking. He was being made to hear what it would have been insufferable to see.

Hubert squatted on the wet shore and began to cry, but stopped because the sound of his voice was ludicrous. He did not want to see what was left of the swan. It was mere fright that had made him kill it, but if he had not been frightened he would not have heard its cries. He felt a sick satisfaction, definite jealousy of the dead bird, an extreme feebleness, a great haste.

There is ambiguity in the ending, for although Redd's decision is to stay in Wisconsin, the death of his expatriate urges have brought about an inner demand to rise above Wisconsin in the creation of ideal music or to remain dumb. But the swan's death song makes the whole ending ambiguous. Was Redd's sobbing in the woods the death song of his own creativeness?

Apparently all written before 1928, the stories in Good-Bye, Wisconsin deal with much the same material and themes and are similar in technique to what is found in the first two novels. The two major themes continue to be love and the self. Expatriatism, one of Wescott's major themes, is, of course, a special variation of the theme of the self. The three stories that deal with it, when combined with statements in the essay, present, Kahn says

Wescott's fullest statement on the problem of expatriation. The theme appears in both the earliest and the latest stories Wescott wrote during the twenties (also "The Runaways" appears first in the collection and "The Whistling Swan" last) and indicates the importance of this idea in stimulating Wescott's imagination. As we have seen, the problem has no easy solution—actually no solution at all. The rewards of flight and life abroad are ambiguous and dubious. Disillusionment replaces innocence; new appetites stimulate new hungers. Whether one is a Redd or Riley, there is no resolution, merely an exchange of values that are apt to leave one more restless than before—or nomads, like Amelia and Nick. And the individual decision, if we are to judge by these examples, is not arrived at wisely, judiciously, but through circumstances, moods, and obscure collisions of ideas and reactions in the back of one's mind. In any event, the blessings of expatriatism are mixed, the damnation subtle and diabolical.

The difficulty is that generalizing about "the problem" often is at the cost of the specific insights of the individual stories. Any statement about the theme in general in Wescott's work cannot ignore the expatriate-narrator of The Grandmothers, Alwyn Tower, and the expatriate stories here cannot be taken as the "fullest statement" of this aspect of Wescott's theme of the self. It is through Alwyn Tower's expatriatism, his back-trailing, that he is able to achieve the necessary distance to judge his heritage and find the self. His is not "a Redd or a Riley," or "like Amelia or Nick," and he is the only really successful expatriate, the only one who could find the self through expatriatism alone. Although Amelia and Nick "expatriate" in the unconscious urge to find the self, they fail because they are capable of nothing but a tawdry dream. Terrie Riley is superior to them in discovering that life is complex (and painful and pleasurable); and although he is not capable of enough insight to grasp his ambivalent feeling toward Europe (life), or do anything except try to quench his thirst for it, he is alive. To say that "merely an exchange of values" is involved is inadequate. As for Redd, there is the ambiguity of the ending and more important, the event of the slaying of the swan does, as Burke says, parallel the slaying of a portion of himself. Burke does not go on to say what the portion is, but it is obviously that portion capable of "taking flight," and capable of at least one song at death. It is out of "mere fright" that he kills it. Alwyn Tower and Hubert Redd are the only two expatriates who are artists and are the most pertinent to Wescott and his career. Alwyn Tower, the author's second self in The Grandmothers, is for Wescott the path taken, and Hubert Redd, so similar in background and sensibility, the path not taken, his eventual destiny remaining ambiguous.

It should be emphasized that both "The Sailor" and "The Whistling Swan" combine expatriatism and love as themes: in the first the two themes are of parallel importance; in the second, love is subordinate as a theme to expatriatism and the self. "The Sailor" is really the better story, although "The Whistling Swan" is concerned with the artist, with a mature and intelligent protagonist, and makes use, as will be considered later, of Wescott's favorite technique of narration.

Old Riley, the central character of "Prohibition," is, like the fathers of Bad Han and Amelia Fox, a drunkard, with the characteristics of the village drunk of small-town fiction. Riley is not melancholy, dangerous, nor frustrated, nor is he the crushed idealist. It is simply that sober he finds life dull. "Alcohol saved him from the mediocrity of the world." His drunkenness is "injurious to others," because it "furnished the community with a token of its inner desperation." He leads his two sons, Young Riley and Terrie Riley (whose later life is depicted in "The Sailor") to follow him in drink and carefree revelry—until his vice leads one winter to the freezing and amputation of both hands and feet, after which he leads a happy existence in his bed, drinking through a straw the whisky with which his wife provides him. His fate sobers everyone else, however. For the first time, his wife stirs from her sloth as Young Riley stops drinking to work hard at making the farm a paying thing, and Terrie is allowed to join the Navy. The prosperity of the farm turns the Riley daughter's boyfriend into a suitor and husband. Everyone, including Old Riley himself, is much happier than before.

This is the only piece written by Wescott that is comic in tone: "The Runaways," which uses a similar kind of grotesque detail, is merely sad. It is the monotony, the sobriety and lack of humor of a prohibitive society that is obliquely criticized here. It drives the older brother and Terrie, particularly, to drink, for drink makes the world "bright and distorted," and it is this that Terrie seeks in other lands: "that shining, deformed appearance even in broad daylight when he was sober." Only after his father's death can Young Riley, not as imaginative, find comfort in the more orderly dullness of hard work. It is only Terrie who seeks. These are three different responses to the Wisconsin wasteland, and the old man's and Terrie's seem more commendable—even though unsatisfactory because of their own human limitations—than Young Riley's plodding industry.

"Adolescence" and "In a Thicket," both concern adolescents, one a boy in the city, the other a girl in the country. The region is entirely unimportant; both are initiation stories, or, more specifically, stories of transition from innocence to experience, concerned with the beginnings of mature sensibility and knowledge. The concentration is on evoking the quality of the experience of the transition, and the means, in "In a Thicket," is through a symbolic texture of light and dark giving a rich and functional quality to the prose.

The thickets in the story are literally those which obscure the world from the cottage in which the fifteen-year-old Lily and her aged grandfather live, and figuratively the thicket of childhood from which Lily is emerging. The grandfather, in contrast to Lily, withdraws from existence, aging, back through innocence. In a half-waking state the previous night Lily had been aware of a prowler. Even after a neighbor woman, with oblique glances at Lily, comes to inform the old man that a Negro convict has escaped the previous night from the nearby prison, Lily tells her grandfather nothing, but waits in the dark for the prowler's approach that night with a sense that "the unknown, the difficult, the hypnotic, were likely to be revealed at any moment." When she hears the noises indicating his presence, she is, in a compound of terror and hope, drawn, yet transfixed in a spellbound state, toward the mysterious force beyond the screen door. She stops short of it, listening to the sounds suggesting violence and sensuality, and at last sees the prowler, his blackness glimmering in the moonlight: then the two remain poised opposite each other, momentarily transfixed. Finally he walks away, and Lily wakes the next day aware of "clots of color and vortices of movement she had never seen," to find a three inch gash in the screen door. Underneath every detail of the event lies sexuality—the symbolic black man (who has committed a crime of violence), the symbolic white girl, and perhaps too obviously, the gash in the screen door. The qualities of mystery and of darkness, and the elusive rhythm of sexuality, passion and love as the bio-psychological center of life are convincing because all is rendered as the experience from innocence to knowledge.

In "Adolescence," sensitive and effeminate thirteen-year-old country-boy Phillip is taken to a masquerade party by fifteen-year-old brash, dominant and ordinary city-boy Carl, in the costume of a girl provided by Carl's female cousins. The masquerade and costume as a disguise are metaphors for the experience of youth, which is puzzling and painful and colored by sexuality. Carl enjoys in Phillip "qualities he would later enjoy in women;" and Carl is to Phillip the possible future self. Uncomfortable and isolated as a "strange girl," insecure and afraid of his coming maturity, but excited by the games and the clumsy pairing off, Phillip's disguise and still-feminine-like qualities attract a clumsy approach and kiss from another boy; no one but Phillip himself discovers his real identity, for the disguise of pre-adolescence for him is torn away, and soon there would be "no more disguises, nor need to be taken care of, nor harm in being neglected." He is no longer, he feels, an imitation girl, although he has fears his masculinity may not be sufficient. On the way home he plans his first venture into the masculine world of the pool hall; and afterwards his landlady's "Who's that?" as he goes to his room signifies his transitional stage. Although well-conceived, the story is uninteresting. Although Phillip's feeling and thought are communicated he comes through as a kind of dull Penrod; his excitement seems academic, and his conception of himself is mundane.

In "Like a Lover," the hypnotic, spellbinding quality of love, and the relationship of love and death, become the central issue. The isolated, bewitched girl again appears, as the nineteen-year-old Alice Murray, who is fascinated by a much older man named Hurst. He is uncommunicative and ominous and possesses strange yellow eyes. Defying her mother's frantic prohibitions she marries him and goes to live on his farm, where the atmosphere becomes for her electric with fear. Awake or sleeping she is surrounded by clubs, whips and sharp instruments. Her fear reaches its culmination in an unrevealed incident that drives her, trembling, back to her mother, where she stays for seven years in another spell of isolation until she learns that Hurst is to marry again. Shaken awake, she tries to warn the woman, a widow named Mrs. Clayburn, that Hurst will kill her. Mrs. Clayburn at last believes her, but reveals that she is "powerless" and "paralyzed;" she does marry Hurst. After two months of nightmares foreshadowing the woman's death, Alice one day sees her friend Mary Clifford coming down the road from the Hurst farm. She is nearly standing in her buggy, frantically whipping her lame mare to desperate speed; Alice faints away and falls "backward on the porch."

No one of the stories in this collection is more successful aesthetically, for here form and theme, as they should, fuse, and the theme far transcends any regional setting or detail. In one aspect it is a terror story, and thematically it is about love. Technically it is a symbolic narrative. By a kind of narrative incremental repetition—the changed significant detail being the actual death of Mrs. Clayburn—the same predestined story of love is given twice; as narrative technique it helps to establish a tone of terror, to structure anxiety, suspense, and dénouement; thematically the pattern repeated implies its universal validity and establishes its quality of predestination.

As for the love theme, Rueckert has this to say:

Love, as the story attempts to make clear, destroys all theories, renders knowledge useless and the will powerless; it is deeply, essentially irrational, a kind of madness; it is more powerful than any parental authority; it is fatalistic, cruel, and leads to self-sacrifice. In this story it is everywhere associated with death . . . with masochism on the part of the women, with sadism on the part of Hurst, and, in the titlephrase, with "God (who is) like a lover, waiting, stepping out of the hazelbushes in the dark, opening his arms . . ."

Rueckert sees, quite correctly, the idea of love in this story as identical with the western, Romantic concept of love with its "religious linkages and the love-death association," as traced in history and explained by C. S. Lewis, Denis de Rougemont, and Leslie Fiedler, the "central idea" being contained in the simile likening God to a lover, and "by implication Hurst, or any lover, is likened to God, and finally, by implication love is likened to a god . . ." Love is a passion and a passion is a kind of madness, no matter in what form it may appear, whether as a man, a woman, or a god. The spell of madness means that rational behavior is replaced by released irrational forces, the result being unpredictable; hence Wescott's view of love as a Daemonic force, which it is useless to resist, "always just below the surface waiting to be released, to take over, whip in hand, and to ride man to his frequently unhappy and almost predestined end. One cannot often throw this rider; one usually outlasts him, lets the passion, whatever form it happens to take, run its course, and hopes for the best."⁴ The story contains, Rueckert believes, "the central vision" of the collection. It is more accurate to call it one-half of the central vision of the love theme. The other half deals with love in a wider sense and encompasses within it the above concept of love; it is the vision in "A Guilty Woman."

Again making use of the kind of material exploited by yellow journalism (another murder, but the murderer is the protagonist), Wescott's sensibility, understanding, and art turn this too into one of his finest stories.

Evelyn Crowe,⁵ now forty-five as the story opens, has been pardoned after serving only six years of her sentence for the murder of her lover, Bill Fisher. She was a chaste, passionless spinster in her late thirties when she was suddenly "in haste to be corrupted" by the faithless Fisher, who, when she pleaded with him to marry her, refused, writing her that he had thought he would "try old maid's love—see what that was like." In her passion she shot him and unsuccessfully attempted to take her own life. She has suffered the trial which revealed her private letters, and the aftermath including imprisonment. Like most of Wescott's lovers, she is a victim of passion as madness, and is made a fool of by love.

Martha Colvin, an old friend, has taken Evelyn in to live with her on her Wisconsin farm. For a while she lives a quiet life, feeling gratefully that nothing else can happen to her, seeing no one but Martha and Martha's longtime bachelor friend, Dr. John Bolton. But soon she and Bolton are in love, and Evelyn finds love a "personal, portable hell," a "cruel, brilliant light within herself by which to examine herself. Her ability to transcend disasters and defeats (like Mary Harris in The Grandmothers, Bad Han, and others) is what saves her. Most of Wescott's other heroines who survive disaster, however, do it by a kind of stoicism and mute suffering. Evelyn is more sensitive, complex, and interesting. It is clear that Wisconsin (or small-town America) does everything to prevent this flexibility which opposes rigidity and ossification; and when she was a school-teacher, it demanded that her morality be public and her way of life be self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency, Evelyn realizes, is another name for pride, her "besetting sin," the socially-engendered armor which prevented her from having an emotional life, from loving, until her affair with Fisher. That and its termination in violence, no matter how costly, have freed her from deadly repressions. The trial, exposure, and imprisonment have humbled her. Rather than crushing her, such experience has humanized her, given her the flexibility that makes it possible to love.

The story is brilliantly brought to a close. Evelyn feels guilty, cruel, humiliated and ashamed that she has won the love of the man that Martha loves. But Martha is wise and honest. Both women, through their final conversation, come to realizations about themselves not possible before. Martha now knows that with her own kind of selfishness she has bored Bolton for years by being too proud to need him; it is another example of the pride that has so crippled Evelyn, but the latter, having had it smashed, is the more complete woman, ready for love, and consequently she finds it, even in the Indian-summer of her life.

Passion first entered the life of Evelyn as a kind of madness, and true to pattern it makes a fool of her—she murders, and she attempts the ultimate foolishness of suicide; but the story goes beyond this, to make it, thematically, the most complex and rewarding of the group. It drives to what is beneath the outburst of passion to reveal the complicated makeup of pride, which is the outward face of repression socially and personally engendered, and a sin preventing love and a full life; pride causes passion, then "madness" which is not love but the passion of outrage at finding one cheated of love and the self violated. It goes beyond even this to the paradox that suffering—the madness, and the aftermath of punishment and humility—extends, deepens, and releases man for a mature (a-Romantic) love, another and superior thing to the passion previously experienced.

Martha and Evelyn are both at the end able to overcome behavior based on the Romantic view of love which exploits pride, selfishness, and jealousy. "Guilty Woman" and "Like A Lover," two of Wescott's finest stories, offer in emphasis the two opposed aspects of love, but "A Guilty Woman" juxtaposes the two, showing a protagonist who transcends Romantic "love as madness" for mature love.

"The Dove Came Down" and "The Wedding March" are clearly the most inferior stories in the collection; they can only be called failures. In dealing with Protestantism the former has something in common with "Prohibition," but the methods are contrasting. Character, action, and details are at a minimum. The concentration is on the introspection of Arthur Hale, who, having visited Europe and being what he is, finds his feelings and attitudes attempting to coalesce as he reacts against the church service to which he has taken his fiancée, Emily, in order to escape the presence of his family, whom they are visiting. The only two characters are Arthur and Emily. Arthur is depressed by the "weakness or mere poverty of temperament" of the congregation, their singing, and the details of the church interior, such as the memorial windows. During the communion he contrasts the "Catholic mystery" he has seen at Lourdes with the "merely symbolical worship in a progressive Protestant church." One is concerned with the visible, the other the invisible, need, which he feels is not satisfied by religion. Grace, the dove, ought to come down. He is revolted at the ideal eating of the body of God, tracing it in his mind from primitive rituals to what seems today simply a remnant. He refuses the sacrament. Emily admires him for it, although her needs, experience, and attitude are in contrast; an orphan, converted by a revival as a child, she is still subject to fears and mysteries. In the spiritual realm, Arthur concludes, "however much love can do, no two humans can agree."

Except for Emily's dialogue, and Arthur's, we are given only the thoughts about and reaction to Protestantism by Arthur. These seem bloodless, passionless, as though Arthur himself were incapable of real interest in them, and lead nowhere. His relationship to Emily lacks interest or verisimilitude, and her long speeches, in the last part of the story, are unbelievable, inert exposition.

The symbol of the dove, a revolving symbol, is the central thing that holds, or tries to hold, the story together, and will be commented upon later.

"The Wedding March" is another story concerned with love, but inferior to the others. Hugo Randolph, a bachelor of thirty-four or five, waits in the church for his bride, and during the actual ceremony, he recalls what he thinks of as his first wedding, his initiation into sexual passion by an older woman, the wife of his employer, when he was a nineteen-year-old farm hand. His mind shuttles back and forth from present to past, but most of the story concerns the early affair, the scenes and thoughts of what he as a boy took for love. For a long time he felt dead after the woman broke off the affair to join her husband whom she loved. While he waits for his bride, the ceremony works on his mind "like some rite of more specific magic," and "raises from the dead . . . love." The juxtaposition of the two "weddings" has produced certain realizations as well, given in a summing up of truths about passion, passion as an intoxicant, overlapping passions, pleasureless love as destiny, and the relationship of love and death. The love-death theme is one of the two that is developed with some clarity, the bells that awaken the protagonist that day taking on both connotations; the recognition of the death of the old love and the rebirth from it of the new, the wedding as an "easter," and the church metaphorically evoked as a tomb that signifies the death and rebirth of love are all parts of the development.

The other important theme deals with memory and its powers: concerning the past affair it makes that "idyll like another . . . mightier in retrospect than while it had taken place; so much more fleeting are all actions, so much more evanescent the body, than illusions and the mind." The other themes that Hugo's memories suggest remain in the chaotic and underdeveloped form as mere temporary half-hearted theorizing on his part. As a character, Hugo remains a kind of means for speculations attributed to a name. And there is no difference in language, no shift of any kind, from the omniscient commentary on him to his thoughts. The first woman remains obscure behind the language and abstractions, and the bride is even less real to Hugo and the reader alike: "A certain amount of white and green foam," an effect that sharply contradicts the death-rebirth theme, for Hugo seems spellbound by the past. The "meaning" or truths, in what is a familiar bad habit of Wescott's, are condensed and jammed into the final summing up of his thoughts. And although the action is in the present, as man and wife leave the church, the present comes to an end simultaneously with the end of the evocation of the past. But the present action has been dim and seems of little interest, in spite of what we are told, even to Hugo himself.

Characters

Of course characters in the short story are not expected to equal those of the novel in depth, complexity, and import, but, as in his novels, Wescott ranges all the way from failure to almost unqualified success in characterization. "The Runaways," and "Prohibition," although not among his best stories, have characters that are at least clear-cut. Of course they are treated at some distance, with an irony that, unusual in Wescott, becomes satiric grotesque, and at certain points in "Prohibition" becomes humor.

"In a Thicket" and "Like a Lover," both superior stories, depend on a close attention to, and especially in the former, an impressionistic rendering of, the sensibility of the protagonists. Such characterization when it succeeds as well as it does in these stories results in a closer fusion with other elements in the story.

It is difficult to say why Phillip in "Adolescence" is so uninteresting, why his excitement is not exciting. Phillip is another character of sensibility, and distance and point of view, discussed later, have something to do with it. Although he has something in common with Arthur Hale and Hugo Randolph he is not as much of a failure in characterization as they. All three of them have a certain energyless morose petulance even when they are in the emotional heights or depths. Hugo, of "The Wedding March," Kahn calls "a grey, bloodless thought machine." He is a disorganized one at that; and the themes he mulls over are never drawn together into any cohesion. Wescott is more concerned with ideas here than rendering them into fiction. "The Dove Came Down" is very similar in this respect, the attitude of Arthur Hale toward Protestantism and the Midwest being confused and leading nowhere as he speculates with a kind of fatigued discontent. In "The Dove Came Down," "The Wedding March," and "The Whistling Swan" (particularly in the first two), it is completely unbelievable that the men have any sentiment or even sexual itch for their fianceés whatsoever; this strengthens the contention that the stories are incomplete attempts to use fiction as a device to clarify a melange of ideas.

In "The Sailor," Terrie Riley is seen from some distance and the omniscient narrator interprets his sensibility, but Terrie comes through with clarity and even sympathy, in spite of his being semi-literate, coarse, and with nothing of the alleged fine sensibility of those discussed above. This very distance and the contrast between what the omniscient narrator (and hence the reader) perceives, and what Terrie does, dramatizes his attempt to understand. Even the minor characters emerge with more clarity and interest than the protagonists of "Dove," and "Wedding."

As a character, Evelyn Crowe of "The Guilty Woman" is the most interesting and the most complex—the most successfully rendered of all. This success is intrinsic to that of the whole story. It is not sensational violence that is the means. Wescott wisely de-emphasizes such. The story, with Evelyn's mind, follows through several steps to fresh insight and perception of human behavior that transcends the cliché or the melancholy dead-end. Her guilt and fears, her tears, shame, and humility—all are means to a fuller life and an understanding of it. Such realization she comes to is not achieved by pure speculation or academic thinking, but speculation under pressure, the pressure of finding oneself in love again.

As for the shortcomings that appear in Wescott's first novel and sometimes in his second, particularly lack of dramatization, scenic confrontation, and adequate dialogue, they are again evident, most often in the unsuccessful stones. "The Dove Came Down" and "The Wedding March" have almost no dramatization or scenic confrontation and since characterization is negligible, the entire weight of the performance rests on narration. The dialogue, when least satisfactory, lacks verisimilitude or conviction in this volume. In "The Dove Came Down" it is held to a very few lines—with the exception of an incredibly long speech—and in "The Wedding March" there is none at all, as though an attempt had been made to find a way around dialogue altogether. "Prohibition" and "The Runaways" contain the only attempts to render Wisconsin speech, but only in a few lines. The sparse dialogue in "The Sailor" is plausible idiom, but as is so often the case in these stories, the dialogue does little that has not already been done in some other way.

Symbolism

Wescott's technique of symbology and symbolic texture is nothing different from what he has done in his first two novels, although there is a variation in frequency, quality, and other factors, depending on the story. A single symbol is often at the very center of the story, whether it be a dove, a swan, or a gashed screen door. The bird continues to be Wescott's favorite symbol, appearing rarely in the other stories in minor ways, but figuring prominently in "The Dove Came Down," and "The Whistling Swan." Flora and fauna are used for symbolic atmosphere in some stories, particularly in "The Runaways" (the marsh), "The Thicket," and "Like a Lover." Sometimes, as in "The Dove Came Down," "The Wedding March," and to an extent in "The Whistling Swan," when other elements in the story are weak, the symbols are left to carry most of the meaning and are inadequately conceived or presented. In "The Dove Came Down," the bird is not only central but is used as a revolving symbol, for it has different aspects of meaning to the protagonist as the story proceeds: the "miracle of healing" which the sick demand at Lourdes, the Holy Spirit at Pentecost as it is presented in the conventional sense in religious paintings—but of deeper meaning, divine Grace, to Arthur—and at last a kind of Grace by means of its association with sunshine. Such technique, of course, is not enough to make a story, and the same can be said of the use of the wedding to attempt to bring off the theme of death and rebirth in "The Wedding March."

A case can be made that the swan's appearance in "The Whistling Swan" near the end of the story is a kind of "rigged" symbolism. No preparation is made for its use by a previous meaningful appearance, even in the character's thought. At the crucial moment it is meant to trigger a stock emotional response to the pitiful death cries of the bird, and to resolve forces in the story that have not been associated with the swan. It is therefore a combination of gimmick, and, since the intended emotional response has not been paid for, sentimentality. Another way of looking at it is that it is an example of the breaking into the literal level of the story what should have remained on the metaphorical or symbolic level, in this case, within the character's mind.

Narration and Structure

In "The Dove Came Down" and "The Wedding March," the narrator has certain qualities of the participating narrator that in The Grandmothers is Wescott's great technical discovery. A close look at "The Dove Came Down" reveals that the story is really in control of the omniscient narrator; although we follow the thoughts of the protagonist as he ruminates, the distance in sympathy is great, even evidenced by such phrases as "the thoughtful lover," and "the young man," and what is presented is a thin edge of his mentality. In "The Wedding March" the point-of-view is soon that of the protagonist, the language and development of his thought is better rendered, and the result is the third-person participating narrator; but the rumination is not enough, alone, nor successful in drawing together scene and meaning. "The Whistling Swan," another story to use this narrative method, is more successful despite other flaws. More impressive than any of these is "A Guilty Woman," which uses, with the exception of paragraphs at the beginning and end, a third-person point-of-view that focuses closely on the sensibility of the protagonist, with many of the qualities of the participating narrator in "The Whistling Swan." The trio makes one think that Wescott was experimenting here with the third-person participating narrator, with its attributes of rumination and rhetorical voice, as a technique. Whether written before or after The Grandmothers, where the voice is so successfully developed, certain adjustments might have had to be made for the short story form and for the particular piece. His two most successful works, The Grandmothers and The Pilgrim Hawk, use such a narrator. A degree between these successes and the failures of some of the short stories is The Babe's Bed, soon to be discussed. Another point to be made about this narrative voice is that so far it seems to be closely related to the author's second self, the mind of the writer in the story, and that when the narrative voice fails, consequently, everything fails.

In "The Wedding March," and "The Dove Came Down" the protagonist is placed in a specific situation and is almost immobile in location (the wedding in a church, the service in a church). Because of the situation, the character ruminates, bringing in experiences of time-past. There is, therefore, at one level his interior monologue dealing with past action, at another there is whatever action takes place externally in time-present, and at another are the symbolism and the generalities developed by the character's rumination and memory. This is, of course, in concept basically the method used in The Grandmothers. The events in time-present are few, and in the stories the concentration is on the monologue. One difference between "The Whistling Swan" and the other stories is that in it events taking place in time-present are more fully developed; another is that the swan is externalized rather than developing in the monologue. Although the use of the narrator in The Grandmothers is similar in concept to these stories in the novel, each series of incidents in time-past is well developed in concrete terms, and is more likely to carry its own weight of meaning in the development of a biographical portrait. Another difference is that although it is of utmost importance what everything means to the narrator Alwyn Tower, his position in time and place gives him more distance. The protagonists in the three stories, although they may consider the past from the present, are in a present situation in which whatever is gleaned from the meditation seems to ask for some kind of immediate application. Of course, a most important characteristic associated with the use of such a narrator, whether successful or not, is the emphasis it places on certain qualities of Wescott's prose—generalities, aphorisms, epigrams, and rhetorical voice.

"The Runaways" and "Prohibition" are at the other pole in technique. As with Wescott's first novel, the point-of-view is omniscient and the anonymous narrator makes himself felt through voice. They are narratives in straight chronological order. The prose has less involution, lyricism and less rhetoric than in the stories just discussed, and there is some dialect of the region.

"Like a Lover" is a symbolic narrative, the level of meaning and the level of action fusing for artistic success. "In a Thicket," also successful, is the same kind of story technically. "Adolescence" attempts to be in this category too, the girl's disguise and role being the state from which the protagonist emerges. All of them use an omniscient narrator who is sympathetic to the protagonist's subjective experience and capable of rendering it.

The resemblance in structure of "The Sailor" to The Grandmothers is of minor importance, a reversal of the protagonist's position, Terrie Riley viewing Europe from the distance of Wisconsin in an attempt to understand it. More important, he does not do the actual narration, although he tells his brother of his adventures. The omniscient narrative voice takes over the function in relating his adventures to the reader, even informing him that there are some things that Terrie didn't tell his brother; in fact we are informed that he is "inexpressive" and that his ideas are lacking in "virility." The distance, therefore, between the character and the voice is very great. One wonders if this very good story could not have been a very fine one if it had been possible to render it through the language of Terrie. The structure is consistent with the theme, depending on the contrast between Wisconsin and France.

"The Guilty Woman" doesn't fall easily into any of the groups technically, though it does resemble closely the three "ruminating" stories in that the protagonist in a specific situation in time-present ruminates on time-past. Present events are much more developed, dramatically functional and important, but so are events in time-past in that they are not ephemeral or elusive. Unlike the other three stories, action at both levels successfully leads to clarification of theme, insight, and development of character.

It is evident in his short stories that Wescott experimented with different forms, especially in structure and point-of-view and narration, with varying degrees of success, only four of them ("The Sailor," "Like a Lover," "In a Thicket," and "The Guilty Woman") without major flaws.

Yet he was to write only six more stories over a period of a dozen years.

The essay "Good-Bye, Wisconsin," written after Wescott had spent three years abroad,⁶ was first published in the New York Herald Tribune⁷ when the author was at the peak of his career after the publication of The Grandmothers. It appeared again as a kind of preface and the title work of his only collection of short stories. For some reason, perhaps because of its wide circulation, and the directness of its rejection of Wisconsin, it was the recipient of more critical comments than anything else by Wescott, except, of course, The Grandmothers.⁸ Wescott, even though writing an essay, does not discard whatever fictional techniques he feels are useful. Like the protagonists of "The Sailor," "The Whistling Swan," and The Babe's Bed, Wescott himself in the essay is returning from Europe to Wisconsin. Like those stories too, the essay is organized by contrasting America and the Midwest to Europe, and also by Wescott's approach to an arrival in Kewaskum, Wisconsin, his hometown, his visit there, and his departure. It is not organized in terms of argument; in this respect it is haphazard, Wescott commenting on whatever he feels or thinks concerning everything he observes, his comments being the evaluations which lead him again to depart.

A large part of what contributes to Wisconsin's deficiency for Wescott is identical in essence to what his work has indicated before, allowing for some change in time. In many ways it is another rendition of the myth as discussed in chapter 3. Wisconsin is portrayed as a cultural wasteland, materialistic, drab and depressing, provincial, isolated, unimaginative, repressively "Puritan," a milieu in which artistic talent is stifled, a conforming world in which his own brother asks him not to wear his beret on the street. Both he and Wisconsin have changed, Wescott finds. His attitude is ambivalent toward a "progress" which has ended the deprivation but also the poetry of the older life; it is not the "home" he left—and not the one he wrote about. In the town Wescott meets only group-consciousness, and in the fraternity house, the incubation of what we now call the Organization Man. To him the Middle West is an "abstract nowhere," "out of focus, amorphous, a mystery," and he concludes that "there is no Middle West. It is a certain climate, a certain landscape; and beyond that, a state of mind of people born where they do not like to live." But this does not give an idea of the innumerable subjects upon which the author touches at least briefly, all related in some way to American culture. Concluding that America is "still a land of perennial disappointments" Wescott departs again for Europe.

The essay is not a piece of objective social analysis, but an attack, which presents in terms of his personal vision the reasons why Wescott finds the Middle West and America a place that in countless ways prevents the development of the self. Aspects of the same vision appear in "The Sailor," and "The Whistling Swan," but they are responsible to the aesthetic logic of the stories. The attack in the essay consists of one cleverly phrased generality after another, "the truth of which," as Rueckert so aptly remarks, "a man could not know with any certainty even after half a lifetime of study," although, one might add, so typically broad and dogmatic are they that it is impossible to read the essay without a kind of aggressive doubt rising in the mind.

The essay is pontifical, dogmatic, didactic, authoritative, and couched in a tone of nostalgia and lament. The prose style is dominated by aphorism, epigram, and paradoxical statement. In other words, this is the spellbinding narrative voice, the rhetorical voice so highly developed in The Grandmothers, which in fiction, after the first novel, has been the voice of the third-person participating narrator. Here first person is used, with no discernible difference in effect. Ruminating, yet persuasive, the voice is concerned with communicating truth. Relieved of most of the concerns necessary in fiction, the author indulges in a tour de force of the rhetorical voice. There are no symbols here, for instance, in the sense that they are successfully used in fiction; there is only rhetoric about symbols. Even the images which give rise to the generalities (the truth) or serve as examples are, as is so often the case when encompassed by the narrative voice, vague and general. The following is typical; the subject is the billboards on the local motion-picture theater:

On the brick wall, on the easels on the sidewalk, samples of what it has to offer: the abnormally large and liquid eyes of a beauty; the ridicule and pity of ill-fitting shoes; distant crystal and iron seas; foreign luxury, fashion shows, garden parties with diamonds and swans.

"Large and liquid eyes" is concrete, but the adverb "abnormally" is not, and the noun "beauty" is a general classification and hence vague. "Ridicule and pity" are abstractions; "foreign luxury" and "fashion shows" are vague and general. The example is an illustration of Wescott's strong impulse toward generality, even when using images, and toward rhetoric, which in the essay is brilliant and witty. These impulses, it has been noticed in previous works, can get out of hand in his fiction. But he has not forgotten, such a short time after The Grandmothers, that the narrative voice can be a powerful and effective instrument. The question still remains at this point whether he will be able to control it in the best interests of his fiction.

In the last section of the essay, Wescott boards the train and announces that he "would like to write a book about ideal people under ideal circumstances," an "indoor book," and he describes what might be considered characteristics of the novels of Henry James. In the last paragraph he describes the kind of style he would like to develop in a book "out of which myself, with my origins and my prejudices and my Wisconsin, will seem to have disappeared." He seems then, genuinely to be saying good-bye to Wisconsin, and trying to say good-bye to what there is of Wisconsin in himself. But his description of the style he hopes for is curious:

For another book I should like to learn to write in a style like those gestures (of the signal flags used by sailors): without slang, with precise equivalents instead of idioms, a style of rapid grace for the eye instead of the ear, in accordance with the ebb and flow of sensation instead of intellectual habits, and out of which myself, with my origins and my prejudices and my Wisconsin, will seem to have disappeared.

Certain of these characteristics are strikingly unliterary. Wescott's weakness in dialogue, idiom and slang is likely to make one suspect his motives, but no doubt this is unjust. The first half of the paragraph, however, seems to describe the language of science. The important thing is to notice Wescott's conscious desire for a style which he will attempt very late in his career, and to his detriment.

The Babe's Bed, a somewhat long short story of thirty-five pages, was written in 1929 and published as a book in a limited edition in Paris in 1930. It is in part a kind of postscript to the essay, an extra good-bye to Wisconsin, although the people and the tensions are more of the twenties than those he has treated before in his fiction. Again we have the expatriate protagonist returning to Wisconsin and comparing it with Europe as a means of coming to conclusions about both. Again, the region and the country is found inimical to the development of the self, but that is only one aspect of the story.

The household that the protagonist, a young nameless bachelor, returns to in Wisconsin is that of his family—his father, mother, and grandfather, his younger sister, an older, ill, married sister, her husband and their baby boy. There is, as before, the familiar three-level pattern: present action, the interior monologue of the protagonist about the past, and the symbolism developing within the monologue from the interaction of the present action and the rumination. The tension grows in the depressing heat as antagonisms and affections in the family break the surface. The "babe's bed" in the story, including the babe himself, is again a revolving symbol, with different facets or concepts revealed by it—but all within the mind of the protagonist. Because the babe is in danger of injuring himself at night during his temper tantrums, the protagonist suggests the making of a harness (quickly accomplished) to provide a discipline for the babe and tranquility for the others.

The central drama in the story, as in others like it, is that of the narrator's mind. It undergoes introspection and involution, and the language and manner in which it is rendered is that of the rhetorical narrative voice, ruminating, turning out generalities, producing layers of meaning as the present action works toward the climax of placing the babe in his harness. This event is the dividing point in the story. For up until this moment the protagonist, as rhetorical narrator, has followed the kind of process such narrators always have in Wescott's fiction. However, he has done exactly what the narrator in "The Dove Came Down" and "The Wedding March" did to contribute to the failure of those stones, and what he did in "Good-Bye, Wisconsin" to make us skeptical, and what to a certain degree Alwyn Tower is guilty of in The Grandmothers. Whether it is called excessive generalization, rumination inadequate in drawing together other elements in a story, or something else, the point is that the speculations and conclusions, the generalities the protagonist-narrator produces and the symbolic significance he imagines are inadequately justified by the concrete events and details that take place outside of his mind. Wescott before has either been unaware of this or unable to do anything about it, but in The Babe's Bed he is not only aware of it, he makes the protagonist aware of it. In fact, this is the very subject of the story.

The bachelor sees almost everything as symbolical, or attempts to make whatever he sees into a symbol or a basis for generalizing—but all of his vision of things is in relation to himself. The inordinate affection of his older sister and himself for each other is revealed as an (unconsummated) incestuous relationship. He uses this, and the existence of the baby, and the events leading to the baby being put in his bed and harness at dinner, as the springboard for his imaginings (in a metaphor extension reminiscent of the convoluted incest metaphor in The Grandmothers) which become simply grotesque, absurd; and instead of enlightening the situation and the human relationships, his imaginings are a distortion of realities (Wescott might call them pseudo-truths). Consequently he is disoriented in time, his relationship to the present confused. A crisis develops as the baby screams at being placed in his harness at dinner. Immersed in his own mental web, the bachelor flies into a rage at a minor incident that follows. But suddenly he realizes his anger should be pointed inward, not outward, that he has constructed fantasies through his involution and rumination, and that they bear the most tenuous relation to the facts, to reality.

The bachelor then reverses his whole mental process, and the story consequently reverses itself. Although his mental process still involves involution and analysis, the layers of meaning which have been built up are now revealed as unfounded, unjustified, worse than worthless, mere fantasies. The result is that the bachelor arrives at a certain knowledge of himself. This is the first thing that he learns—that he is infatuated with himself, and that his ambiguous talent and obsession is the making of fantasies. Consequently, part of his existence he sees as taking place in his mind only, "in an ephemeral western town in himself." His attitude then is fatalistic toward this "force." He looks at it fatalistically as Wescott's lovers look at love, and he calls it various things, including "nature or destiny or god or anonym. Maniacal worker, mad about its art." It is, he feels, his destiny:

Soon he would depart again, to his distant ambitions—

the necessary infatuation with himself, the remorse incessantly attendant upon his faults. . . . Time could not be depended upon to sweep him safely, normally, onward; but would be forever letting him fall back into what was over and done with, and letting him, enfevered by the unwanted past, leap weakly ahead into what was to come.

This destiny is identical to the very disease that Alwyn Tower in The Grandmothers considers his "birthright," and which, by the act of creation, he was seeking to, and did, escape.

Now the bachelor sees that the fantasies he produces are in one sense true to himself, but they are not at all true to external reality. His art then, is not something made in imitation of this objective reality (not in other words images of truth), and therefore, as a statement about reality they have no validity. Now the bachelor knows that art cannot be solely true to the self but must have a valid relationship to life external to him. Therefore, his insight is bound to be shocking. Reality, he sees, is what happened at dinner, and so complex are even the events contributing to it that this reality is impossible to capture "in print."

Throughout the story, the narration is, of course, by the participating narrator. For the first half the voice carries on its usual functions. The second half reveals the falsity of the symbolizing and generalities which are very characteristic of that voice, and layer by layer, it de-symbolizes and de-generalizes. Yet, incurably, and apparently without the awareness of either character or author, one of the greatest faults of this rhetorical narrator, his profuse capacity for generalizations, particularly in a summing up at the end of a story, is indulged in here to a degree beyond any aesthetic justification—an ironic, though unintentional, proof of the validity of the narrator's destructive analysis of himself.

What is especially significant about this story is that Wescott, having developed the participating third-person-narrator, capable of lyricism, but especially of rhetoric, and having failed with it in some stories, having utilized it brilliantly in one of his major works, The Grandmothers, now apparently is out to destroy his faith in this method and the psychological sources behind it. And, sadly enough, the story, although important to the understanding of Wescott's art, is a poor example of his use of this method of narration, so abstract, so continually generalizing, so dry and devoid of vivid language is the prose. The characters and present events in the story (the "external reality") are inadequately developed and expositorily presented, and elicit almost no interest whatsoever. There are the same general difficulties of "The Dove Came Down" and "The Wedding March." It is one of Wescott's most inferior works. One can only assume that the nameless bachelor, since he is beset by the same problems of narrative art as Wescott himself, is, as artist, his duplicate, and that Wescott is determined to give up what was once his basic artistic method of narration, or even the writing of fiction itself. He nearly did just that. With the exception of three short stories, no fiction appeared from him until ten years later.

The short stories that were published after the collection in Good-Bye, Wisconsin are few and inferior. Looking at them, one hardly needs the clue of The Babe's Bed to see that Wescott's difficulties are to an important degree concerned with point-of-view and narration. There are only five of them: "Hurt Feelings" (1932), "The Sight of a Dead Body" (1936), "The Rescuer" (1936), "Mr. Auerbach in Paris" (1941-42), and "The Frenchman Six Feet Three" (1942).

"Hurt Feelings" is a rewritten portion of an unfinished novel Wescott stopped working on in 1931.⁹ Unlike any long fiction before this, it has no "regional" qualities, but its material and the values that energize it are markedly American. Concerning John Durn, a multimillionaire of the "self-made" American species who is on his deathbed, the story reveals what Mrs. Holly Cleaveland, his divorced, middle-aged daughter, discovers upon investigating his papers; the secret of her father's success is simply "hurt feelings," the stupendous rage of a petty man whose gargantuan ego was violated by jealousy (his wife had once called his business partner a better business man). His revenge extends not only to his wife and partner but his daughter and her husband. The ironies are obvious—the contrast of public image and private fortune to the real man. The prose is not quite as soporific as that of TheBabe's Bed, but apparently is of a style Wescott was trying to develop. The result is a dry, emasculated prose and the expository method. The omniscient narrator controls all—a retreat in point-of-view to the first novel. Although we are told that Mrs. Cleaveland gradually discovers all by going through the papers, Wescott does not do what might make the story interesting—he does not as he had done so often let the protagonist's mind become the center of the story, thus making the reader's and the protagonist's discovery one. Instead he relies on an anonymous omniscient narrator who remains far removed for a great portion of the story from the thoughts of Mrs. Cleaveland, and who supplies us with information and subtleties and details neither she, nor any one person, could possibly know, and in rhetoric she could not command.

In the last four sections of the story additional revelations of her father's destruction of her marriage are rather artificially contrasted with the complimentary remarks of her father's ex-partner. Finally, Mrs. Cleaveland comes to a great truth—that the really "great" men are those who simply want to live, those classified as fools or failures. We are led to presume that she will get her husband back and save the soul of her son—as soon as her father expires.

The pattern is familiar. The tying up of everything at the end so that a truth or truths may be revealed to apply directly to the life of the protagonist, the present events juxtaposed against the past. But the symbol-making and the generalizing occur both in and outside the mind of the protagonist, and in each case with distance. The story cries for a Jamesian or Conradian development that follows the adventure of the central intelligence—with at least a minimum of social action, more than simply a perusing of old papers—not condensed exposition about the material that allowed such an adventure to take place. Emasculated prose, unexciting narration, trite characters and complications, a plot whose dependence on suspense is undermined by revealing the outcome beforehand—these are other important reasons for the story's lack of distinction.

"The Rescuer" does not jell aesthetically, and in this respect is as much a failure as "The Dove Came Down" and "The Wedding March." The omniscient anonymous voice begins the story, fades half-way into the view of suddenly-introduced reporter Martin Herz, then asserts itself again. The first shift marks the point where the story divides itself into two fragments. The first part concerns three boys burned to death in the flames of a "haunted house," the rescue of another boy, a twin, by a mysterious savior, and the twin's death of grief for his counterpart. The second half is Herz's attempt to extract some truth from these events, but rather than anything being resolved, new complications are introduced, then forgotten. The shift and reshift of narration in the story is only the most glaring evidence of a divided mind on the part of the author. In the last half Herz is an illustration of what the bachelor was trying to avoid in The Babe's Bed, only he seems less sane. The detail revealed (by an omniscient voice) when he is first introduced—that he committed suicide later—simply undercuts him and his thwarted investigation.

In "The Sight of a Dead Body," there is a reversion of technique, to no advantage. Even the name and some of the characteristics of the main character, Michael Byron, go back to Wescott's first novel. As a farm hand on a New Jersey farm, Byron one afternoon lazily lolls and speculates haphazardly about love and life, and upon rising to investigate a disturbed bull, finds a nude male corpse on a manure pile. The discovery is the only event in the story. The limited third-person-narrator is Mike Byron, but the use of the narrator does not accomplish much except to allow us to experience the disorganized, thin, half-heartedly symbolic movement of Mike's mind. No attempt is made to load the discovery of the body with meaning, except through obvious contrast with the natural surroundings. The event occurs at the end of the very short story. The story is something like a purely imagistic poem in trying to avoid implication. What it amounts to is "fine-writing" and a poor story.

"Mr. Auerbach in Paris," and "The Frenchman Six Foot-Three" are both didactic, the difference, somewhat important, being a matter of degree. Alwyn Tower appears as narrator in both of them, and, as in The Pilgrim Hawk, narrates in first person. The message of both stories is similar, the first emphasizing the shortsightedness of those who had pro-German, anti-French attitudes during World War II; they stand as representative of a certain view of life. The second is concerned with viewing the fall of France in personal-cultural terms. The attempt is to make the single tall Frenchman into a symbol of France and her characteristics at that time, but Alwyn limits his abstracting and generalizing so that in the personal and cultural situation the sad, pitiful, and complex qualities are not ignored. Yet the story falls short of its conception. The fact that the narrator speaks in first person seems neither to add nor detract. There is too much exposition and rhetoric—the measurement of this shortcoming is that characters and their plight barely emerge from being fixed in language.

As in The Pilgrim Hawk and several of the stories, there are two levels of time (three counting the present time of narration), the story held together by the thoughts of the narrator who symbolizes and creates rhetoric in a distinctive voice. With plenty of opportunity for it, there are no really well-realized dramatic situations; everything has the tone and the imaginative deficiency of the "true incident," and the prose, although superior to, say, The Babe's Bed, achieves only a certain dry elegance; even though expressing personal biases and tastes and judgments, it is curiously lacking in vitality.

Notes

¹ Rueckert, pp. 61-62.

² Kahn, p. 127.

³ Kenneth Burke, "A Decade of American Fiction," Bookman,LXIX (1929), p. 566.

⁴ Rueckert, pp. 66-67.

⁵ The name is consistent with the bird symbology in The Apple of the Eye, where crows signify death.

⁶ Kahn, p. 120.

⁷ Rueckert, p. 69.

⁸ Kahn, p. 120.

⁹ Rueckert, p. 93.

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth. "A Decade of American Fiction," Bookman,LXIX (1929), 561-567.

Kahn, Sy Myron. Glenway Wescott: A Critical and Biographical Study, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1957, Publication number 20,631.

Rueckert, William H. Glenway Wescott. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1965.