The Fiction
[In the following essay, Labrie provides a rare, extensive treatment of Nemerov's fiction.]
Nemerov has published two volumes of short stories, A Commodity of Dreams (1959) and Stories, Fables & Other Diversions (1971). A Commodity of Dreams takes its theme from its title story. Exhibiting Nemerov's penchant for fable, the story is set in an English forest where a man has constructed a museum in which his dreams are carefully cataloged and in which objects that have appeared in his dreams are displayed. The museum is a way of preserving Captain Lastwyn's psychic past as well as tangible articles from his undistinguished life: “‘The little boys and girls, my home, the way we used to live, the little things which happened that one doesn't remember. I've had them all back, I have them all back’. ‘Here?’ I asked, indicating the files. ‘Here, and inside me.’ He bowed his head a little, and added, ‘I have seen my father smile again, and spoken to my mother—though we said only silly things.’ As he raised his head I was not surprised to see tears in his eyes” (p. 64).1 Captain Lastwyn confides that he is not interested in psychoanalysis, presumably because it would be both superfluous and a semiabstract entry into a subconscious world which presents itself to him with perfect clarity and picturesqueness.
With characteristic poise Nemerov ends the story with the narrator somewhat dazedly taking his leave of the forest museum and boarding a bus which is going in the wrong direction. Rather than get off, he submits to his situation with a newfound quietude. Nemerov's short stories, like those of many contemporary writers, tend to end enigmatically. The jarring effect of these endings is in accord with his belief that, instead of judging the artist's work in the light of their own experience, readers should be encouraged to judge their experience in the light of the artist's work. Knowing that he is regarded as eccentric by the bus conductor, the narrator of “A Commodity of Dreams” placidly conceives of her and of all men as equally, if not knowingly, dreamers, a blurring of the distinction between inner and outer worlds which has Nemerov's deepest assent. The story reveals itself finally as about the drollness and oddity of man's solipsistic infatuation with himself and as such is typical of all of the stories in the collection.
“Yore” offers an analogous tale on a larger scale in which not only individuals but whole communities indulge in solipsism. The scene is the significantly named Forgeterie in the Hotel Beauldvoir and involves a group of worldly cosmopolitans of the sort who inhabited European watering spots at the turn of the century. The conventions of this group include arranged marriages and comfortable harbors, where they can sit out interruptions like war with a feeling of aloof security. Overseen by a bone-china moon, the inhabitants of the Forgeterie ritualistically cultivate the sense of their ordered past against the backdrop of a looming external world whose abrasiveness they will do everything in their power to avoid.
The story centers on Felicia Drum, who has been persuaded to marry an aristocrat whom she does not love. Her outlook is exquisitely bitter. She feels herself caught between two unappealing alternatives—a raw, fearful external world that she knows nothing about and the smoothly ordered and airless world that she does know. She marries as is expected of her, and thereby commits herself to a life of spiritual asphyxiation. This is dramatized in the Wagnerian water opera that she watches, which appears to have been loosely modelled on Andersen's fairy tale “The Little Mermaid.” Drifting mentally through the opera, she glows with consciousness as the final grisly scene is played out following the prince's ardent leap into the water to join his mermaid sweetheart for ever:
Felicia was quite in time to see that she, her long white arms fixed firmly around her lover's middle, her silver tail flashing in one powerful turn and dive, dragged him away below. The audience, leaning over the edge of the pool, had a clear view of his silent writhings, kickings and strugglings, accompanied by chains of bubbles from the air in his clothing and one final chain of bubbles from the air in his lungs; after this—it had taken over a minute—he lay still at the entrance of the coral castle, until presently a cortege of mermaids swam down and carried him away, while on distant pianos empty octaves bounded angrily up and down their deserted, echoing stairwells.
(p. 12)
The water world with its choreographed violence symbolizes the stifling urbanity exhibited by all of the characters in “Yore.” Stylistically, the scene is typical of the way in which Nemerov maintains a fine edge throughout the stories in this collection by counterpointing the note of violence with dry, elegant language and a tragicomic tone.
“Yore” concludes with the echoes of a real war heard in the distant background. Thinking about this war and with conscious irony, Felicia declares finally that “if there's anything in the world I love, it's reality” (p. 13). The statement expresses the stasis that is the configuration of her life. War would at least sweep away the decay that surrounds her and is thus a romantic force in her imagination. She accepts as desolately real on the other hand the outmoded conventions of her social caste and in a sense her final ironic comment with its jadedly self-conscious overtones is an anticlimactic confirmation of her place in that caste.
“The Sorcerer's Eye” is one of a number of stories in A Commodity of Dreams which develop the theme of obsessiveness. The story employs a fairy tale motif that includes a forest, castle and beautiful maiden. The girl's father is given the role of the tyrannous giant-God figure who must be overcome—in the best tradition of Freudian fairy tales—if the children are to assume control over their own lives. The glass eye of the tyrannous father, the eye of knowledge, becomes the center of the narrator's obsession. He finally seizes the eye and instantaneously discovers the refined anguish of new awareness. He knows suddenly all of the fear that in childhood “had been denied, all the fear, I think, of children all over the world when in their sinfulness and shame they stand before the mighty parents whom they are bidden to destroy” (p. 244). As a confirmation of the perils of mature vision the beautiful girl who flees with the narrator becomes suddenly transformed into a “thickened, sallow, blotched creature dressed in a somewhat elegant gown which was, however, badly ripped and stained” (p. 243).
The obsessions of Nemerov's unheroic protagonists frequently begin with some small nagging irritant. Sometimes this takes a physical shape, as in “The Twitch,” an amusing tale about a self-disciplined Hollywood mogul who has weathered a lifetime of anti-Semitism and a young Aryan actor who, reacting subconsciously to his own racism, twitches uncontrollably in having to play the part of a Jew. In “The Guilty Shall Be Found Out and Punished” the narrator is obsessed with an elusive itch under his right foot which he cannot understand but which the reader associates with lascivious impulses that the narrator is too timid to express but about which he still feels vaguely guilty. The guilt is a sign of the cultural and social origins of many of the characters' obsessions. The obsession of the protagonist in “The Web of Life” originates in a social convention, that of respect for the dead. He is condemned to see both his own life and his inheritance slowly evaporate in preserving his dead great uncle in an expensive cryogenic mechanism that is designed to provide the old man with a fresh-frozen immortality. Bound to his great uncle's posthumous obsession by the conditions of inheritance, the narrator acknowledges with chagrin the oddity of his simultaneously fortunate and helpless position: “If Great-uncle taught me one thing for which I am thankful, it is that money is the blood of the world, and as things are now I can comfortably go on bleeding for years, for life.” (p. 87). The theme of man's powerlessness is pointed up repeatedly in these stories of obsession—a powerlessness which like that depicted in “The Web of Life” frequently lurks within the very trappings of power.
Nemerov had intended to call his first book of stories Obsessions, only later changing the title to A Commodity of Dreams. The appropriateness of the original title is evident throughout the book. In “Tradition” the principal character funnels his life into the slaughtering of thousands of crows, taking advantage of a forgotten village bounty on crows. He then creates a marginal handicraft industry out of the bones and feathers of dead crows and creates a legend about the massacre of the crows by inventing a plague of crows and some heroic ancestors to deal with them. Infuriated by him at first, the town finally honors his death as a member of one of the area's oldest families. In addition to dramatizing one man's obsession, the story embodies a conspicuous Nemerovian theme, that of the impact of imagination on external reality.
At the same time the obsessed characters generally find themselves at some point, often a point of no return, in collision with the external world. Such is the case with Samuel Amran in “An Encounter with the Law.” Amran drives north from New York City in the autumn to see the New England foliage, his powder-blue Cadillac gliding effortlessly through the tiny white villages. He relaxes as he feels the weight of commercial and familial responsibility sliding from his shoulders. Unthinkingly he flicks a cigar butt out of the car window which suddenly brings him face to face with a humorless policeman who becomes the incarnation of his most surrealistic fears: “Except for mouth and chin, the man seemed to have no face but to be all blue-gray cloth, black leather and green glass; even his skin was leathery, red, rough, and his peeling nose seemed to incorporate itself somehow with the sunglasses which in turn fitted closely, concealingly, under the visor of his cap. He wore great black gauntlets going nearly to the elbows, and his belt sagged to one side under the weight of the holstered gun” (pp. 204-05).
Humiliated and flustered, Amran tries to bribe the policeman, who in turn orders him to go to the police station. Following the policeman's motorcycle, Amran comes to a fork in the road, a location that seems to flow from an earlier dream and he goes berserk, gunning the engine in a frantic attempt to escape. Exhilarated and flushed with a sense of power, Amran forges through what has become a solipsistic experience only to find that there are unforeseen, real consequences ahead as he smashes into the policeman, killing him instantly. He returns to contact with the external world with a heavy sadness, taking off the policeman's cap and sunglasses and noticing that the “face beneath was younger, softer, than what he had expected” (p. 210). The obsessions of characters like Amran are manifestations in Nemerov's short story typology of the impasse between the mind and the external world, an impasse whose consequences are as catastrophic as they are unavoidable.
While obsession leads to disaster in colliding with the external world, the energy which brings about the catastrophe generally comes from within, a satisfying circumstance in stories which focus in any case on characterization. This can be seen in “Delayed Hearing” in which a car accident so infuriates one of the victims, Miss Mindenhart, that she pursues the other driver with mounting fury through the courts. Frustrated by the inability of the courts to bend to her will, Miss Mindenhart strikes out at her gentle, pacifistic adversary in a scene that brings about the woman's surprising death and registers Nemerov's sense of the human condition:
If Mr. Julius Porter had not grabbed at his cousin's arm, slightly deflecting the trajectory of the handbag; if Mrs. Haxton had only put up an arm to ward off the blow, as Miss Minderhart assuredly anticipated she must do … if only Mrs. Haxton had not at this moment confirmed herself in a religion of suffering nonresistance; if only, above all, she had not worn that smile … But as it was, the silver- or chrome-plated arrow of the handbag pierced her left eye, and there was a grotesque instant of silence and motion arrested everywhere.
(p. 199)
With detachment and irony Nemerov shows the inevitable coming together of the willful and the inexorable in a pattern of determination so far reaching and so pervasive that it is identical in a diffused state with the very atmosphere of his fictional world.
An excruciating tale of obsession is “The Amateurs.” The title plays on the Latin word for love—a contrast with the bored group of elegant sado-masochists whose obsessive tormenting of one another results in the crucifixion of one of its members. Osmin, the man who is crucified, draws a romantic named Allan Hastings into carrying out the crucifixion by playing on the need of Hastings and the group for some conclusive action. The action performed is intended by Osmin to satisfy both Hastings's need for finality and the group's perverse hunger for raw emotional experience. The crucifixion serves the purpose of freeing Osmin from the prolonged self-hatred that has constituted his life. Fittingly, his death effects its intended catharsis as Hastings, overcome by what has happened, breaks into a “deep, healthy laughter” (p. 183). The story firmly underlines the fact that Nemerov's characters will what they are compelled to will even when they are completely aware of the brutal mechanism underlying their lives.
The propensity of the characters for violence when they are separated subjectively from the world around them is dramatized in the story “A Secret Society.” Judson Paley, a New England aristocrat, is both socially and psychologically cut off from the town in which he lives. Ostensibly enjoying the idle life of privilege, Paley in fact seethes with a helpless feeling of violence and alienation. Steeped in self-consciousness, he moves about town under the pressure of strange impulses. On one occasion he is driven by the temptation to take a policeman's revolver and kill himself. He finally does seize a bank guard's gun and turns it on himself, but he forgets to release the safety catch. A failure even in this, he is carried back home, whimpering.
The guard's gun becomes an obsessive symbol of Paley's desire to have some sort of impact on the world around him, a contrast with his pampered and ineffectual existence. Holding the gun in his hand, he feels that he holds the “absolute upon which everything was founded, the black imperative whose existence made conditional the existence of everything else, the banks, schools, stores, theaters; waitresses, barbers, dentists and hygienists too, for that matter; himself as well, come to that” (p. 33). Nemerov's characterization of Judson Paley is characteristic of his technique in A Commodity of Dreams in that it combines the luridness of the violent and the grotesque with the blandness of the mundane. He opens “A Secret Society” with a description of Paley in the barber's chair, a scene which is uncomfortably self-conscious for Paley but which makes the reader aware of the ordinary world that goes its way outside the membrane of Paley's obsessions.
An occasional character will strive to break down the impasse between himself and the external world, sometimes wittily, as in the story “Beyond the Screen.” In the 1950s, when not everyone had a television set and not everyone wanted one, Andrew Stonecroft has his house invaded by his mother-in-law and her TV. The world relayed through the set becomes for Stonecroft an emblem of the solipsism of his whole society, which attunes itself to reality only within the abstract, cinematic shadows of the living room screen. As Stonecraft watches the parade of real deaths which constitutes the world's news pass narcotically across the screen, he decides to act. In the midst of a thunderstorm he rips out the lightning arrester from behind his house, determined to take his chances with life and death along with those unfortunates on the TV news, most of them in the developing nations, whose lives still have some extra subjective reality.
All of the stories in A Commodity of Dreams possess a firm symmetry, a feature of Nemerov's narrative style. The most symmetrical is probably the story “The Ocean to Cynthia,” which involves a charming confidence man, Anthony Bower, who has spent his life seducing and living off well-to-do women he meets on transatlantic liners. Bower typifies Nemerov's attraction to stories which have to do with fraud: “Debasement and counterfeit especially of the intellectual and artistic currency,” he wrote on one occasion, constitute a “subject of great charm.”2 Flanking Anthony Bower is Father Frank, a fake priest who is anything but frank, and Elizabeth Brayle whose name symbolizes her blindness to Bower's designs.
The denouement comes when Bower is shocked to discover, through a locket containing a love inscription he had written many years before, that the woman he is now attempting to seduce is his own daughter, the illegitimate offspring of an earlier seduction. Swept away by an unusual wave of recognition and despair, he hurls both himself and Elizabeth into the sea with a final flourish so that they move together “as though dancing toward the free fall and the wild marble water singing below” (p. 103). As the passage illustrates and as is the case with most of these stories, the tight symmetry of the plot is matched by the chiselled precision and grace of Nemerov's prose.
On the whole Stories, Fables & Other Diversions (1971) is a more formal and subdued collection than A Commodity of Dreams. Although it contains some memorable tales, it tends to lack the dramatic energy of the earlier volume. The antiheroic qualities of the protagonists in Stories, Fables & Other Diversions are even more pronounced than in A Commodity of Dreams and the writing sometimes has a flatness that tends to undermine the dramatic potential of the stories. The characters are as alienated as in A Commodity of Dreams and Nemerov's view of them is as wry as ever. The reader is led to be even more detached from them than in A Commodity of Dreams and is moved to identify with the metaphysical condition of the characters rather than with their personal traits and circumstances. This is largely due to the emphasis on fable, a form which Nemerov values for its conciseness.
In addition, although they are still driven by subconscious forces, the characters in Stories, Fables & Other Diversions are more self-contained than those in the earlier collection. The narrator of the story “Unbelievable Characters,” for example, longs for a violence which does not appear. Watching a skywriting plane spell the syllable “ROB-,” he wonders if the completed instruction will be “ROB—BURN—MURDER.” The word turns out to be “ROBIN,” a word sadly bereft of dramatic connotations. Bored to the limit, he concludes finally that there was always the “millionth chance” that the smoking plane was “really on fire, that the smoke would turn black and begin to plunge away down the sky” (pp. 36-37).3 The scene reflects an idle interest in violence in a desiccated world rather than the bursting of violence from beneath and within that marks the lives of those in A Commodity of Dreams.
The characters in Stories, Fables & Other Diversions are devotees of consciousness. Even Mrs. Melisma in “Bon Bons,” who has a craving for filled chocolates, becomes a practitioner of self-analysis, the “passionate scientist of her vice” (p. 28). Hoisted up by Nemerov as an emblem of North American materialism, Mrs. Melisma pores over her dilemma: “She saw that life had embarked her on a hopeless quest for the One Supreme filled chocolate, containing in itself not the abstract or mere quintessence but the entire luscious being of the absolute; in the search for which all actual experience fell into the gullet and abyss of non-being, and was an nothing. Nor would the Platonic Idea of that chocolate satisfy; no, it must be the real thing, the filled chocolate incarnate, and to eat it would be to redeem time” (p. 28). The passage reveals the strength of Stories, Fables & Other Diversions, its nimble play of mind and language, bringing the collection into line with Nemerov's lyric poetry, so that what the stories lack in action they make up in the refined elaboration of idea. The narrative style is carefully distilled, with plots that are firmly contained and coolly ordered.
All of these qualities can be found in “The Nature of the Task,” one of the strongest stories in the collection. The story is a Kafkasque fable in which a man named Palen is given the task of killing flies in a square-shaped room. There is no indication of who has given him this task, but it would seem that he has been dealt the assignment by God or life and that he has accepted it. Not noticing any flies, his mind, which is in constant need of stimulation, seizes upon the idea of counting snowflakes. Remembering that he once heard that to count things was to kill them, he equates the counting of snowflakes with the killing of flies. He starts by counting the blue snowflakes on the walls of his room and then switches to counting snowflakes falling outside. He becomes blocked finally by the thought that since no two snowflakes are alike he may not in fact be counting identical objects. In stopping his counting, he suddenly becomes conscious of a fly buzzing in the room, a fly which had presumably been there all along but which he only became aware of when he stepped outside the confinement of his own mind.
As in “Bon Bons” Nemerov embellishes the story with metaphysical witticisms. He satirizes religious consolation, for example, in a scene showing Palen's scruples about carrying out his task: “One must simply sit still. Indeed, that might be precisely the mystical important of an instruction to kill the flies in a room where no flies were: that is, do nothing—the chief recommendation of the great religious of every persuasion from the beginning of the world” (p. 104). The story goes deeper than its verbal wit, however. Palen does not hastily confuse mind with world; rather, he is led to recognize the precociousness of consciousness in extracting meaning from a world which holds its meaning to itself. The rage for order is inevitable, however, given the mere existence of the mind. This is signified in the way in which Palen divides even the barred window into an intelligible grid, like that of a chessboard, so that the “sky, the single tree, the passing cloud, even the occasional bird, appeared superimposed on a graph” (p. 96). Reaching a plateau of Nemerovian wisdom, Palen stoically accepts his own inventiveness as the “glibness of a mind that moved, it seemed, independently of his will,” and he comes finally to a “deep and thoroughgoing distrust of the reason—just because it ‘reasoned’ so very well” (p. 103).
While Palen arrives at a healthy skepticism, other characters in Stories, Fables & Other Diversions lack his perspective. “The Idea of a University” was titled after Cardinal Newman's celebrated discourse on the purpose of a university and is a satiric sketch about intelligence isolated from the world around it. For Newman a university was a place for intellectual and moral formation, and he would have had little sympathy with the university in Nemerov's story, which seems to be an appendage of American technology. Furthermore, the moral status of Nemerov's fictional campus is silhouetted in the university's establishing its own slum for interdisciplinary study, a slum composed of poor people who had been imported from Georgia. The slum symbolizes the arrogance of the mind as well as the potential destructiveness of intelligence when it is abstractly detached from matter and from the external world. While far from being a social commentator, Nemerov has frequently underlined the severe social ramifications of intellectual aloofness.
Nemerov's contemporary university develops in piecemeal fashion, adding an aircraft hangar here, an experimental prison unit there. It develops sporadically and mindlessly into a receptacle for random spillovers from the larger society instead of providing that society with clarification and direction about its fundamental nature and purposes. The impotency of the academic community is illustrated in the scene in which the president of the university is peremptorily denied entrance to the experimental prison which is ostensibly part of his domain but which is actually controlled by the Pentagon. The meaning of this scene is amplified in the conclusion of the sketch, which focuses on the brain of the university, the significantly named Random Access Computer Unit. Inside the building that isolates the computer from the community it is meant to serve, a large typewriter “with no evidence of human control or for that matter attention” is seen “patiently printing something across and down an apparently endless roll of paper that fed in turn into a large but overflowing wastebasket” (p. 95).
A number of the tales in Stories, Fables & Other Diversions show Nemerov's interest in fantasy. Examples include “The Twelve and the One,” “The Outage,” “The Executive,” and “The Nature of the Task.” Of these the most imaginative and powerful is “The Executive,” a story about an encounter between the white manager of a supermarket, Mr. Budby, and Hubert, his black stock boy. Hubert is a walking disaster who innocently but effectively destroys whatever he comes into contact with. On one occasion, for example, he thoughtlessly leaves hundreds of cartons of fish standing out in the June sun. The manager, who enjoys thinking of himself as an executive, is a churchgoer whose anger over the costly ineptitude of his stock boy is tempered by moral scruples as well as by the store's policy of racial integration.
Nevertheless, Budby finds himself on the brink of firing his employee when he suddenly has a vision of Hubert transfigured into a luminous black angel: “The brightness circling his head hissed and crackled against the ceiling, but did not seem to set it aflame. Dark, downy wings stood out of Hubert's back, and fluttered a bit wildly, maybe because Hubert was still trembling some. Hubert's eyes, behind their limpid brown, flamed like stars, bending upon Mr. Budby an icy radiance” (p. 22). Budby keeps waiting for Hubert to become a proper angel with pink skin, fair hair and blue eyes, but all that happens is that a “blaze of black light, a blazing blackness like the moonlit glimpse of calm waters, continued to glimmer all around Hubert” (p. 22).
The intensity of the vision casts a spell over the relationship between Budby and Hubert for a while, but then as the feeling of the vision wears off and Hubert continues to blunder through the week, the manager gathers himself to act in spite of the scorched arc which he perceives nervously on the ceiling. In a final denial of the vision to which, after all, there had been no witnesses, he fires Hubert. “The Executive,” is the most dramatic of the stories in Stories, Fables & Other Diversions and is executed with finesse and economy. An urbane tone hovers over the narration, but it is modulated carefully so that it diminishes in the sections in which the characters' consciousnesses are the center of interest. Through such subtle alterations in tone, texture and mood, all of which contribute to the unity of effect, Nemerov demonstrates, here as elsewhere, his polished mastery of the short story.
II THE MELODRAMATISTS
Nemerov's first published novel, The Melodramatists (1949), was written during three successive summers. The last sixty pages, which comprise the denouement, were written in a creative cloudburst, two fifteen-hour sessions preceded by “(a) a mean quarrel with a friend, and (b) a month during which I did nothing but (of all things) play golf.”4 The novel is set in Boston in the winter of 1940 and involves the Boynes, a family of Boston Brahmins whose elder members try vainly to maintain appearances. The Boyne parents begin the action in an attempt to impose their values, specifically about marriage and divorce, upon their children. They only partly succeed. The insipid nature of their success in calling off the divorce of their son Roger and his wife Leonora is registered by Mr. Boyne, who perceives all of life as essentially a struggle for power:
The elders … had won, there would be no divorce. But they too realized that something had been sacrificed. They had been presented with a puppet performance, cheated of the life. Among the random images that went through Nicholas Boyne's mind was one of some Roman general who had ordered the execution of his own son on a battlefield; and another, more vaguely recalled, of a Roman—was it ambassador?—who for some reason had stuck his hand in a pot of fire and seen it consumed. To prove something, was it?
(p. 34)5
Having failed to achieve a satisfying victory, Mr. Boyne obligingly goes mad and thereby hands over the reins to the next generation. The daughters Susan and Claire dominate the action, with the plot revolving around their experiments with life. Susan explores the world of earthly love while Claire devotes herself to asceticism and mysticism. Both assume that they can fashion for themselves whatever lives their minds can imagine and much of the satire has to do with the collision between this adventurousness and the obstinate external world. Susan finds herself, for example, being blackmailed by her butler, Hogan, for indiscretions involving Dr. Einman and the family treasury; whereas Claire finds herself saddled with a group of smelly Hungarian nuns and eventually in the power of a prostitute, who has the appropriate name of Mother Fosker. So much, the plot seems to say, for the free exploration of life.
Nemerov's fondness for symmetry is seen in the careful way in which he parallels the lives of the two women. Upon the collapse of their father, for example, each quickly sets her own course. Susan becomes Dr. Einman's mistress on the same evening and in the same house in which Claire places her soul trustingly into the pastoral care of Father Meretruce. Even at twenty-one, when Claire was two years older than her sister, she had developed a “spinsterish asperity of voice and, on occasion, the primness of a young dowager” (p. 27). She approaches experience, particularly of the flesh, with fear and loathing: “Why can't we keep our lives clean?” she complains to Susan on one occasion. “Why is there this perpetual making of dirty jokes running like a sound-track beside us, as though some—some horrible little toadstools were leaning together and whispering about us?” Unsatisfied with her sister's inconclusive response, she moves to the window, where she thrills at the “wonderful coldness,” her mind filled with “images of coldness, of the magnificent vaulted solemnity of churches; convents, white stiff robes, coldness, centuries cold as the tomb devoted to denouncing warmth, intimacy” (p. 29).
Claire's frigidity, so incisively described in this passage, is complemented by a burning zeal for the spiritual. Under the guiding hand of Father Meretruce she embraces mystical asceticism like a lover, climbing eagerly to visionary heights. Taking pain as an ally, she clenches herself in prayerful anticipation of mystical union and experiences with full empathy the vision of Christ on the cross. Restraining the novel's prevailing tone of skepticism at this critical moment, Nemerov focuses eloquently on the expanding circles of Claire's ecstasy:
it was the instantaneous spread of light in the center of her mind, together with impressions of tremendous majesty, a light so white and blinding that our earthly robes seemed by contrast tarred and defiled. In agony and love she saw this light glitter and gleam in brilliant flashes through her spine and head, unbearable in intensity, so that she wished and did not wish for the end. The light like thunder echoed in the circle of her mind, played in fitful coruscations among the gray, coiling masses of her brain, so that she seemed to see by flashes of utter radiance her own essence, that which slept and that which waked, its purities and its corruptions, the carbon and the many-faceted diamond.
(p. 127)
Claire's mystical ecstasy exists in lieu of a strong faith, a fact which becomes uncomfortably apparent when the officious Father Meretruce, a visionless man himself, casts doubt upon the authenticity of her experience. Further complicating her assent to Catholic dogma is the arrival of the unkempt, monolingual Hungarian nuns whose physical unattractiveness awakens her queasiness. Staring at the salivating nuns who are caught up stupefyingly in their mumbled prayers, she wavers between seeing them as merely bestial or as living in “the skull of God” (p. 224).
Uncertain and yet eager to believe, she fears finally that the fury of the nuns' praying may after all be merely their obsession, a narrowing of the variety and sanity of the many forms of reality to the “nonsense of the One” (p. 224). Nevertheless, she forces herself to be receptive to the visitation of God, only to have appear instead “the towers of Notre Dame de Paris—pigeons in the sunlight of a public square—some sort of tall monument with a figure on its top.” Where, she wonders, were the “well-known peace and the much-advertised consolation?” (p. 253). Repressed almost to the last, Claire finally drifts subconsciously toward sexual union with Edmond Einman while upholding her conscious distaste for the body and for human love: “The idea of love revolted her; it was unclean” (p. 281).
In spite of his clear reservations about her, Nemerov invests Claire with intelligence and the capacity to grow. She eventually confronts the flesh in the shape of Mother Fosker and her cohort of allegedly reformed prostitutes. The confrontation produces in Claire a perception of the relationship between religion and subconscious sexuality which is sophisticated, if a trifle glib, and which eventually helps to free her: “She imagined that many must have witnessed with hot pleasure the Son of Man writhing on the Cross, which pleasure might in some subterranean change after his death have been the motive of their conversion. They feared, perhaps, the vengeance of the dead, not because they had killed Him but because He bore away into death the deepest powers of their lust” (p. 281). Like the other characters Claire is a melodramatist, brooding bitterly over her own unhappiness and that of others in a way that is simultaneously both moving and lugubrious: “To be unhappy, that is the weakness fullest of shame; that we are unhappy is the thing we dread most to be told, unless we dread still more the idea that another can think us unhappy” (p. 259). As with a number of the characters Claire's sentiments are a shade too ponderous and uncompromising.
From a structural point of view Nemerov divides his novel between the viewpoints of Susan and Claire, leaving some room for the consciousnesses of Einman and a few of the others. Susan receives more narrative time than any of the characters, reflecting Nemerov's interest in and sympathy with her. At the same time, in order to offset the dominance of Susan's viewpoint, he punctuates the flow of her consciousness with some unappealing illuminations of her. In one scene, for example, in which she is with Edmond Einman, she throws an unattractive light upon herself in displaying her feelings of boredom by yawning openly: “Edmond's talk, so long as it could be understood as primarily attacking her virtue and only in the second place sowing information, had been acceptable enough, a flattering attention. Now, however, it became a bore” (p. 119).
Symmetrically, Susan's dark hair and shapeliness contrast with Claire's fairness and angularity. Intellectually as well she is different from her sister. Impatiently on one occasion she complains about Claire's “perpetual mooning about noble motives” (p. 28). As with Claire, though, the Boyne affluence provides Susan with an opportunity to explore herself and what life has to offer, an adventure which is given thrust by the sudden, shocking collapse of her father's mind, a reminder that time is change and a melancholy indication of life's “infinite capriciousness” (p. 115). Nevertheless, Mr. Boyne's plunge into dementia sharpens Susan's appetite for life so that what she wants it to contain is a sense of “crisis, passion, decision, fulfilment” (p. 115).
Susan's approach to new experience is much less methodical than Claire's and her goals less clearly defined. She confides to Claire on one occasion that she can find out what her goals are only by wanting something first. Her plight is that her gravitating toward passion and finality collides with the “triviality and absurdity of things” (p. 202). Edmond Einman, to whom Susan becomes fatefully attached, is the spokesman for the triviality and absurdity of things, a philosophy of life that Susan cannot gainsay and that she seems to use subconsciously as an intellectual support for her drifting toward an amoral sensuality. Thus Einman becomes both her lover and the nihilistic underminer of the passion that she shares with him, a situation that presents itself to her as a bitter paradox: “She found his sexual powers more satisfying now in bitterness than previously in amusement, and his fancy in this matter more varied and provocative: the savage gratifications they achieved, though occasionally, and not without a mute anger liable at any moment to petty and spiteful fulmination, were the landmarks to bring into momentary focus the desolate plain on which she was” (p. 202).
Susan's commitment to love becomes indistinguishable from her commitment to death. Her conception of love, the product of a sensitive and imaginative mind, reflects this antithetical range of feeling: “Passion, tenderness, pity—she saw in her mind a spider scuttling on a wall—were suicidal extravagances of the will, the image of whose desire was really the white silence of the hospital room, the cool sheets, the bloodless redress of these grievances. And love (as one reverently called it, the very syllable a breath, an apologetic sigh, of weariness) tended that same way too” (p. 213).
Susan's viewpoint is so complexly persuasive that she gives the appearance of being the one character who is exempt from being a melodramatist. She resents Claire's “gushing,” for example, “no less than her assumed familiarity” (pp. 149-147). Listening to John Averist declare his love for her, she becomes sardonically aware that every admission was a “place of concealment for some further secret,” open sincerity a sure sign of “vile deceit” (p. 151). Slumming through Boston in the company of Einman, she decides finally that the smell of beer and urinals was the only significant difference between the city's low life and her own sphere. On another occasion she notices a garishly dressed woman whom she takes to be a whore and following her out of curiosity has the “inconclusive pleasure of seeing her enter a respectable-looking brownstone house on Beacon Street” (p. 95).
Critical and shrewd, Susan does fathom her entanglement with Einman. If it is true that she cannot help herself, it is equally true that she avoids self-pity. She accepts the perversity of her relationship with him, a relationship whose “melancholy charm lay in disillusion which when it could not provoke it would invent” (p. 214). Furthermore, she confronts the ugliness of her life with courage. Scrutinizing one of the reformed whores whom Claire has admitted to the Boyne mansion, she becomes aware of a “loathsome softness” which causes her to bow her head in recognition: “I too am like that, she thought” (p. 264).
In desiring passion and finality, however, Susan is a melodramatist. She is also a melodramatist in resolving the relationship with Einman in a pact of mutual abnegation, a pact which he cunningly engineers by making her believe that he is terminally ill, a stratagem that he calculates will alter her course from death to that of renunciation. A melodramatist in taking the bait, she tells Einman, whom she considers near his end, that they will be a “Christian household, forgiving each other daily for everything” (p. 216). Ironically, Susan exhibits a religious tenderness at this moment which seems forever beyond Claire's reach. She is a melodramatist finally, however, in assuming that what she decides will determine her life, a mistake made by all of the major characters. It is, after all, Mother Fosker and Hogan, emissaries of the intractable outer world, who are the final shapers of her fate.
Even Edmond Einman, who promenades through the pages of the novel as the ultimate realist, is a melodramatist. Einman's nihilism, the venom of which he injects into his relationship with Susan, is based upon a solipsistic despair which is only partially alleviated by the relief which he finds in cerebration. Einman's philosophical perorations are the refreshment of his soul, particularly when communicated to an attentive audience, such as that at the party at which Arthur Charvet attempts to kill himself. Using the incident as his point of departure, Einman quickly moves onto more generalized reflections:
The definition, the essence, of life, look, is this: not that it moves, no. But that it continues to move, it keeps going—so far as we can see, at any rate; though we must never overlook the possibility, the rarest joke of all, that what we live in is not life at all, but simply the vast motion of a mechanical energy to the largest scale, like a rock falling from the highest mountain, like a ship—with its gods and emperors, crew and passengers, its fine foods and economic problems—sinking slowly down the height of an incredibly deep ocean.
(p. 55)
Although Einman touches on some metaphysical ideas that resemble aspects of Nemerov's thinking, he does so with a pedagogical gravity that Nemerov clearly satirizes. Furthermore, Einman's confidence in thought, his ingenuous assumption that his philosophizing about the futility of life has any impact on the course of things, is his most melodramatic illusion. It is the most fundamental mistake that a Nemerovian character can make and is probably as close as Nemerov ever came to depicting tragic hubris.
The denouement of The Melodramatists has the dramatic flair of Restoration comedy. The final confrontation scene, which assembles all of the central characters, also reflects Nemerov's passion for the detective story. The Boyne mansion becomes a tableau of the whole society with the privileged and powerful in revelry below while those who represent intellect and spirit are held prisoner in the upper part of the house. In a burlesque of institutionalized religion, Mother Fosker, with her pulse on the outer world, oversees everything like a demanding Mother Superior.
In spite of their ineffectualness those who represent mind and spirit are the focus of narrative attention since they are more interesting even in failure than their Saturnalian counterparts below. The upper room is the repository of culture, a museum of philosophy and religion. The scene represents a culmination of the past for the characters as well. Susan ruefully acknowledges this when she considers that “one forgot nothing; everything that had happened was there, was still there, and not dead either, but alive and mysteriously moving, the crawling corruption of the past by which one bred the future” (p. 316). Part of the action involves a debate between Dr. Einman and Father Meretruce on science and religion. The debate is as inconclusive as it is meaningless and irrelevant to the representatives of the active world in the rooms below them. Neither Dr. Einman nor Father Meretruce present a convincing case for either science or religion. One of the reasons for this is that Nemerov does not want to turn his novel over to discussion. The points of view expressed by the debaters are merely colors on the novelist's palette and are meant to engage the characters and the reader rather than to elucidate the human condition.
The fact that the debate focuses eventually on the topic of love is not only a source of great irony among such acerbic and disillusioned protagonists, but is in fact unexpectedly relevant. Each of their conceptions of love, both human and divine, together with the machinations and complications attendant upon these conceptions has led, at least in part, to the bizarre spectacle of Hogan holding them all prisoner in an upstairs room. Claire recognizes all of this when she exclaims toward the end: “I am shut in a room in my own house and watched by a man with a pistol—simply because of love and its mysterious ways” (p. 328).
The death of Susan is carefully and ambiguously described by Nemerov so that it is seen simultaneously as the ultimate expression of power by Hogan and as suicide, Susan's earlier submission to Hogan having filled her with a final, despairing self-revulsion. Her death is at once pathetic and absurd. It captures the novel's complex mood—its melancholy, poignancy, and ludicrousness. The mood is sharpened at the end by the elegant surface of the action being ruptured by violence. The complex mood represents Nemerov's bifocal view of fate closing in on man, a fate that registers both the meaninglessness of life and the surprisingly fixed laws of character and behavior that lead relentlessly to unforeseen destruction. The denouement of The Melodramatists may be compared to the laws that Nemerov perceived underlying the ending of Faulkner's Light in August: “Event ineluctably creates event, there is no escape from the assigned role, the idea of freedom consists in our having forgotten that we learned the part we must play. God, or destiny, or luck, or life itself, is inherently novelistic … coincidence itself has no longer any real existence but is unabashedly faced up to as necessity.”6
With characteristic balance Nemerov follows the death of Susan Boyne with a brief scene of recovery and adaptation. Amidst the relaxed yawning of Father Meretruce, Claire goes over to the harpsichord: “She sat down and began to play, inattentively at first but presently with more care, a little piece in fugue. The instrument was out of tune and not only that, but broken glass tinkled on some of the strings, but it seemed not to matter. The morning light seemed to clear the room as the voices in a minor key steadily moved to and from one another, showing an inexorable confidence in their not quite harmonious world” (p. 338). In spite of the feeling of chaos unleashed by Susan's death, the surface of life closes over again with Claire apparently turning away from religion and toward art in her quest for spiritual meaning. Furthermore, culture, as symbolized by the out-of-tune harpsichord, appears to respond.
The central motif in the novel is that articulated in the title. The melodramatic is mirrored in the names—the name Leonora, for example—and is present in every character in the novel with the exception of Mother Fosker, who symbolizes objective reality. Among the minor characters, John Averist, for example, is a sentimentalist: “It was the habit of his soul to wallow romantically. He was in love with Susan, he thought, and made of what he proposed to himself as a hopeless passion, together with her obvious accessibility at least to another, something rather special in the way of emotion” (p. 141).
Even the imperturbable Hogan slips into a melodramatic frame of mind on occasion, as in the scene in which he faces John Averist in a showdown over Hogan's blackmailing of Susan. Hogan assumes that Averist has come to kill him and reflects histrionically: “You pushed the victim's patience too far, you did not know when to stop, you would be found, one gray dawn, lying with your iron-gray hair in a pool of mud that gradually was becoming red. By your side was the strange oriental weapon—yataghan or kris—that did you in” (p. 190). Similarly, before his collapse, old Mr. Boyne is depicted as melodramatic in standing for what he regards as old-fashioned values, all the while exhibiting an “incredibly devious, Machiavellian smile” (p. 25).
While the characters perceive as reality what the reader sees as unreality, the characters perceive as dream what the reader judges to be reality. Averist, for example, cannot accept the reality of his own behavior in trying to decide whether or not to share in the blackmail money that Susan pays to Hogan. He imagines himself transferring the money to Edmond, his rival, so that ironically Edmond might spend the night in a hotel with Susan. The situation becomes ludicrous in its dreamlike illumination of a world “full of connections, circles, cycles and dark designs,” a world whose ingrown complexities and accompanying ironies strike Averist as preposterously unreal (p. 198).
Susan Boyne is also susceptible to perceiving the world as a dream. As the allegedly reformed prostitutes arrive at the Boyne mansion in the company of policemen and Father Meretruce, Susan, watching from above, perceives the scene as having a quality of “remote and silent intensity, as though (she thought) it were an advertisement for a dream” (p. 262). Her own life comes to seem to her to be “dangerously dreamlike,” a feeling which persists as she contemplates ending that life (p. 200). She “lay down on the bed and held the point of the knife to her side. She had little enough idea where to strike so as to be sure. But the symbolic propriety of the place and the position struck her as contemptible and operatic, so she got up and took the knife into the bathroom, whose white and hygienic brightness she imagined her blood as already soiling” (pp. 316-17). The use of the dream motif is Nemerov's way of turning the novel inside out. The melodramatic delusions which fill the subjective lives of the characters but which are unrecognized by them become projected in the outer world as a cosmic parallel for the ever fluctuating margin between the imagined and the real. Much of the novel's narrative apparatus—the unlikely appearance of the Hungarian nuns and the prostitutes in the Boyne mansion, for example—extends the perimeters of the dreamscape to include the reader.
Nemerov uses a technique of surrealistic formalism. The formalism is conveyed through the novel's restraint and urbanity. He admired the dryness of Stendhal, who, when he wrote The Charterhouse of Parma, read a page of the Code Civil every morning—for the style. The Melodramatists centers on a humanized world with only the most perfunctory attention given to nature. In addition, Nemerov circumscribes his characters with epigrams and aphorisms in the manner of Neoclassical writers. Similarly, he makes liberal use of ironic juxtaposition, a favorite Neoclassical device, as in the scene in which Susan pays off Hogan each week by placing forty dollars under the bust of Plato which stands on the harpsichord in the library.
The formalism is emotionally reinforced by Nemerov's antipathy to sentimentalism. He summarized his attitude toward sentimentality memorably in the poem “To the Bleeding Hearts Association of American Novelists”: “I like those masters better who expound / more inwardly the nature of our loss, / And only offhand let us know they've found / No better composition than a cross.”7
Nemerov also strove to make his plot intricate and formal. He has been quoted as saying that he does not regard character in the novel as a very deep matter: “And I certainly do not read fiction to be told how terrible the world is. I can find that out on the morning news.”8 His use of the mock-heroic also inhibits the rush of emotion and emphasizes the formalism of the style. When Hogan is about to enter Susan's room to claim her, an act that destroys her, Nemerov offsets the chilling implications of the scene with a mock-heroic description of the door through which he passes: “Anciently the guardian of gateways was Janus, whose two faces, though they gained him a reputation for irony and deceit, were merely the image and denomination, as honest as possible, of the crucial situation expressed by a door: that it had to do with inside and outside and represented therefore the entire possibility of human society, which without this distinction could not have existed” (p. 273).
Hogan is the focus for much of the mock-heroic imagery because he combines insignificance of soul with a large and calculating ambition. Projecting himself out of his servitude into the upper classes, he lives out the melodrama of his life in the imagined company of kings and generals:
According to the paradigm of history, as Hogan understood it, the Boyne household was passing through a period of decadence, an interregnum consequent on the abdication of the supreme authority (Mr and Mrs Boyne), the over-running of the domain by barbarians (whores and nuns), the dispute over the throne between two princesses, of whom one was swayed by the Church and the other was accessible to lust: the erotic and the political were in conjunction and in favorable aspect, and Hogan's star was at last, by some means not entirely clear, to rise.
(p. 270)
The pervasive use of the mock-heroic enters the realm of reflexiveness when Nemerov enters the narration with derisive philosophical conceits of his own, as in his description of Charvet's attempted suicide: “The party had rather rapidly changed its quality. The proximate cause of the change was evidently alcohol. The formal cause was Arthur Charvet, and the material cause lay perhaps far back and forgotten, somewhere in the tangled mess of relations in space and time that was so glibly referred to as Arthur Charvet. The final cause, however, seemed to be Dr. Einman” (p. 47). The effect of the scene is to place Nemerov as narrator between his characters and the reader and thus to prevent the reader's sympathetic identification with the characters. The technique is necessary in order to sustain the hybrid tragicomic perspective.
The symbolism in the novel is also of a rather formal order. Similes abound and there is overt symbolic use made of setting in the case of the Boyne mansion. The house, which symbolizes the withered vitality of Western civilization, is built around an “enclosed court” which is “stone-flagged and bordered by arched columns; in its center stood a fountain that did not work” (p. 293). The most elaborate and insistent symbol is the photograph of the fetus which Einman carries around with him. The arms of the fetus are folded in “judicial and almost contemptuous posture,” and the mouth, similarly, seems “cruel and royal and full of sullen condemnation” (p. 80). The photograph becomes an absorbing talisman for Susan, who accepts it as an emblem of the alien and enigmatic world outside the mind and the self.
The Melodramatists is not as evenly polished a structure as Nemerov's second novel Federigo. It has a looseness, for example, that becomes uncomfortably apparent at times in the speechifying of some of the characters. On the other hand, as has been demonstrated, the novel exhibits a sophisticated handling of form. In addition, it possesses an attractive emotional vitality unequaled in any of the later fiction.
III FEDERIGO
Federigo, or, the Power of Love (1954) is an elegantly structured novel that testifies to Nemerov's belief that prose can be as fastidious a medium as verse. He felt impelled toward sophistication and elegance by his abhorrence of the slickness of much contemporary fiction: “How narrow the way, and how fastidious, even precious, must the artist be in a world so full of cheap plastic art works that every word, every feeling, every tonality, seems used up and dead and available only as its own parody.”9
Federigo followed five years of false starts on different novels which added up to several hundred pages. Paradoxically, Federigo was completed in just under two months, an admirable feat in connection with a novel of so fine a grain.10 The novel concerns the romantic adventures of Julian Ghent who, approaching middle age and sunk in boredom, writes letters to himself fictitiously signed Federigo in which he implies his wife's unfaithfulness. He leaves the letters where his wife Sylvia will inevitably come across and read them. The letters provide Julian with an excuse to be unfaithful and have the further effect of persuading his wife to be unfaithful since she has gained the reputation of infidelity in any case. Both Julian and Sylvia attract younger partners, but the affairs are impeded by the timidity of Julian on the one hand and the sexual aggressiveness of Sylvia on the other. Through a ploy by the younger partners, Julian and Sylvia find themselves reunited at the end in a manner that recalls the bedchamber scenes in some of Fielding's novels.
The device of the Federigo letter represents Julian's venturing from the monotonous safety of his middle-class existence into what he considers to be the realm of evil. The essence of his desired adultery is not that it is a concession to salacious weakness but that it signifies horror and wickedness. Julian wants the imaginative stimulus of a terrifying freedom at a time when he feels jadedly that his life is fixed within firm grooves and when he feels the ebbing of his vitality.
For much of the novel he feels that his intrigue has been a success: “he was fascinated, his entire sensibility was heightened; instead of a dull succession of moments along which he traveled like a bead on a thread, he began to see time as a house, an immense closed space of many mansions (like the Museum, in a way) with secret passages, hiding-places, alcoves, false partitions behind which whole rooms could be concealed without disturbance to the apparent dimensions as seen from outside” (p. 175).”11 The ending makes it evident that the freedom seized upon by Julian is illusory. Reinforcing this perception, Nemerov notes dispassionately at one point that a “man moving across an open field, under the open sky, naturally refuses to believe he is moving through a dark, narrow tunnel from which there is no escape; yet frequently, so far as his will is concerned, the latter is the more accurate version” (p. 257).
Julian's escape into evil initially involves a plunge into sensuality in the affair with Bianca. Their meeting-place, the Zoo, is almost as erotic a stimulus for Julian as Bianca herself: “Bianca would be walking, perhaps, toward the Zoo, toward the pool, where he imagined the seals, silent and unwatched now, plunging swiftly through the opacity of the water” (p. 110). Significantly, Julian feels relief that the animals, emblematic of sensuality, are caged and that their lives are carefully ordered. With characteristic caution he wants the feeling of a free fall into forbidden sexuality without upsetting his deep-seated gravitation toward order.
The relationship with Elaine Bernard is indicative of Julian's desire to mitigate not only the attrition of time, symbolized by their meeting in the Egyptian tomb, but also to recover those springs of romance which he had felt early in his marriage to Sylvia. His marriage to Sylvia had in fact been brought about by her involvement with a romantically mysterious man (who turns out to have the appropriate name of Alter) while Julian was away at war. The clandestine affair, together with Sylvia's subsequent abortion and unhappiness give her in Julian's eyes an irresistible “flavor of sad experience, of tragic possibility” (p. 26).
At its deepest level Julian's rebellion against his comfortable life with Sylvia is ultimately a revolt against the ordering of his life by the external world, time, and nature. In this sense the purpose of the fictional letters is to elicit from reality a response that will confirm his control over it: “One put to the world a hypothetical question,” he reflects at one point, and “one received, it would appear, a real answer” (p. 72). Julian's pitting of the power of his consciousness against those external forces which would shape reality is derided by the apparitional Federigo in one of their occult meetings: “Hasn't it ever occurred to you,” Federigo asks, “that things are profoundly and beautifully, sometimes, just what they seem to be?” (p. 220).
There are three Federigos: the epistolary Federigo invented by Julian, the literal Federigo Schwartz, a minor background character who symbolizes the independence of the external world, and the apparitional Federigo, who is a manifestation of Julian's subconscious. The emergence of this latter Federigo is an ironic and unsettling subconscious response to Julian's conscious desire to lead a double life, a development that leads to his leading his life in triplicate.
The identification of the apparition with Julian himself is made by Federigo: “To make me leave you alone,” he announces to Julian, “you must be other than you are” (p. 173). Federigo appears to be clairvoyant, but is more likely the conveyor of knowledge or beliefs which lie suppressed within Julian as well as being the embodiment of some embarrassing truths about Julian—as in a hint of latent homosexuality. Sipping his drink in an “extraordinarily delicate way,” Federigo is dressed “casually in slacks and a shirt open at the throat; he also wore sandals instead of shoes, and looked very much at his ease; even impudently so, thought Julian—like a proletarian poet or some such individual” (pp. 216-17).
In a sense Federigo is simply an extension of the fantasy/reality motif which is present in the novel, a dreamed figure who nonetheless brings to the surface the deepest currents of reality within Julian—the inside becoming the outside again. Although Federigo is not consciously summoned, Julian does intentionally fantasize a good deal. On one ironic occasion, for example, he imagines his wife being unfaithful to him by taking Hugo Alter as her lover. Since, unknown to Julian, Hugo had in fact been Sylvia's lover, the scene drolly captures Nemerov's satiric appreciation of the fluid relationship between dream and reality.
The mixing of fantasy and reality follows inevitably from Julian's ingrained skepticism about the real world. He has a “dreamlike sense of the silliness of the world. There had been about him then, what was perfectly proper for an undergraduate, a certain want of commitment to a real world, a world really and intransigently existing, and this slight imperfection, this little hollowness where there should have been belief, still formed, negatively, a part of his character, a kind of abscess. … He did not quite believe in the world” (p. 71). In a similar vein Julian speculates repeatedly on the propensity of life to imitate art, an assumption that underlies his sending of the Federigo letters. His ability to fantasize does have its limits, though, limits which are imposed by his sense of reality. In the fantasy in which he has an affair with Alma Alter, he imagines the two of them dying in a murder/suicide pact. In contemplating the aftermath of this, however, he finds that he is unable to generate any intensity of feeling in the survivors, Hugo and Sylvia: “So much for doing as one pleased,” he reflects sadly (p. 11).
The novel is divided into two books, each of which begins with a fictitious letter of warning and each of which ends in a blending of fantasy and reality. Book One dissolves in a dream as Sylvia becomes convinced by her psychiatrist Dr. Mirabeau as well as by her own standards of reality that she had imagined the letter. Book Two ends in a masque of mistaken identities that again undermines the distinction between dream and reality. Nevertheless, the final acts of Julian and Sylvia carry a convincing sense of reality. A child is conceived on the night on which they believe—and this turns out to be a fantasy—that each is enjoying sexual gratification with someone else. Thus, as always in Nemerov, the sands of reality and the sea of fantasy change places with one another and even the most attentive mind finds itself outmaneuvered. The complexity of the ending is enhanced by its transcendence of comedy in that Julian finally rediscovers the mystery of his wife and thereby that “essential strangeness which was the beginning of love, and which is never lost but only gets forgotten, not replaced but overlaid by a number of dangerously familiar details” (pp. 16-17).
The action of the novel is centered in Julian's consciousness. This impressionism is counterbalanced, here as in The Melodramatists, by elements of formalism, but the weight of the narration is so preponderantly in favor of the subjective that physical action of any sort has a somewhat jarring effect. This explains why the mugging of Julian by Bianca and her friends has such an extraordinary impact as the rasp of her voice cuts through the softness of Julian's reveries: “Go over him good,” the girl said. “The bastard's married, too” (p. 113).
The mugging serves to remind Julian and the reader of the obstinate independence of the external world. In a similar way the perception that the external world goes its own way outside the circumference of Julian's intrigue is brought home solidly in the scene in which he recalls the sight of a window cleaner who had fallen to his death: “Women, with faces averted, went carefully around the body on clicking heels and continued on their ways. … Nor had he himself done anything except feel an indescribable helplessness and lonely guilt, until a policeman and a doorman came running up, and the latter covered the body with a rubber mat taken from before the entrance of a building down the street. He thought now that the policeman and the doorman had been enabled to do this thing for no better reason than that they wore uniforms” (pp. 142-43). Thus Julian's skepticism about the ostensible reality of things and his determination to order things for himself are intermingled with his partially acknowledged sense of helplessness in coping with the external world.
The imagery of mirrors is used by Nemerov to portray the enclosed world of the mind that Julian appears so hesitant to leave. The epigraphs chosen for Federigo herald this motif. The first quotation from Shakespeare shows the mind projecting itself into and combining with the outer world where “it may see itself.” A second quotation from Hart Crane develops the image of a solipsistic mirroring of experience which is paralleled by outer realities that “plunge in silence by.”
Self-conscious and apprehensive, Julian spends a good deal of time watching himself in various kinds of mirrors, a habit that proceeds in part from his divided self, “the one to be observed (by others) as in a mirror” and the other “who did the observing, who looked out of the deep eyes but could never, by any arrangement of mirrors, look into them” (p. 7). The affair with Elaine is pursued both under the eyes of the museum's staring portraits and under the gaze of Federigo, the mirror of Julian's subconscious self.
Julian is also a conscious observer of himself. Indeed, he derives considerable pleasure from this activity, especially under the stimulus of his illicit adventure. The effect is to create a narcissistic mirror that reflects the novel's ironic subtitle among other things. The only power of love in the novel is that of self-love, as can be perceived in the museum scene:
At certain moments he had the penetrative knowledge that he himself was doing the watching, that he stood back in a corner of the gallery, slightly shielded by statue or glass case, and saw himself over some little distance taking Elaine's arm, walking her, heard himself talking to this girl (his voice sounded very odd); at these moments he watched with cynical doubt and a sneer how their heads came close together as they looked at one or another exhibit—came together and casually, whisperingly, drew apart again without a smile, without a glance, with no acknowledgment of what they both knew.
(p. 183)
While Julian obviously relishes this sort of reflexive consciousness, the effect of it is to create a completely enclosed world in which “knowledge becomes a kind of cannibalism” (p. 219). Mirror consciousness becomes in fact a terror for Julian as well as a pleasurable heightening of his experience because in reflecting himself everything becomes “fluid and unstable, there was no solidity anywhere, as in a dream the most trivial object became charged with feelings of despair and fear, while the world began to fall away as in a dream” (p. 132).
The other characters also exhibit mirror vision, thereby implying that this sort of vision is inherent in the human condition rather than peculiar to Julian. Seven years after her affair with Hugo, Sylvia sees her earlier self in a mirror whose range is unimpeded by time: “She seemed to be standing back and looking at this body receiving those caresses as though it were the body of another person, for whom she felt both pity and contempt” (p. 197). Similarly, Marius Rathlin enters the rivalry with Julian for the love of Elaine Bernard thinking to himself: “I am a suitor, I am entering the arena, this that is happening to me is love” (p. 187).
The solipsistic implications of mirror vision sometimes come home to Julian, who speculates hopefully that the sensation he has of being watched may not only reflect his own self-consciousness, but may obscurely point to the existence of other observers from a Platonic world that “exactly replicated the way in which this world ought to go, and with which this world was steadily, point for point, being compared” (p. 145). The idea is further expanded in a biblical version of the postulated cosmic observer, a “They (or He, or It)” who watched both the “fall of every sparrow” and the “progress of Julian Ghent through time,” divinely aware of his “most secret feeling that he ought to have been a monk or priest” (p. 10).
Federigo is an impressive novel by any standards, offering an unflinchingly unsentimental view of some fairly sophisticated characters. Nemerov structures his narrative with a baroque circularity that gracefully matches his complex epistemological themes. The fine meshing of linear and circular development can be seen in his deft use of foreshadowing. Early in the novel Julian is captivated by the view of a woman bending before a mirror at the end of a long, gloomy corridor. Moving toward him and even before she enters the light Julian recognizes her as his wife, a foreshadowing of the novel's final unmasking. The book is not without its imperfections. The subplot, for example, which involves Julian's career in the advertising business, is crude in comparison with the main plot, and is unconvincingly related to the larger action. Nevertheless, this is a minor blemish in a work that is so intellectually satisfying in its handling of both form and theme.
IV THE HOMECOMING GAME
Nemerov's third novel, The Homecoming Game, appeared in 1957. He wrote the book during one summer, the bulk of it in a month.12 While his first two novels had earned less than a thousand dollars, The Homecoming Game—by being turned into a Broadway play and Hollywood film—brought in bags of money: “All one winter and spring,” he has noted, “my shoulder ached from carting those checks to the bank, and for six years thereafter there came every January some six to seven thousand dollars from the movie.”13
The novel centers on the moral dilemma of Charles Osman, a history professor at a small Eastern college. Osman, a Jew who does not look Jewish, is a widower who feels guilty about his wife's death. He fails Raymond Blent, the college's football star, on a history test and thereby imperils the annual homecoming game. A strict but fair grader, Osman is appalled by the pressure brought to bear on him to change Blent's mark. In successive waves he is assailed by student delegations, Blent's erotic girl friend, Lily Sayre, the college's president, and various potentates from the business and political worlds who are benefactors of the college. In an interview with Blent, Osman discovers that the young man deliberately failed the test in order to be disqualified from playing in the game. He had taken a bribe to throw the game and in a change of heart had decided to fail academically in order to disqualify himself.
Moved by Blent's predicament, Osman decides to take charge of the situation and to allow his student to take the test over and to play in the game. He promises to return the bribe money to its criminal sources. Complicating the situation is the fact that Blent has failed not only his history test but a test in philosophy as well. The philosophy instructor, Leon Solomon, adamantly refuses to change the mark, although a painstaking intervention by Osman almost persuades him to do so. In any case the college hierarchy overrules Solomon, and Blent is permitted to play. In spite of this the team loses, since the gamblers who had bribed Blent had also prudently bribed other players on the team. Osman ends up feeling sheepish and empty, disillusioned about his foray into the world of action.
While a reasonably intelligent man in academic matters, Osman is nevertheless something of a pedant and a snob. He carries around a green book-bag from an ivy-league university as a badge of superiority over the intellectual standards which obtain at his small college. He describes the historian as examining the “outsides of past events, with a view to discovering what their insides were” (pp. 3-4).14 In a modest way the dilemma regarding Blent gives him an opportunity, he believes, to assess both the inside and outside of a situation as both impartial historian and participant. He is motivated in part by feelings of ambivalence which he has always had toward football. An undergraduate member of his university's intelligentsia, he had remained aloof from sport. Even then, however, he had felt himself involuntarily excited by the atmosphere surrounding the Saturday game. Sundays were a melancholy aftermath, the “first major hint, perhaps, for Charles, or at any rate the first hint consciously taken, of the disastrous impermanence of all things” (p. 54).
One of Osman's most self-conscious memories is that of having stood as a boy before the mirror dressed in a football uniform with a ball under his arm. In this position he had practiced “those prancing postures and snarling expressions conventionally used in photographs and cartoons of his heroes” (p. 53). As an adult his ambivalence is amplified by occasional doubts about the social and even intellectual impact of the academic world, a world that he characterizes as striving for a “serious austerity” but that as often as not achieved “shabbiness” (p. 22). Feeling that he may after all be part of an ineffectual enterprise, he plunges eagerly into what he perceives as the invigorating world of decision and action.
As with most of Nemerov's protagonists Osman reflects the dichotomy of the subjective and external worlds. Even within the sphere of the subjective he is noticeably vulnerable. He perceives himself as moving with judiciousness, for example, when in fact he is motivated in ways which he does not fully acknowledge. He is drawn to Raymond Blent, for example, not only because of the merit of his case but because Blent is physically attractive, possessing “fineness and delicacy, though it was delicacy on the magnificent or heroic scale” (p. 76). He is also influenced by his own vanity, as Nemerov satirically points up in the scene in which a pushy student delegation presses for a change in Blent's mark: “Didn't they know, didn't they even suspect by this time, that one simply didn't talk to people as they had talked to him? That what their being in such a place as this implied was, in the first place, their will to civilization, civilization with all its admitted faults and evils, civilization at all costs? But their morals, no less than their manners, belonged in a reformatory, not in a university” (p. 17).
Characteristically, Osman thinks over his annoyed reaction to the students and decides rather hastily that if he had not been so annoyed at the students he might have taken a more conciliatory line. Striving to be fair and decisive and yet haunted by the fear that he might be mistaken, he apprehensively considers walking the “high wire of the ethical” (p. 19). Ironically, and this reflects on his intellectual presumption, he discovers once he has been out on the high wire that the situation does not depend on him alone. He discovers that Leon Solomon must also approve a change in Blent's mark. His strenuous though dignified efforts to masterfully determine the outcome of Blent's and his own situation lead belatedly to the humbling reflection that the relationships involved are too complex to manage: “For it lay in the nature of time itself that the experimental method was impossible to be applied to human action” (p. 216). Adding to his final chagrin is the humiliating perception that somewhere amidst the “heroics, dramatics, and noble expressions of principle” he had been forced to resign over an issue which in cool retrospect seemed “small, distant, and ridiculous” (p. 219).
Nevertheless, Osman's ordeal does have a maturing effect on him. For one thing, his ambition, the flagship of his existence, recedes into a dimmer light in his scheme of things: “here perhaps, after all, was the heroism that truly existed in this vale of tears; that men unflinchingly went on facing up to the noble pretense that what they wanted was success, when in truth they wanted nothing of the sort, when every success revealed itself—at once, before the testimonial dinner was over, or the ink had dried on the parchment of the diploma—as merely another piece of nonsense gained at the awful cost of having to defend it and things like it forever and ever” (p. 192). Stung by the discovery that the gamblers had determined the outcome of things in their own effective way, Osman—feeling ironically at the end that he alone is completely outside of the situation—succumbs to his cup of Ovaltine with the “cheerfulness, courage, and constancy displayed by Socrates when they brought him the hemlock” (p. 246).
Structurally, although Osman's is the focal point of view in the novel, the exploration of that point of view is dramatized through his relationships with Lily Sayre and Leon Solomon—spokes attached to the hub as it were. Lily, the candid and bewitching daughter of Herman Sayre, one of the college's affluent benefactors, seduces Osman with her air of “natural freedom, even wildness” (p. 22). In her presence he feels the encroachment of time and eagerly reaches out to her in spite of an “element of calculation” he senses in her (p. 26). Lily has the effect of crystallizing in Osman certain “vague tendencies toward the renewed possession of life, toward the assertion of oneself in the field of reality; tendencies which, for all that they are regarded as normal, had suffered the severe shock of defeat in Charles upon the death of his wife some years before” (pp. 124-25). She entices him out of his habitual introspectiveness and caution: “Darling, you must have been a rather stolid, unimaginative child,” she tells him, adding that the “whole object of life is to make it more glorious and exciting than it is, even if you sometimes come down with a thud in the end” (p. 150).
She appeals to Osman at his two most vulnerable points, his reawakened desire for sexual gratification and his latent snobbery. Combining an icy elegance with youthful sensuality, she overpowers his fastidious imagination: “She wore a black evening gown very severely cut and unadorned, but leaving naked her shoulders and arms. Around her neck lay a heavy, flat chain of gold. These contrasts particularly of texture, the flesh, the funereal cloth, the solidity and hardness of the metal, produced an impression very striking of aristocracy and slavery together. The expensive perfection of the object of desire provoked in the beholder, as it was meant to do, destructive longings to seize the chain, strip off the gown, dishevel the hair” (p. 126).
Osman's relationship with Lily is an important aspect of the novel's structure and irony because as temptress she draws him away from the austere conditions which befit his role as a dispassionate judge in the Blent affair. With her he gives himself up willingly to feelings of “helplessness, irresponsibility, and adoration” (p. 189). Flying about in the Bugatti with Lily inebriated at the wheel, Osman lets himself go, sinking euphorically into a sensual, adolescent world of feeling that is wildly incongruous with his self-appointed role as the ethical arbiter of other people's lives. Although calculating, Lily is attracted to Osman, and although their future would be doubtful she offers herself to him in a moment of tenderness. Paralyzed by so direct a proposal, Osman retreats into his conservatism: “One did not rape, even by invitation, a drunken, unconscious female” (p. 206). Having committed himself to the world of action, the only world that Lily respects, Osman freezes, partly because he would be gaining from a situation which he has pledged himself to adjudicate but mostly because he is after all a quiet, reflective, and reserved man.
The relationship with Leon Solomon is important because it reaches to the roots of Osman's identity and causes him to scrutinize his motives for any trace of impurity. Solomon is an embittered, uncompromising Jewish leftist who had entered the slumbering academic world from a lower-class New York City background, making enemies wherever he went. As opposed to Solomon, Osman's Jewishness blends in with his surroundings. He is a “Connecticut Jew, and not Merritt Parkway Connecticut either, but of the small town, inland variety which resembled the Connecticut Yankee at least a good deal more than it did the Jew, whether rich or poor, of New York City” (p. 66).
Assuming the harsh voice of a prophet, Solomon taunts Osman with having given up the thirst for justice that he contends is the birthright of every Jew: “You are a Christian gentleman,” he sneers, “or practically a Christian gentleman, and a true member of the maspocha of educated men” (p. 70). When the student mob materializes outside of Solomon's house, Osman finds himself identifying with his colleague's Jewishness in an unexpected way. Waiting for Solomon to draw parallels between the student mob, the Gestapo, and the gas chamber, he nervously concedes that Solomon might after all be right but that there was in fact nothing more paralyzing than a “paranoid attitude to dangers which really exist” (p. 179).
Solomon's other chief narrative function is to test the validity of Osman's proposal to Blent and to force him to be scrupulous in examining his motives. The reason for this is that Solomon is so clearly the scapegoat in the situation that he is the one man whom Osman, with his instinct for fairness, must shield from injustice. In addition, Osman senses the moral purity of Solomon in comparison with that of the powerful individuals with whose expedient cause he has aligned himself and he prefers not to offend Solomon “precisely because he could well afford to offend him” (p. 69).
Technically, The Homecoming Game is a suspenseful novel which may be said to combine the dramatic confrontations of The Melodramatists and the polished structuring of Federigo. The effect is to retain the energy which had become somewhat dispersed through the loose ordering of Nemerov's first novel. The various plots and themes are skillfully interlaced. This can be seen, for example, in the clever way in which Nemerov handles the description of the game. He carefully builds the narration toward the game and then depicts the sloping aftermath without in fact describing the game itself. In this way the game figures in the novel's design like the eye of a hurricane.
The satire is handled somewhat more heavily than in Federigo and some of the incidents—like the visit of the student delegation to Osman's office—are implausible. There are some witty moments, however, as when Nemerov illuminates the powerlessness of the academic establishment by pointing out that any combination of the college's wealthy benefactors could, if they wanted to, buy the college and “turn it into an experimental sheep farm or a Jesuit novitiate or a country club” (p. 97). Nemerov was more attentive to the landscape and to the seasons in The Homecoming Game than in his other novels. The descriptions of the landscape are concise and yet evocative as is Osman's grateful absorbing of his surroundings after the student delegation had met with him: “The day had begun splendidly, as autumn days regularly did here, with a brilliant frost on the grass, an air strange and keen in the mouth as the first taste of an apple” (p. 16). The autumn landscape is developed because Nemerov wanted to relate it to the annual homecoming game, which he in turn relates to rites of combat and man's relationship with the earth.15
His use of myth enlarges the novel's scope. In describing the bonfire, he compares it to the rain dance, which, although it did bring the rain, brought the “tribe to the pitch of enthusiasm at which they really at any rate planted the corn” (p. 91). The bonfire even includes an appropriate sacrificial victim. Similarly, the football field is said to have a kind of “totemic or sacrificial” appearance and the ritualistic prancing of the players before the game is said to reflect some “new, delightedly innocent relation with the earth itself” just as their contrasting red and white and black and white uniforms produce an effect of “cleanliness carefully preserved for the one ceremonial destruction” (pp. 209-10).
In spite of the satirical corona which surrounds Nemerov's use of these myths, they do finally give a certain depth to what otherwise would be a rather banal action. Musing on the controlled violence which he sees as the essence of such spectacles as football, Osman reflects persuasively that perhaps war itself in its beginning had been no more than such a ceremony. Turning over the familiar Nemerovian theme of the intermingling of imagination and reality, Osman stares into history and wistfully ponders the significance of the homecoming game: “It might be—again the odd joke of history!—that the earliest form of war was predetermined as to its outcome, having a magical purpose and a ceremonial arrangement which, entering history as garbled traditions, were misinterpreted as both real and necessary: a nasty joke” (pp. 213-14).
V THE FICTIVE LIFE
Nemerov's Journal of the Fictive Life (1965) is a diary he kept during the month from July 10 to August 10, 1963. He begins the Journal under the pseudonym Felix Ledger,16 a novelist who has not written a novel for many years and who wonders why he is unable to write. In trying to answer this question, he finds himself caught up in a general exploration of art and the creative process. Unsatisfied with the indirectness of using the persona of Felix Ledger, Nemerov unmasks and then devotes most of the book to a searching examination of his own life. He writes in a time of personal crisis. His father had recently died and he himself is about to become a father for the third time after an interval of thirteen years. Gradually the Journal becomes a record of his past and his dreams. The dreams in turn lead to a psychoanalytical evaluation of his published writings. The book ends with the birth of his son.
The force of the Journal derives from its immediacy. Nemerov's sexual estrangement from his wife during the later part of her pregnancy, his guilt about his father, his fears about incorporating personal experience into a novel, and his skepticism about the future of art are intertwined convincingly and powerfully. The rawness of the book, while formally unattractive perhaps, provides a note of authenticity that caused Nemerov to think of the Journal as a “third way” of writing, intermediate between fiction and fact (p. 55).17 The need for an alternative to the traditional novel is obliquely pointed up in one of Felix Ledger's whimsical reflections: “Felix would rather not be found dead in possession of the remark, The Novel is Dead. But he knew of a good many novels that showed how rumors of that sort get started.” (p. 3).
Nemerov originally entitled the book Mosaic, meaning thereby to suggest the collagelike, nonlinear form of the work, a form which is superbly adapted to the book's contents. The progress of the narrator through the book is essentially circular. Blocked from writing fiction, he decides instead to write autobiography only to discover that he has in fact written fiction—hence the journal's title. The purpose of the Freudian analyses is to confront the subconscious by revealing the meaning inherent in its creations. The process is inevitably slow and cumulative. For this reason the shifting about in the format of the Journal which goes on in the first fifty pages is, from the point of view of verisimilitude at least, an important part of the book's authority.
The narrative method is that of free association. “The first principle of this writing,” Nemerov notes, “is that everything is relevant; accidents turn up and later, under close reading, prove their right to be here by getting themselves woven into the fabric” (p. 90). Ultimately, he believed that the setting down of random observations and recollections would stir his conscious and subconscious in such a way that a pattern would result. The images thrown up by the subconscious circulate through the book until one has a sense of Nemerov's most absorbing obsessions. In this way there emerges a series of themes and variations.
Nemerov thought of his method as magical in that it fortuitously led to the discovery of hidden and significant relationships and in that way resembled the process of art. For this reason he was exhilarated by the thought that he had stumbled upon a new way of doing the novel. In this connection he wrote to a friend in 1963 about the novelty of his Journal: “I realize that the book is a strange one, though to anyone who is intimate with the art of letters at present, there are the plainest signs that this is The Next Phase, and in five years every hack in the country will be doing it instead of novels.”18 In a later interview he observed that “if you pay close attention to your life, the number of what you would otherwise think of as co-incidences rises remarkably, just probably because of the transformational grammar going on inside your head, always looking for pattern when it's paying heed.”19
The effect of Nemerov's method is a curious ambiguity in which he feels as if he is writing not about himself, but a novel about a life similar to his. The ultimate irony is the underlying implication that every writer faces the same impasse in trying to write about himself—the inevitable transformation of that which was intended to be real into the imaginative and the fictive. Even such a fictive life, however, has a substantial universality about it in its enactment of man's inveterate habit of discovering only what he has first of all imagined. It might be argued that in turning the experience in Journal of the Fictive Life over to Freudian analysis Nemerov committed himself not to the pursuit of truth but to a cumbersome, mechanical system. It must be remembered, though, that he thought of Freud not simply as a scientist but as a great poet. Moreover, he uses the methods of Freudian analysis with considerable freedom, noting throughout the book the similarity between these methods and his own accustomed ways of using his imagination in writing poems and stories. In any case, whatever the future of Nemerov's unusual narrative method, he has written a book of considerable power whose images and anxieties cling to the mind.
Notes
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A Commodity of Dreams & Other Stories (New York, 1959). Page references appear in the text.
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Journal of the Fictive Life, p. 31.
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Stories, Fables & Other Diversions (Boston, 1971). Page references appear in the text.
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Journal of the Fictive Life, p. 61.
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The Melodramatists (New York, 1949). Page references appear in the text.
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Poetry & Fiction, p. 249.
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The Next Room of the Dream (Chicago, 1962). Reprinted in The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago and London, 1977), p. 272.
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Crinklaw, p. 66.
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“The Nature of Novels,” Partisan Review, 24 (Fall 1957), 605.
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Journal of the Fictive Life, p. 61.
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Federigo, or the Power of Love (Boston and Toronto, 1954). Page references appear in the text.
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Journal of the Fictive Life, p. 61.
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Ibid., p. 15. The Warner Brothers film was called Tall Story and featured Anthony Perkins, with Jane Fonda in her starring debut. A comparison of the novel and the film is made in Robert L. White's “The Trying-out of ‘The Homecoming Game,’” Colorado Quarterly, 10 (Spring 1959), 84-96.
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The Homecoming Game (New York, 1957). Page references appear in the text.
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See Nemerov's unsigned essay “Football” in Furioso, 6 (Spring 1951), 66-68.
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Nemerov introduced Felix Ledger in the sketch “From a Novel as Yet Untitled,” Furioso, 6 (Summer 1951), 11-22.
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Journal of the Fictive Life (New Brunswick, N.J., 1965). Page references in the following pages of this chapter appear in the text.
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Letter to Margot Johnson, November 16, 1963.
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Crinklaw, 66.
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