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Archdiocese of Atlanta the GEORGIA BULLETIN SERVING GEORGIA'S 71 NORTHERN COUNTIES GEORGIA BULLETIN BOOK SUPPLEMENT THURSDAY, APRIL 25, 1963 Identity Loss Through Loss Of Faith MISS CAROLINE GORDON SHOWN WITH SOME “BRUSH" WORK Caroline Gordon, the South's leading woman of letters, was born in 1895 at Clarksville, Term. Novelist, short story writer, and critic, Miss Gordon contributes to the Yale Review, New Republic, Southern Review, Harper's, and the Swannee Review. A renowned teacher of creative writing, she is presently Writer in Residence at the University of California. Miss Gordon is readying an essay for the Bulletin to be entitled, "The Re luctant Reader,’’ a discussion of the "dodges" we all employ to avoid reading a work of fiction which will tell us something. BY CAROLINE GORDON Wilfrid Sheed, in his brilliant ( first novel, A Middle Class Edu cation,does not avail himself of that technique which Henry James perfected and labelled "The Central Intelligence," by means of which, Percy Lubbock points out, he revolutionized the craft of fiction. Everything that happens in Mr. Sheed’s novel is seen through the eyes of John Chote, an Oxford under graduate who has won an ex change fellowship to an Ameri can university, but John Chote does not fill what for James was the chief requirement for a "Central Intelligence:’’ he is not capable—or not quite cap able— of morally evaluating what has happened to him. Nevertheless, this novel is Jamesian in conception and, in spite of certain technical flaws, (an amateurish prologue and a denouement which hovers on the verge of anti-climax,) is dist inguished by the attempt to ach ieve the same kind of tight, structural unity which cha racterized James’ last three | great novels. COMPARISON with this mas er in no way detracts from die originality of this young nove list’s achievement. Mr. Sheed’s novel is truly "Jamesian" in intention. He has so far follow ed in James’ footsteps as to attempt to act the Colossus and bestride two continents, and the continents and the ocean which divides them have the same dr amatic function as "true sym bols" in this first novel of die contemporary writer that they had in James’ last four great novels. The characters in James* later novels cross the ocean in search of something they feel a need of and find themselves possessing or possessed by something quite different from what they had in mind. Isabel Archer expects to lead a ful ler, richer life as the result of her marriage to Gilbert Os mond and finds that she will be confined— at least as long as her husband lives—in what is for her the narrowest of pri son cells. She cannot bring her self to leave Pansy Osmond to the mercies of her father, the man whom Isabel chose for her husband but whom she now knows to be as wicked a man as one is likely to encounter. Lambert Strether goes to Paris at the behest of his wealthy, middle aged fiancee and finds there a richer life than any he had hitherto envisioned and, in the act of discovering it, is impelled to turn his back upon it. He reflects that Ma dame de Vionnet is, for him, "the finest and subtlest crea ture he has ever known even while he sees her" as vulgarly troubled as a maid-servent cry ing for her young man. "Goe the’s vision of th£ideal..claim ed by the real" has begun to consume the present reality in the interests of a higher reality. Or, as a theologian might put it, each of these no vels is a sort of Pilgrim's Pro gress, an embodiment, for its own day, of the experience which every Chirstian may expect to have. JAMES, in describing his early education, tells us that he and his brothers and sisters were not allowed "to divine an item of devotional practise.’’ Nevertheless, he has ap prehended, through his genius, the Christian archetypal pat terns. His characters go to Europe to find themselves— that is to confront themselves. John Chote, the leading ch aracter in Mr. Sheed’s novel, has to come to America to find himself, but the experience in each case is the same: the creature’s discovery of its own nothingness in relation to its Creator. Lambert Strether crosses the ocean by "steamer." John Ch ote, belonging, as he does, to an Icarian age, flies across. He is met at the customs shed of the air-port by Eugene Fos- dick, an American he has known at Oxford and Fosdick’s sister, Mirabelle, "a radiant girl in shorts," who has "the longest pair of legs Chote had ever seen." Chote finds the lodgings which Fosdick and his sister have located for him near Lin coln University intolerably squalid. He also finds himself unable to attend the lectures he is supposed to attend on his subject—law. His professors talked in terminably about the role of law—everything but jolly old law itself. To Chote the law was primarily and preferably the musty old cases: Jinks vs. Rams- bottom: plaintiff’s cow in jured bydefendent’s bicy cle, temporarily loaned to Miss Higgins, on Queen’s Highway. HIS STAY in the United States quickly resolves itself into bouts of loneliness and dep ression, alternating with week end visits to the Fosdicks’ lux urious estate in Connecticut. His affair with Mirabelle con sists of rendez-vous which are not as surreptitious as his sense of what is fitting demands and a series of running battles which take the form of discussion of anything or everything either of them has ever heard of. Mirabelle had just finished her second year "at a place called Jones" and knew "just enough about everything to dis cuss it." During his first week in the United States she and Chote "romped through socia lized medicine, the Church of England, the Kinsey Report, the Middle East, female emancipa- ion ..." Where Daphne, the girl Chote left behind him in Oxford, would have bowed her head modestly or kept silent, Mirabelle "charged bravely forward, shooting from both slim hips." Chote’s "middle class edu cation" has prepared him to deal with Mirabelle: "One’s us ual technique was to put a foot out as she went charging past... ‘But what do you believe?* she would ask in desperation. ’Oh, a bit of this and a bit of that, you know. Awfully eclectic, really." Marriage Men and women approach marriage with vastly different psychological and emotional at titudes which each partner must understand and accept if the marriage is to be successful, says Pierre Dufoyer in his new book marriage—a word to YOUNG MEN. It is published by P. J. Kenedy & Sons today. In it, Pierre Dufoyer tells the prospective bridegroom or young husband what true love really is and how to recogn- BUT ALTHOUGH Chote tri umphs easily over Mirabelle, he cannot shake off the persis tent depression engendered by a dream he had on his air plane flight to America: He dream ed he was soar ing away into space, farther ami father away from all the people he loved and trusted (what people, ha ha.) No, that wasn’t a dream—that was really happening. They were talking him into that: right out to the blooming limits. There would be no body else out there, of course, just John Wilson Chote and a lot of empty space. God? Of course not. One couldn’t possibly feel so lonely if God were any where about. It was icy cold—God would make it a little warmer if he had to live out here. Chote pulled up the skinny blan ket and jerked his knees on to the seat. God was there, after all; other wise, one might as well give up altogether. Just —give up. Up give, so to speak. John Chote, at his prepara tory school had been the most relentless, the most coolly cal culating persecutor of a youn ger boy, Godfrey Hook, (Known later at Oxford as "the Rev. Godfearing Hook” because he was the son of a clergyman. Once, after Chote has called off the torment of Hook in the interest of prudence - "I say, chaps, he’s beginning to bruise a bit" - he applies his eye to the key-hole of the door thr ough which the wretched Hook has just been thrust and, seem ing to find his own eye gaz ing back at him, wonders whet her he is tormentor or torment ed, then knows an even worse terror, the fear of losing his own identity. Mr. Sheed, it seems to me, is here dealing with the same theme with which Walker Percy deals in The Mov- iergoer, the possibility that modern man may be in danger of losing his identity as the result of losing his faith in God. Advice ize it. He says the attitude of the man approaching marriage is usually poles apart from that of his chosen partner on such vital matters as love, sex, home life, parenthood and careers. But, he adds, these differences are not irreconcilable. The es sence of true love is under standing, adjustment — and most important die gift of self. If the young couple strives for that ideal, they take a giant step toward a happy and suc cessful marriage.