Books

Tess Slesinger’s first novel, “The Unpossessed,” gives the effect of being peopled by the dead who have been temporarily animated. In any event, it is the obituary, in brilliant fiction, of the generation of tired radicals who couldn’t start anything, not even, as in the case which I choose to take symbolically, a magazine, which has its human parallel in the baby Miles and Margaret feared to bring into the world.

Miles, for example, is the harsh and thin New Englander who wears his radicalism as a crown of thorns and as a compensation for his own sense of joylessness and ineffectuality. His wife spends her years in the effort to thaw him out, almost succeeding, and to give him a sense of being important. The women in this novel are somewhat more awake of their true functions and limitations and they see activities in a fairly sane perspective, and that is perhaps because the author is a woman, a woman who is merciful and just. I believe that sanity and understanding can be imputed even to Elizabeth, who moves from man to man on the sex express, while Norah Blake. Childless as the rest, is most the mother, chiefly to her Jeffrey who roves, without deep desire, from woman to woman in sterile flirtation. I have met almost all of these people, or specimens of the types they represent, so that there are times when the book strikes me as a personal reminiscence.

I have even known someone very much like Professor Bruno Leonard, the solitary Hamletian Jew of “The Unpossessed,” whose most casual conversation flashes and coruscates and glows like a powerful incandescent lamp that shines without heat. With his brilliant quips he conceals hunger for love and a broken heart and hope and ambition. He is always so fright-fully amusing, don’t you know, and he is the god of a group of young radicals who look to him for guidance and direction and then, finally, free themselves from the tangle of the circus party which is to launch their magazine but only buries it in gusts of mockery and laughter. Perhaps the case of Bruno is the saddest because his gifts were the greatest. One is more readily inclined to speak of this Jewish intellectual in the past tense, because the book celebrates his ignominy more deeply than that of any other individual. But like the good spiritual physician he has diagnosed his case, through Miss Slesinger, long before the reader witnesses his tragi-comic close.

The star salesman is putting together the filling cabinet which is to be one of the properties of the non-existent magazine. It has been ordered by Bruno Leonard’s assistant-to-be, Jeffrey. Bruno now addresses the salesman Harrison.

“I ask you, I beg you, to take that thing out of my sight. Your reaction is to continue ruthlessly to hammer it together. Why? Because you believe in the God damn thing-you believe in the Filing Cabinet as in an eternal verity. No room for doubts in your mind -I find you, even, a trifle narrow there-but let’s not speak of that. No hedging for you, no seeing the other fellow’s point of view till you can put it better than you can your own… Now, if you were a Jew, Mr. Harrison, God forbid! you???d have a little streak of madness, you’d want to smash those things sometimes instead of putting them together. And if you were a bright enough Jew you’d stay home wondering whether it would be better to smash them or better to put them together, and after a while you’d stay in bed wondering, unable to get up because you couldn’t decide….And then you’d get a cable form Paris and think of so many answers you wouldn’t send any…and by the time you got to the office you’d find someone else had your job; an Anglo-Saxon named Walter Payson Harrison.”

I quote this as much because of its self-analysis as because of its brilliance. It is brilliant with the talk Miss Slessinger puts into the mouths of her characters and brilliant with her own understanding of their natures and their maladies and their relationships. It could easily have been a harsh book, but it isn’t; it is a book of understanding, even, at times, of mercy.

H.S.