Monday, May. 19, 1947
What the People Want
THERE WAS A TIME (471 pp.)--Taylor Caldwell--Scribner ($3).
"May foamed ... on every street. . . . Spring had tossed her pale green garments on every branch. . . . Long beams of sun fell across [Frank Clair's] thin white hands [which] lay on his coat, still, flaccid. . . . His eyes moved too slowly in their pits of dark shadow."
Pitted, flaccid Frank Clair is the hero of a new novel by Janet Miriam Taylor Caldwell, whose previous novels (This Side of Innocence, The Eagles Gather, Dynasty of Death, etc.) have rung up a total sale of almost 2,000,000 copies. This Side of Innocence was the biggest fiction seller of 1946. Consequently, the appearance of her new novel is an event for her admirers--and, for analytical critics, another ripe opportunity to examine the ingredients and treatment wherewith Author Caldwell has made herself one of the richest novelists in the U.S.
There Was a Time has the color-blind prose and inability to distinguish real emotions from salable affectations that were written all over earlier Caldwell works. But this time, instead of centering around rapacious industrial tycoons, it is a portrait of an artist as a young man. Frank Clair is born in the grimy English city of Leeds (Scottish-English Author Caldwell was born in Manchester); when he is still a boy, his parents bring him to the U.S. city of Bison (Author Caldwell's parents brought her to Buffalo, in whose outskirts she still lives).
Bison's beastliness proves too much for hypersensitive little Frank. At 21 he no longer walks in the forest, where the baton of the "invisible choirmaster" conducts music that used to make Frank's heart soar "on wings of agonized joy." When the spring earth becomes "an orb of gold afloat in rainbows," Frank just counts the orbs of gold that he has in the bank. He turns literary prostitute, and starts writing "poisoned pap" that sells well. He even, like Author Caldwell, writes a novel ("with Sex aplenty") about "international bankers" who "cunningly and sedulously plotted wars for their own profit. This was what the American people wanted ... a scapegoat for their fear. . . . Sound and fury, rage and excess, anger and despair, defeated dreams, filled every page of the novel [and] Frank was sometimes faintly embarrassed by the wealth of adjectives. . . ." This is an embarrassment that Author Caldwell never seems to feel.
Frank is saved from misanthropy and commercial success by a sweet and wealthy girl named Jessica. On the last page he is sitting down to write an honest novel--entitled There Was a Time.
Nero at Nine. Forty-six-year-old Author Caldwell's life story is as extraordinary as Frank's and much more convincing. At nine, soon after her arrival in the tough world of North America, she wrote her first novel--a story of the persecution of the Christians by the Emperor Nero. By twelve, she had done a novel about the French Revolution. She also attended grade school. But father Arthur Caldwell, who was a commercial artist, disapproved of pampering and educating women. When his daughter was 15 and had just finished a biography of Christ, he put her to work in a bindery.
But sickly Author Caldwell went on writing ''novels, essays and poetry by the ream," until she became almost blind. Recently her husband, Marcus Reback, an immigration officer, carted out the last "bushel-buckets" of his wife's discarded, unpublished works and burned them in the incinerator of their beautiful Eggertsville, N.Y. home. In the conflagration, Author Caldwell estimates, were some 140 novels ("they didn't burn well").
Author Caldwell never revises or rereads a line she writes. She does no research ("it would spoil the fun"), picks up her general information about tycoons and industry from "movies and . . . plants I visited." In more difficult business problems--"for instance, when one man must do something to injure the other"--she consults her husband, who studied law. Mr. Reback, whom his wife calls "Tootsie," is a reader of the Wall Street Journal, and "he puts it all in a paragraph. Often I don't in the least understand what it means, but I break up that paragraph and scatter it through the book."
"My first success came too late," says Author Caldwell. "I always loved clothes, for instance. I used to faint from starvation in the office . . . just to save money to buy them. . . . Now clothes don't mean anything to me." But a few months ago, when Critic Edwin Seaver suggested in the Saturday Review of Literature that "the specter of commercialism" was haunting U.S. literature, Author Caldwell (who is now vacationing in Paris and Rome) turned on him like a tigress. "My most 'lyrical prose,' " she retorted, "has resulted from the anticipation of big checks ... a new home, a trip, or a mink coat. The profit motive cannot be removed from an artist."
It is presumably this profit motive that makes Artist Caldwell write fiction that is never above the intelligence-level of the most stunted book buyer. There Was a Time is packed to the boards with the kind of hatred of people and of the world that is often felt by the most normal man. But it is always balanced by Author Caldwell's cautious and frequent lip service to such equally human aspirations as love of humanity, tolerance and faith.
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