The I of the Beholder

By Timothy Foote

TESTIMONY AND DEMEANOR By John Casey Knopf; 207 pages; $8.95

"In my schools," a young man reflects, "I was taught to be myself, to be a gentleman, to be a success. Several different things, it turned out." Author John Casey also had his feet set upon the rungs to Eastern establishment success: St. Albans School in Washington; Harvard, class of '62; Harvard Law School. But somewhere along the way a muse appeared and made off with Casey's torts and breaches. He has been a writer ever since. And a succes, of some esteem, since his first novel, An American Romance, came out two years ago.

Graham Greene once noted with pride that a novelist has "a splinter of ice in the heart." In Testimony and Demeanor Casey demonstrates what one of his characters calls a "lawyer-like habit of being an objective observer in the vortex of other people's passions." Casey is not proud of his cold eye, however. Most of these stories are threaded by the narrator's regret about his role as watcher in the shallows.

The book's title emphasizes the discrepancy, in law, between what a witness says on the stand--which could in fact be handed to the jury as a written transcript--and how he says it, his general demeanor, the matter of flesh-and-blood delivery that sways a jury. All four stories are told in the first person by young men who loosely share some common characteristics. An ex-college wrestler is given brief command of his squad during his own basic training and learns that trying to be fair is a kind of condescension. A sophisticated Eastern writing teacher plays Pygmalion to a gifted but corn-fed coed in Iowa. A stoic, weanling New York lawyer is gently and blessedly maneuvered into an affair with a middle-aged woman. An incipient Washington administrator's friendship with a young Soviet reveals the bureaucratic fate that awaits them both.

Things happen, of course, but only up to a point. The professor, perhaps inevitably, finds himself outgrown by the Iowa maiden, who does not share his reticence about reaching out for life. The Washington careerist, "bright but not too bright" and full of muddled optimism, glimpses the fact that the convergence theory of history, as applied to the evolution of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., is bad news because it is turning the world into a wall-to-wall bureaucracy. "We are not completing anything," the Soviet says. "And we are not being used up in order for anything to be complete." The mechanics of policy, he adds, which should merely be the peripheral protection for life, has become an end in itself, "taking up the space and the time, until no one knows anything else."

Casey's witnesses brood upon events and characters in ways that make both testimony and demeanor memorable. The author can devastate an average college weekend in two paragraphs, construct a sweet, 100% irony-proof love scene, talk like a grownup about the value--and the cost--of work. "Dickens' blacking factory is nothing next to a modern career," a lawyer's lady friend observes. Nick Carraway reflecting on the great Gatsby's death, or on what it is like to come from the Midwest, could not be more perceptive or compelling. Casey's watchful I's, in fact, seem tougher than Fitzgerald's characters, with far less self-pity.

In marked contrast to An American Romance, Casey this time is enormously restrained about explicit sex, though extraordinarily skilled at conveying the hints and guesses of desire. How much real invention he possesses remains to be seen. Meanwhile he is one of the few new writers whose stories can be read once, then read right through again, without any sense of repetition. Even on one exposure an impressionable reader may begin to brood upon these fictions as if they were lost moments of his own past life, to be fondly sifted over for meanings and mistakes.

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