An Occupational Hazard

Thomas Hardy once remarked that “great literature is written to the sound of breaking commandments.” It does not follow, however, that breaking commandments always results in great literature. All too often the modern novel presents us with the story of men so small that even their sins become improbable and their lives as tedious as the long passage of windy and neurotic writing which describe them. Kay Boyle’s Generation Without Farewell (Knopf, $3.95) falls into this category. It is a novel in which sentiment and sexuality are substituted for the genuine poetry of human passion, where the heroes and the heroines are too slight and shallow to wear the costumes of their vast but improbable human failures.

Indeed, improbability is the keynote of this novel. We are informed by the jacket that the background is that of occupied Germany in 1948 and that the novelist was foreign correspondent in Germany for the New Yorker from 1946 to 1953. But there is singularly little of Germany in the novel. It is Germany as it might have been viewed from the U.S. officers clubs, the America Houses, the first- class compartments of German trains and all the naive and comfortable enclaves of American authority and the American standard of living in that tortured and desolate land. There is no proximity to the reality of German history in those dreadful postwar years. The background has no depth or meaning and serves only, as is the case with so many historical novels, to add an air of credibility to a plot and characters too feeble to exist without such a prop. This novel will never be translated into German, not because it is thin and trashy but because no German would recognize the landscape.

ST

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Stephen Tonsor

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Thomas Hardy once remarked that “great literature is written to the sound of breaking commandments.” It does not follow, however, that breaking commandments always results in great literature. All too often the modern novel presents us with the story of men so small that even their sins become improbable and their lives as tedious as the long passage of windy and neurotic writing which describe them. Kay Boyle’s Generation Without Farewell (Knopf, $3.95) falls into this category. It is a novel in which sentiment and sexuality are substituted for the genuine poetry of human passion, where the heroes and the heroines are too slight and shallow to wear the costumes of their vast but improbable human failures.

Indeed, improbability is the keynote of this novel. We are informed by the jacket that the background is that of occupied Germany in 1948 and that the novelist was foreign correspondent in Germany for the New Yorker from 1946 to 1953. But there is singularly little of Germany in the novel. It is Germany as it might have been viewed from the U.S. officers clubs, the America Houses, the first- class compartments of German trains and all the naive and comfortable enclaves of American authority and the American standard of living in that tortured and desolate land. There is no proximity to the reality of German history in those dreadful postwar years. The background has no depth or meaning and serves only, as is the case with so many historical novels, to add an air of credibility to a plot and characters too feeble to exist without such a prop. This novel will never be translated into German, not because it is thin and trashy but because no German would recognize the landscape.