Demon of the Perverse

Robert Phelps’ Heroes and Orators (McDowell, Obolensky, $3.75) is the most promising first novel I have read in years. It has sensibility, it has depth, the writing has a beautiful lucidity, and the author has a most accurate eye and ear for traits of character. Unfortunately, the book is marred—or perhaps limited is the right word—by the author’s one-sided idea of what constitutes the nature of truth. Mr. Phelps, who puts a younger version of himself into his story under the nom de guerre of Roger Becket, has rigorously excluded many facets of his own variegated nature from the narrative.

He insists on telling the worst about himself, never the best. This passion for confession, almost religious in its intensity, would make a heel of anyone, even a saint. But Mr. Phelps is no heel; he is, as everyone who has read his perceptive literary criticism knows, a man of acute aesthetic and moral intuitions. He is a good man who perversely insists on portraying himself as a semi-delinquent. Jonathan Edwards, the old Puritan divine, knew all about this urge when he roasted his parishioners metaphorically over the fires of hell in the historical period known, ridiculously, as the Great Awakening. For myself, I have always thought of this interlude in the story of American theology as the Last Great Sleep.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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Robert Phelps’ Heroes and Orators (McDowell, Obolensky, $3.75) is the most promising first novel I have read in years. It has sensibility, it has depth, the writing has a beautiful lucidity, and the author has a most accurate eye and ear for traits of character. Unfortunately, the book is marred—or perhaps limited is the right word—by the author’s one-sided idea of what constitutes the nature of truth. Mr. Phelps, who puts a younger version of himself into his story under the nom de guerre of Roger Becket, has rigorously excluded many facets of his own variegated nature from the narrative.

He insists on telling the worst about himself, never the best. This passion for confession, almost religious in its intensity, would make a heel of anyone, even a saint. But Mr. Phelps is no heel; he is, as everyone who has read his perceptive literary criticism knows, a man of acute aesthetic and moral intuitions. He is a good man who perversely insists on portraying himself as a semi-delinquent. Jonathan Edwards, the old Puritan divine, knew all about this urge when he roasted his parishioners metaphorically over the fires of hell in the historical period known, ridiculously, as the Great Awakening. For myself, I have always thought of this interlude in the story of American theology as the Last Great Sleep.