The New York Times Book Review, not long ago, carried a full-page Scribner’s advertisement so perversely entrancing that I have been unable since to remove it from prominent display above my fireplace. In tasteful lower-case italics on half-tone, the copy reads: “two books to restore your faith in the novel.” The two books, shown large as life, are Marcia Davenport’s The Constant Image and C. P. Snow’s The Affair. Now although neither the New York Times Book Review nor those particular books ever did much to restore my faith in the unexpendability of movable type, let alone of the novel, one among the summer’s novels—and it was a dry summer—went a good way toward doing exactly that. (I grant that my reading of summer fiction has perhaps been cursory; for reasons with which those of you under thirty-five must surely sympathize, I skipped, for example, a novel by a young man said to have “done for his generation what J. D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac did for theirs.”)
Raised on the litany of the difficult way West, the emigrant children have as their heritage only manifest destiny, always a tradition, as Henry Nash Smith has pointed out, devoid of reference to the past. History began, for these Westerners, the day their family cut loose from society and struck into the desolate promised land that was California or Utah or Nebraska. Now, when manifest destiny has lost its explicability, the conundrum obsessing them is why history began at all. But through constant elaboration of the myths involved in westward expansion, they manage, with the sure self-preservative instincts of sleepwalkers, to obscure their doubts. What it is to be a
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