Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke
mind, the greatest master of this economic test of form.) As for possible nays: The book, though not long, is a bit expanded beyond necessity; and the expansions tend to involve sheerly internal modes of repetition rather than references to life in general. But decidedly, the ayes have it.
The quality of Shirley Jackson’s imagination can be most readily illustrated by comparing and contrasting this newest work with her well-known story, “The Lottery.” Lurking in ordinary human sociality there is always a kind of embarrassment, insofar as the “villagers’" ways are not the ways of the writer’s dreaming, storytelling self. Accordingly, when the writer “extrapolates” from this situation and its modes of estrangement, thoroughly tracking down the implications of it by drawing imaginary lines that go in the same direction but much farther, conditions are set to conceive of someone victimized by an unresolvable malaise. Thus, through the “freedom of the imagination,” the embarrassments that are but lurking in ordinary social situations can be translated into terms of an excess (as when, in “The Lottery,” the “villagers” meet in everyday cordiality to choose by lot from among their numbers a scapegoat whom they stone to death).
In the present, longer story, the theme of such implicit estrangement is worked out much more fully, and with much greater psychological depth (for the remarkable thing about this book is that beneath its apparent simplicity there is an exceptional range of subtlety and complexity). Merricat’s superstitious magic is a kind of improvised protocol, to make up for the fact that savages so often institutionalize the symbolic treatment of awkward personal relationships which the “civilized” do not even know exist.
Indeed, the contemporary “esthetic” cult of primitive ritual may center largely in the need of poets and storytellers to improvise protocols for the handling of troublesome situations that are not otherwise recognized, situations that we “don’t have a word for,” but that go on recurring and plaguing us nonetheless. Shirley Jackson’s playful recourse to the imagery of estrangement, the primitive and the infantile should best be thought of thus; it is the fanciful expansion of problems as realistically local to the age as bridge clubs and Westchester County.
If you keep “The Lottery” in mind, in reading the book you will see what an interesting step this new plot takes. It works out a system of moral accountancy whereby the menacing principle of the “villagers” becomes transformed into a friendly principle, and in such ways that the “resolution” builds up a kind of imaginary womb-heaven, where one’s needs are taken care of by the friendly principle, without effort on one’s own part.
The name of the problematical family in the book is the “Blackwoods.” So while you read you might on the side note each time the words “black” or “wood” appear, reminiscent of the fatal role of the black wooden box in “The Lottery.” When you put all these references together, I think you will see how that very name ambiguously epitomizes the nature of the plot. And, incidentally, in tracking down just those two words, in watching how they tie things up, you will discover for yourself the astounding kind of complexity implicit in the imaginary lines of this charming book’s apparent simplicity.
Drama
Well, a dramatist is a professional gambler. He prefers playing with loaded dice.
—The Philosophy of Literary Form (336)
Rugged Portraiture
Rubicon or The Strikebreaker [film], dir. by Vladimir Vainshtok
The New Masses, April 1934
The story of a marine worker’s conversion to sympathy with the Soviet way of life. The Rubicon to be crossed is the distinction between Bill Parker as a strikebreaker and Bill Parker as a solid member of his class. The parallelisms, contrasting “before” and “after,” suggest somewhat the balance-sheet pattern of Thomas Mann’s early story, Tonio Kröger, though the material is of course profoundly different. In Mann’s story the two contrasted attitudes are Bohemian and bourgeois; in Rubicon they draw the contrast between the worker “on his own” and the worker in his group.
Bill Parker is a stoker who hates his job and finds satisfaction only in the periods of compensatory dissipation which are open to him when his ship is in port. We have here, in outline, the Customary Puritanic swing between drudgery and distraction characteristic of a man whose work lacks group motivation. In any event; Bill has nothing but the freedom of the port town to look forward to. Hence, when he arrives at Havana during a coalheavers’ strike, and is told by the captain that he cannot go ashore “until the boat is coaled, he promptly sets to work with some of the other men heaving the coal into the bunkers. Later we see him ashore, as the reward of his labors. He meets the captain, drunk in a dive—and when the captain taunts him, they get into a fight, with the result that the stoker loses his job and is blacklisted. However, there is a Soviet boat in the harbor—a new hand is needed, and Bill is accepted for the job, the Soviet captain having no objection to a blacklisted man.
In the course of his brawls, Bill had defended himself with a horseshoe. He keeps this horseshoe as a trophy. It becomes the fulcrum of the plot in this wise: On reaching Leningrad, Bill goes to live in an international home for sailors, where he fraternizes with Communist workers and becomes imbued with their attitudes. He has also come into contact with a capitalist lumberman who employs him as an assistant. This lumberman attempts to sabotage a Soviet mill, since he will profit by a time-clause in his contract if delivery is delayed—but Bill recognizes his horseshoe as the implement that did the wrecking, and he exposes his employer.
For contrasted parallels, we have such events as the gluttonous eating of the men on the first ship vs. the gusty eating of those On the Soviet boat; the dissipations under the one way of life vs. the activities in education and sport under the other; dismal living quarters vs. homelike living quarters—and, over all, the horseshoe.
The play has many of those shots of machinery in motion, viewed from peculiar angles and in abrupt sequences, at which the Soviet photographers are particular apt. Again, there are several closeups of individual workers, a tradition of rugged portraiture to which Soviet films have brought a new understanding. There are some quiet skies that are noteworthy, brief studies of turbulent water, and a few very appealing Sheeler-like stills that look up into the well distributed lines of a ship’s rigging.
Field Work in Bohemia
This Room and This Gin and These Sandwiches by Edmund Wilson. The New Republic
The Nation, July 1937, 133–134
There are the people who work with materials: farmers, men in factories and on construction. There are the people who carry on the services that coordinate these acts: trainmen, telegraph operators, shipping hands. There are the people who keep the books involved in the productive and distributive pattern: the accountants, stenographers, filing clerks. There are the people who trade in the symbols by which the books are kept: bankers, financiers, speculators, promoters, business men. There are the people who coach the responses to these symbols: educators, publicists, journalists, editors, politicians. There are the “contradictions”: people out of jobs, business men crippled by other business men, monopolists fighting monopolists, racketeers, gangsters, radical propagandists.
And there is a special, somewhat abstract, highly mobile group of people who may, with varying degrees of success, live off the total muddle. These are in part the people with income, and the entertainers, the artists. Materially they are rewarded, or hope to be. Occasionally they may “go away” to some earthy spot in search of, and sometimes in temporary discovery of, an idyll. When congregating they can build up a somewhat isolated world, with its own values, its own scandals, its own concepts of obligation, trial, heroism, and defeat. They are on the fringes—the fringes of political radicalism, of philosophy, of wisdom, of service, of the soil, of ecstasy and drought, of religion, of moralization and demoralization. They make up the stratum of life depicted in Wilson’s three clever, engrossing, and moralistic plays.
The steam locomotive is said to be a very inefficient machine; but it is the essence of sound performance as compared with the operations of contemporary society—yet the social plant