Books: Aboriginal Calamity

THE DEAD SEAGULL (142 pp.)—George Barker—Farrar, Sfraus & Young ($2.50).

“What depth of shame do we lie in,” muses the hero of The Dead Seagull, “when we sink back on the plush cushions of our disgust and sigh? It is the dog going back to his vomit, attracted to it by a simple miracle: it is his own.”

George Barker’s novel is the story of a sick young dog who would rather sniff in his misery than get well. As such, it is a reekingly unpleasant book; when the author waxes lyrical and theological about his nasty little mess, it becomes a conceited one. Nevertheless, The Dead Seagull has a clinical interest of its own as a crude dissection of evil.

Two Convictions. Barker’s hero, who is nameless, is a young writer of 19 who has just been married to a girl three years older. His senses still swim in an adolescent daydream of genius. When he looks out of a window, he can envision a little girl being torn to pieces by archangels, but he can neither face the plain reality of his wife’s pregnancy, nor meet a man’s emotional and spiritual responsibilities in his marriage.

After a few months of treading in waters that are too deep for him, the frightened young dog goes off with a bitch who offers to assist at the extravagant sexual scenes he finds comfort in. He soon sickens of her and of himself. “Wherever I arrive,” he moans, “I find my life in flames.” Then more soberly he states his true predicament: “I am moved in my heart of hearts by two convictions: that I can do no wrong, and that I can dp no right.”

Too Late. He tries to repair his broken marriage, but it is too early for him and too late for his wife. She has a stillborn son, and dies soon after. Here the story ends. In a pathetic postscript to it, addressed to the son he never knew, the hero finds a moral in his experience.

“The human race,” he quotes Cardinal Newman, “is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity.” And for himself he adds: “Love is the terrible aboriginal calamity…For freedom is the knowledge of necessity, and the necessity of the human is love, and the necessity of love is existence, and the necessity of existence is two sinning in a bed, and the necessity of two sinning in a bed is to be forgiven. It is thus that our only freedom is to be damned.”

The logic is bad, but it expresses the immemorial conviction of men who would rather be safe anywhere, even in hell, than be exposed to the unbearable danger of looking into their own consciences. Author Barker, Englishman and minor poet, has little skill in the novelist’s trade, none at all in creating characters; yet sometimes his phrases light up dark corners of the human spirit.