Books: Empty Soul Blues

SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE (507 pp.]—William Sfyron—Random House ($5.95).

This novel is a soy-pp. crying jag. The tears are shed for life as a lost cause. Such a melancholy viewpoint seems to come naturally to the Southern school of U.S. writers of which Virginia’s William Styron is an unevenly talented member. Characteristically, most Southern writers equate the post-bellum fate of their region with the universal fate of man, and identify decline with tragedy. Amid romanticized passivity, violence erupts in Gothic melodramas of rape, murder and madness. Among the few exceptions: some of William Faulkner’s Negroes, who achieve the dignity of stoic endurance. Unfortunately, the passion seems to be draining out of this school; the magnolias are all too frequently stained with tired blood.

Novelist Styron’s first book, Lie Down in Darkness, was a Fall-of-the-House-of-Usher story about a decaying Southern family, and its lyric, doom-haunted evocation of the Southern landscape made the author the bright hope of U.S. fiction among some critics, as well as the hero of a lively minor cult on college campuses. Much of his new and far inferior book takes place in Italy, south of Rome, but the characters and attitudes are standard sub-Mason-Dixon. The two central figures are Mason Flagg, a rich neurotic dilettante, and Cass Kinsolving, an alcoholic hack painter. The plot, insofar as there is one, advances at a glacial pace towards the question of what Flagg and Kinsolving had to do with the brutal sex-murder of an Italian peasant girl.

Is Sex a Frontier? This whodunit is essentially a whydidit. The man who delves into the twisted personality wreckage of the past is the stodgy self-effacing (“I am something of a square”) narrator of the novel to whom Mason Flagg was a prep-school idol. Complicated flashbacks reveal that Mason Flagg is something of a heel, the hybrid product of a $2,000,000 trust fund and an incestuously possessive mother. By his 205 he is braining his wife with stray crockery, and swapping bedmates at Greenwich Village parties that Author Styron stops teasingly short of describing.

Still under 30, Mason becomes “the solemn apostle of the groin.” tours Europe with a raft of erotica, cases of twelve-year-old Scotch and a pneumatic mistress named Rosemarie (“that great walking Beautyrest of a woman”). When he is not blacking Rosemarie’s eyes, Mason likes to pontificate on Topic A: “Sex is the last frontier … the only area left where men can find full expression of their individuality.”

When his red Cadillac tools into the little Italian town of Sambuco. the apostle of the groin meets the sultan of sauce. When he is not fearsomely hallucinated or agonizingly hung over from his binges, Cass Kinsolving rants at his century. He predictably hates the U.S., Ike, commercialism, conformity and just about everything except the recordings of the late Leadbelly, which he plays by the hour while his wife and four children go hungry. The knave in Mason strikes a bargain with the fool in Cass, and with almost inadvertent demonism, they destroy an innocent girl.

Are the Children Sick? Throughout the novel, the air of damnation is pervasive, though the odor is more of the stage than the sulphur pit. Styron himself prates endlessly about the sickness of the age. and Mason and Cass are obviously two of its sickest children. But they—and all the other characters, including an entire film troupe—are in a puppet show rather than a morality play. They dance to Author Styron’s rhetoric, and rhetoric is all too often stillborn emotion.

Styron’s images of evil, ranging from the death agonies of a run-over dog to the pitiless vandalizing of a sharecropper’s hut, are vivid but despairingly un-Christian and even un-Greek in their fatalism. True, the Greek tragic chorus keens over man’s fate, but not because the gods are blind—only because the hero is.