A Probing of Painful Wounds

May Sarton's novel has had several weeks now to cool. The worn gossip of five years ago has been briefly recoined, passed once more from hand to hand. But presumably Miss Sarton wanted more than to intrigue the Harvard reader and annoy her former colleagues. Presumably she hoped to treat a very real Cambridge tragedy, lifting it to a universal problem with universal implications. It is as fiction, then, that Faithful are the Wounds must be judged, and it is as fiction that Faithful are the Wounds fails.

Miss Sarton presents Edward Cavan, professor of English at Harvard and a man dedicated to his friends, his teaching, and his ideals. But these ideals demand too much from Cavan and he demands the same from his friends. He is uncompromising, the kind of man for whom even the term "liberal" is a reproach, and a sign of diluted vigor. Cavan commits suicide, but just as he was too intense to live, he is too intense to die. His friends cannot turn their eyes from his vision or pry his grip from their lives.

A Damaging Error

Much of her framework Miss Sarton could take from life, from newspaper reports and the talk of friends. But when she must supply her own talent, when her characters must think and feel as well as speak, then Faithful are the Wounds descends to inescapable banality. Only Julia Phillips, a professor's wife and life-long friends of Cavan's, seems more than a type or a convenient point of view. Mrs. Phillip is a sensitive woman, more emotional than intellectual. Miss Sarton seems to understand a woman like Julia Phillips. She can round out her character with evidences of wisdom and warmth. But there are a host of scholars in the book, men whom the author can reproduce neither as convincing intellects nor as reacting humans. With Cavan, however, Miss Sarton makes her most damaging error; since her story concerns the people around Cavan, she should have kept the man himself even further detached from the episodes of the novels. His genius seems authentic only when discussed and dissected by friends, not when seen at close range as in the scene at his seminar.

Because Miss Sarton is dealing with the effect of a single act on many people, she is necessarily repetitive. And because the people are not truly individual or apart from one another, her repetition becomes exhausting. To present nine developed people in a short novel is a challenge in itself, but to go within each of them, probing their thoughts, is a far greater undertaking. When her characters talk, Miss Sarton can invent the right phrases and do it well, for she has a poet's feeling for language. But when her creations must think, she relapses to one view, the Julia Phillips' outlook, and the result is tedious and unconvincing.

Nor is Miss Sarton's resolution more satisfying. Her book is a personal story, with the forces beyond Harvard only phantoms hovering over the tragedy but not responsible for it. In an epilogue, however, Miss Sarton exploits the drama of the recent Congressional investigations, passing by her central theme for a flurry of unnatural reformation and simulated excitement.

A tendency to exploit situations, in fact, seemes typical of this entire novel, and so Faithful are the Wounds raises a question both in literature and in ethics. Authors must take their characters from the people about them combining traits and features into composites. But when he borrows from life--unless revenge was his motive--a writer takes care to change the locale, the time, any detail which might embarrass the subject he has chosen for his literary portrait. In Faithful are the Wounds, Miss Sarton neglects such precautions. The novel has, for people who have lived through the event she describes, all the impact and all the pain of a newspaper account or a contemporary history. But Miss Sarton does not bind herself to the accuracy such forms demand. She can swipe out at the living and make her blow felt, writing as she does half from fact and half from fancy. Such writing is not satisfying in literature, suspended as it is between responsibility and imagination. An author's choice of this technique can have many interpretations, and with Faithful are the Wounds, Miss Sarton's motives are open to question.