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From The New International, Vol. XIII No. 3, March 1947, p. 95.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Bitter Box
by Eleanor Clark
210 pp. $2.50. Doubleday & Co. Inc. 1946.
Miss Clark’s novel represents high achievement expressing unique purpose. Alone among contemporary novelists, she has taken membership in the Communist Party for her theme. Other writers have written about the Communist Party, but none has made it central to his purpose.
This is not, despite its theme, a tendentious novel. It is not a political novel in the sense that we have come to understand that ambiguous literary form. It is not the work of a journalist using the novel to report, it is the work of an artist who uses an art form to penetrate. It is not an item clipped from the newspaper and enshrouded in fictional pretense or sweetened in fictional saccharine to make the better-selling fiction list. Miss Clark does not employ the Socratic dialogues and she makes no effort to impress us with her dialectical powers. Despite the absence of political exegesis, despite the fact that the book does not mention the theories of social fascism and popular front, contains no allusions to socialism in one country, and does not refer to Stalin or Molotov, the reality is that the Communist Party emerges more clearly than in any other novel I have read.
Miss Clark is concerned with morality and its development in character. She takes a bank clerk, John Temple, an insignificant human datum, an unrealized personality, and sends him into the Communist Party. His impulse is essentially personal, and Miss Clark has sedulously and, to my mind, commendably avoided a facile economic determinism to dispose of his motivation. She takes this constricted, almost lifeless character, bound by the inflexible confines of one system represented by the bank, and carefully places him in another equally rigid structure represented by the Communist Party. This new life is distinguished not so much by its values as by its activities: leaflet distribution, party organizational drives, demonstrations. Ultimately, freedom for this clerk cannot be found in the Communist Party because it demands unthinking acquiescence and regimented submission.
But while the individual must repudiate both systems in the interests of freedom, not everybody achieves it. This is one of the tragedies of our time – the disintegrating effect on the personality of membership in the Communist Party. Brand, who inducts Temple into the party, finally repudiates it, but he has become an unintegrated personality, inhabiting a no-man’s land, and his solution is death. Others, like Rose and Hilda, find their solutions in the pursuit of the traditional values represented by marriage and motherhood. And Temple, in an inconclusive and not altogether satisfying final scene, affirms the value of personality.
There are memorable characters: the cashier who is completely integrated into the banking structure and yet curiously retains an inviolate core of personality; the old man, a fusion of senility and religiosity; the party secretary, dull, degenerate, Stalinist bureaucrat; Jackie and Bo, mindless, silly yet engaging lesbian comrades. And all these characters function in the huge city, which is experienced and felt rather than mechanically described.
Unfortunately, the novel suffers from too many sudden and jarring transitions and too many unmotivated actions to make it a wholly satisfactory work of art. But these are not the limitations of talent but of immaturity, and, in our opinion, Miss Clark possesses the ability to overcome them in her second novel.
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