The Melodramatists by Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerov was a Pulitizer Prize winning Poet, but his fiction is less well-known. The Melodramatists was published in 1949, in-between the appearances of his first (The Image & the Law, 1947) and second (Guide to the Ruins, 1950) collections of poetry. He went on to write several books of short stories, but this was his only novel. Like his poetry the book is philosophical and witty–Nemerov once described his own poems as being “bad jokes.” A single setting, the home of the Boyne family, is used to stage battles between religion and secularism, chastity and promiscuity, insanity and rationality. The story is set in 1940-41, with the Second World War (which America had yet to enter) providing a conversational and metaphorical backdrop to the action. (An early version of the still-popular Neville Chamberlain metaphor: “They were both offering up Leonora on the altars of an armed truce: rather, he thought, like Munich, except that in Leona one did not deal with a helpless Czechoslovakia.”)
As the novel opens the Boynes, a Boston clan whose wealth and coldness is witheringly viewed through the eyes of daughter Claire, a Protestant girl flirting with Catholicism: “When [Claire's] mother wept, as she did now, all the jewels on her fingers and at her throat winked in sparkling connivance as at a joke which, they seemed to say, you too might appreciate, were you as detached as a stone.”
The Boyne family begins to crack apart when son Roger announces his intention to divorce his wife Leonora and then runs off to Canada to join the military. Mr. Boyne has a mental collapse—he will not leave his bathtub—and is taken by his wife to an institution, where she is often confused by the doctors for a patient. Claire becomes pious and eventually transforms the family home into a reform facility for prostitutes. The other daughter, Susan, takes up with a middle aged Jewish psychoanalyst, Dr. Einman, a refugee from Auschwitz who sleeps with all of his female patients. She tries to keep her affair a secret from her family only to end up as the victim of blackmail by the butler.
The novel’s philosophical core is the conflict between Susan’s free spirit and Claire’s cautious devotion. A key passage: “Much in the world frightened Claire, but most of all the contemplation of the number of wicked things people might do and still not merely live on, but preserve as well their social position… Susan seemed to understand so well about time and its modifying effect on action—how time was a desert, in which the lineaments of decisive acts crumbled or got covered, lost, in sand—and seemed ready to accept this, even take it for granted: a concession Claire could not by any means make. Sometimes she felt that one’s potential for disaster grew with one…and when she looked into the future she saw but two alternatives: a strict negative volition, a will-not-to-do, or swift catastrophe, not killing at once leaving her to the quiet, often offensively humorous depredations of time, while there grew up a new, cruel generation that would not understand.”
Claire’s attempt at do-gooding backfires when the prostitutes take over, turning the Boyne residence into a cathouse. While I appreciate the absurd twists, I would have preferred the book to court humor a bit more aggressively, as even the most farcical situations here seem pretexts to get priests and whores into the same room with psychoanalysts so that long-winded discussions of forgiveness and morality can occur. Even the tragic conclusion seems less an emotional inevitability than an illustration of a philosophical point. Still, the writing is excellent and massively quotable.