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Abstract –
If we let S. N. Behrman get away with a species of murder in The Worcester Account, it is not only because of his reputation or the fact that most of these reminiscences first appeared in the New Yorker, but because of the high sentimental regard in which most of us hold his themes: the small town (Worcester, Mass.), time past (the beginning of the present century), boyhood and adolescence. Such subjects are notorious for ringing bells in the head; and when the life reported is Jewish life, we are conditioned (Jews and Gentiles alike, I should think) to adopt an attitude more appropriate to dining than to reading. A whole genre has grown up on the public sentiment for the taste and feel and smell and image of the tender past, no matter what: let it be grandmother's potato latkes or grandmother herself, there's no real telling them apart, for they swim side by side in a medium halfway between tears and saliva, and one doesn't know whether one should weep or pull up a chair. This is the genre of delicious writing (COMMENTARY has lots of it, see “From the American Scene,” and I myself have done my share), and Behrman serves up a masterful dish. Who cares if his words sometimes grate on the ears like the very streetcars he writes about (“I was etching matching configurations with my thumbnail”) or if he composes a classy sentence like the following: “He must have been lost in the phantasmal jungles (reanimating what dead of his own?) and his cry for the little glass of warmth symbolized the desire of all of us to break off the winding filaments of the nightmares that bedevil us and find a foothold on the tiny, lit plateau, incessantly eroded by time, that is everyone's fragment of reality”? Whether you pursue it with a napkin or a handkerchief, the remembrance of things past is an end in itself.
© 2010 Commentary Inc.
