THE SLING AND THE ARROW is the carefully documented study of a schizophrenic personality. From the first page to the last it is a masterpiece of correct and faintly disturbing detail; the progress of the disease is recorded with cold and merciless accuracy. This novel escapes the grisly gaiety of The Snake Pit and is better written and more convincing than The Fall of Valor, without, however, being, in any way, a better or more profound piece of work. Mr. Engstrand writes in a curiously flat and bony prose which seems perpetually on the verge of a climax; his characterization is apt even if his people are uniformly uninteresting; his story is very slickly contrived indeed, and Herbert’s downfall as final—and as right—as any of our psychiatrically conscious millions could wish. To talk of perception here or compassion or eloquence is quite beside the point: the jacket intimates that Mr. Engstrand kept [Wilhelm] Stekel* continually at his elbow and could, presumably, forgo creative intuition for scientific fact.
And Herbert Dawes’s case history does, in fact, have a grim and clinical interest. When the book begins he is a top West Coast dress designer, seemingly well adjusted and secure, placidly married to a spineless and spectacularly unperceptive girl named Lonna—who, apparently, ceased going to movies shortly before Hollywood discovered Freud. Herbert has molded Lonna into what his neurosis makes him desire in a wife; she is unobtrusive, mannishly dressed, useless about the house, and in their lovemaking Herbert’s passivity has forced her into the dominant role. But the security of this structure is abruptly challenged when Lonna insists on having a child. (“To the male part of you she was a wife,” probes the inevitable psychiatrist. “But to the inner female self of you she is your husband—how can a husband become pregnant, nurse a child? Suddenly she had become your enemy.”) While swimming Herbert tries to murder his wife with a spear, believing her shadow in the water to be a shark. Even the tranquil Lonna is upset by this and runs off to a psychiatrist, who diagnoses the root of Herbert’s trouble as a fiercely repressed homosexuality. This, apparently, is too fantastic for anyone in the book to believe, most of all Herbert. Lonna frets over her childlessness, the while her husband is feverishly spying on the lovemaking of a brawny sailor and his girl. Herbert eventually sleeps with the girl—in lieu of the sailor—and when the sailor deserts her, Herbert deserts her too. But the sailor, meanwhile, has begun an affair with the unhappy, sex-starved Lonna; whereupon Herbert falls in love with Lonna again, trying hard to hide his jubilance at having his lover-by-proxy back. Lonna, prepared to risk their marriage once again, sends the sailor off; Herbert, whose mental battle is breaking through into physical symptoms, becomes sufficiently ill to stay home from the factory, sends Lonna to take his place, does all the housework, and is about to make this precarious adjustment work when Lonna finds she is going to have a child by the sailor. Herbert breaks completely, kills her, is caught trying to escape dressed in a woman’s suit with no memory of what he has done. The book ends with him in prison, his fantasy complete, dreaming of a male Lonna about to possess him.
This is done with considerable adroitness; indeed, in the hands of a major novelist, The Sling and the Arrow might have been a genuinely moving study. But Mr. Engstrand, for all his skill, never succeeds in cracking the surface of the tragedy or causing, in at least one reader, any sense of identification. His failure is not that his people are unbelievable or his situations unreal. One is simply not interested in his people or in what happens to them. The book reads like a plan—here is a schizophrenic, this is what he does, here is the reason for it. In Herbert’s case, the reason, relentlessly tracked down, stems from his relationship with his father, who according to Herbert loved his wife and daughter more than he loved his son, and who rejected Herbert when he was twelve because he found him in homosexual play with a young neighbor. Herbert’s life was a kind of expiation and flight, an obsession to prove to his dead father that he was masculine entirely and had been cleansed of his sin. Here is a dilemma known to all of us: Herbert’s terrible guilt, the compulsion to be accepted, his helplessness in the face of the war within him. The contemporary sexual attitudes constitute a rock against which many of us flounder all our lives long; no one escapes entirely the prevailing psychology of the times. Perhaps the failure of The Sling and the Arrow can partially be traced to its implicit acceptance of the popular attitude. We are not asked to consider a personality but an abnormal psychology, not a study of human helplessness but a carefully embroidered case history. This has, then, ultimately no more reality than any one of the recent spate of films dealing with psychiatric problems. Here is no illumination, no pity, no terror. One closes this neat and empty volume untouched, indifferent, leaving Herbert floundering in his irrelevant hell, knowing that this happens seldom and can never happen to us.
(1947)
*Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1942) was an Austrian physician and psychologist. He was an early disciple of Sigmund Freud.