This Finer Shadow

INTRODUCTION

It is not always an unmixed advantage to an elderly critic of literature to be recognized as one of the Old School who is interested in extremely modern and daring young writers. But in the case of Harlan Cozad McIntosh this reputation of mine has won me the greatest and proudest pleasure a critic can have—the thrill of being among the first to announce: “Here, anyway, is genius!”

For from start to finish this extraordinary story holds you under a spell—that is to say, if you are, as I am, an obsessed devotee of the dangerous mole-runs of beautiful and desperate human aberration. I have no hesitation in saying that the character “Mr. Roberts” of this book is a masterpiece of portraiture, and an almost flawless presentation of one of those abnormal types of men whose subterranean and half-suppressed feelings lead to more tragedies than the ordinary reader of pathological fiction would believe possible.

But daring and terrifying as Mr. McIntosh’s psychological flashes of insight are, they by no means cover the whole field of interest in this strange, and indeed I

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 may boldly say, this unique book. There are passages of the most exquisite beauty, beauty of that rare, intense, evasive sort which, as the poet says, is like the lightning—vanished ere you can say “It lightens!” There is, indeed, in these poetic passages, so swift, so sudden, so startling a beauty that it sweeps the reader away, causing him to feel for a quick beat of time, as if he were the author!

Nothing could be further from a doctrinaire treatise on “the psychology of the abnormal” than this book. It is an exciting love story of the most healthy, natural and child-like simplicity; and that it is shot through and through by the purple threads of abnormal pity and terror enhances rather than lessens the tender freshness of this ancient theme.

The book is a terrible tragedy, and one that certainly in the fullest classical sense purges our passions; but tragic though it is, it is the extreme opposite of anything dispirited, dejected, disheartened or disillusioned. A fine, pure, fierce detachment from anything cloying, from anything voluptuously soft and sentimental, characterizes this “ill-starred” and yet so proudly “well-starred” young writer. The soul of the hero, obviously a reflection of the author himself, moves through these weird circles and ambiguous scenes, protected like Milton’s lady in Comus, by the invisible guardians of a most unusual and indeed almost unearthly chastity. The moral of it all—if moral you want, and I am myself

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 old-fashioned enough always to want exactly that—is no other than what we learn from Goethe as well as from Milton: namely that nothing, however fascinating in its provocative phosphorescence, can really contaminate a soul “that has an instinct of the one true way.”

Men and women who make the pathetic mistake of thinking themselves what is called “normal” ought all to read this tragic tale, so that they shall be shamed, not only into human sympathy, but into philosophical insight; whereas those of us who make no such claim, and are confessedly engaged in the hard struggle to get ourselves into order, will find in Harlan McIntosh’s book just what we have been seeking in vain: a stark, authentic, unmitigated rendering of what it is like really to be what these complacently detached investigators analyze from so safe a distance! For myself, since I learnt about M. de Charlus in Proust, I haven’t been so helped in my understanding of these strange matters as when destiny gave me the opportunity of passing my blind fingers—for we are all blind in these cases—over the mobile features of Mr. McIntosh’s extraordinary creations.

John Cowper Powys