Facing Survivors in Fiction and Film
by Robert H. Abzug

William Styron. Sophie's Choice. New York: Bantam Books, 1980. 626 pages.

Edward Wallant. The Pawnbroker. New York: Manor Books, 1962. 206 pages.

"Only survivors of Auschwitz know what it meant to be in Auschwitz," Elie Wiesel once observed. He added that even they could not find the necessary words to describe and interpret what they had experienced: "We are incapable of revealing the Event.... What we really wish to say, what we feel we must say cannot be said."1 Wiesel echoed what is by now a truism of the critical literature on Holocaust art and fiction: that no matter the effort, rarely, if ever, does one find a creative work that communicates the full dimensions of Nazi terror. This widely shared sense of literary incapability, of course, has not stopped a flood of fiction that has purported to reveal "the Event." Whether driven by moral mission, artistic challenge, or simple exploitation, writers have created an extraordinary and, more than occasionally, unseemly array of works, most of which have in common the tendency to reduce or mythologize the Holocaust even as they seek to evoke it.2

Despite the problems critics have noted, however, certain works have captured the imagination of the public by giving a sense of an authentic recounting of that human suffering at the core of the Holocaust. Defying Wiesel's admission that even actual survivors of the camps find it impossible to describe their experiences, some of the most notable examples of well-received Holocaust literature have been those that in one way or another use survivors to relive the past. The Pawnbroker and Sophie's Choice, both as novels and films, are perhaps the best known stories of this genre. Sol Nazerman and Sophie Zawistowska are, indeed, the fictional survivors most accessible to and most clearly etched in the minds of Americans.3

The reasons for Sol's and Sophie's success in moving the American public might at first seem obvious and unremarkable. Both characters survive inhuman treatment and struggle heroically to salvage something of their broken selves in postwar America. Sol Nazerman, the Jewish pawnbroker created by Jewish-American novelist Edward Wallant, emerges from captivity numbed and hardened, but finally reembraces feeling in a dramatic moment of conversion. William Styron's Sophie, a beautiful and vulnerable Polish Catholic haunted by her degradation at Auschwitz, finds peace only in suicide. Both works are punctuated by Holocaust memories that give readers and viewers a searing sense of direct witness. In short, these are works filled with human drama and powerful historical reference. Yet I would argue that these stories have also become popular renderings of the Holocaust because even as they move us, they defuse two most troubling issues: the frightful reality of the Holocaust in its details and the special victimhood of the Jews. Just how these seemingly contradictory processes work in Sophie's Choice and The Pawnbroker may be explored through the way the authors reveal Holocaust experience, the place each survivor has in the structures of the plots, the characterization of Jews, and the importance given to Christian paths to redemption.

The ambivalence of the novelists in facing Sol's and Sophie's Holocaust experiences can best be seen in their manner of presentation rather than in substance, for each story told as a narrative is both moving and historically plausible. Sol Nazerman is an instructor at the University of Cracow until the Nazis come, after which he and his family are sent to a camp. There a guard forces him to view his wife having sex with a German soldier in the camp brothel; later he sees her emaciated corpse. He loses his children. He also witnesses the humiliation and death of his close friend Rubin. Sol himself undergoes torture, is a guinea pig in a medical experiment, but somehow survives.

Sophie is the daughter of a law professor at the University of Cracow, a man famous for drafting antisernitic legislation before the war and for predating the Nazis in a call for the literal extermination of the Jews. A dutiful daughter, Sophie types her father's most famous antisernitic tract, marries her father's sycophantic disciple, and hopes mostly that her father won't think her a dunce. When the Nazis arrive, they round up all the professors at the University, including her father and her husband, and murder them. Sophie moves to Warsaw, where she has an affair with a resistance leader; but worried about her two children, she refuses to help the cause. The Nazis arrest her by chance in a roundup and send her to Auschwitz, where at the selection a drunken doctor singles her out for her good looks and good German. He chooses Sophie for work instead of death, but makes her pick one of her children for the gas chamber. Sophie's own talents as secretary and speaker of German land her a job as secretary to Commandant Hoess. There she tries to gain freedom for herself and her son by proving her antisernitic credentials and by offering sex to the Commandant. Hoess dismisses the first and is interrupted in accepting the second. He sends Sophie back to the main camp, where she withers but survives.

Both Sol's and Sophie's stories appear plausible; certainly the histories of many actual survivors are far more extraordinary than these. Yet in each case the method of the telling beclouds literal veracity. We find out about Sol's camp experiences through his nightmares, vivid enough in their detail but also at times marked by the space and time and repetitive distortions of dreams. Wallant renders them at once compelling and surreal, emotionally shattering to the reader without being literally faithful. We are left with a stunning sense of pain, but one gleaned only from hints of the total horror Sol faced, from selected scenes of forced human degradation, which nonetheless are close enough to our own reality that we can imaginatively identify with them. In the end, Sol's memories become both removed from reality and comprehensible; yet they represent events that were both real and incomprehensible.

Meanwhile, Sophie renders her past plainly enough to the narrator-except that she tells various versions, lies about crucial points, and leaves the reader with a final, but not necessarily truthful, version of her experiences. Unlike Sol's bad dreams, which in their understandable pain bring us at least emotionally closer to him, Sophie's constant evasions and revisions distance us from her, making her pitiable but ultimately unknowable, as unknowable as Auschwitz itself. Individual moments of her story evoke deep emotion, but the net effect of her lies is that a harrowing numbness overlays our sympathies.

How these strategies of obfuscation work within the novels is a bit more complex, and we need to look at them case by case. In The Pawnbroker we might imagine an emotional geography, with stonecold Sol in the center and concentric circles of pain surrounding him. In immediate proximity are Harlem and his degraded pawnshop clients. The wretched of the earth-drug addicts, the poor and physically deformed, alcoholics, those destroyed by life or barely able to hang on all pass through and give up their goods to the pitiless and calculating Jew. Indeed, whether Wallant had this in mind or not, the storehouse of the pawnshop greatly resembles that haunted area of Auschwitz known as Kanada, where the most intimate personal effects of those imprisoned and exterminated were impounded. Sol pitilessly collects the lost dreams of his clients, having so cruelly lost his own. In a reversal that is by now something of a psychological cliche, the victim has become the victimizer.

Yet the pain does not end in Harlem. Sol's ersatz family in middleclass Mount Vernon bleeds with psychological suffering. Husband, wife, and son are all at each other's throats. Sol recognizes the cruelty around him, condemns it, but also angrily washes his hands of it. Sol's other family-Tessie (his friend Rubin's widow) and her dying father-fester in a small apartment mired in survivor agony. Tessie waits each day for her father's death and hopes for Sol's periodic visits and the numbing comfort of passionless sex. She is also tormented by Goberman, a survivor, who hounds her for contributions supposedly to a Jewish organization and whom Sol later reveals to have been a lackey for the SS.

Marilyn Birchfield, the Gentile social worker who seems a new and innocent presence in Sol's life, suffers in a different sort of way. She appears to be perfectly well adjusted and content, interested only in the welfare of slum kids and the happiness of the dour Sol. In fact, she lives tormented by loneliness and a sense of her own plainness, and haunted by the prospect of growing old alone. She seeks a relationship with Sol, ostensibly as a mission of mercy but actually quite as much to assuage her own solitary life.

Finally there is Jesus Ortiz, Sol's helper and eager disciple in the store. He lives in a sordid world of criminals, his girlfriend is a whore, and his mother seems unable to control the fate of her family. Jesus is a victim of society who nonetheless dreams the American dream of success. He plans to make it big as a criminal and, once Sol teaches him the trade, as a pawnbroker.

The drama of The Pawnbroker lies in the process by which Sol learns that his own pain, rather than being of some species that excludes him from the world, is a particularly acute brand of what is nonetheless common human suffering. When we first meet him, his soul seems dead, separated from all those around him by a sojourn in the camps that has bludgeoned his capacity for feeling and idealism; indeed, his merciless words give the lie to the frail hopes and illusions of others. He is a superhumanly stern presence; his camp number tattoo acts as a talisman that gives an inkling of his suffering to some but mostly only adds to his mystery. A series of events-the approaching anniversary of his wife's death, the revelation that his crime master (who launders money through the pawnshop) gets his money from a brothel (which brings back excruciating memories of his wife's degradation), the remembrance of a gentler world sparked by the presence of Marilyn Birchfield, and a robbery in which Jesus dies by taking a bullet meant for Sol himself-lead to Sol's collapsing in tears and, for the first time since the camps, finding the ability to mourn.

The Pawnbroker is a moving and disarming story, yet one with a sub rosa drama that tells us as much about the needs of author Edward Wallant and ourselves as it does about Holocaust victims. Indeed, viewed as a creation of Wallant's psyche rather than a portrait of a historical type, Sol becomes a frightening representation of what nonsurvivors most fear about survivors. His militant cynicism-the cold stare of rude, despairing anger uncut by softer sentiments, dreams, and ideals-proclaims a negation of all but crude survival. Projected on Sol is Wallant's and our fear that survivors have discovered an unbearable truth about life: that its essence is meaningless cruelty.

As a truth bearer, Sol also confronts us in our imagination with the question without answer: Why did I suffer this indescribable fate and not you? Though psychologists have made much of survivor guilt felt by those who actually were in the camps and came out alive, there has been relatively little study of what impact being a safe ocean away might have had on the psychology of American Jews (not to exclude others) as they faced in concept and person those who barely made it through. The drama and resolution of such a confrontation, in fact, acts as a powerful, although hidden, force in The Pawnbroker.

Thus we have Sol, who in every breath and in every word tells us he has suffered beyond retrieval and mocks our every effort at comfort. He has faced unfaceable truths and in his very expression accuses us of being spared. Wallant's principal response-and this becomes the task of the novel-is to delegitimize the uniqueness of Sol's pain by making his suffering just the most extreme form of what is a common human denominator. Sol's suffering becomes the suffering of humankind to the nth degree, but still of like kind. He begins as a representative victim of the incomprehensible terror in the camps, but by the end of the novel Sol's tragedy has merged with that of others. His misery, once seen as a permanent scar, becomes vulnerable to the cure of tears and mourning. Sol wins a new lease on life, but we win as well. He can no longer tell us that life has no meaning, or accuse us of anything as extraordinary as not suffering. What we lose, through nightmares that allow us to understand and tears that can be shed, is the incomprehensible mystery for nonsurvivors of what Sol and his kind suffered. That mystery is purged in the cause of bringing Sol into scale with ourselves.

We see a very different use of the survivor in Sophie's Choice. It is far more complex, largely because the novel is not only or even principally about Sophie or the Holocaust. Rather the novel centers on Stingo, a hero fashioned broadly after the young Styron, who journeys into darkness but emerges redeemed. Stingo comes to New York to work for a publisher and to write the Great American Novel. He quits his job and moves to Brooklyn, where rents are cheaper and where he can write full time, and also where he hopes to lose his virginity. At his boarding house he meets Nathan and Sophie, two lovers of the sadomasochistic persuasion. Stingo becomes their good friend and boychild; and through his association with them, he learns about good and evil, life and love, madness and Auschwitz. By the end of the novel, Sophie has told him about her past and has initiated him into an exotic sexual repertoire. Sophie and Nathan eventually commit suicide together, while Stingo almost simultaneously becomes a man and undergoes a religious conversion.

Sophie and Nathan, then, serve as foils to Stingo's grand rite of passage, though at times they steal the show. In this sense Stingo is like Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, who is constantly upstaged by Ahab and the mysterious white whale, but who in the end survives to tell the tale.4 The stormy relationship between Stingo, Sophie, and Nathan unfolds within two interlocking triangles. In one, Sophie protects Stingo against Nathan's jealousy and contempt. In the other, Stingo shields Sophie from Nathan's anger and violence. Sophie's problem, of course, is that she, a Catholic, survived where so many millions of Jews perished. The mad Nathan acts out in passion and murderous rage virtually every ambivalence of desire and repulsion, love and hate, as well as trust and paranoia that he feels toward Sophie.

Stingo's particular vulnerability to Nathan's wrath comes from the young writer's Southern origin. Stingo condemns crude racism, but has grown up with traditional racial assumptions and does not especially reject them. He is the Southernor of good breeding, haplessly but willingly caught in a social order that both treats him well and makes him a passive party to oppression. Nathan taunts Stingo about lynchings and race baiters like Senator Bilbo, or burlesques Southern backwoods provincialism and ignorance. Going right to the heart of Stingo's hopes, he also condemns Southern fiction and recommends that the writer read some of the really good new fiction, particularly that of the Jew Saul Bellow.

In facing such charges, Stingo has a natural ally in Sophie. Nathan excoriates her for having lived while so many died and for being an antisemite. But the twin victimhood of Sophie and Stingo before Nathan's rage has deeper links, since Nathan rails against both of them for matters of historical circumstance. Sophie did not choose to be born into an antisernitic culture or, for that matter, to survive Auschwitz. Stingo did not choose to be an heir to slave money and a white native of a region distinguished by its racial system. Thus while Sophie is specifically a victim of Auschwitz, she is also, like Stingo, haunted by an accident of birth. Much as Sophie, the daughter of an antisemite, endures a double suffering with the Jews and at the hands of a Jew, so Stingo identifies himself as a victim of race and slavery, fellow sufferor to the Negro:

And were not all of us, white and Negro, still enslaved? I knew that in the fever of my mind and in the most unquiet regions of my heart I would be shackled by slavery as long as I remained a writer [that is, as long as he remained introspective].5

If that was all there was to the story, we might have a self-indulgent tale of a mad Nathan unfairly accusing two innocents. But Styron is too savvy about the vagaries of humankind to settle for such simplicity. In particular, he makes a chilling point about Nathan's accusations: just about every charge that he makes is essentially true. He accuses Sophie of being unfaithful, and she is. He accuses her of playing footsie with the SS to save herself, and that is true as well. As for Nathan's racist charges against Stingo, they are never really denied.

Most of all, Nathan is right in seeing Sophie as a closet antisemite. In one of the most extraordinary scenes of the book (left out of the film), Stingo and a very drunk Sophie indulge in a field day of antisemitic rage.

"Jews!" she exclaimed. "It's really true, in the end they are all exactly alike sous la peau, under the skin, you understand. My father was really right when he said that he had never known a Jew who could give something in a free way, without asking for something in return.... And oh, Nathan-what an example Nathan was of that! Okay, so he helped me a lot, make me well, but so what? Do you think he done that out of love, out of kindness? No, Stingo, he done such a thing only so he could use me, have me, fuck me, beat me, have some object to possess! ... No wonder the Jews were so hated in Europe, thinking they could get anything they wished just by paying a little money, a little Gelt. Even love they think they can buy!" . . ."Jews! God, how I hate them! Oh, the lies I have told you, Stingo. Everything I told you about Cracow was a lie. All my childhood, all my life I really hated Jews. They deserved it, this hate. I hate them, dirty Jewish cochons!"6

That is not to say that Nathan is the real hero, but rather that Styron is making a subtle moral point. Simply stated, the author proclaims a victimhood of human frailty, a weakness of moral vision under seduction or pressure, of which Stingo and Sophie are exemplars. They are fallen man and woman, who lie to others and to themselves but are, after all, only human. Styron seems to be saying that only a madman or a Captain Ahab or Nathan could rail over such human foibles. In a sense, Nathan shares with Sol the role of intolerable truth bearer.

In this drama of post-Edenic human frailty, only Stingo seems capable of embracing faith. Indeed, the finale of the book (not the double suicide that ends the movie) consists of Stingo's zany, but compelling, religious conversion. It begins as he and Sophie journey to Virginia to escape Nathan's threats and, Stingo hopes, to settle down and get married. They stop in Washington, and because it is the 1940s, pretend they are married in order to get a hotel room. Cloaking profane in sacred, Stingo calls himself the Reverend Entwistle. Sacred and profane merge when, at one point that night as Sophie instructs Stingo in the ,'varieties of sexual experience," he thinks "in a weird seizure of cognition of the necessity of redefining 'joy,' 'fulfillment,' 'ecstasy,' even 'God'".7 When he awakens, Stingo finds Sophie gone. In a note, she declares that she must return to Nathan:

I love Nathan but now feel this Hate of Life and God. FUCK God and all his Hande Werk. And Life too. And even what remains of Love.8

It is a breathtaking ending, but one that is unsatisfying. There is first of all the question of Auschwitz, which in Stingo's conversion so assumes the symbolic role of Evil that it seems expunged from the realm of human reality on that morning excellent and fair. In this sense one is reminded not of the final scene of Moby Dick, on which Styron surely patterns his novel, but of Benito Cereno, the Melville novella about a revolt on a slave ship. Two captains have experienced the bloody uprising, the Spaniard Don Benito and the American Captain Delano. Safe on shore, Don Benito remains shrouded in the dark memory of the revolt. Captain Delano cannot understand why and points to the blue sky to assure him that it is a wonderful day. Melville meant his ending as a sardonic depiction of an insidious American innocence that, less ironically, Styron seems to embrace. At least Edward Wallant merges Sol's extraordinary misery with the misery of the world, leaving darkness in circulation. Styron banishes Sophie and her burden as an experience that had meaning for Stingo in his rite of passage but now has been absorbed in a broader and generally sunny sense of the universe.

By this negation of both Sol's and Sophie's experience through mystery, tears, and suicide, Wallant and Styron also create problematic and contradictory visions of the place of Jews and Jewishness in relation to the Holocaust. In both works, the central martyrdom of the Jews, implicitly and explicitly recognized as an uninvestigated assumption, is at the same time sharply undercut. Again, the works must be considered separately in order to recognize fully the tensions surrounding the "Jewish question." To begin, one may ask a simple question about The Pawnbroker: Why does a Jewish- American writer choose to redeem Sol the Jew in a drama almost embarrassingly saturated with the names, symbols, and structure of a somewhat revamped Christian passion? There are, of course, Sol Nazerman, Jesus Ortiz, the mix-and-match symbolism of Jesus the disciple playing Judas, and in the final moments Jesus' dying for Sol by putting himself between his master and the gun.

A hint of the answer may lie in Wallant's treatment of Jewish themes. Sol, an intellectual in the old country, becomes in America literally an ancient stereotype of the Jew: the heartless pawnbroker interested only in money. He says as much. When Jesus asks him why Jews have such a talent for money, Sol recounts a history of antisemitic funneling of Jews into moneylencling and pawnbroking. Having been persecuted as a Jew, Sol has become the Jew of his persecutors. Here is true Jewish darkness. Yet where is there light among the Jewish characters? The family of Sol's sister, so mundane and fraught with petty squabbles, prides itself on being assimilated and American. Tessie is a wreck with little in the way of ethnic or religious identification. Tessie's dying father is the only traditional Jew in the book. Even so, the faintly satirical account of his prayers reveals only the shambles of an Eastern European past. Although the Jewish characters of The Pawnbroker occasionally use Yiddish expressions and in other ways identify themselves as Jews, theirs is an identity emptied of substance.

That Wallant should utilize Christian archetypes of redemption becomes less surprising, for his own Jewish world seems oddly devoid of substantive values and symbols. Thus Sol goes to Tessie to help her mourn in the traditional Jewish manner, but only as a result of his being transformed by a Christian passion. And what comes of that transformation? If on an emotional level Sol is saved, so to speak, on a cultural level the ending of the novel is a bit more ambiguous. Does he give up the past and take up with Marilyn Birchfield? When she calls just after the killing of Jesus and wants to see him, Sol answers: "No, no, I am too dirty; you must go away from me." Does he give up the pawnshop and all that it represents? No, in fact he convinces his nephew to give up art in order to take Jesus' place. Having reopened his heart and soul, he nonetheless elects to remain imprisoned in a shop symbolic of Jewish narrowness and greed. It is as if Wallant is saying that Sol, having been reduced from a ferocious threat to a more vulnerable survivor, nonetheless will join Tessie and fade eventually from the scene as relics of Old World Judaism.12

As for Jews and Judaism in Sophie's Choice, multiple levels of perversity seem at work. Here I do not refer to Styron's decision to make his survivor- heroine a Polish Catholic. As the author himself and others have pointed out, on those grounds Sophie is a historically defensible character. That she becomes a victim not only of the Nazis but also of a mad Jew seems a nasty twist and, indeed, returns us to a theme alluded to before. In some ways, Nathan seems to function as a kind of lightning rod for a Gentile's fear of Jewish accusation in the post-Holocaust era. And like Wallant, Styron chooses to emasculate his most powerful character rather than allow him his power. The author pits him against a Christian survivor. Sometimes he endows Nathan's voice with the ring of an Old Testament prophet, but then smashes that noble allusion by making him a paranoid-schizophrenic and a drug addict. Nor does Styron allow Nathan even to remain thoroughly Jewish. Though it is not clear who made the selection, Stingo finds "Jesu joy of Man's Desiring" on Nathan's record player at the scene of the double suicide. And Nathan's family chooses an insipid Unitarian minister to run the funeral; the organist plays "Ave Maria."13

Less obvious and less noticed is Styron's broader treatment of the "Jewish question" in the novel. Sophie's Choice presents a thoroughly and traditionally Christian vision of American Jews and Judaism, one that finds little place for or understanding of Jewish consciousness beyond the merely ethnic. From the very beginning of the book, Jews are treated as an exotic population. Indeed, Styron makes another Melville parallel, this time to the early novels that recount Melville's journeys among the strange peoples of the South Seas. The South Seas have become Brooklyn: Even before he calls himself Stingo, the narrator describes himself as "self-exiled to Flatbush-like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome young Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews."14 Sophie's Choice does contain a brilliant period-piece rendering of Jews through Protestant eyes. Yetta Zimmerman, Morris Fink, as well as Morty Haber and his college crowd-all come alive in the wonder of Stingo's fascination. But colorful exotics those Jews remain. When, as in the case of Leslie Lapidus, they get more than passing attention, they become comic, stunted figures. Lapidus's version of a conversion experience is the result of a psychoanalysis that leaves her free to talk dirty and kiss passionately; she neither expands Stingo's spirit nor satisfies his libido. Considering the religious meaning of sex in Sophie's Choice, that is an indictment indeed.

Most of all, Styron seems ignorant of the redemptive, loving possibilities of Judaism. He notes that Stingo wrote in his journal at the time of the funeral: "Let your love flow out on all living things." Stingo admits that the thought is not original to him:

It springs from the universe and is the property of God, and the words have been intercepted-on the wing, so to speak-by such mediators as Lao-tzu, Jesus, Gautama Buddha and thousands upon thousands of lesser prophets, including your narrator, who heard the terrible truth of their drumming somewhere between Baltimore and Wilmington and set them down with the fury of a madman sculpting in stone.15

A look, then, at Sophie's Choice and The Pawnbroker, two serious and well-received renditions of Holocaust victimhood, indicates that the problems of popular representations of the Holocaust go beyond either any crude exploitation or simple inability to reveal "the Event." Rather, one finds an active combat within the texts between the urge to evoke and the urge to escape confrontation. Such a struggle no doubt reflects inner conflict within the minds of even those most concerned with comprehending and preserving a memory of the Holocaust. And the fact that in both cases escape in one form or another is provided may well account for the popularity of both works and their screen versions for a mass audience.

Each author's contortions in dealing with Jewish victimhood and Judaism are in some ways a more specific acting out of the general struggle between evocation and obliteration of the Holocaust's hold on memory. As a Jew, Wallant can distance himself from Sol and Jewish martyrdom by painting Jewishness itself in darkly fragmented terms and by resolving the emotional issues in the story with a version of the Christian passion. Styron can disconnect endemic tension between Christians and Jews concerning Christian culpability in the Holocaust by making the Holocaust victim a Christian tortured by both Nazi and Jew; by employing a cast of more or less exotic and comic, but otherwise uninteresting, Jewish characters; and by leaving Judaism conspicuously absent in a roster of love-preaching world religions. In yet another way, these works underline a potent attribute of the Holocaust: It is both too horrible to remember and too palpably real to forget. Literary versions of the Holocaust that can at one and the same time evoke a sense of authenticity while domesticating its realities to the tolerances of culture-Sophie's Choice and The Pawnbroker are two examples-are likely to succeed in popular consciousness for the very reasons that they fail in historical representation.

NOTES

1 . Elie Wiesel, "Does the Holocaust Lie Beyond the Reach of Art?" New York Times, 17 Apr. 1983.

2. Representative among a number of recent works that ably delineate the problems of Holocaust literature are Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago and London, 1980); Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington and London, 1980); and idem, Imagining Hitler (Bloomington, 1985). Some of the same problems are noted in the realm of motion pictures in Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York, 1983).

3. Other renditions of survivors written in America, such as Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story, and various Singer short stories, are examples of more complicated visions that, despite reasonably wide readerships, have not appealed to mass audiences and might not translate easily into film.

4. Indeed, Styron has a Melville parallel much in mind. The second para- graph of the book begins "Call me Stingo," echoing the "Call me Ishmael" of Moby Dick and warning the knowing reader that this will be a voyage and a hunt, a journey in which Stingo will have a brush with primal forces of love and evil and death. Yetta Zimmerman's "pink palace" of a boarding house can be seen as something of a landlocked Pequod, Sophie as a very white and mysterious Moby Dick, and Nathan as a very mad Captain Ahab. See Styron, p. 1.

5. Styron, pp. 513-14.

6. Ibid., p. 430.

7. Ibid., p. 604.

8. Ibid., p. 607.

9. Ibid., p. 620.

10. Ibid., p. 625.

11. Ibid., p. 626.

12. Wallant, pp. 198-206.

13. Styron, pp. 617, 619.

14. Ibid., p. 1.

15. Ibid., pp. 623-24.