Books: Trip to a Foreign Land

APPENDIX A by Hayden Carruth. 302 pages. Macmillan. $4.95.

For the 302 pages of this unsettling book, the reader is imprisoned in the mind of a man who has suffered and is now suffering a total nervous collapse. Anybody who wants to know the identity of that man need only “look at the title page,” according to Author Hayden Carruth. Carruth’s self-described “novel or autobiography or dissertation” is not neatly scissored to easily discernible patterns; rather, it comes spooling off the mind of the narrator in grea loops and tangles of yarn. But its feeling is all of a piece—and chilling in effect.

Throughout the book, in alternating sections, Carruth’s narrator presents himself to the reader in a strange double exposure—as he appeared in the early 1950s, when he had his first breakdown, and as he appears now, writing while caring for a deaf-mute as atonement for past sins. In the earlier period the narrator is (as Carruth was) a poet, editor, and a nihilist who thinks that “1 must be really half dead” but is not particularly disturbed by the fact: most of contemporary America, he implies, is in pretty much the same shape. The agent of his undoing is a World War II French waif, Charley Dupont, who “was born in Europe’s misery and came to America in his youth, imbued with the irony of hope.” Dupont bears a disturbing message: “It’s okay to believe,” and the grail he seeks is simply citizenship papers.

Charley’s wife is, like the narrator, a nothing, and not surprisingly the two nothings mate. As the affair continues, it becomes increasingly important to the two participants to see Charley fail—in his career as an architect and in his quest for citizenship. When Charley passes his citizenship test, his wife runs away with a eunuch. Her desertion drives her narrator-lover into madness.

Anguished in spirit but comic in detail, Author Carruth’s convoluted tale is a convincing, step-by-step chronicle of a mind stretching beyond its breaking point. But Appendix A is more than case history. If modern man predicates his behavior on a world of non-meaning, Carruth suggests, even the hint of meaning can cripple him.