"The Revelations of Dr. Modesto" 1955 HARRINGTON, Alan
$250
HARRINGTON, Alan
[256] pp.
Alfred A. Knopf
1955
First Edition
7 3/4" x 5 1/4"
Jacket design by Paul Rand
VG/ VG
With the painstaking precision of an honor student building a ship model inside a bottle in an occupational- therapy clinic, Alan Harrington has carpentered an intricate and bitter little farce having to do with the ravages of “Central- ism,” or, the desire to be Like Everyone Else, on a sensitive psyche. As a miniature ship- wright, Mr. Harrington has wrought an impressive anomaly: his ingenious workmanship excites interest and admiration, whereas the essentially inutile nature of his enterprise can inspire little save sympathetic headshakings and tongue-clickings. Sympathy for the author, even outright partisanship, will not be lacking. From the opening episode, in which his hero, Hal Hingham (a life-insurance sales- man), suffers a kind of civilian shell shock simply from walking across the rumpus room of a giant advertising agency, to the carnival-mirror conclusion in a centrally located mental institution, Mr. Harrington has pre- pared a richly documented bill of particulars against identification with the mob. On the other hand, his brief in favor of individualism seems immoderately skimpy. In this respect Mr. Harrington suggests a clergy- man who is against sin, but has little conviction that anything practical will be found to take its place.
In this excessive imbalance on the negative side, Mr. Harring- ton has a certain affinity with Kafka (whom he does not much resemble otherwise), being marred by an impatient and resigned Americanism, as Kafka was marred by a patient and resigned Europeanism. And Mr. Harrington's present difficult theme, moreover, would challenge even the gifts of the mas- ter in its demand for morbid fantasy, allegorical implication, and sophistical understatement, combined with the most pitiless realism.
Unfortunately, the invisible Dr. Modesto of Mr. Harrington's title is a correspondence-school Caligari who master-minds his somnambulist clients ex cathedra from a Nebraska nut-house, and whose philosophy of ultra- conformism—so far as Mr. Harrington's système du monde is concerned — apparently has no alternative except fierce, free- lance egocentrism. In contrast with his matter, Mr. Harrington's manner is disarmingly unliterary, his characters are comfortably colloquial.