Boston Gothic

BOUNDARY AGAINST NIGHT--Edmund Gilligan--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.75).

Critics say that U. S. fiction began with the gothic romances of Charles Brockden Brown. They mean that it began with weird plots, wild scenes, frenzied speeches, mysterious encounters between mysterious characters. By next month Brown will have been dead 128 years, but U. S. fiction still has a gothic tradition that realists have never been able to conquer, running from Poe right down to the operatic extravagances of Thomas Wolfe. Last week its persistence was demonstrated by a long first novel that had all the ingredients of a gothic romance except a ghost, and which seemed all the more extraordinary because its wild scenes were laid in Boston in 1919, and its gothic horrors tied to a social message.

Though it has no ghost, Boundary Against Night has almost everything else-- spies, detectives, a conspiracy hatched after dark in a deserted church; 3 mad philosopher who sees the coming of complete moral darkness over the earth; a blind hero; a section devoted to Boston during the police strike (which appears from this account a bigger show than the French Revolution) ; a mass of characters, largely Irish, drawn about equally from the police and the underworld; returned soldiers, as embittered as they are eloquent; three suicides, a rape, a robbery and a final thundering climax in which a crazy policeman attired in priestly garments shoots at a thief, hits a can of nitroglycerin and makes the devastation complete. There are a number of death scenes in which characters in their final agony rise as sturdily as opera singers to express their wrath, their views of the world and their lost hopes in prose poetry that owes a good deal to Thomas Wolfe and James Joyce. There is even a scene showing Calvin Coolidge telling homespun jokes in the State House.

But with all its headlong violence, Boundary Against Night follows a clear pattern, contains a dozen long narrative passages that stand out like detached stories. Its characters are stylized social types rather than conventional realistic portraits: Ben Coventry, blinded during the War, generous, humane, intelligent, helpless, is a symbol of sightless aristocracy that cannot provide social leadership. John Hargedon, the hard-pressed, woman-chasing policeman, is a symbol of leaderless strength and courage that wastes itself. Ben Coventry lives in seclusion in his Beacon Street house, breaks with his class when the amorous wife of an old friend guides him to her house at night, slowly recovers his balance only to die in the riots when mobs rule the city and thugs assault his sweetheart. John Hargedon, after a long career trapping and abandoning girls, is himself trapped into marriage by a shrewd wench who despises him, robs a house during the strike, shoots two gangsters after the same loot, and dies an ironically heroic death.

Unabashed in writing purple passages, Author Gilligan is at his best in communicating scenes of disorder like those that mark the beginning of the strike: "In and out of hovels and flats, from boardinghouses to cheap hotels . . . the word ran from mouth to mouth: mouths of thieves, mouths of safebreakers, mouths of pickpockets, mouths of rowdies, mouths of the half-dead, mouths of the gamblers, mouths of the whores. . . . Throngs of hoodlums moved in secret, waiting for some one deed to start a great one." As a result, readers are not likely to have much confidence in his portraits of the good people of Boston, or to take without question the many scenes in which they act with violence. Boundary Against Night nevertheless melodramatizes its central point: that a society which falls into panic when a few policemen leave their beats is badly in need of a moral housecleaning.

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