Introduction
The Breaking of Cassie, a brilliantly dramatic new novel by Lorimer White, is a study in violent contrasts. As such, it is completely in tune with the most profound philosophical thinking of our time.
Any number of examples could be chosen to demonstrate this. Here is just one: .. America is the first country ever founded by people who were confident that they were saints, who attempted to re-create a pre-Fall Eden, who saw themselves as exempt from the sins of history." These are the words of Francine du Plessix Gray, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism and Hawaii: The Sugar-Coated Fortress.
After making this brilliant point, which obviously is worth considerable thought, Ms. Gray shows how it leads to inevitable conflicts, as follows: "In its origins our myth of Eden was as necessary as it was beautiful. It was the only solace of men undergoing the rude process of implantation in the wilderness, a people small in number, beset by dangers, and in constant terror. Their ecstatic infatuation with rebirth led them to believe that Americans were the 'sifted grain' chosen by God to make His work perfect and that an American Adam could thrive free from the sins of the historical Adam. As the colonists founded their first towns, calling them New Haven, New Canaan, New Bedford, their preachers nourished them with visions of America as the new Paradise, the Eden unsullied by the depravity of old Europe. In the words of the Boston Puritan John Cotton, our first settlers had been reoffered 'the grand charter given to Adam and his posterity in Paradise.' Some have called this wishful erasure of historic time, this obsession with a restored innocence, our doctrine of exceptionalism.
"Our myth of Adamic innocence forges that streak of optimism and self-idolatry that is at one pole of the American conscience. It is the watchdog of our national pride, ever ready to spring, at moments of crisis such as Vietnam, at critics who perceive the sins of the Edenic community. But it is contradicted by an equally fundamental trait-the pessimism that flows from our founders' somber Calvinistic view of man. This perfect society, elected by God to redeem the world, is to be built by men who are so debased by original sin as to be hopelessly imperfectible ... Depraved man versus perfect community. How can the debased creature build 'the city on the hill'? The town fathers of seventeenth-century Salem gave us the first answer: the violence of purification. To create the innocence of the new Eden, the new Adam must clear the land of the infidel as brutally as he clears his mind of history.
"If we tend to overlook the ambivalence of innocence and violence in the American character, it is because we forget that we are as millenialist as we are Utopian. Utopians are traditionally rational, optimistic, and pacifist; they hold that man's ills will be cured by the establishment of fastidiously planned societies. Millenialists, on the other hand, are irrational and apocalyptic; they see themselves as divinely ordained elites set above the rest of mankind to save the world; if they often resort to violence, it is because purgative upheavals tend to concur with a search for the impossible purity of an earthly kingdom."
Which brings us to the contradictions in the character of Cassie Kimball, the novel you are about to read, and to the conflicting forces in society which form the basis of its plot. Cassie is very rich and perhaps too beautiful. She has inherited, among other things, an airline, over which she wields complete and firm control. She is sure of herself and sure of her world. It is a world containing many problems, and we first meet Cassie as she is solving some of those problems, swiftly and unerringly. But very soon Cassie's normal world is shattered when she is caught in the crash of one of her own planes and thrust into a world that is shockingly different, primitive, and even savage compared to the one she has always known.
This new world is a remote valley, hidden from civilization and ruled by an absolute tyrant who sees himself as a new Adam and has even adopted the name for his own. He is the unquestioned leader of a religious cult who believe that life should be a continuous celebration of sex. Like our forefathers as described by Ms. Gray, they are both innocent and violent, millenialist as well as Utopian. Their overwhelming desire is to reject the old society and form a new one that is thoroughly rational and free from what they view as sin. But Cassie, with her traditional biases and prejudices, can see nothing but sin in everything they do. What is worse is that she and the two other airline people who crashed with her are the victims of that sin-and the life they are forced to lead under Adam's rule is utterly intolerable to her.
These are violent conflicts indeed, and the violence inevitably increases. Cassie knows she must escape, but escape seems impossible. The story is packed with action and suspense, and in its course Cassie is subjected to shocking sexual degradation which is an inherent part of the plot. How it is resolved will be left for Mr. White to work out and the reader to discover.
The intelligent reader, we are sure, will find many extra rewards, and emerge with a better understanding of our country as it is today.
-The Publishers Chatsworth, Cal. December, 1972