means of swift chapter juxtapositions, and the Frankian crystallizations of unspoken consciousness, it is sustained throughout the book.
For the purpose of a novel, and likewise in order that Frank's intentions be completely realized, it was necessary that two bodies, a white and a black, be set in movement, through the contrasting states, towards each other. Virginia Hade and John Cloud, vehicles for a need conscious beyond the local taboos placed upon sex and race, move towards each other. Away from Nazareth, where nature is still innocent of the divisions that spring to life with exploitation, they meet. For the first moments their contact is as clean as nature is. And then the inevitable differences and discords assert themselves. Having exchanged knives with her, the black man suddenly recalls, "I am John Cloud. Nigger." Whereupon he straightway leaves her. She, pressing his knife into her waist, cuts herself. The wound is a mere body-outlet. Deeper release has been denied. Conscious that her own world is the real cause of her frustration, she nevertheless fastens upon John as the immediate instrument of it. And, impelled by a force, clearly greater than volition, with John's knife still in her hand, and blood upon her, she marches into the town square. White Nazareth is just coming from a revival which has whipped it to within an inch of release. Full release, not quite. It sees Virginia, Cloud's knife, and it immediately knows that a lynching will fulfil what the revival failed in. "—Upon the black branch of the black tree let there be Fruit! Let there be seed, let there be fruit for my passion!" It forthwith gets John Cloud and hangs him. "Nazareth beneath him peers with grimed eyes through the murk of its spent lust." Virginia, comfortable in bed, makes no effort to avert the tragedy she senses taking place, for, "—Who made this wound? My hand. Yet it is your wound, John." Here, then, the design and motor-plot of Holiday.
They are executed with a precision, an economy, a swiftness, and a sense of form that spell artistic mastery. Generally, the aesthetic employed is that so accurately analysed by Gorham B. Munson in his Waldo Frank: a Study. The Frankian aesthetic of mobility ". . . accomplished first of all by the abundant use of very active verbs . . . generated by his shrewd calculation of overstatements, by his thrusting and expanding figures of speech . . . worked up by lyrical crystallizations, by swift dramatic
