Six Writers of Crisis
The Picaresque Saint.
by R. W. B. Lewis.
J. B. Lippincott. 317 pp. $6.00.
This is criticism with a philosophical intent. R. W. B. Lewis is not interested in studying the novels of his chosen six authors with close technical analysis nor in making judgments on that level. He is concerned rather with their attitudes toward the age, man, God, truth, love, as they reflect the “passions and miseries” of the human situation. It is also criticism with a thesis and it establishes that thesis by means of the grand dialectic, by categories, by setting up opposites on opposites. I shall note a few: death vs. life; exile vs. participation; disinterestedness vs. commitment; the aesthetic vs. the moral; faith vs. skepticism or nihilism; God vs. no God; life vs. art.
Its subject is the work of six contemporary novelists—André Malraux, Alberto Moravia, Albert Camus, Ignazio Silone, Graham Greene, and William Faulkner; the latter included not so much for the totality of his work as for two recent books, The Bear and a fable, that suggest, like Silone’s Bread and Wine and Greene’s The Power and the Glory, that concept of the figure for which the book is named: the rebel saint, the saint manqué, the saint not so much of God as of humanity.
Defining these novelists as “representative men in the lofty Emersonian sense,” Mr. Lewis establishes the distinction at once between their work and that of the “first generation”—i.e. Proust, Mann, and Joyce. The first generation represents the aesthetic in all its purity and luminous severity—the “city of art” necessarily distant on its parapets. What the second generation represents can best be summed up, he says, in the single word “human.” Elsewhere he equates “human” with “life,” characterizing these second generation novelists as being “agonizingly dedicated to life” in contrast to the members of the Great Triad who, in the face of a disintegrating Western culture, found their sense of life, as well as the absolute value, in art. The first generation were exiles in one sense or another, he points out; the second generation—specifically Malraux, Silone, and Camus—were committed and involved, politically and socially. But whether “artists in action” or not, what they most brought to the novel was a “humanistic creed,” even a “humanistic theology.”
“Twentieth century literature began on the note of death,” Mr. Lewis declares. If the second generation had quite as much death, considering the cataclysmic 30’s and 40’s, their response was “to center not upon the ubiquity of sickness and of death but on the act of living,” to make the grand affirmation by attempting to put together again man’s broken image of himself. They derived their “renewed sense of life,” Mr. Lewis argues, by looking anew at man and his ambiguously heroic possibilities in a non-heroic world, by emphasizing the necessity for compassion, participation, solidarity, “the tragic fellowship,” the “virile fraternity.” In a world full of hostile distrust, with men isolated from other men by ideologies and competitive rancors, they created fictive heroes who found the ultimate good in companionship, friendship, a sharing of the bread and wine of thought and action.
The concept of companionship finds its apotheosis in what Mr. Lewis defines as “the representative figure of the contemporary novel—the figure of the saint, who shares more than bread and wine, who shares the very sufferings of mankind, participates in them, as a way of touching and submitting to what is most real in the world today.” This is the figure of the half-rogue, half-saint, kin of Don Quixote and Dostoevsky’s sacred idiot. He is “the outsider who shares, the outcast who enters in, dedicated . . . to what yet remains of the sacred in the ravaged human community.” Above all, he retains his share in mortal weakness; he has not bartered his contradictions away, nor ceased to suffer from the sorry dualities of wish and deed, vision and the intractible real. He emerges first in Bread and Wine as Pietro Spina, the revolutionary disguised as priest, “whose conversion from politics to companionship . . . would signalize the humanizing of the one, the spiritual enlightenment of the other.” He is to be found again in the alcoholic priest of Greene’s The Power and the Glory and in Faulkner’s The Bear as a kind of leather-stocking old Adam who renounces his tainted inheritance for woods and animal innocence. Mr. Lewis notes this fictive hero’s capacity for sacrificial heroism, for taking on the guilt of another, or even giving up his life for another (Silone), and notes, also, the religious parallel.
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Separate and brilliant chapters then follow on each of the novelists. Mr. Lewis’s knowledge of the French and Italian literary scene—he includes remarks from conversations with Silone, Moravia, and Camus as well as comments from French and Italian critics—gives him an easy authority. Affinities and dissimilarities between the six are noted again and again; one obtains a rich sense of the diverse ways in which these representative sensibilities have reflected the contradictions of their age—from Moravia still refusing to give meaningfulness to a world deprived of it, to Graham Greene who in a world where God was dead would have him resurrected, to Faulkner who moves in The Bear from his earlier position of “tension between the creative and the destructive” into a “world of light like that following the Incarnation.”
But in his zeal to note the differences between the “fathers” and “sons,” the progress from the religion of art to the religion of man (from the hero as artist to the hero of the novel of crisis), Mr. Lewis would seem to ride his thesis with almost too much energy. For all his instinct for delicate contrapuntal poise, that maneuvering of the dialectic, that shuttling between the poles of art and life, the aesthetic and the moral, would often seem to result in a kind of rigid trimming of the material he is dealing with to the theory at hand.
Though it is not quite said, Mr. Lewis implies that the moral beauty of fictive heroes capable of the selfless, even the noble action, is more significant, is better for us than, say, Proust’s relentless revelations of human weakness, egoism, cruelty. This is quaking ground, indeed quicksand. When he blows the dusty trumpet for the moral (“moral force, not moral preaching”), must it be supposed that the aesthetic is in another camp, far up the abandoned mountainside? Defining Silone, he says: “His fiction illustrates exactly the peculiar business that fiction has perforce been up to in this generation—the business of disclosing in life itself new grounds for the very sense of life; and the business of fashioning out of the ruins a more truthful and more human image of man than the forlorn, essentially aesthetic and often dehydrated images received from the previous generation.” Settembrini, Bloom, Charlus, dehydrated?
Speaking of Malraux, he says: “He rejected the private world of the imagination with its glossy aesthetics; he turned outward to confront the formidable fact of deadliness . . . in the immediate historic world.” The word glossy is baiting and invidious; one may ask if the imaginative and historic worlds must be posited as implacable opposites, or if Joyce, Proust, Mann and many others were incapable of mirroring the deadly, daily world. Likewise, in his enthusiasm for Bread and Wine, he tends to overlook what is for some readers a very definite lack. He admits to its episodic quality, quotes Italian critics who have called it the “non-novel” and said that it reads better in translation than in its non-literary Italian, and lets the case rest there. The case doesn’t, quite. Can one read and re-read Bread and Wine as one can other novels? In terms of its apparent didacticism, and its episodic nature which deprives it of unity of proportion, it does not give that kind of “truth” of beauty which the novels of the first generation give.
Nevertheless, if Mr. Lewis seems almost too insistent on transmuting some of these fictive heroes into religious abstractions, and if he seems to place undue stress on religious parallels, his lucid care and concern with these works of “rebellion, inquiry and conversion”—mirroring the “age and body of the time, its form and pressure”—yield much for us to reflect on. Meanwhile, the writers of the Third Generation must deal in their own terms with what aspects they can of this century that is still with us, machine-driven, warheaded, moon-rocketing.
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