A Critical View

Time to Murder and Create: the Contemporary Novel in Crisis.
by John W. Aldridge.
David McKay. 264 pp. $5.50.

This collection of critical articles and reviews sports a wildly inappropriate title taken from Eliot’s “ldquo;Prufrock.”rdquo; However resonant Eliot’s line may be in its context, it stands in no literal or symbolic relation whatever to what Mr. Aldridge has to say, and in thus appropriating (or expropriating) it, he displays a sense of self-importance which is excessive, to say the least, and a taste for histrionics not at all suitable to the critical medium. Nor is his subtitle—The Contemporary Novel in Crisis—any more apt or accurate. For one thing, he is not actually examining the contemporary novel in any representative sense but only American examples of it, and, for another, even within this restricted framework Mr. Aldridge is inadequate, for he fails to discuss quite a few writers of consequence in American fiction, such as Flannery O’Connor, John Barth, John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip Roth, among others. It appears to me that novels like Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor and O’Connor’s Wise Blood cannot rightly be left out of account in any book which advances, as this one does, such overtly large claims of concern with the performance of American novelists since the end of the Second World War.

The truth is that this somewhat miscellaneous collection offers no comprehensive appraisal of present-day American fiction. My impression is that what Mr. Aldridge is mainly after is to check up, as it were, on the authors he dealt with in his earlier book, After the Lost Generation, published nearly fifteen years ago; and he lets us know in emphatic terms that he feels let down by them, badly let down. The trouble is, however, that he writes about them in a tone somehow suggesting that they are personally responsible to him, and this peculiar tone, so alien to critical discourse, induces an uneasy feeling in the reader, who finds himself at a loss to discover when and where Mr. Aldridge was officially appointed to serve as the Inspector-General of contemporary fiction in America. In this unlikely role he is quite unimpressive, almost fatally so, reminding one more of Khlestakov, the hero of Gogol’s great comedy, than of any real authority.

The one novel recently produced that wins this critic’s unstinted praise is Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, a work whose merits are still very much in question and in defense of which he offers what seems to me to be an utterly inane piece of apologetics, scrambling together all sorts of notions, mostly irrelevant to his text, in support of his extravagant and improbable opinion of it. Yet in articles, written a year or longer before An American Dream appeared, he is just as rough on Mailer (“ldquo;peddling his megalomania in Esquire. . . . the antics of a man sick for publicity at any price,”rdquo; etc., etc.) as he is on his coevals. Thus, William Styron is taken to task with what strikes me as incredible rudeness and rancor; Updike is dismissed out of hand, Mary McCarthy is psychologized and “ldquo;motivated”rdquo; to pieces; and Bellow’s Herzog is so wilfully interpreted that it emerges as a book “ldquo;wholesome and nutritious as a dish of corn flakes, a clearly ‘lsquo;major’rsquo; Establishment work,”rdquo; whose epitome is “ldquo;the platitude of Accommodation and Togetherness.”rdquo;

Now it should be obvious that no ordinary critical terms can possibly cope with a judgment so nonsensical: this is in no way a critical reading of Herzog but sheer tabulation, and the only question is whom Mr. Aldridge is trying to please by thus setting out to degrade Bellow at all costs. And yet in another article Mr. Aldridge decries the anti-intellectualism of many of our writers, contending that “ldquo;the novel is not nearly intellectual enough. . . . contemporary writers generally think too little to be able to feel. . . .”rdquo; But if intellectual capacity is your prize, then certainly Bellow is your man, for, whatever his other qualities, he is surely the most genuinely intellectual of contemporary American novelists, whose ideas, moreover, never take the form of modish apocalyptic preachments but are inextricably a part of his narrative structures. Mr. Aldridge, let it be said, is aware of this objection and tries to counter it by the glib assertion that Bellow’s “ldquo;thematic and stylistic interests”rdquo; happen also to coincide with those most in favor with his audience. This is an argument as foolish as it is false. Interests and ideas that are in favor with a given audience are not necessarily worthless on that account. But that is neither here nor there, as what Mr. Aldridge really wants to insinuate is that Bellow is not a true intellectual but some kind of fashionmonger in the realm of ideas. Now as to that, taking Herzog as a test-case, I would say that the greater part of the public that made the book a best-seller, far from being in tune with its author’s ideas, simply did not know what he was talking about. In my view, the sales-figures of Herzog are a more or less accidental symptom of the current culture-explosion and in no sense a proof of Bellow’s popularity as a thinker or, least of all, as a leader of fashion in the literary world. For he is not a thinker or ideologue but a novelist who is also able to think—that is to say, one of our very few imaginative writers who has managed to transcend the cult of experience in American literature.

Also included in this collection are some comments on writers of an older generation, such as Katherine Anne Porter, John O’Hara, Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, the very last works of Hemingway, and, of all people, P. G. Wode-house. About some of these older writers Mr. Aldridge does at times contribute plausible judgments, as in the piece on Miss Porter, whom he sees as not nearly deserving, in spite of the famed lucidity of her English, the high artistic reputation she has acquired and as being in the last analysis a regionalist writer most truly at home “ldquo;in only one place, the American Southwest of her childhood.”rdquo; Mr. Aldridge is even more severe on John O’Hara, whom he dismisses with some cogency as “ldquo;a pious pornographer”rdquo; for the middlebrows. O’Hara is easy pickings for any critic, and even at that Mr. Aldridge ignores the obvious fact that he is just as vulnerable on the ground of his cheap snobbery as he is on the ground of his cheap sexology. And some things that Mr. Aldridge says about O’Hara are quite uncalled for. I have in mind a sentence like the following: “ldquo;O’Hara is an example of a once talented novelist who has sold out his original talent to write well for middlebrow success.”rdquo; Here Mr. Aldridge indulges himself again in his bad habit of “ldquo;motivating”rdquo; writers he dislikes. In a context of literary criticism—which is very far from gossip—the imputation of low motives is entirely gratuitous; since personal motives are something one can only vaguely speculate about, undocumented assertions with reference to them are useless as well as offensive. About Hemingway in decline Mr. Aldridge makes statements with which, having heard them so often before, one can hardly disagree. And why did this critic include in his collection yet another essay on The Great Gatsby? Though managed dexterously enough, it contains nothing particularly new, merely adding another tribute to the hundreds, if not thousands, already published. Wonderful in its way as The Great Gatsby is, it has been worked to death in the past fifteen years or so both by Fitzgerald’s critics and biographers. It should be left alone for at least several decades. One should know a case of critical superfetation when one sees it.

_____________

If Mr. Aldridge has any thesis to offer at all, it is that on the whole the contemporary American novel is disappointing. Admittedly this is so and most of us have long known it. But what might have caused this falling off? It appears that our novelists are unable “ldquo;to imagine with an intensity and complexity equal to their sophistication”rdquo;; what is wrong is that “ldquo;the imagination of the contemporary novel . . . has remained locked in certain stereotypes and modes of perceiving and recording reality that it has inherited from the modern classic literary past.”rdquo; It soon turns out, however, that what Mr. Aldridge means by referring to “ldquo;the modern classic literary past”rdquo; is hardly anything more than the novels of the American 20’s and 30’s, mainly those of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. “ldquo;We have too often and eagerly accepted the version of reality supplied by these novels, and that has prevented us from arriving at our own version.”rdquo;

At bottom what is Mr. Aldridge really saying? Merely that if our novelists were able to forget their predecessors and applied their imagination more intensely and in a more complex fashion they would produce superior work. This is finally the extent of this critic’s tautological wisdom. Such factors as the climate of ideas or the cultural situation, which has changed so enormously since the last war, and in general the present state of American society, so greatly affluent and almost perversely narcissistic in spirit, are not brought to bear on the question. Mr. Aldridge is singularly unaware of the larger environment in which literature functions. Nor does he have any plausible ideas about the intricate relationship between literary conventions and traditions on the one hand, and new talent on the other. He wants writers to break away from “ldquo;the literary formulations”rdquo; of the past, and we have already seen how restricted is his view of it. What he has in mind is the immediate past only. Yet the history of literature shows that writers make use of “ldquo;the literary formulations”rdquo; of the immediate past even in the process of changing them. Dostoevsky never abandoned but rather built on the foundations of the novelistic methods and conceptions of such predecessors as Gogol, Dickens, Balzac, and Hoffmann; nor did Henry James forget the lessons of Hawthorne, Balzac, and Turgenev. Mr. Aldridge’s notion that in each decade or so writers must start from scratch in devising their “ldquo;version of reality”rdquo; is preposterous on the face of it. As T. S. Eliot once put it, all one can do in art is the next thing possible and the effort to be totally original can only result in the totally unintelligible.

Mr. Aldridge is concerned with American novels and with making provocative statements. But that is not enough to establish his authority as a critic. Innocent in matters of literary theory and indifferent to ideas of any sort, political, philosophical, religious or whatever, he is manifestly a narrowly un-ideological type of critic, who brings to bear very little to the novels he examines besides his interest in novels. Is that sufficient? I think F. R. Leavis was essentially right in remarking some years ago that “ldquo;one cannot be seriously interested in literature and remain purely literary in interests.”rdquo;