Fictional America is divided regionally into two parts, Steven Marcus suggests here. Most American short stories, that is to say, have the cultural climate of the South or the northeastern suburbs of New York. The inhabitants of both areas are depicted as enduring a pretty grim existence; the more enlightened suburbanites suffer, if anything, lives of the more agonized desperation.

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Generally speaking, there are two kinds of stories being written in America today—Southern stories and Connecticut stories. These are more than geographical divisions: each is a distinct school with its own traditions, themes, techniques, social ideals, mythology, and literary ancestors; a “Southern” writer might very well live in Connecticut, though perhaps there are no “Connecticut” writers living in the South.

Thus three prize-winning stories of last year’s O. Henry Awards collection, for instance, all apparently quite different, are “Southern” in theme and tone. In outline, these stories are most eventful. Private Meadows of Harris Downey’s “The Hunters” wanders away from his company one day during the war, meets another detached soldier, and with him spends a day of slaughter, killing some goats, a German prisoner, and finally three parachuting airmen of unidentified allegiance. In Eudora Welty’s “The Burning,” the slave Florabel witnesses the destruction of the family mansion by fire and the suicides of her old-maid mistresses. Ottilie, the prostitute heroine of Truman Capote’s “The House of Flowers,” marries her lover, leaves the city with him, suffers mistreatment at his hands, and finally remains with him in a flowery cabin in the backwoods of Haiti. Yet all this “action” seems oddly illusory: nothing really happens. The common characteristics of these stories so full of incident is a kind of breathless stillness, an unmoving atmosphere of vague emotion and pure language.

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The source of this paradox is in the estranged personalities of the central figures. They are all inarticulate, unable to speak coherently, and in their obscure consciousness the action of the stories is rendered remote and almost meaningless. Thus Miss Welty describes Florabel: “Herself was an unknown, like a queen, somebody she heard called, even cried for. As a slave she was earth’s most detached visitor. The world had not touched her.” So do Mr. Capote and Mr. Downey conceive their characters. Unlike Melville’s Billy Budd or Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, who, though they cannot speak, do think or move in purposeful ways, these people are inarticulate in the very nature of their being; they are impervious to experience—detached from the earth.

Often enough, of course, this sort of inarticulateness has been used in literature to represent, not an estrangement from the earth but a profounder contact with it; sophisticated writers sometimes try to find in the “silent” peasant or proletarian a higher wisdom than their own, perhaps a higher suffering. But in these stories the literary convention seems almost turned around upon itself: the speechlessness of the characters belongs not to them but to their authors, who seem to expend all their art in efforts to hold the world at arm’s length. Thus an art form which has increasingly been concerned with examining the way we experience, ends up making experience itself inaccessible. Where the “classical” short story preserved the opposition of mind and reality, with the writer attempting to discover or impose upon the world a certain logical order, attempting to understand a world whose independent reality was assumed, in these stories reality has become a function of character, while at the same time character itself, become vague and ambiguous, recedes into the obscurity of speechlessness. There has resulted, in a sense, a true unity of form and matter, producing perfect, “seamless” objects, internally consistent but with none of the shocks and roughnesses of reality; this is the popular modern idea of the short story as an “epiphany,” a single symbolic event opening out, not on some general but still definite truth about man and his society, but on nothing less than the universe itself—a broadening of focus so great as to produce merely an attractive blur.

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That such a development in literature should be associated with the South is not surprising. For though it is said with much truth that the South is the one region of America that still preserves a literary tradition, this tradition is preserved at a greater and greater cost of separation from the real world—indeed, even the sharpest and most tangible Southern realities exist often in defiance of the facts of modern life. But the tendency I have tried to describe goes far beyond the geographical limits of the South; it belongs to many modern writers who, finding themselves unable to impose any publicly comprehensible order on their experience, have fled into the autonomous world of their inner selves, mistaking it for the autonomous world of art; technique and understanding become one, and when that happens it is always at the expense of understanding.

Support for this notion is to be found in New Directions XIII, the annual of avantgarde writing published by James Laughlin. This large and well-made anthology includes all kinds of experimental writing, and it is a compliment to Mr. Laughlin’s devotion to the cause of literature that so much bad writing, half conceived and poorly managed, should receive such consistently attractive publication. The most notable writing in this particular volume is by Robert Creely, a young American living in France. Mr. Creely pushes the “limited point of view” to its conclusion, for he has tried to eliminate the artist entirely, and has thereby done away with that intelligence which persuades itself and the reader that circumstances are half perceived and half created. The dialectic between reality and the mind that perceives it is here attenuated almost to nothing.

Here is a sample of his writing:

I put it this way. That I am, say, myself, that this or this feel, you can’t have, of from that man or this, me you can’t take it. And what I would do, with any of this, is beyond you, and mine. But for this time, yours too.

Or:

She said, what did you expect from any of it, being fourteen as you were, or any age, for that matter, what was it you wanted to get out of something like that, that if you knew you couldn’t, and didn’t, later, much want, but just then wanted, as though you knew that later it would have to come to me, this kind of thing, to ask me what I thought and did I understand, as if there, in any of it, was what I was supposed to understand.

This writing is not at all the “endless conversation” of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, nor is it the participial flux of Gertrude Stein’s prose. In both of these one senses a controlling intelligence creating the conversation and the time. Mr. Creely wants us to believe that this prose represents him, that he is actually writing this as himself and about himself. He has removed the “aesthetic distance,” the effort to control experience, remnants of which we still find in the O. Henry prize stories: for it he substitutes his own person—immediate and easy to identify. What he is saying is that experience is so difficult to grasp that the traditional attempt must be given up. He delivers us willynilly to events and to his mind involved, indeed totally assimilated, with them, rather than to our practiced sense of the intelligence behind the story, manipulating events, standing as interpreter between the world and the reader.

Although he fails, Mr. Creely at least has the merit of clearing away the speechless, marginal characters of the other stories, and presents to us the undigested but unconfined consciousness of himself. The effect is deeply disturbing. Not because Mr. Creely’s reveries embarrass us, but because his stories obliterate the double vision of the artist—that effort to give to circumstances the sensible order that they seldom seem to possess alone.

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Inarticulateness, however striking, is not wholly descriptive of the South of modern writing, although it is one of its main features. Except for Faulkner and Eudora Welty, most of the Southern writers are quite young and, as I have said, they come from all parts of the country. One finds “Southern” stories—stories not distinct in style, tone, and intent from those which are obviously about the South—being written about Wyoming, New Jersey, and even Canada. The South is no longer simply a region (it is doubtful that it ever was); it is a state of mind convenient for any writer who has read Faulkner or Katherine Anne Porter. The influence of Faulkner is becoming unhappily obvious; at least twentyfive of the anthologized stories are variations of one or another of his. We must be aware, however, that this development has not been primarily impelled by any reality existing particularly in the South, but by the notions that these young writers have absorbed from elsewhere about modern civilization. The country of their fiction is purely conventional and literary. They stand in relation to Faulkner as the later 19th-century poets of nature stood to Wordsworth. Their primary experience is literature, and the result of that has been the creation of a set of beliefs about the culture of the South which seem, almost automatically, to infuse magic life into any fiction.

Most of these stories are about some experience of childhood and all of them are rural, for, it seems, there are no cities in the South. Cities, wherever they are mentioned, are inevitably the repositories of poor, outcast relatives, or of brothels; and no one in a city ever leads a life that can be of interest or consequence to the characters in the story. Consequendy, ambition and status as we know them—even social meaning itself—do not exist in the South.

“The Temperate Zone,” by Elizabeth Enright, tells of a young Southern woman holed up with her infant in a prefabricated hut in Maine or Canada—some place, at any rate, where it never stops snowing. She bathes the child, thinks of her own sunny and flower-scented childhood, of how different or her it all is now, and of the awful imperturbability of her Northern husband. That is all. The writer believes she has fulfilled her purpose simply by pronouncing the terms of the myth; nothing has to happen, either “objectively” or “subjectively.” The “South” evokes the ideas of fecundity and freedom, sunshine and sensuality. Ostensibly it serves, for Miss Enright and others, as Italy and Africa served in the lives of so many French artists (Stendhal, Flaubert, Gide), to liberate her for the moment from the demands of adulthood and responsibility. In the South life is seen to radiate an aura of primitive simplicity and pastoral directness which would dissolve in the complex, trying life of maturity and urbanism. (This is, of course, not completely true of Faulkner, whose subject is often the impact of the civilized and the urban upon the primitive.) The South, we are let know, is the one place left where there is enough leisure, memory, nature, and social distinction to give life meaning—but this “meaning,” in the generalized, self-consciously mythical forms in whch it is presented, verges constantly on the meaningless.

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The terms of the myth are quite simple: the South is the Garden of Eden. It is a real garden, for it is a wilderness that has been setded and where flowers are cultivated. No one ever does any work in these stories. If one lives in a decaying mansion, a stray servant occasionally does a little dusting; if one lives in a ramshackle cabin, one either waits until it is full of junk and then moves out, taking along only the corn-shuck mattress, or one just lets the cabin collapse of its own weakness, and then one builds another just like it. It is, moreover, the Garden of Eden out of which the South was so rudely forced by the Civil War. And it is the Eden of childhood which every child abandons when he acquires a sense of his own corruption or guilt, and which he carries around as a lively image for the rest of his life (for the creator of this child does not burden him with that civilizing mechanism, repression). As we shall see, the myth of the acquisition of guilt is used again and again, but not as myths are usually used. As Richard Chase has shown, the myth, in most art, is added to the action—it broadens and deepens our associations about the action of the story; we say that it “thickens the texture.” Here the myth is all there is. One comes to believe that these myths of Eden and of being “cast out” are the only sources of feeling the writers have, and that without them they would be unable to experience at all. The effect of this dependence on myth has been to thin out the texture of the story, to devitalize the myth itself, and to make the reader’s response mechanical.

In “the Butcherbirds,” by Esther Patt, a little girl wanders off one afternoon with the “queer” woman of the town, a junk collector, who takes her for a ride in her wagon and teaches her about nature. When the little girl learns that butcherbirds are predatory birds who kill snakes and mice by impaling them on thornbushes, she is horrified. But this woman of nature tells her, “We caint hurt butcherbirds, ’cause butcherbirds aint bad. It’s a sorry sight—the snakes, it is—but it aint bad of the butchers. It’s their way. They’s just like folks—and so’s the snakes,” and the little girl, who had “never compared animals with people,” sees the order and necessity of nature, understands that what is natural cannot be evil, and thus, “enlightened,” rejoins her parents. This story may remind us of Wordsworth; the strange lady is quite like the old leech-gatherer on the moors: it is a kind of “Resolution and Independence” at a tender age. But unlike Wordsworth, who knew that he was brought up “alike by beauty and by fear,” the writer discredits the original insight of the child. By compelling the little girl to deny that the butcherbirds are ugly and horrible and by explaining them as “natural,” the writer has weakened the myth of the expulsion from Eden—the acceptance of pain and mortality. For if the writer does not see that these birds are awful, then the myth which sets out to recapture the vision of childhood and include it in a larger one is meaningless. If one chooses only the redemption, then the sin, the fall, and the hard labor—in fact, all the things that we experience concretely, and which are so painfully important that they have to be redeemed—are ignored.

In other stories too, the Wordsworthian image is present. “Her Breath on the Windowpane,” by William Goyen, is about an old Texas woman who finds herself isolated forever from her family, whom she has worked hard and long to support and hold together. And although the story has overtones of “Michael” and “The Last of the Flock,” there is a difference.

There is a pane of glass between me and the world, seems like, and nothin in the world can get to me anymore, only press its nose against the pane and look through at me. All the world seems flat-nosed against this glass . . . and I am separated from everythin in the whole world and feel alone and lost and afraid with no one needin me for anythin. . . .

This is not romanticism, for it is not critical in the way that most romantic writing is. In all the collections under examination there is not a single story of social protest, or even one that strongly implies a criticism of society’s institutions. Despair, in many cases, is substituted for the hard resistance to fortune and the endurance of calamity of the romantic man of nature. And the sense of loss that we perceived in the stories first mentioned we perceive again—experience itself has evaded our grasp.

The figures in the three O. Henry prize stories have at least the virtue of being “natural objects” like stones or trees, they are accessible to observation. The quasiromanticism of Miss Patt and Mr. Goyen goes one step further into the unreal. Their error is one that is becoming more and more characteristic of our literature: it is a tendency toward abstraction. Behind this tendency is the old liberalistic fear that an idea decreases in validity as it gains concreteness and applies to fewer people. The characters of “The Butcherbirds” and “Her Breath on the Windowpane” are only puppets, and their supposed perplexities do not affect us because we recognize again that they are perplexities stated in the generalized language of intellectuals—prosaic, abstract, and moralistic. The hyperbolic speech of the Ancient Mariner or the hard idiom of the Old Cumberland Beggar have a materiality that these writers never attain.

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The nostalgic quest for the “natural,” the search for simple temperaments, the persistence of the theme of childhood—how crucial these must come to be to writers who consciously use subjects that recommend themselves by their very mustiness and historical exhaustion. This kind of false romanticism is always turning up. It is false because it reduces any sense of wholeness or actuality to the “symbolic” or “mythical.” Even dialect, one of the most concrete and delineating devices of writing, so important as a condition of literal reality in Mark Twain, Anderson, and Hemingway (the “classical” writers in the tradition of rural America), has become merely a symbol, the almost ideological representation of a firm, homely grasp on the temper of the country, and therefore on all human circumstance. It is a symbol which many of the modern short story writers use as a convenient substitute for understanding.

Finally, so many of the stories have as their motif the acceptance of guilt. Several contain a scene in which a young boy bruises the head of a snake, and one, “Dawn of Remembered Spring,” by Jesse Stuart, describes a boy’s wholesale slaughter of snakes. When he has ended the slaughter, he discovers two snakes copulating; bewildered, he tells his parents and relatives about it; they are amused, he remains puzzled. This is “mythologies” with a vengeance. Is the boy playing the traditional role of purging the guilt of man? Is he supposed to discover when he grows up that pleasure and delight are always associated with archetypal guilt, and its symbol, the serpent? The immediate result is guilt. We are led to assume that when the boy grows up he will arrive at an adult resignation to the paradoxical conditions of life; but how can we be sure amid this welter of myths? Mr. Stuart is too delicate with his wordless devices to let us know just how this grim embrace of reality takes place.

Comparable to Mr. Stuart’s story and representative of too many others is “The Jersey Heifer,” by Peggy Harding Love, another “Southern” idyll about guilt and sin, from the perspective of New Jersey. A young couple settle down on a farm (“Farming is a way of life,” says the wise and intrepid husband), and the wife, an innocent, muses about the farm as if it were the fantastic Eden of the antebellum South.

She saw the whole farm as a combination Eden and Noah’s Ark, where she and Joe . . . and the cows and horses could live on equal terms, in innocence and mutual respect. In her heart she could not believe that God had made her truly different from the animals she loved, born in sin with a heritage of guilt; and she would gladly have traded all her human knowledge and foresight for Pax’s [the dog’s] trustfulness or the Jersey heifer’s wild, free spirit. “There’s a serpent in your garden,” Joe had teased her one day in May, holding up a five-foot black snake he had found behind the barn, but Phoebe’s faith had not been shaken.

The heifer, however, refuses to cooperate, breaks her neck trying to eat some apples (more mythology), and has to be killed—a sobering experience for the young wife, who realizes now that after the Flood Noah’s Ark was probably chopped up for firewood. This is a howlingly bad story, but the particularity of its badness is typical of a genre.

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All the features I have described — the mute figure, the writer who doesn’t exist, the South as a ubiquitous presence, the specious romantic mythology—are separate images emerging from the same impulse. Caught in a confusion of unlocated emotions, the writer tries to establish some simple relation between an emotion and an object, to locate some definable thing which is historical or archetypal, that will adequately account for the existence of these emotions and thereby identify them—like a blind child groping for something to latch on to in a strange room. Although they are so easy to mock, these stories attempt to recover personal responsibility, a concrete “loveobject,” an unambiguous guilt to replace the general anxiety of industrial life. This is also why none of the stories is critical; why, in fact, they are forced into affirmation—the real spirit of most of our current fiction. Because they seek objects for their love, they must uncritically affirm any world that seems to contain those objects.

For the first time in many years one can read a series of stories whose only point is that the possibility of feeling does exist. But at what an expensive effort have they been written, at what a dissipation of grace and conviction—for all these stories involve a sacrifice of the intellect. It may well be that the mere rediscovery of a clearly “objectified” emotion is so disarming that these artists can meet it only with simple awe. Their temptation is to affirm by hook or crook anything that is permissive of emotion, and to do away with any notion of a larger, comprehensive reality to which they are responsible. One of the dangers of complex, “symbolic” writing is that it so easily becomes a kind of mindlessness, and in these stories several writers have taken the easy way.

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The “Connecticut” story reveals our cultural estrangement from another angle. Connecticut, as everyone has come to know, is a grassy New York. Like the “South,” it has been altogether symbolized and allegorized; the same modern cottage or the same tired advertising man of thirty-five with his tweed suits and his income between twelve and twenty thousand dollars a year, is relied upon in these stories just as are the barns and streams and guilt-ridden children in the others. All the woods are like Central Park; the trains make Grand Central Station, the icy center of Hell, in fifty-five minutes. The writers of these stories are usually older than those of the Southern stories and, by and large, more skillful. The imprint of the New Yorker is on most of them; and, despite current cliché vilifications of that magazine’s bloodless pattern, when they appear outside of the glossy, columned pages, extracted from the parentheses of luxurious advertisements, and are put into a book of miscellaneous modern fiction, one cannot but welcome their precision and acuity of perception.

Connecticut is the antipodes of the South. Unlike the Southern stories, many of the stories about Connecticut have no apparent action at all; no one moves, nothing changes. But the reader senses that something decisive is happening somewhere—beneath the surface of the story, in the next house, or perhaps behind his back. The earmark of this category is a vague but pervasive anxiety that threatens to become terror. Sometimes, as in Dorothy Livesay’s “The Glass House,” the anxiety stands by itself. Other stories at least try to account for the anxiety by providing the circumstances that are supposed to produce it. In Roger Angell’s “Flight Through the Dark,” a businessman returning to Connecticut from Washington contracts the contemporary ailment of anxiety—the result, obviously, of taking thought about anything, especially politics. He is met in New York by his wife, who has driven down From Greenwich. On the way home, his sense of her devotion to family and home allays his discomfort. The reader, however, is left with the feeling that the anxiety, like the monster in James Thurber’s cartoon, still lurks just around the corner. In Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer’s People,” an elderly couple decide to stay at their New England summer home beyond Labor Day. It is the first time any of the seasonal inhabitants has prolonged a vacation, and the townspeople respond to this intrusion by snubbing them and depriving them of necessary services and utilities. The story ends as the couple, huddled together, without light and heat, and with only a fading battery radio between them and chaos, wait for something to happen. The fear that seizes the “interloper” is a real one, but it has become a cliche in our literature. This is because it is used too often in places where, closer attention would show, it really does not belong. The fear of the writer, rather than the fear of the characters, moves us. The process that Freud called the “displacement of feeling” has been operating here and in many of the Connecticut stories where no situation adequate to the emotion turned upon it has been found.

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There has, in fact, arisen a small school of this kind of terror-writing whose aim is to exploit the sense of danger, and to represent acts of wanton and motiveless violence. Robie Macauley and Jean Stafford are the two best writers in this genre, and their fiction is often frightening in the extreme. In Mr. Macauley’s “The Invaders,” a young couple on a deserted beach are met by two young men, one white and one Negro, wearing gray uniforms. The two invaders sit and watch them and refuse to go away, despite the urging of the couple. Terrified, the man and woman begin to leave, and the two strangers follow them—at a distance. Finally the man, unable to control himself, rips a plank out of a rotten stairway and smashes the invaders in the face. This is a kind of bottomless allegory, where none of the terms are public, where the “symbols,” without losing the emotional aura of symbolism, have yet ceased to be symbols of anything. Henry James, the great influence on all these writers about Connecticut, would scorn such devices, for the meaning of James’s horror stories turned upon the assumption that violence is the physical correspondent of a moral state, that fear derives from an actual and identifiable part of the personality, and further, that the image of terror—the ghost, or the beast, or the figure—has a specific moral meaning. Mr. Macauley has released himself from these conditions. Making sure we do not believe that the cause of violence is the one he gives, he asks us nonetheless to believe that a cause is there.

In Miss Stafford’s “A Country Love Story,” a middle-aged couple spend a winter in an old house in the country. All sorts of worries and fears vex the wife, until she fears she is going mad. She thinks that her husband is acting strangely too, as indeed he is. When the winter is over they both realize how dreadfully they have behaved. But the season of unhappiness has left its mark; she has found “that she actually did have a desire—the desire for a desire. And now she felt that she was stationary in a whirlpool.” The confession strikes me as germane to most of the stories about Connecticut. Although this story resembles James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” its leading character’s terror is significandy different from that of James’s John Marcher, who ultimately feels responsible for his own impotence. Miss Stafford attributes her character’s confusion to the snow outside, or the house she lives in, or her husband’s academic life.

The terror in the society of Connecticut would seem to be an intensification of the sense that the quasi-urban life of the upper middle class wants purpose. Connecticut, as it is given us, is the alternative to the Garden of Eden; it is a Hell, or more properly perhaps, a limbo, where confused people are engaged in the daily round of activities which, though painful and punishing, are merely repetitious. At any moment the façade of suburban gentility may fall away and disclose the fear that lies beneath. One has the sense that these writers are attempting to show that relations between people have been emptied of joy and real communication of feeling, and that anxiety has filled the space. What one really finds, on the other hand, is that material conditions— the topography of Connecticut, or the style of house or automobile, rather than any specific personal or social fact—are commonly called the villain. What, then, would a closer consideration of this myth about the outer circles of Hell called Connecticut signify?

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The preoccupation of these writers, in sharp contrast to the “Southern” authors, is with those amorphous feelings of exhaustion called middle age. Apparently without knowing it themselves, the characters of their stories slide into middle age at around twentyseven, or with the first house or child, or with the intimations of mortality which come when a friend or relative dies. This is not remarkable, for while our culture has done its best to deny abrupt and distinct stages of life, it has at the same time filled us with a kind of fear of establishing ourselves in it, whether through family or property or profession; for these are the symbols of responsibility, whose price is middle age. And paying on the installment plan makes it difficult to know just when youth ends and middle age begins—a pleasant difficulty for those who cannot be happy unless they are young.

It is remarkable that one of the great themes of literature—youth, and the most profound experience of youth, sexual love—is so much neglected. Instead, there is a group of stories about old age, in which the question is how to die without disturbing anyone else—not preparing to meet one’s God or resolving on courage or good sense; it is the problem of not being a problem, or a burden, that is their theme.

As for middle age in these stories, it is no longer the period of life when one settles down to the exploitation of one’s abilities, nor is it marked by any rich sense of accomplishment, whether in ideas or in goods. The suburban middle-class life in them is entirely sterile, and middle age a time when, in some obscure way, one realizes that one is a failure. But like the myth of the South, is this not the uncritical acceptance of a formulated and hardened notion about society: that upper-middle-class life, because of an inherent corruption, is doomed?

This “ideal” of Connecticut grows out of the ideology of bohemia that was so attractive twenty and even ten years ago, when bohemia—its citadel in Greenwich Village— represented freedom of mind and body, a revolt from the drab conditions of bourgeois life, and, as often as not, political radicalism. It was not long before some of the intelligentsia realized that freedom was a condition of the bank account as well as of the spirit, and the disaffection with bohemia began. (The same pattern held for their defection from Stalinism, which differed” from the more profound rejection of Stalinism by the intellectuals in the 30’s: these “free spirits” found the discipline of commitment too much for them.) The old bohemia, that of the indigent and neglected artist, a European idea, was abandoned during the depression, but a newer bohemia came to replace it. This newer bohemia, most aptly portrayed in the New Yorker, was a genteel one. Life in Connecticut was a happy vision of all that Greenwich Village had failed to offer. There one might be proud of possessions, might have satisfaction in being a respected and responsible citizen, and might enjoy a delicate, pastoral-urban existence by carrying on a fairly successful, but not too strenuous, business, and by relaxing among the comforts of domestic order.

The spirit of our current short stories is evidence enough that this fashionable ideology-dream has failed also. The anxiety that pervades them suggests a specific deterioration: the diminishing gratification of what, for want of a better word, we call the career. There is a large gap in the life of Connecticut. Its men never talk about their work, nor do we ever see them at it; yet it always leaves them tired out and bored. A man becomes middle-aged, it seems, as soon as he becomes successful.

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The stories of Edward Newhouse provide excellent examples. Mr. Newhouse’s recent collection, Many Are Called, contains three kinds of stories: the first are about the late depression and pre-war years, 1938-1941, in New York City; the second are a group of truly distinguished stories about the life of officers in the Air Force during the war; and the third are concerned with the postwar years in suburban Westchester or Connecticut. The earliest stories are filled with a wry humor, and even a sense of security, about the depression; it was with us, it was grim, and it was sure to pass away, leaving the world cleansed of hunger and permitting the possibilities for success that had been permitted before. The stories about the war show these same young men in a very happy state. For the first time in their lives they have a definite status; they live in a society of their peers where there is no worry about what to do with one’s salary, a carefully limited responsibility, and no anxiety over the worthwhile engagement of one’s energies and abilities. In the army, and especially among officers, men believe that the future will be the same as the past, a belief necessary to the well-being of any society.

When these men are mustered out, however, and find jobs as comfortable executives, marry intelligent women, have lovable children and convenient homes, anxiety sets in. Their jobs are not careers; their work only keeps them from their homes. And when they are at home, they are disturbed because their jobs offer no possibility of gratification. The anxiety that derives from not being able to conceive of one’s job as a kind of destiny, as something which can be worked upon and created, turns to another object upon which to secure itself. This object is the family. But a second and greater wave of anxiety arises from the inevitable but scarcely conscious recognition that no personal relation can satisfy all the demands for feeling and self-esteem that any man makes. There are all the stories in which families are on the point of falling to pieces because of a small argument, in which husbands work themselves into a lather because they discover that their wives are not always in perfect command of their tempers.

The stories of pure terror, like those of Robie Macauley and Jean Stafford, logically follow the constrained ones of Mr. Newhouse. The characters in the former are conceived at the moment when their anxiety breaks loose, when they apprehend that their lives are not merely relations with families and friends, and when they apprehend further that these relations themselves are imperfect. Life then becomes a series of frightening episodes, and association with others an ineffectual safeguard against the fear of being deserted. This is why middle age is so consistently the theme of these stories; for middle age is a time when a man is supposed to steady and sustain the power of his worldly effort, and to be comforted, to some degree at least, in his accomplishment. But the irony here is that there has been no accomplishment—only a family, and that family on the point of dissolution.

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The movement from bohemia, with its excessive demand upon the “free spirit,” to the world of the suburbs and a correspondingly excessive demand upon the family, indicates one fact about the relation of these writers to the culture they document. Like the Southern writers, they are ascribing their conceptions to a general symbol, in this case the suburban life. And this symbol is inadequate, too easy and at hand, too ambiguous and comprehensive, never allowing the writer to inspect the actual conditions he criticizes. Hortense Calisher’s “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks” is this sort of broadly symbolic story, although it is much more intelligent than most we have spoken of. It tells of a young man, the son of a middle-aged widow who has lived most of her life in Greenwich Village. She is an alcoholic, and the story opens with her son’s taking her to a sanitarium in Connecticut at which she can temporarily regain her equilibrium. There, very neatly, the two images are related—bohemia, and the asylum from it, Suburbia. But Connecticut is like a hospital or alcoholic ward; it is only a place to which those who can no longer stand the strain of being “free” are taken; it is no longer even fashionable. The young man finds no comfort in this comparative geography. He visits a friend, one of those perennial, middle-aged students at Columbia, another “old bohemian” who has found his refuge in the arid rituals of marginal academicism. This student is about done for; he has gone in for homosexuality, for “Europe,” and for endless albums of records which he plays continually. At his apartment the young man meets his friend’s daughter (of an early and long-dead marriage), who has come to visit her father. He also meets his friend’s current lover, a young homosexual. After some pretty grim repartee, the young homosexual, in a fit of depression and jealousy, flings himself out of a window. In the ensuing chaos, the young man finds himself alone with his friend’s daughter. The two offspring of bohemia go to a brownstone in the Seventies where the girl finds herself, symbolically, locked out; and so they spend the night in his automobile, parked in front of his deserted apartment in Greenwich Village—an apartment which now seems to him curiously unbohemian.

He sat thinking of how different it would be at Rye, or anywhere, with someone along who was the same age. For they were the same age, whatever that was, whatever the age was of people like them. There was nothing he would be unable to tell her.

All the images of society—Greenwich Village, Rye, or Connecticut—are rejected. The attractiveness of these worlds was of another age; they seem now corrupt and worn out. All that remains is a pure and fragile relation between two perfectly detached and declassed people. They have only each other —not even a job between them. But they do not even “have” each other sexually: they are two of the most tired young people in literature. Perhaps the direct experience of the degeneracy of bohemia and the hypocrisy of Suburbia so paralyzes them that they can only run for cover. There is a great deal of genuine pathos in this story. It seems to me, however, that Miss Calisher is creating more than pathos. There is a natural tendency to overestimate the value of any “haven”—even if that is only an automobile or an apartment—and especially when one has just escaped a particularly harrowing experience. But is this not perilously close to affirming a life no less drab and anonymously safe, no less bourgeois, the life without possessions or homes or families, as something good and full of possibilities, rather than seeing it for what it is, as a last, sad alternative after so many defeats? Indeed, more than one story this year intimates that desire, if not that choice.

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John Stuart Mill wrote: “There is a Greek ideal of self-development, which the Platonic and Christian ideal of selfgovernment blends with but does not supersede. It may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either; nor would a Pericles, if we had one in these days, be without anything good which belonged to John Knox.”

In this passage Mill was opposing two kinds of character. The restrictive Puritanical vision of a universal, symbolic meaning in every act, of original sin in every glance, and of the necessity of a constant, stern selfregard, was to Mill the essence of Knoxism. Opposed to Knox was Alcibiades, the mutilator of Athens’ statues, the anarchic, selfexpressive man, who saw reality as only a medium in which to act, and who became outraged whenever its intractability stood in his way. Pericles, however, combined the Puritan sense of reality with Alcibiades’ love of the creative self—both the powers of man and his limitations.

In the American short stories we have examined, there is to be found on all sides the image of John Knox. The “Southern” writers are like Knox in that they are content to manipulate a series of symbols whose meanings everyone is sure of, and from whose force everyone is now safe (though in Knox’s time, of course, they still exerted great force). The “Connecticut” writers are like Knox because they cherish a too simple set of moral rewards and punishments, yet vaguely intimate a mysterious and “hidden” God who may at any moment upset them all. There are no Periclean moments to speak of.

We must distrust a literature that is so uniform in its moral bias, that lacks Periclean moments. We must distrust it even if our sociologists and psychologists tell us that it gives an accurate picture of modern life. For the Periclean moment remains among our possibilities, in life as well as in literature, at various and unexpected hours, triumphant and defeated. It was there at the debates of the French Assembly during the Reign of Terror, and when Charlotte Corday killed Marat; it was there when Kirillov shot himself in a dark room, when the executioners led Joseph K. out to die, when Dr. Johnson kicked the stone, when Burke finally saw the limitations of his criticism of the French Revolution. It is the heart of what Lionel Trilling calls “the tradition of Blake, Burke, and Wordsworth,” it is the abiding greatness of D. H. Lawrence and of Freud. It was there when Odysseus met Achilles in Hades, and when Walt Whit-man walked through the hospital wards. And it is there in Edward Newhouse when a father bends over his six-year-old son who is beginning to be affected by the world of mass culture and says: “I’m the first line of defense . . . and all my fighting has to be done on Saturdays and Sundays. All right, then, it’ll be done on Saturdays and Sundays; whatever happens, the bastards’ll know they’ve been in a fight.” It is a toughness of spirit, a resilience of mind that will criticize the world more harshly and bitterly than any of the writers I have mentioned have done, and then will work upon that world as if it were the wet, fresh clay into which God breathed. It was what William James meant when he said, “When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of What is poured off is sweet enough to accept.” It is a marvelous quality of literature because it is taken so directly and completely from life, and it reflects what is the essence of life. It is worth all reading, all effort, to find—and my regret is that it has been so little before us here.

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