The State of the Novel in the Seventies
Grumbach, Doris
Doris Grumbach The State of the Novel in the Seventies • • Everyone pontificates about the health of the novel: it's dying, they say, or it's dead, it's totally original or entirely derived,...
...Tap one critic on his shoulder and he will spin around and give you some unadulterated scorn for its present shape ("I remember when fiction told a story," said one getting-on fellow to me recently...
...Doctorow is an example...
...Take for example then-75-year-old Andre Gide's Imaginary Conversations (translated from the French by Malcolm Cowley and published here by Knopf in 1944...
...His admiration for Dashiell Hammett's novel, Red Harvest, and for The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man is not shared by most of us, except in studies of pop culture and in the memoirs of Lillian Hellman...
...While it is clear that the announcement of its death has been premature, it's not so clear what if anything is keeping it alive, what kind of life-support systems are working for it...
...Gide wrote in 1944: "All these new American novelists are seized and held like children by the present moment, by the here and now...
...The tendency among the novelists of the sixties and seventies seems to be to crest too soon...
...others have not grown appreciably...
...One young man told me: "It's precisely where the old shibboleths of character, setting, dialogue, and plot disappear that the novel is reborn...
...Doctorow is an example...
...It is, further, a time when every possible style is being used because the age has settled on no one or acknowledged no one as definitive for itself...
...A Month of Sundays is written in his fine, fanciful prose, but it fails to fill the promise we have been holding out for him ever since Poorhouse Fair, and it seems safe to say now that he will forever dwell critically among the more distinguished pygmies...
...But Gide was seriously mistaken, it would seem, in his high regard for Caldwell—no one seems seriously aware of him now...
...A Month of Sundays is written in his fine, fanciful prose, but it fails to fill the promise we have been holding out for him ever since Poorhouse Fair, and it seems safe to say now that he will forever dwell critically among the more distinguished pygmies...
...The judgment of the present lacks distance, naturally, but more than that, it suffers from instant and momentary enthusiasms engendered by the craft of reviewing...
...They are early over-achievers...
...As fiction...
...Recently, he has, like Truman Capote, abandoned the arena of the imagination and formed "fiction" over the catafalques of current events, Presidential conventions, the 10 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1975 1967 peace march on Washington (he called The Armies of the Night both History as a Novel and The Novel as History), the flight to the moon, New York City's graffiti, and Muhammad Ali (The Fight...
...Saul Bellow has just published his eighth novel, Humboldt's Gift...
...Its miners are men of talent, but the subject-matter begins to be repeated, and is now in a stage at which it becomes ripe for caricature...
...We instead resort to the topical, hoping that will catch the reader—all the "Washington novels" of Allen Drury, Ward Just, and George O'Higgins, all the current-event novels like Judith Rossner' s Looking for Mr...
...There he will be companioned (I solemnly predict) by such now-acclaimed writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Barth, James Dickey (whose best-seller Deliverance may well fall out of literary consciousness in direct proportion to its meteoric rise a few years ago), Joyce Carol Oates (a novelist so prolific that her reputation may well sink under the weight of over-production), James Baldwin (a meteoric rise and a descent almost as steep, at least thus far), Ralph Ellison (acclaimed for his first and only novel, Invisible Man, and seemingly stymied about ever writing another...
...Doris Grumbach The State of the Novel in the Seventies • • Everyone pontificates about the health of the novel: it's dying, they say, or it's dead, it's totally original or entirely derived, it's never been better, it's never been so bad...
...I doubt it...
...I like to gain some perspective about what is happening now by looking back to what eminent critics thought was happening thirty years ago, and then deciding how close we can come to properly estimating our own moment...
...Two names remain on this hit-or-miss list: John Gardner and Vladimir Nabokov...
...There is very little evidence that the majority of them have maintained the first fine bloom, the protuberant promise their first work showed...
...I like to gain some perspective about what is happening now by looking back to what eminent critics thought was happening thirty years ago, and then deciding how close we can come to properly estimating our own moment...
...The judgment of the present lacks distance, naturally, but more than that, it suffers from instant and momentary enthusiasms engendered by the craft of reviewing...
...They "bring it off," however, in contrast to the long list of experimental writers—the surfictionists, as Raymond Federman calls them: John Hawkes, Ronald Sukenick, Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski, who bring it off brilliantly only on occasion...
...Two names remain on this hit-or-miss list: John Gardner and Vladimir Nabokov...
...There is very little evidence that the majority of them have maintained the first fine bloom, the protuberant promise their first work showed...
...They are early over-achievers...
...Goodbar and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood—forgetting that the topical will hold only for the moment but no longer, but the exploration of the interior human landscape never becomes outmoded because the interior human landscape persists...
...Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Reynolds Price, Ellen Douglas, Willie Morris, still write with what Alfred Kazin has called a characteristic fluency...
...His chameleon-like ingenuity has intrigued and interested us all...
...Take for example then-75-year-old Andre Gide's Imaginary Conversations (translated from the French by Malcolm Cowley and published here by Knopf in 1944...
...It is a time of many imitators and no master, that paradoxical state in which one feels a model lurking behind the followers but the model is either too far back or too much of a combination of many to be singly named...
...It turns out to be long, impressively philosophical, but less interesting than a number of his earlier books, so one wonders about his ultimate standing in the pantheon...
...He is perhaps the most interesting writer of fiction in our time, but I am loath to bet on his interest for the next century...
...Gide confesses that he found Faulkner very hard "to become acclimated to" but that he now regards him as the most important of the lot...
...He is a good, strong writer, of that there can be no question, but my doubts cluster about his inability to find, after that first novel, a subject for his skills...
...By virtue of the strength of his masculine self-assertion, his literary machismo, he has endured into the seventies, ever since the fine first novel, The Naked and the Dead, he wrote after World War II...
...he points to Faulkner and Caldwell especially: "If one believes what they are saying, the American cities and countryside must offer a foretaste of Hell...
...Will the glowing, technicolored screen (movie or TV) displace the scenic art, as Henry James called the art of fiction, the "director" the novelist, the bland eyes of the watcher the eager reader...
...Everyone, including this reviewer, went wild this winter about his Ragtime...
...The patriarch of American critics, Allen Tate, is still alive and publishing (his latest collection of essays is Memoirs and Opinions...
...he Alternative: An American Spectator December 1975 11 Doris Grumbach The State of the Novel in the Seventies • • Everyone pontificates about the health of the novel: it's dying, they say, or it's dead, it's totally original or entirely derived, it's never been better, it's never been so bad...
...Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Reynolds Price, Ellen Douglas, Willie Morris, still write with what Alfred Kazin has called a characteristic fluency...
...Its miners are men of talent, but the subject-matter begins to be repeated, and is now in a stage at which it becomes ripe for caricature...
...Lawrence did his, and Henry James and yes, Charles Dickens...
...Among the young, one hears absolute derision for the novel's storytelling past, the Dickensian decades—and unbounded admiration for the non-narrations of Thomas Pynchon, the anti-romans of Robbe-Grillet, Natalie Sarraute, and Monique Wittig...
...he Alternative: An American Spectator December 1975 11 Doris Grumbach The State of the Novel in the Seventies • • Everyone pontificates about the health of the novel: it's dying, they say, or it's dead, it's totally original or entirely derived, it's never been better, it's never been so bad...
...It comes down to preference: I would now rather read a minor work by Nabokov than any highly-touted major work by anyone else...
...Vitiated and attenuated, I believe, is the once-vigorous and gifted school of Jewish writers: Wiesel, Malamud, Roth, Herbert Gold, Salinger, grouped here not (it would be vulgar) because they are Jews, but because their subject-matter often is Jewish...
...Gide confesses that he found Faulkner very hard "to become acclimated to" but that he now regards him as the most important of the lot...
...True then...
...He was wrong about Stein-beck, whose social-protest novels have disappeared from public consciousness and seem to have made no influential waves toward our time, and whose stories are read mainly by American high school students in issues of Scholastic...
...Will the glowing, technicolored screen (movie or TV) displace the scenic art, as Henry James called the art of fiction, the "director" the novelist, the bland eyes of the watcher the eager reader...
...We have no giants, I have said, no himalayas, but more climbers from the base camps than ever in the history of the novel...
...Gide's example is instructive: he won a few, lost a good many...
...Some of the promised giants have, to my mind, turned into capable but none-theless unimpressive dwarfs...
...One positive summary judgment can be made about the first half of the seventies...
...But Gide was seriously mistaken, it would seem, in his high regard for Caldwell—no one seems seriously aware of him now...
...And Nabokov...
...Gide's example is instructive: he won a few, lost a good many...
...There is no author he would rather read, he goes on, than the author of A Farewell to Arms, but he is not captivated by John Dos Passos' "formula" writing: his "intrepid modernism is the sort that seems old before its time...
...Number 16 of Gide's talks with himself concerns "The New American Novelists...
...Forster saw as necessary to the creation of character...
...There is of course the continuing phenomenon of Norman Mailer...
...Saul Bellow has just published his eighth novel, Humboldt's Gift...
...While it is clear that the announcement of its death has been premature, it's not so clear what if anything is keeping i...
...Of him we now know nothing, and even if he has begun to write, his work is still obscured by the bejeweled and moneyed, the rocket-launched careers of the Michael Crichtons, the Irving Wallaces, the Jacqueline Susanns, the Herman Wouks, the horde of ladies producing Gothic novels for other ladies, the suspense and mystery writers, all the children of the fictional mire...
...There have arisen no visible giants and no uniquely original shape for the novel...
...There is of course the continuing phenomenon of Norman Mailer...
...Some of the promised giants have, to my mind, turned into capable but none-theless unimpressive dwarfs...
...As fiction...
...The tendency among the novelists of the sixties and seventies seems to be to crest too soon...
...We have no giants, I have said, no himalayas, but more climbers from the base camps than ever in the history of the novel...
...We instead resort to the topical, hoping that will catch the reader—all the "Washington novels" of Allen Drury, Ward Just, and George O'Higgins, all the current-event novels like Judith Rossner' s Looking for Mr...
...He is a good, strong writer, of that there can be no question, but my doubts cluster about his inability to find, after that first novel, a subject for his skills...
...Gide is appalled by the "pain and horror," the "strangeness" of American fiction, by the way it has plunged into the abyss of sin and suffering...
...Such ephemera will last, as social commentary and history...
...The reviewer reads so much, so much of it worthless, that his delight knows no bounds when he comes upon something which appears to be original and good...
...Well, he mentions Faulkner, Stein-beck, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, and, in the same breath, Dashiell Hammett...
...truer now...
...Gide was right about Faulkner: hisshadow still falls heavily upon the seventies, particularly upon regional, Southern writing...
...Touchl% On the other hand he extols Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, a now almost-forgotten proletarian novel about a strike, and his short stories in The Long Valley as far superior to The Grapes of Wrath...
...They "bring it off," however, in contrast to the long list of experimental writers—the surfictionists, as Raymond Federman calls them: John Hawkes, Ronald Sukenick, Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski, who bring it off brilliantly only on occasion...
...Like the epic will it have exhausted itself, only this time in multiplicity and the strivings of too many minor practitioners...
...While it is clear that the announcement of its death has been premature, it's not so clear what if anything is keeping it alive, what kind of life-support systems are working for it...
...It comes down to preference: I would now rather read a minor work by Nabokov than any highly-touted major work by anyone else...
...he points to Faulkner and Caldwell especially: "If one believes what they are saying, the American cities and countryside must offer a foretaste of Hell...
...Everyone, including this reviewer, went wild this winter about his Ragtime...
...What we seem to be short on is the kind of interior vision, the inside knowledge of oneself and the informed guesses about others which E.M...
...He appears to be a distinctive voice on the American scene, a view strengthened by a re-reading of his earlier novel, The Book of Daniel...
...Such ephemera will last, as social commentary and history...
...One positive summary judgment can be made about the first half of the seventies...
...It turns out to be long, impressively philosophical, but less interesting than a number of his earlier books, so one wonders about his ultimate standing in the pantheon...
...I doubt it...
...truer now...
...He appears to be a distinctive voice on the American scene, a view strengthened by a re-reading of his earlier novel, The Book of Daniel...
...If I were going to place odds on survival of reputations into the next century I would think seriously about Gardner...
...He is perhaps the most interesting writer of fiction in our time, but I am loath to bet on his interest for the next century...
...Gide is appalled by the "pain and horror," the "strangeness" of American fiction, by the way it has plunged into the abyss of sin and suffering...
...Gide wrote in 1944: "All these new American novelists are seized and held like children by the present moment, by the here and now...
...And Nabokov...
...They are both inventive and playful writers, with extraordinary suppleness of mind and craft, writers whose production is as constant as the novelists of the nineteenth century and whose interest in experimentation never flags...
...His chameleon-like ingenuity has intrigued and interested us all...
...Lawrence did his, and Henry James and yes, Charles Dickens...
...Recently, he has, like Truman Capote, abandoned the arena of the imagination and formed "fiction" over the catafalques of current events, Presidential conventions, the 10 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1975 1967 peace march on Washington (he called The Armies of the Night both History as a Novel and The Novel as History), the flight to the moon, New York City's graffiti, and Muhammad Ali (The Fight...
...His enduring reputation suggests a parallel longevity for the rich and fertile strain of regional writing, from Mark Twain, to Faulkner, to Flannery O'Connor, and into the present...
...What we seem to be short on is the kind of interior vision, the inside knowledge of oneself and the informed guesses about others which E.M...
...Vitiated and attenuated, I believe, is the once-vigorous and gifted school of Jewish writers: Wiesel, Malamud, Roth, Herbert Gold, Salinger, grouped here not (it would be vulgar) because they are Jews, but because their subject-matter often is Jewish...
...But, of course, we can be sure that there is now in some obscure city (probably not in New York, if history tells us anything) a young man or woman just starting out, with a strong parochial sense, and a sense of place and its people, who will define this age as Faulkner defined his, as D.H...
...The vein has worn thin and finally almost out...
...Pure, egocentric taste...
...They are both inventive and playful writers, with extraordinary suppleness of mind and craft, writers whose production is as constant as the novelists of the nineteenth century and whose interest in experimentation never flags...
...Among the young, one hears absolute derision for the novel's storytelling past, the Dickensian decades—and unbounded admiration for the non-narrations of Thomas Pynchon, the anti-romans of Robbe-Grillet, Natalie Sarraute, and Monique Wittig...
...But, of course, we can be sure that there is now in some obscure city (probably not in New York, if history tells us anything) a young man or woman just starting out, with a strong parochial sense, and a sense of place and its people, who will define this age as Faulkner defined his, as D.H...
...Gardner, to my mind, has never equaled his first brilliant literary switch, Grendel, a poetic retelling of the Beowulf epic, even in his acclaimed Sunlight Dialogues, but it is his willingness, indeed eagerness, to make the method of narration suit his donnee that marks his work as somehow special...
...Well, he mentions Faulkner, Stein-beck, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, and, in the same breath, Dashiell Hammett...
...Goodbar and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood—forgetting that the topical will hold only for the moment but no longer, but the exploration of the interior human landscape never becomes outmoded because the interior human landscape persists...
...We are short of writers like Henry James, Marcel Proust and, after them, Lawrence, Woolf, and Joyce, who propelled their highly individual, introspectiveviews of the world and themselves deep into us...
...It is, clearly, almost impossible to see one's own age properly...
...One young man told me: "It's precisely where the old shibboleths of character, setting, dialogue, and plot disappear that the novel is reborn...
...In fact, the stories, he rhapsodizes, "equal or surpass the best stories of Chekhov...
...Touchl% On the other hand he extols Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, a now almost-forgotten proletarian novel about a strike, and his short stories in The Long Valley as far superior to The Grapes of Wrath...
...By virtue of the strength of his masculine self-assertion, his literary machismo, he has endured into the seventies, ever since the fine first novel, The Naked and the Dead, he wrote after World War II...
...The reviewer reads so much, so much of it worthless, that his delight knows no bounds when he comes upon something which appears to be original and good...
...Has its tendency to meander rather than form one strong main stream diminished it...
...Choose one, or more, and mark in the appropriate blank space...
...It is, clearly, almost impossible to see one's own age properly...
...Like the epic will it have exhausted itself, only this time in multiplicity and the strivings of too many minor practitioners...
...others have not grown appreciably...
...Why did that characteristic go out of style, do you think...
...His enduring reputation suggests a parallel longevity for the rich and fertile strain of regional writing, from Mark Twain, to Faulkner, to Flannery O'Connor, and into the present...
...There have arisen no visible giants and no uniquely original shape for the novel...
...Touchl, encore...
...The vein has worn thin and finally almost out...
...Has its tendency to meander rather than form one strong main stream diminished it...
...His admiration for Dashiell Hammett's novel, Red Harvest, and for The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man is not shared by most of us, except in studies of pop culture and in the memoirs of Lillian Hellman...
...It is, further, a time when every possible style is being used because the age has settled on no one or acknowledged no one as definitive for itself...
...Touchl, encore...
...Forster saw as necessary to the creation of character...
...He was wrong about Stein-beck, whose social-protest novels have disappeared from public consciousness and seem to have made no influential waves toward our time, and whose stories are read mainly by American high school students in issues of Scholastic...
...True then...
...Pure, egocentric taste...
...We are short of writers like Henry James, Marcel Proust and, after them, Lawrence, Woolf, and Joyce, who propelled their highly individual, introspectiveviews of the world and themselves deep into us...
...John Updike's seventh novel appeared this year...
...If I were going to place odds on survival of reputations into the next century I would think seriously about Gardner...
...And when the moment passes, where will the American novel have gone...
...Why did that characteristic go out of style, do you think...
...It is a time of many imitators and no master, that paradoxical state in which one feels a model lurking behind the followers but the model is either too far back or too much of a combination of many to be singly named...
...Who were the ones worthy of consideration then...
...The patriarch of American critics, Allen Tate, is still alive and publishing (his latest collection of essays is Memoirs and Opinions...
...Choose one, or more, and mark in the appropriate blank space...
...Tap one critic on his shoulder and he will spin around and give you some unadulterated scorn for its present shape ("I remember when fiction told a story," said one getting-on fellow to me recently...
...Who were the ones worthy of consideration then...
...Number 16 of Gide's talks with himself concerns "The New American Novelists...
...John Updike's seventh novel appeared this year...
...Of him we now know nothing, and even if he has begun to write, his work is still obscured by the bejeweled and moneyed, the rocket-launched careers of the Michael Crichtons, the Irving Wallaces, the Jacqueline Susanns, the Herman Wouks, the horde of ladies producing Gothic novels for other ladies, the suspense and mystery writers, all the children of the fictional mire...
...In fact, the stories, he rhapsodizes, "equal or surpass the best stories of Chekhov...
...Perhaps because it is so deeply rooted in a sense of tradition and place, the literature of the American South, particularly its fictional prose, is still vigorous...
...Perhaps because it is so deeply rooted in a sense of tradition and place, the literature of the American South, particularly its fictional prose, is still vigorous...
...Gardner, to my mind, has never equaled his first brilliant literary switch, Grendel, a poetic retelling of the Beowulf epic, even in his acclaimed Sunlight Dialogues, but it is his willingness, indeed eagerness, to make the method of narration suit his donnee that marks his work as somehow special...
...And when the moment passes, where will the American novel have gone...
...There he will be companioned (I solemnly predict) by such now-acclaimed writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Barth, James Dickey (whose best-seller Deliverance may well fall out of literary consciousness in direct proportion to its meteoric rise a few years ago), Joyce Carol Oates (a novelist so prolific that her reputation may well sink under the weight of over-production), James Baldwin (a meteoric rise and a descent almost as steep, at least thus far), Ralph Ellison (acclaimed for his first and only novel, Invisible Man, and seemingly stymied about ever writing another...
...Gide was right about Faulkner: hisshadow still falls heavily upon the seventies, particularly upon regional, Southern writing...
...There is no author he would rather read, he goes on, than the author of A Farewell to Arms, but he is not captivated by John Dos Passos' "formula" writing: his "intrepid modernism is the sort that seems old before its time...
Vol. 9 • December 1975 • No. 3
