A guide for the guideless

...And after a good deal of strenuous grappling with problems that aren't really problems at Commonweal: 248 all, and (if I may dare say), possibly mis-formulating problems that are problems, this estimable critic comes away with a poor thing: that women's experience of the world is different from that of men and it therefore follows that the consequent ' 'point of view will not be easily accessible to men," nor will the "search of the inner reality of that experience," an "interior journey" analogous to the "mythic or legendary journey to Hell of the hero of the epics...

...no powerful tyrannical editorial hand attempts to fuse into some spurious synthesis the essentially disparate parts...

...Author's italics) As novelists they say no such thing, in either tongue...

...Perhaps the perspective that time sometimes confers upon those who also serve by standing and waiting...

...and each essay could just as well have appeared separately from others, with scarcely any substantial revision , in a quarterly journal or in another or even rival work of similar scope and ambitions...

...what themes seemed to preoccupy us, what trends or tendencies surfaced in the literary culture or could be dredged up...

...The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing * is, before and after it is anything else, an artifact, a product, a commanding presence which compels attention...

...Where is that good writer, that good and interesting writer James Purdy, very much alive, very much with us...

...But what, then, is the sound of received wisdom...

...And though she brings high intelligence to her unenviable task of attempting to establish "women's literature" as a literary category in its own right, she makes quite unnecessary distinctions along the way (the sense, for example, in which Jean Stafford may be called "an author of women's literature" whereas Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, not to mention Susan Sontag and Hannah Arendt, may not be so called...

...Nothing is less interesting than a work greeted with unrestrained enthusiasm a season or a year ago...

...Nathan Scott, in a scrupulous attempt to scant no one who qualifies for admission by whatever margin, inevitably includes (as does Weales in "Drama" and Hoffman in' 'Poetry'') writers and works truly best forgotten...

...618 pp...

...Who wrote what...

...A more secure sense of where we are and where we've been lately...

...Why did we care...

...18.50...

...Why, save in the interest of the archivist, should a comprehensive record be kept...

...Yet if a sense of arbitrariness settles in very soon, how could it be otherwise...

...Thus, following in this curious order Alan Trachtenberg's obligatory essay "Intellectual Background," a blindingly swift survey of what seems to its author the period's prevailing climate of opinion, ideas, events, we have A. Walton Litz's "Literary Criticism," Leo Braudy's "Realists, Naturalists, and Novelists of Manners," Lewis P. Simpson's "Sputhern Fiction," Mark Shechner's "Jewish Writers," Josephine Hendin's "Experimental Fiction," Nathan A. Scott, Jr.'s "Black Literature," Elizabeth Jane*Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing...

...Generosity exceeds judgment in making room for some of the poets included . . . unless (and this is no small consideration) one is writing about one's friends, colleagues, associates and mahave much to answer for within a fortnight of publication...

...So sensible a critic as Elizabeth Janeway can't bring herself to call Sylvia Plath's juvenile novel The Bell Jar by its proper name and must render a soft, evasive judgment ("episodic and uneven") while hastening to add this can be said of many poets' novels...

...What does it all mean...

...Why should we care...

...they share no more than the general ideas and sensibility of what we are still and seemingly forever trapped into calling post-Modernism—by now a condition of servitude, a judgment of cultural history, and something of a joke from which there is no escaping short of some tremendous new extricating movement in the arts, the creation of a new epoch in literary history which at the moment shows no sign of appearing...

...The division of the territory and nature of the task assigned each contributor requires of each a certain dutifulness of tone, a solemnity and purposefulness of manner, whatever the underlying dismay may be...

...Such ephemera apart, however, it showed heroic restraint to wait a long generation before undertaking something in the way of a definitive study while the subject is still—is by definition—emerging, stopping its motion long enough to take some readings before it resumes its headlong career...

...I notice with some embarrassment that with far less cause I have been most discreet in the use and omission of names, Black, Jewish, Southern, females, "experimental," theatric, poetical...

...What is impermissible to feel, think...

...Linz, a fine critic and historian of criticism, as a matter of fact, does not even mention the French philosophers, possibly for the same reason Sartre and Maritain (and any number of other immensely influential figures in their time) do not turn up in these pages—namely, that this is a "guide" to American writing, though one might have thought that a guide's obligations are transnational...

...The procedure and its necessities distort judgment...

...yet so often the massing of names and works seems arbitrary, by turn too many and too few, got together by main force for purposes of thesismongering, and in general the ideas liquefy before our eyes, are readily replaceable by other, conflicting, even opposed ideas: an exchange, as likely as not, of one received idea or truism for another...

...Not only for his life as a writer almost by inadvertence he may well have stumbled onto a rich lode for narrative art, once we've disposed of his unfortunate designation of it as "true life novel" and the soggy suggestion of pulpy trash it conveys...

...What else is new...

...Strategic aesthetic depth leaving some room for maneuver, retreat, cautious advance...

...though whether they are better—more useful, more suggestive, closer to the actualities of the best writing of the period—than the other generic, thematic, formal, or whatever, categories is open to question...

...Far more seriously than a mere matter of life and death: do I deserve to be taken seriously...

...Who's up, down...

...If I allow Derrida to pass unread, do I deserve to live...

...way's "Women's Literature," Gerald Weales's "Drama," and three essays by the editor "Poetry: After Modernism," "Poetry: Schools of Dissidents," "Poetry: Dissidents from Schools...

...Daniel Hoffman's fine, valuable essays may be taken as a final case in point...

...A generation ago Kingsley Amis left his teaching post in the academic provinces because his rearguard elders there forbade him to teach Henry James on the grounds that the American novelist was too contemporary a writer...

...We scarcely recall the names of writers we regarded highly as recently as a decade ago, much less a generation...

...What are the central texts, the primary ideas, the things that matter most in a treacherous world...

...Well (one is inclined to say), yes and no and several degrees of perhaps...

...Tall, of military though not stiff bearing, silvery-grey and black in tone, powerful, robust though not portly, yet somehow slender for all that, a matter primarily of fine tailoring...

...or under that equally spacious umbrella "experimental" fiction, a catch-all for troublesome writers who do not fit conventional categories, though one would have supposed that in this terminal phase of post post-Modernism the exhausted term "experimental," with its whiff of graduate school, writers' workshop, Soho lofts and hip bars, could no longer be used with a straight face...

...By an undeserved stroke of luck we appear to have beaten the ambitious Czechs of Charles University to the wire: thirty-five twelve-months years had passed since the end of World War II, the last great literary watershed, and until now no thick square book of general reference SAUL MALOFF, a novelist and critic, is a regular contributor to Commonweal and other magazines...

...Not a Jew or Black or a Southerner, certainly not a realist or naturalist but surely in that enormous room, the "novel of manners," some space might have been cleared for him—actually Purdy is a mannerist who by degrees has collapsed into his mannerisms and eccentricities while (or perhaps because) no one was noticing...

...and: Seeing it in the cold glare of print, wouldn't you like to reformulate that statement...

...devoted to a comprehensive overview of the immediate and ongoing past in order to light the way to the future for writers, critics, theorists instead of abandoning them to their feckless devices...

...Yet in fact until recent years even the terms of organization upon which the book is organized—categories more sociological and demographic than literary—had not emerged as the general currency...

...What's in, out...

...Moreover, the Guide proves luckless in its timing, one of the risks when dealing with writers in mid-careers: while it was in press, so were (to limit examples to two) Mailer's The Executioner's Song and Roth's The Ghost Writer, in both instances exhilarating recoveries from what can be seen as some confusion of direction in the writer's literary life, a misuse of power or, worse, a loss or at least diminution of it but here in these new works clear evidence of a strong reassertion of it, arguably Roth's best work in a long time and perhaps the best single work of Mailer's career, one that can have important consequences for his life as a writer if he assesses it wisely...

...indeed a philanthropic one, representing, not anything venal, certainly not on the part of the book's makers, its editor and contributors, serious persons all, nothing worse than a peculiar kind of cultural anxiety, American to the bone: Where are we...

...By and large each stays out of the other's way...

...so theirs is a fiction radically insistent on its own fabulism, on the fictive character of its own constructions, and they turn out 'novels which imitate the form of the Novel, [as if they had been written by authors imitating] the role of Author.' As novelists, they say credo quia absurdum est...

...In short, it has the unmistakable look of authority, a book made to last a lifetime and instruct at the very least one full generation: though mint-fresh, looking in a slant light as if it has been with us for a very long time, quietly establishing canonical texts and incontrovertible ideas...

...and the unfortunate nullifying phrase "turn out" aside, this is being said, or sung, of writing in no way remarkable, writing far too slender to bear the burden either of Scott's weighty ornamental inscriptions or of John Barth's modish ones (Barth's being the interior quotation, modish in the Johns Hopkinsian way now as when it was first published in 1967...

...and it should be said that no ' 'point of view'' is easily accessible to the men posited in such argument since they are made of straw, the better to burn...

...Hendin has a weakness for other deplor25 April 1980: 247 able terms and phrases—for example, "holistic" as applied to anything, "anarchic" to fiction, "experimental hero...

...The electronic impulses connectCommonweal: 246 ing Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan with Yale and Hopkins now girdle the inhabited world...

...in any case not much there will withstand churlish scrutiny...

...A harmless enough enterprise, then...

...Happily, such journeying has fallen out of fashion in recent years...

...and tends to speak of some of them—since there they are now, on the page before us, as it were immortalized if only for the moment—rather grandiosely and in a too-literary high manner, as in such a passage as this...

...Only that good, interesting, finely balanced critic Gerald Weales sees fit to mention him, and then only as a playwright, which Purdy was and is not and briefly became, yet another novelist afire to storm the stage...

...sometimes, never, often...

...Was it an episode in the history of literature, or of commerce, of the publishing trade, of publicity and promotion, of a weekly periodical's need for "copy...

...It may originate in the modernist sense of life as problematic, but unlike the great experimental fiction of the 1920s, it does not lament the brokenness of experience as a sign of the decline of Western civilization...

...Belknap/Harvaid...

...To drop the odious persiflage, the Guide bears the imperial imprint of Harvard/Belknap, is over 600 large densely-printed pages in length and narrowly averts the appearance of textbook, if indeed it does, by virtue of the designer's subtle craft...

...Ardor isn't to be expected, hardly anything more heated than a stray enthusiasm of the moment: when it all seems so distant, how can it be otherwise...

...When it walks into a room you can't help noticing it, a gentleman of the old school, the sort they don't breed any more...

...Instead it offers an acceptance of dislocation as a major part of life and perhaps a hope that the displacement of traditional ideals might permit new ways of dealing with the human situation...

...here in America, where there are no provinces, it is almost no joke to say that courses organized around the work of promising first novelists are gladly accepted into the maw of the polymorphous curriculum and no one to raise an eyebrow...

...Edited by Daniel Hoffman...

...This: "Postwar experimental fiction," Josephine Hendin writes, "may be seen as a search for ways to deal with the violence, brevity, and rigidity of life...

...Of course there has been, and some of it has even been worth reading: the point, the important point, is that courses in Contemp Lit attract the students, the impulse buyers at the point of purchase, and it would be wanton to turn them loose among the novels and poems of their time without pointing them in the right, or at least some, direction through the thickets of their own experience, else what are mentors for...

...But no matter: Got up to look like the rock of ages, the Guide is built on shifting sands...

...25 April 1980: 249...

...To die young seems the most terrible of literary fates—Harvey Swados and Warren Miller, to name only two, might just as soon not have lived at all...

...It carries to great extremes the themes of combativeness, fragmentariness, coolness, and meaninglessness that are the marks of modern fiction...

...This is by no means to say there hasn't been a steady stream of books, from both trade and university presses, telling us where we were last season, last year, or (everybody's favorite slice of time) last decade...

...Stalwart, diligent critics each and every one...