Irwin Shaw

...And in Stories...

...For persons tend to become interesting to us if we learn that they held something dear...

...For the New Yorker has been unswerving in its pursuit of worldly opinion, indistinguishable for me from the worldly things sung of in the ads it carries...

...I would include among those of Shaw's stories I continue to admire not only the rightly famous "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses," but also the following tales, less often cited or anthologized: "The Deputy Sheriff," "The Man Who Had a French Wife," and "The House of Pain...

...But as Kenneth Tynan noted, there are sprinters in the theatre as well as middle distance runners, and Ionesco is a sprinter...

...neither was the very wary Harold Clurman, who was, however, pro-Communist during the thirties in the precise sense Fiedler charged Irwin Shaw with hav52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 ing been...

...He may five decades later looking back at us figure as one of Lawrenson's triumphs from the cover of his collected Short rather than she as one of his...

...Shnayerson shows little alertness to rhetorical values not right on the surface...

...One has to believe in what cannot be summarily dismissed...

...T he serious critical judgments of Shaw as a writer and as a person, and most particularly as a person involved in politics, all make the same point: whatever Shaw's views were, he managed not to suffer because of them...

...In this story, which is about a playwright, we are told that while the writer is able to bring off fine first acts, he is not able to develop or conclude a whole play...

...Here I fala is author of Metatheatre, The In- am reminded of Goethe's response tellectual Follies, anch most recently, Im- when asked: What were the interesting portant Nonsense (Prometheus Books...

...But in his short stories Irwin Shaw aimed only at literary excellence, and I believe, achieved it, though I do not think his stories quite on a level with the best tales of Faulkner or Hemingway...

...And I think Shaw tried to follow a mean path, though one of his own devising, and not the one the New Yorker editors prescribed...

...But not your heart away...

...So I have to agree in a way with the judgment of Harold Ross that when Shaw began to write for Hollywood (his novels were really meant to be films: the only thing I can remember of The Young Lions is Marlon Brando's performance in the lead part) he stopped being the writer the editors of the New Yorker had taken him to be...

...Is it possible to miss the implication that many have done better...

...When liberalism had its surfeit of quietism, Mr...

...In fact, what was his life...

...This judgment I think wide of the mark if intended—I think it was—to describe Shaw's short stories, as well as his novels and plays...

...And Mr...

...But I cannot agree with the praise generally given "Sailor Off the Bremen," with its implicit support for the rowdy violence the Communists made popular during the thirties...

...Time put the matter thus: "Before the war, Irwin Shaw won easy fame and money by turning out smooth and clever plays and stories—for many tastes . . ." Diana Trilling described his swings of political opinion as in line with the equivocations of liberal ideology: "When liberalism took its boldest stand on a hatred of war, Mr...

...Handsome, Who can care now, be saddened or ex-unlined, sharp-featured, yet ardent and cited, by his many successes with idealistic, the face of the young Shaw women...

...Now this is an entirely different notion from the very questionable one that there is a talent for starting a full-length play, quite unlike the talent for finishing one...

...Shaw issued the call to action...

...Rereading it today, one wants to ask Fiedler the question Macduff addresses to the messenger bringing word that all his children had been slaughtered: "Did you say all...

...The author does not seem to realize that a life of Irwin Shaw has to be in addition a work of literary criticism...

...not peace, not revolution, and not his art, and he was involved with too many women to have loved any one of them...

...Nothing apparently...

...A s for Michael Shnayerson's biography, it should be clear from what I have already said that I find it lacking in critical judgment...

...Now Shnayerson, citing Shaw's story, sees nothing wrong with the Hollywood values that structure it...

...A man could do worse...

...For me the review cannot genuinely represent an extreme of literary virtue as against the fleshpots of Hollywood...

...he often misses such values when they are perfectly evident...

...taken, and he looks innocent enough But if Irwin Shaw did not give his to have qualified for advice from the heart to any other person, to any cause, "wise man" of Housman's poem: or to his art, then why is his life worth "Give crowns and pounds and guineas/ recounting...

...We never feel in his prose the "uncanniness" of language, its "peal of silence," which according to Heidegger we hear in genuine poetry...

...Being pro-Communist in those days was a way of avoiding the risks Communists had to face...

...Reviewing Shaw's novel Lucy Crown for Commentary, Fiedler went on to attack the author's whole output: "His books and plays with their breathless pursuit of the very latest liberaloid-cliche problem, his improbable dialogue (only he himself apparently talks like his own characters), his limp, watery prose are scarcely worth more than the sentence it takes to describe them...

...Is this not also true of persons...

...Now the same has been said of Ionesco, a master playwright,judged to be that entirely on the basis of his one-act plays...

...Now we do hear the "peal of silence" in the language of Faulkner's "The Bear," and in Hemingway's "A Clean, Well Lighted Place...

...Shaw raised the bones of the war dead...

...I shall give one instance of his judgment: his evaluation of Shaw's story "Flash in the Pan," no doubt occasioned by the failure of the various plays Shaw wrote after the success of his Bury the Dead...

...But Fiedler was wrong and unfair about Shaw's stories, those which, early in his career, appeared in the New Yorker...

...It rather stands for a mean path of competent and, in fact, well-rewarded writing between the poles of extreme devotion to literary values as exemplified by the little magazines and commercial writing as such...

...As for Ross's advice to writers—Give up worldly things and write forthe New Yorker—that seems to me absurd...

...And this may also be the opinion of his biographer, for Shnayerson ends his book with this overall judgment of Shaw: ". . a life well lived...

...not against a war a month past the point when true liberalism demands it...

...It lay in his subservience to the shifts of liberal opinion, which may have been more powerful in Hollywood then than around the New Yorker, though that is hardly the case today...

...Why is this...

...Here we have a thought right out of Hollywood, where different writers are called on to start, develop, and conclude a script...

...Fiedler was right in the main about Shaw's writings, which is to say about his novels and plays...

...But I think it was unworthy of him...

...I do not think so, and thus I cannot include Irwin Shaw among the best in any department, in life or in literature...

...I think it is because moderns tend to be skeptical of general notions, and the sharpness of sensation rivets one's attention...

...Here we see a face flesh-packed any case, the accidental ups and downs and jowly, and the look of a man who of dealing with editors, publishers, pro-has learned not to care at all after hav- ducers, and women one has disappointed do ,not, I think, make a life Lionel Abel, professor emeritus at the interesting...

...Perhaps it is because we have just seen the "worst"—I'm speaking of the Communists, of course —renege on intensity, that we can now think of questioning Yeats's description of the "best," which is beginning to look like an oxymoron: Can those lacking all conviction be reasonably called the "best...

...Reading them again, I noticed there are in them very few descriptions of sensation, something which modern writers have favored and at which they have excelled...

...He seems to have lived by the cynical French adage: "One nail drives out another...

...State University of New York at Buf- The question is: What does...

...Making an analogous point, the young Leslie Fiedler wrote: "The way Shaw has chosen seems to me finally intolerable: to be just right always—not a Communist a month past the time when being a Communist seems (to the most enlightened) a creditable excess...

...These "best" Yeats set off against the "worst," whom he thought filled with "passionate intensity...

...Now this judgment is not invalidated, as Shnayerson thinks, by the fact that Shaw was never a card-carrying Communist...

...So I agree with Fiedler's moral judgment of Shaw, and also with his inference that it has bearing on Shaw's literary worth...

...I say that I agree with Harold Ross on this point and I do, but only in part...

...And this, I think, is the reason Shaw's writing, even in his stories, is so lacking in poetry...

...Thus Mallarme's preference for "the horror of the forest" to the "dense, intrinsic wood of the trees" which so influenced Joyce, Hemingway, and Faulkner, but a taste for which is not to be found in Shaw's prose...

...This was a notion which, it appears from his story, Irwin Shaw also held...

...Those, he remarked, when men believed in something...

...Throw Away The THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 53...

...I agree that Shaw's dereliction from literary values became more pronounced when he opted for Hollywood, but the cause of his dereliction was evident before that, as Trilling and Fiedler noted...

...periods of history...

...On the other hand, I have to take exception to the following (I think overheated) attack by Fiedler on all of Shaw's writings...

...Which tells me that he is not enough of a critic to evaluate Shaw's writings, or the life he led...

...Now what did Irwin Shaw hold dear...

...But if Shaw lacked all conviction, is not this the very description Yeats gave of those he called "the best...

...What if at the very start of his we see in that photo is oh so different career he made it to bed with Helen from the face of the same writer some Lawrenson of Vanity Fair...

...He must have been in heart to any particular woman or for his early twenties when this picture was that matter to the art of writing...

...24.95 Lionel Abel n the cover of Michael Shnayer- ing cared somewhat, a man who may son's biography of Irwin Shaw have (in fact, had) given away crowns there is a photo of the youthful Shaw and pounds and guineas but not his at his typewriter...

...I have looked again into Shaw's short stories, and I find many of them excellent, not written in "watery prose" and still deserving of praise...