TROMPING ON BABIES
Green, Martin
BOOKS TROMPING ON BABIES MARTIN GREEN On Moral Fier JOHN GARDNER Basic Books, $8.95 [214 pp.] There is always something atCractire, to me at least, in an attempt to relate moral values to...
...England has been the home of anti-modernist theory and moralism in fiction and criticism...
...Wouldn't you know that a man who wants to defend ,traditional values against modernism would appeal to "the philosophers" for sr would coin words like "suivant" and "sequaceous" and "audiculous" (glossed as timorously audacious...
...He speaks of Tolstoy's spiritual crisis, and t.he theory he evolved from it, that a man "should try to feel out in his heart and bones what God requires of him---as Levin does in Anna Karenina, or Pierre in War and Peace...
...The major tradition is that rep,resented by creepy Roth...
...But that judgment is interesting only because Coleridge was such a fine practical critic...
...Of course, that is what Mr...
...BOOKS TROMPING ON BABIES MARTIN GREEN On Moral Fier JOHN GARDNER Basic Books, $8.95 [214 pp.] There is always something atCractire, to me at least, in an attempt to relate moral values to aesthetic...
...If you can't see that, you have no business setting up your shingle as a critic...
...Wilt it do to say that she and they are Commonweal...
...No .touch of anything creepy there...
...There is something to be said for the Inklir~g line of literary imagination, but unfortunately---~and for Mr...
...And if we were thinking of the novels of Godwin and Lewis and Maturin and de Sade, we would have judged our times to be in quite as parlous a state as Mr...
...He has things to say a~ut the theater, and a good deal (quite interesting) about modern music...
...It is implied that we had this many-centuries-old tradition, by which moral and aesthetic ,~alues wen~ together, and thenamostly after 1950 awe had rootless experimentalism...
...Gardner has no affiliation to the school of D.H...
...Northanger Abbey disposes of the Gothic novel for ur but it was not a great cultural event then...
...But Huck's is not an entirely convincing or trustworthy voice---it's a device that works by means of the questions that voice provokes in the reader...
...18 August 1978:J36...
...There are too many times when he seems to be simply wrong about the books he cites...
...I was struck again, as so often, by how traits go in groups, in in, tellectual types as well as in others...
...Gardner is no second Coleridge...
...And ~,bout Philip Roth all he has to say' is a parenthesis...
...And when Gardner speaks of "the entirely trustworthy, authoritative voice which leads through Pride and Prejuch'ce, or The Sleepwalkers, or The Golden Bowr'-.~the authorial voice ---he adds, "it may speak ~n dialect, like Huck Finn...
...Leavis--he dismisses Lcwrence as a hysterical writer--~but rather to that of LR.R...
...The group that included Charles Williams, C.S...
...but above all, if what you are looking for is moral fiction, Roth's work is Where you should spend of your time and enthusiasm...
...my father use to go up and down our country in the middle of winter on his wired-together Farmall tractor, plowing out our neighbors' driveways, getting no pay but talk and hot coffee...
...The historical perspective seems to me wrong...
...He is also concerned with contemporary criticism, but in that area he does not name names, nor is he specific in other ways...
...The trouble .is not the obvioushess of the .thesis, just its application...
...Gardner says) and modern criticism encourages it .to do so...
...Gardner is saying...
...When we come to more m~jor issues in ~he argmnent, we are again dimttisfie& When objecting to modern cxiticiun, Gardner saYs, 'Whe aesthetic game~tayers identified with post-modernism do exist, ~uBglin8," obscenely giggling and gesturing in the wings while the play of life groans o n . . . . " (p.54) Whoever he is thinking of must include Susan Sontag, and the writers she has identified herself with: Beckett, Artaud, Cioran, Lei.ris...
...But there is more than one England of which that is ,true...
...Philip Roth...
...On the other hand, he gives a polemical account of the ideologists of the modern mood in morals and aesthetics, like Wittgenstein, Sa~tre, and Freud...
...p.149) Healthy and hea.rty and folksy and rugged, his sentences shine with honest sweat and sex appeal...
...Lawrence or _9 F.R...
...But the tradition only looks that solid from where we stand, looking back...
...But Tolstoy's spiritual crisis came after he wrote those novels, a~d it led him to repudiate them and their heroes...
...But the problem is a tough one, and more than bluffness was required...
...and would give us scraps of autobiography like .this...
...Bad art is always basically creepy...
...But from them he jumps back to great classic names, in philosophy and literature, like Aristotle, Chaucer, and Shakespeare---to what he calls "the tradition...
...Gardner's argument that is very unfortunate--it is only a second-rate or third-rate tradition in English tic.tion...
...Gardner is concerned mostly with modern American fiction, and a great number of novelists are discussed: Philip Roth, William Gass, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Grace Paley, and ten or twelve less familiar nemes...
...they are all very much on the same theme and with the same thesis...
...But surely Mailer was saying rather that the war grew out of the American lust for adventure snd the sexual rivalries between men which that involves...
...The book is a series of essays rather than chapters, in the sense that they don't form separate steps in a sequence of argument...
...Roth is almost exclusively moral in his concerns--that is his strength and his weakness...
...I.f .had lived in the age of Jane Austen, we (men like Gardner and myself) would almost certainly have felr that we were living in the age of Anne Radcliffe...
...with the obvious corollary, that artists and critics must stop being ashamed of their moral impulses and stop dividing t.hose off from their aesthetic sensibility...
...my mother] read aloud to my father when he milked the cows and sang harmony with him on "The Old Rugged Cross...
...About Mailer's Why Are We In Vietnam?, Gardner says that its thesis is that "American feelings about Vietnam grew out of our feelings about our brother blacks...
...This is an ~ppropriate Choice for several reasons, and one of them is that Fowles is English...
...He uses a Tolkien-like myth to emblemize his various arguments, and sees his own work as, like Tolkien's, in defense of civilization, against the forces of darkness...
...Tolstoy's Whar Is Art...
...hat is its first and most obvious identifying sign_9 Warhol...
...Conviction is what counts...
...a~d creepy is not a critical term...
...p.150) Now Roth is a very fine artist...
...Gardner's hero as novelist and moralist is John Fowles...
...figures in that group (uneasily, to my eye) but otherwise the 350 years of literature before 1950 are omitted...
...The thesis is the obvious one: that modern fiction, and art generally, betrays civilization (it trornps'ou babies, Mr...
...Tolkien and the Inklings...
...Lewis, and o~her writers, centered a~ Oxford around the time of the Second War...
...especially when the relation attempted is a purposeful one, which offers to resolve the conflicts most of us feel between the two...
...Gardner judges our r Coleridge said, "The age seems sore from excess of stimulation...
...No one could try this more boldly and bluffly thaa John Gardner, as his title promises and as the extract quoted shows...
...535 obscenely giggling and gesturing in the wi.ngs of li.fe...
Vol. 105 • August 1978 • No. 16
