A TEST OF THE ART-NOVEL

...Indeed, in the novej "The Heat of the Day" this description does more to hold up the action than to further it...

...self, with a general air of attractiveness and ease...

...It is a passage in which she describes her heroine under quite special conditions,, namely, she is having a meeting with a man who wants to sleep with her...

...In fact, Elizabeth Bowen is not a novelist of sensibility at all, if by that phrase one means a writer with a special, idiosyncratic vision of the world...

...I know that not all readers will feel all of these emotions, but I am sure that all of them will have the sensation I had when I first read a book of Henry Green's—the sensation that a new area of human experience had been boldly opened up before me...

...in fact, it is still being written .by.,8 few surviving novelists in the English-speaking world...

...Her clothes fitted her body, her body her...

...TB—* * • WHICH BRINGS US to Elizabeth Bowen...

...the writer seems to be trespassing on territory which literature, understood "properly," should keep away from...

...With these preliminary remarks made, we can now proceed to our test of the art-novel...

...Yet there is an art-novel—"Ulysses...

...But what catches one's attention is the sense of the writer stepping back and setting up her easel, trotting out the most striking colors—a sense of the full-dress portrait,,, with an absolute quota of blazoned feeling in every stroke...

...Compared with Green, most writers seem too literary, though, after reflection, one realizes that they are in fact not literary enough...

...Nature had kindly given her one white dash, lock or wing in otherwise tawny hair, and that white wing, springing back from her forehead, looked in the desired sense artificial — other women asked her where she had had it d6ne...

...And he would lift his great brown eyes, and say, 'They come from Smith's,' while she wondered, 'Are my stockings, straight, I wonder...

...what now appears distinctive about it is not so much its pure act of sensibility as the combination of a sensibility, undistinguished in itself, with an adroit, sharpeyed understanding of people and manners, a talent for the drama of emotional discovery, which brings her closer to Jane Austen than to such writers as Virginia Woolf or . Marcel Proust...

...and this is certainly a strange 'feeling to have when ope .is dealing with a novelist of sensibility...

...She was young-looking— most because of the impression she gave of still being on" happy sensuous terms with life...

...But look at it more closely: notice that the passage has established perfectly the banal rhythms that exist side by side with our deepest emotions...

...To embrace this confusion, this dark point, by dragging out the phrase "a novelist of sensibility" just won't do...

...It is important, however, to realize that the novel in its broadest scope is hardly identical with the artnovel...

...Yet there is one disconcerting factor in this analysis—and that is that Miss Bowen is not content to do the traditional novel well but is always trying to attain a sensibility of her own...

...And all without leaving the object under examination in the lurch for a moment...

...One can say that, roughly, it started with Flaubert...

...they are more frightened of the odium of preciousness,and obscurity than they are of a bayonet-charge, or, to think of something less remote, of appearing as a character in a Mary McCarthy story...

...Instead, the constant effort one feels, the straining towards some secret of the emotions, acts as a disruptive, often irritating force...

...Her eyes were gray...

...It is not an unusual passage for Green, and expresses very neatly his particular style...

...But how to produce trivial dialogue which is well-written...

...it functions within the story without breaking one's stride...

...her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts...

...Raymond Rosenthal has written for Commentary and is a frequent contributor to The New Leader...

...Flaubert himself posed the problem many years ago in a letter to a friend while he was hard at work on "Madame Bovary," and I can best wind up this very short test of the art-novel with his words...

...Sons and Lovers," and "The Enormous Room" are random, disparate examples...

...That, but only that, about her was striking: her looks* after the critical glance, could grow on you...

...THE FIRST THING evident from this passage is that Green has discarded a lot • that ordinarily goes under the heading of literature...

...the sense of the girl herself and of the man who is looking at her—with a richness of rhetoric unique in the presentday novel...

...In the cases of Waugh and Isherwood this is not so apparent...

...For my contention is that Elizabeth Bowen, though an excellent writer, is not an art-novelist even in her best works...

...Her complexion, naturally pa&j.fine, soft, appeared through a pale, fine, soft bloom of make-up...

...With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of the lips...

...Both Watigh and Isherwood, to my mind, and with dfid recognition of their showy talents, have nothing at all to do with the art-novel...

...no, it is rather that one expects from a writer of Elizabeth Bowen's gifts a sharper sense of what is peculiarly hers, expects it and yet, remarkably enough, never gets it...

...that he has woven all of it together—the cliches of tiresome office procedure...

...she had become accustomed to being glanced at...

...Her arms built great thighs on herjt^n his mind's eye, while she might be asking him, 'About those needle valves in stainless . . .', made her quite ordinary calves into slighter echoes of what he could not see between knee and hip, as she might be r saying, ^Now those break vacuum cocks . . .', but which, so he thought, must be unimaginably full and slender, when she wanted to know where the 'accessible traps' came from, white, soft, curving and rounded with the unutterable question, the promise, the flowering of four years' imprisonment with fouf thousand twirps...

...and it is interesting to note that the critics who resort to it are careful not to tell us what her sensibility is sensitive to, what, indeed, makes it inalienably Elizabeth Bowen's...

...and, most significantly, the English language is pared down to its heart—pure Anglo Saxon is the starting-point of all of Green's most intricate literary maneuvers...

...He said: "During the last three or four months I have written some sixty pages: I am afraid that it will continue thus...

...When one reads "Back," this passage does not obtrude from the page...

...That is undoubtedly first-class writing, sensitive, clever, graceful...

...Looking back at her novel "The Death of the Heart...

...What I am presently writing risks being right put of Paul de Kock if I fail to give it a more profoundly literary form...

...This is quite clear in her latest novel, which, if it had stuck to the emotional facts of the material, might have been as much of a success as "The Death of the Heart...

...she is too finished, too excellent a writer of English, too sensitive an observer of life, to be dismissed easily...

...In Koestler's case this is now apparent...

...if you continued to know her, could seem even more to be growing for you...

...jfKie which might be used with enlightening results in the field of the art-novel...

...Zukofsky, who is one of the purest of practicing American poets, had selected poems and parts of poems, had commented sharply on them, and by this means deemed it possible to give his reader a view of what he considers poetry...

...on the contrary, many critics would claim that Waugh, despite his obvious derivation from Ronald Firbank, has created an individual style and form, and that Isherwood, despite his thinness, writes novels that are in the truest tradition of the lightly satiric novel of manners...

...Now it is clear that Miss Bowen cannot be placed in the same category with novelists like Waugh and Isherwood...

...the sidelong, hurried glances of lust in a world committed to the practical, the machine...

...But] if I remove the triviality, I will remove the substance...

...Now here is another quotation from another writer, Henry Green, whom I consider to be writing the real artnovel...

...most critics nowadays shun such terms with a positive zeal...

...Imagine anyone at a loss to name Virginia Woolf's quality of vision, or Proust's...

...The newness, the shock, the seeming simplicity of the language and the actual, rich rhetoric that Green has rediscovered in the ordinary words of everyday usage—all this is the mark of the true art-novel...

...It is a common failing, but in Elizabeth Bowen's case it is a failing which can be appropriated usefully for didactic purposes, LET .ME QUOTE a passage from Elizabeth Bowen's latest novel...

...They lack the essential quality—that of uniqueness of vision and language—to be counted among the prime-movers of the English novel...

...I emphatically disagree...

...It is a good idea and, though the difficulties are great...

...Here is the quotation: "She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent...

...There is also a slight shock associated with reading this passage from Green: obviously this is not the usual way such matters are handled in the run of fiction...

...even the critics who flee avant garde evaluations like the plague have taken over the critical platitude that Koestler is a journalist of ideas, a superior one, of course, but still a journalist...

...Indeed, now that I have the job of" reviewing Elizabeth Boweh's latest novel, I can think of no better way of dealing with .the problems she raises Wan by setting up...

...Elizabeth Bowen has been victimized by her superior knowledge of and adherence to past literature...

...For instance, Koestler, Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood are all interesting, skillful novelists, but they can by no means be regarded as artnovelists...

...in a very limited and sketchy manner, aJund of sample test of the art-novel The very term "art-novel," with its implication of exclusiveness and snobbery, is bound to produce antagonism...

...She is, if you will accept the paradox for a moment on faith, too eloquent...

...And it is not simply because her latest novel lacks a center—in large part that was its artistic intention—or that its characters are shadowed with the ambiguity, the formless fluidity of life in a war-harassed London, and so shadowed lose in definition what they gain in nervous mystery...

...I have chosen a passage from his "war" novel, "Back," which treats of somewhat the same human situation: a man working in an office after his return from a German prisonerof-war camp, who suddenly becomes erotically aware of his secretary...

...and" when one speaks of the art-novel, one is always speaking of prime-movers, that is, those novelists who give the language a new shape and tone and the novel itself a new perspective...

...she is weighted down with all the tricks and trappings which she has been intelligent enough to glean from the accumulated richness of the English novel...

...APOETRY ANTHOLOGY WAS edited recently by Louis Zukofsky carrying the title, "A Test of Poetry...

...However, the cliche "'a novelist of sensibility" does , little to explain her.- For In her presence the dominant feeling I have Is the difficulty of isolating and naming her distinctive quality...