IRRESPONSIBLES: 1949
HICKS, GRANVILLE
Irresponsibles: 1949 By Granville Hicks With this column by Granville Hicks, The New Leader man git rates a new feature periodic guest columns by prominent leaders in politics, science and the...
...Within . . . one generation," he writes, "people have twice undertaken to whip us...
...Why it is an exception is not immediately apparent, since the book portrays race discrimination in the United States Army a phenomenon not calculated to win European respect and is built around a series of official blunders...
...Mr...
...A new trend...
...The literature Mr...
...They were served up by J. [)i)iiakl Adams and Archibald MacI.eish buck in the (lavs before Pearl Harbor, and ihov were dissected and discredited with a thoroughness that should have laid them at rest forever...
...It is the quality Ernest Hemingway most admires, as he demonstrates in To Have and Have Not...
...Bell Tolls, and a dozen short stories, including Fifty Grund...
...Adams has been heatedly defending...
...His latest book is Small Town...
...What is distressing about Johnson's article is not that he is trying to impose his ideas on American novelists...
...someone is always doing that...
...This riav or may not be true, but what ol John Dos Passos' The (irand Design, which Mr...
...For Whom the...
...Johnson's concept of the origins of the two World Wars is breathtaking in its simplicity...
...Irresponsibles: 1949 By Granville Hicks With this column by Granville Hicks, The New Leader man git rates a new feature periodic guest columns by prominent leaders in politics, science and the arts...
...and they were injudicious becaustr~ftiey were based on a grossly inaccurate estimate of the situation...
...Mr Johnson's ideas are not new...
...Johnson deplores is full of persons of incredible staying power...
...Johnson goes on, may be "highly meritorious as literary ware," but they are quite misleading "The literature of social protest, indeed, is never suitable for export...
...But Life says that the novel "depicts the U. S. hombre as a person of great staying power," and adds, "We hope this augurs a new literary trend...
...Johnson does not shrink from the logical conclusion: the literature of social protest had better be abandoned Novelists must write of the common American "with that suggestion of terror that underlies all real respect...
...And this came about because "American literature fails to inculcate in its foreign readers a healthy respect for the common American...
...The common American is "a bad man to monkey with," a fact that Europeans have never understood...
...Caldwell, Hemingway, and Ellen Glasgow, Mr...
...Hicks, as most readers are doubtless aware, is a distinguished literary critic and novelist...
...Here is a book that portrays the President United States as a charlatan, depicts one of his principal advisers as both a dupe and a doublecrosser, and brings together as unadmirable an assortment of Americans as can be found in fiction...
...THE WORKS OF STEINBECK, Faulkner...
...This is exactly the quality that distinguishes so many of Faulkner's characters, the unnamed convict in The Wild Palms, the J3undren family in As I Lay Dying, Lena Groves in Light in August, and scores of others...
...That these undertakings were injudicious^ is attested by the wreckage of five empires: Austrian, German, Italian, Japanese and Turkish...
...The distressing thing is that the Times- prints such preposterous nosense, so crudely nationalistic, so utterly insensitive, so close to the level of the decrees on art and literature of the Central Committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union...
...The rulers of the now-deceased empires, he maintains, appreciate the material strength of this country, but they were deceived with regard to the American people...
...Even more startling is his explanation of the "grossly inaccurate estimate" that, as he sees it, was responsible for the suicidal attacks on the United States...
...J. Donald Adam.-., for instance, emboldened b\ Mr Johnson's article, returns to Ins perenial warfare against Norman Mailer's T7ie Naked and tlw Dead by describing it as "a book well calculated to lower theestimation in which Americans aie held wherever it is read...
...THE EDITORS OF LIFE ALSO ARE IMPRESSED by Mr...
...in the name of a moral code, a religious dogma, or a political faith, and fortunately writers of ability pay no heed...
...The presentation of this fact is "not merely an artistic, but also a civic duty the great task of the writers of the rising generation...
...Perhaps the only wav lo dispose of such notions is to show the talk contradictions tn which Micy lead iliose who accept them...
...Johnson's article, which they cite in praising the awarding of a Pulitzer prize to James Gould Cozzens for his Guard of Honor an exception, Life proudly asserts, to Mr...
...IN THE XEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW recently, Gerald W. Johnson sets forth theories of history and literature that have extraordinary implications...
...Johnson's rule...
Vol. 32 • June 1949 • No. 24
