Living With Books

...Modesto offers a technique by which the personality can be altogether eliminated, and Mr...

...At any time in the past ten years, to be sure, one could find novelists who weren't shying away, but so far as there was a trend, it was in the direction of the new fiction...

...Cowley, is "aggressively nonsocial and non-political...

...I find no fault with the work of Eudora Welty or Carson McCullers or Jean Stafford or any one of a dozen others who are interested in problems of a different sort...

...That, I believe, was an abnormal kind of revulsion, the result of the literary disasters of the '30s and the social disillusionments of the '30s and '40s...

...But it seems probable that, as Cowley suggests, their caution is also a withdrawal from a confused and strife-torn world...

...Norman Mailer is one young novelist who has always been occupied with social problems...

...Even if I didn't know that it had grown out of a series of articles and a movie script, I think I should be likely to say that it was first-rate journalism with some superior Hollywood touches...

...The characters in the new fiction are distinguished by their lack of a functional relationship with American life...

...I want to say firmly that I am not urging everyone, or anyone, to write about social problems...

...the children of light, I believe, are not quite so vulnerable as Mr...

...On the other hand, what he says about the timidity of the younger writers is sound...

...And the least one can say is that his intensity gives power to a somewhat faulty novel...

...They have lost all hope of changing that world for the better, and so they turn their backs on it...

...And yet to some of us it has seemed unhealthy that there should be large and important areas of American experience about which so many talented young writers felt that they could not write...

...The dissenter, moreover, is no mouthpiece for left-wing slogans...

...which is a good thing...

...But the fact remains that this is a thoughtful, many-sided novel, full of vitality...

...In Mardios Reach, as earlier in The Corpus of Joe Bailey...

...it is an anachronism...

...Most of the left-wing novelists of the '30s were not writing under party orders...

...Lardner and perhaps, in their different ways, Mr...

...Among the "new" novelists he names are Frederick Buechner, Robie Macauley, Jean Stafford, Truman Capote and Paul Bowles, and there are, he points out, many others not so well known...

...Felix Jackson's So Help Me God also shows that a thriller remains a thriller, even if it aspires to teach a salutary lesson about character assassination...

...If one can judge from this year's crop of novels, the problem that weighs most heavily on our writers is that of dissent...

...Astonishingly, the year has produced just such a novel as I might have praised--heaven help me!--in the New Masses twenty years ago...

...Nor is there much danger that the lessons of craftsmanship taught by the new novelists, among others, will be forgotten...

...Schulberg and Mr...

...Passion is one of the qualities I miss in the new fiction...

...I have praised particular examples of the new fiction, and I expect to continue to do so...

...That they, who are themselves victims of racial bias, should be so strongly prejudiced against the Negroes is both comprehensible and saddening...

...Schulberg, moreover, has long since freed himself from the delusions that possessed him in the '30s...

...Waterfront is simply an old-fashioned muckraking novel, written with a high degree of technical skill...

...Most of them simply recognize that, of all human problems, the problems of society are not the least important...

...His Dr...

...to a greater extent than is admitted today, they were expressing their own insights and perceptions...

...Matthiessen came closer to doing what he wanted to do in Race Rock than he has come in Partisans, and some critics may advise him to return to the narrow world of his first book...

...The collapse of the Popular Front and the school of fiction it had fostered brought a reaction that was altogether healthy...

...He praises the work of the best of the young writers, but then he makes generalizations about the new novel that apply only to the work of the less talented practitioners...

...Oakley Hall displays some of the less attractive aspects of a business civilization...

...Harrington has conjured up the reductio ad absurdum of conformity...

...It may--it may--also be a sign of a return to the intellectual community of self-confidence and hope...

...What Sykes and Bourjaily and Miss Sarton demonstrate is that one doesn't have to cease to be a craftsman in order to write about social issues...

...To avoid all chance of misunderstanding...

...Harvey Swados sometimes sounds like a new novelist in Out Went the Candle, but he has too much energy to slay within narrow boundaries, and the book becomes an inquiry into contemporary culture...

...Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar elaborately develops the social background of its heroine, and its central theme--the conflict between tradition and revolt--is important, no matter what one thinks of the solution Wouk offers...

...in their own minds, a natural consequence of their desire for formal perfection...

...Jean Stafford's The Catherine Wheel is an achievement for which no apologies are necessary...

...We can also learn that the last thing we want is a revival of the propaganda novel that flourished in the '30s...

...They are sincere in offering this defense, but still one wonders why social problems bore them and why they have kept themselves at such a distance from the mainstream of American life...

...Vance Bourjaily in The Hound of Earth takes an extremely dramatic example of dissent--an atomic scientist who removes himself from society in atonement for his part in the destruction of Hiroshima...

...Dexter Masters, for instance, would not have written The Accident if he had not felt the importance of the problem of the atom bomb and if he had not been deeply moved by the predicament of the scientists responsible for it...

...If more writers arc now invading this area, that at least makes for diversity...

...He specifies: "The setting is seldom one of the centers where policy decisions are made...

...but dogmatism was in the air, and most of them caught it...

...There is no danger of repeating the mistakes of the '30s, if only because the political situation is so different...

...Whether they have academic connections or not...

...My hunch, however, is that a real change in attitude has taken place...

...Sykes supposes...

...How much significance can be found in ten books or even twenty...

...Their care to select small, manageable subjects is...

...In The Naked and the Dead there are passages, especially those dealing with the earlier lives of his characters, that seem to have been lifted straight out of what was once called "proletarian literature...

...It is not easy to say what Mr...

...1955 may go down in literary history as the year in which the trend was reversed...

...The novelists I have been discussing, on the other hand, do not constitute a group, do not share a body of belief...

...The new fiction, according to Mr...

...You can't say that this is a novel about the problem of nonconformity in contemporary life and stop there...

...Call it what you will, there has been a shying away from the larger issues of contemporary life...

...The case has been most strongly stated by Malcolm Cowley in a chapter of his book, The Literary Situation--a chapter called "The 'New' Fiction: A Tidy Room in Bedlam...

...For most of the new novelists, it is a matter of pride, if not actually of temperament, not to feel strongly about anything...

...Don Mankiewicz's Trial deals with two problems of major importance--race prejudice and Communist duplicity--but it deals with them on the level of melodrama...

...in view of the new novelists' fondness for "a remote and peripheral scene," it is worth noting that they arc laid in the tenements and rooming houses of New York City...

...I have commented on several of these novels in The: New Leader as they appeared, but it may be useful to examine them collectively, in order to learn what we can about the trend--if, indeed, there is a trend--and to estimate its possibilities and dangers...

...What worries some people is not so much that dissent is punished as that there is so little of it...

...To me, however, it seems encouraging that he has attempted something so different, even though he has not been wholly successful--and it may be a sign of the times...

...It seems to me that the demagogue succeeds much too easily...

...If, instead of talking about "timidity," Mr...

...The same thing may be said of Gerald Sykes's The Children of Light...

...Moreover, by placing this character in a situation that embodies the stress and strain, the frustration, the apparent purposelessness of modern life--a big department store in the Christmas rush--Bourjaily offers calculated indictment of contemporary civilization...

...A social problem, on the other hand, is something one wouldn't be likely to write about unless one did have strong feelings...

...Because an author has written a "new" novel, it does not necessarily follow that he has declared himself once and for all as a "new" novelist...

...It is a novel about people in an academic community whose lives are affected by the presence of an intransigent dissenter...

...The books I have mentioned are the foundations on which my case rests, but a few other books may be brought into the discussion, if only by way of illustration...

...Robert Coates's The Farther Shore and Millen Brand's Some Hunger, Some Love are not concerned with social problems, but...

...They may write, that is, about the problems and not about the people in whose lives the problems have their reality...

...With the exception of Mr...

...the idea of their interesting themselves in social questions gave them the shudders...

...In 1956, the new novelists may be back in force, their ranks strengthened by a dozen brilliant young recruits...

...In any case, they would insist, it isn't what you write about that counts but how you write about it...

...I think more and more people are getting beyond that stage...

...To begin with, we cannot go far without being reminded that a novel about a social problem is not ipso facto a good novel...

...The Ecstasy of Owen Muir, by Ring Lardner Jr., begins rather promisingly as a satire on a young man who tries to make his actions conform to his beliefs, but soon Mr...

...As Cowley suggests, the behavior of some of the new novelists has been compulsive...

...This is an error May Sarton has avoided in Faithful Are the Wounds...

...I stick my neck out only so far as to say that an important area of human life has been avoided by many talented writers in recent years...

...The problem is there, of course, and it engages the reader's attention, but it is set in a richly complex situation...

...In The Changelings, Jo Sinclair is concerned not with the new problem of conformity but with the perennial problem of race prejudice...

...Modesto is frankly a satire, it would not be fair to judge it by the standards ordinarily applied to fiction...

...The problem is cogently presented, and a remedy is offered--the familiar but by no means negligible remedy of understanding and love...

...Long before the words "proletarian literature" had been spoken on these shores, we had had a multitude of loosely organized, badly written novels on social themes...

...It may be a coincidence that more books concerned with social problems have been published in 1955 than in any of the fifteen preceding years...

...Since Alan Harrington's The Revelations of Dr...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS 1955's Young Novelists Say Farewell To Old Timidity on Social Themes By Granville Hicks You hear it said in critical circles that too many of the writers who have emerged since the end of World War II are talented but timid...

...They are all," he observes, "'serious' new writers, they are trying to produce works of art in accordance with the best literary standards, and they would like to be admired by the critics who write for Kenyon, Sewanee, Hudson, and other quarterly reviews...

...Lardner is swinging a cudgel against the Catholic Church, investigators and informers, and what one of his characters calls "American aggression in Korea...

...Peter Matthiessen's first book, Race Rock, exhibited many of the qualities Cowley attributes to the new fiction: the remote setting, the youthful characters, the personal problems, the preoccupation with form...

...As for the authors of the new fiction, they are...

...Yet what one remembers, looking back on the book, is not the problem but the people...

...at any rate, brought us a surprisingly large number of novels that are concerned with important issues, some of them with specific problems of our society...

...The young girl, Judith Vincent, whose coming-of-age includes the achievement of understanding and love, is only the finest of a number of fine characters...

...One objects to Mailer not because he is passionate but because his passion makes him incoherent...

...He is mad at everything and everybody...

...Though he is no crusader, J. P. Marquand has never been one to avoid "the centers where policy decisions are made," and in Sincerely, Willis Wayde he is again trying to find out what makes businessmen tick...

...Too young to have been directly influenced by the events of the '30s, he has nevertheless acquired, presumably through his reading, some of the attitudes that flourished in that decade...

...Jackson, they cannot be called propagandists...

...As I said when I reviewed the book, I am not convinced that the United States can justly be described as "history's first neurotic nation," but naturally Bourjaily has to show us the picture as he sees it, and I am happy that he has done it so well...

...It has...

...It is an extravaganza and in part an amusing one...

...Her account of what happens when Negroes are forced by a housing shortage to invade a new section of a city is the more poignant because the invaded section is inhabited by Jews and Italians of the first and second generation...

...By and large, however, Mailer's anger and disgust are so diffused that one cannot classify him as a propagandist...

...The new emphasis on form, texture, symbolism, imagery and all the rest of it took extravagant forms, but in itself it was good...

...But now in his second book, Partisans, he writes about a young man who is tempted to become a Communist...

...And in his new novel, The Deer Park, at least one passage reminds one of the antifascist front...

...The characters likely to be treated at length are students of both sexes, young artists and writers, gentlemen on their travels, divorced or widowed mothers, gay boys, neurotic bitches, virtuous grandfathers, old women on their deathbeds, and preternaturally wise little girls...

...In thus describing the new fiction, Cowley has sometimes made the mistake, so easy for the categorizing critic to make, of lumping together good work and bad...

...No one is likely to deny that so richly textured a novel as...

...They, of course, would say that they are bored by social problems, they believe in writing about what they know, and they know nothing about "the centers where policy decisions are made...

...Cowley says, likely to be teachers...

...he is a brilliant, influential teacher and a critic of high sensibility...

...they are close students of the select group of writers they admire, and have learned from them how to set the effects they want...

...Sykes is worried about the rise of demagogy in the United States, and he has told the story of a struggle between a demagogue and an enlightened individual, who happens to be the demagogue's father...

...The tone of the new writing is decorous, subdued, in the best of taste, and every sentence is clear in itself...

...Budd Schulberg's Waterfront isn't an anachronism, for the evil it attacks--labor racketeering among the dock-workers--does not, unhappily, belong to history...

...Some of the satire misses its mark, but a social satire of any description is in these days something of a phenomenon...

...No one is likely to argue at this date that there is a special virtue in writing about social problems...

...Harrington amuses himself--and his readers--by showing what happens when the technique is applied by a young misfit...

...This is not merely a novel with a message...

...Lardner's political beliefs are at this point, but it is all too clear that he is still living in the '30s and sounding a clarion call against the dangers of "rampant fascism...

...Cowley had talked about "alienation," the younger writers would probably have had no quarrel with him...

...If the new novelists have a way of writing as if social problems don't exist, the socially conscious novelists--as we used to say in the old days--may make the mistake of writing as if social problems exist in and by themselves...