The Vanishing Humanist

...contributor, "Encounter," "Commentary" My personal litmus test for the good and consistently readable literary critic is a very simple one: If I continue to respect his intelligence and perceptiveness as much when he is wrong—that is, when he disagrees with me—as when he is right, then I know he is a critic I can trust and shall certainly enjoy...

...That is how O'Faolain squares oft against Faulkner, and I have quoted this random passage at length to show what I mean by saying that, even when wrong, O'Faolain is somehow "right" and always amusing...

...The second meaning I put forward more tentatively, and if it represents a part of the thought which impelled the statement, it is much more interesting...

...Certainly the lacquered surface of Hemingway's last book did not hide this painful struggle, and, just as certainly, O'Faolain is right when he emphasizes the necessity of it for Hemingway...

...But let me quote again: "We begin to see that he has two possible meanings in mind [in making that startling statement...

...As a result, O'Faolain is forced to perform some rather ungainly gyrations...

...Though "a romantic up against the despotism of reality...

...he does not earn my disapproval, but pays for it himself with an inevitable lukewarm-ness, which, when one thinks about it, may be the price for consistent humanism in our savage and complicated day...

...The direct, undeniably personal reaction is becoming as rare as the masterpieces those other critics are continually lamenting and hailing, in both cases for obscure and futile ideological motives...

...When they are really writing, that is, speaking out of their natural genius, the Holy Ghost talks through their mouths...

...Which is to say, his taste or knowledge may have faltered or missed the mark, but his ability to feel his way into a writer, his values, his stand on what really counts in both life and literature cannot possibly be compromised by this passing lapse or misjudgment...

...But the best essay in O'Faolain's book is the one that comes closest to home for him as a fugitive Irishman...

...The first is that it is untrue not in a practical or moral sense but in the craftsman's sense...

...It implies that, to him, memory is much too coarse a sieve to hold the delicate and fearful intrinsicality of the past...

...It is always provoking when a writer has more genius than talent," O'Faolain complains wittily about Faulkner...

...though it is patently true that the modern novel has lost the Hero who, in O'FaoIain's words, "represents a socially approved norm,' and that his place has been taken by the anti-Hero who, deprived of society's sanctions, is forever bent on defining himself and setting up his own personal suprasocial codes, the generalization is too pat and too diffuse for it to be successfully applied to so wide a range of novelists...

...I have never liked Elizabeth Bowen, yet his preternaturally sensitive essay might even send me back to reading her novels...

...Sean O'Casey, with whom Faulkner might be compared, is this sort of writer...

...Though he is certainly not the first to point out that Hemingway has never written about his life in the United States at any length, nobody before him has tracked this "self-bereavement" down to Hemingway's significant silence on his childhood...

...And, of course, like all old friends and good literary critics, O'Faolain soon gives one occasion to disagree both mildly and violently with him...

...So, when one recognizes just this forthright quality in Sean O'FaoIain's modest but incisive book of essays on a group of significant writers of the Twenties, it produces a distinct, pleasantly tingling shock, as when one suddenly hears the voice of an old friend after years of separation...

...To do this he will have to summon up the energies of his soul for the greatest act of courage in his long and gallant struggle—the courage to face that past which he has so far buried away in the cupboard with the old dance programs, piles of letters and faded photographs, memories too painful to handle...

...Bv rejecting it...

...From such a magnificent beginning, O'Faolain then goes on to discuss the relationship between Hemingway's suppression of his tenderness—which is also his childhood, home, parents, relatives, all traditions and atavisms — and the difficult and obstacled development of his personality...

...I do not think that O'FaoIain's taste is at fault here —for he does choose As I Lay Dying and Light in August as Faulkner's best works—but that his misinterpretation can be laid to his sheer lack of knowledge of American literary traditions...

...And nobody has associated this silence both with Hemingway's esthetic of the "captive-now" and his concomitant belief that "memory, of course, is never true...

...One sees this clearly where O'Faolain, while correctly praising Faulkner's humor in contrast to his tragic vein, attributes its ancestry to the Negroes and overlooks completely Mark Twain and the frontier humorists who are Faulkner's most legitimate forebears...

...My violent disagreement, however, centers on the chapter devoted to William Faulkner, where O'Faolain, who delivered these essays first as a series of lectures at Princeton, seems intent on overturning a fashionable literary idol...

...You never know what is going to come out of their mouths, golden wisdom or the most abysmal folly, and they least of all know it, because one of the great gifts that God gave them is their unself-consciousness...

...All those critics who flung their hats in the air on the appearance of The Old Man and the Sea should ponder these, words: "I am not sure that Hemingway's personality has gone 011 developing...

...To fit all in neatly, we find him furiously inventing complementary terms, so that Joyce's Daedalus becomes the archetypical Martyr and Hemingway's Jordan turns out, after all, to look uncomfortably like the old-fashioned Hero whose disappearance O'Faolain is annotating...

...Now, for the first time, I have begun to understand that elegant detachment and over-refined tentativeness, which O'Faolain so tellingly ascribes to her position as an Anglo-Irish writer, and to her exile's nostalgia-heavy sensitivity to an alien society's fakes and hypocrisies...

...But the cultivated European critic often makes this sort of mistake about American culture...

...Indeed, As I Lay Dying has much more to do with Dickens than it has with "the bitter, cruel, rank laughter" of the Negro...

...If it is to develop further, he will now have to face up to the limitations of his central device, get more room to spread, humanize his mystique by considering—I choose the word—a greater variety of human problems...

...Elizabeth Bowen—and this is what endears her to O'Faolain's Catholic humanist heart—is too firmly planted in "the great, central humanist tradition of European culture to take refuge in hereafters.'' as does his bete noire, Graham Greene...

...His wrongness, in fact, is not in this particular passage but rather in what it leads up to, which is to prove that because of his sloppy writing, his unconcern about the facts in his novels, his heavily moralized and abstract characters, Faulkner's novels are romantically inflated, unrealistic, and frequently unreadable...

...when the divine current is not working, they talk through their hats...

...As a fugitive from Ireland's holy wrath, O'Faolain is almost occupationally unsuited to understand or appreciate that strange mixture of cosmopolitanism and provincialism which Faulkner represents...

...Obviously he would prefer Bowen's way out of the dilemma, yet the tragic figure of Joyce stands in his path, reminding him of another struggle against the puritanical bogs and parochialisms of his native country, another sort of detachment...

...Once lift your eye from the actuality of the moment, he seems to say, and you are distracted, deceived, deflected, lose focus, strike without accuracy, and the next thing you know you are in the rough of the sentimental, or the bogus...

...In fact, only when he comes to deal with so thoroughly Europeanized an American writer as Hemingway does O'Faolain perk up and produce the consistently intuitive evaluation one expects from him...

...As O'Faolain says, this is indeed one of the most startling statements ever made by a writer...

...In this period of artistic drifting and doldrums, criticism has too often the habit of assuming the impersonal tones of belligerent dogmatism or, even worse, the flaccidly accommodating accents of chronic uncertainty...

...Gorky was another...

...It is a professional warning, not at all unlike what a golf professional means when he tells us to keep our eye on the ball...

...as when we say that a thing is off the true, or when we speak of a true balance...

...so was Whitman...

...Mildly I would enter a demurrer against the theoretical framework that he has chosen to hold together these essays...