In Defense of the Novel
WEBSTER, HARVEY CURTIS
In Defense of the Novel The Living Novel. Ed. by Granville Hicks. Macmillan. 230 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster Professor of literature, Louisville University; author, "On a...
...Silly like us, hurt into speaking out, they write so well that they make us see our imperfections and our chance to partially overcome them, to make ourselves and our society better...
...Others could have been included, but these ten speak representatively...
...Even if it means that subsistence is all he can earn, he opposes all cultural directives that ask novelists to be as submissive as most Broadway playwrights...
...If you read what they have to say about the novel, you'll want to read their novels because you'll be convinced that to read them will help you to live well yourself...
...But it does, as Granville Hicks's admirable symposium demonstrates vividly, because there are always novelists and good readers who agree with Jane Austen's comment on her silly lady's taste...
...They excite, suggest, surmise, illuminate...
...This they all do without climbing a pulpit or waving any country's or system's flag...
...they never pretend that their artistic diagnosis is the only one...
...They are persuaders not to read the serious creative work they enjoy deprecating with supercilious wit...
...The enemies of the novel are so many that it seems a marvel that it lives...
...author, "On a Darkling Plain" " 'Oh, it is only a novel,' " Jane Austen has a young lady in North-anger Abbey say, laying down her book "with affected indifference or momentary shame...
...The novelists Granville Hicks includes in his symposium are good, dedicated, not very widely read by the too common reader who equates fiction and euphoria, not very highly praised by the critics who prefer a display of erudition to an intelligent evaluation of the novelist or his work...
...it affirms, but does so unglibly...
...To those who think lives of uncomprehending desperation best, this may sound trite or horrifying...
...They believe in and make manifest the self-knowledge that precedes the knowledge of others...
...I would even go so far as to say that the life of the living novel is less expendable than a good economy or an impregnable defense, here or anywhere...
...The good novelists—all of those included in The Living Novel—did or might have predicted Manchuria, Abyssinia, Munich, Korea, Hungary because they know both man by himself and man in society...
...Articulate and alive they speak to us, whether we listen or not...
...read their books, too...
...The serious novel, which is never smug or solemn, is always (though inevitably embedded in the time in which it is written) "an impulse to shake off the time's mud and fly up to the universal...
...The novel says "no" to chaos, the crisis of this moment only...
...All of these novelists are aware of the complexities that we, as individuals and members of society, must face to survive...
...Few American periodicals treat novels much more seriously than Jane Austen's character...
...novels are back-page stuff, read and written about as though they were faintly superior comic books...
...They say what they know, affirm when they can, never dodge...
...I do not name those I quote, because I believe that to do so would emphasize their differences of opinion, and I want to stress their agreements about the novel as a living force...
...This is not wishy-washiness or inert pacifism unless love is that, too...
...He absorbs the past, lives the present, hopes for the future...
...Probably they would not like the designation, certainly they could not accept sanctification without skepticism, but they are, along with all the others who insist on writing perceptively and well, like the saints...
...indeed, they prove that it does and that it gives living space for those who believe in comprehension and love and do not deny each other the right to disagree...
...For them, novel-writing is a way of life and an act of faith...
...Most periodicals deal at length with only bad or mediocre best-sellers, which are praised far beyond whatever merit they may have...
...Hicks's last sentence in his afterword is a fundamental evaluation of these novelists' concurrence with critics, like Hicks, who watch alertly for the new that is good: "Whatever else may be expendable in contemporary American life, the serious novel isn't...
...At its best, the art of the novel tells us more than we can find out elsewhere about love and death," says one of them...
...Also, they know that the flexing of muscles is futile, dangerous exercise on both sides of the Curtain which no poet or novelist would ever have drawn...
...The novelist must reach for the grown-up" —and help to make him...
...The best-known contributors to The Living Novel are Saul Bellow and Wright Morris, both of whom took a long time getting recognized, neither of whom is rich...
...If you don't know it already, you'll discover that the good novelist, unlike most journalists and like most poets, is never immobilized by a worship of the immediate...
...It is good that Granville Hicks, a fine novelist and critic, has chosen the "young" and uncanonized to speak about the novel that lives...
...They believe that "openness, persisted in, destroys hate," that they can maintain an openness that is like love, by their books help readers to understand rather than hate...
...Christian or agnostic, he is a humanist always...
...Which is the best novelist, which says most eloquently what the living novel is and should be, I refuse to say...
...Those he has selected are better qualified to speak than all but two on the current best-seller lists...
...He dare not write for the denominator that is too common, though he should not sneer at the possibilities of any man...
...They voice different ways of happening in different kinds of eloquence...
...The "intellectual" counterparts of Jane Austen's young lady are those who sneer eruditely at any novel that is not currently rated near the top on the literary stock exchange...
...I have my preferences among them, but all I think I need say now is that they speak, every one of them, as separate persons who believe that the novel lives...
...The reader must be lured up, not the writer down...
...All of them have insight and the craft to communicate it...
...he never ignores either permanence or change...
...He must write for all readers, as far as he can, never forgetting that he cannot write merely to please...
...But they have known when catastrophes were coming and understood what makes them more frequently than politicians, economists and newscasters...
...He has to dislike—he never hates— those who show an "ugly correlation between our unparalleled prosperity and the stridency" that demands a "literature that shows us the joy of life...
...In the novel, all one finds is work "in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineations of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language...
...all of them are young as novelists go (between 32 and 47) ; all of them are or will be read by the readers and critics who are curious rather than arrogant, who are against high- and lowbrow conformity, who know that the novel must live...
...In different and excellent ways, the others deserve recognition and enough popularity to enable them to devote themselves entirely to writing: Paul Darcy Boles, John Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Herbert Gold, Mark Harris, Flannery O'Connor, Harvey Swados, Jessamyn West...
...This attitude has prevailed generally, even among the well informed and intelligent...
...Novelists of quality, like the equally important and more underestimated poets, of course make mistakes in seeing and in writing of what they see...
...It aims at maturity in men and nations...
...Read these novelists on the novel...
...No good writer thinks change is progress, that a deep freeze in every kitchen is the American Way of Life...
...For those who think novels should be substitute tranquilizers, what I have just summarized may confirm their suspicion that novelists are snobs in love with their own singularity, that they have nothing to say of consequence to most of us...
...No more than James or Cervantes do they cower before what skilled craft must present honestly in all its perplexing multiplicity...
...Sputnik is not as important as learning to understand the men who recurrently make, fear and are proud of Sputnik or its equivalents...
...Novelists feel it to be their dangerous joy and duty to diagnose—dramatically and without dogmatism—the sicknesses that, recognized, might bring health...
...The novelist must try for a public that "will work as goddam hard as we work who write," and hope it will grow increasingly large...
...He must write as he must, reach as deep as he can, not ignoring the many, not pandering to the "elite" who might help him with his career...
...They are wrong...
...it will not to those who will to live well...
...He is pious and cannibalistic...
...The good novelists presented in The Living Novel never pretend or tell us exactly how...
...He is never anti-egghead, pompously intellectual, wilfully lowbrow...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 49
