Lover's Quarrel with America
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS & WRITING Lover's Quarrel with America By Raymond Rosenthal Martin Green's book on American literature, Reappraisals: Some Commonsense Readings in American Literature (Norton, 250...
...it adds to the fixity the reasons and awareness of this fixity, and it is precious...
...Men like Emerson bring out the brawny male in every twopenny essayist and penny newspaper columnist...
...The broad, abstract, mythical qualities of his writing, from Moby Dick to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, derive their impact and power precisely from the author's intellectual limitations, his stupidity, to put it bluntly...
...Martin Green has reversed the conventional critical procedure...
...His solution to the problem of 'sensitiveness' was, compared to Lawrence's, a compromise...
...Though, because they have so frankly enacted weakness, they have had more than their share of humiliating patronage from the literary world...
...This review amounts merely to an introduction to the man and his incredibly robust mind...
...Partly in order to let fresh air into the cloister, but even more to douse the poisonous fumes that are emanating therefrom today and spoiling the general atmosphere...
...he does not have some prefabricated mold, of either the social or the "entertaining" variety, into which he insists that literature must fit...
...His appearance, in a literary situation dominated by received opinions and conventionalized response, was bound to produce a long moment of stunned uncertainty...
...but when the critic comes close to home and starts roughing up our local boys, such as Henry James, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, Whitman and Faulkner, that is a horse of a distinctly different color...
...They have assumed and lived out everyone's weakness...
...What the author has said is by and large what he means...
...WRITERS & WRITING Lover's Quarrel with America By Raymond Rosenthal Martin Green's book on American literature, Reappraisals: Some Commonsense Readings in American Literature (Norton, 250 pp., $4.50), has been granted a curious mark of distinction...
...If any generalization can be made about the classics of American literature as they have been treated by our foremost modern critics, it would run somewhat as follows: The American writer, starting with Hawthorne, through Melville, Whitman and Twain, and ending with Faulkner and his imitators, is characterized by low intelligence and high mythopoeic sensitivity...
...On Henry James: "James certainly was seeking an ideal civilization, and making use of the real only to that purpose...
...He describes his book as polemical "arguments addressed to a kind of general reader and intended to change that reader's whole mind by giving each subject its aspect of public and urgent importance...
...I must admit that I have been shocked too...
...they are aimed with unerring acumen at their objects...
...On Mark Twain and "Huck": "But above all, where Huck does exist, it is as a narrative voice (a wonderfully fresh and flexible one) not as a full personality...
...On Melville and American "romance": "This (its melodrama) is a weakness of specifically American romance...
...and he will certainly be around for a long time to come...
...Even when the author's blunderings are justified by that all-forgiving, commodious word, the Unconscious, the reader is constantly being told that the critic, having by his delicate operations engineered the author's salvation from his own stupidity, is somehow superior to the very works he praises...
...but, luckily, 1 do not have any vested interests and my mind is open to argument, particularly an argument conducted with such brilliance, painstaking concern for detail, and obvious love for the subjects discussed...
...but without attempting to disguise or cancel the one with the others...
...After all it is easy to be "revolutionary" about some distant French or Italian writer whom no one ever reads anyway...
...For the romance tradition, so far from being strong in America, was in fact feebler there than in other literatures...
...not the fanciful ones which the so-called avant-garde blows up or defends so doughtily...
...But his imagination was not bold the real...
...He does not believe that the guiding notions of "alienation," "myth," "the Gothic novel," or the abstract ideas propounded by D. H. Lawrence in his nowfamous, generally accepted critique of American writing, can really explain the books they intend to, or enhance our understanding or enjoyment of them...
...Green's criticism is attacking the fortress of taste erected by such formidable critics as Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, Lionel Trilling, T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis, which has now become, he believes, a fortress of conventional, rote-like response not merely to literature but to the whole of reality...
...Except for a laudatory notice by James Harvey in Kenyan Review, none of the important literary journals, not to speak of the Sunday book sections, have bothered to deal with his closely reasoned, impeccably written, quietly revolutionary criticism...
...Emily Bronte, for instance, avoided this debilitating equivocation, this disastrous split between fact and fancy...
...Everything in Wuthering Heights, however melodramatic, even supernatural, quite simply and firmly happens...
...Yet, so far as I remember, nothing quite on Green's level has shown up: nothing so original, so brilliant, so profoundly upsetting to received opinion...
...Green has written a series of essays on the writers mentioned above, plus Salinger, Nabokov and Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature which disagree fundamentally with the accepted critical estimates...
...Criticism," the great French critic Thibaudet once said, "above all fixes a taste which is already fixed...
...Green is an Englishman...
...Limned, so to speak, in profile, he appears to me the unlikely fusion of Lionel Trilling's sensitivity and F. R. Leavis' intransigence...
...They are particularly associated with the cause of liberalism in all its phases...
...he will inevitably have to be confronted...
...The silence that has clamped down around him and his book is rather frightening...
...Moreover, Green is no Maxwell Geismar or Clifton Fadiman...
...For example, on Emerson and his relation to "sensitiveness": After describing this trait as a disease "which runs through the history of Western literature since 1800 as persistently as tuberculosis," Green tells us how such figures as Tolstoy and D. H. Lawrence reacted to it and overcame it...
...It was midway between the latter's achievement of strength and Kafka's embracement of weakness...
...Huck has no moral experience, no full relationships, no physique, no psychological type, no social personality, no sexuality, no violence, no impulses but a purely conventional mischief, curiosity, timidity...
...Strangely enough, although criticism of American literature has reflected almost all schools of criticism abroad, Green's book is the first to adopt this attitude on a wide-ranging scale and apply it to the bulk of our literature...
...It also adds a conventional varnish and an exterior conformism, and this is dangerous...
...The obvious contrast is Salinger's Holden Caulfield...
...He always wrote better than he knew, in every sense of that word...
...And, in general, these unusual qualities, this talent for precise definition, are not deployed in a void...
...he has lived and taught here, and he has an advantage in that he comes to his subject with the fresh wonder of a stranger...
...Even more decidedly, these pamphlets are not intended to feed the scholar's lamp with new and perfumed oils, to further enrich the rich peace of the cloister...
...It gives one a sudden, heart-sinking glimpse into that world of vested interests which the past of American literature, both remote and recent, has undoubtedly become for so many critics and critical journals...
...As one can see, Green is an important critic...
...Men of this kind have been the conscience of the Western world...
...with a beautifully clear, broad, tolerant, appreciative mind...
...Real institutions are being threatened...
...He feels that the author, whether he be Henry James or Mark Twain, is just as intelligent as himself and must be approached as an equal, not as a floundering, hit-or-miss, divinely inspired monster...
...I have quoted this passage because it brings so many different notions together, harmonizes them so beautifully, and so patently adds to our awareness...
...They are nearer to intending to destroy that peace...
...He should be read...
...Now to GET to the heart of the matter...
...Having myself tried to formulate somewhat the same idea, I can appreciate the combined virtues of incisiveness and sympathy which Green brings to the matter...
...A great number of critical books have been reviewed since Green's book was published last November...
...the weakness is accepted...
...but at the same time he is obviously his own man, manifesting an independence from his exemplars and from current critical trends that most likely explains the boycott of him better than anything else...
...Then he adds, "Emerson was not a genius...
...As a result, there is a patronizing tone to almost all our criticism...
...Green is a humanist, with overt public concerns and a rooted conviction that literature has an active relationship to those concerns...
...buttressed with a variety of skills and interests, intellectual, social and aesthetic...
...Dostoevsky, by his love of newspaper fact, his skill in newspaper naturalism, managed to transcend the limitations-the sensibilitarianismof even Wuthering Heights romance...
...Each of his essays is so tightly organized, so filled with startling aper?§us, so destructive of the reigning critical complacencies, that it would be unfair to both the subjects he deals with and his entire method to do more than indicate what I regard as its high points, its instructive insights...
...One need only compare Starbuck and his gun beside the sleeping Ahab -so feebly Shakespearean-with, for instance, Raskolnikov and his axe outside the moneylender's door, to realize how poor a variety of romance American Gothic was...
...He attempted a sophisticated manner in and out of season, and too often this makes him seem provincial, even vulgar, gaping at the spectacle of other people's stylishness...
...They represent one of the triumphs of Western civilization, in its more passive mode...
...This often leads to a certain deafness to peculiar American characteristics, but in the long run he profits more from his "outsideness," his ability to view our literature from a radical, humanist stance, than he suffers from it...
...It was the kind of noble compromise we associate with the names of Turgenev, Forster, and Trilling...
Vol. 49 • February 1966 • No. 5
