Colical and Comical Criticism

...Yet such timidity about Bellow's descriptive power seems incomprehensible in a man who has only words of holiest reverence for Faulkner's "thick atmosphere of dissolution and ruin, the harsh tonalities of nightmare and psychic rage...

...But he clearly gave up long ago even a charitable hope of finding such quality here...

...Nothing that has been said or thought or written since that defiant era can in his view be worth more than a book review, rarely favorable...

...Aldridge adds some up-to-date fuel to those earlier indictments of the crassness and mediocrity of American life...

...But the inadequacies of Aldridge's critical attitudes and methods are made more, not less, visible by overexposure...

...In another review he shrewdly explores the "grass-roots anti-intellectualism" of the major American novelists, their "abiding distrust of ideas" compared to the European writers Aldridge's contemporaries, coming of age during the War, felt especially drawn to??Kafka, Camus and Sartre, who "use ideas in their fiction as concrete modes of dramatic action...

...What becomes dev-astatingly clear in reading through his 20-year pursuit of esthetic excellence is the narrowness of his standards and his tedious fondness for scolding...

...A few years after Hemingway's death, Young took on the heroically zany task of reading "Every Damn Thing that could be called a Hemingway-Centered Book or Pamphlet, hard or soft, that had come out since 1960...

...he has added the window dressing of an apocalyptic title, also from Norman Mailer...

...Of course he has rearranged it all to give a specious air of depth and breadth, for example, to separate reviews of books by Norman Mailer as they appeared...

...Young once wrote an excellent book on Ernest Hemingway, and the funniest pieces in this collection are byproducts of his specialty...

...In the final section of The Devil in the Fire (headed "Adversary Culture" without acknowledgment that the term is Lionel Trilling's), Aldridge puts aside reviewing to consider some broad moral dilemmas of American life today, and here one can find the intellectual roots of his aversion to every form of American literary success since the War...

...In a critic of Aldridge's uncommon intelligence, these are lamentable flaws...

...Blowing the academic whistle on Bellow with stern caveats about "the divisibility of theme and content...

...When reputations are measured in gossip, the fact that Jackie Kennedy calls William Styron "Bill" becomes literarily more significant than the critical judgment that Styron's "work sounds like the serious literature [middlebrow readers] have been taught to admire...

...Great are the hazards of making a collection of reviews do the work of a book if James Jones' recent kitsch gets lengthy attention, but Mr...

...It is no accident that he gives one of these essays the same ironic title, "Civilization in the United States," that Matthew Arnold used in 1888 and Harold Stearns in 1922...

...In the course of his sprightly report on the 32 items he accumulated, there are some marvelous moments...

...Aldridge trots out all the hoary complaints about our "mechanical and perfunctory" social life, the absence of cafes, the alimentary insults of Howard Johnson's...

...But his mood seems closer to the contemptuous bombast that European intellectuals like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir serve up to like-minded Americans, who are most exalted when America is most despised...

...The Devil in the Fire (Harper's Magazine Press, 364 pp., $12.50) puts within hard covers not only his recent reviews, but large hunks from earlier collections??testifying to the awesome power of Scotch tape as a book-making tool, as well as to Aldridge's unflagging stamina for proofreading his own prose three times over...

...Yet in the years since that gleefully murderous book of his youth, Aldridge has not produced the intellectually decisive and profound body of criticism that his manner and tone so tauntingly promised...

...Sammler's Planet is i nored...

...His fastidious sensibility is offended by the "feverish" style of The Adventures of Augie March: "we feel we are in the presence of monsters...

...In the end, Hemingway's handling of the fracas emerges as a model of generosity and patience - a genuinely fresh and sympathetic view of a shopworn monument...

...and he raises some Large Questions in the obligatory preface...

...The he thing one least expects from a collection of criticism is laughter, but laugh I did, often, while reading Philip Young's Three Bags Full: Essays in American Fiction (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 230 pp., $8.95...

...Even in his formal essays - on the battle of the bibliographers over the Hawthorne corpus, on the mythological antecedents of the Pocahontas and Rip Van Winkle legends, on the odd links between American fiction and American life??Young's touch is witty and commendably uninsistent...

...Young's perfect comment is "Come Back to the Pops Again, Les Honey...

...Since he deplores the intellectual poverty of American fiction, it seems astonishing that when he writes about Saul Bellow, one of the few Americans who can indeed cope dramatically with ideas, Aldridge does little except sneer, and is caught in some odd contradictions...

...The most intriguing part of this book, "Hemingway and Me: A Rather Long Story," is a blow-by-blow account of Hemingway's attempts to stop publication of Young's critical study of his fiction...

...Now, as though to admit once and for all time that he will never get down to the sustained examination of 20th-century American literature one assumed he would someday write, Aldridge has settled for still another patchwork gathering of book reviews, untainted by the uniformly gray middlebrow banality of the Saturday Review, where most of them first appeared...

...In another essay, Young tackles the great pretender A. E. Hotchner, reducing his record of a supposed 14-year intimate friendship with Hemingway to sawdust...

...One paperback slapped together before the body was cold acknowledged a debt to "Professor Arthur A. Fiedler of Montana State University...

...It is as though a steel door bangs shut in Aldridge's mind with their departure...

...Aldridge knows exactly why Mary McCarthy's novels are more dead than deadly: "When the action lapses . . . she starts making lists, and she does this not only because she has momentarily lost the thread of her narrative but because she cannot cope with emotion...

...When Augie soars into philosophical speculation, where is the critic longing for ideas in the American novel...

...Writers & Writing COLICAL AND COMICAL CRITICISM BY PEARL K. BELL From the start of his literary career in 1951, when he devoted After the Lost Generation to systematically puncturing the inflated reputations of some young postwar writers - Truman Capote, Robert Lowry, Frederick Buechner, among others??John Aldridge has worked hard at being a Matthew Arnold of the prairie, an abrasive and incorruptible crusader against the philistinism that infects intellectuals and masses alike in modern America...

...Aside from the dubious validity of his impeachment, his case against America the Vulgar is more literary and more sentimental than Arnold's or Stearns...

...Hemingway eventually relented, but one gets a unique portrait of the Master torn between vanity and rage, reveling in the excitement of threats and promises and roaring his exasperation at "people who won't leave writers alone to do their work...

...Aldridge is no doubt theoretically committed, with theoretical passion, to the humanistic axiom that "There can be no purpose in the life of any society unless its final objective is the achievement and preservation of individual excellence...

...actually, they are not criticism at all but lively literary journalism...

...Because his scholarship was leavened by wit and a canny distrust of anything modish, Aldridge seemed well equipped, if a trifle overarmed, to carry out his responsibility as a critic: "to function as a monitor of taste, to challenge fashionable opinion...

...Young's judgment has unexpected significance in the time of Clifford Irving: ". . . the hunch is that a really ingenious and knowledgable fake (who had never met him either) could have rifled Papa's countless letters??also many books, magazines, published interviews, and newspapers??and come up with a best-selling hotchpotch that would not differ radically from this one...

...And in "The Trashing of America" he writes in doom-laden tones of the country's physical ugliness and "the terrible vacuum at the heart of American life...

...Aldridge's scorn for the American scene is actually the reverse side of his nostalgia for the time of the giants??the '20s and '30s, when a many-headed David formed by Mencken, Van Wyck Brooks, George Jean Nathan, Dreiser, Pound, Anderson, and Lewis aimed a verbal slingshot at Boobus Americanus, the Goliath of Main Street...

...No one has written more trenchantly about the destructive effects of literary success in the United States today, how the discordant aims of being a celebrity and being a novelist are confused by both writers and critics, so that "the writer simply as personality or public phenomenon can achieve, if he is lucky, a status comparable in kind, if not in scope, to that of movie stars and political figures, [although] his status may have little or nothing to do with his contribution to literature...

...Trapped by his apotheosis of the '20s and '30s, he is left with neither receptivity nor enthusiasm for all that came after...