Writers at the Mercy of the Age
DAVIS, ROBERT GORHAM
Writers at the Mercy of the Age Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer By Alfred Kazin Atlantic-Little Brown. 302 pp. 58.95. Reviewed by Robert Gorham...
...Instead of "I" and "mine," Kazin commonly uses "we" and "our...
...On this question the two books in Bright Book of Life and the two Kazins who wrote them?Kazin young and old, moralist and appreciator—take, understandably but frustratingly, totally incompatible sides...
...everything we do, everything we believe in this moment of climacteric, can help to shape the future toward which men are moving in such agony today...
...Irrationality and relativism, the fragmentation of all traditional ideas, reduce us to helplessness against an encompassing sense of evil...
...Cassandras...
...There is finally no 'truth,' just this sense of freedom...
...portray an antiworld where we are still submissive to evil...
...never was it so imperative for men to be equal to the evil that faces them and not submissive to its terror...
...More complex is the case of Nabokov, "the pure artist opposed to such 'idea mongers' and creators of 'trash' as Dostoevsky, Balzac, Conrad, Mann, Faulkner...
...It would appear that the eclecticism denied the creator is a virtue in the sympathetic critic...
...And in the couse of reading it—or them—one envisages a third work that demands to be written because of the disjunctions and countercur-rents in the volume(s) already before us...
...Unfortunately, these discriminations do not culminate in a pattern of any kind...
...Who are "we...
...magic, unreal...
...Nabokov "recognizes no hindrance to his own absolute freedom...
...Blake and Lawrence were, as prophets, vehicles for forces not fully explicable in rational terms...
...But neither Blake nor Lawrence saw art as a self-sufficiency into which one escaped from life...
...One finishes Kazin's book amazed that he can remain neutral and acceptant in the face of it all...
...The world seems to be waiting, waiting for its new order...
...He simply takes it for granted in delineating the world his writers inhabit—a world they never made and do not expect to change...
...The writers Kazin celebrates primarily as exemplars of this modern freedom are Burroughs and Nabokov...
...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor of English, Columbia University This book is really two books, with the second boiling up through cracks in the pavement of the first...
...In Bright Book of Life, that future is assumed to have occurred-and to have destroyed us...
...Time is essentially personal...
...For two centuries or more America also conceived its strengths prophetically...
...Through imagination we know "the delicious absurdity of rising above all stated connections...
...The mythographer Blake, another of Kazin's heroes, said the same thing more profoundly...
...that as our guide "through this sweetly smiling massacre," Capote is "proud of every harrowing or grotesque detail he can dredge up...
...the delicious bouillabaisse of his internal sensations...
...In a burst of enthusiasm, he put himself above the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, even the poet...
...The first comes in his discussion of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood...
...Failing in this, "we" have lost faith in America, history, human values, objective truth, ourselves...
...Kazin realizes that stressing the senselessness of crime and cruelty is "what relieves the liberal imagination of responsibility and keeps it as a spectator...
...Yet his own obsession with inexplicable crime?murder is the primal fault"—takes Kazin from New York street stabbings back to the Nazis whose menace helped give On Native Grounds its intensity...
...The novel, he felt, brings the whole self to life in response to all of life outside the self...
...Their art was programmatic...
...We share the common condition of a murderous, mechanical society, "dead at the center," where terror is the norm...
...it makes absurd the elaborate studies of history, psychology, sociology, political science, and philosophy, solemnly supported by the universities as disciplined avenues to truth...
...Professional Observers...
...The freedom they offer is regressive and illusory...
...Toward the end, when their defeat was certain, Nazis could still say with grim satisfaction...
...The clue is in the passage from D. H. Lawrence that gives the work under review its title, a title that seems painfully ironic, but apparently is not meant to be so...
...But what in their freedom do these writers choose to imagine...
...The novel," said Lawrence, "is the bright book of a life...
...we are its creators...
...Kazin observes that Capote felt compelled to devote years of work to the "psychological malignity," "the cringing viciousness" of the two men "who killed perversely, wantonly, point-lessly...
...The other breakthrough conies when Kazin speaks lyrically of the "freedom" the novel makes possible in a society where otherwise none of us is free...
...they spoke to a future of realization and fulfillment...
...Now it is assumed that there is no such future, and that this frees the novelist totally as fantasist...
...Often he presents judgments in a single, summary sentence: "But Hemingway died of Faulkner as much as he died of Hemingway": "In Flannery O'Connor's fiction we start below the line of sexual love...
...it made demands on the individual and society that had meaning because they presumed a future myths and imagination could help shape...
...from within our jackets of jelly our hands reach out to "disembowel the passing whore or strangle the neighbor child...
...Instead of dramatizing the struggle with the cruel, the perverse, the irrational—an internal struggle that is the only way to knowledge—they invite us to surrender to evil as "delicious...
...He speaks of Burroughs' "wild gift for continuous fantasy...
...Liberal intellectuals, devoted to the arts, "who for 30 years have tried to make Hitlerism accountable to our humane culture...
...American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer"—although younger authors than Mailer are included...
...We live through terrifying events but cannot understand them...
...For Burroughs love is "one shadowy stranger serving another like a piece of plumbing...
...Implicit in Bright Book of Life is a radical opposition of fiction as liberation in an antiworld of mere seeming, and fiction as a testing ground of values that are realizable only if the literary and real worlds are indissolubly linked...
...The first book is adequately described by the subtitle...
...Kazin groups his writers loosely under such journalistic rubrics as "The Secret of the South...
...Actually, the writers Kazin praises most highly are themselves at the mercy of the age because they have nothing to oppose to it...
...The engagement is archetypal in the sense that it involves a directly experienced knowledge of good and of evil...
...This third would be difficult to construct, however, for the issue it would have to tackle—that history represents death and only in art, an art of sheer play and illusion, can freedom anymore be found may seem overwhelming...
...The Decline of War," characterizing them one by one with a formulaic skill developed over long years of teaching and reviewing...
...The 30 years are those since 1942...
...Nabokov is determined to elude us: "the puppeteer gleefully rubbing his hands at how much he has put over...
...it is never an issue...
...Though he himself is guilty of adopting the attitude he describes...
...and finds nothing to love but his opinions...
...But his best novels, stories of "madness and the madman's destructive pursuit...
...What, in effect, stopped history for Kazin was the meaninglessness (his italics) of the millions of hideous deaths caused by a Hitler who had no serious ideas, no tenable historical hopes...
...an illusion of infinite freedom, playfulness, caprice...
...Catch 22 expresses "the political uselessness many Americans have felt about themselves since World War II...
...His wild boys hate women and devise means to continue the race without them...
...Of Ship of Fools Kazin says: "Rarely has a novel of such pretended scope, with so many characters, been at the mercy of so few ideas...
...Even Mr...
...The reader finds himself wholly in Humbert Humbert's corner...
...But two passionate outbreaks reminiscent of the earlier Kazin—and here the second book emerges?show in what profound contradictions this involves him...
...Bellow "had a powerful sense of his own experience as imaginative, yet could beat other Jewish intellectuals at putting the universe into a sentence": "America has worn out the revolutionary in Mailer...
...Kazin does not argue the accuracy of the bleak picture he paints...
...The self-annulment of all systems that claim to find their final destination in truth is so glaring that Nabokov cannot contain his joy...
...Agreeing with Andrei Sinyavsky that "a work of literature can spring from anything but must not be eclectic," Kazin accepts the sharply differing points of view of the authors he considers, and feels no need to oppose his own position to theirs...
...Sammler in his ripe wisdom feels a strong physical disgust for his neighbors, "dislikes all women particularly...
...And at this point we confront the realm of crucial contradiction that demands a third book...
...Nevertheless, Kazin can say in his final sentence that Nabokov "saves" us from being always at the mercy of the age...
...when 27-year-old Alfred Kazin wrote in the concluding paragraph of On Native Grounds: "Never was it so imperative as it is now not to sacrifice any of the values that give our life meaning...
...he says, even though this despairing capitulation to incomprehension and the power of malevolence renders futile and nugatory the whole enterprise of liberal education...
...At least we have made others suffer...
Vol. 56 • May 1973 • No. 10
