A Study in Contrasts

...nor, in the 19th century, would Melville or Twain, not to speak of Poe, Whitman or Dickinson...

...Mailer's pact with unseen powers is daimonic...

...Lionel Trilling's Erasmian attack on the liberal imagination made liberals feel very unsure about their capacity for appreciating or creating high art...

...Moreover, Lawrence's own marriage was ideally culturally-con-trastive...

...The Marches' inadequacy...

...An Erasmian takes positions only in imagination, not in action...

...writers have always been incapable of imagining marriage between mature, sensitive, responsible people who love each other...

...Through a quarter-century of teaching literature alternately here and in England (but mostly here) they have sent him in what seems a great diversity of directions...

...His choice is not surprising: At Cambridge Green fell under the sway of the critic F. R. Leavis, for whom Lawrence was the chief life-affirmer among 20th-century novelists...

...Green thinks that in A Hazard of New Fortunes Howells deliberately calls attention lo the way a couple like Tolstoy's Kitty and Levin overshadows his own Basil and Isabel March, "the best that the Anglo-Saxon middle class could offCi...

...Green's habit of affixing labels to people comes from the typology of contrasted temperaments he adapted from Karl Mannheim and Max Weber...

...Howells can be contrasted not only with Lawrence but with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, whom he admired yet could not dream of equaling...

...Early one morning, the youthful Green saw some tough, handsome aristocrats in evening costume setting off with their girls by sports car for London...

...Most of them prefer liberal democracy to its alternatives, yet are not engaged by it to the extent that they would let it require anything of them...

...In his language of temperamental classification...

...Similarly, before he could write in praise of Nabokov's Lolita (in Yeats' Blessing on von Hugel), Green had to invoke the Tolstoy of What Is Art?, who would have loathed the book...

...Finding an American was more difficult...

...since each position implies its alternates and opposites, one must, like Basil March, take all of them and become a complete man in appreciations, if not in fact...

...Green's Erasmian practice of con-trastive admirations is more rooted in his personal history...

...Among those who think that literature is declining in importance and that self-salvation through identification with a common cause is no longer possible, he distinguishes pessimists like Mailer and Susan Sontag, "attuned to the extinction of our race along with its culture," from optimistic futurists like Philip Rieff and Marshall McLuhan...

...Lawrence himself, in Studies in Classic American Literature, had already made cruel fun of the way Hawthorne sentimentalized his marriage to Sophia Peabody (though Lawrence's stormy subjection to Frieda was far from a rational union...

...Dean of American Letters...

...But then, in a speech given at an aggressively radical Catholic-Marxian conference in Birmingham in 1968 and reprinted in Transatlantic Patterns, Green courageously and eloquently denied his audience of Leftists the right to claim that literature, when it is properly conceived, is on their side...

...Hemingway, Faulkner, Mailer, or Bellow would not do...

...they were "Yeats' hard-riding squires...

...For him Castro is a Calvi-nist, while Norman Mailer represents the Faustian disposition that has gradually gained acsendancy over the American imagination since 1945...

...Class distinctions do not have the same significance in the United States, but when Green turns to American culture he still has plenty of categories at his disposal...

...Of the 18 topically-arranged essays in Transatlantic Patterns, the first three are about marriage—for English writers the primary social institution...

...Because of his hypersensitivity to opposing strengths, Green is a fascinating cultural critic, and a fair one...

...So Green settled upon the uner-otic William Dean Howells...

...There he devoted a full page to a reproduction of the Metsys portrait of the theologian, and captioned it, "to mc the most poignant of all paintings...

...Becoming a Catholic, he dwelt on the strength of Yeats, who condescendingly rejected von Hugel, and of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, T.S...

...In addition, he has talked at length about Erasmus in a number of his books, especially Cities of Light anil Sons of Morning...

...Under the influence of Baron von Huge!—known only through his books—Green became a convert to Roman Catholicism...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor of English, Columbia University An English postman's son, sensitive and insecure, who made it on his own through Cambridge University, Martin Green has personal reasons for being obsessed by cultural contrasts...

...It began at Cambridge in the late '40s and is celebrated by the reminiscent opening sketch in Transatlantic Patterns...

...the son of a mine worker, he took as his wife Frieda von Richthofen, daughter of an aristocratic German general...

...Even after brilliantly demonstrating that Lolita must be fully accepted on its own terms, and apparently subscribing to Nabokov's esthetics of pure bliss, Green added a postscript saying that a writer who aims high today has to become a monster, has to identify with perversities, hatreds, disgusts, psychoses...

...When Basil speaks of the multiple demands for commitment New York makes on him as compared to Boston, Isabel says with the gentle depreciating irony she has learned from her husband, "Which of your prophets are you going to follow...

...As his English exemplar Green takes D. H. Lawrence, whom he terms the proponent of an erotic "Demetrian" concept of matrimony...

...Eliot, and C.S...

...And a fresh one every Sunday...

...Waugh dominates several of the essays in Transatlantic Patterns as well...

...His typology of persisting temperaments is basically antihistorical, however, as is his distaste for politics, particularly any demanding politics of movement and change...

...Lewis, whose interpretations of Catholicism were conservative or antihumanist or cruel...

...The references to "the Erasmian artist," "prophets" every Sunday and "other people's strengths" suggest still another reason that Green chose Howells: He personally identifies with the novelist...

...Under the influence of Lea\is, he adopted an ethical, antielitist, life-asserting approach to literature...

...Finally, for Green, to take any position is to think immediately of the strengths of those who oppose it or who take it for different reasons...

...They do not see in it—or try themselves to give it—further possibilities of intellectual and spiritual growth...

...Leslie Fiedler told us long ago that U.S...

...Green has always called himself Erasmian...

...The Marches share and increase each other's weaknesses...

...This experience made Green choose Evelyn Waugh as his coun-terhero and write a whole book, Children of the Sun, on the dandies and decadents the novelist associated with in his most brilliant period...

...Persuaded that this was too great a price to pay, Green went over to the side of Soviet successors of Tolstoy, to the point of seeing a certain Tightness in their attacks on Pasternak...

...The loss of confidence or even interest in a communally sought and transformative future makes our best cultural commentators, like Green, seem pathetically helpless in the face of the increasing anarchy, inhumanity and degradation of Western democratic culture...

...He has explored 19th-century Boston, Calvin's Geneva, the pre-World War I Munich of the Von Richthofen sisters, the 1920s London of the Oxford dandies—always at least partly to find out more about himself...

...Emerson's was angelic...

...He answers, "All—all...

...Green's keen artistic perceptions aside, his readiness to negate or bracket his own moral and political loyalties when confronted by those whose talents and self-assurance awe him suggests that liberals might better worry about the political emptiness that many literary figures now share...

...He compares British Marxists to American Freudians, and within America Allen Ginsberg to Lionel Trilling, Trilling to Northrop Frye, whom he attacks as a fraud, etc...

...Erasmus was caught between Luther's spiritual violences and a papacy that made him moralh uncomfortable...

...Green has also followed prophets...

...By contrast, all others at the university, dons and undergraduates alike, became "mousy in our own eyes, shabby, second-rate human types...

...Green believes, demonstrates a "failure characteristic of the Erasmian artist—Howells was too aware of other people's strengths, strengths he himself could not appropriate...

...Unfortunately, Green's Erasmian-ism matches the prevailing mood of this country's writers...

...Cambridge belonged to them...

...Consequently, the wealth of lively -mbiential erudition le has poured out since A Mirror for Anglo-Saxons (1960) constitutes a huge intellectual autobiography that tells as much about the changes in Martin Green as about those in the cultures being described...

...The author compares Waugh's attitudes with George Orwell's, but finds the contrast to be less deep than it first appears: Their social backgrounds are similar, and social background means a lot to Green...

...Under the influence of C. P. Snow, whom Leavis despised, he tried (as described in Science and the Shabby Curate oj Poetry) to pick up enough science to bridge the two cultures...

...A scholar, humanist, ironist, and compromiser...

...Visiting Havana, admiring the ascetic selflessness he found there, Green decided he would be "a perfectly happy citizen of any Communist regime which did not sin too grossly against common decency...