DE VOTO ON FICTION
Swados, Harvey
DeVoto on Fiction THE WORLD OF FICTION, by Bernard DeVoto. Houghton Mifflin. 299 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Harvey Swados IT IS particularly unfortunate for Bernard DeVoto that the publication of his...
...but for the most part they conr sist of extraordinarily windy observations to the effect that people read books to be taken out of themselves, that modern novels require exceedingly close attention, and so on...
...At this point one can only throw up one's hands...
...Very well...
...And yet he can write, in what is evidently intended to be a crush- ing comment, "The schematic critics who . . . today play the highbrow-quarterly circuit have invariably held that there are right and wrong kinds of novels and right and wrong ways, of writing novels...
...On Page 268 of the latter, one reads: "Mr...
...Towards the close of the book he fires a barrage at the avant garde, blasting with his heaviest prose at "the enregistration of microscopically differentiated states of consciousness, the private symbols, and the curious free-floating anonymities so religiously analyzed and praised in the quarterlies . . . Few read them but those who do acquire cachet...
...When the reader finishes "the cheap novel," says DeVoto, "We may dare to say . . . that, because the phantasy has been discharged, he has been strengthened for his mortal struggle with reality...
...Reviewed by Harvey Swados IT IS particularly unfortunate for Bernard DeVoto that the publication of his new collection of essays coincides with the appearance of Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, also a collection of literary essays: any comparison of the two volumes is decidely disadvantageous to The World of Fiction...
...Shortly after the publication of The Middle of the Journey he went the way of most novelists who practice criticism: he found that the safe course for fiction hereafter would be to specialize in novels like Lionel Trilling's...
...Some of DeVoto's remarks about the reading and writing of novels are, as I have indicated, shrewd indeed...
...De Voto, "that the things said here are obvious...
...Who will have the temerity to refuse anyone the support of even the humblest art...
...No one need tell me," warns Mr...
...Perhaps it is DeVoto's concern for the hitherto unrecognized virtues of drugstore literature that gives him the temerity to refuse to others the support of art that makes somewhat less humble claims...
...Or perhaps it is his publishers, who have otherwise mounted this work at least as handsomely as it deserves, who are responsible for the appearance of Plotinus Plinlimmon (of Melville's Pierre) as "Plinli-mon" and for the appearance of John Eglinton (of Joyce's Ulysses) as "Eglington" (twice...
...In that mortal struggle, I think, sanity needs all the support it can get...
...Trilling has a number of literary personalities, one of whom functions as a schematic critic...
...DeVoto himself previously devoted an entire volume (The Literary Fallacy) to an egregiously patriotic construction of imperatives for literature...
...I have quoted at some length because I want to be certain I am not doing DeVoto a disservice by stat-ing that in this book he clearly expresses a preference for the therapeutic value of one type of novel as against the snob value of another type...
...This footnote, with its aggressively unpleasant tone, epitomizes the type of mind here at work...
...In the cults...
...But the reviewer is under the obligation of pointing out that they have been said before, and said better...
...Perhaps it might also be pointed out that the literary critics from whom DeVoto is at such pains to dissociate himself are generally not so careless as to misspell the surnames of famous fictional characters...
...The World of Fiction is shot through with such muddleheaded-ness, and the task of digesting its various theses is not made easier by the self-satisfied and shrewd vulgarity that seems to be DeVoto's chief ingredient...
...What is more to the point, the pages immediately preceding the footnote are given over to precisely the kind of criticism which DeVoto professes to abhor...
...As such he is required to make imperatives for literature and decide which kinds of novels are right and which wrong...
Vol. 14 • May 1950 • No. 5
