CRITICISM AND THE USABLE PAST
HOFFMAN, FREDERICK J.
Criticism and the Usable Past by FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN THIS is surely a curious time in the history of our literature. There is more appraisal and less creative activity than in many a year. No...
...If political action leading out from a private judgment is no longer possible—if truth is merely a matter of an arbitrary documentation of political fact—then perhaps the novelist's exploration of motives has ceased to be useful or even interesting...
...For all the talk about Miss Stein, there has been nothing so exhaustive as this...
...This sense of disaster is seen most poignantly in the work of Orwell...
...In the field of the novel we appear to be suffering from indecision...
...The novelist is now "in the thick of it...
...It is also the end of the novel, for Orwell has exhausted the possibilities of public dominance over private sensibility...
...In any case, we have the impression that such an investigation as he has made has reached its conclusion and should neither be continued nor tried again...
...Of course, for all his reputation as a "dean" of anecdotal historians, Brooks' way is scarcely ours...
...We are overcome by the giants of the recent past, many of whom are still with us and either publishing or apparently getting ready to publish...
...the illness and the breakdown he describes there do much to help account for the use he has made of the American past in the Makers and Finders series...
...We are not so much trying to find out the figure in the carpet as judging our recent past from every conceivable angle of vision...
...many other remarks or quotations help us to see Miss Stein for the half-genius, half-poseuse she was...
...In Howe's view the most pro-found analyses of the political circumstance come from persons who (from accident or choice) stand on the margins of the political center and judge it in terms of emotional and moral qualities that are not totally given in to the superficies of the public scene...
...But that is not to be expected...
...The great, most strongly felt pathos of our times concerns the betrayal of the Revolution...
...We are persistently trying to understand ourselves in literature, and this effort involves trying to find out who were responsible for us in our literary images...
...Having begun with the expectation of political and ideological pressures, with a sense of their necessity to the "new and better world," such novelists as Malraux, Silone, and Koestler end by describing the distress, confusion, soul-sickness caused by the inner and public failures of the revolutionary impulse...
...We are interested in our past not because we regret it but because we want to understand our present, and especially because we need to know as much as possible about the forms our thinking assumed and the methods adopted by literature to express them...
...This state of affairs is as true of the novel as it is of poetry, though there is perhaps more promise that one or another young poet will some day undeniably convince us of his greatness...
...Everything has "hardened into politics, the leviathan has swallowed man...
...Strangely, he cites a remark made by Gertrude Stein concerning the disappointing men from whom most might have been expected: good craftsmen and honest men they were, she had said, but they had "passions merely" and no "passion," though "they knew all about it and could sometimes write about it very surely...
...The Twentieth Century novel has been so amazingly rich in works of first rank that any new writer may well doubt his chances of his work comparing favorably with them...
...the total impact of major lusts and fears has been to wipe out the opportunities for the novelist to measure human spirit and error against social form...
...Felicite of Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple "recalled one of her own servants and she was eager to portray some such strong and simple character...
...There is much reminiscing too...
...Despite this not unexpected expression of distaste, Brooks does give us much of value...
...Miss Sprigge, on the other hand, sometimes succeeds in making Gertrude Stein seem dull, and this is no mean accomplishment...
...One of the most debatable sources of method and "newness" was Gertrude Stein, whom Katherine Anne Porter once called an heiress of the Nineteenth Century reformist woman who "imposed herself" upon the masculine world, determined not only to avoid the conventional image of the discreet housewife but to create the new modes the male must follow or perish...
...This is definitely an example of the past seen in the ego's perspective...
...Guiton say that "their problem seems rather how to live than how to understand life...
...Taking Brooks with his label and his anguished retrospection, we may be entertained, sometimes informed, perhaps even stimulated to review our own notions of the generation just before ours...
...This phenomenon is partly a consequence of an uneasy union of scholarly concern with history and a critical interest in the development of literary forms...
...The final chapter ("A Season in Hell") gives us a clue also to what has come from Brooks since 1930...
...This lack is understandable because there are many confusions involved in placing the private and the public motives of human action in a proper perspective...
...Irving Howe's short book, Politics and the Novel (Horizon), has its own difficulties with initial definitions...
...No year passes without dozens of forays into the past in search of significant thematic ties with the Nineteenth Century and the early Twentieth Century...
...her experiences in flying suggested new ways of seeing Picasso and the moderns...
...If he had chosen to write history instead of memoirs (and he has written memoirs most of the time for many years, though he calls some of his books history), he could have come up with one of the really distinguished studies of our century...
...Donald Sutherland's book (1951) has many merits, but an orderly concern to inform and document is not one of them...
...Among the serious works of criticism necessary but lacking as yet in our criticism is a study of the literary view of "political man," or of man as he appears in a complex of political necessities and commitments...
...We can have no complexity...
...it is above all a study of the loss of individual control over external pressures...
...and his book is mainly about the Nineteenth Century sources of the modern novel...
...The line from Stendhal to Orwell is a fascinating, even a terrifying one...
...More than that, the age when novelists thought of themselves as setting the moral tone, as either law-givers or analysts of the human condition in a state of crisis, seems at least temporarily to have passed...
...there are only novels in which the hero moves into or withdraws from the public scene and qualifies our judgment of present political ethics or past political history by means of his judgment of and involvement in political conditions...
...We now have a detailed, scrupulous, almost worshipful account of Miss Stein's career, Elizabeth Sprigge's biography (Harper's...
...While we may be living in an uncertain time, there is no question that we admire, read, analyze, pick over, and compare the masters of the century...
...Gathering the facts in clusters about the works we know, Miss Sprigge has incidentally helped to illuminate them...
...The pressure of politics upon morality, its tendency to draw morality outside the ego, and the gradual accumulation of public effects in the private consciousness, is really Howe's concern...
...If one takes Brooks' reminder seriously, he discovers the book to be a fascinating and novel review of a decade seen from an unusual perspective...
...Criticism of fiction, reflecting the great activity in the universities, assumes the role of the analyst, the scholar, and the "creative critic...
...I find that critics who look back upon that controversial decade with a jaundiced eye not infrequently invoke the shade of Randolph Bourne, regretting that he hadn't stayed around long enough to put Eliot, et al in their place...
...nor can we really take Brooks for more than what he is worth...
...Her method of presenting her subject involves a kind of echoing of the style itself...
...This brilliant little book tells us much, drives us powerfully toward its conclusions...
...He is an indignant man, referring again and again to his having started "on the wrong track" and now getting back at his past by means of a corrected view...
...we can have only terror...
...She never wrote good English and grammar meant nothing to her...
...while Miss Stein's simplicities and repetitions have their own contextual virtues, they are not necessarily the most effective form of biographical presentation...
...He was there reconstructing what he thought he had been instrumental in destroying...
...The novel 1984 "brings us to the end of the line...
...P. Dutton), quite disarmingly subtitled The Nineteen-Twenties I Remember...
...As such, it is a fascinating account, involving Stendhal's analysis of the relationship of human passion to social and political intrigue, Dos-toevsky's explorations of the tortures of the "intelligentsia" who try to convert ideological crises into personal obsessions, James' curious ambivalence with respect to the facts of public action, Conrad's success (in Nostromo) in exploring every corner of the human landscape...
...Brooks' doubt of the value of some of the matters we much admire is familiar to us from several of his other books, and it is not absent from this one...
...almost anyone who experienced the I920's or who is interested enough in what appears to have been our last really exciting, creative period provides the record, in memoirs, biographies, collections of letters...
...As for the new novelists, Mile...
...But it is neither all that can be said about its subject nor necessarily the only approach to it...
...No young writer seems to have suggested by what he has so far done that he will replace the writers of another generation, that he will be a "beginning...
...Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a "political novel...
...In their study of the modern French novel (An Age of Fiction, Rutgers University Press), Germaine Bree and Margaret Guiton confess that since Albert Camus' The Plague (1947) there has been no major novel in France...
...This is a full decade of much publication and no first-rate work...
...Not the least of Howe's insights is into the failure of the "political novel" as such—that is, the novel which exploits the surface of politics and is either superficial or formless as result...
...Bree and Mrs...
...This involves striking hard at his contemporaries for their preoccupation with either self or form and their failure to communicate strength when strength was needed...
...This is a study of psychological drives, obsessions, forms of evading or distorting public commitments...
...But the book is rich in facts which suggest interpretations even though it doesn't itself offer them...
...But Howe does not assume that this has to be true, though he does take Orwell at face value more than we do or want to do...
...Orwell has proved the futility of moral niceties, personal scruple, human aberrancies...
...The most interesting of this quarter's essays in looking back is Van Wyck Brooks' Days of the Phoenix (E...
...But this perspective is not easy, if indeed it is at all possible, in the Twentieth Century novel...
Vol. 21 • June 1957 • No. 6
