Fiction and the American Scene

...There is probably some truth in all this...

...Some small fund of genuine experience must be squeezed out of more remote corners, where only two or three are gathered together: either in anguished defiance of, or in simple indifference to the normal activities of our muddled society...

...their characters are untroubled by conviction and evince no more than a well-bred nihilism...

...Both the characteristic dilemma of the American writer and his necessary obligation were formulated by Hawthorne when he said about his stories that they were "not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart . . . but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world...

...And he gains added power by hooking on, as it were, to the living and nourishing American fictional tradition, with its feeling for the romantic and monstrous, its description of the quest for humanity through friendship, even though it be that between a boy and a pony, or a half-wit and a vagrant...

...Only occasional moments in The Grapes of Wrath and no moments at all in the regrettable East of Eden show the lyrical energy of the grotesqueries narrated in The Long Valley, or the heightened reality of his sub-social novellas, The Red Pony and Of Mice and Men...

...Howells made the last sustained effort to import the latter from France and England, but nobody paid much attention to him, or at least to that part of him...

...But we may properly ask of those writers that they go on to make the effort—it will probably be thwarted, but the thwarting is their subject and their bruised wisdom—to open an intercourse with the rest of the world...

...We now know, of course, that those great novels were drenched in implications about social experience in America...

...Where is all that juice and all that joy...

...Or one thinks of Nick Adams in the final sentences of Hemingway's short story, "Now I Lay Me," listening in unbelieving silence to the Italian soldier who argued that marriage would quickly heal Nick's inner and outer wounds—"He was very certain about marriage and knew it would fix up everything...

...Not many of them get that far, but Twentieth Century fiction has gone on describing the quest and its motivation...

...They have meant that, however impressive and intriguing that scene may be on its political and economic levels, it remains morally and psychologically unsatisfying to the aspiring individual, and so it remains poetically unrewarding...

...One thinks of Fitzgerald's overtly corrupted but inwardly incorruptible Jay Gatsby, and his unlucky involvement with Daisy Buchanan...

...One thinks of Jake Barnes in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, overcoming for a while his dreadful spiritual and psychic hurt by the deep communion of a fishing trip with Bill Gorton...

...This is likely to be the best end that American fictional "seekers" can hope to arrive at...

...From that grand and all-absorbing subject, our earliest writers of eminence seemed to have shied away...

...Perhaps a little history and maybe a distinction or two might help...

...Hawthorne was trapped in the remote past...

...If so, the social generalization is co-extensive with the fable, and it says: this is the kind of experience it is possible to have and to record, if we really are interested in reality...

...The case of John Steinbeck is particularly revealing...

...Their stories deal with at most two or three eccentrics living untypical lives in dimly seen, unidentifiable localities...

...They felt that the reality worth knowing and the experience worth seeking must be found elsewhere...

...The point, however, is this: that when they do so, they remain faithful to their original vision...

...Here I am not thinking only of the proletarian fiction of 30 years ago, which without any serious exception was artistically bleak...

...New writers, says one authoritative observer, are unwilling or unable to offer a "social generalization...

...That point is persuasively made in a recent book by Richard Chase aptly called The American Novel and Its Tradition...

...But the implications came from far away...

...American novelists of talent have rarely attempted to engage the national scene directly, and the social realists have been steadily dismayed by their failure to do so...

...Fiction and the American Scene by RICHARD W. B. LEWIS Younger American novelists have recently come in for the high-level scolding that has been visited on American fiction regularly for about a century and a half...

...It is the story of the estranged individual squirming towards identity, as he makes his way across a chaotic and would-be oppressive scene...

...The novels he has inhabited have perforce drawn recognizable pictures of manners and morals in America, of the world he himself does not quite belong to...

...Writers like John P. Marquand and James Gould Cozzens manage to bend an undisturbed eye on American society...

...they were rendered indirectly, perversely, allegorically— and exactly because of the social insight that seemed worth uttering...

...and it was to express that feeling that they turned away from the immediate landscape...

...They are constantly harried by the social realists, and the results are often unfortunate...

...They are giving us perhaps, not novels at all, but a fable for our times...

...I am thinking also of Sherwood Anderson and John St nnbeck and of others who sometimes deformed a genuine talent by twisting it in the direction of (very honorable) social and political causes...

...Its range is often limited, its tone subdued...

...That is the way things seem at the start, and where a reality is first touched upon under the present conditions of life...

...Most American novelists dien and later felt that the public and social scene was too unstable and haphazard, too shadowless and shapeless for massive narrative treatment in the British fashion...

...For his own part, Mark Twain hankered a little after conventionality and good citizenship...

...It seems to reflect the same socially and politically unexcit-able nature that we older and more tired folk (with our highly romanticized memories of our own youth) think we detect in young people themselves...

...But Steinbeck's ambition in his longer novels was only slightly misdirected, and this too must be emphasized...

...But they turned towards a darker moral and metaphysical landscape—the landscape of the Puritan mind, as we may say, gone fascinatingly to seed and looked at with unbelief, anger, or sardonic amusement...

...Writers in the present day cannot help, initially, but portray secluded men, communing with themselves far away from the centers of social experience...

...Cooper was exploring the wilderness...

...inward...

...But in Huckleberry Finn, with its alternation between the towns along the Mississippi and the revitalizing freedom to the great river, he dramatized unforgettably the more typical and incurable American ambivalence towards the very value of the social life...

...It yielded a powerful but distinctly un-British brand of fiction...

...As a result, says another commentator, fiction at the moment is simply standing still...

...that they shy away from the great social and political experiences of the day...

...At the same time, in the relationship between Huck and Jim, Twain dramatized something perhaps more fundamental, and which we encounter in other novels that came before Twain and after him...

...For only at his peril does the American novelist abandon the inward and fabulous for the socially realistic...

...In a time when writers read their critics too respectfully, it can be dam-agingly irrelevant...

...But I suspect that criticism in this mode does more harm than good, and I wish it would stop...

...visionary...

...But when he writes fiction or drama out of that sense and in support of that ideal, his work loses at once the enduring quality of his earlier tales— that is, his fables of small, hidden, and eccentric lives...

...The model in this vein is still Huckleberry Finn...

...If, as Robert Hutchins once contended, the aim of education is to unfit men for society, the characteristic hero of American fiction is very well-educated indeed...

...For here Steinbeck is drawing on his poetic and not his political impulse...

...That is: the replacement of one kind of social life —the more familiar kind, with its fraudulence and disorder—by another maybe more enduring kind, by the tiny community of two beings who find and exercise their humanity in far-away friendship...

...They have not always made that discovery in time, and not always stuck to their natural instinct...

...The most impressive of the younger contemporary writers are not repudiating either their sense of alienation and eccentricity, nor their vision of a fragmented and in some great degree dehumanized world...

...In this respect, and for all his technical innovations, William Faulkner is the most profoundly traditional—the most Hawthornian and Brownian—writer of his generation...

...Sudi is the nature of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Ellison's Invisible Man, and Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, all three works of genuine distinction...

...Contemporary American fiction, like the other arts, does tend to reveal more craft than content, more technical assurance than imaginative daring...

...tormented by paradox and beset by monsters...

...And for years after Cooper had written the last of the Leatherstocking Tales, after Hawthorne had written The Scarlet Letter and Melville Moby Dick, liberal journals in the East kept up the clamor for a "national literature" that would get down to the country's real and visible business— the fulfillment of a manifest social, economic, political, and (to be fair) moral destiny...

...The American brand has been almost the opposite of the fiction of social realism, with its solidly sketched "typical" characters and its immersion in the swarming details of observable contemporary life...

...Such is also the nature of so much as is worth salvaging from the addled output of Jack Kerouac...

...and Melville had moved on from the South Seas to a spaceless, timeless realm of enfuriated metaphysics...

...No American man of letters has a more dependable sense of political style, and none is more compassionately devoted to an enlightened ideal of social justice...

...Socially-minded critics were worrying over the absence of a clear relation between fiction and society a couple of decades after the real genre of the American novel had been established once and for all by the wildly composed, oddly engrossing Gothic tales of the Phila-delphian, Charles Brockden Brown, at the close of the Eighteenth Century...

...and it's worth going back beyond the confines of this century, to the early days of the Republic, to make them...

...And the American novel continued in the manner begun by Brockden Brown—fabulous, not realistic...

...Those writers and others still younger are giving us, not novels of manners, but picaresque allegories of the human search —portraits of the wanderer passing through a series of adventures which are unrelated except in the continuing and evolving spirit of the wanderer...

...They are conjoining the two, in a "story" we find recurring in a variety of novels and which comprises a sort of contemporary myth...

...The charge, now rather hoarse from repetition, is that their work is lacking in "social reality...

...He has other business to attend to, some secret and personal mission of discovery or atonement...

...He is unfitted by a peculiar wisdom—rooted in a sense of guilt, alienation, and hurt but lit up by a romantic resentment —from participating at length in the social adventures of his time...

...These recurring images have not meant an unequivocal vote of no confidence in the American social scene...

...But the perspective is oblique, and the social generalization which emerges is a repeated injunction to get away from the social centers, to keep moving on his mysterious private quest...

...But for the most part, American novelists compose more effectively when (like Martin Buber) they stress the private engagement between individual and individual rather than when they suggest (like John Dewey) a social context for experience and judgment...