The Modern Quest

...Their problem is not social...

...As Nelson Algren once said, many novelists feel today that "it is better to be on the lam than on the cover of Time...

...They simply do not remember when such things were not, which makes a tremendous difference in the psychological attitude with which they approach fiction...

...The naturalistic novelist felt constrained to construct his novel in imitation of life (as the once-popular phrase, "slice of life," expressed it), but the newer novels are much more concerned with the individual, much less with society...

...It is an eternal human question, but one given new urgency by the issues of mid-Twentieth Century life...

...Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King...

...There are probably several reasons for this, but two can be identified with some accuracy...

...Herbert Gold's The Man Who Was Not With It is almost allegory...

...However, a number of recent novelists have parted company with most of the traditional value-systems...

...Were they that much better...

...In novel after novel the question recurs: "Who am I, and where do I belong in a world that seems hostile or indifferent, chaotic and disjointed...

...they search for the internal and subjective...

...It is as Herbert Gold wrote in his introduction to Fiction of the Fifties, to find an answer to the question, "Why do I live, struggle, love, defy age and history...

...For the most part they are polite about it, avoid the question, or answer with care and respect...

...In the older tradition, a novel was a formal structure composed of actions and reactions which were finished by the end of the story, which did have an end...

...Kerouac's On the Road, of course, lies at one extreme boundary of this kind of random, unplanned confusion...

...What it feels like to grow up in Chicago is being said a good deal better, perhaps, by Willard Motley...

...I meant the modern novel...

...The trend toward the dissolution of formalized structure in the novel was evident before World War II, foreshadowed in such works as Na-thanael West's Balso Snell or Day of the Locust, among others...

...The Deer Park, of course, is Louis XV's famous bosky dell of sophisticated vice, the classic symbol of moral rot...

...First, the gap between the fiction produced by the generation which wrote before World War II, and that which wrote after, is wide...

...One is the decline of naturalism, which dominated American fiction for more than a half-century...

...The level of attainment is probably higher today in the novel than at any other time in our literary history...

...what I conceived of as the "modern" novel was that of my own generation and assuredly not his...

...or William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness...

...What, then, are the recent novelists doing with the novel form, and what of its content...

...There are those too, of course, who find their answers in "gung ho" commitment to the corporation, the Navy, the Marines, or monolithic conservatism, such as Herman Wouk or Sloan Wilson...

...What are my relationships...

...Vance Packard's Status Seekers, David Riesman's Lonely Crowd, William Whyte's Organization Man, C. Wright Mills' White Collar, Peter Viereck's Unadjusted Man, and others like them offer testimony to contemporary man's attempt to locate himself somewhere, as it has led also to the tremendous popularity of such men as Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, and Bishop Fulton Sheen...

...This is admittedly an uneven list, but the level of achievement is amazingly high...

...But then what...

...About all you can count on for help are Maxwell Geismar and gallant old Granville Hicks, who still enjoy reading books—which is more than a number of modern critics apparently do...

...Herbert Gold, in The Man Who Was Not With It, sees no such coherent pattern in the world about him...

...Cozzens' By Love Possessed is a big, efficient novel about love, a subject on which Cozzens has some clear and decisive statements to make...

...What has O'Hara done since Appointment in Samarra or Butter-field 87 Where are the World War I novels that can match Mailer's Naked and the Dead, Heym's The Crusaders, Alfred Hayes' All Thy Conquests, Anton Myrer's The Big War, or Shaw's The Young Lions} It is easy to point to The Old Man and the Sea and turn away...

...Mark Harris' Bang The Drum Slowly...

...More general, however, is the acceptance of a loose, permissive philosophy of disengagement, a "choosing not to choose...

...Hemingway, Cozzens, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Farrell, Marquand (and for that matter younger men in the same tradition, such as Wallace Stegner or Walter Van Til-burg Clark) had and have a framework of values...

...When Frederic Henry kisses Catherine goodbye and walks back to his hotel in the rain, Farewell to Arms is indubitably finished...

...they simply accept them as part of their heritage, without surprise, piety or excitement...

...John Berry, whose Krishna Fluting won the Mac-millan Fiction award, said that he began his novel as if he were organizing "a two-year expedition into the interior...

...But to the serious young writer today the keynote of the novel is search—search for personal identity within a framework of values, for a sense of placement and continuity...

...There are a number of good and provocative recent novels which illustrate this theme...

...Herman Mailer's Deer Park is a study of corruption and decadence in Hollywood, where (ironically) our scheme of values seems most likely to be made...

...Nelson Algren's Walk on the Wild Side is allegory...

...Edmund Wilson," our senior critic and probably our best, busies himself with General Grant, New York State Indians, and Pasternak...

...These are arbitrary choices, naturally...

...Who am I?" Such novelists have more in common with Twentieth Century poetry than with the naturalistic novel tradition, a greater kinship with Eliot or Dylan Thomas than with Dreiser...

...Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is built about a central metaphor as surely as an Eliot or Pound poem...

...When the shock of contact with such utter youth had worn off somewhat, I was forced to admit that I knew what he meant...

...With the feeling that this was pretty easy, I recommended Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Sherwood Anderson, and a variety of others...

...And in Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, an American millionaire goes to an Africa that never existed, saying, "I want, I want," because, he says, "Things got worse and worse and pretty soon they were too complicated...

...Herbert Gold's The Man Who Was Not With It...

...Vance Bour-jaily, a young novelist teaching in the Midwest, expressed the attitude of his generation rather well in an essay which he called "No More Apologies," published in Discovery in 1953...

...These books, of course, sell the most copies and make the most money...

...The period from 1919-1939 produced eight or ten landmarks of fiction, which is a real achievement for any period...

...John Howard Griffin's The Devil Rides Outside...

...he knows, and therefore in The Old Man and The Sea he presents us with a tightly-built novel which says so, with a central character who moves through an expertly-designed sequence of events to a definite conclusion...

...The Hamlet is still a better book, and I would rather leave A Fable out of this argument...

...What interested me, and what seemed to me modern, was all pre-1940—which to the present-day college student is almost as distant as the Norman Conquest...

...The question of identity, some social psychologists believe, is the major modern problem—to find "a coherent sense of self," a relationship to "the supporting framework of life," according to Allen Wheelis' sociological study, The Quest for Identity...

...The majority of younger writers wish fervently that critics and readers would stop comparing their work with the work of their grandfathers, with the expectation that they must equal or exceed it...

...Naturalism, focusing on society and social problems, encouraged novelists to be reportorial social critics, dealing with the factual and external...

...Anyone who reads American novels today must be prepared to listen with an open mind to what the young writers have to say, and to accept their right to choose their own ground from which to say it...

...Why must I die and for what...

...The list could just as easily include Paul Bowles, Virgil Scott, Willard Motley, Bernard Malmud, Harvey Swados, James Agee, Truman Capote, Frederick Buechner, Jack Kerouac (whatever you think of On the Road, Doctor Sax is a tour de force of fantasy), or the short fiction of Flannery O'Connor, J. F. Powers, or John Cheever...

...Their fictional world reflects an actual world of ambiguity, uncertainty, and anxiety, an inconclusive world without identifiable central authority or reasonable coherence...

...Nobody will argue about the achievement of USA, The Sound and the Fury, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Studs Lon-igan, and three or four others...

...Others, like J. D. Salinger, find their answers in some kind of personal mysticism (such as Zen Buddhism...

...they might differ as to what it is, or they might not like it, but life has a design and their novels do too...

...Ours is as talented and vigorous a generation of writers as any," he wrote, "and especially as the one before it, against which we are often measured...

...Compare its structure, however, with Norman Mailer's Deer Park, which is also about love, and anxiously explores a number of not very successful lives trying to find out something meaningful about love in them, and ends in puzzlement...

...Bellow's Henderson the Rain King is magic fantasy...

...This is the clear, cold stream that runs through the center of recent fiction...

...The "modern" novelists I mentioned were modern when I was in college...

...often their arrangement is random rather than sequential...

...And the novelist too is involved with this search, perhaps more deeply and achingly than anyone else in contemporary life...

...I would maintain that much of our work has been extremely good, some of it extraordinary, and the potential mountainous...

...What he does resent is that this fact is often used to control the judgment of some excellent novels produced after 1939...

...When it is all over, one of the characters, surveying the wreckage of four lives, cries out, "None of us did the right thing...

...Hemingway still has clear and cogent ideas about what life is like...

...Let me list a dozen such novels published within the past few years: Nelson Algren's The Man With the Golden Arm...

...It is as wide, perhaps, as that which separates the novel after 1910 from the novel of 1870...

...This is not a new theme, of course...

...The Partisan Review tends to get lost in what Rahv thinks of what Trilling said about a review by Howe...

...But its progress has markedly accelerated since 1948...

...I found this harder to answer than I first thought...

...It was a salutary experience, and I am sure that there must be others who, like me, have not been watching the clock...

...The older writer worked within a set of unquestioned values, which he built into the very structure of his novel...

...O'Hara's last few novels are little more than Peyton Place in a Brooks Brothers shirt...

...The reader who looks around him with some care and perception, and who isn't misled by the lurid covers of paperbacks, will find himself in the middle of some interesting and exciting fiction...

...They are frightening-ly skilled in technique and terribly knowledgeable about it—after all, they cut their teeth on Ulysses and Mrs...

...For this reason I pass on a few reflections...

...One must understand that they do not necessarily revere the old gods as their fathers do...

...Vance Bourjaily's The Violated...

...Hemingway and Faulkner are in their sixties, Fitzgerald and Wolfe have been dead for about twenty years, Dos Passos and Farrell hardly heard from...

...I decided to catch up a bit on modern fiction...

...Robie Ma-cauley's The Disguises of Love...

...William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness is built out of episodes which expand from and contract to a central moment...

...Vance Bourjaily's The Violated concerns four young people who reach maturity during World War II and their bewildered search for something to tie to, in a rootless, fluid world that offers them nothing...

...This is the modern quest, the search for identity and relationship expressed in "I want, I want...

...Or Hemingway's Nick Adams stories of adolescent initiation with Jean Stafford's Mountain Lion, James Agee's A Death in the Family, Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, or Carson Mc-Cullers' Member of the Wedding, which are initiation stories too, of much more sophistication and dimension...

...They experiment with time...

...Unfortunately, the critics seem not to have given us much help...

...There is more vitality here, and more genuine potential in language and form in the novel, than there has been in any literary art form since Eliot's The Wasteland exploded on the poetic landscape...

...As one trend in the recent novel is toward a kind of structural disintegration, so its major theme is this generation's search for personal identity...

...Dalloway and The Golden Bowl, which we struggled through so laboriously...

...Were the good old days really so good...

...The modern novel often has no such finality...

...A few, such as Jack Kerouac, find a solution in simple disaffiliation...

...Algren's Walk on the Wild Side is a wildly off-center picaresque...

...We have allowed our veneration for the accomplishments of our own generation, which were admittedly great, to obscure its failures, which were real...

...No modern novelist will deny this...

...Burrough's dizzying Naked Lunch crosses it...

...Saul Bellow's Augie March is really a series of incidents which follow each other in chronological sequence, but which lead to no particular denouement at the end of no particular plan...

...This leads to my second reflection: that whatever the critics say or fail to say, the novel is probably the most vital, energetic, and stimulating form of artistic expression today, matched only by painting...

...The Kenyon Review, though it makes valiant efforts, often gets bogged down in such things as "Ritual Elements in Faulkner" or "Myth in the Novels of Robert Penn Warren...

...Bud, the protagonist of Gold's The Man Who Was Not With It, finds the world of the carnival, with its grifters, drifters, fakes, and perverts, a much more solid place than the non-circus world, which is confused and sick...

...And yet pathetically enough, nobody knows the "right thing," even then...

...they integrate symbols, Eliot-fashion, into their materials...

...George Elliott's Parktilden Village...

...George Elliott's Parktilden Village is a study of the moral confusion of a group of nice people in a suburban housing development who get tragically involved with each other for the mere reason that they have no guidelines to follow in developing their relationships...

...The experimentation of the Twenties and Thirties is to them tradition...

...These novelists tend to explore rather than arrange or synthesize their materials...

...his novel is a tentative pattern of moments in the lives of people who search rather unsuccessfully for some kind of personal fulfillment...

...I have the uneasy suspicion in reading it that Papa was going through some skillful motions that he had practiced a long time...

...Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead...

...Farrell is still writing about Studs, whatever his current name may be, and has never really left that New Year's Eve party in Chicago...

...They have given so far a variety of answers...

...After Faulkner's The Mansion I had the feeling that Faulkner was getting a little slower in disentangling himself from those dependent clauses...

...I am on Bourjaily's side...

...The Kenyon Review and The Partisan Review, both distinguished critical journals, more or less keep track of things, but now and then sound as if they were edited from another planet...

...Still others find fulfillment in "kicks," in the euphoric hedonism of hipsterism...

...I read, whenever I could, the work of novelists under thirty or so, with occasional excursions into the fortyish bracket...

...Hemingway, Faulkner, and Company, I realized, were no longer young men (nor was I), and by the same token their novels not so modern as they once seemed...

...Recent novelists are following out in effect some of the experiments in structure which began forty years ago...

...Oh," he replied, "I've read them...

...They believe life is thus and so...

...To see this kind of questioning subjectivity in operation, you might try comparing Farrell's Studs Loni-gan, which is about a boy growing up in Chicago, with Willard Motley's Let No Man Write My Epitaph, which is also about a boy growing up in Chicago...

...We have bowed far too long in the direction of the Twenties...

...Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man...

...This is the first generation of writers in history who feel, as Evan S. Connell, Jr., recently wrote, that "our very lives depend upon the capacity of our nerves to withstand the thought of instantaneous annihilation...

...However, I have the strong feeling that The Old Man, beautifully constructed artifact that it is, doesn't say anything that Hemingway didn't say equally well or better in The Undefeated or Fifty Grand thirty years ago...

...A second reason for the recent disintegration of structural firmness in the novel is inherent in the contemporary view of life itself, as the novelists see it...

...If pressed, they may stick a few pins in some old, sacred balloons...

...It is convenient to overlook Faulkner's Mosquitoes, Hemingway's Torrents of Spring or Across The River, Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, Dos Passos' Number One, Farrell's Bernard Clare, and others which are by no means distinguished books...

...I don't mean disrespect for my betters, but I simply have the sensation that I have heard it before, as I have heard Marquand and Cozzens before, and a good many others...

...The Hemingwayesque prose, the Dos Passos "Camera Eye," the Faulkner-ian rhetoric, the Joycean labyrinth— things which not more than a few years ago were daring and new—are to them as normal as television...

...First, if there is a discernible trend in the form of the modern novel, it is toward the concept of the novel as a series of moments, rather than as a planned progression of events or incidents, moving toward a denned terminal end...

...J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye...

...Grapes of Wrath was and is a powerful book, but what has come since...