BOOKS
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structure and events in it and change and strife; hence he denies its
motion, seeking to affirm it as
being
in the Platonic sense, as a virtual
stability "out of time": in other words out of history, which is social
time. Then certainly it becomes necessary to lift Man (not men) "from
the nightmare of history to the calm dream of his own soul." And this
calm dream is "language" (not apprehension and expression as affective
communication). For a while he is forced to give up writing because of
poverty, and at once he "becomes nothing, not even a shadow." The real
world presses in on him, and he cannot help feeling that "it is blasphemous
for any living man" to live thus and that "he has less honor than a grocer's
clerk, less dignity than the doorman at the St. Francis hotel, less identity
than the driver of a taxi-cab." Here is the vision of shame in the face of
the worker's labor, which proves its reality by affecting life. But it is
merely a passing insight; its impingement on the consciousness is too brief
to save him from the seductive mystery of the dream of
stmis.
It
is easier,
more in the tradition to rejoice in one's cosmic piety and fondle the type–
writer thinking:
"This is my room and I have created a small civilization
in this room, and this place
is
the universe to me.
... "
Life from the
Viewpoint of the Short Story! Now we can understand the sources of
the prose, which is so prolix, naive and egocentric. Piece by piece a full
portrait emerges. Without awareness he writes in one context: "Drama
ii
impossible because everyone is interested in himself." This means that
literature is impossible. A sensitive young man leaped into the eternal
ether and was smothered.
I have seldom read a more self-revealing exposition of the life of the
declassed intellectual, who, being an artist, finds in his very medium a
haven from activity. The result is language without perception. He
desires "evil," but all he finds is "filthiness"; he wants to give purity, but
all he gives is the sentimentality of the "vastest ego." In the title-story
he suffers starvation, he makes the rounds looking for work: but the reso–
lution comes when he faints away into infinity. Rejecting on one side
the brutishness and sycophancy of commerce, of getting ahead in the world,
and on the other the sober courage of struggle against the prevailing op–
pression-what is left but consoling oneself with the small explosions of
"universal" anarchism. He sees the existing order for what it is, for he
comes "upon strange specimens of life, men made frightening by capitalism."
Yet he cannot see how this same force makes "strange specimens" out of
his own themes. In a letter to the
New Masses
he finds the Communist
program the most valid, but that is, after all, a secular matter. As regards
his writing, it is predetermined and immutable.
This whole mode, of course, is nothing new in American literature.
But now the time is ripe for its stagnation; in Saroyan the whole stream
comes to the surface; its peculiar essence has become marketable. In the
historical 'sense the school of esthetes-modernists-from whom Saroyan
>terns and whose "holy" names he invokes in his little testaments-is
philosophically of the same complexion. His masters had the advantage
over him in functioning earlier, when the mode had a stronger base because
of the absence, in the cultural sphere at least, of its dialectic opponent
and conqueror. In the nineteen-twenties Horace Gregory quavered:
