PARTISAN REVIEW
-who was the analyst of fine consciences but scarcely of fine minds
-shared this indifference. The intellectual is the only character
missing in the American novel, which contains everything except
ideas. But what are ideas? At best judgments of reality and at
worst substitutes for it. The American novelist's conversion to real–
ity, however, has been so belated that he cannot but be bafBed by
judgments and vexed by substitutes.
The American novel exhibits a singular pattern consisting, on
the one hand, of a disinclination to thought and, on the other, of an
intense predilection for the real: and the real it conceives as a vast
phenomenology swept by waves of sensation and feeling. In this
welter there is little room for the intellect, which in the uncon–
scious belief of many imaginative Americans is naturally imper–
vious, if not actually inimical, to reality. Consider the literary
qualities of Ernest Hemingway, for example. There is nothing
Hemingway despises more than experience of a make-believe,
vague, or frigid nature, but in order to safeguard himself against
the counterfeit he consistently avoids drawing upon the more
abstract resources of the mind, he snubs the thinking man and
mostly confines himself to the depiction of life on its physical
levels. Of course, his extraordinary mastery of the sensuous ele–
ment amply compensates for whatever losses he may sustain in
other spheres. But Hemingway is only a particular instance. Other
writers, less gifted and not so self-sufficiently and incisively one–
sided as he is, have through this same creative psychology come to
grief. Under its conditioning some of them have produced work
so limited to the recording of the immediately apparent and unmis–
takably and recurrently real that it can truly be said of them that
their art ends exactly where it should begin.
"How can one make the best of one's life?" Andre Malraux
asks in one of his novels. "By converting as wide a range of expe–
rience as possible into conscious thought.'' It is precisely this reply
which is alien to the typical American artist, who is so utterly
absorbed in experience that he is often satisfied to let it "write its
own ticket"-to carry him to its own chance or casual destination.
2.
The disunity of American literature, its polar division into
above and below or highbrow and lowbrow writing, has been noted
