490
PARTISAN REVIEW
and power; a prosiness so primary in texture that if taken in bulk
it affects us as a kind of poetry of the commonplace and ill–
favored; and an emphatic eroticism which is the real climate of
existence in his fictions-Eros hovering over the shambles. Sin–
clair Lewis was never a novelist in the proper sense that Zola and
Dreiser are novelists, and, given his gift for exhaustive reporting,
naturalism did him more good than harm by providing him with
a ready literary technique. In Farrell's "chronicles there is an
underlying moral code which, despite his explicit rejection of the
Church, seems to me indisputably orthodox and Catholic; and his
Studs Lonigan-a product of those unsightly urban neighbor–
hoods where youth prowls and fights to live up to the folk-ideal
of the "regular guy"-is no mere character but an archetype, an
eponymous hero of the street-myths that prevail in our big cities.
The naturalism of Dos Passos is most completely manifested in
U. S. A.,
tagged by the critics as a "collective" novel recording
the "decline of our business civilization." But what distinguishes
Dos Passos from other novelists of the same political animus is
a sense of justice so pure as to be almost instinctive, as well as a
deeply elegiac feeling for the intimate features of American lfe
and for its precipitant moments. Also,
U. S. A.
is one of the very
few naturalist novels in which there is a controlled use of language,
in which a major effect is produced by the interplay between
story and style. It is necessary to add, however, that the
faults of Dos Passos' work have been obscured by its vivid con–
temporaneity and vital political appeal. In the future, I think,
it will be seen more clearly than now that it dramatizes social
symptoms rather than lives and that it fails to preserve the integrity
of personal experience.*
It
is not hard to demonstrate the weakness of the naturalist
method by abstracting it, first, from the uses to which individual
authors put it and, second, from its function in the history of
*
I do not quite see on what grounds some critics and literary historians inClude
such writers as Faulkner, Hemingway, and Caldwell in the naturalist school. I
should think that Faulkner is exempted
by
his prodigious inventiveness and fantastic
humor. Hemingway is a realist on one level, in his attempts to catch the "real
thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion"; but he is also
subjective, given to self-portraiture and to playing games with his ego; there is very
little study of ba'ckground in his work, a minimum of documentation. Caldwell is a
novelist of rural abandon-and comedy. His Tobacco Road is a sociological area
only in patches; most of it is exotic landscape.
