PARTISAN REVIEW
./ )
The split between James and Wells, between the
inn~d
the
/ \outer world, between analytic subtlety and surface reporting, is a
sign of one of the great cultural maladjustments of our age. Both
James and Wells were damaged by it. The absence of critical appre–
ciation forced James to his own extremes, to such overly ingenious
effects as that in
The Figure in the Carpet
itself, where the breathless
pursuit of Hugh Vereker's "meaning" ends as the kind of arid curi–
osity agairist which Wel15 protested. The failure of James' contem–
poraries to respond to Flaubert's challenge for com_position compelled
James to insist upon it to such lengths that he finally objected to
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as "fluid puddings" because of their "defiance
of economy and architecture." Though Wells did not have that tragic
/ blindness, his increa'>ing indifference to any art is equally unbalanced.
His novels have profited less and less by any of James' advice, and in
his carelessly thrown together
Autobiography
he dismissed them
altogether as of no lasting worth.
The consequences of this split between "highbrow" and "low–
brow" have been especially virulent in America, fed, on the one part,
by the divorce between our educated minds and experience_, which
Santayana named the genteel tradition; and, on the other, by the
enormous premiums paid to any sensationalism. Despite the fact that
he was himself the extreme case of a writer glutted by slabs of raw
experience which he could not assimilate, Thomas Wolfe discerned
one phase of our dilemma. At one extreme are "the laboring, farming
sort of people" from which Wolfe came, who think of the writer as
someone romantic and remote from their own lives. At the other
extreme are "the university-going kind of people, and these people
also become fascinated with the glamor and difficulty of writing, but
in a different way. They get more involved or fancy than the most
involved and fancy European people of this sort. They become more
'Flauberty' than Flaubert. They establish little magazines that not
only split a hair with the best of them, but they split more hairs than
Europeans think of splitting. The Europeans say: 'Oh God, where
did these people, these aesthetic Americans, ever come from?' . . . I
think all of us who have tried to write in this country may have fallen
in between these two groups of well-meaning and misguided people,
and if we become writers finally, it i'> in spite of each of them."
Whitman escaped from one group, and James anticipated the
other. It has been the fashion of recent critici'>m to dramatize the
