228
PARTISAN REVIEW
I have said little about the fic–
tion and poetry in the new maga–
zines. Most of these offerings are
repeat performances from the re–
cent past's extended run of creative
stalemate and debility. There is a
good deal to be said against the
intellectual product of the twen–
ties; yet those writers who estab–
lished themselves in that period,
and who still exist, reminding us
occasionally of creatures from an–
other
ag~ummings,
Eliot, Ste–
vens, Williams, etc.-remain our
most gifted avantgarde contribu–
tors. The competition from those
who followed is a sporadic affair
only.
If
that was a Wasteland and
they were the Lost Generation,
then what is this moldy milieu in
which we find ourselves; and what
are we?
WELDON KEEs
Graham Greene and
the Intelligentsia
F
oR
THE
last twenty years the de–
tective story has been the official
bedside book of the tired brain
worker. Where hunting was once
the sport of kings, the vicarious
man-hunt has become the sport of
presidents, college professors, econ–
omists, cabinet ministers, and liter–
ary men; and the small detective–
story reader, like the small business
man who alleges in extenuation of
his own sharp practice the habits
of the vast corporations, has tJ:.c
example of Yeats or Elwt or Roose–
velt ready in his defense. But the
detective-story reader, insofar as
he is an intellectual, has always
been uneasy; he is ashamed of his
predilection (or is it a vice?) and
seeks to justify it, not only by pre–
cedent, but, at length, on esthetic
grounds; he makes a virtue of nee-
. essity, a literary cult of what is
really a pastime, praises Hammett
for his realism, Dorothy Sayers for
her bluestocking wit and learning,
Margery Allingham for her neo–
romantic sensibility, so that you
would have thought, to hear peo–
ple talk a few years ago, that these
detective story writers were being
read exclusively for their style.
Graham Greene is God's gift to
this group of readers. He has si–
lenced forever the embarrassing
question: But is it art? With Miss
Sayers, Miss Allingham, and the
others, there was always that
doubt; the classical prose, the
learned allusions, the decadent de–
tective, were all of the surface; un–
derneath the slipcover were the old
springs of the detective story plot.
Graham Greene was more radical.
He discarded the framework of the
detective story for a machine more
old-fashioned, the thriller; and on
the principle that has been work–
ing in interior decoration, where
Victorian furniture is discovered to
be more modern than modern fur–
niture, and in philosophy, where
St. Thomas Aquinas is found to be
more chic than John Dewey (you
regress in order to advance and
nothing is more out of style than
last year's hat), he produced a
series of modern and highbrow
novels under the formal discipline
of Edgar Wallace and E. Phillips
Oppenheim. And into this scheme
so bizarre, so inexplicable, so amaz–
ing, so different from the rational
universe of Lord Peter Wimsey and
Hercule Poirot, who never for an
instant, even in their most baffling
cases, lose faith in "the little grey
cells" of the brain, he precipitated
the contemporary man, bred out of
Dostoievsky, Eliot, and Kafka, out
of Freud and the Spanish War,
who went to school with Auden,
and whose remote ancestors are
Hamlet and Orestes.
The moral problem he moved to
t
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