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"not uncongenial to an audience conditioned by the theories of Freud
and his successors." Without at all taking a mechanical, psychoanalytic
approach to character, it still seems to me that it is always psychology,
in the broadest sense, that intimidates contemporary religious novelists.
They remain, so far as I know, unable to unite the novelist's concern
with motivation, his wish to establish a recognizable human person–
ality, with the religious impulse in a pure and undivided state. I cannot
see that Bemanos, in spite of his unusual talents, has had the slightest
success in this respect.
To shift abruptly to secular matters,
The Big Clock
by Kenneth
Fearing is a well-done book, though not, to my mind, worth doing. It
is wittier and more accomplished than most thrillers, but it is still a
thriller and makes use of all the privileges of the form-coincidence,
suspense, boldness of action-without imposing upon itself any of the
duties of serious fiction.
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
WOOFED WITH DREAMS
KRAZY KAT.
By George Herriman. Henry Holt.
$3.75.
O
N THE UNDERSIDE of our society, there are those who have no real
stake at all in respectable culture. These are the open enemies of
culture, despising indiscriminately a painting by Picasso and a painting
by Maxfield Parrish, a novel by Kafka and a novel by
A.
J. Cronin, a
poem by Yeats and a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox-these are readers
of pulp magazines and comic books, potential book-burners, unhappy
patrons of astrologers and communicants of lunatic sects, the hopelessly
alienated and outclassed who can enjoy perhaps not even Andy Hardy
but only Bela Lugosi, not even the
Reader's Digest
but only
True
Detective.
But their distance from the center gives them in the mass a degree
of independence that the rest of us can approach ·only individually and
by discipline. In the extremity of their alienation, they are ready to be
assured and irresponsible, they are ready to say: Shoot the bankers, or
Kill the Jews, or Let the Nazis come. They no longer care if the ship
goes down, they go their own way. That is why an editorial in the
Daily News
is so much more interesting-and ofteri so much nearer the
truth-than an editorial in
PM. PM
has too many things to consider;
only the
Daily News
can remain entirely reasonable and disinterested
when it suggests that the human race is on the way to extinction.
When this
Lumpen
culture displays itself in mass art forms, it can
