PARTISAN REVIEW
he is dissatisfied with himself and is not equipped to be very much
more. The novelist is what he is.
Still, certain things are obvious.
Talent abounds; the highest talent.
If
we
t~e
any half dozen
distinguished novelists under fifty we must admire their feeling, their
brains, their writing, their diverse and original skills. They know
how to write. They never exceed their knowledge. They make no
gross errors. For them the novel is an art and they practice it with
fidelity. How rarely one is bored by the best modern novels; how
often, in the past, have 'the great' bored us, how awkwardly dis–
tended by errors they have been.
If
only, we say, we could combine
all the skill of the modern novelist in one outstanding imagination,
if only we could roll any half dozen of our novelists into one.
If
only-and there lies the undefined mystery of our dissatisfaction.
It
may be that these distinguished novelists are much more than dis–
tinguished; perhaps they, and all contemporary literature, are hope–
lessly overshadowed by the events of the last ten years. Life may not
only have afflicted the creative with its excesses; life may have dulled
the ear of criticism also.
If
this is not so we can fall back upon the now hackneyed ex–
planations of the lack of 'great novels'; the breakdown of our civiliza–
tion; the enfeeblement of upper middle class culture; the fact that
two wars have robbed two generations of their maturity; the fact
that life has behaved exorbitantly. Every writer (I believe Mr. Des–
mond MacCarthy once said), has to decide the amount of life he
will live: it is possible for writers to live too much; and, in one sense,
the compressed concentration on skill, intelligence and sensibility
suggests the unmanageable pressure of public life upon the writer's
mind which, to some extent, must always run counter to the open
direction of the world. Our half dozen writers stand on the dwindling
ground of private life. There is also a not unimportant mechanical
consideration. An uncontrollable amount of visual and oral experi–
ence is dispatched by screen and radio directly to the audience without
ceremony, experience which was once the monopoly of the novelist;
and he finds himself in a position similar to the painters' when pho–
tography was invented. Here the dilemma of the novelist is painful;
he is on the flood-tide of a popular movement, a class revolution
which offers new subjects and even new language; one which may
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