FICTION CHRONICLE
523
sense in which Fitzgerald was childishly right when he said, "The
rich are different from us." It is the child's sense, which Jackson re–
creates in the most amiable way, that people are different by a lake
or in a huge Victorian house or sunning themselves in a meadow, be–
cause the experience of them is eternally colored by the experience of
lake and house and meadow, and beyond that by the magic of time,
not merely time of day or season, but time in the rapidly changing life
of a young observer, conscious then of being what he has not been before
or ever will be again.
The stories in Angus Wilson's
The Wrong Set
have little of Jack–
son's amiability, but are equally entertaining. And though the char–
acters are often unpleasant and unhappy and cruel and the stories
often end negatively, this is the world of
The Sunnier Side
rather
than
Geraldine Bradshaw
or
The Dead of Spring.
For these characters
have stubborn inner integrity, though not of a moral kind, and great
human resource, and are capable of peculiarly bright flashes of wit and
idea. Their kind of behavior is appropriate to their kind of character,
and thoroughly natural, but the kinds are so qualified and individualized
and particularized, that they seem determined only by their need of be–
ing themselves and are proved true only by the imaginative assent we
give them.
And it is in this sense that good writing is naturalistic, and not in
the sense of
Geraldine Bradshaw.
To a philosophic naturalist everything
is natural, including religious and mystical and imaginative experience,
everything "generated and controlled by the animal life of man in the
bosom of nature." Ideas are more or less true and events are more or less
determined, but all human experience is equally natural and equally at
the service of the artist who can imagine it. The more exactly qualified
experience is in expression, the more freely it resists reduction to fact or
reduction to law. The naturalism of writers like Willingham and
Goodman reveals a sociological bias toward the kind of experience which
results, or is held to result, from the stunting and deforming effects of
our present civilization, and reveals a rationalist bias away from any kind
of experience which seems to have philosophic premises they cannot
rationally accept. This is true of a good deal of existential fiction also.
But at a time when human life itself is threatened, there is an irresistible
impulse to break free of such limitations in favor of that larger naturalism
which gives us imaginative access to all possibilities of human experience,
but which makes us totally responsible for the values we give them.
Robert Gorham Davis
