FITZGERALD AND AMERICA
353
the American experience, where the individual is left wide open to life
and must discover for himself everything, or almost everything, that
other peoples and peoples of the past could take for granted-but
perhaps too,
in
taking these things for granted, they did not know them
as we shall some day know them, if only we survive the learning.
William Barrett
ANTIPODAL FICTION
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY.
By
Jomes Jones. Scribner's. $4.50
SUCH DARLING DODOS.
By
Angus Wilson. Morrow. $2.50
American fiction has frequently been described as excessively
rich in experience but deficient in intellectual qontrol and, in terms of
comparison with European literature, both halves of the statement ap–
pear to be true beyond debate.
It
has also seemed to me true that, in
terms of the sheer heterogeneity of American society and the indeter–
minate historic status of all its groups, classes, and regions, American
writers have not revealed a width and variety of experience adequate to
the creation of fiction with the urgent relevance to the important dyna–
mic processes of national life that the European novel, at its best,
possessed. The enthusiastic reception accorded
From Here to Eternity
is due largely to the fact that it plows extensively into vast tracts of
important contemporary experience that have scarcely been scratched
before.
Although
From Here to Eternity
may seem like a logical, if tan–
gential offshoot of the work of the most well-known American novelists,
what it derives from them, for the most part to its detriment, are
superficial modes of expression rather than its content or approach to
character. What chiefly sets this lengthy and chaotic first novel apart
is
the fact that the author seems to have broken through to a much
more intimate awareness of what, for want of a better word, must still
be called the American lower classes. Particularly, Mr. Jones manages
to evoke and communicate more of their significant inner life, a sense
of the complex values hidden
in
their daily activities as these values
develop organically into awareness, generalization, and even, at the
peak of the novel, into a not unimpressive flight of theologic speculation.
Even the least articulate, the most
lumpe.n
of Mr. Jones's characters
functioning
in
the most trivial scene
is
fairly drenched
in
a kind of self–
consciousness that is, I believe, a uniquely American attribute, the con–
sequence of democracy not as it operates politically but as it penetrates
