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PARTISAN REVIEW
literature, however, becomes somewhat obscured in some of the more
pretentious efforts where the writer has been able to create a new and
ambiguous literary fac;ade: thus a novel a few years back,
The Young
Lions
by Irwin Shaw, covers a great sweep of canvas and professes to
deal with some major themes in modern life, but in substance is so slick
and spurious that we have in it an example of something new in literary
history, a kind of make-believe of serious literature. Since America
places such a premium upon "know-how" and technique, much energy
and real accomplishment goes into producing the efficient surface of
good writing, and a great number of agile brains are consumed in
this kind of thing, in journalism and books, without having the time
to worry whether the substance behind the surface even exists, so that
we call the thing literature only for lack of another name. But facts
like these only partially explain our ultimate literary shortcomings.
However new our circumstances, writers in the past were often alienated,
at odds with their society or seduced by it, suffered from debts, poverty
and publishers. Life, when urgent and quick in the writer, finds a way
·of getting over material hindrances. The facts compel us to recognize a
deeper cause: that American life itself in this period tends away from
the emotional and organic depths out of which the greatest literature
has sprung. This generalization bites off a great deal, I am aware; and
the rest of what I have to say here must be by way of documenting and
qualifying it.
If
in his
After the Lost Generation,!
Mr. John W. Aldridge had
begun with some such line of reasoning as the above, his book would
have made much better sense, since the unspoken emotional premise
behind his whole argument is a rage of disappointment that a large,
vital, and industrious country like the United States is not now produc–
ing the great literature that, from all purely rational considerations,
we should expect of it. The book attempts to define the present post–
war literary generation by a round-up of some of its novelists: Norman
Mailer, Irwin Shaw (for his war novel,
The Young Lions),
Burns,
Hayes, Merle Miller, Capote, Vidal, Paul Bowles, Frederick Buechner,
and others. It may be that Aldridge has moved a little too fast in
trying to sum up a generation before it has really got under weigh, but
in America these days we travel at great speed, and in intellectual mat–
ters too. The American, so far as he is conscious, is engaged everywhere
in asking himself who he is; and one sign of our extraordinary self–
consciousness as a nation is that we have produced so many books of
literary introspection like
this
one during the past few years. Such books
1. New York: McGraw-Hill Co., 1951. $3.00.
