684
PARTISAN REVIEW
whole nation:
«The best literature in America will continue to be
negative so long as the country's values are such that no writer of
honesty or insight can possibly take them seriously."
Now, a lack of values in a writer may be an entirely superfluous
diagnosis in a case of plain artistic incompetence, and some of Aldridge's
diatribe might have been more accurately directed against downright
bad writing. Before grappling, then, with the thorny question of what
values did or did not corrupt the past decade, we ought to be sure about
its proper literary rating.
If
we are to weigh the 'forties by the 'twenties,
the 'forties will certainly be found wanting-nobody dissents from this
judgment, and so nobody seems to raise the necessary qualifications
that complicate this comparison. The three most memorable novels to
emerge from the last war ,eem to be:
The Naked and the Dead,
Bums's
The Gallery,
and James Jones's From
Here to Eternity
(which is
rightly considered a war book since its subject matter is military and
it closes with the bombing of Pearl Harbor). This may look like a pretty
thin showing for a whole generation of writers, but one or two things
have to be said in its favor in relation to the older decade.
Is
it al–
together certain, for example, that
The Naked and the Dead
is in–
ferior to Dos Passos'
Three Soldiers?
In the 'twenties Hemingway
brought to the language of the novel a style whose originality no con–
temporary can match; yet we should not forget that Hemingway's delib–
erate stylization is also a sterilization of experience, a refinement away
from the complexity of emotion.
The Sun Also Rises
is a tight formal
work of art, while John Home Bums's
The Gallery
is uneven and
in
many ways a failure; yet Bums is attempting to react to a far more
complex experience of Europe, and of the American confrontation of
Europe during the war, than Hemingway ever permitted himself to
deal with. Beside Hemingway's mastery of a style,
From Here to Eternity
is a great loose sprawl of stenography; yet Jones has the remarkable
virtues of the primitive and naive, so that through all his diffuseness
and immaturity there break certain types of American character and
vitality that never enter Hemingway's stylized world.
But with all such qualifications made, the fact remains that the
present generation has produced a literature below the level of the
'twenties, and far below what should be expected of 150 million people
living in the most prosperous country in the history of the world. No
doubt, a more adequate selection of writers by Aldridge would have
made the period look better, but our dissatisfaction with its artistic
output would remain. Indeed, some of the books he deals with hardly
seem worth being remembered by any lengthy critical comment, except
