AMERICAN
FICTION
AND AMERICAN VALUES
685
by a critic hell-bent to produce a lengthy critical comment on any
available material.
All of which brings us back to our initial question: Why are
Americans not writing better books? At this point Aldridge introduces
the word "values" in token of explanation. To be sure, he remains
very vague about the values he intends, but this vagueness is typical
of most literary and philosophical discussion of the subject: "values"
are an easy halting place, sometimes a camouflage, for what lies beyond
them. The highest values may be held in a lifeless nnd stifling way (as
the values of religion by T. S. Eliot); on the other hand, some great
artistic periods have been decadent in their morality, and nihilism itself,
passionately held, has produced some great fruits. Beyond values there
lies the depth of the human commitment and choice from which the
values come. The trouble with a novel like Shaw's
The Young Lions,
to revert to our previous example, is that it has, not none, but too many
and too obvious values: those of a facile liberalism held from the top
of the head and thoroughly false to life. What matters in the end, both
for values and for art, is the depth of life as a felt thing; and it is this,
and not some intellectual explanation, that
is
lost whenever we say that
the meaning of life has been lost. And if our young writers now ex–
perience the life around them as meaningless, it is this meaning they
have lost.
Nowadays in America we have new ways of going at this age-old
problem of the meaning of life. Some time last year the
Daily News
published in its column "The Inquiring Photographer" an interview in
which six people encountered on the streets of New York City were
asked, "What are
you
living for?" This interview was more instructive
about modem life and the question of values than any academic article
published in the philosophical journals for that year. The confusion
of the answers was to be expected, more remarkable was the willing–
ness of these Americans to live in open confrontation of the question
and their confusion about it; and perhaps most remarkable of all that
the
question itself should
be
asked with such open-air and democratic
directness in the pages of the
Daily News.
A hundred or a few hundred
years ago nobody could have been stopped on the streets for this purpose:
ordinary people did not worry in public about the meaning of life so
long as they knew the answer handed to them by acknowledged auth–
ority; but today in America, if the
Daily News
is evidence, we have
become so radically committed to democracy that each individual
is
expected to live through this question for himself. This is the key
to our situation in America: the apparent absence of values is in fact
