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PARTISAN REVIEW
an immense groping, often confused and at odds with itself and even
anti-humanistic in its actual directions, but in its intentions real and
positive nevertheless.
Obviously, then,
it
is grappling with Proteus to try to sum up
American values
in
any simple formula. The question divides and sub–
divides again, and has almost to be examined separately at each level
of our society.
Beginning from the bottom, what we find persistently remarkable
about our current fiction is that the affirmative values are usually found
in the characters of the lower classes. The roots of this lie deep in the
American past, but here we need not go back beyond Faulkner,
in
whom the dumb and the inarticulate and the primitive are almost
always the characters with the deepest and most positive adherence to
life. James Jones's enlisted men are
lumpen
characters, but they are
also bursting with a positive energy of life, in comparison with which the
officers and their middle-class wives appear decadent and corrupt.
Mailer's G.I.'s, however coarsened and degraded by their experience,
are vital and real human beings; but when Mailer wants to create a
character of some intellectual awareness, in whom values wotiId be
held
in
conscience and self-consciousness, he c,an only give us
his
Lieutenant Hearn, a futile and drifting nursling of the middle class
with a vacuum at his heart. In American fiction the values seem to
become uncertain when they are to be held consciously; and therefore
the educated middle classes appear as the social stratum where nihilism
has made its chief inroads.
Our middle class has become such a fluid and uncertain thing that
we have, significantly, to go back beyond the present generation, for an
accurate novelist of the social manners of this class:
J.
P. Marquand is
the nearest thing we have to such a social novelist, and his novels make
up a prolonged and ambiguous lament over the death of the heart of
our older middle class. The Marquand bourgeoisie, while still attached
to them, finds the old ideals of its class harder to justify amid the
scramble of modem life: against the amoral, hard-driving, and cosmo–
politan life of New York the code of old New England looks very para–
doxical indeed. Within the limits of his talent and material, Marquand
is one of the best observers we have, and the historical fact implicit
in his novels is confirmed by such recent social analyses as those of
David Riesman. From old Boston to New York (substitute any other
high-strung urban area, like Washington and Hollywood)-such is the
spiritual journey of the American middle class, in the course of which
this class may have become more clever and sophisticated, but also more
brittle, violent, hard-drinking, neurotic and nihilistic.
