688
PARTISAN REVIEW
New Yorker
become when exposed to the rough edges of American
life.
Thus wherever they crop up in recent literature, as in Marquand
and
The New Yorker,
the traditional norms appear to be at bay. This
appearance, is, I believe, a reality, our fiction is social fact, and for
the very simple reason that the real values of America, whether or not
Americans themselves always know it, represent a radical break with
tradition. America may not yet be an entirely new civilization, but it
contains in itself the seeds of such, a fact which most of us recognize
only intermittently and usually when we are
in
conflict with the new
life of this continent because of some more traditional background. It is
only natural then that Americans are confused about their values and
that our writers stammer in trying to express this confusion. Though
this
situation is new, something like it has occurred in the past, and a
relevant comparison can be made with the position of the Russian
writers of the last century: they too were unsure of themselves in a
culture that they felt as raw and unformed in relation to the developed
cultures of Western Europe, and they too groped for an identity, in
dreadful haste to assimilate Western Europe and in even more dread–
ful conflict about the assimilation. And they produced Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky. We can hardly expect a Tolstoy or Dostoevsky in America
when the deepest experience of these writers is not an organic and
recognized part of American life: our extrovert civilization has devel–
oped other means of adjusting to life without their spiritual struggles.
We have the crack-up and the breakdown, neurosis and maladjustment,
but we do not have the tragic sense of life. Of course, a society does not
exist in order to produce a literature, and the American sense of life
may yet succeed in founding a civilization superior in many ways to
anything in the past: I do not argue these matters, but only that from
what we have so far been able to see the literature of such a new
civilization is not likely to be able to compete in interest with that of the
past. The American sense of life, however, being new, may very well
develop into something quite different from what we know; it may not
even survive: remember that America in this respect merely continues
along the path on which Europe itself was headed until the upheavals
of recent history brought it face to face with the abysses of human
existence that a facile rationalism had let itself forget.
Something like this, I imagine, was what Aldridge was trying to
get at in his book, and his f,ailure to get it right may be in good part due
to the fact that he makes so much of his case tum about the bad little
boys of our literature-Capote, Vidal, Bowles, Merle Miller-whose
