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PARTISAN REVIEW
Trilling's-"substantiality," the virtue, that is, of "intention, passion,
thought" and profound character portrayal, "which is precisely a pro–
duct of a class existence." It should follow, therefore, that if the con–
temporary novel in America has been increasingly characterized by
moral vacuity and dramatic failure, it is because
we
have experi–
enced a loss of our sense of social class, and, with it, of the con–
vention of manners which alone can give it moral and dramatic life.
Morton Zabel, in writing of Graham Greene, has made this very
pertinent observation: "The Victorian
frisson
of crime was all the
choicer for the rigor of propriety and sentiment that hedged it
in.
Dickens' terrors are enhanced less by his rhetoric than by his coziness.
The reversion to criminality in Dostoevsky takes place in a ramifying
hierarchy of authority-family life, social caste, political and religious
bureaucracy, czarist militarism and repression. The horror of
The Turn
of the Screw
is framed by the severest decorum, taste, and inhibition."
And Mr. Zabel concludes from this that "a criminal takes his dignity
from his defiance of the intelligence or merit that surrounds him, from
the test his act imposes on the human community. He becomes trivial
when that measure is denied
him."
One supposes that the criminal sensibility which figures so prom–
inently and horribly in Graham Greene's novels is saved from becom–
ing trivial by the circumstances of Mr. Greene's present religious
orientation. Guilt for the Greene protagonist
is
guilt not in terms of
society but in terms of his own soul; and to achieve this kind of
guilt
in the contemporary world Mr. Greene has had, in a sense, to import
a soul and then construct around it a private scaffolding of manners
against which
,its
moral measure could be taken. For American writers,
however, who have generally lacked access to Mr. Greene's convenient
source of supply, there have been no importable souls and few spiritual
materials for the creation of private manners. One might, in fact, say
that in the last thirty or forty years the only contact American writers
have had with manners has been with their disappearance. Lewis,
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Dos Passos all wrote dramas dealing with
the consequences of this disappearance. They were energized into
drama, almost in spite of themselves and certainly, in the case of two
of them, in spite of their talents, by the great explosive force of a
singular social phenomenon-the impact of the twentieth century upon
Victorian America. But with the fading of the last echoes of that
im–
pact, we have been left with a vast and empty silence, in which, un–
fortunately, all but the nearly inarticulate seem to have lost the power
of dramatic speech.
