350
PARTISAN REVIEW
But not quite all. In the middle of the desert and the silence,
broken only by midget mutterings, we are still able to call to mind
the names of three men who have continued, with, to be sure, greatly
varying degrees of skill, to dramatize the human soul within a con–
vention of manners: Faulkner, Marquand, and Robert Penn Warren.
Except for them, we have no considerable novelists of manners what–
ever; and if we ask to know why we have no others, we had better
try to explain how it is that we happen to have even these men. It
would seem that we have them because of the good fortune of birth
and cultural heritage which made one of them a New Englander and
the other two Southerners. There are only two cultural pockets left
in America; and they are the Deep South and that area of north–
eastern United States whose moral capital is Boston, Massachusetts.
This is to say that these are the only places in the country which could
possibly produce novelists of manners because they are the only places
where there are any manners. In all the other parts of the country
people live in a kind of vastly standardized cultural prairie, a sort of
infinite Middle West, and that means that they don't really live and
they don't really do anything.
In the South and in New England there are still classes of
people who live by a code and a vision of conduct which formulates
and dramatizes their behavior. They have bias and idiosyncrasy as
personalities because they are both restrained and liberated by the
generally accepted dogmas of their class and place. The inhabitants
of other areas belong to a society which is rapidly becoming com–
pletely classless and in which, therefore, behavior is deprived of the
convention which would give it moral direction and vitality and the
inhabitants dramatic personality.
The most appalling fact about the American way of life today,
at least from the literary point of view, is not simply that people do
nothing according to a prevailing conventional rule but that, because
there is no conventional rule, they are losing their human personalities.
Without dogma, we might say, there can be no personality; and with–
out personality there can be no creation of character in fiction; and
without character there can be no novel of manners; and without
the novel of manners, we are left with nothing but the naked creative
sensibility; and that, no matter how brilliant it may be, is never by
itself enough.
John W. Aldridge
