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culture which dins at us every day is made intelligible to us on
our
own terms:
think what an enormous release this is to us as human
beings! The release in criticism that the popculturists are giving us
is, I repeat, just a hint of the kind of pertinence, excitement and real
meaning that a new fiction can give us.
Weare not getting these things now. The most accomplished
"young" short-story writers that we have, those like J. F. Powers and
Eudora Welty, do not
speak
to us as a vital fiction should and once
did. We can admire their art, but it has no intimate meaning for us
as individuals; this being so of the best, think of the foolishness of
ordinary writers continuing to write the realistic story, except for
purposes of entertainment. For purposes of art-that is, for purposes
that relate to our actual lives today as we live them, hence conceive
them-these stories are dead. Much of our non-fiction, as I suggested
before, has more actual life in it.
To sum up: the arts of the short story and novel in America
have lagged far behind the life we are actually experiencing, especially
when you think of the imagination-the sense of possibility-as the
most important part of our experience. The "realistic" story as a
container and expression of this life has become a mockery, a form
that is unable to speak to us any longer in a pertinent way. We must
have a fiction-nay, a fact!--equal to the intellectual pace and new
sense of possibility which our minds have become tuned to. Otherwise
I can't see our novels and stories being important to us who are, alas,
real not fictional people. Our fiction now is addressing a fiction of
ourselves-not what is actually going on.
P.S. The foregoing was written three months ago, before publication
of Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man,
which I have just read. While I
find Ellison's book raw and overambitious, it is the only recent U.S.
novel trying to pioneer in the direction we've been discussing. Unpub–
lished work by James Turner Jackson and Chandler Brossard, plus the
few published stories by the gifted and original Jack Jones, are the only
similarly contemporary work I've seen by young American writers.
Seymour Krim
