56
PARTISAN REVIEW
broadest generalizations--clouds the literary discussion of manners.
Long before manners became fashionable in literary criticism, Yvor
Winters, writing about Henry James's novels in
Maule's Curse,
said
that the great novelist knew "next to nothing of the detail, the man–
ners, of any single and reasonably representative class in its native
environment." The result, said Mr. Winters, was that James tended
to isolate the moral sense in
his
novels "from the manners which
might have given it concreteness." Mr. Winters' thesis was at least
understandable. It had never occurred to me in reading the novels
of James, or, for that matter, in reading Racine and Sophocles, that
the absence of the daily detail of life and of the observation of man–
ners made the rendering of a moral sense any the less meaningful
and intense. But, after all, I felt, Mr. Winters is a man of the world
while I am virtually a recluse, so that perhaps I have no basis of
judgment.
Some time after, a close friend of mine told me that at the age
of 16 she had read Dostoevsky's
The Idiot
and liked it very much
and thought that human beings were really what Dostoevsky por–
trayed them as being, but everyone she knew was engaged in cover–
ing up! This rather extreme conclusion made me remember Mr.
Winters' dictum about the observation of manners as being necessary
to the representation of a moral sense in works of fiction. My friend's
remark suggested that one function of manners was to conceal morals
and motives, which in turn illuminated Dostoevsky:
The Brothers
Karamazov,
for example, was certainly about manners: it was about
bad manners.
My snobbish error had been to assume that any ref–
erence to manners meant good manners!
Of course Dostoevsky's
novel was really about something else, including an intense moral
sense. But the bad manners of the characters were clearly necessary.
The same was true of
M oby Dick:
it was about the bad manners of
the White Whale when he met Captain Ahab and bit him.
As
for
Captain Ahab, he was no gentleman, for he harbored a grudge, which
is not good manners.
At this point I enjoyed that access of well-being which comes
from the belief that one has succeeded in understanding something.
But suddenly I dropped into a new bewilderment. For I remembered
that, according to the prior school of literary thought,
M oby Dick,
like all great works of literature, was supposed to be a myth.
If
it was
