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PARTISAN REVIEW
J.
Donald Adams.
The Modern Writer and His World
unfortunately
furnishes much ammunition to international philistia. The author
him–
self, however, is not a philistine, though he may
be,
by American stan–
dards, a middlebrow (not that American standards are higher; they
are merely different, because we have in this country variations and
contradictions of taste and opinion much more extreme than those
in
England). Mr. Fraser is a man of acute literary intelligence and sensi–
bility who is determined at all costs to be plain, candid, downright, and,
to use one of his own words, "wholesome." He even makes us
think
that he is being candid and realistic rather than insufferable when, in
speaking of
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
he says that "young readers, in
particular, may often derive an improper and unhealthy excitement
from the detailed description of sexual episodes." Maybe so, but let's
not go into all
that.
The general question one wants to pose for Mr. Fraser's considera–
tion is this. What makes him think that his post-Burkean, bourgeois
family-man's liberal conservatism, however admirable it may be as a
political or personal credo, has necessarily a bearing on the future of
literature, or on our efforts to enhance and vindicate it? Aren't we
bourgeois family men-we Miltons, Blakes, Melvilles, Twains, and
J
oyces-a little free in the life of the imagination? And isn't
that
life a
life of hazard and glory?
As
moralists we may sympathize with Mr. Fraser. One may some–
times share his doubts about Mallarme's tendency to destroy poetry by
making it its own subject matter, or Rimbaud's disastrous translation
of life into a form of poetry. One may disapprove of the inhumanity
of Shaw's doctrine of the immanent will, or Lawrence's ill-defined but
vehement prophecies, or the disorderly melodramas of Conrad, or the
"perpetual rediscovery of the Absolute on every second page . . . of
classic American literature" (even though this latter may be "one of
the grand contributions to the tradition of English writing"). But
would literature really be better off-would it be half so well off–
if these great writers had been less violent, contradictory and transcen–
dental, less colorful and unmanageable, if they had had more of the
solid virtues? (I cannot help mentioning at this point Mr. Fraser's de–
plorable rewriting of a passage from Lawrence's
Studies in Classic
American Literature
in order to make it available to the plain reader.
Doubtless there is a lot of mysterious jargon in Lawrence and it is up
to the critic to explain the meaning as he grasps it. But he is not called
on to
improve
Lawrence.)
One may value, with Mr. Fraser, the intuitive conservatism of
