362
PARTISAN REVIEW
profitable to pretend to be prose. The excesses of Algren's recent little
prose-poem on Chicago begin now to threaten to take over his novels.
"When opening time was closing time and everyone was there, down
where you lay your money down, where it's everything but square,!
where hungry young hustlers hustle dissatisfied old cats and ancient
glass-eyed satyrs make passes at bandrats...." I never quite believe
I'm going to find these passages again when I look for them; they
seem something half-remembered from a liverish dream.
Hersey, on the other hand, is stylistically well-behaved, almost im–
peccable. He sports not a back-alley but a Brooks Brothers prose: the
modest well-made style of the man who does not want to call undue
attention to himself but feels obliged to live up to a certain aesthetic
class standard: "I spent a year preparing myself for the trip. I applied
myself to learn Mandarin Chinese and got a fair fluency in it. I read
all I could find on the Yangtze; I learned of its mad rise and fall. ..."
These are the sentences of one secure enough to know that even if
he begins each monotonous period with a subject, everyone will know
he does it because he
wants
to, because he would consider it vulgar to
avoid such simplicity. I am, however, helplessly reminded of the Latin
satirist's tag: "Desiring to appear simple, he succeeds."
For the British, on the other hand, certain kinds of bad writing,
which afflict our writers like their fate, are almost unimaginable. Neither
the vulgar art of the Journalism school graduate pretending he never
went to school, nor the genteel-anonymous style out of the Ivy League
by
The New Yorker
are possible to them. Certain levels of badness (as
well as the corresponding sorts of power) are denied them; and this
is finally a crippling kind of advantage. Certainly
The Long View
of
Elizabeth J ane Howard is vitiated for me by the ease with which it
attains its by-now standard triumphs of polite style. Witty and sensitive
(though perhaps never quite as witty and sensitive as it obviously feels
itself to be), it is able to explore without strain levels of psychological
complexity unavailable to the thickness of Algren or the thinness of
Hersey. H enry James is the name that comes immediately to mind; and
the influence of James is everywhere present in the book, in the rhythms
of the sentences and in the love the characters feel for their own
sensitivity. But for James, self-educated and an American, the inventor
not only of the style that bears his name but of the self that created
it, this style and this self were
difficult.
This is the point that is some–
times forgotten; for James, it was ncver easy; and the sense of his ef–
fectiveness, of what his style must have meant to him is proportionate
to the perceived effort in his work.
