554
PARTISAN REVIEW
T. Farrell, and the function of book-reviewing. It is altogether a sympto–
matic and depressing book, written in an abstract and brittle prose,
without any theoretical originality or sustained literary insights.
Its most irritating quality derives above all from its fake posture
of radicalism. Surely it was time for somebody to write a book about
the Age of Conformity without a single mention of the Cold War, and
Mr. Aldridge has done it. (He has also established himself as the most
garrulous pontificator on the subject of "The Writer in the University"
without once mentioning the breakdown of liberal education, of which
the presence of writers on university faculties is, unhappily, a coefficient
and for which it is often a cover-up.) Mr. Aldridge's social criticism
of literature centers around one overriding concern: the novel of man–
ners, and the fact that the past decade has failed to produce satisfac–
tory examples of it. This failure is interesting; but it is interesting
for
literature
only insofar as the critic is willing to explore the subtle rela–
tionships between our new social situation and the modifications it may
be expected to effect in such traditional literary forms as the novel of
manners. For the social mode of criticism depends on the observation
of such modifications in literature (and this means in literary
form
as
well as content) for its meaning. But such observation is not in itself
a sufficient basis for analysis if it is accompanied-as it is in Mr.
Aldridge's case-by a systematic refusal to admit the central historical
experience of our period. This experience for the past decade has been
the Cold War (one blushes at making so obvious a declaration), whose
ideological and economic ramifications have affected every part of our
lives. And this is where Mr. Aldridge's book becomes symptomatic: he
would like to be radical without being political, and since he will not
be political, his radicalism disintegrates into a cultural nostalgia, em–
broidered with passionate disavowals but in the end not really dis–
tinguishable from the conservatism now flourishing.
As a substitute for politics Mr. Aldridge, like so many people nowa–
days, fixes upon Mr. David Riesman. The little analysis of which his
book can boast consists of setting Lionel Trilling's essays on the novel
of manners over against
The Lonely Crowd)
and the result is predictable:
"One effect ... has been to deprive the novelist of the means of dis–
tinguishing among characters through differences
in
their appearance
and manners, social position, and breeding. He has also been deprived
of some of his oldest themes-the movement of the individual up and
down the scale of class; his struggle for wealth and prestige," etc., etc.
"The novelist in the predominantly 'other-directed' culture of today . ..
is
faced with a situation in which increasingly everyone tends to look,
