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PARTISAN REVIEW
nor the wntmgs of James Baldwin? Of course Baldwin and Ellison
might be embarrassing to Mr. Aldridge in another way; just about
every word he writes about the literary possibilities of the old South
(great) as contrasted with those of the nasty urban North (nil),
is
refuted in their work. And since he has neither politics nor literary taste
to support his position, Mr. Aldridge inevitably falls back on the most
tiresome cliche in modern criticism: the South "happens to be the only
section of the country left where ... there is still a living tradition and
a usable myth," etc., etc. (He doesn't tell us that a poet must be a
Catholic in order to write lyric poetry, but he isn't interested in poetry
anyway.) And then there is that wonderful sentence in which he says
of
The Adventures of Augie March,
"It
is interesting to see ... that
the novel in its early sections partakes of some of the dramatic advan–
tages arising out of the racial and economic tensions of lower-class urban
experience, a type of experience which in the twenties and thirties was
much more common to our larger cities than it is now." I don't know
where Mr. Aldridge has been living lately, but in one of "our larger
cities" where I happen to live the "dramatic advantages arising out
of the racial and economic tensions of lower-class urban experience"
keep the newspapers quite busy, and are in fact accelerating at such
speed that his ideal novelist should be watering at the mouth over
them. But this could only happen to that novelist if he were living
in
the real world, instead of being consumed, as Mr. Aldridge is, by
distaste for the present increase in social mobility and the consequent
loss we have suffered (loss for literature, that is) as a result.
Insofar as Mr. Aldridge's book can be taken seriously as a criticism
of the Age of Conformity, it actually helps the Age along, in that it
confirms what is so often alleged, that the protest against conformity
stems from a nostalgia for the '20s and '30s, and a failure to grasp the
new historical reality. This book also contributes to that adaptation
of radical rhetoric to conservative uses which is one of the more de–
pressing aspects of the present period.
(It
is interesting, by the way,
that while Mr. Aldridge ransacks back issues of
PR
for his points of
departure, he ignores Irving Howe's "This Age of Conformity," which
did after all achieve a certain notoriety.) The charge that the criticism
of conformity stems from nothing but nostalgia is, I think, false. But
to refute it we shall need the real thing-a radical critic-not the
collection of shibboleths worked over in this volume.
Hilton Kramer
