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PARTISAN REVIEW
ADAM AND THE ELDERS
THE AMERICAN ADAM, by R. W. B. Lewis. University of Chicogo Press.
$5.50.
Writers like R. W.
B.
Lewis suffer too much from the kind
of taboo that would prevent me (if I heeded it) from comparing his
work, as I mean briefly to do, with that new bombshell of a secular
moralist, Kingsley Amis. In his poise, his craft, and his genial wit, Amis
is almost another Congreve, a Congreve of Wormwood Scrubs. Without
in fact attacking much more than an outrageous gang of stuffed shirts,
he immediately earns the reputation of a dangerous radical. His first
two novels are immensely invigorating, but offer us little more in the
way of cultural wisdom than the observation that in certain circum–
stances even Mozart can be a bore. Mr. Lewis would sooner die than
say nasty things about Mozart. Like Lucky Jim's friend Margaret Peel,
he is prone to making embarrassing avowals of good will. Growing up
in the aura of a group of powerful literary moralists he is given, in
his thirties, to posing and answering questions already handsomely posed
and answered by men now circling their sixties. The result is what one
would expect, a certain amount of pseudo-Trilling, pseudo-Blackmur,
and pseudo-Ransom. This, unfortunately, is anything but ingratiating
and it is best to mention it and get it out of the way as soon as possible.
Most of it is concentrated in a thoroughly dismal epilogue in which he
dances briefly but deftly between a set of dubious alternatives.
I invite a reader of Amis to consider what Lucky Jim might say
to the following:
The contemporary picture is not a dishonest one. It contains
many remarkable and even irreversible psychological, sociological and
political insights. It seems to be the picture most clearly warranted by
public and private experience in our time.
One might, if this were all, go out and buy a nice, comfy reversible
insight and forget the whole business. But if only that the sins of the
sons should not be visited on the fathers, we ought not to take this too
seriously. Some of Mr. Lewis's book is no more than a Palladian propi–
tiation of such fashionable idols of the tribe as Experience, Irony, Flexi–
bility, and Ambiguity. As a young Joseph feeding his brethren from
the pharaoh's teeming granary, he has forgotten that the real Joseph
left his coat of many colors behind. He wants us to know that his ascent
to the viceregalship has not been easy and that his heart is still torn
between the desert and the palace, between the Adamic joys of the
