BOOKS
141
allowances are made, what
does
he mean?
If
our experience conforms
to any order, this order must be capable of formal analysis; and I
suspect moreover that Fiedler's despair is so deep because his notions
of both "plot" and "imagination" are so ideal, a matter, perhaps, of
some high-bourgeois novel laid up in an Austenian heaven, with some
magnificent inferno of a boneless glory raging beneath. How come, in
this "post-political" age, we know so well what politics
was?
We speak
of the profound political sanity of the nineteenth-century masters, yet
in
War and Peace
Napoleon is a pompous little fool, in
The Red and
the Black
he is a symbol of freedom and life. Politics and plot are
analogous but not the same. So
Up
the British!
and three cheers for
formal analysis! A single Bellow does not make a summer.
Wilson and Snow may suffer as much from triteness and hyper–
lucidity as the Americans from a certain slight willful unpleasantness.
The Americans deliver a series of physical shocks only to dissolve them
immediately in humor, discussion, and lyric atmosphere-a galvanic
therapy that breeds its own indulgences and allowances. But they have
a gaiety and
amor fati
the English too often lack.
If
we wonder whether
Bellow and Baldwin can possibly live and think at that pitch-and
the answer may well be yes- we also sometimes wonder why Wilson
and Snow write at all, their expenditure of energy is so immense and
their relation to their material so stand-offish. Yet in a gifted writer
the extreme of any disposition is usually a strength.
A really great modern English comic writer would combine the
upper-class brilliance of Waugh with the middle-class brilliance of
Wilson.
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
falls short mainly, I'd say, from lack of
social range. As intellectual comedy it is not quite happy enough with
the academic world where ideas have their theater. Wilson is ravaged
and haunted by all he knows of the horrors of spivdom and the sterile
little modern married couples with their cats and their Italian food.
He cannot quite reach D. H. Lawrence's superb classlessness of vision.
As my readers must know by now, the novel's great incident, its in–
triguing, "advanced" discovery, in the days of Gilbert Murray, of a
pagan phallic symbol in the tomb of a seventh-century bishop--this
discovery so stimulating to liberals inside the Church and out-turns
out to have been a hoax engineered by a particularly decadent partisan
of
Blast.
The aging hero, a famous history don, knew this all along,
more or less, but couldn't bring himself to expose it. He marries a
fantastically awful sentimentalist, begets a sentimental liberal and a
sentimental conservative son. As the members of his gruesome family
show their British mettle and tum on each other in a paroxysm of
