BOOKS
THE NATURE OF NOVELS
JUSTINE. By Lawrence Durrell. E. P. Dutton. $3.50.
THE VELVET HORN. By Andrew Lytle. McDowell, Obolensky. $3.95.
LOVE AMONG THE CANNIBALS. By Wright Morris. Horcourt, Brace.
$3.50.
REVOLUTION AND ROSES. By P. H. Newby. Knopf. $3.50.
THE ORDEAL OF GILBERT PINFOLD. By Evelyn Waugh. Little, Brown.
$3.75.
VOSS. By Patrick White. Viking. $5.00.
COUP DE GRACE. By Marguerite Yourcenar. Translated by Grace Frick
in colloborotion with the author. Farrar, Straus
&
Cudahy. $3.00.
Reading seven novels with the doubtful object of reviewing
them caused me some disagreeable thoughts. To read a novel and be
entranced, amused, bored, is perfectly within one's rights as a private
citizen, and there is an end of the matter. To read a novel in order
to give an opinion of its quality is something else. Something profes–
sional enters, the tiny critical hairs at the nape of the neck erect them–
selves; even the preliminary inspection of the dust jacket (critics in
movies are always shown doing this) is keen, suspicious, diagnostic. Since
knowledge is of its nature more or less invariably knowledge of evil,
the novelist is at a disadvantage in this encounter, where the critic may
shift the emphasis at will between Beauty and Force (the limiting terms
of all criticism) simply to improve his attack. Perhaps the encounter
itself doesn't matter, or doesn't matter much. But if the critic is con–
scientious, and if there be any artistry at all in criticism, the problematic
element in the situation is increased by the critic's need and determina–
tion to rely, finally, more on what he feels than on what he knows. He
should, ideally, know a good deal, but he writes at a clever time, in
which the power of technique to deceive and give the appearance of
art is enormous; witness the quantity of "masterpieces" given the world
weekly by reviewers. By the same reasoning, though, it is a time for
which all the tricks have been run through rather often.
It
may be
that literacy is eating itself, competent work being more available to
more people than ever before, while art becomes ever more rare until
it is widely (though quietly, very quietly) suspected of being impossible.
