598
PARTISAN REVIEW
(But perhaps that is a characteristic not uniquely of this 'now,' but of
any 'now'; to know what is truly contemporary has probably at all
times been difficult.)
I had these thoughts not because all these books are bad books,
but precisely because most of them exhibit in their widely differing ways
both skill and taste. They are all written by experienced writers, and I
suppose that as a group, which they are solely because they appear at
more or less the same moment, they would compare favorably with any
other seven novels selected on the same basis. Yet much of what I have
to say is simply negative, not critical rage but no particular response
at all beyond the mild pleasure in professional competence which is the
critical equivalent of saying "Nice shot!" in tennis. I wish I could have
felt more often in agreement with a character (a novelist) in Mr.
Durrell's
Justine:
"The modem novel! The
grumus merdae
left behind
by criminals upon the scene of their misdeeds." But these novelists are
mostly not criminals at all, but only novelists-which is what we have
asked for, and what we shall, I suppose, continue to get.
Something touching this view of the matter is finely said by Evelyn
Waugh in presenting Gilbert Pinfold (a novelist) :
It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists
of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists
and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century. The originators, the ex–
uberant men, are extinct, and in their place subsists and modestly
flourishes a generation notable for elegance and variety of contrivance.
It may well happen that there are lean years ahead in which our pos–
terity will look back hungrily to this period, when there was so much
will and so much ability to please.
As
an epitaph this will no doubt read extremely well; only as an inten–
tion does it seem faintly contemptible.
I shall discuss first three novels which have in common only the
fact of their being set in the past. Not the very deep past-two in the
nineteenth century, one just after the First World War-but they rely
more or less upon the sense of another time which in itself supplies a
kind of prospectively aesthetic distance. None of the three can be dis–
missed as 'historical novels' or mere genre painting, they all stay well
away from great events, but I was a little put off by the somewhat facile
pathos of period manners which seemed in varying degrees to infect
the styles of these works.
Marguerite Yourcenar's
Coup de Grace
is introduced as a true
. story, "derived from the oral account of the principal character con-
