OBSESSED CRITICS
595
he tells us, in desperate shape, for most of our writers have "repudiated
their heritage and their link with a central literary tradition of the
past," have lost contact with "the 'atheists,' the radicals, the immigrant
dreamers of social justice in the late nineteenth century, who mainly
inherited and preserved our true cultural heritage." With Mr. Kenner,
Mr. Geismar believes that a damnable plot is afoot to betray the true
America and its history, traditions and literature ; and they both agree
that the same powers are masterminding the operation. Those who,
in Mr. Kenner's eyes, have subverted the tradition of an aristocratic
government and who are not disciples of Pound or Lewis, are, strangely
enough, the same recreants who according to Mr. Geismar have in–
trigued seditiously against the "central tradition of American con–
science" and have "almost blacked [it] out of the national consciousness
today." The measure of their perversity can be gauged by their deplor–
able refusal to worship in Mr. Geismar's Pantheon, where the works
of "Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Ellen Glasgow, and
Theodore Dreiser," the great writers of our century, and our true cul–
tural heritage, lie enshrined.
As befits his conception of himself as critic, Mr. Geismar is ex–
plicitly prescriptive: he
knows
what novelists need and want and is
generous with his advice. Thus, what is essentially missing in Heming–
way is "a sense of that 'ordinary' life, in all its variety and mystery, that
had always been the core of the great novels, at least." He locates
the center of Sinclair Lewis's failure by perceiving that nowhere did
he "attempt to project a single working-class figure of any dimension"
or "an effective or even attractive social rebel." He reproves Norman
Mailer for similar lapses: "Mr. Mailer leans rather heavily on the sex–
ual experiences of his lower-class figures, too. These may be a solace for
the common man, and even a source of strength, but they don't con–
stitute his only achievement." These two sentences are, I think, a miracle
of the picturesque-they summon up an image of the Worker, striding
from the whore house to the factory, while his sense of achievement
swells to a crescendo of moral triumph, like Tamburlaine in Persepolis.
And what ought novelists to write about? Like a Philadelphia law–
yer, Mr. Geismar comes well-prepared:
one would welcome a new generation of novelists who would look into
such things as McCarthyism, or the white-collar equivalent of Nixon–
ism, or the loyalty oaths and security dismissals, or the large-size looting
of our natural resources, or the marriages of the corporations, and the
rise of the stock market while small business and farming declines [sic];
or the hostility of Asia and the alienation of Europe while our public
mind is both intimidated and dazzled by a series of shifting advertising
slo~ans.
