0430
PARTISAN REVIEW
contemporary life. Most of them were unable, or perhaps too shrewd,
to deal with the postwar experience directly; they preferred tangents
of suggestion to frontal representation; they could express their pas–
sionate, though often amorphous, criticism of American life not
through realistic portraiture but through fable, picaresque, prophecy
and nostalgia.
Morally the young novelists were often more secure than their
predecessors. Few of them were as susceptible to money and glitter
as Fitzgerald; few had Hemingway's weakness for bravado and swag–
ger; few succumbed to hallucinatory rhetoric in the manner of Faulk–
ner. Yet, as novelists, they were less happily "placed" than the writers
who began to publish in the Twenties and early Thirties. They lacked
the pressure of inevitable subjects as these take shape in situations
and locales. They lacked equivalents of Fitzgerald's absorption with
social distinctions, Hemingway's identification with expatriates,
Faulkner's mourning over the old South. Sentiments they had in
abundance and often fine ones; but to twist a remark of Gertrude
Stein's, literature is not made of sentiments.
Literature is not made of sentiments; yet a good portion of
what is most fresh
in
rcccnt American fiction derives from sentiments.
Better than any other group of literate Americans, our novelists re–
sisted the mood of facile self-congratulation which came upon us
during the postwar years. To be novelists at all, they had to look
upon our life without ideological delusions; and they
saw-often
better than they could say-the
hovering sickness of soul, the despair–
ing contentment, the prosperous malaise. They were not, be it said
to their credit, taken in. Yet the problem remained : how can one
represent malaise, which by its nature is vague and without shape?
It
can be done, we know. But to do it one needs to be Chekhov; and
that is hard.
My point, let me hasten to add, is not that novelists need social
theories or philosophical systems. They do, however, need to live in
an environment about which they can make economical assumptions
that, in some ultimate way, are related to the ideas of speculative
thinkers. Let me borrow a useful distinction that C. Wright Mills
makes between troubles and issues. Troubles signify a strong but un–
focussed sense of disturbance and pain, while issues refer to troubles
that have been articulated as general statements. Novelists, as a rule,
concern themselves with troubles, not issues. But to write with as-
