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PARTISAN REVIEW
experience yet, through their inner quality, very close to it. These
writers are sensitive to the moods and tones of postwar American
life; they know that something new, different and extremely hard
to describe has been happening to us. Yet they do not usually write
about postwar experience
per se:
they do not confront it as much
as they try to ambush it. The film critic Stanley Kaufmann has noted
a similar phenomenon:
When Vittorio de Sica was asked why so many of his films deal with
adultery, he is said to have replied, "But if you take adultery out of
the lives of the bourgeoisie, what drama is left?" It is perhaps this be–
lief that has impelled Tennessee Williams into the areas that his art
inhabits. He has recognized that most of contemporary life offers limited
dramatic opportunities . . . so he has left "normal" life to investigate
the highly neurotic, the violent and the grimy. It is the continuing prob–
lem of the contemporary writer who looks for great emotional issues to
move him greatly. The anguish of the advertising executive struggling
to keep his job is anguish indeed, but its possibilities in art are not
large-scale. The writer who wants to "Iet go" has figuratively to leave
the urban and suburban and either go abroad, go into the past, or go
into those few pockets of elemental emotional life left in this country.
Abroad, the past, or the few pockets of elemental emotional life:
-many of our best writers have pursued exactly these strategies in
order to suggest their attitudes toward contemporary experience.
In
The Assistant
Bernard Malamud has written a somber story about
a Jewish family during the Depression years, yet it soon becomes
clear that one of his impelling motives is a wish to recapture inten–
sities of feeling we have apparently lost but take to be characteristic
of an earlier decade. Herbert Gold's
The Man Who Was Not With
It
is an account of marginal figures in a circus as they teeter on the
edge of
lumpen
life; but soon one realizes that he means his story
to indicate possibilities for personal survival in a world increasingly
compressed. The precocious and bewildered boy in J.D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye
expresses something of the moral condition
of adolescents today-or so they tell us; but clearly his troubles are
not meant to refer to his generation alone.
In
A Walk on the Wild
Side
Nelson Algren turns to down-and-outers characteristic of an
earlier social moment, but
if
we look to the psychic pressures break–
ing through the novel we see that he is really searching for a per–
spective for estrangement that will be relevant to our day.
In
The
