666
DISSENT
FALL 1959
Trade Unions Today: ----,
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IS–
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Little Unions-Automation–
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Crisis of Leadership.
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Henderson himself, who might be gar–
rulous but instead is completely articu–
late, one of those rare examples of a
fictional genius, outsize and fantastic,
who really delivers the goods, that is
he does strike the reader, or at least
this reader, as being fully as extra–
ordinary a person as his creator in–
tended him to be. This compulsive
monologist should be the biggest bore
in creation, instead he is fascinating. I
think this is because he is always un–
expected and yet his unexpectedness
always, once it has occurred, is just
what one might have expected, given
his personality. Kind of the way life
is. "Henderson, then, is not a 'char–
acter,''' Miss Hardwick writes, by
which she seems to mean he is not a
convincingly real person. True, but be–
side the point. Like saying Pantagruel,
with whom Henderson has much in
common, isn't believable. Or that other
compulsive monologist, Mr. Nabokov's
Humbert Humbert.
Perhaps Bellow, though I'm sure
he'd be indignant at the suggestion,
has learned something since
Augie
March.
Perhaps he is pulling in his
horns in order to penetrate deeper, per–
haps he has given up his ambition to be
the great American novelist in order to
be a good American novelist.
(Seiz;e the
D.ay,
his other
post-Augie
book, also
seems to me superb, of course in an
entirely different way.)
If
so, he should
be encouraged and not damned with
praise that is faint, however intelli–
gent.
May I conclude with a few rhetorical
questions including this one? Why has
literary criticism become so excessively
serious-minded? Why does a critic as
clever and witty as Miss Hardwick miss
the obvious point about
Henderson
and
maunder on about the lack of symbolic
meaning? How come Lionel Trillinli
writes in
Encounter
an article about
Lolita-with
whose thesis I agree most
wholeheartedly though it might have
