NOVel AND AMERICA
43
tive, perhaps, but innocent, unfallen in a disturbing way, almost
juvenile. The great works of American fiction are notoriously at
home in the children's section of the library, their level of senti–
mentality precisely that of a pre-adolescent. This
is
part of what
we mean when we talk about the incapacity of the American
novelist to develop; in a compulsive way he returns to a limited
world of experience, usually associated with his childhood, writ–
ing the same book over and over again until he lapses into si–
lence or self-parody.
Merely finding a language, learning to talk in a land where
there are no conventions of conversation, no special class idioms
and no dialogue between classes, no continuing literary language
-this
exhausts the American writer. He is forever
beginning,
saying for the first time (without real tradition there can never
be a second time) what it is like to stand alone before nature, or
in a city as appallingly lonely as any virgin forest. He faces,
moreover, another problem, which has resulted in a failure of
feeling and imagination perceptible at the heart of even our
most notable works. Our great novelists, though expeI1ts on in–
dignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treat–
ing the passionate encounter of a man and woman, which we
expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away
from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged,
mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery,
symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.
To be sure, the theme of "love" in so simple a sense is by
no means necessary to all works of art. In the
Iliad,
for instance,
and in much Greek tragedy, it is conspicuously absent; and in
the heroic literature of the Middle Ages, it is peripheral where
it
exists at all. The
"belle Aude"
of the
Chanson de Roland
is a
supernumerary, and the only female we remember from
Beowulf
is a terror emerging from the darkness at the bottom of the
waters. The world of the epic is a world of war, and its reigning
