Kingsley Widmer
THE ACADEMIC COMEDY
A decade ago, an intelligently disenchanted young critic,
John W. Aldridge, wrote in
After the Lost Generation:
If
we take ... his [the writer's] subject matter to be the fund
of values, attitudes, customs, and beliefs which he shares with his
audience and in terms of which he discovers what he has to say
. . . then it becomes clear that the events of the last fifty years
. . . have dangerously narrowed the areas of subject matter avail–
able to writers and, consequently, crippled their means of
dis–
covering themselves and their age.
As
if to prove the crippling inability to adventure into a more 'lpen
world, Aldridge has now written an academic novel. It is academic
not only in subject and scene, and not only in stylistic abstractness
and derivative technique, but also in the
mea culpa
of the nar–
rating
persona,
who got all his experience "not from life, or any
speculations upon life, but from the reading of books," and who
ends, a portentous Gatsby of the American literary life, "baffled
to the end, watching over nothing."
The real flesh of the academic novel, badly shriveled by
Aldridge in his moralistic critic's frying pan, derives almost always
from an intellectual archetype: the ugly dialectician, the parasitic
philosopher-poet at the gentleman's banquet, the vice-ridden
master, the learned unsavory monk, the Socrates-Falstaff-ghetto–
intellectual. With all his personal grossness and labyrinthine wit,
this ugly-wise one appears as both the idol and the outcast of the
genteel academy, the topsy-turvy king of polite cultivation. In
The Party at Granton,
*
an enigmatic master of this type provides
the focus for the novel and its academic literary party. Buchanan,
*
David McKay Co. $3.50.
