528
KINGSLEY WIDMER
off (with a young instructor's wife, a frigid nymph) into a
garbage-laden river.
Nevertheless, the nuclear experience of
Party at Granton
does
not reveal itself primarily in the guilty disillusionment with
academic literary politics which Aldridge makes so much of, nor
in the tired critical profundities with which he splays his rumina–
tions, but in the more obscure and poignant master-pupil agon.
Aldridge shies away from exploring this directly and fully;
perhaps he
is
self-conscious about writing a professorial literary
critic's satire of a professorial literary critic for professorial literary
critics.
As
such, it deserves Aldridge's own, earlier, comment on
the peculiarity of academic literature "in which more ideas are
conceived than are ever put to use, more passions are analyzed
than are ever felt." And the manner fits the substance. These
confessional charades suffer from an overwhelming neo-Jamcsian
ratiocination: "That, at any rate, was how [he] saw [him] then,
or, more precisely, how he saw, or imagined he saw, other people
see him. No one, of course, ever saw...." However subtle James
is at his best, his abstracting manner, as repeated imitations force
us to realize, developed an eccentric refinement of the novel, and
weakened the novel's major strength: the presentation of life in all
its irregularity and vitality. Aldridge also displays the essentially
academic style in passages of poetic and historical-literary parody.
The outskirts of that upper-middle-class wasteland, says the nar–
rator, remind him of Fitzgerald's "valley of .ashes"; and for that cry
about immersing oneself in "the destructive element" of modern
unsavory suburban-academic life, in case you've forgotten, "Con–
rad's Stein had been the original author...." Pedagogic, too, is
the novel's wayward history of the Fugitives-and-successors in
American literature (a long digression providing a synthetic back–
ground for King Critic). Aldridge busies himself at under-cutting
the "Southern School"; but this, like most of the intellectual content
of academic novels, assumes the reader to be the victim of the
fashionably provincial and to have over-valued small but academ–
ically powerful coteries.
Perhaps the Jamesian abstractions, the pseudo-history of the
Southern School, the stock allusions, the skittishly self-conscious
reflections, the academic suburban party, the comfortably agonized
