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MARY McCARTHY
Closer to Balzac is Dreiser's picture of the hotel business in
An
American Tragedy;
when Clyde becomes a bellhop, Dreiser
(though this i.s not "important" to the story) stops and shows
the reader how a hotel, behind the scenes, works.
In newspaper jargon, you might call all this the boiler–
plate of the novel-durable informative matter set up
in
stereo–
type and sold to country newspapers as filler to eke out a
scarcity of local news, i.e., of "plot." And the novel, like news–
paper boilerplate, contains not only a miscellany of odd facts
but household hints and how-to-do-it instructions (you can
learn how to make strawberry jam from
Anna K arenina
and
how to reap a field and hunt ducks).
The novel, to repeat, has or had many of the functions
of a newspaper. Dickens' novels can be imagined in terms of
headlines: "Antique Dealer Dies by Spontaneous Combustion
in Shop," "Financial Wizard Falls, Panic Among Speculators,"
"Blackleg Miner Found Dead in Quarry." Henry James, who
did his best to exclude every bit of boiler-plate from his books
and who may have killed the novel, perhaps with kindness
(consider the unmentionable small article manufactured by the
Newsomes in
The Ambassadors;
what was it? Garters? Safety
pins?), even James has the smell of newsprint about him, the
smell of the Sunday supplement. His international plots recall
the magazine section of the old Hearst newspaper chain,
in
which every Sunday, after church, Americans used to read
about some international marriage between an American
heiress and a titled fortune-hunter.
Novels, including James's, carried the news---of crime, high
society, politics, industry, finance, and low life. In Dickens you
find a journalistic coverage of the news on all fronts and a
survey of all the professions from pickpocket to banker, from
lawyer to grave-robber. His books tell the whole story of
Victorian society, from the front page to the financial section.
This ideal of coverage requires him, in fairness, to print, as it
were, corrections; a bad Jew is followed by
a:
good Jew, a bad
