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MARY McCARTHY
they ever really come back to the novel, assuming that was
what they wanted to do. Gide stopped with
The Counter–
feiters;
Lawrence with
Women in Love;
Malraux with
Man's
Fate;
Orwell with his first book,
Burmese Days;
Camus with
The Stranger.
Their later books are not novels, even if they
are called so, but fables of various kinds, tracts, and parables.
But they did not settle down to a single form or mode, and this
perpetual restlessness which they have in common seems a sign
of an unrequited, unconsummated love for the novel, as though
in the middle of their
oeuvre
there were a void, a blank space
reserved for the novel they failed to be able to write. We think
of them as among the principal "novelists" of our time, but
they were hardly novelists at all, and in each case their work as
a whole has an air of being unfinished, dangling.
They are certainly key modern figures. Allowing for dif–
ferences in talent, their situation is everybody's; mine too. We
are all in flight from the novel and yet drawn back to it, as to
some unfinished and problematic relationship. The novel seems
to
be
dissolving into its component parts: the essay, the travel
book, reporting, on the one hand, and the "pure" fiction of
the tale, on the other. The center will not hold. No structure
(except Faulkner's) has been strong enough to keep in sus–
pension the diverse elements of which the novel is made. You
can call this, if you want, a failure of imagination. We know
that the real world exists, but we can no longer imagine it.
Yet despite all I have been saying, I cannot, being human,
help feeling that the novel is not finished yet. Tomorrow is
another day. Someone, somewhere, even now may be dictating
into a dictaphone: "At five o'clock in the afternoon, in the
capital of the Province of Y., a tall man with an umbrella was
knocking at the door of the governor's residence." In short,
someone may be able to believe again in the reality, the
factuality, of the world.
