748
BENJAMIN DEMOTT
FICTION CH RON ICLE
THE DOUBLE VIEW. By Chandler Brossard. Dial. $3.50.
THE HOUSE OF FIVE TALENTS. By Louis Auch incloss. Ho'ughton
Mifflin. $4.50.
THE INHABITANTS. By Julius Horwitz. World. $4.00.
CEREMONY IN LONE TREE. By Wright Morris. Atheneum. $4.00.
A character in Chandler Brossard's new book remarks in
a discursive moment that "the American upper middle class isn't
being
destroyed, it's destroying itself." He explains the remark:
You can only exist in so far as you function, function spontaneously,
organically. In other words,
react.
All right. The upper middle class
in this country doesn't do these things. By now they live so ex–
clusively by formula, and by preconceived patterns, that they are in
effect merely somnambulists, or robots, or, as I said, corpses....
Even their speech has become pure gibberish. It's an argot of com–
pletely esoteric, arbitrary symbols, cliches, and vocal nuances, utterly
removed from contemporary reality.
The familiarity of these assertions does not lessen their truth, which
is too heavy with what are still called human consequences to be
ground at once in the mill of critical abstraction. Doubtless the
people in question are largely oblivious to their situation, yet all
pay a penalty of non-being at which only obliviousness or cruelty
itself can shrug.
But after refusing to shrug, or to pretend to classy remoteness
from the speech in question, abstraction can decently remind it–
self that the situation constitutes a literary problem as well as a
public agony. When middle to upper-middlebrow speech and ges–
tures become cliches, when the possibility of achieving unique styles
of behavior at the standard novelistic level vanishes, writers must
respond in some fashion. And not only American writers. Elizabeth
Bowen used to let it fall, ten years ago when she was still visiting
American colleges regularly, tightening her grip on Ivy steps, that
she liked to write about people of a certain position
in
life, types
"who had enough money to allow them to think of self-expression
in their own forms." But it has been more than a decade since this
writer has addressed herself (in fiction) to London, and the best
London novels
in
that period have been either "historical" or about
