172
MARY McCARTHY
claimed-only human vectors with acceleration and force. But
in
my experience this is simply not true. There are more people than
ever before, at least in the sense of mutations in our national
botany, and this is probably due to mobility-cross-fertilization.
Take as an example a gangster who was in the slot-machine
racket, decided to go straight and became a laundromat king,
sent his daughter to Bennington, where she married a poet-in–
residence or a professor of modern linguistic philosophy.
There
are three characters already sketched out in that sentence and
all of them brand-new: the father, the daughter, and the son–
in-law. Imagine what one of the old writers might have made
of the wedding and the reception afterwards at "21."
The laundromat king or his equivalent
is
easy to meet in Ameri–
ca; there are hundreds of him.
Try
teaching in a progressive
college and interviewing the students' parents. And do not pre–
tend that the laundromat king has no "inner life"; he is prob–
ably a Sunday painter, who has studied with Hans Hofman
in
Provincetown. What, for that matter, was the inner life of
Monsieur Homais in
Madame Bovary?
People speak of the lack
of tradition or of manners as having a bad effect ob the Ameri–
can novel, but the self-made man is a far richer figure, from
the novelist's point of view, than the man of inheri!ed
wealth,
who is likely to be a mannered shadow.
The relation between parents and children (Turgenev's
great theme) has never been so curious as in America now,
where primitivism heads into decadence before it has time
to
turn around. America is full of Bazarovs but only Turgenev
has described them. Nobody, so far .as I know, has described
an "action" painter, yet nearly everyone has met one. Nobody
has done justice to the psychoanalyst, yet nearly everyone has
gone to one. And what a wealth of material there is
in
that
virgin field, what variety: the orthodox Freudian, the Homeyite,
the Reichian, the Sullivanite ("inter-personal relations"), all the
different kinds of revisionists, the lay analyst, the specialist
in
group analysis, the psychiatric social worker. Social workers
