CHARACTERS IN FICTION
173
themselves have become one of the major forces in American
life, the real and absolute administrators of the lives of the poor,
yet no one since Sinclair Lewis and Dos Passos has dared write
of them, unless you count the young author, John Updike, in
The Poorhouse Fair,
who presents a single specimen and lays
the story
in
the future. Imagine what Dickens would have done
with
this
new army of Beadles and the Mrs. Pardiggles behind
them or what he would have done with the modern architect
as Pecksniff, with the cant formula "Less is more." No serious
writer since Dos Passos, so far as I know, has had a
go
at the
governmen~
official, and the government official has not only
multiplied but changed (like the social worker) since Dos
Passos' time, producing many sub-varieties. And what about
the Foundation executive? Or the "behavioral scientist"? The
fact is that the very forces and institutions that are the agents
and promoters of conformity in America-bureaucracies public
and private and the regimented "schools" and systems of healing
and artistic creation-are themselves, through splits and cellular
irritation, propagating an array of social types conforming to
no previous standard, though when we look for names for them
we are driven back,
faute de mieux,
on the old names: Peck–
sniff, Mrs. Gamp, Bazarov, Mrs. Pardiggle, Babbitt. When Peter
Viereck, in a book of non-fiction, wanted to isolate a new kind
of conformist intellectual he could think of nothing better to
call
him
than "Babbitt Junior." It is as though a whole "culture"
of plants and organisms had sprung into being and there were
no scientists or latter-day Adams to name them.
This naming is very important, yet only two names in
recent fiction have "stuck": Gulley Jimson (Joyce
Cary)
and
Lucky Jim (Kingsley
Amis).
Some interest in character is still
shown by writers in England, perhaps because it is an island and
hence more conscious of itself. But even in England the great
national portrait gallery that constituted the English novel is
short of new acquisitions. The sense of character began to fade
with D. H. Lawrence. After
Sons and Lovers,
we do not remem-
