184
STEVEN MARCUS
made float about in interstellar darkness. It is as if Wordsworth had
tried to write
The Prelude
in the style of Blake's prophetic books, or
Dickens had tried to write
David Copperfield
in the style of
Watt.
Nevertheless, Golding's failure in this novel is no discredit, for he
was aspiring to a difficult achievement: to create for the present
post-modern era a work which would also satisfy the traditional
novelistic purpose. That failure suggests again, however, the rather
narrow limits of
his
range.
Before turning to the American scene, I should mention Muriel
Spark, whose elegantly compact and highly wrought fantasies-such
as
Momento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye,
and
The Go-Away
Bird-are
examples of this development, though they are much more
modest and altogether less serious works than Golding'S.
It
has been
said in praise of her fictions, by the way, that they curiously resemble
metaphysical religious poems. It may be replied that if John Donne's
poems were praised as curiously resembling modern novels, one
might not be so prepared to accept this as a good thing, either for
John Donne, poetry, or the modern novel. Nevertheless, if for purposes
of contrast we consult the work of Kingsley Amis or Angus Wilson,
,
two novelists whose allegiances go to the older fictional idea, our
sense of the precariousness of the current situation is renewed.
In America the same tendencies exist, and one can find no better
instance of them than the writings of Bernard Malamud. Malamud's
first novel,
The Natural,
is nominally about baseball, but it has about
the same relation to
You K now Me Al
as
Lord of the Flies
does to
A High Wind in Jamaica.
In this first novel, baseball, as one might
expect, is represented as a legendary kind of behavior. Moreover,
The Natural
is written with reference to the myth of the Holy Grail,
and in particular out of an elaborate system of references to Jesse
Weston's
From Ritual to Romance
and, secondarily, to
The Wa'ste
Land.
Although this sounds as if
The Natural
were cooked up in the
literary pot, it must be added that the allusions are in no way
obtrusive and that the novel reads freshly and directly, though some–
thing at its center remains obscurely unrealized.
Malamud's second novel,
The Assistant,
is equally representative
even though
it
takes place in a grocery store in Brooklyn during the
depression. These tough sociological facts, however, are handled with
utmost delicacy and circumspection by the author, as if they were
