612
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
great care, she preserves her anxious reticence until on the night of the
final party one drunken fool comes irrelevantly and brutally to her
cabin. Then Mrs. Treadwell, in an access of furious pleasure at last,
the voyage nearly over, with the steel<apped heel of her tiny gilded
slipper, which suddenly reveals itself as a splendid weapon, beats
him
with many accurate blows in the face very nearly to death. Perhaps she
should have done something different, but what she did she did well,
she got away with it, and he deserved it.
John Thompson
REALITY PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS. By Herbert Gold. Dilll Press. $-4.95.
Andre Malraux once remarked that the American novelist
seems to know nothing
but
his typewriter. We could say that he leaves
the guardianship of Western culture to the professors, his brother-writers
to the critics, and social issues to the politicians. Of course we have
little right
to
demand of the novelist that he be jungle-adventurer, art–
historian and political figure as well, though such pursuits are far from
irrelevant to the creation of fiction. True
engagement
for the artist is,
as Camus said, to be engaged to his art (and
through
it), but only men
make novels and if in their own persons they are
too
insular to speak
out as interested critics and as surrogates of the public conscience, they
run the risk that the critical and moral force of their work will be
similarly stifled.
If
such has been the case especially in this country since the war,
then quite without warning we now have signs of a new spirit taking
hold. Herbert Gold's mixed bag of essays on American events and
American places directly follows a second collection of essays by James
Baldwin, Harvey Swados'
A Radical's America
and a new volume of
acute and lucid social criticism by the once-esoteric Paul Goodman. One
might
be
tempted to say that a great re-examination of American culture
is under way, that the novelist (at least in his off-hours) is resuming his
traditional role as a social observer after years of default to the journalist
and the popular sociologist. But the substance of the present volume
belies such a conclusion, for though its appearance necessarily testifies to
some resumption of the public concerns that have usually exercised the
novelist, it is at its heart a rallying cry for the sort of inwardness we
had grown accustomed to during the fifties. This is particularly true of
