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the essays on fiction which Mr. Gold rightly includes as an important
part of his consideration of the American scene.
What Mr. Gold has succeeded in doing in such essays as "The
Mystery of Personality in the Novel" and the ostensibly predictive
"Fiction of the Sixties" is to compose a belated manifesto for the fiction
of the fifties. "Can there be a powerful general cause for the writers
of the sixties, apart from their personal need to tell a story?" he asks. Not
surprisingly, he finds that all the great causes have been exhausted.
He has nothing but derision for any writer who would accept the easy
palliatives of religion, Marxism, hipsterism or any other 'ism. But except
for hipsterism, which he considers at length and intelligently, he gives
no evidence of having squandered much thought on any of the solutions
he casually dismisses. Just as the writers of the coming decade will not
be propagandists, Mr. Gold tells us, they will not be chroniclers.
"Stripped down to poetry and story and the inauguration of passionate
conviction, they will leave the self-conscious recording of the details of
the social life to the social historians; the 'research team,' that miniature
lonely crowd, is better equipped to perform this interesting but secondary
function." The new "metaphysical" novelist will instead create a private
reality and personal values by peeling off his skin, by wrestling in the
depths of the self with the .universal problems of love and death, of
isolation and survival, with the dilemma of existence itself.
The obvious flaw of such a program is that in all likelihood the
results would be in the highest degree abstract: not formally abstract
like modem painting, but physically unrealized, made up of reflec–
tion in itself perhaps interesting but incapable of embodying itself
with the dense reality of "felt life," incapable of becoming the
concrete–
universal that we demand not only of the novel but of all literature.
Some of Mr. Gold's best fiction suffers from this disability. The well–
known story "Love and Like," for example, could more accurately
borrow a title from one of the essays in the present volume, "Divorce
as a Moral Act." The situation clearly has enormous personal significance
for the author, but in the story it is too schematic, too thin of detail, too
evidently dependent on its creator's will. Perhaps it is not in the nature
of the short story to be able to create rich context and to endow its
world with autonomous life. One of this year's most serious novels
by
a young writer is well over four hundred pages long, however, and in
reviewing it Paul Goodman finds that its characters "exist in a kind of
vacuum: they do not have enough world to grow in.... These novels
are a spurious genre. What the writer feels and dreams and somewhat
knows is nailed on a wooden framework of narrative, though he is not
