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DANIEL F. HOWARD
flirting with important tensions just below the level of social chatter
but using his considerable artistry
to
obscure them. To talk about
Firbank at all, he has first to discharge a splendid stream of contempt
- "that coddled, wealthy
flan eur,
the darling of the Sitwells . . . the
squinning, giggling shyness, the gossip, the absolute snobbery, the neu–
rotic preciousness and drunken Catholic homosexuality . . . the most
tiresome tradition of English eccentricity." Then he can consider the
bare possrbility of tragic implications in his work - "attenuated moods,
nerves, and semi-religious languishings ... his equivalent of a sense
of tragedy." Finally, Alvarez remains unimpressed: making a gallant
effort to give Firbank a fair trial in the court of seriousness, he actually
announces by contrast his own admira:ble literary criteria.
In another fine essay he also convicts Jean-Paul Sartre. He ex–
plains Sartre's persistent unsatisfactoriness as proceeding from a child–
hood in the household of his adoring widowed mother and pompous
grandfather, who insisted that the world reflect only himself. Though
Freud runs deep in Alvarez's criticism, this is his most overtly psycho–
logical interpretation. Convincingly, he infers from Sartre's writing a
guilt derived from his father's early death, the equivalent of an Oedipal
impulse too easily realized. Then, forced to be a precocious child to
satisfy the projections of a narcissistic and doting household, Sartre is
seen as defending himself by transforming himself from the child
manipulated into the child manipulating: clever, outrageous, fantastic
because of the vivid, almost psychotic fantasy life that accompanied his
guilty playacting, he satisfied his audience even as he stood cynically
superior. So began a career in which the feelings were all wrong,
mis–
placed, a career that succeeded by bewildering the self in a house of
mirrors - not art but a "schizophrenia of brilliance."
This explanation of Sartre's bad-boyism again reveals Alvarez's in–
sistence on the urgency of confronting "reality," one component of
which is the writer's inner self - a core of honest reactions, not only
liberated from coterie and chic, but also stripped of self-deception.
Literature, then, is the vehicle of an expanding self moving toward
extremes of being. And if one component of Alvarez's "reality" is a con–
tinuing search for the self, another is the necessity for the artist-critic to
be responsible to modern culture. In this respect his acknowledged
master is Matthew Arnold, and predictably, among contemporary critics,
he responds to the social-cultural concerns of Lionel Trilling and
Edmund Wilson. Speaking of a writer in the same tradition, Norman
Podhoretz, he formulates the ideal relation between the intellectual and
Culture (one in which he finds Podhoretz somewhat deficient). He
proposes a special responsibility for the intellectual Jew, because "lacking
