PARTISAN REVIEW
75
whom he imagined everywhere. Brought up to be a minister, he found
no church liberal enough to suit his beliefs, and became a kind of lay
apostle preaching the doctrine of socialism. All forms and conven–
tions of the community in which he lived seemed to him intolerable;
and he married his wife, for instance, simply by taking her hand as
they stood together on a high rock overlooking his native
city.
He was not only an immensely prolific novelist, author of in–
numerable
books,
The Legends of the American Revolution, Blanche
of Brandywine, The Mysteries of Florence, The Memoirs of a Preach–
er, The Empire City, The Bank Director's Son, The Entranced, New
York: Its Upper Ten,
etc., etc.; he was a lecturer as well and fancied
himself
a natural political leader. He founded, in fact, a radical or–
ganization called The Brotherhood of Union (later renamed The
Brotherhood of America), of which he appointed himself the "Su–
preme Washington"; and he issued revolutionary manifestos insisting,
"When Labor has tried all other means in vain- . . . then we advise
Labor to go to War ... War with the Rifle Sword and Knife!" More–
over, he considered his fiction another weapon to be used in the
struggle, "LITERATURE merely considered as an ARTis ;t despi–
cable thing . . . A literature which does not work practically, for
the advancement of social reform ... is just good for nothing at all."
And
this,
surely, is one clue to Lippard's long eclipse.
Had he been just a "dirty" writer, he might have survived
change of fashion and critical neglect, survived as an underground
classic; and had he been a properly pious Socialist,
his
memory might
well have been preserved by Marxist critics in search of literary an–
cestors. To be a "dirty" socialist writer, however, is to lose on all
counts. Yet Lippard does not stand alone in
his
allegiance to sensa–
tion and smut, on the one hand, and to social reform, on the other.
Indeed, to come to terms with him we must come to terms with a
whole school of fiction which the habit of contempt and the limita–
tions of our own hopelessly elitist views of
art
have made it difficult
for us to understand. Outside the context of that streaJIl of literature,
Lippard can only seem an eccentric, a freak, rather than one of the
group of literary pioneers trying to create a true popular literature.
It is tempting to see Lippard in an American setting, which is
to say, one too parochial really to explain him; and, as a matter of
fact, he himself encourages us to do so. His most famous novel is
