PARTISAN REVIEW
351
Together with the impertinence there was also a sense of evil, of
the provincial kind described in Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter
and
his wonderful short story "Young Goodman Brown ." All evil might,
I suppose, be described as eccentric, in that it is a refusal to fit
behavior into the center of the general interest. But there is evil which
is the behavior of those who do not even have knowledge of that cen–
ter and who move into little corners of their own obscenities, ex–
ploiting their surroundings for opportunities of such corners offered.
This is the essentially
provinicial-
Hawthornish - evil described by
David Storey in his novel
Radclytte,
and actually practiced in the
famous case of the Moors' murders. It is perhaps also related to the
evil described by Iris Murdoch in her novels, though Miss Murdoch
places it within the weaving pattern of social rituals, like movements
in a dance.
*
*
To English writers, the great attraction of America is its being
the center of energies which are entirely contemporary. These show
themselves in the arts - painting, fiction, and poetry - when these
express an American total sum of present-day consciousness not of a
civilization confined to one class or to an elite. The American writer
seems open to everything that happens in his country. His attitude is
summed up in the idea of "projectiveness." He is open to the whole
surrounding experience which pours through his senses and realizes
itself, almost spontaneously, and in a form mostly free, in
his
work.
He regards literature as the means through which, almost me–
diumistically, he realizes this material.
I know that there are many exceptions to all this, but I am
concerned here with what attracts the English writer - particularly
the young writer - to the United States. He goes there for the "turned
on," the energetic, the "confessional" - not for the technical per–
fection of a Richard Wilbur or a James Merrill. Both material and
treatment are extremely varied. The novelist often deals with the
sheer quantity of surrounding life. To take some obvious examples,
there is Saul Bellow's Chicago; the pressure of the highly individual–
istic ebullient rebellious members of the Jewish family in the work
of Philip Roth; the permutations of sexual pairs and groups in John
Updike's Westchester County; the realization of human relations
through a symbolic language of objects bought in chain stores or at
"organi c" food shops, in the urban Ameri ca of Mary McCarthy.
