PARTISAN REVIEW
411
taken, each book veering sharply away from the one before, as
though the author were mortified at having written it as he did and
preferred to put as much light as possible between that kind of
book and himself. Rahv in his essay reminds us that the contem–
poraries, Paleface James and Redskin Whitman, "felt little more than
contempt for each other." The redface is in the position of sympathiz–
ing equally with both parties in their disdain for the other, and as
it were recapitulating the argument within the body of
his
own work.
He can never in good conscience opt for either of the disputants;
indeed, bad conscience is the medium in which his literary sensibility
moves. Thus the continuing need for self-analysis and self-justification.
Let's go back to Jake the Snake. In
The Great American Novel,
your allegiance to him is ob viously stronger than it is to Henry James,
wouldn't you say?
Yes, there is more of Jake the Snake in there than in
Letting Go
or in
When She Was Good.
Not that I regret now that I didn't ap–
proach those earlier books as I did
The Great American Novel.
Ac–
tually I don't know if I would ever have found my way to this "reck–
lessness" if I hadn't first tried to dramatize, in a series of fictions, of
which
When She Was Good
is one, the problematical nature of
moral authority and of social restraint and regulation. Though I was
not deliberate about this at all, it seems to me now that the question
of who or what shall have influence and jurisdiction over one's life
has concerned me in much of my work. From whom shall one re–
ceive the Commandments? The Patimkins? Lucy Nelson? Trick E.
Dixon? These characters, as I imagined them, are hardly identical
in the particulars of their lives, nor do they inhabit similar fictional
worlds, but invariably the claim each makes to being the legitimate
moral conscience of the commupjty is very much what is at issue
in the book. The degree to which irony, pathos, ridicule, humor, or
solemnity permeates
Goodbye, Columbus, When She Was Good,
and
Our Gang,
seems to me now to have been determined by what I took
to be the dubiousness (and relative danger) of that claim.
The question of moral sovereignty, as it is examined in
Letting
Go, Portnoy's Complaint,
and
The Breast,
is really a question of the
kind of commandment the hero of each book will issue to himself;
here the skepticism is directed inwards, upon the hero's ambiguous
sense of personal imperatives and taboos. I can think of these char-
