530
PARTISAN REVIEW
The essay on Green was the fullest articulation of this psychological
aesthetic, but evidence of its underlying dynamic and its characteristic
vocabulary are everywhere. Even Andre Gide, hardly a minor writer, could
be described as a victim of blockage: "We get the deliberate pressure and
the deliberate withholding, but not the natural
ease.
In place of
ease
stands
embarrassment. " Other writers are guilty of unblocking only minor chan–
nels, such as Nancy Hale in whose stories "the surface tension mounts, as
in a glass, reaches its climax, breaks, spills over-but at no point is it more
than water," or Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose "manner
comes
naturally to
her in a steady trickle." Christopher Isherwood's
Prater Violet
displays a
more satisfactory relation with instinct; in it, the portrayal of Friederich
Bergman .. is a work of joy, and the result is sheer overflow.' ,
However much he deplored the timidity of British fiction in facing
emotions and
sex,
Rosenfeld was much tougher on American writing where
a vaunted sophistication about psychology and frankness about "life"
nirned out often enough upon examination to
be
mere attitudinizing.
Writers like Kenneth Patchen, Henry Miller, and John O'Hara came espe–
cially under fire for failing in their accomplishments to live up to their
self-advertisements. Rosenfeld accused Patchen,
inJournalofAlbion Moon–
I£ght
and
Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer,
of treating psychoanalysis as a
grab bag of titillations to
be
reached into only for Gothic decorations, thus
turning the categories of psychological understanding into lurid confirma–
tions of human bestiality. "Accordingly, Patchen's terrors are always on tap.
Though he appears to draw upon the subconscious as the source of
his
images
and obsessions, he actually uses it as a storehouse for artificial props, con–
structed, I dare say, quite consciously." Henry Miller is both praised and
dismissed as a talented poseur who, in
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare,
palms off as insights commonplaces about American society that are already
stocks-in-trade of
Life
magazine. And John O'Hara's sketches in
Pipe Night,
of the authentic life of our times as recorded in busses, trains, gin mills, and
nightclubs are too obedient to literary requirements, which just happen to
be
commercial requirements as well, to do the job of social analysis. O'Hara,
Rosenfeld charged, builds his images of America upon the literary premise
of bittersweetness-the convention that toughness and sentimentality must
go together-which conveniently protects his readers and himself from nasty
doses of reality. O'Hara's "realism" turns out to
be
just real enough for a
public that is disposed to look upon poverty in the light of romance, as a
form of "roughing it." These were all well-deserved judgments that have
stood up well with time and all point to the same quality in American fiction
that Rosenfeld was quick to criticize: the oversold quality of its "impact"
and "insight" and its propensity to congratulate itself for nonexistent
achievements.
