MARK SHECHNER
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The full weight of Rosenfeld 's contempt was reserved for Irwin Shaw,
the " left-wing middlebrow" novelist whose formula for commercial success:
Hemingwayesque sophistication, Jewish issues, and
New Yorker
taste,
yielded great book-club profits just after the war. The failures of Patchen,
Miller, and O ' Hara to produce convincing fiction were primarily their own,
whereas Shaw's shortcomings, as Rosenfeld saw them, were also representa–
tive of a newly-ascendant social class, and his writing a profitable defense of
its values: an unexamined patriotism, a smug liberalism, and a hard-boiled
savoir faire.
That is, the upbeat values of the bullish market of cultural
fashion .
It
was not the values
per se
that Rosenfeld found offensive, for,
after all , liberalism, patriotism, and know-how are not such bad things , but
the style that made them popular commodities, one that devalued emotion
and conflict while claiming to be hard-hitting. Shaw's style made a pretense
of knowing the world by way of a markedly American brashness-in-com–
placency, a "guts and dry martini attitude toward life." "He knows every–
thing; that is to say, sex and liquor. He has had all these commodities, not
without enjoyment, of course, but nevertheless with just that properly arch
touch of weariness, lest anyone think him naive ." What Shaw pioneered so
successfully was a literature that appeared to grapple with issues while being
really shy of moral struggle, for the
New Yorker
sophistication of that era
put all struggles behind it. Indeed, his values themselves are hardly affirmed
since they are never tested; there is little more to them than the self-congrat–
ulation of the upwardly mobile. Thus Shaw's moral conclusions are prepared
in advance, and the conflicts through which he marches his characters are
contrivances only for putely narrative suspense.
Despite obvious differences, the emotional dynamics of American and
English fiction are revealed by Rosenfeld's psychological aesthetic
to
be
quite the same; only the mannerisms differ. Among the Americans, straight–
talk or its simulacrum as in O 'Hara and Shaw or the rush of apocalyptic fervor
as in Patchen and Miller- that is, the deliberate underplaying of emotion or
its overdramatization-are cultural artifacts that allow real psychological or
social conditions to be evaded under cover of aggressive confrontation. The
English novel , by contrast, covers its retreats with satire or waspishness or
prose. Such characterizations sound like psychologized stereotypes, and
Rosenfeld's analyses do sometimes recall popular myths of national character.
Style in English fiction is made to sound like a headlong flight from feelings
into idiosyncracies, while the hardboiled realism and psychologism of the
American novel are taken to be trumped up effects, propaganda for emo–
tions that can' t be truly represented . To the extent that these are stereotypes,
they contain an element of applied Reich , especially where Rosenfeld 's
diagnoses imply the modal character types of
Character AnalySts-hysterical ,
