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PARTISAN REVIEW
chested. In our hearts we are all daring spies, all beautiful and hand–
some, all worthy of romantic outpourings from Cary Grant and
Ingrid Bergman.
But when all is said and done, such explanations won't suffice .
The distribution of blame is too one-sided. One has to turn to the
writers of fiction themselves. What is missing among them, almost
uniformly, is the sense of literature as a vocation, and a vigorous
one, at that. Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Updike, Cheever-they all
had it; you could point to them and say, confidently, these are the
dominant voices of the age . But of whom can you say that in this
generation? The voices are disparate and irregular ; they call out
feebly and then subside . In order to collar an audience, writers today
may have to use greater force than ever. Instead, many of them
write with an almost throwaway casualness, unsure of their own
entitlement. Can it be that the enterprise of fiction has lost its ambi–
tion, its- ifl may borrow a phrase from the realm of issues, of poli–
tics- will to power?
I am alone in a room, rereading Malcolm Lowry's
Under the
Volcano,
rediscovering the drunken Consul who is "homesick for
being homesick." All our secrets are there, in this most powerful and
thin-skinned of twentieth-century novels. The secrets are not the
happy but the tortuous kind: Geoffrey Firmin, the Consul, is bent
on self-destruction and by novel's end will get, quite literally, thrown
to the dogs . In the extremity of his suffering, we catch glimpses of
our own taste for poison, the paths we set on to impede ourselves .
I have gone back to
Under the Volcano
(make of this what you
will) because it has been made into a movie. John Huston is direc–
tor, so the chances are good . But how to catch its astonishingly pri–
vate impact-you, while you read it, are the Consul, there's noes–
caping it- the juggernaut of language, its
love of literature?
Lowry's
ingestion of countless books that he in turn alludes to gives the novel
its thickness. The Consul is adrift on a sea of half-remembered quo–
tations from sources great and small.
"I am," wrote Lowry, himself an alcoholic, in a letter to his
mentor Conrad Aiken, "a small boy chased by furies ." The state of
contemporary fiction is an eviscerated one; the furies have been
chastened. Irony reigns. It is time to reclaim them , those furies that
engage us and that should engage the fiction we read: love, hate,
despair, greed, desire, envy, sloth-the whole mixed lot. Who
knows? We may win over a few readers.
Daphne Merkin is a contributing editor of
Partisan Review
and is
working on a novel to be published by Harcourt Brace jovanovich.
