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PARTISAN REVIEW
modernist literary circles.
It
must be said that Wolfe is half-right. Most contemporary fiction has
not tackled the kind of subject Wolfe has in mind; in fact, much ofit has dealt
with narrower, more personal subjects. There have been large canvases,
notably
The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer and
Humbolt's Gift
by
Saul Bellow, and, of course, Doctorow's ideologically slanted novels. But that
is not the point. The fact is that the vast panorama of social, intellectual, and
political life, mingling with the financial aristocracy of this country, has not
been a concern of most contemporary writers of fiction.
Wolfe's manifesto has one flaw: the failure lies not with the recoil from
realism. Much recent fiction does aspire to a kind of petty realism in its rep–
resentation of the trivia of daily life. What is lacking is not realism but a sense
of the range of social experience - a feel for the big theme. Wolfe seems to
have some scorn for modernism in literature, but he forgets that such mod–
ernists as Mann and Proust produced great social landscapes, though they
were not ground-level realists, like Sinclair Lewis, for example, whom Wolfe
mentions frequently as a role model for the novelist today. One could also
cite a writer like Andrei Sinyavsky, who in his recent novel,
Goodnight,
cre–
ates a real sense of the pervasively claustrophobic life in a totalitarian coun–
try, by employing a literary method far from the standard idea of realism.
Wolfe makes the further point that the new blockbuster of a social
novel can come only out of the genre ofjournalism, as did
The Bonfire of the
Vanities.
But he invokes the name of Balzac as the great exemplar of the
realistic social novelist. However, Balzac was far from being a journalist,
and, indeed, journalism has been known to lower rather than raise the
imaginative level of fiction.
*
*
*
Eliot
Today.
So great is my affection for Cynthia Ozick and my
admiration for her intelligence, her courage, her moral stands, and her writing
- so great is my respect for her that I would not want my comments on her
brilliant piece on T. S. Eliot in
The New Yorker
to be taken as a criticism of it.
It is a masterful montage of all the elements in Eliot's life and work. And it is
a penetrating description of the cultural scene today that is so inhospitable to
the kind ofliterary achievement that Eliot represents. But though Ozick's
description of the currently fashionable climate of opinion is scathing, I wish
her piece were more of an assault on its pervasive influence. Or have I
misread her?
Ozick does raise some rather prickly questions about the relation of
Eliot's life to his work, about the enduring value of his poetry and his criti–
cism, and about the relation of his political beliefs to the quality of his work.
Ozick's central point is that Eliot's "elitism," pessimism, conservatism, and
religiosity have no meaning for the democratic ambience and free-wheeling
