80
PARTISAN REVIEW
of battling with the demons both within and outside of ourselves. Since
nearly everyone from the deeply religious
to
those deeply steeped in dis–
belief has some idea of how things could work better, it is always of inter–
est
to
see what highly talented and original artistic types think about
when they either explain the world or dream of one. In this sense, each
of these writers wants
to
talk about the weapons of sensibility that allow
humanity a chance
to
defend itself, to ennoble itself,
to
move as close as
possible to not a sentimental ideal of paradise regained but to a better sit–
uation from which human qualities can lift up in flight
to
the heights nec–
essary
to
achieve themselves. That flight, of course, is doomed
somewhere along the way, but if it is daring and substantial enough, such
a flight will leave the patterns of its wings painted on the air of culture,
and it will be breathed in and out even beyond memory. So what these
writers have in mind is a discovery of the indomitable, which is not our
flesh, of course, but our spirits, our minds, our designs, our ways of mea–
suring the transcendent elements of humanity when we encounter them.
To get where they want
to
go, the Hemingway of
A Moveable Feast,
the Wright of
American Hunger
(which was truncated in
1944
to
a
book about his experiences in the South and put out as
Black Boy),
the
Ellison of various autobiographically informed essays, and the Murray
of
South to a Very Old Place
introduce into areas of great universal con–
cern a certain kind of American sensibility and certain kinds of Ameri–
can issues that we often think of as removed from that bigger world. To
do so, however, these writers bring along what they know of nature, of
various class backgrounds, of popu la r cu Itu re, of tech nology, of fash ion,
and whatever else will allow them to clarify what they think some of the
answers might be to the ongoing riddle of the protean sphinx. Heming–
way decided, or seems to have decided, to make his book another kind
of
Portrait of the Artist as a YOUllg Mall
while fusing it with a singing
and jaunty literary version of the much lighter spirit that inhabits
An
American ill Paris,
that paean
to
youth and self-discovery, and finding
out how to put a personal stamp on an idiom. Wright, El lison, and Mur–
ray express in their separate ways something that I wrote to introduce a
section on books in my collection,
Always ill Pursuit:
Familial, religious, military, and class conflicts drive many works of
classic literature, no matter where or when they were written. In
our own country, contrary
to
certain opinions, writing that focuses
on color needn't be less good than any other. The challenge staring
down at any writer who uses color conflict in our American con–
text is how close he or she can get
to
the standards set by writers
