Some Criticism Stranger than Fiction

> Edmund Fuller, Man in Modern Fiction: Some Minority Opinions on Contemporary American Writing. Random House. 171 pp. $3.50.

> Maxwell Geismar. American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity. Hill and Wang. 265 pp. $1.95.

> Charles Shapiro, ed. Twelve Essays on Great American Novels. Wayne State University Press. 289 pp. $5.00.

The "man" in Edmund Fuller's modern fiction is man measured against the Judeo-Christian ethic. Fuller somehow attaches the Hellenistic tradition onto this ethic and offers the resulting mash as the only prescription for the dignity of man. Fuller's "modern fiction," on the other hand, is a flock of sitting ducks like Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, James Jones; and even lesser birds. If Mr. Fuller is hunting a clear statement of the modern liberal's position in literature, why not flush bigger fowl (in this respect) like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams?

Though Fuller's vision or version of maturity may not be ours, he draws a steady bead on the adolescent in American literature. As an example of this arrested development, he cites the failure of the American novelist to create a mature love story, the critical salaams before Kerouac, and the many novels with the tone of the small boy who has just learned to read those four-letter words chalked in public places.

In what probably is his best chapter, "The New Compassion in the American Novel," Mr. Fuller laments the progression from the "lovable bum" to the "genial rapist, the jolly slasher, the funloving dope-pusher." Contemporary writers of the belligerently subterranean school are dissatisfied with the traditional good guys and bad. Under the new villain's mustache one may find the clean-cut face of the old hero. These contemporary authors (Steinbeck, George Mandel, and James Joyce among them) have a new compassion which withholds blame from the ex-villains. "Therefore, since their concept of compassion will not permit them to blame anything upon the criminal, the degraded, and the destroyed, they blame everything upon the non-criminal, the non-degraded, and the undestroyed. It is a kind of counter-puritanism." (For that last happy mot, we can forgive Fuller all his "dishes of tea," "getting in dutch's," and "slaps in the face.")

Twice at least Fuller suggests the virtues of pluralism. In a defense of Wouk against the intellectuals' attack, Fuller cites the complexity of Queeg and his situation as a literary merit. He condemns in the same chapter, "The Hipster or the Organization Man?," the hipster's either/or blinders on life. It is unfortunate that he does not allow the same latitude to writers who value other religious or ethical views than his own, but perhaps Fuller's offensive will incite liberals to some fruitful re-examination of their positions. On most questions of religion, sex, politics, and literary theory, Maxwell Geismar would be at odds with Edmund Fuller. It is surprising, then, to see how often the two concur or at least complement one another.

Geismar's book is a collection of essays written for a literate audiencereaders of the Saturday Review, Nation, the New York Times Book Review. His predilection might be described as "social consciousness," or more accurately "realism." He does not wield the naive "for or agin' the peepul" proletarian probe, but he does insist that literature remain faithful to history, to social facts, and to psychological truth. Thus, for instance, he questions Faulkner's romantic view of the Old South and his malicious multiplication of the Snopses of the New. So too he impales Sinclair Lewis as full of the manners, habits, and idioms of the people of the United States., but largely ignorant of the "basic determinants of the life which surrounds them," giving as one large omission in Lewis' America the real institutions of finance capitalism. This critical method is certainly fruitful, but some readers feel their reservations justified when they come upon Geismar's mauling of J. D. Salinger.

Geismar uses his critical method not only to indict culpable omissions but also to point out the renewed values of some American classics for the contemporary scene. His use of history is also valuable as a corrective for some of Mr. Fuller's ideas. Thus Geismar concedes the excesses of brothel literature, but observes that these were the almost inevitable backlash from the Puritanical and Victorian repression of the last century.

Like Fuller, Geismar sees the blight of arrested development on some of our best novelists: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Mailer. Vorse, he discerns a certain fear, even a hatred for sex and life itself in Cozzens, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Mailer, and Jones. His exhibit of quotations seems to make a convincing case, but could he be mistaking the venom of satire for the values of the writer?

In spite of other areas of agreement Fuller and Geismar part company on Wouk. Geismar summons "Woukism" as a dirty descriptive epithet for the worst aspects of contemporary society; Fuller defends The Caine Mutiny as a case for military discipline, not a plea for conformity in society at large. They line up similarly on Marquand--whenever, I suppose, the question of "conformity" is posed baldly.

They do share a certain unexamined readiness to invoke "life" or "vitality" as the real measure of literary worth. Geismar, for instance, describes From Here to Eternity as a "living organism of the first class," an awkward expression conjuring images of amoebae. This abdication of the real work of the critic for simple effervescence is rationalized by George P. Elliott in our third book of criticism: "For how can one define, account for, analyze vitality? Here is an alive world; it delights me to learn about it. These, I think, are the fundamental assertions to be made about a great novel; criticism comes rationalizing after."

True Confessions is an alive world; its readers delight to read about it. It is neither novel, however, nor is it great. Chronologically criticism may come "rationalizing after," but this does not diminish its stature as a guide to new ways of seeing and understanding how books come alive or why they fail to.

Some of the better pieces in Twelve Original Essays do just that, as, in fact, does Mr. Elliott himself when he talks about Huckleberry Finn. He brings the charge against Twain that his other work lacks "sustained moral seriousness." The last of Huckleberry Finn is a "cheat" with the introduction of Tom Sawyer as clownish deus ex machina to dissolve the real moral dilemmas Twain has made come alive.

Richard Chase does a good analysis of how the images in Henry James's The Ambassadors work, and his discussion of "those all too gratuitous renunciations that James prizes so highly" is worth all the critical clucking over James's lack of "vitality." Charles Shapiro sees Theodore Dreiser as chronicler of industrial America of the early twentieth century its dreams, frustrations, and the "cruel misdirection of American energy." Henry Fleming's story in The Red Badge of Courage is, to Bernard Weisberger, the story of an isolated country boy's discovery of self in a day before the mass media were supplying ready-made self-images for the G.I.

Probably the richest essay in the collection is David Brion Davis' "The Deerslayer, a Democratic Knight of the Wilderness." Davis explains the failure of Cooper to create psychological reality by his attempt to "combine Homeric heroism and Christian sainthood in the figure of the American pioneer." While one still meets people trying to defend Cooper's novels as esthetic realizations it is refreshing to read an essay which allows them some literary merit but finds the novels more valuable for their insights into the nature of American civilization.

Together these three books suggest many ways of reading (and rereading) American fiction. Their great value to the high school teacher, it would seem, is how they make it possible to decentralize honors programs, by putting many university scholars and literary critics at the disposal of the bright student. In combination with paperback editions of the novelists considered, the teacher can use the mass media (paperbacks and university presses) to individualize the instruction of those bright students who unhappily too often get lost in the egalitarian shuffle.