Annotations for Speaker: Stanley Hyman

Some trends in the novel, that is. The concept of trends in the novel or trends in any literary form is, of course, artificial, a retrospective abstraction. But it is sometimes a convenience. No writer writes anything as part of a trend, but that annoyingly articulate reader we call the critic sometimes follows after the writer at a safe distance, picking up work already done and trending it.

Never very rewarding at any time, this park custodian activity would seem particularly luckless at present when the novel appears to be in a curious period of stagnation with all the old trends largely played out and no new developments yet very tangible. Naturalism, which has been the main line of our fiction, at least since Dreiser, seems now to consist of no more than Caroline Slade's gentle documentaries on the theme of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore or vast pointless excursions into the slums with such writers as Willard Motley and Leonard Bishop.

In its more lyrical form, as such a writer as Sherwood Anderson represents it, naturalism can now claim only earnest, decent and essentially talentless writers, like Albert Halper or Alexander Baron in England. That flood of naturalism, so overpowering in the '30s. The left wing or proletarian novel seems to have dried up almost without a trace, leaving only a few stagnant puddles where writers like Howard Fast and Albert Maltz continue to work.

Naturalism as ironic melodrama as we knew it in such books as James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? seems to have persuaded a whole generation of young European writers under Gide's leadership that the American novel is virile and significant. But by the time Europe learned about it, this tradition was already as stone-cold dead as the marathon dancing and flagpole sitting it celebrated and so much resembled.

Three somewhat unattractive trends in the novel seem clearly visible at present, although perhaps they have always been clearly visible and represent no more than the statistical tendency of most novels at any given time to be rather bad ones. In any case, they are undeniable trends. And before peering about under rocks for more hopeful signs, we might pause to note them.

The first is a tendency of our established and most famous writers to parody their own earlier work or rewrite it downward. We might regard this as the Louis Napoleon principle.

Following Marx's engaging suggestion made when he was a political journalist and before he took his own historical laws quite so seriously that every historical event is shortly afterwards followed by its parody, inducing Louis Napoleon's revolution a generation after Bonaparte's as his typical example. Our leading novelists seem to be devoting themselves to the demonstration of this principle with a unanimity that is one of the most depressing features of the current stagnation in our fiction.

Thus, Hemingway rescues himself from the critical obituaries that followed across the river and into the trees by writing a compact and moving work, The Old Man and The Sea, that turns out on examination to be his fine short story, "The Undefeated," done over again with less power. Where the aging bullfighter was heroic in failure and tragic in stature by his stubborn refusal to admit defeat and incompetence, the aged fisherman is sentimentalized to be somehow victorious in principal. His fish skeleton, a more worthwhile capture than any amount of merchandise for the market by means of the author's change of the rules in the course of the game. Where the form of the undefeated was heroic tragedy, the form of The Old Man and The Sea might be called Christian comedy, in which faith and grace automatically redeem from worldly failure.

Faulkner has similarly in a recent book, Requiem for a Nun, rewritten an earlier work, Sanctuary, to give its protagonist-- one can hardly say heroine-- some of the doom-ridden grandeur of the Sartorises, where Sanctuary had a symbolic rightness in the temple's innocent natural evil allowed her to pass unscathed through the wildest Jacobian melodrama and artificial evil, more sinning than sinned against. The Athenian framework of retribution and redemption, temple is made to bear in Requiem for a Nun serves only to take her out of her corncob sanctuary into a dimension where she and the characters around her simply become ridiculous.

In the same fashion, Steinbeck's carefree fantasy world of Tortilla Flat has become the self-conscious moral slum of Cannery Row. And O'Hara has rewritten Appointment in Samarra with a female hero as a rage to live, demonstrating that where Julian English's speedy doom could achieve a kind of meteoric brilliance prolonged over Grace Caldwell Tate's long lifetime, it possesses only a seeping dullness.

When we add to these the law of entropy in Farrell's trilogies and tetrologies slowly running down, each with measurably less life in it than the last, and Dos Passos' recent trilogy that reads like some cruel satire on USA, we have not much left to boast of in the recent work of our important novelists.

A second trend might be called the disguises of love, taking its title from Robie Macauley's recent novel. One of the oddest of these disguises is the writing of stories about homosexual love in the imagery of heterosexual love. I have elsewhere discussed this Albertine strategy for Proust's Albert made Albertine is surely the godfather of all such operations. And here would only note the nature of the strategy and a few examples.

At its simplest, it is simply metamorphosizing a boy with whom the male protagonist is involved into a girl. As in Corvo's The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole with its boyish girl gondolier, Zildo. Or the mannish Mexican girl, Amada, who moves in with the writer in Tennessee Williams' short story, "Rubio y Morena."

We see its more complicated form in Robin Maugham's novelette, The Servant, where a wicked man servant corrupts a weak-willed young English gentleman by means of a preposterous, adolescent nymphomaniac, he sneaks into the house eventually estranging him from his noble fiancée. And on examination, both girls turn out to be only symbolic vehicles for homosexual love of the young gent. The nymphomaniac for the servant's nasty love and the fiancé for the male narrator's pure love leaving our original polygon a rather odd triangle.

I would submit that this Albertine strategy underlies such fiction as Paul Bowles, Frederick Buechner, and Williams' own more complicated The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, underlies such plays as a Streetcar Named Desire and all derivatives like William Inge's Picnic, where a Kowalski-like natural male animal breaks through the defenses of a conventional seeming young woman, and underlies such films as, All About Eve.

Robie Macaulay's The Disguises of Love, on its appearance was reviewed in The New Yorker by our perceptive commentator for this evening, Mr. Anthony West, with considerable attention to the fact that in it, the usual relations between the sexes in our culture seem to be curiously reversed. Mr. West noted that, in essence, the frail pushover of a hero, Professor Graeme was villainously seduced and his life ruined by a heartless young female student, Frances, who determined to have her will of him to the extent of reserving a double room with bath for their first date.

I would argue that all the book's absurdity disappears when it is regarded as a sophisticated example of the Albertine strategy, with Francis simply a male student named Francis, with an I, and enough clues in the book's title, constant preoccupation with the theme of gender reversal, and imagery to suggest that here, we may have the strategy's conscious parody-- that Macaulay may have not only anticipated our investigations, but even assisted them by pointing up the evidence. Other current varieties of love's disguises can be dealt with in a more perfunctory fashion. One of the most widespread is a kind of infantile regression, where happiness is equated with a pre-sexual or pre-genital attachment to an older woman or women.

Perhaps the best example of this is the fiction of Truman Capote, particularly The Grass HarpThe Member of the Wedding is a similar exercise in regression. It is worth noting parenthetically how readily these infantile fantasies seem to adapt for the stage, as is the entire literary output of William Saroyan.

The child-centered world of JD Salinger's fiction, where ambiguous attachments to girl children are the constant refuge from a distressing adult life, shows a similar tendency. But Salinger seems to me a writer of far too much talent and seriousness to remain permanently fixed on this level. With other variants of the sexual impulse, the sadistic nastiness in Steinbeck's East of Eden, the novels of Edgar Mittelholzer, or recent Erskine Caldwell, the kiss-and-tell tradition as it diminishes in interest from Henry Miller to Maud Hutchins, we need have no particular concern.

A third and most widespread trend consists of those books that appear to be novels and are not. They might be called "pseudo-fictions" on the analogy of I. A. Richards' pseudo questions and pseudo statements, which would not only name them accurately-- they are false fictions, rather than non-fictions-- but might lend our activities some of the optimistic "semantics will save us" tone of a quarter of a century ago, as though all these complicated matters could readily be put in order. We must insist not on a definition, but on certain minimal requirements-- that fiction is an exercise of the moral imagination, that it organizes experience into a form with a beginning, middle, and end, and that it's centered around a dramatic action.

A pseudo fiction may be quite a good work of its sort, although most of them are not. What must be recognized is that its sort is not the form we have traditionally called the novel. The appreciation the pseudo fiction aims at is, "yes, that is just what it must be like." The inescapable sense any work of the fictive imagination from Don Quixote to The Weavers Grave gives is, life is surely nothing like this anywhere. This is art.

We can readily see what pseudo fictions are by contrasting the moving and effective reporting of John Hersey's Hiroshima with the pretentious disguised reporting of the same writer's The Wall, or even more clearly by contrasting Budd Schulberg's pseudo fiction about F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Disenchanted, in one direction with Arthur Mizener's brilliant biography of Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise, in the other direction with Fitzgerald's own truly effective rendering of the same pathetic story, Tender As The Night.

In recent years, we have had the political or current event's pseudo fiction of Lionel Trilling's The Middle Of The Journey, and Erwin Shaw's The Troubled Air, the former enormously better than the latter, but absolutely comparable in kind. The pseudo fiction about the war in such wordy bestsellers as From Here To Eternity, The Naked And The Dead, and The Caine Mutiny-- biographical and autobiographical pseudo fictions by Angus Wilson and Mary McCarthy, and some particularly uninteresting pseudo fictions about a fake new generation, the Beat Generation, by such beat generators as Calder Willingham and Chandler Broussard.

Particularly ominous are the examples of several English novelists, who seem to fall into pseudo fiction when they are tired, as our own established novelists fall into self-parody. Thus, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, who created truly imagined political fiction and semi fiction in Darkness At Noon and Down and Out in Paris and London, failed to do anything of the sort in the journalism of Thieves In The Night and 1984. Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh have continued to grind out works of satiric intent long after the imaginative grasp that made their earlier works novels was exhausted.

Diaries, journals, familiar essays, war experiences, newspaper columns, sociology, religious parables-- everything from an account of making a movie in Africa with John Huston to the inside dope on the Jelke ring is given a thin veneer of fictionalizing these days and published as a novel, while the few works of authentic fiction brought out each year wither on The New York Times and "Bear in Mind" list. Now that the novel no longer sells as it did in comparison with nonfiction, it will be interesting to see whether the next decade reverses the process and gets us our Moby Dicks as the whales around us.

Before we take a look at some trends in the novel that seem more hopeful, one reservation suggested above needs re-emphasis. Put most simply, it is that bad works can share the preoccupations of good. Insofar as discussion focuses on problems of theme and value, as this one has, it should be obvious that a very poor book can share its theme and values with a masterpiece, without acquiring any of the masterpiece's virtues.

These categories of hopeful trends are thus no guarantee of quality. And in fact, each category includes a very mixed bag of works, not at all meant to be exhaustive. A novel can be deliberately produced with every feature of major fiction, and still somehow fail to come alive, which is my impression of the novels of Robert Penn Warren, although I am defensively aware how much my view is a minority one.

With that out of the way, let me say that the most hopeful direction fiction seems to me to be taking at present is toward the conscious use of myth and ritual as an organizing principle. The tendency in literary discussion is to speak of myth alone. But since in actual terms, the two are inseparable, the myth being nothing more or less than the story or spoken correlative of the rite, we would do well to consider them together whenever we can. A work of fiction that emphasizes myth and slights the physical reality of ritual tends to be thin and heady-- in my opinion, the trouble with Mann's Joseph novels-- whereas a work of fiction centered on both, like Mann's shorter Death in Venice or Mario and the Magician, has a depth and resonance that is one of the sure signs of major art.

A recent work that seems to me resonant in its use of myth and ritual in precisely this fashion is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, organized around a theme that has been basic to American fiction from Moby Dick to The Great Gatsby, the ancient ritual myth of the quest. Ellison's nameless hero pursues the secret of visibility, his own fully human identity as the knight of romance pursued grail castle, and breaking through the enchanted wood of the "keep this n--- boy running" practical joke that is the book's key metaphor, an act as seen in Kenneth Burke's terminology. He achieves at the end, if not the goal of fully conscious humanity, at least a sure footing on the spiral stairway to it.

Another recent work organized on the framework of the quest, The Palm-Wine Drinkard by a young West African named Amos Tutuola, makes an instructive comparison with Invisible Man. Tutuola's story, the drunkard's pursuit of his dead palm-wine tapster into the Town of the Deads, is a complicated ritual of the quest without any kind of mythic or intellectual structure to give it focus or coherence. It is without, in short, the tradition of the picaresque novel behind it. And ultimately, the book becomes only a series of fantastic adventures, projecting such attitudes of Tutuola's culture as the weird money economy and the terrified loathing of children, the way a Rorschach test might.

Similarly, we could note the Huckleberry Finn framework of the rites of passage, the series of ceremonial initiations leading to maturity in Shirley Jackson's Hangs A Man, a book I find it difficult to discuss, or in a more fragmentary form, in Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye. Salinger's book suffers technically from its reduction to the limited vision and vocabulary of a 16-year-old boy, with the addition of an adult narrator's perspective to the novel. Capable of adding a myth adequate to its rights, it might have been not the engaging tour de force we were given, but the substantial imaginative work for which Salinger so clearly shows the potentiality.

Even in the historical novel, we have recently had, in Jay Williams unfortunately titled The Rogue From Padua, the kind of centering of dramatic action in ritual rather than history that we had previously only seen glimpses of in Naomi Mitchison rather stilted The Corn King and The Spring Queen. Williams' account of the peasant wars in Germany in the agonistic terms of ritual witchcraft can probably do nothing to stem the torrent of historical novels, as many-breasted as the Asiatic Artemis. But it can at least keep alive the tradition of the form's potentiality.

The theme of the sacrificial victim or expiratory ritual, embracing such diverse works as Kafka's The Trial, Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts, and James Gould Cozzen's Castaway, takes on a curious postwar topicality in Jocelyn Brooke's recent The Scapegoat. Where even a work we tend to call nonfiction, like Thoreau's Walden, centers around a year's cycle of death and rebirth and identifies its form with a quest for a horse, a hound, and a turtle dove, it is not hard to see that these rituals or symbolic actions of initiation, rebirth, and redemption lie very close to the center of aesthetic experience. And their conscious use by the novelist would seem about as artificial as his conscious use of human life for his subject matter.

A second hopeful trend in our fiction seems to me something we probably have to call, despite the term's pomposity, pre-existentialism. In his book Existentialism From Within, E. L. Allen writes, "Existentialism is an attempt at philosophizing from the standpoint of the actor instead of, as has been customary, from that of the spectator." I have to take Dr. Allen's word on that, since I am as innocent of philosophy as Emerson's cutworm. But if we accept the definition, its immediate relevance to a certain kind of novel is obvious.

I would call pre-existentialist that fiction that comes to the view independently as a discovery in the novelist's craft, rather than formally pushing a wheelbarrow full of speculative thought. Richard Wright's Native Son, and particularly his novelette The Man Who Lived Underground, seemed to me examples of the first. His recent The Outsider, deliberately patterned on French existentialist fiction, an example of the second. Kenneth Burke's novel as a series of declamations, Towards A Better Life, would be almost the proto-existentialist work of fiction in our time, its rhetorical form a brilliant device for the self-exposure of motives.

Novels we had once thought were primarily political, like Malraux's Man's Fate and Celine's earlier work, now seem obviously pre-existentialist in their reduction of all our large, vacant generalities to the crises of individual human action. As the example of Wright ironically suggests, Negro experience in America would seem to predispose a novelist to this approach more than any length of time spent in Paris. And Mr. Ellison has elsewhere discussed-- and I hope we'll touch on here tomorrow night-- the break in American sensibility typified by Hemingway's dismissal of the freeing of Jim in Huck Finn as a false note, and the consequent renunciation of a whole depth of insight into the nature of American experience that our 19th century fiction had possessed.

Pre-existentialism may, in fact, be a characteristically Negro-centered note in our fiction. And as we might expect it is a major aspect of Faulkner's work, although I do not find it much in evidence in the work of such white Southern writers as Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. Several underrated American novelists seem to me characteristically pre-existentialist along these lines, among them William March, John Sanford, and the Robert M. Coates of that fine and almost unknown book, Yesterday's Burdens.

Finally, for our third encouraging trend, there is a miscellaneous body of real fictions distinguishable from pseudo fictions by form, by a core of resolved action, and above all, by the presence of moral imagination. It is a quality we can identify in the brilliant short fictions of Frank O'Connor as unmistakably as in those of Hawthorne. One symptom of genuine fiction is the presence of that faintly disreputable word, "love," undisguised, rather than in the varieties of concealment noted above.

Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Joyce Carey have, in their various ways, created traditions for dealing with the reality of human love, Carey a particularly virile and robust one. And in this country, we can note with pride such recent work as Peter Taylor's A Woman Of Means, Jessamyn West's The Witch Diggers, Brendan Gill's The Trouble Of One House, and the fine book just published here by a young British writer resident in France, Patrick O'Brian's The Catalans.

HJ Kaplan's The Plenipotentiaries is that amazing conception-- a rewriting of Henry James and a characteristically Jamesian situation in contemporary terms. And Jean Stafford did something similar with the Proustian tradition in Boston Adventure, before going on to create her own specialized fictional structures in The Mountain Lion and The Catherine Wheel. Nelson Algren's The Man With The Golden Arm is an equally rare bird-- a work in the line of slum naturalism, familiar from Algren's previous books, but this time somehow suffused with poetry and rich with symbolism.

These true fictions are as unmistakable when they are concerned with sin and the darker places of the human heart, as in the work of Bernanos, Mauriac, and Graham Greene, as when sin has become bad taste and the human heart is no darker than a well-kept front parlor, as in the novels of E. M. Forster, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Henry Green. I have read only separately published snatches of Saul Bellow's forthcoming The Adventures of Augie March, but those protean snatches and his two fine earlier novels suggest that it is another book to join the thin ranks of the genuine works of fiction in our time.

The relationship between the contemporary novel in English-- which seems a more viable unit than the American novel-- and the European is a complicated matter. And perhaps there are more relationships than one. The Italian novel, like the Italian film, has seemed in the last few years to have attained tremendous vitality and power.

Recently, we have been able to get a new perspective on it by the publication in America, some decades delayed, of an early novel written under Mussolini by one of the most impressive of the Italian novelists, Alberto Moravia. Published as The Time Of Indifference, it is a depressing yet oddly moving pain of despair, very unlike Moravia's later work. The Time Of Indifference opposes the melancholy, almost impotent, nostalgic values of an upper-class Italian family to those of an unattractive go-getter, the lover first of the mother and then of the daughter, while the family's son, who is not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be, articulates the book's philosophy of indifference and sinks through ineffectual gestures of revenge into total apathy.

This opposition between older humane values that can only be celebrated as dying and new efficient values that are accepted as the wave of the future, but portrayed in all their unloveliness, is a thoroughly familiar motif. It is the constant theme of all serious Soviet fiction from the marvelous stories of Isaac Babel in the 1920s, in Red Cavalry and Benya Krik, where the older values are typified by Jewish shtetl culture opposed to the new revolutionary dynamism. Through such works as Olesha's Envy, where Ivan Babichev and his crazy machine Ophelia, the symbol of all Western humane culture, refuses to be vanquished by his brother Andrei, the forward looking sausage-maker, who is himself a kind of horrible, synthetic sausage, right down to Leonov's ambiguous Road To The Ocean in the 1940s.

Seeing this drama of the old, quixotic man going down to defeat before the new, efficient man under fascism and communism, we might be tempted to call it the reaction of the novelist to a totalitarian culture. But how can we miss it in Shakespeare, with his wonderful All For Love Anthony's losing to the beardless, new, bureaucratic Octavius's, as his Falstaff is cast off by the young, dynamic Prince Hals? It is, in fact, the protest of the artist against the death and decay of the old values in any society.

It was a major Russian preoccupation long before the revolution, and was James Fenimore Cooper's theme sometime before Moravia got around to it. Hemingway's Robert Cone is as much the new man as Andrey Babichev or King Henry V. Sartoris and Snopes are Antony and Octavius for us.

Moravia's role in recent Italian fiction suggests that a backward-looking and nostalgic protest is not opposed to a literature of hope and faith so much as it is an essential precursor of it and an ambiguous ingredient within it. If we can thus learn neither hope nor despair from Europe, we can certainly not export any hardboiled ersatz substitutes for either. The cult of Hammett, Cain, and McCoy is absurd in a France already possessed of a Celine who has gone to the end of that line, and a Malraux transmuting contemporary melodrama into authentic tragedy.

Our problem, in the last analysis, is formal, not thematic. We have had writers like Rex Warner and Ruthven Todd using Kafka's tradition to write political fables, and writers like Isaac Rosenfeld and William Sansom mining it for moral or religious fables. But who have we able to write like Kafka in a concentration of myth and ritual so intense that no single level of interpretation can contain it? And the short work like The Metamorphosis is simultaneously an allegory of the artist, an appeal against the social order, and an odyssey of the human soul.

Where our fables are thin and our documentations of life are ultimately unsatisfying, the dichotomy suggests that we need a synthesis of the two separated traditions. Dostoevsky, we might note, has all the richness of observed life in Dickens plus an added moral or symbolic dimension. Moby Dick is another such work, with humane and hopeful values perhaps more congenial to our needs. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake clothe our own paltry experience with all the ancient grandeur of myth and magic.

Where such a novelist as Cousins can write in Guard Of Honor, a triumph of realistic observation, and in Castaway a little masterpiece of symbolic fantasy, we need the union of both-- the work at once large in detail and significance. All our current trends, in the last analysis, come down to this-- the plea for the wedding full of richness and ceremony of Black Iago and delicate Desdemona that John Peale Bishop described so movingly in his poem "Speaking of Poetry." This ritual marriage is the formula for a major art of the novel, as it is the formula for any great art. And we can do no more at present than hope, unworthily, for its consummation in our time.

I don't have much to say to Mr. West's points, in that I think he summarized and commented on what I had to say fairly, with perhaps one small reservation-- that his feeling that I had somehow underrated E. M. Forster by saying that his work dealt with the vocabulary of bad taste rather than the vocabulary of sin, in writers like Graham Greene, I think is unwarranted.

I was suggesting, and would argue, I think, that these are both major traditions in the serious and worthwhile novel. And if Graham Greene, and those like him, sees things in terms of sin, and Forster does not, I surely wouldn't submit that as a weakness in Forster. I would also note in that account that when I said that Foster's picture of the human heart was no darker than a well-kept front parlor, that of course, a well-kept front parlor is very dark.

Other than that, I suppose the big issue is Kafka, which I think is too much to bring up as a discussion now. And all you can fairly say is that Mr. West apparently doesn't share my feelings for Kafka. I refuse to give them up for that reason, and will, left with what I imagine all of you are exercised with, too, which is simply a difference in taste and opinion. And that's all.

Well, since I spoke last night of the moral imagination in a favorable tone, I imagine that I'm tarred with Mr. Frohock's brush. And I just want to put in one reservation that I think he's using the term in too limited a fashion to reduce the moral imagination to some kind of ethical concern, as perhaps Mr. Trilling, who is not entirely my favorite critic, does seems to me to be making too little of what I think, as I claimed last night, is a central phenomenon in all fictional or all imaginative writing.

I would insist, that is, that the moral imagination is not an ethical matter only but is the organization of experience into significance, that is, can be equated with form, can be equated with the craft of art. Insofar as this experience is made meaningful is organized, that is an exercise of the moral imagination.

These facts are related, are structured meaningfully in relation to human life. And I would add, too, along those lines, to Mr. Frohock's slogan from Baudelaire, one that I think I think is significant there. Freud's slogan, that we must colonize ed with ego. That spreading of the rational, the idea that Freud said was the principle of his work and that is probably the principle of ours, too.

The idea that somehow we have to drain these irrational marshes is the operation of the artist and, of course, is the operation of the moral imagination in infection and should probably be the critics' concern, too.

Oh, I would, surely.

Well, I won't fight for organization, but I'm afraid I have to fight for moral. Organization is perhaps a bad word in that it does suggest this kind of mechanical operation. I'd be glad to move on to any other more satisfactory one. But just seeing this thing in terms of the imagination seems to me, again, to lack enough distinction.

I suspect that a boy pulling the wings off flies is exercising the imagination so that some other operation is involved in art. And I think probably I liked organization because of that idea of the ordering. There's a poem of Wallace Stevens called "A Jar in Tennessee," I think, about placing a jar on a bare hilltop in Tennessee, and all the wilderness around it comes into shape because of that jar.

That it seems to me is a little fable of the artist's role. That is, this organization of that wilderness by that jar is, I would insist, a moral act, is an act of the moral imagination, is the creation of art.

Well, I think we had Mr. Frohock agreeing before if we had a concept of the moral large enough to include the creation of beauty as a moral act, and I thought that he was willing to join on those terms, which it seems to me any deep and meaningful use of moral would include so that if the impulse of some artists is nothing more or less than to make a beautiful thing-- whether it be a pigsty or not-- we would certainly regard that as one of the possible moral activities.

This seems to be the carom question.

Mr. West reproved me a little for the term pseudo fiction last night. And then, he suggested that many traditional fictions would probably be called pseduo fiction. I think as I was using it in a limited sense, it means a bad book. That is, it means a book that doesn't come alive, that hasn't grown--

--that hasn't shaped its experience into any kind of effective, any kind of imagined-- the thing I hate to keep harping on those words. But I don't seem to have any others. About Sinclair Lewis, the truth of the matter is, I suppose, I'm a little of both parties in that I've never read much of him. And I probably wouldn't and would find him dull. But that I would agree that our criticism, every variety of it has its fashionable writers.

And even if he were better, he would just not be one of its fashionable writers at the moment. That is, criticism carries along with it, as Mr. Frohock said, a certain number of writers who do what it thinks should be done. And I suspect that all of those criticisms are reductive, that all of our criticism-- certainly much of what we heard last night-- seemed to be saying that one kind of novel was it. And you can more or less throw the others out.

That is we have an alarming tendency to prescribe for the novel rather than to report what it's doing. And I suspect that probably the silliest of all critical positions is that connote position of telling the writer to go and do something else. I suspect that Mr. O'Connor, who is in the curiously ambiguous position of being both critic and novelist, can carry that off better than most of us.

And I think he played a little fast and loose with us last night in telling a great body of novel to go die, while at the same time saying that much of it he rather liked and would perhaps admit that some of his own work is actually part of that fine modern literature he was excommunicating for us. But I don't think that Sinclair Lewis in any fashion is much of a problem-- that is, he isn't much read. He's probably not the novel of the future more than Henry James. And specifically, I have nothing at all to say about him.

Well, I'd sooner hear Mr. O'Connor on this since the novel, the 20th century novel, he buried last night seems to have revived this evening.