BOOKS
Generation of Saints
By DONAT O'DONNELL
JOYCE, Proust and Mann being representative writers of `the first generation,' the representa- tive writers of 'the second generation' chosen by Professor R. W. B. Lewis* are Moravia, Camus, Silone, Faulkner, Graham Greene and—in an epilogue, for some reason—Andre Malraux. The `second generation' writers have their 'representa- tive hero;' the picaresque saint : 'a person who is something of a saint, in the contemporary man- ner of sainthood, but who is also something of a rogue.' Along with this, his unifying theme, Pro- fessor Lewis stresses certain other common ele- ments—concern with death, metaphysical sense of loss, human companionship, need to 'exist.' Sub- themes appear as well :
If, in the generation-wide struggle to come alive, Moravia represents the erotic motif; if Camus represents human reason in its compas- sionate workings; if Silone represents the con- version of political ambition into the charitable urge, and Faulkner the conversion of darkness into light and the old into the new; if Greene represents the interplay of the more than human with the less than human—then Malraux may be said to represent all of these things or versions of them,
As a critic Professor Lewis is always attentive, often perceptive. Taken separately, his essays are never less than intelligent introductions to their subjects and sometimes—as on Silone and Faulk- ner—considerably more.
The English regarded Faulkner's verbal eccentricities in somewhat the way Italians of a traditional temper regarded the unconventional irregularities of Slime's prose. The irregularities of James Joyce, for the English. remained con- ventional ones: recognisable deviations from the known center, the only center; but Faulkner's idiom, which came from no center known to them, seemed simply unforgivably had writing. His hot Southern American Protestant rhetoric fell on deaf • Anglican ears; his 'ideas' seemed extravagant and intrusive, and his recurrent ex- pression of outrage appeared dubious to a coun- try which was to wait another decade or so before producing its own generation of angry young men.
Without altogether relinquishing the -suspicion that 'hot Southern American 'Protestant rhetoric' may sometimes be a synonym for bombast, one must concede that Professor Lewis is here carrying out one of the most important functions of the critic : the exposure of prejudices and complacen- cies which hinder the understanding of a work of art.
The Picaresque Saint is, however—as its pub- lishers - state—'no random collection of literary essays.' It is an ambitious attempt to isolate deter- mining characteristics in contemporary writing. The attempt, well worth making, and made with enthusiasm as well as intelligence, has proved, in my opinion, a respectable failure. And I believe that the reasons for its failure are fundamental and identifiable. There are also, of course, pre- liminary difficulties of definition. 'Generations' are not really so easy to sort out : what `generation' * THE PICARESQUE SAINT. By R. W. B. Lewis. (Gollancz, 25s.)
did Gide belong to? Professor Lewis puts him firmly in the 'first generation,' in 'a world in which the aesthetic experience was supreme.' Andre Walter fits neatly into such a world, but the mature Gide was not an aesthete at all but mainly an odd kind of moralist—a picaresque saint, in fact, dis- qualified by the age-limit which Professor Lewis, by his terms of reference, has to impose. The idea of `representative writers' is also open to question. Such 'representatives' tend to be elected by the critic alone: is Moravia a more `representative writer' than Auden or Brecht?
These difficulties, and even the critic's apparent indifference to their existence, would not neces- sarily imply the failure of the enterprise. Professor Lewis has chosen an interesting group of contem- porary writers and if he did in fact isolate charac- teristics present in them, and not in comparable earlier writers, we could accept readily enough phrases like `representative writers' and 'second generation.' But the characteristics on which he concentrates most of his attention turn out to be as easy to find in earlier writers as in his group taken as a whole. Thus what he considers to be the most fertile of his themes, that of the picar- esque saint, is not present to any significant extent in several of his 'second generation' authors and is to some extent present in many authors of past generations. Only in the work of Silone and Greene are there heroes who are both 'saints' and picaresque. As against this rather meagre and doubtfully classified collection the nineteenth cen- tury can show numerous and authentic examples of the picaresque saint, both in life and literature: Tolstoy's Pierre, Dostoievsky and almost any of his heroes, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, amides rete d'Or, Leon Bloy and his self-portraits, Lionel Johnson. . . . The 'picaresque saint' idea, in fact, far from providing an identifying symbol for the `second generation' of twentieth-century writers, could be considered with less difficulty as a nineteenth-century heirloom, somewhat marked down. The way it has been marked down—the journey from Rimbaud to Pinkie Brown—would be worth study, but to treat it as a highly signifi- cant contemporary invention is misleading.
When we are asked to consider a group of twentieth-century writers why should we dwell on themes inherited from the nineteenth century? Is there really nothing distinctive about these writers, marking them off from their predecessors? It is Professor Lewis himself who suggests the answers, when he says that 'the form or soul of the modern epoch, its essential plot, is the shape of the experience of political history. Or rather : it is the shape of individual experience during a period when political history affects all experi- ence.' If this is so, the critic, in dealing with the writers of this epoch, ought to examine, in every case and as a matter of primary importance, the writer's relation to the political experience of his place and lime. This is precisely what Professor Lewis fails to do, or refrains from doing, in the case of all his authors except Silone. (It is no accident that the essay on Shone is much the most solid in the book.) Thus in the case of Camus we
are given no clue to the probable political rele- vance of La Chute—the implicit link between the ironic withdrawal of the 'penitent judge' and Camus's own withdrawal from judgment on the Algerian war. Indeed Professor Lewis gives no sign of being aware that there is any war in Algeria—a rather strange omission on the part of one who expresses such strong views on the literary relevance of political history. Again in the case of Malraux, where it is even more difficult to ignore politics, Professor Lewis largely succeeds in doing so, mainly by concentrating on La Vole Royale and Les Noyers d'Altenburg and ignor- ing La Condition Humaine and L'Espoir. In the case of Faulkner, although he does not altogether ignore the relevance of the peculiar institutions of Mississippi, he suggests that Faulkner's central insight is 'a sense of the fertile and highly ambigu- ous possibility of moral freedom in the new world.' The critic, like the turtle, is a specialist in fertile ambiguity : it is useful for survival.
In a political age literary criticism which attempts to leave out politics inevitably becomes detached from reality. A literary criticism which brings in politics, however, is obviously open to the dangers of becoming doctrinaire, passion- blinded or corrupt. These are dangers; the un- reality which comes from 'leaving politics out'— when dealing with writers profoundly affected by politics—is not a danger but a certain calamity. The critic must therefore confront these difficul- ties, and cope with them as best he can; he will also have to cope with certain pressures—the 'reader- over-his-shoulder' will begin to wear a different expression. Like the creative writer, and after the creative writer, he will be drawn or dragged into politics. We rightly condemn those Soviet `politico-literary' critics who are ready to act as gendarmes controlling the writers of Russia. And we applaud those Polish critics—some of them represented in Mr. Lionel Trilling's valuable col- lection The Broken MirrOr—who have struggled, often with the aid of 'fertile ambiguities,' to defend the idea of freedom, both in relation to literature and to their people. What we easily fail to see is that the 'non-political' Western critic resembles his Soviet rather than his Polish colleagues by the way in which he - acquiesces in the orthodoxy which prevails in Iris society. Soviet orthodoxy falsely pretends that literature can be produced in conformity with a predetermined political line; Western orthodoxy falsely pretends that litera- ture, being connected with spiritual values, can be kept out of politics, which belong to a baser, more material sphere. Both of these false doctrines are closely related to political realities in their areas of origin, because they are ways of diverting serious critical attention from these realities. The Soviet effort in this direction, backed as it is by harsh penalties and centralised power, is clearly much more thorough; the Western pressure, vaguer and more diffuse, almost impalpable, is probably more effective than we realise.
The Picaresque Saint is a particularly disturbing symptom of the effects of this pressure, for here we have an intelligent critic explicitly conscious of the importance of politics in relation to litera- ture and yet turning aside, time after time, from political implications clearly present in his subject —indeed turning aside always except where the implications concern fascism, officially dead, or communism, officially 'hell' (his own word). This, kind of criticism—acute on small matters and absent-minded on very large ones, inventive of diversions, cosmically concerned and terrestriallY calm—is important not in itself but as marking a dangerously close intellectual atmosphere. The canary in the mine-shaft is important when its song hesitates and stops.
Previous page
