Where are the novels of yesteryear?
PERSONAL COLUMN J. H. PLUMB
We all educate ourselves more profoundly than we realise and we do it mainly in our youth. 1 was forcefully reminded of this in shifting a large number of books from one house to another. Many were novels—an old collected edition of Dostoievsky, the Scott Moncrieff Proust, a battered copy of Madame Bovary, cheap one franc editions of Balzac bought from the boxes on the quais by the Seine. And all the past flooded back—the wonder of the books that dominated ' my adolescent life, as much as love and more than ambition.
I was lucky to have a room of my own that looked out on a quiet garden, an old apple tree, two herbaceous borders, a rambling rose and a minuscule grass patch, that was all. But the garden and the room were all one, an intensely private.wombish world in which to lose myself to literature and to life. I started maybe with a score of books—a few Dickens, a volume or two of .Scott, The Last of the Mohicans, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Three Men in a Boat, which I soon snobbishly buried deep. By the time I left for university I had bought or begged a thousand volumes. To get Farewell to Arms the day it came out, I walked eight miles a day to save the bus fares to school. 1 can still feel and smell the newness of that book now. And the utter absorption of reading it. Romantic love, a hatred of war, unbearable tragedy but tough and fate-accepting. To the adolescent utterly true and so utterly absorbing that time became irrelevant and dawn was com- ing up as the book was finished.
That happened to me often enough and yet the books that made it impossible to go to bed were a motley crew. I remember one winter's night being unable to put down Sylvia Town- send Warner's Lolly Willowes, a book about which I knew nothing and which I had bought because I could not resist its strange elongated shape nor the beauty of its printing. After reading it I was a fan, dedicated and persistent, that bought and still buys anything that Miss Warner writes. Ancl,how good she still remains may be seen from her wise, delicate and compassionate handling of T. H. White's biography. If only all my discoveries had lasted as well as she. Some have vanished almost without trace, book and author too. There was, I well remember, a totally absorbing book about a small town in the Middle West, so vivid that I felt that I lived there, that my own family lived there, although at that time I had never set foot in America. It was called Something of a Hero. I never discovered any other books by the author, whoever he was. Was I mistaken? Or was there a book of real quality that has got lost in the years?
Other discoveries led to a lifetime's pleasure. J. G. Cozzens is one of the few novelists whose latest book I am impatient to possess! One of his early novels turned up in a small bookshop in the English midlands and, rashly it seemed, I bought it. But not so, for Cozzens was clearly a major novelist, combining a marvellous economy with a wide understanding compassion for men and women. He possessed that com- bination of gravity and tenderness that drew me to George Eliot, the fine early novels of Arnold Bennett and which still attracts me in Malamud, Bellow and Alfred Hayes. I read very little literary criticism beyond the weekly reviews and I am glad that I did not. I did not waste time on the over-fashionable or the cults of Bloomsbury or of Leavis. My appetite was kept sharp on what it liked. • But it was very eclectic: the classics- Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust—jostled with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Huxley, Lawrence and Thomas Wolfe, whose Look Homeward Angel I swallowed wholesale, moved even by those overwritten purple patches in italics, 'By the wind grimed ghost came back again, eh.' Yet Faulkner, on whom I spent precious pounds, died on me in the first chapters of his The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, My Son. His world was too remote for an English youth to grasp. Yet at that time what a feast of fiction there was: books profound, wonderful, true, that absorbed month after month, year after year. One lived vicariously in hundreds of lives. Style, narrative power, structure, such matters scarcely counted. One sped with ease from the ornate involutions of Proust to the sharp acid prose of Richard Aldington. Characters and depth of feeling, they were the essentials.
I suspect passionate readers of my generation had the best of all literary adolescences. There was a range of fiction available of incomparable richness, stretching back a hundred years, and there were giants of the craft still alive and still producing, so that one never questioned that the art of fiction was one of the highest cultural activities of man. And yet can one say so now? Over the last thirty years the sales of fiction have been surpassed by non-fiction. In England at least fewer and fewer publishers will take a risk with a first novel. And throughout Western Europe there is a sense that fiction is losing its position, losing its authority, and that there are few novelists left of outstanding talent.
Take France alone. Who can compare with the giants of the 'thirties—with Martin du Gard or with Gide, who would exchange Colette for Sagan? Or the early Sartre for the late Sartre? And, perhaps, it was symbolic that Camus, the writer of three great novels, should have more or less quit fiction before he died. And more symbolic still that the novelist of greatest talent and potential in Europe, Georges Simenon, wastes his genius in crime stories. And what a sad prospect is England; one's hopes never realised: amateurs collapsing after their first public performance. Only America survives and improves, the only country now with a galaxy of talent that swims confidently in the main- stream of literature, eschewing the outrageous experimentation and dilettante amateurism that .mars so much of the fiction of Western Europe.
This, of course, is not chance. Nor can this decline in the quality of fiction be easily explained by the growth of other channels for creative activity—television, radio and the like. It goes deeper. It is more explicable if one looks • at the origins of the great boom in fiction. The rise of the novel took place just over two hundred years ago and the first novelists who maintained themselves on the proceeds of their writing were English—Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe. The output of novels rose astonishingly in the eighteenth century and the reasons are not far to seek. Ian Watts, in a most perceptive book, The Rise of the Novel, showed how a growing middle- class, combined with increased leisure for women, produced an intense preoccupation with the individual life. And it is with in- dividuals, in conflict with each other or their societies, that novels are concerned.
Fiction has flourished most successfully in a middle-class world—not always, it is true, for the Russian novel in all its marvellous variety developed in a society in which the middle-class was thinly spread. But even in the Russian novel there is a strong middle-class element. What we can be sure about is that the novel and the new commercial and industrial middle-class de- veloped and grew during the same era. And it may not be without significance that America, the remaining bastion of an aggressive Capitalist spirit which is socially acceptable to all classes, is also the society in which the novel still continues to flourish at an exceptionally high level of .performance. Whatever the reason is, novelists there at the moment are the most accomplished and exciting in the world. It is sad that in this field there is no competition with Russia. It is like comparing the Himalayas with the steppes. And yet 1 feel if the novel is to survive as a major literary form, Russia will be the critical situation.
If the monolithic bureaucracy cracks and literary freedom is won again, what stresses, what anguish, what heroism may be revealed to us. Here is a human experience—revolution, terror, war, yet purposeful, even hopeful as well as evil; an experience almost unbelievable in its complexity and drama, and surely worthy of a dozen Tolstoys. A society as open as America cannot provide so multi-dimensional a theme or one so replete with conflict and drama at so many levels of human experience. And yet the astounding variety of experience that America offers, the deep social conflicts which still mar or make so many individual lives, the changing social structures of New England as well as the Deep South. the even more dramatic issues of the ghettoes should ensure that the novelist's world will still be a rich and varied one; rich and varied enough to tempt the creative artist and rich and varied enough to snare the imagination of young men and women of literary taste.
One must hope. however, for a renaissance in Russia and a revival in Europe, for nothing, I feel, not even history, can deepen and expand human experience so much as a novel of genius. And that is why it enriches so profoundly the adolescent's life, opening for him world upon world in which to live and love and die. His horizons expand and he learns that in other countries there are men and women as human as himself with the same problems of love, hope and despair. And it will be a sad day when there are no novel-hungry youths saving their shil- lings, denying themselves petty luxuries so that they can buy the latest Malamud or Bellow or hunt for a copy of The Brothers Karamazov or Middlemarch.
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