Reader's Choice

How do the U.S. novelists who emerged from the Second World War compare with those who emerged from the First? John W. Aldridge, a young teacher at the University of Vermont, is the first critic to explore this question in a book: After the Lost Generation (McGraw-Hill, $3.75), subtitled “a critical study of the writers of two wars.” Mr. Aldridge takes a retrospective glance at Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos, then discusses eleven novelists of the forties — Robert Lowry, Alfred Hayes, Vance Bourjaily, Norman Mailer, John Horne Burns, Irwin Shaw, Merle Miller, Gore Vidal, Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, and Frederick Buechner. These eleven were selected, Aldridge explains, because “they all grew up and began to write in the atmosphere of war, because they form, in fact, a ‘war generation.’” Aldridge’s line-up seems to me shaky here and there, but I’ve no wish to argue about his choices beyond noting one inexplicable omission: John Hersey.

In terms of literary time, the World War II generation of novelists is still more or less in its infancy, with the result that Aldridge’s book suffers from a certain air of prematureness. Six of his young writers are studied on the basis of a single novel, and several of the books which he examines just don’t seem worth a serious critical analysis. But within the limitations of his material, Aldridge has something substantial to say. His After the Lost Generation is a clearly written, carefully thought out, and generally interesting commentary on the contrasting outlook of two generations of Americans.

Hemingway, Dos Passos, and company — fiercely disillusioned by the war, and coming of age amid the breakdown of traditional values by science — found an impetus to creativity in the very intensity of their “lostness.” Revolt and negation, so passionately felt, became values (to be sure, limited and immat ure) in terms of which the novelist could, for a time, discover dramatic significance in his experience of chaos. Chaos has also been the typical subject matter of the novelists of World War II, but, in Aldridge’s view, this generation lacks even the values of revolt — it grew up conditioned to chaos and relatively free of illusions. It could never be lost “because somehow it had never been found.” The great dilemma of today’s young novelists is the problem of giving meaning and emotional impact to their experience in an age without a solid framework of values.

The eleven new writers whom Aldridge discusses are seen to have reacted to the problem in four different ways. There has been an escape into journalism: a reportorial treatment of war and of facts which are dramatic in themselves. There has been an attempt to find new themes with new meanings of their own, the principal discoveries being homosexuality and racial conflict. Writers such as Capote and Buechner have cloaked their lack of something significant to say in richly embroidered technique. Writers such as Merle Miller and Irwin Shaw have resorted to affirmative conclusions not genuinely warranted by the body of their story.

In trying to summarize briefly Aldridge’s argument, I have run the risk of misrepresenting him: his book certainly pays its respects, and discerningly, to the talents of the new writers. Their novels, he notes, are generally speaking better-written, more expertly constructed, and more knowing than those of the twenties. Aldridge stands, in fact, at the opposite pole to those literary journalists who keep querulously berating the serious young writers for not producing healthy, hopeful fiction that will nourish “the great audience.”The special merit of Aldridge’s commentary is that it steadily points up the intimate and necessary connection between the problems of the artist and the moral climate of his time. Every age gets precisely the novels it deserves.

In his second novel, Barbary Shore (Rinehart, $3.00), Norman Mailer makes a sharp departure from the naturalism of The Naked and the Dead. The new book — also an ambitious story, with a fairly complex pattern of personal relationships and tensions — has a far stronger imaginative coloring, and it shows a remarkable advance in Mailer’s writing: his style has become rounder, more flowing, and even tinged with poetry. But in Barbary Shore the parts are more impressive than the whole. In the final analysis, it is not, I feel, a successfully realized novel.

Mailer’s narrator, Mikey Lovett, is a young man in his mid-twenties with “no past"—just a few hazy memories, such as that he was always poor; a scar behind his ear suggests that he was probably wounded in the war. Lovett takes a cheap room in a boarding house in Brooklyn Heights with the intention of writing a novel, but soon he finds himself increasingly absorbed in the lives of the other people under the same roof. His landlady, Mrs. Guinevere, is a blowzy, vulgarly genteel ex-burlesque queen, perennially in slippers and peignoir, and with a husband who remains invisible. The two lodgers are seemingly commonplace, but there is something indefinably puzzling about them. McLeod, a neat, solitary man of fifty, claims to be a window dresser in a department store. Hollingsworth is an oafish, nattily dressed young Babbitt, a mixture of Y.M.C.A.good fellowship and smug, small-time lechery. A third tenant moves in, a hysterical Bohemian girl, Lannie, who sometimes talks like a character out of Saroyan and sometimes seems to have escaped from the world of Truman Capote.

In due course, it turns out that Hollingsworth is a government agent ; Lannie is somehow associated with him; and McLeod was for fifteen years a leading figure in the Communist Party and is now a discredited “Old Bolshevik,”anguished at the Party ‘s betrayal of its early promise. Hollingsworth’s assignment is to obtain an important “little object” which McLeod stole while working in a government office; but he decides to double-cross his organization and take over the “object" himself. After a curious series of interrogations, at which Lovett and Lannie are present, McLeod wearily agrees to Hollingsworth’s terms, but insists on making an impassioned statement of his credo — that the two leading economic systems of today are both based on exploitation and both doomed; and that, after the Colossi are shattered by the coming war, men like Lovett, men unburdened by the guilt and failures of the past, will start the true Socialist Revolution.

The fuzzy political nihilism of the novel’s underlying idea (“plague on both houses”) has called for a story deliberately steeped in grotesquerie and in a kind of pointlessness. But in trying to create this tone, Mailer tends to produce an impression of outright make-believe. The characters seem to be playing a game of mystifying the reader; their motivation and their conduct are at times inexplicable. Barbary Shore never quite achieves — as it is clearly intended to achieve — the coherence of a political parable. It is a good illustration of what John Aldridge has to say about the new writers’ failure to impose dramatic meaning on their material. It is also, I should add by way of corrective, an original and absorbing story of some very odd goings on in a house in Brooklyn Heights. Mailer has certainly furnished further evidence that he has one of the stronger talents of his generation. His work would gain considerably, I suspect, if he were to find a way out of the political purgatory in which he appears to be wandering.

The Man Who Was Loved (Harcourt, Brace, $3.00) is the first collection of short stories published in the United States by an uncommonly talented writer, James Stern, whose two previous collections appeared only in England, and who has been described as “one of the least known authors with the most high reputations.”A few years ago, Mr. Stern published in this country a nonfiction study of post-war Germany, The Hidden Damage, which displayed a singular assemblage of gifts: a fine ear for speech, a remarkable economy in summing up a scene or a character, and a two-angled vision of events which gave the reader a purely objective picture and a keenly understanding viewpoint. These gifts are manifest in The Man Who Was Loved, and a further one that is rare today among short story writers — a capacity to excite the reader, within the compass of a quietly keyed story, with brief, vividly dramatic bits of action.

Mr. Stern writes, in this volume, about Ireland, where he was born; England, where he was educated; Germany and the African veldt, where he once lived; and New York, where he lives now. His twelve stories are told with a subtly selective and revealing artistry, and in the voice of a highly civilized and intelligent adult. The title piece is about a British Major in South Africa, famed for his snake-killing and much beloved by whites and blacks alike, whose death shows that his white friends’ love is weaker than their prejudice. “The Broken Leg” portrays an English fox-hunting couple whose parental affections hinge on their son’s prowess in the saddle. “The Idolator of Degas” registers a devastating comment on human vanity. The keynote of the book is variety, a refreshing absence of pattern. With a couple of exceptions, these tales have an unpretentious perfection. They are warmly felt and expertly entertaining.

“To me he outranks Pepys,” writes Jacques Barzun, in his Introduction to the diary of a remarkable man, the late James Agate, whose fame has not yet carried across the Atlantic. Mr. Agate (who died in 1947), besides being dean of the London drama critics, was book reviewer for a daily paper, film critic, commentator for the BBC, popular lecturer, universal godfather to the ambitious young in acting and writing, novelist and biographer, breeder of horses, enthusiast for cricket and golf — and, during the last fifteen years of his life, author of nine volumes of autobiographical diary called Ego, which won him thousands of devotees in England. A section of this work the last two installments (January, 1945 June, 1947) — is now offered to American readers under the title The Later Ego (Crown, $4.00).

Mr. Barzun is, I think, indulging in Introduction-writer’s license when he puts Agate’s diary above Pepys’s — Agate’s contains far more topical reference of the perishable kind, but I fully share Barzun’s delight in this exhilarating work. Agate’s brother once said of him, “His income and his intestines fill his whole life,” a sweeping libel which, however, makes a point: here is an autobiographer whose chief trouble is income tax and not inner conflict; who has succeeded in living on genial terms with his ego and is able, when necessary, to take it down a peg with humor. In Agate’s journal, started in his mid-fifties, you will find no such intimate revelations as in Boswell’s, and none of the soul-searching of Gide’s, Its great strength is its unfailing liveliness and wit — it is a storehouse of varied pleasures for the educated reader.

An old friend of Agate’s, in his obituary notice, admirably summed up the flavor of the man’s personality: “As a critic he was cogent, never smooth, often belligerent, often capricious . . . full of notions and allusions and audacities, full of sound and fury too, but always signifying something. . . . His prose was lively and prickly, but not that of a great stylist. . . . Like Falstaff in more ways than one, he was not only witty in himself but the direct occasion of wit. ... He had a formidable amount of charm.”

The diary served Agate as a vat into which he poured his unquenchable verbal energy, his enormous fund of knowledge, and his prodigious interest in living. He defends opera in foreign languages, on the ground that the sense often murders the enchantment of the music. He explains his passion for babies and cals. He writes epitaphs for the war criminals in the style of Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe. He writes to a friend whose book he has read in manuscript: “Have corrected your spelling. Also your Italian, German, French, and occasionally your English. . . . Have amended your quotations. . . . Titivated your titles. . . . Rationalized your punctuation. . . . In short, I have put this entrancing book right in all matters of fact and left only its errors of taste and judgment.”

Agate says of an actress: “In the dictionary of her playing, to ask Mrs. Smith to stay to dinner is like Circe enticing l lysses.” He says of Oscar Wilde: “He touched nothing which he did not chichify.” He makes a New Year’s Resolution: “To do the work of two men instead of three.” He rejoices that one of the greatest ambitions of his life has finally been realized — he has been elected President of the Hackney Horse Society.

Lion Feuchtwanger, whose historical fiction has enjoyed immense popularity, has chosen for his latest hero Francisco Goya; and has built his novel, This Is the Hour (Viking, $3.95), around Goya’s love affair with Doña Maria del Pilar Teresa Cayetana, Duchess of Alba. When Doña Cayetana selected Goya as her lover, he was already in his middle forties, stout, and almost deaf; the Duchess, sixteen years younger, was a renowned beauty and a grande amoureuse, whose escapades were talked of throughout Madrid. She remained the ruling passion in Goya’s life until she died, at forty, in 1802.

This is a subject and a period which offer the historical novelist an infinity of riches. As Court Painter to Carlos IV and a favorite at court, Goya lived close to the center of the contemporary stage; as an artist and a man who had grown up in great poverty, he perceived and was stirred by the evils of his time. Spain (cut off from its Empire by the British fleet) was critically impoverished and in decay. The aging Queen set the tone at court with her unbridled sensuality and extravagance. The country’s direction was in the hands of her favorite, Manuel Godoy, a young army officer suddenly elevated to First Minister. The Inquisition, confronted with the spreading ideas of the Enlightenment, was waging a fearful campaign against heresy. The nobility, with few exceptions, was firmly opposed to every form of change.

This Is the Hour (a Book-of-theMonth Club selection) is chiefly interesting as a crowded canvas, done in primary colors, of this decisive period in Spanish history — the period in which Spain effectively isolated itself from the forward march of Western Europe. Feuchtwanger’s book is not, of course, the kind of historical narrative, such as Catherine Drinker Bowen’s, which sticks to documented evidence. It is fiction; and occasionally it rearranges fact to suit the author’s convenience (Goya, for instance, was cross-examined by the Inquisition for his Caprichos three years before the Duchess’s death, not after it); occasionally it plumps for the dramatic in favor of the probable (the legend that the Duchess was Goya’s model for his famous Maja Desnuda — the Duchess was thirtyeight when the picture was painted and the model is a young girl of very different build). Still, if this is fiction, it is also intended to be history, and I can’t help wondering why Mr. Feuchtwanger has so sedulously avoided mentioning dates. One never knows what year it is.

As a novel, Feuchtwanger’s book is no great shakes. The characters give the impression of having been wrenched from real life and told to behave in a manner befitting “colorful" characters in a historical romance. The writing is an execrable tissue of clichés and is pitched in a key which the following sentence may suggest: “Mad and alluring, challenging and alarming, lay the future before him.” There is enough genuine drama in Goya’s life without this kind of phony overexcitement.

Peace Can Be Won (Doubleday, $2.50) by Paul G. Hoffman, administrator of EGA from its inception until last October, is a brisk little book which makes a timely contribution to the great debate on U.S. foreign policy. What gives special interest to Mr. Hoffman’s program for “waging peace” is that its author cannot conceivably be regarded as a leftist do-gooder or an impractical theorist. As Mr. Hoffman points out at the start, he speaks as a Midwestern businessman, who was reared in the spirit of rugged individualism and who was once “by instinct and indoctrination” an isolationist.

In Peace Can Be Won, Mr. Hoffman joins hands with the growing school which accepts the idea that even uneasy “co-existence” with the present Russian government is impossible; but which holds that a preventive war would be majestic folly, and believes that a policy aimed at more than “mere containment” could, in due course, bring about a crack-up of the Soviet regime without a military showdown. The latter point, though of course highly speculative, is perhaps not quite the fantasy it would have seemed three years ago. Mr. Hoffman’s chapter on ECA is a forceful reminder of the really remarkable gains made against Communism in Western Europe — a story which dramatizes the farreaching potentialities of economics and diplomacy as weapons against the Kremlin.

Mr. Hoffman outlines his program in terms of four fronts — military, economic, political, and ideological — and he gives a high priority to helping the Europeans build up a defense force of fifty divisions. This will entail, despite the extent of European recovery, a heavy contribution from the United States, for the Marshall Plan did not envisage the need for large-scale European rearmament. All in all, the United States must be prepared, says Hoffman, to devote 50 billion dollars annually for the next three years to military expenditures. He argues, with robust confidence, that the American economy can thrive under this burden, provided that firm anti-inflation measures are put into effect. In the interests of the West’s economic health, he also advocates a drastic reduction of U.S. customs duties (to help the Europeans earn dollars) and a reduction in the government subsidies which are keeping our farm prices “unrealistically high.”

All forms of foreign aid and technical assistance should be unified, Hoffman recommends, under an Overseas Economic Administration which would have equal rank with the other departments of government. This organization would take over the present setup of ECA and it would absorb the Point Four program now administered by the State Department.

On the propaganda front, Mr. Hoffman also urges the creation of a single Overseas Information Agency, headed by an administrator with cabinet status: at present, for instance, the Marshall Plan has an information program which is independent of the U.S. Information Services.

Our current expenditures on propaganda — a puny fraction of the funds matched against us by the Communists — should, says Hoffman, be tripled, and 15 per cent earmarked for secret activities (such as financing the spread of anti-Stalinist printed matter behind the Iron Curtain). The total cost of his program of economic and political warfare would be, Hoffman estimates, around 3 billion dollars annually. Barbara Ward and others have placed the cost of a dynamic anti-Communist policy a good deal higher, and it is possible that Hoffman’s avowed optimism is present in his accounting. In any event, as Mr. Hoffman impresses upon his readers, to wage peace expensively is infinitely cheaper than having to wage war.