Odd Jobs (55 page)

This memorable and gracious confession of artistic envy is as penetratingly diagnostic of the American imagination as the oft-quoted sentences Melville wrote, a decade earlier, in Hawthorne’s praise: “He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say
yes
” and “Certain it is, however, that this great power of blackness in him derives
its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free.” Almost in spite of himself, Hawthorne was a seminal author. Melville likened him to Shakespeare and from his example took the courage to revise
Moby-Dick
with a new reach of ambition. Hawthorne—his flowing, delicate, ironical style, his tendency to work on the edge of allegory—was never far from the mind of Henry James, as a father to surpass. Hawthorne’s fantastications, by way of the homage and emulation of Jorge Luis Borges, have even helped liberate Latin Americans into magic realism, unlocking thereby the colorful inner demons of the New World’s southern half. It was Hawthorne who began in artistic earnest to investigate our peculiar American gift for unhappiness, and Mrs. Leavis points out that he was, in his investigation, a realist and a historian:

By her lights, even the slightest of his sketches of the colonial past have a certain intensity, a guilty searchingness, and more rounded and imaginative accounts like “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” have a definite majesty; she compares “Young Goodman Brown” favorably with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the “Walpurgisnacht scene in Joyce’s
Ulysses
, which smells of the case-book and the midnight oil.” In her fondness for Hawthorne’s historical stories, with their own smell of casebook archives, Mrs. Leavis ignores a number of, to my taste, more compelling and less parochial tales, such as “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Hawthorne was not only and always a Puritan. According to Mrs. Leavis, the peculiarities of the Puritan
inheritance—its forcible habit of introspection and its suspicion of worldly pleasures—drove our seminal novelist to poetry, and weakened him for Trollopeian earth-hewing. “Declining to be, perhaps incapable of being, a naturalistic novelist, he was true to his best perceptions of his genius when he did the work of a dramatic poet,” she states. She quotes Henry James: “Hawthorne is perpetually looking for images which shall place themselves in picturesque correspondence with the spiritual facts with which he is concerned, and of course the search is of the very essence of poetry.” But James, too, in the era of Zola and Howells, was by temperament condemned to the subtle search for such correspondences; another critic is chastised for failing his “duty” (a frequent word with Mrs. Leavis) to “warn the innocent reader off any attempt to take James as a naturalistic novelist.” His novels are “in a tradition of medieval and Elizabethan drama transmitted through Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Bunyan (and so Hawthorne).”

Indeed, it would seem that the nineteenth century saw a general poeticizing of prose fiction; Mrs. Leavis cites a passage from
Middlemarch
as “
the
example I should choose to illustrate what we mean by declaring that in the nineteenth century the novel took over the function of poetic drama.” In another essay she tells us:

We are approaching, in such judgments, the moot question “What is poetry?” For if Defoe’s image of Robinson Crusoe on his island, with his umbrella made of animal skins (with “the hair upwards”), finding Friday’s footprint on the sand isn’t poetic, what is? And what novel goes further in the direction of the purely verbal than Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
? Yet there does appear to have been a basic slow displacement of energy from one genre to the other. Browning was the last poet to write dramatic poems, with characters and dialogue and a plot, to major effect. In discussions of the poeticism and insubstantiality of the American novel, Trollope is usually named as the foil; the greater figure of Dickens is left out of account, perhaps because he is too much of a poet, with an extravagance and surrealism almost American.

Mrs. Leavis’s willingness to read a novel as a poem, in the image-by-image New Criticism fashion, and to cheerfully allow Americans their cultural deficiencies, leads her to overvalue, I think, Melville’s
The Confidence-Man
and, to a degree, all the products of his last gasp as a publishing writer, in the mid-1850s:

The pairing of Melville’s acknowledged masterpiece with his most abject failure is curious, and curiouser still her implicit belief that breaking down
The Confidence-Man
into its allegorical parts and apparent intentions will make it run. Training in “practical criticism” does not overrule, in the reading experience, readerly sensations of suspense, coherence,
jouissance
, and recognition, and Melville’s
Confidence-Man
—all the more poignantly for those acquainted with the youthful exuberance of
Typee
and the irresistible virtuosity of
Moby-Dick
—is painful to read: crabbed in style, misanthropic in sentiment, arthritic and repetitious in movement, the work of a formidable writer on the edge of breakdown. Mrs. Leavis, fond of categorical statement and eager to find in fiction an “idealistic weakness for human nature,” sometimes brushes past that elusive but essential something, that sense of music, of voice, of phrase-by-phrase unexpectedness, of constantly retuned attentiveness, which makes some texts wine and whose absence leaves the rest watery. Where she does settle to a text, as to the George Eliot passage mentioned, she can be thrilling, in explication and appreciation.

What thrilled us about her husband’s dicta, in the easy-to-thrill Fifties, was his regal power of vast exclusion. “The great English novelists,” his
The Great Tradition
begins, “are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.” Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, the Brontës, Meredith, Hardy, Joyce, Virginia Woolf—all excluded. It was thrilling to think that somewhere a principle of exclusion so decisive existed, that standards so exalted were being somehow maintained. In exactly what quality virtue so stingily distributed resided remained a bit general, a bit stiff-sounding—“the realized
concreteness that speaks for itself and
enacts
its moral significance,” Leavis said. His wife, in her slightly less unbending criticism, offers clues to the Leavisite principle nowhere more emphatically than in the last piece in this collection, “The Italian Novel.”

The Italian novel, to be frank about it, won’t do at all. Manzoni’s
I promessi sposi
, generally considered Italian fiction’s first classic, “belongs to the infancy of art.” It is a historical romance, but “the romanticism does not get, as in Scott’s better novels, a corrective in realistic sociological analysis.” It “really tells us nothing about Italy” in the course of a “picturesque melodrama with a happy ending provided by Providence and not achieved logically by events.” Giuseppe di Lampedusa, whose novel
The Leopard
was much admired, “spent goodness knows how many years on his one novel but he never even unified it in style and tone, much less integrated the parts.” He is a poor Proust spin-off, “a willing victim of nostalgia.” Svevo: “It is hard to understand Joyce’s enthusiasm for Svevo, who, though more Austrian than Italian in feeling, has none of the intellectual and imaginative power of Mann or Kafka” and, though dissatisfied with the petty bourgeois life he portrays, shows “no imaginative grasp of any other kind of life.” Most interestingly: “His Freudian preoccupation is a disability rather than a strength or a help—for psychoanalysis is inevitably reductive.” Moravia is a mere compiler of “clinical accounts of sexual experience, pathological rather than pornographic.” And so on, except for Verga, who writes about peasants without sentimentalizing them, in the way of George Sand and Tolstoy, and who in some novels at least is “possessed by a genuine sense of the tragic nature of the life of the poverty-stricken South of Italy.” Like the French, the Italians tend to be raised as Roman Catholics, and “having lost religious faith they have no positives, other than the hope that once lay, apparently, in Communism, soon lost by novelists like Silone and Vittorini.” To make matters worse, Italians go to too much opera: “One concludes the frequentation of opera as a national entertainment is inimical to the effort of grappling with and possessing a serious novel.” Another handicap is a national incapacity, noticed long ago by Stendhal, for moral reflection: “No one who reads Italian fiction of any period can fail to notice this absence of conscience or awareness of moral values, in the characters. It makes Italian fiction less interesting than that of every other country I know, giving its novels characteristically a heartlessness and meaninglessness that only the exceptional Italian writer avoids.” As if all this weren’t bad enough, in modern times Italian writers have read
and even, in the cases of Vittorini and Pavese, translated “the American novelists who had such an unfortunate effect on post-war Italian writers … whose coarseness and crudity and their simplification of people and issues and brutalizing cult of violence made them undesirable and misleading models.” Oh, dear! No, what is needed is not Roman Catholicism and opera and American fiction but “firmly human values and outward-going sympathies.”

Mrs. Leavis asserts, in connection with Edith Wharton, that a complete writer must offer something “in the way of positives.” Failure to do more than complain prevents Wharton from being, for all her talent, a great novelist like Jane Austen or George Eliot:

And where does one find such a foundation? Presumably by playing cricket with the blacksmith or, if one is a blacksmith, with the squire.
The American Novel and Reflections on the European Novel
ends on a lofty admonitory note: “Unless men and women are capable of relationships which include loyalty, confidence, mutual interests, and there are people of integrity who can act disinterestedly sometimes, which of course requires courage and faith—people, in short, capable of respect for themselves and each other, I don’t see how one can expect that novels worth consideration could be written.”

Mrs. Leavis does not entertain the possibility that even in a world thoroughly debased and unrelational novels might still be written, describing conditions. Or that authenticity in rendering the actual condition of mankind is the
sine qua non;
without it, fiction becomes mere escapism, mere castle-building in air. She devotes a page to Camus’s
L’Étranger;
complaining that the hero, Meursault, “has no feeling for his mother” (not quite the case, actually) and that “he refuses to admit that love is more than sex or that religion and morality are real.” Well, does this disqualify him from being a character in a novel? Suppose religion and morality, conventionally understood, are not real to the novelist, or
real, as for young Camus, only in the moral stand that abstention from false pretense involves? Mrs. Leavis claims, “Meursault’s quarrel is really with the conditions for living as a human being anywhere and at any time.” Insofar as Meursault is condemned to death by society in the novel,
L’Étranger
does acknowledge the coercive power of a social consensus, and insofar as the novel is a child of Western bourgeois culture, it may be true that where that culture dissolves or has never penetrated the novel cannot be found. But to elevate its satisfying forms into an argument for social order and human decency (as the critic understands them) is to ask the cart to drag the horse.

What is “moral”? The Leavises’ pet word derives from the same Latin root as “mores”—
mos
, meaning “custom.” Much of what we call moral is merely customary. Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and they are the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. Hawthorne and Camus both presented stripped-down prose forms to do justice to the diminished worlds they saw around them and felt within themselves.
Middlemarch
was situated, we might notice, in an English era when the author was a child, so that a sense of “experience as a process of growth” could be readily grafted onto nostalgia; the author is exultantly “on top of” her material, lavishing upon it an affection and analytical zeal the novel will scarcely see again until Proust. However much we admire
Middlemarch
, it cannot be written again, weighted by the same residue of Christian moral passion. As Borges showed with
Don Quixote
, the same words wouldn’t have the same meaning. Q. D. Leavis, in her engaging and invigorating desire to read a positive humanism into the novel, seems to ask that this art form exempt itself from the negative and desolating effects of the modern age and thus surrender its right to bear credible witness.