The Novel of Manners in America

Mr. Blackmur has recently suggested in the pages of The Kenyon Review (Winter, 1949) that we are probably in for a little “new criticism” of the novel; he does not anticipate this event with any great enthusiasm, for he is obviously worried that the visible hardening into a kind of dogma of the New Criticism’s concern for verbal and structural analysis will lead it astray. “The Henry James novel, the Joyce novel, the Kafka novel, the Mann novel and the Gide novel together,” he says, “will kill us yet if we do not realize soon that these novelists do not depend on what we think of as their ‘novels’ except in the first instance.” In these feelings I follow Mr. Blackmur without qualification. Yet how we are to deal with the novel remains a problem for us. It is our drunken, disreputable cousin, never mentioned when the subject can be avoided but forever turning up on the front porch at the most embarrassing times. It is not a theoretical or remote problem at all, but an immediate and practical one. I have no doubt, having read a good many and written a few, that remarks about novels such as we write now are something the editors of the quarterlies would do away with altogether if they could; and if you look into the books, the situation is at least as bad: so far as criticism of the novel is concerned, we are—with The Craft of Fiction and Aspects of the Novel and the rest—still living in the age of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and A. C. Bradley—which, in fact, we are not. Yet novels must be dealt with, not because of any passion we may have for an orderly aesthetic of the novel, but because we have to talk about them, in print, in the classroom, and among our intelligent, unprofessional friends; and it is awkward to be at a stand to know what kind of talk is relevant and what kind is not.

It is important, too, that the novel is the last of the verbal forms to retain wide popularity, important, I mean, to those whose business it is to talk about the novel. It is about all we any longer share with the common reader, and whatever the reasons for his interest may be, they are very probably not the kind which concerned Henry James so much of the time in his prefaces and still concern those for whom the mechanical techniques of the novel are its main interest. No doubt what Mr. Blackmur himself has called for James the Art of the Novel is also important; it is certainly still the best kind of talk about the novel we have, the one that convinces you most continuously that as far as it goes it is to the point. We cannot do without it, whatever else we may need to say about the novel; for if it is not enough for us to say that the novel, as largely practised in English, is a perfect paradise of the loose end or for the novelist to go forth to encounter the reality of experience with no better means of communion with it than silence, exile and cunning, neither is it enough not to say and do these things. Whatever there is to be said, for example, for Hardy as a novelist, what James said against him is also to be said. We feel ourselves as critics forced to choose, then, between a kind of talk which seems to us relevant but inadequate—and seriously misleading if it is not treated so—and a kind of talk which would get at what the art of the novel does not; and the second of these choices is known to us only either as something we haven’t got or as a discouraging confusion of traditional talk about Gentle Jane’s charm and Hardy’s philosophy and Dos Passos’ socialist realism, most of which is either downright false or clearly beside the point.