by John Updike
Ghan Shyam Singh, a Professor of Italian Language and Literature at The Queen’s University in Belfast, and a friend of the Leavises, is to be thanked for seeing these specimens of her acute and spirited criticism into print. He is to be chastised, however, for the “minimal editing” (his phrase) that has left her hitherto unpublished lectures so full of erratic punctuation and grammar, with many run-on sentences and a few virtually inscrutable ones:
Yet it is this social life which James had elected to share, evidently not without psychological strain, as a work that approaching never to perfection, yet does not strike cold.
I would suggest that it is James’s sense of not being on sure ground and his lack of any deeper knowledge of and response to the whole English subject than aesthetic or prejudiced that makes him so prone to make use of other novelists, truly English novelists, to provide a scaffolding from which to work or a framework within which to construct with a difference.
A more merciful editor, surely, would have silently corrected Mrs. Leavis’s spelling “Nabakov” to “Nabokov,” added the omitted definite articles to the titles she cites as Grapes of Wrath and Cancer Ward, given the post–Civil War epoch of American culture that she terms “the Gold Age” its usual name “the Gilded Age,” restored William Dean Howells’s own title A Hazard of New Fortunes to the novel that she with misplaced wifeliness calls A Husband of New Fortunes, and rectified the egregious misquotation of Huck Finn’s pivotal declaration “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” as the nonsensical “All right then, I’ll go to hide.” Professor Singh might also, editorial minimalist though he is, have considered deleting the sentence (concerning Henry James) “He tried and often succeeded in doing his duty as a novelist” one of the two times it appears, in identical form, in the same essay.
In 1980 Professor Singh persuaded Mrs. Leavis to come to Belfast and perform the Herculean task of giving, during a one-week stay, “five lectures—one each on the English, the American, the Anglo-Irish, the French, the Russian and the Italian tradition of the novel.” I count six lectures there, but in any case it was a huge assignment, which, though she was a few months short of her death, she performed heroically, with a lavish dispersal of provocative ideas. The French, Russian, and Italian lectures close this volume, and the American one begins it, describing a complex cultural situation with a bracing simplicity:
I see the American novel as resulting from two conditions. The first is the reaction of a former colony having emancipated itself successfully by war from the mother-country, determined to show it then stood on its own feet culturally as well as politically.… The second condition which gave the American novel its unique character was the naïve Utopian theory on which their settlement of the new continent was originally based.… Hence the American novelist was characteristically both a patriot and a dissident and the failure to achieve the intended (moral and spiritual) goal could not be blamed on the English, but, as these writers recognized, was innate, owing to the facts of human nature. Hence a radical bitterness from loss of faith in man characterized the American novel from its early days and up to the present day, so that its prevailing and indeed inevitable style has always been ironic—ironic not only in tone but in essential structure.
Without quite knowing what an ironic structure is, this American reader can feel in his Utopian bones the justice of that supposed “radical bitterness” generated by a background of unreal expectation, a bitterness to be felt behind the tortuous verbal churning of Faulkner as well as beneath Hemingway’s surface of taut facticity—a naïve, unending surprise and indignation that life is as it is. We cannot, unlike the Europeans, quite get over it.
Our two opposed attitudes toward the Old World are epitomized by men called Henry James: the father scorned the English as “an intensely vulgar race, high and low,” and wrote that “American disorder is sweet beside European order: it is so full of promise,” while the son found an artistic life impossible to live in America and settled in England. Eight of Mrs. Leavis’s essays touch on the younger Henry James, and, composed over a span of forty years, they vary in degree of admiration. He saw his duty and frequently did it, we are twice assured, and the essay lengthily titled “The Fox Is the Novelist’s Idea: Henry James and the House Beautiful” concludes in the tone of a guest tersely thanking his host after a quarrelsome evening: “In his Notebooks he exhorted himself ‘Be an artist, be distinguished, to the last.’ And I must say, I think it evident that he was.” Yet Mrs. Leavis, despite the affection with which she recalls reading her first Henry James as a girl, sketches a rather devastating portrait of a foreigner in England who “was largely dependent on English literature for his usable knowledge of the English people,” who as “an American novelist peculiarly dependent on Old World novelists for techniques, themes and patterns” borrowed wholesale and wrong-headedly from Trollope and George Eliot, and who through the decades of exile lost his ear for American speech:
As regards language, the novelist’s essential medium, we can see (as James apparently never did) that instead of having an advantage in having two closely related languages at his disposal he hadn’t a really sensitive mastery of spoken English, while his native ear for American, at first so fine and sharp, gradually dulled, so that later American heroines like Maggie and Millie speak insipidly.
Further, James was not, as Americans see him, an Anglophile and imitation Englishman, but—in line with his father’s patriotic views and his Irish grandmother’s animus—downright anti-British. “James’s accounts of the English gentry, while becoming increasingly confident, are always hostile and external, and they are used for propaganda. His English lords and gentlemen are satisfyingly cut down to less than American size.” James is “susceptible” to the charms of English country houses; however, “he sees them as beautifully desirable but in degenerate or unworthy hands. This is what makes it all right for them to be taken over by American money.” His well-known short story “The Real Thing,” generally understood to concern the paradoxical relations of art to reality, seems to Mrs. Leavis full of “anti-English hostility,” vented when the American painter-hero “brutally” turns his two models, Major and Mrs. Monarch, “out to starve” even though “there is almost nothing to be said against [them] except that they are upper-class English.” Their evident virtues, as she sees them—their “dignity in humiliating circumstances,” their “touching magnanimity to the Cockney female model”—do not placate their creator’s “uncertain and sometimes unmanageable anti-British drives,” which hopelessly blind him to the fine balances and shadings of “the whole English subject.”
It is a pretty picture that Mrs. Leavis paints of the eighteenth-century English society in which the English novel developed:
It was a very fluid society where the middle class, unlike Germany and other European countries, constantly married into or otherwise rose into the aristocracy and where the younger brothers of aristocratic families were traditionally, ever since the Middle Ages, able to enter all professions and become merchants, without incurring social disability, and where the landowners traditionally lived on their estates for most of the year and in contact with their tenants of all grades, making local communities centring on the great house and parsonage complex, ideal for a novelist needing a microcosm of society for his purposes. But this was the English system.
Needless to say, “this inter-penetration of classes in England was a great asset to the novelist,” and the established Protestantism added to interpenetration “the compassion for the underdogs so unfailing in Fielding’s novels, as later in Dickens’s and George Eliot’s.” Mrs. Leavis waxes panegyric: “One sees why England, where the squire played cricket on the village green with his tenants, the blacksmith and the villagers, was the envy and astonishment of Europe.” In contrast to the French—whose novels were aristocratic in origin and remained locked into “spiritually desiccating” studies of amorous psychology and thorough disillusion—the British in their novels, of which her
favorite instance is Middlemarch, took as their province “a society revealed from top to bottom and all characters shown as mutually dependent and as affected by the rest, and all equally seen with respect and compassion.” Whereas even “Stendhal’s great novel, Le Rouge et le Noir, is utterly un English in its absence of respect for social order and in being without any idealistic weakness for human nature or natural ties.”
While this vision of a peaceable kingdom where the squire and the blacksmith play cricket together may seem rather rosy to those who are still struck by England’s ineluctable stratifications and class antagonisms (which Thatcherism has done little to assuage), Mrs. Leavis does confront the central issue, in fiction, of accessibility. The class-bound British fiction writer would appear to have imaginative access to a broader, livelier range of human types than his democratic American rival. Hawthorne, the first of our writers resoundingly to strike the oddly hollow American note—the first to make apparent in the quality of his imagination that an American is not simply an Englishman on another continent—gave the case an indelible phrasing in a letter to his publisher, James Fields, in 1860, on the eve of the publication of his last novel, The Marble Faun. As he nears the end of his distinguished yet rather crepuscular career, Hawthorne makes the piquant observation that he is not really a popular writer. “Possibly I may (or may not) deserve something better than popularity; but looking at all my productions, and especially this latter one with a cold or critical eye, I can see that they do not make their appeal to the popular mind. It is odd enough, moreover, that my own individual taste is for quite another class of works than those which I myself am able to write.”
A disconnection is observed between the artist as himself part of the populace and what he is able in good conscience to produce. No such disconnection yet exists in England, apparently, for Hawthorne goes on, illustrating the “quite another class,” to ask Fields, “Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste; solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were made a show of.”
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:
Hawthorne’s sense of being part of the contemporary America could be expressed only in concern for its evolution—he needed to see how it had come about, and by discovering what America had, culturally speaking, started from and with, to find what choices had faced his countrymen and what they had had to sacrifice in order to create that distinctive ‘organic whole’.… He prepared himself for the task by study, though Providence had furnished him with an eminently usable private Past, in the history of his own family, which epitomized the earlier phases of New England history; this vividly stylized the social history of Colonial America, provided him with a personal mythology, and gave him an emotional stake in the past, a private key to tradition.
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:
While the novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a few exceptions, were descended from Addison and Defoe, with some admixture of a debased stage comedy, there is quite another kind of novel, created by Emily Brontë, Melville, Conrad and Henry James, among others, which makes use of the technique of the dramatic poem.
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:
To the modern English and American reader, well trained in practical criticism and knowing with regard to myth, symbol, allegory and imagery, the writings of the great 1853–6 phase are of more interest than the earlier novels, evidently more accomplished as art, more varied … and are noticeably more condensed, controlled and mature than either Moby Dick or Pierre.
The pairing of Melville’s acknowledged masterpiece with his most abject failure is curi
ous, 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.
