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12.12.20

WRITING

 

Our Literary Drought

December 3, 2020
(Roman Genn)
Novelists, poets, and critics seek a higher truth, but today’s pickings are slim

In 1955, the year of the founding of National Review, literature in its main branches — poetry, fiction, criticism — was flourishing. In American poetry, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings were still at work. In fiction, so, too, were Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright. In France, Albert Camus and André Malraux remained productive. In England, Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen and Barbara Pym were writing, and the year before, Kingsley Amis had won the Somerset Maugham Award for Lucky Jim. Internationally, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov had not yet quite hit their impressive strides. Randall Jarrell had earlier, in dismay, dubbed the 1950s “the Age of Criticism,” but some immensely powerful critics, among them Yvor Winters, William Empson, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Edmund Wilson, and Lionel Trilling, were on the job. Over the entire anglophone literary world strode T. S. Eliot, major modernist poet and a critic who stood in the direct line of Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold. For literature the good times were rolling.

When and why they stopped rolling are complex questions. That they have stopped, that we are in a less-than-rich period for literature today, cannot be doubted. Ask yourself whose next novel among living novelists you are eagerly awaiting. Name your three favorite living poets. Which contemporary critics do you most rely upon? If you feel you need more time to answer these questions — a long, slow fiscal quarter, say — not to worry, for I don’t have any impressive answers to these questions either. Recent years have been lean pickings for literature.

In 1955, not only highbrow but popular literature had a wider audience than it does now. Traveling on the subway or buses, or sitting in medical or dental offices, one noticed people reading the thick novels of James Michener or Grace Metalious, of Irving Stone or Mary Roberts Rinehart. (These same people are instead now diddling with their cellphones.) Ogden Nash’s light verse was widely known. People consulted newspaper review sections on what books to read. The readership for highbrow writing has, inevitably, always been less than widespread, but it was nonetheless reverently taught in universities, and taught for its own aesthetic and philosophical content, not, as much writing in universities is now taught, for political or social reasons. Dead white male authors had not yet been impaled on long feminist polemical swords.

Unlike the sciences, the arts do not march to the drum of progress. Art instead goes through high and low periods. Consider some of the high periods: In England, there were the Elizabethan playwrights, the Romantic poets, the great Victorian novelists. Nineteenth-century Russian fiction — Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Leskov, Chekhov — has never been eclipsed. France had its rich line extending from Balzac through Flaubert through Stendhal and ending in the genius of Marcel Proust. Sometimes the general culture of the society helps explain the efflorescence of literary talent, such as that of Renaissance Italy or Belle Époque France. But sometimes, as is the case in 19th-century Russia, with its French-imitating aristocracy and its slave- (or serf-) centered economy, it is a mystery still never adequately explained.

Rich literary periods are often followed by stagnant ones. We in the United States, but not we alone, are now going through such a stagnant period. What is the last novel you can think of that caused a genuine stir? Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, published more than 30 years ago, perhaps qualifies, though Wolfe was never able to equal it in subsequent novels. The novel, which among its other functions used to bring the news about how we live and much more, has in its contemporary effusions lost its excitement; poetry has lost its powers of elevating our spirit; criticism has lost its authority; and literature generally has lost its centrality in our culture.

Part of the reason for this significant loss is the absence of powerful literary talent. Part may also be explained by the zeitgeist, or spirit of the time. We have for a good while now been living in what Philip Rieff called “the triumph of the therapeutic,” in which the ideas of Freud, Jung, and their successors have been dominant. Literary artists have always been highly suspicious of psychology — Nabokov called Freud “the Viennese quack” — for its narrowing and predeterminate explanations of human behavior, and rightly so.

Perhaps a great part of the absence of powerful literary talent in our day is explained by the loss of attention span sparked by the many forms of distraction now everywhere available — distraction that puts literary endeavor into the shade, if not shadow. One such distraction has been politics. Several American magazines that once were thought of as general-interest publications — among them The AtlanticHarper’s, most sadly The New Yorker — have given over more and more of their space to politics, to the detriment of their former cultural and literary interests. The Trump years have intensified this tendency. Reading these magazines in their current incarnations often feels like nothing so much as watching CNN or MSNBC, on the page instead of the screen, which is not all that edifying an experience.

The Digital Age has also taken its toll, a damnably heavy one, on literature. Everything about it, from 280-character tweets to Kindles, is anti-literary. What the Internet offers is information, whereas literature sets out in pursuit of something deeper. Reading online, I have found, is different from reading a book or serious magazine. I, who rarely skim books or magazines, online find my fingers twitching on my mouse when confronted by any piece that runs to more than ten or so paragraphs. Impatience of a kind that is alien to careful reading sets in quickly. I do not read online, as I do on a page, with an eye out for careful argument, organization, striking phrases or metaphors, style generally. “Just the facts, ma’am,” as Sergeant Friday used to say on Dragnet, just the facts is all one wants and generally gets from the Web.

I have resisted using a Kindle, even though I recognize its value in allowing one to travel with several books locked into this one little machine. I also recognize its value, for older readers, of allowing those who need it to enlarge the type of any book. But I love books too much, the look, feel, even smell of them, to forsake them. In the battle — and I think a battle it is likely to be in future — between pixel and print, I am unambiguously, dogmatically, zealously a print man.

If serious literature were to cease to be produced in its current versions, what, really, would be lost? Barroom poetry slams? Confessional novels that have possibly saved their authors heavy therapeutic bills? Academic writing programs? No big loss, any of this, surely.

As it happens, something much greater will be lost. We need the kind of truth that only the novel, for example, conveys to counter the many coarse ideas sent out into the world by inferior thinkers and publicized by witless academics and journalists. Great poetry can serve as a corrective, reminding us of the power of language properly deployed. T. S. Eliot said of Henry James that “he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it.” What he meant was that James in his novels operated above the level of mere ideas. The truths he was interested in were the truths of the heart, often in conflict with society, sometimes in conflict with itself.

And here is Lionel Trilling on the importance of the novel:

For our time the most effective agent of the moral imagination has been the novel of the last two hundred years. It was never, either aesthetically or morally, a perfect form and its faults and failures can be quickly enumerated. But its greatness and its practical usefulness lay in its unremitting work of involving the reader himself in the moral life, inviting him to put his own motives under examination, suggesting that reality is not as his conventional education has led him to see it. It taught us, as no other genre ever did, the extent of human variety and the value of this variety. It was the literary form to which the emotions of understanding and forgiveness were indigenous, as if by the definition of the form itself.

In the current day, when we are swamped by the findings of social science, the endless academic studies of our beliefs and behavior, the relentless verbosity of the punditi, the ravings of rivaling politicians, it is useful to remember that the best novelists, poets, critics have always sought a higher truth. The literary act is ultimately an act of discovery and rediscovery of those home truths, many of them forgotten in the noise of contemporary life, some necessarily new to the changes of the age, that most acutely define us. Literature, and only literature, can tell us who we truly are. Its strong return is devoutly to be desired.

This article appears as “Literature, Then and Now” in the December 17, 2020, print edition of National Review.

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