The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal Read Online Free Page A

Edmund Wilson, the most interesting and the most important, has shown virtually no interest in the writing of the last fifteen years, his talents engaged elsewhere in the construction of heroic sepulchers for old friends like Fitzgerald and Millay, a likable loyalty but a not entirely useful one. He can of course still make a fine point during a Peacock flurry and he has been startling brilliant in recent essays on Grant and Lincoln, but one can search the pages of that book of his which he calls a “Literary Chronicle of the Forties” without coming upon any but the most cursory mention of the decade’s chief talents.
    Malcolm Cowley, a good professional literary man, had some sharp things to say recently about the young writers. Although he made almost no reference to the better writing of the day, he did say some accurate things about the university-trained writers, whose work, he feels, is done with too reverent an eye upon their old teachers, the new critics. Cowley speaks out for a hearty freedom from university influence, citing his own generation (the men of the 1920s are loyal to their time if not to one another:
everyone
was a genius then, and liquor was cheap abroad) as being singularly independent of formal instruction. Yet McCullers, Bowles, Capote, etc. (like Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Neill, etc.) are not graduates of universities, and many of the other young lions have had enough war to wash them clean of academicism. Mr. Cowley, like most commentators, tends to bend whatever he finds to his premise. To him there is no single genius who can set the tone for a generation but one wonders if he would recognize that great writer any more than Lord Jeffrey, a century ago, was able to recognize
his
time’s greatness? For the Cowleys, the novel stopped at
Gatsby
. That Carson McCullers (whom he does not mention) has influenced many works, that Tennessee Williams has influenced the theater of the world, that Paul Bowles, among others, has reshaped the short story—none of these things impinges on him.
    Mr. Cowley’s gloom is supported by the young John W. Aldridge, Jr. In his amusing novel
After the Lost Generation
he got onto the subject of “values” (by way of Lionel Trilling and perhaps V. S. Pritchett). After discussing a number of fictitious characters who were writing books (using real, if unlikely, names like Truman Capote and Gore Vidal), he “proved,” by the evidence of their works, that they had all failed of greatness because, except for “a pocket or two of manners” (the Army; the South; here and there in New England), there was really nothing left to write about, none of that social conflict out of which comes art, like sparks from a stone grinding metal. His coda indicated that a young writer of singular genius is at this moment hovering in the wings awaiting his cue. It will be interesting to read Mr. Aldridge’s next novel.
    Yet Mr. Aldridge does have a case: the old authority of church, of settled Puritan morality,
has
broken down, and if one’s vision is historically limited to only a few generations in time it might seem that today’s novelists are not having the fun their predecessors in the 1920s had, breaking cultural furniture. But to take a longer view, one must recall that the great times for literature and life were those of transition: from the Middle Ages to modern times by way of the Renaissance, from dying paganism to militant Christianity by way of the Antonines, and so on back to Aristophanes. The opportunity for the novelist when Mr. Aldridge’s “values” are in the discard is fabulous: to create without wasting one’s substance in political or social opposition. What could be more marvelous! Neither Virgil nor Shakespeare had to attack their day’s morality or those in authority. They were morally free to write of life, of Henry James’s “the main thing.” There were certainly inequities