Highbrow Authors and Middlebrow Books

Until fairly recently, speculations on the health of the novel were a morbid and monotonous feature of our literary life. In fact, ever since Ortega y Gasset pronounced the novel dead back in the Twenties, and T. S. Eliot discovered that Flaubert and James had killed it, critics have generally shown more interest in the novel dead than alive, and have devoted more energy to conducting post-mortems than to providing resuscitation. For a number of years in the Sunday book-supplement world, the novel was dying as regularly as tycoons and athletes, and of a much more interesting variety of ailments. In the main, it was the critics of that world, the middlebrow, trend-tracking kind, who carried on the discussion over the last two decades, the concern for the novel's health apparently having passed from Eliot to Trilling to Frank O'Connor to J. Donald Adams with steadily dwindling intensity and authority.

For a while there it looked as though, if the novel were not actually dying under its own power, it was certain very soon to be talked to death. It now appears, however, that the situation has rather dramatically reversed itself, and that it is not so much the novel as the talk about its death that is dying. In fact, among highbrows we are suddenly hearing a great deal of talk about the novel's aliveness, while the middlebrow post-mortems have diminished in number to the point where we can sometimes go for whole months or even years without hearing any more baleful middlebrow news of the novel than the tired old news that it continues to be obsessed with sexual perversion and other "sordid and depressing" aspects of life, and that nobody writing today is anywhere near as good as John P. Marquand. A kind of forlorn pettishness about issues which everybody else long ago ceased to think of seems to have overcome the old-style middlebrow crepe hangers. And not only have they stopped talking about the death of the novel; they have apparently stopped being aware of the novel altogether, except as a form which somehow failed to oblige them by dying at the right time and has instead taken on a new life they are unable to comprehend.

The truth of course is that the novel as the middlebrows used to know it did in effect die. The death which they made a habit of announcing so solemnly was actually quite real, in the sense that the kind of novel they once felt close to did pass away as a dominating literary force and has since been replaced by another kind, a largely intellectual kind, (continued on page 166)Highbrow Authors(continued from page 119) toward which the middlebrows quite naturally feel alien and about which they seem able to do nothing except carp in the outmoded rhetoric of yesterday's moral indignation. That is, infact, one of the most interesting and important developments in the literary life at the present time. Middlebrow literary opinion has grown increasingly ineffectual, irrelevant, or merely silly, increasingly dissociated from its former concern with the novel, living or dead, while in the highbrow world there has never before been such an abundance and variety of concern. In the established literary quarterlies and the less widely circulated critical journals, modern novelists are being subjected to a scrutiny almost terrifying in its tone of triumphant possessiveness, and even such serious younger writers as Salinger, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, whose careers, for all their prominence, may still be considered in the developmental stage, have already had special issues of some of the smaller of these magazines devoted entirely to their work (in fact, Salinger has had serveral entire critical volumes devoted to him alone). Newer writers like William Burroughs (Naked Lunch) and Joseph Heller (Catch-22) have not yet had time to be examined on quite this scale, but they have already received an enormous amount of attention, and there can be no doubt that they too will very shortly be swept up by the full force of the new wave of critical interest and borne at high speed into the prominence of minor classic status.

This interest, furthermore, has by no means been confined to the small world of professional and academic criticism. It may have begun there, but it has quickly spread throuhout the largecirculation quality-magazine world as well. The increasingly serious literary emphasis of Esquire, Playboy, and the various women's fashion magazines -- to say nothing of the recent appearance of such important new publications as The New York Review of Books -- serves to indicate just how vital it has become not only for highbrows but for everyone who values highbrow tastes to be in the know about new writers and writing.

The principal reason for this changed state of affairs is not simply that highbrow interest in the novel has increased, while middlebrow interest has declined. That decline is only an effect of the more important circumstance that the serious novel is no longer the vehicle of middlebrow ideas and middlebrow experience, as it pretty largely was back in the days of Dreiser and Anderson, Lewis, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. These writers have now nearly all been converted, by a process of academic appropriation following after deep analysis, into highbrow property, while currently active writers like Bellow and some of the others have never belonged to or written for the middlebrow world, but have from the beginning worked from assumptions about the nature of modern experience and modern fiction at least paralleling those of the highbrow world. The result is that, in sharp contrast to their predecessors and in a manner seemingly unique in literature, these writers have been absorbed directly into the highbrow critical canon without ever having had to fight the battle for general readership and acceptance in the middlebrow world. With the exception of Faulkner, they are the first novelists in our recent history to have become critically established in their lifetimes without first having been more or less widely read, and one can only suppose that this has occurred not only because of highbrow interest in their work but because their is no longer a ground on which the battle for middlebrow acceptance can be fought.

But whatever the reason, the process by which so many of the better younger writers have been transported from obscurity to prominence, while at the same time bypassing the traditional apprenticeship period in the middlebrow world, is now part of the accepted routine of our literary life. The middlebrows have, consequently, been left with no established novelist of genuine high quality, and except possibly for James Gould Cozzens, John O'Hara and John Steinbeck, no established novelist who even approaches high quality. They furthermore have scarcely anyone at all in the younger group who is articulating emotions and experiences that are familiar and attractive to them.

This was emphatically not the case during the great period of middlebrow ownership of the novel. The established novelists of that time, although they may themselves have been lowbrows or even, in one or two instances, highbrows, were not only working in the middlebrow literary world but giving voice to concerns that had a clear and concrete basis in middlebrow and middle-class life. They were able to do so because they as well as the bulk of their readership were primarily middle class and provincial in background and were, therefore, united by a bond of common assumption and shared experience. This made possible for a relatively short time in America what we now enviously associate with Victorian England and the France of Balzac: a novel centered in the value system of the dominant social class and able, as a consequence, to dramatize materials and themes of particular relevance to that class. Among the most important of these, indeed the most important if considered in terms of its meaning in the whole range of American experience, was the theme of first confrontation of the modern world and first initiation into the new circumstances of modern life. In the many works that now form the classic body of modern American fiction this theme appears as a very specific and recurrent preoccupation. Although differing greatly from one another in nearly every other respect, such books as Winesburg, Ohio, Sister Carrie, Babbitt, Manhattan Transfer, Of Time and the River, Studs Lonigan, The Sun Also Rises, This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby are alike in the one respect that in each of them either the characters or the contemporary reader, or in most cases both, came into relationship with experience of a kind unknown to them before and markedly different from the provincial experience of their origins.

These books are all in this sense attempts to answer, either directly or indirectly, the familiar and obsessive provincial question which the European novel had begun to answer a hundred years before: what is real life like; what is the nature of experience in the world outside the neighborhood, town or region? And the fact cannot fail to seem remarkable to us today that this was a question to which virtually a whole American middle-class provincial culture was seeking an answer, and that the interest of that culture in the novel was largely sustained by the promise the novel held out of supplying it.

It is no accident that Scott Fitzgerald was able to refer, however jokingly, to The Sun Also Rises as" a Romance and a Guide Book" and to his own This Side of Paradise as "a Romance and a Reading List." Beneath the lightness of tone there is a perfectly serious point. Although it is hard to conceive today of any really literate person turning to a novel for either romance or information, whether about books or the better bars of Paris and Pamplona, these are exactly the elements which the general reader of their time found initially fascinating in these two novels. They provided him with a portrait of life at its most interesting and adventurous remove from provincial existence, yet plausible enough to be accepted by the provincial imagination; and a set of facts supposedly essential to anyone desiring entry into that life. What was important was that the reader did desire entry into that life. It was symbolic to him of all that his own life was not, and he wished to be informed about how he should behave if he should ever succeed in gaining entry.

Hence, Hemingway's preoccupation with the rules of social form, with the etiquette of correct conduct in situations of physical and psychic test, and Fitzgerald's passion to learn the rules, to become an acceptable member of the club, made a powerful appeal to his imagination as well as to his native interest in process and know-how. It was very like the appeal made by the archetypal older brother or favorite uncle who returns to his home town after long absence to charm his relatives with tales of curious customs in far-off, exotic lands. Hemingway's role was always that of the older brother or uncle, the man to whom everything imaginable had happened; Fitzgerald's was always that of the wide-eyed younger brother or nephew, the boy to whom nothing worth imagining had ever happened; and the reader could identify equally well with both. He could identify not only because he could sense that both were themselves as enchanted and as fundamentally innocent as he, but because they were telling him something he did not know and wished to know, and telling it in the context of moral assumptions and emotional responses which were very much like his own. The novel in their hands was, therefore, an educative form, an extension and extender of his grasp of reality, a rule book for the conduct of the desirable life that lay beyond the limits of the undesirable life in which he felt enclosed. And it is this educative element which the novel has lost in our time, and in so doing, has lost the middle class, or what has become, by a shift from class to cultural status, from sociology to phrenology, the middlebrow.

We are all familiar with the standard reasons given for the change that has taken place in American society and, by extension, in the American novel, since Hemingway and Fitzgerald began to write. Our present population is no longer typified by a common provincial heritage or a regional and small-town mentality, but has become increasingly heterogeneous and diffuse, increasingly suburban and exurban in character and cosmopolitan in outlook. Middle-class culture has given way not merely to middlebrow but to mass culture, and while the former had some of the cohesiveness of a differentiated social institution, the latter is, as its name suggests, merely a social abstraction characterized by undifferentiated numbers. There is also some significance in the fact that it is no longer middle-class culture but minority culture that is providing the primary subject matter of the contemporary serious novel. Middle-class culture appears to have receded as a potential source of novelistic material in time with its recession as the characterizing culture of our society, while the experience of the Jew and the Negro has steadily gained in prominence and relevance, not simply as social fact but as an experience symbolic of the universal modern sense of isolation and estrangement. The extraordinarily rapid rise to fame of James Baldwin as both social critic and novelist, in time with the explosion of the Negro problem, is a particularly dramatic illustration of this development.

This change is, of course, in large part the result of a change in the racial and ethnic character of our writers themselves. The older writers of predominantly gentile extraction have been succeeded by a new generation composed of a large number of Jewish and Negro writers such as Baldwin, Mailer, Bellow, Malamud and Roth. It would appear, in fact, that throughout our literature at the present time the authority that once belonged to the Midwestern and Anglo-Saxon imagination has passed to the urban and minority intelligence, the intelligence, that is, which is just coming into the kind of critical relationship with American society which the Anglo-Saxon imagination has exhausted and left behind. But however invigorating this development may be for our literature as a whole -- and everything indicates that it has been immensely invigorating -- it may also have served to increase still further the distance now separating the novel from the general reading public. For where Hemingway and Fitzgerald were writing out of, at the same time that they were addressing, a culture racially and ethnically similar to themselves, the new minority writers are making use of a cultural experience which, while intensely real to them, is still strange and unreal to most of the people who might read their books. And regardless of how skillful these writers may be in dramatizing the full symbolic implications of that experience, there is always a point beyond which the most sympathetic non-Jewish and non-Negro reader cannot go, where the necessary suspension of disbelief can no longer be willed, and he is forced to say, "That is not and cannot be myself."

But over and above these sociological considerations there is the essential fact that we no longer seem to need the novel to initiate us into the realities of the modern world. It is not merely that we have grown much too sophisticated to be willing to settle for the sort of information which the older novel provided, although there is no doubt that we have. It is also that the novel has ceased to be the primary source of our information about the varieties of experience that lie beyond the limits of our personal lives, and we simply cannot bring to it quite the old expectations, quite the old naive willingness to give ourselves up to the image of experience which it sets before us. It may be that we have lost faith in both the novel and experience, that something has gone wrong with our ability to respond not only to the imagined portrait of life but to the real possibilities of the lived life. But if it has, the fault lies as much with experience and our present relation to it as it does with the novel.

The provincial expects always to be transformed by contact with the world beyond the provinces. He may even expect to be saved by it, as though something terribly religious were bound to happen to him if only he could get out of town and on the road to his personal Damascus. Most of the characters in the older American novels believed this implicitly: Anderson's George Willard, Hemingway's Nick Adams, Fitzgerald's Amory Blaine and Nick Carraway, Wolfe's Eugene Gant, Dos Passos' Martin Howe, Farrell's Studs Lonigan were all seekers after the cosmic "it" to be found in the experience of the modern world. They were all disciples of what has come to be called the cult or mystique of experience, that innocent faith in the spiritual conversion principle of merely additive living, which has provided the American novel with so much of its basic as well as extraneous material. But we have come to know better -- even if our knowledge is not shared by writers like Jack Kerouac who continue to practice an extinct provincialism and to exult depressingly in experience which literature and the rest of us have long since had. We are all of us very much in the modern world at the present time, and we can scarcely remember a time when we were not very much, even too much, in it. It is, in fact, the usual thing with us to be educated by all the secondary sources of experience to which we now have such abundant access, long before we have a chance to be educated by primary experience. We are vicariously informed about experience almost to the point where we do not need to have experience, and if we do have it, we very often feel it to be less compelling than the second-hand version of it which we already possess. This is undoubtedly the reason why the more popular entertainment media such as television and the motion pictures -- media which for years have very nearly succeeded in doing our living for us -- are finding it necessary to make use of steadily more bizarre and sensational materials in their effort to maintain their hold on the public attention. Since the public knows so very much as it is, and is so heavily surfeited with what it knows, it requires exposure to stronger and stronger doses of reality in order to be able to respond at all. And although lacking the cynicism of the more frankly commercial media, the novel has been propelled in the same direction. Because it is no longer able to discharge its older educative and initiatory function, it has been forced to concern itself with the more marginal and unusual realities -- sometimes with precisely those depicted on the movie and television screens -- or with kinds of experience which may have great personal meaning and importance to the author but little or none to the reader, particularly the general or middlebrow reader who is not equipped to find his satisfaction solely in the artistry with which the experience is portrayed.

Actually, the middlebrow reader's estrangement from the contemporary serious novel involves a paradox of rather bewildering complexity. If we take it for granted that the serious novel does not interest him -- and publishers' sales figures seem to indicate that it emphatically does not -- the first explanation that comes to mind is that he does not find it relevant to his life. Yet in saying this one cannot allay the suspicion that his life is itself irrelevant to life, at least to most of those forms and manifestations of it which the novelist can get at and put to creative use. The middlebrow seems to have very little sense of a distinctive experience or a distinctive past, and such sense as he does have seems to be intermittent, fragmentary and elusive. As I have said, he lacks the advantage which, 30 or 40 years ago, he might have enjoyed, the advantage of involvement in some of the large cultural movements and historical changes which gave the members of the older middle class their feelings of having shared in a collective cultural past. He has had no part, for example, in the great psychological as well as physical migration from the provinces to the city; he was not on hand at the opening of the last frontier of the modern consciousness and the modern world. Hence, he cannot know the powerful response of instantaneous recognition and identification felt by those readers who discovered in some of the novels of their time an imaginative rendering of things they remembered having lived or wished they might live. He is not, to be sure, very likely to be exposed to novels having to do with such things, or with things of equivalent importance to his own time and his own experience. The novelists of his time also lack the advantage of sharing in a collective cultural experience, and so tend to devote themselves to expressing experience about which they can say only that it has meaning and relevance to their own lives. It is therefore not surprising that the middlebrow reader, having little or no sense of personal experience, should be able to make little or no sense of the experience of novelists who have a sense only of their personal experience.

A novel may, on the other hand, be about something the reader knows or is supposed to know. It may be about suburbia, exurbia, mass culture or the advertising business, although, interestingly enough, our current serious novels are almost never about such things. It may depict a life that is virtually an exact copy of the life he leads every day. But by confronting him with that life, the novel is bound to appear to him hateful and depressing, or again simply unreal and foreign, not only because he has probably never before seen his life except in hurried glimpses through the haze of his semiconsciousness, but because the novelist's determination to get at the truth would almost inevitably force him to portray realities which the reader could not accept without finding his life intolerable. Certainly, he does not want to be reminded that he is living a life that is not worth living, and the fact that in order to live it he has had to close his mind to it does not increase his ability or desire to identify with it when he sees it reflected in a novel. Hence, it would seem that unless the novel were in other respects sufficiently unique, surprising or salacious to amuse or titillate him, he would have little reason to read it and much reason not to read it.

Yet this is by no means to suggest that what the middlebrow actually wants from fiction is irrelevance of the kind that the ordinary run of escape fiction could be counted on to give him. The thing that makes him a middlebrow requires him to pretend to himself that he is observing the pieties of middlebrow status, that he is continuously and consciously exercising his taste in ways that have been approved by the cultural establishment to which he feels affiliated. What he therefore wants from fiction is a portrait of experience that seems real and familiar to him, but that is not so real and familiar as to make him uncomfortable or force him to examine his life. He also wants a style of presentation that looks serious and "literary" at the same time that it too is familiar and conventional enough not to violate his preconceptions about the way good literature should sound or assault his sensibilities with the ugliness of the really new.

Then, of course, along with all this, and in spite of his high moral pretensions, he wants the various extraliterary dividends which he could get from trash if he dared to read it. He wants sex and sensation and violence and outrage, and he wants them on the only terms on which he can be sure of a clear and powerful response, in the form of massive copulations, giant orgasms, hideous rapes and Cinemascopic murders and pillages -- the bloodcurdling extremity of which is in perfect proportion to the emotional impoverishment of his life. He wants them on these terms, that is, if he can persuade himself, at whatever cost to the truth, that they are the terms of serious literature.

At the moment there are not many good writers around who would be able to assist the middlebrow in this kind of self-deception. There are, to be sure, a number who could provide him with the titillation he craves, but too often the titillation would carry with it some reminder of the real world which he would find distasteful. Because of his rather gingerly orientation toward himself and toward reality, the middlebrow requires a fiction combining some of the pretensions of serious literature with some of the escapist and sensational qualities of trash, a fiction, in other words, that will feed his intellectual vanity, coddle his complacency, and enable him at the same time to drain off his more virulent frustrations -- all in a context of lifelike and literaturelike unreality. Certainly, there is no one writer who satisfies all these requirements. But it is possible to think of two who in very different ways and to very different degrees satisfy at least some of them. John O'Hara, of course, comes immediately to mind because the large sales of his books -- to say nothing of the kind of critics who praise them -- are convincing proof of his overwhelming middlebrow appeal. William Styron seems at first glance to be a much less obvious possibility because he has some reputation for seriousness and is so much better a writer than O'Hara that he threatens at every moment to be mistaken for highbrow and to disappear into the relatively readerless obscurity of highbrow status. Yet whatever their differences of talent and artistic intent, O'Hara and Styron are alike in the one respect that both combine serious literary pretensions with an essentially middlebrow view of life. Each in his way embodies the middlebrow notion of the important novelist.

To put the matter in the simplest possible terms, the middlebrows like O'Hara because his books remind them of the life they imagine themselves to be leading. Hence, he is the perfect antidote to those other writers who keep reminding them either of the life they actually are leading or of a life they can imagine nobody leading. The middlebrows like Styron because his books remind them not of life but of the classic modern literature they think they are supposed to admire. Hence, he is one younger writer from whom it is possible to get the comforting impression that nothing has really changed in the novel since the golden age of middlebrow proprietorship over it.

But the matter is, of course, nowhere near that simple. O'Hara creates a familiar, seemingly respectable world -- or let us say that he creates an initial illusion or facsimile of one -- that is both totally unlike the world the middlebrows live in and exactly like the world they want to see themselves as living in. The unlikeness puts a safe distance between themselves and his world, freeing them of all moral responsibility for it, at the same time that the likeness enables them to identify vicariously with it, in a state of guiltless, voyeuristic fantasy. On the surface O'Hara's favorite locale, Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, is an American Dream community straight out of Nostalgia by way of The Saturday Evening Post. It is everybody's Our Town raised to a higher income bracket and gone sophisticated, a good, solid, red-blooded, churchgoing sort of place where the people seem both prosperous and nice, and the best families have been best friends of the best families for generations. There appear to be no Jews, Negroes or homosexuals in Gibbsville, but if there are any, they would certainly be tolerated, although just as certainly not admitted to the clubs or invited to the parties. Gibbsville is, in fact, just about the only fictional community in current American literature where the middlebrow reader can escape the prevailing obsession with minority groups and perverts, and be sure that, if deviations from right conduct do occur, they will at least occur among the right sort of people. That, at any rate, is the assurance that O'Hara seems to provide. That is the sop he tosses to middlebrow snobbery and moral hypocrisy, and, as it turns out, it is absolutely vital to the success of his appeal to the middlebrow mind.

For in almost every O'Hara novel there comes a moment when the reader's conscience has to be palliated if his confidence is to be held, a moment when life in Gibbsville is revealed to be a good deal more than it appears to be on the surface. Beneath the veneer of respectability and niceness, behind the closed bedroom doors of the mansions, in the expensive convertibles parked out in back of the country club, all sorts of interesting and incredible things suddenly seem to be going on -- among the right people, of course -- and all of them, not very surprisingly, have to do with sex. To put the matter with typical O'Haraish directness, whatever else his characters may piously appear to be doing with their time, what they are actually doing is sleeping or trying to sleep with everybody else's wife or daughter or sister or mistress or mother. The pursuit of the Good Life, when reduced, as O'Hara persistently reduces it, to its symbiotic essence, becomes the pursuit of the Good Lay. Our Town is magically transformed -- one might almost say, overnight -- into the Kinsey report; the Saturday Evening Post image fades into something with green covers out of Olympia Press; and bed emerges at last as the natural social habitat of the solid citizens of Gibbsville, a kind of fornicatory home-away-from-home where everybody sooner or later gets acquainted and settles down to the enjoyment of real togetherness.

There are even occasions when John O'Hara seems to dissolve into a pornographic Krafft-Ebing, and his fiction into a clinical recital of all the possible ways of having sex for those who feel -- as even the staunchest Gibbsvilleans ultimately must -- that, sexually speaking, they have already had everything. On such occasions we leave behind the world of mere work-a-lay adultery and become spectators at a sort of novelistic stag-party film in which the full range of deviational activity is explored by performers as aloof and businesslike as the people who pose for French feelthy postcards. Lesbians make passes at little girls and soul-kiss married women. Little girls seduce older men, and older men seduce little girls. Exhibitionistic town boys seduce older girls in the backs of trucks, and older girls seduce each other in college dorms.

It all turns out to be as twisted and corrupt as the gamiest of the serious novels which the middlebrows find too ugly and distasteful to read. But there is one very important difference. Where in many of these novels the corruption exists in a context of seemingly equal distortion, in a world which the middlebrows find both forbidding and strange, in O'Hara's novels the corruption has had its sting removed through being presented within the familiar and sanctifying context of middle-class moral appearances. It is made acceptable not only because the right people indulge in it but because the moral machinery which conventionally condemns it is built into the setting in which it occurs. That setting is Gibbsville, and what is Gibbsville if not an idealization of our collective imaginary memory of what appears on the surface to be the perfect American town, the kind of town we like to think we have all lived in or at the very least come from? But as an idealization Gibbsville is inevitably unreal, although it is, of course, deeply familiar as an imaginary construct. It is removed from the reader in time, and it exists out of time in a dimension of myth and nostalgia -- the same dimension in which we sentimentally place Our Town and The Saturday Evening Post.

By a very human incongruity the dirty book with the green covers also occupies that dimension in our minds: sentimentality and pornography are, in psychological terms, bedfellows. Hence, O'Hara's treatment of sex, which is nothing more than bad pornography smuggled in under the thin plain wrapper of social documentation, is finally just as unreal as his Gibbsville. It is unreal first because it is sex cold-bloodedly enacted without love or passion by people who seem just as wooden and lifeless as the characters in straight pornography, and second because it is literary sex, book sex, having virtually nothing to do with, and therefore casting no revelatory light upon, the actual practice of sex in the living society about which O'Hara is ostensibly writing. It is merely such stuff as wet dreams are made on, sex used ritualistically and mechanically as a substitute in life for an earned emotional relationship, and in literature for an earned dramatic significance, the kind of significance which the serious novelist takes pains to find outside as well as between the sweaty sheets of his created world.

But literature's loss is, in O'Hara's case, the middlebrow reader's gain. Because of the lifelike unreality of O'Hara's setting and the impersonal nature of his pornography, the reader senses that none of it finally relates to him or engages him on the moral level. Yet he also senses that it is familiar enough and close enough to his erotic and sentimental dream of life to enable him to derive vicarious satisfaction from it. He is therefore absolved of all responsibility to judge or condemn it, and freed to lie back and enjoy the show with a clean conscience and a dirty mind. He has, in fact, been allowed to have it both ways, which is the prime requirement the middlebrows make of a novel: he has had his cheesecake and not eaten it, too. The Saturday Evening Post image -- the pretensions to respectability which he initially saw in Gibbsville and which lulled him into an it-can't-happen-here state of mind -- has canceled out the distaste he might otherwise have felt obliged to have for the pornography. The pornography has at the same time provided him with the titillation he craved; while O'Hara's seeming earnestness and detachment, above all his apparently serious commitment to the old-fashioned belief that whatever is sexy or obscene must be art ("Don't say 'urinate,' " cried the lusty old slicer-of-life. "Say 'piss!' ") have given the reader the excuse he needs for succumbing to the capital middlebrow self-delusion, the delusion that he is reading literature while enjoying all the kicks of trash.

The case with Styron is both very similar and very different. Styron is, first of all, obviously no O'Hara. For one thing, he is an infinitely better, infinitely more intelligent writer, and for another, his place on the sliding scale of literary charlatanism is nowhere near so secure. Styron apparently writes the way he does because he honestly believes that is the way serious literature sounds -- and he is right: it does or, at any rate, it did. His charlatanism -- if it can be called that -- is of the unconscious and, therefore, wholeheartedly sincere kind. O'Hara, on the other hand, passed off as serious literature what he should know to be trash, presumably because, first, he can no longer write anything else and, second, because he has found out by now that his particular audience is incapable of telling the difference anyway. O'Hara is an example of the once-talented novelist who has abnegated his original power to write well for middlebrow success. Styron is an example -- and a very rare one indeed in the present younger generation -- of the still-talented novelist who has achieved a certain measure of middlebrow success without having to compromise at all. He is what the middlebrows want just as he is -- or to be exact, he was until the appearance of his book Set This House on Fire raised new questions concerning his status in the middlebrow club.

But that again is a simplification. Styron is better than this, and deserves better than this. Let us say that he is a victim of his age in that he happened to form himself on standards of literary seriousness which have unfortunately become too widely known and accepted to be considered very serious anymore. He formed himself, that is, on the standards set by his eminent predecessors, and now he is condemned to writing like them, to achieving his effects in the way they achieved theirs, while today seriousness can ultimately be measured only in the degree to which a writer refines upon his predecessors or goes them one better, with another kind of power and a different degree and quality of emphasis.

Yet it is precisely this lack of primary seriousness in Styron that accounts most for such popularity as he has so far enjoyed with the middlebrow reading public. His work sounds not only to him but to them like the serious literature which they have been taught to admire -- and that is, of course, the now classic and institutionalized literature of the Twenties and Thirties. For a long time this kind of assurance of continuity with the honored past has been the one element the middlebrows have sorely missed in the novels of the current younger writers. They have been confused by the fact that so many of these writers are supposed to be good, while at the same time they are obviously not good in the old familiar ways. Styron's considerable virtue is that he puts their minds at ease by satisfying the expectations which they chronically bring to new writing and vindicating their prejudices about the nature of good writing in general. He is, in short, a "literary" writer in the sense that his work resembles what is generally taken to be, or has been indemnified by previous usage as being, "literary." He therefore never commits the unpardonable sin of the truly original writer: he never confronts the reader with what, disturbingly, the reader has never seen before; he never educates the consciousness by demanding that it go to work here and now, as if for the very first time, on him and his unique vision of reality. Instead, he comforts the reader, however unintentionally, with a vision of the familiar and the previously envisioned, skillfully projected through a literary manner with which the reader feels thoroughly at home. Yet Styron is a sufficiently good writer never to seem merely imitative. In everything he has done up to now he has managed to strike a fine balance between sounding familiar enough to be acceptable and not sounding so familiar as to seem entirely unoriginal.

His writing style, which has been justly praised for its evocative power and great verbal ingenuity, is an excellent example of this kind of equilibrium. It belongs to a category of literary expression which the middlebrows -- and, for that matter, many highbrows -- have come to identify as the "major" modern American style, the traditional language of our native form of modern literary genius. It is rich, reckless, bombastic, melodramatic, poetical, rhetorical, metaphorical and sentimental, and in Styron's hands it clearly shows the marks of the hard usage already given it by most of our native modern literary geniuses. In fact, one can easily imagine his books as big sprawling houses of language, crammed with antiques passed down to him by beneficent forebears named Wolfe, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Yet Styron's skill at interior decoration is such that one cannot help but see at once how interesting and new the familiar old pieces look in the quite individual arrangement he has made of them. For there can be no doubt about it: the arrangement is individual. It at least is his own, even if the materials are not. He has not, therefore, been altogether imitative, and neither has he been disturbingly original. He has simply exercised ingenuity in turning to his own advantage the stylistic innovations of his predecessors. But he has also inevitably done something else, something vastly more important from the point of view of his middlebrow admirers. He has managed to convey the impression that by sounding like his predecessors, he has earned the right to take a place in the ranks of greatness beside them. The style in his case may not be the man, but it would seem to make him. For if he writes in the certified style of geniuses, must he not be a genius, too?

In very much the same way, Styron's stock situations and emotional stances are also those of serious modern literature. The anguished, possessed, drunken, demented and tormented, the boorish, slobbish, phonily tender and sentimental -- these are all the conventional materials through which modern writers have defined their sense of the forms and terms of life in the modern world. But the point is that they are the conventional materials. Now at this late time of our history they seem to belong to a canon of more or less habitual arrangements of reality, and they seem valid and real no longer because of their relation to actual life and observed experience, but because of their relation to past literature, which has conditioned us to the assumption that they are valid and real, at the same time that it has conditioned our responses to them. Hence, in meeting them again in Styron's work, one has the feeling of having met them before, not necessarily in any specific book, but in the whole of modern literature, the feeling of being on familiar ground without the feeling of having detected a plagiarism. The intellectually ambitious reader might therefore be forgiven if he should assume that Styron must be as serious, even as original, in his handling of these materials as his predecessors were in their handling of them.

This seems to me to be Styron's principal weakness as a novelist, and it happens also to be a middlebrow weakness. In spite of his great talent and sensitivity he has still not found it possible to operate outside the system of ideological and dramatic conventions which have become the clichés of the highbrow world even as they remain the intellectual status symbols of the middlebrow world. The result is that although his books are written wonderfully well, at least by middlebrow standards, they continue to exist in a dimension of irrelevance and unreality which is the dimension neither of life nor of literature but of something in between. They have many of the qualities of literature, just as they bear considerable resemblance to life, but they are essentially skilled adaptations of the already formulated modes of seeing and judging life and of portraying it in literature.

Styron's talent seems at the present time to be imprisoned within the circle of these modes and condemned to moving round and round in a monotonous and unending routine of coming at experience over and over again from exactly the same direction and reacting to it in exactly the same way. The explanations it finds for human conduct inside the circle are always fashionable and always predictable: the motives of women are finally reducible, as they are in Lie Down in Darkness, to Oedipus complexes and the "sickness of the age"; the troubles of men can finally be traced, as they are in that book and Set This House on Fire, to an inordinate fondness for the bottle, a suppressed fondness for other men, or some topical problem involving the controversial issues of race, creed or color.

John O'Hara's talent is also imprisoned inside the circle, and that is the main reason the middlebrows like him so much. But where O'Hara continues to pander not only to middlebrow tastes in pornography but to middlebrow needs to escape from literature and life, Styron, at least in Set This House on Fire, seems to have come close to losing the middlebrows by reminding them too uncomfortably of both literature and life. But he has not yet come close enough or reminded them uncomfortably enough. To do that he will have to submit himself to a tougher discipline even than the one which his high ambition has already imposed on him. He will have to submit himself to the ultimate discipline of learning to see again with his own eyes and to think again with his own mind, and no longer with those of his predecessors and contemporaries. For that is the work that most urgently needs to be done by the ambitious writer today if the dead formulations of the past are ever to be put aside and the novel is ever to be freed to function again as the educator of the consciousness of its time.