The Sustaining Stream

The best-kept secret of the curious world of American publishing is that this country is in the middle of a modest literary boom. It is not a renaissance; the ages preceding this one have not been shamefully dark. Nor is there now any blinding coruscation of genius. But there is a gentle swell of hope and good prose.

With Hemingway and Faulkner dead, this is not a time of giants. The public is too easily preoccupied with giantism--an understandable result both of the publishers' belief that bestsellers sell best, and of the wistful ache of uncertain readers to be in the mode. But literature has never been a procession of giants. Nor do they arise, like occasional Poseidons, from a featureless sea. Rather, they form part of a moving and sustaining stream of literature, which is and must be fed by tributaries. Minor writers are needed to produce major ones.

The U.S. now has an impressive roster of novelists of proven excellence. If it is still necessary to use the label minor, pending future performance, it is also necessary to remember that even such a writer as Melville seemed minor to his own age.

What follows is a recommended reading list of American novelists whose first work has appeared within the last few years. A few are widely read, but none is read widely enough. A few are almost unread, which is their unreaders' loss. This is not exclusively a list of young novelists; youth in novelists is not an asset but a liability which is occasionally overcome. Also, the list omits such excellent writers as J. D. Salinger, Truman Capote, William Styron and Saul Bellow, merely because their first books appeared longer ago than the last few years. The writers:

Walker Percy, 46, was an intern in the pathology department of Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital 20 years ago when tuberculosis forced him to give up medicine. A private income permitted him the luxury of pleasing only himself, and he began to write. His first two novels pleased no one and were not published. His third, The Moviegoer, was warmly praised by a few reviewers, ignored by many others (TIME, May 16, 1961), and widely unread. It was a blow that puffers of giantism accepted with much bad grace when The Moviegoer won last year's National Book Award.

The novel is conventional in form, despite Percy's suspicion that "there is a disintegration of the fabric of the modern world which is so far advanced that the conventional novel no longer makes sense." But his vision of rotting fabric broods over the novel. The hero, a likable, intelligent stockbroker surrounded from horizon to horizon by the quietest of despairs, expresses his predicament with irony: "It is a pleasure to carry out the duties of a citizen and to receive in return a receipt on a neat styrene card with one's name on it certifying, so to speak, one's right to exist. What satisfaction I take in appearing the first day to get my auto tag and brake sticker! I subscribe to Consumer Reports and as a consequence I own a first-class television set, an all-but-silent air conditioner and a very long-lasting deodorant. My armpits never stink. I pay attention to all spot announcements on the radio about mental health, the seven signs of cancer, and safe driving. Yesterday William Hoiden delivered a radio announcement on litterbugs. 'Let's face it,' said Holden. 'Nobody can do anything about it--but you and me.' This is true. I have been careful ever since." The Moviegoer's shortcoming is that if there is anything to say after the characters have acted out this demonstration of emptiness, Percy does not say it. The author is at work on another novel, to be called Ground Zero or The Fallout, whose hero runs Macy's air-conditioning system from a control center seven floors below street level.

David Stacton, 37, is a Nevadan who wears cowboy boots, is fond of both Zen and bourbon, and is as nearly unknown as it is possible for a writer to be who has written, and received critical praise for, 13 novels (all have been published in England, five in the US.). His books, most of which have historical themes, are masses of epigrams marinated in a stinging mixture of metaphysics and blood. Mostly they resemble themselves, but something similar might have been the result if the Due de la Rochefoucauld had written novels with plots suggested by Jack London. Stacton writes so fast that he is able to arrange his novels in "triplets"--bouquets of three related volumes--and he turns out a triplet almost every year. Among his novels published in the U.S. are On a Balcony, about Nefertiti and the Pharaoh Ikhnaton; The Judges of the Secret Court, about the events subsequent to Lincoln's assassination; and most recently, A Dancer in Darkness, a superbly gory retelling of the legend of the Duchess of Amalfi. Usually his books are brief and taut, and he is contemptuous of jumbo novels "for women who lie on sofas all day." But his best book, he feels, is a long novel about Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton. It is called Sir William, and will be published in England by Faber & Faber. Stacton's U.S. sales have been meager, and his American publisher has no present plans to issue the book.

Joseph Heller's Catch-22, the first novel by this 39-year-old escapee from McCall's promotion department, is powerful, clumsy, angry and comical, somewhat in the manner one would expect of a half-grown rhinoceros. The author seems only occasionally and precariously in control of this jabberwock of a book, but since Catch-22 is a wild war satire, it does not much matter that the book tramples what scenery it does not chew. The novel's hero is Yossarian, an Air Force captain whose maladjustment is that he is sane. He is stationed in Italy and has flown 40 or 50 missions, and he tries to explain to a friend what troubles him about this: "They're trying to kill me." No one is trying to kill you, the friend says. "Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asks. The friend explains that it is all right; they are shooting at everyone. The tone of Heller's brilliantly apocalyptic burlesque can be guessed from the fact that a character named Major Major Major Major is almost unnoticed in the confusion. The book's chief fault is that the author does not know how to end it. After running well for almost 500 pages, it merely runs down. Next project for the satirist: another novel, called Something Happened, due next year.

Richard Condon is also technically a comic novelist (although purists fond of wedging hyphens between split hairs might call him a serio-comic or even a calamito-comic novelist). He is the author of The Manchurian Candidate, a comic eruption that simply as comedy ranks with the best funny novels done recently in the U.S.--that is, with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Richard Bissell's 7 1/2 Cents and Peter De Vries's Comfort Me with Apples. But Condon is something more. He is a comedian who throws his custard pies in black anger, with intent to maim. His novels resemble (more accurately, are resembled by) Heller's Catch-22; the difference being that Condon's work is wildly plotted and Heller's is wildly plotless. The reaction of Condon's readers is usually either disgust and incredulity or fanatical admiration and incredulity. True believers will be pleased to learn that the first draft of An Infinity of Mirrors, a novel on Paris during World War II, is cooling off in Condon's trunk. And Condon is nothing if not prolific: he has plotted in his head three other novels which may or may not see the light of print.

John Knowles is a precisionist and a sharp contrast to the ebullient undiscipline of Condon and Heller. His first novel, A Separate Peace, is brief and limited in the breadth if not the depth of the experience it describes. Its author is always in perfect control of style and structure. Its theme is the death of innocence; a prep-school boy moves to the disillusion of adulthood by causing, in a half-willed way, the death of his best friend. It is a book that rings in the mind long after the reader has finished it, whose reverberations fill a shape far larger than the one set down on paper. Knowles's second book, Morning in Antibes, did not ring in the mind. His third novel will be published in the fall.

John Updike, at 30, is among the youngest, most gifted, and most solidly established of the new novelists. His career so far has been the kind young men dream about; six of his books, including two well-received novels (The Poorhouse Fair, and Rabbit, Run) have been published. A third novel, The Centaur, will be issued later this month; it is a complex attempt to combine as parallel themes reminiscence of small-town boyhood with Greek mythology. There is almost no critic who has not praised Updike's crystalline style, his mastery of the distilled phrase. Yet amid the praise there is a growing impatience. Novelist Stacton, who admires Updike's "sense of words," summed it up recently: "I wish he could find something important to say."

Most of what Updike has said so far, important or not, has remained well within the neutral middle range of emotion and event. His heroes, particularly those of his short stories, tend to be young boys or young husbands whose problems are small, and whose perceptions, although perfect and sometimes intense, are small also. The sole (and partial) exception is his novel of Everyslob, Rabbit, Run. Here his hero is a former high school basketball star whose memories of past glory give him immortal longings. When his life runs aground in the shallows of marriage, he is moved in anguish to ask: "Is this all there is?" It might also be asked of Updike, for he leaves the question unanswered, and the book ends seemingly with author as well as hero lost in uncertainty.

Except for Rabbit, Run Updike has risked little. The risk of sloppy writing--one taken by most great novelists from Dostoevsky to Faulkner--is unthinkable to him; a page of prose, he feels, should be able to stand alone. "I would not attempt a big novel yet," he says. "My experience is too limited; I would be out of my depth." Such modesty is unexceptionable; yet it is hard to escape the feeling that out of his depth is exactly the place for a young novelist to be.

When Updike took his family to Europe this fall, he sailed tourist class. On the same ship, traveling first class, was Novelist Katherine Anne Porter. The two writers, Updike reports, did not meet. It seems long past time for this talented and valuable writer to look a venturesome novel and Katherine Anne Porter straight in the eye.

Philip Roth, who is Updike's age, is to some extent his opposite. At 26, he won the National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus, a collection of skillful satires of Jewish life in the U.S., about which the principal reservation of critics was that it would be hard for the author ever to write anything as good. Roth accepted the award with a witty speech about the nonsensical questions writers are asked (Should the writer smoke marijuana or shouldn't he? Is Yaddo* bad for you? Should he have a telephone?). The tone of the speech was not that of a young tiger intent on astonishing his elders but of an accepted member of the literary world whose high position is beyond the need of proof.

Roth's second book involved the boldest sort of risk taking. Letting Go is a long, complex novel about the entanglements of two of those songless goliards, the young university instructors. It is sober and often solemn; with a self-confidence approaching bravado, Roth refused to use in it the skill at satirical pastiches that had glittered so brilliantly in Goodbye, Columbus. "I had done that," he said recently, "Why do it again?"

What Roth discovered in Letting Go was a great prairie of writing space. "It was like being an artist and discovering a big canvas. It was the most exhilarating writing experience I ever had." Updike, who is a miniaturist, calls Roth's novel "overblown," but what limits the book to partial success is not its great size. Rather it is Roth's treatment of his hero, a tedious young English instructor who looks within himself and finds the world empty. Roth chose to write of this frail spirit in the first person, and trapped himself by accepting the instructor's lugubrious self-assessment.

The result is one of those fitfully brilliant books that enhance their author's reputation without ever really gathering a following of their own. But his third novel will be read with higher hopes than could be generated by any book whose publication can be foreseen.

H. L. Humes, 36, a founder of the Paris Review and the author of two books, Underground City and Men Die, is a New Yorker who was trained as a scientist at M.I.T. and whose interests include cosmological theory, civic reform in Manhattan, and the feasibility of selling houses made of paper. Humes's novels have excesses that mark them recognizably as first and second books, but they are rich with life and intelligence. Underground City, set in France during the Resistance and the early postwar days, is, notably, the only novel in memory that achieves both dignity and passion in dealing with the predicament of the patriot who is not a flag kisser. Men Die, which is concerned with race hatred and other crippling manias, is audaciously and successfully arty. The central incident of the book is an explosion that wrecks a Caribbean naval base. Humes's time sequence begins with the detonation and is hurled about in jagged fragments--precisely the imprecise arrangement of an explosion. The author gets away with this, which suggests the quality of his skill. Humes is now at work on a play, two movies, and a scientific treatise in which he hopes to explain, among many other things, the origin of hailstorms and the nature of magnetism.

Ralph Ellison, a Negro, is skilled as a novelist to the degree that James Baldwin, also a Negro, is skilled as an essayist. That is to say, he is among the very best of all U.S. writers, whatever the shade of their skin. But Negro writers quite properly find inexhaustible subject matter in their own racial wounds.

Ellison has written only one novel, The Invisible Man, a sourly brilliant odyssey of a Negro who wanders from the Deep South to deeper Harlem and the Communist Party. It is a long, difficult work, about which it is enough to say that it is the only novel yet written, except for Finnegans Wake, that successfully extends the nightmare techniques Joyce developed in Ulysses. Currently writer-in-residence at Rutgers University, Ellison is well into a new, untitled novel, on which he has been working for six years. "I'm a slow writer." he said recently. "Some days I don't even finish a page, and often that's no good. But I'm not depressed about it. I like what I've done, mainly."

Bernard Malamud dances a fine step on the wavy line between myth and mundanity. The baseball-playing demigod who clubs immemorial home runs in The Natural is almost a part of the real world; the faltering drifter of The Assistant, who pumps life into the impoverished Jewish grocer he has robbed, is almost not a part of it. In each case, Malamud has subtly shifted reality, as a dream peddler must, to suit the thread of his dream. What is remarkable is that the author's magical illusions are accomplished without stylistic props; his tales are simply and clearly told. They are humorous, sad and wise, and unlike the work of any other writer. His last novel, A New Life, the account of a hapless Manhattan teacher's exile at a cow college in the Northwest, carried Malamud's alternation of farce and sadness farther over the line into the real world. In prospect for Malamud readers: a new book of short stories (his first was The Magic Barrel) and a play.

These ten novelists are not isolated. Pressing close upon them in potential talent, if not yet in accomplishment, are another half-dozen or more writers of promise, notably Richard Dougherty (Duggan); Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird); Richard Bankowsky (The Glass Rose) ; James Purdy (The Nephew); William Gaddis (The Recognitions).

The new novelists do not make up anything that could be called an American school. Writing in the U.S. has always been an occupation of lone authors going their own ways. But two generalizations can be made. For one, these writers all exhibit a consistently high quality of style; they occasionally produce bad books, but almost never bad writing. The newer American novelists have not only read and honored Joyce, Proust, Freud and Hemingway; they have recovered from the experience. They have even, most of them, recovered from Faulkner. Their ways of writing prose are their own.

Secondly, the most successful novels from these writers are, with some exceptions, quite limited in the breadth, although not in the depth, of what is written about. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is the modern archetype of this kind of book, a brilliant and intense vision of a very few compass degrees of experience. No one has been really successful with a broad, full-compass attack of what it is like to be alive in the 1950s and '60s. Few of the new novelists have tried.

* A foundation at Saratoga Springs, endowed by George Foster Peabody and his wife Katrina. Selected writers, artists and composers are given room and board in a stately 50-room mansion surrounded by 500 peaceful acres, where they may stay for as long as two months at a time for undisturbed, isolated creative activity.

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