A Concern for Truth

THE WORLD OF MODERN FICTION edited by Steven Marcus. 2 vols. 525 & 510 pages. Simon & Schuster. $17.50.

An anthology is a sort of zoo. The literary lions are not at their best caged up away from their own kind, and may look ridiculous if housed next door to a morose musk ox or an albino bandicoot. Even the labels may go wrong, and the surly, myopic wombat is advertised as a Thomson's gazelle. But the zoogoers don't mind. They have always known that some animals are nicer than others. So it is with anthologies; they are compiled for those who have been taught to be kind to writers but are nervous as to whether they will be rewarded with a snarl or a civet effluvium in return for the proffered peanut.

Columbia University Professor Steven Marcus' anthology is composed of what zoos and museums call recent acquisitions--36 pieces of fiction written in the past 25 years by 16 Americans and 20 Europeans. It costs $17.50, which is more than peanuts.

Dissidents & Irritants. The selection reflects what Editor Marcus believes to be "the dominant position in world writing--as much as in world power--that America has come to occupy during the last 20 years." This view is borne out by the anthology, but another selection might have been less flattering to U.S. readers. For example, British writing is meagerly represented by Angus Wilson, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark. There are no stories by two great English stylists, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, by Anthony Burgess or V.S. Pritchett, or by those writers, like Coljn Maclnnes, John Wain or Kingsley Amis, who have given voice to the enhanced position of the British working class--"the people of England who have not spoken yet," as Chesterton wrote nearly two generations ago.

These conspicuous absences prove the contrary of Marcus' suggestion that good writing is somehow a function of national power and prosperity and a product of the consensus that goes with them. The U.S. is represented not by Virgilian celebrators of the Great Society but by outsiders dog-paddling against the mainstream of American life. If American society is a success, no one would know it from this anthology. Unless it is Louis Auchincloss (unrepresented here), the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant has no laureate and, unless it is John O'Hara (also unrepresented), no candid friend. The voice of America is off key.

Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Lionel Trilling, Saul Bellow and Ivan Gold in totally different ways represent the singular sensibility that Jews have brought to American life. Mailer has a derisive piece about the manners of a group of middle-class Jewish New Yorkers deciding what is the correct attitude to take toward a stag film. A famous piece by Lionel Trilling (Of This Time, Of That Place) pits genius against the academic establishment in a story about a moral crisis in the life of a college professor. That the military is an insensitive institution is made plain by William Styron's story of a long march ordered by a Marine martinet, and it is unconsciously funny when measured by the standards of less car-oriented societies in which marching is not considered an ordeal.

Science & Revelation. Marcus' collection also supports the unhappy tradition that the short story is the resort of sensitives with neither the lungs for a novel nor the brains for polemic or criticism. This is not the case, of course. Out of great sorrows come little songs, and out of little sorrows come short stories. Still, the man who presumes to take an hour out of the reader's life had better have some comedy or magic up his sleeve. John Cheever does. His much anthologized piece, The Enormous Radio, again presents its enigmas. Cheever examines modern technological superstitions--deus in machina--in the form of a radio set with God's own ear for private conversation, and thus makes a nightmare of a cozy modern apartment.

The late Flannery O'Connor, whose death in 1964 was a severe loss to American fiction, is represented by a very long story--so long that it has been separately published as a novel. Wise Blood deals with a familiar theme: man obsessed to the point of fanaticism. The scene is the dirt-road South outside the progressive and prosperous mainstream of U.S. life. In a modern U.S. city, there is no place outside of the psychiatric ward for the hero of Wise Blood, a gaunt drifter who blinds himself the better to see God and extinguish the devil.

If there is one quality common to all these stories from the dual Anglo-American tradition as well as European sources, it is the concern for fiction as a revelation of the truth. The private vision, because it seeks no corroborating evidence, must carry conviction of itself. It is this seriousness--even in the comic vein of a Saul Bellow--which makes Jean-Paul Sartre's satirical portrait of a protoFascist, Childhood of a Leader, seem as frivolous in this company as a mere cartoon. The same quality makes the similarity--a glum but grimly maintained Freudo-Marxist determinism--between Doris Lessing and Italy's Alberto Moravia more pronounced than their differences of sex and language.

Force & Style. The Europeans in the collection seem most successful when they are least experimental and stay close to the traditional fixture of fiction --the sense of time and region. In Albert Camus' The Renegade, his great moral force triumphs over impressionistic style. But Stories and Texts for Nothing, III, Samuel Beckett's abstract exercise in vocalized nihilism, is a dud. So also is Secret Room, by France's modish Alain Robbe-Grillet, a montage of quasi-photographic fragments that is merely abstract and fatally a bore.

Heinrich BOell's Enter and Exit, a story of the first and last days of World War II, is technically no more demanding than a run-of-the-mill yarn in the old Saturday Evening Post, but the reader follows BOell's hero willingly. Although the psychology is unsubtle and the theme not far from trite, BOell deals in reality.

If this anthology demonstrates one thing, it is that experiment in style has come to an end. Fiction, despite many premature critical obituaries, did not die with the avantgarde.

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