EVERY ART IS a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.

We’re hierarchical animals; none of this is new. Why though is the artist as a person as well as a creator, endlessly anatomized, while the psychological make-up of a critic is let go hang? Who has investigated the oedipal pulsings of a Sainte-Beuve? Or the possible anal indelicacies of a Saintsbury? Or the Gestalt of all our critics who wrote a novel once? Nobody hangs their laundry out. Or sees them as men and women for a’ that, outside the hall of fame like everybody else, beating their little welfare fists against the big bank door.

When the Reform Bill goes through on Olympus, all critics and certainly all biographers, will carry their non-academic vita with them at all times, to be checked as freely as the tag on a decanter, before it pours forth. We shan’t want to see their medals. What we’ll want to know is the state of their beds, their dreamgoals and psychic pocketbooks, before we listen to them freudenize Twain and stack-sullivanize Keats. What is home to Harold Rosenberg, we’ll ask, that Barnett Newman is this to him? Where were you, Edmund Gosse, Maurice Bowra, Brander Matthews, when the lights went out? And who has collated Arnold Toynbee’s “analysis”—a Jungian one, I was told—with his version of history?

Oh, I can see all the arts then, a proper Disneyland, with all the worms turning animatedly to say to the spades “Kindly present a psychiatric background of your prejudices. And in print please!” Before you dig me up.

Trouble is, would we read it?

Perhaps all artists have to settle for the fact that they don’t get justice, but treatment. Sitting men will always see themselves as Jovian. The artist’s concept of himself tends to be cruciform—as befits a hanging one. Both will be even further shaped by their situations. The critic spreads bottomwise, into scholarship. An artist’s best mobility is above the neck. Often when he has enough work behind him, he grows a second head on it.

I begin to remember how many artists of the past have had two of them. My prejudice is that we should always carry our critic head a little negligently under the arm, like a collapsible top-hat. In the nineteenth century, the writer-artist sported his less self-consciously; the poets wrote the best literary criticism of the age, and even in the letters of George Eliot (who all her life, according to Gordon S. Haight in his preface to her Letters, suffered from “a morbid lack of self-confidence” in her work), we see nevertheless how widely and naturally she expects any writer to range. Europe expected it. There are periods that tolerate this, just as the gardener is allowably the authority on roses, the vintner on wine. Ours is not one of them.

To do this of course, one must have formidable artists. I think I would always rather read the notebooks of Matisse than the essays of Roger Fry—and a look at Fry’s paintings in their room at Kings hasn’t disabused me. (Though I would also rather read Hindemith on music than E. M. Forster; an artist has to be in his own art, for this kind of authority.) To have a fan’s passion for an art, or even like Fry to help disseminate and explain its new forms, is a kind of hostess function, never to be confused with an artist’s data on art’s essences.

Literary criticism has yet another confusion at its very heart, in that anyone talking about the medium seriously is in effect using it—and had better have the powers of the artist as well. This often convinces literary critics that they are artists. It convinces me that artists are the best of them. Only the artist can be trusted never to confuse essences with statuses. And every judgment he makes involves him. This is true of the most minor review or conversational flight. He has no light words.

The French understand this. To the end that some become exaggerates of it, as the later Sartre becomes the art-spider who must cling to the corpus of Genet for his energy while his own work in art dwindles, appendage to that suddenly monster second head. (At a certain point in that sort of game, perhaps there is no turning back.) Yet when we say then “But au fond, he was always philosophe,” something is added. We are subscribing then to the abiding continuum of human thought.

When I was sixteen, Jules Romains seemed to me both boring and mysteriously seductive; I sensed that he was part of some luminous tradition my own hadn’t prepared me for. A few years on, Gide bowled me over, above all for his seriousness; for his hairsplittings in the realm of orthodoxy I cared nothing. What was this temper of mind that suited me down to the ground though I might war with its contents? Or feel outside it, as with Simone Weil, whose atmosphere I nevertheless recognized to the point of shock—for I was no religieuse.

I had been a philosophy student though, happy to deliver a paper on any closed system, from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea to a flirt with Kant and Hegel—always holding my breath in wait for that wonderful, acolyte moment when I would see the angel-plan spread out before me, and could hope to believe. Spinoza, as a Jew and hence somehow already in my blood, didn’t interest me—perhaps here as elsewhere I always had a taste for Christian boys. Mystics like Jacob Boehme drew me, but uneasily, as half on the road to art and artists like Blake. In the French attitude what I had found was what the world had long recognized as a perfect agar in which critique could nourish endlessly: the spirit of rational inquiry, in a religious temperament. It was my air. I too wanted to lay my life on a line.

But did I want that same air for art?

English after all was my language and spirit. Once past Spenser, or midway in Shakespeare, the air turns Protestant. Since Dr. Johnson, a large part of literary talk had been just that—talk, coffee-house common-sensical, with heaven around the corner in Grub Street. Then had come the message of Matthew Arnold’s muscular speeches—we must cope—then Ruskin’s sentimentality of the chaste, and Pater’s watered-down Marcus Aurelius—a whole silly-season of flowers set in a dry sink. Shaw had been a journalist, D.H. Lawrence a bitter heckler; though coping was glorious at times, nothing I saw in English criticism matched the high, tonally fixed seriousness of the French. But the language itself was a fountain to be leaned upon, not formless but forming—always literally more words in it than French, looser, more open to change, yet not as heavy-spawning as German. A fine wool of a language, English, to which cockle-burrs can cling, yet which still has the watercolor vowels and voice-syrups of a Romance tongue. Its writers of the twentieth century have leaned on it like a rationale. And I with them. It suited what we like to think is our lawlessness.

Yet somewhere is a thought-continuum we too yearn for and must have. Nowadays the phrase “He’s a renaissance man” is slang. Said not as if we are the forceful owners of a world on the way to knowing everything, but like men who wish that all knowledge once again was one. Or that one man—each—could have a “universal” portion of it. We think of Goethe, the poet-dramatist and novelist of Elective Affinities who could also discover the intermaxillary bone in man and quarrel with Newton over their theories of light, as able to do this, aside from his gifts, only because he lived at a time when the intellectual life could be the size of a duke’s court, under smaller astronomies than we shall see again. But because knowledge is “larger” now, and no part of the world is sealed to it, must this be the end of seeing the connection of art, philosophy, and yes, science—as real as they ever were in that smaller continuum? Surely the closer interconnection of the physical world is telling us otherwise. In death and life.

I begin to see that agnosticism is a pale life unless, like any other religion, it is lived. Because I broke through the egg at the chickhole marked Art, doesn’t preclude a temperament as religious as the churched, or an inquiry as rational as—the rational. In my work, it begins to seem to me, I am no longer the “novelist” or “short-story writer” which the American mode likes to have me. Nor even a writer only, though for passports and pickpockets that will do. I am the thing being written at the time. I am this one, now.

Going back over one’s work, one can see from earliest times certain para-forms emerging. If one is crazy, these are idées fixes; if one is sane these are systemic views. A mind is not given but makes itself, out of whatever is at hand and sticking-tape—and is not a private possession, but an offering. Every “essay” I had ever written was in effect a way of telling what was offered to whom. I had always had to write everything, no matter the subject, as if my life depended on it. Of course—it does.

My father once gave me a fine sled, a Flexible Flyer. Though he’d often seen me ride bellywhopper on the old one, now for some reason, perhaps because I was a girl, he knotted two thick ropes through the steering wing of the new sled, one to the hole in each side. Once he had done this, I took to sliding down our steep hill sitting up holding the reins—which earned me the jeering name “High Coachman.” I persisted. I liked the view.

About the same time, the Irish “Director” (an actor I imagine) whom the Mt. Neboh Sunday School hired every year to stage its elaborate children’s musical, had a chat with my mother. As a fair ballet student since I was six, I was trying out for the star part—and for the blue spotlight on the rose-sequined tutu. Poor man, he couldn’t tell her that my long ten-year-old bones and solemn face, plus a certain soft-shoe expertise I had concealed from her and the ballet-mistress, made me a cinch for the comedy trick—or that the other part was always slated for the President of the Congregation’s little blond cuddly. “Why do they all want the classic stuff!” he said, clutching his bald spot. “When she can tapdance to hellandgone!”

So now and then I say a funny thing in the forum. I have since learned how serious the comedy trick can be. But my taste for the High Coachman view remains.

This then is my vita. I have no light words.

But outside the “work,” the words turn different, differently.

Anti-criticism is the one great dialectic tradition within which an artist can afford to be. Men who go to war for their convictions too often become the monster they meet.

Yet, in art, surely one doesn’t fight the human soldier but the killer-process? Surely no one critic is digne enough to be the great enemy. And the killer-spirit may invade from anywhere. In the arts, nowadays it seems not to come huge on all fours, breathing false flame from fine nostrils. Rather, it tends to inhabit small, wan people, bilious with desolation, whose demon keeps them building matchstick bridges across the bloody flux.

In anti-criticism, I begin to see there are only two causes for going to war:

The proposed or predicted “death” of an art, or of some part of it. The setting up of “boundaries” which an art “must” have.

Neither of these propositions understands the very nature of art. The nature of the killer-spirit is that it will always find a dead art, or a caged one, more examinable.

Anti-criticism has therefore only two positives:

Art has no law-and-order per se—being a way to it. In art, death does not die—is not a dying.

During my first teaching year, I was asked to inaugurate a series of lectures on the novel to be given by experts in their fields: Leon Edel on James, James Clifford on Pamela, etc. It was suggested I speak on the novel generally. “But I haven’t yet written one!” I stammered. That didn’t seem to be a prerequisite.

I spoke from the one point of view I thought I could contribute—a writer’s. My tone—which struck the note for all work of this kind I would do later—was personal. For a writer, the editorial “we” is a falsehood. We have only “I.”

I often wonder why people are always being so much more solicitous about the novel, than of other forms of literary expression—always giving out greatly exaggerated rumors of its death, always rushing to resuscitate it, somewhat in the way worthy matrons used to rush hot soup to that rather deplorable family at the end of the town. Meanwhile, look around you. Poets are often still reduced to reading each other; Broadway is always complaining about the dearth of good plays, yet no one ever seriously proclaims the death of either drama or verse. No, the truth of the matter is that the novel has only lately become respectable, worthy of being talked about in the universities. The kind of people who in their hearts still believe that “real” knowledge can’t reside in the specious world of the imagination, who will pay lip service to poetry and drama because these have been going on long enough to have anthropological value—(you know: the kind of man who would be ashamed to say aloud that he never reads a poem or sees a play, but who tells you virtuously that he “has no time for novels”)—these people sometimes manage to make us feel that the novel, like that deplorable family, might, for its own good, be better dead. The truth of the matter is that the novel is as protean as any other form of expression. Like them, it does die sometimes—but, take heart—only, like them, when it becomes too respectable, in being the thing done at that time. Then lo, one day another changeling is found under a cabbage leaf somewhere—in Dublin or in Mississippi. …

I’d like to tell about some particular novels and what I got from them at certain times.

One of the first things we are told is that novels are useful as an accessory to history. By this people usually mean that when we read a novel written in a vanished era, or retrospectively about it, we can acquire, and painlessly too, first a mass of concrete data on how people lived in those days—the cut of their clothes and their manners, the slant of their architecture, the cadence of their speech—and secondly, a much more amorphous mass of data known as the “spirit of the age.” The first kind of data, the concrete, might be thought of as the “Did they or did they not have bathrooms, and what kind?” department—certainly it would be for our era—the second kind of data, the “What did they say to themselves in the mirror when they were shaving”—that is, in the event that they shaved. The first category I won’t belabor; certainly novels do provide a great deal of such material, in my mind, although the account books and all the other minutiae that people leave behind them do this in more detail, and although the novel—and this is important—always provides such material “by the way.” The second category—the “spirit of the age” and how a novel interprets that, bears more explanation and examination. For the fact is that novels, good novels, are not accessory to history but in themselves a very special kind of history, in which the people always take precedence over the era. Such novels don’t tell us how people lived and thought, but how some people did so, and—as it happened—at a certain time. They do give us the spirit of the age, but only as subsidiary to the “spirit of human beings.” No doubt this is why certain people regard novels as untrustworthy.

The truth is that a good novel, like any work of art, is not an accessory to anything. It stands alone. For two reasons. First—it is an artistic attempt as opposed to an inclusive one; it abstracts from the world to compose a world of its own; it does not attempt to give all the facts but the pattern of some of them. Second—no matter how deceptively objective in method, the novel always has a stance. It is rooted in the peculiar semantics of a special kind of mind—one sensitive to the overtones of facts and to the overtones of people—and to the odd sonorities produced when these two combine. Its comments on the history of human beings are always, in the highest sense, prejudicial—no doubt why I regard them as so trustworthy.

I might say a word here about modern so-called “historical” novels, and about the special dissatisfaction I get from them. By this I mean the novel not written in a past era, or fairly close to it—within say two or three generations—but the novel which goes back an untouchable distance to recreate an era that the author can know only through other people’s facts and other people’s books. Some time ago, when a friend gave me for comment his new “historical” novel—one that had taken four years of research, and in the writing of which I knew there would be considerable ability, I accepted it with a sinking feeling and protected myself by saying, “You mustn’t mind in case I don’t enthuse; I’ve a blind spot somewhere, or else my standards are inexcusably lofty—anyway, about the only historical novels I want to read are War and Peace, Henry Esmond, and The Virginians.” He looked at me blankly and said: “But of course they aren’t really historical. The Napoleonic wars were only 25 years before Tolstoi was born, and as for Thackeray—the period is only background for the people!” And of course he was right—it was I who was confused.

But I think I know now why the modern “historical” novel, no matter how exquisitely recreative of detail, usually sets my teeth on edge in some indefinable way. It is because this kind of novel is almost always an accessory to history—the era takes precedence over the people. Therefore the novelist, not being concerned primarily with his characters, cannot really imagine the truth about them as people—they remain lay figures, however beautifully reanimated and dressed. Such novels also violate those other tenets of which I have spoken. In them, the writer doesn’t venture to compose a world out of the flux close to him, but plumps for a world already long since composed for him. Thus he tends not to use freely his own sense of proportion; his canvas is at once enormously wide and tempting—think of all that wonderfully available material; how can one leave any of it out?—and at the same time his choices, set within limits not imposed by himself, do not have the tension of suspense—because, after all, history tells us things did turn out a certain way. Above all, he can’t use, except retrospectively, the superb struggle of values still under question. No, his era becomes his hero, either in itself or in some post hoc analogy with ours, and that is not enough for me. I am very prejudiced. I think novels should end up in the libraries, not begin in them. That’s why I look blank when someone says, “Ah, you’re researching, are you?”

Yet, nevertheless, all novels worthy of serious study are in their sense historical. In that respect, they attempt a number of daring things, although all of these may not be present in one novel. First, the novel attempts to write the story of a person or a group of persons. Whether it is their inner or their outer story, or some combination thereof, varies with the literary fashions and predilections of both the writer and his day. Sometimes a novel tries only to particularize these individuals, so that they live for us. At other times, it may also so generalize these individuals that, no matter what their “period” is, we identify with them—we recognize some continuity in the human psyche that we and they share. For isn’t it a peculiar fact that although we make many formal surface protestations over our inability to “change human nature,” at heart we love to see its very sameness explored? We love to see the old striations picked over again, reassembled in the light of another mind. The process entertains and instructs us with our own foibles, sometimes it comforts us—“there, but for the grace of God, go I,” and sometimes it inspires us—“there, in the grace of human beings, I go too.”

And, because no individual can be totally divorced from his situation in time and circumstance, the novel, sometimes inadvertently but more often not, gives a picture of his period. A great novel often does all three: the individual story, the human identification, the era. Parenthetically, the great subject of the novel in our day is the relationship of the individual to his time—to political time, dimensional or psychological time, to “no time left.” But no matter how the focus of the novel shifts, no matter what subject it prefers in one decade or another, it shares, with poetry and drama, the great advantage of all art over the assemblage of literal fact. It makes use of the fact, in any or all assemblages of them, but it dares beyond the fact. Like all art, the novel’s obligation to reality is obscure. It can therefore be more real than real.

Let me tell you briefly about four novels. I did not choose them because they are necessarily great ones, or because they clearly contain one or more of the elements of which I have spoken—any good novel does. In fact, I thought I had chosen them at random, out of the genial but practical impulse which leads us to press a book on a person, saying “Read this. You must read this”—and which has caused me to buy copies of these four rather often. Purposely, these are novels written well in the past. You know all about the others. These have settled down; they have perspective or in one case are ignored. They span almost exactly one hundred years. After I chose them I saw that, if taken chronologically, they do show certain changes in the focus of the novel. Since, also quite by accident, they happen to be respectively English, Russian, Italian and American, they show, by chance in a comparative sense, that enormous versatility which causes some to say that the novel is the art-form of the middle class, and causes others to question whether it can strictly be called a form at all. I cannot synopsize these books for you, because no good piece of fiction can be in any very useful way; I can only say what I perhaps might if I were lending you them.

There is a certain book that, if there were still any desert islands to be shipwrecked on, I would hope to have with me at the time. First, frankly, because of the company—it has so much of it. It has two heroines, one blond and gentle, of the pretty sort that dark women like to think of as ninnies, and one dark, fiery and ve-ery slightly masculine—of the type the gentle ones like to call “bluestocking.” Its heroes are two also—brothers, Robert, a mill-owner, tradesman, Whig, an unromantic man of action who “seems unconscious that his features are fine,” and Louis, the tutor, the seeming misanthrope, who really has a “quiet, out of the way humor”—one of the typical hommes fatales of nineteenth-century novels—those gentlemen whose attractive morbidity proceeds from the possession of qualities superior to their station in life. I leave it to you to guess which of the four marries who. In addition to these, the large cast includes three comic curates, three spinsters, two rectors, a country squire, a pompous baronet and a modest one, a mischievous scamp of fourteen and several other charming children, various supernumeraries drawn from village life, etc.

This is a novel full of that coziness which the psychological novel has lost, a novel truly crammed with the furniture of daily living. Reading it is like walking into a series of genre pictures, into parlors, salons, kitchens, schoolrooms, and yet, because it was written in 1849 and is set in three towns in the West Riding of Yorkshire, it is pervaded too by those great secondary characteristics of nineteenth century English romanticism—the wind and the weather. Its plot is of the period, an entirely un-selfconscious blend of melodrama and sociological observation in which there is a mystery of parentage for one heroine and the dread risk of hydrophobia for the other; yet, underlying these, one of the most solid representations we have of England at the time of the industrial revolution—the period when the woolen trade was suffering from the effects of the Orders in Council, the wars of 1812 and the riots of the workers over the introduction of new machinery. The novel has humor too, high comedy and low, that its author intended; second, for us, the unconscious humor that we now find in those stilted mores of the emotions that we have learned to call Victorian. It has everything.

It remains only to tell you what the name of the book is: it was written by a woman who was born in 1816 and died in 1855; it is of course Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, to my mind a book grossly neglected in favor of Jane Eyre, and I send you off to it without further ado, stopping only to quote its first line—one of the most enchanting beginnings I know—“Of late years, an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England.”

We come now to one of the great novels of the world—as I say that, I always find myself thinking what a singular treasure one has when one is able to say such a thing almost without thinking, without question. Criticism is a defensive procedure, beset with the never quite submerged antics of the ego, for in judging we know full well that we judge ourselves. But on those occasions when we meet a truly great work of art and can subscribe to it fully, then judgment quite literally rests. By this I mean that such a meeting rests us—we find ourselves suddenly in that area which is below ego and above fashion, where, unutterably relieved, we can declare for the absolute. We are surprised by the lasting. We’ve been muddling along with the transitory; we are suddenly suspended in what is sure. It is no less difficult to talk about, however.

I first read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons when I was about seventeen; I was reading it in the family living room where my father was also sitting quietly reading, and when I finished the next but last chapter, which tells of the death of the medical student Bazarov, in the house of his parents, I found myself crying hard, openly, in a way that I had never before cried over a book—and perhaps not since—and I sneaked out of the room so that my father would not see. At the time I no doubt cried partly because the death of the young and untried is peculiarly affecting to those who are the same, who perhaps have already imagined themselves on a similar bier. And partly, I suppose, because Bazarov, the nihilist who denied filial love even while he suffered from it, had something to say to me; although I did not see, as an older person might, that his nihilism was only that of the young, I recognized the suffering. No doubt I thought too that I would have loved and understood him, as Madame Odintsov, whom he loved, had not. I was later to see otherwise, that their tragedy was that they had understood each other, and had parted for this, not for the lack of it.

But, to return to that living room, I often wonder now, in the way that we like to rearrange the past, of what conversation would have ensued if my father had caught me sneaking away, and if I had handed him the book, saying: “Read it. And explain to me. Why am I crying?” For the simple and eternal subject of this book, set down with the Russian genius for depicting the concrete in the terms of the illimitable, is this: two generations, and the gaps and ties that lie between them—between the older, rebels passé, who have settled with life, and younger revolutionaries with the short future of revolutionaries, who think they will not settle. And how this has gone on, two by two, and will go on, two by two. And how, in Turgenev’s mind, it perhaps does not go on in vain.

About seventeen years later I re-read the book, and was shocked to see all I had missed in it. “I read too much too young,” I thought to myself. I think otherwise now. Such books should be read first when one is young enough to care without quite knowing why, and again during those smart years when one thinks one knows why one once did care, and again—and this I look forward to—when one is too old not to care, and not to know why. Meanwhile, every time I re-read Fathers and Sons—I did so again in order to be able to talk to you about it—I see something I missed before, and I do not expect ever to read it without doing so.

Let me tell you, briefly, what it concerns. Nicholas Petrovich is awaiting his son Arcadi, who has just graduated from the university and is bringing home for a visit his friend Bazarov, son of a retired doctor, and himself a medical student. Arcadi, a sweet and simple young man who “loved nature although he did not dare avow it” and is doomed by his admiration of Bazarov, the brilliant disciple of scientific materialism pushed to the nth, who believes, or thinks he believes this: “I do not believe it at all necessary to know each individual in particular. … Moral maladies spring from a bad education, from the absurd condition of our social law. Reform society and you will have no more of them … in a society well-organized it will be all the same whether a man is stupid or intelligent, bad or good.” “A good chemist is twenty times more useful than a good poet.”

Arcadi is ashamed to let his friend see the depth of his love for his own father. The two friends visit Bazarov’s parents, and there we see that Bazarov also has not been able to quench his family feelings—his tenderness toward the worth and the foibles of his father, his inability to be harsh to the simple, doting attentions of his mother. Meanwhile, we see the two fathers, good fellows, not really old—Nicholas P. is still in his middle forties—but both of them retired to those compromises that individual lives sooner or later make. Arcadi’s father, full of vague, well-intentioned efforts to manage his farm under the recent rulings which have freed the serfs, is abashed before the sweeping theories of the young men; Vasili, Bazarov’s father, retired from practice, but still doctoring, is outmoded in his son’s eyes. The sad timidity of the fathers before their critic sons, their sense of failure, of compromise, of not yet being, wholly negligible—and this complicated with an insistent love of their critics; opposite them the young men, bent on changing the world, despising their elders for their abdication from it, unaware that they themselves hold the ovum of compromise—and this all complicated with a love for those whom their theories teach them to despise—all this Turgenev does in the round, as the whole novel, separate its facets as we may, does. Do not think that I do it any sort of justice here.

The action of the novel occurs entirely in the series of visits paid by the young men; on one of these, to the house of Mme. Odintsov, Bazarov falls in love and “recognized with a sombre indignation that romanticism had gained on himself.” Mme. Odintsov, beautiful, rich, has, after certain difficulties, attained her defenses, and means to keep them; for her “tranquility is better than anything.” She is one of those subtle people who choose the expedient thing even while they are well aware of what they lose by doing so. In the account of their love affair, as in the account of the fathers and sons, we hear, with the same extra-sensory perception with which we hear it beneath the concrete action of all great fiction, the sound of the mills of the gods grinding. Here it is the sound of what people must give up, or will give up—in favor of what they cannot give up. But I am way ahead of myself. That happens to be what I saw in last week’s re-reading.

What I saw in the second reading was entirely different. It was then, say 1948; by then, a whole generation of students, locked like me in the ivory towers of literature had had to become “politically conscious.” And I saw with amazement that I had entirely missed seeing the extent to which this is a novel of political and social ideas. Perhaps I may be excused for this because, as with the “historical” novel, I had been trained by this time to think of the “political” novel as a separate entity, where the people were always pastiche to the ideas. Whereas, in the 19th century Russian novel, although the air is political, the garden is political, and social argument streams through the Russian temperament like arterial blood—man as a human animal underwrites it all. Fathers and Sons takes place during the era of reforms that began with the accession of Alexander, when the serfs were freed, the peasants allowed to pay for land and given courts of justice—you may remember the reference in the first paragraph of the book, to the domestic, “a servant of the new generation of progress.” Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches played an important role in bringing about these reforms, for which he later was punished, and his portrait of Bazarov so outraged his friends that he went to live abroad. All his work is documentary in the narrow sense as well as the large. Yet I had been so interested in the people, it had all seemed so natural, that I had hardly noticed. As I have said, this is a great novel.

But, during those years over here after the iron curtain fell, when people wondered what the Russians were like now, when later one heard it surmised that the Russians were still Byzantine, still Slavophile, still in fact Russian, I often wondered why the knowledge that censorship denied us was not more sought in those books that ignore frontiers, in a book like this, where the author can say, in a casual aside: “The city of X, to which the two friends went, had for governor a man still young, at once progressive and despotic, as so many are in Russia.” Or where Bazarov can say of “Liberals”; “You gentlemen cannot go beyond a generous indignation … or resignation, things which do not mean much. You think you are great men, you think yourself at the pinnacle of human perfection when you have ceased to beat your servants, and we, we ask only to fight with one another and to beat. Our dust reddens your eyes, our mire soils you; you admire yourselves complacently; you take pleasure in reproaching yourself; all that bores us; we have other things to do than to admire or reproach ourselves; we must have other men broken at the wheel.” Does that sound familiar?

Later on I saw many other things in this book. Once, when I was reading another favorite, James’ The Bostonians, I thought suddenly of Eudoxia Kukshin in the Turgenev book, the emancipated woman, and of how Turgenev had done, in ten hilarious pages, so much of what James had done in 378. And I thought of Turgenev’s portrait of Anna, Bazarov’s mother, the simple, household woman, whom he has set down forever in two pages of short sentences bright as silk, in a way that James, for all his long and marvelous respirations, perhaps could not do. Still later when, having become a writer, I was reading with a certain professionalism, more aware of trade-secrets, as it were, I saw how Paul, Arcadi’s uncle, the frustrated elegant of whom Bazarov says “his nails might be sent to the Exhibition,” a man who in a lesser book would be made to say all the properly wrong things that would conform him to type, is here made to step out of character now and then, to speak on the side of the angels, to say some of the right things that make him a man. Bazarov, of course, does speak in a straight “line”; the secret here is that while he does so, we watch him feeling in another.

But the story must end. Bazarov returns to live in his father’s house and help him doctor; he contracts a surgical infection from an autopsy on a typhus patient, and dies—untried.

And now I shall have to reverse myself. I’ve been telling you that novels are neither political tracts nor historical ones, are stories of individuals, not eras, and I am now about to tell you of two modern novels, one of which began as a political tract, and another, in which an era—ours just past—is the true subject. But “modern” means in part a “reversal.” And, as I have said, the novel is a protean form. If it won’t remain consistent, there is no reason why I should.

I was in Rome during the spring elections of 1953. The city, with almost every building plastered from roof-line to pavement with election posters, looked like an enormous mosaic. Almost all the posters had that wonderful Italian versatility of design and color, and many of my American friends were making collections of them. This was the period of McCarthy at home; it came uncomfortably to us to admit that the Communist posters were by far the handsomest and had the most effective slogans. A friend and I were sitting in his car, parked off the Piazza del Populo, looking at some of them. My friend was an Englishman, a Catholic who had spent some of his boyhood in Italy, had worked with British Intelligence there during the war, and was now a critic and editor specializing in Italian literature. We were looking at one poster that had a photo of a banquet table surrounded by members of ducal or princely families—one was a Torlonia. The name of each man was printed over his head, and beneath the photo there was a list of figures, enumerating the taxes each of the men should by law have paid, and the actual smaller amounts each had paid. “Can one trust those figures?” I said. “Is this true?” My friend sighed. “Yes,” he said. “Unfortunately, there is no need to exaggerate them. You in America have wealthy men, but you cannot understand the kind of wealth a man can have here. None of your American millionaires is rich the way Torlonia is—in privilege, in land, and in human men.” Just then, a group of young boys and girls surrounded our car—it was not a pretentious one—and spat into it. After they had gone, and we had cleaned ourselves, my friend said: “I don’t suppose I can make you understand the basis for Communism here. I love southern Italy, yet I cannot bear to stay here long, because I know how the peasants have to live. I’m a Catholic, but if I stayed there for any length of time, I would have to become a Communist too. Not in any intellectual way, in theirs. And in spite of all that we all well know. But I don’t suppose you could understand.”

But I did understand, because I had read Silone’s Fontamara. Fontamara is a town in southern Italy, and this is a story of how Fascism and Communism came to that town, and of what was there before. It was written in 1930, probably when Silone was still a member of the Party, but although he may have begun it as a pamphleteer, he finished it as a novelist, and the reader does not have to know or subscribe to any Internationale except that of human beings in order to participate. What Silone has done is to show how some people have to live, and he has done it from the inside of the peasant mind, using the choral dignity of a people who have no written language. As he himself says, the story is “woven”; it is told by three people, as an old man, his wife and his son, each of them handing over the next chapter to another: “my wife will tell you what happened next”; “my son will tell you what happened next.” And they do. And you see. As Silone says in his preface: “… let each man tell his story in his own way.” Many years later it was reprinted, not long ago, in a revised version I did not read. It did not seem to me to need revision.

And as each man tells his story in his own way, we are beginning to see, perhaps without even having paused to note the great landmarks of Joyce and Proust, what a long way the novel has come. People are still its subject, but now it is people in the aggregate, almost in the mass, as if the individual no longer has enough weight to hold a story together, against the single all-face of the human condition. The arena has become more compelling than the gladiators—as it had in the Malraux novels. Or the novel takes to an old and tried way of handling men in the aggregate—to satire—to Orwellian returns to Erewhon and Gulliver’s Travels. Or in those novels which cling, however tenuously to the story of the individual, we see the powerful, nullifying mask of the real hero—our era, our “spirit of the age”—peering always over his shoulder. And then the novel perhaps tumbles toward essay.

In 1949, a novel called Do I Wake or Sleep appeared under the name of Isabel Bolton, a pseudonym. Since then she has published several others. All of them were written during her sixties or later, and all have a similar scheme—a tenuous, brittle plot, touched upon sometimes faintly, sometimes luridly, and always transmitted through the mind of one observer, who is always a woman looking back upon her past, out upon her world. All of the first three novels were set in New York—Do I Wake opened at the World’s Fair in 1939, just after Hitler entered the Sudetenland. What she did with the New York scene was to make it no longer a scene only, but a fusion of the sensations peculiar to a city strung upon the nerves of its inhabitants. She had a style that, like all the best, seemed fatally wedded to the meaning it carried, the one inseparable from the other. Its nearest antecedent was possibly Virginia Woolf, the Woolf of the last extraordinary novel, that ought to be better known—Between the Acts. Like Woolf, she used breathless, cumulative phrases, flashing with participles, whose almost wearing cadence seemed certain to topple, but built instead into sentences whose strange effect is to make the present, our present, constantly palpable. “But isn’t this poetry?” it was said, and the next instant—because a strong analytic intellect, prosaic enough when it wished, was working there—“But isn’t this essay?”

What this novel was, was an essay of the emotions—ours—the haunted esprit of our age, expressed by an intellect wedding itself constantly to the immediate, like some antenna, some thinking reed drawing together the vibrations in our air. So just as we had begun to tire of the narrow limits of the stream-of-consciousness “inner I—me,” this novelist took up the method again, with all its limits, but transposed the subject—to the inner “we.” Her characters were dangerously limited—they stood on a single premise; what drew the reader was the acuity with which he found phrased for him those very limits, that very premise which, as a citizen of our time, we all share. The writer seems to have caught for us, in her half lyrical, half philosophical net, the “we” of her era and of ours—that individual whose private self appears to be shrinking in the face of all the mass-media obligations and terrors of his public one. It was one of the earliest novels of this type, over here. Now we are all too well acquainted with them; many a novel may be named for one man, but he seems to speak in the voice of the aggregate, as a prancing symbol of what we think we are. I think that too will change.

And so, the novel goes on. In fancy, I lend you these four. Each of them says to you what Turgenev remarks that little Feniitchka, the mistress of Nicholas Petrovitch, seemed to say when she became respectable: “Excuse me, I am not here for nothing.”