I cannot recall who described Britain and America as two nations divided by a common language, but the epigram matches very concisely why the literatures of these two countries afford a uniquely rewarding opportunity for comparative study. The current orthodoxy on the differences between English and American fiction may be found in such books as Richard Chase’s The American Novel and Its Tradition. According to Chase, the English novel is “notable for its great practical sanity, its powerful engrossing composition of wide ranges of experience into a moral centrality and equability of judgment.” It is, characteristically, realistic in its depiction of life, “middlebrow” in intellectual temper and, naturally enough in view of the society out of which it grew, preoccupied with “manners.”
The American fictional imagination, on the other hand, “has been stirred by the aesthetic possibilities of radical forms of alienation, contradiction and disorder.” It has assimilated, precariously, to the novel form the conventions of romance, and manifests “an assumed freedom from the ordinary novelistic requirements of verisimilitude, development and continuity, a tendency towards melodrama and idyl, a more or less formal abstractness and, on the other hand, a tendency to plunge into the underside of consciousness, a willingness to abandon moral questions or to ignore the spectacle of man in society, or to consider these things only indirectly or abstractly.” In brief, the American novel, though lacking the solidity, poise and completeness of the English novel, is more daring, and goes deeper into the human condition.
Another way of distinguishing between English and American fiction, which runs sometimes alongside, sometimes athwart Chase’s scheme, is by reference to language and I propose to devote my remarks to this side of the question. I believe it is widely recognized that in fiction, as in poetry, America offers more achievement and excitement today than England. And certainly one reason for this is that American writers seem to be trying to do more with their medium, which is language.
Linguistic interpretations of the American literary tradition are customarily centered on the idea of the American vernacular as a source of literary vitality. Whereas Chase’s tradition begins with James Fenimore Cooper’s stilted, but mythically suggestive tales of the wilderness, in the vernacular scheme the American novel comes of age with Mark Twain (notorious critic of Cooper), who in Huck Finn found a voice, non-literary yet articulate—even poetic, tough yet tender, humorous yet troubled, a voice which expressed the American experience. Ernest Hemmingway formulated this reading of American fiction (in which he himself occupies a key position) when he said “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”
Unfortunately the American vernacular has served, on occasion, as the rallying cry for a certain literary nationalism or isolationism. That is, from time to time American writers who eschewed the vernacular—like Henry James—are brought before the bar of a kind of literary Un-American Activities Committee and found guilty of treason. Such criticism is a legacy of the revolt against the Genteel Tradition at the turn of the century, and obscures the real significance of the vernacular. As Mark Twain first employed it, the vernacular is a vital element in American fiction. But it is not in itself enough to define the American fictional achievement, and its influence has been more than American.
Consider these three passages:
- You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr Mark Twain and he told the truth, mainly.
- If you really want to know about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of trap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
- As soon as I got to Borstal they made me a long-distance cross-country runner. I suppose they thought I was just the build for it because I was long and skinny for my age (and still am) and in any case I didn’t mind it too much, to tell you the truth, because running had always been made much of in my family, especially running away from the police.
The first two quotations are, of course, the opening lines of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The connections between them are obvious, and have been frequently pointed out. But the connections between them and the third quotation, which is the opening of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959) by the young British writer Alan Sillitoe, are equally obvious. Allowing for the differences of speech determined by period and locale, all three passages adopt the same tone, establishing a direct, informal, conversational relationship between the narrator and the reader (“you”). All three exploit loose or “incorrect” grammar to subtle rhetorical effect, characteristically by adding to the end of a statement an unexpected qualification (Huck’s “mainly,” Holden’s “but I don’t feel like going into it,” the runner’s “especially running away from the police”) that disconcerts yet delights us by its candor. All three, interestingly, revoke “truth” with deceptive casualness. In the face of adult incomprehension and adult evil, these youthful heroes are inventive and resourceful liars—but not to the reader: they are passionately concerned to find—and state—the truth. For this purpose the vernacular monologue is an ideal narrative method.
But the method has obvious limitations. The use of the first person necessarily excludes more than one perspective on events, while the use of the vernacular severely restricts the vocabulary and hence the expressive possibilities open to the writer. The above-mentioned writers get round that by using situational irony and the comments of other characters to evaluate their heroes, and by discreetly highlighting the vernacular speech on occasion, but their freedom for maneuver of this kind is limited, and all successful attempts in this genre have the quality of a tour de force. Certain lands of novelistic undertaking require either richer imagistic resources than those afforded by the vernacular, or a wider perspective than that afforded by the first person, or both.
The Indecorous Americana
What I have been discussing is, in literary parlance, “decorum”: that is, the adjustment of style to subject, to the narrator and to the latter’s assumed relationship to his audience. The interesting thing about American literature is that the vernacular monologue is virtually the only literary form in which decorum in this traditional sense is preserved. As soon as he leaves this mode, the American writer seems to be in a void of literary conventions, obliged to make up his own rules as he goes along. This may be observed by comparing Melville or Hawthorne with any major English novelist of the nineteenth century—Jane Austen, or Dickens, or George Eliot. The English novelists create and sustain their own distinctive authorial voices which give unity of form and feeling to their versions of experience, and persuade the reader to accept their validity. It may be an anonymous voice, but it is strongly charged with personality: urbane or energetic, jolly or meditative. It is always civilized and reliable. The reader knows where he is.
It is quite otherwise with the American writers. Melville threshes about in the literary conventions as wildly as his own white whale. The identifiable, if mysterious, narrator who begins the story of Moby Dick fades gradually from view, and his function is taken over by an impersonal and omniscient narrator. The jocular, yarn-spinnlng style of the early chapters shifts into passages of prophetic declamation, Shakespearian pastiche, poetic lyricism, and discursive prose. Narrative alternates with dramatic dialogue, soliloquy and learned digression.
Hawthorne, though concerned, as Melville seems not to be, to cultivate an even and harmomious narrative tone, is scarcely less disconcerting. What he gives with one hand he seems to take away with the other. The supernatural is qualified by the skeptical, the symbolic by the literal. He keeps an anxious, wary eye on the reader. He takes a long time to warm up, but is given to effects of startling compression. His style is so highly polished it is almost painful. We can never relax in his presence.
One might speculate that literary decorum is not unconnected with social decorum in the ordinary sense of the word, and that the ease with which the English novelists find and sustain an appropriate tone owes something to the existence in England of a subtle and complex code of manners, understood and accepted by all, for which America has no equivalent. Similarly, American writing in the vernacular style may be interpreted as a rejection of attempts to import an alien code of manners rote America. Its use of “low” and vulgar language, while preserving literary decorum, commonly draws protests from sections of the community committed to upholding conservative European standards of social decorum.
The American writer, then, is outside the vernacular monologue, fundamentally unsure about how to address himself to his subject and to his audience. As a result, he tends to fuse and combine modes of discourse—the prosaic, the lyrical, the satiric, the sentimental, the colloquial, the archaic, and the discursive— which in European literature are kept in separate compartments. To state it most simply the American writer puts words together which, according to the canons of traditional literary decorum, just don’t belong together. This can be most conveniently illustrated from poetry. “Who goes there? Hankering, gross, mystical, nude? / How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?”
One cannot imagine any English poet of the nineteenth century, including Hopkins, arranging that disturbing collocation of adjectives at the end of the first line, or springing that disconcerting question, an inch away from bathos, in the second Whitman’s lines have a distinctly modern ring, and when we consider that the modern poetic revolution in the English language was led by two Americans—T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound—we may appreciate that the American writer’s relative freedom from traditionalism canons of literary decorum brings with it tremendous advantages as well as disadvantages, particularly when it comes to the treatment of twentieth-century experience. This has been as true in fiction as in poetry.
If we apply Chase’s descriptive distinction to twentieth-century fiction, we find it fits the American novel well enough, but the English novel not so well. The “powerful engrossing composition of wide ranges of experience into a normal centrality and equability of judgment” is essentially a characteristic of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, and its performance depended upon a way of life which, while fluid enough to be interesting, was also stable enough for the novelist to assume that he held in common with his audience essentially the same views on morals, metaphysics and society. Hence the ease with which the Victorian novelist sustained a tone that mingled a relaxed familiarity with a wise omniscience. He addressed himself to “the common reader,” confident that such a person existed.
The twentieth century affords no such conditions, nor such confidence. The common reader, who never existed in America, is now, in England, only a ghost haunting book jackets. The modern novelist is conscious not of community, but of isolation, if not alienation. The experience he contemplates is fragmentary, disordered, subversive of the old certainties. This situation calls for a new kind of literary decorum, a decorum of indecorum, a bursting of the molds of obsolete conventions, that yet avoids dissipating its energy in a welter of disconnected and contradictory effects.
The modern novelists may be judged by the success with which they have confronted this challenge. To me, the supreme example of success is Joyce’s Ulysses, where language plays magically over the commonplace so as to stretch its significance to infinite dimensions, without, however, violating its value as the commonplace. Among other major novelists, Conrad projected his vision of the times in tales of adventure and melodrama overlaid with brooding philosophic skepticism and rich symbolic pattern, Virginia Woolf made the impossibility of communication her subject, D. H. Lawrence mingled the realistic and the visionary with a grand disdain for novelistic convention. Almost alone, E. M. Forster managed, precariously, to adapt the authorial manner of the nineteenth century to the matter of the twentieth. The novelists, like Galsworthy and Bennett, who went on writing as if nothing had happened, have not survived.
I am talking about the period of the “experimental” novel. But in America the novel had always been experimental, always groping, in profound uncertainty about its status and its audience, for new forms of expression with which to articulate baffling experience. Hence the language of modern American fiction—Hemingway’s cunning manipulation of the simplest syntax and diction, Fitzgerald’s lyricism so daringly expended upon the trivial and evanescent, Faulkner’s torrential rhetoric, flecked with colloquialism—constituted less of a break with “tradition” than equivalent experiments in Europe—may indeed have been made possible by the absence of such a tradition.
The modern movement in literature seems to have lost much of its impetus. We are no longer living among giants. The contrast, however, is more striking in England than in America. In England we seem to be slipping back into old exhausted decorums, reverting to a Victorian technique based on a shallow or cynical assumption that class, material success and sexual behavior still adequately contain the realities of existence. Style is all too well adjusted to the superficial view. English life being, on the surface, rather fiat, dull and stuffy, we are producing a lot of novels written in flat, dull and stuffy prose. Leaving aside Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, who belong to an intermediate period I have not had space to touch on, the most interesting novelists we have are William Golding, who obtains poetic license by only obliquely treating contemporary life, and Kingsley Amis, who makes comic capital out of the impoverishment of the contemporary English imagination. Otherwise only vernacular monologues, based on American models, relieve the monotony.
In America, however, it is still possible to sense that Joyce is a living influence. John Updike can make a golf shot into an epiphany, Bernard Malamud can treat the life of a baseball player, and J. F. Powers the life of a Catholic priest, in terms of Arthurian myth, Salinger can invest the apparatus of modern urban life with a strange significance, even blessedness. John Hawkes can turn a ride on a Greyhound bus into a macabre nightmare. These writers, in short, use language to slice deep into experience, not merely to pare the surface.
I am not suggesting that contemporary American novelists have solved all their problems. The lack of any tradition of literary decorum is still a liability as well as an asset. In those writers associated particularly with The New Yorker, the effort to submit the roughness and multiplicity of their material to the discipline of a measured and exact prose sometimes produces an effect of tortured preciousness, of strained urbanity, reminiscent of Hawthorne at his least happy moments. In what one might call the hipster wing of the American literary scene, embracing the Beats, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, et al, the traditional American indifference to decorum only encourages the fallacy that passionate commitment can compensate for formal incoherence, that “anything goes.”
Saul Bellow’s Herzog seems to me very representative of the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary American fiction. Whereas in British fiction today vitality seems to be exclusive to the uncouth, Herzog is alive and civilized, sensual and bookish. Bellow’s nervously energetic prose, ransacking every level of contemporary English from slang to philosophical terminology, conveys a forceful impression of the multiplicity of modern consciousness, in which the sense of private and public crisis, of beauty mingled with squalor, of tenderness snatched out of horror, of tragedy wobbling on the brink of the absurd, are simultaneously present. This density of impression is felt particularly in the many superlative descriptions of Herzog’s responses to the urban scene. But in the end one feels that Bellow overreaches himself, tries to make his hero bear the weight of too much meaning—or too much explicit meaning. In a very characteristically American way he seems impatient with the restraints of novelistic convention, and his urgent need to make his message heard and felt spills over into passages of unassimilated philosophizing.
Bellow strains, through bold metaphor and racy idiom, to make Herzog the vehicle for large generalizations about the plight of modern man. But the “ideas” remain ideas, with rather awkward demands upon our assent as ideas, and are not extensions of Herzog’s character, and the effort to make Herzog measure up to their universality of reference betrays Bellow into a certain verbal excess, a desperate squandering bordering at times on incoherence of words. Bellow is not so much presenting his hero to the reader as colluding with his hero to impress the reader.
I am not enlisting in the currently fashionable pursuit of knocking Herzog because it is a popular success. The kind of flaw I find in it seems to me to run through a great deal of American literature and to be almost inseparable from what is vital in it. Certainly one must prefer a “failure” like Herzog to most “successes” in contemporary British fiction.
