SHOULD NOVELS ARGUE?

SHOULD NOVELS ARGUE?

Date: January 18, 1981
MARY McCARTHY'S new book transcribes the Northcliffe Lectures she gave some months ago at University College, London. Her main argument is that the classic novel in the 19th century grew up and grew strong upon ideas and arguments provoked by public issues, politics, religion - the questions of Free Trade, Empire, women, Reform and so forth. It was assumed that a serious novel would deal with such questions in their bearing upon the themes of power, money, sex and class. The novelist's relation to his readers was sustained by a shared assumption that these matters constituted reality. Miss McCarthy believes that this assumption was undermined by Henry James, and that James's sense of the novel has dominated the general understanding of fiction from that day to this. She argues that in the typical Jamesian fiction ideas, concepts and public issues are mostly replaced by images, hints, guesses, sensations, nuances of sensibility. James's characters, she says, are mostly interested in themselves and in one another, not in anything as external as Free Trade. They visit art galleries, but they never argue about the pictures they have seen.
Text:
According to Miss McCarthy, the damage James did in practice was given currency and respectability by T.S. Eliot's theories: It was Eliot who praised James for having ''a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.'' Eliot's influence was such that readers started thinking that ideas are crude things, good enough for journalism but not for a work of art. The serious novelist in our own day, Miss McCarthy argues, is discouraged from dealing with ideas or from making debate and argument an important part of his fiction. A few Jewish novelists, including Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, have demanded the right ''to juggle ideas in full view of the public,'' but this right ''is never conceded to us goys.''
Miss McCarthy's thesis is not convincing. James did not banish ideas from the novel. His novels ''The Bostonians,'' ''The Princess Casamassima'' and several other of his fictions are full of ideas and relentless in debating them. It is true that James was never content merely to represent an argument as if its interest consisted solely in the nature of the ideas deployed; he always insisted that ideas are vivid when they become motives in the person who holds them and lives by  them. His interest in ideas was not in their intrinsic quality, but in the part they played in the imagined lives of his characters. Miss McCarthy finds it odd that in James's ''The Spoils of Poynton'' we are not told in any detail what the furniture is like or why it is valuable, although the entire novel turns upon a quarrel over its possession. This seems to me beside the point: What divides the several characters is not the market value of Poynton and its furnishings but their different relations to these things, differences of taste and appreciation.
But even if it could be shown that James tried to disqualify ideas as constituents of the novel, it would still be clear that he failed. Miss McCarthy thinks that he closed off some of the most vital possibilities of fiction by excluding ideas; but in fact James did not prevent Proust, Joyce, Mann, Lawrence or Forster from writing novels in which ideas and the arguments they provoke are important matters. Miss McCarthy tries to enforce some distinction between ''the novel of ideas'' and ''the novel of images.'' The distinction is unreal. There is no such thing as ''the novel of images,'' for it is impossible to sustain a narrative simply by moving from one image to another - and Miss McCarthy produces no examples as proof. Such categories have more to do with theory than with actual novels, but there is some merit in countering Miss McCarthy's argument by noting that ideas and arguments are incorporated with little or no fuss in many contemporary novels. Think of novels by Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Solzhenitsyn, Mailer, Styron, Updike, Pynchon, V.S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch. Indeed, the more one thinks of Miss McCarthy's thesis, the more bizarre it appears; almost as weird as that extraordinary remark about Jews and goys. Who are those readers who have denied to gentile novelists the argumentative rights given to their Jewish colleagues?
But even if the proposed distinction between the novel of ideas and the novel of images is unreal, it is still useful to Miss McCarthy if she is mainly interested in defending the kind of fiction she has written. I think whatever verve ''Ideas and the Novel'' has arises mostly from that consideration. As an account of the 19th-century novel, or even of the presence of ideas in it, the book is not persuasive. Miss McCarthy has some fine things to say about ''Les Miserables,'' especially about Jean Valjean's conscience as a dialogue. But her exposition of the larger subject is fragmentary and eccentric. The book becomes interesting not in its bearing upon the official theme, but in its relation to Miss McCarthy's own fiction, especially to ''A Charmed Life'' and ''The Company She Keeps.'' Her later fiction has received a pretty cool response. Is it the case that it has been ill-received precisely because it is, according to Miss McCarthy's enforced distinction, fiction of ideas?
Miss McCarthy's 1973 novel ''Birds of America'' began with a quoted epigraph: ''To attempt to embody the Idea in an example, as one might embody the wise man in a novel, is unseemly. ...''
I don't recognize the quotation; but no matter. ''Birds of America'' made yet another attempt to embody an Idea, and to show ideas in circulation, like Miss McCarthy's Peter rattling around Europe, a few chapters in Paris, a few in Rome, wherever he can find people willing to argue about democracy, Communism, the C.I.A., the Sistine Chapel or Hanoi. This is the kind of fiction Miss McCarthy likes to write and many people, evidently, like to read. Where then is the problem?
I think it is to be located in Miss McCarthy, and not elsewhere. She seems to feel that seriously-minded critics of the novel have taken James and Eliot at their word and have conspired to put a low value upon the novel of ideas. She believes, however, that civilization will be saved, if saved at all, only by the force of ideas. This belief was more widespread in the years immediately after World War II than it is today. Such writers as Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv and Miss McCarthy believed that the novel was one of the best means of showing how contingency may be converted into thought, and thought into action. The problem was to distinguish between good thought and bad thought, good ideas and bad ideas; and then to make the good prevail. ''Ideas and the Novel'' issues from the same context of feeling. Miss McCarthy's implication is that ideas are having a hard time and that, so long as this state of affairs persists, civilization can't be saved.
But the case is not as simple as that. Miss McCarthy distinguishes between good ideas and bad, but she does not admit that even a good and true idea may go stale and die. Or rather, she has forgotten the fact. In her essay on Flaubert's ''Madame Bovary,'' reprinted in ''The Writing on the Wall,'' she noted that for Flaubert ''all ideas become trite as soon as somebody expresses them,'' and that this applies ''indifferently to good ideas and bad.'' An idea may begin full of life and spirit but by repetition it is delivered into a dictionary of idees re,cues, as Miss McCarthy noted, ''borrowed ideas and stock sentiments which circulate tritely among the population.'' It is curious that Miss McCarthy accepted the dismal fate of ideas when she wrote about Flaubert, but now, writing from other needs, has persuaded herself that it may be ignored or transcended. She still thinks of ideas as valued objects, social treasures currently held in low repute: She assumes that the mind has a privileged relation to ideas and that it cannot survive without that relation. These assumptions remain, however, unexamined. ''Ideas and the Novel'' takes its own ideas on faith and is consequently diminished.

 Denis Donoghue is the Henry James Professor of Letters at New York University. His new book, ''Ferocious Alphabets,'' will appear this winter.

MM & VS West

Ideas and the Novel: Dostoevsky’s ‘The Possessed’ Mary McCarthy

Ideas and the Novel: Dostoevsky’s ‘The Possessed’

Mary McCarthy

You could say that Crime and Punishment was a novel about the difference between theory and practice. Well, if you were a philistine, you could. The Possessed, too, deals with ideas and their execution. It does so on a wider scale, yet without any such reassuring conclusion. In the earlier book, there was just one theory, Raskolnikov’s, which he fails to prove, owing to his own half-heartedness in applying it – an indication of a possible weakness in the theory itself. In The Possessed, there is a whole band of theorists, each possessed by a doctrinaire idea, and a whole innocent Russian town to practise on. But in the outcome there is no divergence between idea and reality: in most cases theory and practice have fused, which is what makes the novel so frightening. The exception is the superannuated old liberal, Stepan Trofimovich, an idealist in his writings and something more abject in his daily conduct, who naturally holds no terrors for his fellow citizens.

It is possible to see Crime and Punishment as a prophecy of The Possessed. There is the seed of a terrorist in Raskolnikov, which cannot come to fruit since he lacks a prime essential: organisation. He is isolated, and his having a devoted mother and sister who bring out the ‘good’ in him makes him feel all the more cut off. He appears to believe in socialism, yet his only friend, the former student Razumikhin, is a conservative and disquietingly thick with functionaries of the law. A minor figure, Lebeziatnikov, is lumped together with Raskolnikov by a spiteful person as one of a pair of ‘notorious infidels, agitators and atheists’. Lebeziatnikov, who keeps talking about a commune and regards Sonia’s being forced into prostitution as ‘a vigorous protest against the organisation of society’, is certainly a socialist, but Raskolnikov, who has no time for idiots, consistently gives him a very wide berth. He is reserved, proud and unsociable, and despite his boldness in theory, never had any plan to commit more than a single murder (the second was unplanned and regretted), obviously not a chain of crimes. A final liability is the difficulty he has in making up his mind.

In The Possessed, all these deficiencies are made up. There is determination in Pyotr Verkhovensky, an organising gift, complete absence of scruple. He thinks large, in sweeping arcs, not one faltering step at a time. He is highly sociable, almost convivial, has no pride; when we first meet him, he is described as ‘an ordinary young man, very lively and free in his manners but nothing special in him’. He is constantly paying visits in the town’s highest circles, but he has other calls to make too. At the direction of a mysterious ‘Committee’ somewhere abroad, he has set up a ‘quintet’ of inconspicuous citizens, each and all inhabited by ideas. These obscure men are chords he knows how to strike at the right moment in a revolutionary overture of his own authorship. The ideas that possess them can be turned to his purposes regardless of intellectual sympathy or pooling for a common aim. Making up the ‘quintet’ are five one-track minds bent on different versions of revolutionary doctrine, but for the purpose their divergences do not matter, any more than those between the first violin and the kettle-drum. The important thing is that each instrument know its cue. And they can function as instruments in Pyotr Verkhovensky’s diabolical concert because each has merged with an idea: they are ideas, so to speak, without ties to anything material, which might serve as a deterrent. Self-persuaded, they need no persuasion. As incarnate ideas, they have lost the power of thought, which may seem paradoxical till you reflect on it. These ordinary men, including fathers of families, have turned into syllogisms, and a syllogism cannot think but can merely go from A to B to C by a rigid track of inference.

The devils of the Russian title are not the quintet, nor Kirilov, nor the young ensign, Erkel. The devils are the ideas in possession of them that have made them into automata. The only demon is Verkhovensky, who believes in nothing, has no ideas or principles. If he is an Idea, which I wonder about, it is an idea without specific content – a principle devoted (but not dedicated) to destruction. Dedication is not his style.

He is aware of a lack in himself, which is why he turns to Stavrogin. The nucleus needs a centre, and he himself cannot be that, for he is not within but without – a manipulator and strategist. The Byronic figure of the young nobleman appeals to him. His remarkable mask-like beauty, as of Death-in-Life, almost casts him for the central role in Pyotr Stepanovich’s Apocalypse. Or, to put it in more practical terms, from what Pyotr has heard of his exploits in the town he perceives that he can find a use for him: Stavrogin may be able to supply the charisma that is wanting, the seductive spark of the inhuman. Pyotr himself is inhuman enough, but on a lower level of being, as he is aware. He is infernal but cold, sharp, precise, business-like. The very fact that he is greedy to make use of Stavrogin, once the possibility has occurred to him, is typical of the economics of his mind. ‘You will be the leader, I will be your secretary,’ he tells him at one point, showing as concise a grasp as Stalin’s of where the levers of power in revolutionary politics lie. And later, in great excitement: ‘You are the leader, you are the sun and I am your worm.’ It is no shock to see him fawning, but his excited state would be quite out of character if he were not carried away by the vision of what he cando with Stavrogin.

Verkhovensky can find a use for everything – not just the enigmatic vagaries of Stavrogin, but every failing, every tic, in the community. These are handles he can coolly pull to initiate action, and the ideas of the quintet, which resemble tics, are among the handles he has practised with. There is the theory of Shigalyov, a man with long ears like a donkey’s and a philosophy of despair to match: his final gloomy solution of the social question is ‘the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths.’ There is the thought of the miserly Liputin, a domestic despot and Fourierist who believes in the ‘social harmony’ and gloats at night over visions of a future phalanstery: he has come to the conclusion that, as the necessary massacre of 100 million persons would take no less than thirty to fifty years to achieve, maybe emigration is the answer.

These two are adherents of Verkhovensky’s quintet, but he has many other instruments in the town, sometimes unknown to themselves – for example, the provincial governor’s wife, Yulia Mikhailovna, who has become so enamoured of the new ideas she imbibes from him that she has virtually converted her salon into a revolutionary cell, arousing jealousy in the other ladies. There is Kirilov, a disciple of Feuerbach and believer in a new man-god, who has resolved to commit suicide in order to free other men from the superstitious fear of death. This could not suit Pyotr’s hand better, since Kirilov gladly agrees to donate his suicide to the cause, leaving the time of it for Pyotr to fix. It will be timed just right to cover the murder of the brooding Slavophil Shatov, who has broken with the ‘Society’ and whose execution as a spy has been voted by the quintet.

Fedka, the convict, no social idealist, is another of Pyotr’s agents. His need of a passport enrolls him initially, and a gift of money assures his following through. With Stavrogin’s tacit consent, he will murder a drunkard posing as an army captain, who has got tired of distributing leaflets for the cause, and the fellow’s demented crippled sister, whom Stavrogin has secretly married. Even before this, Fedka will undertake another commission: to rob and desecrate an especially venerated icon, with a confederate – no ordinary criminal but a quintet member, who will commit the ultimate blasphemy of placing a live mouse in it. Coming on top of other indignities, this outrage leads to the district governor’s having a nervous breakdown and leaving town for Switzerland. But before his nervous illness is recognised and he is deprived of his functions, this mild bureaucrat has had some striking factory-workers flogged – an error the town will pay dear for.

The fever of organisation is such that there is no act that does not lead to something else. Sometimes the hand of Verkhovensky is discernible; sometimes not. The vanity of the writer Karmazinov leads him to pronounce an absurd farewell to his public, entitled ‘Merci’, at the benefit fête for the governesses of the province, and this oration is a contributing cause of the general disorderly uproar that evening, which leads to fires being set. We know that Pyotr did not suggest the topic of the oration – indeed, having been shown the text, he remembers the title as ‘Bonjour.’ Yet we feel that he was somehow behind the governesses’ fête – did he slyly urge the charitable idea on Yulia Mikhailovna? – and behind the invitation to Karmazinov, who has already demonstrated what a fool he will be on the platform by his excited, approving interest in the manifestos that are circulating through the town. And who was the guiding spirit in the benefit committee’s decision – catastrophic – not to serve a buffet lunch and champagne to ticket-holders?

There is a terrible sequentiality in all this as in ‘The house that Jack built’. Events pile up, and every slender straw thrown on the heap is arsonous. The town is tinder, ready to ignite at a touch. Of course this is mainly the work of Pyotr Stepanovich, who has prepared the ground. Yet there are times when the alarming incidents seem to have their source in some indefinable larger causality. Moreover, such implacable sequiturs are not usual in Dostoevsky, where normally there is room for the arbitrary, the non-sequitur. Here the only non-sequitur is the unexpected arrival of Shatov’s wife, and this is also the only episode that has no effect on things to come. It is as though the reasoning process going on in the characters’ heads had been copied by outward events, which seem to be obeying Aristotelian logic with never an undistributed middle term. The implacable sequiturs may be comical, too, since the chain of logic, inevitably, is made up of both large beads and small beads, so that if an end-result is a very small bead – the governor in a Swiss rest-home – it is grotesquely out of proportion with the horrors that had led up to it.

Much of this appearance of logic is due to the device of the supposedly objective narrator used here by Dostoevsky. In Crime and Punishment, the reader was mostly inside Raskolnikov, listening to his thoughts. In The Possessed – with the exception of the suppressed chapter, ‘Stavrogin’s Confession’ – everything is told from the outside, by a gossipy young friend of Stepan Trofimovich’s, who enjoys his confidence as well as that of the governor’s wife, so that he is well placed to tell what went on. He draws no moral conclusions, not being qualified to serve as the author’s representative: he simply and somewhat excitedly reports, as though ‘filling in’ some visitor who had missed out on that momentous period ‘among us’. The events are related from hindsight, as he has pieced them together looking back and verifying where he can. And, like anything seen from hindsight, they fit into a clear sequence of cause and effect – the opposite of what we experience with Raskolnikov, whose perspective is toward the future, hence still open-ended. Moreover, the narrator of The Possessed, in the interests of historical accuracy, feels obliged not to leave out any detail that might complete the picture. Since he is not quite confident, even looking backward, of being able to distinguish what was important from what was unimportant, we get that comical mixture, typical of gossip, of the relevant and the irrelevant. The mountains are confused with the valleys; the whole moral landscape is obligingly flattened for our inspection.

This unconsciousness of scale on the part of the narrator is one of the delights of the novel. We understand that we can trust his veracity but not always his judgment; some of the opinions he utters echo in our minds more loudly than he seems to expect. For instance, the well-known passage in the introductory chapter: ‘At one time it was reported about the town that our little circle was a hotbed of nihilism, profligacy and godlessness, and the rumour gained more and more strength. And yet we did nothing but engage in the most harmless, agreeable, typically Russian, light-hearted liberal chatter.’ He is referring to the circle around old Stepan Trofimovich and is saying considerably more than he is aware of saying. To Dostoevsky’s mind, the little circle, in the last analysis, has been pretty much what rumour said, while maintaining a double screen of illusion about itself. Its members are less dangerous than they generally like to think (here the narrator is right), but more dangerous in their frivolity than he is capable of knowing. In lightly dismissing their talk as harmless, he shows an obliviousness of real consequences that marks him for Dostoevsky as a typical unthinking liberal. The circle of idle chatterers around Stepan Trofimovich was dangerous because it prepared the way for the hyperactive circles that sprang up on the cleared ground.

There is no doubt that Dostoevsky meant to pass a stern judgment when he made the ‘harmless’ old liberal the father of Pyotr Stepanovich and the former tutor of Stavrogin. The devils that were loosed on the community were incubated in that muddled, innocent brain, which when put the question cannot even say unequivocally whether or not it believes in God: ‘I can’t understand why they make me out an infidel here. I believe in God, mais distinguons. I believe in Him as a Being who is conscious of Himself in me only ... As for Christianity, for all my genuine respect for it ... I am more of an antique pagan, like the great Goethe ... ’ Liberalism is the father of nihilism; it is only a step to Kirilov and his ruling idea of the man-god, and Kirilov at least has the manhood – or godhood – to act on his crazed conviction.

The town was ‘ready’ for Pyotr Stepanovich and his quintet, which was only the inner circle of activists. There was a less clearly defined outer circle – possibly there were several concentric ones – of adherents to a secret organisation referred to as ‘the Society’. And a proof of the town’s ‘readiness’ to catch fire was that there were people in it who did not know whether they were members or not. Long after the scare had died down, an elderly Councillor, wearing the decoration of the Stanislas Order, came forward and confessed that for three months he had been under the influence of the International: unable to produce evidence for the claim, he insisted that ‘he had felt it in all his feelings.’ Earlier, at the height of the strange affair, the quaking Stepan Trofimovich, who has undergone a police search of his rooms, is queried suddenly by the narrator: ‘Stepan Trofimovich, tell me as a friend ... do you belong to some secret society or not?’... ‘That depends, voyez-vous.’ ‘How do you mean, “it depends”?’ ‘When with one’s whole heart one is an adherent of progress ... who can answer it? You may suppose that you don’t belong, and suddenly it turns out that you do ... ’ In his uncertainty, which fear and pompous vanity make a half-certainty, he is convinced that he is going to be taken ‘in a cart’ to Siberia. The chosen few of the nihilist inner circle are, on the whole, uncompromising in their positions, but those who are outside and somewhat envious (i.e. virtually the entire educated population) behave vis-à-vis the terrorists with the wildest inconsistency. Stepan Trofimovich professes to abhor his son’s activities – and maybe he does – yet the narrator learns that on his premises the police have found two manifestos. ‘Manifestos!’ cries the narrator. ‘Do you mean to say you ...’ ‘Oh, ten were left here,’ the old man answers with vexation.

Rumour and imagination, naturally, add fuel to the fire that the devils have set. In fact, it is a question whether Pyotr’s vast organisation is not largely imaginary, an idea in his mind. This is Stavrogin’s suspicion. It has occurred to him more than once that Pyotr is mad, and Pyotr’s worship of him, which he finds repulsive, seems to decide the issue. That happens at a peculiar moment, when Verkhovensky finally articulates a credo. He has been saying that he is a scoundrel and not a socialist. ‘But the people must believe that we know what we are after ... We will proclaim destruction ... Well, and there will be an upheaval! There’s going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before ... the earth will weep for its old gods .... Well, then we shall bring forward ... whom? ... Ivan the Tsarevich. You! You!’ After a minute, Stavrogin understands: ‘A pretender? ... So that’s your plan at last!’ He himself is slated to be the pretender. ‘In this we have a force, and what a force! ... the whole gimcrack show will fall to the ground, and then we shall consider how to build up an edifice of stone. For the first time! We are going to build it, we, and only we!’ ‘Madness,’ answers Stavrogin. A few minutes later, Verkhovensky, pretty much back to normal, is offering to have Stavrogin’s wife murdered free of charge. This comes as a relief. It had been almost a disappointment to find that he had a ‘positive’ side, a ‘constructive’ side, after all.

I am willing to accept that Verkhovensky is mad, Stavrogin, the child-violator, is mad, the quintet is mad, Kirilov is mad, and that among the founding members of the local ‘Society’ not even Shatov is sane. A clinical finding to that effect would not greatly alter our understanding of the novel. Possession by an idea is a common form of insanity. But did the entire community go temporarily mad – the governor’s wife, the governor, Stepan Trofimovich’s protectress, who broke with him because he had not kept her abreast of the new ideas, the old gentleman who was sure that he had been under the influence of the Socialist International for ‘fully’ three months? That, too, is not out of harmony, I think, with the impression Dostoevsky wanted to make. The fact that the whole pathological episode, if that is what it was, is viewed from the outside, as though offered to a clinician for judgment, is surely meant to suggest that. As is known, the story was originally planned as a satire on liberal and nihilist ideas, and much that is satirical survives in the final version: the grotesque members of the ‘quintet’, the governor and his wife, Stepan Trofimovich and his domineering sympathiser, the landowner Varvara Petrovna, ‘a tall, yellow bony woman with an extremely long face, suggestive of a horse’. To picture the new ideas as a virulent illness attacking a body politic is a classical strategy on the part of a satirist, and the course of the disease is represented here in what often seems a dry, mock-medical vein: predisposing conditions, first symptoms, onset (Stavrogin biting the governor’s ear), temporary remission, aggravated symptoms, spread to other parts of the body, subsidence, final recovery.

Once the figures of Stavrogin, Kirilov and Shatov were developed – they must have been present in germ from the outset – a gloomy religious element began to suffuse the novel, which up to then one could imagine as a sort of Russian Headlong Hall, with perfectibilians, deteriorationists, status-quo-ites contentedly discoursing while Squire Headlong-Stavrogin set a charge of dynamite to his property. Stavrogin, Kirilov and Shatov brought suffering – unacceptable to satire – into the tale. Not a ray of comedy falls on them, and yet by a miracle, which I think is effected through the ‘redemption’ of Stepan Trofimovich, the antagonistic elements are able to co-exist, the satiric metaphor and something like a Slavophil myth of the Passion.

The loosing of the devils yielded a total of five murders, two suicides, one death-by-manslaughter, one death as a result of exposure (Stepan Trofimovich), two other related deaths, the burning-down of a considerable area of the town, general damage to property. Pyotr Stepanovich, the author of it all, escapes as though in a cloud of brimstone, by taking the train to Petersburg.

It is clear that Dostoevsky stood in awe of the power of ideas. The most fearful, evidently, in his eyes were socialistic ideas with their humanitarian tinge. And here at any rate he could speak from experience: his having belonged to a group – the Petrashevsky circle – that engaged in discussions of utopian socialism had taken him to Siberia and nearly to the firing-squad. Yet this experience, he believed, had not only taught him a lesson in the ordinary sense (‘Stay out of discussion groups’), but had brought about a spiritual rebirth. His dread of the power of ideas combined with a fatal attraction to them; like so many Russian writers then and now, he was drawn to ideas as if to a potent drug. In Geneva, long after he had returned, a new man, from Siberia, he could not resist going to hear Bakunin expound his theories, and he expressed disappointment that Bakunin was not more constructive. In Dostoevsky, ideas may lead those they fasten on to extreme suffering, but they can also be bringers of redemption, the one in fact leading to the other, as had happened in his own case.

Moreover, once an idea has possessed Dostoevsky, he seldom lets it drop but continues to examine it from all sides, at the risk of a certain monotony. Thus Raskolnikov’s All-is-permitted theory peeps through at intervals in The Possessed: it is Stavrogin who expounds it in his atrocious practice but also in words. As a ‘prince’, he has given the ‘No barriers’ concept an aesthetic twist, almost a cool-headed twirl. ‘Is it true,’ Shatov asks him, seemingly much worried, ‘that you declared you saw no distinction in beauty between some brutal obscene action and any great exploit, even the sacrifice of life for the good of humanity?’ Stavrogin does not reply.

It is curious to turn from all this dark questioning to the homely English novel of the same time. George Eliot was a great moral writer, but no character in her novels, however thoughtful, would be asking a question like that of another character. It is not that she would have shrunk from such a phrase as ‘for the good of humanity’: she thought a great deal about our suffering race and clearly felt that it was her duty to devote her professional life to serving it. Besides, she had an interest in theories of socialism and was perfectly familiar with abstract thought. With her competence in French and German, she must have read many of the same books that Dostoevsky read. But the kind of questions her characters put to themselves and to each other, though sometimes lofty, never cast doubt on basic principles such as the notion of betterment or the inviolability of the moral law. Unlike the great novels of the Continent, the English novel is seldom searching, at any rate not on the plane of articulated thought.

I doubt, for instance, that it could ever have occurred to George Eliot to wonder about the validity of mental activity in itself. She could not have pictured ideas as baleful or at best equivocal forces. About the worst ideas can do, in her view, is to encourage a tendency towards headstrongness in a heroine. We see this in Middlemarch with Dorothea Brooke, whose determination to be the helpmeet of Mr Casaubon springs from a fixed longing of her brain. ‘It would be like marrying Pascal,’ she says to herself. ‘I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by.’ But it is all a mistake, as with Emma’s obstinate plans for Harriet in Jane Austen’s novel. Mr Casaubon is no Pascal; his ‘Key to All Mythologies’, to which Dorothea plans to devote her young energies, is a figment of his fussy, elderly brain, an ‘idea’ he once had for a multi-volume work which is simply gathering dust in his head. In a sense, this, likeEmma, is an education novel: Dorothea has finally grown up when she learns to stop asking her husband about the progress he is making on his master work.

Among George Eliot’s novels, the best place to look for an examination of ideas and their influence might be Felix Holt, the Radical. On the surface, this short novel has quite a lot in common with the novels I have been discussing in these lectures, especially Crime and Punishment and The Red and the Black. The hero is a Radical of independent mind. He comes from the lower middle class, is poor, indifferent to his dress, often proudly contemptuous in his manner, and ambitious, not for himself but for humanity or, more accurately, for the small part of it he knows. He wants them all and particularly Esther Lyon to be better than they are. He is angered by her reading-matter – Byron and Chateaubriand – by her ladylike ways and taste for fine gloves, all of which are proofs of shallowness. He is a reformer in the public sphere, too, who earnestly desires to improve the lot of working men and believes that the first step must be to win them from the slavery of drink through night and Sunday classes: without education, the working man cannot advance his cause. When we meet Felix, on the eve of a parliamentary election, he is deeply troubled by corrupt electoral practices: above all, the habit of treating in public houses. In short, he is a man of the Left with a number of stubborn ideas that unfit him for practical politics.

Though he is not a religious believer and despises ordinary conventions, he differs from a Raskolnikov in that he would not consider for an instant violating the moral law in order to benefit humanity. In fact, this is precisely what estranges him from the Radical politicians he encounters, who have easy consciences in such matters, accepting with a wink the prospect of violence – a little rough-and-tumble – for the ultimate good of defeating the Tory. Felix would never commit a murder, even in the abstract, turning it over in his mind as a theory. Yet in reality it happens to him to kill a man and to be tried and sentenced for it, though his intention was to halt a riot and the blow he struck was not meant to be mortal. Thus he joins the ranks of principled heroes of 19th-century fiction who end up on the wrong side of the law: Jean Valjean, Julien Sorel, Raskolnikov, Nekhludov in Resurrection, who joins the woman he has wronged – the prostitute Maslova – in the convict gang travelling to Siberia. No reflection, however, precedes the decision that leads Felix unintentionally to take a man’s life: an impulse, rather, rooted in his nature sends him to try to head off the riotous working men who will only damage their cause and other people’s property by a drunken spree of violence. In the style of so many other 19th-century ‘new men’, he has proudly announced, ‘I am a man of this generation,’ but what we find in his actions is a simple old-fashioned boy any mother could be proud of – a testimonial to right training.

‘If there’s anything our people want convincing of,’ he tells Esther Lyon when she comes to see him in prison, ‘it is, that there’s some dignity and happiness for a man other than changing his station.’ (By ‘our people’ he means his own class, the working people, not the English nation, I assume.) Of course, there is some truth in what he says, but it is a truth that discourages political action. Felix seems to be totally immune to his century, as though he had been vaccinated against the bug of equality. The novel, which ends with him out of jail and happily married (there is even a little Felix), has a lengthy appendix called ‘Address to Working Men’. There the author imagines Felix expounding his political philosophy to a working-class audience: ‘Now the only safe way by which society can be steadily improved ... is not by any attempt to do away directly with existing class distinctions and advantages, as if everybody would have the same sort of work, or lead the same sort of life ... but by the turning of Class Interests into Class Functions or duties.’ One is grateful for the knowledge that the address isimaginary, with the audience’s reaction mercifully unimagined.

Despite all her learning and her capacious intelligence, ideas for George Eliot are wholesome moral reflections: she does not seem to have suspected that they could possibly be anything but ‘improving’. Tolerance was her great virtue as a novelist: she always seeks to widen, to make common to all, emotions in her characters’ bosoms that the reader might be inclined to spurn any intimacy with. I take an example at random from Middlemarch, where the pious banker, Bulstrode, obliged to face his conscience, at once begins to dodge. ‘If this be hypocrisy,’ the author writes, ‘it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all.’ The effect of such reminders, page after page, is broadening: we are all made of the same stuff, we have to acknowledge. And, side by side with the injunction to look in the mirror, a general cure is suggested whose name is unselfishness. This is the single thought urged on us by her novels. It is stated explicitly over and over and driven home by telling examples. Mr Casaubon is selfish, Rosamond Vincy is selfish, her brother Fred is selfish, Tom Tulliver is selfish, Harold Transome is selfish, Esther Lyon starts out to be selfish but is saved in time by Felix Holt. On the other side of the ledger, Maggie Tulliver is unselfish, Mary Garth is unselfish, the Dissenting minister Rufus Lyon is a pillar of unselfishness, Dorothea Brooke is headstrong yet capable of self-sacrifice.

The limitations of this urgent central idea may explain why George Eliot’s ‘good’ characters are so unconvincing, even when she tries, as with Felix Holt and Will Ladislaw, to give them a rough edge that might make them complicated to know socially. Her selfish characters are far more persuasive since we are forced to recognise ourselves – or part of ourselves – in them. Thus the virtue of tolerance we are called on to exercise by this writer at her fullest and best has no work to do with the characters we are instructed to admire and to imitate. If George Eliot fails, even inMiddlemarch, to be a very great writer, this is, I think, because of an intellectual deficiency. The division of central characters into self-seeking and non-self-seeking is inadequate as a key to understanding. In Felix Holt, for example, it tells us nothing about the Radicalism that is presumably the subject of the story, and what we get is something strangely like a less ponderous, more charming Romola, in costumes of the post-Reform Bill period.

Dickens knew that an idea can be dangerous. Unlike George Eliot, he was familiar with the hold of abstractions on human flesh and blood; it is not surprising that Dostoevsky read him with eagerness and perhaps learned from him. Still, the incubus or succuba preying on Dickens’s people is usually nothing as clearly identifiable as a theory or concise programme. The great case to the contrary is Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times. From almost the first page, we see how the Utilitarian doctrines that have taken possession of his brain are blighting the natural life of his family, how they wither any hope of instruction in the model school he has set up in Coketown. Here he is in the schoolroom, lecturing the schoolmaster:

Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts ... Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts. This is the principle upon which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle upon which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!

Then: ‘Girl number twenty ... Give me your definition of a horse.’ Sissy Jupe is too frightened to say anything. ‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’

Mr Gradgrind’s close friend and business associate is Mr Bounderby, who has his ownidée fixe and global explanation: ‘The turtle soup and the gold spoon. And the venison.’ It is apparent that these two upholders of the social order are mad, just as mad as the terrorists of The Possessed. The reader is meant to understand that Gradgrind and Bounderby are dangerously insane and that at the same time they are perfectly normal – that is, that many other people share the maniacal ideas they express. Bounderby is a wicked bounder, but Gradgrind is not altogether a bad man: a philanthropist, even, according to his lights – he actually has girls in his school.

It seems odd at first glance that the idea that has got hold of Mr Gradgrind should be named by him ‘Facts’. The nature of an idea, surely, it to be abstract: i.e. the polar opposite of the concrete, of the plurality of facts, living and dead, each different from the next, that the world consists of. But we soon understand that Mr Gradgrind’s facts are peculiar, not like the ones we know. Here is a definition of a horse, given by a boy pupil, that he is able to commend: ‘Quadruped, Gramnivorous. Forty teeth, namely 24 grinders, four eye-teeth, and 12 incisors. Sheds coat in the spring, in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in the mouth.’ This sounds like the idea of a horse rather than the fact of a horse. It is as though a drawer labeled ‘Horse’ containing miscellaneous pieces of information, dried and filleted for better storage, had been obediently opened in the filing-cabinet that constitutes the star pupil’s mind. The dehydrated facts Mr Gradgrind favours add up to a fleshless abstraction – horse in general.

The reason for this curious taste of his is evident in his character: he insists on being in control. And here something of importance for my subject emerges. Ideas are utilitarian. They have a purpose. They are formed in consciousness with a regulatory aim, which is to gain control of the swarming minutiae of experience, give them order and direction. That is Mr Gradgrind to a T. He believes in education and the extension of knowledge. He wants to see laws formulated for every department of life that will push back the ever shrinking areas of ignorance, light up dark corners with modern illumination, keep the streets of the mind patrolled. In the interests of thoroughgoing enlightenment, he has forbidden the reading of ‘idle story-books’ in his house. ‘Idle imagination’, he and Bounderby have concluded, is the chief obstacle to the establishment of reason’s rule in the young.

Well, it is natural that he should be hostile to novels and natural, in turn, that the novel should be hostile to him, even when it happens that he is not a bad man and means well. If we take Mr Gradgrind as representing in caricatural form, not just his own Utilitarian school of thinking (based, after all, on the greatest good of the greatest number), but the mental faculty that is continuously active in formulating ideas, laws, generalisations, then we can look on the novel, which is wedded to minutiae, as his sworn enemy. All art, of course, objects to the continuously active Mr Gradgrind: but the novel is best armed to do battle with him, in that it appears to have one foot in his camp because of the mass of particulars, resembling his ‘Facts’, that it mobilises for its own purposes.

But it is a strange conflict, with long truces, and often looks like a mere family quarrel. I mean that the novelist’s effort – any artist’s effort – to impose shape and form on that mass of particulars while maintaining their distinctness has something in common with the mind’s will to absolute rule through the synthesising process. They are similar, but they are not the same. The artist’s concern (especially, I should say, the novelist’s) must be to save the particulars at all costs, even at the sacrifice of the perfection of the design. An idea cannot have loose ends, but a novel, I almost think, needs them. Nevertheless, there is enough in common for the novelist to feel, like Dostoevsky, the attraction of ideas while taking up arms against them – most often with the weapons of mockery.

We tend to suppose that most novelists take the field against particular ideas, like Dickens in Hard Times, that only a few – say, Tolstoy and Lawrence – show an innate angry suspicion of ideas per se, as though the tender living tissue in their care needed protection from the rampaging will to abstraction. Yet even in celebrated victories over specific sets of ideas (Voltaire’s disposal of Leibnitz in the person of Dr Pangloss – ‘If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?’; Orwell’s disposal of Stalinism – ‘All animals are equal but some are more equal than others’), there is a certain overkill, as though the work were being enjoyed for its own sake. I believe this is always the case, that the tension is always there, except where the novelist has never felt the fascination of ideas, and this, until our own time, has been rare.

I said just now that the novelist’s concern must be to save the particulars, and perhaps this needs a little explanation. Even when he shows vast social forces in motion (like Victor Hugo or Manzoni or Tolstoy), the novelist’s care is for individual destinies, and it seems to be proper to the novel that they should be small destinies. Not the kings and noblemen of the tragic theatre or the witty bloods of comedy but Renzo and Lucia, Tess, Jude, Stephen Blackpool, Felix and Esther, Cosette. None of these poor sparrows ‘fits’ into the overall social framework, and if they have a place in a larger scheme, it can only be God’s, which is unknowable: ‘The President of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess.’ Now the habit of concern for the small predisposes the novelist to distrust generalisation – to champion Dobbin against the gramnivorous quadruped. The position, however, is not simple. As we have seen, there appears to be an affinity between ideas and facts, both Mr Gradgrind’s kind and the other – that is, between the lofty and the very small – as though in the novel they grew together, like the red rose and the green briar in the ballad.

Besides, in the past, if the novelist’s mission to teach and improve inclined him to Mr Gradgrind’s side, his common sense – a highly necessary faculty for the novelist, which I have neglected to mention until now – and his powers of observation led him to despair of any recipes for improvement or else to fall back, like George Eliot, on simple housewifely stand-bys: Forget Self and Think of Others.

Today there is no longer a dilemma. Ideas are held not to belong in the novel: in the art of fiction we have progressed beyond such simplicities. The doctrine of progress in the arts is a hard doctrine, imposing itself even on those who are fervent non-believers. The artist is an imitative beast, and, being of my place and time, I cannot philosophise in a novel in the good old way, any more than I can write ‘We mortals’. A novel that has ideas in it stamps itself as dated: there is no escape from that law.

For a time, about twenty years ago, it looked as if there could be a compromise. Though an author of standing knew better than to put explicit ideas in his novels, they could be there implicitly, and the reader was allowed – as a student, even encouraged – to take them out. ‘What are Golding’s ideas in Lord of the Flies?’ ‘Is there a Manichean split in Faulkner’s The Wild Palms?’ Today all that is quite impermissible. What the author may not put in, the reader may not take out. There must be nothing said or hinted that is remotely subject to paraphrase. In the place of ideas, images still rule the roost, and Balzac’s distinction between the roman idéé and the roman imagé appears to have been prophetic, though his order of preference is reversed.

Nevertheless, there are a few back doors left through which ideas may be spirited in, and some talented authors have found them. One brilliant example was furnished by J.G. Farrell in The Siege of Krishnapur, a novel teeming with ideas that is set in India at the time of the Sepoy Mutiny and has an exciting plot as well. Farrell’s motto might have been stated thus: If because of ideas and other unfashionable components your novel is going to seem dated, don’t be alarmed – date it. The Singapore Grip – Farrell’s last novel, he was drowned this past summer – carries the principle on to the fall of Singapore in the Second World War: ideas, characters and setting have a distinct period flavour – that is, they are as solid as furniture and without any touch of camp. A more recent novel, John Updike’s The Coup, performs a rather similar feat, moving back, as it were, in time via geography: a ‘developing’ African country bristles with ideas, mainly in the head of its hero, a Western-educated native dictator who finishes, still reflective, in exile in the South of France. There was also Alison Lurie’s Only Children, set in the late Thirties with the ideas and life-styles of the period. In the USA, a special licence has always been granted to the Jewish novel, which is free to juggle ideas in full view of the public: Bellow, Malamud, Philip Roth still avail themselves of the right, which is never, never conceded to us goys. In concluding, I might mention an unnsual solution to the problem. This was Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an American story of a cross-country trip with philosophical interludes – one of the chief characters was named Phaedrus. Pirsig’s device was simple: he refrained, probably at a financial sacrifice, from calling his book a novel, and it was listed as a non-fiction title. If the novel is going to be revitalised, maybe more such emergency strategies will have to be employed to disarm and disorient reviewers and teachers of literature, who, as always, are the reader’s main foe.

                                                                              

Ideas and the Novel: Henry James and some others by Mary McCarthy

Ideas and the Novel: Henry James and some others

Mary McCarthy

‘He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’: T.S. Eliot writing of Henry James in the Little Review of August 1918. I want to take exception, not to the truth of Eliot’s pronouncement (he was right about James), but to the set of lofty assumptions calmly towering behind it.

The young Eliot’s epigram summed up with cutting brevity a creed that for Modernists appeared beyond dispute. Implicit in it is the snubbing notion, radical at the time but by now canon doctrine, of the novel as a fine art and of the novelist as an intelligence superior to mere intellect. In this patronising view, the intellect’s crude apparatus was capable only of formulating concepts, which then underwent the process of diffusion, so that by dint of repetition they fell within anybody’s reach. The final, cruel fate of an idea was to turn into an idée reçue. The power of the novelist, insofar as he was a supreme intelligence, was to free himself from the workload of commentary and simply, awesomely, to show: his creation was beyond paraphrase or reduction. As pure work of art, it stood beautifully apart, impervious to the dry rot affecting the brain’s constructions and to the welter of factuality.

Thus the separation was perceived as twofold. The reform programme for the novel – soon to be promulgated in a position-paper like Jacob’s Room (1922) – aimed at correcting, not only the errors of the old practitioners, who were prone to philosophise in their works, but also the Victorian ‘slice of life’ theory still admitted by Matthew Arnold, and later, permissive notions of the novel as a ‘spongy tract’ (Forster) or large loose bag into which anything would fit. Obviously novels of the old, discredited schools – the historical novel, the novel of adventure, the soap-box or pulpit novel – continued and continue to be written despite the lesson of the Master. Indeed, they make up a majority, now as before, but, having no recognised aesthetic willing to claim them, they tend to be treated by our critical authorities as marginal – examples of backwardness if they come from the East (Solzhenitsyn) or of deliberate archaising if they come from the West (say, Iris Murdoch). The pure novel, the quintessential novel, does not acknowledge any family relation with these distant branches. It is a formal, priestly exercise whose first great celebrant was James. The fact that there are no Jamesian novels being produced any more – if there ever were, apart from the Master’s own – does not alter the perspective. The Jamesian model remains a standard, an archetype, against which contemporary impurities and laxities are measured.

The importance of James lies not so much in his achievements as in the queerness of them. He did not broaden a way for his successors but closed nearly every exit as with hermetic sealing tape. It is undeniable that this American author, almost single-handed, invented a peculiar new kind of fiction, more refined, more stately, than anything known before, purged, to the limit of possibility, of the gross traditional elements of suspense, physical action, inventory, description of places and persons, apostrophe, moral teaching. When you think of James in the light of his predecessors, you are suddenly conscious of what is not there: battles, riots, tempests, sunrises, the sewers of Paris, crime, hunger, the plague, the scaffold, the clergy, but also minute particulars such as you find in Jane Austen – poor Miss Bates’s twice-baked apples, Mr Collins’s ‘Collins’, the comedy of the infinitely small. It cannot have been simply a class limitation, or a limitation of experience, that intimidated his pen. It was a resolve, very American, to scrape his sacred texts clean of the material factor. And it was no small task he laid on himself, since his novels, even more than most maybe, dealt with material concerns – property and money – and unrolled almost exclusively in the realm of the social, mundane by definition. Nevertheless, he succeeded, this American prodigy. He etherealised the novel beyond its wildest dreams and perhaps etherised it as well.

To take a pleasant example, he managed in The Spoils of Poynton to relate a story of a contest for possession of some furniture in immense detail without ever indicating except in the vaguest way what the desirable stuff was. We gather that quite a lot is French – Louis Quinze and Louis Seize are mentioned once each (‘the sweetest Louis Seize’) – but we also hear of Venetian velvet and of ‘a great Italian cabinet’ in the red room, though with no specifics of place, period, inlays, embossment, and of a little Spanish ivory crucifix. When you think of what Balzac would have done with the opportunity! Actually The Spoils of Poynton is a Balzacian drama done with the merest hints of props and stage setting. James’s strategy was to abstract the general noun, furniture, from the particulars of the individual pieces, also referred to as ‘things’. He gives us a universal which we can upholster according to our own taste and antiquarian knowledge. In short, he gives us an Idea. The Spoils of Poynton is not a novel about material tables and chairs: it is a novel about the possession and enjoyment of an immaterial Idea, which could be any old furniture, all old furniture, beautiful, ugly, or neither – it makes no difference, except that if it is ugly the struggle over it will be more ironic. James, however, is not an ironist; no Puritan can be. And the fact that with this novel we can supply ‘real’ tables and chairs from our own imagination makes The Spoils of Poynton, to my mind, more true to our common experience, hence more classic, than most of his fictions.

But that, for the moment, is beside the point. What I should like to bring out now is another peculiarity: that though James’s people endlessly discuss and analyse, they never discuss the subjects that people in society usually do. Above all, politics. It is not true that well-bred people avoid talk of politics. They cannot stay away from it. Outrage over public events that menace, or threaten to menace, their property and privilege has devolved on them by birthright (though it can also be acquired), and they cannot help sharing it when more than two meet, even in the presence of outsiders, which in fact seems to act as a stimulant. This has surely been so from earliest times, and James’s time was no exception, as we know from other sources. But from his fictions (forgetting The Princess Casamassima, where he mildly ventured into the arena), you could never guess that whispers – or shouts – ever burst out over the tea table regarding the need for a firm hand, for making an example of the ringleaders, what are things coming to, and so on. Dickens’s Mr Bounderby, although no gentleman, put the position in a nutshell with ‘the turtle soup and the gold spoon’ – his own blunt résumé of the trade-unionist’s unmistakable goals. As James’s people are constantly telling each other how intelligent they are, more subtlety than this might be expected of them, but we can only hope it. What were Adam Verver’s views on the great Free Trade debate, on woman suffrage, on child labour? We do not know. It is almost as if James wanted to protect his cherished creations from our knowledge of the banalities they would utter if he once let us overhear them speak freely.

Or let us try art. These people are travelled and worldly and often in a state of rapture over the museums and galleries they visit, the noble façades of mansions and dear quaint crockets of cathedrals. Yet they rarely come away from a morning of sightseeing with as much as a half-formed thought. They never dispute about what they have looked at, prefer one artist to another, hazard generalisations. In real life, they would certainly have had their ideas about the revolutions that were occurring in painting and sculpture. In Paris, if only out of curiosity, they would have rushed to seè the Salon des Indépendants. Wild horses could not have kept them away. A bold pair, armed with a letter from Lady Sackville or Isabella Stewart Gardner, might have penetrated Rodin’s studio. His bronze statue of Balzac in a dressing-gown, shown at the Salon des Beaux Arts, would already have led the travellers to take sides, some finding it disgusting and incomprehensible while others were calling it a ‘breakthrough’. What would they have made of the nude Victor Hugo in plaster in the Luxembourg Garden? Or ‘The Kiss’ (‘Rather too suggestive’?) in marble. Unfailingly, one would have heard judgments as to what was permissible and impermissible in art.

James himself, however unversed in politics he might have been, had no deficiency of art-appreciation. He wrote well and copiously about painting, sculpture and architecture. But not in his novels. There all is allusion and murmurous, indistinct evocation of objects and vistas, in comparison with which Whistler’s ‘Nocturne’ is a sharp-edge photograph.

In the novels, a taboo is operating – a taboo that enjoins him, like Psyche in the myth or Pandora or Mother Eve, to steer clear of forbidden areas on pain of losing his god-sent gift. The areas on which neither he nor his characters may touch are defined by the proximity of thought to their surface – thought visible, almost palpable, in nuggets or globules readily picked up by the vulgar. Art in other hands might have been such an area, but James took the risk – after all, it was his own great interest, and he dared make it the ruling passion of several of his figures – at the price, however, of treating it always by indirection, as a motive but never as a topic in itself. If you think of Proust, you will see the difference.

With religion and philosophy, though, James is as circumspect as he is with politics. As son and brother, he must often have heard these subjects earnestly discussed, which perhaps accounts for his dislike of ideas in general. Or was this only a sense, which grew on him as he sought to find his own way, that he must not trespass on father’s and brother’s hunting preserve? In any case, with the exception of The Bostonians – a middle-period extravagant comedy, which he came almost to disavow, full of cranks, cults, emancipated women, do-gooders, religious charlatanry – neither he nor his characters has a word to say on these matters, nor – it should go without saying – on science. With so much of the stuff of ordinary social intercourse ruled out, the Jamesian people by and large are reduced to a single theme: each other. As beings not given to long silences, who are never seen reading, not even a guidebook, that is what they are condemned to. Whenever a pair or a trio draws apart from the rest, it is to discuss and analyse and exclaim over an absent one – Milly or Maggie or Isabel. Yet here, too, there is a curious shortage of ideas of the kind you or I might formulate in discussing a friend. In their place are hints, soft wonderings, head-shakings, sentences hanging in the air; communication takes place between slow implication and swift inference: ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ The word ‘Wonderful!’ returns over and over as the best that can be said by way of a summing-up.

As James aged, his reticence, or the reticence he imposed on his surrogates, grew more ‘wonderful’ indeed. With The Wings of the Dove, we arrive at a heroine of whom we know only three things: that she is rich, red-haired and sick. She is clearly meant to be admirable, as we infer from the gasps and cries of the satellite figures around her: ‘Isn’t she superb?’ ‘Everything about you is a beauty,’ ‘beautiful’, ‘a dove’, ‘Oh you exquisite thing!’ But vulgar particulars are never supplied. As James himself observed in his Preface, ‘I go but a little way with the direct – that is with the straight exhibition of Milly; it resorts to relief, this process, whenever it can, to some kinder, some merciful indirection: all as if to approach her circuitously, deal with her at second hand, as an unspotted princess is ever dealt with ...’ And he continues: ‘All of which proceeds, obviously, from her painter’s tenderness of imagination about her, which reduces him to watching her, as it were, through the successive windows of other people’s interest in her.’

It is an extension of the method, of course, that worked so successfully in The Spoils of Poynton. There the ‘treasures’ had only to be called by that name two or three times, the astonished words ‘rare’, ‘precious’, ‘splendid’ to drop one by one from soft young lips, to convince the reader that ‘the nice old things’ were worth squabbling over, at least to those engaged in the squabble. But the moral splendour of a human being needs more demonstration than the museum quality of mobile property, at any rate in a novel. One can decide that the fuss being made about furniture is ridiculous or justified or a little of both, and, as I have been saying, it does not greatly matter which. It is unnecessary to fully sympathise with Mrs Gereth’s emotions to be amused by the lengths to which she will go in single combat, and in fact one senses James’s own moral reserve on her subject. But the fuss made over Milly Theale makes one irritably ask why, what is so admirable about her that cannot be named, unless it is just her money? Similar doubts may be felt about the Ververs, father and daughter, in The Golden Bowl.

Their creator’s reluctance to furnish them with identifiable traits that might let us ‘place’ them in real life has curious consequences for the principals of the late novels. These figures, one realises, must be accepted on faith, as ectoplasms emanating from an entranced author at his desk – in short, as ghostly abstractions, pale ideas – which explains, when you come to think of it, the fever of discussion they excite in the other characters. Those by comparison are solid. They have bodies and brains, however employed. Motives are allotted to them, such as plain curiosity (the Assinghams, Henrietta Stackpole) or money greed or sexual hunger (both seem to be working, though sometimes at cross-purposes, in Kate Croy, Merton Densher, Charlotte Slant), motives that give them a foot in the actual world. And if, despite their efforts, the principals evade definition, if, unlike furniture, they cannot be established as universals standing for a whole class of singulars, Milly and Maggie and Chad remain nonetheless ideas of a sort. That is, ideas, expelled by a majestic butler at the front door, return by another entrance and stand waiting pathetically to be dressed in words.

Before leaving James, hoist – if I am right – by his own petard, I want to ask whether his exclusion of ideas in the sense of mental concepts was connected or not with the exclusion of common factuality. The two are not necessarily related. Consider Thomas Love Peacock. There the ordinary stuff of life is swept away to make room for abstract speculation. That, and just that, is the joke. It tickles our funny-bone to meet the denizens of Nightmare Abbey – young Scythrop, the heir of the house, and Flosky, who has named his eldest son Emanuel after Kant, and Listless, up from London, complaining that Dante is growing fashionable. Each has his own bats in the belfry; there is a bad smell of midnight oil in the derelict medieval structure, where practical affairs are neglected for the necromancy of ‘synthetical reasoning’. In hearty, plain-man style (which is partly a simulation), Peacock treats the brain’s sickly products as the end-result of the general disease of modishness for which the remedy would be prolonged exposure to common-or-garden reality.

But for James, mental concepts, far from being opposed to the ordinariness of laundry lists and drains, seem themselves to have belonged to a lower category of inartistic objects, like the small article of ‘the commonest domestic use’ manufactured by the Newsome family in The Ambassadors – I have always guessed that it was a brass safety-pin. But, safety-pin or sink-stopper, it could not be mentioned in the text, any more than Milly Theale’s cancer (if that is what it was) or, let us say. The Origin of Species. I confess I do not easily see what these tabooed subjects have in common, unless that they were familiar to most people and hence bore the traces of other handling. Yet, though both were in general circulation, a safety-pin is not the same as the idea of natural selection. More likely, James wished his fictions to dwell exclusively on the piano nobile, as he conceived it, of social intercourse – neither upstairs in the pent garrets of intellectual labour nor below in the basement and kitchens of domestic toil. And the garret and the basement have a secret sympathy between them of which the piano nobile is often unaware. That, at any rate, seems to be the lesson of the greatest fictions, past and present.

What is curious, though, is that ideas are still today felt to be unsightly in the novel, whereas the nether areas – the cloaca – are fully admitted to view. I suppose that the ban on ideas that even now largely prevails, above all in English-speaking countries, is a heritage from Modernism in its prim anti-Victorian phase. To Virginia Woolf, for instance, it was not a question of what might be brought into the novel – sex, the natural functions – but of what should be kept out. In the reaction against the Victorian novel, it was understandable that the discursive authors, from Dickens to Meredith and Hardy, should stand in the pillory as warning examples of what was most to be avoided. When the young Eliot complimented James on the fact that no rough bundles of concepts disfigure and coarsen his novels, he at once went on to cite Meredith (‘the disciple of Carlyle’) as a bad case of the opposite.

Actually Meredith, with his tendency to aphorism, was in his own way an experimental writer, which made him exciting to the young. This may have been why he was singled out for rapid disposal. That he went counter to the ‘stuffy’ realist tradition, jested with the time-honoured conventions of the form, even gave hints of something like the interior monologue, did not excuse him. In fact, he has not lasted, except, I think, forThe Egoist; the mock-heroic vein, which he worked and over-worked, failed to undermine the old structure and became a blind alley. Brio was not enough. In any case, his way with ideas, wavering between persiflage and orotund pronouncement, was too unsteady to maintain a serious weight. His contemporaries seem to have known what he was ‘about’, but a reader today finds it hard to determine the overall pattern of his thought.

This can never be said of Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, in this country. Nor abroad of Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac, even Flaubert, of Manzoni, and of all the Russians except Chekhov, who was relatively non-committal. The talkative novelist was evidently the norm and always had been. In America, those who have survived – chiefly Melville and Hawthorne – seldom expressed themselves on topics and issues of the day, and their utterances could be somewhat riddling on the great themes of good and evil. Nevertheless they cannot be charged with unsteadiness, lack of serious purpose. They were sermonisers like their contemporaries in the Old World; it was only that their sermon, like the Book of Revelations, required some decoding; the apocalyptic imagery, as with any allegory, called for interpretation.

The 19th-century novel was so evidently an idea-carrier that the component of overt thought in it must have been taken for granted by the reader as an ingredient as predictable as a leavening agent in bread. He came to expect it in his graver fiction, perhaps to count on it, just as he counted on the geographical and social co-ordinates that gave him his bearings in the opening chapter: the expanse of Egdon Health at sundown crossed by the solitary reddleman and his cart; the mountain heights of the Lecco district looking down on the lone homeward-bound figure of Don Abbondio. Or ‘A rather pretty little chaise on springs, such as bachelors, half-pay officers, staff captains, landowners with about a hundred serfs ... drive about in, rolled in at the gates of the hotel of the provincial town of N.’ Or ‘About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good fortune to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton.’ We are so much in the habit of skipping pages of introductory description and general reflections that interrupt the story that we can scarcely believe that such ‘blemishes’ once gave pleasure, that a novel would have been felt by our ancestors to be a far poorer thing without them. They can be dismissed by the modern reader as ‘mere’ conventions of the genre, but in the old times a novel that lacked them would have been like an opera without an overture, which of course is a convention too.

The function of geographical descriptions – naming of counties, rivers, and so forth – and social topography is to make the reader feel comfortable in the vehicle he has boarded, like passengers in a plane having landmarks below pointed out to them and receiving bulletins from the pilot on altitude and cruising speed. Yet it was not essentially different from the function performed by ideas. Both gave depth and perspective. And the analogy to air travel is illustrative. The briefings supplied by the pilot (‘On your left, folks, you’ll see the city of Boston and the Charles River’) are a relic of earlier days of aviation – a mere outworn convention we ‘put up with’ in a contemporary airbus. Scarcely anybody bothers any more to rise in his seat to try to make out the landmark being mentioned; you cannot see anything anyway – the plane is going too fast and the view obstructed. Besides, who cares? The destination is the point. But if you put yourself back in fancy to the propeller plane, you will see, as with the novel, what has been lost. So intrinsic to the novelistic medium were ideas and other forms of commentary, all tending to ‘set’ the narration in a general scheme, that it would have been impossible in former days to speak of ‘the novel of ideas’. It would have seemed to be a tautology.

Now the expression is used with such assurance and frequency that I am surprised not to find it in my Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms, which is otherwise reasonably current. For example, under ‘NOVEL’, I read: ‘In the late 19th and 20th centuries the novel, as an art form, has reached its fullest development. Concerned with their craft, novelists such as Flaubert, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, E.M. Forster and Thomas Mann have used various devices to achieve new aesthetic forms within the genre.’ I do not know what Flaubert, who died in 1880, is doing there, but the tenor of the list is clear. If the ‘NOVEL OF IDEAS’ does not figure as an entry (though ‘NOVEL OF THE SOIL’ does), it may be that the authors were not sure what the term covered. I must say that it is not clear to me either, though I sense something derogatory, as if there were novels and novels of ideas and never the twain shall meet. But rather than attempt to define a term that has never been in my own vocabulary, I shall try to discover what other people mean by it.

Does it mean a novel in which the characters sit around, or pace up and down, enunciating and discussing ideas? Examples would be The Magic Mountain, Point Counter Point, in fact all of Huxley’s novels, Sartre’s Les Chemins de la Liberté, Malraux’s Man’s Fate. The purest cases would be Peacock – Headlong Hall, Nightmare Abbey, Crotchet Castle – if they could be called novels, which I doubt, since they lack a prime requisite – length – and another – involvement of the reader in the characters’ fates. You might also count Flaubert’s unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet, where the joint heroes are busy compiling a Dictionary of Received Ideas, and Santayana’s The Last Puritan, by now forgotten. But though the term would seem clearly to apply to the works just mentioned (The Magic Mountain being the one everybody remembers best, having read it at 19), there are not very many of them and they are rather out of style.

Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, which belongs to our own time, roughly conforms to the type. Like The Magic Mountain, it takes place in a sanatorium, where patients who have come to be cured have little else to do after their treatments and medical examinations than muse and argue. Isolation is crucial to this type of novel: the characters are on an island, out on a limb, either of their own choosing – Peacock’s crochety castles, Huxley’s grand country house presided over by Mr Scogan (Crome Yellow) – or by force majeure, as in a hospital or a prison (Solzhenitsyn’s The Third Circle). Or the island may be moral, self-constituted by a literary clique (Point Counter Point), by a group of like-thinking, semi-political bohemians (Les Chemins de la Liberté), by a cell of revolutionaries (Man’s Fate). What is involved is always a contest of faiths. The debates on the magic mountain between Naphta and Settembrini oppose nihilistic Jesuitry to progressive atheistic humanism but also pan-Germanism to pro-Russian sentiments, prophecies of war to firm belief in peace, repose to work – in other words, you might say, night to day. Beneath the circus-like confrontation of current creeds lies a clash between very ancient faiths. Settembrini is a monist, Naphta a dualist. Settembrini, asked to choose, exalts mind over body: ‘within the antithesis of body and mind, the body is the evil, the devilish principle, for the body is nature.’ It is like a game of preferences with the aim being self-definition, which no doubt is why young people are dazzled by it.

On a simpler level and without encyclopedic pretensions, Cancer Ward presents us with various naive faiths – from faith in Stalin to faith in the healing properties of radioactive gold to faith in the mandrake root – sometimes peacefully co-existing, sometimes at odds with each other. It is natural that in a hospital the belief in a cure, in sovereign remedies, should dominate every mind. It becomes vital to have a theory, and world theories, global diagnoses of the body politic or the human state generally, take on, as though of necessity, an importance not usually accorded them by the healthy. The pressing need to have faith, i.e. grounds for hope, gives an urgency to the abstract disputes of both The Magic Mountain and Cancer Ward. Here ideas of any and every kind become, as if by contagion, matters of life and death. It is also true that in these narratives no idea can win out over another. Nobody is convinced or persuaded. The excited debates between patients or between doctor and patient end up in the air. Hans Castorp, whose young mind has been the salient contested for by opposing forces, leaves the sanatorium and returns ‘down below’, to the plains, which should be the level ground of sound, commonplace reality, except for the fact that there he dies as a soldier in the general reasonless catastrophe of the First World War. In Cancer Ward, Kostoglotov, too, leaves his sanatorium, having been let out as cured, which should be a happy ending, except for the fact that the cancer ward whose gates close behind him has been a species of sanctuary: he is slated to return to his real down-to-earth life of penal exile. One kind of death sentence, in both cases, has been exchanged for another.

It is not especially uncanny (or no more than any resemblance or twinning) that this pair of novels, so widely separated in space and time, so widely divergent in manner, should match in a number of respects. Sanatorium life is much the same, I suppose, everywhere and always. But sanatorium life, as such, did not dictate the ending: a positive conclusion would have been possible if the novel were only about sickness and recovery. The ending is imposed not by the particular case – cancer ward or tubercular clinic – but by the fact that, in general, the so-called novel of ideas (at least the kind I have been describing) does not allow of any resolution. Nothing decisive can happen in it; it is a seesaw. Events that do occur in it are simply incidents, sometimes diverting, as in Peacock. A real event, such as the death of Hans Castorp, is reserved for a postscript; it does not belong to the text proper. The same with Kostoglotov’s re-shouldering of his penal identity. We do not see it happen; in fact, it may not happen ‘for good’, since when he goes to register with the NKVD in the town outside the hospital gates, the Komendant speaks cheerfully of an amnesty in the offing. But Kostoglotov cannot make himself believe him – he has heard of amnesties before and nothing came of them – and the reader knows no more than he. It is left in suspension, like the arguments between the sick men, which never ‘get’ anywhere.

If a secondary character chances to die – for instance, Quarles’s child in Point Counter Point – that, too, is an incident, outside the work’s proper concerns; the main characters go on arguing as before. When it occurs in a sanatorium, it is just an episode, figuring in the normal mortality rate: a new patient moves into the bed the next day, and the ripple of concern quickly subsides. The sanatorium is an ideal setting for the discussion novel, for time does not count there. Ideas, though some may age, are indifferent to time. Mann speaks of ‘the more spacious time conceptions prevalent “up here” ’. That is an effect, of course, of the routine, which makes one day like another. But there is an endlessness, an eternal regularity, in all such novels; the characters slip into their places like habitués of a corner café. The sense of eternity, of time stopped, may be represented under other aspects. In André Gide’s The Counterfeiters, which I might have included under this heading, Edouard, the chief character, is shown writing a novel in which a facsimile of him is writing a novel, in which, we suppose, still a third figure ... The black-hatted Quaker on the Quaker Oats box holding a Quaker Oats box portraying a Quaker holding a Quaker Oats box, getting smaller and smaller in infinite regress, like repeating decimals. In Point Counter PointHuxley borrowed the device.

Still, when the novel of ideas is spoken of, maybe another type of story is being referred to – a story that does come to some sort of resolution. That is the missionary novel sometimes referred to as a ‘tract’. On the surface, it may look like the kind of novel I have just been trying to analyse, in that it may have the air of a panel discussion, with points of view put forward by several characters speaking in turn and each being allowed equal time. But it soon appears that one speaker is right and the others, though momentarily persuasive, are wrong. I am thinking of D.H. Lawrence.

Of course there are missionary novels that are not novels of ideas – for example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is animated by a strong conviction, but, if I remember right, does not ‘go into’ the arguments for and against slavery. And there are missionary elements hiding in many tales that pass for thrillers or love stories. In fact, it is hard to think of a novel that in some sense does not seek to proselytise. But what I have in mind are books like Women in Love, Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where reasoning occupies a large part of the narrative, exerting a leverage that seems to compel the reader’s agreement. The incidents, few or many, press home like gripping illustrations the point being proved. There is something of parable in most of Lawrence’s plots.

In Kangaroo we get a powerful example of Lawrence’s method at work. The ideas, fully expounded in long conversations, far from being unresolved, are boldly lived out and tested. The Lawrence figure, Somers, finds certain already held and seductive ideas made flesh for him in the shape of the Australian working-class leader known as Kangaroo. It is an incarnation Somers had never hoped to come upon, sickened as he is by Europe. He is smitten by Kangaroo’s proto-fascist movement and by the wild fresh country of which working men and their virile matey principles seem to be a natural and harmonious part. The infatuation holds for many pages, as he is drawn into the Diggers movement as a sympathetic foreign observer. He is nearly converted when, rather abruptly, he is startled into closer inspection: Kangaroo, dying, asks for a declaration of Somer’s love, and the sickly plea lets Somers finally see the soft, weak, flabby underside of native fascism. The Australian spell is broken; Somers and his woman leave.

Up to the end, however, an equilibrium of ideas is maintained, so that the conversations remain interesting, by no means one-sided. In Somers, a genuine intellectual process, going from curiosity to attraction to repulsion and disillusionment, is shown with considerable honesty. It is typical of Lawrence at his best that even when Kangaroo and his ideas are rejected, he is not vulgarly ‘seen through’; something is left for a kind of dry pity and understanding.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is surely the most biased of Lawrence’s books. Yet Sir Clifford, Lady Chatterley’s husband, is nonetheless given his say, not too unfairly represented by and large: it is only that he and his entire set of convictions are refuted out of hand by a quiet adversary, Mellors, whose strong point is not words but performance. His performance is itself an argument, speaking for a view of natural life and sexuality that is hostile to the intellect. Sir Clifford is no intellectual: he is a retired country gentleman who sometimes writes poetry and short stories. But the weapons he is familiar with and falls back on as a disabled champion of a social order and mild way of life are the weapons his education has taught him to use: received notions and principles.

Lawrence’s hatred of the intellect, of the ‘upper storey’ (there is maybe a class prejudice here), is strange, certainly, in a man who himself lived almost wholly for ideas. The fact that they were his own made the difference, apparently; he had hammered them out for himself. They were not quite so much his own as he thought, one must add. Was he unconscious of being one of a number of writers who disliked and distrusted the intellect, who, like him, held it responsible for most of the ills of modern civilisation? He showed no awareness of such a fellowship, just as he showed no awareness of a paradox underlying the whole position: that is, that without the intellect and its systemising bent neither he nor his fellow thinkers would have been able to carry out their mission of teaching at all. His insistence on blood and instinct as superior to brain was a mental construct incapable of proof except on the mental level.

Yet if his ideas, true or false, have stayed with us, if he was a novelist of ideas in my second, missionary sense to whom we can still listen – the only one, probably – this must be because he was an artist as well as a cogent, programmatic mind – in other words, because he makes us feel as we read those novels that there is something in what he says. But while despising the intellect, he would not have liked the name ‘artist’ either. For him, it would have been six of one and half a dozen of the other – who could measure which was the less effete? He was unable to get along with any of his own kind, really, and could only associate, finally, with people who shared his ideas, which was bound to mean in practice people who consented to have no ideas of their own.

His life was a near-tragedy, and his self-infection, quite early, with concepts – which, when he took them for absolutes, made him quarrelsome – shared responsibility with his bad lungs. But if he had not been fevered, he might not have taken to the stump, and we might never have had these burning novels or, if you wish, tracts. Far more than the discussion novels with their eternal seesaw, they are truly novels of ideas. Without ideas none of them, after Sons and Lovers, could even palely exist. If you cut out Naphta and Settembrini, and the author’s musings on time, The Magic Mountain will still hold up as a story of a sort. The equivalent cannot be argued of Aaron’s Rod, say. I am not sure whether this makes Lawrence better or worse than Mann; at any rate, it makes him special. At the same time, surprisingly, it links him with the old novelists.