Ideas and the Novel BY Mary McCarthy
1
“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 offer it to you as a motto or, rather, counter-motto for the reflections that follow, which will 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 patronizing 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 re?ue. The power of the novelist insofar as he was a supreme intelligence was to free himself from the work-load 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 program 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 philosophize 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 recognized 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 archaizing 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.