The so-called Victorian attitude toward sex wag really a very temporary interlude in the English literary tradition of healthy licentiousness. The eighteenth-century English novelists were extremely frank and even bawdy in this respect, and even Dickens, when he came over here, made a point of shocking Americans by saying, for example, that he didn’t want his sons to be virgins when they were married. The American attitude toward sexuality was peculiarly American in this period, because of the actual roughness of American society. The literary class was very genteel and very careful; I’m often fascinated by the self-conscious gentility of Howells and James and even of Mark Twain. All of them wrote exquisitely; they were all marvelous stylists. But they were all rather goody-goody when it came to literary culture. Their air of superior refinement was their way of getting away from the roughness of the American experience more than anything else. This was fundamental. The American novel today has certainly gone to the other extreme, but the early realists felt themselves to be a part of that small Brahmin class even Mark Twain, the self-educated printer and frontiersman. And as a result, their work displays a certain tendency to elegance quite different from the aristocratic quality of English fiction in this period. Of course, the English had a much more complex society to describe. The American experience was peculiarly narrow in this sense. That was one of the reasons why James went to England, why he started writing novels about English society.

James and Howells—James particularly—considered Balzac simply the greatest novelist that Europe had ever produced. They felt he could create his splendid imaginative world

Crane, Dreiser, and Norris were all born within a few months of each other, and two of them, Norris and Crane, died at a very early age. Crane and Dreiser fascinate me because they were both extremely gifted but nonetheless very different. Dreiser was clumsy and verbose, but he wrote very powerfully. Crane was one of the most amazing geniuses we’ve ever produced. The 1890’s represent the great watershed of American history, not only in fiction but in politics—the beginning of open class struggles, of open polarization in American life. A cocky, disparaging attitude toward the bourgeois experience developed; the ethos of the middle class had been exploded. Many of the younger writers were much more cynical, much less hidebound by genteel conventions. Can you imagine Henry James going as a correspondent to the Greco-Turkish War as Crane did? Or having the kind of experience that Dreiser did when he was taken in by a prostitute in Evansville, Indiana, who happened to be his brother Paul’s mistress? Or having the concern with money that Crane had all his life and that made Dreiser, as a young man, steal from the laundry for which he worked? The writers of the 1890’s represented a tougher, harsher, crueler world. Take Crane’s fascination with war. Everybody knows that he wrote The Red Badge of Courage before he ever saw a battle. Yet many Civil War veterans thought that he had been at Chancellorsville. Crane saw the life of America as war, the life of the world as war.

Crane was the son of a Methodist minister; he grew up in a religious, Christian home. His mother was a pillar of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Yet, coming from this respectable, almost traditional kind of American background, Crane found himself always looking at things with a beady eye—finding objects of derision in American institutions. When he came to New York as a newspaper reporter and began to observe the misery and degradation of slum

Even Howells didn’t like all of them. He was a very generous critic, a great supporter of all new fiction. But there were severe limitations to his appreciation. He thought Maggie , Stephen Crane’s first book, wonderful, but he did not like The Red Badge of Courage for reasons I’m not sure I understand entirely. I think the fact that in Maggie the young girl becomes a prostitute and eventually commits suicide must have pleased his moral sense. But in The Red Badge of Courage , a masterpiece written in letters of fire, the underlying depiction of the violence of war apparently distressed Howells’ peaceful soul.

Howells didn’t like Dreiser at all. Despite his importance, Dreiser is still one of the most neglected figures in American literature. All sorts of literary professors are still afraid of him. But in his own time Dreiser was treated with the most incredible contempt and hostility by the literary establishment. They always, of course, complained about his bad writing, though they didn’t seem to mind it when they read other things just as bad. In point of fact, it was his attitude toward society that they didn’t like—his conviction that there wasn’t, fundamentally, any real design to life.

James and Howells,

I didn’t say he was warm, I said he was interested. When I spoke of distance in the fiction of Crane and Dreiser, I meant their sense that what they were writing about was far removed from them. We can see the same thing in our own lives. We write about politics and power and the people around us, but we feel ourselves to be engulfed by too many people, too many problems, too many pressures. We are more detached; the world’s become more complex, more overwhelming. Crane was interested in writing about the Bowery for literary and artistic reasons. He regarded the people on the Bowery as aesthetic facts. He was fascinated by the new opportunity, the new material he found there. His concern for prostitutes reflected only his rejection of his father’s morality. That’s why he liked being a police reporter. He liked to hobnob with criminals, precisely because it was a way of shocking the people he’d lived with before. Nothing delighted him more than to feel he was a scapegrace, in some way a naughty fellow. But he wasn’t warm. He didn’t care a hang about Dora Clark, the famous prostitute he defended. He just hated the police and was outraged because he thought that they were being mean to her. He had no feeling of closeness to Bowery bums; he felt that these people were all helpless.

As we know from Crane’s most famous story, one of the greatest stories in the world, “The Open Boat,” he was interested in getting at the facts of experience. It is a description of what he went through in a dinghy after the Commodore , the ship he was taking from Florida, blew up in the water. Sitting in this dinghy, freezing and starving and expecting at any moment to be drowned, he observed everything with a cold, clear eye. That shocked

I guess I didn’t put that very clearly. Professionalism in any field has nothing to do with one’s own emotions. Any historian who’s studying a subject may be personally involved with in terms of memory of or sympathy, but he tries to get at the facts as far as he understands them. No one, to this day, has given us a better picture of the transformation of American life in the 1890’s than Crane did, in Maggie , in George’s Mother , and even in “The Open Boat,” precisely because he saw clearly what was happening. To use a modern example, I happen to admire Norman Mailer’s book on the Pentagon, The Armies of the Night , very much. I think it’s best thing that’s been written about the political atmosphere in which we’ve been living since the Vietnam war started. His book seems to me a triumph of detachment and involvement at the same time.

I think so. James and Howells in their earlier work show very clearly what a great age of confidence the 1870’s and 1880’s were for the people they were writing about: the northern middle classes who went to Saratoga and Newport and lived in the best of all possible worlds. Then, bit by bit, one sees in their work a growing anxiety. Howells became a socialist; he grew more and more resentful of the crassness of American society, the exploitation of the poor, the brutality of American corporations. James became more and more struck by the corruption of society, in England and this country. His analysis took the form of sexual allegory—the attempt to get money through marriage, or the betrayal of adultery became symbols in his work of the corruption of society as a whole.

James was disillusioned with his society, but a good writer always is. The mood of anxiety and bitterness which many Americans feel right now certain American novelists felt as early as the 1920’s—F. Scott Fitzgerald for instance. The Great Gatsby is one of the great American social novels. The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night , and the unfinished novel about Hollywood, The Last Tycoon , were all immensely prophetic documents as well as

The basic thing about the First World War and American novelists was that so many of them got into it. When relatively few Americans were actually in the Army, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and many others were in the war. They found in the war a great sense of adventure. Hemingway was so eager to get into it that he enlisted as an ambulance volunteer. He was on the Italian front long before America entered the war. At the very beginning many writers felt this was their chance to get to Europe, to participate in things. All the wonderful works of fiction of the World War—Dos Passes’ 1919 , Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms , even Faulkner’s Soldiers’Pay —can be described conventionally as tales of disillusionment, but actually they are tales of adventure. These writers had a great sense of buoyant confidence; this was their moment. You can see in 1919 and in Hemingway’s stories the great sense of freshness and adventure. They were free of American provincialism; they were free of their parents. (Many, were still young enough to have to worry about parents.) Above all, they had that literary desire to participate in extreme experience.

Take, for example, one of the great works of American literature, The Enormous Room , by the poet e. e. cummings. When cummings went to Europe as an ambulance driver, he was utterly cynical about the French. He refused to say that the Germans were terrible, which the French authorities wanted him to, and because of a critical letter his friend Slater Brown had been writing they both got arrested. Out of this experience came that marvelous book, one of the first great books about the concentration-camp world. But when you read The Enormous Room now, the thing that strikes you is how fresh it is. It’s full of energy. I’ve just reread the whole of Dos Passos’ famous trilogy, U.S.A. The parts about the war are a constant record of carousal—of drinking, lovemaking, roaring through the streets of Paris and elsewhere. Dos Passos obviously had a great time.

When they began to look at the world after the Versailles Treaty, and especially when they began to look at the leadership we were getting under Harding and Coolidge, they felt, understandably, that an awful lot of people had died for nothing.

I think the greatest

Well, I’ll take the word “major” away; Hemingway produced an original art. He was one of the great painters of prose, a writer of extraordinary freshness. The early stories have a directness and a lyric vibration which is absolutely incomparable. He was the most original stylist of his period. The “minor vision of life,” of course, resulted from his self-centeredness. Hemingway’s career is depressing because he could only return to early experiences. He was very much preoccupied with his own wounds, and with an image of himself as a virile male that obviously derived from a very great anxiety. He was an original rather than a great writer.

Disillusionment is clearest in Faulkner’s early work. Faulkner had volunteered for the Royal Air Force before America entered the war; he was overeager to get involved, and he had some bad experiences in those rickety, primitive planes of 1916. His early work is not as interesting as Hemingway’s or Fitzgerald’s, however. Yet he developed in the 1920’s a whole series of truly Balzacian novels—perhaps the only Balzacian novels in American fiction—about a whole region, the South. He was able to do this because of his marvelous sense of contrast between the popular image of the South and the reality. Of course, he had, unlike the northern writers, many different groups to write about. No other American novelist had such a range of types and classes to choose from- the aristocracy, the low peasant class, and the Negroes and Indians. This gave

Mississippi was and is special because it was so poor, because it was so full of illusion. It had been a frontier territory for a long time. In “The Bear,” one of the greatest stories ever written, when Faulkner describes the wilderness and the hunting, you realize that a physical frontier still existed, and the effect is fantastic. There was also tremendous provincialism in Mississippi, and of course the excess of Negroes over whites created for the whites an atmosphere of danger, hostility, and tension. And Faulkner also evokes the feeling, oddly enough, of being close to the Middle West, which in many ways allies Faulkner to Mark Twain and also to contemporaries of his own like Dos Passes and Sinclair Lewis.

Not at all! I’m saying that he seized upon that environment. But no one could write about the wild, wonderful world of race passion that Faulkner describes in Light in August if he lived in Richmond, Virginia. Mississippi didn’t create Faulkner. Faulkner had the talent to seize upon what he had around him.

I think that Sinclair Lewis was a very important writer. He was a brilliant satirist and social critic, but above all he had, like H. L. Mencken, a very strong sense of values, a very solid point of view. In his best books— Main Street and Babbitt —but even in Dodsworth , he presented a dissection of American materialism and cultural sterility. Only after the Depression, when Lewis lost that sharp-edged point of view, did he stop being interesting as a writer. Lewis is easy to underestimate; his achievement is very hard to pin down. He had an enormous influence on the American mind. Indeed, many of these novelists of the 1920’s had great impact on their society. Dos Passes, Hemingway, Lewis, and Fitzgerald became creators of a new language, of a whole new vision of society. They made readers aware of two different cultures in America: the middle-class culture, which was satirized so bitingly by Lewis, and the “ideal” culture of the intelligentsia. And to a degree they changed how readers looked at these cultures and thus the cultures themselves. Henry James was widely read and influential in that sense, but he did not shape the beliefs and attitudes of readers the way Lewis, a lesser writer surely, shaped

Because the characteristic point of view of James, and of Howells, was ethical. James’s greatest stories were about individual conscience winning over social institutions. But the characteristic note of Lewis’ fiction was his sardonic, subversive feeling about American mores, which was easy for the reader to catch. It requires a very delicate kind of imaginative sympathy to read James’s Portrait of a Lady , for example, and feel that a basic problem of American society is being described. One must identify completely with Isabel Archer, which takes some doing, to recognize the complex and subtle moral world in which she’s involved. But when Lewis describes Babbitt in his office, fumbling over the writing of a letter and having a secretary finally write it herself, when Lewis portrays the American businessman as essentially an inefficient parasite, almost any American can recognize the type. Very simply, Lewis dealt with social patterns, social fables—with groups . Even Fitzgerald, who was in many ways the most exquisite American novelist after James, was concerned with group behavior, whereas the only group portrayed by James was the American elect.

Again and again, looking back upon these writers of the twenties, I see that Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Lewis, Dos Passos, and Hemingway each did something quite remarkable. None of them was like anybody else. There has never been anyone remotely like Sinclair Lewis. That is true also of the romantic Fitzgerald, of the utterly idiosyncratic Faulkner, of Hemingway. Or consider Dos Passos. Today, no critic takes him seriously. But read U.S.A. There is nothing remotely resembling Dos Passos’ method, his tone, his color, his vocabulary. He is absolutely his own man. And that, of course, is a great thing.

Well, remember Fitzgerald’s great remark, that there are no second acts in American life. If anything, deterioration is the rule rather than the exception. American writers are famous for early brilliance, and then for petering out. Ever since Mark Twain, the successful American novelist has also become a celebrity, a prima donna, and in a way an economic royalist. Mark Twain was a rich man; Lewis and Hemingway and others became very rich through their work. Successful American novelists have a peculiar relation with the public, very much like that of a movie star. They tend to become too much concerned with fame. Hemingway became so interested in reaching a big audience that after a while he couldn’t write at all.

Faulkner did not wear out, but one reason was that he didn’t live in a big city. Remember also that Faulkner did not become successful until relatively late in his career. Unlike Hemingway and Fitzgerald,

The influence of the 1920’s lasted pretty much until the middle 1930’s, when the experimental, avant-garde side of the twenties petered out. As to the Depression itself, it produced some good novelists, like James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, and Nathanael West, whose Miss Lonelyhearts is important. But many writers got caught up in ideological issues, which in general lessened their artistic achievements. Only a very great writer like Faulkner was able to withstand the pressure of constant leftist criticizing. Properly speaking, the American novelist didn’t get back to himself, as an independent creator, until after World War II. By and large, the 1930’s was a period in which many writers sacrificed their individuality, became more conscious of society than of themselves.

No. The reason why the First World War produced such a brilliant body of American novelists and books was that the writers were all upper-middle-class; the war for them was a great chance of breaking with their backgrounds. What the Depression did for American literature was to awaken literary recognition on the part of people from the immigrant groups in the big cities. The typical writer of the 1920’s was someone from a “good family,” like cummings, whose father was a minister; Hemingway, whose father was a doctor; Dos Passes, whose father was a lawyer. The typical writer of the 1930’s, however, was someone like Richard Wright, whose father was a tenant farmer; Ralph Ellison, whose father was a poor Negro in Oklahoma; John Steinbeck, who worked as a bricklayer.

The Depression era saw a remarkable coming-of-age of Jewish, Negro, and Irish writers. (Dreiser was the first important American writer who was not a Protestant and not, properly speaking, middle-class.) Middle-class attitudes had absolutely

That is, I suppose, the most important question one can ask about the current literary situation. Novelists, of course, enjoy living well and having money, but they cannot keep from feeling morally and intellectually that things are wrong with our society. There is a contradiction between the enormous wealth and splendor of American life and the sense of anxiety, of something fundamentally immoral going on in our society today. A lot of people are able to delude themselves that they are living in the best of all possible worlds, but the novelist, if he’s a real writer, senses that things are not right. A writer like Saul Bellow, for example, whom I think very highly of, is a very successful American. He has a position of great honor, and he certainly enjoys all the fruits of living in our intoxicating century. Yet his work is full of the most terrible sense of grief, of guilt, of foreboding. Why is this? Because in this privileged world human relationships are deteriorating. Bellow is aware, I

Yes. Mailer is an extraordinarily talented man. He has a very muscular, combative kind of talent, and he completely understands and rejoices in the popular side of American life. In what I think is his best book, The Armies of the Night , he says that he even felt a sneaking sympathy for the federal marshals in Washington opposing the pickets (of whom he was one), because he recognized in them the same comic, sardonic talent which he had found among the men he had known in the Army. Like Stephen Crane, he has a great passion for what happens in the street, in crowds. At the same time, of course, Mailer is also a very interesting ideologist. More than any other good novelist that I can think of, he openly declared after the war that the next chapter in the American imagination would have to deal with a whole new attitude toward sex. His point was that white middle-class men had deprived themselves of certain fundamental qualities of passion. In a famous essay called “The White Negro” he compared the active, strong, reckless quality of the Negro, who as a kind of outlaw in American society had to gain his way by forceful means, with the timid and obedient white middle-class American.

As a novelist, Mailer has been extremely erratic. He has shown himself to be almost uninterested in finishing books properly. But I think he is an original, in many ways the most original, American novelist since Scott Fitzgerald. He reminds me always of Crane and Fitzgerald. He’s very sophisticated, but very passionate, very strong, and he also has an extraordinary sense of mischief. The best thing about Mailer is that he has recognized that in our time a strong talent is literally subversive. He has social intelligence of a very prophetic kind.

Twentieth-century America has produced some of the most extraordinary capacities for unhappiness the world has ever seen. And the best novelists have called the score properly on what is happening. The novel as a literary creation deals with the human soul in active relationships, and these are enough to make one despair sometimes. The easy confidence which Americans were supposed to feel has quite departed. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t live with a sense of anxiety and foreboding because of the violent animosities