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PARTISAN REVIEW
philosophical excursions which embarrass the reader throughout with
their bogus naivete and portentous platitudinousness, Steinbeck says:
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the
never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me
that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue,
is
im–
mortal. Vice has always a fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as
nothing else in the world is.
Edmund Wilson was the first to observe that Steinbeck's interest
in human beings exists at a level apart from or below morality. It is not
impossible that this ambitious book is partly an answer to that pro–
nouncement. Whether it is or not, Steinbeck insists that he is concerned
with morality and that indeed no writer of fiction is concerned with
anything else, a generalization which ought to have made his insistence
unnecessary. In any case, it is clear that something has gone wrong, that
Steinbeck needs a social crisis such as a depression to dramatize ex–
perience for him and make possible the true exercise of his gifts. Without
a social crisis of the kind that compelled and awakened the characters of
The Grapes of Wrath,
his human beings are merely curiosities, having
the limited significance of sword-swallowers and flagpole-sitters. Yet
Steinbeck is too good a writer for this new novel to be regarded as any–
thing but a gifted author's misconception of the nature of his own
powers, the exact counterpart of Hemingway's effort, in
To Have and To
Have Not,
to write a social novel.
The ovation which greeted Hemingway's new novel was mostly
very nice. For it was mostly a desire to continue to admire a great
writer. Yet there was a note of insistence in the praise and a note of
relief, the relief because his previous book was extremely bad in an
ominous way, and the insistence, I think, because this new work is not
so much good in itself as a virtuoso performance which reminds one of
Hemingway at his best. The experience of literature is always com–
parative, and we have only to remember a story like "The Undefeated,"
which has almost the same theme as
The Old Man and the Sea,
or
the account of the Caporetto retreat in
A Farewell To Arms,
to see
exactly how the new book falls short. Whenever, in this new book, the
narrative is concerned wholly with fishing, there is a pure vividness of
presentation. But when the old man's emotions are explicitly dealt
with, there is a margin of self-consciousness and a mannerism of as–
sertion which is perhaps inevitable whenever a great writer cannot get
free of his knowledge that he is a great writer. Perhaps this
is
why the
old fisherman is too generalized, too much without a personal history;
the reader cannot help but think at times that Hemingway, the pub-
