THE DUCHESS' RED SHOES
59
and the American novel: for in terms of his broad definition there
was just as much social texture
in
America as in England; it was a
different social texture as it was a different society and it was not
the kind of social texture that James was interested in: but it had
just as much of "a culture's hum and buzz of implication," etc.,
which Mr. Trilling says he means by manners.
There was an adequate subject matter for some kinds of fic–
tion in Hawthorne's and James's America, as we can see when we
read the great historians, or a history of American politics, or the
poems of Whitman and Emily Dickinson, or the biographies of Poe,
Hawthorne, Melville, Aaron Burr, John Randolph of Roanoke,
Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln,
Mark Twain, Henry Adams, and others. It is true that Hawthorne
and James did not know how to get into any full relationship with
this rich subject matter. The reasons for their estrangement are
complicated and have to do with personal disabilities as well as the
literary and intellectual traditions which nurtured them. To say,
however, that the thinness of American life caused the thinness of
American fiction is an extreme oversimplification. It is not far from
criticizing the Civil War as a war and as a subject for epic poetry
because no major American poet has written an epic about it! And
in this labyrinthine question, Mr. Trilling's intuition and insight are
superior to James's, although he quotes James with approval. For
Mr. Trilling sees, as James did not, that there is often something
wrong in the relationship of the sensibility of the American writer
to American society. It is Mr. Trilling's description of what is wrong
which is extremely questionable: he says that Americans have the
wrong idea of reality, but his conception of the right idea of reality,
so
far as I understand it, merely substitutes a new overemphasis and
a new one-sidedness for an old one.
If
we are asked to choose between
Jane Austen's and Henry James's idea of reality, on the one hand,
and John Steinbeck's or Theodore Dreiser's on the other hand
(Dreiser is Mr. Trilling's example), what can we answer but that
we choose both and neither?
To continue, however, with Mr. Trilling's positive recommenda–
tions: "Now the novel as I have described it has never really estab–
lished itself in America. Not that we have not had great novels,
but that the novel in America diverges from its classic intention
