VI. Literature

1. Romanticism and Modern Fiction

1958

Belying their seemingly chaotic diversity, all of modern fiction and modern criticism unite on at least one point: rejection of romanticism. The characteristic literature—and, indeed, art in general—of the present century has been, broadly, either naturalist or nonobjective. Both schools were born in revolt against the romanticism of the nineteenth century. The aim of the naturalist, as of the historians of the school of Leopold von Ranke, is to “present life as it really is,” to do an honest and competent reporting job on the people and places that the novelist has seen and heard. The old style “hero” or “villain,” the dramatic plot, and the generally happy ending of the romantic novel here disappear, for, after all, there are precious few heroes among the people the novelist perceives, and precious little drama or climactic happiness in their daily lives. Instead, the novelist sets down, meticulously and minutely, the details of the world around him; and he writes in a characteristically deliberate, graceless, and plodding style, his pedestrian manner accurately matching the pedestrian theme and the drab characters. In the works of such writers as Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell, the straight naturalistic novel reached perhaps its apogee. Their technical and stylistic clumsiness was generally considered one of their strong points: for wasn’t the honesty of their naturalism underscored by their very style’s reflecting the clumsy groping of the characters?

The “symbolic” or nonobjective novel seems at first glance to be poles apart from the naturalistic, but, in reality, the two unite on fundamentals. While the naturalists reject romantic fiction as escapist sentimentality, the nonobjectivists and “higher critics”—in short, the avant-garde—reject it as hopelessly simpliste and unintelligent. While the naturalists reject drama, the avant-garde, in addition, spurn language and rational meaning. Instead of using the common language as an instrument of communication, the nonobjective writer tries to prove himself more intelligent than the common run of men by inventing or partially inventing a new language, replete with codes and “keys” to the “many levels of meaning” for the eager initiates. Both schools dismiss romanticism contemptuously as fit only for children and naïve adolescents, who, when they “grow up,” are expected to realize that they are hopelessly bumptious and philistine, because (a) “in real life people don’t act that way,” and (b) without benefit of close textual exegesis by the New Criticism, how can they possibly understand Finnegans Wake?

In recent years, by a kind of logical progression, the naturalist and nonobjective schools have tended more and more to fuse. Old-fashioned naturalism had purged all drama from literature, and boredom was rapidly setting in. As a result, the naturalists tended more and more to depict not just the “average man” or the “girl next door,” but the most grotesque and depraved of extant or conceivably extant characters. And this step seemed justified as the world noticed that, with the general breakdown in moral standards, more and more people were becoming depraved. With ever-greater intensity, novelists and playwrights have been cluttering their fiction with homosexuals, rapists, nymphomaniacs, narcotic addicts, etc. and proclaiming that this is the way people really are. Often, they will assert that this is the way people really are down deep, after the veneer of respectability has been stripped away. Freudian doctrine has been widely used to justify the claim that man, at the core, is a cesspool of iniquity, and that, therefore, these writers are being even more “realistic” about the world around them than were the Farrells and Dreisers of yesteryear.

And the grotesquerie of characterization has been matched by a growing obscurantism of language. Undoubtedly the apogee of this tendency was reached in the recent plays of Eugene Ionesco and of James Joyce’s disciple Samuel Beckett, who have gone beyond even the Faulkners and the Tennessee Williamses and the Kerouacs to proclaim the meaninglessness of life by their absence of plot, depravity of dramatis personae, and virtual gibberish of their language.

Arriving in the midst of such a literary climate, it is no wonder that Ayn Rand’s new novel Atlas Shrugged has struck the world as a puzzling phenomenon. For apart from her controversial ethical and political philosophy, Miss Rand has bewildered the critics by presenting the first important novel in decades to re-create—and, as we shall see, to advance beyond—the romantic tradition, a tradition that had for so long been driven underground into dime novels and costume dramas. In fact, one of Atlas Shrugged’s unique virtues as a novel is to make us aware once again of the romantic aesthetic.

What, then, is the fundamental romantic attitude toward art in general and the novel in particular? In answer, we may first ask the question, what is art anyway? Why do we not call “art” a block of stone as it comes from a quarry; yet why do we call it art when reshaped by a sculptor? And why do we not call it art if it is reshaped to serve as a bench or as part of a building? There can be only one answer: because the sculptor communicates meaning to the beholder, meaning beyond the fact that it is a block of stone or that it is now being used for some other consumers’ object, such as a bench or a building. Since only aspects of objective reality can be meaningfully communicated, this means that art is the reshaping of reality by the artist and its subsequent communication to others.

We may, therefore, at once challenge the artistic credentials of the nonobjectivist, whether in painting, sculpture, or literature. For if art is necessarily communication, an objective medium is necessary in order to communicate. In literature, this medium is language. Hence, the importance in literature of precision and objectivity of language, and of clarity of style, for this clarity is the measure by which the artist is accurately and efficiently communicating his meaning.

Art is not only communication; it is necessarily also selection. No one, not even the von Ranke historian, can present all of reality as it really is. He must select some aspect of reality to communicate. But the moment this is conceded, it must also be granted that the artist or the historian can only select according to some standard of selection. And one of the functions of the critic is to judge that standard. The task of the historian or journalist is to capture the essence of the events of the day or of an age, and to select and present his facts accordingly. The standard is here set by the nature of the historical or journalistic discipline. But in fiction, or other art, there is no such evident standard; for in literature, the artist creates his own events. Since he is free to create his own events, the artist differs radically from the journalist, for if he tries to ape the journalist and record the events around him, we are free to ask, is this art? And if it is, may we not question the artist’s purpose and standards of selection?

Any choice is necessarily determined by the values of the chooser. The artist’s selection is therefore determined by his standards of value. We may now arrive at a definition of art: the reshaping of reality in accordance with the artist’s values and the communication of these values to the reader or beholder.

In short, art is the objectification, the bringing into tangible reality, of an artist’s values. We may now proceed at one stroke to answer the questions, why should the artist want to do what he does, and why should anyone else enjoy reading a novel or seeing a play or painting? Because the artist wishes to objectify his values in concrete reality, and the reader or onlooker enjoys seeing his own values objectified in reality. And the meanings and values can be communicated from one to the other by means of this objectification.

We all know that one of the prime characteristics of art is its ability to induce emotion in the beholder. This is particularly true of fiction, where the reader tends to identify with the central character. We are now in a position to explain this phenomenon. For emotions are value-responses, i.e., they are reactions determined by a person’s values. If a man approves of something, he will feel a favorable emotion toward it; if he disapproves, he will experience an unfavorable reaction. The reader who likes and enjoys a novel so responds because he is seeing his own values objectified; the man who dislikes a novel is reacting to values that are opposed to his own. The process of communication between novelist and reader therefore operates as follows: the novelist selects and reshapes reality according to his values, and presents them in concrete form; the reader, experiencing the concrete forms, through them penetrates to an understanding of the writer’s underlying values, and responds to the extent that he shares these values.

Since all art conveys values, all art is intimately bound up with morals. For values are either moral or immoral, good or bad. The novel, specifically, is also tied to morality in another way: it deals with the action of characters, and since men’s actions are determined by their values, these actions can be judged as either moral or immoral.

Since the artist must choose, and therefore must choose according to his values, all artists are presenting reality not as it is, but as they believe it ought to be. Every novelist, whether he knows it or not, is a moral philosopher and teacher. The naturalist writers who claim to represent life as it really is, are misleading themselves; for when they present dreary human beings stumbling their way through meaningless lives, what they are telling their readers is this: life is dreary, men cannot achieve their goals, they are playthings in the hands of fate, or society, or of their id.

In short, these writers are conveying their basic values and premises, their philosophy of life. And when the extremists among them portray a world of dope addicts, homicidal maniacs, and other depraved persons, they are telling the world that this is the essence of life, that this is the true nature of man and all that man can attain.

The romanticist, on the other hand, realizes that he is presenting a world that ought to be, and by doing so he is saying that there are values and ideals that man can strive to achieve and which would make a better world than exists at present. What, specifically, are the means employed by the romantic novelist in communicating these values? The most important one is plot, and it is therefore not a coincidence that absence of an exciting plot is the prime characteristic of modern, and especially “high-brow” modern, fiction. For the plot is the objectification within the novel of the values and personalities of the characters. The plot is a purposeful logical progression of events, and it is through this progression of action that the author’s values, and the personalities of his characters, take on concrete form. The author who presents characters without plot is not writing a novel, but a psychological casebook, which may or may not have value as psychology. Plot is therefore the critical distinguishing attribute of the novel.

The importance of the plot for the romantic novel was anticipated by Aristotle, in his Poetics:

All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity.... Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse.... So that it is the action in it, i.e., its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy.

A plot necessarily involves drama and conflict, and it is also a logical succession of events flowing out of the interplay of the novel’s characters. A plot also implies that each individual has free will, that he is free to choose his values and to try purposefully to attain them. Since the romantic novelist is presenting a world that ought to be, his central character is a hero, i.e., a good man, a man with good and proper values, who struggles to achieve his values amid the conflict of the plot structure. The more intense this conflict, the more clearly will the hero’s fight for his goals and values be emphasized and dramatized in action. And, if his struggle is with natural forces rather than with other men, much of the point of the story will be lost, for nature has no free will and can adopt no values, and is therefore not really an adversary. If, therefore, the hero is engaged in conflict with other human beings, and is trying to attain good values, his antagonists will necessarily be villains who are opposing him in order to realize bad or evil values. Hence the romantic novel will be a battle of heroes and heroines against villains.

The climax of the plot is of enormous importance, since this is the final resolution of the conflict, the final lesson, the concluding presentation of the author’s implied philosophy of life, the ultimate impact on the reader. Hence the importance of the much-reviled “happy ending.” For if the author is reshaping reality to objectify his values, then his good heroes will triumph over the villains, and thereby complete and crown the world he is presenting.

Apart from the rare case where the author’s specific purpose is to show the spirit of the hero remaining unbroken, even when defeated physically, an unhappy ending displays a profoundly pessimistic conclusion that has no place in the proper novel, where a better world is being created. For such an ending conveys and attempts to inculcate in the reader the view that the good, in life, must in the end be vanquished, either by evil people or by blind chance. When Oscar Wilde bitingly lampooned the moral approach to fiction in The Importance of Being Earnest—“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means”—he writ more ironically than he knew. For what we have been saying is that Miss Prism was right.

It is, therefore, fallacious to criticize romantic novels for presenting neither events nor characters “as they occur in reality.” The true romantic novelist does not try to set forth his characters as statistical averages or modal types of the people he sees around him; he molds them as philosophical archetypes, i.e., as concrete embodiments of certain sets of values, whether heroic, villainous, or definite mixtures of the two.

The romantic therefore presents the essence of his characters, and wastes little time in accumulating detail. In presenting his characters as essences, he raises them from the particular to the status of the universal, and carries a message to all readers regardless of time and space. The naturalistic novel, on the other hand, accumulates endless detail down to and even including, the brand names of clothes, thus diminishing the importance of the characters by rooting them ever deeper in particular concretes.

Now we can see the reason why issues and characters for the romantic novelist will be either “black” or “white,” and why he will side strongly with the “whites.” The more firmly a person holds values, the more strongly and openly he will be devoted to them. It is no coincidence that just as modern America is marked by a decay of belief in moral principle, so has the serious romantic novel all but disappeared from the literary scene.

Nothing about Atlas Shrugged has puzzled the critics more than its “blacks” and “whites,” and small wonder: for the present age is a shifting inconstant sand of “middle-of-the-road” attitudes in all subjects: aesthetics, ethics, or politics—an age where the only firmly held moral principle is that no one may dare hold moral principles too strongly.

Romantic fiction has been denounced as “escapism,” meaning that the housewife or the tired businessman is trying to escape from his daily cares into a world of enjoyment. But far from being philistinism, we have seen that such “escape”—the experiencing of a world where one’s values have come true—is precisely the noblest function of fiction. And since Atlas Shrugged is our day’s most striking example of important romantic fiction, we may say that just as Ayn Rand’s explicit moral, political, and economic philosophy redeems the tired businessman from the weight of guilt he has long suffered for his productiveness and profit seeking, so her aesthetic principles redeem him from his “sin” of seeking in literature for values in action that he can admire and applaud—including noble heroes who vanquish villains and achieve their goals. In short, Miss Rand, by the construct of her novel, is saying that the modern intellectuals are just as wrong in condemning the tired businessman’s “philistinism” as they are in attacking his method of livelihood.

Atlas Shrugged partakes of all the aspects of the romantic novel treated above. It has been accurately termed a “melodrama” by the reviewers, melodrama being defined by Webster’s as a “romantic and sensational drama, typically with a happy ending,” in which “sensational” means “suited or intended to excite great interest or emotion.”

How does Atlas Shrugged advance beyond the romantic tradition? In two main ways. One: it not only presents values in action, but portrays them as capable of being applied and achieved in daily life. For the trouble with most romantic fiction has been that the authors have not believed their values to be applicable in the real world. They have therefore fled into such remote worlds as historical costume dramas or science fiction. This was their illegitimate form of “escapism.” Atlas Shrugged, on the contrary, presents very clearly a world that not only ought to be, but can be, and its concrete relation to our world is evident. Hence, Miss Rand’s own label for her aesthetics of “romantic realism,” or perhaps, “realistic romanticism.”

The second, and perhaps most important, departure of Miss Rand’s is her creation of a new form of novel of ideas. A novel dealing explicitly with philosophical ideas is such a rarity in modern America that most reviewers dismissed Atlas Shrugged as scarcely a novel because it carries an explicit philosophical message. It has thereby violated a seemingly deep-seated American prejudice: what Irving Howe has called “the notion that abstract ideas invariably contaminate a work of art and should be kept at a safe distance from it.”

But Atlas Shrugged has done far more. For previous novels of ideas have been essentially plotless and static. They have been books in which characters simply sit and discuss philosophy. A typical modern example is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, where the device of a tubercular sanitarium is used to legitimatize the virtual dissolving of action into a series of philosophical conversations among the patients. Another is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins, where the plot is essentially reduced to a series of parlor discussions on the principles and applications of existentialist philosophy.

Miss Rand, on the other hand, not only presents explicitly a far-ranging, comprehensive, and to a remarkable extent original, philosophical worldview, but also dramatizes that philosophy implicitly through her characters and her plot. In short, she fuses the novel of ideas with the best romantic form of the novel: a thoroughly exciting melodrama. Her characters are not only romantic archetypes; they are archetypes expressing her own explicit philosophical system. And since this system covers and integrates all aspects of human action—metaphysics, ethics, politics, economics, psychology, and sex—the breadth and scope of the work is enormous. For her characters are developed as philosophical archetypes in every aspect of their actions; and just as Miss Rand’s philosophy is thoroughly integrated and interconnected, so are all of its concrete manifestations in the novel interconnected. Every theme, every character, every incident, every line of this 1,168-page novel has its function and purpose as part of the whole.

Setting aside, then, the specific content of Miss Rand’s philosophy, the hostile and uncomprehending reaction to the aesthetics of Atlas Shrugged is a measure of the poverty and aridity of our literary and artistic scene. The disappearance of the serious romantic form is a measure of the extent to which we have lost our concern for values, which we all require as a guide to our actions; the absence of a novel of ideas is the measure of the sterility of our current intellectual endeavors, of our lack of concern for ideas themselves. It has been truly said that we are living in an Alexandrian age, an era not of original and profound thought but of taxonomic classifying, of living on the borrowed capital of the ideas of our predecessors. Perhaps the striking originality, in method and in content, of Atlas Shrugged will serve as a beacon for new and fresh literary and intellectual directions.

2. Letter on Recommended Novels

May 30, 1961

Mr. Kenneth S. Templeton

Dear Ken:

I have owed you for some time a letter about possible right-wing novels to suggest for schools. Literature is not my forte, but I have scouted my agents in the literature field, and have come up with at least a few suggestions.

I am assured that one of the most famous Italian novels ever written, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, just published in paperback by Dutton, is a great novel (it was on Eliot’s original five-foot shelf), and also pro-free enterprise. Chapter 28 is supposed to be an excellent description of the sufferings brought on the poor by price control. Manzoni is also pro-religious, but anticlerical. He was a friend of Cavour.¹⁰⁹ In Italian, the novel is entitled I promessi sposi.

The founder of modern anarchism, William Godwin (unfortunately a left-wing anarchist, though not nearly as bad as Kropotkin, etc.) wrote about twenty novels of which the most famous, and still read sometimes, is Caleb Williams.

There is, of course, some acid anti-State material in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

For a “specialized” audience, the openly and avowed individualist-anarchist novel by John Henry Mackay, The Anarchists, would, I predict, warm the cockles of your heart. The climactic scene in Mackay’s story is a great speech in which the hero, who had previously collaborated with the left-wing anarchists, breaks with them and espouses the Tuckerite cause of individualist anarchism.

The best novel by far on the causes of the Spanish Civil War, showing the monstrousness of the Left, is the two-volume work by José Maria Gironella, The Cypresses Believe in God.

There are, of course, the various Horatio Alger novels, and the “romances” of Harriet Martineau.

It is not well known, but the popular English woman novelist “Ouida” was a magnificent libertarian. Unfortunately, in her score or more of novels, I think the only work which was substantially libertarian was her short story, A Village Commune (1881), where Ouida attacked the network of crippling taxes which kept the Italian peasants, and all the other groups in Italy, in misery.

The strange young German writer of the early nineteenth century, Heinrich von Kleist, has just had his best stories translated into English and published as The Marquise of O and Other Stories.The most powerful—and rip-roaringly libertarian—of the lot is Michael Kohlhaas, the story of one man’s private-army vengeance against the army and courts of “justice” of a German state that “did him wrong.”

One time, I heard Ayn Rand commend an extremely obscure novel by Merwin and Webster, a writing team of the turn of the century, called Calumet “K”—a novel about the building of a grain elevator.

For current pro-business novels, there is Cameron Hawley’s Executive Suite and especially Hawley’s Cash McCall (which is also pro-speculator and anti-high taxation).

Everyone read John Dos Passos’s first, left-wing trilogy USA, but few have read his later, anti-New Deal District of Columbia trilogy. I particularly commend an excellent one of the trilogy—The Grand Design is bitterly anti-FDR, both on domestic and on foreign issues, and with portraits of the New Deal dipped in acid. There is also Dos Passos’s latest, anti-union novel, Midcentury.

There are countless “anti-Utopia,” individualist science fiction stories and novels, of which one very famous individualist novel is Robert Heinlein, Revolt in 2100. Also see Eric Frank Russell’s short story “And Then There Were None,” a story of a libertarian, individualist-anarchist planet, that defeats, by Gandhian nonviolence, an American imperialist attempt to add it to its list of colonies.

George Orwell’s 1984 is of course a classic anti-State novel; also good and witty is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Taylor Caldwell has written various right-wing novels in recent years. The most hard-hitting is The Devil’s Advocate (not to be confused, of course, with Morris West’s famous recent novel of the same title.)

Dostoevsky was an authoritarian and a pan-Slavist, but his The Possessed is supposed to contain acid portraits of socialists and other leftists in action; also, of course, The Brothers Karamazov is valuable for its great sequence on “The Grand Inquisitor.”

There is, finally, a host of antiwar novels of the 1920s and 1930s, which deserve to be resurrected. There are the multivolumes of Jules Romains; Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front; Paths of Glory; and the grisly Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. Of more recent vintage is Nevil Shute’s On The Beach and Leonard Wibberley’s magnificent comic spoof, The Mouse That Roared.

(Note: Don’t recommend the war-mongering Advise and Consent by Allen Drury.)

This is only a foray into the literary field. I am sure that there must be other good novels.

I hope this has been helpful to you and Baldy.

3. Review of Edmund Fuller, Man in Modern Fiction

June 22, 1962

Dr. Ivan R. Bierly

William Volker Fund

Dear Ivan:

Edmund Fuller’s Man in Modern Fiction is an important and interesting book; it transcends purely technical literary matters to discuss the philosophy of man that permeates modern fiction.¹¹⁰ Not only is Fuller remarkable for his interest in the view of the nature of man expressed in fiction—rather than in literary symbolism or sociological reportage—but he has a philosophic viewpoint which is especially remarkable for today’s literary critics.

While he doesn’t precisely name it as such, Edmund Fuller speaks for the great classical tradition in aesthetics—the great tradition of Western civilization that brought us, in so many fields of aesthetics (painting, poetry, music, sculpture, and latterly fiction), the masterpieces of our heritage: especially in the Hellenic, Renaissance, Baroque, and nineteenth-century periods. As a classical aesthetician, Fuller stands out foursquare against the entire tradition of twentieth-century aesthetics, which, in the other art forms as in fiction, reflects in its content a profoundly antihuman view of man. Fuller, in this excellent set of essays, points out again and again the assumption of modern novelists that man is subhuman, that he is a will-less, determined creature, little better than an animal, driven only by momentary sensation, and lacking purpose, values, free will, aspiration, heroism, or deep communication and love for others.

Fuller, in pinpointing the distorted and debased view in which man is held by the leading modern novelists, has written a far more important and significant work about fiction than almost any other, for he deals with the really crucial issues about a work of fiction—far more crucial than explaining some recondite symbol. The works of James Jones, Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, James Joyce, and Jack Kerouac are raked over the coals, and application made to others of their school as well.

We see the error of the sentimentalist view of “compassion” (compassion for the depraved and degraded, with corresponding hostility toward the “squares” who are not degraded—thus violating the classical-Christian view of compassion as only forthcoming after a person has repented since he or she arrived at his degradation by his own free will and has moved by his own effort and change of values toward redemption and rehabilitation).

We also see the error of these novelists’ treating man as essentially depraved, sex as a clinical or psychological case history, with women as mere objects of men—instead of as passionate love between two people truly in communion with each other. Also criticized properly is James Joyce and the cult of obscurity and noncommunication—as well as derision at man’s stature, and the insanities of “beatnik” writing and “philosophy.”

In contrast to these morbid degraders of man, Fuller shows how the great classical novelists differed in their treatment of man, of moral problems, of love, etc., e.g., Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. When a modern novelist writes of criminals or rapists, they are considered guiltless, tragic victims of society or their environment, or “happy bums”; when Dostoevsky wrote of them he took sides; he showed that the criminals had tragically chosen, of free will and error, their own guilty path. Dostoevsky portrayed men with purposes, as choosing good or evil, etc.

The only serious error of Fuller’s, in my view, is his defense of Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny as against the valid criticisms of William H. Whyte and others. Fuller lamely tries to defend Wouk against the charge of choosing the organization, and loyalty to the organization, as against individualism and individual responsibility. And curiously, while he praises Dostoevsky and the classical novelists for taking sides, he praises Wouk for not doing so, for treating the Captain Queeg problem as hopelessly muddled and two-sided. And Fuller even weakly tries to defend Wouk’s conformist and anti-intellectual Marjorie Morningstar. However, the discussion of Wouk is the only real slip in the book. The rest is filled with insight. And not only does it, at last, bring classical (Hellenic-Judeo-Christian) philosophical attitudes to bear on modern fiction, but it does so with verve and wit.