Book Reviews

ARE V lEW E RI S N OT E BOO K Trousered Apes As WILLI SCHLAMM once put it, the whole darned army is in the avant garde. Insofar as writers are concerned, this means that we have an almost totally unrelieved pre occupation with savagery in our plays, poems, novels and even phil osophical speculation. The excuse is that you "gotta see it like it is." In the avant garde writer's view, "seeing it like it is" means that the human being is just another ani mal, and not one of the cleaner ani mals' at that - Trousered Ap'es, as Duncan Williams calls our literary "anti-heroes" in his scarifying at tack on "sick literature in a sick society" (Arlington House, $6.95) . Professor Williams, a British critic, thinks rather better of hu man possibilities than the angry young playwrights of London or such American novelists as Nor man Mailer. Not everyone is dedi cated to "violence and animalism,"

are still whole sections the recalcitrant "boure!eImE~nt - that would reject "decision to en cou e psychopath in oneself." Nevertheless, Mr. Williams does admit the provocation that pushes young writers to pessimistic ex tremes. For one thing, there has been "an almost total loss of religious faith." We have "no ultimate ref erence." Mr. Williams thinks the population explosion, which he takes seriously, must offer a dizzy ingly dangerous temptation to to talitarian rulers who possess the nuclear ability "to destroy the spe cies .." With no belief in a ration ally structured universe or in a beneficent Creator or First Cause, it is easy for people to slip into the attitude of "anything goes." Our novelists and poets and dramatists, with no faith of their own to sus125 126 THE FREEMAN February tain them or guide their artistic efforts, become easy '- victims in their turn of a temptation to mis take an ugly part for a less lurid whole. It is all quite understand able.

The Double Duty of Artists In Mr. Williams's opinion, how ever, artists have what amounts to a double duty. They should "mir ror" the civilization they see around them. But they should also be capable of rising above the "chronic upheaval which is engulf ing our culture." This has not been a popular notion of the artist's duty, as Malcolm Muggeridge makes clear in his foreword to the American edition of Trousered Apes. Not since the Eighteenth Century have writers considered themselves to be teachers or moral ists. There was a time in the "half way house" of the Nineteenth Cen tury when they aspired to be "ob jective" observers, as the very word "naturalism" indicated. More re cently, out of despair, they have become consc.ious immoralists, mocking the idea that you can have a believable moral code in a world without purpose, or teleology, or God, or any other concept that gives meaning· and dignity to existence.

The trouble is~ as Mr. Williams demonstra tes with a wealth of ref erences to scores of writers from the times of Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope and'tT ane Austen down to the present, that one little thing leads to another. The crea tions of the poets and the fiction writers have a definite influence on the texture of a culture. When a Shakespeare or a Richardson can discover heroes and gentlemen, life will ennoble itself by imitating what it sees on the stage or reads in books. But when the very idea of a hero is called into question, lead ing ultimately to the cult of the Dostoevsky anti-hero, life will imi tate that, too. So the modern avant garde writer who has a clinical ob session with man as something that is "violent, animalistic, alienated, mannerless and uncivilized," be comes more than a mere neutral observer. Our Sartres, our Mailers, our Truman Capotes (In Cold Blood) and the film makers of Bonnie and Clyde take on Satanic pastorates in spite of themselves.

A Re-Run from the Thirties The Williams thesis, however heartening and welcome it may be, is not quite as novel as either Mal colm Muggeridge or Christopher Booker (the delighted· sponsors of Trousered Apes) might suppose. Wehad the whole argument out in the early Nineteen Thirties, when Gorham Munson and the "new" Humanists took issue with the pre vailing negativistic cults of the mo ment. The fact that Munson and 1973 TROUSERED APES 127 his friends got nowhere in the "proletarianized" Rooseveltian dec ade is an indication that the mal aise goes much deeper than any thing that might be corrected if only Truman Capote, say, would start writing about something other than moral monsters. But if novelists, dramatists and poets cannot be satifactory substitutes for great religious leaders or phil osophers, they should be quick to catch any stray hints of regenera tion in society. After all, they pride themselves on their acute sensibili ties. Gorham Munson was right to the extent that he held it a novel ist's duty to "body forth" the best that might be found in the world around him, even though few fic tion writers can ever have the stat ure of a Confuci us~ a Thomas Aquinas, a Luther, a Calvin or a John Wesley.

America follows the Trend Since he is an Englishman, Mr. Williams chooses most of his more extended references from his own side of the Atlantic. If he had taken a closer look at American litera ture, he might have discovered that the American writer held on to a basic moral health until well into the Twentieth Century. It was not until the Nineteen Thirties that the anti-hero really invaded our fiction. The characters of Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Roberts (The Time of Man), Ellen Glasgow, Booth Tarkington and even Scott Fitzgerald had a healthy forward-living quality that disap peared from our fiction only after Hitler and the depression had made their simultaneous appearance on the world scene. For all his naivete, Lewis's George F. Babbitt had something to commend .him; he wanted to live in a true community. Lewis even found himself a hero in the businessman protagonist of Dodsworth. Willa Cather's operatic singer in The Song of the Lark and her glowing pioneer women in My Antonia and OJ Pioneers were cer tainly not anti-heroines. We have had only one full generation of writers whose stupid devotion has been to the literature of the absurd.

If memories weren't so short, we Americans might still find it in us to recover from the malaise that Mr. Williams anatomizes with such powerful accuracy. Prospects for Recovery The conditions of recovery, how ever, will not prevail as long as our contemporary critics remain sunk in what Mr. Williams, who has a genius for the happy phrase, calls our "temporal provincialism." This provincialism is currently en hanced by the current academic rage for the "relevant" - Le., what is being thought and said in 1972 and 1973 at the expense of ideas 128 THE FREEMAN February that were prevalent twenty, forty or a hundred and fifty years ago. How to break the vicious circle? Maybe a maverick group of young college presidents such as George Roche at Hillsdale College in Mich igan and John Howard at Rockford in Illinois can do· something about it. They might even prevail on Mal colm Muggeridge, or even Duncan Williams himself, to spend a year or two in American surroundings as visiting lecturers. Even our re bellious young might be willing to listen to common sense when it comes with a foreign accent.

Aside from his perspicacity as a critic, Mr. Williams is a competent theologian. He does not try to prove the existence of a Supreme Being. He notes that, just as a cat can't do calculus, the human spe cies can't fathom the ultimate pur pose of the universe. But he argues with great good sense that if the calculus exists beyond the ken of a cat, so there may be an ultimate purpose in the universe despite man's inability to go beyond the intuition that where there is evi dence of structure there must also be a structuring intelligence. HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX 'FREEMAN BINDERS $2.50 each ORDER FROM: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 tt1e Freeman VOL. 23, NO.3. MARCH 1973 Freedom ... What Is That? "Freedom is a timelesstorch, Blazing in the dark." Ralph Bradford 131 The Natural Controls C. R. Batten 140 If men would refrain from lawmaking to repeal the laws of nature, prospects for peace and progress might improve.