Novelists in Youth

ELT: Volume 34:1,1991 demonstrates that there is a complex design hidden in Debits and Credits. A simüar critical turn of mind is instanced in the taüpiece contributed by Harry Ricketts, who convincingly argues that Something of Myself win make better, less cryptic reading if we agree to distinguish in it three structural patterns besides the unsatisfactory chronology, that is KipUng's attitude to fate, his mixed feeUngs about England (those of a "foreigner" in his native country) and about America. A pleasantly printed and weU-edited volume, Critical Essays on Rudyard Kipling can be warmly recommended to both critics and cultists. In the eyes of many it wül confirm the old—the undying— impression that Kipling, Hke Janus, was double-faced, but in Hterary and artistic matters persistent controversy may prove a requisite of longevity. Pierre Coustillas University of Lille Novelists in Youth John Halperin. Novelists in Their Youth. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. 257 pp. $29.95 IN THE INTRODUCTION, John Halperin writes that "This book has been written with the common reader in mind—the reader who is interested in fiction, in history, in biography. The speciaUst may or may not find in these pages a new way of considering or approaching the work of my six authors; that he or she must decide individually." Halperin's common-sense introduction, lack of footnotes, commitment /to traditional attitudes and methodologies, easy assertions, and lack Of a conclusion, indicate that he is indeed aiming for the general rather than the academic reader. The speciaUst wül not find a particularly novel approach here. But on the positive side, Halperin succeeds in what he is trying to do: to show the usefulness, even the necessity, of biographical study for the understanding of Hterary works. He counters the recent tendency to separate authors from their "texts" by revealing, for the most part successfuUy, how six transition period writers' early Uves affected their decisions to become writers and to express themselves as they did throughout their fives. Halperin's thesis—based on Marcel Proust and a host of others—is that one of the best prescriptions for becoming a writer is unhappiness, and particularly an unhappy childhood: "it is the impossible early wound 92 Book Reviews that shapes the individual and gives form to what, as an artist, he or she produced." He shows how the young Henry James felt passive, homosexual , constipated and not fit to take part in the important poHtical events of the day, and so adopted the status of fuU-time observer. Thus James's early experience of ahenation from the mascuHne Hfe of his period eventuaUy led to his theory about point of view, for instance. According to Halperin, Hardy simply could not accept his fanuhZs low social position. He therefore continuaUy Hed about his social class and could not help writing about this subject, chronicling the decline of a famüy in novel after novel. For Halperin, this obsessive concern with social status lies at the very heart of his best writing, including Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Gissing never recovered from the shame and practical consequences of having been caught stealing to support his alcohoHc prostitute mistress (later wife) just as his very promising career as a scholar was about to take off. Halperin finds that Gissing^ subsequent aimless wanderings in America, near-starvation and unfortunate marriage—all symptoms of a basic, self-destructive urge—provided him with an impetus to begin and keep on writing. Conrad was a lonely chüd, brought up by a single parent, his father, and suffered from melancholy and afienation aU his Hfe. Hence his concern with drifters, outsiders, men gone native and other lonely folk, and his ability (in the words of Q.D. Leavis) to "rub in so intolerably the inescapable isolation of every man." Edith Wharton was divided between her love of Old New York and her hatred of it and of her own disastrous society marriage. Halperin sees her status "as a noveHst of the very first rank" growing out of the conflict between her disHke of the New York that did not care about art and her love...