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AMONG our “professional" intellectuals—I refer to those who appear to regard being an intellectual as a vocation, like medicine, plumbing, or the law — there is a tiresome tendency for the critical stance to degenerate into compulsive, griping. This resolute moroseness is exemplified — amusingly at times — by John W. Aldridge in a new book which is entitled In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity (McGraw-Hill, $4.00).

While Aldridge’s essays range over a variety of topics, most of them are related by a dominant concern with the inroads of the conformist spirit on American literary life. Stressing, in particular, the migration of literary intellectuals into the Universities, Aldridge argues that writer-professors who have adopted the values of academic, orthodoxy now constitute a new and powerful avant-garde. “The Universities,”he says, “control literature . . . lo a degree unparalleled since the eighteenth century"; and he argues that this control has virtually stilled the ideal of creative independence and free critical dissent. Mr. Aldridge, it should be noted at this point, is a writer-professor himself.

Aldridge’s essays unquestionably register a number of telling points, and they put forward some provocative ideas about the various ways in which orthodoxy is spreading in the literary sphere. A sizable part of Aldridge’s thesis is certainly valid, but he mars his book by frequently betraying ignorance on matters of fact and by his obvious determination to interpret everything in the blackest possible light.

The late 1940s, he claims, witnessed a '‘quasi renaissance" in American letters and produced “great seminal ideas" (which, Aldridge confesses, he cannot define). Now, in dismal contrast, the young writer of promise finds it almost impossible to establish and maintain a reputation, apparently because he is “extravagantly promoted" by his publisher and indifferently received by reviewers “increasingly drugged on the volume of novels flooding into the market.”Whatever truth there may be in Aldridge’s estimate of the late 1940s— I myself suspect that, though he is not yet thirty five, he is suffering from a bad ease of premature nostalgia—it is clear that he speaks of the publishing scene from the remoteness of the groves of

academe. The increase in the number of novels published in 1955 over 1947 was insignificant (3 per cent); “extravagant promotion" is not an invention of the conformist fifties; and I have yet to hear a young writer complain that his publisher has condemned him to obscurity by overenthusiastic promotion.

And what about the tremendous increase in the audience of t he serious young writers brought about by the emergence of “quality" paperbacks? Well, says Aldridge, “almost unbelievable financial returns” — his facts, again, are ludicrously wrong — “have been substituted for the real satisfactions which the writer has always needed to get from the circulation of his work but which appear to he farther from him now than ever before. Now that good literature has been made “promiscuously available,”Aldridge laments, a writer “is simply used and discarded" which would seem to be a dyspeptic way of sav ing that he gets read.

Another divert ing example of Aldridge’s tortured logic is the follow-up to bis argument that the South is “just about the only culture left in America where people still have personality, still live by a semblance of order and dogma, and are, therefore, easily translatable into fictional terms. This seemingly complimentary estimate of Southern culture is capped by the remarkable pronouncement: “In the South . . . the sensitive child is faced early in life with a grim alternative: either he must live inside his imagination . . . or he must surely go mad.... It appears that nearly every Southerner who preserves his sanity into adulthood emigrates to New York and becomes a novelist

When he is dealing with individual writers, Mr. Aldridge is generally a thoughtful and sensitive critic. But the overall viewpoint which animates his book is rooted in the stubifying notion, “ Whatever is, is wrong and I’m again it.”

A somewhat similar contrariness and the author acknowledges it colors Man McCarthy’s Sights and Spectacles (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, $3.50), a collect ion of I healer chronicles which Miss McCarthy wrote for Partisan Review between 1957 and 1955. But whereas Aldridge is generalizing about a wide area of cultural life, Mary McCarthy is concentrating on a specific sector, and one that is peculiarly open to attack. Moreover, as ibis department has said before and will probably say again, Miss McCarthy is a writer blessed with dazzling resources of mlellccl and insight, wit and erudition. Her addiction to withering dispraise and her parsimony when dispensing appreciation certainly limit her range as a commentator. But there is possibly no other American critic who can carry out destructive operations with such exhilarating éclat.

These chronicles are not a comprehensive survey of the Broadway theater. Some plays in the category of commercial entertainment are covered briefly, but the emphasis is on the most serious productions — Shakespeare and other Elizabethan revivals; Shaw, Chekhov, Ibsen, Wilde, and the leading American dramatists. Also included in Miss McCarthy’s book are a few reports on the off Broadway theater.

The author’s critical perspective is defined in an Introduction, from which it seems well worth drawing together a few statements: “As a writer, I am troubled by the fact that most American plays are so badly written. The list of playwrights from Aeschylus through Shaw is a list of masters of language. Yet the American playwright is ‘excused’ from this responsibility. This business of excusing began with O’Neill, whose lack of verbal gift was a personal affliction that became a curse to the American stage. The same story could be told of American acting. American actors, on the whole, cannot act.The American School playwrights have accustomed us to a stage inhabited by inarticulate, ape-like individuals groping for words. . . . The hero is found standing with clenched lists, stage left, yelling at some member of his family, stage right, until one of them breaks into hysterical weeping and collapses . . . with his great head buried in his arms. The weeping character is confessing to being alcoholic, homosexual, a failure. Nobody anywhere has ever behaved like these people. This fact, somehow, is supposed to make them more ‘typical."’

On the positive side, there are, among other things, favorable commentaries on Our Town and on the plays of George Kelly; a trenchant definition of the best (and the worst) in Saroyan; a persuasive evaluation of Bernard Shaw. Miss McCarthy’s special forte, however, is debunking reputations hallowed by the Broadway intelligentsia — that, for instance, of Tennessee Williams. If one finds oneself, as I do, agreeing with her verdicts more often than not, then her talent for dishing out punishment provides no end of delight.

The Ford Foundation (Reynal,$3.50) by Dwight Macdonald, an “unauthorized biography" which first appeared in the New Vorlcer, is also a work in the deflationary and satiric key.

There is, unquestionably, an intrinsic vein of comedy in many aspects of the subject which Mr. Macdonald is exploring — the very situation of the Foundation, “a large body of money [two and a half billion dollars] completely surrounded by people who want some"; the idea that Henry Ford’s fortune should be serving all the estimable ideals which were anathema to his philosophy: the bureaucratic opera bouffe which is more or less inseparable from the attempt to administer, scrupulously and circumspectly, a gigantic philanthropic enterprise; the jargon of philanthropoids; the occupational frustrations of men employed in giving away vast sums of money; the necessity of paying for intelligent criticism because nobody is willing to scratch the hand that may some day feed him. Mr. Macdonald also has fun with the effort of the Neanderthal Congressman, Carroll Reece, to prove that the Foundation was subtly affiliated with the Communist conspiracy an enterprise which backfired so completely that, according to Gallup polls, the Foundation emerged with more supporters.

All in all, Dwight Macdonald’s book is consistently entertaining, and at times it is, in fact, desperately funny. It is somewhat unsatisfactory, however, if one is looking for a fairly balanced appraisal of the Foundation ‘s work. When Macdonald is ridiculing the zany pretensions of the Institute for Philosophic Research headed by Mortimer Adler and describing other esoteric projects; when he observes that “a philanthropoid would deal with the problem of a man trapped in a burning house by subsidizing a study of combustion"; when he draws attention to the Foundation’s fondness for sponsoring large schemes of research whose findings have proved totally sterile—in sum, when he is discussing what he considers the Foundation’s weaknesses, Mr. Macdonald is a thorough and in the main persuasive critic. But it is clear that he has channeled most of his energies into the diverting job of fault finding, and has skimped on the more laborious task of checking conscientiously into the positive results of many of the Foundation’s donations.

Macdonald’s book, it should be noted, covers up a fiasco enshrined in the last installment of the New Yorker articles, which made much of the fact that the Foundation was not succeeding in disbursing its prodigious annual income. No sooner were the words in print than the Foundation announced a gift of $500 million to colleges and private hospitals. On that issue, the Foundation neatly finessed its often snide biographer.

In Mania I Love you (Atlantic— Little, Brown, $3.75) there is happily none of the porlontous and juvenile philosophizing which made William Saroyan’s last two novels embarrassing to this reviewer. The current work is essentially a fairy story in modern dress, which has as its narrator and heroine a ten-year-old girl called Twink, This format is ideal for Saroyan since it enables him to bring freely into play his most engaging quality— an ability to see the world with the freshness and wonder of childhood.

Twink’s mother (who is separated from her husband) suddenly decides to go to New York to make another bid for fame and fortune on the stage. Luckily she takes Twink along, for it is the little girl who is offered a part; and it is thanks to her that Emerson Tully rewrites his play with a starring role for her mother. It is Twink who makes friends with the great theatrical coach, Kate Cranshaw, who takes mother and daughter under her wing. And when the producer is faced with a financial crisis, Twink is responsible for bringing Gladys Dubarry and her millions to the rescue. Clearly, the plotting is on the cute side; but Twink is a wonderful characterization — Saroyan has not struck a false note — and she makes the novel funny and touching.

The editors of New Short Novels (Ballantine. Cloth, $2.00; paper, $5 cents)—the second in an annual series designed to provide an outlet for the novella — have again put together a decidedly interesting volume whose keynote is diversity. Wallace Stegner’s “Field Guide to the Western Birds” describes a party given by a rich California matron to further the career of a pianist who is an insufferable boor; it is a freshly keyed variation on the theme of the artist and society. “A Boom at the Inn” by Daehine Rainer, a poet who is publishing her first major work of fiction, portrays life in a decrepit boardinghouse in Greenwich Village run by a queer, impoverished gentlewoman with a passion for collecting derelicts. It is quite plotless, but it is written with a wry humor, an individuality, and a vigor which are distinctly impressive. John Phillips’s “The Engines of Ilygeia” is a grimly convincing tale in which a young woman is dying of cancer and her husband is in a half-dazed, half exasperated state of horror, aggravated by his guilt at having been unfaithful to her. Norman Mailer is represented by a story which brings together three middle-class couples for the showing of a pornographic movie. It was originally intended to be the prologue of an eight-volume work, since abandoned, which began with The Deer Park.

Don’t Go Near the Water (Random House, $3.95) by William Brinkley is a humorous first novel about land-bound American Navy men in the Second World War — the Public Relations section of the giant Com fleets Command on the Pacific island of Tulura. Well before publication, the film rights were bought for an astronomic sum; and it is easy to see why. The book combines the most sure-fire elements of box-office appeal of Tales of ihe South Pacific, Mister Roberts, and No Time for Sergeants. I seriously doubt that any other author has ever worked into a novel so many ingredients calculated to ensure success on the screen and the musical comedy stage as well as in the book market. Virtually every episode and every character is a natural for the scenarist and the librettist — their only tough problem will be to select from an embarrassment of riches.

The novel is really a series of short stories confected in accordance with the classic commercial formula — trouble; dire trouble; happy ending. The magician who makes everything come out peachily is Ensign Max Siegel, a gentle hero with a monstrously ugly body and a beautiful soul.

Among the crises in which Max is involved are the arrival of the correspondent of Madame, a determined glamor girl whose panties wind up on the masthead of a cruiser steaming into battle; the transformation of Admiral Boatwright, a fiercely “unpublic relations minded” naval genius, into “ Bow-Wow Boatwright,” the best publicized admiral of the Pacific Fleet; and the grooming of Boatswain’s Mate Farragut Jones, whose vocabulary is strictly limited to four-letter words, for a stateside morale-building tour. The book’s love interest, which reverses the South Pacific situation, teams Ensign Siegel with a “ palomino ”-hued Tuluran beauty of aristocratic ancestry; and the cast contains a lively assortment of comedy types.

Mr. Brinkley’s powers of humorous invention seldom, if ever, falter or flag. In the field of slick, lightweight fictional vaudeville, Don’t Go Near the Water is tops.

An early work of Bernard Berenson’s — extensively revised by the author—has recently been republished in a handsome volume containing some 400 illustrations: Lorenzo Lotto (Phaidon, $15.00). Lotto, who was once Berenson’s “favorite artist,”is far better known and more highly appreciated today than he was when the first edition of Berenson’s study appeared some sixty years ago. “His spirit,”Berenson writes, “is more like our own than is perhaps that of any other Italian painter of his time, and it has all the appeal and fascination of a kindred soul in another age.”

Whereas Lotto’s greater contemporary, Titian, expressed what was typical of his epoch, Lotto’s painting was personal and psychological, Herenson describes him as “the first Italian painter sensitive to the varying states of the human soul . . . perhaps the most interesting portraitist of his time. . . . His analysis is so searching, his diagnosis so complete, that he seems to combine the ideal physician’s sympathy with the ideal priest’s tenderness.”

Of the illustrations, only nine are in color, which is decidedly too few. But this deficiency is partly atoned tor by the superb quality of the black-and-white photographs.

The Skira series “The Taste of Our Time,” which began with monographs on Manet, Goya, and El Greco, has been broadened to include the theme “Famous Places as Seen by Great Painters.”The first items in this group are Montmartre and Venice ($6.50 each).

This whole series has been most happily conceived and admirably executed on all counts — format, text, and illustrations. Smaller than the average novel, the books are easy to handle and light enough to slip into one s baggage (the volumes on Montmartre and Vemce seem to me rewarding traveling companions). The illustrations—there are from sixty to eighty in each book—are all in color; and for their size they are really of outstanding quality.