80 0 K S
133
THE FEAR OF LITERATURE
THE SHAPE
OF
BooKs
TO
CoME.
By ]. Donald Adams. Viking Press.
$2.50
THE
PUBLISHERS of this work speak of J. Donald Adams as "one
of America's foremost literary critics," and there is an important
sense in which they are right. Mr. Adams was the editor' of the
Times
literary supplement for eighteen years, between 1925 and 1943, and
thus was as powerful as any man can be in determining what books
were to be regarded as notable, significant and worthy of extended re–
views. Yet in another important sense Mr. Adams was not a literary
critic at all; the effect of h is editorship cannot be discerned in a single
instance: no work can be said to have been raised from oblivion and
given lasting attention because of his functioning as an editor. Here then
is a strange accomplishment-the accomplishment of nothing at all
while occupying a position of great power. Everyone read the
Times
Book Review,
but no one remembers the books praised in the
Times
be–
cause they had been praised in the
Times.
Most of the best-sellers be–
tween 1925 and 1943 are as dead as the Pharaohs; all that remains of
Mr. Adams' editorship is the memory of ineffable reviews written by
Percy Hutchinson, Eda Lou Walton, Edith H . Walton and Peter Monro
Jack.
The interested reader of Mr. Adams' volume will soon come to
suspect that this critic does not really like books at all. Books are dis–
turbing; such is the reason for his dislike of Joyce, for example; but the
true key to Mr. Adams' attitude appears when he writes of classic au–
thors, who are no longer present to utter the naked truth. For instance:
he quotes Thoreau's famous statement, "Most men lead lives of quiet
desperation," and labels it a "striking half-truth"; and Shakespeare's
cynicism, skepticism and despair are acceptable to him only because this
phase is succeeded by the "serenity of the final period." Does not this
make it clear that
Cymbelz'ne
and
The Winter's Tale
would have been
given the highest prai e in the
Times,
while
Macbeth
and
King Lear
would have been received with regret? The fact is (as Mr. Adams' title
shows) that he has placed his hope of a satisfying literature in books not
yet written, in books of the future, in books he had not yet read. These
unseen books alone conform to the standards he avows, standards which
may be reduced to one imperative--a wholesome view of life. This ex–
cludes works like
Gulliver's Travels
or
Hamlet,
for one author wrote as
his epitaph, "Savage indignation shall lacerate his heart no more," and
the other author's philosophy has been stated without contradiction as
being : Duncan is dead in his grave.
JosEPH HANNELE GoLDSMITH
