PARTISAN REVIEW
favorably, Hyman inserts an exclamation point or a parenthetical apol–
ogy.
He suggests that Wilson and Levin are probably plagiarists, and
following Granville Hicks's article in
The Antioch Re-view,
has a great
deal to say about Wilson's personality, including the fact that he was
once rude and overbearing at the dinner table. The writing of the editors
of
PARTISAN REVIEW
"has become largely a kind of ethical nail-biting."
Brooks is a "narrow and embittered old gentleman with a white mou–
stache'' and Eliot "a sick, defeated and suffering man." In these chap–
ters, including the one on Eliot, the terms fuzzy, arbitrary, contradic–
tory, foolish, and laughable are constantly used.
In the later, better chapters, Hyman's values appear more positively.
"Insight" is the key word, appearing as many as four times to the page.
An insight, seizing on a clue in a work of literature, produces a new
configuration. The more clues, insights, configurations, the better, dis–
covered on as many levels and from as many perspectives as possible.
By this standard Blackmur, Empson, Richards, and Burke are the four
best critics. An insight won't simply come of itself, it has to be worked
for, and Hyman admires Blackmur's criticism as the best example of
sheer grinding. In approaching a poem by Wallace Stevens, Blackmur
lists all the hard words and then "goes openly to the dictionary and
looks them up." This gives him the clues. In discussing "the Malatesta
family in the
Cantos,
Blackmur refers to four books on them he has
apparently read, three in Italian and one of these unpublished." "Emp–
son reads a line of Shakespeare quite literally against a potential back–
ground of every other line he wrote." This is what most impresses
Hyman; speaking of Blackmur's reading of Eliot's
Ash Wednesday,
he
urges Tate, Bowra, Van Doren, and Wilson to "ponder the fable of the
Ant and the Grasshopper."
He knows, of course, that insights come not only from knowledge,
but also from the use of schemata drawn indifferently from all the arts
and sciences. "We ought scrupulously to risk," Blackmur wrote, "the
use of any concept that seems propitious or helpful in getting over gaps.
Only the use should be consciously provisional, speculative and dra–
matic.'' Where Blackmur is maddeningly pretentious, dull, involved,
guarded, hedging, in his use of such concepts, Burke is free, bold and
assertive, making a brilliant figurative and linguistic analysis not only
of the literary text but also of the terminology of the interpretive schemes
he uses, getting perspective by incongruity through translating these
schemes into terms of each other, economic for amatory, metaphysical
for ecological, and the like, and the whole comic business held to–
gether only by the transcendental pentad of his grammar.
830
