PARTISAN REVIEW
to fame and familiarity, and it is galling to see them battened on,
praised for a hundred qualities they don't possess, mis-selected, made
catch-cries. James was inevitable! Forster and Fitzgerald are being
over-rated. The question apparently wants me to say that these
novelists are being revived mainly because we have no fiction of our
own; so I will; but it's obvious. There have been single novels, but
the one new writer who looks now to give us book after book that
will not disappoint us, and in fact to grow, is Jean Stafford. The
amazing cults, as of Kafka and Kierkegaard, are more interesting
to me than the revivals. It is the advance of middlebrow culture that
has made all these possible, and I read in
Life
that
Don Giovanni
is---oh, just great, great.
6. In the first place, it is not clear that poetry
has
benefited from
the intense concentration upon it of modem criticism. There are
things that you cannot see with a microscope, for instance you can–
not see the sun, and some critics specially devoted to the microscope
have therefore argued that the sun does not exist. There are poets
who believe whatever they are told, and so the sun disappeared from
certain tracts of American verse. One or two extraordinary things,
like Robert Lowell's poetry, were helped into existence by some of
this criticism, and undoubtedly the general conscience of literate
poets improved; but at certain costs.
In the second place, there is something frightening in the notion
of a criticism "equally intense" being turned on work much less able
to bear it in general than poetry-dialogues, say, travel books, and
so on. Could not the criticism
be
simply more thoughtful, perhaps
more learned, perhaps more penetrating, capable of making larger
connections? On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the
criticism of drama and fiction has something to learn from the criti–
cism of poetry. It has also something to learn-if it liked-from
Shak~pearian
criticism. And criticism of every kind has everything
to learn from the science of the mind as that has developed from
Freud forward.
To the last part of this question: Yes.
7. "The effect of the tension is" depressing. "Cultural interests
are affected" adversely. "The writer should" do any damned thing
he can think of to keep on writing, writing well.
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