tHE VALUE OF TASH
he took his chances, as every serious writer must. Now, in a literary
atmosphere he evidently finds alien, he has returned to test the value of
his taste.
I think it the modicum of justice, let alone that gratitude which
has become so unfashionable in American literary life, to say at once
that Wilson's taste remains one of the most valuable and interesting of
our time. Those who shook their heads knowingly when he took the
New Yorker
job are shown to have been rather silly: this is the same
writer, with the same strengths and weaknesses, as before-no man can
undo in a few reviews what he has made of himself in 25 years.
If
the
pieces in
Classics and Commercials
differ from those in his previous
books, it is only in being deliberately slighter in frame and, because of
the absence of those guiding notions he once used as binder, more
frankly dependent on sheer taste. But the fundamental dispositions
behind his work remain unaltered: an emphasis on literature as a
pleasure-yielding activity and an instinctive bias toward the view that
it is always intertwined with other disciplines and passions; a wide and,
if
you wish, journalistic curiosity about how men live and get things
done; a belief that criticism is a conversation among peers in which
exegesis can be little more than a preliminary to the main business of
LIBERAL PRESS, INC.
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PARTISAN REVIEW
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A VISION, by W. B. Yeats
3.75
ANCIENT HEBREW ARTS, by Adolf
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Over 200 Excellent
photos
5.00
ARMA VIRUMQUE CANO. A poem
by John Walker. Linoleum Cuts
1.00
CELEBRATION AT DARK, by William
Jay Smith. A new volume of poems 2.00
THE DELICATE PREY and other
stories, by Paul Bowles
3.00
EL JOVEN OLVIDO, by Rosllmel del
Valle. Pooms in Spanish
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F. O. MATTHIESSEN: A lasting mem–
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Leo Huberman
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NEW DIRECTIONS 12. Best ever
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