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PARTISAN REVIEW
something, or with the symbolism of something: of the many rapt
cur–
rent worshipers of the symbolic, he would seem quite the most rabid.
For him only what is symbolic has real literary importance, though
some things he designates symbolic seem faintly trivial, and some don't
seem too demonstrably symbolic. One may perhaps be allowed to wonder
why those critics who have an almost connubial relationship with irony
should prove the most unironic, the most didactic and hectoring, of
stylists; or why, for all their
Bludbruderschaft
with symbolism and par–
adox, theirs should be the most lecturing-to-retarded-children of methods;
when Professor Stallman isn't elucidating the far-fetched in Crane, he is
likely to be explaining the self-evident.
But, what is far more important, Professor Stallman's insistence on
symbolic exactitudes-works of art, for him, must be strictly symbolic,
not just richly subterranean-seems an arid and arbitrary obsession,
rooted in a kind of strong antagonism to reality without having any
vibrant fellowship with art. Mr. Stallman is the kind of man who, until
he has consulted the seismograph, cannot be sure he has felt the earth–
quake. He is also far too "literary" to have a really true sense of litera–
ture: for all his connection with the New Criticism, he is far more
engrossed by what surrounds and underlies and overhangs and next–
door-neighbors the work of art than by the work of art itself. He is a
literary archaeologist, digging tirelessly after sources. He is naturally
a zealous literary genealogist: what gives Crane "exceptional critical
interest" is the "number of comparisons with other artists"; and he then
goes on, for the next five pages, to compare. But he is no less a sort of
literary gossip-columnist or seashell collector: thus when Crane hap–
pened to doodle on a table cover, he didn't do what thousands of people
do every day, rather it was "like Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's
Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man."
Mr. Stallman is even a kind of literary
astrologer: because one who knew them both noted that Crane and
Harold Frederic had died at the same hour of night within two years
of each other, Mr. Stallman must inform us, as though this sort of
thing had mystical significance, that Scott Fitzgerald died at that hour,
too.
As for Professor Stallman on Crane himself, I can only, for reasons
of space, document a single procedure. Crane, for Mr. Stallman, com–
mitted the crime of having a false theory about writing-the theory
that one should first experience what one writes about. It might seem
an extenuating circumstance that he adopted this theory in extreme
youth; it might seem even more extenuating that he quite violated the
