Vol. 20 No. 5 1953 - page 538

538
PARTISAN REVIEW
not keep posterity in hand.
In
a highly industrialized society "re–
search" is an honorable calling. Politeness and decency have left us
nothing of Emily Dickinson's swoons or suspicious flutters, still ladies
and gentlemen coming later can hypothecate depths of perverse
commitment about which one can at best only be an agnostic-like
the after life these hypotheses cannot be proved true or false from on–
the-spot accounts. The scholar can do anything he likes with Walt
Whitman, or rest Herman Melville on a bed of Oedipal nails that
would puncture the sleep of the most thick-skinned artist. Posterity,
dipping into
Harper'S Bazaar,
the
N ew Yark T imes
"Interviews" and
so on, will find a mute and inglorious Faulkner, a kittenish Marianne
Moore, a sober Dylan Thomas- perhaps there will not even be a word,
but only a picture memorializing an Allen Tate of granite solemnity
and dignity, a mutely beautiful Katherine Anne Porter, a schoolmaster
with a mustache named Randall Jarrell. From our serious periodicals
it will be learned that our literary men, and also those of the past,
had no life at all: they lived and died as a metaphor. But living
people, even thousands upon thousands of students, know our writers,
and know it first-hand , to be fantastically interesting and-who would
dispute it?--often
fantastic.
Our squeamishness and glorification of
privacy may be paid for by a blank. Even a bureaucrat or a play
producer might, if he gave thought to it, hesitate to enter history
by way of those "profiles" and cover-stories which have become an
unyielding bore of joshing flattery, whose only purpose may be to
keep literary lawyers busy and neighborly researchers employed in
the piling up of a benign lump of fact.
It was clear that something new was needed- nobody is
that
dull, the harried editor heard in his dreams. This something was
found, a new, a fearful and quite unprecedented growth, a pioneer
and monstrous crossbreeding of indifference and total recall: the
New Yarker
"article" on Hemingway. Before this it seemed never
to have occurred to a magazine that brute sound, as it were, might
be a novelty, that "pieces" may after all simply be made with words,
any words, if they have been truly uttered by a person of some cele–
brity. One would have expected these offerings to be signed with
tiny initials, indicating a stenographer, or better by a few steel
tracings of a machine not yet on the market, but showing in
its
simplicity and efficiency every possibility of easy mass production.
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