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PA RTISAN REVIEW
operatives. In the mind of Mr. Stanley Hyman, who serves the in–
dispensable function of reducing fashionable literary notions, criticism
seems to resemble Macy's on bargain day :
First floor, symbols; Sec–
ond floor, myths (rituals to the rear on your right); Third floor,
ambiguities and paradoxes; Fourth floor, word counting; Fifth floor,
Miss Harrison's antiquities; Attic, Marxist remnants; Basement,
Freud; Sub-basement, lung. Watch your step, please.
What is most disturbing, however, is that writing about literature
and writers has become an industry. The preposterous academic re–
quirement that professors write books they don't want to write and
no one wants to read, together with the obtuse assumption that piling
up more and more irrelevant information about an author's life helps
us understand his work-this makes for a vast flood of books that
have little to do with literature, criticism or even scholarship. Would
you care to know the contents of the cargo (including one elephant)
carried by the vessel of which Hawthorne's father was captain in
1795? Mr. Cantwell has an itemized list, no doubt as an aid to read–
ing
The Scarlet Letter.
Mr. Leyda knows what happened to Melville
day by day and it is hardly his fault that most days nothing very much
happened. Mr. Johnson does as much for Dickens and adds plot
summaries too, no doubt because he is dealing with a little-read
author. Another American scholar has published a full book on
Mardi,
which is astonishing not because he wrote the book but because he
managed to finish reading
Mardi
at
all.
I have obviously chosen extreme examples and it would be silly
to contend that they adequately describe the American literary scene;
but like the distorting mirrors in Coney Island they help bring into
sharper contour the major features. Or as Mr. Donald Davie writes
in
Twentieth Century:
The professional poet has already disappeared from the literary
scene, and the professional man of letters is following him into the
grave.... It becomes more and more difficult, and will soon be im–
possible, for a man to make his living as a literary dilettante.... And
instead of the professional man of letters we have the professional critic,
the young don writing in the first place for other dons, and only inci–
dentally for that supremely necessary fiction, the common reader. In
other words, an even greater proportion of what is written about liter–
ature, and even of what literature is written, is "academic".. .. Liter-
