Sleven Marcus
THREE OBSESSED CRITICS
Some years ago, in an essay which soon became famous,
Randall Jarrell argued that our age is an age of criticism. Subsequent
events have tended to verify Mr. Jarrell's notion, and epithets like "cri–
tical industry" and "critical racket" have become commonplaces in
literary and academic conversation. In England, the phrase "American
criticism" regularly evokes a response once reserved for the lower middle
class; there is something depressingly brash, energetic, ambitious, pro–
fessional, engineered, about this large-scale undertaking; its intense
gravity and self-consciousness seem especially suspect and are very likely
bad form, slightly vulgar. But then the English have seldom taken
kindly to formal discourse of any sort, and their judgments of our
cardinal literary discipline must be discounted as largely defensive and
self-justifying. The three volumes* under discussion do much toward
explaining the English discomfort. These books simply outface anything
our transatlantic cousins are able to do. Coming from diverse points of
the intellectual compass and having in common little besides the com–
rpon pursuit of true judgment, they may be fairly taken to represent
the solemn dedication, the devoted single-mindedness, and the proud
service of the absolute which are characteristic of the American critical
enterprise.
Hugh Kenner is one of the most remarkable critics writing today.
Mr. Kenner has a subtle, supple intelligence and a genuine gift for
developing and enlarging other people's ideas. One of his sentences has
long seemed to me a touchstone of this talent. In his book on Wyndham
Lewis he writes, "It hasn't been safe for men of letters to think since
the seventeenth century, when ideas were substituted for things as the
accredited materials of thought." One can trace the progress of this
notion from the dogmatic coarseness and crudity of T. S. Eliot's "dis-
*
Hugh Kenner,
Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature,
McDowell, Dbo–
lensky,
$4.50;
Maxwell Geismar,
American Moderns : From Rebellion to Con–
formity,
Hill and Wang, $3.95; Harry Levin,
The Power of Blackness,
Knopf,
$4.00.
