OBSESSED CRITICS
593
man, "the democracy snob." Whitman, "a corrupted prophet" who had
"an intermittent Blakean talent for naive perception," is the chief in–
strument in a conspiracy organized against the real America and its true
history, "The conspiracy to suppose that American political history
be–
gins, effectively, with Lincoln...." This baleful plot has as its object
the suppression of "the whole novel tradition of an aristocratic govern–
ment deriving authority from a popular franchise," the central, vital
tradition of American politics. It
is
directed by men who believe, per–
niciously, that it is "for some reason important to present an America
dominated by an image of itself as egalitarian paradise"; these are,
mirabile dictu,
the same bigots who rigged up the new interest in Henry
James, for "one notes as an overlooked feature of the James revival
that it is only to a neurotic James that it has been thought safe to en–
trust the aristocratic tradition"-which is just about the most persuasive
argument for the soundness of Ezra Pound's mind I have yet to read.
Furthermore, the worst result of these subversive machinations against
America is the "notion of an American consciousness diffused across
the sidewalks of Manhattan." We must, I think, pause here to sympa–
thize with this
cri ,de coeur:
the nights out in Santa Barbara must get
awfully lonely.
The sidewalks of New York lead us to Mr. Kenner's essay on
Freud, that "Sinaitic will-specialist." This essay, a review of the first
volume of Ernest Jones's biography, is a little classic of ignorant and
conceited certitude, and I cannot hope to do it justice here. To Mr.
Kenner, Freud "is already as dated as William Archer or
Trilby,"
and
was "continually the victim of bright ideas." Mr. Kenner strikes through
the mask and finds that in Freud's work "the illusion of being con–
scious, and of intending and willing, is represented as no more than
an indispensable self-deceit," revealing here not merely his encyclopedic
understanding of that work but his mastery of tautology as well. The
world Freud created, moreover, is one "in which, ultimately, nothing
possesses any interest at all, except for the sort of tumid interest people
can always derive from themselves"-which is, I suppose, not only a
direct hit at Freud, but a shot that ricochets down the corridors of
history, felling, among others, Jesus, St. Paul and St. Augustine, all of
whom, one suspects, Mr. Kenner must by implication be concerned to
deny.
What is all this? Is it, as crusty Christopher once said, "a narcotic
dose administered by a crazy charlatan"? It's hardly that simple. Prais–
ing Lessing as a critic, Kierkegaard remarked that he possessed "an ex–
ceedingly uncommon gift of explaining what he himself had under-
