596
PARTISAN REVIEW
Mr. Geismar's tastes and interests are truly catholic, and his
VOle!! III
as mild as the sucking dove's.
It
is always rewarding to read so genial
a critic-it justifies one's confidence in the pleasure principle and in
the richness and possibilities of experience. Moreover, I wish that
Norman Mailer would take some of this advice, and instead of lean–
ing on the sex life of lower-class figures would describe just how Ana–
conda coils herself around National Gypsum when they get into
bed
together.
Yet Mr. Geismar knows that novelists are not presently interestea
in the things that interest him, that they are not dedicated to finding
"self-expression . . . in the movements of social reform or social revolu–
tion" as they once were and ought still to be. And he knows why they
aren't, too ; they are being misled, they are the dupes, the front-men
in that old conspiracy against Geismar, home and beauty. In an epi–
phany called "Higher and Higher Criticism," Mr. Geismar identifies
the brutes, these literary counterparts of McCarthy and Nixon.
They
have established the "New Criticism," which is
surprisingly well organized, with its chains of communications running
from the colleges to the dominant literary magazines
(Kenyon, Hudson,
Partisan
reviews, etc.), to the foundations and fellowships. It could
be
called a literary monopoly . . . it has been developed in this country
[like fascism, it is international] mainly by romantic Southern conserva–
tives.. .. Another branch of what is almost an interlocking directorate
includes the literary ex-Communists seeking refuge in pure criticsim;
and such hesitant humanists as Lionel Trilling, who now represent the
"Liberal Mind."
Still another subsidiary wing of the cartel is run by "bitter ex-radicals
like Sidney Hook." Having clarified things so thoroughly, Mr. Geismar
goes on to speculate about "the amount of fascism in this general move–
ment and the poetry it advocates," since what binds all these power–
mongers together is at once "a bland authoritarianism" about literature
and a lost ability "to keep their human values intact"-that is,
if
they
ever had human values, for the only people whom Mr. Geismar seems
to allow as having them are those who were once radicals (Mr. Geis–
mar's favorite euphemism) and who have not repudiated their heritage
and commitment. That we are in imminent peril from this movement
is Mr. Geismar's constant message : "Isn't it odd that our English de–
partments, which yielded themselves to the racist concept of the Anglo–
Saxon 'gentleman' at the turn of the century, now flaunt the defiant
banner of the Old South?" It would take, I believe, a bitter ex-radical
like Sidney Hook to analyze properly the relations between the two
parts of this proposition : I would merely like to point out the ex-
