OBSESSED CRITICS
597
quisitely modulated resonance, the delicate suggestiveness, in the word
"odd" (herewith qualifying as a New Critic and bland authoritarian)
and call to the reader's fancy a vision of John Crowe Ransom wrapped
in a Confederate flag at the bloody angle called Ambiguity, while
Cleanth Brooks, mounted on his dappled charger, Paradox, leads his
irregulars around to the rear to cut off Mr. Geismar and his embattled,
decimated, yet loyal, crew. At the same time, up north, Phillips and
Rahv are at work in the munitions factories, sabotaging the big dialectical
guns, Trilling is making hesitant speeches about conciliation on the
corner of 116th Street, and Hook is instigating draft riots in Wash–
ington Square.
In the latest issue of
December,
a little magazine published in Iowa
City, Mr. Geismar reviews his own book. He gives himself a very good
notice, but is slightly troubled that he should do so, even in "this ob–
scure little western publication which I hope and pray will never reach
our eastern shores." Well, Mr. Geismar ought to have known better;
he ought to have known that in this age of witch hunts and mass per–
secutions no liberal or progressive is safe, that the literary FBI has a
full dossier on him---our agents in the midwest notified central head–
quarters long before
December
ever hit the newsstands. I would like,
however, to linger over one statement in that review: Mr. Geismar de–
clares that he "writes, on the whok, as if reading books was a pleasure."
I have compiled a modest thesaurus of Mr. Geismar's edifying remarks
about writers, and would in this connection like to set down a few
extracts from it here. To Mr. Geismar, Hemingway "has always re–
fused to understand the nature of his own private orbit of anguish";
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and the other writers of the twen–
ties "were masters, not of life, but of a kind of romantic enchantment;
wizards of illusion," who were "as ignorant of their real heritage as they
were indifferent to their future"; John Dos Passos lacks "an interest
in people as such, a knowledge of possible experience, a curiosity about
life simply as life"; Faulkner "doesn't seem to understand the South,"
and is "completely bound in by the class and caste concepts of his
ancestry and origins"; James Gould Cozzens is deficient in "primary
feeling; he is a cold writer who has needed a recharge, say, of human
sympathy"; Steinbeck's work contains "a certain malice and hostility
toward human life itself';
The Deer Park
has "no human center"; its
social values "are based on a biological void"; Saul Bellow is struck
off as "the Herman Wouk of the academic quarterlies";
J.
D. Salinger'S
later stories prove that he fails "to understand his own, true, life ex–
perience and to iI.dfill
him&elf'i
in James Jone&'s tlovelsl people
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