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PARTISAN REVIEW
The Last Tyc.oon
finished might have turned out to be his best
novel or his worst, but it would have been a novel different in kind
from all the others. The completed chapters and notes are written by a
Fitzgerald who had finally settled for the wisdom that can come this
side of paradise and for the comforts of the traditional relations between
a novelist and his society: the one not taking meaning from, but giving
meaning to, the other.
Midge Deeter
THE SERIOUSNESS OF ROBERT PENN WARREN
SELECTED ESSAYS. By
Robert Penn Worren. Rondom House.
$4.00.
Any critic who is really interesting in himself, who is worth readinlg
as an individual writer and thinker, is likely to be so much more various
and subtle in practice than he is in theory that it is important to under–
stand why his theory is important to the critic himself. Even if he is not
an aesthetician or philosopher, but simply a sensitive intelligence re–
sponding directly to works of art, his general point of view, though he
may often forget it, serves as his formal code, his landmark-in actual
practice, his way of defining his total experience to himself. This de–
finition may not serve him in specific cases; the critic will often find
himself in sympathy with writers h e does not agree with. But his
way of defining his life to himself can be so urgent as to become another
presence in his work; what is important in his work is not only what he
says, but what he would like to say.
This seems to me the case of Robert Penn Warren. The
textbooks he has edited with Cleanth Brooks have more than any other
single force helped to establish in our universities "critical" reading
as a substitute for the old historical concerns; of course it was not
Warren and Brooks who started this trend-they merely serviced it
more effectively than others did. Yet the point here is that as a working
critic Warren is not only far more elastic in his taste, shrewd in his
judgment and generous in his interest than any other critic identified
with the Southern "school," but that he remains all of these things
without yielding in his allegiance to the same fundamental point of
view that is shared by so many Southern poets and critics. This point
of view I should describe as an attempt, through an ideal conception
of poetry, to reclaim the Christian, sacramental vision of the world
