738
RICHARD CHASE
ly a list of names interspersed with pleasant commentary and apt
quotations, these are much the best essays of the collection.
Mr.
Kazin's piece is the only one in the book that has a real inner pas–
sion and intellectual power, although both Miss Hardwick and Mr.
Brustein perform genuine intellectual acts. Kazin's main point about
the novelists of the fifties may perhaps be fairly summed up by the
following sentence: "Salinger's work is a perfect example of the
lean reserves of the American writer who is reduced to 'personality,'
even to the 'mystery of personality,' instead of the drama of our
social existence." Brustein's point about the American drama is that
it has impoverished itself intellectually and imaginatively by cutting
itself off (as American poems and novels at their best have not)
from literature (for language even), from the literary life, from
literary tradition, and from the world of ideas. He has the same
complaint about the contemporary Broadway theater that Kazin
has about the novel of the fifties. There is no lack of "daring"
themes in contemporary plays, but they are all psychological-deal–
ing with "homosexuality, promiscuity, infidelity, incest"-and the
real issues associated with these themes, although they are con–
fronted by Americans every day outside the theater, are always
"sentimentalized and evaded" on the stage.
Miss Hardwick has the temerity to attack
The New York
Times Book Review,
along with
The Herald-Tribune Book Review
and
The Saturday Review.
Most people I know think the
Times
Book Review
nowadays is either too magisterial or too irrelevant to
attack. They are wrong, and Miss Hardwick has done a service by
reminding us of all those people who are potentially valuable to the
health of the literary life in this country and who innocently depend
on the
Book Review
for literary opinion. "There' comes to mind,"
Miss Hardwick says, "all those high-school English' teachers, those
faithful librarians and booksellers, those trusting suburbanites, those
bright young men and women in the provinces, all those who believe
in the judgment of the
Times
and who need its direction." The
Book Review
has slowly declined over the years to its present
all–
time low estate. It is not only that within its pages there
reigns
a
"Wliversal,
if
somewhat lobotomized, accommodation." What
is
basically wrong, as Miss Hardwick says, is the plain bad editing of
the
Review.
The standard answer to such complaints is that the
