ARGUMENTS
61 7
FOR ART'S SAKE
Saul Bellow's animosity toward the present generation of
literary intellectuals has long been smoldering.
It
was one of the urgent
animating emotions of
Herzog.
Recently in an address to the PEN Con–
gress in New York (a version of which he printed
in
the July 10 issue
of the
New York Times Book R eview)
Mr. Bellow renewed the attack
with ferocity and precision.
It
is an indictment which critics and teachers
of literature would be unwise to ignore, for it aims at the heart of their
enterprise, an enterprise which Mr. Bellow sees not only as futile but as
actually dangerous to the well-being of literature.
Bellow reopens, with surprising harshness, the long-standing feud
between art and criticism, relatively dormant since Eliot, Pound and a
group of American critic-poets were able to appropriate both in effecting
a massive revolution
in
taste. In the wake of the modernist movement in
literature, with its accompanying explosion of critical activity, it was
in–
evitable that hostilities should be resumed, for that movement affected
art quite differently from the way it affected criticism. It endowed
criticism with sophisticated techniques and an omniverous and unquench–
able appetite. But its liberating effect on subsequent literature was more
than balanced by the massive
fact
of the modernist writers, the intimidat–
ing largeness of their achievement.
It
was out of neither perverseness nor
obtuseness that Dr. Leavis could write, a quarter of a century after
Lawrence's death, that "he is still the great writer of our own phase of
civilization." The vanguard literature with which the young man of the
fifties had to come to terms included many of the same books that had
confronted his predecessor of the twenties.
This imbalance in the last decades between the progress of poesy
and progress of criticism was exacerbated by the fact that the modernist
classics were consciously "difficult" books, books which in a sense presup–
posed a subtle cognitive criticism that could interpret them and create
the atmosphere in which they could be appreciated. That atmosphere,
