PARTISAN REVIEW
23
is impossible. Why should he expect this extraordinary being, the per–
fect critic (who does occasionally exist ), why should there be anyone
else who comprehends what he is trying to do? After all, there is
only one person spinning that particular cocoon, only one person
whose business it is to spin it.
It
is not possible for reviewers and critics to provide what they
purport to provide - and for which writers so ridiculously and
childishly yearn.
This is because the critics are not educated for it; their training
is in the opposite direction.
It
starts when the child is as young as five or six, when he ar–
rives at school.
It
starts with marks, rewards, "places," "streams,"
stars - and still in many places, stripes. This horse-race mentality,
the victor and loser way of thinking, leads to: "Writer X is, is not,
a few paces ahead of Writer Y"; "Writer Y has fallen behind";
"in
hi~
last book Writer Z has shown himself as better than Writer
A."
From the very beginning the child
is
trained to think in this way:
always in terms of comparison, of success, and of failure.
It
is a weed–
ing--{)ut system: the weaker get discouraged and fall out; a system
designed to produce a few winners who are always in competition
with each other.
It
is my belief - though this is not the place to
develop this - that the talents every child has, regardless of his of–
ficial
"I.Q.,"
could stay with him through life, to enrich him and
everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities
with a value in the success-stakes.
The other thing taught from the start is to distrust one's own
judgment. Children are taught submission to authority, how to search
for other people's opinions and decisions, and how to quote and
comply.
As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a
democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country,
makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the
assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question,
because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young per–
son has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for
granted that a choice is inevitable ) between the arts and the sciences,
he often choose the arts because he feels that here is humanity, free–
dom, choice. He does not know that he is already molded by a sys-
