352
PARTISAN REVIEW
with scores and ranks and lists and exclusive traditions. But
where does that leave us?
History plays a part here. We have undoubtedly become
more permissive, or less crabbed, depending on how you feel
about what we've become. I was talking the other day to F. W.
Dupee, who was much associated with the Partisan Review in its
early days. He was saying that his whole generation was perhaps
more of a Mencken generation than they realised at the time,
given to the notion that you could prove your intelligence only
by knocking other people over, that criticism was necessarily a
severe and punitive trade. Dupee was thinking of the early work
of Mary McCarthy and the continuing work of Dwight Mac–
Donald.
I grew up a little later and in another place, but similar
assumptions were still afloat. I remember hearing F. R. Leavis
lecture more than once, but the only thing I remember from the
lectures themselves is
a~
occasion on which Leavis held up, with
some disgust, a book called
Critical Approaches to Literature,
by
David Daiches. Leavis read out the title, paused, gave a long,
righteous sniff, and said, "As if there were any
other
approaches
... " This was the manner which made the word "critic, " as
Northrop Frye once said, "a synonym for an educated shrew",
and I'm not sure I have actually forgiven Leavis for saying life
was too short to read Fielding. When we say we want standards,
we have to be sure we don't want (or don't gat) a joyless canon of
classics and a lot of excommunications. But of course the
ordinary meaning of criticize, in the sense of find fault with,
does have something to do with its other meanings, and it is odd
to hear critics say they're not going to criticize. "My intention is
not to criticize Mr X . . ." No? What are you doing then? What
are we doing?
First, I hope we are enjoying ourselves-critics and others,
reading, seeing movies, looking at paintings, listening to music
and so on. I used to think a capacity to enjoy rubbish was the
first requirement for a critic of any kind.
If
he didn't enjoy
rubbish, he wasn't a real reader or moviegoer or whatever, but
some sort of cultural social worker. I now think this view is
rather puritanical in its way. There are people who really don't
enjoy rubbish, but aren ' t snobs or interlopers or masochists.
