304
PARTISAN REVIEW
But arts, philosophies, and religions are escape hatches of another
order, leading to their own realities. In a dualistic system (a structure
of reality and a structure of mind), man, the alien in a pre-existing
temporal-spatial continuum, was forced
to
invent phenomenologi–
cal time, and to measure it in the reality of his own nature-until the
escape into "change-independent" subjective time becomes the
escape from "temporal existence" into "eternity," when, as the Angel
says in the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, "There shall be time
no longer."
All these essays, however glib and superficial (they often end
abruptly with general platitudes or appended musings unrelated to the
subject of the essay), might be interesting and lend themselves to a book
if Craft, with his intellect and wit was, in and of himself, compellingly
interesting. He seems not
to
be, as the pieces on Walt Disney (he does
not like pop culture) and the hernia operation (he does not like
hospitals) best indicate, even though the pieces on Mann, Aldous
Huxley, Schoenberg, and "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" have a
worked-out argument and are perceptive. They strike one as having
been more carefully crafted. Craft does not command the stature of his
mentor Stravinsky, whose mere assertion of strong opinion, without
explanation, was cause enough for attention and interest.
The failure of this book is not a failure of ability or even
knowledge on Craft's part. The most disappointing element is that
Robert Craft has the skill, musical distinction, wit, and critical
intelligence to offer music criticism to the generally educated reader
that is perceptive regarding not only music, but the links between
music, cultural and social history, philosophy, and psychology. The
interpretive bridge between the culture in general and music, in history
and in our own time, needs to be constructed, and few have command
of both the necessary tools of the language of music and an insight and
concern for the general culture. Robert Craft has this command and he
should produce serious criticism, either in essay or book form, but not
in the form of the essays in
Current Convictions.
In his essay on Thomas Mann's
Doctor Faustus,
Craft raises
obliquely the issue of what the value of verbal descriptions of music
might be. This is ironic, for much of his
Current Convictions
is
devoted to describing music and its performance in words, without the
assistance of printed musical notation.
It
seems clear that Craft would
like .to bring music, through words, into clearer focus in relation to the
way we regard the past, the present, and the future, in music, in society,
and in art. Unfortunately,
Current Convictions
is evidence exclusively
of Craft's ambition, ability, and apparent desire to do so, and not more.
LEON BOTSTEIN
