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PARTISAN REVIEW
to draw out the more elusive meanings in a work of literature, but in
their rhetorical strategies for arousing envy in other critics.
The question I wish to pose here is one that strikes me as most
pertinent to a conference sponsored by
Partisan Review.
Whatever
happened to the tradition of criticism represented in
Partisan Review
that was probably the richest vein of criticism in America in this
century? I think of it in Parrington 's terms as "critical realism," and
am conscious of using the word "criticism" in a double sense: first as
interpretation and judgment, second as an adversary habit of mind, a
posture of skepticism and challenge. The major critical realists were all
dissenters .who normally did their best work in a mood of revolt, if not
downright belligerence. They were largely socialists in their political
orientation, though that association cannot be pushed too far, since, as
Irving Howe points out, writers of his generation often did their best
work when their ideologies had begun to decompose.
In any case, as critics the critical realists were wholly in the world,
if not entirely of it. As a point of philosophical conviction as well as of
moral necessity, they assumed the continuity of art and society, and
their criticism normally addressed the social forces that impinge upon
the artist and art itself as a contingent form of behavior. As Van Wyck
Brooks once crankily put the matter, "To think of literature as merely
literary, as something that is derived from literature, seems to me
utterly frivolous." Irving Howe now speaks of his own impatience
with the merely literary: "To be a first-rate critic you need a first-rate
mind, but not many first-rate minds are likely to be content for long
simply to remain critics." How much literary criticism is to be found in
the pages of
Dissent?
Does that not tell us that in the editors' judgment
serious journalists have better things to do?
I say without intending to flatter Irving Howe that what appeals
to me most about his temper of mind and the tradition in which he has
placed himself is that they exclude so little. Howe despairs of a great
deal, despair being a normal feature of critical realism, but h e dismisses
little out of hand as irrelevant to civilized understanding. Each of the
major critical realists of our time had some version of this impatient
catholicity; for all of them, literature was anything but merely literary.
Edmund Wilson was the very exemplar of critical realism at its most
restless and expansive. Was there anything at all that could not be
brought into his range of fire and made to appear central to contem–
porary thought?
It
was as a model of sustained curiosity and thorough–
ness that he meant so much to the New York intellectuals in the 1940s,
at just the moment when they had to cast off the partisan dogmatism of
