194
PARTISAN REVIEW
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Barbara, I think, is making a different point,
Irving. She's saying that Hilton Kramer, with whom one doesn 't
always agree, represents an intelligence that goes beyond purely
formal criticism. He's involved in the whole culture and the whole
society in which we live, in the way that Clement Greenberg and
Harold Rosenberg were. They were involved in the same questions
you were, but they wrote about art.
BARBARA ROSE: Greenberg and Rosenberg, like Hilton Kramer, came
from literary backgrounds . Art criticism was once thought to be a
form of writing. It is significantly less than that today. It is not a
form of literature, with the exception perhaps of Hilton Kramer,
who I think has the distinction of being the last art critic.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: I'm told that Hilton Kramer is in the audience.
Since you've been praised, do you want to get up and make some self–
criticisms?
IRVING HOWE: Or do you want
to
attack us for praising you?
HILTON KRAMER: I just want to raise a question about Barbara's
reference to Baudelaire's criticism. Is today's readership of criticism
and reviewing inferior in terms of knowledge and sensibility, to the
bourgeois readers whom Baudelaire so profoundly despised? I don't
think our readers are more stupid than those readers. But there are
more of them. We have not addressed the change that has occurred in
the conditions of criticism, the conditions of readership, with this
vastly enlarged educated public.
BARBARA ROSE:
The New York Times
is a special case. Its readership
has a certain cultural level which is not identical to that of the
culture at large. It is not even identical to that of the public of the art
magazines, most of whom buy the magazines to look at the pictures.
HILTON KRAMER: I was really not referring to
The Times
as such.
Occasionally even publications like
The New York Review of Books
or
Partisan Review
address the subject.
IRVING HOWE: In my paper, Hilton, when I spoke of the literary critic
and criticism, I also meant reviewing. I don 't believe, and I suspect
you would agree with me, that there is some kind of Chinese wall
between literary criticism and reviewing. I remember in the late
forties , John Berryman published a brilliant review, in
Partisan
Review,
of course, of a book by a lamentable critic named Maxwell
Geismar. Geismar attacked T.S. Eliot for never having written
anything except reviews. And Berryman argued that the most gifted
and influential critic of the time had indeed done what we would call
"review essays." Even the constrictions of space can sometimes be a
l
