HARRY LEVIN
863
tionalism as a kind of prologue to postmodernism. Much of this was
already prefigured in
The Waste Land,
with its reechoing quotations,
its backward glances, its consciousness of aftermath.
We may well derive some sympathy for the postmodernists
from our awareness that they were up against an exceptionally dif–
ficult act to follow, without merely consolidating the gains or assimi–
lating the innovations of their modernistic predecessors . When my
college friend james Laughlin foundeq his
New Directions
in 1936, he
conceived it as a quasi-annual showcase for original talent and a
publishing house for the avant-garde. But, admirably as it has per–
formed its function, that has been more of a rearguard action, not to
say a holding operation.
If
the pioneering skyscrapers loomed up–
ward to symbolize modernity, there is no comparable statement to
be discerned in the irresponsibly eclectic whimsies of Philip Johnson.
Conversely, why should we talk about "the lost generation," when
we have in mind the dynamic heyday of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and
Gertrude Stein? Would that poignant epithet not be better suited to
such coevals as Delmore Schwartz, john Berryman, and Sylvia Plath?
One of the distinctions between these generations is that so many of
the later-born have taken shelter within the academy .
Speaking as a non-creative academician, I have welcomed this
influx and believe in its leavening effect on pupils and even col–
leagues. I am less sure that it has turned out to be wholly salutary for
the writers themselves, whose self-consciousness has been raised to
an almost Alexandrian plane. Nor would I- at the risk of appearing
sclerotic in my turn- agree that much of what is now contemporary
writing needs or deserves classroom study, though it achieves this
form of canonization far more readily than Eliot or Joyce did in their
day. I do not share the feeling that literary studies are being jeopar–
dized because of their present concern for methodological or theoret–
ical problems, though I would not genuflect before the highly publi–
cized French solutions to them. Anglo-American criticism, which
had dealt so perceptively with the end products of literature, might
indeed pay more attention to its basic processes. At all events, the
follies we have survived encourage that collective search for wisdom
in which
Partisan Review
has been so fully engaged, and it is a
pleasure for
me
to revive the association .
Harry Levin is Irving Babbit Professor
of
Comparative Literature,
Emeritus, at Harvard University. He is the author of
Memories of the
Moderns
(New Directions, 1980), among other works.
