BOOKS
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Finally, the style is all too often in the mode of academic–
impenetrable. Where it is not bristling with allusions (Donoghue
is nothing if not well read), it meanders like an aging river. The
voice is abstract, high-toned, cowing. Here is a short extract from
"Emerson at First":
In Emerson, the mind holds its power by keeping its dis–
tance, and by enforcing the distance between an object and
its destiny. It is the mind's power to do this which ensures
that no account of life is necessarily predicated upon a crisis
or a rupture. Two forms of satisfaction are entailed. The
mind is not intimidated by what it deals with, and a sense
of history can proceed on the assumption not of ruptures and
dissociations but of a continuous sufficiency of soul to the
world it lives in.
I have to believe that it's the writing-its degree of abstract–
ness-and not my reading that makes the difficulties. The idea
of an enforcement of a "distance between an object and its des–
tiny" begs for clarification. And how does that distance avert
such a predication?
Two
forms of satisfaction? Of what sort?
Why
two? I could go on.
I presume that Donoghue ' s discriminating intelligence is
there behind the sentences. But must it be like God's own-ev–
erywhere present, nowhere visible? Passages in other essays
have shown me how lucid Donoghue can be. He has only to give
his reader some purchase on his argumentation. Then his sub–
tlety and grace are manifest. The following insight, on Stevens,
is delivered with all of its fine feathers intact:
What then does Stevens want? Not the satisfied prescrip–
tions of intelligence, however much he reveres intelli–
gence; because it excludes too much. But he is not willing to
hand himself over to irrationality-as Surrealists do-because
that would also exclude too much. What he seems to want is
either that the mind will transform itself, and run so
wildly beyond or beside its official forms as to include the
irrational in its processes. Or else that the mind , coming
to the end of its processes, will point beyond itself toward
images it cannot predict or specify, images corresponding
to "the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind ."
