LETTERS
To the Editor:
I am completely astonished that you
were moved to write about my Eliot
piece
(PR
2, 1990) - which I never
expected to receive so much attention
- and to write, moreover, with such
extraordinary kindness.
Please know that I am in full agree–
ment with you on every point. Part of
the reason the piece is unsatisfactory -
or may appear ambiguous - may lie in
what it was I set out
to
do. My aim was
mainly to describe the situation then
(perhaps more autobiographically than
historically) and now. I did not take on
the task of overt defense of serious
high culture (though it seemed to me
that defense was implicit), nor did I
propose to polemicize.
As
I wrote to Hilton Kramer (who
has now twice expressed, in print, a
good deal of anger at my failure to
polemicize), ''The germ of this essay
lay in a question that Robert Gottlieb,
Editor of
The New Yorker,
put - not so
much to me as to our generation....
Gottlieb wanted to know how [Eliot's]
astonishing disappearance [from
current literary discourse] had come
about, and I undertook to find out. My
'reply' to the question is, I believe, not
much more than an extended
restatement of the question itself - the
literary pickle we are in nowadays,
including the accelerating disrespect
for serious high cu lture. I described
that pickle: I did not commend it."
I wish now that I had put into the
essay what I finally see it was
obligatory to say expl icitly - those few
sentences I wrote
to
R. W. Flint, and
also to Hilton Kramer: "There is a
difference , I think, between being
swept away by the poetry and being
swept away by the poet. In Eliot's case
(and not only in Eliot's case), I willingly
agree to the first but hope to avoid the
second."
I added, " In 1948 [the year of the
Nobel], and in the years of Eliot's as–
cendancy, this distinction was rarely
sought." Perhaps this is critically mis–
taken - I was recollecting my own
sense of things in college and graduate
school, when Eliot, as public figure and
poet, was, at least in the classroom,
sacrosa nct. For the sake of fresh see–
ing, I had determined to come to all
that material
de novo,
and, except for
the biographies, to concentrate on
primary sources chiefly. Still, in looking
over the mass of adu latory critical
matter of the forties and fifties, I al–
most never came on a comment about
Eliot's rotten side (which in those days
would in any case never have con–
cerned his unknown private life). By
and large, according to the general in–
tellectual atmosphere of that time (and
anti-Semitism was a social given), it just
wasn't "done." It struck me - I hope
you'll correct me if I'm in error - that in
those days there was extremely lim–
ited interest, confined to a few voices,
in making the distinction between, as
you say, "a writer's life and work ," as
well as extremely limited discussion of
the problem itself. And it was that dis-
