CYNTHIA OZICK
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Defined, definite, specific - how, what , when, where: the journalist's
catalogue and catechism. Naming generates categories and headings, and
categories and headings offer shortcuts - like looking something up in the
encyclopedia, where knowledge, abbreviated, has already been codified
and collected. james's way, longer and slower, is for knowledge to be
detected, inferred, individually, laboriously, scrupulously, mazily -
knowledge that might not be found in any encyclopedia.
"I had rather be a journalist, that is the essence of it" - hark, the cry
of the common culture. Inference and detection (accretion heading to–
ward revelation) be damned. What this has meant, for literature, is the
eclipse of the essay in favor of the "article" - that shabby, team-driven,
ugly, truncated, undeveloped, speedy, breezy, cheap, impatient thing. A
while ago , coming once again on Robert Louis Stevenson's "Virginibus
Puerisque" - an essay not short, wholly odd, no other like it, custom–
made, soliciting the brightness of full attention in order to release its
mocking charms - I tried to think of a single periodical today that might
be willing to grant print to this sort of construction. Not even "judicious
cutting," as editors like to say, would save Stevenson now. Of course
there may be an instantly appropriate objection to so mildewed an obser–
vation. Stevenson is decidedly uncontemporary - the tone is all wrong,
and surely we are entitled to our own sounds? Yes, the nineteenth cen–
tury deserves to be read - but remember, while reading, that it is dead.
All right. But what of the "clear partisanship" of a book review en–
countered only this morning, in a leading journal dedicated to reviews?
"Five books, however rich and absorbing, are a hefty number for the
reader to digest," the reviewer declares, commenting on Leon Edel's
multivolume biography of Henry james; "a little amateur sleuthing some
years ago suggested to me that the number of people who bought Mr.
Edel's quintet bore little relation to the number who succeeded in battling
their way through them." (Amateur sleuthing may be professional gall.
"Succeeded in battling," good God! Is there a paragraph in Edcl's devoted
work, acclaimed as magisterial by two generations, that does not seduce
and illumjnate?) Edel, however, is not under review; he is only a point of
contrast. The book in actual question, a fresh biography ofjames - in one
volume - is, among other merits, praised for being admirably "short." It is
"attention span" that is victor, even for people who claim to be serious
readers.
And writers may give themselves out as a not-dissimilar sample. Now
and then you will hear a writer (even one who docs not define herself as a
journalist) speak of her task as "communication," as if the meticulous
making of a sentence, or the feverish uncovering of an idea, or the sting
ofa visionary jolt delivered by what used to be called the Muse, were no
