EDITH KURZWEIL
167
they had to be able to "place themselves in history" and to use a "kind
of forward-looking backward-seeing process." In the scores of tren–
chant "Comments" William wrote in
Partisan Review
over the years,
that method became, more or less, his
modus operandi- which
clearly
was based on his earlier and thorough gobbling up of philosophy from
the Greeks through the classics (including the French and German
ones), his extensive range over literature and criticism, and the history
of music, the arts, and the sciences.
WELL INTO THE
19505
AND
19605,
William wrote some fiction and a
good deal of literary criticism, in addition to commenting on the politi–
cal questions of the day, always trying "to resist the conservative push,
without, however, giving in to those radicals in politics and in the arts
who had swung to a sectarian extreme." He paid special attention to
psychoanalysis, which then was going strong. For instance, in
I957,
in
"Art and Psychoanalysis," he wondered whether or not "some day, the
neurotic man will become the pillar of society." Eleven years before, in
"Dostoevsky'S Underground Man," he had noted that to Nietzsche,
Dostoevsky had been the only psychologist from whom he could learn;
and that to Gide he had been the greatest of all novelists. Although
William concurred that Nietzsche had been "both a creature and a
prophet of the pathological," he went on to ask whether the Under–
ground Man's madness had impelled him to break with tradition, or his
surroundings had driven him to a new version of existence. The many
Freudians' scientific analyses, he noted, were about Dostoevsky'S per–
son, and were relevant to the fictional character, but hard as they had
tried, none of their takes on the artistic personality explained the art–
neurosis nexus. Even Freud, William stated, had shied away from con–
necting the novelist's creations to his personal drives, as when he wrote:
"before the problem of the creative artist, analysis must lay down its
arms." (Joseph Frank's essay on Dostoevsky, included in this issue, was
one of the last pieces I read to William.)
In "Dostoevsky and Parricide," Freud had analyzed the novelist's
character. But William was out to show that a genius's personality
derives not only from his psychology but also from his culture. After all,
William wrote, Mann, Gide, Nietzsche, Melville, Baudelaire, Proust,
and Kafka, among others, had created "what might be called a domi–
nant type: a morbid, frustrated, sensitive, and prophetic man, in short,
a browbeaten superman [torn] from top to bottom by moral and psy–
chological dilemmas." William himself was conflicted and "could not
help but be more deeply impressed [than the psychoanalysts] by the fact
