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Joseph Frank and the Unknown Dostoevsky

As a tribute to the late Joseph Frank (1918-2013), I reprint my review, slightly updated here, of the first volume of his great biography of Dostoevsky, which first appeared in the New York Times Book Review (November 21, 1976).

Some great writers leave books behind that are like monuments, chiseled in alabaster, inviolable, or like tall mountain peaks which must be climbed simply because they’re there. Dostoevsky is one major writer who will never harden into a classic. He forces his readers to grapple with his books in a personal way, with some of the same intensity he brought to writing them. The author of the definitive biography, Joseph Frank, describes “the unusual sense of excitement that Dostoevsky manages to create from page to page, and the almost hypnotic fascination, quite aside from plotting, that he never fails to exercise on his readers.” At moments Dostoevsky seems to reach out and grab the unwary reader by the throat, enclosing us in an atmosphere of emotional violence that is sometimes comical but can also come to feel suffocating.

It’s no wonder that Dostoevsky has proved such an awesome burden to those who have tried to write about him, especially in the English-speaking world, where he was discovered late and where his work has always seemed a little strange, bizarre, formless, even pathological. To Henry James the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were “loose baggy monsters” and “fluid puddings,” powerful but inimitable. Brilliant critics like R.P. Blackmur and Philip Rahv worked intermittently for decades on books on Dostoevsky and died without completing them. As an independent young critic writing for the literary quarterlies in 1945, Joseph Frank made his reputation with a dazzling and original essay on “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Much later, he taught comparative literature for many years at Princeton and Stanford and published a widely admired collection of essays on modern writers, The Widening Gyre (1963), which included an expanded version of his essay on spatial form. The first volume of his long-awaited book on Dostoevsky, published in 1976, was twenty years in the making, and even the author may have wondered at times whether it would see the light of day. (The fifth and last volume would not appear until 2002.) The book was worth waiting for. From its auspicious beginning, dealing with Dostoevky’s little known early years through his imprisonment and mock execution in 1849, Frank’s book proved to be a masterful work of cultural biography; it explored the young writer’s Russian milieu in a way that had never been attempted in English. Indeed, this biography, with its increasingly detailed successor volumes focusing on major works, including 140 pages on The Brother Karamazov in the final volume, is certainly the most ambitious book on Dostoevsky undertaken in any language. But I found the first volume, dealing with Dostoevsky’s life and work before his arrest, trial, and exile, especially eye-opening, for it cast a fresh light on a poorly understood phase of his career.

Essentially Frank wrote three different but overlapping books within this opening volume, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849. The first is a lively personal biography, the second a close study of Dostoevsky’s intellectual and political development, and the last a thoughtful work of literary criticism on his neglected early novels and stories. Eschewing the speculative flights of more partial critics, whose novel theses are more daring but more questionable, Frank weighs and balances evidence with an appealing judiciousness, yet also a modesty that invites trust and confidence. While mastering all the pertinent scholarship Frank has managed to preserve some of the wide-eyed curiosity of the inquisitive amateur. His cultural expansiveness, which takes the subject in its broadest connections at every moment, reminds one of Michael Holroyd’s panoramic treatment of Lytton Strachey, which singlehandedly revived Bloomsbury as a matter for continuing fascination. But where Holroyd’s book was glib and gossipy, Frank writes with a measured clarity that proves it’s possible to be utterly serious without excluding the general reader.

This is most true of the biographical part, especially the first hundred pages, where Frank keeps Dostoevsky’s early life within a narrative framework and patiently revises the accepted harsh image of Dostoevsky’s childhood and his father, a military physician and small landowner, who was probably murdered by his own serfs in 1839, when his 18-year-old son was away at school. Like Dostoevsky himself in his Diary of a Writer, Frank stresses the piety, near-poverty, and close-knit domesticity of Dostoevsky’s upbringing, which was no different from the wealthier, less religious and more Europeanized upper-class educations of nearly all his great literary rivals. Dostoevsky’s father send him to Petersburg to become and army engineer, but the literary and intellectual ferment of the great city in the 1840’s made him a writer and radical instead, until the Czarist authorities catastrophically intervened.

Frank concludes this volume in 1849 when Dostoevsky’s career seemed to come to an abortive early end. At the age of 27 he and his friends were arrested for their participation in a circle of liberal intellectuals who met weekly to discuss reforming the system, an absolute monarchy which still kept twelve million peasants in a state of agricultural serfdom. Only four years earlier the writer had awakened like Byron to find himself famous, when the celebrated critic Belinsky had proclaimed his first novel, Poor Folk, then still in manuscript, a work of genius. Instead his arrest led to a ten-year hiatus in his writing life, including periods in prison, labor camp, the army, and Siberian exile, as well as a ghastly death-sentence and mock execution that fixed itself in his mind like a burning brand.

These experiences gave a different weight and shape to Dostoevsky’s imagination, so that the book we have here is about Dostoevsky before he became the Dostoevsky we know. Yet the twilight world of prison and exile was all too continuous with the dark, tortured side of his own psyche, fostered by uncertain health and delicate nerves, and the influence of his favorite Romantic writers—Schiller, Hoffmann, Gogol, Balzac—whose passionate work he loved and sometimes imitated. Reading these early works of Dostoevsky, especially the one indubitable masterpiece, The Double (1846), which Frank strangely undervalues, or the brilliant first chapter of Netochka Nezvanova (1849), an unfinished novel cut short by his arrest, we’re amazed at how much is already there of the writer who has become much more than a writer, who has become for us, with Freud and Nietzsche, one of the buccaneers of modern thought, explorers of the irrational and unconscious underpinnings of the human psyche.

The anxious Petersburg clerks, dreamers, and would-be artists who populate these stories not only show the most paradoxical turns of feeling and behavior, but they already reveal the rootlessness and insecurity we associate with the shadowy byways of the modern city. In The Double an ambitious clerk, Golyadkin, is gradually evicted from his own life and driven mad by a diabolical alter-ego, another Golyadkin (who is something between a sordid actuality and a suppressed part of his own mind). As the critic Dmitri Chizhevsky has shown, this displacement highlights the dilemma of “finding one’s place,” a niche of one’s own, and “shows that Golyadkin’s place was illusory to begin with.”

In the 1950s we might have treated this (like Chizhevsky) as a psychological or existential problem, an instance of ontological insecurity. To Frank this approach, which he himself took toward the writer in those days, shows the extent to which—in our sense of Dostoevsky’s modernity and immediacy—we tear him from his own place in the Russian world of the mid-nineteenth century. To recapture the texture of that world Frank learned Russian, and came to see Dostoevsky as a writer who brought into sharp focus all the cultural tensions of his age. In dealing with the clerks and dreamers of the early stories he emphasizes the social roots of their personal insecurities, “the crushing of the human personality in the Russian world of despotism and unconditional subordination.” This may account for Frank’s special animus toward Freud’s famous essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” which stresses the neurotic and personal sources of the writer’s imaginative patterns, but which is based on biographical evidence that has since proved flimsy and unreliable.

What most surprised me was that Frank’s attempt to restore Dostoevsky to his historical setting does so little to distance him from us. In an essay on Notes from Underground fifteen years earlier, the first fruit of his research on the Russian milieu, Frank came close to miring Dostoevsky in the local polemics which the story itself works to transcend. But there’s no trace of a reductive approach in book itself, and time and again Dostoevsky’s world reminds us of our own. If the rigid political framework and class structure of the Czarist order seem remote—though less remote, say, than the reactionary monarchist France of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black—yet the passionate ideological ferment inside that constricted world seems eerily familiar to us. Dostoevsky’s pictures of urban bureaucracy and urban poverty are closer to us than the church-and-army world of Stendhal, and the seething tensions of a nascent urban intelligentsia make his characters seem strikingly modern in their hopes and in their marginality.

Russia in the 1840s was a changing world frantically resisting the pressure for change, which came both from within and from Western Europe. Radicals such as Belinsky and Alexander Herzen wrote in an Aesopian language, like Eastern Europeans today, but within the limits of a heavy-handed censorship and a small, fragmented intelligentsia, the latest Western ideas were hotly debated. The Czar himself hinted at the abolition of serfdom, and the debating circle which Dostoevsky attended was quietly ignored for years by the authorities. But the frightened Russian reaction to the European revolutions of 1848 brought all such talk and toleration to an end. Thus the interruption of Dostoevsky’s career in 1849 coincided with a sharp break in Russian political and cultural life, while his return to Petersburg ten years later, under a more liberal Czar, coincided with a turbulent revival of the ferment of the 1840’s. His great political novel The Possessed (1873) deals directly with the links between the radical sixties and the liberal forties.

Though Dostoevsky’s politics were drastically changed by imprisonment and exile, and he reacted with horror (yet a shock of recognition) to the new radicalism, Frank is surely right to treat him as “the chronicler of the moral consequences of flux and change” and “the future novelist of the spiritual crises of the Russian intelligentsia.” Frank’s subtitle, “The Seeds of Revolt,” is well chosen, for his book illuminates both the roots of Russian socialism and the seeds of Dostoevsky’s own rebellion against it, in the name of a Christianity which, in Frank’s words, “always retained the strongly altruistic and social-humanitarian cast of the 1840s.”

The book’s only weakness comes from its painstaking care as it sorts out the strands of Dostoevsky’s political and intellectual development and finally his literary growth, where the brisk pace of the early biographical chapters slows down to something far more detailed and minute. Thanks to Frank, no one in the future will ever doubt the seriousness and depth of Dostoevsky’s involvement with radicalism in the 1840’s, which undermined neither his basic Christianity nor his insistence on the autonomy of art (both under attack then, as later, in radical circles). Valuable as it is for Frank to pin down these loyalties and the friendships that went with them, he risks losing his reader in a proliferation of detail, in minor figures, momentary alliances, and transient ideological currents. Similarly, in the literary-critical chapters that conclude the volume, Frank taxes the reader’s patience by paraphrasing the wildly improbable plots of minor fictional works. Yet he also gratifies us by giving serious attention to each of Dostoevsky’s first three novels.

Despite the value of this criticism, what draws our eye are the anticipations of greater things to come, which break through time and again like lightning bolts across a cloudy sky. Frank resists looking ahead too omnisciently to the later career, but in his immensely eloquent chapter conclusions he allows himself a flash forward that’s like a payoff for the preceding detail. Thus an overlong analysis of some forgotten newspaper columns, which Dostoevsky himself never bothered to reprint, concludes brilliantly with a paragraph showing how this “feuilleton style” foreshadows the unique narrative voice of Notes from Underground. As his subtitle suggests, Franks has a truly organic sense of the writer’s development, and he has a superb grasp of the lines of growth and continuity.

What makes the Russians so interesting, aside from the greatness of their writing, was the furious intensity with which they absorbed ideas and pursued them to their practical conclusions, with inferences which, as Dostoevsky remarked, were “not even suspected” by their European originators. The Germans thought them up; the Russians acted them out. Kirilov in The Possessed commits suicide to assert the freedom of the will. While the ideological passions of will never have the chic appeal of Bloomsbury’s kinky passionlessness, at least those who were involved with the left in our sixties owe it to themselves to discover the antecedents of their hopes and failures.

Time and again the Russians were willing to live or die for ideas that were only debated abstractly in the West; the Russian revolution was one late example, and Lenin gave Marxism that practical bent its founder sometimes lacked. Dostoevsky was appalled by the consequences of these ideological furies, even as he shared them and dramatized them in the riveting emotional atmosphere of his work, whose strength it is to render ordinary life with the terrible clarity and power of hallucination.

Becoming Gore Vidal

First posted in The Daily Beast (August 4, 2012)

Gore Vidal liked to style himself a populist but for his political leanings this hardly fit tha man at all. Populists in America come in many shapes and sizes, from William Jennings Bryan to Frank Capra, from Thomas Hart Benton to Sarah Palin. Vidal didn’t resemble these would-be common folk prone to idealize the salt of the earth. He was a patrician radical, a type more common in Europe than here, since we have never had a formal aristocracy. His prototype was Henry Adams, the grandson and great grandson of presidents, who felt that he had been born to public service but found that the corrupt, rough-hewn America of the Gilded Age had no use for his talents. Becoming a writer instead, he turned his disappointment into cutting irony and wit, surveying the details of American history – and his own life – from an eagle’s perch. After his death in 1918 his autobiography, written largely for private consumption, became a surprise bestseller, evoking an era long gone.

Like Adams, Vidal lived in swiftly changing times, which produced a far more leveling culture. A growing ethnic diversity eroded old traditions of Wasp privilege and authority. The traditional elite was giving way to more meritocratic elites but also to a messy democracy and a boisterous popular culture, including movies, pop music, and television. When Vidal started out as a writer in the mid-1940s, the great field of a young man’s ambitions was the novel, then the crown jewel of the arts. After publishing a Hemingway-style war novel when he was barely twenty, he attracted unusual attention in 1948 with his third novel, The City and the Pillar. The book was a bold step forward in its touching, explicit treatment of homosexuality but an otherwise conventional coming-of-age story. The dazzlingly good-looking young author became an instant star, and over the next five or six years, though he remained extremely productive, his fiction went nowhere. Later he would insist that he was blacklisted for writing sympathetically about the gay demimonde and love between men but at the time he felt that the culture itself had changed: the novel itself was no longer the royal road to success.

Unlike most patricians Vidal was a consummate professional who also had to support himself from an early age. Seeing that movies and TV were supplanting fiction in the shifting galaxy of popular culture, he patiently taught himself to write dialogue, crafting effective small-scale dramas for stage and screen. Even more momentously, he began investing himself in reviews and essays that gradually evolved a distinctive voice and, even more important, a recognizable character behind them. It’s fascinating to see them develop from a flat, impersonal objectivity toward an engaging conversational voice, not exactly intimate but coolly inviting. Other novelists were testing their wings in essay writing, dipping into their own experience in direct ways, including Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy, but Vidal, like Mailer began doing more. He had noticed that the public, though no longer so captivated by novels, had grown more preoccupied with authors, less as writers than as recognizable, sometimes notorious public personalities. Vidal instinctively understood how the nascent celebrity culture could envelope or sideline the literary culture, and he exploited this opening. Mark Twain, with his iconic head, white flannel suits, and irresistible platform manner, had been there before him. So had Hemingway, whose self-cultivated myth had begun to overwhelm his literary conscience.

Vidal created a character quite different from Twain or Hemingway. He took on the role of a sardonic observer, the witty, acerbic outlier commenting on the foibles of the literary scene, the follies of popular taste, and, as time passed, the depredations of the plutocracy and the political class. Where Mailer, partly inspired by the Beats, but also by his own literary frustrations, dabbled in transgression and presented himself as an outlaw, Vidal came out like Adams as the remnant of an older America, its conscience and historian. He ran for public office, quickly making his failed effort a part of his gathering myth, and he began writing political novels, the first of them, Washington, D.C., plainly modeled on Adams’s satiric novel Democracy. Soon he was locking horns with William Buckley as commentators at the 1968 Democratic convention.

As a nonfiction writer, turning the crisis of the novel to his own advantage, Vidal never approached the fictional density of Mailer’s finest work, from The Armies of the Night to The Executioner’s Song, but he bested him in a medium Mailer failed to master and came to loathe, television. Vidal’s coruscating wit, epigrammatic clarity, movie-star good looks, and feline hauteur proved perfectly camera-ready, whether he was chatting with the plebeian Johnny Carson or basking in the fan’s gaze of an adoring Yalie, Dick Cavett, and crossing swords caustically with other guests. No matter what the subject, he came up with a sound bite that could curdle milk. He could be unbearably glib, but his patrician persona and acid tongue, his radiating sense of superiority, made for good showbiz. Despite becoming a public character he survived as a writer as well, chronicling the fate of his own generation and the changing cultural scene in essay after essay, even as he chronicled the earlier history of the nation in his novels. Mailer showed a quirky brilliance in his fiercely competitive takes on his fellow writers, but no one wrote better than Vidal on his friends and contemporaries, among them Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and John Horne Burns. A legion of departed forties writers lives on vividly in his evocative essays.

His political novels, his novels in general, proved less memorable. Their greatest virtue is their uncluttered directness, their fluid mastery of well-researched detail. They sparkled with the effortless clarity of his conversation. Like Robert Graves before him, Vidal cleared out the fusty antiquarian machinery of historical fiction, playing off real and invented characters and providing a feeling of lived reality to the American past. With Burr he had the kind of scoundrel he could identify with, a troublemaker demonized by history for killing one of the founding fathers. But only in Burr’s duel with Hamilton, when one of them is momentarily blinded by the sun, did one get an inkling of some higher imaginative ambition, a place where the novel chose not to go. The book’s perfectly workmanlike sequel, 1876, offered no such exalted moment at all. Vidal had successfully returned to fiction, taking possession of a large slice of American history, but he had chosen the popular route where no real innovation was possible.

In his last decade, beset by old age and illness, the loss of his longtime partner, Howard Austen, Vidal in a way became the despised Burr, finally a marginal figure. He had once said that his goal was to seize the spotlight and hold on to it forever, but now the spotlight turned away from him or else shed an unpleasant light on his bitter mix of conspiracy theories after 9/11. He had always loathed the “American empire” and its neoconservative apologists, especially Jews. Once Bush and Cheney added real substance to the term, Vidal’s cold fury gave cynicism a bad name. His political criticism, once so poised and witty, slid into a sour misanthropy that reminded me of the elder Mark Twain, who was justifiably incensed by our earlier imperial adventures. But no writer should be judged by the diminished work of his last phase. Vidal in his prime was never less than fun to read. As an indelible character and a fine essayist, he added something of his own to the drama of American life that he portrayed with such zest and elan.

The Great Contrarian – Dwight Macdonald

First published in The East Hampton Star (July 19, 2012)

Masscult and Midcult (New York Review Books, $16.95) gives us only one phase of Dwight Macdonald’s storied career as a political gadfly, provocative journalist, nonpareil editor, and embattled critic. It showcases Macdonald as an endlessly entertaining highbrow scold, taking up the cudgels for literary standards, drawing a bead on misconceived cultural projects. His political writings are out of print but this side of his work is well worth revisiting. Macdonald died thirty years ago but, as many reviewers seem to agree, this may be the liveliest collection of essays published this year.

Born to modest privilege but not wealth in 1906, he went to Phillips Exeter and Yale in the 1920s and spent much of his later life trying to live this down. In college he was a precocious troublemaker, mocking a celebrated English professor as unqualified to teach and writing to Yale’s president to object to compulsory chapel for its banal sermons. He and some friends started a little magazine in the early thirties while he was writing mainstream profiles for Henry Luce’s new Fortune magazine. Radicalized by the Depression, he briefly became Trotskyist and in 1937 helped relaunch another quarterly, Partisan Review, devoted to anti-Stalinist radicalism and cutting-edge modern literature.

By the 1940s the horrors of the war had turned him from a pacifist into a libertarian anarchist, and for five years he published his own magazine, the legendary Politics, that became a beacon of cosmopolitan humanism in a dark time. At the end of the decade he despaired of politics and turned instead to the cultural subjects that would soon give him a wider audience. The argumentative Macdonald was a lethal polemicist, and he had come to think of mass culture as the latest enemy of personal freedom and genuine art. Just as totalitarianism exacted a terrible conformity, he thought, the postwar avalanche of bestselling books, Hollywood movies, network television, pop music, and mass-market journalism had grown into a soft totalitarianism, undermining essential standards of language, taste, and creative expression. He signed on as a staff writer for The New Yorker and began mounting double-barreled assaults not so much on pop culture as on the well-meaning middlebrow culture of the 1950s, the world of the Book-of-the-Month Club, bestselling fiction, films with literary pretensions, reference works that did little more than decorate the shelves – all watered down versions of real culture, as he saw it.

Several of these terrifically enjoyable screeds are included here, including his attacks on the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which dispensed with some of the poetic, archaic language of the King James Version; on Mortimer Adler’s monumental – and monumentally misconceived – Great Books collection; on James Gould Cozzens’s ridiculously overpraised novel By Love Possessed; and on the remarkably permissive third edition of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Along with this big game, the book’s editor, John Summers, reprints Macdonald’s sweeping but snobbish 70-page overview, “Masscult and Midcult,” along with some very effective literary essays on James Agee and Ernest Hemingway, whose self-imitating later work made him a ripe target for Macdonald, and two later attacks, on Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism and Norman Cousins’s new magazine, World, a short-lived successor to his echt middlebrow Saturday Review. Only Agee, an old friend of Macdonald’s who had recently died young, gets off easily in a balanced tribute. All the others bite the dust.

Macdonald was a born contrarian who thrived on controversy. When he reprinted his essays he often appended harsh attacks on him along with his own feisty responses, which could be devastating but never bitter or malicious. But as a person, even with his own children (according to his biographer, Michael Wreszin), “he seemed unaware of the intimidating intensity of his verbal aggression.” A jovial, rotund man himself, he delighted in mischief and was surprised when anyone took his attacks personally. He took on his victims in the name of serious cultural ideals, pointing to how their nobler aspirations were betrayed or their style was pretentious, cliched, or riddled with cant. The trouble with popular culture, he felt, was that it was impersonal, mass-produced, mechanical, never the product of an individual vision, a vibrant imagination finding its own form. In both politics and cultural controversy he was the closest American equivalent of George Orwell, appealingly direct in his own writing, seeing himself as a guardian of the language but also of the gift of freedom that made honest language possible.

This double mission leads to a paradox in Macdonald’s work, for as much as he is a democrat and even a radical in politics he is every inch the elitist in culture and the arts. He shares common ground with backward-looking social critics like T. S. Eliot and José Ortega y Gasset, prophets of decline who were implacable foes of mass society. Like them, Macdonald believed that “the great cultures of the past had all been elite affairs, centering in small upper-class communities which had certain standards in common,” encouraging creativity and criticism. He was sure there was a universal standard of excellence that clashed with the needs of a broad, undiscriminating audience. He identified with the minority appeal of early modern art and literature and hated to see its techniques diluted for mass consumption, though he allowed that some great writers of the past, like Dickens, had almost accidentally been popular.

This is a key to the major flaw in his work, which struck me even as an undergraduate first reading Partisan Review some fifty years ago. Macdonald’s attachment to tradition, his idealized sense of the past, makes it difficult for him to discriminate – his own favorite word -among new directions in the present. He hated the ponderous but upbeat themes of most ‘serious’ works of the 1950s like Cozzens’s overblown novel, Archibald MacLeish’s play J.B., a verse update of the Book of Job, or Thornton Wilder’s ever-popular Our Town. But he was just as dismissive of the would-be radicals of the era: the Beats in America, the Angry Young Men in Britain. Macdonald claimed to admire Picasso but saw Jackson Pollock and his friends as “drip and dribble” painters.

He loved the avant garde only when it belonged safely to the past, when its spare intransigence was already hallowed by time. He revered the King James Bible as a grave monument of English poetry and prose, deeply integrated into the fabric of later literature, but could not acknowledge how much its archaisms, obscurities, and mistranslations needed respectful correction and clarification, especially where original was pithy, direct. To him such “trivial gains in accuracy” are not worth the loss of “long-cherished beauty of phrasing.” Yet those gains were anything but trivial, and much of the hallowed phrasing was preserved. His attack on the new dictionary, though in many ways justified, was even more of a rear-guard action. Multiplying example after example, Macdonald wins every local skirmish but loses the war. The day was past when a dictionary could serve as the sovereign arbiter of usage rather than an alert recorder of how the living language continued to evolve.

Macdonald was most effective on easier targets. As a matchless critic of style, he could deftly puncture Norman Cousins’s gaseous editorial statements or the other Cozzens’s arch, pompous language. In Cozzens he detects the prig under the cover of the moralist. He calls By Love Possessed a “neo-Victorian cakewalk” and demolishes its gullible reviewers: “Confusing laboriousness with profundity, the reviewers have for the most part not detected the imposture.” The impact of Macdonald’s meticulous takedown was immediate. Rarely has a single review so deflated a writer’s reputation, yet Macdonald happily sent the piece to Cozzens himself – in case he missed it, as if any writer ever missed the current buzz about his work. Macdonald could be ingenious even in overkill, as when he compares the Bible revisers’ work to the saturation bombing of German cities, leaving large monuments intact while leveling all their surroundings.

Macdonald’s one-liners still resonate. He wonders why Hollywood moguls are called producers “when their function is to prevent the production of art.” They charge screenwriters with “licking the book,” like bears licking their cubs, but here “the process is reversed and the book is licked not into but out of shape.” Of Time magazine he writes: “As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them, Time gives us something to do with our minds when we aren’t thinking.” Anticipating current criticisms of the Internet, he complains about the proliferation of newspapers and magazines which substitute facts and information for thinking and imagination, and even compares reading this mountain of material to the work of a calculating machine, an ancestor of today’s computers. “This gives a greatly extended coverage to our minds, but also makes them, compared to the kinds of minds similar people had in past centuries, coarse, shallow, passive, and unoriginal.” Amid these distractions, he concludes, “the real problem of our day is how to escape being ‘well informed,’ how to resist the temptation to acquire too much information.” Sound familiar?

Macdonald is right to say that the real challenge is not wide reading, which he feels has deteriorated into skimming, but deep reading, “to bring the slow, cumbersome depths into play, to ruminate, speculate, reflect, wonder, experience what the eye has seen.” This is usually the mandate of art rather than journalism or information, and no computer can supply it any more than Time could. But the arts themselves, much like language, were evolving in Macdonald’s day, and his stubborn adherence to the past, his faith in continuity or very slow change, kept him from appreciating this.

The very distinctions between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow that he tried so hard to uphold were falling apart. The arts and even the politics of the 1960s made no sense in terms of these cultural hierarchies. The songs of Dylan or the Beatles, the films of Stanley Kubrick, Sam Peckinpah, and Robert Altman, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg of Roy Lichtenstein, the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, or Kurt Vonnegut – all these bridged or shattered such jerry-built cultural categories.

Macdonald’s values are sound yet his essays survive less for what they say, which is too often anchored in an idealized past, than for how they say it: their wit and rhetorical verve, their uproarious satire and sheer love of disputation, the way they marshal unanswerable facts and embarrassing quotations. His designated victims often hang themselves as he chuckles from the sidelines. Great satirists and parodists rarely swim with the tide. From Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh, they gained energy, as he does, from their articulate distaste for the newfangled. And as he says about one of his favorite writers, Edgar Allan Poe, “while his works are sometimes absurd, they are rarely dull.”

Looking Back at the French New Wave

First posted in The Cine-files  (May 28, 2012)

At a time when movies seem more mass-produced than ever, we have every reason to wax nostalgic about the French New Wave. Rarely have so many divergent but pathfinding talents emerged at the same time and place. The New Wave was essentially the product of a single decade, from 1959 to 1969, set in motion by a handful of directors who had sharpened their teeth as film critics in the 1950s. Their gift for offbeat storytelling, propelled by an invigorating spontaneity, ran parallel to the social upheavals of that era.. Yet each had his own personality, and their most characteristic films are surprisingly unlike each other. What they had in common needs no rehearsing here: their dislike of the upholstered, screenplay- and star-driven French cinema of their day; their preference for underrated Hollywood directors ranging from Hitchcock, Hawks, and Welles to hard-boiled outliers like Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray; their warm affinity for the European humanistic cinema of independent spirits like Vigo and Renoir, Cocteau and Melville, Bresson and Becker. With Melville they shared a love of the unsentimental brooding fatalism of American gangster films and pulp fiction, which were part of the heritage of postwar existentialism. But they were also caught between the buoyant, life-affirming legacy of Renoir, who showed them how to improvise and sympathize, and the plot-driven aesthetics of the more macabre Hitchcock, whose darker humor demanded iron control.

Though most of the New Wave directors enjoyed long careers, their best films came early on. Truffaut never equaled his first three breathtaking features, The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim. These are the films I’ve invariably used in courses, and they still play beautifully, each in its own way. In his next feature, The Soft Skin, the Hitchcock influence weighs heavily on him, even as it kindles the imagination of Claude Chabrol who after his first features, such as the superb Les Bonnes Femmes, evolved his own style of bourgeois thriller over five productive decades. Yet his work too crested early, at the end of the 1960s with La Femme Infidle, This Man Must Die, and Le Boucher, all introduced here at the New York Film Festival under the Francophile direction of its devoted founder, Richard Roud. Godard is a special case since he produced so many varied films in the decade that followed the release of Breathless in 1960 – perhaps the film that most defines the New Wave and one that holds up astonishingly well on repeated viewings.

In Breathless Godard’s jump cuts, improvisational camera work, casual location shooting, and often tongue-in-cheek dialogue created perhaps the archetype of the New Wave film, and it continues to exert its influence over both indie and mainstream filmmaking today. But the more disjunctive films he made afterward, full of Brechtian alienation effects, can now be seen as period pieces, though everything he made through Weekend in 1967 is worth seeing. The other defining feature of early New Wave films are certain iconic performances: Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim, Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows, Anna Karina in several early Godard films. Yet how disparate these performances are. Belmondo’s punk imitation of Bogart is cool and ironic yet projects an undertone of fatal arbitrary attraction. Where Karina comes across as waif-like, passive, and playful, Moreau is willful, infinitely alluring, yet ultimately inaccessible, a baroque period turn on the femme fatale. Léaud, Truffaut’s autobiographical stand-in, resonates with the director’s memories and a sense of entrapment that echoes American youth films of the 1950s such as Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause.

The ultimate importance of the New Wave, besides the enduring films and exceptional artists it gave us, was to break down the pattern of the classic Hollywood cinema that been dominant from the thirties through the fifties, the well-made story with impeccable production values directed at a broad audience. There were many other influences that contributed to this opening: the example of postwar Italian neorealism, with it documentary aesthetic and powerful, heartbreaking immediacy, but also the subsequent work of Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Bunuel, and others, which arrived on the American film scene along with the New Wave, just as the sixties broke out. Their work represented a modernist, experimental turn in filmmaking, yet the New Wave movies were not really art films as these were. They emerged from a dialogue with American genre films, which they deepened and interrogated in highly personal ways. The first American film influenced by the New Wave was probably Bonnie and Clyde; its screenwriters tried to convince Truffaut to direct it, but that job fell instead to Arthur Penn. Its combination of crime, love, period detail, comedy, and graphic violence mystified and outraged traditional reviewers like Bosley Crowther but proved decisive for American filmmakers who came into their own in the 1970s, beginning with Robert Altman. The techniques and sensibility of the New Wave also helped inspire the New German Cinema of Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog, and Schlöndorff.

The New Wave directors themselves each went their own way. The work of Godard and Rivette grew more personal and intransigent, though Rivette occasionally emerged with perfectly accessible films like La Belle Noiseuse (1991) and Va Savoir (2001), both cut down from much longer versions. Truffaut and Chabrol, on the other hand, made their piece with commercial cinema, which enabled them to work regularly, still exercising their craft in inimitable ways. Between these two poles their colleague Eric Rohmer produced delicious movies over some four decades, at once sensuous and intellectual, baked in rich sunlight yet leavened with civilized conversation, carrying the legacy of the New Wave into the twenty-first century.

The Work of a Critic

First published in the Chronicle Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2, 2012

The role of critics varies greatly according to the mission they imagine for themselves and the audience they address. Academic critics writing for their peers will take a different tack from public critics speaking to a general audience, large or small, or from writers themselves using criticism to carve out a space for their own work. Surprisingly, novelists and especially poets have proved to be among our best critics. Poet-critics from Johnson to Eliot form the main line of the English critical tradition, while the foundations for a coherent criticism of the novel were laid by Henry James. Yet American writers are better known for their prickly aversion to critics rather than their appreciation, even when critics built up the following for their work. My favorite example, one that set my blood boiling, was Saul Bellow's likening of the critic to a deaf man tuning a piano. (Had he merely said "tone deaf" I wouldn't have been so offended.) Then there are the old saws that continue to surface: "Those who can't, criticize." "No one ever grew up dreaming of becoming a critic." All this implies that critics, with little imagination themselves, are hardly more than mechanical observers or failed writers, stewing in their inadequacy and taking out this resentment on their betters, the really creative spirits. As one wag put it, a critic is one who arrives late on the battlefield to kill off the survivors.

In fact, really good critics are writers, with their own style and literary personality, though their works feeds off other writing, as novelists and poets feed off the text of our common life. Both kinds of writers must somehow be faithful to their subjects yet find their own angle of vision. They have to tell the truth, a truth we'll acknowledge, but, like Emily Dickinson, "tell it slant." They distill art into meaning, they punish failure and lionize success, but like all writers they work by way of selection, even distortion. We remember critics for their temperament as much as their critical judgment: the pugilistic vigor of Hazlitt, the digressive idiosyncrasies of Ruskin, the clerical acerbity of Eliot, the transparent windowpane of Orwell, the poetic conjunctions of Benjamin, the Hegelian dynamics of Adorno. We can forgive a great deal in a critic who manifests a striking sensibility or a startling point of view, as we are seduced by writers who freshen our sense of the familiar world. Some critics survive on the strength of their prose alone; some by promoting new artists and movements; others by introducing seminal concepts (the objective correlative, the dissociation of sensibility); by demonstrating sheer intelligence or depth of learning; or by helping reorient the history and direction of an art form. As it happens, T. S. Eliot could qualify under any of these categories.

So let me lay down a few principles that are simply features of the kind of criticism I love to read and have tried to write.

–It was only in the mid-twentieth century, thanks to the New Criticism, that criticism itself began to play a major role in the academic study of literature, which previously was focused on textual scholarship and factual research. Because of the new emphasis on close reading, most academic criticism grew too long, too pedantic and detailed. The critic felt obliged to lay out every step of the reading, not simply the interpretive outcome, the take-away or upshot of disciplined attention. Such monographs too often became little more than stepping stones in the job market, rungs in the accreditation process. Earlier critics read just as closely but luxuriated in aphorism, intuition, and apodictic summation, writerly vices. They kicked away the analytic ladder that brought them to their destination. Most journalistic criticism, on the other hand, is too brief and superficial, too uninformed, almost weightlessly opinionated. Trapped by space limitations and deadlines, such pieces habitually default on context, ignoring much that undergirds the work and conditions its meaning. With the exception of longer, more intricate reviews in little magazines and intellectual journals, they reduce criticism to consumer guidance. They strike attitudes and ventilate feelings, largely unsupported by argument or evidence. If criticism must make its case as illuminating commentary on works of art, then the best vehicle for criticism is not the extended monograph or the hastily written review but the literary essay, personal, reflective, attuned to an ongoing conversation. This is why critical journals (like the avant-garde magazines of the 1920s and 1930s) and critical schools (the New York Intellectuals, the New Critics) were so important to twentieth-century criticism: they kept a conversation going, they responded to new movements in the arts with strong revaluations and critical methods that were responsive to difficult new writing.

–It follows that the criticism I enjoy is more affective than cerebral, more empirical than theoretical. The glory of the essay, since Montaigne, comes in the way it generalizes from the concrete, raising "perception to the point of principle and definition," as Eliot put it. Much of recent criticism works the other way around, setting up a template of theory or method and shoehorning arbitrary examples into it. It has little truck with aesthetics, too readily dismissed as an ideology. In rare cases this theoretical approach shines a different light on an individual work or a larger issue; too often it is counter-intuitive, distorting literary works with it own ideological agenda, or simply missing the mark. Do we experience a shock of recognition when we read such a commentary? Does it open up a new path of understanding for us, or merely serve as a vehicle for our political or moral prejudices? Does the reading actually confront the power of the literary work or its agonizing failure to muster that power? Love and hate are crucial for critics, along with deep-seated ambivalence. They give evidence that the writer's work has really touched us. They feed the flame of good critical prose and supply energy that empowers the critic to bring a bolt of clarity to the reader. This is why sharply formulated, deeply felt literary judgment, not simply analytic interpretation, is vital to the critic's task. It tracks the movement of a genuine critical sensibility. Make-or-break evaluation gives evidence that the stakes are high, that the critic is engaged, the subject really matters. A critic needs an analytic mind but also something of a polemical style, for criticism is also a form of persuasion

–The work of criticism is a juggling act, a discourse without clear borders. The critic must play the role of what I once called a double agent, balancing text and context, a sensitive grasp of form along with a feeling for the social currents that help shape art. F. R. Leavis is usually seen as a formal critic, yet he insisted that "one cannot seriously be interested in literature and remain purely literary in interests." In principle, nothing is alien to the critic: the writer's biography, the history of ideas, the social history of the times, the tools of philology, the evolution of formal conventions, the parallels to the other arts, the insights gleaned from literary history but also from other disciplines. These blurred boundaries have been unconscionably abused in recent years as critics squander their authority by poaching on fields they know little about, pronouncing on subjects they know even less about. One result is that a stereotyped progressive mind-set, the well-meaning agendas of political correctness, becomes their received wisdom; open-minded scholars are unable to take their work seriously. Historians recoil from the anecdotal evidence of New Historicism, as social scientists resist ideological position-taking in social criticism. Research gives way to fashionable cant, currently some form of postmodernism and anti-essentialism, which caricatures the wisdom of the past, gives unquestioned sanction to all forms of relativism, and effectively assumes what needs to be proved.

–Despite the sins of critics borrowing from fields they haven't mastered, I call myself a generalist, a public critic, which is simply another name for an intellectual, someone whose first love is the exchange of ideas. As an undergraduate at Columbia I learned to pillage literature for ideas, to quarry it crudely for important themes, but somehow I also imbibed a strong historical sense, what Philip Rahv called the sixth sense of the critic. Eliot noted that this historical awareness "involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence." This sense of the present became a watchword among the New York Intellectuals. Intrigued by the ambitious reach of their work, its crossing of conventional boundaries, I became sensitive to the politics of literature, of literature as an actual intervention in the world. But it was only as a graduate student at Yale, then in the last stages of the New Criticism, and at later at Cambridge, still under the influence of Leavis, that I learned more about how literary works were put together, how they were made of language and exploited formal conventions. This brought me back to my sophomore year of high school, when I first read A Tale of Two Cities and The Scarlet Letter and was amazed at the sheer craftsmanship of the whole but also at the architecture of sentences and paragraphs. These books seemed ingeniously tooled, shaped to endure, yet their stories were also full of arresting details, resonant symbols, and a vivid recreation of earlier times and places. They gave me intimations of both literary form and the pressure of history that I understood only years later.

–Despite the importance of craft, works of art are not so much objects as experiences. Critics are not anatomists who murder to dissect but seismologists attuned to every rumble in the terrain of art and of their own inner lives. When Matthew Arnold called poetry a criticism of life, he meant that life itself, the stream of felt experience, is what gives art meaning and value. Before 1900 no one would have questioned this. But in the twentieth century we grew so concerned about the mediations of art – the conventions of realism, the techniques of modernism, the movements that congregated into different schools – that we sometimes lost sight of art's purpose and substance. Since art reshapes life into staged experiences, this further blurs the boundaries of criticism, creating an opening from aesthetic criticism to moral and social criticism. This was the trajectory of the great Victorian critics – Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin – though it was also resisted by the successors they influenced, including Pater and Wilde, who disliked moralizing yet themselves wrote in this sweeping prophetic strain. For me the arts offer invaluable clues to the inner configurations of a culture, its intimate depths of mind and feeling. The alienating effects of industrial society created the conditions for a social criticism grounded in aesthetics, for art pointed to a potential for human fulfilment that modern life had undermined. Twentieth-century critics like Orwell, Leavis, Wilson, and Trilling were heirs to this tradition, which has few successors today.

–Despite its ambitions as a critique of ideology, postmodern relativism lays down a path of acquiescence to commerce and power rather than effective resistance. It rejects moral judgment as a form of hierarchy and elitism, though criticism has always demanded a trained sensibility, capable of doing the necessary work of discrimination. Eliot described criticism, simply but memorably, as "the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste," but "correction" rings oddly in contemporary ears, for it suggests that the few who know more or feel deeply might offer instruction to the many, and might improve society in the process. Yet taste and discrimination remain the ultimate tests of the critic, without which there can be no clarifying insight or understanding. Instead we have today the democratization of criticism represented by customer reviews of books and films on the Internet. Critical judgment increasingly resembles what we find on websites where hotels and restaurants are usefully rated by people impelled to write in or sound off. Their judgments are unedited, and we know nothing about where they come from. We must turn critics ourselves to weigh their worth. Criticism becomes a form of polling, in which we look for enlightenment from the man in the street.

In this context, it becomes wildly anachronistic to hold on to the Victorian notion of the critic as social or moral guide, or to the modernist charge of the critic as mediator and expositor of difficult art, or even to the more general view of the critic as an informed intellectual, someone who thinks hard about art and society, who has developed the faculty of focused attention, along with the rhetorical skills and the cast of mind to craft those perceptions into argument. This remains the mainstream of the critical tradition, and it speaks to the passions that drew me irresistibly to art and critical writing in the first place. At bottom criticism is personal, agonistic, however thoughtful and measured its tone. It is Jacob wrestling with an angel, an existential encounter in which the full being of the critic confronts the full power of the work, which invites yet also resists critical translation.

Remembering Daniel Bell, 1919-2011

Daniel Bell's death closes out one of the most expansive and impressive intellectual careers of the twentieth century. He was a teacher of mine during my last term at Columbia, a friend for many years afterward, and an amazingly wide-ranging writer who could be both prescient and wrong on key issues. His style, with its staggering breadth of reading and reference, was anchored in intellectual journalism rather than in academe. His essays, he said in 1960, "were written for audiences not specialized but educated, audiences responsive to ideas." Bell's initial fame came from his thesis on "the end of ideology," an argument that seemed haplessly ill-timed when it appeared just at the outset of the 1960s, which was to prove one of the most ideologically polarized decades in American history. It also seemed little more than a rephrasing of the cold war anti-Communism of the postwar intellectual scene. But with the pragmatism of post-Communist leaders, who deploy Marxism as a facade for state-dominated capitalism, and the break-up of traditional liberalism, Bell's point has held up better in the long run than it did at first. And in his essays on the new American Right in the fifties and sixties, collected and edited in The Radical Right, he was one of the first to see how ideology, above all a populism of resentment, had settled in at the other end of the political spectrum.

I couldn't have disagreed more with the viewpoint of his influential book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, in which he highlighted every irrational feature of the culture of the 1960s, creating an unrecognizable portrait of the whole era as "an attack on reason itself." But he was at least consistent in tracing this back to modernism itself, which he saw reductively not as a breakthrough in the arts but as a pernicious outbreak of apocalyptic nihilism. "What the new sensibility did," he wrote, "was to carry the premises of modernism through to their logical conclusion." Culture was not Bell's strong suit. His treatment was coarse-grained and almost embarrassingly indebted to Lionel Trilling's more nuanced dissent from modernism and his critique of the "adversary culture," including his notion that the sixties represented a kind of acting-out of modernist ideas. Bell too saw the new culture as "an effort by a cultural mass to adopt and act out the life-style which hitherto had been the property of a small and talented elite." But even in the 1950s, in an essay chastising but welcoming the new Dissent magazine, he argued that "the problem of radicalism today is to reconsider the relationship of culture to society." This was in many ways prophetic. The long-range effects of the counterculture were far greater than the impact of the political left, apart from the conservative backlash that it provoked.

Bell's own politics were nothing if not consistent. As many old friends slid towards Nixon and neoconservatism, he remained a solidly grounded Hubert Humphrey-style liberal – pragmatic, anti-utopian. He was a great believer in the power of temperament over political commitment. He was not at all surprised that some of the most rigid Stalinists of the 1930s became equally rigid anti-Communists. He observed the mellowing of Irving Howe with amazement, describing him as one of the few friends who had actually undergone a dramatic change of temperament. And in his last years he himself actually wrote for Dissent, a journal that seemed to him anachronistic in its radicalism when it first appeared. As a person Dan was a bottomless well of Jewish jokes and sayings. One of his favorites: "As the Yiddish proverb goes, if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." He repeated this with the customary twinkle in his eye and chuckle in his voice.

He had the memory of an elephant. The course I took with him on Victorian culture, which he team-taught with Trilling and Steven Marcus, juxtaposed literary readings with social and political documents as a method of fathoming the "moral temper" of the era, a pregnant concept. With a boisterous laugh, he later loved to remind me of something I supposedly said in the seminar apropos of one of these documentary readings grounded in social fact: "I didn't know this course was going to be about real estate." I might have felt literary and superior enough to have said such a thing, though I had no recollection of it. But I suspected I could trust his memory better than my own.

The Challenge to Book Culture

On the face of it, it would be hard to imagine a more depressing cultural subject right now than the future of book culture. Publishers are hurting badly; droves of independent bookstores have closed down; Borders, a major chain of booksellers, has filed for bankruptcy and is currently dumping the dregs of its stock at its flagship store on 57th Street and Park Avenue; floundering newspapers have cut loose their reviewers and, at best, folded their book review sections into their shrinking pages. The newspapers themselves may not be far behind. The Great Recession delivered the coup de grace; advertising revenue is in free fall. Ask any editor, any author, any media maven: it is not a pretty picture. The executive editor of the New York Times wonders whether there will still be a print edition five years from now.

On the other hand, some would argue that this worst of times is also the best of times. Thanks to the Internet, to online booksellers like Amazon, to the ubiquitous Google digitizing whole libraries, books have never been so readily available, including rare books, out-of-print books, and, thanks to the famous "long tail," older titles once hard to find, since bookstores rarely stocked them. Loving the serendipity of browsing in bookstores, actually fingering the merchandise, we forget the frustrations of the fruitless search, the books we could not find. Browsing online we find it's all there yet tantalizingly out of reach.

Without fetishizing the physical properties of the book, which after all do not reach back to the tablets on Sinai, we can acknowledge the difference between reading print, flipping pages, plunging ahead or backward, and reading on a computer or miniature electronic device. There is something of a generational divide here, but screen reading, while near-miraculous for retrieving hard-to-find information, is less than ideal for the focused attention of literary reading. As storage devices books indeed are cumbersome. We can be grateful for the amazing horizontal connectivity of the Internet without slighting how shallow those connections often are. It gives us the world at a glance but often no more than a glance.

In the case of book reviewing, or critical writing of any kind, cyberspace offers a few advantages, but to my mind they are outweighed by the drawbacks. There is that vast storehouse of material that can be retrieved, such as reviews, old and new; biographical information; profiles of writers, movie directors, artists, composers; but also, for reviewers, something genuinely new, a vast grey hinterland between publishing and not publishing. The Internet is an open grid for bloggers, commentators, cranks, obsessive enthusiasts who have made cults of individual writers, but not least of all for the fabled man in the street, the consumer now empowered to talk back, to emerge from anonymity, or take cover in anonymity, to make his or her peeves and passions known.

To put it simply, the professional reviewer, who has a literary identity, who had to meet some editor's exacting standard, has effectively been replaced by the Amazon reviewer, the paying customer, at times ingenious, assiduous, and highly motivated, more often banal, obtuse, and blankly opinionated. What works for a website like Trip Advisor, which gives us unfiltered but welcome criticism of hotels and restaurants, most assuredly does not work for literary reviewing, which demands taste, training, sensibility, some knowledge of the past, and a rare feeling for both language and argument. Barring this, we're stuck with the thumbs-up, thumbs-down school of reviewing. Raw opinion, no matter how deeply felt, is no substitute for argument and evidence. The democratization of reviewing is synonymous with the decay of reviewing.

But what about bloggers, you may ask. They may not be professionals but they certainly can be devoted and persistent. Blogging has a style of its own, most commonly diaristic, spontaneous. As with online reviewing in general, it has opened the culture to a vast spectrum of writing and opinion, most of which no one will ever read. I enjoy casual blogging myself as a relief from the formal essay, with its carefully honed prose. I plan to post these very remarks in a blog, and would be gratified if they found a few readers. But it's striking that there are twenty successful political blogs for each effective literary blog. With all due respect to Critical Mass, the valuable website of the National Book Critics Circle, there's not a single must-read literary blog I turn to on a regular basis. The ones that I do read are linked to print magazines like The New Yorker, The New Republic, or The Atlantic, or the ones actually modeled on print magazines, such as Slate and Salon or gateway sites like Arts & Letters Daily. But will the online extensions of print journals still thrive when the magazines themselves go under, as some surely will when they run out of millionaires nostalgic for the old print culture who are willing to subsidize them. What will happen to online journalism, especially investigative journalism, when it destroys the print journalism on which it feeds, or to aggregator sites when they find themselves aggregating only from other websites?

As writers of books and as reviewers ourselves, what do we expect from a book review? In the case of a movie review we're usually content with learning what it's about and deciding whether to see it. Because books are literature we hold book reviewing to a higher standard. We expect much more than plot summary or summary judgment. We expect it to be really written, exacting, to rise to the level of its subject, to display an understanding of the medium, a personal point of view. We would be outraged if new novels were rated with a certain number of stars, as movies commonly are. We demand incisive judgment, not mere consumer guidance. Book reviews should be a province of writing, not of marketing – or polling. Criticism is a refined art, not a popularity contest. We expect it to be done with style and intelligence.

The last thing we want to do is idealize the old middlebrow culture with its genteel book industry, its banal bookchat and boosterism, its highly stratified culture – a pyramid capped by a small cadre of little magazines and rigorous critics. But we may miss its respect for the written word, the life of the mind, the culture of the past. The Internet accelerated a democratization of culture which had long been under way, a shift toward visual media and popular music that consigned literature to the outer margins. The revolution initiated by the movie screen and the TV screen is being brought to high definition by the computer screen. Here critical writing has a small niche but will it acquire a real presence? Deployed with technical savvy, it can become a form of resistance, a rampart of personal vision within a relentlessly homogenized culture, ever in thrall to the fashions of the moment. Thanks to its open grid and easy access, the same technology that marginalizes literature and drowns out criticism leaves room for dissent, for the still, small voice that may yet find ways to be heard.

These remarks were prepared for panel on "The Next Decade in Book Culture," with special emphasis in criticism and book reviewing, at the PEN World Voices Festival, April 27, 2011, cosponsored by the National Book Critics Circle.

Ralph Ellison Visible: On Arnold Rampersad's biography of Ellison

Review of Arnold Rampersad's Ralph Ellison: A Biography

657 pp. Alfred A. Knopf, $35 978-0-375-40827-4

Published in the Times Literary Supplement, May 25, 2007

 

 

T. S. Eliot once wrote that there were two ways good writers could court recognition – either by publishing so much they turned up everywhere or by publishing so little that each work, perfectly crafted, would become a literary event. Eliot himself took both courses, writing reams of critical prose (but collecting it selectively), and bringing out poems only at widely spaced intervals, each a marker in a carefully plotted career. Curiously, Eliot did not mention another approach which he would also try: polishing your mystique by not publishing at all. Turning to the stage, he wrote almost no new poetry in the decades after Four Quartets.

Some artists opt out at an early age – Rossini in opera, Forster in fiction – but the more ingenious way of not publishing is to create a buzz around work in progress. By offering tantalizing glimpses of ambitious projects, writers arouse expectations that the books themselves, if they do appear, can almost never satisfy. I recall the long wait for Joseph Heller's second novel, the gossip that attended Truman Capote's unwritten magnum opus, the anticipation Norman Mailer stoked around unfinished works, including his novel about ancient Egypt. Harold Brodkey's reputation never quite recovered from the publication of his long-awaited novel, The Runaway Soul. Henry Roth, legendary for his writer's block, surprised the world with an autobiographical novel some sixty years after Call It Sleep. But there was nothing quite like the awe surrounding Ralph Ellison's heroic labors over a successor to Invisible Man – protracted for four decades, right up to his death in 1994 at the age of 81. An almost religious hush descended on interviewers when they questioned him about this work, as if the future of American letters depended on it. Unlike Capote, whose book existed largely in his mind, if at all, Ellison could whip out a tape measure and show the sheer bulk of the manuscript, more than 2,000 pages at one point. Some who heard him read aloud from the book were mesmerized; others were just as convinced it was a dud. I avoided the fragments he published in obscure literary journals for fear of tarnishing my imaginary sense of the book, but also out of disbelief that it actually existed.

It was during these years of incompletion that Ellison became one of the most famous writers in the world, in ever-increasing demand for lectures, panels, readings, and service on boards of every kind. It was one thing for him to serve as a judge of the National Book Awards, which he himself had won for Invisible Man in 1953, or Lyndon Johnson's National Council on the Arts, which led to the creation of the arts and humanities endowments – the first serious federal support for the arts since the New Deal. It was quite another matter to join the board of the Rockefeller-created Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. This may have appealed to his feeling for American history but it was also his entrée as a black man into some exclusive precincts of American society. The second half of his life – and the second half of Arnold Rampersad's vigorous but tendentious new biography – is full of such activities, to the point that they almost certainly became ways of not writing, not finishing, not wrestling with his own demons.

Ellison's travail over his second novel has usually been ascribed to the size of his ambition. Mingling allegory and allusion with autobiography in a vein rich with dark comedy, Invisible Man covered a large swathe of black and American life, including the aftermath of slavery, the folklore of the rural South, the educational mission of Booker T. Washington, the migration to Harlem, and the ferment of black nationalism and Marxism during the Depression. Its success raised the bar for Ellison. In 1965 a poll of writers, critics, and editors designated it as the most distinguished American novel since the war. A poll today would probably lead to the same consensus. His friend and protégé Stanley Crouch put it best: "The tragedy lies in the weight Ralph put on himself. . . . Ralph wasn't wary enough of the dangers that come with the magnification of things by one's imagination. Well, the greater the ambition, the greater the failure. The longer the book remained unfinished, the more excruciating the pain. And for a long time, sadly, he lived with a constant debilitating sense of having failed." (551)

Arnold Rampersad, the biographer of iconic black role models like Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson, and Arthur Ashe, develops a different explanation. Though the fame of Ellison and his book was growing in the 1960s and 1970s, so were the attacks on him, especially by younger black writers and militants – and so was his comfort level in the white world. The radicalism of the Black Power movement was an updated version of the Garveyite nationalism he had lampooned brilliantly in his novel. As an integrationist, he had little use for their separatism. He despised the usual emphasis on blacks as victims, insisting on the creative adaptations of black culture even under slavery and the crucial role of blacks in the dialectic of American culture. Anticipating the new historiography of slavery, he wrote that "slavery was a most vicious system, and those who endured and survived it a tough people, but it was not . . . a state of absolute repression." (CE, 284) In a famous exchange with Irving Howe, he wrote that "Howe seems to see segregation as an opaque steel jug with the Negroes inside waiting for some black messiah to come along and blow the cork." (SA, 123) His refusal to endorse this vision of entrapment and victimization also separated Ellison from the work of his mentor, Richard Wright. Instead he worked out a notion of democratic culture as the great solvent, embracing high and low, rural and urban, black and white. He admired scholars such as Constance Rourke, the author of American Humor (1931), who pioneered the serious study of vernacular culture. In his splendid essay "Living with Music," he concludes that "in the United States when traditions are juxtaposed they tend, regardless of what we do to prevent it, irresistibly to merge. Thus, musically at least, each child in our town was an heir of all the ages." (CE, 236)

The phrase "musically, at least" implies an important qualification. Though American music could not be imagined without the cross-fertilization of the races, the barriers to social integration were far greater – but not insuperable, as his own life demonstrated. Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1913, not long after the territory became a state. His father died in an accident when Ralph was three, and he grew up in terrific poverty. To support two small boys, his mother worked intermittently as a chambermaid and depended on the kindness of an extended network of family and friends. Ellison's early gifts were musical, not literary. Offered last-minute admission to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1933, he simply did not have the money to get there, and risked life and limb as a black man hoboing across the country, stealing rides on freight trains. But he made up his mind early on to penetrate white society, to go where he might not be wanted. Invited to his first concert, where he finds himself the only black, he knows people are staring at him but sees it as "an excellent chance to develop poise." He wanted to be the exception, to seek out the best, which meant going places where few blacks were welcome. Much like aiming for excellence in some branch of art, this required "a very stern discipline."

"Unlike many other blacks," Rampersad writes of his early years in New York, "who refused to pay the psychological toll of trying to be friends with whites, [the Ellisons] sought to cement their place in the tiny part of white society that would receive them." (231) Initially this centered on the world of New York's Jews but the circle eventually grew much larger. To an unimaginable degree, he succeeded. The drama of the book is in the distance between where he started and what he became. Almost as if it were a personal myth, he lived out the crossover he saw as vital to the dynamic of American social life. But Rampersad insists on the price he paid – in suppressed feelings of rage and insecurity, and finally in the damage it did to his work.

As early as 1954-55, Rampersad begins dropping suggestions of Ellison's "faltering record" and "eventual decline" as an artist, (313, 98) which he traces to his estrangement from black people, his lack of interest in specifically black literary expression, and, above all, his preference for white friends in elite institutions like the Century Association (the closest equivalent of a London gentlemen's club) and American Academy of Arts and Letters (which saw itself as a counterpart of the French Academy). In this milieu he was invariably the token black, doing little to bring along others of his race. He took no part in the civil rights movement, arguing that a writer's duty was to stay at his typewriter and perfect his craft. He rarely yielded an inch when challenged, though at least once he broke down sobbing in public when accused, as he often was, of being an Uncle Tom. He was prepared to tangle with young black interviewers, telling them that "though I lived in the Harlem YMCA, I did not come to New York to live in Harlem, even though I thought of Harlem as a very romantic place. . . . I was not exchanging Southern segregation for Northern segregation, but seeking a wider world of opportunity and, most of all, the excitement and impersonality of a great city. I wanted room in which to discover who I was." He adds that "one of the first things I had to do was to enter places from which I was afraid I might be rejected. I had to confront my own fears of the unknown." (CE, 739) A born loner, he relished living on upper Riverside Drive, in a twilight zone very close to Harlem (like the protagonist of Invisible Man) but even closer to the Academy, which is situated anomalously in a poor immigrant neighborhood. He grew prosperous but resisted any move downtown.

Ellison and his wife spent two years at the American Academy in Rome from 1955 to 1957 but he protested when Time magazine coupled him with Wright as expatriate writers. He insisted that black writers in Europe like Wright, Baldwin, and Chester Himes risked losing touch with their material. But Rampersad portrays him in effect as an expatriate in a white world of privilege. Comparing him to his friend Saul Bellow, who "was writing about the world he actually lived in, or he used that solid life as his runway for flights of the imagination," Rampersad finds that "Ralph, with a growing distance between himself and the black social reality about him, was finding it hard to turn that reality into fiction." (315) The final verdict in bleak: "His inability to create an art that held a clean mirror up to 'Negro' life as blacks actually led it, especially at or near his own social level, was disabling him as a writer. As a novelist, he had lost his way. And he had done so in proportion to his distancing himself from his fellow blacks." (512-13)

Rampersad is both an able critic and an immensely diligent biographer. He makes good use of Ellison's papers, especially unpublished letters, to reveal facets of his life and personality, including the inner workings of his marriage, that were completely unknown until now. Ellison himself, in many exemplary essays and interviews, made much of the difficulties of his early years – the death of his father, the struggles of his family to survive, the culture and especially the music that entranced him, the Tuskegee experience, his arrival in Harlem, the months of utter destitution he spent with his brother in Dayton, Ohio in 1937-38, immediately after the death of their mother. Rampersad adds many details about such matters but also about Ellison's first marriage, about the crisis in his marriage to his second wife Fanny, when he had an affair in Rome with a married woman much younger and taunted her about it, though she had supported him in every way, and virtually effaced herself to do so. At the center of the book, he gives a riveting account of the Ellison's efforts to complete Invisible Man and the tremendous acclaim that followed its appearance.

Nevertheless, it is clear that at some point Rampersad came to dislike Ellison, despite his respect for his work. With the help of astute comments from observers who knew him well, Rampersad lays bare a vulnerable yet unattractive side of Ellison's character. Novelist Richard Stern describes him as a "confident, warm, and charming man" who was also "pocked with insecurity, anger, and bitterness" and chronically "countered these feelings with booze." (383). His anonymous Rome lover, with little sense of his background, tells Rampersad that "he was very angry a great deal of the time" and "was constantly offended by things and incident no one else would notice." (338) According to the black writer Jervis Anderson, who profiled him in the New Yorker and suffered his slights, he showed "a continuous effort to retain discipline and control over himself, to keep a lid on the volcanic parts of his personality." (502) Rampersad returns again and again to his friendships with whites, his wariness with ordinary blacks (who may have reminded him of his early poverty), and his failure to help younger black writers who beat a path to his door. In short, he has written a balanced but subtly debunking biography that may darken Ellison's reputation for years to come, like Lawrence Thompson's more overtly hostile biography of Robert Frost. In a more intelligent way, it recycles the accusations of snobbery, contented tokenism, and a refusal of solidarity and political activism that Ellison fended off though much of his life. But it also channels them into a diagnosis of his work, even Invisible Man, where they scarcely belong.

Was Ellison really so estranged from blacks? Was his work really damaged by his warm friendships with Robert Penn Warren, John Hersey, R. W. B. Lewis, Richard Wilbur and their wives? To Rampersad, in an unusually tortured formulation, "the price he paid for easy association with like-minded whites was a measure of insecurity only heightened by the knowledge that to many blacks this delight was a form of racial betrayal." (391) Thus the biographer introduces the notion of "racial betrayal" without taking responsibility for it. It's clear enough that Ellison as a person could be haughty, self-protective, and ungenerous, but he also had a raunchy, down-home side that shows up in his letters to his closest black friend, Albert Murray. It comes through in his warm-blooded fiction, which bridges the chasm between folk motifs and experimental modernism. It goes to the heart of his essays, especially on jazz, which have become an influential part of his legacy, enshrined by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in his Jazz at Lincoln Center and by Ken Burns in his documentary history of jazz.

The charge that he was turned his back on his race founders on the shoals of these evocative pieces that celebrate the local roots of jazz, the competitive interplay between the soloist and the group, and the showmanship of performers like Louis Armstrong as clown and entertainer. The very cadence of these essays enacts his infinite affection for black culture and creativity in the wider context of American life. In a piece on Mahalia Jackson, he describes blues and jazz singing as

an art which depends upon the employment of the full expressive resources of the human voice – from the rough growls employed by blues singers, the intermediate sounds, half-cry, half-recitative, which are common to Eastern music, the shouts and hollers of American Negro folk cries, the rough-edged tones and broad vibratos, the high, shrill and grating tones which rasp one's ears like the agonized flourishes of flamenco, to the gut tones which remind us of where the jazz trombone found its human source. It is an art which employs a broad rhythmic freedom and accents the lyric line to reinforce the emotional impact. It utilizes half-tones, glissandi, blue notes, humming and moaning. Or again, it calls upon the most lyrical, floating tones of which the voice is capable. (252)

This dazzling range of tones is what he sought and achieved in his own writing. He disliked bebop for being too cerebral and thought it expressed contempt for the audience. Like Mark Twain, one of his heroes, he plumbed the expressive register of vernacular culture. He saw the jazz musician and the blues singer as genuine artists expressing individuality through a mastery of technique. Accordingly, the jazz riff became the model for his writing, though he undoubtedly lost control of it in Juneteenth, the section of his second novel published in 1999. He connected jazz improvisation on received material with the polyphony of The Waste Land and the virtuosity of Ulysses, and he himself emulated the weave of allusion that joined Armstrong to Eliot, a linkage unheard of at the time but received wisdom today.

Since Rampersad makes excellent use of Ellison's archive, I would have expected the latter half of his book to trace the stages of his work on his second novel, still largely unpublished, since it took up so much of his literary life. Instead, convinced that it is a dead loss, misconceived and out of touch, the biographer disposes of it in a few pages, dealing only with the published sections. He takes due note of each of Ellison's essays, which show him at the top of his form, but spends too many pages on the distractions of club life, the Academy, and his many other public activities, as if they accounted for Ellison's deeper failure. Yet paradoxically, this was the time Ellison ceased to be controversial and won almost universal acclaim, including an ardent following of younger black writers and intellectuals. With the exhaustion of Marxism, nationalism, and crude protest writing, they all became Ellisonians. As he turned into a plaster cast of himself, his cosmopolitan vision of American cultural interdependence, with its inescapable black contribution, carried the day, though it may have been an optimistic myth that reflected his own needs. Rampersad pays tribute to this humane vision while casting a shadow over the man who conceived it – in the teeth of his detractors' hostility, his own insecurity, and the demands of a fierce, almost superhuman effort of self-discipline.

Review of Lewis M. Dabney's Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature

Review of Lewis M. Dabney's Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature.

639 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35. 0-374-11312-2

Published in the Times Literary Supplement, March 3, 2006

 

 

Apart from his collection of long stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), which was banned for obscenity in the State of New York, Edmund Wilson's books were never widely read. But for upwards of half a century they had an incalculable impact on readers. Several generations of American intellectuals not only cared what he thought about literature and politics but used his career as a model. They admired his restless curiosity, omnivorous reading, sharp literary judgment, and grasp of culture as a living entity. They envied the unforced clarity of his style. He was hardly more than a decade older than the writers who founded Partisan Review in the mid-1930s, and his deep-dyed American background was different from their immigrant roots. Yet, as Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin testified, they looked to him as their difficult-to-please mentor. Other sources of inspiration for the PR circle were distant figures, but Wilson actually married into the family when he took Mary McCarthy, their scarlet princess, as his third wife.

The same chemistry of warm admiration and crusty independence can be observed in his relations with writers and editors in the 1950s, especially Roger Straus and Jason Epstein, who encouraged him to collect his earlier journalism and reissued his books as upmarket paperbacks. Not long afterward, the more literate radicals of the 1960s rediscovered To the Finland Station (1940), his galvanizing history of revolutionary ideas and personalities, and were cheered by his critique of the cold war, which he saw as a byproduct of America's imperial designs. In "The Metropolitan Critic," published anonymously in these pages shortly before Wilson's death in 1972, a young Clive James took the measure of his whole career, singling out literary chronicles like The Shores of Light (1952) as keystones of the critic's trade, and paid tribute to the insight of his deceptively plain style. Finally, a generation of public intellectuals who emerged in the 1980s, including historian Sean Wilentz, cultural critics Andrew Delbanco and Louis Menand, political essayist Paul Berman, and art critic Jed Perl, were drawn to Wilson's example as a counter to specialized academic work, with its restricted language and limited audience, particularly in the social sciences and literary theory.

As early as 1943, in one of his first autobiographical essays, "Thoughts on Being Bibliographed," Wilson vented his ambivalence about young writers who vied for his approval, wanting "to thrust him into a throne and have him available as an object of veneration." (CC, 109) Being canonized, he thought, would make him the object of attack and lock him down to work he had already done. (The attack, a sweeping and dismissive one, came a few years later in Stanley Edgar Hyman's skewed book on modern criticism, The Armed Vision.) Wilson's generation, including friends like Fitzgerald and Nathanael West, had begun dying off along with their elders in the modern movement. "Yeats, Freud, Trotsky, and Joyce have all gone in so short a time, it is almost like the death of one's father," he wrote in 1941. (277) His actual father, Edmund Wilson senior, had been a brilliant trial lawyer and prosecutor whom Woodrow Wilson considered appointing to the United States Supreme Court, but he was also a hypochondriac who spent his later years in a twilight of psychosomatic fears. The elder Wilson had a horror that his only son, with his rich assortment of interests, would not make his mark, and so urged him to "concentrate on something." Wilson replied, persuasively, that "what I want to do is to try to get to know something about all the main departments of human thought." (A Piece of My Mind, 227)

When his father died in 1923 he had already set about to accomplish this, not in the cloistered world of scholarship but in the cultural marketplace. He grew famous as a journalist covering popular culture from the Ziegfeld Follies, vaudeville, and burlesque to silent movies, and as an up-to-minute literary critic introducing his readers to difficult modern writers, such as Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. He also wrote poetry, plays, and fiction, including a novel set in Greenwich Village, I Thought of Daisy (1929), in which he tried, like his college friend Fitzgerald, to sum up the restless mood of the 1920s and the experience of his generation. Like so many first-rate critics, he wanted to be a writer, not a conduit of other people's writing. But the terse, classical manner that served him so well in his essays fell flat in his fiction, where it seemed like evidence of emotional disengagement. Wilson had sometimes patronized Fitzgerald, who looked to him as his "intellectual conscience." But rereading The Great Gatsby as he revised the proofs of his novel, Wilson grew depressed to realize "how much better Scott Fitzgerald's prose and dramatic sense were than mine. If I'd only been able to give my book the vividness and excitement, and the technical accuracy, of his!" (Letters, 173)

Lewis M. Dabney's definitive and unfailingly intelligent biography of Wilson, more than twenty years in the making, is especially good on the turning points in Wilson's life – his experience as a soldier in Europe, which separated him from his narrow, privileged background; his eager embrace of sex and alcohol in the carnivalesque years of the 1920s; his conversion to left-wing politics after the stock-market crash, which confirmed his patrician distaste for America's "business civilization"; his tempestuous marriage to McCarthy and withdrawal to Cape Cod; and his explorations of the American past, his own life, and other cultures – French Canadian, Iroquois, Haitian, Israeli, Zuni Pueblo – in his last decades. During those years he no longer felt connected to contemporary life as he encountered it in the pages of Life magazine, but felt stranded, like his father, in "a pocket of the past." (PM, 239)

Dabney stresses the effects of Wilson's Puritan background but also his serious effort to declass himself, partly through an allegiance to art and culture. He recoiled from Christianity but was drawn to Jews, ancient and modern, for their peculiar moral urgency. His mother was a collateral descendent of Cotton Mather, his paternal grandfather a learned Presbyterian minister, yet Wilson made the leap from Victorian gentility to 1920s bohemianism. He opened himself to fresh experiences, first in the army hospital corps in France, where he rubbed shoulders with people he could not have known at boarding school or Princeton. He plunged into popular culture, which was so remote from his classical education, into "dissipation" and sexual experimentation (reported in his journals with almost clinical precision), and then into politics and Depression journalism, focusing on the travail of ordinary Americans. His travels across America were followed in 1935 by a five-month trip to the Soviet Union, where, during a long hospital stay, he read Marx and Engels by day, Gibbon at night. He was exploring radical movements from the French to the Russian Revolutions and, after this failed him, began searching for a republican ideal of virtue and character in figures like Grant, Lincoln, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. If Wilson's course of downward mobility at first resembled Orwell's, by the end he sounded like Henry Adams, a sardonic observer formed for a different world, a disaffected link to an almost forgotten past.

Since Wilson's father left him no money directly, and his mother tightly controlled the purse strings, he spent much of his adult life in genteel poverty. Along with his ferocious work ethic, this constant need for cash helped democratize his point of view. So did his passionate affair with a working-class woman, Frances Minihan, between 1927 and 1933. As described in his journals and his sexually explicit novella "The Princess With the Golden Hair," it became the most tender experience of his life, the notable exception to his many destructive relationships with women of his own class. She was utterly devoted to him, tolerant of his affairs, and sexually uninhibited in a way that delighted him. She loved him unconditionally and marveled at his intelligence, but the social gap they tried to bridge kept them from marrying. Instead Wilson had a breakdown, at almost the same moment as the larger breakdown of American society.

Wilson's personal crisis and the relative failure of his novel shook his confidence as a writer and made him fear that he would go the way of his father. His parents' marriage was a union of opposites. His father grew neurotic, solitary, and reflective, spending his happiest hours amid the woods and streams of upstate New York; his mother was gay, social, anti-intellectual, and felt constantly thwarted by her husband's self-absorption. As if in protest she suddenly went deaf on the way back from a trip to Europe, and she came to think that brilliant people, her husband and son among them, "always had something wrong with them," a notion that may have contributed to the thesis of one of his best collections, The Wound and the Bow (1941). Largely written during his marriage to McCarthy, the book was anchored by two long biographical essays on Dickens and Kipling, both studies of the effect of childhood trauma on the writer's creative life.

Wilson himself was an unhappy child, shy, bookish, and socially awkward. All his life he was a disaster as a lecturer or teacher. "He was an uncomfortable man, uncomfortable with himself," according to his friend Isaiah Berlin. Edna St. Vincent Millay, who epitomized the sexual freedom of the Village, relieved him of his virginity in 1920, when he was 25, and he spent decades making up for lost time. Though never a theorist, he grew as hungry for new ideas as for new sexual encounters. His work became an adventure in crossing boundaries: between national literatures, between the classics and the moderns, between journalism and criticism, literature and history, writing and politics. His formation as a critic was Victorian. An early reading of Taine's History of English Literature introduced him to the historical approach to literature in terms of time and place, narrative and portraiture. Beginning with his celebrated study of modern writers, Axel's Castle (1931), he never wavered from this model, even when the new technical criticism made it unfashionable. The great 19th-century critics, including Taine, Michelet, Georg Brandes, and Matthew Arnold, oriented Wilson's work towards history and biography, but his own mentors were crisp cynics like Shaw and Mencken, who favored witty broadsides over lengthy tomes and brought criticism closer to the common language. Concision became his watchword. From his teacher at Princeton, Christian Gauss, he learned the Coleridgean principle that "every word, every cadence, every detail, should perform a definite function in producing an intense effect."(Classics and Commercials, 15) And he praised George Saintsbury and Ford Madox Ford "because they found out how to manage a fine and flexible English prose on the rhythms of informal speech rather than on those of literary convention." (CC, 307-8)

As early as the late 1920s, Wilson worried that criticism was growing too abstract and academic. As literary editor of The New Republic, he groused to one his reviewers, R. P. Blackmur – already a formidable intellectual at 25 – he that "there has lately been such a reaction against the impressionistic criticism of the day before yesterday that there is a tendency entirely to eliminate any intimation of what the work under consideration looks, sounds, feels, or smells like." (Letters, 170) The New Criticism, a discursive, pedagogical offshoot of modernism, did not yet exist, yet Wilson was already instructing it in the exigencies of literary journalism, insuring that scholastics would dismiss him as an "introductory critic" writing for the uninitiated.

But Wilson's intellectual ambitions went far beyond book reviewing. He looked to "general ideas" to place each book in a larger context – social, biographical, comparative. Just as he'd turned to French Symbolism as a way of framing his approach to the writers in Axel's Castle, he relied on a psychoanalytic template for The Wound and the Bow and a Marxist framework in his other major collection of essays, The Triple Thinkers (1938, 1948). By interweaving personalities and ideas, he lent drama to the development of Marxism in To the Finland Station. But he made use of these systems in the most undogmatic manner imaginable, never subsuming his feeling for art or forcing his response to the works themselves. Mining Dickens's fragment of a memoir, especially his early experience in the blacking factory, and working his way through every one of the novels, he created the modern Dickens out of whole cloth, just as he rescued Kipling from being dismissed as a bluff imperialist. His Dickens was much darker, more haunted, his Kipling more damaged and divided than their contemporaries could have realized. All through his essay, Wilson blends Marx with Freud to make sense of Dickens' class-consciousness:

His behavior toward Society, in the capitalized sense, was rebarbative to the verge of truculence; he refused to learn its patter and its manners; and his satire on the fashionable world comes to figure more and more prominently in his novels. Dickens is one of the very small group of British intellectuals to whom the opportunity has been offered to be taken up by the governing class and who have actually declined that honor. (WB, 43)

He goes on to show how Dickens, like his admirer Dostoevsky, gained from his "social maladjustment," for it gave him a privileged vantage point outside or between the social classes. Elsewhere he sees how writers, including some of his Princeton contemporaries, lost their edge when they married rich women and settled back into a life of comfort. Writing in the throes of the Depression, Wilson cherishes his own independent position.

Dabney is a sure guide to every stage of his long career, but never more than in the early 1940s, when Wilson "entered upon several years without a regular job or salary, adrift in a nation at war, where intellectual life was on the back burner." (277) He had broken with The New Republic over its support for America's entry into the war; he thought of the owners as British agents. His marriage to McCarthy was tempestuous, perhaps violent on his part, and punctuated by her breakdowns and repeated efforts to leave him. His drinking led to volatile mood swings and towering rages that made him hard to live with, though it never interfered with his writing. They behaved like two prima donnas sharing the same stage or, as David Laskin describes them, "two tyrants under a single roof, always amazed that they had failed to cow or convince the other." (280) His life was shifting from the city to the house he bought on Cape Cod and eventually to his ancestral stone house in upstate New York, where he would retreat each summer into an earlier world. He began writing for The New Yorker, longer and less timely pieces than those he had done for The New Republic, and watched his generation unravel. "Too many of my friends are insane or dead or Roman Catholic converts," he wrote a few years later. (PM, 235) He edited Fitzgerald's unfinished novel (The Last Tycoon) and his uncollected essays (The Crack-Up), which did much to restore Scott's faded reputation. "So began the flood of retrospection," says Dabney, "that included portraits of teachers, family, and close literary friends."

And so began his work on Patriotic Gore (1962), his retrospective account of American writers in the decades after the Civil War. It proved to be an ambitious and idiosyncratic book, perhaps 200 pages too long and missing the narrative arc of To the Finland Station. Centered on figures like Grant and Holmes, the book was a testament to Wilson's boundless curiosity and his engagement with the American past. Heedless of its subjects' literary reputation, it was full of revealing things about neglected or forgotten writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, or Mary Chesnut, whom academics would discover only years later.

With the help of much unpublished material – including some 70,000 letters among Wilson's papers at Yale – Dabney gives a balanced account of even the most contentious episodes of his life, including his marriage to McCarthy and his friendship and acrimonious quarrel with Vladimir Nabokov. They bonded and broke over Russian literature but the ill will went back to Wilson's dislike of Lolita and perhaps his envy of the fame and wealth that book brought its author, whom Wilson had long sponsored. The immediate occasion was Wilson's review of Nabokov's altogether perverse edition of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, but it led Wilson to overreach his own knowledge of Russian, as it led Nabokov, who had admired Wilson's essays, to denounce his "old-fashioned, naive, and musty method of human-interest criticism." (406) Here Nabokov unwittingly put his finger on what was strongest about Wilson's work. Though his mask as a critic was impersonal, judicial, he always reached for the human center of a book, and always, as Isaiah Berlin pointed out, in a personal way. While other critics wrote "just intelligent sentences," Berlin told Dabney, "everything Wilson wrote was filled with some kind of personal content." (6) Frank Kermode took note of his ability to proceed from "passionate identification with the work under discussion" to "detached appraisal" and "historical inference, which does not neglect the primary response." (158)

Dabney is scrupulously fair about Wilson's life and character but finds it difficult to say anything unkind about Wilson's work. He defends even his 1947 assault on Kafka which, he points out, "has been said to mark the outer limits of his sensibility." (The same could be said of his baffling rejection of Lolita.) Dabney suggests that he "was reacting against the Kafka cult" and that the hero's helplessness "was remote from Wilson's Protestant heritage and – though anticipated in Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener' – not in the American grain." (345-46) Wilson, though hardly restricted to the native grain, was put off by his sense of Kafka as "a man constitutionally lacking in vitality." Along with Max Brod, Kafka's loyal but obtuse friend, he wonders why Kafka was unable to escape the power of his parents. "Why should he have allowed his father so to crush and maim his abilities?" Wilson's own fortitude, strengthened by Hebrew scripture, kept him working through long periods of illness and unhappiness. Yet only a few years earlier in The Wound and the Bow, he had shown how great writing could be bound up with neurosis, weakness, and early damage. That book included one of the best essays ever written about Hemingway, gauging the terror at the heart of his best work and its dissolution in the bluster and affirmations of his later writing. Wilson dismissed the "politicos" (read: Marxist critics) who accused Hemingway (as they accused Kafka) of "an indifference to society."

His whole work is a criticism of society: he has responded to every pressure of the moral atmosphere of the time, as it is felt at the roots of human relations, with a sensitivity almost unrivaled. (WB, 215)

This could not only be transferred to Kafka but read as a credo for Wilson's own form of "human-interest criticism." For him the critic, like the artist, is a sensitive barometer of the moral weather of society, best measured not by way of abstractions but in the atmosphere of feeling, the minute pressure of actual human relationships.

Review of Janna Malamud Smith's My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud

Janna Malamud Smith, My Father is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud

292 pp. Houghton Mifflin. $24 0-618-69166-9

Published in the Times Literary Supplement, May 12 2006

 

 

More than other leading postwar novelists, Bernard Malamud's star has faded in the twenty years since his death. Younger writers, smitten with a nostalgia he never felt, still try with indifferent luck to recapture his magical sense of the immigrant generation in its encounters with the new world. Some readers know him best though his least typical work, the baseball novel The Natural (1952), lushly adapted into a film by Robert Redford. Malamud was at his strongest in his short fiction, especially the stories collected in The Magic Barrel (1958), and in his second novel, The Assistant (1957), as terse and gripping as any of the stories. But beginning in the 1960s, his demanding notions of form and craft, like his moral outlook, were going out of fashion, as were the old-world characters and second-generation misfits who fired his imagination. Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, and John Updike managed to reinvent themselves from decade to decade, liberated by the cultural carnival that surrounded them, even when they condemned it. In the underrated academic novel A New Life (1961) and the black humor of Pictures of Fidelman (1969), Malamud too tried to loosen up but real spontaneity eluded him. He could not play the celebrity game; his conscience was exacting, his sense of privacy absolute. In interviews and occasional lectures he vehemently shielded his private life, though he sometimes exposed it in his fiction, with unfortunate results in his autobiographical novel Dubin's Lives (1979).

His daughter, Janna Malamud Smith, a psychiatric social worker, was particularly close to her father – almost incestuously, she now thinks – and even wrote a book defending this insistence on privacy. But now, in a striking turnabout, she has come to feel that the lack of a biography or a sense of the man himself has helped dim his reputation. An authorized life by an English scholar, Philip Davis, is in the works, and she has anticipated it with this uneven but revealing memoir. Part of the problem with My Father Is a Book is that the author has not decided what kind of book it is, or whether her father's life was much more than the sum of his writings. By including things that happened before she was born or after she left home, she conflates biography, memoir, and a psychological profile. To this she adds personal excursions into Malamud's fiction, where she finds that "the underlying themes possess an uncanny, sometimes creepy familiarity: they are the spooks of the familial unspoken returning to haunt." Rereading Dubin's Lives, where the protagonist, a writer, is having an affair with a girl his daughter's age while the daughter is seeing a man her father's age, she recoils from "a way-too-intimate view of my father's confused feelings." (241)

It becomes evident quite early that she was at once too close to her father and too distant to understand him fully. To protect his vocation, which meant the world to him, Malamud was guarded, formal, and slightly aloof even with friends and family. From the start their lives were organized around his work. Through an apprenticeship of almost two decades, with few financial or literary prospects, Malamud nurtured an unshakable ambition to write. In 1945 he sent a letter to his future wife reminiscent of Kafka's warnings to his own fiancée, Felice Bauer:

Though my heart wants you with a single purpose, I must repeat what marriage to me will mean for you. Though I love you and shall love you more, most of my strength will be devoted to realizing myself as an artist. I will need your help to overcome weaknesses in health, finances and steadfastness. You will be called on for all the love, patience, courage, understanding – and paradoxically – selflessness that you are capable of bestowing. (79)

Callow as this sounds, it was prophetic of the stresses and bonds of their long marriage, marked by initial money troubles, patriarchal privilege, a lasting commitment to family life, some serious discord and infidelity, and eventually poor health – all this subsumed by his fierce devotion to art. This was the picture Philip Roth sketched of Malamud and his wife Ann in The Ghost Writer, not very different from the one Malamud himself drew in Dubin's Lives and several late stories. He concluded an autobiographical lecture in 1984 with the wish that he might have been two men, one chained to his desk, living for art, the other leading the untrammeled life that would light up the writing. He envied the fluency of writers who could do both; his own effects, he felt, could only be achieved through unremitting labor.

This work ethic, with its stress on discipline and self-denial, was part of Malamud's heritage from his immigrant family. In her father's background Smith also uncovered a legacy of poverty, mental illness, and premature heart disease. His mother's breakdowns began with the birth of her children; he himself interrupted one of her suicide attempts, which led to her hospitalization, and eventually to her death in 1929 when he was fifteen. His younger brother Eugene began showing signs of mental distress as a soldier in second world war. He recovered briefly but by the end of 1940s he too was hospitalized. He died of a heart attack in his fifties, without really having lived. Malamud's parents, including his stepmother, were barely literate in English. Their pinched lives remained in thrall to the grocery store that serves as a kind of prison in The Assistant. The surreal, phonetically spelled letters his father sent him read like Malamudian inventions, comic and poetic in flavor, except that they chronicle the disintegration of the family after Bernard left New York with his wife and young son in 1949 to teach composition at a state college in Oregon. "Neither his father nor his brother really survived his departure," Smith writes. "He was the capable person among them." (103). If writing was his "exit visa" (75) from the constricted world in which he grew up, a sense of guilt, along with an unrelenting need for order and control, was the price he paid for his flight.

As Malamud's New York family fell apart, his family in Oregon unexpectedly thrived. He occupied a humble academic position, barred from teaching literature for lack of a Ph.D., and he went through culture shock at the "cheerful blandness" (126) of college life in the Northwest. But on the days he didn't teach, he devoted himself to writing with an iron will that astonished his colleagues. Soon he completed The Natural and began selling his stories for the first time. In this idyllic setting his daughter was born and he became the ordinary pre de famille that his conscience and family history demanded. A New Life exploits the comic possibilities of this suburban normalcy at the same time it underlines his sense of alienation, even exile, in the American heartland, which redoubled his need to write his way out. Like Joyce writing about Dubliners in Trieste and Paris or Sherwood Anderson remembering Winesburg, Ohio, Oregon sharpened Malamud's perspective on the ghetto Jews he half recalled and half imagined. In his twelve years there he wrote his best books.

Oregon was his daughter's first home; her book comes alive as she recalls the Andy Hardy atmosphere of the family's life there. When her father began teaching at progressive Bennington College in Vermont in 1961 it was her turn to feel uprooted. Soon afterwards her father, like so many Bennington faculty, began an affair with a student that the daughter still resents today, for it strained her parents' marriage and displaced emotions otherwise directed towards her. She is troubled as she goes through Malamud's warm correspondence with this woman, who began as his lover but became a close family friend. With marked reluctance and distress, Smith rereads Dubin's Lives, his lightly fictionalized account of this affair. But instead of blaming her father, she indicts the "louche," avant-garde atmosphere of the college, in which a mostly male faculty freely exploited the largely female student body, choosing new favorites from each incoming class.

Malamud took the public posture of a stern moralist, almost a Jewish sage, yet his work has a mischievous streak in line with Lambert Strether's message at the end of The Ambassadors: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to." His fiction is full of pale abstainers (like the rabbinical student in "The Magic Barrel") whose defensive shell cracks under the temptations of the flesh. Such licence was out of bounds to immigrants like his parents whose lives were dominated by work and necessity. But the deprivations of his youth and his growing fame as a writer drove his sense of entitlement. He admired Hemingway and felt that an artist required adventure, even if it clashed with the rectitude of his self-image. At Bennington, it appears, he really became the two men he had longed to be, the ascetic devoted selflessly to art and the artist who takes his pleasure and enjoys his freedom. His daughter, still idealizing the father she adored as a girl, is hardly the ideal person to explore this paradox.

My Father Is a Book tells the story of a man who exited emotionally from his marriage yet wanted to preserve it, either for appearance sake, out of dependency, or because family so much mattered to him. Malamud felt he had a "thin family life" after his mother's death. He charmed his way into the families of friends and grew up with a burden he tried to conceal, but also a quixotic determination to make his mark. His youthful pessimism drew him to Henry Adams, Matthew Arnold's poetry, and T.S. Eliot. He wrote a master's thesis at Columbia on Thomas Hardy and his early stories reflect this dour outlook, which the Holocaust did nothing to dispel. But as early as The Assistant and A New Life he granted his characters intimations of redemption and rebirth; disaster offers them the chance of spiritual regeneration.

Janna Malamud Smith tells her father's story selectively, trying to put the best face on it. [She makes one touching love affair that led to a lifelong attachment stand in for other, more casual Bennington-style relationships. Her research into his early life feels haphazard, but the letters she quotes, though restrained, provide a window on his mind. Malamud's clenched letter detailing his brother's background and breakdown, written to inform his doctor, reads like one of R. D. Laing's schizophrenic case histories. Smith's book is less frank.] She gives a three-dimensional portrait of her father but obscures the living behind a veil of discretion. Her brother hardly figures here, though Malamud wrote harsh stories about father-son conflict, and she passes quickly over indications of her mother's bitterness. It is hard to imagine that Malamud's undramatic life and divided self will quicken interest in his work, but the book should fascinate those who already care about him. Even this partial portrait shows how autobiographical his fiction could be, why it prospered during his Oregon exile, then began losing its edge as success undid some of his inhibitions and made him a happier, less hungry man.