Letters and Literature

...No letters have been more eagerly awaited than those of James Joyce (Viking, 1957...

...In fact, we are already closer to that judgment than we were when the Letters appeared: the publication this month of Stanislaus Joyce's My Brother's Keeper (Viking) gives us a stronger picture of Joyce's Dublin years than we have ever before had...

...This is no less true of Wolfe than of the other three...

...negatively they portray a man indifferent to the usefulness of such writings for more than the sparest kinds of biographical information...

...This is the kind of experience the letters of Ezra Pound provide (Harcourt, Brace, 1950...

...They reveal Joyce as a man suffering, with what must often seem a terrifying concentration of human powers, for the demands of his art: enduring some eleven operations on his eyes, anxiously worried over numerous bannings, indictments, misunderstandings, financial difficulties...

...but, since in his case the person was so closely related to the poet, there is scarcely a point in them that does not illuminate the poetry and its cultural milieu...

...but not infrequently they reveal the man as having given almost everything to his work, having very little to leave beyond it...

...As Stephen Spender has recently said of their author, "Compared with Joyce's various mental lodgings, Proust's cork-lined room seems wide open as the prairies...

...The personality of the man shrinks embarrassingly before our eyes...

...Any one familiar with the work of William Carlos Williams might expect that his letters will place him solidly in the above group...

...One can say that in most cases the life of an artist has a dividing line (its position varies with every case), at which point private reflection becomes public statement...

...This may be an impression based upon an imperfect testimony...

...They lead one necessarily to the conclusion that Joyce rarely communicated his total self except in his published work...

...This is not to say that the Letters are without value...

...I cannot see the slightest reason why we should meet," he says to Amy Lowell after that formidable saleswoman of modern poetry has brought out a collection of "Imagists...

...Some writers give us much more than we deserve to expect...

...It is all but impossible to imagine a more narrowly self-dedicated person than this one...

...The manuscript was left incomplete at the death of Stanislaus Joyce in 1955...

...and writers whom we rather casually thought of as belonging to our generation now remind us of their place in literary history...

...Pound is truculently reiterative...

...Its story of the two brothers in the streets or environs of early Twentieth Century Dublin is more than ordinarily provided with tortures, agonies, and frights...

...What can we expect from such an experience...

...His tone, harshly condemnatory, selfishly assertive, lyrically laudatory by turns, gives us much of modern literature in a new light, raw and glaring but without any real spots of darkness...

...but in the long range of an artist's ambition, focusing upon the center of the work...

...It is like an interview with him, from the perspective of some years: he had been talking about his novel decades ago, to his agent, to his friends, to his editors...

...In spite of the strongest of self-admonitions, it is difficult to accept them as the private statements of so distinguished a modern genius...

...This is strong talk, and not entirely fair, but it is part of the informality, and of the concentration of energy and spirit which led Williams to formulate a much underrated and too much ignored position in modern American literature...

...this I am sure Mr...

...The Selected Letters (McDowell and Obolen-sky, 1957) do not surprise or disappoint...

...that is, they speak often and meaningfully—usefully, as Eliot would say—of major poetic and philosophical concerns...

...the Wolfe of the letters is undeniably linked to the Eugene Gant of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River...

...the letters eloquently help us to see the other work from a renewed and floodlighted point of vantage...

...it should, for one thing, help to settle finally the question of Joyce's personal involvement in his fiction...

...he had had no notion that he would eventually be talking to us about it...

...we are no longer looking at contemporaries when we read their letters but viewing the immediate past...

...The letters of William Butler Yeats (Macmillan, 1954) are a special case, as is their author...

...We have a close-up view of the circumstances in which Twentieth Century literature was made...

...His lifetime preoccupation with the role of place (region, home, weather, experience in "the American grain") in the formation of literature shines through here as it does nowhere else...

...Otherwise, we read the letters in the hope that they will prove useful—usually only in a marginal sense, by way perhaps of confirming or correcting a critical view of the personal vision a writer has had of his work, or of seeing more clearly his experience in writing it...

...they sometimes become a clue to an expanded aesthetic, beyond the limits found in published statements, and by their very informality suggest shades of meaning not previously revealed...

...it is difficult to see Stuart Gilbert's principles of editorship, but they most certainly have helped to confirm us in the melancholy conclusion that—for the most part, at any rate—the Joyce of the letters was a narrow, small soul, moved by fears and petty concerns, withdrawn not into commodious retirement but into a janitor's closet unlighted and unaired...

...we encounter an entirely new range of personalities...

...Anderson is confessedly vague, at times assertively fond of his insights, at other almost pitifully insecure about what they mean...

...Eliot would call an impertinence...

...Eliot is scarcely admired, and his influence is roundly condemned—"the worst possible influence in American letters," he says in one place, "simply because he more than anyone I know has blocked the interchange of fertilizing ideas between American and English letters...

...Their letters are not only an informal gloss upon their work...

...They belong to the class of letters I have been discussing...

...in various ways the letters of other modern celebrities supplement it: Hart Crane (Hermitage House, 1952), Sherwood Anderson (Little Brown, 1953), Thomas Wolfe (Scrib-ner's, 1956...

...Most significantly, they show more clearly than any other kind of document Yeats' special problem of definition, his unique way of treating modern skepticisms, and the sometimes tortured, sometimes healthily excited progress toward a curiously formulated vision...

...Nowhere have the public and private attitudes of a writer been more successfully fused...

...The letters are a mine far more difficult to explore than Pound's or Williams', but they are as richly rewarding of diligent probing...

...It is not too difficult to determine this line of demarcation in the case of work that has from the beginning been scheduled for publication...

...If this biographical account does not entirely satisfy (it is after all composed from a perspective not entirely sympathetic to Joyce's own creative center), it does come at a time when the Joyce of the Letters very much needed a supplementary, corrective testimony, and it helps above all to enlarge and enrich him in our minds...

...For one thing, I think it an extremely doubtful practise to read the letters of a literary hero whose works we either have not read or do not altogether understand...

...I admire some of your work and it is a pity that it is not put out to higher interest...

...The four letter writers have in common a persistent sense of themselves as meaningfully relevant to the world of their contemporaries...

...But they rarely sound like editorials or first-drafts of prefaces...

...not less vividly real is the strength of his honesty, his unwillingness to toady, to bow before rank, influence, power...

...The Letters recently published are neither complete nor entirely representative...

...But how to use, and how to judge, writing not overtly designed for publication—his letters, for example...

...none have proved so disappointing...

...We know what he is about, whether we approve or not...

...In a few cases, the letters reinforce our conception of the public man...

...The final biographical estimate of Joyce will be more generous...

...Instead, they are a quiet autobiographical annotation of the Yeats canon-—picking up as they do the current of his thought, his concern with present composition and its social or metaphysical environment, and showing us why and how he thinks...

...Both of these celebrities come in for extensive commentary in the Letters: Pound is admired, abused, judged, definitively appraised...

...the letters become informal appendices to one of the strongest American theories of local culture and natively endowed poetry we have...

...One feels that Stanislaus was there when the separate sources of Dubliners, the Portrait, and Ulysses were made available to his brother—and that he possessed the ground sense needed to distinguish fact from fancy...

...The judgments of his contemporaries are vigorous, forthright, frankly prejudiced, far-seeing, and outgoing...

...Crane's letters are more frequently personally centered...

...Collections of letters in modern literature have been appearing in generous abundance in the last ten years...

...He so much as says, when he permits his work to be published, that he wants to share, with as many people as his editor or publisher can attract, what had earlier been a private vision...

...In only half of the cases is the man of the letters clearly seen as the man of literature...

...It is in a sense a testimony of the fact that modern literature has matured...

...his theoretical sense of what literature is and should be is translated in scores of cases into a close look at the literary scene...

...In fact, Williams' letters project their author into the contemporary scene more vigorously than any other collection so far published...

...The advantages of this kind of insight into the cir-cumambience of literature are obvious enough...

...it gives only a little more than half of the story of the two brothers...

...this is his privilege...

...This kind of letter writing reveals an excess of critical energy which, not exhausted in creation, ranges widely over the contemporary scene, praising, condemning, and exhorting...

...But the book is a little masterpiece of fraternal judgment and solicitude...

...We can expect that Williams will be wrong-headed many times...

...The talk about the "native grain" of American experience provides a most informative play of ideas, as against the expatriation of Pound and Eliot...

...We surprise him into admitting truths in an emotional circumstance quite informally different from the mask he subsequently assumed for the world...

...But the experience of reading through collections of letters offers many surprises and is as little available to orderly principles as any experience can be...

...More frequently he transcends his prejudices...

...Taken with the Letters, My Brother's Keeper serves the role of an estimably useful document...

...To me it is a lamentable stinginess of spirit that permits you to hold your present well-known attitude toward unknown and young American writers...

...yet there is never a hint of Williams' parading an image of his public importance in private correspondence...