BOOKS:

...His prose is convoluted and dull...

...Among the poets listed, there is Jon Anderson with three fine books to his credit, a contributor to Theodore Solotaroff's New American Review, a poet whose second book Death & Co was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review...

...Joyce in a letter dated 10 July 1917 chronicles the hardships encountered before Dubliners appeared...

...His essay entitled "Contemporary Literature" (included in the volume On Contemporary Literature edited by Kostelanetz) states that Ralph Ellison is one of a number of writers who "have produced some of the most significant literature of the twentieth century...

...We do not allow our writers the luxury of growth...

...Clecak has no trouble criticizing him clearly and energetically yet sympathetically...

...In retrospect, however, one can see how crucial the "failure" of this novel was for Roth...

...Lack of an analysis that addresses these questions leads to the positing of a "negation" of the New Left that is itself as abstract as the New Left's own negation of corporate capitalism...

...BOOKS The End of Intelligent Writing RICHARD KOSTELANETZ Sheed & Ward, $12.95 RORERT LEITER Anyone with more than a passing interest in contemporary literature knew of Richard Kostelanetz's The End of Intelligent Writing prior to its book length publication...

...An author who makes sweeping judgments must inspire trust...

...By failing to calculate how American society would recoil from holistic utopianism, the New Left guaranteed its political marginality...

...Our universities are producing great numbers of literate humans who are flooding the market and wish to be heard...

...Stone's A Hall of Mirrors won a Houghton Mifflin Fellowship Award and his second novel, Dog Soldiers, reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review is proving the most acclaimed work of the season...

...The need to repeatedly bolster one's theories with the ideas of others belies either a writer confident in his ignorance or one who is running scared...

...Clecak's pessimism about the prospects for democratic socialism ("many radicals do not accept the limitations on the political imagination that makes the principles of democratic socialism the most desirable basis of social organization in relatively developed nations") is well-grounded, yet does not go far enough...

...If Kostelanetz's attitude towards Hall is not just a mean-spirited, personal swipe, then what's to stop Benedikt from following Hall's guidelines-as Kostelanetz believed Tom Clark, Hall's immediate successor at Paris Review, had done...

...Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left, 1945-1970 PETER CLECAK Harper & Row, $11.95 TODD GITLIN Marxism without a functioning revolutionary proletariat is like religion without God: it is difficult, but a modern person has little choice but to make the most of it...

...Kostelanetz had damned both for being "on the mob make since the early sixties...

...and rumors accumulated over the years that the author, because of his all-out attack on the New York Literary Establishment, was having trouble finding a publisher...

...But more insulting is his lack of consistency...

...Portnoy's Complaint dispelled any fears...

...the theorists then succumb to doubt, if not despair...

...For, to put it bluntly, if the contemporary radical imagination tends to get out of hand, to get carried away with its own giddy severity, then who is to push for democratic socialism...

...Both writers have been published by the powers that be, have been praised by them as well, and continue to inspire awe among their contemporaries...

...It examines the ways in which four important post-World-War-II radical theorists grappled with those dilemmas, and how the New Left tried to short-circuit them...

...The apocalyptic vision of new possibilities, built on vague assumptions of material abundance and on visions vacillating between the Orphic and the Puritan, ran up against the intractabilities of modern capitalism...

...Two other puzzling inclusions are Alan Lelchuk and Jeremy Lamer among the fiction writers...

...Clecak speculates that New Left graduates may permeate American institutions, yet the mechanisms of this process are (understandably) vague, and he points to the danger of assimilation when the Utopian desires are utterly stripped away...

...Woiwode's first novel, What I'm Going to Do 1 Think, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, won the William Faulkner prize for the best first novel of its particular year...

...Roth has been extravagantly praised from the start of his career...

...This is curious, for Mills is one of the theorists whom Clecak very well understands...

...yet, in the final account, Clecak verges on the same mistake made by the New Left: of overvaluing the role of political will in history...

...The End of Intelligent Writing is dangerous in one respect...

...Kostelanetz has spent some three hundred good-size pages constructing his conspiracy theory and then, with a straight face, includes the names of writers who have, by and large, been supported by and discussed in Kostelanetz's most hated journals...

...The problem is not what is published, but rather the way in which information about what is published is disseminated to the public...

...he homes in on the New Left, arguing persuasively that it "moved . .. from a rudimentary sociology of change to a self-defeating dialectic of liberation...

...One could go on endlessly...

...But the use of a quote to justify one's theories, struggles and sense of moral superiority is an easy way around some difficult problems, yet typical of Kostelanetz's method...

...Thus, in the second part of his book, Kostelanetz offers a "corrective" to the New York mob's doings and undoings -lists and lists of names: essayists, novelists, poets and playwrights who may revive the art of intelligent writing via literary magazines of true worth...

...Clecak has the historical perspective that the New Left scanted, but he is not able to explain, except ideologically, why the New Left ran amok in absurd and self-destructive utopianism...

...And the University Presses of Iowa and Southern Illinois have instituted admirable programs: the former continues to support the short story with its annual short fiction award while the latter rediscovers "lost" writers of merit, like the brilliant Edith Summers Kelley...

...The attempt to eliminate all alienation is, at least this time, a dead end...

...Since then his stories and poems have appeared in every major journal, large and small, and his second novel is eagerly awaited...

...But it is in the second part of the book that Kostelanetz does the most damage to his thesis...

...Of all the recent critiques of Marcuse, I think Clecak's is the fairest and most inclusive...

...The pressure to publish -a staple of creative writing courses- may do more harm than good...

...The study of the development of Marxism in the American 1950s is properly a study of individuals...

...Clecak promises another book to continue this analysis, and I hope he and others succeed in reassembling the pieces of radical paradox into actionable forms...

...Kostelanetz's contention is that (surprise, surprise-or perhaps one should say ha, ha), a conspiracy holds forth in the Literary World...

...Radical Paradoxes is an achievement because Clecak is sensitive-though, I am inclined to argue, not sensitive enough- to the reality of those dilemmas...

...He points to Mills' "tendency to transform criticism into a myth of personal consolation," his "authoritarian undercurrent," his "forced hopefulness...

...Kostelanetz's complaint is that the establishment is suppressing these multitudes...

...Its trouble, I think, is in the realm of omission rather than commission...

...his strength is in his grasp of them, and his weakness is in his lack of what C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination...

...He is sensitive to Mills' and Baran's intellectual and political isolation, and to the general tendency of radical intellectuals to disdain political activity in order to preserve their intellectual integrity...

...But all who put words to paper are not artists...

...Thus, Heller's failings become, in the eyes of Vonnegut, grand successes...

...Anyone with eyes and ears is aware that Kostelanetz's thesis has its levels of truth...

...The house organs are The New York Review of Books and Commentary with a little help from friends at Harper's, The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review...

...I don't quite reach Kostelanetz's proposed quota, but I have read something-be it poem, play, essay or novel-by at least two hundred of these assorted writers...

...Plain Marxists," trying to formulate a revolutionary alternative to gradual change, foundered in their attempts to find a "surrogate proletariat...

...Advanced capitalism systematically manufactures alienation, yet alienation is inevitable...

...Any number of them exist now, many that Kostelanetz does not itemize...

...Roth was acclaimed, a shining star once more...

...However in The End of Intelligent Writing, Kostelanetz has little to say about Ellison that is favorable (or for that matter anyone else discussed in On Contemporary Literature...

...These two gentlemen may never have met (although that's unlikely), but they are undeniably kin of a literary sort...

...The Iowa Review, Fiction and The American Poetry Review are just three magazines that have published Kostelanetz's younger writers...

...Parts of the work appeared in The Hudson Review during the sixties...

...And why then, after all the mud-slinging does Kostelanetz include Tom Clark on his list as well...

...This prolonged search for acceptance may explain Kostelanetz's use of a James Joyce quote as one of the epigraphs to his book...

...The New Left vision "was essentially a simplistic negation of the worst features of the present...

...But he spells Sigal's last name wrong and, later in the book, denigrates Bourjaily in the same way he castigates his favorite target, Saul Bellow...

...or Marvin Bell, whose first book was a Lamont Poetry selection, published by Atheneum, and who has appeared in many journals, including NAR...

...And what did the Indochina War and other political barbarisms have to do with the "reduction of reason and history to caricatures...

...This is trenchant criticism, and has a great deal to recommend it...

...Failing to develop a sensible post-Marxist revolutionary theory-indeed Clecak believes with Sartre that Marxism cannot be transcended in our time-the New Left fell back on one or another last-ditch pseudo-Marxism, but its mad spinning of the Fortune Wheel of Revolutionary Agencies was an evasion of the hard paradoxes of radicalism in this time, and it ended up with a set of myths, "reducing reason and history to caricatures...

...And if it is true that magazines and publishing companies are only as good as their editors, then one must simply persevere...

...That is, what was it in the social base of the student movement that fueled absurd utopianism...

...And I don't quibble with Kostelanetz's superior tone, only with the inclusion of certain names...

...In Chapter Sixteen, entitled "Young Writers in North America," Kostelanetz includes a list of said writers, and tells us that if we have read more than "a third of them (we) should consider (ourselves) part of an ideal literary public...

...On Sweezy I think Clecak is rather too wordy, and overestimates Sweezy's contributions to contemporary radicalism, though perhaps this is a matter of taste...

...The choice of fiction for review in The New York Revew of Books is one indication of the problem...

...Peter Clecak's excellent book is an exploration of the dilemmas inherent in that stance...

...The question once again is not only, What is to be done...

...But most conspicious on the fiction list are the names L. Woiwode and Robert Stone...

...Benedikt is poetry editor of Paris Review, an influential position...

...But the inclusion of Michael Benedikt's name must be a slip-up...

...but Who is to do it...

...A sociological imagination would consider what it was in history, concretely, that led so many New Left radicals to the same errors...

...Kostelanetz does not...

...But Clecak does not rest with pointing to the failure of the "plain Marxists...

...Attempting to leap over socialism to communist images of total community, it substituted metapolitics for politics and fell all over itself...

...Clecak groups together C. Wright Mills, Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Herbert Mar-cuse as "plain Marxists," who tried to identify socialism with community and to discover the place of freedom, reason and happiness as an underside...

...Here are two writers who through sheer talent refute all of Kostelanetz's theories...

...And one need look no further than the case of Philip Roth...

...Clecak himself skirts this trap, but the temptation of many radicals these days is to sneer at the New Left rather than absorb its healthier ideas...

...This is no merely academic point, for Clecak's advocacy of a movement for democratic socialism, in which I concur, will most likely founder for the same reason the New Left did: for lack of a realistic yet passionate sense of what the present situation affords...

...With the refusal of the industrial working class to take history into its hands, Mills, Baran, Sweezy and Marcuse, in their distinct ways, toyed with the potential of Third World revolutions, intellectuals, and countercultural students, only to see each of them fail to act up to its revolutionary billing...

...Clecak's intellectual portraits are by and large trenchant, that of Mills is outstanding...

...for in the absence of concrete possibilities, the interminable perception of paradox can stupefy, just as the interminable perception of revolutionary possibility can falsify reality and destroy...

...And his career followed a distinct path that veered as far away from When She Was Good as possible...

...Thankfully the use of quotes contributes handily to the book's undoing...

...In the wake of the debacle of the nineteenth-century "labor metaphysic," which among other things finished off the Old Left, the New Left cast about for surrogate revolutionary classes...

...The driving spirit behind it might be called "the creative-writing-course mentality...

...They, along with their cohorts, are bringing about the end of intelligent writing...

...There may not be a conspiracy, but it is obvious that friends are doing their damnedest to help friends...

...Another is having Kurt Vonnegut review Joseph Heller's Something Happened on the front page of The New York Times Book Review...

...No matter who is in power, the best literature will endure...

...True, he showed great promise and with his third book, When She Was Good, created one of the finest novels of our time...

...The first part of The End of Intelligent Writing covers the same territory, albeit in greater depth, as Philip Nobile's recent Intellectual Skywriting, a study of The New York Review of Books...

...At one point, Kostelanetz quotes the late Cyril Connolly to the effect that "No magazine can be more intelligent than its editor . . ." If one is mature enough to accept this viewpoint, then ponderous polemics like The End of Intelligent Writing become innocuous...

...It is New York City based and populated predominately by members of the Jewish faith...

...Kostelanetz has already broiled former Paris Review poetry editor, Donald Hall, for using his position to become "the prime poetry-entrepreneur of an earlier generation...

...When She Was Good did not win favor with the New York critics or the American public and so Roth, apparently afraid he was losing favor with the elders, turned his back on his finest achievement...

...Kostelanetz surveys the matter, but misses the point...

...From the beginning, Clecak is refreshingly blunt about his pessimistic premises...

...But the problem with Kostelanetz's book is not the thesis per se but the way it is developed...

...And in his preface, Kostelanetz calls for the resurrection of neglected writers like Clancy Sigal and Vance Bourjaily...

...The Fiction Collective, whose first three titles have met with phenomenal success, is providing a viable alternative to traditional publishing methods...

...Alternative ideas will always present themselves...

...It is striking, though, that whereas Clecak's chapter on Sweezy seems ponderous, his chapter on Marcuse is scintillating: perhaps this is because Marcuse himself, in his grand manner, is scintillating...

...Jason Epstein and Bob Silvers, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Lionel Trilling and Norman Podhoretz-these names crop up again and again...

...If one has no faith in this simple truth, then there is little need to create...