A DISTASTE FOR CANT, AN EAR FOR PROSE
Wimsatt, Margaret
BOOKS i i A DISTASTE FOR CANT, AN EAR FOR PROSE MARGARET WIMSATT The Critic's Credentials: Essays and Reviews STANLEY EDGAR HYMAN Edited & With a Memoir by Phoebe PettingeU Atheneum, $12.95...
...Eudora Welty speaks for herself...
...He must be a polymath before attempting to practice his trade...
...These two books have one sure thing in common...
...Eudora Welty's book ends with perCommonweal: 633 sonal pieces set in the Mississippi of her younger, days, local colorism of a high ~der, literary imagination looking back and re-peopling the past, whether the Natchez Trace, the lost towns under the river bluffs, the corner store of her childhood, or Ida M'Toy's secondhand clothes shop...
...Welty's real trade is fiction, so most of what she gives us is, though polished and often witty, in a sense off the cuff--odd musings, hapWriters are often asked to give their own analysis of some story they have published...
...Delightful to read, they illuminate for us the shaping of a novelist's sensibility, the mind behind the eye of the story...
...Each has a fine last section, dessert after the meal...
...seldom has a critic drawn her/his audience into such a warm dialogue of shared appreciation...
...As faith has decayed in our day, the Euhemerist passion for pseudohistory has increased . . . . Is there then, no real history connected with the Bible...
...Miss Welty, the first citizen of Jackson, Mississippi, includes essays and reviews on stable authors, the staple of Eng...
...is it better to be wide as a church door...
...Her enthusiasm for both is delightful...
...what mouse...
...Hyman's lifelong interest in myth and ritual is here turned to, tuned in on, Darwin, Freud, and Jessie Weston, that earlyliberated lady who changed her mind about faerieland several times, and whose last set of opinions is familiar to readers of T.S...
...Even the admiring reader may wonder ff quite this much knowledge is required before we attempt judgment--though we know what he is reacting against, we wonder: what .mountain...
...And in "Illumination for the Unchurched" and "History and Sacred History" (both late pieces, 1970) he displays a loving and minute knowledge of the Bible, both Testaments, that would put many a Rabbi or Jesuit to shame...
...Peter's house...
...Philip Roth...
...I never saw, as reader or writer, that a finished story stood in need of any more from the author: for better or worse, there the story is...
...Perelman, whose early cartoons in the defunct magazine Judge she read concealed under the lid of her desk in high school Cicero class...
...They are not failed fiction--rather, fiction in the making...
...Hyman is professorial...
...There is also the question of whether or not the author could provide the sort of analysis asked for...
...Stanley Edgar Hyman died in 1970 at the age of fifty-one, and his wife Phoebe Pettingell has" lovingly edited and introduced some of his uncollected pieces...
...Eliot's The Waste Land...
...The Eye of the Story py reflections--communication facilitated between her own favorite writers, and us, her favored listeners and readers...
...But even he can't rise and do both at the same time...
...One wishes Mr...
...Hyman's requirements for the critic are formidable...
...Story writing and critical analysis are indeed separate gifts, like spelling and playing the flute, and the same writer proficient in both has been doubly endowed...
...or deep as a well...
...His long fourth part is about Third World writers, less familiar to many of us: Russian, Italian, German, and diverse African...
...The Jews and Christians Who believed, and what they believed and practiced, are real history, not the doings of their divinities...
...courses: Jane Austen, Chekov, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Woolf among them, and, delightfully, a paean of praise for S.J...
...It is interesting, and proper, that Miss Pettingell should have chosen "The Critic's Credentials" (1963) to head this bogk, and as its title...
...He is hard on modern translators, preferring King James with all its bless~ ambiguities, and very hard on archaeologists who...
...Of course there is...
...What the two share is a commitment to authors they admire, a distaste for cant, and an ear for English prose...
...finding fishhooks near the shore of the Sea of Galilee, conclude that they have found St...
...Hyman had lived to complete his "critical study of Bible Scholarship . . . . Had he lived longer, perhaps he might . . . have ended where his grandfather began as a student of Torah...
...He must be a modern Aristotle, up to date in all branches of knowledge, he must bridge the gap between Lord Snow's two culPares...
...Many of these essays were written when he held down steady reviewing jobs, most of them for The New Leader...
...But he has more room than Welty has for oddballs and the currently popular, as: Nabokov~ Richard Wright, John Updike, and (a light touch here...
...29 September 1978:632 Professor Hyman also deals with what might be considered classics: Mark Twain, Edgar Lee Masters, James J0yce, Sinclair Lewis...
...BOOKS i i A DISTASTE FOR CANT, AN EAR FOR PROSE MARGARET WIMSATT The Critic's Credentials: Essays and Reviews STANLEY EDGAR HYMAN Edited & With a Memoir by Phoebe PettingeU Atheneum, $12.95 [325 pp.] The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews EUDORA WELTY Random House, $10 [355 pp.] Two esteemed writers here present us with volumes related only generically: each is a collection of essays and reviews...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 19
