Avant-garde Critic Turned Hipster

...The lead piece, "What's This Cat's Story," a more-than-autobiographical description of Krim's flirtation with avant-garde life in New York in the late 1940's and early '50's, is the most engrossing in the book...

...As a collection, Views of A Nearsighted Cannoneer is uneven...

...The idea in the sentence is tautological, and the "unbugged" is inexact: "Beat" writers are as "bugged" as anybody else, and the use of these oversimplifications of emotion and concept has all the freshness of a "Superman" comic strip...

...Sy, man, you sucked me in) "swings...

...Not every punch lands and some of the swings are light-years off the mark, but when he does connect, you know you've been hit and you take a long count...

...At best, his writing is —as W. C. Fields once said of a barroom free lunch—"a succulent melange," now new, now cheap, which somehow carries the reader from the beginning of the essay to the end, leaving him rather breathless with a "what the hell was that...

...It is scarcely necessary to write a sentence such as "Nothing can speak for itself like what it is, with the exactness, punch and accent that an unbugged, unproving-anything natural writer can lay down...

...And it is true that, with the exception of novelists such as Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy, the group of leading lights he mentions — Isaac Rosenfeld, James Agee, Weldon Kees (who did produce two extraordinarily good volumes of poetry), Willie Poster, Manny Farber, Anatole Broyard, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Rahv, William Barrett, Clement Greenberg—produced a good part of their finest work in the form of criticism...

...His summing-up of the '40s and '50s as "trivial literary deeds (shreds of stories, memoir, unsatisfying critiques, a miserable few over-elaborate poems)," is manifestly unfair to the fine poetry of Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell and others, the novels of Bellow and McCarthy, the paintings of Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline and William De Kooning, the remarkable achievements in dance of Merce Cunningham and Jean Erdman, to mention just a few...

...It was the support of such people as Greenberg and Färber that caused the acceptance of modern American painters in an art world dominated by Europeans...

...determined by and determining such and such a movement in literature...

...Its virtues and defects stem from the same source...

...It is a period that few writers have touched upon, let alone described accurately, and even in distorted perspective and with facts wrong, he catches a good deal of the feeling and drive of the time...

...The former were conservative, possibly more traditional and Europe-directed...

...Krim's explanation is a trifle simplistic (appearing in PR, he says, was "a hip-badge of prestige and real in-ness"), but his portrait of himself as "not a cardcarrying intellectual" who tried to "make it" in this circle of "Northern Lights" and landed in Bellevue instead, is extraordinarily touching...

...Krim quotes one poet who claimed, "I write criticism like hammered steel...

...Krim is correct in one sense...

...Despite all the vivid description and sense of the intellectual excitement of the time, and even allowing for Krim's jumbled vision, one must take exception to two things...

...But its ups and downs are not the gentle undulations of a tight-lipped, well-controlled critic...

...The first is Krim's homage to the "Beats" and his insistence that they are more lively and "real" than the older group...

...The opening essay and a few others in the book, such as the one on "Making It," have the fresh quality of good journalism—a journalism which is intensely personal and immediate, which conveys instantly the tone and smell of the "hip" kids of today...

...It isn't that the "Beats" give him anything in themselves...

...Isolated sentences defined whole periods of history or fixed new truths whose validity immediately became apparent...

...In fact, if any action could be thought to have infinite causes, nine-tenths of them would appear in the review, and that within the compass of anywhere from two columns to four pages...

...This "group of brilliant minds which roved with barely believable and almost illegal freedom over the entire domain of the thinkable and utterable," as Krim says, was so concentrated and intense that most of the time anything less seemed not worth doing...

...This new prose is an enormous improvement over his stilted "critic" style, in part because he hasn't the equipment to sustain the latter...

...feeling...

...My second quarrel with Krim concerns his language...

...It was Barrett and Poster, among others, who hammered home the necessity for recognizing the good things in American culture, even popular culture, and this was not precisely the message of the academic journals...

...Pieces such as The Magical Underwear Parity (with Detachable Garters)" will probably help Krim to become the Henry Miller of the varsity crowd, but all in all, gaucherie included, the book (o.k...

...To downgrade all this in order to glorify the "Beats," who have as yet to produce one really interesting work although there are many highly publicized ones, seems absurd...

...Looking back over the writings of these men in the New Republic, the Nation, Partisan Review, Commentary and The New Leader, one comes across pieces that are breathtaking miniatures...

...Krim confuses movements...

...gems not only stylistically, but as vehicles for ideas so astonishingly new that a two-column review often contained enough material for two complete books, each of which could have caused a revolution in several branches of the arts...

...they are the utterly wild steeplechase plunges of a free-swinging, high- and low-living man who's been in and out of avant-garde literary life, mental hospitals, government jobs, movie publicity and the "Beat" movement...

...But Beat language is thin and repetitive...

...The reader will compare for instance, "Anti-Jazz," with the later, more exciting "Making It...

...Reviewed by CONSTANCE H. POSTER Contributor, "Furioso," "New Republic" Reading a dozen essays by Seymour Krim is like having gone 12 rounds with Jake LaMotta in his prime...

...The author had to be placed definitely as a writer, a thinker, a human being, a historical entity living in country X in 19...

...Things have happened to Sy Krim, and while they happened he paid attention...

...Now if these seem exaggerated claims, it should be remembered that when a book was reviewed then, the review's purpose was more than simple description and evaluation...

...Why these writers relegated to criticism what properly belonged to poetry, novels or the more standard creative forms is a subject of some interest...

...He's really quite lucky to have stumbled upon the new style...

...The "New Critics" and the PR writers didn't have as much in common as he believes...

...Krim can use language in a way that is sometimes compelling, a peculiar untrimmed style composed in varying parts of Walt Whitman, Thomas Wolfe, Time style and "Beat" cant...

...Much of Views of A Nearsighted Cannoneer will date terribly within a year or so, but this is the penalty of being a journalist...

...yet they provide a gelatinous culture in which his work can proliferate...