Criticism and History

...The first is a bitter, funny, snobbish, morally superior indictment of society for paying poetry so little attention, the second a stinging and horrified attack on the university English departments for paying it the wrong kind of attention...

...There is something else to be learned from Rahv's criticism that is even less happy-namely, that in the face of that powerhouse of history, with its inexorable capacity to destroy custom and tradition of every sort, the ability of criticism, even the greatest, to offer us a useful guide for the future is an extremely limited one...

...It is this, too, that contributes an air of melancholy and unreality to this final critical testament...

...On a related issue-the intellectual prestige the concept of myth acquired under the influence of the New Criticism-rahv has written one of his best essays, "The Myth and the Powerhouse...

...There are other essays in this collection that are less familiar, and one of the most important of these is the piece entitled "Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy," which dates from 1939...

...The authority Rahv brings to his polemical role is the authority of a first-class critic of great literature...

...an enthusiastic rumination on the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens...

...CRITICISM AND HISTORY BY HILTON KRAMER The posthumous publication of Randall Jar-rell's The Third Book of Criticism (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 334 pp., $7.50) is a melancholy event-melancholy not only because of the fact of Jarrell's untimely death, but because of a terrible weariness of spirit that runs like an unacknowledged leitmotif through most of the essays in this book...

...Now myth, the appeal of which lies precisely in its archaism, promises above all to heal the wounds of time...

...Placed in a volume mainly devoted to the poets Jarrell most admired?Frost, Ransom, Whitman, Stevens, Moore, Lowell, and Williams-these polemics had the salutary effect of clearing a space, as it were, where the serious critic of poetry could do his own work...

...In a manner and with a spirit very different from Jarrell's, Rahv's book too carries with it a certain air of depression-a sense of resignation, if not exactly of despair...

...These, together with the Auden essays, are the strength of this volume...

...He saw the new interest in myth as, essentially, an escape from the sense of history...

...Moreover, it would be a great mistake to think that the essays on the New Criticism, on myth, on the religious revival of the '50s, and other such matters are now of concern only to readers with an antiquarian interest in an academic scene that is gone with the wind...

...This combination of resources has enabled Rahv to give us, among many other things, the most stringent account we have had of that academic perversion of criticism over which Jarrell, in the end, could only weep...

...and, on the other hand, a firm and judicious commitment to precisely that "sixth sense," the sense of history, which keeps literature and literary discourse securely attached to the realities of the vast world-the world of politics and ideology, the world of power in all its social, sexual and cultural forms?that exists beyond the literary arena...

...Some of these essays?The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Joseph K." (1940), "The Dark Lady of Salem" (1941), "Attitudes Toward Henry James" (1943), "The Heiress of All the Ages" (1943), "Tolstoy: The Green Twig and the Black Trunk" (1946)-are established classics in our critical literature...

...One of the reasons Rahv's earlier essays now seem so familiar is that they have passed into the established wisdom of informed criticism...

...But Rahv went further than this, discerning (correctly, I think) that this new academic orthodoxy, with its "amalgam of diluted formalism and diluted traditionalism," was itself an ideological phenomenon of some importance...

...He had already said as much in two celebrated essays?The Obscurity of the Poet" and "The Age of Criticism"-which he collected in his initial (and still his best) book of criticism, Poetry and the Age, published in 1953...

...In America, whose second name, I sometimes think, should be 'amnesia,' " Rahv writes, "the historical sense in this country chronically suffers one lesion after another as literary periods crowd each other out with extreme celerity, each presenting itself as the culmination of the imaginative process of all times...

...But it offers us a bracing example of a first-rate mind coming to grips with the essential issues, and this is probably the only antidote to despair one can hope for nowadays...

...In most of the essays in this Third Book, the serious critic has been effectively displaced by the injured poet propagandizing for literature, giving reading lessons in public, and speaking from the heart...

...This, too, is a classic of its kind-Its kind being an inquiry into the relation of an entire literary genre to its political sponsorship (in this case, the Communist party...

...It has made a deranged relationiship between the critical and creative powers in our literary economy," Rahv wrote, "and, by inhibiting the energy of discovery in criticism, it has brought it to a condition of arid self-sufficiency and self-consciousness...

...And literary sensibility, disquieted by the effects of the growing division of labor and the differentiation of consciousness, is of course especially responsive to the vision of the lost unities and simplicities of times past...

...and, to project the lessons of this essay onto an even more delicate sphere of literary debate, it affords an illuminating perspective on the efforts now being made-essentially political efforts -to place the critical judgment of black literature, and the artistic accomplishments of blacks generally, beyond the reach of informed standards in order to serve enlightened social objectives...

...There is also a reading-It might almost more accurately be called a performance-of Frost's "Home Burial...

...He grew more and more hortatory, full of appeals to innocence, pledges of sincerity, and complaints about the fragile status of poetry in the world at large...

...You can read him at his best in the two early essays on Auden?Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry" (1941) and "Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden's Ideology" (1945)-now collected in The Third Book for the first time...

...And he defined this preference for the mythic over the historical in terms that apply with even greater force to the cultural dislocations of the '60s than to the situation in 1953 when this essay was written: "It seems as if in the modern world there is no having done with romanticism-no having done with it because of its enormous resourcefulness in accommodating the neo-primitivistic urge that pervades our culture, in providing it with objects of nostalgia upon which to fasten and haunting forms of the past that it can fill with its own content...

...There had always been an element of boyish wonder and enthusiasm in his writing, and now it became the dominant note, reinforcing a reluctance to come before the literary public sounding as if he were a professional intellectual...

...His most ambitious critical efforts have been directed toward the great European and American novelists-tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Gogol, Hawthorne, and James...

...Nothing could be further removed from this yearning for a cultural paradise where literature enjoys an untroubled and essentially unhistorical appreciation of its true worth than the essays Philip Rahv has now brought together in Literature and the Sixth Sense (Houghton Mifflin, 445 pp., $10...

...Writing in the 1950s, he was quite as alert as Jarrell to the stifling effect that the New Criticism, once it was installed as a form of academic orthodoxy, was having on literature itself...

...and a series of brief observations-Some of them quite dazzling, some of them merely brief-called "Fifty Years of American Poetry...

...Rereading these essays in Literature and the Sixth Sense, it is astonishing to realize the extent to which certain of them-most particularly the very brief and brilliant "Paleface and Redskin"-have since afforded other critics points of departure that amount, in fact, to substantial proportions of their conceptual apparatus...

...Rahv has long been one of our finest critics, and it is only, I think, the relative scarcity of his production that has prevented this fact from being more widely acknowledged...

...He knows very well that there are-perhaps today more than ever-historical forces at work on the entire cultural terrain, including the beleaguered purlieus of serious writing, that are not susceptible to critical intelligence or rational debate...

...He became more and more a kind of salesman of unfettered literary appreciation, and he was never a man for the soft sell...

...The strength of his criticism derives from its special combination of resources: on the one hand, a literary sensibility that is at once deeply responsive to the complex inner life of the works of art he is drawn to and deeply aware of the artistic strategies that make this life palpable and affecting...

...Jarrell belonged to a generation of poets and critics for whom the university was the only available sanctuary for the literary life, and when the university failed him-failed him by transforming the values he most treasured into something alien and repugnant to his own sensibility-he found the world outside (which he sometimes gave the impression of having only recently discovered) even more obdurately inhospitable to these values...

...But in later years Jarrell no longer wanted to be the kind of critic who wrote these early essays on Auden...

...So also are his two great general essays on American literature: "Paleface and Redskin" (1939) and "The Cult of Experience in American Writing" (1940...

...The triumph of the New Criticism in the universities?or rather, the widespread vulgarization of this criticism as a form of academic pedagogy, obscurantism and advancement-had induced a profound despair over the very nature of the critical vocation, and his response to that despair was to adopt a tone and a method markedly different from the despised weightiness and solemnity he saw overtaking the whole literary enterprise...

...For "by and large it was the traditionalist bias that made for its fashionableness in this period," he observed, "aligning it implicitly with the conservative reaction to which some American intellectuals succumbed under the gross pressures and inducements of the Cold War...

...For when the cultural history of the Cold War comes to be written, Rahv's essays on these subjects will be an indispensable guide to the actual ideological energies that carried these interests to an incredible pinnacle of prestige and influence in the highest reaches of our culture...

...At the same time, however, it would be misleading to suggest that Literature and the Sixth Sense is mainly concerned with this ideological combat...

...In the end, Jarrell seemed to be looking for a literary Eden in which poetry would be permanently protected against bad taste, pedantic critics, mass culture, and indeed, against history itself...

...But Rahv himself, though deeply committed to the critical vocation, has never suffered from an exaggerated sense of its power to dominate the dialectic of culture...

...Myth is reassuring in its stability, whereas history is that powerhouse of change which destroys custom and tradition in producing the future-the future that at present, with the fading away of the optimism of progress, many have learned to associate with the danger and menace of the unknown...

...When he came to devote an entire volume to such polemics, the tone was shrill and despairing, and the indictment itself astonishingly devoid of ideas...

...Jarrell was, at his best, a superb critic of modern poetry-fiercely intelligent and wonderfully inward with the poetry he admired, sharp and witty and unabashedly unfair about what he disliked...

...The interest of this essay at the present moment is twofold: since current political developments have reopened the whole question of the relation of literature to politics in the '30s, Rahv's hardheaded analysis of both the literary and political realities of the period is a useful reminder of exactly what happened to our writers when the integrity of the literary mind was temporarily subordinated to a ruthless ideological program...

...This change in his critical outlook had the unfortunate effect of depriving Jarrell of a certain seriousness...

...The essays and "fables" in his second book of criticism, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, published in 1962, were cries of pain-at times eloquent, at times merely self-pitying-from a poet who now felt orphaned in his own culture...

...The best of these later essays is the one on "Graves and the White Goddess...

...This "neo-primitivistic urge that pervades our culture" is, if anything, even stronger today than it was in the '50s, and Rahv deals with it-and its deleterious effect on our literature-In his essays on Norman Mailer and Leslie Fiedler and in some brief remarks on pornography and black humor...

...In the early essays on Auden reprinted in The Third Book, there is an interest in ideas, a sensitivity to history, and a curiosity about the relation of the poet's sensibility to the intellectual battleground of his own time, which Jarrell abandoned in his later critical writing...

...The rest consists of essays on prose fiction-christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, Kipling, the Russians-which proselytize on behalf of their subjects and are clearly intended to be forgotten once the books in question have been read...

...Indeed, the entire thrust of Rahv's criticism acts as a caution against making facile allowances for artistic delinquencies in the name of some political ideal...