The Uses and Abuses of Criticism

...And Goodheart's stylish invocation of the radical daimon ignores the vital fact that the health of a society cannot be sustained if its intellectuals are consistently negative and antagonistic toward existing institutions...

...His book deserves the scrupulous attention of everyone troubled by the seemingly irreversible degradation of standards in American intellectual life today...

...The individual self, brazen and free in the sacred moment of the present, continues to be the one true deity, with the achievements of the past vilified as its enemy...

...Had he lived on into the 1960s, I like to think that he would have been a ferocious and invincible force against the literary Storm Troopers who sought in the name of Revolution to destroy both literature and the university, the indivisible heartland of Matty's personal and professional life...

...In so doing, Good-heart continues, they inexcusably exempted themselves "from the necessary task of making a strenuous critique of their society's institutions...

...An especially horrendous instance of this is a recently published belletristic rummage sale garlanded with the tony title Literature in Revolution (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 640 pp., $12.95...

...Why must Goodheart in the end betray the faint heart that invariably makes a righteous mess of things by wanting to have it both ways, by keeping a tremulous toehold on the radical bandwagon while giving it the good swift kick it deserves with the other foot...

...Nowhere in his 70 pages of ill-chosen words does White reveal any genuine understanding either of Matthiessen or of present-day criticism...

...Eugene Goodheart would do well to ponder on White's accident-prone "learning" the next time he is tempted to denigrate close scholarship...

...Lesser atrocities blot every page...

...These men, he says, over-compensated for their earlier Bolshevism by uncritically espousing the virtues of a free society in contrast to the repressive totalitarianism of Russia...

...In simpler words, if the clerisy is eternally on the outside, who's going to mind the store...

...that he dared to speak of morality and value in literature, in addition to esthetic form...

...No less important is the intellectuals' responsibility to steer the contemporary forms of societal organization in the direction of necessary change, without calling for disruption and destruction...

...The arid formalism of the New Critical exegetes should not permit a professor of literature to overlook the exaltation described by John Updike's Bech: "Could 1 explain, to a crowd of riot-minded guitarists . . . with what zest we executed the academic exercise . . . called explication...

...And the entire essay is so sloppily organized that no single idea is ever allowed to reach its destination before White is skidding headlong into another ideological telephone pole...

...Attacking the New Critical methodology, Goodheart deplores its sterile dedication to "form," its canonization of close textual scholarship that remains hermetically sealed against any rude reminders of the social, political and cultural context of a work of art...

...Finally, it is unsettling to discover the radical daimon raised high at the end of a book whose strongest thrust affirms the destructiveness of the demon of unreason let loose in the politics of culture and the university milieu...

...Some less familiar insights into Roszak's non-think are also offered...

...I say this because he was the finest teacher I ever had, and in time he also became my friend...

...This is his major atrocity...

...In contrast to earlier writers on American literature like V. L. Parrington—who had flat-footedly declared, "with esthetic judgments I have not been greatly concerned"—Matthiessen devoted himself primarily to "what these books were as works of art, with evaluating their fusions of form and content...

...His specious "sociology" of science, Goodheart observes, is in fact "the most banal 19th-century romanticism...

...Both the praise and the blame have tended to be ax-grinding distortions of Matthiessen's achievement in American Renaissance, and few writers have bothered to note, as Alfred Kazin did in On Native Grounds...

...Roszak has, of course, been the most seductive popularizer of the new Arcadia, and Goodheart demolishes his evangelical mishmash of crude mysticism and sanctimonious Philistinism with consummate skill, demonstrating how thoroughly redolent is Roszak's credo with the know-nothing "suspicion of the learned or professional clergy, the antinomian feeling that one's personal living sense of the truth is superior to the operations of the intellect...

...It is obvious from White's introduction that his own essay (by far the longest in the book...

...it supports, in fact, blind routine, obedience, authority...

...The health of a modern democratic society is not in its capacity for vaunting its virtues, but in its capacity for developing an intelligent, moral, and effective dissenting clerisy that can help make necessary social changes...

...In strong-minded disregard of current fashion, he has written a lively, tough and learned brief for "high culture" as the indispensable foundation of a university education...

...To train one's mind to climb, like a vine on a sunny wall, across the surface of a poem by George Herbert . . . this was life lived on the nerve ends...

...One stumbles through a maze of solecisms ("an esthetic criteria"), howling danglers ("although deep into his [i.e...

...Against the subversive, reductive, mindless repudiators of the Judeo-Christian and classical traditions, he quietly points out that the nihilistic imperative of the proselytizers of the counterculture is doomed to futility...

...In the wake of the radical turmoil of the '60s, George White has set out to prove—though he is such a wretchedly bad writer it is always a struggle to figure out what he means—that Matthiessen, far from being just another New Critic, boldly defied the formalists who had a death-grip on literary study at the time...

...Francis Otto Matthiessen was an abrasive, quirky, intolerant, politically naive, poignantly lonely, lovable man who tried with tragic unsuccess to combine a crushing pressure of contradictory strains of mind and emotion within one desperately honest, tense and complicated sensibility...

...This disorganized potpourri was edited by George Abbott White, a sometime graduate student at Brandeis who has based his oddly fragmentary career on two long-standing projects that seem fated to remain permanent works-in-progress —a biography of F. O. Matthiessen, the distinguished critic and literary historian who taught English and American literature at Harvard from 1929 until his suicide in 1950, at the age of 48...

...Most reprehensible is a flagrant misquotation from Quentin Anderson's The Imperial Self...

...What has consistently confused people is that while American Renaissance seems written wholly in the New Critical spirit of dedication to the text, Matthiessen himself was a fellow-traveler until the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1948...

...Ideology and Literature: American Renaissance and F. O. Matthiessen," was meant to serve as the monumental tailor's dummy on which every other contributor's cloth had to be draped...

...Though he makes a valuable distinction between individual evaluation of a work of literature and austerely nonjudgmental analysis, I think Goodheart overrates the hold of the New Critics in universities at the present time...

...and that American Renaissance thus represented "a threat to the academic orthodoxies...

...But Goodheart does not limit his fire to the nation's radical philistines...

...Deeply concerned with the role of intellectual dissent, of receptivity to the genuinely new and shocking in art and thought, he assails the academic custodians of the humanities for their complacent apathy and inflexibility, which "has presented itself in the guise of scientific detachment and objectivity" and has in the process "depersonalized and deintellectual-ized humanistic study...

...Whatever the guilt of Western culture may be, the fact remains that one cannot decide arbitrarily to live outside of it, just as one cannot decide to live outside one's body...

...The book transcends these crippling academic or political categories...

...White never comes to grips clearly or authoritatively with the crucial point: that American Renaissance was neither an inflexibly narrow exercise in the New Criticism nor an ideological exploration of American literature as a paradigm of society...

...More seriously, he dubiously equates method and pedantry, and underestimates the corrosive prevalence of sloppy inattention—the arrogant distaste for accurate reading, let alone analysis, encouraged by today's "liberal" professors under the leaky umbrella of "personalized" humanistic study...

...It is a spectacularly chastening illustration of the issues, problems and attitudes that Goodheart raises and confronts...

...If political liberty means something, it means the freedom to follow one's daimon, even if it leads to antagonism toward established institutions...

...Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville that grew out of his "realization of how great a number of our past masterpieces were produced in one extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression . . . affirming [America's] rightful heritage in the whole expanse of art and culture...

...What literary greener of America could write, as Williams has done in Culture and Society: "I agree with Leavis as with Coleridge and Arnold . . . that a society is poor indeed if it has nothing to live by but its own immediate and contemporary experience...

...he was a formidable fighter, and his clout would have done incalculably effective damage to the enemy...

...In his final chapter, Goodheart lapses more gravely from his admirably high level of intellectual acuity and incisive persuasion...

...The book is at its polemical best in dealing with the theoretical confusion and barbarous cannibalism of the high priests of the counterculture—Theodore Roszak, Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown...

...According to White, it was a deeply committed, radically ideological work, and from this he makes his Nijinsky leap into the present with such nonnegotiable SDS rhetoric as...

...For many students (and for those middle-aged swingers breathlessly swimming with the adversary tide), that windy slogan "the death of the past" persists as a programmatic statement of fact rather than an audaciously romantic metaphor of cultural history...

...Perhaps the clearest lesson we learn from Culture and the Radical Conscience is that when ideology is allowed to monopolize the discussion of literature, the result is disastrous...

...The young, buoyed by aggressive innocence, are still mortally in thrall to "instant politics, instant joys, instant miseries, instant relationships"—in the words of Eugene Goodheart, a professor of literature at MIT...

...In the three decades since his study appeared, Matthiessen has been applauded and damned as a hardcore New Critic who was meticulously attentive to the 19th-century classics as literary art, but indifferent to their historical and societal roots...

...the book's "strong democratic faith and feeling for democratic minds and ideas...

...His most ambitious attempt to deal with some of the intellectual contradictions in American Renaissance consists not in prodding his own mind, but in borrowing from Richard Ruland's The Rediscovery of American Literature...

...The phrase "mental set of the intellectuals of the '50s" is meaningless without some examples of the writers and the work included in this mystical cohort...

...As an instructive comparison to our native radicals, Goodheart cites the Leftist British critics Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, who insist that the creations of the past are an indispensable force for the democratizing of society...

...Indeed, all of Matthiessen's work—on T. S. Eliot, Henry James and Theodore Dreiser, as well as American Renaissance—resists constricting classification, giving it an enduring literary and intellectual vigor and an undated permanence...

...We are not free to choose what we are or even what we will do...

...Throughout his garbled, mawkish, failed-term-paper treatment...

...Yet almost from the moment of his death he has been travestied and slandered as a political martyr, first by the Stalinists and now by the equally vulgar if less politically cynical New Left ideologues like George White...

...Matthiessen's prodigious American Renaissance was his most ambitious work—an investigation of Emerson...

...The "Leon Abel" cited as the author of Metatheatre seems to be an imaginative amalgam of Lionel Abel and Leon Edel...

...This is why the publication of Goodheart's Culture and the Radical Conscience (Harvard, 179 pp., $7.95) is an event of importance...

...Predictably, his swamp of ambiguity and contradiction is politics: Despite his brilliant argument against the radicals' goal of politicizing the university, he betrays a taint of their muddled paranoia when he contemptuously dismisses "the mental set of the intellectuals of the '50s...

...Furthermore, most intellectuals identified with the '50s were never Bolshevists or Stalinists...

...and a history of Students for a Democratic Society...

...Since the dead cannot fight back, it is up to the living to set the record straight: In Matthiessen the humanistic vitality of American culture and the American university, which Goodheart champions and White can only desecrate, had one of its great representative men...

...Goodheart submits a fresh and, let us hope, influential reinterpretation of the term "skeptical humanism," which he elegantly defines in a passage on Augustine: "To keep the traditional culture alive in us is not necessarily to affirm or celebrate it...

...and for all the loud disaffection of the Woodstock nation from institutional America, it is no accident that "what calls itself the counterculture now has such close affinity with the dominant commercial culture in its music, its literature, its style, its appetites...

...offering excellent contributions by Harry Levin, Aileen Ward and Raymond Williams amid a much larger percentage of incoherent junk...

...Against the modish mortuary view of Western cultural history, Goodheart presents a powerfully reasoned defense not merely of the past as such, but of its very practical relevance to the present...

...If the tradition contains within itself permanent human possibilities, then it is necessary to keep it alive as a kind of repository of options...

...our criticism is obsessed with coherence and order...

...Matthiessen's] own interrelated writing on Hawthorne and Melville, Whitman would be the subject of the succeeding chapters"), and non-English ("And as far as the homosexuality, it was Freud's notion that...

...Such remarks are indefensibly vague...