Speaking Around Literature

...It was, after all, co-organized by a magazine that does not really exist...

...After that the -isms took over literary discussion, beginning with Marxism and extending to the recent structuralism and two other -isms that cunningly avoid the suffix by calling themselves semiotics and decon-struction...

...If you are willing to be true litterateurs, you will avoid not only false rhetoric but also facile hope...

...If I may return to Troy once more, I perceive the Trojans as the true critics, who loved beauty so much that they would not give her up even if she was another man's wife and had been stolen from him...

...How do you think Bernard Shaw and Edmund Wilson managed to deal with literature without the benefit of structuralism...

...When I learned that Gadda was unable to conclude his book, that it remained unfinished business, I became sure it must deal with literary conferences...

...They give us a delegation whose almost every member is at least a part-time poet, and if by some chance he isn't, he is an academic, which is almost as good...

...1 cannot speak for my American colleagues, but as for myself, I have alwaysbeeninprofound sympathy with that wonderful writer whose time will surely come again, Anatole France...

...I ask you now: Do you want to be of the party of Hector and Helen or do you want to be of the party of the wooden horse, in whose head are hiding Barthes, FoucaultandSaussure, and in whose other end are lurking Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman...

...If that happens, there will come a time when a Mandelstam will no longer die in a camp, when a Pasternak will be able to go to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Prize, when a filmmaker such as Sergei Paradzhanov will not be sentenced to five years of jail (although let off sooner) for homosexuality, and when, merely for marching in the wrong peace march and publishing in a trade union publication, the poetess IrinaRat-ushinskaya will not be condemned to seven years of prison to be followed by five years of hard labor...

...Hepossesses the gift of being able to deliver some 30 pages of prose—and very prosaic prose at that— with the nourishes and bravura, indeed with a whole arsenal of histrionic splendors, to match a Voznesensky or a Yev-tushenko declaiming one of his powerful poetic effusions...

...When I first heard about a book by the great Carlo Emilio Gadda entitled La cogrtizione del dolore—the cognition, the awareness, the experience of pain—I immediately suspected that it dealt with literary conferences...

...Yet if one of the organizing magazines of this conference is a myth, and the second one, InostranayaLiteratura, is a state organ, the third seems to be alive enough for three...

...Of course, even if the greathearted and poetry-loving Russian people can afford to buy this set of many volumes, that does not necessarily mean that they will read it all, or, that in any event they will understand it...

...The day a melancholy Hungarian esthete who was born Lu-kacs GyOrgy emerged as Georg Lukacs, a German Marxist literary historian and critic driven by furor Teutonicus, was a black one for literature...

...For, as Professor Aldo Gargani, for instance, has so brilliantly demonstrated, it is possible for an Italian academic to deliver a paper of a mere 20 pages of prose and make it sound like 10,000 verses of the purest concettistic Gongorism by Giam-battista Marino...

...If any language were used up, one might assume it to be that of music, or at least of the music made with traditional instruments and traditional notes...

...Further, unlike the poets or quasi-poets of the Italian and Russian delegations, we are not even politicians...

...I refer to the Saturday Review, once a vaguely respectable weekly that afforded businessmen and housewives, schoolteachers and their students the opportunity to learn from Norman Cousins and an array of middling academics about what was going on in culture...

...As a result, we do not speak the lingua franca of literary conferences, which, as becomes progressively apparent, is not the language of literature but that of politics, or literary politics—as remote from ours as ours is from it, so that not even the ministrations of the excellent translators can bridge the gap...

...The American delegation, in particular, shows yet again how amusingly naive the United States is in foreign politics— in this case, literary politics...

...There is no reason to assume that, anymore than music, traditional literary criticism is exhausted and can be saved only by new cacophonies...

...And if one or another of their delegates is not a poet, he is, like Comrade Felix Kuzne-tsov, a dazzling actor, able to flawlessly impersonatea poet...

...Should they happen to have an off day, they have two sure excuses: One, that they are used to flying in the empyrean of verse, but that their large, radiant wings prove encumbrances to them in the earthy medium of prose...

...Equally entertaining, and rather more instructive, is the lineup of participants...

...The critic is in the even more awkward situation of having additionally to bite the hands of other writers who supply him with the subject matter of his writing...

...Butwhen I finally started reading it and discovered it was an eminently sad and serious book rather than a painfully funny one, I immediately realized it could have nothing whatsoever to do with literary conferences...

...Expatiating on a letter of Herman Melville's, Leslie Fiedler observed that it is the duty of the writer tobite the hand that feeds him, that he must seriously question and criticize the values of the society he lives in...

...Any discourse that is more obscure and less penetrable than the text it purports to illuminate is not criticism...

...And just how far, we might well ask, would Francesco De Sanctis or Fernand Baldensperger or Ernst Robert Curtius have thrown deconstruction...

...The Russians are no less ingenious...

...Because poets are big slingers of words, veritable Davids ready to take on any Goliath, and Davids, moreover, who cannot fail...

...I know because I occasionally wrote for it...

...or, worse yet, when it degenerates into the kind of literary politics that nowadays passes for literary criticism in the guise of one -ism or another...

...It is the sacred duty of literary criticism to elucidate and explicate, to make literature more comprehensible and exciting, more accessible and sustaining to laymen and experts alike...

...The American team, if I may use a sporting term, contains novelists, short-story writers, essayists, critics—but not a single poet...

...Certainly it has followed us to Acireale, and may in due time crawl into our graves with us...

...they, too, have loaded their delegation with poets of every stripe and from every part of their vast realm: Russia, Georgia, Kazakstan, even Bulgaria...

...Do not tell me, please, that the traditional language of criticism is used up, that one can no longer write or speak criticism the way one used to in the not so very old days...

...On the other hand, here are we, the Americans, vulnerable to the point of nakedness, without so much as one after-hours poet in our ranks...

...and two, that though their prose may be mediocre, their poetry is great, something we foreign delegates cannot dispute because we can read it only in translation, and, as everybody knows, the greatness is thus totally lost...

...Now, as every shrewd and sophisticated country in the world knows, the thing to send to conferences is poets...

...delegates, gave the following talk at the close of the conference...

...In my view, the task of the critic today is to stand on top of a large mound not unlike the one Heinrich Schliemann stood on in Asia Minor, and start digging past those layers of useless incrustation, of Troys upon false Troys, until he reaches the true Homeric Troy: literature as it was before the critical -isms took over, literature (if I may change my metaphor) as a great feast where you need only the fork of esthetics and the knife of ethics to dig in...

...What do you think Albert Thibaudet or Benedetto Croce, Erich Auerbach or Kornei Chukovsky would have made of semiotics...

...The NL's cultural critic, John Simon, one of the U.S...

...Nevertheless, there have been in our midst such magnificent composers as the Englishmen Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippet and Lennox Berkeley, the Frenchmen Francis Pou-lencand Henri Dutilleux, the Swiss Frank Martin, the German Karl Amadeus Hartmann, the Italian luigi Dallapiccola, the Pole Witold Lutoslawski, the Finn Aulis Sallinen, and the American Samuel Barber, among others...

...I suggest that all of these are forms of pseudocriticism...

...But perhaps that is an exaggeration: Politics is a necessary evil and becomes an unnecessary one only when it is practiced by literary men and women who have no power whatsoever...

...Today, save for the title, it has nothing to do with any of its previous selves, though somewhere in limbo Norman Cousins' column doubtless continues to appear...

...To put the matter more bluntly, when we have not exhausted the older modes of inquiry, why seek new ones...

...I am enthralled to learn that the Soviet Union is publishing a new complete edition of one of the world's great poets and prose writers, Aleksandr Pushkin, and that this edition will be printed, as Comrade Nikolai Fedorenko informs us, in 13 million copies...

...Literary conferences, I submit, ought to be witty and amusing, lest they become farcical to the point of pain, or excruciating to the point of uncontrollable giggles...

...And, of course, a good mind—for which Marxism, structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction and the rest have tended to be only crutches, if not actually substitutes...

...Wherever we have gone in Palermo, copies of Ac-quario have cropped up in stunning profusion...

...Sponsored by the regional government of Sicily, and remotely connected with the Mendello Prize, the conference was organized by Signor Lentini, editor of the vevievt Acquario of Palermo, in conjunction with Nikolai Fedorenko, editor of InostranayaLiteratura of Moscow, and Norman Cousins, listed as editor of the Saturday Review of New York...

...This one had a good chance of being genuinely entertaining...

...Our hotel rooms were infiltrated by them, 18th-century villas seem to be carpeted with them, and had some of the speeches at the conference been shorter, we might have found the time to verify that the lesser streets of Palermo are paved with A cquario...

...In his novel set in a lovingly evoked Tuscany, LeLys rouge ("The Red Lily")— translated into English as The Scarlet Lily, possibly to avoid political misunderstandings—the hero, who is none other than the author himself, declares: "Je ne suis pas aussi depourvu de tout talent pour m 'occuper de politique" (I am not so devoid of all talent to concern myself with politics...

...it is aborted poetry, perverted politics, or pure self-promotion...

...But let me hope that they will—and that these 13 million sets will miraculously multiply, like the fish and loaves of the Gospel, until every Russian, from the lowest to the highest—especially the highest—has read and fully understood Pushkin's message...

...But quite a number of years ago Cousins sold it to a couple of young hotshot businessmen who turned it into four magazines—the Saturday Review of Art, Education, Science, and Society—any one of which you could subscribe to, and all of which had one thing in common: a column by the former publisher, Norman Cousins . This version (or versions) promptly failed, and the magazine began to go from hand to hand—it was even bought for a rich kid in his early 20s by his doting family—becoming, by turns, a biweekly, a monthly, a bimonthly, but always maintaining a column by Norman Cousins...

...Culture Watching SPEAKING AROUND LITERATURE BY JOHN SIMON This spring a " triangular encounter of Soviet, United States and Italian writers" took place— for two days in Palermo, and two in Acireale—under the title "Literature, Tradition, Values...

...So what do the Italians do...