`Always Subordinate to the Arts'

“Recently, in London, V.S. Pritchett said to me that he liked to read books, almost any books. I said to myself (not to him) that given his retentive memory and agile intelligence, the sheer love of reading, of reading what one dislikes, or even detests, is the first requisite of the literary critic. I have read certain poems, some of them quite long, hundreds of times; I have never been able to finish The Ring and the Book; I don’t think I shall read Paradise Lost again. I once read Middle English fairly well, but I could not get beyond the first hundred lines of Piers Ploughman.”

This is Allen Tate in “The Unliteral Imagination; Or, I, too, Dislike It,” a 1964 essay with a title borrowed, as the author acknowledges, from Marianne Moore’s “Poetry.” I sympathize with both men. Like Pritchett, I’m always reading but unlike him finding it increasingly difficult to read what I dislike or detest (which severely compromises my knowledge of contemporary writing). In Tate’s scheme and to no one’s surprise, I will never be a literary critic. I don’t possess the requisite analytical skills or trencherman’s appetite for the job. I’m constitutionally incapable of proselytizing. My idea of a first-rate literary critic is Hugh Kenner or Guy Davenport, Dr. Johnson or Randall Jarrell, Eliot or Christopher Ricks. I don’t care about the reading habits of others except when they can introduce me to a book I like. I recognize and honor a canon based on merit and tradition, not fashion or accessibility. I could sign my name to the final two sentences in Tate’s paragraph. A few pages later he writes:

“Is it not absurd to say one loves poetry? To say that is to say that one loves all poetry – as indiscriminate a love as the love of all women. Yet it is reasonable to prefer all women to horses. I prefer all bad poems to all good sociological tracts.”

I didn’t name this blog cavalierly, and took my inspiration from Dr. Johnson, as quoted by Boswell in Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides:

“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”

These are my priorities, over-simplified: First, life; then, books (or any work of art); only then, the critic. I can’t see it any other way. The rest is egotism, and I don’t take myself that seriously. I can’t afford to: I know the terrain too well. Bloggers often call themselves “critics” rather than essayists, bookworms, dilettantes or fans because it sounds more grownup and professional, and suggests power. My blog is an ongoing collection of small essays inspired by the great practitioners of that form. I write about books because my life has been full of them. Had I been a plumber or priest this blog would, no doubt, look very different, but I’m stuck with this life and so are the indulgent readers of Anecdotal Evidence. Frank Wilson linked to an essay by Jacques Barzun, “A Little Matter of Sense,” published in The New York Times in 1987. Barzun says what I’ve been trying to say but with more critical acuity:

“Criticism is not an art; it is not a science; it has no method and no theory. It is a craft with varying maxims and devices; a difficult craft, but always subordinate to the arts. That is why it must vary as they have varied. The critic is properly a servant, of the public and of the artist, both. He removes barriers to understanding and enjoyment, a task that can be performed in many different modes. Or rather, I should say that there are several kinds of criticism but only one mode - the indicative mode. The critic always points, with his finger on the diagnostic spot.

“Good criticism is rare and it comes in many shapes, from annotation to dialogue and from poem to epigram, including the essay and the anecdote along the way. We must welcome it and read it in whatever form it takes. The essential is that the critic should speak in what I have termed the indicative mode and should address the common reader.”