'It Must Be Constantly Reproduced'

“The tendency of every age is to bury as many classics as it revives. If unable to discover our own urgent meanings in a creation of the past, we hope to find ample redress in its competitive neighbors. A masterpiece cannot be produced once and for all; it must be constantly reproduced. Its first author is a man. Its later ones--time, social time, history.”

And readers – non-aligned, obsessive, sometimes entertainingly eccentric readers. Reading has become a species of eccentricity and, in some quarters, reading the books of the past is judged aberrant behavior. The author of the passage above and its original place of publication come as a surprise: Philip Rahv, a critic and longtime co-editor of Partisan Review, a literary magazine that had started as an organ of the Communist Party USA. Rahv and his co-editor, William Phillips, relaunched the journal in 1937 in the wake of Stalin’s Great Purge and Soviet double-dealing in the Spanish Civil War.

The passage at the top was first published in 1938 in the Partisan Review as the opening paragraph of “Dostoevski and Politics: Notes on The Possessed,” which was included in Rahv’s first essay collection, Image and Idea (1949). I was surprised because, though I haven’t read Rahv in many years, I think of him as a rather crude critic (Exhibit A: “Paleface and Redskin”), too often preoccupied with politics, though I do remember his devotion to Henry James. The paragraph is thoughtful, measured and very nearly a linked string of aphorisms. The third sentence brings Moby-Dick to mind immediately.

Reading is selfish in several senses. We all have our reasons. We all, at some point, accept our pleasures and aggravations. But reading has a social dimension. By that I mean, the purest act of criticism is reading a book, enjoying it and sharing that enjoyment with another likely reader. In short, intelligent proselytizing in conversation or print. It will probably come to nothing. But sometimes lives are changed by modest gestures. I learned about The Anatomy of Melancholy and The Wife of Martin Guerre by talking to friends.