All right. But what of the “clear partisanship” of a book review encountered only this morning, in a leading journal dedicated to reviews? “Five books, however rich and absorbing, are a hefty number for the reader to digest,” the reviewer declares, commenting on Leon Edel’s multivolume biography of Henry James; “a little amateur sleuthing some years ago suggested to me that the number of people who bought Mr. Edel’s quintet bore little relation to the number who succeeded in battling their way through them.” (Amateur sleuthing may be professional gall. “Succeeded in battling,” good God! Is there a paragraph in Edel’s devoted work, acclaimed as magisterial by two generations, that does not seduce and illuminate?) Edel, however, is not under review; he is only a point of contrast. The book in actual question, a fresh biography of James—in one volume—is, among other merits, praised for being admirably “short.” It is attention span that is victor, even for people who claim to be serious readers.
And writers may give themselves out as a not dissimilar sample. Now and then you will hear a writer (even one who does not define herself as a journalist) speak of her task as “communication,” as if the meticulous making of a sentence, or the feverish uncovering of an idea, or the sting of a visionary jolt delivered by what used to be called the Muse, were no more artful than a ten-minute telephone conversation. Literature may “communicate” (a redundancy, even a tautology), but its enduring force, well past the routine of facile sending and receiving, is in the consummation, as James tells us, of life, interest, importance. Leviathan rises to kick away the pebble of journalism.
Yet the pebble, it seems, is mightier than leviathan. The ten-minute article is here, and it has, by and large, displaced the essay. The essay is gradual and patient. The article is quick, restless, and brief. The essay reflects on its predecessors, and spirals organically out of a context, like a green twig from a living branch. The article rushes on, amnesiac, despising the meditative, reveling in gossip and polemics, a courtier of the moment. Essays, like articles, can distort and lie, but because essays are under the eye of history, it is a little harder to swindle the reader. Articles swindle almost by nature, because superficiality is a swindle. Pessimists suppose that none of this is any longer reversible. That the literary essay survives in this or that academic periodical, or in a handful of tiny quarterlies, is scarcely to the point. It has left the common culture.
Some doubt whether there is a common culture now at all, whether it is right to imagine that “the West” retains any resonance of worthy meaning; or even that it should. To claim commonality is, paradoxically, to be written off as elitist. Politically, through exploration, exploitation, and contempt, the West has spread elitism and exclusion; but it has also spread an idea of democratic inclusiveness so powerful—all of humanity is made in the image of the One Creator—that it serves to knock the politics of contempt off its feet all over the world. The round earth, like an hourglass, is turned upside down these days, spilling variegated populations-in-motion into static homogeneous populations, south into north, east into west; the village mentality, with its comfortable reliance on the familiar, is eroded by the polychrome and polyglot. America, vessel of migrations, began it. Grumbling, Europe catches up. While the kaleidoscope rattles and spins, and tribe assaults tribe, no one can predict how all this will shake itself out; but the village mentality is certainly dead. The jet plane cooked its goose.
…
BETWEEN THE LAST paragraph and this one, I took a quick trip to Paris. This is not the sort of thing a hermitlike scribbler usually does; generally it is a little daunting for me to walk the three short blocks to Main Street. But the rareness of such a plummeting from one society into another, perhaps because one’s attention becomes preternaturally heightened, somehow illumines the notion of commonality. I crossed an ocean in an airplane and found, on the opposite shore, almost exactly what I left behind: the same congeries of concerns. The same writers were being talked about, the same world news (starvation, feuding, bombing) was being deplored; only the language was different. So there really is a “West”—something we mostly forget as we live our mostly Main Street lives. Suppose, then, the language were not different but the same?
And if “commonality” requires more persuasive evidence than a transoceanic flight, there is, after all, the question (the answer, rather) of English—setting aside Shaw’s quip about America and Britain being separated by a common language. The mother-tongue, as the sweet phrase has it, is a poet’s first and most lasting home, his ineradicable patriotism.* In my teens I read Katherine Mansfield: what did a New York-born Jewish girl whose family had fled the boot of the Russian Czar have in common with a woman born in New Zealand forty years earlier? And what did this woman of the farthest reaches of the South Pacific have in common with an island off the continent of Europe? How rapidly the riddle is undone: Keats and Shelley and Coleridge and Wordsworth, to begin with. The great tree-trunk of English literature … no, that grand image ought to give way to something homelier. Call it the drawstring of English letters, which packs us all into the same sack, at the bottom of which—as we tumble around all mixed up down there, North Americans, Australians, Nigerians, South Africans, Jamaicans, numbers of Indians, and on and on—lies a hillock of gold.
The gold is the idea (old-fashioned, even archaic, perhaps extinct) of belles-lettres. Some will name it false gold, since English, as language and as literature, came to the Caribbean, and to New York, and to all those other places, as the spoor of empire. (Spooky thought: if not for the Czar of All the Russias, and if not for mad King George III, and if not for their anachronistic confluence, I would not now be, as I am, on my knees before the English poets. Also: no native cadences of Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Faulkner, Mark Twain, Cather!) The Shropshire Lad for a while bestrode the world, and was welcome nowhere. But Milton and Mill and Swift and George Eliot and E. M. Forster came along as stowaways—“Areopagitica,” and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and “A Modest Proposal,” and Daniel Deronda, and A Passage to India. These hardly stand for the arrogance of parochialism—and it is just this engagement with belles-lettres that allows parochialism to open its arms, so that the inevitable accompaniment of belles-lettres is a sense of indebtedness. “It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature,” James noted; everything that informs belles-lettres is in that remark, and also everything that militates against the dismissal of either the term or the concept.
If I began these reflections in curmudgeonly resentment of the virtual annihilation of what Henry James knew—of the demise of the literary essay—it is only to press for its rescue and reclamation. Poetry and the novel will continue to go their own way, and we can be reasonably confident that they will take care of themselves. But the literary essay needs and merits defense: defense and more—celebrants, revivification through performance. One way or another, the literary essay is connected to the self-conscious progression of a culture, whereas the essay’s flashy successor—the article, or “piece”—is in every instance a pusher of Now, a shaker-off of whatever requires study or patience, or what used to be called, without prejudice, ambition. The essayist’s ambition is no more and no less than that awareness of indebtedness I spoke of a moment ago—indebtedness to history, scholarship, literature, the acutest nuances of language.
Is this what is meant by “elitism”? Perhaps. I think of it as work, if work is construed (as it ought to be) as “the passion for exactitude and sublimity.” The latter phrase I borrow from a young essayist in London—my daughter’s age exactly—who, because of a driven Parnassian ardor and because he is still in his twenties, has, I trust, the future of belles-lettres secreted in his fountain pen. In the newest literary generation, the one most assailed by the journalist’s credo of Now, it is a thing worth marveling at: this determination to subdue, with exactitude and sublimity, the passionless trivia of our time.
* I know a European writer of genius, in love with his language, whose
bad luck it was to have been born just in time to suffer two consecutive tyrannies. It is a wonder that this writer lived past childhood. At the age of five, under Hitler, he was torn from his home and shipped to a concentration camp. Having survived that, he was spiritually and intellectually crushed by the extremes of Communist rule, including a mindless and vicious censorship. Currently, after the fall of the dictator, and having emigrated to America, he is being vilified in the press of his native land for having exposed one of its national heroes as a programmatic antisemite. After so much brutalization by the country of his birth, it would be difficult to expect him to identify himself as a patriot. But that is what he is. He is a patriot of his mother-tongue, and daily feels the estrangement of exile. Pro patria dulce mori!
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
American Academy of Arts and Letters: Excerpts from unpublished letters and documents from the Hamlin Garland file. Hamlin Garland papers. The poem “Genius” by Archer Milton Huntington. Archives of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY.
Black Sparrow Press: Excerpts from “The Foot” by Alfred Chester, copyright © 1970 by Alfred Chester, from Head of a Sad Angel: Stories 1953–1966; excerpts from “Letter from the Wandering Jew” by Alfred Chester, copyright © 1971 by Alfred Chester, from Looking for Genet: Literary Essays & Reviews. Reprinted by permission of Black Sparrow Press.
The Detroit News: “No Head for Howells’ Hat” by H. L. Mencken (The Detroit News, November 23, 1924). Reprinted by permission of The Detroit News.
Harcourt Brace & Company and Faber and Faber Limited: Excerpts from The Waste Land, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” “Gerontion,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” and “Ash-Wednesday” from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Harcourt Brace & Company, copyright © 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot; excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1943 by T. S. Eliot, copyright renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Rights outside the United States administered by Faber and Faber Limited, London, from The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. Excerpts of three letters from The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1898–1922, Volume One, edited by Valerie Eliot, copyright © 1988 by SET Copyrights Limited. Rights outside the United States administered by Faber and Faber Limited, London. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company and Faber and Faber Limited.
Harvard University Press: Excerpts from letters from Henry James: Selected Letters, edited by Leon Edel, copyright © 1974, 1975, 1980, 1984, 1987 by Leon Edel and Alexander R. James. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press.
The James Estate: Excerpt from William James letter to his sister, copyright © 1980 by The Estate of William James; excerpts from Alice James diary entries, copyright © 1980, 1996 by the James Family. Reprinted by permission of Bay James, Literary Executor, on behalf of The James Estate.
The Jerusalem Post: Excerpts from Yad Vashem article by Mordechai Paldiel. Reprinted by permission of The Jerusalem Post.
William Morris Agency, Inc.: Excerpts from Henry James: A Life by Leon Edel (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), copyright © 1985 by Leon Edel. Reprinted by permission of the William Morris Agency, Inc., on behalf of the author.
Oxford University Press: Excerpt from Complete Notebooks of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Oxford University Press and Carcanet Press Limited: Excerpts from “My Name and I” from Collected Poems 1975 by Robert Graves, copyright © 1975 by Robert Graves. Rights outside the United States administered by Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press and Carcanet Press Limited.
Viking Penguin: Excerpts from Seize the Day by Saul Bellow, copyright © 1956, 1974, copyright renewed 1984 by Saul Bellow. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
Yale University Press: Excerpts from Isaac Babel: 1920 Diary, edited by Carol J. Avins, translated by H. T. Willetts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.
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