The Critic As A Diplomat

"I go on the assumption than a review is simply a short piece of criticism," wrote F. O. Matthiessen in the midforties, when he was professor of History and Literature at Harvard, "and that it should be as good criticism as its writer can make it. This means a declaration of war on all literary supplements in which you can't tell the review from the publisher's agent. . . I think that we ought to pay attention to the kind of letter I received recently from a younger creative writer. 'In books we have dignity enough,' he said, 'but the incalculable force of a Sunday Review is the soft drip that drives a man to the wall.'"

In this posthumous collection of some forty of Matthiessen's best reviews, the 'soft drip' of the blurb writer has been replaced by the professional literary critic's persistent hammering at values. There is also enough 'gritty detail' to drive many an author to the wall on the merits.

Vantage Point

The selections, somewhat arbitrarily grouped by the editor, are almost all directed at the area of Matthiessen's greatest interest, American literature, and a large proportion of them discuss modern American poetry. From his vantage point as reviewer, he is able not only to treat the authors in question on his own terms but also to estimate the contributions of his fellow critics on the same subjects. For instance, his review of Van Wyck Brooks' The Flowering of New England gives him the opportunity to denounce what he considers a cardinal sin--concentration by the critic on a writer's life rather than on his work. ("The book Walden in mentioned specifically, in four passing sentences though there is repeated reference to it as a pond.") Similarly, in a review of Bernard DeVoto's Mark Twain at Work, he ends with the thought that "DeVoto seems determined to prove through his tub-thumping exaggerations that he possesses every temper but the critical temper."

The reviews are successfully focused by the title piece, which was given as the Hopwood lecture at the University of Michigan in 1948, and contains a full statement of the premises which guided Matthiessen's own work. In this lecture he summarized his belief in the critic's duty to live in his own time, rather than in the "closed garden" of isolation from his society; his appreciation of the dangers and possibilities of mass media of communication; and his conviction that the artist "by perceiving what his country is and is not in comparison with other countries . . . can help contribute, in this time of fierce national tensions, to the international understanding without which civilization will not survive."

It is now almost three years since Matthiessen's death and this new selection of his work only emphasizes how difficult it will be to replace him.