Well-Tempered Critic
Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time.
by Stanley Edgar Hyman.
Horizon Press. 288 pp. $6.75.
One of the genuine excitements of these years has been the quite sudden rise in the amount and quality of the periodical criticism produced in this country. We have not had since the 30's—if indeed we had then—anything like the present proliferation of commentary that is at once serious and lucid, that treats literature and ideas with the proper sobriety, yet is almost wholly free of the stylistic quirkiness and obscurantism that have so often flawed even the best quarterly criticism.
That, in fact, would seem to be at the heart of the development. The defensive tensions of critical language have relaxed as critical authority has shifted from the quarterlies to the high quality, mass circulation review media, a shift brought about not only by the appearance of a large new audience of educated readers, but by the recognition that the great work of modern formalist criticism—the perfection of theory and the explication of classic texts—has been completed and can no longer engage our most adventurous critical minds. Hence, a great deal of the best talent which in the past found expression in the Kenyon, Hudson, and Sewanee Reviews, is now finding expression, along with an opportunity for a much broader communication of ideas, in the liberal weeklies and monthlies and in such new periodicals as the New York Review of Books and Book Week. There it is helping restore to favor the kind of literary journalism done so well by Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, and others in the 20's and 30's, and the long essay-review is fast becoming the most influential critical form of the present time.
It is probably inevitable that these liberating changes have been accompanied by a change in the pitch and intensity of the critical voice. One should not be surprised to discover, for example, that the innovating zeal, the eccentricity and flamboyance, which Wilson in particular brought to the form of the essay-review are largely absent from the work of his successors. If the bulk of that work is free of obscurantism and written with a new confidence in the public's capacity for intelligent response, it is also lacking in what one normally thinks of as style, the impress upon language of a strongly individual point of view. There are, to be sure, a few dissidents among the new reviewers, a few roaring boys and hatchet men, but they have not appreciably affected the temper of a criticism distinguished at its best by judiciousness, great practical sanity, and a modesty of tone behind which one seems to sense an ego quite happily reconciled to its inhibitions. Wilson's fight for acceptance of the rebellious and original, and for more militant discriminations of taste has clearly been won, but won at the price of a certain loss of character, a certain failure of force in the crucial act of judgment. The critic's voice is seldom raised in either condemnation or praise, anger or ecstasy. Nothing appears to offend outrageously or to excite really profoundly. In short, the prevailing note seems to be one of moderation and quiet good sense, in which neither perversity of opinion, meanness of spirit, nor the felicitous stroke of brilliance appears likely to disturb the calm elucidation of the work at hand.
Of course no really good critic can be adequately defined by a generalization as sweeping as this one, and Stanley Edgar Hyman happens to be a very good critic indeed. His work has many of the characteristics I have described, but it also possesses others which place it outside all portraits of tendency and give it the uniqueness of an important and vital body of commentary.
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Mr. Hyman has here brought together a selection of fifty-four of the reviews he has written in recent years for the New Leader, and in them he ranges learnedly and at moments with great impressiveness over a very wide area of contemporary American, British, and continental literature as well as anthropology, mythology, and biblical translation. His writing is consistently flexible and lucid, unpretentious and urbane, often witty, and quite without distinctive style. Yet it is in no sense careless or colorless or lacking in variations of emphasis or mood. Mr. Hyman is capable on occasion, although rare occasion, of the lethal phrase, even of the first-rate demolition job, but his tendency is to seek always for a way of putting the pieces back together, to nullify the effect of his occasional strictures in some often seemingly forced affirmation of positive value. His weakness, in other words, is a benevolence not always justified by the circumstances or by the apparent drift of his own argument. He seems persistently to feel more negative than he allows himself to admit, with the result that his conclusions about a particular work are often at variance with the tonalities of the language with which he has arrived at them.
Mr. Hyman's benevolence causes him to be overly indulgent with the poor work of writers whom he believes to be serious, and to make claims for the excellence of others which seem wholly unjustified by the evidence of their artistic record. He appears to feel obliged, for example, to praise Philip Roth for his incredibly bad novel, Letting Go, even though he himself observes that it is unfettered homage of just this kind which may be at least partly to blame for the artistic mistakes Roth has made. Mr. Hyman describes these mistakes with great clarity, but by the end of his review he has managed to bury them beneath his many complimentary remarks on Roth's excellence as a novelist.
Mr. Hyman also seems to admire James Baldwin so extravagantly for his polemical writings that he never quite gets around to saying that Another Country is an even more incredibly bad novel. In his discussion of Capote he again reveals his tendency to censor his negative feelings by first attacking Capote for his style and the poverty of his artistic imagination and then seeming to take it all back in a laudatory review of Breakfast at Tiffany's. On Pynchon's V. he reveals a more disturbing tendency to assent too eagerly to fashionable opinion. He solemnly describes as effective satirical portraiture of our time what can only be regarded as an abdication of satirical portraiture in favor of the easy mockery of the sick joke. But he is also able to speak of Ralph Ellison as “the profoundest cultural critic that we have,” of Daniel Curley as “one of the most gifted writers of my generation,” and of Janet Frame's Scented Gardens for the Blind as “the most remarkable novel that I have read in many years”—opinions which, if odd, are at least all resolutely unfashionable.
Mr. Hyman seems to me best and wittiest on bad books by third-rate or chronically overrated writers such as Herman Wouk, Steinbeck, and Henry Miller, where no question of the possible seriousness of the subject intrudes to inhibit his purely destructive impulses. On Steinbeck and the Nobel Prize he is devastatingly and accurately funny. He refers to The Winter of Our Discontent as “this ludicrous marsh-mallow,” and says of Herman Wouk that “he can compete with the worst of television because he is the worst of television, without the commercials, a $7.95 Pay-TV.” It is my impression, however, that on only two occasions does Mr. Hyman function with complete success as what he calls a “corrector of opinion” of writers who have merited serious attention but who, for one reason or another, have been taken too seriously. These are his essays on Purdy's Cabot Wright Begins and Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers, about both of which he asks (and answers) the nasty and necessary questions which snobbery and the fear of authoritative contradiction have prevented others from asking.
It seems to me a pity that Mr. Hyman asks such questions only occasionally, for his reticence prevents him from being the deeply influential critic which his talents ought certainly to equip him to be. But it may well be that his reticence is the unavoidable defect of his very considerable virtues, his breadth of mind, his wide range of literary interests, his clear understanding of the difficulties confronting the gifted writer at the present time. These are the virtues which have made him one of the most intelligent and humane critics that we have, and I doubt that we would care to trade any of them for anger or eccentricity.
