Imagine, please, Alberto D’Andrea. He is twenty-two years old and is studying American literature at the University of Rome. He has never been to the United States, but as a boy he grew up, you might say, on American movies. This partly explains his interest in American literature; less consciously, perhaps, he was drawn to the study of American literature because of America’s power in the world, for since World War II, when the United States emerged as a superpower, its literature has taken on a worldwide interest, resulting in institutions such as the University of Rome having a department of American literature. Thus far Alberto has studied the Puritans and the great New England writers of the 19th century; he has studied Melville, Twain, and James; he has, in a brisk survey course, read some of the novelists of naturalism and, in the 20th century, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. Next term he is to take a seminar in contemporary writing in the United States, and in preparation for this seminar he has been able to get hold of a new book entitled the Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing¹

Although his English is quite good, it nonetheless takes Alberto a full two weeks to slog through the more than six-hundred pages of the Harvard Guide. Sometimes he thinks he will go a little mad trying to keep straight the names—oh, so many names—of American critics, novelists, dramatists, and poets (more than a hundred and sixty pages devoted to poets alone). These Barths and Plaths and Bellows and Blooms and Mailers and Malamuds and Millers (Arthur, Henry, Jason, Perry, and J. Hillis) refuse to sort themselves out in his mind. If the names remain a bit of a blur, in the end, owing to the way the Harvard Guide is organized, a general picture does begin to emerge, if rather hazily.

Contemporary American writing, young Alberto decides, is evidently a literature of great diversity. There is black literature, of course, of which Alberto has heard, with black writers on the attack against American society, and then further divided among themselves. There is women’s literature, speaking from, as the critics in the United States say, another consciousness, “another, equally significant, area of existence.” There are realists, naturalists, novelists of manners, and experimental novelists by the score. There are Southern writers, deep fellows these, writing on the theme of self and history and something called “the awful responsibility of Time.” Then there are the Jewish writers—Alberto pictures them in yarmulkes and prayer shawls—dreamy figures, trying to flee the responsibility of tradition, family, civilization, so that they can enjoy sex a bit more.

If all these writers, with all their special concerns and points of view, have anything in common it is a grave unease in their own country. The Harvard Guide, Alberto cannot help but notice, claims over and over again that most American writers acutely feel a sense of powerlessness. In the words of one author discussed in the book, “America is a bitch.” With his yellow-marker pen, Alberto D’Andrea draws a line under that sentence.

Alberto. . . . But enough of this young Italian, whom I have brought on stage in the first place because, reading through the essays that make up the Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, I have had a difficult time imagining for whom the book might have been compiled. What purpose is this thick volume meant to serve? How, even, is it meant to be used? Is it to be read straight through? This is nearly impossible. Is it meant to be consulted in the way one does an encyclopedia? Nearly useless. Is it for the connoisseur in American literature? Too boring. The beginner? Highly confusing. The editor, Daniel Hoffman, remarks in his preface that the Harvard Guide is “a series of original essays by critics especially interested in the subjects and authors about whom they have chosen to write,” and that these essays are intended, in Edwin Muir’s phrase, as “a helpful intermediary between literature and the reader.” Still, it is difficult to imagine who that reader might be—the mind goes all the way to Italy without quite finding him.

The Harvard Guide does fulfill another function, though not one that its compiler and contributors are well aware of. It provides literary history—or, more precisely, a substitute for literary history. Although A. Walton Litz omits mention of it in his survey of literary criticism in the Harvard Guide, one of the casualties of criticism in postwar America—and “contemporary” in this volume begins in 1945 and runs through 1978—has been literary history. No Van Wyck Brooks, no Vernon Parrington has emerged or is likely to. Such literary history as has been written must be dug out of biographies and criticism of the kind that Edmund Wilson was perhaps the last American critic to write; it can also be found in surveys of collective authorship such as the Harvard Guide, though here, too, one has to dig it out and piece it together, in the fashion of an archeologist.

Having pieced together the literary history of the past thirty-three years in the United States through the essays of the contributors to the Harvard Guide, one arrives at one of the most impressive omnium gatherums of literary cliché ever assembled. With but one exception—that of Nathan A. Scott, Jr. in his essay on “Black Literature”—each contributor pumps vigorously away at the old melodeon, as Mencken used to call the grinding out of clichés. In the case of one contributor, Gerald Weales, who writes the essay on “Drama,” there was probably no help for it. American drama since 1945 has not been exactly exhilarating. There have been the posthumous plays of Eugene O’Neill; the works of the odd couple, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller; the complicated if not very interesting failures of Edward Albee after his early successes; the one-act plays of Sam Shepard; the one-play acts of various passing playwrights—and the rest has been British imports, Neil Simon, and trade-union negotiations. Weales has possibly published at least ten other versions of the essay he has now published once again in the Harvard Guide. But what is a theater critic to do? There’s been no business in show business.

Along with Scott on “Black Literature” and Weales on “Drama,” other contributors to the Harvard Guide and their subjects are: Alan Trachtenberg on “The Intellectual Background”; A. Walton Litz on “Literary Criticism”; Leo Braudy on “Realists, Naturalists, and Novelists of Manners”; Lewis P. Simpson on “Southern Fiction”; Mark Schechner on “Jewish Writers”; Josephine Hendin on “Experimental Fiction”; Elizabeth Janeway on “Women’s Literature”; and Daniel Hoffman with three essays on poetry, “After Modernism,” “Schools of Dissidents,” and “Dissidents from Schools.” Apart from Mrs. Janeway, all the contributors to the Harvard Guide are professors, though none is currently teaching at Harvard. The academy provides not only the dominant tone of the book, which is natural enough, but its organization as well, which is not natural at all. The Harvard Guide is organized, that is to say, rather like the curriculum of a university highly sensitive to public relations and worried about a ruckus with a touchy pressure group. By including essays on Jewish writing, black literature, and women’s literature, the editor must have thought he was responding nicely to the time-spirit of the day.

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The Harvard Guide‘s categories of organization oddly—and badly—skew the material it sets out to cover. Saul Bellow is treated exclusively as a Jewish writer (and given a paragraph for his plays in the “Drama” essay), and Ralph Ellison exclusively as a black writer. Since each is a writer with serious pretensions to belonging to world literature, what point can be served in boxing them off in academic ghettos, except to diminish them? But the nuttiness of the Harvard Guide’s scheme of organization is seen to best advantage in the essay on “Women’s Literature,” where Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Lillian Hellman, like Russian female athletes who have failed to pass the hormone test to qualify for the Olympics, are ruled out of discussion for being inadequately feminist in their points of view. Throughout the book there are discussions of writers whose chief interest is that they fall conveniently into one or another category and who, but for this convenience, would scarcely be worth mentioning at all. By sheer allocation of space, Norman Mailer—included in the index under “Jewish writer,” “novelist of manners,” and also “experimental writer”—would appear to be the dominant figure of the age, and a stranger (our Italian student Alberto, say) might judge him America’s most important postwar writer, when in fact he has only been the country’s noisiest writer. Meanwhile, a quiet writer of great artistry, William Maxwell, who fits into none of the Harvard Guide’s existing categories—perhaps one ought to have been set up entitled “Good Writing”—goes quite without mention.

A vade mecum of this particular kind inevitably allows ample room for cavil. One is not used, for example, to see Mickey Spillane discussed with the dead (and deadly) earnestness that he is in Leo Braudy’s essay on “Realists, Naturalists, and Novelists of Manners.” To have Eleanor Roosevelt’s memoirs brought into an essay on “Women’s Literature” surely seems a case of scraping the outside of the barrel; and talking about the things that Joyce Oates does better than Dostoevsky, as Mrs. Janeway does in the same essay, shows evidence of having been hit over the head with the barrel. One wishes there were a plainer way of writing about Southern fiction than the swampy rhetoric, the literary equivalent of Senator Claghorn, that Lewis P. Simpson has had to resort to in his essay, which ends: “About all that can be said with assurance is that since the Southern novel has adhered closely to the novel’s origin in modern historicism, the Southern novelist’s imagination of the self’s condition awaits further revelations of the congruence of self and history.”

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But these, as I say, are cavils. What cuts deeper is the absence of any serious attempt in the Harvard Guide to argue with or test any of the current cultural assumptions under which literary work is carried on in the United States. It is this that makes the book seem such a compendium of clichés—up-to-date cliches, to be sure, but clichés for all that. In his essay, “The Intellectual Background,” the historian Alan Trachtenberg warms up the melodeon for much that is to follow. Trachtenberg begins with the standard revisionist version of the cold war and of the period up through the middle 1960’s, which he refers to as “this phase of moralistic and anti-intellectual acquiescence.” Against the energies of modernism—a word he uses in the loosest possible way—he sees those of “counter-modernism, resistance to the very idea of the modern. . . . It took the form of racism and sexism, resistance to redressing racial injustice and full equality to women. . . .” C. Wright Mills is approvingly quoted as saying that writers, artists, and professors have now become “employees,” “dependent salaried workers who spend the most alert hours of their living being told what to do.”

Really pounding away at the melodeon now, Trachtenberg misses nary a note: Robert Coles, the Uriah Heep of American left-wing social science, is praised for his “major undertaking in cultural psychoanalysis in the period, Children of Crisis;” there is the standard view of Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd is cited for its “voice of compassionate discontent and its unusual civic responsibility”); Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse are admired as leaders of the “party of eros,” though “many commentators have found that [Marcuse’s] later thought tends to conflate art and politics and open the door to elitism. . . .” Trachtenberg concludes on a note of grandiloquent hedge: “Whether the imaginative writer will continue to hold his place of authority against the new media and against the cosmic fantasies fulfilled by reality itself remains to be seen.” In short, as Adam said to Eve, while passing through the gates of Eden, “We’re living in an age of transition.”

With a background such as Trachtenberg’s, what does the foreground of the Harvard Guide provide? Other of its contributors are not so overtly political as Trachtenberg, with the exception of Elizabeth Janeway, who, over the past decade, has gone from a pedestrian book reviewer to a zealous feminist ideologue. Yet, more literary than political though its contributors be, it is extraordinary how easily—and repeatedly—phrases come up describing the United States as “a madness-inducing society,” “a disturbed society,” “overstructured,” a society dominated by “destructiveness, greed, and vulnerability,” “a personal tragedy”; and, finally, in the essay on “Experimental Writing,” Josephine Hendin blithely remarks that Thomas Pynchon “indicts the capitalistic urge, the multinational corporation, the mega-cartel as models of America, its allies and enemies, drifting toward centralized wealth and power.”

Sometimes, as in these remarks on Pynchon, the critics are only describing the views of the authors they are writing about. More often, though, they seem to share these views. Certainly the critics in the Harvard Guide only rarely engage their author’s assumptions in argument. Increasingly over the years critic and author are at one in their assumption. And this is true not just of literary critics: in The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch, wishing to demonstrate that American corporations make automatons, zombies, prostitutes out of their employees, adduces as proof a passage from Joseph Heller’s novel, Something Happened. Like the fly and the dunghill, left-wing sociology and left-wing fiction feed upon and replenish each other.

The melodeon is never stifled for long in the pages of the Harvard Guide, and one of its repeated high-C clichés has to do with the decade of the 1950’s, which, its contributors seem generally to agree, was a dreary decade indeed. Leo Braudy is at one moment telling us that “The conservatism of the 1950’s therefore goes hand in hand with the great postwar consumer society, the proliferation of the suburbs, and the expanding number of things to buy,” when Gerald Weales chips in at the next with his remark that the 50’s was “a decade famous for its blandness, its spirit of conformity.” After other comments of a similar kind, it is a bit dispiriting to have Daniel Hoffman, as late as page 460, refer to “the postwar period of seeming social and literary conformity.” Well, was it “seeming” conformity or the real thing?

Aside from the circumstance that the United States had a less than greatly literate President in Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 1950’s was in fact a decade of literary production of an extremely high quality. Not only were Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dos Passos; Frost, Stevens, and Eliot; John Crowe Ransom, Yvor Winters, and Allen Tate still alive and publishing, but Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison, Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke and John Berryman, were coming into their full maturity as artists; Lionel Trilling and Robert Penn Warren were at the height of their powers, and Edmund Wilson was still a powerful engine of literary creation. Partisan Review, potent and serious, had not yet turned into the journal got up in youth drag that it was to become. Literature had a dignity and a standing it has not since regained. And no one among the authors of the Harvard Guide seems have noticed this; at least, none has chosen to mention it.

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Literature, as Geoffrey Grigson once remarked, is always in a bad way, like government or politics or mankind. Granting this, one must go on to say that contemporary American literature seems in an even worse way than usual, though one gets almost no sense of this from the Harvard Guide. The closest one comes to it is an oblique nod from A. Walton Litz in his essay, “Literary Criticism,” where he notes, apropos of the strange intellectual peregrinations of Harold Bloom and the critics who have come to be called deconstructionists, that “we are not confronted with contemporary writers of such overwhelming power that they command the critic’s attention.” Listen to what Litz is saying—that our writers are not good enough, or at any rate not interesting enough, for our critics. How did this come to be? Wedded to their clichés about the 1950’s—Litz: “As the monolithic social and political attitudes of the 1950’s gave way to the diversity and conflict of the 1960’s, literary criticism also lost its monolithic appearance”—the contributors to the Harvard Guide are in no position to understand what has happened.

What has happened, I believe, is that American writers have never received so much attention or been so institutionally well supported—and never has contemporary literature seemed quite so beside the point, so peripheral, so trivial. This is not to say that good literary work isn’t being done; it is, in discrete novels, volumes of verse, criticism, and especially in literary biography, which the Harvard Guide does not deal with at all. But literature en bloc seems to have lost its force, and no longer seems as central to serious culture or to the life of the nation as it once, and not so long ago, did. Since the Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing does not seem to have detected this, let alone speculated upon it, perhaps I can be allowed to fill in this ample gap with a few ruminations of my own.

A good place to begin is by totting up the palpable changes that have taken place in the conditions and circumstances of serious literary production since World War II. Among the most obvious has been the enlargement of the freedom allowed novelists, poets, autobiographers, and biographers to write about the sexual component of life, and in any language they choose. I say enlargement of freedom but in fact this freedom is now quite complete. James Jones, Gore Vidal, and Norman Mailer are among the postwar writers who helped bring this about; but the great figure here is Henry Miller, who paid the real price of having his books actually banned from his own country. Yet greatly convenient to writers though it has been, this new freedom does not seem to have resulted directly in any masterworks or marked any towering advance in human understanding of the kind that literature at its best makes possible.

The postwar period has marked a change, too, in the relation between American and European writing. During this time, American writers ceased to gaze longingly on Europe, with its older and denser culture, in the manner of Henry James and Edith Wharton, and after them the writers of the generation of the 1920’s. As form follows function, so often does literature seem to follow political power. America, in literature, was where the action was—or at least seemed to be—and Europe for the first time in matters literary gazed longingly at us (hence the department of American literature at the University of Rome). For whatever it may bode, this situation appears to be coming to an end. Flashier American literary critics are now looking to France for models and methods. The shedding of American feelings of literary inferiority vis-à-vis Europe appears, too, in the end not to have come to much.

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Far from feeling encouraged by a sense of a new national grandeur, literature followed sociology and in the United States took an ethnic turn. Black writing and Jewish writing were said, during this period, to be entering upon a golden age. We now know this to have been largely bogus. The “unmeltable ethnics,” as Michael Novak styled the resurgence of ethnic feeling in the United States, melted quickly enough in literature. The essay, “Jewish Writers,” by Mark Schechner, after many trite and a few quite false observations—Schechner’s first sentence speaks of “a coherent and identifiable Jewish culture and religion [having] effectively ceased to exist”—takes up in detail only five novelists, the old Hart, Schaffner & Marx trio of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth, and adds Isaac Bashevis Singer and Norman Mailer. Schechner’s own style has the taste of an older Jewish critical manner gone sour; his prose is a confection, reheated, of Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, with occasional bebop touches. The Jew, he writes, with a characteristic overdramatized flourish, “has been obliged historically to turn the hyphen in his identity into the cutting edge of a sharp sensibility.” Schechner is down on Malamud, high on Roth. But reading his essay one comes to recognize that the Jewish content in much contemporary writing—Singer and perhaps Malamud apart—is not very great. Find, for example, the Jewish element in a Norman Mailer, whom Schechner characterizes in the following terms: “To interpret the whole career as an exercise in consistency, one would have to note that at the bottom of all concerns is the obsession with power, usually at the point of conjunction between sex and politics where policy melts into potency and the arms race abuts the presidential orgasm.” Such a sentence makes plain that there has not been all that much Jewish writing, but only a number of Jews, coming from a highly verbal culture, who write.

But contemporary American Jewish writers have not been as wounded by being lumped together as have black writers. The one unfailingly thoughtful and penetrating essay in the Harvard Guide, Nathan A. Scott, Jr.’s “Black Literature,” offers an account of these wounds. Throughout his essay Scott mentions one after another promising black writer who has fallen silent, and the reason is that these writers are working under a pressure that other contemporary American writers have not had to face. They are caught between the Scylla of what has become white critical apathy and the Charybdis of black agitational militancy, and their craft has taken a terrific banging about. Scott praises the novelist William Demby’s Beetlecreek (1950), for example, for “its refusal of the automatisms of racial protest and the cogency of its construction,” and of the characters of the novel he remarks that they “are not enlisted in the services of the sort of roman à thèse in which Negro writers have tended to make their chief investment.”

Those few black novelists and poets who have held out, who have refused to abandon the stringent demands of literary art in favor of the easy anger of propaganda, have been read out by the black critics of the movement known as the Black Aesthetic, and of which a characteristic utterance is that of Harold Cruse: “Criticism of Negro writing is mainly the Negro’s responsibility.” Apropos of Richard Gilman, a white critic, having gone along with this view, Scott remarks that “it would seem surely that a profound collapse of faith in the indivisibility of the human family and in the unity of culture has everywhere become a notable feature of the period.” Scott’s essay lists some casualties: James Baldwin, who has pulled away from the reasoned penetration of his work in the 1950’s, and who has since become a writer increasingly given over to the passions of hatred and contempt; and writers such as Melvin Tolson, who have not succumbed to these passions, but who have, unfairly according to Scott, never been “considered as something other than merely a special case of ethnic ferment.” Scott closes his courageous essay on a note of complaint about the Harvard Guide itself: “There is an insurmountable impropriety involved in the discussion of black American writers under a special rubric reserved for them alone. But for the moment, given the carelessness with which the critical community canvasses their work, they must, as it would seem, be so treated, if any assessment of their accomplishment is to be guaranteed at all.”

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But of course the Harvard Guide allows a separate rubric for black literature because that is how it is done in the university. And here we come to one of the chief points about contemporary American writing, which is the increased importance to it of the university. Alan Trachtenberg mentions this, sanguinely and almost in passing, as “a phenomenon that indicates not only a new ground of acceptance for serious literature, a new audience among college students, but also, at an even deeper level, a new recognition of literature as itself a serious and legitimate form of knowledge—a form, that is, of idea as well as emotion; a form of thinking about common existence.” This, though, isn’t the half of it; it isn’t even a hundredth part of it.

The principal, the major, the overriding and overwhelming fact about American writing between the end of World War II and the present is its nearly complete absorption by American universities. Even though a few novelists (Norman Mailer, John Updike, and William Styron), a few poets (James Merrill and Richard Howard), and a lone serious critic (Hilton Kramer) have remained outside the university, the preponderance of contemporary American writers now work in universities. More than this, contemporary writing has come to occupy a greater and greater part of the literary curriculum. Where once a young novelist might have learned about life working on a newspaper—as did Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway—he is now more likely to learn about it through a creative-writing program. Where once the world was a poet’s workshop, today a poetry workshop is his world. A literary reputation is currently validated and certified above all by a writer’s work finding a place in the contemporary curricular canon. For better or worse, the seat of contemporary literature is now the university.

Nor can there be much question that it has been for worse. An index to the health of our literature has long been the novel, and the novel, of all literary forms, seems to have come upon very lean days. Part of the reason for this, surely, is that increasing numbers of novelists and story writers are now university teachers, and thus locked away from their true subject, which is the great and very real world. That their true subject is lost to them, in turn, helps to explain the high production of experimental fiction. The novelists discussed in Josephine Hendin’s essay, “Experimental Fiction,” are many of them professors. Perhaps this is why their novels are so teachable; the problem is that they are not very readable. But then much of this fiction, it needs to be said, is not really intended for use outside an English department.

“Experimental fiction admittedly leaves out much of the joy and nobility which exist in the real world,” writes Professor Hendin, “but all art involves exclusion; no single work of art tells the whole truth about all experience.” But why is this fiction, and so much else that passes for literary study in the university, so unrelievedly bleak in its views? (Not that cheerfulness is wanted, but if a writer is going to be glum, he ought at least to be interesting in his glumness.) The reason is that the professors who write and teach contemporary literature have swallowed the more dolorous views of modernism—in short, the wasteland outlook—and have accepted the normalization of alienation. Sentences encapsulating these views—little laboratory slides of despair—pop out all through the pages of the Harvard Guide. Here is one in Leo Braudy’s hyper-ventilating style: “History was no longer a pattern of factually and philosophically analyzable causes; it was a nightmare, an allegory of good and evil, a metaphysical comic book.” Here is Daniel Hoffman, explicating a bit of poetry and society along with it: “From his [Robert Lowell’s] poems on the world about him we can infer that society itself is mad; the suffering poet in a mental hospital looms as a Promethean hero for our sick age.” Nuggets of unearned nihilism of this kind are commonplace in the criticism devoted to contemporary writing, and the Harvard Guide is strewn with them.

The antinomian strain appears to nestle comfortably with the contemporary literary imagination. As contemporary writers are deemed not good enough for some of our critics, so is their country deemed not good enough for many contemporary writers. E. L. Doctorow, Robert Coover, Joseph Heller are the names of but a few of the better-known contemporary writers who require complete concordance with their politics to read them at all. There is no imaginative inquiry, no literary testing of the grounds of assumption in their works; as their novels open, the case on America is closed. Stendhal, in what has since become a famous remark, said that “Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert,” but many contemporary American novelists and poets are so patently and thoroughly political that reading them is like being at a pistol range hoping to hear a note of music.

Yet another result of the absorption of contemporary literature by the university is the vast overproduction of criticism devoted to contemporary writers. Between the various guides and contemporary-authors series—Twayne, University of Southern Illinois, Minnesota Pamphlets (now Scribner’s American Writers Series)—there is scarcely an American writer of any reputation (John Updike, Gore Vidal, Thomas Pynchon) who has not had at least one book-length study devoted to him, even though he might be very much in mid-career. It is all so vastly overdone, so thoroughly out of proportion. Literary journals offer no protection. A recent issue of Parnassus carries an article about the poet Adrienne Rich that is so idolatrous as to be unseemly applied to anyone still alive. Salmagundi, a journal that has published some good things over the years, recently ran an essay running to forty-two pages entitled “‘Shipwreck, Autochthony, and Nostos’: An Approach to the Poetry Of John Peck.” Happening upon it, I wondered if this essay might be a parody—it begins with a quotation from Peck’s doctoral thesis and we later learn that he was born in Pittsburgh in 1941—but I have to report that it is not. Forty-two pages in a serious journal about a not very well-known poet who is not yet forty. Why? Reading much criticism of contemporary American writers one is reminded of the late Benjamin Sonnenberg’s description of his work as a public-relations man: “I make very large pedestals for very small statues.”

But even when the statues have rather more amplitude, the pedestals of contemporary American criticism have become extremely boring through reiteration. This is especially evident in the Harvard Guide. Simpson on Faulkner, Braudy on Dos Passos, Schechner on Bellow, Hendin on Nabokov, Hoffman on Stevens—one feels one has read all this before. And this is because, apart from a turn of phrase here or a twist of judgment there, one has. It has all been said before—over and over again.

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Still, the Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing does have one serious advantage, and this is that it causes one to think about the sweep of our literature over the past three decades. Despite the diversity of writing detailed in the Harvard Guide, despite the variety of talents at work among our writers, despite the enthusiasm of its contributors, one comes away feeling that contemporary American writing, taken as a corpus, is a good deal less than first-rate—that, in fact, we are currently in the midst of a distinctly second-rate literary era. By what measure can one determine this? I would invoke two measures. First, the presence of great writers. Second, the contribution that literature seems to be making to the life of the nation. On neither of these measures does contemporary American writing score high.

One might argue that the first measure, great writers, cannot be known—that this is a judgment available only to posterity. But one can have more than an inkling. Gravity is the quality that confers greatness in literature, even on comic literature; gravity has to do with spirituality, with high and undeflected seriousness, with recognition that literature provides the best record of the common humanity of all. It is immediately notable. Many contemporary Russian writers—Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, Vladimir Voinovich—have it. So do V. S. Naipaul and Marguerite Yourcenar. But it is in very short supply in the United States just now.

As for the second measure, the contribution that contemporary literature seems to be making to the life of the nation, this, in the United States today, seems sadly negligible. Never have writers seemed so much to be writing for themselves. The old literary man’s gambit here was to complain that readers are not sufficiently advanced, too philistine, not quite good enough. But there is a potentially ample public for serious literature in the United States; and one of the interesting phenomena of the postwar years has been the change in the fortunes of certain writers, once contributors to COMMENTARY and Partisan Review, from small-public to large-public writers. (The watershed year was perhaps 1964, when Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Mary McCarthy’s The Group became best-sellers.) But increasingly, contemporary writers have cut themselves off from the lay public, and have grown isolated and insulated. Critics have joined them rather than attempted to argue them back.

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“In any period,” F. R. Leavis once noted, “it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends.” That small minority is in a condition of dishevelment today. Even though many writers have become celebrities and support for writing has never been so generous or the attention accorded it greater, American writing itself has never seemed less important, and more lost, than it does now. And it will take more than a Harvard Guide to help it find its way back.

¹ Belknap/Harvard, 618 pp., $18.50.