The Ordeal of Criticism
Image and Idea.
by Philip Rahv.
New Directions. 164 pp. $3.00.
In the texture of these essays, there is the manifest intent of reaching a relatively large, amateur audience. Rahv’s is an open tone and a vocabulary not deliberately hermetic, both of which set these pieces outside the orbit of the so-called “New” or textual-explicatory criticism, with its highly developed jargon proper to limited intra-academic discourse. On the other hand, there is a certain truculence of statement, a refusal to come to terms with bourgeois or genteel expectations and especially the central American fable of optimism and success succeeding everywhere, that cuts them off from the largest possible area of acceptance, that area in which flourish the Saturday Review of Literature and such exponents of official Americanism in art as Howard Mumford Jones.
“Alienation” is always Rahv’s key word—a word that expresses at once the possibility of a rich interplay between artist and society and its failure in fact. In his insistence upon asserting in a public voice the difficulty of performing the business of the artist in America (with the further implication that a society is critically tested by its ability to provide the writer with the possibilities of freedom and acceptance that his development requires), Rahv associates himself with the tradition of criticism that includes H. L. Mencken and the early Van Wyck Brooks, and that has found perhaps its finest expression in some of the essays of Edmund Wilson.
The followers of that tradition have sometimes been called the “Ordealists,” and it is a name that suggests some of their passionate intensity, though it directs attention too exclusively perhaps to their analysis of the artist’s plight, at the expense of the larger criticism of society implied in that analysis, the moral prophetic tone toward which in one way or another they aspire. (The freezing of that moral drive into literary pharisaism in the later Brooks makes a splendid American “case.”)
Yet in Rahv, who comes relatively late upon the scene, there is lacking the vigor, the selfassurance verging sometimes on bumptiousness, of the early practitioners of this kind of criticism. He cries out still against the academy, still ultimately distrusts the pious and the priests, still resolutely sallies forth to rescue the more classic American writers from the ikons that respectability makes of them when it can no longer ignore them, still crusades for the ignored contemporary writer; but something has changed.
There is in Rahv a greater subtlety and resiliency, a wider area of critical tolerance—but those qualities have been achieved by sacrificing the liveliness, the vigor, and brute impact found in the early Ordealists and nowhere else in American criticism. It is in part the kind of artist with whom the critic has come to deal that makes the difference; the proper idols of the Ordealists are what Rahv himself would call the “Redskins,” plein-air types, resolutely barbarous: Whitman and Twain and Dreiser and Farrell. But what is the latter-day Ordealist doing as a leading advocate of Kafka or Henry James (at whom even Wilson sneers as he retreats, and who was to Brooks the essential despised Paleface), or as a reviver of Nathaniel Hawthorne? There is involved here something like what Partisan Review enjoys calling “a failure of nerve,” as well as a gain of insight and a broadening of sensibility.
_____________
To understand Rahv’s Considerable role in recent American literary life, one must see him in a context larger than that of this rather slim volume; first of all, against the background of Partisan Review, in which he has long been a controlling force, and beyond that of the parallel, or apparently parallel, interests in radical politics and avant-garde literature out of which that magazine first emerged. One must read back into these essays, selected and revised to represent what Rahv’s critical position has now become, the remembered course of his development from a somewhat doctrinaire, though no longer Stalinist, Marxist critic, convinced that there could be no ultimate contradiction between his literary and political allegiances.
He has from the beginning been overshadowed by the figure of Edmund Wilson, a more productive and ingenious critic, with a subtler and more ingratiating style and a considerably wider group of readers. Rahv, however, represents in more extreme form the critical approach found in Wilson, not mitigated by contact with the university curriculum or the pervasive “gentlemanliness” of the latter.
By the 30’s, Marxism had become at last effective in American intellectual life, overcoming the strong native resistance to a deterministic specification of the role of the intellectual; and it seemed on the verge of organizing coherently all the vaguer anti-bourgeois, anti-genteel notions that had until then existed without a program in the livelier critical minds. The “Revolutionary Movement” seemed for a while capable of providing a true focus for the first wave of “Freudian” protest against conventional sex mores, for Menckenian middle-class baiting, for the espousal of anti-philistine literature, as well as for the political revolutionary impulse proper.
In Partisan Review, Philip Rahv and his early associates provided a journal to give visible form to that focus, to express the uneasy but powerful complex without disregarding or falsifying any of its contributory elements. The Ordealist approach, refined by the Marxist dialectic, provided the critical method suitable for such a journal, and in its insistence on the rich interpenetration of the exigencies of formal statement and social pressures in the personality of the creative artist, managed to resist for a long time the impulse toward anti-literary “Marxism” and anti-political aestheticism. Rahv’s understanding that literary standards could be maintained only outside the totalitarian circle of Stalinism, enabled him to escape the fatal descent which has led others who began with a similar position to the admiration of—Howard Fast!
But the collapse of radical politics on the one hand, and the deflation of the literary reputations of the “radical” writers of the 30’s, Dos Passos, Farrell, Caldwell etc. on the other, has finally destroyed the original ideological basis upon which Partisan Review and Rahv once stood. On the philosophical side, Rahv has attempted to salvage a kind of minimal Marxism committed to no real politics, supplemented by a heavier and heavier reliance on the insights of Freud, and most recently revised in the light of Existentialist philosophy. The process has meant a re-definition of the key term “alienation,” from a product of social forces, to a resultant of buried disturbances in the individual psyche, to a basic determinant of the human condition. In each case, there has been the prospect of less and less hope, and finally there is that acceptance of anguish as ultimate that has so much vexed recent genteel critics of Partisan Review.
Throughout all his adaptations, however, Rahv has clung desperately to a naturalistic and rationalist position, a faith in “scientific method” as the sole criterion of truth, and the almost mythic vision of a dead, God-less universe that provides a common background for Marx and Freud and Sartre.
Yet despite this philosophic predilection, Rahv has come more and more to comment upon, and Partisan Review more and more to print, poets and fictionists committed to various supernaturalist positions. It is a fact of our time that such writers have come more and more to do the work of real distinction, and Rahv has stubbornly refused to betray his own fine taste; but his position is ultimately intolerable. The plight of a critic dedicated to naturalism devoting his expositions and COMMENTARY to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Kafka and Hawthorne, reflects on its own level the contradictions of Partisan Review, printing T. S. Eliot and Robert Lowell and Robert Penn Warren, while conducting symposiums on “The Failure of Nerve.”
_____________
Despite himself, Rahv sometimes becomes the victim of a desire to resolve that contradiction by denying the reality or ultimate efficacy in the work of art of religious convictions he finds distasteful. It is the obverse of the predicament of the supernaturalist critic before, say, a poet like Rimbaud—and equally dangerous. Such a process vitiates, I think, much of what Rahv has to say about the notion of sin as salvation in Hawthorne, and even somewhat mars the otherwise penetrating and acute study of Tolstoy.
I find Rahv at his best in the general essays such as “Paleface and Redskin” or “The Cult of Experience in American Writing,” which afford real scope for his post-Marxian toughmindedness, his willingness to make generalizations in an age of “careful scholarship” and narrow textual exegesis, and his complete lack of squeamishness before despair, rare among those who write about American literature.
I feel, too, that our intellectual life has profited by the strategic elevation of certain culture heroes in which he and Partisan Review have played a leading role: the creation of the contemporary pantheon of Dostoevsky, Hawthorne, Melville, James, and Kafka, which we are likely short-sightedly to resent these days as having become merely chic, capable of being admired by the culture vulture breathlessly pursuing the up-to-date. Though Rahv’s critical system, with its fundamental reliance upon naturalist assumptions, will not permit him to comprehend fully the very writers of whom he has become a leading advocate, he must be given credit for his share in a revolution of taste in fiction, as crucial as the parallel one in verse that has uplifted Donne and the Metaphysicals.
The publication of Rahv’s collected essays coincides with the second decade of Partisan Review, and with a growing feeling in all quarters that that magazine has somehow lost its raison d’être, or at least its initial vigor and interest. Image and Idea provides, beyond the intrinsic pleasures and profits of its discourse, a key to understanding that decline historically.
A kind of critical approach is represented here that may seem to us no longer vital; its realest achievements in Rahv, in Edmund Wilson, and in others stir in us rather a comprehension of the recent past than an impulse to future explorations along the same lines. At a point when criticism seems to be going off in a score of directions none of them indubitably forward, it is hard to have to raise such a charge yet once more; and yet it must be said firmly and without irrelevant rancor.
Those of us who were brought up intellectually on Partisan Review, look to it sometimes, I am afraid, unreasonably expecting it to do for us in our present ideological plight what we cannot do for ourselves; reflecting on its limitations, we are obliquely commenting on our own. It is well to remind ourselves that no critical approach can outlive the historical moment that evokes it; the thing is to have justified that moment.
_____________
