The trouble about writing commissioned criticism is that the relation between form and content is arbitrary; a lecture must take fifty-five minutes to deliver, an introduction must be so and so many thousand, a review so and so many hundred words long. Only rarely do the conditions set down conform exactly with one's thought. Sometimes one feels cramped, forced to omit or oversimplify arguments; more often, all one really has to say could be put down in half the allotted space, and one can only try to pad as inconspicuously as possible.
Moreover, in a number of articles which were not planned as a series but written for diverse occasions, it is inevitable that one will often repeat oneself.
A poem must be a closed system, but there is something, in my opinion, lifeless, even false, about systematic criticism. In going over my critical pieces, I have reduced them, when possible, to sets of notes because, as a reader, I prefer a critic's notebooks to his treatises. The order of the chapters, however, is deliberate, and I would like them to be read in sequence.
w. H. A.
CONTENTS
Foreword xi
i
PROLOGUE
Reading 3
Writing 13
n
THE DYER'S HAND
Making, Knowing and Judging 31
The Virgin & The Dynamo 61
The Poet & The City 72
m
THE WELL OF NARCISSUS
Hie et llle 93
Balaam and His .Ass 107
The Guilty Vicarage 146
The I Without a Self 159
THE SHAKESPEARIAN CITY
The Globe 171
The Prince's Dog 182,
Interlude: The Wish Game 209
Brothers &■ Others 2,18
Interlude: West's Disease 238
The Joker in the Pack 246
Postscript: Infernal Science 273
v
TWO BESTIARIES
D. H. Lawrence 277
Marianne Moore 296
vi
AMERICANA
The American Scene 309
Postscript: Rome v. Monticello 32,4
Red Ribbon on a White Horse 327
Postscript: The Almighty Dollar 335
Robert Frost 327
American Poetry 354
vn
THE SHIELD OF PERSEUS
Notes on the Comic 371
Don Juan 386
Dingley Dell & The Fleet 407
Postscript: The Frivolous & The Earnest 429
Genius & Apostle 433
Postscript: Christianity & Art 456
VIII
HOMAGE TO IGOR STRAVINSKY
Notes on Music and Opera 465
Cav & Pag 475 Translating Opera Libretti (Written in collaboration
with Chester Kallman) 483
Music in Shakespeare 500
ue
PART ONE
Prolog
READING
A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.
c. g. uchtenberg
One only reads well that which one reads with some quite personal purpose. It may he to acquire some power. It can be out of hatred for the author.
paul valery
The interests of a writer and the interests of his readers are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident.
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally. In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct; some great scholars have been poor translators.
We often derive much profit from reading a book in a different way from that which its author intended but only (once childhood is over) if we know that we are doing so.
As readers, most of us, to some degree, are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in advertisements.
One sign that a book has literary value is that it can be read in a number of different ways. Vice versa, the proof that pornography lias no literary value is that, if one attempts to read it in any other way than as a sexual stimulus, to read it, say, as a psychological case-history of the author's sexual fantasies, one is bored to tears.
Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously "truer" than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.
We cannot read an author for the first time in the same way that we read the latest book by an established author. In a new author, we tend to see either only his virtues or only his defects and, even if we do see both, we cannot see the relation between them. In the case of an established author, if we can still read him at all, we know that we cannot enjoy the virtues we admire in him without tolerating the defects we deplore. Moreover, our judgment of an established author is never simply an aesthetic judgment. In addition to any literary merit it may have, a new book by him has a historic interest for us as the act of a person in whom we have long been interested. He is not only a poet or a novelist; he is also a character in our biography.
A poet cannot read another poet, nor a novelist another novelist, without comparing their work to his own. His judgments as he reads are of this kind: My God! My GreatGrandfather! My Uncle! My Enemy! My Brother! My imbecile Brother!