Randall Jarrell
THE AGE OF CRITICISM
There is a subject that I cannot do justice to, but would
like to treat even unjustIy-a subject readers and novelists and poets
often talk about, but almost never write about: our age of criticism.
Perhaps I ought only to talk or, at most, write a verse satire about
it; one can say anything in verse and no one will mind. I wish that
you would treat what I am going to write as if it were verse or talk,
a conversation-with-no-one about our age of criticism.
It
is only a
complaint, perhaps more false than true-partial, and full of exaggera–
tions and general impressions; but it is a complaint that people do
make, and may at least relieve their feelings and mine. And I will
try
to
spare other people's by using no names at all.
The common reader does not know that it is an age of criticism,
and for him it is not. He reads (seldomer and seldomer now) his–
torical novels, the memoirs of generals, whatever is successful; good
books, sometimes-good books too are successful. He cannot tell the
book editor of the Chicago
Tribune
from Samuel Johnson, and is
neither helped nor hindered by criticism-to him a critic is a best–
seller list, only less so. Such a reader lives in a pleasant, anarchic,
oblivious world, a world as democratic, almost, as the warm dark
depths below, where nobody reads anything but newspapers and
drugstore-books and comic-books and the
Reader's Digest
at the
dentist's. This common reader knows what he likes, but is uncom–
fortable when other people do not read it or do not like it-for what
people read and like is good: that is what
good
means.
On the slopes above (as a fabulist might put it) live many races
of animals: the most numerous are the members of Book Clubs and
the dwellers
in
the Land of Book Reviews. These find out from their
leaders weekly, monthly, what they ought to read, what they ought
to like; and since, thank goodness, that is almost always what they
would have read and liked anyway, without the help of the reviewers,
they all live in unity and amity. It is the country of King Log, the
fabulist would say: thousands of logs lie booming on the hillside, while
their subjects croak around them; if you shut your eyes it is hard
)
