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PARTI'SAN REVIEW
to tell who reads, who writes, and who reviews ... Nearby one finds
readers of scholarly journals, readers of magazines of experiment,
readers of magazines of verse. But highest of all, in crevices of the
/ naked rock, cowering beneath the keen bills of the industrious storks,
dwell our most conscious and, perhaps, most troubled readers; and
for these--cultivated or academic folk, intellectuals, "serious readers,"
the leaven of our queer half-risen loaf-this is truly an age of criticism.
It
is
about them and their Stork-Kings that I am going to talk for
the rest of this article.
Four times a year
(six
if they read
Partisan Review)
these people
read or try to read or wish that they had read large magazines called
literary quarterlies. Each of these contains several poems and a piece
of fiction-sometimes two pieces; the rest is criticism.
The rest is criticism.
The words have a dull uneasy sound; they
lie on the spirit with a heavy weight. There has never been an age
in which so much good criticism has been written--or so
much
bad;
and both of them have become, among "serious readers," astonishingly
or appallingly influential. I am talking as a reader of the criticism
of the last few years to other readers of
it,
and am assuming that
we recognize its merits and services, which are great; I myself can
and do read the magazines that I have been talking about, and they
seem to me the best magazines that we have-the magazines which
enjoy attacking them are almost ludicrously inferior to them. But, I
think, they print far too much criticism, . and far too moch of the
criticism that they print is of a kind that is more attractive to critics
and to lovers of criticism than it is to poets and fiction-writers and
to lovers of poetry and fiction. Criticism
does
exist, doesn't
it,
for
the sake of the plays and stories and poems it criticizes? Much of this
criticism does not; much of it gives a false idea of the nature and
use of criticism, a false idea of the variety and importance of critics.
Some of this criticism is as good as anyone could wish: several
of the best critics alive print most of their work in such magazines
as these. Some more of this criticism is intelligent and useful-it
sounds as
if
it had been written by a reader for readers, by a human
being for human beings. But a great deal of this criticism might just
as well have been written by a syndicate of encyclopedias for an
audience of International Business Machines. It is not only bad or
mediocre, it is
dull;
it is, often, an astonishingly graceless, joyless,
humorless, long-winded, niggling, blinkered, methodical, self-important,
cliche-ridden, prestige-obsessed, almost-autonomous criticism. Who
can
believe that either readers or writers are helped by most of the great
