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PARTISAN REVIEW
less so with the years. I was told recently two awful and delightful in–
stances of the specialization, the dividing-into-categories, of people's
unlucky lives. A student at Harvard, taking his final examinations for
a Ph. D. in English, was asked to make a short criticism of some
contemporary book he had read and liked. This was the first ques–
tion to give him any trouble-he had been particularly good on
Middle English; he said after a while, "I don't believe I've read any
contemporary books-at least not since I've been in college." Another
student, taking
his
final examinations at Princeton, was asked to sum–
marize Tennyson's "Ulysses." He did. "How does this treatment of
Ulysses compare with that in the
Divine Comedy?"
someone asked.
The student said that he didn't know, he hadn't read the
Divine
Comedy.
"How does Tennyson's Ulysses compare with the one in the
Odyssey?"
someone else asked. The student said that he didn't know,
he hadn't read the
Odyssey.
Both students were scolded and passed,
and their professors came home to tell me the stories.
These men were indeed specialists in English. And yet, reader,
aren't many intellectuals almost as great specialists in Important-that
is to say, currently fashionable-books? Many of the intellectuals whom
one hears discussing books certainly do not seem to have read widely
or enthusiastically. Talking with an excellent critic and historian of
ideas-a professor, too,
a
La
Matthew Arnold-I asked him whether
his students read much. He said, "My students! I can't get my collea–
gues to read anything!" Of course he was exaggerating; I felt that
he was exaggerating very much; but it troubled me to remember
the conversation at the literary parties at which he and I had occas–
ionally met. Here people talked about few books, perhaps, but the
books they talked about were the same: it was like the Middle Ages.
And-this was like the Middle Ages too-they seemed more interested
in the books' commentators than in the books; though when the
books were Great, this was not always so.
If
you talked about the
writings of some minor American novelist or short-story writer or
poet-by
minor,
here, I mean anybody but the immediately fashion–
able six or eight-your hearer's eyes began to tap their feet almost
before you had finished a sentence. (I have to admit that if you
talked about such writers' unfortunate lives, and not their unfortunate
writings, this didn't happen: lives, however minor, keep their primitive
appeal.) But if you talked about what the ten-thousandth best critic
in the country had just said, in the last magazine, about the next–
worse critic's analysis of
The Ambassadors,
their eyes shone, they did
not even interrupt you. There are few things more interesting to
