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Critic as Artist
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11131 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1993 |
2,705 Words |
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Walter Sullivan
Walter Sullivan, a novelist and literary critic, is professor
of English and director of the program in creative writing at
Vanderbilt University. His most recent novel is The War the
Women Lived: Voices From the Confederate South (1996). |
THE ASPECT OF ETERNITY
Bruce Bawer
Minneapolis: Graywolf, 1993
352 pp., $25.00
Bruce Bawer is a fugitive from the academic world, a Ph.D. in English who refuses to teach, and it is interesting to wonder what might have happened to him had he not gone straight. Here is a critic who knows good work when he sees it and knows how to say why it is good or bad. He writes with clarity and grace in words that any intelligent human being can understand. His essays are well organized, moving to judgment by means of concrete example. Even when you disagree with his conclusions, you are obliged to respect his opinions and appreciate the means by which he reached them.
As he indicates in his preface to the fifteen essays that make up The Aspect of Eternity, had he become a professor, this book would not exist. In order to advance in that profession, he would have been required to make his critical judgments conform to academic political fashion and to express them in jargon-ridden prose that his colleagues might or might not comprehend. Worst of all, his sense that the best literature contains an element of the transcendent, "the aspect of eternity," as he puts it in his title, would have been disallowed.
These essays began as book reviews--at least they were occasioned by the publication of a novel, or a biography or a reprinting of some of an author's major fiction--and they follow the same general pattern. Bawer tells us something about the writer's life, gives an overview of the writer's oeuvre, as Bawer prefers to call it, concentrating usually on a pivotal title, coming at last to an assessment of the author's work. But to say that these essays follow a common pattern is right in only the most general way. Bawer is not procrustean: He takes the path that he thinks will reveal most about the books to be considered.
The sins of the fathers
For example, Bawer believes that James Baldwin, Peter Matthiessen, Jean Stafford, and Graham Greene were influenced as writers by their relationships to their fathers. Baldwin's father was not the man who raised him, and the anguish thus engendered informed both Go Tell It on the Mountain and Baldwin's later, less successful work. Matthiessen's books that celebrate the primitive at the expense of the civilized, are, Bawer says, motivated by Matthiessen's dislike of his
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