An American Critic

Extract

Mr Blackmur is an American critic of considerable reputation—to judge from this book, not undeserved. This is the first substantial work of his I have read: I knew him previously as an authority on Henry James’s Prefaces, which I thought he overrated as criticism. The frequent bracketing of them (as of equal critical interest) with Flaubert’s Letters is unfortunate: James’s greatness in criticism is more unequivocally manifest in the essays on French poets and novelists and in the book on Hawthorne. Mr Blackmur, however, himself shows (not always with happy results) the influence of the James of the Prefaces (and sometimes of other Jamesian manners: the autobiographical anecdote on page 9 is told in the style of A Small Boy and Others). His own virtues as a critic are a refreshing absence of the genteel kind of academicism and some powers of analysis of poetic effects—in which he shows the influence of Mr Empson. His general value-judgments and ascriptions of importance are not always to be trusted, and his critical tact (or ‘touch’) can be questionable, but we may usually expect intelligent and unexpected comments from him—though they sometimes are rather marginal. The characteristic vice of his writing is corrugation—unnecessary difficulty; he falls into ‘pseudo-botanical’ jargon of the kind D. FL Lawrence objected to, fails satisfactorily to tackle his themes or even, at times, to make them intelligible, and at his worst shows a peculiarly American kind of externality—a lack of inner understanding of the work, or the man, he is considering.