23 MAY 1970, Page 15

Creative critic

HENRY TUBE inventory Michel Butor, edited by Richard Howard (Cape 42s) 42s) The Writing on the Wall Mary McCarthy (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 45s) The Situation of the Novel Bernard Bergonzi (Macmillan 55s) Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer Seymour Krim (Alan Ross 36s) Michel Butor is both novelist and critic. His work, like that of Jorge Luis Borges, is apt to abolish the artificial distinction between 'creative' and 'critical' writing, and is aimed as much at familiarising the new as at renew- ing the familiar. The study of Baudelaire, Histoire Extraordinaire, published here last year in a translation by Richard Howard, gave the English reader some idea of M Butor's remarkable way with the familiar, or at least the assimilated, and the present volume of essays, inventory, contains similar additions to Chateaubriand, Balzac, Verne, Proust, and Apollinaire. In these essays one seems not so much to stand in front of the works and receive a lecture, as to enter them in M Butor's company, and almost at the ex- press invitation of each dead master in ques- tion, when strange buddings and bloomings take place at one's feet. This is, of course, no more attributable to magic than are the original works, and our guide does not wish

us to think so : 'Very rare, in fact, are those who have read all of Balzac, which is however indispensable to a true ap- preciation.'

For M Butor has a clear message to im- part, addressed alike to reader, artist and critic: 'attention paid to what we usually take for granted reveals inexhaustible treasures', and more firmly still: 'Everything then is susceptible and subject to in- terpretation; nothing is any longer shielded from light or intelligence'. It is in this spirit that he treats, as well as the classic authors mentioned, fairy tales; science fiction; the novel; the music of Stravinsky and Boulez; and the paintings of Mondrian, Pollock and Rothko.

The exhilaration one feels as he patiently and lucidly notates not only the novel's technique, but its purpose and the way it works on the reader, is caused less by the treasures revealed than by the sense of inex- haustibility, of infinite possibility both in the works that have already been written and in those to come; and when, undeterred by the obscurantism with which specialists are apt to defend their little holdings in music or painting, he dispels the spectres of serialism and abstract expressionism, it is again to give one a feeling of buoyancy, as if we were only now just stringing the first lyre or chalking the first bison on the cave wall. The excellent translations of the essays in Inventory are by several hands and offer the English reader much the same experience as Rothko spoke of, apropos painting: 'A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.'

Mary McCarthy is herself, as critic, too much the sensitive observer to awaken in her reader that sense of shared creativity which is M Butor's special gift. Certainly, like him, she shields nothing from her in- telligence, but the pleasure and enlightenment one gets from The Writing on the Wall and other Literary Essays are less those of accom- panying a gardener, under whose hands things grow, than of one who names, clas- sifies, trims the hedges and edges and makes ruthless clearance of the weeds. Her pub- lishers had the imaginative idea of sending her book for review complete with the con- tents of the garden—a large cardboard box tied with yellow ribbon and containing, be- sides Miss McCarthy's handbook, many of the published weeds and flowers themselves.

Thus Salinger's Franny and Zooey came, as we learnt from the handbook, ripe for the

bonfire, while William Burroughs's Naked Lunch was not to be cast away, but not to be planted in front of the house either; it might perhaps join Orwell's Essays, Jour- nalism and Letters in the vegetable garden.

The best pieces in The Writing on the Wall are those which elucidate Nabokov's Pale Fire, Nathalie Sarraute's Between Life and Death and the novels of Ivy Compton. Burnett, all books which demand an eye as

searching as Miss McCarthy's and which— just because they are among the few works of our time which will outlive princes— have tended to be misunderstood or ignored by their contemporaries. The limitations of Miss McCarthy's someyihat downright clarity are evident in her approach to Mac- beth as a golf-playing general, with all that follows in interpreting the play. It is a per. iectly tenable view and the play can be pro. duced on these lines, as it was at Chiches- ter four years ago, but the effect of the essay is to constrict rather than expand its reader's imagination. Which is only to say that the time has passed when a single-track interpretation of Macbeth would do, and that Miss McCarthy is a critic who likes to have things tied up with yellow ribbon. For this reason she is perhaps at her most en. joyable when, having unerringly cut the heads off certain faiblesses de nos fours, whether those of Salinger, Sartre, de Beau- voir, or the critics of Hannah Arendt's book about Eichmann, she presents them be- ribboned and woebegone for the reader's admiring derision.

Exchanging the company above for that of Bernard Bergonzi in The Situation of the Novel is like coming in from a long walk in mountain air to a small stuffy room with most of the air excluded. In this room we find a 'liberal humanist' poring over certain English and North American novels, dismissing the French nouveau roman on the strength of Alain Robbe-Grillet's theoretical writings and two readings of his novel Jealousy (103 pages long in the English translation), paying lip service to Borges, but ignoring the rest of contemporary South American literature as he ignores Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Ivy Compton-Bur- nett, the Italians and, with the exception of a passing reference, Nabokov, and pronounc- ing in melancholy but polite tones that the novel reached the limit of its novelty with Joyce and Virginia Woolf and that the best we can do is to warm our hands over the embers of what was once a blaze.

Within the limits of this view, Mr Bergonzi does some justice to Anthony Powell and Nigel Dennis, and he rightly calls in question the somewhat facile ex- perimentation of John Barth and other North Americans, as well as that of our own seedier laboratory assistants; but one has an uneasy sense throughout that he is more at home with other critics than with, as it were, the original book of the critique, and that 'the novel' whose situation he elegises is only a sort of mist through which he fails to descry the things themselves. The problem is not that modern art is 'inhuman' or that it fails to communicate directly with the art of the past, but that Mr Bergonzi and his fellow tragedians (the word 'tragic' as used by Mon- drian is explained by his translator as denoting: 'everything opposed to the advent of the New Plasticise) are imprisoned by their 'humanism' in a desperately narrow and dogmatic concept of what is 'human'. Perhaps if Mr Bergonzi were to read Jealousy a third time . . .

Seymour Krim's essays in Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer record the ex- periences of an evidently nice, reasonable and intelligent man who fell among New York intellectuals, who climbed on a bandwagon and was jostled off under its wheels, who meaning to be a creative genius became a slick critic, and now coming to his senses tells all. The book is best read as they once heard travellers' tales, for New York, as Mr Krim describes it, does indeed seem to be a place where men walk without heads, or with their heads between their legs, where they eat each other and where strange gods (Mr Krim's is called Milton Klonsky) are worshipped with savage rites. Mr Krim declares that he is now safe and free and the reader heartily hopes so, since he is an engaging person, but there are dark in- timations that he associates freedom with the happy hippies. Surely our hero is not going to mount another bandwagon? If so, he will have to call his next book Views of a

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