Literary Conscience

THE EXPENSE OF GREATNESS--R. P. Blackmur--Arrow Editions ($3).

These 13 relentless, triple-chilled critical essays are not for easy readers. Critic Blackmur's key word is responsibility--the responsibility of a writer to be no less than excellent in both matter and manner. Always tortuously, often brilliantly, he applies his implacable test to great and near-great men: Hardy, Yeats, T. E. Lawrence, Melville, Henry Adams, Housman, Thomas Wolfe, others.

Melville, says steely Critic Blackmur, "habitually used words greatly," but was grievously limited to "putative statement" --to talking about dramatic intentions rather than embodying them. He was at his best in sermons, where the putative need not support itself. Emily Dickinson was pitifully irresponsible with words, too often wrote, instead of her extraordinary best, "a kind of vers de societe of the soul."

Thomas Wolfe's work is an "ailing overgrowth of superabundant sensibility"; he was "guilty of the heresy of expressive form: the belief . . . that life best expresses itself in art by duplicating its own confusion in the transferred form of the spectator's emotion." Products of the run of generally read novelists--Fabricius, Feuchtwanger, Cronin, Stribling, Lewis--are briefly dismissed, not for lack of interest or use, but "because they show little material for literary criticism to fasten on."

Such poets as Sandburg, Masters, Riding are brutally panned; kindlier treated are Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, Euripides and his translators Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. Housman was no great minor poet; he was a man obsessed by an adolescent sense of death, with a knack for popular expression of it. Yeats used magic as Dante used Catholicism, as the spine or frame that great poetry needs. But T. E. Lawrence exemplifies the desperation, the brilliance, the failure, of the man of genius who can find no frame.

Of Henry Adams, New Englander Blackmur writes almost with worship, as one of the more cruelly responsible of men. His lifelong, conscience-driven groping toward a conception of unity could end in only one thing: "Death is the expense of life and failure is the expense of greatness." But "for Adams, as for everyone, the principle of unity carried to failure showed the most value by the way, and the value was worth the expense."

Blackmur's rigorousness is hard to take straight. Like a literary Cotton Mather, he burdens the creative conscience with almost more than it should bear, forgets that creation is a shade more to the point than anything that can be said about it. But it is through such painful filters as his that excellence is passed uninfected from generation to generation.

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