Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 1382

Krim's main attack is upon the aesthetic and the publishing apparatus of American literary culture in our day.

Krim was able to get an advance for a novel, and time and opportunity to write at Yaddo, but it was no good.

`` I had natural sock '', he says, ' as a storyteller and was precociously good at description, dialogue, and most of the other staples of the fiction-writer's trade but I was bugged by a mammoth complex of thoughts and feelings that prevented me from doing more than just diddling the surface of sustained fiction-writing ''.

And again, `` how can you write when you haven't yet read ' Bartleby The Scrivener ' ''??

Krim came to believe that `` the novel as a form had outlived its vital meaning ''.

His `` articulate Jewish friends '' convinced him that education ( read `` reading '' ) was `` a must ''.

He moved in a `` highly intellectual '' group in Greenwich Village in the late forties, becoming `` internationalized '' overnight.

Then followed a period in which he wrote reviews for The New York Times Book Review, The Commonweal, Commentary, had a small piece in Partisan Review, and moved on to Hudson, The Village Voice, and Exodus.

The work for Commonweal was more satisfying than work for Commentary `` because of the staff's tiptoeing fear of making a booboo ''.

Commentary was a mere suburb of Partisan Review, the arch-enemy.

Both magazines were `` rigid with reactionary what-will-T. S. Eliot-or-Martin Buber-think??

fear.

'' Partisan has failed, Krim says, for being `` snob-clannish, overcerebral, Europeanish, aristocratically alienated '' from the U.S..

It was `` the creation of a monstrous historical period wherein it thought it had to synthesize literature and politics and avant-garde art of every kind with its writers crazily trying to outdo each other in Spenglerian inclusiveness.

'' Kenyon, Sewanee, and Hudson operated in an `` Anglo-Protestant New Critical chill '' ; ;

their example caused Krim and his friends to put on `` Englishy airs, affect all sorts of impressive scholarship and social-register unnaturalness in order to slip through their narrow transoms and get into their pages ''.

Qui s'excuse s'accuse, as the French Jewish intellectuals used to say.