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By David Gates
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At a time when people like Cynthia Ozick and John Updike are still going strong--as well as such younger critics as Albert Mobilio and Francine Prose--you won't catch me getting all elegiac over the decline of vigorous writing about books for intelligent general readers. But in the mid-20th century, this readership was proportionately larger--and so was a critic's stature. That's part of what gives "A Company of Readers," a book of previously uncollected essays by W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, its kick: they wrote as if they knew that lots of folks as smart as themselves were hanging on every word. Well, at least three such folks were: after writing their pieces, they sat and edited each other.
The poet and the Columbia professors--who, as Barzun, now 93, writes in a foreword, had "long forgotten our Ph.D.s"--made up the editorial board of two book clubs (the Reader's Subscription and the Mid-Century) from 1951 to 1963. These essays appeared in the clubs' publications. Auden (on Tolkien, Faulkner, etc.) and Barzun (on Lawrence, Proust, etc.) are their usual energetic, provocative selves. Barzun even proves prophetic: in 1958 he wrote of "the indigestible bulk of data that we collect about every patient and pupil, every applicant and every piece of business, every army post and every movie star... every fleeting opinion and every sexual fancy."
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But the star here is Trilling: whether writing on Kenneth Clark's "The Nude" or Ingmar Bergman's screenplays, he's ferocious but fair-minded, colloquial but commanding. And God, did he hate bum writing. When James Baldwin wrote in "Another Country" that the wind "nibbled delightedly" through a character's slacks, Trilling comments, "No, the wind did not, and nothing is gained by saying it did." He died in 1975, but if I said he lived on in these pages, I bet he'd tunnel up out of the grave to slap me around.
A Company of ReadersArthur Krystal, ed.
Free Press
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