Cleaning the Tools

obvious, the hackneyed, and the heavy as well as the apt and even the wise. The tone of the present discourse should seem neither censorious nor despairing. I should be gratified if these pages revealed a modicum of the comic sense. Comedy means, in the words of Anthony Burgess, "acceptance ... of the fundamental disparateness of all the elements of the world," a scene which "makes one, if not laugh, at least feel like laughing." CLEANING THE TOOLS / Ronald Hayman Describing the public function of literature in How to Read (1918), Ezra Pound wrote: "It has to do with the clarity and vigour of 'any and every' thought and opinion. It has to do with maintaining the very cleanness of the tools, the health of the very material of thought itself." TS. Eliot, writing in 1923 on "The Function of Criticism," argued that there is an unconscious community between the true artists of any time. They have a common inheritance and a common cause. Although criticism, he maintained, unlike creative writing, is always about something other than itself, the best critics are like the best creative writers in having a highly developed sense of fact, which is "something very slow to develop, and its complete development means perhaps the very pinnacle of civilisation." In the intervening sixty years, civilization seems to have slipped further away from that pinnacle. Although we have great writers among our contemporaries, literary values have been tarnished. Inferior cultural currency has driven much of the good out of circulation, while in the United Kingdom, the respect commanded by the intellectual is waning faster than it is in France or Germany. Some writers have the opportunity to reach a huge audience through television, whether by writing for it or by making themselves into "television personalities," but it has become unthinkable that a writer of such stature as TS. Eliot would try to exert influence on public taste by editing a monthly or quarterly magazine. The circulation of Eliot's Criterion was comparatively small, as was that of Edgell Rickword's Calendar ofModern Letters and that of Scrutiny, edited by F. R. and Q. D. Leavis with a couple of co-editors, but all three reviews played a major part in maintaining the "cleanness of the tools" and in fighting for the same cause as the best writers. Today it would be impossible for such a periodical to survive without a massive infusion of government subsidy, and although the Arts Robert B. Heilman The Missouri Review · 269 Council is committed by its Charter "to develop and improve the knowledge, understanding and practice of the arts," policy is determined by people who vigorously reject the view that it is only a small minority which is capable of responding fully to first-rate works of literature. Hostility to "elitism" is now so much more endemic than it was in the twenties that the relationship between the critic and the public has changed, while the gap between the critic and the reviewer has widened. In the book pages of the newspapers and weeklies, space is allocated according to the news value possessed by a book. A new novel by John Ie Carré will be sent to the most prestigious reviewers, who will be invited to treat it at considerable length. A book by a writer who is known mainly as a critic will have little news value, and since it will be treated as comparatively unimportant, it will—so far as the market is concerned— be comparatively unimportant, however important the statements that it makes. Gabriel Josipivoci is one of our more important critics, but not a single review of his 1982 book Writing and the Body appeared—even in such papers as The London Review of BooL· and The Times Literary Supplement—until several months after publication. Generally, of course, the literary standards are higher in these papers than in the newspapers, and the amount of space that can be given to individual books is greater, but the newspapers, which reach a wider public, naturally have more money to offer the reviewer, and to those who are trapped or tempted into working on the assumption that the main function of reviewing...