Lace or Steel

In sum, the economics of publishing underlies all that we do in our several ways. Surely our desire and our ability to write, under whatever auspices, bring us closer together than our roles keep us apart. Why make distinctions, then, on whose window affords the largest, most ample view? Again, the house of fiction has many windows—and they are all made for seeing. LACE OR STEEL / Seymour Krim I seem to be an ex-everything, ex-satellite of the Partisan Review circle, ex-Beat Generation apologist, ex-New Journalist, and it is therefore fitting that I am also an ex-critic who is now a plain and simple reviewer. Let me explain. When I came of age in New York in the forties and fifties, literary status depended less on the sheerly imaginative and more on the knowing and analytical. The difficult standards erected by Pound, Eliot, Joyce, ef al. almost created a generation of scholars, even among those of us who wanted only to be lyrical prose writers in the American grain. That gritty lyricism was best found in the novel, but the kind of novel that I thought I wanted to write was not held in very high repute in the severe intellectual/literary climate in which I had to win friends and influence people. So I armed myself by easing into criticism in the hope that I would win the respect of my fellows and then be allowed to go about my true business—fiction. Of course, it never happened. I am now sixty and have yet to write my first novel. But I did become for a whUe an ambitious young critic who wrote for some of the better magazines of the period: Partisan Review, Hudson Review, Commonweal, Commentary, The New Leader, etc. I poured everything I had into these extended book reviews because this was the time when critical prose was examined with a microscope by one's peers. I wrote and rewrote my pieces as if I were trying to make lace out of the words. As everyone who was around then remembers, this was the time when a poet could tell me with a straight face (giving a macho finality to my metaphor about lace): "I write criticism Uke hammered steel." Lace or steel, we exhausted ourselves trying to make a high art out of criticism and, to my present way of thinking, distorted primary values because of the ingrown literary self-consciousness of the period. The poet was choking on his unfulfilled verse, and I was choking on the unwritten chapters of the great novels stuck in my craw, but we Richard Rupp THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 279 persisted in our crazed efforts because neither of us was strong enough to resist the cultural tides and retreat to our own inner bases. Nature put a stop to all this, however. Both of us cracked up. I came out of it with a series of blunt autobiographical pieces that people have been kind enough to call a kind of premature New Journalism, and the poet took a final swan-dive from a Greenwich Village roof. A period had ended. When I returned to regular writing about books in the early seventies, I wanted to have nothing to do with literary criticism in any exalted sense. Nor did I want to write for literary magazines. I was teaching at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop when the book editor of the Chicago Sun-Times contacted me to do a review of a novel by Hubert Selby, Jr. I stalled for several weeks, not knowing if I really wanted to return to what I remembered as a small, exaggerated world of great tension and frustration. But I finally did the piece—which led to many more. In time, I moved from the Sun-Times to the Chicago Tribune's Book World, then added Newsday, the Washington Post, the Detroit News and the Village Voice. Reviewing for newspapers became much more relaxed and enjoyable for me than writing for the small-circulation highbrow magazines, be they New Critical or liberal/left. I didn't try as hard to hit home runs and toned down my...