Procrustes' Bed

Under the deft hand of J. D. McClatchy, the Yale Review has been as good as it was in the salad days of J. E. Palmer as editor. The latest issue contains some remarkable pieces of fiction and nonfiction. Martin Greenberg's "Concerning Hannah Arendt" is an essay that ranges from Schocken Books and translation to the Holocaust, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. It should change the judgment of many readers about Hannah Arendt: "she knew she was right" but was often devastatingly wrong. This carefully reasoned essay depends upon the cumulative force of various facts and the convincing argument arising from the weight of those facts, chiefly about the Jewish people in Europe and their Nazi oppressors.

The essays of Anthony Hecht (on Pope) and Louis Auchincloss (on the late fiction of James) are brilliantly succinct and sweeping—original criticism in a different vein than Greenberg's.

Jean Ross Justice's story "Bryan Dead" is as original in its right as a work of fiction as the essays are in theirs as nonfiction. She has another dazzling story in the latest Southwest Review, "The Two of Us." These stories, which explore the now well-worn subject of the dysfunctional family, reveal how it is possible to explore this kind of family from within without being tiresomely sociological and predictable.

The same issue of the Southwest Review contains an epistolary essay on boredom and the Hardy Boys—letters addressed to Franklin W. Dixon in a whimsical and droll vein. My recollection is that Dixon was but one of the pen-names taken by a one-man literary factory who wrote many series, including Nancy Drew. In any case I salute Ramsey Scott for his letters in response to boredom. My own exercises in a similar vein involved reading my way through a friend's copies of the Hardy Boys books (which the public library would not stock) as I was playing scales on the piano. My parents did not approve of the Hardy Boys any more than did the library board. Ah the trials of youth, ah the obstacles to reading when few people, especially parents, agreed with the enlightened view of Vermont Connecticut Royster's father reading anything is better than reading nothing.

Two of the most durable quarterlies founded soon after World War II are the Hudson Review, now in its fifty-ninth year, and the Georgia Review, which has celebrated its sixtieth anniversary in a double issue (fall/winter 2006). Over the past year the Hudson Review has published several substantial essays in criticism in addition to its usual lively fare by regular contributors such as Karen Wilkin on art, Richard Hornby on the theater (see especially his "History Plays"), R. S. Gwynn on poetry, Brian Phillips on fiction, and William H. Pritchard on literature in general. Pritchard's "Dryden Rules" and Hecht's "Alexander Pope" show that, despite the flagging interest of scholars in the eighteenth century, there is plenty of life in its great poetry. I want to mention Marcus Klein's essay on "The Turn of the Screw" and Michael Gorra's essay on Joseph Conrad, one of the best general essays on that writer since R. P. Warren's "'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo" was published in this magazine in 1951. Of the reviews Dean Flower's should be singled out: after writing engaging pieces on V. S. Pritchett and Alfred Hitchcock in the recent past he has forged an excellent account of recent work on Edmund Wilson, one that stresses the virtues of Lewis Dabney's biography. The most dazzling items of late in the Hudson are fiction: "My Brother Eli," perhaps the best of Joseph Epstein's many accomplished stories, and Bruce Ducker's "Findurman's News." The current issue (winter 2007) contains the items by Gorra, Klein, and Ducker; a superb piece by John Simon on the anecdote ("Short But Seldom Sweet"); and acute reviews by Pritchard, Gwynn, Mark Jarman, and others. Relish this opening salvo from "At the Galleries" by Karen Wilkin: "I find art world jargon morbidly fascinating, so a stylish young sculptor's...