In 1955, the year of the founding of National Review, literature in its main branches — poetry, fiction, criticism — was flourishing. In American poetry, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings were still at work. In fiction, so, too, were Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright. In France, Albert Camus and André Malraux remained productive. In England, Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen and Barbara Pym were writing, and the year before, Kingsley Amis had won the Somerset Maugham Award for Lucky Jim. Internationally, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov had not yet quite hit their impressive strides. Randall Jarrell had earlier, in dismay, dubbed the 1950s “the Age of Criticism,” but some immensely powerful critics, among them Yvor Winters, William Empson, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Edmund Wilson, and Lionel Trilling, were on the job. Over the entire anglophone literary world strode T. S. Eliot, major modernist poet and a critic who stood in the direct line of Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold. For literature the good times were rolling.
When and why they stopped rolling are complex questions. That they have stopped, that we are in a less-than-rich period for literature today, cannot be doubted. Ask yourself whose next novel among living novelists you are eagerly awaiting. Name your three favorite living poets. Which contemporary critics do you most rely upon? If you feel you need more time to answer these questions — a long, slow fiscal quarter, say — not to worry, for I don’t have any impressive answers to these questions either. Recent years have been lean pickings for literature.
In 1955, not only highbrow but popular literature had a wider audience than it does now. Traveling on the subway or buses, or sitting in medical or dental offices, one noticed people reading the thick novels of James Michener or Grace Metalious, of Irving Stone or Mary Roberts Rinehart. (These same people are instead now diddling with their cellphones.) Ogden Nash’s light verse was widely known. People consulted newspaper review sections on what books to read. The readership for highbrow writing has, inevitably, always been less than widespread, but it was nonetheless reverently taught in universities, and taught for its own aesthetic and philosophical content, not, as much writing in universities is now taught, for political or social reasons. Dead white male authors had not yet been impaled on long feminist polemical swords.
Unlike the sciences, the arts do not march to the drum of progress. Art instead goes through high and low periods. Consider some of the high periods: In England, there were the Elizabethan playwrights, the Romantic poets, the great Victorian novelists. Nineteenth-century Russian fiction — Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Leskov, Chekhov — has never been eclipsed. France had its rich line extending from Balzac through Flaubert through Stendhal and ending in the genius of Marcel Proust. Sometimes the general culture of the society helps explain the efflorescence of literary talent, such as that of Renaissance Italy or Belle Époque France. But sometimes, as is the case in 19th-century Russia, with its French-imitating aristocracy and its slave- (or serf-) centered economy, it is a mystery still never adequately explained.
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