The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [66]
Because Blackmur begins with this wonderfully tendentious phrase about an amateur, it might be easy to mistake his meaning—until the reader plunges into the heart of his essay. “A Critic’s Job of Work” (the appealingly homely title is a bit misleading) speaks out in favor of Plato and Montaigne, of “imaginative skepticism and dramatic irony” that “keep the mind athletic and the spirit on the stretch,” and, wittily, of the “juvenescence of The Tempest,” and the “air almost of precocity of [G. B. Shaw’s] Back to Methuselah,”12 venerable texts about age that remain forever young. What Blackmur objects to is contemporary criticism that is “primarily concerned with the ulterior purposes of literature,” and here he cites three texts, all well reputed, that he thinks are pointing in the wrong direction for literary study: George Santayana’s essay on Lucretius, Van Wyck Brooks’s The Pilgrimage of Henry James, and Granville Hicks’s The Great Tradition. The problem with all three, however different they may seem, is that they are “concerned with the separable content of literature, with what may be said without consideration of its specific setting and apparition in a form; which is why, perhaps, all three leave literature so soon behind.”13
Remember that this is an essay from 1935. Its own juvenescence, if we may put it that way, seems considerable: “the ulterior purposes of literature,” “the separable content of literature,” and “leav[ing] … literature behind” are very contemporary concerns, as timely now as they were then.
“A Professional Writer”
Several years ago I wrote an essay about “The Amateur Professional and the Professional Amateur.”14 What I meant by “amateur professional” was someone who did not have specific training in a field but nonetheless had become a respected practitioner in it, like C. P. Snow, a scientist who wrote novels and cultural criticism, or Carl Djerassi, a chemist who writes plays, or Judge Richard Posner, who has written on law and literature. What I meant by “professional amateur” was someone who disavowed the status of professional in favor of the preferred role of amateur, gaining points by not being a professional: the book reviewer, the belletrist, the polymath, and the public intellectual. Two examples I cited from this category were Kenneth Burke and Edmund Wilson, both of whom wielded enormous critical clout and had a great influence on the literary field in the twentieth century.15 Wilson went to Princeton, became a highly regarded critic, and wrote books that influenced literary taste and judgment (several of which became classics on academic course curricula). Burke dropped out of Columbia to be a writer, became the editor of a little magazine, The Dial, and wrote highly influential works of literary criticism and philosophy. Neither was a traditional college professor.
Over time Edmund Wilson developed contempt for what he regarded as “academic pedantry,” and for the “PhD system” that produced and depended upon it—a system he thought ought to have been scrapped after World War I as a “German atrocity.”16 His gleeful animadversions against academia and the Modern Language Association, occasioned by a book series whose editorial practices he disapproved, were published in an article in The New York Review of Books (later republished as a separate booklet) and elicited a strong