Volume 15, Number 3 · August 13, 1970
Critical List
By Frank Kermode
Literature and the Sixth Sense
by Philip Rahv
Houghton Mifflin, 445 pp., $10.00
The Writing on the Wall
by Mary McCarthy
Harcourt, Brace & World, 213 pp., $6.75
The first of these books is a retrospective of some completeness, and contains all the literary criticism the author wants to preserve except for some work on Dostoevsky, which he is saving for a book devoted to that author. The second, consisting of essays written over the last seven years of thereabouts, is a different kind of show. Of the first we are bound to ask not only how the earlier work has kept, how it looks beside the later, but also what kind of a personality the whole thing testifies to—whether, allowing for change with the years, we can hear one voice and read one mind. And in this sense we are asking a lot more of the first book than of the second. We are judging not the skill and utility of this piece or that, but the authority and the authenticity of a life.
Review, 3416 words
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