Volume 5, Number 9 · December 9, 1965
Corrective Critic
By John Thompson
The Myth and the Powerhouse
by Philip Rahv
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 243 pp., $4.95
Most of the essays in Philip Rahv's new collection, The Myth and the Powerhouse, come from those uncherished years, the Fifties. In the small world of the advanced literary intellectual, as indeed in the larger worlds that suffer or contrive what we call history, it was not a happy decade: not tragic, to be sure, but dispirited, and dispiriting to think about. It was not a time of discovery but of defense, at home and abroad. Defense and consolidation are not congenial tasks for the type of mind that is happiest with the new, with discovery and analysis of ideas and feelings which by their very novelty or inaccessibility seem to require these activities. The new is food and drink to the advanced intellectual, but he can provide the new himself only in one way. He can register, make conscious, the mind of his time. He does not create that which he struggles to bring to consciousness.
Review, 1321 words
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