Volume 2, Number 11 · July 9, 1964
Lettuce and Tomatoes
By Philip Rahv
A Piece of Lettuce: Personal Essays on Books, Beliefs, American Places, and Growing Up in a Strange Country
by George P. Elliott
Random House, 370 pp., $4.95
Waiting for the End
by Leslie A. Fielder
Stein & Day, 256 pp., $5.95
These two new works of criticism, dealing mainly with the American literary experience, make a startling contrast. Elliott, who has published fiction and poetry, is not a professional critic, but in so far as he ventures into criticism (mixing it, in some parts of his book, with personal reminiscences and asides that are much to the point), his writing is sensible, modest, pertinent, and for the most part reliable in judgment. He does have something definite to say on every subject he tackles—whether it be Raymond Chandler or Ezra Pound, George Orwell, or Henry Miller—and he says it as plainly as he knows how; and where one cannot agree with him the grounds of disagreement are clear, as in the essay on Dante in which the critical argument is weakened by pledges of faith too tenuous to be redeemed and gratuitous besides. He is remarkable, however, among latter-day literary men, for affecting few mannerisms and refraining altogether from straining for that facile and fashionable brilliance of phrase and reference to which we have recently become, if not accustomed exactly, then surely indurated. Elliott is still old-fashioned enough to be concerned with the sensibility of the common reader and with the virtues of plain prose. Quite alien to him is the ambition to dazzle with an impression of virtuosity, an impression more often than not deceptive because so largely derived from the kind of manic verbalization nowadays widely confused with excellence of style.
Review, 2269 words
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