Volume 34, Number 8 · May 7, 1987
No Success Like Failure
By Michael Wood
Selected Essays of R.P. Blackmur
edited and with an introduction by Denis Donoghue
Ecco Press, 372 pp., $17.50
Wayward Skeptic: The Theories of R.P. Blackmur
by James T. Jones
University of Illinois Press, 216 pp., $24.95
R.P. Blackmur was much possessed by failure, by what René Wellek calls an insight into human insufficiency. Perhaps the most brilliant member of a brilliant generation of critics—he was born in 1904, died in 1965—Blackmur worried more than any of them over what can't be said, can't be faced, over the places in history and personal life where hope winds down and possibilities seem to die. 'We burn the last dry lifewood of the mind,' he wrote in a poem in 1945; but he was always doing that, and then finding life after all in the ashes. His criticism was, as Denis Donoghue has said, a way of postponing failure, but it was also a way of probing and celebrating it, of turning it into a distinctive glory. Blackmur wished he could show, 'clearly, self-evidently, and irrefutably,' how criticism resembles art.
Review, 4110 words
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