Volume 26, Number 15 · October 11, 1979
Hard Marker
By Victor Brombert
In response to Secrets of the Shell
(June 28, 1979)
To the Editors
Gore Vidal's reference to The Novels of Flaubert (1966) in his review of V.S. Pritchett's The Myth Makers (NYR, June 28) involves a quotation from Pritchett's twelve-year-old review of my book (taken out of context), as well as Vidal's own use of the quotation to launch a violent attack on American "literary criticism." I assume that Vidal has not read my book. He accepts at face value Pritchett's observations on my use of language, but does not report that Pritchett's essay is in fact almost exclusively devoted to my book, extensively draws on the ideas developed in it, paraphrases my arguments, approves of them.
But there is a more serious distortion. Vidal praises Pritchett for not only writing "intelligently" about Flaubert, which "does not take much critical acumen," but for saying "something new about him," which "does take considerable intelligence." As evidence of this newness, Vidal quotes Pritchett ("Flaubert presented the hunger for the future, the course of ardent longings and violent desires that rise from the sensual, the horrible, and the sadistic"). Only he fails to quote Pritchett's fuller statement: "… proceeding through the novels, Professor Brombert is able to show how, exhaustively and like an infected pathologist, Flaubert presented the hunger for the future, the course of ardent longings and violent desires that rise from the sensual, the horrible, and the sadistic."
Gore Vidal, in his review, states that the first job of the critic is to "describe what he has read." This is a precept he obviously chose not to follow in his excessive eagerness to discredit American academic criticism.
Victor Brombert
Department of Comparative Literature
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
