Volume 26, Number 15 · October 11, 1979
Hard Marker
By Irving Younger
In response to Secrets of the Shell
(June 28, 1979)
To the Editors:
Justly praising V.S. Pritchett's easy comprehension of writers very different from himself, Mr. Gore Vidal congratulates Pritchett upon his well developed "negative capability." The famous phrase does not signify what Vidal seems to think.
"I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects," wrote Keats to his brothers George and Tom in December 1817. "Several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
Then "negative capability" means the ability to contemplate with equanimity questions to which there are no answers. Pritchett may have it, but Gore Vidal was talking about something else.
Irving Younger
The Cornell Law School, Ithaca, New York
