Volume 20, Number 21 & 22 · January 24, 1974
Prophets
By Christopher Ricks
Modern Heroism
by Roger Sale
University of California, 261 pp., $10.00
D.H. Lawrence
by Frank Kermode
Viking, 192 pp., $2.45 (paper)
Roger Sale is an independent critic because he looks for himself. He uses his eyes (and they are not glazed), and what he is looking for is himself: discovering his sense of being a certain person, with established but (if need be) changeable allegiances, convictions, impulses, and experiences. He has energy of judgment, he is modestly intrepid, and he can write with a proper polemical urgency. Yet Modern Heroism isn't altogether a good book; though the subject would seem to be made for him, there is too persistent a sense that Sale is making for it. 'Not so much an idea as a sort of magnetic field,' he says at once. But if there is one thing that so combative a critic can't risk being, it is disarming.
Review, 2616 words
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