Arts and Letters

Common sense in Joseph Wood Krutch was something both subtle and massive. During the fifty-five years that I knew him and felt him to be my closest friend I encountered in no other man the combination of wit and wisdom which I now recognize as having been unique in him. His wit, we all agreed, was incessant; and it took many forms. He was the best story-teller we ever hoped to know—the briefest, the funniest, and the most memorable; for his stories had depth as well as point, humanity as well as humor, so that they stayed with us even as his voice did; and they still do. Yet they were only one of the shapes that wit took on in him. In his prose there was the epigram, the sudden saying, with which he ended many a paragraph in such a way as to suggest that here, come to think of it, was the truth he had been pursuing all along, and so, as Falstaff might have said, and once did say, "No more words." Joe Krutch, however, loved words as few men have; his talk was an endless delight, forever in and out of seriousness, forever light as well as strong. He was the only man of my acquaintance who always spoke in perfect sentences, which may sound deadly, but the fact is otherwise, for he was never dull. His prose, written or spoken, was the utterance of a man whose mind gave him the kind of pleasure that minds were created to give: the pleasure of exercise, use, and delight—I use the word again because it best expresses the temper of a man who put love and joy above all other satisfactions, and who, though he passed for a pessimist—but I should say, because he passed for a pessimist, and was indeed one—was continually discovering life to be better than he had thought it would be, so that his days were both black and bright, both hopeless and triumphant. This was what made him such good company: we never knew what he would be feeling next, and perhaps he didn't either.

Much has been made, since his death last May, of the two careers he seems to have had. I say "seems," because the two in my opinion are so closely connected as to look and sound like one career after all. It is true that until some point in the 1940s he was wholly occupied with literary and dramatic criticism; he lived in or near New York, he was a professor of English at Columbia, and he wrote among other books a masterly life of Samuel Johnson, for whose genius he felt an affinity that qualified him to walk with confidence where Boswell had walked before. It is one of the most charming books in English; and its subject is a man who never willingly left the metropolis with which every thought we have of him is identified. But not long after this, its author published a biography of Thoreau, and with that biography turned his attention entirely away from cities, theaters, universities, and crowds. Soon he was living in Arizona, where he went at first for relief from asthma, but where he and Marcelle happily stayed. The desert now became his subject and his love: not only the desert, but the whole world of nature which opened itself to him in an ever-enlarging vision. And there are those who say of him that thus he became a different man from the one whose Samuel Johnson and The Modern Temper had meant so much to so many readers. But just as many readers were to find as much meaning in the series of books that henceforth he wrote in order to reveal what for him were precious secrets buried in the sand or blazing in the sun. The same sensible man was speaking in these books, and speaking as time went on with a special urgency because he feared that certain of these secrets might not be disclosed in time. He was one of the first ecologists: one of the first to say that we of earth may possibly destroy ourselves. His death is mourned by a generation of men who heard in his voice the deep good sense that an earlier generation had heard when the subject, though not the mind that handled it, was altogether different. It is the mind that matters: a beautiful mind, serious and playful by turns, but never to be forgotten by those who lived in its presence.