Arts and Letters

He seemed to come from another time, another place. But which time, which place?

On the face of it, Louis Kronenberger did just about all the things American literary people do or have to do. He worked for years as a reviewer at Time and PM, neither of which may strike us as quite the ideal place for a serious writer. He compiled anthologies. He wrote for semi-popular magazines. He became a professor, though I'm reasonably sure that for him, as for others among us, that wasn't an ideal solution. Yet what strikes one as most remarkable about Louis Kronenberger is that none of these ways of living, or earning a living, within our culture affected him very deeply. He satisfied the demands made upon him by circumstances, but they were not the defining conditions of his life or work. The career he made, the image he projected, the memories he left were his own, never in fashion, the products of a solitary mind.

When I first met Louis Kronenberger some thirty-four years ago, I felt that I was brushing past a survivor from the 1920s. In crucial respects, that is indeed what he was. The man bore himself with an ease, a spontaneous generosity, a pleasing lightness that one could hardly associate with the literary people likely to be encountered in New York during the thirties and forties and fifties. He wrote and spoke about literature with a breadth of reference I have rarely encountered among professors taken to be scholars; but never with any lapses into jargon or claims to Method or other heavinesses. Literature for him was a mode of play, as it had been for many writers of the twenties, and this, far from being frivolous, was the evidence of a deep seriousness, a pleasure in surface, form, shape, tone. At the time I really couldn't appreciate the value of his differences from the Partisaners and Kenyonites. He was reasonably, though not excessively, respectful toward them, but he staked out a claim for his own kind of writing, which was the sophisticated appreciation of the man of letters. Not many of the New York writers, except for a few friends like Lionel Trilling and somewhat later myself, were ready to accord him an equivalent honor. They were literary-political intellectuals; he was a citizen in the republic of letters; and while there is place and room for both, we ought not to evade the differences.

If part of Louis came from the twenties—a time which I, like others who did not experience it, would take to be more generous in spirit, freer in being, than the decades of my own maturity—another part of him, perhaps a deeper part, came from elsewhere. Every writer makes for himself an imagined or created self, looks at this fragile creature with amusement, skepticism, and regard, and knows that, if not he, it is something he cannot exist without. For Louis, this imagined or created self came from the eighteenth century, which he knew, loved, and wrote about brilliantly. This was the home of his imagination, the "other place."

Louis would have enjoyed sitting about with Augustan wits; had Dr. Johnson said to him, "Sir…," those bright eyes of his would have gleamed; he would have been stimulated by exchanging letters with Lady Mary Montagu; he would have adored hearing Pope do a string of heroic couplets. For if Louis as a child of the twenties had a keen feeling for literature as play, so as a spirit that had attached itself to the eighteenth century he had a keen affection for literature as artifice, shining surface, brilliant phrasing. Everything our age, our students dismiss as "artificial" he knew to be part of the seriousness of literature.

So he wasn't quite of our time; but then he was too. He had to be. His own prose has sometimes been described as an imitation of Augustan prose, but that doesn't strike me as accurate. His style is a twentieth century style drawing upon eighteenth century models; his sentences are more nervous and rapid, less securely weighted than the sentences of, say, Dr. Johnson. What he made for himself was a personal style in which the tensing of balanced clauses, the stripping of elaborate syntax, the conscious playing with epigram became one way of responding to our own moment. That way is of a writer not quite at home in his time but knowing that, nevertheless, he must live there; a writer establishing a distance from his moment but granting it all due rights and powers.

He was a writer of many modes and genres, from essay to memoir to comic fiction to informal history, and in all of these he mastered the discrimination of historical sensibility, the location of individual style, the appreciation of neglected talent. He liked the word "appreciate," though he bridled at the contemporary notion that to appreciate a masterpiece is somehow less worthy than to take it apart or do it in.

Finally there was no place for him; no place, I mean, where he could feel entirely comfortable and blossom to the fullest. Our culture demands set molds, fixed positions, and in his quiet way, without any declarations of rebellion, he resisted.

Succumbing to no school and joining no clique, he does not figure much in our standard histories of modern criticism. But he wrote with a fine and easy learning, free of that small-minded grubbiness which mars so much of academic literary life. He wrote in such books as Kings and Desperate Men, The Republic of Letters, The Thread of Laughter, as if we did not live in a time of sectarianism and ideology, as if to read with care and pleasure were a sufficient method for a well-stocked, supple mind. Reading through his books one finds gleaming sentences, shafts of intuition, and I take pleasure in quoting just a few:

On Fielding: "His view of the world rings true, not because it is profound, but because it is empirical. Fielding, with his deep distaste for hypocrisy, is one of those novelists much better able to detect lies than discover truth. Richardson is of exactly the opposite party; his whole universe is a lie, but he discovers truth…."

On Congreve: "The marriage scene between Millamant and Mirabel is so supremely witty and delightful as mere banter that we almost fail to notice the quite realistic basis of the bargaining. We are so pleased with Millamant's remark about how she 'may dwindle into a wife' that we may miss the point of her conditions—which are plainly made that their marriage may not stagnate into a farce or deteriorate into a failure. Congreve, like other masters of high comedy, employs a kind of paradox—suggests the tarnish of life through the glitter, the lees through the froth, the clouds and shadows through the moment—the all-too-passing moment—of sunshine."

On Wilde: "There are things and people that have the charm of not being easily compared to other things and people; and about which the question, 'Has this importance?' is quite irrelevant. The proper question is simply, 'Has this distinction?' The Importance of Being Earnest quite lacks importance, but it has distinction. In the end, it must come off rather as a triumph of manner than of wit; otherwise it becomes mere farce-comedy, mere sandpapered Gilbert, which is how Shaw reviewed…. But then it is not Shaw's kind of trifling; carving cherrystones is no sport for a man whose métier is smashing idols. And that the point of a play should be its utter lack of point is the one point that no Shaw could ever grasp."

And on Shaw: "He had a little of Dr. Johnson's way of taking one side of any argument as quickly as the other, from the feeling that he could handle both sides equally well. And Shaw, rather than Dr. Johnson, had a real ability to see both sides of any argument, and a real compulsion to criticize the one by the other."

It's customary at the end of such tributes to affirm bravely that the work of our author will survive. I don't know whether Louis Kronenberger's work will live beyond our moment. Very little of literary criticism ever does, or needs to. What matters is that the critic should help preserve the continuity of that life of imagination and mind we rather lamely designate as "the tradition"—preserve it through revolt and acceptance, modulation and return. Critics are secondary actors without whom, however, the play might not be able to go on. Louis Kronenberger—a modest and gentle man, a kind and amusing and clever man—helped, for some of us, to keep the play going. Given the script provided by our time, this was an achievement for which he merits our thanks.