Books: Classic Propaganda

THE MARCH OF LITERATURE — Ford Madox Ford—Dial ($3.75).

ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE—John Cowper Powys—Simon & Schuster ($3.75).

Distaste for the literary classics is an inhibition commonly traced to English teachers. Cures are rare. On the contrary, the psychosis is likely to be aggravated by stuffed-shirt critics, lecturers, anthologists, Five Foot Shelves. An accidental cure sometimes occurs when a reader stumbles on to a first-rate modern critic, who illuminates the classics with insight and imagination while advising the reader to follow his own reason, draw his own conclusions. An honest reader, if he believes that Shakespeare is junk, and can say why, does the cause of great literature less harm than the snobbish or timid who pretend to like writers who really bore them to death.

To hammer home this thought, two impassioned English oldsters—Powys is 66, Ford 65—give their best to prove to common readers that the classics are good reading. Both are concerned with the literary rather than the biographical aspect of their subjects, both agree on their main admirations: Homer, Shakespeare, the Bible, the Greek tragedies, Dostoyevsky; neither has much use for the scientific and political spirit of contemporary letters.

But if Powys and Ford belong to the same genus of bookworm, their appetites differ in numerous details. Ford Madox Ford, “an old man mad about writing,” prefers his classical diet served with French sauce (“the Mediterranean as against the Nordic tradition”); his main concern is with “fine”‘ writing, literary form. Lively, rambling, witty, he is at his best in picking out single quotations; at his worst when he strays beyond “pure” literature, as when he declares Dostoyevsky to be “the greatest single influence on the world of today.”

More conventional in his choice of genius, John Cowper Powys finds no difficulty in swallowing Nietzsche, Milton, Poe, Dickens, Proust, all at one gulp. Of all literary “appreciations” his are the most fulsome, the most ardent, the most consciously designed to engulf readers with a vicarious sense of cosmic genius. And hence Powys’ book is the more likely to be read, since, like Durant’s Story of Philosophy, it enables readers to enjoy the classics without reading them.