This selection of pieces written between 1962 and 1967 is in one sense a sequel to Puzzles and Epiphanies, which collected work from the three years before that. But although it occasionally takes up the same subjects it does seem to me a very different kind of collection. Whereas the earlier book was said to have a family resemblance to Romantic Image, a more speculative work of 1957, this one will undoubtedly be seen to take after another more solemn cousin, The Sense of an Ending (1967). It is called Continuities because it often returns to the cultural problem of schism and continuity, words which I picked up from V. W. Turner’s Schism and Continuity in an African Society. I lacked the nerve or folly to call the book Schisms and Continuities, and anyway am more in favour of continuities than of schisms.
Choosing what to include in a volume of this sort is not easy, and friends are usually astonished at what is put in and left out. For example, I wanted to include two pieces on Marshall McLuhan and also a long television conversation I did with him in January 1965 which was never broadcast because the B.B.C. thought it would be unintelligible. Now every schoolboy could understand it, which is why I decided not to have it in. And so with the other pieces, although I am not convinced that their objections to McLuhanism are quite obsolete. Sometimes one leaves in a rather old-fashioned piece out of affection, as here with the Dowson essay, and leaves out perhaps better things. The Dante essays ends the volume because it represents, for me, only, a sort of end, a sort of beginning.
Incidentally, this does not mean that I regard the kind of criticism here reprinted as anything but serious, though the level of seriousness varies a bit; and when I find it subjected to routine academic censure I find myself wondering whether the complainant is not one of those who might himself benefit from its peculiar discipline, and occasionally pass on the benefit to his pupils in graduate school, where it is not always easy to distinguish the solemn from the barbaric. Good literary journalism is valuable and rare. It would be too much to assert that it has only ‘genius, wit and taste to recommend’ it, but to dismiss it as irremediably ephemeral, and at the same time to promote the preservation of the average doctoral dissertation, is to fall into what could very well be named ‘the common cant.’
Here I refer, of course, to this kind of work, not to the present book, which is for the reader to judge; I am only saying that the genre is more than respectable. The essay on Edmund Wilson tries to use the example of a great critic to state this more explicitly. Wilson can deal justly with other writers without neglecting the meditative movement of his own mind, and he can satisfy, without loss of intellectual integrity, the non-specialist’s urgent and entirely proper demand for amenity of exposition and fine texture. This is the kind of journalism I call valuable and rare. It is rare not because those who could easily do it have better things to do, but because it is more demanding than most of what passes for scholarship. It calls incessantly for mental activity, fresh information, and civility into the bargain. Of course I agree that they do not always come.
The pieces here collected appeared first in the New Statesman (Liii, II, in, VI, VII, X, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XXI, i and ii, XXII, i, XXIH, XXIV, XXV); the New York Review of Books (IV, XII, XIV, XVII, ii, XX); Encounter (Li, I.ii, part of IX, XI, i); Sewanee Review (VIII, X), Book Week (XI, ii) and Atlantic Monthly (XXII, ii). To the editors of these periodicals I offer my gratitude for their help, and for their permission to reprint. Parts of the long essay on Lawrence, and parts of the ‘Afterthoughts on Wallace Stevens’ were included in a series of Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in 1967, and, attenuated as they are, must represent my gratitude to Clifford Leech and my other Toronto hosts.