Word: critics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...think we should run things." Says Ray Heffner, president of Brown University: "The university must not be aloof from the most pressing problems of our time. And yet the university cannot be so committed to transforming society along definite lines that it loses its function as objective analyst and critic of society...
...opponents, his long refusal to endorse Humphrey after the Vice President won the nomination, or his peculiar reaction to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia as something one should not get excited about? It has the elements of deep fiction or psychological drama, so perhaps it is fitting that two critic-novelists think that they have found the answers...
...Burgess is the Elizabethan prodigality of creation. Plots, passions and persons hatch in his brooding skull, and it is a matter of wonder only that he has brought so many gaudy fictional chickens home to roost. It seems almost too much that Burgess should also be so good a critic, because the cliché of legend demands that a critic, however good, is by nature a failed creator...
Novelist Burgess's principal credential as critic is one that should be essential. He loves the language. Many critics profess to do so as a man will say he "loves children," but the truth of such claims can be tested by the question: how often is he seen playing with children? Like Joyce, Burgess loves to play with words, the greatest of toys allowed to grown men. English is not enough; he can play in Russian, German, Spanish and Malay, and this gives him the insight of a craft-brother to a hundred writers who have little in common...
Bloody Arrogance. Burgess is opposed to the kind of critic who "mistakes the parade of prejudice for objective appraisal." The latter type has three awful exemplars in Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne, who recently collaborated on a book called Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without. As the selections begin with Beowulf, and include such dispensable works as Hamlet, Pilgrim's Progress, the poetry of Hopkins and Eliot, it is clear that the three iconoclasts are prepared to do without a great deal that Burgess is not. The essay in which Burgess puts...