Cynthia Ozick

Iroquois—the mettle of his literary scrutiny, and his excavations into the meaning of culture, surpassed the scope of the academy. He was in it and yet seemed to loom somewhere

beyond it. Erudition enriched his thinking, but it was intuition more than learning that pressed his sentences forward from loop to loop. He was an intellectual who wanted to be an artist.

The eclipse of an artist can sometimes be reversed (Melville and Dickinson are the famous American examples);

the eclipse of an intellectual, almost never. When a society changes—and from generation to generation society always changes—art trumps time.

by contrast, are singularly chained to the mood and condition

Today there is a well-known critic celebrated for aesthetic rhapsody, and countless minor zealots enmeshed in the vines of ri-varous ideologies, from which too many English-department Tarzans swing. But there is no grand cultural explicator and doubter, no serious traveler to the most exalted, and often the most problematical, stations of art and ideas and manners, no public mind contemplating the transcendent through the gritty resistances of human vulnerability. Trilling was conscious of a complexity of earthbound ironies: he saw that despite the loftiness of one's will or desire, the gross and the immediate impose themselves.
"The kind of critical interest I am asking the literary intellectual to take in the life around him is a proper interest of the literary mind," he stated in 1952, in one of his more roundabout sentences, five years after he had stopped writing fiction. This was not the bright and malleable sentence of a fiction writer; it was the utterance of a figure. "Art," he ended, with his most Arnoldian gesture, "strange

Good-citizen writers, by contrast, year after year decline no summons, refuse no banquet, turn away from no tedium, willingly enter into every anecdote and brook the assault of any amplified band. They will put down their pens for a noodle pudding.

Their work will not be taken for work.

It may be that the little magazines no longer define themselves as uniformly as they once did because they cannot.

For a long time it hardly recognized itself for what it was, and was often confused with the magazine article—that shabby, team-driven, ugly, truncated, undeveloped, speedy, breezy, cheap thing.