an excerpt of

         Tradecraft*

While everyone else at the conference was heading off for the National Gallery or the Phillips Collection, I went to the International Spy Museum. This, I found, was just my cup of tea. At dinner later, the editor of this journal challenged me to write a review using what I had learned. No problem, I thought, knowing, as I do, that reviewing poetry is akin to spying in more ways than one.
For example, when you review, you probably know next to nothing about the writer’s life, and so each poem brings with it little clues that you have to piece together. And, though the poems do not add up to a life, they do usually add up to a vision. And what’s a good spy to do but try to ferret out that vision . . . to read for a larger picture by amassing and interpreting the evidence . . . to read between the lines?
Still, that’s only one paragraph’s worth of connection (and hardly very original in its observations about the art of reviewing), so, to meet my challenge, I feel compelled to think of other ways that spying can elucidate the role of the reviewer.
As I wound my way through the museum’s display of decades of deception, the array of special gadgets intrigued me (pun intended). How quickly the cameras hidden in cigarette packs or penlights, the tape-recording devices tucked into briefcases, the James Bond–type automobiles, have come to look like antiquated tools of the trade. The business has all gone cyber now. Which means that spying, retreating from the arena of dead drops and brush passes, has gone more into the realm of analysis, forcing the good spy to act, well, a bit more like a literary critic.
I found myself a bit envious of those spies who held fast to whatever it was that made them choose the job in the first place. They knew what they were doing—and why. When caught, they steadfastly defended their innocence to the end—Julius Rosenberg, Alger Hiss—or else proudly claimed their duplicity—Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess. When I was growing up in the 1950s, it was a given in my household that Rosenberg and Hiss were framed. Their innocence was so incontrovertible in my father’s mind that, when I began to question it after some of my reading in college, I was persona non grata for an entire summer. Now, on the wall of the museum before me, there was a reproduction of the Venona files with the code names of those men big as life, their guilt confirmed with reasonable authority. My father had failed the first test of a good reviewer—having an open mind, a willingness to conceive of alternatives. His particular brand of idealism had clouded his ability to face the facts.
Less enviable, but more interesting, were the turncoats. Double agents, by definition, have to be malleable, play both ends against the middle. Yet how much fun I had watching a video about how difficult it was to set the traps that eventually coughed up Aldrich Ames as the mole in the CIA. He—it’s clear—knew what it was to be fluid, to be alert to circumstance. In literary terms, one might call this negative capability—and certainly it involved a willingness to consider new perspectives, to diminish cause in favor of causality. But honestly, do we want our reviewers to be the equivalent of traitors? Don’t they need to hold firm to some standards of their own?

So . . . with that question ringing, I turned to my latest reading of contemporary poetry, but not without first taking a long walk, occasionally looking over my shoulder to test whether I was being followed! At each park bench, I tried to throw “them” off the trail by reading Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence by Sydney Janet Kaplan, professor of English at the University of Washington. In her introductory chapter, Kaplan—the author of an earlier book on Mansfield and the origins of modernist fiction—reveals to me just why she would make a good spy: she admits that she had previously taken up the negative attitudes expressed by Mansfield and Lawrence and had tended to buy the literary world’s dismissal of Murry. (“For years I had been so absorbed in Katherine Mansfield’s writing that I had not interrogated her reactions to Murry sufficiently.”) But Murry’s journals, when finally made public, revealed to Kaplan a character far different from her preconceptions—and her new look at some of the important figures in modernism, including Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, is the product of a critic’s ability to change course.
Far from being stuck with outmoded tools of the trade, Kaplan resurrects a hybrid literary criticism that takes into account personality, psychology, and historical circumstance, but she also employs the best methods of New Criticism even as she understands both the uses and abuses of the tenets of contemporary theories. Ideology clouds, while standards illuminate. Thus, Kaplan’s method reminds us that the critic’s objective might be to be a triple agent—aware of his or her own values within that element of adaptability; able, while in the enemy camp, to keep in mind the final goal: assessment, import, consequence. She serves as a model for those of us who might have hardened into one way of thinking, one set of attitudes or a single taste:

Behind [this book] lurks the more general question of how literature is produced: out of which conjunctions of outward circumstance and inward necessity? And, in turn, the questions of how literature itself produces changed lives, and how the lives shaped by fiction shape again the lives of their producers, and finally, of those who circulate their ideas, and their lives.

To top it off, as in any good spy story, Kaplan’s “reading” of the lives of these important figures through their books (and vice versa) leads her to exciting revelations, and hers is a book that should be on the shelves of all university libraries—not only for its content, but for its reminder that a questioning and receptive mind should be the aim of all who read and teach.
But, if the critic’s mind is too open, how can he or she form an independent opinion? And isn’t that what the job requires? There is always a crucial moment in which the good spy is expected to assess the information at hand and to come, if not to a conclusion, then at least to a sense of probable outcome—and then to act. Knowing is not enough; a spy must be able to convey the knowledge, to complete the assignment and deliver. Mission accomplished. . . .

____
*An essay-review of

The Broken Word. By Adam Foulds. New York: Penguin Books, 2011. 63 pp. $16.00, paper.

Horse and Rider. By Melissa Range. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2010. 69 pp. $21.95.

We Don't Know We Don't Know. By Nick Lantz. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2010. 79 pp. $15.00, paper.

Vinculum. By Alice Friman. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. 89 pp. $17.95, paper.