Michael Dirda

When a critic ventures into fiction, the results are unpredictable.

HERE & ELSEWHERE

The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Burke

Black Sparrow/Godine. 415 pp. Paperback, $22.95

Would you rather be a critic or a novelist? Even the most influential arbiters of taste and the finest literary scholars recognize that their work is basically secondary and ephemeral. Oh, contemporary practitioners of "theory" may swagger across the quad, wearing their Big Man on Campus sweatshirts and smiling beneficently at besotted acolytes and epigoni, but it's all show. Long ago, as slightly disdainful graduate students, they skimmed through bound issues of the Partisan or Kenyon Review and in those tattered pages glimpsed their fate: Who now reads, let alone reveres, the critical essays of William Troy or Christopher Caudwell? Who under 40 recognizes the name of Philip Rahv? Art can be long, but criticism is usually very brief indeed.

Knowing this, sooner or later, men and women of letters nearly always try their hands at fiction. And so, if you consult the various bibliographies, you will find listed Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey , George Steiner's The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. , Harold Bloom's The Flight to Lucifer , Edmund Wilson's I Thought of Daisy and Memoirs of Hecate County , Leslie Fiedler's Nude Croquet and Susan Sontag's highly touted but already half-forgotten novels of ideas. Some of these books possess real merit (the Trilling and Wilson, in particular), but all are kept alive, or rather half-alive, by artificial means, usually the devotion of aging friends and former students. At best, they might be called period pieces, though most seem mere oddities, by-blows, memorials to the critic's secret dream.

Such would appear to be the fate of Kenneth Burke and his fiction, which includes the novel Towards a Better Life (1932) and the collection The White Oxen and Other Stories (1924). Both books have been reprinted in the past (the latter with a few supplemental stories), but neither seems to have ever found much of a readership. As they have had no apparent influence on American literary history, their chief interest must rest on one of two possibilities: Either they are truly undervalued works that deserve our attention, or they are interesting because they were written by Kenneth Burke.

But who is Kenneth Burke? Once I would have answered: a brilliant and wide-ranging practical critic who became, like others before him, the victim of an increasingly elaborate, largely unread and often unreadable theoretical masterwork. Yet in his youth Burke could deftly unpack the "rhetoric" of Hitler's Mein Kampf or thrillingly explore the sexual symbolism and psychology of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." Even in later years, he might produce the occasional tour de force, such as a detailed explication of the first three chapters of Genesis or an eye-opening reading of Augustine's Confessions .

But Burke's real energies were always engaged in big projects: First there was Attitudes Toward History (once described to the poet Howard Nemerov as "two mouse-gray volumes containing all knowledge"), though this itself was soon dwarfed by a trilogy: A Grammar of Motives , A Rhetoric of Motives and the never published but apparently completed A Symbolic of Motives . In my own college days, I read a lot of the early Burke -- he was praised to high heaven by Stanley Edgar Hyman in The Armed Vision , a study of contemporary critics circa 1955 -- and I dutifully worked my way through the first 40 or 50 pages of A Grammar of Motives before giving up. The theory of "dramatism" seemed to combine linguistics, Erving Goffman-like interpretations of both art and social interaction, and a whole lot that I couldn't follow.

Burke died at age 96 in 1993, clearly the dean of American literary criticism (although his lifelong friend the more journalistic Malcolm Cowley lived nearly as long). But to Burke's good fortune, literary studies began to metamorphose in his later years, and his books were reprinted, then eagerly reread, as he found himself viewed, for better or worse, as a founding father of cultural studies. Perhaps it was even more gratifying when the eminent scholar Denis Donoghue championed Towards a Better Life , naming Burke's novel as one of the three books he himself would most like to have written (the others were Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno and Robert K. Merton's winsome work of "Shandean" scholarship, On the Shoulders of Giants ). As a result, Burke's novel is now again available, in a handsome trade paperback containing his complete fiction.

It opens wonderfully: "I had become convinced that, by the exercise of the intelligence, life could be made much simpler and art correspondingly complex; that any intensity of living could be subdued beneath the melancholy of letters." That grave, somewhat costive melodiousness persists for nearly 200 pages. The sentences fall like a succession of aphorisms, reminiscent of Emerson's hammer-like prose, their clauses as carefully balanced as heroic couplets, and often ending with a punch: "The apparently weak are merely schooled to other strength and may be easily enduring hardships which are intense and even still unnamed, while the man who triumphs has done so by acting in accordance with other rules, like one who would win at tennis by shooting his opponent."

Though Burke ignores plot-driven realism, a wispy story nonetheless emerges in Towards a Better Life , as our narrator, John Neal, meditates on his past in a series of declamations or epistles to a friend and rival named Anthony. While living a bohemian artistic life in New York, Neal fell in love with a woman named Florence, an actress who eventually left him for Anthony. In despair, the young intellectual then escapes to a rural small town, where he marries, or so it seems, a beautiful and kind-hearted woman named Genevieve. Shortly thereafter, he invites an itinerant acting troupe to perform at the local school and discovers Florence in their company. The couple talk, sleep together and, afterward, break for good. Neal then returns to New York but undergoes a psychological collapse, first suspecting Genevieve of infidelity, then ordering her onto the streets to earn a little money. In the end, this increasingly deluded prosateur is writing stories about himself, imagining an Alter Ego (always with capital letters) and starting to speak to a wooden dummy outside a cigar store. A coda, interspersed with suggestive jottings ("if they cannot have religion, they should have lotteries"), recapitulates an aimless bohemian life.

It's obviously not much of a novel. In truth, the only real hold on a reader's interest lies in those "filtrations of well-modulated prose." For some fairly sophisticated readers, this may be enough. Burke can sound dandyishly aesthetic -- "If one seeks new metaphors, will he not also find new women?" -- or mildly humorous, in an understated way: A promiscuous character in a play "has been refined by something more subtle than abstention." Acid social observations -- "He who commands a large salary thinks little of boring his neighbors" -- are balanced by longer pen portraits: