"For the educated man," he writes, "there is a moment of his early acquaintanceship with Dante when he realizes that all he has slowly taught himself to enjoy in poetry is everything that Dante has grown out of. A comparable moment of fear is to be had with Auden, when we understand that his slow change through the 1940s entails a renunciation of the art-thrill, and that the Audenesque dazzle is forever gone. For a poet to lose such a talent would have been a misfortune. For a poet to give it up was an act of disciplined renunciation rarely heard of in English."
Several of the longer pieces in As of This Writing concern writers and critics -- most notably Edmund Wilson, Mark Twain, George Orwell and Gore Vidal -- who have been inspirations to the author, and it quickly becomes clear to the reader that James is at his most persuasive and illuminating in the role of enthusiast, as someone who can communicate his visceral love for a particular artist's work by explicating his gifts and making palpable his magic.
He makes you want to run out and rewatch Fellini's Eight-and-a-Half and Amarcord on the big screen. And he makes you want to reconsider your doubts about Solzhenitsyn's artistry as writer, given the magnitude of the job he faced: "Because Solzhenitsyn deals with modern events over which there is not merely dispute as to their interpretation, but doubt as to whether they even happened, he is obliged to expend a great deal of effort in saying what things were like. The task is compounded in difficulty by the consideration that what they were like is almost unimaginable."
As for Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath, they elicit this cruel and self-consciously clever put-down, "To any of them nothing mattered more than the ticker tape that carried the stock market quotation of their status. A 10-point drop could send them to the window sill: for the artist concerned with his own share price, it is always 1929."
Such missteps, reminiscent of the snarky tone that intruded in the author's 1998 novel The Silver Castle are thankfully rare. The bulk of this volume not only reminds us of James' ability to be funny and touching at the same time, but it also attests to his shrewd gifts as a critic.
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