Colors of the Mind

"Angus Fletcher is my direct contemporary, just a few weeks older than I am, and my lifelong friend. He is alive and well, and I’m glad to say still at work, and he is about as dear a friend as I’ve had from 1950 until now. He’s written many powerful books, but the one that has influenced me most is this collection of brilliant essays, subtitled “Conjectures on Thinking in Literature”. What Angus Fletcher taught me, and teaches others, is a very complex matter of what it means for thinking to take place in a literary work. It’s the question of how Shakespeare thinks in his plays and sonnets, of how Henry James thinks in his late, intricate work, or of how Emily Dickinson thinks in her extraordinary poems. I’ve tried to extend Angus Fletcher’s way of looking at the mind as represented in art to the greatest American poet, Walt Whitman, who thinks through metaphors. My real subject, increasingly, is metaphorical thinking – which is how Shakespeare and all poets and novelists and storywriters think. Those are the five books. Four of them are by personal friends, and one is by someone I corresponded with. The personal element may have enhanced their influence on me, but I very strongly recommend all five books, not just to whatever real students we still have of literature (and indeed of the other arts) but to common readers who wish to be more deeply educated. Well, there are indeed a few shining exceptions. There’s Dr Samuel Johnson. There’s William Hazlitt, whom I reread all the time. There’s another particular hero of mine, Walter Pater, the great aesthetic critic of the later 19th century. There is my old friend Kenneth Burke. If I were to be asked, “Harold, can anything in your life’s work survive?” I would not know what to answer. I would think that if anything should survive, it would be this new book, because it is my summa. It is my swansong on the question that has occupied me throughout my long life, which is the question of literary and poetic influence. I’ve written it and rewritten it and cut it down. If anything by me deserves to survive, it’s The Anatomy of Influence . Whether it will survive, I have grave doubts. Only a few literary critics survive. Whether I will be one, I do not know. One must read, try to possess by memory, and be possessed by the very best that has been imagined, cognitively apprehended and expressed powerfully. Thinking clearly and well is based upon memory. Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well, and democracy will not survive. We have this horrible contemporary phenomenon in the Tea Party – a real menace not only to America but to the world. Because if it goes on like this, they will destroy our economy and they will destroy America. They have no democratic vision, and I don’t mean with a capital “D”, I mean with a small “d”. They frighten me. They’re like the early followers of Adolf Hitler, and I’m willing to be quoted on that. They are a sickening phenomenon. That is because they have not read deeply and widely enough. But then maybe they’re not to blame, because American education – even in elite universities – has become a scandal in my opinion. It has committed suicide."