The New Criterion
(Mobile Version)

February 1986 Volume 4, Number 6  

Features

But if the artist fail?
by Samuel Lipman
On the failure of musical talent.

Philip Larkin, 1922-1985
by Donald Hall

“Trying to preserve something”
by Robert Richman
A tribute to Philip Larkin.

Larkin’s voice
by X.J. Kennedy

The career of Gaston Gallimard
by Frederick Brown

The fictive music of Wallace Stevens
by Bruce Bawer


Poems

Christmas in Utah
by Leslie Norris

Night passage
by Curtis Harnack

William James in Brazil
by Herbert Morris


Art

Houses, fields, gardens, hills
by Jed Perl
On Catherine Murphy, Joan Snyder, Jennifer Bartlett & Esti Dunow.


Theater

Winter journey
by Mimi Kramer
On revivals of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest & Noël Coward’s Hay Fever.


Dance

The trouble with Robbins
by David Daniel
On Jerome Robbins’s In Memory of . . . & other works.


Books

René Wellek: the theorist as historian
by James Tuttleton
A review of A History of Modern Criticism, Vol. 5 & Vol. 6.

Hopper’s scene
by James R. Mellow
A review of Hopper’s Places by Gail Levin.

Americans in Mexico
by Mark Falcoff
A review of The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes.

Novels with politics
by David Pryce-Jones
A review of Atrocity & Amnesia: The Political Novel since 1945 by Robert Boyers.


Notebook

The avant-garde comes to Hofstra
by Roger Kimball
On the symposium Avant-Garde Art & Literature: Toward a Reappraisal of Modernism.


Letters

Lanzmann’s “Shoah”

The “language poets”