Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
A Life in Criticism
An Interview with M. H. Abrams
by Jeffrey J. Williams | ns 69
M. H. Abrams is an iconic name in literary studies, appearing on the spines of over eight million copies of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and as the first entry in the references of two generations of critical books. His career has spanned, as he remarks in an essay on "The Transformation of English Studies: 1935-1995" (in American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske [Princeton UP, 1997]), over half the life of the discipline of English, and he has been a major participant in its development.
His book, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford UP, 1953), was long a critical standard revaluating Romanticism as well as making sense of the varieties of criticism in its first chapter, "Orientation of Critical Theories." (Its diagram of the four focuses of criticism, with Work at the hub and Universe, Author, and Audience at the spokes, has probably been traced on thousands of classroom blackboards.) Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (Norton, 1971) traced the religious residue in post-Enlightenment, Romantic literature and philosophy. The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (Norton, 1984) collects many of his influential essays on literature, and Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Fischer (Norton, 1991), collects his many essays on critical theory, from "Orientation" to a series of responses to deconstruction.
While setting the terms for criticism of Romanticism for a generation, Abrams has had a great deal of influence in the undergraduate classroom, with his A Glossary of Literary Terms (1957; 9th ed. 2008), and of course The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962; 8th ed. 2005). His was the first of the Bible-thick anthologies for which Norton became famous, but he tells here how it arose from a survey course and a chance meeting with a visiting editor.
Among his other work, Abrams' first book, from his undergraduate thesis at Harvard, was The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge (1934; Octagon, 1971). Abrams edited a number of volumes, including Literature and Belief: English Institute Essays (Columbia UP, 1958), English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism (Oxford UP, 1960), and volumes of Pope's poetry, Wordsworth's Prelude, and essays on Wordsworth. High Romantic Argument: Essays for M. H. Abrams, edited by Lawrence Lipking (Cornell UP, 1981), includes responses as well as a bibliography of Abrams' writing.
M. H. Abrams was born in 1912 in New Jersey. He attended Harvard University (BA, 1934), Cambridge University in England on a fellowship (1934-35), and Harvard again for his graduate work (MA, 1937; PhD, 1940). During World War II he worked in a lab at Harvard on problems of oral communication in military battle. He got his first—and only—job as a professor at Cornell in 1945, where he is Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus and still regularly visits his office in Goldwin Smith Hall.
This interview took place on 26 August 2007 at M. H. Abrams' home in Ithaca, NY. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams, editor of the minnesota review, and transcribed by David Cerniglia, assistant to the review while a PhD student in the literary and cultural studies program at Carnegie Mellon University.
Williams: You've seen a lot of change in literary studies. You've seen it go from literary history, when you were at Harvard in 1930 or thereabouts, to New Criticism, and then to Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism, to deconstruction, and finally to New Historicism. Maybe you could talk about the course of criticism that you've seen.
Abrams: I was brought up in the days when to get a PhD you had to study Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Old French, and linguistics, on the notion that they served as a kind of hardcore scientific basis for literary study. But the fact is that good teachers taught literature too. Very clearly the bias of the teaching, even by the most lively teachers, was historical. They dealt with the changes in literary forms, with the history of the novel, and there was very little attention to the analysis of the literary text itself. We owe to the New Critics the ability to do what they called close reading—a close, extensive analysis of the construction of a poem and its metaphoric structure. That was new when I was an undergraduate, and it was distrusted, as new things always are, by the traditionalists.
I remember that I was one of the young bucks at Harvard who, as a graduate student, tried to get a New Critical kind of question into the general examination in English studies for English majors. At the end of your senior year you took a written exam, if you were aiming for honors at any rate, and the questions in those exams had a historical bias for the most part. Even when you were asked to discuss a particular poem they didn't expect you to open it out in the way the New Critics opened it out by close reading. So two of us graduate students got together and we proposed that one of the questions confront a student with a poem, unidentified either in time or place or authorship, to see what he would manage to say about it.
Williams: Like I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism?
Abrams: I spent a year at Cambridge on a fellowship studying with Richards—and yes, our proposed question was modeled on Practical Criticism or on the sort of thing that Cleanth Brooks and Warren in Understanding Poetry were doing. The whole notion was pooh-poohed by the older people who were writing the exams, who said students wouldn't be able to cope with the question. So we organized an experiment, I. A. Richards-style: we got together a dozen English majors, seniors, we dug out a poem, they were confronted with it and were asked to say what they could about it, and the results were very good. And we showed it to Douglas Bush and others who were the old timers in the department. Bush was one of the best of the old line teachers. He wrote a wonderful book about the use of mythology by the English poets. He was persuaded that maybe we ought to try it and, as I recall, the examiners did put in such questions.
But then after that I began to have qualms about the shortcomings of the New Criticism—not with their method of reading poems in detail, but with their antipathy, or at least careful avoidance, of historical contextual matters as relevant to the understanding of a poem, and even more with their theoretical shortcomings. Their analysis of poetry was basically on the verbal level, and focused on such matters as the use of metaphor, instead of taking a literary work as a human product, often presenting human beings in interaction with each other or speaking their minds and so on. It was the lack of humanity in their criticism that seemed to me an important shortcoming.
But looking back now at the swing against the New Critics, after almost every new kind of theorist attacked the New Critics—remember de Man's clever statement that "close reading is never close enough"—I have become a defender of those things. I want to say that without the New Criticism none of us would have very much to say about a poem. To be confronted with the verbal particulars of a poem and to deal with them is something the New Critics taught us to do.
Before the New Critics, close reading was, as far as I know, not exemplified by anyone. Take even a great critic like Coleridge. He analyzes the difference between fancy and imagination by analyzing two kinds of similes and metaphors which he compares to each other, and that's illuminating because he takes a short passage and opens it up; but he never deals with the poem as a whole in that way. You get something like De Quincey's treatment of the knocking of the gate in Macbeth. He takes a short passage in Macbeth and opens it out to show the power of Shakespeare's representations there of so-called comic relief. But De Quincey deals in that way only with a short passage in the play. There's no analysis of that nature applied to the whole of Macbeth until the New Critics.
Williams: I can see how you combine both poles of the formation you mentioned—you are both an advocate of the close reading of poetry, especially, and also very much a literary historian. You were trained in literary history at Harvard; where did the close reading come from?
Abrams: The exciting critical theorist at the time was I. A. Richards who, to a considerable extent, was behind the New Criticism. Between Richards and Richards' student, William Empson, a great deal of the New Criticism was established—ambiguity, multiple meanings of a poetic passage, and the close analysis that Richards established in his practical criticism. Between them and T. S. Eliot you have the main models that underlie the New Criticism. That was an exciting thing. I was a student, and students are always excited by what's new, not by what's old. I was never a zealot for the New Criticism, but I was an admirer of it and found it interesting and exciting to read.
Williams: Did it also have something to do with your experience of being in Cambridge?
Abrams: I got a Henry Fellowship for a year, and when they asked me where I wanted to go, I said I wanted to go to Cambridge because I wanted to study with I. A. Richards. Then when I came back to Harvard, Richards came to Harvard as a University Professor, so I got to know him pretty well. He was a fascinating person.
Williams: Did you work with him as a grad student?
Abrams: The year I spent at Cambridge was after I got my bachelor's degree at Harvard. Richards was my supervisor, as they call it at Cambridge, a sort of a tutor, and I used to see him once a week. He'd assign me reading and we'd talk about it, and he'd show me letters he got from T. S. Eliot and so on. Eliot would send him some of his poems for his comments before he published them. So I found myself in the middle of the big literary goings-on of the time.
Williams: Before they were published, in manuscript?
Abrams: Yes. Richards would prop them up on his mantelpiece. Richards also introduced me to Yeats, who he said had become a great poet even though he believed in fairies. I was fortunate to work with Richards for that year. I used to see him when I was at Harvard afterwards, but I didn't do any formal graduate work with him.
Williams: That's amazing. I know that there was a cluster of criticism that first appeared around then—Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism in 25 and Practical Criticism around 30 [29], Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle in 31, Burke's Counter-Statement in 31, and Eliot's Selected Essays in 32.
Abrams: You're right, exciting things were happening. Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle was another very important book for me, which I read very early in my graduate career. The range of treatment across national lines, the kind of analysis you get there of Proust, for example, was terribly exciting. That's where the action was for the ambitious young students of the time.
Williams: There also was a wave of new poetry. Harriet Monroe founded Poetry, I think in 1912, and then put out an anthology called The New Poetry in 1917 and 1926.
Abrams: While I was a student, New Signatures, the first publication in book form of W. H. Auden and Spender and other young poets of that time, the Oxford Group, was sensationally new. I still have a copy of it somewhere, of the original edition of New Signatures that came out with a cardboard cover. It was an exciting time.
Williams: You said that you later came to question the New Criticism. What caused that?
Abrams: It wasn't the ultimate critical thing to do. It had its shortcomings. Cleanth Brooks always claimed that they were never against literary history, they believed in literary history. He himself in his original scholarly publications was a literary historian. But history was kept separate from the analysis of the poem. You wrote literary history or you did close reading of particular poems. That was an artificial separation because there's no doubt a poem is illuminated and enriched, or often makes sense only if you have some sense of the cultural—well, what we used to call "background," that we've now learned to call "context." And the fact is that the New Critics—the good ones—were good New Critics because they had been trained in the cultural context, the historical context, the history of literature. They brought it in quietly by the back door as though it were there, present before them, in the poem itself. For them it was in fact present, they could take it for granted, but only because of their training. But if you got a young person who knew nothing of this context, this background, the poem often didn't make good sense at all.
Williams: One interpretation, for instance that Gerald Graff has in Professing Literature, is that the New Criticism was suited to the expanding university, with rising enrollments, because you didn't need a lot of background.
Abrams: It was very teachable. There's no doubt that that was part of the reason for its acceptance; it gave teachers something to talk about to their students. Basically the rationale for the New Criticism was a solid one: it really confronted you with a poem, made you look at it in detail, work out the relations of its parts, and gave you a way of coming to grips with what, in its particularity, it effected. And that was new in literary discussion.
Williams: Do you think it was a response to science? Or to give literature a separate space?
Abrams: The New Critics tended to define literature in opposition to science, but literature had always, in earlier theorists, been defined in opposition to science or history or something else. That is, people have always tried to establish the identity of literature by opposing it to what it was not, or to what was supposed to be not literary, and science was just a rather latecomer on the scene. Aristotle opposed poetry—what we would now call literature—to history. In the eighteenth century it began to be opposed to science and the New Critics simply inherited that opposition. But I don't think the reason for the New Criticism was their opposition to science. It was their way of defining what poetry was, what they considered it to be.
Williams: In some ways they tried to be almost as exacting as science, and they used a lot of scientific metaphors like "organic."
Abrams: It's what de Man later would call "rigorous." They talked about sensibility, people's responses to things, but it was a matter of getting the exact emotional nuance in the poem they were reading. So they showed that you could be exact about something that was really not data at all.
Williams: But it wasn't as wishy-washy as the impressionists before them like Spingarn.
Abrams: The famous example of criticism of the impressionist sort used to be the statement by A. E. Houseman, "I don't know what good poetry is, all I know is if I'm shaving and a line of poetry comes in my head and my beard stands up so I can't shave it, that's good poetry." He said that to be clever, and it is clever. The New Critics said, "Oh my goodness! That's no criterion for poetry!" But I know exactly what Houseman meant; it's not intended to be an analysis of a poem.
Williams: So the trajectory of criticism, in very broad terms, moves from impressionism and literary history to the New Criticism, and sometimes then people see it as moving to theory, but really in between was Frye and archetypal criticism.
Abrams: By the way, the New Criticism is far from dead. Not only is it practiced by people who don't know they're practicing it, or who have profited from it without awareness, but one of the best poetry critics of our time, Helen Vendler, is essentially a New Critic. She stayed with it through thick and thin, and practices it and has applied it to brilliant writings on Herbert and all sorts of other poets. It's not dead, but she represents a minority now.
Williams: The 60s seem to be an in-between time in criticism. There were people like Frye and Fiedler, although by the 70s things start moving toward what we call theory.
Abrams: Well, all critics are theorists; they have a theoretical underpinning whether they're aware of it or not. But what we now call theory is, as far as I can make out, a proposed view of interpretation which is deliberately formulated to run counter to what is established and to yield new readings of old texts. So I think theories are designed, each in its own way, as a type of new reading of old texts. If you look back to earlier criticism for things that would meet that definition of theory, what would qualify would be Freudian criticism and Marxist criticism. Both are designed to look at old texts and give you new meanings which run counter to the established, traditional meanings. The first great, brilliant exemplar of the new type of grand theory is probably Northrop Frye, with The Anatomy of Criticism and the archetypal mode of reading. He wasn't the one that invented it, but he really developed it at the greatest length and took advantage of what had been going on in the analysis of myths and so on, and developed a comprehensive view that all literature is constituted by a repetition of archetypes of a definable sort.
Williams: The way that the history is represented, I think that a lot of people have forgotten that time.
Abrams: It's strange that Frye's book and what followed it was so exciting for a long time, but it has disappeared almost as quickly from the standard critical perspective.
Williams: One thing that seems clear in my reading is that Marxist criticism was very prominent in the 30s. All the critical accounts in the 50s talk about it as if it went without saying, but it dropped out of the picture during the 60s. Was that something that you were aware of at Harvard?
Abrams: I was well aware it was going on, but I didn't find it convincing. I'm always suspicious of the hermeneutics of suspicion. I'm always suspicious of a theoretical construct that undertakes to persuade you that what people have always taken a poem to be about is not only wrong but the opposite of the truth. That tends to be the paradigm for all sorts of recent theories of literature. It was the French theorist Ricoeur who used the phrase "hermeneutics of suspicion." He applied it to psychoanalytic and Marxist criticism, but it applies to all theories, in the new sense of Theory with a capital "T," which undertake to show, by a reconstruction of the nature of interpretation, that you can look at old poems and come out with new readings. I've been skeptical from the beginning of all attempts to show that for hundreds of years people have been reading wrong, or have missed the real point.
Williams: To continue the trajectory, after Frye the next prominent movement was phenomenology?
Abrams: Yes, phenomenology, the consciousness criticism that Hillis Miller first advocated, the Poulet school. Then came the structuralists, and then deconstruction as a revolt against structuralists, which had great momentum for a number of years, but which I predicted would fade. But all these things leave footprints; they fade out but leave something behind.
The people who did deconstruction were very bright people, but misguided. I never "dissed" them—I never disrespected them—I always found them admirable and I loved to argue with them because I think they were worth arguing against. You don't want to waste your time arguing against somebody who doesn't count or isn't bright. Of course I like to pretend that I'm a total traditionalist, but I'm not quite that stuck in the past; I'm open to well-grounded innovation.
Williams: I thought that it was remarkable, in the debates over deconstruction, that you tried to deal with Derrida seriously and to make sense of what he was doing in terms of the English philosophical tradition—in comparison to Hume, for instance. We use this word "conversation" but I think how critical argument frequently happens is that it misses other arguments or goes on in two different planes. I thought that your essays responding to deconstruction tried to bring them into conversation with the British tradition, but they weren't trying to do that.
Abrams: While I was waiting for you I glanced through an old essay of mine that's included in Doing Things With Texts, which is a collection of essays about Theory, among other things. It's called "A Colloquy on Recent Critical Theories." I deal there with Derrida and Hillis Miller and deconstruction, the New Criticism, the beginnings of New Historicism, and then with Stanley Fish and reader response criticism; and I find that all the things I said in that essay I'll still stand by. Such matters were fresher in my mind then than they are now. I used to live these things day after day, but in the last ten years or so I've done very little reading in what's going on in the critical world. However, when the time comes to bring out a new edition of the Glossary of Literary Terms, where I have essays about all critical theories—then I have to catch up fast.
Williams: Speaking about deconstruction, I wanted to ask you about one person you don't write about as much, de Man, who was one of your colleagues at Cornell from 60 to 67.
Abrams: He was a personal friend. He was a fascinating man and a brilliant one—but in a sense that's really independent of the discoveries that were made about his writings during the Second World War. I have to say that he seems to me to be a dishonest critic. He wrote to make a sensation. He said things he must have realized were designed to startle rather than to be valid. He was a glamorous person, and to students he was charismatic to a high degree. And that's without being handsome or attractive in the usual way, or having an attractive vibrancy in his speaking voice. It was not that. There was something about the very intricacy of his mental operations that attracted people. But anyway—no, I didn't like to argue with de Man in print because I would have quickly gotten to the point where I would have had to assert that he must have known that what he said wasn't true.
De Man was a great phrasemaker, with phrases like "the New Critical close reading was not nearly close enough," but I've never been able to understand the reverence some people had for de Man's essays. One of his devices was to pick up an old rhetorical term and give it twists in order to make it come out in a different way. I remember one of his essays in which he took a metaphor in Proust, and the whole point turned out to be that, when Proust used the metaphor "A is B," he meant that to be a statement of identity of A and B; and that's a false claim. Who ever uses a metaphor to claim identity? It's taking the "is" of metaphorical comparison and identifying it with the "is" of identity. But an expression wouldn't be a metaphor if you were claiming identity. It would be the thing itself. De Man was full of rhetorical tricks of that sort.
Williams: I'm probably more impressed now with the essays in Blindness and Insight than Allegories of Reading. He was a perceptive reader of other critics.
Abrams: I think a good deal of his critical writings were a misapplication of very high talents. He was an enormously talented person.
Williams: The Mirror and the Lamp was a very influential book, and the first chapter was a touchstone in basic criticism courses for years. But I was struck by a quote I read that you were surprised more than anyone else how much legs that the book has had. It's still in print 54 years later. I know that it was originally your dissertation, although it came out a number of years after.
Abrams: After ten years of hard work revising the text. The title in fact was the title of my doctoral thesis. The title has been both a boon and a bane to the book. It's a boon in that it's a catchy title and nobody forgets it that's ever seen it. The trouble is that, like all titles that are not just baldly descriptive and uninteresting, it's misleading because people think the book is about mirrors and lamps and nothing else. The fact is those are only two of the metaphors I discuss that represent the relation of poetry to reality. The book deals with many root metaphors that I called "constitutive metaphors"; and I think one of the best things in the book (and some reviewers agreed with me) is the treatment of organic metaphors. To conceive the invention of a poem on the analogy with a growing plant, it's my treatment of that theme, I think, that is more revelatory and innovative than my treatment of metaphors of mirrors and lamps. But apart from that—the book deals with so much more than just the constitutive metaphors of literary criticism.
So the title is on the one hand attractive and on the other hand misleading. I wouldn't want to change it even if I could. I wouldn't want a bald title like The Romantic Theory of Poetry or something like that. One of the reasons I think that the book has been influential is its claim that we use root metaphors cognitively—in philosophizing, for example—as much as we do in poetry. That was revelatory to many people. I remember I was talking to a philosopher, a fellow graduate student, and I said that philosophy employs metaphors, and was outraged—"Oh no, no. Metaphor is something only poets use." Well, that metaphors are indispensable to a cognitive use of language has become a commonplace now, but at the time it seemed to be a radical novelty.
You're right, looking back: that first chapter was important because it made a kind of sense of the whole seeming chaos of critical theory. Suddenly you were able to classify the confusion of critical theories; and once you classify them, you can see how they fit together, how each tells a part of the story, not the whole story. It turned out to be an important chapter, but very hard to write. I rewrote it at least six times. But that is the thing that people tend to remember, the first chapter. That and the title.
Williams: Lodge reprints the chapter in his anthology 20th Century Literary Criticism.
Abrams: Lionel Trilling also came out with an anthology of literary criticism, and he told me that the introduction is based on a mirror-and-the-lamp kind of analysis.
Williams: You mentioned how metaphors affect or constitute how we think, and I wondered if you had done work in psychology, since I had read that during the war [WWII] you had worked in a lab researching psychoacoustics?
Abrams: Yes, trying to solve the problem of oral communications in a noisy environment—not only gunfire but motor noises. But that had nothing to do with my critical work. I got interested in metaphor through I. A. Richards. He got me reading Bentham's theory of fictions, which is really a theory of metaphor—it deals with the role of metaphor in legal language, especially. When I came to deal with the history of criticism, it struck me immediately that there were key metaphors that distinguish one type of criticism from another.
Williams: It strikes me that your work is really in the history of ideas, but it's a kind of intellectual history blended with literary history. The Mirror and the Lamp reevaluates Romanticism and sets out a history of literary ideas.
Abrams: That applies even more to Natural Supernaturalism, which, just between you and me, is a more important book than The Mirror and the Lamp. The Mirror and the Lamp is the one that people know if they know anything about my writings, but the second book is more important. There's a neatness about The Mirror and the Lamp, and it does open out a way of dealing with cognitive matters, matters of theory and so on, in terms of constitutive metaphors, which is applicable outside of the realm of criticism. But Natural Supernaturalism is much wider in its scope. It has to do with what is much more humanly important than literary criticism.
Williams: It seems as if it didn't hit its moment as The Mirror and the Lamp did. The Mirror and the Lamp came out right as the new wave of American criticism was cresting, and encapsulated ways of critical thinking.
Abrams: That's right. It made sense out of criticism when doing criticism was the big, new thing.
Williams: Whereas Natural Supernaturalism makes a broad claim that Romantic thought and literature represent a turn in Western culture, but even though Romanticism asserted a turn from the theological to the secular, it still bore the remnants of Christian culture.
Abrams: The Hebrew-Christian paradigm translated. That's how innovative Romantic thinkers differed from the Enlightenment. Like The Mirror and the Lamp, as a title, Natural Supernaturalism was attractive but misleading. Four-fifths of the book is about other things than secularized theological paradigms. The chapter I'm most proud of in that book is the one where I deal with the parallel between metaphysical systems like Hegel's Phenomenology and Wordsworth's autobiographical Prelude and the modes of history being written at the time; there is, among them, a very close parallelism in the narrative construction. That seems to me new, enlightening, and tells you a lot about the nature of philosophy at that time and philosophy generally. I guess the book has gotten its share of notice.
Williams: I don't think it's lacked attention.
Abrams: But the book most people are aware of is The Mirror and the Lamp. I remember a graduate student once sent me, triumphantly, a novel he'd found, a nineteenth-century novel by an unknown, forgotten author, and it's called The Mirror and the Lamp. I've got a copy of it somewhere. I've never read it, but I should read it and find out what it's about.
Williams: Natural Supernaturalism is a different kind of critical book…
Abrams: It's not about criticism. It's an intellectual and imaginative history of the Romantic period which deals with literature and metaphysics and history across the board. It's criticism in the sense that any book that deals with literature can be called literary criticism, but that's only one part of what it's about. It really deals with a broad spectrum of what happened, in intellectual and imaginative writing, before, during, and after the Romantic period.
Williams: I see it more in keeping with books like Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being and also C. S. Lewis's Allegory of Love, insofar as it has a big cultural view. Lewis makes a big claim that in the Middle Ages there's a change in our conception of love, and in Natural Supernaturalism you make that kind of large-scale claim. You have to be a certain kind of scholar, you have to know a lot of the intellectual history, a lot of the history of the period, as well as the literature, to make that kind of claim. It doesn't seem as if people write those kind of books now.
Abrams: I wrote during an era of important books that stake out a large claim. You're right. You mention two books that I greatly admire: The Great Chain of Being and Allegory of Love. There was a poll, about thirty or more years ago, conducted, I think, by somebody at Columbia. It asked, "What are the five most important books in literary theory and criticism of the last thirty years?" The Mirror and the Lamp is one of them, and Allegory of Love was another, together with The Great Chain of Being, and T. S. Eliot's Collected Essays, and American Renaissance by Matthiessen. That was the first time I became aware that people thought of The Mirror and the Lamp as important beyond its narrow reference to literary criticism.
Williams: It was on the nonfiction list too, wasn't it?
Abrams: That was more recent—number twenty-five in a list of the Most Important Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century. That's a big claim. Do people ever attend to The Great Chain of Being now?
Williams: I don't think so.
Abrams: That's a tremendous book. I'd put it near the top of the list myself. I owe so much to that book. I really learned a lot about writing intellectual history from that book.
Williams: I think people still read American Renaissance. One of the reasons I mention it is that, as a critic writing now, you have to ask what is the kind of book one should try to write, and it seems it's hard to find a model like that.
Abrams: Well, we've passed through the age of deconstruction. Hillis Miller wrote a review of Natural Supernaturalism in which he said that it's like Auerbach's Mimesis—and he mentioned two or three other powerhouse books—the point of which was that you can't write that kind of book any more because everything's undecidable. You're basing your historical claims on interpretations of texts; but such interpretations can't stand up because all these texts are undecidable, and disseminate into a tangle of contradictory meanings. An age of radical skepticism about our ability to say anything that can be understood is hardly an age that would foster the writing of big intellectual, cultural, and literary histories.
Williams: I want to ask you about the Norton. I've researched anthologies, and it's clear that the Norton was very much a different kind of book than had come before. You didn't invent the anthology of course, but you invented...
Abrams: Some people seem to think I did. When I studied English at Harvard as a sophomore, we took a survey course and we used an anthology, Shafer I think was the name of the editor, and it was a pretty good anthology too.
Williams: What were the anthologies like before the Norton?
Abrams: What Norton did was introduce anthologies that looked like standard books; the prose and poetry would be printed in a single column on a page that's the size of a page in an ordinary book. All the anthologies that I'd seen before were large and were printed in double columns. Norton developed the use of Bible paper which would diminish the bulk of the book. That was the big Norton contribution. It was more expensive than other paper, and only certain presses could handle it.
George Brockway, the president of Norton, knocked on my door one day, in Goldwin Smith on campus and introduced himself and said he'd spoken to a classmate of his at Williams College, Bob Elias, who was an Americanist in my department, and asked, "Do you know anybody who could do an English literature anthology for us?" and Elias said, "Well, Abrams across the way here teaches a survey course in English literature." He came and saw me and persuaded me to try my hand at getting up an anthology.
I thought, "Well sure, why not; I'll try it." I based the anthology on the course I was teaching at Cornell in conjunction with David Daiches, who was then a professor at Cornell. I got Daiches as one of the other editors. One of the innovations in the book, as it turned out—I thought we'd do it in a year and it took four years—was that it eliminated the snippet representations that you tend to get in earlier anthologies. As far as possible we printed complete works. Of course, that wasn't possible with Paradise Lost and The Prelude, but those we represented by substantial selections. Other things we either didn't put in or printed them complete.
Another innovation was to treat the choice and editing of the text just as carefully for undergraduates as we would have for scholars, using the same extreme care. So we chose the best possible texts—often, we had to pay for the use of them. Another thing: we got experts in each field, so we were a group of seven collaborative editors rather than a single editor or two trying to deal with everything "from Beowulf to Thomas Hardy"—which is the name of the anthology that had been assigned at Harvard. And we exerted great care in the annotations of the texts. Though these editorial matters were directed to undergraduates, they were just as meticulously crafted, and with as much attention to their relevance and validity, as if they had been directed to literary specialists.
Williams: For the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism that I'm involved with, I'm among six other editors, and it's clear it's much better to spread the work and also to bring in several people's expertise.
Abrams: That wasn't the way things were done before the Norton. I wouldn't say that we were the first to employ a large group of expert scholars, but the only anthologies I know of were edited by one, or at the most two people.
Another thing: the head notes and the introductions to the periods and so on were, again, very carefully written to be accurate, to take account of the latest information, and to be full, so that in the anthology you had the equivalent of a short history of English literature, eliminating the need for students to resort to auxiliary histories or criticism. The book was self-contained and complete. And we could boast, also, that the anthology was portable; you could read it anywhere—under a tree, in a bus, and so on. It's less portable now than it once was—the anthology gets bigger and bigger. But now you have the option of buying a separate volume for each literary period.
Williams: One thing I noticed in the preface to the first edition, which came out in 62, was that you mention the balance between range and emphasis, which is, I think, the problem with any anthology. In my surmise the earlier anthologies were better on range, but they made fewer discriminations that would give you emphases. But you also wouldn't want it to be all great authors because then you lose the interstices.
Abrams: The introduction and the notes and the head notes always took into account historical and biographical context. We never slighted that kind of thing. As a matter of fact, the very first edition included an interesting innovation that we dropped because people didn't use it; much later it suddenly became the vogue. We interspersed what we called "topics" containing contextual materials for each literary period. It was before its time. Now we've reintroduced such materials, in the wake of the New Historicism.
I remember Bob Adams, who was one of our seventeenth century editors, had a topic on how it occurred to someone in the seventeenth century to test the old view that a centipede wouldn't cross gunpowder. So he actually got a centipede, put it on the table, spread gunpowder, and the centipede crawled right over it. That really is a dramatic way of showing students the difference between legendary science and true experimental science. But that was only one of many topics.
Williams: I'm curious about how the process went, especially because I've done my share of editing. Were there any difficult moments? You must have been very efficient.
Abrams: I really picked very good people in each period—the best ones I knew. (Well, it was mostly my choice, though I got formal approval from the publisher.) Fortunately I'd known most of them personally before, and Bob Adams was a colleague at Cornell, and Daiches was also a colleague. One of the reasons we all got along so well is that we never met together as a group. We dealt with each other by mail. I don't think we'd ever all met as a group until the celebration at the MLA one year, when we all showed up when the anthology was first published.
I guess it was I who set up the criteria for our editorial work: the highest standards, but directed toward undergraduates, rather than specialists. Then we consulted by mail on what we would include. Basically, we started with the materials I included in the survey course I taught at Cornell, and then added to that. The idea was not to force people to teach what you wanted them to teach, but instead to give them the equivalent of a small library from which they could select what they wanted to teach. The anthology is really a library of relevant materials made available to each instructor.
All questions that arose about choosing and editing the texts were circulated among the editors; in cases of disagreement, the final decision was mine. We never had important disputes. Somebody might grumble now and then, but it never came to anything. And that was true even for such a maverick as Robert Martin Adams, who always marched to his own drumbeat. Even he got along well, partly because I knew Bob and his idiosyncrasies, but more because we respected each other. But none of us expected the success of the anthology when it finally, after four or five years, hit the market.
Williams: It must have been gratifying.
Abrams: Don't forget that we did all this in the heyday of the New Criticism when, if people taught literature chronologically, they kept quiet about it. All the talk was about "the poem as such," "the poem itself," and so on. So the anthology was directed against what seemed to be the strong current of the non-historical, non-chronological study of literature. It turned out that there was a huge market for such an anthology. Many teachers were just waiting for something like it to be available. The adoptions were immediate and large.
Williams: And the university went from four million students in 1960 to eight million in 1970.
Abrams: That's certainly part of it. And books became increasingly expensive. So if you put together a survey course of English literature, using separate books for each author or group of authors, it would cost the student hundreds of dollars.
Williams: And, alongside the Norton, you also did the Glossary of Literary Terms, which you took over in 57. Somebody told me—I don't know if this is apocryphal—that the Glossary has sold eight million copies.
Abrams: No, no. The eight million copies was an estimate of the total sales, as of a couple of years ago, of the Norton anthology. It must be nine million or so by now. The anthology is used all over the world. The glossary has had very large sales too, but it's not anything like eight million. I don't know the exact total, but I'm now working on the ninth edition of the glossary. Can you imagine?
Williams: Really? They're handy. They not only have definitions of terms like "metaphor" but mini-essays on, say, critical movements like deconstruction that are both knowledgeable and accessible.
Abrams: Oh, they're very useful. You find everything you want to know—as well as all the stuff you don't need to know. But I said in the first edition what I've repeated ever since: it's a book I wish I'd had when I was an undergraduate. And the analyses of all the critical movements are original. They don't just repeat the standard comments. I refer to the Glossary myself when I forget something. I find it useful.
Williams: You must have good work habits.
Abrams: I've never been a very efficient worker, actually.
Williams: Really? People would be surprised.
Abrams: I don't even have a very good memory. I depend on miles of written notes, without which I'd be helpless. I work steadily, however. I used to go to my office seven days a week—to the despair of my wife—but not for a very long day. Some people would go for five days and stay eight hours each day. I couldn't do that. I'd go three, four hours a day, but every day, unless we had a social engagement, or were away on summer vacation. But it adds up—day after day after day after day. It adds up.
I had good guidance and good teachers. A. O. Lovejoy was one of my models.
Williams: Was he at Harvard?
Abrams: No, I just read his books. He did give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard when I was there, but I only attended one of them. But I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot also from Richards, from his writings on metaphor, but also from his example of writing clearly on technical matters, and in ordinary language. Another important person for me was Ronald Crane at Chicago. He always argued with Lovejoy. With Lovejoy, the history of ideas was constituted by single ideas put together to form a pattern; he was a particularist, for whom each idea separately made sense. The emphasis of Crane, on the other hand, was on system: individual ideas change their character when they're put together in a systemic way. They're both right, of course. My own writing in intellectual history—and that would include The Mirror and the Lamp—tries to maintain a view of the system in which an idea occurs, and also to identify, and follow historically, the separate ideas.
I learned also from Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote Science and the Modern World. I used to skip the parts about his own philosophy, but studied closely the chapters about the impact of science on intellectual history and so on. Not as important to me as Lovejoy and Crane, but important. And T. S. Eliot. Eliot was a power when I was young.
Williams: Speaking of when you were young, I wanted to ask you a couple of biographical questions. How did it come to be that someone from New Jersey...
Abrams: Long Branch, on the sea shore.
Williams: How did you end up becoming a literary person or a man of letters?
Abrams: Not by ambition but by accident.
Williams: What did your father do?
Abrams: My father started as a house painter, became a contractor, then opened a paint and wallpaper store in Long Branch, New Jersey. He was a hard worker. There was no tradition of learning in my family.
Williams: Why did they send you to Harvard?
Abrams: The principal of my high school was a man called Cate, and he used to pick his bright students and get them into Harvard. We had a small school, a graduating class of ninety or so, but in my class, three of us went to Harvard. You're not going to get that happening very often, but we had a bright class, and we all three went on scholarships to Harvard in 1930.
Williams: Those must have been tight times.
Abrams: Oh, yes. It was during the Great Depression. I had a vague intention of going to law school because everybody who didn't know what else to do at the time thought about law school. It was in the depths of the Depression, in the early 30s, when you weren't going to make a living no matter what you did. So I said, "I like reading English literature, I'll stay with that." Two things were decisive in determining my decision. First, I got a fellowship to go to Cambridge University, which assured me that I was not run of the mill and gave me a chance to look around and think a little. Second, my honors essay was published by Harvard. It's called "The Milk of Paradise" and it's about poets and novelists who took opium, which affected their writings. Those two events gave me the impetus and the daring to think I might be able to make it in teaching. It was a gamble because in those days there weren't any jobs in teaching, but there weren't jobs in any profession. So I thought I might as well enjoy starving instead of starving while doing something I didn't enjoy.
A special problem was the fact I was Jewish. When I was at Harvard as an undergraduate, I think there were one or two Jews on the total faculty—both converts. When I came to Cornell, there were two Jews on the faculty. But what broke the barriers against Jews in academia was the Second World War, both because of the Nazi persecution of the Jews for which many people felt they had to compensate, and because colleges were stripped of their faculties during the war. And then came the GI Bill, which flooded colleges and universities with mature and eager students, of whom many came from poor families without any tradition of attending college. Colleges, as a result, had to build faculties in a hurry, and they couldn't afford to be prejudiced the way they used to; so they hired Jews and Catholics and Irish who had had difficulty breaking into faculty ranks. That was just a matter of lucky timing.
Before the war, it was phenomenal when a Jew made it onto a university faculty. I remember that the young Lionel Trilling published a book on Matthew Arnold, and it got ecstatic reviews. The story was told that Nicholas Murray Butler, who was then the president of Columbia, saw the reviews and said, "Who is this young fellow?" The upshot was that they made Trilling a professor. That was sensational at the time, to be tenured in English literature if you were Jewish. That was the first big breakthrough. The other breakthroughs came when Harry Levin was kept on at Harvard, where he had been an undergraduate, then a junior fellow. After that the floodgates opened.
Williams: You finished at Harvard in 1940 and then worked in the psychoacoustics lab during the war. How did that come about?
Abrams: I was at Harvard and had just gotten my PhD. I was already more than thirty years old and of no great interest to the army. The first course I taught at Harvard was called "The Psychology of Literature," and it was a summer session course, taught under the aegis of the psychology department. So I was known to the psychology department, when S. S. Stevens, a very distinguished experimental psychologist, was given the task of setting up a secret laboratory to work on the problem of communications in a noisy environment. He put together a group of young scientists to work on the problem, and he offered me the job. He asked, "Do you know anything about phonetics?" and I said, "Well, I know a little phonetics because I've been working in philology." He said, "I'd like you to join my staff," and I said, "I don't know anything about oral communications in noise," and he said, "Neither does anybody else. I want you because you think like a scientist." So I joined that laboratory; my wife got a job in the same laboratory as the secretary-treasurer.
Williams: Then after the war you moved to Cornell. How did that happen?
Abrams: When the war ended I was offered the job at Cornell. I came up here—I still had an appointment at Harvard and I could have stayed on in the English department there; but I was captivated by the atmosphere and the natural environment of Cornell.
Williams: Really? You visited and liked it so much?
Abrams: Yes. I had no intention of joining the faculty when I was invited for a visit, but came out of politeness. When they offered me the job I took it. Ithaca was a very attractive small town then, and the campus of Cornell was much more like that of a college than of a university. There were wooden faculty houses right on campus. It was very pleasant in those days, little traffic and no parking problems. If somebody had told me then that there'd soon be parking problems, I would have been incredulous.
Williams: Any reflections on being in one place for so long? You didn't move around as some people do.
Abrams: I liked the place the first time I saw it. Cornell's natural location is incomparable, and I love the open country. Cornell put together more of the things I value than any university I know of, so I was never tempted by offers elsewhere. Also, I just didn't like the way some people used universities and colleges and departments as though they were telephone wires from which to fly to the next higher wire when the opportunity arose. I didn't approve of that. I believe in striking roots, and feeling loyalty to the place where I am.
Williams: Cornell seems to cultivate that more than most places I've been.
Abrams: That's true. It instills in its faculty, and in its students, a sense of belonging, community, and loyalty. It's common among American alumni to feel close to their university; but that is especially the case at Cornell. I think that's partly because of Cornell's special history, being the youngest of the Ivy League colleges—after all, it was only started in 1865, with the famous motto, "Any person can find instruction in any subject." "Any person." Right from the beginning that meant male and female, and without respect to race, gender, or religion. It was a revolutionary institution when it started; it was often attacked as a godless university. People felt loyal to it early on, because it was innovative and under attack. Also, it was a rather strange anomaly, because the university is partly state, partly private. In all these respects, Cornell is more American than any other university I know of. It's partly Midwest, it's partly East; it's Ivy League and yet it's not like the other colleges in the League; it's private yet a land-grant college; and it's a liberal arts college with an ag school—or what they used to call an ag school. So it's very American.
I think a main attraction, finally, is the charm of the landscape here and of the outdoor life it makes possible. It's a big university in a very rural environment, so that the tendency is inward. You can't spread out into the environing city for your cultural and other enterprises; you turn inward to the university. All these things seem to inspire great affection and loyalty in most of its alumni. You probably got the feel of it when you were here.
Williams: I did [while at the Society for the Humanities in 2002-03]. It snowed a lot, though!
Abrams: When I first came here in 45 we used to have ice skating on Beebe Lake every day. Each night they'd scrape the ice with a bulldozer and reflood it. Then the winters got so mild that, if the ice did form at all, it would crack up and refreeze in a way that made outdoor skating impossible. At that time I took up skiing because I got tired of my friends who skied saying, during a storm, "Goody! It's snowing!" I said if I can't beat 'em, I'll join 'em.
Williams: One last question: could you tell me surprises you've had that changed the way you saw things, perhaps disappointments on the one hand, and good surprises on the other?
Abrams: I find it hard to think of disappointments. Some things, of course, I would have preferred to go otherwise; but I even enjoy the kinds of critical movements that I disapprove of, because I enjoy a good intellectual fight. I enjoy a verbal exchange in print with somebody I disagree with, about what seem to me fundamental matters. I'm good-humored about it, because I really enjoy it. And I never argue with somebody I don't admire. I don't find it worthwhile to argue with somebody who isn't intellectually capable of responding in kind. So even my disagreements with what's happened in the literary and critical field aren't really disappointments.
As for good surprises, they're at the degree of success of the books I've published. I didn't expect the success of The Mirror and the Lamp, I didn't expect the success of the Norton anthology, I didn't expect the success of the Glossary. Yet I must confess, if I take down one of these books now and read in it, I often say, "My gosh, did I write that?" It still seems to me good and I still believe what I find that I once said. Just before you came I read, as I told you, my essay called "Colloquy on Theory," and it seems to me to stand up despite the passage of time. And that I find a source of gratification.
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