Books in Brief: Present Perspectives

Present Perspectives: Critical Writings, by Robert Craft (Knopf, 433 pp., $18.95)

The first half of Present Perspectives, Robert Craft’s third collection of essays, constitutes an awe-inspiring exhibition of conspicuous polymathy: two-hundred-odd pages of incisive commentary on such things as Evelyn Waugh’s journalism, Prokofiev’s autobiography, Arlene Croce’s dance criticism, T. S. Eliot’s view of prose fiction, and Berg’s Wozzeck. At page 215, Mr. Craft switches over to the specialty of the house: seven essays and a lengthy set of diary entries dealing with various aspects of Igor Stravinsky’s career. Mr. Craft is not always critically sound. (He considers Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and “Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing” to be “the best products of his imaginative world,” and he completely misses the boat on the question of Shostakovich’s greatness as a composer —two conspicuous examples.) He is, however, unfailingly intelligent, a more immediately relevant consideration in books of this sort; moreover, he has at last refined the neo-Nabokovian tricks out of his prose style. The result very nearly justifies the continued existence of The New York Review of Books, in which most of these fine essays originally saw print; had Mr. Craft thought to equip Present Perspectives with an index, I might have even broken down and subscribed.