A Critics’ Critic

Craft and Character, by Morton Dauwen Zabel. 331 pp. New York: The Viking Press. $4.75

Mr. Morton Zabel, a critic whose leftist orientation only occasionally interferes with his analyses, takes the reader on a potentially fascinating tour of Victorian and modern novelists. He starts with three essays on Dickens, proceeding to Thomas Hardy in what is perhaps the best piece of the lot, then taking in Samuel Butler and Henry James. This concludes the first section of the book, subtitled “The Terms of the Appeal.” The next part is devoted to “The Terms of the Response,” beginning with a long and sometimes perceptive series on Conrad, then continuing through E. M. Forster, Ford Maddox Ford, Willa Cather, Graham Greene and various “Readings in Fiction” (including an acid and entirely justified attack on Somerset Maugham, an obeisance to Lionel Trilling’s fiction dictated perhaps more by ideology than by criticism, and a competent summation of Hemingway).

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F. Reid Buckley

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Craft and Character, by Morton Dauwen Zabel. 331 pp. New York: The Viking Press. $4.75

Mr. Morton Zabel, a critic whose leftist orientation only occasionally interferes with his analyses, takes the reader on a potentially fascinating tour of Victorian and modern novelists. He starts with three essays on Dickens, proceeding to Thomas Hardy in what is perhaps the best piece of the lot, then taking in Samuel Butler and Henry James. This concludes the first section of the book, subtitled “The Terms of the Appeal.” The next part is devoted to “The Terms of the Response,” beginning with a long and sometimes perceptive series on Conrad, then continuing through E. M. Forster, Ford Maddox Ford, Willa Cather, Graham Greene and various “Readings in Fiction” (including an acid and entirely justified attack on Somerset Maugham, an obeisance to Lionel Trilling’s fiction dictated perhaps more by ideology than by criticism, and a competent summation of Hemingway).