Krystal, Arthur

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Yale University Press, P.O. Box 209040, New Haven, CT 06520-9040.

CAREER: Literary critic, writer, editor.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve, Wesleyan University Pres (Middletown, CT), 1989.

(Editor and author of introduction) A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the Readers' Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs, Free Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals, including the Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, Harpe's, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, American Scholar, and Art and Antiques.

SIDELIGHTS: Arthur Krystal is a writer and literary critic, and also an editor, including of Jacques Barzun's The Culture We Deserve, twelve essays by the scholar. Barzun was born in France but spent nearly his entire life at Columbia University from the time he entered as a student at the age of fifteen. In this volume, he emphasizes the decline of culture in all areas, including education, politics, and the arts. Barbara Fisher Williamson, who reviewed the book for the New York Times Book Review, felt that the most informative entries focus on the writing of history.

Krystal is also editor of A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the Readers' Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs. The Readers' Book Club was in existence from 1951 to 1963. It was published by Gilman Kraft, brother of columnist Joseph Kraft, with its first editor, Lionel Trilling, who had been Gilman's teacher. Trilling went to Jacques Barzun, who had taught Joseph Kraft, and invited him to become part of the venture. Barzun agreed and solicited W.H. Auden, who became the third editor.

The club, which its founders considered to be a step up from the everyman's Book of the Month Club, underwent only one change of name, to the Mid-Century Book Club, and publisher. A book was offered to members every four weeks. Some were new titles, while others were reprints. Each book was introduced in the club's newsletter with an essay by one of the editors, and a total of 173 essays were eventually published. Krystal collected forty-five of them for this volume, and all but one have never before been reprinted.

Louis Menand noted in the New Yorker that Krystal writes that these essays "constitute 'some of the last examples of literary criticism aimed at a general audience by professional critics.' But the pieces are not criticism; they are blurbs, blurbs of rare discernment, perhaps, but blurbs. Their purpose, after all, was to persuade subscribers to buy the selections—and to keep on subscribing." Menand felt that it was not just the books the editors were promoting, "it was a sense of intellectual ease and familiarity that readers might, through a steady consumption of such books, hope to acquire themselves. 'Read this,' the editors seem to say, 'and sound like us.'"

Menand assessed the contributions of the editors, writing that "as it turned out, the only one with a knack for the style of relaxed erudition that the circumstances called for—the only one you can imagine anybody wanting to sound like, even in 1951—was Barzun. This is a little unexpected, for Barzun's take on modern life is fairly severe. He was born in Paris in 1907, and was raised in the world of the French prewar avant-garde…. The war ended all that … and Barzun never developed a taste for the art and literature that came afterward…. Most art and literature after 1914 seemed to him stylistically incoherent and filled with nihilism and disgust." Menand felt that the reason for Barzun's responsiveness and open-mindedness is that they "were features of the Romantic and early avant-garde culture he admired. But part of the reason is that he had a trick that seems to have escaped the other two: he picked his occasions. He wrote on subjects he knew something about, and therefore had points to make."

Menand wrote that Trilling "labored under a ponderous theoretical apparatus, whose elements he took from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. There was nothing ad hoc or belletristic about his criticism; it was theoretical to the last degree…. Trilling was also a kind of cultural neurasthenic. His reaction to art that he suspected of lacking the proper gravitas was to avoid it."

Washington Post Book World's George Scialabba called the tone of the reviews "authoritative yet informed, earnest yet relaxed, frequently personal, regularly wry, and once—Trilling on Eliot's recording of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats—memorably whimsical. Auden's is perhaps the most distinctive style, varying the general urbanity now and then with puckishness or crotchet."

In a Wall Street Journal review, Terry Teachout called A Company of Readers "one of those brilliant book ideas so 'obvious' that nobody ever thinks to carry them out…. The Readers' Subscription may have been, in reality, more highbrow than its competitors, but never self-consciously so. All three judges wrote of books in the clear, elegant language of learned men who devoutly believed that culture is accessible to the nonspecialist, whatever his background or condition of life. In a larger sense, one might well define culture as the tribute the uneducated pay to education: They take it on faith that learning is a virtue, and some of them actually do something about it."

Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature is a collection of Krystal's own writings, essays, and reviews that span two decades, and most come from the New York Times Book Review, American Scholar, and Harper's. His subjects are reading and writing, the relationship between life and literature, the nature of God and death, and his dissatisfaction with the literary scene. "Krystal celebrates the author compelled to write by a sense of mortality and the critic qualified to judge literature by traits of temperament and taste," commented Elizabeth Mary Sheehan in the New York Times Book Review.

Library Journal's Mary Paumier Jones noted that the best-known of the essays, "Closing the Books: A Once-Devoted Reader Arrives at the End of the Story," "attempts to come to terms with his own loss of interest in reading. Is it his age, he wonders, or the age."

A Kirkus Reviews critic stated that "for someone who has gained a modest reputation as a bumptious crank, critic Krystal … comes across here as sensible, personable, and unafraid of his own ideas…. This poke in the eye of literary opinion and knowledge feels oddly good."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Spectator, October, 1989, John Simon, review of The Culture We Deserve, pp. 41-44.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2002, review of Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, p. 1012.

Library Journal, June 15, 2001, Ali Houissa, review of A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the Readers' Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs, p. 72; September 1, 2002, Mary Paumier Jones, review of Agitations, p. 176.

National Review, August 4, 1989, Stephen J. Tonsor, review of The Culture We Deserve, p. 41.

Newsweek, August 13, 2001, David Gates, review of A Company of Readers, p. 59.

New Yorker, October 15, 2001, Louis Menand, review of A Company of Readers, p. 202.

New York Times Book Review, September 17, 1989, Barbara Fisher Williamson, review of The Culture We Deserve, p. 25; February 2, 2003, Elizabeth Mary Sheehan, review of Agitations, p. 20.

Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2001, Terry Teachout, review of A Company of Readers, p. A11.

Washington Post Book World, September 30, 2001, George Scialabba, review of A Company of Readers, p. T10.

Wilson Quarterly, autumn, 2001, Michael Dirda, review of A Company of Readers, pp. 144-145.