NONFICTION - April 24, 1994

THE OLD MODERNS: Essays on Literature and Theory by Denis Donoghue (Alfred A. Knopf: $27.50; 288 pp.). Denis Donoghue writes in the final essay in this collection that literary historians are “like war correspondents who are irritable when nothing much is happening”; they like revolution, change, movement, controversy. Donoghue, a professor of English at New York University, isn’t completely immune to such things, but in “The Old Moderns”--as the oxymoronic title implies--he is certainly the voice of established tradition.

Donoghue’s readings are occasionally so close they’ll put the reader to sleep, but on the first-rank moderns--notably Henry James and W.B. Yeats--he writes compellingly. Of particular interest is the essay on James’ “The Golden Bowl,” where Donoghue uses William James, Henry’s philosopher brother, to point up the frustrations caused by the novelist’s later work. William, in a letter to Henry upon reading “The Golden Bowl,” wryly asks Henry if his brother can’t “sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style? Publish it in my name, I will acknowledge it, and give you half the proceeds.”