Traveler in the Word-Clouds : He’s given birth to two-fifths of a mile of opinions. And the journey continues . . .

“If you keep on doing newspaper work, Ernest,” Gertrude Stein warned the young Hemingway, “you will never see things, you will only see words.” Hemingway took her advice and stuck to fiction, and to things--at least until he grew old and things disappeared into the words he’d used to conjure them and left him with mostly cadences and echoes.

This thought and what follows come as a kind of end-of-year hiatus in the procession of something more than 1,000 book reviews written since 1982, when I began. That amounts to a column two-fifths of a mile long--a newspaper column, that is, not a column of ants. Distinctions, like frontier lines, are always important when otherwise one might think that there was no special difference. Between the flatlands of Dakota and Manitoba, say.

Still, two-fifths of a mile of opinions is bound to seem ant-like, particularly under the signature of a regular newspaper reviewer. Like ants upon a piece of cake left outdoors, reviews both irritate and advertise. There are times when subjects, readers and the practitioners themselves must wonder whether Stein’s words don’t apply. If you keep on doing book reviews, will you never see books, will you only see words about books?

I could put it differently and evoke the only partly useful distinction between reviews and criticism (another Dakota-Manitoba frontier). A critic at best, and at best, not full time (I think randomly of the novelists Virginia Woolf and Diane Johnson, the short-story writer V.S. Pritchett, the playwright George Bernard Shaw, the poet Seamus Heaney and such broadly humane chroniclers as Alfred Kazin, Cynthia Ozick and Edmund Wilson)--such a critic writes in order to give birth to an opinion. A reviewer--not at best, perhaps, but quite often, considering the twice-weekly nature of the task--gives birth to an opinion in order to write.

A word-clouded project, and it doesn’t really help to recall St. John’s “In the beginning was the Word.” It was not a reviewer’s word he was thinking of nor a critic’s, either.

(God, the writer, said: This is.

Satan, the critic, said: This should be different,

and how.)

Now all the above is true but not all of the truth. (“The truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth” amounts to swearing in court that you are about to lie.) An end-of-the-year thought is apt to be gloomy, but presumably one has been going along reasonably cheerfully to get there. Anyway, unless you write in blood and not for pay, it is poor taste to do yourself down in print, with a subliminal tug at the reader: “Tell me it’s not so bad.”

In fact, reviews bear an honorable distinction from criticism. (Of course, it’s a fuzzy line, a matter of South Dakota and Northern Manitoba.) A review is not so much the statement of a truth as the true statement of an experience. Not so much “Hamlet” as “Hamlet did this when I went to see it.” A “to me” is implicit for both critic and reviewer, but in a review, whether avowed or not, it is fundamental.

Those seemingly discouraging two-fifths of a mile are not really a column. They are a road. Roads wear down and so do feet; mine are sore at times, though I think not callused. But however worn, roads have a recurring youthfulness of purpose. It is always a new thing to pick up the day’s milk, the mail, to go into town to hear who got into a fight and to begin a journey, short or long.

If reviewing can be compared to anything, in fact, it is at least as close to travel writing as it is to formal criticism, and certainly closer than to academic critical theory. I will get back to this.

Journalism is the first rough draft of history; newspaper reviewing is the first rough draft of opinion, and very rough indeed. I am tempted to say that the job of a reviewer is to be right in the present and willing to be wrong in the future, but that is not quite it. With pains, intuition and luck we may prophesy a short distance. More exactly, perhaps, the job or the hope is to be right for tomorrow and willing to be wrong for the day after.

How dull the history of literature would be, after all, if it did not contain the comic misapprehensions of contemporary scribblers. In the courts of criticism we are the court jesters, and sometimes the academic courtiers refer to us that way. One can also think, as Shakespeare did, of the clean tooth of a jester’s bite. The quick eye and instant intuition may be deceived by appearances, yet an immediate response is not always less true than a considered one. In fact, being less deeply committed to previously elaborated theories and principles, it may sometimes be less deceived.

“For fear to fall I stand not fast,” Thomas Wyatt wrote. Trying not to fall but not really fearing to, reviewers may not be so tempted to cloud their stands. This is partly, perhaps, because a newspaper pronouncement is not likely to survive long enough to be painfully rebutted. But it rests more soundly in the notion of reviewing as a matter less of judgment than of travel.

Great travel writing does not say: This is Borneo. It says: This is a trip to Borneo. This is what I found in Borneo. And this is what changed in me when I was there. Reviewing--I admit this is what I believe ought to be rather than what often is, even in my own writing--is the experience, in its fullest sense, of a journey. That does not mean that reviews should be purely descriptive and analytical. Without judgments--choleric, euphoric, sardonic--they are lifeless. But these are the judgments of a traveler, not a judge.

Graham Greene pronounced, often objectionably, on Liberia. Bruce Chatwin wrote of a Patagonia that no other visitor would be able to find. Tocqueville’s discriminating appreciation, like Dickens’ gloomy distaste, captured only a part of the United States--had they traveled together and swapped notes we would likely be without two oppositely valuable books. Judgments are the branches a traveler snaps while finding his way through the terrain, or losing it. The wrong turns may show as much as the right ones.

Nobody in this century has written better of the art and civilization of Medieval and Renaissance Europe than Zbigniew Herbert. Confined in postwar Poland until the end of Stalinism, he launched himself into France and Italy upon a pent-up flood of desire. The chapters in his “Barbarian in the Garden” speak of Piero della Francesca, the cave paintings at Lascaux, the cathedral in Orvieto, the treasures of Siena and much else. But Herbert does not look at them as static works. He looks at them as a traveler through space and time. He describes the trip, he wanders back through history, he stops--he always stops--for lunch.

I would like to be like him. Of course, he was not a reviewer, but a poet and, I suppose, a critic. Still, he was a fellow traveler, and a reviewer can only wish to travel as well. He made a discoverer’s tour around each site and left it as untouched as ever.