Harry Slochower's Mythopoesis: Some Personal and Social Reflections*

I shall be commenting momentarily on Harry Slochower's book Mythopoesis, which I read half a dozen years ago when it first appeared. That I read the book to my delight and instruction may well represent more an achievement of mine than Harry's, a statement I can explain through some personal history involving Harry. I first came to know about a certain Professor Slochower in 1948 through a young lady named Louise Miller, whom I dated in those years. She and I were both college students, and at the time I met her, she was studying comparative literature with this Professor Slochower. In our long and arduous discussions of literature and culture, she was forever quoting the message of her beloved teacher—to my dismay, annoyance, and, I can now admit, jealousy. The message unsettled me because I could not as yet distinguish dialectical criticism from what I took to be the appalling notion of cultural relativism. Then, as now, Harry was a superb dialectician. Indeed, insofar as his interpretive method subsumes what is now called structuralism, I would say that the world has finally caught up with him. However, in those years, I wasn't able to entertain such things. I was captivated by what now appears to me a quaint literary movement, though perhaps a provisionally valuable one at the time, called The New Criticism. You can well imagine the clash of values with my distant rival, Professor Slochower. Reluctantly I read No Voice Is Wholly Lost, which Louise Miller forced upon me. It proved to rank with two other books that I read at that time as having a significant impact upon the subsequent course of my life. The two other books were Trilling's Liberal Imagination and Freud's General Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. I was forever indebted to that headstrong young lady who overcame my youthful arrogance