Wild about Harry

Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature by Harry Levin. Oxford University Press, $7.50.

Harry Levin is one of the ablest and most consistently entertaining practitioners of literary criticism in business today. He brings to the study of literature gifts that no one else possesses, and he has the talent and grace to honor literature by writing about it interestingly. When one sees him unfairly and unimaginatively attacked for doing the very thing that he does so well, one bridles. Thus when the New York Review of Books turned loose one of its axmen on Mr. Levin’s latest book, and let him chop up what Mr. Levin had written in an altogether imperceptive and ungrateful fashion, I found myself quite angered. It was the New York Review man’s conclusion that Mr. Levin didn’t work in depth, and that he ought to emulate F. R. Leavis, who does.