"For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again"
About this Quote
Howard Nemerov compresses a whole sociology of reading and writing into a sly, loaded phrase. By calling up a "Jewish Puritan of the middle class", he fuses two archetypes of American diligence and moral seriousness to spotlight an attitude toward art: the novel as duty, as labor, as carefully tended shop. The repetition of "the novel is" mimics a merchant counting stock, stressing conscientious application over play, delight, or unruly imagination. To say the novel is "practically the retail business all over again" pushes the joke and the critique: artistic practice becomes inventory, display, and customer service, all under the watch of profit-and-loss.
Nemerov, a poet with a sharp satirical streak, was writing in a postwar American culture where literature increasingly met a broadened middle-class audience and a professionalized industry. Book clubs, university programs, and an expanding publishing apparatus encouraged a view of the novel as instrument of seriousness, a vehicle for worthiness and instruction. The phrase works as shorthand for that ethos. It is not a statement about any group so much as a composite emblem: a convergence of immigrant striving, Puritan thrift, and middle-class respectability that turns art into conscientious enterprise.
Underneath the jest lies a real anxiety about the fate of the novel in a commercial republic. If the novel must be useful, impeccable, industrious, it risks becoming a ledger of correct intentions. Retail logic rewards predictability, tidy categories, reliable brands; art thrives on waste, risk, and surplus, on moments that do not reconcile with the cash drawer. Nemerov points to a paradox: the same discipline that enables sustained creation can calcify into a moral bookkeeping that mistakes effort for vision. His line asks writers and readers to notice when devotion to craft shades into piety and when seriousness becomes another form of merchandising, and to recover the unruly freedoms that no shop can stock.
Nemerov, a poet with a sharp satirical streak, was writing in a postwar American culture where literature increasingly met a broadened middle-class audience and a professionalized industry. Book clubs, university programs, and an expanding publishing apparatus encouraged a view of the novel as instrument of seriousness, a vehicle for worthiness and instruction. The phrase works as shorthand for that ethos. It is not a statement about any group so much as a composite emblem: a convergence of immigrant striving, Puritan thrift, and middle-class respectability that turns art into conscientious enterprise.
Underneath the jest lies a real anxiety about the fate of the novel in a commercial republic. If the novel must be useful, impeccable, industrious, it risks becoming a ledger of correct intentions. Retail logic rewards predictability, tidy categories, reliable brands; art thrives on waste, risk, and surplus, on moments that do not reconcile with the cash drawer. Nemerov points to a paradox: the same discipline that enables sustained creation can calcify into a moral bookkeeping that mistakes effort for vision. His line asks writers and readers to notice when devotion to craft shades into piety and when seriousness becomes another form of merchandising, and to recover the unruly freedoms that no shop can stock.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Howard
Add to List
