=== Page 1 === PARTISAN REVIEW NOVEMBER-DECEMBER, 1952 NICOLA CHIAROMONTE Sartre v. Camus: A Political Quarrel ALBERTO MORAVIA Sunny Honeymoon (a story) WALTER KAUFMANN Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Advent of Psychology RANDALL JARRELL Thoughts on Marianne Moore GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB The Victorian as Intellectual DELMORE SCHWARTZ Long After Eden (fiction chronicle) F. W. DUPEE The Pursuit of Faulkner Reviews and poems by Barker Fairley, Wallace Fowlie, Francis Golffing, Pearse Hutchinson, Jane Mayhall, Richard H. Rovere, Winfield Townley Scott 6 75c === Page 2 === THE POETRY CENTER of the YM-YWHA John Malcolm Brinnin, Director presents sacheverell richard theodore w. h. edith osbert edwin SITWELL DYER-BENNET* ROETHKE AUDEN SITWELL SITWELL ARLINGTON ROBINSON MEMORIAL BOWEN MACNEICE ANDERSON* MACNEICE HUXLEY MERRILL NEMEROV SMITH LAUGHTON* MICHAIX POETRY CENTER INTRODUCTIONS THOMAS "UNDER MILK WOOD"* THOMAS October 23 October 26 December 4 December II December 18 January 29 February 12 February 26 March 5 Date to be announced March 12 April 19 April 23 April 26 May 7 May 14 elizabeth louis hedli louis aldous james howard william jay charles henri dylan by dylan MEMBERSHIP: $15.00 for 16 events. Single Admission: $1.50 except events starred which are $1.80, $2.40 and $3.00. Lectures and Readings by KATHERINE ANNE PORTER ROBERT FROST JEAN STAFFORD EUDORA WELTY Oct. 30, Nov. 6, Nov. 9 Nov. 13, Nov. 20, Nov. 22 Jan. 15 Jan. 22 and others to be announced. SUBSCRIPTION: $4.00 each series of three lectures. Single Admission: $1.50 POETRY CENTER MEMBERSHIPS are available at $15.00 per year. In addition to a reserved seat for the 16 presentations, members will receive other privileges including a 10 percent reduction on all courses listed below and membership in the Poetry Center Library. COURSES: The Craft of Poetry, John Malcolm Brinnin. The Craft of the Short Story, Howard Moss. The 20th Century Novel, Howard Moss. William Butler Yeats, Kimon Friar. Reading the Modern Poem, John Malcolm Brinnin. Aspects of Duality in Literature and Art, Kimon Friar. Ancient Greek Literature, Kimon Friar. Ancient Greek Drama, Kimon Friar. Problems of Literary Criticism, Elias L. Tartak. TUITION: $35.00 per semester for The Craft of Poetry or The Craft of the Short Story. For all other courses, $15.00 per semester. There is no registration fee. For further information, call or write The Poetry Center, YM-YWHA, Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street, New York 28, N. Y. TRAfalgar 6-2366 === Page 3 === PARTISAN REVIEW'S Annual Special Christmas Offer A SAVING OF $1.50 ON EACH GIFT SUBSCRIPTION Christmas rates: One-year renewal or gift subscription for PARTISAN REVIEW Each additional subscription $4.00 $2.50 Please add 50 cents for foreign subscriptions. A special gift card, signed with your name in pen and ink, will announce each of your gift subscriptions. Please use the enclosed reply envelope to send in your order. THIS OFFER EXPIRES DECEMBER 31, 1952 PARTISAN REVIEW • 30 West 12th Street, New York 11, N. Y. The intimate soul of a tortured poet THE LETTERS OF HART CRANE Edited by BROM WEBER 405 letters by the great American poet, written be- tween 1916 and his suicide in 1932. Intimate, revealing letters to his family and to such great figures of the twenties as Alfred Steiglitz, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, Malcolm Cowley and Gertrude Stein. "The record of Crane's days vibrates with an explosive terror and repose—elated, wretched, violent, Rabelaisian." -From Brom Weber's Preface. 448 pages. Frontispiece. $5.00 At all bookstores, or HERMITAGE HOUSE, INC. 8 W. 13th St., New York 11 === Page 4 === YALE Gertrude Stein— enigma...strange prophet...wry genius MRS. Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes By Gertrude Stein THE second volume in the Un- published Writings of Ger- trude Stein, featuring her last long novel, Mrs. Reynolds, composed during World War II, is particularly timely to- day, being concerned with war, peace, anxiety and tran- quility, saints, miracles and predictions, and the shadows cast by two men: Angel Har- per, who is Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Lane, who is Joseph Stalin. 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SCHOOL OF APPLIED PSYCHOANALYSIS NEW YORK PSYCHOANALYTIC INSTITUTE 247 East 82nd Street, New York City COURSES FOR SCHOLARS AND GRADUATE STUDENTS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES Theory and Applications of Psychoanalysis Classes begin Request catalog November 10, 1952 at TR 9-6900, Ext. 8 A free catalogue of dollar books by William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Wallace Fowlie, D. H. Lawrence, Frank Norris, Anais Nin, Michael Fraenkel and others is yours for the asking from THE ALICAT BOOK SHOPS 287 South Broadway Yonkers 5, N. Y. === Page 5 === OXFORD BOOKS The Responsibilities of the Critic Essays and Reviews by F. O. MATTHIESSEN Edited by JOHN RACKLIFFE. Incisiveness, erudition and a consistent refusal to compromise with mediocrity-these were the characteristics that made Matthiesen one of America's finest critics. In this posthumous volume, he appraises the work of many contemporary authors and poets, discusses such subjects as critics and criticism, the creative process and his own personal goals. The publica- tion of these articles for the first time in book form reveals the unity of Matthiesen's thought, and serves as a key to a career that left an indelible impression on American letters. $5.00 The Aeneid of Virgil Translated into English Verse by C. DAY LEWIS A new translation of the great epic by one of England's most distinguished contemporary poets. Mr. Lewis has chosen the voice of the storyteller to recapture for modern readers both the power of Virgil's narrative style and the richness of his story. $3.75 The Blue Fox By RONALD DUNCAN. At the sign of the Blue Fox in Devonshire, a popular British author has found the es- sence of country life. 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Y. under the act of March 3, 1879. === Page 7 === A LITTLE TREASURY NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1952 VOLUME XIX, NUMBER 6 CONTENTS GOETHE VERSUS SHAKESPEARE: SOME CHANGES IN DRAMATIC SENSIBILITY, Walter Kaufmann 621 SUNNY HONEYMOON, Alberto Moravia 635 COLERIDGE, Winfield Townley Scott 660 THE RETURN and THE CLOISTERS, Jane Mayhall 660 THE NUNS AT THE MEDICAL LECTURE, Pearse Hutchinson 662 MR. STEPHEN AND MR. RAMSAY: THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL, Gertrude Himmelfarb 664 PARIS LETTER: SARTRE VERSUS CAMUS, Nicola Chiaromonte 680 THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE, Randall Jarrell 687 BOOKS FICTION CHRONICLE: LONG AFTER EDEN, Delmore Schwartz 701 THE PURSUIT OF FAULKNER, F. W. Dupee 706 THE POSITION OF HOFMANNSTHAL, Francis Golffing 711 SOCIALISM AND THE SCHOLARS, Richard H. Rovere 715 FAUST: A MODERN VERSION, Barker Fairley 718 RIMBAUD IN THE SORBONNE, Wallace Fowlie 723 INDEX TO VOLUME XIX 734 === Page 8 === Beautiful gifts for all who love literature A LITTLE TREASURY OF WORLD POETRY HUBERT CREEKMORE, EDITOR Translations from the Great Poets, from 2600 B.C. to 1950 A.D. The outstanding poems of Sappho, Ovid, Li Po, Dante, Baudelaire, Lorca, Goethe, Rilke and many others. Illustrated with 64 photographs and portraits of the poets, fully indexed, buckram binding, gilt top, cellophane wrap, slip case. over 900 pgs. $5.00 THE FIRST MORNING New Poems by PETER VIERECK “Viereck’s talent rises like a lovely bird . . . in the purest sense lyrical, sensitive, distinguished in feeling." —WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS. 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So if you see something advertised or reviewed which you would like for yourself or to give as a Christmas present, let us know and we will send it off instanter — beautifully gift- wrapped if you wish. LIBERAL PRESS, INC. printers of PARTISAN REVIEW P.S. Our Christmas cards are better than ever this year. 80 FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK 3, N. Y. 4 seasons bookshop 17 WEST 8th ST., NEW YORK 11 Open noon to 11 p.m. AL 4-2233 === Page 11 === reduto beduldning ИЯЗСОМ И 2YA223 МЯІСІТІЯЭ УЯАЯТИ That book about Hemingway YAWOMIM3H ТЯЗНИЯЗ "The full content and meaning of Hemingway's books has not hitherto been so fully described, nor has so ambitious an effort been made to situate Hemingway in his personal and historical milieu, or to define the moral and aesthetic problems his whole work raises. However the reader may differ in his judgment on Hemingway's achievement, his basis for any such judgment will be enlarged and strengthened by the analysis he finds here. I assume that this will be the most detailed book on Heming- way for some time to come.” —MORTON DAUWEN ZABEL THE WRITER AS ARTIST By CARLOS BAKER HEMINGWAY: THE WRITER AS ARTIST By CARLOS BAKER 342 pages, including "A working check- list of Hemingway's Prose, Poetry, and Journalism-with Notes." $4.50. Order from your bookstore, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS ИЯЗМОЭ. 8 ТЯАНИЯ 00.E2 22989 ЭNIIVIH 3H === Page 12 === REHEARSALS of DISCOMPOSURE Alienation and Reconciliation in Modern Literature: FRANZ KAFKA, IGNAZIO SILONE, D. H. LAWRENCE, and T. S. ELIOT. NATHAN A. SCOTT. Astute appraisal of four leading 20th-century writers whose sense of estrangement and exile-political, psychological, or religious-makes them spokesmen for the alienated modern conscience. A King's Crown Press publication $4.00 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 2960 Broadway N. Y. 27 "His first novel establishes ANGUS WILSON as one of the major English fic- tion writers of the last ten years. . . Composed with admirable economy . . . it is animated by a hatred of stupidity and cruelty which links the author to the major English satirists."-Wil- LIAM PEDEN, Saturday Review "Deserves to be widely read and discussed; it will certainly rank among the notable novels of the year."-JAMES HILTON, N. Y. Herald Tribune HEMLOCK AND AFTER THE VIKING PRESS $3.00 published October . . . ESSAYS IN MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM By Ray B. West, Jr. Univ. of Iowa. Presents influential critical documents since Coleridge, a section on modern critical theory, and a final one repre- senting the practice of criticism of fic- tion, poetry, and drama. prob. 624 pp. $6.00 timely. . . ERNEST HEMINGWAY By Philip Young. One of the Rinehart Critical Studies, this new approach to Hemingway and his work analyzes his style, its implications, its origins, and its effect on other writers. available spring, 1953, prob. 224 pp. $2.00 new rinehart editions THE BIBLE: Selections from Old and New Testaments. Ed. Allan G. Chester 415 pp. $ .75 SAMUEL JOHNSON: Selected Prose and Poetry. Ed. Bertrand H. Bronson 512 pp. $ .75 THE RINEHART BOOK OF VERSE Ed. Alan Swallow ............. 384 pp. $ .75 THE RINEHART BOOK OF SHORT STORIES. Ed. C. L. Cline 320 pp. $ .65 EARLY ENGLISH PROSE TALES Ed. Ashley & Moseley .................. in prep. SELECTED WORKS OF JOHN DRYDEN. Ed. William Frost ... in prep. MATTHEW ARNOLD: Selected Prose & Poetry. Ed. Frederick L. Mulhauser in prep. TWAIN: ROUGHING IT Ed. Rodman W. Paul .................... in prep. RINEHART & COMPANY 232 madison ave. new york 16 === Page 13 === A literary masterpiece ... 4th big printing “Gathers up Rome and holds it before us, bristling and dense and dreamlike . . . 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Y. 21 === Page 15 === 283 Walter Kaufmann GOETHE VERSUS SHAKESPEARE: SOME CHANGES IN DRAMATIC SENSIBILITY The contrast between these two poets concerns me be- cause in throwing light on Goethe's modernity and relative proximity to us, it may help those who are more intimate with Shakespeare to gain an approach to Goethe. The only comparative evaluation I shall offer will be Goethe's own, which is worth citing at the outset. In a conversation with Eckermann (March 30, 1824), Goethe, at the height of his fame, rejected the notion that Tieck, the German romantic, might be his equal, and added: "It is just as if I were to compare myself to Shakespeare, who also did not make himself, and who is nevertheless a being of a higher order to whom I look up." The most enthusiastic admiration is also evident in Goethe's autobiography and his essay, "Shakespeare without End" but es- pecially in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. The account of Wilhelm's first acquaintance with Shakespeare, in Book III, becomes a paean before shifting to the author's long reflections on Hamlet; and in the second chapter of Book IV it is intimated that Goethe actually named his hero, who was to occupy him for fifty years, after Shake- speare. Against this background of unreserved admiration, I shall now attempt to model some over-all differences, not piecemeal, but unorthodox. I shall confine myself entirely to a very few of Shakespeare's dramas to suggest two major points which are interrelated: these plays are not primarily psychological, notwithstanding the poet's psy- chological penetration; and the crux of these plays is that the hero belongs to, and lives in, a world of which the other characters have no inkling. The insistence on explaining all behavior psychologically is a === Page 16 === 622 PARTISAN REVIEW relatively recent development. But its relevance is limited, and some levels of meaning escape this approach altogether. Take Judas' be- trayal of Jesus. Scripture offers no psychological explanation but in- timates the inevitability of predestination; and any effort to explain this act—whether in terms of jealousy, disappointment, or politics— trivializes it. Similarly with Aeschylus and Sophocles: again, the in- exorable, preordained before the hero's birth. No analysis of behavior can account for the outcome, for it is the poet's very point that the behavior itself is accidental in the sense that it is a mere means to a predetermined conclusion which would have been inescapable, no matter what the hero might have done; and the hero's behavior is necessary only insofar as it leads to his undoing. Hence that sus- pense, on which modern writers rely to such a great extent, is lacking. The Greek dramatist chose themes which ensured that his audience would know the outcome in advance—the conclusion was predeter- mined in this sense, too—but it did not occur either to the poet or his public that this might in any way detract from the power of his work. Precisely this was found in the unfolding of what had to come to pass. Nor does our knowledge of the outcome of a drama, or of the Bible stories, lessen our sense of Jacob's or of David's anguish, of Jeremiah's agony or Ajax' madness. The majesty of passion here portrayed is scarcely touched by psychological analyses the relevance of which almost invites comparison with chemical analyses of paint- ing: they reveal something about the artist's medium, not his meaning. This parallel between Greek tragedy and Scripture is not of the surface: Aeschylus and Sophocles have what one might call a religious dimension. They transcend the social sphere and represent something of cosmic significance, beginning perhaps with divine oracles and ending in death or madness, as if some vastness from beyond rushed in, or welled up, to burst into man's pretentious brain. There is the chorus to remind us constantly of the ritual origin of the drama and of its function in religious festivals. The dramas became entertain- ment without ceasing to be revelations. And only in Euripides, where the attempt to psychologize the characters has taken definite form, the gods appear ex machina, unmotivated and not quite appropri- ately. For the attempt to motivate the action psychologically leads us to expect that there will be no supernatural intervention, and the === Page 17 === GOETHE VERSUS SHAKESPEARE 623 god's appearance in the context of entertainment seems doubly questionable. In Shakespeare, to be sure, there are no deities, and the dramas are so excellent as entertainment—and we are sometimes told that he wrote only to entertain—that we are easily led to assume that no ritual or religious elements remain. His outstanding interest in hu- man motivation, moreover, suggests that all the action in his tragedies is meant to be psychologically motivated. And yet this exoteric view leaves out of account those levels of meaning which raise Shake- speare's plays above mere entertainment and invite comparison with Aeschylus, Sophocles and the Bible. For his greatness is certainly not solely a function of his use of language. There is, of course, one level of meaning on which Othello, for example, is the tragedy of jealousy, and the play does not lack con- sistency on this psychological plane. Iago is deeply wounded, having been passed by when Othello made Cassio his lieutenant, though he had less seniority and combat experience. Nor is Iago jealous of Cas- sio alone: he also hates Othello because he suspects that the moor has seduced his wife, Emilia, and he envies Othello his beautiful Desde- mona. If one analyzes the drama psychologically, it is surely Iago who has an inferiority complex—not, as Margaret Webster has sug- gested, Othello. Iago is consumed by ressentiment against Othello, Desdemona and Cassio—using the word ressentiment in precisely the sense in which Nietzsche introduced it into psychology. Nor does this interpretation conflict with A. C. Bradley's when he claims in effect that Iago is motivated by what Nietzsche called "the will to power." Undoubtedly, he does enjoy a sense of power in manipulating others, in creating situations, and in sending those who hurt him to their doom. But that his will to power manifests itself so vengefully is surely due to his ressentiment—especially against the Moor. He can- not forgive Othello his "constant, loving, noble nature" which is a living reproach to him; nor can he forgive him that, in spite of his black skin, Desdemona prefers him. And the thought that perhaps his own wife does, too, Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards; And nothing can, or shall, content my soul, Till I am even'd with him, wife for wife; Or, failing so, yet that I put the Moor === Page 18 === 624 PARTISAN REVIEW At least into a jealousy so strong That judgment cannot cure. (II.2) He wants to be equal because he cannot endure Othello's superiority; and if it cannot be accomplished "wife for wife," Othello must be pulled down to Iago's own miserable level, "into a jealousy so strong that judgment cannot cure." He must cease to be Othello, the "most dear husband" of Desdemona. He must be destroyed-and preferably in a manner entailing her destruction and Cassio's as well. It is Iago rather than Othello that is pictured with the most uncanny psychological penetration, for the Moor's conduct hardly requires any similar analysis. The Moor is of a free and open nature, That thinks men honest, that but seem to be so, And will as tenderly be led by the nose, As asses are- thus Iago describes him at the end of the first act; and seeing that Othello assumes Iago's honesty without the slightest doubt, he can- not fail to be persuaded by the overwhelming evidence of Desde- mona's illicit relation with Cassio with which Iago confronts him. He then consents to Cassio's death and himself smothers Desdemona. If this were all there is to the drama, it would be superb theater, distinguished by the incredibly keen characterization of Iago and the magnificent poetry of some of the speeches. This would be sufficient to ensure the play a high rank, but it has yet another dimension. To begin with Iago. His scheme is motivated, but the full mag- nitude of his wickedness is unaccounted for. Since he is so villainous, the motives outlined here make his behavior plausible; but no at- tempt is made to explain his initially evil nature, without which all these provocations could not have occasioned such diabolical actions. Perhaps this is even underscored in the last scene: I look down towards his feet;-but that's a fable: If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee. And in the last lines of the play he is again referred to as a "hellish villain." A modern writer might well have been tempted to carry the psychological motivation beyond the point where Shakespeare stopped. Yet this is not a fault of Shakespeare's art, but an important === Page 19 === GOETHE VERSUS SHAKESPEARE 625 clue to his conception of the drama. Any further explanation would have threatened to trivialize Iago's wickedness, to explain it away and reduce his terrifying stature. As he stands, Iago invites compar- ison with Judas or the serpent in Eden. What he does is enigmatic and inevitable; and to ask why he is evil or why Othello is deceived by him, is almost like asking why the end is tragic. Why did Prome- theus steal fire from heaven? Such questions miss the point, and Shakespeare's tragedies retain something of the sacramental quality of the Greek drama and the Bible. Iago is no exception; in Hamlet the action is propelled by a ghost; in Macbeth, by witches. Nor are these spirits dei ex machina, extraneous to the action, interfering in it inappropriately, and hence more or less objectionable. They bring about an action which would lose its essential character without them, and they point to a supra- psychological significance which raises the drama beyond mere ac- cident. They create that "numinous" atmosphere-to use Rudolf Otto's apt word for what is simultaneously majestic, awe-inspiring, overpowering and fascinating-which is the essence of Shake- speare's great tragedies and gives them the depth and intensity of the religious experiences which Otto describes. This numinous quality which becomes incarnate in ghosts and witches is by no means confined to spirits, but is found in those tragedies, too, in which no supernatural beings make their appear- ance. Lear has something of this: his conduct in the first scene sug- gests less-as Goethe characteristically supposed-insufficient motiva- tion than the inevitability of an ancient myth. His titanism is insepar- able from this. And in Macbeth, too, the witches' numinous quality is reflected by the hero whom they choose as the vehicle of destiny. Nor does Othello lack this dimension-nor Caesar and Coriolanus, nor even such gentler souls as Richard II and Hamlet. Some details of their characters are drawn with the most admirable psychological skill, but in each case the hero far surpasses any such consideration and is raised to the unquestionable majesty of myth. To achieve this effect, Shakespeare relies not only on occasional contacts with ghosts or witches, but above all upon a radical distinc- tion between the hero and the other figures in the play. Like Saul, the hero is "higher than any of the people from his shoulders and upward"-a man marked and set apart, one with a destiny, a tragic === Page 20 === 626 PARTISAN REVIEW figure. It is one of the most crucial features of these tragedies that the hero is never understood by any other character in the play. The fact that Shakespeare's heroes generally do not soliloquize about the failure of other men to understand them does not prove that they are understood, but only that Shakespeare does not romanticize his heroes; and again this is not a failure of his art but an essential feature of his greatness: instead of becoming pathetic his heroes re- tain the stature of majesty; instead of being mere projections of author, reader, or audience, they are what others think or dream they are, and retain the full impact of myth. Instead of having Othello tell us that his stature precludes his being understood by any of the others in the play, Shakespeare com- posed a murder scene in which Othello acts and speaks in a manner convincing us that he lives in a world in which none of the others can participate. Iago has succeeded in his scheme insofar as the Moor kills his wife, but he has patently not succeeded in reducing Othello to his own level. The scene is the most numinous in the whole drama, awe-inspiring rather than fearful, and Othello, instead of frothing at the mouth with jealousy, acts with a solemn majesty suggesting the hierophant. Desdemona, Iago, and the others in the play, as well as most readers and listeners, to be sure, take that for "a murder, which I thought a sacrifice." Othello's lines in this scene underscore the inadequacy of the purely exoteric interpretation of the action and suggest another level of meaning-even as Shylock's famous speeches, "Signior Antonio, many a time and oft . . ." and "Hath not a Jew eyes? . . ." underline the insufficiency of any reading which sees only the comedy in The Merchant of Venice. There is one level on which it is a comedy and on which Othello is the story ever, Shylock is a great tragic figure; and Othello's murder, a sacri- fice. He had not thought of Desdemona as mortal; she was his very god. In that sense, there was no proportion between Othello's con- ception of Desdemona and the essentially inconsequential, if beauti- ful and faithful, object of his love. If the Moor were to understand her limitation and the sheer brevity of her existence, this would not be another insight but the catastrophic dissolution of his faith, his religion. Iago is the poet's instrument for bringing about this tragic end and does it not by opening Othello's eyes to Desdemona's true === Page 21 === GOETHE VERSUS SHAKESPEARE 627 nature—the play is not a philosophic allegory-but through a villain- ous deception. Nothing less would have offered a sufficient frame- work for the drama. In spite of these dramatic intricacies, however, what shatters Othello is essentially the realization of Desdemona's limitations, which he immediately associates with the thought that she must die. "She must die"—that is the point of intersection of the two levels of meaning (yet this spatial metaphor of intersection is inadequate insofar as it falsely suggests a complete separation of the two levels). Macbeth presents an analogous case. The hero is ambitious, but also has another dimension to which the other characters in the play are blind and which Lady Macbeth takes for mere weakness. Being extraordinarily ambitious herself, she cannot understand how he differs from her: Yet do I fear thy nature: It is too full o' the milk of human kindness, To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great; Art not without ambition but without The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly, That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, And yet wouldst wrongly win. . . That is how Macbeth appears to her—and to many a reader; and she rightly concludes that he would never murder Duncan unless she made him do it: Hie thee hither, That I may pour my spirits in thine ear, And chastise with the valour of my tongue All that impedes thee from the golden round, Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem To have thee crown'd withal. (I. 5) What she fails to see is that Macbeth would be great in another way; that his desire for enhancement is different in kind from her ambi- tion and not only more choosy as regards the means; and that, once crowned, Macbeth will find that his "ambition" is unstilled, being of such a nature that no crown could satisfy it. Indeed, Macbeth is far closer in spirit to Hamlet than to Lady Macbeth. He has a deep spirituality and an essentially lyrical soul (albeit of titanic dimen- === Page 22 === 628 PARTISAN REVIEW sions) which finds expression in almost all of his monologues and asides; and again there is no other character in the play who could possibly appreciate these speeches: Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had liv'd a blessed time; for from this instant, There's nothing serious in mortality; All is but toys: renown, and grace, is dead; The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of. (II. 3) I have liv'd long enough: my way of life Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf. (V. 3) Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (V. 5) Not a soul in the drama could respond to such melancholy any more than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern could to that of Hamlet, or Bo- lingbroke to that of Richard II. Shakespeare's tragic heroes live in a world of their own, and this—no less than the witches and ghosts— underscores the inevitability of their disaster, which is not a matter of circumstances but destiny. Macbeth and Hamlet are doomed no less than Oedipus, called to do what they would rather not do, placed in a world which is not their own and among people unable to un- derstand them. When we compare Shakespeare with Aeschylus and Sophocles, the following points seem important. Shakespeare's dramas are longer and more complex, and the satyr play is absorbed by the tragedy: in- stead of appearing as a separate member of a series of plays, it ap- pears within the tragedy in the form of Shakespeare's famous comic scenes. Secondly, the inevitability is rendered less obvious and tem- pered by a wealth of psychological detail. And, finally, the mythical stature in which most of the figures had shared in the ancient dramas is in Shakespeare restricted to the hero. These three points make Shakespeare more "modern" and mark the transition from the classical drama to the romantic. He marks the end of a world in the === Page 23 === GOETHE VERSUS SHAKESPEARE 629 same sense as Michelangelo: a unified world on the verge of disinte- gration; the exaltation of the individual to a plane somehow higher than that reached by all subsequent individualism. And the poet no less than his heroes into whom he breathed his spirit may justly be called-in Goethe's previously cited words-"a being of a higher order." As I now turn to compare Goethe with Shakespeare, my inten- tion is certainly not to belittle Goethe but to understand him and to show how he is nearer to us, more like ourselves in what he has to say to us. I hope to sketch not what the nineteenth century saw in Goethe but what we today may find in him. Goethe's Faust has much in common with Shakespeare's dramas. The Prologue in Heaven suggests clearly that Faust, too, transcends the plane of psychological analysis; and there is no character in the play (excepting of course the Lord in the Prologue) who understands Faust. The parallel extends to another point which Francis Fergusson has stressed in relation to Hamlet: Faust, too, deals not only with the hero but with the society in which he lives. There is the scene "Before the City Gate" and another in "Auerbach's Cellar"; and later on Gretchen's entire milieu is brought to life. If Goethe uses this social background in large part to model Faust's character that much more clearly, the same consideration applies to Hamlet. More- over, where there are elements of ritual in Hamlet, we have choruses in Faust, ranging from the Easter choirs to the Dies Irae in the Cathe- dral scene. Nor are ghosts lacking. Again, there is an abundance of psychological insight and much humor. Finally, Faust's character in- vites comparison with Hamlet's, Gretchen with Ophelia, and Valen- tine with Laertes. At this point, the similarity may seem misleadingly close; and to gain a clue to the important differences, it may be well to cast a sidelong glance at Goethe's Tasso, who is in some ways even closer to Hamlet. Here, however, the differences are more obvious. While both dramas depict an individual against the background of a so- ciety, Hamlet is far lonelier than Tasso and far surpasses him in stature. In fact, we hardly exaggerate when we say: none of the other characters in the play understand Hamlet, but he does not state this expressly-while Tasso never tires of informing us that none of the === Page 24 === 630 PARTISAN REVIEW others understand him, although at least half of them do. Add to this that in Hamlet we have a world with evil in it and with a nu- minous dimension, while in Tasso we have a world without evil and without any such dimension. In Hamlet we have a real society; in Tasso, a stylized projection of the poet's experience into an imaginary Renaissance setting. Hamlet is not pitiful and pathetic: the ghost speaks the truth and the evil situation in which he finds himself is real-while Tasso's predicament is essentially subjective and he may to that extent be considered sick or neurotic. These differences may help us as we return to Faust. For Faust, too, lacks Hamlet's stature. His practice of magic does not serve to elevate him to superhuman stature: the word Uebermensch (super- man) is actually used mockingly by the earth spirit whose sight Faust cannot bear. He is as we are, merely human. The spirit with whom he can commune, Mephistopheles, is a devil stripped of all numinous attributes. Far from inspiring awe, he ridicules such feel- ings. And while he is surely one of the few truly great creations of world literature, he is a projection of human qualities—call them in- human if you will; it is still a peculiarly human inhumanity, one that we encounter in ourselves and our fellow men. In the same vein, Faust is a projection of the poet, the reader, the audience—essentially as we are ourselves—while Hamlet is more as we think, or like to think, we are; and therefore Hamlet is more like a figure in a dream or myth. Faust's inability to confront the earth spirit, his failure at the point where Hamlet and Macbeth succeed, is crucial, suggesting how much more modern and how much closer to us he is. There is an implicit contrast here with more heroic times—an anticipation of Joycean irony. And what is merely implicit in this abortive encounter is spun out in detail through the appearance and speeches of Mephis- topheles. For Mephistopheles is an essentially modern devil. And where the nineteenth century put up with him for Faust's sake, we are much more likely to put up with Faust for Mephistopheles' sake. Faust is not the solitary hero that we find in Hamlet: while Mephisto never quite understands him (and the Lord calls our at- tention to this at the very beginning), Faust never does justice to Mephisto either. In this respect one may think of Othello and Iago— a parallel strengthened by the fact that Iago-Mephisto lead Othello- === Page 25 === GOETHE VERSUS SHAKESPEARE 631 Faust into responsibility for the death of Desdemona-Gretchen. But while it is true that Iago and Othello never understand each other, Iago is evil in a sense in which Mephisto is not. We do not sympa- thize with Iago, and his wickedness is essentially unaccountable. Mephistopheles, on the other hand, is rather engaging, and while his wickedness is not explicable psychologically, it is nevertheless fully accounted for—first by the Lord and then, with characteristic frank- ness, once more by Mephisto himself, who takes great pains to keep Faust and the audience well posted as soon as he has made his first entrance. Decidedly, he is not mysterious but, on the contrary, an embodiment of ruthless intellectual analysis—though fortunately for the drama, not only of that. By a stroke of genius, Goethe also asso- ciates him closely with sex and gives him the sense of humor which Faust so sorely lacks. In sum, Faust, unlike Hamlet and Macbeth, is not a titan but human as we are, and a would-be superman as some of us are; and Goethe goes further and creates an essentially human devil. The plot is no longer centered in a man raised above his fellows by inscrutable fate, one made to perform a hideous deed to which his own will stands in a questionable and mysterious relation (the crux of Oedipus, Hamlet and Macbeth); instead the hero wishes to raise himself above other men, is eager to experience agony as well as joy, but suffers like the rest of us when confronted with grief—and for all the osten- tatious interference of spirits, his grief no less than the occasion for it is as natural as can be. And the central relation, that between Faust and Mephistopheles, is largely reducible to a formulation used by Faust in a different context: "Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast." Goethe found both in himself, and so do many of us. I have said that Faust is etched against the background of his society, and called attention to the scenes "Before the City Gate" and "Auerbach's Cellar" as well as the many scenes in which Gretchen's world comes to life. There is also the Walpurgis Night and, in Part Two, the Imperial Court, civil war, a Classical Walpurgis Night, and classical antiquity as it appears in the Helena act. On the whole, it is therefore not one society in which Faust finds himself, as Hamlet does, or Macbeth, or Othello; rather he transcends his own society and understands himself, and forces us to understand him, in rela- tion to the past as well as his own time. We must experience his === Page 26 === 632 PARTISAN REVIEW society, from the small-town milieu of Gretchen to life at court, as well as classical antiquity. Faust is somehow defined through their contrast—as Bloom, too, is to be understood fully only in contrast with the ancient Ulysses. In this respect, too, Faust is more modern than Shakespeare and closer to us. The creation of a human devil who carries humor not only into occasional comic scenes, such as Mephisto's dialogue with the student in Part One, but into almost every scene in the drama, reinforces the abandonment of the framework of a single society and leads us still further from the sacramental and inevitable which was still charac- teristic of Shakespeare's tragedies. The artist becomes sovereign and subjects everything to caustic comments: everything has become prob- lematic—every human feeling, every social institution, every received Weltanschauung. Faust's noble sentiments, whose often magnificent expression delighted the nineteenth century, become foils for Mephis- topheles' sarcastic insights: in fact, this premature brother of Nietz- sche and Freud mercilessly exposed romanticism before it had yet reached its full development. The social setting and the faith and world-view that go with it are not only used as a background for Faust's character, nor merely questioned implicitly through the con- trast with classical antiquity: they, too, become ridiculous, seen in the mirror of Mephisto's wit. And yet the poet is not satisfied with this by now familiar di- vision in the modern soul. Unable to accept his Weltanschauung from society, he forms his own. He employs archangels, though it does not occur to him to believe in them, ghosts, witches, wizards, various species of devils—ingeniously invented—saints, even a Mater Gloriosa—but then turns around, having finished Act V, and writes a fourth act in which the accusations which Mephisto had raised against the Catholic Church in Part One are substantiated before our eyes. In the first scene of the Second Part he imitates Dante's terza rima in a grandiose speech; in the last scenes he parodies Dante, creates portable jaws of hell in contrast to Dante's awe-inspiring por- tal to the Inferno, and elevates not only Gretchen but even Faust in- to his Dantesque heaven, while the Florentine had sent even Fran- cesca da Rimini to hell. Yet in the end we get no mere collection of highly polished gems with cutting edges, but a single cosmos, a world which is the poet's own creation. === Page 27 === GOETHE VERSUS SHAKESPEARE 633 If the Helena episode should suggest to superficial readers a wish to return to a past age, or a conviction that the contemporary world lacks any such exemplary unity as could be found in former ages, the poet's answer is clearly that, confronted with this lack of unity, he fashions a whole world out of himself. At the moment of composition, he does repair the damage of a lifetime. Perhaps this damage, which T. S. Eliot considers irreparable, is not as unique a feature of our age as he supposes. "Decadence," Nietzsche once wrote, "belongs to all epochs of mankind"; and it may well be the mark of the great poet that he goes beyond mirroring the damage and creates a perspective in which it is transcended. In an age of intolerance and terror, Goethe's singular tolerance and freedom from fear are apt to seem remote. We turn to Dostoev- sky. Not to his pamphlets, steeped in bigotry, but to his novels in which we encounter terror in congenially crushing proportions. We also find a world, whole and overwhelming-and new to us as if it were the poet's own creation. Yet it is not, and here may be the reason why these novels-and admittedly I know none greater-seem to move us more than people who grew up in Dostoevsky's culture. What strikes us as original and fresh is really reaction: flight into a past which does not happen to be ours; acceptance of a Weltan- schauung which, though new to us, is long irrevocable. For us this novelist explodes horizons and unwittingly advances tolerance-sim- ply by forcing us to measure our values against his. Yet in his own context he belongs with those who despair of the damage and of our whole modern world and try to conjure up the dead. That he did all this with a range of human sympathies which his worse judgment fortunately could not cure and with a passion which not only sur- passes that of all other cultural necromancers but appropriates each character in turn-that raises him above all other literary artists of the past one hundred years. But if we would find passion, not less intense for being free from terror, and scope and unity outside the pale of dogma, nor purchased by a sacrifice of vision-one world in which our modern multiplicity is formed-then we should look to Goethe. Here criticism, as in Mephistopheles, does not respect tradition or propriety, and yet his analysis is not unmindful of its limits, which are recognized in humor. No occasion is left from which irreverent reflection might === Page 28 === 634 PARTISAN REVIEW be banished, not even a Prologue in Heaven. Here we breathe our modern climate of opinion-in which we must even ask in the end whether psychology cannot explain the different attitudes toward majesty and mystery in Shakespeare and in Goethe. To what extent might Shakespeare's surely troubled relation to his father-though not as difficult as Dostoevsky's-illuminate his attitudes where they are different from Goethe's? Particularly the way in which he again and again elevates one man above all others and then leads him to his doom? We cannot charge "contempt of art" and be done with such queries. But while conceding free sway to psychology, we need not overlook the limits of its power and the relevance of cultural developments. In his Antichrist, Nietzsche said, "In the son that be- comes conviction which in the father still was a lie"-and a look at totalitarian countries bears him out. But we can also say, conversely: "In the son that becomes a lie which in the father still was a con- viction." Whatever its psychological roots may have been, Goethe's attitude toward miracle, mystery and authority (the trinity of Dos- toevsky's Grand Inquisitor) is all that is left for us today: reflective wit which does not halt before the numinous. Shakespeare's less Mephistophelian attitude has not lost meaning for us: his ghosts and witches are still vivid symbols of the frontiers of the mind, and his heroes move us with the eloquence of dreams like voices from inner abysses. But symbols, when recognized as such, evoke reflection and lose the strength to integrate a world: like Mephistopheles' minions and the legions of heaven in Faust, they be- come legitimate butts of sarcasm and themselves require integration. This, however, Goethe had the power to provide. Without the ostrich attitudes of some of the later nineteenth century, without curbing his wit, and without seeking refuge in ruins, he fashioned a whole world and repaired the damage of a lifetime. And since the damage of his day was more like ours, he can give us what we cannot find even in Shakespeare. Surely, his age and ours is far from exemplary or exhilarating, but it is precisely this that makes Goethe himself exemplary and the experience of his per- sonality, as reflected in his work, exhilarating. === Page 29 === Alberto Moravia SUNNY HONEYMOON They had chosen Anacapri for their honeymoon because Giacomo had been there a few months before and wanted to go back, taking his bride with him. His previous visit had been in the spring, and he remembered the clear, crisp air and the flowers alive with the hum of thousands of insects in the golden glow of the sun. But this time, immediately upon their arrival, everything seemed very different. The sultry dog days of mid-August were upon them and steaming humidity overclouded the sky. Even on the heights of Anacapri, there was no trace of the crisp air, or flowers or violet sea whose praises Giacomo had sung. The paths winding through the fields were covered with a layer of yellow dust, accumulated in the course of four months without rain, in which even gliding lizards left traces of their passage. Long before autumn was due, the leaves had begun to turn red and brown, and occasional whole trees had withered away for lack of water. Dust particles filled the motionless air and made the nostrils quiver, and the odors of meadows and sea had given way to those of scorched stones and dried dung. The water, which in the spring had taken its color from what seemed to be banks of violets floating just below the surface, now was a gray mass reflecting the melancholy, dazzling light brought by the scirocco wind which infested the sky. "I don't think it's the least bit beautiful," Simona said, on the day after their arrival, as they started along the path to the lighthouse. "I don't like it, no not at all." Giacomo, following several steps behind, did not answer. She had spoken in this plaintive and discontented tone of voice ever since they had emerged from their city-hall marriage in Rome, === Page 30 === 636 PARTISAN REVIEW and he suspected that her prolonged ill humor, mingled with an ap- parent physical repulsion, was connected not so much with the place as with his own person. She was complaining about Anacapri because she was not aware that her fundamental dissatisfaction was with her husband. Theirs was a love match, to be sure, but one based rather on the will to love than on genuine feeling. There was good reason for his presentiment of trouble when, as he slipped the ring on her finger, he had read a flicker of regret and embarrass- ment on her face, for on their first night at Anacapri she had begged off, on the plea of fatigue and seasickness, from giving herself to him. On this, the second day of their marriage, she was just as much of a virgin as she had been before. As she trudged wearily along, with a bag slung over one shoulder, between the dusty hedges, Giacomo looked at her with almost sorrowful intensity, hoping to take possession of her with a single piercing glance, as he had so often done with other women. But, as he realized right away, the piercing quality was lacking; his eyes fell with analytical affection upon her, but there was in them none of the transfiguring power of real passion. Although Simona was not tall, she had childishly long legs with slender thighs, rising to an indentation, almost a cleft at either side, visible under her shorts, where they were joined to the body. The whiteness of her legs was chaste, shiny and cold, she had a narrow waist and hips and her only womanly feature, revealed when she turned around to speak to him, was the fullness of her low-swung breasts, which seemed like extraneous and burdensome weights, unsuited to her delicate frame. Similarly her thick, blond hair, although it was cut short, hung heavily over her neck. All of a sudden, as if she felt that she was being watched, she wheeled around and asked: “Why do you make me walk ahead of you?" Giacomo saw the childishly innocent expression of her big blue eyes, her small, tilted nose and equally childishly rolled-back upper lip. Her face, too, he thought to himself, was a stranger to him, un- touched by love. "I'll go ahead, if you like," he said with resignation. And he went by her, deliberately brushing her breast with his elbow to test his own desire. Then they went on walking, he ahead and she behind. The path wound about the summit of Monte Solaro, === Page 31 === SUNNY HONEYMOON 637 running along a wall of mossy stones with no masonry to hold them together and grapevines strung out above them. On the other side there was a sheer descent, through uninhabited stretches of grape- vines and olive groves to the mist-covered gray sea. Only a solitary pine tree, halfway down the mountain, with its green crest float- ing in the air, recalled the idyllic purity of the landscape in its better days. Simona walked very slowly, lagging farther behind at every step. Finally she came to a halt and asked: "Have we far to go?" "We've only just started," Giacomo said lightly. "At least an hour more." "I can't bear it," she said ill-humoredly, looking at him as if she hoped he would propose giving up the walk altogether. He went back to her and put his arm around her waist. "You can't bear the exertion or you can't bear me?" "What do you mean, silly?" she countered with unexpected feeling. "I can't bear to go on walking, of course." "Give me a kiss." She administered a rapid peck on his cheek. "It's so hot . . .," she murmured. "I wish we could go home." "We must get to the lighthouse," Giacomo answered. "What's the point of going back? . . . We'll have a swim as soon as we ar- rive. It's a wonderful place, and the lighthouse is all pink and white. . . . Don't you want to see it?" "Yes, but I'd like to fly there instead of walking." "Let's talk," he suggested. "That way you won't notice the distance." "But I have nothing to say," she protested, almost with tears in her voice. Giacomo hesitated for a moment before replying: "You know so much poetry by heart. Say a poem, and I'll listen; then before you know it, we'll be there." He could see that he had hit home, for she had a truly extra- ordinary memory for verse. "What shall I say?" she asked with childish vanity. "A canto from Dante." "Which one?" "The third canto of the Inferno," Giacomo said at random. === Page 32 === 638 PARTISAN REVIEW Somewhat consoled, Simona walked on, once more ahead of him, beginning to recite: "Per me si va nella città dolente, per me si va nell'eterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente..." She recited mechanically and with as little expression as a school- girl, breathing hard because of the double effort required of her. As she walked doggedly along, she paused at the end of every line, without paying any attention to syntax or meaning, like a schoolgirl endowed with zeal rather than intelligence. Every now and then she turned appealingly around and shot him a fleeting look, yes, exactly like a schoolgirl, with the blue and white cap perched on her blond hair. After they had gone some way they reached a wall built all around a large villa. The wall was covered with ivy, and leafy oak branches grew out over it. "E caddi come l'uom cui sonno piglia," Simona said, wind- ing up the third canto; then she turned around and asked: "Whose place is this?" "It belonged to Axel Munthe," Giacomo answered, "but he's dead now." "And what sort of a fellow was he?" "A very shrewd sort indeed," said Giacomo. And, in order to amuse her, he added: "He was a doctor very fashionable in Rome at the turn of the century. If you'd like to know more about him, there's a story I've been told is absolutely true... Would you like to hear it?" "Yes, do tell me." "Once a beautiful and frivolous society woman came to him with all sorts of imaginary ailments. Munthe listened patiently, ex- amined her and when he saw that there was nothing wrong said: 'I know a sure cure, but you must do exactly what I say... Go look out that open window and lean your elbows on the sill.' She obeyed, and Munthe went after her and gave her a terrific kick in the rear. Then he escorted her to the door and said: "Three times a week, and in a few months you'll be quite all right.'" Simona failed to laugh, and after a moment she said bitterly, looking at the wall: "That would be the cure for me." === Page 33 === SUNNY HONEYMOON 639 Giacomo was struck by her mournful tone of voice. "Why do you say that?" he asked, coming up to her. "What's got into your head?" "It's true . . . I'm slightly mad, and you ought to treat me exactly that way." "What are you talking about?" "About what happened last night," she said with startling frankness. "But last night you were tired and seasick." "That wasn't it at all. I'm never seasick, and I wasn't tired, either. I was afraid, that's all." "Afraid of me?" "No, afraid of the whole idea." They walked on in silence. The wall curved, following the path and hanging slightly over, as if it could hardly contain the oak trees behind it. Then it came to an end, and in front of them lay a grassy plateau, below which the mountainside fell abruptly down to the arid and lonely promontories of Rio. The plateau was cov- ered with asphodels, whose pyramidal flowers were of a dusty rose, almost gray, color. Giacomo picked some and handed them to his wife, saying: "Look, how beautiful . . ." She raised them to her nose, like a young girl on her way to the altar, inhaling the fragrance of a lily. Perhaps she was con- scious of her virginal air, for she pressed close to him, in something like an embrace, and whispered into one ear: "Don't believe what I just told you . . . I wasn't afraid . . . I'll just have to get used to the idea . . . Tonight . . ." "Tonight?" he repeated. "You're so very dear to me," she murmured, painfully adding a strictly conventional phrase, which she seemed to have learned for the occasion: "Tonight I'll be yours." She said these last words hurriedly, as if she were afraid of the conventionality rather than the substance of them, and planted a hasty kiss on his cheek. It was the first time that she had ever told Giacomo that he was dear to her or anything like it, and he was tempted to take her in his arms. But she said loudly: "Look! What's that down there on the sea?" And at the same time she eluded his grasp. === Page 34 === 640 PARTISAN REVIEW Giacomo looked in the direction at which she was pointing and saw a solitary sail emerging from the mist that hung over the water. "A boat," he said testily. She started walking again, at a quickened pace, as if she were afraid that he might try once more to embrace her. And as he saw her escape him he had a recurrent feeling of impotence, be- cause he could not take immediate possession of his beloved. "You won't do that to me tonight," he muttered between clenched teeth as he caught up with her. And she answered, lowering her head without looking around: "It will be different tonight. . . ." It was really hot, there was no doubt about that, and in the heavy air around them there seemed to Giacomo to reside the same obstacle, the same impossibility that bogged down his relationship with his wife. The impossibility of a rainfall that would clear the air, the impossibility of love. He had a sensation of something like panic, when looking at her again he felt that his will to love was purely in- tellectual and did not involve his senses. Her figure was outlined quite precisely before him, but there was none of the halo around it in which love usually envelops the loved one's person. Impulsively he said: "Perhaps you shouldn't have married me." Simona seemed to accept this statement as a basis for discussion, as if she had had the same thought without daring to come out with it. "Why?" she asked. Giacomo wanted to answer: "Because we don't really love each other," but although this was the thought in his mind, he expressed it in an entirely different manner. Simona was a Com- munist and had a job at Party headquarters. Giacomo was not a Communist at all; he claimed to attach no importance to his wife's political ideas, but they had a way of cropping up at the most unexpected moments as underlying motives for disagreement. And now he was astonished to hear himself say: "Because there is too great a difference of ideas between us." "What sort of ideas do you mean?" "Political ideas." He realized then why her standoffishness had caused him to === Page 35 === SUNNY HONEYMOON bring politics into the picture; it was with the hope of arousing a reaction to a point on which he knew her to be sensitive. And indeed she answered immediately: "That's not so. The truth is that I have certain ideas and you have none at all." As soon as politics came up, she assumed a self-sufficient, pedantic manner, quite the opposite of childish, which always threatened to infuriate him. He asked himself in all conscience whether his irritation stemmed from some latent anti-Communist feeling within himself, but quickly set his mind at rest on this score. He had no interest in politics whatsoever, and the only thing that bothered him was the fact that his wife did have such an interest. "Well, whether or not it's a question of ideas," he said dryly, "there is something between us." "What is it then?" "I don't know, but I can feel it." After a second she said in the same irritating tone of voice: "I know quite well. It is a question of ideas. But I hope that some day you'll see things the way I do." "Never." "Why never?" "I've told you so many times before. . . . First, because I don't want to be involved in politics of any kind, and second, becaus I'm too much of an individualist." Simona made no reply, but in such cases her silence was direr than spoken disapproval. Giacomo was overcome by a wave of sudden anger. He overtook her and seized her arm. "All this is going to have very serious consequences some day," he shouted. "For instance, if a Communist government comes to power, and I say something against it, you'll inform on me." "Why should you say anything against it?" she retorted. "You just said that you don't want to be involved in politics of any kind." "Anything can happen." "And then the Communists aren't in power. . . . Why worry about a situation that doesn't exist?" It was true then, he thought to himself, since she didn't deny it, that she would inform on him. He gripped her arm tighter, al- most wishing to hurt her. 641 === Page 36 === 642 PARTISAN REVIEW "The truth is that you don't love me," he said. "I wouldn't have married you except for love," she said clearly, and she looked straight at him, with her lower lip trembling. Her voice filled Giacomo with tenderness and he drew her to him and kissed her. Simona was visibly affected by the kiss; her nostrils stiffened and she breathed hard, and although her arms hung down at her sides, she pressed her body against his. "My spy," he said, drawing away and stroking her face, "my little spy." "Why do you call me spy?" she asked, taking immediate of- fense. "I was joking." They walked on, but as he followed her, Giacomo wondered whether he had meant the word as a joke after all. And what about his anger? Was that a joke too? He didn't know how he could have given way to such unreasonable anger and have made such even more unreasonable accusations, and yet he dimly understood that they were justified by Simona's behavior. Meanwhile they had come to the other side of the mountain, and from the highest point of the path they looked down at an immense expanse of air, like a bottomless well. Five minutes later they had a view of all one side of the island, a long, green slope covered with scattered grapevines and prickly pears, and at the bottom, stretching out into the sea, the chalky promontory on which stood the lighthouse. The sweep of the view was tremendous, and the pink-and-white checked lighthouse, hung between sky and sea, seemed far away and no larger than a man's hand. Simona clapped her hands in delight. "How perfectly lovely!" she exclaimed. "I told you it was beautiful, and you wouldn't believe it." "Forgive me," she said, patting his cheek. "You always know best, and I'm very silly." Before he could control himself, Giacomo said: "Does that go for politics too?" "No, not for politics. But don't let's talk about that just now." He was annoyed with himself for having fallen back into an argument, but at the same time he suffered a return of the left-out and jealous feeling that overcame him every time she made a dogmatic, almost religious reference to her political ideas. === Page 37 === SUNNY HONEYMOON 643 "Why shouldn't we talk about it?" he said as gently as he could. "Perhaps if we talked about it, we might understand one another better." Simona did not reply, and Giacomo walked on after her, in an extremely bad humor. Now he was the one to feel the heaviness and heat of the day, while Simona, intoxicated by the sight of the distant sea, shouted: "Let's run down the rest of the way. I can't wait to get into the water." With her bag bobbing over her shoulder, she began to run down the path, emitting shrill cries of joy. Giacomo saw that she was throwing her legs every which way, like an untrained colt. Suddenly the thought "Tonight she'll be mine" floated through his head and quieted him. What could be the importance of belonging to a political party in comparison to that of the act of love, so age- less and so very human? Men had possessed women long before the existence of political parties or religions. And he was sure that in the moment when he possessed Simona he would drive out of her every allegiance except that of her love for him. Strengthened by this thought he ran after her, shouting in his turn: "Wait for me, Simona!" She stopped to wait, flushed, quivering and bright-eyed. As he caught up with her he said pantingly: "Just now I began to feel very happy. I know that we're going to love one another." "I know it too," she said, looking at him out of her innocent blue eyes. Giacomo put one arm around her waist, catching her hand in his and compelling her to throw it over his shoulders. They walked on in this fashion, but Simona's eyes remained set on the water below. Giacomo, on the other hand, could not tear his thoughts away from the body he was holding so tightly. Simona was wearing a skimpy boy's jersey with a patch in the front. And her head was boyish in outline as well, with the unruly, short hair falling over her cheeks. Yet her slender waist fitted into the curve of his arm with a womanly softness which seemed to foreshadow the complete sur- render promised for the coming night. Suddenly he breathed into her ear: === Page 38 === 644 PARTISAN REVIEW "You'll always be my little friend and comrade." Simona's mind must have been on the lighthouse, and the word "comrade" came through to her alone, out of context, without the sentimental intonation that gave it Giacomo's intended meaning. For she answered with a smile: "We can't be comrades. . . at least, not until you see things the way I do... but I'll be your wife." So she was still thinking of the Party, Giacomo said to himself with excusable jealousy. The word "comrade" had for her no tender connotations, but only political significance. The Party con- tinued to have a prior claim to her loyalty. "I didn't mean it that way," he said disappointedly. "I'm sorry," she said, hastening to correct herself. "That's what we call each other in the Party." "I only meant that you'd be my lifelong companion." "That's true," she said, lowering her head in embarrassment, as if she couldn't really accept the word except politically. They dropped their arms and walked down the path with no link between them. As they proceeded, the lighthouse seemed to draw nearer, revealing its tower shape. The water beyond it had a metallic sheen, derived from the direct rays of the sun, while behind them the mountain seemed to grow higher, with a wall of red rock rising above the lower slope which they were now traversing. At the top was a summer-house with a railing around it, in which they could distinguish two tiny human figures enjoying the view. "That vantage-point is called La Migliara," Giacomo explained. "A few years ago an Anacapri girl threw herself down the mountain from it, but first she wound her braids around her head and over her eyes so as not to see what she was doing." Simona tossed a look over her shoulder at the top of the mountain. "Suicide is all wrong," she said. Giacomo felt jealousy sting him again. "Why?" he asked. "Does the Party forbid it?" "Never mind about the Party." She looked out over the sea and thrust her face and chest forward as if to breathe in the breeze blowing in their direction. "Suicide's all wrong because life is beau- tiful and it's a joy to be alive." === Page 39 === SUNNY HONEYMOON 645 Again Giacomo didn't really want to get into a political argu- ment; he wanted to make a show of the serenity and detachment which he thoroughly believed were his. But again his annoyance carried him away. "But "T —" (this was the name of a Communist friend they had in common) "committed suicide, didn't he?" "He did wrong," she said succinctly. "Why so? He must have had some reason. What do you know?" "I do know, though," she said obstinately. "He did wrong. It's our duty to live." "Our duty?" "Yes, duty." "Who says so?" "Nobody. It just is." "I might just as well say that it's our duty to take our life if we feel it's not worth living . . . Nobody says so. It just is." "That's not true," she answered inflexibly. "We were made to live and not to die. . . Only someone that's sick or in a morbid state of mind can think that life's not worth living." "So you think that T - - was either sick or in a morbid state of mind, do you?" "At the moment when he killed himself, yes, I do." Giacomo was tempted to ask her if this was the Party line, as seemed to him evident from that stubborn note in her voice which annoyed him so greatly, but this time he managed to restrain him- self. By now they had reached the bottom of the slope and were crossing a dry, flat area, covered with woodspurge and prickly pears. Then the land turned into rock and they found themselves before the lighthouse, at the end of the path, which seemed like the end of all human habitation and the beginning of a new and lonely world of colorless chalk and stone. The lighthouse rose up above them as they plunged down among the boulders toward the sea. At a bend they suddenly came upon a basin of green water, surrounded by rocky black cliffs, eroded by salt. Simona ran down to the cement landing and exclaimed: "Wonderful! Just what I was hoping for! Now we can swim. And we have it all to ourselves. We're quite alone." === Page 40 === 646 PARTISAN REVIEW She had no sooner spoken these words than a man's voice came out of the rocks: “Simona! What a nice surprise." They turned around, and when a face followed the voice, Simona shouted: "Livio! Hello! Are you here too? What are you doing?" The young man who emerged from the rocks was short and powerfully built with broad shoulders. His head contrasted with this athletic body, for it was bald, with only a fringe of hair around the neck, and his flat face had a scholarly expression. The face of a ferret, Giacomo thought, taking an instant dislike to it, not exactly intelligent, but keen and treacherous. He knew the fellow by sight and was aware that he worked in Simona's office. Now Livio came into full view, pulling up his tight, faded red trunks. "I'm doing the same thing you are, I suppose," he said by way of an answer. Then Simona said something which gave Giacomo considerable satisfaction. "That's not very likely... Unless you've just got yourself mar- ried... I'm here on my honeymoon... Do you know my husband?" "Yes, we know each other," Livio said easily, jumping down onto a big, square stone and shaking Giacomo's hand so hard that the latter winced with pain as he echoed: "Yes, we've met in Rome." Livio turned to Simona and added: "I'd heard something to the effect that you were about to marry. But you should have told the comrades. They want to share your joys." He said all this in a colorless, businesslike voice, but one which was not necessarily devoid of feeling. Giacomo noticed that Simona was smiling and seemed to be waiting for Livio to go on, while Livio stood like a bronze statue on a stone pedestal, with his trunks pulled tightly over his voluminous pubis and all the muscles of his body standing out, and talked down to them. Giacomo felt as if he were somehow left out of their conversation, and drew away, all the while listening intently. They conversed for several minutes with- out moving, asking one another about various Party workers and where they had spent their vacations. But Giacomo was struck less by what they said than by the tone === Page 41 === SUNNY HONEYMOON 647 in which they said it. What was this tone, exactly, and why did it rub him the wrong way? There was a note of complicity in it, he concluded, a reference to some secret bond different from that of either friendship or family. For a moment he wondered if it weren't just what one would find between fellow employees in a bank or government office. But, upon reflection, he realized that it was en- tirely different. It was ... he searched for some time, groping for an exact definition ... it was the tone of voice of two monks or two nuns meeting one another. And why then did it rub him the wrong way? Not because he disapproved of Livio's and Simona's political ideas; in the course of a rational discussion he might very well allow that these had some basis. No, there was nothing rational about his hos- tility; its cause was obscure even to himself and at times it seemed to be one with his jealousy, as if he were afraid that Simona would escape him through her Party connections. As these thoughts ran through his mind, his face grew dark and discontented, so that when Simona joined him, all smiles, a moment later, she exclaimed in surprise: "What's wrong? Why are you unhappy?" "Nothing... It's just the heat." "Let's go in the water. . . . But first, where can we undress?" "Just follow me... this way." He knew the place well and now led Simona through a narrow passage among the rocks. Behind these rocks they stepped across some other lower ones and then went around a huge mass which sealed off a tiny beach of very fine, black sand at the foot of glistening, black rocky walls around a pool of shallow water filled with black seaweed. The effect was that of a room, with the sky for a ceiling, a watery floor and walls of stone. "No bath-house can match this," Giacomo observed, looking around him. "At last I can shed my clothes," said Simona with a sigh of relief. She put her bag down on the sand and bent over to take out her bathing-suit, while leaning against the rocks Giacomo stripped himself in a second of his shirt and trousers. The sight of him stark naked caused her to give a nervous laugh. "This is the sort of place to go swimming with no suits on, isn't it?" she said. === Page 42 === 648 PARTISAN REVIEW "Unfortunately, one can never manage to be alone," Giacomo replied, thinking of Livio. He walked, still naked, with bare feet, over the cold sand in her direction, but she did not see him coming because she was pulling her jersey over her head. Her nakedness, he reflected, made her seem more virginal than ever. Her low-swung, round breasts had large, rosy nipples, and a look of purity about them, as if they had never been offered to a masculine caress. Indeed her virginal quality was so overwhelming that Giacomo did not dare press her to him as he had intended, but stood close by while she pulled her head out of the jersey. She shook back her ruffled hair and said in surprise: "What are you doing? Why don't you put on your trunks?" "I'd like to make love right here and now," said Giacomo. "On these rocks? Are you mad?" "No, I'm not mad." They were facing each other now, he entirely naked and she naked down to the waist. She crossed her arms over her breasts as if to support and protect them and said entreatingly: "Let's wait till tonight. . . . And meanwhile let's go swim- ming . . . please . . ." "Tonight you'll put me off again." "No, it will be different tonight." Giacomo walked silently away and proceeded to put on his trunks, while Simona, obviously relieved, hastily donned her two- piece suit. She shouted gaily: "I'm off for a swim! If you love me, you'll follow!" "Let's go in right here," Giacomo suggested. Simona paused and stuck her white foot into the green and brown seaweed that choked the black water. "This pool is too murky. . . . It's no more than a puddle. Let's go where we just came from." "But we shan't be alone." "Oh, we have plenty of time for that." They went back to the basin, where Livio was taking a sun-bath on the cement landing, lying as still as if he were dead. Somehow this increased Giacomo's dislike of him. Yes, he was the sort of fellow that goes in for purposeful tanning, and then wanders about showing it off, wearing skimpy trunks designed to exhibit his virility as well. === Page 43 === SUNNY HONEYMOON 649 When Livio heard them coming he leaped to his feet and said: "Come on, Simona, let's dive in and race over to that rock." "You'll have to give me a handicap of at least a length," she said joyfully, forgetful of her husband. "I'll give you three lengths, if you say so." There it was, Giacomo could not help thinking, the same inti- mate, conspiratorial, clubby, Party manner, that tone of voice in which, despite their marriage, she had never spoken to him, and perhaps never would speak either. Sitting on a flat rock, just above the landing, he watched his wife plunge awkwardly in and then swim like a dark shadow under the green water until she came out, with her blond head dripping. "That was a real belly-flop," Livio shouted, making a perfect dive to join her. He too swam underwater, but for a longer distance than Simona, so that he came out farther away. Giacomo wondered if this "Party manner" weren't all a product of his imagination, and if there hadn't been in the past some more intimate personal relation- ship between them. And he realized that this second hypothesis was, on the whole, less disagreeable than the first. Then he said to him- self that if he were to mention any such suspicion to Simona she would be outraged and brand it as utterly "bourgeois," not to say "evil-minded and filthy." The moment after, he dismissed it as out of the question. No, they were comrades, as she had said, and nothing more. What still puzzled him was why he objected more to their being Party comrades than to their being lovers. With a wavering effort of good will, he said to himself that his jealousy was absurd, and he must drive it out of his mind . . . And all the while he watched the two of them race across the dazzling green water in the direction of a round rock which emerged at the far end of the basin. Livio got there first, and hoisting himself up on a protruding spur shouted back at Simona: "I win! You're all washed up!" "Speak for yourself!" Simona retorted. This was the sort of joking insult he and Simona should have batted back and forth between them, Giacomo reflected. If they didn't joke that way on their honeymoon, when would they ever do it? He got up decisively, ran several steps along the landing and went in after them. He landed square on his stomach and was in- === Page 44 === 650 PARTISAN REVIEW furiated by the pain. After swimming several strokes underwater he came up and started toward the rock where Livio and Simona were sitting. They were close together, talking uninterruptedly, with their legs dangling. He didn't relish the sight; in fact, it took away all the pleasure he should have felt from plunging hot and dusty into the cool water. He swam angrily ahead, arrived at the rock breathless and said, hanging on to a ledge: “Do you know, this water's very, very cold." "It seemed warm to me," said Simona, momentarily interrupt- ing the conversation to shoot him a glance. "I swam here in April," Livio put in; "It was cold then, I can tell you." With a curiosity that seemed to Giacomo somewhat flirtatious, Simona asked him: "Were you all alone?" "No, I came with Nella," Livio answered. Giacomo was trying to clamber up on the rock, but the only place where he could get a solid grip was the one where Livio and Simona were sitting. They seemed to be oblivious of his struggle and he preferred not to ask them to move over. Finally he caught hold of a jutting piece of the rock studded with jagged points, one of which left a pain in the palm of his hand as if it had dug deep into the flesh. Just as he got himself into a sitting position, the other two, with a shout of: "Let's race back!" dove into the water, showering him with spray. He looked furiously after them as they raced toward the shore. Only when he had regained his self-control did he plunge in and follow. Simona and Livio were sitting in the shelter of a cliff and Simona was opening a lunch box that she had taken out of her bag. "Let's have something to eat," she said to Giacomo as he ap- proached them. "But we must share it with Livio. He says he meant to go back up the mountain, but in this heat it would be too ridiculous." Without saying a word, Giacomo sat down on the rocks beside them. The contents of the lunch box turned out to be scanty: some meat sandwiches, two hard-boiled eggs and a bottle of wine. "Livio will have to be content with very little," Giacomo said gruffly. === Page 45 === SUNNY HONEYMOON 651 "Don't worry," Livio answered gaily. "I'm a very abstemious sort of fellow." Simona seemed extremely happy as she sat with crossed legs, dividing the lunch. She gave a sandwich to each one of them, bit into her own and asked Livio: "Where did you get your tan?" "On the Tiber," he replied. "Your whole group is very river-minded, isn't it, Livio?" she asked between one bite and another. "All except Regina. She scorns the river completely; says it isn't aristocratic enough for her." The things they talked about were trivial and childish enough. Giacomo reflected. And yet there was a greater intimacy between them than between husband and wife. "No matter how hard she tries, Regina will never be able to put her background behind her," Simona observed. "Who is Regina?" asked Giacomo. "Someone in our outfit... the daughter of a wealthy land- owner... a very fine girl, really," Livio told him. "But wiping out an old trademark is no easy matter." "And in this case, what trademark do you mean?" "The bourgeois trademark." "If you people ever get into power," Giacomo said impulsively, "you'll have to wipe that trademark out of millions of people." "That's exactly what we'll do," Livio said with complete aplomb. "That's our job, isn't it, Simona?" Simona's mouth was full, but she nodded assent. "The Italian bourgeoisie will be a tough nut to crack," Livio went on, "but we'll crack it, even if we have to kill off a large pro- portion in the process." "There's a chance you may be killed off yourselves," said Giacomo. "That's the risk we have to run in our profession," Livio retorted. Giacomo noticed that Simona did not seem to go along with Livio's ruthlessness; at this last remark she frowned and uttered no word of approval. Livio must have been aware of this, for he brusquely changed the subject. === Page 46 === 652 PARTISAN REVIEW "Simona, you really should have told us you were getting married, you know. There are some things it's not fair to hide!" There was a note of tenderness toward Giacomo in Simona's reply. "We decided from one day to the next. . . . Only the legal witnesses were present. Even our own parents weren't in on it." "You mean you didn't want them?" "We didn't want them, and anyhow they might not have come. . . . Giacomo's father and mother didn't want him to marry me." "Because you're too far to the left, is that it?" "No," Giacomo interposed. "My people don't go in for politics at all. But my mother had her eye on a certain girl . . ." "They may not go in for politics, as you say," Livio said, after another mouthful, "but there are always political implications. How could it be otherwise? Politics gets into everything these days." True enough, Giacomo thought to himself. Even into honey- moons and a newly married couple's first embrace. Then, annoyed at his own train of thought, he held out the hard-boiled eggs to his companions. "You two eat them," he said; "I'm not hungry." "Be honest now," Livio said, with a look of surprise on his face. "Why aren't you hungry?" Simona asked him. "That damned scirocco, I imagine." Livio looked up at the cloudy sky. "There'll be a storm before night; I can promise you that," he said. Livio's conversation was made up of commonplaces and clichés, Giacomo reflected. But Simona seemed to like them. They conveyed more to her than his own attempts to express emotions that were difficult if not impossible to put into words. Meanwhile Simona, having finished her lunch, said: "Let's lie down for a sun bath now." "Will you be my pillow, Simona?" Livio asked, sliding toward her with the plain intention of putting his head on her lap. For the first time Simona took her husband's presence into account. "It's too hot for that, and you're too heavy." === Page 47 === SUNNY HONEYMOON 653 And she looked at Giacomo out of the corner of her eyes as if to say: From now on, I won't let anyone do that but you. Giacomo's spirits soared, and he once more felt that there was a possibility of love between them. He got up and said: "Shall we go for a walk among the rocks?" "Yes," she said promptly, following his example. And she added, to Livio: "See you later . . . We're going to explore." "Have a good time," Livio threw after them. Simona led the way through the passage which her husband had shown her before. She made straight for the black beach, sat down at the foot of a rock and said: "Stretch out and put your head on my legs. . . You'll be more comfortable that way." Overcome by joy, Giacomo threw his arms around her and drew her to him. He gave her a kiss, and Simona returned it, blowing hard through her nose, almost as if she were suffering. When they had drawn apart, she repeated: "Stretch out, and we'll snatch a bit of sleep together." She leaned her back against the rock, and Giacomo, his heart overflowing with love, lay down and put his head on her lap. He closed his eyes, and Simona began to stroke his face. With a hesitant and timid motion she passed her hand over his cheeks, under his chin and up to the top of his head, where she ran her fingers through his hair. When Giacomo opened his eyes for a split second he saw that she was looking at him with childish intentness and curiosity. Meeting his glance she bent over, placed a quick kiss on each of his eyes and told him to go to sleep. Giacomo closed his eyes again and gave himself up to enjoyment of the light touch of her tireless little hand until finally he dozed off. He slept for an indefinable length of time and woke up feeling chilled. Simona was sitting in the same position, with his head on her lap. Looking up, he saw the reason for his feeling so cold. The sky was filled with heavy, black storm clouds. "How long have I been asleep?" he asked her. "About an hour." "And what about you?" "I didn't sleep. I was looking at you." "The sun's disappeared." "Yes." === Page 48 === 654 PARTISAN REVIEW "There's going to be quite a rain." "Livio's gone," she said by way of an answer. "Who is that Livio, anyhow?" Giacomo asked without moving. "A Party comrade, a friend." "I don't care for him." "I know that," she said with a smile. "You made it pretty plain. As he was going away he pointed to you as you lay there asleep and said: 'What's the matter? Has he got it in for me?'" "I haven't got it in for him. . . . But he has no manners. I'm on my honeymoon, and he acts as if it were his." "He's a good fellow." "You used to be in love with him. Admit it!" She came out with a peal of innocent, silvery laughter. "You must be crazy. I couldn't possibly fall in love with him. He doesn't appeal to me in the least." "But the way you talked to one another..." "He's a Party comrade," she repeated, "and that's the way we talk." She was silent for a moment and then said with unexpected bitterness: "He's unintelligent, that's why he doesn't appeal to me." "He doesn't seem to me much more stupid than the next man." "He said a lot of foolish things," she went on angrily. "That we'd kill people off, for instance. . . He knows better and spoke that way just to show off. . . . But such loose talk is harmful to the Party." "You're the one that's got it in for him now." "No, I haven't got it in for him, but he had no business to talk that way." Then she added, more coolly: "As a matter of fact, he's of value to the Party, even if he isn't too bright. He's absolutely loyal; you could ask him to do anything." "And what value have I?" Giacomo was bold enough to ask jokingly. "You can't have any value, since you're not one of us." Giacomo was displeased by this answer. He got up and looked at the lowering sky. "We'd better get back home before it rains, what do you say?" "Yes, I think we had better." Giacomo hesitated for a moment, put his arm around her waist and asked softly: "When we get there, will you be mine . . . at last?" === Page 49 === SUNNY HONEYMOON 655 She nodded, turning her head away in order not to meet his eyes. Feeling easier in his mind, Giacomo quickly got dressed. A few steps away, Simona pulled on her shorts and jersey and started to throw her bag over one shoulder. But with a tender protectiveness such as he had not displayed on the way down, Giacomo said: “I’ll carry that for you.” They started off. First they crossed the flatland, where the pale green branches of the prickly pears seemed to gleam discordantly against the dark sky. As they reached the beginning of the slope they turned around to look behind them. The pink and white light- house stood out against a majestic mass of black storm clouds rising from the horizon to invade that part of the sky which was still empty. These clouds, shaped like great rampant beasts, had smoking under- bellies, and irregular fringes hung down from them over the sea, which was spottily darkening in some places, while in others it still shone like burnished lead in the sun. The fringes were gusts of rain, just beginning to comb the surface of the water. Meanwhile a turbulent wind covered the prickly pears with yellow dust and a blinding stroke of lightning zigzagged diagonally across the sky from one far point to another. After a long silence they heard the thunder, no clap but rather a dull rumble within the clouds. Giacomo saw his wife pale and instinctively shrink toward him. “Lightning scares me to death,” she said, looking at him. Giacomo raised his eyes to the half-clear, half-stormy sky. “The storm isn’t here yet,” he said; “It’s still over the sea. If we hurry, we may get home without a wetting.” “Let’s hurry then,” she said, continuing to climb up the path. The clouds, apparently driven by an increasingly powerful wind, were spreading out over the sky with startling rapidity. Simona quickened her pace to almost a run, and Giacomo could not help teasing her. “Afraid of lightning? What would the comrades say to that? A good Marxist like yourself shouldn’t have any such fear.” “It’s stronger than I am,” she said in a childish voice, without turning around. There were steps, first narrow and then wide, to facilitate the ascent of the lower part of the path, and higher up it rose in wide curves through groves of olive trees. Simona was way ahead; Giacomo could see her striding along fifty or sixty feet before him. At the top === Page 50 === 656 PARTISAN REVIEW they paused to catch their breath and look around. Anacapri, mo- mentarily at their backs, stood reassuringly behind a barrier of green, looking like an Arab city, with its terraces, bell tower and gray-domed church. Giacomo pointed to the shrunken lighthouse on the promontory below, profiled against the threatening storm. "Just think, we were way down there!" he murmured. "I can't wait to be home," said Simona, perhaps with the thunder and lightning in mind. Then, meeting Giacomo's eyes, she added with hesitant coquetry: "What about you?" "I agree," he answered in a low voice, with emotion. The climb was over, and all they had to do now was follow the level path to their rented house, which was well this side of Anacapri. They walked by the wall around the Munt he villa, along a meadow planted with oak trees, and there, just around a bend, was the white wall of their house and the rusty iron gate in the shade of a carob tree with pods hanging all over it. The clouds were straight above them now, and it was as dark as evening. Simona hurriedly pushed open the gate and went ahead without waiting for her husband to follow. Giacomo walked more slowly down the marble steps among the cactus plants. As he went, there was another rumble of thunder, louder this time, like an overturned wagonload of stones rolling down a hill. From inside the house Simona called back: "Shut the door tight!" The house was on a hillside, set back among the trees, and consisted of four roughly furnished rooms. Giacomo made his way in amid almost complete darkness. There was no electric light, but kerosene lamps of various shapes and colors were lined up on the hall table. He lifted the glass off one of these, lit a match, touched it to the wick, put back the glass and entered the dining room. No one was there, but he could hear Simona moving in the room next to it. He did not wish to join her immediately, and feeling thirsty he poured himself a glass of white wine. Finally he picked up the lamp and went to the bedroom door. The bedroom, too, was almost dark. The window giving onto the garden was open, and through it, in what light was left among the shadows, he could make out the terrace surrounded by lemon trees planted in big pots. Simona, in a dressing gown, was tidying the still unmade bed. He set the lamp down on the bedside table and said: "Are you still afraid of the lightning?" === Page 51 === SUNNY HONEYMOON 657 She was leaning over the bed, with one leg slightly raised, smoothing the sheet. Pulling herself up, she answered: “No. Now that I’m in the house I feel safer.” “And are you afraid of me?” “I never was afraid of you.” Giacomo walked around the bed and took her into his arms. Standing beside the head of the bed, they exchanged a kiss. Giacomo undid the sash of Simona’s dressing gown and it slipped down over her shoulders and hips to the floor. But Simona did not interrupt the kiss; indeed she prolonged it with an awkward eagerness, betrayed by her characteristic way of blowing through her nose. With sudden decisiveness, Giacomo let her go. “Lie down, will you?” he said, hurriedly taking off his clothes. Simona hesitated and then lay down on the bed. Giacomo was aware of being impelled by strictly animal feelings, as if he were not in a house, but in a dark cave, yes, as if he were a primitive man, moved by carnal appetite alone. Yet it was with a certain tenderness that he lay down beside his wife. She was facing the wall, but brusquely she turned around and pressed herself against him, snug- gling into his arms. For a few minutes they lay there, motionless, then Giacomo began chastely and gently to caress her. He wanted to possess her on her own virginal terms, without bringing any of his masculine experience into play. His light caresses and the words he whispered through her hair into one ear were intended to calm her fears and lead her almost insensibly to give herself to him. He was not in a hurry and it seemed to him that his new policy of consider- ation and patience would win for him what his haste of the previous evening had failed to obtain. And by degrees he had the impression that, in response to his words and caresses, she was yielding not only her body but also that inward part of her which had resisted him heretofore. Simona did not speak, but her breathing grew gradually heavier. All of a sudden, almost involuntarily, he gave way to a natural impulse and attempted to take her. Under the impact of his body Simona seemed at first to surrender, then brusquely she rebelled and struggled to free herself. With a mixture of anger and submission she whispered: “I can’t do it! I can’t!” Giacomo refused to heed her change of heart and tried to prevail over her by force. She defended herself with her feet and === Page 52 === 658 PARTISAN REVIEW knees and hands, while he did everything to overcome her. In the combat their naked bodies were bathed in sticky perspiration. Finally Giacomo lost his patience, leaped out of bed and went into the bathroom, saying: "I'll be back in a minute." Guided by a furious inspiration he groped his way to the wash basin, took the razor blade he had used for shaving that morning and plunged it into the cushion of his thumb. He felt the cold blade cut through his skin, but had no pain. Then he put the blade back on the shelf and squeezed his thumb, which gave out an abundant flow of blood. He went back to the bedroom and threw himself upon his wife, rubbing his bloody thumb on the sheet between her legs. Then he shouted angrily: "You may not realize it, but you're no longer a virgin!” Tremblingly she asked: "How do you know?" "Just look!" He took the lamp from the table and threw its light upon the bed. Simona was hunched up on the pillow, with her knees against her chin and her arms crossed over her breasts. She looked down at the place where Giacomo had thrown the light and saw a long streak of red blood. Batting her eyelids in disgust, she said: "Are you sure?" "Positive!" But just at that moment her eyes traveled to the hand in which Giacomo was holding the lamp. Blood was streaming out of the cut in the cushion of his thumb. In a plaintive voice she cried out: "It's not my blood; it's yours! . . . You cut yourself on purpose." Giacomo put the lamp back on the table and shouted in a rage: "That's the only blood I'll see tonight or any night to come. You're still a virgin and you always will be!" "Why do you say that? What makes you so unkind?" "That's the way it is," he answered. "You'll never be mine. Some part of you is hostile to me, and hostile it will remain.” "What part do you mean?" "You're closer to that fool, Livio, than you are to me," he said, coming out with his jealousy at last. "That part of you which is close to Livio is hostile to me." "That's not true.” === Page 53 === SUNNY HONEYMOON 659 “Yes, it is true. And it's equally true that if your Party came to power you'd inform on me . . .” “Who says so?” “You said so yourself this morning, on the way to the lighthouse.” “I said nothing at all.” “Well, what would you do then?” She hesitated for a moment and then said: “Why do you bring up such things at a time like this?” “Because they prevent you from loving me and becoming my wife.” “I wouldn't inform on you,” she said at last. “I'd leave you, that's all.” “But you're supposed to inform on your enemies,” he shouted, angrier than ever. “It's your duty.” Still huddled up at the head of the bed, she burst into tears. “Giacomo, why are you so unkind? . . . I'd kill myself, that's what I'd do.” Giacomo did not have the courage to remind her that on the way to the lighthouse she had branded suicide as morbid and abso- lutely inadmissible. After all, this contradiction was more flattering to him than an open declaration of love. Meanwhile, still in tears, she had got down from the bed and gone over to the open window. Giacomo lay on the bed, watching. She stood straight, with her head bent to the side and one arm raised against the frame. Suddenly the room was lit up, and every object in it, her naked, white body, the garden and the potted lemon trees around the terrace. There followed a metallic crack and a violent tremor which made the window and the walls of the room tremble. Simona gave a terrified cry, left the window and threw herself sobbing into her husband's arms. Giacomo pressed her to him, and almost immediately, while still weeping she sought his embrace, he penetrated her body without any diffi- culty whatsoever. He had the feeling that a hidden flower, composed of only two petals, had opened—although still remaining invisible— to something that in the dark night of the flesh played the role of the sun. Nothing was settled, he reflected later on, but for the time being it was enough to know that she would kill herself for him. (Translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye) === Page 54 === Winfield Townley Scott COLERIDGE Old father, blessed ghost, mariner Of my launching, fixer of the bloody sun Round which my condemned and lifelong voyage Swerves and follows-follows again, ignorant What tropic oceans, what icy straits Hide ahead, or winds across the magnet Shudder deeper than engines, or tides Trouble the ways before the invisible pole Set under that unsettling sun; old talker Glittering through my childhood-voice and eyes Compellent to hold, to send me out to Find home by way of Vinland, India, by Horns of undiscovered coasts that sounded Music undeniable till the sea Flamed with mirage that grayed all gold; old Detective of death in the boy's hand in the lane- Resolve my life again. By this invocation Invoke me, blessed ghost, old father. Jane Mayhall THE RETURN He died to a green god. The past was made into a flowering like scattered fields never walked upon, acres that slanted to mountains. He quickened in green death ascending: "To speak and speak and mean nothing, to walk in the world alone.” === Page 55 === He followed into a maze to imagine the mixed beauty that was always his; leaves trembled like disheveled mirrors, the signet rock sank in the forest, the plundered stones from pouring streams blazed black to a mock richness. He dropped, stunned by the green eye of one: “I am what I see and who sees me. I am the invisible mouth of the dewberry, and the bridled root of a Pegasus tree. Lift the fairy roofs of dead flowers and you will find my heart crouching there. Or, sucking the waters of a poisoned thorn, I am the jealous lover of Pan.” Now, the god plagued him near, cruel and rare as the end of desire. Fallen from hope, gored in black swamp, his hand pointed down to the way he had come. Green fingers twined, the forest groaned; and he was drawn like the hollow rain into his last love, and lost being. THE CLOISTERS And quiet here, the sea-shell murmuring crowd swings upon a silken-corded shore, our shoes like music on the stony floor. Twice turned on stone, we mark a figure bowed with wooden head and crowned in thorny gold. And from the posture of an ancient chair we reconstruct a king who dawdled there. The sculptor of the mind designs his cold and cryptic image from the ceiling light. Now, changed by the mind's unbounded art, the battered whole turns into beauty's part: the shining center of an unknown weight. === Page 56 === A grassy peacock, tailed with dragon stars, struts upon a canvas creaking heaven; and delphic angels, pledged to number seven, fly in choirs of love to holy wars. The marble arches from old Europe's church entice a birdlike eye to doff a wing. Elastic rapture snaps the throat, we sing with puerile praise that strains aloft to perch. Oh, then we glow like Gothic saints in glass, enshrined upon a veiled transparency, being not ourselves, but being free to melt like modes in Palestrina's mass. Pearse Hutchinson THE NUNS AT THE MEDICAL LECTURE The nuns at the medical lecture have rose faces like babies surprised into wisdom, the clerical students passing the pub look slightly scared, but mainly serene, the cultured ancient cod in his lamplit room, lined with the desert fathers and the village idiots and the palace pornographs, warms the port in his palm and remarks that passion rages most after innocence because it is innocent, and rages to corrupt; the young spongers gape, consoling themselves for the gap between drinks by considering sagacity, we all sometimes talk like a tenth-rate so understanding confessor. Always the maligned force that carries light achieves its kind revenge, and the velveteen shield of every proud prig erupts in termed lunacy; the man in dark glasses was, fancy, at the very same college a vague few years ago, and buys the boy === Page 57 === a pint; the foreign landlady sends in coffee at odd hours and doesn't charge it; the brilliant friend suddenly weeps, and pity does the trick; the adolescent skeleton marionettes in front of the glistening wardrobe; the nun fingertips her scraped pate with pride, and the masseur, the barber, the preacher, and the prior . . . So like whiskey creates anger, and love creates greed, as the lizard creates the sun, and the bull sand, we have created your sin, we conceived the death of your innocence. With all our aging need, we have corrupted you, as the air corrupts the bud into flower, as the fountain corrupts the air. Let us go, and you in front with sackcloth and ashes over silk, and lament the beautiful ivory death all would have walked thru had we not met— in a carnival of personal pronouns, a battle of flowers and roots, wear this laughter to shreds. === Page 58 === Gertrude Himmelfarb MR. STEPHEN AND MR. RAMSAY: THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL Virginia Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse, opens brightly: "Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow,' said Mrs. Ramsay. 'But you'll have to be up with the lark.' " To her six-year-old son, "these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition to the lighthouse were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a day's sail, within touch." For some lines, the radiance of the child's world prevails; and then: " 'But,' said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, 'it won't be fine.' " Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children's breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastic- ally, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridi- cule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgment. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are ex- tinguished, . . . one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure. This is our first introduction to Mr. Ramsay, that egotistical, tyrannical, petty, and most disagreeable Victorian paterfamilias. It === Page 59 === THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL 665 is also an introduction to Virginia Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, after whom the character of Mr. Ramsay was, surprisingly, modeled. Surprisingly for it was of Stephen, the Victorian intellectual par excellence, that John Morley said, “His natural kindness of heart, supported by his passion for reason and fair play, made him the most considerate and faithful of men," a judgment which other con- temporaries echoed. What, then, is one to make of the narrow, mean, vitriolic Mr. Ramsay, who was also the broadminded, enlightened, good-humored Mr. Stephen, author of some thirty volumes of bio- graphical and critical works, among them the urbane two-volume History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century and the per- ceptive three-volume English Utilitarians, editor of the monumental Dictionary of English Biography, and contributor to it of no less than 378 distinguished articles? The muckraker, even the sophisticated Lytton Strachey variety of muckraker, would solve the problem easily enough by creating two figures, a public Dr. Jekyll and a private Mr. Hyde, of which the Mr. Hyde would be assumed to be the real person. This technique, unsatisfactory at best, would be particularly unfortunate in the case of an intellectual, for whom public and private cannot be so neatly distinguished, for whom the public man, the thinker, is as essentially the real person as the private, domestic man. Leslie Stephen was such an intellectual, by birth, character and vocation. He was, despite the muckraker, neither a fool, nor a fraud, nor a split personality. He was all of a piece—a Victorian man of letters. Virginia Woolf herself never forgot that Mr. Ramsay was Mr. Stephen, an intellectual whose life and fate were, in large measure, the life and fate of his mind, and whose private terror was that pe- culiar to the intellectual profession, the terror of being declared counterfeit. Mr. Ramsay badgered his wife with the questions: Were his mental powers weakening? Was his last book as good as his earlier ones? And he tormented himself with the thought that his writings, voluminous though they might be, would not survive his lifetime. Leslie Stephen had similar anxieties. Himself a professional book-re- viewer, he could not bear, he confessed, to read reviews of his own books. Before the publication of one of his works, he wrote to a friend: "I always suffer from a latent conviction that I am an im- poster and that somebody will find me out.” === Page 60 === 666 PARTISAN REVIEW From the perspective of a later age and a different intellectual climate, it may be possible to find him out. Some clues are present in the excellent new biography, Leslie Stephen, by the young Oxford don, Noel Annan.1 Others are to be sought in that class and society of Victorian intellectuals of which Stephen was so exemplary a member. To an American looking backward, the English intellectual of the Victorian era appears as the intellectual, one who could lay claim to the title and estate by what might almost be regarded as the prin- ciple of legitimacy-the unimpeachable right of descent. It is with some awe that an American, generally separated from his kind by barriers of class, nationality and region, views those two great clans of Englishmen, in which the bonds of birth and marriage reinforced those of class and profession: the Macauleys, Trevelyans, Arnolds, Huxleys, Darwins, Wedgwoods and Galtons; the Stephens, Wilber- forces, Venns, Diceys, Thackerays, Fishers, Russells and Stracheys. The English intellectual, moreover, had, until very recently, that ad- ditional mark of legitimacy which stamped a career that was at the same time dignified, remunerative and socially influential-a unique combination of virtues to which the Herr Professor, the feuilletoniste, and the American college teacher could never aspire. To be a man of letters in England in the last century was to have access to the high society of Holland House, to have hopes of making the family fortune, or to be a serious contender for political power, all without impugning the literary calling. Rarely was the Victorian intellectual driven to the expedient of the typical American intellectual of the same period-the expedient of a Melville in the customs house lead- ing a double life, a tedious daytime existence of making a living, and an exotic, surreptitious night-life of writing. There was nothing exotic or surreptitious about the English intellectual in his Victorian prime, for whom writing was thought to be as natural as breathing, a faculty which was the birthright of every Englishman of honorable (middle or upper-class) birth and respectable (public school or uni- versity) education. And yet, the very quality of legitimacy which confers upon the Victorian the title of the perfect intellectual also, paradoxically, de- 1. Harvard University Press. $5.00. === Page 61 === THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL 667 prives him of the claim to it. For if to be an intellectual is as natural as breathing, it can be no more remarkable than breathing. If it has the status of an ordinary vocation, it does not enjoy the extraordinary status of an avocation. If it is no special distinction which the in- dividual must laboriously earn, if it comes to him as a right rather than a reward, if it is an incidental by-product of class and family and dedication, then the much- acclaimed Victorian intellectual may be not an intellectual at all, but rather a cultured gentleman whose occupation happens to be writing. The distinction is important in a discussion of modern Eng- lish culture and, specifically, in a discussion of the phenomenon of Stephen-Ramsay. One of the peculiarities of the intellectual qua gentleman, which may account for his natural, artless manner, is the survival of the schoolboy in him. That Leslie Stephen was a product of both Eton (he had been sent there in obedience to a doctor's prescription that this delicate, sensitive boy get "fresh air, humdrum lessons, and a rigorous abstinence from poetry") and of Cambridge are among the primary facts of his intellectual life. For to the Englishman, school is not a passing stage to be outgrown, but a permanent, metaphysical condition. It is, in fact, the only relation to the metaphysical that many English intellectuals experience. The English equivalents for the philosophical extremes toward which men temperamentally in- cline may be seen as the antitheses of Rugby and Eton, Oxford and Cambridge. So it appears to be of the order of a law of nature that while Matthew Arnold derived from Rugby and Oxford, Leslie Stephen should be of the genus Eton-Cambridge. The contrast between Eton and Rugby or between Cambridge and Oxford is reflected in a contrast of religious temper. At Eton, as Stephen was fond of recalling, there was none of the "cant" about Christian behavior or Christian gentlemen so common at Rugby, none of the moralizing sermons, like the famous one of Dr. Arnold about the vices by which "great schools were corrupted and changed from the likeness of God's temple to that of a den of thieves." No one at Eton pretended that religion had anything to do with the school- boy's life of cribbing, lying, cheating, stealing and bullying. The old fossil droning on in the college chapel about "the duties of the mar- === Page 62 === 668 PARTISAN REVIEW ried state” was under no illusion, as his modern descendant might be, as to the relevance of his sermon to the lives of his pupils. Re- ligion, as distinct from the mere social activity of church-going, was a private affair. Religion was a private affair, partly at least for the reason that science was so much a public affair. It was in the ‘fifties, while Stephen was at the university, that the Mosaic account of creation began to be seriously undermined, on the one side from geology and zoology, with their revelations about the antiquity of the universe and the evolution of species, and on the other from the recently imported "Biblical Criticism" of Germany. Many of the bright young men in these middle years of Victoria's reign discovered that they could no longer subscribe to the dogmas of Christianity. Those of the Rugby- Oxford temperament, like Matthew Arnold's friend, Arthur Clough, went through agonies of doubt and emerged to find their familiar world shattered. Others, generally the more sanguine products of Eton or Cambridge, experienced nothing more disturbing than the sensation of having awakened. Stephen, as he later testified, did not lose his faith; he simply awoke to the realization that he had none. A professional intellectual, he managed to live through one of the greatest intellectual revolutions of modern times, without quite know- ing it. Under the impression that the true historical explanation of any event is an evolutionary one, historians have represented the English loss of faith as a gradual stripping of religion of one dogma after another until nothing remained but the memory of Christianity-the convention of a name and the habit of a ritual. If this were so, Stephen's agnosticism might be taken as a kind of diluted fourth- generation Evangelicalism: the first generation being represented by Wesleyan fundamentalism, when religion looked upon learning and culture as godless; the second by the Clapham Sect (including Stephen's grandfather and Macaulay's father), which succeeded in making piety socially and culturally respectable; and the third by men like Macaulay and James Stephen (Leslie's father), who had discarded the traditional Evangelical apparatus of conscience-probing, sin-confessing, "illuminations” and conversions. Leslie Stephen him- self would have favored such an interpretation. His own spiritual journey, starting from the quiet, unostentatious piety of his home, === Page 63 === THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL 669 followed by the quiet, unostentatious, lax conformism of school, ended in the quiet, reasonable, good-natured agnosticism of his ma- turity. The evolution of faith from belief to unbelief seemed to him to be as natural and inevitable as the process of physical growth itself. Stephen was deceived, however, as were later historians, into confusing manners with belief. Because the generation of his elders- his own father and Macaulay, for example-had come to look upon enthusiasm with distaste, and regarded public protestations of faith, like public displays of emotion, as vulgar if not obscene, it has been assumed that their religious belief was as attenuated as the public expression of that belief. The truth is that Leslie Stephen's father, who had, indeed, come a long way from the primitive evangelical fervor of his ancestors, was nevertheless deeply pious, in thought as well as in behavior. Between James Stephen and Leslie Stephen there was not simply one more step in the march of enlightenment; there was a leap which no amount of good manners or good nature could obscure. Stephen could not appreciate the enormity of the distance which separated belief from unbelief, because he could not appreciate or credit the very fact of belief. “The one thing,” he wrote, “that can spoil the social intercourse of well-educated men . . . is a spirit of misplaced zeal,” and he was grateful that there was no Arnold at Eton and no Newman in Cambridge. He admitted that Cambridge men did not deny the existence of the soul, but he congratulated him- self that they were sensible enough to know that “it should be kept in its proper place.” He himself, who did more to popularize agnos- ticism than any other man except Huxley, never really understood what all the fuss was about. He never understood, as Huxley did, that a new chronology had come into being, Before-Darwin and After-Darwin, with Darwin marking the dividing line between belief and unbelief. Before Darwin a bold spirit could be tempted to think of God as merely the custo- dian of the laws of nature; after Darwin it took no great courage to think of the laws of nature as themselves the custodian of the universe. Before Darwin man was assured that he was created by God in His image; after Darwin he was advised that he was created by laws of nature which were the laws of chance, in the image of === Page 64 === 670 PARTISAN REVIEW whatever species of primate science might discover to be his next of kin. It is little wonder that Stephen, and so many of his contem- poraries, failed to recognize the revolutionary character of their time, when the arch-rebel of the piece, Darwin himself, seemed to be un- aware of or uninterested in the broader implications of his theory. It remained for Huxley, ten years after the appearance of Origin of Species, to coin the word "agnosticism," and to discover how many of the young intellectuals who enlisted in the ranks of the agnostics regarded it not as a new and startling revelation but as an old and obvious truth. Stephen was one of those to whom agnosticism was as old and obvious as common sense. And it was hard to get excited about so commonplace a thing as common sense, in a country which had made of common sense the national character, and among in- tellectuals who had made of it a metaphysical principle. A better name for Stephen's creed than agnosticism might be "Muscular Christianity"-without the Christianity. His ideal phil- osopher was identical with what he took to be Kingsley's ideal par- son: "A married man with a taste for field-sports." Upon sports Stephen, like his countrymen, lavished that passion and enthusiasm which was denied to all other activities. And with the passion went a sense of sport as the ne plus ultra of life. That politics, for example, was a game was not the admission but the boast of nineteenth-century politicians. (Gladstone was disliked, less because he was a hypocrite, although some suspected him of that too, than because his constant appeal to principle, his invariable tone of moral superiority and righteousness, violated the rules of the game. This was the nineteenth- century conception of the demagogue: a man who intruded con- science into politics.) Religion was a game in the same sense in which politics was a game, because both were skirmishes played out on the fringes of so- ciety, with society itself secure and invulnerable. Everyone, it could be assumed, or at least everyone who counted, conformed to the image of Tom Brown: "a brave, helpful, truthful Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian." If men chose to argue about Arianism or Erastianism, about the position of the altar or the cut of ecclesi- astical vestments, it was their right as Englishmen to be idiosyncratic. Indeed, it was fortunate that there were these religious idiosyncrasies, === Page 65 === THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL 671 and most fortunate that they expressed themselves in the traditional rivalry between Cambridge and Oxford; without them there would have been no game, and with them there was the comfortable know- ledge that the game would be kept under control, that it would never become more than a game. (Newman so far forgot himself in the excitement of the game as to be carried away into the alien world of Catholicism, after which he was looked upon as a disagreeable curiosity.) Religious differences, then, could be indulged because, as part of the game, they did not assume the character of moral differences. But what if it should happen that men started to quarrel not about religious differences but about religion itself? Would morality still be inviolable? Would the rules of the game still be observed? No one worried about these questions more than those who were themselves least able to believe. And they were the ones who came up with the answer that for the men of intelligence and character (for the masses of men it might be different) religion was not the necessary sanction for morality. George Eliot, Mill, Huxley, Morley, Frederick Harrison and Stephen agreed that atheism, positivism, agnosticism, or how- ever they identified their particular variety of disbelief, could be more, not less, moral than orthodox Christianity. To Stephen, agnosticism was superior to religion because it was the more sporting and manly way of playing "the great game of life." For the agnostic, there were none of the easy subterfuges, the cheap consolations of religion. The agnostic had to be courageous without being foolhardy, self-sufficient but not proud. He had to know when to stand alone and when to join with others, how to exploit his good fortune and how to retreat before bad. And he had to understand that the secret of thinking is in the doing and that to be deliberate is to be decisive. The good agnostic, in short, was the good sportsman. It is not surprising that Stephen, interpreting agnosticism in this way, saw in it a philosophy peculiarly congenial to the English. Cer- tainly there is no other country where both the spirit of sportsmanship and the physical activity of sports have penetrated so deeply into so- ciety as to determine the character of its intellectuals. It is almost impossible to read a memoir or biography of a Victorian writer with- out coming upon the inevitable walking statistics. Even Mill, that effeminate "logic-chopping machine," who had escaped the natural- === Page 66 === 672 PARTISAN REVIEW izing institutions of the public school and university, walked fifteen miles three days before his death at the age of 67, a modest record compared with Stephen's grandfather, who celebrated his seventieth birthday by walking 25 miles to breakfast, then to his office, and home again the same day. Fifty miles a day was about the average for the "Sunday Tramps" organized by Stephen. And walking was the least strenuous of the sports to which Stephen and his friends were addicted. Stephen remembered, as the most important events of his university days, the two occasions when the Trinity Hall boat, with himself as coach, went "head of the river." And the most cherished memories of his later life were his mountain climbing expeditions, on which he was joined by such other enthusiasts as Meredith, Huxley, Harrison and F. W. Maitland; Stephen himself was the first person to scale the Schreckhorn. Mountaineering was no idle, leisure-time amusement. It was a disciplined, exacting game, with a precise set of rules and code of behavior-a paradigm of life itself. When Stephen put to himself the ultimate question of the meaning of life, it was to his favorite sports, rowing and mountaineering, that he looked for an answer. In "A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps," one of his most thoughtful and personal essays, he pictured himself hanging over a precipice and asking himself the value of life. As his fingers clung desperately to the edge of the rock, he contemplated the vision of eternity lying in wait for him below. He reviewed in his mind the answers of Christianity, pantheism and Mill's Religion of Humanity, rejecting the first because it did not appreciate the goodness of man, the second because it did not appreciate his individuality, and the third because it pretended to make too much of him. It was not until he recalled the physical sensation of a race on the Thames that the answer came to him. He remembered how he had rowed on, in this race that was already lost, every muscle aching and his lungs strained almost to the breaking point, for no other reason than "some obscure sense of honor." So now, hanging over the precipice, he was over- whelmed by the instinctive thought that the "fag end of the game should be fairly played out, come what might, and whatever reasons might be given for it." If the sportsman, submitting himself to the ordeal of the Thames or the Alps, must be satisfied with answers so vague as an "obscure === Page 67 === THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL 673 sense of honor," "come what might," or "whatever reasons" answers that are more in the nature of an admission that there are no answers -surely the philosopher, Stephen implies, cannot expect better ones. From the sportsman's maxim that life is nothing but a game, it is only one short step to the assertion that the game is more than life. Life is sometimes farcical; the game is always serious. In life there are extenuating circumstances and rules have exceptions; the game must be played out strictly according to the laws. In life, responsibil- ities may be shirked and consequences evaded; the game takes its toll inexorably. If the game, an enterprise apparently so grave and momentous, has no meaning, then life itself need have no meaning. Thus the philosopher yielded to the sportsman. As the philosopher in Stephen yielded, so did the intellectual. At Cambridge, he was known as a "college rough." In his early memoirs, he spoke of a don (identified by his friends as himself) who lectured on the Greek Testament in this manly fashion: "Easy all! Hard word there! Smith, do you know what it means? No? No more don't I. Paddle on all!" He was not much worse than most profes- sors who were too busy with the administration of the college to study or even tutor seriously, and whose students had to depend upon crammers to pass their examinations. He himself, like most of his contemporaries, was largely self-educated. To an American, for whom self-education implies that painful process by which an un- schooled person acquires a smattering of knowledge, it may seem odd to speak of urbane, cultivated, professional intellectuals, men of good breeding, graduates of the best schools, as self-educated. Yet this was so. Stephen had to learn French and German on his own; he first read modern philosophy-Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Comte, Hamilton and Mill-while a don, between bouts of rowing and tutoring; he became acquainted with modern literature only af- ter he was installed as a literary critic in London. Even the univer- sity man's knowledge of the ancients was more a matter of vocabulary and prosody than ideas and philosophy. Stephen tells the story of his Cambridge friend and colleague, Henry Fawcett, who announced after dinner one evening: "Now I am interested in Socrates, and want to know more about him, so I am thinking of giving a lecture upon him." "But Fawcett," Stephen mildly remonstrated, "have you read his works?" "No, but I mean to." === Page 68 === 674 PARTISAN REVIEW It is the faith of the self-educated man that nothing is beyond his means, that all knowledge must submit to a firm will and good sense. This is also the creed of the amateur. The English essayist, like Stephen, whose relation to ideas is that of a self-educated intel- lectual, may best be thought of as a professional amateur, a type familiar to Americans in certain sports. The professional bearing of the Victorian intellectual is so con- spicuous that his amateur status is apt to be overlooked. This pro- fessionalism is exhibited in the regularity and facility of his writing, qualities that accredit him, perhaps even more than his social position, as a genuine, working intellectual. There cannot have been many writers like Anthony Trollope, who kept a schedule and a watch in front of him to make sure that he turned out his 250 words every quarter of an hour for a minimum of three hours. But the sense of writing as a regular occupation, rather than as the erratic outburst of inspiration, was and still is typical among English intellectuals. Stephen himself was no more productive than many others; he aver- aged three or four eight-thousand-word articles a week (each at one sitting, it is, incredibly, reported), apart from incidental writing tasks. This was the sportsmanlike way of writing: no fuss, no anguish; the game is played at the appointed time, so many minutes to the period, so many periods to the game. As a writer, then, the Victorian intellectual was very much the professional; it was as a thinker that he tended to be amateur, and largely for the reason that he was so professional in his writing. No one could write profoundly, on subjects which he must have gotten up for the occasion, at the rate of 25 thousand words a week. And even if he could, the essayist would not have wanted to enter too profoundly into his subjects. There was something unsporting, to his mind, in the way a German philosopher (or these days, the English complain, an American academician) would worry an idea, strain for a meaning, deliberately cultivate the far-fetched and the extreme. The essayist preferred to be reasonable and urbane, to preserve the amenities of discourse as would two gentlemen conversing in the presence of ladies. Ideas were picked up, played with and dropped, without great passion or enthusiasm, until the contracted number of pages were filled. Where there was a show of passion it was against those who, by affronting common sense, had ruled themselves out of === Page 69 === THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL 675 the company of gentlemen. To Stephen the German philosophers were fair game: Hegel was “in many things, little better than an ass”; as for Schlegel, Stephen refused to believe that Coleridge could have stolen his Shakespeare criticism from Schlegel “partly at least, from the reason which would induce me to acquit a supposed thief of having stolen a pair of breeches from a wild Highlandman.” For the most part, the tone was mild and agreeable. It was as if the essayist had entered into a compact of friendship with his sub- ject, so that Morley could be equally tender toward Rousseau and Burke (as if these two were not implacable enemies), or Stephen toward almost all of the great writers of the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries. This equanimity and good nature characterizes all of Stephen’s literary work. He was a biographer who did not believe in revealing all that an inquisitive reader might like to know, and a critic who praised the Life of Kingsley for its reticence. He was widely read in the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but he managed, as English reviewers say in praise, to carry his learning lightly. He was thoughtful yet never argumentative, sensitive but not precious, sympathetic without being committed. He had all the virtues of the gentleman—amiability, broad-mindedness and a high tolerance —which meant that he had the great vice of the essayist—literary promiscuity. Stephen’s essay on Jonathan Edwards is instructive. Here was a man who was as unlikely a candidate for his sympathy as is con- ceivable—a religious zealot, mystic, witch-hunter, and hair-splitting theologian. Yet Stephen never lost his temper: Edwards “is morbid, it may be, but he is not insincere”; “there is something rather touch- ing, though at times our sympathy is not quite unequivocal. . .” Stephen was able to be good-tempered because he never really be- lieved that a man could honestly believe in sin and hell-fire as Ed- wards professed to. Himself a gentleman, he was generous enough to ignore these distressing lapses of taste and to assume that Edwards too was at heart a gentleman. So casually and smoothly that the reader is almost lulled into acquiescence, Stephen comes out with his remarkable conclusion: “That Edwards possessed extraordinary acuteness is as clear as it is singular that so acute a man should have suffered his intellectual activity to be restrained within such narrow fetters. Placed in a different medium, under the same circumstances, === Page 70 === 676 PARTISAN REVIEW for example, as Hume or Kant, he might have developed a system of metaphysics comparable in its effect upon the history of thought to the doctrines of either of those thinkers. He was, one might fancy, formed by nature to be a German professor, and accidentally dropped into the American forests.” The Victorian essayist had the temperament which Americans associate not with the literary critic but rather with the cultural an- thropologist. A variety of beliefs, styles and personalities came under his purview, and, in the fashion of the anthropologist, he gave them each the best of his understanding and sympathy. But he never made the mistake of believing them or accepting them at face value, much as the anthropologist takes care neither to be contemptuous of the Zulu nor to be taken in by the Christian. Toward all of his subjects he displayed the same gentle irreverence, with only the slightest hint of the superciliousness that betrays the superior man who is above the battle. Thus Stephen could write, of the greatest mind of his time: “Newman is good enough as a writer and ingenious enough as a sophist to be worth a little examination. I only consider him as a curiosity.” Or he could refer to Hobbes as “the Herbert Spencer of the seventeenth century,” and describe philosophy in general as a by-product of social evolution and as “the noise that the wheels make as they go round.” But like the anthropologist, who often harbors behind his façade of impartiality a whole armory of liberal beliefs and assumptions (cooperation is freedom, freedom is happiness, happiness is democ- racy . . .), the essayist too had his stock of prejudices, which every now and then emerged in the rhetoric of the essay. In Stephen’s case, they were expressed by his favorite invectives, “morbid” and “un- manly.” Morbid and unmanly were anything tainted with excessive sentiment, sensibility, emotion or exoticism. Donne’s love poetry was morbid. Rousseau had a morbid tendency to introspection and a morbid appetite for happiness. Balzac’s lovers were morbidly senti- mental and morbidly religious. Keats, Shelley and Coleridge were unmanly. Charlotte Bronte’s Rochester and George Eliot’s Tito and Daniel Deronda were all feminine. (A reviewer of Stephen’s book on Eliot corrected what he took to be a typographical error in the description of a male character as womanly.) Stephen was confident that he himself could never be charged === Page 71 === THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL 677 with unmanliness. His philosophy, such as it was, was a sound, Eng- lish utilitarianism. His religion was a healthy agnosticism. His aesthe- tic principles were common sense and good nature. He was, in short, one of those “manly and affectionate fellows” whom he so admired in college. If all of this sometimes added up to Philistinism, then he admitted to being a “thorough Philistine who is dull enough to glory in his Philistinism.” Besides, Philistinism was a word “which a prig bestows upon the rest of the species.” He disclaimed any comprehen- sion of the non-literary arts; “artistic people,” he once told his ar- tistic children, “inhabit a world very unfamiliar to me.” And he was only so much of an intellectual as his compulsive sense of manliness permitted him to be—and manliness drove a hard bargain. The re- sult was that Stephen, who, as Maitland put it, had a “lust for pen and ink” so great that he begrudged the time spent at the dinner table, could be found uttering, and, what is more, believing, such crude Philistinisms as: “To recommend contemplation in preference to action is like preferring sleeping to walking.” Or: “The highest poetry, like the noblest morality, is the product of a thoroughly healthy mind.” Writing itself, if conducted in the properly casual and sportsmanlike spirit, was not unmanly. But thinking, which re- fuses to abide by the conventions of manly propriety, was. It is for this reason that Stephen, as he once confessed, found that he could write when he could not read—and a fortiori when he could not think. Mr. Ramsay knew, what Stephen perhaps only suspected, that as an intellectual he had failed. He did not know that this failure had been the price of his admission to the society of Victorian intel- lectuals. But he knew that something somewhere had gone wrong. His mind had failed him. Yet— It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. . . . But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers in the distance. Z is only reached === Page 72 === 678 PARTISAN REVIEW once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q-R-... R is then- what is R? A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying—he was a failure—that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. . . . Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him. . . . Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R. He was doomed to failure and he would die like a man. But perhaps something, human sympathy or love, could be salvaged from this wreck of an intellectual: Who shall blame him, if, so standing for a moment, he dwells upon fame, upon search parties, upon cairns, raised by grateful followers over his bones? Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed ex- pedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now perceived by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Stephen had starved himself as an intellectual, thinking it would make him a better man. He had emaciated his sensibility, constricted his faith, stunted his imagination. When finally intellectual poverty forced him to retreat to domesticity, his spirit was poor, hardened and unyielding. But deep within him was a turbulence that erupted with painful regularity and violence, always in the privacy of his family. In the privacy of his home, the stoical, death-defying mountaineer was revealed as a man who could not bear to hear the word dentist mentioned, or to read newspaper accounts of the Boer War. The critic who execrated sentimentality as morbid and unmanly luxuriated in the sentimentality of his “Mausoleum Book,” a diary in which he recorded the grievances and griefs of his private life, the “hideous morbid fancies” that he had been unkind to his wives (“fancies === Page 73 === THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL 679 which I know to be utterly baseless and which I am yet unable to dispense by an effort of will"), and the conviction that he was un- loved and uncared for. The optimistic, science-ravished utilitarian who contemplated a world free from the slavery of color, the tyranny of arbitrary power and the subjugation of religion and church, was wretched, willful and harsh. The man who made a philosophy of common sense was prostrated by the minor crises of domestic life—a child late for dinner, an unexpected household expenditure, a vanity offended. "I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead," his children once heard him groan in genuine misery, "I wish my whiskers would grow." There are different habitats of madness suitable for different varieties of intelligence and sensibility. There are the super-rational heights of madness on which may be found, perhaps, an exalted spirit like Hegel; and there are the irrational depths in which a Dos- toevsky or Nietzsche may find refuge. Victorian intellectuals dwelt, for the most part, upon the plains of madness—that deceptively peaceful countryside where philosophers paraded as journalists, and writers showed off their Rugby Blues more proudly then their Ox- ford Firsts. Here lived those scientists and rationalists (Darwin, Hux- ley, Spencer) who suffered from lifelong illnesses which defied medi- cal diagnosis and cure; those historians of enlightenment (Maine, Lecky) who were subject to spells of painful depression; those novel- ists of domestic comedy (Bulwer-Lytton, Thackeray, Meredith) whose marriages were tragically unhappy; those religious heretics (Harrison, Morley) who were fanatically orthodox and puritanical in morals; those successful and wealthy authors (Macaulay, Dickens) who were obsessed with the fear of bankruptcy; those respectable moralists (Ruskin, Carlyle) who lived in the shadow of serious sexual aberrations, and those others (George Eliot, Mill) who flouted the most peremptory moral conventions. In this company of "manly and affectionate fellows" that made up English intellectual society, Ste- phen was a member in good standing. === Page 74 === PARIS LETTER SARTRE VERSUS CAMUS: A POLITICAL QUARREL The news in Paris is the public break between Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre on the issue of Communism. I hope PR readers will not think the fact that these two famous Parisian intellectuals could be aroused by such an issue to the point of ending a ten-year-old friendship is another sign of European belatedness. This polemic and this break are in fact a sign that in France ideas still count, and, more particularly, that French intellectuals cannot easily reconcile themselves to the divorce between principles and political life which has been the mark of the postwar years all over Europe. Moreover, the arguments exchanged between Camus and Sartre touch upon questions of general intellectual import. Finally, the Communist issue will be a live and significant one in Europe as long as the Communist parties retain their strength. The fact that they are still strong is not the fault of the in- tellectuals. And while the Communist issue is alive, it is worth the trouble to study its phenomenology. At the origin of the Sartre-Camus clash, which occupies a good part of the August issue of Les Temps Modernes, there is L'Homme Revolté. With this book, Albert Camus attempted to do something that Jean-Paul Sartre has never found the time to do, namely to give an account of the reasons which led him to take the position he has taken with regard to the political ideologies of our time, and more particularly Communism. Camus had taken part in the resistance as a writer and a journalist, he had been the editor of a daily paper after the libera- tion; during this period he played a public role, and took political stands. Having withdrawn from public life in order to devote himself to his writing, he felt that he was under the obligation of thinking through the ideas that he had been expressing in articles and speeches. In other words, he felt intellectually responsible for his political com- mitments, and attempted to live up to this responsibility. For this, if for nothing else, he deserves credit. In the author's own words, L'Homme Révolté is intended to be "a study of the ideological aspect of revolutions." This has to be stressed because, as we shall see, the attack launched upon the book by Les === Page 75 === PARIS LETTER 681 Temps Modernes is all based on the assumption that Camus had meant his work to be primarily a political manifesto, if not a new Das Kapital. Briefly summarized, the main thesis of L'Homme Révolté runs as fol- lows: (1) Nihilism, already implicit in the Jacobin myth of terroristic violence, has been brought to its extreme consequences by contemporary Communism. But nihilism is not exclusively a political phenomenon. It is rooted in the history of modern consciousness, and its origins can be traced back to such strange "revolts" against reality as Sade's, Lautréamont's, and Rimbaud's. Philosophically, the Hegelian notion of reality as "history," and of human action as a dialectical series of "his- torical tasks" knowing of no other law than their realization is one of the main sources of ideological nihilism. From Hegel, in fact, Marxist prophecy is derived, with the vision of a "happy end" of history for the sake of which, in Goethe's words, "everything that exists deserves to be annihilated." This is the aspect of Marx emphasized by Communist fa- naticism at the expense of Marx's critical thought, simply because apocalyptic prophecy, being as it is beyond the pale of proof, is the sur- est foundation of a ruthless orthodoxy. (2) At this point, the revolution- ary myth finds itself in absolute contradiction with man's impulse to re- volt against oppression, leading to systematic enslavement rather than liberation. (3) By denying that human life can have a meaning aside from the "historical task" to which it must be made subservient, the "nihilist" must inevitably bring about and justify systematic murder. The contradiction between the revolutionist who accepts such a logic and the man who revolts against injustice in the name of the abso- lute value of human life is radical. And the very absurdity of this contradiction should convince the man who insists on acting for the sake of real humanity that he cannot escape the classical question of the "limit." To begin with, the limit of the idea of "revolt" is, according to Camus, the point where the idea becomes murderous. Contemporary ideologies, the revolutionary as well as the reactionary ones, are es- sentially murderous. Hence they must be refused once and for all, at the cost of one's being forced into what the ideologists call "inaction," but which, in fact (except for the self-satisfied and the philistine), is a refusal of automatic action and an insistence on choice, real commit- ments, and the freedom to act according to authentic convictions on the basis of definite situations, rather than follow ideological deductions and organizational discipline. This is a rather crude simplification of Camus' thesis. It should, however, be sufficient to indicate that, no matter how debatable the arguments and the conclusions, the question raised by Camus is a serious === Page 76 === 682 PARTISAN REVIEW one, and deserves to be discussed seriously at least by those people today who, while not pretending to have at their disposal any new systematic certainty, are aware of the sterility of the old political dogmas. Let's notice in passing that until recently Jean-Paul Sartre was not un- willing to recognize that he belonged in the company of these people. As a matter of fact, he went so far as to write that the biggest party in France was that of those who abstained from voting, which proved how deep among the people was the disgust with the old parties, their methods and their ideologies; a new Left, he added, should try to reach those masses. An attentive reader of L'Homme Révolté will not fail to notice that, in his own peculiar language, and in terms of general ideas rather than of specific moral problems, Camus formulates against the modern world the same indictment as Tolstoy. For Camus, as for Tolstoy, modern society does not recognize any other norm than violence and the accomplished fact, hence it can legitimately be said that it is founded on murder. Which is tantamount to saying that human life in it has become a senseless affair. Tolstoy, however, believed that, besides re- taining an "eternal" value, Christianity was still alive in the depths of our society among the humble; hence he thought that a radical Christian morality: non-violence, could offer a way out. Camus is not religious, and a much more skeptical than Tolstoy as to the moral resources of the modern world. He does not advocate non-violence. He simply points out the reappearance, through nihilistic reduction to absurdity, of the need for a new sense of limit and of "nature." No matter how uncertain one might consider Camus' conclusions, his attack on the modern ideological craze appears both strong and eloquent. Of course, if one believes in progress, one might still maintain that Nazism and Stalinism were the result of contingencies, factual errors, and residual wickedness. But progressive optimism is precisely the notion that Camus vigorously questions. His arguments cannot be easily dismissed by a philosophy like existentialism, which stresses so resolutely the discontinuity between human consciousness and any "process" whatsoever, and which in any case makes it very difficult to go back to the notion that man's ethical task is to "change the world" through historical action. This not only because the idea of "changing the world" is a radically optimistic one in that it presupposes precisely that fundamental harmony between man and the world which existentialism denies; but because only if man is "historical" through and through (as Hegel and Marx assumed) is the definition of a "historical task" possible at all. Now, the main existentialist claim was === Page 77 === PARIS LETTER 683 the rediscovery of an essential structure of human consciousness beyond historical contingencies. From this, going back to Hegel and Marx seems a rather difficult enterprise, one, in any case, that requires a lot of explaining. Yet, lo and behold, in the first attack against L'Homme Révolté launched in the June issue of Les Temps Modernes by one of Sartre's faithful disciples, Francis Jeanson, this critic found no better line of attack than to accuse Camus of “anti-historicism.” His arguments can be summarized as follows: (1) by rejecting the cult of History which seems to him characteristic of the nihilistic revolutions of our time, Camus places himself “outside of history,” in the position of the Hegelian “beautiful Soul,” which wants to remain pure of all contact with reality, and is satisfied with the reiteration of an abstract Idea void of all dialectical energy; (2) by criticizing Marxism and Stalinism, Camus accomplishes an “objectively” reactionary task, as proved by the favorable reviews of his book in the bourgeois press; (3) intellectual disquisitions are a fine thing, but the task (the “choice”) of the moment makes it imperative to struggle in favor of the emancipation of the Indo-Chinese and the Tunisians, as well as in defense of peace; this can- not be done effectively if one attacks the CP, which, at this particular moment, is the only force capable of mobilizing the masses behind such a struggle. This was bad enough. Much worse, and much sadder, is the fact that, in his answer to Camus' “Letter to the Editor of Les Temps Modernes,” Sartre himself did little more than restate his disciples's arguments. In his “Letter,” Albert Camus had addressed the following remarks, among others, to Sartre: “To legitimate the position he takes toward my book, your critic should demonstrate, against the whole collection of Les Temps Modernes, that history has a necessary meaning and a final outcome; that the frightful and disorderly aspect that it offers us today is sheer appearance, and that, on the contrary, in spite of its ups and downs, progress toward that moment of final reconciliation which will be the jump into ultimate freedom, is inevitable. . . . Only prophetic Marxism (or a philosophy of eternity) could justify the pure and simple rejection of my thesis. But how can such views be upheld in your magazine without contradiction? Because, after all, if there is no human end that can be made into a norm of value, how can history have a de- finable meaning? On the other hand, if history has meaning why shouldn't man make of it his end? If he did that, how could he remain in the state of frightful and unceasing freedom of which === Page 78 === 684 PARTISAN REVIEW you speak? . . . The truth is that your contributor would like us to revolt against everything but the Communist Party and the Communist State. He is, in fact, in favor of revolt, which is as it should be, in the condition (of absolute freedom) described by his philosophy. However, he is tempted by the kind of revolt which takes the most despotic historical form, and how could it be otherwise, since for the time being his philo- sophy does not give either form or name to this wild independence? If he wants to revolt, he must do it in the name of the same nature which existentialism denies. Hence, he must do it theoretically in the name of history. But since one cannot revolt in the name of an abstraction, his history must be endowed with a global meaning. As soon as this is accepted, history becomes a sort of God, and, while he revolts, man must abdicate before those who pretend to be the priests and the Church of such a God. Existential freedom and ad- venture is by the same token denied. As long as you have not clarified or eliminated this contradiction, defined your notion of history, assimilated Marxism, or rejected it, how can we be deprived of the right to con- tend that, no matter what you do, you remain within the boundaries of nihilism?" This is a stringent argument. Sartre did not answer it, except by insisting that “our freedom today is nothing but the free choice to struggle in order to become free . . . .” and that if Camus really wanted “to prevent a popular movement from degenerating into tyran- ny,” he should not “start by condemning it without appeal.” “In order to deserve the right to influence men who struggle,” Sartre admonished, “one must start by participating in their battle. One must start by ac- cepting a lot of things, if one wants to attempt to change a few.” Which is, among other things, a theory of conformism, or at least of reformism, not of revolution and drastic change. Because if one “must start by accepting a lot of things” in order to change “a few,” then why not begin by giving up wholesale notions such as “capitalism,” “commu- nism,” the “masses,” etcetera? If he had cared to answer further, Camus could easily have retorted that it was precisely the awareness that “one must start by accepting a lot of things” if one wants to obtain real changes that had persuaded him to give up ideological radicalism. While Sartre, for the sake of changing “a few things,” is ready to swallow a totalitarian ideology plus a totalitarian organization. One thing is certain: Sartre is more intelligent than that, and knows much better. How can he then, in polemic with a man like Camus, imagine that he can get away with taking over the most ordinary kind of journalistic arguments? === Page 79 === PARIS LETTER 685 The answer, I believe, must be found in the phenomenology of the amateur Communist, a type widespread in Europe today, especially among the intellectuals. The first thing to say about the amateur Communist is that he is by no means a "fellow traveler." He does not receive either orders or suggestions from the Party; he does not belong to any "front organiza- tion," and, except for an occasional signature, he does not give any particular help to the Communist cause. What he is interested in is the defeat of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat. A truly independent Communist, and, within the framework of the Communist ideal, a liberal, that is what he is. His points of contact with official Communism are two: (1) he considers it obvious that the Soviet Union is a socialist, that is, a fundamentally just state; (2) for him, it is self-evident that the CP, being the party of the "masses," is also at bottom the party of social justice and peace. Hence, he supports both these institutions in principle, but by no means on all counts. The totalitarian mentality is utterly foreign to him. As for the difficulties and ambiguities of his position, he is perfectly aware of them. But, precisely, "one must accept a lot of things, if one wants to change a few." One would surmise that, being neither a Communist nor an anti- Communist, neither a totalitarian nor a liberal, and insisting as he does on the difficulty, if not the illegitimacy, of a resolute political stand, the amateur Communist should be a rather hamietic character. At this point, however, we witness a remarkable phenomenon: the fact of participating (at a variable distance) in the massive intellectual universe of Communism (of being able, i.e., to use Communist arguments without subjecting himself to the rigid rules by which the militant Communist must abide) gives the amateur Communist a singular kind of assurance. Far from feeling uncertain, he feels very certain, and behaves as if his position were not only politically sound, but also guaranteed by the laws of logic, ethics, and philosophy in general, not to speak of history. Which amounts to saying that he enjoys both the prestige of the Communist uniform which he shuns and the advantages of the civilian clothes which he ostensibly wears. He considers himself "objectively" a Communist insofar as he embraces the proletarian cause, but "subjective- ly" a free man, since he does not obey any order from above. The last, and most refined, touch of such a character is the conviction he often expresses that, in case of a Communist victory, he will be among the first to be "liquidated." His heretical orthodoxy will thus receive even the crown of the martyrs. In what substantial way these refinements can further the cause of the oppressed is, on the other hand, a question === Page 80 === 686 PARTISAN REVIEW that should not be asked. The important thing here is that the unhappy consciousness of this believer without faith should continue to feed on contradictions, since contradictions are to him the sign that he has a firm grip on real life. A man of Sartre's talent cannot be forced into a "type." But the fact is that, since 1945, every time they took a stand on contemporary politics, he and his friends have been behaving more and more like amateur Communists. Worse still, they have been more and more satisfied with taking over the usual arguments of the Communist catechism, and this with an arrogant refusal to justify their position in terms of the philosophical tenets with which they fare so well. They have been behaving, that is, as if, once they had declared themselves in favor of the Proletariat, the consistency of their ideas was a matter of auto- matic adjustment of which no account was due to "others." By so behaving, these philosophers have obviously fallen victim to the most intolerably dogmatic aspect of Communist mentality: the idea that being a resolute partisan can make short work of all questions. The crudeness of the arguments used by Sartre against Camus cannot be explained if one does not assume that, having established an intellectual connection with the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist mentality, he is intellectually dominated by it. Personally, of course, he remains independent. That is precisely why he, an intellectual, can be a victim of the delusion that intellectual assent has no intellectual consequences. But, having reached the conclusion that "participation" in the Com- munist system is the most effective way to pacify his political conscience, it follows that the philosopher of "anguished freedom" participates in the moral smugness which the system guarantees to its proselytes. From moral smugness to intellectual arrogance the step is short indeed. Once one has adopted a certain logical system, it is of course absurd not to avail oneself of the arguments that, from such a point of view, are the most effective. It remains that Jean-Paul Sartre has not answered Albert Camus. The latest news has it that Lettres Fran~aises has offered the excommunicated Sartre a political alliance. It is unlikely that the editor of Les Temps Modernes will accept such an offer. He prizes independence too much. He will not give any direct help and comfort to the Communist Party. He will simply continue to spread the intel- lectual confusion by which the Communist Party benefits. Nicola Chiaromonte === Page 81 === Randall Jarrell THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE Miss Moore's poems judge what is said about them almost as much as poems can, so that even one's praise is hesitant, uncertain of its welcome. As her readers know, her father used to say, "The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint"; and she herself has said, "If tributes cannot/ be implicit, give me diatribes and the fragrance of iodine." Quotation is a tribute as near implicit as I can get; so I will quote where I can, and criticize where I can't. (My father used to say, "The deepest feeling always shows itself in scratches;/ not in scratches, but in iodine.") And I have found one little hole through which to creep to criticism, Miss Moore's "If he must give an opinion it is permissible that the/ critic should know what he likes." I know; and to have to give an opinion is to be human. Besides, I have never believed her father about feeling; "entire affection hateth nicer hands," as Spenser says, and I should hate to trust to "armour's under- mining modesty/ instead of innocent depravity." And that last quotation isn't Spenser. It felt queer to see all over again this year, in English reviews of Miss Moore's Collected Poems,¹ those sentences—sentences once so fam- iliarly American—saying that she isn't a poet at all. I can understand how anyone looking into her book for the first time, and coming on an early passage like "Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were the staple/ ingredients in its/ disinclination to move. Finally its hardihood was/ not proof against its/ proclivity to more fully appraise such bits/ of food as the stream/ bore counter to it," might make this mis- take; but what goes on in the mind that experiences And Bluebeard's Tower above the coral-reefs, the magic mouse-trap closing on all points of the compass, capping like petrified surf the furious azure of the bay, where there is no dust, and life is like a lemon-leaf, a green piece of tough translucent parchment, 1. Macmillan. $2.50. === Page 82 === 688 PARTISAN REVIEW and, dissatisfied, decides that it is prose? Aren't these lines (ordinary enough lines for her) the work of someone even at first glance a poet, with the poet's immemorial power to make the things of this world seen and felt and living in words? And even if the rhythms were those of prose-these are not-wouldn't we rather have poetry in prose than prose in verse? I wouldn't trade Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity for some epics. Nowadays, over here, Miss Moore wins all the awards there are; but it took several decades for what public there is to get used to her- she was, until very recently, read unreasonably little and praised reason- ably much. Even the circumstances hindered. The dust-jacket of her Collected Poems says: “Since the former volumes are out of print many readers will now, for the first time, have the opportunity to own the treasure of her poetry.” This is a felicitous way for a publishing firm to say that it has allowed to remain out of print, for many years, most of the poetry of one of the great living poets. Miss Moore's prose-seem- ing, matter-of-factly rhythmed syllabic verse, the odd look most of her poems have on the page (their unusual stanzaic patterns, their words divided at the ends of lines, give many of them a consciously, sometimes misleadingly experimental or modernist look), their almost ostentatious lack of transitions and explanations, the absence of romance and rhetoric, of acceptedly Poetic airs and properties, did most to keep her wonderful lack- of arbitrary intensity or violence, of sweep and overwhelmingness and size, of cant, of sociological significance, and so on, made her unattractive both to some of the conservative readers of our age and to some of the advanced ones. Miss Moore was for a long time (in her own phrase about something else) "like Henry James 'damned by the public for decorum,' / not decorum but re- straint." She demands, "When I Buy Pictures,” that the pictures "not wish to disarm anything." (Here I feel like begging for the pictures, in a wee voice: "Can't they be just a little disarming?” My tastes are less firmly classical.) The poems she made for herself were so careful never to wish to disarm anyone, to appeal to anyone's habitual responses and grosser instincts, to sweep anyone resistlessly away, that they seemed to most readers eccentrically but forbiddingly austere, so that the readers averted their faces from her calm, elegant, matter- of-fact face, so exactly moved and conscientiously unappealing as itself to seem averted. It was not the defects of her qualities but the qualities that made most of the public reluctant to accept her as more than a special case: her extraordinary discrimination, precision and === Page 83 === THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE 689 restraint, the odd propriety of her imagination, her gifts of "natural promptness" (I use the phrase she found, but her own promptness is preternatural)-all these stood in her way and will go on standing in her way. These people who can't read modern poetry because it's so-this or that or the other-why can't they read "Propriety" or "The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing" or "What Are Years" or "The Steeple-Jack"? Aren't these plain-spoken, highly-formed, thoughtful, sincere, magni- ficently expressive-the worthy continuation of a great tradition of English poetry? Wouldn't the poet who wrote the Horatian Ode have been delighted with them? Why should a grown-up, moderately in- telligent reader have any trouble with an early poem like, say, "New York"? The words that follow the title, the first words of the poem, are the savage's romance-here one stops and laughs shortly, as any- body but a good New Yorker will. (Her remark about Brooklyn, "this city of freckled/ integrity," has a more ambiguous face.) She goes on, by way of the fact that New York is the center of the wholesale fur trade, to the eighteenth century when furs were the link between the Five Nations and Bath, between Natty Bumppo and the Trianon: It is a far cry from the "queen full of jewels" and the beau with the muff, from the gilt coach shaped like a perfume-bottle, to the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, and the scholastic philosophy of the wilderness to combat which one must stand outside and laugh since to go in is to be lost. And she finishes by saying about America-truthfully, one thinks and hopes-that "it is not the dime-novel exterior,/ Niagara Falls, the calico horses and the war-canoe" that matter, it is not the resources and the know-how, "it is not the plunder,/ but 'accessibility to ex- perience.' " The only way to combat a poem like this is to stand outside and laugh-to go in is to be lost, and in delight; how can you say better, more concretely and intelligently, what that long central sentence says? Isn't the word scholastic worth some books? Of course, if the eighteenth century and the frontier don't interest you, if you've never read or thought anything about them, the poem will seem to you uninteresting or incommunicative; but it is unreasonable to blame the poet for that. In grammar school, bent over the geography book, all of us lingered over the unexpected geometrical === Page 84 === 690 PARTISAN REVIEW magnificence of “the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Al- legheny,” but none of the rest of us saw that it was part of a poem—our America was here around us, then, and we didn’t know. And isn’t the conclusion of Miss Moore’s poem the best and truest case that can be made out for Americans? It is most barbarously unjust to treat her (as some admiring critics do) as what she is only when she parodies herself: a sort of museum poet, an eccentric shut-in dealing in the collection, renovation, and exhibition of precise exotic properties. For she is a lot more American a writer (if to be an American is to be the heir, or heiress, of all the ages) than Thomas Wolfe or Erskine Caldwell or—but space fails me; she looks lovingly and knowingly at this “grassless, linkless [no longer], languageless country in which letters are written/ not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,/ but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!” Doesn’t one’s heart reverberate to that last phrase “as to a trumpet”? Miss Moore is one of the most perceptive of writers, sees extra- ordinarily—the words fit her particularly well because of the ambiguity that makes them refer both to sensation and intelligence. One reads, at random among lines one likes: But we prove, we do not explain our birth; reads about the pangolin returning before sunrise; stepping in the moonlight,/ on the moonlight peculiarly; reads, An aspect may deceive/ as the/ elephant’s columbine-tubed trunk/ held waveringly out—/ an at will heavy thing—is/ delicate./ Art is unfortunate./ One may be a blameless/ bachelor, and it is but a/ step to Congreve. One relishes a fineness and strangeness and firmness of discrimination that one is not accustomed to, set forth with a lack of fuss that one is not accustomed to either; it is the exact opposite of all those novels which present, in the most verbose and elaborate of vocabularies, with the greatest and most obvious of pains, some complacently and irrelevantly Sensitive per- ceptions. How much has been left out, here! (One remembers Kipling’s A cut story is like a poked fire.) What intelligence vibrates in the sounds, the rhythms, the pauses, in all the minute particulars that make up the body of the poem! The tone of Miss Moore’s poems, often, is enough to give the reader great pleasure, since it is a tone of much wit and precision and intelligence, of irony and forbearance, of unusual moral penetration—is plainly the voice of a person of good taste and good sense and good will, of a genuinely humane human being. Because of the curious juxtaposition of curious particulars, most of the things that inhabit her poetry seem extraordinarily bright, exact, and there—just === Page 85 === THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE 691 as unfamiliar colors, in unfamiliar combinations, seem impossibly vivid. She is the poet of the particular—or, when she fails, of the peculiar; and is also, in our time, the poet of general moral statement. Often, be- cause of their exact seriousness of utterance, their complete individuality of embodiment, these generalizations of hers seem almost more particular than the particulars. In some of her poems Miss Moore has discovered both a new sort of subject (a queer many-headed one) and a new sort of connection and structure for it, so that she has widened the scope of poetry; if poetry, like other organisms, wants to convert into itself everything there is, she has helped it to. She has shown us that the world is more poetic than we thought. She has a discriminating love of what others have seen and made and said, and has learned (like a burglar who marks everything that he has stolen with the owner's name, and then exhibits it in his stall in the marketplace) to make novel and beautiful use of such things in her own work, where they are sometimes set off by their surroundings, sometimes metamorphosed. But for Miss Moore I'd never have got to read about "the emerald's 'grass-lamp glow,"" or about the Abbé Berlèse, who said, "In the camellia-house there must be/ no smoke from the stove, or dew on/ the windows, lest the plants ail.../ mistakes are irreparable and nothing will avail," or about "our clasped hands that swear, 'By Peace/ Plenty; as/ by Wisdom, Peace,"" or about any of a thousand such things—so I feel as grateful to her memory as to a novelist's. Novelists are the most remem- bering of animals, but Miss Moore comes next. Her poems have the excellences not of some specialized, primarily or exclusively Poetic expression, but of expression in general; she says so many good things that, call it prose or poetry or what you will, her work is wonderful. She says, for instance: . . . The polished wedge that might have split the firmament was dumb. At last it threw itself away and falling down, conferred on some poor fool, a privilege. Is this an aphorism in the form of a fable, or a fable in the form of an aphorism? It doesn't matter. But how sadly and firmly and mockingly so it is, whatever it is; we don't need to search for an application. Miss Moore speaks well, memorably well, unforgettably well, in many different ways. She is, sometimes, as tersely conclusive as Grimm: === Page 86 === 692 PARTISAN REVIEW Jacob when a-dying, asked Joseph: Who are these? and blessed both sons, the younger most, vexing Joseph. And Joseph was vexing to some . . . or as wise as Goethe: Though white is the colour of worship and of mourning, he is not here to worship and he is too wise to mourn, a life prisoner but reconciled. With trunk tucked up compactly—the elephant's sign of defeat—he resisted, but is the child of reason now. His straight trunk seems to say: when what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived . . . or as beguiling, as full of becoming propriety, as Beatrix Potter: The fish-spine on firs, on sombre trees by the sea's walls of wave-worn rock—have it; and a moonbow and Bach's cheerful firmness in a minor key. It's an owl-and-a-pussy- both-content agreement. Come, come. It's mixed with wits; it's not a graceful sadness. It's resistance with bent head, like foxtail millet's . . . or as purely magical as Alban Berg: Plagued by the nightingale in the new leaves, with its silence— not its silence but its silences, he says of it: "It clothes me with a shirt of fire . . ." === Page 87 === THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE 693 or as elevated as the Old Testament: Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast each with a splendour which man in all his vileness cannot set aside; each with an excellence! . . . or as morally and rhetorically magnificent as St. Paul, when she says about man, at the end of the best of all her poems, "The Pangolin": Un- ignorant, modest and unemotional, and all emotion, he has everlasting vigour, power to grow, though there are few creatures who can make one breathe faster and make one erecter. Not afraid of anything is he, and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an obstacle at every step. Consistent with the formula-warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few hairs-that is a mammal; there he sits in his own habitat, serge-clad, strong-shod. The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done, says to the alternating blaze, "Again the sun! anew each day; and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul." The reader may feel, "You're certainly quoting a lot." But I have only begun to quote-or wish that I had; these are just a few of the things I can't bear not to quote, I haven't yet come to the things I want to quote-I may never get to them. But how can I resist telling you "that one must not borrow a long white beard and tie it on/ and threaten with the scythe of time the casually curious"? Or say nothing about the "swan, with swart blind look askance/ and gondoliering legs" (the "swart blind look askance" makes us not only see, but also feel ourselves into, the swan); or about the jerboa that "stops its gleaning/ === Page 88 === 694 PARTISAN REVIEW on little wheel castors, and makes fern-seed/ footprints with kangaroo speed”; or about “this graft-grown briar-black bloom"? — a phrase that would have made Hopkins say with a complacent smile, “Now, that’s the way you use words." But there are hundreds of phrases as good or better: one goes through “The Steeple-Jack” and “The Hero” hating to leave anything unquoted. There “the/ whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt/ marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the/ star in the steeple; it is a privilege to see so/ much confusion”; there one finds “presidents who have repaid/ sin-driven/ senators by not thinking about them”; there one hears “the ‘scare-babe voice'/ from the neglected yew set with/ the semi-precious cat’s eyes of the owl”; there the decorous frock-coated Negro by the grotto answers the fearless sightseeing hobo who asks the man she’s with, what’s this, what’s that, where’s Martha buried, “Gen-ral Washington there; his lady, here”; speaking as if in a play, not seeing her . . . Even admiration seems superfluous. But expostulation doesn’t: where is Ambrose the student, with his not-native hat? and the pitch, not true, of the church steeple? and that “elegance the source of which is not bravado” that we and the student like? I think that Miss Moore was right to cut “The Steeple-Jack"—the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state—but she has cut too much: when the reader comes, at the end, to “the hero, the student, the steeple-jack, each in his way, is at home,” he must go to the next poem for the hero, has lost the student entirely, and has to make out as best he can with the steeple-jack. I wish that the poet had cut only as far as “but here they’ve cats not cobras to keep out the rats”; this would keep the best things, the things necessary for the sense of the poem, and still get rid of the tropical digression. The reader may feel like saying, “Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it’s hers, isn’t it?” No; it’s much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody’s, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David’s left leg. The change in Miss Moore’s work, between her earliest and latest poems, is an attractive and favorable change. How much more === Page 89 === THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE 695 modernist, special-case, dryly elevated and abstract, she was to begin with! "As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive/ of one's attending upon you, but to question/ the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists." Butter not only wouldn't melt in this mouth, it wouldn't go in; one runs away, an urchin in the gutter and glad to be, murmuring: "The Queen of Spain has no legs." Or Miss Moore begins a poem, with melting grace: "If yellow betokens infidelity,/ I am an infidel./ I could not bear a yellow rose ill will/ Because books said that yellow boded ill,/ White promised well." One's eyes widen; one sits the poet down in the porch swing, starts to go off to get her a glass of lemonade, and sees her metamorphosed before one's eyes into a new Critique of Practical Reason, feminine gender: for her next words are, "However, your particular possession,/ The sense of privacy,/ Indeed might de- precate/ Offended ears, and need not tolerate/ Effrontery." And that is all; the poem is over. Sometimes, in her early poems, she has not a tone but a manner, and a rather mannered manner at that-two or three such poems together seem a dry glittering expanse, i.e., a desert. But in her later work she often escapes entirely the vice most natural to her, this abstract, mannered, descriptive, consciously prosaic com- mentary (accompanied, usually, by a manneredness of leaving out all introductions and translations and explanations, as if one could repre- sent a stream by reproducing only the stepping-stones one crossed it on). As she says, compression is the first grace of style-is almost a defining characteristic of the poetry our age most admires; but such passages as those I am speaking of are not compressed-the time wasted on Be- ing Abstract more than makes up for the time saved by leaving out. Looking at a poem like "What Are Years," we see how much her style has changed. And the changes in style represent a real change in the poet: when one is struck by the poet's seriousness and directness and lack of manner-both her own individual excellence and by that anon- ymous excellence the best poets sometimes share-it is usually in one of the poems written during the '30s and '40s. I am emphasizing this difference too much, since even its existence is ignored, usually; but it is interesting what a different general impression the Collected Poems gives, compared to the old Selected Poems. (Not that it wasn't wonder- ful too.) Some of the changes in Miss Moore's work can be considered in terms of Armour. Queer terms, you say? They are hers, not mine: a good deal of her poetry is specifically (and changingly) about armour, weapons, protection, places to hide; and she is not only conscious that this is so, but after a while writes poems about the fact that it is so. As === Page 90 === 696 PARTISAN REVIEW she says, “armour seems extra,” but it isn't; and when she writes about "another armoured animal,” about another “thing made graceful by ad- versities, conversities,” she does so with the sigh of someone who has come home. She asks whether a woman's looks are weapons or scalpels; comments, looking out on a quiet town: "It could scarcely be dangerous to be living/ in a town like this"; says about a man's nonchalance: "his by-/ play was more terrible in its effectiveness/ than the fiercest frontal attack./ The staff, the bag, the feigned inconsequence/ of manner, best bespeak that weapon, self-protectiveness." That weapon, self-protective- ness! The poet knows that morals are not "the memory of success that no longer succeeds," but a part of survival. She writes: "As impassioned Handel/ . . . never was known to have fallen in love,/ the unconfiding frigate-bird hides/ in the height and in the majestic/ display of his art." If Handel (or the frigate-bird) had been less impassioned he wouldn't have hidden, and if his feelings were meant to feel; it was because he was so impassioned that he "never was known to have fallen in love," the poem almost says. And how much sisterly approval there is in that unconfiding! When a frigate-bird buys pictures, you can bet that the pictures "must not wish to disarm any- thing." (By being disarming we sometimes disarm others, but always dis- arm ourselves, lay ourselves open to rejection. But if we do not make ourselves disarming or appealing, everything can be a clear, creditable, take-it-or-leave-it affair, rejection is no longer rejection. Who would be such a fool as to make advances to his reader, advances which might end in rejection or, worse still, in acceptance?) Miss Moore spoke as she pleased, and did not care whether or not it pleased; mostly this made her firm and good and different, but sometimes it had its draw- backs. She says of some armoured animals that they are "models of exactness." The association was natural: she thought of the animals as models and of the exactness as armour—and for such a writer, there was no armour like exactness, concision, irony. She wished to trust, as abso- lutely as she could, in flat laconic matter-of-factness, in the minimal statement, understatement: these earlier poems of hers approach as a limit, a kind of ideal minimal statement, a truth thought of as under- lying, prior to, all exaggeration and error; the poet has tried to strip or boil everything down to this point of hard, objective, absolute pre- cision. But the most extreme precision leads inevitably to quotation; and quotation is armour and ambiguity and irony all at once-turtles are great quoters. Miss Moore leaves the stones she picks up carefully === Page 91 === THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE 697 uncut, but places them in an unimaginably complicated and difficult setting, to sparkle under the Northern Lights of her continual irony. Nobody has ever been better at throwing away a line than this Miss La Rochefoucauld, and can disabusedly say about man: "he loves him- self so much,/ he can permit himself/ no rival in that love . . ." and about woman: "one is not rich but poor/ when one can always seem so right . . ." and about both: "What can one do for them-/ these savages/ condemned to disaffect/ all those who are not visionaries/ alert to undertake the silly task/ of making people noble?" All this is from "Marriage," the most ironic poem, surely, written by man or woman; and one reads it with additional pleasure because it was written by the woman who was later to say, so tenderly and magically: "What is more precise than precision? Illusion." Along with precision she loved difficulty. She said about James and others: "It is the love of doing hard things/ that rebuffed and wore them out-a public out of sympathy with neatness./ Neatness of finish! Neatness of finish!" Miss Moore almost despairs of us in one poem, until she comes across some evidence which shows that, in spite of everything, "we are precisionists"; and Santa Claus's reindeer, in spite of cutwork ornaments and fur like eidelweiss, are still "rigorists," so she names the poem that for them. How much she cares for useless pains, difficulties undertaken for their own sake! Difficulty is the chief technical principle of her poetry, almost. (For sureness of execution, for originality of technical accomplishment, her poetry is unsurpassed in our time; Auden says almost that and the author of "Under Sirius" ought to know. Some of her rhymes and rhythms and phrases look quite undiscoverable.) Such unnecessary pains, such fantastic difficulties! Yet with manners, arts, sports, hobbies, they are always there—so per- haps they are necessary after all. But some of her earlier poems do seem "averted into perfection." You can't put the sea into a bottle unless you leave it open at the end, and sometimes hers is closed at both ends, closed into one of those crys- tal spheres in which snowflakes are falling onto a tiny house, the house where the poet lives—or says that she lives. Sometimes Miss Moore writes about armour and wears it, the most delicately chased, live- seeming scale-armour anybody ever put together: armour hammered out of fern seed, woven from the silk of invisible cloaks-for it is al- most, though not quite, as invisible as it pretends to be, and is when === Page 92 === 698 PARTISAN REVIEW most nearly invisible most nearly protecting. One is often conscious while reading the poetry, the earlier poetry especially, of a contained removed tone; of the cool precise untouchedness, untouchableness, of fastidious rectitude; of innate merits and their obligations, the ob- ligations of ability and intelligence and aristocracy—for if aristocracy has always worn armour, it has also always lived dangerously; the as- sociation of aristocracy and danger and obligation is as congenial to Miss Moore as is the rest of the “flower and fruit of all that noted superiority.” Some of her poems have the manners, or manner of la- dies who learned a little before birth not to mention money, who neither point nor touch, and who scrupulously abstain from the mixed, live vulgarity of life. “You sit still if, whenever you move, something jingles,” Pound quotes an officer of the old school as saying. There is the same aristocratic abstention behind the restraint, the sitting still as long as it can, of this poetry. “The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease./ Distaste which takes no credit to itself is best,” she says in an early poem; and says, broadly and fretfully for her, “We are sick of the earth,/ sick of the pig-sty, wild geese and wild men.” At such moments she is a little disquieting (she speaks for everybody, in the best of the later poems, in a way in which she once could not); one feels like quoting against her her own, “As if a death-mask could replace/ Life’s faulty excellence,” and blurting that life-masks have their disadvantages too. We are uncomfortable—or else too comfort- able—in a world in which feeling, affection, charity, are so entirely divorced from sexuality and power, the bonds of the flesh. In this world of the poems there are many thoughts, things, animals, sentiments, moral insights; but money and passion and power, the brute fact that works, whether or not correctly, whether or not precisely—the whole Medusa- face of the world: these are gone. In the poem called “Marriage” marriage, with sex, children, and elementary economic existence missing, is an absurd unlikely affair, one that wouldn’t fool a child; and, of course, children don’t get married. But this reminds me how un-childish, un-young, Miss Moore’s poems always are; she is like one of those earlier ages that dressed children as adults, and sent them off to college at the age of eleven—though the poems dress their children in animal-skins, and send them out into the wilderness to live happily ever after. Few poets have as much moral insight as Miss Moore; yet in her poems morality usually is simplified into self-abnegation, and Gauguin always seems to stay home with his family—which is right, but wrong in a way, too. Poems which celebrate morality choose more between good and evil, and less between lesser evils and greater goods, than life does, so === Page 93 === THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE 699 that in them morality is simpler and more beautiful than it is in life, and we feel our attachment to it strengthened. "Spine-swine (the edgehog misnamed hedgehog)," echidna, echino- derm, rhino, the spine pig or porcupine—"everything is battle-dressed"; so the late poem named "His Shield" begins. But by then Miss Moore has learned to put no trust in armour, says, "Pig-fur won't do, I'll wrap/ myself in salamander-skin like Presbyter John," the "inextinguishable salamander" who "revealed/ a formula safer than/ an armourer's: the power of relinquishing/ what one would keep," and whose "shield was his humility." And "What Are Years" begins "All are naked, none are safe," and speaks of overcoming our circumstances by accepting them; just as "Nevertheless" talks not about armour, not about weapons, but about what is behind or above them both: "The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/ comes itself. What is there/ like fortitude? What sap/ went through that little thread/ to make the cherry red!?" All this is a wonderfully appealing, a disarming triumph; yet not so appealing, so disarming, so amused and imaginative and doubtful and tender, as her last look at armour, the last poem of her Collected Poems. It is called "Armour's Undermining Modesty"; I don't entirely understand it, but what I understand I love, and what I don't understand I love almost better. I will quote most of the last part of it: No wonder we hate poetry, and stars and harps and the new moon. If tributes cannot be implicit, give me diatribes and the fragrance of iodine, the cork oak acorn grown in Spain; the pale-ale-eyed impersonal look which the sales-placard gives the bock beer buck. What is more precise than precision? Illusion. Knights we've known, like those familiar now unfamiliar knights who sought the Grail . . . . . . did not let self bar their usefulness to others who were different. Though Mars is excessive in being preventive, heroes need not write an ordinall of attributes to enumerate what they hate. === Page 94 === 700 PARTISAN REVIEW I should, I confess, like to have a talk with one of them about excess, and armour's undermining modesty instead of innocent depravity. A mirror-of-steel uninsistence should countenance continence, objectified and not by chance, there in its frame of circumstance of innocence and altitude in an unhackneyed solitude. There is the tarnish; and there, the imperishable wish. One doesn't need to say that this is one of Miss Moore's best poems. Some of the others are, I think, "The Pangolin"; "Propriety" (if ever a poem was perfect "Propriety" is; how could a poem end better?); "The Mind is an Enchanting Thing"; "Melanchthon"; "Elephants"; the first half of "The Jerboa," that poem called "Too Much"; "Spenser's Ireland"; "Bird-Witted"; "Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle"; "In Dis- trust of Merits"; "What Are Years"; "The Steeple-Jack"; "The Hero"; "Those Various Scalpels"; "Marriage"; "His Shield"; and "New York." "Virginia Britannica" is a beautiful poem that some of the time gets lost in the maze of itself; "Nevertheless" and "No Swan So Fine" are two of the most beautiful of the slighter poems; "Camellia Sabina" is- but I must stop. Miss Moore's Collected Poems is a neat little book, with all its verse tucked into a hundred and thirty-eight pages; a reader could, with a reference to size, rather easily put her into her minor place, and say- as I heard a good or even great critic say-that it is easy to see the difference between a poet like this and a major poet. It is; is so easy that Miss Moore's real readers, who share with her some of her "love of doing hard things," won't want to do it-not for a century or two, at least, and then only with an indifferent, "I suppose so." There is so much of a life concentrated into, objectified on, these hard, tender, serious pages, there is such wit and truth and moral imagination inhabiting this small space, that we are surprised at possibility, and marvel all over again at the conditions of human making and being. What Miss Moore's best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it "comes into and steadies the soul," so that the reader feels himself "a life prisoner, but reconciled." === Page 95 === BOOKS LONG AFTER EDEN EAST OF EDEN. By John Steinbeck. Viking. $4.50. THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. By Ernest Hemingway. Scribner's. $3.00. MEN AT ARMS. By Evelyn Waugh. Little, Brown. $3.00. HEMLOCK AND AFTER. By Angus Wilson. Viking. $3.00. TESTIMONIES. By Patrick O'Brian. Harcourt, Brace. $3.00. The heroine of John Steinbeck's new novel makes Lady Macbeth seem like a naughty girl and Lizzie Borden a half-hearted dilettante. She drives one of her high school teachers to suicide; she insults her first protector, a prudent man, with such exact brutality in a few offhand sentences that he almost beats her to death; she commits arson, theft and murder with the ease and aplomb of someone eating a sandwich; she sleeps with her brother-in-law on her wedding night, departs from her husband soon after giving birth to twins (the twins, the reader feels by now, are merely another of her spiteful exaggerations), establishes herself in a house of prostitution, poisons the madam who loves her as a daughter, and in short displays the most relentless and sustained pursuit of evil for evil's sake to be found in literature apart from Suetonius and the Marquis de Sade, none of whose celebrities come close to Steinbeck's charmer, since they are sometimes compromised by the gleam of a motive, while she is absolutely remarkable in the gratuitous and unmotivated character of her behavior, and equally remarkable for the lack of passion and excitement with which she usually goes to work. There is much else in the novel, which is the story of three generations, but the heroine quite naturally dominates the book and leaves the reader in such a state of dazzled numbness that all the other characters seem humdrum, slow-moving and lacking in imagina- tion. The crux of the book appears to be the ne- cessity that Adam, the lady's husband, recognize the existence of pure, unmixed evil and identify his unequivocal wife as an embodiment of it. The truth is that the extraordinary amount of effort, experience, suffering and destruc- tion needed to persuade the husband that his wife is indeed a monster suggests the novelist's estrangement from a genuine sense of good and evil. There can hardly be any other explanation of Steinbeck's systematic, unrelieved, entirely incredible caricature of villainy. In one of the many === Page 96 === 702 PARTISAN REVIEW philosophical excursions which embarrass the reader throughout with their bogus naiveté and portentous platitudinousness, Steinbeck says: We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is im- mortal. Vice has always a fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is. Edmund Wilson was the first to observe that Steinbeck's interest in human beings exists at a level apart from or below morality. It is not impossible that this ambitious book is partly an answer to that pro- nouncement. Whether it is or not, Steinbeck insists that he is concerned with morality and that indeed no writer of fiction is concerned with anything else, a generalization which ought to have made his insistence unnecessary. In any case, it is clear that something has gone wrong, that Steinbeck needs a social crisis such as a depression to dramatize ex- perience for him and make possible the true exercise of his gifts. Without a social crisis of the kind that compelled and awakened the characters of The Grapes of Wrath, his human beings are merely curiosities, having the limited significance of sword-swallowers and flagpole-sitters. Yet Steinbeck is too good a writer for this new novel to be regarded as any- thing but a gifted author's misconception of the nature of his own powers, the exact counterpart of Hemingway's effort, in To Have and To Have Not, to write a social novel. The ovation which greeted Hemingway's new novel was mostly very nice. For it was mostly a desire to continue to admire a great writer. Yet there was a note of insistence in the praise and a note of relief, the relief because his previous book was extremely bad in an ominous way, and the insistence, I think, because this new work is not so much good in itself as a virtuoso performance which reminds one of Hemingway at his best. The experience of literature is always com- parative, and we have only to remember a story like "The Undefeated," which has almost the same theme as The Old Man and the Sea, or the account of the Caporetto retreat in A Farewell To Arms, to see exactly how the new book falls short. Whenever, in this new book, the narrative is concerned wholly with fishing, there is a pure vividness of presentation. But when the old man's emotions are explicitly dealt with, there is a margin of self-consciousness and a mannerism of as- sertion which is perhaps inevitable whenever a great writer cannot get free of his knowledge that he is a great writer. Perhaps this is why the old fisherman is too generalized, too much without a personal history; the reader cannot help but think at times that Hemingway, the pub- === Page 97 === BOOKS 703 licized author and personality bewitched by his own publicity and an imitator of his own style, is speaking to him directly. Nevertheless this book does not exist in isolation from the author's work as a whole, which gives it a greater significance and to which it gives a new definition and clarity. We see more clearly how for Heming- way the kingdom of heaven, which is within us, is moral stamina; ex- perience, stripped of illusion, is inexhaustible threat. Which should make the reader recognize how purely American a writer Hemingway is. For what is this sense of existence but the essential condition of the pioneer? It is the terror and the isolation of the pioneer in the forest that Hemingway seeks out in his prizefighters, gunmen, matadors, soldiers and expatriate sportsmen. The hunting and fishing which were necessities of life for the pioneer may be merely sports and games now, but they are pursued with an energy and passion absent in other areas of existence because only within the conditions of sport can a man be truly himself, truly an individual, truly able to pit an isolated will and consciousness against the whole of experience. In To Have and To Have Not, Hemingway tried to repudiate this sense of existence; in For Whom the Bell Tolls he tried to go beyond it, but he wrote with all of his power under control only when the hero was contained within guerilla warfare, which is obviously Daniel Boone again; in Across the River and Into the Trees there is an hysterical fury against modern warfare, for in modern warfare the isolated individual can have no role purely as an isolated individual. Now, after the bluster, bravado and truculence of that book, his fresh possession of his own sensibility suggests the pos- sibility of a new masterpiece. If one had no other information on the subject, the beginning of Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms would convince one that the Second World War occurred solely to rescue Englishmen from boredom and decadence. But if one happens to read next Angus Wilson's Hemlock and After, one begins to see what Waugh has in mind, and one begins to be afraid that so far as any redemption of England was at stake, the war may well have been waged in vain. And it is only when one reads Patrick O'Brian's Testimonies that it becomes apparent how Waugh and Wilson have permitted their subject matter to cripple their point of view and sensibility. Waugh's novel is the first part of a trilogy, a fact which both the author and the publisher ought to have acknowledged with a little more lucidity. The hero, moved by a noble patriotism, has returned from a life of expatriate idleness in Italy to fight for England. His === Page 98 === 704 PARTISAN REVIEW patriotism is as foreign and strange to virtually everyone he encounters as a formula in relativity physics, and the view that the war is a lark or a racket prevails. When, after great difficulty, he succeeds in getting into an ancient and famous regiment, his fellow soldiers turn out to be dis- oriented eccentrics who behave in the course of their training as if they were elder statesmen in a lunatic asylum. The point of the satire, if there is a point, is that everyone but the hero is silly, inane and asinine. The hero, by virtue of his nobility, is also silly in that he is naive, always at a loss and utterly ineffectual. Waugh appears to be saying to the reader: I see the stupidity, foolishness and triviality of human beings just as much as you do, but I draw a different conclusion; human be- ings are ridiculous without religious belief and they are just as ridiculous when they are possessed by religious belief, but at least when they are truly religious, they have a touching, pathetic, bewildered quality which makes possible a little compassion amid one's overwhelming contempt. If this is all that Catholicism means to Waugh, then any old religion and any old myth would serve as well and as vainly; and since it is all the meaning it has in his recent novels, no great fantasy is required to read them as the fiction of an agent provocateur in the pay of a society for the propagation of atheism. And apart from one scene in which the hero seeks to seduce his former wife, the wonderful bounce and brio, the daring and the gaiety of the books which made Waugh justly famous, have been succeeded by what can only be described as a bored titter. The Socrates-Socrates indeed!-of Hemlock and After is Bernard Sands, a celebrated English novelist who, having come to see, at last, his own hypocrisy and corruption-"the shame/ Of motives late revealed, and the awareness/ Of things ill done and done to others' harm/ Which once you took for exercise of virtue"-makes a disastrous speech on "the saving power of evil" at the opening of an English Yaddo: "So much," he says, "that has been written would have been better left unprinted"; and he concludes, "I make you a present of the failure of humanism"; and it is toward this version of nihilism that the entire story moves. Wilson's theme is thus close to Waugh's in that there appear to be but two human alternatives: moral ambiguity and self-de- ception, or moral depravity without compunction. Most of the characters disgust and all of them depress the author to an extent which is in- describable. Indeed it is a torment to try to imagine how an author of Wilson's great gifts, which his previous writings demonstrate, can sus- tain the desire to write amid such emotions. The reader can hardly fail to agree with Wilson's attitude toward his characters. But there is no indication, through the implication of style and point of view, that === Page 99 === BOOKS 705 existence might permit of emotions other than disgust and depression: Wilson's subject matter resembles Proust's, but in Proust there is from beginning to end a sense of nobility, a conviction that human beings might be otherwise than they are, which is almost utterly absent from Hemlock and After. To read a first novel by an unknown author which, sentence by sentence and page by page, makes one say: he can't keep going at this pitch, the intensity is bound to break down, the perfection of tone can't be sustained-is to rejoice in an experience of pleasure and astonishment. Patrick O'Brian's Testimonies makes one think of a great ballad or a Biblical story. At first one thinks the book's emotional power is chiefly a triumph of style; and indeed the book is remarkable enough for a beauty and exactness of phrasing and rhythm which can only be characterized by quotation: It was September when I first came into the valley: the top of it was hidden in fine rain, and the enclosing ridges on either side merged into a gray, formless cloud. There was no hint of the two peaks that were shown on the map, high and steep on each side of the valley's head. This I saw from the windows of the station cab as it brought me up the mountainous road from the plains, a road so narrow that in places the car could barely run between the stone walls. All the way I had been leaning forward in my seat, excited and eager to be impressed: at an- other time the precipices that appeared so frequently on the left hand would have made me uneasy, but now they were proofs of a strange and wilder land, and I was exhilarated. . . . There may be things more absurd than a middle-aged man in the grip of a high-flung romantic passion: a boy can behave more foolishly, but at least in him it is natural. I kept away. I read Burton and walked the mountains. We had a spell of idyllic weather, and the soft loving wind was a torment to me. I would not pass those days again. I knew I was a ludicrous figure, and it hurt all the more. I did not eat. I could not read, I could not sleep. I walked and walked, and when one day I broke a tooth on a fruit stone I welcomed the pain. Long before I had engaged to help with the yearly gathering of the sheep for the shearing, and now the time came round. The boy came up to ask if I would meet Emyr on the quarry road early the next morn- ing. I wondered how I should face him, but there was nothing for it and I said I should be very glad. But the reader soon forgets the style as such-a forgetting which is the greatest accomplishment of prose-in the enchantment and vividness of the story. John Aubrey Pugh, an Oxford don who has given up his teaching post and come to live in a secluded Welsh valley, falls in love with Bronwen Vaughn, the wife of the young farmer who is his neighbor. === Page 100 === 706 PARTISAN REVIEW She in turn but less quickly falls in love with him, and she is estranged from her husband, an admirable man in many ways, because he has com- pelled her to some unnamed, brutal sexual perversion. When a famous preacher whose advances she has rejected with contempt persuades the entire community that she has committed adultery with Pugh—an accusation which is false in a physical sense but true emotionally—she is poisoned or poisons herself. This summary is more unjust than most, for the comparative simplicity of the action when thus formulated con- ceals the labyrinthine complexity of attitude, motive and feeling. For example, Mr. Pugh and Mrs. Vaughn, as they call each other to the end, come to a recognition of their love for each other without speaking explicitly of love at all, while they are arguing mildly and pen- sively about whether civilization makes human beings happy or unhappy. The over-civilized man condemns civilization and the beautiful spon- taneous woman defends it, both of them unknowingly and passionately evaluating civilization as they do because they are in love with each other, the man condemning civilization because it is the great obstacle between him and another man's wife, the woman praising it because the man is entirely a product of it. The reader, drawn forward by lyric eloquence and the story's fascination, discovers in the end that he has encountered in a new way the sphinx and riddle of existence itself. What O'Brian has accomplished is literally and exactly the equivalent of some of the lyrics in Yeats's The Tower and The Winding Stair where within the colloquial and formal framework of the folk poem or story the greatest sophistication, consciousness and meaning become articulate. In O'Brian, as in Yeats, the most studied literary cultivation and knowledge bring into being works which read as if they were prior to literature and conscious literary technique. Delmore Schwartz THE PURSUIT OF FAULKNER WILLIAM FAULKNER: A CRITICAL STUDY. By Irving Howe. Random House. $3.00. Faulkner has had his belated triumph in America and Irving Howe has confirmed that fact by writing an entire book about him. Perceptive, just and readable, the book is worthy of the occasion. Mr. Howe cannot, to be sure, come to Faulkner in the excited spirit of the pristine discoverer. The work of discovery now belongs to the past. It === Page 101 === BOOKS 707 was accomplished by such writers as Malraux and Sartre in France and O’Donnell and Warren among ourselves. For most American readers the decisive event was probably Malcolm Cowley's Portable William Faulk- ner, an anthology which was a first-rate effort of criticism. Mr. Cowley introduced us to Faulkner's meanings as Sam Fathers in The Bear in- itiates Isaac McCaslin into the wilderness. He showed that Faulkner's South was no mere regional setting but a "mythical kingdom"; that his novels could be read as a "connected story," and that his story could be construed as a "moral parable" of Southern history. In recognition of its limited locale and wide interest he called Faulkner's work a "saga" of Yoknapatawpha County. The force of Mr. Cowley's conception may be judged by the ex- tent to which it has influenced Mr. Howe, although the latter makes the conception his own by elaborating it. If he cannot come to Faulkner as a discoverer, he can come as a settler and make his efforts in this kind as vivid and rewarding as the efforts of the first arrivals. Where they were fragmentary, he is thorough, breaking down Faulkner's achieve- ment into analyzable units and creating standards for determining its worth. Some books on living writers are tentative and complimentary to the point of being useless. Some others are so comprehensive as to broadly hint that the author is safely dead. Mr. Howe's book succeeds in being comprehensive without striking this mortuary note. It does not, in my experience of it, communicate much personal feeling. A rift in the logic, a show of prejudice, a small mad smile would be welcome now and then. On the other hand, it has the invaluable qualities of awareness and flexibility. It is the product of a mind that works hard at its tasks. A certain obsessive clairvoyance is to be felt among other critics of Mr. Howe's generation as they contemplate a half-century of brilliant achievement and instructive error. This compulsion is foreign to Mr. Howe, no doubt because he is so determined to salvage one strain of the past—its liberalism—and make it continue to work for him. His insights come to him in usable quantities; he looks no farther than he needs to in order to define a literary issue or identify an imagined char- acter. This reserve is still in itself a virtue even though it will be sug- gested later on that he might in some respects look farther. For him liberalism is not merely a system of ideas but an economy of the mind and a method of criticism. In the first half of the book, Faulkner's work is considered in the light of his situation as a modern Southerner; in the succeeding half, the major writings are examined in some detail; and there is a con- cluding note in which Faulkner is compared with the classic modern === Page 102 === 708 PARTISAN REVIEW novelists. It is in the second half that Mr. Howe is probably most satis- fying. He makes Faulkner's novels extraordinarily vivid in all their particulars. His knowledge of the characters is acute. When there is some problem of coherence or intention, as there so often is in Faulkner, he is good at pleading the author's cause and saying what can be said. The reasoning is always clear. The phrasing is rapid and precise. He may work hard at his job but he has the gift of saying hard things easily, as when he remarks of As I Lay Dying that it is a "wry celebra- tion of mankind" or of Joe Christmas that "the condition of his hu- manity is that he remain vulnerable." These phrases came back to me, as I believed, at random; but I now see that they are going to serve a purpose. What Mr. Howe says of that novel and that character are irresistibly applicable to Faulkner's entire work. It is all a wry celebration of mankind and the condition of its humanity, or its art, is that it remain vulnerable. And I could wish that Mr. Howe in his theoretical account of the novelist's origins and concerns, had made more allowance for his larger preoccupations and less allowance for his preoccupation with Southern history. Admit- tedly, the former is all too easy to do. Some French critics of Faulkner have done it to excess, as French critics are inclined to do, grasping at his conception of l'homme in defiance of the complexity and variety of the novels. But American critics face another temptation which is more or less peculiar to ourselves and probably springs from some exaggerated homing impulse in us. Faulkner having made his great decision to live and work in his native Mississippi, we are tempted to keep him there in spirit as well as body. It is not given to us to do as he did—even if we wished to, many of us could find no real native ground but only a col- lection of childhood residences—and so we admire his decision to excess. Mr. Cowley represented this impulse with a singular warmth and modes- ty; besides, he was interpreting Faulkner according to his own needs as an editor. Mr. Cowley was making an anthology; Mr. Howe is character- izing an oeuvre. This is a different matter. It ought to be said, however, that Mr. Howe gives a highly rational expression to the prevailing nos- talgia. And Faulkner's relation to the South does not engage him to the exclusion of all other issues. It simply commands more of his attention than it does of mine. He is constantly aware of other possibilities, as when he says of The Sound and the Fury that "to confine the meaning of [the] story to a segment of Southern life is sheer provincialism." Such observations represent a high degree of consciousness rather than merely a form of honorable amends. But why do they need to be so frequent? === Page 103 === BOOKS 709 The discussion of these matters is confined to the first half of his book, although they naturally have repercussions throughout. Faulkner found himself as a writer, Mr. Howe maintains, when he discovered "his native subject: the Southern memory, the Southern myth, the Southern reality." But Mr. Howe goes on to show that these entities do not work harmoniously in the novelist's mind. Much of his energy as a writer comes out of his need to reconcile them. Feeling the myth to be at odds with the reality, he finds the process of memory as dif- ficult as it is necessary. The myth posits a considerable Southern civil- ization done in by the superior force of the North. The reality consists in the meager testimony of old tales and ruins together with the sub- stantial fact of racial injustice. Hence the tragic quality of Faulkner's work has its source, not only in the historical tragedy of the South but in his own plight as a divided man; the drama begins in his mind. Hence too his recreation of the past tends to be "mythical" rather than precise; he has no such feeling for social fact as characterized Balzac's reconstruction of French society; he thinks in terms not of classes but of clans; and these correspond to certain values in his moral scheme. "In the death of the Southern tradition he believes passionately; its life is harder to imagine." All this is extremely penetrating. As an account of Faulkner in his capacity as a Southern writer, Mr. Howe's study is the best there is. It allows for more contradiction and irony in Faulkner than the straight Southern traditionalist account allows for. It supplies his mind with a history, and that it has one we can scarcely doubt if we read his novels in sequence. But when, in the chapter called "Outline of a World," Mr. Howe tries to define the entire work in the light of these conceptions, the results seem to me misleading. Describing the work as a "portrait of Yoknapatawpha County," he derives its inspiration from "a communal memory, some great store of half-forgotten legends . . . a story of old, confused family records that can be unraveled only with difficulty." But can he make this dream come true in discussing the 17-odd novels? Is he not seduced into spreading over the entire lot a Jungian haze which is intermittent in Faulkner and which is actually thickest in the later Faulkner who wrote Absalom, Absalom! and "The Bear" and de- vised the Compson genealogy and the County map for the Portable? As for those pariah novels, Pylon and The Wild Palms, which lie out- side the County, isn't he led to discount their peculiar virtues and their weight in Faulkner's total production? For that matter, do Sanctuary and Light in August stem from "a communal memory, some great store of half-forgotten legends"; or aren't they obviously made-up stories ani- === Page 104 === 710 PARTISAN REVIEW mated by themes of the widest urgency? Is Temple Drake so much a County girl gone wrong as she is a member of an all-American family claiming descent from Daisy Miller? And isn't her story a highly char- acteristic American story of how a life of casual moral anarchy can open suddenly into a career of crime? Is The Unvanquished ("a trivial sketch of adolescent adventure") a proof of Faulkner's inability to im- agine the Southern past seriously? Does it not suggest that he knew better than to try and produced instead a book that is fine on its own terms? Reading Mr. Howe's quick dismissal of The Unvanquished, I sus- pect not his taste but his assumptions. I suspect him of apriorism but I cannot prove it. Nor can I confirm my suspicion that he praises "The Bear" extravagantly because it is the capstone of the Yoknapatawpha arch. That narrative seems to me intermittently good, at worst too sententious. I prefer "Old Man." Mr. Howe admires this story too but cannot securely place it in the saga. I suspect but again without be- ing able to offer confirmation-that this is why he does not admire it enough. His apriorism, as I conceive it, consists in his adopting too narrowly a historical view of Faulkner's origins and achievement. We must cer- tainly agree that his native situation was in many essential ways decisive in the formation of his talent. He owes to it his need to set things right, his sense of purpose. He owes to it his conviction that life can be other than it is. This conviction is indispensable to any writer who finds him- self as much at odds with his times as Faulkner does. Other American writers, although hating industrial civilization as much, are left to appeal to memories of pioneering days or of a childhood in the woods. But childhood is finally an inadequate source of values; and pioneering was the forerunner of industry. On the other hand, the Southern past lives on mainly in pious recollection and books of history. The discon- tinuity with the present is complete; the tragedy nearly perfect. For the Southerner, therefore, the feeling that life can be other is exacerbated at the same time that it is assuaged. To the extent that the feeling is not, for Faulkner, nourished by the Southern past, it is nourished by the spectacle of present Negro life and character. In the Negro he has the same inestimable advantage that the classic Russian novelists had in the serf and that American writers of other backgrounds are seriously in want of. The worker? The farmer? The paisanos or other immigrant communities? Alas, these prove to be continuous with the rest of our population or, like the paisanos, too special. They cannot be depended upon to maintain their separate identity and tragic status. That the === Page 105 === BOOKS 711 Negro largely can is needless to remark; and in the Negro of the South Faulkner finds an enduring embodiment of human wrong and human possibilities. To him the possibilities are quite as important as the wrong. As developed in a heroic portrait like that of Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, the Negro, in his singleness of being, his concentration of ani- mal and moral qualities, is Faulkner's great image of a natural humanity. But Faulkner's naturalism-which requires further definition-is entirely alien to the classical Southern mind. It places him in the tra- dition of Whitman and Mark Twain and Hemingway. Thus, in the very process of showing Faulkner's dependence on Southern conditions, we are thrust out upon this larger-or at any rate other-stage. F. W. Dupee THE POSITION OF HOFMANNSTHAL SELECTED PROSE. By Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Translated by Mary Hottinger and Tania & James Stern. Introduction by Hermann Broch. Bollingen Series. $4.50. Among the European centers of art and learning round the turn of the century Vienna was perhaps the most curious, ambitious, and the one most riddled with contradictions. It has remained, to this day, one of the most neglected. Berlin, Paris, London, even Rome, have furnished the cultural historian with what seems to be inexhaustible matter for contemplation, evaluation, gossip: the story of Austria's contribution to the great awakening, as exciting as any, has never been told, except piecemeal, discipline-wise, and for local consumption. This in itself is a remarkable fact, worthy of the attention of both scholars and students. But it cannot concern us here; nor can we hope, in this space, to sketch a panorama complete with Schoenberg and Alban Berg, Klimt and Egon Schiele, Bahr, Karl Kraus, Schnitzler and Hofmanns- thal, Freud and his early disciples, Schlick, Buehler and Wittgenstein. The liveliness, the sense of constant discovery prevailing in Vienna between 1900 and World War I, the reader is left to infer from these names. What interests us is the fact that Hofmannsthal was one of them, that he operated in that particular field of force, that he achieved his definition as well as his distinction through concord with some of the intellectual currents around him, through silent ignorance of the rest. And the rest comprised, oddly enough, the three most pow- erful movements then centered in Austria: logical empiricism, psycho- analysis, and the musical avant-garde. === Page 106 === 712 PARTISAN REVIEW Few great writers of our era—and I think there can be no ques- tion of his stature—have baffled, divided, disconcerted their audience as Hofmannsthal did. Many of his endowments worked against him, at least in later life: his amazing versatility, which increased right up to his death, and which to some seemed pure magic, to others prestidigita- tion; his constant command of melos, which made the driest bones of contention sing out and smoothed every wave of party quarrel; the peculiar conjunction, in this mind, of intuitive depth and esprit, Attic salt; his frank exploitation of every resource of rhetoric, especially in the plays, fit to arrest the average attention as well as the ear attuned to niceties of diction and prosody—all this was weighed in the scales and, by most of Hofmannsthal’s critics, found wanting. Although through his libretti and productions like Everyman he achieved a measure of fame—indeed international fame—it is quite plain that he could never become a popular poet; but his main objectors came from the ranks of the elite, not from those who favor the middle ground. For a very few he rose too high (a notion which never ceased to hurt him, since he liked to appeal largely) but for many more he had fallen from grace when, early in life, he deserted the highly-wrought mode of his lyrics and chamber plays for a speech that, while eloquent and vibrant with passion, was fundamentally plain. What happened to the young Hof- mannsthal—he was still this side of thirty—during the crisis so pro- foundly portrayed in the “Letter of Lord Chandos” will never be known in full, yet one thing is certain: that crisis was not one of style alone but involved his whole affective and imaginative range, together with the possibilities of speech and knowledge. A crisis as complete, as desperate, as one is likely to find in the annals of poetry; and Hofmannsthal saved himself as best he could. To this writer at least, he was saved in more ways than one. Not only did he rise whole from the vortex of unbeing but the new path he now chose to pursue spelt his salvation as a poet.1 The end, in a sense, of his private was the beginning of his public difficulties. He had started his career early, a child prodigy, the quality of his achievement as miraculous as Mozart’s; by his verse he had garnered success of a rare kind, the approval of men like George and Borchardt; his first plays on classical themes—Electra (1903), Oedipus and the Sphinx (1906)—had been given widely and received with ac- claim; he had managed, in short, to please both the elect and those not quite chosen—a thing rare in any culture and rarest in Germany, where the waste is known to start directly below the high peaks. Having 1. It should be pointed out, for the sake of accuracy, that the crisis exposed in the Chandos letter was not fully resolved until 1910, the date of Everyman. === Page 107 === BOOKS 713 given so much, it seemed only natural to his audience that he would give more-of the same. When he didn't, the result was that of a land- slide, disastrous throughout the area it affects. His high-brow friends threw up their hands in despair; critics foamed at the mouth at seeing their auguries thwarted; the refined theater-goer, who had delighted in what struck him as the consecration of Euripides through Freud, stared aghast at the silly Austrian comedies and morality plays Reinhardt now proceeded to stage for his darling playwright. But these might still pass (let the poet relax from his more serious labors): only what was one to make of those atrocious libretti written for Strauss, those casual newspaper articles-causeries full of charm and subtle intelligence to be sure, but hardly worthy of one so superbly, so uniquely gifted, one destined to save German speech from the naturalist miasma! To make sense, the general hue and cry over Hofmannsthal's defection must be read in political terms. He was the renegade, the lost leader; for the most ardent among his one-time worshipers-Stefan George and his group-something yet more sinister: a false Messiah. (At a more shallow level, it was a matter of Literaturpolitik as well: Hofmannsthal had dis- appointed the hopes of those who wanted a representative South Ger- man writer to pit against men like Thomas Mann and Gerhart Haupt- mann.) How a poet can betray his destiny-rather than the expecta- tions of his admirers-it would be difficult to tell; yet everybody told it of this one, glibly, with insouciance, until the occasion of his death (1929) redressed the balance as quickly as, on that earlier occasion, it had been disturbed. Some of the old friends and supporters stood fast; fellow Austrians like Andrian and Bahr, the great North German poets Borchardt and Schroeder, Reinhardt of course, and Richard Strauss. But they were a motley crew, ridden with internal divisions, scarcely equipped to stem the general tide of disapproval. One should think that the double spon- sorship of a famous composer and a famous man of the theater were sufficient to re-establish Hofmannsthal's waning prestige-the others, though eminently distinguished, carried no weight with the public- but in actual fact it worked just the other way. The critics and literati despised Strauss's and Reinhardt's opinions on writing: to be liked by them was, indeed, a calamity. They went further: such an espousal furnished conclusive evidence that Hofmannsthal had lost caste, that he was truckling to the idols of the day. Utterly absurd as it seems to us now, the notion of Hofmannsthal as a meretricious writer was beginning to take hold in those days and by 1920 had become the orthodox view of the textbooks and critical journals. === Page 108 === 714 PARTISAN REVIEW Hermann Broch, in his introduction to this volume, is emphatic on Hofmannsthal's 'conversion' and reads its main features correctly. But the essay is written too thickly and unduly encumbered with jargon borrowed from depth psychology. It also misses the social stresses which, during those critical years, worked on the poet, steadying his balance and, in a measure, defining his course. According to Broch, Hofmannsthal's sole problem—as well as his sole theme, endlessly varied in his works-was ego identification; and to this, even if we did not have the author's own word for it, no one would wish to demur. But while developing the notion with great skill, and convincingly, into an inner progression (early identification; renunciation of the lyrical 'christening' act; suspension between the I and not-I in the mature prose works and plays) Broch fails to extend that notion to his author's ambience: the social struc- ture in which he was reared, his family situation, his early associations and pieties. It would have been well for the Jungian mystagogue to move slightly to the left, at least once in a way: Marx and Freud think—and of critics, T. W. Adorno, whose analysis of the George- Hofmannsthal correspondence is probably the soundest exposition we have of both the man and the work. If we wish to understand a writer, we cannot afford to stay planted on the threshold of his consciousness or his parental home. No matter how shrewdly we peer in either direc- tion, the limits of our stance will also be those of our vision. Though it preceded the collapse of the Austrian empire by more than a decade, Hofmannsthal's breakdown (and subsequent break- through) is strictly co-ordinate with the chain of events that led to the democratization, and liberation, of the Habsburg conglomerate. Rather than mere prophecy we find here a full pre-enactment, suffered by the structure's greatest representative, of the fate ready to overtake that structure. Hofmannsthal's divinatory powers were remarkable and so was his range of emotional and intellectual apprehension. His vast knowledge of history—though he wore it lightly—very early became a byword among his friends; also his gift of second sight, and his capacity for suffering, as well as withstanding, experience. His biographers have pointed out that he was not ready for the collapse of the old order, that he never 'got over it,' and in a sense they are right. But only in the sense that the trouble had been so thoroughly anticipated, and endured in advance, that when he came to face the actual mess Hofmannsthal's immediate response was that of a man unnerved, spent. But he soon rallied. Much had been lost, and for good—savings and revenue, social rank and prestige, to say nothing of his role as the empire's cultural === Page 109 === BOOKS 715 doyen. Yet together with these something else went: a sense of old commitments; and Hofmannsthal, in the thick of his troubles, was glad. He began to liberalize his talents, to scatter abroad the coins, both large and small, of his imagination; and that he continued to do this in the teeth of hectoring, obloquy and neglect is immensely to his credit. The record of his progress along the new path—to the extent that the terrain is prose—will be found in the pages of this book: an admirable choice, well managed in English, and exploding the ignoble myth still whispered in certain quarters of Hofmannsthal’s steady decline after, say, 1907. The selections include the fragment of a novel, Andreas (earlier published in England, in a different translation), a number of tales, travel notes, essays, aphorisms and the exquisite scenario Lucidor: Characters for an Unwritten Comedy. Francis Golffing SOCIALISM AND THE SCHOLARS SOCIALISM AND AMERICAN LIFE. Edited by Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons. 2 volumes. Princeton University Press. $17.50. Here, thanks to Princeton industry and Rockefeller subsidy, is a big, sympathetic survey of American socialism—appropriately, and disastrously, a collective enterprise. The first volume, the work of two editors and fourteen sovereign scholars, is the survey proper; the second, worked up by three editors and countless learned consultants, is “Biblio- graphy: Descriptive and Critical.” Since Volume II cites nothing com- parable in aim or scope to Volume I or to itself, the work must, I suppose, be said to fill a need, even while it fails to satisfy a want. Now and then, though, it satisfies. Daniel Bell’s long article on Marxist and semi-Marxist parties is painstaking, meaty, and, when it appraises, un- commonly shrewd. (It is also, for those of us who have attained a certain ripeness, rich as memorabilia. Along with his formidable gifts as a political analyst, Bell has some of the instincts of a genealogist and a class historian, with the result that his chapter of delight and revulsion similar to what one gets from an hour spent with old letter files, family records, and college yearbooks—“Well, I’ll be damned, Mother, here’s old Albert Weisbord! That’s a name to con- jure with, eh?”) There are some other rewarding pieces—Sidney Hook on Marxism as philosophy, Will Herberg on Marxism as political theory, and Donald Drew Egbert on socialist art—but the study as a === Page 110 === 716 PARTISAN REVIEW whole is toneless, ungainly, and cursed with the defects of the virtues it prizes. The word "socialism" turns out to be a trap, and part of the complex trouble is that the editors know it. They seek to be free of it with a chapter, their own handiwork, on "Terminology and Types of Socialism," an example, I fear, of how the semantics mania can create employment without increasing production. While they separate the types readily enough, they construe relationships between them that are either non-existent or tenuous enough to be overlooked. Committed to an inventory of the entire stock, they overlook nothing that bears the label but a plenty that doesn't. Well over a hundred pages are devoted to the religious and secular utopian socialists of the nineteenth century, while the attention devoted to labor organizations, to patterns of im- migration, and to the development of the general economy is about one- tenth of that. I have no objection to one more guided tour through the Oneida community—God knows, the rediscoverers of America have limbered us all up for this sort of outing during the past fifteen years—but the idea that it will throw much light on the socialist ex- perience of my own time seems almost preposterous. (That it can con- tribute something I will not deny—particularly after reading the essay on the psychology of socialism by George W. Hartman, an old-school socialist and an old-school psychologist. It is his contention that radical politics and economics are expressions of the primal urge toward the prettification of environments, exterior and interior, that occasionally blesses even the degenerate society of the present with well-kept gardens, trim kitchens, and orderly minds and spirits.) I would hazard the guess that more of the roots of twentieth-century American radicalism are to be found in Princeton itself than in New Harmony or Hopedale. Some critics have taken this work as a text for sermons on the futility of collaborative projects in general. The editors more or less invite this, by asserting, in defense of the method, that "the subject of the relation of socialism to the various aspects of American life and thought is too complex to be treated adequately by any one man or from any single standpoint"—an extraordinary profession that leads one eventually to come up with such names as Gibbon, Burckhardt, Renan, and, for that matter, Marx. There is no doubt that these big collabora- tive projects, so greatly favored by the foundations, almost invariably come to bad ends. I find it difficult, however, to believe that it is really the principle of collaboration that is at fault. Though it is self- evident that pooling the talents of twelve or fourteen scholars is not the way to make a single Gibbon—and that if there chances to be a Gibbon in the lot, he will very likely be crushed by the weight of the others—I === Page 111 === BOOKS 717 can think of nothing inherent in the principle of collaboration that pre- ordains them to dismalness. In essence, the division of labor is the same on a job like this as on an encyclopedia, and there have, after all, been some good encyclopedias. One thinks, coming to a genre several steps closer, of the great collaborative projects of the British universities, most notably of the Cambridge histories, which, if they never gain the force or reflect the luster of a single great mind or personality, at least manage to get all the way around their subjects and to achieve a kind of uniform penetration. What is revealed by the doughiness and malformations of similar work in this country is not so much that American scholarship is damaged by excessive organization as that it is impossible to organize. In the British works, the whole takes its character from the common assumptions, the common sense of proportion, and the common style of those who fabricate the parts. In our research and scholarship, the standards of simple literacy vary so widely from place to place and in particular from one discipline to another that it is apparently hopeless to try to achieve the kind of communication and integration that work of this type requires. Far from standing in danger of being deadened by attempts to impose consistency, we suffer from a lack of any system of intellectual assizes that would allow the imposition. At all odds, this showy, expensive production comes to very little. The distinction of a few pieces like Daniel Bell's, which, happily, is very long, scarcely makes up for the aridity and downright foolishness of much of the rest. Socialism in American literature is treated in a feeble parlor discourse by Willard Thorp. Professor Hartman leads us through the forests of the academic psychologist's jargon in order that we may be blinded by such illuminations as: "Voters do not invariably indicate their wishes with optimum clarity." (Elsewhere he informs us that "it is a grave misfortune that so useful a linguistic and ideological term as 'totalitarianism' now has the significance of an all-inclusive despotic tyranny whereas it could profitably and neutrally have been employed to characterize an internally harmonious culture operating on the same principles throughout its institutions.") There is more jargon and junk from the preserves of sociology, economics, theology, and antiquarianism, to say nothing of bibliography. The pity of it is not that one book is a disappointment but that it will forestall the writing of books that might be better. A good study of the impact of socialism on American life would be a useful thing, but if anyone should care to undertake it now, he would learn from publishers and foundations that the subject had already been disposed of by Princeton and Rockefeller, in two volumes. Richard H. Rovere === Page 112 === 718 PARTISAN REVIEW FAUST: A MODERN VERSION GOETHE'S FAUST, PARTS I AND II. An abridged version translated by Louis MacNeice. Oxford University Press. $4.00. One does not know whether to be amused or sobered by the thought that the process of translating Goethe's Faust into English has been virtually continuous from the time it started. This may be stretch- ing the truth a little, but not much. The poem appeared in stages up- wards of a century ago—chiefly in 1790, 1808 and 1832; there are all of fifty translations of the whole or the part thus far; none of them seems to have been executed overnight. Putting the translators end to end, it works out at, say, two and a half years apiece. Call this juggling with arithmetic, if you will, it tells a story. Before the present translation gets reviewed, the next one is under way. Someone is working at it now. It is obvious that if the translations were better there would be fewer of them; it can only be because the existing translations do not satisfy that a new one is undertaken. And we have to admit it: we have no rendering of Goethe's Faust that transmits what Gottfried Keller—a hard man to please once called the electrifying language of the original. Not one of the fifty translations, it is safe to say, has ever become the bed- side book that the German text has been for millions of readers. It isn't easy to say why this is so, but I think it was Mark Van Doren who gave the best clue when he said somewhere that the remoter the lan- guage, the easier it was to translate from and that, precisely because German was a sister-tongue, English could only struggle with it. Translators, he almost implied, should steer clear of the Germanic languages altogether. MacNeice comes to the difficult task with an advantage that he shares with Shelley. He is a poet too, less inspired, but more practiced and adaptable. This is what lovers of Faust have been waiting for ever since Shelley gave up the task too soon—a poet-translator, not a pedant, one who brought with him something of the creative force that shaped the German poem. Naturally we come to this volume with high expec- tations and the reward is there. There is scarcely a page without the felicities and surprises that only a poet can spring. And there are sus- tained passages too. The prison scene—a supreme test—is beautifully done. This is certainly one of the most interesting of the Faust transla- tions, perhaps the most interesting. Unfortunately MacNeice has his handicaps as well. Instead of coming to the poem with the enthusiasm that it calls for—an enthusiasm === Page 113 === BOOKS 719 that he must have felt when he translated the Agamemnon—he came reluctantly at the invitation of the B.B.C. Furthermore he has, he tells us, “next to no German,” and no collaborator, even as expert a Ger- manist as Ernest Stahl whom he had at his elbow, can fully offset that; he is or was “somewhat prejudiced against Goethe”; he finds Part II “incoherent” and, oddly enough, is of the opinion that “everyone agrees”; he has “a blind spot for the Helena in general”; and he has his reservations even in the Gretchen tragedy. All this puts him at a dis- advantage for the job in hand. Where it shows up conspicuously is in the style of Faust—its linguistic temper, its quality of speech—which he may be said to recapture at one point only to miss at another. For example, in Mephistopheles’ first speech in the Prologue in Heaven he hits off the opening lines admirably: Since you, O Lord, once more approach and ask If business down with us be light or heavy— And in the past you’ve usually welcomed me— That’s why you see me also at your levee. Only to mar the note lower down: The little god of the world, one can’t reshape, reshade him; He is as strange today as that first day you made him, where the manipulation of “reshape, reshape him” to rhyme with “made him” is foreign both to Faust and to Goethe and should have been avoided. It cannot be said too strongly that the forcing of rhyme, which is what MacNeice is cleverly doing here, is not felt once in the upwards of twelve thousand lines of Goethe’s poem. From beginning to end the rhymes just come. And so they should in English. MacNeice defends the retention of rhyme against those of his friends who wanted him to “turn the whole thing into blank verse or free verse” and he was also knew what they were talking about, having seen translation after translation made unpalatable with rhymes that were contrived and artificial. The worthy Bayard Taylor probably started it with that rigid adherence to prosody which produced things like this: But would that I, on mountains grand, Amid thy blessed light could stand, With spirits through mountain-caverns hover, Float in thy twilight the meadows over, === Page 114 === 720 PARTISAN REVIEW And, freed from the fumes of lore that swathe me, To health in thy dewy fountains bathe me. MacNeice, needless to say, does better, as his version of the passage shows: O could I but walk to and fro On mountain heights in thy dear glow Or float with spirits round mountain eyries Or weave through fields thy glances glean And freed from all miasmal theories Bathe in thy dew and wash me clean! But he is not above reproach either, on this very score. We may pass "eyries" as good enough, but what about "thy glances glean"? What the German says is: Auf Wiesen in deinem Dämmer weben. If rhymed it must be, the line might better go: Or weave through meadows silver-sheen. But why keep the rhyme at all, if it has to be laboured? One is tempted to lay it down as a principle for the translating of Faust into English that it is better at every turn to sacrifice rhyme than to trifle with it in any slightest degree. There is a further point, not unrelated. MacNeice catches the spirit of Faust's great opening monologue and handles it boldly. But he makes us hesitate when he translates: Und sehe dass wir nichts wissen können into such abstract English as: And this is all that I have found— The impossibility of knowledge. And he makes us resist him outright when he translates: Schau alle Wirkenskraft und Samen Und tu nicht mehr in Worten kramen in such a way as to destroy its native force: That the seeing its whole germination, the seeing Its workings, may end my traffic in words. === Page 115 === BOOKS 721 Here it is the supreme virtue of the style that suffers-its raciness, its vernacular. For there can hardly be another poem of like magnitude that stays so close to the spoken word. Line after line, especially in the great passages of Part I, comes to our senses as if it were just being said for the first time; the impression persists even after repeated reading. The translator's business is to hang on to this quality at all costs, especially in a language which, apart from this signal exception, is better at it than the German. MacNeice does hang on to it for the most part, but not consistently. One of his lapses is Frau Marthe's speech on p. 101. But enough of strictures. The MacNeice translation at its best-and it is often at its best-is good enough to make us regret lastingly that, having done so much of the poem, he did not see fit to finish. All the B.B.C. wanted of him was seven hours of radio time, which meant that about one third of the text had to go. Fortunately the text carries us through to the end and for this we must be grateful. Looking at the work more broadly, we can soon convince ourselves that, whatever the translator's views on the respective merits of the two parts, it is Part II that he is really at home in, not Part I. And this need not come as a surprise to those who realize how very modern much of Part II is. Whereas in Part I he sometimes affects us as un- easily bridging the gulf that separates him from the folkishness of the late eighteenth century, in Part II MacNeice moves with such ease that we feel he is not far from his natural element as poet of the 1950's. Look at his splendid rendering of the Alpine monologue in which Faust turns from the sunrise to the rainbow and resigns himself for the moment to relativity: Our aim was life, we wished to light the torch, And a sea of fire laps round us-beyond measure! Is it love? Or hate? Which burn and turn about us In monstrous changing tides of pain and pleasure. Consider too what he has done with the much maligned Classical Walpurgisnacht, not the whole of it but some of the best parts, includ- ing Faust's meeting with Chiron, who, it will be remembered, puts him on his back and gallops him through the night and tells him about Hercules and Helen (this is the passage that Gide turned into French). Faust tries to flatter Chiron as a pedagogue, but is rebuked: Leave that; it is irrelevant. As mentor even Pallas is low-rated; === Page 116 === 722 PARTISAN REVIEW In the end they carry on just in the way they want As though they were never educated. Here, and again in Nereus' remarks on the same theme, we can say of MacNeice's translation what we can never quite say in Part I, that it is as good as the original. Evidently the urbanity of the later scenes is more congenial to him and, in any case, closer to modern English. Later in the Walpurgisnacht we see him again at his best—and on a more extended scale—in the Homunculus episode (why is it so little known?) where he catches the mood delightfully in all its playful beauty and wisdom. Finally there is Act V, perhaps the poetic climax of the whole, in which MacNeice rises to the height of the argument and enters into the passion of it as well as the irony. Witness Faust's encounter with Despair in the last moments of his life, where, if anywhere, the poem touches our time to the quick and the poet of our time, we cannot help feeling, is touched to the quick too: Endless round—he must pursue it: Painful Leave-it, hateful Do-it, Freedom now, now harsh constraint, Broken sleep that leaves him faint, Bind him to his one position And prepare him for perdition. Whether so touched or not, he has given us a translation of Act V that leaves nothing to be desired; the piety, the fury, the eeriness, the heaven- liness—they are all there, completely. And there can be no doubt about it—the sophisticated satire of Mephistopheles' battle with the angels goes better in English than in German. Barker Fairley WILLARD GALLERY PAUL KLEE—Pedagogical Sketchbook intro. 3.00 PAINTERS and trans. By Sibyl Moholy-Nagy LORCA—Lament for the death of a bull- 2.75 GRAVES LEWIS MULLIGAN TOBEY fighter and other poems LORCA—An appreciation, with selected 2.50 SCULPTORS trans. of his poetry by Roy Campbell HOLDERLIN—A study of his life, vision, 2.50 RICHARD LIPPOLD DAVID SMITH and poetry by L. S. Salzberger APPOINTED AGENTS FOR BOTTEGHE 3.50 OSCUR E, single copy $2.00 subscriptions No. 10 exciting contents NEW ADDRESS- 23 W. 56 NEW YORK 19 New recordings list on request, also complete list of "Little Mags," GBM winter currents, Joyce items, books on the film, free on request. GOTHAM BOOK MART 41 WEST 47th STREET NEW YORK 36, N. Y === Page 117 === RIMBAUD IN THE SORBONNE The oral Ph. D. examination in an American university has little resemblance to the "soutenance de thèse" for the "state doctorate" which is the highest degree the Sorbonne offers. The ceremony in Paris is open to the public. It occurs quite frequently and in most cases is a tiresome procedure. The duty of the jury, usually composed of five pro- fessors, is to point out the inadequacies, weaknesses, omissions of the theses, both the main thesis and the complementary one. On January 12, 1952, in the Salle Liard, the "soutenance" of M. Etiemble on the "Myth of Rimbaud" was, on the contrary, one of the main events of the season. The large hall was crowded with students, professors, writers and notables from Paris society. The jury was composed of Professors Levaillant, Carré, Bruneau (who presided), Jasinski and Dédeyan. Each in turn complimented M. Etiemble on the giganticism of his task and spoke on some aspect of the two theses. Levaillant, first, praised the indefatigable scholar. Etiem- ble has been working on his investigation for twenty years. His subject was accepted by the Sorbonne in 1937. Since that time he has lived in the United States (where he taught at the University of Chicago), in Central America, in Egypt. He has accumulated 16,000 "fiches" or items on the myth of Rimbaud. A prodigious documentation, even for a thèse de doctorat at the Sorbonne. He has read in many foreign lang- uages and has discovered practically everything published about Rim- baud between 1869 and 1950. Between the school of symbolism and the most recent movement of "lettrism," Etiemble has studied every at- tempt to make of Rimbaud what he calls a myth, or a fable disproving or controverting the truth. To his novels (Un Enfant de Chœur and Peau de Couleur) and to his explosive critical writings in Les Temps Modernes, Etiemble has added a long work of meticulous scholarship. The theses have been read only by the jurymen and they indicated often during the examination that Etiemble has not altered, for the writing of his Mythe de Rimbaud, his polemical style. Levaillant pleaded with Etiemble to soften some of his attacks. When Dédeyan stated that Etiemble risked being excommunicated from all churches, the candidate replied under his breath that such was his hope. Etiemble explained that at the beginning, the object of his research was purely bibliographical. But as time went on, he became aware of a forceful "influence" on literature, of scandalous interpretations of Rim- baud which constitute the "myth." === Page 118 === 724 PARTISAN REVIEW The thesis bears not on the works of Rimbaud, but on his com- mentators who are legion. In a fragment of his thesis, published in Temps Modernes for January 1952, Etiemble calls the genre he is at- tacking "mythistory." What characterizes the literary myths of Rimbaud is the fact that each is based on some error of interpretation of a very limited number of texts. For the symbolists it was particularly Bateau Ivre. For the surrealists it was the prose work, Un coeur sous une sou- tane. The Catholic myth of Rimbaud's death-bed conversion was prom- ulgated by his sister Isabelle, but Etiemble points out that another wit- ness, Riès, claims the poet died with blasphemy on his lips. More im- portant than these contradictory stories, is the large myth of Rimbaud which Etiemble sees as a completely organized religion, with its forms of worship, its ceremonies, its sacred books, its sacred interpretations. The use of the scholastic term aseity, meaning the quality of belonging to what is by itself (God), in a poem on Rimbaud by Louis de Gon- zague-Frick, is a convincing proof to Etiemble that a new religion has been formed around Rimbaud. He calls the eye-witnesses of the poet's life the "evangelists": Verlaine, Isabelle the sister, her husband Paterne Berrichon, a school friend Ernest Delahaye. They were responsible for the first lies, for the method by which each school in turn has appro- priated Rimbaud; symbolists, surrealists, Fascists, Communists, existen- tialists. The interpretations of the "sacred" texts have played an important part in the development of such myths. The meaning of the word, illumination, for example, and of the phrase, Je est un autre. Finally, when Rimbaud has been treated as demon, angel, magician, prophet, nothing human remains. Rimbaud is a god. This is the result, for Etiemble, of the curious combination of hagiography and scandal char- acterizing the works of Rimbaud. He insists that a new religion has been born which is one manifestation of the mysticism impairing the intelli- gence of our period, and which equates the name of Rimbaud with that of Hitler, Stalin, Father Divine. Etiemble's inquisition spares no one. He disapproves especially of the Catholic interpretation, the writings of such men as Daniel-Rops and Claudel. On the whole, the members of the jury manifested a profound re- spect for Etiemble and for the extent of his knowledge, for his powers of destruction. At one moment, M. Levaillant, realizing the candidate's passion for truth, quoted; Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. M. Dédeyan, the Sorbonne professor of comparative literature, reminded Etiemble that he had claimed the birth today of other literary myths: Lorca, T. E. Lawrence, Genet, Artaud, and asked whether Lautréamont === Page 119 === Outstanding New Books THE REVENGE FOR LOVE, by Wyndham Lewis,$3.50 This book, first published in England in 1937, is as timely as today's headlines. Full of vivid and vital writing, it is a devastating attack on the empty pretentiousness of left- wing intellectualism and a pitiless portrait of the paid agitator. 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Movingly presents the author's memories of childhood in New England and his love of France, and shares with the reader his insight into the drama of man. TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE IN AMERICA In combination, these six volumes present an exhaustive study of American literature during the first half of the present century. The Modern Novel in America, 1900-1950 by Frederick J. Hoffman.............................................$3.00 Fifty Years of American Drama, 1900-1950 by Alan S. Downer.....................................................$2.50 Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 by Louise Bogan........................................................$2.50 The Short Story in America, 1900-1950 by Ray B. 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He even confessed that he himself had added to the myth of Rimbaud as Christian, and approved of Etiemble castigating himself for contributing to the myth of Rimbaud as com- munard. M. Jasinski, the last of the jury to speak, was the most critical, the most adverse to the idea of the thesis and especially to the spirit in which it had been written. He even suggested that Etiemble doesn't like Rimbaud and is perpetrating in his thesis some kind of vengeance on the poet who must have harmed him when he was young! In de- scribing the thesis as a whole, he used the word canular, from the language of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, which designates an elabor- ate trick of mystification. Despite this severe stricture, the decision of the jury was unanimous in granting M. Etiemble the degree of "doctorat d'état, mention très honorable, à l'unanimité." This word, canular, must have struck the imagination of Etiemble who, from Montpellier, where he resumed his teaching in the university, sent to the weekly newspaper Arts, a letter on the question of whether the myth of Rimbaud is a "canular." At the time of the "soutenante," the word had amused him. He knew that the rules of the game de- manded that the jury inflict some degree of torture on the candidate. But with the report that the sociologist, Roger Caillois, had also considered exaggerated the use of "myth" or "religion" when it was only a question of verbal inflation, Etiemble began wondering if he him- self were the real creator of the myth and whether he had been de- ceiving himself during the twenty years' labor. He reread his 2,000 pages without having his convictions altered. In applying the word myth to the first part of his Structure du Mythe: the various characterizations of Rimbaud as surrealist, existentialist, Communist, atheist, Catholic, voyou, etc., he is using the term in its loosest connotation of error, col- lective lie, illusion. But in the second part of the main thesis, he uses the word in its fuller sense of legend in its relationship with the super- natural and involving some kind of rite. The fact that twenty authors have spoken of Rimbaud as the myth of Satan, and that André Breton in the surrealist exhibition of 1947 erected an altar to Léonie Aubois === Page 121 === PERSPECTIVES USA A new anthology-magazine of American Arts and Letters Perspectives USA is to be published quarterly by Intercultural Publications Inc., a non-profit corporation established by The Ford Foundation. The magazine is designed primarily for distribution abroad, but it will also be made available to readers in this country. The distribution abroad-in English, French, German and Italian language editions-aims at giving foreign readers an insight into the intellectual life of the United States today. Much of the contents of Perspectives USA will be reprinted from other magazines, but a part will be new writing. Each number will be edited by a distinguished American critic: Lionel Trilling, R. P. Blackmur, Malcolm Cowley, Jacques Barzun, Selden Rodman, Kenneth Rexroth, etc. The first issue will be available about October 15, and will include: JACQUES BARZUN-America's Romance with Practicality WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS- Poems, a story, and an essay RANDALL JARRELL-An essay review of Williams' poetry SELDEN RODMAN-The Painting of Ben Shahn (illustrated) MEYER SCHAPIRO-On a Painting of Van Gogh (illustrated) MARIANNE MOORE-Translations of La Fontaine's Fables THORNTON WILDER-Goethe and World Literature ARTHUR BERGER-The Music of Aaron Copland ALBERT GUERARD-Recent American Novels EDWARD DAHLBERG-The Florida of the Inca WILLIAM FAULKNER-Nobel Prize Speech KENNETH REXROTH-A new poem OSCAR HANDLIN-Democracy and Power: The Immigrants in American Politics PERSPECTIVES USA will be 192 pages, of which eight are full-color reproduc- tions. Price: $1.50. Annual subscriptions: $5.00. Subscriptions should be placed with Paragon Mailing Service, 347 Adams Street, Brooklyn 1, New York. Distribution to bookstores is through The Viking Press. A list of distributors in foreign countries may be obtained from Intercultural Publications Inc., 655 Madison Avenue, New York 21, New York. === Page 122 === 728 PARTISAN REVIEW d'Ashby, the mysterious heroine of one of the Illuminations, has helped to justify Etiemble's second use of myth in the central part of his thesis. He claims that the statement found in Pierre Debray is not at all ex- ceptional: "Since God exempted Rimbaud from the ordinary condition of man, his immaculate conception . . ." A decalcomania has been forged whereby every episode in Rimbaud's life corresponds to an epi- sode in the life of Christ: the birth at Bethlehem, the debate with the doctors, the forty days in the desert, the way of the cross, the death, resurrection, transfiguration. The sacrament of suicide has been initiated by Vaché, Rigaud, Hart Crane in the name of Rimbaud. The sentence of Roger Caillois, whispered to a neighbor at the "soutenance," "Ils appellent ça religion, ce n'est que de l'inflation ver- bale," was quoted by Etiemble in his letter to Arts and provoked a reply of Caillois himself the following week (February 1). Caillois first em- phasized that the "they" of his sentence refers to everyone: the critics of Rimbaud who consider him a god, Etiemble in as much as he im- agines they believe him a god, the professors of the Sorbonne jury in as much as they agree with the investigation. Etiemble's article in Arts had clearly defined the two uses of myth. Caillois has no quarrel with the first general meaning of falsification. It is the second sociological meaning of the term, as used by Etiemble, that Caillois questions. Both aspects are based upon words, expressions, metaphors. The vocabulary is religious, but Caillois considers that the writers who used it were not religious. The fact that they said Rimbaud was a god does not neces- sarily imply that they believe it. The altar erected by Breton was a poetic gesture and the word aseity, used by Louis de Gonzague-Frick, may have been borrowed from Apollinaire's Le Larron. Breton's altar had no piety attached to it and the word aseity had no connection with dogma. Caillois wonders whether the recent postal stamps bearing the face of Rimbaud (from the Fantin-Latour portrait) have greatly af- fected the idolaters. Between such phenomena and religion in its pure sense, there are many intermediaries. A suicide, for example, is neither a rite nor a sacrament unless it be performed in some kind of ceremony and fulfill some theological function. Otherwise it is simply a gesture of revolt or despair, far more philosophical than religious. To substan- tiate his viewpoint, Caillois recalls the activities of the bobby-soxers in relationship to Frank Sinatra. There were societies formed, insignia, faintings, collective manifestations. The articles in The New Yorker re- vealed that a religious vocabulary was used and a degree of ecstasy reached in some of the manifestations which seemed liturgical. If the fanatical disciples of Rimbaud have created out of his life a decalco- === Page 123 === PRESENTED TO NEW SUBSCRIBERS as a Gift ...typifying the kind of books and savings offered by The Readers' Subscription Poets. OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN FIVE VOLUMES, EDITED BY W. H. AUDEN and NORMAN HOLMES PEARSON Retail Price $12.50 Free to new Members! The Readers' Subscription has been created with one essential purpose in view-to make good books available at real savings. Perhaps the most distinguished editorial board in America, W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzum and Lionel Trilling, insures the literary value of the books selected. And an adaptation of the book club plan makes possible great savings. It costs you nothing to join The Readers' Subscription. You may begin your membership by accepting, as a gift, Poets of the English Language, and by ordering your first selection, at $3.75, any one of the following books: Two Cheers for Democracy, Short Novels of Colette, The Lonely Crowd, The Later D. H. Lawrence, Rome and a Villa. As a member, each month you will receive a copy of The Griffin, the monthly magazine of The Readers' Sub- scription which in recent months has featured original contributions by Forster, Wescott, Riesman, Colette, and Clark. After reading reliable reviews by Editors Auden, Barzun and Trilling, you will be able to accept or reject the current selection. And with every fourth selection accepted you will receive a bonus book of your own choice. Savings on monthly selections may run as high as 25%, and your over-all savings, realized through the receipt of bonus books will surely exceed 40%. For the oppor- tunity of enjoying these extraordinary savings and serv- ices, you simply agree to accept four selections during the next year. THE READERS' SUBSCRIPTION, INC., 35 WEST 53RD ST., NEW YORK 19 Please enroll me in The Readers' Subscription. I am to receive, free, Poets of the English Language. As my first selection send me, at the members' price of $3.75 plus 25¢ for postage and handling, the book checked below. Two Cheers for Democracy Short Novels of Colette The Lonely Crowd The Later D. H. Lawrence Rome and a Villa. I agree to accept three other selections during the next year. NAME ADDRESS CITY. ZONE STATE 39 === Page 124 === 730 PARTISAN REVIEW mania of the life of Jesus, it is important to remember that a decalco- mania of a religion is not a religion. The writer Joseph Delteil, who has lived for some years in his vineyard near Montpellier, participated once in the debate by a letter sent to Arts on February 8. Rimbaud is not a god (Delteil thanks heaven for that!) but he is not an ordinary poet. For Delteil the ques- tion of Rimbaud's humanity comes first. The day when Rimbaud chose Harrar, rather than the Académie Française or the Island of Guernsey, he instilled in every artist an uneasy conscience. The fact that Rim- baud turned to hard manual labor after writing such a work as Une Saison en Enfer, marks the outstanding logic of the poet's life. Each week in Paris the critical debate grew more complicated. It is a usual thing for a critic to write about a poet. Etiemble's thesis is more unusual: a man writes on the men who wrote on a poet. Then Caillois writes on Etiemble, and in Arts of February 15, Arthur Adamov wrote on Caillois and on Etiemble's article of January 25. In reading this latter article, Adamov grew angry because he could find nowhere Etiemble's personal view on Rimbaud. He develops Etiemble's notion of myth by claiming the existence of a myth whenever there exists an iden- tification between a few men and a single man who takes on for them a character symbolic of what they would like to be. Each creative artist whose work transcribes the particular torment of its age, becomes an idealized picture whose formation and success are indeed worthy sub- jects of study. Adamov fears that Etiemble has not gone beyond the stage of pure documentation, the establishment of a gigantic card in- dex. Adamov's criticism joins that of others in finding an irritated im- passioned style in Etiemble's writing which impairs the pure objectivity of his research. The difficulty is in the differentiation among the var- ious cults of Rimbaud: the Catholic apologists, André Breton's fetish- istic attitude, the narratives of personal recollection. Perhaps more from Grace Borgenicht Gallery 65 E. 57 N. Y. 22 PAINTINGS JEANNE MILES Nov. 3 - 22 CALVERT COGGESHALL Nov. 24 - Dec. 13 BETTY PARSONS GALLERY - 15 East 57 Street === Page 125 === RIMBAUD IN THE SORBONNE 731 Etiemble's style than from the 'evidence' he has accumulated, one feels he is put out by any kind of attention given to Rimbaud. On the one hand are the facts of Rimbaud's life: his precociousness as a poet at fourteen; the revolt he waged against his family, his city and all bourgeois standards; his study of occult sciences; his flair for shocking; his vagabond life with Verlaine; his denunciation of ration- alism; his poetic work with its important innovations in the art of the prose poem; his flight from Europe and existence of adventurer mer- chant in Africa; his agonized return to France and death in the Mar- seille hospital. It would be difficult to find a poet's life more susceptible than Rimbaud's of varying interpretations, more capable of engendering an entire body of legend. The contribution of Etiemble to Rimbaud scholarship is to confirm what already seems truthful concerning Rim- baud and to complete, as far as possible, the work of extirpating the false from the true. Already, for example, the precociousness of Rim- baud as poet had been confirmed, but the originality of the early poems had been seriously questioned. The struggle he waged with his mother and immediate surroundings is certainly a fact, but there is nothing so vastly extraordinary about his revolt. Most boys would have behaved in the same way, given the same conditions. The extent of his readings in occultism was radically modified once the list of books in the public library of Charleville was established. His sullenness and unbearable be- havior in literary groups in Paris might easily have masked the typical timidity and gaucherie of a young fellow from the provinces. The only real documents existing on Rimbaud's life with Verlaine are the writ- ings of the two poets themselves. What remains of Rimbaud after all the errors have been rectified and the disguises removed, is the poet- creator of a new work and the twenty-year-old poet who renounced all literary activity and who held to his word to the end. M. Etiemble knows the writings of Rimbaud as well as any living critic. The value of his thesis, once it is published (the first volume is due in December 1952) will be not so much the denunciation of the errors concerning Rimbaud as the study of the genesis of those errors and the particular ways in which they were propagated. At the poet's death, his sister and brother-in-law were largely instrumental in disseminating an account of Rimbaud's death and of his conversion in extremis. The JOHN BLOMSHIELD Private Instruction ★ Painting ★ Drawing Small evening groups for beginners ★ 340 E. 63 STREET, N. Y. 21 ★ TE 8-4149 === Page 126 === 732 PARTISAN REVIEW symbolists named Rimbaud a forerunner of their school and the type of poète maudit, but they knew very few of his poems and praised them excessively, according to Etiemble who has little respect for such a poem as Bateau Ivre. Rimbaud's myth, in its second religious sense, developed in the period of surrealism, between the years 1920 and 1935. Those were the years when, according to Etiemble, men began living by the rules of Rimbaud, and derived from his work suicidal doctrines. One of the members of the Sorbonne jury believes that M. Etiem- ble's thesis will instigate a new chapter in literary history. Other similar myths have existed and continue to exist, and literary scholarship during the past fifty or sixty years has been concerned with contradictory well- established errors. The myth, for example, of Chateaubriand's trip to America and the extent of his travels there. The myth of Molière's life and character. Certain contemporary writers have themselves tried to counteract their myths as they were in the process of developing. Jean- Paul Sartre, for example, has helped to diminish his St. Germain-des-Prés legend, and André Gide, in his posthumously published Et nunc manet in te, has given to his own portrait a pathetically human explanation. Wallace Fowlie Bernard Berenson: "HEMINGWAY'S The Old Man and the Sea is an idyll of the sea as sea, as un-Byronic and un-Mel- villian as Homer himself, and communicated in a prose as calm and compelling as Homer's verse. No real artist symbolizes or allegorizes - and Hemingway is a real artist - but every real work of art exhales symbols and allegories. So does this short but not small masterpiece." At your bookseller, $3.00 SCRIB NERS === Page 127 === EZRA POUND has given permission to reprint his brilliant Guide to Kulchur ($4.00) with “Addenda: 1952.” It “presents him at his erudite, arrogant best, striding contemptuously through the fine arts and scattering nuggets of coruscating wisdom all over the place.”—John Barkham, Saturday Review. ELIO VITTORINI has been acclaimed by Hemingway as “one of the very best of the new Italian writers.” The Red Carnation ($3.00) portrays the cynicism and idealism of Italian youth in the chaotic days of Mussolini’s first rush to power. WARREN CARRIER founder and original editor of the Quarterly Review of Literature, has written his first novel with intensity and insight. The Hunt ($2.75) is a story of a trapped killer’s violent love and hate. HENRY MILLER One of America’s foremost novelists writes with loving care of the liter- ature which shaped his life and craft. The Books In My Life ($5.00), Miller explains, “deals with books as vital experience.” MAUDE HUTCHINS The author of the sparkling and controversial A Diary of Love now serves up many of her tangiest short stories and plays-for-reading in a delightful new fare called Love is a Pie ($3.50). CHODERLOS DE LACLOS whose famous novel of low morals in high society, Dangerous Acquaint- ances ($3.75), shocked French aristocracy in 1782, is superbly translated by Richard Aldington. ALBERT COSSERY is a young Egyptian writer about whom Henry Miller is enthusiastic. His second novel, The Lazy Ones ($2.75), is an enchanting tale of lassitude and desire told in a vein of humor, extravagant and a little perverse. NEW DIRECTIONS is the publisher of these and many other books of equal interest. If you are not already on our mailing list, write to New Directions, 333 Sixth Avenue, New York City, for our complete catalog. === Page 128 === INDEX TO VOLUME XIX ALDRIDGE, JOHN W. Manners and Values ............................................. 3 347 ANONYMOUS The Original Sin of the Intellect ................................ I 41 ARVIN, NEWTON Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) .............. 3 286 ASHER, ELISE Two Poems .................................................................. 5 559 AUDEN, W. H. Some Reflections on Music and Opera ...................... I 10 AYME, MARCEL Grace (story) ........................................................ 3 327 BARRETT, WILLIAM (br) Emily Dickinson. By Richard Chase .................. 3 364 Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) .............. 4 420 BARZUN, JACQUES Artist Against Society: Some Articles of War ........... I 60 Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) .............. 4 424 BOGAN, LOUISE Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) .............. 5 562 BORKENAU, FRANZ (br) Capitalism and Socialism on Trial. By Fritz Sternberg ....... 4 489 BROWN, SPENCER Xavier Greenspan: An Essay on Criticism .............. 3 377 BURNHAM, JAMES Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) .............. 3 288 CAMUS, ALBERT Art and Revolt .......................................................... 3 268 CARVER, CATHARINE (br) The Fancy Dress Party. By Alberto Moravia The Red Carnation. By Elio Vittorini ...................... 5 602 CHASE, RICHARD Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) .............. 5 565 CHIAROMONTE, NICOLA Letter from Italy ........................................................ I 87 Paris Letter: Sartre versus Camus ............................ 6 680 CLARK, ELEANOR Theater Chronicle .................................................... 2 217 DAVIS, ROBERT GORHAM (br) The Structure of Complex Words. By William Empson .......... 3 368 DOWLING, ALLAN Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) .............. 3 292 At War With Time: A Letter .................................. 4 453 DUPEE, F. W. (br) William Faulkner: A Critical Study. By Irving Howe .......... 6 706 ELLISON, RALPH Invisible Man: Prologue to a novel (fiction) .................. I 31 FAIRLEY, BARKER (br) Goethe's Faust, Parts I and II. Translated by Louis MacNieçe ...... 6 718 FERGUSSON, FRANCIS (br) Auden. By Richard Hoggart ............................... 4 483 FIEDLER, LESLIE A. (br) A Walker in the City. By Alfred Kazin .............. 2 238 Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) .............. 3 294 FITZ, DUDLEY (br) Rome and a Villa. By Eleanor Clark .................. 4 487 FOWLIE, WALLACE Rimbaud in the Sorbonne ....................................... 6 723 === Page 129 === INDEX TO VOLUME XIX FRANK, JOSEPH Paris Letter Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) FRIEDMANN, F. G. America: A Country Without Pre-History GOLFFING, FRANCIS (br) Selected Prose. By Hugo von Hofmannsthal GREGORY, HORACE (br) The Iliad. Translated by Richard Lattimore Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) GREENBERG, CLEMENT Art Chronicle GUEST, BARBARA Now You Remembering Nights Awake (poem) HIMMELFARB, GERTRUDE The Victorian as Intellectual HOFSTADTER, RICHARD (br) The Uprooted. By Oscar Handlin HOOK, SIDNEY Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) HOWE, IRVING Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) HUTCHINSON, PEARSE At the Medical Lecture (poem) JARRELL, RANDALL The Age of Criticism Thoughts about Marianne Moore JASPERS, KARL Nietzsche and the Present JOYCE, STANISLAUS Joyce's Dublin KATZ, LESLIE Notes on a Modigliani Nude KAUFMANN, WALTER Nietzsche and the Seven Sirens Goethe versus Shakespeare KRIM, SEYMOUR The Fiction of Fiction: A Critical Nudger KRISTOL, IRVING (br) The Irony of American History. By Reinhold Niebuhr Liberty and the Communists KRONENBERGER, LOUIS Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) LASKY, MELVIN J. The Happy Time of Gottschalk and Veronese LERNER, MAX Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) LEVINE, ROSALIND Untitled Sonnet (poem) LOY, MINA Idiot Child on a Fire-Escape (poem) MACAULEY, ROBIE The Superfluous Man MACDONALD, DWIGHT (br) White Collar: The American Middle Classes. By C. Wright Mills MAILER, NORMAN Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) MARCUSE, LUDWIG The Oldest Younger Generation MAYHALL, JANE Two Poems 735 Issue Page 2 4 2 6 1 4 1 5 6 2 5 5 6 2 6 1 1 1 4 6 3 3 4 4 5 5 4 5 2 1 3 2 6 202 431 141 711 121 435 97 560 664 252 569 575 662 185 687 19 103 124 372 621 351 360 493 439 605 581 452 561 169 110 298 211 660 === Page 130 === 736 PARTISAN REVIEW MILLS, C. WRIGH T Issue Page Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) 4 446 MORAVIA, ALBERTO Sunny Honeymoon (story) 6 635 NIEBUHR, REINHOLD Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) 3 301 O'HARA, FRANK On Looking at La Grande Jatte, the Czar Wept Anew (poem) 2 183 ORTEGA Y GASSET, JOSE The Self and the Other 4 391 ORWELL, GEORGE Such, Such, Were the Joys 5 505 PALMER, WINTHROP Guernica (poem) 4 419 PHILLIPS, WILLIAM Lives and Wives of a Genius (story) 2 153 Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) 5 585 PORTER, JOHN H. The Pale Virgins Shrouded in Snow (story) 1 78 RAHV, PHILIP (br) The Social History of Art. By Arnold Hauser 2 225 Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) 3 304 (br) Witness. By Whittaker Chambers 4 472 RIESMAN, DAVID (br) Soviet Attitudes Towards Authority. By Margaret Mead 2 242 Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) 3 310 ROETHKE, THEODORE The Partner (poem) 5 558 ROSENFELD, ISAAC George (story) 4 410 (br) The Need for Roots. By Simone Weil 5 598 ROVERE, RICHARD H. Communists in a Free Society 3 339 (br) Socialism and American Life. Edited by Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons 6 715 SCHLESINGER, ARTHUR JR. Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) 5 590 SCHORER, MARK Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) 3 316 SCHWARTZ, DELMORE (br) Fiction Chronicle: Dear Uncle James 2 234 (br) Fiction Chronicle: The Wrongs of Innocence and Experience 3 354 Masterpieces as Cartoons 4 461 Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) 5 593 (br) Fiction Chronicle: Long After Eden 6 701 SCOTT, WINFIELD TOWNLEY Coleridge (poem) 6 660 TATE, ALLEN The Maimed Man (poem) 3 265 Is Literary Criticism Possible? 5 546 THOMAS, DYLAN Two Poems 1 7 THOMPSON, JOHN JR. (br) Selected Poems of Horace Gregory 2 246 TRILLING, DIANA (br) John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor. By F. A. Hayek 1 115 TRILLING, LIONEL Our Country and Our Culture (symposium) 3 318 WATKINS, VERNON The Return of Spring (poem) 4 451 === Page 131 === FARRAR, STRAUS AND YOUNG ALBERTO MORAVIA "In the present flowering of Italian letters . . . no name stands higher." -JOHN BARKHAM, Saturday Review Syndicate. His wise and wicked novel of a Dictator and a Duchess is a sharp-witted entertain- ment with serious overtones. "A bawdy and caustic comedy of errors and venalities." -N. Y. Times Book Review. $3.00 THE FANCY DRESS PARTY DINO BUZZATI A newcomer to our distinguished list of Italian authors. His novel, a winner of the Italian Academy Award, is "haunting in its mood, beautiful in con- ception. . . . A wonderful book." -HERBERT WEST $3.00 THE TARTAR STEPPE FRANCOISE MALLET "An astounding virtuosity . . . far and away the most interesting book by a woman writer that I have read in a long time." -ROBERT KANTERS, Gazette de Lettres. An outstanding critical success in France, this touching and disturbing novel deals with a young girl's wayward love. $3.00 THE ILLUSIONIST HENRY ADAMS First published in 1879, his timely novel of chicane- ry in Washington is "still just about the best satire ever written about the Government of the U. S." -Time $3.50 DEMOCRACY WILLIAM L. SHIRER "Nobody else could make this story as readable and as vividly impressive as Bill Shirer." -FREDERICK LEWIS ALLEN. "A vivid panorama of modern history in the making; a dramatic picture of the changes that have overtaken the Western world since 1914." -LLOYD MORRIS $3.50 MIDCENTURY JOURNEY EDMUND WILSON His new collection—a literary chronicle of the 20's and 30's-comprises early and recent writings, com- pletely re-written to form a comprehensive picture of the books and the ideas, the movements and the literary life of America at its most creative peak. $6.50 THE SHORES OF LIGHT 101 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 3, N. Y. === Page 132 === AAKCJAARAK)AAK()AAK(R)AAK BORZOL BOOKS BERNARD SHAW AND MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL: Their Correspondence, edited by Alan Dent. A vivid, exciting, and outspoken record of a remarkable friend- ship by turns passionate and witty, dramatic, cynical, fervent, serious, silly, earnest, mock-earnest, urgent and impetuous. "Not a novel in letter form, but a complete drama. And a truly classic one... first-rate comedy in- tertwined with the tragic plot." -JACQUES BARZUN. 397 pages $5.00 STEPHEN CRANE: An Omnibus, edited by Robert Wooster Stallman. The best of Stephen Crane is here presented in one volume: The Red Badge of Courage (published complete, from the original man- uscripts, for the first time in America); novelettes, in- cluding Maggie and George's Mother; short stories, in- cluding The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel; newspaper reporting; poetry; and the first collection of Crane's let- ters. This volume of rich and fascinating writing is an event in American literary annals. 703 pages $5.00 ANDRÉ GIDE: Madeleine (Et nune manet in te). Gide's probing, intimate "letter" to at once self-accusing and self-excusing, tells the tragedy of his conjugal life, the happiness and sorrow of his rela- tions with the "Emmanuel" of the Journals-in reality his wife, Madeleine. Privately published by Gide in 1947, it was not issued publicly until after his death. Suppressed pages from the Journals, extracts not published in any language until they appeared in the French-language edi- tion, are also included in the volume. The translation, introduction, and notes are by Justin O'Brien. $3.00 At all bookstores ALFRED A KNOPF, Publisher AAK(R)AAK()AAK(R)AAK()AAK(R)AAK AAK(R)AAK(R)AAK()AAK(R)AAK()AAK