=== Page 1 === CONTEMPORARY WOMEN POETS 8 Volume XLV $2.50 PARTISAN REVIEW/1 Vanya Rudikoff w Therapies, New Problems tasha Spender dler's Long Goodbye nk Kermode na Trilling and the Fifties rbaralee Diamonstein o Art and Money ge Edwards mocracy in Spain nathan Baumbach athless Revisited o Essays on Conrad Tony Tanner and Ian Watt Stories Bruno Schulz Poetry Kate Farrell Cheri Fein Dorothy Friedman Rachel Hadas Colette Inez Ann Lauterbach Lois Moyles Sarah Plimpton Carol Polcovar Rosmarie Waldrop Marjorie Welsh Ellen Wisoff Reviews Anthony Giddens G. S. Fraser Edward Marcotte John Romano === Page 2 === OCTOBER 5 A Special Issue on Photography OCTOBER, the quarterly journal of theory and criticism of the arts, devotes its spring issue to an examination of photography using the tools of semiotics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and historical analysis. Included are chapters from Nadar's My Life as a Photographer, a central document in the history of photography, here translated into English for the first time. Photographers discussed include Brassai, Weston, Lartigue, Fox Talbot, Muybridge, Evans, Cameron, Smithson, Degas, Nadar. contains: Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in its Place Hollis Frampton Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image Hubert Damisch Opticeries Jean Clair Tracing Nadar Rosalind Krauss Positive/Negative: A Note on Degas's Photographs Douglas Crimp Time Exposure and Snapshot: the Photograph as Paradox Thierry de Duve Photography en abyme Craig Owens OCTOBER is published by MIT Press for The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. Available at bookstores, or write MIT Press, 44 Carlton Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02139 === Page 3 === His triumphant achievement...his tragic life JOHN BERRYMAN An Introduction to the Poetry JOEL CONARROE The poetry of John Berryman is highly personal, reflecting the flamboyant, drama-filled life which ended with his suicide in 1972. This new addition to the Columbia Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry series clarifies the com- plex relationship between the poet's ultimately liberating work and his private torments. $10.95 at bookstores or direct from COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 136 South Broadway, Irvington, New York 10533 JOYCE'S ULYSSES AND THE ASSAULT UPON CHARACTER JAMES H. MADDOX, JR. "Maddox's understanding of Joyce's simultaneous sentiment and irony, characterization and style, feeling and intellect makes his work uniquely whole, wholesome, and important." -Robert Kellogg. 320 pp., index. $16.50 ITALO SVEVO NAOMI LEBOWITZ The first in-depth study in English of the author of Confessions of Zeno. "I think it's absolutely marvellous-it's so interesting, so deep, so humane-it makes one want to read and think." -Iris Murdoch. 240 pp., notes, bibl., index. $15.00 RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS 30 College Avenue, New Brunswick NJ 08903 === Page 4 === Partisan Review William Phillips EDITOR Steven Marcus ASSOCIATE EDITOR MANAGING EDITOR Linda Healey ASSISTANT EDITORS Elizabeth Dalton Edith Kurzweil POETRY EDITOR John Ashbery EDITORIAL ASSOCIATE Joan C. Schwartz EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Kathleen Agena Sallie Bingham Estelle Leontief Robert Muller Barbara Rosecrance Ann Weissberg STAFF ASSISTANTS Karen Casiano Suzanne Katz Hyman Saundra K. Young CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Peter Brooks Morris Dickstein Richard Gilman Caroline Rand Herron ART CONSULTANT Barbara Rose CONSULTANTS Norman Birnbaum Frank Kermode Christopher Lasch Richard Poirier Susan Sontag Stephen Spender PUBLICATIONS AND ADVISORY BOARD Joanna S. Rose CHAIRMAN Edward J. Bloustein Edward E. Booher Lillian Braude Carter Burden Cynthia G. Colin Joan Ganz Cooney H. William Fitelson Marjorie Iseman Vera List Eugene Meyer Robert H. Montgomery, Jr. Lynn Nesbit Tracy O'Kates David B. Pearce, M.D. Richard Schlatter Roger L. Stevens Robert Wechsler Henry R. Winkler DESIGN DIRECTOR Henry Altchek PARTISAN REVIEW, published quarterly by PR, Inc., New York, N.Y., is at Rutgers University, 1 Richardson St., New Brunswick, N.J.08903 and at 522 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.10036.Subscrip- tions: $9.00 a year, $17.50 for two years; $25. for 3 years; foreign subscriptions, including Canada and Mexico, $10.60 a year, $20.70 for two years. All payments from foreign countries must be made by U.S. money order or checks payable in U.S. currency. Single copy: $2.50. No manuscripts will be returned unless accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. No responsibility is assumed for their loss or injury. Copyright © 1978 by P.R., Inc.Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional entries. Distributed in the U.S.A. by DeBoer, Nutley, N.J. 07710, Capitol News, Boston 02120 and L-S Distribu- tion, San Francisco 94109. "Partisan Review Registered" Copyright © 1978 by Jonathan Baumbach === Page 5 === PR1 1978-VOLUME XLV NUMBER 1 CONTENTS NOTES ARTICLES Sonya Rudikoff Natasha Spender New Therapies, New Problems 24 Chandler's Own Long Goodbye: A Memoir 38 Barbaralee Diamonstein Pop Art, Money, and the Present scene: An Interview with Roy Lichtenstein and Leo Castelli 80 Tony Tanner "Gnawed Bones" and "Artless Tales"-Eating and Narration in Conrad 94 Ian Watt Heart of Darkness and Nineteenth- Century Thought 108 Jorge Edwards The Consensus in Favor of Democracy in Spain 120 Jonathan Baumbach Breathless Revisited 124 STORIES Bruno Schulz Dead Season 66 CONTEMPORARY WOMEN POETS Colette Inez, Ann Lauterbach, Kate Farrell, Cheri Fein, Dorothy Friedman, Lois Moyles, Rachel Hadas, Carol Polcovar, Sarah Plimpton, Ellen Wisoff, Marjorie Welsh, Rosmarie Waldrop 9 BOOKS Frank Kermode We Must March My Darlings by Diana Trilling 128 === Page 6 === Anthony Giddens Class in a Capitalist Society by John Westergaard and Henrietta Resler Schooling in Capitalist America by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis Edward Marcotte Structural Anthropology, Volume II by Claude Lévi-Strauss John Romano Naked Angels by John Tyrell G.S. Fraser Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 by Adrienne Rich The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments by David Jones Poems 4 by Alan Dugan Trilogy by Diane Wakoski Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment by W.S. Merwin Poems of Black Africa ed. by Wole Soyinka 133 142 146 151 === Page 7 === NOTES COLETTE INEZ is the author of Alive and Taking Names and The Woman Who Loved Worms. She conducts a poetry workshop at The New School. . . . ANN LAUTERBACH lives in New York and is director of the Max Protech art gallery. . . . KATE FARRELL, who also lives in New York, has had poems published previously in Partisan Review and other maga- zines. . . . CHERI FEIN is managing director of Poets and Writers, Inc. . . . DOROTHY FRIEDMAN has an M.F.A. in poetry and is the co-editor of The Helen Review. Her book, Lost Beasts, will be published this fall. . . . The author I Prophesy Survivors, LOIS MOYLES was born in Seattle, Washing- ton and now lives in Oakland, California. . . . RACHEL HADAS's book, Starting from Troy was published in 1975. She is currently a student of comparative literature at Princeton. . . . CAROL POLCOVAR's work has appeared in numerous magazines in the five years that she has been writing poetry. Her first book of poems, RIDDLES, will be available early next year. . . . Born in New York, SARAH PLIMPTON now lives in Paris. . . . ELLEN WISOFE lives in New York and works at Brooklyn College. . . . MARJORIE WELISH has published in several magazines and has com- pleted her first book, Greenhouses and Gardens. . . . Co-owner of Burning Deck Press, ROSMARIE WALDROP has recently published a book of poems called Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger. . . . SONYA RUDI- KOFF is an editor, essayist and critic. . . . NATASHA SPENDER lectures and does research on the psychology of music. . . . Born in Poland in 1892, BRUNO SCHULZ was killed by the S.S. in his native town of Drogobych in 1935. His novel, The Street of Crocodiles, was published here recently by Penguin. "Dead Season" is taken from Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass to be published in May by Walker and Company. . . . CELINA WIENIEWSKA's translation of BRUNO SCHULZ's The Street of Crocodiles won the 1963 Roy Publishers' Polish-into-English Prize. . . . A writer and television interviewer, BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN is the editor of Reborn Buildings: New Uses, Old Places, to be published next October by Harper & Row. Her interview with Roy Lichtenstein and Leo Castelli is part of a series entitled "Inside New York's Art World," held at the New School for Social Research. All the interviews in the series have been placed with the oral history archives at Columbia University. . . . TONY TANNER is a Fellow of Kings' College, Cambridge. He is just completing work on a new book, Contract and Transgression: Adultery and the Novel. . . . Author of The Rise of the Novel, IAN WATT teaches at Stanford University. . . . JORGE EDWARDS was born in Chile and served in that country's diplo- matic service until the fall of President Allende. His writing is well known in Spain and South America. He now lives in Barcelona. . . . Co-director of the Fiction Collective, JONATHAN BAUMBACH, is currently Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington. Babble is his most recent novel. "Breathless Revisited" was written for inclusion in the forthcoming Great Film Directors: A Critical Anthology (to be published this spring by Oxford University Press), edited by Morris Dickstein and Leo Braudy and printed here by permission of the editors. . . . FRANK KER- MODE is Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard for the current academic year. . . . EDWARD MARCOTTE describes himself as a freelance philosopher who holds a diploma in power lawnmower repair and works for the Salvation Army while studying for his B.A. . . . Author of Dickens and Reality, JOHN ROMANO teaches at Columbia. . . . G.S. FRASER has just published a book of critical essays, representing his work over the last thirty years and covering modern poets from Yeats to Larkin: Essays on Twentieth Century Poets. === Page 8 === THE CRITICS SPEAK ROBERT FROST The Work of Knowing Richard Poirier, Rutgers University. Relying on close readings of Frost's best poems, Poirier penetrates the public persona and demonstrates why Frost should be ranked among the finest poets of his time. 288 pp. $11.95 AFTER JOYCE Studies in Fiction After Ulysses Robert Martin Adams, University of California, Los Angeles. In an authoritative and provocative examina- tion of Joyce and his influence on con- temporary fiction, Adams, one of America's most versatile critics, reveals the ways through which Joyce's influence was absorbed into the work of some of the century's greatest writers. 225 pp. $10.00 THE COMPOSITION OF FOUR QUARTETS Dame Helen Gardner, Oxford University. A distinguished critic probes the origins and growth of a group of poems that make up one of the great poetic achievements of this century. Gardner looks at Eliot's preliminary drafts, and explores the historical background as well as sources in the poet's experience. 272 pp. November $32.50 FIVE TEMPERAMENTS Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery David Kalstone, Rutgers University. In examining the ways five contemporary poets have found to write about their lives, Kalstone offers readings that "are, at once, evaluations and celebrations, discoveries and corrections of heresy." -John Malcolm Brinnin 225 pp. $10.95 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 200 Madison Avenue New York, N.Y. 10016 === Page 9 === CONTEMPORARY WOMEN POETS COLETTE INEZ WESTERN TIME CONCEPTS A is packed in a box. Goodbye. We have known him all our lives, the drab accretions. B begins to cry, we cannot know his enterprise. Both A and B are framed in our field. Looking back, we see the past from C, our earth which boxes in the dead like points departing from their origin. Look for Genghis Khan in D, he slumps in a far back box, horizon's line, names receding, Hannibal. E outside the frame will seize the field as we drift towards Carthage, Hannibal's mount, the steeds of Khan riding out of memory. We expect to predict what has not arrived but will come to us in a cavalcade of this and that until we are A, packed in a box, composed, crosschecked in memory's conveyances. ABCD even E are alert in the archives of our fiction. === Page 10 === ANN LAUTERBACH ROMANCE (SANS RIMBAUD) She said nothing; he mentioned his daughter. They met, one evening, in a room without coercion and from there digressed to a place remote as a park and as wandering: grass littered with small defects, fountains waterless. They forgot their hobbies and skipped out on real appointments with friends. Hair, mouth, skin. They knew them, perched on a limb each morning, singing. He despised summer, the risky season, melodious, thick air entangled air netting journeys he dreamed of; choice itself a violence. He craved an immune but legible haven where he might raise himself to Kingdom Come. He lay in bed, her face overhead, obliterating: a Byzantine portrait. He mentioned his daughter: "Everyone starts with image, clutching the long white doll that supersedes illusion." She said nothing, searched the attic for clues. The old pictures stabbed, utterly private, vindictive: someone standing by a gate in front of a garden. She came across letters, irrevocably folded, and dreamed they were a shape tangible in space, of huge porcelains cast at her feet by an entirely white man. She sent a grave wind to molest him; he vanished. Each moment jettisoned desire until they were wicked with loss. . === Page 11 === Kate Farrell RIVER 1 My ideas began to seem like trees In a cold April, always with a lilac Haze around the branches' tips, and Waiting I thought I would disappear Like the color of the sky from knowing Too much. Do you remember how crossing The bridge in your old winter coat Summer used to end and you thought You were changing fast as leaf colors- 2 As we wait out the rain beneath this Private dock, I tell you that I was Very young then, in the back yard, Overrun with honeysuckle and ivy. What was it I wanted? I think a Collection to hide and come back for. Or the sun in a rowboat, passing a house With a sign on it, RIVER, I used to think I could live there forever. Is this Like my life or is my life like this? And too much is being told again to Separate being with you from the change. I wanted to explain: It's an element As time is, when it's in the style of A city you walk through, not going or Coming back to anywhere you know. Reading what you wrote, so much the Very middle of a season, as if === Page 12 === Remembering with some other memory, As if thinking everything at once Were just like forgetting. 3 I thought I was the only one in space With the pattern trees had behind as I Ran to the postoffice as if there Weren't time. I thought the idea for Eternity began in the speed of connections Between non-proximate things. Like a Chance to keep staying with no sequence Between. What I thought, for instance, As a slight retraction of this light Weather in summer, the tablecloth Moving from the ocean you imagine behind Blowing in waves through trees. I thought I could see blank waves left from leaves Or fast dark brown birds leaving the sky Like a table from the night before's Party with empty bottles and candles. I thought time always took back something From space, so that what you imagine as The most secret memory is still possible To say. As light always gets back Enough color from the sides of everything To keep from going completely away. I Could hardly wait for what I don't know, Maybe just an idea. If I were a painter I thought it would be a whole page of Blossoms like fields in China filled with Birds and buildings and the hot last part Of spring. I thought it would be late Where you were, I thought, to go out To get marigolds or wild roses. === Page 13 === 4 You, coming back up through grass And green undergrowth, is it you? The way you saw yourself later, standing So long on the porch drinking coffee, Trying to begin a new way of thinking. I kept thinking I saw you. Leaning Against the wall in your blue t-shirt, The sky like a tide. It was May, And every day, it seemed, was like Starting all over. The idea you grew Up with, it was that, the vanishing Point of all meaning, and you, The center of a proof being revealed. CHERI FEIN LULLABY Night time. So then. Eyes close tight become the sleeping plant the leaf curled in and moist the rest time to think of you as north and star and peeking light as clouds move south or west away your bed and I rock back and forth with calm and blue like glaze for you this song for you like glass or leaf no light right now no need I rock and think of you inside shining in my throat like song and slow curled in and in my heart a heart-shaped leaf asleep and dreaming clear as cloud moves off the star so shining === Page 14 === DOROTHY FRIEDMAN ECOLOGY It is time to tell the air terrible days. Warn it of white summers in squared courtyards and forgotten churches. It is time to induce humanity. The air must be off there somewhere, perhaps in that warehouse, hiding under shoes. There are sides to paper torn from books. There are outsides of glasses. And inside thoughts struggle. There are excuses. People are drowning here and trees. Sweat is terrible on mouths behind woods. Today we move among the branches, dividing. The forest thins to nothing but two fine twigs. The music bursts round torn branches hung alone and growing old up there. === Page 15 === LOIS MOYLES DECENT FORMALITY Remember the old daredevil-dominated days when, at dawn the flag was run up to its gold ball, and the eagle could come when he chose, if at all? Remember how taped-up bells when tapped gave no alarm, and the rains were allowed to fall several sizes at once. And all the while we watched like very candid wolves, for them to come— the overhead engines ripening out of reach, the flyers falling informally, like loosened legs from the sky, some with chutes, some without. But waiting was a worse ailment than accident, a kind of cloud of cinder that hindered the heart's silent paddle passing. Until those homey-men-like-ourselves, blind to spilled silver (or to even its possibility) rolled like smoking stones at our feet and stained the grasses grey. Or else they were flung down without life— like an insult, to scorn what we adore, and by inference, our taste for it. If by evening they hadn't stopped dropping, at least the shadows were made single and no addition of daredevil could darken them. === Page 16 === Then, when only the billowing smell of the sun in its sack descended, we used to go into groves to be tickled, and to carry out extinct arguments. Our orders were to hold up one day at a time, like a page to the light— some with watermarks, some without. And to find the fallers-faint-as-foolscaps, if they were there. If not, to watch the long slow angles of air for a fluffy-legged, heart-prodding justice-bird tearing at the oat-colored space. It was a kind of grace, in those days, to hear the grasses wrinkle under live wings, and to see them straighten again with decent formality. RACHEL HADAS NOSTALGIA And in the seventh year to return to the vale of civility. The time of blue is receding and the time of yellow approaching. Tall translucent globes of maple light fringe the gentian drumroll of hill and valley. Eight deer emerge at teatime, toss their tails, white flags of truce, retreat to almost naked trees. Against a streaked slate sky of messy weather furled leaves are sharp chartreuse. Sleet cutting sun, compost heap still frozen at the core— all undisturbed by anything but the stately twirl of seasons. === Page 17 === Down in Slab Hollow Grandma sits by the fire and does not speak, Anemone does something in the kitchen, the cranky philosophe grinds valves in the shop. Go with the hermit to trace the course of the brook. Feet frigid in brown water, sit on a stone, pebbles of years nudging numb toes and fingers, down to the cement bridge, the waterfall, past knowledge to the river, city, ocean. Ineffability was always the point. Was land at fault if nothing could be uttered? The fields put on their yellow shawls, chenille, the bushes flutter yellow frills in wind. Spading up last year's rot, keep off of names, identify by texture each transformed species of garbage: eggshell, kitty litter, potato peel, ash, leafmold. Know what layers exactly make the garden grow. Certain things turn out to be important: bluejay gulping mouse poison intended for ants finds it refreshing; swallow fussily inspects a prefab condominium, rejects it; mist all week, and rain. To bed, to sleep, and emulously to dream of bicentennial buffaloes. Full moon illumines Buick, barn. Now the dream master sets the main feature in a T-shaped room: cathedral-like, blond wood, white walls and mirrors, niched guests each making the expected gesture to the enchanting distant host. No, don't be sad. To have entered the vaulted place and sat at table with the others is not little. But never getting closer to the master of the feast and waking to spring rain is where it starts again. === Page 18 === CAROL POLCOVAR LES FAUVES In a few hours I can be found not far from here photographing ships and fishermen I live just past the bridge where the yellow woman sings falsetto. Here, love, here we are all quite mad, the spoon of the sea forever frozen in its cup the day refusing to begin yet if you breathe, your chest will rise and colors filter through In our most noble hours we are like wild beasts insisting ourselves from ochre to hot blues when you are gone i will study at your colors, i will spread myself across the bed and wear the shawl and eat the melon, now i bend to dry your feet In another time i grasped your arm and said, "I can go back now to study the way our forks clicked against the plate," but when sunlight drowned us, i collected you and spread you softly in the light I remember that and the landscape hushing green. === Page 19 === THREE POEMS BY SARAH PLIMPTON a face turning over in the wind reddening like the sky the windows put on one after another hung straight from the walls a brighter light blackened skies burnt into the ground the stars swollen from the head a warm night rolled thin and printed shut the eyes narrowing in the door round mouths of light that shut the air between the cracks of blue small windows cut in the winters head open upside down the ground === Page 20 === ELLEN WISOFE THE OPPOSITE OF A STILL LIFE Blue vase of pleated daffodils, Conceited daisies And dried material "Arranged Free By Florist." Deft collisions, Blue moves of spring. The daffodils are gone in two days. I help the daisies on their way: "I love him, I love him not..." Until there's nothing left. But the middle-the Velcro- Which holds no interest Though it is yellow enough. Then this, too, is pulled free. Surprise of green roots! Then the stem, Then nothing. === Page 21 === MARJORIE WELISH GREENHOUSES AND GARDENS Of the hunted rabbit, strangely and undramatically put into, and who fell into the crib of flowers like the pelt of the hero. It took remarkable sensibility to place his death in a garden, letting the accidental victim fall as if it fit him into the least statistically likely bed. When Breton describes Arshile's remembering it suspiciously sounds like remembering for him. This should be checked. Gorky always exaggerated his states of feeling, the heat, the tenderness, the edible, the lusciousness, the song— an imitation oriental carpet. I was looking at it when I realized his colors suspend in the same way in a solvent permissive yet starved. I am reading letters translated from the Armenian. The language is secluded. Writing to the person who is his sister he can speak of his provincial memories, the heat, the tenderness.... The extortionist grows less. Dearest beloveds, recall father's garden of apricots and ruins where we used to play, the shrine, the milled wheat down the path from our house, and the morose clocks of Ararat or Mont-Ste.-Victoire, and the Tree of the Cross upon which the authentic although sometimes sucpicious and proud crane, white where he flew, was absent when Armenian villagers attached the colorful pennants of their clothing. === Page 22 === His letters made the biography I had read atmospheric, bluish. Distant access. As if the writer were permitted to read only press releases. A generation of writers is embarrassed. The bland composite photo they posted is embarrassing; his letters show real criminality. Clearly he did not let them through but entertained them in the tavern or in calling cards, in places where “social privacy” is. The same hand that really is the immigrant carries the pose, perhaps even to his sister. Perhaps, like everything else, primary sources are premeditated: the episodic hills, the credentials of nature with which he covered himself, allowing seed pods like small glass bottles of cologne to absorb him, putting faith into his meeting with Breton, who in the introduction to the catalogue said his forms are analogical— gradually nature taking on protective coloring. Meanwhile he pleads to be accepted the way he is. Personal letters are like a greenhouse. They step into the garden to have a word with you. They speak, they touch your arm. You vow to go away together. The extravagant humidity lasts from cover to cover, and personality is palpable. They touch upon the situation. === Page 23 === ROSMARIE WALDROP THE SENSES BRIEFLY: A LETTER ". . . it is annoying to tell you how the picture you took of laughter in the window shows that you perfect what you try to escape because in between these lips there’s something" which blows which blows but inexorably you don’t see the error the quiet arrival because the piano leaves you indifferent a word in the eyes of insatiable can’t you find her ubiquitous body? as if in an unknown identity mad and tonedeaf she expects fat letters but somehow forgets the indigo divan and wednesday had this this voice which waits for the horn the repetition the excitement === Page 24 === Sonya Rudikoff NEW THERAPIES, NEW PROBLEMS Dora's mother is in her grave these many years, and Herr K, and Anna O, and Freud and Breuer too, Jung, Adler, Reich, Ferenczi, those early figures, all have gone into the dark. Gone too are the brave young anthropologists asking the elders of primitive tribes when they slept with their mothers and killed their fathers. That heroic inno- cence, that inspiration, that industry and simplicity of olden times! Freud could think of himself as a kind of Christopher Columbus, conquistador, Hannibal crossing the Alps. There was his mission, others were converted to it, there was a small band of disciples, each was given a talismanic ring, and it was all for Science. Could anything be further from this age? Probably the psychoanalysts still gather on the beaches of Wellfleet and East Hampton and Lake Winnepesaukee where, as an old joke has it, when a child cuts his foot on a stone or shell, no one knows what to do. Reading their Newsweek now, they note that a lot of new therapies have inherited all that old excitement of the heroic period in psychoanalysis: est, Arica, Esalen, encounter, bio- feedback, primal screams, or behavior modification interest people now, and perhaps those worthies shake their heads in amazement and disbelief as they read about the new heresies. The familiar theological analogy is not inappropriate here: psy- choanalytic history has been full of struggles over correct doctrine and discipline, with conversions, schisms, defections, apostasies, separated brethren, and repeated impulses toward ecumenicism. Even the term “orthodox Freudian” is revealing, and Freud himself reinforced certain gnostic and sectarian tendencies in the movement, guarding his own ultimate pastoral authority. Was it grimly ironic when doctrinal rigidities developed, then, in a movement that was the opposite of orthodox? The pioneers were isolated, beginning in passionate dissent, gaining adherents only by the power of their ideas, endlessly de- nounced, banned, and proscribed. The followers codified the vision. Others of course have noted all this, amid rueful observations on the comfortable Upper East Side existence of contemporary psychoanalysts === Page 25 === SONYA RUDIKOFF 25 compared with the hard-scrabble life of the early days. Freud's wife never got her snake bracelet, but her sisters of the present time are certainly strangers to such austerity, and indeed the domestication of psychoanalysis in America, its widespread acceptance, its diffusion through the culture, is itself an American success story. Like potatoes introduced into Russia under Catherine the Great, psychotherapy has become a staple of the American diet and it's hard to remember what people did without it. Psychoanalysis now has become a therapy among therapies how- ever, and if it is to be defended, the tone employed will no longer be one of acrimonious denunciation but something more subtle, ironic, affectionate. Current practices of a few unusual therapies might be far more threatening to psychoanalysis than Reich's orgone box or Karen Horney's dissent, and yet the psychoanalytic profession and its adher- ents would never mass against them as it did on those earlier occasions. There is instead a way of being very witty about all these variations of care and cure, with a special wit reserved for those which come from California, mother of cults. Thus, Dr. Joel Kovel, a Freudian psycho- analyst, who has written a survey of the new therapies (a complete guide to therapy, From Psychoanalysis to Behavior Modification, New York, Pantheon Books.) compares the new therapeutic approaches to "a collection of high-school bands milling noisily about the parade grounds. What, if anything, is each of them playing?" It is a genial query, addressed from a distance in accents of curiosity and condescen- sion. A reader might wonder why this psychoanalyst is reminded of high-school bands rather than, say, the marching bands of colleges or universities or of professional groups. And why not of orchestras, with inspired conductors? Parade grounds sketches in a disorderly ambi- ance, vivid with uniforms, absurd self-importance, a fat boy playing the tuba, drum majorettes in their white boots. A revealing image with its instant dismissal of alternatives! This Freudian psychoanalyst does not quite say "Yonder peasant, who is he?" but there is no mistaking the position of comfortable serenity from which he surveys the new therapies, nor the implied orthodoxy, almost as if he were Matthew Arnold being witty about Dissenters. Freudian therapy is given a very lucid and intelligent summary in Dr. Kovel's survey; it is clearly not one of the high-school bands, although Dr. Kovel thinks it has become somewhat fetishized and rigid, and his final defense of it is qualified. Perhaps none of the older analytic therapies would be classed with the high-school bands either. Clearly it is the newer therapies which depart most from the original === Page 26 === 26 PARTISAN REVIEW and the early translations. For example, and taking them in no particular order, there is scream therapy, developed by Arthur Janov from Freudian ideas about primal needs, which uses a method of intensive emotional catharsis to reach a Primal Trauma and achieves therapeutic results by contrived cataclysmic expression of the Primal Scream. There is est, an authoritarian group encounter therapy; the name, an acronym for Erhard Seminars Training, suggests intense declarative being. In the therapy, two hundred or more people pay $250 each to spend two successive weekends locked up in large ballrooms, where they meditate, speak, weep, are given talks and pep-talks by trainers and leaders, and are permitted to eat and go to the bathroom only once a day. In some profound way that few have been able to articulate, the experience of encountering the self under those condi- tions is revolutionizing. People speak of "going through" it or of "having been through" it, and the very strangeness, the traumatic quality of a subway disaster or concentration camp or a highjacking—in an undertaking chosen and paid for without coercion, separates it from the more continuous quotidian experience of many other therapies. Psychodrama is an older therapeutic experience, more continuous with other kinds of group therapy, and its technique of role-playing to achieve psychological change has influenced even those remote from the world of therapy. Transactional therapy isolates the "games" and "scripts" of interpersonal confrontations and introduces a vocabulary of psychological counters (such as "strokes," "hooks," "P-A-C games-Parent, Adult, Child) which the members of a group use to analyze their own and each child's behavior. Variations of game therapy abound in this new world. Another kind of group therapy takes the family itself as the patient, and, whether based in Freudian theory or some other theory, it treats the illness or disturbance of the "presenting patient" not as an individual affliction but as a group disease, the evidence of a malfunctioning social system in need of correction. The individual who first seeks treatment may be merely the most vulnerable part of the system whose illness by definition is of the whole. Unlike the games of transactional therapy, or the roles of psychodrama, or the emotional experiments of Primal Therapy, which all use merely the shadows and images, family therapy as far as possible brings in the actual figures of the family drama, parents and children together for treatment, even uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, or anyone else who is in the family. Some family therapists also work with individual members, others do not; some are active and intervene or === Page 27 === SONYA RUDIKOFF 27 coach, some explicitly support the individual against the family, as Laing does, others take a more distant view of the pathology. Family "sculpting" and genograms are among the unusual techniques em- ployed, in addition to counseling; that is, the members of a family are encouraged to rearrange and revise family traits and dynamics, but reconstruction of early childhood is not considered essential. Obvi- ously, verbalization plays an important part in this therapy, but neither the kind of verbalization of unconscious material for which Freudian therapy is known, nor the verbalization of Jungian or Adlerian therapies. Behavioral-directive therapies work with a different perspective, isolating certain observable somatic or psychic symptoms as the essential illness, and then developing very specific techniques for removing the symptom from the person. The increasingly popular and effective sex therapy that began with Masters and Johnson is an example of behavior therapy combined with some psychological counseling. Sexual problems are disengaged from the rest of the personality, demystified and demythicized by objective definition and by the learning of specific techniques to promote erotic pleasure and diminish "unwanted behavior." Assertiveness therapy defines a spe- cific and limited goal-the elimination of unassertive behavior-and applies specific remedies, verbal instruction, and exercises to increase assertiveness, whatever the causes and history of its absence might be. Behavior modification or operant conditioning can be used to cure addictions, bed-wetting, stuttering, and many other isolable conditions and symptoms; its usefulness extends also to many conditions resistant to psychoanalytic and psychiatric therapies, such as autism. Tech- niques such as patterning which were developed to treat spastics, brain-damaged children or victims of muscular dystrophy, also rely on operant conditioning. Some of the new therapies abandon psychological theory and method and instead work directly with massage, electrical stimulation, drugs, and mechanical contraptions. Some bio-functional therapies eschew the actual use of mechanical aids but concentrate on biological signs, bodily struggle, and biophysical transformation, accompanied by psychic manifestations and theory, as in Reichian therapy. Other therapies may transform the verbalization of Freudian therapy into the expressive emotional mode, as in Gestalt therapy. An existentialist emphasis may modify both the method and goals of Freudian therapy, or an interest in Eastern mysticism may modulate a neo-Freudian approach, as it did for Fromm and Horney. And of course there are === Page 28 === 28 PARTISAN REVIEW innumerable variants and permutations developing in the contempor- ary atmosphere which sanction expressiveness, exalt self-realization, and urge the exploration of human possibilities of all kinds. Countless practitioners write handbooks; current ideas may be incorporated into the thinking and practice of innumerable counselors and psychother- apists of no definable ideological adherence whose training is contem- porary and whose methods and theories are eclectic. Such people, often highly gifted as therapists, may be well-read in Freud and classical psychoanalysis, may have studied at the Menninger Clinic or Tavistock or with Horney or other neo-Freudian teachers. They may have participated in family or Gestalt therapy workshops, or in Esalen, T- groups, may practice meditation, may have undergone Kleinian analy- sis, read Albert Ellis on rational-emotive therapy, George Bach on “fight” therapy, may do diagnostic testing, and might “go through est.” Like their clients, these therapists provide a fascinating contem- porary demonstration of the history of ideas. Matthew Arnold was witty and mocked Dissenters, T. S. Eliot who had fun with Quakers and the Inner Light, and the French Catholic who rejected Protestantism protested that he’d lost his faith not his reason. Dr. Kovel, citing messianic tidings and Lourdes miracles, adopts a similar tone toward the various alternatives to Freudian therapy. Such responses are not adequate, although defenders of entrenched positions usually employ them; few are likely to say or think “Not knowing when the dawn will come/I open every door.” Instead, the variety of contemporary therapies and the ambiguous character of the diseases to be treated encourage an ironic attitude, knowledgeable but distant and uncommitted. From that position, almost any therapy can appear absurd. Contemporary neurosis, with its vague and almost symptom- less, dissatisfaction, anomie, and other features so different from the dramatic conversion hystérias of the early days of psychoanalysis, is so much harder to define, understand, or treat. The number of people who are not actually ill in any previously recognizable or measurable sense constitutes nowadays a sophisticated new kind of critical mass. Resistant to most of the ancient consolations of religion and culture, unable to find fulfillment in vocations, in service, in domestic life, in love, and yet determined to be fulfilled, these are the clients of the modern therapies. Their economic and social lives permit a concern with nonmaterial satisfaction, and their willing- ness to pursue unusual kinds of treatment is testimony both to their unhappiness and to the failure of all the complex support networks and traditional solutions which sustained people in the past. Thus, to === Page 29 === SONYA RUDIKOFF 29 analyze such phenomena in the vocabulary of individual psychology, and to see the pursuit of self-realization as narcissistic is really beside the point. Perhaps more important is the fact that the very existence of these clients is without precedent. Such people simply were not to be found in large numbers before our time. Only a tiny handful of the literate and articulate could afford to be out of sorts with life. Only a postindustrial culture like our own could permit the widespread experience and consideration of unease, only the past hundred years has introduced us to the possibility of special kinds of therapy for this new kind of unhappiness. Past ages had the vocabularies of philosophy, poetry, and religion for the management of life's problems, and the social structure and the folk culture to reinforce personal understanding. In the nineteenth century that vocabulary remained, and there were cults and therapies to rival our own in number and variety. Troubled people then went to mesmerists, hydropathic healers, to homeopathic magicians and in- spired preachers. Reputable doctors prescribed (and their reputable patients followed) rest cures, over-feeding, phrenology, mind cures, leeching, genital cauterization, and hypnotism for the relief of mental illness and nervous disorders. The nervous intelligent people of New England, Philadelphia, and New York were interested in all of the new ideas, and it was in just this spirit that they were alert to the work of Morton Prince, S. Weir Mitchell, the Emmanuel Movement (the first of the group therapies), counseling, the settlement house movement, the ideas of Sigmund Freud-all of which sought a hearing in this country between 1880 and 1910. Theosophy appealed to many people then, often in conjunction with socialism, sex reform, new art, birth control, and other forms of new thought. Katherine Mansfield, enthralled by Gurdjieff a little later, slept in a stable, hoping the exhalation of cows would cure both her unhappi- ness and her tuberculosis, and for the past fifty years such remedies have made continuous appeal. Eastern mysticism, meditation, Zen, Sufi, Yoga disciplines, Jewish and Christian mysticism-all have been summoned not so much for their truth but for their power to repair the ravaged modern life. Contemporary unease has also increased the interest in social therapies, frequently cranky as in the nineteenth century. The story of utopian communities, millenarian faith, new religions, social philosophy, and new spiritual adventure prefigures modern experience; impulses toward personal coherence and evangeli- cal renewal have a social context and a belief in the possible. Our contemporaries might phrase their yearnings differently, but for us as === Page 30 === 30 PARTISAN REVIEW well as for our predecessors, an intense wish still asserts that, as in the old hymn, there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul. The age demands therapy as faith, while earlier ages used faith for their therapy. One aspect of the difference is to be found in the modern character of the medical profession and the consequent professionaliza- tion of therapy, even the nonmedical kinds. Their goals and procedures have been rationalized and objectified, their recruitment systematized, the credentials of practice are civic and temporal rather than transcend- ent, and the criteria of a postcapitalist society measure their effective- ness. No longer sanctified by conversion or spiritual apprenticeship, nor even by the passionate affinities of heroic allegiance, the therapies of the present day are divided and specialized, split into factions, politicized, taught and promulgated by training centers, and solidified with methodologies, prerequisites, licenses. As a consequence, the nonmedical therapies may be more clearly distinguished from the psychiatric and psychoanalytic ones. At the same time, there is a nearly universal preoccupation with health, with the care and cure of the body and its ills, and with the self. Going to a therapist has become part of the care of the self, no more unusual than going to the dentist or the allergist, and this domestication of it in everyday life has provided familiarity and information, if not actual enlightenment. Psychologi- cal troubles are now on the same level as migraine headaches, dyslexia or obesity. Everyone claims to be knowledgeable on these matters and there are guidebooks for dealing with any condition or affliction discernible from feeding diabetics to living with epilepsy to saving or dissolving a marriage to understanding autistic children. Each guide is armed with credentials and authority. The world of therapy has thus unwittingly developed a structure to reinforce the very prob- lems it treats. Dr. Kovel's book takes its place in this landscape. It has been well- received, offered by a book club, and presumably it fills a need. In addition to a summary of neurosis, a descriptive review of therapy, and a consideration of the new therapies, Dr. Kovel provides a practical synopsis in which he answers frequently-asked questions about the specific appropriateness of the several therapies. There is a "guide for the perplexed," a comprehensive conclusion, and a glossary. The deliberate even-handedness occasionally flags, the language then be- comes colloquial and even irritable: the new therapists appear less charitably as "messiahs," "zealots," "gurus" who thrive on "enthrall- ment," who "cash in on" their patients' gullibility, who "trumpet" their ideas in "pseudosacientific jargon," which incompletely "masks" === Page 31 === SONYA RUDIKOFF 31 some sort of “underlying megalomania.” Despite all of this, the discussion is thoughtful, and there is a surprising, even admiring, view of Reichian therapy. As a committed Freudian psychoanalyst, Dr. Kovel finds that the alternative therapies do not pay enough attention to the transference, that artificial construct of attachment to the analyst. Instead of using the transference, which reproduces infantile neurosis, to analyze the unconscious, many therapists exploit transference feelings. Some therapies dilute and defuse those powerful feelings of respect, hero- worship, adoration or infatuation (and their negative counterparts); other therapies may minimize the relation between patient and therap- ist, demystify or rationalize it, eliminating the demonic baggage of childhood feelings, the powerful force of unconscious fears and wishes. Freudian theory posits the requirement not only of transference, but of its analysis and dissolution, to be achieved by free association. Therap- ies which don't dissolve the transference also tend to avoid the uncon- scious, either denying its existence or abandoning the specific verbal analysis of it in favor of somatic or emotional acting-out, or by adopting entirely different psychologies of motive and behavior. These matters might concern some prospective patients, but, except for intellectuals with a disinterested knowledge of the subject, most people have neither the skill nor the wish to explore so closely all the various therapies extant, especially if their need for help is at all urgent. Referrals from friends or physicians might be more significant, so might other criteria such as convenience. After all, only in the large urban areas or in regional medical centers is it possible to contemplate such a range of therapies. For the rest of the population, there is really very little choice. Furthermore, the development of counseling in schools and universities, in industry, and the expansion of pastoral counseling and other services have so diffused therapy throughout the culture that only the most serious conditions now necessitate such exploration of alternatives. Obviously there are thoughtful readers contemplating therapy who might be genuinely interested in this discussion, but the more intellectual among such readers would find the discussion too personal and informal, while another sort of reader would be impatient with the theoretical considerations and especially with the pervasive concern about transference. Who is the book for, then, who can benefit from it? Not explicitly addressed, there is nevertheless a hidden audience-Dr. Kovel's psycho- analytic colleagues-for whom this discussion might be not a guide- book or a theoretical manifesto but a kind of apologia pro vita sua. The === Page 32 === 32 PARTISAN REVIEW entire exploration implicitly if indirectly invites the reader to consider the psychoanalytic profession as well as its ideas. As a meditation it does not have the style or imaginative projection of a more auto- biographical work, but it still evokes certain problems of the vocation, even if only through the scrutiny of the several therapies. Readers outside the profession must remember that psychoanalytic work is not done in the setting of an elaborate technical network, with apprentices or ancillary services, as in other medical specialties, or as in architec- ture and engineering; nor is a psychoanalyst a member of a firm, like a lawyer, nor does he or she have colleagues, students, a tangible bureaucracy, as an academic does, nor is there the executive or adminis- trative work with groups as in religion or the military services. The work is solitary, but unlike the self-employed or small businessman or momma-and-poppa store, this enterprise serves only six to eight people a day, and except for annual conferences or occasional meetings, there is little interaction with colleagues, with "suppliers" or others simi- larly situated. In contrast to the politician, the psychoanalyst has no constituency. There is a chance to make quite a lot of money by putting a high price on expertise, but, unless affiliated with a hospital or clinic or medical school, there is no opportunity for psychoanalysts to see their work judged by others or even discussed with them, no objective signs of its effectiveness, nor any clients whose opinions or sanctions count, except in cases of gross malfeasance. Instead, this highly trained professional must navigate between the arrogance of infallibility and the delusions of isolation and impotence. Like a missionary in the solitude of the desert, he or she must have intense practical need to continue believing in the ideas of an initial conversion. Therapists other than psychoanalysts share in the same isolation, the same absence of objective confirmation, the same sense of unreality, although those working with or in groups are less precariously pitted against their patients both in the manifestations of unconscious and transference, and in the regularity and frequency of the one-to-one consultations. It is clearly a hazardous vocation, though, with great possibilities for doing harm as well as good. Most of the therapies Dr. Kovel reviews do not challenge his thinking. Behavior therapies simplify too much and limit the human predicament to its unacceptable symptoms; transcendent or mystical therapies depend too much on unresolved transference; Jungian psy- chology is too limited, depersonalized, and spiritualized; the human potential therapies which encourage pursuit of self-realization are shallow in their imagining of the realizable self, too indifferent to the === Page 33 === SONYA RUDIKOFF 33 demonic or infantile, too rationalistic, and therefore incomplete. And any therapy which fails to analyse the transference fails in Dr. Kovel's view to assist the patient in the process of individuation, relying instead on manipulation and on infringement of the patient's auton- omy. A more serious challenge, and one to which Dr. Kovel responds, can be seen in the social critique of psychoanalysis, and of therapy altogether. He does not cite the vast literature on the subject but, divided as he is in his own allegiances to both classical psychoanalytic theory and radical politics, he is troubled by the way psychoanalysis has become "locked into upper-bourgeois class interests, a fate which has exerted an inexorably stultifying influence over its theory and practice," and by the lack of a social critique which gives the individ- ual "no choice other than to go along with the cultural delusion which is civilization's classic response to its discontents." The once revolutionary theory, which arrogated to itself nothing less than the mission of transforming human life in society, has been incorporated into late capitalism, as Dr. Kovel notes, thus reifying the conformism and power-orientation of the very society it once dared to heal. The lengthy treatment, and its extreme costliness, have limited the putative benefits severely to only that handful who are able to pay the fees and spend the time. The therapeutic structure necessarily reinforces authoritarian and compliant impulses, even if the transfer- ence is intended to be self-liquidating. The concentration on subjective and unconscious factors deflect attention from objective social and political circumstances, and, indeed, the fundamental action of the therapy itself may be to promote conformity through enlightened understanding, the creature of bourgeois society adorning and serving its creator. Therapy comes from theraps, servant or attendant, and it raises a hard question: if society is the patient, as some have observed, is therapy then fated to serve society rather than transform it? The question, of great theoretical interest, must also express the personal and existential dilemma of the individual therapist. Sitting in his lone office, awaiting still another patient entangled in the shards of infantile passion and memory, any psychoanalyst might well wonder what he and his patient have to do with all that world out there. If the number of patients entering psychoanalysis has declined, as seems to be the case, and if the annual cost of a single patient's psychoanalysis is a sum sufficient to support an entire family above the poverty level, it is not surprising that a psychoanalyst would question his own profes- sional existence. Faced with urgent social and political changes of the sort that have demanded attention in recent decades, what a meagre and === Page 34 === 34 PARTISAN REVIEW limited contribution it might seem, to respond and act by still another analysis of still another dream? And where would be the profound social change that was to follow the discovery of the unconscious? Dr. Kovel does not discuss this specifically and he makes no reference to all the energetic opinion expressed by various observers on theoretical and cultural aspects of psychoanalysis. His own social critique fails to take account of the way the psychoanalytically unprepared for the events of these decades. The suspension of social judgment, for long one of the basic terms of psychoanalytic treatment, and Freud's insistence that psychoanalysis was not, and did not have, a Weltanschauung, had produced a curious neutrality which could be supported or defended only with increasingly awkward argument. Although as an aspect of treatment, it was intended to direct attention away from outward immediate circumstances to the inner psychic forces which create neurosis, as a corporate expression of the psychoan- alytic establishment it had the undeniable effect of counseling confor- mity to things as they are. Did the psychoanalytic writers imagine that the social changes they might theoretically support would ever actually occur? Did they really foresee an end to the racism or other social pathologies whose cost they so deftly discerned? And how was such an end to come about? The social message of Freudian theory seemed to imply only stoic acceptance of war, cruelty, poverty, injustice, and inequality, an unwilling but enlightened acquiescence in a kind of eternal damnation by the irrational forces of unconscious life, which would forever dominate and destroy efforts toward social progress. What made this position untenable, how did the entire habit of mind lose its authority? Was it the civil rights movement or Vietnam or the peace movement? Or the new feminism or the demographic changes which generated the youth culture? Or, as many writers have observed, had important social and psychic changes occurred long before and were merely being dramatized in the politics of the sixties? Certainly some unknown and unexpected quarters revealed impressive resources: after generations of silence, who would have expected the black communities in the rural South to show such vitality? Who would have thought the Catholics would respond with Vatican II and Pope John XXIII amid widespread disaffection and erosion of faith? Who would have expected the ostensibly trapped housewives and neurotic mothers to emerge in the labor force as they did, to divorce, to change their lives, to resume their careers? Who in the forties and fifties would have anticipated the renewal of feminism? Freud had pro- === Page 35 === SONYA RUDIKOFF 35 nounced religion an illusion, interesting only for its psychopathology, but what an important source of strength in the civil rights movement came from the little wooden churches and the expressive Baptism of the rural South! Amid the heroism of all those black ministers, those domestic servants, those students, those passionately committed con- gregations, psychoanalytic formulations could contribute very little. Perhaps too much had been said already in that process of fetishization which had made psychoanalysis serve a religious and philosophical moment peculiar to American life and history. The proliferation of new therapies expresses not only a felt inadequacy in psychoanalysis but also the transformation of psychoan- alytic insights into more available therapeutic practices. Family ther- apy is an example of such transformation, with the transference abandoned, the psychodynamics of family life sharpened, an active interventionist approach on the part of the therapist, and a move beyond family histories and fantasies to the more specific current interaction. (It is interesting to note, by the way, that just when the nuclear family is everywhere pronounced dying or already dead, family therapy should be increasingly significant and appealing.) Other therapies provide additional examples of such transforma- tion. Counseling, social work, and group therapy have all drawn upon a psychoanalytic psychology as their various techniques have evolved. The family life education programs and the family advocacy groups sponsored by the family service agencies throughout the country have taken therapy to a further stage of social intervention. The millions of student clients of the numerous counseling centers at American col- leges and universities are less likely to enter psychoanalysis because they have availed themselves of the often psychoanalytically-oriented therapy of counseling, and the same is true of the millions of clients of the nation's social workers, clinical psychologists, and group thera- pists. These therapists are far more numerous than psychoanalysts, less costly, and can be seen less frequently. Psychiatry itself has been transformed in the eighty years since Freud's studies in hysteria, primarily affected, of course, by psychoanalysis. All of these develop- ments and many others, have changed the position of psychoanalysis among the therapies in recent decades, not to mention its changed position in intellectual life. Perhaps the profound and protracted psychological archaeology of Freudian theory and practice was fundamentally uncongenial in America. This nation of immigrants is itself a denial of history, or a defiance of it, and what some of the new therapies express is an === Page 36 === 36 PARTISAN REVIEW indifference even to the ancient history of each one of us, and an inspired impulse to attempt something new. All sorts of American traits support this; a desire for speedy results, egalitarianism, optimism (which scants the dark and demonic psychological forces postulated in Freudian theory), an openness to experience, unabashed eclecticism, theoretical confusion. Assertiveness therapy, for example, can seem quite plausible in this perspective—why not? Whatever the causes of lack of assertiveness, no matter how numerous and intricate and ancient, why bother with them? Why not correct the condition with certain specific, practical, limited techniques neither magical nor mystical? Freud's stoic poetry may speak to some among us more than the poetry of B. F. Skinner or Werner Erhard of est, or Dr. Janov or Joel Goldsmith or even the ponderous awkward writing of Sullivan, Fromm and Horney. Such criteria may not be the ones that matter, however. The heroic exemplary role of Freud, of Marx, of the nineteenth-century sages and poets, their taste and literary style and intellectual force, may not offer anything to therapeutic procedure. In any case, psychoanalytic claims for therapeutic success are questionable: not only are they based on very meagre evidence, but they are in fact not measureable in any meaningful way. Behavior therapy, on the other hand, despite its impoverished vocabulary, can show objective results of some value: for example, autistic children who had been totally withdrawn did learn to speak and respond when operant conditioning was used. Sex therapy is demonstrably effective, as are Alcoholics Anonymous, Weight Watchers, phobia ther- apy, and other techniques which combine behavior therapy with procedures from group therapy and psychodrama. Their limited conception of human nature may be distasteful but their effectiveness should not be minimized. Extremely short psychotherapy is another technique that can claim success, and orthodox psychoanalysts are among those most interested in it. Encounter therapy, Esalen, est, family therapy, and innumerable other therapies of the present day can also claim noticeable constructive changes in behavior as well as in subjective states. Mystical or existentialist methods, or therapies which depend on enthrallment may nevertheless effect profound transforma- tions in feeling and in action, in life outside the consulting room, palpable changes which certainly bear comparison with the unresolved negative transference in which so many analyses remain stalled. Which changes are the ones to be measured, then? Radical therapy is one of the new therapies Dr. Kovel finds sympathetic, although it is certainly open to theoretical questioning. === Page 37 === SONYA RUDIKOFF 37 This conjunction of Marxism and psychoanalysis, a conjunction favored by many of the early psychoanalysts as well as many social scientists, combines theoretical formulations with echoes of participat- ory democracy, the advocacy movements of specific disadvantaged groups, and the ideology of revolution. Dr. Kovel's critique of it asserts that a psychosocial analysis of oppression and domination ignores the characteristic feature of neurosis-its deliberate insulation from intol- erable circumstances-and thus substitutes false consciousness for psychic change. This matter then becomes difficult to untangle, and Dr. Kovel doesn't take account of the unseen antagonists involved in it. For, if radical therapy should spur troubled people to social action, and if certain social or economic goals are realized, by what standard is the consciousness determined to be false, inasmuch as changed circum- stances are supposed to change consciousness? The civil rights move- ment comes to mind as an example of mass radical therapy: were the students and ministers in the bus boycotts, sit-ins, voting rights marches all laboring under false consciousness? And then, it remains to be asked, what would have been, for them, the opposite of false consciousness? Freud observed that if the neurotic's hysterical misery could be resolved by psychoanalysis, then he would be freed to deal with the common unhappiness which is the human fate. Dr. Kovel puts the radical critique to one side as he introduces this Freudian observation and conflates it with Blake's inspired thought that "the Negation must be destroyed to redeem the Contraries." But what, after all, is common unhappiness? Until not so very long ago, certain life circumstances were thought to be immutable and virtually impervious to efforts of human intervention and amelioration. Historic attempts to deal with the common unhappiness were interpreted as expressions of hysteria and were summarily repulsed or extinguished. Even in the past hundred years, in the history of socialism, of the labor movement, of suffrage, of pacifism, of feminism, the common unhappiness has been identified variously, not to mention the evidence from earlier history. What Negation, then, is to be destroyed, and which Contraries re- === Page 38 === Natasha Spender CHANDLER'S OWN LONG GOODBYE: A MEMOIR A few months after the death of his wife, and a few weeks after his own first suicide attempt, Raymond Chandler arrived in England and settled into the Connaught Hotel, 67 years old, still suicidal, ill, very alcoholic and absorbed in what he always called the "long nightmare" of mourning. Knowing nothing then of this recent history, I found myself one day in late April, 1955, sitting next to an elderly American at luncheon in the house of his publisher Hamish Hamilton. I saw only the lumbering courtesy and humor, which he seemed to force through an aura of despair to respond to the cheerful kindly conversation of his hostess. After luncheon when Yvonne Hamilton had told me the story, I tentatively suggested inviting him, which she encouraged me to do, though I supposed that he might well be in no mood for social life. However, he responded with apparent pleasure and gruff grace to my invitation for dinner in the following week, "as long as there aren't any literary heavyweights around." Hardly wishing to conduct a weighing-in of our friends, we invited younger nonliterary but intelligent ones, who liked his books. It was an amusing evening; he seemed delighted by compliments, and even rather exhilarated to deliver himself, with a certain flourish, of a far too deprecating reply. It seemed touching that, to quote Adlai Stevenson, he should allow himself to "inhale some of the flattery" with a mixture of modesty and swagger, as if a long-immured hermit should be eagerly overjoyed at anyone even remembering his name. In his letter of thanks—which characteristically arrived by special messenger—he said that his hostess might be thought "a rather over- enthusiastic appraiser of lowdown literature. I must insist that I am nothing but a glib and 'quick-brained' character who chanced on a formula that would permit almost infinite experiment into the Ameri- can vernacular." Yet in spite of the pace of all our gaiety, and his sudden flights of glorious nonsense, his great brooding silences and the shadow of his desperation had hung in the air. Later, one of the guests, Reprinted by permission of A & W Publishers, Inc. from THE WORLD OF RAYMOND CHANDLER, edited by Miriam Gross. Copyright © 1977 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. === Page 39 === NATASHA SPENDER 39 Jocelyn Rickards, talked to me of the alarm we both felt about his survival. She believed that his good manners would never permit him to implement his evidently strong suicidal impulses if he had an imminent social engagement with a lady. So in turn we each invited ourselves to a meal with him, or him to one with us. Other friends joined in, and so began the "shuttle service" by which our small group tried to ensure that he was never out of sight of an impending gentle and undemanding social engagement, and that he could at bad times telephone one of us at any time in the twenty-four hours. Those telephone calls in the small hours (for he was particularly insomniac after his wife's death) could start out as long stretches of silence broken only by heavy breathing, followed by grim battles of his nihilism versus our spirit, but sooner or later he might be coaxed into feeling that there was not long to wait for the festivities of the following day; or his sardonic mockery of one's efforts to encourage him led to his being unable to resist making a joke, and then sudden delight at his own sally brought with it a resurgence of pleasure and hopefulness; he would ring off chuckling with triumph at having got the best of an argument and no doubt happily thinking up further volleys to shoot off at luncheon. Sometimes "Hang on till breakfast- time" was the only way to deal with those early morning calls if all else failed, and then one or other of us would go to breakfast with him, "The Dawn Patrol" as Alison Hooper called it. The nucleus of the shuttle service was Jocelyn Rickards, Alec Murray, Alison Hooper and the Spenders. Others joined in, but some dropped out fairly quickly because of the "emotional blackmail" he used in his suicidal state. Our motive (as mine continued to be to the end, having been the last survivor of that group to continue the responsibility) was to see him through to a point where he would want to go on living; where he could recognize and accept reality without disrupting the fantasy into which all his psychic energy had been channelled when he was writing his novels; and above all where he would reverse the process of slowly killing himself with drink. But alternating with extreme alcoholic behavior, his fantasy seemed en- tirely to be used in acting out romantic Don Quixote illusions, from the untoward effects of which we tried gently to deliver him, though at times it seemed far from easy or even advisable to do so, for the process would make him rather ruffled. As we came to know him better, and to answer the many suicide threats or cries for help, both of which seemed to be absolutely genuine, yet elaborately staged, it became no easier to judge the degree of his desperation, for you can't take chances with === Page 40 === 40 PARTISAN REVIEW suicide, and play-acting doesn't guarantee that the intention is less serious. So, as Alison remembers, if telephoned with the peremptory “Unless you can get here in half-an-hour you'll find a mess like strawberry jam on the sidewalk," one was there in half-an-hour— though sometimes one might arrive to find a silent abstracted figure, wrapped in gloom. The oscillation of his mood between exuberance and despair made one realize he was having a concealed nervous breakdown, concealed in that he could put up a good superficial show on social occasions, but in private he was resolutely and scornfully impervious to our suggestions that he consult medical advice for these extreme episodes. Indeed, he put up a very good show with us when he was in the mood, charming, considerate and wonderfully funny— "sparkle" was one of his favorite words, and when he found his vein of good humor, it could be a Catherine-wheel display. At first we didn't realize how muffled anxiety existed even at the cosy and undemanding social evenings he had in our company in ones or twos. At the Connaught, he would roll into the bar like a tough old Hemingway returning from a lonely battle at sea, he would hurl his order for "gimlets" at the barman, and then slump flabbily into a chair-his gestures too expansive, his voice rather loud, the topic too boastful until, after a time, he began to feel more at ease. Our judicious delaying of more orders for drinks, combining with his increasing feeling of safety in the company of friends, brought out a gentler humor, yet curiously dissociated from what we knew to be his true state of mind. However, in both despairing and exuberant phases he seemed propelled by anxiety. Those virtuoso verbal improvisations at luncheon at the Connaught which, by their elegant outrageousness, both shocked and entranced the neighbors at the next tables into abandoning all pretence of attending to their own conversations, gave the impression that he was wound up to concert pitch, and after such cadenzas were over he was quite exhausted. (Later, under the title "A Routine to Shock the Neighbors," he tried to write out some pieces in the same vein, but they emerged on paper as flat, labored and some- times, in their oddly automatic tone of "porn," rather embarrassing.) In his despairing times too, his anxiety rose as he talked of his wife's death, and it then seemed strange to us that after a traumatic loss a person could seem anxious rather than sad, almost as if still in anticipation of the shock. His misapprehensions about the circum- stances of our lives were also at times suffused with anxiety. I remember a whole luncheon taken up with his unrealistic fears for Jocelyn's safety during a two-week absence of her flat-mate, though Eaton Square === Page 41 === NATASHA SPENDER 41 was an eminently safe district in those days. But he clung obstinately to visions of a violent burglary or waylaying in spite of all reassurances. We all attributed the anxiety to the recent events which had made him so suicidal, and no doubt they had made things worse. But as we came to know his life-history it was clear that he had always had an anxious temperament. His mother had divorced his drunken and violent father, taking her seven-year-old son to England to live with her mother and sister in Dulwich-in a middle-class household of high Victorian rectitude, where they were made to feel like disgraced poor relations. Raymond always talked of his father as a “swine,” his mother as a “saint,” and of his own schooldays at Dulwich College with pride for his intellectual prowess, particularly as a classical scholar, and for his character of exceptional sexual purity. The self- control of the Arnold tradition, combined with the chaste and death- laden images of the Tennysonain Arthurian legends which inspired Raymond’s early poetry, was a dominant influence throughout his life, despite his migration to themes of Californian violence, sexual free- dom, and corruption. From his reminiscences it seemed clear that at too early an age he was made to feel that he was “the man of the family” in this household of women, at the same time protecting his mother and sharing the humiliations she suffered from the moralizing condescension of his aunt and grandmother. Clinically this kind of childhood situation is often recognized as a determining factor for later homosexuality. By his own account this was not so in Raymond’s case, though its strenuous repression might have accounted for the alert and vehement aversion he always went out of his way to express towards it. This may be why we all, without a second thought, assumed that he was a repressed homosexual, too facile a conclusion perhaps, but backed up by the fact that for all the jolly talk (“the sex-in-the-head where fortunately it remained,” as Alison described it) he didn’t ever make the slightest advance to any of us nor to any of our friends. But then he had seemed from his first arrival to be a psychological and physical wreck, who aroused only our maternal compassion. In the cold moralistic atmosphere of the Dulwich household he could hardly have failed to acquire a self-punishing conscience so that he was not only anxious, but also anxious to succeed, to gain approval. Traces of his need for maternal approval remained in his demeanor in old age, for I remember one afternoon at a swimming pool in Palm Springs when after each dive he made, he would come to where Evelyn Hooker and I were stretched out on chaises-longues, like two dowagers doing our embroidery, and would stand waiting until we told him === Page 42 === 42 PARTISAN REVIEW what a fine dive it had been. As a schoolboy his strong desire for achievement was rewarded with academic success; for him as for many writers, his mastery of words gave him a sense of power; the written word, unlike the human being, can't hit back. How interesting that in a life so lonely and bare of lasting friendships, some of his most enduring and rewarding ones were with pen-pals, a “safer” form of communication, for the delay of reply provided a cushioning of impact. His correspondence with Hamish Hamilton, which was a source of great amusement and pleasure to them both, had lasted well over a decade before they ever met. His rigid use of his own idiosyncratic moral judgments as a stick to beat others with was part of that same powerful self-punishing super-ego, with which he strove for perfection of the life (perforce secluded) and of the work, and from which struggle his only refuge was the bottle. It made him feel anxious and “threatened” if he realized that there was opposition to his code, which was then energetically used to destroy the reality of other people's, with accusations of “sham,” “hypocrisy,” “snobbery,” or whatever. This persecution from within was kept at bay by projection and denial of reality in fantasy, which suggests that Chandler may have had to pay a very high price for the novels we enjoy. He felt sustained compassion for those whom he could regard as “victims” to be resuced; about more fortunate people with ordinary problems and human failings he could often be scathing and censori- ous. He was generally courteous and gentle to women, and liked to see himself as their active protector, but what he really sought was their protection in the helpless condition to which illness had so dismay- ingly reduced him. When this need made him at times as demanding as an anxiously bullying child, one wondered how much the idolized saintly mother had given to him of the warmth and reassurance he had needed in childhood. It appeared that he had always tried, amidst dangers, to win the approval of his elders, and valiantly to protect her, the first "victim" (or even perhaps martyr? One doesn't know). He used to regret her never having remarried (as she put it, for his sake); he said he had not regarded possibly acquiring a step-father as the hazardous step she saw it to be. He lived with her until she died of cancer when he was in his mid-thirties. Like D. H. Lawrence he had to contend with her total disapproval during her terminal illness, and two weeks after her death he married Cissy who was then still a beautiful woman, in her mid-fifties, much nearer to his mother's age than to his own. They led a devoted and (for long stretches of time) secluded life until her === Page 43 === NATASHA SPENDER 43 death in her eighties, after a long illness. They were of course childless. We knew from people who had met them a few years earlier that they both had seemed nervous and lost on their first visit to London, she very ailing, he very protective towards her. Though knowing his social nerves one wonders if even then his refusal to dine out without her was not partly for the maternal moral support he still both needed and found in her company. His own reminiscences of her were adoring, irresistibly lyrical and full of delight at Cissy's exploits which showed her spirit and charm-she managed on one occasion to drive the car right over an irate policeman's foot, not once, but again in reverse, yet even then beguiling him into such instant and helpless admiration as to allow her to escape unbooked. He would recall the rugged struggle for existence of their early marriage. There followed a swift rise to power and riches in the oil business attributed to his own "toughness" (a favorite epithet of approbation possibly arising out of childhood-"identification with the aggressor"-since he had in fact been a sensitive and not very strong child, always the introverted intellectual, never the fantasized extroverted Marlowe type). He recalled the privations Cissy loyally shared during his late ten-year apprenticeship as a mystery writer, and again the uncompromising "toughness" with which he out-smarted the villains and fought his way to success through the corruption and shifting sands of Hollywood, where he had made the fortune of which he was now so openly proud, and which in his present euphoric phases he seemed to be generously jettisoning just as, in his despair, he was jettisoning his life. What we didn't know until somewhat later was that both his oil business and his Hollywood careers had ended in debacles of alcohol- ism, though he always presented different explanations, denying to himself the true reason for his failures, his inability to cope with colleagues, and the contrast between their invigorating uninhibited social life and the isolation of his marriage, retreat into which provided a therapeutic setting for recovery from these disasters. A healing maternal presence in the home left him free to pursue the interior monologue of fantasy which went into his writing, and even through the agony and apprehension of Cissy's last illness it provided an escape from intense strain. He wrote The Long Goodbye as Cissy lay dying, and we who tried to see him through the subsequent "long nightmare" recognize in the book three distinct self-portraits. It may well reflect the interior dialogues between facets of his own personality as he looked back upon === Page 44 === 44 PARTISAN REVIEW their long life together, which he was soon to lose. His letters and London conversations so strikingly resembled the dialogue of all three characters in turn, that one feels his endeavor to impose fictional roles upon us also was part of this urgent involuntary bid for his American continuity, amid the bewildering though enjoyable impact of an alien English style. Troubled memories of gruelling tests of nerve in the 1914-18 war were frequently followed by patriotic approval of the immense current military strength of America. Like Terry Lomax, Raymond was a young ex-soldier in the early twenties, battle-scarred and scared, whose pride was that “of a man who has nothing else.” Lomax, when castigated by Philip Marlowe for being a moral defeatist, says that his life is all “an act.” Raymond often acknowledged his own tendency to fantasize and play-act, and once wrote to me in apology for having distorted the truth: “I have such an endless sense of the dramatic that I never seem to play any part quite straight. My wife always said I should have been an actor.” To an American friend, referring to his two London visits which, possibly out of pride, he had presented as romantically spectacular when in truth they had been consumed in mourning, he wrote “All the rest had been play-acting.” Like that of Roger Wade, the successful, middle-aged, alcoholic and egocentric writer, Raymond's drunken stream of consciousness could also at bad moments be full of self-hatred, writer's angst and sarcastic hostility. Wade says: “I have a lovely wife who loves me, and a lovely publisher who loves me, and I love me best of all.” Wade's wife echoes Cissy in saying “He was a good actor—most writers are.” Like Raymond himself, Wade is childless and says: “If I had a ten-year-old kid, which God forbid, the brat would be asking me ‘What are you running away from when you drink, Daddy?”’ Again in apology Raymond wrote to me of himself: “It's as if I had two natures, one good, one bad. ... A man who's been an alcoholic and has lived all his life in the shadow of an alcoholic father (even if he never saw him) so much so that he was glad he could not have children—they might be tainted—can never rid himself of the contempt for his failings which that ensures, and that sometimes, however wrongly, he transfers to others who do not in any way deserve it.” Marlowe, of course, represents Chandler's ideal self, the conscience which punished the Roger Wade within him though not without commendation for achievement (for Wade in the book is “a bit of a bastard and maybe a bit of a genius too”), and befriended the Terry Lomax, not without censure. Marlowe describes this friendship by === Page 45 === NATASHA SPENDER 45 saying "You bought a lot of me Terry," and another time "I owned a piece of him. I had invested time and money in him." This ticking taximeter of money at the heart of it seems a forlornly mistrustful attitude to friendship, poignantly so, considering Raymond's gener- osity. In Marlowe's brief love affair with the millionairess Linda Loring the taximeter ticks through the dialogue on the credit side, and in the unfinished novel Poodle Springs Marlowe marries Linda, seemingly alert to the dangers of being morally defeated as Terry had been by her sister's money. But we shall never know how it might have ended. All three characters were drinkers, like Raymond himself, two of them disintegrating and despairing, for only the ideal-self Marlowe shows a disposition towards integrity. As aspects of Raymond's own character their dominance veered with his mood, Roger Wade his "bad self," Philip Marlowe his "good self," and Terry Lomax his anxious one. These three, often in conflict, were in good times subordinated to a fourth, the genial, generous and benevolently paternal friend. At the outset, we were too confident that his oscillations between euphoria and helpless suicidal gloom were no more than the tempor- ary derangement consequent on bereavement. We thought only time was needed to end them. Raymond confided to Jocelyn during their first luncheon that he didn't have long to live as he had incurable cancer of the throat. After a tussle she persuaded him to consult a Harley Street physician; we saw him into the Westminster Hospital, whence after a few days he emerged with the diagnosis of smoker's laryngitis and a determination to ignore all instructions. After consid- erable provocation the distinguished physician withdrew politely from all responsibility for his wayward uncooperative patient, this being the first of many such relationships Raymond was to have but not to hold with English doctors. Who on earth could have persuaded him to seek psychiatric help, for he certainly wasn't a docile patient? Alison and I used to consult a friend, Dr. John Thompson (later of the Albert Einstein Hospital), as to how our friendly but unprofessional help could be most effective, but since it was only amateur, all one can say is that it was probably better than nothing. Soon afterwards there was liver trouble and a host of minor ailments, through all of which we nursed him or saw him into the hospital, trying (when liver tests required total abstinence) to extract the carefully hidden whisky bottles from his luggage without his spotting us. He used to seek our admiration for the "Hemingway-Rockefeller- Bogart" persona he projected from his past, yet he little knew that === Page 46 === 46 PARTISAN REVIEW though his new \"girlfriends,\" as he was pleased to call us, found that image entertaining if only partly credible, we truly admired him for quite a different sort of valor. What we admired was the courage and sporadic humor with which (even amid the egocentric self-pity) he fought his way through these alarming roller-coaster changes of mood, the plunging into loneliness and illness, the zooming up into deliciously irresistible sagas of outrageous nonsense; the bullying contentiousness swivelling sud- denly to the disarming repartee, and all as if it were happening to him entirely outside of his control. Though he could also become an intolerable crosspatch, we admired the courage (sometimes very dra- matized courage) with which he undertook those gruesome drying-out cures, and the effort he often generously made to break out of his hopelessness in order to entertain us. Impossible as he could some- times be, we all became fond of him. As far as we could see, he made no attempt to work in the first two years after Cissy's death. But the fantasy which in health and seclusion had gone into novels in this period of illness and disorientation in a strange country (for his homecoming to England had been unexpec- tedly fraught with culture-shock) was either acted out in extravaganzas of social behavior or found its way into letters, of which he must have written hundreds. His fantasy was such that it was often quite difficult to tell whether some story of exploits had not first been improvised and then congealed into permanent credence by frequent repetition. These stories would even sometimes be about one of us. We heard them with indulgent amazement at the kaleidoscopic change a perfectly ordinary event had undergone, emerging as dramatic or amusing with some- times only a slender thread connecting it with the truth. If one knew him well, one could winnow fact from fantasy in his letters but since they read as plausibly as his novels it is impossible to imagine how a stranger would ever be able to do so. Although some parts were lucid, benevolent and even brilliantly reasoned, friends told me that they more or less ignored other parts of them as alcoholic distortion, or, as I did, "let it ride," interpreting their exaggerated accounts of people, whether approving or scurrilous, as symptoms of his disorientation and misery. Like Roger Wade, he seemed to be able to type equally well, whether sober or drunk. His legacy from childhood of Victorian values was only modified by changes in his environment. They contributed to his deep distrust and disbelief in the generosity of human nature; people are always out to get something out of you and "toughness" is the only weapon === Page 47 === NATASHA SPENDER 47 against corruption. This legacy was manifest in his repertoire of pejorative epithets. "Snobbery"-yet he himself had vestiges of that Victorian middle-class attitude "Tradesmen come in by the back door," and was too impressed by English titles ("blue-blood" as he called it) and great family fortunes. "Literary Pretentiousness"-he was always looking for evidence of condescension towards the "mystery writer," particularly from any writer whose classical education might be better than his own and, in addition, whose liberation from Victorian values might allow him more intellectual adventurousness with new theories than Raymond's rigid ethic left him free to enjoy. "Sham and Hypocrisy"-his sometimes harsh judgments of others were, one felt, also part of this legacy. There were various perennial characters in his more elated fantastic conversation, all of whom could be seen as representing some anxiety of his (clearly related to this repertoire of pejorative epithets or to his hatred of his own Roger Wade alcoholism) which was allayed by the fantasy. For instance, there was the "posh doctor" in striped trousers, whose urbanity or superiority were both mocked yet regarded as formidable; he was hated for "having too much on the ball." (Striped trousers were not only formal attire for Harley Street consultants in 1955, but in his youth in England an authoritative figure of a publish- ing house, also clad in striped trousers, had "thrown him out," insulting him by suggesting he wrote cheap serial stories for a living, upon which Raymond had left England for ever.) The "posh doctor" was always eclipsing Raymond in worldliness, success with women, money, and suavity of manners, and above all was always being condescendingly stringent, issuing warnings or challenges about Raymond's excessive drinking. But in these various fantasy encounters Raymond always got the best of it in the end with some brilliantly delivered insult, after which he would leave the "posh doctor" with sagging jaw, and go on his way laughing. There was an English "duke" in his garden as magnificent as Kew, whose quietly-voiced, politely phrased rebukes to Raymond for his crude and racy American conversation would at first seem humiliating, but finally Raymond would lay a sophisticated verbal trap, the duke would falter and fall headlong, the duchess would gaze in admiration, and Raymond would stroll away refusing all invitations brought by the footman who was sent hurrying after him. Sometimes a fantasy figure was superimposed upon a real person to whom it bore not even a superficial resemblance; it was useless to protest about this transformation. Such a one was Cyril Connolly, who === Page 48 === 48 PARTISAN REVIEW as a literary figure also had “too much on the ball." In fact, Raymond had been excessively grumpy the only time he was invited to Ian Fleming's house in Victoria Square precisely because we had all talked a little (but to his mind too much) of the pleasures of knowing Cyril. He was in fact a brilliant classical scholar who had read more widely than Raymond, and his conversation and writing could be a cornu- copia of these treasures, together with surprising wit, instant parody, sharp aphorism. Our admiration of Connolly made Raymond suspect him (quite wrongly) of despising a “mystery writer." Cyril Connolly appeared in Raymond's fantasy as a curious mixture of hedonistic dilettante yet pedantic and censorious critic who knew nothing of the "real" world of violence (nor of course did Raymond in his very secluded life) and who when finding himself in an alarming situation requiring instant tough physical action would be left helpless and gasping, whilst Raymond would stride in and master the whole dangerous predicament in a matter of minutes. This fantasy of Chandler's physical invincibility was particularly sad when one looked at the sick and shaky man who was entertaining one with these stories, the whole image having arisen out of a single moment of annoyance at feeling socially neglected. In fact, at that luncheon Raymond had been very much the center of attention. He had arrived pointing a finger of triumph at Ian and crowing, "You forgot the glass of water" for he had just read Diamonds Are Forever, prided himself on detecting all faults of detail, and was referring to the omission, in a scene at a short-order counter in Las Vegas, of the first object always placed before the customer; and Ian had amiably deferred to the colleague he so admired, and to whom he inscribed a book "To Field Marshal Chandler from Private Ian Flem- ing." But, as often happens with alcoholics, Raymond was capable of seizing upon some chance remark of a person he hardly knew, brood- ing upon it, and transposing it into his own private fictional context, which then wholly determined his subsequent attitude towards that person. On the other hand he could be fiercely loyal to a friend if anyone else made what he thought to be an unjust or "caddish" comment. He never forgot it and forever held it against the speaker, however unconsidered (and subsequently withdrawn) the remark may have been. At other times he could change his opinion within days, "that slimy punk" having become "that sweet sad man" or vice versa. He had a clear eye for details but not for the realities of the lives around him, since his novelist's selection and manipulation were always at work to fashion the characters he projected from within. === Page 49 === NATASHA SPENDER 49 Another perennial fantasy/real-life composite figure was the rich father of one of his "girlfriends" whom Raymond, never having met him, imagined as a Harlan Potter. He would in imagination rehearse a session of hard bargaining which used to begin with the august and icy "Mr. Potter" saying: "I can't put it out of my mind, Mr. Chandler, that you wish to marry my daughter for her money". . . . "That is certainly a factor," Chandler would reply; after which with all royalty figures at his fingertips he would point out how much he was worth, and so on, reminiscent of his stories of his "brutal bargaining with Hollywood moguls." He himself later realized that this scene related to his inability to work during this time and to fears about his continued earning power since he was very keen to lead a life of secure and stylish luxury. Later in May he moved from the Connaught to a spacious apartment overlooking the trees in Eaton Square, which Alison had found and helped him to arrange, though he was quite obstreperous about her suggestions for making it more comfortable. There must have been times when our help reminded him too sharply of his loss, for Cissy had been very fond of rearranging furniture. It was near to Jocelyn and to Alec Murray, also not far from Helga Greene, a new friend who also gave him as much attention as she could amid a busy life. For the next few weeks Eaton Square life became an amazing succession of contrasts: troughs of illness and misery, crests of exub- erant festive gestures. After one of our all-day vigils by rota when he had been particularly ill and irritable, he could be suddenly jubilant or contrite, and lavish presents would appear—whole sprays of orchids to Jocelyn, red roses to me, or (most endearing, as Alison said) the four- page letter of apology typed in the small hours and sent by special messenger if his deportment and contentiousness had been, as he would own, intolerable, and he was afraid he had tried his friends too far. He alternated not only in mood but also between a clear idea of his friends' desire to help and compulsions to test out their staying power by provoking them with outrageous behavior into, as he very much feared, possibly deserting him. Sometimes he would totally ignore the "only flowers or chocolates" rule and a box from a jeweller arrived and would be sent back to the shop. However he could on occasions become very distressed no matter how tactfully one declined, and it became useless and even unkind to argue. Then we accepted happily, realizing that these lavish gestures were both pure gratitude and the fantasy of his novels rolled into one. During a particularly bad bout of his illness, Jocelyn and I === Page 50 === 50 PARTISAN REVIEW concealed from him that I was to play a concerto with the Bourne- mouth Symphony Orchestra since he was far too shaky to go. However he somehow had found out and when, after the concert was over, and a dinner with the mayor and council was in progress in the vast and otherwise deserted dining room of a large hotel, Raymond suddenly arrived white-faced and ghostly in full evening dress with white silk scarf, lurched towards the table and said he'd come to take me back to London. Lady Groves persuaded him to join us, and after dinner he was helped, almost carried, by the conductor Stanford Robinson to the waiting car—a very upright and ancient Rolls Royce the floor of which was covered with silver ice buckets full of champagne and carnations, a sight reminiscent of a scene from one of his novels. We three bowled off for London through the night—stopping at Raymond's insistence to drink champagne, with the aged chauffeur joining us, and wild New Forest ponies wandering up towards the car. Soon Raymond was asleep and Stanford and I talked. Then Raymond, waking as we neared London, said very quietly and soberly, “I know what you are all doing for me, and I thank you, but the truth is I really want to die." It sounded simple, undramatic, and the natural encouraging reply seemed suddenly impossible to utter. Luncheons with each of us, dinners with other friends, or evenings when we battled for hours to lift his depressions continued. His various sagas of his tough-guy exploits or sexual encounters became even more incredible. There was the instant "affair" with a bejewelled blond he had met in the lift at the Connaught who was "just resting" after her umpteenth divorce, and who silently followed him out of the lift to his room on the fourth floor; or there was his heroic punch-up by which he foiled the attempt by two hoodlums to snatch his wallet; and above all there were stories of rescuing ladies in distress when there was "no one else around to do it so I had to." Some of these tales became part of his life story, frozen (like some of his pet hates amongst acquaintances) into immutability. Though sometimes his hold on reality made him selective about the audience for certain stories (and his American friends, by some accounts, received an Arabian Nights version of his London life), at other times he could stick to his own account of a situation or event even to the person who had actually been a witness of it. His highly dramatized views of our lives (for he treated all the shuttle service friends in a paternalistic manner) were often totally wide of the mark, and it was useless to argue against his strong desire to impose his interpretation. For him we became characters in one of his novels and to introduce our reality into his dream was to arouse his === Page 51 === NATASHA SPENDER 51 energetic opposition. He often didn't listen or, like a magpie, picked out only the bits which would fit his own picture, which was however always one of genuine solicitude for us and belligerency towards our imagined "enemies." He wished to deliver us from the "hardships" of our lives, and thought of rescuing all of us because "there was nobody around so I had to," though he could very well see some of the people who were around, but he discounted for rather arbitrary reasons their competence or concern. Nevertheless, his sympathy was genuine and abundant. To Alison he even offered to arrange to have somebody in America bumped off for having ill-treated her "It'll cost a thousand bucks!" he said, with a swagger, suggesting that he had only to raise a finger for the Mafia to act, and steadfastly ignoring that she thought this might be going a little too far. Suddenly and rather dramatically he announced he was going to do a drying-out-cure at home, and though it was going to be tough he was man enough to take it on. Indeed, in spite of the dramatics, he was. We nursed him on a rota system; I remember Jocelyn coming in one day to take over her turn, looking as fresh as paint, the sad old Raymond in the throes of it, gallantly trying to hurl outrageous witticisms at her, her smiling, droll, and spirited replies, and our most unhappy admiration of his courage and endurance, in which the doctor shared. He was always immensely preoccupied with thoughts of illness, his own and that of all his friends about whom he became unduly over-anxious, and his letters were full of medical details, his or theirs. I thought it indiscreet of him to tell me such facts about others who might not like me to know them, but it clearly was an obsession of his. He looked for illness in all of us, he wished to return to the life of caring for an invalid, and felt utterly lost without the gentle round of devotion and simple errands he had been used to doing in the tragic previous year, when, he said, he had not been drinking. But by now his desire to care for any invalid could have fulfilment only in fantasy so long as his own health was so precarious. Thus it was, I now think, that of all the shuttle service friends, he wished to be of particular service to me, as the one who could be seen as having been recently ill, though leading the usual hard working life of concerts, family, and looking after friends, including him. It is now clear that in the friendship which ensued while I was in reality rather energetically organizing the nursing of an ailing Raymond, and Alison teased me about being "our patrol leader," he was with genuine concern occu- pied with thoughts of rescuing an invalid; possibly this was satisfying === Page 52 === 52 PARTISAN REVIEW at an unconscious level the search to restore the even tenor of life be- fore his loss. He had begun to be attracted to the idea of his forthcoming return to La Jolla; hitherto an unendurable prospect because of Cissy’s lingering presence there. Thereafter his allegiance wavered between London and La Jolla. For all that he had been attentively cared for and even at first lionized in London, he often felt socially excluded, and excessive drinking had not improved his popularity as a dinner guest. London social life never ceased to amaze him. He met a girl at a dinner party and had almost automatically described her as showing herself “open to any proposition,” but on his next meeting he found she was “much less accessible than I thought—she made a very smart and charming appearance and forced me by superior style to act more or less a gentleman . . . she simply outmanoeuvred me and all I got out of it was an affectionate embrace in Bedford Square.” Yet all this was play-acting too, since she never had been open to any proposition, nor had he intended making any and they had discussed only his various symptoms of ill health, whereupon she had marched him off, much against his wish, to one of the many “posh doctors.” He saw London social life as “hypocritical” and never came to realize that London malice is often neither serious nor literal (we like a good joke but don’t believe it for a moment, and tacitly assume that nobody else does; the only unforgivable malice is that of passing on unkind remarks). Although he very much enjoyed what he saw as the quick wit of the English, Raymond regarded this as having “knives for your back” and, for instance, tried to persuade both Stephen and me never to speak again to two of our best friends who had engaged in some harmless joke at our expense. But would his culture shock have been so great had he come from New York and had friends of his own mental caliber—rather than from his very cloistered La Jolla life? He wrote to me sadly in 1958: “If the tax situation permitted, I’d rather come back to England, where at least I have friends.” “You like America because it is bright and vigorous, I like that part of it too, but with Cissy ill so long I never really had a chance to dig some kindred spirits out of the mob of Philistines and now I’m too tired to want to.” In California, his home with Cissy had been a citadel, almost nobody had been allowed to cross the threshold, so although he was talking of his return there with an air of “belon- gingness” and he had two devoted intelligent friends who took great care of him, his stay that autumn at a certain La Jolla hotel was yet another shock. Of the dining room there he wrote: “I particularly === Page 53 === NATASHA SPENDER 53 abhor tables full of middle-aged to elderly females, all dressed to the nines and with bloody awful hats, and all yammering at one another much too loudly in those flat toneless monotonous voices that scratch like fingernails." He had an almost puritanical hatred for the meaning- less hedonosm of aimlessly leisured people parading their near nudity at the swimming pool, and he was also daunted by the prospect of lonely mealtimes. Small wonder that he seized upon a reason to return to England after a few months. I now don't know how he heard that I was ill, but illness was always a priority and he surprisingly presented this fact retrospectively to the tax authorities as a rationale for having acted upon his homesickness for England. Late in November he flew back to London. * * * On this the second period of our seeing him over some weeks, he very soon came to see us, and we were immediately worried by the spectacular deterioration in his state, for he was drinking heavily again. It clearly was to be the problem as before; alone at the Ritz he would drink, and social life would exacerbate the syndrome. Mean- while he was startled by the news (which the Spender family took in its stride) that I was to have an operation in mid-December, so when he suggested a trip south to build up my strength, we were both touched by his concern and hopeful that two weeks of vigilant nursing might improve his own health and morale; though (in retrospect) it was foolish to think that without his doing a preliminary cure it could possibly be effective, the therapeutic success of the previous trip had made us overconfident. At this time he spoke almost incessantly of Cissy, but his previous moods of lyricism and resignation had given way to far more complex emotions concerning his whole past life, and he would be submerged in retrospective anger and active despair. To persuade him that all these turbulent feelings about the past were quite natural, that many bereaved people experience them, and to encourage him, as it were, to plough through them, yielded only limited and temporary reassurance, since even when he seemed most affective and heartrending he had the defensive air of one who could not allow himself to acknowledge what he was saying. We were all determined that there should be no more of the passive despair of Eaton Square, that none of us would let him slip back into his jettisoning mood. But we were in for a long battle, and it now astonishes me that we didn't then realize the underlying reason for the === Page 54 === 54 PARTISAN REVIEW approaching crisis. His over-dramatic reaction to my operation must have been related to the fact that by coincidence it occurred on the anniversary of his wife's death, December 12th. Stephen had quite a time keeping Raymond quiet while I was away at a hospital outside London, for he introduced an element of confusion and havoc where our own family took it calmly. Our family doctor was now looking after Raymond, and finally the long-term effects of his prodigious drinking which he had brought with him from America ended in his being suddenly removed in the night from his hotel to the London Clinic. A two week cure gave him a fresh lease on life, though Jocelyn said that his very first action, as she helped him out of hospital, was to imbibe the largest Ballantynes she'd ever seen in her life. Nevertheless a post cure euphoria prevailed. We didn't ever discover whether our doctor, who was very sensitive to Raymond's need to restore the pride of his Marlowe self-image, had invented an official diagnosis of "malaria" as a face-saver, but Ray- mond was delighted that here at last was a doctor who didn't mention his drinking. However, our doctor told us, before bowing out, that there was by now very little hope of reversing the process of deteriora- tion, as did his successor, the local Scottish doctor. Jocelyn had gone abroad and the others were also away; at the same time Raymond suddenly took a more realistic attitude to his own finances. So we found him a flat near us at Carlton Hill; he found it too modest and neither stylish nor comfortable enough. Its proximity made it easier for us to dash down to shop or cook for him, or to reply to the summonses for help from "Auntie," his elderly daily house- keeper, sometimes at her wits' end when he was hallucinated and extreme. If he was too ill or drunk to be left alone at night, we used to fetch and care for him at our own house; sometimes Stephen sat up half the night with him when he was insomniac. He wrote appreciatively to Stephen later about his having taken him into our own home when he "felt lost" and that Stephen and Nick Bentley were the only two men in London who were unfailingly kind to him (I can think of at least two others). The children liked him ("always drunk of course," they said cheerfully), but he was very querulous about them and, though they were very well behaved, thought that we were far too lenient, and that it was unreasonable that he should be expected to answer them during family mealtimes when conversation should be only for grown-ups. "Any time a five-year-old child is allowed to dominate a dinner table and out-talk everyone else, and I get reproved by you for not answering some unintelligible question the little brat fires at me—any time that === Page 55 === NATASHA SPENDER 55 happens there's something wrong." All the same he felt he belonged for he wrote to Stephen early in 1957: "I rather feel now that the Spender family is my family. And I need the Spender family far more than they need me. Insofar as it is possible I shall always consider myself one of the Spender family." Clearly the previous summer had been a false recovery. We had all realized that sporadic euphoria does not show an authentic recovery from grief, but neither did the docility and dependence of his Garda convalescence, which had been, though contented, sometimes almost somnambulist. At that time the true battle had not yet arrived, for though his new friends had provided some continuity of refuge, a new life in a new country was no setting in which he could resolve the ambiguity into which a person is anyway plunged by loss, particularly that loss of every anchor to previously ingrained habits centered on such a long-standing, enclosed ménage. Perhaps the new battle for equilibrium had begun not only because of the approaching emotional storm of the anniversary, but also because his visit to La Jolla had undermined his illusion of "belongingness," and in his second visit to England he felt himself to be a refugee rather than a vacationer. However, in spite of these overt and more authentic outbursts, delusory elements remained apparent in the over-anxiety and euphoria attached to the outcome of my quite ordinary operation, possibly due to the unconscious purpose of retrieving his own lost past, for the fact that one of his new protective companions had survived may have given him an unconscious feeling of reprieve from the prospect of the continued inner turmoil of grief which was the dynamic underlying preoccupation. So the overriding reason for bad times at Carlton Hill was drink, I believe, to drown the fiercely conflicting images of his past life; and any other reason he projected to certain selected friends of his was a self- deception similar to reasons he had invented in earlier crises to explain, for instance, the abrupt end of his oil-tycoon career. He published an article on Cissy's death which seemed both a tender relinquishment of his vanished life and an act of covert reparation to her for his recent violent feelings for which he seemed to have correspondingly violent feelings of guilt. Some of us spent a number of peaceful afternoons helping Raymond sort the many letters of sympathy and fellow feeling from bereaved readers of the Daily Express to whom his rather Victorian and elegaic picture of farewell had brought comfort. He also invited some of these correspondents to tea, and would afterwards retail their === Page 56 === 56 PARTISAN REVIEW stories with a great deal of feeling. But there were also more suicide attempts, after which he would seem shamefaced and almost contented, and a very strange hallucinatory incident which frightened “Auntie” into calling us for help, when he appeared to be re-enacting his original La Jolla suicide attempt. It is curious that in The Long Goodbye his attitude to suicide is far tougher than that which we all felt towards these suicidal crises. There Philip Marlowe (his good self) says to Roger Wade (his bad self): “nobody can stop you from killing yourself if you really want to. I realize that. So do you.” By now his cries for help had become intensified, as I was the last surviving shuttle-service friend upon whom he totally depended, though he made lengthy nocturnal telephone calls to Jocelyn in Paris, who always raised his spirits. My own anxious concern that his survival seemed so problematical, and my distress about his evident loneliness became the target for his endeavor to project his illusory views about the form he thought my life should take. His great need for nursing companionship would lead him blindly to ignore my devotion to my family and to music, and he would sometimes demand more time than I could spare from work and family, and test out my staying power as a friend by expressing views reflecting a divorce from reality which was beyond the powers of compassion to resolve. These weeks became the peak of his battle towards grasping the reality of Cissy’s death and the unreality of his “play-acting” attempts (as he later described them) to substitute a fantasized “romantic whirl of enjoy- ment of London life” for the natural process of allowing his complex grief to work itself out without either projection or denial. He later expressed his own sense of the truth of this explanation of his Carlton Hill crisis to Stephen, when giving him a far too generous account of my role at that time and an equally generous expression of reciprocal solicitude for my health. “I am willing to stake anything to get Natasha well. After all she alone gave me the impetus and motive for curing myself” (not true—we all did something towards it). “I shouldn’t have cared to do it for myself. She alone had the infinite patience to see me go through crisis after crisis without once coming even near to giving me up as a bad job. The doctors could cure me temporarily, but they could not give me back a soul. Only Natasha could be steadfast enough to do that!” Actually I have since wondered sometimes whether patience was the most salutary help to offer, for sometimes I felt forced to leave the room, if for instance he expressed hostility to children (there argument was not possible, for his feeling of that deprivation in his past life was the saddest part of his illness). I had === Page 57 === NATASHA SPENDER 57 so often admired Jocelyn's more cheerfully forthright way of dealing with crises at Eaton Square, for if he hectorèd, she could hector back, gracefully turning his contentiousness into a jocular vein in which it became too silly for him to persist in it. However, at Carlton Hill his fight for equilibrium was on a much more profound level. Arguments of the form "I know I'm bad and it's tiny steps for tiny feet, but your beliefs commit you to having to help me," invoked when he was desperate, were tiring; though sometimes, like Jocelyn, I could turn him towards the jokes he could seldom resist. Yet one might say there was a clash of codes. Raymond thought the belief I had in caritas and prayer either mysterious or an abdication of intellectual control; and I thought his fundamental distrust of everyone's goodwill too pessimistic about human nature. The battle against his slow suicide resolved itself into persuading him that with all their faults it's worth living amongst other people. Despite mixed feelings, his dominant attitude hitherto had always been the total commitment to Cissy, and self-protective intolerance towards others. Though still fundamentally absorbed by Cissy, he looked forward to finding a similar protective isolation through someone else, where he might exclude the rest of the "dangerous" outside world and continue his creative work within such a haven. Except for what he later described as an earlier "brief moment of infatuation," he had always realized that this had never been a prospect with me or any other member of the shuttle service. As soon as he returned to American in May 1956 he continued a search with a succession of people in La Jolla to reestablish a cloitre à deux-an unrealistic search. But all that can be said of the victory which we in the shuttle service, and later I in particular, had helped him achieve was as he later wrote in March 1957: "You made me realize that whatever one has suffered, to resign from life is just silly." His loneliness at the end of his life was painful to see and revives equally distressing memories of that of Auden at the end of his life. Although Auden was a far closer and more long-standing friend, and we had beliefs in common, sitting over luncheon at Carlton Hill was quite like sitting over tea in our kitchen in Loudoun Road with Auden, discussing LIFE. Though their achievements were of a totally different order, in history they were not unlike; both devoted to memories of "saintly" mothers and both always searching to be mothered, both concerned with the discipline aspect of writing and justly proud of their craftsmanship, both in old age nervy and demanding, both childless, both drinking, and both craving only companionship and a === Page 58 === 58 PARTISAN REVIEW gentle round of domestic chores—nothing more. But where Raymond in work and life was sentimental, a fantasist and self-deluding (his drinking had a long life history), sometimes self-pitying, Auden was absolutely nonfantasist, controlled and stoic, his daily litany being a counting of his blessings. In Raymond it is possible that childlessness explained his skirmishes against both Christianity and psychoanalysis, for both creeds recognise the primacy, vulnerability and sacredness of childhood. Auden's Christianity originated in his relationship to a loving mother; his compassion was easily accommodated in both creeds. Raymond on occasion found it hard to keep in touch with his. Raymond was proud to think of himself as a "passionate moralist," which sounds comparatively merciless towards himself and others; Auden believed benevolently in redemption and forgiveness, and was a "compassionate moralist." Perhaps Raymond's anti-Christianity (al- though here is a contradiction, for later he claimed to be Christian) was part of his dominant modes of defence, projection and denial in fantasy, since he so valued "pride" and "toughness" that he would not have cared to classify them amongst the Seven Deadly Sins. Neverthe- less he could sometimes be disarmingly modest, and often endearingly gentle. Towards psychoanalysis Raymond always maintained a wary if not belligerent attitude. At one of those first luncheons at the Con- naught when I remarked that our neuroses mostly originate in child- hood, he replied with scornful, teasing gusto: "Oh, I don't know-I pick mine up as I go along." (It is true that one of his neurotic ambivalences between over-confidence and anxiety, generosity and apprehension—his attitude to money-probably had at least been traumatically reactivated by a shock he sustained in early married life when he lost an important job and his financial security because of drinking.) He was also defiantly proud to tell of having repudiated the help of the "trick-cyclist" at the clinic after his first suicide attempt by saying: "Doctor, if you'll be perfectly frank with me . . . I may be able to help you." Certainly Raymond was a character of opposites, and hated his own Roger Wade "bad self" with its bitterness. Nevertheless, he was right to express his opinion of my lack of realism later to Stephen by saying that I was "in love with complete goodness." "I side with you," he wrote to Stephen, "the devil is part of the being of every creative person." When Raymond left England again after Easter (during which once more we had been away with the children) he went to stay with friends in Old Chatham, New York, before, finally, the long months of === Page 59 === NATASHA SPENDER 59 continuous drinking caught up with him and dangerously ill he was suddenly rushed into a New York hospital. From there he wrote shakily by hand, thanking me for a "wonderful" letter and saying that he had had a curious mystical experience after five days' illness, having woken with a curious lightness of the heart, as though the "long nightmare" was over at last, and he had been "absolved." It is true that he never again talked at length of the "long nightmare," though at Palm Springs we all saw unacknowledged reverberations of it. The end of Carlton had marked the end of the shuttle service as such, though we all remained friends; his will to live had survived the long-drawn-out crises which culminated in the New York hospital. One could now hope that his good nature, the almost innocent wit, and the affection for all his friends, which had shone intermittently even between the worst clouded moments of the bereavement syn- drome, would now prevail. The suicide threats were over, but I don't believe any of us had the faintest effect on his drinking except for short periods of vigilant care. * * * The last of the three periods during which I saw Raymond consecutively lasted a few weeks at the end of my American concert tour in December 1956. He had telephoned sounding positively jaunty, energetic and (I thought probably) well, and was longing to discuss all his Californian plans including matrimonial ones, for he had spent five months or so seeing a great deal of someone he had planned to marry. But at the last moment they had decided not to go ahead; he was still at times havering, yet already thinking of other possibilities in La Jolla and said that he needed my advice. He was keen on desert air and with his usual solicitude invited me for a two week rest cure to Arizona (for I had been ordered off work for a few weeks) after which I should go on to Los Angeles and resume my concert tour. I had clearly not been a good judge of his state by telephone, for when he met me by car at Phoenix airport on December 6th he was again very jangled and drunk and drove the car alarmingly, driving first of all straight into a fence, and then weaving across and even off the road, so that it was a miracle that we arrived in Chandler, Arizona without disaster. It took a nightmare vigil of some days to sober him up, after which time with the well-known self-deception of the alcoholic he wrote an affectionate letter to "My Very Dear Stephen" saying how well he was. "I do not get drunk, obstreperous and think or say the unkind and === Page 60 === 60 PARTISAN REVIEW often bitter things I used to say with what I now regard as frightful arrogance and lack of Christian charity." Indeed, as soon as he had recovered from the very bad start and we had set out on the tour ranging from Tucson through almost every canyon and desert, I saw that his spirit was transformed since his last stay in London, and the usual travel therapy restored his health. He was his amused and amusing paternalistic self throughout the trip and, as he described it, had become self-reliant. He talked of finishing a novel (the first talk of work since we had known him, for Helga Greene had some time previously in 1956 become his agent and was encouraging him with plans). The upset about the marriage disappointment had calmed down; though he was intending marriage somehow in the future, talked of the possibility of a Texas divorcée and of another very nice ex- wife of a friend, or simply hoped with Micawberish optimism, some- one would turn up. He would live in La Jolla, "but emphatically not alone" he said with cheerful self-confidence. I left him happily plan- ning a longer stay in Palm Springs and myself went off on a round of visits ending up in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve with my friends Professor and Dr. Edward Hooker; where I started practising again for later concerts. Evelyn Hooker is a psychologist, and as we were very close friends, I asked her prognosis about Raymond's fight for recovery, so that when we heard he was to arrive in Los Angeles on January 6th she was sympathetically looking forward to meeting "the impatient patient," as he sometimes called himself. I was now rather keen to get back to work, to stay on with the Hookers practising the piano, but meanwhile Raymond had with great solicitude written to Stephen urging him to use his influence to persuade me to stay in the desert until I was "really well" for he was, as always, very concerned for my health and pianistic career, and eager to do something in return for the earlier help he felt I had been to him. He had always regarded his role as that of patron, though his ideas of a musical career were unrealistically Hollywood. He was very impressed that I played concertos at the Royal Albert Hall or on television but curiously enough he never heard a concert of mine. When Raymond arrived, the Hookers were both so alarmed by his once more being in a totally unsteady and distraught state that they tried to dissuade me from looking after him, since I was myself still in need of rest, and their opinion was that he very much needed the sort of psychiatric care which I was not equipped to give. However, I had by now already promised a short visit and feared disappointing him in his present precarious state. Christopher Isherwood was an admirer of Raymond's powerful evocation of Los Angeles in all his novels so === Page 61 === NATASHA SPENDER 61 Raymond took us for lunch and a perilously erratic drive round his Los Angeles, taking both hands off the wheel to gesture grandly "That's where Bugsie Siegel was SHOT!" and recapturing scenes which he had used in his novels. That evening Gerald Heard and Raymond came to dine at the Hookers, and as always I found Gerald's gentle, erudite, mandarin brilliance a peaceful delight. Topics ranged widely: mescalin, Chinese jades, the piano music of Schubert, Tolkien, and the private life of Dr. Swift, all of which Raymond found very boring, and Evelyn and Edward Hooker's attentive efforts to engage Raymond in conversation were of little avail. Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy joined us after dinner, but even Christopher's appreciative account of our afternoon drive failed to mollify Raymond's feeling of exclusion so often engendered when subjects unfamiliar to him were discussed. I didn't ever discover whether his upset state was due to some more recent drama or development in his La Jolla life plans during the previous two weeks, or whether it was simply a result of solitary drinking. The following afternoon he arrived at the Hookers looking very burly in a red lumber-man's cap and we drove to Palm Spring through sheets of driving rain. There for five days a quiet regime of work (the first time I had ever seen signs of daily work on a novel), swimming, more vitamin pills, less drink and daily visits to the movies somewhat restored his well being, when on the sixth day news was brought to us of the sudden death of Edward Hooker. I wished to return immediately to be with Evelyn, but Raymond was suddenly so distraught that she and I decided that I would return only after three days for the funeral service. I tried to conceal from Raymond my sadness, but his continued irritability led me to consult Christopher by telephone, and we arranged that at the weekend we should all return to Palm Springs together so that Evelyn could get away from her house and be with friends, and Raymond also would have company. Inevita- bly he was to be left alone for some days while I stayed with Evelyn, with whom I drove back from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, Christo- pher and Don Bachardy arriving the following morning. Raymond, delighted to see us all again, seemed strangely jolly, then grumpy, once again dissociated from reality but always animated and contented in Christopher's company, and responsive to Christo- pher's off-beat humor. Evelyn was superb, joining in when she could, disappearing to rest when she felt unequal to it. Raymond was by turns querulous then high-spirited and seemingly quite unaware of the undertow of deep concern and admiration the rest of us had for Evelyn. One afternoon when we all discussed religion, Christopher talked === Page 62 === 62 PARTISAN REVIEW of meditation, and I was surprised that Raymond, generally so opaque to all such ideas, seemed genuinely absorbed by it. He returned to the subject of meditation again and again but reiterated his adamant belief that "Cissy is gone for ever," and said he could only relate that fact to the futility of other people's prayers which he saw as fundamentally no more than "asking for things" which, he said, he would be too proud to do. That suggests that there was always only one thing he would wish to ask for-and that he knew to be irrational. We did not ever manage to convince him that one need have no concern with (nor belief in) personal survival nor even with the nature or existence of God, yet still be disposed to practise meditation. To me it seemed analogous to the concentrations enjoyed by the interpretive musician, but I did not ever detect in Raymond that sort of aesthetic orientation which might have given meaning to the analogy. It was only when we all talked of leaving for Los Angeles that he became suddenly irate, monopolizing attention and totally unsym- pathetic to Evelyn's needs and my desire to be with her in her bereavement. Then we realised that this proximity to a sudden death had put Raymond back into his own traumatic time of the same season two years previously, and he was making himself quite ill with anxiety. So we all gave up the idea of my immediate return, the heroic Evelyn insisting upon it, and I stayed on an extra four days until I felt reasonably sure he had recovered his poise. I later learned that he had minded my spending even the two last days of my California time with Evelyn before my departure. This became one of those incidents to be congealed in his mind in immutable grievance; I had failed him as a good friend. But I had seen no sign of vexation about it at the time, nor any disturbances other than those evoked by Edward's death. However, he continued to telephone Evelyn, to read her various bits of nonsense he had written in the hope of cheering her up and wrote later to me: "I think I really have a friend there, a very real friend." Throughout February he sounded cheerful (though beset with laryngitis and dermatological ills described at length) but the great news was that already he had a "sweet new Australian secretary" and was being well looked after, to our great relief. Her enterprising spirit soon pervaded his life, and he praised her honesty, as he did mine. He was very soon immensely involved with helping her get a divorce, but also seemed briefly concerned with the pursuit of a lady he had spoken of when in Arizona (not, however, thought so intelligent as his secretary), so his La Jolla matrimonial plans seemed already well under way. He wrote and telephoned us often about the Australian family === Page 63 === NATASHA SPENDER 63 drama which increasingly absorbed him; he was clearly very fond of them; here at last was a family to which he could become the father (or rather the stepfather he himself had never had). However, he was in a protracted and annoying battle over tax liability and residential status, so although homesick for England his enforced absence colored his attitude, and his tone became changeable (as it often did when he was drinking more). It was critical of English life, fickle about some English friends he had hitherto been fond of. Though I wrote and he telephoned fairly often, generally about his secretary's divorce proceedings, I was not so assiduous a correspondent as he. He protested about this (sometimes with justice), though there was a continual discussion of his plans and hopes of our meeting him and his new family after the summer holidays. After a dearth of letters from me, in June I received a sad letter from La Jolla in which he wrote: "I don't care about your neglect of me at all-only that you should understand if you want to, how I feel. I was rather stupid all along. You were so kind and tender to me in my troubles that I believed it was to me, not merely to someone in trouble. I now know that I was wrong, that you would have done the same for anyone in deep trouble." After the erratic post had delivered three of my letters my silence was forgiven, suggesting that his over-reaction to it had been another of those dramatic inabilities to "play any part quite straight." A gloriously funny letter arrived saying that he had been trying to think all day of things not to forgive me for and had finally remembered an antique grievance: "When you were going to have that last party for me champagne; whereupon in your most stuffy voice: 'I'd much rather not. When the Spenders entertain, they like to provide their own refresh- ments.' And (all this from memory of course), then: 'I think I'll give you a Talbot,' in a voice that suggested you were going to give me the lower half of the Queen of Sheba. So I dutifully cancelled the order for the champagne, feeling rather whipped.... Now I'm not scolding you any more." I hope and assume that I managed to persuade him that, although one would do the same for anyone in trouble, I certainly did not lose the affectionate concern which, although he had for some time no longer needed us in the way he had at first, our whole family retained for him. These friendships with despairing people start out in an emergency, as if by chance one were the only bystander at a street accident and gave what first aid one could. The traumatic despair of its === Page 64 === 64 PARTISAN REVIEW origins always remains, however submerged, the fundamental ground- bass theme of the friendship. In August Raymond's secretary wrote that I was not to be surprised if his letters were not clearheaded: he was in the hospital after another bad drinking bout and had three special nurses round the clock whom he did not need, for he had made an excellent recovery; but they kept him occupied and he was enjoying the constant attention! But he soon wrote a number of letters describing all symptoms and diagnoses (of course, none of them faintly related to drink) yet already, except for a fractured wrist, seemingly quite recovered in every way. During that autumn, though as usual beset by various ailments, he sounded more happily engrossed in work. He finished Playback and enjoyed his stay in Palm Springs when Helga Greene visited him. She had by this time become a closer friend; their community of professional interests had begun to flourish as the bereavement receded into the past, and she did immensely well for him. It was not until the following February (1958) that he returned to London and took a flat in Chelsea, where he stayed until August. This time he was looked after by a male nurse (which he had needed and should have had in Carlton Hill, but we had had no authority to arrange it) and also, until she left for a trip to Australia, by his Australian secretary. He seemed proud of his new family and that the children trusted and liked him. His life was admirably organized by Helga Greene who had fostered and encouraged the work on finishing Playback. We saw him at meals occasionally through that summer, and I found him in quieter good humor and, I hoped, happier than on previous visits. He had aged; there was less sparkle, less vehemence, little contention and more gentle geniality. I remember Stephen and I having invited him to lunch at the Café Royal grill to meet a talented young writer, Frank Norman, whose account of prison life Stephen had first published in Encounter and whose first book needed a resonant introduction. Raymond wrote it, the only work he completed in 1958. Though older and more frail, Raymond still retained his rather swashbuckling manner. Frank had lived nearly all his life in orphanages, Borstals or prison, and Ray- mond became very excited at meeting (as he over-dramatized it to himself) this "hardened criminal," which Frank was very far from ever having been. Raymond hectored Frank quite considerably, with a seeming vicarious desire for an atmosphere of violence, whereas Frank was quiet, cheerful, and I thought admirably dignified under this onslaught. When Raymond said for about the sixth time, with a === Page 65 === NATASHA SPENDER 65 theatrical tough-guy heave of the shoulders, "You'll never go straight," Frank replied quietly: "I hope, if I have to, that I'll have the guts to earn my living mending roads." Raymond also came to stay in the Oxfordshire cottage where we were living for the summer, in one of the most beautiful large gardens in England, but London seemed to have become his center of gravity at last and enjoyment of the Cotswold quiet, if he had any at all, was transient. He was amiable, unusually tolerant, and bored. During that autumn his letters were cheerfully nostalgic, particularly about Venice where Stephen and I had stayed. In the New Year the Spender family moved to San Francisco. In March 1959 we were planning to drive down from Berkeley to visit him in La Jolla but at the last moment he telephoned to say he was suddenly leaving for England with Helga who, we were glad to hear, had just accepted his proposal of marriage. It was a gossipy, affectionate telephone call; and I was happy (amid later sorrow) to have had that half-hour of cloudless friendship, for less than three weeks later he was dead. === Page 66 === STORIES Bruno Schulz DEAD SEASON I At five o'clock in the morning, an hour glaring with early sunshine, our house was already enveloped in an ardent but quiet brightness. At that solemn hour, unobserved by anyone—while the rooms in the semi-darkness of drawn blinds were still filled with the harmonious breathing of sleeping people—its facade bathed in the sun, in the silence of the early haze, as if its surface were decorated by blissfully sleeping eyelids. Thus, in the stillness of these early hours, it absorbed the first fires of the morning with a sleepy face melting in brilliance, its features slightly twitching from intense dreams. The shadow of the acacia in front of the house slid in waves down the hot surface, trying in vain to penetrate into the depth of golden sleep. The linen blinds absorbed the morning heat, portion after portion, and sunbathed fainting in the glare. At that early hour, my father, unable to sleep any longer, went downstairs loaded with books and ledgers, in order to open the shop which was on the street level of the building. For a moment he stood still in the gateway, sustaining with half-closed eyes the powerful onslaught of the sun. The sundrenched wall of the house pulled him tenderly into its blissfully leveled, smooth surface. For a moment Father became flat, grown into the facade and felt his outstretched hands, quivering and warm, merging into its golden stucco. (How many other fathers have grown forever into the facades of houses at five o'clock in the morning, while on the last step of the staircase? How many fathers have thus become the concierges of their own gateways, flatly sculpted into the embrasure with a hand on the door handle and a face dissolved into parallel and blissful furrows, over which the fingers of their sons would wander, later, reminiscing about their parent, now incorporated forever into the universal smile of the house front?) But soon he wrenched himself away, regained a third dimension and, made human once more, freed the metal framed door of the shop from its bolts, bars and padlocks. Copyright © 1978 by Jakob Schulz. === Page 67 === BRUNO SCHULZ 67 While he was opening that heavy, ironclad door, the grumbling dusk took a step back from the entrance, moved a few inches deeper, changed position and lay down again inside. The morning freshness, rising like smoke from the cool tiles of the pavement, stood shyly on the threshold in a tiny, trembling stream of air. Inside the shop the darkness of many preceding days and nights lurked in the unopened bales of cloth, arranged itself in layers, until it spent itself at the very heart of the shop, in the storeroom, where it dissolved, undifferentiated and self-saturated, into a dully looming arch-matter of cloth. My father walked along that high wall of cheviots and cords, passing his hand caressingly along the upright bales. Under his touch the rows of blind torsos ever ready to fall over or break order, calmed down and entrenched themselves in their cloth hierarchy and prece- dence. For my father our shop was the place of eternal anguish and torment. That creature of his hands had for some time, in the years of its growth, been pushing against him ever more violently from day to day, and had finally outgrown him. The shop became for him a task beyond his strength, at once immense and sublime. The immensity of its claims frightened him. Considering with awe their extent which he could not satisfy even with his life, he looked with despair at the frivolity of his shop assistants, their silly carefree optimism, their jokes and thoughtless manipulations, occurring at the margins, as it were, of that great business enterprise. With bitter irony he watched that gallery of faces undisturbed by any worry, those foreheads innocent of any idea, looked into the depths of those trusting eyes never troubled by even the slightest shadow of doubt. For all her loyalty and devotion, how could my mother help him? The realization of matters of a higher order was outside the scope of her simple and uncomplicated mind. She had not been created for heroic tasks. For he did notice that behind his back she occasionally exchanged quick and understanding looks with the shop assistants, glad of any moment without supervision, when she could take part in their fatuous clowning. My father separated himself more and more from that world of light-heartedness and escaped into the hard discipline of total dedica- tion, and horrified by the laxity spreading everywhere, he shut himself off in the lonely service of his high ideal. His hand never strayed from the reins, he never allowed himself a relaxation of rules or the comfort of facile solutions. That was good enough for Balanda & Co. and these other dilet- tanti of the trade, who knew not the hunger for perfection nor the asceticism of high priesthood. My father suffered when he saw the === Page 68 === 68 PARTISAN REVIEW downfall of the retail textile trade. Who of the present generation of textile merchants remembered the good traditions of their ancient art? Which of them knew for instance that pieces of cloth, laid in a stack on display shelves in accordance with the principles of textile art, could emit under the touch of a finger running downward, a sound like a descending scale? Which among his contemporaries was conversant with the finer points of style in the exchange of notes, memos and letters? How many still remembered the charm of merchant diplomacy, the diplomacy of the good old school, the exciting stages of negotia- tion: beginning with irreconcilable stiffness and intransigent reserve at the visit of the representative of a foreign firm, through gradual thaw under the influence of the indefatigable persuasions and blandishments of that envoy, until the invitation to a working supper with wine— served at the desk, on top of papers, in an exalted mood, with some pinching of Adela's bottom while she served the meal, amid peppery jokes and a free flow of talk, as behooves gentlemen who know what is expected in the circumstances—was crowned with a mutually profi- table business deal? In the quietness of the morning hours, while the heat was slowly rising, my father expected to find a happy and inspired phrase that would give the required weight to his letter to Messrs. Christian Seipel & Sons, Spinners and Mechanical Weavers. It was to be a cutting ripost to the unfounded demands of these gentlemen, the reply ad rem, concise at the decisive point, so that the letter could rise to a strong and witty final plea to produce the desired shock effect, and could then be rounded off with one energetic, elegant and final irrevocable sentence. He could almost feel the form of that phrase which had been eluding him for many days, he could almost touch it with his fingertips, but could not lay his hands on it. He waited for a flash of carefree humor to take by storm the obstacle that stubbornly barred his way. He reached for yet another clean sheet of paper in order to give fresh impetus to the conquest of the obstacle that had been defying all his efforts. Meanwhile the shop became gradually peopled with his assistants. They entered flushed from the early morning heat, avoiding father's desk, at which they cast frightened and guilt-ridden looks. Exhausted after the night and conscious of it, they felt the weight of his silent disapproval, which nothing they did could dispel. No- thing could placate the master, brooding over his worries, no show of eagerness could pacify him as he sat lurking like a scorpion behind his desk his glasses flashing ominously as he foraged like a mouse among his papers. His excitement increased, his latent temper intensified in === Page 69 === BRUNO SCHULZ 69 step with the heat. The square patch of sunlight on the floor glared. Shiny, metallic flies flashed like lightning in the entrance to the shop, settling for a moment on the sides of the door, glass bubbles blown from the hot pipe of the sun, from the glassworks of that radiant day; they sat with wings outspread, full of flight and swiftness, then changed places in furious zigzags. Through the bright quadrilateral of the doorway one could see the lime trees of the city park fainting in the sunlight, the distant bell tower of the church outlined clearly in the translucent and shimmering air, as if in the lenses of binoculars. The tinplated roofs were burning, the enormous, golden globe of heat was swelling all over the world. Father's irritation grew. He looked round helplessly, doubled up with pain, exhausted by diarrhea. He felt in his mouth a taste more bitter than wormwood. The heat intensified, sharpening the fury of the flies, making the metal on their abdomens shine. The quadrilateral of light now reached Father's desk and the papers burned like the Apocalypse. Father's eyes, blinded by the sunlight, could not stand their white uniformity. Through his thick glasses he saw everything he looked at in crimson, greenish, or purple frames and was filled with despair at this explosion of color, the anarchy raging over the world in an orgy of brightness. His hands shook. His palate was bitter and dry, heralding an attack of sickness. His eyes embedded in the furrows of wrinkles watched with attention the development of events in the depth of the shop. II When at noon my father, exhausted by the heat, trembling with futile excitement and almost on the verge of madness, retreated upstairs and the ceilings of the floor above cracked here and there under his skulking step, the shop experienced a momentary pause and relaxation—the hour of the afternoon siesta. The shop assistants turned somersaults on the bales of cloth, pitched up tents of fabric on the shelves, made swings from draperies. They unwound the cloth, set free the smooth, tightly rolled ancient darkness. The shopworn, felted dusk, now liberated, filled the spaces under the ceiling with the smell of another time, with the odor of past days, patiently arranged in innumerable layers during the cool falls of long ago. Blind moths scattered in the darkened air, fluffs of feathers and wool circled with them all over the shop, and the smell of === Page 70 === 70 PARTISAN REVIEW finishing, deep and autumnal, filled this dark encampment of cloth and velvet. Picnicking in that camp the shop assistants devised practical jokes. They let their colleagues wrap them tightly up to their ears in dark, cool cloth and lay in a row blissfully immobile under the stack of bales—living bolts of cloth like mummies, rolling their eyes with an assumed fear at their own immobility. Or else they let themselves be swung up to the ceiling on enormous, outspread blankets of cloth. The dull thudding of these blankets and the current of air that arose made them mad with joy. It seemed as if the whole shop was taking off in flight, the fabrics rising in inspiration, the shop assistants, with their coattails flowing, swinging upward like prophets on short ascensions. My mother looked indulgently at these games, the relaxation due in the hours of siesta justified in her eyes even the worst transgressions. In the summer the back of the shop was dark because of the weeds growing in the courtyard. The storeroom window overlooking it became all green and iridescent like submarine depths from the movement of leaves and their undulating reflections. Flies buzzed there monotonously in the semiobscurity of long afternoons, monstrous specimens bred on Father's sweet wine, hairy hermits lamenting their accursed fate day in, day out in long, monotonous sagas. That degenerate race of shop flies, inclined to wild and unexpected muta- tions, abounded in unnatural specimens, bred from incestuous unions, degenerated into a super-race of top heavy giants, of veterans emitting a deep melancholy buzz. Toward the end of the summer some specimens were posthumously hatched out with wasted wings, mute and voice- less, the last of their race, resembling large, bluish beetles, and ended their sad lives running up and down the green windowpanes on busy futile errands. The rarely opened door became covered with cobwebs. My mother slept behind the desk, in a cloth hammock swinging between the shelves. The shop assistants, bothered by flies, winced and grimaced, stirring in an uneasy sleep. Meanwhile, the weeds took over the courtyard. Under the ruthless heat of the sun, the rubbish heap sprouted enormous nettles and mallows. The heat of the sun falling on the subterranean water on this plot of soil produced a fermentation of venomous substances, some poison- ous derivatives of chlorophyll. This morbid process brought forth malformed wrinkled leaves of astonishing lightness which spread until the space under the window was filled with a tissue-thin tangle of green pleonasms, of weedy rubbish degenerating into a papery, tawdry patchwork clinging to the walls of the storeroom. The shop assistants === Page 71 === BRUNO SCHULZ 71 woke with flushed faces from a quick nap. Strangely excited, they got up with feverish energy, ready for even more heroic buffooneries; corroded by boredom, they climbed on tall shelves and drummed with their feet, looking fixedly at the empty expanse of the market square, longing for any kind of diversion. Once a peasant from the country, barefoot and smock clad stopped in the doorway of the shop and looked in shyly. For the bored shop assistants this was a heaven-sent opportunity. They quickly swept down the ladders, like spiders at the sight of a fly; the peasant, surrounded, pulled and pushed, was asked a hundred questions which he tried to parry with a bashful smile. He scratched his head, smiled, and looked with suspicion at the assiduous young men. So he wanted tobacco? But what kind? The best, Macedonian, golden as amber? Not that kind? Would ordinary pipe tobacco do? Shag perhaps? Would he care to step in? To come inside? There was nothing to fear. The shop assistants proded him gently deeper into the shop, toward a side counter. Leon went behind the counter and pretended to pull out a nonexistent drawer. Oh, how he worked at it, how he bit his lip with effort! It was stuck and would not move. One had to thump the top of the counter with one's fists, with all one's might. The peasant, encouraged by the young men, did it with concentration, with proper attention. At last, when there was no result, he climbed, hunched and gray-haired, on top of the counter stamping it with his bare feet. He had us all in fits of laughter. It was then that the regrettable incident occurred which filled us all with sadness and shame. Although we did not act in bad faith, we were all equally to blame. It was all due to our frivolity, our lack of seriousness and understanding for Father's worries. Given the unpre- dictable, insecure, volatile nature of my father, our thoughtlessness produced consequences that were truly fatal. While we were all standing in a semicircle, enjoying our little joke, my father quietly entered the shop. We did not see him come in. We noticed him only when the sudden understanding of our little game distorted his face in a grimace of wild horror. My mother came running, very frightened: "What is the matter, Jacob?" she asked breathlessly. She began to slap him on the back as one would a person who is choking. It was too late. My father was bristling all over, his face was decomposing quickly, falling apart, changing under our eyes, struck by the burden of an inexplicable calamity. Before we could understand what was happening, he shook himself violently, buzzed and rose in === Page 72 === 72 PARTISAN REVIEW Drawing by Bruno Schulz === Page 73 === BRUNO SCHULZ 73 flight before our eyes, transformed into a monstrous, hairy, steel-blue horsefly, furiously circling and knocking blindly against the walls of the shop. Transfixed, we listened to the hopeless lament, the expres- sively modulated dull plaint, running up and down the registers of boundless pain, an unrelieved suffering under the dark ceiling of the shop. We stood unmoving, deeply shamed, unable to look at one another. In the depth of our hearts we felt a certain relief that at a critical moment my father had found a way out of an impossible situation. We admired the courage with which he threw himself recklessly into a blind alley of desperation from which, as it seemed, there was no return. Yet, looking at it dispassionately, one had to take my father's transformation cum grano salis. It was much more the symbol of an inner protest, a violent and desperate demonstration from which, however, reality was not absolutely absent. One has to keep in mind that most of the events described here suffer from summer aberrations, the canicular semireality, the marginal time running irresponsibly along the borderline of the dead season. We listened in silence. My father's revenge was particularly cunning; it was a kind of reprisal. From then on we were condemned to hearing forever that baleful low buzzing-a persistent, doleful com- plaint, which rose to a pitch and then suddenly stopped. For a moment, we savored the silence with relief, a beneficent respite during which a glimmer of hope arose in us. But after a while the buzzing restarted, ever more insistent and plaintive, and we realized that there was no end to that suffering, to that curse, to the homeless beating against all the walls. That monologue of complaint and silence, each time rising even louder and angrier, as if it wanted to cancel the previous moment of short appeasement, jarred on our nerves. Suffering which is limitless, suffering which is stubbornly enclosed within the circle of its own mania, suffering to the point of distraction, of self- mutilation, becomes in the end unbearable for the helpless witnesses of misfortune. That incessant, angry appeal for our sympathy contained too obvious a reproach, too glaring an accusation against our own well-being, not to make us rebellious. We all inwardly writhed, full of protest and fury instead of contrition. Was there really no other way out for him but to throw himself blindly into that pitiful and hopeless condition and, having fallen into it, no matter whether by his own fault or ours, couldn't he find more strength of spirit or more dignity to bear it without complaint? My mother could only check her anger with === Page 74 === 74 PARTISAN REVIEW difficulty. The shop assailants, sitting on their ladders in dull amaze- ment, had dreams of retaliation and thought of reckless pursuit along the shelves with a leather flyswatter, and their eyes became bloodshot. The canvas blind over the shop entrance was flapping furiously, the afternoon heat hung over miles of sun-drenched plain, devastating the distant world underneath it, and in the semiobscurity of the shop, under the dark ceiling, my father hopelessly circled and circled, enmeshing himself tighter and tighter in the desperate zigzags of his flight. III Yet, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, such episodes were of no great importance for, that same evening, my father was poring as usual over his papers, and the incident seemed to be long forgotten, the deep grudge overcome and erased. We, of course, refrained from any allusion to it. We looked with pleasure, as, with seeming equanimity, in peaceful concentration, he industriously covered page after page with his calligraphically precise writing. Instead, it became ever more difficult to forget the compromising presence of the poor peasant. It is well known how stubbornly such unfinished business becomes rooted in certain minds. We ignored him on purpose during these empty weeks, leaving him to stamp on the counter in the dark corner, daily becoming smaller and grayer. Almost unnoticeable now, he was still stamping away on the same spot, smiling benevolently, hunched over the counter, indefatigable, chattering softly to himself. The stamping and knocking became his true vocation, in which he was completely engrossed. We did not interfere with him. He had gone too far; we could not reach him now. Summer days have no dusk. Before we knew where we were, night would come to the shop, a large oil lamp was lit and shop affairs continued. During these short summer nights it was not worth return- ing home. My father usually sat at his desk in apparent concentration and marked the margins of letters with black scattered stars, ink spots, hair lines, which circled in his field of vision, atoms of darkness detached from the great summer night behind the windows. The night meanwhile scattered like a puffball a microcosm of shadows under the globe of the lamp. Father was blinded as his spectacles reflected the lamp. He was waiting, waiting with impatience and listening while he stared at the whiteness of the paper through which flowed the dark === Page 75 === BRUNO SCHULZ galaxies of black stars and dust specks. Behind his back, without his participation as it were, the great battle for the shop was being fought. Oddly enough it was fought on a painting hanging behind his head, between the filing cabinet and the mirror, in the bright circle of the lamplight. It was a magic painting, a talisman, a riddle of a picture, endlessly interpreted, and passed on from one generation to the next. What did it represent? That was the subject of unending disputations conducted for years, a never ending quarrel between two opposing points of view. The painting represented two merchants facing one another, two opposites, two worlds. "I gave credit," cried the slim, down-at-heel little fellow, his voice breaking in despair. "I sold for cash," answered the fat man in the armchair, crossing his legs and twiddling his thumbs above his stomach. How my father hated the fat one! He had known both since his childhood. Even as a schoolboy, he was full of contempt for any fat egoist who devoured innumerable buttered rolls in the middle of the morning. But he did not quite support the slim one either. Now he looked amazed as all initiative slipped from his hands, taken over by the two men at loggerheads. With bated breath, blinking his eyes from which the spectacles had slipped, my father now tensely awaited the result of the dispute. The shop itself was perpetual mystery. It was the center of all Father's thoughts, of his nightly cogitations, of his frightening si- lences. Inscrutable and all embracing, it stood in the background of daily events. In daytime, the generations of fabrics, full of patriarchal dignity, lay in order of precedence, segregated according to their ancestry and origins. But at night the rebellious blackness of the materials broke out and stormed about with silent tirades and hellish improvisations. In the fall the shop bustled, overflowing with the dark stock of winter merchandise, as if whole acres of forest had been uprooted and were marching through a windswept landscape. In the summer, in the dead season, the shop retreated to its dark reservations, inapproachable in its thickets of cloth. The shop assistants banged at night with their wooden yardsticks at the dull wall of bales, listening as the shop roared with pain, immured in the cave of cloth. In the surrounding darkness my father harkled back to the past, to the abyss of time. He was the last of his line, he was Atlas on whose shoulders rested the burden of an enormous legacy. By day and by night, my father thought about the meaning of it all and tried to understand its hidden intention. He often looked askance, full of 75 === Page 76 === 76 PARTISAN REVIEW expectation, at his assistants. Not himself receiving any secret signs, any enlightenment, any directives, he expected that these young and naive men, just emerging from their cocoons might suddenly grasp the meaning of his trade, which stubbornly evaded him. He pestered them with persistent questioning, but they, stupid and inarticulate, avoided his looks, turned their eyes away, mumbling some confused nonsense. In the mornings, using a walking stick for support, my father wan- dered like a shepherd among his blind, woolly flock, among the bleating headless rumps crowded around the drinking trough. He was still waiting, postponing the moment when he would have to move his tribe and go out into the night burdened with responsibility for that swarming, homeless Israel. . . . The night behind the door was leaden-close, without a breeze. After a few steps it became impassable. One walked without moving forward, as in a dream, and while one's feet stuck to the ground, one's thoughts continued to run forward endlessly, incessantly questioning, led astray by the dialectical byways of the night. The differential calculus of the night continued. At last, one's feet stopped moving and one stood riveted to the spot, at the darkest, most intimate corner of the night, as in front of a privy, in dead silence, for long hours, with a feeling of blissful shame. Only thought, left to itself, slowly made an about turn, the complex anatomy of the brain unwound itself like a reel and the abstract treatise of the summer night continued its venomous dialectic, turning logical somersaults, inventing new so- phisticated questions to which there was no answer. Thus one debated with oneself through the speculative vastness of the night and entered, disembodied, into ultimate nothingness. It was long after midnight when my father abruptly lifted his head from his pile of papers. He stood up, full of self-importance, with dilated eyes, listening intently. "He is coming," he said with a radiant face, "open the door." Almost before Theodore, the senior assistant, could open the glass door, which had been bolted for the night, a man had already squeezed himself in, loaded with bundles, black-haired, bearded, splendid and smiling: the long awaited guest. Mr. Jacob, deeply moved, hurried to greet him, bowing, both his hands outstretched in greeting. They embraced. It seemed for a moment as if the black shining engine of a train had voicelessly driven up to the very door of the shop. A porter in a railwayman's hat came in carrying an enormous trunk on his back. We never learned who this distinguished visitor really was. Theo- dore firmly maintained that he was Christian Seipel & Sons (Spinners === Page 77 === BRUNO SCHULZ 77 and Mechanical Weavers) in person, but there was little evidence for it, and my mother did not subscribe to this theory. There was no doubt though that the man must have been a powerful demon, one of the pillars of the County Creditors' Union. A black, carefully trimmed beard surrounded his fat, shiny and most dignified face. With Father's arm around him, he proceeded, bowing, toward the desk. Unable to understand the conversation which was in a foreign language, we nonetheless listened to it with respect, and watched the smiles, the closing of the eyes, the delicate and tender mutual self- congratulations. After the exchange of preliminary courtesies, the gentlemen proceeded to the crux of the matter. Ledgers and papers were spread out on the desk, a bottle of white wine was uncorked. With strong cigars in the corners of their mouths, with faces folded into grimaces of gruff contentment, the gentlemen exchanged short one- syllable code words, spasmodically pointing their fingers at an appro- priate entry in the ledgers with a humourous flash of villainy in their eyes. Slowly the discussion became more heated, one could perceive a mounting, barely suppressed, excitement. They bit their lips, the cigars hung down, now bitter and cold, from mouths suddenly disappointed and hostile. They were trembling with inner irritation. My father was breathing through the nose, red flushes under his eyes, his hair bristling over his perspiring brow. The situation became inflammable. A moment came when both men got up from their chairs and stood almost blind with anger, breathing heavily and glaring from under their spectacles. Mother, frightened, began to pat Father imploringly on his back, wanting to prevent a catastrophe. At the sight of a lady, bowed, smiling, to one another, and sat down to a further spell of work. At about two o'clock in the morning, Father banged shut the heavy cover of the main ledger. We looked anxiously into the faces of both men to discern who had won the battle. My father's apparent good humor seemed to be artificial and forced, while the black-bearded man was leaning back in this armchair, with legs crossed, and breathing kindness and optimism. With ostentatious generosity, he began to distribute gratuities. Having tidied up the papers and invoices, the gentlemen now rose from behind the desk. Winking to the shop assistants with implied anticipation, they silently intimated that they were now ready for new initiatives. They suggested behind Mother's back that the time had come for a little celebration. This was empty talk, and the shop === Page 78 === 78 PARTISAN REVIEW assistants knew what to make of it. That night did not lead anywhere. It had to end in the gutter, at a certain place by the blind wall of nothingness and secret shame. All the paths leading into the night turned back to the shop. All sorties attempted into the depth of it were doomed from the outset. The shop assistants winked back only from politeness. The black-bearded man and my father, arm in arm, left the shop full of energy, followed by the tolerant looks of the young men. Immediately outside the door, darkness obliterated their heads at a stroke, and they plunged into the black waters of the night. Who has ever plumbed the depths of a July night, who has ever measured how many fathoms of emptiness there are in which nothing happens? Having crossed that black infinity, the two men again stood in front of the door as if they had just left it, having regained their heads with yesterday's words still unused on their lips. Standing thus for a long time, they conversed in monotones, as if they had just returned from a distant expedition. They were now bound by the comradeship of alleged adventures and nighttime excesses. They pushed back their hats as drunks do and rocked on unsteady legs. Avoiding the lighted front of the shop, they stealthily entered the porch of the house and began to walk quietly up the creaking steps to the first floor. They crept out onto the balcony and stood in front of Adela's window trying to look at the sleeping girl. They could not see her. She lay in shadow, her mouth slightly open, sobbing uncon- sciously in her sleep, her head thrown back and burning, fanatically engrossed in her dreams. They knocked at the black windowpanes, and sang dirty songs. But Adela, a lethargic smile on her half-opened lips, was wandering, numb and hypnotized, on her distant roads, miles away outside their reach. Then, propping themselves up against the rail of the balcony, they yawned broadly and loudly in resignation and began to kick their feet against the balustrade. At some late and unknown hour of the night, they found their bodies again on two narrow beds, floating on high mountains of bedding. They swam on them side by side, racing one another in a gallop of snoring. At some still more distant mile of sleep-had the flow of sleep joined their bodies, or had their dreams imperceptibly merged into one?-they felt that lying in each another's arms they were still fighting a difficult, unconscious duel. They were panting, face to face in sterile effort. The black-bearded man lay on top of my father like the angel on top of Jacob. My father pressed against him with all the === Page 79 === BRUNO SCHULZ 79 strength of his knees and, stiffly floating away into numbness, stole another short spell of fortifying sleep between one round of wrestling and another. So they fought: What for? For their good name? For God? For a contract? They grappled in mortal sweat to their last ounce of strength while the waves of sleep carried them away into ever more distant and stranger areas of the night. IV The next day my father walked with a slight limp. His face was radiant. At dawn a splendid phrase for his letter had come to him, a formulation he had been trying in vain to find for many days and nights. We never saw the black-bearded gentleman again. He left before daybreak with his trunk and bundles, without taking leave of us. That was the last night of the dead season. From that summer night onwards seven long years of prosperity began for the shop. -Translated from the Polish by Celina Wieniawska === Page 80 === Barbaralee Diamonstein POP ART, MONEY, AND THE PRESENT SCENE: An Interview With Roy Lichtenstein and Leo Castelli Diamonstein: It's doubtful if the art of the sixties would have looked quite the way it did if Leo Castelli had not assembled his group of artists and promoted them into international prominence. He helped define a whole esthetic period and confirm new boundaries for art. It was he who introduced the first flag paintings by Jasper Johns, the first shaped canvases by Frank Stella, and the first cartoon paintings of Roy Lichtenstein. As critic David Borden once remarked, he may not have written it, but he has certainly lived and helped make the history of modern art, since he first opened his gallery nearly twenty years ago. In 1962, when the art popping on the New York scene was labeled as neo-Dada, Roy Lichtenstein was known as the comic strip man, who used popular images and printing technology, Ben Day dots as a device for formal painting. His remarkable use of the commonplace challenged not only the way in which we live but our accepted ideas and way of seeing art. It's often been assumed that the source of Roy Lichtenstein's originality is in subject matter, the giant brush strokes, the land- scapes, the comics. A first-rate curator and critic and a close friend of yours, Diane Waldman, says that is a misconception about your work. She says that yours is an art of reference and that you're willing to use anything that suits your needs from the art of your predecessors. Would you agree with that appraisal, and which painters would you say most affected your work? What I'm really asking is, how was your vision formed? Lichtenstein: Well, I think that what Diane Waldman said is true. "Reference" is an important part of the content of my work. "Reference" is a much better word for what I do than "parody" or "homage"; but I don't think I can know in any fundamental way how my vision was formed. === Page 81 === BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN 81 My early Pop painting referred to comic strips and other com- mercial images, Picasso, Mondrian, art Deco, etc., but what really occupies me is what occupies most artists and that's constructing a painting—a work; putting together marks. There are certain charac- teristics common to all of my works and certain differences consistent with the particular subject I'm pursuing. You asked who influenced me and that's difficult because there are so many influences: Happenings and Environments, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Rivers. Diamonstein: Was this when you were at Rutgers? Lichtenstein: I was there from 1960-63 and the most immediate influences on my work were Allan Kaprow, who was teaching there, and associates of his in Happenings. Obviously, comic strips them- selves were an influence, but the license to refer to them so directly came from work being done then by Kaprow, Oldenburg, Dine, Whitman, Rauschenberg and company. Diamonstein: What about their predecessors, some of the instances in your work of homage to Léger and Picasso. Lichtenstein: These were more remote influences. I think my biggest esthetic influence might be Picasso. I have only grown to like Léger recently. You might think because of his preoccupation with indus- trial forms and the bluntness and "dumbness" of his style that he would have been important to me, but I never understood him. Diamonstein: I suspect all of these people had an influence on you. Lichtenstein: I agree. Diamonstein: The work you were doing at that time was referred to as neo-Dada. You had a long friendship with Duchamp, who then lived in New York. What did he think of that new movement, and how widespread was his influence on the work of that so-to-speak school of painting? Castelli: Well, curiously enough, the first of the painters that were influenced by Duchamp did not know him or his work at all. They knew about him, but they hadn't noticed him particularly. Actually, they got to know Duchamp through John Cage who had known Duchamp before they did. So, I should say that Rauschenberg and Johns discovered, in quotes, Duchamp. Rauschenberg knew him a little earlier, but it was Johns who was closest to Duchamp. Diamonstein: Then he rediscovered Duchamp. Castelli: After Johns had painted the flag, the targets, the letters, the figures. But then, he got to know Duchamp, and Rauschenberg a bit too, and they became fast friends before the Pop artist's appeared === Page 82 === 82 PARTISAN REVIEW upon the scene. He used to come to the gallery, and I showed him Lichtenstein's work, at one point, when it appeared, and he was very very interested. He liked it very much and thought it was a marvelous development that was occurring in a direction that he had done so much to promote. Diamonstein: In 1957, the first two artists that you signed up exclu- sively were Johns and Rauschenberg? Castelli: Yes. That's true. Diamonstein: Well, how did that come about? What is it that made the Castelli gallery different from other galleries? Castelli: Well, I wouldn't want to boast about what makes it different. I would tentatively say that I always had a historical viewpoint, that I was interested in continuing the great tradition that the Museum of Modern Art had begun of really analyzing painters and movements, a thing that had not been done in France, where all these painters came from. Diamonstein: Who were the painters that were represented in the gallery? Castelli: Well, I was conscious after coming to this country in 1941— and I first went to the Museum of Modern Art-that something was happening there that had never happened in Europe. I saw that Alfred Barr, who was chiefly responsible for the choices and the structure of the museum, had assembled the artists-Picasso, Ma- tisse, Arp, and Brancusi-who had really invented something that was new. So, for instance, for the first time in my life I saw Mondrian, and even more surprising, Klee, who wasn't at all represented in Europe. They didn't know about him in France, strangely, whereas they knew Kandinsky, but only his last period. This was the first time I found out what modern art was about, and having found out, I thought I would continue the work of the museum and try to find out where art was going from this point. We all knew Abstract Expres- sionists and I was involved with all the artists of that group, de Kooning, Rothko, Kline, and so on, but this was a movement that I could not really deal with because they were all at the Janis gallery, and Sidney took care of them. So I wanted to continue from there. Well, what was going to come after Abstract Expressionism? There were lots of followers and they were all just repeating, mechanically almost, the gestures that really had meaning in the others. And when I opened my gallery I had to put together a stable, and that is by no means easy. An accident helped a great deal there, and that accident, in my career, was the appearance of Rauschenberg and Johns. === Page 83 === BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN Diamonstein: And after Rauschenberg and Johns, who were the artists in the gallery? Castelli: Well, after Rauschenberg and Johns—at the same time as Rauschenberg and Johns-I did find a close friend of theirs, Cy Twombly. But he very soon went to Europe, disappeared, and although I had been giving him shows all along, he missed part of what was going on here in New York. He was a little bit of an outsider. But, of course, a great painter, as you all know. After that, the next ones who appeared upon the scene were Stella, especially, and also a woman, Lee Bontecon who did, at that time, most amazing work. It's really a great shame that after a few years of glorious work she disappeared from the scene. Of course, Stella was to be much more important than Lee Bontecon. Diamonstein: When did Roy appear on the scene? Castelli: Actually, Lichtenstein appeared in '61, and he appeared with a certain number of paintings under his arm. There were some that I liked very much and some that I didn't find as interesting. Diamonstein: These were cartoon paintings? Castelli: They were cartoon paintings of bathroom interiors. I found out pretty rapidly that in one of the canvases that was terribly interesting he was blowing small things up, you know-a cup, for example, much larger than nature. It was one of the things that was absolutely required to make them work. There were others that didn't do that, and I found them less interesting. Now, later on, of course, that element is not necessary any longer. His brush strokes were gigantic too. Diamonstein: Roy, I've read that it was a Bazooka bubble gum wrapper that originally inspired you, and Leo once told me that it was cartoons for your children's room. What is the genesis of the work? Lichtenstein: I hate to be a great mediator, but I think I drew some cartoons for my children from Bazooka bubble gum wrappers. I hope history records this carefully. Castelli: Just to finish a moment, about his appearance with his paintings: I liked them very much, and of course, I decided immedi- ately that he would be somebody that we wanted to handle and show. This whole group-Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and Johns- in the beginning, before the word Pop Art came out, was called neo- Dada. This was because it proceeded from the Dadaist beginnings of Duchamp, who actually wasn't a real Dadaist either. At that time, I had decided that we would do a very special, curious show. It was a 83 === Page 84 === 84 PARTISAN REVIEW Rauschenberg show, but it began as a group show. At first only one Rauschenberg would appear, and then, every other day I would take out a painting of somebody else's and put in another Rauschenberg, so that in about ten days all the other paintings were evicted, and there was only Rauschenberg; and then the show finished in the same way; he was replaced little by little by other paintings. Diamonstein: Was that the first process art? Castelli: It was the first thing I did that seemed a little bizarre. It was in the style of Happenings, I would say. But to come back to Lichtenstein, who plays a role here, I put one of Roy's paintings in that show at the beginning, and it was on that occasion that Rauschenberg saw a Lichtenstein painting for the first time. He was incredibly taken aback and didn't know what to do with it. He said, what is that, I really don't understand, and the next day he came up and said, I really thought about it and I think I understand it, and I do like it very much. Diamonstein: How would you describe the Pop Art movement, Roy? And who made the movement? Did you ever expect the press to react to the artistic adventures of that group in the way that they did? Lichtenstein: No, I wouldn't have imagined anything like that. I was brought up in an era when very few serious American artists had any success with their art, and I was teaching and painting, and I expected to continue that way. So, I had no expectation that something like that would happen. In fact I thought nobody would like the work. The only gallery that I thought would look at the work at all was Leo's or possibly Green gallery. Most galleries, advanced galleries, seemed committed to Abstract Expressionism. I also didn't realize that other artists were doing a similar kind of work. Diamonstein: Who helped it coalesce into a movement, and who made it? Lichtenstein: I think it began when Leo (there were also, of course, Ivar Karp, Ileana Sonnabend, and Dick Bellamy) saw within a three week period three artists doing somewhat similar things. Leo's description of me bringing my work to the gallery for the first time is about right. I left the paintings at the gallery and came back three weeks later and saw Warhol's work and heard about Rosenquist's. I think this was seen to be a movement by Leo, and there were other artists involved too: Oldenburg, Dine, Wesselman, and Segal to name some. Diamonstein: Do you think the kind of art we're talking about can still be called Pop Art? === Page 85 === BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN 85 Lichtenstein: I think our work has changed since the early sixties to the point where Pop is no longer a good description. At any rate I don't love having all my efforts summed up as "Pop." Words like that stop people from thinking. Of course I liked that in the beginning: Roy equals Pop. The word means what you think it means. Diamonstein: What does it mean to you? Lichtenstein: Well, I suppose it is art that refers to commercial images or that imitates techniques of commercial printing. There is usually an absurd edge to introducing the insensitive elements of commerce into art. I think most people realize all this, but I think these elements get changed when the work itself is unified. All this can be referred to as "Pop" if you want. I'm sure we will never be able to change the name no matter what. Castelli: Actually, Abstract Expressionism is extremely varied and its all put into the same bag too. You compare Pollock to Rothko, and you see that the difference is immense. Lichtenstein: Nothing can be done about it. The names stick. I use them myself. Diamonstein: Leo, you said recently that you felt that everything in painting and sculpture seems to have been done. I suspect you might have said the same thing in the late fifties as well. Do you really mean that? Do you see any new trends ahead? Castelli: I did say that things seem that way, but as you point out quite correctly, it seemed that way in the fifties too, the late fifties, before the appearance of Rauschenberg and Johns and so-called Pop Art as we've used the term. So one can never foresee what's going to happen. One might almost say that what happens occasionally is a mutation really, because artists tend to go on exploring and basing their explorations on the previous artists, and then perhaps they see a new area there that they can explore. And the more intelligent ones, the geniuses, do find a way out of the dilemma of going on and repeating what their predecessors have been doing. Diamonstein: Well your own work has certainly evolved, Roy-from cartoons to architectural influences to futurism to Ben Day sunsets to the influence of Monet and Mondrian and Donald Duck. It reflected, of course, much of the sixties technology. In what direction is your work moving now? Lichtenstein: I don't know for sure. I've just finished a group of still- lifes which was based on industrial furniture, institutional furniture. It was taken mostly from ads of, well, companies that sell steel tubular furniture to offices. It's an offshoot of other still-lifes I've === Page 86 === 86 PARTISAN REVIEW done. Now I think I'm going to do something with surrealism; but since I haven't done it, there's no point in dwelling on it. I mean, I have some ideas, a few drawings. Diamonstein: Leo, how do you decide what work is shown in your gallery, and how do you decide the market value of a work of art? Castelli: Whenever a group of paintings, say by Lichtenstein, is ready-even before it's ready-we start thinking when, how, and where we are going to show. Generally speaking, when something new comes up, I like to show it in New York to begin with and then it can travel to other places. But we have done otherwise on some occasions. Diamonstein: Let me amplify that question a bit, if I may, because there is much talk that prices are not arrived at necessarily as a result of market forces alone. There is talk, and I guess there has always been in the world of art, that sometimes the bidding up of prices occurs, that there's collusion, and the placing, rather than the selling, of works of art. How much price manipulation has gone on and still goes on? Castelli: I would say, since you mention the term "market forces," that most definitely these forces, at least in my case, make up the prices. As far as I'm concerned, when a new group of work comes up, it has exactly the same price as the previous group. The market forces may now come about through the secondary market. Dealers do buy paintings, not only collectors. Little by little, they increase the prices-my prices. It's a slow process. But then, suddenly, a sale comes about at Parke-Bernet, and a painting that I sold, say, two or three years before, for thirty thousand dollars, as in a recent instance, shoots up to ninety thousand dollars. Diamonstein: What painting was that? Castelli: That was a painting of a studio interior of Roy's, and we expected it to go pretty high, but not to ninety thousand dollars. Then that of course influences the prices of other paintings that I may have or other dealers may have. We look at a painting and we see that it's just as good or better than the one that went for ninety thousand dollars. Diamonstein: How does that square with an artist's point of view? Lichtenstein: I have no influence over the price of the work. Castelli: The only influence you have is that always when a new series comes up, we discuss the price of each and every painting, and we usually pattern our prices on the previous show. Diamonstein: More and more museum directors point with pride to their ability to merchandise their museum and its activities. More === Page 87 === BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN 87 and more of their conversation seems to concern itself with box office rather than scholarship. What do you see, in terms of showing contemporary works of art, as the differences in role and function between museums and galleries? Castelli: Well, we are obviously infinitely more flexible than museums can be. They have to make a plan way ahead of time. They cannot show anything really important that appears on the scene. So we are actually the pioneers. And sometimes-I would say through practi- cally the whole of the sixties-the museums really have been very remiss. They haven't picked up any of the new movements, and the few galleries that are involved in avant-garde art have done the whole job of promoting the new art. Diamonstein: Roy, do you think the museums have been remiss as well? Lichtenstein: I think they've been very late. I think they were very late with Abstract Expressionism, and I think they were very late from then on. They've been very late with Pop and everything that came after. I think Leo and some other galleries are really important in that role because they do show work that may have no chance of selling, but that ought to be seen. I think that's a very important role. You're also getting separate views from each gallery. And there are many more galleries than museums. Castelli: One thing that's not really recognized is that about ninety- five percent of our activity-I don't speak of commercial galleries, but the galleries who take care of the avant-garde, the new things- I'd say ninety-five percent of our activity is public service activity. We have to finance ourselves for public service activity. The museums get funds in other ways, and they're always crying for money. Well, we have a tough time too. Diamonstein: Do you see the role of galleries taking on what were considered to be the functions of museums in the past-educational roles and in the public interest? How do you see your own role and function as an art dealer-as an impresario? Castelli: Yes, well, the impresario part, of course, is a little bit of a joke, because I was always thinking that really I was not interested in buying and selling paintings at all, but doing the job, discovering and presenting to the public works that are new, that seemed to me important, that indicated historical development. Diamonstein: In 1964, Robert Rauschenberg won the top prize at the Venice Biennale, amid a swirl of rumors, most of them also related to your activities. What is your version of these events? Castelli: My version is simply that Ileana Sonnabend and I had === Page 88 === 88 PARTISAN REVIEW absolute faith in his importance and worked very hard to make Rauschenberg a famous painter and that it was as the result of our prolonged efforts that he got to the Biennale, that he got the prize. From the audience: What do you do to build up your artists? Castelli: Build them up? Well, one thing is, first, complete and total belief in the artist. If you don't believe in him, you can't build him up. I had really a fanatical enthusiasm. You can't imagine how fanatical it was. Now everything has sort of taken its course and many years have gone by. But how fanatical I was about the artists, like Rauschenberg, like Johns, like Lichtenstein, the early times, and therefore I felt it was almost like a mission to promote them. I was very much assisted in that work, especially with Rauschenberg and Johns, by Alan Solomon, who did a splendid show of Rauschenberg first, and Johns afterwards, at the Jewish Museum. And that was an incredibly influential event. Perhaps it was not understood how important it was at that time, but certainly it contributed enor- mously to Rauschenberg's getting the prize at the Venice Biennale. Diamonstein: Excluding Lichtenstein, who are your favorite artists? Castelli: There are Johns, Rauschenberg, and probably the first ones that I had who went in a certain direction. Then there is Frank Stella. Now I have two new artists that are pretty abstract. They are Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland. Then there are Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Rosenquist. Then come the Minimal artists like Bob Morris and Donald Judd. What comes next is a little obscure. But let's stop here and not make a longer list. Diamonstein: Roy, excluding Leo, who is your favorite artist? Lichtenstein: Duccio. Castelli: An Italian artist of the thirteenth century. Lichtenstein: Duccio di Buoninsegna of Siena. Diamonstein: There has always been a classical influence on your work, an informed sensibility. What about the influence of architec- ture? Lichtenstein: Just pediments and things that I've seen around New York City. I started to do those in black and white. We're talking about those long paintings that have architectural motifs. I took some photographs of buildings in bright sunlight with the shadow coming down to show the architectural detail. I did those black and white paintings maybe four or five years before, and then I found a way of adding color and other texture to the work, and did my recent work in that area. Diamonstein: Is shape more important to you than color? Lichtenstein: Yes. I think shape is more important than color. It's the === Page 89 === BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN 89 fundamental thing about art. There is no such thing as color without shape. A color has to end somewhere. I've never seen a color organization that had no form. Diamonstein: How would you characterize the use of words in your painting? Lichtenstein: The words are usually absurd statements. They form an area of gray pattern—black letters against white. The statements they make are usually too simple or too complicated or mildly funny in some way. Diamonstein: Roy, how great is the influence of photography and film on your work? Lichtenstein: Well, I think photography had an influence, quite an influence on my cartoon things, and I think it had an influence on my work because photography had an influence on cartooning itself. Airplane battles and things like that are not something you see at eye level in the normal course of painting a still life or portrait. So to see a man in an airplane is obviously the result of having seen a photograph somehow. Of course, I saw the cartoon, but I think those sort of cinema-like shorts which are used a lot in cartoons themselves influenced the character of some early work of mine. I'm not particularly interested in photography—I mean, as an art form. The photographic thing plays some part in the printing process, the dots and all that kind of—something vaguely to do with photography. That's probably what you mean. Diamonstein: Who was Ben Day? What's the origin of that term?* Lichtenstein: I have yet to find out. It would be the invention of having some way of, instead of making the gray, making little black and white dots on a screen, and they could be indicated by the artist that this would be a forty percent screen— Diamonstein: You slip the Ben Day dot in. Lichtenstein: And the printer puts the Ben Day on it. What I've been imitating more than that is something like art type, which is a printed dot on a transparent paper of some sort that has a wax on it, and you burnish it down on your drawing, which some cartoonists use, I guess. But it's supposed to imitate printing, of course, that part of printing comes through photography in a way. Diamonstein: How did you become a painter, Roy? *Note: The printer credited with the shading effect through the use of dots was Benjamin Day, Jr., the son of the founder of the New York Sun (circa 1832), the first of the penny dreadfuls. Incidentally, he was also the father of Clarence Day who wrote Life With Father. === Page 90 === 90 PARTISAN REVIEW Lichtenstein: I don't know. I just went to art school. Since the age of fifteen or so I thought I was going to be a painter. Diamonstein: And you're also something of a collector. Lichtenstein: Well, I've collected things, probably artists you wouldn't know, all my life. But I do have certain things, Dorothy and I like drawings and we have some Warhols and Oldenburgs, a Rosenquist, a Rauschenberg. Diamonstein: Some collectors become dealers. Here you are, Leo, a Trieste-born businessman. But in 1951, before you became a dealer, you put together what is now considered a celebrated show on 9th Street. Can you tell us about that? Castelli: Well, just to go back a little bit, I had a gallery in Paris before I came to America. So when I got here, well, I got interested in what was going on here, and I knew quite a few people, like Julian Levi, for instance, who had a gallery at that time, and I knew quite a few artists, who came over soon after the outbreak of the war, like Duchamp. So I was right in the midst of that environment, right from the beginning when I got here to America. After I got out of the army in '46, I began to go around and got to know artists like de Kooning and so on. I was sort of a private dealer and did what I could with paintings that my associates in Paris, who still had the gallery going, were sending over here. That made my livelihood for me. At one time we had a club that was formed back in '48, I believe, and all the artists of the group and other people, used to come and discuss various matters. And then the idea came up of doing a show of all these people that the museums really didn't want to touch back then. You know, Pollock and David Smith. And we set up this 9th Street show in an empty store. It was in a house that was going to be demolished. We got it for very little. For a period of two months, I think we paid one hundred fifty dollars for the whole thing. And then, with the help of the artists, we painted the walls. I was the only one who had a little money, and believe me, it wasn't much. I contributed something like five or six hundred dollars to the enter- prise. Diamonstein: Was this the counterpart of the Salon des Refusées? Castelli: It was the counterpart as we saw it to the Salon des Refusées. It was really a great success. Unfortunately, Roy wasn't around yet, but Rauschenberg was part of it. There were, of course, all the major painters-Kline, Pollock, David Smith, de Kooning-they all had worked very hard to put that show together. Diamonstein: I'd like each of you to tell us what, regardless of price or availability, your favorite painting, sculpture, or work of art is—any period, any location. === Page 91 === BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN 91 Lichtenstein: Well, one I can think of is "Girl Before a Mirror," the Picasso which the Museum of Modern Art has. Castelli: I like some sculpture, and I would say, the minute somebody asks me which my favorite sculpture is, it's Brancusi's "Bird in Flight." Diamonstein: And painting? Castelli: That's more difficult to answer. Diamonstein: What is your most prized possession? Castelli: My most prized possession. There are several. To speak about people present, namely Roy here, I think that his portrait of Washington is one of my very favorite paintings. I have Jasper Johns's flag, which I like very much. Jasper Johns's target, with plaster of paris. And, of course, some of Rauschenberg's work. But I like other things just as much. Diamonstein: Roy, did you ever expect your life to unfold the way it did? Lichtenstein: No. I can't elaborate on that. I just didn't. Castelli: It's really quite incredible. Well, it depends very much on the character of the painter, what he does with his work, how he handles it. Roy has been going on from one thing to the other, working constantly. Jasper Johns produces a group of works, and then for years sometimes he doesn't do much except for his prints and drawings. So he's very spotty. He has adopted the attitude that unless he feels that he can do something that's new, he just prefers not to do anything. That's a very Duchampian attitude too. Rauschenberg has invented an infinite variety of themes. Some are almost impossible to place in a private collection, especially because they are either huge or flimsy. So there are many, many problems. But Rauschenberg has been, like Roy, immensely productive. The difference is that in the case of Roy, his production has always been very much in demand, very, very easy to sell. From the audience: I was wondering if you could tell us, Mr. Castelli, to what extent your own esthetic judgments have influenced the artists that you have shown. Castelli: Hardly at all. I would say, except—well, in the choice that I make of a group of paintings. I really prefer, say, three or four, and say to Roy, for instance, that I like this one or that one particularly. That might influence him. By the next series he can sort of figure out what elements in the work I do prefer. Then I have to say something that may interest you. In the beginning, Lichtenstein did two types of paintings. Some in which form was an important element, and some which were more related to the comic strips, that were funny. Now, I liked the paintings just for their form and didn't particularly === Page 92 === 92 PARTISAN REVIEW care about the content. I think that Ivan Karp was quite involved with the content too, and so Ivan would express his enthusiasm about that particular group and I about the other. Now, perhaps it's not true at all, but I think what I felt about that particular group had a certain influence on Roy, and he perhaps, little by little, or very soon, abandoned the funny content, in the paintings. From the audience: May I ask the same question of Roy Lichtenstein? Do you think that Mr. Castelli has influenced your work? Castelli: Maybe I'm entirely wrong there. Lichtenstein: Yes. But while anything might have some subliminal influence, there are so many influences that the result is unpredic- table. The artist's major direction is stronger than all of this. There might be strong pressure to remain the same if you are successful and at the same time there is pressure to change. There is no way to know if you are responding to pressure or following your own course. From the audience: When you were speaking before of price. It brought to mind something that I had read; some of your peers were talking about setting a basic price for resales, for future sales. I was wondering how you personally feel about that—in fairness to the buyer as well as the artist. Diamonstein: I think what's being asked here is a central question, regarding artist's rights. An artist sells a picture at X dollars, and the collector then resells it at 3-X dollars, or 100-X dollars. How much of that should belong to the artist, and what is your attitude about those new contracts that were being entered into by some municipalities, the City of Seattle, for example. Lichtenstein: I don't know. I'm not terribly enthusiastic about it. I don't think it will work and I think it obscures far more important legislation. I think the artist should discourage rather than partici- pate in the resale of his work. Selling an artwork is more like selling a house than selling sheet music. You don't send a percentage of the profit from selling a house back to the architect or builder. The bill also seems to benefit the artists who least need it. There are also transactions such as one sculpture being exchanged for three draw- ings, and some cash. I think these things are too complicated to control. Diamonstein: Well, let me cite a specific instance. There's a legendary story about a Johns painting that Leo Castelli owns. He bought it when no one else wanted it—that at least is the way I have been given to understand the story—for twelve hundred dollars. About a year or so ago, that very same picture that he paid twelve hundred dollars === Page 93 === BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN 93 for, since we are now talking about dollars and cents and not the esthetics of it, was evaluated at four hundred thousand dollars. Do you think that is an equitable distribution? Lichtenstein: Well, the artist, for one thing, can save some of his production from each period if he is so interested in its possible appreciation. What happens if his prices go down? Should he pay the seller? Diamonstein: How do you feel about that? Castelli: I would say it would be eminently fair if the artist, or, as Roy pointed out, the dealer, could take advantage of these enormous rises in prices. But I think it's just impossible, as he pointed out too, to administer things like that. There are swaps, there are exchanges. There would be just an immense number of loopholes that could be found to avoid this. Also, the only artists that would profit from that, would be the ones that need it least. Lichtenstein: Yes, if that money went to a general retirement fund for artists, or something like that, it would make sense. Castelli: It would be entirely for that, even if administration were cumbersome. The artist who really sort of lives very well, as Lichten- stein or Jasper Johns does, these artists have a great number of their own paintings. And Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg took advantage of the rising prices. I don't think their situation really calls for it. Frankly- Lichtenstein: There's something else, and that is that the artist in this case sort of condones the resale; and you really want a painting to be bought in order to be sold. For the artist to participate in the appreciated value means that he sort of con- dones these resales, because he's going to make something out of it. Diamonstein: And you really want it to have a loving home? Lichtenstein: That's right. But I understand that there are other ways of looking at it. There are lots of things I'd like to see done for artists, but that isn't one of them. Diamonstein: What would you like to see? Lichtenstein: I think some sort of fund for older artists and funds for the exhibiting of work by younger artists. One or the other. Or both. Castelli: The two extremes. Lichtenstein: If it could come possibly from this resale of art, that would make some sense, I think. Castelli: And anybody would be more enthusiastic about contributing to something like that, rather than putting another ten thousand dollars in the price of Roy's or Jasper's picture. === Page 94 === Tony Tanner “GNAWED BONES” AND “ARTLESS TALES”—EATING AND NARRATION IN CONRAD In his preface to his wife’s Handbook of Cookery for a Small House Conrad states that of all the books ever written “those only that treat of cooking are, from a moral point of view, above suspicion. The intention of every other piece of prose may be discussed and even mistrusted; but the purpose of a cookery book is one and unmistakable. Its object can conceivably be no other than to increase the happiness of mankind.” The tone throughout the short preface is appropriately light, even jocular. But in view of my topic I want to take note of a potentially far-reaching point that Conrad makes. Good cooking is a moral agent. . . . The decency of our life is for a great part a matter of good taste, of the correct appreciation of what is fine in simplicity. The intimate influence of conscientious cook­ ing by rendering easy the processes of digestion promotes the serenity of mind, the graciousness of thought, and that indulgent view of our neighbours’ failings which is the only genuine form of optimism. Conrad then goes on to designate an opposed realm where the virtues and comforts consequent upon good cooking do not obtain— the wigwam of the Noble Red Man. In Conrad’s version, the Red Indians were great hunters for their domestic life was: clouded by the morose irritability which follows the consumption of ill-cooked food. The gluttony of their indigestible feasts was a direct incentive to counsels of unreasonable violence. Victims of gloomy imaginings, they lived in abject submission to the wiles of a multi­ tude of fraudulent medicine men . . . who haunted their existence with vain promises and false nostrums from the cradle to the grave. Needless to say Conrad has no evidence for this outrageous state­ ment, and no contribution to anthropology is being offered here. === Page 95 === TONY TANNER 95 What interests me in this slight piece is another example of a character- istic Conradian strategy-the ironic juxtaposition of what I referred to as opposed realms, or more exactly segments of the world in which life in all its cultural aspects-linguistic, religious, ethical, etc.-is struc- tured differently. Examples will be familiar-West and East, London and the Congo, Switzerland and Russia. The one I am adding is the bourgeois kitchen and the savage's wigwam, with a further related subordinate pair of terms, the cooking of sanity and the diet of unreason. My source is once again Conrad's preface: a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen-the kitchen of the small house, the abode of the preponderant majority of the people... a sane view of life can be no other than kindly and joyous, but a believer in patent medicine is steeped in the gloom of vague fears, the sombre attendants of disordered digestion. Of course the tone is light, eminently domesticated we might say- this is after all Conrad writing as Jessie's husband, the sane and contented Western citizen. But if we isolate certain phrases and words from the present context we can see that Conrad is drawing on a vocabulary of opposed states of consciousness and mood which in varying forms are operative throughout his major fictional work. On the one hand-decency, good taste, correct appreciation, sanity of mind, the preponderant majority, optimism, sanity, kindness and joy, all these qualities or states being associated in this context with the small house, the stable edifice of the settled bourgeois; on the other hand-morose irritability, unreasonable violence, gloomy imaginings, a haunted existence, vague fears, all associated in this context with the wigwam, the temporary shelter of the restless nomad. Any reader of Conrad will recognize how often he brings mental attitudes and dispositions of these contrasting kinds together, forcing them to form a context for his fictional space, thus undermining whatever fixed ideas we might have about sanity, good taste, and so on, and impressing upon us the disquieting psychic reality of unreason- able violence, gloomy imaginings, vague fears. The juxtaposition of the bland narrator of Under Western Eyes and the haunted Razumov is a clean illustration of this pattern. And of course this enforced co- presence of differing types of consciousness, different ranges of experi- ence, differing assumptions, values, terminologies, helps to generate that probing and disturbing irony which we associate with Conrad. Although he appears to operate dualistically-London/the Congo- === Page 96 === 96 PARTISAN REVIEW his fiction works to dissolve the dangerous habit of dualistic (i.e., oppositional) thinking. So one effect of Heart of Darkness is not to endorse either the West or the jungle but to erode some of the unexamined assumptions which make such either/or thinking possi- ble. I am not suggesting that comparable ironic energy is at work in his preface to his wife's cookbook-presumably he intended that it should sell rather than that readers should start to question the prevailing vocabulary of the Western kitchen. His wigwam full of groaning dyspeptic Indians is, of course, a joke-arguably in dubious taste- intended to amuse rather than disturb. But in relating cooking to the whole matter of how we live, Conrad indicates his awareness that what we eat is intimately connected to what we are, in a more than alimentary way. Falk is the one piece of fiction by Conrad in which literal cannibalism is the act at the center of the action (although rather than summarize the plot of this novella I will assume some knowledge of its general outline which will, in any case, become clear as this discussion proceeds). Falk is one of the most arresting figures in Conrad, to be compared and contrasted with Kurtz and Axel Heyst. Unlike most of Conrad's social outcasts and pariahs, Falk was not guilty of a mo- ment's weakness, a sudden collapse of some inner discipline, a fall from the ranks. It was precisely his strength that took him into isolation. It is important that on the voyage which ended in cannibal- ism he was the man who to the last attempted to maintain order and morale, to give the flagging Captain energy and maintain some organization and integration on the ship. He was a supreme main- tainer of the ranks, as long as there were ranks to maintain. His moment of decision came after the other good man on the ship-the carpenter, note-attempted to kill him with a crowbar. That is to say, the builder or mender and upholder of structures had turned into the murderer, and tools became weapons. This is symptomatic of the total collapse and disintegration of normal patterns which I will mention later. After that, self-survival became the only meaningful concern for Falk. The point is that Falk was "unfortunate" (his word) enough to have to eat human flesh. He feels no guilt about it, yet he feels unclean. He wishes to rejoin human society but not at the cost of deceit. That is why he insists on telling his story to the girl. Hermann, who is so shocked, seems to be the opposite type to Falk-the man who clings to the shore, whose life is public and orthodox and unhaunted, who stays within the prescribed tastes of the community. Yet in a way he is the === Page 97 === TONY TANNER 97 real exploiter in the book. He exploits the niece, using her physical labor for his convenience, thus in a sense abusing her body (Falk wants to marry the girl, not to rape her he respects the cultural binding of the sexual drive). Although when he first hears Falk's story Hermann hysterically dismisses his proposal of marriage, he soon moves from hysteria to prudence and allows the girl to go because she is about to turn from an asset (free labor) into a liability (a mouth to feed). Hermann can also be cruel, devious, and mean. Although everything is so tidy and spotless on his ship this is only part of the economic system to which he is totally committed. For example, his ship is so clean it is said to look as if it had been "explored with toothbrushes." This is not an idle simile for in a way his bourgeois establishment is a kind of mouth, a clean mouth but a mouth nevertheless and Hermann is in one way a much more insidious and dishonest kind of "consumer" than Falk. His reaction to Falk's opening statement-"Imagine to yourself that I have eaten man"—is notable. He says "What for?," then later shrieks out "Beast," and still later says to the narrator "Why tell? Who was asking him"; utilitarianism, defensive abuse, the preference for concealment-this is the bourgeois mind. The narrator stands in a different relationship to Falk. For one thing his position is in some ways oddly parallel to the one held by Falk. His ship is in trouble, morale is collapsing, men are ill and indeed nearly dying. In addition he has been robbed of his savings— just as for Falk, in another sense, there was finally nothing left for him to draw on. In any case the narrator responds sympathetically to Falk's story with an "Ah' of complete enlightenment," This is why he has to take up "the role of an ambassador," as he puts it, between Falk and Hermann: the two men live in different countries of the mind and of character. Hermann's ship is said to be "world-proof," Falk looks like a man "who has fallen out of the world." The narrator is truly mundane, trying to be in the world as it is, neither refusing it nor having had to step out of it. Hence he is the necessary point of intersection; he is qualified to be the true narrator and translator. The niece, who never speaks, responds to Falk's story in total silence with total attention, and tears of pure sympathy, is for her part the true listener. She is willing to take in-assimilate-what Falk had, in a more literal sense, had to assimilate. Hermann wants to extrude it; she can swallow it. That is why she is an appropriate mate for Falk. In these and many other ways, all the main characters are involved in different kinds of hunger, different kinds of devouring and assimilat- ing, different kinds of telling and listening. === Page 98 === 98 PARTISAN REVIEW The connection between hunger and the sexual drive is very explicit in the story. As the narrator says of Falk: He wanted to live. He had always wanted to live. So we all do-but in us the instinct serves a complex conception, and in him this instinct existed alone. There is in such simple development a gigantic force, and like the pathos of a child's naive and uncontrolled desire.... He was a child. He was as frank as a child, too. He was hungry for the girl, terribly hungry, as he had been terribly hungry for food. Don't be shocked if I declare that in my belief it was the same need, the same pain, the same torture. With this emphatic focus on the "will to live" Conrad seems to be writing with Schopenhauer in mind, as he did most notably in Victory in which Axel Heyst tries to live out the Schopenhauerian ideal of "complete denial of the will"-and fails. Falk is the direct opposite of Axel. He is the very incarnation of the "will to live" as described by Schopenhauer-"indestructible," "a blind incessant impulse" and so on-and Falk is a survivor. Schopenhauer states that "will is the thing- in-itself," a phrase used in connection with Falk, and hardly accident- ally. In addition Schopenhauer stresses that the sexual drive and its satisfaction is "the focus of the will, its concentration and highest expression" and "next to the love of life" it is "the strongest and most powerful of motives." All of which is born out by Falk's behavior. (It is worth noting that although Schopenhauer rejected suicide as a denial of the will to live, he did allow one species of suicide as being a genuine demonstration of the vanquishing of the will to live-voluntary contemplate.) And in addition to these basic biological hungers, Conrad stresses a related aspect of Falk's behavior. Not only is he like a child, an early evolutionary product in his appetites (Axel Heyst by contrast comes very late on), he is also a primitive economist. He is, it is pointed out more than once, a "monopolist," exploiting the fact that he has the only tug on the river. The narrator says: "He extracted his pound and a half of flesh from each of us merchant-skippers with an inflexible sort of indifference which made him detested and even feared." Given the narrator's knowledge of what is to be disclosed the metaphorical linking of Falk's economic and other appetites can hardly be accidental. The setting of the story is a river hostelry by the Thames which the narrator describes at some length, concluding that the bad condition of both the restaurant and the chops they were eating === Page 99 === TONY TANNER 99 brought forcibly to one's mind the night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the first rudiments of cookery from his dim conscious- ness, scorched lumps of flesh at a fire of sticks in the company of other good fellows; then, gorged and happy, sat him back among the gnawed bones to tell his artless tales of experience-the tales of hunger and hunt-and of women, perhaps! Of course the combining of a banquet and story-telling is as old as Homer, and familiar from writers like Boccaccio. My interest is in what Conrad has done with the traditional setting. There is first of all the obvious grouping of the words "flavor," "talk," "taste," "mouth," "hunger," "swallow," as though Conrad is giving deliberate initial emphasis to the various inter-permeating aspects of the oral functions. The second notable feature of the description is the way Conrad uses the setting to relate the narrative moment to the notional beginning and end of man. Everything about it seems to portend some terminal dissolution since the emphasis is on decay, deterioration, decline (rotten planks, worm-eaten furniture, chipped plates, and so on). The waiter and the building alike are "tottering" with age. Poised precari- ously over the mud of the river shore, the dining room seems on the verge of returning to the primordial slime, an idea additionally fostered by references to "lacustrine dwelling" and "inhabited lake." A kitchen midden is of course a refuse heap (there is a lot of rubbish in the story), and the hostelry would indeed seem to be close to a final disintegration. On the other hand prehistoric and antediluvian times are brought to mind leading to the idea of "primeval man" just beginning to cook and to narrate, suggesting that the two activities are coeval and inextricably linked. The proximity of gnawed bones and artless tales is a reminder that we engorge the world in the form of food just as metaphorically we devour it with the other senses ("all the feast was for the eyes"), and then then disgorge it in the form of words: utterance, or outer-ance (making outer) is thus related to what we may call inner- ance, the crucial intersection point being the mouth which chews and talks. Prior to the emergence of the single narrator who tells the story of Falk, the group are said to be discussing a number of topics, including "break-downs," and although the initial reference is to the breakdown of ships, the story will go on to touch on many other kinds of breakdown-the breakdown of community, of values and rules, of categories, conventions, and ideas, of language, and ultimately the breakdown of the body itself. Two of these breakdowns in particular- of category and of the body-make up my main subject, but for the moment I want to note the rather unusual amount of detail concerning === Page 100 === 100 PARTISAN REVIEW the cooking given in the frame situation-inedible chops, scorched lumps of flesh, gnawed bones, etc.-and move to a point in the narrator's story in which details of cooking become of paramount importance. The narrator has described how Falk has abducted Hermann's ship and left his, the narrator's, in the harbor. Perplexed by this action, the narrator has gone to Schomberg's hotel and restaurant for some tiffin and perhaps some explanation of Falk's behavior. He is served with both, both equally foul. Once again inedible chops are on the menu and they are put in front of the narrator at the same time as Schomberg's "talk gathered way like a slide of rubbish." Schomberg's hatred for Falk is based on Falk's refusal to patronize his restaurant, and he goes into great detail about Falk's eating habits. Apparently Falk refuses to touch fried or roasted meat ("a white man should eat like a white man .. . ought to eat meat, must eat meat" complains Schomberg). He prefers instead rice boiled in a pot, and he eats alone. The narrator says that he could not be bothered about "Falk's ideas of gastronomy" because "I could expect from their study no clue to his conduct in matters of business, which seemed to me totally unres- trained by morality or even by the commonest sort of decency." Of course the clue to Falk's business conduct is precisely to be found in his "ideas of gastronomy"-as I have mentioned, the biological and the economic are shown to be intimately interrelated-and this becomes clear when Falk finally tells his story: i.e., the two planes merge and emerge at the level of language. Before considering that story I want to draw attention to the range of words relating to different states of food, and different kinds of cooking, employed during this conversation with Schomberg-raw, boiled, fried, stale, and by implication roasted and rotten. At this point let me just recall a few of Lévi-Strauss's ideas concerning the raw and the cooked. I will limit myself to his brief essay on "The Culinary Triangle." Starting from the vowel triangle and the consonant triangle, Lévi- Strauss posits a culinary triangle. It would seem that the methodological principle which inspires such distinctions is transposable to other domains, notably cooking which, it has never been sufficiently emphasised, is with language a truly universal form of human activity: if there is no society without a language, nor is there any which does not cook in some manner at least some of its food. The three points of his culinary triangle are the raw, the cooked, and the rotted. But within this abstract triangle there is another === Page 101 === TONY TANNER 101 concrete one relating to the fact that "in any cuisine, nothing is simply cooked, but must be cooked in one fashion or another." He then sets up the triangle of the roasted, the boiled, and the smoked, but his main emphasis is on the difference between roasting and boiling. His argument, based on the varying degrees of mediation between the raw food and the heat used to cook it, concludes "the roasted is on the side of nature, the boiled on the side of culture." Since eating human flesh (the manner of its preparation, pace Jessie Conrad, unspecified) Falk, at least in his eating habits, wants to limit himself to "culture," insisting on the boiled and abhorring the roasted and fried. This might seem a slight point, but is is related to Lévi-Strauss's more general observation that the cooking of any society is a kind of language which in various ways says something about how that society feels about its relations to nature and culture. Seen in this light Falk's gastronomic habits are not an irrelevance but a very important utterance connected with a desire to reassociate himself with "culture." More generally, I think it does suggest that Conrad was well aware of the basic ideas from which Lévi-Strauss is working-namely that cooking is, with lan- guage, a universal phenomenon among men, and in deciding what is "food" and what isn't, and then how to cook it to remove it from its natural continuum and, as it were, socialize it, man is exploring and articulating his sense of his complex relationship to both nature and culture. Since he participates in both and belongs wholly to neither realm, man must find this relationship endlessly ambiguous, endlessly engaging. Lévi-Strauss as anthropologist concentrates on how men think about nature and culture and then use the ensuing categories. Conrad as novelist concentrates on how individual men in specific circumstances articulate (perhaps unconsciously) their ambiguous position in nature and culture at a certain moment in time. In particular he was interested in men who, for whatever reason and in whatever set of circumstances, deviate from the prevailing prescriptive classifications and normative categories—whether these be categories of conduct (what "one of us" should or should not do) or classifica- tions of edibility (what "one of us" should or should not eat). For it is in such acts of deviation—whether a jump from an apparently sinking ship, or the desperate consumption in extremis of a fellow human being-that the apparent stability and binding power of the categories themselves is questioned. Thus, by implication, all the ways in which we describe ourselves to ourselves are available for scrutiny; they can be de-reified, and "discussed and even mistrusted" to use Conrad's own words. In this connection let me just refer to Marcel Mauss's and Dur- === Page 102 === 102 PARTISAN REVIEW kheim's book on Primitive Classification in which it is stated that "it would be impossible to exaggerate... the state of indistinction from which the human mind developed." They go on to argue that "the first logical categories were social categories... it was because men were grouped, and thought of themselves in the form of groups, that in their ideas they grouped other things." Thus classification is "sociocentric," a projection onto things of ways in which men think about their relations to other men. I stress this because one might infer from this that if a man were in a situation in which all the usual ways of thinking about his relations to other men have broken down so that he no longer conceives of himself as part of a society, a clan, or even a crew, no longer feels any kind of communality or group solidarity—in such a situation the man might equally find that the habitual classifi- cations of things simply have no meaning. To put it crudely—the completely de-socialized man would find himself in a completely de- categorized world. This is exactly what happens to Falk. He fell out of the world and has experienced reality unmediated through hitherto unquestioned taxonomies. He has confronted, not only the thing classified, but "the thing itself." I am suggesting, then, that in Conrad's story the breakdown of categories is intimately related to the more obvious themes of the breakdown of a ship and the breakdown of the human body. To support this suggestion I want to refer to two brief passages in the narrator's account. When he first took charge of his ship he found everything in a mess. In particular, a violin case proved to be full of unreceipted bills and possibly corrupt estimates, with no trace of a genuine "fiddle" (I don't know whether Conrad intended the pun); and an account book—which he hoped would enable him to order the ship's affairs—turned out to be full of verse, "rhymed doggerel of a jovial and improper character." Apparently a trivial point, but if we note that what the narrator is encountering here is the wrong things in the wrong containers, I think it is possible to see this as a minor example of the failure or breakdown of categories I have been discuss- ing. What should be the art container or category (the violin case) contains bad economics (unpaid bills), while what should be the proper economics container (the account book) contains bad art (dirty poetry). Just as, on Falk's voyage, the carpenter unexpectedly turned out to "contain" a murderer. If we may allow that "man" and "food" are two categories which are usually considered necessarily distinct, then cannibalism too becomes an example of the wrong things in the wrong categories—i.e., man shifts into the food category, where he === Page 103 === TONY TANNER 103 shouldn't be. It is the most drastic case of the wrong thing in the wrong place, or a relapse back into that primal lack of differentiation, that indistinction described by Mauss. (This incidentally is, I think, why cannibalism lies behind the first Greek tragedy, the Oresteia trilogy.) The second passage which interests me in this connection con- cerns the narrator's account of Falk's appearance. He looks like a centaur, "a composite creature. Not a man-horse... but a man-boat." Here again we have a fusion or con-fusion of usually distinct catego- ries; man-boat is as much of a taxonomic freak as man-food is a categorical nightmare, and as much a surprise as the conjoining of a violin case and unpaid bills. "Separated from his boat to me at least he seemed incomplete. The tug itself without his head and torso on the bridge looked mutilated as it were." Here we have introduced the opposite but profoundly connected idea; for, related to the theme of the fragmentation of what should be a discrete unit-i.e., "mutilation." Here the "mutilation" is only "as it were" because it exists only at the level of language, the narrator's metaphor, rather than the level of experience. But it alerts us to the possibility of unnatural severances as a phenomenon intimately related to the possibility of unnatural "com- positions." Here again let me recall that at the silent center of this story is the act of cutting up the human body (fragmentation) to turn it into food (fusion). This theme is very interestingly prepared for by the narrator's earlier description of Hermann's shop-like ship (another slight catego- rical anomaly-a ship-shop!). In general Hermann is associated with all kinds of compulsive hygiene; in particular, his boat is constantly associated with cleaning and washing clothes. The narrator gives a detailed description of the family washing when it is "exhibited" to dry: It covered the poop entirely. The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapse flourishes and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. What is "suggested" here-note the word-is the kind of disinte- gration and mutilation of the human body which, not to dwell on it in too much hypothetical detail, presumably takes place in an act of === Page 104 === 104 PARTISAN REVIEW cannibalism as the body is cut up for purposes of assimilation. But this is not the body, not the “thing itself,” but clothing, the man-made container for the thing itself. Note that throughout the story Hermann is associated with clothes, just as Falk is nearly always described in terms of his body presence and posture. Connected to this is their different relationships to language: Hermann is verbose, voluble, hysterical, an over-user of words; Falk is invariably silent, even when he has to talk he is made to seem almost nonlingual (his speech has no inflexions, and he speaks without emphases). This of course is why he is drawn to the young niece in the way that he is. She too is described as pure magnificent body, with a constant stress on volume, mass, and so on; and she is utterly silent as well as apparently nameless, as though having no traffic with lan- guage. She too is the thing itself. Language, categories, containers, coverings, clothes—obviously I am suggesting that these are deliber- ately interconnected in this story. Set over against them is the body, man's corporeal, "corporate existence." This phrase brings in the sense not only of the individual human body (the "skin-bound organism") but also of a body of men who form some kind of functioning group which bestows on them their social as opposed to their physical identity (culturally-interrelated organisms). Thus one of Conrad's main concerns is, what is it that holds man/men together both physically and socially? And by fixing on the literal act of cannibalism Conrad can explore in a particularly powerful way what happens when established ways of holding man/men together "break down." The idea of, or word for, cannibalism recurs frequently in Conrad, from Nigger of the Narcissus, in which Singleton is dignified by a comparison with a cannibal chief, to The Secret Agent in which Stevie is fragmented into "what might have been an accumulation of raw material for a cannibal feast," blown to bits by a metaphor carelessly dropped earlier in the book. But more important of course is Conrad's use of cannibals in Heart of Darkness. They are of course admirable figures in that story. "Fine fellows—cannibals—in their place. They were men one could work with." In addition they are victimized and deprived on the three levels I have mentioned. They are virtually without food, thus suffering on the biological level; they are shame- lessly exploited economically—the white men throw their food over- board because it smells rotten and give them pieces of brass as a substitute currency; and they are out of their own language and culture on the ship, so that their particular concepts and cultural rituals are neither understood nor allowed to operate. The amazing thing to === Page 105 === TONY TANNER 105 Marlow is why they didn't eat the white men. And Marlow then embarks on the long passage pondering the mysteries of "restraint"; the mystery of what restrains man, and what ensues when normal restraints fail are central subjects in Conrad. In this story the man without restraint of course is Kurtz. It is worth noting in passing that the savage who is killed because he opens the ship's shutters too wide is, rather oddly, compared to Kurtz. "Poor fool! If he had only left that shutter alone. He had no restraint, no restraint-just like Kurtz." The point is that Conrad goes to considerable lengths to make us see Kurtz as a much more horrifying cannibal than the literal cannibal who may or may not feel like eating everybody (and for the most part cannibalism is not indiscriminate and is usually highly ritualized except in cases of extreme "meat hunger"), but who reveals seemingly inexhaustible reserves of self-restraint. Kurtz wants to eat everything. This is a study of a certain kind of white imperial consciousness which, as it were, wants to engorge the world and transform it into self. Conrad was dramatizing in the figure of Kurtz that terrifying drive to annihilate difference, which is too often to be found at the heart of any so-called civilizing, imperial drive, or indeed at the heart of society itself (see the treatment meted out to Yanko Goorall in "Amy Foster" where the community torment and persecute him on account of his "difference"). This appropriation or nihilation of the other brings us back to cannibalism, but a cannibalism of consciousness which if not restrained will attempt to devour otherness altogether. One of the processes which binds men together, as opposed to breaking them down, is narration, the establishing of a circuit of discourse in a particular way. Conrad's narrative technique in Falk is familiar from the Marlow stories. He starts in the first person plural- "we," "us," "our talk." This strategy has three important, and illusory, effects. It conceals the solitude of writing behind the communality of conversing; it seems to transform the author into an auditor of a tale not of his making; and it makes the written text appear as a vehicle for speech. Then one of "us" begins to tell a story, in this case not Marlow but an unnamed narrator. The narrator has no name (like the niece in his story). This odd withholding of information in Conrad is a matter for separate study; it goes along with his refusal to name Bangkok, a taking away of an already given name, and is part of the strategy of despecification practised so subtly by Conrad. It is also practised by his narrator. I think the motive is to undermine the illusory finality and exactitude of the written text, to unstabilize its silent impersonal unquestionable === Page 106 === 106 PARTISAN REVIEW authority, by reintroducing the hesitations of the speaking voice, the uncertainties and fadings of memory. This is not necessarily part of a philosophical attempt to impugn completely the capabilities of lan- guage as such. This is borne out, to my mind, by the unusually detailed descrip- tions in Falk, not of what people say, but of how people speak. Seldom if ever is reported speech introduced or concluded with the simple conventional “he said.” The tone, timbre, volume, are often given, and the physicality of speaking is constantly brought home to us. In addition, the narrator has varying degrees of trouble with the some- what Germanic English of the Hermann family-they offer a sort of spectrum of degrees of intelligibility—and he reports that Falk’s speech "was not transparently clear." In the central scene the niece says nothing, Falk is reluctant to speak, while Hermann says too much (he makes Falk's story seem unreal—i.e., language can vaporize action and destroy truth). It is the narrator who tries to say what is necessary, and this brings in the whole activity of "translation"; literally of one language into another (as when the narrator has to look up “mensch” and “fressen” after listening to Hermann’s rantings), but more gener- ally the translation of sounds into meanings, grunts into words, silence into significance, substance into semantics, or, in the light of my title, the translation of food into narrative, food here comprising the experience consumed through the sense. Narration takes on a special importance in Conrad as part of the constituting process of man. We must eat to live, but we must also narrate to live. Sartre’s Roquentin poses the question in La Nausée— live or tell. In Conrad these are not mutually exclusive alternatives; rather, telling is a crucial component of living, at least living with “a sense of corporate existence.” The idea of living being dependent on narrating may be found in other writers; for instance, John Barth in Chimera sees it as the basic meaning of the situation of Scheherezade, and the French critic Todorov makes a similar point about the whole subject of the Thousand and One Nights and other story collections, pointing out that from the point of view of the characters “narration equals life: the absence of narration, death.” For Conrad it is not a matter of biological survival, but of communal survival, though after this study of “break-down” the very idea of communality can never recover its old stability. But as far as possible experience has to be made assimilable and shareable through narration, even though as it ap- proaches the central core of the experience language fails into silence. === Page 107 === TONY TANNER 107 The narrator has to "translate" Falk's unique wordless experience into the vocabulary of people like Hermann, his listeners, and ourselves, not just stating facts but creating a context in which the facts generate meaning. Recalling the terms I mentioned at the start, we may say that he has to bring the anguish of the wigwam into the security of the kitchen, revealing in the process that such a static opposition is a false antimony for the wigwam has its sanities, and there is an unreason of the kitchen too-the apparent polarities dissolve into each other. Falk had to eat the uneatable, and in so doing he discovers the radical relativity of cultural categories; the narrator has to speak of the unspeakable, and in so doing he encounters the insoluble problematics of utterance. In these two figures Conrad dramatizes in an extreme form his sense of the profound paradoxes on which human life-itself a shifting and unstable concept-is founded. === Page 108 === Ian Watt HEART OF DARKNESS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY THOUGHT Conrad isn't a philosophical novelist in the way that George Eliot, Thomas Hardy or George Meredith are; we don't feel in the presence of logical arguments or moral lessons. But if Conrad doesn't present himself as a thinker, he strikes us as very thoughtful; the intimations of his fictional world steadily invite ethical and even metaphysical response. The basic conflict in this fictional world arises from a double vision; Conrad wants both to endorse the standard Victorian moral positives, and to express his forebodings that the dominant intellectual directions of the nineteenth century were preparing disaster for the twentieth. This conflict between the endorsements and the forebodings is most comprehensively expressed in the tension between Marlow and Kurtz in Conrad's ideological summa, Heart of Darkness. It has gradually established itself for the twentieth century as the supremely modern work in the Conrad canon; and it appeared, very appropri- ately, in the last year of the nineteenth century, and in the thousandth number of that very representative organ of high Victorian culture, Blackwood's Magazine. Scientifically, Conrad was fairly well informed and, unlike most of the other great modern writers, he neither doubted nor discounted the findings of natural science. His position about the ultimate human implications of these findings, however, was deeply skeptical, and in several ways. Like Matthew Arnold in his essay "Literature and Sci- ence," Conrad diagnosed a deep intellectual muddle behind contem- porary attempts to force a marriage between science and culture; for his own part he contemptuously rejected "the tyranny of science and the cant of science," and concluded that "life and the arts follow dark courses and will not turn aside to the brilliant arc-lights of science." Some negative inferences, however, had to be drawn from science as regards human life, and they led to radical conclusions that brought Conrad fairly close to an Existentialist position: the individual con- === Page 109 === IAN WATT 109 sciousness was destined to be in total contradiction to its physical and moral environment. “What makes men tragic,” Conrad wrote to Cunningham Cuninghame Graham, “is not that they are victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. . . . There is no morality, no knowledge, and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that whether seen in a convex or a concave mirror is always but a vain and fleeting appearance.” It was primarily the two forms of natural science which most affected the general Victorian outlook—physics and biology—that had been decisive in making man see himself as the victim of nature. The traditional belief that the creation of the world, and of man, was a unique manifestation of God’s providence had been fatally under- mined long before by astronomy. Then in the nineteenth century geology had suggested, not only that the earth itself was a transitory phenomenon, but that, as Tennyson put it in In Memoriam, even man himself might one day, like the fossils in the books, become extinct and “Be blown about the desert dust, or sealed within the iron hills.” Finally Victorian physics had confirmed this vista of coming extinc- tion. For, it now appeared, our terrestrial planet had originated, not out of the hand of God but accidentally out of the cooling gases of the sun; and the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics by Lord Kelvin in 1851 seemed to mean that the destiny of the earth was to end in cold and drought through the diffusion of heat-energy. This astrophysical pessimism, widely popularised by Balfour Stewart’s The Conservation of Energy in 1873, soon became a standard feature of late Victorian thought. As Edward Carpenter wrote about the universe of his youth: “one of its properties was that it could run down like a clock, and would eventuate in time in a cold sun and a dead earth—and there was an end of it.” The eighteenth century had inferred a divine watch-maker from the operations of the celestial machine; it was now discovered that there was no watch-maker and that the watch’s spring was running down. This dispiriting historical perspective pervades Heart of Darkness. Marlow’s first remark, as the sun sets over London, is: “And this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth.” Dismissing from our minds both the present lights on the shore and the glories of the national past enacted along the estuary of the Thames, Marlow harks back to the darkness which had here confronted the first Roman settlers in Britain; and we are made to see civilization, not as a stable human achievement, but as a brief interruption of the normal rule of darkness; the extent and duration of civilized order are as limited and brief as “a === Page 110 === 110 PARTISAN REVIEW flash of lightning in the clouds," and, Marlow reflects, "We live in the flicker." Like atomic physics in our day, however, it was biology which had the most important moral and political implications for the later nineteenth century. That some of these implications found their way into Heart of Darkness is not surprising, for Conrad grew up in the heyday of evolutionary theory, and Alfred Wallace was one of his favorite authors. The main plot of Heart of Darkness is provided, in effect, by that aspect of the evolutionary process to which Marlow is exposed in his voyage further up-river. Marlow stumbles onto a grim historical variant of the law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; the case of Kurtz demonstrates the process in reverse. His atavistic regression is brought on by the wilderness which, Marlow says, "whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude." At home everything conspired to keep Kurtz in ignorance of his true self; the police stopped him from devouring others or being devoured; but in the solitude his "forgotten and brutal instincts" revealed themselves as potent forces in his biological inheritance, and therefore as powerful arguments against the widespread distortion of evolutionary theory to support the Victorian faith in economic, social, political and national progress, the faith which originally animated Kurtz. The strongest single support for the Victorian faith in progress was economic expansion, to which both Bentham and natural science had lent a theoretical rationale and an immense public prestige. Conrad, however, rejected the material and quantitative values of a commercial and industrial society: he saw only danger in "the blind trust in mere material and appliances"; he warned against "carrying humility towards that universal provider, Science, too far," and he viewed the Victorian hope that progress would automatically result from "the peaceful nature of industrial and commercial competition" as an "incredible infatuation." Kurtz, of course, stands not only for the civilizing beneficence of economic progress, but for the other more spiritual components of the Victorian religion of progress. Evolution had replaced the traditional view of man's supremacy in the Divine plan with the idea that an equivalently spendid status could be attained through the working out of humanity's secular destiny. In Arthur Lovejoy's phrase, the "tem- poralisation of the Chain of Being" had substituted the law of historical progress for the lost belief in the perfection of God's providential design. === Page 111 === IAN WATT 111 During the eighties and nineties the main ideologies that sup- ported this kind of belief were social Darwinism and Imperialism, whose doctrines were closely related. Social Darwinism, of which the most famous exponent was Herbert Spencer, supported the competitive economic order at home, and Utilitarian theory in general, on the grounds that—to use his phrase in First Principles (1862)—"the “sur- vival of the fittest" was a law of nature, and led to human progress. The same kind of thinking provided an ideology for colonial expansion. Merely by occupying or controlling most of the globe, it was assumed, the European nations had demonstrated that they were the fittest to survive; and the accelerating exportiation of their various economic, political and religious institutions was therefore a necessary evolutionary step towards a higher form of human organization in the rest of the world. It was also widely thought—by Spencer, for example—that the dominance of the white races was itself the result of biological superiority, and this racial doctrine became particularly useful in enlisting popular political support for the imperialist adven- tures of the end of the nineteenth century. As Victor Kiernan has written, the "mystique of race was Democracy's vulgarization of an older mystique of class." Conrad's own attitude to colonialism was complicated; but he had been lucky, from a literary point of view, in finding an ideologically perfect and patriotically unembarrassing example of the discrepancies between colonial pretence and reality. It was a pure case: first, because the Congo Free State was in theory international, and thus did not raise the question of national loyalty; second, because unlike most other colonies the Congo Free State was a conscious political creation; and third, because the whole world had listened to public professions of exalted educational, moral and religious purposes from its founders, and then been forced to discover that the verbal pretences masked what Conrad later described as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical explora- tion." During the two decades between Conrad's arrival in England in 1878 and the writing of Heart of Darkness, many leaders of thought were becoming convinced that the Victorian world order was collap- sing. Heart of Darkness is an expression of that conviction; and its widely-shared rejection of earlier optimistic assumptions about pro- gress is clearly echoed both in the literature and the evolutionary theory of the period. A great many novels of the nineties have a note of apocalyptic gloom. Grant Allen's 1895 novel, The British Barbarians, for instance, === Page 112 === 112 PARTISAN REVIEW pictured the twenty-fifth century as a relapse into anthropoid animal- ity; and there is a sense of the impending collapse of western civiliza- tion both in Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols, (1889), and in Max Nordau's Degeneration, which was immensely successful in its 1895 English translation. The idea gained even wider currency from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), where Lord Henry mur- murs "Fin de Siècle," and his hostess knowingly answers "Fin du globe." The most immediate basis for this loss of confidence in the future was probably political, but the implications of natural science were also important. Darwin himself had been in the main dubious about whether any political or psychological deductions about man and his future could be drawn from evolutionary theory, a good many of Darwin's follow- ers, however, had drawn such deductions, and, in the case of the most eminent of them, Thomas Huxley, they had become increasingly pessimistic. In his influential and widely-reported 1893 Romanes lecture on "Evolution and Ethics," a lecture which had the optimism of Spencer as its main target, Huxley asserted an intractable dualism between nature and human values which is in many ways parallel to that which Conrad presented in Heart of Darkness. Spencer had been sure that what he regarded as the necessary law of progress meant that "evil and immorality" would disappear, and "man become perfect." Huxley had no such illusions. He conceded that "after the manner of successful persons, civilized man would gladly kick down the ladder by which he has climbed. He would be only too pleased to see 'the ape and tiger die.' But they decline to suit his convenience, and the unwelcome intrusion of these boon compan- ions of his hot youth into the ranged existence of civil life adds pains and griefs, innumerable and immeasureably great, to those which the cosmic process brings on the mere animal." The prospect of happiness or perfection, then, is "as misleading an illusion as ever was dangled before the eyes of poor humanity"; man will always "bring with him the instinct of unlimited self-assertion," so that his future will be "a constant struggle . . . in opposition to the State of Nature"; and this unhappy conflict will continue until "the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet." Five years later, in 1898, even the sanguine positivism of Herbert Spencer had apparently evaporated and he was inclined to agree, === Page 113 === IAN WATT 113 writing in a letter to Grant Allen: "We are in the course of barbarisa- tion." Heart of Darkness, then, expresses a perspective that was very representative of many currents of thought in late nineteenth-century England; but it is representative in a very tangential way. Conrad's imaginative world seems wholly independent; the ideas don't stick out, or ask for support or confirmation. Thus the closeness of Conrad's moral and social assumptions to Huxley's later evolutionary thought is very striking if we compare Conrad's picture of man and society with that of Hardy, Wells, or Shaw; but we could hardly say that Heart of Darkness is about evolution; and even if one said it is about colonial- ism, or about the implications of colonialism for the colonizers and their civilization, the description would still seem both too analytic and too restrictive. Yet in his own way Conrad was an intellectual, and his first mention of writing Heart of Darkness presented it in specifically intellectual terms: "The idea in it," he explained to his publisher, William Blackwood, "is not as obvious as in 'Youth' -or at least not so obviously presented," and added: "The subject is of our time distinctly-though not topically treated." This description, written on December 31, 1898, when the story was barely begun, refers only to its most obvious ideological content: that is, as Conrad rather defensively put it in the same letter, "the justifiable idea" of exposing "the criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa." This anticolo- nial tenor is very similar to that of Conrad's earlier story, "An Outpost of Progress," which had led Cunninghame Graham, an avowed Marxist who shared platforms with such men as Engels and Kropotkin, to write a letter of enthusiastic praise. What Cunninghame Graham had correctly recognized was a general political perspective very similar to his own definition of "the Imperial Mission" as "the Stock Ex- change Militant"; and Cunninghame Graham was equally enthusias- tic about the anticolonial first part of Heart of Darkness. Conrad, however, urged him to delay final judgment, writing that "There are two more instalments in which the idea is so wrapped up in secondary notions that You-even You!-may miss it." Conrad nowhere specifies what these "secondary notions" were; but he gives a clue in a later letter to Blackwood when he says that the final scene, where Marlow finds himself forced to lie about Kurtz's end to the Intended, "locks in" the whole narrative "into one suggestive view of a whole phase of life." === Page 114 === 114 PARTISAN REVIEW One of the secondary themes "locked in" to the conclusion is presumably Marlow's view of women. At the very beginning of the story Marlow was quite unable to convince his "excellent aunt" who got him a job with the Trading Company that it was run for profit; and this led him to interject: "It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own. . . ." Marlow makes a similar comment when he first mentions the Intended: "Oh, she is out of it-completely. They-the women I mean-are out of it-should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse." In the manuscript Conrad made this passage even more explicit, and anticipates Marlow's final lie to the Intended about Kurtz's actual end, by adding: "That's a monster-truth with many maws to whom we've got to throw every year-or every day-no matter-no sacrifice is too great-a ransom of pretty, shining lies." Marlow's misogyny may seem a somewhat less disabling prejudice if it is set in the context of his general view of life. What he says clearly refers, not to the women who work in the office of the Trading Company, for instance, or to Kurtz's native mistress, but quite specifi- cally to women of the well-to-do and leisured class, to whom his aunt and the Intended, and presumably the womenfolk of his audience, belong. Marlow's perspective, in fact, assumes the Victorian relegation of leisure-class women to a pedestal of philanthropic idealism high above the economic and sexual facts of life. Since Marlow believes that it is only through work-more generally through a direct personal striving to master some external and objective force-that anyone can find "his own reality," it follows that the practical truths of life are not transferable from one individual to another, whether verbally or otherwise; and it further follows that, merely by allotting its women a leisure role, bourgeois society has in effect excluded them from dis- covering reality. It is by no choice or fault of hers, therefore, that the Intended inhabits an unreal world; but because she does, Marlow at the end finds himself forced to lie to her about Kurtz. One reason is that if he told the truth she would not have the necessary grounds in her own experience to be able to understand it; another is that since for all his seeking Marlow himself has found no faith which will move moun- tains, his nostalgia inclines him to cherish the faith that ignores them. Work versus words is an even commoner opposition in Conrad than in life; and in Heart of Darkness the cognitive role of work is often made the dialectical opposite of another secondary theme-the self- deluding tendency of verbal communication. Kurtz is the most obvious example; he is, Marlow discovers, "very little more than a voice," a === Page 115 === IAN WATT 115 hollow soundbox of egotistic pretensions; and Marlow's "memory of that time" lingers round him still "like a dying vibration of one immense jabber." For Marlow, women such as his aunt and the Intended are destined to be the mere echo chambers of this jabber. His aunt's illusions about the civilizing work in Africa came to her only because she lived "right in the rush of all that humbug" which had been "let loose in print and talk just about that time," while the illusions of the Intended are only "the echo of [Kurtz's] magnificent eloquence." Both Marlow's aunt and the Intended unconsciously function as the facade for the operations of the manager and his cronies; they are indeed, as Kurtz's oil painting suggests, the blind publicists for the venal hypocrisies of the sepulchral city; and words are its whitewash. Marlow sees both the Intended and Kurtz as pitiful victims of the unreal aspirations of their century. The developing imperatives of Romantic individualism had set up the ideal of absolute liberation from religious, social and ethical norms; and this trend was later reinforced by many others—most obviously by the Utilitarian view of society as composed of an aggregate of economic individuals, by the democratic egalitarianism of liberal political theory, and by the thought of Herbert Spencer, who assumed that the progressive differen- tiation of individuals was the ultimate and sufficient aim of the evolutionary process. All these views at least agreed that progress required the removal of most established economic, political and social "restraints"; and the harlequin's surrender to Kurtz thus represents his century's innocent but fateful surrender to that total Faustian unre- straint which believes that anything is justified it it "enlarges the mind." Conrad's critical intelligence had arrived, independently perhaps, but supported, surely, by his quick sensitiveness to what he could use in the thought and speech of others, at an unformulated but resolute intellectual conviction which had much in common with that general tendency among so many of the thinkers of the later nineteenth century, who began from the assumption that reason was not the controlling factor in human affairs. This view, in very varied forms, controls the philosophy of von Hartmann, Vaihinger, and Nietzsche, the psychology of William James, Bergson, and Freud, the anthropol- ogy of Sir James Frazer, and the sociology of Tönnies, Sorel, Pareto, Max Weber and Durkheim; all of these shared Conrad's total skepti- cism about progress. As a naturalized Englishman and a sea captain, however, Conrad had also come to adopt other much more positive and conservative === Page 116 === 116 PARTISAN REVIEW loyalties which supply some of the other secondary notions by which Marlow judges his experience in Heart of Darkness. Ford Madox Ford wrote that Conrad ideally "desired to be . . . a member of the ruling classes of England" in the stable days of Lord Palmerston, and the positive standards in Heart of Darkness have something of this early Victorian quality. These standards—roughly, Duty, Restraint, and Work—are those by which Marlow lives; and in various guises they were a firm, indeed a notorious, presence in early Victorian thought. John Stuart Mill wrote in his "The Utility of Religion" that it was characteristic of "an age of weak beliefs" that "such beliefs as men have" should be "much more determined by their wish to believe than by any mental appreciation of evidence." We can see this wish to believe both in Marlow and in Conrad. Thus in his first letter to Cunninghame Graham, Conrad wrote: "It is impossible to know anything," but added, "'tho' it is possible to believe a thing or two." Marlow makes the distinction even more explicit in Lord Jim when he comments: "Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each . . . carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy." One of the few stable points of reference in Heart of Darkness, which Marlow much admires in others and what keeps him more or less sane himself, is efficiency at work. This emphasis on the psycho- logically stabilizing function of labor is close to Carlyle's remark in Sartor Resartus (1834) on "the folly of that impossible precept, 'Know thyself,' till it be translated into this partially possible one, 'Know what thou canst work at.'" In Conrad's own day the idea of the supreme value of work had been made the basic social and political issue not only by Marx, but by Ruskin and Morris; while notions of group duty and discipline, a necessary component of the Imperialist mission as well as of the nautical order, were advocated by W. E. Henley and Kipling. At the back of these insistences was the Victorian nightmare that the disap- pearance of God would destroy all social and moral sanctions for individual conduct, and that thereafter, in Tennyson's words, men would merely "submit all things to desire." The question, in its simplest terms, was whether in a secularized world there would remain anything which corresponded to the word "conscience." Heart of Darkness continues this Victorian preoccupation. For instance, when the dying Kurtz is said to have "judged" his life, Marlow is surely implying the real existence of the conscience, of some inner moral constraint. === Page 117 === IAN WATT 117 Marlow's overriding moral commitment to civilization, however deluded, weak, and unjust it is found to be, is rather similar to that of Conrad's contemporary, Freud. Freud's observations had forced him to a position which dramatically undermined the accepted psychological foundations of the social and moral order, since man was shown to be unconsciously dominated, not by reason or benevolence or duty, but by the omnivorous and ultimately unappeasable appetities of the id; and so, in Civilization and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion Freud wondered whether any secular mechanism could ever replace religion in controlling the aggressive drives which led to war and hatred of civilization. Freud had a deeper belief in systematic thought than Conrad, and Conrad was not interested in Freud; nevertheless, they shared not only the same dark view of man's innate constitution, and the same conviction that culture was based on repression of restraint, but a similar sense that the destructive tendencies of man which their vision emphasized must be controlled as far as possible, partly by promoting a greater understanding of the inherent darkness of the self, and partly by supporting the modest countertruths on which civilization depends. As against the more absolute negations of Rimbaud or Nietzsche, or the equally absolute transcendental affirma- tions of Dostoevsky or Yeats, both Freud and Conrad defend a practical social ethic based on their fairly similar reformulations of the Victorian trinity of work, duty, and restraint. The general modern tendency has been to overlook this aspect of the thought of Conrad and Freud in favour of its more dramatic and original destructive side; in effect both of them have been either attacked or praised more for what they saw than for what they said about it. In the process their insistence on the need to control the unconscious and egotistic sides of man has been misinterpreted or overlooked: and this bias has often been reflected in the modern critical treatment of Kurtz. Kurtz dramatizes Conrad's fear of the ultimate directions of nineteenth-century thought. These directions are beautifully expressed in Auden's poem "In Father's Footsteps," which begins with a poign- nant valediction to the basic psychological strategy of the Victorian religion of progress as it assimilated the implications of biological evolution: Our hunting fathers told the story Of the sadness of the creatures Pities the limits and the lack Set in their finished features; Saw in the lion's intolerant look === Page 118 === 118 PARTISAN REVIEW Behind the enemy's dying glare, Love raging for the personal glory That reason's gift would add, The liberal appetite and power, The rightness of a God. The "rightness of a God" was a role almost automatically con- ferred on the white European when he left home and went out to govern colonies. "All Europe," we are told, "had contributed to the making of Kurtz," and his motives, as well as his fate, are deeply representative. He goes out, first of all, to make money; he is thus a representative of economic individualism, a protagonist of the career open to talent in the free marketplace; and because he finds a more effective way of exploiting the ivory of the Congo he is naturally expected to become a power in the great Trading Company. Paradoxi- cally, however, the Benthamite, Utilitarian, and Imperialist modes of thought turn out to be not the historical contraries but the comple- ments of Romantic individualism as it had been transformed into its later Bohemian, Decadent, and Symbolist embodiments. Kurtz is a poet, a painter, above all a man with the power of words; and his final quest for absolute liberation from all the constraints of civilization makes him a symbolic parallel to the career of Arthur Rimbaud, who had turned his back on European civilization in 1875, and ended up as a trader and explorer in Abyssinia. The representative importance of Kurtz's surrender to the drives of the unconditioned ego has been analyzed by Lionel Trilling in his essay "The Modern Element in Literature." Conrad's "strange and terrible message of ambivalence towards the life of civilization," Trilling writes, "continues the tradition of Blake and Nietzsche"; and Kurtz is a portent of the future, for "nothing is more characteristic of modern literature than its discovery and canonization of the primal, nonethical energies." Kurtz, however, does not consciously seek to liberate these ener- gies; he goes out as a member of the "gang of virtue," the benevolent liberal reformers who are going to bring the light of modern educa- tional, political, moral and religious progress to the dark places of the earth. Unlike Rimbaud, or Gauguin later, Kurtz is an envoy of civilization, not a voluntary exile; he is "an emissary," as the brick- maker says, "of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else." But in Africa Kurtz meets the ape and the tiger within himself, and eventually lets them loose. Given the opportunity, it appears, the autonomous individual will indeed "submit all things to desire," and far deeper than his social instinct, it appears, is the desire to do === Page 119 === IAN WATT everything he wants to do and claim "the rightness of a God" for doing it. 119 This "rightness" finds a powerful sanction in Western industrial progress. Kurtz achieves supernatural ascendancy primarily through his monopoly of firearms; the idea is prefigured, ironically enough, in his report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, where Kurtz begins from the premise that "we whites . . . must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings-we approach them with the might as of a deity." The harle- quin confirms this basis for Kurtz's power: "He came to them with thunder and lightning, you know-and they had never seen anything like it." So, Marlow tells us, Kurtz later presided "at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which-as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times-were offered up to him- do you understand?-to Mr. Kurtz himself." Marlow is horrified, and so, just before his end, is Kurtz, to understand what happens to a man who discovers his existential freedom under circumstances which enable him to put into practice the ultimate direction of nineteenth-century thought: to bestow on the individual all those powers and freedoms which had formerly been reserved for God. Man's last evolutionary leap was to be up to the throne that he had emptied; up, and yet, at the same time, it seemed, far down, and far back. Heart of Darkness embodies that view of human destiny which Sartre summed up in his definition of man as "the being whose plan it is to become God." Conrad enacted the unreal exorbitances of the plan in the fate of Kurtz; for himself he tentatively preferred the humbler and irresolute moral alternatives of Marlow. Conrad's vision had no use for Christianity, mainly on practical grounds: "Christianity," he wrote in 1916, "is the only religion which, with its impossible stan- dards has brought an infinity of anguish to innumerable souls-on this earth." The cardinal lesson of experience is a full realization of our fragile, lonely, and humble status in the natural order; and here any theoretical system, whether philosophical, scientific or religious, is likely to foster dangerous delusions of independence and omnipotence. Thus in "Youth" Marlow prefers Burnaby's Ride to Khiva to Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, the soldier to the philosopher, on the grounds that: "One was a man, and the other was either more-or less." So, against all the unreal psychological, social and religious hyperboles of his waning century, Conrad decisively rejected both the more and the less; and in Heart of Darkness affirmed the necessity, as Camus put it, "in order to be a man to refuse to be a God." === Page 120 === Jorge Edwards THE CONSENSUS IN FAVOR OF DEMOCRACY IN SPAIN Those who have lived in Spain during the last few years, and especially those of us who have come here from countries whose political evolution has been the opposite of Spain's, countries that have gone from parliamentary democracy to military dictatorship, have experienced a series of constant political surprises ever since the death of Franco—surprises and lessons in politics. The peaceful transition from the dictatorship of the Franco regime to democracy is still going on after two years; and surprises still occur, even though one has the impression that the dangers have become more acute, or, at least, more visible now. The economic crisis, with its accompanying evils of inflation, recession, and rising unemployment, is beginning to be felt in all aspects of everyday life. Strikes, a social phenomenon forbidden under Franco, are an immediate and unavoidable conse- quence. With annual inflation rates as high as thirty percent, strikes, are, of course, an indispensable weapon for the workers; but, in a country unfamiliar with strikes, they also constitute a source of irritation for the middle classes,, especially when essential public services such as mail or gasoline supplies are affected. The list of factors that irritate the average Spanish citizen at the moment is long: constantly rising prices, poorly functioning public services, an inundation of pornography in magazines and films, pointless verbosity in parliamentary debates, and excesses in some regional nationalism, which easily go from dependence on the central- ism of Madrid, to a regional chauvinism. Add to this the frequent acts of terrorism, followed by amnesties that seem scandalous to a large segment of public opinion, although the reason for these amnesties is the latent continuation of the Civil War in the Basque Country and the government's aim to put an end to it finally through national reconcili- ation. The politics of the Left in Spain, and especially of the Commun- ists, which have proved so disconcerting abroad, are based on a full === Page 121 === JORGE EDWARDS 121 awareness of the dangers of the present situation. These dangers derive not only from the economic crisis, but also from the power of the establishment consolidated over the forty years of the Franco regime. It is certainly true that Alianza Popular, the only party to lay any claim to Franco's heritage, attracted only eight percent of the votes in the general elections held last June. But the electorate that gave a relative majority of the votes to Adolfo Suarez, the president of the government party, Union del Centro Democratico, has no great interest in or knowledge of politics, and could be won over to a nostalgia for the Franco regime should the situation continue to deteriorate. The demonstration held on November 20th, the second anniversary of the death of Franco, was in fact larger and better organized than the first. And this second anniversary had another worrying aspect: three out of the nine military divisions in the Spanish army ordered requiem masses to be held in the barracks under their command in memory of the late Head of State. Santiago Carrillo, the leader of Spanish Communism, insists that the real choice today in Spain is not between Right and Left. Carrillo has said many times that the only alternatives for Spaniards at the moment are dictatorship and democracy, a military coup along South American lines or the consolidation of the process begun by the King and Adolfo Suarez's government. For the present executive of the Spanish Communist Party, the choice between monarchy and republic is at the moment invalid and irrelevant. On one occasion Carrillo declared that without the Monarchy the situation would already have declined into violence. By this he wished to point out that the charismatic authority of the King is far greater than any that a Republic President might have, at least with regard to containing any possible resurgence of the pro-Franco sectors. It is curious to compare the present caution of the Communist Party, now that it is legal and, with representatives in Parliament and a voice in the press, with the revolutionary optimism of the fifties and early sixties, when the party leaders thought that a peaceful national strike, the continually-deferred and mythical huelga nacional pacifica, or “HNP” would put an end to the dictatorship. The party leaders who during those years, thanks to their experience in clandestine opposi- tion, were able to assess realistically the domestic situation in Spain taking into account the economic progress achieved under Franco, were purged from the party under Carrillo's management, as one of them, Jorge Semprún, has related in his fascinating Autobiography of Federico Sanchez (the name he used for clandestine party work). === Page 122 === 122 PARTISAN REVIEW The fact is that Carrillo, after having tried and expelled Jorge Semprún and his friend Fernanco Claudin from the Spanish Commun- ist Party, learned his own lesson without any need for self-criticism and without reinstating the two men, as is frequently the case in the Communist world. Little by little he abandoned what could be called his ideological optimism, which had marred all his strategy in Spain and furthermore had depended heavily on Moscow's political interests, and he learned not to underestimate his enemy, the Franco regime. It was a lesson learned through many years of clandestine struggle, and, for this very reason, has less hold over the young leaders of Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol (PSOE), the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party headed by Felipe Gonzalez. This is one of the present causes of the friction in the Spanish Left. The Communist Party tends to act with much greater caution than the Socialists and at the same time tries to prevent the Socialists from getting a more dynamic, or one might say revolutionary, image, among the lower classes and the young people. Felipe Gonzalez, who has imposed a moderate party line, in direct contact with European Social Democracy, understands Carrillo's precautions very well, but among his party's militants there is a general air of impatience similar to that which finished by slowly undoing the Chilean Socialist Party from the beginning of Allende's government. The essential diffence between the Spanish and Chilean (or Portugese) situation lies in the eurocommunist positions of Carrillo's party. These, and the firm intention of the King and of Adolfo Suarez to transform Spain into a European style democracy, and to end the political and economic isolation of the Franco years, have made possible a more or less general consensus in favor of the democratiza- tion of Spain covering the political spectrum from the Monarchy to the Communists. Recently, for example, Carrillo revealed that over a year ago, at the time when he had entered the country clandestinely, he held a secret meeting with Adolfo Suarez that convinced him of Suarez's sincere wish to carry through the process of democratization. The latest episode in the progress of this consensus in favor of democracy in Spain is the Pacts of La Moncloa (the presidential palace), in which the government has obtained the opposition's agreement to its plans for economic stabilization, in exchange for certain reforms aimed at extending the process of democratization, especially as regards taxes, social security, and political control over radio and television. However, the optimism that prevailed at the ceremony of the signature of the Pacts of La Moncloa did not last long. Difficulties arose almost immediately, as each party seemed determined === Page 123 === JORGE EDWARDS 123 to secure the application only of those parts of the Pacts that were in its own interests. Reading the recent editorials in Mundo Obrero, the Communist weekly that has only recently begun publishing openly, one discovers that the main political concern of the Spanish Communist Party seems to be the implementation of the Pacts of La Moncloa. Mundo Obrero often accuses the government of delaying the application of the more progressive measures contemplated in the Pacts. But these editorials also accuse the Socialists of not taking the agreement seriously. This is another stage in the difficult democratization of Spain, a process that hs required at every step a reaffirmation of the general consensus in favor of democracy. The municipal elections, which could take place between March and June 1978, will constitute the next decisive phase in this process. The evolution of the economic crisis, and of the dilemmas that face both the opposition and the government, and the internal situation of PSOE (the Socialist Workers' Party), deeply disturbed at the moment by the crisis in Portuguese socialism, will all affect the success of the moderates, whether right or left-wing. These factors will also affect the voting of the more impatient sectors of Spanish socialism and the extreme Left as they will the votes of those who are nostalgic for the Franco regime. -Translated from the Spanish by Virginia Jarret === Page 124 === Jonathan Baumbach BREATHLESS REVISITED "Art and theory of art, at one and the same time; beauty and the secret of beauty; cinema and apologia for cinema." -Godard on Elena et Les Hommes Breathless has aged well. Seventeen years after, Godard's least overtly political film remains his most radical work of art, one of the half dozen signal events in the short history of film. Its imitators- and its influence has been pervasive even among directors who clearly despise its esthetic-have in no way compromised the originality of Godard's first feature. As with most deeply instinctive works, concerned more with their own process than with delineating a world, Breathless is essentially inimitable. Audacity is the work's defining impulse. "I wanted," says Godard in an interview, "to give the impression of just finding or experiencing the processes of cinema for the first time." It is not only its freshness and sense of discovery, its breakneck energy and wit that make Breathless so exhilarating to watch, but in addition its moment by moment defiance of esthetic injunctions, its thumb of the nose at conventional tyrannies. Breathless translates discontinuity into coherence, revises our idea of the possibilities of cinema. Chance informs the movement of Godard's world (chance and a certain antipsychology) as instinct seems to be at the heart of his method. The plot, which serves as both parody and metaphoric occasion, is derived from a mélange of American gangster film conven- tions. In the opening shots, Michel (Belmondo) steals a car, is followed by the police, and, finding himself trapped, takes a gun from the glove compartment and kills the policeman. (We see Michel fire the gun and in a separate shot we see the policeman fall, making it seem as if the firing of the gun and the death of the policeman were only cinemati- cally connected.) This series of chance conjunctions dooms Michel. Godard assumes the Hollywood code of the thirties and forties in which if a character commits murder, the filmmaker is obliged to === Page 125 === JONATHAN BAUMBACH 125 murder him in return as a form of symbolic deterrence. The uninten- tional effect of this code was to predicate the outcome of certain films in advance and to create in the consciousness of the filmgoer a race of doomed antiheroes and a vision of a mechanically moralistic universe. Breathless is the secret life of the film noir (a self-subverting genre at its best) made manifest, the film of our filmgoing fantasies. Breathless, then, is the reconstituted fantasy of Godard’s filmgo- ing, and is at once homage to and parody of the American action film and poetic transformation of it. In the gangster film, we tended to root, despite ourselves, for the survival of the doomed antihero, lamenting the mischance that set him wrong. In Breathless, the antihero, Michel, becomes the rebel we imagine ourselves, a man living his idea of freedom without the compromise of civilized constraint, a figure of ultimate romantic integrity. Humphrey Bogart is his icon. In one of the film’s characteristically self-conscious moments, Michel stops to admire a poster of Bogart in The Harder They Fall and imagines himself as Bogart, rubbing his thumb across his lips in identification. Michel’s self-willed audacity parallels the film’s method so that we experience Michel/Belmondo as an agency of Godard, the filmmaker as outlaw, the outlaw as artist. Although romanticized, Michel is never treated sentimentally. He is a character in a fiction, Godard is at pains to keep us aware, and not a real person. His death at the end is exhilarating rather than sad or, perhaps, something of both. Godard is a dialectician, moving between abstraction at one pole and realism at the other. It is the energy and vision of Breathless and not the outcome of its narrative that moves us. Before Breathless, cutting had been used in films for the most part as a putatively invisible seam, a smoothing over of transitions so as to spare us the bumps. The jump-cutting of Breathless creates disruption, calls attention to shifts in time and place, to the film as film. By showing up his iconoclastic craft, Godard humanizes the technology of filmmaking. Breathless asserts the personality of the filmmaker who appears in it himself in the ironic role of an informer—the author betraying the character that represents him. I can think of no other serious film that lets us get as close to process. Paradoxically, while Breathless is an exceptionally naked work, or seemingly naked, it is at the same time mysterious and opaque. Godard gives away the trick of his tricks without undermining the magic of his art. The film’s main disguise is in its narrative which may cause some problems, which in fact has caused problems, for those viewers (and reviewers) who believe that serious art needs to deal with demonstrably === Page 126 === 126 PARTISAN REVIEW significant themes. Clearly, the hero of Breathless is a disaffected punk who breaks the law (who kills) as an emblem of his freedom. Yet we experience him in the context of the film as a vital force, a man inventing his life moment by moment as if he were improvising a movie. The key to Michel's survival is his unequivocal self-interest— integrity is sanity in Godard's world—his seemingly pathological cool. Love, as the convention goes, undoes him. He moves in with an American girl (Grade B, I am tempted to add), the schizzy Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), who sells Herald Tribunes on the Champs Élysées and aspires to be a reporter. Patricia is the self-deceived American bitch-goddess manquée. It is the manquée that redeems her for us. When she seems most in love with Michel she betrays him to the police, a way, she reports, of testing whether she loves him or not, although more likely it is a repudiation of the demands of love. Michel's death is circumstantial or offers us that appearance. He is tired of running. Michel says when Patricia tells him that the police are coming. A friend comes by and offers Michel a gun, which he refuses. Nevertheless, as chance has it (or is it that character is fate?), he is shot down, running away, carrying the very gun he refused. Patricia's betrayal, within the film's borrowed conventions, is the killing blow. It is also a fulfillment of character, an act of integrity: a killer kills; a bitch betrays. After his death, in the last shot of the film, Patricia imitates Michel's ritual gesture, rubbing the side of her thumb across her lips, an act of identification. Michel is dead; the rebellious spirit survives. Earlier in the film, Patricia reads the last line of Faulkner's The Wild Palms to Michel, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” Michel is unimpressed. “Grief's a waste of time,” he says. “I'd choose nothing. Grief's only a compromise. And you have to have all or nothing.” (There are texts in all of Godard's films, literary fragments that co-exist with the visual, that parallel and illuminate the action and sometimes merely decorate it.) Throughout Breathless, Michel seems to speak as much for Godard as for himself. The character (the icon of Belmondo playing him) embodies the liberating spirit of the French film (what Truffaut called “The Tradition of Quality," the Masterpiece Theatre of its day), choosing after a point to refuse discussion of it altogether. Breathless is an extension of Godard's criticism, a vision of uncompromising personal cinema, a demonstra- tion of what is possible when a radical idea is carried through to its conclusion. There are certain unexpected pleasures in Breathless that are not === Page 127 === JONATHAN BAUMBACH 127 often noted in discussions of that work. In contrast to the romance of the gangster plot, the relationship between Michel and Patricia is precisely and realistically observed. Godard takes characters, or proto- types of characters, from Grade B movies and presents them to us with the attention to detail of a realistic novelist. The love story between Michel and Patricia, both self-involved to the point of alienation, is so exactly perceived that it becomes moving and true within the ironic distance of the film's mode. In almost all of his films—some, of course, more stylized than others—Godard mixes metaphoric action and realistic behavior, creating a world that accommodates both without obvious disparity. The tension in Breathless comes out of the at- tempted synthesis of opposites: cool and hot, intellection and action, documentary and fiction, truth and beauty. There are a number of flawed masterpieces in Godard's prodigious career—Weekend, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Pierrot le Fou, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, Masculine Feminine, A Married Woman, My Life to Live—but Breathless is his most original and fortuitous achievement, a film in which it seems as if every miscalculated risk transforms itself into gesture of grace. === Page 128 === BOOKS WHAT HAPPENED WE MUST MARCH MY DARLINGS. By Diana Trilling. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $10.00. This is a selection of Mrs. Trilling's essays and articles written since 1964, a sequel therefore to Claremont Essays, which was published in that year. She tells us that 1964 marks a turning-point not only in her own career as a writer, but in American history. A lament for President Kennedy, too late for the American edition of Claremont Essays but included in the British, leads off this new collection as a reminder of that turn in the times, but also, I think, as an act of defiance to a public opinion which, lackeying the varying stream, will now find something a little gènant in the memory of that grief. All these years later Mrs. Trilling is prepared to say that the death of Kennedy "robbed us of a future." Whether she is right in her belief that it is a new capacity for endless change, a new incapacity to construct or retain the image of historical truth, that explains our callous confu- sions I do not know and much doubt; the reputation of Opinion as inherently unstable, remote from the truth or merely a mob substitute for truth (insipientium opinio says Cicero) is of some antiquity, and nothing except happiness is harder to recall without irony than grief. But this does not matter, for what distinguishes Mrs. Trilling is a willingness to say that it was so, whatever brute forgetfulness or the revisions of the refined may have made of it subsequently; and whether the customs of forgetting or sophisticating the historical event are ancient or modern she will not observe them. It was like this, she says; I was there. Having been there when something significant was going on is always important to this writer, and as a matter of fact the validation of her presence by an elaborate register of trivial detail might be thought a fault if one failed to see that her speculation moves invariably from such detail to its ultimate cultural implications. She is a sort of Arnoldian journalist; seeing the Hyde Park railings torn up leads to a profound, frightened meditation on the structure of society. But Arnold would not describe the weather, the cloth caps and bad teeth of === Page 129 === BOOKS 129 the rioters, the traffic in the Bayswater Road. Mrs. Trilling tends to do the equivalent of this because the actuality of her observations is clearly important to her. She has a patience in these affairs which we must share; so that in the end it hardly seems too much that she devotes eighty pages to the Columbia fracas, and another eighty to an investi- gation of Radcliffe. She was there; at the Low Library, at a Timothy Leary drug-boost, at the great women's lib show in Town Hall. However surprised or shocked by what went on in these locations, she is never bowled over because, whatever the antics she has to contem- plate, she is profoundly at home. As much as the earlier ones, these are Claremont essays. They express a profound and intelligently con- trolled revulsion on the part of a Manhattan freeholder at the ephem- eral absurdities of the neighbors. Now and again Mrs. Trilling looks across the ocean to the British, whom she knows, but not on the same intimate terms. She notes, whether rightly or not, that they order some things better in Britain: homosexuality, for instance. But it may be that this observation is possible only because there is, in London, no indigenous Mrs. Trilling; her place is filled by shortwinded intelligent women journalists on a ration of a thousand words a week, who meditate not upon the culture but, trendily, on the trends. This more formidable moralist understands trends very well; she is not unsym- pathetic or inflexible; she is certainly not, in the old slang expression, with it, but neither is she a scold of the kind the English have to put up with as the price of having nobody to fill the gap between Katherine Whitehorn and Mary Whitehouse. There is something very salutary about the firmness of the Trilling stance, her immunity to illusion. Her very prose is a sort of drystone wall through which the winds of change may whistle, noisily enough but without moving the structure an inch. On the first day of her return to Radcliffe she noticed a lot of rubbish piled on the field. Why, she inquired, had all this mess been left lying around-was there a sanitation strike? No: "this spread of old scarves, discolored T-shirts, filthy torn sneakers, stained bureau runners, unusable curtains, frayed brassieres and underpants ... was a dormitory giveaway." To the students, it appears, this ugly manifestation represented an act of virtue, but Mrs. Trilling wanted to know "how anybody in direst poverty could use anything this disreputable." The unsightliness of those sneakers and bras led her straight to a condemnation of the students' middle-class gesture as a simple act of bad faith, representa- tive of much else that was going on at the school. Now in my opinion this is an honorable reaction. Most of us, especially six years ago, === Page 130 === 130 PARTISAN REVIEW would have absorbed or concealed the slight culture-shock we felt at the spectacle; we might even have reproached ourselves for having had a momentarily unreconstructed response to it. The writer's reaction is better because she will not regard her own conditioned response in favor of order as somehow more ignoble than this new cult of ordure. To remain obstinately liberal and yet never to be afraid of appearing uptight was and is a difficult posture to hold, and the labor required to hold it is sometimes too clearly manifested in the prose. And yet—though dignity usually prevents her from saying so—time has very often justified that labor. The Timothy Leary essay may have seemed, ten years ago, a bit bigoted, a trifle self-important; but now it is obvious that Mrs. Trilling was quite right not to be ready for anything, and quite right to make her account of that weird and fraudulent evening as long as it is. If you are a stubborn believer in patient and rational discourse, patient and rational discourse is the only means you have to prove it. These essays give us more or less exactly what the author, with due and stubborn consideration, said at the time. It seems characteristic that she reprints, without substantial change, her replies to a Commen- tary questionnaire about anti-Communism, written in 1967, and pursues her disagreement with Lillian Hellman in a vast parenthesis and a series of very long footnotes to the answers. This row blew up a whole decade later, was heavily publicized, and may be one of the reasons why many people want to read the book. There may therefore be some exasperation about having it all consigned to a straggle of small print. Yet the point is clear enough:a difference of opinion with Miss Hellman about historical fact is not unimportant, but it is less important than the clear exposition of a liberal anti-anti-anti- Communist position, which is the business of the original article. This is a complex but intelligible position. Mrs. Trilling believes that an accusation by such a body as McCarthy's HUAC, however distasteful the body or its individual members, does not create a presumption of the innocence of the person accused. She opposed both McCarthyism and Communism. In this convoluted piece she tries to take account of all the facts, from the pumpkin to the Fairfield Foundation and the conversion of Mr. Garry Wills to the anti-anti- Communist cause; the chips of opinion and excessive libertarian sentiment must fall where they may. I believe, myself, that people had better cause to detest McCarthy and the CIA than Mrs. Trilling is willing to admit. She relies too much, I think, on the argument that it is dishonest to make much of === Page 131 === BOOKS 131 these American vices when the Russians are manifestly much more vicious and much less free than Americans. This reminds me of the nursery argument that you must eat your repulsive rice pudding because millions of children are starving in China. It makes the worst the friend of the bad. Nor does it help, indeed it may add to the grimness of the situation, that the HUAC was, as Mrs. Trilling emphasizes, a properly constituted and legal instrument of govern- ment; for such institutions may be at once legal and infamous, and even when they are not in their essence infamous they may be in the hands of infamous men. The Court of Star Chamber is an instance of one or the other case; and so, it might be held, was the HUAC. It seems to me, though admittedly I speak at a comfortable distance from the events and all subsequent controversy and risk, that an American intellectual might, without being either weakminded or unpatriotic, take a very different view of all this from Mrs. Trilling's. Still, there it is, her view, boldly and carefully set forth, for dissenters to consider. So with her central setpiece on the Columbia riots. Is it too long, too obsessed with the record of personal fears and observations? Or does its thereness, the sense it gives of a writer who experienced the actual terrors and the possibilities of much worse agonies that never happened, justify it? It is far from being a simple document, counterpointed as the events at Columbia are with a commentary on Mailer's Steps of the Pentagon and with memories of a more natural catastrophe, a flood at the Connecticut shore. But some things do emerge with a sharpness unaffected by these procedures. There was no obvious or urgent cause for the disturbances. Neither the gymnasium nor the IDA were more than handy excuses. The SDS managed to "activate a campus which hadn't previously realized there was anything spectacularly wrong with it." And no doubt it is from such facts as these that the real horror grows, the horror that Mrs. Trilling felt and perhaps still feels: the apparently unpolitical may be politicized, and then violence flowers as in a speeded-up film, involving the uncomprehending, destroying ordinariness, as in the Dutch train hijacks. Minor violence can intimi- date the powerful for a while; but it escalates to the point where major violence is justifiable in retribution, and then comes the bust, the wall of fire or the cops with their tear gas and nightsticks. You start by pissing on carpets and end with crushed skulls, with nobody any longer capable of rational thought, even in his own interest. It is even part of the horror that the whole movement faded away, having shown how fortuitous and yet potentially unlimited are the possibilities of === Page 132 === 132 PARTISAN REVIEW small-scale anarchy and the preliminary gestures of "existential" revolutionism. Contemporary student revolts in Germany, and even in Paris and London, made more obvious sense in terms of politics, but even they did not seek to be intelligible. What we were watching was the belated irruption of Dada into social action. Cults of disorder, of anti-passéisme, of a psychoanalysis purged of Freud's tragic morality, are all obvious targets for Mrs. Trilling's rational severity. She is quick to notice the ways in which Women's Liberation can be hampered or distorted by the mistakes and excesses of its proponents, quick to see how the decline of learning may signify, in her own college and elsewhere, a loss of humanity in the more general sense. Nor is she merely judicial. She listens with unusual sympathy to the young; one interview with a Harvard graduate is particularly touching, he so intelligent, she so responsive. And she feels genuine pity for those whom she sees as having to pay the price for their elders' faults of omission or commission, for their having, out of guilt or idleness, just gone along with everything. The price may be a special kind of disorientation and loneliness; even with the breakdown of a social system which distinguished coupling from mating, a reduction of sexuality. In short, there are many areas in which Mrs. Trilling, though she clearly sees why and how it is possible for the rest of us to be deceived, is not deceived herself. Her essay on Easy Rider is a clear instance of this power. As it happened, on the day after I read it I came upon a comment on this film in a student newspaper; advising us to ignore a local rerun, it dismissed the movie as a characteristic piece of sixties phony. This doesn't mean that everybody has caught up with Mrs. Trilling; the writer of that notice probably has illusions on other matters that he won't see through for a decade, while Mrs. Trilling is no doubt perfectly clear about them now. I don't mean that she's right about everything; but she is right about most things and honest and lucid even when in my view, she's wrong. FRANK KERMODE === Page 133 === BOOK REVIEWS 133 CLASS AND CLASSLESS SOCIETIES CLASS IN A CAPITALIST SOCIETY: A STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN. By John Westergaard and Henrietta Resler. Basic Books. $15.00. SCHOOLING IN CAPITALIST AMERICA. By Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Basic Books. $13.95. In the 1950s and early 1960s, orthodox sociology was dominated by a view which may be called the theory of industrial society. The notion of industrial society is a very old one, dating back to Saint-Simon. But the term itself had largely fallen into disuse by the turn of this century; it was revived and given fresh impetus in the writings of both European and American liberal intellectuals in the post-War period (especially Aron, Dahrendorf, Lipset, Bell and Kerr), and in their hands became a vehicle for the expression of an optimistic appraisal of the emerging trend of development of the Western coun- tries, together with a means of effecting a largely implicit critique of Eastern European state socialism. Saint-Simon used “industrial so- ciety” in the context of a contrast with feudalism, comparing the productive labor of the industriels with the “idle classes” in feudal society. In the writings of the later authors, the contrast that is developed is one more oriented to industrialism as a socio-technical system bringing in its train certain definite and fundamental social changes. But there is a strong line of continuity between Saint-Simon and the subsequent group of writers in their treatment of classes, class society, and class conflict. The theory of industrial society, unlike Marxism, with its triad of feudalism-capitalism-socialism, is based upon the assumption that social change in the modern era can be encompassed within a twofold typology of society (feudalism, or “traditional” society” more generally, being superseded by industrial society). Consequently, what is for Marxism a generic type of society structured around a distinctive class relation, that of capital and wage-labor, is for those opting for the notion of industrial society only a transitory phase in the emergence of the new industrial order from its agrarian background; class conflict, or === Page 134 === 134 PARTISAN REVIEW at least active class struggle, is here treated as a transitory phenomenon, deriving from the strains involved in the break with traditionalism, where the emerging industrial order has not yet become fully matured and subject to normative regulation. Class divisions produce active struggles, according to this view, only in the early phases of in- dustrialization. As class conflict becomes institutionalized in the economy in the form of recognized modes of arbitration and the conduct of disputes, and in the polity in the shape of the regulated competition of labor and conservative parties (stressed particularly by Lipset), it loses its transformative force. Some industrial society theor- ists, like Lipset, hold that industrial society is still a class society, albeit one in which class divisions have become fruitfully accommodated to the industrial order. Others have held that, in a differentiated industrial society, the very concept of class loses any usefulness—thereby again following Saint-Simon, whose society of industriels was to be a "one class society," and thereby an order in which class has become obsolete, through evolution rather than revolution. As elaborated up to the middle 1960s, the theory of industrial society helped to underpin an optimistic liberalism through this evolutionary version of classlessness, and furthermore offered a ready account of the (putative) decline of Marxism. The interpretation of class conflict associated with the notion of industrial society tied in closely to the thesis of the "end of ideology." The end of ideology always meant above all the end of Marxism as an influential movement in the advanced societies. Marxism, for these writers, is an ideology stemming from the class struggles of nascent industrial society. As Durkheim remarked, it is a "cry of pain" rather than what it claimed to be, a scientific analysis of history, and thus it increasingly dissolved as the conditions giving rise to it were changed by the accommodation or institutionalization of class conflict. What used, in the nineteenth century, to be called the social problem, the problem of class conflict, thus appeared as basically resolved, establishing the basis for progres- sive social reform. Such reform, it was held, was well under way during the two decades after the War, leading to increased social and educa- tional mobility, the diffusion of power among competitive elites, the severance of property ownership from managerial control, and the expanding incorporation of minority ethnic groups within the demo- cratic structure of the polity. These views always had their critics, but some of the leading ones were either not Marxists, or occupied an ambiguous position with regard to Marxism (e.g., C. Wright Mills). The more orthodox Marxist === Page 135 === BOOKS 135 works of the period-including Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital-made little dent in the existing orthodoxy. It took the events of 1968-69 to do this. The impact of the student movements, and the subsequent resurgence of economic difficulties in the West, have stimulated a renewed surge of Marxist intellectual creativity, both on the level of theory and on the more empirical level of the analysis of the failure of the Western countries to implement the progressive changes that liberal thinkers had become accustomed to claiming were already well on the way to realization. How persuasive are such recent Marxist analyses? The publication, within the last few months, of two such works-Westergaard and Resler's Class in a Capitalist Society, and Bowles and Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America-provides a useful opportunity to consider such a question. Both, in their own ways, are important works, and each connects to and culminates several years' research on the part of their respective authors. Further- more, the first of the two books is concerned with examining the contemporary class structure of the society which provided Marx with the basic empirical content of Capital a hundred years ago, but which has never produced more than a marginally revolutionary labor movement; while the second is written in the context of the only major industrialized country in which the labor movement has not become affiliated with a major socialist political party. Westergaard and Resler's book is a full-scale exposition of the themes previously developed by the senior author in various papers and articles published over the past fifteen years or so. In these, Westergaard attacked the liberal orthodoxy by trying to show that classes and class conflict had not withered away, and could not do so in the absence of the abolition of capitalism. The book seeks to document this at length; its main concern is with what the authors call "the hard core of class"-with the substance and structural sources of inequality." "Wage earners," they affirm, "are still enchained by capital, though the chains are suppler now than they were." The basic form and distribu- tion of class inequalities have persisted through the changes that have taken place in Britain since the turn of the century. The rising real income of the mass of the labor force has not greatly affected the overall distribution of income, since the incomes of high earners have in- creased proportionately. Wealth, and particularly share ownership, remains highly concentrated among a small minority, and there are no major trends undermining the position of this minority. Nor has "managerialism" in any substantial way eroded the economic power of private property. Here Westergaard and Resler repeat the now familiar === Page 136 === 136 PARTISAN REVIEW barrage of arguments against the presumption of a managerial revolu- tion: however propertyless they may be, managers are still bound to the overall constraints of the need to pursue profits. "The individual nineteenth and early twentieth-century owner-entreprenuer," they point out, "may have been more liable than the board of a modern corporation to be diverted from profit maximization by a concern with personal prestige and self-aggrandizement." Moreover, there is a difference between administrative operations and the use of power: propertied interests may leave the day-to-day administration of the corporation to managerial executives, but reserve the capacity to intervene when it is deemed important or necessary to do so. Finally, propertyless managers turn out not to be so propertyless after all. It may be true that in the very large enterprises share-ownership is often widely spread, but nevertheless most directors of such enterprises own substantial shareholdings, thus bringing their interests closely into line with the more substantial sectors of the propertied class. The real meat of Westergaard and Resler's work is to be found in the chapter in which they attempt to analyze the achievements of the welfare state, and try to show that they fall disastrously short of the reformist ambitions underlying its history since the War. The power of capital has not been tamed by an internal expansion of management control; how far has it been curbed by the promotion of welfare schemes, and by the range of other economic and educational objec- tives pursued by the interventionist state? Most of the welfare schemes, including social security, health services, provision of subsidized housing etc., they indicate are double-edged. In one sense they help buffer lower income groups from the vicissitudes of the capitalist economy; in a more profound sense they are the necessary means of consolidating its survival, through helping to provide a stable and docile labor force. Welfare provisions are by and large financed from the income of wage earners themselves, and are not accompanied by any shift of power into their hands, being administered by bureaucratic organizations over which welfare recipients themselves have no direct control. The same is true with respect to state intervention in the economy in the shape of nationalization. Westergaard and Resler recognize that some of the impetus to nationalization has come from reformist zeal-particularly in the program instituted by the Labor Party after the War. But the principal effects have been to shore up the capitalist economy by the public appropriation of industries of low profitability. Nationalization has produced neither a significant redis- tribution of wealth, since compensation was paid to former owners, === Page 137 === BOOKS 137 nor any important redistribution of power, since nationalization was not accompanied by any major reorganization of the industries con- cerned in the direction of conferring power on the mass of employees. Westergaard and Resler devote considerable attention to educa- tional opportunity, and this provides the most immediate point of comparison between their work and that of Bowles and Gintis. “The story of the growth of public education,” the former authors say, “is a case study in the mixture of pressures that have swollen state activi- ties.” Pressure for the expansion of education as a social good has been mingled with a strong emphasis on the need for creating a capable, adaptable and diligent labor force. “Preoccupations with political pacification, industrial discipline, and above all labor recruitment and proficiency, have both joined and clashed with more liberal concerns to expand state activity in this field; and they do so still.” Education has certainly not proved to be the instrument of producing social change that some have hoped it would be: the distribution of educational opportunities reflects the broader disparities of wealth and privilege in the social system. Such disparities, Westergaard and Resler hold, cannot be explained in terms of inherited differences in I.Q. levels. Even if we were to accept the claims made by psychologists on behalf of I.Q. tests, as measuring “innate intellectual potentiality,” it remains the case that educational attainment is strongly conditioned by class differences, for the relationship between class and educational attain- ment holds even if measured I.Q. is held constant. Bowles and Gintis take up most of these issues in much greater detail, and against the background of a school system which has been for a long time, nominally at least, less elitist than that in Britain. Their distinctive emphasis upon the educational system, as compared to Westergaard and Resler, is more than simply a matter of their choosing to concentrate their efforts upon a particular social institu- tion. For in the United States, the labor movement has not become the central core of pressures for social reform, much less revolution, and the debates which in Britain have focused only partly upon the sphere of education have tended in the United States to cluster more strongly there, as the prime vehicle for realizing what Bowles and Gintis call “technocratic-meritocratic” values so vital to the United States, according to Bowles and Gintis, “The educational system, perhaps more than any other contemporary social institution, has become the laboratory in which competing solutions to the problems of personal liberty and social equality are tested and the arena in which social struggles are fought out.” Liberal efforts at === Page 138 === 138 PARTISAN REVIEW school reform have failed in two ways: in achieving significant impact on the internal reorganization of the classroom, and in stimulating broader social changes through programs of compensatory education-Project Headstart, etc. The main object of Bowles and Gintis's work is to explain why such reformist endeavors have met with, at best, only very limited success-and why there is no hope of their succeeding without much more fundamental social and economic changes in American society as a whole. These failures of liberal educational reform, they are concerned to emphasize, have produced a conservative backlash finding intellectual expression in the revival of genetic interpretations of differential academic attainment: a signifi- cant portion of their book is devoted to attempting a thorough critique of these. This is "Not a healthy conservatism founded on the affirma- tion of traditional values, but a rheumy loss of nerve, a product of the dashed hopes of the past decades." Bowles and Gintis's approach to the critique of genetic theories of inequality is bold and convincing, seeking to undercut such theories at their roots. The intergenerational transmission of social and economic inequalities works mainly through "noncognitive mechanisms": this is largely independent of the distribution of I.Q., regardless of whether the latter is primarily an expression of inherited capacities or whether it is not. This basic fact, they say, has been unappreciated by both conservative critics and liberal apologists alike. Consequently the latter have managed to produce only relatively superficial and ineffective responses to the arguments of the former. Since I.Q. is not a basic determinant of the structure of privilege, the genetic-environmentalists controversy is irrelevant to the discussion of the sources of inequality. The authors also point to an important tension in liberal thinking on egalitarianism (one actually satirized two decades ago in Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy). The liberal view of the just society is one in which there is no socially derived inequality of opportunity. But this can only operate given that there are genetic differences in intellectual talents and capacities: otherwise it leads to a much more radical view that there is no justification for social and economic inequality at all. Insofar, therefore, as the weight of liberal opinion is directed towards claiming that differences in talent and capacity are not determined by genetic inheritance, liberalism collapses into radicalism. The organization of the school system in the United States, Bowles and Gintis show, has been strongly influenced by the evolution of the economy in the movement from entrepreneurial to corporate capital- === Page 139 === BOOKS 139 ism. Like Westergaard and Resler, they point to processes of educa- tional change as being stimulated by a mingling of reforming and practical demands, with the latter as the crucial filter controlling which reforms are acceptable and which are not. The educational system tends to resemble that of the overall economic order in a fairly direct way. Education is an institution which is geared to the social reproduc- tion of a labor force that can be adaptively distributed in the hierarchy of the reward system and the division of labor. Relations of authority within the school duplicate the hierarchies of the workplace in respect to the concentration of power; the competitive character of school life, with its promise of attainment and threat of failure, coordinates with that of the economic system; and the fragmentation of the economic division of labor is paralleled in the compartmentalized character of academic work. “By providing skills, legitimating inequalities in economic positions, and facilitating certain types of social intercourse among individuals,” the authors conclude, “U.S. education patterns personal development around the requirements of alienated work. The educational system reproduces the capitalist social division of labor, in part, through a correspondence between its own internal social rela- tionship and those of the workplace.” There are at least two major aspects of these books which deserve examination, if one is to locate them with reference to the liberal standpoint expressed in the theory of industrial society. First, are their authors substantially correct in claiming that the reformist measures instituted in the respective societies to secure the progressive leveling of inequalities have failed? Second, how convincing is the view that such failure, suppose their claims are justified, is explained as the outcome of capitalism as a specific mode of production? For liberal thinkers, the first of these questions is all-important; for socialists it is obviously crucial to connect the answer to the second in as satisfactory and sophisticated a way as possible. I believe it is difficult to resist the force of the arguments that the basic institutional and economic structure of capitalism has survived attempts at piecemeal reform such as has been undertaken in the “mixed economy” that has been the goal of successive Labor govern- ments in Britain since the War, and that hence the ambition of securing profound social transformation through the educational system has been and will continue to be frustrated. On the other hand, I also think it true to say that both sets of authors dismiss too readily the impact of reforms in creating the changes which have been achieved, and they do not always provide a balanced assessment of debates about === Page 140 === 140 PARTISAN REVIEW just how much social and economic change has occurred with respect to class inequalities. These comments, I think, are particularly war- ranted in the case of Westergaard and Resler. Their book is written in a dispassionate, clinical way, in contrast to that of Bowles and Gintis, which has a more vigorous and compelling style. But there are several quite basic junctures in Westergaard and Resler's empirical discussion where counterinterpretations to their own are inadequately examined. For example, in discussing the distribution of wealth, the authors strongly emphasize the conclusion that inequalities of wealth have changed only marginally in the direction of a broader spread; apparent shifts in wealth distribution as indicated by wealth statistics, they affirm, are primarily the result of transfers among the wealthy, as a safeguard against taxation. This is a point of view which I find convincing; but it is a much more controversial one than they imply, and they ignore the work of economists (e.g., Polyani and Wood) who have claimed to show that a very substantial redistribution of wealth has taken place over the course of this century. Westergaard and Resler seem to admit only reluctantly that reformist groups, even the labor movement itself, may have been a significant force for change in British society, preferring to put the emphasis upon the manipulative power of capital to institute changes which suit its own interests. There is more than a hint here of the view that anything which is not a revolutionary change is not a change at all. This sort of downplaying of the achievements of the labor movement in Britain is in a way expressive of an underlying pessimism in the authors' views, which sits uncomfortably with the (certainly very tentative) hopes they express for their concluding chapter. For if even the rather modest reformism of the labor movement has been really managed and controlled from above, how could we ever expect labor to generate an effective impetus towards the much more basic processes of opposition that a revolution would demand? Their analysis leaves the impression of a society that is as stable, although class-divided, as the peacefully evolving industrial society evoked by the liberal writers of the 1950s and 1960s-perhaps more so, for the latter group did after all hold that the Western societies were in the process of creating major and progressive social transformation from within. As I have already emphasized in the beginning of this discussion, the theory of industrial society forecloses the differentiation between capitalism and socialism fundamental to any type of Marxist view- point. Industrialism, it is argued, is linked to a distinctive type of socio- economic order which has, in Kerr's term, its own inherent logic. Although the theory of industrial society was connected to an optimis- === Page 141 === BOOKS 141 tic liberalism, there are obvious similarities here to Weber's (much more somber) appraisal of the “iron cage” of bureaucratic routiniza- tion which supposedly characterizes the modern era, and it is not surprising that the theme of bureaucratization and its exigencies has been quite closely involved with this sort of standpoint (with the Weber-Schumpeter line helping to foster the so-called “theory of democratic elitism” as a characterization of the liberal-democratic polity in industrial society). Marxism regards neither the character of industrial organization, nor bureaucratic hierarchy as inviolate; on the contrary, each is presumed to be capable of radical transformation in a socialist order. Because bureaucracy is traditionally seen as an expres- sion of class domination in Marxist theory, orthodox Marxism, with the exception of Maoism, has given little attention to what might be called the “specificity of capitalism”: i.e., how far bureaucratic domina- tion or inequalities of power derive in a direct way from the capital wage-labor relation, as mediated by the capitalist state. The New Left, both in Europe and in the United States, was in blunt opposition to the older forms of orthodox Marxism in this matter, and it is a noticeable contrast between these two books that the American authors, closely affiliated to the student movement of the late 1960s, give more attention to such problems than do the authors of the British volume. The treatment of the specificity of capitalism provided by the latter is of a traditional and limited kind. All of the various types and levels of inequality are referred back to the continued existence of concen- trated private capital ownership: the strong implication being that the abolition of such ownership would thereby produce the dissolution of these inequalities, and of the alienating modes of labor linked to them. One or two comments the authors let drop about the state socialist societies suggest they believe there is more to it than this, but these are nowhere developed. In Eastern Europe, Westergaard and Resler say, “power is concentrated still, because state ownership has not been translated into effective public ownership,” but they do not provide any coherent indication of what “effective public ownership” would look like, nor do they give much sign of showing that they regard the acquisition of power by a centralized, bureaucratic apparatus as a major potential source of domination in a socialist order of the future. But surely such a possibility must be taken with the utmost seriousness by socialists: the abolition of private ownership of capital is no guarantee of the dissolution of a profit oriented economy, and it can be supplemented by a bureaucratic state further removed from the hands of the people than the state in liberal democracy. As far as educational systems are concerned, it seems clear enough that while the degree of === Page 142 === 142 PARTISAN REVIEW openness of recruitment to higher education is greater in the state socialist societies than in the Western countries, the organization of schooling is more rigidly hierarchical and reward oriented there than in the West. Bowles and Gintis recognize this. The Eastern European countries "have abolished private ownership of the means of produc- tion, while replicating the relationships of economic control, domi- nance, and subordination characteristic of capitalism." They envisage a form of socialism which is both much more radically egalitarian and in which power is devolved upon the mass of its population through participatory democracy. Here, however, we reach the limits of their analysis, for their characterization of such a society is largely rhetorical. They speak of the "increased efficiency of socialist economic life," which will derive from "comprehensive and rational economic plan- ning"; and they seem to hold that this is readily compatible with "liberated education and unalienated work." But it is up to all of us who hold socialist views to acknowledge that the second of these accomplishments is only contingently connected to the first, and to seek to develop a detailed theoretical analysis that builds upon studies of the state socialist societies so as to generate a sophisticated understanding of the specificity of capitalism and thereby of the real potentialities of socialist transformation. ANTHONY GIDDENS COLLECTING THE UNCONSCIOUS STRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Volume II. By Claude Lévi-Strauss. Basic Books, Inc. $17.50. Back in the mid-1930s Claude Lévi-Strauss went into the jungles of central Brazil expecting to encounter human beings much different from himself. Instead he found similarities. This discovery had a profound effect on the young professor of sociology at São Paulo University, who had been a classmate of Simone de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne, and he was to spend the following decades codifying it. Structural Anthropology, Volume II, like its predecessor (pub- lished here in 1963), is made up of articles and addresses spanning a === Page 143 === BOOKS 143 number of years. We're given a diversified picture of the author's preoccupations with myth, kinship structures, and the status and scope of anthropology, as well as homages to Rousseau ("founder of the human sciences"), and Durkheim, plus odd pieces on subjects like sacred mushrooms and the Bureau of American Ethnology. Dissatisfaction with what he saw as philosophy's parlor game abstractions brought Lévi-Strauss into the field, where that first shock of similarity engendered the kernel of what was to become structural anthropology. For what people of ostensibly remote cultures have in common are the structures embodied in myths, in marriage and kinship customs, and in systems of classification. Inveighing against the distortions produced by fixation on an evolutionary perspective, Lévi-Strauss argues that the really fundamental thing isn't the distinc- tion between the "science of the concrete" of so-called primitives and our own "science of the abstract," but how the human mind in whatever setting constructs systems of opposition and association. Further, cognition's ultimate components are not overt myths and customs of particular societies but universal covert structures. These structures are unconscious and not to be confused with regularities found on the empirical level. Lévi-Strauss describes a jigsaw puzzle, its pieces cut to shape by a mechanical saw, the latter's movements determined by moving cams. Now, if we are to speak of the puzzle's structure, this will be manifest not in the shapes of the pieces or the way they fit together (at least not in the relevant sense), but only in terms of the mathematical formula regulating the cams. (Lévi-Strauss is never at a loss for neat analogies.) "Every civilization tends to overestimate the objective orientation of its thought and this tendency is never absent," he writes in The Savage Mind. The apparent superiority of modern science is at least partly due to our criteria being unavoidably a product of one kind of objective orientation. Not all investigators have equalled Lévi-Strauss's humility and respectfulness. "Our science reached its maturity," he writes, "the day that Western man began to understand that he would never understand himself as long as there would be on the surface of the earth a single people whom he would treat as an object." But however deep his identification with other cultures he remains aware that the anthropologist must always function as an outsider, this being what delineates anthropology as such: social science applied to societies other than one's own. Some of the most engaging discussion, particularly in the chapter entitled, "Race and History," concerns the perspective formed by members of a culture on outsiders. All societies tend to be ethnocentric: === Page 144 === 144 PARTISAN REVIEW we think ours is the right understanding, that our customs and mores are correctness itself; everything outside the magic circle is viewed as uncouth, evil, subhuman. “Mankind stops at the frontiers of the tribe, of the linguistic group, and sometimes even of the village, to the extent that a great many of the people called primitive call themselves by a name which means ‘men’. . . .” This may go as far as designating outsiders as apparitions. Our own perspective is distorted comparably—thus the ongoing extermination of the world’s primitive cultures. And in the face of this ugly fact what is the value of anthropological research per se? Wouldn’t direct efforts at protecting these peoples be preferable—say by making petitions, protesting to the governments concerned as well as to the U.N., devising programs for their welfare? A lost cause? Lévi- Strauss tends to be pessimistic. The extinction of many of the world’s so-called primitive peoples is practically inevitable. In Brazil alone, from 1900 to 1950, over ninety tribes were wiped out. Slaughter of the South American Indians goes on even now. But is this an anthropological tragedy? Sometimes Lévi- Strauss’s concern seems misdirected, as when he assures us that anthropology shouldn’t lose heart over the partial extinction of its subject matter, since it can compensate by making more efficient use of what is left. Not scientific concern but outrage on a human level should be our response to the murderous destruction of native societies. That Lévi-Strauss doesn’t completely despair over this dwindling of material isn’t surprising. He has often been criticized, rightly or wrongly, for erecting grand theories on the basis of few examples drawn from observing even fewer cultures. In this he is contrasted with American scientists, who tend to downplay fancy theorizing in favor of data gathering and statistics. By their standards his eccentric research methods are unscientific. But though his critics accuse him of selecting data to fit preconceived formulations, there is at least an element of this approach is easily mistaken for a lapse in scientific scruples. As for Lévi-Strauss (who calls for an “epistemological criticism” of the sciences), while he seeks to establish and define the scientific basis of his discipline, he does not claim for anthropology the status of a “hard science” in the sense of physics or biology. These latter so dominate the field as to be seen as defining types to which anything wishing to designate itself as science must come to terms. But may there not be other valid forms of science, differing from physics and the other hard sciences not only in subject matter, but in their primary epistemo- === Page 145 === BOOKS 145 logical orientation? Such a suggestion could, of course, be mistaken for an abandonment of objective criteria, when what Lévi-Strauss is really doing is giving objectivity a new alignment, one that is proper to the human sciences. Only linguistics among the latter qualifies as a hard generality and exactitude. Since the human sciences study man as man it is impossible to approach them with the objectivity reserved for chemistry or physics. This can be done only in proportion as man is dehumanized into an object. And in this case it is no longer man being studied and the human sciences, having focused beyond their stipu- lated material, become indistinguishable from the natural sciences. This impasse is surmounted only by relocating the line separating observer and object. A curious ambivalence marks Lévi-Strauss's attitudes toward knowledge and abstract thinking. While he often echoes the perennial Eden myth in representing knowledge as alienating, he has himself advanced the cause of abstraction to new levels. Despite his idealization of archaic societies which, by some special wisdom perhaps, resist historical change in our own sense, Lévi-Strauss remains the prototype of the Western cosmopolitan academic. Curious, too, are his thoughts on progress. It's all right to insist that the superiority of technological civilization is merely apparent. Blinded by our criteria, recognizing order only where we ourselves have instituted it, we draw ourselves into a vicious circle of conceptual entrapment. Lévi-Strauss seems to betray an unwitting adherence to this science dominated perspective when he cites examples of its employment by so-called primitives as evidence that they are, in certain respects, as "advanced" as we. It's not easy, even for someone like Lévi- Strauss, to discard the ethnocentric perspective from which we're ordinarily bound to view other cultures. Our observations are preju- diced as though made through a microscope set to a certain focus: everything on either side of this focus appears blurred. EDWARD MARCOTTE === Page 146 === 146 PARTISAN REVIEW ANGELS AND REBELS NAKED ANGELS: THE LIVES AND LITERATURE OF THE BEAT GENERATION. By John Tytell. McGraw-Hill. $10. When, in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe discovers that the driver of the Merry Pranksters' bus on their self- consciously mythic, freaked-out cross-country trip in 1964 is none other than Neal Cassady-Cassady, who had been the inspiration, fifteen years earlier, for the character of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerou- ac's On the Road-the discovery gives a confirming pat to a familiar opinion about recent social history: that the Beat Generation had been the important precursor of the sixties Counterculture, originating the styles and attitudes of cultural revolt. Allen Ginsberg served publicly at the time as the emblem of an underground inheritance between two generations, as did Gary Snyder, which is partly the reason that they are currently the only certain examples of ex-Beats in no need of rediscovery. But Neal Cassady was the fierce original, the personal apotheosis of the Beat. As Moriarty, he was the subject of a portrait more memorable than the book itself, as a "burning, frightful, shud- dering angel." To the Pranksters and Yippies Cassady drove East to the World's Fair, he must have glowed with a mystique of ancestry and reincarnation. It seems hardly to make sense at first that a full-scale revival of interest in the Beats did not come to pass when their legacy flourished at the end of the last decade, but in fact, they were largely unread. The instances of the three writers John Tytell studies in Naked Angels are exemplary: in the late sixties, Jack Kerouac was mostly out of print, Burroughs stood in some oblique relation to the drug culture but was otherwise out of fashion, and only Ginsberg was widely known-as sainted elder, at least if not as poet. Moreover, the Beats' writing had little in common with the work of writers who were esteemed and read by the Counter-culture, such as Hesse or Kurt Vonnegut. The gap between the Naked Lunch tetrology and, say, The Lord of the Rings could hardly be wider. Or consider the dramatic difference between On The Road and the 1967 film Easy Rider: on the one hand, Kerouac's energetic, manic, verbal hell-raisers, full of "raw, wild joy," and on the other, Peter Fonda as a wistful, passive-aggressive on a motorcycle, === Page 147 === BOOKS 147 word shy, hoping that someone will shoot him for his ideals. These examples suggest that what was gritty and dismal and hysterical, and gave its high color to the distinctive work of the Beats, was markedly out of place in the next decade; and, too, that the Beats had a better sense of fun. Ultimately the image of Cassady-Moriarty behind the wheel for two decades of wandering, disaffected youth is misleading, all coincidence and sentimentality. And yet it is part of John Tytell's insistence in his thoughtful book, the most thorough critical study of the subject available, that we consider the Beats the "first 'dropouts,' the renegade vanguard of a new culture." At first, he writes, they were regarded as brigands of the underground; they had to find new ways to remind their culture of the dignity of self-reliance and to provide an Emersanian awareness of the tyranny of institutions. Execrating the worldly, dreading the implications of control, they chose to consecrate the whims of the individual. Ecstatic iconoclasts, youthful seekers of what Kerouac called "potent and inconceivable radiance," they simultaneously heralded an impending apocalypse and dramatized the irrational, the oral and the improvisatory to provoke the end of an omnipresent stupor. Elsewhere in the book the Beats are called "the creative soul of the fifties," bearing witness to the individual sensibility at a moment when the Cold War chastened everyone into what Ginsberg called a fear of feeling. Above all Tytell imagines the Beats as an unslumbering oasis of "Emersonian awareness" in an era of "omnipresent stupor." Plainly he intends that the new recognition of Beat literature the book advocates will be founded on an idea of the affirmative political character of their work as against the withering negativity of its historical period. But Tytell finds such an idea difficult to sustain in relation to specific Beat texts, especially texts by Burroughs and Kerouac. It is an admission of this difficulty that he restricts his broad, generalizing comments to the first and last chapters of the book, where he permits himself to blend his very different writers for the sake of speculation. For example, he would not use the above language of transcendence and "inconceivable radiances" in the chapter on Burroughs's fiction, where he leads us on a tour of those debased and putrefying landscapes. He does, however, search out humanitarian features in the unfriendly place, though not without evidence of strain. He reads Burroughs's dread fantasies of complex, impersonal systems of control as === Page 148 === 148 PARTISAN REVIEW more “Emersonian” protest against “the tyranny of institutions”: “Naked Lunch,” he writes, “is a hallucinatory vision of the very worst expectations of the fifties.” This reading overlooks Burroughs’s ghastly delight in the (mostly sexual) possibilities of such tyranny. Burroughs, that is to say, is not Jonathan Swift; when his prose fouls itself, it is not to be expected that the befoulment is in the ulterior service of elegant and virtuous ideas. It is nearer, instead, to a schoolboy playing with bad words. I hasten to say that Tyell’s chapter on Burroughs is in many ways a contribution. It makes valuable comment on Burroughs’s relation to modernist experiments with narrative form, and demon- strates the genuine complexity of temporal structure in the novels. Especially convincing is the discussion of the verbal richness of some of Burroughs’s work. But criticism and even appreciation are different from sympathy, and it is well to keep in mind, whatever pleasure reading Burroughs gives, that sympathy for his work brings one close to hostility for the species at large. Difficulties of another sort interfere with the attempt to read Kerouac for the value of his social vision. The imagination of society that obtains in On the Road or The Dharma Bums is as schoolboyish, in its way, as Burroughs’s scatology: it projects a world without grownups, for the purpose of licensing infinite truancy. For the most part, Kerouac’s subterraneans are not, as Tyell calls them, “youthful seekers” after transcendence, but hyperkinetics—or, alternately, they are in flight. One of the surprises of rereading On the Road is the discovery that its central figures are not hungry for experience but afraid of it. They take to the road precisely to avoid the involved and involving knowledge of persons and places encountered more than fleetingly. Tyell’s formulation of their ambivalence toward such knowledge is apt. Sal Paradise is Kerouac’s urge to settle down, “a projection of the withdrawn Kerouac who lived at home with his mother,” while Moriarty is the alter-ego of anarchy and speed—in Burroughs’s words about Cassady, “compulsive, dedicated, ready to sacrifice family, friends, even his very car itself to the necessity of moving from one place to another.” This tension in the partnership structures the novel, but at neither pole is the domestic, “straight” ideal itself brought into question. As Burroughs shrewdly implied, Moriarty honors the Eisenhower-era conformity quite as much in the breach as Paradise does, for example, in his pastoral interlude of playing house with a migrant farm worker. But Tyell insists upon seeing Dean Moriarty’s road compulsion as a harbinger of ideological revolt, an early prototype of a new Nietzchean, Dionysian irresponsibil- ity.... When dressed he wears baggy trousers and torn T-shirts. === Page 149 === BOOKS 149 Instead of making himself an instrument tuned to comply to the goals of a corporation, an institution, or the state, Dean challenges any official authority with his radical subjectivity. If Naked Angels takes the Beats' iconoclasm too much at face value, it is at the same time the best study of Beat esthetics one will find. In connection with Ginsberg and Kerouac much is made of the "aesthetic of spontaneity" they shared and developed in one another, an ecstatic abandonment of conscious control of language, an intuitive response to the inner voice. Such a heightened state usurps normal consciousness with its filtering processes, soars beyond the intellectual capabilities of reason and choice and selectivity to achieve what Kerouac called "an undisturbed flow from the mind" or what Ginsberg termed in his own work an "undifferentiated con- sciousness." This seems to be a distant relative of the Yeats's automatic writing, a nearer one of Charlie Parker's intricate double-time outpourings. There is reason to take seriously their faith in spontaneity. Kerouac's prose still has power to keep the eye moving, skills of rhythm and pace and sound, enough to justify John Tytell's remonstrance that his long neglect should end. Ginsberg's The Fall of America, winner of the National Book Award, is a marvel of spontaneous creativity. Its method-jotting down what passed by, or came to mind, or played on the radio while travelling (once again) across America-in no way promised the interesting text that resulted. It is with the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, in fact, that Naked Angels achieves its most consistent successes. There is an air of legitimacy about the assertion of Ginsberg's links to Blake and Whitman as it is made here. An account of his development as a poet renders it convincing that Ginsberg's transcendentalism is everywhere strongly felt, and, especially in such a poem as "Kaddish," forged out of self- knowledge. Moreover, only in discussing Ginsberg's poetry is there real pertinence in Tytell's historical thesis, his portrayal of the Beats as shock-troops of sensibility. The American audience for poetry has not stopped reading "Howl" since its first appearance in part because, unlike Burroughs's routine haughtiness or Kerouac's "kicks," the poem has retained its power to give significant offense. The first half of Naked Angels is biography, a record of the Beats' "first conjunctions." Though admirably detached, it could hardly prevent itself from reading like a potboiler, full of crime (murder!) and dope and angst, given what the lives, evidently, were like. Among other === Page 150 === 150 PARTISAN REVIEW things, it reports an incidental remark by Carl Solomon which gives the problem of the Beats what is for me its decisive cast. In the late forties Solomon is said to have called Ginsberg a "dopey daffodil" because the poet "seemed to represent a Wordsworthian projection of sensitivity rather than Artaud's Surrealist conception of the poet as brute." Wordsworth or Artaud, then? Flower or switchblade? The avant-garde at all times likes to think of itself as dangerous, even if only, as in the 1890s, dangerously beautiful. But what if the best gifts of a new generation of writers lay with their instincts of delicacy, warmth, inflection? If their voice insists on being, as it were, stubbornly delicate, in spite of their own Artaud-like desires to terrify? To be cursed with an essentially sympathetic voice seems to be the dilemma of the best Beat writing: the abundantly Wordsworthian poetry of Gary Snyder, the conflicted, elegiac strains in The Fall of America, or in "Kaddish" itself, where the stridency of incantation yet fails to suppress what is shaded and personal in the voice. Something similar is true of that which is enduring in On the Road: We were standing on top of a hill on a beautiful sunny day in San Francisco; our shadows fell across the sidewalk. Out of the tenement next to Camille's house filed eleven Greek men and women who instantly lined themselves up on the sunny pavement while another backed up across the narrow street and smiled at them over a camera. We gaped at these ancient people who were having a wedding party for one of their daughters, probably the thousandth in an unbroken dark generation of smiling in the sun. They were well dressed, and they were strange. Dean and I might have been in Cyprus for all of that. Gulls flew overhead in the sparkling air. No doubt these are the accents of pervasive mystification, shoulder-to- the-wheel romanticism: Byron summering in California. For all that, the passage is well-judged, affecting, and beautifully troubled: "They were well dressed, and they were strange." Ironies swarm in the reflection that it may be Kerouac's ultimate fate to charm rather than to shock. JOHN ROMANO === Page 151 === BOOKS 151 FREE AND UNEASY POEMS: SELECTED AND NEW, 1950-1974. By Adrienne Rich. Norton. $8.50. THE SLEEPING LORD AND OTHER FRAGMENTS. By David Jones. Chilmark. $7.95. POEMS 4. By Alan Dugan. Atlantic-Little Brown. $6.50. TRILOGY. By Diane Wakoski. Doubleday. $6.95. WRITINGS TO AN UNFINISHED ACCOMPANIMENT. Atheneum. $3.95. POEMS OF BLACK AFRICA. Edited and with an introduction by Wole Soyinka. Hill and Wang. $4.95. About thirteen or fourteen years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Rich, first in Rochester and later at the I.A. Richardses when I was visiting Harvard. I remember that on the first occasion we had a joke about the one slightly improper joke in Fanny Hill ("Any port in a storm"). She was a trim, elegant, charming person, making much the same impression on me as an early volume of her verse I had reviewed in England. Our serious conversation was technical, about the difficulty and fascination of translating Dutch poetry. The person in this book and in the photograph on the back of its dust jacket, is much more formidable. Some of the poems go back as far as 1950 when I must simply, beguiled by tact and craft, have missed how strong they were. But it is true that the mark of the earliest poems was elegance, by which I mean doing something graceful and difficult without appear- ing to try: as in "Ideal Landscape" from her 1955 volume: We had to take the world as it was given: The nursemaid sitting passive in the park Was rarely by a changeling prince accosted. The mornings happened similar and stark In rooms of selfhood where we woke and lay Watching today unfold like yesterday. We think at first: "How deft!" And then: "Too much early- mid-period Auden?" === Page 152 === 152 PARTISAN REVIEW The later poems are all Adrienne Rich, and the new strength, the new inner self-confidence, goes with a new harshness. It is part of the strength that she makes us feel, certainly not in the least embarrassed, but uneasy. This short passage in a poem partly in verse is prose, but it is poetry. And the tone has not the hysteria of the confessional mode but the strength, say, of the great French aphorists: Desire: yes: the sudden knowledge, like coming out of 'flu, that the body is sexual. Walking in the streets with that knowledge. That evening in the plane from Pittsburgh, fantasizing going to meet you. Walking through the airport blazing with energy and joy; you were a man, a stranger, a name, a voice on the telephone, a friend; this desire was mine, this energy my energy; it could be used a hundred ways, and going to meet you could be one of them. In a quite different style, from a recent poem called "From an Old House in America," here are some lines about the "strong women, women with character and determination, in fact women with guts" whom Ms. Rich, in her article "The Kingdom of the Fathers" in Partisan Review described (she took the quoted phrases from Margaret Mead) as being acceptable, when the West was opened out, even to the kingdom of the fathers: I am not the wheatfield nor the virgin forest I never chose this place yet I am of it now in my decent collar, in the dagguertotype I pierce its legend with my look my hands wring the necks of prairie chickens I am used to blood When the men hit the hobo track I stay on with the children my power is brief and local but I know my power. . . Adrienne Rich has developed a poetic power that is more than "brief and local." If one were having a general argument with her one would say, yes, it has been the fate of women to bear children, to be === Page 153 === BOOKS 153 exploited by men, and yet to be hated and feared by many of the men who exploit them: but it has been the face of men to have their whole lives distorted by mothers who loved them too much (D.H. Lawrence) or not enough (Baudelaire). Also, if men's love and need for women is mixed with hate and fear, this is because of man's fear of impotence (or, fantasized, of castration) and therefore of final humiliation by some woman. Again, death in battle is a rough moral equivalent for labor pangs. . . But my point is a quite different one: the poetry here is raw, strong-ironically, but not to hurt Adrienne Rich, let us say "masculine"!-and the poetry stands, at whatever angle the reader has his gun poised (or hers) in the war between the men and the women. Adrienne Rich's responses could easily become rehearsed, her eyes blinkered, but she is a free creative creature, and the art transcends, as it properly should, the support and imprisonment of the ideology. David Jones comes in well here because his Roman Catholic faith could be called an ideology and his central emotional experience, expressed in his great book In Parenthesis, was of the all male companionship of the First World War. He never married, hated the open air and would draw flowers with a loose water color wash overlapping the delicate pencil lines, in vases on the inner side of the window. He was a painter, illustrator (wood-cuts, mainly), and letterist of genius. Because of his Welsh ancestry he immersed himself in the "Matter of Britain," the Arthurian story. He was not unsensuous; there is a beautiful naked Guenevere, but of his myth world. He saw Christianity as having the "unific" quality of a new world imperium and he, loving ancient small gods, was in a sense thus depressed by his own religion. But he felt the new "world imperium" of early Christian- ity survived by containing the very gods it transcended. His quality is suggested by this passage, neither versification or liturgy, but a possible inscription on a first-century Roman boundary stone. I do not understand the Welsh, though it may be water-gate or water-bridge. Tenebrae are shadows and the Latin at the end can be rendered: "(In the name of, or by) leaf, flower, seed, O Cross hail, Hail banner!" Jones has a wonderful drawing in ink of marching trees, "Vexilla Regis," the Banners of the King. GWANYN YN Y LLWYN ARBOR AXED FROM ARBOUR-SIDE THAT NOW STRIPT IS MORE ARRAYED MORE THAN IN THE SILVAN RIDE === Page 154 === 154 PARTISAN REVIEW WHEN TO PIERCE THE GREEN AND TANGLED TENEBRAE COMES APOLLO'S RAY SEE WHAT SHEEN THE LOPPED BOUGHS NOW LIFT HIGH FRONDE, FLORE, GERMINE O CRUX AVE AVE VEXILLUM There can be no doubt about Jones's authenticity of spirit. One can feel the chisel putting sacred words on stone. His theme about the imperium and the local rites is, on quite another level than his own, very relevant. But how many readers have the patience (one needs that, rather than any great learning) to decipher him? What is positive and splendid in female and male, what Ms. Rich calls "power", comes oddly together in her and in Jones. Alan Dugan is a consistently excellent poet (I am proud that I had the luck to hail his first book, the one with the unforgettable poem about sharks). His special technical device is a clausal clearness that leaves his poems transparent as arguments and eliminates every emotive adjective. Then the baldness-as in the use of "float around" and the specialized use of "culture" here-becomes rich with grim implications: Speciously individual like a solid piece of spit floating in a cuspidor. I dream of free bravery but am a social being. I should do something to get out of here but float around in the culture wondering what it will grow. Typical of Mr. Dugan's gifts, these lines are concise, unemphatic, alarming, and very funny. Diane Wakoski was quoted in Partisan Review as a spokesman for a number of writers: "We no longer believe that there is something called 'the craft of poetry' which is apart from the life style of the poet... I'd like to... make a case for the excitement in literature being an extension of the writer's life, rather than a transcendence of or an escape from reality." That there is such a craft, though not of course divorced from the poet's life, I hope my quotations so far have shown, === Page 155 === BOOKS 155 even if David Jones is demonstrating the craft of memorial sacred writing, rather than poetry as such. Reality is often not so much horrible as boring and few of us feel guilty in escaping from it with a film like Chinatown, or even, say, an ode by Keats. Rich, Jones, and Dugan could be said not to escape reality but to transcend it, offering us more impersonality, more elevation, or in Dugan's case more uncomfortably direct talk than we feel comfortable with. Will not "an extension of (Miss Wakoski's) life" depend for its interest partly on the interest of that life, partly in how Miss Wakoski's experiences overlap illuminatingly with ours? People are not interest- ing just because they exist, and from a performer we ask a show, the display of some skills. In fact Miss Wakoski's way of writing poetry seems to me one of the several dozen legitimate ways, if you allow that her indifference to the "craft" of the whole poem (there is the craft she needs, plenty of it, in the details of the poem) makes it hard to pick out specially memorable individual poems; and if one allows also that fondness for goof jokes and vividly pleasurable sensuous impressions makes her poems unfashionably unjudgmental. The three volumes included here are very much, in fact, extensions of the pleasure of being Miss Wakoski, but enjoyable extensions. Martha Washington is speaking about crossing the Delaware (a tiresome obsession of George's): the boat built out of razor blades moves best on a burning lake the grass twisting itself into carnation stems; the carnations, thousands of them burning and making the air smell of hot cracked cinnamon... the sane like powdered sugar under your feet. . . Or, for a simple but giggly joke: George Washington never had a moustache, though he was a business man. . . In spite of the Puritan tradition, in spite of civilization and its === Page 156 === 156 PARTISAN REVIEW discontents, the pleasure principle is not quite dead. And I feel that Miss Makoski is among its instinctive defenders. W.S. Merwin is a poet's poet, incredibly at ease with his skills and direct with his obliqueness, lacking popularity I suppose because the trick is over before you have seen it and the few elegant lines can multiply, with consistency, into epic relevance. Of all living American poets, Merwin demands the highest degree of literate tact from his readers. Here, for instance, are the Psalms of David and a sadly skeptical comment on them in a title and three lines: THE OLD BOAST Listen natives of a dry place from the harpist's fingers rain Here is the abstract essence of too-lateness: LETTER TO THE HEART Again the cry that it's late and the islands are just beginning to rise (They rise at dusk, not dawn.) Wole Soyinka's anthology allows space for calling attention, not for detailed criticism. It is in fact very difficult to judge poems in English from a very exotic group of cultures, where the local colour and attitudes are strange to us, and an accidental oddity in the use of English may feel, wrongly, like a deliberate rhetorical effect. The demand made is to extend our own expectations about both idiom and subject matter and suspend judgment for some years. The range is from the highly sophisticated, such as the Southern African Dennis Brutus, Sleep well, my love, sleep well; the harbour lights glaze over restless docks, police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets, to the direct rhetoric of the President of Senegal, L.S. Senghor, To the Brother I love and the friend, my blunt, fraternal greeting! The black gulls, the far-travelling canoe-masters have brought me some taste of your news === Page 157 === BOOKS 157 Mingled with spices, with the fragrant sounds of the Rivers of the South and the Islands. . Senghor, is of course, of French culture, and, if this sounds a bit like Louis Aragon and a bit like much diluted Bâteau lvre, one must remember that French poetry does tend to sound hell in English versions. The best African poet, Christopher Okigbo, killed fighting for the Biafrans in the Nigerian Civil War seems to me very inade- quately represented (never die for the losing side). On the other hand, Dennis Brutus, who feels like the most intelligent, to me, of all living African poets, is very well represented. The Nigerian Wole Soyinka, primarily a playwright, does a good editorial job but represents himself, to choose this wordy opening of “Purgatory” as a fair random sample, Wall of flagellation to the South Strokes of justice slice a festive air— It is the day of reckoning over-generously. But this is as rich and readable as most miscellaneous anthologies and, politically and culturally, a necessary book. G. S. FRASER === Page 158 === Poetry from Norton Judith Johnson Sherwin HOW THE DEAD COUNT New Poems ERICA JONG wrote: "Judith Johnson Sherwin's poems are splendidly unfashionable. They dare to be musical when so many other poets are cultivating flatness.... But most important, they dare to explore the wildness and hunger beneath the surfaces of civilization—and that courage is always the mark of a real poet." This new collection goes beyond Ms. Sherwin's earlier work in its increasing concern with public issues and with heightened insights into the private self that engages those issues. $8.95 cloth, $2.95 paper. At all bookstores Norton W.W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC., 500 Fifth Avenue, N.Y. 10036 STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (ACT OF AUGUST 12, 1970; SECTION 3685, TITLE 39, UNITED STATES CODE) 1. Title of publication: Partisan Review. 2. Date of filing: September 15, 1977. 3. Frequency of issue: quarterly. 4. Location of known offices of publication: 1 Richardson Street, New Brunswick, N. J. 08903, and 522 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022. 5. Location of the headquarters or general business offices of the publisher: 345 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022. 6. Names and Addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Publisher: PR, INC., Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, 345 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022; Editor: William Phillips, 1 Richardson Street, New Brunswick, N. J. 08903; Managing Editor: Linda Healey, 1 Richardson Street, New Brunswick, N. J. 08903. 7. Owner: PR, INC., Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, 345 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022; William Phillips, 1 Richardson Street, New Brunswick, N. J. 08903. 8. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages and other securities: none. 9. For optional completion by publishers mailing at the regular rates (Section 132.121, Postal Service Manual) 39 U.S.C. 3626 provides in pertinent part: "No person who would have been entitled to mail matter under former section 4359 of this title shall mail matter at rates provided under this subsection unless he files annually with the Postal Service a written request for permission to mail the provisions of this statute, I hereby request permission to mail the publication named in Item 1 at the reduced postage rates presently authorized by 39 U.S.C.. 3626. Linda Healey, Managing Editor. Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months 8,400 Actual no. of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date 8,200 11. Extent and nature of circulation: A. Total no. copies printed B. Paid circulation 1. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales 2. Mail Subscriptions C. Total paid circulation D. Free distribution by mail, carrier or other means; samples, complimentary, and other free copies E. Total distribution F. Copies not distributed 1. Office use, left-over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing 2. Returns from news agents G. Total I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. 3,700 4,300 8,000 70 8,070 100 80 8,250 3,700 4,300 8,000 70 8,070 100 80 8,250 Linda Healey, Managing Editor === Page 159 === These are some of the people who have written for A. Alvarez, John Ashbery, Donald Barthleme, Jonathan Baumbach, Samuel Beckett, Norman Birnbaum, Harold Brodkey, Peter Brooks, Anthony Burgess, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, Robert Coover, Robert Creeley, Frederick Crews, Morris Dickstein, Denis Donoghue, José Donoso, Martin Duberman, Jules Feiffer, Leslie Fiedler, Michel Foucault, William Gass, Richard Gilman, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Handke, Elizabeth Hardwick, Michael Harrington, Lillian Hellman, Richard Howard, Maureen Howard, Irving Howe, Frank Kermode, Jan Kott, Rosalind Krauss, Christopher Lasch, Doris Lessing, Denise Levertov, Jack Ludwig, Norman Mailer, Steven Marcus, Herbert Marcuse, James Merrill, Leonard Michaels, Mark Mirsky, Juliet Mitchell, Hans Morgenthau, Robert Motherwell, Victor Navasky, Joyce Carol Oates, Marge Piercy, Richard Poirier, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Rose, Harold Rosenberg, Philip Roth, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Alan Sillitoe, Susan Sontag, Gilbert Sorrentino, Stephen Spender, Christina Stead, William Styron, Ronald Sukenick, Tony Tanner, James Tate, Diana Trilling, Gore Vidal, Robert Penn Warren, Larry Woiwode, Michael Wood Why don't you become one of our readers? PARTISAN REVIEW 1 Richardson St., New Brunswick, N.J. 08903 Enter my subscription for 1 year at $9.00 1 year at $8.00 student rate My check is enclosed Name Address City State Zip * I am a student at extend my subscription 2 years at 17.50 2 years at $14.00 student rate 3 years at $25.00 Please bill me === Page 160 === The Orangery By Gilbert Sorrentino Each poem in this remarkable collection is a variation on "orange," which appears and re- appears as a color, a fruit, a memory, an intrusion, a word seeking a rhyme, a pres- ence expected and awaited. Exploding with color and containing a deep levity, The Orangery appears finally as a comedy of the contemporary white American soul. "Gilbert Sorrentino has captured beautifully the sadness, mystery and humor of life in our America." -John Ashbery University of Texas Press Poetry Series, No. 3 94 pages; $7.95, cloth; $3.95, paper Blood, Hook & Eye By Dara Wier "The precise landscapes and quirky images of Dara Wier's first volume, Blood, Hook & Eye, are also appealing. . . . her strictly ca- denced, imagistic narratives . . . are power- fully realized." -Times Literary Supplement University of Texas Press Poetry Series, No. 2 70 pages; $7.95, cloth; $3.95, paper Often in Different Landscapes By Leon Stokesbury "There's a dreamlike quality (sometimes nightmarelike) to Leon Stokesbury's poems, as you'll see in Often in Different Landscapes." -Saturday Review University of Texas Press Poetry Series, No. 1 69 pages, illustrated; $3.95, paper only University of Texas Press Box 7819 Austin, Texas 78712 === Page 161 === Literature and ideology Drawing on both original analysis and a discussion of the work of other leading theorists, the author of Culture and Society argues that the forms and conventions of Marxist literature represent the social material process of all cultural activity. MARXISM AND LITERATURE Raymond Williams $10.00 cloth, $2.95 paper This first history of prison literature - from slave songs to Malcolm Braly-is a passionate, outspoken book, chal- lenging traditional literary criteria to "open up a hitherto uncharted area of American writing" - Richard Slotkin, Wesleyan University. THE VICTIM AS CRIMINAL AND ARTIST Literature from the American Prison H. Bruce Franklin $13.95 The tortured life, the stage and film work, the writings and manifestos of the man who created the "theatre of cruelty," are examined in this important critical biography, which explores the reasons for Artaud's continued growth and directors. ARTAUD AND AFTER Ronald Hayman $10.95 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 200 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10016 === Page 162 === Images of Kin New and Selected Poems Michael S. Harper The powerful new works in this collection supplement some of the best poems from Harper's six ear- lier books. Together they solidly establish his place in the front ranks of American poets. "Harper is a powerful and awe-inspiring poet, yet he is also a poet of peace and faith." -Edwin Fussell. "[His] poems are as alive and immediate on the page as the presence of the tall young black man himself." -Kay Boyle. $8.95; paper $3.95 Unassigned Frequencies American Poetry in Review, 1964-77 Laurence Lieberman Poet and critic Lieberman chooses the best of his own review-essays from such publications as Yale Re- view, Poetry, and Hudson Review, illuminating the work of some of the most accomplished American poets of our time, including A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, John Berryman, James Dickey, Michael S. Harper, Langston Hughes, Galway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, Archibald MacLeish, W.S. Merwin, Josephine Miles, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Mark Strand, William Stafford, David Wagoner, and James Wright. Stephen Berg, editor of American Poetry Review writes, "I believe the best of Lieberman's essays equal Stevens' most shattering and inspiring prose." $11.95 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS, Urbana, Illinois 61801 === Page 163 === "The basic journal for keeping up with the culture of Latin America" Library Journal Review TENTH ANNIVERSARY DOUBLE ISSUE TEXTS: A 120-page, bilingual anthology of contemporary Latin American poetry with works by Lorenzo Garcia Vega, Alberto Girri, José Lezama Lima, Juan Liscano, Antonio Montes de Oca and Alvaro Mutis, selected and introduced by Octavio Armand. FOCUS: A critical and biographical introduction to the work of Argentine writer Macedonio Fernandez, edited by Jo Anne Engelbert. Articles by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo de Obieta, Noé Jitrik, Edith Grossman and Naomi Lindstrom. ART: Collages by surrealist poet Ludwig Zeller as well as an interview with the artist. REVIEWS: Of recently published criticism and trans- lations of Latin American fiction and poetry. REVIEW is published three times a year. One year subscription $7.00 - Institutions $10.00. Single copy 10th Anniversary Double Issue $5.00. ---------------------------------------------------- Send order with check to REVIEW, 680 Park Avenue, N.Y., N.Y. 10021 Name ............................................................ $ ............ Address ........................................................................................ City, State, Zip ................................................................................ A publication of the Center for Inter-American Relations === Page 164 === NOVELS by J. Inchardi $10 each. Lines On The Death Of A Fisherman Three Jews In A Tub Dreamship Yurros A Paper Toy Intercurse Order by mail from Sirius Books, Box 177 Freeport, Maine 04032