=== Page 1 === PARTISAN REVIEW JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1954 HANNAH ARENDT Tradition and the Modern Age MARY MCCARTHY Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself IRVING HOWE This Age of Conformity MARIANNE MOORE Four Fables of LaFontaine WALLACE MARKFIELD The Patron (a story) HANS MEYERHOFF The Writer as Intellectual CLEMENT GREENBERG Master Léger Poems and reviews by Harvey Breit, Barbara Howes, Steven Marcus, Norman Podhoretz, Ralph Gilbert Ross, Delmore Schwartz, Austin Warren, Edwin Watkins 1 75c === Page 2 === ENCOUNTER Edited By STEPHEN SPENDER and IRVING KRISTOL ENCOUNTER is a new monthly magazine of literature, the arts, and politics. Contributors to the first three issues included: w. H. AUDEN, ARTHUR KOESTLER, LES- LIE FIEDLER, BERTRAND RUSSELL, CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD, AL- BERT CAMUS, and others. ENCOUNTER No. 4, which ap- pears January 1, includes: WORDS AND MUSIC W. H. Auden DOPPELGANGER (story) Wyndham Lewis THE CRISIS IN COMMUNISM Franz Borkenau LETTER FROM TEHERAN F. R. Alleman MEMORIES OF DYLAN THOMAS Allen Tate, Louis MacNeice, Cyril Connolly, George Barker, and others Subscription: one year $5.00 ENCOUNTER Panton House 25 Haymarket London, S.W. 1. PR Readers Should Know DISSENT a new quarterly of radical opin- ion, independent, anti-Stalinist, tied to no party dogma, non- conformist, & socialist in accent. First issue includes The New Conservatism by C. Wright Mills; Stevenson & the Intellectuals by Irving Howe; Government by Secrecy by Lewis Coser. Also: studies of East Berlin Revolt; British Labor Politics; Gail- braith's Economics; previously untranslated prison letters by Rosa Luxemburg. Among the editors: Meyer Schapiro, Lewis Coser, Irving Howe. Price: 60c a copy; $2 yearly subscription. DISSENT 509 Fifth Ave., New York City Preuves Revue mensuelle littéraire et politique BERTRAND RUSSELL Mes rencontres avec Joseph Conrad J. F. GRAVIER 18, rue de Martignac: le cerveau du Plan JEAN RIVERO Réflexions sur l'expérience des Nationalisations GEORGES HUGNET Les revenants futurs (fragments) Présentation de Pierre Berger ARMAND ROBIN Le peuple des télécommandés F. R. ALLEMANN Ernst Reuter CHRONIQUES de Théo BERNARD, Robert KAN- TERS, Claude MAURIAC, Georges PILLEMENT, etc. PREUVES 23, rue de la Pépinière, Paris (VIIIème) le n° de 112 p. illustrées - 2 hors- textes France: 120 frs. Etranger: 150 frs. C.C.P. 178.00 PARIS Spécimen gratuit sur demande. === Page 3 === BARRETT BARZUN BELLOW BERRYMAN BISHOP BLACKMUR BOWLES BURNHAM CAMUS CHASE CHIAROMONTE CLARK CONNOLLY DAVIS DOWLING FIEDLER FITZGERALD GREENBERG GREGORY HARDWIC HAUSER HOOK HOWE JARRELL JÜNGER KAUFMANN KAZIN KLONSKY LANGGÄSSER LOGAN LOWELL MCCARTHY MALRAUX MARCUSE MILOSZ ORTEGA Y GASSET ORWELL PHILLIPS PRITCHETT RAHV RANSOM REED ROETHKE ROSENFELD SCHAPIRO SCHLESINGER THE NEW PARTISAN READER 1945-1953 edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv A Companion Volume to The Partisan Reader: 1934-44 This 640-page anthology contains the best work pub- lished in Partisan Review since 1945, some of the finest writing of the modern period: 12 stories, major es- says and shorter pieces by 40 writers, and a large sec- tion of poetry including work by 20 of the foremost Amer- ican and British poets. Much of this material has never before appeared in book form. Published by HARCOURT BRACE & CO. SCHWARTZ SHAPIRO SIMPSON SPENDER STAFFORD STEVENS SWEENEY VAN GHENT WARSHOW WATKINS WISEMAN L TRILLING The New Partisan Reader retail price $6.00 One year of PR regular price $4.00 total $10.00 SPECIAL COMBINATION OFFER both for $8.50 name street city zone state TATE D TRILLING The New Partisan Reader is available at the special price of $4.50 only in combination with a sub- scription. PARTISAN REVIEW, 513 Sixth Ave., New York 11 === Page 4 === new publications THE PROBLEMS OF AESTHETICS By Eliseo Vivas, Northwestern, and Murray Krieger, Univ. of Minn. A book of contemporary selections on the philosophy of art arranged in an intelligible order which relate to the basic problems of aesthetics. 639 pp., $6.00 THE ENGLISH NOVEL: FORM & FUNCTION By Dorothy Van Ghent, Univ. of Vermont. Analytical studies of eighteen novels, from Don Quixote to Portrait of the Artist, with ex- tensive sets of questions for class discussion. The treatment encour- ages an understanding of each novel both as a single whole and as part of its tradition. Text edition: 473 pp., $5.00 Trade edition: 276 pp., $4.00 POEMS FOR STUDY By Leonard Unger and William Van O'Connor, both of the Univ. of Minn. An anthology of English and American poems from Skelton to Spender which combines the historical and critical approach to the study of poetry. Significant biographical facts and critical dis- cussions are furnished for each poet, along with analyses of one or more of his poems. 743 pp., $4.75 RINEHART & CO. 232 madison avenue n. y. 16 CONTRIBUTORS IRVING HOWE, who has published critical studies of Sherwood Ander- son and William Faulkner, is now teaching at Brandeis University. MARY MCCARTHY'S most recent novel was The Groves of Academe. WALLACE MARKFIELD'S first story appeared in PR in 1946. His work has appeared frequently since in Commentary, The Hudson Re- view, The New Leader, and else- where. HARVEY BREIT, who is on the staff of The New York Times Book Re- view, recently spent some time in India for the Ford Foundation. HANS MEYERHOFF teaches phil- osophy at the University of Southern California. AUSTIN WARREN is the author of several books of criticism, and is co-author, with René Wellek, of the recent Theory of Literature. He is on the permanent English faculty at the University of Michigan, but is spending this winter in New York as a visiting professor at NYU. NORMAN PODHORETZ, a young New York writer who studied at Columbia and at Cambridge, is now in the army. THE ARTISTS THEATRE presents FIRE EXIT a new play by V. R. LANG directed by HERBERT MACHIZ THE AMATO THEATRE 159 Bleecker Street JANUARY 26, 27, 28 For information call JOHN MYERS c/o Tibor De Nagy Gallery 206 E. 53 Street PL. 9-1621 === Page 5 === International Society for Contemporary Music U. S. Section 1953-1954 SIX CONCERTS Twelve first world performances including works by: Babbitt, Dallapiccola, Kahn, Leib- owitz, Steuermann, B. Weber, Weborn Five first New York performances including works by: Apostel, Makoto Moroi, Zemlinsky Works by Arthur Berger, Schoen- berg, Stravinsky First Concert: Carnegie Recital Hall JAN. 24th, 1954, at 8:30 p.m. Double subscription ticket, good for two people at all concerts: $6.50 Single subscription: $4.00 Obtainable by writing to ISCM, 113 W. 57th St., NYC or at the ticket office on the evening of the concert. LIBERAL PRESS, INC. printers of PARTISAN REVIEW 80 FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK 3, N. Y. THE SCHOOL OF LETTERS INDIANA UNIVERSITY Summer 1954 Courses on the graduate level in the theory and practice of Literary Criticism Including work toward advanced degrees in Criticism, English Literature, and Comparative Literature Address enquiries to Newton P. Stallknecht, director, The School of Letters, English Building, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana SENIOR FELLOWS John Crowe Ransom Lionel Trilling Austin Warren Philip Rahv Allen Tate Courses to be given during the Summer of 1954 by: RICHARD BLACKMUR LESLIE FIEDLER WILLIAM EMPSON JOHN CROWE RANSOM HAROLD WHITEHALL Full information available about February 1 === Page 6 === PR PARTISAN REVIEW EDITORS: William Phillips, Philip Rahv ASSOCIATE EDITORS: William Barrett, Delmore Schwartz MANAGING EDITOR: Catharine Carver ADVERTISING AND BUSINESS MANAGER: Barbara Greenfeld ADVISORY BOARD: Allan D. Dowling, Sidney Hook, James Johnson Sweeney, Lionel Trilling PARTISAN REVIEW is published bi-monthly by the Foundation for Cultural Projects, Inc. at 30 West 12 St., New York 11, N. Y. Subscriptions: $4 a year, $6.50 for two years, foreign subscriptions, including Canada, $4.50 a year, $7.50 for two years. All payments from foreign countries must be made by U.S. money orders or checks payable in U.S. currency or with $0.75 added for collection charges. Single copy: $0.75. Manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. Copyright January-February, 1954, by PARTISAN REVIEW. Reentered as second-class matter, May 19, 1950, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y. under the act of March 3, 1879. === Page 7 === JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1954 VOLUME XXI, NUMBER 1 CONTENTS THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY, Irving Howe 7 DOTTIE MAKES AN HONEST WOMAN OF HERSELF, Mary McCarthy 34 TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE, Hannah Arendt 53 FOUR FABLES OF LA FONTAINE, translated by Marianne Moore 76 THE PATRON, Wallace Markfield 80 BOMBAY: A LULLABY, Harvey Breit 87 THE ROCKET CAPTAIN, Edwin Watkins 88 GOOSEGIRL, Barbara Howes 89 ART CHRONICLE, Clement Greenberg 90 BOOKS THE WRITER AS INTELLECTUAL, Hans Meyerhoff 98 FOUR POETS OR PERHAPS THREE, Austin Warren 108 ADVENTURE IN AMERICA, Delmore Schwartz 112 FORSTER'S INDIA, Steven Marcus 115 SOUTHERN CLAIMS, Norman Podhoretz 119 THEOLOGY AND POLITICS, Ralph Gilbert Ross 123 === Page 8 === Newton Arvin William Barrett Jacques Barzun Louise Bogan James Burnham Richard Chase Allan Dowling Leslie A. Fiedler Joseph Frank Horace Gregory Sidney Hook Irving Howe Louis Kronenberger Max Lerner Norman Mailer Margaret Mead C. Wright Mills Reinhold Niebuhr William Phillips Philip Rahv David Riesman Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Mark Schorer Delmore Schwartz Lionel Trilling ............................................................... AMERICA and the INTELLECTUALS 25 leading writers, philosophers and social scientists examine our present-day culture in relation to the changes brought about by world events. This symposium first appeared in 1952, in three consecutive issues of PR, under the title "Our Country and Our Cul- ture." It aroused so much interest that we have now made the entire series available in a handsome, paper-bound book. Please send me ................. copies of AMERICA AND THE INTELLECTUALS. I enclose ........................... NAME .......................................................................... STREET ......................................................................... CITY..........................................ZONE.............STATE........... PR Series 4 $1.00 PARTISAN REVIEW - 513 Sixth Ave., N.Y.C. === Page 9 === Irving Howe THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY (Notes on an endless theme, or, A catalogue of complaints) Intellectuals have always been partial to grandiose ideas about themselves, whether of an heroic or masochistic kind, but surely no one has ever had a more grandiose idea about the destiny of modern intellectuals than the brilliant economist Joseph Schumpeter. Though he desired nothing so much as to be realistic and hard-boiled, Schumpeter had somehow absorbed all those romantic notions about the revolutionary potential and critical independence of the intellectuals which have now and again swept through the radical and bohemian worlds. Marx, said Schumpeter, was wrong in supposing that capitalism would break down from inherent economic contradictions; it broke down, instead, from an inability to claim people through ties of loyalty and value. "Unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably . . . creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest." The intellectuals, bristling with neurotic aspirations and deranged by fantasies of utopia made possible by the very society they would destroy, become agents of discontent who infect rich and poor, high and low. In drawing this picture Schumpeter hardly meant to praise the intellectuals, yet until a few years ago many of them would have accepted it as both truth and tribute, though a few of the more realistic ones might have smiled a doubt as to their capacity to do all that. Schumpeter's picture of the intellectuals is not, of course, without historical validity, but at the moment it seems spectacularly, even comically wrong. And wrong for a reason that Schumpeter, with his elaborate sense of irony, would have appreciated: he who had insisted that capitalism is "a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary" had failed sufficiently === Page 10 === 8 PARTISAN REVIEW to consider those new developments in our society which have changed the whole position and status of the intellectuals. Far from creating and subsidizing unrest, capitalism in its most recent stage has found an honored place for the intellectuals; and the intellectuals, far from thinking of themselves as a desperate "opposition," have been enjoy- ing a return to the bosom of the nation. Were Archibald MacLeish again tempted to play Cato and chastize the Irresponsibles, he could hardly find a victim. We have all, even the handful who still try to retain a glower of criticism, become responsible and moderate. And tame. II In 1932 not many American intellectuals saw any hope for the revival of capitalism. Few of them could support this feeling with any well-grounded theory of society; many held to a highly simplified idea of what capitalism was; and almost all were com- mitted to a vision of the crisis of capitalism which was merely a vul- garized model of the class struggle in Europe. Suddenly, with the appearance of the New Deal, the intellectuals saw fresh hope: capi- talism was not to be exhausted by the naive specifications they had assigned it, and consequently the "European" policies of the Roose- velt administration might help dissolve their "Europeanized" sense of crisis. So that the more American society became Europeanized, adopting measures that had been common practice on the Continent for decades, the more the American intellectuals began to believe in . . . American uniqueness. Somehow, the major capitalist power in the world would evade the troubles afflicting capitalism as a world economy. The two central policies of the New Deal, social legislation and state intervention in economic life, were not unrelated, but they were separable as to time; in Europe they had not always appeared to- gether. Here, in America, it was the simultaneous introduction of these two policies that aroused the enthusiasm, as it dulled the criti- cism, of the intellectuals. Had the drive toward bureaucratic state regulation of a capitalist economy appeared by itself, so that one could see the state becoming a major buyer and hence indirect con- troller of industry, and industries on the verge of collapse being sys- tematically subsidized by the state, and the whole of economic life === Page 11 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY 9 being rationalized according to the long-run needs, if not the imme- diate tastes, of corporate economy-had all this appeared in isolation, the intellectuals would have reacted critically, they would have recog- nized the trend toward "state capitalism" as the danger it was. But their desire for the genuine social reforms that came with this trend made them blind or indifferent to the danger. Still, one may suppose that their enthusiasm would have mellowed had not the New Deal been gradually transformed into a permanent war economy; for whatever the theoretical attractions of the Keynesian formula for salvaging capitalism, it has thus far "worked" only in times of war or preparation for war. And it was in the war economy, itself closely related to the trend toward statification, that the intellectuals came into their own. Statification, war economy, the growth of a mass society and mass culture-all these are aspects of the same historical process. The kind of society that has been emerging in the West, a society in which bureaucratic controls are imposed upon (but not fundamen- tally against) an interplay of private interests, has need for intellec- tuals in a way the earlier, "traditional" capitalism never did. It is a society in which ideology plays an unprecedented part: as social relations become more abstract and elusive, the human object is bound to the state with ideological slogans and abstractions-and for this chore intellectuals are indispensable, no one else can do the job as well. Because industrialism grants large quantities of leisure time without any creative sense of how to employ it, there springs up a vast new industry that must be staffed by intellectuals and quasi-in- tellectuals: the industry of mass culture. And because the state sub- sidizes mass education and our uneasy prosperity allows additional millions to gain a "higher" education, many new jobs suddenly be- come available in the academy: some fall to intellectuals. Bohemia gradually disappears as a setting for our intellectual life, and what remains of it seems willed or fake. Looking upon the prosperous ruins of Greenwich Village, one sometimes feels that a full-time bohemian career has become as arduous, if not as expensive, as acquiring a Ph.D. Bohemia, said Flaubert, was "the fatherland of my breed." If so, his breed, at least in America, is becoming extinct. The most excit- ing periods of American intellectual life tend to coincide with the rise of bohemia, with the tragic yet liberating rhythm of the break from === Page 12 === 10 PARTISAN REVIEW the small town into the literary roominess of the city, or from the provincial immigrant family into the centers of intellectual experiment. Given the nature of contemporary life, bohemia flourishes in the city—but that has not always been so. Concord too was a kind of bohemia, sedate, subversive and transcendental all at once. Today, however, the idea of bohemia, which was a strategy for bringing ar- tists and writers together in their struggle with and for the world— this idea has become disreputable, being rather nastily associated with bohemia. Nonetheless, it is the disintegration of bohemia that is a major cause for the way intellectuals feel, as distinct from and far more important than what they say or think. Those feelings of lone- liness one finds among so many American intellectuals, feelings of damp dispirited isolation which undercut the ideology of liberal op- timism, are partly due to the break-up of bohemia. Where young writers would once face the world together, they now sink into sub- urbs, country homes and college towns. And the price they pay for this rise in social status is to be measured in more than an increase in rent. It is not my purpose to berate anyone, for the pressures of con- formism are at work upon all of us, to say nothing of the need to earn one's bread; and all of us bend under the terrible weight of our time—though some take pleasure in learning to enjoy it. Nor do I wish to indulge in the sort of good-natured condescension with which Malcolm Cowley recently described the younger writers as lugubrious and timid long-hairs huddling in chill academies and poring over the gnostic texts of Henry James—by contrast, no doubt, to Cowley's own career of risk-taking. Some intellectuals, to be sure, have "sold out" and we can all point to examples, probably the same examples. But far more prevalent and far more insidious is that slow attrition which destroys one's ability to stand firm and alone: the temptations of an improved standard of living combined with guilt over the his- torical tragedy that has made possible our prosperity; one's sense of being swamped by the rubbish of a reactionary period together with the loss of those earlier certainties that had the advantage, at least, of making resistance easy. Nor, in saying these things, do I look for- ward to any sort of material or intellectual asceticism. Our world is neither to be flatly accepted nor rejected: it must be engaged, re- sisted and—who knows, perhaps still—transformed. === Page 13 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY II All of life, my older friends often tell me, is a conspiracy against that ideal of independence with which a young intellectual begins; but if so, wisdom consists not in premature surrender but in learning when to evade, when to stave off and when to oppose head-on. Con- formity, as Arthur Koestler said some years ago, "is often a form of betrayal which can be carried out with a clear conscience." Gradually we make our peace with the world, and not by anything as exciting as a secret pact; nowadays Lucifer is a very patient and reasonable fellow with a gift for indulging one's most legitimate desires; and we learn, if we learn anything at all, that betrayal may consist of a chain of small compromises, even while we also learn that in this age one cannot survive without compromise. What is most alarming is not that a number of intellectuals have abandoned the posture of iconoclasm: let the Zeitgeist give them a jog and they will again be radical, all too radical. What is most alarming is that the whole idea of the intellectual vocation-the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization-has gradually lost its allure. And it is this, rather than the abandonment of a particular program, which constitutes our rout. In a recent number of Perspectives Lionel Trilling addressed himself to some of these problems; his perspective is sharply different from mine. Mr. Trilling believes that "there is an unmistakable im- provement in the American cultural situation of today over that of, say, thirty years ago," while to me it seems that any comparison be- tween the buoyant free-spirited cultural life of 1923 with the dreari- ness of 1953, or between their literary achievements, must lead to the conclusion that Mr. Trilling is indulging in a pleasant fantasy. More important, however, is his analysis of how this "improvement" has occurred: "In many civilizations there comes a point at which wealth shows a tendency to submit itself, in some degree, to the rule of mind and imagination, to apologize for its existence by a show of taste and sensitivity. In America the signs of this submission have for some time been visible. . . . Intellect has associated itself with power, perhaps as never before in history, and is now conceded to be in itself a kind of power." Such stately terms as "wealth" and "intellect" hardly make for sharp distinctions, yet the drift of Mr. Trilling's remarks is clear enough-and, I think, disastrous. It is perfectly true that in the government bureaucracy and in- === Page 14 === 12 PARTISAN REVIEW stitutional staff, in the mass-culture industries and the academy, intel- lectuals have been welcomed and absorbed as never before. It is true, again, that "wealth" has become far more indulgent in its treatment of intellectuals, and for good reasons: it needs them more than ever, they are tamer than ever, and its own position is more comfortable and expansive than it has been for a long time. But if "wealth" has made a mild bow toward "intellect" (sometimes while picking its pocket) then "intellect" has engaged in some undignified prostrations before "wealth." Thirty years ago "wealth" was on the defensive, and twenty years ago it was frightened, hesitant, apologetic. "Intel- lect" was self-confident, aggressive, secure in its belief or, if you wish, delusions. Today the ideology of American capitalism, with its claim to a unique and immaculate destiny, is trumpeted through every medium of communication: official propaganda, institutional adver- tising and the scholarly writings of people who, until a few years ago, were its major opponents. Marx-baiting, that least risky of occu- pations, has become a favorite sport in the academic journals; a whining genteel chauvinism is widespread among intellectuals; and the bemoaning of their own fears and timidities a constant theme among professors. Is this to be taken as evidence that "wealth" has subordinated itself to "intellect"? Or is the evidence to be found in the careers of such writers as Max Eastman and James Burnham? To be sure, culture has acquired a more honorific status, as restrained ostentation has replaced conspicuous consumption: wealthy people collect more pictures or at least more modern ones, they endow foundations with large sums—but all this is possible because "intel- lect" no longer pretends to challenge "wealth." What has actually been taking place is the absorption of large numbers of intellectuals, previously independent, into the world of government bureaucracy and public committees; into the constantly growing industries of pseudo-culture; into the adult education busi- ness, which subsists on regulated culture-anxiety. This process of bureaucratic absorption does not proceed without check: the Eisen- hower administration has recently dismissed a good many intellectuals from government posts. Yet it seems likely that such stupidity will prove temporary and that one way or another, in one administration or another, the intellectuals will drift back into the government: they must, they are indispensable. Some years ago C. Wright Mills wrote an article in which he === Page 15 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY 13 labeled the intellectuals as \"powerless people.\" He meant, of course, that they felt incapable of translating their ideas into action and that their consequent frustration had become a major motif in their be- havior. His description was accurate enough; yet we might remember that the truly powerless people are those intellectuals-the new realists-who attach themselves to the seats of power, where they surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance as political figures. For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in the past few decades-as well as to the relationship between \"wealth\" and \"intellect\"-that whenever they become ab- sorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals. The institutional world needs intellectuals because they are intellectuals but it does not want them as intellec- tuals. It beckons to them because of what they are but it will not allow them, at least within its sphere of articulation, either to remain or entirely cease being what they are. It needs them for their knowl- edge, their talent, their inclinations and passions; it insists that they retain a measure of these endowments, which it means to employ for its own ends, and without which the intellectuals would be of no use to it whatever. A simplified but useful equation suggests itself: the relation of the institutional world to the intellectuals is as the relation of middlebrow culture to serious culture, the one battens on the other, absorbs and raids it with increasing frequency and skill, and it enough to make further raids possible- at times the parasite will support its victim. Surely this relationship must be one reason for the high incidence of neurosis that is supposed to prevail among intellectuals. A total estrangement from the sources of power and prestige, even a blind unreasoning rejection of every aspect of our culture, would be far healthier if only because it would permit a free discharge of aggression. I do not mean to suggest that for intellectuals all institutions are equally dangerous or disadvantageous. Even during the New Deal, the life of those intellectuals who journeyed to Washington was far from happy. The independence possible to a professor of sociology is usually greater than that possible to a writer of television scripts, and a professor of English, since the world will not take his subject seriously, can generally enjoy more intellectual leeway than a profes- sor of sociology. Philip Rieff, a sociologist, has caustically described a === Page 16 === 14 PARTISAN REVIEW major tendency among his colleagues as a drift from “science” to “policy” in which “loyalty, not truth, provides the social condition by which the intellectual discovers his new environment.” It is a drift “from the New School to the Rand Corporation.” There is, to be sure, a qualitative difference between the academy and the government bureau or the editorial staff. The university is still committed to the ideology of freedom, and many professors try hard and honestly to live by it. If the intellectual cannot subsist in- dependently, off his work or his relatives, the academy is usually his best bet. But no one who has a live sense of what the literary life has been and might still be, either in Europe or this country, can accept the notion that the academy is the natural home of intellect. What seems so unfortunate is that the whole idea of independence is losing its traditional power. Scientists are bound with chains of official secrecy; sociologists compete for government research chores; foundations become indifferent to solitary writers and delight in “teams”; the possibility of living in decent poverty from moderately serious literary journalism becomes more and more remote. Com- promises are no doubt necessary, but they had better be recognized for what they are. Perhaps something should be said here about “alienation,” a subject on which intellectuals have written more self-humiliating non- sense than any other, except several. Involved, primarily, is a matter of historical fact. During most of the bourgeois epoch, the European intellectuals grew increasingly alienated from the social community because the very ideals that had animated the bourgeois revolution were now being violated by bourgeois society; their “alienation” was prompted not by bohemian willfulness or socialist dogmatism but by a loyalty to Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, or to a vision of a pre- industrial society that, by a trick of history, came pretty much to re- semble Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. Just as it was the triumph of capitalism which largely caused this sense of estrangement, so it was the expansion of capitalism that allowed the intellectuals enough free- dom to express it. As Philip Rahv has put it: “During the greater part of the bourgeois epoch . . . [writers] preferred alienation from the community to alienation from themselves.” Precisely this choice made possible their strength and boldness, precisely this “lack of roots” gave them their speculative power. Almost always, the talk === Page 17 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY 15 one hears these days about “the need for roots” veils a desire to com- promise the tradition of intellectual independence, to seek in a nation or religion or party a substitute for the tenacity one should find in oneself. Isaac Rosenfeld's remark that "the ideal society . . . cannot afford to include many deeply rooted individuals” is not merely a clever mot but an important observation. It may be that the issue is no longer relevant; that, with the partial submission of “wealth” to “intellect,” the clash between a business civilization and the values of art is no longer as urgent as we once thought; but if so, we must discard a great deal, and mostly the best, of the literature, the criticism and the speculative thought of the twentieth century. For to deny the historical fact of “alien- ation” (as if that would make it any the less real!) is to deny our heritage, both as burden and advantage, and also, I think, to deny our possible future as a community. Much of what I have been describing here must be due to a feeling among intellectuals that the danger of Stalinism allows them little or no freedom in their relations with bourgeois society. This feeling seems to me only partly justified, and I do not suffer from any inclination to minimize the Stalinist threat. To be sure, it does limit our possibilities for action—if, that is, we still want to engage in any dissident politics—and sometimes it may force us into political alignments that are distasteful. But here a crucial distinction should be made: the danger of Stalinism may require temporary expedients in the area of power such as would have seemed compromising some years ago, but there is no reason, at least no good reason, why it should require compromise or conformity in the area of ideas, no reason why it should lead us to become partisans of bourgeois society, which is itself, we might remember, heavily responsible for the Stalinist victories. III "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition." This sentence of Lionel Trilling's contains a sharp insight into the political life of contemporary America. If I understand him correctly, he is saying that our society is at present so free from those pressures of con- === Page 18 === 16 PARTISAN REVIEW flicting classes and interests which make for sharply defined ideologies, that liberalism colors, or perhaps the word should be, bleaches all political tendencies. It becomes a loose shelter, a poncho rather than a program; to call oneself a liberal one doesn't really have to believe in anything. In such a moment of social slackness, the more extreme intellectual tendencies have a way, as soon as an effort is made to put them into practice, of sliding into and becoming barely distin- guishable from the dominant liberalism. Both conservatism and radi- calism can retain, at most, an intellectual recalcitrance, but neither is presently able to engage in a sustained practical politics of its own; which does not mean they will never be able to. The point is enforced by looking at the recent effort to affirm a conservative ideology. Mr. Russell Kirk, who makes this effort with some earnestness, can hardly avoid the eccentricity of appealing to Providence as a putative force in American politics: an appeal that suggests both the intensity of his conservative desire and the desper- ation behind the intensity. Mr. Peter Viereck, a friskier sort of writer, calls himself a conservative, but surely this is nothing more than a mystifying pleasantry, for aside from the usual distinctions of temperament and talent it is hard to see how his conservatism differs from the liberalism of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. For Viereck conservatism is a shuffling together of attractive formulas, without any effort to discover their relationship to deep actual clashes of interest: he fails, for example, even to consider that in America there is today neither opportunity nor need for conservatism (since the liberals do the neces- sary themselves) and that if an opportunity were to arise, conserva- tism could seize upon it only by acquiring a mass, perhaps reactionary dynamic, that is, by "going into the streets." And that, surely, Mr. Viereck doesn't want. If conservatism is taken to mean, as in some "classical" sense it should be, a principled rejection of industrial economy and a yearning for an ordered, hierarchical society that is not centered on the city, then conservatism in America is best defended by a group of literary men whose seriousness is proportionate to their recognition that such a politics is now utterly hopeless and, in any but a utopian sense, meaningless. Such a conservatism, in America, goes back to Fenimore Cooper, who anticipates those implicit criticisms of our society which we honor in Faulkner; and in the hands of serious imaginative writers, === Page 19 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY 17 but hardly in the hands of political writers obliged to deal with imme- diate relations of power, it can become a myth which, through abra- sion, profoundly challenges modern experience. As for the “conserva- tism” of the late Senator Taft, which consists of nothing but Liberal economics and wounded nostalgia, it lacks intellectual content and, more important, when in power it merely continues those “statist” policies it had previously attacked. This prevalence of liberalism yields, to be sure, some obvious and substantial benefits. It makes us properly skeptical of the excessive claims and fanaticisms that accompany ideologies. It makes implaus- ible those “aristocratic” rantings against democracy which were fash- ionable in some literary circles a few years ago. (So that when a charlatan like Wyndham Lewis is revived and praised for his wisdom, it is done, predictably, by a Hugh Kenner in the Hudson Review.) And it allows for the hope that any revival of American radicalism will acknowledge not only its break from, but also its roots in, the liberal tradition. At the same time, however, the dominance of liberalism con- tributes heavily to our intellectual conformity. Liberalism dominates, but without confidence or security; it knows that its victories at home are tied to disasters abroad; and for the élan it cannot summon, it substitutes a blend of complacence and anxiety. It makes for an at- mosphere of blur in the realm of ideas, since it has a stake in seeing momentary concurrences as deep harmonies. In an age that suffers from incredible catastrophes it scoffs at theories of social apocalypse— as if any more evidence were needed; in an era convulsed by war, revolution and counter-revolution it discovers the virtues of “moder- ation.” And when the dominant school of liberalism, the school of realpolitik, scores points in attacking “the ritual liberals,” it also be- trays a subterranean desire to retreat into the caves of bureaucratic caution. Liberalism as an ideology, as “the haunted air,” has never been stronger in this country; but can as much be said of the appetite for freedom? Sidney Hook discovers merit in the Smith Act: he was not for its passage but doubts the wisdom of its repeal. Mary McCarthy, zooming to earth from never-never land, discovers in the American war economy no less than paradise: “Class barriers disappear or tend to become porous; the factory worker is an economic aristocrat === Page 20 === 18 PARTISAN REVIEW in comparison to the middle-class clerk. . . . The America . . . of vast inequalities and dramatic contrasts is rapidly ceasing to exist." Daniel Boorstin-he cannot be charged with the self-deceptions pe- culiar to idealism-discovers that "the genius of American politics" consists not in the universal possibilities of democracy but in a uniquely fortunate geography which, obviously, cannot be exported. David Riesman is so disturbed by Veblen's rebelliousness toward American society that he explains it as a projection of father-hatred; and what complex is it, one wonders, which explains a writer's as- sumption that Veblen's view of America is so inconceivable as to re- quire a home-brewed psychoanalysis? Irving Kristol writes an article minimizing the threat to civil liberties and shortly thereafter is chosen to be public spokesman for the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. And in the Committee itself, it is possible for serious intel- lectuals to debate-none is for McCarthy-whether the public ac- tivities of the Wisconsin hooligan constitute a serious menace to freedom. One likes to speculate: suppose Simone de Beauvoir and Ber- trand Russell didn't exist, would not many of the political writers for Commentary and the New Leader have to invent them? It is all very well, and even necessary, to demonstrate that Russell's descrip- tion of America as subject to "a reign of terror" is malicious and ignorant, or that de Beauvoir's picture of America is a blend of Stalinist clichés and second-rate literary fantasies; but this hardly disposes of the problem of civil liberties or of the justified alarm many sober European intellectuals feel with regard to America. Between the willfulness of those who see only terror and the indifference of those who see only health, there is need for simple truth: that intel- lectual freedom in the United States is under severe attack and that the intellectuals have, by and large, shown a painful lack of militancy in defending the rights which are a precondition of their existence.1 1 It must in honesty be noted that many of the intellectuals least alive to the problem of civil liberties are former Stalinists or radicals; and this, more than the vast anti-Marxist literature of recent years, constitutes a serious criticism of American radicalism. For the truth is that the "old-fashioned liberals" like John Dewey and Alexander Meiklejohn, at whom it was once so fashionable to sneer, have displayed a finer sensitivity to the need for defending domestic freedoms than the more "sophisticated" intellectuals who leapt from Marx to Machiavelli. === Page 21 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY 19 It is in the pages of the influential magazine Commentary that liberalism is most skillfully and systematically advanced as a strategy for adapting to the American status quo. Until the last few months, when a shift in editorial temper seems to have occurred, the magazine was more deeply preoccupied, or preoccupied at deeper levels, with the dangers to freedom stemming from people like Freda Kirchwey and Arthur Miller than the dangers from people like Senator Mc- Carthy. In March 1952 Irving Kristol, then an editor of Commentary, could write that "there is one thing the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification." In September 1952, at the very moment when McCarthy had become a central issue in the presidential campaign, Elliot Cohen, the senior editor of Commentary, could write that McCarthy "remains in the popular mind an unre- liable, second-string blowhard; his only support as a great national figure is from the fascinated fears of the intelligentsia." (My em- phasis-I.H.) As if to blot out the memory of these performances, Nathan Glazer, still another editor, wrote an excellent analysis of McCarthy in the March 1953 issue; but at the end of his article, almost as if from another hand, there again appeared the magazine's earlier line: "All that Senator McCarthy can do on his own authority that someone equally unpleasant and not a Senator can't, is to haul people down to Washington for a grilling by his committee. It is a shame and an outrage that Senator McCarthy should remain in the Senate; yet I cannot see that it is an imminent danger to personal liberty in the United States." It is, I suppose, this sort of thing that is meant when people speak about the need for replacing the outworn formulas and clichés of liberalism and radicalism with new ideas. IV To what does one conform? To institutions, obviously. To the dead images that rot in one's mind, unavoidably. And almost al- ways, to the small grating necessities of day-to-day survival. In these senses it may be said that we are all conformists to one or another degree. When Sidney Hook writes, "I see no specific virtue in the attitude of conformity or non-conformity," he is right if he means === Page 22 === 20 PARTISAN REVIEW that no human being can, or should, entirely accept or reject the moral and social modes of his time. And he is right in adding that there are occasions, such as the crisis of the Weimar republic, when the non-conformism of a Stefan George or an Oswald Spengler can have unhappy consequences. But Professor Hook seems to me quite wrong in supposing that his remark applies significantly to present-day America. It would apply if we lived in a world where ideas could be weighed in free and delicate balance, without social pressures or contaminations, so that our choices would be made solely from a passion for truth. As it happens, however, there are tremendous pressures in America that make for intellectual conformism and consequently, in this tense and difficult age, there are very real virtues in preserving the attitude of critical skepticism and distance. Even some of the more extreme antics of the professional "Bohemians" or literary anarchists take on a cer- tain value which in cooler moments they might not have.2 What one conforms to most of all-despite and against one's in- tentions-is the Zeitgeist, that vast insidious sum of pressures and fashions; one drifts along, anxious and compliant, upon the favored assumptions of the moment; and not a soul in the intellectual world can escape this. Only, some resist and some don't. Today the Zeitgeist presses down upon us with a greater insistence than at any other moment of the century. In the 1930s many of those who hovered about the New Masses were mere camp-followers of success; but the conformism of the party-line intellectual, at least before 1936, did sometimes bring him into conflict with established power: he had to risk something. Now, by contrast, established power and the dom- inant intellectual tendencies have come together in a harmony such as this country has not seen since the Gilded Age; and this, of course, makes the temptations of conformism all the more acute. The carrots, for once, are real. Real even for literary men, who these days prefer to meditate upon symbolic vegetables. I would certainly not wish to suggest any direct correlation between our literary assumptions and the nature 2 It may be asked whether a Stalinist's "non-conformism" is valuable. No, it isn't; the Stalinist is anything but a non-conformist; he has merely shifted the object of his worship, as later, when he abandons Stalinism, he usually shifts it again. === Page 23 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY 21 of our politics; but surely some of the recent literary trends and fashions owe something to the more general intellectual drift toward conformism. Not, of course, that liberalism dominates literary life, as it dominates the rest of the intellectual world. Whatever practical interest most literary men have in politics comes to little else than the usual liberalism, but their efforts at constructing literary ideologies— frequently as forced marches to discover values our society will not yield them—result in something quite different from liberalism. Through much of our writing, both creative and critical, there run a number of ideological motifs, the importance of which is hardly diminished by the failure of the men who employ them to be fully aware of their implications. Thus, a major charge that might be brought against some New Critics is not that they practice formal cri- ticism but that they don't; not that they see the work of art as an object to be judged according to laws of its own realm but that, often unconsciously, they weave ideological assumptions into their writings.3 Listening last summer to Cleanth Brooks lecture on Faulkner, I was struck by the deep hold that the term "orthodox" has acquired on his critical imagination, and not, by the way, on his alone. But "orthodox" is not, properly speaking, a critical term at all, it pertains to matters of religious or other belief rather than to literary judgment; and a habitual use of such terms can only result in the kind of "slanted" criticism Mr. Brooks has been so quick, and right, to condemn. Together with "orthodox" there goes a cluster of terms which, in their sum, reveal an implicit ideological bias. The word "tradi- tional" is especially tricky here, since it has legitimate uses in both literary and moral-ideological contexts. What happens, however, in 3 This may be true of all critics, but is most perilous to those who suppose themselves free of ideological coloring. In a review of my Faulkner book— rather favorable, so that no ego wounds prompt what follows—Mr. Robert Daniel writes that "Because of Mr. Howe's connections with . . . the Partisan Review, one might expect his literary judgments to be shaped by political and social preconceptions, but that does not happen often." Mr. Daniel is surprised that a critic whose politics happen to be radical should try to keep his literary views distinct from his nonliterary ones. To be sure, this is sometimes very dif- ficult, and perhaps no one entirely succeeds. But the one sure way of not suc- ceeding is to write, as Mr. Daniel does, from no very pressing awareness that it is a problem for critics who appear in the Sewanee Review quite as much as for those who appear in Partisan Review. === Page 24 === 22 PARTISAN REVIEW much contemporary criticism is that these two contexts are either taken to be one or to be organically related, so that it becomes pos- sible to assume that a sense of literary tradition necessarily involves and sanctions a "traditional" view of morality. There is a powerful inclination here-it is the doing of the impish Zeitgeist-to forget that literary tradition can be fruitfully seen as a series of revolts, liter- ary but sometimes more than literary, of generation against genera- tion, age against age. The emphasis on "tradition" has other con- temporary implications: it is used as a not very courageous means of countering the experimental and the modern; it can enclose the academic assumption-and this is the curse of the Ph.D. system- that the whole of the literary past is at every point equally relevant to a modern intelligence; and it frequently includes the provincial American need to be more genteel than the gentry, more English than the English. Basically, it has served as a means of asserting conserva- tive or reactionary moral-ideological views not, as they should be asserted, in their own terms, but through the refining medium of literary talk. In general, there has been a tendency among critics to subsume literature under their own moral musings, which makes for a con- spicuously humorless kind of criticism.4 Morality is assumed to be a sufficient container for the floods of experience, and poems or novels that gain their richness from the complexity with which they drama- tize the incommensurability between man's existence and his con- ceptualizing, are thinned, pruned and allegorized into moral fables. Writers who spent-in both senses of the word-their lives wrestling with terrible private demons are elevated into literary dons and deacons. It is as if Stendhal had never come forth, with his subversive wit, to testify how often life and literature find the whole moral ap- paratus irrelevant or tedious, as if Lawrence had never written The Man Who Died, as if Nietzsche had never launched his great attack on the Christian impoverishment of the human psyche. One can only 4 Writing about Wuthering Heights Mr. Mark Schorer solemnly declares that "the theme of the moral magnificence of unmoral passion is an impossible theme to sustain, and the needs of her temperament to the contrary, all personal longing and reverie to the contrary, Emily Brontë teaches herself that this was indeed not at all what her material must mean as art." What is more, if Emily Brontë had lived a little longer she would have been offered a Chair in Moral Philosophy. === Page 25 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY 23 be relieved, therefore, at knowing a few critics personally: how pleas- ant the discrepancy between their writings and their lives! But it is Original Sin that today commands the highest prestige in the literary world. Like nothing else, it allows literary men to enjoy a sense of profundity and depth—to relish a disenchantment which allows no further risk of becoming enchanted—as against the superficiality of mere rationalism. It allows them to appropriate to the "tradition" the greatest modern writers, precisely those whose values and allegiances are most ambiguous, complex and enigmatic, while at the same time generously leaving, as Leslie Fiedler once sug- gested, Dreiser and Farrell as the proper idols for that remnant be- nighted enough to maintain a naturalist philosophy. To hold, as Dickens remarks in Bleak House, "a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right," this becomes the essence of wisdom. (Liberals too have learned to cast a warm eye on "man's fallen nature," so that one gets the high comedy of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. interrupting his quite worldly po- litical articles with uneasy bows in the direction of Kierkegaard.) And with this latest dispensation come, of course, many facile references to the ideas supposedly held by Rousseau* and Marx, that man is "perfectible" and that progress moves in a steady upward curve. I say, facile references, because no one who has troubled to read Rousseau or Marx could write such things. Exactly what the "per- fectibility of man" is supposed to mean, if anything at all, I cannot say; but it is not a phrase intrinsic to the kind of thought one finds in the mature Marx or, most of the time, in Rousseau. Marx did not base his argument for socialism on any view that one could isolate a constant called "human nature"; he would certainly have agreed with Ortega that man has not a nature, but a history. Nor did he have a very rosy view of the human beings who were his contempor- aries or recent predecessors: see in Capital the chapter on the Work- ing Day, a grisly catalogue of human bestiality. Nor did he hold to a naive theory of progress: he wrote that the victories of progress 5 Mr. Randall Jarrell, who usually avoids fashionable cant: "Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong; that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps." Which chains were knocked off in Germany to permit the setting-up of death camps? And which chains must be put up again to pre- vent a repetition of the death camps? === Page 26 === 24 PARTISAN REVIEW "seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that man- kind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy." As for Rousseau, the use of even a finger's-worth of historical imagination should suggest that the notion of "a state of nature" which modern literary people so enjoy attacking, was a political meta- phor employed in a pre-revolutionary situation, and not, therefore, to be understood outside its context. Rousseau explicitly declared that he did not suppose the "state of nature" to have existed in historical time; it was, he said, "a pure idea of reason" reached by abstraction from the observable state of society. As G. D. H. Cole remarks, "in political matters at any rate, the 'state of nature' is for [Rousseau] only a term of controversy . . . he means by 'nature' not the original state of a thing, nor even its reduction to the simplest terms; he is passing over to the conception of 'nature' as identical with the full development of [human] capacity. . . ." There are, to be sure, ele- ments in Rousseau's thought which one may well find distasteful, but these are not the elements commonly referred to when he is used in literary talk as a straw man to be beaten with the cudgels of "or- thodoxy." What then is the significance of the turn to Original Sin among so many intellectuals? Surely not to inform us, at this late moment, that man is capable of evil. Or is it, as Cleanth Brooks writes, to suggest that man is a "limited" creature, limited in possibilities and capacities, and hence unable to achieve his salvation through social means? Yes, to be sure; but the problem of history is to determine, by action, how far those limits may go. Conservative critics like to say that "man's fallen nature" makes unrealistic the liberal-radical vision of the good society-apparently, when Eve bit the apple she predetermined, with one fatal crunch, that her progeny could work its way up to capitalism, and not a step further. But the liberal-radical vision of the good society does not depend upon a belief in the "un- qualified goodness of man"; nor does it locate salvation in society: anyone in need of being saved had better engage in a private scrutiny. The liberal-radical claim is merely that the development of technology has now made possible-possible, not inevitable-a solution of those material problems that have burdened mankind for centuries. These === Page 27 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY 25 problems solved, man is then on his own, to make of his self and his world what he can. The literary prestige of Original Sin cannot be understood with- out reference to the current cultural situation; it cannot be under- stood except as a historical phenomenon reflecting, like the whole turn to religion and religiosity, the weariness of intellectuals in an age of defeat and their yearning to remove themselves from the bloodied arena of historical action and choice. Much sarcasm and anger has been expended on the “failure of nerve” theory, usually by people who take it as a personal affront to be told that there is a connection between what happens in their minds and what happens in the world; but if one looks at the large-scale shifts in belief among intel- lectuals during the past 25 years, it becomes impossible to put all of them down to a simultaneous, and thereby miraculous, discovery of Truth, some at least must be seen as a consequence of those historical pressures which make this an age of conformism. Like other efforts to explain major changes in belief, the “failure of nerve” theory does not tell us why certain people believed in the ’30s what was only to become popular in the ’50s and why others still believe in the ’50s what was popular in the ’30s; but it does tell us something more im- portant: why a complex of beliefs is dominant at one time and subordinate at another. V In the preceding pages I have tried to trace a rough pat- tern from social history through politics and finally into literary ide- ology, as a means of explaining the power of the conformist impulse in our time. But it is obvious that in each intellectual “world” there are impulses of this kind that cannot easily be shown to have their sources in social or historical pressures. Each intellectual world gives rise to its own patterns of obligation and preference. The literary world, being relatively free from the coarser kinds of social pres- sure, enjoys a considerable degree of detachment and autonomy. (Not as much as it likes to suppose, but a considerable degree.) That the general intellectual tendency is to acquiesce in what one no longer feels able to change or modify, strongly encourages the in- === Page 28 === 26 PARTISAN REVIEW ternal patterns of conformism in the literary world and intensifies the yearning, common to all groups but especially to small and insecure groups, to draw together in a phalanx of solidarity. Then too, those groups that live by hostility to the dominant values of society-in this case, cultural values-find it extremely difficult to avoid an inner conservatism as a way of balancing their public role of opposition; anyone familiar with radical politics knows this phenomenon only too well. Finally, the literary world, while quite powerless in relation to, say, the worlds of business and politics, disposes of a measurable amount of power and patronage within its own domain; which makes, again, for predictable kinds of influence. Whoever would examine the inner life of the literary world should turn first not to the magazines or the dignitaries or famous writers but to the graduate students, for like it or not the graduate school has become the main recruiting ground for critics and some- times even for writers. Here, in conversation with the depressed classes of the academy, one sees how the Ph.D. system-more power- ful today than it has been for decades, since so few other choices are open to young literary men-grinds and batters personality into a mold of cautious routine. And what one finds among these young people, for all their intelligence and devotion and eagerness, is often appalling: a remarkable desire to be "critics," not as an accompani- ment to the writing of poetry or the changing of the world or the study of man and God, but just critics-as if criticism were a subject, as if one could be a critic without having at least four non-literary opinions, or as if criticism "in itself" could adequately engage an adult mind for more than a small part of its waking time. An equally astonishing indifference to the ideas that occupy the serious modern mind-Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Frazer, Dewey are not great thinkers in their own right, but reservoirs from which one dredges up "ap- proaches to criticism"-together with a fabulous knowledge of what Ransom said about Winters with regard to what Winters had said about Eliot. And a curiously humble discipleship-but also arrogant to those beyond the circle-so that one meets not fresh minds in growth but apostles of Burke or Trilling or Winters or Leavis or Brooks or neo-Aristotle. Very little of this is the fault of the graduate students them- selves, for they, like the distinguished figures I have just listed, are the victims of an unhappy cultural moment. What we have today in === Page 29 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY 27 the literary world is a gradual bureaucratization of opinion and taste; not a dictatorship, not a conspiracy, not a coup, not a Machiavellian plot to impose a mandatory “syllabus”; but the inevitable result of outer success and inner hardening. Fourth-rate exercises in exegesis are puffed in the magazines while so remarkable and provocative a work as Arnold Hauser’s Social History of Art is hardly reviewed, its very title indicating the reason. Learned young critics who have never troubled to open a novel by Turgenev can rattle off reams of Kenneth Burke, which gives them, understandably, a sensation of having enlarged upon literature. Literature itself becomes a raw ma- terial which critics work up into schemes of structure and symbol; to suppose that it is concerned with anything so gauche as human experience or obsolete as human beings—"You mean,” a student said to me, "that you’re interested in the characters of novels!”—is to commit Mr. Elton alone knows how many heresies. (Cf. The Glos- sary, now in its fifth edition, which proves that bad reviews can't kill ponies.) Symbols clutter the literary landscape like the pots and pans a two-year-old strews over the kitchen floor; and what is wrong here is not merely the transparent absence of literary tact—the gift for saying when a pan is a pan and when a pan is a symbol—but far more important, a transparent lack of interest in represented exper- ience. For Mr. Stallman the fact that Stephen Crane looking at the sun felt moved to compare it to a wafer is not enough, the existence of suns and wafers and their possible conjunction is not sufficiently marvelous; both objects must be absorbed into Christian symbolism (an ancient theory of literature developed by the church fathers to prove that suns, moons, vulva, chairs, money, hair, pots, pans and words are really crucifixes). Techniques for reading a novel that have at best a limited relevance are frozen into dogmas: one might suppose from glancing at the more imposing literary manuals that "point of view” is the crucial means of judging a novel. (Willa Cather, according to Miss Caroline Gordon, was “astonishingly ignor- ant of her craft,” for she refrained from "using a single consciousness as a prism of moral reflection.” The very mistake Tolstoy made, too!) Criticism itself, far from being the reflection of a solitary mind upon a work of art and therefore, like the solitary mind, incomplete and subjective, comes increasingly to be regarded as a problem in mechanics, the tools, methods and trade secrets of which can be picked up, usually during the summer, from the more experienced === Page 30 === 28 PARTISAN REVIEW operatives. In the mind of Mr. Stanley Hyman, who serves the in- dispensable function of reducing fashionable literary notions, criticism seems to resemble Macy's on bargain day: First floor, symbols; Sec- ond floor, myths (rituals to the rear on your right); Third floor, ambiguities and paradoxes; Fourth floor, word counting; Fifth floor, Miss Harrison's antiquities; Attic, Marxist remnants; Basement, Freud; Sub-basement, Jung. Watch your step, please. What is most disturbing, however, is that writing about literature and writers has become an industry. The preposterous academic re- quirement that professors write books they don't want to write and no one wants to read, together with the obtuse assumption that piling up more and more irrelevant information about an author's life helps us understand his work—this makes for a vast flood of books that have little to do with literature, criticism or even scholarship. Would you care to know the contents of the cargo (including one elephant) carried by the vessel of which Hawthorne's father was captain in 1795? Mr. Cantwell has an itemized list, no doubt as an aid to read- ing The Scarlet Letter. Mr. Leyda knows what happened to Melville day by day and it is hardly his fault that most days nothing very much happened. Mr. Johnson does as much for Dickens and adds plot summaries too, no doubt because he is dealing with a little-read author. Another American scholar has published a full book on Mardi, which is astonishing not because he wrote the book but because he managed to finish reading Mardi at all. I have obviously chosen extreme examples and it would be silly to contend that they adequately describe the American literary scene; but like the distorting mirrors in Coney Island they help bring into sharper contour the major features. Or as Mr. Donald Davie writes in Twentieth Century: The professional poet has already disappeared from the literary scene, and the professional man of letters is following him into the grave. . . . It becomes more and more difficult, and will soon be im- possible, for a man to make his living as a literary dilettante. . . . And instead of the professional man of letters we have the professional critic, the young don writing in the first place for other dons, and only inci- dentally for that supremely necessary fiction, the common reader. In other words, an even greater proportion of what is written about liter- ature, and even of what literature is written, is "academic". . . . Liter- === Page 31 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY 29 ary standards are now in academic hands; for the free-lance man of letters, who once supplemented and corrected the don, is fast disappear- ing from the literary scene. . . . The pedant is as common as he ever was. And now that willy-nilly so much writing about literature is in academic hands, his activities are more dangerous than ever. But he has changed his habits. Twenty years ago he was to be heard asserting that his business was with hard facts, that questions of value and technique were not his affair, and that criticism could therefore be left to the impressionistic journalist. Now the pedant is proud to call himself a critic; he prides himself on evalu- ation and analysis; he aims to be penetrating, not informative. . . . The pedant is a very adaptable creature, and can be as comfortable with Mr. Eliot's "objective correlative," Mr. Empson's "ambiguities" and Dr. Leavis's "complexities" as in the older suit of critical clothes that he has now, for the most part, abandoned. Mr. Davie has in mind the literary situation in England, but all one needs for applying his remarks to America is an ability to multiply. VI All of the tendencies toward cultural conformism come to a head in the assumption that the avant garde, as both concept and intellectual grouping, has become obsolete or irrelevant. Yet the future quality of American culture, I would maintain, largely depends on the survival, and the terms of survival, of precisely the kind of dedi- cated group that the avant garde has been. The avant garde first appeared on the American scene some 25 or 30 years ago, as a response to the need for absorbing the meanings of the cultural revolution that had taken place in Europe during the first two decades of the century. The achievements of Joyce, Proust, Schoenberg, Bartok, Picasso, Matisse, to mention only the obvious figures, signified one of the major turnings in the cultural history of the West, a turning made all the more crucial by the fact that it came not during the vigor of a society but during its crisis. To counter the hostility which the work of such artists met among all the official spokesmen of culture, to discover formal terms and modes through which to secure these achievements, to insist upon the continuity be- tween their work and the accepted, because dead, artists of the past— this became the task of the avant garde. Somewhat later a section of === Page 32 === 30 PARTISAN REVIEW the avant garde also became politically active, and not by accident; for precisely those aroused sensibilities that had responded to the innovations of the modern masters now responded to the crisis of modern society. Thus, in the early years of a magazine like Partisan Review—roughly between 1936 and 1941—these two radical im- pulses came together in an uneasy but fruitful union; and it was in those years that the magazine seemed most exciting and vital as a link between art and experience, between the critical consciousness and the political conscience, between the avant garde of letters and the independent left of politics. That union has since been dissolved, and there is no likelihood that it will soon be re-established. American radicalism exists only as an idea, and that barely; the literary avant garde—it has become a stock comment for reviewers to make—is rapidly disintegrating, without function or spirit, and held together only by an inert nostalgia. Had the purpose of the avant garde been to establish the cur- rency of certain names, to make the reading of The Waste Land and Ulysses respectable in the universities, there would be no further need for its continuance. But clearly this was not the central purpose of the avant garde, it was only an unavoidable fringe of snobbery and fashion. The struggle for Joyce mattered only as it was a struggle for literary standards; the defense of Joyce was a defense not merely of modern innovation but of that traditional culture which was the source of modern innovation. And at its best it was a defense against those spokesmen for the genteel, the respectable and the academic who had established a stranglehold over traditional culture. At the most serious level, the avant garde was trying to face the problem of the quality of our culture, and when all is said and done, it faced that problem with a courage and honesty that no other group in society could match. If the history of the avant garde is seen in this way, there is every reason for believing that its survival is as necessary today as it was 25 years ago. To be sure, our immediate prospect is not nearly so exciting as it must then have seemed: we face no battle on behalf of great and difficult artists who are scorned by the official voices of culture. Today, in a sense, the danger is that the serious artists are not scorned enough. Philistinism has become very shrewd: it does not attack its enemies as much as it disarms them through reasonable === Page 33 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY cautions and moderate amendments. But this hardly makes the de- fense of those standards that animated the avant garde during its best days any the less a critical obligation. It has been urged in some circles that only the pressure of habit keeps serious writers from making “raids” upon the middlebrow world, that it is now possible to win substantial outposts in that world if we are ready to take risks. Perhaps. But surely no one de- sires a policy of highbrow isolation, and no one could oppose raids, provided that is what they really are. The pre-condition for successful raids, however, is that the serious writers themselves have a sense— not of belonging to an exclusive club-but of representing those cul- tural values which alone can sustain them while making their raids. Thus far the incursions of serious writers into the middlebrow world have not been remarkably successful: for every short-story writer who has survived the New Yorker one could point to a dozen whose work became trivial and frozen after they had begun to write for it. Nor do I advocate, in saying this, a policy of evading temptations. I advo- cate overcoming them. Writers today have no choice, often enough, but to write for magazines like the New Yorker—and worse, far worse. But what matters is the terms upon which the writer enters into such relationships, his willingness to understand with whom he is dealing, his readiness not to deceive himself that an unpleasant ne- cessity is a desirable virtue. It seems to me beyond dispute that, thus far at least, in the encounter between high and middle culture, the latter has come off by far the better. Every current of the Zeitgeist, every imprint of so- cial power, every assumption of contemporary American life favors the safe and comforting patterns of middlebrow feeling. And then too the gloomier Christian writers may have a point when they tell us that it is easier for a soul to fall than to rise.6 6 Thus Professor Gilbert Highet, the distinguished classicist, writing in Harper's finds André Gide "an abominably wicked man. His work seems to me to be either shallowly based symbolism, or else cheap cynicism made by inverting commonplaces or by grinning through them. . . . Gide had the curse of per- petual immaturity. But then I am always aware of the central fact about Gide— that he was a sexual pervert who kept proclaiming and justifying his perversion; and perhaps this blinds me to his merits . . . the garrulous, Pangloss-like, pimple- scratching, self-exposure of Gide." I don't mean to suggest that many fall so low, but then not many philistines are so well educated as Mr. Highet. 31 === Page 34 === 32 PARTISAN REVIEW Precisely at the time that the highbrows seem inclined to abandon what is sometimes called their “proud isolation,” the middlebrows have become more intransigent in their opposition to everything that is serious and creative in our culture (which does not, of course, prevent them from exploiting and contaminating, for purposes of mass gossip, everything that is serious and creative in our culture). What else is the meaning of the coarse attack launched by the Satur- day Review against the highbrows, under the guise of discussing the Pound case? What, for that matter, is the meaning of the hostility with which the PR symposium on “Our Country and Our Culture” was received in the popular press? It would take no straining of texts to see this symposium as a disconcerting sign of how far intellectuals have drifted in the direction of cultural adaptation, yet the middle- brows wrote of it with blunt enmity. And perhaps because they too sensed this drift in the symposium, the middlebrows, highly confident at the moment, became more aggressive, for they do not desire com- promise, they know that none is possible. So genial a middlebrow as Elmer Davis, in a long review of the symposium, entitled with a char- acteristic smirk “The Care and Feeding of Intellectuals,” ends upon a revealing note: “The highbrows seem to be getting around to recog- nizing what the middlebrows have known for the past thirty years. This is progress.” It is also the best possible argument for the main- tenance of the avant garde, even if only as a kind of limited defense. Much has been written about the improvement of cultural standards in America, though a major piece of evidence—the wide circulation of paper-bound books—is still an unweighed and unana- lyzed quantity. The basic relations of cultural power remain un- changed, however: the middlebrows continue to dominate. The most distinguished newspaper in this country retains as its music critic a man named Olin Downes; the literary critic for that newspaper is a man named Orville Prescott; the most widely read book reviewer in this country is a buffoon named Sterling North; the most powerful literary journal, read with admiration by many librarians and profes- sors, remains The Saturday Review; and in the leading American book supplement it is possible for the head of the largest American museum to refer, with egregious ignorance, to “the Spenglerian ster- ility which has possessed Europe for the past half century and [has] produced Proust, Gide and Picasso. . . .” Nothing here gives us === Page 35 === THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY 33 cause for reassurance or relaxation; nothing gives us reason to dis- solve that compact in behalf of critical intransigence known as the avant garde. No formal ideology or program is entirely adequate for coping with the problems that intellectuals face in the twentieth century. No easy certainties and no easy acceptance of uncertainty. All the forms of authority, the states and institutions and monster bureauc- racies, that press in upon modern life-what have these shown us to warrant the surrender of independence? The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispas- sionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical. The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have. (Mr. Howe's article deals with many complex and highly controver- sial issues. It also contains some criticisms of the development of PR, as well as of the individual positions of some members of its editorial board. We are presenting this article to our readers in the interest of a critical analysis of the American scene. We hope to continue the discussion in future issues.-THE EDITORS) === Page 36 === Mary McCarthy DOTTIE MAKES AN HONEST WOMAN OF HERSELF* “Get yourself a pessary,” Dick's muttered envoi, as he pro- pelled her firmly to the door the following morning, fell on Dottie's ears with the effect of a stunning blow. Bewilderedly, she understood him to be saying, “Get yourself a peccary,” and a vision of a coarse, piglike mammal passed across her dazed consciousness, together with memories of Kraft-Ebing and the girl who had kept a goat at Vassar. Her hurt feelings descried a variant of the old-maid joke. Tears rushed to her eyes; she and Dick had had a dismal breakfast—not a word, not a look had acknowledged what had taken place between them in the night. She might have been a stranger or an enemy. Yet up to this dreadful moment, she had allowed herself wanly to hope. “This is tragedy,” concluded Dottie, with a scholarly start of recog- nition. In his dressing gown, with his hair disordered and his biting smile, Dick reminded her of someone. Hamlet—she thought—putting Ophelia away from him: “Get thee to a nunnery.” She stared at him winking back the tears and swallowing, still unable to conceive that this farewell, this harsh thrusting-off, was happening to her. “A female contraceptive, a plug,” Dick threw out impatiently. “You get it from a lady doctor. Ask your friend Kay.” Understanding dawned. Dottie's heart gave a bound; in a per- son like Dick, her jubilant instincts assured her, this was the language of love. But she did not dare let him see her surprise, which would show him that she was not sure of him. “Yes, Dick,” she whispered, her dark eyes beaming with a calm, resolute joy. Their looks met squarely, for the first time that morning; a frown pinched his brow. *A chapter from a novel, The Group, which takes place in the '30s. === Page 37 === AN HONEST WOMAN 35 "I don't love you, you know, Boston," he said, warningly. "Yes, Dick," she replied. "And you must promise that you won't fall in love with me." "Yes, Dick," she answered, more faintly. "My wife says I'm a bastard, but she still likes me in the hay. You'll have to accept that. If you want that, you can have it." "I want it, Dick," said Dottie, in a feeble but staunch voice. Dick shrugged. "I don't believe you, Boston." A slightly vaunting smile appeared on his lips. "Most women don't take me seriously when I state my terms. Then they get hurt. You were hurt a minute ago—don't tell me why. In the back of their heads, they have a plan to make me fall in love with them. I don't fall in love." Dottie's warm eyes were teasing. "What about Betty?" He threw a glance at the photograph of his ex-wife. "You saw her?" Dottie nodded. He looked very serious. "I'll tell you," he said. "I liked Betty physically better than I've ever liked any woman. I've still got hot pants for her, if you want to call that love." Dottie shook her head and lowered her eyes. "But I won't change my life for her, and so Betty lit out. I don't blame her; I'd have done the same thing, if I were made like Betty. Betty is all woman. She likes money, change, excitement, things, clothes, posses- sions." His face grew sober and thoughtful, as though, in speaking of himself, he were revolving an abstract problem. "I hate posses- sions. It's a funny thing, because you'd think I hated them because they meant stability, wouldn't you?" Dottie nodded. "But I like sta- bility; that's just the rub!" He had become quite tense and excited; his hands flexed nervously as he spoke. To Dottie's eyes, suddenly, he appeared much younger—a haggard, worried youth, like some of the more talkative farm boys who sold blueberries on Cape Ann. "I like a man's life," he said. "A bar. The outdoors. A little reading. Fishing and hunting. I like men's talk, that's never striving to get anywhere but just circles and circles. That's why I drink. A newspaper life is a pretty fair substitute; the Paris Herald suited me. I'm a natural exile. But I hate change, Boston, and I don't change myself. That's where I come a cropper with women. Women expect an affair to get better and better, and if it doesn't get better, they think it's getting worse. They think if I sleep with them longer I'm going to get fonder of them, and if I don't get fonder that I'm tiring of them. But for me it's all the same. If I like it the first time, I === Page 38 === 36 PARTISAN REVIEW know I'm going to keep on liking it. I liked you last night and I'll keep on liking you as long as you want to come here. But don't harbor the idea that I'm going to like you more." A note of menace had crept into his voice with the last words; he stood, staring down at her harshly, and teetering a little on his feet. Dottie fingered the tassel of his dressing-gown sash. "All right, Dick," she whispered. "When you get yourself fixed up, you can bring your things here and I'll keep them for you. Just give me a call after you've been to the doctor." A breath of last night's liquor wafted into her face; she choked. It occurred to her that she might have lost her virginity with a man whom she did not greatly like, now that she began to know him better and to grasp his strange philosophy of life. But her training had instilled the principle that it was a mark of low breeding to consider that you might have been wrong in a person. "I can't take you out," he said gently, as if he read her reluctance. "I can only ask you to come here whenever you're in town. The wel- come-mat will be out. I've nothing but my bed to offer you. I don't go to theaters or restaurants." Dottie opened her mouth, but Dick shook his head. "I don't like ladies who want to pay my check. What I make at the League takes care of my simple wants: my carfare, my bar bill, and a few frugal canned goods." Dottie's forehead wrinkled; she felt shocked and scared by such poverty. "There's an aunt up in Marblehead," he assured her, "who comes through with a check now and then. Some day, if I live long enough, I'll be her heir. But I hate possessions, Boston; forgive me if I think of you generically. I hate the itch to acquire. I don't care for this kinetic society." Dottie, very much troubled, felt that the time had come to interpose a gentle remonstrance. "But Dick," she said quietly, "there are false possessions and true possessions. If everybody thought like you, the human race would never have got anywhere. We'd still be living in caves. Why, the wheel wouldn't have been invented! People need an incentive, maybe not a money-incentive. . ." Dick laughed. "You must be the fiftieth woman who has said that to me. It's a credit to universal education that whenever a girl meets Dick Brown she begins to talk about the wheel and the lever. I've even had a French prostitute tell me about the fulcrum." Dottie laughed un- easily. "Good-by, Dick," she said, quickly. "I mustn't keep you from your work." "Aren't you going to take the phone number?" he in- === Page 39 === AN HONEST WOMAN 37 quired, with a jesting shake of the head for Dottie's negligence. His eyes bantered her as she took out her little blue leather address book and wrote down his landlady's phone number with a little gold pencil. “Good-by, Boston,” he murmured, and took her long chin between his thumb and forefinger and waggled it back and forth, absently. “Remember: no monkey-business; no falling in love. Honor bright.” Notwithstanding all this, Dottie's heart was humming as she sat, two days later, beside her friend, Kay Peterson, in the woman doctor's office suite. Actions spoke louder than words, and whatever Dick might say, the fact remained that he had sent her here, to be wedded, as it were, by proxy, with the “ring” or diaphragm pessary that the woman doctor dispensed. With her hair freshly waved and her com- plexion glowing from a facial, she had a look of quiet assurance that bespoke the contented matron. Knowledge had allayed her fears. To Kay's awed astonishment, Dottie, all by herself, had visited a birth-control bureau and received the doctor's name and a sheaf of pamphlets that described a myriad of devices—tampons, sponges, col- larbutton, wishbone, and butterfly pessaries, thimbles, silk rings and coils—and the virtues and drawbacks of each. The new device recom- mended to Dottie by the bureau had the backing of the whole U.S. medical profession; it had been found by Margaret Sanger in Holland and was now for the first time being imported in quantity into the U.S.A., where our own manufacturers could copy it. It combined the maximum of protection with the minimum of inconvenience and could be used by any woman of average or better intelligence, follow- ing the instructions of a qualified physician. This article, a rubber cap mounted on a coiled spring, came in a range of sizes and would be tried out in Dottie's vagina, for fit, wearing comfort, and so on, in the same way that various lenses were tried out for the eyes. The woman doctor would insert it and, having made sure of the proper size, she would teach Dottie how to put it in, how to smear it with contraceptive jelly and put a dab in the middle, how to crouch in a squatting position, fold the pessary between thumb and third finger of the right hand, while parting the labia majora with the left hand, and edge the pessary in, so that it would snap into place, shielding the cervix, and finally how to follow it with the right middle finger, locate the cervix or soft neck of the === Page 40 === 38 PARTISAN REVIEW uterus and make certain it was covered by the rubber. When this process had been rehearsed several times, to the watching doctor's satisfaction, Dottie would be taught how and when to douche, how much water to use, the proper height for the douche-bag, and how to hold the labia firmly around the lubricated nozzle in order to get the best results. As she was leaving the office, the nurse would present her with a manila envelope containing a tube of vaginal jelly and a small flat box with Dottie's personalized contraceptive in it. The nurse would instruct her how to care for the pessary: to wash it after each use, dry it carefully, and dust it with talcum before return- ing it to its box. Dottie's informed serenity had made Kay and John burst into whoops of laughter, when they discussed it in private, after Dottie's amazing visit to them in their new apartment. She had come bearing a Georgian silver creamer for a wedding present, just the sort of thing an old aunt would have inflicted on you, and a bunch of white peonies, and while they were still endeavoring to conceal their disap- pointment in a hunt for a proper vase (for the same money they could have had something plain and modern from Jensen's!), she had sat down and calmly announced to them that she had taken Dick Brown as her lover. Coming from Dottie, that imperial phrase was simply perfect, but fortunately they were too stunned even to exchange a look, let alone smile. Their first conscious reaction was one of guilt. Kay blamed herself for inviting Dick to the wedding and John blamed the punch. They both immediately felt there was an element of revenge in Dick's conduct; Dick thought he had been invited because he was the only one of John's recent friends who was outwardly presentable. At first glance, he looked like a gentleman, though he was as queer a duck as you could meet, a dipsomaniac and a violent misogynist, with a terrible inferiority complex because of what had happened with his socialite wife. To Kay, in particular, it seemed that he had deliberately broken a covenant: his presence at the wedding had been conditional on his reflecting credit on John. Yet they had only to look at Dottie, very crisp and assured in her pearls and crepe-de-chine blouse and smart navy-blue sailor, sipping her Clover Club cocktail out of the Russel Wright cup and wiping a mustache of egg-white from her long upper lip with a cocktail napkin, to feel the utter hopelessness of explaining Dick and his === Page 41 === AN HONEST WOMAN 39 motives to her. In the afternoon light, moveover, she seemed quite appetizing, in her chipmunk style, with her brown friendly eyes gleam- ing with quiet fun and her lashes a-flutter whenever she looked at John. A lot of it was clothes, of course, for thanks to a clever mother, Dottie dressed to perfection: she was the only one of the Boston contingent at Vassar who knew better than to wear tweeds and mufflers, which made the poor things look like gaunt, elderly govern- esses out for a Sunday hike. According to John, her deep-bosomed figure, as revealed by her bias-cut blouses, gave promise of sensuality. And Kay, despite what she knew of Dick, could not help but be a little impressed by what Dottie disclosed to her in the bedroom: it seemed that Dick had actually told her to go and get fitted with a pessary! There was a certain protocol in these matters, as Kay well ap- preciated from her own history with John, and no man who was a gentleman (which Dick in his queer way still was) would send a girl to a birth-control doctor unless he planned to sleep with her regularly, over a considerable period. If it were only a casual affair, he would feel himself bound to use condoms or practice coitus inter- -ruptus. The expense was a determining factor: no gentleman would expect a girl to put up the doctor's fee, plus the price of the pessary and the jelly and the douche-bag, if he were not going to sleep with her long enough for her to recover her investment. It was simpler to buy Trojans by the dozen and not feel bound to the girl. Why, Kay herself was still using suppositories three days after her marriage, though she and John had slept together for ages. This etiquette, John assured Kay, who in turn passed it on to a gladdened Dottie, was well understood by all the young men of his acquaintance. Even Dick, who was thirty, and had lived abroad for so long, would not have sent Dottie to the doctor just to gratify a whim, John argued. In the first place, a man did not transfer the burden of contraception to a woman unless he felt able to trust her: too many shotgun weddings had resulted from a man's relying on a woman's assurance that the contraceptive was in. Secondly, there was the question of the apparatus. The unmarried girl who lived with her family required a place to keep her pessary and her douche-bag safe from Mother's prying eyes; therefore the man took over the custody of these articles. He kept them in his bureau drawer or his === Page 42 === 40 PARTISAN REVIEW bathroom, in readiness for the girl's visit. This custodianship, for most men of feeling, amounted to a sacred trust; the very intimacy of the articles precluded the presence of other women in the apartment, who might open drawers or the medicine-cabinet or even feel themselves entitled to use the douche-bag hallowed to "her." With a married woman, if the affair were serious, the situation was the same: she bought a second pessary and a douche-bag, which she kept in her lover's apartment, where they exercised a restraining influence if he felt tempted to betray her. A man entrusted with a douche and a pessary was bonded, so to speak; if he strayed with another woman, he preferred to do it elsewhere, in a hotel or other premises not con- secrated by these sacral reminders. In the same way, a married woman pledged her faithfulness in infidelity by committing her second pessary to her lover's care; only a married woman of very coarse fiber would use the same pessary for both husband and lover. One adventurous wife of John's acquaintance was said to have pessaries all over town, like a sailor with a wife in every port, while her husband, a busy stage-director, kept himself assured, as he thought, of her good be- havior by a daily inspection of the little box in her medicine cabinet, where the conjugal pessary lay in its dusting of talcum powder. Furthermore, John said, the disposal of the pessary and douche- bag presented a delicate problem when a love affair was to be termin- ated. What was the man to do with these hygienic relics that were left on his hands when he or the woman tired? They could not be returned through the mail, like love letters or an engagement ring, though crude lads had been known to do this; on the other hand, they could not be discarded in the trash-basket for the janitor or landlady to pick up; they would not burn in the fireplace, without giving off an awful smell, and to keep them for another woman was unthink- able. A man could carry them, stuffed into a paper bag, to one of the city waste-baskets late at night or early in the morning or dump them into the river, but such missions were fraught with humiliation and an irrational fear of the police. Indeed, the possession of a woman's pessary and fountain syringe made the modern man her cap- tive. These appliances were the corpus delicti of the dead love-affair that remained to haunt the murderer, like a body crammed into a trunk. Short of keeping them, like grim testimonies, on a closet shelf, the best method of handling them was to do as murderers did in === Page 43 === AN HONEST WOMAN 41 mystery stories: check them in a railroad parcel room and throw away the check. All this meant that no bachelor in his right mind would send a girl to the doctor to be fitted, if he did not feel pretty serious about her. The problem, of course, only arose with respectable married women or nice girls like Dottie and Kay, who lived with their par- ents or with other girls. There were women of the looser sort, divor- cées and unattached secretaries and office-workers living in their own apartments, who equipped themselves independently and kept their douche-bags hanging on the back of their bathroom door for anybody to see who wandered in to pee during a cocktail party. One friend of John's, a veteran assistant stage-manager, always made it a point to look over a girl's bathroom before starting anything; if the bag was on the door, it was nine to one he would make her on the first try. Once a girl got a pessary, it cheapened her in a way. It was different, Kay thought, for a married woman. She and John loathed children and intended to leave breeding to others: Kay had seen in her own family how offspring could take the joy out of marriage. Her tribe of brothers and sisters had kept her Dads' nose to the grindstone; if he had not had so many children, he might have been a famous surgeon, instead of a hard-worked G.P., with only a wing in the hospital to commemorate the work he had done in orthopedics and on serums for meningitis. Poor Dads had quite a kick out of sending her East to Vassar, and she had the feeling that he wanted her to have the life he might have had himself, in the big world of people that counted. He had just crashed through nobly with a check, for the amount he and Mother would have spent on trains and hotels, if they had come on for the wedding; and it moved her and John almost to tears to think of his showing his faith in them in such a generous way. And she and John did not intend to betray him by getting caught, as he had, and having children, when John could make a name for himself in the theater. The theater-strange coincidence!—was one of Dads' big passions; he and Mother went to see all the touring companies and had tickets every night when they came to New York. Still, passionate as she was on the subject of birth control, it gave Kay an uneasy feeling to see Dottie embarking so strong-mindedly on a career of crime. Just to show that Dottie had somebody behind === Page 44 === 42 PARTISAN REVIEW her, she decided to go with her to the doctor and be fitted at the same time herself. It put a certain stamp on a lone girl to possess her own contraceptive equipment; men, if they knew of it, would think the less of her for it. The protective element, so important to a man's feeling, would be gone; a girl who "took care of herself" would be looked on as almost a man. And even if Dick did not mind, the time would come when Dottie would have to begin to think of marriage, to a man of her own sort, for Dick was out of the question, unless the Renfrews could support him. A man of her own sort would be shocked if he knew of Dottie's visit to the doctor, much more shocked than by the discovery of clandestine relations. There was something so open and somehow official about it. Kay herself was horrified when Dottie insisted that the appointment should be made in her real name: Dorothy Renfrew. The office might be raided and the doctor's records impounded and published in the newspapers, which would be terrible for Dottie's family, who would probably turn around and blame Kay, as the pathfinder of the college group. But once Dottie had made up her mind, there was no moving her, as her group-mates knew to their sorrow. Birth control, Dottie insisted, was perfectly legal and aboveboard, thanks to a court decision that allowed doctors to prescribe contraceptives for the prevention or cure of disease. Kay could almost see Mrs. Pankhurst peeping out of Dottie's resolute eye. And indeed Dottie's zealotry was reflected in the furnishings of the woman doctor's office suite, which had a sort of militant plain- ness, like the headquarters of a missionary sect. There was a single upholstered couch, with two antimacassars aligned on its back; against the tan walls was a series of straight chairs. The magazine rack held copies of Hygeia, Parents', Consumers' Research Bulletin, a single issue of the Nation, and a back number of Harper's. On the walls were etchings showing overcrowded slums teeming with rickety chil- dren and a lithograph of an early hospital ward in which untended young women, with babies at their side, were dying, presumably of puerperal fever. There was a pious hush in the atmosphere, some- thing almost religious, which was emphasized by the absence of any smoking equipment and the whirring of a fan. Kay and Dottie, who had taken out cigarettes, replaced them in their cases after a survey of the room. The two other patients waiting were reading Hygeia === Page 45 === AN HONEST WOMAN 43 and the Consumers' Research Bulletin, respectively, with looks of stern concentration; the older of the two, a sallow, thin woman of about thirty, with a pair of cotton gloves, wore no wedding ring, a fact which Dottie silently called to Kay's attention. Kay nodded, thoughtfully. What struck both girls was the perception that the other two patients came from a stratum of society somewhat lower than their own, from the depths of the middle class, and this moved them to an appreciation of "how much good the doctor was doing," as Kay whispered to Dottie from behind her hand. Their education had impressed on them the necessity of social awareness. "Extend your antennae, girls," was an apothegm often repeated by an out- standing teacher, and here in this sanctum of change they felt ter- rifically extended and very much aware. Just because it was so im- personal, the occasion seemed more significant than losing your virginity. They let their gaze flicker about the room and return to rest meaningfully on each other. Birth control, both girls were thinking, was just one facet, of course, of a tremendous revolution in American society. John, who was quite a social thinker, had been holding forth on that very sub- ject only the night before, when Kay and Dottie, who had gone to a theater, picked him up backstage at the Music Hall and bore him off to a speakeasy. Dottie had never seen the new Music Hall before, and showing off its technical marvels had got John started. The trans- fer of financial power, he explained, from Threadneedle Street to Wall Street was an event in world history comparable to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, which had ushered in the era of capitalism. When Roosevelt, just now, had gone off the gold standard, it was a declaration of independence from Europe and an announcement of a new epoch. The NRA and the eagle were symbols of the arrival of a new class to power. John had shown the two girls that their class, the upper middle, was finished politically and economically; it was being squeezed between the monopoly capitalists and the rising class of workers and farmers and technicians, of which he as a stage technician was one. You saw this, he said, in every branch of life; on the stage, for instance, where the director used to be king in the days of Belasco, the director today was dependent, above all, on his master electrician, who could make or break a play by the way he handled his light-cues—behind every big director there was a genius === Page 46 === 44 PARTISAN REVIEW electrician, just as there was a genius cameraman behind every big movie-director. The same with the engineers in radio; it was the men in the control room who really counted. A doctor today was dependent on his technicians, on the men in the lab and the X-ray room; they were the birds who could make or break a diagnosis. John's deep voice swelled as he warmed up to his theme. Their class was finished, he told the two girls tenderly, sliding an arm around Kay; but individuals in it had something to pass on to in- dividuals in the rising class, just as old Europe had something to pass on to America. In these terms, he explained, his marriage to Kay was a sort of exploitation from below: his vital energies were exploiting her hereditary resources of culture and taste. Hence, to- gether, he said, smiling, they represented the future, not a future of class struggle and violence as the rabid Communists saw it, but a future of gradual assimilation and mass abundance through the machine. John-Kay interrupted-was very much interested in the possi- bilities of technocracy. He predicted an economy of plenty and leisure in which everybody would only have to work a few hours a day. It was through such an economy that his class, the class of artists and technicians, would come naturally to the top; the homage people paid to money today would be paid in the future to the engineers and contrivers of leisure-time activities. For instance, one of John's Williams fraternity brothers had become a playground director here in New York, after having wasted three years in Wall Street trying to sell stocks and bonds on commission. There was a real future in playgrounds. Already a man like Commissioner Robert Moses was the idol of New York. With his splendid new parkways and his civic playground, Jones Beach, he was making a new city, a city of planning and pleasure. Private enterprise-suggested John-also had a part to play, if it had breadth of vision. Yes-agreed Kay-Radio City, where John worked, was an example of the same thing, under- taken by enlightened capitalists, the Rockefellers, and there was the new Museum of Modern Art, which also had Rockefeller backing. New York was experiencing a new Renaissance, with the new Medicis competing with public ownership to create a modern Florence. You could even see it in Macy's, where enlightened merchants, the Strauses, were training a corps of upper-middle-class technicians, like === Page 47 === AN HONEST WOMAN 70 Kay, to make the store into something more than a business, some- thing closer to a civic center or permanent fairgrounds, with educa- tional exhibits, like the old Crystal Palace. And the smart new reno- vated tenements, which were springing up along the East River, in the Fifties and Eighties, were still another example of intelligent planning by capital: Vincent Astor had done them. The whole face of New York was changing, Kay continued earnestly. The new small movie-houses, where they showed foreign films and served tea and coffee in the lounge and sometimes even had ping-pong tables, were a sign of the times. Europe still had something to teach us in the arts of living, but we were beginning to see that we could com- bine the charm of the old world with sanitation and functional plan- ning. Venetian blinds were an example, like the old jalousies, but modernized, and the new apartment buildings, four or five stories high, with central courts planted with grass and shrubs, and com- pletely up-to-date kitchens. A lot of waste space was being eliminated in these buildings-no more foyers or dining-rooms, which were ob- solete conventions. John, said Kay, emphatically, was a perfect fanatic about waste space. A house, he declared, ought to be a machine for living, nothing more, nothing less. When they moved to a permanent apartment, he was going to supervise all the painting, mix the colors himself, and have a carpenter build everything in, bookcases, bureaus, chests, phonograph. The beds were going to consist of mattresses and springs, supported by four low pegs, and they were even talking about a dining-table that could come down from the wall like a Murphy bed-a single leaf of wood that would fold back into place. John sat smiling phlegmatically as Kay expounded his ideas; it was manifest to Dottie that they were awfully happy. They had moved into their summer sublet the day after graduation, a week before they were married. Everything in their life was planned. Since Kay had not been trained to do housework, John had taken it over; he swept and cleaned and marketed and, just now, the first week, he brought her breakfast in bed. When Kay started at the store, on Monday, John would serve the breakfast in the kitchen and clean up, after she left, shop for the day at Gristede’s with him, until twelve-fifteen when he was the list Kay had left for him, until twelve-fifteen when he was due at the Music Hall for the first show. He and the other assist- ant stage-managers spelled each other, so that three nights a week === Page 48 === 46 PARTISAN REVIEW he was home for dinner and he had Sundays off. The other nights he and Kay would catch a bite together in the theatrical district; they had found a little Italian place with an eighty-five cent din- ner that was terribly good and quick. On the nights he was home, they would take turns cooking, with Kay doing simple dishes that she could prepare after work or John making one of his specialties- Italian spaghetti or meat-balls cooked in salt in a hot skillet or a quick-and-easy meat loaf his mother had taught him: one part beef, one part pork, one part veal; add sliced onions and pour over a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. Kay, not to be outdone—she said, laugh- ing—had written her mother for some of her cook’s dishes-veal kidneys done with cooking sherry and mushrooms, a marvelous jellied salad of lime jello, shrimps, mayonnaise and alligator pear, which could be fixed the night before in ramekins and then unmolded on lettuce-cups. (How fortunate, thought Dottie, with a quick, anxious look at the unperturbed John, that he did not seem to mind the little social differences in their backgrounds; another man might have flushed at Kay’s tactless candor.) On Sundays, they planned to en- tertain, either at a late breakfast of chipped beef or corned-beef hash, or at a casserole supper. They had found a new cookbook that had a whole section devoted to casserole dishes, which were the thing now, they maintained; nobody today wanted to eat the old heavy course- dinners of the Boston Cooking School type. What people liked was just one dish and a crisp salad with garlic and French dressing; no dessert. The trouble with American cooking was the dearth of im- agination in it and the terrible fear of innards and garlic. John put a dish was the seasonings and you had to have the courage to be ex- perimental. When he fixed chipped beef, for instance, he put in mustard and Worcestershire sauce and grated cheese and green pepper and an egg, and you would never have known it was the same dish as the old milky chipped beef that you got at college and sometimes at home on Sunday mornings. Kay fished in her bag for a recipe that she had cut out of the food column in the paper. “What do you think of that?” she demanded, passing it to Dottie. “I’m thinking of serving it next week to John’s boss when he comes to dinner. I love the recipes in the Tribune; I wouldn’t think of getting the Times now.” “The Tribune’s typography has it all over the Times,” John explained in an aside to Dottie. === Page 49 === AN HONEST WOMAN 47 Dottie scrutinized the clipping. It was a recipe, or receipt, as her mother called it, for shoulder of lamb rolled and basted with grape jelly. "It sounds terribly good," she proffered, uncertainly, handing the recipe back. John and Kay glanced at each other. "You don't think it's too unusual?" suggested Kay. "Well, of course," Dottie equivocated, "I don't know the person. Perhaps you ought to try it out first." There was a pause. "How lucky you are, Kay," said Dottie warmly, "to have found a husband who's interested in cooking and housekeeping and who isn't afraid of experiment." She leaned for- ward. "Most men, you know, have awfully set tastes, like Daddy, who positively insists on a joint or a roast fowl or chops at every meal and won't hear of 'made' dishes, except the good old beans on Saturday." She dimpled up at them, shyly; she did really think that Kay was awfully lucky. Kay seized her arm. "You ought to get your cook to try the new way of fixing canned beans. You just add catsup and mustard and Worcestershire sauce and sprinkle them with plenty of brown sugar, cover them with bacon and put them in the oven in a pyrex dish." John nodded gravely. "You can use a bean- pot," he said. "It sounds terribly good," repeated Dottie, "but Daddy would die." "There's a foolish prejudice against canned goods," said John. "Some of them are very good. Do you know corn niblets?" Dottie shook her head. "Get your cook to try them. They're a big favorite with men." "It's a question of what you do with them," put in Kay. "You don't just take them out of the can and serve them. You heat them up with a little butter and a little chopped green pepper. People don't understand that canned goods have to be treated with a little imagination. You add things to them and create something of your own." The two pairs of eyes rested sharply on Dottie. "Tell your Mother about iceberg lettuce," added Kay. "It's a variety that's been developed recently and once you've tried it you'll never use the old loose-leaf Boston lettuce again. It's crisp as toast and has wonderful keeping powers. It's also called Simpson lettuce. Have your cook ask for that on the market." "I shall," murmured Dottie. "Thank you. It sounds terribly good." At that both the Peter- sons had laughed at her. But Dottie did intend, when she got back to the cottage, to pass this tip on to Mother. She had had Mother badly on her conscience for the past two days, ever since she had got back to the Vassar Club that fatal morning and found a message that Gloucester had been === Page 50 === 48 PARTISAN REVIEW calling, first at midnight and again at 8 A.M. It had been a dread- ful moment, almost the worst in her life, when she had waited, with the receiver in her hand, knowing that she would have to lie to Mother and pretend that she had spent the night with Polly Andrews in Polly's cousin's apartment. What was harrowing was not the fear of being found out-Mother trusted her completely and would never dream of checking up. Rather, it was the sense of separation, of the forking of the ways. Mrs. Renfrew's bright, curious voice on the telephone, eager for details about the wedding, had cut Dottie's heart: she felt she was depriving her parent of one of her sources of life. The hardest thing was to have to recognize that Mother would worry if she knew. It was like acknowledging a fault in Mother, a failure in understanding, due to the difference in age. This would hurt Mother more than anything else, if she ever were to find out. And the very fact of lying now would make it more difficult to tell her later on, when the occasion was more propitious, for the first thing Mother would ask was “When did this happen, Dottie?” The consciousness of withholding something had made Dottie more alert, during the past two days, to the small items of passing interest that she could bring back to Gloucester, in compensation for what Mrs. Renfrew was not being told. Mother, for instance, would be vastly amused to hear about Kay and John's housekeeping arrangements; as a Vassar woman herself, she felt a lively concern for girls like Kay who had broken with convention and were trying to live their own lives; she still kept in touch with the Lucy Stoners and woman's rights fighters of her own class at college, most of whom had settled down to humdrum married bliss. It was really because of Mother that Dottie had taken her courage in her hands and gone to see the people at the birth-control headquarters. In the back of Dottie's mind was a plan, not yet fully matured, of coming to New York and work- ing as a volunteer for the birth-control people. In that way, she could see Dick regularly, and she could also talk openly to her mother about a certain segment of her widened horizon. The big stumbling-block, of course, was Daddy, who would have to be reasoned with a good deal, before he could see birth-control as an important part of welfare-work. He would have to be convinced that no notoriety would attach to an unmarried woman who worked in such a movement; the fact that the Catholics were against it would === Page 51 === AN HONEST WOMAN 49 be a very strong argument with Daddy, who was violently anti- Catholic, like all good Boston Republicans. The other difficulty would be to explain how she had got interested in the movement; would it be stretching probability too far to say that she had gone with Kay to visit birth-control headquarters? "Miss Renfrew," called the nurse softly, and Dottie, trembling, got up. With a farewell look at Kay, like one about to be executed, she advanced into the doctor's consulting room; all at once, she was frightened stiff. At the desk sat a white-coated, olive-skinned woman with a big bun of black hair. The doctor was very handsome, about forty years old, with large black brilliant eyes, which rested on Dottie briefly, like electric rays, while one broad hand, with exquisite tapering fingers, motioned Dottie to a chair. She began to take the medical history, in a detached, businesslike way, but all the while Dottie was aware of a mesmeric, warm charm that emanated from her person and seemed to tell Dottie not to be afraid. It occurred to Dottie, almost with surprise, that they were both women. The doc- tor's femininity seemed a part of her professional aspect, like her white coat; the broad gold wedding ring on her hand shone like a talisman, a Hippocratic band. "Have you ever had intercourse, Dorothy?" The question seemed to flow so naturally from the sequence of operations and previous diseases that Dottie's answer was given before she had time to flush. "Good!" exclaimed the doctor, and when Dottie glanced up, wonder- ingly, the doctor's smile was encouraging. "That makes it easier for us to fit you," she said, like one commending a child. Her skill as- tonished Dottie, who sat as if anesthetized by the doctor's personality, while the doctor's questions, like a delicately maneuvering forceps, extracted information, as it were, from Dottie's body while leaving her mind's tissues unbruised. The questions betrayed no more interest in the man or the circumstances of Dottie's deflation than if Dick had been a surgical instrument: had Dottie been completely pene- trated, had there been much bleeding, much pain? What method of contraception had been used, had the act been repeated? "With- drawal," murmured the doctor, writing it down on a separate pad. "We like to know," she explained, with a quick, personal smile, "what methods our patients have used before coming to us. When was this intercourse had?" "Three nights ago," said Dottie, coloring, === Page 52 === 50 PARTISAN REVIEW with the sense that now at last they were about to touch the bio- graphical, "And the date of your last period?" Dottie supplied it, and the doctor glanced at her desk calendar. "Very good," she said. "Go into the bathroom, empty your bladder, and take off your girdle and step-ins; you may leave your slip on, but unfasten your bras- siere, please." Dottie did not mind the pelvic examination or the fitting. Her bad moment came when she was learning how to insert the pessary herself. Though she was usually good with her hands and well co- ordinated, she felt suddenly unnerved by the scrutiny of the doctor and the nurse, so exploratory and impersonal, like the doctor's rubber glove. As she was trying to fold the pessary, the slippery thing, all covered with jelly, jumped out of her grasp and shot across the room and hit the sterilizer. Dottie could have died. But apparently this was nothing new to the doctor and the nurse. "Try again, Dorothy," said the doctor calmly, selecting another diaphragm of the correct size from the drawer. And, as though to provide a distraction, she went on to give a little lecture on the history of the pessary, while watching Dottie's struggles out of the corner of her eye: how a medi- cated plug had been known to the ancient Greeks and Jews and Egyptians, how Margaret Sanger had found the present diaphragm in Holland, how the long fight had been waged through the courts. . . . Dottie had read all this, but she did not like to say so to this dark, stately woman, moving among her instruments like a priestess in the temple. As everybody knew from the newspapers, the doctor herself had been arrested only a few years before, in a raid on a birth-control clinic, and then been freed by the court. To hear her talk on the subject of her lifelong mission was an honor, like touching the mantle of history, and Dottie felt awed. "Private practice must be rather a letdown," she suggested, sym- pathetically. To a dynamic person like the doctor, fitting girls like herself must be a tame end, she thought sincerely, to a gallant career. "There's still a great work to be done, in education," sighed the doctor, removing the diaphragm with a short nod of approval. She motioned Dottie down from the table. "So many of our clinic patients won't use the pessary when we've fitted them or won't use it regu- larly." The nurse bobbed her white-capped head and made a clucking noise. "Those are the ones, aren't they, doctor, that need to limit === Page 53 === AN HONEST WOMAN 51 their families most? With our private patients, Miss Renfrew, we can be surer that our instructions are being followed." She gave a little smirk. "I won't need you now, Miss Brimmer," said the doctor, washing her hands at the sink. The nurse went out, and Dottie started to follow her, feeling herself a rather foolish figure, with her stock- ings rolled around her ankles and her brassiere loose. "Just a minute, Dorothy," said the doctor, turning, and fixing her with her brilliant gaze. "Are there any questions?" Dottie hesitated; her heart's beat quickened; she wanted, suddenly, not so much to ask, but to tell the doctor about Dick. But to Dottie's sympathetic eye, the doctor's lightly lined face looked tired. Moreover, she had other patients; there was Kay still waiting outside. And supposing the doctor should tell her to go back to the Vassar Club and pack and take the six o'clock train home and never see Dick again? "Medical instruction," said the doctor, kindly, with a thoughtful look at Dottie, "can often help the patient to the fullest sexual en- joyment. The young women who come to me today, Dorothy, have the right to expect the deepest satisfaction from the sexual act." Dottie scratched her jaw; the skin on her upper chest mottled. What she wanted to ask was something a doctor might know, especially a married doctor. She had not dared confide in Kay, and she could certainly never tell Mother, the thing that was troubling her: what did it mean if a man made love to you and didn't kiss you, not once, not even at the most thrilling moment? In all the sex books they had looked through at college, such a thing was never mentioned. Perhaps it was too ordinary an occurrence for scientists to catalogue or perhaps there was some natural explanation, like trench mouth or hali, but whenever she had thought of this queer fact, during the past days, alone in her bed at the Vassar Club, she had flushed all over. What worried her was the fear that Dick was peculiar, what Daddy would call a "wrong un." She could not get out of her mind the way he had turned the lamp on her and just stood, watching. She yearned to ask the doctor-that was really, she knew, why she had come here-but in this gleaming surgery she felt she ought to clothe the question in technical terminology: "If the man fails to osculate?" Her dimple ruefully flashed-how could one say such a thing? "Is there anything abnormal...?" she began and then stared helplessly at the tall, impassive woman. "If prior to the sexual === Page 54 === 52 PARTISAN REVIEW act . . . ” “Yes?” encouraged the doctor. Dottie gave her throaty, scrupulous cough. “It’s terribly simple,” she protested, “but I can’t seem to say it.” The doctor waited. “Perhaps I can help you, Dorothy. Any techniques,” she began impressively, “that give both partners pleasure are perfectly allowable and natural. There are no practices, oral or manual, that are wrong in lovemaking, so long as both part- ners enjoy them.” Gooseflesh rose on Dottie; she knew, pretty well, what the doctor meant, and, for the first time, she was shocked. She was also hurt. “Thank you, doctor,” she said quietly, cutting the topic off. In her gloved hand, when she was dressed and powdered, she took the manila envelope the nurse in the anteroom handed her and paid out new bills from her suede billfold. She did not wait for Kay. In a calm trance, like a dead person, she crossed the street and en- tered a drugstore, where a fountain syringe ordered itself for her. She proceeded into the phone booth. She had no wish ever to see Dick again, but the possession of all this machinery left her no choice. When a voice told her that Mr. Brown’s room did not answer, she went and sat on a park bench, with her two parcels beside her. Her hand-made underwear felt sticky from the lubricants the doctor had used and this soiled nasty sensation trickled into her very soul. She had nowhere to go but to Dick’s. For the first time in her twenty- four years, she had a clear and distinct awareness, accompanied by a sense of fatality, of how the other half lived. === Page 55 === Hannah Arendt TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE* Our tradition of political thought has its definite begin- ning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx. The beginning was made when in The Republic, in the allegory of the cave, Plato de- scribed the sphere of human affairs—all that belongs to the living together of men in a common world—in terms of darkness, confusion, and deception which those aspiring to true being must turn away from and abandon if they want to discover the clear sky of eternal ideas. The end came with Marx’s declaration that philosophy and its truth are not located outside the affairs of men and their common world but precisely in them, and can be "realized" only in the sphere of living-together, which he called Society, through the emer- gence of "socialized men" (vergesellschaftete Menschen). Political philosophy necessarily implies the attitude of the philosopher toward politics; its tradition began with the philosopher turning away from politics and then returning in order to impose his standards on hu- man affairs. The end came when a philosopher turned away from philosophy so as to "realize" it in politics. This was Marx’s attempt, expressed, first, in his decision (in itself philosophical) to abjure philosophy, and, secondly, in his intention to "change the world" and thereby the philosophizing minds, the "consciousness" of men. The beginning and the end of the tradition have this in com- mon: that the elementary problems of politics never come as clearly to light in their immediate and simple urgency as when they are first formulated and when they receive their final challenge. The beginning, in Jacob Burckhardt’s words, is like a "fundamental * This essay is drawn from a series of lectures delivered under the auspices of the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University. === Page 56 === 54 PARTISAN REVIEW chord" which sounds in its endless modulations through the whole history of Western thought. Only beginning and end are, so to speak, pure or unmodulated; and the fundamental chord therefore never strikes its listeners more forcefully and more beautifully than when it first sends its harmonizing sound into the world and never more irritatingly and jarringly than when it still continues to be heard in a world whose sounds—and thought—it can no longer bring into harmony. A random remark which Plato made in his last work: "The beginning is like a god which as long as it dwells among men saves all things" (arché gar kai theos en anthropois hidrymené sôdżei panta, Laws VI, 775), is true of our tradition; as long as its beginning was alive, it could save and bring all things into harmony. By the same token, it became destructive as it came to its end—to say nothing of the aftermath of confusion and helplessness which came after the tradition ended and in which we live today. In Marx's philosophy, which did not so much turn Hegel upside down as invert the traditional hierarchy of thought and action, of contemplation and labor, and of philosophy and politics, the begin- ning made by Plato and Aristotle proves its vitality by leading Marx into flagrantly contradictory statements, mostly in that part of his teachings usually called utopian. The most important are his predic- tion that under conditions of a "socialized humanity" the "state will wither away," and that the productivity of labor will become so great that labor somehow will abolish itself, thus guaranteeing an almost unlimited amount of leisure time to each member of the so- ciety. These statements, in addition to being predictions, contain of course Marx's ideal of the best form of society. As such they are not utopian, but rather reproduce the political and social conditions of the same Athenian city-state which was the model of experience for Plato and Aristotle, and therefore the foundation on which our tra- dition rests. The Athenian polis functioned without a division between rulers and ruled, and thus was not a state if we use this term, as Marx did, in accordance with the traditional definitions of forms of government, that is, one-man rule or monarchy, rule by the few or oligarchy, and rule by the majority or democracy. Athenian citi- zens, moreover, were citizens only insofar as they possessed leisure time, had that freedom from labor which Marx predicts for the future. Not only in Athens, but throughout antiquity and up to === Page 57 === TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 55 the modern age, those who labored were not citizens and those who were citizens were first of all those who did not labor or who pos- sessed more than their labor power. This similarity becomes even more striking when we look into the actual content of Marx's ideal society. Leisure time is seen to exist under the condition of state- lessness, or under conditions where, in Lenin's famous phrase which renders Marx's thought very precisely, the administration of society has become so simplified that every cook is qualified to take over its machinery. Obviously, under such circumstances the whole busi- ness of politics, which is now the simplified "administration of things" (Engels), could be of interest only to a cook. This, to be sure, is very different from actual conditions in antiquity, where, on the contrary, political duties were considered so difficult and time-con- suming that those engaged in them could not be permitted to under- take any tiring activity. (Thus, for instance, the shepherd could qualify for citizenship but the peasant could not, or the painter, but not the sculptor, was still recognized as something more than a banaulos, the distinction being drawn in either case simply by apply- ing the criterion of effort and fatigue.) It is against the time-con- suming political life of an average full-fledged citizen of the Greek polis that the philosophers, especially Aristotle, established their ideal of scholé, of leisure time, which in antiquity never meant freedom from ordinary labor, a matter of course anyhow, but time free from political activity and the business of the state. In Marx's ideal society these two different concepts are inex- tricably combined: the classless and state-less society somehow realizes the general ancient conditions of leisure from labor and, at the same time, leisure from politics. This is supposed to come about when the "administration of things" has taken the place of government and political action. This twofold leisure from labor as well as politics had been for the philosophers the condition of a bios theōrētikos, a life devoted to philosophy and knowledge in the widest sense of the word. Lenin's cook, in other words, lives in a society providing her with as much leisure from labor as the free ancient citizens en- joyed in order to devote their time to politeuesthai, as well as as much leisure from politics as the Greek philosophers had demanded for the few who wanted to devote all their time to philosophēin. The combin- ation of a state-less (apolitical) and almost labor-less society loomed === Page 58 === 56 PARTISAN REVIEW so large in Marx's imagination as the very expression of an ideal humanity because of the traditional connotation of leisure as scholé and otium, that is, a life devoted to aims higher than work or politics. Marx himself regarded his so-called utopia as simple prediction, and it is true that this part of his theories contains a great many developments which have come fully to light only in our time. Gov- ernment in the old sense has given way in many respects to admin- istration and the constant increase in leisure for the masses is a fact in all industrialized countries. Marx clearly perceived certain trends inherent in the era ushered in by the Industrial Revolution, although he was wrong in assuming that these trends would assert themselves only under conditions of socialization of the means of production. The hold which the tradition had over him lies in his viewing this development in an idealized light, and in understanding it in terms and concepts having their origin in an altogether different historical period. This blinded him to the authentic and very perplexing prob- lems inherent in the modern world and gives his accurate predictions their utopian quality. But the utopian ideal of a classless, state-less and labor-less society is born out of the marriage of two altogether non-utopian elements: the perception of certain trends in the present which can no longer be understood in the framework of the tradition, and the traditional concepts and ideals by which Marx himself un- derstood and integrated them. Marx's own attitude to the tradition of political thought was one of conscious rebellion. In a challenging and paradoxical mood he therefore framed certain key statements which, containing his political philosophy, underlie and transcend the strictly scientific part of his work (and as such curiously remain the same throughout his life, from the early writings to the last volume of Das Kapital). Crucial among them are the following: "Labor is the creator of man" (in a formulation by Engels, who, contrary to an opinion current among some Marx scholars, usually renders Marx's thought adequately and succinctly). "Violence is the midwife of history" (which occurs in both the writings of Marx and of Engels in many variations). Finally, there is the famous last thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, however, to change it," which, in the light of Marx's thought, one could render === Page 59 === TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 57 more adequately as: The philosophers have interpreted the world long enough; the time has come to change it. For this last state- ment is in fact only a variation of another, also occurring in an early manuscript: "You cannot aufheben (i.e., elevate, conserve, and abolish in the Hegelian sense) philosophy without realizing it." In the later work the same attitude to philosophy appears in the many predictions that the working class will be the heir of classical phi- losophy. None of these statements can be understood in and by itself. Each acquires its meaning by contradicting some traditionally ac- cepted truth whose plausibility up to the beginning of the modern age had been beyond doubt. "Labor created man" means first that labor and not God created man; secondly, it means that man, insofar as he is human, creates himself, that his humanity is the result of his own activity; it means, thirdly, that what distinguishes man from animal, his differentia specifica, is not reason, but labor, that he is not an animal rationale, but an animal laborans; it means, fourthly, that it is not reason, until then the highest attribute of man, but labor, the traditionally most despised human activity, which contains the humanity of man. Thus Marx challenges the traditional God, the traditional estimate of labor, and the traditional glorification of reason. "Violence is the midwife of history" means that the hidden forces of development of human productivity, insofar as they depend upon free and conscious human action, come to light only through the violence of wars and revolutions. Only in those violent periods does history show its true face and dispel the fog of mere ideological, hypocritical talk. Again the challenge to tradition is clear. Violence is traditionally the ultima ratio in relationships between nations and the most disgraceful of domestic actions, being always considered the outstanding characteristic of tyranny. (The few attempts to save vio- lence from disgrace, chiefly by Machiavelli and Hobbes, are of great relevance for the problem of power and quite illuminative of the early confusion of power with violence, but they exerted remarkably little influence on the tradition of political thought prior to our own time.) To Marx, on the contrary, violence or rather the possession of the means of violence is the constituent element of all forms of government; the state is the instrument of the ruling class by means === Page 60 === 58 PARTISAN REVIEW of which it oppresses and exploits, and the whole sphere of political action is characterized by the use of violence. The Marxian identification of action with violence implies another fundamental challenge to tradition which may be more difficult to perceive, but of which Marx, who knew Aristotle very well, must have been aware. The twofold Aristotelian definition of man as a dzôon politikon and a dzôon logon echon, a being attaining his highest possibility in the faculty of speech and the life in a polis, was designed to distinguish the Greek from the barbarian and the free man from the slave. The distinction was that Greeks living to- gether in a polis conducted their affairs by means of speech, through persuasion, and not by means of violence through mute coercion. Barbarians were ruled by violence and slaves by labor, and since violent action and toil are alike in that they do not need speech to be effective, barbarians and slaves are aneu logou, that is, they do not live with each other primarily by means of speech. Labor was to the Greeks essentially a non-political, private affair, but violence is related to and establishes a contact, albeit negative, with other men. Marx's glorification of violence therefore contains the more specific denial of logos, of speech, the diametrically opposite and traditionally most human form of intercourse. Marx's theory of ideological super- structures ultimately rests on this anti-traditional hostility to speech and the concomitant glorification of violence. For traditional philosophy it would have been a contradiction in terms to "realize philosophy" or to change the world in accordance with philosophy—for Marx's remark about interpreting and chang- ing the world implies that one can change the world only now, after philosophers have interpreted it and because of that. Philosophy may prescribe certain rules of action, though no great philosopher ever took this to be his most important concern. Essentially, philosophy from Plato to Hegel was "not of this world," whether it is Plato de- scribing the philosopher as the man whose body only inhabits the city of his fellow men, or Hegel admitting that from the point of view of common sense, philosophy is a world stood on its head, a "verkehrte Welt." The challenge to tradition, this time not merely implied but directly expressed in Marx's statement, lies in the pre- diction that the world of common human affairs, where we orient ourselves and think in common-sense terms, will one day become === Page 61 === TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 59 identical with the realm of ideas where the philosopher moves, or that philosophy, which has always been only "for the few," will one day be the common-sense reality for everybody. These three statements are framed in traditional terms which they, however, explode; they are formulated as paradoxes and meant to shock us. They are in fact even more paradoxical and led Marx into greater perplexities than he himself had anticipated. Each con- tains one fundamental contradiction which remained insoluble in his own terms. If labor is the most human and most productive of man's activities, what will happen when after the revolution "labor is abolished" in "the realm of freedom," when man has succeeded in emancipating himself from it? What productive and what essentially human activity will be left? If violence is the midwife of history and violent action therefore the most dignified of all forms of human action, what will happen when, after the conclusion of class struggle and the disappearance of the state, no violence will even be possible? How will man be able to act at all in a meaningful authentic way? Finally, when philosophy has been both realized and abolished in the future society, what kind of thought will be left? Marx's inconsistencies are well known and noted by almost all Marx scholars. They usually are summarized as discrepancies "be- tween the scientific point of view of the historian and the moral point of view of the prophet" (Edmund Wilson), between the his- torian seeing in the accumulation of capital "a material means for the increase of productive forces" (Marx) and the moralist who de- nounced those who performed "the historical task" (Marx) as ex- ploiters and dehumanizers of man. This and similar inconsistencies are the glorification of labor and action as against contemplation and thought and of a state-less, that is, action-less and (almost) labor- less society. For this can neither be blamed on the natural difference between a revolutionary young Marx and the more scientific insights of the older historian and economist, nor resolved through the as- sumption of a dialectical movement which needs the negative or evil to produce the positive or the good. Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers, in whom they can be discounted. In the work of great authors they lead into the very center of their work and are === Page 62 === 60 PARTISAN REVIEW the most important clue to a true understanding of their problems and new insights. In Marx, as in the case of other great authors of the last century, a seemingly playful, challenging, and paradoxical mood conceals the perplexity of having to deal with new phenomena in terms of an old tradition of thought outside of whose conceptual framework no thinking seemed possible at all. It is as though Marx, not unlike Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, tried desperately to think against the tradition using its own conceptual tools. Our tradition of political thought began when Plato discovered that it is somehow in- herent in the philosophical experience to turn away from the com- mon world of human affairs; it ended when nothing was left of this experience but the opposition of thinking and acting, which, de- priving thought of reality and action of sense, makes both meaningless. II The strength of this tradition, its hold on Western man's thought, has never depended on his consciousness of it. Indeed, only twice in our history do we encounter periods in which men are con- scious and over-conscious of the fact of tradition, identifying age as such with authority. This happened, first, when the Romans adopted classical Greek thought and culture as their own spiritual tradition and thereby decided historically that tradition was to have a perma- nent formative influence on European civilization. Before the Romans such a thing as tradition was unknown; with them it became and after them it remained the guiding thread through the past and the chain to which each new generation knowingly or unknowingly was bound in its understanding of the world and its own experience. Not until the Romantic period do we again encounter an exalted con- sciousness and glorification of tradition. (The discovery of antiquity in the Renaissance was a first attempt to break the fetters of tradition, and by going to the sources themselves to establish a past over which tradition would have no hold.) Today tradition is sometimes con- sidered an essentially romantic concept, but romanticism did no more than place the discussion of tradition on the agenda of the nineteenth century; its glorification of the past only served to mark the moment when the modern age was about to change our world and general circumstances to such an extent that a matter-of-course reliance on tradition was no longer possible. === Page 63 === TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 61 The end of a tradition does not necessarily mean that traditional concepts have lost their power over the minds of men. On the con- trary, it sometimes seems that this power of well-worn notions and categories becomes more tyrannical as the tradition loses its living force and as the memory of its beginning recedes; it may even reveal its full coercive force only after its end has come and men no longer even rebel against it. This at least seems to be the lesson of the twen- tieth-century aftermath of formalistic and compulsory thinking, which came after Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche, by consciously invert- ing the traditional hierarchy of concepts, had challenged the basic as- sumptions of traditional religion, traditional political thought, and traditional metaphysics. However, neither the twentieth-century after- math nor the nineteenth-century rebellion against tradition actually caused the break in our history. This sprang from a chaos of mass- perplexities on the political scene and of mass-opinions in the spiritual sphere which the totalitarian movements, through terror and ideology, crystallized into a new form of government and domination. Totalitar- ian domination as an established fact, which in its unprecedentedness cannot be comprehended through the usual categories of political thought, and whose "crimes" cannot be judged by traditional moral standards or punished within the legal framework of our civilization, has broken the continuity of occidental history. The break in our tra- dition is now an accomplished fact. It is neither the result of anyone's deliberate choice nor subject to further decision. The attempts of great thinkers after Hegel to break away from patterns of thought which had ruled the West for more than two thousand years may have foreshadowed this event and certainly can help to illuminate it, but they did not cause it. The event itself marks the division between the modern age—rising with the natural sciences in the seventeenth century, reaching its political climax in the revolu- tions of the eighteenth, and unfolding its general implications after the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth—and the world of the twentieth century, which came into existence through the chain of ca- tastrophes touched off by the First World War. To hold the thinkers of the modern age, especially the nineteenth-century rebels against tra- dition, responsible for the structure and conditions of the twentieth century is even more dangerous than it is unjust. The implications ap- parent in the actual event of totalitarian domination go far beyond the most radical or most adventurous ideas of any of these thinkers. === Page 64 === 62 PARTISAN REVIEW Their greatness lay in the fact that they perceived their world as one invaded by new problems and perplexities which our tradition of thought was unable to cope with. In this sense their own departure from tradition, no matter how emphatically they proclaimed it (like children whistling louder and louder because they are lost in the dark), was no deliberate act of their own choosing either. What frightened them about the dark was its silence, not the break in tradition. This break, when it actually occurred, dispelled the dark- ness, so that we can hardly listen any longer to the overloud, "pa- thetic" style of their writing. But the thunder of the eventual explosion has also drowned the preceding ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not, "what are we fighting against" but "what are we fighting for?" Neither the silence of the tradition nor the reaction of thinkers against it in the nineteenth century can ever explain what actually happened. The non-deliberate character of the break gives it an irre- vocability which only events, never thoughts, can have. The rebellion against tradition in the nineteenth century remained strictly within a traditional framework; and on the level of mere thought, which could hardly be concerned then with more than the essentially negative experiences of foreboding, apprehension, and ominous silence, only radicalization, not a new beginning and reconsideration of the past, was possible. Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche stand at the end of the tradi- tion just before the break came. Their immediate predecessor was Hegel. He it was who for the first time saw the whole of world history as one continuous development, and this tremendous achievement implied that he himself stood outside all authority-claiming systems and beliefs of the past, that he was held only by the thread of con- tinuity in history itself. The thread of historical continuity was the first substitute for tradition; by means of it, the overwhelming mass of the most divergent values, the most contradictory thoughts and con- flicting authorities, all of which had somehow been able to function to- gether, were reduced to a unilinear dialectically consistent develop- ment actually designed to repudiate not tradition as such, but the authority of all traditions. Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche re- mained Hegelians insofar as they saw the history of past philosophy as one dialectically developed whole; their great merit was that they === Page 65 === TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 63 radicalized this new essence in the only way it could still be further developed, namely in leaps and reversals. Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its authority. They were the first who dared to think without the guidance of any authority whatsoever; yet, for better and worse, they were still held by the categorical framework of the great tradition. In some respects we are better off. We need no longer be concerned with their scorn for the "educated philis- tines," who all through the nineteenth century tried to make up for the loss of authentic authority with a spurious glorification of cul- ture. To most people today, this culture looks like a field of ruins which, far from being able to claim any authority, can hardly com- mand their interest. This fact may be deplorable, but implicit in it is the great chance to look upon the past with eyes undistracted by any tradition, with a directness which has disappeared from occi- dental reading and hearing ever since the Romans submitted to Greek civilization. III The leaps and inversions of the rebels against tradition were all caused by some new experience which they tried almost instan- taneously to overcome and resolve into something old. Kierkegaard's leap from doubt into belief was a reversal and a distortion of the traditional relationship between reason and faith. It was the answer to the modern loss of faith, not only in God but in reason as well, which was inherent in Descartes' De omnibus dubitandum est, with its underlying suspicion that things may not be as they appear and that an evil spirit may willfully and forever hide truth from the minds of man. Marx's leap from theory into action, and from contemplation into labor, came after Hegel had transformed metaphysics into a philosophy of history and changed the philosopher into the historian to whose backward glance eventually, at the end of time, the mean- ing of becoming and motion, not of being and truth, would reveal itself. Nietzsche's leap from the non-sensuous transcendent realm of ideas and measurements into the sensuousness of life, his "inverted Platonism" or "trans-valuation of values," as he himself would call it, was the last attempt to turn away from the tradition, an attempt which succeeded only in turning tradition upside down. === Page 66 === 64 PARTISAN REVIEW Different as these rebellions against tradition are in content and intention, their results have an ominous similarity: Kierkegaard, jumping from doubt into belief, carried doubt into religion, trans- formed the attack of modern science on religion into an inner- religious struggle, so that since then sincere religious experience has seemed possible only in the tension between doubt and belief, in torturing one's beliefs with one's doubts and relaxing from this tor- ment in the violent affirmation of the absurdity of both the human condition and man's belief. No clearer symptom of this modern re- ligious situation can be found than the fact that Dostoevsky, perhaps the most experienced psychologist of modern religious beliefs, por- trayed pure faith in the character of Myshkin, The Idiot. Marx, when he leaped from philosophy into politics, carried the theories of dialectics into action, making political action more theo- retical, more dependent upon what we today would call an ideology, than it ever had been before. Since, moreover, his springboard was not philosophy in the old metaphysical sense, but as specifically Hegel's philosophy of history as Kierkegaard's springboard had been Descartes' philosophy of doubt, he superimposed the "law of history" upon politics and ended by losing the significance of both, of action no less than of thought, of politics no less than of philosophy, when he insisted that both were mere functions of society and history. Nietzsche's inverted Platonism, his insistence on life and the sensuously and materially given as against the suprasensuous and tran- scendent ideas which, since Plato, had been supposed to measure, judge, and give meaning to the given, ended in what is commonly called nihilism. Yet Nietzsche was no nihilist, but on the contrary was the first to try to overcome the nihilism inherent not in the no- tions of the thinkers but in the reality of modern life. What he dis- covered in his attempt at "trans-valuation" was that within this categorical framework the sensuous loses its very raison d'être when it is deprived of its background of the suprasensuous and transcendent. This insight in its elementary simplicity is relevant for all the turning- about operations in which the tradition found its end. "The deposition of the suprasensuous removes also the mere sensuous and its differ- entiation. ... The deposition ends in senselessness" (Martin Heideg- ger, "Nietzsches Wort 'Gott is tot'" in Holzwege). === Page 67 === TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 65 What Kierkegaard wanted was to assert the dignity of faith against modern reason and reasoning, as Marx desired to assert again the dignity of human action against modern historical contemplation and relativization, and as Nietzsche wanted to assert the dignity of human life against the impotence of modern man. The traditional oppositions of fides and intellectus and of theôria and praxis took their respective revenges upon Kierkegaard and Marx, just as the opposi- tion between the transcendent and the sensuously given took its re- venge upon Nietzsche, not because these oppositions still had roots in valid human experience, but, on the contrary, because they had become mere concepts outside of which, however, no comprehensive thought seemed possible at all. That these three outstanding and conscious rebellions against a tradition which had lost its arché, its beginning and principle, should have ended in self-defeat, is no reason to question the greatness of the enterprises nor their relevance to the understanding of the modern world. Each attempt, in its particular way, took account of those traits of modernity which were incompatible with our tradition, and this even before modernity in all its aspects had fully revealed itself. Kierkegaard knew that the incompatibility of modern science with traditional beliefs does not lie in any specific scientific findings, all of which can be integrated into religious systems and absorbed by religious beliefs for the reason that they will never be able to answer the questions which religion raises. He knew that this incompatibility lay, rather, in the conflict between a spirit of doubt and distrust which ultimately can trust only what it has made itself and the tra- ditional unquestioning confidence in what has been given and appears in Marx’s words, would “be superfluous if the appearance and essence of things coincided.” Because our traditional religion is essentially a revealed religion and holds, in harmony with ancient philosophy, that truth is what reveals itself, that truth is revelation (even though the meanings of this revelation may be as different as the philoso- phers’ alétheia and dếlôsis are from the early Christians’ eschatological expectations for an apokalypsé in the Second Coming), modern sci- ence has become much more formidable an enemy of religion than in its most rationalistic versions, ever === Page 68 === 66 PARTISAN REVIEW could be. Yet Kierkegaard's attempt to save faith from the onslaught of modernity made even religion modern, that is, subject to doubt and distrust. Traditional beliefs disintegrated into absurdity when Kierkegaard tried to reassert them on the assumption that man can- not trust the truth-receiving capacity of his reason or his senses. Marx knew that the incompatibility between classical political thought and modern political conditions lay in the accomplished fact of the French and Industrial Revolutions, which together had raised labor, traditionally the most despised of all human activities, to the highest rank of productivity and pretended to be able to assert the time-honored ideal of freedom under unheard-of conditions of uni- versal equality. He knew that the question was only superficially posed in the idealistic assertions of the equality of man, the inborn dignity of every human being, and only superficially answered by giving laborers the right to vote. This was not a problem of justice that could be solved by giving the new class of workers its due, after which the old order of suum cuique would be restored and function as in the past. There is the fact of the basic incompatibility between the traditional concepts making labor itself the very symbol of man's sub- jection to necessity and the modern age which saw labor elevated to express man's positive freedom, the freedom of productivity. It is from the impact of labor, that is to say, of necessity in the traditional sense, that Marx endeavored to save philosophical thought, deemed by the tradition to be the freest of all human activities. Yet when he proclaimed that "you cannot abolish philosophy without realizing it," he thus began subjecting thought also to the inexorable tyranny of the "iron law" of productive forces in society. Nietzsche's devaluation of values, like Marx's labor theory of value, arises from the incompatibility between the traditional "ideas," which, as transcendent units, had been used to recognize and measure human thoughts and actions, and modern society, which had dis- solved all such standards into relationships between its members, es- tablishing them as functional "values." Values are social commodi- ties that have no significance of their own but, like other commodi- ties, exist only in the ever-changing relativity of social linkages and commerce. Through this relativization both the things which man produces for his use and the standards according to which he lives === Page 69 === TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 67 undergo a decisive change: they become entities of exchange and the bearer of their "value" is society and not man, who produces and uses and judges. The "good" loses its character as an idea, the standard by which the good and the bad can be measured and recog- nized; it has become a value which can be exchanged with other values, such as those of expediency or of power. The holder of values can refuse this exchange and become an "idealist," who prices the value of "good" higher than the value of expediency; but this does not make the "value" of good any less relative. The term "value" owes its origin to the sociological trend which even before Marx was quite manifest in the relatively new science of classical economy. Marx was still aware of the fact, which the social sciences have since forgotten, that nobody "seen in his isola- tion produces values," but that products "become values only in their social relationship." His distinction between "use value" and "ex- change value" reflects the distinction between things as men use and produce them and their value in society, and his insistence on the greater authenticity of use values, his frequent description of the rise of exchange value as a kind of original sin at the beginning of market production, reflect his own helplessness and, as it were, blind re- cognition of the inevitability of an impending "devaluation of all values." The birth of the social sciences can be located at the mo- ment when all things, "ideas" as well as material objects, were equated with values so that everything derived its existence from and was re- lated to society, the bonum and malum no less than tangible objects. In the dispute as to whether capital or labor is the source of values, it is generally overlooked that at no time prior to the incipient Indus- trial Revolution was it held that values, and not things, are the result of man's productive capacity, or everything that exists related to so- ciety and not to man "seen in his isolation." The notion of "socialized men," whose emergence Marx projected into the future classless so- ciety, is in fact the underlying assumption of classical as well as Marxian economy. It is therefore only natural that the perplexing question which has plagued all later "value-philosophies," where to find the one supreme value by which to measure all others, should first appear in the economic sciences which, in Marx's words, try to "square the circle-to find a commodity of unchanging value which would serve === Page 70 === 68 PARTISAN REVIEW as a constant standard for others." Marx believed he had found this standard in labor-time, and insisted that use values "which can be acquired without labor have no exchange value" (though they retain their "natural usefulness"), so that the earth itself is of "no value"; it does not represent "objectified labor." With this conclusion we come to the threshold of a radical nihilism, to that denial of everything given of which the nineteenth-century rebellions against tradition as yet knew little and which rises only in twentieth-century society. Nietzsche seems to have been unaware of the origin as well as of the modernity of the term "value" when he accepted it as a key notion in his assault on tradition. But when he began to devaluate the current values of society, the implications of the whole enterprise quickly became manifest. Ideas in the sense of absolute units had become identified with social values to such an extent that they simply ceased to exist once their value-character, their social status, was chal- lenged. Nobody knew his way better than Nietzsche through the meandering paths of the modern spiritual labyrinth, where recollec- tions and ideas of the past are hoarded up as though they had always been values which society depreciated whenever it needed better and newer commodities. Also, he was well aware of the profound nonsense of the new "value-free" science which was soon to degenerate into sci- entism and general scientific superstition and which never, despite all protests to the contrary, had anything in common with the Roman historians' attitude of sine ira et studio. For while the latter demanded judgment without scorn and truth-finding without zeal, the "wertfreie Wissenschaft," which could no longer judge because it had lost its standards of judgment and could no longer find truth because it doubted the existence of truth, imagined that it could produce mean- ingful results if only it abandoned the last remnants of those absolute standards. And when Nietzsche proclaimed that he had discovered "new and higher values," he was the first to fall prey to delusions which he himself had helped to destroy, accepting the old traditional notion of measuring with transcendent units in its newest and most hideous form, thereby again carrying the relativity and exchange- ability of values into the very matters whose absolute dignity he had wanted to assert-power and life and man's love of his earthly existence. === Page 71 === TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 69 IV Self-defeat, the result of all three challenges to tradition in the nineteenth century, is only one and perhaps the most super- ficial thing Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche have in common. More important is the fact that each of their rebellions seems to be con- centrated on the same, ever-repeated subject: Against the alleged abstractions of philosophy and its concept of man as an animal ra- tionale, Kierkegaard wants to assert concrete and suffering men; Marx confirms that man's humanity consists of his productive and active force which in its most elementary aspect he calls labor-power; and Nietzsche insists on creation and power. In complete independence of one another—none of them ever knew of the others' existence— they arrive at the conclusion that this enterprise in terms of the tra- dition can be achieved only through a mental operation best described in the images and similes of leaps, inversions and turning concepts upside down. (Kierkegaard speaks of his leap from doubt into be- lief; Marx turns Hegel, or rather “Plato and the whole Platonic tra- dition” (Sidney Hook), “right side up again,” leaping “from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom”; and Nietzsche under- stands his philosophy as “inverted Platonism” and “transformation of all values.”) The turning operations with which the tradition ends bring the beginning to light in a twofold sense: the very assertion of one side of the opposites—fides against intellectus, praxis against theôria, sensuous perishable life against permanent unchanging suprasensuous truth— necessarily brings to light the repudiated opposite and shows that both have meaning and significance only in this opposition. Further- more, to think in terms of such opposites is not a matter of course, but is grounded in a first great turning operation on which all others ultimately are based because it established the opposites in whose tension the tradition moves. This first turning-about is Plato's peri- agôgé holês tês psychês, the turning-about of the whole human being, which he tells—as though it were a story with beginning and end and not merely a mental operation—in the parable of the cave in the Republic. The story of the cave unfolds in three stages: the first turning- about takes place in the cave itself when one of the inhabitants frees === Page 72 === 70 PARTISAN REVIEW himself from the fetters which chain the cave dwellers' "legs and necks" so that "they can only see before them," their eyes glued to the screen on which shadows and images of things appear; he now turns around to the rear of the cave where an artificial fire illuminates the things in the cave as they really are. There is, second, the turning from the cave to the clear sky where the ideas appear as the true and eternal essences of the things in the cave, illuminated by the sun, the idea of ideas, enabling man to see and the ideas to shine forth. Finally there is the necessity of returning to the cave, of leaving the realm of eternal essences and moving again in the realm of perishable things and mortal men. Each of these turnings is accompanied by a loss of sense and orientation: the eyes accustomed to the shadowy ap- pearances on the screen are blinded by the fire in the cave; the eyes then adjusted to the dim light of the artificial fire are blinded by the light that illuminates the ideas; finally, the eyes adjusted to the light of the sun must readjust to the dimness of the cave. Behind these turnings-about, which Plato demands only of the philosopher, the lover of truth and light, lies another inversion indi- cated generally in Plato's violent polemics against Homer and the Homeric religion, and in particular in the construction of his story as a kind of reply to and reversal of Homer's description of Hades in the eleventh book of the Odyssey. The parallel between the images of the cave and Hades (the shadowy, unsubstantial, senseless move- ments of the soul in Homer's Hades correspond to the ignorance and senselessness of the bodies in the cave) is unmistakable because it is stressed by Plato's use of the words eidôlon, image, and skia, shadow, which are Homer's own key words for the description of life after death in the underworld. The reversal of the Homeric "position" is obvious; it is as though Plato were saying to him: not the life of bodiless souls, but the life of the bodies takes place in an underworld; compared to the sky and the sun, the earth is like Hades; images and shadows are the objects of bodily senses, not the surroundings of bodiless souls; the true and real is not the world in which we move and live and which we have to part from in death, but the ideas seen and grasped by the eyes of the mind. In a sense, Plato's peri- agôgê was a turning-about by which everything that was commonly believed in Greece in accordance with the Homeric religion came to stand on its head. It is as though the underworld of Hades had risen === Page 73 === TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 71 to the surface of the earth. But this reversal of Homer did not actually turn Homer upside down or downside up, since the dichotomy within which such an operation alone can take place is of Platonic origin and quite alien to the Homeric world. No turning about of the tra- dition can therefore ever land us in the original Homeric “position.” It is true that Plato set forth his doctrine of ideas solely for political purposes in the form of a reversal of Homer; but thereby he estab- lished the framework within which such turning operations are not far-fetched possibilities but predetermined by the conceptual struc- ture itself. The development of philosophy in late antiquity in the various schools, which fought each other with a fanaticism unequaled in the pre-Christian world, consists of turnings-about and shifting emphases on one of two opposite terms, made possible by Plato's separation of a world of mere shadowy appearance and the world of eternally true ideas. He himself had given the first example in the periagôgé from the cave to the sky. When Hegel finally, in a last gigantic effort, had gathered together into one consistent self-develop- ing whole the various strands of traditional philosophy as they had developed from Plato's original concept, the same splitting up into two conflicting schools of thought, though on a much lower level, took place, and right-wing and left-wing, idealistic and materialistic, Hegel- ians could for a short while dominate philosophical thought. The significance of Kierkegaard's, Marx's, and Nietzsche's chal- lenges to the tradition—though none of them would have been pos- sible without the synthesizing achievement of Hegel and his concept of history—is that they constitute a much more radical turning-about than the mere upside-down operations with their weird oppositions be- tween sensualism and idealism, materialism and spiritualism, and even immanentism and transcendentalism imply. If Marx had been merely a “materialist” who brought Hegel's “idealism” down to earth, his influence would have been as short-lived and limited to scholarly quarrels as that of his contemporaries. Hegel's basic assumption was that the dialectical movement of thought is identical with the dialec- tical movement of matter itself. Thus he hoped to bridge the abyss which Descartes had opened between man, defined as res cogitans, and the world, defined as res extensa, between cognition and reality, thinking and being. The spiritual homelessness of modern man finds its first expressions in this Cartesian perplexity and the Pascalian === Page 74 === 72 PARTISAN REVIEW answer. Hegel claimed that the discovery of the dialectical movement as a universal law ruling both human reason and affairs and the inner "reason" of natural events, accomplished even more than a mere correspondence between intellectus and res, whose coincidence pre-Cartesian philosophy had defined as truth. By introducing the Spirit and its self-realization in movement, Hegel believed he had demonstrated an ontological identity of matter and idea. To Hegel, therefore, it would have been of no great importance whether one started this movement from the viewpoint of consciousness, which at one moment begins to "materialize," or whether one chose as start- ing point matter, which, moving in the direction of "spiritualization," becomes conscious of itself. (How little Marx doubted these funda- mentals of his teacher appears from the role he ascribed to self-con- sciousness in the form of class-consciousness in history.) In other words, Marx was no more a "dialectical materialist" than Hegel was a "dialectical idealist"; the very concept of dialectical movement, as Hegel conceived it as a universal law, and as Marx accepted it, makes the terms "idealism" and "materialism" as philosophical sys- tems meaningless. Marx, especially in his earlier writings, is quite con- scious of this and knows that his repudiation of the tradition and of Hegel does not lie in his "materialism," but in his refusal to assume that the difference between man and animal life is ratio or thought, that, in Hegel's words, "man is essentially spirit." His turning-about, like Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's, goes to the core of the matter; they all question the traditional hierarchy of human capabilities or, to put it another way, they ask again what the specifically human quality of man is; they do not intend to build systems or Weltan- schauungen on this or that premise. The allegory of the cave is told by Plato in the context of a strictly political dialogue searching for the best form of government in the sense of the best way to organize the living-together of men. As such, the story contains not so much Plato's doctrine of ideas as the relationship and applicability of this doctrine to the political realm of a common world, and, at the same time, tells the story of the philosopher in this world as though it were his concentrated biog- raphy, the life of the philosopher. Important in our context is the fact that the transcendence of the ideas, their existence outside the cave === Page 75 === TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 73 of human affairs, does not imply an absolute transcendence in the sense of other-worldliness; the ideas transcend only the common world of living-together. (It is true that Plato in the concluding myth of the Republic, as in the concluding myths of Gorgias and Phaidon, established a tangible, physical hereafter; but these myths were meant as myths, and not as parables or truth; they were given, not as part of his own political philosophy, which he taught his pupils, but as the corresponding fairytale for the multitude unable to perceive truth. These myths, far from being able to explain the cave allegory, are invented precisely because the cave parable is for the few and not supposed to convince the many.) Plato’s doctrine of ideas is not political in origin; but once he had discovered them, he hoped to use them for political purposes as absolute standards, units of measure- ment by which one could judge a realm where everything seems to dissolve into relationships and to be relative by definition. It is per- fectly true that, in the words of Werner Jaeger, “the idea that there is a supreme art of measurement and that the philosopher’s knowl- edge of values is the ability to measure, runs through all of Plato’s work right down to the end”—true to the extent that his work is concerned with politics. And it is here that the transcendence of the ideas has its origin; they are transcendent in terms of the world of the polis and no more so than the yardstick is transcendent in terms of the matter which it is supposed to measure; the standard neces- sarily transcends everything to which it is applied. Not the ideas them- selves, but the non-religious concept of transcendence in philosophy, is political in origin. In other words, the dichotomy between the relativity of human affairs (ta tôn anthrôpôn pragmata), their fu- tility, mortality, and ever-changing motion, and absolute truth whose permanent light illuminates this futility. What distinguishes the life in the cave from the life under the sky of ideas is that the former is characterized by activities in which men are related and communicate with each other, that is lexis, speech, and praxis, action, while the latter is characterized by blepein eis to alêthestaton, contemplating the truest in solitude and ultimately in speechlessness (rhéton gar oudamôs estin hös alla mathémata, “it can never be articulated in words like other things we learn”). In the parable of the cave, Plato does not even mention speech and action, but depicts the lives of the inhabitants as though they too === Page 76 === 74 PARTISAN REVIEW were interested only in seeing: first the images on the screen, then the things themselves in the dim light of the fire in the cave, until finally those who want to see the truth must leave the common world of the cave altogether and embark upon their new adventure all by themselves. In other words, the whole realm of human affairs is seen from the viewpoint of a philosophy which assumes that even those who inhabit the cave of ordinary human affairs are human only insofar as they too want to see, though deceived by shadows and images. This dichotomy, between seeing the truth in solitude and speech- lessness and being caught in the web of relationships and interde- pendencies of human affairs through speaking and acting, became authoritative for the tradition of political thought. It is at the basis of our common understanding of the relationship between thought and action and as such was not dependent upon an acceptance of Plato's doctrine of ideas; it depended much rather on a general atti- tude which Plato expressed in another random remark and which Aristotle later quoted almost verbatim, namely that the beginning of all philosophy is thaumadzein, the surprised wonder at every- thing that is as it is. This surprise and wonder separate the few from the many and alienate them from the affairs of man. Aris- totle, therefore, without accepting Plato's doctrine of ideas, and even repudiating Plato's ideal state, still followed him in the main by sep- arating the bios theōrētikos from the bios politikos and by basing the rules for the latter on the experiences of the former. The prior- ity of seeing over doing and speaking, of the vita contemplativa over the vita activa, could be challenged only in the modern age, when an altogether new "scientific spirit" had begun to doubt that things are as they appear, replacing experience, the reasoning but non-interfering observation of appearances, with the modern experi- ment, where we prescribe conditions in order to know, until the search for truth eventually ended in the conviction of the modern world that man can know only what he makes himself. Since the rise of modern science, whose spirit is expressed in the Cartesian philosophy of doubt and mistrust, the conceptual frame- work of the tradition has not been secure. The dichotomy between contemplation and action, and the hierarchy which ruled that truth is ultimately perceived only in speechless and actionless seeing, could === Page 77 === TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 75 not be upheld under the conditions of science becoming active and doing in order to know. When the trust that things appear as they really are was gone, the concept of truth as revelation had become doubtful and with it the unquestioning faith in a revealed God. The notion of theory changed its meaning. It no longer meant a system of reasonably connected truths which as such had not been made but given to reason and the senses. Rather it became the modern scientific theory which is a working hypothesis, changing in accordance with the results it produces and depending for its validity not on what it "reveals" but on whether it "works." By the same process, Plato's ideas lost their autonomous power to illuminate the world and the universe. First they became what they had been for Plato only in their relationship to the political realm, standards and measure- ments the regulating, limiting forces of man's own reasoning mind, as they appear in Kant. Then, after the priority of reason over doing, of the mind prescribing its rules to the actions of men, had been lost in the transformation of the whole world by the Industrial Revo- lution—a transformation the success of which seemed to prove that man's doings and fabrications prescribe their rules to reason—these ideas finally became mere values whose validity is determined not by one or many men but by society as a whole in its everchanging functional needs. These values in their ex- and inter-changeability are the only "ideas" left to (and understood by) "socialized men." These are men who have decided never to leave what to Plato was "the cave" of everyday human affairs, and never to venture on their own into a world and a life which, perhaps, the ubiquitous functionalization of modern society has deprived of one of its most elementary charac- teristics—the instilling of wonder at that which is as it is. This very real development is reflected and foreshadowed in Marx's political thought. Turning the tradition upside down within its own frame- work, he did not actually get rid of Plato's ideas, though he did record the darkening of the clear sky where those ideas, as well as many other presences, had once become visible to the eyes of men. === Page 78 === FOUR FABLES OF LA FONTAINE Translated by Marianne Moore THE SWAN AND THE COOK (Book Three, XII) Of the miscellany In a man's aviary, A swan swam and a goose waddled: One a sublime sight that made the garden complete; Or so the owner thought; and one, a bird to eat. One enhanced the flowers; one stayed near the house and puddled. They would ornament the moat simultaneously, Now and then side by side or were seen converging; At times merely drifting, again were submerging, Apparently looking for something illusory. One day the cook, who had had an extra drop, Took the swan for the goose, held it up By the neck, would have cut its throat and had it simmering; But at the point of death, it burst into song so ravishing The astonished cook perceived That his dulled eyes had been deceived And said, “What! make so sweet a singer into soup! Dear, dear; God forbid murder to which my hand could stoop. Close a throat whose uses are delectable!” So when the horseman is hovered by perils too dire to outleap, Sweet speech does no harm; none at all. THE SERPENT AND THE FILE (Book Five, XVI) A snake, so they say, lived near a watchmaster; (Rather unfortunate for a man with just that work.) The serpent glided in for something to stay hunger. However, his flickering fork === Page 79 === Could find nothing but a file to endanger. Kindly, with anything but an injured air, The file said, "Poor worm, aren't you courting despair? A great fool, little snake, although small. By the time my filings could yield The fourth of an obol in all, You would break your two teeth in. Only Time's tooth wears me thin." Now this is meant for you, vapid second-rate minds, Good-for-nothings who try to harm worth of all kinds. Your gnashed teeth imply nothing profound. Do you think that you could leave a tooth-mark On any master-work? Bite steel or burnished brass or dent the diamond? THE FARMER AND THE ADDER (Book Six, XIII) Aesop tells how a countryman As imprudent as he was benevolent- With an estate he'd gone out to scan One winter day-observed as he went, A snake on the snow in a plight that was serious, Mummied from head to tail till no longer venomous. He dared not delay; it would die if left there; So the man picked it up, took it home, gave it care, And failed to foresee the result of an action In which compassion had been complete; He stirred circulation by friction And laid the maimed form near heat, Which no sooner had tempered its torpid blood Than animus stirred and grew livelier. The adder hissed, raised its head as best it could, Coiled, and made a long lunge toward where the farmer stood- Its foster father who had been its rescuer. The farmer said: "Ingrate! You'd be my murderer? === Page 80 === You shall die!" With indignation which nothing could foil, He picked up his ax and the dastard was dead. Two strokes made three snakes of the coil— A body, a tail, and a head. The pestilent thirds writhed together to rear But of course could no longer adhere. All should practice charity Toward all? I've thrown some light on this. Ingrates, I say with emphasis, Will always die in misery. THE LION, THE WOLF, AND THE FOX (Book Eight, III) A careworn lion, all bones and pained in each paw, Craved a cure lest his disabilities progress. (Better not gainsay a king or you are an outlaw.) In this case, to relieve his distress, The king had practitioners of any description Come to attend him from every direction Till all varieties of cure in the world had been brought To afford the king what he sought. But the fox paid no heed and sat at home, safely denned. In paying court, the wolf said the fox had meant to offend, Slandering the poor beast and creating a stir. Plucked forth in embarrassment, the fox dared not demur So at last drew near and said what he had to say, Aware that it was the wolf who was the slanderer. He plead, "Sire, though I have been called malingerer As one the wolf wished to betray, My service to you has been delayed Since vows for you had to be paid, Involving a hard journey day after day. Wherever my loyalty led, I told surgeon and sage that you barely can prick up an ear Lest your vestige of vigor should fail you some night. === Page 81 === They said the blood cools from year to year, And since you lack heat through an oversight, Wrap a live wolf's skin about the flesh you'd redeem- At the height of its natural heat. That should compensate, it would seem, For energy years can deplete. To make a long story short, Try a wolf-skin dressing-gown." The king welcomed the report; The wolf was flayed, torn up, choked down. The king devoured his former escort And found the skin a constant comfort. Courtiers, don't be slanderers; better turn a deaf ear. Why must one compromise a fair career? The evil flies home faster than the good we have done. This is sure; slanders are laid at the slanderer's door. Courts are places, furthermore, Where nothing is forgiven one. === Page 82 === Wallace Markfield THE PATRON On the seventh Friday, Mr. Fisher made his proposal to Mordecai Karp who lay upon the mohair couch in the parlor, listening sternly to a late Beethoven quartet as Mr. Fisher's daughter, Henri- etta, plaited the sidelocks grown over-long about the young man's ears. "Mordecai," said Mr. Fisher, cupping hands across the curve of belly, "in another house, with another father, there would be questions now." He turned to Henrietta. "Stop a minute while your father talks. "I was saying that some families would not be happy with the situation. You can see it yourself, you are an intelligent boy. My daughter is more than the age for children . . ." Henrietta sniggered, and Mordecai frowned, rubbing his temple, where one great vein stood out like a small bicep. "The point is," Mr. Fisher continued, "we have wondered over something, these last two Fridays that you come for dinner." "Superb dinners, too," Mordecai said, half-smiling to Mrs. Fisher, who was clearing the dishes from the coffee table. "Better each time, believe me." "I want you should hear it," Mr. Fisher hesitated, "the proposal we have." "Please!" Mordecai cried, rigid now. "No matter how tender, I will not be trapped by a piece of boneless brisket. Go, go call him now, Marvin the dental surgeon, I'll bet his number is close at hand. He will give Henrietta more happiness than a young writer who is obscure, who receives as yet only small notes from the ice-bellied lady editors and-yes, I am not ashamed-has even learned to fashion two meals from a can of browned rice." In anguish, Mrs. Fisher's head rocked back and forth. "Tell me, how two meals?" === Page 83 === THE PATRON 81 Spent, Mordecai fell back into the couch. "It's not hard, pro- vided you crumble in a few pieces of white bread." "A society that permits this deserves no better then they should blow up the cities." Mr. Fisher's fingers clove the air, in a gesture recalled from an old George Arliss movie. "From week to week we watch you grow a little thinner, living as you do in that place without hot water, where you can catch the worst drafts, if you will excuse the expression, from the bathroom in the hall. But here is an up- stairs and a downstairs, a furnished basement and two bathrooms— do we need it, do we have small children? Therefore Mrs. Fisher and myself ask that you move in with us, that you may do your work in air and light, with nobody to bother you. (Of the food, I need not speak.)" Mordecai remained wordless, and twilight, streaming through the slanted blinds, seemed to blunt his lips and nostrils, like wax over a flame. "Is it so hard to imagine?" Mr. Fisher pleaded. "Let us sup- pose for argument's sake that you were still in school, studying for an accountant, a lawyer, an optomestrist perhaps. A family of our means would be more than happy, it would be our greatest pleasure if we could help you, present you with a fine office. Should it make a difference because you are a writer, because you are still a little obscure? though myself, I feel everything you tell me you wish to say." Paler than a plucked chicken, Mordecai pushed himself up and took his stand between the potted ferns. "One thing tell me: is this your proposal, or you Henrietta—is this the first step to the book clubs, to the apartment with parquet floors, the children who will enter unbidden to my writing chamber?" He broke in, Mr. Fisher, before Henrietta's face could fully adjust itself for the tears. "She knew nothing, believe me, we were afraid to ask her. . . ." "Then if you allow me, I wish to speak with her alone." Mr. and Mrs. Fisher went slowly to the kitchen, sliding together the double doors of the living room. From the depths of the enormous percolator Mrs. Fisher filled two water glasses with coffee, which they sipped at the porcelain table, staring out to study the Parkway that presented its winter aspect below, with the snow lying heavy against the new grass and the overhead fixtures ruddying the squat stoops of the two-family houses. === Page 84 === 82 PARTISAN REVIEW Mr. Fisher did not regard the step he was taking as something that lay beyond the progression of tricycles, mastoid operations per- formed by the best surgeons, summer camps, and later, expensive bungalow colonies with the prosperous young men emerging after dusk to take over the porches. If he had fallen into error, it could be blamed upon the false economy that sent his daughter, she who could match the breasts and legs of any chosen for the Sunday maga- zine sections, to the particular college which lay merely a half-hour off by subway. At first, he had been uncertain of Henrietta's feelings for Mor- decai Karp. They had met, as he learned, not from her, but from whisperings of phone conversation that filtered through his bedroom door, at a forum on The Role of the Artist in a Pocket-Size Culture. During the question period, Mordecai arose to obtain a simple point of information and then, true to his nature, remained on his feet a full twenty minutes to berate the speaker. ("In one frail body St. Thomas and Sidney Hook together," Henrietta had said.) The shuffle of the crowd to the exit, a few words together and then the cafeteria, where all that was Mordecai Karp exposed itself, naked and quivering, over the spice-tray. And the first time at the house he had seemed incapable of speech, till snatching with impossibly long fingers at the box of glazed fruits, he embarked upon the proposition that, surrounded by such furniture, normal human beings are made ready for the coming of the crematoriums. "Did you look at him?" Mrs. Fisher wailed later. "Didn't you feel like crying for those wrists?" "Only the wrists?" Mr. Fisher had sallied, imitating his favor- ite comedian. "I've seen better dressing on a tuna fish salad." But one evening, while his wife helped Henrietta dress, pleading all the time for an account of wherein she had sinned as a mother, Mr. Fisher drew out for Mordecai the small, peeling carton of stories and poems which concerned his misadventures as a young immigrant in search of an unknown uncle. "The face we seek," Mordecai had said, after disposing of rhyme scheme and narrative, "is seldom the face we come upon. Anyway, we are all strangers, and it is only in the mass grave of history that we are brought together." In some way struck by this, Mr. Fisher was spun along the grooves of thought reserved usually for the morning subway, where === Page 85 === THE PATRON he tended to question the meaning of his life during the last two stops. Perhaps then the proposal teased his consciousness, like an overfull bladder at night. More likely, though, it had come much later, when his wife had opened Henrietta's pocketbook to insert a bill, as was her habit. Color thick on cheek and brow, she had pushed the paper from his hands as he lay in bed and dropped her bulk upon the silken coverlet. "A good child, a fine child," she moaned, "you pour your life out on them-and for what?" "Who, where?" he had asked. "What boils over now?" "Where her lipstick should be, where she should keep powder and a little bag of sachet to give a sweet, clean smell, I find it there." Fingers opened, where loathesome it curled within her palm, and the night had pierced him for a moment like a sword. "All right," he said, staring at the opening in his pajamas, at the flesh bulging grey and flabby, "you forget Emma Goldman already and the picnics of the Youth Circle, coming back for the boat with the grass smell on your dress?" Only then the proposal glowed in his mind and urged him from the bed to give it shape and beat down the will of his wife, who came upon him with secret stores of energy and curses that seemed to bubble from her blood. Coffee drained unto the bitter grounds, the kitchen could no longer hold them. Mrs. Fisher hovered in the hall, joggling from living room to bathroom, using the flush of water to pad the sound of movement. Once, for all her toe-pinched stealth, Mordecai peered through: "Please!" he said, and shut the door again. She went back to the kitchen and began, compulsively, to wash the sink. "The time they've been in there ... you could give birth." Mr. Fisher took the bags of garbage into the street and stood for a moment, holding his head into the cut of the wind, a joyous sob catching his throat as it had not for more seasons than he knew. Upstairs now, the phonograph was on again, and lights in pro- fusion. Mordecai stood in hat and scarf, striding up and back as Henrietta searched the closet for his gloves. "It is done," he said. "Not the state, nor the foundations with their soul-sucking blanks, but you shall be my patron." He slithered into his coat, feeling for the manila envelope which was always with him. "Let it be Monday then, when I shall return with a few of my things. Clothes of course" (he sneered) "will be small problem." Hand upon the door, he turned. "One more thing. It is a long === Page 86 === 84 PARTISAN REVIEW week end, and by Monday the few pieces of stuffed cabbage will have grown dry and too sour for my taste. . . .\" He came with a valise and three shopping bags, and they feared to question how he had managed on the subway. The new portable typewriter offered itself upon the desk, set off by a scratch pad and a tiny vase, pencil-filled. Ignoring these, he asked for thumbtacks and stepped fullshod upon the bed to mount a poorly toned Rouault, some faded movie still and—of all things!—six or eight playing cards whose unshamed fronts bore witness to the martyrology of a naked Negress beneath an awesome Great Dane. “Only at night will I walk the streets,” he explained, “perhaps for an occasional egg-cream, and these will serve to remind me of the quality of life in our time.” Much of his working day they could only guess at. When he took his mail—a few magazines on the Occult, and Physical Culture pamphlets where the eternal brass-armed men smiled with strange sweetness as they half-turned in their jockstraps—or permitted the airing of his room, the secretions of sleep seemed to glow in his eyes and paste the uncurling hair in stiff dead strands above his ears. Mrs. Fisher, carrying in the plates of guava jelly and cheese on lightly salted crackers for his evening hours would grovel before the door till he was framed within the keyhole. Sometimes, she thought, when his back filled her eye, he was looking over-long at the playing cards, but of this she was not sure. More often, he would fix himself upon the daybed and pluck at the newspapers (always from the back begin- ning) to ravish what could only be the comic page. Yet, when relatives came, newly married cousins from the edges of Brooklyn, uncles and aunts with cake-boxes who had risen early in New Jersey for the long drive, eating raisins and cracking nuts carefully over the bridge table, he would emerge, Mordecai, to fasten himself upon them, eager and swift before the prod of conversation. With the fruit bowl passing from hand to hand he would discuss the rise of a new movie star, the unexpected divorce hinted by a column- ist, or ingenious ways to soften a cheap cut of meat. Stunned by him, they would look upon Henrietta, to watch her eyes give off a deadly certainty which betrayed all that she had been for them as a child. Away from his business one day and dwelling on the thought that he could afford this and more, Mr. Fisher in a bathrobe sat listening to a famous young married couple analyze the recent rise === Page 87 === THE PATRON 85 in the birthrate when his wife entered suddenly from the streets. Her nostrils white, her voice broken. "All over the neighborhood already. In the candy store they complain he comes in, he reads all the maga- zines, he rips the covers, he blocks the door for the customers. By the new grocery he goes at night when it closes and buys the cheapest cans of sardines, big ones like moose." Thus, in the evening, when dinner was finished, Mr. Fisher put aside his second cutlet with the droplets of fat winking in the gravy and bore it tenderly to Mordecai's room. "How does it go?" he solemnly inquired, moving the plate away from the sheath of papers. "I mean, the writing." Mordecai's fork probed for a soft spot. "I have decided to junk my novel of experience. Instead, my hero will be the mass-mind of our age. A small work, one day perhaps in the life of a movie-pervert who is forced to watch over and over again till supper hour, when the row is cleared for masturbation. But by that time, it is already too late. The one scene that tingles his groin is long since over, and he must begin again in another theater." "All right," his wife said, when Mr. Fisher returned with the empty plate, "so what does he work on?" "It's hard to say, exactly," he answered. "I think maybe it's like a historical novel." A few weeks later, seated on the rocker in the bedroom to pare the bunions which had grown large and painful from the too-many hours on her feet, Mrs. Fisher raised her head and hissed for silence from her husband. Painfully taking the few steps, she jounced into bed and doused the light. "Listen," she demanded. "There's nothing." "Not with your sinus. Breath through the mouth." Together, they could hear and follow it, the barely muted ur- gency of bedsprings rising unmistakably from Henrietta's room. Sag- ging toward each other under the quilt they coughed in turn at a sudden pause, but then it came again, like spite. A full half hour, at least, till footfalls and the sound of running water. They broke apart to their own pillow-creases and suddenly Mr. Fisher giggled, and reaching toward his wife to muffle the spasm in her solidity, he saw, amazed, that she misunderstood his touch. Stretched out, they found use for each other, and passed soon into fearful sleep. === Page 88 === 86 PARTISAN REVIEW Peace for three days, perhaps four, till Mrs. Fisher, almost against her will, began a nagging battle of attrition with Henrietta, who threatened to disappear with Mordecai into some unknown and heatless flat, where egg crates served as furniture and drunks made water in the hall. As for Mordecai, he stayed less frequently in his room, and clutching a lunch bag and a leather case which they had never noticed, would depart after dusk for the city. Sometimes he would return early, with small jars of hard candy, but more often he would let himself in at what hour they could not tell. On such a night, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher entered his room, she to discard the sardine tins hoarded outside the window, he to leave a magazine offering marvelous rewards for unknown writers. When they had done, a strange exhilaration charged their nerves, and smiling serenely, Mrs. Fisher reached toward a wad of papers which lay in a half-open drawer upon some comic books. Her lips began to move with the words, and soon her flesh seemed to turn to ice, where it was pinched out over the corset. “Read, go ahead,” she cried. “Smut, dirt, filth, go ahead! Enjoy it, he uses your daughter's name, he writes down her words, the way her body moves, even ideas for pictures.” Mr. Fisher took the papers from her, gripped and flayed by the sections to which she pointed. “Even here, you can see,” he spoke softly, “he writes well, there is strong feeling in him.” But it was too late now. She began with the Rouault, and when the playing cards were outraged upon the floor addressed herself to the gutting of the typewriter, so that as they left the room, its keys stood up like broken fingers. === Page 89 === Harvey Breit BOMBAY: A LULLABY (To Nehru) The Bombay hawk Attacks between the sun and sun-sleeper While pigeons gawk. While hawks flay, “Love me, love me interminably,” The pigeons say. O Bombay, O city ultimately When unison of bird and bird Is heard. O country Gods, O urban saints, In dark caves the sages are Far from shore. Children, you are Bombay hawks, Pigeons, you are antique beggars. Children are unflowered stalks Lean as whips, rejecting pity; Elders drowse, an orison of dreams Devoid of schemes. Elders, wake a little while And fly with hawk. Children, sleep a little more, With pigeons talk. O Bombay city, pilgrimage: Make boy and birds and man one image. === Page 90 === Stake nearer each from the extreme: Locked-up truths release from ancients, Give youthful plans a skin of patience. These do make a sweet proportion: Pigeons, fly in tougher arc! Hawks, conclave in civic caution! Edwin Watkins THE ROCKET CAPTAIN "Let space be bent," the Rocket Captain said, "We'll warp all our five senses to her lead, As a man bends to women. To take wing The soul must, like the seasons' changeling, The gaudy earth, get other clothes to wear. We shall be strange, to breathe the upper air, As a fish in new water. Let my gills grow." A wet Venusian bird, ascending slow Through foliage indistinct from rain, assumes That element. In water is no room For such leaps as we make upon the air, But she sinks on slow tides, or mounts to where Her wing finds no more water to its flight And rests on the thinnest billows. There the light Is like salt-water in a diver's eyes. "On the damp star of Love, our proper prize," The Rocket Captain said, "is amorous. We'll try what pleasure tempts our unused lust In thickets grown of mist, where air is rain, And maybe girls with tails like fishes swim. I hear water moving; cloud on cloud Of waves of air sustain yon billowed bird. === Page 91 === Cut out the jets! for I shall mount and ride This web-foot creature down the moving tide." She who has waited while past years of space Her lover came, this Leda in reverse, Will bear her Captain down; in what wet cave The two are couched, or whether he can breathe Being gathered to her element, I leave To his determination. From their height Castor and Pollux lean across the night. Barbara Howes GOOSEGIRL Again the careless goose walks over my grave, Again the splayed foot's echo radios ill Toward me aswirl in the happy amphitheater Where love stood still. This is the other side of passion, for Our days careen in paradox; this toy, My heart, is colder at white heat than ice, A jeopardy of joy. The dreadnought goose will tread its fill on us yet, And semaphore foreknowledge of those drives Toward love, of love, and all, all counterfeit, Our carelong lives. === Page 92 === ART CHRONICLE MASTER LÉGER Léger was overlooked for a while. The conscious preoccupa- tions of the younger painters in New York during the '40s lay in a dif- ferent quarter; and so few of his 1910-13 pictures were known. He was over here during most of the war, and what he showed us then was not impressive. Nor—but let this be said to his credit—did he try to impress us with his personality. Now we have begun to know better. His large retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (where it came from the Chicago Art Institute, which organized it) makes it quite clear that, besides being a major fountainhead of contemporary style, Léger belongs with Matisse, Picasso, and Mondrian among the very greatest painters of the century. The sequence of promise, fulfillment, and decline his exhibition revealed was much like that in the previous Matisse, Picasso, and Braque retrospectives, and its dates site the chronological contour lines of School of Paris painting over the last forty or fifty years. For Matisse fulfillment came between 1910 and 1920; for Braque, between 1910 and 1914; for both Picasso and Léger between 1910 and 1925. None of the four was ever, before or after these dates, as consistent in quality, and very seldom as high. Michel Seuphor refers to 1912 as "perhaps the most beautiful date in the whole history of painting in France." That year Cubism reached fullest flower, and Léger was one of the three artists mainly responsible, even though he did not paint with "cubes." 1913 was another beautiful year, perhaps more so for him if not for Picasso and Braque. In 1914 he had, like Braque, to go to war, and the few paintings he finished while in the army are rather weak. But he recovered his level as soon as he had the chance to work regularly again, and the pictures he did from 1917 until at least 1922 are just as original and perhaps even more seminal. Yet they do not quite come up to the pure, the utter === Page 93 === ART CHRONICLE 91 finality, the poised strength of his 1911-13 work-just as Picasso's art between 1914 and 1925, while manifesting its own kind of perfection, rarely attains the transcendent perfection it knew before. The same is doubly, triply true in Braque's case, though he did experience a partial- very partial-recovery between 1928 and 1931 or 1932. The four years from the middle of 1910 to the middle of 1914 were the special ones, then. But just what made them so exceptionally favor- able to painting? A trio of geniuses, born within a year of one another, were in their early thirties-but Matisse, who was approaching his peak during the same period, was then in his forties. More of the answer may be given by something that extends far beyond the individual cir- cumstances of the artists involved. In France, and elsewhere, the gener- ation of the avant-garde that came of age after 1900 was the first to accept the modern, industrializing world with any enthusiasm. Even poets-thus Apollinaire-saw, at least for a moment, aesthetic possi- bilities in a streamlined future, a vaulting modernity; and a mood of secular optimism replaced the secular pessimism of the Symbolist gen- eration. This mood was not confined to the avant-garde; here, for once, the latter had been anticipated by the philistines; but the avant- garde was drawing the aesthetic conclusions at which the philistines balked. Nor was painting-and sculpture-the only department of culture to benefit by this. Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Proust, Mann, Valéry, Rilke, George, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Freud, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Einstein all developed or matured in the years of that same mood, which underpinned even those who rejected it. But professional tradition in painting, having long been distinctively secular (what great painter since El Greco was fundamentally a religious man?), now received new and, perhaps, special confirmation from its public, and felt itself to be more in the truth than ever before. Whatever the reason, it came about that one of the greatest of all moments in painting arrived on the crest of a mood of "materialistic" optimism. And of all the optimists, materialists, and yea-sayers, none was, or has remained, more whole-heartedly one than Fernand Léger. He has told us about, and we see, his enthusiasm for machine forms. And we also seem to see in his art all the qualities conventionally asso- ciated with "materialism"; weight, excessive looseness or else excessive rigidity of form, crassness, simplicity, cheerfulness, complacency, even a certain obtuseness. But what a mistake it would be not to see how much else there is in this art, which has succeeded better, I daresay, than any other in making the rawness of matter wholly relevant to human feeling. === Page 94 === 92 PARTISAN REVIEW -However, Cubism was more than a response to a certain historical moment and its mood. It was also the outcome of anterior events within painting, and an understanding of these opens the way to the understanding of Cubism as an event itself. In Renaissance pictorial tradition the represented object always stood, in Aristotelian distinction from everything not itself, in front of or behind something else. Cézanne was one of the first to worry consciously about how to pass from the contours of an object to what lay behind or next to it without violating either the integrity of the picture surface as a flat continuum, or the represented three-dimensionalality of the object itself, which Impressionism had inadvertently threatened. The Cubists inherited the problem, and solved it, but—as Marx would say—only by destroying it: willingly or unwillingly, they sacrificed the integrity of the object almost entirely to that of the surface. This—which had, however, nothing intrinsic to do with aesthetic value—is why Cubism constituted a turning point in the history of painting. Picasso and Braque began as Cubists by modeling the object in little facet planes, borrowed from Cézanne, in order to define its volume more vividly. But the threatened outcome of this was to leave the object standing away from its background like a piece of illustrated sculpture; so, eliminating broad color contrasts and confining themselves almost entirely to shades of brown, gray, and black, they began to model the background, too, in facet planes, as Cézanne in his last years had modeled cloudless skies. These facet planes became increasingly frontal— that is, parallel to the plane of the canvas—and soon, to make the transition from object to background even less abrupt, and expedite the transition from plane to plane within the object itself, the facets were almost all left open; whence the truncated rectangles and triangles and the semi-circles which remained the characteristic vocabulary of Picasso and Braque's Cubism until 1913. Amid all this, contours and silhouetting lines were lost (especially when the object was spread apart so as to show its surface from more than one point of view): the space inside the object now faulted through into surrounding space, and the latter could be conceived of as, in return, penetrating the object. All space became one, neither "positive" nor "negative," insofar as occupied space was no longer clearly differentiated from unoccupied. And the object was not so much formed, as exhibited by precipitation in groups or clusters of facet planes out of an indeterminate background of similar planes, which latter could also be seen as vibrating echoes of the object. === Page 95 === ART CHRONICLE 93 Either way, the Cubists ended up by doing with form what the Impres- sionists, when they precipitated their objects out of a mist of paint flecks, had only begun to do with color—they erased the old distinction between object-in-front-of-background and background-behind-and- around-object, erased it at least as something felt rather than merely read. . . . Picasso and Braque started Cubism; Léger joined it. He, too, was influenced by Cézanne after 1906, but he had used him at first for ends closer to those of Futurism, analyzing the object to show how it could move rather than how it managed to present a closed surface to eye or finger. But by 1912 the main thing for him, as for Picasso and Braque, became to assert the difference between pictorial and three-dimensional space. Though Léger’s vocabulary remained different and its units larger in scale, his grammar became a similar one of straight lines and faired curves. The curves predominated with him, but the sketchy black lines that traced them left his forms just as open in effect; and the way he modeled his roundnesses—with primary blues, reds, or greens swatched around highlighted axes of crusty white pig- ment laid on so dry and summarily that the canvas showed through here and there—caused these roundnesses to be felt simultaneously as both curved and flattened planes. The different directions in which the cylindrical or conical forms slanted, the interspersed cubes and rec- tangles, the equivalence of the different colors none of which advanced or receded more than any other, the sense of volumes compressed in ambiguous space and always presenting their broadest surfaces—all this likewise erased the distinction between object and background, object and ambiance. The objects, or their parts, seemed to well into visibility out of a background of similar, interchangeable elements; or it was as if the surface were repeating itself in endless depth. The first and de- cisive effect was of a welter of overlapping planes. To sort these into recognizable objects required almost as deliberate an effort on the part of the spectator as to read Picasso’s and Braque’s “analytical” Cubism. —And need I say that the deliberate effort contributes least in the experience of art? The logic of Léger’s analysis is nevertheless simpler than Picasso’s or Braque’s. He dissects broadly, articulating objects into their anatomical units of volume, which remain larger, and more obvious in their refer- ences, than the little planes into which the other two artists chip the surfaces of volumes. Perhaps this simplicity is what induced him, in 1913, to abandon recognizable objects altogether and paint several defin- === Page 96 === 94 PARTISAN REVIEW itely abstract pictures with planes defining cylinders and cones that sig- nify nothing else, and flat rectangles that define not even volume. (These works, of which there is no example in the Chicago-Museum of Modern Art show, all have the same title, “Contrast of Forms.") Only a short while previously, Picasso and Braque had invented the collage, which, for them, turned out to be a way of saving the recognizable object from dissolution in abstract art. The object may have become for a moment even less recognizable than before, but a searching eye could still de- cipher it. It was Léger alone of the three master Cubists who drove analytical Cubism to its conclusion. Not that he arrived at the flat picture, as Mondrian, drawing the very ultimate consequences of Cubism, was to do, or that he even approached the flatness of Picasso’s and Braque’s collages: the priority analytical Cubism gave the picture plane was never absolute, and Léger always held on to some sort of illusion of depth. But he did accept, as Picasso and Braque did not, the full implication of the method of analytical Cubism: namely, that once objects are broken up into more or less interchangeable units they them- selves are no longer necessary as entities—no longer necessary to the decisive effect—and the artist is free to work with the units alone, since which Cubism resolved the object were planar units, but they could conceivably have been the chromatic units of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists. However, Léger’s evolution toward abstract art should also be seen in terms more personal to himself: his predilection for weight and dec- orative balance, and a horror vacui greater even than Picasso’s, led him, again in 1913, to begin packing the picture toward margins formerly left vague, and he found himself mustering his planar units toward a density and compactness for which there were not enough hints in nature. What nature could not supply, the planar units did by multi- plying themselves in complete independence of the laws under which surfaces and their planes materialize in non-pictorial reality. Léger did not create abstract art for more than a brief period; later on, after the war, he would do a few more abstract pictures, but only intermit- tently, not as settled practice. In the final reckoning he was no more willing than Picasso or Braque to abandon nature altogether. The reason for this reluctance on the part of all three, and of Matisse too, is one of the most interesting of topics in contemporary art criticism, but not one to be broached here. Suffice it to say that the personal rejection of abstract art by the artists who did the most to clear the way for it calls for no value judgments. === Page 97 === ART CHRONICLE 95 The realization, original with Cézanne, that the eye, by following the direction of surfaces closely, could resolve all visual substance into a tight continuum of frontal planes had given the painter a new incen- tive in the exploration of both nature and his medium—and a rule, at the same time, to guarantee the aesthetic coherence of what was dis- covered. Picasso, Braque, and Léger, it could be said, were the only ones intrepid enough to carry the exploration to its end, and able by genius to apply the rule fully and yet in terms of their own temperaments. (This is to subordinate, but not to dismiss, the work of the other Cubists, who were all their followers to some extent.) Thus these three could for three or four years execute a well-nigh unbroken series of works that were flawless in unity and abundant in matter, works achieving that optimum which consists in a fusion of elegance and power that abates neither. Then the matter, for them, was exhausted, and the rule lapsed. Henceforth neither they nor any other artist could expand taste by these means, and to cling to them any longer would mean to depend on taste instead of creating it. By 1912 or 1913 "synthesis," as I have indicated, began to replace "analysis" in Picasso's and Braque's collages. At those points where the picture was nailed to its physical surface by pieces of pasted newspaper or trompe-l'oeil textures, the facet planes fused into larger shapes, and gradually the object or its part re-emerged in flat, distorted profile, to be locked into the equally flat profile of background, or "negative," space. The result was a tight picture-object in which the illusion of depth was given by overlapping and up-and-down placing but never by shading (which had played an important part in analytical Cubism) or anything else. Bright color came back, but it was almost absolutely flat color. Now the priority of the picture plane was asserted in a different and more radical way: the object was not disintegrated by the pres- sure of shallow space, but rolled flat in flat space-or at least space that was felt, if not read, as flat. Here Picasso found a new rule of coherence almost, if not quite, as efficacious as the previous one, and it took him ten years to exhaust its application. Léger entered upon his own variety of synthetic Cubism as soon as he got out of the army, in 1917. In the large "City," finished in 1919, foreground and background, object and ambiance, are alike cut up into vertical strips and discs and squares that are recombined on the surface as well as in shallow depth in a grandiose montage. He had not to practice collage in order to learn from it. He still shades, in dark and light now, not in primary colors, but it is more for decorative and architectural effect than to produce the illusion of volume as such, === Page 98 === 96 PARTISAN REVIEW and the contrast of the shaded forms with large and small areas of flat color achieves the effect of a façade, but a façade that transcends architecture by its complexity and intensity. The rhythm counts above all now, and will continue to as the artist veers away from a course parallel to Picasso's and takes hints from the Matisse of the large can- vases of 1916 with their discontinuities of imagined space and abrupt but cadenced juxtapositions of broad vertical bands of color. Such con- cerns remain, and will remain, largely alien to Picasso, whose unrivaled capacity as a composer-designer is tied to a certain traditionalism which makes him reject large, insistent, emphatically decorative rhythms in his easel paintings. Léger's last complete masterpiece, as far as this writer knows, is the huge "Three Women" (also called "Le grand déjeuner") of 1921, in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, a picture that im- proves steadily with the passage of time. Later on, Léger will be able to secure unity only by elimination and drastic simplification, but here he achieves it by adding, varying, and complicating elements simple in themselves. First, staccato stripings, checkerings, dottings, curvings, an- glings—then a massive calm, the calm that always supervenes in great painting. The great tubular, nude forms, so limpid in color, so evenly turgid, yet with their relief so firmly locked in place between busy fore- ground and even busier background, and their contours so expertly adjusted to still the clamor around them—these own the taut canvas as no projection of a more earnestly meant illusion could. For Léger, as for Picasso, the impetus of Cubism gave out during the last half of the '20s. Nothing after that—and I say nothing advis- edly—equals the breadth or finality of the pictures done between 1910 and 1925. We still get the general flavor of a great artist, but not— measured by the standards he himself instanced—great art. The firm, heavy, simplifying hand now reveals its liabilities as well as assets; what it addresses crumbles under the pressure, and machined contours and rawly decorative color schemes freeze it into but a mechanical coher- ence. Color, which is Léger's secret weapon, never goes quite dead— or never, at any rate, as dead as for Picasso and Braque in these later years—but that is not enough. The color may be justly felt in some of the heraldic clusters of objects and fragments, suspended in mid-air, of which Léger produced so monotonously many in the '30s and '40s, but these hang almost as limp as the others, limp past redemption— unless translated into tapestry, as one was, to its benefit, in 1950. Color, among other things, has a pleasing, old-fashioned, lithographic, popular- === Page 99 === ART CHRONICLE 97 print sort of picturesqueness in the "Leisure" of 1949, but the compo- sition wobbles and flutters underneath, and the result is no more than an uncertainly nice picture. And the large, bright "Builders" of 1950 is not even nice. Despite some appearances to the contrary, Léger remains a very accomplished painter; moreover, he is still able to execute things whose virtues are more than those of plausibility. I have in mind certain small still lifes done within the past twenty years, but of which there is no example in the present show. On the other hand, there are the show- pieces, which are in the show. The large "Three Musicians" of 1944 is solid and compact, but lacks tension and intensity, as does also the large "Adam and Eve" of 1939, whose undulating chiaroscuro, for all its presence, over-unifies the picture and renders it too bland. Yet, as is obvious, only a master-a master who has, or had, greatness in him-could have turned out either of these two paintings. I should have liked to see the final, largest version of the "Bicyclist" series of 1944-45 in the exhibition; it does much the same thing as "Leisure" but, as I remember it, much better. Certainly, that series did not de- serve to be represented by "The Great Julie," also in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, with its forced, arty color, a middle- sized picture that is still far too large for its content. Perhaps the evi- dence in general could have been better chosen to make a case for the post-1925 Léger, but even so, I do not think it could have altered the conclusion much. The decline that overtook Léger after 1925, as it did so many other estimable members of the School of Paris, was made all the more marked in his, as in Picasso's, case by the refusal to sit with past triumphs and repeat himself. Léger having created taste and still seeking to create it, but in vain, taste now revenges itself on him all the more, as it also does on Picasso-and as it seems to have done on other great artists at one time or another in their careers. This, however, is not all there is to it. And far be it from anyone to write finis to a great artist's career before he dies. Matisse surprised us by painting a picture in 1948 that can stand up to anything he did in the past-the "Red Interior." And Léger is not yet as old as Matisse was then. Clement Greenberg === Page 100 === BOOKS THE WRITER AS INTELLECTUAL THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES. By Robert Musil. Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Coward-McCann, Inc. $4.00. Every so often we rediscover a poet or writer. Why? Of course, there are always Ph. D. theses to be written, or a living, possibly a name, to be made on the academic pastures—which would probably be incentive enough to send scholars and critics out in search of the forgotten men of world literature; but this is, fortunately, not the whole story. After all, there is always the exceptional case of rediscovering a writer of genius, say Melville, who was neglected, misjudged, and for- gotten because he was too far ahead of his times, as we say, so that his contemporaries simply failed to see what he had to say. Such a rediscovery, then, is a way of catching up by posterity with what the writer had discovered because he was a genius. Only this is the excep- tional case. Much more common is another form of literary rediscovery. This is the case of redressing the critical balance in favor of a writer, or group of writers, who did not create works of genius which were forgotten, but who nonetheless displayed an excellence or made a significant con- tribution which had not been fully appreciated. Such re-evaluations are the function of the fluctuating trends of the critical market. They may simply reflect the speculative nature of the market: for instance, instead of romantic poetry, we suddenly invest heavily in metaphysical poets. Or they may be a means of launching a contemporary movement in literature and criticism. Again, such rediscoveries may happen for non- aesthetic reasons; that is, social, psychological or ideological factors may call for a revision of the critical estimate of a writer. Or they may be due to the accidental factor of literary provincialism-regionalism, if you prefer, so that a writer is quite well known in one part of the world, and not at all in another. These are perfectly legitimate aspects of criti- cism, and keep the process going at a prosperous rate. Only we must remember that these are the normal, common transactions of the market, === Page 101 === BOOKS 99 and not fall for the high-pressure methods which are often employed to sell these rediscoveries as if they were the rare, exceptional case of the forgotten man of genius, which they are not. These rambling reflections occurred to me while reading a compar- atively unknown Austrian writer, Robert Musil, who has recently been rediscovered in the English-speaking world in connection with the partial translation of his major work, a novel called The Man Without Quali- ties. The rediscovery was launched, a few years ago, by a front-page review in the London Times Literary Supplement in which Musil was hailed as "the most important novelist writing in German in this half- century" and in which it was claimed that "only two modern novelists compare with him in range and intelligence-Proust and Joyce." For once, I found myself on the side of The New Yorker where Mr. Anthony West debunked the pretentious English review and expressed his own exasperation with the publication of this work by calling it "one of those mysterious literary events for which logic provides no explana- tion." I sympathize with Mr. West though I don't share his critical estimate of Musil; but I can see why he, and other readers, might be- come exasperated with the work and its critical apostles. On the basis of the English translation alone, it is indeed hard to see what the work stands for or why it stands for anything. The trans- lation consists of less than one-half of the first volume of the German original, which is more than a thousand pages long. The total work comprises three volumes, the third being unfinished. Moreover, while I have a high regard for the art of translation and think that the present translators handled an extremely difficult assignment remarkably well, their selection is inexcusable. They have simply translated 72 sections of the first volume running consecutively. Thus the book ends nowhere; nor does it contain some of the most important chapters (e.g., section 116 or the incest theme of the second volume) giving an idea where the work as a whole is going. In short, if the English edition was meant to rediscover the greatness of Musil in a foreign clime, say, as the French symbolists once rediscovered the greatness of Poe, this edition is most poorly designed to launch and support such a project. More importantly, comparing Musil with Proust and Joyce, or calling him, as an American reviewer did, "a sort of day-light Kafka," is critical nonsense-though these comparisons, as I remember, were al- ready made by German critics. For Musil is not so unknown as it may appear from the novelty of this publication in the English-speaking world. During the '20s, his name was familiar as part of a very active and productive literary circle in Vienna. His books, even the first volume === Page 102 === 100 PARTISAN REVIEW of The Man Without Qualities, sold moderately well; and one of his plays enjoyed a prestige success. There was even something of a Musil cult sustained by a nucleus of devoted followers who supported him financially and in whose critical estimate he undoubtedly ranked with Proust and Joyce. Such a comparison, however, is exaggerated and super- ficial. Musil was not the exceptional case; which does not detract from the significant contribution he did make. If we are looking for critical comparisons, Musil, I think, had certain affinities with Henry James and with Gide: with James, in his style and composition, the social setting, and perhaps outlook on life; with both James and Gide, in his intense intellectualism. As a matter of fact, Musil's most significant contribution, his achievement as well as his failure as a writer, lies in the ingenious treat- ment of the theme of the intellectual in the modern world. And it is this aspect of his work which I wish to discuss primarily. To satisfy the conditions of a halfway accurate report, however, I must at least mention two other topics which are usually singled out by critics as providing the thematic structure of The Man Without Quali- ties: the portrait of a society in decay and, running counterpoint to this social theme, the portrait of a psychotic sex murderer, called Moos- brugger. The former is largely responsible for the comparison with Proust. Musil depicts the decline of the Austrian Empire during the last year before the outbreak of World War I. The picture reveals a keen, critical intellect at work and is drawn along amusing, satirical lines. But it is not comparable to Proust's work—either in the vast scale on which the latter reconstructed the Swann and Guermantes ways of life, or in Proust's quest for time lost and the "eternal essences" through which it might be recovered, or, most importantly, in the abundance of memor- able, unforgettable characters and situations created by Proust. Nobody will go away from Musil's book remembering the "feel" of the world he describes—in fact, there are no sights, smells, or any other qualities of direct sensory experience in it at all—nor the "feel" of the characters as in Proust. In Musil it is not what the characters are like which is memorable as in Proust, but rather what they say or think. The running down of the Empire is presented in conjunction with a stupid, sterile cultural publicity campaign in which the major repre- sentatives of Austria's cultural and political élite are engaged to prepare for the celebration of the seventieth jubilee of the reign of the Emperor Francis Joseph. The campaign is completely devoid of meaning, and gets nowhere. The real forces of disintegration, however, are revealed by the Moosbrugger episode, in which most of the people active in the cultural === Page 103 === BOOKS IOI campaign are also involved in trying to save the murderer's life. Moos- brugger is Dostoevsky's “underground man.” (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Balzac were Musil's favorite authors.) He represents the threatening, uncontrollable, destructive forces behind the façade of high society and cultural cant. Since he is frightfully real in terms of the underground forces inside the people who come into contact with him (one woman most interested in saving his life is almost as psychotic as Moosbrugger), his fate becomes a symbol of the bad conscience, the mauvaise foi of the others, and their attempts to save him, a symbol of their futile attempt to save themselves and Austria. These two components of the work are intertwined with the major theme expressed in the title, The Man Without Qualities, which is Musil's designation of the hero, only known by his first name Ulrich. Ulrich is the prototype of the intellectual bringing to bear the full powers of his (or Musil's) critical intelligence upon an analysis of himself and the actions, motives and ideas of the people around him. This function of The Man Without Qualities has earned the work other critical clichés; for example, that it is a “psychological novel” or, in Mr. Geismar's words, a “distinguished novel of ideas,” again inviting comparisons with Proust and Joyce. I have never understood what the term “psychological novel” means, or for that matter, the term “social novel.” What novel is not a psychological and social document? Anyway, as far as Joyce is con- cerned, the comparison is again quite superficial. Musil did not invent, as Joyce did, a new literary technique to exhibit unconscious psycho- logical motivation, nor did he embark upon the ambitious project of logical, social, historical and mythological elements. The translators call attention to the fact that the action in The Man Without Qualities is compressed within the time-span of one year analogous to Joyce's use of one day or one night. They might have added that, like Joyce, Musil began his career as an artist by writing a portrait of himself as a young man based upon his recollections of the years spent in the barracks of a military academy, not so different from Joyce's experiences in the Jesuit College of Belvedere House. But these are trivial points. Musil did not care for Joyce's work; and this attitude makes sense. His own work was altogether different from Joyce's, a much more self-conscious, reflective, intellectual analysis of psychological processes and ideas than a concrete, dynamic presentation of them in the lives and actions of people. The result, of course, may be called a “novel of ideas"; but it is worth noting that even the ideas Musil deals with, or the way he deals === Page 104 === 102 PARTISAN REVIEW with them, further restrict the significant scope of the work. The Man Without Qualities is primarily a work about an intellectual, addressed to intellectuals. This explains why its appeal and contribution is definitely limited—unlike, say, The Magic Mountain, also a novel of ideas, but of a much wider scope—while its reputation is extremely high among those who can identify with it because they feel it was written especially for them. I wish to consider two aspects of this general topic: the writer as an intellectual, and the portrait of the intellectual itself. On both points, I think, the work makes an interesting and often original con- tribution. As a writer Musil was endowed with an exceptionally brilliant mind. Born in 1880, he received his early education in the confined, authoritarian quarters of military academies; and later (in 1906) pub- lished his first novel about his experiences in these military prep schools, one of which had previously been attended by the young Rilke. This work was one of the earliest documents of its kind: detailing the terror and misery, the anguish and guilt engendered and transmitted by these European institutions of culture and cruelty. (Joyce's Portrait was com- pleted in 1914.) Shortly before Musil was to receive a commission, he abandoned a career in the army in favor of studying mathematics and engineering. He obtained a degree in civil engineering, taught the sub- ject, and contributed a significant technical invention to the field. Meanwhile, he also developed a great interest in and ability for logic, experimental psychology and philosophy, took further academic work in these subjects at the University of Berlin, and received a degree in philosophy on the basis of a dissertation on the epistemology of Ernst Mach. Musil thus came to literature and the arts from experimental work in the sciences, special studies in logic and mathematics, and a positivistic philosophical orientation associated with the so-called Vienna circle founded by Moritz Schlick. The only other writer I have heard of with a similar intellectual background was Musil's contemporary in Vienna, Hermann Broch. This intellectual background and attitude Musil incorporated in Ulrich, the man without qualities. Ulrich is Bentham's "impartial spec- tator," or a kind of Viennese intellectual Prufrock. He has also known them all; he has also measured out his life in coffee spoons; and he does not presume. Only, unlike Prufrock, he is a man of extreme intel- ligence (by profession a mathematician, always on the verge of making a great scientific discovery) who is engaged in a constant, self-conscious process of cross-examining himself and everybody else. === Page 105 === BOOKS 103 The attitude of intense intellectual analysis that goes into Musil's work is not always successful from an aesthetic point of view. Like Gide, Musil seems to have developed his literary ideas from notebooks in which he first tried to think through the problems which he subsequently converted into the concrete, sensible images of a work of art. Like Gide he often failed in this process of conversion. The aesthetic failure is par- ticularly noticeable in the last two volumes (the first comes off best) where Musil's ideas are rarely translated into anything but lengthy con- versations; in the last, unfinished volume, Musil's long preparatory notes, reflections, and discourses are often not yet transformed into con- versational material; but even conversations, however interesting and ingeniously contrived, are not enough to make a novel. What the work lacks from an aesthetic point of view, therefore, is the successful con- version of ideas into, or integration with, human actions, concrete situ- ations, and the development of specific characters. (This, in my minor- ity opinion, also shows a certain affinity with Henry James.) What makes The Man Without Qualities worth rediscovering, none- theless, I think is partly that these aesthetic shortcomings are by no means characteristic of the entire work—the first volume, in particular, con- structs a social canvas on which the people and situations often come very much and excitingly to life—and partly that the work has a great deal to say about all the topics touched upon by Musil's critical intelli- gence, but especially about the problem of the intellectual itself. Why is Ulrich called a man without qualities? Because no qualities are worth possessing in a world in which it has become “a habit to speak of geniuses of the football field, the boxing ring,” not to mention the “race horse of genius.” Ulrich who was, to begin with, what we would call a promising young man, possibly a budding genius in the sciences and certainly aspiring to be a “man of importance,” comes to recognize the depressing futility of this mad race in competition with the horses of this world. He “suddenly grasped the inevitable connection between his whole career and this genius among race horses. For to the cavalry, of course, the horse has always been a sacred animal, and during his youth- ful days of life in barracks Ulrich had hardly ever heard anything talked about except horses and women. That was what he had fled from in order to become a man of importance. And now when, after varied ex- ertions, he might almost have felt entitled to think of himself near the summit of his ambitions, he was hailed from on high by the horse, which had got there first.” Thus Ulrich embarks upon the career of the unattached, free- floating intellectual, in Mannheim's terminology, or the totally non- === Page 106 === 104 PARTISAN REVIEW committed man from an existentialist point of view, floating in and out of the various circles of people and activities without belonging any- where, detached, ironic, non-participating except for a constant, self- conscious readiness to analyze every action and motive of the players and himself. This analysis is often ingenious and always intellectually honest. Musil rejected psychoanalysis; but there is much of the same intellectual, skeptical temper in his own work as in this psychological movement which was then reaching its highest form in Vienna. A side remark on psychoanalysis, incidentally, is characteristic of the subtle sense of satire pervading the whole work: “An age that does not tolerate any intellectual depth anywhere learns with attentive curiosity that it has discovered a depth psychology.” Ulrich, then, is a symbol of ironic detachment from and intellectual integrity in a world of muddled thinking, confused emotions, and sham values. He sees through the pompous racket of the publicity campaign, the stupid, pretentious and hypocritical culture-mongering of the people engaged in it, the phony rationalizations excusing artistic and intellectual debility, the repressive nature of traditional morality, the escape into nebulous mysticism and new forms of authoritarianism-all these symp- toms of a sick society are expertly dissected and diagnosed. The contra- puntal theme of the sex murderer shows that Musil was equally aware of the destructive forces threatening the individual from within, eventually erupting into the Thirty Years War of our century. He depicted the rise of a fanatic pan-German racism; he predicted the “ant society” of the future. He cast the light of bitter satire upon the figure of a rising young poet, called Feuermaul (fiery mouth), an ill-concealed parody of the young Werfel, who has just conquered Viennese high society with his flamboyant airs and his brilliant insight that “man is good.” No, Musil was not taken in; the work reflects a critical intelligence at work playing expertly and uncompromisingly with all the questionable qualities of the people and the world they represent. In this horse race the intellectual may refuse to possess any qualities, may rediscover the meaning of Joyce’s-and Lucifer’s—non serviam; and this act of refusal is not only a weapon of defense, but may even represent a challenge, or a legitimate act of affirmation: a position which Musil himself de- scribes quite aptly as “active passivism.” I confess that I consider this performance, especially in our days when we are not only engulfed by a rising tide of anti-intellectualism on the part of those to whom this attitude is a way of life, but when the intellec- tuals à la Viereck themselves have joined the sad spectacle of muddled slinging and thinking on the nature of their own profession. No, critical === Page 107 === BOOKS 105 intelligence may not be the cure-all for the troubles of the individual or the turmoil in society, as a naive pragmatism once thought it would be; nor is it without difficulties if the goal be personal happiness or salvation; but it’s worth being reminded, as the tide is turning, that a free intelligence has a legitimate function in society over and above its technical application; and that, though it may be predominantly cri- tical and destructive, it is generally quite harmless, which is more than one can say for all the popular forms of anti-intellectualism. Musil also serves as an interesting reminder of some of the personal difficulties besetting an intellectual like Ulrich. To belong nowhere, to be incapable of committing oneself is not only to be isolated and alien- ated from society; it is also an unhappy, personal burden; for a great many problems of life are not solved by thinking, but by acting. Now a man without qualities is, as Musil realized, paradoxically enough also a man possessing all qualities. There is no position he cannot theoretically defend, none in which he cannot see some partial truth; hence, there is none with which he might not be identified or identify himself. Thus Ulrich longs at times to be relieved from the elusiveness and pluralistic ambiguity of thinking about problems the solution of which can only be found in the “unequivocation and finality of action.” There is, however, one ambiguity, or dilemma, which Musil singled out as crucial and to which he returned constantly throughout his work in search of a solution. The dilemma arises as follows: The function of the intellect is to think clearly and precisely. This is the way a scien- tist tries to think when engaged in experimental research aiming at a truthful description of certain aspects of the objective world. What we call the logic of science sets the conditions for this inquiry into meaning and truth. Musil acknowledged this discipline of the mind—just as he practiced a highly exaggerated form of physical discipline for his body. It is this logical clarity and precision, ruthless and uncompromising, which is the function of the intellect in search of truth among the falsehoods of the world; and science, or a scientifically trained mind, is an indispensable prerequisite for exercising this function. Now this quest for clarity and precision, which cannot be abdicated by the intellect without self-betrayal, encounters formidable and appar- ently insuperable obstacles in certain areas of life. Musil encountered them when he turned from positivism to art and literature, from the precise logic of the science descriptive of an objective reality to the elusive “logic of the soul” (as he called it) expressive of man’s inner world of dreams, fantasies, feelings, and values. In other words, there seem to be aspects of life, frighteningly significant in terms of human exist- === Page 108 === 106 PARTISAN REVIEW ence, to which the precise logic of the sciences is not (or, not yet) applicable and to which we seem to have access only through the purely subjective, emotional expression and symbolism of the poets. Musil be- came obsessed with this dilemma, this "two-facedness of life," this "am- biguity of the world," this "pre-established disharmony"; and his work may be seen as a prolonged attempt to come to terms with this experience and to find a way out of this dilemma. (None of this is in the English edition.) The posing of the dilemma, I think, is interesting in its own right, and Musil's wrestling with it always exciting; but the dilemma also ex- plains some aspects of his work generally neglected by critics who are now rediscovering him. Beginning with the second volume, a major theme of the work is the incestuous relation between Ulrich and his sister; at the end, they have apparently become lovers. Now this love affair seems to convey one manifestation of the intellectual's dilemma, what Musil calls the "dual sexuality of the soul," and to suggest a possible solution. It seems as if the split in Ulrich can be healed only through love of his sister who is, narcissistically, an extension of himself; brother and sister thus represent the two halves, the logic of the intellect and the logic of the soul, which they cannot reconcile within their own selves, but only through sexual union with each other. More important, perhaps, than the theme of incest is the light which this dilemma throws upon Musil's conception of the novel as a whole. He never thought of it as a novel in the traditional sense of the word; and this he undoubtedly has in common with Proust, Joyce, or Mann. The three volumes represent the end of the era in which the novel flourished as a great form of art. In its stead, Musil proposed the notion of "essayism"-perhaps adapted after Baudelaire's "dandyism" -as a form of literature and as a way of life. The essay, according to this view, takes a position halfway between the concept of objective truth developed in the sciences and the subjective, emotional symbolism expressed in poetry; instead of the rigid, logical procedure of the former, and instead of the diffuse, non-scientific sym- bolism of the latter, essayism is meant as a technique which would com- bine, or steer a middle course between, both objective and subjective criteria and perspectives. It is not quite clear to me how this is meant-except that an essay usually does combine objective and subjective elements and thus occupies a position halfway between scientific truth and poetry; but it is per- fectly clear that Musil aimed at such an "in between" position in his own work (which explains why so much of it reads more like an essay than === Page 109 === BOOKS 107 like a novel) and that he envisaged “essayism” as a way of life which might overcome the crucial dilemma confronting the free-floating intel- lectual. This way of life he even called a “higher humanism,” which would reveal the “art of raising oneself above the level of scientific knowledge,” or in which the “pedantic,” scientific precision would be complemented by an “imaginative precision” thus perhaps bringing back the possibility of being “a whole person,” which Ulrich says at the be- ginning of the work “does not exist any more.” For Musil, as for Joyce and Mann, irony was a basic attitude for such a new humanistic outlook. In this sense, Ulrich pleads ironically, as his contribution to the preten- tious cultural publicity campaign of the others, for the establishment of a “world secretariat of precision and the soul.” Now it isn’t exactly news that there is a principle of polarity at work within man, or that we are in search of a “principle of complemen- tarity” (in Bohr’s terms) for the inner world of man as much as for the interior of the atom. Moreover, it is also common knowledge that the “unhappy, divided consciousness” of man manifests itself in various ways. Nonetheless, Musil’s recognition of the problem emphasized a special aspect which still deserves to be taken seriously regardless of the worth of his own solutions. It might, of course, be said that what he did was simply to focus upon the fatal split between intellect and emotions so characteristic of the psychological dynamics of the intellectual in general. But, I think, the issue transcends psychology and is relevant to a general theory of culture. There is no doubt that Musil saw what has become a particularly acute division among intellectuals in our culture. If some variety of secular humanism should survive, or possibly be re- vived (which is doubtful), it must, among other things, come to terms with the two aspects of the humanistic tradition depicted by Musil as incompatible with each other, the logic of the sciences and the logic of the soul, or arts; and it must not do so, as it is often done today, by sacrificing one for the other. It makes little sense to dismiss the arts, as a so-called scientific philosophy often tends to do, as nothing but an ex- pression of subjective feelings, devoid of intellectual content and properly belonging in the field of experimental psychology. It makes just as little sense to look upon the arts, as non-scientific, literary, and existentialist thinkers are often inclined to do, as a gateway to truths superior to science, but incapable of clear and precise formulation. What does make sense in the intricate and complex relationship between these two fields is a difficult question; but Musil’s portrait at least throws into sharp relief the crucial issue that there must be some community of interest, some form of communion or affinity, between these two disciplines of === Page 110 === 108 PARTISAN REVIEW the human mind, and that the intellect must be capable of both scien- tific and imaginative precision in order to rediscover the basic affinity between these two major areas of secular culture, and in order to re- establish some kind of order and unity in its own house. From what I can judge on the basis of my experiences in the academic world, espe- cially with people who, like Musil, come to question the positivitistic faith in the logic of science as the only legitimate employment of the intellect, the issue as he stated it certainly presents what William James would have called a “genuine option,” alive, forced, and momentous. Or, at least, it poses a constructive challenge to the critical intelligence of those who still think that some form of secular humanism is worth preserving, or that it is the only thing a critical intelligence can subscribe to as the basis for a general theory of culture. In this respect, The Man Without Qualities makes a substantial and significant contribution even though we don’t have to hail its rediscovery as falling into the category of a neglected, forgotten work of genius. Hans Meyerhoff FOUR POETS OR PERHAPS THREE THE DRAGON AND THE UNICORN. By Kenneth Rexroth. New Directions. $3.00 COLLECTED POEMS. By Yvor Winters. Alan Swallow. $2.50 THE WHITE THRESHOLD. By W. S. Graham. Grove Press. $2.25 THE POEMS OF C. P. CAVAFY. Translated by John Mavrogordato. Grove Press. $3.25 I found The Dragon and the Unicorn, a travel diary of an American’s year in England, France, and Italy, always entertaining and holding the attention except in the frequently interspersed ‘philos- ophical’ meditations, which never come within hailing distance of the Four Quartets;—are often, it seems, mere verbal conglomerations, and could, in toto, be removed with advantage. As a diarist, Rexroth is always shrewd, independent in his judgment of food, wine, paintings, and people. But the notion that he can be read on these subjects— which include, for painting, the Chinese as well as the Florentine—as the plain man reads the nineteenth-century poets, English or American, seems absurd. He is scarcely “that rare bird, a thoroughly modern poet, who can be understood by anybody. . . .” Intelligibility apart, is he a poet? He prints as verse, initial capitals and all; but his lines have no metrical norm, whether accentual or syllabic, despite the typographical appearance of something like a tetra- meter line. Except in his ‘philosophical’ passages, he writes with a stac- === Page 111 === BOOKS 109 cato vivacity; but his good clean writing doesn't of itself require-what he doesn't give-verse, let alone poetry. I see no reason, short of the claim to status, why he shouldn't have printed himself as prose. Had he done so, he might be acclaimed as a sort of counter-Baedeker, offer- ing guidance to be 'read with caution' but provocative of self-educative rebuttal or assent. Having rather too often found Yvor Winters' critical writings un- convincingly dogmatic, his 'best poems' lists offered in his bare ipse dixit affronting, and his influence on young poets inhibiting, I had sur- prise yet more pleasure, since Winters is an honest maverick-in think- ing well of his Collected (i.e., Selected) Poems. His polemic and idio- syncratic are left for prose, as Landor (chiefly) managed to confine them to his life. Winters' own 'best poems,' however, are not marmoreal exercises (my recollection of Twelve Poets of the Pacific) but avowedly and pa- tiently personal tributes and affirmations-like those to David Lamson and Lamson's sister and to Stanford's (and Winters') teacher, W. D. Briggs. It is academic to write as though one didn't practice the pro- fession of professor; it is unacademic, and sound, of Winters to make poems out of his livelihood and life-what, believingly, he does. The poems to Briggs are meditations on teaching as a faith, and so are "Chiron" and "On Teaching the Young." The latter I want to quote: The young are quick of speech. Grown middle-aged, I teach Corrosion and distrust, Exacting what I must. A poem is what stands When imperceptive hands, Feeling, have gone astray. It is what one should say. Few minds will come to this. The poet's only bliss Is in cold certitude- Laurel, archaic, rude. The other best poems in Winters' book (if, under the plea of space, I may adopt his own bare listing) are two translations ("Death's Warn- ing" and du Bellay's "Rome") and "The Moralists," "The Invaders," "To Emily Dickinson," "The Fable," "To A Young Writer," "Time and === Page 112 === 110 PARTISAN REVIEW the Garden,” “To a Portrait of Melville,” and “On the Portrait of a Scholar of the Italian Renaissance.” The reading of these ‘best poems’ is a literary education I com- mend, for they are minor triumphs au rebours: they are neither journal- ism (like Rexroth et al.) nor neo-metaphysical (word-play, puns, seman- tic rhymes, symboliste, ironic, paradoxical) nor slick in the style which teachers of so-called creative writing have taught to publishing young who shall be nameless. They are successfully ‘classical’ in a fashion rare in English: easy to conceive of; hard to come by. W. S. Graham is a Scots poet, a ‘regionalist.’ He has obviously learned from Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. He is textually rich in alliter- ation and slant rhymes of the sort which Winters, on principle, rejects. But one has only to compare him with the neo-Irish ‘Christian’ poet W. R. Rodgers, to discern Graham’s own kind of restraint. He is seeking (in the spirit of Edwin Muir’s Scott) to recover the Scots poetry of Dunbar and his successors down to the seventeenth century, to substitute, for the double-language of Burns’s “Cotter’s Satur- day Night,” a single diction. But he does not attempt the unreal Celtic Revolution of the Word of Hugh MacDiarmid. This diction admits of “tig,” “whinwork,” “linty,” “airts,” “minch,” and “rhinns,” for which an American-or English—reader will need a glossary; but it is not thereby made either bizarre or unintelligible. It seems to me a wholly successful adjustment of the general tongue and the regional. The other thing I want to say of Graham is that he manages a regional (and perhaps even personal) ‘mythology’ without arrogant demands on rival regionalists. This typological use of his native Lanark- shire cannot be achieved in a single poem: The White Threshold has to be read as a book. I have left the most achieved work for the last. C. P. Cavafy (1863- 1933) was an Alexandrian Greek whose oeuvre has already been not only handsomely published in Athens but the subject of much Hellenic and ‘barbaric’ scholarship. The English version, done by one truly bilingual, is both remarkably faithful to the Greek (in form as well as ‘sense’) and poetry in its own right. Even before the revolution which won the Greek independence of the Turks, there began a renascence of Greek poetry, associated not alone with ‘patriotism’ but with what was naturally taken as its correlative— the literary use of the popular, or demotic, language. Cavafy was not a proponent of the demotic nor a political revolutionary. He is an Eliotic figure; and it is hardly pure coincidence that E. M. Forster, whose === Page 113 === BOOKS III delicate, oblique, and high praise of the earlier Eliot can be found in Abinger Harvest, introduced Cavafy to English readers in his 1923 Pharos and Pharillon. Like Eliot, Cavafy makes living poetry out of the present but also out of the past, which he presently sees. I suppose, too, that being an Alexandrian Greek is something like being an Anglo- American-something archaistically 'precious' and more royalist than the king. Unlike Eliot, Cavafy abstains from anything approaching 'phi- losophy' or generalizing abstract perspective (the sort found in "Burnt Norton"); but even here they are not so far apart as either is from, say, Rexroth: Eliot's metaphysical training has chiefly had the salutary effect of making him philosophically diffident, as a sense of humor keeps a poet from being unintentionally comic. Like Eliot, Cavafy is at once a poet who seems, in contrast to the epic 'greats,' both limited and minor; but the emphasis should substan- tially fall on "seems": These poets are not minor as Gray and Collins and Bryant (poets whom I respect) are minor. For extent and grand style, they substitute implication. Trying out Cavafy's poems on many kinds of persons has convinced me of his having a range unpredictable of a poet so, at first and second sight, special. Cuius cuique. The patently contemporary poems are for the most part poems of homosexual experience. In a fashion alien to English and American pretty-and to Proust and Gide-they are, however, neither self-flagellating nor defiantly assertive nor mawkish. They accept, record, interpret; and they are usually translatable into normal terms of sex, love, and union: the more so, it would appear be- cause they attempt no disguise of their origin. Another group of Cavafy's poems reinterpret, with scrupulous taste, passages from Homer: I think especially of "The Horses of Achilles" and "Ithaka" (a distinct improvement on Tennyson's "Ulysses," of which, vestigially, it cannot but remind an English reader). Most to my own taste-and, happily for it, most abundant-are poems Byzantine in both time and space: post-Christian and Easternly Hellenic. As Mavrogordato's really helpful notes make clear, Cavafy was an assimilating and interpreting reader of Byzantine historians, secular and ecclesiastical-of Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists and the Letters of Julian the Apostate. His is the world of Gibbon's Decline and Fall; but, in place of Gibbon's one-sidedly rationalistic irony, Cavafy's irony is objectively empathic. Dear to him are the juxtapositions-in Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria-of 'pagans,' neo-pagans like Julian, Hebrews of varying zeal and orthodoxy, and Orthodox Christians. A fine poem is "Myres: Alexandria, A.D. 340," a dramatic monologue === Page 114 === 112 PARTISAN REVIEW in which the pagan speaker characterizes his unostentatiously—perhaps unstable—Christian friend and describes the difficulty of attending the Orthodox funeral rites, rigidly separating pagan from Christian as the departed friend did not. Dramatic objectivity disappears only when Cavafy thinks on the ‘great tradition’ of Hellenism. All save Greeks are barbarians. Yet even then he lacks spread-eagle patriotism, national or racial arrogance. His Hellenism is not a willed, a self-determined state but a culture—a subtler version of Winston Churchill’s grandiose, sometimes ‘hammy,’ celebra- tion of AngHicity and its empire. It is never Matthew Arnold’s abstract “culture” abstractly opposed to Anarchy. Your verses must be written, Rafael, So that they hold, you know, some of our life, So that the rhythm and every phrase may tell An Alexandrian is writing of an Alexandrian. (“For Ammones, Who Died . . . in 610”) I love the Church . . . The Church of all the Greeks, and when I enter in, With smoky fragrance the incenses, Liturgical harmony and cadences, The priests and their majestic presences . . . To the great honors of our race my thoughts return, The glory of our Byzantine achievement. (“In Church”) I have not mentioned Cavafy’s most showy pieces, though—invok- ing the protection of praeteritio—I should like to name the early and Audenesque and brilliant poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians.” ‘Re- strained’ and ‘subtle’ are the epithets befitting his best work, in which sophistication and simplicity lie, uniternecinely, together. Austin Warren ADVENTURE IN AMERICA THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH. By Saul Bellow. Viking. $4.50. Saul Bellow’s new novel is a new kind of book. The only other American novels to which it can be compared with any profit are Huckleberry Finn and U.S.A., and it is superior to the first by virtue of the complexity of its subject matter and to the second by virtue of a realized unity of composition. In all three books, the real === Page 115 === BOOKS 113 theme is America, a fact which is not as clear in this new work as it is in its predecessors, perhaps because of its very newness. The sheer bigness of America as a theme and as a country has always made the novelist's task difficult, which may be the reason that Thomas Wolfe was so excited by trains, just as it certainly has something to do with the fact that U.S.A. does not possess complete narrative unity. In other American novels of the same seriousness and ambition, the theme of America and of being an American is narrowed to a region—Hawthorne is writing about New England, Faulkner is writing about the South—or the novels are about Americans in Europe, which is almost as true of Hemingway as it is of James; or there is, in any case, a concentration upon a particular American milieu. Moreover, the classic choice of the American writer has been either uncritical affirmation on the one hand, or on the other hand some form of re- jection, the rejection of satire in Lewis, the rejection of social protest in Dos Passos, or the rejection of tragedy in Dreiser and Fitzgerald. The point can hardly be overemphasized: Huck Finn is in flight from civilization; Milly Theale is swindled of, above all, her desire to live; Lambert Strether (or William Dean Howells) discovers in middle age that he has not really lived at all; Lily Bart commits suicide; Richard Cory blows out his brains; J. Alfred Prufrock feels that he "should have been a pair of ragged claws"; Frederic Henry makes "a separate peace"; Quentin Compson has to say four times that he does not hate the South; Clyde Griffiths is electrocuted; Jay Gatsby is murdered. There are many other instances of the same kind, almost none of which can be considered purely as tragedy, but more precisely as catastrophe: Clyde Griffiths and Jay Gatsby perish because they are Americans, Agamem- non and Macbeth because they are human beings. The Adventures of Augie March is a new kind of book first of all because Augie March possesses a new attitude toward experience in America: instead of the blindness of affirmation and the poverty of re- jection, the reality of experience with an attitude of satirical acceptance, ironic affirmation, the comic transcendence of affirmation and rejection. As he says at the very start: "I am an American, Chicago-born- Chicago, that somber city-" (the adjective should make it clear that to be an American is far from the same thing as being a 100 percent American) "and go at things as I have taught myself, free style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent . ., and it is soon clear that Augie has identified America and adventure, an identification which functions as both method and insight. Augie's style === Page 116 === 114 PARTISAN REVIEW of speech is the kind of speech necessary for going everywhere and talking to all kinds of Americans: he is a highbrow of sorts, but he does not talk like one, knowing that if he did, there would be the wrong kind of distance between himself and most other human beings. Being a pure product of the big city, he talks like a wise guy and he is a wise guy, like the other guys on the block; but he does not entirely like being a wise guy, and he is one not for the sake of any sense of self it gives him, but because it is a way of staying alive if you live in twentieth-century America, staying alive and getting around. Augie is an adventurer in every sense of the word, including the not so innocent sense, because adventure is the only way to the reality of experience in America. This essential fact about Augie has been the cause of mis- givings in several critics who have otherwise expressed much admiration for the book, and who feel that there is something wrong about Augie's resistance to commitments, or what Augie himself calls being recruited. Augie does not want to be recruited or committed to the commitments which others have decided are desirable for him, one of which is a wealthy marriage. To be committed is to be pinned down and cut off from the adventure of reality and of America, to be cut off from hope and from freedom and from the freedom to move on to new hopes when some hopes collapse. Once you are committed, the frontier is gone. This may not be the most desirable moral attitude, but it certainly gives Augie a degree of awareness which none of the other characters possess. The critics who felt misgivings about Augie's being uncom- mitted recognized the overwhelming reality of a dozen other characters. But since their reality is given solely through Augie's mind, there must be a necessary connection between Augie's uncommitted or free mind and his perception of their reality. Moreover, as Augie himself might say, you have got to be sure that you are not committing yourself to what that guy Erich Fromm calls "escape from freedom." To which it must be added that Kierkegaard, in pointing the necessity of choice and commitment, attacked the very commitments which Augie resists, the conformist, conventional, and official roles which are characteristic forms of inauthenticity, a term which anticipates the stuffed shirt. And the connection between Augie's chief attitude and his grasp of experience comes to a climax in the wonderful episode of the eagle who, like Augie, refuses in his own way to be committed. Any para- phrase of the episode would violate its narrative tact and subtlety, but the main thing about the eagle is his refusal to be dominated beyond a certain point by another being: which seems quite sensible to Augie and outrageous cowardice to the girl who is training him and who is also trying to impose another kind of domination upon Augie. Augie === Page 117 === BOOKS 115 does not want to be dominated and he does not want to dominate any- one else: this is a free country, and to dominate or to be dominated is to be cut off from the reality of experience and of human beings in America, however else it may be in a hierarchical society. Augie is precisely like the veterans of the last war who once the war was over wanted to get out of the army because no matter how high your rank, there was always someone else to boss you around: freedom is existence, as America is adventure. Since America began as an adventure, Augie is right to conclude as he does: Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus, too, thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America. Thus, by hoping for the best and being prepared for the worst, Augie proves that there is an America, a country in which anything might happen, wonderful or awful, but a guy has a fighting chance to be himself, find out things for himself, and find out what's what. For the first time in fiction America's social mobility has been transformed into a spiritual energy which is not doomed to flight, renunciation, exile, denunciation, the agonized hyper-intelligence of Henry James, or the hysterical cheering of Walter Whitman. Delmore Schwartz FORSTER'S INDIA THE HILL OF DEVI. By E. M. Forster. Harcourt, Brace. $4.00. The Hill of Devi is E. M. Forster's account-composed mainly of letters written to people in England-of his two trips to the Indian state of Dewas Senior; the first, in 1912-13, ended quickly; the second was longer and took place in 1921 when Forster was employed as Private Secretary to the ruler, His Highness Sir Tukoji Rao III, K.C.I.E., the Maharajah of Dewas Senior. The book is chiefly occupied with descrip- tions of the daily life of the Court of the Maharajah, the way the little, anomalous state was ruled and misruled, bankrupted and finally ruined; it also follows the rapid degeneration in the fortunes of the Maharajah himself, concluding with his flight from his Palace to Pondicherry, where he exiled himself and died. Dewas Senior was "an amazing little state, which can have no parallel, except in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera." The royal family was Rajput and Maratha, split in the middle of the eighteenth century into === Page 118 === 116 PARTISAN REVIEW Senior and Junior halves, ruling tiny, neighboring states. A queer and apparently motiveless rivalry sprang up between the sections of the dynasty, and the atmosphere of the Court of Dewas Senior was heavy with spies and emissaries from the adjacent court, with spies from other more powerful states, with British Political Agents, Agents to the Gov- ernor General, rumored and impending visits from the Viceroy and the Prince of Wales, and all the familiar and cruelly farcical apparatus, rigamarole and stage machinery of colonial government-a story often told, but one always worth listening to again. Dewas Senior was in the middle of rebuilding and abortively Westernizing itself (the Maharajah had read Aristotle's Politics with his English tutor), and had, like so much else in Colonial India, got bogged down through lack of energy and money; it was a chaos and a shambles when Forster arrived, and was even worse when he left. The New Palace . . . is still building, and the parts of it that were built ten years ago are already falling down. You would weep at the destruction, expense, and hideousness, and I do almost. We live amongst rubble and mortar, and excavation whence six men carry a basket of earth, no larger than a cat's, twenty yards once in five minutes . . . two pianos (one a grand), a harmonium, and a dulciphone, all new and all unplayable, their notes sticking and their frames cracked by the dryness . . . dozens of warped towel-horses are stabled there, or a new suite of drawing-room chairs with their insides gushing out. I open a cupboard near the bath and find it full of teapots, I ask for a book- case and it bows when it sees me and lies rattling on the floor. I don't know what to do about it all, and scarcely what to feel. It's no good trying to make something different out of it, for it is as profoundly Indian as an Indian temple. The life of the Court proceeded through this mess, or perhaps it is more precise to say that the life of the Court was this mess: confusion and vulgarity and broken-downness were the conditions under which it thrived as well as perished. For although Gilbert and Sillivan might have written an opera describing this state, the original version surely was in German, a burlesque in three acts by Hegel, called The Philosophy of History. It is amazing how cogent Hegel's analysis of the spiritual life of India still seems, how thoroughly a book like The Hill of Devi ratifies its speculations. Almost everything Forster describes offers the reader a view of the Spirit still entangled with nature-not at one with it, but not yet separated into self-consciousness either. And the struggle of the Spirit to find itself, to become sensible of its existence in the material and social reality that encompasses and, in the denseness of India, almost strangles it, generates the two dominant modes of con- === Page 119 === BOOKS 117 sciousness in Indian life—the alternate obliviousness to and worship of that overwhelming material reality. In a typical Indian complex of ideas, spirit seems to be both absent and immanent everywhere at the same time; for the Indian there seems to be no sense of the contradiction, or at least the unruliness, present in this notion, which at once disquiets the Westerner. “The unseen was always close to him, even when he was joking or intriguing. Red paint on a stone could evoke it. . . . It was difficult to be sure what he did believe (outside the great mystic mo- ments) or what he thought right or wrong.” In this garbled world oleo- graphs of Krishna and the Archbishop of Canterbury can hang next to each other on the wall, and men and cows can sleep, undisturbed, in the same room. Forster, making decorations for the religious festival Gokul Ashtami, the celebration of the birth of Krishna—the same ritual described in A Passage to India—took some abandoned “glass battery cases” and filled them with water and live fish, “into which some hu- manitarian idiot dropped handfuls of flour so that the fish should not starve. You couldn’t have seen a whale.” Not an idea or an object is allowed to remain for a moment in an unassimilated state, but is at once caught up in the swirling disorganization of the Court. (One wonders just how long the beautiful geometrical patterns of Le Cor- busier’s new city in India will stand as they are, how soon it will be before they begin to burgeon with festoons and votive images, and to succumb to the static heterogeneity of Indian culture.) Into this scene comes—as he has always done—the Englishman; but in The Hill of Devi he is not a conqueror or a merchant, a missionary or an educator. From Sir Walter Raleigh to Sir Evelyn Baring the destiny of a considerable part of the English upper classes has been in- volved with subjugated peoples, and the attitudes Englishmen have developed toward them are almost as various as those they admit to in the relations of the classes at home. But Forster is no T. E. Lawrence, toying with his personality and acting the great white Sheikh, nor a Mary Kingsley, with Bible and black bombazine umbrella, stalking through the jungles, imperturbable in her convictions and her love. For- ster has sundered all relations with the gunboats and the cotton mills; he has deliberately renounced the shibboleth of the Colonial, the “Civis Romanus sum,” that dreadful apostrophe by whose authority the battle- ships were sent into the harbors of Piraeus and Canton, polo fields laid out in every outpost, and Englishmen universally compelled to dress for dinner in the tropics. Forster casts a jaundiced eye on everything Eng- lish and everything the English have done. He squats with the Indians until his legs cramp: “The courtiers saw that I was in pain, and told === Page 120 === 118 PARTISAN REVIEW the servants to move the tray that I might stretch, but I refused, nor would I touch the entire English dinner that was handed round during the meal. . . .” He is happy that he is alone with them, contemplating “with pleasure that there was not another European within a radius of twenty miles.” On the other hand he is no Bishop Colenso, con- verted by the natives he came to convert: “. . . it is difficult to make vivid what seems so fatuous. There is no dignity, no taste, no form, and though I am dressed as a Hindu I shall never become one. I don’t think one ought to be irritated with idolatry because one can see from the faces of the people that it touches something very deep in their hearts. But it is natural that missionaries, who think these ceremonies wrong as well as inartistic, should lose their tempers.” Forster always tries to maintain those trying attitudes of disinterested intelligence and enlightened sympathy, the only things he knows that he can trust; unlike the Colonial English he has no faith in the white man’s mission, or God’s either, for that matter. His principal motive for being there at all is intellectual curiosity, that quality whose absence from the English middle-class mind was so deplored by Matthew Arnold. Forster has faith only in the occasional intelligence of human nature, and he keeps going, in the face of the greed, inefficiency and stupidity which surround him, by believing that if one looks hard enough he will find people who are interesting and worth loving. In Bapu Sahib, the Maharajah of Dewas Senior, he found that person. “Affection, all through his checkered life, was the only force to which Bapu Sahib responded.” “He was certainly a genius and pos- sibly a saint, and he had to be a king.” The Maharajah was a deeply religious Hindu; he spoke and wrote excellent English (Forster speaks no Indian tongue), and in several ways resembled Aziz in A Passage to India—a man who unsuccessfully tried to straddle two cultures. Sur- rounded by spies and courtiers, pampered and bullied by the Colonial Administration, alternately intimate and remote, he was just the char- acter who, in his incalculability, has always fascinated Forster. And yet his personality never comes through in the book. It is the one thing Forster does not conceive successfully—one has merely Forster’s word that the mystery surrounding the being of the Maharajah is there, but one never gets the full sense of that mystery, and whether it really touches something universal and imponderable in all human affairs. And, one suspects, Forster overrates the Maharajah’s genius as well, for those sayings and writings of his that Forster includes in this book are not nearly so impressive as he supposes them to be. This is the same kind of failure that has been noted about A Passage to India in relation to === Page 121 === BOOKS 119 the Marabar Caves and Mrs. Moore—the mystery is more an assertion by the author than an actual presence; if the reader feels the mystery, it is by submitting to Forster's belief in it rather than by experiencing it directly in the fabric of the novel. What is clear in The Hill of Devi, however, is the deep bond of affection that was forged between Forster and the Maharajah; all the silliness which cost the latter a kingdom could not damage it. But the content of that relation is never realized. It is not easy to suggest why this should be once again the weakness in Forster's writing. No doubt there is a hiatus between the ability to describe accurately the conditions of life and spirit in Dewas Senior and the more demanding skill required to present its most complex per- sonality—a hiatus that might be bridged by the evocation, say, of Hegel rather than Gilbert and Sullivan, although not necessarily so. I don't mean to imply that Forster doesn't, in general, apprehend his subject with his usual acuteness, but there is clearly a reticence on his part to do more than hint at what this personality is like. Perhaps this relaxing of his critical faculties in relation to the Maharajah is the result of love and friendship—perhaps it is something more, a refusal to consider personality in abstract terms, a fear of defiling an affectionate memory by relating it to ideas. Whatever it may be, the character of the Maha- rajah, and what it was like to be in close relation to such a remarkably talented Indian, is the weakest thing in the book, while the description of the State of Dewas Senior, and its effect on an intelligent English- man, is the strongest. The Hill of Devi is an excellent account of what it was to be an Englishman and a liberal in a decrepit Anglo-India, and that leaves it an excellent travel book, one of the best I know. Steven Marcus SOUTHERN CLAIMS SOUTHERN RENASCENCE: THE LITERATURE OF THE MODERN SOUTH. Edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and Robert D. Jacobs. Johns Hopkins. $5.00. As its title indicates, Southern Renascence is a book about a hallucination shared by twenty-six critics, historians, and sociologists. Half of them describe it in great detail, while the other half busy them- selves with speculations on how it came into being. One would like to think that the whole thing is a case of innocent literary misjudgment. But we are clearly dealing here not with a group of people so impressed by Southern literature that they feel impelled to study it, but rather with something closer to a political movement. This book grows out of a conviction (never quite stated) that the South, by an iron law of === Page 122 === 120 PARTISAN REVIEW culture, should have produced a great literature. Nowadays we all know that only a hierarchical society with a leisure class at the top can pro- duce works of art. The antebellum South was such a society, so it ought to have had a literature. But for some reason it didn’t: the great writers of nineteenth-century America all came from the industrial North or the frontier. Oddly enough, then, from a cultural point of view the South was in the same position of inferiority with respect to the North that America was to Europe. Our traditionalist critics, however, take that in their stride. Without actually repudiating Eliot’s Law, they invoke Tate’s leftist deviation to account for the special case. Tate’s refinement amounts to this: that the Civil War changed everything by creating a “tension” between agrarianism and industrialism, aristocracy and de- mocracy, regionalism and nationalism. In our own time, this tension has finally generated a great literature. A delayed reaction, to be sure, but better late than never. Howard Washington Odum informs us that since 1900 “the South has contributed no less than five thousand titles to the full-sized book literature of the nation as measured by standard catalogues and major publishers.” Of course, the editors do not claim every one of the 5,000 titles for the Renascence. With a due sense of proportion, they give Faulkner three essays to himself. Warren and Tate carry off second- place honors, with two men assigned to cover each. Then come painstak- ing accounts of Ellen Glasgow, James Branch Cabell (whose “line of descent is not from such mighty works as Dante’s Divine Comedy; it is rather from Dante’s admirer and biographer, Giovanni Boccaccio”), Stark Young, Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Erskine Caldwell (who has “created a world abundantly and successfully, a world sufficient unto itself, which bears significant relation to other fictional worlds . . . and, further, a world indispensable to the constella- tion we call Southern literature”), Caroline Gordon, John Crowe Ran- som, John Peale Bishop, Donald Davidson (“he is unique in modern times in having made the effort Wordsworth undertook in his Prelude”), Cleanth Brooks, and Merrill Moore (“A culture has gone far that can propel a writer to such distances as Moore has traversed. . . . He ex- plores the universal through the personal, the abiding truth through the moment of lyrical enlightenment flashing upon the contemporary scene”). Along with these revaluations, we get several surveys charac- terizing Southern writing in general and relating it to the Southern temper. This great bulk of evidence demonstrates that the laws of cul- ture discovered in history by Eliot and modified slightly by Tate have now been confirmed before our very eyes. === Page 123 === BOOKS 121 Why did it take such a long time for the Southern way of life to find expression in literature? Only when the cancerous growth of indus- trialism had already contaminated the upper half of our body politic and was threatening to invade the lower regions, did the necessity for preserving the Southern way of life become clear. The Agrarians declared in their symposium [I'll Take My Stand] that industrialism was predatory, in that it was based on a concept of nature as something to be used. In so doing, industrialism threw man out of his proper relationship to nature, and to God whose creation it was. The Agrarian quarrel, they declared, was with applied science, which in the form of industrial capitalism had as its object the enslave- ment of human energies. (Louis D. Rubin, Jr.) Southerners knew all this not because they were more intelligent than Northerners, but because they had a different history. Having exper- ienced defeat-"a bitter cup which no American is supposed to know anything about" and having lived through a "foreign" occupation, the typical Southerner learned the lesson of tragedy: that human beings are limited creatures. Northerners, on the other hand, because they are so prosperous and successful, believe that whatever is willed can be achieved if only you invent the right machines. For the typical Northerner, as he appears in this book, is an identical twin of the typical American whom contemporary Europeans have analyzed so thoroughly. If he weren't so personally unattractive, he would make a good tragic hero, a sort of industrialized, urbanized Tamburlaine. Measured against this God of the Machine who worships no God but himself, whose sense of life is a compound of the superficialities of liberalism and scientism, whose urban character has blunted his sensi- tivity to the eternal rhythms of Nature, whose social mobility has cut him adrift in a world with no traditions and values measured against this Northerner, The Southern temper is marked by the coincidence of a sense of the concrete, a sense of the elemental, a sense of the ornamental, a sense of the representative, and a sense of totality. (Robert B. Heilman.) These qualities plus his experience of the vicissitudes of history make it easy for the Southerner to write masterpieces, as easy as putting pen to paper. Now it is true that serious Southern writing has a richness and immediacy that are rare in other parts of the country. It is also true that it goes in for, in specificity, is unembarrassed by violence and emotion- alism, and makes a great show of organizing its total conceptions. More- over, some Southern novelists, by virtue of living with the Negro prob- lem, have been able to feel the urgency of human relations in a way === Page 124 === 122 PARTISAN REVIEW that the quieter North hasn't. As for the sense of defeat, we know from postwar Italian movies that it may bring an awareness of how tough life can be, a sensitivity to the details of poverty, a remarkable candor in the face of humiliation, and with it all, a bitterness that hardly dares betray itself by its right name. Southern writers make no attempt to obscure the wretchedness and bestiality of which people are capable, while dreaming of human glories that are gone. As a group, they have tried to remain true to the conception of man as the shame and glory of the universe. But the Faulknerian attitude to the Negro problem—that it is a deep moral turbulence in the blood of the South which can only work itself out in agony, guilt, and expiation—soon becomes a received idea, and the urgency disappears. Violence gets out of hand, becoming a sub- ject luxuriated in for its own sake or for effect, while the rhetoric gets more and more flamboyantly dizzy. The kind of concreteness that derives from a living response to experience, moreover, is as rare in the South as anywhere else. Indeed, Italian movies and Southern literature (always excepting Faulkner, who is as much an accident as any other genius) have also taught us that defeat doesn't always bring wisdom. Certain ad- mirable qualities, yes, but no sense of tragedy, no revelation of human limits and the meaning of mortality. And most disturbing, a fuzziness about what has been defeated that neutralizes the benefits a history of defeat sometimes provides. Who besides Faulkner has imagined convincingly and concretely the great things that the world lost when the antebellum South was destroyed? The experience of defeat has left Southern writers with a poignant sense of loss, but loss of what? Ransom's poetry, for instance, is so full of lament for transience that Isabel Gamble (in an otherwise good essay) compares him to the Elizabethan lyricists. And when Tate in the “Ode to the Confederate Dead” uses as an indictment of modern man his own inability to imagine what the South used to be like, we have surely reached some sort of record for self-mystification. Tate and many of his co-regionalists can tell us, in effect, “I don’t know what kind of world it was, but I do know that it was better than ours, and the fact that neither of us can imagine what it was like proves that we are fragmented, dehumanized creatures.” Only immense devotion to an ideology would sanction logic of that order, and the Agrarians are de- voted. They did everything they could to destroy the myth of the courtly, well-mannered, hospitable, uncle-tommish, magnolia-filled South, in order to replace it with a far more sophisticated legend based on a preconceived ideology about culture. They have tried to convince us that a little corner of America once was Europe. === Page 125 === BOOKS 123 But reality takes its revenge on ideology, and it has avenged itself on the Southern mind by denying it the “sense of totality” altogether. The characteristic defect of Southern writing is precisely its inability to sustain a large conception: how could it be otherwise under the cir- cumstances? But Southern Renascence itself should be considered a representative product of the Southern Renascence. What happened to the concrete, elemental Southern temper when this book was written? Agrarian con- servatism hasn't taken a fresh look at the world since I'll Take My Stand, and consequently, for all its devotion to concreteness, it has become that most insidious of all abstractions—an abstract commitment to the con- crete, a traditionalism basing itself on traditions that never existed, a conservatism devoid of content. There was, indeed, something elemental in I'll Take My Stand. It came early enough in the progress of our thinking on these matters to be relevant as prophecy and exhortation; the spirit that drove the great nineteenth-century critics of industrialism crept into it. But its heir has grown into a pale, timid creature, degener- ate son of a red-blooded father. No crusading energy animates Southern Renascence. It is academic, serene, well-mannered, and comfortable in the feeling that no one would dream of disputing either its sociology or its literary judgments. The anti-industrialism most of these critics sup- port is so bloodless that one suspects they know how irrelevant it all is. Nor is there much conviction behind the analyses of individual authors. The better critics are obviously bored with the jargon they feel con- strained to use, nagged by repressed instincts of judgment for which they have no language, bleary-eyed from searching for “significance” be- hind every image. After all, it's a strain on the eyes, this staring at a thing that isn't there. Norman Podhoretz THEOLOGY AND POLITICS CHRISTIAN REALISM AND POLITICAL PROBLEMS. By Reinhold Niebuhr. Scribner's. $3.00. Reinhold Niebuhr's virtues are again evident in this collec- tion of essays: his mind is powerful and incisive, his scholarship thorough and digested. Although the essays are either essentially secular or theo- logical, with little explicit reference of one type to the other, a systematic view of man and society is implied in all of them. I shall try to state this view, assuming that Niebuhr's theology is a necessary part of his social criticism and is itself completed by his theory of history and civilization. === Page 126 === 124 PARTISAN REVIEW Christian realism seems to be a definition of man based on the Scriptures and on Christian theology. Man is radically free to choose either good or evil and he often, in fact, chooses evil. Evil is thus a positive goal, not merely, as in Platonism, the absence of good; nor is it the case that man always wills the good and is prevented from at- taining it either by ignorance or by insufficient control of the passions. Niebuhr accuses secular social thinkers of these erroneous beliefs about people, beliefs also found in classical rationalism, in Thomas Aquinas, in Rousseau. Contemporary attempts to deal with evil by education or scientific method are regarded as sentimental; if man wants evil, edu- cation, science, even self-discipline, can make it more effective. The tragic flaw in man which brings him to desire evil seems, for Niebuhr, to be self-interest. Its opposite is love, which brings true altru- ism. Man is free to choose evil because he is not totally bound by time and culture; he is in nature and beyond it, is creature and creator, is destructive and creative. Social science treats man only as a natural creature, time- and culture-bound; so it cannot do justice to his tran- scendent nature and his creativity; nor can it account for the willful evils of communism and fascism. Niebuhr seems to equate love with creativity and altruism, and he argues that if man chooses love, he needs, if he is to go far with it, God's grace. Christian love (agape, as distinct from philia and eros) reaches its height in sacrificial love, love of the Cross, which is the ultimate altruism. Secular appeals to enlightened self-interest as a basis for community presuppose a rationality that men do not have and use a form of the very principle of destructiveness to yield good. This is not only illogical but unrealistic in that it does not face up to human experience, which is Niebuhr's criterion of the worth of social beliefs. Contemporary experience includes war, totalitarianism, concentration camps and gas chambers; and Niebuhr thinks that only religious vision is adequate to face and understand these horrors. Niebuhr's reliance on experience is all to the good, but experience is, of course, the touchstone of empirical science. Insofar as science does not understand what it should, it is not scientific enough. To make a generalization which does not, of course, apply to all current work, there are two essential respects in which contemporary social science fails in its dealing with our experience: it often substitutes the laboratory for the social situation; and it neglects history. Laboratory work is in- dispensable but its conclusions cannot be applied without qualification to society. The neglect of history destroys the context of social issues and vitiates their meaning. Criticism of social science in terms like these === Page 127 === We couldn't transcribe this content due to usage restrictions. === Page 128 === 126 PARTISAN REVIEW action. But Niebuhr cannot accept this because it is a cure worse than the disease, an attempt to deprive man of that very freedom which is his glory as well as his disaster. What, then, is left? The answer, not directly given, is in the theological essays: we must rely on grace, which will yield Christian love. Why doesn't Niebuhr make this answer in the context of his po- litical essays? I think he cannot do so unless he commits himself to some social use of grace: a religious revival perhaps, or at least a revival of faith; yet his own test of experience keeps him from this pro- posal because he knows that ages of faith have exhibited as much human evil as other ages. There is still another alternative: God's grace falls on us mysteriously and He may resolve our difficulties in His own good time. But if this is what Niebuhr believes, what is the use of all this political writing? Why not wait and have faith? The most penetrating essay in this book, for me, is the tenth, "Love and Law in Protestantism and Catholicism." (It is also the best written, as it should be, for the material is better grasped.) Here Niebuhr deals with the anguish and perplexity of man's personal situation. His special quality, perhaps, is that he never thinks of man as entirely a transcendent creature trapped in the coils of mortality and society, from which it is his appointed task to extricate himself. Rather, he treats man's social character as an essential part of his nature. So he does not, like Luther, think of man as totally depraved and completely reliant on grace; nor does he, like Saint John of the Cross, treat ordinary human love as a subordinate step on the way to Universal Love. He sees filial and pa- ternal love, and sexual love, as different in degree, but not in kind, from love of the Cross. So he escapes the mystic's disavowal of society as well as the collectivist's disavowal of personality. One can generalize from Niebuhr's strength and weakness: this kind of theological speculation is at its best when it deals with the person and with those interpersonal relationships which are at the heart of daily living and make community. But it fails in its trafficking with the large problems of society, and it offers for political life no solution at all. Ralph Gilbert Ross the hans hofmann school of fine art 52 west 8th street new york city phone gramercy 7-3491 morning afternoon evening === Page 129 === BACK ISSUES OF PR now available at reduced prices-30c each (regular price 60c) Any four of the following for $1.00 22 OCTOBER 1949: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Causes of the Civil War; Louis Martin-Chauffier-Proust and the Double "I"; Angus Wilson- Two stories; Irving Howe-O'Hara in Samarra. 23 NOVEMBER 1949: Albert Camus-Between Yes and No; Saul Bellow- From the Life of Augie March; Elizabeth Hardwick-Elizabeth Bowen's Fiction; Clement Greenberg-Our Period Style. 24 DECEMBER 1949: José Ortega y Gasset-In Search of Goethe from With- in; Allen Tate-Our Cousin, Mr. Poe; Leslie A. Fiedler-Montana, or the End of Jean Jacques Rousseau; Delmore Schwartz-Views of a Second Violinist. 25 JANUARY 1950: Arthur Mizener-Scott Fitzgerald; James Burnham- The Suicidal Mania of American Business; Alfred Kazin-On Melville as Scripture. 26 FEBRUARY 1950: Religion and the Intellectuals, I; Jorge Luis Borges- The Zahir (a story); Joseph Frank-Maltraux and Modern Art. 30 JULY-AUGUST 1950: Marcel Aymé-Crossing Paris (a story); Geoffrey Gorer-The Erotic Myth of America; Raymond Aron-Politics and the French Intellectuals. 31 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1950: Randall Jarrell-The Profession of Poetry; Hollis Alpert-Philadelphia: Plans and Pigeons; Erich Auerbach-The World of Rabelais. 32 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1950: Marie Bonaparte-Poe and "The Black Cat"; Saul Bellow-The Trip to Galena (a story); George Barker, Horace Gregory, Robert Lowell-Three long poems. 33 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1951: Arthur Koestler-The Age of Longing (a story); Harvey Breit-A Sense of Faulkner; Randall Jarrell-The Obscu- rity of the Poet; Delmore Schwartz-The Grapes of Crisis. 34 MARCH-APRIL 1951: James Agee-The Morning Watch (a short novel); Sidney Hook-Philosophy and/or Agony; Stephen Spender-Reflections on the Literary Life. 35 MAY-JUNE 1951: Elizabeth Hardwick-A Florentine Conference (a story); William Barrett-Fitzgerald and America; Erich Auerbach-Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert. 36 JULY-AUGUST 1951: Andre Gide-Two Declarations; Diana Trilling- A Communist and His Ideals; Eleanor Clark-The Fountains of Rome; Louis Auchincloss-Edith Wharton and Her New Yorks. 38 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1951: Saul Bellow-The Einhorns (a story); William Barrett-American Fiction and American Values; Raymond Aron -The Leninist Myth of Imperialism. ALSO: All bi-monthly issues for 1952, with exception of January-February. PARTISAN REVIEW, 513 Sixth Avenue, New York 11, N. Y. I enclose for the following back issues (insert numbers below) NAME STREET CITY. .ZONE.. STATE. === Page 130 === 128 RIOPELLE FIRST AMERICAN EXHIBITION Paintings and Watercolors thru jan. 23 PIERRE MATISSE GALLERY 41 e. 57 st., n. y. ANNE RYAN COLLAGE AND PAINTINGS Jan. 4-23 RICHARD LINDNER PAINTINGS Jan. 25 - Feb. 13 BETTY PARSONS GALLERY-15 E. 57th St. 9 Jan. 4-23 Americans today SIDNEY JANIS 5 E 57 JAMES JOYCE THE SECRET OF ULYSSES, an analysis of Joyce's Ulysses. by Rolf Loehrich. $6.00 Edt. by W. Y. Tindall. It serves as a general introd. to Joyce's themes and methods. Prof. Tindali brilliantly dem- onstrates the generic importance of Chamber Music, and its value for under- standing Joyce's whole life and work. $3.75 Other specials listed in Winter GMB Currents-Also list of recordings by poets GOTHAM BOOK MART 41 WEST 47th N. Y. 36, N. Y. PL 7-0367 THE DYLAN THOMAS FUND November 10, 1953 DEAR FRIEND, I am sure you have read in the press of the sudden and tragic death of the great poet Dylan Thomas. Thomas died of encephalopathy at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York on November 9th, after an illness of four days. He was only 39 years old. He was attended by one of the finest brain surgeons in New York and everything possible was done to save him. Thomas' death is an incalculable loss to literature. His work was growing in stature with every year. But there is also a personal tragedy-he leaves a widow without means of support and three children-which gravely concerns his friends and admirers. As spokesmen for a committee of his friends we are making this urgent appeal to you for a contribution to The Dylan Thomas Fund, which we have hastily organized, which will be used to meet his medical bills and funeral expenses and, if the response is as generous as we hope, to tide his family over the next difficult months. Please send your check to The Dylan Thomas Fund, care of Philip Witten- berg, Treasurer, 70 West 40th Street, New York City. An accounting of dis- bursements from the Fund will be sent to the contributors at a later date. For the DYLAN THOMAS FUND COMMITTEE W. H. AUDEN E. E. CUMMINGS ARTHUR MILLER MARIANNE MOORE WALLACE STEVENS THORNTON WILDER TENNESSEE WILLIAMS === Page 131 === Considerably revised since its New York production, this new play by the author of A Streetcar Named Desire is a fantasy with disturbing impli- cations. In a desiccated no-man's land legendary characters move in a phantasmagoria of humanity's uneasy dreams. The predicament and the way CAMINO of escape for a modern Everyman, REAL Kilroy, the ubiquitous ordinary guy- is the more compelling for the ex- travagant humor of his adventures. by Tennessee Williams $3.00 NEW DIRECTIONS, 333 Sixth Avenue, New York 14, N. Y. This is Thomas' first book-length prose THE DOCTOR AND THE DEVILS narrative, a murder story based on the ghoulish exploits of Burke and Hare, one of the most famous cases in Scot- tish criminology. The Chicago Tribune calls it“... a superb job of imagina- tive reconstruction, rich in the poetic quality of its language and yet drip- ping with the ‘cauld grue’ of, say, Stevenson's The Body Snatcher. . . ” by Dylan Thomas $2.50 === Page 132 === AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X) BORZOI BOOKS THE FINAL HOURS by José Suárez Carreño. This extraordinary novel of Madrid-one of the first contemporary Spanish books to be translated into English-places today's Spain on the reading map for Americans. A story of the night life of present day Madrid, it is rich in incident, passionate concentration, and atmosphere. $3.50 THE HORSEMAN ON THE ROOF by Jean Giono. A novel of adventure, risk, and romantic extravagance laid in Southern France during the plague year 1838. Written with great subtlety, verve, and sparkle in a style remini- scent of Stendahl's, it is an impressive achievement, the work of a man considered by many critics as one of France's outstanding writers. $4.00 ALBERTCAMUS The Rebel. In this book the well-known author of The Plague and The Stranger explores the underlying causes of that strange state to which the affairs of men and nations came under the rule of Hitler and in the Soviet Union of Stalin. This profound study of the malaise of our time has caused a sensation among French intellectuals, and is likely to do no less in the United States. With an introduction by Sir Herbert Read. $4.00 GERMAN STORIES AND TALES Selected and edited, with an Editor's Note, by Robert Pick. Pleasurable reading was the criterion by which this book of short German fic- tion was edited. The authors include Hermann Broch, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Kesten, Arthur Schnitzler, and eleven others. The col- lection is the first in a new Borzoi series, to be followed by Spanish Stories and Tales, and French Stories and Tales. Coming February 15th. $5.00 At all bookstores ALFRED A. KNOPF, Publisher AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X) AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X) AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X) AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X) AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X) AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X) AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X) AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)AAK(X)