=== Page 1 === PARTISAN REVIEW NOVEMBER-DECEMBER, 1953 LIONEL TRILLING Flaubert's Last Testament WILLIAM PHILLIPS The Fox and the Grape (a story) PHILIP RAHV The Myth and the Powerhouse JACQUES BARZUN Food for the N. R. F. ELIZABETH HARDWICIK Anderson, Millay and Crane G. L. ARNOLD French Politics: Failure and Promise Poems by Francis Fergusson, Robert Lowell and Edwin Muir. Reviews by Nicola Chiaromonte, R. W. Flint, Ernest Jones 6 75c === Page 2 === Distinguished fiction from VIKING Saul Bellow's long-awaited novel "is very possibly the most significant and remarkable novel to have been pub- lished in the United States in the past decade . . . a diamond-bright, spontaneous prose that is totally free from imitativeness. It enables Bellow to express himself in a way that has hitherto been beyond the range of most American novelists, and it may open doors to others, too. We have a great writer among us." -HARVEY SWADOS "$4.50 "A book of extraordinary and massive power. In its verve, its force, its seemingly endless narrative resource, its audacity of style, and above all in its close mastery of the whole American scene, it seems to me head and shoulders above most contemporary novels and is plainly one of the richest of twentieth century American novels." -ALFRED KAZIN The ADVENTURES of AUGIE MARCH Elizabeth Taylor is "a novelist of the most serious account. Among living novelists it is E. M. Forster of whom Mrs. Taylor most reminds us—this should suggest her charm and her achievement. She has the same gentle worldliness as her older compatriot, a similar undemanding love of people, a similar wit."-DIANA TRILLING "Elizabeth Taylor's books, every one - and now The Sleeping Beauty-seem made in heaven for the original joy of reading. Her sensitivity of spirit, excellence of mind, subtlety and wit of perception and pinning down, and the sheer beauty and grace of what she does with a novel, are unlike anyone else's. The Sleeping Beauty is an enchanting book."-EUDORA WELTY $3.00 The SLEEPING BEAUTY THE VIKING PRESS === Page 3 === PARTISAN REVIEW'S Annual Special Christmas Offer A SAVING OF $1.50 ON EACH GIFT SUBSCRIPTION CHRISTMAS RATES I one-year subscription (your own or gift) $4.00 Additional one-year subscriptions $2.50 Please add 50 cents for each foreign subscription. A special gift card, signed with your name in pen and ink, will announce each of your gift subscriptions. Please use the enclosed reply envelope to send in your order. This Offer Expires December 31, 1953 PARTISAN REVIEW • 513 Sixth Avenue • New York 11, N. Y. A sensitive account of a literary friendship and the development of a great novelist WILLA CATHER A Memoir By ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT "A valuable literary canvas . . . The whole tracing of Miss Cather's 'career' and dedication as an artist between 1910 and 1947 shows a novelist's skill in its little scenes. Along with the critical consideration of all her work . . . she presents an endless number of characters who are part of significant circum- stances."--N. Y. Herald Tribune "This is the way to see Willa Cather." Saturday Review $3.50 CARNIVAL By BERRY FLEMING Author of The Fortune Tellers "A work of art . . . a fascinating per- formance . . Though a novel in form and language, it is poetry in substance and pitch."--N. Y. Herald Tribune $3.00 HENRY JAMES: The Untried Years, 1843-1870 By LEON EDEL Editor of The Complete Plays of Henry James. "Important and beautiful. It shows how rich and fascinating an American chronicle can be written about James . . . He has succeeded brilliantly and movingly."--ALFRED KAZIN $5.00 At all bookstores J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY East Washington Square, Philadelphia 5, Pa. === Page 4 === "MAY SARTON has come into her maturity as a lyric poet with The Land of Silence AND OTHER POEMS “SHE is one of the very few who are born into each age to bring it that freshness of in- sight, that mingled delight of newness and of assent which it is in the gift of the artist alone to give.”—VICTORIA LINCOLN This collection of 56 lyrics and a group of sonnets bears the stamp of an individuality which owes nothing to current poetic poses. Her last book of poems was described in the Saturday Review as "an achievement of the first quality." THE LAND OF SILENCE can only rein- force this opinion. $2.50 The English Novel By Dorothy Van Ghent FIGHTEEN brilliant, closely reasoned essays discussing the outstanding masterpieces of English fiction (and Don Quixote) in a search to define that special essence of great- ness. “I recommend this book warmly as one of the most ex- haustive, imaginative and valu- able studies of the novel yet written." -ALBERT J. GUERARD, JR. $4.00 At all booksellers RINEHART & CO. N. Y. 16 CONTRIBUTORS JACQUES BARZUN has published English versions of Diderot's Ra- meau's Nephew, Becque's La Parisi- enne and Mirbeau's The Epidemic. Two more of his translations will appear shortly: a volume of New Berlioz Letters and Flaubert's Dic- tionary of Accepted Ideas. FRANCIS FERGUSSON's most re- cent book is Dante's Drama of the Mind. He is now teaching at Rut- gers University. EDWIN MUIR is the well known English poet and critic. His Col- lected Poems: 1921-1951 were pub- lished in this country last year. G. L. ARNOLD is on the editorial staff of The Twentieth Century in London. His political writings have appeared here in Commentary, The New Leader and elsewhere. NICOLA CHIAROMONTE is pres- ently living in Rome, and writing drama criticism for the Italian paper Il Mondo. R. W. FLINT is a young critic whose work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Hudson Re- view and elsewhere. ERNEST JONES teaches English at Queens College. He was formerly fiction critic for The Nation. An important American poet THEODORE ROETHKE demonstrates his great power, range, depth, and vigor of imagery in this collection of his best poems. THE WAKING POEMS 1933-1953 "A poet of enormous talent, one whose influence may prove crucial to poetry in English." -The Hopkins Review At all booksellers $3. DOUBLEDAY === Page 5 === AIKEN ARENDT AUDEN AUERBACH BABEL BALDWIN BARKER BARRETT BARZUN BELLOW THE NEW PARTISAN BERRYMAN BISHOP BLACKMUR READER BOWLES BURNHAM CAMUS CHASE 1945 1953 CHIAROMONTE CLARK CONNOLLY edited by William Phillips DAVIS DOWLING FIEDLER and Philip Rahv FITZGERALD GREENBERG GREGORY A Companion Volume to The Partisan Reader: 1934-44 HARDWICK HAUSER HOOK HOWE This 640-page anthology JARRELL JÜNGER KAUFMANN KAZIN contains the best work pub- lished in Partisan Review KLONSKY LANGGÄSSER LOGAN since 1945, some of the finest writing of the modern LOWELL MCCARTHY MALRAUX period: 12 stories, major es- MARCUSE MILOSZ ORTEGA y GASSET says and shorter pieces by 40 writers, and a large sec- tion of poetry including work ORWELL PHILLIPS PRITCHETT by 20 of the foremost Amer- ican and British poets. RAHV RANSOM REED ROETHKE Much of this material has never before appeared in ROSENFELD SCHAPIRO SCHLESINGER book form. Published by HARCOURT BRACE & CO. VAN GHENT WARSHOW WATKINS WISEMAN The New Partisan Reader is available at the special price of $4.50 only in combination with a sub- scription. It can also be purchased at this special price to- gether with each of the gift subscriptions offered on page one. 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. T D TRILLING PARTISAN REVIEW, 513 Sixth Ave., New York 11 SCHWARTZ SHAPIRO SIMPSON SPENDER STAFFORD STEVENS SWEENEY === Page 6 === PR PARTISAN REVIEW EDITORS: William Phillips, Philip Rahv ASSOCIATE EDITORS: William Barrett, Delmore Schwartz EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: 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 513 Sixth Ave., 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 November-December, 1953, 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 === UNIVERSITY PRINTS NOVEMBER-DECEMBER, 1953 VOLUME XX, NUMBER 6 CONTENTS FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT, Lionel Trilling 605 TWO POEMS, Robert Lowell 631 AESOP IN HELL: THE FOX AND THE CROW, Francis Fergusson 632 TWO SONNETS, Edwin Muir 634 THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE, Philip Rahv 635 THE FOX AND THE GRAPE, William Phillips 649 FOOD FOR THE N. R. F., Jacques Barzun 660 FRENCH POLITICS: FAILURE AND PROMISE, G. L. Arnold 675 BOOKS ANDERSON, MILLAY AND CRANE IN THEIR LETTERS, 690 Elizabeth Hardwick INTELLECTUALS UNDER THE "SYSTEM," Nicola Chiaromonte 697 JARRELL AS CRITIC, R. W. Flint 702 FICTION CHRONICLE, Ernest Jones 708 A LETTER OF RESIGNATION 716 INDEX TO VOLUME XX 718 === Page 8 === Princeton UNIVERSITY PRESS Mimesis By ERICH AUERBACH. Translated from the German by Willard R. Trask. This book reaches back through two thousand years of Western literature to discover how the writer from age to age has solved the most intriguing prob- lem of his craft—the serious portrayal of everyday reality. By an analysis of key passages in 20 writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf, Erich Auerbach traces the revolutions of thought and taste that have determined the changes in our concept of realism. $7.50 Dante's Drama of the Mind A MODERN READING OF THE "PURGATORIO" By FRANCIS FERGUSSON, author of The Idea of a Theatre. "Mr. Fergusson has here approached the poem in ways that are quite original and new in the history of Dante interpreta- tion. Time and again, out of positions that have been at- tained only by modern criticism, he comes up with insights into the poetic structure of the poem which are freshly il- luminating even to one who has lived with the work many years."--Charles S. Singleton. $4.00 Blake's Illustrations to the Divine Comedy By ALBERT S. ROE. A detailed study of William Blake's last great work, giving the history of the drawings and the first thorough analysis of the entire series. There are full- page collotype reproductions of the 102 drawings and 7 en- gravings, in this first unlimited publication. Albert S. Roe is curator of the Art Collections of Bowdoin College. Text, 228 pages; illus., 112 pages. 8% x 11%. $20.00 Order from your bookstore, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS === Page 9 === Distinguished RANDOM HOUSE poetry A tale in verse and voices by Robert Penn Warren BROTHER TO DRAGONS An extraordinary tale, in verse and voices, by the Pulitzer Prize- winning author of All the King's Men. It is based on a brutal murder, committed by the nephews of Thomas Jefferson. The events leading up to the murder, and the even more astonishing aftermath, provide the narrative framework for one of the most remarkable poetic achievements of this century. $3.50 Karl Shapiro POEMS: 1940-1953 This collection, which contains 106 poems in all, represents the author's own choice of the contents of three previous books—and eighteen more recent poems not previously published in book form. $3.00 At all bookstores, RANDOM HOUSE, N. Y. === Page 10 === Boswell tours the German courts and visits Voltaire and Rousseau BOSWELL ON THE GRAND TOUR Germany and Switzerland, 1764 Edited by FREDERICK A. POTTLF, Sterling Professor of English, Yale Uni- versity. In this volume of his private papers James Boswell shakes off the gloom of his Utrecht days and embarks in high spirits on a tour of the German courts during the reign of Frederick the Great. Assuming the title of Baron, he attends balls and musicals in his suit of flowered velvet, dines on lark, and completely entrances dukes, princesses, and himself. Nor does he forget the pleasures of an occasional amorous escapade. Boswell records in complete and vivid detail his interviews in Switzerland with Voltaire and Rousseau, the two greatest men of his age. Professor Pottle has supplied illuminating notes throughout, and letters Boswell wrote and received (including a hitherto unpublished letter from Voltaire). 9 illustrations and endpaper maps. $5.00 "A new writer takes his place in the literary world" -Richard Wright in his Introduction IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN By GEORGE LAMMING A truly remarkable self-portrait of both a man and his people by a young Negro from the Barbados whom the Times Literary Supplement has singled out as "a major new writer." George Lamming tells the story of his boyhood in a colonial world bounded by the Caribbean Sea, sun and sky. He tells of his awakening to the turbulent forces of a chang- ing society, his realization that his island home is no longer his castle, and his gradual awareness that his castle is in his skin and his skin is both his pride and his prison. "As an evocation of place and time the book is remarkable."—GRANVILLE HICKS. Endpapers and frontispiece by West $3.75 Indian artist, Denis Williams. At all bookstores MCGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY, New York 36 === Page 11 === ★ —YALE— ★ Provocative books by important modern writers THE PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS Volume I — Language By ERNST CASSIRER Volume I of a three-volume philosophical classic, translated from the German for the first time. A synthesis of Cassirer's vast knowledge of the creative activities through which man has given form to his experience. $5.00 THE ORIGIN AND GOAL OF HISTORY By KARL JASPERS A great European philosopher places our era in the total view of history, appraising the perils of the contemporary crisis and the chances for the future. $4.00 Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought New volumes in this distinguished series ERNST JÜNGER By J. P. 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Edited by the noted English critic and author, this book includes such generally unavailable masterpieces as Maria Edge- worth's Castle Rackrent, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's The Room in the Dragon Volant, George Eliot's The Lifted Veil and Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts. A Permanent Library Book Eleven novels . 896 pages $6.00 At all bookstores THE DIAL PRESS, Inc. 461 Fourth Avenue . New York 16 . N. Y. === Page 13 === ANNOUNCING One of the truly great books of the century THE VOICES OF SILENCE Man and His Art by ANDRÉ MALRAUX Translated by Stuart Gilbert "The 450-odd illustrations are, very simply, perhaps the great- est collection of reproductions of man's art ever put together in the covers of one work." -N. Y. Times With 663 pages of text; slip case. $25 at all booksellers DOUBLE DAY OSCAR TARCOV a first novel An interpretation and critical analysis of Kierkegaard's thought by the author of The Existentialists, James Collins. $4.50 At all bookstores or direct from the publisher Henry Regnery Company - 20 W. Jackson Blvd. - Chicago 4, Illinois EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOANALYSIS by JEAN-PAUL SARTRE S ARTRE here blends philoso- phy and psychology in present- ing a new psychoanalysis based on the principles of existential- ism. H e criticizes traditional pscho- analytical schools and at- tempts to justify a method which interprets the human personality in terms of a fundamental choice of being. M an-in-the-world is the object of an examination which includes in its scope the "Psycho- analysis of things." $4.75 Expedite Shipment by Prepayment PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY PUBLISHERS 15 East 40 St., Desk 97 New York 16, N. Y. BRAVO MY MONSTER is a novel of suspense and horror written in diary form. "A brilliant, highly original ex- ploration of a realm of experience opened up by Franz Kafka. The au- thor's power is impressive." -Allen Tate $3.00 THE MIND OF KIERKEGAARD === Page 14 === BOLLINGEN SERIES 1953 XX THE COLLECTED WORKS OF C. G. JUNG Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Vol. 7: TWO ESSAYS ON ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY The core of Jung's psychological system. 6" x 9". 325 pages. $3.75 Vol. 12: PSYCHOLOGY AND ALCHEMY The first volume to appear in the Collected Works, this work presents a seemingly forgotten relic of medieval superstition that provides an important clue to our understanding of contemporary psychology. 6" x 9". 270 illustrations. 550 pages. $5.00 XXXI PSYCHOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS An anthology of passages from the writings of C. G. Jung. Edited by Jolande Jacobi. 6" x 9". 342 pages. $4.50 XXXIV WINDS By St.-John Perse. The French text with a translation by Hugh Chisholm. 9" x 12". 256 pages. $5.00 XXXV CREATIVE INTUITION IN ART AND POETRY The A. W. 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Y. 21 === Page 15 === Lionel Trilling FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT¹ Flaubert died suddenly in 1880, having brought close to its end but leaving unfinished and unrevised the novel that had occu- pied his thought for eight years. The entire dedication of himself with which Flaubert responded to the claims of art is of course the very essence of his legend, but to Bouvard and Pécuchet he gave a special and savage devotion which went beyond the call of literary duty as even he understood it. The book was to him more than a work of art; it was a deed. At the moment of what he conceived to be the ultimate defeat of true culture, it was an act of defiance and revenge. Flaubert was not unique in nineteenth-century France for his belief that bourgeois democracy was bringing about the death of mind, beauty, literature, and greatness; this opinion, among the distinguished writers of the century, was virtually a commonplace. But he was unique in the immediacy and simplicity with which he experienced the debacle—“I can no longer talk with anyone without growing I rage.⁹⁹ He was unique too in the necessity he felt to see the crisis in all its possible specificity of detail. For him the modern barbarism was not merely a large general tendency which could be compre- hended by a large general emotion; he was constrained to watch it with a compulsive and obsessive awareness of its painful particularities. 1 This essay was written as the introduction to the edition of Bouvard and Pécuchet which New Directions will bring out in January in the translation of G. W. Stonier and T. W. Earp. 2 All the quotations from Flaubert's letters are from the admirable Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller which Farrar, Straus and Young will publish in January. === Page 16 === 606 PARTISAN REVIEW He was made rabid—to use his own word—by this book, this phrase, this solecism, this grossness of shape or form, this debasement of man- ners, this hollow imitation of thought. He was beyond believing that he could do anything to stem or divert the flood of swinishness, as he called it, that was sweeping away every hope of the good life—Bouvard and Pécuchet is a triumph of the critical mind, but if we suppose criti- cism to be characterized by the intention to correct and reform, the book cannot be called a work of criticism. In its intention it is less to be compared with any other literary work than with the stand of Roland at Roncesvalles. No less beset than the hero, no less hopeless, no less grim, and no less grimly glad, Flaubert resolves that while the breath of life is in him he will give blow for blow and pile up the corpses of his enemies as a monument to the virtues they despise and he adores. His long fierce passion for the book was not matched by the ex- pectation of certain of his friends who were most competent to esti- mate the chances of its success. “I am preparing a book,” he wrote to Turgenev in November of 1872, “in which I shall spit out my bile.” But Turgenev grew troubled, and so did Taine and Zola, because Flaubert was precisely not spitting out his bile. The new novel, as Flaubert said of it, was to be “a kind of encyclopedia made into farce,” and he devoured libraries, his notebooks grew ever more numerous, and his pride in them grew with their number; he was to brag that he had read 1,500 books in preparation for the novel. Anyone who loved Flaubert must have been dismayed as he gave year after year of his life to gathering the materials for a massive joke which was no doubt very funny but surely not so funny as to need this sacrificial attention from a man of genius. His love of research, his insatiable craving for particularity, was said to have spoiled Salammbô by over- loading it with antiquarian lumber. Now it threatened to defeat the new work. Turgenev and Taine believed that an intellectual satire such as Flaubert planned must be short if it was to be read; Turgenev pointed to Swift and Voltaire in support of his opinion that Bouvard and Pécuchet must be treated presto. But Flaubert persisted in his ex- travagance. What he wanted to do, he said, was nothing less than to take account of the whole intellectual life of France. “If it were treated briefly, made concise and light, it would be a fantasy—more or less witty, but without weight or plausibility; whereas if I give it detail === Page 17 === FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT 607 and development I will seem to be believing my own story, and it can be made into something serious and even frightening." And he be- lieved that it was exactly by an excess of evidence that he would avoid pedantry. The misgivings of his friends seemed in part justified by the public response to the book when it was published in the year after Flaubert's death. At first it was accepted merely as a "document," that is, its interest seemed to derive less from itself than from its connection with its author. But as the years passed the first impression was corrected. With due allowance made for its unfinished, unrevised state, but quite in its own right, Bouvard and Pécuchet was given its place beside the great works of Flaubert's canon. Its pleasures are granted to be very different from those of Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education, but French readers find in it a peculiar interest and charm consonant with its nature. Its nature is singular. We cannot go so far as to say with Ezra Pound that the novel "can be regarded as the inauguration of a new form which has no precedents," and in any case, Mr. Pound, after having said that "neither Gargantua, nor Don Quixote, nor Sterne's Tristram Shandy had furnished the archetype," goes on to show its clear connection with at least the first-named book. And if it can be argued that Bouvard and Pécuchet, in its character of "a kind of en- cyclopedia made into farce," has no specific literary genre except per- haps that which is comprised by Gargantua, it is still true that there are a sufficient number of works sufficiently analogous with it in one respect or another to constitute, if not a genre, then at least a tradition in which it may be placed. Yet its singularity must not be slighted. If we try to say what was the characteristic accomplishment of the French novelists of the nineteenth century, we can scarcely help concluding that it was the full, explicit realization of the idea of so- ciety as the definitive external circumstance, the main "condition," of the individual life. American literature of the great age was, as D. H. Lawrence was the first to see, more profound in this respect than the French, in that it went deeper into the unconscious life of society; and in England Dickens in his way and the later Trollope in his were more truly perceptive of social motives and movements. But the French achievement was more explicit than either the American or the English, it made itself available to more people. Almost, we might be moved === Page 18 === 608 PARTISAN REVIEW to say, it made itself too available: it is the rare person who can receive the full news of the inherent social immorality without injury to his own morality, without injury, indeed, to his own intellect—nothing can be so stultifying as the simple, unelaborated belief that society is a fraud. Yet with the explicit social intelligence of the great French novels we dare not quarrel—it is a given of our culture, it is one of the ineluctable elements of our modern fate, and on the whole one of the nobler elements. What Bouvard and Pécuchet adds to this general fund of social intelligence is the awareness of the part that is played in our modern life by ideas—not merely by assumptions, which of course have always played their part in every society, but by ideas as they are formulated and developed in books. The originality of Flau- bert's perception lies in its intensity; other novelists before Flaubert had been aware of the importance of ideas in shaping the lives of their heroes, and Flaubert himself, in A Sentimental Education, had shown Frédéric Moreau living in a kind of ideological zoo—Sénégal, Regimbart, Deslauriers, Pellerin, all have learned from books the roar or squeal or grunt by which they identify themselves. But in Bouvard and Pécuchet the books themselves are virtually the dramatis personae; it is they, even more than the actual people of the Norman village, that constitute reality for the two comic heroes. Through this extrava- gance Flaubert signalizes the ideological nature of modern life. No one has followed Flaubert in his enterprise. In the essay to which I have referred Mr. Pound was bringing, in 1922, the first news of Joyce's Ulysses to the readers of the Mercure de France, and he spoke at some length of the connection that is to be found between Ulysses and Bouvard and Pécuchet. “Between 1880 and the year Ulysses was begun,” he says, “no one had the courage to make a gigan- tic collection of absurdities, nor the patience to seek out the man-type, the most general generalization”—and he goes on to speak of Leopold Bloom as being, like Bouvard and Pécuchet, “the basis of democracy, the man who believes what he reads in the papers.” The connection between the two novels is certainly worth remarking, but although Ulysses does indeed resemble Bouvard and Pécuchet in its encyclopedic effect, the use made of the absurdities they collect is very different in the one novel and in the other. The difference is defined by the dis- similar intellectual lives of Leopold Bloom and Bouvard and Pécuchet. To Bloom, ideas are the furniture or landscape of his mind, while to === Page 19 === FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT 609 Bouvard and Pécuchet they exist, as I have suggested, as characters in the actual world. Bloom's ideas are notions; they are bits and pieces of fact and approximations and adumbrations of thought pieced together from newspapers and books carelessly read; Bloom means to look them up and get them straight but he never does. They are subor- dinate to his emotions, to which they lend substance and color. If a judgment is passed upon them by the author, it is of an oblique sort and has to do with their tone, with their degree of vulgarity, not with their inner consistency or cogency. But Bouvard and Pécuchet are committed to ideas and confront them fully. They amass books and study them. Ideas are life and death to them. There is no necessity to choose between the two conceptions of what Mr. Pound called "the man-type, the most general generaliza- tion." Leopold Bloom represents much of the modern mind from the lowest to the highest. His representativeness probably needs less to be insisted on than that of Bouvard and Pécuchet, who stand for the condition of life of any reader of this book, of any person who must decide by means of some sort of intellectual process what is the correct theory of raising his children, or what is the right principle of educa- tion; or whom he shall be psychoanalyzed by, a Freudian, a Reichian, a Washingtonian; whether he "needs" religion, and if so, which con- fession is most appropriate to his temperament and cultural back- ground; what kind of architecture he shall adopt for his house, and what the true theory of the modern is; what kind of heating is best suited to his life-style; how he shall feel about the State; about the Church; about Labor; about China; about Russia; about India. If we try to say how the world has changed from, say, two hundred years ago, we must see that it is in the respect that the conscious mind has been brought to bear upon almost every aspect of life; that ideas, good, bad, indifferent, are of the essence of our existence. That is why Flaubert was made "rabid" by his perception of stupidity. And if we look to see if anyone has matched Flaubert in the passion of his response to ideas, we will not discover that person in any art and only one in any other discipline-Nietzsche alone, I think, saw the modern world as Flaubert did, and with Flaubert's intensity of passion. But when we have become aware of the singularity of Bouvard and Pécuchet, we must be no less aware of the tradition in which its singularity exists. As for the novel's connection with Rabelais, this may === Page 20 === 610 PARTISAN REVIEW be observed even in certain aspects of the prose, not necessarily as a result of influence, perhaps only because of the effect of an analogous subject matter. “He planted passion-flowers in the shade, pansies in the sun, covered hyacinths with manure, watered the lilies after they had flowered, destroyed the rhododendrons by cutting them back, stim- ulated the fuchsias with glue, and roasted the pomegranate tree by ex- posing it to the kitchen fire”—the errors of this catalogue are com- mitted not by the infant Gargantua but by Pécuchet. Rabelais knew nothing of encyclopedias but he too wrote “a sort of encyclopedia made into farce.” His intention was in part that of Flaubert—it was the intention of burlesque, the mockery of learning. But only in part: Rabelais also had the intention of which Flaubert's is the exact in- version. It is no doubt all too easy to reduce Rabelais to a classroom example of the high optimism of the early Renaissance, and to make more naive than it really is his humanistic delight in the arts, sciences, crafts, and exercises which are available to man. Yet the optimism and the humanistic delight are certainly of the essence of Rabelais and they are specifically controverted in Bouvard and Pécuchet. We have but to look at the respective treatments of gymnastics to see how Flaubert stands Rabelais on his head—Gargantua's friend Gymnast can make any demand upon his agility and strength, to Rabelais' great pleasure, but nothing is sadder than the middle-aged Bouvard and Pécuchet putting themselves to school to the regimen and apparatus of Amoros's manual, which, absurd as it is, descends in a direct line from the Renaissance idea of the Whole Man, the vaunting mind in the vault- ing body. If we speak of encyclopedias, there is one actual encyclopedia which we must have in recollection—the great Encyclopédie itself. Flaubert never makes Diderot the object of his satire—one may well suppose that the author of Rameau's Nephew was the last man in the world with whom Flaubert would have sought a quarrel—but Did- erot's great enterprise of the Encyclopédie, which derived its impulse as much from the spirit of Rabelais as from the spirit of Bacon, is the heroic and optimistic enterprise of which the researches of Bou- vard and Pécuchet are the comic and pessimistic counterpart. To have thought of Diderot busily running about France, taking notes on this trade or that process, learning how spinning or weaving or smelting or brewing was done, so that all the world might have a healthy === Page 21 === FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT 611 knowledge of the practical arts, would be to have the inspiration for those scenes in which Bouvard and Pécuchet undertake to deal with practical life, to grow their own food and to preserve it, to make their own cordial (Bouvarine it is to be called!). Bouvard and Pécuchet in its despair that anything at all can be done is the nega- tion of the morning confidence and hope of the Encyclopédie. Which brings us to the third book of Gulliver's Travels. The Voyage to Laputa, in which Swift satirizes the scientific theories of his day, may be thought of as the ambivalent prolegomenon to the Encyclopédie—ambivalent because Swift was Baconian in his con- ception of the practical aim of science but anti-Baconian in his con- tempt for any kind of scientific method he knew of, even Bacon's positivism. In the expression of his scorn he provides a striking prece- dent for Bouvard and Pécuchet, which had for its explanatory sub- title, "The failings of the methods of science." The analogy that may be drawn between Flaubert's book and Swift's go considerably beyond what is suggested merely by the Voyage to Laputa—it leads us, in- deed, to the personal similarity between Flaubert and Swift. But this may better be observed in a later place. Mr. Pound, having particularly in mind the encyclopedic nature of Bouvard and Pécuchet, finds Don Quixote to be a very different kind of thing—"Cervantes parodied but a single literary folly, the chivalric folly." Yet it is not the parody of the chivalric idea that in itself makes Don Quixote what it is, but rather the complex drama that results from putting an elaborate idea to the test in the world of actuality. Flaubert said of Madame Bovary that she was the sister of Don Quixote; Bouvard and Pécuchet are at least consanguineous enough to be cousins. And their idea, despite its encyclopedic muta- tions, is, after all, as much a unity as Don Quixote's: they believe that the world yields to mind. And if Don Quixote, then certainly Candide, which also tests an idea in the laboratory of the world. The conclusion of Bouvard and Pécuchet, "Let us return to copying," has not become proverbial only because its proverbial possibilities have been pre-empted by "Let us cultivate our garden." Then the second act of The Bourgeois Gentleman, in which Monsieur Jourdain receives instruction from the professors of the sciences, arts, and graces, may be thought of as a small encyclopedia in the form of a farce and as the model for this history of the bour- === Page 22 === 612 PARTISAN REVIEW geois savants. And the ingenious reader may amuse himself by dis- covering all the analogies that may be drawn between Bouvard and Pécuchet and Faust. II "Bouvard et Pécuchet sont-ils des imbéciles?" The blunt question is the title of an essay, notable in the history of Flaubert criticism, which was published in 1912 by the eminent scholar René Dumesnil. It is the question which lies at the heart of the ambiguity of Bouvard and Pécuchet. It will perhaps seem strange that ambiguity should be imputed to the novel. In England and America more people know about Bouvard and Pécuchet than have read it. The author's purpose as stated in his famous correspondence, and also the outline of the story, are part of our general literary information. Neither the purpose nor the story suggests the possibility of ambiguity. Flaubert's avowed in- tention, that of pillorying the culture of bourgeois democracy, does not seem likely to induce or even permit more than one meaning to appear. As for his plan of having two simple copying clerks under- take to master seriatim all the sciences and disciplines and to come to grief or boredom with each one, it seems clear and schematic to a degree, even to a fault-it is hard to see why it should not be en- tirely within the control of the author's equally clear purpose. Yet it has been said by a French writer that of all the works of Flaubert, it is Bouvard and Pécuchet that gives the critics the most trouble; that it is a book which is intricate, complex, and difficult to analyze; that its meaning is hard to come at.3 Indeed, so great is the ambiguity of Bouvard and Pécuchet that it is possible to conclude that the book quite fails to be what Flaubert intended it to be. Which does not, of course, prevent it from being something else of a very good sort. The trouble starts with the fact that Bouvard and Pécuchet, as Dumesnil demonstrated, are not imbeciles. Perhaps it is too much to say, as Dumesnil does say, that they have the souls of apostles, but imbeciles they certainly are not, and we shall be able to go consider- ably further in their praise than this mere negation. There can be no doubt that Flaubert began with the intention of making them as 3 Claude Digeon, in his Le Dernier Visage de Flaubert, Paris 1946, p. 94. === Page 23 === FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT 613 foolish and ridiculous as possible. We are surely not free to suppose that he had any inclination to show them mercy because they were poor clerks and lived very limited lives. When the word bourgeoisie came to be used in this country in a social-political sense, it was likely to be restricted in its reference to people of pretty solid estab- lishment. For the social group more or less analogous to that to which Bouvard and Pécuchet belonged we used other words, choosing them according to our political disposition—"white collar worker," "office proletariat," "little people." But Flaubert made no such distinction. For him the bourgeoisie was the bourgeoisie from top to bottom. He saw the characteristics and the power of the class as continuous from the wealthy to the poor. If he had thought to call the small bourgeoi- sie the "little people," he would have done so contemptuously, hav- ing reference to the size of their ideas and ideals and impulses. And he feared them exactly for this littleness, which he believed they wanted to impose upon the world. It was by no means the straitened lives that Bouvard and Pécuchet lived for forty-seven years until the great moment when they met each other that induced Flaubert to let them off from being imbeciles. No doubt in reference to just this hole-and-corner existence he had at one time cruelly planned to call the book The History of Two Cockroaches. But two cockroaches cannot be friends with each other. And François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard and Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet-their Christian names once mentioned in their history are forever forgotten and may as well be memorialized here-are truly friends. This fact is of decisive importance in the novel-it defeats whatever intention Flaubert may have had to make his protagonists contemptible. To Flaubert friendship was not merely a relation: it was a virtue, as it was for Montaigne, as it was for Swift. Bouvard and Pécuchet are able to be friends because they are sufficiently different in their natures, although at one in their minds. Bouvard, as the sound of his name suggests, is the fleshier of the two, the more rotund, and the easier-going, the more sentimental, sensual, and worldly. Pécuchet, in accordance with his name, is lean and stringy; he is puritanical, passionate, pessimistic-a little more sincere than Bouvard. Flaubert set great store by their names. When he overheard Zola say that he had found the perfect name for a character, Bouvard, he turned pale, and in the greatest agitation begged Zola not to use it. And he was much troubled when a banker === Page 24 === 614 PARTISAN REVIEW named Pécuchet, a man he respected, played an important part in his financial life in 1875; the point of delicacy was settled by M. Pécuchet's death. Once in their life together, after many frustrations, at a moment when they are nervous and depressed, Bouvard and Pécuchet find that they can't stand the sight of each other; this is natural and transitory, and it but serves to emphasize the fulness and constancy of their devotion to each other. Their manner of life, we must recog- nize, has great charm. They are much harassed, much frustrated by practical as well as by intellectual matters, but their housekeeping, which is omnipresent in the story, is a pleasure to read about. Even when the economy falls quite to pieces and becomes sordid, it never quite belies the rich common poetry of their first meal, their first evening, their first morning in their own home. From their establish- ment we derive the pleasure which is afforded by the living arrange- ments of Robinson Crusoe or The Swiss Family Robinson, or Boffin's Bower, or Sherlock Holmes's rooms in Baker Street. Their enterprises are based on innocence and a pleasant sufficiency; they have a good deal in common with the respected author of "Speculations on the Source of the Hempstead Ponds, with some Observations on the Theory of Tittlebats," for Mr. Pickwick, another superannuated bour- geois bachelor, was devoted to the life of the mind, and his scientific adventures, although more primitive than those of Bouvard and Pé- cuchet, are alike in kind. They have affinity with Tom Sawyer- they are consciously boyish in their dreams of glory, in their dreams of love; for a moment, in their hydrotherapeutic phase, they have their Jackson's Island and are seen naked as Red Indians and glee- fully splashing each other from their adjoining baths. Their life, de- spite its disappointments, is a kind of idyl, and it approaches the pastoral convention—there is no reason not to think of them as two shepherds tending their woolly flocks of ideas. Who would not want to read Bouvard's "Lament for Pécuchet," or, for the matter of that, Pécuchet's "Elegy for Bouvard," whichever came first; and whose heart would not be wrung by the event either poem recorded and the loneliness of the survivor at the double copying desk, the con- trivance of which had been the last ingenuity of the two friends? Had they lived alone and pursued their studies and projects alone, it is possible that imbecility might have descended upon the === Page 25 === FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT 615 mind of each. It is not until they meet each other that they really begin their intellectual life. Although they are always at one in their enthusiasm, they take sufficiently different views of questions to create between them a degree of dialectic; Flaubert, like Plato, conceived of friendship as one of the conditions of thought. Love and logic go together. Not imbeciles, then, but certainly not without folly. Wherein does the folly of Bouvard and Pécuchet lie? In part their error is the same as that of their prototype, Monsieur Jourdain—they want to learn too quickly. They do not know the true mode of thought, they have no patience. They would not understand what many of the great researchers meant when they said that they stared at the facts until the facts spoke to them. They are committed to the life of the mind in general, but not, in the way of the true scholar, in particular. They are perhaps too thoroughly Whole Men; they lack the degree of benign limitation which permits an intense preoccupation, making a single subject seem the satisfaction of the demands of a whole tem- perament. And then we must remember their age; they are forty- seven when they begin, they have no time for patience—they are about the same age as Faust was when he expressed his sense of the inadequacy of all the disciplines. They are Faustian; they must try everything, and to no intellectual moment are they able to say their “Verweile doch!” But their measure of folly is not what makes Bouvard and Pé- cuchet comic characters. They are comic through the operation of the censorship which the race exercises over those who address them- selves to the large enterprises of the spirit. This censorship undertakes to say who may engage upon what high adventures. It decides who, by reason of age or degree of pulchritude or social class, may be permitted to fall in love, or have surpassing ambitions, or think great thoughts. Whether or not we are ourselves engaged in any of the great spiritual enterprises, we feel it our duty to protect their decorum and their décor by laughing at anyone who does not conform to the right image of the lover, the hero, or the thinker. This would be a more disagreeable human trait than in fact it is if we were not at the same time prepared to discover that some of the people whom we debar from their desires have their own special virtues. Leopold Bloom, although he has no ashplant and no irony and does not an- === Page 26 === 616 SWER EVERY QUESTION "QUIETLY" AS STEPHEN DEDALUS DOES, BUT, ON THE CONTRARY, IS WITHOUT DIGNITY IN LOVE OR THOUGHT, IS YET SEEN TO BE A PROPER OBJECT OF OUR RESPECT AND AFFECTION. DON QUIXOTE IS TOO OLD, TOO STRINGY, TOO POOR, AS WELL AS TOO LATE IN THE DAY, FOR CHIVALRY AND COURTLY LOVE, BUT HE IS NOT TOO MUCH OR TOO LITTLE OF ANYTHING TO BE WISE WITH A NEW KIND OF WISDOM. THE ANCIENT INSCRIPTION THAT MR. PICKWICK DISCOVERS IS DECIPHERED TO READ "BILL STUBBS, HIS MARK," WHICH HE BELIEVES TO BE NOTHING BUT THE OPERATION OF MALICE—HE REALLY HAS NO MIND AT ALL EXCEPT WHAT MAKES HIM DEFY DODSON & FOGG AND BECOME THE SAINT OF THE FLEET. SO WITH BOUVARD AND PÉCUCHET. THEY ARE FUNNY BECAUSE THEY ARE WHAT THEY ARE, BECAUSE THEY ARE MIDDLE-AGED, BECAUSE ONE IS FAT AND ONE IS THIN; BECAUSE THEY WEAR STRANGE GARMENTS; BECAUSE THEY ARE UNMARRIED AND AWKWARD IN LOVE; BECAUSE THEY ARE INNOCENT; BE- CAUSE THEY ARE CLUMSY AND THINGS BLOW UP IN THEIR FACES, OR FALL ON THEM, OR TRIP THEM UP; BECAUSE THEY ARE GULLIBLE AND THINK THEY ARE SHREWD; BECAUSE THEY ARE FULL OF ENTHUSIASM. BEING FUNNY IN THEM- SELVES, BEING COMICALLY NOT THE MEN FOR HIGH ENTERPRISES, THEY ARE THEREFORE FUNNY WHEN THEY UNDERTAKE THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. THEIR COM- ICALITY IS A PRIORI, IT DOES NOT GROW OUT OF THEIR LACK OF INTELLIGENCE. WHEN IT COMES TO INTELLIGENCE, MANY A MAN HAS LESS WHO CAN COM- MAND A BETTER LABORATORY TECHNIQUE THAN THEIRS. GRANTED THAT THEY BE- GIN EACH ADVENTURE IN STUPIDITY, AS THEY PROGRESS THROUGH THE INTELLEC- TUAL DISCIPLINES THESE "SIMPLE, LUCID, MEDIOCRE" MINDS (AS MAUPAS- SANT CALLED THEM) ARE LIKELY TO SEE WHATEVER ABSURDITIES ARE TO BE SEEN; THEY ARE THE CATALYSTS OF THE FOOLISHNESS OF OTHERS. THEN, WHETHER OR NOT THEY ARE PROPERLY TO BE CALLED APOSTLES, THEIR DEGREE OF VIRTUE AND THEIR GENEROSITY OF SPIRIT ARE UNMISTAKABLE. THEIR HEARTS—AND WHAT IS MORE, THEIR MINDS—INSTINCTIVELY TAKE THE SIDE OF THE INSULTED AND INJURED. IF THEY CANNOT STAY LONG WITH ONE IDEA, THEY NEVERTHELESS LIVE BY THE MIND; THE COURAGE THAT THIS RE- QUIRES THEY ABUNDANTLY HAVE. IT IS NOT THEY WHO EXEMPLIFY THE VICES OF THE BOURGEOISIE THAT FLAUBERT DESPISED. FOR THE BOURGEOISIE THEY HAVE NOTHING BUT CONTEMPT. IN THEIR CONFLICTS WITH THE LOCAL PRIEST, DOCTOR, MAYOR, MAGNATE, IT IS THEY WHO ARE IN THE RIGHT OF THINGS. THEY STAND FOR INTELLIGENCE: THEY ARE TRAITORS TO THEIR CLASS. AND THEY SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES; THEY ACQUIRE THE PECULIAR PATHOS OF THEIR DEDICATION. === Page 27 === FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT 617 The evidence of their superiority gave umbrage. As they upheld immoral points of view, they were surely immoral themselves; slanders were invented about them. Then a pitiable faculty developed in their spirit, that of perceiving stupidity and no longer tolerating it. Insignificant things made them sad: advertisements in the news- papers, a smug profile, a foolish remark heard by chance. Musing on what was said in the village, and on there existing as far as the Antipodes [other people like the mem- geoisie], they felt as though the heaviness of all the earth were weighing on them. It is no wonder that more than one critic has considered whether Bouvard and Pécuchet must not be taken as standing for Flaubert himself, or for Flaubert and the good friend and neighbor of his later years, Laporte, who found pleasure in helping accumulate the material for Bouvard and Pécuchet. 111 Bouvard and Pécuchet, then, are not the objects of Flau- bert's satire. At most they are the butts of his humor, which is strongly qualified by affection. They are never represented as doing anything in the least ignoble or mean. They are "justified" characters. We therefore naturally suppose that the savageness which the book was intended to express is to be found in the exposition of the studies which the two friends undertake—this surely will constitute the fierce indictment of the bourgeois democracy. But again our supposition is disappointed. The horrors of the culture of the bourgeois democracy play a considerably smaller part than we anticipate. They are less horrible than we had expected. And the animus with which they are exhibited turns out to be not nearly so savage as we had been led to hope. As I have said, a good many of the misadventures of Bouvard and Pécuchet befall them simply because they are comic characters, or because life is as it is. If their tenant farmer cheats them, if their handyman diddles them, we cannot conclude that rural cupidity and the unreliability of rural labor have been brought about by the as- cendancy of the bourgeoisie. If Bouvard, in two wonderful scenes, === Page 28 === 618 PARTISAN REVIEW witnesses the terrible power of sexuality, in human beings and in pea- cocks, and cannot himself go much further in the direction of passion than a warm flush of inclination, or if Pécuchet contracts gonorrhea from his first sexual experience, we are not exactly being given ex- amples of the effect of the bourgeois swinishness. When the hailstorm destroys the fruit which the two beginners have been almost successful in bringing to maturity, the phenomenon is not cultural but meteor- ological and, in its context, cosmological. That the agricultural treatises differ from each other, that "as regards marl, Puvis recom- mends it, Ravet's handbook opposes it," this cannot fairly be ascribed to the contemporary corruption of mind—it is of the immemorial nature of farming: since the time of Cain, farmers have exercised their moral faculties on just such differences of opinion. Pécuchet meditates on the inherent contradictions that seem to exist between fruit and branch: "The authorities recommend stopping all the ducts. If not, the sap is injured, and the tree, of course, suffers. For it to flourish, it would have to bear no fruit at all. Yet those that are never pruned or manured yield fruit, smaller, indeed, but better flavored"—this is not an indictment of the stupidity of bourgeois- democratic pomology but a profound consideration of the nature of life, cultural as well as arboricultural. In their true goodness of heart the two friends undertake to rear and educate a pair of brutalized waifs; they fail not because their educational methods are contempt- ible but because the human material has become intractable. A considerable part of the intellectual criticism of the novel de- pends upon the inversion of the snobbish censorship to which I have referred. This is the mode of comedy which perceives that if any abstruse discipline is confronted with an actual human being, no mat- ter how stupid—and, indeed, the stupider the better—, it is the person who is justified as against the discipline. A draper should not be adept in arms nor study the arts of logic or language; still, when put in company of the fencing master who can kill a man by demon- strative reason, or the rhetorician who shows him that A is sounded with the mouth so, Monsieur Jourdain is not the greatest fool on the stage, nor would he be if he had secured Aristotle as his teacher. In any vaudeville dialectic the intellectual advantage always rests with the obtuse or primitive person; the straight man, the patient teacher who believes in the subject, is always discredited. No discipline which === Page 29 === FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT 619 is confronted with the simplicity, the intellectual innocence, of Bou- vard and Pécuchet can long maintain its pretense to value. Then we must have in mind the large part that is played in the book by the intellectual and quasi-intellectual absurdities which are as ridiculous as we want to call them, but about which it is im- possible for a sensible man to be seriously troubled. Two of the amusing episodes of the novel concern themselves with Bouvard and Pécuchet training their memories by a compound of three mnemonic systems and hardening their bodies according to Amoros's manual of gymnastics. René Descharmes, in his well known work, Autour de Bouvard et Pécuchet, devotes a long chapter to one of the mnemonic systems, the most famous one of all, that of Feinagle, and he gives another chapter to the gymnastic manual. In Descharmes, as in Flau- bert, the books are very funny. But we can scarcely believe that these books, and the treatises on hygiene and diet, were the kind of thing that was making Flaubert "rabid." As long as there have been printed books there have been mnemonic systems and they have been absurd; there have always been professors of physical training and they have always had a grandiose solemnity which may still be ob- served. Quackery is pretty constant in culture, and it is the detritus of culture, not its essence. An American scholar and critic, Mr. Hugh Kenner, recently de- scribed Bouvard and Pécuchet as "the book into which Flaubert emp- tied his voluminous notes on human gullibility, groundless learning, opinions chic, contradictory authorities, ridiculous enthusiasms, the swill of the 19th century." But we must think with a certain tender- ness of some of "the swill of the 19th century" because it has served as the intellectual aliment of certain of the best poets of our age, the men whom we must readily exempt from our general condemnation of our own culture and who have done most to make us aware of the awfulness of our culture and that of the nineteenth century. When Bouvard and Pécuchet involve themselves with the study of psychic and occult phenomena, their researches are no doubt less profound than those of William Butler Yeats, but not different in kind; and although they fall short of Yeats's degree of success in practice, still, on one occasion, they do startle themselves, their audience, and the reader by demonstrating an actual example of clairvoyance. Nothing that the delightful Robert Graves tells us about the Druids contradicts === Page 30 === 620 PARTISAN REVIEW what Bouvard and Pécuchet discover in their study of the science of Celtic archaeology: “Some uttered prophesies, others chanted, others taught botany, medicine, history and literature: in short, all the arts of their epoch. Pythagoras and Plato were their pupils. They in- structed the Greeks in metaphysics, the Persians in sorcery, the Etrus- cans in augury, and the Romans in plating copper and trading in ham.” Then the passion of Bouvard and Pécuchet for antiquities, their lust for old documents, and the cultural conclusions they base on their investigations and accumulations are no different from those of Ezra Pound, about whom Mr. Kenner has written so well; and they have Mr. Pound's responsiveness to comprehensive schemes of social and economic reform. Their knowledge of the emotions of the Waste Land is no less intense than that of T. S. Eliot, and based on a not dissimilar experience; with them as with him despair arises from culture and leads to religion.⁴ Readers of literary bent, who have as an element of their pathos the belief that they are persecuted by science,⁵ will set special store by those parts of the novel that have the effect of exposing the arrogance as well as the contradictions and absurdities of the physical science of the day. Everyone who has ever studied literature knows that physical science was the basis of the vulgar materialism of the nineteenth cen- tury. In this regard it is well to remember that Flaubert had no prin- 4 Mr. Kenner's remarks on Bouvard and Pécuchet appear in the essay "Pound on Joyce" which serves to introduce Mr. Pound's essay "James Joyce and Pécu- chet" as it is reprinted in the Autumn 1952 issue of Shenandoah, a review pub- lished at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia. It would make an interesting exercise in cultural criticism to speculate on what Flaubert would do with the contents of this issue of the review, which, so far as it is tenden- tious, would seem to be much opposed to bourgeois democracy; in particular, what he would do with the thirteen lines in which William Faulkner reviews Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea. I raise the question not out of the malice of my own tendentiousness, and certainly not out of any belief that what is to be found in this issue of Shenandoah is unique in the appeal it might make to Flaubert's sense of the absurd (it certainly isn't), but only to enforce my point that in Bouvard and Pécuchet we do not deal only with the culture of the bourgeois democracy that Flaubert knew, but with any culture or sub-culture that is committed to words-on-paper. And the proper reflection to make on those incredible thirteen lines of Mr. Faulkner's is that a degree of stupidity, even silliness, may be essential to genius. Which doesn't of course, invalidate Flaubert's enterprise of naming stupidity and silliness when they appear. 5 It is not sufficiently understood that men of science have an analogous— homologous?—pathos to support them in their own troubles: they believe that they are systematically persecuted by the humanities. === Page 31 === FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT 621 cipled hostility to science as such-quite to the contrary, indeed. He takes note of the ridiculous statements that science can make, but much of the confusion that Bouvard and Pécuchet experience is the result of their own ineptitude or ignorance rather than of the inade- quacy of science itself. It is not the fault of botany-although it may be the fault of a particular elementary textbook of botany-that they believe that all flowers have a pericarp, but look in vain for it when confronted by buttercups and wild strawberry. Medicine, of course, is the natural prey of the comic-the treat- ment it receives in Bouvard and Pécuchet adds nothing in point of comic method to the classic one established by Molière. And this can serve to remind us of the extent to which the seventeenth and eight- eenth centuries figure in the novel. These have become sacred eras, and persons of sensibility believe that either of them can show a virtue for every vice of the nineteenth century. Yet Flaubert represents them as being the seedground of literary stupidity. "Think of devices which can captivate," says Boileau. "By what means think of these devices? In all your speeches passion should be found, Go seek the heart, and warm it till it bound." How "warm the heart"? The rules are not enough; genius is also necessary. And genius is not enough. Corneille, according to the Académie Française, understands nothing of the theatre. Geoffroy depreciated Voltaire. Racine was jeered at by Subligny. Laharpe bellowed at the name of Shakespeare. What we may call the primary or elemental religious experience of Bouvard and Pécuchet is treated by Flaubert with considerable seriousness and sympathy; it is the theological developments which follow upon that experience that he mocks. This theology cannot be said to be peculiar to the nineteenth century or to the bourgeois de- mocracy. Again, when it comes to philosophy, it is not merely the phil- osophy of the nineteenth century that brings Bouvard and Pécuchet to their despair. It is philosophy in general, what anyone except a logical positivist would say were the genuine problems of philosophy. These take, it is true, a specifically modern form, in part because Flaubert === Page 32 === 622 PARTISAN REVIEW had had his say about ancient philosophy in The Temptation of St. Anthony. But they go back at least as far as the seventeenth century. "The famous cogito bores me," says Bouvard, just like any truthful person who has read Descartes. He and Pécuchet attempt Spinoza. They feel that "all this was like being in a balloon at night, in glacial coldness, carried on an endless voyage towards a bottomless abyss, and with nothing near but the unseizable, the motionless, the eternal. It was too much. They gave it up." As who does not? Their response to the Ethics is not foolish, not trivial; they have caught most accurately the emotion that Spinoza enforces upon us, and they know that it is impossible to live with. Yet Flaubert, at the time of writing the novel, had a devoted admiration for Spinoza, as we all have. What is being mocked? For even literature, the great palladium of Flaubert's life, is not proof against the corrosive action of the simple, lucid, mediocre minds of Bouvard and Pécuchet. It is not merely bad literature that bores them after their first afflatus of en- thusiasm; it is literature itself. The elements of each author that at first enchant them—the tone, the idiom, the system of distortion and extravagance—come to be the ground of their eventual boredom. The more we consider Bouvard and Pécuchet, the less the novel can be thought of as nothing but an attack on the culture of the nineteenth century. Bourgeois democracy merely affords the setting for a situation in which it becomes possible to reject culture itself. The novel does nothing less than that: it rejects culture. The human mind experiences the massed accumulation of its own works, those that are traditionally held to be its greatest glories as well as those that are obviously of a contemptible sort, and arrives at the under- standing that none will serve its purpose, that all are weariness and vanity, that the whole vast structure of human thought and creation are alien from the human person. Descharmes concludes his study of Bouvard and Pécuchet with the statement that the import of the novel is comprehended in a verse from Ecclesiastes which Flaubert might well have used as an epigraph: "And I set my mind to search and investigate through wisdom everything that is done beneath the heavens. It is an evil task that God has given the sons of men with which to occupy themselves." The relevance of the pessimism of Ecclesiastes goes well beyond this single text. The pessimism of Bouvard and Pécuchet is comparable with, al- === Page 33 === FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT 623 though not the same as, that of Gulliver's Travels. Just as we may not lessen the depth of the pessimism of Gulliver's Travels by reading the book as if it were only the response to Swift's eighteenth century, so we may not lessen the depth of the pessimism of Bouvard and Pécu- chet by reading it as if it were only the response to Flaubert's nine- teenth century. What does permit us to qualify the pessimism of Bouvard and Pécuchet is the comic mode in which it has its existence. The book is genuinely funny, and the comic nature of the two heroes invites us to stand at a certain distance from their woe. We are not dealing with, say, Musset's Octave, he who so advertised his self-pity by call- ing his history that of "a child of the century," by which he invites the reader to acknowledge a common paternity and thus approve his self-commiseration. Bouvard and Pécuchet permit us to laugh at our- selves in them and yet to remain detached from their plight. They are a reductio ad absurdum of our lives in culture, but we are not constrained to follow the reduction as far as it can take us. They themselves qualify the pessimism of the book by their last act. Another famous copying clerk, an American, Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, with the classic American pessimism which is more entire than any that the French have contrived, when he perceives the nothingness of society, simply curls up and wills to die, and dies. But when all is lost to Bouvard and Pécuchet, all is not lost: they procure the double copying desk, and the order of the day, which had come to them like a revelation, is "Copier comme autrefois." And so we last see them in the metamorphosis to which their lives entitle them, a sort of bachelor Baucis and Philemon, rustling their leaves at "travailler sans raisonner," the virtue of work without philosophizing, which Candide inculcates. Yet the abrogation of abstruse research does not mean the abrogation of mind, for what they copy from the old papers which they indiscriminately buy up are the absurdities they have learned to recognize. The results of their copying are to constitute, according to Flaubert's plan, the last part of the novel. Scholars have debated which of Flaubert's several collections of ab- surdities was to appear as the fruit of their efforts. The weight of the evidence seems to give that place to The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, and most readers will be willing to accept this conclusion if === Page 34 === 624 PARTISAN REVIEW only because of the pleasures of the Dictionary itself, which is the most elaborate of the collections. But for the understanding of the novel itself it is almost enough to know that something was to follow, that, reduced as the two friends are, they have not lost their love of mind, to which they testify by recording the mind's failures. IV The pessimism of Bouvard and Pécuchet is qualified by certain other considerations. These are extraneous to the text, but our sense of the ambiguity of the novel justifies us in going beyond the text to see if we may gain further understanding from an awareness of the circumstances of its composition. Indeed, it is virtually impos- sible not to do something of this sort. In the time between his death and his centenary in 1921 the fame of Flaubert increased to the point where he was a classic of his language and the subject of an elaborate scholarship. His novels, which he had written according to his famous ideal of strict objectivity and stern impersonality, were read—and even when there was no excuse of ambiguity—more and more in the light of his personal legend, which seemed to grow ever greater in its power of appeal. If there is such a thing as biographical success, Flaubert achieved it in its fullest measure, for the last period of his life is as interesting, both in event and thought, as the early years in which his mind was formed and the middle years of his decisive productions; and its pathos is irresistible. This pathos, I venture to suppose, is similar in the effect it has upon the French reader to that which moves the English reader in the life of Swift. It is the pathos of the man whose savage pride induces him to have always before his mind the idea of mankind as a whole, and to regard the human actuality with an angry disgust so intense that it seems to him—and sometimes to others —like a madness. Those individuals whom he exempts from his gen- eral contempt for the human kind he grapples to himself with hoops of steel. If he is incapable of marriage and even of sexual love in any conventional sense, he can give to a few women an extreme devotion; and to many men he can give a friendship of surpassing respect and loyalty. It was in his remarkably deep affections that Flaubert was struck === Page 35 === FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT 625 again and again in his last years. "I am obsessed by the dead (my dead)," he wrote to Laure de Maupassant. "Is this a sign of old age? I think so." He was fifty-three. The year was 1873 and the necrology of the last four years had been long; it was to become longer. His mother, his dearest friends, his literary colleagues and comrades-in- arms-their deaths accumulated and were augmented by the passing of people whom he did not love as he loved his mother, or George Sand, or Louis Bouilhet, or whom he did not respect as he did Jules de Goncourt, or Gautier, or even Sainte-Beuve, but who nevertheless embodied his past, such as Louise Colet, his former mistress, and Maurice Schlesinger, the husband of the woman Flaubert had loved with a virtually mystic passion since his adolescence and whom he had enshrined as Mme. Arnoux. He could make of his life an altar of the dead, as witness the time, effort, and passion he gave to keep alive the memory of the cherished Louis Bouilhet. But he could also make it an altar of the living. Perhaps he would not have said with Henry James that life is nothing unless it is sacrificial, but he acted as if he believed this to be so when he offered up his independence for the happiness of his niece Caroline. Caroline Commanville was the only child of Flaubert's only sister, who had died in 1846, and she had been reared by her grand- mother and her uncle. To Caro, as she was called, Flaubert gave the full of the devotion of which he was capable. His love, characteristic- ally enough, expressed itself in his solicitude for the grace of her mind. Something of his yearning tenderness for her, which appears so un- abashedly in the letters which she published after his death, was lent to Bouvard and Pécuchet when, moved in part by belated parental impulses, they adopt the stray children to educate them for decorous and useful lives. Flaubert spent thirteen years on Caro's education, and the goal of his affectionate efforts was like that of Nature in Wordsworth's poem: This Child I to myself shall take; She shall be mine, and I shall make A Lady of my own -a Lady who in her own person should be the answer to the vulgarity and stupidity of the time. === Page 36 === 626 PARTISAN REVIEW How far he did indeed succeed in his best hopes for the intellec- tual grace of Caro may be judged by American readers from the de- scription of her which Willa Cather gives after meeting her at a hotel at Aix in 1930, when she was a woman of eighty-four. And nothing can suggest better the moral limitations of Miss Cather and her feminized universe than the fact that although she renders the most intense and delicate homage to the charm of Mme. Franklin- Grout (as she had become), speaking at length of her manners, her command of many languages, the purity of her passion for art, her friendship with her uncle's great friends, her closeness to her uncle himself, she gives no intimation that for the sake of Caro, and at her behest, Flaubert had put himself into financial jeopardy, surrendering the fortune upon which he depended for his literary life, and with very little thanks from the beneficiary. Up to 1875 the business affairs of Caroline's husband Com- manville seemed to justify an elaborate establishment in Paris and a fashionable and expensive way of life. Then it became clear that Commanville was on the verge of bankruptcy. To save the Comman- villes from disgrace Flaubert pledged his entire fortune—when it came to the bourgeois pieties he was to be outdone by no one. He gave up his pleasant flat in Paris and took cheaper rooms, and in general greatly curtailed his expenses. He sold the property at Deauville from which he derived his income. At one time it seemed probable that he would have to give up the house at Croisset, where he had lived agonized cry—without it, he said, using the English word, he would have no home. George Sand offered to buy it if possible and let him live in it all his life, but the sale proved unnecessary. In all, Flaubert put at the disposal of the Commanvilles 1,200,000 francs, in return for which he was to receive a small allowance. The full extent of the sacrifice can be properly understood only if we feel the force of Gautier's remark that Flaubert's bourgeois fortune was part of his creative endowment. The sacrifice being what it was, the Commanvilles' subsequent behavior gives the inci- dent a Lear-like character. They did not pay the allowance promptly and Flaubert had to importune for it. They were angry when Flau- bert, with much reluctance and humiliation, consented to allow his friends to procure a pension for him; they did not forgive the friends === Page 37 === FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT 627 who had won his consent and campaigned for the pension. They felt he was a drain on their resources and called him "the consumer"; their own way of life continued to be expensive. They required him to enlist his friends in further help to them. When the devoted La- porte, who himself had lost his fortune, refused to commit himself further, they insisted that Flaubert break with him, which he did in great sadness. These events, interesting in themselves, are significant for our purpose as constituting the circumstance in which Flaubert wrote the Three Tales and as having a bearing upon their common theme of the sacrifice of the self; and the Three Tales must inevitably be read as a gloss upon Bouvard and Pécuchet. In September of 1875, with the Commanville affairs temporarily under control, Flaubert went to spend six weeks at Concarneau with his old friend, the naturalist Georges Pouchet. Flaubert's nerves were in a bad state, he was deeply distraught. He envied the calm with which his scientist friend went about his work. Unable to take up his own work on Bouvard and Pécuchet, he swam and walked to restore his equanimity and he be- gan the story of St. Julian. He took it with him when he left Con- carneau and finished it in January. In February he began A Simple Heart, which he completed in August. In August he began Herodias, which he finished the following February. The stories appeared as a newspaper serial and then in a volume; they were greeted with al- most universal admiration-Flaubert's first popular success since Madame Bovary. The part that these three stories play in Flaubert's artistic de- velopment cannot concern us here. Nor can we stop to consider all that they might be understood to say of Flaubert's inner life. What is of immediate consequence to us is the theme which they have in common and how that bears upon Bouvard and Pécuchet. The stories are well known and need be recalled but briefly. All are associated with Flaubert's native Rouen. The legend of St. Julian is the subject of a window of the Cathedral; the Herodian story is told on the tympanum of the Cathedral's south portal. The Félicité of A Simple Heart was a servant-girl whom Flaubert had known in his boyhood. The story of St. Julian, a Christianized version of the Oedipus legend, tells of a young nobleman brought up to arms and the chase; his passion for killing is exorbitant (the catalogue of === Page 38 === 628 THEMATEMPARTISAN REVIEW the beasts he slays reminds us of nothing so much as the 1,500 volumes Flaubert read for Bouvard and PÉcuchet) until one day it is prophesied to him by a gigantic and invulnerable stag that he will kill his own mother and father. The prophecy comes true despite Julian's best efforts to circumvent it. Julian, shunned by all mankind, lives as a hermit. One cold night there comes to his hut a leper of extreme loathesomeness who asks for food, then for the warmth of Julian's embrace, then for a kiss upon his ghastly mouth. And as Julian's caritas extends to this last request, the leper appears as Christ and carries Julian off in glory. A Simple Heart is a record of a life of religious piety and of entire devotion to others. Virtually the only events of Félicité's life are the deaths of those whom she loves and serves. (It has been remarked that Félicité has a seizure on the road very much like that which Flaubert suffered as the first episode of his illness; other possible connections with Flaubert are her cherishing of her nephew, her being exploited by her relatives, her being left destitute by the death of her mistress and her continuing to live by sufferance in the stripped and empty house.) Herodi as is the story of John the Baptist imprisoned by the Tetrarch Antipas, of Salome's dance, and the severed head. The religious elements of the three stories must not mislead us about the condition of Flaubert's belief. The Tales are not to be thought of as tentatives toward an avowal of faith. For this Flaubert's attitude toward religion was far too complex. Even in Bouvard and Pécuchet, as I have noted, Flaubert treats simple, primary religious faith, or impulse to faith, with great gentleness; what dismayed him were the intellectual extrapolations from this simplicity. Yet his re- sponse to religion is not comprised by the tenderness he could show to simple faith and his contempt for systematic theology. What his attitude to religion actually was in its considerable complexity has been well described by Philip Spencer in his Flaubert: "He seems . . . to have regarded Christianity as a spent force. . . . The only two ele- ments in Catholicism to which Flaubert responded were subordinate to the main tradition and divergent from it: the hatred of life, the negation of life's goodness, which he thought he discovered in Catholic philosophy, and, concomitant with it, the rigorous self-abatement of asceticism. But his own religious feeling, if such it can be called, was diffuse—a kind of creatureliness before the mystery of creation. 'What === Page 39 === FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT 629 draws me above all things,' he wrote in 1857, 'is religion. I mean all religions, not one rather than another. Each dogma on its own repels me, but I consider the feeling that created them as the most natural and poetical in humanity. I don't like philosophers who find there only fraud and foolishness.' A man who can speak thus does not easily "turn to" religion, and the Three Tales must not be thought of even as the tribute to religion of an unbeliever who perceives the charms and advantages of faith and who regrets his inability to be- lieve. Flaubert was a very serious man. But we shall not be wrong if we think of the stories as a tribute to what Flaubert took to be a characteristic mode of Christianity, the "negation of life's goodness"-life's goodness in general and specific- ally the goodness of man's life in culture. In each of the stories the protagonist exists beyond the life in culture and stands divested of every garment that culture weaves. Julian passes beyond parental love, beyond social rank, beyond heroism and fame, beyond the domestic affections, beyond all the things, persons, and institutions that bind us to the earth, and he reaches that moment of charity which is the surrender of what Flaubert believed to be the richest luxury of culture, the self in the separateness of sensibility and pride that define it. Félicité, endowed by nature and culture with no other gift than that of the power to love and serve, is deprived of every person upon whom her love has fixed, and is left with no other object to cherish than her poor stuffed parrot, the dumb effigy of the Speaking Bird, the Logos, the Holy Ghost. John the Baptist, naked and solitary, cries out from his prison-pit against the court of Antipas, and Flau- bert is at his usual pains to specify not only the deeds but the artifacts —the garments and the food and the armaments hidden beneath the palace-of which the Baptist's naked and solitary voice is the negation. The Tales, that is, continue Flaubert's old despair of culture, which was, we may say, the prime condition of his art; it was a de- spair which was the more profound, we need scarcely say, because it was the issue of so great a hope. Emma Bovary had tried to live by the promises of selfhood which culture had seemed to make, and cul- ture had destroyed her. Frédéric Moreau had ruined himself by never quite believing in the selfhood which culture cherishes as its dearest gift. Now Flaubert considers the condition of the spirit which puts === Page 40 === 630 PARTISAN REVIEW itself as far as possible beyond the promises, the consolations, and the demands of culture; in each of the Three Tales he asks what remains when culture is rejected and transcended. The answer, given with a notable firmness and simplicity, is that something of highest value does remain—it is the self affirmed in self-denial: life's nothing un- less sacrificial. And Bouvard and Pécuchet, sitting at their double copying desk, having a work and each other, but stripped of every idea, every theory, every shred of culture beyond what is necessary to keep men alive and still human, are, in their own mild negation of self, intended by Flaubert to be among the company of his saints. === Page 41 === Robert Lowell INAUGURATION DAY: JANUARY 1953 The snow had buried Stuyvesant. The subways drummed the vaults. I heard Ublan-green girders charge on Third, Manhattan's truss of adamant, That groaned in ermine, slummed on want . . . Cyclonic zero of the Word, God of our armies, who interred Cold Harbor's blue immortals, Grant! Ice, ice; our wheels no longer move; Horseman, your sword is in the groove! Look, the fixed stars, itinerant As lack-land atoms, split apart, And the Republic summons Grant, The mausoleum in her heart. A MAD NEGRO SOLDIER CONFINED AT MUNICH We're all Americans, except the Doc, A Kraut DP, who kneels and bathes my eye. The boys who floored me, two black patients, try To pat my hands. Rounds, rounds! Why punch a clock? In Munich the zoo's rubble fumes with cats; Hoydens with air-guns prowl the Ludwigplatz, And pink the pigeons on the mustard spire. Who but my true-love set the town on fire? === Page 42 === Cat-houses talk cold turkey to my guards; But I found true-love stitching outing-shirts In the black forest of the colored wards— Lieutenants squawked like chickens in her skirts. You are my true-love, though your talk went wrong. Thus we are married, child; and when I drew You underneath my overturned canoe, I hugged you to my heart where toys belong. Six times I knew you—like a trolley-pole Sparking at contact, your electric shock—. The power-house! . . . The sergeant calls our roll. He counts the spoons. We file before the clock, And fancy minnows, slaves of habit, shoot Like starlight through their air-conditioned bowl. It's time for feeding. Each subnormal boot- Black heart is pulsing to its ant-egg dole. Francis Fergusson AESOP IN HELL: THE FOX AND THE CROW In the dead-still November woods, a flutter in the dry thicket of scrub-oak, betrays the crow and his heavy cheese, in harsh struggle, To reynard-fox’s steady, agate gaze. The crow’s thin claws slip on the branch that swings and dips, forward and back: how can he raise The prize, on his weak neck and trembling wings? And like unseen, revealing verity, the very visage of unwelcome things, See now the witness of indignity glide from behind a bush on noiseless paws, with face of ambivalent sympathy. The crow regains his poise, clenching his claws and beak, but his quick breath comes sharp and dry as the fox holds a tense and lengthy pause. === Page 43 === Then: "I think I could help, if I might try," fox offers in a friendly way, intent for signs of weakness in crow's button eye. "How still and wide now is the whole extent of woods and sky! Why, in this tiny copse, must our wills lock in grinding punishment?" Thinks crow, beak locked on cheese; speechlessly mopes. But to relentless fox his thoughts are clear, inspiring more imaginative hopes Of victory more bitter and more drear than scrawny body clamped in his strong teeth: the crow's fond spirit downed and clamped in fear. "How beautiful is flight above the heath where I must creep, admiring from afar your gleaming wings," says fox. His face, beneath Crow's teetering perch, reveals no slightest bar to candor or to perfect understanding; and now a tell-tale moisture starts to mar Black crow's bright eye. It is his soul demanding the sweets of song, or philosophic solace; he is a bird who dreams of human standing. "How must it feel to leave behind the onus of earth-bound creatures, high in air, alone with the Alone, in all wide heaven solus? "I long," fox presses on, "in your own tone to hear truth's music-pardon my insistence- give me truth's very tune!" That snaps the bone Of the sad crow's last, desperate resistance, unclenches claws and beak, melts him with pity for mortal fate, especially in this instance. Let us not dwell on this absurdity. I do not want to hear crow's raucous bawling in agony of twisted vanity, Which, in his disarray, is more appalling than living gone. The copse returns to peace, in the hushed air one ragged feather falling, as though to say that there that scene might cease. === Page 44 === Edwin Muir TWO SONNETS I You through whom we have lost and still shall lose Even what we win (but never fully win), You gave the choice without the skill to choose, The rough-cast world, the broken Eden within, Taught us the narrow miss and accident, The countless odds and the predestined plot, Action and thought to every bias bent, And chance, the winning and the losing lot. You gave us time, and time gave us the story, Beginning and end in one wild largesse spent, Inexplicable. Until the heavenly Glory Took on our flesh and wrought the meaning. Since, Sons, daughters, brothers, sisters of that Prince Are we, it's said, although in banishment. II They could not tell me who should be my lord, Yet I could read from every word they said The common thought: Perhaps that lord was dead, And only a story now or a random word. How could I follow a word or serve a fable, They asked me. "Here are lords a-plenty. Take Service with one if only for your sake, Though better be your own master if you're able." I would rather scour the roads, a masterless dog, Than take such service, be a public fool, Obstreperous or tongue-tied, a good rogue, Than be with those, the clever and the dull, Who say that lord is dead; when I can hear Daily his dying summons in my ear. === Page 45 === Philip Rahv THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE One must know how to ask questions: the question is who was Ariadne and which song did the sirens sing?-FRIEDRICH GEORG JU ENGER. Much has been written of late about myth. What it is and what it will do for us has been widely debated, yet I cannot see that any clear statement of the intrinsic meaning of present-day mytho- mania has emerged from the discussion. The exponents of myth keep insisting on its seminal uses, appealing indiscriminately to Yeats and Joyce and Mann and other exemplars of the modern creative line, while the opponents point to the regressive implications of the new- fangled concern with myth, charging that at bottom what it comes to is a kind of nebulous religiosity, a vague literary compromise be- tween skepticism and dogma, in essence a form of magico-religious play with antique counters in a game without real commitments or consequences. To be sure, not all exponents of myth are of one type. Some make no excessive claims; others have turned into sheer enthusiasts who blow up myth into a universal panacea, proclaiming that the "reintegration of the myth" will not only save the arts but will lead to no less than the cure of modern ills and ultimate salvation. So extravagant have been their claims that even Jacques Maritain, who is hardly to be accused of a naturalistic view of myth, has been moved to rebuke them, primarily for confusing metaphysical and poetic myths, that is confusing the fictions composed by the poet qua poet (which may be called myths, if at all, only in a loose analogical sense) with the great myths deriving their power solely from the belief that men have in them.1 For myth actually believed in is not understood as a symbolic form, competing with other such forms, but as truth pure and simple. Now why should a distinction so elementary be generally over- looked by the cultists of myth? For the very good reason, obviously, === Page 46 === 636 PARTISAN REVIEW that it is this very cultism which enables them to evade the hard choice between belief and unbelief. After all, now that the idea of myth has been invested in literary discourse with all sorts of intriguing suggestions of holiness and sacramental significance, one can talk about it as if it were almost the same thing as religion, thus circum- venting the all-too-definite and perhaps embarrassing demands of orthodoxy even while enjoying an emotional rapport with it. At the same time, myth having been somehow equated with the essence of poetry, it becomes possible to enlist its prestige along with that of re- ligion. The mythomaniac puts himself in the position of speaking freely in the name both of poetry and religion without, however, mak- ing himself responsible to either. But it should be evident that in the long run neither benefits from so forced a conjunction. It deprives them equally of specific definition and commitment; and this, I take it, is the implicit point of M. Maritain’s critical remarks. The discussion of myth has led some literary men to undertake interpretations of it in terms of its origins and fundamental import in the history of culture. Such interpretations are in the main more wishful than accurate, running counter to the findings at once of such noted philosophical students of myth as Ernst Cassirer and an- thropologists and ethnologists like Malinowski, Jane Harrison, Lord Raglan, A. M. Hocart, S. M. Hooke, et al. The fact is that the cur- rent literary inflation of myth is not in the least supported by the authoritative texts in this field of study. Typical is the approach of a distinguished literary critic, who on the subject of myth proceeds entirely without discretion. Myth is for him “the cartograph of the perennial human situation,” and he contends that in myth alone can we hope to encounter “a beckoning image of the successful alliance of love and justice, the great problems of the race from its dark beginnings.” In other words: Back to myth if you want to be saved! It leaves one wondering how that sort of thing can possibly be squared with anything to be found, for instance, in the late Professor Cassirer’s numerous, painstaking, and truly imaginative inquiries into myth. What we do realize in reading Cassirer, however, is that contempor- ary mythomania makes for the renewal in our time of the symbolic- allegorical treatment of myth favored by the romantics, who saw in myth a source of higher teachings and ultra-spiritual insights, convert- ing it into a magic mirror that reflected their heart’s desire. As Cas- === Page 47 === THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE 637 sirer observes, the romantic philosophers and poets in Germany were the first to embrace myth with rapture, identifying it with reality in the same way as they identified poetry with truth: from then on "they saw all things in a new shape. They could not return to the common world-the world of the profanum vulgus. The cultism of myth is patently a revival of romantic longings and attitudes. It seems as if in the modern world there is no having done with romanticism-no having done with it because of its enormous re- sourcefulness in accommodating the neo-primitivistic urge that per- vades our culture, in providing it with objects of nostalgia upon which to fasten and haunting forms of the past that it can fill with its own content. And the literary sensibility, disquieted by the effects of the growing division of labor and the differentiation of consciousness, is of course especially responsive to the vision of the lost unities and simplicities of times past. Now myth, the appeal of which lies pre- cisely in its archaism, promises above all to heal the wounds of time. For the one essential function of myth stressed by all writers is that in merging past and present it releases us from the flux of temporality, arresting change in the timeless, the permanent, the ever-recurrent conceived as "sacred repetition." Hence the mythic is the polar oppo- site of what we mean by the historical, which stands for process, inex- orable change, incessant permutation and innovation. Myth is reas- suring in its stability, whereas history is that powerhouse of change which destroys custom and tradition in producing the future-the future that at present, with the fading away of the optimism of pro- gress, many have learned to associate with the danger and menace of the unknown. In our time the movement of history has been so rapid that the mind longs for nothing so much as something perma- nent to steady it. Hence what the craze for myth represents most of all is the fear of history. But of that later. First let us turn to the genetic approach to myth developed by the scholars in this field, com- paring it with some of the literary notions which, by infusing myth with the qualities that properly belong to art, have brought about widespread confusion as to the differences between the mythic and the aesthetic mode of expression. The most commonly accepted theory among scholars is the so- called ritual theory defining myth as a narrative linked with a rite. === Page 48 === 638 PARTISAN REVIEW The myth describes what the ritual enacts. A mode of symbolic ex- pression objectifying early human feeling and experience, the myth is least of all the product of the reflective or historical consciousness, or of the search for scientific or philosophical truth. Though satisfying "the demands of incipient rationality .. . in an unfathomed world,"" it arises, basically, in response to ever-recurrent needs of a practical and emotional nature that are assumed to require for their gratifica- tion the magical potency of a sacral act. Its originators, as S. M. Hooke writes, "were not occupied with general questions concerning the world but with certain practical and pressing problems of daily life. There were the main problems of securing the means of sub- sistence, of keeping the sun and moon doing their duty, of ensuring the regular flooding of the Nile, of maintaining the bodily vigor of the king who was the embodiment of the prosperity of community. . . . In order to meet these needs the early inhabitants of Egypt and Mesopotamia developed a set of customary activities directed toward a definite end. Thus the coronation of a king . . . consisted of a regu- lar pattern of actions, of things prescribed to be done, whose purpose was to fit the king completely to be the source of the well-being of the community. This is the sense in which we shall use the term 'ritual.'"" Cassirer uses the term in much the same sense, as for ex- ample, in his comment on the mythic tale of Dionysus Zagreus: "What is recalled here is neither a physical nor historical phenomenon. It is not a fact of nature nor a recollection of the deeds or sufferings of a heroic ancestor. Nevertheless the legend is not a mere fairy tale. It had a fundamentum in re; it refers to a certain 'reality.' . . . It is ritual. What is seen in the Dionysiac cult is explained in the myth." As for the Greek myths with which we are most familiar, Hooke sees them as the fragments of a very antique pattern that in becoming separated from ritual gradually acquired an independent life through poetic formulation. Thus both the Minotaur and Perseus myths mani- festly involve an underlying ritual pattern of human sacrifice devel- oped in a stage when myth and ritual were still one. And to compre- hend that unity one must keep in mind, as Lord Raglan puts it, that "in the beginning the thing said and the thing done were inseparably united, although in the course of time they were divorced and gave rise to widely differing literary, artistic and religious forms." It is clear that both epos and logos evolved out of mythos. But that this evolu- === Page 49 === THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE 639 tion is irreversible the literary expatiators of myth fail to grasp. The primitive significance of myth is not to be disclosed by scru- tinizing ancient poetry. "It is as vain to look to Homer for the prim- itive significance of myth," writes A. M. Hocart, "as it would be to seek it in Sir Thomas Malory." The epic, though a medium of mythological lore, is at the same time, as Susanne M. Langer observes, "the first flower, or one of the first, of a new symbolic mode-the mode of art. It is not merely a receptacle of old symbols, namely those of myth, but is itself a new symbolic form, great with possibil- ities, ready to take meaning and express ideas that have had no vehicle before." Poetic structure transforms the mythic material, discipling and subjecting it to logical and psychological motives that eventually alienate it from its origins. To take the fact that myth is the common matrix of many literary forms as an indication that myth is literature or that literature is myth is a simple instance of the genetic fallacy. Myth is a certain kind of objective fantasy to which literature has had frequent recourse for its materials and patterns; but in itself it is not literature. The literary work is mainly characterized by the order and qualitative arrangement of its words; myths, on the other hand, as Miss Langer notes, are not bound to "any particular words, nor even to language, but may be told or painted, acted or danced, with- out suffering degradation or distortion. . . . They have no meter, no characteristic phrases, and are just as often recorded in vase-paintings and bas-reliefs as in words. A ballad, however, is a composition. . . . "97 We know that Oedipus Rex is based on a mythic ritual. But the question is, what chiefly affects us in the play? Is it the myth, as such indifferent to verbal form, serving as Sophocles' material, or his par- ticular composition of it? The Oedipus myth has its own power, to be sure, but one must distinguish between this power and that of the dramatic embodiment the poet gave it. And by confusing these differ- ent powers the inflators of myth are able to credit it with properties that really belong to art. Moreover, the mythic imagination is a believing imagination. At- taching no value to fictions, it envisages its objects as actually existing. Conversely, the imagination of art, a relatively late development in the history of human mentality, is marked above all by its liberation from the sheerly actual and material. Art achieves independence as it gradu- ally detaches itself from myth. The poetic image, Cassirer notes, at- === Page 50 === 640 PARTISAN REVIEW tains "its purely representative, specifically 'aesthetic' function only as the magic circle with which mythical consciousness surrounds it is broken, and it is recognized not as a mythico-magical form, but as a particular sort of formulation." Then what is meant by saying that not only the great epic and dramatic poets but even the best lyric poets seem to be possessed by a kind of mythic power? Cassirer's reply is that in those poets "the magic power of insight breaks forth again in its full intensity and objectifying power. But this objectivity has discarded all material constraints. The spirit lives in the world of language and in the mythical image without falling under the control of either." Word and image, which once affected the mind as awe- some external forces, have now cast off effectual reality, becoming for the literary artist "a light, bright ether in which the spirit can move without let or hindrance. This liberation is achieved not because the mind throws aside the sensuous forms of word and image, but be- cause it uses them both as organs of its own, and thereby recognizes them for what they really are: forms of its own self-revelation."8 This type of historical analysis of the relation between art and myth is unlikely to interest the cultists. For what is the mind's recog- nition of its own creations if not an advance toward freedom? But it is freedom which is refused by those who wish to re-mystify the world through myth or dogma. This new-fashioned freedom is still largely untried by the generality of men. Why not keep it so, thus saving them from its perils? In literature this has prompted the en- deavor to establish what might well be called a poetics of restitution- restitution for the disenchantment of reality carried through by science, rationality, and the historical consciousness. It is only natural that in such a poetics, ruled by schematic notions of tradition, the libera- tion of art from the socio-religious compulsions of the past should be taken as a calamity-a veritable expulsion from Eden. And how is Eden to be regained? Inevitably some of the practitioners of this poetics discovered that myth answered their purpose much better than tradition. After all, the supra-temporality of myth provides the ideal refuge from history. To them, as to Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, his- tory is a nightmare from which they are trying to awake. But to awake from history into myth is like escaping from a nightmare into a state of permanent insomnia. But if the road back to genuine mythic consciousness is closed, === Page 51 === THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE 641 what is still open is the possibility of manipulating ideas of myth. And that is precisely the point of my objection. For myth is not what its ideologues claim it to be. Though the common matrix of both, it is neither art nor metaphysics. In fact, both art and metaphysics are among those superior forces which culture brought to bear in its effort to surmount the primitivism of myth. Dialectical freedom is unknown to myth, which permits no distinction between realities and symbols. The proposition that "the world of human culture . . ." could not arise until the darkness of myth was fought and overcome"9 is no doubt historically valid. Witness the struggle against it in Greek philosophy, as for instance in the animadversions on mythic tales in the Phaedrus. Socrates, walking with his companion by the banks of the Ilissus, calls those tales "irrelevant things," declining to put his mind to them by reason of their uselessness in his search for self- knowledge. Even if instructive in some things, the one thing they cannot impart is ethical enlightenment: the question of good and evil is beyond myth and becomes crucial only with the emergence of the individual, to whom alone is given the capacity at once to assent to the gift of self-knowledge and to undergo its ordeal. Individuality is in truth foreign to myth, which objectifies col- lective rather than personal experience. Its splendor is that of the original totality, the pristine unity of thought and action, word and deed. The sundering of that unity is one of the tragic contradictions of historical development, which is never an harmonious forward movement but "a cruel repugnant labor against itself," as Hegel de- scribed it with unequaled insight. It is the paradox of progress that humanity has proven itself unable to assimilate reality except by means of "the alienation of human forces." In order to recover the potency of myth civilized man would first have to undo the whole of his history; and when some literary intellectuals dream of this recovery they are manifestly reacting against the effects of self-alienation at the same time that they exemplify these effects with appalling sim- plicity. What Marx once called "the idiocy of the division of labor" must have gone very far indeed if people can so drastically separate their theories of life from their concrete living of it! (The "idiocy" results from the fragmentation of vital human functions, since, as Marx said, "together with the division of labor is given the possibility, nay, the actuality, that spiritual activity and material activity, pleasure === Page 52 === 642 PARTISAN REVIEW and work, production and consumption, will fall to the lot of differ- ent individuals.") It is not unimaginable that in the future the paradox of progress will be resolved and acting and thinking reintegrated. We can be cer- tain, however, that a conquest so consummate will take place not within our civilization but beyond it, on the further shore of historical necessity, when man, at long last reconciling nature and culture within himself, will no longer be compelled to purchase every gain in freedom with the loss of wholeness and integrity. Admittedly that too is prob- ably a dream, but it is at least a possible dream and so long as civil- ization lasts perhaps an indefeasible one. The fulfillment it promises is the hope of history—and its redemption. And inconceivable as that fulfillment may seem to us at present, it will be brought about through the real processes of history or not at all—never through the magic potion of myth. I said above that the craze for myth is the fear of history. It is feared because modern life is above all an historical life producing changes with vertiginous speed, changes difficult to understand and even more difficult to control. And to some people it appears as though the past, all of it together with its gods and sacred books, were being ground to pieces in the powerhouse of change, senselessly used up as so much raw material in the fabrication of an unthinkable fu- ture. One way certain intellectuals have found of coping with their fear is to deny historical time and induce in themselves through aesthetic and ideological means a sensation of mythic time—the eternal past of ritual. The advantage of mythic time is that it is without definite articulation, confounding past, present, and future in an un- differentiated unity, as against historical time which is unrepeatable and of an ineluctable progression. The historical event is that which occurs once only, unlike the timeless event of myth that, recurring again and again, is endlessly present. The turn from history toward myth is to be observed in some of the important creative works of this period, as Joseph Frank has shown in his remarkable essay "Spatial Form in Modern Literature." He quotes Allen Tate as saying that Ezra Pound's Cantos in their "powerful juxtapositions of the ancient, the Renaissance, and the modern worlds reduce all three elements to an unhistorical miscellany, === Page 53 === THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE 643 timeless and without origin." Frank analyzes The Waste Land, Ulysses, Nightwood and other literary works along the same lines, establishing that while on one level they seem to be dealing with "the clash of historical perspectives induced by the identification of contemporary figures and events with various historical prototypes," in practice they make history unhistorical in that it is sensed as "a continuum in which distinctions of past and present are obliterated . . . past and present are seen spatially, locked in a timeless unity which, even if accentu- ating surface differences, eliminates any feeling of historical sequence by the very act of juxtaposition. The objective historical imagination, on which modern man has prided himself, and which he has cul- tivated so carefully since the Renaissance, is transformed in those writers into the mythical imagination for which historical time does not exist."10 Frank offers no social-historical explanation of this retreat from history; he is simply concerned with it as an aesthetic phenom- enon expressing itself in "spatial form." Perhaps for that very reason he too readily assumes that the mythic imagination is actually operative in the writers he examines. But the supplanting of the sense of historical by the sense of mythic time is scarcely accomplished with such ease; the mere absence of the one does not necessarily confirm the presence of the other. For my part, what I perceive in Pound and Eliot are not the workings of the mythic imagination but an aesthetic simulacrum of it, a learned illusion of timelessness. We should not mistake historical retro- spection, however richly allusive and organized in however "simul- taneous" a fashion, for mythic immediacy and the pure imaginative embodiment of a perpetual present. In point of fact, the polemical irony which the poems both of Pound and Eliot generate at the ex- pense of modern society in itself attests to a marked commitment to- ward history. Are not these poets conducting a campaign against his- tory precisely in the name of history, which they approach, however, with mythic prepossessions, that is to say without either dynamism or objectivity, responding to its archaistic refinements while condemning its movement? The truth is that they are as involved in historicism as most contemporary writers sensitive to the "modern situation," but in their case the form it takes is negative. Willy-nilly they express the age, that few would deny is historicist through and through.11 As Eliot himself once wrote, if a poet is "sincere, he must express === Page 54 === 644 PARTISAN REVIEW with individual differences the general state of mind-not as a duty, but because he cannot help participating in it." Eliot is plainly a more "sincere" poet than Pound, and he is also a religious man; and it is necessary to uphold the distinction between religion and myth. His religiousness, which has temperamental as well as deep so- cial roots, hardly disallows the cultivation of historical awareness. This may well explain why he has always been able to curb his "myth- icism," so that it is but one of the several tendencies in his work rather than its motive-power. As a literary critic he is seldom inclined to hunt for mythological patterns, whose task it seems to be to reduce the history of literature to sameness and static juxtaposition; more typically he searches for those alterations of sensibility that are his- torically illuminating and productive of significant change. It is Pound who in his later phase is wholly in the throes of "mythicism." But, far from being a reincarnation of an ancient im- aginative mode, it is really but another sample of modern ideology, applied to poetry with frenetic zeal in an effort to compensate for loss of coherence. In the Cantos time neither stands still as in myth nor moves as in history; it is merely suspended. As for Joyce's Ulysses, it seems to me that the mythological parallels it abounds in provide little more than the scaffolding for the structure of the novel; and only critics fascinated by exegesis would mistake it for the structure itself. Those parallels do not really enter substantively into the pre- sentation of the characters. The manner in which Bloom is identified with Odysseus and Stephen with Telemachus is more like a mythic jest or conceit, as it were, than a true identification. To be sure, it reflects the somewhat scholastic humor of the author; but its principal function is that of helping him organize his material. In that sense it has more to do with the making of the novel than with the reading of it-for as readers we find both Stephen and Bloom convincing because they are firmly grounded in the historical actualities of Joyce's city, his country, and Europe as a whole. It is in Finnegans Wake, far more than in Ulysses, that the mythic bias is in ascendant, the histor- ical element recedes, and the language itself is converted into a medi- um of myth. Finnegans Wake is the most complete example of "spatial form" in modern literature. Joseph Frank's definition of that form is ex- tremely plausible, yet I cannot agree that it is a mythic form in any === Page 55 === THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE 645 but a very limited analogical sense. It is best understood, to my mind, as the aesthetic means devised for the projection of a non-historical or even anti-historical view of history. The most one can say of this form is that it reflects a mythic bias. But this bias is by no means in- dependent of historicism, of which it is a kind of reactionary distor- tion or petrification. There is a good deal of evidence supporting this conception of "spatial form." Thus in his book, The Protestant Era, Paul Tillich lists the main premises of the non-historical interpretation of history, and we find that one such premise is that "space is predominant against time; time is considered to be circular or repeating itself in- finitely." What is the inner meaning of this spatializing of time? From Tillich's philosophical standpoint it means that time is being detached from history and yielded back to nature. In other words, the contradiction between history and nature is resolved in favor of the latter. Tillich defines time, in terms reminiscent of Schelling and Bergson, as the dimension of the dynamic, creative, and qualitative, whereas space he defines as the static and quantitative. If this con- trast is valid, then one can only conclude that the attempt to re- spatializetime implies a defeatist attitude toward history, an attitude that in the long run makes for cultural regression. Further premises of the non-historical interpretation of history are that "salvation is the salvation of individuals from time and his- tory, not the salvation of a community through time and history," and that history is to be understood as "a process of deterioration, leading to the inescapable self-destruction of a world era." It is not difficult to recognize here some of the components of "mythicism." As an ideology "mythicism" is of course not to be equated at all points with its artistic practice. One must distinguish between the cultism of myth, which is primarily an ideological manifestation, and the literary works in which myth is made use of in one way or another. In Joyce the ideology is hardly perceptible, but you will find it in Eliot and a somewhat secularized version of it in Pound. Some critics write about Thomas Mann as if he too were enlisted in the service of myth. This is a mistake, I think. Joseph and His Brothers is not so much a mythic novel as a novel on mythic themes. In this narrative it is the characters, not at all the author, who confound past and present in their experience of that "pure time" which transcends === Page 56 === 646 PARTISAN REVIEW both. Furthermore, in his recreation of myth Mann is heavily indebted to the Freudian psychology; and psychology is inherently anti-mythic. The Freudian method is a special adaptation of the historical method in general. Freud's early efforts to fit his theory into a biological framework were of no avail; and now it is clear, as W. H. Auden has so well put it, that Freud, "towers up as the genius who per- ceived that psychological events are not natural events but historical and that, therefore, psychology, as distinct from neurology, must be based on the presuppositions . . . not of the biologist but of the historian." Not a few characteristics of "mythicism" are brought into Til- lich's exposition under the heading of the "mystical" approach to history, against which he argues in the name of historical realism. This is a perspective that he evaluates as a creation of the West, especially in so far as it stands under Protestant influence. "For his- torical realism the really real appears in the structures created by the historical process," he writes. "History is open to interpretation only through active participation. We can grasp the power of historical being only if we are grasped by it in our historical experience." His analysis, combining certain Marxist concepts with the religious variant of existential thought, repudiates all attempts to escape the present for the sake of the unreal past of archaism or the equally unreal future of utopianism. It is a view resistant to attitudes of religious pessimism toward the historical world and even more so to the mythic dissolu- tion of it in the eternal past of ritual. The fear of history is at bottom the fear of the hazards of free- dom. In so far as man can be said to be capable of self-determination, history is the sole sphere in which he can conceivably attain it. But though history, as Tillich affirms, is above all the sphere of freedom, it is also the sphere in which "man is determined by fate against his freedom. Very often the creations of his freedom are the tools used by fate against him; as, for instance, today the technical powers created by him turn against him with irresistible force. There are periods in history in which the element of freedom predominates, and there are periods in which fate and necessity prevail. The latter is true of our day. An analysis of this type, largely coinciding with the Hegelian-Marxist idea of historical tension and crisis, suffi- ciently accounts for the retreat from history toward myth. In our === Page 57 === THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE 647 time the historical process is marked far more by loss and extremity than growth and mastery, and this fact is interpreted by the spokes- men of traditionalism as completely justifying their position. The mythic principle appeals to them because of its fixity and profoundly conservative implications. But the hope of stability it offers is illusory. To look to myth for deliverance from history is altogether futile. In literature the withdrawal from historical experience and cre- ativeness can only mean stagnation. For the creative artist to deny time in the name of the timeless and immemorial is to misconceive his task. He will never discover a shortcut to transcendence. True, in the imaginative act the artist does indeed challenge time, but in order to win he must also be able to meet its challenge; and his triumph over it is like that blessing which Jacob exacted from the angel only after grappling with him till the break of day. In criticism the reaction against history is shown in the search for some sort of mythic model, so to speak, to which the literary work under scrutiny can be made to conform. The critics captivated by this procedure are inclined to take for granted that to identify a mythic pattern in a novel or poem is tantamount to disclosing its merit-an assumption patently false, for the very same pattern is easily discoverable in works entirely without merit. Implicit here is the notion that the sheer timelessness of the pattern is as such a guar- anty of value. What is not grasped, however, is that the timeless is in itself nothing more than a pledge waiting for time to redeem it, or, to vary the figure, a barren form that only time can make fecund. And Blake said it when he wrote in his "Proverbs of Hell" that "eternity is in love with the productions of time." 1 Jacques Maritain: Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York 1953), p. 180ff. 2 Ernst Cassirer: The Myth of the State (New Haven 1946), p. 5. 3 A. N. Whitehead: An Anthology selected by F. S. C. Northrop and Mason Cross (New York 1953), p. 475. 4 S. M. Hooke: in Myth and Ritual (London 1949), p. 6. 5 Ernst Cassirer: Op. cit. p. 42. 6 Susanne M. Langer: Philosophy in a New Key (New York 1948), p. 160ff. 7 Susanne M. Langer: Feeling and Form (New York 1953), p. 274ff. 8 Ernst Cassirer: Myth and Language, p. 97ff. 9 Ernst Cassirer: The Myth of the State, p. 298. === Page 58 === 648 PARTISAN REVIEW 10 Joseph Frank in Criticism: the Foundations of Modern Literary Judg- ment, edited by Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie (New York 1948), p. 392. 11 "Historicism," writes Karl Mannheim, "has developed into an intellec- tual force of extraordinary significance. . . The historicist principle not only organizes, like an invisible thread, the work of the cultural sciences (Geisteswis- senschaften) but also permeates everyday thinking. Today it is impossible to take part in politics, even to understand a person . . . without treating all those realities we have to deal with as having evolved and as developing dynamically. For in everyday life, too, we apply concepts with historicist overtones, for ex- ample, 'capitalism,' 'social movement,' 'cultural process,' etc. These forces are grasped and understood as potentialities, constantly in flux, moving from some point in time to another; already on the level of everyday reflection we seek to determine the position of our present within such a temporal framework, to tell by the cosmic clock of history what the time is"—Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (New York 1952), p. 84. 12 Paul Tillich: The Protestant Era (Chicago 1948), p. 71ff. 13 Ibid, p. 186. === Page 59 === William Phillips THE FOX AND THE GRAPE It was a steaming night, with a smell of the East in the air. The city was sleepless, and people drifted through the streets like actors in a slow-motion dream. A little after midnight, Jack Jackson was walking along Broad- way above Times Square. He did not seem to know where he was going, as he pushed his way mechanically through the crowd. But his eyes kept rolling furtively, as though they had been trained to act independently of his mind. Jackson had just come from a Communist meeting called to lay down a new "line." It was a routine meeting, yet it left him uneasy, like the first one he had gone to ten years ago, when he suddenly felt cut off from everything he had taken for granted. Then, too, he had gone off alone and found himself walking aimlessly into the night. Now Jackson was a functionary, a veteran of many shifts and turns; and even though the party was making a complete somersault, abandoning its revolutionary program for a broad popular front, Jackson permitted himself fewer doubts about the new line than about the laws of gravity. In a short but ponderous speech, he had repeated the official explanation of the new policy, which denied any real change, and when he was finished, he had convinced himself he had always believed in the new line. The only question on which there was disagreement at the meet- ing was whether the party should welcome into the fold writers who did not believe in proletarian literature. When Jackson was asked his opinion, he elaborately summed up the arguments on both sides, concluding with the observation that on the one hand there was one approach, on the other hand there was another. As soon as he was === Page 60 === 650 PARTISAN REVIEW done, one of the younger women, known for her bluntness, especially to men, snapped at him, "We are aware, Comrade Jackson, that we have two hands. What we want to know is which hand." Jackson looked around to see if everyone was laughing at him. Before the meeting was over, Jackson again reassured everyone of his faith in the new line, but still he could not conceal a preference for the old tough attitude toward non-Communists. For he actually regarded every non-Communist as a personal representative of the counter-revolution. He also did not like the idea of the party now becoming more respectable: unlike most of his fellow Communists who were really glad to become socially acceptable, he felt compro- mised by not being at war with the rest of society. Even in the party, Jackson was known as a chronic leftist, addicted to orthodoxy and militancy, which in his mind were one. Jackson had some reputation as a Marxist theoretician, partly because he had made a career of finding textual support in the writ- ings of Marx and Engels for every maneuver of the party, but mostly because he had appointed himself a watchdog of Communist theory, protecting it against what he felt was the constant threat of infiltra- tion by bourgeois ideas. Over the years, he had developed a remark- able gift for smelling out the minutest deviations, which he hated almost as much as capitalism. Very little was known about Jackson's past. One rumor was that he had been a bank clerk, another a book salesman. He did not seem to have had very much schooling, at least not enough to justify his role as an expert on every subject. He had the pomposity of a self-educated man, talking over his head, in a strange pedantic com- bination of official jargon and homemade thinking. Still, he was often invited to lecture before professional groups, who were usually impressed by his revolutionary rhetoric and his intimate knowledge of party history. But he was most at home in an atmosphere of conspiracy. Even when there was no need of it, he acted the part of the conspirator, whispering out of the corner of his mouth, looking around him when he talked, endlessly conniving, and never committing himself to a position until he was sure it was safe, that is, in line with the most powerful faction in the party. Innocent party members mistook his conspiratorial air for political gravity. But those in the know made === Page 61 === THE FOX AND THE GRAPE 651 fun of him, behind his back, of course, and there were endless jokes about his being so secretive that he would make sure he would not be seen before he sneaked into a toilet. Some people also insisted that when he went to bed with a woman he did not tell her who he was; and a story went the rounds that one girl slept with him because he said he was Molotov, whom he vaguely resembled, on a special mission to this country. Though everyone took for granted his name was an assumed one, even this was not enough to conceal his identity, for he was usually called J. J., apparently a further conspiratorial abbreviation. J. J. was supposed to have been married several times, but his wives were blotted out with the rest of his past. Everyone knew, how- ever, that he was an inveterate lecher, though his sexual activities were even more furtive than his political ones. It was said that when- ever a woman came to his office for political advice, he would put his arm around her to be more persuasive. And several people who would not go so far as to claim they were eye-witnesses said that J. J. once got himself so involved in the education of a student who could not grasp the nature of dialectics that he ended up with her on the desk in his office. J. J. was not an attractive man, at least not by conventional standards. Yet his slightly comic, gnomish look—in between that of an overgrown child and a dwarfed man—offset his conniving air. He was built like a sphere, short, round, and compact, as though he had just been hatched from an egg. His head was moony and large, like Humpty Dumpty, bulging out of his neck, a little ball on a bigger ball. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses that concealed small, roving eyes, giving him a grave and innocent stare. Even the older bureaucrats, who knew they had to watch out for J. J.'s maneuvers, were often taken in by their own picture of him as a pompous, timid little man, the natural butt of every red-blooded joke. As J. J. continued uptown, groping his way like a sleepwalker, he suddenly became very thirsty, and began to look anxiously at every bar he passed. But they all seemed forbiddingly respectable and clannish, full of cozy couples and gay parties, where he was sure he would feel out of place. J. J. was almost ready to give up, when he remembered that a recent exposé of vice in New York had men- === Page 62 === 652 PARTISAN REVIEW tioned some bars along the side streets in the midtown area. He turned down the next street, a little frightened, but excited by his own boldness. He stopped to look through the windows of several dingy places, but he could not make up his mind to go into any of them. After winding in and out of a few side streets, he realized that he had no way of choosing among them for they all looked alike from the out- side. There were always some flushed soldiers and sailors milling around a few disheveled young girls, one or two older women hang- ing over their drinks at the bar, and some stray men sitting gloomily as though they were in a convalescent home. Finally, he picked one bar where he felt he would not be conspicuous, because he saw several apparently unattached men and women inside, and he walked in as casually as he could. He sat down at an empty table in the rear, and surveyed the place. At one end a juke box was blaring a girl's tough voice trying to be coy, and a bald man in shirt sleeves was huddling up to it, jerking and stuttering to the rhythm of the song, his wet shirt clinging to him like an oversized bathing suit. A solid row of men interspersed with a few women lined the bar. Some were mumbling to each other; the rest sat mutely, as though waiting for the night to run its course. Here and there a few men were sitting alone, pawing a glass; and at the table next to him were three girls sprawled in their chairs, looking bored and restless. The waiter came over to J. J., and seemed irritated when he ordered a beer. J. J. noticed that the place smelled of sweat and whisky. He wondered who these people were, and decided they were lumpens, part of the drifting mass of manual and white-collar workers, without ties, or roots, or conscience. These were the little people, he thought, whom Hitler and Mussolini were able to mobilize by instilling in them a feeling of importance. Soon J. J. became aware that one of the girls at the next table was looking at him. At first he pretended not to notice, but then he began to try to catch her glance. When she smiled at him, he smiled, too, but he tightened up with excitement. She continued to smile reassuringly. Suddenly she broke the deadlock. "Won't you buy me a drink?" she asked him coyly. === Page 63 === THE FOX AND THE GRAPE 653 J. J. took another sip of beer to compose himself, afraid he might show his nervousness by stammering. Then he said, "Sure," in a loud, metallic voice, that he did not feel belonged to him. The girl got up and sat down opposite J. J. at his table. Her eyes ran over him, as she tried to size him up. But J. J. could not get a clear picture of her; he was too agitated and too busy trying to figure out how to behave. "What would you like to drink?" J. J. asked, fumbling for an opening. "A long beer," she said. "Too hot for whisky. Too hot for a bitch in heat. I don't know why anybody stays in this goddamned town in summer." "I guess people have to work. Only the rich can get away," he said, satisfied he knew the answer to that one. J. J. looked at her again, now noticing her tight black skirt and white blouse with a high sheen that held her like a pillowcase. Her face was chunky, but it was lifted by a steep, full forehead, rounded off by her thick blond hair sleekly drawn back. "What are you," she asked, "a salesman?" "No, I'm a writer." "What kind of writer-mysteries?" "No, magazine articles. I'm working on a novel." "Let's listen to that song. It's my favorite. Cools you off in the summer and warms you up in the winter. In the spring you don't need music." She closed her eyes, and began to hum and sway with the song, thrusting her chest out when the beat was stronger or the voice louder. Then they ordered another beer, and sat for a few minutes with- out talking. J. J. wanted to find out more about her but he did not know what to say. When they finished their beer, she began to fidget. "Let's get out of this hole," she said. "Where shall we go?" he asked when they got outside. "Do you want to come to my room?" she said. "It's next block." "Well, I don't know, maybe," he stammered. "What's the matter with you?" she said. "Are you a jerk or something? What do you want? Don't you like me? Feel me, don't === Page 64 === 654 PARTISAN REVIEW be scared, feel me, and there's more where this comes from.” "How much do you charge?" J. J. blurted, surprised by his bold- ness and his astuteness in grasping the situation. "Ten bucks," she said, offhand. But she looked puzzled by his question. "I tell you what. I'd just like to talk to you. I don't want to go to bed with you. But I'll pay you the ten bucks anyway, and I won't stay long because I don't want you to lose any business on account of me." For the first time, she was caught off balance, and for a moment was speechless. Then she asked, "What's this, a new line? Or are you nuts? Ten bucks for talking." She hesitated, then said with a shrug, "O.K., what've I got to lose. C'mon." She took his arm and steered him to an old rooming house just off the avenue. "It's one flight up," she said, "but don't make any noise because the landlady says she wants the joint quiet and no trouble." He followed her into a small room, all bed and chest of drawers, off which he could see a tiny bathroom. "Sit down," she said, pointing to a small, frayed armchair, as she sprawled on the bed. "What the hell do you want to talk about, talking is a waste of time. I'm dying of the heat and he wants to talk." "I'm a writer, I told you. I want just to find out about you, maybe write about you, but I'll change you so nobody will recognize you." As he defined his mission, J. J. kept looking at her breasts bal- looning in her blouse. "Don't tell me you want the story of my life. There is no story, just say I'm a working girl, working for a living.” "No, I mean why do you do this, you know what I mean." Suddenly she became suspicious. "Say, who are you anyway? You aren't a cop, are you?" "Of course not. Do I look like one, or act like one? A cop wouldn't want to talk to you, or sleep with you, would he?" "No, I guess you don't look like a cop. But you can never tell. Once a cop picked me up, talked to me like a gentleman, and then before he pulled me in the sonofabitch had himself a good time. He swore to the judge that he never even touched me, this whore he called me, while he stood there acting as if he was pure as his mother's milk. Nope, you never can tell.” === Page 65 === THE FOX AND THE GRAPE 655 "I wish there were some way of proving I'm not a cop. I don't have any papers or identification with me." J. J. remembered that party functionaries did not carry any documents when they went to important meetings. But he continued to fumble for some way of clearing himself. "Listen," he said, "I've talked to cops, and you know I don't sound like one. There are some intelligent ones, but their uniform becomes a straitjacket." "You can never be sure. But I guess you're too educated to be a cop. O.K. you gotta take some chances, as my mother always used to say, as soon as you get out of bed in the morning you begin to take your chances. Say, what's your name?" "Jack, why?" "You aren't kidding, are you? Every John calls himself Jack. But you got an honest face, and even if I don't believe you, tell me more, honey." "What's your name?" he asked, feeling secure enough for the first time to take the lead. "Mary, but if a man coughs, whistles, or yells, I come." "You haven't answered my question, Mary. Why do you do this? You're young, and attractive, and intelligent enough to get a respectable job. Don't you want to get married and have a family?" "Say, what are you, a teacher? Be good, he says, and I'll give you an A. We're talking too much. Don't you want to play?" she asked, jutting out her breasts and running her hands over them caressingly. J. J. felt his face get hot, and he thought how simple it would be to say yes. But he tightened up again, and regained control of himself by resuming his cross-examination. "Seriously," he said, as though he were beginning a speech, "you're wasting your life. It's probably not too late now to quit and find a job. In ten years you'll no longer be a plaything and you'll be too old to do anything else." "Listen, I'll tell you," she said, resigned to the fact she was getting paid for talking about herself. "But how do I know you'll give me the money?" "I'll give you five dollars now, and five later," he reassured her. "O.K. I'll tell you. You think I'm as dumb as some people think I look. Sure, some girls don't know they'll be bags before they know it, like some girls I know in burlesque who think they're real dancers === Page 66 === 656 PARTISAN REVIEW and that's why men pay to look at them. Christ, how dumb can you be? No, sir, I've figured it all out. I'm in it till I make my pile, then clear out with enough dough not to have to worry and marry the first jerk who asks me. I've already got some socked away, and in five years I'll be able to retire, a lady. It's like what they call an annuity, a guy was telling me about it once, but he'll never have it, he's a jerk. And don't think I'm going to stick to this two-bit racket, I'm going to work the carriage trade where men don't look for bargains. And see," she continued as though her pride were at stake, "even now I've got something to show for it. When I go out on Sunday, I don't look like they found me in an alley." She went over to a closet and pointed to a fur coat and a row of shining dresses. "And look at these," she said, pulling out a pair of suede shoes, "they're the best, fifty bucks. When I'm on my feet, only the best is good enough for them." J. J. was overwhelmed by the frankness and practicality of her outburst. But he began to feel at home, for she was presenting an argument, a position which he could refute. He thought a moment, and then began to answer her, measuring his words, as though he were addressing an unenlightened audience. "What you say," he began in a low voice, "has a superficial plausibility. In a way, this is the law of our society, based on the ethics of the jungle, and most people act as though they must get quickly as possible, dog eat dog. But the trouble is that nobody really wins, not those who do the eating any more than those who are eaten. Sure, there are people who think they can out- smart the system, make a lot of money by ruthless or shady means, and then retire to a comfortable, respectable existence, maybe even donating some of their profits to charities or social causes to ease their conscience. But it doesn't work. Even if your aim is to be a decent citizen, after you have made your money, you are changed, yes, destroyed, by"-J. J. fumbled for the right words "by the in- human, competitive process by which you have made it." J. J. looked at her to gauge the effect of what he had just said. Then he con- tinued in the paternal tone he had used on so many floundering women. "Look at yourself. You won't be the same person by the time you're ready to retire, assuming that your appetite for easy money can be curbed to permit you to retire. You see, you're like === Page 67 === THE FOX AND THE GRAPE 657 a grape. You are squeezed, or, let's say, you squeeze yourself, to pro- duce some wine. But then, you're finished, you're finished, you're not a grape any more." J. J. leaned back, satisfied he had made his point. At first Mary had tried to listen to J. J., tilting her head like a schoolgirl, but she soon became bored, then irritated, and her eyes began to wander around the room. "You sure can talk more than any man," she said in a tired voice; "reminds me of my old man who used to lecture me, then went out and got drunk and beat up my old lady, who died of t.b., God bless her. But he never called me a grape. I've been called plenty of things, but not that. Say, it's cute, I'll have to remember it." J. J. knew he was beaten, but he could not let go what he thought was his advantage and tried another tack. "You know," he said, "people who have to work for a living can help themselves by joining organizations, knowing whom to vote for, and in Germany, girls, that is prostitutes" -he stumbled over the word-"used to get together and even picket." Mary interrupted him. "I'm not interested in politics," she said. "Politics is for men." J. J. felt hot and tired. "Can I use your john?" he asked. "Sure," she said, "it's free, but you got to jiggle it or it won't work." When he came back, she said impatiently, "Well, what do you want to do? You're not going to pay me just for talking, and it's getting late. Don't you like me?" She confidently stuck her massive bosom out again, but her face looked worried, as she asked, "Ain't I your type, honey? It's the first time anyone in pants has turned me down." J. J.'s legs began to run, and his head felt feverish, as he thought of getting into bed with her. It occurred to him she might think he was queer if he didn't. "Sure, I like you," he muttered perfunctorily. "But how do I know you don't have a disease, a venereal disease." "What do you want, a written guarantee?" she snapped. "You think I was born yesterday. I keep myself clean, and I saw the doctor last week." "But anything could have happened since then," he said with an air of scientific authority. === Page 68 === 658 PARTISAN REVIEW "Yeah, anything could have happened. I could have dropped dead, or been run over, or arrested by a cop. I always say you've got to take your chances. When you get off your ass you're on your own.” She stopped abruptly, leaned back on the bed, and said, laughing, “What's the matter, honey, are you scared?” He looked at her breasts and the rise of her belly, and he began to feel nauseous. “I'm awfully thirsty,” he said, making for the bathroom again. He splashed his face and neck with cold water, and took a drink out of his hand, because the glass on the washstand was rimmed with lipstick. When he came back, she lay slumped on the bed, her head flat on her arm, cushioned by a pillow. Still a little shaky, he pulled himself together by taking a judicious attitude, and he began to answer her question as though he had been thinking about it a long time. “That is not so,” he said, “the weighing of consequences is not necessarily an expression of fear; to be blind to them is just stupidity. Anyway, as I told you, I only wanted to talk to you, which you agreed to do.” J. J. looked at his watch. “It's late,” he continued, “I guess I've kept you long enough. You probably want to go out again now.” “No,” she said, “I think I'll go to sleep. It's too hot, and you talk so much you've knocked me out.” “Here's the rest of the money I owe you,” said J. J. getting up. "Thank you very much.” “O.K.,” she said, sitting up, “leave it here. You're one for the books, but you're a gentleman, I must say so, a real gentleman and I can't brag I've met so many of them.” As J. J. opened the door, he turned to look at her again and blurted, “Good-by, maybe I'll see you again some day.” “Sure,” she said, leaning back on the bed, chest high, running her hands through her hair, “you know where to find me. Keep your nose clean. And don't make any noise going out." J. J. walked out into the soggy night, wet and limp. He stopped to get his bearings, looking stealthily around. He had forgotten about his meeting. As he walked to the subway, he kept thinking about Mary, but he could not recall very clearly === Page 69 === THE FOX AND THE GRAPE 659 just what had happened in her shabby little room. Even Mary's face, which he tried to fix in his mind, had become blurred, and he won- dered whether he would recognize her if he saw her somewhere. For a moment, he imagined himself back in her room, boldly putting his arm around her, but the queasiness and nausea came back, and she faded out again. Suddenly, J. J. remembered he had another meeting at nine in the morning, and he began to walk faster as he became worried about getting enough sleep, for he knew that if he were not alert he might make some political slip that could be used against him, maybe years later, when he, himself, had long forgotten what he had said. The crowds had thinned out, but there were still some people wandering through the streets, as though they refused to admit any distinction between night and day. === Page 70 === Jacques Barzun FOOD FOR THE N.R.F. or "My God! What will you have?" I pick up the half-galleys that the publisher has sent me and start to read. The book is the American edition of Roger Martin du Gard's Notes on André Gide. They begin, you remember, with the first meeting between the two men at the offices of the Nouvelle Revue Française before the First World War. The translation seems competent, the atmosphere of forty years ago is well rendered. But what's this? "... On the counter a plate-ful of dry buns..." Alas! This must refer to gâteaux secs in the original, and those are tea cakes, not stale bakery stuff. Does it matter? Under the eye of eternity, I suppose not. But right here and now it does. For we are not a mag- nanimous race, we twentieth centurions. We fasten on trifles, live on hints, and form conclusions from signs, which we interpret way be- yond the iota, all the way down to the id. So in a thousand minds, the N.R.F. will be ticketed as a carefree bohemian place, where the buns of the last monthly meeting recur until eroded by time; whereas sustained by Gide's money, the magazine was actually a rather posh establishment, punctilious in style and proud of its tea cakes. I read on and strike other trifles of the same sort. On a com- parative basis, I should still have to call the book well translated; but drawn off by the act of comparison, my mind leaves the book and dwells on the theory and practice of modern translation. I think of the place that modern French literature occupies in our English- speaking world, and out of thirty years' reading I conjure up the accumulation of hidden error, of factual and emotional misconcep- tion, which our awareness and admiration of that literature enshrines. No doubt the educated American is hardened to the "Frenchy" style of the nineteenth-century classics that one reads in youth-The Three Musketeers or Les Misérables, in which all colloquialisms of the type Que voulez-vous? are given a word-for-word rendering. But doesn't this, combined with the hundreds of unintelligible sentences, === Page 71 === FOOD FOR THE N.R.F. 661 lay the foundation for the curious beliefs of adults about France and the French? In some, it is the conviction that life over there is less drab than with us, by virtue of the many provocative turns of thought. In others, it is a faith in the subtlety of every phrase, charged as it obviously is with hidden meaning. The philistine, of course, wonders how these foreigners manage to understand one another, and for once he is the better judge, given the evidence presented. Open the latest, "modernized" reissue of Les Misérables and you will find, in every other paragraph, sentences such as this one about Napoleon: "He had in his brains the cube of human faculties." Undoubtedly, the routine discredit in which the novels of Victor Hugo now stand owes much to the bald transliteration of a rhetoric which could be out of fashion without seeming insane. As rendered in this same version, Hugo's preface—which is a clear and simple social mani- festo—can show only three phrases with a rational meaning. The rest is translator's English. Scanning the books of our own day, one might think that pub- lishers had acquired a greater sense of responsibility and had recourse for translation to genuine writers, in place of the old-time hack whose livelihood depended on mass output, just as his linguistic knowl- edge depended on the dictionary he happened to own. This apparent improvement is on the surface only. Enough jokes have been made about the obvious traps for everybody to avoid them. But the same wrong principles prevail as regards the moral and artistic obligations of publisher and translator. It is still taken for granted that literary facility, coupled with what is called a working knowledge of a for- eign tongue, is enough to make a translator. Yet this combination of talents, rare as it may be, does not begin to suffice—witness Have- lock Ellis, whose version of Germinal is made unreadable by gibberish like: "They don't gain enough to live"—meaning earn enough to live on. One must go further and say that being an experienced translator is no guarantee of competence in a particular effort, any more than being a concert violinist is a guarantee of a good performance every night. The late C. K. Scott-Moncrieff was perhaps the greatest trans- lator of our century. He gave us a Proust and a Stendhal which, though incomplete, are monuments of an art—triumphs of a type of thought—that I hope to define more fully in a moment. Yet on at === Page 72 === 662 PARTISAN REVIEW least two important occasions he fell from his own high standard and attached his name to the usual illegitimate product in which English and French incestuously mingle. In The Sweet Cheat Gone, and no- tably in the dialogue, one is reminded of the Hugo-Dumas school of translators: "Listen, first to me,' I replied, 'I don't know what it is, but however astonishing it may be, it cannot be so astonishing as what I have found in my letter. It is a marriage. It is Robert de St. Loup who is marrying Gilberte Swann.'" And even in the narrative parts of the book: "Well, this Albertine so necessary, of love for whom my soul was now almost entirely composed, if Swann had not spoken to me of Balbec, I should never have known her." This sentence is not Proust twisting the tail of syntax, but a common construction that the translator had not only the right but the duty to make readable. Scott-Moncrieff's other dereliction affects Stendhal. On the title page of the only available edition of On Love, our translator is credited with having "directed" the work. This is a solemn responsi- bility, for the signature is a high guarantee. But the directing cannot have been close or active, for the text abounds in errors and infelicities. Besides gross blunders like "deduct" for "deduce," one meets ambi- guities at every turn. According to the preface, for instance, the book "is not a novel and contains none of the distractions of a novel." What Stendhal actually says is that this book will not afford enter- tainment like a novel. Typical of a still worse incompetence is the rendering of one of the aphorisms at the end: "The majority of men in this world only abandon themselves to their love for a woman after intimacy with her." What the original states is that most men of the world only begin to love, etc. When one knows that fifteen years before this luckless attempt upon Stendhal's work a first-rate version by Philip and Cecil N. Sidney Woolf was published here and in England, one begins to im- agine an imp of the perverse at work to balk communication between literatures. The truth is that translation is not and has never been recognized as an art-except in the way of lip-service. Judges of the art are naturally few, and among its practitioners little or nothing is consciously known of its techniques. Perhaps the decline in classical studies accounts for this deficiency, which should then be called a for- getting of a once established discipline. I remember from my youth a series of trots which were advertised as containing two parallel === Page 73 === FOOD FOR THE N.R.F. 663 translations, “the one literal, the other correct." Today the distinction would probably puzzle many readers and not a few translators. In any event, the present oblivion on the part of writers and critics goes with a rooted faith in publishers that translation is a mechanical job, hardly worth paying for, and merely incidental to the finished book. Note how one firm after another will reissue— sometimes at great expense, with illustrations and introductions by good craftsmen—the same execrable translations dating from the Flood. Thus, there is not, I believe, a single readable version of Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin. When the work was being brought out again in 1943, I offered, as the introducer, to go over the old anonymous text that Tradition and Thrift alike recommended to the publisher. This offer (gratuitous in both senses) was declined with some surprise as surely not worth the time and trouble. My own surprise was that a perfectionist in book production, who did not mean to cheat anybody, should be quite content to palm off a mass of verbi- age in the vein of: “His doublet and hose are concealed by aigulets, his gloves smell better than Benjamin . . . There has sprung up between the planks of the St. Simonian stage a theory of little mushrooms. . . .” Little mushrooms indeed. Their poison is absorbed into the liter- ary system, which it afflicts with insensitivity to meaning whenever anything foreign—and especially anything French—is concerned. The resulting misconceptions in turn produce conscious, large-scale misin- terpretations. For instances of this we need not go much beyond titles. To be sure, the false lead in a title usually causes but a passing confusion; one example is Gide's My Theatre for a collection of plays—as if "Shakespeare's Theatre” meant "Shakespeare's Plays"; another is Stendhal's Souvenir de Egotism for "Reminiscences of an Egotist.” But in at least one famous instance the established form of a title is a literary disaster: we all speak of Flaubert's Sentimental Education. We do not, it is true, attach quite the same meaning to "sentimental" here as we do in Sterne's Sentimental Journey, yet unless we are warned we may miss the fundamental point of the entire work. The supposition of many an intelligent reader who knows no French is that the education of Flaubert's hero was "sentimental” in the sense of nurturing illusions, fostering "romantic emotions,” and that the novel records the consequences. Because he was badly brought up, Frédéric Moreau lacked the wits to see how "unrealistic" his === Page 74 === 664 PARTISAN REVIEW ideas were-hence his unhappiness, his wanderings, and his feeble nostalgia for the youthful days of his first visit to a house of pros- titution. This interpretation is just tenable enough to prevent the search for a truer one, and few even of the seekers would begin by consulting a French dictionary. If they did they would find that sentimental(e) means simply "of the feelings." Flaubert's title applies not solely to his hero but to all his characters; he is saying: "Look! This is how modern life educates the feelings"-the irony resting on the dreadful word "educates." As to this interpretation of the title there can be no doubt: we have Flaubert's word for it. While at work on the novel, he writes to a friend: "Je veux faire l'histoire morale des hommes de ma génération-sentimentale serait plus vrai" (To Mlle. de Chantepie, Oct. 6, 1864). The title once changed, we see that Fréderic is a failure, not because of his emotions of whatever kind, but because of his lack of them. He is not even that sloppy thing we call sentimental; he is dry as a bone-and thus only half-brother to Emma Bovary. She at least tried to live out her dreams. She took risks, showed courage, and partly re-shaped her surroundings. Her faults of judgment, her "un- realistic" choices are more to be respected than Fréderic's caution and lack of will. Flaubert could and did say that Emma was himself; he never would have owned any kinship, except momentary, to Fréderic. All of which is part of the answer to "What's in a title?" II For the translator or would-be translator, Flaubert's mis- rendered adjective deserves to symbolize Nemesis. Sooner or later he who meddles with foreign texts will succumb to his fate, which is traducing. This may seem a strange necessity, for the criteria of a good translation are few and simple: that it shall be clear to its readers and in keeping with their idiom; that it shall sound like the original author; and that it shall not mislead in substance or implica- tion. But the steps to these results are beyond computing, they are dissimilar in kind, if not contradictory, and they are nowhere codified. What is easily grasped is that translation requires one to be always in two minds. The act of translating does not consist in carry- ing words across a no-man's-land, but in answering the question: === Page 75 === FOOD FOR THE N.R.F. 665 "How would I say this if the notion occurred to me for the first time in my own tongue?" Not finding words but turning phrases— hence being sure of what the foreigner thinks and what the native says: two minds with twin thoughts. In moments of fatigue or inat- tention the performer resumes his more comfortable single mind, and error ensues. From the ignorance which turned gáteaux secs into "dry buns" to the awkwardness of Scott-Moncrieff when he nods over Proust's dialogue, the difficulty to be met is that of the schizophrenic: what does this mean? What am I saying? Where is reality in these multitudinous appearances-French, English, adjective, verb, cliché, idiom, plural, inversion, image, illusion, assonance, repetition, brevity, and downright nonsense itself? Translation is not spinning a thread, it is putting a ballet on paper. Sufficient reason—but no excuse— for the inevitable blunder. The primary danger, illustrated by sentimental, is the lure of the homonym. Contrôler does not mean "control"; demander does not mean "demand"; un enfant sage is not a wise child nor a con- current someone who agrees with you. The fact that diéte does not mean "diet" is annoyingly exemplified by the spoiling of one of Vauvenargues' epigrams in a letter from Matisse to Gertrude Stein. As given in The Flowers of Friendship, it reads: "Solitude is to the spirit what diet is to the body." The proper word is of course "fasting." Equally of course, "dieting" sometimes does mean fasting in English and diéte sometimes does mean "regimen" in French. The lesson is plain: the translator can take nothing for granted. He must be steadily suspicious, inquisitive, a double man vigilant and hostile in self-examination. Paradoxically, the more at home in each language one feels, the greater the chances of growing blind to gross errors—as I can illus- trate from one of mine. It consisted in putting down the English word "dais" for the French dais. Now when thinking in English, no other preposition is possible with this noun than "upon"—it is a platform; whereas when thinking in French, sense requires sous, i.e., under the canopy. The two languages have each carried off a piece of the ceremonial structure. But in the shuttling state of mind of the trans- lator the difference established by usage disappears in a kind of simul- taneous perception which renders the blunder invisible. This cross- eyed condition no doubt accounts also for such a slip as one finds === Page 76 === 666 PARTISAN REVIEW in Mr. Leon Edel's biography of Henry James: "Dressing the balance between remaining abroad and returning home, James etc." Mr. Edel writes and thinks in French as easily as in English and he undoubtedly thought: dresser le bilan, but understanding the phrase full well he translated only half of it. In the nature of things, I can only men- tion, not specify, other types of blunder that, like everybody else, I must have made in the course of scholarly work, when translating from languages that one can read and "understand," but that one will never know as strictly as one must in order to put oneself for- ward as a translator. Blindness being the fundamental, hidden, and recurring diffi- culty, it must be consciously and perpetually guarded against. For- tunately there are tricks and tools that the careful workman can use. One obvious device is to lay aside the first draft of the translation until the original has faded from the mind, and to take it up for revision by itself, quite as if it were an original composition. It is easy then to catch some of the unnatural turns. But the laying aside requires time, for the primary idiom lingers in the memory an aston- ishingly long while; and, reviving at sight of the equivalent, makes deceptively meaningful whole sentences that are in fact senseless to the monolingual reader for whom they are intended. Many translators cannot afford the pause; others, as they have told me, do not recog- nize the need. They work as it were always in the teeth of the original and think they are thereby insuring fidelity. It is painful to reflect that we may owe to this misguided zeal the faults that mar most of Croce's works in English and many a dubious passage in the devoted rendering of Gide's Journal—four volumes which will not soon be done again, but in which we read, for example, that a play of Molière's ends "atrociously" when Gide means "cruelly" (atroce- ment); and in which the purity of style the author prized so highly is blemished by continual lapses from idiom: "it is not one of the least interests of this book," etc. A second point of method for the translator is to bring to con- sciousness all the differences of form, rhythm, sense, and habit that he can find between his two languages. (I assume that no translator other than a hack or a genius will attempt more than two, and to simplify discourse I shall continue to generalize from the experience of turning French into English.) Any published translator will tell === Page 77 === FOOD FOR THE N.R.F. 667 you how difficult it is to find steady English equivalents for *esprit,* constater, il s'agit de, etc. but few seem to know that there are aids to reflection on these matters. It is a sign of the unprofessional char- acter of the business that no translator with whom I have talked had ever heard of *Les Faux Amis* by Koessler and Derooouigny or *Le Mot Juste* by J. G. Anderson (rev. Harmer). Both books list and define words that look alike but mean different things in French and English. The former, which is especially rich in comment and ex- amples, works from the French side upon English words; the latter confronts kindred pairs of words and idioms in a spirit of enlightened neutrality. Both should be not merely consulted at need, but read and re-read (occasionally corrected) until the chief oddities of both tongues have become items of familiar knowledge-like the fact that a meter is not the same as a yard. This suggests the next step. Grim as it may sound, the translator must keep in training by asking himself, at any time, while reading any book (in either language), "How would I say it in English?" Like the violinist, he is an interpreter and cannot avoid thoughts of adroit fingering even in the midst of pleasure. Indeed, the translator cannot help becoming something of a grammarian in the unfavorable sense: he is bound to be a reader of grammars and dictionaries. No one volume is perfect enough for his needs, though it may be said that the professional must own at least *Grevisse, Le Bon Usage* (the counterpart of Fowler's *Modern English Usage*), and should have access to Littré. Of lesser dictionaries, the Oxford French is remark- ably compact and true, and it begins with a soundly philosophic preface on the kind of life one must lead in order to give accurate renderings: not by any means a description of the Good Life, but rather of the full life, poised between literature and worldly pursuits, and dedicated to matching words with all men on all occasions. The compilers themselves answer to these specifications, even though they too stumble once or twice: they will tell you that *jeu d'esprit* means witticism, which it doesn't. Every turn of the road brings us face to face with Nemesis, that is to say with the recognition that complete and unfailing equivalence is impossible. Accordingly the third duty of the translator is to atone for inevitable shortcomings by a sustained impersonation of his orig- inal. He may rob Peter by reflex action but he pays Paul with com- === Page 78 === 668 PARTISAN REVIEW pound interest. He strives, that is, to bring his text into spiritual con- formity with that of his author. To do this with any success is as much the fruit of technique as of inspiration-the technique of writing English no less than that of understanding French. For I posit that a good translation is addressed to living readers and dare not be an exercise in archaism. At every point, then, the translator must gauge the force and function of the elements before him, and make sure that no force is lost, no function forgotten. The sums and products must balance. Force may be easy to weigh and hard to reproduce. In translat- ing Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, I discovered that terms of contempt or abuse are of a discouraging specificity: any given term implies so much and no more, and its nearest English equivalent always hits above or below the mark. The dictionary meaning, therefore, hardly enters into the equation. Rather, one is paralyzed by the very aptness of the term. The problem is to recapture this felicity with the vocabu- lary available now, a hundred and fifty years later: were there "crooks" in the eighteenth century? Surely there are no "rogues" now, and even "scoundrels" are on the wane. Dictionaries fail here because language itself breaks down. As for the function of the given phrase, sentence, paragraph, it can be fully understood and properly rendered only if one has an inkling of what the author could have written in its place had he been so minded-other words and even other ideas. To know or guess these possibilities calls for familiarity with the author and his tradition. It is not too much to say that to translate a work of any in- tellectual and literary pretensions requires a sympathetic knowledge of the whole canon. How far "the canon" extends is a matter to be determined in each attempt. For a good many years I had toyed with the idea of putting Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idées reçues into English, and in moments of leisure I had filled a notebook with scraps of those terse and baffling definitions. Sooner or later, I knew, a call to complete the job would come, whether from on high or from a publisher. I dreaded the day, for I knew the difficulties by heart, or more exactly, the dilemmas. I had as many as three and four versions of the proble- matic items and secretly hankered to give them all-escape per var- iorum. Just a year ago the call came, at once from on high and from === Page 79 === FOOD FOR THE N.R.F. 669 a publisher, whose editor showed me in a copy of Gentry the transla- tion of a few excerpts from the Dictionnaire and extended an invita- tion to do the whole. The published fragment showed an enviable courage and was not without merit, though it contained some easily avoidable errors. To call Political Economy "a science without guts" (instead of "heart- less") and to confuse "parents" with "relatives" when the injunction was to avoid seeing them, suggested a newcomer to the craft of trans- lating, if not to Flaubert. I began to sort my notes, ponder the title, and (to lessen my own fallibility) I started rereading Bouvard et Pécuchet, the Correspondence, the works of Descharmes, Steegmuller, Dumesnil and others, not excluding good old Tarver (Life and Letters of Flaubert), despite his penchant for what I have called "translator's English." When it came to getting the Dictionary down on paper, the par- ticular problems had fused into the general one of how often to take liberties. They had to be frequent and great because the book itself is a sort of bare exhibition of stupidity, without internal or external commentary. Each definition is like a biologist's slide: to see the point of it one must know what was in the observer's mind when he pre- pared it. The French reader has trouble too, though less, because he can often compare what he expects with what the definition leaves out. The translation must therefore supply (or substitute) a context not found within the original, and at the same time keep matching its brevity and commonplaceness. No one could hope to win every trick of such a game. Add to this challenge Flaubert's extravagant playing on words, allusions, and ideas, and any one will concede the right to transmute as a means to translating. A simple case is that of message-"nobler than 'letter'" says Flaubert. True in French but cer- tainly what is wanted is "missive." For the same reason, modified by others, banquet must become "reunion"; coup de Jarnac, "Parthian shot"; and folliculaire, "newshound." The ultimate question was whether Idées reçues in the title should or should not be rendered as "Received Ideas." The term certainly exists in Eng- lish; almost every dictionary records it in the desired sense. But it somehow needs surrounding matter to be perfectly clear: it will not do in a title; it has to be: Accepted Ideas. Entrenched behind isolated words and phrases, the literalist may === Page 80 === 670 PARTISAN REVIEW carp at this and other decisions. There are two schools of thought about translation, and the professional worker should read the argu- ments of Tytler, Postgate, Rudler, Belloc, and the rest. For my part, I side with those who maintain that not poetry alone but even the flattest of flat prose consists of words plus echoes. Some of these echoes are fixed (and recognized) in idioms, clichés, and dead meta- phors; others exist more vaguely, in literature, in capricious habit, sometimes in mere sounds. For example, the young Berlioz writes to his father that a piece of music was thirty times more impressive than he expected. Who does not feel at once that in English "thirty" is all wrong? It suggests an exact measurement, our ears demand the familiar "fifty times." To make thirty equal fifty is therefore to trans- late more exactly, not less. If this rule is ill-observed, it is perhaps because carrying it out would demand encyclopedic experience and attention. Nothing is more difficult than to keep abreast in two languages of the ceaseless variations of rank, color, and popularity within the vocabulary. To take a trivial instance, how could a non-resident foreigner learn that in American English the simple word "appliance" is almost never spoken, though it appears on nearly every hardware shop and the letterheads of countless manufacturers? Out of such minutiae arise the differences between Britain's English and ours-differences which, as they affect literature, have just recently been charted by Mr. G. V. Carey in his little book, American into English. How much more pro- found and harder to chart the differences between languages that are only cognate, and that keep shifting independently, with no contacts save through translators themselves! III From here on the consideration of linguistic detail merges with the great questions of cultural exchange, political friction, and popular superstition. The unsophisticated American returns from his first trip abroad convinced that the entire French people is touched with philosophy and hourly inspired to the picturesque because the common folk use such delightful latinized expressions. In reverse, I have listened to a demonstration showing that the phrase "How do you do" could only become current among such practical peoples as === Page 81 === FOOD FOR THE N.R.F. 671 the Anglo-Saxon, illogical but eager for know-how even while shak- ing hands. One aspect, certainly, of international communication is far from a joke. It is to find and train high-grade translators. At a time when some nine hundred and fifty world organizations are trying to tie threads of discourse instead of snapping them, we should be seeing the rise of an ethics of translation, or at least a set of first principles by which to gauge competence. We see nothing of the kind, but rather an increase (by volume) of irresponsible practices. I have had occasion to read quite closely two of the quarterlies-one private, the other official-that publish in more than one language. Both of them are edited by conscientious people who do their best to produce valid reading matter. But the available translators are simply not equal to the task or not willing to discharge it honestly. From one issue that I read in copy form, it was clear that the French translators had barely revised their first typed draft. Each page con- tained dozens of errors of the grossest kind-not only misrepresenta- tions of the meaning, but errors in French, as if a foreign author scarcely deserved to appear in decent style. I was assured that all these paid perverters were completely bi-lingues; all one could reply was that if so their speech was the new bilinguesgate, a reproach to the users and to their upbringing. In the other, the official quarterly, a greater effort is made to understand each author and recast his thought in idiomatic form. Yet a comparison of original and translation (which are printed side by side) usually shows how frequently main points escape the hasty converter. In an article by Mr. Peter Ustinov, precisely on transla- tions for the stage, the well-known playwright refers to the strength a writer wields when "entrenched in the sinews of his native lang- uage." The key phrase which is perhaps strained but not unreason- able in its metaphor becomes in French: "entering the sinuosities." Mr. Ustinov goes on: "The French language seems to me the very antithesis of the English. It is accurate, hard, polished, although it contrives, by the very beauty of its music, to cement the sparkling sentences with words of sensuous languor." In translation, the last clause reads: "even though it compels you, for the sake of beauty, to cement, etc." which is sheer nonsense. The theater being a popular and socially responsive art, it should === Page 82 === 672 PARTISAN REVIEW seem important to have foreign plays accurately transported across frontiers. The whole purpose of adaptation is to enable the audience to grasp at once how life is lived—wherever it may be. Yet in the verbal part, which is surely the most manageable, good adaptations are rare. Mr. Eric Bentley, who collects them for his volumes From the Modern Repertory, tells me that it is difficult to find texts that can be relied on throughout. The simple requirements of sayability, sense, and truth to the original seldom come together. From my own knowledge I can testify that it passes belief what the French listen to and read as the works of Bernard Shaw. The title of The Apple Cart (La Charrette aux Pommes) indicates how the rest goes—blind man’s buff amid strange idioms. Every speech suggests the plight of the indifferent pupil who excuses himself with a stubborn “That’s what it says.” The pity is that the idioms in Shaw are quite translat- able and the Apple Cart image too: the French for it is ren verser le pot de fleurs. At the opera, of course, sound and meaning fare still worse. After repeated efforts, one can point only to Edward Dent’s ver- sions of the Mozart librettos as successes in the genre. If we listen on other occasions, say to Boris Godunov, we are punished by hearing about villagers and monkeree. The old texts, full of ’neath and ’gainst, have no doubt been discarded as the silly nonsense they were, but the modern substitutes are either hard to sing or deplorably prosaic: in a recent version of Monteverdi, his music is made to accompany suburban-train diction. It becomes a mercy that enunciation in singers is still as rudimentary as notions of fitness among musical translators. All these signs of primitivism in one important department of our culture point in the same direction. They point to the need for a new discipline, perhaps a new institution. If we take our century at its word, it is pining for Communication. It believes in the Commu- nication Arts and has got as far as inventing the dismal phrase. Unesco takes one shaky step farther and issues “bilingual” cards headed, on one side, Département de l'Information and on the other, “Department of Mass Communication.” Well, our century and Unes- co and any other massive communicators might do worse (by which I mean they could not do better) than to set up an Institute of Translation. Its purpose would be, first, to collect a library of works of theory === Page 83 === FOOD FOR THE N.R.F. 673 and reference—a bigger task than it may seem if one forgets the technological, legal, medical, and other special vocabularies that “cul- ture” now draws on, and the innumerable languages that the world now recognizes. The institute’s next duty would be to elaborate canons, appoint a teaching staff, prepare manuals, and devise a curriculum. When properly equipped, like any other school, it could accept stu- dents, train them, and finally certify them, both at large and for specified languages. The staff, aided by graduates returning for ad- vanced study, would in time be expected to produce the handbooks and lexicons that are still wanting, and perhaps to exert a steadily increasing critical pressure on those who write and publish. Meanwhile, every reader of translated matter must continue to be on his guard. It will not do to think that grave misunderstandings occur only as isolated and dramatic events, like the one Churchill reports in his war book, when the verb “to table” a suggestion, mean- ing opposite things to the group, nearly split an Anglo-American mil- itary council. Nor is it only the Japanese language, with its surfeit of homonyms, which runs the risk of fatal ambiguity, as in the famous “Mokusatsu Mistake.” The passage from one tongue to another al- ways entails danger, even in a library, even in a bank—as I recently discovered from a friend’s inquiry: didn’t en provenance des Etats- Unis applied to goods mean “originating in the United States”? This ancient firm had always assumed that it did, but now a question had arisen. Very properly, too, I had to admit, since the French phrase implies nothing about origin; all it says is “coming from.” Yet prov- enance by itself, in both languages, commonly suggests an ultimate source. This is but another proof of the generality that all translation depends on verbal tact, and that consequently no such thing as an IBM translating machine is possible: it would be as unsatisfactory as what we now have. When I am tempted to console myself with the thought that things cannot be as bad as I make out, that I must see trouble mag- nified from being too close to it, I take down from the shelf a volume from a respectable encyclopedia which, until a recent revision, thirty years overdue, included translated articles by foreign authorities. Those 1 On this, see William J. Coughlin in Harper’s for March 1953; and as regards the general problem of East-West intellectual exchange, Donald Keene: “On Appearing in Japanese Translation,” Twentieth Century, September 1953. === Page 84 === 674 PARTISAN REVIEW on French art and letters address the student thus: "The reverie, face to face with wide horizons, serene and tender piety, sometimes even a real gladness, are blended in those accents, the character of which, well defined, remains as striking as in former times." One dare not assume that the secret of such prose has been lost. It was only a few months ago that the English edition of Simone de Beauvoir's book about the United States added to her grievous misconceptions about this country no less grievous misreadings of her text. We could all smile and make the mental correction when we read there that Ger- hardt Eisler was indicted for conspiracy, falsifying passports, and "de- spising Congress"; we recognized translator's English in quaint asides like "Thirty-six hours in Chicago, this was little"; but there was no way of guessing the author's mind from misconstrued tenses and wrong words. Here was an American speaking to Madame de Beau- voir: "If everyone had good faith, all would be well; and he added forcefully, 'All would be well.'" This stood for: "If everyone showed a little good will ['was cooperative' is what I bet he said] things would go all right, said he cheerfully. And he added with spirit: 'Things will go all right.'" I have not said anything about translating poetry, a distinct prob- lem about which Dudley Fitts, a translator of the first rank, has made frequent comments in book reviews. He should theorize at greater length for the benefit of the future Institute, even though verse trans- lators seldom fail from haste or indifference, and are perhaps not greatly improvable by instruction. Indeed, Father Ronald Knox's ex- cellent little book On Englishing the Bible would lead one to infer that in poetical and spiritual matters a good many readers prefer gibberish and contortions to simplicity and sense. And it could be argued that if the Western world has survived the dire mistranslations of the Bible it can survive anything. Are we then to be forced at last to the conclusion that a rough approximation of anyone's meaning, that of the saints and the prophets included, is quite good enough for a busy world? This might be the reason why translators are "a dispirited race," as Francis Steegmuller recently called them. Were one driven to believe this, the temptation would be great to retire from the intellectual scene altogether; retire on a diète of dry buns and beat one's breast with loud lament, or as we say in English, pushing the cries of a desperate. === Page 85 === G. L. Arnold FRENCH POLITICS: FAILURE AND PROMISE Watching the French struggle with their problems these past few months has been an enlightening experience for observers here in London, especially since both the problems and the attempted solutions contrast so markedly with our own experience. England this year has been basking in the sunshine of an unusually long and agreeable sum- mer stretching into mid-September, and in the metaphorical sunshine of the Coronation, the Everest exploit, various sporting triumphs, a slightly improved economic situation, and the world-wide attention roused by Churchill's dramatic intervention in the role of global peace- maker. By contrast, France has been an unhappy land: rent by strikes and political crises of uncommon length and ferocity, plagued with the endless war in Indo-China, alarmed by tension in North Africa, scolded or pitied by its allies in NATO, and latterly faced with the spectacle of a resurrected Germany taking the lead in Europe. No wonder British politicians, editorialists and commentators have adopted a rather super- ior tone in dealing with French affairs. There has always been a tendency to deplore the un-British behavior of the French, but of late a veritable chorus of woe has come into action. Even the newsreels have caught the fashion: it is scarcely possible these days to enter a cinema without being shown a French liner capsized, a Moroccan dignitary wear- ing angry looks, or even a Parisian model clad in unsuitable gowns. Tourists have been irritated by last summer's strikes which left a good many of them stranded, and popular sympathy went out to the well- publicized martyr who told the Daily Express he was through with holi- daying in France ("and anyhow you can't get a decent cup of tea in the place"). Not since the debacle of 1940 in fact have the British felt so superior to their neighbors across the Channel, or taken such good care to let the world-and especially the United States-know it. And yet-there is scarcely an intelligent observer here who would not prefer to live in Paris, and that not merely for the sake of beauty, wit or gastronomy. There are more serious and enduring reasons why === Page 86 === 676 PARTISAN REVIEW London strikes the returning traveler as dull and almost provincial com- pared with Paris; just as it is not simply the unfortunate location of Bonn that makes German public life seem unbelievably petit-bourgeois compared with French. Is it the fact that NATO is centered in Paris, and that both the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, and the steel-coal High Authority in Luxembourg, derive from a now partly flagging French impetus? Is it the pervading feeling that with Germany at best a glacis, and Britain primarily a link between Europe, North America and the Commonwealth, Europe stands and falls with France? Or is it just that the French are still the most alive, the most articulate, the most intelligent and, when all is said and done, the most civilized na- tion on the Continent? Anyone may take his or her choice; what is cer- tain is that after even a short stay in France, the rest of Europe seems either dull or disagreeable or both, especially Germany. The current prosperity and stability of the Federal Republic is no optical illusion, but it is bought at the price of a narrow resurgent nationalism, a phil- istine self-satisfaction, and a spiritual torpor that has to be seen to be believed. Whatever the Germany of Adenauer may have to contribute to the Europe of tomorrow, leadership will have to come from elsewhere. But can France—shell-shocked by war, defeat and occupation, finan- cially insolvent, and rent by social conflict—do anything but infect her neighbors with her own disease? The question has an odd ring, but since it has become the fashion to pose it let us see what the French think of their own chances. Travelers' tales are notoriously unreliable, and even travelers to this year's XIIth International Congress of Philos- ophy at Brussels (August 20-26) are not necessarily in the best position to judge the prospects of a French come-back in the sciences and human- ities, though there seems to be an impression that the French contribu- tion was as outstanding in these fields as it has long been in art, literature, films and the theater. Besides, philosophy—as who should know better than the Europeans, who have produced such quantities of the stuff— fills no empty stomachs; not at any rate in the short run, and we are all very much pressed for time these days. Malenkov, they say, is ante portas, or at least round the corner. Nor should much reliance be placed on the notorious ability of the French to make more convincing speeches, and write more coherent books and articles, than their German neigh- bors. Bonn may seem a village compared with Paris, and the German politicians (with one or two obvious exceptions) scarcely fit to rank beside their French colleagues; but the mark is a good deal harder than the franc. If German newspapers, films and plays are abysmally dull, parochial, badly written, and downright old-fashioned, compared with === Page 87 === FRENCH POLITICS 677 French, the reason may be that the Germans have more important mat- ters to attend to; though that does not quite explain why the intellectual level at present is so much below that of the Weimar Republic; or why the whole country gives the impression of aiming to become a bigger and better Belgium; or why it is now unfashionable to have taken part in the anti-Hitler resistance. . . But let us return to France and her troubles, beginning with last summer's phenomenal strike wave, which provided such good copy for local and foreign journalists, and so much occasion for gloom in political and military quarters. Everyone has heard by now that the explosion was set off by a series of stupidities on the part of a government which had just begun to adopt a reform program, but had forgotten to explain its essentials to the public. On the eve of what nearly became a general strike, the Prime Minister, M. Joseph Laniel, an amiable elderly Conservative with a good Resistance record and an almost complete lack of political sense, needlessly angered the trade unions by telling them that he did not want economic questions "argued in the marketplace." This was fol- lowed by further blunders, culminating in the promulgation of a draft decree on retirement ages whose obscure wording was probably due to haste. In any case the advance mimeographed copy submitted to the civil servants' delegates on the statutory commission had a blank space which allowed the postmen to suspect that they would be regrouped with sedentary workers, whose retirement age is 63 instead of 58. In fact the decrees were not intended to alter the retirement ages of post- men or any civil servants; they provided only an option for those wishing to stay longer, though they did introduce civil service rules in the na- tionalized industries. But before anyone had had time to explain, the Bordeaux local of the pro-Socialist Force Ouvrière group of trade unions had decided to strike, thus starting a blaze which swept the country with incredible speed-so much so that it took the Communists two whole days to climb on the bandwagon! It has now become common knowledge that, as the saying goes, "only a spark was required" to set the tinder alight, but the odd fact is that last August no one had an inkling of this truth. The unions were talking about the expected rendez- vous d'Octobre, i.e., concerted pressure after the end of the parliamen- tary holidays, with the aim of extracting major wage increases or forcing the government to resign. They may still get their way on both points, but in the meantime France has been treated to a display of spontaneous working-class activity which has already left its mark on the public mind. It is immaterial in this context whether or not the Communist- === Page 88 === 678 PARTISAN REVIEW controlled CGT managed in the end to regain the ground it lost in the beginning; it may have done so, though it should be noted that its numerical strength is now somewhat inferior to the combined weight of the other unions: the Catholic CFTC (750,000 members), the So- cialist Force Ouvrière (about 500,000), and the independent Confédér- ation Générale des Cadres which organizes foremen, technicians, and “managerial” elements in industry. It is, however, pretty clear that all the unions have drawn closer together, and to this extent the chances of another “Popular Front” have improved. Whether the once-bitten Socialist and Catholic labor leaders and their parliamentary allies will, at some date in the future, risk such a desperate experiment remains to be seen. If the upheaval is viewed from the angle of governmental action rather than labor politics, several new and hopeful features emerge. One is the belated recognition that prices must be forced down and minimum wages scaled up; secondly, there has been a sudden release of energy on the part of the bureaucracy, armed with the special powers bestowed upon the Laniel Ministry last July. Though no one knows how long the present reforming zeal will last, the decrees published since the be- ginning of August mark a departure from the previous habit of placating entrenched interests at the public expense. In the excitement caused by the strike wave it was generally overlooked that most of these measures were both courageous and novel. They notably empower the administra- tion to break cartels, diminish tax fraud, cut official red tape, reduce the excessive number of middlemen, terminate subsidies to alcohol pro- ducers, and encourage low-cost housing at the expense of luxury build- ing. On top of these welcome changes the military budget for 1954 has been sharply reduced—partly thanks to increased American aid for Indo-China. To the Finance Minister, M. Edgar Faure, and his young and eager brain-trusters (the chief planner is twenty-eight) these re- forms are just a beginning. It is perhaps unlikely that they will be fol- lowed by anything more drastic under a mainly Conservative govern- ment, but although “structural reforms” may have to await an electoral swing to the Left, the first steps have been taken. To that extent the prolonged parliamentary deadlock in May-July, followed by the August upheaval, may be said in retrospect to have marked a low point, perhaps the lowest point France had reached since the Liberation nine years earlier. If a government dominated by elderly Conservatives could give so much rein to its only left-winger (who happened to be the Finance Minister), there is no saying what a genuine reform administration might not do. === Page 89 === FRENCH POLITICS 679 That such an administration will be assembled in the near future is indeed unlikely. All one can claim is that, for the first time in years, some of the elements of a progressive combination are in existence. These include the formal dissolution of the Gaullist group in Parliament, and the consequent emergence of a number of left-wing ex-Gaullists with a hankering after social reform; the re-activation of labor; the growing pressure of the left-wingers inside the center groups in Parliament and in the country; and last but not least the emergence of some young, capable and progressive figures in the political no-man's-land between the Socialists and the Conservative bloc in Parliament. If the prolonged deadlock last summer did not in the end lead to the formation of the "Mendès-France majority" projected by some political wire-pullers, it did compel the elder statesmen to make room for Mendès-France's po- litical ally, Edgar Faure. Through Faure-a stocky, chain-smoking econ- omist who once studied Oriental languages, speaks fluent Russian, and at 45 has already been Prime Minister (for forty days last year)— Mendès-France obtained a foothold in the Laniel government.1 Faure's wife edits La Nef, which is virtually a Socialist periodical, and Mendès- France at least, though officially a leading Radical, is in fact in some ways closer to the moderate Socialists than to the majority of his nominal supporters. It is through these two men, rather than under its own steam, that the Socialist Party expects one day to recover the influence it lost in 1951, when it deliberately left the government to undergo a "cure in opposition." This roundabout approach may not seem a very hopeful way of initiating a Socialist recovery, but in Europe the issue of "planning" versus "free enterprise" is no longer a party matter; least of all in France, where the cleavage runs through all political groups, with the exception of the Communists and the Conservative remnant. The "Mendès-France majority," if and when it is one day pieced to- gether, will assemble under the banner of State action to lift the French economy out of the doldrums. Until then the bourgeoisie is being given a last chance to make good on its claim of being able to run the modern industrial system. . . . These issues are considerably more important in the long run than Indo-China, whose significance is chiefly that of a dead weight. The war there has dramatized France's dependence on NATO, the problems 1 Or so it seemed on the eve of the Radical Party congress at Aix-les-Bains (September 17-20) which witnessed another impressive speech by Mendès-France, this time culminating in the startling phrase, "We are in 1789!" (i.e., on the eve of an upheaval). The proceedings of the congress suggested that Mendès- France is at the moment somewhat isolated in his Cassandra role. === Page 90 === 680 PARTISAN REVIEW of the French Union, and the shortage of funds for modernizing the French economy. As a result, it has provided an uncertain rallying ground for all the forces who hanker after neutralism. Conversely, it made it impossible last June for Mendès-France to form a government, despite the profound impression caused by his "inaugural" address, which preceded the adverse vote by less than forty-eight hours. For on the issue of holding out in Indo-China he had most of the Gaullists, as well as a large number of wavering Center deputies, against him, while the Socialists rallied to his support. Only the Communists and a few others openly voted against him; the issue was decided by the fact that a large number of Deputies abstained. Thus the breakthrough on the part of the younger elements in all the non-Communist groups failed to come off, but two facts stayed in the memory of the older parlia- mentarians and showed them the need for action: the margin of de- feat had been extremely narrow; and secondly, the parliamentary leaders who threw their weight against Mendès-France had been abandoned by large numbers of their own followers, chiefly the younger and more independent ones. Even the Gaullists split, and a substantial minority of this profoundly nationalist party rallied to the man whom the neo- fascist weeklies, Rivarol and Aspects de France, tirelessly denounced for the triple crime of being a Jew, a leader of the Left, and a Resistance figure under Pétain. To make things even, some of the leaders of his own Radical Party very deliberately and artistically knifed him in the back. But this traditional maneuver somehow failed to have the usual effect. The "system" had been badly shaken, and not only from the Left: before Mendès-France got his chance to confront the Assembly with an "all-or-nothing" program of action, the liveliest of France's elder statesmen, the 74-year-old Reynaud, had told the shocked Depu- ties that France was in danger of becoming "the sick man of Europe," and that "more reforms are needed than was the case in 1789." After that no genuine "return to normal" was possible, though the deadlock lasted another month until the amiable Laniel had managed to include both Reynaud and Faure in his Cabinet. And promptly thereafter came the strike wave and then, in part stimulated by the eruption from be- low, the spate of reforming decrees from above. If no more than a beginning, all this amounts at least to something like a crise de conscience. But for Indo-China, the essential break- through on the home front might by now have occurred, and Indo- China seems to be petering out, or at least becoming less of a burden. Once relieved of this millstone the French can at long last tackle their === Page 91 === FRENCH POLITICS 681 real problems, and luckily there is a vast amount of potential energy and talent ready to be applied to what, in the words of one of the best- informed observers in Paris, is "essentially a functional disorder." The same man has on occasions irritated both French and foreign disputants by claiming that France has no real problems. This may be an exagera- tion, but it is a good deal nearer the truth than some of the despairing talk now current. The harshest critics of the present system are precisely those who contend that France can lift itself by its own bootstraps. It is true that to do this a more realistic balance must be struck between productive capacity and international obligations. Here is the point on which the critics of Mendès-France-both Frenchmen and Americans- angrily or sorrowfully fastened in the days after his near-successful bid for power: he was, they said, advocating pacifism or neutralism, and this despite his firm defense of the Atlantic Pact which automatically threw the Communist vote against him. But the man whom many regard as France's leading economic expert (he was de Gaulle's Finance Minister at the age of 38, before resigning in protest against the Provisional Government's inadequate policies and becoming French representative on the International Mon- etary Fund) made it clear in his challenging "inaugural" on June 3 that in his view the disproportion between means and ends has plagued France for a century. The country's economic growth has not in modern times kept pace with the burden of arms it has had to bear since Ger- many was unified in the last century and became a menace to the rest of Europe. Two world wars have shaken French self-confidence, destroyed a great deal of accumulated wealth, disrupted the traditional balance between town and country, and enforced speedier industrialization in a climate of savage social conflict. Yet the country remains potentially the richest in Europe, and its hold on North Africa ideally permits the construction of a Eurafrican economy, if centrifugal tendencies can be overcome and the sterile Arab League threat beaten off. Finally Western Europe can only be organized around France, a truth which, to their credit, even the Germans seem to have understood at long last. The break with past habits will, however, have to be sharp, for France is dangerously close to losing the race against time. In trying to answer the question whether the right response is likely to be forthcoming, one should look both to current signs of revival and to past experience of similar challenges being partly or wholly overcome. Every community builds up its own traditional way of reacting to shocks and defeats; that of France is on the whole encouraging. French history is strewn with challenges of the sharpest kind, and on the record it may be claimed === Page 92 === 682 PARTISAN REVIEW that an adequate response has always in the end been made—some- times, it is true in a sanguinary and dramatic fashion. The decay of the Bourbon Monarchy gave rise to the Revolution, the disaster of 1870 to Gambetta, the Commune, and the establishment of the Republic; since 1940 the country has witnessed a whole series of energetic at- tempts to overcome previous weaknesses, down to and including the obstinate struggle in Indo-China, whose morale-building significance should not be overlooked merely because the over-all political direction was bungled. Gaullism, though in the end a failure, was another signifi- cant reaction to the humiliating collapse of 1940; so was the (perhaps over-ambitious) Monnet Plan for modernizing the French economy, and the successful Schuman Plan for integrating the heavy industries of Western Europe. The Fourth Republic is unquestionably a more streamlined and modern affair than the Third. Compared with the postwar German regime it has the additional great merit of having come into being at the crest of a violent and bloody reaction against what went before. The 20,000 to 100,000 victims of the 1944-45 "purge"—no one knows the exact figure—probably included a proportion of scapegoats; but though civil war and massacre are a high price to pay for purification, there is no doubt that morally France is better off today for having enshrined its Resistance heroes and heroines in the national legend, where other countries persist in glorifying figures of a very different stamp. One may on occasion be tempted to feel that the French make too much of the Resistance (did they really all take part in it?); but that is rather like whether Jeanne d'Arc was really needed to drive the English out, or whether all her countrymen really supported her (a good many did not). Every nation has its favorite image of its own better self, and if the French choose to pretend that the whole country was behind de Gaulle (or behind Gambetta, or behind Danton) the political scientist, if he has any rudiment of historical sense, will enter these myths on the credit side of the ledger. What will he place on the debit side? Principally, no doubt, the relative backwardness of an economy ill-adapted to mass-production methods; the social cleavage between the working class and the re- mainder of society, which accounts in large part for the unnatural size of the Communist vote; and perhaps the torpid state of the body politic, though that seems on the point of changing for the better. Not, however, the alleged weakness of French political institutions. Here one has to distinguish between temporary difficulties due to social and political deadlock, and structural faults which are not nearly as im- === Page 93 === FRENCH POLITICS 683 portant as they often seem to outsiders. Given the existence of a parlia- mentary rather than a presidential system—and it so happens that the two are not compatible, whatever some Gaullists may assert to the con- trary—the controlling position allotted to the National Assembly is a necessity. The reason has been stated, in what one would have thought was a thoroughly convincing fashion, by an American historian, Henry Bertram Hill, in an important paper delivered at a conference held at Princeton in February of 1950 (Cf. Modern France, Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1951): given the power—and the very high competence- ally elected and nominally all-powerful assembly is the only possible guarantee of liberty, of compromise between social classes, and there- with of political (as distinct from ministerial) stability. The fact that this stabilizing function entails frequent minor shifts among personalities and sub-groups is of secondary importance. In fact, as every detailed investigation shows, France has since the war suffered no greater in- stability than some of its neighbors. The key posts have for years been in the hands of the same small group of men, and if the general trend has led away from the high hopes of the Resistance period there is no proof that this tendency has had anything to do with the institutional framework under which the French prefer to live. Conversely, an event such as the sudden dramatic formation of the “Mendès-France coalition” last June, with its incalculable effect on the public mind, could not conceivably have occurred under any other system. What then are the causes of the current political and social weak- ness? If one abstracts from the underlying discrepancy between the country's economic potential and its international obligations (which is rather like abstracting from the formation of a body and concentrating on its skin), one is immediately struck by the odd contrast between the technical excellence of so much that has been done in postwar France and the ricketiness of the financial props. The same railways whose heavy annual deficit was largely responsible for the recent political convulsion are, by every technical standard, among the best in Europe, having been extensively modernized (at vast expense) since the war; much the same might be said of the huge and costly power dams and electrical works built since 1947; of the nationalized coal mines, and other State-subsidized enterprises. In the privately owned sector, ultra- modern steel mills—in advance of anything in the Ruhr—testify to the same combination of energy and perfectionism. Nor are these isolated instances of success in reaching the ambitious goals of the 1946 Monnet Plan, which has been unflinchingly carried through by a succession of === Page 94 === 684 PARTISAN REVIEW governments. Over-all industrial production passed the 1938 level in 1948, and by December 1952 was 13 percent higher than in 1929, France's best pre-war year, and nearly 50 percent higher than in 1938. On the social side, France now has a welfare system which is as well developed as Britain's, and in some respects superior (e.g. family allowances). The birth rate is high for the first time in many decades, and the growth of population is having a stimulating effect on con- struction and the consumer industries. By every normal test the economy ought to be booming. Yet, owing to the stagnation of exports, France has a permanent deficit with the European Payments Union; the level of industrial production, despite an annual investment of nearly a fifth of the national income, is now stagnant; prices are among the highest in Europe; and the Budget runs at a steady deficit of about two billion dollars in an eleven billion total, despite a tax rate unequaled in the whole world. (It is another popular misconception that the French pay no taxes. In fact, as Adlai Stevenson was told to his sur- prise during his stay in Paris last summer, taxes take over 33 percent of the national product, against 27 percent in Britain and 26 percent in the United States. If social security payments are added, the French government collects and spends nearly half the national income.) The thought naturally suggests itself that it is precisely this mon- strous growth of taxation which is at the bottom of the trouble. Since 1913 public expenditure (in real terms, i.e., leaving inflation out of account) has increased fourfold, largely owing to the cost of two wars and the establishment of the welfare state. Suspicion tends to fasten on this factor. There is, however, a different explanation, to which some publicity has recently been given by M. Bertrand de Jouvenel in two articles in the Manchester Guardian, (July 6-7, 1953): while most of the additional expenditure since 1913 has been unavoid- able, the necessary revenue has been raised in such a way as to penalize the more modern and efficient sectors of the community, while exonerat- ing small farmers and shopkeepers. Only three million people, mainly salaried employees, pay income tax. Five million small farms and small businesses manage on the whole to escape very lightly. How then is the fantaistic tax burden being met? Principally by forcing industry and commerce to pay up. To quote M. de Jouvenel, “ . . . as the load of taxation has been increased it has been more and more shifted to busi- nesses, away from individuals, who would never have stood for so heavy a load had it been laid upon them directly, and who still fail to see the relation between high prices and the fact that 28.7 percent of business receipts are paid into the public exchequer.” Big business in === Page 95 === FRENCH POLITICS 685 turn philosophically accepts a high rate of taxation and social security rates, in the knowledge that the consumer can in the end be compelled to pay the price—literally. The result is that exports are choked off by high costs, while real wages have remained low, the share of the work- ing class in the national product being now slightly below pre-war- despite greatly increased nominal wages, family allowances, paid holi- days, etc. The rapid resurgence of Western Germany and the comparative stagnation of France, which has struck so many observers in recent months, is certainly not due to any inferiority on the part of French scientists, technicians or workers, although the more lavish equipment of Germany industry with research facilities is making itself felt. It is almost entirely due to social and institutional arrangements which in the last analysis go back to one all-important factor: the predominance within the German community of industry over commerce, and of in- dustry and commerce over agriculture. Germany's economic and social life is geared to the needs, the work rhythm, and the attitudes of an expanding industry, with all other classes forced to adapt themselves to its requirements. In exchange, German prices are lower, and commerce accounts for only 8 percent of the national income, against 16 percent in France. In the case of France, a highly efficient industrial and tech- nological nucleus is prevented from equally rapid expansion by an antiquated social model which reflects, finally, the excessive weight of pre-industrial society. The result is not merely a slower rate of in- dustrialization, but an actual stifling of progress, and this in a highly competitive world in which France, moreover, has to shoulder the heaviest military burden-relative to the country's capacity-of any nation west of the Iron Curtain. No wonder the social cleavage is sharper in France than in Ger- many, despite the influx into the Federal Republic of millions of dis- possessed refugees from the East. An expanding economy generates a climate of hope; a stagnating one produces a feeling of despair. It is this sense of having to struggle against the stagnation imposed upon the country by the selfishness, incapacity and conservatism of the busi- ness community and the farmers which causes the "New Dealers" to talk in almost revolutionary terms and to look for allies on the farthest Left (if they are not, like the hard core of the Gaullists, aiming at a dictatorial solution). Yet the goal is essentially modest: it is to turn France into a modern country and to allot the primacy to industry, at the expense of finance, commerce, farming and middle-class conser- vatism. As so often in French history, relatively moderate aims are === Page 96 === 686 PARTISAN REVIEW wrapped up in radical language and may require for their achievement a political upheaval whose incidence will then be blamed on the alleged weakness of the country's institutions. That a system which penalizes industry in the interest of farmers and shopkeepers is not even efficient economically has gradually been recognized in France since the war, but the barriers to reform are extremely powerful. The Monnet Plan failed in its total purpose-which was to revolutionize the French economy, not just to modernize some sectors of it-because it did not tackle agriculture. This is now de- scribed as an oversight on the part of the planners, and there is talk of making up for it; but in fact it involved a political decision. It is of course perfectly true that farming ought to have got more attention when the Plan was drawn up: although it still absorbs nearly one-third of France's manpower, its share of the funds was limited to 8 percent. (The Russians now admit having made a similar mistake-also for political reasons.) Thus after six years of State-subsidized tractor pro- duction, France still has only 150,000, against an estimated need of one million (the Soviet Union has half a million, on a much bigger terri- tory). Technical training and advice to farmers is backward compared not only with Denmark but with Greece. By contrast, subsidies were until recently paid to marginal producers of wine and sugar beet, of which there was an unsalable surplus. These grotesque practices had the twofold effect of costing the Treasury large sums of money and making some of the best land unavailable for urgently needed crops. Result: France, potentially the greatest agricultural surplus producer in Western Europe, has to import increasing quantities of food, with disastrous ef- fects on the balance of payments. The proportion of produce consumed on the farms has now risen to one-sixth of the total (the highest in Europe), and a French farm laborer feeds only six people (against 20 in the United States). Yet to tackle this antediluvian system would be equivalent to a social revolution, and so far no French government- not even the Socialist-Communist coalition of 1946-47-has had the courage to try. (The recent abolition of some of the most unproductive subsidies, though a step in the right direction, merely removes a partic- ularly grotesque anomaly.) Turn to housing and one finds a similar picture. This field, too, was neglected by the Plan, and doubly neglected by a private building industry of which M. Claudius Petit, a former Minister for Recon- struction, once said in despair that it operated "in accordance with the best Merovingian standards." There is talk now, at long last, of stepping up the rate of house construction to 200,000 a year, which will just === Page 97 === FRENCH POLITICS 687 about keep step with the most pressing needs of a growing population. Until this year, France—according to a United Nations report released in Geneva in mid-September—had the melancholy distinction of being the least progressive country in Europe where housing is concerned. Last year the rate of construction was nine domiciles per thousand in- habitants, against 23 in Holland, 24 in Britain and 27 in West Ger- many. It was against this background of crushing taxes, mounting deficits, industrial stagnation, high prices, falling exports, inefficient farming and non-existent housing, that M. Mendès-France last June came before the National Assembly and boldly proposed an ambitious but vague pro- gram of structural reforms, to be introduced in large part by decree (with subsequent parliamentary sanction). One of his principal points was the need to stimulate food production and get prices down, so as to increase exports and at the same time bring relief to the hard-pressed housewife. Everyone immediately understood what he was after, and the Assembly shrank back; for though technically he came to grief over Indo-China—most of the Gaullists and nearly all the conservative "In- dependents" refusing to go along with his implied plea for a negotiated peace and/or gradual withdrawal—the real obstacle was the farm prob- lem: to make French farming more efficient means tackling the working habits of the most numerous and politically powerful class of the com- munity—its working habits, not its living standard, which is low and should not be depressed. The share of agriculture in the national income is only 20 percent, though 30 percent of the national labor force is em- ployed on the land. The peasants, therefore, have some excuse for not pay more taxes. What they could and should do is grow more food. But this either means "consolidation" of parceled-out land holdings, so as to create economically viable units which can be mechanized, or— some form of cooperative farming. As noted above, no French govern- ment has so far had the heart to try either course. There is thus some justification for the wry remark now to be encountered here and there that France is Europe's biggest underdevel- oped area. This kind of statement, however, represents as a technical operation what is in reality a social and political choice. It is easy enough to agree on the facts: everyone knows by now that the French economy is weighed down by an absurd system of taxation, by too many middlemen, by the under-capitalization of agriculture and the consequent flight from the land, and by the tendency of French investors to smuggle === Page 98 === 688 PARTISAN REVIEW their capital abroad (some 10 percent of all potential French investment money is believed to be in the United States and Switzerland), or at least to invest it in North Africa, where profits are higher. It is when one comes to the proposed remedies that this pragmatic assessment of facts gives way to sharply diverging estimates of what is or is not pos- sible. For the real decision that will have to be made over the next few years involves nothing less than a choice between genuine planning and genuine laisser-faire, with the issue at stake not the satisfaction of this or that sectional or class interest but the continued existence of France as a great nation and a viable economic unit. Socialism, that is to say, is going to present itself as an alternative to the present experi- ment in liberal economics in such a way that the nation as a whole will have to choose between different ways of insuring its survival in the modern world. That, of course, is what the Communists are banking on, and but for their allegiance to the interests of a foreign power they would have a fairly good chance of carrying a majority along with them in another "Popular Front" experiment; for on the issue of national survival and social rejuvenation a great many Frenchmen who normally have no faith in Communist slogans might nonetheless be tempted to shut their eyes and take the plunge. Fortunately this danger has dimin- ished with the increasing unattractiveness of the Soviet Union; but the resulting void is not as yet adequately filled by the sectarian and unco- ordinated attempts of Socialists, Syndicalists, Keynesian New Dealers, Catholic democrats, and former Gaullists, to invent a rival solution that will capture the imagination of Frenchmen. Hence the thrill which ran through the country at the first sign that a majority comprising all these reforming elements might come together under the New Deal banner tentatively raised by Mendès-France last June. The attempt turned out to be premature (as its chief protagonist is said to have predicted in private), but it marked a turning point. If and when the present experiment in making French capitalism genuinely competitive and efficient has failed—and no one on the Left doubts that it will fail—the pendulum must swing back toward planning, though dirigisme still suggests unpleasant memories of postwar rationing, short- ages and maladministration. In the end French nationalism—for so long wedded to liberal middle-class concepts in economics—cannot tolerate the spectacle of France becoming "a second Spain," as J. Servan- Schreiber, perhaps the ablest propagandist of the French "New Deal," has recently put it in a much discussed article. The revolt against this pros- pect was at the core of Gaullism and continues to inspire those of its ad- herents who are now finding their way to the Left, as well as many who === Page 99 === FRENCH POLITICS 689 have remained faithful to the General. It is powerful even among intelli- gent Conservatives of the Laniel-Pinay type. It was no extremist but that idol of the provincial bourgeoisie, Antoine Pinay himself, who the other day complained that the French Army was out of date ("its organization goes back to Napoleon and hasn't changed") and had much to learn from the Swiss militia. And it is not the Communist Humanité, but the liberal Le Monde and the Catholic Figaro who consistently stress the real weaknesses of the body politic, with a ruthlessness and an intellectual honesty hardly matched elsewhere in the world. But though virtually everyone is agreed that a New Deal is urgently needed, the decisive impetus will have to come from the Left, if only because the Left is ready-in principle anyhow-to stake its political existence on planning, State action and social change. How far the New Deal majority, when it is assembled, will eventually extend toward the Center and the Right depends on personal and political variables which cannot be calculated beforehand. If the moderate reformers who are now staking everything on a final experiment in classical liberalism refuse their cooperation, the New Dealers may have to fall back tem- porarily on Communist support; but on the whole it seems more likely that the majority will stretch from the Socialists, via the Catholic labor unions and their parliamentary allies, to the left wing of the Radicals, and to the Gaullists-if there are any left in the next Parliament. For on the whole it seems likely that we shall have to await the general election of 1956 before the promised "regrouping" takes effect. When that time comes the issue of "neutralism" versus "Atlantic- ism" will, it is to be hoped, have been settled without causing a major breach either between America and Europe, or among those Frenchmen who believe with equal conviction that France must remain in the At- lantic camp, and that the country needs a New Deal. It would be a misfortune if the Atlantic cause were to become allied to a timid and reactionary outlook which denies France the opportunity of meeting the modern challenge, both at home and in North Africa; just as the New Deal will fail if-like Léon Blum's experiment in 1936-37-it associates itself with pacifist daydreams. Fortunately there are signs that the public mood is in many ways tougher and more realistic than it was before the war: so much so that on occasion the visitor to France is tempted to wonder whether Britain is not on the whole more urgently in need of an awakening than the storm-tossed country across the Channel. === Page 100 === BOOKS ANDERSON, MILLAY AND CRANE IN THEIR LETTERS LETTERS OF SHERWOOD ANDERSON, Little, Brown. $5.00. LETTERS OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY. Harper. $5.00. THE LETTERS OF HART CRANE. Hermitage House. $5.00. Many people believe letters the most personal and revealing form of communication. In them we expect to find the charmer at his nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances. Yet, this is not quite true. Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of commu- nication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope. In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomor- row and your excuses for yesterday. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires—this is a benevolent form. The ideal self expressed in letters is not a crudely sugary affair except in stunted personalities; in any case it is very much a part of the character, having its twenty-four hours a day to get through, and being no less unique in its combinations than one’s fingerprints. In the letters of artists and public figures we may not find literary charm, but we do invariably get a good notion of how the person saw himself over the years. This vision does not always strike us as "acute"; we are often tempted to put some poor fellow wise on the subject of his own character, to explain that we are a lot more impressed by his dying on the gallows than by his last "God bless you" to his wife. It is difficult to think of a man except as the sum of his remarkable deeds, a statue surrounded by selected objects and symbols. Private letters are disturbing to this belief. What they most often show is that people do not live their biographies. In the last year or so the correspondence of quite a number of our writers has been published—Pound, Sinclair Lewis, Hart Crane, Ger- trude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Edna Millay—and we have had mem- === Page 101 === BOOKS 691 oirs on Willa Cather and others. The '20s, which only a few years ago felt so near, are gradually slipping back into that vault called American Literature, where the valuables are kept. The publication of letters is a compliment which suggests the writer is worth a kind of scrutiny not granted every author. As these writers begin to take on that far-away, mysterious, "historical" glaze, publications about them are of consider- able importance; a certain ice of opinion, fact and fancy is already spreading over their images. And we cannot assume that eventually all letters, every scrap of interesting material will be published; what is more likely is that the selections, the biography, as we have them now will stand for a time. It is, then, interesting that the first volume (who knows if there will be another?) of Sinclair Lewis' letters should be entirely given over to communications he wrote and received from his publishers. In- deed, this correspondence is rather good fun, dealing as it does with the finagling, financing and advertising which, though uncommonly exposed to this extent, are in some way a part of literary history, as the billboard is a sort of cousin to the performance. We see Lewis composing a fan letter to be sent by his publishers to all the best writers of his day on the subject of that remarkable book Main Street; and wondering if per- haps something special isn't needed for the elegant eye and heart of Edith Wharton. This was all a part of the game, but we may doubt Lewis, much as he liked to appear in print, would have been delighted by this whole volume of business testimony. Sherwood Anderson's letters are unhappily selected for quite the opposite reason. They are often bleak and dull to read because they are chosen upon a principle of reckless high-mindedness, a remorseless track- ing of Anderson the writer, the artist, the thinker, at the expense of biog- raphy. It is felt Anderson the advertising man, Anderson before forty, was, though alive, a mute statistic; and even after he has been allowed existence at forty only his literary life is permitted. But with Anderson, "the man" is overwhelmingly important. He appears to have been splintered, repressed, uncertain in an exceptional way; in a very real sense his literary equipment began and ended with this painful state of being. Though he could sometimes grow mannered and arty, he is not particularly vivid if you isolate him as "an artist." It is as a case that he is unfailingly interesting, this peculiar rising and waning star, this man who brought to literature almost nothing except his own lacerated feelings. This latter circumstance, and not his Flaubertian dedication, is what makes us think of him sometimes as a typical American writer. 1 From Main Street to Stockholm. Harcourt, Brace. $5.00. === Page 102 === 692 PARTISAN REVIEW With certain other authors an undeviating, purely literary selection would produce not only the most interesting but the truest portrait of the man: Ezra Pound's life seems to have been, almost literally, an open book. Yet, even if one were to admit the validity of excluding all letters written before Anderson became an author, it seems a bit lofty to omit nearly everything that happened to him during the period of authorship. During these years Anderson divorced three wives and married a fourth; a much-married man without love letters gives us a jolt. There is no letter to Anderson's daughter, only two to his son Bob, who worked with him on the newspaper enterprise; a few more to his son, John, get under the wire because John too is an "artist," a painter, and letters relating to that calling are summoned. This selection makes Anderson seem dis- tinctly hard and unreal; wives are divorced in a footnote or abandoned like unpromising manuscripts, grown children when addressed at all are usually given a lecture on art—and the author himself is as naked as can be, stripped to a man who is writing another book. Anderson's strange, restless soul, remarkable beyond all else for painful, shrinking feelings, is uneasy with his literary friends, Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld. Struggling to tell them what he is all about he is sometimes like a tenor with the stage all to himself: "I have been to Nebraska, where the big engines are tearing the hills to pieces; over the low hills runs the promise of corn. You wait, dear Brother! I shall bring God home to the sweaty men in the corn rows." Or again he is not so much complex as hidden and diffuse, singing in a voice not always recognizable from one day to the next. He is a man of the Middle West he tells us, close to the people, and yet all sorts of angels seem to be whispering in his ear, correcting his accent. In this selection Anderson seems, like Napoleon the 3rd—A Sphinx without a riddle. Edna Millay's letters—after reading them you hesitate to know what you thought you knew about this poet. Can this be that sensa- tional young woman of legend who burnt the candle, built the house on sand, kissed so many lips? More than once you find yourself thinking of quite another enduring American type, Meg in Little Women, re- sourceful, sensitive, devoted, bobbing her hair, not to be a flapper, but to pay for Father's illness. These letters are very charming, although not in the sense one would care much to read them if they were not by Edna Millay, or at least by someone, for they haven't that sort of power which can be enjoyed apart from a beforehand interest in the writer. They show, for one thing, an intense, unmixed family devotion; not === Page 103 === BOOKS 693 merely an affection for spruced-up memories of colorful relations, long dead ancestors from a region one no longer visits, not earnestness nor the urgings of duty, but an immense love for the present, living, im- pinging kin. This world of nicknames, old jokes, little gifts flying through the mails is startlingly passionate. With friends too there is very often the same extraordinarily intimate style, the same devotion, fidelity, acceptance-and all the while we know Edna Millay was becoming more remote from everyone, enduring very early “a sort of nervous breakdown which interferes a bit with my keeping my promises," and later in hospitals with "an all but life-size nervous breakdown" and at last horribly alone in the country, cold, without even a telephone, dying miserably after a sleepless night. How is it possible with all this fraternal, familial feeling that the frantic, orphaned creature of the later years came into being? And how is it possible to begin with that this jolly, loving daughter and sister was in her most famous period in such violent revolt? Edna Millay seems to have had a wretched life, much more so than those persons whose earliest days were marked by a blighting, am- biguous relation to their families and later somewhat toward everyone. There is not anywhere a sadder story than this-the aching existence of this woman who loved and was loved by her family and friends, who, flaming youth and all, married only once and then, to all appearances, wisely. Even Emily Dickinson appears on happier ground in her upstairs bedroom. It seems likely that Edna Millay's fame and success came too early; the racking strain of keeping up to this is suggested everywhere. And more important: I think Edmund Wilson in his fascinating and moving work on her undervalues the spectacular pain of the sort of success she had. She was a woman famous for her fascinating, unconventional per- sonality, and for rather conventional poems. She was not in the deepest sense "famous" or much cared for by many of the really good poets of her own time. Hart Crane's opinion, written to a friend much stricken with Miss Millay, is interesting: "She really has genius in a limited sense, and is much better than Sara Teasdale, Marguerite Wilkinson, Lady Speyer, etc., to mention a few drops in the bucket of feminine lushness that forms a kind of milky way in the poetic firmament of the time (likewise all times); -indeed I think she is every bit as good as Elizabeth Browning. . . . I can only say I do not greatly care for Mme. Browning. . . . With her equipment Edna Millay is bound to succeed to the appreciative applause of a fairly large audience. And for you, who I rather suppose have not gone into this branch of literature with as much enthusiasm as myself, she is a creditable heroine." === Page 104 === 694 PARTISAN REVIEW This was not an easy situation for Edna Millay to live with. You cannot give, as she did, your whole life to writing without caring hor- ribly, even to the point of despair. And so in 1949 we find that she is planning a satire against T. S. Eliot. In this work she says there is to be, "nothing coarse, obscene, as there sometimes is in the work of Auden and Pound, and nothing so silly as the childish horsing around of Eliot, when he is trying to be funny. He has no sense of humor, and so he is not yet a true Englishman. There is, I think, in these poems of mine against Eliot nothing which could be considered abusive; they are merely murderous." This is appalling. Edna Millay was not a stupid nor even an exces- sively vain person. She knew, in spite of this wild cry, that the literary approval of Pound was to be valued more highly than that of Frank Crowninshield. (Critics are often wrong, but writers are hardly ever wrong, hide and deny it as they will, in knowing whose opinion really counts.) Her words are not those of a poet secure in her powers, and they are especially harsh for this writer, who was forever generous and warm-hearted toward other poets, including nearly all of her feminine rivals. This hopeless, killing bitterness about her own place, as I believe the projected satire reveals, is the end of a whole life which one can at least imagine was thrown off its natural, impressive track by a series of seemingly fortunate fatalities. Perhaps she was not meant to go to Greenwich Village at all and certainly not to become famous in her youth. Sensible, moral, steadfast, a kind of prodigy—among her circle hardly anyone except Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop even rose to the second-rate. Not nearly enough was asked of her and she had no time to prepare herself in solitude—until it was too late. It is a tribute, a terrible one, to her possibilities and hopes that she was unable to enjoy the comforts of a strong, public position and split in two. Very few critics can find in Edna Millay's poetry the power and greatness Wilson finds. Still there is something humanly delightful and pleasing in Wilson's obstinacy, like the great Ruskin putting Kate Greenaway among the finest living artists—which he did. One cannot read even a few of Hart Crane's letters without feeling the editor, Brom Weber, has made a tremendous contribution. (Of course the "contribution" is Crane's, but he could not have presented his own correspondence.) Fishing about in contemporary literature, Weber has dredged up a masterpiece, for these letters are marvelous, wonderful simply to read, important in what they add to our notion of Crane, and in an unruly, inadvertent fashion quite profound for the picture they give of America itself, and in particular the literary scene === Page 105 === BOOKS 695 from 1916 to 1932, from Hart Crane at 17 until his death at 33. It is easy with this volume to be reminded of Keats's letters, and if Crane's are not quite so extraordinary as that the same must be said for most of English prose. Poor Crane-a genius from Cleveland-with his little pair of par- ents, or his pair of little parents, so squeezing in their anxiety and ego- tism, so screeching in their divorce, the mother rather beached and given to a humble mysticism (Christian Science), the father, dazed and busy, a business success but not really. Crane's parents are curdling and outrageous by their very multiplicity in America, their typicality; they are as real and to be expected, this young couple, as Cleveland itself. Vast numbers of people under middle age now have parents like this and are these persons' only child. Hart Crane was merely a bit in the vanguard by getting there somewhat early. And the son himself, a poet, homosexual, drunkard, a suicide. One had not imagined much could be added to this macabre, but neat, biography. However, what the letters amazingly suggest is the disturbing possibility that Crane had a happy life. Naturally, he was often much annoyed by his parents, but there is no doubt he was always much fascinated by them. He wrote this middling pair an extremely generous number of lively and often lengthy letters, a source of amazement when we consider Crane's bumming about, drinking, and the dizzy life he had made for himself away from home. In the end he was returning from Mexico, not to New York, but to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, planning fantastically to "be of some help" to his stepmother in the shrunken state of solid assets which became known at his father's death. Contrary to the guilt feelings usually surmised Crane seems to have "enjoyed"-no other word occurs to me-his homosexuality, taking about this the most healthy attitude possible under the circumstances. There is not the slightest suggestion in the letters that he worried about his inclinations or was trying to reform; if anything troubles him on this score it is continence, the lack of opportunity. For what it may be worth, we remark that his suicide came at a time when he was involved, and more than a little luke-warmly, with a woman. "You know you're welcome-more than that, my dear, to make this your future head- quarters. I miss you mucho, mucho, mucho! But I don't think that either of us ought to urge the other into anything but the most spontaneous and mutually liberal arrangements." Crane also "enjoyed" alcohol-his letters are heathenish in their failure to express intentions to liberate himself from this pleasure. He could, however, be remorseful over his drunken actions and there is no === Page 106 === 696 PARTISAN REVIEW doubt he tried his friends' charity extravagantly. As the Russian proverb about drinking has it, "A man on foot is a poor companion for a man on horseback." Yet Crane somehow never seems to feel he is galloping to destruction. In this he is very different from Fitzgerald, who had in the midst of chaos the rather cross-eyed power of gazing upon his deterioration as if he were not living it but somehow observing his soul and body as one would watch a drop of water slowly drying up in the sun. Crane, on the other hand, expresses over and over the greatest delight in alcohol; he sees himself as a true lover of the grape rather than a snuffling slave of the bottle and, though the results may be the same, the attitude alters the experience along the way. It is one thing to die in ecstasy and another to pass away, moaning, "I knew this stuff would get me in the end." (This is not suggested as the literal deathbed mood of either of these authors, but as a fundamental difference of attitude toward their "difficulties.") Crane's letters are vivid in every respect-responsive, humorous, beautifully written, fresh-everything and more. The sheer power of mind they reveal is dazzling; his comments upon his reading, his con- temporaries, his own work, even the landscape, are always interesting and usually brilliant. It is impossible to think of him, after this, as a natural who knows not what he doeth. What is so appealing about his mind is the utter absence of cant, artiness and fear-all those things Sherwood Anderson seemed to think were the "copy"-a literary man was obliged to wring out of his skin. Even when Crane is wounded in his vanity-self-justifying and "true to human nature" as he will be in his explanation of lapses-there is always something solid and shrewd in the way he goes about reclaiming himself. One can see in him cer- tainly a "neurotic need for affection" but there is also astonishing inde- pendence and balance. His melancholy is as short as his enjoyment of things is long. Very near the end, before he jumped into the sea, if he did jump, he is writing about the glorious Mexican Easter and the wonderful singers in the cafés ("has the old Hawaiian gurgling backed off the map") and detailing his incredibly funny difficulties with a drunken servant, Daniel. "I took the opportunity to talk to him about sobriety-meanwhile pouring him glass after glass of Tenampe. Reading these letters it is hard to remember the withered and anesthetized tragedy we thought Crane had become. Yet you cannot easily account for the amount of joy in them and the joy you receive from getting close again to Crane's life. Perhaps it is his magical free- dom from true disgust which makes you think this "doomed" poet was, after all, under the protection of a charm. Elizabeth Hardwick === Page 107 === BOOKS 697 INTELLECTUALS UNDER THE "SYSTEM" THE CAPTIVE MIND. By Czeslaw Milosz. Knopf. $3.50. "A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges displace and tilt them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers. ... The vision of the cobblestones is unquestionably real, and poetry based on an equally naked experience could survive triumphantly that judgment day of man's illusions. In the intellectuals who lived through the atroci- ties of war in Eastern Europe there took place what one might call the elimination of emotional luxuries. . . . They are hungry—but what they want is bread, not hors d'oeuvres. Dialectical materialism awakens a re- sponse in them because it is earthy. They would willingly espouse a literature and art born outside the sphere of the Method, but on con- dition that it be earthy, strong, and healthy. If only they could find it!" Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind is entirely written from the point of view of the man "lying under machine-gun fire on a street" and looking at the cobblestones: the naked reality. In the preceding para- graph, he had said, "The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those things are worthwhile which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death." What can these things be for a modern man, a man who finds him- self by definition in an "extreme situation"? Only two: the first is a comprehensive system that accounts in terms of concrete, material neces- sity for the machine-gun fire, the battle, its causes, its stakes, the future that lies beyond them; the second is the irrational, the "emotional life of man" (as Milosz puts it in the last pages of the book); something that no such system can account for, or exhaust, only suppress or disre- gard, as an "emotional luxury" precisely. Traditional religion, traditional culture, and the systems of philosophy are of no avail simply because there is no apparent transition from the naked particular experience to them; they do not throw any direct light on the event, offering, so to speak, only hypothetical hypotheses. A Polish intellectual, an outstanding poet, and a member of the un- derground during the war, Czeslaw Milosz, when Poland became a People's Democracy, tried to come to terms with "naked reality" and even with the Diamat (dialectical materialism as an instrumentum regni, === Page 108 === 698 PARTISAN REVIEW which should not be confused with Marxism, since Marxism plays about the same role in it as the problem of Grace in the official answers given by the Catholic catechism). He finally gave up the attempt because he felt that to him, as an individual and a poet, truth and genuine emotion were more important than the infinite rhetorical possibilities (and the good salaries) offered by socialist realism. I do not know any description of what happens to the mind under a totalitarian system comparable to the one given by Milosz in his book, the mind, not the body, or the individual as a psycho-biological compound. Intellectuals are well taken care of, under the System; the individual as such can manage to satisfy his needs; the mind, however, undergoes strange mutations. Milosz con- centrates on describing them objectively, from a point of view which is not smug nor self-righteous. His sarcasm is directed against himself rather than against his adversary: "Maybe all this is inevitable and right," he seems to say, "while my incapacity to believe is indeed an emotional luxury. This, however, does not change the facts." By sticking to the essential facts, and avoiding any political polemic and secondary issues, he forces the mind to wonder. Which is no small feat in a time of set ideas and ideological quibbling like ours. In the ordinary outward life of a community, tragedy is followed by yearning for normal life, the attempt to go back to one's occupation, to adapt to the new situation, to rebuild, and even to forget. In the in- dividual consciousness, however, tragedy can have only tragic conse- quences: "In the second half of the war," Milosz explains, a serious crisis in political consciousness took place in the "underground state." The underground struggle against the occupying power entailed great sacrifices; the number of persons executed or liquidated in concentration camps grew con- stantly. To explain the need of such sacrifice solely on the basis of loyalty left one a prey to doubt. Loyalty can be the basis of individual action, but when decisions affecting the fate of hundreds of thousands of people are to be made, justification could there be? From the East the victorious Red Army was drawing near. The Western armies were far away. In the name of what future, in the name of what order were young people dying every day? . . . At this moment, Communist underground organizations began to be active. . . . The country, it was fairly clear, was going to be liberated by the Red Army; with its aid one should start a people's revolution. . . . The Warsaw uprising began at the order of the Government-in-Exile in London . . . was intended to oust the Germans and to take possession of the city so that the Red Army would be greeted by an already functioning Polish government. Once the battle in the city began, and at the Red Army, standing on the other side of the river, would not move to the aid of the insurgents, it was too late for prudence. The tragedy played itself out according to all the immutable rules. . . . For two months, a kilometer-high column of smoke and flames stood over Warsaw. Two hundred thousand people died in the street fighting. . . . After the uprising, the city which once numbered over a million inhabitants was a wilderness of ruins, === Page 109 === BOOKS 699 its population deported, and its demolished streets literally cemeteries. . . . There was no logical reason for Russia to have helped Warsaw. . . . The destruction of Warsaw represented certain indisputable advantages. The people dying in the streets were precisely those who could create most trouble for the new rulers, the young intelligentsia. . . . This traditional capital of revolts . . . was undoubtedly the most insubordinate city in the area that was to find itself under the Center's influence. All that could have argued for aid to Warsaw would have been pity for the one million inhabitants dying in the town. But pity is superfluous wherever sentence is pronounced by History. . . . In April of 1945 . . . Alpha and I re- turned to Warsaw and wandered together over the mounds of rubble that had once been streets . . . we stumbled upon a little plank fastened to a metal bar. The inscription, written in red paint or in blood, read: "Lieutenant Zbyszek's road of suffering." I know what Alpha's thoughts were at that time, and they were mine: we were thinking of what traces remain after the life of man. . . . Why?" The quotation is long, but no conceptual resumé could give an idea of the actual context of Milosz's debate with Communism. Such being the context, the question "Why?" suffers only two clear answers: one is to be found in the "earthiness" of dialectical materialism, supported by the verdict of History and organized power; the other is the "absurd," or maybe the stark "horror and pity" of tragedy. It is im- portant to notice that both answers have a metaphysical rather than a political, or even rational, character. The question they are supposed to satisfy does not bear simply on the means of improving an existing state of affairs, but on the essence of reality: "Who is the God, if there is any, who can justify what has happened? What must be His attributes, if what has happened is to have any meaning at all?" The context out of which the question arises is, on the other hand, concrete: a series of violent deeds. Under such conditions, if dialectical materialism is accepted as an answer, it is not so much because its tenets are, in themselves, convincing, or because its practical consequences redeem the horror of the event, which they certainly do not. It is rather because such a system is endowed with the quality of being "earthy," while all other answers are "idealistic" and do not beget, as the system does, a comprehensive plan of action. The only acceptable and true God is a God endowed with the attributes of "earthiness," and an effective practical will whose ultimate end is the transformation of a human world which is intrinsically senseless into one which will make sense, be rationally organized, and through. Total rationality, of course, implies total Justice as well as total Goodness. This is obviously a metaphysical construction that has very little to do (except for some crude remnants of Hegelian dialectics) with the analysis of a given social situation which is the starting point of Marxism. === Page 110 === 700 PARTISAN REVIEW "Earthiness," not correspondence to reality, is the prime requirement. As a matter of fact, "earthiness" here stands for resentment against reality, for anything in reality that is not factual and does not lead to a factual System. Among other things, this resentment manifests itself rather na- turally-as Milosz points out in the case of the conversion of his ex- colleague Alpha-in the form of "anger against the losers." An irresistible feeling, when the only choice left seems to be the one between justifica- tion of the winners and "empty nothingness." The losers are the Devil. First of all, because they are responsible for the rigor of the present state of affairs and whatever is bad in it; without them, the System would have started to function under more favorable (i.e., "ideal") conditions. Secondly, because they were "spiritualists," as their defeat clearly proves. And, thirdly, because if they were not utterly stupid and wrong, reality would become ambiguous again; the stark facts, whose meaning the System has settled forever, would again come to haunt one's mind. Proving Communism wrong and wicked is not a very interesting en- terprise by now. The proof can be reached on the ground of facts and simple evidence. As for the Diamat, it is, of course, as Milosz says, "noth- ing more than nineteenth century vulgarized to the second power." In it, "history and every branch of human creativity are presented as governed by unshakable and already known laws." "Centuries of human history . . . are reduced to a few generalized terms. Undoubtedly, one comes closer to the truth when one sees history as the expression of the class struggle rather than a series of private quarrels among kings and nobles. But precisely because such an analysis of history comes closer to the truth, it is more dangerous. It gives the illusion of full knowledge; it supplies answers to all questions, answers which simply run around in a circle. . . . What's more, the humanities get connected with the natural sciences thanks to the materialistic outlook . . . and so we see the circle closing perfectly and logically." Why is such a simplification convincing? Why does the mind of a man "stick" to it? One obvious answer is that it offers the only compre- hensive and univocal explanation of the world that can be derived from philosophy and science, the only one that can be vulgarized, made accessible to everybody. The Diamat is the reductio ad absurdum of Darwinism, Marxism, and scientific method for the sake of unity. A reductio ad absurdum does not prove that certain notions are wrong, but it certainly raises a question about them. In any case, it seems to imply the recognition that the need for a coherent, if not uni- vocal and dogmatic, image of the world is a permanent need of man, not an invention of metaphysicians and theologians. === Page 111 === BOOKS 701 "The son of a worker, subjected to such an education," Milosz ex- plains, "cannot think otherwise than as the school demands. Two times two equals four. The press, literature, painting, films, and theater, all illustrate what he learns. . . . It would be wrong to assert that a dual set of values no longer exists. The resistance . . . is, however, emotional. It survives, but it is beaten down whenever it has to explain itself in rational terms. A man's . . . opposition to this new philosophy of life is much like a toothache. Not only can he not express the pain in words, but he cannot even tell you which tooth is aching." Yes, but what about the intellectual? How can a sophisticated mod- ern intellectual fall for an explanation of the world that is finally (as Milosz also points out) that of Monsieur Homais? The answer is that, no matter how immunized against intellectual simplification, most mod- ern intellectuals are also immunized against the notion that a personal toothache can make any difference when it comes to questions of power and historical action. The difference between them and the workers is that they may well know which tooth is aching, but they are unwilling to admit that it makes a difference. Among them, worship of power and the accomplished fact, contempt for weak-mindedness and admiration for tough-mindedness, are much stronger than among the workers. In other words, they are far from being convinced that consciousness is the most decisive of all realities; they believe in consciousness only to the extent to which it manifests itself in a series of practical con- sequences logically derived from a Prime Mover. They are, that is, even more subject than the worker to the fascination of stern orthodoxy, provided the orthodoxy be a doctrine of perpetual change, rather than of some old-fashioned immutable truth. The difference between them and the workers is that, while the workers' mind will "stick" to official truth in good faith even although uneasily, the intellectuals' adhesion will be both easy and in bad faith. Orthodoxy, to them, can never be more than an official vocabulary they adopt with the hope of being able to alter its definitions precisely by accepting them. This finally brings forth the phenomenon of Ketman, which Milosz analyzes in some of the most brilliant pages of his book. He found the notion in Gobineau, who describes Ketman as the attitude by which Mos- lem intellectuals, confronted with the superior power of religious con- formism, not only hide their true opinions, but feel authorized to deny them and "to resort to all ruses in order to deceive one's adversary. One makes all the protestations of faith that can please him, one performs all the rites one recognizes to be the most vain, one falsifies one's own books, one exhausts all possible means of deceit." === Page 112 === 702 PARTISAN REVIEW No matter which way we turn, the final drama (or sinister comedy) of totalitarian orthodoxy takes place in the mind. If it proves anything, the Diamat proves that the mind cannot be made captive except by the mind, consciousness enslaved only through consciousness. In this sense, however, the mind is neither a psychological compound nor a philo- sophical notion; it is the domain of intrinsic evidence and coherence on which the cogency and inevitability of human beliefs are founded. For lack of a better term, we might call it metaphysical. Totalitarian mater- ialism, in any case, proves its reality per absurdum: by striving to occupy precisely those grounds, that is. "Only the bourgeois persists in thinking that nothing results from nuances of thought," says Milosz. Nicola Chiaramonte JARRELL AS CRITIC POETRY AND THE AGE. By Randall Jarrell. Knopf. $4.00. The Summer School Conference on the Novel at Harvard this year was opened by some rather ungrateful remarks, to the effect that if a group of poets has been called a Nest of Singing Birds, a group of critics might as well be called a flock of crows picking each other's bones. It was more or less boasted that this year they had secured a group of writers. With one or two exceptions, however, the results were more elephantine than ornithological. Where there was wit, there was little sense, and where there was sense, there was little wit. One looked back nostalgically to a memorable address given by Randall Jarrell at an earlier Conference and reprinted in this first collection of his critical pieces. Mr. Jarrell is a provoking critic in all senses of the word, one who can be counted on to scatter the unctuous fog which usually sur- rounds the middle-academic study of letters. He is, or has been, our nearly perfect Jacobin, our Tom Paine of the highbrow quarterlies, keeping alive the great style of the feuilleton. One attractive feature of this style in Mr. Jarrell's hands is its vulnerability. Certainly not a cloak for timidity, no mere "nice bit of meat for the dog," it placates the occasion rather than the audience. The you Mr. Jarrell addresses is not the lazy ego you actually cherish, rather that ideally generous celebrant in the Jarrellian cocktail-party-in- the-clouds who knows that however deeply his jokes may scar this cor- ruptible body, they can never touch the incorruptible spirit. "Eyes talk- ing: Never mind the cruel words,/ Embrace my flowers, but not embrace the swords." To read through these essays and reviews consecutively is === Page 113 === BOOKS 703 to appreciate the rare marriage of wit and generosity he has managed to carry off during these last unlamented years. Such a mixture would be impossible to sustain were it not firmly grounded on taste and ex- perience. Like Heine, Poe and Byron, all of whom he resembles in one way or another, Mr. Jarrell would doubtless subscribe to the notion that any- thing worth saying is worth exaggerating. His enemies have a way of becoming goblins and gnomes with a subtle if somehow harmless malig- nancy: his heroes-Goethe, Frost, Corbière, Marianne Moore, Whitman, et al.-are sometimes equally fabulous in their access to Wisdom. At the same time, no modern critic has a more lively respect for that dying species, the general reader. If you don't enjoy this poem, he tells us, I know a very intelligent little girl who does. He can show us more vividly than anyone else the movement of life from kitchen to parlor, from city to university, from the poem to the world, from the major classic to the minor success. When tired, he merely insists that there is, that there must be, such a movement. In other words, he is a better exponent than most academic Aristotelians of the famous doctrine of Imitation, a saving witness against the popular image of the Writer-as- Scapegoat we hear so much about. Literature is his life. You see me, sir, a mad young fellow . . . but every inch a critic! What is one to say about Delmore Schwartz's recent claim that in his criticism of Frost and Whitman especially, Mr. Jarrell has seized the baton from the failing hands of Eliot and the Eliotics and carried it a stage further, that in applying Eliot's literary standards with the same adventurousness of spirit, he has dispelled some of the hypnotic sterilities of the Eliot cult? (Mr. Schwartz cites Jarrell's quip that to expect Ransom's poetry to be influenced by Tate's and Warren's would be like expecting "a daydream to be influenced by two nightmares" as a prime example of his success in combining wisdom with wit.) Now, I think that this is a claim that had to be made by someone, if only because Mr. Jarrell's confident, comprehensive taste urges it upon us. And I think it is entirely justified if you take it in conjunction with Eliot's remark about Twain, to the effect that Twain was "an adult when he wrote like a child and a child when he wrote like an adult." Behind this super- ficially brilliant mot is the unspoken assumption that a certain subject- matter, a certain range of experience, is ipso facto childish, and that the best a genius like Twain can do is to dignify it with "adult treatment." It is just in this respect that, whatever their other disagreements with him may be, the university critics have closed ranks behind Eliot and united in patronizing and minimizing the genius of a large class of === Page 114 === 704 PARTISAN REVIEW writers represented by Twain-Lawrence, Faulkner, Dreiser, Anderson, Norris, etc. among the novelists, and Whitman, Frost, W. C. Williams, etc. among the poets. Not that these writers have lacked defenders or even cults of their own, but that they have been sorely in need of the wide-ranging, sober, affectionate, knowledgeable, histrionic consideration that Mr. Jarrell gives to his favorite poets. Mr. Schwartz's claim has force, though, only if we are modest in making it. By giving amusingly short shrift to those parts of, say, Frost which are also parts of the World, Mr. Jarrell brings out his virtues in very high relief. He has a sixteenth-century woodcarver's faculty for this kind of personification. On the other hand, Winters has written almost as enthusiastically about Frost's great lyrics, although his selection is a trifle narrower and he doesn't praise the dramatic monologues suffi- ciently. Good as it is, Jarrell's Whitman essay is incomplete, and I don't mean merely in terms of literary-historical analysis. For example, in the short lyric in "Out of the Cradle . . ." which begins "Shine, shine, shine," Whitman is extraordinarily successful in this lapse into conven- tional meter in concentrating and sublimating the themes of the poem into a sort of apogee of American romantic lyricism. It seems to me, merely in itself, one of the great lyric touchstones of American poetry. But of course it shouldn't be read apart from the rest of the poem, al- though its mere existence throws the diffsness of the rest into a new perspective, giving it point and "emotional form." Mr. Jarrell, however much he may favor the taking of risks, is too nervous about this looser, bardic, "public" diction in Whitman. He wants his poets to be largely representative, but he is shy of their becoming involved with public emotions. He wants his poets to be general but not too general, and this, I think, is a limitation. Like Winters, but from an exactly opposite direc- tion, he is reacting too strongly against the middlebrow cult. To my mind, much his best writing is on Marianne Moore. Here both poet and critic approach each other from such thoroughly special and entrenched positions that they do meet across the best poems in nearly every case. Miss Moore, unlike Whitman and Frost, is least suc- cessful when she tries to be most representative. One can also express doubts about the notion of Ransom as a "daydream." In his special Ransomian way, Ransom is really every bit as mordant and agitato as Tate and Warren. What about "Equilibrists," "Two in August," or "Captain Carpenter"? It's a bantering, mock- melodramatic, rhetorical, "open" convention, but it's certainly not pure sweetness and light. And in what sense are "Ode to the Confederate === Page 115 === BOOKS 705 Dead" or "Mediterranean" nightmares? My own unorthodox feeling is simply that in his best poems Ransom is the more memorable poet. Qualify and dissent as we may, the fact is plain that Mr. Jarrell is a critic who brings more loving care, more intelligent good will, to his criticism than most of us can afford. If, as he once wrote, Dr. Williams is "the America of poets," he is in some significant sense the America of critics, which brings us to a question which D. H. Lawrence was probably the first European to pose. How to reconcile what an American writer appreciates and what he projects? In the case of Mr. Jarrell, how to reconcile the tone of his poetry and the tone of his criticism? From the beginning, his poems have been about losses, though his tone (very roughly speaking) has mellowed from indignation to a wistful nostalgia. The bomber pilot loses a life he never had, the young girl loses a dream, Vienna loses its baroque amenity. The life of his poems-and the least one can say is that they do have subjects and a life of their own-is so faint that one is tempted to think of this world as a sort of pastoral frieze. Violent things happen, but as part of the weather rather than the action. Briefly, then, Mr. Jarrell takes an elegiac attitude toward his subjects, though few of his poems are immediately recognizable as elegies, lacking as they do the familiar elegiac rhythms. I should cite a couple of touchstones by way of contrast, moments when an extreme sense of separation and loss releases a correspondingly brilliant utterance. Today, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home And at your threshold set you down, Townsman of a stiller town. Frowning and forefending angel-warder Squander the hell-rook ranks sally to molest him; March, kind comrade, abreast him; Dress his days to a dexterous and starlight order. RECENT PAINTINGS 50 YEARS OF AD REINHARDT MONDRIAN to December 5 thru nov. ALFONSO OSSORIO opening December 7 BETTY PARSONS SIDNEY JANIS • 15 E 57 GALLERY - 15 East 57th Street === Page 116 === 706 PARTISAN REVIEW The passages are very different; the first darkens to a profound quiet, the second rises to a superb visionary rhetoric. Both are excerpts from poems which don't maintain the same level, therefore particularly unfair to quote if I were merely admonishing Mr. Jarrell. But in both the rhythm is part of the meaning. Reading Mr. Jarrell's poetry as elegy, one misses this surrender to primitive metres. This withholding on the part of so talented a poet seems to come from so deep an immersion in a Whiteheadian sense of process that mere existence becomes at once extremely problematic and extremely dense. He is an elegist by nature, but neither in his verse nor his criticism has he seemed willing to promote this bias deliberately, thereby gaining some sort of perspective on it. One might elaborate the idea of the elegy in modern poetry by saying that twentieth-century poets have, for the first time, an altogether elegaic attitude toward the kind of language which Dante called “illus- trious.” Any use of splendid language and deep, complex rhythms tends to invoke a lost or ideal reality. You find this tendency appearing strongly in Milton's early poems with their self-consciously baroque or Theocritan charms, finally coming to the surface and becoming the main substance in Eliot and Yeats, “ . . where the walls of Magnus Martyr hold inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold,” and where “. . the lost heart stiffens and rejoices in the lost lilac and the lost sea voices.” Even in his most intimate lyrics, like “A Prayer for my Daughter,” Yeats's use of the fulsome or the old word, though never obtrusively artificial, is nevertheless elegiac and emblematic at once. The stanza which begins, “May she become a flourishing hidden tree . . . ,” beautiful as it is, hardly seems to express the poet's sense of any actual likelihood. Certainly Yeats himself would have gone crazy “Rooted in one dear perpetual place.” There's a difference between this attitude and Marvell's; Marvell invokes a Platonic ideal which is still intermittently possible, Yeats expresses an ideal possibility which is lost for good. When you turn to Mr. Jarrell's criticism, you find the missing rhythms in abundance, picking up momentum from the Zeitgeist itself. Here is all the buzz and hum of a nation of eclectic connoisseurs warm- ing to the job of appreciation and analysis. Here the stance of the neutral observer is taken for granted and becomes an asset. Here the extreme fatalism, the “romantic” sense of man's helplessness before na- ture and history (to invoke the Babbitt-Winters argument) is not re- quired to declare itself openly except when the critic's predilections hap- pen to coincide with those of another poet, and then usually in the veiled terms of enthusiastic pleasure. More often than not, his praise === Page 117 === BOOKS 707 of such great modern "elegies" as Frost's "Acquainted with the Night" has been as emphatic as Mr. Winters', the difference being that where Mr. Winters invokes a tradition, Mr. Jarrell invokes a mystery, calling in the Goetbean daemon to confirm it. In other words, Mr. Jarrell is one step further than Eliot and Winters inside the Age of Criticism which he wants to, but can't quite honestly, deplore. It would be callow, I suppose, to claim the '50s as a potentially great critical era. On the other hand, it does offer oppor- tunities for the kind of universality which results in an Aristotle or Longinus. Criticism has a popular support and an esprit de corps which somehow makes it immune from the ravages of summer conferences on the State of Letters. It is just this Alexandrian state of affairs, this pos- sibility of an Alexandria of the spirit surviving in the stately tumult of a Roman world, which Mr. Jarrell's criticism reflects so clearly and which makes him so uneasy. One of his daemon's names is surely Orig- inal Creativity, that needful legacy of the romantics. The critic, he pleads, is really as likable as that boy who died last year from unrequited creativity. And so he is, as Mr. Jarrell proves. "Critics," he writes, "have a wonderfully imposing look . . . and the reader surely has his favorites too, writers to whom he goes for style and wit and sermons, informal essays, aesthetics, purple passages, confessions, aphorisms, wisdom-a thousand things." "One occasionally encounters intellectual couples for whom some critic has taken the place of the minister they no longer have." But what does he imply? That we should acknowledge all this and still despise ourselves? His remedy, after all, is a bit lame: "Around the throne of God, where all angels read perfectly, there are no critics- there is no need for them." Surely the critics will all be there, sending their quarterly bulletins to Purgatory! There seem to me at least two ways out of this dilemma; either, like Joyce, to merge criticism and "creativity" into a grand mélange of F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Man & His KINSEY Work edited with intro. by Alfred Kazin $3.00 our price $2.00 HENRY JAMES AND ROBERT LOUIS SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN $8.00 STEVENSON a record of Friendship and FEMALE Criticism Ed. Janet Adam Smith $3.25, our price $1.50 THE DIAL BOOK SHOP THE FILM TILL NOW: A Survey of World Cinema by Paul Rotha $12.00 our price 81 WEST 12 STREET, $6.00 NEW YORK 11, N. Y. Other specials are listed in our GBM Currents-Also list of recordings by poets Free on Request GOTHAM BOOK MART ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE 41 WEST 47th N. Y. 36, N. Y. PL. 7-0367 NEW SCHOOL CH 3-3857 === Page 118 === 708 PARTISAN REVIEW symbolism, parody, tragi-comedy, burlesque and lyric prose, or, like several others, to take the kind of elegiac attitude toward the present, or toward childhood, which organizes both criticism and creative work under a guiding and tempering idea. Our Alexandrian fate is merely dismal if we think only of Bentley and Rhymer, but fairly cheerful if we think of Mr. Jarrell. As he shows so well in his criticism, it can be an exhilarating as well as an exhausting position. But it is in their criticism itself rather than by broad appeals ad hominem, that critics will persuade their readers to read the minor masterpieces and to practice the humane virtues. R. W. Flint FICTION CHRONICLE THE IDOLS AND THE PREY. By John Goodwin. Harpers. $3.50. THE BOLD SABOTEURS. By Chandler Brossard. Farrar, Straus and Young. $3.50. THE SLEEPING BEAUTY. By Elizabeth Taylor. Viking. $3.00. THE CATALANS. By Patrick O'Brian. Harcourt, Brace. $3.50. THE SISTERS MATERASSI. By Aldo Palazzeschi. Doubleday. $3.50. For several decades it has been fashionable for novelists to discern metaphysical import and matter for fiction in the spectacle of effete Westerners—almost infallibly of Anglo-Saxon origin-disintegrat- ing, or, rarely, finding salvation amid exotic and primitive surroundings. Of late the novels of the neo-primitive school have lacked variety, as if imagination had failed or the fictional possibilities of the material had been temporarily exhausted. Its classics are South Wind and The Plumed Serpent: ironic amusement at the shifts to which Western Man can be reduced when confronted by a civilization incomprehensible to him but some way or other better, or an apocalypse in which the good life to be secured within that civilization is figured forth. All that the imita- tors of Lawrence and Douglas have done with these patterns is to re- move any possibility of the good life and to create meaningless violence as a chief source of local color. The novels and short stories of Paul Bowles demonstrate the point, and so does The Idols and the Prey, a skillfully contrived mechanism which shunts a few ripely unpleasant Americans resident in Haiti along to material ruin. (Their spiritual ruin is complete when the novel opens.) It is never clear, except that general wreckage is now de rigueur in such fiction, why Boyd, the central figure, must contrive his own de- struction and that of his friends. He makes it happen, effortlessly and predictably, and accompanied by appropriate primitive goings-on. All === Page 119 === new and outstanding the avon book of modern writing edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv of Partisan Review All new fiction, poetry, essays and autobiography representing the top-flight work of such outstanding American and European writers as Colette, Irving Howe, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Musil, Robie Macauley, Eleanor Clark, Isaac Rosenfeld and many others. designed by Avon Publications to bring the best in current writing and thought to the American reader. 35c wherever paperbound books are sold Available at your local newsdealer. If he cannot supply you, order direct from Avon Book Sales Corp., 575 Madison Ave., N.Y. 22, N.Y. Enclose 35c plus 5c extra to cover cost of wrapping and mailing. THE SCHOOL OF LETTERS INDIANA UNIVERSITY SUMMER 1954 Courses on the graduate level in the theory and practice of Literary Criticism Including work toward a Master of Arts Degree Address enquiries to Newton P. Stallknecht, director, The School of Letters, English Building, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana SENIOR FELLOWS John Crowe Ransom Lionel Trilling Allen Tate Philip Rahv Austin Warren THE FELLOWS Newton Arvin Eric Bentley Richard Blackmur Cleanth Brooks Kenneth Burke Richard Chase William Empson Francis Fergusson Leslie Fiedler Robert Fitzgerald Irving Howe Randall Jarrell Alfred Kazin L. C. Knights Robert Lowell Arthur Mizener Herbert Read Philip Blair Rice Mark Schorer Delmore Schwartz Stephen Spender Newton P. Stallknecht Robert Penn Warren Rene Wellek Harold Whitehall Yvor Winters Morton Dauwen Zabel Full information available about January 1 === Page 120 === 710 PARTISAN REVIEW this is the more regrettable because Mr. Goodwin, whenever he can forget the ruin he has planned for his characters long enough to look at them or at the Haitian social scene, is amusing and wise. Though their local color is designed to shock, their excursions into it locate Messrs. Bowles and Goodwin quite as much among the heirs of Sarah Orne Jewett and George Washington Cable as among the imitators of Law- rence and Douglas. The Bold Saboteurs is also fashionable, the most recent evidence of what is happening to autobiographical fiction in America. For forty years and with minor variations portraits of artists as young men and records of sentimental educations have been exceedingly common among us. Mr. Brossard’s publishers are perhaps mistaken when they announce that he has “extended the limits” of the novel. He has merely added the devices of surrealist fantasy to a rigidly conventionalized design and has made his hero tough where twenty years ago he would have been delicate. Surely this must be the easiest kind of writing to write. Put down as much as you can remember or imagine of what it was like or might have been like to grow up on the streets of Washington in the ‘20s and ‘30s and, by the deceiving light of fantasy, mere recollection or mere imagination turns up with one more vision of the decline of Man in the Western World. So far—I am thinking of novelists so dissimilar as Joyce and Ray- mond Queneau, Genet and the Dylan Thomas of the entrancing Adven- tures in the Skin Trade—this kind of writing has been memorable when it has been comic, as if the metropolitan nightmare, whether dreamed in Dublin, in Paris, or in London, were supportable only when it provides matter for guffaws. Mr. Brossard is never funny. In his fact and in his fantasy he is violent and rather dull. The Bold Saboteurs is informative about what used to be called low life, but whatever Mr. Brossard really intended is not here. After these enterprises in fictional chic it is pleasant to think of Elizabeth Taylor. No violence and no meaningless artifice stand between her and her reader. Her unspectacular people and her commonplace English seaside town in the off season can be felt and seen, sharp and clear. If there is nothing to distinguish her writing notably from that of Elizabeth Bowen or of the earlier Rosamond Lehmann, it is still, with its evidence of a cultivated, delicately judging moral sensibility, one of the best kinds of writing there is nowadays. So beguiling, indeed, are Mrs. Taylor’s felicities that the excessive contrivance of her novel be- comes only slowly apparent. This entirely promising tale of a middle- aged Siegfried who awakes to life a Brunnhilde cast into emotional === Page 121 === BOOKS 711 slumber by an accident and held captive by a monstrous sister is too neatly flanked by the minor themes of first love and the loneliness of middle age. Mrs. Taylor seems to have intended some parable about Love, and in working it out she has crowded her short novel with feelings and situations relevant to her intention but to be taken on faith, for she has had no time to create them. After the first chapters, dominated by a few finely drawn characters and a wonderful seascape, the action sprawls out inexorably in a clutter of plot and moves on to a happy conclusion. The closest parallel I can think of is in those endings of Dickens in which good feeling and the god-like bestowal of prizes and demerits clouds everything that has preceded them. This fairy-tale end- ing is implicit in the title and suitable to the parable; it violates the reality of the nearly faultless early chapters. They may have been meant to end well, but they were not meant to end tidily. It is a violation which infects the writing. This prose which can recapture so happily all the tensions and shifts in the most commonplace relationships turns, when the novel must be set in some final order, into a parody of the prose of Ivy Compton-Burnett. A parody, however, with the passion left out, as if wit and intellect sufficed to resolve matters set going in a different emotional climate. PERSPECTIVES USA 5 Edited by Malcolm Cowley A Partial Table of Contents Changing Mind (a long poem) CONRAD AIKEN Antony in Behalf of the Play KENNETH BURKE Torch Song (a story) JOHN CHEEVER Young Man with a Horn (on Jazz) OTIS FERGUSON Theodore Roosevelt EDMUND WILSON American Houses, Modern Style HUGH MORRISON Some Observations on Changes in Leisure Attitudes DAVID RIESMAN Also: Book notes and reviews, a digest of American periodicals, notes on and photographs of the contributors. 188 Pages 8 Photographic Illustrations Price: $1.50 Annually: $5.00 Published by Intercultural Publications Inc., 2 West 46 Street, N. Y. 36. Address subscription orders to Paragon Mailing Service, 347 Adams Street, Brooklyn 1, N. Y. Bookstore distribution through Viking Press. === Page 122 === 712 PARTISAN REVIEW The Catalans reads like a poor translation from the French. The language is deliberately opaque, the result, perhaps, of a resolve to avoid the merely colorful. This common grayness is intensified by Mr. O'Brian's infuriating habit of using the wooliest abstract nouns and then, for em- phasis, of repeating them immediately—a trick for the voice and not for the pen. Everything, at last, seems to be said and observed through a thick pane of plate glass. This is too bad, for The Catalans is, if some- what obviously, a serious and carefully written novel. The sense of seeing and hearing through obstacles is aggravated by a multiplicity of themes. The Catalans begins by sounding like one of those short French novels, all economy of line and eloquent simplicity of language, which, whether written by Mme. de La Fayette or by Colette, make the short French novel one of the glories of fiction. And then, like The Sleeping Beauty, it becomes crowded. It begins as an ac- count of the death-of-the-heart in a middle-aged man. It ends—Mr. O'Brian's musings on Grace and Damnation having disappeared sud- denly—as an account of the awakening, in a dry season, of another middle-aged man to the possibilities of love. Set as it is on the French Mediterranean, a few miles from the Spanish border, it is also about the sense of the family and family property as it exists among the pros- perous bourgeoisie. The death-of-the-heart, the heart's awakening, prop- erty, the family—a single novel could compass these. But The Catalans is very short and Mr. O'Brian bestows equal emphasis on these themes, toys with them, and then loses interest. Little and too much. A deficiency of feeling, or feeling sometimes obscured and sometimes dissipated in language, and an excess of merely verbalized preoccupations. But when the writing turns directly to describe a seacoast and a life which Mr. O'Brian does not entirely love he manages an astringent veracity. The Sisters Materassi is the most reassuringly substantial of these novels. It is leisurely in a pleasantly old-fashioned way. (It was first published in 1934, and it is tiresome of Doubleday to have left the reader to assume that it is a new book.) It lingers throughout on the kind of life and out of them creates an entire little world, all wonderfully alive, for Signor Palazzeschi knows exactly what he is about and is sure of his power. This long-drawn-out and un- climactic account of the fatuities of the Materassis, lingerie makers to wealthy Florentines, and of their selfish and selfless devotion to a worth- less object, their beautiful, captivating, and amoral nephew, is reminis- cent of the novels of Italo Svevo. But with a difference. The buffoonery of a Zeno, the folly of an Emilio Brentani destroy them spiritually. Signor Palazzeschi, though he never loses sight of the spiritual and moral idiocy === Page 123 === Books for the Discriminating Reader . . . THE BIG TREE OF MEXICO by John Skeaping "One of the best introductions to the primitive, Indian mentality since D. H. Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico." ALA Booklist. Illustrated. $3.75 THE DARING YOUNG MEN: The Story of the American Pre- Raphaelites by David H. Dickason An illuminating account of the American Pre-Raphaelite move- ment-from Joaquin Miller to Ezra Pound. This book explores a completely new era in Anglo-American cultural relations. Illustrated. $5.00 FROM THE MODERN REPERTOIRE, Series I & II, edited by Eric Bentley "Eric Bentley's series is the best possible. Nobody that I know of has such a vital sense of the theatre and literature at the same time." John Crowe Ransom. Series I $ 5.00 Series II $ 6.00 Both volumes ordered as a set $10.00 THE AGE OF PIRANDELLO by Lander MacClintock "As fine a survey of modern Italian drama as exists in any language I know." Eric Bentley. $5.00 A HISTORY OF ESTHETICS by Katharine Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn Revised and enlarged edition. "Everything in the history of esthetics is here." Saturday Review. $7.50 DYNAMICS OF ART by Andrew P. Ushenko. An inquiry into the nature of aesthetic experience. $5.00 THE INDIANA UNIVERSITY POETRY SERIES SONGS FOR A NEW THE GYPSY BALLADS OF AMERICA by Charles G. Bell GARCIA LORCA translated by Rolfe Humphries NEW ENGLAND HARVEST DRY SUN, DRY WIND by Donald C. Babcock by David Wagoner IN THE HOUSE AND OUT and Other Poems by Samuel Yellen Each, $2.75 At All Bookstores INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington, Indiana === Page 124 === 714 PARTISAN REVIEW which animates the self-sacrifice of his victims, sees their folly as con- ferring on them a perverse minor triumph. Their entirely material and curiously sexual passion for Remo reaps for them the spiritual benefit of being able to continue life on some level meaningful to them when money and the object of passion are gone. In this sense, and as a study of the material destruction of those ripe for destruction the novel is first-rate. Technically it is remarkable for the way in which, on occasion, the careful realism is deliberately violated by the introduction of passages of grotesqueque which point up in comic horror the monstrousness of the victor and his victims. The wedding scene, in which the virginal aunts deck themselves in bridal finery and orange blossoms to attend Remo's unloved but wealthy American bride to the altar-she thought she was having a typical Florentine wedding—is a brilliant example of pure Ex- pressionist fiction. What one had thought of-Caligari and a few other films excepted-as a method which had come to very little, can be as- tonishingly powerful in the hands of an accomplished writer. The portrait of Remo, the temperate and calculating prodigal, is superb. He is one of those non-human beings, more common among men than among women, who, secure in the possession of great physical beauty and charm, can flourish without any ties, spiritual or sexual- a marble faun, a Donatello incapable of assuming humanity. It is pos- sible to construe him, given the date of The Sisters Materassi, as a sly parable on Fascist youth, though on its surface the novel is set in a po- litical vacuum into which nothing penetrates but the immediate material concerns of the characters. His existence is all Kraft durch Freude, and although his important affiliations are with motorcars, in his radiant and meaningless beauty he reminds one of a figure on a party poster. The translation is excellent. All the play of light and shade on a subject which could have been merely banal or merely sorrowful is caught in Angus Davidson's prose. Ernest Jones LIBERAL PRESS, INC. printers of PARTISAN REVIEW 80 FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK 3, N. Y. === Page 125 === 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 of escape for a modern Everyman, Kilroy, the ubiquitous ordinary guy- is the more compelling for the ex- travagant humor of his adventures. CAMINO REAL by Tennessee Williams $3.00 NEW DIRECTIONS, 333 Sixth Avenue, New York 14, N. Y. This is Thomas' first book-length prose narrative, a murder story based on the THE DOCTOR ghoulish exploits of Burke and Hare, AND THE DEVILS 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 by Dylan Thomas $2.50 quality of its language and yet drip- ping with the 'cauld grue' of, say, Stevenson's The Body Snatcher. . ." === Page 126 === 716 PARTISAN REVIEW A LETTER OF RESIGNATION To the Editors Dear Friends: I should like by this letter to sum up what I took to be the main sense of our recent conversation. You told me that a number of the readers of PARTISAN REVIEW found it an anomaly that I, a "McCarthyite" (as they defined me), continue to ap- pear as a member of PR's Advisory Board. They felt that the presence of my name cast doubt on the integrity of PR's "stand" on "the issue." You had yourselves, you said, come reluc- tantly to this same opinion. And I, once you had said this, could not but agree, of course, that my name should be removed. I do not want to inflate this little episode beyond its modest deserts. The function of the Advisory Board is large- ly nominal, as we know, and nothing much is at stake whether my name ap- pears or is absent. Still, there is also a sentimental problem. My connection with PR goes back a good while, to the earliest stage after its break with the Communist Party. I have been hap- py in my association with PR, for per- sonal reasons (because you are my friends), and because of two partic- ular features of PR's editorial standard. PR has steadfastly resisted compromise on quality of writing-it has kept its brow defiantly high. And PR, almost alone among the world's advanced in- tellectual magazines, remained anti- Communist throughout all the shifts of these past fifteen years. I must now assume that for PR, "McCarthyism" has become the dom- inant issue, which determines the char- acter of the magazine's basic editorial policy as well as its relation to individ- uals. This is the implication of what you said to me, and of the action with respect to me which seems to you ap- propriate. It is implied also by symp- tomatic articles that PR has published over the past year. I want to make clear that, for me, "McCarthyism" is not a dominant or even important issue, and that I do not regard myself as either "pro-Mc- Carthy" or "anti-McCarthy." I ap- prove many things that McCarthy has done, and certain of his "methods"; I disapprove some of his actions, and a number of his methods. My attitude toward Senator McCarthy is in these general respects no different from what it is toward many other political fig- ures. But "McCarthyism" is not McCarthy. I believe "McCarthyism" to be an in- vention of the Communist tacticians, who launched it and are exploiting it, exactly as they have done in the case of a dozen of their previous operations in what might be called diversionary semantics. The Daily Worker of Sept. 24, 1953, made the objective plain enough: "McCarthyism is the tech- nique of the Big Lie-the Big Lie that Communism, at home and abroad, is the main danger." The intellectuals of the Eastern sea- board take the bait, rush to gobble it indeed, as if the past twenty-five years had never been. Why, at an anti-Mc- Carthy cocktail rally, the very gleam in the eyes and fervent crack in the voice carry a middle-aged memory right back to the good old days of the League against War and Fascism. In a recent communication to the The Commonweal, on an occasion very similar to this one, my brother, Philip, exactly expressed my own standpoint: "On the basis of what can be known now-and of inferences, suppositions, feeling and smells-the party of the anti-McCarthyites is one I will not join." PR has evidently decided (or perhaps has been tricked into deciding) to join that party, and to become, as it then must, an "organ" of that party, its voice among advanced intellectuals. It is surely inappropriate, then, that my name should continue on your mast- head. === Page 127 === 717 Please believe that I end my small formal relation to PR with no ill will on my side. I shall continue to read PR, to wish it good fortune, and, if you permit me, to write for it. You have been good enough to suggest that I write an essay on some of these very matters. This I shall gladly do, and I hope that what I write will be part of a continuing process of clarification. We are entering difficult terrain, and better maps are needed than any of us possesses. James Burnham We deeply regret that political dif- ferences of a fundamental nature have led to James Burnham's resignation from PR's Advisory Board. Burnham, who has been accused of being pro- McCarthy, states in his letter that he is neither for nor against him; he ap- proves of some of his actions and meth- ods while disapproving of others. We, on the other hand, believe that such ‘neutralism’ plays into the hands of McCarthy and his crowd, and is of no help whatever in the struggle against world Communism. Even if the “Com- munist tacticians” exploit and exagger- ate the issue for their own ends, it is still true that McCarthy's political be- havior provides them with the oppor- tunity. We have always been opposed to the anti-anti-Communist attitude that prevails in some intellectual circles, and we are equally opposed to the new anti-anti-McCarthy attitude now advo- cated by Burnham. It seems to us that anti-Communism is strengthened rather than weakened by outright opposition to McCarthy and his methods. Burnham has for many years been a friend of PR and of its editors. Our disagreement with him is purely politi- cal; and we hope that it will not af- fect our relations in other areas. We are looking forward to the clarification of his political views.—THE EDITORS "All poems are equal in truth and separate in truth." —KARL SHAPIRO BEYOND CRITICISM by Karl Shapiro In the three essays which con- stitute the book, the Pulitzer- prize poet defines the critical position he has taken since the beginning of his career. Mr. Shapiro asks for a non-scien- tific, non-religious and non- philosophic approach to litera- ture. Cloth, $3.00 Order from your bookseller or directly from the publisher University of Nebraska Press LINCOLN 8 SOUTHERN RENASCENCE The Literature of The Modern South Edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs The combined work of more than two dozen authors and critics, SOUTHERN RENA- SCENCE provides the first full- scale study of modern Southern writing. For the first time the major Southern writers are ex- amined both in their own right and as members of a bounded region. *** "A valuable book, both as liter- ary criticism and as cultural history. I am impressed by its comprehensiveness and its ser- iousness."—RICHARD CHASE $5.00 At your bookstore or order directly from THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS Homewood • Baltimore 18, Maryland === Page 128 === INDEX TO VOLUME XX Issue Page ABEL, LIONEL (br) Dom Casmurro. By Machado de Assis ........................................................ 5 584 ARENDT, HANNAH Understanding and Politics ................................................................................... 4 377 (br) Bulshevism. By Waldemar Gurian .................................................................... 5 580 ARNOLD, G. L. French Politics: Failure and Promise .................................................................... 6 675 BARKER, GEORGE The Ballad of Wild Children (poem) .................................................................... 1 39 Shakespeare and the Horse with Wings ................................................................. 4 410 BARZUN, JACQUES Food for the N. R. F. .................................................................................................. 6 660 BELLOW, SAUL (br) Ernest Hemingway. By Philip Young ................................................................ 3 338 BERRYMAN, JOHN Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (poem) ................................................................. 5 489 BEWLEY, MARIUS (br) The Forlorn Demon. By Allen Tate .................................................................... 4 431 CAMPBELL, JOSEPH Heinrich Zimmer (1890-1943) ........................................................................... 4 444 CARRUTH, HAYDEN (br) Poetry Chronicle: Parnassus Stormed .............................................................. 5 577 CHASE, RICHARD (br) The Shores of Light. By Edmund Wilson .......................................................... 1 112 (br) The Thread of Laughter. By Louis Kronenberger ............................................ 2 242 CHIAROMONTE, NICOLA (br) The Captive Mind. By Czeslaw Milosz ......................................................... 6 697 COXE, LOUIS O. The Veteran (poem) .............................................................................................. 2 215 DeMOTT, BENJAMIN The Sense That in the Scene Delights ..................................................................... 1 9 DIRKS, WALTER The Enlightenment-Unfinished Business ................................................................ 5 540 DOWLING, ALLAN (br) Arrow in the Blue. By Arthur Koestler ........................................................... 1 122 ERLICH, VICTOR The Russian Formalist Movement ........................................................................ 3 282 FERGUSSON, FRANCIS (br) The Common Pursuit. By F. R. Leavis ........................................................... 2 232 Aesop In Hell: The Fox and the Crow (poem) ..................................................... 6 632 FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE Love, Happiness and Art ........................................................................................ 1 86 FLINT, R. W. (br) Poetry and the Age. By Randall Jarrell ......................................................... 6 702 FRIEDMANN, F. G. The World of "La Misena" .................................................................................... 2 218 === Page 129 === INDEX TO VOLUME XX GARDNER, ISABELLA That "Craning of the Neck" (poem) GOLFFING, FRANCIS (br) Hoelderlin. His Poems. GREGORY, HORACE Robert Graves: A Parable For Writers GRIFFIN, HOWARD A Dialogue with W. H. Auden HARDWICH, ELIZABETH The Subjection of Women Memoirs, Conversations and Diaries (br) Anderson, Millay and Crane in Their Letters HOFFMAN, DANIEL G. Old Bug Up There (poem) JANOCH, GUSTAV Conversations With Kafka JARRELL, RANDALL Rilke: Requiem for the Death of a Boy (translation) JOAQUIN, NICK The Woman Who Had Two Navels JONES, ERNEST (br) Fiction Chronicle KATZ, LESLIE Television Chronicle KRAMER, HILTON The New American Painting (br) Sculpture of the 20th Century. By Andrew C. Ritchie KRONENBERGER, LOUIS (br) Stephen Crane: An Omnibus. LANGG ASSER, ELISABETH Mars LANSNER, KERMIT (br) Feeling and Form. By Susanne K. Langer LAUGHLIN, JAMES Step On His Head (poem) LOGAN, JOHN Two Poems LOWELL, ROBERT Epitaph of a Fallen Poet (poem) Two Poems MACDONALD, DWIGHT (br) The Books In My Life. By Henry Miller MANN, GOLO (br) Lord Acton. By Gertrude Himmelfarb MARCUS, STEVEN (br) The Writer in America. By Van Wyck Brooks MARCUSE, LUDWIG European Anti-Americanism MIZENER, ARTHUR (br) The Days Before. By Katherine Anne Porter MUIR, EDWIN Two Sonnets MUSIL, ROBERT Friends of His Youth 719 Issue Page 2 216 4 428 1 44 1 74 3 321 5 527 6 690 1 40 2 166 2 191 4 397 6 708 5 590 4 421 5 586 3 348 5 504 4 440 2 215 1 41 1 39 6 631 1 126 2 239 3 356 3 314 2 244 6 634 2 137 === Page 130 === 720 PARTISAN REVIEW Issue Page NEMEROV, HOWARD I 115 (br) MacLeish and Viereck PHILLIPS, WILLIAM The Fox and the Grape 6 649 POLLET, ELIZABETH 3 343 (br) Fiction Chronicle: The Names of Love RAHV, PHILIP The Myth and the Powerhouse 6 635 RANSOM, JOHN CROWE (br) Language As Gesture. By R. P. Blackmur I 108 RIGGS, THOMAS, Jr. (br) The Laureate of Main Street 4 437 ROSS, RALPH GILBERT (br) Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals. By Peter Viereck 3 352 (br) The Conservative Mind. By Russell Kirk 5 568 RUDIKOFF, SONYA 3 332 (br) Colette At Eighty SCHLESINGER, ARTHUR, Jr. The Highbrow In American Politics 2 156 SCHWARTZ, DELMORE The Duchess' Red Shoes I 55 Tales from the Vienna Woods: An Inside Story 3 267 (br) Cezanne. By Meyer Schapiro 4 442 SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS 3 300 Gimpel The Fool STEINBERG, LEO 2 194 The Eye is a Part of the Mind STRAUS, DOROTHEA 5 558 The Magnifying Glass SWADOS, HARVEY 2 248 Popular Taste and The Caine Mutiny SWEENEY, JAMES JOHNSON I 102 Painter Pugg and the Chair Carriers' Calves: Reconsidered THOMPSON, JOHN, Jr. 2 213 Emma's Story (poem) TRILLING, DIANA I 19 From An Autumn Journal TRILLING, LIONEL 6 605 Flaubert's Last Testament TUrRNELL, MARTIN 2 179 The Criticism of Jacques Rivière WARREN, ROBERT PENN 4 393 The Death of Isham (poem) WATKINS, VERNON 3 298 Lace-Maker (poem) WHITE, MORTON 4 434 (br) Bentham and the Ethics of Today. By David Baumgardt WILSON, ANGUS 2 236 (br) Nunc Dimittis YOUNG, PEARCE 3 297 Resurrection (poem) === Page 131 === The most outstanding book bargains available today! Anchor Books for the permanent library of the serious reader BOOKS FOR FALL August 27 THE WANDERER by Henri Alain-Fournier THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION by Lionel Trilling September 10 LOVING by Henry Green MAN ON HIS NATURE by Sir Charles Sherrington THREE PHILOSOPHICAL POETS by George Santayana October 8 THE LONELY CROWD by David Riesman (abridged) THREE GREEK ROMANCES Translated by Moses Hadas THE AENEID OF VIRGIL Verse translation by C. Day Lewis THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY BACKGROUND by Basil Willey November 19 HISTORY OF ENGLAND Three volumes by G. M. Trevelyan 75c 75c 75c 85c 65c 95c 65c 85c 85c each 85c AVAILABLE NOW THE IDEA OF A THEATER by Francis Fergusson STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by D. H. Lawrence THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad LAFCADIO'S ADVENTURES by André Gide SOCRATES by A. E. 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