=== Page 1 === PARTISAN REVIEW MAY-JUNE, 1950 DIANA TRILLING The Liberals and the Hiss Case ALBERTO MORAVIA Two Prostitutes (a story) ERICH AUERBACH The Scar of Ulysses HENRY ADLER Letter from Israel ISAAC ROSENFELD The Example of George Orwell RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS IV William Barrett, George Boas, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, Paul Kecskemeti, Dwight Macdonald, William Phillips 60c === Page 2 === 402 TRAVEL FAR FOR A LITTLE Our Digest gives passenger carrying freight ships to Europe, South America, Australia, Asia, Africa. Travel safely, romantically, comfortably,-often at amazingly low cost. Now you can plan that dream trip you thought you would never be able to afford. Invaluable report FREE. "How to Work Your Way Around the World" with every Digest. 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Copyright May-June, 1950, by PARTISAN REVIEW. Reentered as second- class matter, January 9, 1948, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. === Page 9 === MAY-JUNE, 1950 VOLUME XVII, NUMBER 5 CONTENTS THE SCAR OF ULYSSES, Erich Auerbach 411 TWO PROSTITUTES, Alberto Moravia 433 HYDRA, Edward Field 455 RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS IV William Barrett, George Boas, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, Paul Kecskemeti, Dwight Macdonald, William Phillips 456 A MEMORANDUM ON THE HISS CASE, Diana Trilling 484 LETTER FROM ISRAEL, Henry Adler 501 ART CHRONICLE, Clement Greenberg 510 BOOKS DECENCY AND DEATH, Isaac Rosenfeld 514 FICTION CHRONICLE, Robert Gorham Davis 519 VARIETY VILLAGE CAFE, Anatole Broyard 524 === Page 10 === TO OUR SUBSCRIBERS You will receive as many issues of the bi-monthly Partisan Review as you would have received of the monthly Partisan Review. 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Y. 16 === Page 11 === Erich Auerbach THE SCAR OF ULYSSES* Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in the Nineteenth Book, when Ulysses has at last come home, the scene in which the old housekeeper Eurycleia, who had been his nurse, recognizes him by a scar on his thigh. The stranger has won Penelope's good will; at his request she tells the housekeeper to wash his feet, which, in all old stories, is the first duty of hospitality toward a tired wanderer; Eurycleia busies herself fetching water and mixing cold with hot, meanwhile speaking sadly of her absent master, who is probably of the same age as the guest, and who perhaps, like the guest, is even now wandering somewhere, a stranger; and she remarks how astonishingly like him the guest looks. Meanwhile, Ulysses remembers his scar and moves back out of the light; he knows that, despite his efforts to hide his identity, Eurycleia will now recognize him, but he wants at least to keep Penelope in ignorance. No sooner has the old woman touched the scar than, in her joyous surprise, she lets Ulysses' foot drop into the basin; the water overflows, she is about to cry out her joy; Ulysses restrains her with whispered threats and endearments; she recovers herself and conceals her emotion. Penelope, whose attention Athena's foresight had diverted from the incident, has observed nothing. All this is scrupulously externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion. The two women express their feelings in copious direct dis- course; although these feelings are only slightly mixed with the most general considerations upon human destiny, the syntactical connec- * This is a chapter from Mimesis: dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der Abend- ländischen Literatur, a study of the representation of reality in Western literature from Homer and the Bible to the modern age. Mimesis is one of the most important works of literary scholarship and criticism that has appeared in the German language in recent years. Two more parts of the book-the chapter on Rabelais and the chapter on Stendhal-will be published in PR in subsequent issues.-Ed. === Page 12 === 412 PARTISAN REVIEW tion between part and part is perfectly clear, no contour is blurred. There is also room and time for orderly, perfectly well-articulated, uniformly illuminated descriptions of implements, ministrations, and gestures; even in the dramatic moment of recognition, Homer does not omit to tell the reader that it is with his right hand that Ulysses takes the old woman by the throat to prevent her from speaking, at the same time that he draws her closer to him with his left. Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear-wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor—are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved. In my account of the incident I have until now passed over a whole series of verses which interrupt it in the middle. There are more than seventy of these verses—while to the incident itself some forty verses are devoted before the interpolation and some forty after it. The interpolation, which comes just at the point when the house- keeper recognizes the scar—that is, at the moment of crisis—describes the origin of the scar, a hunting accident which occurred in Ulysses' boyhood, at a boar hunt, during the time of his visit to his grand- father Autolycos. This first affords an opportunity to inform the reader about Autolycos, his house, the precise degree of the kinship, his character, and, no less exhaustively than touchingly, his behavior after the birth of his grandson; then follows the visit of Ulysses, now grown to be a youth; the exchange of greetings, the banquet which marks his reception, sleep and waking, the early start for the hunt, the tracking of the beast, the struggle, Ulysses' being wounded by a tusk, his recovery, his return to Ithaca, his parents' anxious questions —all is narrated, again with such a complete externalization of all the elements of the story and of their interconnections, as leaves nothing in darkness. Not until then does the narrator return to Penelope's chamber, not until then, the interpolation having run its course, does Eurycleia, who had recognized the scar before the interruption, let Ulysses' foot fall back into the basin. The first thought of a modern reader—that this is a device to increase suspense—is, if not entirely wrong, at least not the essential explanation of this Homeric procedure. For the element of suspense is very slight in the Homeric poems; their entire style is such that they do not seek to keep the reader breathless. The digressions are not === Page 13 === THE SCAR OF ULYSSES 413 planned to keep the reader in suspense but rather to relax the ten- sion. This very thing frequently occurs, as in the passage before us. The broadly narrated, charming, and subtly fashioned story of the hunt, with all its elegance and self-sufficiency, its wealth of idyllic pictures, seeks to win the reader over wholly to itself as long as he is hearing it, to make him forget what had just taken place during the foot-washing. But an interpolation that increases suspense by retarding the action must be so constructed that it will not fill the present entirely, will not put the crisis, whose resolution is being awaited, entirely out of the reader’s mind, and thereby destroy the mood of suspense; the crisis and the suspense must continue, must remain vibrant in the background. But Homer—and to this we shall have to return later—knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only present, and fills both the stage and the reader’s mind completely. So it is with the passage before us. When the young Eurycleia (vv. 401 ff.) sets the infant Ulysses on his grand- father Autolycos’ lap after the banquet, the aged Eurycleia, who a few lines earlier had touched the wanderer’s foot, has entirely van- ished from the stage and the reader’s mind. Goethe and Schiller, who, though not referring to this par- ticular episode, exchanged letters in April, 1797, on the subject of “the retarding element” in the Homeric poems in general, placed it in direct opposition to the element of suspense—the latter word is not used, but is clearly implied when the “retarding” procedure is opposed, as something proper to epic, to tragic procedure (letters of April 19, 21, and 22). The “retarding element,” the “going back and forth” by means of interpolations, seems to me, too, in the Homeric poems, to be opposed to any tense and suspense-arousing striving toward a goal, and doubtless Schiller is right in regard to Homer when he says that what he gives us is “simply the quiet existence and operation of things in accordance with their natures”; his goal is “already present in every point of his progress.” But both Schiller and Goethe raise Homer’s procedure to the level of a law for epic poetry in general, and Schiller’s words quoted above are meant to be universally valid for the epic, in contradistinction to the tragic, poet. Yet, both in modern and in ancient times, there are important epic works which are written throughout with no “re- tarding element” in this sense but, on the contrary, with suspense === Page 14 === 414 PARTISAN REVIEW throughout, and which perpetually "rob us of our emotional free- dom"-which power Schiller will grant only to the tragic poet. And besides it seems to me undemonstrable and improbable that this procedure of Homeric poetry was directed by aesthetic considerations or even by an aesthetic feeling of the sort postulated by Goethe and Schiller. The effect, to be sure, is precisely that which they describe, and is, furthermore, the actual source of the conception of epic which they themselves hold, and with them all writers decisively influenced by classical antiquity. But the true cause of the impression of "retardation" appears to me to lie elsewhere—namely, in the need of the Homeric style to leave nothing which it mentions half in darkness and unrealized. The excursus upon the origin of Ulysses' scar is not basically dif- ferent from the many passages in which a newly introduced char- acter, or even a newly appearing object or implement, though it be in the thick of a battle, is described as to its nature and its origin; or in which, upon the appearance of a god, we are told where he last was, what he was doing there, and by what road he arrived on the scene; indeed, even the Homeric epithets seem to me in the final analysis to be traceable to the same need for an externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses. Here is the scar, which comes up in the course of the narrative; and Homer's feeling simply will not permit him to see it appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; it must be set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero's boyhood-just as, in the Iliad, when the first ship is already burning and the Myrmidons finally arm that they may hasten to help, there is still time not only for the wonderful simile of the wolf, not only for the order of the Myrmidon host, but also for a detailed account of the lineage of several secondary captains (II. 16, 155 ff.). To be sure, the aesthetic effect thus produced was soon noticed and thereafter consciously sought out; but the more original cause must have lain in the basic impulse of the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: of them, too, nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer's personages vent their innermost hearts in speech; === Page 15 === THE SCAR OF ULYSSES 415 what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but it seldom happens wordlessly; Polyphemus talks to Ulysses; Ulysses talks to the suitors when he begins to kill them; Hector and Achilles talk at length, before battle and after; and no speech is so filled with anger or scorn that the particles which express logical and grammatical connections are wanting or out of place. This last observation is true, of course, not only of speeches but of the presentation in general. The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths. And this procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground -that is, in a local and temporal present which is absolute. One might think that the many interpolations, the frequent moving back and forth, would create a sort of perspective in time and locality; but the Homeric style never gives any such impression. The way in which any impression of perspective is avoided can be clearly observed in the procedure for introducing the interpolations, a syn- tactical construction with which every reader of Homer is familiar; it is used in the passage we are considering, but can also be found in cases where the interpolations are much shorter. To the word "scar" (v. 393) there is first attached a relative clause (which once a wild boar . . .), which enlarges into a voluminous syntactical parenthesis; into this an independent sentence unexpectedly intrudes (v. 396: a god himself gave him . . .), which surreptitiously disentangles itself from syntactical subordination, until, with verse 399, an equally free syntactical treatment of the new content begins a new present which continues unchallenged until, with verse 467 (the old woman now touched it . . .), the scene which had been broken off is resumed. To be sure, in the case of such long interpolations as the one we are considering, a purely syntactical connection with the principal theme would hardly have been possible; but a connection with it through perspective would have been all the easier had the content been arranged with that end in view; if, that is, the entire story of the scar had been presented as a memory which awakes in Ulysses' mind at this particular moment; it would have been perfectly easy === Page 16 === 416 PARTISAN REVIEW to do; the story of the scar had only to be inserted two verses earlier, at the first mention of the word "scar," where the themes "Odysseus" and "recollection" were already at hand. But any such subjectivistic- perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is en- tirely foreign to the Homeric style; and so the excursus does not begin until two lines later, when Eurycleia has discovered the scar- the possibility for a perspectivistic connection no longer exists, and the story of the wound becomes an independent and exclusive present. This particularity of the Homeric style becomes even more ap- parent when it is compared with an equally ancient and equally epic style from a different world of forms. I shall attempt this com- parison with the account of the sacrifice of Isaac, a homogeneous narrative produced by the so-called Elohist. The King James version translates the opening as follows: "And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham! and he said, Behold, here I am." Coming to it from Homer, this opening startles us. Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, from whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus, discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered in council; nor have the deliberations in his own heart been presented to us; unexpected and mysterious, he enters the scene from some unknown height or depth and calls: Abraham! It will at once be said that this is to be explained by the particular concept of God which the Jews held and which was so entirely different from that of the Greeks. True enough-but this constitutes no objection. For how is the Jewish concept of God to be explained? Even their earlier God of the desert was not fixed in form and content, and was alone; his lack of form, his lack of local habitation, his singleness, was in the end not only maintained but developed even further in competition === Page 17 === THE SCAR OF ULYSSES with the comparatively far more manifest gods of the surrounding Near Eastern world. The Jewish concept of God is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things. This becomes still clearer if we now turn to the other person in the dialogue, to Abraham. Where is he? We do not know. He says, indeed: Here I am—but the Hebrew word means only something like “behold me,” and in any case is not meant to indicate the actual place where Abraham is, but a moral position in respect to God, who has called to him: Here am I awaiting thy command. Where he is actually, whether in Beersheba or elsewhere, whether indoors or in the open air, is not stated; it does not interest the narrator, the reader is not informed; and what Abraham was doing when God called to him is left in the same obscurity. To realize the difference, consider Hermes’ visit to Calypso, for example, where command, journey, arrival and reception of the visitor, situation and occupation of the person visited, are set forth in many verses; and even on occasions when gods appear suddenly and briefly, whether to help one of their favorites or to deceive or destroy some mortal whom they hate, their bodily forms, and usually the manner of their coming and going, are particularized in detail. Here, however, God appears without bodily form (and yet he “appears”), coming from some unspecified place— we only hear his voice, and that utters nothing but a name, a name without an adjective, without a descriptive epithet for the person spoken to, such as is the rule in every Homeric address; and of Abraham too nothing is made perceptible except the words in which he answers God: Hinsne-ni, Behold me here—with which, to be sure, a most touching gesture expressive of obedience and readiness is suggested, but its delineation is left to the reader. Moreover the two speakers are not on the same level: if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, where it might be possible to picture him as prostrate or kneeling or bowing with outspread arms or gazing up- wards, yet God is not there too: Abraham’s words and gestures are directed toward the depths of the picture or upwards, but in any case the undetermined, dark place from which the voice comes to him is not in the foreground. After this opening, God gives his command, and the story itself begins: everyone knows it; it unrolls with no interpolations in a few 417 === Page 18 === 418 PARTISAN REVIEW rudimentary sort. In this atmosphere it is unthinkable that an imple- ment, a landscape through which the travelers passed, the serving- men, or the ass, should be described, that their origin or descent or material or appearance or usefulness should be set forth in terms of praise; they do not even admit an adjective: they are serving-men, ass, wood, and knife, and nothing else, without an epithet; they are there to serve the end which God has commanded; what in other respects they were, are, or will be, remains obscure. A journey is made, because God has designated the place where the sacrifice is to be performed; but we are told nothing about the journey except that it took three days, and even that we are told in a mysterious way: Abraham and his followers rose "early in the morning" and "went unto" the place of which God had told him; on the third day he lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. That gesture is the only gesture, is indeed the only occurrence during the whole journey, of which we are told; and though its motivation lies in the fact that the place is high up, yet its uniqueness heightens the im- pression that the journey took place through a vacuum; it is as if, while he traveled on, Abraham had looked neither to the right nor to the left, had suppressed any sign of life in his followers and him- self save only their footfalls. Thus the journey is like a silent progress through the indeter- minate and the contingent, a holding of the breath, a process which has no present, inserted between that which is past and that which lies ahead like a blank duration, and which yet is measured: three days! Three such days positively demand the symbolic interpretation which they later received. They began "early in the morning." But at what time on the third day did Abraham lift up his eyes and see the goal? The text says nothing on the subject. Obviously not "late in the evening," for it seems that there was still time enough to climb the mountain and make the sacrifice. So "early in the morn- ing" is given, not as an indication of time, but for the sake of its ethical meaning; it is intended to express the resolution, the prompt- ness, the punctual obedience of the sorely tried Abraham. Bitter to him is the early morning in which he saddles his ass, calls his serv- ing-men and his son Isaac, and sets out; but he obeys, he walks on until the third day, then lifts up his eyes and sees the place. Whence he === Page 19 === THE SCAR OF ULYSSES 419 comes, we do not know, but the goal is clearly stated: Jeruel in the land of Moriah. What place this indicates is not clear-"Moriah" especially may be a later correction of some other word. But in any case the goal was given, and in any case it is a matter of some sacred spot which was to be given a particular consecration by being con- nected with Abraham's sacrifice. Just as little as "early in the morn- ing" serves as a temporal indication does "Jeruel in the land of Moriah" serve as a geographical indication; and in both cases alike, the complementary indication is not given, for we know as little of the hour at which Abraham lifted up his eyes as we do of the place from which he set forth-Jeruel is significant not so much as the goal of an earthly journey, in its geographical relation to other places, as it is through its special election, through its relation to God, who designated it as the scene of the act, and therefore it must be named. In the narrative itself, a third chief character appears: Isaac. While God and Abraham, the servingmen, the ass, and the imple- ments are simply named, without the mention of any qualities or any other sort of definition, Isaac once receives an appositive; God says, Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest. But this is not a char- acterization of Isaac as a person, apart from his relation to his father and apart from the story; he may be handsome or ugly, in- telligent or stupid, tall or short, pleasant or unpleasant-we are not told. Only what we need to know about him as a personage in the action, here and now, is elucidated-so that it may become apparent how terrible Abraham's temptation is, and that God is fully aware of it. By this example of the contrary, we see the significance of the descriptive adjectives and digressions of the Homeric poems; with their indications of the earlier and as it were absolute existence of the persons described, they prevent the reader from concentrating ex- clusively on a present crisis; even when the most terrible things are occurring, they prevent the establishment of an overwhelming sus- pense. But here, in the story of Abraham's sacrifice, the overwhelming suspense is present; what Schiller makes the goal of the tragic poet -to rob us of our emotional freedom, to turn our intellectual and spiritual powers (Schiller says "our activity") in one direction, to con- centrate them there-is effected in this Biblical narrative, which certainly deserves the epithet epic. === Page 20 === 420 PARTISAN REVIEW We find the same contrast if we compare the two uses of direct discourse. The personages speak in the Bible story too; but their speech does not serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts-on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed. God gives his command in direct dis- course, but he leaves his motives and his purpose unexpressed; Abra- ham, receiving the command, says nothing and does what he has been told to do. The conversation between Abraham and Isaac on the way to the place of sacrifice is only an interruption of the heavy silence and makes it all the more burdensome. The two of them, Isaac carrying the wood and Abraham with fire and a knife, "went together." Hesitantly, Isaac ventures to ask about the ram, and Abraham gives the well-known answer. Then the text repeats: "So they went both of them together." Everything remains unexpressed, mysterious, and "of the background." I will discuss this term in some detail, lest it be misunderstood. I said above that the Homeric style was "of the foreground" be- cause, despite much going back and forth, it yet causes what is mo- mentarily being narrated to give the impression that it is the only pre- sent, pure and without perspective. A consideration of the Elohistic text teaches us that the term is capable of a broader and deeper application. It shows that even the separate personages can be repre- sented as "of the background"; God is always so in the Bible, for he is not comprehensible in his presence, as is Zeus; it is always only "something" of him that appears, he always extends into depths. But even the human beings in the Biblical stories have greater depths of time, fate, and consciousness than those of Homer; although they are nearly always caught up in an event engaging all their faculties, they are not so entirely immersed in its present that they do not remain continually conscious of what has happened to them earlier and elsewhere; their thoughts and feelings are more "many-layered," more entangled. Abraham's actions are explained not only by what is happening to him at the moment, nor yet only by his character (as Achilles' actions by his courage and his pride, and Ulysses' by his versatility and foresightedness), but by his previous history; he remembers, he is constantly conscious of, what God has promised him and what God has already accomplished for him-his soul is torn === Page 21 === THE SCAR OF ULYSSES 421 between desperate rebellion and hopeful expectation; his silent obedience is extremely problematic, multi-dimensional. Such a situa- tion as this is inconceivable for any of the Homeric heroes, whose destiny is clearly defined and who wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives: their emotions, though strong, are simple and find expression instantly. How "of the background," in comparison, are characters like Saul and David! How entangled and stratified are such human re- lations as those between David and Absalom, between David and Joab! Any such "entanglement" of the psychological situation as that which the story of Absalom's death and its sequel (II Samuel 18 and 19, by the so-called Jahvist) rather suggests than expresses, is unthinkable in Homer. Here we are confronted not merely with the psychological processes of "background"—indeed of "abysmal"— characters, but with a purely geographical background also. For David is absent from the battlefield; but the influence of his will and his feel- ings continues to be effective, they work even on Joab in his rebel- lion and disregard for the consequences of his actions; in the magni- ficent scene with the two messengers both the physical and psycholog- ical "background" is fully manifest, though the latter is never ex- pressed. With this, compare, for example, how Achilles, who sends Patroclus first to scout and then into battle, loses practically all "presentness" so long as he is not physically present. But the most important thing is the "many-layeredness" of the individual char- acter; this is hardly to be met with in Homer, or at most in the form of a conscious hesitation between two possible courses of action; otherwise, in Homer, the complexity of the psychological life is shown only in the succession and alternation of emotions; whereas the Jewish writers are able to express the simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict between them. The Homeric poems, then, though their intellectual, linguistic, and above all syntactical culture appear to be so much more highly developed, are yet comparatively simple in their picture of human beings; and no less so in their relation to the real life which they describe in general. Delight in physical existence is all to them, and their highest aim is to make that delight perceptible to us. Between battles and passions, adventures and perils, they show us hunts, ban- quets, palaces and shepherds' cots, athletic contests and washing === Page 22 === 422 PARTISAN REVIEW days—in order that we may see the heroes in their ordinary life, and seeing them so, may take pleasure in their manner of enjoying their savorsome present, a present which sends its strong roots down into social usages, landscape, and daily life. And thus they bewitch and ingratiate us until we live with them in the reality of their lives; so long as we are reading or hearing the poems, it does not matter whether we know that all this is only legend, "make-believe." The oft-renewed reproach that Homer is a liar takes nothing from his ef- fectiveness, he does not need to base his story on historical reality, his reality is powerful enough in itself; it ensnares us, weaving its web around us, and that suffices him. And this "real" world into which we are lured, exists for itself, contains nothing but itself; the Homeric poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning. Homer can be analyzed, as we have tried to do here, but he cannot be interpreted. Later allegorizing trends have tried their arts of interpretation upon him, but to no avail. He resists any such treatment; the interpretations are forced and strange, they do not crystallize into a single teaching. The general considerations which occasionally occur (in our episode, for ex- ample, verse 360: that in misfortune men age quickly) reveal a calm acceptance of the basic facts of human existence, but with no compulsion to brood over them, still less any passionate impulse either to rebel or to embrace them in an ecstasy of submission. It is all very different in the biblical stories. Their aim is not to bewitch the senses, and if nevertheless they produce lively sensory effects, it is only because the moral, religious, and psychological phenomena which are their sole concern are made concrete in the sensible matter of life. But their concern with religion involves an absolute claim to historical truth. The story of Abraham and Isaac is not better established than the story of Ulysses, Penelope, and Eurycleia; both are legendary. But the biblical narrator, the Elohist, had to believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham's sac- rifice—the existence of the sacred categories of life rested upon the truth of this and similar stories. He had to believe in it passionately —or else (as many rationalistic interpreters believed and perhaps still believe,) he had to be a conscious liar—no harmless liar like Homer, who lied to give pleasure, but a political liar with a definite end in view, lying in the interests of a claim to power. === Page 23 === THE SCAR OF ULYSSES 423 To me, the rationalistic interpretation seems psychologically ab- surd; but even if we take it into consideration, the relation of the narrator to the truth of his story still remains a far more passionate and definite one than is Homer's relation. The biblical narrator was obliged to write precisely what his belief in the truth of the tradition (or, from the rationalistic standpoint, his interest in the truth of it) demanded of him—in either case, his freedom in creative or representative imagination was severely limited; his activity was perforce reduced to composing an effective version of the pious tradition. What he produced, then, was not oriented toward "realism" (if he succeeded in being realistic, it was but a means, not an end); it was oriented toward truth. Woe to the man who did not believe it! One can perfectly well entertain historical doubts on the subject of the Trojan War or of Ulysses' wanderings, and still, when reading Homer, feel precisely the effects he sought to produce; but without believing in Abraham's sacrifice, it is impossible to employ the nar- rative of it for the purpose for which it was written. Indeed, we must go even further. The Bible's claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer's, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be an historically true reality—it insists that it is the only real world, a world called to reign alone. All other scenes, issues, and ordinances have no right to appear independently of it, and it is promised that all of them, the history of all mankind, will be given their due place within its framework, will be subordinated to it. The Scripture stories do not, like Homer's, court our favor, they do not flatter us in order to please us and enchant us—they seek to dominate us, and if we refuse their domination we are rebels. Let no one object that this goes too far, that not the stories, but the religious doctrine, raises the claim to dominance; because the stories are not, like Homer's, simply narrated "reality." Doctrine and promise are incarnate and inseparable from them; for that very reason they are "of the background" and mysterious, containing a second, concealed meaning. In the story of Isaac, it is not only God's intervention at the beginning and the end, but even the factual and psychological elements which come between, that are mysterious, merely touched upon, "of the background"; and therefore they call for subtle investigation and interpretation, they demand them. Since === Page 24 === 424 PARTISAN REVIEW so much in it is dark and incomplete, and since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret it constantly finds some- thing new to feed upon. Doctrine and the search for enlightenment are inextricably connected with the physical side of the narrative, the latter being more than simple "reality"-indeed they are in con- stant danger of losing their own reality, as very soon happened when interpretation reached such proportions that the real vanished. If the text of the biblical narrative, then, is so greatly in need of interpretation on the basis of its own content, its claim to absolute authority forces it still further in the same direction. Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history. This becomes increasingly difficult the farther our historical environment is removed from that of the biblical books; and if these nevertheless maintain their claim to absolute authority, it is un- avoidable that they must themselves be adapted through interpretative transformation. This was for a long time comparatively easy; as late as the European Middle Ages it was possible to represent biblical events as ordinary phenomena of contemporary life, the methods of interpretation themselves forming the basis for such a treatment. But when, through too great a change in environment and through the awakening of a critical consciousness, this becomes impossible, the biblical claim to absolute authority is jeopardized; the method of in- terpretation is scorned and rejected, the biblical stories become ancient legends, and the doctrine they had contained, now cut loose from them, becomes a disembodied image. As a result of this claim to absolute authority, the method of interpretation spread to other traditions than the Jewish. The Homeric poems present a definite complex of events whose bound- aries in space and time are clearly delimited; before it, beside it, and after it, other complexes of events, which do not depend upon it, can be conceived without conflict and without difficulty. The Old Testament, on the other hand, presents universal history: it begins with the beginning of time, with the creation of the world, and will end with the Last Days, the fulfilment of the covenant, with which the world will come to an end. Everything else that happens in the world can only be conceived as an element in this complex; every- === Page 25 === THE SCAR OF ULYSSES thing that is known about the world, or at least everything that touches upon the history of the Jews, must be fitted into this complex as an ingredient of the divine plan; and as this too became possible only by interpreting the newly entering material, the need for inter- pretation reaches out beyond the original Jewish-Israelitish realm of reality, out to Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Roman history; interpretation in a determined direction becomes a general method of comprehending reality. But this process almost always reacts upon the framework, which requires enlarging and modifying; the most striking piece of interpretation of this sort occurred in the first cen- tury of the Christian era, in consequence of Paul's mission to the Gentiles. Paul and the Church Fathers re-interpreted the entire Jew- ish tradition as a succession of figures prognosticating the appearance of Christ, and assigned the Roman Empire its proper place in the divine plan of salvation. Thus, while, on the one hand, the reality of the Old Testament appears as complete truth with a claim to sole authority, on the other hand that very claim drives it to a constant interpretative change in its own content; for millennia it undergoes an incessant and active development with the life of man in Europe. The claim of the Old Testament stories to represent universal history, their insistent relation—a relation constantly redefined through conflicts—to a single and hidden God, who yet shows him- self and who directs universal history through promise and exac- tion, gives these stories an entirely different perspective from any the Homeric poems can possess. As a composition the Old Testament is incomparably less unified than the Homeric poems, it is more obvious- ly pieced together—or was interpreted as belonging to one vertical concept of universal history. Each of the great figures of the Old Testament, from Adam to the prophets, embodies a moment of this vertical connection. God chose and formed these men to the end of embodying his essence and will—yet choice and formation do not coincide, for the latter proceeds gradually, historically, during the earthly life of him upon whom the choice has fallen. How the process is accomplished, what terrible trials such a formation inflicts, can be seen from our story of Abraham's sacrifice. Herein lies the reason why the great figures of the Old Testament are so much more fully developed, so much more burdened with their own biographical 425 === Page 26 === 426 PARTISAN REVIEW past, so much more distinct as individuals, than are the Homeric heroes. Achilles and Ulysses are splendidly described in many well- ordered words, epithets cling to them, their emotions are constantly displayed in their words and deeds but they have no development, and their life histories are clearly set forth once and for all. So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them—Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles-ap- pear to be of an age established from the very first. Even Ulysses, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows al- most nothing of this. Ulysses on his return is precisely the same as when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a wild beast—between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord’s jealousy, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only during the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full in- dividualty; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament offers us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen to be examples. Heavy with their development, sometimes even aged to the verge of disintegration, they show a dis- tinct stamp of individuality entirely foreign to the Homeric heroes. Time can touch the latter only outwardly, and even that change is brought to our observation as little as possible; whereas the stern hand of God is ever upon the Old Testament figures; he has not only made them once and for all and chosen them, but he continues to work upon them, bends them and kneads them, and, without destroying them in essence, produces from them forms which their youth gave no grounds for anticipating. The objection that the biographical element of the Old Testament often arises from the combination of several legendary personages, does not affect us; for this combination is a part of the development of the text. And how much wider is the pendulum swing of their lives than that of the Homeric heroes! For they are bearers of the divine will, and yet they are fallible, subject to misfortune and humiliation—in the midst of which their acts and === Page 27 === THE SCAR OF ULYSSES 427 words reveal the transcendent majesty of God. Almost all of them undergo, like Adam, the deepest humiliation—and hardly one that is not deemed worthy of God's personal intervention and personal inspiration! Humiliation and elevation go far deeper and far higher than in Homer, and they belong basically together. The poor beggar Ulysses is only masquerading, but Adam is really cast down, Jacob really a refugee, Joseph really in the pit and then a slave to be bought and sold. But their greatness, rising out of humiliation, is al- most superhuman and a likeness of God's greatness. The reader clearly feels how the extent of the pendulum's swing is connected with the intensity of the personal history—precisely the most extreme circum- stances, in which we are immeasurably forsaken and desperate, or immeasurably joyous and exalted, give us, if we survive them, a per- sonal stamp recognized as the product of a rich background, a rich development. And very often, indeed generally, this element of development gives the Old Testament stories an historical character, even when the subject is purely legendary and traditional. Homer, with all his subject matter, remains within the legendary, whereas the subject matter of the Old Testament comes closer and closer to history as the narrative proceeds; in the stories of David the historical report predominates. Here too, much that is legendary still remains, as for example the story of David and Goliath; but much—and the most essential—consists in things which the narrators knew from their own experience or from first-hand testimony. Now the difference between legendary matter and his- torical matter is in most cases easily perceived by a reasonably ex- perienced reader. It is difficult to distinguish the true from the synthetic or the one-sided in a historical presentation that requires great historical and philological training; but it is easy to separate the historical from the legendary in general. Their structure is different. Even where the legendary does not immediately betray itself by ele- ments of the miraculous, by the repetition of well-known standard motives, typical patterns and themes, through neglect of clear details of time and place, and the like, it is generally quickly recognizable by its composition. It runs far too smoothly. All cross-currents, all fric- tion, all that is casual, secondary to the main events and themes, everything unresolved, truncated, and uncertain, which confuses the clear progress of the action and the simple orientation of the acting === Page 28 === 428 PARTISAN REVIEW personages, is blurred. The historical event which we witness, or learn from the testimony of those who witnessed it, runs much more var- iously, contradictorily, and confusedly; not until it has produced results in a definite domain are we able, with their help, to classify it to a certain extent; and how often the order to which we think we have attained becomes doubtful again, how often we ask ourselves if the data before us have not led us to a far too simple classification of the original events! Legend arranges its subject-matter in a simple and straightforward way; it detaches it from its context in the historical world, in order that the latter may not confuse it; it knows only clearly outlined men who act from few and simple motives and the continuity of whose feelings and actions remains uninter- rupted. In the legends of martyrs, for example, a stiff-necked and fanatical persecutor stands over against an equally stiff-necked and fanatical victim; and a situation so complicated—that is to say, so real and historical—as that in which the "persecutor" Pliny finds himself in his celebrated letter to Trajan on the subject of the Chris- tians, is unfit for legend. And that is still a comparatively easy case. Let the reader think of the history which we are ourselves witnessing; anyone who, for example, evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, or the behavior of individual peoples and states before and during the last war, will feel how difficult it is to represent his- torical themes in general, and how unfit they are for legend; the historical comprises a wealth of contradictory motives in each in- dividual, a hesitation and ambiguous groping on the part of groups; only seldom (as in the last war) does a more or less plain situa- tion, comparatively simple to describe, arise, and even such a sit- uation is subject to division below the surface and is indeed almost constantly in danger of losing its simplicity; and the motives of all the interested parties are so complex that the slogans of propa- ganda can be composed only through the crudest simplification—with the result that friend and foe alike can often employ the same slogans. To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend. It is clear that a large part of the life of David as given in the Bible contains history and not legend. In Absalom's rebellion, for example, or in the scenes from David's last days, the contradictions === Page 29 === THE SCAR OF ULYSSES 429 and crossing of motives both in individuals and in the general ac- count have become so concrete that it is impossible to doubt the his- tory of the information conveyed. Now the men who composed the historical parts are often the same who edited the older legends as well; their peculiar religious concept of man in history, which we attempted to describe above, did not in the least lead them to a legendary simplification of events; and so it is only natural that, in the legendary passages of the Old Testament, historical structure is frequently discernible of course, not in the sense that the traditions are examined as to their credibility according to the methods of scientific criticism; but simply to the extent that the tendency to a smoothing down and harmonizing of events, to a simplification of motives, to a static definition of characters which avoids conflict, vacillation, and development, such as are natural to legendary structure, does not dominate in the Old Testament world of legend. Abraham, Jacob, or even Moses produce a more concrete, direct, and historical impression than the figures of the Homeric world-not because they are better described in terms of sense (the contrary is the case) but because that confused, contradictory, often-obstructed multiplicity of inward and outward events which true history affords, is not blurred in their representation but still remains clearly percept- ible. In the stories of David, the legendary, which only later scientific criticism makes recognizable as such, imperceptibly passes over into the historical; and even in the legendary, the problem of the class- ification and interpretation of human history is already passionately apprehended-a problem which later shatters the framework of historical composition and completely overruns it with prophecy; thus the Old Testament, in so far as it is concerned with human events, ranges through all three domains: legend, historical reporting, and interpretative historical theology. Connected with the matters just discussed is the fact that the Greek text seems more limited and more static in respect to the circle of personages involved in the action and their political ac- tivity. In the recognition scene with which we began, there appears, aside from Ulysses and Penelope, the housekeeper Eurycleia, a slave whom Ulysses' father Laertes had bought long before. She, like the swineherd Eumaios, has spent her life in the service of Laertes' === Page 30 === 430 PARTISAN REVIEW family; like Eumaios, she is closely connected with their fate, she loves them and shares their interests and feelings. But she has no life of her own, no feelings of her own; she has only the life and feelings of her master. Eumaios too, though he still remembers that he was born a freeman and indeed of a noble house (he was stolen as a boy), has, not only in fact but also in his own feeling, no life of his own any longer, he is entirely involved in the life of his masters. Yet these two characters are the only ones whom Homer brings to life who do not belong to the ruling class. Thus we become conscious of the fact that in the Homeric poems life is enacted only among the ruling class-others appear only in the role of servants to that class. The ruling class is still so strongly patriarchal, and still itself so in- volved in the daily activities of domestic life, that one is sometimes likely to forget their rank. But they are unmistakably a sort of feudal aristocracy, whose men divide their lives between war, hunting, marketplace councils, and feasting, while the women supervise the maids in the house. As a social picture, this world is completely stable; wars take place only between different groups of the ruling class; nothing ever pushes up from below. In the early stories of the Old Testament the patriarchal condition is dominant too, but since the people involved are individual nomadic or half-nomadic tribal leaders, the social picture gives a much less stable impression; class-distinctions are not felt. As soon as the people completely emerges-that is, after the withdrawal from Egypt-its activity is always discernible, it is often in ferment, it frequently intervenes in events not only as a whole but also in separate groups and through the medium of separate individuals who come forward; the origins of prophecy seem to lie in the irrepressible politico-religious spontaneity of the people. We receive the impression that the movements emerging from the depths of the people of Israel-Judah must have been of a wholly different nature from those of even the later ancient democracies, of a dif- ferent nature and far more elemental. With the more profound historicity and the more profound social activity of the Old Testament text, there is connected yet an- other important distinction: namely, that a different conception of elevated style and of the sublime is to be found here than in Homer. Homer, of course, is not afraid to let the realism of daily life enter into the sublime and tragic; our episode of the scar is an example, we see === Page 31 === THE SCAR OF ULYSSES 431 how the quietly depicted, domestic scene of the foot-washing is in- corporated into the pathetic and sublime action of Ulysses' home- coming. From the rule of the separation of styles which became al- most generally accepted later on and which specified that the realistic depiction of daily life was incompatible with the sublime and had a place only in comedy or, carefully stylized, in idyl-from any such rule Homer is still far removed. And yet he is closer to it than is the Old Testament. For the great and sublime events in the Hom- eric poems take place far more exclusively and unmistakably among the members of a ruling class; and these are far more untouched in their heroic elevation than are the Old Testament figures, who can fall much lower in dignity (consider, for example, Adam, Noah, David, Job); and finally, domestic realism, the representation of daily life, remains in Homer in the peaceful realm of the idyllic, whereas, from the very first, in the Old Testament stories, the sublime, tragic, and problematic take shape precisely in the domestic and common- place: scenes such as those between Cain and Abel, between Noah and his sons, between Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, between Rebekah, Jacob, and Esau, and so on, are inconceivable in the Homeric style. The reason for this is to be found in the entirely different ways of developing conflicts. In the Old Testament stories the peace of daily life in the house, in the fields, and among the flocks, is under- mined by jealousy over election and the promise of a blessing, and complications arise which would be utterly incomprehensible to the Homeric heroes. The latter must have palpable and clearly expres- sives, selves out in free battles; whereas, with the former, the perpetually smouldering jealousy and the connection between the domestic and the spiritual, between the paternal blessing and the divine blessing, lead to daily life being permeated with the stuff of conflict, often with poison. The sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the commonplace that the two realms of the sublime and the commonplace are actually not only unseparated but basically in- separable. We have compared these two texts, and, with them, the two kinds of style they embody, in order to reach a starting point for an investigation into the literary representation of reality in European === Page 32 === 432 PARTISAN REVIEW culture. The two styles, in their opposition, represent basic types: on the one hand fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events displaying in the foreground unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical develop- ment and of psychological perspective; on the other hand, certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, sug- gestive influence of the unexpressed, "backgroundishness," mul- tiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-his- torical claims, development of the concept of the historically be- coming, and preoccupation with the problematic. Homer's realism is, of course, not to be equated with classical- antique realism in general; for the separation of styles, which did not develop until later, permitted no such leisurely and externalized description of commonplace happenings; in tragedy especially there was no room for it; furthermore, Greek culture very soon encountered the phenomena of historical becoming and of the "many-layeredness" of the human problem, and dealt with them in its fashion; in Roman realism, finally, new and native concepts are added. We shall go into these later changes in the antique representation of reality when the occasion arises; on the whole, despite them, the basic tendencies of the Homeric style, which we have attempted to work out, remained ef- fective and determinant down into late antiquity. Since we are using the two styles, the Homeric and the Old Testament, as starting points, we have taken them as finished products, as they appear in the texts; we have disregarded every- thing that pertains to their origins, and thus have left wholly un- touched the question whether their peculiarities were theirs from the beginning or whether they are to be referred wholly or in part to foreign influences. Within the limits of our purpose, a consideration of this question is not necessary; for it is in their full development, which they reached in early times, that the two styles have exercised their determining influence upon the representation of reality in European literature. (Translated from the German by Joseph Meserve) === Page 33 === Alberto Moravia TWO PROSTITUTES Toward the beginning of the summer Giacomo found himself entirely alone. He thought that he had many friends and knew a number of women, but no sooner had a few acquaintances gone off on their holidays than he was left high and dry. Actually, like everyone else, he moved in a limited circle of persons, and now it occurred to him that when he was an old man such leave-takings would be final and his solitude complete. He fell into the habit of getting up very late and staying in his boarding-house room until it was time for lunch, smoking or reading distractedly in bed. After lunch he went out for a cup of coffee, bought a newspaper and took it back to his room. Sometimes, when he was especially tired, he liked to let the paper fall from his hand and go off to sleep. In mid-afternoon he got up, washed, dressed and went out. He went to a café in the most fashionable street, where they served small individual bottles of German beer of which Giacomo was very fond. As he slowly sipped the cold beer he observed the sidewalk and the people seated at the outdoor tables around him. All the idlers of the city, the prettiest girls and the best-dressed young men, met at this point of the street and among these tables. Many of them stood directly in front of the café windows, pre- tending to chatter, but actually striking a pose for the benefit of anyone who might be looking and, in their turn, watching out of the corner of one eye what was going on about them. Women went in lively fashion, with cigarettes in their hands, from one table to an- other, laughing and talking in a loud manner, and the waiters with their trays were barely able to fray a path among the crowd. There was a lot of joking, calling out from person to person and gossipy === Page 34 === 434 PARTISAN REVIEW talk that made for a certain atmosphere of self-sufficiency, as if those present were gathered not on the open street but in an exclusive drawing-room. Indeed if a shabby man, or a solitary and friendless one like Giacomo ventured in, he seemed like an uninvited and un- welcome guest. It was a strictly private affair between those who were sitting at the tables and those who were walking up and down in front of them. Above this scene the full-grown foliage of large plane trees threw a flickering pattern of light and shade over tables, glasses, faces and clothes. It was hot, but not stuffy, and the sky was cloudless and burning. As twilight came the people scattered, each one going to his own house, and the waiter cleared the tables and drew the curtains together. After he had finished his first bottle of beer Giacomo usually ordered another. By this time it was sunset, and he got up and walked slowly home. In the evening he came back to the café and witnessed a repetition of the scenes of the afternoon: the same parading dis- play and the same social atmosphere, but by lamplight and on a smaller scale. On this broad, airy street, winding up a hill with palaces and gardens on either side, the evenings were particularly agreeable. The wind blew gently under the plane trees and voices rang out cheerily in the soft, tired air while women's faces took on a mysterious look among the shadows. Less people passed by than in the daytime and it was possible to observe them more closely. Giacomo ordered an ice in a tall glass and ate it slowly and conscientiously, as if he were being paid to do exactly what he was doing: to eat an ice and watch the people go by. He felt empty and calm, and at times he could even persuade himself that he was master of his lonely and abandoned situation. But he was prey to a latent anxiety, which at the most unexpected moments gripped his heart. Sometimes he realized that his gluttonous enjoyment of beer and ices betrayed the fact that he could expect nothing more out of life than these simple pleasures. Or again a casual look, word or gesture on the part of some of the other habitués of the café suddenly revealed to him how much fuller and richer their lives were than his. He had a dim feeling of pain and resolved that before the end of the summer he would take some step toward regaining his own freedom. For in his moments of anxiety he felt that he was no longer free, even if he appeared to be === Page 35 === TWO PROSTITUTES 435 so, but that he was impotently enslaved to a solitude which was not of his own seeking. One night on his way home from the usual hour at the café he was attracted by the dim light from the cellar window of a nightclub farther along the street. He remembered having heard that in winter this was a gathering place for women in search of amorous adventure, and he was curious to see whether now in midsummer he could find there a companion for the night. He went down a few steps, pushed open a glass door and found himself in the bar. The shaded lamps left it half dark inside and the summer heat mingled disagreeably with the lingering smell of stale tobacco. In front of the shelves lined with bottles along the wall, the barman's face was positively black with heat, as if something like an apoplectic stroke had drawn all the blood into his head. But he moved about normally enough in his shiny white jacket, with his hands gliding over the zinc bar, the steam coffee-maker, the water taps, the bottles of olives and all the other accessories of his trade. For the moment Giacomo could think of nothing better to do than to perch on a stool and ask for a liqueur. He had hardly settled down and begun to perspire under the low ceiling than he realized that what he was looking for was not in the bar but in the back room, which he could now see was composed of a series of booths, each one containing a couple of tables and upholstered benches, the latter fitted into recesses under the windows or in the walls. At this moment the booths were all empty except for two women who were sitting on a bench under the window of one of them. For a short while, although he scrutinized them keenly, he could not make out exactly what sort they were. They were stylishly but unostentatiously dressed, blondes both of them, with one ap- pearing seven or eight years younger than the other and wearing her hair loose over her shoulders. She had a healthy complexion with no make-up on it, large blue-green eyes, a pointed nose and full red lips. She wore no hat and a sport jacket lay over the bench beside her, leaving her in a shortsleeved blouse. The older woman's hair was carefully waved and she wore a tiny hat tilted precariously over one side of her forehead. She too had light-colored eyes, but they were close together and deep-set under fleshy lids, which gave her a === Page 36 === 436 PARTISAN REVIEW vicious and hypocritical air. Her eyes, as well as her cheeks and exceedingly narrow curved lips, were heavily made up. She was more stylish than her companion, and at first sight perhaps more beautiful, but in an elaborate and banal urban manner. At second glance Giacomo decidedly preferred the younger, if for no other reason simply because there was something less conventional about her. The two women sat there motionless, without saying a word, while Giacomo looked the one with the hat straight in the face and at the other from a side view. What suddenly convinced him that they were prostitutes was the excessive and inappropriate air of dignity assumed by the older of the two, and her almost ugly, dark hands, with purplish red polish on the nails, which were laid on the table. The younger woman had polish on her nails too, but her hands were pale and slender. “Here’s your drink, sir,” the barman said all of a sudden, putting down a glass. Under ordinary circumstances Giacomo would not have had the courage to question him about the two women, but in the present atmosphere of unreality he had acquired a bold front which successfully masked his essential awkwardness and timidity. “Who are those two?” he asked abruptly. The barman was running a damp rag over the bar, and without raising his head or stopping his work he answered: “I don’t know, sir. They were here the other evening, but before that I’d never seen them.” However, his tone of voice clearly indicated that they were women of the sort for which Giacomo was looking. “Please take my glass over to that table,” said Giacomo, and getting down from his stool he went to sit at the table beside that of the two women. He was still in the same relative position, that is looking at the younger one from the side and with the other directly across from him. The latter, who could not help seeing him, lowered her gaze, while her companion, who could have ignored his presence, shot him a bold glance out of the corner of her greenish eye, which had a vaguely hilarious expression. It seemed to Giacomo as if the wo- man with the hat on saw this glance and disapproved of it. But perhaps, he thought, he was mistaken. === Page 37 === TWO PROSTITUTES 437 The barman brought over his glass, put it down on the table and went back to the bar, leaving the three of them alone in the booth. The younger woman spoke up in a clear voice: “It’s plain now that that friend of yours isn’t coming. An ill- mannered fellow I call him.” “Sh!” said the older woman with annoyance. “Why shouldn’t I talk now?” asked the younger. “I repeat that if he doesn’t come he’s ill-mannered.” “Very well,” said the older, sitting as stiffly as if she were afraid her hat would slip down over her nose, “but why shout about it?” “Who’s shouting?” “You are.” “All right. I shan’t argue. . . .” But she had spoken gaily and without anger, perhaps, Giovanni thought, merely in order to catch his attention. “Give me a cigarette, will you?” she added. Giacomo had laid his cigarette-case beside his glass on the table and he was quick to lean over and hold it out. The girl was no less quick to accept, then she took the case in her hand and offered it to her friend, who appeared to hesitate between the desire for a smoke and resentment of the other’s behavior. “It’s not really proper to take a cigarette upon so short an acquaintance,” she observed regretfully. But she took one and before putting it in her mouth. Then, with the motion of a fine lady allowing a per- fect gentleman to give her a light, she leaned over the table toward Giacomo’s lighter. The other had already lit up and was blowing smoke out through her nostrils. “Hot, isn’t it?” observed Giacomo, turning instinctively toward the older of the two women, who he felt was still hostile to him. This conventional remark seemed to please her, as if it were a mark of undeserved respect. “Frightful,” she said in a cool and worldly tone of voice, drawing in small mouthfuls of smoke and blowing them out again without inhaling while she stared at the tip of her cigarette. “I don’t remember when there was ever anything like it.” “I’m perspiring all over,” said the younger woman with a laugh, raising her arm to show the dampness of her blouse underneath it. === Page 38 === 438 PARTISAN REVIEW As she did so her breasts quite perceptibly inflated the silk, reveal- ing the weight of them rather than the shape. “It's impossible to breathe in this hole,” she added. The older woman appeared to disapprove of this exhibition and gave a chiding look at her companion. Then she said, turning to Giacomo: “This is really a place to come to in the winter, isn't it? In summer, one's better off at an outdoor café.” Apparently she was set on carrying on a drawing-room con- versation, in spite of the fact that she had allowed him to sit near them and regardless of her companion's bold behavior. “Yes,” he replied. “Outdoor cafés are best, especially those in a pleasant park.” “That's where we always go,” she said quickly. “What do you mean, ‘always’?” interrupted the other. “All the time,” and she flicked the ash off the end of her cigarette, bending her head slightly to one side. “This evening is an exception. . . . We are waiting for a friend. . . .” The younger woman began to laugh: “A fine sort of friend, when we don't even know his name. . . . ” “What's that?” said the older one defensively, but without mov- ing. “His name is . . . Meluschi.” The young woman laughed again. “That's the name of our landlord! What's the connection?” “My sister has a great way of joking,” said the older one to Giacomo. “I'm not joking at all,” he rejoined the other. “He's no friend of yours, much less of mine. In fact we more or less picked him up on the street.” There was something almost sensually cruel about her outspokenness. Her eyes shone maliciously and her nostrils quivered. “In the first place we were in a café,” the older woman said, turning to Giacomo as if he alone could understand her. “He came over very politely and asked if he could talk to us, just the way you did tonight.” And she added, in the direction of her sister: “If you go on like that, who knows what this gentleman will think of us?” But her companion went right on laughing, shifting about in her chair with her face flushed from mirth. “He's thought it already, never fear . . . or else he'd never have === Page 39 === TWO PROSTITUTES come over here with a face like that on him. Isn't that so, Mr.? What is your name, anyhow? Yesterday we didn't ask, and you see what's happened. . . ." "My name is Giacomo," said the young man, half amused and half put out by the girl's words. Then he added with an effort: "Yes, I did come over with such a thought in mind, but I may have been mistaken. . . ." "Oh no, you were not mistaken at all!" And she gave a hearty laugh. "And what's your name?" "My name's Rina," the older woman interposed, "and my sister's is Lori." Her sister laughed again. "Your name isn't Rina at all; it's Teresa. And mine is not Lori but Giovanna." "I like Rina and Lori better, because they're short. That's enough now, Lori. . . ." "Can't anyone laugh?" "It's all right to laugh, but you're loud and vulgar." "I'm nothing of the sort," said Lori, but she grew serious, as if her sister's last remark had struck home. "What's your last name?" Giacomo asked. "Panigatti," said Rina, modestly lowering her eyes. "There's a town in Sicily called Canicatti," said Giacomo, en- joying her discomfiture. "No, it's Panigatti, and we are not Sicilians. . . ." "Where do you come from?" "We come from Verona," she answered, but her younger sister winked and interposed: "We really come from Meolo, but she doesn't like the sound of that because it reminds her of a cat's meowing." "Will you have something to drink?" Giacomo asked. "Yes, champagne, champagne!" said the younger sister with mock enthusiasm. "I suggest we go to some other place. What do you say?" And the older woman picked her gloves up from the table and began to slip them on. "What about your friend Meluschi?" asked Giacomo. 439 === Page 40 === 440 PARTISAN REVIEW "It looks to me as if he really weren't coming," said Rina. But her sister shouted impetuously: "He certainly won't turn up again; he must have been just a loafer. . . ." All three of them got up and went toward the door. Giacomo went over to the bar and asked how much he owed. "Are you paying for all three drinks?" asked the barman. "Yes, and a package of Egyptian cigarettes." "Two thousand liras in all," the barman said. The amount was small. Giacomo took the cigarettes and handed over the money. From behind the bar the barman bowed and said good-night. They came out on the wide sidewalk under the heavy foliage of the plane trees. Outside the area where they cast their shadows a full moon lit up the asphalted street and the flower-beds on the out- er edge of the sidewalk. The colors of the flowers, red, blue, green and yellow, seemed strange and unreal in the moonlight. "Where shall we go?" Giacomo asked. "Somewhere where we can drink," answered the younger wo- man. "I've gone long enough without a drop. I'm as dry as. . ." "How about the Splendid bar?" said the older one, stepping out on the sidewalk and deliberately making her gestures show up in the moonlight. "It's stifling down there," protested her sister. "I say we go to the Ancus Martius Grotto," proposed Giacomo. This was a place not very far away, a nightclub in a cellar that was decorated to look like an ancient ruin, with fake classical vases and inscriptions all around. Hidden behind columns and carved out of the soft tufa stone there were a number of small rooms, dark corners and recesses where it was possible to talk at ease. The older woman did not appear very pleased; perhaps it was not fashionable enough to suit her. But the younger one enthusiastically took Giacomo's arm. "Yes, let's go to the Grotto. Who was Ancus Martius anyhow?" "One of the kings of ancient Rome." They walked slowly along the deserted sidewalk until they came to the entrance of the Grotto, a red brick stair leading to the cellar. Two enormous amphorae, one on either side of the door, gave a clue to the whole style. At the bottom of the stair there was === Page 41 === TWO PROSTITUTES 441 a broken and blackened stone with an inscription in dog-Latin. As they passed this and started down a second flight of stairs they were greeted by the smell of mingled smoke, wine and mold, together with a hollow, far-away noise of voices and music from the large and winding rooms below. From the landing they could see rows of tables under the low vaults, with people sitting around them over carafes of wine. Arches, columns, pilasters all contributed to the imitation of a primitive underground basilica. “Wonderful!” said Lori, clapping her hands. “It's really old, isn't it? . . . It looks like . . . what do they call those places where the ancient Christians used to meet?” "The catacombs," Giacomo suggested. “Yes . . . the catacombs . . . and to think you've never brought me here before!" This last remark was addressed to her sister. "I've never really liked it," said the latter. The people sitting at the tables watched them go by without showing the least curiosity. For the most part they were unpretentious young men and their girls; occasionally a large group drank and joked noisily, making the vaults echo. Far away, on a bandstand at the other end of the grotto, three or four violin and cello players could be seen moving their arms up and down. "Let's go through here," said Giacomo. They made their way among the tables of the main room and through a narrow hall lined with red bricks to a smaller room decorated in Pompeian style. The purposely unfinished frescoes on the walls portrayed cupids, satyrs and naked women against a dark red background and gave the impression of having been scientifically restored. Over them customers had pencilled their names and various jokes and exclamations. A wrought-iron lamp hung from the ceiling and most of the room was occupied by a large table with a few stools around it. Giacomo sat down at the head of the table with the older sister to the right and the younger to the left of him. "What will you have to drink?" he asked. "Anything at all, as long as it's good," said Lori. Her sister said she would like a liqueur, but it seemed that there was none to be had. "We have red and white Chianti, and Orvieto on tap, and bottled wines," said the waiter. === Page 42 === 442 PARTISAN REVIEW “What sweet wines have you?” “Marsala, Passito, Aleatico. . . .” “Bring us some Aleatico.” “So you come from Meolo,” said Giacomo, picking up the con- versation. “Yes,” answered the younger sister. “But I live in Milan and my sister lives here. Every now and then we exchange visits: she comes to stay with me or I go to stay with her.” “I don’t care for Milan,” said Rina. “The winters are too cold. I’ve been ill and need sunshine.” “What was the matter with you?” Giacomo asked. “I’m delicate,” she explained, touching her chest with one hand. Her chest was, indeed, almost hollow, as Giacomo had al- ready noticed. But her deep-set eyes under the fleshy lids had a vicious expression that aroused his curiosity. “That’s not it,” Lori put in. “The truth is she’s in love with someone who lives here.” “What does he do?” asked Giacomo. “He’s in business,” said the older sister with the same modesty with which she had declared that her last name was Panigatti. “He’s a cheese salesman,” said the younger, holding two fingers up to her nose as if to indicate that he smelled of his trade. Then the waiter brought the wine. Giacomo uncorked the bottle and poured it into the thick green glasses. “It’s good,” Lori said, looking at Giacomo. “Very sweet.” “Aleatico,” her sister confirmed. Giacomo drank his first glassful in a single swallow and poured himself another. The two women had emptied their glasses too, and Giacomo filled them and ordered another bottle. “Where is your friend just now?” he asked Rina prudently. “He’s on the road.” “Oh, there’s no danger of his putting in a sudden appearance,” said her sister with a laugh. “He always wires or calls up. He’s a very good fellow.” “Lori, don’t talk about him like that. You don’t even know him.” “He’s not so very wonderful,” Lori said unexpectedly. “You’re quite right to deceive him. I don’t blame you.” The older woman said nothing. Giacomo decided that she was === Page 43 === TWO PROSTITUTES 443 the one to be his conquest, or that he should at least make some ad- vance. Inconspicuously he put his hand on her knee under the table. She looked at him hypocritically and said: "Where are you from?” “From Ancona," Giacomo answered. His hand roughly pushed aside her dress and travelled from the knee up her thigh. Above very tight garters her bare skin seemed to be bursting. She had on all sorts of fancy underwear, silks, laces, tiny buttons and an elaborate system of suspenders. "That's a beautiful city," she said, without moving or pushing Giacomo's hand away. Her dress was riding way up to one side, leaving one leg bare. "Do you think I can't see you?" shouted her sister, with, how- ever, no jealousy in her voice. "But as far as I'm concerned, go right ahead." Giacomo withdrew his hand, but a moment later he was sorry and put it back, for she had seemed to ask nothing better. For the sake of being fair he put his other arm around the younger sister's waist. She laughed and looked at him sideways out of her big, malicious eyes, holding her glass in her hand. Giacomo bent over and brushed her neck with his lips. The older sister pushed Giacomo's hand away and pulled down her dress. She seemed to do this not out of anger but because some people were passing by the entrance to the small room. "What do you do in Milan?" Giacomo asked. "What do I do?" she repeated with a laugh. "She's a model," supplied her sister. "I used to be," said the younger woman deliberately. "Now I do just what you do here." "Why do you say such a thing?" asked the other irritably. "You're trying to pass yourself off for something different from what you are." "What do you know about that!" said Lori slowly with mock astonishment. She was slightly drunk and the color and expression of her eyes wavered from one moment to the next. "And what is it that you do, if I may ask?" "I don't do anything," said Rina, shrugging her shoulders con- temptuously. "I'm a lady of leisure. . . ." === Page 44 === 444 PARTISAN REVIEW "What do you know about that! Then I do the same thing. I'm a lady of leisure too. . . .” Rina looked daggers at her sister, but did not reply. Then she said warningly to Giacomo: “If you encourage her to go on drinking like that, there's no tell- ing what she'll say." Lori turned suddenly bitter. “I haven't had too much to drink, I'll have you know! And then Giacomo here is different. He doesn't put on airs the way you do. . . .” “Come, come,” said Giacomo conciliatingly, patting the girl's knee. She paid no attention, and he ventured to move his hand up her legs. She held them close together, and go as far as he would he found no trace of slip, stockings or underpinnings of any kind. From her smooth, cool thighs, very different from her sister's, he reached all the way to her stomach, which perhaps because of the way she was sitting down and leaning over fell into a fold and gave the impression of being round and well fed. She was quite naked under her dress, but with no ulterior motive, simply because it was uncomfortable to feel clinging underwear in the hot weather. Mean- while, heedless of his hand, she went on shouting at her sister: “I make no bones about it. I don't pretend to live with one man alone and then bring a stranger home with me every evening." The older woman stared at her unblinkingly, with her tiny hat tilted over her narrow eyes. “I make no bones about it, I say," repeated the other less vehemently, as if she regretted her previous violence. “And you, be still there!" she added, turning her anger on Giacomo. "I told you not to encourage her drinking," said the sister. By now Giacomo felt drunk himself and the girl's unashamed nakedness excited him. Drunkenness and excitement combined to make him grow suddenly impatient. "What would you say if we two got out of here and left her?" he whispered to Lori, taking advantage of a moment when Rina was fitting a cigarette into a long holder. But to his surprise the girl showed a most unexpected loyalty to her sister. "Ask her," she said. "When I'm staying with her she decides everything." === Page 45 === TWO PROSTITUTES 445 Somewhat astonished, Giacomo turned to the older woman, lowering his voice, not so much because he was afraid that the other would hear him as because he was ashamed of what he was saying. “I wonder if we mightn't move along. . . . I was thinking I might go somewhere else, perhaps with just one of you." "No, not with just one of us," Rina rejoined promptly. "It's either both of us or nothing." "Why so?" "Because that's the way we do it." "What shall I do with two women?" Giacomo wondered. The idea of their being sisters intrigued him. "And how much is it for you both?" "Twenty thousand liras. Ten thousand each." Giacomo could not help thinking that this was quite a lot, but Rina's tone of voice was such as to rule out any possibility of bar- gaining. "Very well," he said. "But where shall we go?" "To your place," she answered. "I haven't a place of my own," said Giacomo. "I live in a boarding-house." "Then I don't know." "Can't we go to where you live?" "I must preserve the sanctity of my home," she said with mellifluous pride. "You take people there all the time!" her sister said languidly, her bitterness tempered by the effects of the wine. "Which one of you am I to believe?" Giacomo asked. Then, realizing that he had made a faux pas, he added: "Well, just this once anyhow. . . ." And he took Rina's hand. Rina smiled and shook her head. "I can't take you home. It's impossible." "How so?" "It's just impossible, that's all." Giacomo saw that he had to take another tack. "Then let's go to a hotel," he said. "Out of the question! They always ask to see your papers. . ." "What was the name of that hotel where we went a few days ago with that . . . ?" put in the younger sister with a strange hesita- === Page 46 === 446 PARTISAN REVIEW tion in her voice. “ . . . Hotel Corona, wasn’t it?” “Very well, then,” said Giacomo with annoyance. “When the time comes we’ll just go our separate ways.” A silence followed. Rina puffed in a mysterious and worldly manner at her cigarette, looking at Giacomo benevolently out of her deep-set, fleshy eyes. “How much do you suppose it would have cost you to take all three of us to a hotel?” she asked. “I don’t know. . . . Two thousand liras, I suppose.” “More than that, because you’d have had to take one double and one single room. At least three thousand, I make it.” “What are you driving at?” “If you promise not to make any noise, then give us the extra three thousand liras you’d have spent at the hotel—and we’ll go to my house. . . . ” The younger sister could not help laughing at the perplexity on Giacomo’s face. “A good business woman, isn’t she?” she observed, putting her head down between her arms on the table and closing her eyes. “All right,” said Giacomo. “Let’s go immediately.” “Let’s go.” All three got up and the older sister, who seemed to be in a hurry, went ahead of the other two down the long, arched, brick- lined hall. Giacomo took the younger one into his arms. She pushed him away with mockingly exaggerated gestures, as if to imply that her sister might notice, then all of a sudden she let him kiss her. They drew quickly apart. “It’s good to have a kiss every now and then,” she whispered with a smile. “Yes, it is,” he answered. They retraced their steps among the tables in the various rooms. The low vaulted ceilings echoed voices, clinking glasses and the in- distinct hum of the music all mingled together, and the air seemed heavier and more smoke-laden than when they had come in. Giacomo began to think that he too had had too much to drink. Outside it was almost warmer than underground. The air hung motionless under the plane trees and the street lamps lit up their mass of dense, inert leaves. === Page 47 === TWO PROSTITUTES 447 “We must find a taxi," said the older sister, as if she were coming away from a fashionable private party. They walked down to the nearby square, but there was no taxi in sight. “Where is this home of yours, anyhow?" Giacomo asked gaily. He was walking between them, arm in arm, and letting them lead him along. “Remember the sanctity of the home!" said the younger sister with a giggle. The older one named a street some distance off, in the out- skirts of the city. “We'll have to take a bus,” said Giacomo, “and make con- nections with a tram at the end of the line." There was really nothing else they could do. Fortunately the bus came soon and they got in. Giacomo paid the three fares and they sat down, the older one occupying a seat to herself and the other two sharing one behind her. “You'd have found a hotel more convenient,” the younger sister said in a loud voice as the bus started. “You'll have a long walk coming home. But the hotels here are so fussy. I know one in Milan where they ask no questions and don't even require a deposit on the room. . . ." Some of the people in the half-empty bus turned around to look at Giacomo and his companion, but the hour was late and they were apparently too tired to smile. The bus hurtled recklessly through the narrow streets of the central part of the city with beetling palaces on either side. The older woman turned around and said to Giacomo emphatically: “How long do you plan to stay? Your wife must miss you. She doesn't see much of you, does she, with all these long trips?" “Wife? Do you know his wife? ... Are you really married?" “Yes, married to you,” Giacomo said, laughing and taking her hand. But she pulled it away and whispered with mock severity: “Watch out. ... My sister's looking.” “Hurrah for the sanctity of the home!" Giacomo said. “Yes, three cheers for the sanctity of the home!" More of the passengers looked at them with curiosity in their eyes. === Page 48 === 448 PARTISAN REVIEW "Can't you keep quiet for a minute?" asked the older sister, turning around. "I'll talk when I choose," replied the younger. After this reply the older one drew herself up and definitely turned her back on them. Apparently she had decided in desperation to try to give the impression that she had nothing to do with them at all. She opened her bag and began to powder her nose. In the mirror of the compact Giacomo could see the hardness and ill humor of her eyes under the fleshy lids. The bus made its last stop in a dark square. Through the black, pointed leaves of the palm trees in a public garden they could see the round, yellow headlight of a tram. "That's ours," said the older woman, quickening her pace. The tram was almost full, but they managed to seat themselves in the same arrangement as before. At the second stop a man about fifty years old with a conical head and greying hair got in. He was dressed in a black suit, a white shirt and a black tie and had a prominent red-tipped nose in the middle of his wooden face. He sat down beside Rina and raised his hat somewhat as if it were the cover of a pot. "When are you going back to Milan?" Giacomo asked his companion. "Not for some time," the girl said. "I want to have some fun. My sister's always taking me to the best places, but the people we run into there have a way of never turning up again, like the one with whom we had an appointment this evening. I'd rather go to a businessmen's restaurant. . . . They tell me that the . . ."-and here she named a fashionable establishment-" . . . is just the place to go." Her sister stirred on her seat but did not turn around. "Yes," Giacomo assented. "They have good food there." "I want to have fun, I say," the girl went on. "What's the name of that place where they have a vaudeville show and between acts you can dance on the floor?" "The Eden?" Giacomo suggested. "I went there some time ago with a man from the south . . . he was very generous with his money. . . . What would you say if we were to go together one of these evenings?" === Page 49 === TWO PROSTITUTES 449 "Why not?" "I'm crazy about places like that." Giacomo did not reply, and she went on: "Will you look me up if you come to Milan?" "Where do you live?" "I'll give you the exact address," she said, looking at him with a sort of drunken satisfaction. "You can come whenever you like. I don't believe in the sanctity of the home." The man in black turned around and scrutinized them carefully. Rina's neck and shoulders were held so stiffly that not even the rocking motion of the tram could shake them. "That wine of yours really went to my head," the girl said after a pause. "It was good stuff, though. . . ." The tram came to a stop. Rina got up and without speaking went toward the door. The man in black passed in front of her while she waited there and again took off his hat. She nodded graciously, as if she were grateful to him for this mark of respect after the sort of talk she had heard from her sister. "Where are you going?" called out Lori, getting up in her turn. "Is it our stop?" The sister said nothing, but got out, with Giacomo and Lori following her. The tram went on and they were left in the midst of a very large, flat, asphalt-paved space, surrounded on three sides by tall apartment-houses with very few lighted windows. Straight ahead of them two rows of lamps ran along either side of a paved road apparently leading into an uncultivated area where there were no houses in sight. "Are we there?" asked the girl, looking around her. "I never seem to recognize it." The older sister waited until the man in black had walked away. Then she said angrily: "Yes, we're there. But I don't want you to stay with me ever again." "Why not? What's the matter?" "I've told you often enough," said her sister, her anger mounting as she spoke. "You might have the decency in the part of town where I live and the tram I take every day not to carry on that way. You talked nonsense all the way out here, and in such a loud voice. . . ." === Page 50 === 450 PARTISAN REVIEW "What did I say?” "Everyone on the tram knows me. . . . What are they going to think? Did you see that gentleman sitting next to me? He's Mr. Picchio, a lawyer, who lives in my house, on the same floor. He'll say my sister is a little slut who brings men home with her. . . ." "But what does it matter?" "It matters a lot. I don't want people to talk about me behind my back." "Look here," said the younger sister, planting herself in the middle of the open space with her hands on her hips. "Look here, what's the use of all this fuss? What your neighbors will say is no more than the truth. Go along with you!" And she came back to Giacomo's side. "Very well," said the other, "but this is the last time I'm inviting you for a visit." They walked a little way in silence. Then Rina went up to the entrance of one of the large apartment houses. "For heaven's sake be quiet," she whispered to Giacomo as she turned the key in the lock. They came into a lobby with a black marble ledge running all the way around the floor. A star-shaped hanging glass lamp cast myriads of sparkling facets on the walls. Thence they passed into a room enclosing the stairs. Rina walked around the cage of the self-running elevator and went to a door at the end of a hall. "Quietly," she said again, as they went in. After they had shut the door behind them she lit a lamp en- closed in a square white glass box. The apartment seemed to be furnished in extremely modern style. Everywhere there were cubical or box-shaped pieces of furniture, chromium lamps, glass tables and tubular chairs. Rina led Giacomo down a narrow corridor to a closed door. "We might as well go straight into the bedroom," she said. The room was a small one and most of it was taken up by a low, wide double bed. The design on the bedcover was composed of squares fitted one inside another, in various shades of all different colors, from pale blue to violet, red and brown, and the same material was used in the upholstery of the chairs. A wardrobe made up of a series of sections joined together, with a revolving mirror in the === Page 51 === TWO PROSTITUTES 451 middle, took up most of one wall. There were globe-shaped lamps on low tables. Everything was spotlessly clean, and in spite of the bright colors of the bedcover the atmosphere of the room was some- what dull and sad, like that of an up-to-date, modest hotel. Rina carefully took off her hat and put it in the wardrobe. Then she went into a corner and pulled her dress off over her head, leaving her- self clad in a perforated black slip. She had hardly any breasts, Giacomo thought to himself, but her body was pleasing enough, with the wide hips and plump legs. Not knowing quite what to do and finding her within his reach he put his arms around her waist and pulled her to him. She allowed him to kiss her but displayed no feeling. "I'll fix the bed," she said, "and you can undress in the bath- room over there if you like. . . ." She bent over the bed to pull off the bedcover and lifted up her silk-stockinged leg, showing again how the garter was too tight above the knee. Then she turned down the sheet, which was clean and still creased from ironing. Plainly her statement about the sanctity of the home had some real meaning. Giacomo wondered whether he should get undressed, but he was ashamed to lie down naked and alone in the big double bed. She was sitting on the edge of the bed now, with her back to him, pulling off her stockings. The younger sister had disappeared and through the half-open door he could hear her stirring about in the bathroom. Giacomo observed that it was very hot and asked Rina if she could open the window. "After we've put out the light," she answered. "Otherwise someone might look in and see." Just then Lori came out of the bathroom and went over to stand in front of the mirror in the wardrobe. Giacomo saw her look at herself with curiously concentrated attention, then, as if her mind were on something else, slowly unbutton her blouse from top to bottom. When it was unbuttoned she hesitated for a moment, then equally slowly took it off, revealing herself naked underneath. She had rather large breasts, which seemed to be dragged down by their weight, but the tips of them were pointed upward and from the stiff way they shook with every movement it was clear that their shape was a natural one and not the effect of age or weariness. She walked by Giacomo, hung her blouse over the back of a chair and === Page 52 === 452 PARTISAN REVIEW went over to a gramophone placed on a stool in one corner of the room. "Let's have some music," she said. As she leaned over to wind the gramophone she looked up through her loose hair at Giacomo with a happy expression on her face. Her breasts hardly moved at all, and Giacomo was sur- prised because the effort of turning the handle made the rest of her body shake all over. As a popular tune started up she came over to him and held out her arms. "Let's dance," she said. They wheeled around, but when the music grew louder Rina called out from a chair at the dressing-table: "Turn that thing off!" Instead of obeying her Giacomo led his partner out into the corridor. His timidity was gone; now that he was launched upon the adventure there was nothing to do but carry it to a logical con- clusion. Soon both Rina and Lori would be fully undressed and all three of them would lie down on the wide double bed. The idea was so very agreeable that it actually checked his impatience to perform. He wished somehow to handle Lori alone because he was half ashamed to do so before her sister. But just as he was gradually trying to change a dance step into a closer embrace the music came to a sudden stop. "It's that fool of a Rina," the girl said, freeing herself abruptly from his arms and rushing into the bedroom, where Giacomo dis- contentedly followed her. "Why did you turn off the gramophone? We were dancing," she said to her sister, who was just lowering its cover. "I told you before I didn't want any noise," Rina answered. "Didn't you make enough racket in the tram? You put me to shame before Mr. Picchio and I don't know whether I'll ever be able to look him in the face again." They stood facing each other, one naked, the other in her slip. "What do I care about Mr. Picchio?" her sister shouted. "Per- haps he's caught on to the fact that you go out after men. But what of it?" "I care, though. And then it's not true. You're the one that goes man-hunting in Milan." === Page 53 === TWO PROSTITUTES 453 "And what do you do, in the name of heaven?" "Never mind what I do. . . Just remember that as long as you're in my house you have to behave. . . This evening you've put me to shame. . . There are things you can do on your own hook, but please don't do them here. . ." "The sanctity of the home, eh?" The girl gave a forced laugh, then her face turned red with anger. "I don't give a rap for this filthy home of yours. I'd just as soon go away this minute." "Go on away; you'll be doing me a favor," said her sister in a less secure and almost intimidated tone of voice. "I'm going, never fear," said the girl furiously, taking her blouse off the chair and beginning to button it up in a hurry. "Go on then," said Rina, but she was plainly suffering from the other's decision. "I'm going, and you'll never see me again." With her face still red she pulled out from behind the wardrobe a canvas suitcase trimmed in leather. Then she opened a drawer and began to pack her belongings helter-skelter. "Come now," said Giacomo, going over to her. "Come, come." "Let me alone," she said, pushing him away. "As far as I'm concerned, go on," said her sister, who was standing near the gramophone with a disconcerted expression. "I'm going away from your filthy house, never fear." "Go, then," said her sister sorrowfully. "Go as quickly as you can." This time Lori did not answer. She leaned the suitcase against her thigh, raised her knee and closed it. Then passing angrily between Giacomo and her sister she took a crumpled hat off a rack and went out of the room. "Lori!" Rina called, as if her feelings had got the better of her. There was no answer and a moment later the apartment was shaken by the angry slamming of the front door. Rina sat down on the edge of the bed and put her head between her hands. The whole thing had taken place so swiftly that Giacomo had not yet recovered from his earlier presumption that he was suc- cessfully launched upon the adventure and had only to let himself be carried along to a happy ending. He was still puffed up with self-assurance and yet the affair had already gone up in smoke. He === Page 54 === 454 PARTISAN REVIEW felt stabbing pangs of annoyance, disappointment and futility. Looking at the woman who sat in her black slip on the edge of the bed she had vainly prepared a short time before, he saw that she was in tears. “To think of all I did for her!" she said in a quivering voice. "When she was a small child and I was sixteen years old I worked to support her. What would she have become without me? I gave her summer holidays, bought her clothes and everything. . . . When she was older I found her a job as a model. . . . For years I deprived myself in order to send her money. . . . And now, see how she has treated me!" She shook her head and looked up at him from beneath her fleshy eyelids, and now there was nothing vicious in her eyes. "Come, come!" said Giacomo, forcing himself to sit down beside her and taking her hand in his. "She'll come back." "No, I know her. She'll not come back so soon, in fact she'll never come back at all." And she drew a handkerchief out from under the pillow and blew her nose. Giacomo wondered whether he should suggest that the two of them go ahead as if nothing had happened. Even in her tear- ful and dishevelled state Rina would probably have consented, but she would have made a most unsuitably melancholy partner in love- making. "I think I may as well go home," he said, getting up. "I'm not urging you to stay," she said, following his example. "I feel so very badly. . . . You saw how she treated me. . . . The wicked, ungrateful girl!" So saying she went into the corridor. At the door Giacomo took her into his arms and gave her a kiss. She returned it with something like gratitude. "I'm sorry," she said. "It doesn't matter," Giacomo answered. When he got outside he looked hopefully around for the angry Lori. But he could see only great black pools of asphalt, rows of street lamps and dark apartment houses. "One more day is gone," he reflected spitefully. And he started off in the direction of the lamps. (Translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye) === Page 55 === Edward Field HYDRA This island whose name means water Never had Gods and temples as other Greek islands had; It never was the home of monsters with ferocious heads And maybe it wasn't even there. But a few centuries ago As though it had just risen from the sea Men saw stones and pine-trees on the slopes And with the stones made houses and with the trees made ships. And as naturally as fish swim The ships went sailing; And as naturally as the sun rises The boys grew into heroes and sailed to war. But the heroes were foolhardy as heroes are So although they were brave and did amazing things The ships were sunk at last And the handsome heroes lay on the ocean floor. Wars over, fame won, the island settled down, But with the trees all gone, the soil blew away to sea; The houses began to crumble, And the island bleached in the sun to anonymity. The name means water but now even the wells are drying And no one expects the rock to grow trees again; While the waters push gently on its shores waiting For the island to sink quietly back in the sea. === Page 56 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS IV WILLIAM BARRETT What, after this pandemonium of voices, remains to be said? or could possibly have been left unsaid? An editor who has seen the separate contributions cross his desk might feel stung to answer this or that point already made, but as a contributor he has to place himself on the same footing as everyone else. Nevertheless, on the whole symposium itself there is a permissible comment that illumines the central issue: namely, the character of this historical period and the possibility of a real religious revival within it. What strikes me most about the symposium is the amazing dissonance of the participant voices: one might roughly classify the contributions under the two headings, pro or con, but such a classification would hardly do justice to the extraordinary diversity of orientations, points of departure, presuppositions, types of experience appealed to, etc., etc. Talk about cultural pluralism! Well, we have it, and our problem may now be to get beyond it. In a real Age of Faith a symposium like this could not have been held—even apart from the prohibitions of the ecclesiastical police—because men's doubts and differences would move in a much narrower orbit. We are what we are mostly from the unconscious influences we soak up—and in the matter of religion too: in Ages of Faith everybody is religious as a simple spontaneous act of being, and the strength of religion is precisely when it works as a concrete and cohesive fact of feeling, lived without being questioned, and surrounding the individual's life at every moment from birth to death. If we were free to choose, we might prefer such an Age of Faith, whether pagan or Christian, when religion is there for the whole people like the air they breathe, for in such periods our energies might be more intense, direct, fructifying, even if our horizons were more narrow. But this kind of choice we never have; centuries of rational criticism have done their work and given us this world in which we now live; and we must remember this when we see the efforts of a few contemporary intel- === Page 57 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 457 lectuals to think themselves back into religion, and so not conclude too hastily that we shall shortly have a homogeneously religious life like that of the past. (This doesn't mean they shouldn't make the ef- fort if they see fit, for a man should follow his bent at all costs; but it does warn us what we may expect in the present, or near future, of any such "revival.") I would even question whether a modern convert can live his belief in one of the orthodox religions in any- thing but a tenuous way compared with the vigor and immediacy of such orthodox belief in the past. Read Eliot's essay on Dante, for example, and you do not get anything like the original figure, but a strange creature, the Anglican Dante, a sweet refined intellectual Christian, with all the raw strength of Dante's medieval belief (with- out which there could not have been all those details of imagery in the Inferno) left out because that robustness of belief is impossible for the twentieth-century Anglican convert. Where history has brought us can be seen if we turn to America, the newest, and certainly the most irreligious civilization that has ever existed. Of course, it will be objected that the churches are powerful pressure groups in American life, that the books of Lloyd Douglas have tremendous sales, and that Life magazine advertises religion with its bathing beauties. Yes, and no better evidence could be given of the fundamentally irreligious character of this new civilization. Lloyd Douglas is as irreligious a writer as ever put a record on the dictaphone, and as American too as that version of the gospels produced in the 'twenties that interpreted Jesus as a successful business executive. At the moment some of our intellectuals seem to have discovered a very saleable commodity that might be called "the higher Lloyd Douglas": the practice of a suave but vague "spiritual" rhetoric that gives many people the illusion they are somehow getting more than they are willing to pay for in the cold cash of commitment. I am reminded of an incident when Mr. Nehru visited this country last Fall: at a private reception he was being asked questions from the floor when one voice, shaking with emotion, exclaimed, "Mr. Nehru, we intellectuals in America want you to know how much Gandhi means to us." The words gave me some- thing of a turn, for I recognized the speaker, a young New York literatus, and I could not help thinking that this young man smoked and drank, and, and so far as I can guess, practiced contraception. How, === Page 58 === 458 PARTISAN REVIEW then, could Gandhi mean so much to him? I decided that the young man must be faking, but I now find this an ungenerous judgment on my part, and as mistaken as it would be to pronounce the simpleminded midwestern appreciator of Lloyd Douglas to be hypocritically Christian. Both are examples of the great generosity and naive good will of the American Character wishing to show that it approves of any genuine manifestation of spirit, however different from its own. The young man wanted, after all, only to show Mr. Nehru that his heart was in the right place, and that he wanted to be friends—even with an ascetic saint. I suspect that a good deal of this generous, but vague, aspiration toward "the spirit- ual" is behind the current revival in America. But it won't do for a religion. Religion is total or it is nothing, and I will begin to believe that a new leaven is working when I see the Catholic faithful walking barefooted through the streets of our cities on Good Friday, or climbing the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral on their knees. Nineteenth-century materialism offered the theory that the religious sense of mankind would weaken and disappear as the material level of the masses rose. It is very easy to sneer at this as an over-simplification; as a real solution to the religious problem it is indeed a gross over-simplification; but as a sociological hypothesis it seems very apt, and certainly describes what has happened to the American masses, who, immersed in their gadgets, radios, television sets, automobiles, know nothing of the religious passion that once characterized the peasantries of Europe. Currently, of course, the A-bomb and the H-bomb are causing some tremors in this self-confident and spontaneous irreligion of Americans: for the first time they are beginning to doubt seriously that man is sufficient to himself and can solve his own problems. But, again, the reaction seems typically American: religion is clutched at like another tool or instrument, as if it might solve the international problem of the atom when all else has failed. The H-bomb has merely brought to a head a sore that has been festering in Western Civiliza- tion for some time: the doubt whether man is capable of mastering the technological environment he has produced. One has only to walk anywhere in the streets of New York, with their snarl of traffic and swarm of harassed humans, to feel that man has got himself en- tangled in something of his own making that he cannot manage. A === Page 59 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 459 pretty good case could be made out for writing off the human race. right now; but since we are implicated in the facts, we can't afford quite that much objectivity. The greatest shift in the intellectual climate from the nineteenth to the twentieth century is probably the slow and gradual loss of the once passionate hope in human pos- sibilities. Where the nineteenth century was exalted and tormented by that absorbing question, What might man become? we today are willing to settle for simply hanging on. The question everywhere in the background today and not very far in the background either, is one of survival. This atmosphere is created mainly by world Communism, the expanding presence of which points up every insecurity we have. It surprises me that the contributors to this symposium have tended to deal with a possible religious revival in one or other of its ancient forms, whereas it is more likely that if a new religious wave were to sweep mankind again, it would be radically different from anything in the past. William James proposed as a pragmatic test of the genuineness of a religious feeling its capacity to transform the whole person. Communism meets this test very well. I knew one young woman who was a dipsomaniac, tried psychoanalysis, which did not work, then became converted to Communism and the bottle was no longer necessary to her, for her life had now acquired a meaning. Communism provides the individual, as religions did in the past, with a total structure outside himself to which he can belong. Moreover, it makes available to its faithful that wonderfully healing sublimation of resentments that was one of the most ex- traordinary psychological achievements of past religions, which, in love of the sinner but hatred of the sin, could draw and quarter their infidel victims with the fiery joy of self-righteousness. Only the Communist today has the wonderful catharsis, an Evil against which he may discharge all his hatreds, while at the same time he is able to hide from himself, by his sanctimonious love of the masses, the fact that he is principally a creature of resentments. All this may lead the reader to believe that I stand altogether outside of any religious faith, and it may now come as something of a surprise when I say that, like a good many other people in the modern world, I have my own private religion. There would be no excuse for burdening the reader with any details of this except that === Page 60 === 460 PARTISAN REVIEW the record would otherwise be incomplete, this does seem to be the place for such confessiones fidei, and, more important still, I may be able to draw from my very private case some general conclusion relevant to the common situation. The story goes back to a simple in- cident some years ago when I was teaching a class in the history of philosophy: the subject was Leibniz, including his argument for the existence of God, after the exposition of which I turned easily and naturally to Kant's famous refutations, and thus dismissed the students with their minds presumably both enlightened and purged. The stroke of fate in this case was something not uncommon in American universities: I had to give the same lecture in the after- noon; feeling a little like a phonograph record being played over the second time, I could nevertheless let my mind wander freely, and so in the middle of Kant's refutations the meaning of Leibniz first dawned on me. There was nothing very dazzling or blinding about the experience; no emotional factors at all were involved, so far as I can tell; I was not even intellectually predisposed for this turn of thought, since at the time I was a positivist; it was simply that my mind, relaxed, saw another way of coming at Leibniz's argument—a way that Kant never saw. I don't think I gave any sign to the class or changed the routine of the lecture in any way; but the next few years I spent thinking about very little else. It seems to me quite clear that Kant did not understand the argument he was attacking, and all modern refutations have been Kant's, in more or less purified form. This does not, of course, establish Leibniz's argument, since the elimination of a refutation does not make an argument conclu- sive; but being unable to dismiss the argument from my mind after ten years of applying all possible rational erodents, I have on my hands at least this conclusion: that I am unable to think of the world except as opening toward the possibility of God. This may be very little. I agree; but perhaps it is a fact for our time that a good many people, straining every nerve for what religious belief they can possess, can come up with so little. My own belief leaves me at an uncomfortable distance from any Church, and I am inclined to be a little hostile toward some of the recent converts be- cause I suspect their belief has come a little too easily. It is not that I object to the demand of a faith beyond reason, but I am unwilling to accept a faith in what is logically contradictory. The great medieval === Page 61 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 461 Schoolmen labored for centuries at the doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity, but without removing their essential self-contradiction, and I don't expect that anyone will do any better in the future. No doubt, our civilization has erred in placing too great a value upon truth under all circumstances and to all people; but history, including this historical value, has formed me, and while I do not insist on it as a value for others, I have to live with my own bedrock literalness of mind, unable to accept anything whose literal consequences I can- not believe. Here again we come back to the fact from which I started: that the historical climate sets the situation in which religion too must exist and realize itself. I am not very comfortable either about harboring a private religion. I would prefer it otherwise, since religion is most valuable in human community, when alive in a whole people. But what we must not forget is that history has witnessed as radical revolutions in religion as in governments, economies, and human knowledge. If mankind gets past its present crisis, if the threat of Communism dis- appears and a genuine era of freedom ensues, out of that new liberty a new religion might be born, as different from what we have now as Christianity was from paganism. In the meantime one can only wait: the creative waiting in which one struggles to send one's roots deeper into life and reconquer for oneself, in the openness toward Being, the primitive simplicities that our civilization has almost entirely lost and without which life itself has no meaning- no, none at all. GEORGE BOAS In considering the return to religion of the "leaders of culture" in English speaking countries, the question of genuine conversion must not be omitted. Conversions occur in all ranks of society, in all professions and trades, from agnosticism to Roman Catholicism, from one Protestant sect to another, and, I believe, from Roman Catholicism to Protestant sects. They occur in the young, the middle aged, the old, and the dying. They occur when one is healthy and vigorous and, at least in the case of Jean Cocteau, when under the influence of drugs. There seems to be, in short, no === Page 62 === 462 PARTISAN REVIEW condition of human life, except that of childhood, in which con- versions have not been seen and whatever one may privately think about the naturalistic determinants of such happenings, one cannot dismiss conversion itself as an illusion. But we are interested in this symposium in one set of con- versions, those of intellectuals and particularly those in English speak- ing countries. And since the supernaturalistic causes of conversion by their very nature cannot be explained, we must confine ourselves to ruminating on the states of mind which might prepare an in- tellectual for the reception of such influences. Though it may be true that the early twentieth century was a period when natural science seemed supreme, yet one must not forget the influence of natural science itself in stimulating religious emotions. No scientist who had any feeling of responsibility to vera- city ever maintained that he and his colleagues had explained the whole universe as a whole. At most such total explanation was a hope, a program which some day might be carried out, but which in fact never had been carried out. There were of course certain writers, like the Duke of Argyll, who were so enthusiastic about scientific law that they identified it with the Will of God. But even the toughest minds were more given to proclaiming that some day this grand design would be filled in than to announcing its completion in their writings. But one did not have to await the coming of Christianity into the Occident to find people who refused to suspend judgment and wait patiently for the great day to dawn. The early Stoics were in- dulging in religious lyricism long before the Christian era opened and the tradition was carried along, as all students of the history of philosophy know, until in such bits of literature as Seneca's Nine- tieth Epistle one finds passages which might just as well have been written by a Christian Father. Those of our contemporaries who insist on total explanations, misusing to be sure the word "explana- tion," are in precisely the same state of mind as I imagine Cleanthes and later Seneca were in. Just as the Pagans identified the artist who had planned and made the cosmos with Zeus, so our contemporaries of this type identify him with God. Neither the former nor the latter stop to think that both Zeus and God have had dramatic histories and that the deity born on Mount Ida and suckled by a goat could === Page 63 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 463 no more have created and maintained the cosmos than the Yahveh who walked in gardens could have done so. In the second place, ever since the publication of Kant's first Critique, and possibly earlier, the gap between essence and existence, between logic and fact, between reason and observation, has been widened rather than narrowed. This gap may be called either an absurdity or a mystery, and the noun one uses will depend largely on one's temperament. Though such gaps do not seem scandalous to me, they do seem scandalous to many of my colleagues in the various departments of philosophy throughout the country. But the absurdity can be wiped out if one attributes it to the creative power of a divine will, which by its very divinity is not open to scrutiny and to which one must submit oneself in humility. The mystery is equally potent in generating other mysteries, until one flatly states that at what will be called "the heart of the universe" there is operating a power whose plans, desires, motives and so on are all inaccessible to the reason. The anti-intellectualism of the second half of the nineteenth century was one of the most powerful trends of the times. There arise immediately to one's memory names like those of Vaihinger, Peirce, Bradley, James, Freud, Henri Poincaré, as well as those of their teachers and disciples. The flight from reason was certainly justified in some of its forms. But as far as the leaders of culture were concerned, it often entailed a flight into un-reason. For not even today has Dewey's philosophical reconstruction been fulfilled. But how easy was it for a man educated in a theistic tradition, a tradition which had modified his whole vocabulary, to identify the non-rational heart of things with the one being which had operated non-rationally. And after giving "real assent" to the existence of such a being, what was there to prevent his attributing to it all the other mysterious traits which religion had endowed it with? To swallow the central causal mystery and to gag at the peripheral theological mysteries was to show an inexcusable cowardice. What is more unacceptable in the Incarnation or the Blessed Trinity or trans- substantiation than in the existence of an anthropomorphic cause of all things? When one has reached the realm of un-reason, one can either stop short or else begin elaborating a mythology. A dissenter at this point might remark that as far as mythology is concerned, one had a large choice. One could resort to Pagan or === Page 64 === 464 PARTISAN REVIEW Hebraic or Christian mythologies, to say nothing of the various oriental varieties, less well-known but easily discoverable in any public library. Even had one turned to Christianity in one's distress, there was still an embarrassment of riches. Should one become a Gnostic, a Marcionite, a Montanist, an Arian, an Athanasian? Should one become an Orthodox Catholic, a Nestorian, a Roman Catholic? Should one become an Anglican, an American Episcopalian, a Calvinist, a Lutheran, a Baptist, a Unitarian, a Universalist? It is interesting to observe that most intellectuals are converted to the dominant religion of their country. Few Frenchmen have been con- verted to the Church of England; few Americans to Greek Orthodoxy. One who has not been converted can only surmise what happens in such a field and runs the risk of making a fool of himself if he does. But I venture to guess that the soul hungry for grace feels a certain solitude, a certain detachment from his fellows, which impels him to seek others of his inclination. A man converted to eighteenth- century deism would be as lonely after his conversion as before. But a man converted to Roman Catholicism, if American, would at once be admitted into the fellowship of twenty-five million people, which in turn is but a small fraction of the total membership of that society. Moreover, if he is innocent of history, he will also think that the Church springs directly from Saint Peter, and that the society with which he has become identified has a divine lineage and that his fellows are no upstarts who arose in the sixteenth century or the nineteenth century, but really include the community of all the saints and martyrs. Thus both his intellectual education and his sentiments com- bine to orient him towards one of the major ecclesiastical organiza- tions. There is, however, another psychological element which must not be overlooked. Our intellectual, our leader of culture, is often a man who wants absolute standards of beauty and goodness as well as of truth. To him, if one may judge by his writings, a standard loses force if it is valid in a system of relations, whether those rela- tions be social, psychological, or material. The variants in human cultures, in individual needs, in methods of measurement; the im- possibility of applying a universal standard to actual deeds and artifacts; the gap between essence and existence; are enough to make many of us welcome a relativistic system as a precise statement of === Page 65 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 465 what experience gives us. Nor is there anything uncertain about such statements. To state the weight of a body in a formula which in- cludes altitude and latitude is indeed more closely related to the truth than to state it in a formula which omits them. But the idea seems to have arisen that in ethical and aesthetic matters there are statements which define and measure values in utter detachment from any human concerns. The Good is not the good as seen, felt, desired, measured, destroyed, created, suffered for by any man; it transcends all history, all time and space; and yet it can be used as a standard by beings who are in essence historical creatures. How the Eternal descends into the Temporal is, to be sure, as great a mystery as the Incarnation, but the person who has been con- verted would not shun it on that account. If the eternal standards do not apply to human acts and artifacts, that is because of our wickedness, our estrangement from God, our ignorance, our weak- ness, our inherent—or inherited—sinfulness. It is interesting that in scientific matters the gap between what happens and what law prescribes is usually attributed to the frailty of the law, not to the inherent wickedness of matter. But when it is a question of human beings, one feels no need of adjusting the law to the facts. The facts must be amended to fit the law. If this does not seem unreasonable, and if a man can be over- come by the awe which most of us feel at the merest glimpse of the cosmic order, then clearly a sense of humility arises. One need not be a Roman Catholic to feel one's insignificance. Many a pagan, many an atheist has felt it. But, if I may be permitted to slip into dogma, most people in the Western World do not seem to enjoy this feeling. An institutionalized theism, such as Catholic- ism, with a highly sys- tematized body of metaphysics behind it, alleviates one's sense of hum- ility by convincing one that, regardless of what science may say, Man is the darling of the cosmos. The crude anthropomorphism of the Sunday School hymns may be laughed aside, but nevertheless the universe will be related to the being of a central cause who is the perfection of human nature. One will be permitted to communicate either directly or through ritual with this cause. The human race will be given cosmic status. Since the two major religions of the English speaking world grant their adherents a certain latitude in interpreting their theological dogmas, if not in practicing their religious rites, one === Page 66 === 466 PARTISAN REVIEW can still be an intellectual, a leader of culture, while denying the law of contradiction and the lessons of history. This in itself would explain why disappointed, lonely, and frustrated souls seek peace and companionship in a community of fellow-believers. When the re- construction in philosophy has been completed, and people have become reconciled to time and change and diversity, then conver- sions to traditional religions may be rarer. That moment has not come. The present state of the western mind emerged into print about 1905. It took over three hundred years for the Church itself to be established as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The naturalistic program promised too much too soon. But unless we have a reversion to barbarism through war, we may still expect that the domain of the scientific method will spread rather than shrink. On the other hand, what is a better agent of war than the conviction that human beings are incurably wicked and irrational? CLEMENT GREENBERG All the factors you suggest play their part in the present revival of religiosity among intellectuals—and still others besides. One factor attracts another, so that they converge in what seems like a concert, not of individuals, but of the "objective" forces of society. But you should have pointed out that the religious revival seems confined largely to literary intellectuals, and that among these it is the poets who are most affected. I want to restrict my remarks to the state of mind among these latter. Nowadays they decide the literary climate. T. S. Eliot first brought to our attention that "dissociation of sensibility," that divergence between thought and feeling which, he says, began to manifest itself in English poetry with Milton. It had, however, begun elsewhere and its effects were already noticeable on the Continent before they became apparent in English literature. Formally, the disassociation dates from Descartes' claim that the subject receives his surest guarantee of the fact that he exists from the presence of his own thought. Thought becomes the prima facie evidence of truth and throws out of court whatever is reported === Page 67 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 467 by direct perception or intuition or affect without being manipulated by the "categories of understanding." The truth is not what is felt but what works and is consistent with itself. The result is a split in consciousness, between the conative and the cognitive, the subjective and the objective. In the end we fall prey to a kind of collective schizophrenia. This schizophrenia is part of the discomfort of our civilization. It is painful to be unable to assent to the data of immediate aware- ness and to be compelled to act only upon that which is derived from the operations upon experience of "objective," detached reason. How intense by comparison is the comfort of believing what we feel. And how richer seeming. Romanticism and all the revivals of religion and religiosity since the eighteenth century are attempts to restore the validity of the data of feeling. I am not saying anything new here. But I do think it necessary at this moment to repeat with added emphasis that latterday revivals of religion are still part of that which, under the name of Romanticism, is spurned by so many of the revivers themselves. And that, essentially, Romanticism is a reaction against the failure of scientific description to confirm what is "anschaulich" in ourselves and the world around us. It is obvious why poets are restive in the presence of the scientific or naturalist attitude. Our total, our felt sense of reality-which is what art speaks for and to-has never yet been contained within the rules of logic and verification. It is therefore of the essence of art that it should deal with inconsistencies, maintaining them un- resolved (or in suspension, as it were). But it was only with the real rise of science that the poet became susceptible to the reproach of intellectual irresponsibility on that account. By now the gap be- tween poetic practice and actual knowledge has grown too great and the reconciling formulas outworn. There are, and have been, poets -Yeats was one-who believe that art as such is its own warrant, and therefore the warrant of everything necessary to it. But there are other poets-and the circumstances of our day seem to increase their number-who cannot feel safe in the practice of their art unless its lack of logical consistency receive the sanction of some all- embracing, extra-aesthetic authority, such an authority as would hold good for more than simply art. This authority is to be found most conveniently in religions. Among religions Christianity, with its === Page 68 === 468 PARTISAN REVIEW beautiful paradoxes of the Trinity and Transubstantiation, lends itself particularly well. Once we believe in these, we are absolved of any except the most empirical crimes against the rules of evidence. Thomas Aquinas to the contrary notwithstanding. We can believe once more in the data of our feelings, and the art whose substance they furnish becomes "responsible" again. In theory at least, the dis- association of sensibility is healed. I have, of course, simplified the process, repeating what is already well known, in order to describe it. The fact is that no amount of de- voutness is able, in these times, to protect religious sanctions or symbols in art from the pressure of naturalism with its rules of evidence. This is shown by the irony omnipresent in successful con- temporary poetry, religious and otherwise: that irony which remains literary art's last defense against the disassociation of sensibility. And woe to the poet who lets this irony lapse. The mysteries of religion have still other specious charms for the modern artist. They promise profundity. Science has told us nothing about the absolute ground of being, and I can well see how, in view of this, some people might find superficial the sureness and clarity that science displays in treating what is knowable. The knowable, that about which verifiable propositions can be formulated, may strike them as shallow simply because it can be known. This kind of sensibility, is however, relatively new. It dates from Romantic- ism and the beginning of bourgeois society's refusal to confront the difference between its ideals and its actuality; it was only then that the unknowable became identified with the "profound," which in its turn was established as a genre almost-the genre of the allusive and illusive, of vaguenesses, hints, of clues that lead nowhere, of assumptions that are neither defined nor corroborated, of big words. We are through with the big words and what they advertise; their aesthetic credit, at least, is exhausted. But in the name of "pro- fundity" we still long to dissolve our art and ourselves in some ulti- mate vagueness or confusion. And what promises this better than religion? Yet the aspiration is an aesthetic, not a moral or religious one. === Page 69 === 469 IRVING HOWE In most of the recent literary manifestations of religious feeling there is a conspicuous scarcity of credible reference to that old hero: God. Intellectuals attracted to religion invoke theology, myth, metaphysics and psychoanalysis, but seldom publicly ask or answer the central question facing anyone who professes to faith in the twentieth century: do I, how can I, believe in the existence of God? In a previous age religious discussion could take for granted His existence and consequently assume its subject to be the proper fulflment of His will. This latter assumption is now possible only to those whose faith is mere complacence or those who tread the choreography of dogma to avoid the problem of belief. Only confusion can result from a denial that religion requires, as its inalienable premise, the acceptance of a supernatural being or force: white-whiskered patriarch or nonpersonal mover, it does not matter. It is therefore difficult to take very seriously the religious claims of those intellectuals who, even as they shuffle the theological cards of Guilt, Redemption and Original Sin, seem quite unable to credit the reality of God. Their God is usually a creature projecting their anxiety. Himself rather embarrassed before the problem of His reality. Cocteau writes to Maritain that "All I know that suit Him are extreme art and Orders"; and while this rather limited knowledge may reveal something about Cocteau, how many readers of his letter to Maritain can believe them a vehicle of true faith? The same difficulty inheres even, and perhaps particularly, in the most serious religious expression of our day, the theology of crisis. From the point of view of the serious believer, is there not a danger that this theology, with its unresolved dialectic of faith and doubt, might too easily become an anodyne indefinitely postponing a resolution of the crisis in belief? The modern religious intellectual rightly feels Dostoevsky to be an ancestor, for no one knew better than he the symbiotic relationship between faith and scepticism in the heart of the religious aspirant. But I doubt that Dostoevsky would take kindly to the religious claims of twentieth-century intellectuals, for it is precisely the mark of his seriousness that his alter-ego Shatov, while unable in honesty to utter a blunt statement of belief, yet recognizes that the mere struggle for belief is not an adequate basis === Page 70 === 470 PARTISAN REVIEW for religion. Some religious intellectuals who are ready to replace faith by need have recently taken Kafka as their Jacob-figure, but it should be remembered that even if one grants that Kafka's struggle was for God, Jacob wrestled with God. Is there not a point, then, at which the theology of crisis, at least as taken by literary people, may come to seem a reflection of an ineradicable prevalence of scepticism? And this is the essential weakness of the modern religious intel- lectuals: that with a few exceptions such as Eliot, they do not seem finally to believe. They are engaged in a herculean effort to shake off the nineteenth century but, whatever else, they will not revive the dead God. For modern man has lost the possibility of belief: all that remains is ritual and desperate striving. Our real task is to ful- fil the nineteenth century; our fate, whatever its terminus, is mun- dane. The trend to a literary religion without God directs our attention to two significant weaknesses in our culture. There is a fatal resistance to ideas in contemporary American writing, which usually reacts to the burden of mind either by caving in or gradually discarding most of the burden. The religious component of our recent writing strikes me as largely unserious and impressionistic, sometimes lugubriously flippant, often a mere exercise in dialectic as thoroughly rationalist in spirit as the thought of the deplored sceptics. I have, for quite accidental reasons, particularly noticed this in the articles of those young Jewish intellectuals who are preparing to return to the God of Moses, sometimes along the path of the Baal Shem Tov. (The Jewish revival is different from its Christian counterpart largely in its greater sentimentality.) The other weakness in our literary culture which the religious revival aggravates is our addiction to a "pragmatic" mode of thought. Most of the recent religionists do not ask us to accept God because they are ready to assert that the statement God exists is true, but because they feel it might be useful or good to behave as if it were. I take this approach to religion, as to anything else, as a sign of intellectual disintegration, akin to the brittle quest for novelty which leads readers to ask not Is this author right? but Does he have anything new to say? The most prevalent, and to me most objectionable, of such "pragmatic" justifications of religion is that, without it, morality must === Page 71 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 471 collapse. The argument is encountered even in serious writing: des- troy the universally acknowledged source of morality and there can no longer be either justification for moral preference or objective standard of moral categories. Aside from the fact that it ignores the historical evidence that morality managed to collapse in those epochs when it was acknowledged to stem from a universal source, this argument must be rejected because it is fundamentally auth- oritarian in nature: man can behave only under the whip of a celestial overseer. A morality which does not arise from the conscious making of its adherents is unworthy of acceptance; if man cannot evolve both a sustaining morality and a society in which to realize it, then he might as well be left in his muddle. One "pragmatic" test of the religious trend might be valuable: does conversion change significantly the intellectuals' style of life? As far as I can see, most of those intellectuals who turn to religion remain as sceptical, "alienated," and anxiety-ridden as those who do not. Their conversion does not seem to relieve them even of those tensions supposedly unique to the sceptic. Their moral behavior is neither better nor worse than that of any of the rest of us. They fail to find in religion what is supposed to be one of its great values: an enriching community; few of them try to relate themselves to a con- gregation, as, in terms of their dedication, they should. At least in their public behavior, their conversion has not seriously affected their lives; they are in the same fix as the rest of us. (I am not in a position to judge what the religious trend has done to sexuality during the past few decades, but I am convinced that at least the Christian tradition is profoundly opposed to a healthy unfolding of free sexuality-on that Lawrence was right.) A literature may be nourished by a faith or ideology long after faith has decayed and ideology curdled; Eliot's poetry is undoubtedly enriched by his religious faith. But this is not to say that religion could now bring into existence a burgeoning new culture; the his- torical conditions for such a culture, not the least of which would be the sponsorship of a rising social class, are quite absent. In criticism the religious revival seems to me mostly harmful. It has resulted in much vague talk about Christian values, neither defined nor instanced, and in a great deal of party-line readings by critics who once rightly objected to tendentious readings from another === Page 72 === 472 PARTISAN REVIEW party. And it has once more brought to prominence the obnoxious assumption that philosophical naturalism is somehow incompatible with the deepest relationship to poetry or the profoundest acceptance of the "tragic view of life." Why life should become any the less tragic when the supernatural is rejected I do not know, but I do know that there is something painfully provincial and au courant in the view that the "the proper idols" of the naturalist critic must be Whitman, Dreiser and Farrell and that Dostoievsky, Kafka and James are be- yond his province. This, in effect, is to deny an essential value of literature: that taste surmounts opinion; that in great writing there is a common secret, a binding thread, which holds us all alike; that the non-believer can respond to the language and feeling of Donne's Holy Sonnets because the language and feeling of poetry are ultimate- ly universal and beyond subject matter. As for myself: I have no belief in and feel no need for super- natural sanction or support. More than most intellectuals I remain loyal, not to one or another doctrine, but to the underlying values of the 1930's. The religious turn must consequently seem to me, quite without offense to individuals, part of a historical moment of sickness—not merely the epochal sickness we all acknowledge, but a more immediate sickness within our sickness. This view opens me, I know, to some perils as a writer and human being. I hope, however, for a vindication from experience—and if that is not forthcoming, my disappointment will be the least of our troubles. PAUL KECSKEMETI Are intellectuals more religiously minded today than they were in the recent past? One thing seems certain: in the intellectual circles of the West, unmitigated loathing and derision are no longer de rigueur when it comes to discussing religious phenomena. The typical intellectual of the turn of the century was militantly anti- clerical and anti-religious. He felt that the battle was joined between the forces of good, represented by radical social opposition and materialist humanism on the one hand, and the forces of evil, repre- sented by vested interests, established authorities, and organized religion on the other. His place was on the side of the forces of good; it was his task to combat reaction, darkness and traditional religion. === Page 73 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 473 This general attitude survives today in a somewhat modified form among orthodox Marxists, especially of the Stalinist type. But in intellectual circles outside the Marxist camp, the old crusading spirit is gone, even though many of the basic beliefs and attitudes of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century progressivism still survive. By and large, we find no outright rejection of religion in these circles; what we do see most often is either qualified criticism or sympathetic appreciation. In this sense, we may speak of “greater religious sympathies” existing among intellectuals. But I do not think that this change can be correctly described as a movement from “lack of religion” or “rejection of religion” towards “more religion.” It seems to me, rather, that the earlier type of intellectual was a more “religious” man than his present-day successor who pays his respects to traditional religious forms and beliefs. In fact, what do we mean by “religion”? I propose to define this term for the purposes of this discussion as meaning a system of beliefs and practices serving to secure “salvation” for the individual and the group—where “salvation” means the elimination of all evil and imperfection from human existence, the attainment of perfec- tion. It makes no difference in this respect whether “salvation” is con- ceived of as a this-worldly or other-worldly affair, and whether it is thought of as dispensed by God or by man himself; we have to do with “religion”—though with very different types of religion—in either case. The typical progressive intellectual of around 1900 had be- liefs which can be interpreted adequately only as beliefs in salvation. His thinking was strongly utopian: he saw an ideally perfect society ahead, and more often than not just around the corner. In that society, he held, there would be no such man-made evils as exploita- tion, inequality and injustice. But more than that, the ideal society of the future would progressively get rid of the evils of “nature” too, such as illness, old age, and ultimately, death itself. The idea of overcoming death is, in fact, essential to all religions as doctrines of salvation, for death is the archetype and paradigm of the evils from which man seeks salvation. In sum, we may say that the religious man is one who is certain of being supported by an invincible force that will eventually deliver him and his group from all evil, including death; and that the typical progressive intellectual of the recent === Page 74 === 474 PARTISAN REVIEW past was religious in this sense, although strongly opposed to tradition- al forms of religion. For the progressive intellectual's religion was completely this-worldly; in the name of rationality, science and in- tellectual honesty, he rejected all beliefs that could not eventually be confirmed by scientifically controlled experience. The possession of a this-worldly religion gave the intellectual of fifty years ago great strength and peace of mind. He made the best of two worlds. Nothing required him to lower his sights, to settle for less than perfection; and at the same time, he did not ask to be believed merely on faith. All his promises would be honored in cash, at face value, whereas other religions pay in imaginary cur- rency out of a treasury of fictitious entities. Could anyone doubt the moral, intellectual and practical superiority of the progressive intellectual's creed? And yet, we can see today, after fifty years and a number of wars and revolutions, that the progressive intellectual's creed was utterly vulnerable. For in spite of the radical elimination of vested interests, established authorities and organized religion in Russia, per- fection in the shape of freedom, equality, non-violence and justice failed to materialize. To his bitter humiliation, the progressive in- tellectual, too, had to learn that it was impossible for him to maintain both perfectionism as to the ends sought and deference to the verdict of experience in so far as the attainment of the ends was concerned. Like other founders of religions before him, he, too, had to make a choice between abandoning either the idea of salvation or the standard of this-worldliness. In either case, a radical change of attitude towards traditional forms of religion became inevitable. Obviously, conversion to some older form of religion will result if one retains faith in salvation but despairs of attaining it with this-worldly experience. There are such cases on record among former- ly radical intellectuals, but I think they are vastly outnumbered by those who made the other choice and abandoned the idea of salvation rather than that of this-worldly standards of experience. Those who make such a choice will become resigned to imperfection and death; they will not recognize any of the visible, real forces in the world today as strong and pure enough to overcome and eliminate all evil. But they will not become cynics for that. They will tenaciously cling to "ideal" values such as Truth, Beauty and Goodness. They will be === Page 75 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 475 attached to cultural progress and democracy. But, having lost their faith in an invincible force guaranteeing the realization of all these values, they will be troubled. Just because they cannot achieve faith in salvation, they will look back with nostalgia upon the ages which had unbroken faith. Intact faith, though impossible to achieve, will appear to them as good in itself, and religion as something valuable rather than sinister. It is the man who has no religion as a working faith who will show sympathy to all religions and to the idea of religion as such. The religious man has no "idea" of religion; he has his faith which embodies salvation, and he rejects all rival faiths as embodiments of evil. It seems to me that nostalgic longing for religion is more characteristic of today's typical intellectual than the possession of religion. This is why he asks such questions as whether culture and the good society can exist without some religious underpinning; this is why he "envies" (as Pierre Emmanuel recently put it) those who lack both moral righteousness and intellectual honesty but have faith and enthusiasm. This longing for religion assumes many forms among present-day intellectuals. Some try to rehabilitate religion in terms of "scientific" standards of validity: has not psychology shown, with William James, that "religious experience" is a perfectly straightforward form of experience, with unique pragmatic results? Is not physics shown, with Schroedinger, that material mass is not the stuff of everything? Others probe epistemology, and conclude that, since no axioms can be disproved, it is no intellectual sin to adopt religious axioms, how- ever extravagant. All such efforts are undertaken in the expectation that they will ultimately help the intellectual to overcome his in- ability to believe. I do not think that faith can be achieved in this way; but it is symptomatic of the position of the contemporary in- tellectual that he is diligently exploring all avenues that might lead him to the secret chamber where the coveted Grail is stored. The plain fact is that one cannot lose two religions— the tradi- tional one, and the flamboyant utopianism of the progressive intel- lectual—without having a bad conscience about it. It is this bad conscience which, I think, is at the base of today's "turn towards religion." Some other considerations are also involved. Man has a deep need for salvation, and when the worst comes to the worst and the fate of society is about to be decided by mobilized masses, the === Page 76 === 476 PARTISAN REVIEW masses will follow those who promise them salvation rather than those who deny its possibility. This eminently practical, political consideration also points to the desirability of faith. Yet, of course, to be convinced of the desirability of faith is not the same thing as to have faith; to possess an idea of religion is not the same thing as to possess religion. Most intellectuals who can achieve the first but not the second of these alternatives can appraise their own position only in negative terms. Is desire for something not forever inferior to its possession? But I wonder whether this self-condemnation of the man of good will, strong intellect and feeble faith is without appeal. Would it not be possible to find positive potentialities inherent in this position? I cannot develop this hint here any further, but I would at least raise the question. DWIGHT MACDONALD I take "religious belief" to mean a belief that God exists. And God? Not certainly the Old Testament Jahveh, with a beard and a human, all too human personality. Nor, to me anyway, the other extreme: the Eddington-Jeans kind of God, whose presence manifests itself in the physical order of the universe. That the stars run in their courses, that the atoms split as per schedule—these reg- ularities I can accept without calling in God to explain them. In such I have not found to be necessary." No, I take God to mean some kind of supernatural consciousness or order that is related, in a value sense (good, bad), to our life here on earth. This God I can neither accept nor reject. In fact, I cannot imagine him. This insensibility is not because I am unconcerned with the moral problems that have driven men in the past to religious belief, and that today, in the age of Nazism, Stalinism and bombs from A to H, have understandably made many religious converts. On the contrary, since the 'thirties, when my mind was busy with all sorts of deep social, economic and historical problems (theories of capitalist crisis, historical materialism, unemployment, progressive v. imperialist wars, etc.) that now seem to me superficial, I have come to be in- terested in ethics to such an extent that I am constantly charged, by === Page 77 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 477 the people Philip Rahv has named the "secular radicals," with being religious myself. Yet such, unfortunately, is not the case. I say "un- fortunately" because, from a purely intellectual point of view, God is a hypothesis I found to be, if not necessary, at least most convenient. For two reasons: (1) I'm compelled to recognize the existence of two worlds which don't seem to connect: that of "science," where judgments can be established objectively, on the basis of quantitative criteria (measurements), and that of "values," where judgments are ultimate- ly subjective and criteria are qualitative (one's own personal moral belief and aesthetic taste-these may be communicated to others and may influence them, for men do have "something in common" in those fields, but they can not be established with the precision and universality of scientific judgments, since the appeal is a sub- jective one, from "me" to "you," and "you" is always different from "me"). Despite John Dewey's technically impressive effort to bridge the gap, in his A Theory of Valuation, I see it as still gap-ing. For some reason, this dualism makes me uncomfortable, and I try in- stinctively to show that the good also "works," that honesty is the best policy and beauty is truth, truth beauty. The most satisfactory bridge between the two worlds is . . . God. But, for me, the bridge is out. (2) An even more important intellectual function of God is to serve as an ultimate base for one's system of values. Discussing the basis of one's moral code is like taking apart one of those wooden Russian eggs, each of which encloses a still smaller one: "I believe it is wrong to kill people." "Why?" "Because I have respect for humanity." "Why?" "Because I am human and recognize my brother's kinship." "Why?" etc., etc. If one believes in God, one finally gets down to an ultimate egg that is solid and so ends the taking-apart (analytical) process. God is simply and logically an absolute, an end and not a means, unique in our-that is, some of us-experience. But an unbeliever gets down to an egg that is hollow like the rest, but that contains no further egg. One's belief turns out to rest, ultimately, on air-"I just feel it to be so." This doesn't bother me too much emotionally, but it is undeniably awk- ward from a logical point of view. Yet what can I do? I just don't seem to have the knack for === Page 78 === 478 PARTISAN REVIEW religious experience; I'm tone-deaf when it comes to God. So many of my fellow-men, past and present, have felt at home with the idea of God that I must admit it is a deep and apparently permanent human trait. Yet I'm sure that, if they had not, the idea would never have occurred to me at all. Not even in adolescence, when many Americans' personal experience seems to parallel the experience of the race (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) did I experience the slightest quiver of religious feeling. Nor do I now, although the brutal irrationality of the modern world has made me understand and sympathize with others' religious beliefs, and although in sur- prisingly many ways I find myself agreeing more with contemporary religious-minded people than with the "secular radicals." God, at- tractive though the idea is from an intellectual standpoint, simply does not engage my feelings or imagination. This is all the more a pity since I have lost confidence in the dominant non-religious social tendency in this country today: the Marx-cum-Dewey approach represented by Sidney Hook (pure), the liberal weeklies (debased), the Reuther brothers and Senator Humphrey ("grass roots"), the Americans for Democratic Action (official), and Partisan Review (highbrow). This seems to me to have failed politically, culturally, and even scientifically. Politically: It has either failed or, where it has won power, has produced the horrors of Soviet Communism or the dull mediocrity of the Attlee and Truman governments. Lenin and Kautsky are the antithetical political types it has produced; both seem to me unsatisfactory. Culturally: Its close connection with nineteenth-century philistine progressivism, wellmeaning but thoroughly bourgeois, has meant that the creators of living culture, from Stendhal to Eliot, have existed outside it and mostly opposed to it. As Leslie Fiedler has recently noted, this split affects Partisan Review itself: the editors have had to rely largely on writers whom they, as ideologues, consider "re- actionary" and "obscurantist." Scientifically: Confidence in scientific method, unchecked by an independent system of human values, has encouraged an indis- criminate development of technique which now gives us Ford's monstrous River Rouge plant, the H-Bomb, and the Nazi-Soviet organizations for controlling and conditioning human beings. This === Page 79 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 479 is a misuse of science, it is true, but one implicit in the ideology I am criticizing. For a more humane use of scientific method, grounded not on technique, know-how, and "does it work?" but rather on a value judgment as to what life should be like, one must turn to thinkers quite out of the liberal-socialist mainstream: anarchists like Kropotkin, decentralists like Geddes, Borsodi and Gandhi, Utopians like Fourier. The questions that now interest me are not the "big" ones: What To Do About Russia?, Is Planning Incompatible with Capital- ism?, Will There Be a Depression?, Does America Need a Labor Party or a Revitalized Democratic Party-or just a Dozen More TVA's?, Is World Government the Answer to the H-Bomb? These seem to me either unimportant or unanswerable. So long as the dominant areas of the world are organized in vast super-states, whose economic base is large-scale industry and whose political base is tens of millions of helpless "citizens," I see no hope of significant improve- ment. Nor do I see any signs that any considerable number of my fellow-men are now in a mood to break up such monstrosities into communities human in scale. So in terms of mass action (i.e., of politics as the word is now generally understood), our problems ap- pear to be insoluble. They may yield, I believe, only to a more modest and, so-to-speak, intimate approach. Reform, reconstruction, even revolution must begin at a much more basic level than we imagined in the confident thirties. It is the "small" questions that now seem to me significant. What is a good life? How do we know what's good and what's bad? How do people really live and feel and think in their everyday lives? What are the most important human needs-taking myself, as that part of the universe I know best, or at least have been most closely associated with, as a starting point? How can they be satisfied best, here and now? Who am I? How can I live lovingly, truthfully, pleasurably? The thinkers I have found most helpful in answering, or at least talking about, these questions are: Christ, Socrates, Diderot, Jefferson, Thoreau, Herzen, Proudhon, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Simone Weil and Albert Schweitzer. Most of these are religious, which is natural enough, since the above questions are the kind that, in our age, are asked mostly by religious people. Yet, although when I read === Page 80 === 480 PARTISAN REVIEW Tolstoy and Gandhi I see the logical convenience of the God-hypo- thesis, it does not move me emotionally; nor do I feel a spiritual need for it. I can believe that man is an end and not a means, and that to love one another is the greatest duty and pleasure, without giving this belief a religious basis. I suppose the period I feel closest to, in my values, is the Enlightenment, from which all that is most at- tractive in socialist as well as bourgeois-democratic doctrine derives. WILLIAM PHILLIPS In a sense, the Zeitgeist is never wrong. It is simply the way history looks at itself, the coincidence between what is happen- ing and what people think should happen. But there is a difference between a local mood and a world mood, between intellectual fashion and Zeitgeist. And the religious revival confronting us is so far restricted to certain literary circles in America, with very little effect on American thinking as a whole, none at all on European thought. Speaking for myself, I do not feel touched at any vital point by the question of religion as it has been raised. Perhaps this is because I have just returned from a short stay in Europe, and I cannot help seeing the turn to religion here as a side-show, though I cannot exclude the possibility that my native heathenism has cut me off from more than one variety of religious experience. Anyway, this is how the whole thing strikes me. 1) It is primarily a literary tour-de-force. 2) It is especially American. 3) It has very little to do with American life as a whole. 4) It is neither a genuine literary nor religious movement. 5) It is one symptom of a general breakdown of beliefs and values. 6) It raises a lot of boring questions. Let me take my last observation first. Since no new facts or ideas about religion have emerged, the formal argument tends to resurrect the clichés of undergraduate philosophy. I hate to recall the long evenings of youth filled with debates over the existence of God. And when the argument is not on a formal plane, it becomes a question of how charmingly one can confess his ignorance and sincerity, and present himself as a man of true feeling. I am not implying that the religious experience of a superior writer is without interest; on the contrary, it is often of great literary and biographical interest, because of the tension between the search for a transcendent === Page 81 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 481 principle and the writer's purely secular experience. But ,even so, the experience of religion is not necessarily more interesting than, say, the experience of death, or sex, or psychoanalysis. What is actually at stake is not the question of religion, but the question of temperament, of allegiance to one or another literary school, and of general uprootedness. For what we have now in America is not so much a turn to religion as a turn to religiosity, which is not at all the same thing. There has been virtually no serious presentation of the problems of belief, faith, creed, the value of exist- ing religious institutions. Only T. S. Eliot has made such an effort, and he has done so in terms of British institutions and traditions. Nor can there be said to be any widespread or deeply-rooted revival of religion in this country, crucially involving the life of the nation and the life of the individual. I have not been able to observe any difference between the way of life of those who profess some kind of religious belief or feeling and those who do not-or any difference between their beliefs on other questions except that many writers are generally devoted to the "new criticism," to some theory of myth, and to the idea of tradition that stems from T. S. Eliot and his followers in this country. The conse- quences of religious belief seem to be mainly literary, which smacks more of art fetishism than of true belief. And I, for one, can not be impressed by a faith or a morality that finds its justifications in the strategies of literature. Besides, the result so far of the new religiosity is not a religious literature but a religious attitude to literature, which is a reversal of the situation that produced the great religious art of the past. Dante, for example, did not have a religious attitude to literature; on the contrary, many of the purposes and consequences of the Divine Comedy were terribly secular. It is simply that Dante's faith was one dimension in the range and fervor of his experience. So far as I could observe there has not been any religious revival in Europe comparable to what is taking place here. Nor has there ever been one. For one thing, the church has a more vital relation to both the public and private lives of the people, and, generally, the asser- tion of a religious position, far from being a literary act, has serious social consequences. Also Europe today needs an active faith even more than America, because the terrible dilemmas of European life === Page 82 === 482 PARTISAN REVIEW require immediate salvation. Most writers abroad have adopted a secular faith, turning to politics for redemption, and have committed themselves either to Stalinism or some variety of democratic socialism. And those who still invoke a religious faith have either become en- tangled in some kind of reactionary politics or, like Bernanos, have added a Christian dimension to socialist values. When it comes to such modern figures as Bernanos, Kierkegaard, or even Silone, we cannot but be impressed by their seriousness. And while I cannot connect myself with their faith, I must stand in awe of their moral ambitions, their ruthless self-examination, their suffering. In some way I am forced to measure myself not against their beliefs, but against their complete humanity. Even their failures typify the moral failures of our time, and help remind us that neither the clerical nor the secular tradition has been able so far to lift human existence to a moral plane. But I would be more impressed by the new religiosity if it did not preen itself so on its imagination and profundity. It looks down on the secular mind, and is quite ready to dismiss scientific and naturalist thinking as arid, schematic, and generally insensitive to the mysteries of literary and human existence. And most writers who have made their peace with religion seem to assume that creative- ness and the power of the sensibility are somehow on the side of God and tradition, and that they are therefore endowed with some special insight into the forces of the human underground, particularly into the nature of evil. Now there is no denying that many scientific minds are quite insensitive to anything that cannot be contained in a syllogism, while at its best what we call the literary mind takes in areas of experience closed to the canons of logic and consistency. But this is no reason to assume that all the struttings and confusions of writers, especially in fields they are unequipped to handle, arc a sign of superior wisdom, or that a confession of faith is necessarily a mark of special profundity. I do not mean to question one's right to believe, so long as one is privately fortified by his belief. What I do question, however, is the claim of the new religiosity to special insight into the problems of art, morality and politics. When the new religionists dismiss secular thinking as "village atheism," they are simply standing on its head the history of modern thought. For it is the secular curiosity, === Page 83 === RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS 483 restlessness, and skepticism of the "big city" that has opened up wider areas of consciousness against the provincial obstinacy and depressed faith of "the village." True enough, what we know and the values we live by come from many sources, from Hellenism, from the humanist tradition, from science, from Judaism, and from Christianity as well. But while we have been shaped, in different ways, by all these forces, we are also called upon to revaluate and reshape ourselves and the world we live in, and I am sure we cannot do so by retreat into faith and mystery. A long time ago when I knew I was no longer a boy and wondered whether I would ever be a man, I found myself literally flooded by what I can best describe as religious feelings rather than religious beliefs, which I could not understand and which I was content not to understand. Though I had little interest in theology, I felt the existence of God as I felt my own existence, but what was more important I was both elated and pained by the feeling that I was intimately connected with some larger order: elated because I was not completely adrift, pained because my sins and failures were subjected to eternal scrutiny. Above all, I felt both responsible and resigned, which, I take it, is the way man finds his potentialities and limitations through religion. The youthful elements of the experience I have recalled are obvious; still I find myself cherishing it, perhaps for no better reason than that I share a common weakness for cherishing everything that happens to me, though I might con- fess I sometimes think it is one of the few bonds I had at the time with my fervently religious father. But what I would like to emphasize is that I was not disposed in any way to connect my religious ex- perience in the years that followed with my explorations of literature, science, politics, or even with all my observations of the world about me. I am also immodestly reluctant to attribute any moral achieve- ments of mine to a divine order, nor can I honestly make some principle of evil the scapegoat for my own moral failings. === Page 84 === Diana Trilling A MEMORANDUM ON THE HISS CASE Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky's Seeds of Treason* is first to appear of the several forthcoming books on the Hiss case. Mr. Toledano is an editor of Newsweek, Mr. Lasky a World-Telegram reporter-both are experienced newspaper men and particularly know- ing in the ways of Communist organization and intrigue. Frankly pro- Chambers, they devote a good part of their book to Chambers' personal history, from his youthful quest for a meaningful purpose in life, through his involvement with the Communist movement and his meeting and subsequent joint espionage with Alger Hiss, to the days of his ordeal in court. But they also amplify the court record with a variety of material gathered in extensive independent research and interviewing. There is an enlightening account, for instance, of Com- munist espionage throughout the world, similar to and contemporay with that in which Hiss and Chambers were engaged. And there is an instructive section dealing with the steady refusal of the Roosevelt ad- ministration to pay any heed to the knowledge constantly being pressed upon it, that there were undercover Communists in high government places, Hiss among them. Mr. Toledano and Mr. Lasky's actual recapitulation of the Congressional hearings and the two trials is perhaps too brief, but it is cogent. Certainly nothing which came out in court is not the more firmly established for being presented against the background they have so painstakingly built up. I say "established" because I speak from the point of view of someone who agrees with the authors of Seeds of Treason that Chambers told the truth and Hiss lied. But what about the many people of good will who followed the case to a quite opposite conclusion-that Cham- bers is a vicious liar and Hiss the innocent victim of his persecution? Is there any possibility that they will change their minds just because they are freshly confronted with the evidence, and with the material Mr. Toledano and Mr. Lasky adduce in its support? I expect not. For * Funk and Wagnalls. $3.50. === Page 85 === THE HISS CASE 485 such is the political and cultural context of the Hiss case that feelings have considerable precedence over reason, especially among Hiss's de- fenders. In addition, the tone of Seeds of Treason is of a kind that is likely to reduce the persuasive power of its facts for the very people it might have hoped to influence. Where our emotions are involved-and wherever there are ideas there are emotions-we all of us tend to hear what we wish to hear, believe what we wish to believe. Evidence, in the sense in which it is sought by the law, is something to which we repair only as it supports our emotions, and it is one of the everlasting miracles of the American jury system, imperfect as it may be, that again and again twelve human beings can be brought together and be disciplined, or discipline them- selves, to try to free themselves of prejudice and reach a decision only on objective grounds. The effort of objectivity which we see demon- strated in a courtroom would probably not be possible were it not for the living presence of a defendant to remind the jury of its respon- sibility. The juror functions in direct and immediate relation to the object of his decision, and this is his great protection against self-delusion. An analogy to the juror at work might be the psychoanalyst at work- both have been warned of their need for an extraordinary consciousness of their unconscious processes. It is a caution that is reinforced for the juror by the judge's last words to him as he files out to make his decision: he is charged to his prime duty of self-awareness. But we who are not in the jury box have no one to charge us to beware of our hidden motives. We are perfectly free to function in relation to ourselves, or to some prejudicial concept of mankind or progress, instead of in relation to immediate fact. Public opinion is seldom face to face with responsibility. Especially in a case like Hiss's, where there are so many historical and political ramifications, our awareness of our unconscious partisanship is likely to be in inverse proportion both to our passion and our pride of conscience. If one dare measure the unmeasurable, I would offer it as my impression that as the public-the articulate public-has lined up for and against Hiss, there has been more conscience on the Hiss side, more consciousness on the side of those who think Hiss guilty. By conscience, I mean a formulated moral intention. By consciousness, I mean an aware- ness of subjective motive. It is those who believe Hiss, much more than those who believe Chambers, who are worried about the consequences of the case, fearful of the uses to which the retrograde forces in this country will put his conviction. Those who believe Chambers are turned more to the past than the future. Hiss's conviction represents a retroac- === Page 86 === 486 PARTISAN REVIEW tive victory for them, the proof they were right in their repeated warn- ings against Communist infiltration. (I am speaking here, obviously, not of the reactionary section of anti-Hiss opinion but of the anti-Com- munist liberals who believe Hiss guilty.) It is not that they are un- concerned with the future, but that they invoke it less frequently than they do the past, and less frequently than they do experience-experience of Communism's methods and goals. But in this very fact that they are so much turned to the past lies the source of their superior conscious- ness. Most anti-Communist liberals have been through the Communist mill, or frighteningly close to it-which has given them a first-hand knowledge of the Communist technique, personnel and idiom; also of the way political partisanship can blind one to glaring political fact. To be a decent person and to have had proof, in one's own political past, of one's power for self-deception is to be forever charged to self- awareness. It means that at least one tries to put evidence before prejudice. But however much more reliable the anti-Hiss side may be in point of weighing evidence, it has not served its country well by its deficiencies of conscience. To hate and fear Communism, to see Hiss's triumphant public career as the triumph of a force which seriously threatens democracy and his downfall as a defeat of this enemy-this is not enough conscience. Not enough, at any rate, for a liberal. Who- ever thinks Hiss guilty but would still think of himself as a liberal has the duty of bringing to the case his most finely tempered understanding of its complexities. The first demand that conscience puts on him is that he separate himself from his undesirable allies, from those who think Hiss guilty because they believe that anyone who is on the side of freedom and Americanism. It has always been true that politics makes strange bed- fellows, but probably never so horribly true as in these last decades in which Communism has not only split the liberals among themselves but also time and again thrown the anti-Communist liberal into the same camp with forces he detests, or should detest, as much as he detests Communists. In the Hiss case, this enforced alignment between anti-Communist liberals and reactionaries is particularly open and distasteful. Who brought Hiss's perfidy to public issue, except the one agency in Washington most suspect for its political motive, the un- American Activities Committee? What is the anti-Hiss press, except the usual rabble-rousers and Red-baiters? What party has most to gain from his conviction, except the Republican Party, and the Republican Party === Page 87 === THE HISS CASE 487 in its most retrograde wing? It is scarcely an attractive company, and the liberal must make a clean break with it. Just as the pro-Hiss liberal claims his right not to be smeared as a Communist just because the Communists agree with him in this case, so the anti-Hiss liberal must insist on his right not to be labelled a reactionary just because re- actionaries agree with him in this case. This voice of conscience is never heard in Mr. Toledano and Mr. Lasky's volume. There is no criticism of the un-American Ac- tivities Committee, no dissociation from its purposes or from the pur- poses of Hearst or the Republican Party. Nor do the authors of Seeds of Treason make any discriminations of judgment on Chambers. Mr. Toledano and Mr. Lasky go beyond believing Chambers told the truth. They apparently regard him as a hero of our times, a martyr to prin- ciple and to the security of the nation. Chambers is their hero, Hiss their villain. It is an unthoughtful and dangerous attitude; in logic, an untenable one. There is nothing Hiss has done which Chambers did not do. It must therefore be Chambers' repentance which makes him a hero. But it would follow, then, that were Hiss to repent, he too would be a hero- unless Mr. Toledano and Mr. Lasky think it is too late for Hiss to repent. But if they think it is too late for Hiss to repent, would they be willing to name the precise date when it became impossible any longer to wipe out the sin of having been a Communist? Naturally, where any crime has been committed—I am setting aside the whole delicate question of the moral difference between a crime committed for personal gain and a crime committed in devotion to a selfless goal-we are more sympathetic to the repentant person than to the unrepentant. But repentance does not retrospectively change a crime into a virtue, any more than our sympathy for a repentant person makes the unrepented crime any the more heinous. It is my sense of Chambers that this is his own moral attitude vis à vis Hiss. Certainly there is nothing in his conduct or in his public pronouncements cal- culated to assert a moral superiority to Hiss. And this does him much credit. The defenders of Hiss have made Chambers out to be a sort of moral monster. They have dreamed up or transmitted on hearsay all manner of impalpable personal charges to explain away the palpable evidence of documents transcribed in Hiss's handwriting or on Hiss's typewriter from government papers available to Hiss. Some of these specific charges either backfired or threatened if used in court-the homosexual charge, for instance, of which Hiss's lawyers === Page 88 === 488 PARTISAN REVIEW made so much in their pre-trial investigations. Only the general al- legation that he was a psychopath was brought to court, and even this turned out to be more of a liability than an asset to the defense. For what Hiss's lawyers failed to realize is that you cannot have things like this only one way: if there are certain criteria for a psychopath, they are as applicable to the psychiatrist—or the defendant—as to the witness. Although the pro-Chambers people find it easy to understand this, they do not seem to understand its corollary in the moral realm— that if it is villainous for Hiss to have been a Communist agent, it is equally villainous for Chambers. Better, of course, that the concepts of heroism or villainy be dropped from the discussion, for here they can only be concepts of journalism, not of serious thought. And not only the personal suffer- ing of the chief protagonists in the case, two men whose lives have been ruined, but also and literally our fate as a nation requires that it be dealt with on a higher than merely journalistic level, like that of Seeds of Treason. Mr. Toledano and Mr. Lasky speak of the case as a tragedy. But the tone of their book is far indeed from the tone of tragedy which, it seems to me, would be bound to accompany any study of the Hiss case which proceeded from a wholesome political premise—the premise that for the case to have served any useful pur- pose there must be salvaged from it a better notion of liberalism. A man in public life, like Hiss, is of necessity a man with many friends. Even among public persons, however, Hiss would appear to have had a special gift of friendship; everywhere one goes these days one meets someone who knew him, either at college or at law school, in Washington or through his work with the Carnegie Foundation—and evidently to know him was to admire him. And yet, when one inquires further into these relationships, it develops that most of Hiss's friends were not really friends at all, in the sense of being on frequent visiting terms with him or in relationships of evolving intimacy. In fact, Hiss seems to have had remarkably few friends, but a host of acquaintances and associates for whom he suggested the possibility of friendship. His looks, his manner, his career evidently symbolized for the men who met him or worked with him some principle of their own personalities which they would happily see fortified or multiplied in their social world. Every friend stands for something we either need or value in our own characters, supplements what we lack or reinforces what we already possess. For those who knew him Hiss apparently stood for a particular kind of practical idealism—an idealism not wasted in fantasy or in an === Page 89 === THE HISS CASE 489 acerbity of criticism of the status quo but beautifully assimilated to practical activity. Just as his good manners were a reminder that de- portment can go along with intelligence, so his fine career was a reas- surance that idealism can be made a worldly success. It was also a reassurance that history was on the side of political idealism and that liberalism need no longer be merely an embattled sentiment. For a long time before the Roosevelt era the political idealist had been a very lonely man, with small hope of finding any community with government, and certainly no hope of being able to shape policy. Now, in the Roosevelt years, this was changing. Govern- ment had raised the intellectual minority out of its isolation and placed it at the very center of power. That, even in these circumstances, the intellectual liberal minority still needed even more reassurance than history was giving it; that it still conceived itself as an ineffectual little group buffeted about by the reactionary hordes; that it persisted in thinking itself lonely even while its ranks swelled, and isolated even while it stood at the apex of public life—this is one of the salient features of its psychology. Once un- popular, always unpopular; once weak, always weak—such is the in- forming feeling of modern liberalism, a feeling which has outlasted even the Roosevelt years. And it derives, I think, from the identifica- tion liberalism has made with Communism. The friends of the Soviet Union can watch it grow from one-sixth of the earth's surface to one- fifth to one-third and still persuade themselves that Russia is in as much need of protection as she was in the early days of the Revolution. Just so, even at the height of the Roosevelt era, when liberalism had achieved a hitherto unimagined power, it lived, not by the reality of its strength, but by the conviction of its frailty. What forged or cemented the bond between liberalism and Com- munism, rationalizing this sentiment of liberalism's weakness was, of course, the threat of fascism. The economic depression had given a ter- rific jolt to liberal complacency and freshly thrust upon the intellectuals of this country the fact of the class structure of our economy; but it made revolutionaries only of those middle-class intellectuals sufficiently imaginative to make a very long-range association of their own fates and that of the proletariat. The middle-class liberal suffered a cer- tain amount of personal strain in the depression but he was not really damaged to the point where the Soviet system presented itself to him as a fierce necessity. If he would make a revolution it would be for the immediate sake only of the working-class, not for his own imminent ad- vantage or protection. It was Hitler's rise that swung the full tide === Page 90 === 490 PARTISAN REVIEW of America's idealistic middle class; for a dominant fascism, it quickly became clear, directly and catastrophically affected the life of every member of society, whatever his class roots or profession. In fighting fascism, the liberal middle-class American was fighting in self-defense. He was fighting, not in the name of a remote ideal, but in the name of everything worth preserving in our own system-liberty, democracy, reli- gious tolerance. And in the idea of self-defense, he had an excuse for a fervor, even a violence, which yet did no violence to the popular image of the liberal temperament. After Russia had lost Germany to Hitler rather than have Germany fall to any left-wing party except the Communist Party, she was quick to recognize the hidden ally she had in fascism. The fear on which fascism had risen to power was the fear of Communism, and now Communism, thus established as the prime enemy of fascism, could represent herself as the prime friend of democracy. In the name of a militant anti-fascism, the Communist movement could now organize and control the world over all the vagrant liberal and democratic forces which had previously eluded her solicitations. The League against War and Fascism was the best-known of these innocents groups, but there were many others-especially when the civil war in Spain further concretized the fascist menace. The conduct of England and America in relation to the Spanish War of course made it all the more natural for sympathizers with the Loyalist cause to look to Russia as the spearhead of anti-Franco feeling. The handful of liberals who had been close enough to radical politics before 1932 to understand the extent of Russia's betrayal of the German working classes, and who had sufficient political experience to follow the double game Russia was playing in Spain, might try to warn the innocents among the Russian- dominated anti-fascist groups in this country that they were being used, but their efforts were in vain. Not only were there few places where they could make themselves heard, most of the so-called liberal press having been completely won to this popular anti-fascist front, but also, having no political party around which to group, they had no organiza- tion which to combat the highly-organized move- ment which the Communist Party had brought into being, all unknown to most of its participants. One of Roosevelt's first acts when he had been made President had been to recognize the Soviet Union. It had been a gesture which had won virtually unanimous support from American progressives. Here was the perfect symbol of the new dispensation we could look to, after so many years of Republican timidity and backwardness. The drastic === Page 91 === THE HISS CASE 491 domestic reforms of Roosevelt's first term, especially the new government attitude toward labor, further marked out the path of progress which this country was now to follow-suddenly American liberals could feel a real congruity of purpose with the administration. And if the price of this resurgent energy was the hatred of the reactionaries of the country, it was a price the liberal gladly accepted. Let the backward forces in American political and economic life call him Red, he could meet the charge head on, with the firm conviction of his Americanism. The word "patriotism" was not yet invoked on the side of progress; this was to wait a few years more. But to the concept of Americanism there were now assimilated all the good values which fascism attacked -freedom of speech and thought, freedom of religion, the right of labor to organize for collective bargaining. And expectably enough, whoever questioned a single attitude on the anti-fascist side himself fell under the fascist imputation. Thus, not very slowly but very surely, the ranks of American liberalism were broken into two profoundly antagonistic groups-those whose only enemy was fascism; and those who had two enemies, both fascism and Communism. And if this division was clearly drawn even before the war, if the anti-Communist liberal found it hard to make himself heard even in peacetime, how much more difficult was his role after 1941, when Russia and America became military allies. The blow which the dominant liberalism of this country had suffered in the short period of the Soviet-Nazi pact would have appeared to be staggering. It has resulted in the disaffection of many intellectuals who had been able to overlook all the other threats to their faith in the Soviet Union. But the termination of the pact with Hitler's at- tack upon the Soviet Union brought most of them back into camp. For it gave American liberals just the excuse they had been seeking for Russia's unseemly alliance-it was clear Russia had just been temporiz- ing to prepare for the fight. This, we must understand, was the reality of politics: even an ideal government had often to use un-ideal methods to achieve her goals. Means were justified by their ends, and only political dreamers measured an end by the methods used to attain it. It was the same argument that had been put forward to explain away so many contradictions between socialist theory and Communist practice, or to defend Roosevelt against the criticism that he had never broken with the Democratic Party bosses. And the appeal to practicality became even more urgent once we were in the war. It was not practical to question the conduct of an ally, particularly of an ally who had so much reason in the past-intervention, === Page 92 === 492 PARTISAN REVIEW non-recognition, cessation of trade-to be unsure of our friendliness. It was not practical to jeopardize Russian confidence by raising the ques- tion of peace terms while the fight was still raging. It was not practical to give a forum to dissident opinion on Russia's role in world affairs. It was practical to give Russia anything she needed which we had, with no strings attached to it-all the lend-lease she wanted, say, with no conditions imposed; indeed, to send Harry Hopkins to Russia with its of- fer, rather than wait for Molotov to come and ask for it. What was practical, when peace terms were at last under discussion, was the conciliatory spirit of Yalta, the reassertion of our faith that we had only to disarm ourselves in relation to Russia for Russia to disarm herself in relation to the world. What was practical, in other words, was what was ideal. The Roosevelt administration was notable in history for having been able to resolve that age-old, apparently unresolvable contradiction in the minds of liberals-between what might be wished for, and what could be. In the space of a decade and a half, a paradox had become a simple working formula. This, sketched in haste, was the political background of Hiss's public career. Chambers has told us his ideological story. We have to guess at Hiss's by understanding the external circumstances of his in- tellectual life, and by trying to fill in the gaps between the public and the private man. I have said of both sides of the Hiss case, of both those who believe him guilty and those who believe him innocent, that they tend to neglect the evidence in the case because they are motivated by hidden preferences. But I have offered it as my impression that this is even truer of Hiss's partisans than of his accusers. And indeed perhaps the most striking aspect of the Hiss case is the passion of loyalty that has been roused on Hiss's side, not merely among people who knew him-that is readily understandable-but among men and women who would seem to have had no closer connection with him than with Chambers. How can we account for the unshakable faith people who never set eyes on Hiss have in him, so that they will go to any imagina- tive extreme to explain away Chambers's charges and evidence? Some of these people think Chambers is a moral monster not only because he has called Hiss a Communist and a spy, but because he was himself a Communist and a spy. That is, they would be ready to think Hiss monstrous too if they believed him guilty. They point to Hiss's idealistic career, which was so much in consonance with their own === Page 93 === THE HISS CASE 493 idealism, as proof of the outrageousness of the accusations made against him. They do not recognize that idealism is of the very nature of the Communist commitment—perhaps a misdirected idealism, perhaps an idealism carried to undesirable length, but an idealism nonetheless. This, however, is a minority of the Hiss defense. Most partisans of Hiss take another ground. They admit that the Communist, even the Communist spy, is motivated by idealism, although it is an idealism different from that of the liberal. But reactionaries, they know, have a way of making an amalgam of the idealisms and of calling every liberal a Communist. And they believe that Hiss is an innocent liberal victim of this kind of slander. This latter group is the most passionate and personal in its loyalty to Hiss. And the first thing we observe of its members is that they have certain shared social and cultural characteristics. Apart from the known fellow-travelers, most of Hiss's supporters are people of the middle and upper middle-class, of education, breeding, professional solidity and dis- tinction; people of great probity; thoughtful and conscientious citizens. Judged by the conventional criteria of class, Hiss's defenders come off rather better than his accusers. In contrast to the respectability of those who are on the Hiss side, those who think him guilty have a taint of the bohemian, of the unconnected. (It is the generalizing social distinction one might make, say, between Hiss's Harvard and Chambers' Columbia.) One wonders why the lines can be drawn in this curious fashion, by class. For surely it cannot be only class loyalty, in the simple snobbish sense, that has attracted such handsome support to the Hiss cause. In dealing with people of this much probity and intelligence and social conscience, it would be manifestly unfair to ascribe to them an in- grained class-feeling which functions in despite of their educated democratic principles. No, on the contrary: people of this sort do not exist without their principles, and therefore it is to their principles that we must look for an explanation of their feelings about Hiss. What principles do they embody which are also incorporated in Hiss? What moral identification do they make with Hiss which makes it so imperative that Hiss not be condemned? Hiss's personal acquaintances defend themselves, or at least their ability to judge people, when they defend Hiss—that is obvious enough. But do not the men and women who never knew him but yet stand by him so staunchly also defend themselves in defending Hiss? The Hiss principle is, of course, a configuration not only of ideas but of social personality. Even the scantiest outline of the years between 1929 and the present must remind us of the new kind of figure which ap- === Page 94 === 494 PARTISAN REVIEW peared on the American political scene during Roosevelt's administration. Wilson had been a scholar and a gentleman; Teddy Roosevelt had been a person of good birth. But neither of them had the unmistakable marks of breeding, the amenity and grace, of Franklin Roosevelt, and neither had been able to bring his own kind into politics with him in any number worth notice. Before the Roosevelt era, politicians were a raffish com- pany. Even at their best they must be condescended to by people of cul- tivated mind and habit. But when Roosevelt came into office, this changed overnight. From his start in office and increasingly as the years went on, Roosevelt attracted to government men and women for whom, in an earlier day, the political life would have been unworthy—men and women whose professional competence had been established in fields far removed from politics and whose private ambitions were subordinate to a precise, conscious morality. Of this new kind of political man Hiss can be described as almost a prototype, in quality if not chronologically. Serious, alert, well-educated, eager, sensitive, charming, he perfectly expressed this new government of mind and spirit which had replaced the government of patronage and crude personal advantage. His career was a career of energetic devotion to principle; his times were times of strenuous effort on behalf of high social goals. His personality was ex- actly cut to the mold of his career and his times. If we can say, as I think we can, that before this century the source of all political idealism was (however remotely) religion, I think we can also say that in our own century the source of all political idealism has been socialism, and, since the Russian Revolution, specifical- ly the socialism of the Soviet Union. I do not mean that whoever has worked for political progress has necessarily been a socialist. I mean only that it has been from socialist theory that political progress has chiefly taken its inspiration, and from socialist example its practice. On all progressive citizens of this country, the treatment of Russia by the democracies at the time of the Revolution and in the decade which followed had left a large impress of guilt. For here was an actual ex- periment in—well, not socialism perhaps, but Communism (the dif- ference was to be regarded as one of degree) and look how shamefully we had treated it! Roosevelt's recognition of the Soviet Union was an in- vitation for all those who felt this guilt to rally around him. And his do- mestic policies—his bold incursions upon big business, his courageous stand on behalf of labor, his fearless understanding that the modern econ- omy had carried us past the day when laissez-faire could be considered a governmental virtue—signalled an administration unafraid to move to- === Page 95 === THE HISS CASE 495 ward the socialist source of its ideals. The middle-class Hiss need never have been a Communist to have found in the Roosevelt regime an excel- lent field for playing out his social guilt: there were thousands like him. Nor need he, any more than Roosevelt himself, have been a Communist, or even a socialist, to have been in favor of domestic changes which, al- though moving in the general socialist direction, yet so soundly met the requirements of this stage in our economic evolution that no party which would win or stay in office now dare retreat from them. It was absurd to think of Roosevelt as a Communist, and it still is. Or even as a socialist. Only those who were opposed to any form of social progress could call Roosevelt a Red. But he did not mind being called a Red-and precisely here lay both his strength and his weakness. It was Roosevelt's great strength that, truly liberal in his political goals, he refused to be intimidated by the bad names by which reactionaries might call him. It was his great weakness that he took the word "Red" only at its cant value, and refused to see the reality of the Red threat and its menace to democracy. This strength and this weakness, both, the liberals who followed him into office shared with him. I have spoken of the impact of European fascism on the American liberal. But the possibility of fascism was not limited to Europe, it could also happen here. In fact, it was already happening here: the reactionaries who labelled every progressive measure of Roosevelt's as the insidious work of Bolshevism were its vanguard. Anyone of firm liberal intention must refuse to be frightened by them, must be only flat- tered to be thought their enemy. And if, in the interests of progress, one found oneself-as, for instance, Mrs. Roosevelt did so frequently-on the same side on certain issues with avowed Communists, it was an association to be borne with equanimity, for only in the darkened mind of reaction was Communism a danger. One was inviolable in one's anti- fascist democratic Americanism. Much has been said, by those who think Hiss innocent, about the patent contradiction between his impeccable public life and the nefarious private activities of which he has been convicted. It has been felt that for him to be guilty as accused he would have had to be a Jekyll- and-Hyde personality, never letting his right hand know what his left was doing. But leave the espionage out of account for the moment, and consider Hiss only as an undercover Communist. If we examine the ideological atmosphere in which he conducted his public life, how much actual contradiction was there between his public and his private commitments? How much intellectual acrobatics did it take for a secret === Page 96 === 496 PARTISAN REVIEW Communist to be in public affairs? Surely not enough to split a per- sonality. Actually, he need only temper his passions, suppress his ultimate aims and stay with the immediate practical idealism—and he could both think like a Communist and act like a good servant of a liberal America. And this is, of course, what Hiss's staunch partisans know, though they cannot let themselves be conscious of it. They know not only how thin a line divided their own principles from Hiss's overt principles, but also how narrow a bridge Hiss had to span between his overt and his hid- den beliefs. Could they too have taken the step Hiss took—the step, at least, to the Party, if not the step to espionage? Certainly not. And yet—the emotional-intellectual factors involved in such a choice are mysterious. Who knows? Perhaps there but for the grace of God go themselves. (The anti-Hiss liberal also thinks, "There but for the grace of God go I." But by "there" he means Chambers as well as Hiss. And he refers, usually, not to a mysterious possibility in his emotional and ideological life but to a choice fully confronted.) They defend Hiss to defend their own areas of ideological agreement with Hiss. And they defend him so absolutely, with such emotions of outrage at whoever thinks him guilty, because they dare not contemplate where they themselves might be blown by the uncharted winds of fashionable doctrine. Hiss must be innocent to prove that they are themselves in- nocent. The misery which so many nice people feel at the thought that Hiss is guilty is thus not to be derided or taken lightly. The Hiss case represents a capsule of self-knowledge which it is not easy to swallow. I have said that if this case is to serve any purpose in our lives there must be salvaged from it a better notion of liberalism. I mean by this two things. The case will have been useful, I think, if it helps us detach the wagon of American liberalism from the star of the Soviet Union and if it gives liberals a sounder insight into the nature of a political idea. Most American liberals are not Communists. They would not dream of joining the Communist Party. They would be horrified at the possibility of a Communist America. And they severely and sincerely condemn certain aspects of the Soviet regime. But their great point of difference with the anti-Communist liberals is that, whereas the latter fear the Soviet Union and anyone who tolerates it, they measure the degree of their liberalism by the degree of their tolerance of Russia. Their position is supported by their fear of war. They hope to === Page 97 === THE HISS CASE 497 avert war with Russia by "understanding." They believe that to fear Russia is to place oneself squarely on the side of the war-mongers. This was not their position on Hitler Germany. They did not substitute understanding of Nazism for opposition to Nazism. These are the same people who were most resolute against fascism, but they cannot admit that the socialist revolution has produced an equally virulent totalitarian- ism. They may acknowledge that the Soviet Union has certain totali- tarian features. What they refuse to see is that by definition totalitarian- ism is nothing if not a totality. Either you have a free vote, or you do not. Either you have the freedom to criticize your government and change it, or you do not. Either you can write and speak and work as you choose, or you cannot-and all such criteria as "free for whom," "free for what," are only rationalizations. When the anti-Communist liberal says you need not be either a war-monger or a reactionary just because war-mongers and reactionaries are on the same side with you on this or that specific issue, they counter with the statement that you need not be a Communist just because you are on the same side with Communists on a specific issue. And certainly, they are right to this extent: there is no reason to fear being in agreement with Communists on a specific issue, if one brings to this agreement as much awareness of the Communist danger as of the reactionary danger. But this is a big "if." For it is the very essence of contemporary liberalism that it thinks so differently about reaction and about Communism. The liberal who brings to all his associations the clear knowledge that he is opposed to totalitarianism in whatever form-that of the Soviet Union no less than that of Hitlerism-has nothing to fear from the motives which may be assigned to him because of his decisions on specific points. Clarity and honesty are all the protection he needs against being tainted. Take, for instance, the official in the State De- partment who advises a certain line of conduct which happens to coin- cide with the Russian line. Does he fully realize that the interests of Russia are the interests of an expanding totalitarianism? If he does and can yet believe that the line is to the best interests of a democratic America, then let him proceed with a clear conscience. But the task of persuading the liberal who is not afraid of Com- munism that he should be afraid of it is a gigantic one, and one which involves changing a climate of opinion and feeling over the whole of our culture. Perhaps, however, it is here that the Hiss case can be helpful, by clarifying for the liberal the historical process of which he === Page 98 === 498 PARTISAN REVIEW and Hiss have together been a part, and by impressing upon him a new sense of the reality of political ideas. Politics is power. Every nation is a power nation. This has been so since the beginning of organized social life and will always be so. Political idealism is a direction power may take; it is not a negation of power. The liberal in politics is as directly involved with power as is the reactionary, however much better the uses to which the liberal may wish to put his power. And every political idea, no matter how liberal, relates to power. This is the real reality of politics and of political ideas. Only when the liberal recognizes that his political ideas are ideas which relate to power can he recognize the kind of responsibility he must take for his ideas. "Ideas are weapons" is a slogan of modern American liberalism, but the slogan was raised, not to warn liberals of their fierce responsibility as thinking people, but, rather, to encourage them in what seemed the small improbable hope that they too could be effectual. The liberal has deceived himself that because he is in a minority his ideas have the strength of a slingshot compared to the can- non of reaction. It is a dangerous deception, and has made the liberal irresponsible. The Fuchs case dramatically demonstrates that the ideal- ism of an idea single individual placed in the right circumstances can be as strong as an atom bomb. Ideas are not to be separated from the acts to which they might lead; and whether or not, in any particular instance, they do actually lead to acts is irrelevant. They might lead to acts; they often do lead to acts; they must therefore be judged as if they were acts. The Com- munist idea must be judged as a Communist act. And similarly, the idea of tolerance of Communism must be judged as an act of tolerance of Communism. The liberal who refuses to separate his liberalism from tolerance of Communism must thus ask himself how far he would be prepared to act on this tolerance. Would he be willing to keep someone in high government office who was stealing our documents for transmission to Russia? If not, why not? Just because of his abhorrence of stealing? Very well, then. Would he be willing for a Communist who was not a spy to be in high government office? And if not, why not? What can possibly be wrong with being governed by someone whose political philosophy is tolerable? Obviously it is only if one regards a Communist as the representa- tive of totalitarianism that one has any ground for questioning his right to hold office in a democracy. If someone represents a tolerable political === Page 99 === THE HISS CASE 499 system, we can have no objection to his presence in government-and no need to prove that he is anything but what he is. We can even have no objection to his functioning in office as a Communist, even though this might lead to his legislating us into Communism. This is the responsibility that the liberal must take for his ideas, including his ideas about Communism. This is the outcome any liberal not afraid of Communism must be willing to confront. Hiss, of course, has been found guilty not only of being a Com- munist but of being a Communist spy. The difference between the two seems to me to be important only in terms of personal morality and psychology, not in terms of idea. We must keep it in mind that, to the committed Communist, personal morality as we conceive it is bour- geois morality or no morality at all. The only morality to a Communist is revolutionary morality, and according to revolutionary morality, Hiss performed a moral act because he was furthering the revolutionary goal. It is interesting to study why someone like Hiss who was bred by standards of bourgeois morality should have switched to so different a moral code; but such a study has only a coincidental pertinence to his objective acts. What is immediately pertinent to his acts is his ideas. In lying and stealing Hiss took the fullest responsibility for his political ideas. He contemplated where his ideas might lead, and he was never- theless willing to have these ideas and perform his acts. He really under- stood the reality of politics. Which is precisely why so many liberals cannot bear to think Hiss guilty: his guilt confronts them with a reality of politics which is at such odds with their own ideology. But this is also why the Hiss case may be useful-because it can help teach liberals that political ideas are political acts, and acts of political power. The espionage to which Hiss's Communist commitment led him is the awful evidence that ideas are not the innocent little things we think them, that they have a commanding life of their own, that they can look both ideal and legal but turn out to be neither. The Hiss case faces the liberal with the most cogent representation he has yet had of the kind of responsibility he must take for his thoughts. As I write, the conviction of Hiss has already had one of the un- happy consequences that was predicted for it. The discovery of a Soviet agent in American office was bound to encourage the search for others, and the McCarthy investigations are in progress. Hiss's defenders warned us that his conviction would be a signal for a grand-scale witchhunt for Communists in government, and one in which innocent liberals would === Page 100 === 500 PARTISAN REVIEW be tarred with the Communist brush. The way McCarthy conducts himself confirms their fear. Their fear was based, however, upon the belief that Hiss was him- self an innocent liberal. If you believe that Hiss was guilty, you must also fear that innocent liberals will be smeared by a McCarthy. But you also acknowledge the fact that had it not been for the un-American Activities Committee Hiss's guilt might never have been uncovered. And you reserve the possibility that a McCarthy, too, may turn up someone who is as guilty as Hiss. What you lament is the tragic confusion in lib- eral government which leaves the investigation of such important mat- ters to the enemies of liberal government. The anti-Communist liberal maintains, that is, a very delicate position which neither supports a McCarthy nor automatically defends anyone whom a McCarthy attacks. He decries witchhunts. He demands that there be no public accusations without proper legal evidence. And even where this evidence is presented, he calls as much attention to the political motive of the accuser as of the accused. But he does not make the mistake of believing that just because the wrong people are looking for Soviet agents in the American government, there are none. He does not deceive himself that whoever a McCarthy names is ipso facto an innocent liberal. He deplores, indeed, the very need to speak of a liberal as either innocent or not innocent. For he knows that were we really as realistic about politics as, in our practical idealism, we like to think we are, there would be no such confusion of innocence and non-innocence among liberals. There never was before the Communist revolution. A liberal was simply a liberal, and it was quite enough to be. (A number of leading liberals have been invited to comment on Mrs. Trilling's article. Whatever comments are received will be printed in forthcoming issues.) === Page 101 === Henry Adler LETTER FROM ISRAEL From the sea, it's a delicate low line, like the brush work in a Japanese print. Nearer, the low tawny hills with purple shadows. The Carmel is a magnificent amphitheater and where Elijah preached to the worshippers of Baal are pretty white villas. North, the gleam of the river Kishon where Barak defeated Sisera. Now, beautiful, grey, shiny, stand the giant containers of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, universal as God, whose pipes run from Kirkuk near the site of the civilizations of Babylon and Sumer which rose and fell with the Tigris and Euphrates. The tugs have Hebrew inscriptions and in the cafés one hears the swift staccato, rather Gaelic-sounding, tongue which has evolved in a few years from a classical language. This is the sliver of land on the map which your fingernail can cover, legendary and real, actual and incredible, the stage of the Biblical saga and of a small ferocious war fought with tanks and tommy guns between the descend- ants of Ha'Ibri and the Phoenicians, Edomites, Moabites, Babylonians, Assyrians and Egyptians. By ship, you come from Marseilles, once the last outpost of the civilized world centered in the Mediterranean, past their culture to become the Philistines at Gath. From the air you see the cobalt sea frilling at the khaki summits of the submerged moun- tains which are now the Greek islands, and you cross the fangs of Anatolia where the Hittites now live. At Athens airport, Jew and Egyptian pass on their way to planes for Lydda and Cairo. This Mid- dle Sea was the world's hub, junction, circus. Races are mixed, history is tangled, civilzations are fused. In this Piccadilly Circus of the na- tions, the terms East and West seem to have no meaning. Certainly Israel does not know what they mean. In Tel Aviv the normally quiet sea is whipped into breakers when the Nile floods. And there are khamsin days when the desert wind blows from South Arabia like a breath from a boiler room, lowering in a cloud black as doom, weighting the limbs so that people walk as if drugged. The land is like an unlocalized stage setting in which scenes from times most distantly remote from each other are juxtaposed by the relics turned up by the plough: Effigies of that Babylonian Baal and Ishtar, later === Page 102 === 502 PARTISAN REVIEW Ashtoreth, later Astarte and Aphrodite, the gods go west and come back again, grow from the sexual puppet to the marble sublimation; Minoan pottery, Greek coins, and in the communal settlement at Caesarea, the sea washes over the granite stubs protruding like rotten teeth of the Roman harbor. The only relic of the old hippodrome (now a banana grove) is a granite pillar lying like a dead mastodon in the long leaves. Arabs have tried to hew a section to sell. Ozymandias! But one feels no superiority toward the frustrated effort, the inadequate technique. The abstract country seems to absorb every influence, the sun irons out every shadow, so that one feels the simultaneity of history, the parallelism of all effort, the precariousness of the hotel situated near the ruined castle. As the physicists point out, if space is empty there is no time. Time is an index, a gauge of movement. The mind compresses experience, as it does personal experience. What is the present? There is no history except what you know. Dazed by the sun in Acre, looking at the plaque commemorating the fall of Major Oldfield in leading a sortie against Napoleon, I felt that my assump- tion of the existence of jeeps and bars might be the delusion and in the silent square with a Negro woman grinning from behind her vegetable stall, it seemed that red-coated soldiers might come from the corner where the camel was champing. This is not merely romanticism. Philo- sophers make this distinction between the conveniences of chronology and the chimerical nature of time. And here, on the ashen ground, with grass in summer as pale as moss on a rock, where the almost imper- ceptible undulations are as featureless as space, the eye always moves on, having nothing to cling to. Hence the Arab, and, increasingly, the Hebrew music, the incessant ululation, unpunctuated as the desert, the interminable emotion, ceaselessly paid out like a tape worm to the unat- tainable horizon, without beginning, without end, only the eternal present, plaintive, lonely, crooning its weltschmerz like the cat on the tiles in the interrogation of the augmented second. Everywhere is the same. Tomorrow is like today. Love, hate, grief, do not vary and therefore can be sung only by repeating them with ingenious new emphases, rococo trills. A land of archetypal shapes, Grahame Suther- land country, the rocks lie where they were flung in that early volcanic explosion, the stones geologically potted history in compressions of grey, pink, blue, amber, heave and rear, the primaeval thrust, the convulsion snapshotted, travail petrified. The rocks are Henry Moore, expectantly reared, incipiently alive. Impersonal as the surface of the moon, Israel would have excited Paul Nash. From the north east came Tiglath Pileser, the combed Assyrian bulls, from the south the wall-eyed men === Page 103 === LETTER FROM ISRAEL 503 who walk in step on the Egyptian friezes. In Galilee one sees the snow-capped mountain of Hermon where once the women sat and wept for Tammuz buried in the ground each year when the flowers faded and the crops died and the earth became ash. Now Tammuz and Ehul are the names of months in the Hebrew calendar. Jehovah, God of Reason, rules Marduk, the god of force. (But there is a tiny school of Hebrew poets who want to go back to the premonotheistic mythology of the Canaanites, a sort of D. H. Lawrence group). Macadam is laid over the caravan routes and in Tiberias the stone ruins of Herod Antipater's castle are surrounded by the ferro concrete cubes of the new suburb (1920 German style). The country is in a hurry. There is as yet no architecture, only building. You will be attracted to the homs of Arab Jaffa, the tall romantic buildings with a frail high-set balcony like an impossible set by Gordon Craig, the amiable scruffiness, the charming insincerity of the Arab, rather than to the busy purposeful rectangular city of Tel Aviv, sunbaked concrete, anarchical traffic, busy, noisy, irritable, bourgeois. The tractors whir in the valleys and, fenced by the cypresses, the pink and white bungalows of the colonies look oddly suburban in the grand impersonality of the landscape. The cultivated bougainvillea and eucalyptus trees, the neatly fenced orange and banana groves, seem prim and artificial amid the rambling levelness. But the be- spectacled man on the tractor who with one eye on the textbook goes to put philosophy into action (back to the land for the Jews) is romantic in a less obvious way. The clerks and professors fumbling with the plough are imbued with what may be called the existential theory of finding your destiny by creating it, like Whitman's spider projecting its filament into the air. The Babylonian refugees have returned via Rome, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Russia, China, India, Africa, the Mile End Road and Hester Street, blond Poles, redheaded Rumanians, smooth Germans and swart vociferous Yemenites. There may be no such thing as the Jewish race but there is for many reasons a Jewish psychosis. And one feels excitingly as one walks past the hotels and bars of Hayarkon Street by the Mediterranean in Tel Aviv, hearing the babble of all nations, that there is a compression of the nations within one orbit, a rich potentiality and vitality of peoples, of cultures, of living. It is a small country but everything, people, politics, landscape, seem bigger than life size. It is only forty miles from Tel Aviv to Haifa or Jerusalem but the problems of booking taxis, (railways have only recently started running again), the loneliness of the country, the abrupt rear of hills, make it seem much larger. Zionism does not quite fit in === Page 104 === 504 PARTISAN REVIEW to Toynbee's analysis of the stimulus of hard countries. The Jews are not making a new migration but a return. And while they are partly impelled by material adversity, a strong element in the stimulus which drives them to establish technologically an agricultural system in this stony terrain is a psychic frustration. The migration is not a casual exploration for Lebensraum but a deliberate pilgrimage toward an apparently unre- warding place. To the Jew the Bible is a saga, a blend of history and mythology. It seems to belong to prehistory and both the religious and rationalist sections of the people are aware that they are making an attempt to resume contact with a half-mythological world, a Golden Age. On the Sabbath, truckloads of families from Tel Aviv go for excursions to Galilee and the Negev to see not only the bullet-shattered settlements but also the biblical sites, from Dan where the spring water flows into the racing Jordan to Beersheba where Abraham dug his wells. It is as though Le Morte d'Arthur were to be authentic history. There is an apparent dichotomy of the rationalist and religious groups in the country, a conflict of the modern and the traditional, the West and the East, the blue-shirted youngsters of extreme Left parties and the young men with the long side curls who drive tractors and study the Talmud. There is the jeep driven by the soldiers in cowboy hats singing songs in praise of Mitzi and Zippi, (the Hebrew counterparts of Dinah and Sweet Sue) and the donkey, with his heartbreaking sobs, who pulls the little two-wheeled truck driven by the bearded farmers. But the cleavage is more apparent than real. The Hebrew religion was a revolt against the desert. The Puritanical Jehovah was a necessary protagonist against the dissipating sand, the insignificance of time, the compulsion of hot-blooded lusts. The Arab came to friendlier terms with his senses. Architecturally, the mosque is phallus and breasts. But the Jew was an intellectual. The Synagogue is as bare and abstract as the Universal God. With the modern rationalists, Jehovah becomes Reason and the Communal or Party Committee, representing the Group, ac- quires the veneration and authority formerly held by the Sanhedrin. At the same time there is a sense of revival, a renaissance of some- thing old in new terms. It is the poetry of the desert, a Jewish romantic movement. The rites and customs, the ark and scroll of the law, the apparatus of a religious statehood interrupted in A.D. 70, preserving itself for so long in the irrelevant celebrations in ghetto synagogues, are rooted again in the seasonal rites, so that spring and harvest festivals are once more days for the flower-decked cart and white-dressed children, for parties where Western Jews dance to swing and the Yem- === Page 105 === LETTER FROM ISRAEL enites to the adamant drum. At Purim a girl posed in a circle of the dark passionate Yemenite faces, fingers over shoulder in the attitude of one carrying a pitcher. Her feet hardly moved, making a slurred, delicate intimation of a step as she advanced, retreated, riding the rhythm lightly, seeming hardly to be responsible for her floating circuit, her hands slowly weaving, her body lifting with each impulse of the never ceasing drum. The girl at the drum both sang and played, her fingers flickering over the drum like water, in the center for the deep pitch, over the rim for the sharper and lighter notes. They sang with an Arab intonation, everyone in the party clapping in a deep slow rhythm and giving at the same time a little shudder of the body as though the rhythm were vibrating from something deep down. Some- times the dancer held her hand above her shoulder as though she were acting some age-old ritual of the journey bearing a pitcher to the well. She went on this interminable, delightful journey, rotating, sing- ing, pausing, her body lilting, every movement subtly varied and yet all identical celebrations of her sex on this parade where one laughs and gossips with the other women and demurely preens before the ad- miring men. A little girl, her cheeks carmined for Purim, stared with delighted glowing eyes, her mouth curved in an incredulous smile while the small room seemed to quiver with the chanting and the clapping and the beating drum. A little old woman joined in. Her face was as brown and wrinkled as a walnut. She was tiny and she wore a gilt brocaded turban, a long narrow dress down to her spindly ankles. Her eyes were small, deep-set, brown, and she looked almost Burmese. She danced erectly, with pride, rising on her toes at the end of each step so that it seemed to be part of a ceremonial progress, a slow march, a hieratic dance of women who know the dignity of their sex. She danced a wedding dance with the girl and her face broke into a smile, revealing big uneven teeth, yellow as the keys of an old piano. The dance was frank, physical, an exhibition of the delights of the body, breaking up with giggles as impulsively the demure girl made a more than usually abandoned gesture. Into the crowd burst a figure in a black cloak, brandishing a stick. The face was deathly white, the eye sockets were empty and a thin wisp of yellow mustache hung limply. The face was expression- less as a dead man's. It was a mask and the figure began a menacing dance, shaking the stick, bending first to one side then the other in rhythm with the drum, almost collapsing like a rundown doll, resur- recting and slowly turning and shaking the stick while the children 505 === Page 106 === 506 PARTISAN REVIEW squealed in delighted terror. Their faces were as they should be in the theater, as they probably were round the earliest camp fires, at all the ritual dances. Their mouths were agape, their eyes bright, flickering with fluctuating emotion at the dream brought to life, a little frightened as though turned mad with so much wonder, blinking with tiredness and then straining again at the elaborate fantasy. They come from Yemen and their faces are deeply imprinted with the East. Leaving, and when the tapping drum was in the distance, I passed some Ashkenazi Jews, young bearded men in fur hats and long coats, the garb of the old ghettos and Russian small towns where they come from. In the moonlight their faces had a luminous pallor. They were walking quickly, lightly and quietly singing a Purim hymn. Nearby was the music from parties given by Germans and Americans in their modern flats. Like the United States, Israel is on a small scale a melting pot. It was odd to think that all these people were Jews. There is a revolt against the stigma of the old time comfort-loving European Jew. In the communal settlements (the kibbutzim), work starts at four in the morning when the sun pinks the Galilean hills and there is a misleading promise of coolness. At nine in the summer, the sun has the searing intensity of flame focussed through a magnifying glass but the intent ant-like work in the fields goes on until about four in the afternoon when work stops and theirs is the daily luxury of a cooling hot shower, the clean shirt, the armchair gossip, the minutes with the children. Individualism and privacy are luxuries for the most part foresworn and regarded as rather unpatriotic. In the smaller kibbutzim where accommodation is limited, young unmarried people often sleep in the same room and there is a conscientious atmosphere of morality, of knocking at doors and averting eyes. Married couples often live in bungalows, one room to each couple, so that it has to be kept meticulously tidy and no undue relaxation is possible. Since the rooms tend to be separated only by matchboard partitions, there is the compulsion of having to live quietly and even the intimacies have to be subdued, let alone such psychological necessities as whoopee or a good quarrel. But there are encouraging signs of variations on the original group principle which will allow greater individuality. There is beauty in the attempts of the religious kibbutzim to link modern life with the two-thousand year old religion. At Gan Yavne, a religious kibbutz built on the shore near the Mediterranean where stood one of the oldest Rabbinical schools (and where Jonah was swallowed by the whale), fifty young men and women were gathered round a long table while a bearded bright-eyed man expounded the === Page 107 === LETTER FROM ISRAEL 507 section in the Talmud dealing with crime and punishment. Unlike English law, the Talmud seeks to prepare in advance an elaborate code for every conceivable contingency. Since it was written two thousand years ago, these applications now seem exotic, sometimes absurd, some- times barbaric, like English and American legislation a hundred years ago. But the principles involved, the reasoning by which the law is decided, shows a delicate and humane attitude. It is written in a dedicated spirit, with Mosaic Law as its essence and with the relation- ship between religious faith and political living prominent in their con- siderations. I should not like to see it rewritten by some keen trained rationalistic modern lawyer. The young men with side curls are not effeminate pedants. They drive tractors, are good soldiers, have first- rate brains. On the Sabbath, since no flame may be kindled, the electric lights are left on all night. There is a divinity in their apparent ab- surdities. They firmly advocate the Sabbatical year which comes once in every seven years and when they demand that all agricultural work shall cease. They argue that if stock piles are laid in, no one will starve. They urge that man must recognize that he is the tenant, not the lord, of the earth. He must voluntarily cede back to God. This recogni- tion of the supremacy of God, the necessity for man's humility, is the reason for their constant prayers and observances. Man's disasters, they claim, have all proceeded from his attempts to build codes of law on expediency, enlightened self-interest, common sense, necessity, rational- ism, and all the other names for the short term immediate advantage, comfort and good business. Their theological pedantry is a safeguard against the slightest backsliding, the thin edge of the wedge. They desire the Torah-State, the state in strict conformity with the Mosaic law, the Hebrew equivalent of the Church-State. I spent the Sabbath with them. Despite their religious intensity, there is a relaxation, an ease among them. A service came before the Sabbath Eve meal and after- wards people sat in groups talking and drinking wine beneath the lights hung in the trees. In the morning, prayers until eleven and then breakfast. In the afternoon, singing, about fifty people joining in, some of the most fervent and full-throated singing I have heard. When the sun sets and the dusk grows, they sing the songs of farewell to the Sabbath, sitting in the dark while the sun dwindles to a red tiddley- wink and sinks into the sea. In the gloom, while the lamps are kindled, is for them a sad moment. They regard the Sabbath as a bride, the union with God, and many have memories of the European small towns when it was the oasis in the week, when drudgery gave way to the napery and the wine. === Page 108 === 508 PARTISAN REVIEW The main tug of war in the country is that between East and West. Britain, the United States and Russia have taken the places of Babylon and Egypt, Rome and Persia. But the essential conflict is tem- peramental. In Tel Aviv there are three good theaters doing interesting plays in Hebrew, several cinemas, one or two good hotels and bars. There are several cafés where the largely German-Jewish population sip coffee and eat pastries. The shops are modern and the women stylish. But their hair thins and their complexions get prematurely hag- gard. In the hot season, the sun brings out a sweat at nine in the morning, destroys shadow, bears down so that one feels flat as a lizard. The young New Yorkers with their Hawaiian shirts and Gershwin records set their wooden huts on the hilltops near the Leb- anese border where Arab smugglers are caught every night and near the tombs at Meiron of two great sages of the Jewish cultural heyday. The jeeps trundle through the sand dunes of the Negev to Aquaba from where a Jewish fleet may sail again as it has not done since Solomon. The new state is young, brash, sensitive, unsure, provincial, but it has made the wonderful leap from the bitter interregnum of the ghetto, the old clothes man, the discreet humility. The people are taking to Arab dances like the Debka, the lilting galloping rhythms, the quavering songs, the music of pipe and tabor. Celebrating the new settlement at Ben Shemen under a moon big as a bicycle wheel, girls in crimson dresses danced with corn sheaves and pitchers, with no self- conscious air of dressing up but rather as though resuming a familiar tradition. In Galilee we sat at a fish fry round a spirit stove while the mosquitoes twanged against the net and the singing went out from the island of light into the night on the indifferent land, now cool, but capable of torrent and gale or, suddenly, the bland sun, an ecstatic spring and a smouldering summer, the temperamental Jewish weather. One feels an affection for the unpredictable, intractable country. There is something familiar to me in these limestone crags with the buzzard slowly flying over, the scrub, boulder, shrub, on the heave of big hills, the land of Golam (now Transjordan) like soft grey folds of elephant hide, the Jordan lands, blue-rose, graphitic, the green, mottled, black and dun collapse of the hills to the sea of Galilee, blue as a fallen sky. It may be that the people who have come back may feel an odd memory of Ha'Ibri. The impact on the East of two thousand years ex- perience in other lands, the sense of returning to something familiar, may produce a new mystique. The word “Orientalism” may acquire a new dignity. Instead of the factual approach of the West, there are the meditative, the almost feminine, subtleties of argument and values, the === Page 109 === LETTER FROM ISRAEL 509 introspection emanating from a sense of the pathos of space, of man's precarious lodgement, the colorful and blood-heating day, the lyrical evening and the night when the hills withdraw in mist and man is alone. It is a land for mystics. Three silver birches against the blue Galilean sea and oddly one feels that there may be archetypal shapes which are obscure symbols of God. The blend of the sensual and the ascetic, the despot and the poet, the voluptuary and the saint, the dualism in the Hebrew character which one meets in the Bible and today, is explicable here with the searing sun and the icy purity of the Jordan, the charred grass and wild oleander, the scorched earth and the horned lark, the turtle plopping in the pool. After the savage day the contrite evening. The two elements seem to permeate the Jewish character through history. In his greatest depravity he recognizes sin. Evil fights with conscience and barbarism suffers guilt. This almost feminine interweaving can be seen to-day in the police and customs officials who retain a saintly patience, some- times lose their tempers, break into quarrels, and then, better nature appealed to, apologize and acknowledge error. It may be that the people returning from the world may start a world in microcosm, that the wisdom of two thousand years may achieve a synthesis, a new emphasis in living, that the culture preserved in vacuo for so long may strike rich roots in the strange and familiar country. Meanwhile, the little human experiments continue, although the constellations of lights from the settlements on the hills are far apart and the singing takes on that Eastern upward quaver, like a question. === Page 110 === ART CHRONICLE TWO RECONSIDERATIONS A second, third and fourth visit to the Vienna show at the Metropolitan gave me reason to modify in one important respect the impression that I reported in the previous number of PARTISAN REVIEW after a first visit. I did much less than justice to Titian (as well as failing to praise extravagantly Brueghel's little "Adoration of the Magi" and even to remark on Lorenzo Lotto's "Virgin and Child with Saints Catherine and James the Great"). On second and calmer view, when one has assimilated the first impact of the number and general brilliance of the pictures and begun to take one's ease among them, it is discovered that those works that had originally the greatest immediate effect do not in every case remain the necessarily superior ones. Thus, as one goes from Titian to Tintoretto, the latter's instantaneously effective patterning of dark and light, with the more readily apprehendable painterly qualities produced by a faster and freer brush, does not come as the refreshing surprise it was before. This time I had taken a longer look at Titian, and Tintoretto appeared a little thin and papery in contrast. His paint remained too much on the surface, easy to be peeled off in a single fragile layer. Nor was Tintoretto the only one to make this impression. By comparison with Titian every other painter in the Vienna show, save perhaps Velasquez, began to seem thin too. I find Titian's great and special virtue his ability to transform the canvas so completely in the interest of the illusion of mass and volume. This was the central interest of five centuries of Western painting, and it makes Titian the central and perhaps supreme master of those five centuries. Other painters have worked more sculpturally, still other painters have given a more emphatic version of deep or distant space, but none has achieved statements of the illusion, as such, of the third dimension that are equally convincing, full, and integrated. None has so thoroughly possessed a flat surface for the sake of that illusion or— to be even more exact—surrendered so little of the illusion for the sake of that surface. Yet Titian does not violate what is called the integrity of the picture plane; there are few "holes" in his paintings, few protrud- ing bosses. It is not a question of trompe-l'oeil with him; he does not === Page 111 === ART CHRONICLE 511 model and tint toward the end of a complete naturalism, for the simple sake of likeness to nature. His illusion is original and harmonious, and something that is a means; it is the illusion of the three-dimensional world that can be most convincingly rendered with paint on canvas as art. The principal factor in this art is color-color modulated according to a scheme of dark and light values such as is deemed best fitted to endow flat colored surfaces with the illusion of volume. Titian's color has a substantiality of texture that makes it hard to conceive that it is the product of thin layers of paint spread on a sheet of canvas; one has the impression of configurations that well up out of infinite real space-as if the reverse as well as the obverse side of the canvas had been transformed by paint. Or as if the very threads of the fabric had been dissolved into pigment so that the picture consisted entirely of paint without a supporting surface. And yet-this is the contradiction essential to the art-the supporting surface that we know to be actually there is not denied in its flatness, and we feel this without feeling any the less the illusion that it is not there. On the other hand, and despite all this, repeated visits to the Vienna show have not persuaded me one jot more of the final rightness of Titian's large figure compositions. They still do not quite come off, and an increasing perception of his sheer qualities as a painter makes this only more exasperating and disappointing. Nor does the fault lie as much with the grime or the possible retouching as might at first be thought. There would appear to be something wrong with the design in every one of the figure compositions; that these pictures make Titian's special virtues clearer even than do his portraits, however more unified the latter are, is but additional cause for exasperation. Perhaps Titian's way of creating form by color modelling does not accord with his insist- ence on frontal arrangements of solidly moulded forms parallel with the picture plane. This may explain a certain redundancy in the massing of nude figures, a certain lack of movement and plastic variety; in the context of what is after all atmospheric painting the eye is held too evenly close to the surface over too great a part of the picture, and the escape it finds through the upper right- or left-hand corner may be- come too pat, no matter how wonderfully the corner itself is painted. Whatever the explanation, one sees how Tintoretto's adventurous- ness gave him an advantage over Titian in the department of design. Tintoretto is not his equal as a painter and executant, but he often con- ceives more greatly. His "Susanna and the Elders" lacks Titian's sub- stantiality and depth, but it has a greater and more difficult unity than === Page 112 === 512 PARTISAN REVIEW can be found in the older master's figure compositions. On second view I began to suspect that the final rightness which I thought to miss in the Susanna picture had been there at least originally. The trouble is not in the way in which Susanna's undulating silhouette is fitted into the background, as I wrote last month; it's in the wattled wall that runs diagonally into depth across the left center of the canvas. This, it appears to me, has been darkened by time so that it now makes a more or less blank hole where it must originally have provided a livelier transitional passage in different shades of brown. Titian would have insured him- self better against such an eventuality. But enough of comparisons. They are dangerous to make on the basis of the relatively few works by which Titian and Tintoretto are represented in the Vienna show. A visit to Venice may cause me to reconsider my judgments again—and in a more embarrassing way than this time. In the work of certain contemporary artists we tend at first to notice chiefly, or exclusively, that which it has in common with the work of other artists. As a result we think of these artists as un-original and derivative and too dependent on influences from outside, and we class them with the great unimportant host of imitators. Then, as their work becomes more familiar, it slowly becomes apparent that the resemblances that used to bulk so large have somehow—incomprehensibly—shrunk and lost their scope and importance, and that the main point of the art in question has become precisely that which is individual about it. This, rather than the resemblances, is now all we can notice. The late Arshile Gorky, who died in the summer of 1948, was an artist who had the misfortune to belong to this category. He was not an innovator, but he was at the very least original by mere virtue of his gifts. They were such as no other painter's in this country could equal. And he also had a rather original temperament, but one that required time to make itself felt, especially since the artist himself seemed to lack confidence in it. In many ways Gorky was a better handler of brush and paint than any one he was radically influenced by, including Picasso and Miró. And what he did with the hints he got from Matta made the latter look a more serious painter than he has any probable chance of really being. The fact of Gorky's originality was the point made for me by a show at the Koetz Gallery in April of fourteen oils executed over the last several years of his life. It was the most brilliant and consistent show by an American artist that I have ever seen, and I say this advisedly. === Page 113 === ART CHRONICLE 513 I now find Gorky a better painter than Ryder, Eakins, Homer, Cole, Allston, Whistler, or any other American one can mention. This writer once made the mistake of thinking Gorky a slave to influences—first Picasso's and Miró's, then Kandinsky's and Matta's. These influences were indeed there, but the error was in seeing them as something obeyed rather than assimilated and transformed. His second one-man show, at Julien Levy's, made me begin to change my mind, and a third show at the same dealer's made me change it definitely. But nothing has convinced me so flatly of my error and demonstrated its shocking extent so fully as this last show at Kootz's. I had seen all the pictures before, but during the two years since when I had last seen most of them they seemed to have blossomed into some added richness that made irrelevant whatever in them had at first appeared derivative. They struck me as being much more unified now and as possessing a singular excellence compounded of skill and feeling that owed its inspiration to no one. Many of us who followed Gorky's course with real interest had al- ways appreciated his enormous gift but, for all our interest, we had failed in large measure to recognize the extent to which he fulfilled it in the last four years of his life. And I have reason now to believe that the fulfilment dates back much further than this, as we would have known had we had the eyes to see. We have had to catch up with Gorky and learn taste from him; he was one of those artists who had by themselves to form and extend our sensibility before they could be sufficiently appreciated. And we now see that he did do this. How otherwise can the suddenness be explained with which he is now revealed to us? Revealed in all the abundance and perfection of the fruits he garnered from his supernal skill as a draughtsman and his taste and sincerity as a colorist. In such pictures as the "Diary of a Seducer" (1945), "Landscape Table" (1945), and "The Beginning" (1947) he shows himself as one of the great painters of his time and among the very greatest of his generation. This, of course, makes his absence all the more tragic. By now Gorky would have been only forty-five, and he should have been here to receive his due. Clement Greenberg === Page 114 === BOOKS DECENCY AND DEATH DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. By George Orwell. Har- court, Brace. $2.75. COMING UP FOR AIR. By George Orwell. Harcourt, Brace. $3.00. BURMESE DAYS. By George Orwell. Harcourt, Brace. $3.00. In an article on Arthur Koestler, written in 1944, George Orwell complained that no Englishman had as yet published a worth- while novel on the theme of totalitarian politics-nothing to equal Darkness At Noon-"Because there is almost no English writer to whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside." Five years later, with the publication of 1984, he had become the one exception. He had not in the interval gained any more intimate an acquaintance with the subject; the year he spent fighting with the POUM in the Spanish Civil War was his closest approach to it. The success of 1984 must therefore be attributed to his imagination. But this is precisely the quality in which all his previous work had been weakest. Orwell was fair, honest, unassuming and reliable in everything he wrote. These qualities, though desirable in every writer, are specifically the virtues of journalism; and Orwell, it seems to me, had always been at his best, not in the novels or political articles, but in casual pieces of the kind he wrote for the London Tribune in his column, "As I Please." He was a writer in a small way-a different matter from the minor writer, to whose virtuosity and finesse he never aspired. This lack of literary manner enabled him to give himself directly, if some- times feebly, to the reader; he held back his feelings (even in his account of the Stalinists' responsibility for the Barcelona street fighting in Homage to Catalonia, his anger does not rise above the note of "You don't do such things!") but only in the manner of restraint, and there was nothing hypocritical or false about him. He had all the traditional English virtues, of which he made the traditional compression into one: decency. When he died, I felt as many of his readers who never knew him must have done, that this was a friend gone. Down and Out in Paris and London, one of his earlier books, is the steady Orwell who underwent no apparent development. Recorded here are some of the worst days of his life when he was unemployed, === Page 115 === DECENCY AND DEATH 515 broke and starving. But the tone is substantially the same as that of the article on boys' weeklies in Dickens, Dali & Others. The Eton graduate and former Burma policeman accepts dish-washers and tramps as his fellow men without condescension and with only a little squeamish- ness at the filth of his surroundings. He makes no effort to bend his prose to the sounding of lower depths, and he was to feel no need to make a special adjustment to the language and problems of political journalism when he returned to England to gain some recognition as a writer. Detached yet close observation, dryness, a stamping out of whatever may once have been the snob in him (yet never at the expense of the Englishman) and the correlated stubborn attachment to common sense, to which he sometimes sacrificed his insight—this made up his basic journalistic style, unchanged through the years. In Burmese Days, first published a year later in 1934, there is considerable bitterness as Orwell expresses his disgust with the Indian Civil Service. This is hardly the same man writing. For once he is full of contempt, especially toward his hero, John Flory, though the latter happens to be the only "decent" character in the novel—he is not bigoted as the rest of the whites, he does not have the Imperial attitude, he is humane toward the natives. Yet he is a weakling, he gives way to alcoholism and the unrelieved colonial ennui, and he is in- capable of withstanding the corrupt moral pressure of his colleagues; Orwell cannot forgive him this. His attitude toward this character—in whom there must have been a good deal of himself—is neither com- pletely personal nor detached, and here Orwell betrays a fault which, until 1984, was to remain his greatest as a novelist, a fault of imagina- tion, in not knowing what to do with a character, once the main traits and the setting have been provided. (The Burmese jungle, the char- acter of the natives, their attitude toward the swinish pukka sahibs, the dances and festivals, the pidgin and official English were all ex- cellently reported.) Flory, for all the significance a socialist writer might have given such a characterization, falls into the useless, unimagina- tive category of the weak liberal—anybody's whipping boy. The only interesting thing in his treatment of him is that it is so thoroughly bad-mannered; the mild Orwell makes not the slightest effort to spare his contempt for the man and ends by having him commit suicide, and the masochistic suggestion which this carries links Flory, however vague- ly, with the ultimate characterization of the political hero (Winston Smith) as he who undergoes infinite degradation. Otherwise one is still unprepared for 1984. Coming Up for Air, written in 1938, reverts to the journalistic === Page 116 === 516 PARTISAN REVIEW style of ease and understatement, the disquietude of Burmese Days worked out of it. But this does not do the novel much good, as it fails to catch the anxiety of the pre-war days. The hero, George Bowling, running out on his job and family for a breather before the war which he knows is coming, refers to himself as a typical middleaged suburban bloke, and Orwell, for the greater part of the book, is satisfied to treat him at this level. But his concern with politics had apparently been getting ahead of his style. Where Orwell's sense of politics in Burmese Days was of little more than incidental value, in Coming Up for Air it has become the source of the whole book. This, together with the continuing weakness of the novelist's imagination, accounts for such passages as the one in which Bowling, inspecting the shot motor of his car, compares it to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Moreover, Orwell's politics suddenly appears to be out of joint. (A pity that it had not been more so. It is sometimes an advantage for a political writer to lose his grasp of politics, for the unreality of his observations brings him so much nearer to experience. But this, too, had to wait till 1984.) Bowling's holiday consists in a return to his boyhood village, which he finds un- recognizably overgrown with factories and ugly housing developments. The values of his youth, Bowling realizes, have vanished for good. But this feeling is presented in such strength, it subverts the politics to a conservative tone. The decency which Orwell had linked, at one level, with the Socialist movement, in which he saw its only chance of surviving, now seems to belong entirely to the laissez-faire days preceding the first World War with their unshaken social traditions, the slower pace, the less highly developed technology. This again may be merely a failure of imagination, Orwell at as great a loss to know what to do with a theme as with a character; but it also suggests that the failure came of a division deep in him. He was a radical in politics and a conservative in feeling. Though he continued to write his political articles and casual pieces in the same informal and disarming style, as though nothing were happening, his feelings were getting the better of him. This, though I have no evidence for it, I must suppose to be the case on the strength of the fact that he was for many years a sick, and during the writing of 1984, a dying, man. His style, the character of the man, did not allow conflicts to appear at the surface, which had to remain undis- turbed. He kept on writing in the easy manner that disarmed the reader of any suspicion of conflict, remaining empirical and optimistic all the time that he was turning over a metaphysics of evil. A dying man, one may expect, will find consistency his last con- === Page 117 === DECENCY AND DEATH 517 cern. Death exempts him from his own habits as much as it does from responsibility to others. Life being what it is in our world, the onset of death is often the first taste a man gets of freedom. At last the imagina- tion can come into its own, and as a man yields to it his emotions take on a surprising depth and intensity. The extreme situation in which Orwell found himself as the rapid downhill course of tuberculosis approached, enabled him for the first time to go from one extreme to the other: from his own sickness to the world's. His imagination, set free, was able to confirm the identity of the two extremes, turning sickness into art. The torture scenes in 1984 have been compared with The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. The comparison seems to me forced; a better one, it applies to the novel as a whole, is with Ippolit's “Es- sential Explanation” in The Idiot. The torturer O'Brien's words to Winston Smith as he is re-educating him, “The objective of power is power,” are the equivalent, in what they reveal to Smith of a politics stripped bare of morality, of Ippolit's nightmare of the monstrous in- sect, representing the world of nature without God. That the ob- jective of power is power may long have been obvious to some men, but for the restrained writer who had muffled the terror and dis- gust politics produced in him, who had held on to a socialist rationale and let out his antipathies in an exaggerated idyll of the conservative past—for him such words had a deeper meaning. They mark the end of decency. Decency, meaning precisely the reserve of Orwell's own character, the constitutional intolerance of the extreme course, has failed him. Now he is dying. What good has this withholding done? He turns, like Ippolit, against himself, with the cry, not of glad tears of release, but of the jealousy of life, "I have been cheated!" And now the decent man, Winston Smith, is unremittingly punished for the loss. He is given neither an opportunity for redemption nor even the small comfort of dying with his inner life intact. His end must be beyond the last extreme, a species of pure diabolism; it is to the embrace of Big Brother that Orwell steers him, one of the most hideous moments of revenge in literature. It is beside the point to argue that this revenge is the Party's, which will not allow its victims to die unrepentant, or that Orwell was merely following the “confessions” of the Stalinist trials. These argu- ments are true, but it is also true that Winston (named, if uncon- sciously, to honor his conservative principle) was too close to Orwell for his torturer to be an entire stranger. So close a vengeance is always taken on oneself. === Page 118 === 518 PARTISAN REVIEW The significant point is that Winston yields. The force to which he is subjected is overwhelming, any man would crack. Yet in novels all actions are willed; the force that seems to break the will is in reality the rationalization of its action. Winston's breakdown covers a multiple suicide. There is first of all Orwell's own suicide, committed, accord- ing to the reports one hears, in the course of writing the novel and in the year that followed, when he neglected his health and remained ac- tive, though with two best-sellers he must have had the means for a change of climate and complete rest. Winston's yielding is reminiscent also of Ippolit's suicide, which the consumptive bungled only that his death might occur as so much the greater an indignity. There is defiance in this indignity, deliberately sought. Both Winston and Ippolit rebel against a world in which everything is possible, in which 2+2 no longer equal 4-by yielding. The defiance is marked by the extent of the yielding. Though Winston hasn't even a squeak of defiance left, so much the more defiant is it, as though he were to say, “Take away my last shred of decency, will you? Then here—take everything. Here's lungs and liver, mind and heart and soul!” Everything goes, nothing is saved. “He loved Big Brother.” This is Orwell finally yielding up the life-long image, the char- acter and style and habits of reason and restraint. I cannot conceive of a greater despair, and if it falls short of the magnificent it is only because Orwell was not a genius. But the mild journalist had at last attained art, expressing the totalitarian agony out of his own, as no English writer had done. He encompassed the world's sickness in his own: in this way, too, it may happen to a man to see totalitarianism “from inside.” Whether Orwell's vision was true or false, consistent or not, or even adequate to reality, is a separate question, and not, it seems to me, very important in his case. All that matters is the force of the passion with which the man, who began as a writer in a small way, at last came through. The force with which he ended is the one with which greatness begins. This force, it will be observed, was enough to kill a man. Isaac Rosenfeld the hans hofmann school of fine arts 52 west 8th street new york city phone gramercy 7-3491 provincetown, mass. summer session june 12 - sept. I approved G.I. Bill of Rights personally conducted by mr. hofmann === Page 119 === FICTION CHRONICLE GERALDINE BRADSHAW. By Calder Willingham. Vanguard. $3.50. THE DEAD OF SPRING. By Paul Goodman. Libertanian Press. $3.00. THE WALL. By John Hersey. Alfred A. Knopf. $4.00. THE WORLD IS A BRIDGE. By Christine Weston. $1.50. THE CANNIBAL. By John Hawkes. New Directions. $1.50. THE SUNNIER SIDE. By Charles Jackson. Farrar Straus. $2.75. THE WRONG SET. By Angus Wilson. $3.00. Geraldine Bradshaw sounds as if it were written to the prescription of all the attacks on the naturalist novel that recurred ritualistically through the 'forties. It is good that an occasional example still appears to give point to these attacks, for though they say nothing in a literary way that was not said repeatedly before 1885 by French and German critics of Zola, the satisfaction they continue to give grows out of real political and religious need. On the one hand, the world battle with Stalinism keeps alive a bad conscience over some literary simplifica- tions of the 'thirties; on the other hand there is an interested attempt- making very broad assumptions indeed-to turn the reaction against literary naturalism into a reaction against philosophic naturalism of any kind, as if The Life of Reason by Santayana, for instance, had its inevitable imaginative consequence in Geraldine Bradshaw or Bernard Clare. Geraldine Bradshaw certainly is more to the point than Germinal or La Débacle. Already in the late nineteenth century Brandes and other critics had decided that Zola was really a Hugosque romantic, a Wagnerian symbolist, energizing and transforming his materials by force of temperament, "un coin de nature vu à travers un temperament," Calder Willingham, however, writes as if he had no temperament, and it was still the days of Thérèse Raquin, and he had the preface open before him, following its false medical analogies in a wryly observant but inhuman fashion, with everything devotedly kept as dreary and banal and somatic as possible. Geraldine is a teaser, and the drama of the book, its series of agons, consist of the persistent efforts of the hero and one or two other people who don't hold their liquor well to get successfully to bed with her. What makes the book serious is the fact that none of this is any fun. "A solid horrible hour was required to separate her from her stockings and panties. She removed the stockings herself, but a mortal battle was fonght over the panties. Several times Davenport almost gave up from === Page 120 === 520 PARTISAN REVIEW sheer exhaustion." Over 250 pages later the same garments still intervene between Davenport and the right true end. This frustration and exhaustion take on symbolic character despite themselves. Geraldine and Geraldine's case and all the battles to break down Geraldine's resistance are presented simply and totally as facts, as events. We are forced to give factual assent at the same time that it is impossible to give imaginative assent. There is nothing to be done about Geraldine as a fact, at least not in a book, and since this is not socialist realism, we are not directed to do anything about her outside the book. Geraldine is not the occasion, as she might so easily have been, of some qualitatively novel kinds of experience. In fiction the qualitatively novel exists only as a mind perceives it in experience, and experience can be evaluated only as it is placed with other experiences in an imaginative order which the author's temperament requires and for which he takes imaginative responsibility. The joyless struggles with Geraldine recall as their opposite extreme the joyful struggles which Frank Norris's temperament led him to invent with Moran of the "Lady Letty." We don't have to give factual assent to Moran, with her great ropes of hair, her man's tanned wrists and her magnificent deltoid muscles. She is born of the unconscious, of eroticism and some rather trashy neo-primitivistic ideas, but Norris so commits himself to her imaginatively that she becomes an experience. There is no eroticism whatsoever in Geraldine Bradshaw, despite all the bodily details. But the battles with Moran are not merely erotic. They are so transvaluative for the hero when put in relation to the experiences that San Francisco society had offered him, that they have a wonder- fully liberating effect. No such sense of liberation and transvaluation occurs in Paul Goodman's The Dead of Spring. Goodman mixes realism and fantasy in a way that permits him to do anything he wants, but he uses his wanton power over his shapeless fantasy figures chiefly to exhibit his contemptuous impatience with them. "The stifling ambience of our Empire City in the last stages of imperial decay," is taken as a deter- minative fact which makes any imaginative satisfaction impossible. Free fantasy produces no equivalents of Moran; instead we have a tone remarkably like that of Geraldine Bradshaw, with even greater pre- occupation with the purely external indications of sex, especially in the male. Instead of sexual experience in a transformed and transform- ing relation to other experiences, we have sexual exposure in its most em- barrassing forms. There is more discursive reasoning than in Willingham's novel, but no genuine experience to mediate between the rhetoric and === Page 121 === FICTION CHRONICLE 521 the banalities of the "stifling ambience." Goodman's apparent play of spirit and his sociology actually seem to hide a fear of approaching experience qualitatively, of realizing imaginatively the varieties of human possibility and giving them imaginative order and even beauty. I mention these two books in these terms because the same question arises with a much more serious book, John Hersey's The Wall. In describing the fate of the Warsaw Ghetto, Hersey is trying to imagine something which occurred but which he did not experience. His docu- mentation and recreation of it are respectful, patient and as complete as he can make them, in the manner of Defoe rather than Zola. Warsaw during the German occupation is a terrible corner of nature, but it is not seen through a temperament. In the Journal of the Plague Year Defoe was not only writing about an extreme social experience which had never been photographed or reported in newspapers or reproduced in such detail, but one which had begun working directly on his own imagination when he was still a little boy. The Wall follows in time not only a vast amount of other documentation of the extreme human situations of the war, but also such accounts as those of Rousset which reported at first hand unpredictable and hitherto unimaginable kinds of human experience in these situations. By putting his novel in the form of a chronicler's notes, Hersey acknowledges the second-hand character of his findings, and scrupulously never goes farther than he feels he safely can in reproducing direct experience. However, this too great degree of imaginative control in the in- terests of justice to history gives an effect always of calculation, of pro- portional representation rather than imaginative order. There must be so many unsympathetic characters who show themselves strong, and not quite so many sympathetic characters who show themselves weak; there must be unexpectedly good moments and unexpected love affairs even in the midst of suffering and ruin; a baby must be born but at an almost predicatable point in the book it must also die. Hersey does this with high craftsmanship, but the work is sustained by a sense that some- thing like this did actually occur rather than by the sense that if some- thing like this did occur, this is the way it would be. The real excitement comes in the underground battling toward the end, which is in a very old adventurous tradition. The Wall does not reveal unexpected qualities of experience, be- cause Hersey avoids a real imaginative commitment which would lead to a transformation and revaluation of his material, and make up for the lack of direct participation in the events as history. He doesn't enter into the full emotional and even unconscious relationship with === Page 122 === 522 PARTISAN REVIEW his characters that would give them an independent existence trans- cending their documentary purpose and perhaps even proving refractory to it. Nor does Hersey treat the total ghetto experience in the way that Zolaesque symbols and emphases and thematizations-if he felt the need to express what imagining that destruction of the ghetto did to this total sense of human life and value. Single brilliant paragraphs in the manner of Rimbaud's Illumina- tions in John Hawkes' The Cannibalgive greater imaginative quality to the ambience of the ruined cities of Germany than the whole of The Wall does to the ambience of the Warsaw ghetto. And give a sense of pure horror which Hersey seems deliberately to avoid. But the strange characters of The Cannibalgare projected away from us, so to speak, on the further side of the desolation that has created them, and the actions of these characters are stranger and remoter still. The vision is imaginatively homogeneous, but does not develop dramatically in a way that enables us to put it comprehensively into relation with more normal experience. In introducing the work Albert Guerard, Jr. speaks frequently of Kafka, but Hawkes' situations do not, like Kafka's, evoke in us an unconscious recognition that makes their strangeness our own. The strangeness in Christine Weston's The World is a Bridge is the strangeness of India, and especially the strangeness of India with the British gone and the Hindus and Moslems slaughtering each other in a partitioned land. If the events were less tragic and less ser- iously conceived, the characters and their courtly circumstances would be those of an affecting but conventional romantic novel. The political events are not given Hersey's careful articulation. Nevertheless, The World is a Bridge has a qualitative effect as experience that The Wall does not have, because of what Miss Weston does with India and Indians. It is not merely that Indians act like Indians in peculiarly Indian circumstances in a way which we cannot predict, but also that Miss Weston is responding to this imaginatively in terms of her own ex- perience of India, her own feeling for India and Indian symbols, so that the ambience has a determinative depth of suggestion that that of Warsaw did not have for Hersey. We understand how this is so in reading such memories or fan- tasies of childhood as Charles Jackson's The Sunnier Side, in which early experience, if fully enough placed, has a uniqueness and depth which makes it resistant to any kind of reduction, in which there is an indissoluble fusion of time and place and person and act. This is the === Page 123 === FICTION CHRONICLE 523 sense in which Fitzgerald was childishly right when he said, "The rich are different from us." It is the child's sense, which Jackson re- creates in the most amiable way, that people are different by a lake or in a huge Victorian house or sunning themselves in a meadow, be- cause the experience of them is eternally colored by the experience of lake and house and meadow, and beyond that by the magic of time, but not merely time of day or season, but time in the rapidly changing life of a young observer, conscious then of being what he has not been before or ever will be again. The stories in Angus Wilson's The Wrong Set have little of Jack- son's amiability, but are equally entertaining. And though the char- acters are often unpleasant and unhappy and cruel and the stories often end negatively, this is the world of The Sunnier Side rather than Geraldine Bradshaw or The Dead of Spring. For these characters have stubborn inner integrity, though not of a moral kind, and great human resource, and are capable of peculiarly bright flashes of wit and idea. Their kind of behavior is appropriate to their kind of character, and thoroughly natural, but the kinds are so qualified and individualized and particularized, that they seem determined only by their need of be- ing themselves and are proved true only by the imaginative assent we give them. And it is in this sense that good writing is naturalistic, and not in the sense of Geraldine Bradshaw. To a philosophical naturalist everything is natural, including religious and mystical and imaginative experience, everything "generated and controlled by the animal life of man in the bosom of nature." Ideas are more or less true and events are more or less determined, but all human experience is equally natural and equally at the service of the artist who can imagine it. The more exactly qualified experience is in expression, the more freely it resists reduction to fact or reduction to law. The naturalism of writers like Willingham and Goodman reveals a sociological bias toward the kind of experience which results, or is held to result, from the stunting and deforming effects of our present civilization, and reveals a rationalist bias away from any kind of experience which seems to have philosophic premises they cannot rationally accept. This is true of a good deal of existential fiction also. But at a time when human life itself is threatened, there is an irresistible impulse to break free of such limitations in favor of that larger naturalism which gives us imaginative access to all possibilities of human experience, but which makes us totally responsible for the values we give them. Robert Gorham Davis === Page 124 === VARIETY VILLAGE CAFÉ Before Mary MacCar- thy popularized it in the New York Post, the Bistro hadn't even an obscene scrawl in the men's toilet. But those who came to see what she imagined or pretended to see, decorated it with the im- ages of their disappointment. The defacement was short-lived. The tourists were bored and left; the one beer an hour squatters who were bounced to make room for them are back. Business goes on as usual. Everything's as quiet as a wake—and, in fact, if I had to tell you what I think the people in the Bistro are doing, that's what I'd say, that they're holding a wake, a wake for the world, which is to say each man for himself. The essence and absurdity of the Village are here—the artists and their caricatures, manic poets and spastic painters encouraged by the management because it's good bus- iness and because it appeals to their sadistic sense of humor. An anthropologist interviewing these people could find all the ills of America. Miss MacCarthy only finds that they "do nothing." Her generation is used to "the battle of ideas and standards." —Ah, the luxury of ideas and standards! The rhetorical questions they flattered themselves with! "Who shall own the machinery of production?" "What is art?" A decade of char- ades! The problems dumped into this generation's lap, which dumps it in turn into the Bistro, are un- heard of by our surprised Hecate County suburbanite. Marx is passé, the bourgeoisie already épaté: the students here are from the New School, where they've just been asked What is the meaning of meaning? Some- one—he's not here—shouted some- thing about the machinery of pro- duction, rattled the workers' ghost- ly chains, but the others know that the machinery of production is for beer and bombs, and they'll take beer. Art?—The art of self-defense! God?—Moloch, the juke-box! You ask who shall run the government? —Why, the bartenders of course! Gene, Steve and Ray—who else! Perfect Machiavellians! Gene as- signs status. Steve can break your nose over the bar, and your girl knows he's a better lay. Ray gives you your baby formula. Patting a behind here, squeezing a homo- sexual's arm there, they breathe their normality like Sen-Sen in your face. Every drink you drink is a toast to them, arteriosclerosis or ulcers for you. Those seated together at tables examine each others' psyches like monkeys searching for fleas. The standees are more like the apes in the experiment. Some psycho- logist—a less sardonic Gene—is- === Page 125 === 525 olated them from birth, and when they were mature and in heat, put them together. Having no observed precedent like normally raised apes, they were thrown back on instinct, forced to start from scratch. They scratched, grappled, growled, seized each other this way and that-a psychologist's joke. Finally, each one obtruding his or her need, Nature triumphed, they fitted compatibly together, copu- lated. Here, in this arena, the grappling, complicated by con- sciousness, continues. These too, grew in isolation, knew no pre- cedent. They grapple too, every conceivable which-way, but alas! their needs are necessarily unob- trusive, can never meet. But while there's grappling, there's hope, the Bistro doesn't close till three, and, by that time, they'll be too heavy with beer and too tired to care. Many of the habitués wear the "impassively disconsolate counten- ance" attributed by Veblen to servants and priests. And so they are-priests of nothing, servants of everything, carrying all their history on their backs, just as homeless Japanese-antipodal vic- tims of the same violence-pack all their filthy tatters, reeking fish and primitive appurtenances every- where with them. How they came here is a familiar story: they be- gan by avoiding work to make room for work, which obligingly cancelled itself out to make even more room, too much room, enough for agoraphobia, whose antidote is this. Others come partly out of a desire to compare themselves in- vidiously with the bartenders, who, nothing -loath, always give them their lumps, stopping just short of sodomy. In a whole week of Sunday neurosis, the regular customers show every day. On week-ends the tourists pour in, to this Museum of Natural History, to see them in their typical attitudes, posed by the great taxidermist Himself. What do you do? And what do you do? And you, and you, and especially you. . . . Like Buridan's ass, they grow ever gaunter hover- ing halfway between the pleasure principle and the death instinct. Most of the permutations and combinations of sex and insulting have been exhausted between them and they accept each other in- differently, like siblings with noth- ing to stimulate their rivalry. They're here to kill time till it kills them. Now and then, an earnest voice, "like the insistent out-of-tune of a broken violin," pursues an ignis fatuus, a hot flash born of indigestion or fatigue. At We specialise in first editions and out-of-print books by modern English authors, and probably have in stock, or can obtain what you require. Auden, Isherwood, Greene, Spender, Gill, Koestler, Joyce, Sitwell, are but a few of the authors of which we have extensive, if not complete, stocks. May we send you our lists, and re- ceive your "wants" lists? BERNARD HANISON - Books 57 St. Martin's Lane, London, W.C.2. England === Page 126 === 526 one table a small hipster com- ponent keeps its own counsel. Cool is their keyword: Keep cool, man, or you'll burn yourself out. The address man still survives with them, but now it is no longer strictly slang, it also connotes a large abstraction, a featureless des- ignation. Here and there you see the un- fallen faces of girls fresh from Eastern colleges, or free on their winter projects. At ten, it is the mystery of birth that fascinates them; at twenty, its inverse, abor- tion. (These aborted lives are liter- ature.) Their counterparts are the Harvard boys, little Oedipuses too polite to murder their fathers, shrinking from the task in nar- row shouldered suits. Those that live here ran away from home to be doggedly themselves, but there are still dozens of cans and can'ts tied to their tales, and all they can do is bitch about it. The fairies always à l'affût, in ambush behind demurely dropped lids, or frankly tumescent in a gimlet eye. The real queens are quashed—Gene throws a beer on their tattersall vests, glares into their crimson faces. None do much business here, but the tension—so much deeper and more equivocal than at the regular markets—is like a delicious knotting in the bowels. Outside, pacing, peering through the breath-blurred windows, are the barred, the untouchables who have touched one of the trinity's touchy spot. Exiled from exile, they wait, doing their appointed penance, on the alert for redemp- tion. A rare fight, perhaps, will bring the bartenders out, and if they see you there, a nod, a nuance, may mean readmittance. In the middle of the floor stands a man who has two slabs of card- board strung from his neck, with poems pasted on them, a sand- wich-man, absurd image of a hu- man being—or a generation—sand- wiched between bits of bad poe- try. Crouched in a booth is his opposite, whose poems are so deep- ly buried within as to be forever unutterable or unprintable. Other, median types consciously or uncon- sciously soak up tension for future lines. Dominating the bar, infusing it with his spirit, Gene, the manager, walks among these shades, these displaced persons, like a com- placent prison guard. Symbol of the further world, the one outside the ark, Gene is king or judge of court. He establishes rank, and, exquisite irony, ranks you as you rank yourself, accepts your own unconscious evaluation, which he intuits through your gestures, your acquaintances, the amount you spend, who you make it with, and who puts you down. He is neither friendly nor unfriendly. Since you are not of the same species, his ordinary social standards don't ap- ply to you. Like a Coney Island boardwalk conner, he guesses how much weight you carry, and each === Page 127 === 527 time he calls your number you lose. The regulars can't bear this imper- sonality: they sentimentalize their relation to him, imagine reactions pro or con, come on or cut out ac- cordingly in periodic rises and falls. The patron saint of the Bistro is a youth, a pure character now banned as giving the show away. He is one who comes neither to drink nor sport, but for the lay- ing on of hands where it is most required. He cadges those who need to give into the soft act of surrender, accepting eleemosynary with the transcendent air of a holy man. His life is the reductio ad absurdum-or sublime, if you like-of the Bistro's spirit. Ap- plying every drug known to a drugged age, he has wrested his rhythms from Nature, captured his self. Jump with a benny, jell with a saggy. Ride the horse, stop for a sip of tea. Total masturbation -the triumph of modern art, a life like a Mondrian or Malévitch's White on White, capping Valéry's Mister Head, which is, after all, but the artificial construction of a metaphor-monger. This is a Lazarus who comes back to tell nothing, because there is nothing. Born a tabula rasa, to that beati- tude he returns. Earthquakes, eclipses, tidal waves, wars, droughts, orgies, upheavals, pla- gues, he reduces to the propor- tions of a pill. Pills are private bombs. It's closing time at last-last call The DICTIONARY of PHILOSOPHY Edited by DAGO BERT D. RUNES with the collaboration of 70 eminent scholars. "By far the most authoritative book of its kind."-Prof. Karl Jaspers. ...................... $6.00 PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY, Inc. 15 E. 40 St., Dept. 97, New York, 16 THRU MAY 30th LOUIS CARRE ADVANCING FRENCH ART 712 FIFTH AVE. WILFREDO LAM PAINTINGS April 25-May 13 PIERRE MATISSE 41 E. 57 New York 22 BRADLEY TOMLIN PAINTINGS May 8-27 GROUP SHOW May 28-June 18 BETTY PARSONS GALLERY - 15 East 57 Street === Page 128 === 528 for drinks, last chance to find, each one thinks, whatever it was he was looking for. But by now it's successfully forgotten, blurred by beer like a love letter urinated on. By now you're shot, and they're about to eject you like a spent cartridge. Go home-a brutal sen- tence. Go home-taking, perhaps, the morning paper, a record of yesterday's obscenities, to bed with you. If you had a bed-mate, be- tween you you might bracket a lit- tle peace. More likely, you'd only double your loneliness. Either way, double or nothing, the toss is a loss because the coin's counterfeit, so forget it. Go home. Sleep, and let up your dreams like balloons to be burst by the morning sun. Anatole Broyard MAGABOOK SHOP 168 West Fourth Street, New York City 14, WAtkins 4-5043 IGNAZIO SILONE-FONTAMARA. Very Scarce. Red. from 5.00 .3.00 PAUL KLEE ON MODERN ART. Introd. by Herbert Read. Illust. .2.00 SIDNEY HOOK-HERO IN HISTORY. Reduced from 3.50 .2.00 HERMAN MELVILLE-REDBURN. Reduced from 2.50 .1.25 JUNG-ESSAYS ON CONTEMPORARY EVENTS. Reduced from 3.50 .2.00 EDMUND WILSON-NOTEBOOKS OF NIGHT. 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