=== Page 1 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW

MAY, 1948

PHILIP RAHV
Disillusionment and Socialism

ALFRED KAZIN
From an Italian Journal

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
For Whom Does One Write? (II)

JOSEPHINE HERBST
Miss Porter and Miss Stein

NICOLAS NABOKOV
The Cult of Atonality

CLEMENT GREENBERG
Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility

ELIO VITTORINI
In Sicily (a story)

WELDON KEES
Popular and Unpopular Music

FRANK JONES
The Critical Scene

5

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The former Luke estate overlooking the Hudson River

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COUNTY Homes has already converted several old carriage
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now occupied.
COUNTY Homes will plan and build a home on any one
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month rent in New York City can afford to buy or build on
County Homes property on the banks of the Hudson.
COUNTY Homes suggest that prospective home owners
inspect the property and choose a site before the land
planning is completed. Acreage is available from 1/4 acre up.
35 commuting minutes from New York City.

COUNTY HOMES, INC.
DAVID SWOPE, President
Tappan Hill, Tarrytown, N. Y. Tarrytown 4-3034

=== Page 3 ===
1948

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CONTRIBUTORS
LOUIS CLAIR is a former editor of
Modern Review.
WILLIAM ELTON teaches at Brown.
MARTIN GREENBERG has written
for Commentary and The New
Leader.
HORACE GREGORY is a member
of the faculty at Sarah Lawrence
College.
JOSEPHINE HERBST is a well-
known novelist.
CLELLON HOLMES, who lives in
New York, has published reviews in
Poetry.
FRANK JONES was one of the co-
editors of Diogenes.
ALFRED KAZIN recently returned
from Europe.
WELDON KEES is a painter, critic,
and poet.
PAUL KECSKEMETI is working
with the Army in connection with
its reorientation program in oc-
cupied countries.
NICOLAS NABOKOV's "The Re-
turn of Pushkin" was played by the
Boston Symphony at Carnegie Hall
in January.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE's new play,
"Les Mains sales" will be produced
this fall on Broadway.
ELIO VITTORINI, the Italian novel-
ist, has translated some of D. H.
Lawrence's books into Italian.
RICHARD WILBUR's first book of
poems was published last year by
Reynal and Hitchcock.
The frontispiece by Jacques Lipchitz
is reproduced through the courtesy
of the Buchholz Gallery.

=== Page 5 ===
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MAY, 1948 VOLUME XV, NUMBER 5

CONTENTS

FRONTISPIECE, "Sacrifice," Jacques Lipchitz
DISILLUSIONMENT AND PARTIAL ANSWERS, Philip Rahv
AN EPISODE FROM "IN SICILY," Elio Vittorini
FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE? (II), Jean-Paul Sartre

POEMS
THE LONG HOME, John Berryman
FRAU VON STEIN, MY BROTHER'S KEEPER, Clellon Holmes
PITY, Richard Wilbur

FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL, Alfred Kazin
MISS PORTER AND MISS STEIN, Josephine Herbst
ART CHRONICLE, Clement Greenberg

DRAWINGS
PICTOGRAPH, Adolph Gottlieb
HORNED FIGURE, William Baziotes
THE ATONAL TRAIL: A Communication, Nicolas Nabokov

REVIEWS
WELL-INTENTIONED/WELL-EQUIPPED, Frank Jones
FASCINATION AND PHILOSOPHY, Paul Kecskemeti
OF MANDARIN EXCELLENCE, Horace Gregory
POETRY CHRONICLE, William Elton
THE GUILTY AND THE LIVING, Martin Greenberg
ACADEMICIAN'S CHAPBOOK, J.B.
FRENCH PERIODICALS, Louis Clair

VARIETY
MUSKRAT RAMBLE: Popular and Unpopular Music, Weldon Kees

519
530
536

545
548
549

550
568
573

575
576
580

587
593
596
598
601
603
605

614

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Mupki
MENE
VA BUNTIE

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COMMENT

DISILLUSIONMENT AND PARTIAL ANSWERS

The radical writers made homeless by their break with
the Soviet cause, in their search for a vantage-point from which to
reassess the contemporary scene, continue to bear witness to their
disenchantment. These writers have long been a source of annoyance
to certain liberals, respectable social types most of them, journalists,
literary men, and academicians, in whose circles the word has gone
out that all those troublesome ex-Communists or ex-Marxists are to
be lumped together as a group of renegades neurotically "obsessed"
with the Russian question and therefore so twisted in their testimony
as scarcely to deserve serious consideration. This attitude is as pre-
sumptuous intellectually as it is mischievous politically; and what it
comes to in the end is a roundabout defense of totalitarianism on the
part of liberals so intent on keeping open a line of communication
to the power-center in the Kremlin that willy-nilly they become its
accomplices. Now, however, that Stalinist aggression and duplicity
have gotten us into a new pre-war situation and that the whole
Western world has finally come to recognize the crucial importance
of understanding the true nature of the Soviet regime, it can readily
be seen that the so-called "obsession" of the homeless radicals is a
piece of reality, while the apparent sobriety and reasonableness of
the official liberals and their opportunistic attempts to take a bal-
anced view of a total evil amount to nothing less than political mud-
dle and cowardice, if not downright collaboration with the enemies
of democracy and freedom.

There is also a certain type of literary man, genteel and non-
political to the core, a hero of nonparticipation and noninvolvement,
who takes it upon himself to scold the homeless radicals for their
political bias and assertiveness. Now it is true, of course, that the
homeless radicals were nearly all associated, in a variety of ways,
with the Communist movement of the thirties. This movement, how-

519

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PARTISAN REVIEW

ever disastrous in its ultimate results, provided the most significant
political experience of the period and the only experience of its kind
open to the intellectuals of the Western world; and it is not for those
who missed it, who stood aside because of complacence or indifference
or immersion in private lives and careers, to lecture those who came
through it and out of it—came out not simply with a loss of faith
but also with sharpened political instincts and a sense of the pathos
as well as the realities of radical politics which the disengaged people
who now plume themselves on having stayed put would find it very
difficult to acquire.
Moreover, the writers who broke with Communism do not at
all form a group with a unified outlook or program. Some, like Gide
and Edmund Wilson to a lesser extent, have apparently set aside
political interests and returned to the old-style literary life; Malraux
and Burnham have gone in for Realpolitik with a vengeance; others,
like Silone, Koestler, Orwell, Farrell, and Hook, retain, though each
in his own distinct way, a basic hope for socialism, while a few have
adopted an anarcho-utopian position consoling in its purity but
devoid of historical actuality. Hence it is misleading to speak of
these writers—and I have mentioned only some of the most promi-
nent among them—as if they stood on common ground, even if all
are equally vigorous in their opposition to world Communism and
its masters in the Kremlin.

A case in point is John Dos Passos, the latest of those writers
to come forward with an important statement summing up his present
views. His article “The Failure of Marxism” in the January 19th
issue of Life appears to be the product of a disillusionment so strong
that it has carried him beyond radicalism to the other shore. The
location of that other shore is ill-defined, and one’s impression is that
Dos Passos himself is none too sure of it. Such terms as “left” and
“right” or “progressive” and “reactionary” have been so debased
by promiscuous use in the liberal press and by the mendacity of Stal-
inist propaganda that it has become very difficult to employ them
with fairness and precision. Still, there can be little doubt that Dos
Passos, in his recoil from the ruinous experience of Bolshevism, is
now inclined to abandon the basic premises of leftist thinking and to
put the values of socialism into liquidation.

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DISILLUSIONMENT AND PARTIAL ANSWERS

Much can be said against Dos Passos's approach, which seems
to us narrow and unhistorical, offering no perspectives for the future.
What it suggests, though not quite explicitly, is that individual free-
dom and the productive capacity of modern economy are somehow
tied up for good with the techniques and incentives of capitalism.
If that is true then it is really all up with us. For the trend the world
over is irresistibly away from private capitalism, and if freedom
and productivity depend on its survival then "the regime of the law
of the club that centers in the Soviet Union," as Dos Passos so aptly
calls it, will surely prevail. His mood, justified no doubt by the fate
of radicalism in our time, is that of defeat and pessimism. But there
are two kinds of pessimism—a cathartic pessimism which, in purging
us of our illusions, reanimates our thought and braces us for the
tasks ahead, and a pessimism that brings on intellectual and political
prostration. It is the latter kind of pessimism that may well trap the
homeless radical mind into a realignment with used-up political
formulas and outworn social forces.

The perspective of a democratic socialism, that is, of a planned
and socialized economy combined with the fullest political and cultural
liberty, has by no means been annulled by historical events. On the
contrary, it is still the only possible perspective, despite its present
vulnerability in a world dominated by Soviet totalitarianism on the
one hand and American capitalism on the other. Of these two forces,
both hostile, the former is by far the more barbarous and deadly,
and for this reason the libertarian socialists have no alternative but
to direct their main struggle against it. In this struggle a strategic
alliance, chiefly in this country, with bourgeois democracy and to
a certain extent even with the bourgeoisie as a class (insofar as its
interests coincide, in however temporary a fashion, with those of
democracy) becomes unavoidable and in fact indispensable if the
struggle is not to be conducted in a quixotic and futile manner. At
this time the opportunity for free socialism arises principally out
of the conflict between its greater and lesser enemies. This lesser
enemy, namely American capitalism, is now plainly in no position to
bear down on the non-Communist left at home or abroad. A series
of immense blunders, mainly on the part of Roosevelt in his dealings
with the Soviet government, have put capitalism in so perilous a
situation that despite all fears and doubts it must extend its support

521

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PARTISAN REVIEW
to the semisocialist economies of western Europe. It must perforce
accept democratic socialism if it is to repulse totalitarian Communism.
For many months the Stalinists and their liberal allies denounced the
Marshall Plan on the ground that it would be used to re-impose the
capitalist pattern on the European economy; but now that the Amer-
ican Foreign Assistance Program has been passed by Congress without
discriminatory provisions against socialist governments or "experi-
ments" it has become clear that the cry of "imperialism" was nothing
but the propaganda of saboteurs.
In Europe capitalism is worn out, and in this country, too, it has
reached that stage of decline when it no longer has sufficient élan
or self-confidence to engage in imperialist adventures or even to pursue
a truly independent class policy in foreign affairs. Its greed is do-
mestic; in foreign policy it blunders and wobbles, relying in the long
run on other forces to formulate its aims and lines of action. Thus
its resistance to Soviet expansion is just as much inspired by demo-
cratic and national interests as by class interests; hence nothing is so
wide of the mark, and pernicious in a political sense, as the attempt
of certain European leftists, such as Sartre and his friends in Paris,
to present the case for peace and socialism in such a way as to ignore
the essential distinctions between the American role and that of the
Russian expansionists. The truth is that, at present, American "im-
perialism" is the bogey of people who have not yet succeeded in
getting rid of their Stalinist hangover. That, in my opinion, is the
secret of Sartre's "Fourth Force."
Without American aid European socialism cannot hope to stop
the advance of the Communists, no more than it was able to stop
the advance of the Nazis. There is this fact to be considered, that
the United States, however reluctantly, is currently financing the
effort to convert Great Britain into a socialist commonwealth. (The
doctrinaires both of the left and right are of course embarrassed by
this paradox, so damaging to their dogmas.) No administration in
Washington, in the present predicament of the United States, can
afford to exclude democratic socialists from its circle of alliances. This
gives rise to an opportunity which it is necessary to know how to
exploit, for there are always great risks involved in adopting a policy
of the lesser evil. Unfortunately, there is no alternative to this policy.
The irony of the situation is that the bourgeoisie too, if that is any
522

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DISILLUSIONMENT AND PARTIAL ANSWERS

compensation or solace to us, has been compelled to adopt a policy
of the lesser evil, and one that carries far greater risks than ours.
Still, in grasping this opportunity it is imperative that we shun any
alignment with capitalism apart from the immediate need and that
we do not fall in with its flattering idea of itself as the system alone
compatible with the practice of democracy.
Now Dos Passos is apparently unable to evaluate the present
relation of forces in terms of the struggle against Stalinism. Instead he
engages in what seem to us to be purely speculative analogies be-
tween the "socialized economies" of Soviet Russia and Great Britain,
finding that "in its ultimate implications British socialism is turning
out to be not so very different from the Russian brand." That is an
inexcusably loose statement, for in Russia the economy is ruled by
the arbitrary power of a dictatorship whereas in England it is managed
by a representative and fully democratic government. Dos Passos
claims that "personal liberty has been contracted in Great Britain,"
when actually the structure of political freedom is wholly intact. The
evidence cited by Dos Passos shows that the contraction he speaks of
has occurred solely in the economic sphere. Socialists, however, do
not consider the right to buy and sell as one pleases to be a signifi-
cant part of the heritage of freedom. Since it is not that sort of con-
traction that set us against Soviet Communism, it is even less likely
that it will set us against the effort of the British Labourites.

The policies of the Labour government are indeed open to
criticism, but scarcely for the reasons Dos Passos is able to summon.
Insofar as that government has not learned the lesson of interna-
tionalism and is trying to establish socialism in one country, its effort
is bound to fail. It has long been known that the framework of the
nation-state is too narrow for a socialist economy. As not a few
economists have demonstrated, the frantic drive for export markets,
even if successful, offers no solution to the British problem, since it
cannot conceivably lead to a rise in the standard of living. The
equalization of poverty, undertaken by the Labour government, is a
good thing in itself, but after all the task of socialists is to organize
not poverty but abundance; and abundance can be attained only
through a radical extension of the area of planning and production,
in other words, through a federation of European states. Only such
a federation or union would make possible a rational division of labor

523

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PARTISAN REVIEW

in the economic sphere. Politically, too, in terms of the necessity of
halting Soviet expansion, a Western federation would decisively alter
the balance of power in favor of European democracy as well as lessen
its dependence on the United States. The Brussels pact of five nations
is nothing more than a military alliance of sovereign states, a feeble
substitute for the organic integration and promise of a United States
of Western Europe. Bevin and Attlee have just now begun to talk of
such a union, and that only under the compulsion of their fear of the
Soviet armies. But so far there is very little to show that the socialist
vision of the leaders of the Labour government is sufficiently broad
to lead them to take the initiative in organizing Europe on a basis
other than national atomization and rivalry.

If Dos Passos fails us it is precisely when he appears to equate
democracy with "free enterprise." Anyone who has arrived at this re-
gressive equation has gone beyond wanting a socialist policy, let
alone a policy based on the strategic use of bourgeois disorientation
in the face of the Communist onslaught. But neither can this policy
be wanted or even properly grasped by those leftists, like Dwight
Macdonald and the more heady contributors to his magazine, who,
in their disgust with the absolute politics practiced in Moscow (and
in other capitals too) have taken cover in a position of absolute
morality and grandiose utopianism, swapping Lenin and Trotsky for
Tolstoy and Gandhi. Clearly, these people cannot do without saints
and without an ideology, that is, a construction in which operational
conceptions and empirical observation are replaced by wishing and
believing (and in this instance, also, by attitudes of irresponsible and
elegant intransigence gratuitously transferred from the sphere of
bohemian aesthetics to that of politics).

There is no more crucial failure of political imagination than
the inability to comprehend that there is a price to be paid for decades
of socialist defeat and betrayal, and that manifestly the kind of de-
mands on man's nature and society made in the era of the primitive
accumulation of millennial faith in socialism can no longer be made
with good grace or good sense. The consequences for the human
situation of the successive victories of fascism and Stalinism, and the
resultant fall of the level of civilization, can be evaded only in the
abstract propositions of ultra-leftism, from the standpoint of which

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DISILLUSIONMENT AND PARTIAL ANSWERS
the differences between American democracy and Russian totalitarian-
ism seem paltry indeed. After all, by concentrating on visionary ends
and dismissing the concrete problem of means as mere low-grade
practicality, it is easy enough to reach a position of high-minded in-
transigence that holds out for nothing less than the complete integra-
tion of human personality and the satisfaction of human wants with-
out any sort of coercion or frustration. Moreover, these belated
anarcho-utopians maintain that a society as splendid as that can be
achieved without the aid of science and an advanced industrial tech-
nology. So far as they are concerned the disgrace of the atom bomb
suffices to put the ban on science and technology! One might have
thought that if anything had been established in our time it is that
socialism is extremely difficult to come by even under the most fav-
orable material conditions, such as prevail in this country, for exam-
ple; and surely the totalitarian abortion that Bolshevism produced
must remain forever incomprehensible if one declines to take into
account the calamitous backwardness of the Russian economy. Never-
theless, Macdonald and his co-thinkers now assure us that socialism
is possible irrespective of the economic environment. Why not? Any-
thing is possible, if in your refusal of reality and in the absence of
any sense of method in social analysis you unconsciously accept the
most inane and hollow of all the assumptions of "progressivism"—the
assumption of the original goodness of human nature, a piece of
Rousseauistic naiveté that the horrors of the twentieth century should
by now have compelled even the most sanguine forward-lookers to
abandon.

Macdonald was no sooner done with the Bolshevik Utopia, in
its Trotskyite edition, than he began searching for a likely substitute
among the odds and ends of older and even moldier Utopias; and
now, impelled by excessive ideological strivings, he regularly goes
further in his argumentation than he really wants to go, for at some
point in his advance toward excess he must have realized that the
politically intelligible and feasible has somehow escaped him for good
and all. Heinrich Heine, badgered by the more fanatical ideologues
of his time to join them in their follies, once remarked with his usual
perspicacity that "he who dares not go so far as his heart bids him and
reason permits is a poltroon, but he who goes further than he wants
to go is a slave." Enslavement of the mind through ideologies is one
525

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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the more conspicuous phenomena of our epoch. Macdonald is a
writer of engaging personality and a marked deficiency of political
intelligence. The attitudes he strikes suggest that he is far more open
to the romantic lure of extreme ideologies once it was blood-and-
thunder revolution and now it is goodness absolute and invulnerable
-than to the appeal of rational analysis. His latest reasoning may be
summed up politically in the following syllogism: "Everything has
failed us, liberalism, Social Democracy, Bolshevism, and the working
class too-therefore let us go forward to the earthly paradise." At
bottom this approach is really the same as that of Dos Passos, only
turned inside out; it is likewise the product of disillusionment pure
and simple. One is precipitant in his rush toward a position of indis-
criminate leftism, while the other is equally precipitant in his indis-
criminate rightism. Both flee, though in opposite directions, from the
difficult and wholly unglamorous possibilities of socialist politics in
this desperate age.

"All the beautiful ideologies have burst," a British poet has
lately written. That is true, and it has left a good many of us with
the kind of wasteland feeling which in the thirties, in the palmy days
of Marxist hope and enthusiasm, we used to ascribe to the "bourgeois
intellectuals" as their exclusive malaise. Yet painful as the bursting
was and damaging to morale, it is time to rally from the blow and
to admit that the ideologies, including our own, were too good to be
true, too beautiful to be real. Socialism, however, is not identical
with its historical ideologies, such as Marxism or anarchism. It re-
mains a viable idea, even if stripped of its ideological trappings.
After all, what other ideas are there?

The debacle has taught us what not to expect and what not to
believe in. For one thing, it has taught us that something more than
the profit motive stands between us and the good society. The power
motive is no less potent in human affairs, and of that Lenin and
Trotsky told us far too little, though it has already undone all that
they appeared to have accomplished through their great revolution.
The lesson of experience, too, is that the idea of a revolutionary elite
-a selfless brotherhood of world salvationists-leading a proletarian
mass sufficiently capable of self-definition to master its social fate
is an open invitation to dictatorship. It is plain that the masses
526

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DISILLUSIONMENT AND PARTIAL ANSWERS
cannot control their fate once the elite has secured total power through
their support and revolutionary effort. This idea must be scrapped,
and so must the idea that the sole technique of beneficent change
is a violent revolutionary upheaval. This doctrine is shot through and
through with eschatological elements inherited from the Judaeo-Chris-
tian tradition; besides, its political use is to provide a perfect screen
behind which a new and ruthlessly ambitious ruling class can be re-
cruited and trained. Revolution and reform are both instrumentalities
of change to be employed in accordance with specific historical cir-
cumstances, not to be imposed in advance, by wishful theorizing,
on the social process.
But by far the most important lesson of the debacle is that
bearing upon the interaction or, better still, the reciprocal dependence
of socialism and democracy. It has become indisputably clear that
where there is no democracy there can be no socialism, that, in fact,
under such conditions all claims to socialism are fraudulent. That
was more or less taken for granted among radicals of all groups and
parties until the Bolsheviks, to justify their terroristic dictatorship
and exploitation of the masses, imposed a fetishism of collective forms
of economy, transforming these forms into ends in themselves. Actu-
ally, of course, in disregarding the social content which these forms
may serve to conceal one disregards the essence of socialism. And
at no point is the muddleheadedness of the liberal collaborators of
Stalinism more evident than in their willingness to accept the mere
fact of the abolition of bourgeois property relations as a proof of
the existence of socialism. In reality what has been erected in the
Soviet sphere on the basis of the abolition of bourgeois property is
a system of state serfdom—a system to which, from the standpoint
of culture, individual liberty, human decency, and labor's right to
wage an independent struggle for the improvement of its status,
liberal capitalism as we know it is vastly superior.
The revolutionary phrases with which this fetishism of economic
forms is embellished are of course part and parcel of what Dos Passos
rightly describes as "the stale and, rotting verbiage left over from
the noble traditions of oldtime socialist theory." It is to this verbiage
that Miss Freda Kirchwey had recourse some months ago in The
Nation when she defended the suppression of freedom in the Krem-
lin's vassal states on the ground that those states were undergoing
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PARTISAN REVIEW
a "revolution." The term "revolution," in Miss Kirchwey's honorific
use of it, is taken from the lexicon of old socialist theory in total
disregard of its original and classic meaning. In that meaning a
revolution was nothing if not a mighty release of political energy
on the part of the masses and the smashing of all the old and intol-
erable restraints and disabilities. Above all, a revolution meant the
taking hold of the machinery of power by the poor and exploited.
That is not what has happened in countries like Poland, Hungary,
and Rumania, where the revolution, in the technical sense of a forced
transfer of power, was made not by the people but by policemen,
an exploit not envisaged even by the most aberrant planners of socialist
change. In all the puppet states it is not the workers who now dispose
of the governmental machinery and of the means of production but
solely the Communist Party bureaucracy, which, furthermore, is not
in itself an independent force. It is the agency of a foreign, that is, of
the Russian ruling class. Thus one set of masters has been replaced
by another, far more advanced in its demagogy and more ruthless
and efficient in its control of the masses. This is what liberalism has
come to in this country, that in the pages of a journal like The Nation
the setting up of police states and the consequent political expropria-
tion of all classes, including the working class, is palmed off as the
fulfillment of the revolutionary ideal.
It is this sellout of liberalism that has now been going on for
many years that has prepared the ground for the rise of a politician
like Henry Wallace. The latter, combining all the wretched delusions
of liberalism in his own person and in his own right no mean promoter
of the mythical "economic democracy" of the East as against the dis-
dained political liberties of the West, is the most useful quisling that
Stalin has so far found in this country. As for his myth of "economic
democracy" in the East, in this respect he is surely no better and no
worse than Miss Kirchwey, who draws on the ideological fetishism of
economic forms to justify revolutions the aim of which is not to
liberate but to enslave mankind. Collaborationist liberalism has thus
fallen heir to the broken ideology of the Bolsheviks-an ideology
so degenerated that in Soviet Russia it has become an alibi for
mass-murder.
To my mind, there is no hope for democratic socialism unless
it frees itself of ideological prejudices and encrustations. Perhaps
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DISILLUSIONMENT AND PARTIAL ANSWERS

in the nineteenth century, when socialism was not yet a practical
possibility, it needed to bolster itself with an ideology. Its principal
ideology turned out to be Marxism, a system containing many
valuable insights and therefore by no means to be thrown over as
a whole; but this system is also a metaphysical explanation of reality,
a mystique of History on the March, a proletarian cult, and the
projection of a Messianic kingdom. Insofar as it is so mystifying a
totality, radicals would do well to transcend it. For what we need is a
disenchanted socialism, a socialism defined simply as a socio-economic
project of twentieth-century man. Such a project can be freely chosen
as a value and as a plan of action. Its purpose cannot be to usher
in an era of universal happiness and salvation but rather to solve cer-
tain elementary though agonizing problems of human organization
in an industrial age. Utopian attitudes are entirely incompatible with
this conception, for utopianism subsists on unqualified promises and
expectations. The traditional ideologies of socialism have sickened
because of their inherent utopianism which passes itself off as science.
Lenin, particularly, despite the brilliance of his strategic concepts,
was, historically speaking, at once the master and the martyr of
utopian illusions. His State and Revolution, written on the eve of
the October overturn, is a veritable textbook of such notions. From
this point of view his thought was far inferior to that of Dostoevsky,
who was acute enough to discern that to start with a theory of un-
limited freedom is to end up with unlimited despotism in practice.
The kingdom of freedom, in the Marxist sense of that phrase, is per-
haps unattainable, but one can still believe that human energy and
mind are not so sluggish as to be unable to lift mankind to a higher
level of necessity.

Philip Rahv

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=== Page 20 ===
Elio Vittorini

AN EPISODE FROM "IN SICILY"*

Some time before this I had been very ill for months.
I had a profound knowledge of what it meant, that profound misery
among the miseries of the working class: particularly when one has
already been confined to bed for twenty or thirty days, and has
to stay within the four walls of his room, he and the bed linen, the
metal of the kitchen utensils, and the wood of the chairs, table,
and cupboard.
At such times there is nothing but these things in the world.
You look at them, these pieces of furniture, but you cannot do any-
thing with them, you cannot make soup of a chair or a cupboard.
Yet the cupboard is so large that it would provide enough to chew
for a month. You look at these things as if if they were edible: and
perhaps that is why children become dangerous and set about smash-
ing things....
The baby has the rung of the high chair in his mouth all day
and shrieks if his mother tries to take it away. Mother, wife, or per-
haps a daughter, she scans the bookshelf and picks out a volume
occasionally and proceeds to read it. She spends hours reading or
glancing through its pages.
"What are you reading?" asks the sick man.
The woman does not know what she is reading: yet a book
can be anything, a dictionary or an old grammar.
Then the sick man says: "Must you choose this moment to
acquire your culture?"
The woman replaces the book, but later returns to scan the
shelf of books, not of eatables-and again chooses one, and perhaps

* This episode is taken from Vittorini's novel Conversazione in Sicilia, which
will be published in this country under the title of "In Sicily." The translation
is by Wilfred David.

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IN SICILY
leaves the house and spends at least a part of the afternoon out.
"What did it fetch?" the sick man asks her later.
The woman says that it fetched one lira and fifty centesimi.
The sick man is discontented. In the fever's unrelenting grip he never
fully grasps the situation, as he lies on his side on his bed that is
three days stale. Yet he wants something, apart from the book that
was his since youth: and he expects a little soup, and bawls out his
wife who, instead, has brought bread and cheese for herself and the
children.
"Hawks!" he yells at the babies.
They get a plate of soup every day at school. This reveals good
intentions, providing a plate of soup every day in schools for the chil-
dren of people who are dying of hunger. But it seems to serve as
appetizer. After that spoonful of soup the boys return home ravenous.
Deaf to reason, they are resolved to eat at any cost. They are like
wild beasts, they devour chair rungs and they would like to devour
their father and mother. Should they find the sick man alone one
day, they would devour him. On the table by the sickbed lie the
medicines. The boys arrive from school, ravenous, wrought up, their
appetites whetted. Prowling like wolves they approach the sick man,
they want to eat him up. But their mother is at home, so the boys
leave the invalid alone and fall on the medicines.
"Hawks!" cries the sick man.
Meanwhile the gas man has cut off the gas, and the electricity
man has cut off the light, and the lengthy evenings are passed in
the sickroom in total darkness. Only the water has not been cut off:
the water man comes every six months, and thus there is no imme-
diate risk of his arriving and cutting off the water: they keep drink-
ing as much water as they can, water cooked in every form, water
boiled and even unboiled.
But there is the landlady who comes every day and demands
to see the "sick gentleman," demands to see him in person, and,
entering the sickroom and seeing him, she says:
"Well, my sick gentleman-far too extravagant-paying no rent
and staying in bed ... at least send me your wife to wash up for
me...."
So his wife goes to the landlady's to wash her pots, to wash
her floors, to wash her linen, all in lieu of the unpaid rent, and
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PARTISAN REVIEW
the sick man passes the long hours at home alone with his inexorable
fever, which batters at his face, keeps battering at him, rending him
as if taking advantage of his solitude.
His wife returns and he asks her if she brought anything from
the landlady's house.
"Nothing," says his wife.
She always brings nothing.
"But why don't you at least go and pick some wild vegetables?"
he asks.
"Where?" says she.
She walks down the lanes and goes to the park. Grass grows
on the fields, green foliage on the trees. Vegetables! She tears out
some grass, tears out branches of firs and pines. She goes to the
gardens and plucks some flowers and returns home with vegetables--
the leaves and flowers hidden in her breast. She flings all this on
the sick man, and he lies with flowers strewn over him.
"There you are," says his wife. "Vegetables!"

I knew all this, and more besides. I could understand the misery
of a sick man of the human race of toilers and of his family around
him. Does not every man know it? Cannot every man understand
it? Every man is ill at once, halfway through his life, and knows
this strange evil thing that is inside him, knows his own helplessness
against it. Thus every man can understand his fellow. . . .
But perhaps every man is not a man: and the entire human
race is not human. That is a doubt that arises on a rainy day, when
a man's shoes are tattered and water seeps into them: when his
heart is no longer captive to anyone in particular, when he no longer
has a life of his own, when there is nothing accomplished or to be
accomplished, nothing to fear, nothing to lose, and there, outside
himself, are being perpetrated the massacres of the world. One man
laughs and another cries: both are human, the one who laughs has
also been ill, is ill: yet he laughs because the other cries. He is a
man who persecutes and massacres: and whoever, in his hopeless-
ness, sees him laugh at the newspaper headlines and the placards,
does not seek his company but that of another who cries. Not every
man, then, is a man. One persecutes and another is persecuted: not
all the human race is human, but only the race of the persecuted.
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IN SICILY
Kill a man, and he will be something more than a man. Similarly a
man who is sick or starving is more than a man: and more human
is the human race of the starving.
I turned to my mother: "What do you think of them?"
"Of whom?" my mother said.
"Of the sick people to whom you give injections."
"I think they won't be able to pay me perhaps," said my mother.
"All right," said I. "You go every day to them all the same,
and hope they will be able to pay you in return
in one way or another. But what d'you think of them? What d'you
think they are?"
"I don't hope," said my mother. "I know that one pays me
and another can't. I don't hope."
"Nevertheless you go to all of them," said I. "But what d'you
think of them?"
"Oh!" my mother exclaimed. "If I go for the sake of one, I can
go for the sake of another. It doesn't cost me anything."
"But what d'you think of them? What d'you think they are?"
I said.
My mother stopped when we were in the middle of the street,
and gave me a faintly squinting look. She smiled too, and said:
"What odd questions you ask me! What must I think they are?
They are poor people with a touch of consumption or a touch of
malaria. . . ."
I shook my head. I asked strange questions. My mother could
see that: but she did not give me strange replies. And that is what
I wanted, strange replies.
"Have you ever seen a Chinese?" I asked.
"Certainly," my mother said. "I've seen two or three. . . They
come this way selling necklaces."
"Good," said I. "When you have a Chinese before you, and
you look at him and see he's got no coat on though it's cold, and
his suit's tattered and his shoes torn, what do you think of him?"
"Oh, nothing special," my mother replied. "I see many others
here in our village who haven't got coats when it's cold and have
tattered suits and torn shoes. . . ."
"Good," said I. "But he's a Chinese, who doesn't know our
language, can't speak to anyone and doesn't even laugh ever. He
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PARTISAN REVIEW

travels about among our people with his necklaces and ties and belts.
He hasn't bread, he hasn't money, and he never sells anything, he
hasn't any hope. . . . What d'you think of him, when you see that
he's such a poor Chinese without any hope?"
“Oh!” my mother replied. “I see many others who are like
that here among us. . . . Poor Sicilians without hope.”
“I know,” said I, “but he's Chinese. He's got a yellow face,
slit eyes, a flat nose, prominent cheekbones, and possibly he stinks.
He's more hopeless than all the others. He has absolutely nothing.
What d'you think of him?”
“Oh!” my mother answered. “Many people who aren't poor
Chinese have yellow faces, flat noses, and possibly stink. They are
not poor Chinese but poor Sicilians, yet they have nothing.”
“But look,” I said. “He's a poor Chinese who happens to be
in Sicily, not in China, and he can't even boast of having a good
time with a woman. Now a poor Sicilian could. . . .”
“Why can't a poor Chinese?” asked my mother.
“Well,” I said, “I expect a woman would give nothing to a
poor wayfarer who happened to be Chinese instead of Sicilian.”
My mother frowned.
“I wouldn't know,” she said.
“You see?” I exclaimed. “A poor Chinese is poorer still than
all the others. What d'you think about him?”
My mother was irritated. “The devil take your Chinese.”
“You see?” I exclaimed. “He's poorer than all the rest and
you send him to the devil. And when you've sent him to the devil,
to hell, don't you think he's more human, more a member of the
human race than all the rest?”
“The Chinese?” My mother looked at me still irritated.
“The Chinese,” I said. “Or even the poor Sicilian who lies ill
in bed, just like those you give injections to. Isn't he more of a man,
more of the human race?”
“He?” said my mother.
“He,” said I.
“More than who?” my mother asked.
“More than the others,” I replied. “The one who's ill. . . . He's
suffering.”

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IN SICILY
"Suffering?" my mother exclaimed. "That's because he's ill."
"Only?" I said.
"Cure the illness and all is well," said my mother. "It's noth-
ing.... It's the illness."
Then I asked: "And when he's hungry and suffering, what is
that?"
"Well, it's hunger," my mother replied.
"Only?" I said.
"Why not?" said my mother. "Give him some food and all's
well again. It's hunger."
I shook my head. I could not get any strange replies out of
my mother, yet I asked again: "And the Chinese?"
Now my mother gave me no reply: neither a strange one, nor
one that wasn't strange: she shrugged her shoulders. She was right,
of course. Cure the sick man of his sickness, and his pain vanishes.
Give the hungry man food, and his pain vanishes. But what is man
in sickness? And in hunger?
Is not hunger the whole pain of the world that goes hungry?
Is not man in hunger more of a man? More a member of the human
race? And the Chinese. . . ?

535

=== Page 26 ===
Jean-Paul Sartre
FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE? (II)*

Up to this point we have been considering the case in
which the writer's potential public was nil, or almost, and in which
his real public was not torn by any conflict. We have seen that he
could then accept the current ideology with a good conscience, and
that he launched his appeals to freedom within the ideology itself.
If the potential public suddenly appears, or if the real public is
broken up into hostile factions, everything changes. We must now
consider what happens to literature when the writer is led to reject
the ideology of the ruling classes.

The eighteenth century was the palmy time, unique in history,
and the soon-to-be-lost paradise, of French writers. Their social con-
dition had not changed. Bourgeois in origin, with very few exceptions,
they were unclassed by the favors of the great. The circle of their
real readers had grown perceptibly larger because the bourgeoisie
had begun to read, but they were still unknown to the "lower"
classes, and if the writers spoke of them more often than La Bruyère
and Fénelon, they never addressed them, even in spirit. However,
a profound upheaval had broken their public in two; they had to
satisfy contradictory demands. Their situation was characterized from
the beginning by tension. This tension was manifested in a very par-
ticular way. The governing class had in fact lost confidence in its
ideology. It had put itself into a position of defense; it tried, to a
certain extent, to retard the diffusion of new ideas, but it could not
keep from being penetrated by these ideas. It understood that its re-
ligious and political principles were the best instruments for establish-
ing its power, but the fact is that as it saw them only as instruments,

* This third selection from Sartre's Qu'est-ce que la littérature? continues
the section which was published in the March issue. The translation is by Bernard
Frechtman.

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=== Page 27 ===
FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

it ceased to believe in them completely. Pragmatic truth had replaced
revealed truth. If censorship and prohibitions were more visible, they
covered up a secret weakness and a cynicism of despair. There were
no more clerks; church literature was empty apologetics, a fist
holding on to dogmas breaking loose; it was turning against freedom;
it addressed itself to respect, fear, and self-interest, and by ceasing
to be a free appeal to free men, it was ceasing to be literature. This
distraught elite turned to the genuine writer and asked him to do the
impossible, not to spare his severity, if he was bent on it, but to
breathe at least a bit of freedom into a wilting ideology, to address
himself to his readers' reason and to persuade them to adopt dogmas
which had become irrational with time. In short, it asked that he
become a propagandist without ceasing to be a writer. But it was
playing a losing game. Since its principles were no longer a matter
of immediate and unformulated evidence and since it had to present
them to the writer so that he might come to their defense, since there
was no longer any question of saving them for their own sake but
rather of maintaining order, it contested their validity by its very
effort to re-establish them. The writer who consented to buttress
this shaky ideology at least consented to do so and this voluntary
adherence to principles which, in the past, had governed minds
without being noticed now freed him from them. He was already
going beyond them. In spite of himself he was emerging into solitude
and freedom. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, which constituted
what in Marxist terms is called the rising class, was trying at this
same time to disengage itself from the ideology that was being im-
posed upon it and to construct one better suited to its own purposes.
Now, this "rising class," which was soon to claim the right to
participate in affairs of State, was subject only to political oppres-
sion. Confronted with a ruined nobility, it was in process of very
calmly attaining economic pre-eminence. It already had money, cul-
ture, and leisure. Thus, for the first time, an oppressed class was
presenting itself to the writer as a real public. But the conjunction
was still more favorable; for this awakening class, which was reading
and trying to think, had not yet produced a revolutionary party
which would secrete its own ideology as the Church did in the
Middle Ages. The writer was not yet wedged, as we shall see that
he was later to be, between the dying ideology of a declining class

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PARTISAN REVIEW

and the rigorous ideology of the rising class. The bourgeoisie wanted
light; it felt vaguely that its thought was somehow alienated, and it
wanted to become conscious of itself. One could probably find some
traces of organization: materialist societies, groups of intellectuals,
freemasonry. But they were chiefly associations for inquiry which
were waiting for ideas rather than producing them. To be sure, a
form of popular and spontaneous writing was spreading, the secret
and anonymous tract. But this literature of amateurs did not com-
pete with the professional writer but rather goaded and solicited him
by informing him about the confused aspirations of the collectivity.
Thus, the bourgeoisie-as opposed to a public of half-specialists,
which with difficulty still held on to its position and which was always
recruited at the Court and from the upper circles of society-offered
the rough draft of a mass public. In regard to literature, it was in
a state of relative passivity since it had no experience in the art of
writing, no preconceived opinions about style and literary genres, and
was awaiting everything, form and content, from the genius of the
writer.

Solicited by both sides, the writer found himself between the
two hostile factions of his public as the arbiter of their conflict.
He was no longer a clerk; the ruling class was not the only one
supporting him. It is true that it was still pensioning him, but it was
the bourgeoisie which was buying his books. He was collecting at
both ends. His father had been a bourgeois and his son would be
one; one might thus be tempted to see in him a bourgeois more
gifted than others but similarly oppressed, a man who had attained
knowledge of his state under the pressure of historical circumstances,
in short, an inner mirror by means of which the whole bourgeoisie
became conscious of itself and its demands. But this would be a
superficial view. It has not been sufficiently pointed out that a class
can acquire class consciousness only if it sees itself from within and
without at the same time; in other words, if it profits by external
competition; that is where the intellectuals, the perpetually unclassed,
come into the picture.

The essential characteristic of the eighteenth-century writer was
precisely an objective and subjective unclassing. He still remembered
his bourgeois attachments, yet the favor of the great drew him away
from his milieu; he no longer felt any concrete solidarity with his

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?
cousin the lawyer or his brother the village curé because he had
privileges which they did not. It was from the Court and nobility
that he borrowed his manners and the very graces of his style. Glory,
his dearest hope and his consecration, had become for him a slippery
and ambiguous notion; a fresh idea of glory was rising up in which
a writer was truly recompensed if an obscure doctor in Bruges or
a briefless lawyer in Rheims devoured his books almost in secret.
But the diffuse recognition of this public which he hardly knew
only half touched him. He had received from his elders a traditional
conception of celebrity. According to this conception, it was the
monarch who consecrated his genius. The visible sign of his success
was for Catherine or Frederick to invite him to their tables. The
recompense given to him and the dignities conferred from above
did not yet have the official impersonality of the prizes and decora-
tions awarded by our republics. They retained the quasi-feudal
character of man-to-man relations. And since he was, above all, an
eternal consumer in a society of producers, a parasite of a parasitic
class, he treated money like a parasite. He did not earn it since there
was no common measure between his work and his remuneration;
he only spent it. Therefore, even if he was poor, he lived in luxury.
Everything was a luxury to him, including, and in fact particularly
so, his writings. Yet, even in the king's chamber he retained a rough
force, a potent vulgarity; Diderot, in the heat of a philosophical
conversation, pinched the thigh of the Empress of Russia until the
blood flowed. And then, if he went too far, he could always be made
to feel that he was only a scribbler. The life of Voltaire, from his
beating, his imprisonment, and his flight to London, to the inso-
lence of the King of Prussia was a succession of triumphs and hu-
miliations. At times the writer enjoyed the passing favors of a mar-
quise, but he married his maid or a bricklayer's daughter. Hence,
his mind, as well as his public, was torn apart. But this did not cause
him to suffer; on the contrary, this original contradiction was the
source of his pride. He thought that he had no obligations to anyone,
that he could choose his friends and opponents, and that it was
enough for him to take his pen in hand to free himself from the
conditioning of milieu, nation, or class. He flew, he soared, he was
pure thought, pure observation. He chose to write to vindicate his
unclassing which he assumed and transformed into solitude. From
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PARTISAN REVIEW
the outside, he contemplated the great with the eyes of the bour-
geois and the bourgeois with the eyes of the nobility, and he re-
tained enough complicity with both to understand them equally
from within. Hence, literature, which up to then had been only a
conservative and purifying function of an integrated society, became
conscious in him and by him of its autonomy. Placed by an extreme
chance between confused aspirations and an ideology in ruins—like
the writer between the bourgeoisie, the Court, and the Church—
literature suddenly affirmed its independence. It was no longer to
reflect the commonplaces of the collectivity; it identified itself with
Mind, that is, with the permanent power of forming and criticizing
ideas.
Of course, this taking over of literature by itself was abstract
and almost purely formal, since the literary works were not the con-
crete expression of any class; and as the writers began by rejecting
any deep solidarity with the milieu from which they came as well
as the one which adopted them, literature became confused with
Negativity, that is, with doubt, refusal, criticism, and contesta-
tion. But as a result of this very fact, it led to the setting up, against
the ossified spirituality of the Church, the rights of a new spirituality,
one in movement, which was no longer identified with any ideology
and which manifested itself as the power of continually surpassing
the given, whatever it might be. When, in the shelter of the struc-
ture of the very Christian monarchy, it was imitating marvelous
models, it hardly fussed about truth because truth was only a very
crude and very concrete quality of the ideology which had been nour-
ishing it; for the dogmas of the Church, to be true or, quite sim-
ply, to be, was all one, and truth could not be conceived apart from the
system. But now that spirituality had become this abstract movement
which cut through all ideologies and then left them along the wayside
like empty shells, truth, in its turn, was disengaged from all concrete
and particular philosophy; it was revealed in its abstract independ-
ence; it became the regulating idea of literature and the distant
limit of the critical movement.
Spirituality, literature, and truth: these notions were bound up
in that abstract and negative moment of becoming self-conscious.
Their instrument was analysis, a negative and critical method which
perpetually dissolves concrete data into abstract elements and the
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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

products of history into combinations of universal concepts. An
adolescent chooses to write in order to escape an oppression from
which he suffers and a solidarity he is ashamed of; as soon as he has
written a few words, he thinks that he has escaped from his milieu
and class and from all milieus and all classes and that he has broken
through his historical situation by the mere fact that he has attained
reflective and critical knowledge. Above the confusion of those bour-
geois and nobles, locked up in their particular age by their preju-
dices he has, on taking up his pen, discovered himself as a timeless
and unlocalized mind, in short, as universal man. And literature,
which has delivered him, is an abstract function and an a priori power
of human nature; it is the movement whereby at every moment
man frees himself from history; it is the exercise of freedom.

In the seventeenth century by choosing to write a man em-
braced a definite profession, with the tricks of the trade, its rules
and customs, its rank in the hierarchy of the professions. In the
eighteenth century, the molds were broken; everything was to be
done; works of the mind, instead of being put together according
to established norms and more or less by luck, were each a particular
invention and were a kind of decision of the author regarding the
nature, value, and scope of belles-lettres; each one brought its own
rules and the principles by which it was to be judged; each one
aspired to engage the whole of literature and to cut out new paths.
It is not by chance that the worst works of the period are also those
which claimed to be the most traditional; tragedy and epic were the
exquisite fruits of an integrated society; in a collectivity which was
torn apart, they could subsist only in the form of survivals and
pastiches.

What the eighteenth-century writer tirelessly demanded in all
his works was the right to practice an antihistorical reason against
history, and in this sense all he did was to reveal the essential require-
ments of abstract literature. He was not concerned with giving his
readers a clearer class consciousness. On the contrary, the urgent
appeal which he addressed to his bourgeois public was an invitation
to forget humiliations, prejudices, and fears; the one he directed
to his noble public was a solicitation to strip itself of its pride of
caste and its privileges. As he had made himself universal, he could
have only universal readers, and what he required of the freedom

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PARTISAN REVIEW
of his contemporaries was that they cut their historical ties in order
to join him in universality.
What is the origin of this miracle by which, at the very moment
he was setting up abstract freedom against concrete oppression and
Reason against History, he was going along in the very direction of
historical development? First, the bourgeoisie, by a tactic which
was characteristic of it and which it was to repeat in 1830 and 1848,
joined forces, on the eve of taking power, with those oppressed classes
which were not in a condition to push their demands. And since the
bonds which united social groups so different from one another could
only be very general and very abstract, it aimed not so much at ac-
quiring a clear consciousness of itself, which would have opposed
it to the workmen and peasants, as to have its right to lead the oppo-
sition recognized on the grounds that it was in a better position
to make the established powers know the demands of universal
human nature. On the other hand, the revolution being prepared
was a political one; there was no revolutionary ideology and no
organized party. The bourgeoisie wanted to be enlightened; it wanted
the ideology which for centuries had mystified and alienated man
to be liquidated. There would be time later on to replace it. For the
time being, it aimed at freedom of opinion as a step toward political
power. Hence, by demanding for himself and as a writer freedom of
thinking and of expressing his thought, the author necessarily served
the interests of the bourgeois class. No more was asked of him and
there was nothing more he could do. In later periods, as we shall
see, the writer could demand his freedom to write with a bad con-
science; he might be aware that the oppressed classes wanted some-
thing other than that freedom. Freedom of thinking could then
appear as a privilege; in the eyes of some it could pass for a means
of oppression, and the position of the writer was in the way of becom-
ing untenable. But on the eve of the Revolution he enjoyed this
extraordinary chance, that he did not have to do more than defend
his profession to serve as a guide to the aspirations of the rising class.
He knew it. He considered himself a guide and a spiritual chief.
He took his chances. As the ruling elite, which grew increasingly
nervous, lavished its graces upon him one day only to have him
locked up the next, he had none of that tranquillity, that proud
mediocrity, which his predecessors had enjoyed. His glorious and
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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

eventful life, with its sunlit crests and its dizzying steeps, was that of
an adventurer. The other evening I was reading the dedication of
Blaise Cendrars' Rum: "To the young people of today who are tired
of literature, to prove to them that a novel can also be an act," and
I thought that we are quite unfortunate and quite guilty, since we
have to prove what in the eighteenth century was self-evident. A
work of the mind was then doubly an act since it produced ideas
which were to be at the origin of social upheavals and since it ex-
posed its author to danger. And this act, whatever the book we
may be considering, can always be defined in the same way; it is a
liberator. And, doubtless, in the seventeenth century too, literature
had a liberating function, though one which remained veiled and
implicit. In the time of the Encyclopedists, it was no longer a ques-
tion of freeing the gentleman from his passions by reflecting them
back to him without complaisance, but of helping with the pen to
bring about the political freedom simply of man. The appeal which
the writer addressed to his bourgeois public was, whether he meant
it or not, an incitement to revolt; the one which he directed to the
ruling class was an invitation to lucidity, to critical self-examination,
to the giving up of its privileges. ...
And as the writer thought that he had broken the bonds which
united him to his original class, as he spoke to his readers from above
about universal human nature, it seemed to him that the appeal he
made to them and the part he took in their misfortunes were dictated
by pure generosity. To write is to give. In this way he accepted
and excused what was unacceptable in his situation as a parasite in
an industrious society; this was also how he became conscious of that
absolute freedom, that gratuity, which characterize literary creation.
But though he constantly had in view universal man and the abstract
rights of human nature, there is no reason to believe that he was an
incarnation of the clerk as Benda has described him. Since his posi-
tion was, in essence, critical, he certainly had to have something
to criticize; and the objects which first presented themselves to criti-
cism were the institutions, superstitions, traditions, and acts of a
traditional government.
In other words, as the walls of Eternity and the Past which had
supported the ideological structure of the seventeenth century cracked
and gave way, the writer perceived a new dimension of temporality
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PARTISAN REVIEW
in its purity: the Present. The Present which preceding centuries had
sometimes conceived as a perceptible figuration of Eternity and
sometimes as a degraded emanation of Antiquity. He had only a
confused notion of the future, but he knew that the fleeting hour
which he was living was unique and that it was his, that it was in
no way inferior to the most magnificent hours of Antiquity, since
they too had begun by being the present. He knew that it was his
chance and that he must not waste it. That was why he considered
the combat he had to wage not so much as a preparation for the
society of the future as a short-term enterprise, one of immediate effi-
cacy. It was this institution that had to be denounced and right now,
that superstition that had to be destroyed immediately, that particular
injustice that had to be rectified. This impassioned sense of the present
saved him from idealism; he did not confine himself to contemplating
the eternal ideas of Freedom or Equality. For the first time since
the Reformation, writers intervened in public life, protested against
an unjust decree, asked for the review of a trial, and, in short,
decided that the spiritual was in the street, at the fair, in the market
place, at the tribunal, and that there was no turning away from
the temporal, but, on the contrary, that one had to come back to
it incessantly and to go on beyond it in each particular circum-
stance. . . .

Thus, the overthrow of his public and the crisis of the European
consciousness had invested the writer with a new function. He con-
ceived literature to be the permanent practice of magnanimity. He
still submitted to the strict and severe control of his peers, but below
him he caught a glimpse of an unformed and passionate waiting,
a more feminine, undifferentiated kind of desire which would free
him from their censorship. He had disincarnated the spiritual and
had separated his cause from that of a dying ideology; his books
were free appeals to the freedom of his readers.

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=== Page 35 ===
John Berryman

THE LONG HOME

bulks where the barley blew, time out of mind
Of the sleepless Master. The barbered lawn
Far to a grey wall lounges, the birds are still.
Rising wind rucks from the sill
The slack brocade beside the old throne he dreams on.
The portraits' hands are blind.

Below these frames they strain on stones. He mumbles . . .
Fathers who listen, what loves hear
Surfacing from the lightless past? He foams.
Stillness locks a hundred rooms.
Louts in a bar aloud, The People, sucking beer.
A barefoot kiss. Who trembles?

Peach bloom, sorb apple sucked in what fine year!
I am a wine, he wonders; when?
Am I what I can do? My large white hands.
Boater & ascot, in grandstands
Coups. Concentrations of frightful cold, and then
Warm limbs below a pier.

The Master is sipping his identity.
Ardors & stars! Trash humped on trash.
The incorporated yacht, the campaign cheque
Signed one fall on the foredeck
Hard on a quarrel, to amaze the fool. Who brash
Hectored out some false plea?

Brownpaper-blind, his morning passions trailed
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PARTISAN REVIEW

Home in the clumsy dusk—how now
Care which from which, trapped on a racing star
Where we know not who we are! . . .
The whipcord frenzy curls, he slouches where his brow
Works like the rivals' failed.

Of six young men he flew to breakfast as,
Only the magpie, rapist, stayed
For dinner, and the rapist died, so that
Not the magpie but the cat
Vigil upon the magpie stalks, sulky parade,
Great tail switching like jazz.

Frightened, dying to fly, pied and obscene,
He blinks his own fantastic watch
For the indolent Spring of what he was before;
A stipple of sunlight, clouded o'er,
Remorse a scribble on the magic tablet which
A schoolboy thumb jerks clean.

Heat lightning straddles the horizon dusk
Above the yews: the fresh wind blows:
He flicks a station on by the throneside . . .
Out in the wide world, Kitty—wide
Night—far across the sea . . . Some guardian accent grows
Below the soft voice, brusque:

"You are: not what you wished but what you were,
The decades' vise your gavel brands,
You glare the god who gobbled his own fruit,
He who stood mute, lucid and mute,
Under peine forte et dure to will his bloody lands,
Then whirled down without heir."

The end of which he will not know. Undried,
A pruneskin helpless on his roof.
His skin gleams in the lamplight dull as gold
And old gold clusters like mold

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THE LONG HOME

Stifling about his blood, time's helm to build him proof.
Thump the oak, and preside!

An ingrown terrible smile unflowers, a sigh
Blurs, the axle turns, unmanned.
Habited now forever with his weight
Well housed, he rolls in the twilight
Unrecognizable against the world's rim, and
A bird whistles nearby.

Whisked off, a voice, fainter, faint, a guise,
A gleam, pin of a, a. Nothing.
—One look round last, like rats, before we leave.
A famous house. Now the men arrive:
Horror, they swing their cold bright mallets, they're breaking
Him up before my eyes!

Wicked vistas! The wolves mourn for our crime
Out past the grey wall. On to our home,
Whereby the barley may seed and resume.
Mutter of thrust stones palls this room,
The crash of mallets. He is going where I come,
Barefoot soul fringed with rime.

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=== Page 38 ===
Clellon Holmes

FRAU VON STEIN, MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

Some postman rings but never sees you either.
You pick up letters, then take coffee or a class,
Reading them on a step somewhere who keep my brother

When you read. You carefully wade his nerve's morass,
Seeking an upland in the words, a solid stone,
But reaching no neural bog you cannot gracefully pass.

You chose your role as comrade, knew he needed one.
Concerned recipient of him as letter-lover,
You water whimsy and digest the purgative pun,

Temper the outbursts, make his definition mover,
Say only, with your tact, you actually seek yourself
In this, a monologue you do not seek to smother

When you write. Why do you save his letters on a shelf?
You're one he goes to after hours. Are you alone?
And is your love's neutrality the only health

For him? Perhaps you're cynic as you read him grown
Beyond the early envelopes. Or he cuts cruelly your heart
But brings some frantic palatal air it's never known.

Or are you what you are, the simple cool remark
Encased in understanding that he rav'nously reads
And angers at or loves, which leaves its medical mark?

He thinks you wishfully up when passion makes him plead,

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=== Page 39 ===
FRAU VON STEIN, MY BROTHER'S KEEPER
Dreams you when madness rants or infidelities pour out;
Forgets you often starve to let him love his greed.

But does not see you're what his gluttony's about.

Richard Wilbur
PITY

The following day was overcast, each street
A slow canal to float him to the place
Where he'd let fall the dear and staring face,
A funnel toward the thin reproachful tweet.

All day the starved canary called him back
In newsboy's whistle, crying of a tire,
Squeak of a squeegee, sirens finding fire,
Until the nightfall packed his head in black,

And he went back and climbed the stairs again,
Stepping across her body, freed the bird,
Which left its cage and out the window whirred
As a bad thought out of a cracked brain.

549

=== Page 40 ===
Alfred Kazin

FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL

"He ought to have a hundred hands to write, for what can
a single pen do here. . . ." Goethe: Rome, 1786.

Florence, June 11, 1947—The night man at the hotel desk is a
wizened, fatherly hunchback, with a face that belongs with the insignia
of little keys fastened to the lapels of his official frock coat. In the hot
and windless summer night, while millions of little green insects buzz
around the flickering street lamps along the Arno, he bustles behind
the bar, amused at our thirst, gently lifting stoppers from decanters
and bringing up green and purple bottles from some mysterious cellar
bin under his feet. An old magician doing his act for spellbound chil-
dren, he first pours out a little of this and then a little of that, pre-
tending to look amazed at their instant transfusion, and as he squeezes
the soda over the highly colored surface, cries out Eccola!—but with a
patient solicitousness that says plainly that while nothing will relieve
our thirst if we insist on it so impatiently, he will go on inquiring into
bottle after bottle, if we wish.

The lounge is an old family parlor, with the rubber plant on a
lace doily over the upright piano, heavy brass-framed pictures of hunt-
ing dogs and "The Stag At Eve," and old copies of The Illustrated
London News. A withered English blonde sits in one corner, reading
The Times, and from time to time calls across the lounge in a piercing
"Oxford" accent, recounting to another inglese her difficulties with
the Italian law, "so unnecessarily complicated." She has come back to
reclaim a house bought before the war. In another corner a man with
the burned-out face of Oswald Spengler: completely bald, shaven head,
rocklike Prussian military skull, burning little eyes, a fierce wide scar
running across his left cheek and deep into his neck like a singed enve-
lope. Junker face, haughty with suffering: he never looks at anyone, and
prowls around the lounge smoking cigarettes out of a long jeweled
holder.

All signs and instructions are first in English, then in French, and

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FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL

occasionally underwritten in Italian. The atmosphere is that of a pro-
vincial British hotel in an eternity of Sundays, though they "no longer
come to us as they used to. They, too, are passing through difficult days."
Americans, of course, are wonderful-so gay, so young, etc.; but the
manager's daughter, whose English is impeccable B.B.C., complains
with a little pout that her friends laugh at her-"my accent has become
a little coarse"-since the GI's were here.

To the left the Ponte Vecchio; to the right the provisional iron
structure that has replaced the Santa Trinità. The gallery that led
from the Uffizi Gallery to the Pitti is broken in the middle; on both
sides of the Ponte Vecchio a jagged heap of ruins, lit up under the
solitary street lamp, has that crumpled, uncovered look of scenery the
minute the footlights are turned off. In the daytime the ruins look
peculiarly incongruous, a tabloid headline in an illuminated manu-
script, against the round towers and the slender cypresscs, each cluster
of them supreme on its hill. The Germans were on one side of the
river and the Americans on the other; hard to think of Florence being
fought over on this street.

At the noon hour an old man in an old boat, moored in the
middle of the Arno just below our window, patiently dredging up mud
from the bottom, hour by hour, which he as patiently packs up on
every side of him. Across the way a little boy swimming off a little
delta that has formed in front of his house. A scull shoots by, propelled
by a young man in tights and blazer and wearing that smart little
beard-Dino Grandi, Italo Balbo-why did I think it was worn only
by Fascist aviators and ambassadors? Just below the embankment, on
the other side of the river, the familiar whitewash slogan we saw on
every wall coming down from Genoa: VOTATE PER IL P. COMU-
NISTA CHE VI DARA' PACE LAVORO LIBERTA'.

June 12-Ran into P., who was born in New York of Italian
parentage and originally came here before the war to finish a medical
course. An ex-GI and, of course, armed with the precious green pass-
port: which will do for us what Roman citizenship once did for St.
Paul. He gets around familiarly in American army circles from Leghorn
to Pisa and has the friendliest relations with the brass. With the tough-
faced pal who is saddled on us everytime we see him, he is engaged
in some elaborate financial exchange deal that obviously pays off. (The
lire today 650 to the dollar; some weeks ago it was 900.) They go
around Florence with great wads of lire stuffed into one of those ver-
tical leather zipper bags that are sold at home for packing a bottle
of whiskey into a suitcase. The pal, who might be an an extra in a gangster

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PARTISAN REVIEW
film, is bursting with prosperity; explained things to me with a con-
descension that did not hide his awe at my ignorance. Funny to see
him standing under the statue of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the latest
New Yorker in one hand and that moneybag in the other, looking
like an Oklahoma Indian who has just discovered oil.
P. a sensitive guy, and a little pathetic-the medical degree is
indefinitely postponed, and his life at the moment is simply that of a
British planter self-exiled to Kenya, piling it up for the wife and kiddies
at home. He wants to make what he can in this crazy period and then
clear out. Yet despite some vague efforts to dissociate himself slightly
from his pal, at least in our eyes, there is no doubt that he is having
the time of his life. The thing's absolutely unreal: he's way up there,
the most of his Italian-American background, dines with generals, and
in that new American world in Europe. After years of being a nobody
at home, and no doubt a "Wop" to the Gentiles, he is now making
with the best will in the world, patronizes the old country. Actually
he does not seem to like the Italians very much-says they "simply have
no character," and with a certain intellectual disapproval outlines the
black-market situation to me, specifying that the government does not
govern, that the whole economy rests on private buying and selling, and
that the political situation is absolutely hopeless, divided between the
priests and the Commies. Personally, he assures me, he is a democratic
socialist, and rails against Nenni for surrendering the Italian Socialist
Party to the Communists. But this with a blasé, mocking air, as if to say:
what can you expect of these people? Funny to think of him among
the smart American promoters and finaglers who are here to pick up
some easy money, for with all his amiable commercial guile and know-
it-all air, he really hates Italy for letting him down, morally, so hard.
Isabel Archer and Christopher Newman and Hemingway's tough Amer-
ican ingénues: somehow the pattern never changes. How could Europe
be like this? Still, caught in between the two great blocs, a vacuum has
been created here, which obviously some natures do not abhor. There's
money in it. Yet notice how these two American types, P. and his pal,
respond to their opportunity-the pal frankly a good deal of a mug,
indifferent to those who cannot play it smart; P., with his typical
American intellectual's contempt for politics, yearning for democratic
socialism, but meanwhile unable to forgive "Europe" for destroying his
personal illusions-which, if he had saved them, would have left his
wife and kids at home in a precarious situation. What a difference from
those old British traveling salesmen, with their contempt for the natives
and their quietly expert managerial ways!
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=== Page 43 ===
FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL

June 13—In the great Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore, above the
altar in the choir, Christ hangs supine on his cross, but wearing a
golden crown that is much too large for his head. His knees are up-
raised, as if he had been struggling with death, and the paralysis had
struck him where he fought; but his whole body slopes downward
with a weariness in which I feel the weight of the ages. Every line of
him is cast in pain, renunciation, and silence. Yet here he is Christ
the King, and so named not by his enemies in mockery, but his own
church. At the foot of the altar, a young monk sweeping the red cloth
and smoothing out the breaks in the carpet. How strange it is to pass
behind the altar and, looking down the whole length of Christ's poor,
bent figure, twisted into the deepest suffering and hopelessness, so for-
lorn above the ornate altar—how strange to realize that the sculptor
perhaps overdid it—see that here he looks not a king but a scarecrow,
and that the crown which is so large for his head expresses not so
much amazement and homage before him who undertook so much,
as the condescension of authority to its own figurehead.

The faces of young monks, like the faces of young girls in the
climax of adolescence—both meeting in the same corridor, but the one
going back as the other goes forward.

June 15—Sunday—Nenni spoke this morning in the great "town
square," the Piazza della Signoria. By ten the Lungarno was jammed
with workers walking or riding along to the meeting in trucks—the old
men a little sedate, buttoned up into frayed jackets despite the blister-
ingly hot day; the youngsters cheering, singing, and gaily waving their
red flags. The girls looked wonderful. Everyone says that they have
been liberated since the war, and they certainly look it as they come
tearing along on their bicycles, flapping their sandals against the pedals,
with their long, black hair streaming behind. A band trotted along
blaring out the Garibaldi hymn and Bandiera Rossa. It was all like a
light-hearted Sunday excursion en masse—the sun sparkling on the
river and the long white sheets hung out of the windows; uncovering
depth on depth of green out of the trees. Staggered with sun, drunk
with light. I feel these days as if my body had grown taste buds all
around it, and every cell were eating at Italy without getting its fill.

At the meeting itself the beauty and unexpectedness of the scene
were so overwhelming that at first I could hardly give attention to
what was being said. In an angle of the enormous square two contrasting
structures—the Old Palace (really the City Hall) on one side; startlingly
unaged, its gay and arrogant tower suddenly rearing itself with a kind
of deceptive lightness up from behind the row of battlements. On the
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PARTISAN REVIEW
other the Loggia dei Lanzi, crammed with statuary, set below the Palace
like a sideboard at a great feast of stone. There is about the Palace at
one side a curiously scalloped and rippling effect, as if the architect
had omitted some base to its rhythmic structure and then made it up-
with what triumph and ease-in the upward leap of the tower, which
gives that exhilarating effect of humor in its own authority. (And in
fact something was omitted, for I learn that the architect was forbidden
to use any of the ground that had belonged to the hated Ghibelline
family of the Uberti.)
The speakers held forth from the Loggia. We stood in the center of
the square, near the tablet that marks the place of Savonarola's execu-
tion. If one tired of Nenni or the meeting, one could always regale
oneself with the Palace, the centerpiece of Neptune, and the reproduc-
tion of Michelangelo's David which stands just before the door of the
Palace. Nenni must have felt as if he were discoursing from the Floren-
tine Acropolis; there were little compliments and expressions of pride
on addressing the citizenry from that celebrated place. He stood behind
a loud-speaker, his arms toiling furiously with the conventional Italian
vigor, but his face impassive as an owl's under his heavy spectacles.
A dumpy little man, bald and round, looking like a union boss at a
convention, sweating away, while behind him “The Rape of the Sabine
Women," "Hercules Slaying the Centaur Nessus," and Cellini's Perseus
-the bloody sword in one hand and with the other majestically holding
aloft, with his cool and savage gravity, the head of Medusa. Yet no
doubt even Lorenzo the Magnificent must have looked dwarfed and
a little mean in that mighty piazza, or Savonarola haranguing the Floren-
tines on their immoral ways for the whole effect of the Piazza della
Signoria is to create in an instant the civic and aesthetic presence of
a great city-state. There is something in the ensemble formed by the
Palace, the Loggia, the Neptune and the David, the color and weight
of the stone, the very historical imagination embodied in a European
square, that makes the impervious surface of a fully completed thought.
With the imprint still on us of those cramped, functional cities created
purely out of commercial relationships, we enter into this piazza with
a disbelief almost stronger than our pleasure, as if we were of another
race from those who built this; as if, with its obvious indifference to any-
thing we might think of it, it could vanish the minute we turned our
backs on it.
Not the place, I would have said, for a tired old Social Democrat
leading a "popular front" rally. Certainly everything about Nenni him-
self is commonplace, and brings up thoughts of those battered but crafty
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=== Page 45 ===
FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL

relics of the Second International who have decided, after years of
futility, to float to success on the Stalinist wave of the future. L. finds
Nenni's stubbornness on the Communist issue typical of the Romagna—
Mussolini's region—and draws many parallels between their attitudes
toward Italian Socialism. But why make it a question of personal traits?
Nenni is only another expression of the long, inner defeatism of Euro-
pean Socialism, and obviously scared by the prestige and the mass base
the Communists built up during the war. According to P., who recently
talked with him, Nenni's pro-Communist line is a gamble. Privately
Nenni says: "Sooner or later the Russians are going to take over. It's
in the cards. I'm for us to become a Czechoslovakia rather than a Poland
or Bulgaria." The Communists dominate the largest section of the work-
ing class—if the Socialists separate themselves from them, Nenni says,
what happens to their mass base? Half the workers in the Milanese
factories hold cards in the C.P. Probably the greater part of the crowd
this morning was Communist, to judge from the yells and cheers that
went up whenever Nenni flattered the party. Yet I noticed that easily
the most popular part of his speech was his strong declaration that
Italy should remain neutral in any war between Russia and the U.S.
Nenni has to keep a lot of people happy at once.

R. drove us out to Settignano to see the Bernhard Berenson villa,
I Tatti. In the courtyard, which might have been the entrance to one
of the retreats at which the storytellers in the Decameron flourished
during the plague, there was a row of neat little lemon trees, each set
in its black bucket with finicky care. The lemons all drooped in a plane,
exactly at an equal distance from the ground—with what immense and
induced art it was not difficult to imagine. The elaborated niceness of
the symmetry introduced me to Berenson's mind even before I met him.

The butler seemed uncertain whether to admit us, Berenson being
away, but Leo Stein,* Gertrude's brother, whom R. knows slightly, came
out of the library and offered to show us around. Stein is a tall, gentle,
gangling old man, now seventy-five, who looks like a Jewish Uncle Sam
—very rustic, nervous, deaf, but full of talk and little wisecracks, all of
them delivered in such a flat, uncompromised Middle Western twang
after his thirty or forty years of Italy, that it was strange in that braided
garden to take in his mussed, blue serge suit and hearing aid, the knap-
sack over one shoulder. He sounded out like the authentic voice of
Allegheny, Pa.

* He died later in the summer, some weeks after our meeting.

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PARTISAN REVIEW

The Berenson house very beautiful and quietly massed with treas-
ures, but almost too exquisite to walk in. It is like a private chapel
raised to the connoisseur's ideal experience, where every corridor and
corner has been worked to make a new altarpiece, and where the
smallest detail reveals the mind of a man who has the means to reject
all intrusions of mere necessity. He has shaped the whole with an in-
flexible exactness of taste that is just a little chilling. Curiously, its
greatest effect is not so much to lead you to its pictures as to shame you
into a fresh realization of how awkward, soiled, and generally no-account
life can seem compared with art. In the dim light of the shaded corridors
those Sienese giants gaze past you, lost in their own dream of time and
interred in an oily gloss-their faces tortured with thought and good-
ness, and somehow away, bearing your praise and awe with equal
indifference. What golden and mysterious fish!

I noticed how jumpy Stein became when we stopped too long
before some pictures. Of course, showing his friend Berenson's house
must have been a bore; he had been in and out of the place for years,
and comes almost daily now to work in the library. Yet I was a little
surprised, knowing of his life-long concern with painting, to hear him
confess that it was not the work of art that mattered to him so much
as the mind of the painter. He is very much preoccupied with all sorts
of psychological questions and told us that he had just (at seventy-five)
finished psychoanalyzing himself. The devouring interest of his life was
to discover why men lie. This is something that evidently touches him
very deeply. While he had been showing us pictures and rooms with
a certain irritation, and made affectionate, mocking little digs at Beren-
son's expense (their rivalry is famous), he suddenly, in Berenson's study,
went off into a long discourse about psychology and the need for scien-
tific exactness in determining character. He spoke with a kind of uneasy
intensity, as if he had been held in on this topic for a very long time,
and wanted our understanding with or without our "approval." It was
of the greatest importance to him, this practice of lying; it would be a
key to all sorts of crucial questions, if only he could get his hands on
the solution; it was, you might say, at the center of human ambiguity.
As he went on he would look up at us every so often, pull irritably at
his hearing aid, and grumble: "What? What? You think what? I can't
hear you!" riding impatiently over us and his deafness for standing in
his way, and rearing up against our passing comments with a loud cry,
very moving in an old man, which seemed to come straight from the
heart: "It's important! It's the big thing! No one looks these facts in
the face! Animals can't lie and human beings lie all the time!"

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FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL

He was, however, very happy these days; had got over a bad
illness and was just publishing a new book* in the States; there was a
lot of work ahead of him. He talked about his writing with a mingled
anxiety and enthusiasm, as if he were just starting out on his career;
though very frail, he gave the appearance of a young writer speculating
dreamily on all the books he is going to write. I should have caught on
sooner, but didn't until we went into Fiesole to have a drink: he had
always suffered from a bad case of being Gertrude Stein's half-noticed
elder brother, and now that she was dead probably felt liberated to
go on with his own career. His resentment of her shone through every-
thing he said. Talking about their childhood in Europe, when they had
been trundled around by a father "who didn't think we could get any
kind of decent education in America," he remembered most how Ger-
trude had always lorded it over him. "But you know," he said simply,
"she was the kind who always took herself for granted. I never could."
And one saw that she had dominated the situation when they had de-
cided to make their lives in Europe. "She always took what she wanted!
She could always talk her way into anything! Why,"-discussing her
pioneer collection of modern paintings-"she never even liked Picasso
at first! Couldn't see him at all. I had to convince her. And then she
caught on and got 'em for practically nothing." After all those years,
the bitterness rankled, keeping him young. How often, I wonder, has
he been approached only as a lead to his famous sister, and this by
people who haven't the slightest knowledge of his interests? It must
be this, added to his long uncertainty about himself, which lends that
strangely overemphatic quality to his interest in "facts." Facts-the
masculine domain of elder brothers humbly and grimly toiling away at
real things, like aesthetics and psychology, where Gertrude, the mother
of them all, took the young geniuses under her wing and, always the
last of the feminists, did as she pleased-even to putting the English
language in her lap like a doll, and making it babble out of her in-
scrutable naturalness and humor. She always did as she pleased. Strange
to see him now, at his age, going back and back to the old childhood
struggle. They had transferred the cultural rivalry in that prosperous
Jewish family to Europe and worked it in and out of the expatriate
life, making of Paris and Florence new outposts for an old ambition.

Rome, Oct. 28-Berenson. I had missed him in Settignano, but
went to see him today at his hotel just off Trinità dei Monti. It was very

* Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose. Crown Publishers, New York. 1947.

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cold, and he sat in a corner of the sofa with a rug over his knees, precise
as one of his own sentences. Eighty-two: delicate little élégant with a
little white beard, very frail, an old courtier in his beautiful clothes,
every inch of him engraved fine into an instrument for aesthetic re-
sponsiveness and intelligence. He spoke English with such purity and
beauty of diction, blandly delivering himself of his words, one by one,
that he might have been putting freshly cracked walnuts into my hand.
He took me in quickly, quietly, absolutely. "Your name is of course
Russian and no doubt you are a Jew? There seem to be so many young
Jews writing in the States these days. How is that? Quite a difference
from my time!" "Oh! and is there much anti-Semitism in the States
these days? Oh!" He was extremely attentive; it was all, one was left
to gather, a distant but not uninteresting fact to him, himself a Jew,
"born in Lithuania, in the Jewish aristocracy, the old gentry," and taken
at a very early age to Boston. Being a "Jewish aristocrat" has probably
always been his carte de visite in the outside world, from President
Eliot's Harvard to Henry James's London, as it was so immediately
a way of dissociating himself gently from any possible entanglements he
may have incurred by interesting himself in American Jewish life. To
be a Jewish aristocrat does not diminish one's foreignness, but transfers
it to another plane—like that Negro who went South with a turban
on his head and was welcomed everywhere as a foreign potentate.
He reads everything; there was even a copy of that shabby little
Rome Daily American on his lap when I came in, and it is curious how
incongruous he makes anything so typically journalistic and American
look in his presence, so unbroken is the effect of elegance he gives to any
room he sits in. Every day he goes through at least one Italian, French,
Swiss, and English newspaper; takes all the reviews and magazines, even
Time. It was all out of an intense curiosity in the political behavior
of the human animal. Remembering his extraordinary library, one had
a picture of him at I Tatti as another Voltaire at Ferney, a kind of
European intelligence office—yet subtly remote from the pressure of
events, each of which he put away in some chamber of his apparatus
for meditation. He kept coming back to Henry Miller, whose works
he knew fully, and whom he detested. He vaguely shared my admiration
for that moving long story in Sunday after the War which recounts
Miller's return to his parents' home, but with this thought under con-
sideration he turned Miller into a dreary historian of the imponderable
petty-bourgeois bleakness of Brooklyn rather than the "cloacal" and con-
fused rebel he had just dismissed. He said "clo-acal" in a way that
made me see all the refuse coming up from the bottom of the Tiber
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and gathering itself into the collected works of Henry Miller. And of
course I shared in the general illusion that Kafka was a great writer?
"There is a very small light of reason burning in the world," he said
reflectively. "Mr. Kafka tries to put it out." He had exact, firm judg-
ments on everything that crossed his path; his years, his fortune, his
snobbery, and his taste have given him a freedom in getting past con-
ventions that is highly stimulating if not very satisfying-it is as if he
were surveying the present from a point removed in sympathy; I miss
that quality which alone makes a thinker interesting, his commitment
to the living. We were talking about the cultural inertia and provin-
cialism which become deeply felt after one settles into Italy, and he
thought the decline had set in with the Risorgimento-which is curious
not because there is any lack of skepticism today in Italy about the
vaunted traditions of the Risorgimento, but because of the example
that immediately came to his mind. One was left to infer that the cul-
tural elite had surrendered its prerogatives. Why, in his first years in
Italy one could still pick up from Roman pushcarts first editions of
English eighteenth-century novels which had come straight from the
shelves of the old nobility. He finds Italians now lacking in individuality.
Curious to see how he touches on all these things quite outside the realm
of historical development; he goes straight to fundamental themes of
style. The long romance with Italy is probably over-obviously "Italy"
the aesthetic concept, Italy as he first knew it and as he has retained it
at his villa with such devotion and finesse, has had to bear the burden
of a certain jarring or contradiction under the pressure of recent events.
There must be odd infringements on so exquisite a connoisseur's existence
that make one reflect on how hard it is to possess fully everything we
buy in this world.
We talked about his old friend Santayana, who is living not far
away as a guest of the Nuns of the Blue Sisters-they no longer see
each other. Curious to think of these two old intellectual grandees
finishing out their lives in Italy, the one a Spaniard and the other a
Lithuanian Jew, but both formed by their early life in Boston and at
Harvard. They were together at the Boston Latin School, at Harvard,
and in Germany thereafter-Santayana always one year ahead, as he
is one year older. He greatly admires Santayana, and it was only when
talking about him that he seemed younger and less distingué than anyone
else you ever heard of-but they are estranged, and to judge from the
oily and characteristically malicious tone Santayana takes to him in his
memoirs, the friendship ended on his side rather than on Berenson's.
In Santayana's eyes, Berenson was simply a pushing Jew; he has never

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liked Jews who do not know their place; despite the magnificent pres-
ence, the soigné air, the echoes of Pater and Matthew Arnold, the great
fortune built up by Berenson as a consultant to millionaire collectors,
the villa, and the "Jewish aristocracy" of Lithuania, one is compelled,
after sixty years, to recall Berenson as a young immigrant given his start
by Mrs. Jack Gardner. But how he looks up to Santayana, and how he
rejects the faintest criticism of that great man, who is always the idol
of nonphilosophic minds who are never quite sure what he is getting at!
Berenson himself hadn't read the Santayana memoirs; his secretary
told him not to, he would be too distressed. And very pleasantly and
understandably, he didn't care about men like Whitehead-pure thinkers
who thought about thinking. Yet I was not to offer the slightest possible
irreverence on the subject of Santayana-my faint complaint being his
addiction to pseudo-classic Wisdom. In some way Santayana's life has
always been a touchstone for his own-the manner conceals an extra-
ordinary humility, it seems. And meanwhile there is Santayana in his
convent cell and Berenson in his villa: not "expatriates," not "Amer-
icans," simply unbound to any particular country. Both with that strange
formative early life in New England, and with no place to go back to,
the last New England heroes of the James saga, yet quietly and firmly
superior to all national limitations-truly citizens of the world, and dis-
courning of essential things, above all contemporary battles, in an English
that comes straight down to us from the Boston of seventy years ago.

Florence, June 16-Café scene in the Piazza della Repubblica,
which everyone absentmindedly still calls the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.
In the moonlight hundreds of people sitting at those long lines of tables,
row on row, between the hedges of rubber plants that mark off one
café from another; an audience waiting to make its own play. Won-
derful to watch the long appraising stares, like an expert judging horse-
flesh, with which these open-air troglodytes look each newcomer up and
down. No one misses a thing. They may look bored and weary to death,
with scales over their half-closed eyes, sipping indifferently at their
miniscule cup of espresso as if there were all the time in the world and
they had been sitting here, with that same cup of coffee, spoon, and
water carafe, since the Etruscans. But in the air the preparatory vapors
of a seduction; these are buds that open only at night. As soon as a new
one walks into the lighted den, making the grand tour up and around
the long line of tables, faint waves radiate from brains chattering with
thought and speculation. Ah, some more of the Americani. The waiter
in his soiled and patched evening clothes grins and bows; the three
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whores glumly sitting together go through the girls with unforgiving
eyes like one of those electric signal boxes in a prison corridor that
ring an alarm bell if there is any metal on your person. The cigarette
vendors come screeching around like a flock of gulls maddened by
the smell of food off the ship's bow-old, young, sick, every age and
every human condition, each of them with his little suitcase held out
before him like a tray. Sigarette? . . . Nazionali . . . Americane! Every
five minutes a beggar appears at the table-usually old women with
black shawls and the look of the eternal mother of sorrows, leading little
barefoot girls whose faces are so gray and bent with suffering, whose
arms hang so miserably at their sides as if they had been scratching old
sores, that you find yourself either responding to the situation or reward-
ing the impersonation. Under the table more barefoot kids in dis-
carded GI pants and American Air Force jackets, hunting cigarette
ends and storing them carefully in little tin pails; it will all go to make
"new" American cigarettes. In the history of Europe this age should
go down as that of the Pax Americana, or the secondhand butt.

The beggars cover the café in waves; they make sure never to
come up together or at too close intervals, and while one makes his
rounds the others stand at the hedge, like actors waiting to go on.
Notice how the Italians give, every time. They may look indifferent
and
after the tenth approach exasperated beyond words, but after
shrugging their shoulders or trying the frontal attack method (Signora!
Have mercy! Do you think I'm the Bank of Italy?) they come up with
the usual. The crucial test comes when someone at a table tries to look
away. Hopeless. The beggar simply keeps turning with him and stares
him down.

In the brilliantly humming summer night all these café dwellers,
each moored in his cultural swamp, gently pushing at the world outside
like a fly caught in a dish of honey. The faces lack that paunchy, pasty
look of the normally overfed at home: here you can actually see the
bony structure brought into the world at birth. The general level of
good looks is amazing: face after face with that focused sensuality that
is always the personal ticket of young actors and actresses. Most of
them emptily looking out to sea, or engaged in a little deal. The air
is damp with sex, but you can hear sums being recited at table after
table; the whole piazza is one great bourse for the black market.
Centotrenta lire . . . centosessanta . . . tremila quaranta. A fierce-looking
boy in his late teens rides up on a bicycle and unerringly goes straight
to the American faces and clothes. Will you buy American cigarettes-
real American cigarettes, not counterfeit? Wanna change your money,

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mista? Heh, mista? Will you for God's sakes sell him something? You
think he hasn't got the money? Takes out a great wad of sweaty lire.
"Listen!" he says disgustedly, about to ride off-"I'll buy anything you
got! ANYTHING!" Funny in that place to hear the long wailing sing-
song of the cigarette vendors, which as the evening drags on becomes
simply: "America!"

Rome, Sept. 3-Almost impossible to find a book of Silone's in the
shops, but everyone goes at him constantly-as if he were not simply
a legend brought from overseas who writes "bad Italian," but a con-
venience to everyone's sense of superiority. It is very tiring to hear him
knocked down with the same contemptuous phrases by every literary
creature one meets. Even C., who does those little articles and cartoons
for the Socialist press, and may fairly be described as an amiable hack
of not overpowering gifts, loves to discourse on the "outside world's"
absurd overestimation of Silone-it puts him right in style, and gives
him the only point of contact he has with opinion outside Italy. "You
people cannot imagine how crudely he writes," and screwing up his
shoulders with that well-worn Mediterranean gesture which denotes
some intractable human error or folly, takes up the argument after
everyone at the table had given it up as hopeless: "Silone! Always
Silone! You people have never heard of anyone else!"

He writes, it seems, badly; he is a "political," not really a man of
letters a deputy, an active Socialist, editor of his own political weekly,
etc.; he does not shine in conversation, but is in fact a depressed and
depressing character; his reputation is out of all proportion to the real
situation in Italian writing. The main point, obviously, is that Italian
intellectuals are not disposed to honor a novelist who has been pushed
at them as a symbol of the "real," the anti-Fascist, Italy. Curious situa-
tion: on the one hand there is a certain defensiveness about compliance
with a regime which only the boldest cared to defy head-on, and which,
as they say, "was after all, not so bad as Hitler. You have no idea
how easygoing it was. With us, even authoritarian government is al-
ways a little bit of a joke." I have noticed that even Gaetano Salvemini's
return has aroused mixed feelings-"he criticizes too much." On the
other hand, whatever moral debt some Italians may have incurred for
Fascism, none of them is likely to feel any great repentance now, con-
sidering the misery into which so many have been plunged after being
bombed, pillaged, and cheated up and down the peninsula. They are
understandably furious with those Anglo-Americans who were Musso-
lini's really sincere admirers, and then worked their precious moral

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superiority both ways—denouncing them first for Fascism and then
laughing at them for its ineffectuality. The modern Italians are, anyway,
oversensitive on every question of prestige, and are now even more so,
with so much of the country's economy pinned to the black market.
They are annoyed with those who approach them on set political lines—
who go around like L., that proverbial American liberal, saying in
effect: "Your country is beautiful and I have the greatest admiration
for your leading writers, Mr. Dante and Mr. Silone. But are you quite
free of sin?"

Mrs. C. told me that Fontamara was a terrible book and that the
first she had seen of it was an Italian edition sent over especially by
Silone's English publisher—not easy for them to take that! And he is
not a "literary" writer, a deep matter in a country where style works on
writers like a narcotic. ("My greatest pleasure," said A., who is very
intelligent, "is spending a morning polishing my paragraphs.") So
Silone is considered a gross writer, and with so much of his time taken
up with inter-Socialist politics, a curiosity. Yet harsh and peculiarly
personal as so many of these attacks are—essential to Italian self-esteem
—there is a curious muddleheadedness to Silone which I can see more
clearly here than I could at home. He has gone through an intense
religious evolution without getting out of the shell of party Marxism,
and up to recently kept up with Nenni and the anti-Communist oppo-
sition in the Socialist movement out of some vague idea of reconciling
them. But essentially, as P. says, he is disliked because he personifies
the one type the Italians cannot take—the moral dissenter. "He simply
will not reduce everything to the canonical Italian level of the 'family
affair.' " Similarly one can see that the personal character of his Socialism
represents more and more a longing to get back to the immediate human
relatedness with peasants and artisans he enjoyed in his early days in
the Abruzzi. What I have always loved in Silone is his feeling for the
bottom people—a fact that would be equally admired in Italy if he did
not let the intellectuals feel that he is making dour ethical judgments
on them. But the peasant types whom Carlo Levi described in Christ
Stopped At Eboli with such easy detachment, creatures of living
mythology and native farce, are to Silone just those "who do not be-
tray." He may be muddled and intolerably gloomy, but he is striking
out for unfashionable values. In Catholic Italy it is very queer to take
Christianity that seriously.

Sept. 5—Rome keeps eluding me, as Florence never did, or even
Assisi—the one almost too perfectly pure in style, the other simply
mysterious, lost to our age like a buried city. I knew in Assisi that I
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must remain outside it, that I could not reach across that wall of old
sacredness, and was content to be amazed and to go away. But Rome
makes everything initially so easy and yet ends by being the greatest
enigma of all.

And this is not because the past has made a camouflage city over
the "real" one, an historic patina barring the depths to the city's inner
life. I had expected it to be so, but what is astonishing here is the
realization that all these streets and streets of gray, Baroque church
fronts, old stones, arches, inscriptions, temples, palaces are casually
interwoven with the greater modern city and are entirely lacking in
the "picturesque." The city is not grand. Except for that hideous birth-
day cake, the Vittorio Emanuele monument, and the great sweeping
roads which Mussolini erected to the Colosseum, there is nothing im-
perious about Rome as there is about Washington or the Paris laid out
by Baron Haussmann. The greater part of it has a softly informal qual-
ity, as if the stone had rotted over the dark cramped streets like vege-
tation, and the overripe gourds of Baroque churches had begun to
melt at the edges, emitting a thin juice of blood and dirt. The city
always seems small without ever being compact. It was not until I
came to the Pincio along the park, and looked down on the city, with
its domes, obelisks, and spires upflashing in the sun like an heraldic
coat of arms, that I realized how enormous are those churches which,
when you pass their doors, seem to protrude, each over its little front
of street, like an old chatelaine barring the way.

It is perhaps just this long inner weathering, softening, crampening
that makes the city immediately so easy, as if it had been used up and
used up, generation after generation, and now had no pretense with
anyone. Yet it is in this very blandness and intimacy with which Rome
takes you in, this lack of outward "surface," that ambiguity begins.
Here the remains of the successive generations have been piled up and
with such indifference that they finally melt into equivalent
phases of the same weariness with time. People say: "How amazing
that the various periods blend so well." How amazing, rather, that the
city should still be able to absorb them all and keep us equidistant in
time from each. The obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo is as "Roman"
now as the great stone goddess dumped into a corner of the courtyard
of the Palazzo Venezia; the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Campi-
doglio, the Palazzo Farnese, the temple of the vestal virgins along the
Tiber, that great heap of Latin Rome set up like a goldfish bowl in
the middle of the Piazza Argentina, those Baroque churches on the
Corso, behind those sooty fronts of European gray which always look

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as if they had been trod over by millions of feet in the long procession
of Christendom, churches where the gilt and coiled pillars writhe and
mount in irreversible dreams of splendor, in a style that summons back
the death agony of empires—all, seen week after week, take on an im-
possible unity of experience. Returning late last night along the Via del
Babbuino, I noticed in the corridor of a small house a wall decorated
with shards off some Roman wall, and had this strange picture in my
mind of Rome today wearing its own past as slyly as a savage decked
out in the glass beads and metal crucifixes donated by missionaries.

Nov. 8—E. T., whom I used to see in that 23rd Street cafeteria
scribbling away at his anti-Fascist novels, and was almost the type of
the Italian anarchist, with his unworldliness, his ungovernable brio, his
fifteen or seventeen years of prison under Mussolini, and his fierce dis-
like of Communist totalitarians (he even spent some weeks on Riker's
Island for beating one up), has since his deportation suddenly blos-
somed out as the C.P.'s anti-American expert. I have been reading in
L'Unità an article by him which announces the following facts to the
Italian proletariat: (1) Truman is a gangster; (2) This is so because
he got his political start from the Pendergast gang in Kansas City;
(3) There used to be a Capone gang in Chicago, and Chicago is very
near Kansas City; (4) There is also a Tammany gang in New York,
which is connected with political gangs in Washington and Chicago;
(5) Q.E.D., America is dominated by gangsters.

Nov. 15—Our "landlord," Prince L., has gone off for a few days and
there is a meek little retired sea captain in his studio who is elaborately
deferent to us on all occasions. Came over to my window this morning and
asked me to have a coffee with him, to discuss the writer's problems.
He is doing a fantasy on the Third World War, the point of which is
that America will assuredly lose it. Not a Communist but an old-fashioned
liberal—"my only politics is Italy." But he has soaked up the C.P. line
with such thoroughness that I can spare myself much study by listening
to him. All strikes are forbidden in America; Lewis was put in jail for
starting one; Negroes are lynched weekly in New York and Chicago;
the ruling class is itching to use the atom bomb on Russia, and will
drop some on Italy if the workers seize power. Russia? He shrugs: a
far-off country, run by Oriental despots; it does not interest him; he
is not a Communist. But America has all the wealth and all the ships
and all the bombs and is mad to rule the world. "You may be amiable,
but you have everything and we have nothing."

Dec. 1—Dinner with Silone and Carlo Levi in a sweltering mob
at the pizzeria Re degli Amici—accordion players, Neapolitan blues

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singers, a grotesque one-man band loaded front and back with instru-
ments and beating time to the upward and downward surge of a rusty
black derby squeezed over his eyes, wandering beggars and nuns col-
lecting alms. Sociability unlimited, the café of all good Roman artists,
Socialists, and Actionists—the beautiful Italian bedlam and intellectual
merriment, people calling and flirting from table to table: all one great
family party. Always at such moments, as when walking the streets at
noon and feeling the relatedness of people to each other, the family
motif binding Italians together seems stronger than the personality of
each one. I keep thinking of a dance on the village green.
Even Silone looked almost gay tonight, though taking advantage
of Levi's valiant efforts to speak English, which he pretends not to under-
stand at all, he put his face in a great mass of fish, meat, and greens,
and remained dolorously alone with his own thoughts. Levi in his most
resplendent mood and most carefree costume, with a crazy fur cap given
him by a Florentine carriage driver and a long checked overcoat
straight out of Harold Teen. Falstaff in a zoot suit, grinning from ear
to ear, the most pagan of all the Jews. He looks like a Roman senator
out on the street, and glad of it. Everything interests him, every strand
in Italian politics, art, and gossip runs through his hands as he talks.
As he sits there, papa at the head of the table, sighing one minute for
the New York girls, the other relating stories of Florence under the
occupation, imperturbably self-centered as a child but bringing up
light and gaiety on all possible subjects by his delight in his appetites and
his own mind, one thinks of Bacon's discovery that the plant, man, grows
more vigorous in Italy. Paints in the morning, writes in the afternoon,
rounds out his day with a cartoon for Italia socialista, and then makes his
grand entrance here, an old stogy in his mouth, amiable as a Congress-
man back home on Main Street—the pinnacle of Italian self-enjoyment.
Tells me with enormous relish that he did a cartoon satirizing Nenni
lost in the Communist jungle, and that Nenni, misunderstanding,
called up to congratulate him. Reports that the people he described in
Christ Stopped At Eboli, which recounts his confinement for three
years under Fascism, have taken to wearing markers on their clothes,
reading: "I am a character in Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped At Eboli."
What will you have? It is a marvelous people, the Italians! And he
sits there, roaring his head off, making eyes at every pretty girl who
passes. The years have hardly worn at him; he shares in everything and
belongs to no one—it has all gone into a bouillabaisse of experience—
the times in and out of prison, the period of exile in Lucania when, as
a political prisoner with no other way of reach
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early training as a physician, he discovered for the Italians themselves
the most impoverished and beaten section of the peasantry; and now
postwar Rome, out of which he protrudes with undiminished force, and
every aspect of whose life he makes seem as local to his own as if he
were the neighborhood scribe, writing letters for all the peasants in
the village.
Curious to watch Silone and Levi together—both men of the same
generation, both formed entirely outside the shell of Fascism and char-
acteristically better known in other countries than in their own, funda-
mental types of the writer “engaged” to action, yet so different in mind
and temperament that the extremes of the Italian character have been
called on to produce them—the one awkwardly self-conscious, soured with
political and literary disappointments ("He has been told so often he
is a bad novelist," M. says, "he is ready to believe it"), but a man who
defends sadly the most creative urgings of our age; the other riding the
crest of the wave, hearty and ineffably self-assured, relying on his
Italianism for every experience. In the "outside world" people are
beginning to compare them, to find in them tokens of the "new" Italy;
here the formula simply doesn't operate—the Silone one knows is not
to be found in a crazy-quilt evening, but in his work, with its scruples,
its awkward tenderness, and its humor—and the work is no longer
separable here from Italy; it is one more chapter in the inner history
of the Italian masses.
And afterwards, toiling home through the cold, stopping for an
espresso, admiring the nymphs in the Piazza del Popolo, a bag of chest-
nuts from the old woman on the corner warming herself at the fire,
while in the faint light of the lamps in the park, just beyond Michel-
angelo's gates, that Roman god and emperor whose name I have never
learned still stands with his arm half-raised, beautiful and indifferent.

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Josephine Herbst

MISS PORTER AND MISS STEIN

Which is the "real" Gertrude Stein? Her portrait by Picasso
now on view at the Museum of Modern Art or the Miss Stein in the
article by Katherine Anne Porter in Harper's Magazine, December, 1947?
In feeling and attitude toward their subject the painter and writer
appear to be at opposite poles. There is nothing false in the details that
Miss Porter selects; each might have been verified by Miss Stein herself.
The chosen facts are assembled with wit and presented in flawless prose;
the given features are correct. But what is wrong with the expression?
What features are missing?
Miss Porter frankly admits that her subject has a "horrid fascina-
tion" for her; she sees Miss Stein as "one of the blights and symptoms
of her very sick times." Picasso's approach to the portrait of Gertrude
Stein, however, was not antipathetic. The painting itself recalls a period
and it is exactly this background and its significance that Miss Porter
blacks out. The portrait was commissioned by Miss Stein in 1905 when
Picasso was twenty-four, living in poverty in a Montmartre tenement.
He had just finished the famous series of circus acrobats, and the portrait
initiated an important new development in his work. During the sittings,
Picasso suddenly painted out the whole head, declaring, "I don't see
you any longer when I look." That summer he went to Spain, Gertrude
Stein to Italy. When the painter returned, he painted in the head
without having seen her again. Between the painting out and the paint-
ing in a great change had come to Picasso's art and the two styles
survive in the work; the naturalistic method of the background and
the face in the new style, suggesting a sculptured mask with boldly
drawn features similar to the faces seen in ancient Spanish sculpture.
Miss Stein was then working on Three Lives. Cubism was being born,
Cézanne had just died. The posthumous exhibition of Cézanne's paint-
ings was held in Paris in 1907 and not long after, Stieglitz opened 291
in New York. It was not until 1913 that the American public had a
chance at the post-Impressionists; they were received with howling

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MISS PORTER AND MISS STEIN

derision. Henry James was still writing for the “happy few.” Both
Stein and Picasso were straining for new mutations in the creative
arts, and one has only to keep in mind the stale academic rigidity that
prevailed in the painting and writing of the period to acknowledge
the tremendous influence both the painter and writer exerted in their
respective fields. The question that has now arisen is whether this was
a “good” or a “bad” influence, and the argument extends far beyond
the subject of Miss Stein.

In brief, Miss Porter presents Miss Stein as a gloomy, low-pressure,
possessive slug, eating her way through a leaf, with two major obses-
sions, Money and Success. Picasso emerges as one of Miss Stein’s
possessions, not as a fellow artist in an exciting, mutual venture. Miss
Toklas, her dogs, her paisley shawls, even the GI’s are impaled on the
pincushion of Miss Stein’s world as exclusively her own. Her life ex-
perience would appear to have been little more than the glutton dream
of a greedy egomaniac; her quarrels, personal stigmata.

Picasso’s portrait obliges us to confront the actual woman and
the period. The mouth is generous, not avaricious, the whole being is
saturated with patience and eagerness, two qualities most enjoined by
Miss Stein herself. There are the Oriental head and fine eyes to which
Miss Porter also gives due admiration. The Picasso woman is vast,
solid, and egotistical, but one must ask what kind of ego is made
manifest? What goal did it serve? Fortunately, we have Gertrude Stein’s
work and the evidence of the period as a corrective for any bias either
with a documentation of her correspondence which indicates that she
was generous not only with her mind but often with her cash. The
human frailties that Miss Porter indicates are not peculiar to Miss
Stein, even if true. Balzac never forgot the franc, Dickens may have
been a brute to his wife and Dostoevsky a reactionary. It is profitable
to examine even monstrous traits insofar as they explain a connection
between a state of being and a work of art. Does Miss Porter’s Miss
Stein reveal the source of her direction or its value within the frame-
work of a period or the substance of an achievement?

Picasso brought to his subject the illumination of a great inno-
vator. Miss Porter comes with the last sad decades firmly in mind,
forgetting the significant origin of the innovation and miscalculating
the sequence of the evil. She sees only “irresponsible” chaos in Miss
Stein’s prose and, by implication, places a certain moral condemnation
upon it as contributing to the prevailing disorder. Curiously enough,
Miss Porter’s verdict recalls a review of Miss Stein’s Wars I Have Seen

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PARTISAN REVIEW
by an OWI propagandist, published in the New York Times when the
book appeared. Only one aspect of Miss Stein was discussed, her "fri-
volity." A writer like Miss Stein had many aspects; but frivolity is not
her prevailing mood. Like that other egomaniac, Walt Whitman, an
intellectual bent seems to have been accompanied by a nonrational urge
in the same direction. Both were impelled to identify themselves with
"everybody," and, in a long, often tedious, Sears Roebuck cataloging,
to explain everybody to everyone. Both often appear to be seeking
frantically for an elusive "somebody" in the "everybody" of public
crowds; both fill up lines with instantaneous, nonliterary expressions,
flinging them up carelessly, as personally, intimately, freshly, as a child
sees; both were caught up in the crowds of war, paying less attention
to events and programs than to the elements beneath. Whitman dis-
covered the anonymous "unknown" soldier; Stein, the anonymous civ-
ilian who is neither always heroic nor always afraid but who eats,
sleeps, scrambles for food, looks for hopeful portents, awaits events,
resists, and sometimes succumbs to the enemy. If we accept the Porter
version of Miss Stein's salon, it appears only as the paradox of an ex-
perience that was in general unusually democratic, oddly equalitarian for
a writer who has often been identified with esoteric snobbism. By what
standard of responsibility is she to be measured? By Silone or Malraux?
By Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells? Is Glenway Wescott's Apartment in
Athens, which the author acknowledged was his "contribution to the war
effort," to be the standard, and are we to accept its historical distortions?
Even a few names suffice to indicate the difficulty. In her chosen orbit,
Gertrude Stein was responsible, and more may be learned from her
failures than from any number of glittering, successful works patterned
on models with which we are familiar. She was under the spell of the
private life that goes on whether there is justice or injustice, struggle
or ennui, and she hoped by abolishing the chronological sequence to
express life by its values only.
There are no Dali snails crawling over corpses in Stein's prose; no
descent into degenerative processes solely for the thrill. If her influence
was pernicious, where is it to be found? In the banalities of Hollywood,
the brutality of best sellers? Various writers proclaimed their indebt-
edness to the laboratory methods of her prose; Sherwood Anderson,
Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, to name three. Miss Porter's portrait
would seem more convincing if she detailed this evidence; she implies
that Miss Stein's chief followers were "ill-mannered" brats from the
Middle West, intent on sex and rum, and who had "never read a book."
This has a witty ring, but is it true? Is the lumpen illiterati determined
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MISS PORTER AND MISS STEIN

by geography? Is it true that transition and Miss Stein were inseparable
components of a muddled “occultism” and that the lack of a mother
tongue betrayed them both? Muddled as Jolas was editorially, he
printed Joyce’s Work in Progress, and Miss Porter concedes that Joyce
had a mother tongue. Jolas even printed Miss Porter. The hospitality
of transition accounts for diversified creative efforts as well as for sense-
less mouthings now sunk in the sands.
One becomes nostalgic for that hospitality even with its muddle.
Some irresponsibility must be allowed the artist in a world geared to
collective uniformity; singularity needs to be safeguarded, not feared.
This is no argument for a detachment that pays no heed to a moral
climate. It may be the time to re-examine a trend, but in what spirit
is this to be undertaken? What goal is it to serve? The entire field of
modern art is now under fire and one should say, in justice to Miss
Porter, that there is no evidence of an intention to share in the general
attack. The fact remains that her charge of “irresponsibility” is echoed
by less scrupulous persons in broadsides against modern art and writing
between the sham and the genuine, without de-
fining, the ends to be served.
Is there any relevance in the fact that Hitler condemned modern art
and burned the books? In effect, he made art a public enemy, almost as
guilty as the Jews. Nor did Joyce’s mother tongue spare him from the nec-
essity of fleeing Paris when the Nazis came. During the war the impulse to
name a guilty party induced a group of writers, led by Archibald Mac-
Leish, to cite as “irresponsible” such writers as Joyce, Proust, D. H.
Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot. Van Wyck Brooks sponsored Longfellow
and Lowell as safe democratic carriers. Magazines and newspapers cur-
rently define modern art as “subversive,” as a “racket,” “degenerate,”
and “irresponsible.” The trustees of the Institute of Modern Art in
Boston have just repudiated the word “modern,” substituting “contem-
porary”; as outlined by the trustees, the principles laid down for future
policy have a familiar, unholy sound. On February 12, the New York
Times reported that the Central Committee of the Communist Party
had denounced Russia’s three leading composers for displaying anti-
democratic leanings, for ideological errors, and for utilizing atonality
rather than melody. Seven “irresponsible” composers were ordered to
return to the “great Russian traditions in music.” A month previously,
the writer Fadayev was obliged to admit his “errors” and to accept the
corrections as “sound fatherly” advice. Nor does fatherly advice stop
with the arts; an important economist was bawled out for his con-
sidered findings on the state of capitalism in the Western World.
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PARTISAN REVIEW

How responsible some of the local attacks upon irresponsibility
are, can be seen from an examination of Mona Lisa's Moustache, a
recent work so vulgarly contrived that it would be idiotic to give it
attention if it had not been hailed by several reviewers as the final
sane word on an "insane subject." Gibbings treats the Duchamp "Mona
Lisa with a Moustache" as a painting. He interprets Gauguin as an exhi-
bitionist who repudiated a business career for a hedonistic exploration of
the dark "occult" forces of the South Seas; his painting, as insane jargon.
The author, an interior decorator, misstates facts; once, indeed, in a
radio broadcast, he claimed that Hitler was not opposed to modern art
but only to a few Russian "bolshevik" specimens. In the course of further-
ing his contention that there is a connection between Nazi degeneracy
and modern art, he imputes the fall of France to Picasso's "Guernica"!
One should take a good look at "Guernica." Picasso was no Vansittart.
The bull that has gone raging mad, tearing down the city, ripping ter-
rified bodies to fragments, does not signify a specified "people." Picasso
indicts a virulent principle, the leader run amuck, gone mad with a
power that has turned his victims to stone. The bull may be Franco; it
is the dictator, triumphant, wherever he may be found, under any
name. That this painting, with its tremendous significance for our
time, should be misinterpreted as a symbol for a people's degeneracy is
a symptom of someone's malaise. It was a sign of health that Gertrude
Stein could say, "I write for myself and strangers."

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ART CHRONICLE

IRRELEVANCE VERSUS IRRESPONSIBILITY

The recent questioning of the validity of modern painting in
this, its post-Cubist stage—as we see such questioning, for instance, in
Geoffrey Grigson's article, "Authentic and False in the New 'Romantic-
ism'," in the March Horizon and in the remarks quoted indirectly therein
from Gide and the late Coomaraswamy—reflects again the fallacies to
which any criticism of a non-literary art commits itself when it relies
largely on discourse, and when, in addition, the amateur's distance is
assumed to be adequate to serious discussion. Once again we hear that by
devoting himself to means instead of ends the contemporary advanced
artist has reduced himself to a technician, performer, virtuoso, at best
a mere exponent of his own sensibility, whose work must lack real
"human" import.
Modern art lacks a subject (end), lacks "humanity," etc.—how
many cultivated people, literary men in particular, go on complaining
this way. Thirty years ago their similars, with an equal incomprehension
of the point of modern art, were so excited by the novelty of the phe-
nomenon itself that they were willing to suspend the traditional de-
mands for subject and form, purpose and treatment, means and ends;
whether or not they realized what it was all about, they had a categorical
enthusiasm for the "modern" that stilled their qualms. And regardless of
the damage this uncritical attitude may have done in some areas, it was
on the whole a lucky thing for modern art, for without the busy support
of the amateurs of novelty in the teens and twenties it would have had
much more difficulty in getting itself accepted. But times have changed
again, and modern painting and sculpture have now drifted into one of
the most precarious of all positions: that of a familiar phenomenon
whose familiarity has not made it any the less baffling, a phenomenon
moreover that continues to resist the literary approach. And when one
remembers that for the average cultivated person in our society then
literary approach is the standard one with respect to all the arts, then the
position of modern painting and sculpture is seen to be precarious indeed.

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PARTISAN REVIEW
Yet painting and sculpture have always been in a somewhat anomal-
ous position. Whereas the point of music qua art is usually unmistake-
able enough, in practice if not in theory, that of painting and sculpture
is more often than not missed by the very people who sincerely enjoy
them. If the relative standings of the artists of the past have been es-
tablished for the record correctly in the main, the grounds on which
this has been done still remain more inaccessible to discourse than
those governing the criticism even of music. "Apprendre à voir," said
the Goncourt brothers, "est le plus long apprentissage de tous les arts."
Does not even Valéry (in Choses vues, a selection from which, trans-
lated by William Geoffrey, appears in the spring Kenyon Review) com-
plain that the "object of painting is uncertain" and in his further re-
marks demonstrate how, even in the case of this enthusiast of painting, the
literary approach prevented him from fully experiencing this art. And, in-
cidentally, was the literary approach to art in general ever put more
succinctly, if unwittingly, than when Valéry writes of music: "I conclude
that the real connoisseur in this art is necessarily he to whom it suggests
nothing"? As though, when the verb "suggests" takes for its objects the
relatively conceptualized images Valéry has in mind, the same does not
apply to painting and sculpture.

The French writers of the generation after Valéry's who so en-
thusiastically welcomed Cubism and its aftermath did so for the most
part with a magnificent incomprehension that does not seem to have
interfered with their élan. But we who write in English lack that un-
inhibited rhetorical exuberance which permits contemporary Frenchmen
to be so irresponsible toward their subject matter whenever it happens
to be art—and anyhow we make ourselves ridiculous if we try to imitate
it. When we sit down to write about art we apply ourselves with an
earnestness that, in the absence of a real familiarity with the medium
or of a special interest like iconography, makes us grow querulous in the
end. This querulousness is not confined to journalists and the editors
of art magazines. A writer as enlightened as Mr. Grigson can feel
thwarted enough to reproach modern art for its failure to be affirmative,
noble, human, universal, etc. And it is significant that Gide, distinguished
among all contemporary French writers by his lack of rhetoric and dis-
daining the face-saving levity with which most of his colleagues address
themselves to art, can utter a similar reproach. Nevertheless, in art
irresponsibility is often preferable to irrelevance, and at the moment,
Mr. Grigson's or Gide's irrelevance does more harm than, say, Sartre's
catalogue blurbs.

"Play-boy of means" is what Mr. Grigson calls the modern artist.
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TOP PICTOGRAM (1948) by Adolph Gottlieb. Pen and Ink. 12" x 15". Courtesy of the Kootz Galle

=== Page 66 ===
HORNED FIGURE (1948) by William Baziotes. Pen and Ink. 6½" x 4". Courtesy of the Koots Gallery.

=== Page 67 ===
ART CHRONICLE

"Painters need order; they need subject; which is another way of af-
firming that they need viable ends." Here in America our familiarity,
not to say our obsession, with means teaches us that, though a means
may be without an end, it can never be without a result or consequence.
And art is essentially a matter of means and results, not of means and
ends: for no one has ever been able to point out the ends or purposes
of art with the finality any artist would need were he to take Mr. Grig-
son's advice and go in search of ends. If, however, by ends Mr. Grigson
really means content and wants to reproach modern art for lack of it,
then he has missed the whole point.
Must one argue this all over again? The message of modern art,
abstract or not, Matisse's, Picasso's, or Mondrian's, is precisely that means
are content. Pigment and its abstract combinations on canvas are as
important as delineated forms; matter—colors and the surfaces on which
they are placed—is as important as ideas. Human activity embodies its
own ends and no longer makes them transcendental by postponing them
to afterlife or old age. All experience is sanctified, all we can know is
the best we can know. These may be errors, just as the myths of religion
are errors, but they are capable of producing an art just as profound
and "human" as that which incorporated the myths of religion.
The inability to perceive "human" content in modern art means
ultimately the inability to perceive the point of painting and sculpture
in general. Mr. Grigson will allow Auden to say "love" in an oblique
way, and not a painter, simply because he can always recognize the
word, "love," for what it means, but has trouble deciphering paint.
Abstract art is effective on the same basis as all previous art and can
convey a content equally important or equally unimportant; there is
no difference in principle. On the other hand, it is possible to assert—
and the assertion has not been effectively refuted so far—that the great
masters of the past achieved their art by virtue of combinations of pig-
ment whose real effectiveness was "abstract," and that their greatness
is not owed to the spirituality with which they conceived the things
they illustrated so much as it is to the success with which they ennobled
raw matter to the point where it could function as art.

Mr. Grigson's call for "viable ends" and common, universal hu-
manity in contemporary painting and sculpture (as if anything worthy
of the name of art does not strive necessarily for a maximum of human-
ity and universality) is echoed in essence if not at all in style by a long
article called "Aspects of Two Cultures" appearing in Number 52 of
the VOKS Bulletin, a cultural magazine published in Moscow in English
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=== Page 68 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW

—among other languages—by the USSR Society for Cultural Relations
with Foreign Countries. The author of the article is the magazine's
editor, Vladimir Kemenov, whose pen, if not mind, functions in a sub-
cellar of consciousness a Neanderthal man would have shrunk from
entering. Mr. Kemenov attacks contemporary "bourgeois" art indis-
criminately, sparing neither abstract art nor neo-realism and taking in
everything in between (though he is careful never to use the word
"academic"). Aside from the unbelievable level of intellectual probity
on which it is written, Mr. Kemenov's article is remarkable for its in-
sinuations to the effect that our country is now the chief promoter of
"decadent" art (Dali and Sir Kenneth Clark are called Americans, and
it is pointed out that Lipchitz has spent a "long time" in this country).
Mr. Kemenov accuses modern art of trying to convince the working
man "that he is no more than a conglomeration of mechanical parts . . .
or else a biological creature possessing purely animal instincts and de-
sires." Lipchitz is said to be a "representative of that tendency in modern
bourgeois art which utterly perverts the image of man, distorting his
body, violating measure and proportion, emphasizing his animal nature."
Picasso's art is called "an aesthetic apologetics for capitalism" des-
pite his own "professed sympathy for the struggle of democracy against
fascism." The Impressionists and Cézanne also get theirs in passing, be-
ing accused of one-sided "rationalism."
Mr. Kemenov goes on to say that modern art is pathological, insane,
mystical, irrational, escapist, etc. But it is to be noted that throughout the
article he, or at least his translator, avoids the term, "degenerate art,"
perhaps because the Nazis used to apply it so regularly to modern art.
This does not, however, prevent him from adding that the latter is a
"fantastic mixture of unwholesome fantasy and fraud," "worthless non-
sense," "a mixture of pathology and chicanery" tracing its origins to
"daubs painted by the donkey's tail." But even our "realistic" art is only
"quasi-realistic. . . . Its purpose is to put a veneer on bourgeois reality."
Mr. Kemenov says that the decadence and deterioration of modern
bourgeois art (it used to be better in the nineteenth century, he admits,
when it was realistic and closer to the people) are such that it is unable
to produce good war propaganda; only imported Soviet music, movies,
and posters could "spiritually" mobilize people in this country and Britain
against Hitler during the war. "As opposed to decadent bourgeois art,
divorced from the people, hostile to the interests of the democratic masses,
permeated with biological individualism and mysticism, Soviet artists
present an art created for the people, inspired by the thoughts, feelings,
and achievements of the people, and which in its turn enriches the people

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ART CHRONICLE

with its lofty ideas and noble images." Although Mr. Kemenov does
not name a single Soviet painter or sculptor, he also writes: "Young
Soviet art has already created works of world-wide significance. . .
Soviet art is advancing along the true path indicated by the genius of
Stalin." Since it would be hard to say that Mr. Kemenov is irresponsible,
we have to conclude that he, too, is irrelevant.

The truly new horror of our times is not, perhaps, totalitarianism as
such, but the vulgarity it is able to install in places of power-the of-
ficial vulgarity, the certified vulgarity:

"From low to high doth dissolution climb,
And sink from high to low. . . ."

Clement Greenberg

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THE ATONAL TRAIL: A COMMUNICATION

Atonality or Dodecatonalism as a system of musical com-
position is, as everyone knows, a product of Central Europe. As such it
had from the outset the earmarks of a Messianic cult and a determinist
religion. Like the Bauhaus, Gestalt philosophy, Antroposophy, and many
other Central European "currents" of the teens and twenties, it had its
God or Master, its prophets and apostles, its interpretation of history,
its fervent adepts and converts and its no less fervent financial
backers. However, until the late twenties the movement was es-
sentially limited to Central Europe, and only a handful of com-
posers outside of this realm were converted to the Schönbergian
system of musical composition. Schönberg, Berg, Wellecz, and
other Viennese composers, adherents full or in part of the twelve-
tone system of composition, were naturally well known to everyone con-
cerned with new music. Their theories were discussed, their music care-
fully studied.

The ideological conflict between the converts to the twelve-tone
system and the adherents of the principle of tonal or modal composition
raged in musical periodicals all over Europe in the twenties. In most
of this controversy the Schönberg adepts centered their attacks against
the work of Igor Stravinsky, whose rejection of any "system" as a
basis for composition quite naturally put him at the opposite pole
of the dodecatonal cult. However, towards the end of the twenties
the debate between tonalists and atonalists subsided and it seemed
that everyone concerned (not the "large" public) had thoroughly
understood the principles of atonality and the twelve-tone system. A
few composers adopted them in their entirety, most of the others accepted
them only partially (as a further emancipation of dissonance) but every-
one seemed to feel that the problem of atonality was a closed issue.
It was understood to be the last consequence drawn from an evolution of
chordal harmony which had first started somewhere around 1600 (with
the first emancipation of dissonance in the works of the early Italian

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THE ATONAL TRAIL
opera composers, Peri, Cavaliere, and Monteverde) and from the con-
sequent adoption of equal-temperament tuning as the basis of Western
music. As such it entered and without doubt enriched the vocabulary of
most twentieth-century composers. However, as a system of composition
it was rejected by most contemporary composers. Only a small group
of initiates led by Schönberg adopted the twelve-tone technique in its
entirety and by attempting to present it to the public as a "new" system,
rather than a final step in a harmonic evolution, they created a strange
kind of fetish, a hermetic cult, mechanistic in its technique and depress-
ingly dull to the uninitiated listener. Now, twenty years later, the debate
of atonality versus tonality is sporadically revived by the promoters of
the Schönbergian doctrine. This time the revival has taken place in
France and in America. In France it is a part of a general infiltration
of "Mittel-europa" ideas into the "cora" of French civilization, an infiltra-
tion which has been going on for some ten to fifteen years. In America,
its revival is due to the fact that many Central European issues have
been imported here as a corollary to the immigration of their pro-
tagonists. Here the debate found an attentive and fertile soil in the "lec-
ture tour pattern" of incoming intellectuals or in the broader American
pattern the desire for "education" and "appreciation."
Most of the revival of this debate is just so much rehash of settled
issues a kind of cafeteria dinner consisting of stale clam chowder and
faded mixed-fruit salad. It has neither much intrinsic meaning, nor does
it contribute in any way to the progress of musical thinking. Usually it
reflects a great deal of "standardized" confusion of terms, lack of true
knowledge of music history, a traditionally erroneous interpretation of
the evolution of musical language and a both biased and arbitrary re-
jection of all modern musical production which is not written according
to the dodecatonal method (see Mr. Kurt List's appallingly arrogant and
superficial article in the January issue of PR). But what is worse, this
revival of a settled debate shows a lack of new ideas and therefore a
return to the ideas of the twenties. All this is part of the retrospective,
impotent attitude which is now so apparent in most phases of cultural
and political life in Europe.
One of the most zealous propagandists of atonality and the twelve-
tone technique is the French critic and composer René Leibowitz. For
some time he has been a regular contributor to Mr. Sartre's magazine
Les Temps Modernes. There, Mr. Leibowitz has been leading a twofold
campaign: (1) a defense of the dodecatonal system and its Master, and
(2) an attack on Stravinsky and those composers (and there are many)
who do not accept the dodecatonal system as a basis for composition.
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PARTISAN REVIEW
In general Mr. Leibowitz's articles are on a fairly high “cultural” level,
though the spurious use of some Existentialist terms inapplicable to
music (situation, essence) occasionally obscures his otherwise clear but
somewhat naive line of reasoning. Recently Mr. Leibowitz has made a
tour in the United States and has, I understand, given the usual visiting
foreigner's series of lectures. He has been in Hollywood to pay homage
to Schönberg and has also called on Stravinsky. The result of his visit
to Hollywood was the article: “Two Composers: A Letter from Holly-
wood,” printed as the Music Chronicle in the March issue of PR.
This peculiar little item warrants a certain amount of attention.
Not that the ideas expressed in it are particularly new. Far from it. In
a sense it is a rehash of the same old argument—Schönberg versus
Stravinsky—which we have read about in most of the articles of the
apologists of atonality in the twenties. And yet Mr. Leibowitz takes a
detached attitude, and under the cloak of impartiality he attempts to
prove the greatness of Schönberg by smearing Stravinsky without either
an understanding of the ideas underlying Stravinsky's music or a
thorough analysis and comparison of both composers' recent works. On
the whole it is a superficial piece, politely vicious and presumptuous and
at the same time full of weak and untenable arguments. Mr. Leibowitz
begins his piece by stating that it “is probably quite safe to say that
the musical activity of the last forty years has evolved essentially under
Schönberg's influence.” In fact, he (Mr. Leibowitz) doubts whether
“there is a single composer” whose work has not been affected by
Schönberg even though he might “never actually have heard a note”
of Schönberg's music. He ends this candid paragraph by stating that
Schönberg's “fantastic innovations have entirely transformed the art of
sound through what might be called the emancipation of dissonance.”
No one will deny Schönberg's influence which, of course, is enormous
and has manifested itself in contemporary music very vividly in the
Western world. However it is presumptuous to assert that all composers
knowingly or unknowingly have experienced this influence. It seems,
historically speaking, much more likely and closest to the truth, that the
transformation of the language of contemporary music towards a free
(or better, “new”) use of dissonance has been the result of a spon-
taneous development which occurred in several countries and in the
works of several composers at the same time quite independently. To
say, for example, that Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps is erroneously
accepted as a “caesura in modern harmony” because Schönberg drew
more radical conclusions in this direction some five to eight years before
this work was written is the same as saying that the Chinese discovered
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THE ATONAL TRAIL

the logarithmal tables around 400 B.C. and that their rediscovery in the
seventeenth century is not a caesura in mathematics. Such argumentation
does not prove anything. The "caesura in modern harmony" was created
by Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, regardless of Schönberg's "innovations,"
because it was the most convincing and imaginative work of that period
and has been accepted as such by most contemporary composers. Music
history gives us many instances where such "fantastic innovations" were
not realized in a convincing way until several years after their invention.
(For example, the "fantastic innovations" of the early Italian "monodic"
composers. What they innovated around 1590 was fully and convincingly
realized only around 1605-1607 in the great works of Monteverde.)
Similarly, the innovations of K.P.E. Bach and the Manheimer School in
the 1750's came to full realization some twenty years later in the works
of Haydn and Mozart. It all goes to say that "pioneering" in art is
not necessarily the thing that counts. What counts is the convincing
"work of art" which establishes the style, the tradition, and ultimately
the cast of a historical period. Pioneering in music is only interesting for
historians and musicologists but not to history itself and certainly not to
the public.
Actually the innovations of Schönberg may have seemed "fantastic"
at the time they were formulated, but looking at them historically and
judging them by their intrinsic contribution to the evolution of the
musical language, they are neither "fantastic" nor revolutionary. They
are rather a theoretical conclusion drawn from a development of har-
mony which began at the turn of the seventeenth century and tortuously
but steadily moved on to the beginning of the twentieth century. By
basing his whole system on the independent and autonomous use
within the limit of an octave, Schönberg, in ef-
fect, has established a mechanistic basis for the art of music, and has
renounced any possibility of an organic foundation for the selection of
musical materials. It becomes evident that Schönberg stands at the end
of a period rather than at the beginning of a new one. His system is
the result of a gradual "emancipation of dissonance," over a period of
several hundred years, and not a deus ex machina invention of his own.
It is erroneous to measure the quality and permanent value of a
composer's work by his influence on his contemporaries. If we were to
apply such a criticism, composers such as Meyerbeer in the nineteenth
century, and Alberti in the eighteenth century (the inventor of the so-
called Alberti bass) should be classed as first-rate composers. Besides,
it is an arbitrary statement that "the last forty years have evolved es-
sentially under Schönberg's influence." There were various, and, at

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PARTISAN REVIEW
times, more powerful influences which can be discerned in contemporary
music. Certainly, the influence of Stravinsky has been among them.
Mr. Leibowitz remarks that Schönberg inherited the "riches of a
century-long evolution which from Bach through Haydn, Mozart, Bee-
thoven, Schubert, Schumann on to Brahms, Wagner, and Mahler was
based on polyphonic thinking, on functional harmony, on variation."
On the other hand, Stravinsky had inherited "some Italian influences"
through Glinka but was really brought up in the "atmosphere of the
well-known [Russian] 'Five'." It seems to me that the line of tradition
indicated by Mr. Leibowitz is rather a declining curve and at the end of
the curve, the abandonment of polyphonic thinking is fairly complete.
Stravinsky, free from the burden of a declining tradition, has been able
to re-establish ties with the true polyphonic thinking of the eighteenth-
century tradition.
Mr. Leibowitz elsewhere states that it is more difficult for musicians
to follow Schönberg than Stravinsky because Schönberg demands "a
sacrifice of arbitrary and hedonistic attitudes." This implies a total
misconception of Stravinsky's art, for there has rarely been a composer in
the last hundred years who has so completely avoided the arbitrary and
the hedonistic as Stravinsky. What escapes Mr. Leibowitz is the fact that
Stravinsky is working in a completely new direction. Stravinsky is not
concerned with the further evolution of harmony, but with the problem
of musical time and its measurement, the function of the interval, the
extension of a phrase, the juxtaposition in time of several melodic lines.
The whole question of time-space-linear and chordal harmony which
creates the fourth dimension of music-rhythm-is the real preoccupation
of Stravinsky's art. In this, Stravinsky is a real innovator, akin to Mon-
teverde, who also stood at the beginning of a cycle in musical history. If
seen from the point of view of the discovery of the "clear and distinct
idea" of rhythm (in the full meaning of the word), Stravinsky's music
is neither arbitrary nor hedonistic.
As a result of this misconception of what Stravinsky is trying to ac-
complish in music, Mr. Leibowitz concludes that all Stravinsky's work has
been in continual decline since 1912. He says that "behind these frozen
and sometimes ready-made patterns . . . there is nothing except perhaps
the illusion of music." Mr. Leibowitz should know that most great
composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries always worked with
ready-made patterns. In the case of Stravinsky, they are essential be-
cause it is against their familiarity that he imparts and expresses his
rhythmical discoveries. Without them, the purpose of his artistic dis-
coveries would never be clear.
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=== Page 75 ===
THE ATONAL TRAIL

Mr. Leibowitz, like many other critics, suffers from a dogmatic ac-
ceptance of a biased interpretation of musical history. It seems to me
that the traditional division of musical history into four periods: homo-
phonic, polyphonic, monophonic, and harmonic is entirely erroneous.
It is an interpretation which confuses the elements of musical language
with stylistic periods. Polyphony is by no means a musical element. It
is a style of composition. It is a technique concerned with what has been
called the "proper and beautiful conjunct motion of melodies." The
elements of music are melody, harmony, and rhythm. They are always
present in any musical composition. Speaking historically, however, these
elements emerged as "clear and distinct" ideas only through a long evolu-
tion of Western musical culture. It is this gradual emergence of these
three musical elements as conscious ideas which forms the great historical
cycles of our musical civilization. At present, the harmonic cycle is de-
clining while the rhythmic cycle is rising out of the exigencies and con-
tingencies of the harmonic past. While Schönberg has carried the har-
monic cycle to its logical conclusion, Stravinsky has been investigating,
from his Sacre du Printemps to his Third Symphony, the new domain
of rhythm.

Nicolas Nabokov

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=== Page 76 ===
EZRA POUND

A few weeks after this advertisement appears New Directions will publish
two volumes of the Cantos of Ezra Pound. One of them, priced at $5, will
include all of the Cantos which Pound has completed to date, 1 through 83.
The other will include the Cantos completed since the last volume of them
which we published. These new ones are called The Pisan Cantos because
they were written during the time Pound was confined in a US Army
Prison Camp near Pisa. The Pisan Cantos costs $2.75.

Pound is at present confined as a patient in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Wash-
ington. At the hearing on his case held in Federal Court a year ago, leading
psychiatrists, testifying as government witnesses, diagnosed Pound's illness
as "a paranoid state," and declared that he was not well enough to de-
fend himself in a trial. The doctors at St. Elizabeth's hospital do not be-
lieve that he will ever recover sufficiently to be tried on the charges of
treason brought against him for making broadcasts from Italy during the
War. These same doctors testified that they believed that Pound had been
ill for a period of ten years or more. This fact, we believe, should be
taken into consideration in making moral judgments about his political
actions.

In another sense, Pound's political actions do not concern readers or
publishers of poetry. New Directions has never judged the merits of a book
by the politics of its author. New Directions has published the great
Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, who was until recently a member of the
Chilean Senate as an avowed Communist, and it has published the great
novel, Death on The Installment Plan, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, now an
exile in Denmark because Leftist elements in France accuse him of tolerat-
ing the German Occupation. We have published the German playwright
Bertholt Brecht, whose position is about as far Left as you can go, and
we have just published The Marble Cliffs of Ernst Juenger, who, before
he changed his heart, was writing in a vein philosophically akin to that of
the Nazis. In short: the editor of New Directions tries not to confuse
political and esthetic judgments.

We sincerely hope that readers and critics will approach The Cantos of
Ezra Pound with a similar objectivity. Judge them on their merits as
poetry, and enjoy them for their beauties as poetry.

New Directions also publishes these other books by Pound: Polite Essays
(on literary subjects-$2.50); Personae (Pound's collected poems apart
from The Cantos-$3.50); The Unwobbling Pivot of Confucius (transla-
tion and commentary-$1.00). A Selected Poems volume will be ready
in late summer, and at some future date there will be a Selected Essays
volume (edited by T. S. Eliot) and a volume of Pound's translations from
the literatures of many languages.

*Residence on Earth, Spanish texts &
English translations by Angel Flores.
$3.50.

**The Private Life of The Master Race,
translated by E. R. Bentley, $2.50. The
Trial of Lucullus, translated by H. R.
Hays, 50 cents.

New Directions Books, 500 Fifth Ave., N. Y. C.

=== Page 77 ===
BOOKS

WELL-INTENTIONED | WELL-EQUIPPED

THE FROZEN SEA: A Study of Franz Kafka. By Charles Neider. Oxford.
$3.50.
RAGE FOR ORDER: Essays in Criticism. By Austin Warren. University of
Chicago Press. $3.00.
ON THE ILIAD. By Rachel Bespaloff. Translated by Mary McCarthy.
Bollingen Series. Pantheon. $2.50.
THE MOMENT AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Virginia Woolf. Harcourt, Brace.
$3.00.
THE COMMON READER AND THE SECOND COMMON READER. By
Virginia Woolf. Harcourt, Brace. $4.00.

Charles Neider's book on Kafka begins most encouragingly. For
its first few chapters I thought that here at last was a sensible treatment
of Kafka, a biographical interpretation based on the soundest of evi-
dence: obvious correspondences between private life and public per-
formance. These opening chapters establish the dominance of the father-
image in much of Kafka's writing, by intelligent use of biographical
data and analysis of the novels and tales in the light of the "Letter to
My Father" which Max Brod cites in his life of Kafka. This approach
was at least a change from the theological ax-grinding that has charac-
terized a good deal of Kafka criticism, revealing so much about the
mental states of some of his readers and so little about the writer: a
tendency against which a reaction seems to be setting in, if one may
judge from Neider's book, Austin Warren's essay on Kafka in Rage
for Order, and a recent essay by Eliseo Vivas in the Kenyon Review.
But, alas, the absence of salvationism in Neider's treatment apparently
left a vacuum which he chose to fill with Freud: the search for God
is replaced by a search for the unconscious. The last three chapters
of his book, in which he expounds and defends this psychoanalytical
interpretation of The Castle and The Trial, were admirably reviewed,
no doubt unawares, by Vivas in a sentence of his article: "Psychoanalytic
criticism is seldom practiced by properly trained therapists for their pur-
poses; it is, as a rule, written by amateur psychoanalysts whose insensi-
bility to the aesthetic values and indifference to the philosophic content

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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the work is hardly camouflaged by their pseudo-scientific interest in
it." It seems that Neider became one of these amateurs as a result of
reading Kafka. His Preface tells us that the dreamlike symbols of the
novels interested him in the psychology of dreams, and that this led him
to psychoanalysis, which thereupon obligingly explained Kafka. The
curious thing about his book is that its first five chapters do not read
like the work of a man insensible to aesthetic value and indifferent to
philosophic content, whereas the last three do. One gets the impression
that he hasn't digested all that Freud yet; swallow it he did, however. He
claims to have discovered a "secret key" to Kafka which reveals The
Castle as a "tale of the quest for the unconscious by someone who has
reached the preconscious, presenting in detail the dynamics of the
Oedipus complex," and The Trial as a symbol of the same quest, "pre-
senting in detail the dynamics of the castration complex." Maybe so;
but Neider's two chief conclusions about the general intent of Kafka's
work are typical of the tendency of psychoanalytic criticism to claim
exemption from the laws of evidence and the dictates of common sense.
One of these conclusions is that Kafka, having read some Freud, delib-
erately wrote the two great novels on a Freudian pattern, this being
the "secret cabala" to which he once referred in talking about his
books. The trouble with this is that there is not a shred of evidence
for it, external or internal, unless one were to dignify by that name
Neider's exhaustive analysis of sex symbolism in his texts. Such symbols
can be, and have been, found in equal abundance in many pre-Freudian
works—Pilgrim's Progress and The Inferno offer good hunting—without
necessitating the inference that they constitute a code created by the
writer's conscious intelligence and will. Neider insists that Kafka differs
from other writers in this deliberate design; but his arguments merely
establish that the results of that intent, if it existed, resemble those of
other writers' unconscious intents, if such they were. His other conclu-
sion is equally astonishing. "What is true on the plane of social sym-
bolism," he says, "is reversed on the subterranean level. As a result Kafka's
work is shot through with paradox." Translated into English, this says
that the secret meaning of Kafka's novels contradicts (this is a hard
word, I know, but what else is meant by "reverse"?) their patent
meaning. Well, then the novels mean nothing at all; since two con-
tradictory meanings cancel each other out. But perhaps this objection
is too naive, too Aristotelian. Perhaps the secret and patent meanings
are thesis and antithesis, and the synthesis is . . . what? Neider not only
fails to answer this question; he doesn't even raise it. Nor does he explain
the "secret" meaning of Joseph K.'s execution—a considerable omission,
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WELL-INTENTIONED/WELL-EQUIPPED
not compensated by his excursions into what he calls nomenclatural
symbolism. One of these deserves a prize of some sort. Talking about
the magistrate's books in The Trial, he says: "The title of the second
is meaningful: How Grete was Plagued by Her Husband Hans. Grete
(from Margaret) means pearl or child of light, Hans (from Johannes)
means the Lord graciously giveth or Jehovah is gracious. The noble
names suggest the nobility of the libido. The intention of the book is
thus not obscene." Noble names, indeed! All very Grimm.*

The Kafka literature is becoming as weird as the Lawrence litera-
ture, with about the same ratio of light to lucubration. Happy gleams
of the former can be detected in an essay in Austin Warren's distin-
guished collection. Warren understands that criticism, like politics, is an
art of the possible. One of his concluding remarks on Kafka is: "One
secular hope after another has failed; Kafka can be the symbol of what
is left." I italicize that can be for the benefit of critics who claim to have
discovered, for all time, what a book is or must be. As with the other
writers he treats—Edward Taylor, Herbert, Pope, Hopkins, Yeats, Haw-
thorne, Forster, James—Warren speaks of Kafka as a poet with a "rage
for order," a "desire to perceive order for himself, [which] makes his
final creation a kind of world or cosmos"; and he conceives his critical
task to be the concentrated formulation of that cosmos and of the "lan-
guage and mythic structure in which it is incarnated." Here the critic
intervenes in the reader's behalf, not in what he takes to be the writer's.
He aids and guides the reader's perception, suggesting a point of view
from which a writer's work can be grasped as a unity, but not claiming
that this unity is or even explains the work; and then retires, leaving
the reader to make his own interpretations within a range of possibility
limited only by a passion for precision, for justesse, which the critic
hopes to have kindled in him by example rather than precept. This
tact enables writers of Warren's degree of elegance to be almost as il-
luminating about a writer as the writer himself. A case in point. Nothing
in Neider's book clarifies the nature of Kafka's quest half so well as
does a sentence he quotes from Kafka: "All these so-called diseases,
pitiful as they look, are beliefs, the attempts of a human being in distress
to cast his anchor in some mother-soil." How easy to identify this meta-
phor as a sex-symbol, and then "explain" it as a sign of the search for
the unconscious! And how much simpler, and closer to the unique
values of art, to say with Warren, "Kafka's 'mystery' is the apparent
* There is a secret key to this sentence. It will be sent in a plain envelope,
on request.
589

=== Page 80 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW
sign of how elusive is the truth." Is it not just this elusiveness that lends
desperation to what Kafka called the attempt to cast anchor? Elusive-
ness and anchor-casting are, of course, mere metaphors, artistic terms,
while unconscious and preconscious are, at least in intention, scientific
terms; and "truth," in this large sense, is doubtless neither here nor
there. But in this case as in many others it is art, not science or philoso-
phy, that "explains" art. By talking casually of putting down roots, or
by jesting at truth, like Pilate, we can signify many kinds and levels of
experience all at once. So can art, and this is one of the reasons for its
irreducibility.
Of the many penetrating studies of poetic worlds in Rage for Order,
the most successful as a portrait of man and artist is that of George
Herbert. This is partly because his is the most attractive personality
among those discussed; at any rate, the precise affection of Warren's
treatment makes him seem so. Also, his portrait is the more smoothly
and easily traceable in that the conflict between his actual and imagined
worlds caused less strain and distortion in his essential humanity than
was the case with most of the other figures. Certainly the religion which
he ended by preaching was less of an artifact than that of Yeats, which
Warren analyzes with equal delicacy and care. But each of these essays
delineates with remarkable clarity and vividness temperaments, philoso-
phies and talents which are widely dissimilar and yet comparable in the
quality which Warren terms "metaphysical." This is as close as he comes
to devising a label; and, wisely, he goes easy on the glue. It is less ap-
plicable to some of his poets than others: he admits himself that it does
not sit too well on Pope. But it is far from being one of those superfi-
cially unifying strands so often woven into collections of articles written
on different occasions. By presenting it in terms of particulars rather
than instances, Warren succeeds in making it signify an essential feature
of creative activity.

The contrast between Neider's secret-key chapters and Austin War-
ren's essays is like that between the two women, Rachel Bespaloff and
Virginia Woolf. They are both benign, both seeking to widen and deepen
the common reader's literary life by describing and interpreting books
which they consider relevant to his everyday experience. But Mme
Bespaloff tends to overinterpret and to preach; whereas Mrs. Woolf
subordinates her own ideas and attitudes to those of her subjects, but
in so doing suggests very subtly a definite scheme of values, without
implying that her readers share or ought to share that scheme.

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WELL-INTENTIONED / WELL-EQUIPPED

Mme Bespaloff's essay, a series of brief meditations on leading
figures and aspects of the Iliad, endeavors to re-state the Homeric view
of life in modern terms. Hector is seen as a symbol of self-respect,
Achilles, self-love; Helen, the ambivalence of beauty; and comparisons
are made between the Weltanschauungen of Homer and Tolstoy, Homer
and the Hebrew prophets, Homer and Christian ethics, etc. There are
some penetrating observations about Homer, but none of them are re-
markably original; what is new in Mme Bespaloff's treatment is a ten-
dency to compare and even equate ideas which apparently exist in the
same context for her, whether or not they are logically or historically
comparable. This leads to fuzziness, and sometimes to guff. Some of
her associative suggestions are well formulated: "In the Bible, God is
master of Becoming; in the Iliad, Becoming, or Fatum, if you wish, is
master of the Gods." "For what the Greek, in all piety, asks of his gods
is not love but good will." But she frequently goes off the deep end,
e.g., in stating that glory, for the Homeric warrior, is "the same thing
that Christians saw in the Redemption, a promise of immortality outside
and beyond history, in the supreme detachment of poetry." This is worse
than vague; it's bunk. Glory was no more outside or beyond history for
a Greek warrior than his dinner, and it had nothing whatever to do with
Redemption. Mme Bespaloff indulges excessively in this pseudo-thinking,
a process of cloaking several subjects of discourse in a thick mist which
may lead the unwary or uninformed to mistake blurred outlines for new
insights. Her essay is far inferior to Simone Weil's The Iliad: Poem of
Force, which can be had for a tenth of the money, and is also excel-
lently translated by Mary McCarthy. Mme Bespaloff's fantasies, however,
are preceded by a long "introduction" by Hermann Broch, author of
The Sleepwalkers; this increases the book's value as well as its size
and price. Entitled "The Style of the Mythical Age," it has little to do
with Homer or Mme Bespaloff, but says some interesting things about
myth, Kafka, and the modern temper.

Since Virginia Woolf's The Moment was greeted in this country
by an outburst of pedestrianism, published as a lead review in the most
influential of the Sunday literary supplements, there is probably little
anyone can do now to rescue it from oblivion. But it should not be
overlooked by such innocent souls as still risk ostracism by reading books
for mere enjoyment, because it contains many things on the level of
The Common Reader, with which it was linked in Mrs. Trilling's con-
demnation of Mrs. Woolf for being aristocratic and refined. Like The
Death of the Moth, its predecessor, The Moment is made up of essays,
sketches, and reviews previously uncollected, some not previously pub-
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=== Page 82 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW
lished, mostly on literary topics. There are several exquisite portraits in
miniature, notably those of Ellen Terry and Roger Fry; some more of
Mrs. Woolf's magical evocations of the literary and artistic past, such
as "Sterne's Ghost" and "B. R. Haydon"; and some of her most im-
portant critical pronouncements, including "The Leaning Tower," "The
Artist in Politics," "Congreve's Comedies," and "The Art of Fiction."
As usual, the value of her aperçu is enhanced by her constant interest
in craftsmanship, language, and style, and by her inexhaustible curiosity
and affection for human traits both normal and eccentric. Of all the
four writers under review perhaps, indeed, of all writers on literature-
Virginia Woolf is the least "critical" in the day-of-judgment meaning
of the word. She writes plastically, molding little busts and cameos of
people, times and places; her every word is a revelation of her indi-
vidual sensibility, and one might suspect that she has no regard for
general principles at all, so little does she parade them and so modestly
does she qualify the range and validity of her wider judgments. When
speaking of Russian or American literature, for instance, she is careful
to stress the fact that she is a foreigner, an Englishwoman, a lover of
gardens, quiet, and Jane Austen. But this does not prevent her from
seeing that Miss Austen may be likened to the Greek tragedians, "though
with a thousand differences of degree: she, too, in her modest, everyday
prose, chose the dangerous art where one slip means death." She is one
of the few imaginative writers who can apply their own artistic methods
to criticism without ever violating its first canon: to bring the reader
closer to the book, the particular, than he could have come unaided-to
"make it new," as Pound tried to do, and so often ended by making it
Pound. She can instill a deeper awareness of the nature of writing by
analyzing a page of Flaubert, as she does in "Re-reading Novels" in this
new volume, than you could get from an entire treatise, even a good one,
on truth and value in art, or contemporary significance in fiction. No
writer about books surpasses her in immediacy, in the ability to convey
"knowledge of" as distinguished from "knowledge about."
But this is old stuff for Virginia Woolf's admirers, and just stuff
for her detractors. If one is "searching for criteria without wishing to
go to the trouble of acquiring taste," as Gide accused certain people
of doing, then certainly the familiar literary essay, as practiced by
Hazlitt, Strachey, Woolf, is the last place to look. Such writers assume
that their readers are already equipped with aesthetic palates; and, in
cases where this assumption is correct, they will guide you, not just
benignly but beneficen:tly, toward what Virginia Woolf calls "that
absence of self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship and sense of com-
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=== Page 83 ===
WELL-INTENTIONED/WELL-EQUIPPED
mon values which make for intimacy, and sanity, and the quick give
and take of familiar intercourse."
Frank Jones
FASCINATION AND PHILOSOPHY
DREADFUL FREEDOM: A Critique of Existentialism. By Marjorie Grena.
The University of Chicago Press. $2.75.

For Marjorie Grene, Existentialism is, above all, the expression
of a spiritual predicament in which our generation finds itself. The
dominant experience of this generation has been, according to the author,
the utter collapse of all belief in transcendent, absolute values. As a
result, man now finds himself alone; neither the God of supernatural
revelation nor the gods of science and social action are there to guide
and comfort him. Thus, he has become free, but free in a dread-pro-
voking sense; he must chart his course without a compass in the void
of a starless night.

The importance of Existentialism, as seen by Mrs. Grene, is that it
faces this conclusion without evasion and flinching. Existentialism alone,
among present-day philosophies, confronts man with a true picture of
his desperate spiritual condition-or rather, this is done by one branch
of Existentialism only, the "atheistic" Existentialism of Heidegger and
Sartre. All other philosophies now in vogue, including pragmatism, log-
ical positivism, and nonatheistic Existentialism, seek to gain acceptance
by offering cheap and gratuitous comfort rather than by facing the
facts honestly.

This does not mean, however, that the author unreservedly endorses
atheistic Existentialism. On the contrary, she seems convinced that such
a complete denial of absolute values cannot be the last word of philoso-
phy. But she somehow finds herself unable to find a logically vulnerable
point in the Existentialist position. She feels about Existentialism as most
people do about Hume: "He can't be right, but damned if I see where
he's wrong." Hence such curiously half-retracted judgments as that the
analyses of Heidegger and Sartre are, "if not valid, at least terribly rele-
vant to the dilemma of those who can find comfort in no creed of God
or science" (p. 47), or that it is its emphasis upon dread and despair
that "gives the movement such significance, however transient, as it
obviously does have" (p. 138). In other words, Existentialism is signifi-
cant in a transient way; it will remain triumphant until such time as
593

=== Page 84 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW
our age solves its spiritual dilemma. As things stand now, whether right
or wrong, it is unanswerable.
This temporary capitulation-pending the arrival of relief troops
from somewhere-is pathetic in its sincerity. But it seems to me that
the capitulation is unwarranted. Mrs. Grene definitely overestimates the
logical stringency of Sartre's position.
In reality, it is not difficult to see through the fake character of
Sartre's challenge. What Sartre says is that man is not free unless he
is free to begin completely anew at every moment. If he recognizes any
binding for him now, or if he adopts principles that
put mortgages upon his future acts, he betrays his freedom. It follows
that a value can be, for a free man, only what he pronounces to be a
value at this moment by a groundless and unjustifiable fiat, and also that
values thus created on the spur of the moment fizzle out as soon as they
are born. It is easy to show, of course, that "freedom" of such a spas-
modic nature is a terribly frustrating affair. Before bemoaning our having
to shoulder the burden of this freedom, however, we had better go into
the question whether the decision to be free really commits us to making
our life such a dreary string of senseless improvisations. I don't think
it does. Quite on the contrary: I am certain that a Sartrean being
cannot be free, since he cannot determine himself.
It should be pointed out, at this juncture, that this theory of freedom
and value is not characteristic of Existentialism, or even of atheistic
Existentialism, as a whole. Heidegger's approach to the problem of
meaning and value, for instance, is an entirely different one. Heidegger
is concerned with the mode of being of things that "matter," things
that "make a difference"; and he finds that there are such things because
man's time is finite, i.e., because he dies. All meaning and urgency in
life flows from the finite character of life: it is the anticipated end of
life that gives it meaning. For Sartre, it is the other way around; mean-
ing and value are created by leaving a past behind, by departing towards
an open future.
Mrs. Grene does not seem to be aware of the radical nature of this
difference. In paraphrasing Heidegger's doctrine, she uses expressions
like "death in its utter negation of meaning," and "distracting and de-
ceiving cares" (p. 53). But this means reading Sartre into Heidegger.
For Heidegger, death is no "negation" but the only possible source of
meaning, and the category of "care" (Sorge) belongs to the sphere
of genuine rather than of distracted and adulterated existence.
Mrs. Grene's approach concedes only one function to Existentialism
-that of voicing nihilism as the only adequate expression of man's
594

=== Page 85 ===
The Diaries afford an unprecedented insight into
the workings of the imagination of a genius. The
dreams, stories, outcries, and prosaic-though
anguishing-minutiae of daily life contained in
them constitute a record of one man's predica-
ment and the predicament of a modern writer.
First appearance in any language.
Second and concluding volume in preparation.

342 pages                                                        $3.75

SCHOCKEN BOOKS / PUBLISHERS
342 MADISON AVE., NEW YORK 17, N. Y.

THE POETS' THEATER
announcing program number one
may 11 and 12

two noh plays by paul goodman:
  "dusk." décor by mark rothko. music by ned rorem.

  "stoplight." décor by costantino nivola. music by ben webber.

"the servant girls" (les bonnes) by jean genet, one of the most remark-
  able plays to come out of the existentialist movement in paris
  by a leading french poet. décor by horace armistead.

17. e. 76th st., n. y. c.                                 for information and reservations
                                                            phone re. 4-0004. miss davis.

=== Page 86 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW
present situation. If this is accepted, no brand of Existentialism will make
sense except that of Sartre, and those applying the Existentialist method
for a different purpose and in a different sense can achieve nothing but
futility. Accordingly, in Mrs. Grene's exposé, Kierkegaard is merely a
provincial coffeehouse eccentric, and Jaspers as well as Gabriel Marcel
are philosophical pygmies, completely dwarfed by the colossal stature of
Sartre. This judgment, I repeat, is inevitable if we accept Marjorie
Grene's definition of what Existentialism is; but everything will appear
in a different light if we reject the definition.
The main question, then, is this: Is Existentialism primarily a re-
sponse to man's loss of faith in God, Reason, Progress, and Science,
and an acceptance of this loss of faith as final? Or should it be under-
stood as an attempt to give a new answer to traditional questions of
philosophy, especially to questions concerning the nature of Being and
Truth? To be sure, the movement will appear far less sensational if we
adopt this second definition; but I think its philosophical content cannot
be discovered in any other way.
Dreadful Freedom is an able and penetrating statement of a sensitive
philosophical reader's fascination with Sartre, but it is no "critique" of
Existentialism as such. If anyone wants to supply an adequate critique of
Existentialism, the first requirement is to get over that fascination.

Paul Kecskemeti

OF MANDARIN EXCELLENCE
TWO QUIET LIVES. By David Cecil. Bobbs-Merrill. $3.00.
As one reads the best of David Cecil's writings, it is not ir-
relevant to think of Cyril Connolly's thoroughly witty and alert pro-
nouncements on the style of the "new Mandarins." Mr. Connolly, with
a rather more than a drop of Mandarin blood in his own veins, is one
to be trusted in making discriminations of Mandarin excellence: time
is on his side in his notation of the enduring merits of Lytton Strachey's
Eminent Victorians. In that small company more than a few of Virginia
Woolf's Common Reader essays hold their place, and so does Geoffrey
Scott's The Portrait of Zélide, and to them may be added David Cecil's
life of Cowper, The Stricken Deer, (first published in 1929), and today,
his portrait of Thomas Gray in Two Quiet Lives.
If in this country the best examples of David Cecil's art have been
slow in gaining critical recognition, it is because of his critical modesty
596

=== Page 87 ===
OF MANDARIN EXCELLENCE

and his deeply rooted, almost radical, conservatism; in general literary-
criticism, he avoids both spectacular and fashionable choices of subjects
"to write about," and the very title of his latest book, Two Quiet Lives,
is an index to his own temperament, which is of low, yet penetrating,
vitality. Beyond the discriminations of literary criticism and in his life
of Cowper and his portrait of Gray, his attention is drawn to what is
called "the crack-up" or "the nervous breakdown," and Cecil is happiest
when he surrounds his figures with scenes of pastoral serenity, Cowper
in Huntingdon, Gray at Eton, and in chambers at Pembroke in Cam-
bridge. In such scenes all the externals of living are so "quiet," so
orderly that one can almost hear dust fall on writing desks and table
tops, and it is there that David Cecil observes the advances and retreats
of "melancholy" and hypochondria.
David Cecil's choice of Thomas Gray, if not immensely fashionable,
has its elements of timeliness: is "Gray's Elegy" Gray archetypical of
poets who even today have invaded colleges and universities? And is
the prospect a "melancholy" one? Perhaps not, but Gray's situation, his
middle-class origins (he was son of a mother who ran a warehouse in
a trading center of east London), his "refinement" beyond the aristo-
cratic ease and brilliance of his friend Horace Walpole, his flights of
pedantry, his fine Observations on English Metre, place him not too far
away from the "poet-teacher or teacher-poet" of the twentieth century.
In recreating him David Cecil's insights are unerring: Gray's quarrel
with Walpole is at last set to rights by showing Walpole's worldly gen-
erosity to Gray, his invaluable help to Gray even to the publication and
fame of the "Elegy," and David Cecil's view of Gray at the pianoforte,
playing Scarlatti and Vivaldi, supplies more than a hint of the Gray
who "composed" his "Elegy" with a music so memorable that its many
platitudes (which Voltaire observed with a Frenchman's amazement)
became catch phrases in the English language. Almost every line of
David Cecil's portrait is pertinent to an understanding, and certainly,
to a rereading of Gray's verse and letters. It illuminates whatever seems
too hastily written in Dr. Johnson's remarks on Gray's "visible fastidious-
ness," his "effeminacy" which "was affected most 'before those whom
he did not wish to please." And one may also take the portrait of Gray
as an oblique warning to those who look too cheerfully, too blandly at
the melancholia which, at times, unfolds its wings near or over poets
in American universities.
The "quiet" life of Dorothy Osborne, which precedes the portrait
of Gray in David Cecil's book is slightly dim and overlaid with the flaws
of the Mandarin style when it is not at its best. The décor of Dorothy
597

=== Page 88 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW

Osborne's century—the seventeenth—is artfully reconstructed, unswept,
and tastefully furnished; “Chickfields," the countryhouse, from which
Dorothy Osborne wrote her letters to her lover and future husband,
William Temple, floats before the reader's eye. But a little less than
half of the indolent, melancholy lady herself is missing; her charms
seem to have been taken, and in too much of “one piece” from Sir
Edward Parry's commentaries in his edition of her letters in the Every-
man's Library—and David Cecil adds nothing to them. Her husband,
Sir William Temple, became Swift's patron, and Swift saw her as "Mild
Dorothea, peaceful, wise and great”; what eludes David Cecil is the
woman whose intellect calmed as well as charmed an impulsive, sulky,
handsome, ambitious young man—a future diplomat. It is the quality
of her future wisdom, her indolently poised decorum that escapes her
present biographer; and Dorothy Osborne, artist as she was in writing
letters that seemed to speak, not loudly, but persuasively, in a clear
voice, would not have become Lady Temple, nor captured and held
Sir William, without her brains.

Horace Gregory

POETRY CHRONICLE*

Stages of crisis-disintegration appear in these volumes, rang-
ing from the naive epigone of disorder to the sharply-aware critic-poet,
desperately reacting against an unrhetorical and loose naturalism and a
disregard for formal values.

At the foot of error springs the Fallacy of Communication, the
poetic vehicle used for non-poetic purposes, as in Hubbell's Civic Muse,
McGrath's Political Muse, and Miss Rukeyser's Muse of Demonic Inco-
herence. Hailed for his “carved chastity of line,” Hubbell is really a

* Long Island Triptych. By Lindley Williams Hubbell. Swallow Press and
William Morrow. $2.00; To Walk a Crooked Mile. By Thomas McGrath. Swal-
low Press and William Morrow. $2.00; The Green Wave. By Muriel Rukeyser.
Doubleday. $2.50; Poems, 1940-1947. By Theodore Spencer. Harvard. $2.75;
Ships and Other Figures. By William Meredith. Princeton. $2.00; Aegean Islands.
By Bernard Spencer. Doubleday. $2.50; A Way of Happening. By Ruth Hersch-
berger. Pellegrini & Cudahy. $2.00; Burr Oaks. By Richard Eberhart. Oxford.
$3.00; Poems, 1922-1947. By Allen Tate. Scribner's. $2.50.

598

=== Page 89 ===
POETRY CHRONICLE
comedian: "The Glory of God shines over Greenpoint. / The oxen of
the sun / Tread out the darkness. . . . / The delicatessens open. It is
day," "... the land / Where, in the fullness of time, Mae West was
born," and "the heart, / Said Rena, / Must learn to compose, like
Palestrina"-Gershwin would have done. Literary anachronisms curiously
resemble biological atavisms (supporting Brunetière's genetic theory);
compare such specimens as Henry Miller, and Thomas McGrath still
carrying his little banner touchingly at the end of the May Day parade.
He can be fierce, as an echt Union Square poet: "When they saw the
moon would never fill / Its inside straight they knew the game was
up. / The trumpets turned up a jack of Mills bombs. / Obviously it
was time for departures"; he can be tender, despite an ode for Mike
Gold: "The hills sharp as a girl's breasts"; and he can write such boyishly
pornographic claptrap as: "Maine is a map of Freud with feminine fine
lakes / And phallic forests wherever the blind eye looks."
A Heraclitean nightmare of texture without structure, Miss Rukey-
ser's flux may be a result of the Fallacy of Expressive Form, the form
yielding to the raw material of the poem; hers is, with MacLeish, a
tragedy of the thirties, the wrack of a genuine sensibility in a zealous
topicality (e.g., the immortal "Not Sappho, Sacco"). She is left with the
ultimate topic; and, inevitably, the book, which concerns itself with sex
and reproduction ("Strangler and bitch, they said, / but they mistook
the meaning of my name: / I am the root who embraces the source. /
I sing. I sing," she sings), reaches its climax in "Nine Poems," a sonnet-
cycle of pregnancy, month-by-month.
Chaos has many faces: it leers through a Shakespearean sonnet of
Miss Millay, and it smiles in the unimpeachable pseudo-order of Theo-
dore Spencer; here, in the almost textureless, careful cadences of Hous-
man-out-of-Emerson-out-of-Donne, is the emptiness of the academic
vacuum. "We look around and the Usual / Is all that we can find,"
he writes in "Song." Simple, with an ingénue's simplicity, wise to
the time-styles and the author's limitations, it is poetry-for-verse's-
sake, a willed verse, and rarely comes alive; it pays lip service to the
idea of paradox, but ignores its essence, the worked-out dramatic im-
pact; it is pleasant, skillful, innocuous, and dull.
Struggling towards order are the war-poets (preposterous term): the
American, William Meredith, and the Englishman, Bernard Spencer.
The first suffers from youth and a fine excess-that is, in his passionate
poems; in his witty poems, he is sometimes a clumsy Karl Shapiro, if
such a thing is possible; see (in "Battlewagon") "Old Billy-be-damned
bang bang flashy-in-battle," "Oh by jesus noise," "exquisite with pur-
599

=== Page 90 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW
pose," and (in "A Figure from Politics"), "The gigantic sweet conspiracy
of lovers." But for all his absurdity, and surely his Notes are among the
most incredible in modern poetry (he explains, for example, that the
ubi sunt theme was a medieval favorite, dutifully quoting Wells's Manual
to prove it), one feels an unusual sense of control, an awareness of form,
and a possibility that when he leaves the schoolroom and kicks out his
teachers, Yeats, Auden, & Co., he may achieve a real evocation of
experience. Bernard Spencer, older, British-in-a-Greek-setting, has a
keen eye, a warming freshness, a sincerity that make him stand out in
this galère (consider, for instance, a passage from "Olive Trees": "The
dour thing in olive trees / is that their trunks are stooped like never
dying crones, / and they camp where roads climb, and drink with dust
and stones. / The pleasant thing is how in the heat / their plumage
brushes the sight with a bird's-wing feeling: / and perhaps the gold of
their oil is mild with dreams of healing"); in an ordered age, neatly
tightening the diffuseness of the lines, the loose Eliot flavor ("the old
man dying upstairs," etc.), he might have become a first-rate minor poet.
"Poetry makes nothing happen," says Miss Herschberger, quoting
Auden; but it is not true that nothing makes poetry happen. Fortunately,
this nothingness centers in just a few of her cuter poems, such as "Love
Like a Capitol Hill," ending in Dorothy Parker rather than Ransom;
and, on the whole, hers is one of the most remarkable first volumes in
many years. A Way of Happening is John Crowe Ransom rewritten for
the woman's page, with such excellent success that he may have to
revise his comments on women-poets in The World's Body; her "Miss
G," for example, is his own poem on the death of a lady skillfully re-
worked. It is obvious that Miss Herschberger has a pretty wit, and that
because of her intelligence, she has taken the short cut to lightness and
irony sooner than most young poets. There are lines which delight ("Tur-
tles were subtle at the ship's low keel"), such phrases as "the fool funi-
cular," parts of "Little Cuckold," set in expert verse patterns; but there
are also lapses in taste, such as "The Moor," incongruities ("the emmet's
laughter"), overcuteness, sentimentality, diffuseness. Actually, there are
two Miss Herschbergers warring against each other, the witty and
objective ironist and the subjective and feeling woman, who, happily
manage, for the most part, to keep the peace.
Whatever defects appear in Eberhart's work, the things one cannot
doubt are his talent, his sincerity, and his genuineness; what is noticeable,
however, is his ineffectuality, a basic weakness, an apparently willful
will-lessness. He has his fine and quiet triumphs, as in the lyric "Cover
Me Over, Clover"; yet one detects, perhaps mistakenly, a failure of
600

=== Page 91 ===
POETRY CHRONICLE

nerve, an absence of that intellectual toughness which enabled Yeats to
write cleverly and long and well; Eberhart's loose lyrical substance is
too powerless to create the necessary structure-texture tension. Both
Eberhart and Miss Herschberger, outstanding poets in their ways, reveal
the dangerous breadth of the chasm in modern sensibility.

Tate's Collected Poems, 1922-1947 requires much more space than
is left for an adequate discussion of an importance, both critical and
poetic, which has never been fully gauged. The fact that Tate is a leader
of a corps of critic-poets who have risen out of an intensely felt need,
in a time of disorder, to defend our perilously-placed culture helps to
explain his poetry, its tone, and the form it takes. Early in his career
Tate decided that "Poetry does not dispense with tradition; it probes
the deficiencies of a tradition," and he is, ironically, a propagandist
in verse, much of his work being a variation on a theme in "Dover
Beach." His poetry, though, like Theodore Spencer's, conative in origin,
transcends both the latter's and Blackmur's by the superior quality of
his creative sensibility, having often a fine texture to go with his struc-
ture; so successful has he been that some passages (e.g., the opening of
"The Mediterranean") have become touchstones for our time. Since it
is a willed poetry, it is difficult to sustain, his achievements being mainly
fragmentary, twisting off into overwrought lines and lumpy self-conscious
passages. Nevertheless, Tate is, like Jonson, a poet's poet and a critic's
poet, functioning as guide and assimilator of sensibility; there is a rightness
about his best work, reminding us that he is not only one of the finest
poets of our age, but that he probably corresponds to what Delmore
Schwartz has called T. S. Eliot, a culture-hero. The publication now
of his collected poems comes as a testimony to integrity and order in
our time of brilliant and weak failure.

William Elton

THE GUILTY AND THE LIVING

THE QUESTION OF GERMAN GUILT. By Karl Jaspers. Translated by
E. B. Ashton. Dial. $2.00.

Heine long ago observed that the Germans were pre-eminent
in philosophy because they had nothing else to do. The nonexistence
of a political society in Germany compelled its best intellects to seek
other fields, leaving public affairs in the hands of bureaucratic admin-

601

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PARTISAN REVIEW
istrators. Enforced indifference to politics produced the characteristically
German phenomenon of Weltfremdheit among its men of thought. This
is no mere scholarly unworldliness or touching practical vagueness.
In fact, the alacrity with which the German intellectual world sub-
mitted to Hitler is proof that, if it knew nothing of politics, it at
least knew how to be politic. Weltfremdheit is an inner acceptance of
the intellect's exclusion from the public forum.
Today, without a national and political tradition to fall back on,
it is precisely intellectuals on whom Germany must rely. Yet Weltfremd-
heit and the moral cowardice which it begot disqualify most intellectuals
now in Germany. At this juncture Karl Jaspers, a professor and a
philosopher, has courageously undertaken the thankless duty of speaking
out to his fellow Germans on the question of their guilt.
Professor Jaspers makes no attempt in these lec-
tures to "describe"
the crimes of Nazism, to evoke the evil in its fullness-intentionally so,
I have been told, lest the audience to which his words are directed be
tempted perversely to extract a grim kind of flattery from the very
enormity of the evil. His concern is to distinguish the various senses in
which Germans are guilty of the Nazi acts, in order that each shall by
self-examination come to understand his own responsibility.
By distinguishing among several categories of guilt-criminal,
political, moral, and metaphysical-Professor Jaspers breaks down the
notion of collective guilt. This is all to the good-where all are guilty,
none is. Thus, the "question" of German guilt, in the realm of post-
war international politics, has been settled-guilty or not, the German
collectivity is being punished as if it were-and its only consequence
has been to make the Germans even more sullen and indifferent to what
the world charges them with.
Nevertheless, faced with the frightful mess that is Germany today,
it is just this question of national guilt that is most apt to rouse us out
of our own apathy. How was it possible, we still wonder, for a handful
of debased and vulgar amateur politicians so intimately to involve a
whole nation in their victory and ultimate ruin that we are tempted to
look on mere membership in this nation as a kind of guilt? Professor
Jaspers' distinctions provide the only sane basis on which to consider
this question without resorting to superficial collective characterizations.
He himself hardly does so, though what he says is interesting: "We do
not drop the distinction between political liability and moral guilt],
but we have to narrow it by saying that the conduct which made us
liable rests on a sum of political conditions whose nature is moral, as
it were, because they help to determine individual morality.... There

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THE GUILTY AND THE LIVING

is a sort of collective moral guilt in a people's way of life which I share
as an individual and from which grow political realities. . . . There is
no absolute division of politics and human existence as long as man
is still realizing an existence. . . . Professor Jaspers was perhaps wise in
not pursuing this further; it would have meant a disquisition on German
history, and his audience has been only too prone in the past to take
refuge from the failure of its own history in the idea of history.

In the Urfaust, Mephistopheles says to Faust: "Ist's doch das einzige
Kunststück euch in euern Verworrenheiten Luft zu machen, dass ihr
den entgegnenden Unschuldigen zerschmettert." Professor Jaspers' book
is a strong corrective to this tendency to blame one's own difficulties on
someone else. Yet there is a kind of sad pointlessness to the Schuldfrage
now. There is no longer anything at stake in the answer to the question.
Repentance or unrepentance, guilt or innocence—what do these things
matter in Europe today?

Martin Greenberg

ACADEMICIAN'S CHAPBOOK

ART AND THE SOCIAL ORDER. By D. W. Gotshalk. University of Chi-
cago Press. $3.75.

Anyone interested in the American academic mind—and the
recent wild growth of academicism forces us to that interest—can find in
this ponderous volume its full-scale portrait. It is not a pretty sight.

Nothing delights the American academician more than a newly
contrived synthesis. To juggle materials, reclassify them, and then de-
velop a "theory" (or, as R. W. Flint has noticed, a "clue") which is
merely a shift in verbal emphasis is standard procedure for academic
studies. This tendency has been inflated to grandiose absurdity in F.S.C.
Northrop's The Meeting of East and West which synthesized all human
thought into nothingness.

Stalking his synthesis, Professor Gotshalk rejects "nihilistic" theories
of art. ("Nihilistic" means a definite, limited, and hence non-synthesized
point of view.) Plato's theory of art as "imitation" is taken to mean
"that the purpose of fine art is the copying of nature." Hence Gotshalk
can triumphantly inquire: "If fine art is imitation, why art? The original
must always be so much superior." And so much for Plato. Freud is
similarly disposed of: that which the old master always and almost

603

=== Page 94 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW

pathetically insisted on—that his genetic investigations of creative pro-
cesses were not intended as value judgments of art—is blandly ignored.
And so much for Freud.

Instead our professor launches a nasty and obtuse attack on modern
art as a "withered skeleton" of cynicism and irresponsibility in order to
plump for his synthesis: an "organic" view of art as based on a "benefi-
cient unity of belief" within a "general welfare state." Such phrases are
already enough to give one a bad chill, but when Gotshalk hails the
"great burst of fresh artistic activity of considerable promise" in Stalinist
Russia and declares that there "the arts have had a position not unlike
that in the best 'organic' societies," then we know the discussion is at
an end.

As usual the style keeps pace with the ideas. Here is an example
of what passes for English prose in the academy:

This subordination of overt action to the amplification of intrinsic percep-
tion is a fundamental feature of the negative side of the aesthetic experience, and
its explicit recognition is required, along with putting at a distance nonaesthetic
interests, in any adequate description even of this side of the picture.

It is depressing to realize that the university presses will churn

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=== Page 95 ===
ACADEMICIAN'S CHAPBOOK
such books out year after year, one forming a footnote in the next,
and that graduate students will cleave their way through these prose
jungles to find a reference for a thesis that no one will read.
J. B.

FRENCH PERIODICALS

Simone de Beauvoir publishes the first installment of her
diary on her last year's trip to America in the December, 1947 issue of
Les Temps Modernes.

Madame de Beauvoir still likes Steinbeck, James Cain, and Erskine
Caldwell. She is not well-disposed toward PARTISAN REVIEW: it is not
open to the realistic currents of American life, and it is snobbish.
What strikes her in America is "the divorce between intellectuals
and creative writers; most creative writers started out by selling news-
papers or shining shoes and acquired their culture through the hazards
of life; inversely, it is very rare that men of culture produce creative
writing; so that this quarrel is almost a class quarrel. In France we
have an overproduction of intellectuals; for us the effort of writers to
integrate the crudest forms of life into literature was new and has
enriched us particularly."

Some of Madame de Beauvoir's observations on the role of psy-
chology and especially of psychoanalysis in America seem relevant: If
psychoanalysis is so fashionable in the U.S., it is not because Americans
expect this discipline to help them to "find themselves," but on the
contrary because they expect from it complicity with their own escapism.
The unadjusted may be tempted to question the order of the world in
which he lives; such a revolutionary attitude is dangerous and threaten-
ing for society, and in turn creates anxieties in the individual who has
to face decisions, risks, responsibilities. Hence, the individual admits
a priori that he who is maladjusted is wrong, and he is only too happy
to consider his confusion a sickness which can be cured as easily as
a cold. All the questions which worry him, all his doubts and anxieties
are not recognized as expressions of an inner truth; they are considered
to be objective realities which must be studied scientifically. Every
individual is a "case." An individual who departs from the norm because
of his extravagance, eccentricity, the affirmation of his individuality,
is called "a character." A "case" is described by his "problem." Every
American citizen has a "problem" just as he has a marital status; if he
is normal and perspicacious, he himself knows how to define it in terms

605

=== Page 96 ===
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FRENCH PERIODICALS

which already indicate its solution; if he is less perspicacious, he defines
the problem and demands its solution from competent people. . . .
Psychoanalysis is a huge enterprise of social recuperation; its sole aim
is to allow each citizen to take again his place in society. Adjusting
actually means giving up one's personality; being happy means knowing
how to remain energetically blindfolded. Many things would change
among Americans if they could bring themselves to admit that there
is unhappiness in the world and that unhappiness is not a priori a crime.

However, the Sartre school of Existentialism, of which Madame de
Beauvoir is an eminent and fighting spokesman, recently has been
threatened in its own camp. Georges Bataille, the critic and essayist—
sometimes called an Existentialist himself—devotes two articles in his
magazine Critique (December and February) to an attack against
Sartre and his disciples. He accuses them of having given up the key
Existentialist position according to which "existence precedes essence,"
and of having constructed an elaborate metaphysical system—whereas
Kierkegaard reasoned only from the inner and pressing needs of his
"being in the world," his subjectivity. The true Existentialist should live
before knowing, should test and experience existence, but Sartre and
his school manifest a "hypertrophy of intellectual functions." For them,
knowledge becomes a professorial exercise which takes precedence over
all other activities. It is no longer, as for Kierkegaard, the subjective
life of the individual which poses questions, but the exigencies of syn-
thetic thinking. . . . One has the impression that moral impotence has
been caused by an excess of intellectual power. "Like a child driven
by an urgent need, hopping around uneasily without being able to make
up his mind, this kind of thinking remains evasive yet keeps alive—it is
sick of a morose virtuosity. . . ."

Sartre's own attacks against all previous systems of philosophy
are now turned against him. He who most of all denounced the "thingifi-
cation" of men is being accused now of this very crime: "Existential
philosophy makes us into things in a more profound sense even than
science which at least left the private and intimate being untouched."

If Existentialism continues to elicit passionate discussion in all French
literary periodicals, Marxism also remains a perennial debate subject.
In the February issue of Masses, Michel Collinet, formerly a leading
member of the socialist left and prominent in the Resistance, publishes
some remarkable pages on the anniversary of the Communist Manifesto.
It is in the interpretation and especially the prediction of Nazism that
Marxism has revealed its Achilles' heel. Having elucidated the progressive

607

=== Page 98 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW

yet antagonistic factors which govern capitalist society, Marxism neglected
certain regressive factors such as the persistence of ideologies which stand
in the way of adaptation to economic realities. This might have seemed
of secondary importance in periods of ascendancy like the nineteenth
century. But in a period of economic decomposition and political catas-
trophe the regressive factors become dominant; myth, traditions, old
ideologies which in earlier periods had been pushed into the background
by purposeful activity, now become decisive. In the face of this social
sickness, classical Marxism is as defenseless as was the pre-Freudian
physician in the face of a patient's compulsion neurosis.
Man exists only as a particle, as a private being, in the plebeian mass.
The social being is destroyed in each individual. This is why such a
mass calls for a leader. The atomized individual who is denied direct
contact with society can only exist through a Führer who monopolizes
the individual's social essence and his political consciousness. The mass
of déclassés recognizes itself in the Führer, identifying itself with him.
The totalitarian party, the militarized plebs, differs from any kind
of democratic party just as a disciplined army differs from civil society.
In the Nazi party, the alienation of man was complete. The individual
core disappeared, what remained was only an object, an unconscious

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=== Page 99 ===
FRENCH PERIODICALS
instrument of leadership. What is at first achieved within the party be-
comes the essence and anticipation of what the party tries to accomplish
within society at large. The traditional relations between state and
society are finally reversed. The totalitarian party is the instrument by
which the state absorbs society. If one wrote a new Communist Mani-
festo, one would not have to talk about class struggles which indeed no
longer exist but to evaluate the chances of success of the various
Führers; strategy would replace historical determinism, the language of
Machiavelli that of Marx.

Thierry Maulnier, in pre-war days one of the leading intellectual
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Marxism always has scared the bourgeoisie, scared it not only as
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basic tenets of Marxist thought. All accusations against its materialism,
its mechanism, have remained superficial. Bourgeois thought has created
admirable works in spheres far removed from those investigated by

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=== Page 100 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW
Marxism, but it never was capable of redefining itself in terms of the
problems that Marx raised. Against Marxism there prevailed frivolity,
bad faith, and a suspect kind of eloquence and rhetoric.

But if the bourgeoisie has a "bad conscience," this does not imply
that the proletarian revolutionaries have a "good conscience." On the
contrary, while they have attacked the bourgeois worship of "eternal
values" and exposed them as a mystification, they have themselves
smuggled in those very values through the back door. The values by
which the bourgeoisie justifies its domination are denounced as historical
and relative by the critical efforts of the proletarian thinkers, but once
these values pass into the hands of the proletariat they suddenly become
authentic and universal. "Bourgeois truth is the truth of a class, at the
service of a class, i.e., falsehood; proletarian truth is also truth of a class
at the service of a class, but this class makes of it the 'true' truth, the
truth of science."

The proletarian revolution is assigned the task of finally realizing
philosophy, for so far philosophy only has served to justify unjust con-
ditions through the elaboration of ideals which served untruth:

In the first effort of the Marxist thinker, all values are reduced to their
historicity; they are treated as means of attack and defense of the contending
classes. Then in a second effort the proletarian values, and they alone, are
erected in intangible and unconditional glory on the summits toward which
humanity marches; they become the supreme end of revolutionary practice.
They are no longer pure absolutes as in bourgeois thought but rather
"relative absolutes," absolutes of history: they have passed into the
service of the proletariat and are now above the proletariat which is
destined to realize them; they have become the supreme reference by
which all tactical impostures, all momentary iniquities can be justified.

While reading Thierry Maulnier's attack, one isn't always very
clear whether he is speaking of Marxism or of Stalinism, but this con-
fusion of the critics is hardly surprising if one reflects upon the all-
pervasive confusion on this subject in the French left. The well-known
leftist Catholic review Esprit (by no means a fellow-traveling organ),
recently devoted a whole issue (December 1947) to the danger of a
Gaullist neo-fascism while ignoring almost completely the danger of
Stalinist totalitarianism and, in fact, advocating an alliance with the
Stalinists against De Gaulle. Joseph Rovan, e.g., can write in this issue:

There is no Third Force in present-day politics. The eternal Third Force
lives in libraries and convents and dies on the scaffold. Present-day politics force
us to choose between fascism and revolution, between two kinds of violence,
between Gaullism with or without De Gaulle on the one hand, and common

610

=== Page 101 ===
FRENCH PERIODICALS

action with the Communist Party, as it is, on the other. We are placed in a
historical situation in which every step is sinful, but where abstaining from
walking is a sin also. We must prefer the violence which promotes the prole-
tarian revolution to a liberty which promotes fascism. Later on, as the problems
emerge, we will ask the real questions: What kind of violence, until when and
up to what point?

In the same issue, Paul Fraisse asks correctly: "Are we blind
enough to forget that there exists also a fascism of the left? Shouldn't
we then reject both kinds of fascism simultaneously?" But he concludes
that one has to deal with first things first, that the Gaullist danger is
the most pressing now.

The syndicalist monthly Revolution Proletarienne prints an excellent
rejoinder by J. D. Martinet to this position of Esprit. We quote only
the concluding sentences:

The naiveté of the present position of Esprit is fearsome. It makes those
spiritualists into standard-bearers of Stalinist fascism. And if Stalinism should
triumph one can easily imagine the "loyal opposition" of the group around
Emmanuel Mounier: it would again innocently serve the Stalinists... until the
day when they—or at least their best elements—will also be liquidated.

One more example of the complete confusion on the issue of Stalin-
ism which still prevails in most sectors of the French left: Georges
Bataille recently reviewed Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom in Critique
for January. Here are a few of his key remarks: When the peace came
in August, 1945, a feeling of inferiority developed nearly everywhere.
Only the Communist world remained an exception, a monolith among
an anxious and incoherent multitude united by nothing but its fear.
But this monolith which carries limitless hopes in its own destiny at the
same time represents instant terror to all those who don't accept its laws.
Communism destroys all hope for those opposed to it; hence, the fear
of Communism has become an obsession to all who are not Communist.

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=== Page 102 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW

The rest of the world is incapable of initiative, it relies on the forces
of inertia, it abandons itself to its own contradictions, and its ideas are
nothing but impotent stammerings of protest.
M. Bataille knows very well that Communism means "resolute con-
tempt for individual interests, for thinking, personal rights, and conve-
niences." But what is to be found on the other side? "The modern bour-
geois personality appears as the meanest incarnation that humanity has
ever assumed; but to this isolated 'personality,' to this mediocrity, Com-
munism offers a leap into death. Of course, the 'personality' refuses to
jump, but it does not, for all of that, become more appealing. . . ."
Bataille is by no means a Stalinist, yet he finds it useless to "close
one's eyes so as not to see in the Soviet Union of today, with its rude
and intolerant aspects, the expression not of decadence but rather, on the
contrary, of a will that nothing can daunt in its determination to resolve
the real problems of the revolution."

Such are the contradictions in the political thinking of the French
left, that the same Emmanuel Mounier, editor-in-chief of Esprit, after
publishing the above mentioned Stalinoid issue, in the January number
of his magazine reacts violently to the recent attack by A. Zhdanov—

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=== Page 103 ===
FRENCH PERIODICALS

the Politburo member charged with shadowing what passes for philoso-
phical thought in the Soviet Union—on a textbook on Western phi-
losophy by one Alexandrov. He writes:

The revolution is in power for thirty years already, for thirty years it has
been fashioning thought. . . . If Russian philosophers still cling en masse to
“formalism and apolitical thought,” to “admiration for what is foreign” and
“take refuge in the past,” it is rather difficult for Zhdanov to reduce all this
resistance to “subjective factors”; one should reason according to good Marxist
criteria and conclude that there must be something very wrong in the objective
situation. Does one not note this paralysis which the powers-that-be impart to
thinking when, immediately after asking of the philosophers more self-criticism
and independent research, Zhdanov says: “Your discussion of Hegel is rather
strange. . . . The question of Hegel has been resolved a long time ago. There is
no reason whatsoever to pose it anew. . . .” One has to call things by their name:
we are here faced with a mortal error of Russian Communism, a radical de-
formation of revolutionary humanism. . . .

The author ends his piece by an appeal to the Communists of the West
to assume a task of education in respect to their comrades of the East.
He thinks that it is precisely in the Catholic countries, which—according
to the very Catholic Mounier—have always contained a fruitful melange
of orthodoxy and liberty, that this new Western Stalinism has most
chances to develop. It would seem rather difficult to push confusion
further, and yet Mounier is considered an eminent representative of
progressive thought in the France of today. . . .

Louis Clair

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613

=== Page 104 ===
VARIETY

MUSKRAT RAMBLE: POPULAR
AND UNPOPULAR MUSIC

"... in the ripe olives the very cir-
cumstances of their being near to
rottenness adds a peculiar beauty
to the fruit."

It is midafternoon. I come away
from the window and the rooftops
and turn the knob on the radio
that sends a thin line cutting across
the rows of numbers. I would like
to hear, say, Earl Hines playing
"Rosetta" but will settle for a Lee
Wiley record; except for a station
on which a voice not easily dis-
tinguishable from Miss Margaret
Truman's is singing "At Dawning"
and another on which a program
of "light classics" by a feeble string
group emerges oppressively dis-
tinct, all the other stations are play-
ing record after record by big
dance bands. Claude Thornhill,
Kay Kyser, Tex Beneke, Charlie
Spivak, Vaughn Monroe. I switch
off the radio and go into the other
room to pour myself a drink.

We live in a time of triumphant
demonstration of the three laws
Mr. Nock found so illuminating:
Epstean's law (people satisfy their
needs and desires with the least
possible exertion), Gresham's (bad
money drives out good money),

614

and the law of diminishing re-
turns.

For the last ten years or more, a
period that has been sufficiently
dispiriting for both High and Pop-
ular Culture, it has still been pos-
sible, though the occasions of pos-
sibility have been rare enough, for
some works of value to emerge.
In High Culture, individual writ-
ers, painters, and composers, most
of them isolated as so many bears
in winter, have gone on working,
and in climates colder than most
bears care for. Although Gresham's
law in particular has continued to
function with the efficiency and
drive of a supercharged bonecrush-
er, it has had to cope with one fac-
tor that alone has kept the world
from becoming a cultural Nagasaki
-the granitelike recalcitrance of
these figures of High Culture. It
is all that stands between what
little we have left and a world com-
pletely at the mercy of the John
Steinbecks, Eli Siegmeisters, Fib-
ber McGees, Leon Krolls, and
Henry Seidel Canbys.

High Culture, although it has
been subject to the same acceler-
ated tendencies toward decay that
kept Henry Adams awake and put
the world to sleep, still has a kind
of life, however spasmodic its suc-
cesses and however hemmed in by
the all but completely victorious
Middle Culture that takes what it
can assimilate both from High and
Popular Culture for the purpose
of mashing them to death.

=== Page 105 ===
But Popular Culture is com-
pletely at the mercy of the laws
hastening corruption and decay.
Popular Culture must go along. No
other road is open. Unlike High
Art, it cannot fall back on at-
titudes of recalcitrance for survival.
Lloyd Hamilton, W. C. Fields, Bus-
ter Keaton—comedians of wit, hu-
manity, and situation, for instance,
give way to verbalizing gagsters:
Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Red Skel-
ton.* The comic strip evolves into
a series of continued stories that
are linear replicas of soap operas
and the pulps; and similar patterns
tiredly repeat themselves in every
field of Popular Culture.

If the laws of which I have
spoken could themselves speak,
however, their proudest boast
would be reserved for the debase-
ment of popular music. Here is
total capitulation. The period from
the end of the First World War to
about 1936 was one of enormous
productivity of first-rate tunes;
month after month accounted for
numbers that are still fresh after
a decade of repetition. Even David
Rose has done his worst and left
them relatively untouched. The
period represents a flowering that

* Fields, toward the end of his life
(like Chaplin today) became increas-
ingly savage in his satire, and an au-
dience that wanted nothing but re-
assurance could only respond uneasily,
baffled and repelled; eventually it
turned away from him. Along these
lines, the reception of Chaplin's last
film has been very instructive.

615

has few comparable examples in
the Popular Arts. But after 1936
the drought set in. The last ten
years, so far as popular music is
concerned, have been bleak. From
around 1920 to 1936: Exactly Like
You, Thou Swell, Tea for Two,
My Fate is in Your Hands, Hon-
eysuckle Rose, April in Paris, Ava-
lon, Get Out of Town, I Never
Knew, Nice Work if You Can Get
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=== Page 106 ===
Side of the Street, Cherry, It Had
to Be You, There'll Be Some
Changes Made, You Do Some-
thing to Me, Moanin' Low, I Know
That You Know, Liza, My One
and Only, Embraceable You,
Someone to Watch Over Me,
Memories of You, Lady Be Good,
I Can't Get Started With You
(written by Vernon Duke and Ira
Gershwin in 1936-about the last
gasp of the period), My Kinda
Love, Time on My Hands, Concen-
tratin' on You, Delilah, Rose
Room, Body and Soul, After
You've Gone, Old Fashioned Love,
Keepin' Myself for You-a much-
truncated list, but one that in-
cludes most of the tunes on which
both good jazz performers and
everyone on down from there-
including the large ponderously-
stringed music-to-read-by schmalz
combinations-have depended most
heavily.

A handful of men wrote
most of them: Gershwin, Spencer
Williams, Fats Waller, Youmans,
Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart.
Most of these men are dead; there
have been no successors. (Out of
an earlier jazz period that stretched
into the twenties came such revered
hot classics as Wolverine Blues,
That's a Plenty, King Porter
Stomp, Ballin' the Jack, Some of
Me Blues, Royal Garden Blues,
Maple Leaf Rag, Squeeze Me,
Wabash Blues, among a great
many more. These belong to a
time as enclosed and without con-
tinuançe as that of the Ephrata
Cloisters, Vorticism, or the demesne
of Lord Timothy Dexter.) Today
from the broken tap that Cole
Porter turns on at widely-spaced
intervals leak repetitive imitations
of his earlier smooth flow. Vernon
Duke writes songs for children and
"serious" music. Duke Ellington
interests himself in musical em-
broidery work. He has also recent-
ly become a disk jockey and plays
some of the most richly-debased
stuff ever committed to wax. Rich-
ard Rodgers composes music for
operettas like Oklahoma and Al-
legro, a very sad end. Harold
Arlen, responsible for such un-
faded period pieces as Fun To Be
Fooled, You Said It, Moanin' in
the Morning, and Down with
Love, has eliminated from his work
his early originality and spontane-
ity.

The general drift of songwriters
to the West Coast since the intro-
duction of sound films has had its
effects. In Hollywood, Epstean's
law finds its purest expression.
Songwriters, malleable as margar-
ine, easily made happy by residences
convenient to a racetrack, have
lived up to the pattern. Hollywood
Hit Parade-juke box-Hooperized
numbers tailored to blanket the
country and ravel out in four
weeks, become all-pervading mod-
els. Just as large sections of indus-
try seem to be consciously aiming
at the creation of overpriced
jimcrack merchandise-expensive
fountain pens that feed great blots

616

=== Page 107 ===
on one's stationery, alarm clocks
that fail to go off, shirts that turn
to ribbons after three washings,
toothpaste that brings on gingivitis,
chinaware that disintegrates in the
dishwater, so does the songwriting
industry aggrandize the ephemeral
as it ransacks the most barren and
unserviceable ideas of the past.
"Imitation diamonds," wrote Toc-
queville over one hundred years
ago, "are now made which easily
may be mistaken for real ones;
as soon as the art of fabricating
false diamonds shall have reached
so high a degree of perfection that
they cannot be distinguished from
real ones, it is probable that both
one and the other will be aban-
doned, and become mere pebbles
again." Tocqueville's prediction has
yet to be realized; the relevance
of his metaphor persists. Song-
writers of late have attempted only
the imitation of imitations.

The nervous, gay, compulsive
music of the twenties gives way to
a tastelessness streamlined be-
yond belief. Gershwin and some of
his contemporaries were greatly
gifted men for what they were do-
ing, expressing simple emotions
with a freshness of melodic and
harmonic ideas and with a par-
ticular sense of joy that the thirties
buried (enthralled Stalinist grave-
diggers wielding albums of Josh
White and the Red Army Chorus
under their arms; "folk" operet-
tists; novelty swing combinations;
exponents of calculated corn;
floy-floy hysterics; the composers

617
of the song "everyone" is whistling
–Chi Baba Chi Baba, Chickory
Chick, Open the Door Richard,
Pistol Packin' Mama, People Will
Say We're in Love, Jingle Jangle
Jingle, Deep in the Heart of Texas,
There'll Be Bluebirds Over the
White Cliffs of Dover, I'll Dance
at Your Wedding—an endless and
unspeakable catalogue. There are
few more dependable methods of
obtaining a quick migraine than
by merely reading over a list of the
hit tunes of the last ten or twelve
years.

Monolithic symbol of the whole
period is the juke box: this per-
manent guest in public places that
squats like some ominous and tem-
porarily static beast, afoam with
lights and tubes of colored water;
it might have been built by André
Breton in collaboration with some
monstrously sick and divided op-
ponent of industrialism who had
spent a claustrophobic lifetime in
Greek candy stores. There it sits,
booming or silently awaiting a
nickel, ready with "A Rainy Night
in Rio" and Perry Como, where

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=== Page 108 ===
the piano player used to be, his
cigarette turning the ivories of the
upper register a sickly Mars yel-
low. He was not often a good
pianist, but he knew more tunes
than the twenty the juke box
knows; and you could talk to him.

Compared with the music cur-
rently being written, musical per-
formance is deceptively healthy.
Even the best jazz today lacks the
fresh originating intelligence at
work in the late twenties; and the
best musicians are now only ex-
tending and developing patterns
of improvisation laid out during
the early quarter of this century.
There is an immense concern with
mere preservation. The unearth-
ing, several years ago, of Bunk
Johnson, probably the oldest living
pioneer of jazz, who had dropped
out of music and had to be pro-
vided with a set of new teeth be-
fore his triumphant comeback, was
a welcome act of antiquarian re-
covery. Johnson's long-buried and
pure turn-of-the-century New Or-
leans style served as a landmark
from which to view almost fifty
years of jazz mutations and var-
iants. Johnson's more impassioned
admirers correctly placed great em-
phasis on his astonishing power
and wide-open tone, alive with per-
sonal feeling. These almost com-
pensated for an inventive defi-
ciency that made for considerable
monotony as chorus followed
chorus.

It has been the practice of
618
some later musicians to work in-
tensively at the inventive, though
feeling has often been buried in
displays of virtuosity. Performers
such as Armstrong, James P. John-
son, Kid Ory, Barney Bigard, Art
Tatum, Earl Hines, Bechet, Jack
Teagarden, Georg Brunis, Ben
Webster, and a good many of the
Chicago stylists clustered around
Eddie Condon, continue to resist
corruption; but their ranks are
systematically being thinned out by
desertions for cushier swing bands,
by sudden collapses of talent, and
the normal high death rate among
jazz musicians, whose occupational
hazards include heart attacks, mal-
nutrition, and a recurrent pattern
of drunkenness and sudden death of
pneumonia in Middle Western
cities.

More than a few go on playing
well; the difficulties of hearing
them continue to multiply. Man-
hattan's Fifty-Second Street, once
as devoted to night clubs featuring
jazz and jam sessions as Grand
Street is to wedding gowns or
Bleecker Street to salami, makes
way for replacements in the form
of office buildings, expensive clubs,
business establishments, and tour-
ist night spots with "intimate"
singers and Hawaiian dancing
girls. Four years ago there was at
least one night club in New York
that offered first-rate jazz, un-
watered and nonpoisonous liquor
at reasonable prices, and a quiet
crowd that did not come there to
have their photographs taken, their

=== Page 109 ===
caricatures drawn, or to annoy the musicians. This was the Pied Piper, on Barrow Street, in the Village. For a brief period, when it first opened, it offered a memorable five-piece group that included Max Kaminsky, the late Rod Cless on clarinet, Frank Orchard on valve trombone, and, as intermission pianist and at the top of his form, the remarkable, vastly influential, and still underrated James P. Johnson. There is nothing remotely like the Pied Piper left in New York. Indifferent music, high prices, poor liquor, or combinations of this trin- ity have taken over everywhere. The rash of jazz "concerts" in such places as Town Hall have not been very satisfactory substitutes. The musicians, along with the more ravaged-looking members of the audience, wear expressions of strain brought on by the absence of a bar and by a milieu too little enclosed. At various times, attempts have been made to present regular pro- grams of good jazz on the air- notably those conducted by Con- don and by Rudi Blesh; but from the start their chances of commer- cial sponsorship were as remote as those of Wallace Stevens' appear- ing as a regular contributor in Collier's. The networks made short work of both programs.

While jazz persists on records and occasionally elsewhere, the best of it increasingly nostalgic, depending more and more on a cultist rather than on a popular base, it is almost drowned out by

619

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF A YOGI
by
PARAMHANSA YOGANANDA
Preface by Dr. W. Y. Evans-Wents
M.A., D.Litt., D.Sc.

The life story of one of the world's
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=== Page 110 ===
the racket of the large swing and
popular bands. These have next
to nothing to do with jazz, although
they often contain remnants of
rather gratuitous jazz in solo work
(the best of these bands, Artie
Shaw's and Benny Goodman's, are
gone). Standard practice today in
the search for trade-marks and
novelty is the isolation of some
rhythmic pattern, tonal element,
or harmonic trickery to vulgarize
and thus "build up" a "style." Hence
"rippling rhythms," slinky piano ef-
fects, fixated use of a series of aug-
mented chords, musical statements
that are so surfacy that they beg
the question of feeling at all. The
Stan Kenton band is a good exam-
ple of tremendous effort going into
the creation of such a style, through
echo chamber effects and hollow
intimations of Debussy and Stra-
vinsky.

Enormously popular just now
are the relaxed Cream of Wheat-
Gerber's Baby Food instrumental
trios, usually piano, guitar, and
string bass, with one man singing
empty little jump tunes. There are
dozens of these, all playing at a
volume undeviating as a cat's purr.
This music had its origin, I would
guess, in the dimly-lit night clubs
of the East Fifties, where it served,
and still serves, the purpose of cov-
ering up dead spots in the conver-
sation. Like the music that dom-
inated the period in the late 1700's
just before the revolutionary music
of Gluck, it was not originally in-
tended to be listened to at all. Mil-
620
lions now follow it, over the air
and on records.

And now, finally, we come to
those who play in the latest and
extravagantly-acclaimed manner
variously labeled Be-Bob, bebop,
and rebop. Here is a full-fledged
cult. Its more orthodox devotees
even model their appearance on
that of Dizzy Gillespie, bebop's pio-
neer and bellwether, a goateed
trumpet player who wears a beret,
horn-rimmed glasses, and neckties
with his own not very appealing
countenance painted thereon.
Iconoclastic and compulsive types,
many bebop cultists extend their
interests beyond music-to drug-
addiction, abstract painting, and
the theories (and for all I know
the practice) of Wilhelm Reich,
philosopher of the orgasm. Some
beboppers are interested in the
close textual critics of poetry; I
learned from a friend whom I be-
lieve to be reliable that one such
fan announced that Cleanth
Brooks is "definitely hip"-a term
of warm approval.

The beboppers or hipsters are,
however, a great deal more inter-
esting than bebop itself. Yet they
offer the most insistent testimonies
to bebop's superiority to other
kinds of music. "Do you dig Diz-
zy?" is fast becoming the musi-
cian's counterpart to "Do you speak
English?" writes Mr. Mort Schil-
linger in Downbeat, in the charac-
teristic razmataz style of the swing
magazines. "Never before in the
history of Jazz has so dynamic a

=== Page 111 ===
person as Dizzy Gillespie gained
the spotlight of acclaim and idol-
ization . . . from the humblest of
the unknown to the heights of
huzza at which he stands today.
With the waxing of Hawk's [Cole-
man Hawkins'] Body and Soul . . .
Jazz reached a pinnacle of devel-
opment. The human imagination
has its limitations, just as the hu-
man arm or leg, and Jazz had
reached the point where the musi-
cian's imagination could no longer
function effectively without the
added stimulus of new horizons for
exploitation. There were two al-
ternatives: either Jazz could re-
main stagnant and in time lose its
identity as a highly creative art,
or it could develop new facets for
the imagination, new stimuli to
artistic fabrication. Fortunately it
followed the latter course-chose
it and assigned the task to Dizzy
Gillespie." Mr. Schillinger goes on
to remark Gillespie's "genius for
substituting and extending chords
in unorthodox but singularly thril-
ling ways and places [and] Dizzy's
entirely original articulation and
phrasing which is hardly describ-
able through the medium of the
printed word without recourse to
highly technical terminology...."

Mr. Rudi Blesh, in a recent piece
in the Herald Tribune, is more
controlled. "Seeming non-sequiturs
can be artfully combined to ex-
press an integrated idea, and this
method, a psychological one, is
common in modern music and lit-
erature. But the irrelevant parts of

621

bebop are exactly what they seem;
they add up to no such unity. . . .
A capricious and neurotically rhap-
sodic sequence of effects for their
own sake, [bebop] comes perilous-
ly close to complete nonsense as
a musical expression. . . . Far from
a culmination of jazz, bebop is not
jazz at all but an ultimately de-
generated form of swing, exploiting
the most fantastic rhythms and un-
related harmonies that it would
seem possible to conceive."

I have been listening to bebop
on occasion for several years now,
and lately, as I started work on
this piece, listening with more strict
attention; and I can only report,
very possibly because of some deep-
ly-buried strain of black reaction
in me, that I have found this mu-

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=== Page 112 ===
sic uniformly thin, at once dilapi-
dated and overblown, and exhibit-
ing a poverty of thematic devel-

SONIA
SEKULA

RECENT PAINTINGS
May 10 - May 28

BETTY PARSONS
GALLERY - 15 East 57th Street

PAINTINGS
by
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through May 15

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760 Madison Ave., New York 21

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BEN ZION

May 10 - June 5

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opment and a richness of affec-
tation not only, apparently, inten-
tional, but enormously self-satisfied.
Whole-tone progressions and triple-
tongued runs are worked re-
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like this in the way of an overcon-
sciousness of stylistic idiosyncrasy.
I should say, since the Gothic Re-
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reserve as their trump card this
music's "element of the unex-
pected," it is precisely bebop's un-
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mately as boring as the projects of
Gutzon Borglum.

In Paris, where Erskine Cald-
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where the post-Picasso painters
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is vastly admired. Evidently Gresh-
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equal severity in other countries
besides the United States, although
a lot of people are taking Christ's
own time finding it out.

Weldon Kees

the hans hofmann school of fine art
52 west 8th street • new york city • phone gramercy 7-3491
summer session
provincetown, mass.
personally conducted
june 14 - sept. 3
by mr. hofmann

622

=== Page 113 ===
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=== Page 114 ===
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=== Page 116 ===
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