=== Page 1 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW

ALBERTO MORAVIA
Images of Africa

IRVING HOWE
The Costs of History

DANIEL BELL
On Hannah Arendt

COLIN MACINNES
The Silly Season

RICHARD STERN
Teeth (a story)

RICHARD ELLMANN
Oscar Wilde

Poems and reviews by David Ferry, Randall Jarrell,
Alvin C. Kibbel, Rufus Mathewson, John Simon,
Susan Sontag.

FALL
1963
$1.25
7/6

=== Page 2 ===
Oxford University Press

Fiction for the Working Man

By LOUIS JAMES. Mr. James's discussion of the "cheap" literature of
early Victorian England is a fascinating excursion into literary and
sociological byways. Concentrating upon its working-class audience, he
describes the popular reception of Dickens, Southey, Byron and Shelley,
surveys the influence of novels from France and America, and follows the
evolution of true romance stories. $5.60

Journey from Obscurity,
Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918

I. Childhood

By HAROLD OWEN. When Wilfred Owen died at twenty-five-among the
final victims of the Great War-few people realized that he was one
of England's major poets. Curiosity about the man has grown along with
his reputation. In this first part of a projected biographical trilogy,
his younger brother re-creates the poet's turn-of-the-century childhood
world. Harold Owen's book (the first full account of the Owen family)
is a significant social document and at the same time an autobiography
of singular and meticulous honesty. $4.80

Milton's Grand Style

By CHRISTOPHER B. RICKS. Mr. Ricks' scholarly discussion of Milton's
style illuminates its subtlety as well as its sublimity and grandeur.
From a discussion of criticism by F. R. Leavis, William Empson, and
C. S. Lewis, he proceeds to an analysis of syntax, metaphors, word-play
and the texture of Milton's verse. He concludes with a masterful chapter
on simile and cross-reference. $4.00

Between the Lines
Yeats's Poetry in the Making

By JON STALLWORTHY. Yeats, fortunately, was a poet who thought on
paper. By transcribing and arranging extensive and largely unpublished
manuscripts, Mr. Stallworthy has been able to plot in detail the fascinating
progress of the poet's mind from inspiration to finished work. Among
the eighteen poems studied are: The Second Coming, A Prayer for my
Daughter, The Sorrow of Love, and Sailing to Byzantium. 3 facsimiles.
$7.00

Oxford University Press / New York

=== Page 3 ===
Oxford University Press

The City of Satisfactions

By DANIEL HOFFMAN. A brilliant new collection in a beautifully
designed book, from a poet already widely acclaimed. “From his strong
restraints burst dazzling powers . . . one of the best poets of his genera-
tion.”—RICHARD EBERHART. “The quality of his imagination is unique.”
—E. LUCAS MYERS, The Sewanee Review. “These poems are exquisitely
made and absolutely original.”—RICHMOND LATTIMORE. $3.00

The Burning Perch

By LOUIS MACNEICE. Marked with mature irony, this collection of poems
is a distinguished addition to the poet’s impressive body of work. “He is
stylistically more incisive, closer to the breath of experience than many
of his British or American fellows . . .”—M. L. ROSENTHAL, N. Y. Times
Book Review. MacNeice is “clearly in command of poetry as both a means
and a kind of intelligence.”—JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN, The Saturday
Review. $3.75

Three Plays

By JEAN GIRAUDOUX. Translated by CHRISTOPHER FRY. These superb
translations of Tiger at the Gates, Duel of Angels, and Judith are re-
markable in their retention of the wit, grace, and deep emotion so
characteristic of Giraudoux—the most significant French dramatist of
the twentieth century. Judith, the newest translation, has not been pub-
lished before nor produced on Broadway. Harold Clurman, who directed
its London presentation, contributes an introduction to the volume. $5.00

Architecture in Transition

By CONSTANTINOS A. DOXIADIS. Since World War II Doxiadis has
stepped from eminence in his Greek homeland to international architectural
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In a world strained by exploding population and industry, no one—expert
or layman—can afford to ignore his view of the social goals of architecture.
“One of the world’s most distinguished town planners and consultants.”—
—BARBARA WARD, National Observer.
26 half-tones, 74 drawings and diagrams. $7.50

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=== Page 4 ===
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=== Page 5 ===
FALL, 1963 VOLUME XXX, NUMBER 3

CONTENTS

TEETH, Richard Stern 327

ROMANTIC PANTOMIME IN OSCAR WILDE, Richard Ellmann 342

LEON TROTSKY: THE COSTS OF HISTORY, Irving Howe 356

POEMS

THREE BILLS, Randall Jarrell 387
SEEN THROUGH A WINDOW and SEVERAL VOICES,
David Ferry 388

IMAGES OF AFRICA, Alberto Moravia 390

THE ALPHABET OF JUSTICE, Daniel Bell 417

LONDON LETTER: THE SILLY SEASON, Colin MacInnes 430

BOOKS

THE PUBLIC POET, Rufus Mathewson 437
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL, Susan Sontag 441
THE DRUMMER OF DANZIG, John Simon 446
JUNG AND FREUD, Alvin C. Kibei 453

CORRESPONDENCE 471

INDEX TO VOLUME XXX 478

=== Page 6 ===
By Martin
Heidegger

BEING
AND
TIME

The first publication in Eng-
lish of one of this century's
most significant and influen-
tial books - the monumental
Sein und Zeit, which sparked
in its German edition the
world-wide existentialist move-
ments in philosophy, religion,
psychiatry, literature, the arts,
and politics.

"The most important philo-
sophical work to come out of
Europe in this century."
-JAMES K. FEIBLEMAN

This translation by John
Macquarrie and Edward Rob-
inson is fully annotated and
contains helpful glossaries.

$12.50 at your bookseller

HARPER & ROW,
Publishers · N.Y. 16

CONTRIBUTORS

RICHARD STERN'S story will ap-
pear next year in his collection,
Teeth, Dying and Other Matters.

RICHARD ELLMANN is in England
writing a book on Oscar Wilde.

DAVID FERRY, who teaches at
Wellesley College, is working on
his second book of poems.

COLIN MACINNES is an English
novelist and essayist. His most
recent book is England, half Eng-
lish.

RUFUS MATHEWSON is a mem-
ber of the Russian Institute at
Columbia University.

SUSAN SONTAG will write on the
theatre for PR, beginning with the
next issue.

JOHN SIMON has written a new
collection of essays, Acid Test.

Correction: We regret that ALLEN
GROSSMAN'S name was mis-
spelled in the last issue.

=== Page 7 ===
JOSEPH CONRAD: Giant in Exile
A penetrating evaluation of Conrad's major stories and
novels set against the drama of his life and contradictory
personality. "An admirable...guide, perhaps the most
useful single volume on Conrad for a new reader."-
Lawrence Graver, Nineteenth-Century Fiction.
Cloth $5.00 Paper $1.95

Leo
Gurko

THE MAGIC LANTERN OF MARCEL PROUST

Howard
Moss
A distinguished poet explores the mysteries of Proust's
great novel. "An enlightened, enlightening appreciation
of Remembrance of Things Past. Mr. Moss is brief but not
summary, and his style is elegant." The New Yorker.
$3.50

EXPLORATIONS

William
Butler
Yeats
A collection of Yeats' important prose works that have
long been out of print. "These essays show his extraordi-
nary gift for being right.... His is a triumph of intuition
over knowledge." Frank O'Connor, The New Yorker.
Times Book Review.
$5.95

THE FLOWER AND THE CASTLE

Maurice
Valency
An examination of the life and works of Ibsen and Strind-
berg, through whose influence the present-day dramatic
tradition has chiefly evolved. All the major works of the
two great Scandinavians are considered in detail. $7.50

DAUBER and REYNARD THE FOX

John
Masefield
This special edition of Dauber and Reynard the Fox com-
bines two classic tales in verse by England's Poet Laureate.
Mr. Masefield has written a new introduction for each
poem, and included, as well, a glossary of the sea terms
that appear in Dauber.
$2.95

MACMILLAN 60 Fifth Avenue, New York 10011

=== Page 8 ===
BOLLINGEN SERIES
FALL 1963

HINDU POLYTHEISM
By ALAIN DANIÉLOU. The Vedic gods, the great Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva
Trinity, the Goddess Shakti, and the secondary deities in the enormous
Hindu pantheon are interpreted as their worshipers envisaged them. 33
halftone plates, with text figures. November $8.50

Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, Volumes 9-11
SYMBOLISM IN THE DURA SYNAGOGUE
By ERWIN R. GOODENOUGH. An examination of the wall paintings dis-
covered in the third-century synagogue in eastern Syria. 354 illustrations
in monochrome collotype, 21 in four-color offset. November $25.00

HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL:
SELECTED PLAYS AND LIBRETTI
Edited and introduced by MICHAEL HAMBURGER. Six works, ranging
from "Der Rosenkavalier" to the profound and momentous play "The
Tower," demonstrate Hofmannsthal's dramatic versatility.
October $7.50

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 14
MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS
An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis
of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy
Translated by R. F. C. Hull. In his longest and last scientific work, Jung
brilliantly demonstrates that the alchemists were symbolically working
out problems deeply rooted in the unconscious. Ten plates, bibliography,
and index. September $7.50

THE TAO OF PAINTING
By MAI-MAI SZE. A study of the ritual disposition of Chinese painting, with
a translation of the famous Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting
(1679-1701). 12 gravure plates, 2 in color, and 428 illustrations from the
Manual. New, one-volume edition, boxed. October $17.50

Bollingen Series is published by Bollingen Foundation. Distributed by Pantheon Books, 22 East 51st St.,
New York 22, N. Y. For detailed catalogue, write to Bollingen Series, 140 East 62nd Street, New York 21, N. Y.

=== Page 9 ===
TEETH
Richard Stern

In the multiplied objects of the external
world I had no thoughts but for the
teeth. For these I longed with a phren-
zied desire.
—Poe, “Berenice”

Ah Miss Wilmott, how did you come to think what you
did? Is all your interpreting so askew, so deformed by self-interest?
And is your self-interest so unbroken a pup that any street whistle
seems its master's voice? To think that you were misled as wisdom
itself was being certified in your aching jaws? Those third molars,
so long held back, and then so painfully emergent, fangs and cusps
clinging savagely to the gum flesh. “Impacted,” said Dr. Hobbie,
and despite the kind, soft-beaked, confident face behind the metal
glasses, you shuddered. You remembered the last one, also impacted,
eight months before, also in the Bank Building, though two flights
up on the ninth floor in a large office afloat in the strawberry light
off the lake. Dr. Grant, the extractionist, Miss Blade's recommenda-
tion, a strong fellow with white moustache and a post on the Executive
Council of the American Dental Association, just back from a down-
town committee meeting to have a go at your trouble. A lovely
May day, the creamy air swimming over the I.C. tracks, enough to
make you forget the pain, until Dr. Grant, eyes aswell under his
speckled horn rims, leaned over your open mouth and blocked out
the view. And then, the tugging, the hammering, the cracking,
chiselling, wrestling, blood squirting into the cotton gagging your
mouth, blood dripping past it down your throat, your heart pumping,

=== Page 10 ===
328
RICHARD STERN
your great brow streaming, your wet palm grabbed tight by the
fierce little nurse, Miss Romeyne. Afterwards, on the couch, another
blow, Dr. Grant sitting beside you, your long legs dripping feet over
the edge, hand to your swelling jaw. “How does a hundred dollars
sound, Miss Wilmott? Pretty fair? Including post-operant care,
anaesthesia, the works. I know you're a teacher.”
The pain lasted twelve days, unabated by Miss Blade's late
revelation that she had been charged a hundred and twenty-five
dollars. For this omission, Miss Blade would not get to know about
Dr. Hobbie. Not that she'd appreciate him anyway. Miss Blade
favored all the weak sisters in the department, the students with the
loudest line of gab and the worst minds who took so long with their
dissertations that they completed them and their scholarly life
simultaneously.
Miss Wilmott learned of Dr. Hobbie through her once-a-week
cleaning woman, Mrs. Spiders, whom she passed in the lobby of the
bank as she was on her way to request the bank to honor Dr. Grant's
hundred dollars, although her balance was zero until the first of
June. Mrs. Spiders was on her way to Dr. Hobbie. “Yeah, Miss
Wilma, mah Hobbie's a grand tooth man.” Mrs. Spiders' syntax
obscured identification, but she spoke of him now and then through-
out the year, so that when Miss Wilmott's second tooth began
cracking her head open the night after Epiphany, the vision of the
great dental surgeon soothed it till morning, when she phoned him
up and got a noon appointment. Dr. Hobbie was seldom too busy
to squeeze in a sufferer. Half his business was “street business”
anyway, delivery boys feeling pain between the first and fifth floors,
taxi-drivers from the Yellow Cab Stand, sales people from the local
stores, even receptionists from other dentists' offices in the building.
A good sign. Not that Miss Wilmott needed confirmatory signs.
Except for that first day. An initial visit to Dr. Hobbie was
disconcerting, especially if your appointment came on Wednesdays.
Every Tuesday, he danced at the Tall Girl's Club till three a.m., and
Wednesday was one long yawn for him. An unrepessed yawn, for
Dr. Hobbie repressed no habit that any normal dentist would. No
dentist with a smart practice walked around with his smock so loosely
tied that a skinny, peppermint-colored back exposed itself to his
patients' gaping faces. No normal dentist worked in a shelveless

=== Page 11 ===
TEETH 329

closet which barely enabled his movements, and certainly no nurse's.
As for answering the phone, tucking it between shoulder and jaw
while continuing to drill, or taking long looks at Educational Channel
Spanish lessons while working in a silver filling, these were procedures
which-Miss Wilmott imagined-might lead to dismissal from the
A.D.A. Yes, there was almost no limit to the external defects of Dr.
Hobbie's practice.

But Hobbie was a dental genius. In thirty years of agonized
dental visits, Miss Wilmott had never known such not-only-painless,
but even pleasurable, sensations. Dr. Hobbie's office did not face the
strawberry-colored lake air but the west wall of the Bank Building;
there were no couches, no magazines, in fact nothing at all in the
scarcely redeemed cave of a waiting room but a kitchen chair and
a coat rack. But you almost never had to wait, and when you were in
the chair, there was almost no pain. The fees were ludicrously small,
even for her, a low grade instructor in the History Department. Ten
dollars for her impacted wisdom tooth, and for that there were sound-
wave drills, the best Swedish steel, a lecture on her lower jaw,
Mantovani playing Cole Porter on the hi-fi, and the sweetest of all
analgesics, Dr. Hobbie's account of his personal troubles.

These came out of him as naturally as his pale, thin back out
of the white smock. They were not unlike Miss Wilmott's own
troubles, at least his implicit ones. They had to do with Suzanne, his
tall, expert-dancer of a wife, who'd left him last June to live with
the Bank Building florist, Mr. Consolo, but who still somehow or
other extracted money from him, though they had no child to
support. Which led to another trouble: here he was, forty-two years
old, the only fellow he knew who had no children, as well as
the only one who had to spend half his time looking for girls with
whom to dance the samba and the twist, though he had a perfectly
good dancing wife of his own. The implicit troubles were, she knew,
those for which she had female equivalents.

It was her early insight into their equivalence that made her
think that Dr. Hobbie could help her with more than her teeth.
He wasn't the world's most attractive man, not even the most at-
tractive she'd known, which said a great deal; for her timid six
feet, popped eyes and no-nose face-she'd overheard someone say she
looked as if she'd been blotted-were no powerful magnet for men.

=== Page 12 ===
330
RICHARD STERN
In her entire life, there were very few times she'd gone out with
half-decent men. She'd come to think that perhaps it didn't matter,
that she could make it without a man. If only people would stop
pressuring her. Thousands of small pressures: salesgirls calling her
Mrs. when she bought her father's birthday shirts; people being
introduced to her at parties; being the extra girl and getting tied up
with the miserable extra man, more miserable when he saw her;
the hundreds and hundreds of self-pitying hours in her two rooms,
Jack Paar jabbering maniacally on the twelve-inch screen while
she shared him with Middlemarcli, its pages stained with the peanut
butter she sometimes supposed was more faithful to her than any
person on earth.

She had yens, God knows, though not as many as two-bit
Freudians would think. She'd even had a little experience, a summer
at Truro where her six feet and impressive learning had substituted
for a movie star's chest and model's face. There'd even been a
marriage proposal, from a Wyoming historian at the American
Historical meetings in '58. It turned out that he wanted introductions
to the scholarly Big Chiefs at Chicago. At least, though, it was on
the books, her chance at the middle-class nirvana.
As Hobbie's big-beaked, sandy face, a good-hearted parrot's,
leaned over her open mouth, even that first day, Miss Wilmott felt
a kind of root tremble in her heart. A sweet man, a poor troubled
fellow. Not a cretin either, though naive and uncultured. In dentistry,
he was actually a scholar, full of the history of instruments, surgical
procedures, technical advances. He spent weekends reading the
journals, and while Dr. Grant was in A.D.A. executive sessions, he
listened to papers. He was so enamored of his profession that she
began to pick up toothy tidbits for him, things she'd come upon in her
ubiquitous browsing in the stacks.

"Ever read ahhh Poe's Ber-ahhh-niece?"
"Nope. Spit out, Miss Wilmott."
Then, after rinsing with the sweet, violet water, "It's about a
man so insanely fond of teeth that he breaks open his former fiancée's
grave ahhh, pulls out all her teeth ahhh and keeps them in a box."
"Oh, my Lord," eyes furry with astonishment. "And I thought
I liked teeth. Little wider there, Miss Double-U."
Miss Wilmott read the Britannica on Teeth and Dentistry, soaked

=== Page 13 ===
TEETH
331

up tooth lore, began to think in tooth metaphors, and felt the root
tremble in her heart whenever Dr. Hobbie leaned over to pass a
steel shaft beneath her strong, white crowns. “There’s a tribe called
the Ndembu in Rhodesia which has a tooth ceremony called the
Ihamba, ahhh. They pull out the premolar incisor and their troubles
are supposed to come out with it. Then they have a tooth dance.”
“That’s really something. Not much longer now. Good girl.
Where do you find such things out?”
She puffed her cheeks with the violet water and spat as daintily
as possible into the bowl’s soft whirlpool. “Periodicals.”
“Periodicals?”
“Magazines. That was in the ahhh Rhodes-Livingstone Journal
last month.” Into her mouth and out, a silvery tool. “Dahhhhhh.”
“Just a little bit more now. There we are, almost out. I envy
you book people. Myself, I can’t . . . here we are,” holding up an
enamel needle bloodied with nerved dentine. “That’s the old trouble
maker. I think you’re going to be all right for a while now.”
“I might as well get everything cleaned up, Dr. Hobbie. As
long as I’m making real progress. I’d miss my visit anyway.”
With the hand that held the silver forceps in which her trouble-
maker lay, he brushed the soft tip of his beak back and forth, as if to
sniff out a proper response. “Might work a little on that back bite then
if you really want to go ahead and spend the money. It’ll run you
thirteen, fourteen dollars.” He opened the child’s notebook in which
he entered all appointments and payments. “That’ll be three-fifty
today, and we’ll set you down for next Thursday. Four-fifteen, o.k.,
right after Mr. Givens. He’s my other book patient.”
Thursday, she came a few minutes early and sat on the kitchen
chair listening to Dr. Hobbie tell Mr. Givens that he had this fine
teacher from the University coming right in, he wanted Mr. Givens
to meet her.
At 4:14 the door opened, you never had to wait, and a short,
good-looking Negro of forty, dressed in house painter’s stained cover-
alls, was introduced to her by Dr. Hobbie and said he was very glad
to meet her, was she a Marxist like the other teachers up there at
the University? and to her “I’m afraid not,” said he was disappointed,
he having been a Marxist for twenty years, the Manifester and the
Working Day being his favorite books of all time.

=== Page 14 ===
332
RICHARD STERN
Dr. Hobbie’s other book patient. After this, most of her appoint-
ments coincided with Mr. Givens’. She wondered if Dr. Hobbie also
brought his sales people together. At any rate, she exchanged a few
words each time with him while a beaming Hobbie stood by. Once
she recommended Herzen’s Memoirs to him and another time she
told him that she’d just reread the Manifesto and not only the
“Working Day,” but the whole first book of Capital. At this, Mr.
Givens struck a great hand to his fine brow. “You mean to say
there’s a whole book of that, and I don’t know it? Give me the
name there, Miss Wilmer. I’m ashamed of myself. I’ll go git it today
if I got to go to every bookstore in Chicago.” Miss Wilmott gave him
the name, told him it was readily available, and recommended the
Everyman Library Edition, one sixty-five for each of the volumes.
“God,” said Mr. Givens, “they could charge three or four dollars
for them, and I’d git them as quick as I’m going to now.” He held
out his hand, and she put her own great one into it. Dr. Hobbie
said, “What’d I tell you, George?”
Today Miss Wilmott’s tidbit was that biologists regarded fish
teeth as migrated scales. “I suppose our ancestors may have masticated
on the skins,” she said, as he placed her head back into the rest.
Dr. Hobbie said that that sure would make dentistry easy.
Then a large shape darkened the office door, a grey fedora pulled
nose-level on the head. “ ’night son,” it said.
“ ’night, Dad,” said Dr. Hobbie.
Though she’d not seen Hobbie’s father, a doctor from the floor
above, she knew that the glass cabinet of unfinished bridges and
tooth sets over by the television aerial was due to him, or rather
to the dying patients whom he felt would be comforted by his son’s
diverting skill. They often died in the midst of their absorbed
interest in refurbished mouths, and Miss Wilmott’s Dr. Hobbie
kept their work, as if, in some odd turn of the world, a mouth would
appear just right for one of the unfinished bridges.
“That your father?”
“Yep. That’s the old man. Been in this building since they put
it up. He’s a real good doctor if you need one.” He was washing his
hands, and she studied his reflection in the dark window. He took
off his smock, and she saw his skinny, harmless back, white and pink,
a rabbit scooting into a green shirt. “He helped me out with Suzanne

=== Page 15 ===
TEETH
333
last week. She hit a car. Two hundred bucks. I've got to pay her
lawyer. That doesn't seem fair, does it? I mean Consolo is no poor
man. They do well, even in winter. Three-fifty a dozen for irises."
She put on her coat. "What do I owe you today?"
"I put my book away. I guess I can't charge you, or they'll be
getting me up for not reporting income."
"I won't think of that," she said, and laid a five dollar bill on
top of his sterilizer.
He took out his wallet and gave her two dollars. "I'll drive you
home. It's another cold one."
"Lovely," said Miss Wilmott. She drove a '52 Pontiac which
hadn't started for most of January and February.
Out on Fifty-third Street, the wind was knifed for murder.
People passed like thugs, scarves pulled over mouths, hats down like
old Dr. Hobbie's to the nose. Ridges of steel ice humped the streets,
and every third corner had its famished crocodile of open car hood,
whining for life.
"I'll offer him supper," thought Miss Wilmott, though there
was nothing in the kitchen but two cans of roast beef hash, eggs, and
a loaf of Pepperidge Farm Bread. Nor could she take the chance of
asking him to let her shop. He'd not let himself be invited then.
"I'd like to give you a little supper, Dr. Hobbie. If you're free,
I mean."
"Gee."
"I don't get too many chances to cook for other people."
"That would be something, Miss Wilmott," but he was turning
around, looking for something. "Darn," he said. "Guess what? I
don't have the car today. It's in the garage. I am sorry, Miss
Double-U, I'll put you in a cab. Let me take a raincheck on that
supper, o.k.? It's real nice of you." And he opened a taxi door, put
her in, spoke to the driver and said "So long." Turned out he'd
paid the fare.
But Miss Wilmott had a bad night. The heat was low, her bed
was cold. She got up, put on a sweater and the furry bathrobe her
father'd sent her for her birthday. Feb. 2. Thirty-one. She turned on
WFMT. Buzz. It was three o'clock. Dr. Hobbie'd be coming home
from the Tall Girls. She sat back in the terrible green armchair
she'd gotten at Carmen the Movers for eight dollars. A troglodyte.

=== Page 16 ===
334
RICHARD STERN
The only arms that ever held her. How long was it going to go
on like this? She couldn't even get a man over for supper. For talk.
For an exchange of troubles. The enamel crown was off, the pulp
cavity cut away, and the tiny, mean, piranha nerves of the dentine
sang out in the iron cold of February. Today's Sun-Times remarked
that a marine had pole-vaulted sixteen feet, twenty years to the
day after another man had pole-vaulted fifteen. A photographer,
rapacious for a shot, had knocked down the bar and the record
might not be official. Dr. Hobbie had said he'd come for supper,
but the garage had his car. The grain of the world was wrong.
What could she do? She was a Ph.D. in English history, a low-grade
instructor at a high-grade university. If she wrote a few more articles
and a good book, they'd give her six years an an Assistant Professor
and then maybe tenure. She could get a tenure job right now
at lots of women's colleges. Down south, where the streets didn't
look like an illustration of the Inferno, where women were loved.
But she wouldn't live down south again. She'd gone a year to W.C.
in Greensboro, and she wouldn't live in a place where Mr. Givens
would have to sit in the back of a bus and drink from a different
water fountain. Maybe she'd go back east, nearer relatives, nearer
the marrying girls of her class at Wheaton. But she'd left such
dependence and such competition behind. She was a scholar. She
knew her stuff. She loved to work, to find out what happened, to
read two hundred-year-old periodicals, to trace in detail the rise of
sentimentality, the alteration in the attitudes toward children, toward
women, toward pain, toward dirt. But now, now. Tonight. She
could not read, not listen to the radio, not steam a kettle. She stared
at the arrested chaffinches in her stained rug border, the bricks and
boards which held the books she'd dragged around for years with
her, east, west, south, her swelling paunch. It was a terrible night.
Only self-consciousness kept her going. She brooded on until the
room turned fuzzy with fatigue and then she went off to sleep in
the troglodyte's arms.

Miss Wilmott did not see Dr. Hobbie again until Spring. She
was writing an article on the use of opium in England during the
first two decades of the nineteenth century, and it took up every
minute of the time that she did not give her classes, committee

=== Page 17 ===
TEETH
335
meetings, papers, meals and pillow. Weekends, nights, vacation days
found her in Harper Library or downtown at the Newberry reading
account books, newspapers, doctors’ diaries, the works of Coleridge,
De Quincy, Bramwell Bronte and other well-known users of the
drug. Her fingers bore dots of yellow where the dust of the old
accounts bit into the curious, living flesh: her addiction marks. When
she got to the use of opium by dental surgeons, she was brought
up short.

It was May, a year from her terrible encounter with Dr. Grant.
Walking home from the bus stop one evening, facing the strawberry
light off the lake, she felt the root atremble in her heart. “Your liking
and your lust is fresh whyle May dooth last,/When May is gone,
of all the year the pleasant time is past.” Carpe diem, Miss Wilmott.
Old time is swiftly flying. “Oh dear,” she said, taking her long, slow
strides into the fading light. “It isn’t simple.”

But the next morning, she telephoned Dr. Hobbie and asked if
she could come in to have her teeth examined. No, there was nothing
special wrong except that her jaw ached when she ate ice cream,
and her bite was a little unsteady. Dr. Hobbie told her to come in on
Tuesday.

Monday night, he telephoned and said he was awfully sorry,
he couldn't see her tomorrow. “The old man kicked the bucket
today. This afternoon. I’ll be real busy tomorrow. How about Friday?”
“Of course,” she said, “and I’m awfully sorry about him.”
“Three-thirty, right in his office.” For a moment, she thought
it was her appointment time, and that he was moving into his father’s
office. “Had his stethoscope on a patient and kicked the bucket right
there, listening. Seventy-eight years old.”

Miss Wilmott could not think of opium that May night. There
was a burr stuck in the evening: Dr. Hobbie’s mortal phrase, “Kicked
the bucket.” It was not worthy. Offhandedness had limits. Distaste
helped blunt her disappointment at the postponement. By Thursday,
however, she could hardly wait to see him.

It was ten-thirty. She must have been his first patient, for she
had to wait outside the locked door. When he arrived, he said,
“Don’t have to work so hard now. The old man left me eighty-four
thousand bucks. Never thought he was within fifty of it. Suzanne
would hit the deck if she knew how much she lost out on. I’m

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336
RICHARD STERN
going to New York, take in some shows and restaurants before she
gets the word and tries to get her hands on it. I don't think she's
given up on me. Every so often, she gets soused up and calls me
on the phone, gives me a good chewing out. You don't do that if
you've given up on somebody. Maybe you can give me a list, Miss
Wilmott." A list of what-girls? "I don't know the restaurant situa-
tion too well there."
Ah. She said she knew very little about New York.
Dr. Hobbie's hands at her mouth were sure as ever, but Miss
Wilmott did not feel comfortable. He talked a blue streak. "People
been calling me day and night asking about the old man. They
can't figure out why his phone doesn't answer. Think they'd read
the papers. That's a nasty one you have back there." He touched
her with a silver prong. "I'm on the run every minute. Have to shut
off his phone, sub-let his office, the apartment. Papers, you have no
idea, writing relatives, the funeral. Dying is harder on the relatives
than the dead man. I'll bet getting born is easier. Not that I know
much about that. You ever had a child, Miss Wilmott?" He'd run
on too fast, and blushed. Miss Wilmott's file turned up a sentence,
"A blush is a primitive erection." Her own face chugged with
capillary action. "Of course not," he was saying. "Excuse me. I was
just shooting off. The old man's kind of thrown me. Never had a bad
word for me since I was a little tyke. Helped me through school,
helped me furnish the office, helped with Suzanne." Had his old
man given him the kitchen chair, the TV set, the glass case?
Miss Wilmott nearly invited him to dinner on the spot. But
held back. This time she'd prepare. There'd be another appointment
in a week. She'd invite him then.
Two days before the appointment she went down to Halstead
Street and bought a fine roast, a Greek cheese and olives, baklava, and
a beautiful egg plant which she would transform into a marvelous
Greek dish she'd read about in an eighteenth century cook book. It
took two days to make, and Miss Wilmott turned to it from her
opium with the energetic passion she knew great cooks must have.
So there she was, the day of her appointment, ready to show
her stuff. But oh how foolish was Miss Wilmott. The most untutored
person would not prepare so elegantly for an empty chair. If she'd
telephoned even one day early, Dr. Hobbie might have cancelled

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TEETH 337

his plane tickets to New York; for that's where he was going, one
hour and ten minutes after finishing up her mouth.
Her disappointment was immeasurable. Back she walked along
Fifty-third Street, hardly looking at the colors which the sun stirred
up in the chubby western clouds, hardly aware of the birds singing
goodnight to her from the cottonwood as she pushed her legs past
each other down Harper, Blackstone, Dorchester, Kenwood, and then
up Kimbark towards her apartment.
Nor did she see Mr. Givens, the housepainter, till he was
practically at her feet. "Hey there, Miss Wilmer. How ya doing this
fine evening?" He'd taken off his cap, was in coveralls, and he carried
a paper bag. Miss Wilmott's heart, which had jumped with fear,
calmed in recognition. And then in a brilliant flash, she remembered
the beautiful dinner waiting twenty feet up from where they stood.
The rest was simple. "Mr. Givens, I couldn't be more happy to see
anyone. Guess what just happened to me?" and she told him about
someone being called away from the dinner she'd cooked, an
emergency. Could he help her out and share it?
"Why Miss Wilmer, that's really something. I'm just going on
up to the Blackstone Library with a couple of hamburgers and a
jelly doughnut. I'm reading that Memoir book you told me about.
Best thing I ever looked at. I'd like to come up, it's real nice of you.
I'll read at it tomorrow night."
So Mr. Givens came and sat down at the table she'd set the
night before between her green troglodyte and the TV set with her
complete supply of Wedgwood picked up in the corners of State
Street pawn shops and Maxwell Street stands. It was a wonderful
dinner, praised by Mr. Givens as the last word in a lifetime of
good eating.
He was not bad company, either. He had strong opinions about
everything. There were the rich, who always argue about bills, never
paid you what they'd agreed to, always trying to cut your throat;
there were the sports-crazy people of Chicago, blowing off the air
raid sirens when the ball team won the darn pennant; there were
the "jaw-breakers" (whom she didn't identify with John Birchers
till he lumped them with the Bund and the Ku Kluxers) out to
loot everybody by scaring them out of their brains, not that there
were too many around to be scared out of; there were these Care-

=== Page 20 ===
338                                 RICHARD STERN
oaches and Milers, beat writers who were full of more hot air about
colored people than Talmadge and Bilbo; there was De Goal sitting
up in a French cloud while everybody in Paris killed themselves
with these plastic bombs; there was the Russians, more boojwa than
the capitalists, never thinking beyond their own bellies, not that he
should be thinking about anything else after such a wonderful meal,
for which Miss Wilmer, I never will git to thank you enough.
With which he was up, a handsome man with a fine moustache,
grey at the temples, a high forehead, a very distinguished-looking and
intelligent self-educated man, probably unmarried, though she didn't
know and wouldn't dream of asking, and if the world wasn't the way
it was, and if he could possibly get interested in her, who knows if
despite everything that separated them, she would not enjoy cooking
for him and taking his praise and affection every single remaining
evening of her life. If she could take anyone that much, there being,
after all, much to be said for freedom, one's own time, doing one's
own work at one's own speed, so goodnight, Mr. Givens, it's been a
real pleasure, mutual, yes, some time again and I certainly would
like to go out with you, no absolutely, I'm not in the least offended
by the offer, I'm proud you asked me.
The next week Miss Wilmott began writing her article. It flew.
Never had she written so fast, so well. In one week, she laid out a
thirty-nine page first draft, and she knew that there wouldn't be
more than a handful of changes. Still, she distrusted compositional
euphoria, remembered Horatian maxims, and laid the article aside
for a few days before turning to the final draft.
Fatal delay.
The evening Dr. Hobbie was due back from New York, she
sat in the troglodyte's arms, fingering her reference cards, thinking
about plunging ahead. On the very first card, the terrible equation,
“Picul=1331/2 lbs.” swooped towards her eyes. “Oh no,” she said
out loud. “No, no, no.” But there it was. Her calculations about
imports had been pegged at a hundred and sixty-six and a half
pounds to the picul. She'd misread her skewered threes. An absurd
error, yet an easily corrigible one. But, no, those thirty false pounds
lodged in Miss Wilmott like splinters she was too fearful to dig
out of her tender article. Infection set in. Her beautiful account of
opium consumption, rich in psychological insight, economic analysis,

=== Page 21 ===
TEETH
social theory and literary allusion rose rankly to her nostrils, a
festered lily.
That night her jaw throbbed in sympathetic misery. Her know-
ledge, her research, her opium, what were they now in the dark,
stranded by her needs, errors, miscalculations, her muddled self-
interest? In agony, Miss Wilmott reached for the phone and called
Dr. Hobbie's home number. Four, five, six rings. The receiver was
on its way down when she heard his "Hallo."
"Oh Dr. Hobbie. Thank goodness. Forgive me for calling you.
I wasn't even sure you were back. It's Miss Wilmott. I'm in awful
pain."
It was right to call him, said Dr. Hobbie, he'd just gotten in,
he was barely asleep. He'd meet her in twenty minutes at the office,
no, better, he'd pick her up in fifteen minutes. Yawn. That too quick?
"I don't want you to have to do that. I'm just being nervous. It
probably was knowing that you'd come back that made me tooth-
conscious. If you were in New York, I probably wouldn't have
noticed."
"We'll take a look anyway, Ethel. See you in a few minutes.
Bye now." Click.
He'd called her Ethel. Bye now. Bye now. By now he was taking
pajamas off his long, pale body, slipping into underwear, pants, shirt.
She dressed in a flash, a blue cotton with her initials figured in
the lapel, EAW, an unfinished word. Downstairs, she waited at the
door, her nose blob flattened further against the glass, waiting.
The first car brought her out to the stoop, but though it paused in
mid-career, it was not Hobbie, and went on. Few neutral cars would
stop for Miss Wilmott.
There was a bite to the air. Miss Wilmott was starting up the
stairs for a sweater when Dr. Hobbie's open Dodge pulled up in
front of the house. She ran down and climbed in beside him.
Oh, how gay she felt. "It's wonderful of you to do this."
Behind his glasses, beaked the soft face. "I'm kind of proud to
get a night call. Doesn't happen more than twice a year. Makes me
feel like the old man."
Suddenly, Miss Wilmott was in a stew: there was not a splinter
of pain left in her body. Nothing. Yet it had been genuine. Her whole
head had gone out on strike with pain. There was no question
339

=== Page 22 ===
340                                            RICHARD STERN

of that. There may have been a psychic trigger, but the somatic
   twenges were genuine. Now there was absolutely nothing. Could it
   be that sitting beside this gentle fool, this beau sabreur de la bouche,
   was enough to soothe her uproarious gums?
       At the Bank Building, all was dark. Dr. Hobbie's keys got them
   into the elevator and his office. He lit up his little workshop of
   analgesia, put a smock over his short-sleeved shirt, flipped a few
   switches, and before she'd summoned the strength to tell him how
   fine she felt, he'd sat her in the chair and stared into her mouth.
   "Whew. Good you called me. This must have been killing you.
   Can't remember a worse-looking abcess. We'll lance it and see what
   we can do."
       Sir Percival. He was over her, touching, spearing, dabbing,
   in-and-out of her mouth, his beaky head swimming in a kind blue
   light. There was music—the hi-fi—“Is It True What They Say About
   Dixie?" Time flew. It was bitter dark, bitter cold, the iron February
   cold; she was lying down, face up, staring at the wicked ice smother-
   ing the earth. Above her head, the whacking, cracking blade opened
   up the ice. Hobbie's terrible lit face, a starving bird's, gleamed in the
   white air. His talons, fierce Swedish tools, reached for her mouth.
   "Berenice," he screamed, "Berenice." And out, out they came, one
   by one, her thirty glorious crowns, roots, rapt from her yielding
   jaws. Oh it was over. She lay back, vacant, depleted, fulfilled.
       Dr. Hobbie leaned over, a bloody three-pronged crown caught
   in his silver forceps. "There's your trouble-maker. He won't bother
   you ever again. How do you feel, Ethel?"
       She nodded. Her face felt shot away by the novocaine. The
   nod was like shifting a boulder.
       "We'll pick up a little pain-killer and chloroseptic for you, and,
   I'll take you home."
       She raised his good dentist's hand and patted it for thanks.
   For more than thanks.
       In the car, she asked him if he'd seen some good shows.
       "Not a one. Went dancing most of the time. Those places that
   sell you tickets. They're not bad. You get some fine dancers. And then
   last Saturday who showed up at the hotel but old Suzanne. I knew
   she'd smell out the old man's dough."
       It was wickedly dark out. They were on Cottage Grove, a five-

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TEETH 341
mile corridor of passive malfunction. The May night blew cold on
Miss Wilmott's brow. Struggling through the rocky, cotton-lined
resistance in her mouth, she said, "Well, well. And what did you do?"
What a question, Miss Wilmott! Where do you come off to ask
such a question?
"She's not so bad, Ethel. You get used to a certain person, and
then you take her faults with her better parts. Flags." Indeed there
were, on stores. "Decoration Day."
"When May is gone, of all the year the pleasant time is past,"
said Miss Wilmott.
"I like June," said Dr. Hobbie. "I was born in June. I graduated
in June. I got married in June. Of course, Suzanne ran off to Consolo
last June. Every month has its good and bad times."
They were outside the drugstore. He ran in, and she waited
alone in the car, her head back on the seat, aching.
"I don't have my purse," she said when he came back.
"Forget it," he said, and put the package in her lap. "They give
it to me cut-rate. I'll stick you next time."
Oh stick me now. Never, never. Her great head leaned against
his shoulder and without warning, large tears bloomed and fell in
her face. "Oh dear," she said.
Dr. Hobbie took his hands off the steering wheel and put them
around her. "That's all right, Ethel. Just what you're supposed to do
after an operation. You're going to be o.k."
She was not going to be o.k. The Ndembu's troubles left them
when their teeth were pulled; not hers. The Ndembu danced to
celebrate; Dr. Hobbie had not taught her the twist.

=== Page 24 ===
Richard Ellmann

ROMANTIC PANTOMIME IN OSCAR WILDE

The disrepute into which estheticism fell at the end of the
nineteenth century did not lose Oscar Wilde his favorite audience
of the young, even in this country. For a time the First World War
countered his tenets by discrediting graceful communication and
by causing artists to stop using the word art. It seemed that the
ambiance of truth must properly be crude and inarticulate: style
consisted in laying hold of the aptest monosyllables. Today pas-
sionate muteness has in its turn become stale, and the verbal dexterity
of Wilde reasserts itself, as if minds had begun to long for such
pontifical impudence. Rupert Hart-Davis's splendid edition of Wilde's
letters and new books on Lord Alfred Douglas, Ada Leverson, and
John Gray, indicate a renewed interest in Wilde as a man, while
the production of Lady Windermere's Fan this spring in Moscow, and
of The Importance of Being Earnest in Paris, confirm that his
comedies transcend class, fashion, and nation. He is likely to remain
the one writer of the nineties whom everyone reads or, more pre-
cisely, has read.
Some of his persistent interest lies in a characteristic that, along
with his girth, he shares with Dr. Johnson: he was greater than any
of his works, and occupies, as he himself insisted, a “symbolical”
relation to his age. He was highly conscious of living at the end of
the nineteenth century rather than at its beginnings, and he empha-
sized directly or by implication what he held to be his differences
from his predecessors. He complained that Byron, for example, was
too much involved with the passions. He enforced that particular
contrast by declaring in a letter that in the late Victorian age it is
the scabbard which wears out the sword. If the early romantics had

=== Page 25 ===
OSCAR WILDE
343
celebrated nature, Wilde, as a late romantic, deplored it. "A sun-
set is no doubt a beautiful thing," he said, "but perhaps its chief
use is to illustrate quotations from the English poets." And he re-
marked that Wordsworth "found in stones the sermons he had al-
ready hidden there." He said to a friend, "Nature is a foolish place
to look for inspiration in, but a charming one in which to forget one
ever had any."

The early romantics had upheld simplicity and directness as
virtues; Wilde declared these were not essential, and indicated his
own preference for complexity and even obscurity. "Our Art is of
the Moon and plays with shadows," he said with approval; he fol-
lowed Verlaine in calling for nuances, and in expressing distaste for
clear statement as for brute fact. The world of human experience
had palled, he decided, by the end of the century: "Life," Wilde
remarked, "is a great disappointment." (He had said the same of
the Atlantic Ocean and of Niagara Falls.) The point was not to
live life but to play with it: "It is more difficult to tell about a
thing than to do it." The early romantics could still be aroused by
heroic action, but Wilde felt that action is useless or, if not useless,
vulgar, and that one's hopes for its outcome must almost certainly
be dashed. Therefore he had no heroes in the traditional sense: "The
one person who has more illusions than the dreamer," he said, "is
the man of action. He, indeed, knows neither the origin of his
deeds nor their results." Wilde's hero was not Prometheus but the
dandy, Algernon Moncrieff, who preferred lying down to standing
up, and whose most disastrous passion was for cucumber sandwiches.
Even when Wilde advocated socialism he did so on the ingeniously
antisocial grounds that socialism will free us of the tedious responsi-
bility of looking after other people and enable us to worry only
about ourselves. If Blake considered his enemies wicked, Wilde found
his to be absurd. If Byron had a dreadful secret which he could not
talk about, Wilde had a secret he was always talking about. By
such broad and jaunty gestures he attempted to formulate his own
place.

Wilde could not fully understand his relation to his age, though
he perceived very early that he had one, because he never learned
to estimate either his powers or his desires accurately even in the
period when he supposed he had become humble. In a lofty passage

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OSCAR WILDE 345

society for help and protection." But this act was fully in character,
as will become apparent. Even Wilde's offense seems symbolic in this
way: the pertinent point about homosexuality is that it is not a crime
at all, while the point about Byron's incest, if we take that as the
symbolic crime of the early part of the century, is that it is almost
always and everywhere a crime.

All Wilde's discussion of homosexuality suffers from senti-
mentality. Though he tries to relate it to his general sense of guilt
at having been undisciplined, he cannot come to grips with it in
moral terms. That is why De Profundis, when read in its censored
version, is like a stage confession, and when read in its totality (in
Hart-Davis's edition), is chiefly an exposure of another man's faults.
As Wilde says to Lord Alfred Douglas, to whom it is addressed, "I
blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I allowed you to
bring on me." (To Robert Ross he wrote, "I admit I lost my head.
I let him do what he wanted.") Yet even this confession ends in a
proposal that, almost as soon as Wilde is released from prison, they
should meet. Wilde's real view of his offense was quite different
from the judicial point of view of his time, but he could never
bring himself to say so in print, and the principle of sexual freedom,
which has been maintained by others with some moral grandeur, as
he knew, is never expressed in his writings. At his trial he made
his famous defense of the friendship of old men and young, with
Greek examples (though Dorian Gray moralized an opposite view),
but in the context of his own relations with boys at a male brothel
this was appealing to courtly love as a defense of whoring.

Wilde was reluctant to try to stop people from regarding him
as a sinner; it was a kind of reputation he had enjoyed from the
time his first poems appeared, when respected citizens like Colonel
Thomas Wentworth Higginson of Boston complained in the press
that they were indecent, a distinction they could not really claim. So
far from curbing this talk about himself, Wilde assisted it; he sur-
prised André Gide by the open imprudence of his behavior in Algiers
in 1891, he wrote his interpretation of Shakespeare's friendship with
Mr. W. H. and published it when it was bound to add to the talk
about him, and he surrounded Dorian Gray with the atmosphere
of unmentionable acts. So we are obliged to say that the role of
public sinner was one that Wilde had for a long time aspired to

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RICHARD ELLMANN

fill, although he did not wish to be taken altogether seriously at it.
Sometimes he thought of his character as a palimpsest, with per-
versity scrawled over a fine original manuscript; as he said in the
sonnet “Hél as,” there had been a time when he possessed “ancient
wisdom and austere control,” but he had sacrificed them to become
“a stringed lute upon which all winds can play.” (In a letter written
when he was twenty-three, he said, “I shift with every breath of
wind and am weaker and more self-deceiving than ever.”) In this
image, the Aeolian harp, which for the romantic poets was in tune
with nature, is in tune only with man’s baser nature. Actually he
had never possessed either ancient wisdom or austere control, nor
had he ever been an Aeolian harp, for the capacity for self-surrender
(as opposed to wobbling) was one he did not possess. The maga-
zine Punch complained early in his career, “His name is Wilde, but
his poetry’s tame.” In pederasty he was polite, in self-immolation he
was impudent. Wilde liked to think of women as sphinxes without
secrets, of certain friends as egoists without egos, and so on, but
this sense of the flawed surface of others came from his being, him-
self, a romantic without full conviction. Rousseau described in his
Confessions real faults for which he felt real remorse, but Wilde
never particularizes his offenses, as if individual acts (except when
committed by Lord Alfred Douglas) had no importance in them-
selves, and he so empurples both his sense of guilt and his sense of
repentance that they lose reality.

Instead of becoming the scapegoat of his age, he became, some-
what involuntarily, his own scapegoat. He wished to betray himself,
but only a little, to destroy himself, but only a part. The role of
victim—Sebastian or Marsyas—was one among several, including
the dandy and the apostle of joy, that he aspired to play through.
In his early flirtation with Catholicism, he wrote a friend that he
would go to call on Newman “to burn my fingers a little more.”
He half enticed the age to crucify him, half lost his nerve in the
process, meaning or almost meaning to pull back at the last. But
the age was unexpectedly eager (like most ages), and the right to
choose left him before he had time to exercise it. So he emulated
his father’s disgrace, exceeded it even, and fulfilled his own half-
wish, no less felt for being passive and scarcely conscious, to kill
the success he loved but secretly impugned. It would be wrong to

=== Page 29 ===
OSCAR WILDE 347
assume that this image of destroying the object of affection came to
him only after his fall, to be expressed in "The Ballad of Reading
Gaol." In that poem the act of killing what we love is made largely
deliberate, as it is also in Salome, written in 1893; but in other
works Wilde, like his Lord Arthur Savile, blamed fate rather than
volition. In a poem written about 1880, "Humanitad," Wilde de-
clared that we are by nature our own enemies, that we are both
Judas and Christ, "the lips betraying and the life betrayed." The
same mixture of flaunting and fleeing appears in his conduct after
he was found guilty; there was time to escape to France, and his
friends urged him to go, but Wilde could not decide, and the half-
packed suitcase which the police found when they arrested him is a
kind of emblem of his state of mind. Wilde thought he detected a
similarity to himself in Hamlet, and his interpretation of Shakespeare's
play is very much in character; for Wilde Hamlet is a man who
spies on his own actions, who instead of trying to be "the hero of
his own history wishes to be the spectator of his own tragedy." Yet
when all is said about the cross-cutting of Wilde's impulses, the force
of his personality (before prison life eroded away half of it) was
such that the spiteful age seems to be immolated with him, and one's
first association with that trying literary period is always Wilde,
pulpy, brilliant, will-less.

To read him today is to become aware in all his writing of
that hesitating, much-braked momentum which leads him towards
his pathetic fall. There is a certain trepidation mixed with the gay
versatility that samples all the literary forms in turn, not only those
he listed in De Profundis but others as well—fairy tales, a novel, a
play in French, a confession. He is apt to use the same witty re-
marks in different works, as if fearful he will lose his audience with-
out them, and aware that they will cover over deficiencies of plot
for the time being at least. In characterization he is only a little
interested, though he contributes a splendid character to English
comedy in the lounger who appears in most of his plays and in his
novel. As for the wit itself, its balance seems more hazardously main-
tained than we had thought; and while it pretends such arrogance,
it seeks with a nervous humility to please us. Wilde is not without
affection for the conventions he jocularly throws down; after he
leaves the room, as he knows, they will be put back in their place;

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RICHARD ELLMANN

and Shaw was right in saying that Wilde’s unconventionality was
“the pedantry of conventionality.” Wilde develops the theme that the
artist is at war with society, and goes on a lecture tour—and to
America—to win society’s applause for it. The amiability of his wit
is admirable; his friends regarded it as one of his greatest virtues and
it is so; of all writers, Wilde was probably the best company. But
Whistler had a rancorous insight when he perceived that even kind-
ness had a weak point, a vulnerable man’s unwillingness to take the
button off the foil.

Regarded more justly, this amiability came both from his
temperament and from his convictions. He sensed that a perfervid
romanticism was out of date, and he was glad to summon up para-
doxes, akin to those Blake wrote down with indignation, in startling-
ly good humor. Wilde said in Paris later that Napoleon was greater
at St. Helena than he had been at Austerlitz, that in fact St. Helena
was the greatest subject in the world; he meant that defeated exile
was, for a writer as for a general, a greater theme than war. Direct
combat never attracted him. He was quick to declare that Shelley
was too rebellious, and his own “Sonnet to Liberty,” composed at
an age (twenty-five) when he might have been expected to be
rash, is closely hedged: it derides those who seek liberty more than
it praises them, and ends with the equivocal comment, “And yet, /
Those Christs that die upon the barricades, / God knows it I am
with them, in some things.” He is attracted by the wildness of their
self-sacrifice in part because it outdoes his own. Their image fascin-
ates him, as did the image of Christ, not as has been said because
he fancies himself to be Christ, but because he knows he is not
Christ, he knows he will flub his own martyrdom.

The “Sonnet to Liberty” is a rather brief tribute after the odes
to liberty written earlier in the century, and it must be the only poem
on this subject written during these hundred years which ends so
discreetly. Yet when Wilde was asked in San Francisco if it repre-
sented his political creed, he said no and blamed it on “the fire
of youth.” The same embarrassment appears in Wilde’s first play,
Vera, where the heroine, who is a nihilist, proves in the end to be
more sympathetic to benevolent despotism than to democracy. In-
stead of assassinating the Czar she kills herself and cries that in so
doing she has saved Russia. The young hero in Wilde’s verse play,

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OSCAR WILDE 349

The Duchess of Padua, experiences a similar change of heart. When
he learns that his father has been killed by the Duke of Padua, he
agrees at once to kill the duke. But at the last moment he shies away
from murder, and, with extraordinary love of verbal techniques,
simply leaves his victim a letter urging him to repent.
Much as Wilde liked to think of himself as a creature over-
come by passion, he was not capable of so unmitigated an energy,
and his preference for characters who generously pull back from
violence at the last moment suggests again how full he was of
checks, of rivulets rather than rivers of emotional force. In his
Newdigate prize poem, “Ravenna,” he notes that Ravenna has
shown little interest in her own emancipation, and tells the city not
to wake from her slumbers; it is enough that she rests there mocking
all human greatness. Next, as if to satisfy both worlds, he says the
city may yet wake. Then all verges off into dreamy contemplation.
Wilde’s conscious rebellion was only against dullness, a quality
shared without partisanship by both conservatives and liberals. The
only weapon he cared to use against them was wit, anger being
something for old men, not young. Even the rigidity of old age
is tolerable because it is funny, and Wilde makes no effort to do
more than point it out as preposterous. His model was a young
rebel who could keep his friends and be invited to dinner parties.
For Wilde, in fact, wit became a dandyism of the mind, his
special form to go with that other dandyism he so much admired
and imitated, the cadenced prose of Newman and Pater. His at-
tempts to copy their styles were unsuccessful because lacking in
subtlety. He is hypnotized by words of color like “white” or “purple”
(he wrote a woman poet that even Keats would have envied her
the phrase “purple barge in purple shadow on the seas”), by vague-
ly sinister words like “strange,” “curious,” or “monstrous.” Expres-
sions already given up as dated by poets he adopts for his prose with-
out a scruple, and when he is not turning clichés upon their heads he
is apt to be indulging in them without irony, as if to go the ro-
mantic poets, and even the Victorians, one better. Wilde’s serious
conception of beauty always betrayed him; he was at his worst in
delineating his only ideal. Walt Whitman had told him as much
in Camden in 1882 when he countered Wilde’s talk of beauty with
the businesslike comment that “beauty is a result, not an abstraction.”

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RICHARD ELLMANN

Wilde's mildly shocking epigrams are much better than his
strained adjectives; they are harder to come by, and they are meant
to leave the audience somewhat unconvinced, arrested by their witti-
ness more than by their credibility. That they could be expressed at
all is the marvel, and their very frivolity becomes almost an inde-
pendent form of art by implying that every home truth is so largely
false, and that its opposite, if not precisely true, is at least merrily
discomfiting. Yet there is another attraction of those epigrams such
as "I can resist anything but temptation," or "It is perfectly
monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against
one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true," or "To
lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks
like carelessness," or "To love oneself is the beginning of a life-
long romance," or "The Bible is a book that has done so much
harm that I despair of doing anything to equal it." We feel in them
the rhythms of reassuring platitudes, of proverbial certainties, and
cutting across them the intransigences of individual thought. We
have the pleasure of affirming the ancien régime and of rebelling
against it at the same time. Long live the king, we cry, as we cut
off his head. Wilde was candid enough in one of his essays, "The
Truth of Masks," where he admitted to exaggerating his position
deliberately so as to develop an "artistic standpoint" "with much of
which," he said, "I entirely disagree," and presumably anticipated
others would also. This was not just a debater's trick to quiet critics.
"A truth in art," he said in more profound self-justification, "is that
whose contrary is also true." The doctrine is adapted from Blake,
for whom the battle of contraries was much more deeply rooted and
ferociously felt, but it was pertinent enough to Wilde because art
had become for him a network of encounters between dead platitudes
and the resuscitating artist. To be always taking standpoints without
steady conviction may however become uncomfortable, and Wilde
may well have committed himself to socialism, on very much of
his own terms, in an attempt to possess more completely his own soul.
Even the exaggerations in Wilde's essays have since his death
come to seem more characteristic and less wilful. The doctrines of
estheticism as he formulated them are more than clever overstate-
ments of his school. They stem from need as well as caprice, for they
constitute an exoneration. To consider life wasteful and disorderly

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OSCAR WILDE 351

is nothing new, but to go on to disengage the artist utterly from
life, to make him omnipotent, imperturbable, divinely free, is to
evolve not an esthetic theory but an image of regeneration. Assump-
tions which are usefully comic Wilde tries to shape into a half-serious
esthetic; all that is real is obnoxious and ugly; insincerity improves
upon sincerity, lies upon repulsive truth; to brush aside the circum-
stances of one's life is to become pure. We put on our masks (and
Wilde was the first writer in English to dwell upon the truth of
masks) to be absolved of an unbearable burden, our lives. "In so
vulgar an age as this we all need masks," he writes in a letter of 1894.
"The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us,"
Wilde had himself say and would like himself to believe. This desire
to be insulated from real emotion, this nostalgia for aplomb, levels
life into whatever we have contempt for or anxiety about, and makes
art the place where our thin skins turn to marble.
Wilde's discovery of the mask reflected in part his uneasiness
with his private life, and it also brought into England, in portable
though misleading form, the symboliste doctrine that the artist ap-
proaches the real world as circuitously as a detective attempting to
piece together from inadequate evidence an almost unfathomable
crime. The doctrine reaches a subtler exposition in Wilde's younger
compatriot, Yeats, who perceived that the mask was a useful figure
for the way the mind constantly transforms its atmosphere and is
itself altered, in a reciprocal process of conversion. In Wilde's more
simplified form, the interest does not lie in the esthetic theory,
which is perhaps no more than a taste for varied self-expression
with hieratic sanction, but rather in that for him the doctrine of
the mask is itself a mask. His theme is not as he supposes the
divorce of art from life, but its inescapable arraignment by experi-
ence in spite of all those witty protests he makes, in full awareness
of their futility.

Wilde's creative works almost invariably end in a ceremonial
unmasking, though in his late romantic and indulgent way the
ceremony usually is not open to the general public and takes place
before only one or two persons. The Ideal Husband admits to being
as frail as the next man, and acknowledges that his political position
was gained by divulging an official secret. The respectable Lady
Windermere recognizes, as she recovers her incriminating fan, that

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RICHARD ELLMANN

she is as frail as the next woman, and owes her rescue to a person
whom she had once felt free to despise. Dorian Gray deprives himself
of his painted concealment. Wilde liked to confuse the issue by re-
peating that he had treated life itself as the supreme mode of fic-
tion, but it was the destruction of this mode that animated his crea-
tive writings. The hand that languidly holds the lily suddenly shakes
an admonitory finger, just when we had forgotten that admonitions
could exist. The ultimate virtue in Wilde's essays is pretense, but
the dénouement of his dramas and narratives, no matter from what
varied sources he borrows their plots, is always the same: pretense
is let go.

From this point of view his wit can be regarded as essential
to his personality rather than as one of its decorative flourishes.
Wilde, it is true, made out in De Profundis that his taste for per-
versity in passion was like his taste for paradox in the sphere of
thought, but as with all his confessions, those social acts close to
pantomime, this one was too easy. The essence of his wit is that it is
a shrinkage of fat truths, a constant ripping away of society's masks.
If the exposure is never reduced to seriousness, that is because the
reader must be titillated with hyperbole, not faced down with grave
rebuttals. "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." is a good example of an
epigram writ large. The old theory that Shakespeare loved Willie
Hughes is put forward, accepted, rejected, and half-accepted again
by three characters. Each of the characters is to some extent an
imposter. The narrative becomes a Gidian mystification. Every fraud
leads to exposure, but a little fraud is still left over, just as in Lady
Windermere's Fan a succession of harmless new lies cover up the
discovery of old ones. The lid is put on the jack-in-the-box only to
have him jump up again, and the last remark of the narrator, who
has found a new fraud in the previous witnesses, is "But some-
times . . . I think that there is really a great deal to be said for the
Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare's Sonnets." The naked truth
still eludes us, but several layers of falsehood have been stripped
away.

Exposure or usually near-exposure is always the focal point in
Wilde's plays. We burn to show what we are. Salome derives its
weird power from Wilde's circling about the maskless truth as his
heroine dances about Jokanaan's head. Salome strips the veils from

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OSCAR WILDE

353

her body, and all semblance of restraint from her mind, so that the
play ends in open lust except that this is always viewed in archaic,
ritualized terms (adapted later by Yeats), and that its object is a
saint remote at the bottom of a well or later his trunkless head.
Wilde's greatest work, The Importance of Being Earnest-the only
one of his creative writings where the tension of an epigram is
sustained throughout-has the same note in a lower octave: Bunbury
and Uncle Ernest, those delightful exercises in self-projection and
self-concealment, must die. Frivolous Jack, if he would flutter the
ladies, must be Ernest at the last. Even Prism is exposed. It is easy
to guess what effort to free himself lay behind this recurrent and
dominating interest on the part of Wilde's characters in giving them-
selves away. In fact, Wilde's urge to play at confessing seems so
overpowering that the Marquis of Queensberry, instead of being his
villain, appears in retrospect as the agent who made up Wilde's
mind when Wilde intended never quite to make it up.
To bring imposture to a crisis, Wilde has to attribute to each of
his characters some secret crime which he can then live down for
a while only to have it finally discovered. He dignified this pretense
of social innocence in The Picture of Dorian Gray by making it a
kind of Faustian pact, complete with a Gretchen for Dorian to
betray, and Dorian sells his soul not to the devil but, in the ambiguous
form of his portrait, to art. In Wilde's rather simple-minded method
of composition by contrasts, Dorian is countered by Sybil Vane,
whose offense-the one which loses her Dorian's love-is to give
herself to life rather than to art. She becomes as much in love as
Juliet and so cannot act the part on the stage, for to feel a part too
deeply is to become, in the eyes of others, histrionic. Mastery on
the stage, as in life, consists in not feeling too much too crudely.
Then Lord Henry is in a somewhat malign fashion on the side of
art, holding that it is disengagement, while Basil Hallward, though
a painter himself, is on the side of life, and feels that a painter must
necessarily be absorbed into his painting, Dorian, falling under
Lord Henry's Mephistophelean tutelage, takes seriously what Lord
Henry takes lightly, shares Wilde's too often stated preference for
art over life, and of course comes to grief with it. Estheticism, em-
braced as a new gospel, becomes diabolical, just as life, seen as all
in all, becomes boring. Wilde recognized something defective in es-

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354
RICHARD ELLMANN

`theticism, just as he half-accepted the world's ambivalent pleasure
in his own wit by putting his best remarks into the mouths of his
most sinister characters. Perhaps he dimly perceived that the force
of his work might ultimately lie in the attempt of his heroes to make
their lives into masquerades, only to be found out, in his own
passion for art as a deception which penetrates a fraud. He did not,
of course, give up his wit, except in Salome, where the Biblical prose
and the use of French become an overblown substitute for it and
another revamping of old rhythms. His story, "Lord Alfred Savile's
Crime,"-in which the young man, informed by a fortune-teller he
will kill somebody, tries unsuccessfully to murder several relatives and
finally, to make the prophecy good, kills the fortune-teller-is a parody
of Wilde's own conscious sense of guilt as something to fill the mind
almost as ornamentation. Sometimes his characters, in their zeal
to confess, confess crimes they have not committed, like the young
man in The Duchess of Padua or Mrs. Erlynn in Lady Windermere's
Fan. But whatever they confess, confess they must.
In self-abasement they are usually rescued with fairy-tale speed
and indulgence. Wilde cancelled his nightmare of being found out
with lighthearted dreams of pardon and transfiguration. After being
crucified, he says in the poem "Humanitas," we shall be whole
again. In his best comedies, where he is most at home, he guarantees
that no character will be hurt or abused or punished. The truth once
out, it can be hushed up again. A Woman of No Importance finds
forgiveness from her illegitimate son and his wealthy fiancée. The
Ideal Husband, after a few hours of suffering, enters the Cabinet
with honor, and we almost concede his argument, which so pleased
Bernard Shaw, that it requires courage to do wrong. The king in
Wilde's fairy-tale who out of sympathy for the afflicted dresses as
a beggar finds that his rags are merely a disguise, since they turn
to golden raiment as proof that to humble is to exalt oneself. To
repudiate one's legacy, to be a foundling; to repudiate one's life, to
become a prisoner; these make the spirit wealthy and earn remittance
of the body's sins; they haunt Wilde's writings as they must have
engrossed his thoughts, and they are experiences in actuality compar-
able to his dream of becoming marmorean in a work of art.
For his real self is only varnished with corruption. Like his
heroes, he retains an essential innocence. We may dissimulate our

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OSCAR WILDE 355

badness but not our goodness. Tetrarch Herod is unexpectedly
squeamish about deaths inflicted by others. Murderers often lose
heart. Dorian Gray, after having ruined so many men and women
in dreadful, undisclosed ways, cannot bear to have a hunter kill a
rabbit; this tenderness, portrayed again in the fairy-tale, “The Star-
Child,” with the same rabbit as its illustration, is related to Dorian’s
remorse, which brings him back again and again to the contempia-
tion of his sins until he cannot bear to look at them any more. But
even at that stage his violent action is not to destroy himself but to
get rid of his picture. It is only the image which he means to at-
tack, and his own death is a side-effect and an unintended one. For
in the pinch Dorian like Wilde is carried along to consequences he
does not foresee or entirely desire.

We can be grateful for Wilde’s preoccupations, since they give
his wit its special quality, of surprising and undeceiving without dis-
lodging us, and since they agitate his puppet plays into vitality.
Under the waving of peacock plumes, the brooding over an impos-
sible self-immolation is always going on, whether Wilde concedes it
tragically in Salome (though that confession is couched in French)
or renders it comic in The Importance of Being Earnest. Always en-
dangered, he laughs at his plight, and on his half-acquiescent way
to the loss of everything jollies society for being so much harsher
than he is, so much less graceful, so much less attractive. He chaffs
us and asks for liking, ingratiatingly allows or half allows his errors,
begs for mercy with panache. And once we have recognized that
his charm is precarious, its eye on the door left open for the witless
law, it becomes even more triumphant.

(This piece is part of a series of revaluations of “modern” writers.
Other essays will appear in coming issues.)

=== Page 38 ===
Irving Howe

LEON TROTSKY: THE COSTS OF HISTORY

Has any major figure of the twentieth century left so
complete a record of his thought and experience as Leon Trotsky?
Perhaps Churchill, perhaps De Gaulle; but neither of these men
combined so fully or remarkably as did Trotsky the roles of historical
actor and historian, political leader and theorist, charismatic orator
and isolated critic. Trotsky made history, and kept an eye on
history. He was a man of heroic mold, entirely committed to the
life of action, but he was also an intellectual who believed in the
power and purity of the word. At no point in his career, whether as
a revolutionary émigré or commander of revolutionary armies, did
Trotsky allow his public activities or personal condition to keep
him long from his desk. "In my eyes," he once wrote, "authors,
journalists and artists always stood for a world that was more at-
tractive than any other, a world open only to the elect."

An exile in Siberia, he wrote about the 1905 Russian Revolu-
tion, the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century, the rise
of the freemasons. An exile in Europe, he wrote about the contro-
versies of European Marxism, the special problems of Russian
society, and his own theory of "permanent revolution." A leader
of the Bolshevik regime, he wrote about military affairs, literary
disputes, the economics of statification, manners and morals in a
proletarian state, the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy. An exile in
Turkey, France, Norway and finally Mexico, he wrote his monu-
mental history of the Russian Revolution, his political autobiography,
studies of Lenin and Stalin, and a stream of books, pamphlets,
articles on the Chinese revolution of the late twenties, the tactics
of the German Left confronting Hitler, the anatomy of the new
despotism in Russia, the failure of the Popular Front in Europe,
problems of political morality, the need for Marxist reconstruc-

=== Page 39 ===
TROTSKY 357

tion. And in 1939, when an agent of the Russian GPU drove an
ax into Trotsky's skull, the murderer gained access to his victim's
study on the pretext of discussing an article.

With full, almost naïve conviction Trotsky believed in the
creative possibilities of the word. But he believed in them not as
most Western intellectuals have: not in some ironic or contemp-
tive or symbolic way. The common distinction between word and
deed Trotsky scorned as a sign of philistinism, worthy-he might
have added of liberal professors and literary dilettantes. He re-
garded his outpouring of brilliant composition as the natural privilege
of a thinking man, but more urgently, as the necessary work of a
Marxist leader who had pledged his life to socialism. The heritage
of the Russian writers of the nineteenth century is stamped upon
his books, for he took from them the assumption that to write is to
engage in a serious political act, a gesture toward the redemption or
recreation of man.

Trotsky's life is interwoven with the complexities and tragedies
of twentieth-century experience: the Marxist theoretician and scath-
ing polemicist; the great historian, the organizer of the Bolshevik
seizure of power and leader of the Red Army; the literary man
devoted to the Russian classics while alert to the novelties of French
prose; the defeated but unyielding critic of the Stalin dictatorship,
resisting with his pen a worldwide apparatus of terror and lies; the
founder of the Fourth International trying vainly, at the end of his
life, to rebuild a revolutionary movement-these are but some of
his public roles.

At the age of eighteen, in the tradition of sacrifice that had been
established by the Russian radicals of the nineteenth century, Lev
Davidovich Bronstein-as he was then called-chose the life of a
professional revolutionary. What such a life could mean has been
eloquently described by Edmund Wilson in To The Finland Station:

Whoever has known the Russian revolutionaries of these pre-
war generations at their best has been impressed by the effec-
tiveness of the Czarist regime as a training school for intellect
and character in those who were engaged in opposing it.
Forced to pledge for their conviction their careers and their
lives, brought by the movement into contact with all classes of
people, driven to settle in foreign countries whose languages

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358
IRVING HOWE
they readily mastered . . . -these men and women combine an
unusual range of culture with an unusual range of social ex-
perience and, stripped of so many of the trimmings with which
human beings have swathed themselves, have, in surviving,
kept the sense of those things that are vital to the honor of
human life.

In the spring of 1897 Bronstein and his friends organized a
clandestine group, the South Russian Workers' Union, which held
political discussions and issued leaflets about conditions in local
factories; the writing and hectographing, at the rate of two hours a
page, was done by Bronstein himself. Inevitably the police closed
in, and early the next year most of the members of this embryonic
radical movement were arrested; some were subjected to flogging
and Bronstein was kept for several months in lice-ridden solitary
confinement. Next he was transferred to an Odessa prison, where
he remained a year and a half, and then sentenced to four years
in Siberia.

But most of the important Russian Marxists were then living
as exiles in Western Europe, debating their political course in rela-
tion to the seemingly invincible monolith of Czarism and preparing
to establish an organization that might ensure tighter relations be-
tween themselves and the scattered illegal groups in Russia. Eager
to meet and learn from such Marxist leaders as Plekhanov, Martov
and Lenin, young Bronstein escaped from Siberia in the fall of 1902,
made his way secretly across Russia and, taking the pseudonym by
which the world came to know him, managed to smuggle himself
across the frontier.

Once in Europe, Trotsky immediately threw himself into the
political life of the Russian émigrés. In London he met Lenin for
the first time, and the two men took long walks through the streets
of the alien city, exchanging political ideas and impressions of the
underground in Russia. Trotsky began to write articles for Iskra dis-
tinguished by revolutionary enthusiasm, but florid and immature in
style: the hard aphoristic brilliance of his later prose would come
only from an accumulation of experience and a conscious self-
discipline. By the time the Russian Social Democratic Party held its
Second Congress in 1903, Trotsky, though still in his early twenties,
was a figure of some importance. He refused to align himself com-

=== Page 41 ===
TROTSKY 359
pletely with either of the factions that were hardening into shape, the
Bolsheviks led by Lenin and the Mensheviks led by Martov. This
division can now be seen as a partial anticipation of the great split that
would come during the First World War between revolutionists and re-
formists within the socialist movement, but at the time the issues
were still murky, and Trotsky, disinclined in his earlier years to tie
himself to a party apparatus, sided now with one group and now
with the other. At stake, apparently, was a bit of phrasing as to who
could be considered a member of the party: someone who “person-
ally participates in one of its organizations” (Lenin), or someone
prepared to “cooperate personally and regularly under the guidance
of one of the organizations” (Martov). Scholastic as this difference
might seem—two years later the Mensheviks virtually took over
Lenin’s phrasing—it was nevertheless a sign of a divergence in po-
litical outlook that went deeper than the participants could yet grasp.
Immediately after the Congress Trotsky sided with the Menshe-
viks, composing vitriolic attacks on what he regarded as Lenin’s
dictatorial and “Jacobin” views concerning party organization. In
a pamphlet he wrote denouncing Lenin there appeared a sentence
that has since been quoted many times as a prophetic anticipation,
ignored by the later Trotsky himself, of the decline of the Russian
Revolution:

Lenin’s methods lead to this: the party organization at first
substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central
Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a
single “dictator” substitutes himself for the Central Committee.

The remark is a striking one, of course, in its anticipation of
the ways in which the highly centralized structure of the Bolshevik
party would encourage an authoritarian psychology among the lead-
ers and intellectual dependence among the followers. As a sociological
insight, it remains valuable for the study of modern politics and
political organization. Yet it is hardly as prescient as some historians
have supposed, and it certainly is not sufficient evidence for the
claim that in his youth Trotsky grasped the causes of the degenera-
tion of the Russian Revolution in a way that the older Trotsky,
even after his downfall, refused to acknowledge. Though anticipating
the debacle of the Bolshevik party in the era of Stalinist totalitarian-

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360
IRVING HOWE
ism, Trotsky's remark does not-nor could it-touch upon the
complex of causes behind that degeneration. Any effort to explain
a major historical phenomenon (like the rise of Stalinism) by the
workings of an exclusive cause (like Bolshevik centralization) is
doomed to be superficial, and the later Trotsky was right in rejecting
such a mode of explanation.
Though siding with the Mensheviks on party organization,
Trotsky began, in the early years of the century, to express views
on another fundamental problem-the relationship in the coming
Russian Revolution between the socialist and the liberal bourgeois
parties-which brought him closer to Lenin. Since, as all Russian
Marxists agreed, the first task was to overthrow the Czar and
establish democratic rights, the Mensheviks argued that the liberal
bourgeoisie would have to take the lead and the working class serve
as a loyal opposition. Trotsky, by contrast, insisted that the socialists
should keep a clear distance from the bourgeois parties and not
compromise with liberalism.
These discussions, apparently so academic, soon involved the
destinies of millions. For the moment, however, they were happily
put aside when the Russian people, long voiceless and dormant,
began in 1905 to stir against the Czarist regime. In Petersburg a
demonstration led by an Orthodox priest called for democratic rights;
the Czar ordered his troops to fire into the crowd. From Geneva
Trotsky wrote in a state of high excitement:
One day of revolution was enough, one magnificent contact
between the Czar and the people was enough for the idea of
constitutional monarchy to become fantastic, doctrinaire, and
disgusting. The priest Gapon rose with his idea of the monarch
against the real monarch. But, as behind him there stood not
monarchist liberals but revolutionary proletarians, this limited
"insurrection" immediately manifested its rebellious content
in barricade fighting and in the outcry: Down with the Czar.
The real monarch has destroyed the idea of the monarch. ...
The revolution has come and she has put an end to our po-
litical childhood.
Throughout the year 1905 Russia was in a turmoil of rebellion.
Strikes closed the factories, street demonstrations broke out in the
cities, the crew of the battleship Potemkin revolted. One of the first

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TROTSKY 361

exiles to return to Petersburg, Trotsky for a time lived a political
life that was half-public, half-clandestine. Belonging to neither the
Menshevik nor Bolshevik faction, but contributing frequently to the
press of both and acting with a boldness neither could match, Trotsky
became the popular tribune of the revolutionary left. In October
there met in the capital the Soviet of Workers' Delegates—a kind of
rump parliament of representatives from the unions, left parties, and
popular organizations—in which Trotsky soon rose to the post of
chairman. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who until Lenin's arrival in Novem-
ber were skeptical about the Soviet because of fear it would threaten
their political identity, Trotsky grasped the enormous revolutionary
potential of this new and spontaneous organ of political action. His
personal fearlessness, his combination of firm political ends with
tactical ingenuity, and his incomparable gifts as an orator helped
transform him, at twenty-six, into a leader of the first rank: he
had entered upon the stage of modern history, where he stayed until
the ax of a murderer removed him. Here is a passage from one of
his speeches before the Soviet, a characteristic flare of virtuosity, in
which he tells about a conversation with a liberal who had urged
him to moderation:

I recalled to him an incident from the French Revolution, when
the Convention voted that “the French people will not parley
with the enemy on their own territory.” One of the members
of the Convention interrupted: “Have you signed a pact with
victory?" They answered him: “No, we have signed a pact
with death." Comrades, when the liberal bourgeoisie, as if
boasting of its treachery, tells us: “You are alone. Do you think
you can go on fighting without us? Have you signed a pact
with victory?" we throw our answer in their face: “No, we
have signed a pact with death."

In the fifty days of its existence the Soviet experienced the
dilemma so frequently faced by revolutionary institutions: it was
strong enough to frighten the government but not strong enough to
overthrow it. Finally, Czarism regained the initiative, for it was not
yet as fully discredited as it would be in 1917 and the revolutionary
movements were still unripe and inexperienced. In the repressions
that followed, thousands were killed and imprisoned; reaction once
again held Russia. Together with the other leaders of the Soviet,

=== Page 44 ===
362 IRVING HOWE
Trotsky stood public trial, at the climax of which—for now he stood
firm in the sense of his powers, secure in the knowledge that he had
established himself in the line of the great European rebels, con-
vinced that he had found the key to history—he made a brilliant,
openly defiant speech:

A rising of the masses is not made, gentlemen the judges. It
makes itself of its own accord. It is the result of social rela-
tions and conditions and not of a scheme drawn up on paper.
A popular insurrection cannot be staged. It can only be fore-
seen. For reasons that were as little dependent on us as on
Czardom, an open conflict has become inevitable. . . .

. . . no matter how important weapons may be, it is not in
them, gentlemen the judges, that great power resides. No!
Not the ability of the masses to kill others, but their great
readiness themselves to die, this secures in the last instance the
victory of the popular uprising. . . .

Again Siberia: this time deportation “for life.” But it was a
saving feature of pre-totalitarian despotisms that they were often
inefficient, so that even before reaching his Arctic destination Trotsky
could make a superbly bold escape, being driven by a vodka-besotted
peasant for a whole week across the frozen tundra and through
ferocious blizzards.

For the young Marxist who only a few months earlier had been
sentenced to Siberia “for life,” the escape was a personal triumph:
in retrospect one might say, a personal triumph with historic portents.
But now that he was safe again in Europe Trotsky turned back to
his pen, composing his first major work, 1905, an historical study
that in scope and vigor anticipates the History of the Russian
Revolution.

These were hard times for the Russian revolutionists. The Czar
took a merciless revenge as he cut away almost every vestige of
popular rights. In Russia the socialist movements came close to col-
lapse from police harassment and inner demoralization, while in
exile they kept fragmenting into embittered factions. Trotsky con-
tinued vainly to urge that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks reunite:
perhaps he did not fully grasp the extent of their disagreements,
perhaps he feared what the consequence of grasping it might be.

=== Page 45 ===
TROTSKY 363

Wandering from country to country, often after being expelled by
the police, and earning a bare living through political journalism,
he found himself in New York during the war years, and there he
wrote for a radical Russian paper until word of the March 1917
revolution brought him rushing back to his homeland. During the
years between the two Russian revolutions Trotsky's main intellectual
work was the development-and defense against critics within the
movement-of his theory of permanent revolution, a bold set of
speculations concerning Marxist strategy in backward countries. It
may be useful here to attempt a schematic and condensed summary
of this theory:

1) Czarist Russia is a backward country in which the im-
mediate task is the bourgeois-democratic revolution that will
confront those problems that, historically, have been solved by
the great bourgeois revolutions of the past: such problems as
the overthrow of the autocracy, the abolition of semi-feudal
relations in the countryside, the right to self-determination for
oppressed national minorities, the convocation of a constituent
assembly to establish a republic, the proclamation of democratic
liberties, etc.

2) These tasks, however, must be faced in Russia long after
the bourgeoisie as a class has lost the revolutionary élan of its
youth. Because of the special backwardness and isolation of
Russian society, the Russian bourgeoisie is characterized by
timidity and indecision. It has many social and economic
reasons for opposing the Czarist autocracy, yet is bound to it
by links of petty interest, prestige and cowardice. Above all,
it shares with the autocracy a growing fear of the two main
classes at the base of Russian society: the peasantry and the
workers. Because of these congenital weaknesses, the Russian
bourgeoisie is incapable of a revolutionary initiative even in
behalf of its own interests; it cannot make "its own" revolu-
tion. Consequently the tasks of the bourgeois revolution in a
backward country like Russia must now be fulfilled by the
plebeian classes. Or to put forward a seeming paradox, the
bourgeois revolution has to be made against the bourgeoisie.

3) While it rests with the working class and the peasantry
to carry through the bourgeois revolution, these classes are
not socially or historically of equal weight. The peasantry-
because of its geographical dispersion, centuries-long passivity,
tradition of petty ownership, and lack of common outlook-has

=== Page 46 ===
364
IRVING HOWE
shown itself incapable of taking the historical lead. Its role has
always been to serve as a crucial but subordinate ally of an
urban class.
4) The sole urban ally now available to the peasantry-unless
it remain the collective serf of Czarism-is the proletariat.
For Trotsky, then, the inevitable conclusion is that the bourgeois-
democratic revolution could be completed in a backward coun-
try only under the leadership of the revolutionary party,
inexperienced though it may be-which means more par-
ticularly, only under the leadership of the revolutionary party
speaking for the working class. But the workers, having gained
power, will not be able to stop short before the problems of
the bourgeois revolution. The very effort to cope with these
will inevitably force them to go beyond the limits of bourgeois
property, so that, as Trotsky would write later, “the demo-
cratic revolution grows over immediately into the socialist,
and thereby becomes a permanent revolution."
5) The socialist revolution thus begun in a backward country
cannot be completed within national limits. For that, there
would be neither a sufficiently secure economic base nor a
working class sufficiently strong and conscious. Power could be
held and steps toward socialism taken only if there speedily
followed victorious revolutions in the advanced European
countries. Russia's very backwardness would thrust her forward
in the revolutionary scale and bring her under the rule of the
working class, perhaps before any of those countries which,
because of their economic maturity, were commonly regarded
as most ripe for socialism. But this same backwardness, after
having forced the working class to power, would overtake it
and drag it down unless it received aid from abroad. Or as
Trotsky later put it: "In a country where the proletariat has
power... as the result of the democratic revolution, the sub-
sequent fate of the dictatorship and socialism is not only and
not so much dependent in the final analysis upon the national
productive forces, as it is upon the development of the inter-
national socialist revolution."
Unquestionably this was the boldest theory, the most extreme
prognosis, advanced by any Russian Marxist in the years before
the first world war. The full measure of its audacity can be grasped
even today by anyone who troubles to break past the special barriers
of the Marxist vocabulary and examine the theory in terms of the
tensions between "underdeveloped" and advanced countries in the

=== Page 47 ===
TROTSKY 365

twentieth century. The vexing problem of the relation between back-
wardness and industrialization, which today preoccupies all serious
political thinkers, was to be solved, as Trotsky saw it, by the historical
audacity of the barely-developed proletariat in the colonial coun-
tries. For the Mensheviks, who believed that the bourgeoisie would
have to lead the forthcoming bourgeois revolution, Trotsky's theory
was an absurdity. Lenin, though agreeing with Trotsky as to the
historical impotence of the Russian bourgeoisie, felt that the Russian
working class was still too weak and inexperienced to play the
grandiose role assigned to it by Trotsky and that the revolution
would have to be carried through by an alliance between proletariat
and peasantry, whose exact relationship he refused to specify or pre-
dict. Later, after the Russian Revolution, Lenin acknowledged the
prescience of Trotsky's theory, and in retrospect it seems no exaggéra-
tion to add that of all the Marxists it was Trotsky who best foresaw
the course of events in Russia.

But not entirely. There were at least two crucial respects in
which history would cross his expectations. Like most Marxists,
Trotsky did not foresee the extent to which the working class in
Western Europe, increasingly absorbed into national life and having
won for itself major economic and political benefits, would choose
parliamentarism, rather than revolution, as the way to realize its
aims. The help from a victorious European proletariat which Trotsky
hoped would salvage the Russian Revolution was not to be forth-
coming. Secondly, he failed to anticipate certain consequences of an
isolated revolution in a backward country. He knew it might col-
lapse or be overthrown, but he did not imagine that a consolidation
of power from within its ranks might undo its original values. That
the working class in a backward country, or a party acting in its
name, could in moments of crisis approach and even take power,
but that it would then reveal a fundamental incapacity to recon-
struct economic and cultural life on a level high enough for achieving
socialism-all this he foresaw brilliantly. But what he did not count
on was that in such a debacle the revolutionary party, or a bona-
partist sector of it, would concentrate power in its upper ranks and
establish itself as a bureaucratic élite above all classes-above ex-
hausted proletariat, supine peasantry, dispersed bourgeoisie. The re-
sult would be a new, collectivist mode of authoritarianism, neither

=== Page 48 ===
366 IRVING HOWE

capitalist nor socialist in character. The first of these miscalculations
did not necessarily call into question the validity of Marxism, but the
second involved historical possibilities with which traditional Marx-
ism was not well prepared to cope.
With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Trotsky
moves into the center of modern history. His achievements as revolu-
tionary leader are sufficiently known not to require a full account
in these pages, but a few details may help us in tracing the curve of
his political career.
Returning to Petersburg after the overthrow of the Czar, Trot-
sky thrust himself into the excitements of Russian politics, a politics
that was chaotic and ultimatistic but, for the first time in history,
free. Parties sprang up, debate rang passionately, the long-silent
masses began to find their voice. The provisional governments that
had replaced the Czar—first under the liberal monarchist Prince
Lvov, then the Constitutional Democrat Miliukov and finally the
populist Kerensky—were inherently unstable. Their incapacity or
unwillingness to permit a division of landed estates among the
peasants and their failure to end Russia's participation in a fruitless
and exhausting war made them increasingly unpopular. Since Trot-
sky opposed in principle any political collaboration with these re-
gimes, even when they included some Menshevik ministers under
Kerensky, he found himself at odds with both the Mensheviks and
the "conciliationist" wing of the Bolsheviks. By the same token he
was now closer to Lenin, whose entire political strategy beginning
with the spring of 1917, to the astonishment even of many of his
own comrades, was directed toward preparing the Bolshevik party
for a seizure of power. In July Trotsky formally joined the Bolsheviks,
though for some months he had already been working with them.
Supported by Lenin and for the first time in his political career
working closely with a disciplined party organization, Trotsky be-
came the popular spokesman for Bolshevism. Sukhanov, the gifted
Menshevik whose eyewitness chronicle of the revolution is a major
historical source, has recalled that Trotsky "spoke everywhere simul-
taneously. Every worker and soldier at Petrograd knew him and
listened to him. His influence on the masses and the leaders alike
was overwhelming." His biographer, Isaac Deutscher, offers a vivid
picture of Trotsky as a mass orator:

=== Page 49 ===
TROTSKY 367
. . . he established his platform in the Cirque Moderne, where
almost every night he addressed enormous crowds. The amphi-
theatre was so densely packed that Trotsky was usually shuffled
towards the platform over the heads of the audience, and from
his elevation he would catch the excited eyes of the daughters
of his first marriage. . . He spoke on the topics of the day
and the aims of the revolution with his usual piercing logic;
but he also absorbed the spirit of the crowd, its harsh sense
of justice, its desire to see things in sharp and clear outline . . .
Later he recollected how at the mere sight of the multitude
words and arguments he had prepared well in advance receded
and dispersed in his mind and other words and arguments,
unexpected by himself but meeting a need in his listeners,
rushed up as if from his subconscious. He then listened to his
own voice as to that of a stranger, trying to keep pace with
the tumultuous rush of his own ideas and phrases and afraid
lest like a sleepwalker he might suddenly wake and break
down. Here his politics ceased to be the distillation of in-
dividual reflection or of debates in small circles of professional
politicians. He merged emotionally with the dark warm human
mass in front of him . . .

Trotsky was more than a superb orator, more than a remark-
ably sensitive medium between the aroused masses and the straining
Bolshevik leadership. In the Soviets, those improvised institutions
of popular sovereignty where the left-wing parties struggled for
domination, he became the main political spokesman for the Bolshe-
vik point of view. And as preparations for the October Revolution
proceeded, “all the work of practical organization of the insurrec-
tion”—even Joseph Stalin had to admit shortly afterwards—“was
conducted under the immediate leadership of the President of the
Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky. It is possible to declare with
certainty that the swift passing of the garrison to the side of the
Soviet, and the bold execution of the work of the Military Revolu-
tionary Committee [the body directing the October insurrection],
the party owes principally and first of all to Comrade Trotsky.”

In the government now formed under Lenin, Trotsky became
foreign minister, intending, as he joked, to issue “a few revolutionary
proclamations and then close shop,” but in reality having to con-
duct the difficult Brest-Litovsk negotiations with imperial Germany,
which at a heavy price brought peace to Russia. In 1918, when the

=== Page 50 ===
368 IRVING HOWE
Civil War broke out across the whole of Russia, Trotsky became
Minister of War. Without military experience, he applied himself
to creating a revolutionary army from almost nothing. He began
with a few thousand Bolsheviks, Red Guards who had fought in
the revolution; a considerable group of Russian army officers willing
to serve the new regime in a nonpolitical capacity; and masses of
untrained recruits who lacked discipline and often enough arms.
For almost two years Trotsky lived in an armored train which
served as the political-military headquarters of the new army. Moving
from front to front, working with ferocious energy, exposing himself
in crucial battles to rally frightened men, insisting upon the military
authority of the old officers while checking their power through
a network of political commissars, holding fast to standards of ef-
ficiency and discipline among soldiers who had long been demoralized,
but above all else, stirring his followers to fight and die through the
exaltation of his speeches and manifestoes, Trotsky created an ef-
fective army which finally defeated the Whites. He understood that
in a revolutionary army it is the will to struggle which is often de-
cisive; victory would come to his troops only as they believed them-
selves to be crusaders in behalf of a better world, only as they were
ready to face death out of a conviction that they were-to quote
from one of Trotsky's speeches to his soldiers-"participants in an
unprecedented historic attempt . . . to create a new society, in which
all human relations will be based on . . . cooperation and man will
be man's brother, not his enemy."

Once the Red Army had ended the threat of counter-revolution,
the young Bolshevik regime had for the first time to face the
problems of social reconstruction. In these difficult years, when Rus-
sian economic life was reduced to chaos and hunger swept across the
land, Trotsky argued in behalf of compulsory work and labor armies
based on military discipline-draconian measures, he admitted, but
necessary for lifting the economy to that minimal level of production
where ordinary incentives might begin operating. (It is but fair to
add that Trotsky advocated these measures only after his proposal
for modifying "War Communism" had been rejected and that he
was among the first Bolshevik leaders to urge the economic relaxa-
tion that went under the name of NEP.)

=== Page 51 ===
TROTSKY 369
In the public debates that followed-for a certain measure of
political opposition could still be expressed in Russia-the Menshevik
leader Raphael Abramovich opposed such forced labor battalions
with the query: "Wherein does your socialism differ from Egyptian
slavery? It was just by similar methods that the Pharaohs built the
pyramids, forcing the masses to labor." Trotsky replied: "Abramovich
sees no difference between the Egyptian regime and our own. He has
forgotten the class nature of government. ... It was not the Egyptian
peasants who decided through their Soviets to build the pyramids
... our compulsion is applied by a workers' and peasants'
government..."
It was an unfortunate argument, Trotsky at his weakest. In
advancing it he failed to acknowledge that by 1920 the Russian
workers were not deciding very much on their own; it was the
Bolshevik government that made the decisions. A great deal of the
support the Bolsheviks had enjoyed among the workers since the
October revolution had by now been lost or badly weakened. The
policies of this government could not be justified simply because it
was, or called itself, a workers' government; its rights to that title
might better be justified by the nature of the policies it put forward.
But most unfortunate of all, Trotsky's argument provided the formula
that could later be used all too easily for rationalizing the Stalinist
plunge into totalitarianism.
In arguing for labor armies and also in justifying the suppres-
sion of dissident socialist groups, Trotsky invoked the harsh neces-
sities of fighting a desperate civil war and salvaging a collapsed
economy. As he began, upon the completion of the civil war, to
work at the revival of industrial production, all his enormous talents
came into play; but his political role took on a harsh and authoritarian
cast which cannot be justified even to the extent that certain of
his measures during the civil war might be. Driven by the force
of intolerable circumstances, but also trapped in the vise of a Bolshe-
vik exclusivism which led to greater concentrations of power at the
summit of the ruling party just when an opening of political and
economic life might alone have saved the situation, Trotsky now
condoned acts of repression which undercut the remnants of "So-
viet democracy." A few years earlier the left-Mershevik leader, Julius
Martov, had warned against the tendency of the Bolsheviks to

=== Page 52 ===
370 IRVING HOWE

equate the power of their party with the interests of the proletariat.
Trotsky, flushed with the conquest of power, had replied: "You are
bankrupt; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now
on-into the rubbish-can of history!" Sad words, from the man who
in a few years would himself be harried into exile; sad words, as
they reflect a failure to see that it is not always the least intelligent
or good or even politically "correct" who are cast into that rubbish-
can.

In the years after the revolution, Lenin was more flexible, less
doctrinaire than Trotsky. He opposed Trotsky's scheme for labor
battalions and argued against a facile identification of the Bolshevik
state with the proletariat; he described the regime as a "deformed
workers' state" in which the workers' organization had to defend
not only the state against its enemies but themselves against the
state. But while this led him to propose an easing of economic life,
he did not urge a parallel easing of political life. On the contrary,
the turn toward the NEP in 1921, with its attendant threat to the
Communist political monopoly, became for Lenin an argument
against the reintroduction of even limited political freedoms.

In a speech before the Third Congress of the Comintern (1921),
Lenin repeated the assumption that had been common to all the
Bolshevik leaders:

It was clear to us that without aid from the international
world revolution, a victory of the proletarian revolution [in
Russia] is impossible. Even prior to the Bolshevik revolution,
as well as after it, we thought that the revolution would also
occur either immediately or at least very soon in other back-
ward countries and in the more highly developed capitalist
countries. Otherwise we would perish.

Russia, Lenin kept insisting, was a backward peasant land that
lacked technology, industry and the accumulated culture required for
surpassing the achievements of the Western capitalist countries. Con-
sequently the fate of the Russian Revolution depended on the ability
of the Communist movement to achieve power in at least one major
advanced country, so that assistance could come for besieged Rus-
sia. With the defeat of the 1919-1921 revolutions in Western Europe,
however, there were already signs that Lenin's prophecy-"otherwise

=== Page 53 ===
TROTSKY 371
we perish”—would be realized. But realized in ways that neither
Lenin nor Trotsky had foreseen.
The Bolshevik party could preserve itself as master of a be-
leaguered state within the limits of a shrunken Russia, but in doing
so it underwent large transformations in political ideology, social
character and moral quality. In a country where all the means of
production are owned by the state, and the state is totally in the
grip of the only legal party, major changes in the nature of the party
are equivalent to a social revolution creating new relationships be-
tween rulers and ruled.
Both the Russian economy and the Russian people were ex-
hausted. To prevent economic collapse or social explosion, Lenin
proposed as part of the NEP major concessions to an already hostile
peasantry; but this in turn helped bring into existence a whole new
conservative stratum of “rich” and middle peasants. When the mass
of soldiers, demobilized after the civil war, came back drained of
their revolutionary or patriotic fervor, the conservative tendencies
within the villages were further reinforced.
So too in the cities. The workers were sapped of their social
energy, some having fallen into demoralization and others turning
against the regime. Many of the most devoted Bolsheviks had died
during the civil war; others had been worn out; and still others,
lacking the iron will of a Lenin or a Trotsky, displayed the character-
istics of officials everywhere, with vested interests of their own which
set them in increasing opposition to the workers in whose name they
ruled. Apart from large amounts of economic help, what the coun-
try needed most was the ventilation of ideas, a gust of freedom to
bring new life and strength; but after 1921 the Bolsheviks refused
to allow any party but their own to function legally and thus con-
tributed heavily to their own degeneration. Ruling as a minority
dictatorship, though at times with mass support, the Bolshevik re-
gime had planted the seeds of counter-revolution at the very moment
the revolution triumphed. Each repressive measure taken by the
dictatorship, even when truly the consequence of an emergency cre-
ated by civil war or economic collapse, further undermined the
ideological claims to which many of its supporters were devoted and
helped create within the regime a cancerous social growth flourish-
ing upon deprivation, cynicism and brutality.

=== Page 54 ===
372
IRVING HOWE

A new social stratum—it had sprung up the very morning after
the revolution—began to consolidate itself: the party-state bureau-
cracy which found its roots in the technical intelligentsia, the factory
managers, the military officials and above all the Communist func-
tionaries. It was narrow in outlook, provincial and boorish in tone,
primitive in culture. It was committed to a nationalist perspective,
and instinctively authoritarian in method. It looked upon the work-
ers as material to be shaped, upon intellectuals as propagandists to
be employed, upon the international Communist movement as an
auxiliary to be exploited, and upon Marxist thought as a crude
process for rationalizing its new ambitions.
To speak of a party-state bureaucracy in a country where in-
dustry has been nationalized means to speak of a new ruling group
or class which parasitically fastened upon every institution of Rus-
sian life. That many members of this new party-state bureaucracy
were unaware of the significance of this process seems obvious; it
was, in many respects, an historical novelty for which little provision
had been made in the Marxist scheme of things. Years later, in
1928, the Bolshevik leader Bukharin, who had joined with Stalin
to defeat Trotsky and was then himself shattered by Stalin, remarked
that the disasters of the post-revolutionary period were all due to a
“single mistake”: the identification of the party with the state. There
were people in the “rubbish-can of history” who had been saying
that for some time.
At precisely which point the revolutionary dictatorship of Lenin-
ism gave way to the totalitarianism of Stalin is hard and perhaps
profitless to say. This transformation—a gradual counter-revolution—
began during or shortly after the revolution itself, in the inner
structure of the Leninist regime; came to its decisive moment in the
mid-twenties; and reached full expression in the thirties, with the
mass deportation of peasants, the Moscow trials and the blood purges.
Having consolidated its power, the new bureaucratic class proceeded
to exploit the opportunities for centralized economic planning that
are peculiar to a nationalized economy; it undertook a “primitive
accumulation of capital” so cruel and bloody as to make the earlier
accumulation of bourgeois society seem a model of humaneness.
Of this whole process Trotsky was a powerful critic, from the
publication in 1923 of his brochure The New Course, in which he

=== Page 55 ===
TROTSKY 373

first explored the social physiognomy of bureaucratism, to his final
writings in 1940, in which he showed signs of uncertainty as to some
of his earlier sociological analyses of Stalinism. But especially in the
earlier critiques, Trotsky made the error of supposing that in al-
liance with the new conservative elements in the countryside (whose
interests he saw reflected in the "Right Communist" group led by
Bukharin), the bureaucracy might constitute a nucleus for the
restoration of private capitalism. Actually, as it slowly gathered into
its hands control of the entire state, which meant control over the
socio-economic life of the nation, this new ruling stratum had every
interest in preventing a return to private capitalism, for it neither
owned nor could own property but instead controlled the state in
whose legal custody property resided. Private capitalism would have
meant the end of its power and privilege. It turned instead against
every real or potential source of opposition both within and outside
the party, destroying the bulk of the Bolshevik "Old Guard" in the
purges of the next decades, reducing the intellectuals to a traumatized
obedience, terrorizing the workers into passivity, and establishing it-
self as the sole center of power.

Until the late twenties, criticism of this bureaucratic trend
could still be voiced in Russia, though in the later years not with
impunity. Various opposition groups struggled to change the Bolshe-
vik course between 1920 and 1923, that is, before Trotsky became
the major critic of Stalinism and indeed, without his badly-needed
help. One respected Bolshevik oppositionist, G. Myasnikov, wrote:
"The Soviet power must maintain at its own expense a body of de-
tractors as did once the Roman Emperors." These words went un-
heeded, and their author suffered rebuke from the Central Com-
mittee. The questions Trotsky would raise in his struggle against
Stalinism-questions concerning revolutionary strategy abroad, eco-
nomic development at home, democracy within the ruling party-
were surely important; but now it seems clear that the main sig-
nificance of all the opposition groups, both Trotskyist and non-
Trotskyist, was as a series of ill-connected efforts to stop or slow
the trend toward totalitarianism.

For some years, roughly between 1923 and 1928, Trotsky was
both political leader and intellectual guide of the left opposition
groups in Russia which attacked the growing despotism of the Stalin

=== Page 56 ===
374 IRVING HOWE

regime. Far more skillful as the spokesman of a revolutionary up-
surge than as a factional maneuverer, painfully aware that he was
caught in a moment of social retreat which must prove inhospitable
to his austere demands and standards, Trotsky fought doggedly,
with intellectual flair and personal pride. But he fought on the
terrain of the enemy, accepting the destructive assumption of a
Bolshevik monopoly of power, and there were times when he sud-
denly withdrew into silence and illness, as if in disgust at having to
cope with the hooliganism and intellectual vulgarity of his opponents.
The very aspects of post-revolutionary Russia which Trotsky saw as
conducive to the rise of Stalinism—social weariness, pervasive poverty,
lack of culture, asphyxiation of independent thought, loss of spirit
among Bolshevik cadres learning to prefer the comforts of ad-
ministration to the heroism of revolution, the decline in strength and
numbers of a proletariat bled white by civil war and industrial col-
lapse—all this made it almost inevitable that Trotsky, no matter
what his tactics, would fail. Years earlier, in 1909, he had provided
a vivid description of parallel circumstances:

When the curve of historical development rises, public thinking
becomes more penetrating, braver and more ingenious. . . .
But when the political curve indicates a drop, public thinking
succumbs to stupidity. The priceless gift of political generaliza-
tion vanishes somewhere without leaving a trace. Stupidity
grows in insolence and, baring its teeth, heaps insulting mock-
ery on every attempt at a serious generalization. Feeling that it
is in command of the field, it begins to resort to its own
means.

Many centuries earlier Thucydides had put the matter in his own
words:

Those who enjoyed the greatest advantages were the men of
limited intelligence. The consciousness of their inability and
of the talent of their adversaries made them fear that they
would be duped by the fine speeches or the subtlety of spirit
of their enemies and therefore they advanced straight toward
their aim; while the others, scorning even to foresee the
schemes of their adversaries and believing that action was
superfluous when talk seemed to suffice, found themselves
disarmed and defeated.

=== Page 57 ===
TROTSKY
375
In only one way could Trotsky possibly have wrested power,
and this was through a military coup taking advantage of his
popularity in the army. But such a coup would have contributed to
the acceleration of the very authoritarian decline he was now op-
posing; and in any case, he was too much a man of ideological
rigor, too much a man devoted to his own sense of historical place
and honor, to succumb to the smallness of a bonapartist adventure.
In a bitterly ironic turn of events, he was suffering from the vindica-
tion of his own theory of permanent revolution, by means of which
he had predicted that a proletarian revolution in a backward country
would, if it continued to suffer isolation, find itself in an historical
limbo. Only, as it happened, neither he nor anyone else could pre-
dict how terrible that limbo would be.
The programs advanced by Trotsky during these years are far
too complex, and far too deeply imbedded in the historical context
of the time, to allow for easy summary. In general, however, at least
three major themes can be noted. To cope with the economic crisis
in which Soviet Russia found itself during the early and middle
twenties-what Trotsky described as the problem of "the scissors,"
the two blades of which, moving farther apart from one another,
were the rising prices of industrial goods and the declining prices of
agricultural products-the Trotskyist opposition put forward an
elaborate plan for the reorganization of the economy. The goals of
this plan included strengthening the "socialist" industrial sector,
raising the productivity of labor, supporting the poorer peasants
against the new kulaks who had sprung up in the countryside since
the NEP, improving the living standards of the workers and drawing
them into a more active role in economic life. What was needed, wrote
Trotsky, was "a socialist accumulation of capital," an harmonious
development of the various departments of industrial production, and
toward this end "Soviet democracy has become an economic neces-
sity." Together with his economic program, Trotsky concentrated
on the problems of democracy within the Bolshevik party and the
state-dominated institutions of social life:
Free discussion within the party has in fact disappeared; the
party's social mind has been choked off. In these times the
broad masses of the party do not nominate and elect the
provincial committees and the Central Committee. . . . On

=== Page 58 ===
376
IRVING HOWE
the contrary, the secretarial hierarchy of the party to an
ever greater degree selects the membership of conferences and
congresses which to an ever greater degree are becoming ex-
ecutive consultations of the hierarchy.
Trotsky did not propose the restoration of freedom for the out-
lawed socialist parties, but confined himself to urging democracy
within the Bolshevik party so that its intellectual life could be re-
freshed. And finally, he urged a reassertion of the principles of
"socialist internationalism" in the work of the Communist parties
abroad, charging that under Stalin's domination the Communist
movement was being reduced to an appendage of Russian national-
ism. As Trotsky saw it, the struggle between Stalin and himself was
not primarily a personal dispute or a competition for power; it in-
volved profound differences of principle between a bureaucracy that
had become encrusted on the workers' state and the oppositionist
forces that spoke for the socialist tradition.
Some years later, when the triumph of Stalinism had become
complete in Russia and a good number of Western liberals had
succumbed to an uncritical acceptance of its pretensions, it became
fashionable to say that Stalin, having embarked upon a frenzied
program of industrialization through his successive Five Year Plans,
had "stolen Trotsky's thunder." Such remarks ignored the fact that
what mattered for Trotsky was not industrialization as an end in
itself but industrialization in behalf of what he took to be socialist
ends. Industrialization might be effected in any backward country
prepared to employ centralized power with sufficient ruthlessness in
order to sweat capital accumulation out of the people, but that was
not what Trotsky believed to be the issue. For him, as he kept
insisting, industrialization mattered as a means for "raising the
specific gravity of the proletariat in society," and thereby moving
toward the harmonious world of socialism. The industrialization
of Stalin, by contrast, was achieved through the social exploitation of
the working class, the imposition of totalitarian controls upon the
entire country, and the destruction of political life and consciousness.
It brought with it grave economic imbalances, profound social dis-
ruption, and extreme political barbarism, the effects of which will
be felt for decades to come. No, this was not the "thunder" that
Trotsky or any other Bolshevik leader of the twenties had proposed

=== Page 59 ===
TROTSKY 377

or even imagined. An observation by one of Trotsky's former col-
laborators, Max Shachtman, is worth quoting here:

The workers' power in Russia, even in the already attenuated
form of a dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, stood as an
obstacle in the path of [capital] accumulation precisely be-
cause, on the one hand, genuine socialist accumulation was
impossible under conditions of an isolated and backward
country and, on the other hand, workers' power was in-
compatible with any other kind of accumulation. This power,
then, had to be shattered.

It had, that is, to be shattered by Stalin's totalitarian dictatorship,
which did indeed manage to impose a layer of industrialization on
Russia's backward economy but in doing so created a socio-political
structure profoundly in conflict with socialist values.

A more cogent criticism of Trotsky's course in the twenties con-
cerns his failure to speak out in behalf of a multi-party democracy
within the limits of "Soviet legality." In 1917, a few weeks before
the October revolution, when Trotsky was elected President of the
Petrograd Soviet, he had promised: "We shall conduct the work
of the Petrograd Soviet in a spirit of lawfulness and of full freedom
for all parties." Toward the end of his life Trotsky would write that
"Only when the civil war began, when the most decisive elements
of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries took part in the civil
war on the other side of the barricades, we prohibited them. It was
a military measure, not a permanent step." All recent political ex-
perience inclines us to suspect such arguments from necessity, so
badly abused have they been; and even if one grants some force
to Trotsky's claim one must also heed the careful documentation in
Leonard Schapiro's The Origin of the Communist Autocracy, an
account of the repeated violations of democratic procedures by the
Bolshevik regime in the years between 1917 and 1922, a good many
of which could not be attributed to the pressures of the civil war.
In any case, Trotsky's decision to limit himself during the factional
struggles of the twenties to a demand for democracy within the
Bolshevik party placed him in a severe contradiction. Democracy
within a ruling party, especially if it dominates a society in which
property has become the possession of the state, is finally impossible
unless it is extended beyond the limits of that party. Trotsky was

=== Page 60 ===
378
IRVING HOWE
demanding both a monopoly of power and a monopoly of freedom
for the Bolsheviks: something just barely possible for a brief interval
but surely not for longer. There is no reason to suppose that if he
had raised the demand for multi-party democracy it would have
strengthened his cause or re-established his popularity. Such a de-
mand would probably have isolated him still further within the
Bolshevik hierarchy and very likely not have sparked any great
enthusiasm among the weary and impoverished masses. But what
it would have done was to make his political and moral position
more secure in the eyes of that historical posterity upon whose verdict
he seemed so heavily to bank.

By 1928 Stalin had consolidated his power. The Left Opposi-
tion of Trotsky was crushed and the Right Opposition of Bukharin
rendered powerless; the members of both groups were driven into
exile, silenced in prison, or broken to recant. Trotsky himself was
sent to a distant region of Asian Russia and early in 1929 deported
from the country. A pall of obedience fell over Russia, and then:
terror.

It was now, in his years as a powerless and harassed exile,
that Trotsky achieved his greatest moral stature. No longer were
there masses of cheering listeners to inflame with his eloquence; no
longer armies to spur into heroism; no longer parties to guide to
power. The most brilliant figure of the revolution was cast by the
usurping dictatorship as a heretic, then a traitor, and finally, in the
macabre frame-ups of the Moscow Trials, an agent of fascism.

Driven from country to country, partly because of the pressures
brought to bear by the Stalin regime and partly because the presence
of the famous revolutionist, helpless and isolated though he might
be, made governments feel uncomfortable, Trotsky found his final
exile in Mexico. He lived always in danger of assassination, and at
least one effort involving the Mexican Communist painter David
Siqueiros was made upon his life before the actual murder. A
number of Trotsky's political associates were killed by agents of the
Russian secret police, and his children, including a son who had
never shown any interest in politics, were systematically hounded in
Russia.

But Trotsky continued to cry out his defiance, unbent and

=== Page 61 ===
TROTSKY
379
unyielding, caustic and proud, a solitary promethean figure; he con-
tinued to write his trenchant analyses of the totalitarian regime in
Russia, its terrorism directed against defenseless millions, its byzantine
deification of the dictator, its blundering ventures into European
politics. One need not accept in whole or part the ideas of Trotsky
in order to recognize that during his last decade he rose to an intel-
lectual eminence and personal strength surpassing anything he had
shown during his years of power. His productivity as a writer was
amazing. Unburdened by office, he was once again the independent
political analyst, historian and literary man; it was the role in life,
as he had once said, that he most enjoyed; and he wrote now with
an authority of statement, an incisiveness of structure, a cutting sharp-
ness of phrase, a brilliant freedom of metaphor which require that
he be placed among the great writers of our time.
Trotsky's writings on Germany in the immediate pre-Hitler
years are a model of Marxist polemic and analysis, but also of polemic
and analysis that can be valuable to the non-Marxist as well. With
blazing sarcasm and urgency-he was never patient toward fools-
he attacked the insane policy of the German Communists, which
declared the Social Democrats to be "social fascists" representing a
greater danger than the Nazis, and thereby prevented the formation
of that united front of the left which he kept insisting was the one
way to stop Hitler. Had his advice been followed (the Stalinists
attacked him for "capitulating" to Social Democracy!), the world
might have been spared some of the horrors of our century; at the
very least, the German working class would have gone down in bat-
tle rather than allowing the Nazi thugs to take power without re-
sistance. Only a little less important are Trotsky's writings on Spain
during the thirties, writings in which he analyzed the difficulties
of modernizing a stagnant country, the way the Spanish bourgeoisie,
out of social greed and cowardice, would block measures toward re-
form or even a dynamic economy, thereby opening the way to
fascism-in short, that complex of problems which in a few years
would lead to the Spanish Civil War. Equally incisive, though, as it
now seems, marred by dogmatic rigidity, are the writings Trotsky
devoted to the social crisis of France during the late thirties, in which
he analyzed the Popular Front as an unstable, inherently pusillanim-
ous amalgam of bourgeois, socialist, and Staliininst parties lacking co-

=== Page 62 ===
380
IRVING HOWE
herent purpose or will. With an excess of revolutionary hopefulness,
he saw the French working class as an historical agent striving
toward revolutionary action but restrained by its corrupted leaders.
Trotsky's most important political commentary of the thirties—
a commentary which has influenced and been used by even those
writers who sharply disagree with him—was devoted to the problem
of Stalinism. Step by step he followed the transformation of the
Stalin dictatorship into a full-scale totalitarian state, denouncing the
economic policies by which the regime aggravated the exploita-
tion of the masses in behalf of its mania for super-industrialization,
enriching (though sometimes also confusing) his description of
Stalinism with historical analogies drawn from the decline of the
French Revolution, and riddling the claims of those Western liberals
who had begun to praise the Soviet Union only after it had sunk
into totalitarianism. Again and again Trotsky was accused of exąg-
geration and spite in his attacks on the Stalin regime; the American
liberal weeklies printed recondite discussions of the "psychological
causes" behind his attacks, but almost everything he wrote would
later be confirmed by the revelations that started coming out of the
Soviet Union after Stalin's death. In the mid-thirties Trotsky was
also forced to devote his time to refuting the lies of the Moscow
Trials; he did not live long enough to hear Khrushchev admit they
had been frame-ups contrived by the state, though he did live long
enough to hear some American liberals accept them as truth and
praise them as therapy.

All the while Trotsky kept working to create a new movement
of the revolutionary left, the Fourth International, which would be
loyal to the original principles of Marxism-Leninism. This effort
failed. The masses of radical workers in Europe remained attached,
however passively, to the traditional parties of the left and showed
no interest in the tiny Trotskyist groups, while those intellectuals who
broke away from Stalinism often found themselves reconsidering and
then abandoning the whole Leninist outlook. As a political leader
in those years Trotsky tended to be fractious and inflexible, perhaps
because his imagination was still caught up with the myth of the
Russian Revolution and could not easily adapt itself to the reduced
scale of political action within which he was now confined. Among

=== Page 63 ===
TROTSKY 381

the scattered groups of the non-Communist left he won more ad-
miration than adherence.
The most enduring portion of Trotsky's writings during the
years of exile was not, however, directly polemical or narrowly
political. It was directed to the world at large, rather than the
constricted circles of radicalism, and today it is surely the most im-
mediately accessible to readers untrained in radical ideology. Trotsky's
autobiography, his unfinished book on Lenin, his severely controlled
study of Stalin, that masterful compression of his basic views on
Stalinism called The Revolution Betrayed, but above all, The History
of the Russian Revolution—these are among the major works of his
eleven years of exile. The History is Trotsky's masterpiece. It is a work
on the grand scale, epic in proportion, brilliant in color, vibrant
with the passions of strongly-remembered events. Throughout the
book there is a rising tension, so characteristic of modern writing,
between the subjective perceptions of a highly self-conscious author
and the unfolding of a sequence of history taken to be determined
by objective law. The book unfolds into great complexity—the com-
plexity of revolutionary craft and assurance—from a simple but
commanding image: the meeting of Russian worker and Russian
peasant, often in his guise as soldier or Cossack, their first hesitant
gropings toward each other, the subsequent drama of retreat and
reconciliation, and finally, a clasp of unity. Apart from its claim to
being a faithful record and true interpretation, The History is a major
work of twentieth-century literature, deserving to be placed beside
the masterpieces of modern writing.

During the last years of his life Trotsky not merely wrote with
great vigor in reply to the calumnies of the Moscow trials, not merely
composed a number of major works, not merely produced a steady
barrage of topical pieces on political and literary themes; he also
engaged in sharp debates with intellectual opponents ranging from
independent Marxists who disagreed with him on the “class nature”
of the Russian state to liberals and socialists who challenged his as-
sumption that between Bolshevism and Stalinism there was a funda-
mental conflict rather than a deep continuity. To support this as-
sumption he wrote an ambitious essay, “Their Morals and Ours,” in
which he argued for the historical relativity of moral standards, tried
to show the social causes of the moral distance between Bolshevism

=== Page 64 ===
382 IRVING HOWE
and Stalinism, reiterated his defense of the methods employed by
the early Bolshevik regime, and had little difficulty in demonstrating
that his liberal critics were necessarily quite as committed to the
belief that “the end justifies the means” as they charged he was.
In the less polemical sections of this essay Trotsky struggled with
the problems of the relation between historically-conditioned moral
values, reflecting the interests of social classes and therefore in con-
stant flux, and those moral “absolutes” he was inclined to depreciate
as excessively abstract, but which he nevertheless found it impos-
sible to avoid using himself.
In the last year or two of his life Trotsky plunged into a dis-
cussion concerning the political role and sociological nature of
Stalinist Russia, which had been provoked by some of his American
followers who found increasingly unsatisfactory his view that Rus-
sia merited “critical support” in the war because it remained a
“degenerated workers’ state.” Trotsky clung hard to this position.
When the Russian armies marched into Finland, he denounced the
invasion as another instance of Stalinist reaction, yet because he saw
the Russo-Finnish war as part of a larger conflict between the
bourgeois West and the Soviet Union, he continued in his writings
to give the latter “critical support.”
This discussion might seem, at first glance, another of those
exercises in ideological hair-splitting which occupy radical sects; but
it had a genuine value, since the issues that were being discussed
would have to be faced by anyone trying to provide a theoretical
framework for the study of Stalinism. Trotsky held that Stalinist
Russia should still be designated as a “degenerated workers’ state”
because it preserved the nationalized property forms that were a
“conquest” of the Russian revolution; in his view it was a society
without an independent historical perspective, one that would soon
have to give way either to capitalist restoration or workers’ de-
mocracy. His critics insisted that the loss of political power by the
Russian working class meant that it no longer ruled in any social
sense, for as a propertyless class it could rule only through political
means and not in those indirect ways that the bourgeoisie had em-
ployed in its youthful phase. Stalinism, they continued, showed no
signs of producing from within itself a bourgeois restoration; quite
the contrary, for the bureaucracy had become a new ruling class,

=== Page 65 ===
TROTSKY 383
with interests of its own in opposition to both capitalism and social-
ism. Trotsky did not live long enough to follow this dispute into
the post-war years.
The last years of his life were difficult. Neither poverty nor
powerlessness seemed to trouble him as much as the constrictedness
of his daily existence; he worked under the constant protection of the
guard his friends provided him, and he chafed at being unable
to move about freely. For many years he had been living with his
second wife, Natalia Sedov, in a marriage that was a model of
mutual considerateness and devotion; together they now suffered
blow after blow, as the news came of the death or disappearance of
sons and friends. In his public conduct Trotsky remained firm and
vigorous; privately, he suffered from intervals of depression. Once
he apparently contemplated suicide. The indignity of needing to
defend himself against the slanders pouring out of Moscow, the
frustrations he suffered trying to rebuild a political movement ("I
give advice because I have no other way to act," he wrote to a
friend in France), the annoyance of having to write certain articles
and books for merely financial reasons, the pain he felt at seeing so
many people close to him persecuted by the Russian regime, the
anxiety that he might not live long enough to fulfill the tasks he had
set himself-all these left their mark. Trotsky was a man of enormous
self-discipline, with an unshakable conviction as to his place in
history and his responsibility to the idea of socialism; but he was also
a complex and sensitive human being, impatient with the turn of
history which had left him helpless-but only for the moment, he
believed-to influence events. In the mid-thirties he kept a diary
which reveals sudden flashes of unhappiness and irritation, as if he
were rebelling against the disproportion between his intellectual
powers and his political opportunities. But the diary also reveals
capacities for human warmth and intensity of feeling, above all
toward his admirable wife. And there are sentences which open a
more intimate view of him: "Old age," he wrote, "is the most un-
expected thing that happens to a man."
Only sixty when he was murdered, Trotsky was still a vigorous
man who might otherwise have lived on for a number of years and
continued to write and work. It would have been profoundly interest-
ing to see how he would have responded to the intellectual crises of

=== Page 66 ===
384 IRVING HOWE
the post-war years, when as it seemed to many observers, all political
systems, including both Marxism and classical liberalism, proved
insufficient. Trotsky's mind was a mixture of the rigid and the
flexible: he held unquestioningly to the basic tenets of Marxism, but
within those limits was capable of innovation and risk. The prob-
lems he was forced to grapple with were qualitatively different from
those which the greatest minds in his tradition had had to confront;
for Trotsky was living in the time of the debacle of socialism and
the triumph of totalitarianism, events that none of his intellectual
ancestors had foreseen.

In one of his last articles, "The USSR in War," he showed a
readiness at least to consider the possibility that the proletariat might
not fulfill the revolution that he and other Marxists had so long
expected. He knew quite well that in such an event he would have
to initiate a fundamental shift in political thought:

If this war provokes, as we firmly believe, a proletarian revolu-
tion, it must inevitably lead to the overthrow of the bureau-
cracy in the USSR and regeneration of Soviet democracy on a
far higher economic and cultural basis than in 1918. . . . If,
however, it is conceded that the present war will provoke not
revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains
another alternative: the further decay of monopoly capital-
ism, its further fusion with the state and the replacement of
democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime.
The inability of the proletariat to take into its hands the
leadership of society could actually lead under these conditions
to the growth of a new exploiting class. . . .

There were other problems—already present during the last
years of Trotsky's life but visible in their full significance only during
the decades since his death—which call into question at least parts
of his political outlook. Can, for instance, the modern phenomenon
of totalitarianism, with its profound irrationality, its systematized ter-
rorism, and its tendency to suppress traditional class dynamics, be
understood adequately in terms of Trotsky's Marxism? Trotsky, it
is true, had kept writing that in the absence of socialism, there would
be a relapse into a kind of modern barbarism, and the Europe of
the thirties and forties certainly sustained this prediction. But to pre-
dict a phenomenon is not necessarily to describe it fully or under-

=== Page 67 ===
TROTSKY 385

stand it adequately; and for those purposes his intellectual outlook
did not, in the era of totalitarianism, suffice. Or again: can the
murder of six million Jews in Europe be satisfactorily explained
through his theory that Nazism represented the last brutal attempt
by the German bourgeoisie to retain power? Similarly, with his
treatment of the problem of democracy. He was extremely sensitive
to the numerous signs of the decay of European democracy during
the years between the two world wars, and his writings on Germany,
France and Spain often brilliantly register the ways in which the
crisis of capitalism endangered the survival of democracy. But the
“class analysis” of democracy, to which Trotsky was committed,
seems not at all sufficient for an era in which it has become so pain-
fully clear that freedom and liberty—far from being mere guises
of class domination—are the most precious values of human life
and that without them little remains but servitude.
Staying within the limits of Trotsky’s ideology, it would be dif-
ficult to account for the considerable stability and the marked rise
in living standards that have characterized the life of Western
capitalism and that now call into question the whole revolutionary
perspective. This does not approximate what he called “the death
agony of capitalism,” though there does of course remain the pos-
sibility that the crises he predicted have merely been delayed. Nor
have his prognoses concerning Russia been realized: the post-Stalin
society ruled by Khrushchev has achieved a relative stability; it is
neither threatened by bourgeois restoration nor within measurable
distance of socialist democracy, but maintains itself as an authori-
tarian dictatorship, keeping terror in reserve but not employing it
with the maniacal consistency of Stalin.
These apparent failures in historical prediction are not as dis-
turbing as Trotsky’s refusal or inability to reconsider some of his
intellectual premises. In his last book, the biography of Stalin, there
are perhaps one or two signs that he had begun to feel some un-
easiness about the Bolshevik heritage, but for the most part he con-
tinued to defend it to the last. His powers of mind operated within
the boundaries of a fixed political tradition, but not toward scruti-
nizing his own assumptions. One could hardly have expected him to
repudiate his lifework, and much of the anti-Bolshevism directed
against him in the late thirties must be acknowledged to have been

=== Page 68 ===
386 IRVING HOWE
crude in method and purpose. Yet for a Marxist theoretician who
so fiercely and effectively criticized every move of the Stalinist re-
gime and who so contemptuously swept aside all of its pretexts for
the suppression of freedom, there should have been a stronger impetus
to turn back to the early years of Bolshevism and submit them to
the kind of objective critical study that historical distance alone makes
possible.

It is very hard to imagine that Trotsky's influence in the future
will be of the kind he anticipated: a renewal of orthodox Marxism
in theory and proletarian revolution in practise, along the lines that
have come to be known as "Trotskyism." We are living in times
that disintegrate all fixed ideologies, and the idea of socialism, if it
is to survive as more than an historical memory or a label incongru-
ously attached to authoritarian states, will surely go through a good
many transmutations and critical revisions in the coming years. But
the writings of this extraordinary man are likely to survive, and the
example of his energy and heroism likely to grip the imagination of
generations to come. In the Eastern European countries heretics
turn instinctively to his forbidden books. In the West political think-
ers must confront his formidable presence, parrying his sharp
polemics and learning from his significant mistakes. Trotsky em-
bodied the modern historical crisis with an intensity of conscious-
ness and a gift for dramatic response which few of his contemporaries
could equal: he tried, on his own terms, to be equal to his time.
In his power and his fall, Leon Trotsky is one of the titans of our
century.

=== Page 69 ===
POEMS

THREE BILLS

Once at the Plaza, looking out into the park
Past the Colombian ambassador, his wife,
And their two children—past a carriage-driver's
Rusty top hat and brown bearkin rug—
I heard three hundred-thousand-dollar bills
Talking at breakfast. One was male and two were female.
The gray female complained
Of the plantation lent her at St. Vincent
"There at the end of nowhere." The brown stocky male's
Chin beard wagged as he said: "I don't see,
Really, how you can say that of St. Vincent."
"But it is the end of nowhere!" "St. Vincent?"
"Yes, St. Vincent." "Don't you mean St. Martin?"
"Of course, St. Martin. That's what I meant to say, St. Martin!"
The blond female smiled with the remnants of a child's
Smile and said: "What a pity that it's not St. Kitts!"
The bearded male went for a moment to the lavatory
And his wife said in the same voice to her friend:
"We can't stay anywhere. We haven't stayed a month
In one place for the last three years.
He flirts with the yardboys and we have to leave."
Her friend showed that she was sorry; I was sorry
To see that the face of Woodrow Wilson on the blond
Bill—the suffused face about to cry
Or not to cry—was a face that under different
Circumstances would have been beautiful, a woman's.

Randall Jarrell

=== Page 70 ===
SEEN THROUGH A WINDOW

A man and a woman are sitting at a table.
It is supper time. The air is green. The walls
Are white in the green air as rocks under water
Retain their own true color though washed in green.
I do not know either the man or the woman,
Nor do I know whatever they know of each other.
Though washed in my eye they keep their own true color.

The man is all his own hunched strength, the body's
Self and strength, that bears, like weariness,
Itself upon itself, as a stone's weight
Bears heavily on itself to be itself.
Heavy the strength that bears the body down.
And the way he feeds is like a dreamless sleep;
The dreaming of the stone is how he feeds.

The woman's arms are plump, mottled a little
The flesh, like standing milk, and on one arm
A blue bruise, got in some household labor or other,
Flowering in the white. Her staring eye,
Like some bird's cry called from some deepest wood,
Says nothing of what it is but what it is.
Such silence is the bird's cry of the stone.

SEVERAL VOICES

the tall man
Height scares me. I am always afraid of falling.
The snaky sea lies coiled about my feet.
When I fall down those snakes will raven me.

the fat woman
I billow on my bones. The axis of the world

=== Page 71 ===
Bears seas about itself in its difficult turning.
Where is this heavy world lumbering to?
the pretty girl
The blossom on the stem, tossed in a sunny wind.
The hummingbird and bee come to me for favor.
Giving and taking, we're a whole act together.

the old sick man
What scares me is the bright touch of a sharp point
Of white light, piercing my dark.
I prayed I'd go to sleep in that pitch dark.

David Ferry

=== Page 72 ===
Alberto Moravia

IMAGES OF AFRICA

Accra, March
From the terrace of my room, I have a panoramic view of
Accra, capital of Ghana. Under a sky of veiled blue, full of mists and
ragged yellow and gray clouds, the city resembles an enormous cabbage
soup in which numerous bits of white pasta are boiling. The cabbages
are the tropical trees with their thick, cascading foliage of dark green
speckled with black shadows; the bits of pasta, the buildings of reinforced
cement, brand new, which by now are rising up in large numbers
throughout the city. One of these buildings is my hotel, which is located
in the middle of a large park all aflame with red flowers. It is an
enormous construction, very new, in that sparkling, colorful, decorative
and ultra-modern style called neo-liberty. In this hotel, there are high
arcades with groups of chairs and tables where you can sit and sip
good iced drinks; there is a vast high-ceilinged dining room with large
windows, everything harmonizing in periwinkle blue and creamy yellow,
immaculately clean, every table sparkling with polished silver and gleam-
ing crystal, with African waiters dressed as though for an eighteenth-
century ballet; there is a large cocktail lounge with a bar that is high
and massive like an altar; there is a spacious and comfortable lobby;
there is an elevator made entirely of metal that brings you to the wide,
ventilated, well-lit corridors of the upper floors; there are rooms all
fitted out with great luxury, from the baths with highest quality
porcelain to the plastic floors, to the curtains of a tropical fabric, and
to the light modern furniture.
When was this hotel built? A short while ago, since Gunther, in his

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book on Africa, speaks of Accra in 1954 in these not very attractive
terms: “It looks like a collection of tin hovels interspersed with dilapi-
ed frame buildings and tawdry hole-in-the-wall shops under moldy
arcades. The impression a visitor is apt to get is one of an almost
desperate squalor. . . .” Two or three years ago, perhaps. Besides, we
have already mentioned that this is not the only modern building in
Accra. A brief visit to the modern part of the city reveals ministries in the
most modern style built on pilework of reinforced cement, with long
verandas of the colonial type; onto them open the doors of rooms in
which, amid the Swedish style furniture, government officials in sleeveless
shirts and white trousers examine papers, aided by secretaries who are
invariably pretty and well-dressed; cottages buried in the dark, brooding,
tropical vegetation; villas dotted with balconies.

The streets of this residential area in Accra wind through exuberant
flowering gardens like paths in a huge park; in these streets, one sees
few pedestrians and many automobiles of American and English make.
Naturally, the city of hovels that Gunther spoke about still exists
now, alongside the modern and luxurious city. Ten minutes by car
from my hotel, the asphalt of the roads becomes yellow earth, and the
cement constructions lined up in orderly rows along the sidewalks are
replaced by innumerable huts and “tukul” gathered like mushrooms
at the edges of the steep excavations. And the center of Accra certainly
isn't modern: a sprawling street that looks as if it had been yanked out
of a small town in the Far West with two lines of uneven mismatched
buildings, here a modern building all of glass, there a hut with a
corrugated tin roof, further on a long low factory of two floors, even
further on a shanty with a straw roof. And along the sidewalks, alternat-
ing with crowded parking lots, are the open markets with the merchandise
laid out on the stones and the women vendors, all enormously corpulent,
hidden under huge straw hats, their thighs overflowing the tiny stools
on which they're seated.

Between these two cities, the one modern and luxurious, the other
decaying and poverty-stricken, there is no intermediate zone whatsoever,
no area of average middle-class houses; just as in Accra and in all of
Africa there has been no phase of transition between the colonialisn
of yesterday and the neo-capitalism of today. It has gone from soldiers
in cork helmets to bankers in printed vests; from the ancestral hut to
the skyscraper, abruptly and without transition. The young government
official who works in the most modern offices has a father who lives in
a hut on the savanna and drives his flocks to pasture, holding a

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AFRICA
shepherd's crook in one hand, and a lance in the other to defend
himself against leopards and lions.
What this demonstrates is that neo-capitalism is advancing in
Africa with the speed, the impetus and the impetuousness of a fire
attacking a very dry or oily substance. The hotel, in Accra, for example,
is only one of many similar hotels that have appeared almost everywhere
on the black continent, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean.
Next to the hotels, a quantity of buildings have sprung up in the
modern sections of the African cities which testify to the interests of
European and American capital in Africa: proud, gloomy and icy
banking centers with those black polished marbles and granites of a
thick gray texture that one sees in Zurich, London, New York, Frankfurt;
small pocket skyscrapers of glass and metal with lines of brass name-
plates on which one reads various writing ending with the magic initials:
Ltd; great department stores with immense windows, escalators, and
salesgirls dressed in uniform as they are in the ten-cent stores of
New York.
We are by now a long way from the old colonialism with its decadent
bungalows, its Victorian hotels, its slave-like bars, its dusty shops and,
in short, all its picturesqueness in the Conrad style. Neo-capitalism, in
no way intimidated by malaria, by the tze-tze fly, by the humid heat
and the dry heat, by the mud of the rains and the dust at the height
of summer, by the backwardness and primitiveness of the population,
and of cities, strengthened by its past victories
in mechanical and pharmaceutical fields, today feels itself capable of
absorbing Africa much more rapidly and effectively than it could over-
populated Asia and lethargic South America. In addition, the interests
of neo-capitalism in Africa are justified not only by the market in
hand-made goods and by the presence of the most diverse mineral
riches, but also by its rivalry with communism and by the need to
establish itself quickly in order to frustrate, with an industrial revolution,
every possibility of a political revolution.
But others, with all the statistics at their disposal, would know how
to describe more precisely than I what the neo-capitalist invasion of
Africa is today in facts and figures. What interests me are all those
things which the economists can not ignore, or rather those aspects
of the invasion which are more irrational but, by no means, less
important. And in the meantime, there is no doubt that while the red
star of communism shines over Asia, over Africa, at least for the
present, the white star of neo-capitalism glitters. In other terms, there
seem to be reasons of an historic, ethnic, psychological and aesthetic

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nature for which the African, facing problems of economic under-
development and social and cultural backwardness analogous to those
of Asia, prefers instead the Western solutions. The "irrational" reasons
for this preference can be reduced to three: the first is colonialism
which, precisely because it is older, crueler and stronger here than
anywhere else, has driven the Africans to adopt the culture of those
very colonialists against whom they revolted: and this is due in part to
the fact that in those cultures one finds the most effective antidote
against the evils that they brought about, and in part to the relation-
ship of attraction and repulsion that is always established between the
executioner and the victim. The second reason is the individualistic
nature of the African culture: Africa has never known the great
centralizing and bureaucratic empires so diffuse in Asia; outside of the
tribes, or of the family, the African was always as free as a bird in air
or a fish in water. The third reason is the particular character of the
magical and fetishistic religions of Africa which are not an obstacle,
like Buddhism or Mohammedanism, to the understanding and acceptance
of modern industrial civilization, but rather a stimulus to that under-
standing and acceptance exactly because of whatever there is of the
magical and of the fetishistic in the machine. To these three reasons,
one could add a fourth which has its origin in the infantile character of
the African: neo-capitalism with its infinite mass-produced products of
light industry, all well-made, ingenious and almost always superfluous,
fascinates the Africans in the same way that the copper wires and glass
beads of Venice fascinated them when the adventurers of one or two
centuries ago offered them in exchange for gold, ivory and precious
woods.

For the Africans, neo-capitalism is therefore everything that provides
happiness in this life; in this sense, contrasted with the Asians who
have accepted the severe Marxist humanism, the African is eudæmonistic.
These are my thoughts as I walk down the main street of Accra,
through the most multicolored crowd I've ever seen in my life. What
an incredible and cheerful sight: between the two lines of uneven
mismatched buildings swarms a multitude dressed in fabrics of the
most brilliant colors and the boldest designs imaginable. The men wrap
these fabrics around their bodies in the style of Roman togas, from the
head to the feet, leaving the neck, one shoulder and arm bare; the
women wear them tight at the hips and the bosom like evening dresses
for La Scala or the Metropolitan; kerchiefs of the same material wound
around their heads with and tied into enormous bows that give the im-

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pression that they're carrying vases of flowers on their heads. The
fabrics, as I said before, are barbarically colored and patterned; but an
expert eye can not help but notice that this barbarousness is a second
hand product, that is, it is a barbarousness filtered through the pictorial
experiences of the European avant garde. The open markets offer in-
numerable bolts of these fabrics piled up on the sidewalks; I stop and
have some of them shown to me. They are of very crude cotton, the
price is very low; yet to have brought about the mixture of such violent
and new colors and such extravagant and seductive patterns, one feels
that the primitivism of Gauguin, cubism and l'art nègre were needed.
Made in Manchester or in Holland, these fabrics interpret and, at the
same time, stimulate the Africans' passion for the violent colors that
always produce such a beautiful effect with their black skin.

I stroll along admiring the sight of all those men and women
strutting down the dusty street in the scorching sun with their togas
and their evening dresses, in an atmosphere of perpetual proud holiday;
and then suddenly I remember something: those printed cotton fabrics
that were shown to me during my trip to Russia in the combinat of
Tashkent in central Soviet Asia. Placed side by side with the English and
Dutch fabrics which the Africans of Accra wear, there is no doubt that
the Soviet fabrics, printed in colors and fabrics that are drab and old-
fashioned, would make a very poor impression. So there is reason to
believe that these fabrics and in general all the products of Western
light industry have paved the way, in a cultural and psychological
sense, for neo-capitalist influence in Africa, while the well-known lack
of Soviet light industry has produced the opposite effect as far as the
ideological and political expansion of Communism is concerned. Of
course, man does not live by colored fabrics and other similar products
alone, but neither does he live by bull-dozers and tractors, turbines and
excavators. And judging by the joy and pleasure with which the
inhabitants of Accra wrap the multi-colored fabrics around them, one
would say that at least in this part of the world, light industry provides
greater satisfaction for man than heavy industry.

Kano, April
The Negroes walk. I have traveled thousands of kilometers in black
Africa and everywhere, in the uncultivated territories as well as in the
cultivated areas, I have seen single individuals, or couples, a man and
a woman, or small families, or even groups of ten, twenty people of
both sexes and of every age walking in terrible solitude through bound-

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less heaths swarming with trees and bushes, along the paths which, like
tunnels, pierce the compact arborescent mass of the rain forest.
Where are these migrant Negroes going? They never have the air
of the vagabond, or of the beggar, whose destination is unknown even
to himself, since wherever he goes he will not find things changed. But
the Negroes seem to know very well where they're going; and, in fact,
they do know. In short, wherever the Negro goes, he is usually motivated
by a concern for business affairs; that is, he moves principally for
economic, mercantile reasons of subsistence. For the most part, the
Negroes go and come from the markets, and when they are not going
to and returning from the markets, they are on their way to the pastures
or the fields, or else they are coming back from them; they may also
move for family or social or magical reasons, but behind these reasons
there is always the economic factor. Because the Negroes, although in
their way capricious, fanciful, irrational, are one of the most trade-
oriented races in the world, even if their trades are often at the archaic
level of an exchange in kind and of the sale and simple acquisition of
a few products of family manufacture. However, poverty is not enough
to explain the Negroes' frenzy for trading. In reality, the Negro lives
in a primitive, and therefore functional, civilization in which the social
life is fixed at the level of the instinct of conservation.
Seen in this light, black Africa appears to be not the motley group
of states and smaller states copied from the West and more or less cut
along the lines of the old French and English colonies that one sees on
the map, but a single organism in which an integrating and balancing
economic unity is set against the infinite tribal fragmentation. And this
is an affirmation based not on conjectures and illusory observations,
but on the fact that in black Africa the cities where markets are located
are found at the center of territories that do not coincide with, and,
in fact, extend beyond political boundaries. This, you will say, also
occurs in Europe. It is true; but in Europe, linguistic, political, military,
religious, and in short, historical realities have their own concreteness
which confers, so to speak, a sacred character on these boundaries.
In Africa, instead, this concreteness does not exist, it being a question,
as we have pointed out, of nations formed on the pattern of the
colonies which, in their time, had been designed by the absurd will of
the European colonizers. And so the markets with the paths, roads,
land and water routes which join them to the inhabited centers are
still today the only garment that man has known how to throw over the
savage and archaic nudity of black Africa.

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Markets of Africa, beautiful and strange, where one feels, in
visiting them, that their true function goes beyond mere buying and
selling and that without them human life in Africa would truly be
extinguished and would return to the savage level: I visited several
of these markets, and everywhere I always found the same feverish
atmosphere, excited, festive, panicked, like fairs that are, at the same
time, religious reunion, political assembly, magical encounter, cultural
exchange, erotic outburst.

They are found, for the most part, at the center of the cities, in fact,
they form the nucleus of propelling energy; and at first sight, with their
huts and hovels lined up on two sides of very narrow lanes, with their
promiscuous and bawling crowds, their stench and their filth, they form
an almost unbearable contrast with the cities around them, often
constructed in a European or even American style, with houses, large
buildings and small skyscrapers. But after a brief reflection, one is
convinced that the contrast is only apparent. The cities may be, in fact
ought to be, constructed in the European style; this is as it should be, since
black Africa has decided to become modern. But its heart remains
the old African heart, and this also is as it should be, since, while
modernizing itself, Africa also wishes to remain faithful to itself. Now
the heart of the African cities, whether at Lagos or Accra, Ibadan or
Kano, is the market, and the market preserves, in spite of the buildings
that surround it, the character that it had in the time in which instead
of buildings there was only the forest and the savanna: the character
of the only social center of a primitive and embryonic world perpetually
menaced by a pitiless dark nature.

Sometimes the market is not found at the city's center but outside,
far from the inhabited area, perhaps because the city could not contain
within its walls the crowding stalls of the vendors and the torrential
flood of buyers. I remember especially one of these peripheral markets
in the outskirts of Kano, which is the principal city of northern Nigeria
and one of the Negro cities that has its own beautiful style, a cross
between the barbaric and the Arab: a great inhabited center that,
seen from the tower of the minaret of the Mosque, seems round like a
globe, or like a bowl, in the middle of an endless plain of pale, and
almost blue, green. This globe, this bowl, is a dark brick red; just here
and there, the uniformity of this somber tint is broken by the jade green
of some garden or some basin of municipal water. The houses, all one
storied and all made with mud mixed with straw and dried in the
sun and painted that color "terra di Sienna," have smooth walls with
an undulating surface as if they were petrified waves; when the mud

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was still soft, the builder, with a pointed tool or spatula, marked furrows
which also give a wave-like impression. These wall-waves, devoid of any
opening, hermetic, with that rare small door or window here and there,
form narrow and deserted streets in which the life of the African city
reveals all its terrible poverty: dust, an occasional naked child, a woman
crouched on the steps of a doorway pounding something into a mortar,
a man cowering in the sun and the flies. The silence is profound; the
sun that glitters among the red battlements of the walls, in the im-
maculately blue sky, is a vertical, a hard and burning sun and explains
the hermetic quality of the city. Arab in feeling, although the Arab
cities are white and Kano, instead, is all red, of exactly the color that
the earth in Africa often has.

But Kano is a market city, that is, a city to which, from the farthest
corners of Africa, both east and west, people flock, those who want to
buy and those who want to sell. At fifty kilometers from Kano we were
informed that on precisely that day a market was being held. We went
there. After an hour speeding along jerkily on a sandy track through
the swarming of the bush and the acacia of the savanna, there were
the first signs of the market: groups of Negroes dressed in wide
fluttering gowns of white cotton walking with that gay capricious step
of theirs across the heath, headed toward an unimaginable goal. At
first, there were only a few individuals, then some families, finally small
strolling crowds; they walked quickly, chattering, laughing, gesticulating,
with that anticipated enthusiasm and that premeditated promiscuity
that are peculiar to those who are on their way to a gathering place in
which they know they will be swallowed up by an even vaster multitude.
In short, all these Negroes who were running a few at a time toward
the market seemed to have already a foretaste of the moment when
they would plunge themselves into the crowd, and confused with so
many others in the dust, sweat and noise, they would find a compensa-
tion for that weak, irritating, and superfluous individual separateness.

But there is the market: an immense plain scattered with large trees
of loose spreading foliage, and under the trees, a multitude all dressed
in white like the crowds of an ancient Roman and Greek city. The
plain was so flat that the crowd with its white gestures and movements
stood out against the blue sky as if they were not standing on a plain
but on a mountain top; this crowd, even from a distance one could
see, was shaken by a violent confusion like that of different currents
crossing in the sea during a storm. It swayed, it opened, closed again,

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came and went, turned, moved away and then near. These were the
movements of the traders, and in fact, every once in a while, through
an opening in the crowd, one caught a glimpse of a herd of oxen pushed
one against the other, with myriads of black-nosed muzzles, myriads of
immense crescent horns. Then the crowd closed again and above them,
I could see great black vultures wheeling slowly, as if looking for some
prey, and then they turned and crouched in the branches of the trees.
A dust rose from the crowd that dimmed the air; a festive, gay, ex-
uberant, contagious dust.
Then we approached and entered the crowd and wandered about
for two or three hours in the inexhaustible human sea that divided
for us in a strange automatic way, forming for us a narrow pathway
among the bodies; the Negroes, however, hadn't seen us, so immersed
were they in their festive hypnosis. It is useless to describe the
merchandise that was laid out there on the ground between the feet
of the squatting buyers. They were the usual products of African
gardens, the few objects of their handicraft, or they were, instead,
merchandise mass-produced in America and in Europe; always what
impressed one the most was not the merchandise so much as the men,
the buyers and sellers. The merchandise was lacking in interest; but what
the men succeeded in doing with this miserable merchandise, what
they derived from it other than money was inexhaustible and always new.
All of Africa, as I have said, is dotted with these markets. The
Negroes leave, let us imagine, from Senegal and then, by land or by
water, reach Onitsha on the Niger, not far from the river mouth.
Look at the map, you will see that it is a question of thousands of
kilometers. These enormous distances overcome in order to sell or to
buy a sack of seeds or ten meters of cotton give a good idea of what
the true Africa is in contrast to the Africa on the maps. One thinks,
rather than of a continent divided into nations like Europe, of a great
apolitical space, thick with tribes but lacking in nationality, a little
like what the oriental territories between Poland and China must have
been during the Middle Ages, with their great fairs and markets and
their migrations from one fair to another. This character of black
Africa, along with others that it is not convenient to describe here, leads
us to predict, not a multitude of large and small nations in the European
style, but a single organism united somewhat in the way large continental
countries are, such as India or China or the United States or the
Soviet Union. The Africans walk; their long tireless legs require space.

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Lagos, April

The Negroes dance. Somebody here at Lagos told me that some-
times, at the dockyards, the black workers improvise a dance to the
rhythm of the motor of an excavator or a drill. To those who are familiar
with the simplicity of the music with which the Africans often accompany
their dances, drums played by hand, or clapping of the hands and
snapping of the fingers, this transformation of the bulldozer into a
musical instrument will not seem so unusual. But still the news has
its significance. First of all, it indicates an irresistible inclination to
express in dance not this or that particular moment of life, such as, for
example, agricultural work or sexual initiation, but all of life; and
secondly, the fact that the Negro is the only one among the so-called
primitives who is capable, through the dance itself, of happily becoming
part of modern industrial civilization.

On the second point, just a few words will suffice. There are
primitive peoples in all five continents who translate into dance the
religious and social manifestations of their existence; but only the
Negro has succeeded in becoming a modern man while conserving intact
his traditional dancing ability. The frequent phenomenon of modern
dances invented by the Negroes in America is so well known that it
isn't necessary to demonstrate it in detail. If anything, one could say
that the dance is the most striking aspect of the contagious primitive
rhythm that the Negro has introduced into Western civilization. This
rhythm which, by now, seems to us to be indivisible from and deeply
rooted in the civilization of machines, comes, instead, directly from an
archaic pre-historic world-that of the savanna and the forests of
black Africa. That is the most precious gift that Africa has given to
the world; on the other hand, the descendants of the slaves sold on the
markets of Bahia or New Orleans have shown themselves more capable
of assimilating Western civilization than any other primitive, or at any
rate, non-European people.

As for the first point, i.e., translating all of life into dance, one
could say that this is one of those obvious things which for that very
reason escapes attention. And yet the phenomenon is not so simple. I
remember, for example, a day when I was driving along the still
unfinished road that goes from Lagos to Benin: a strip of earth red as
blood between two vertical walls of nearly black foliage. Suddenly in
the distance, we saw a group of Negroes who were walking in the
middle of the road, dressed in the usual fluttering multi-colored gowns.
They were walking calmly, with that tireless, brisk and carefree walk
that the Negroes have when, without apparent goal, they stroll through

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the boundless spaces of their continent. However, when we were a
short distance from the group, a tall slender young man began to
improvise a dance step, moving away somewhat from the others. His
companions didn’t look at him, they continued to walk on chattering
and laughing. But suddenly a woman began to dance too, still walking
at the same time: then another boy, then another woman, finally the
whole group, as if taken with a kind of infection or automatic imitation;
they proceeded down the road, in that majestic and funereal solitude
of the forest, jumping, shaking their arms and swaying their hips, with
a frenzy and a violence that the calm bearing of a few moments
before had not, in any way, foretold.
We passed next to them. There was an old man who carried
strung across his back a small wooden drum which he beat at the
edges with his palms; there were some young men with fluttering
streamers of colored cloth thrown over their shoulders; there were
boys and some almost naked children. All were dancing while they
walked, their excitement in strange contrast with the absolute im-
mobility of the forest; and all had, in their white eyes, a fixed and
abstract look that made one think of an easy ecstasy, in a manner of
speaking, always within reach, always ready to make the fine screen
of individuality fall away and let man communicate with the mystery.
In this case, the mystery was there, two steps away, visible and obsessive:
the forest grandiose and hostile, beneath which they wandered like the
faithful beneath the nave of a cathedral. The group continued to dance
while we passed by. The road was straight, after about half a kilometer,
I turned and looked back: the group was no longer dancing; now they
had gone back to walking with a normal step.

What do I wish to express with this example? I wish to express
what I have already said before: that the Negro dances his life; and
that for this reason there is always in his dance something surprising,
something that springs up unexpectedly. In reality, the Negro doesn't
know what is waiting for him in the dance; in the same way, we usually
do not know what is waiting for us in life. He tries to move his body
in a certain direction, according to a certain rhythm. Sometimes, moving
in this way, he succeeds in entering into a more general, a vaster rhythm
which flows around him like a sea current that flows around the body
of a swimmer; and then he begins to dance. But sometimes the personal
rhythm doesn't succeed in becoming a part of the universal rhythm, and
then the Negro immediately stops dancing and goes back to his normal
step. But still, he tries, he tries continuously, and with the obstinacy
and the patience of a water-diviner or a gold prospector.

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The dance, for the Negro, is also a means of joining with, or better,
of freeing himself from his superficial individual form and blending with
the others in the same way that different pieces of various metals are
blended in a single crucible. I still remember, in this connection, a day
when, returning from a trip to Ibadon, we passed through the periphery
of Lagos. The road ran along an uninterrupted line of hovels fantastic-
ally blackened and warped by the humidity, huts patched with bottoms
of tin cans and parts of boxes, low constructions painted red and
covered with roofs of sheet iron. Now and then, between one hovel
and another, a field opened out, land that could be used for building
although it had not yet been, in which some mangy grass grew, grass
that was shaggy and wild, very different from the more polite species
found in the European suburbs. We were attracted by a throng that
had gathered in one of these fields; we stopped the car and got out.
It was a crowd all in blue, which is the color of the Yoruba tribe, one
of the four great tribes into which Nigeria is divided. All those blue
gowns, togas, trousers, shirts, tunics, head scarves, formed a great spot
of deep blue, perverse, harsh, and chemical under the low overcast
sky, framed by the red huts and large diffuse trees swarming in a green
that was almost black. Within the blue, like a troubled sea, black faces,
arms, shoulders were discernible here and there; or rather than black,
they were the color of a darkly toasted coffee. We scarcely had time
to get out of the car before the crowd rushed toward us, surrounded
us, engulfed us. A moment earlier, we had been in an almost free
space; a moment later, we were among the bodies of a hundred people,
our nostrils perceived their odor, our skin their sweat, against our
legs were their legs, against our chests theirs pressed; and hundreds of
eyes stared at us avidly.

An old man, with a small skull cap on his head, explained to us
that there was a dancing contest and if we wanted to attend we were
most welcome. After hearing this explanation, I suddenly understood
the gaze of all those eyes with the form and density of boiled eggs
whose white has been disclosed through a hole, the yolk black; a
gaze that was ecstatic and, in an inoffensive way, cannibalistic. And I
also understood the sensation, of which I was unable to rid myself, of
having been surrounded and swallowed up not by a multitude, but by
a single palpitating warm body, with innumerable members, infinite
huge eyes, and yet at the same time, only one body. This body, or more
precisely, this momentary fusion of many bodies into one was an effect
of the dance. When we declined the invitation, the crowd, after having
pressed and squeezed up against us, imbuing us with their odor and their

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perspiration, with a vast flowing motion returned to the open space
and there spontaneously re-formed the circle around the dancers. While
we were getting back into the car, we could see at a distance some
diabolic masks hopping and shaking and all around, a stormy sea of
black woolly heads that swayed rhythmically.
For the Negroes, the dance still has the value of a purely individual
display; and anyone can verify this fact by entering one of the many
nightclubs that explode with their violent neon lights in the sweltering
murky night on the Gulf of Guinea, deep in the lower-class sections
of Lagos. They are for the most part located outdoors; their cement
platforms open into the midst of a multitude of rickety peeling tables
and tubular chairs; their orchestras are on a raised platform close to a
confused, ragged background of slums and hovels. And yet when the
music passionately and authoritatively attacks a twist or a high-life, the
spectator immediately forgets the poverty of the setting and cannot help
but be fascinated by the grace, the elegance, the unself-consciousness,
the rhythm, the intense expressiveness of the dancers. When these tall
lean Negroes, smothered in jackets and immense trousers, have caught
hold of the streamer of the dance, they do not let go; and they move
around the platform with the careless lightness of a leopard that tracks
its prey among the grasses of the bush. Their partners, incredibly
slender, fluid, and long-limbed, with ankles and wrists of a marvelous
elegance, and heads impressively elongated, lengthened even more by
solid cone-shaped hair styles, writhe before them in a manner that
succeeds in being both completely chaste and utterly sensual.
Where have I seen them before, those slender figures, black and
elegant, those heads all eyes and mouth, that skin with the oiliness, the
roughness, the sheen and the dark color of bronze? But, of course, at
the museum in whose glass cases the mysterious sculpture of the artists
of Benin is displayed. In Europe that sculpture sometimes gives the
impression of being almost a caricature. But here in the night clubs of
Lagos, one realizes that they are realistic, in fact, almost photographic.
It is nature that, in the gulf of Guinea, is expressionistic, subjective,
delirious, unrestrained, caricature-like; not men. The men dance, and
through the dance, express the madness of nature.

Lagos, March
Sometimes, I've asked myself the question: is black Africa older
or younger, historically, than Europe? Considering it carefully, com-
pared with Africa, which is primitive in the sense of being still wrapped
in the cocoon of Nature, Europe, which shed that cocoon a long time

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ago, should be older. On the other hand, it is clear that black Africa
is at a cultural stage that Europe had reached some thousands of years
ago; therefore, in this case, Africa would be the older. But Africa is
now entering, for the first time, the industrial civilization that has been
established in Europe for two centuries, and thus Africa is younger.
Still, one can not deny the fact that the African fails to comprehend
the deeper meaning of this industrial civilization; he accepts it without
understanding it and he doesn't understand it because his religious
concepts precede not only Calvinism, which lies at the origin of that
civilization, but Christianity itself; therefore Africa is older. But isn't the
African perhaps younger than the European in that he is more ir-
rational, more carefree, more infantile, more inclined toward dancing,
singing, pantomime that is art forms which don't demand intellectual
maturity, and so on? But this is a trick of words. In reality, all things
considered, the culture of Africa is archaic, decrepit, prehistoric.
Today, the Africans, after having remained fixed at this culture
for millenia, are passing with a dizzying jump, because of a caprice
not unusual in history, to the neo-capitalist, industrial culture. Thus,
a trip to Africa, when it is not limited to a monotonous jaunt through
the large hotels that Westerners have scattered over the black continent,
is a plunge into prehistory.
But what is this prehistory that fascinates Europeans so much?
First of all, let us say, it is the structure of the African landscape
itself. The principal trait of this landscape is not its diversity, as in
Europe, but rather its terrifying monotony. The face of Africa is
therefore more similar to that of an infant with few of its features
yet defined than to that of a man on which life has marked innumerable
significant lines; or rather it is more similar to the face of the earth
in prehistory when there were no seasons and man hadn't yet appeared
than to the face of the earth today with its innumerable modifications
wrought both by the seasons and by man himself. This monotony, on the
other hand, presents two aspects that are truly prehistoric: repetition,
and formlessness, that is the inability to assume any limit,
finiteness, or shape.
Prehistory, for example, is the savanna that covers Africa for
thousands of kilometers from west to east, from the Atlantic Ocean to
the Indian Ocean. The savanna is a vast steppe, pale green in color,
scattered as far as the eye can see with one type of tree, the small
African acacia bristling with thorns, its branches opening out like an
umbrella, and one type of circular bush of a dark green. You can

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drive for hundreds of kilometers on roads or dirt tracks and the steppe
never ends; it does nothing but repeat itself, or rather repeat the two
motifs that are uniquely its own, the acacia and the bush. The savanna
is the home of the great feline animals, the lion and the leopard, as
well as the herbivorous animals which serve as their food: zebras,
gazelles, buffalo, antelope; but these animals are seen rarely.
Sometimes, very far away, in those remote deserted areas, you can
discern myriads of black points moving rapidly through the swarming
of the acacia and the bush: they are herds of zebras or gazelles fleeing
who knows where, frightened by who knows what. If you stop in the
middle of the savanna, the roar of the automobile is suddenly replaced
by a virgin silence, suspended, truly prehistoric in its profundity and
its transparency. You hear the wind blowing mutely; the sun floods
the immense steppe with an implacable light; suddenly you feel yourself
observed and you discover above the umbrellas of the acacia, rising
up on enormous necks, the small large-eyed heads of some giraffes.
These shy curious animals stand here and there among the trees like
small graceful dinosaurs grazing in a land of the Mesozoic era; then
startled by a gesture or a voice, they run away, one after the other,
crossing the road with slow awkward heavy leaps, the legs high and
the bodies massive. You go on your way again and the savanna begins
to repeat once more the motif of the acacia and the bush millions
and millions of times, for hundreds, for thousands of kilometers. Every
once in a while, the savanna appears to rise a little toward the sky
and to assume the shape of long soft hills that seem to enclose it and
give it the form of a valley; but it is a futile attempt that invariably
vanishes and dissolves into the usual formlessness.

Prehistory is also the rain forest that stretches below the savanna;
it, too, extends for thousands of kilometers, uninterrupted from west
to east, from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans. The color of the
savanna is pale green, a hint of yellow and of blue; the color of the
forest is black. I drove through the forest, for example, on the road that
goes from Lagos to the legendary Benin, once a center for marvelous
sculptors and smiths. The road is narrow, straight, of earth red as blood;
one might say that the forest was black flesh on which a long wound
still open and living had been traced. Also here, you drive for hundreds
and hundreds of kilometers without any change in the landscape: the
forest, like the savanna, does nothing but repeat itself, to a point of
obsession. The dominant motif is the tangled black of the trees, of the
shrubs, of the lianas, and the creepers that rise up on both sides of

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the road and almost block the view of the sky, which is reduced to a
blue stripe parallel to the red stripe of the road.
At first, this tangled forest seems quite varied in its foliage, its
trunks, its hanging branches, but this variety also repeats itself until
finally the eye tires and ceases to seek it and appreciate it. If you stop
suddenly in the forest, here too you will be struck by the purity and
transparency of the silence. The forest rises straight up on both sides
of the road; a small stream winds through it, black, stagnant, unmoving
among the trees; here and there along the shores of that low slimy
water you can see enormous tree-trunks that fell from age and are
decaying there in peace, the eternal death-like peace of prehistory. The
forest is funereal, gloomy, mute and empty; and it seems that there
is nothing in the forest but serpents and insects. The forest, also, like
the savanna, seems to wish, every now and then, to escape from its
formlessness and to simulate something finite, recognizable, formed, such
as a clearing, a pathway, an isolated tree, a group of trees; but almost
immediately this sign crumbles and vanishes into the formless green
and dusk of the equatorial vegetation.
Prehistory in Africa exists not only in the structure of the landscape
but also in the universal presence of the only religious belief that is
truly aboriginal-magic. In Europe, the world of magic survives with
modest, indecipherable relics, like the wreckage in the sea after a
shipwreck; but in Africa you are always aware that the world of magic
is still complete, intact and active as a concept of life. Now the world
of magic is exactly that which is considered the evil of Africa, no
longer by the Europeans, but by the Africans. This evil has its roots in
fear, a fear of prehistory, of all the irrational forces which man, over
many thousands of years, has succeeded in driving back and dominating
in Europe, and which here in Africa are still intrusive and unchecked. It
is a fear to which the European eventually becomes accustomed, since
he has his roots elsewhere and his personality is more solid and less
ephemeral than the African's; on the whole, it is a fear that is painfully
pleasant. But the fear of the African, deprived as he is of a history, with
a personality that flickers like a candle flame, is a beautiful, a good
fear, a nameless fright, a perpetual, obscure terror. Magic is the
expression of this fear of prehistory; it is as ugly, gloomy and demented
as the evil of Africa is aphrodisiacal and pleasing, even if it is disinte-
grating and destructive. In reality, magic is the other face of Africa's evil.

At the market of Lagos, after having wandered around in the
impure sultry air through various aisles of booths and stalls overflowing

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with merchandise and foodstuffs, all equally softened and inclined toward
putrefaction by the tropical heat, I suddenly found myself in a clearing
surrounded by huts. The clearing, as usual, was strewn with refuse of
every kind, gutters of urine, fruit peelings, rotting food, small Negro
babies completely naked and not yet able to walk; but on the ground
in front of the huts some objects were displayed which attracted my
attention. They were the so-called "ju-ju," those objects which the
Africans use for their innumerable rituals of magic; objects that one
can buy at the market and that must be much in demand, because
in that clearing there were at least twenty huts, all of which offered
the same hellish merchandise. And what were these "ju-ju"? First of
all, arranged in two rows, several large smoked rats strung on sticks
like figs from Calabria; then in a large basket, dried chameleons;
finally, on a bench, plates and small baskets brimful of a repulsive
mixture which my eyes found it hard to look at for long: small skulls
of monkeys or dogs or rodents, hooves of gazelles or antelope, eyes and
fingernails, hair and bristles, clay disks, excrement and unrecognizable
putrefied fragments. All this rubbish had its own meaning, its destination,
its price, its usefulness. The African goes to the market, buys the rat or
the skull or the chameleon and then takes it home and uses it. In
what way? The answer is of no importance. It is enough to say that
he uses it and that he believes in it.

In the "ju-ju" one can discern the quality of a particular ugliness,
both extravagant and repugnant, that is a product of fear. A murky and
disgusting substitute for science, the "ju-ju" deceives itself with the
belief that it is controlling prehistory while, in reality, it is the direct
expression of prehistory. The same could be said about the masks
which, still today in certain parts of black Africa, give a tone of
perpetual and sinister carnival to the life of the Africans. These masks
are well-known; by now, there's hardly a living room in Paris or London
that doesn't have an African mask hanging on the wall. I will limit
myself to recalling one among the many which I saw. In a large
scraggy field on the outskirts of Lagos, we noticed a circle of men
standing around idly. We approached and saw a masked man dancing,
or rather, jumping from one foot to the other to the rhythm of a
wooden drum which a decrepit and skeleton-like old man was beating
with his palms. The body of the masked man was clothed in straw
tied at the legs, the waist and the shoulders in such a way that you
might have said a sheaf of straw was dancing; the face was covered
with a black silk stocking on which several clusters of white shells
had been sewn. With each jump, the straw moved and parted but

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did not reveal the body of the dancer who, as a result, seemed almost
not to exist at all; and the clusters of shells rose, letting you glimpse
the smooth black features of the face, with only the nose outlined
under the silk of the stocking, like certain Negro statues which are
otherwise stylized. Perhaps, at first glance, the masked dancer hadn't
seemed terrifying; and yet after a while, he became almost unbearable
to look at. Yet his intention was not to produce fear in the spectator--
he "was" fear. The weakness of the terrified human being was expressed,
by the Africans, through the body in the form of straw; the face, closed
in the stocking and covered with shells like an underwater rock,
alluded to man's incapacity to emerge with his face freed from a
prolific and overwhelming prehistoric nature. Then, above the field,
almost grazing the roofs of the huts that surrounded it, an enormous
airplane flew over with a deafening roar. But the spectators didn't
turn around, they didn't raise their eyes to the sky: all their attention
was fixed on the masked dancer who personified fear.

San'a, February
The airplane descends, swaying over a wide pale green plain
surrounded by steep brown mountains to the far horizons. It is the
plateau glittering with sunlight on which, at two thousand meters, rises
San'a, the capital of Yemen. Down there, very far away, crushed to
the ground by the blue sky, you see the walls of the city, a rose-
colored brown that suggests the color of turtle doves, with cylindrical
towers set in rows at regular intervals. Between those walls and myself
stretches a surface so flat that even the stones there project a shadow.
The camels, tall and hunch-backed standing here and there on the
plain, look like immobile chess pieces on a board.

Now the plane has come to a stop in front of a yellow cabin;
under a shed in the sun, a crowd of bystanders watch two soldiers
who, bending down, weigh the passengers' luggage on a dusty market
scale. The brown hands with fine fingers make the weights run along
the steel bar; a few kilos are added or subtracted; a scribe, squatting
on the ground, rapidly covers a sheet of paper with fluttering signs.
The two soldiers, having finished the weighing, get up and look at us.
They are small and thin with narrow ankles and wrists, dark thin
bearded faces. They both wear a black turban, a black jacket, a newly
washed shirt, a white sash and a striped skirt tight at the hips and
around the legs. Two polished metal cartridge belts cross over their
chests: from the sash, at the height of the navel, projects the handle
of a short scimitar; in its scabbard a smaller straight dagger is also

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fitted. On their feet, they wear the traditional Yemen sandal with the
square sole; and over their shoulders, they carry an old rifle, a ninety-
one model. Both have one smooth cheek and one swollen one as if
suffering from a tumor. It is the gat, a small green plant whose leaves,
when chewed for a long time, produce a euphoria not unlike, though
less intense than, that caused by hashish. I indicate the swelling to the
soldiers, and then, smiling, touch my cheek. Immediately, they both
laugh; and then an expression of ingenuousness and gentleness appears
on those fierce faces, correcting the first predatory impression.
Later, after leaving my suitcases at the rest-house, I go out for my
first visit to San'a. The rest-house is at the end of one of those immense
irregular dusty spaces which are the plazas of Arab cities; spaces
imitated by the desert that surrounds the city and made purposely for
the slow erratic advance of the camels, for the uneven trot of the
donkeys and for the tumultuous migrations of the sheep. At the end
of the plaza, like an ancient altar-piece representing Jerusalem or
Byzantium, rise the walls of San'a with the round towers and the
gateway and beyond the walls, the famous palaces. I say "famous"
because San'a, until yesterday forbidden to foreigners, is one of the
architectural myths of the Orient; as far as I know, it is impossible to
see buildings such as these in any other country of Arabia.
Well, there they are: the famous legendary palaces. They are very
tall, five or six floors, square, massive, thick, almost towers or fortresses;
constructed of bricks of dry mud, they have a uniformly brown color
against which white decorations made with lime and stucco stand out.
In these cornices that look like spun sugar, in these rosettes laid out
like certain Italian playing cards above prison-like windows, in these
arabesques like hand-made lace, there is nothing of the geometrical
rigor of great Arab architecture, but only a witty and crude Bedouin
parody.
They are really hand-made palaces, simple, mixed from mud and
straw, constructed without a plumbline, with walls sometimes oblique
or bulging, decorated with an artisan improvisation, according to a
crude and rustic tradition. And now I recall those houses and palaces,
also old and crooked and decorated with openwork designs, that are
lined up along the canals of Venice. Yes, San'a is a small Bedouin
Venice built in the middle of the steppe on the Yemen plateau, like
Venice in the middle of the waters of the lagoon. The same oriental
imagination concerned with decorative and fairy-tale effects seems
to have conceived both these cities.
I enter the city through the gate called Bab-al-Yemen, between two

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towers around which, with the usual ability of orienta crowds to form
a picture or even an oleograph, swarm street-peddlers, passers-by, soldiers,
idlers, women and boys, and wandering about apparently free and
without masters are dogs, sheep, goats, donkeys and even camels.
The double-door of the gateway which, until two or three months
ago, was kept closed and bolted from sunset to dawn, is wide open;
it looks ancient, its warped and worm-eaten planks studded with old
iron knobs. Once in the city, the similarity to Venice is confirmed.
These little streets that wind in shadow between high, hanging façades
recall, in fact, the narrower and more secret canals of Venice. Only
that at San'a, the canals are filled, not with water, but with a soft
yellow dust in which you sink up to the ankle, with every step raising
stinging clouds that catch at the throat and make the nostrils ache.
Venice of dust, San'a, equal to the Venice of the lagoon, also has its
plazas and small squares, or more precisely, irregular spaces at times
vast and spread out, at others, narrow and intimate, around which the
palaces are arranged with casual, yet always supremely picturesque,
views. And finally, as in Venice, between one palace and another,
sprout the green tufts of trees from the thick gardens closed between
the walls. San'a, evidently, is famous for these gardens which the
Yemenites speak of as if they were the most delicious and perfect
places. However, it is true that in such praise imagination also plays a
part; the imagination of a people like the Arabs to whom, with their
vast collection of deserts, even a scrubby, dusty oasis seems a voluptuous
paradise.
You wander endlessly through the obsessive labyrinth of these
serpentine streets; looking up at the tall façades, on every floor you
can see swaying flowers arranged on a vertical groove that goes from
the roof to the sidewalk. Through these grooves the dirty water from
the houses runs down; and, in fact, there is a stench in the streets
and here and there the dust becomes an impure slime. But the doors
of carved wood with their padlocks and bolts; the multi-colored glass,
blue, red, yellow, green, of the windows; the flight through these
streets of girls wrapped in black veils; the scene in the plazas of groups
of camels kneeling in the dust; the gardens and courtyards that are
glimpsed beyond the doors console you for these medieval inconveniences.
Finally, after much wandering, one of the streets flows into the canal
grande of San'a: a wide, deep, waterless bed brimming with dust and
rocks, its steep earthy banks guarded by two rows of towering and
illustrated palaces. The canal grande of San'a, after having divided

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the city in two, comes to an abrupt end when it reaches some walls
of dried mud which, at that point, have no opening.
San’a, like all cities in the Orient, is divided into two areas: the
area in which the people live, mysterious and deserted, whose hermetic
atmosphere expresses the well-known cryptomania of the Moslems with
their medieval concept of family life; and the area in which they do
business, a tumultuous crowded place that is almost too insolent and
aggressive in its bustle and trade. Here in the streets swarming with
passers-by whose activities and destinations are difficult to determine, the
shops are the size of closets; inside these square low-ceilinged rooms,
the shopkeepers sit on crossed legs in front of a pile of seeds or a
bowl full of farina: it is difficult to imagine a poorer and more symbolic
type of commerce. And in these streets where everybody looks at things
but few buy anything, perhaps less money circulates than in one large
Western department store or supermarket. Even the vivacity of the Middle
Ages, composed of rags and of colors, of mean dealing and subtle
trickery, of shouting and gesticulation, of ingenuousness and cunning;
and in those of the more realistic stories in A Thousand And One
Nights. Everything that would be impossible in a modern city today
here at San’a happens frequently; to be interrogated on the street by
curious bystanders of every type; to be followed by a train of men
armed to the teeth but intimidated by a camera; to see the crowd
surround you, attentive, in suspense, as though expecting some miracle,
or at least something extravagant, to happen. Yemen was opened to
foreigners only three months or so ago, after the expulsion of the
Imam, and so because of the obscurantism of a prince, conditions of
isolation and segregation that were normal everywhere in the Middle
Ages were created in this country. But there is no xenophobia in the
crowd at San’a. If anything, there is that trusting and ingenious
familiarity with which, on certain deserted islands, the native birds
approach the men.

At the end of my walk on what must be the main street of San’a,
after having examined one by one the shops in which the artisans make
things under the very eyes of the buyer, a sign printed in English and
in Arabic indicating the Bank of the Yemen State reminds me that
I must change some money. I enter a small courtyard, between white
walls without windows; squatting on the ground near a pool of clear
water, two men in black turbans and green robes are counting a great

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ALBERTO MORAVIA 411
deal of silver money and arranging it in piles. I go into a small room
on the first floor and show a check to another similarly dressed
individual who is stretched out on a sofa on three or four pillows.
Immediately, I'm told to make myself at home; a servant brings me a
Turkish coffee; I am questioned regarding my travel plans and given
a succinct account of the events that led up to the expulsion of the
Imam and the triumph of the Republic. Time passes, another coffee
arrives, we go on to discuss the politics of Sallal and Nasser, of the
English and the Soviets; and finally, a scribe comes in with a large
paper bag which he overturns on the table. It is the equivalent of a
hundred dollars, that is a hundred silver talleri bearing the profile of
Maria Theresa; each one weighs an ounce, or twelve grams. In Yemen,
there are no banknotes; and these talleri, which are still coined today
for Yemen by Swiss and Austrian minters, are the only money that
serves as a medium of exchange in this country. I thank everyone,
put the coins in a large handkerchief and leave the bank.
Later, I examine one of them. On one side is the portrait of Maria
Theresa, Empress of Austria: an authoritarian nose, a double chin, full
bosom, and hair piled on top of the head. On the other side is the
two-headed eagle. On the edge of the coin is the motto of the
paternalistic kingdoms of that period: clementia et iustitia. But what
strikes me the most is the date: 1780. Nine years before the French
Revolution, eleven years before the death of Mozart. If on the one
hand, these coins serve as a reminder of the backwardness of the country
in which they circulate, on the other hand they inspire a certain
melancholy. They were coined in a time when European culture was
at its peak, on the eve of military, political and economic expansion in
our continent. From 1780, the year when they were coined, to today,
Europe has undergone a process of disintegration and destruction. And
the Yemen talleri are perhaps one of the last vestiges of its power in a
world that is, by now, liberated from its guardianship.
San'a, February
Hugh Scott, an English entomologist who traveled in Yemen
around 1935, sketched this small portrait of the Imam Yahya (complete
name: Yahya Ibn Muhammad Al Mansur Ibn Yahya Hamid Ad Din),
the old King of Yemen, father of the last Imam who ruled for only
one week and then was de-throned by Colonel Sallal: "The Imam
wore the turban that he had worn during the reception; but now the
brocade vest had been substituted by the wide-sleeved, striped robe that
the middle-class Yemen wear... At his left stood an old worn-looking

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chest with open drawers overflowing with papers. On the floor, all
around the Imam, were piles of papers of every size and shape. The
Imam went through these papers quickly, signing them and writing
a few words on them and then tossing them to two or three scribes
who were squatting on the floor in the middle of the room. These
scribes stamped the papers with stamps which they dipped into two
jars full of red and blue ink. At a certain point, a servant entered
carrying a basket full of silver dollars. After being shown to the
Imam, the money was piled up in heaps on the floor.
"So for an hour we remained in complete silence, before the King,
while more and more bundles of papers were carried into the room in
endless procession, rapidly taken care of by the Imam and then carried
away again. Once the Imam looked up from his work and then I took
advantage of the moment to thank him for having permitted us to
visit the country. Occasionally, the Imam stopped signing papers to
drink some water from a bottle wrapped in a wet cloth (to keep it cool).
With every swallow, he shouted loudly: 'W'al Hamdu Lillah' (God be
praised) . . . Finally he rose staring fixedly ahead and screamed at
the top of his voice, 'In the name of God, the compassionate' and
left the room."
To this portrait we can only add the fact that the Imam remained
on the throne for forty years, during which Yemen was not only
maintained in the conditions in which the Turks had left it (and it is
known that the Ottoman Empire had been already immobile for at
least two centuries), but probably, the Imam being much more re-
actionary than any Turkish governor, even slipped several steps back-
ward. Atrocious stories are told about the Imam Yahya, most of them
false, all intended to emphasize his tyrannical, capricious and fanatical
character. We will limit ourselves to observing that he was in every
way similar, with a few whims more or less, to any feudal lord of any
Arab country during the Middle Ages. The Imam's only problem was
that he was the perfect feudal lord of the Middle Ages in the middle
of the twentieth century. In other words, the Imam was an anachronism,
or a splinter of dead wood thrust into the live flesh of the present. This
splinter paralyzed Yemen. Now, through the convulsion of Sallal's
revolt, it has been cast out.
Therefore, Yemen was not, until yesterday, one of those backward
countries, partly modern, partly old-fashioned, a depressed area in
which there were both the disadvantages of a dying Middle Ages and
those of a misunderstood and premature modernism. It was, instead, a
fossil in an excellent state of conservation; and the customs and usages

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of the Middle Ages were not in a state of decadence but were main-
tained intact as in the year 1000. For this reason, a visit to Yemen,
even today, constitutes a fascinating experience in that it permits you
to see directly how people lived five hundred years ago or more.
Conservatism always makes a mistake when it keeps a populous
in backward conditions and then permits it, through the press, the
cinema, television, radio and tourism, to make comparisons. It is clear
that nobody will willingly spend three days on a camel's back to
cover a distance which he knows for certain is covered elsewhere in
a few hours by car. It is probable that the Imam in spite of his
ignorance and crudeness was aware of the inconveniences of enlightened
tyranny. Therefore, every means of communication and information was
barred from the Yemenites: no radio, no television, no cinema, no
newspapers, no books. The country was forbidden to foreigners: no
tourism, no commercial exchanges, no hotels. Furthermore, the Yemenites
were not even supposed to communicate too often among themselves:
no streets, no trains, no airplanes, the gates of the city closed from
sunset to sunrise, a curfew, and safe-conduct to pass from one city to
another. In the end, education is dangerous: no schools; ninety percent
of the Yemenites were illiterate. What else? Since as Sun King, the
Imam was identified with the state, his control of the public and private
lives of his subjects was pervasive.
The result of this Yemen isolationism was twofold: on the one
hand, the country remained immobile in relation to everything that
is usually called progress; and this was an evil and produced incalculable
damage. On the other hand, however, the Yemenites conserved (or at
least they seem to have conserved) all the ingenuousness and freshness
of a patriarchal civilization.
In contrast with the other Arab peoples, who are more crafty
and corrupt because more advanced, the Yemenite people give an
impression of candid, sometimes enchanting and always genuine pro-
vincialism. Certain traditional qualities of the desert-dwelling Arabs,
such as courtesy, simplicity, dignity, boldness, seem better conserved here
than elsewhere, along with a purity of Semitic features that makes
every shepherd, every soldier, every artisan an exotic Oriental figure.
Nothing in Yemen can give a more intense feeling of the Middle
Ages than the so-called rest-houses which, in the absence of hotels, are
the only places where a traveler can hope to find lodging. Rest-house
is an English word and designates a hostel managed by the colonialist
state in countries like India and Africa, for the use of government

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officials obliged to travel in unfriendly zones. But the rest-houses of
Yemen are rather like the medieval type inns described in Don Quixote
and The Decameron. They are, in no way, modern hotels, but some-
thing else completely. In Yemen, the rest-houses are located, for the
most part, in old gloomy buildings on the outskirts of the cities; for
example, at San’a the rest-house is in an old Turkish ex-prison. Like the
Castello dell’Innominato described in such minute detail by Manzoni,
the rest-houses have, on the ground floor, an anteroom or porter’s
office which is, in reality, a guardroom: rifles, scimitars, cartridge belts,
daggers hang from nails on the walls; various armed men (in Yemen it
is very difficult to distinguish a soldier from a common citizen: both
are armed more or less in the same way) are stretched out on the
floor, on cushions or mats, or else seated around small tables on
which tiny cups of coffee are set.
From the anteroom, you go up to the second floor on a roughly
made staircase with immensely high steps. Here the traveler is shown
into the reception room, the Yemenite version of the hall. It is a large
rather squalid rectangular room with a close row of straight-backed
chairs and easy chairs arranged around the walls as they are in a
ballroom in the provinces. The furniture is Western; in one rest-house
they were all in Louis XV style, ruthlessly curled and gilded. On the
floor, large printed carpets; at the windows, fluttering curtains of
flowered cretonne. The traveler sits down on an easy chair, sips the
usual Turkish coffee and listens to the radio spill forth an uninterrupted
and noisy stream of government propaganda. Finally, an individual in
robe and turban (a director, a secretary, or merely a servant?) arrives
to give a brief account of the situation in the rest-house. Well, the
traveler can choose between two equally disagreeable alternatives:
either to sleep with four other guests in a large room or to sleep
alone in a small room in which, however, there are still all the belong-
ings of someone who is away on a trip for the moment.
The traveler naturally chooses the second alternative if he is a
foreigner; if he is a Yemenite, he’ll probably choose the first; the
Yemenites are sociable, affectionate and have a medieval inclination
towards promiscuity. The traveler, following the servant who carries
his bags, passes through the hall on which the doors of the bedrooms
face. They are all wide open and inside you can see an expanse of
unmade beds and men lying down on the covers, or sitting on the
edge of their beds talking and drinking coffee. But here is the little room.
Alas, it’s very close to the bathroom and the least you can say about the
bathrooms in the rest-houses is that they don’t exactly emanate a perfume

=== Page 97 ===
ALBERTO MORAVIA 415
of violets. In addition, the room is a complete chaos of clothes hung
on nails, dirty clothes rolled up, old slippers, socks stiff with perspiration,
crumpled paper, newspapers, empty bottles, all the things that ac-
cumulate in a room that is very rarely cleaned. One of the window
panes is broken; the sink provides nothing but the freezing cold water
of the plain. A hasty examination of the rumpled sheets and their
uncertain whiteness creates a feeling of doubt: either they were badly
washed and not ironed or else somebody has already slept there. The
traveler asks for a towel: a boy in a green and white striped robe and
a blue turban, as beautiful and sweet as a young girl, brings him a
cloth covered with smudges of black fingerprints. Patience.
Later, the traveler wanders through the rest-house waiting for
dinner. As in medieval inns, the rest-house is a bustle of servants,
scullery maids, boys; in the vast murky kitchen, around an immense
black stove in which a red fire blazes, crackling like a blacksmith's forge,
preparations advance in that particular patriarchal manner that Nievo
has described so well in the pages dedicated to the Castello di Fratta.
Meanwhile, the hungry guests wander through the halls chatting amiably,
affectionately: this is a country in which men hold hands or link
fingers and when they meet, they kiss each other on the cheek and on
the mouth. Finally, the doors of the dining room open and the guests
can enter. Still another medieval usage: there is only one long table
at which the guests sit in two rows, like monks in the refectories of
monasteries. The dining room is huge with a ceiling of gigantic white-
washed beams, all crooked and warped, and the walls painted with
decorative red, green, blue and yellow motifs: it seems to belong in an
abstract painting.
But here is the food. A group of servants goes around the table
offering enormous trays heaped with substantial and traditional dishes:
rice pilaf, stuffed egg plant, a fricassee of mutton with pieces of meat
weighing up to ten and twelve ounces immersed in a thick dark sauce,
potatoes roasted whole and other similar dishes, good though rather
heavy. On the table arranged in nice order there are bowls of tomato
and onion salad; the fruit course consists of a strange fruit that looks
like a lemon and is instead an orange, but has the sweet taste of a
tangerine. The guests eat in silence, in a kind of ritual hurry that does
not exclude an occasional smile or gesture of greeting. They tell me
that they are, for the most part, officials of the new government. The
cities of Yemen were not prepared for this influx of exiles, of Egyptian
officials of the expeditionary forces, of foreigners on business trips. The

=== Page 98 ===
416 AFRICA
result is that the rest-houses are crowded and the traditional way of
life in the time of the Imam no longer holds.
We have described the rest-houses because they are a typically
medieval institution; but all of Yemen is still at the rest-house level,
though only for a short time longer. Soon, very soon, Western neo-
capitalism will arrive here with its experts, its bankers, its construction
and business companies; and Yemen will become, as is desirable and
right, a country like all the others. The Middle Ages of Yemen will be
swept away by bull-dozers and reinforced cement. Unfortunately some
unique aspects will disappear. It is to be hoped that a few of them will
be preserved and incorporated into the revolution.

(Translated by Carolyn Gaiser)

=== Page 99 ===
Daniel Bell
THE ALPHABET OF JUSTICE
REFLECTIONS ON \"Eichmann In Jerusalem\"

Hannah Arendt's book is about justice. In fact, as she says,
\"the purpose of a trial is to render justice, and nothing else.\" But this
trial is about other things as well: about agony, cowardice, betrayal,
shame, and, above all perhaps, vengeance. How can one write objectively
about such things? All we can do is to respond and, in the way in which
we respond, to identify ourselves, our qualities, and our commitments.
Both the Old Testament (the Pentateuch) and the Stoics held that
Man, unrestrained, is a behema, a wild animal-the natural man of
Rousseau and Freud before the appearance of the civil order or civiliza-
tion-and that morality, rooted in conscience (or, in the Christian
version, in guilt or sin), is insufficient to the task of restraint without
the external force of law. Thus justice, in the first, tribal instance, has
an awesome, retributive basis, barbaric as we may now think it to be.
In the second, more disinterested, conception justice is rooted in the
natural law, which demands of men penalties for the disruption of the
moral order itself.

The reaction of many persons has been: Why raise such distinc-
tions? The crime was so great and Eichmann's complicity, whether as
major instigator or minor cog, was so clear, why not let the trial stand
as a symbolic event? Why raise abstract questions such as whether
Eichmann should have been tried for crimes against humanity, rather
than for crimes against the Jewish people? The objection is a genuine
one. It goes back to the root of one's identity, and one's root conception
of the world.

One can see the world as a human community and man's quest
as the difficult one of defining some permanently valid universal rules-
either through some conception of natural law or some consensual
international code. Or one can see the world as inevitably hostile and
divided (from the orthodox point of view between Jews and goyim),

=== Page 100 ===
418 DANIEL BELL
in which survival is a precarious matter of toleration, bargaining, bribery
or force.
The Israelis, having combined Jewish history with contemporary
nationality, inevitably accept the latter view. Most of us-intellectual
Jews who have grown up in Galut (exile) and live our lives as cosmopol-
itan beings-accept in varying degrees the unresolved and perhaps ir-
reconcilable tension between parochial identities, with all its emotional
tugs, and universal aspirations. Miss Arendt, at least as shown in her book,
has cut all such ties: There is the unmoved quality of the Stoic, trans-
cending tribe and nation, seeking only the single standard of universal
order.
Her choice is made clear in the remarkable last pages of the
book when she assumes the robes of a judge to sentence Eichmann
in her own terms. She rejects any tribal or parochial identification,
though she respects its open cry for vengeance. (Justice in that event
she says might have been better served if Eichmann had been shot
down directly in the streets of Buenos Aires-a direct act of retribution.)
She despises the liberal flummery (particularly that of the Israeli
prosecutor Gideon Hausner) which disguises its political or parochial
motives by its high-flown talk of the "rule of law." In the garb of
the Stoic she justifies the death penalty not because of crimes against
the Jewish people but for a "crime against the very nature of mankind."
("The choice of victims . . . could be derived from the long history
of Jew-hatred," but for her it is the act not the victim which is salient.)
It is this unflinching desire to hew to a single standard, eliminating
the questions of "motivation and conscience" because "guilt and in-
nocence before the law are of an objective nature," that gives Miss
Arendt's book its seeming coldness and even harshness of tone. From
this "objective" standard, she judges not only Eichmann but the
conduct of the trial and that of the Jews in Europe as well; and it is
this double edge that has provoked so much rage in return. It is this
emphasis on justice, too, which gives her judgments an abstract quality,
a distancing which has been mistaken-cruelly, I believe-for an aesthe-
tic judgment. Any singular emphasis on justice necessarily separates
law from morality; it relegates the latter to a private sphere between
persons, and gives the law a formal quality. Aesthetic judgments,
deriving equally from a singular pre-occupation, are also separable
from morality (behold the prize awards to Ezra Pound) and have
a formal quality too. Thus the confusion.
All of this however, leads to two questions: in applying her un-
compromising standard of justice, how fair has Miss Arendt been—

=== Page 101 ===
ALPHABET OF JUSTICE 419

to the Israelis, to the judgment of Eichmann, to the memory of the
Jews murdered in Europe? and, second, how "adequate" is such a
standard, not as a denial of the nature of justice, but as a response
to the events themselves?

To be didactic is often to lose the excitement of a debate. Yet in
the midst of so much controversy, and because of the gravity of the
issues, one can keep one's bearings only in this way. Let me therefore,
in dealing with the first of the two questions I have posed, divide it into
four issues which seem to be at the heart of the "accusations" against
Miss Arendt-accusations as extreme as that in the London Observer,
which capitalized journalistically on the controversy while printing
extracts from her book by saying that she "has been accused of being
an anti-Semite, a supporter of the Nazis and a brazen apologist for
Eichmann."

These four issues are her observations on:
I. The conduct of the trial.
II. The Israeli motives.
III. The role of the Jewish community leadership in Europe.
IV. The character, and thus the "responsibility" of Eichmann.

I. THE CONDUCT OF THE TRIAL

Hannah Arendt has argued that the trial in Jerusalem was often a
"show trial," at times even a "mass meeting," rather than a court for
the administration of justice. In law, a man must be tried not for
what he is, or for what he stands, but for what he did, and that alone.
"This case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what
Eichmann had done-according to Hausner this distinction was im-
material."1 Thus, there were more than fifty "sufferings-of-the-peoples
witnesses" whose testimony was irrelevant to any specific action of
Eichmann's. The atmosphere was such that witness after witness sought
to arouse the audience on "matters that had no connection whatever
with the crimes of the accused."

"Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended and
judged and that all other questions of seemingly greater import . . . be
left in abeyance." (My italics.) Of course, Miss Arendt does not leave
them in abeyance-who can? But when she insists that what is
primary, that what is "on trial are [Eichmann's] deeds, not the suffering

1. To save space and to avoid the tiresome repetition of "Miss Arendt said . . . "
or "Miss Arendt declared . . ." let it be understood that all quotations, unless
otherwise stated, are by Miss Arendt.

=== Page 102 ===
420 DANIEL BELL
of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism
and racism," she is negating her own conclusion as well.
We can admit and deplore the histrionics and excesses of Hausner;
they did detract from the extraordinary uniqueness of the trial. But
one should not confuse such theatrics with the question of who was on
trial and the rationale of the indictment. For both the Israelis and
Miss Arendt treated Eichmann as a symbol. And it is there that the
first issue is joined, and blurred.
Of what is Eichmann a symbol? Of anti-semitism, surely. Of
Nazism, certainly. That is easy. But what was Nazism? And what was
this particular anti-semitism? Something uniquely aberrant? An element
of German national character, involving, therefore, the guilt of all
Germans? An aspect of all gentiles, and therefore endemic in Christian
history? A recurrent malady of human aggression? Eichmann, for the
Israelis, was seemingly all of these, but there was never a clear effort
to identify the interplay of these elements, for these historical and
sociological questions were ultimately subordinate to a political motive
in holding the trial, and in politics one can't always say what one
believes. (Can one say that one does not trust any gentiles or any
Germans?)

In her own way, Miss Arendt treats Eichmann as a symbol, too.
But her circle is more cleanly joined: he is an individual, Adolf,
son of Karl, Eichmann; but he is also Everyman. The partial identities
as German and gentile which were crucial for the Israelis are irrelevant
for her. Eichmann was only an "average person," neither "perverted nor
sadistic," only "terribly and terrifyingly normal." And what the case
did bring out was the question of "how long it takes an average
person to overcome his innate repugnance toward crime," and what
exactly happens to him once he has reached that point." (In the
case of Eichmann, four weeks of wrestling with his conscience.)

Thus, even for Miss Arendt, though the trial by the canons of
justice should have dealt with an individual, Eichmann was historically a
"new type of criminal"-one who upsets "the assumption current in
all modern legal systems that intent to do wrong is necessary for the
commission of a crime," and so, who cannot be tried by the norms
of positive law which have prevailed, and which the Israelis sought to
employ. No intention to do wrong was present, argues Miss Arendt, not
because Eichmann was following orders-all soldiers do so-but because
Eichmann was obeying a different kind of law; and the definition of
this law leads us, as do so many other questions in the book, back to
her conception of totalitarianism.

=== Page 103 ===
ALPHABET OF JUSTICE 421

In short, in dealing with the conduct of the trial, though Miss
Arendt is convincing about the lachrymose excesses in the courtroom—
yet given the circums ances could such emotionalism have been avoided?
—her real quarrel is not with the conduct of the trial but with the
nature of the indictment. And that is a far different issue, which I
shall discuss in a different context.

II. THE ISRAELI MOTIVE

It is quite clear that the Israelis intended to try Eichmann not
as a person, but as a symbol. Before the trial Ben-Gurion said, "It
is not an individual that is in the dock at his historic trial, and not the
Nazi regime alone, but anti-semitism throughout history."

The motives behind the Israelis intention were several: to demon-
strate to the world the fate of the Jews, and so establish a lien on the
conscience of nations as a means of defending the Israeli state; to
demonstrate to the Jews in Galut the debilitating quality of life in
the Diaspora, led as a minority existence; to demonstrate to the
Israelis the validity of the Zionist answer as the restoration of Jewish
heroism.

The Israeli leadership today is a tough-minded group with few
illusions about the idealism of the Powers. They are prepared—for
the sake of survival—to engage in preventive war and to commit
provocations. (The Lavon affair is a striking instance. Some years ago,
Israeli intelligence agents in Cairo set fire to a U.S. information
agency building, in order to blame the Egyptians for the act and arouse
anti-Nasser sentiment in the U.S. When the plot miscarried, members
of the Israeli service forged papers to demonstrate that Pinchas Lavon,
then Minister of Defense, had approved of the action. Lavon was
forced to resign and, although he was subsequently cleared over the
opposition of Ben-Gurion, his political career was ruined. For more
than a year, Israeli censorship prevented any discussions of the story
and the full details are still not clear today. For a people scarred by
the Dreyfus case, the Lavon affair poses a painful question on the
relationship of morality to political expediency.) The Eichmann trial,
with its potential boomerangs—the unbearable recollections it would
provoke about the submissiveness of so many Jewish victims, and the
dilemmas arising from the inescapable revelations that the present
German government is supplying arms to the Israelis—was embedded
in all these political calculations.

Miss Arendt's criticism of the Israeli motives—one of the very
few to probe so openly and strongly on those points—was bound to

=== Page 104 ===
422
DANIEL BELL
create a storm of resentment in the Jewish community. For she posed—
and still does the humanly perplexing tension between the application
of different standards.
The Israeli motive, for Miss Arendt, was "ideological (using the
word in the original analytic sense) in that it masked an underlying
parochial intention with the facade of a universal claim; and some
of the Israeli fury against her derives from her insistence that political
advantage, rather than the ends of justice, shaped the government's
conduct of the trial. Whatever one feels of the theoretical arguments
about the framing of the indictment, there is a critique of "practical"
judgment which runs through Miss Arendt's book, and it is those
observations, rather than the questions of the nature of the indictment
that have provoked the storm of controversy.
Her judgments derive, obliquely, from her argument that it was a
mistake to charge Eichmann with "crimes against the Jewish people,"
not only because such a charge deflects from the significantly different
crime (the "disruption of the moral order"), but because such an
indictment reduces the culpability of Eichmann, and, equally, involves
the question of the role of the Jewish community leaders in the crimes
themselves. And it is this latter issue which is the eye of the storm.

III. THE JEWISH LEADERSHIP
Let it be said first that the question is not why the Jews failed
to resist: The history of the war shows that mass resistance, without
outside support, was virtually impossible, and in almost all instances
no outside support from the allied governments was forthcoming.
Individual resistance, or that of small groups, was met with such
savage reprisals that the phrase emerged "besser Todt ohne Schrecklich-
keit, als Schrecklichkeit ohne Todt." (Better a death without torture, than
a torture without death.)
The heart of the issue is summed up in Miss Arendt's sweeping
judgment: "Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders,
and this leadership, almost without exception, co-operated in one way
or another with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish
people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have
been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would
hardly have been between four-and-a-half and six million people."
Enough evidence has been cited to show that this was not the
"whole truth." But is it a question of numbers? Is it enough to say
that this was true of Germany or Hungary but not of sections of
Poland or of Belgium? There were dozens of communities where such

=== Page 105 ===
ALPHABET OF JUSTICE 423

councils did "co-operate;" and this cooperation was regarded by the Nazis
as the cornerstone of their Jewish policy. It is true, for example, that
in Russia there was no organized Jewish community, and almost
the entire community of leaderless Russian Jewry was still wiped
out. But in Russia the Nazis embarked on a policy of wholesale
shootings, often, as Alex Dallin has pointed out in his German Rule in
Russia, 1941-1945, making little distinction between Jews and Russians.
In the other countries, the Nazis set out to round up, tag, classify
and arrange time-schedules for deportation to the death camps and
to confiscate, in orderly fashion, the assets of the Jewish community.
And in such instances, cooperation facilitated their task.
A different point, perhaps, is that what could have been left
as historical fact or evaluation is converted by Miss Arendt into a
moral judgment and opprobrium. And this is more difficult to accept.
The effort by various Jewish community leaders, such as Rabbi Leo
Baeck of Berlin, to ease the plight of their members may have been a
terrible mistake, but it is an understandable one; and who can set
himself up as judge?
What is apparent, in retrospect, both as moral value and sociological
truth, is that victims should not cooperate with their executioners.
Where resistance was possible, as in Denmark, the Nazis gave way.
The historical point, perhaps, is that European Jewry, especially in the
West, had become bourgeois and had lost the sense of solidarity of the
people. In Holland, for example, the Jewish Council came into being
on the assumption that only "foreign Jews" would be deported. In
Germany, Jews sought to attain privileged status as war veterans
or decorated Jews against ordinary Jews, as families whose ancestors
were German-born against those recently naturalized, or as German
Jews against Polish Jews. The only memorable resistance was in Poland
where the ideological orientation and the proletarian outlook had been
shaped by the Bund and the Socialist Zionists. But all this is a lesson
for the living, not for the dead.

IV. EICHMANN
Central to the trial-and to our conception of human nature and
politics-is the enigma of Eichmann, the man and the Nazi. For Gideon
Hausner, "there was only one man who had ever been almost entirely
concerned with the Jews, whose business had been their destruction"
and that was the "perverted sadist," the "monster," Adolf Eichmann.
It would be comfortable for all of us if this were true. Then
we could believe that such behavior was aberrant, that Hitlerism and

=== Page 106 ===
424
DANIEL BELL
even Stalinism, death camps, purge trials, degradation through forced
confession, were the work of madmen who, in unique circumstances,
had seized control of the machinery of a modern state, and who, with
some kindred henchmen, had terrorized the other normal persons into
silence and even acquiescence. If all this were so, we could then settle
back once more in an optimistic belief about human nature and spin
out our utopian dreams. Then evil could again be seen as something
"other," as something cunning, mephitic or surrealistic, the conjuring of
literary romancers like Lautreamont who in his Chants de Mal dorer
narrates a "career of evil" through the incantations of sadism. But the
reality of evil, as Simone Weil once noted, is that it is "gloomy,
monotonous, barren, and boring," because evil, when done, is felt not
as evil, but as a necessity or a duty. And this was the evil of Adolf
Eichmann.

Adolf Eichmann was the déclassé son of an Austrian middle class
family (his father was a lawyer) who joined the Nazi party after he
had been fired from a humdrum job as a traveling salesman for the
Vacuum Oil Co. He did not join as a zealot or a convert; in fact,
he had at the same time joined the Freemasons' Lodge Schlaraffia
(\"from Schlaraffenland, the gluttons' Cloud-Cuckoo Land of German
fairy tales\") and had been expelled from the Lodge just as his Nazi
sponsor, Ernst Kaltenbrunner (a friend of his father's, and later the
chief of the Head Office for Reich Security) told him that membership
in the two was incompatible. When Eichmann joined the Security
Service, he was under the impression that he would be guarding
the high Party officials, and that his job would consist of standing on
the running board of their shiny cars as they wound through the
street demonstrations. In all this, he was truly Hans Fallada's whitecollar clerk in Little Man, What Now?

How did Eichmann happen to change, or did a change even take
place at all? Adolf Hitler once wrote in his manual on rhetoric that
mass demonstrations "must burn into the little man's soul the proud
conviction that though a little worm he is nevertheless part of a
great dragon." Eichmann was not a cog or a wheel in the machine—such
an image is too mechanical and fails to realize the way human beings
respond to situations that give outlet to their hunger and fantasies—
in this case, of importance and omnipotence. He saw his opportunities
and he jumped to them with alacrity. And he had a Fuehrer, a legitimation (the Nazi concept of race superiority), and a system that allowed
him to act out his puffed-up dragon pride. One other ingredient
completed the role: like Caliban, he was given "speech," the Amtsprache

=== Page 107 ===
ALPHABET OF JUSTICE 425

or officialese, (“Amtsprache is my only language,” he said)—and was
thus provided with a stock of phrases and explanations which shielded
him from any other reality. (As François Bondy has said, in a most
memorable phrase, “der Stil ist der Unmensch.”)

Eichmann became the Nazi expert on Jewish organizations. Before
the war, during the phase of the “first solution,” he “saved” thousands
of Jews by co-operating with the Zionists to speed the able Jews out of
Germany. “It was not until the outbreak of the war, on September
1, 1939, that the Nazi regime became openly totalitarian and openly
criminal,” Miss Arendt writes. The point is crucial, for the war closed
off all exits for the Jews, it allowed Hitler to put into effect his “final
solution,” and it created a different psychological atmosphere—of
fatalism and even resignation—about death; as Eichmann put it,
“dead people are seen everywhere” and “everyone looked forward to
his own death with indifference. . . .”

The decision to press for the “final solution” was taken at the
Wannsee conference in January 1942. It necessitated the active co-
operation of all ministers and the entire civil service. As Eichmann
said: Here the most prominent people, the Popes of the Third Reich,
the elite of the civil service were vying with each other to take the lead.
“At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt
free of all guilt.”

But can people actively engaged in murder find release or assuasion
so easily? How do they handle the frightening emotions generated by
a blood ritual? For primitive peoples there is always the communal
purgation, but modern men need subtler deceptions. They handle it,
as Eichmann and the Nazis did—and here, I think, Miss Arendt’s
by “distancing” themselves from the events, by
the use of “language rules” (Sprachregelung).

In the first war decree of Hitler, for example, the word for
“murder” was replaced by the phrase “to grant a mercy death.” And
in the “objective” language of the Nazis, concentration camps were
discussed in terms of “economy”; killing was a “medical matter.” All
official correspondence was subject to these “language rules” and as Miss
Arendt point out, “it is rare to find documents in which such bald words
as ‘extermination,’ ‘liquidation,’ or ‘killing’ occur. The prescribed code
names for killing were ‘final solution,’ ‘evacuation’ (Aussiedlung), and
‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung).” Deportation was called
“change of residence” and in the case of Theresienstadt, the special
camp for privileged Jews, “resettlement.”

We have here (as with some aspects of modern linguistic philo-

=== Page 108 ===
426 DANIEL BELL
sophy), the end of the “categorical logic of language” which unites
words and the world. Reality is now set afloat, to be grotesque or
absurd, a self-contained “game” in which the function of the rules is
to disguise, not to bound, events. One finds this not only among the
Nazis, but in the most variegated areas of life where the purpose is
to avoid the direct confrontation with ugly experience. In his description
of the “Cosa Nostra,” Joseph Valachi remarked on the witness stand:
“Genovese told me that Bender had disappeared.” “Did you take that
to mean that Bender had been killed?” asked Senator McClellan.
Valachi nodded and said, “It meant in our language that he had
ordered his death.”

But a disguise is not enough. Ordinary men have to feel some
sense of higher purpose to engage in such conscience-provoking acts,
and the function of the slogans and catch-phrases, such as “the battle of
destiny” (which Eichmann called “winged words”) was to submerge
the sense of individual responsibility in some cosmic enterprise. “What
stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was
simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose,
unique (‘a great task that occurs once in two thousand years’), which
must therefore be difficult to bear.” It is the same device that Bert
Brecht used explicitly in Die Massnahme, which he wrote shortly after
becoming a Communist in 1930 (“What vileness would you not commit
/But change the world. . . . Sink down in the slime/Embrace the butcher
comrades. . . . ”) to justify the murder of weak-kneed

The point of all this-the heart of the argument-is that ordinary
men, men like Eichmann, can easily become part of a system which will
wipe out entire populations as superfluous, not in the manner of the
Mongol hordes (there, at least, a primitive utilitarianism was at work)
but as a projection of unconscious impulses onto secular ideologies.
Lacking any restraint, “everything is possible” to men in the pursuit of
an Idea.

At stake is the meaning of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is not
just the pulverization of private life, the destruction of society by the
State, so to speak—this is never wholly possible, and soon breaks down
—but the creation of an ideology—“Race” or “History” speaking through
the Fuehrer or the Party—which serves as the rule of higher law.
Old-fashioned despotism was the arbitrary will of a single man with
no legitimation beyond superior force or tradition. The strength of
totalitarian movements consists in creating a legitimation which over-
rides not only ordinary morality about lying, cheating, stealing but

=== Page 109 ===
ALPHABET OF JUSTICE 427
reduces the scruple against murder to a petty-bourgeois sentimentality.
And totalitarian society differs from militarized regimes—and from
previous despotisms—by creating a new form of compliance to its ends.
Just as the Christian sense of sin forced men to internalize guilt as
conscience, and to substitute self-regulation for external restraints, so
the totalitarian belief instills in its followers a guilt-free sanction which
replaces conscience with the higher end.
It is quite unlikely that any society can be totalitarian for long,
since the diverse desires of men cannot be harnessed to a single end
without some strong allegiance, an enemy in wartime, or compliance
through terror. But what the “rediscovery of evil” showed—the pre-
occupation in the decade of the fifties with Kierkegaard, Simone Weil,
Camus, Tillich, Niebuhr and Barth—was that a truth which had been
brought to be historical and political was, au fond, metaphysical. The
frightening prospect it disclosed was that, given the structural tendencies
of modern societies to centralize power and to manipulate vast numbers
of men through the agencies of state coercion, the totalitarian potential
was an ever-recurrent one.

V. THE PAROCHIAL AND THE UNIVERSAL
All of this leads to the point which, in intention, was the pivot of
Miss Arendt's book—that the Israelis failed to understand the uniquely
new nature of the crimes committed, a failure reflected in the indict-
ment of Eichmann as instigating crimes against the Jewish people. For
the Israelis, Nazism was one of the long procession of brutalities
committed within the tradition of anti-semitism. For Miss Arendt the
Nazi crimes, the rationalized murder of entire populations, is the
beginning of a new set of fearful possibilities in human history.
The point was anticipated a dozen years ago in her Origins of
Totalitarianism: “The chances for eventual success of totalitarianism
are slimmer still if we remember that almost no system has ever been
less capable of gradually expanding its sphere of influence. . . . [But]
the totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects the experience
of modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth.”
And the point is taken up as the rationale for her argument in
Eichmann in Jerusalem: “The particular reasons that speak for the
possibility of a repetition of the crimes committed by the Nazis are even
more plausible. The frightening coincidence of the modern population
explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through auto-
mation, will make large sections of the population ‘superfluous’ even in
terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy make it possible to

=== Page 110 ===
428 DANIEL BELL

deal with this twofold treat by the use of instruments [e.g. fusion bombs]
beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's
fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.
"It is essentially for this reason: that the unprecedented, once it has
appeared, may become a precedent for the future, that all trials touching
upon 'crimes against humanity' must be judged according to a standard
that is still an 'ideal.' "
In short, Miss Arendt insisted that the Israelis, in trying Eichmann
in a Jewish court and on specifically Jewish issues, missed a crucial
point of modern history. Moreover, by kidnapping Eichmann in Ar-
gentina and thus extending the territorial principle of seizure beyond
its borders, a precedent was created for the breakdown of international
law whereby in the future, for example, an African state could kidnap
a segregationist leader in America and try him in Ghana or Guinea
for crimes against the black people. For her, the Israeli mistake was
to be parochial at a time when the problem of mass murder had become
universal.
It is this tension between the parochial and the universal that
explains the furious emotions over Miss Arendt's book. For she writes
from the standpoint of a universal principle which denies any parochial
identity. It is this which gives her exposition a cold force and an
abstract quality. But one senses, too, a recoil from the fact that Israel has
become one nation among the many, no different in its morality and
vulgarity from all the others; and she is harsh about these features.
But the events concern more than Israel, though Israel conducted the
trial. The Israelis are a nationality, but the Jews remain a people, and
the experiences of the race are the shaping elements of one's identity.
One feels that while many of Miss Arendt's strictures are correct-if
one can live by a universalistic standard-her response to the unbearable
story reduces a tragic drama to a philosophical complexity. Can one
exclude the existential person as a component of the human judgment?
In this situation, one's identity as a Jew, as well as philosophe, is
relevant.
The agony of Miss Arendt's book is precisely that she takes her
stand so unyieldingly on the side of disinterested justice, and that she
judges both Nazi and Jew. But abstract justice, as the Talmudic wisdom
knew, is sometimes too "strong" a yardstick to judge the world.
In the Talmudic Haggadah (the sections of legends and parables,
as distinct from Halacha, or the law) there is a homiletic story, the
"alphabet of creation," which is learned by all youngsters who embark
on the study of the "word." The question is: Why did God begin the

=== Page 111 ===
ALPHABET OF JUSTICE
429
world with the letter "B." The boy who begins to recite the Torah
rushes past the opening word of Genesis, Bereshit, to show how well
he can read. But the Rabbi halts him. God is not a capricious God.
To undertake such an awesome task as creating the world is not to be
done lightly. Why the letter “B?” Each letter of the alphabet, eager
to have the glory of initiating the world, presses its claim before the
Lord. Taw steps forth and points out that Moses will give the law
(Torah) to Israel, and thus the "T" is pre-eminent; but God points out
that Taw will also be placed on the foreheads of men as a sign of
death. Shin pleads that it stands for Shaddai, one of the ineffable names
of the Lord; but it also stands for Shaw which is a lie, and the world
cannot begin so compromised. Among the letters, Daled presses its case,
but as the Talmud points out, "If Daled had stood only for Dabar,
the Divine Word, it would have been used, but it stands also for Din,
justice, and under a law of justice, without love, the world would
fall to ruin." And why "B?" The letter Beth stands for Baruch,
which means blessing, and "blessed be the Lord forever."

(Daniel Bell's piece continues the discussion of Hannah Arendt's
book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, dealt with in the last issue. For reasons
of space, we have had to put off the publication of several letters about
Lionel Abel's essay and a reply by Mr. Abel.)

=== Page 112 ===
LETTER FROM LONDON

THE SILLY SEASON

High Summer, in England, is known as the Silly Season, when
the pages of the Press are filled traditionally with picturesque trivialities.
In the great world outside, the foundations of our lives may rock, but
we remain true to our pre-autumnal passion for frivolity. (It is instruc-
tive, for example, to re-read the London papers of High Summer, 1939:
never would you have guessed the British Empire stood on the verge of
its catastrophe.)

This year, the harvest of futility has been rich; and to our Press,
the Great Train Robbery has been a godsend. I am sorry to report that
the British, usually severe in their judgments of criminals—and especially
of crimes against property, rather than against the person—have reacted
on the whole light-heartedly to this episode.
To begin with, the sum—£21/2 millions—is so enormous. Stealing a
car, or a measurable sum of money, is something popular imagination
can grasp, and so condemn. But a theft so vast carries the whole exploit
into the realm of legendary fantasy. I once asked the late Howard
Samuel, my publisher, who was also a socialist property millionaire,
if he could really tell the difference between one million pounds and
two. He replied with some asperity that he most certainly could—but to
most of us such figures, when so huge, are quite identical.

And then there is the train: that Night Mail hurtling through the
darkness with its Ali Baba’s cave of loot on board, and not even an
old-age pensioner to guard it! Which of us has not dreamed of tamper-
ing with something so majestic and impregnable as an express train—
and a Royal Mail at that?

Then there is that the money has been pillaged from banks; and
nobody, I believe, loves banks very much. They have spent large sums
of late trying to project an endearing image of themselves on the public
mind, yet the popular suspicion lingers that whereas others labor and
take risks, the banks will never be the losers in any deal.

=== Page 113 ===
LONDON LETTER 431

Then yet again this money was insured. Now, insurance is an
admirable institution, yet it unquestionably has made theft seem less
wicked than in the days before it, when a man could be ruined by a
robbery. Additionally, it is well known that insurance companies are,
in fact, licensed and scientific gamblers, placing odds against fate at
most profitable rates; and when fate betrays them, nobody is really
sorry.

There can be little doubt, in general, that this coup heralds the
entry of English crime into its industrial era. The professional core of
English criminals—perhaps no more than 5 percent of the total of
what are known as the "criminal classes"—are becoming increasingly
well organized technically and, above all, well financed, so that the
planning of the theft, the leisurely disposal of the loot, and the social
security of families of any of the robbers who may fall by the wayside,
can be more efficiently looked after. And the chief fear of the authori-
ties, in the present instance, is not just that £2½ millions of unearned
income injected into the economy is inflationary, but that this huge
sum will be used to finance further large-scale thefts. Hence the
enormous reward (10 percent of the sum stolen) offered to informers
and potential traitors; and the joyful atmosphere of a treasure hunt
that surrounds the initiatives of the general public in trying to track
down this horde of stolen notes.

Has the Hal Woolf affair been reported in the American Press-
or has it been swamped by more sensational items emanating from
our sedate group of islands? Hal Woolf, whom I knew well, was
a competent neo-academic portrait painter, with a wide circle of
bohemian friends who felt for him great affection; and last November,
Hal disappeared in London. Thanks to the persistent inquiries of his
former wife—with whom he had remained on excellent terms—it
transpired that he had been knocked down by a car in Park Lane,
slightly injured, and admitted to a hospital. There the doctors dis-
covered he had in his possession Indian hemp, and the police were
informed and arrested him on his discharge from medical care.

Shortly after this, he was re-admitted into another hospital special-
izing in brain surgery, where he died after some days, with police
officers at his bedside. Despite his wife's having already initiated police
inquiries, she was not informed of his hospitalization until after his
death had occurred. When she identified the body, she found his head
badly mutilated.

Spurred at last by Press interest (initiated by the indefatigable

=== Page 114 ===
432 COLIN MACINNES

Claud Cockburn), the government ordered an inquiry-but a police
inquiry into a matter in which police behavior seemed to be much
involved. As to what may have happened, there are two theories. The
police one, predictably, is that Hal Woolf was more gravely injured
than was suspected at the first hospital, and had to be re-admitted for
brain surgery after his arrest by them-when they say he "became ill"
in the police cells-which surgery would account for his mutilated
appearance after death. The theory of the suspicious is that something
must have happened to him in Savile Row police station between his
two hospitalizations to account for the graver injuries that led to his
death, for police silence about his being in the hospital, and for the
presence of police officers at his death bed.

These suspicions arise partly from the fact that a "purge" of
Indian hemp smokers is at present being conducted by the Vice
Squad. This addiction has now become quite general in various "fringe"
circles, and is not unconnected with the Afro-Caribbean presence here
-though the Cypriots and Maltese also make their modest contribution.
Unfortunately, in the public mind there is confusion between hemp
addiction and that to really dangerous drugs like morphia and heroin;
whereas in fact the hemp world and the junkie world move on quite
different levels, and it is just as unusual for a hemp smoker to be
"turned onto" junk as it is for a liquor boozer so to be. However, hemp
smoking is of course illegal, and since addiction to real junk on a
commercial scale is also regrettably increasing-that is, among persons
who are not the "registered addicts" whom our laws permit to secure
modest supplies from a doctor-public feeling against hemp is equally
severe. Hal Woolf, though an admitted addict, led an otherwise normal
and socially blameless life, as I can testify; yet since he was a "weed"
smoker, some sections of the public feel that if the police stepped out
of line, they were entitled to do so in view of the menace of "dangerous
drugs" in general.

Yet the police are having a bad press at the moment, and it
looks as if the hallowed myth that English coppers never use violence,
perjury, framing of suspects-let alone participate in crimes-is at last
being shattered in the public mind. Now, what has been foolish about
this legend is not that coppers do do these things-as all police forces
do and must-but that national vanity led many to suppose that our
coppers were far nicer men than any others. If the public-and more
specially juries-know what "police methods" really are, this fact will

=== Page 115 ===
LONDON LETTER
433

not alter these methods in the least, but will perhaps insure that
charges against any accused person are considered with some realism.
In the Ward trials, there can now be no doubt that undue
pressure was used by the police both to insure that hostile witnesses
should be present—by bringing frivolous charges against some, and
fixing enormous sums as bail—and by telling others who were vulnerable
what they were, and were not, to say. A self-declared prostitute who
gave damning testimony against Ward (and later withdrew it, greatly
to her credit) appeared recently on television and told the astonished
viewers what threats had been used by the police to insure that when
she entered the witness box she said what the prosecution wanted.
It was impossible to watch this interview without becoming convinced
that this woman was now telling the truth; and equally impossible to
heed the soothing platitudes of the retired police officer who followed
her on the screen to assure us that such mis-practices are alien to
English police behavior.

Nor has that other great shibboleth of English mythology—that
our justice, like our whisky, marmalade and chocolate biscuits, is second
to none in quality—survived recent occurrences. Lord Denning, a judge,
is at present undertaking a massive enquiry into the whole Profumo
affair and its ramifications. To this task, he has been appointed by the
Prime Minister. But is it right and sensible, we must ask, that a judge,
removed from the panoply and objectivity of his court, should be
employed by a politician to investigate a matter in which other politicians
of his party may well be involved? And since his report, whatever its
content, is bound to be controversial, is it wise that a judge should
descend from the impartiality of his bench to swim in the murky
political ocean? In brief, the feeling is general that the essential separa-
tion of function between judiciary and legislature is being blurred, and
that the government is using the prestige of judges to whitewash their
own supposed misdeeds.

When the appeal of Aloysius "Lucky" Gordon, a Caribbean, against
his conviction for assaulting Christine Keeler was recently allowed, the
Lord Chief Justice declined to let the written evidence on which his
decision was based to be read out in public court—though he did allow
the defense counsel to see it. A case has thus been decided by justice
no doubt being done, but certainly not being seen to be done. This
Chief Justice is the same legal luminary who, at the time of the Vassall
tribunal, rebuked a reluctant witness for not putting the interests of the
State above all other interests. For adhering precisely to this doctrine,

=== Page 116 ===
434
COLIN MACINNES
the judges at Nuremberg (two of them British) condemned the Nazi
leaders in the most categorical terms.
English judges are drawn from a minute minority of about 2,000
barristers—that is, lawyers who plead in court, and do not initiate
contact with the client, which is done by the non-pleading solicitors.
During their youth, they argue cases this way or that for fees but, once
be-wigged as judges, assume enormous powers (and income) since much
English law is created not by parliament, but by justices' interpretations
of its enactments. The feeling is growing that these immensely privileged
persons are assuming an increasingly administrative, rather than inter-
pretative, function; and that their powers are growing as that of an
elected parliament declines.

The aforementioned national gadfly Claud Cockburn startled every-
one recently by printing full particulars of the man he alleged to be
Head (capital letters) of our Secret Services. In America, everyone
knows who runs the CIA or FBI, but in England the identities of their
opposite numbers are shrouded in becoming mystery. Yet why should
we not know who these men are? Our Secret Services are responsible
only, and directly, to the prime minister, and it is inconceivable that
this busy man should be able to control this vast bureaucracy, which
means that it is in fact operated anonymously, and largely without
democratic control.
Like everyone else in World War II, I drifted for a while into
the periphery of this occult organization, and was much impressed by
two things about it. First, the undoubted brains of many of its officers
(people who could crack codes before breakfast, for example), and
next by the temperamental boyishness of these gifted men. The upper
hierarchies of English life (civil service, judiciary, universities) are
exclusively staffed by gentlefolk, and the Secret Services are no exception.
One may doubt most earnestly whether such persons are either devoted
to democratic processes or as politically mature as they need to be in
1963. That overgrown sexless schoolboy, James Bond, is usually thought
to be a parody of what secret servicemen really are. It is alarming to
reflect that the creator of these fantasies may in fact be a realist.

Of all the social sewage that the Profumo affair has dredged up
to assail our nostrils, the most repellent have been the revelations of
how slum landlords operate in the center of our capital. All visitors
here will have noticed the glass and concrete palaces that newly adorn
London, but perhaps not so many will have visited the insalubrious

=== Page 117 ===
LONDON LETTER 435

areas where the seamier kind of property dealer has been operating
at huge profits.
Chief among these are London W. 11 and W. 12, now known as
Rachmansland, in dishonor of the memory of the lover of Mandy
Rice-Davies, now deceased, whose satrapy this sinister area was. I have
described this district in two novels (Absolute Beginners and Mr. Love
& Justice) and my report, of five years ago now, was greeted at the
time with incredulity. This zone largely consists of vast bourgeois terraces,
put up by Victorian speculative builders, which the bourgeoisie never
cared for, so that they soon fell into decline and were sublet in flats
and single rooms.
Tenants of long standing are protected by law from evictions, but
such is the pressure on housing in the capital—and so convenient is
this area to whores and gangsters (not to mention harassed colored
immigrants) —that every device was used by Rachman and his as-
sociates to buy out, or frighten out, sitting tenants, so that the rooms
could then be let far more advantageously. This happened on a colossal
scale, and may have been one of the factors leading to the race riots of
1958. For not only were many of the older cheap-rate tenants replaced
by immigrants paying three or four times as much for the same
premises, but one of Rachman’s stratagems was to install ebullient
Caribbeans in a poor white house so as to scare out the more timid
of the older tenantry.
In surprising—and heartening—reaction to these tactics, a number
of grass-root tenants’ associations came into being to fight together for
the victims’ rights. At the time of penning this, one Mrs. Cobb, a
barman’s wife, who is apparently in arrears with her rent, is resisting
a siege by the landlord’s bailiffs from behind barbed wire, through
which food is passed to her daily by sympathetic neighbors. But I
predict that such occurrences will become more infrequent, for the
latest tactic of the landlords is to reconvert their premises in this area
yet another time, and turn them back into what they were intended to
be in the first place—substantial houses and flats for the middle classes.
For the lettings to semi-criminal tenants have, since the recent fuss,
become too perilous, and the demand for suitable bourgeois properties
is still high.

“Direct action” of the kind adopted by the tenants’ associations
may not be unconnected with the recent marked upsurge of anarchism
among the young—in their tactics, that is, if not always in their
conscious philosophy. This should not really surprise us, for it is often

=== Page 118 ===
436
COLIN MACINNES
forgotten that the founding father of anarchism, William Godwin, the
father-in-law of Shelley, was an Englishman, and that such anarchist
worthies as Kropotkin, Bakunin and Malatesta all visited our shores—
Peter Kropotkin for over thirty years. Freedom, the anarchist weekly,
founded by Kropotkin and the Fabians 70 years ago, still appears
buoyantly, and is remarkably uninhibited in its political commentaries
and revelations. For nearly two years a more thoughtful journal,
Anarchy, has now come out monthly, and it seems to me to get nearer
to the core of many of our social ills than periodicals of far higher
circulation. It has also recruited an able cohort of well-informed and
vigorous young writers, though fuddy-duddies like myself occasionally
contribute to it (Freedom Press, 17A Maxwell Road, London S.W. 6).
Anarchism is, of course, profoundly opposed both to Communism
and to party democracy as we know it, since it deems both to be
authoritarian and state-worshipping, as opposed to the concept of
voluntary co-operative effort in all social and political spheres dear to
anarchist ideology. I expect that its appeal to the young arises from their
being disabused with all the classic political parties, and to its libertarian
moral climate. It is certainly the only party of the left
(sorry, not "party," for an "anarchist party" is a contradiction in terms
—one simply becomes an anarchist, one does not "join") which has
hit out in all directions, at one moment manifesting against Bombs
—Russian, American or British, the next invading that hallowed
ground of the Left, the Cuban embassy in London, and demonstrating
against the retention of political prisoners in Castro's jails.
This movement shows the disillusionment with orthodox politics
at the radical, or positive extreme. But in other ways, all the "affairs"
referred to in this letter denote, I think, a growing disenchantment of
all kinds of people with party government. Often, of course, this attitude
is cynical and irresponsible, and falls into the fatal fallacy of supposing
that the government are They, and the public We, and that neither is
responsible for the other. Certainly, the glee with which the British
nation has gobbled up all the muck that has been raked over in the
past few months is far from reassuring. For comment on these scandals
has suggested that the patient does not seem to have recognized
his own malady; and that many Englishmen and women see these
events as if they were happening not to oursels, but to some imaginary
alien country.
Colin MacInnes

=== Page 119 ===
BOOKS

THE PUBLIC POET

A PRECOCIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY. By Evgeny Evtushenko. Translated
by Andrew R. McAndrew. E. P. Dutton. $3.50.

The underlying question may be this: to what degree is
the rebel disfigured by the spurious culture he seeks to change; to
what extent is he formed by the world he would transform? How much
of Bolshevism's centralism is a translation of Tsarist autocracy? Abram
Tertz traps his schoolboy rebel in the cruellest of ironies in his story
"The Trial Begins"; what would he do with those who "hurt the
feelings" of their fellow men? Shoot them! Evtushenko's self-justifying
book bears many marks of the immediate past, but the "autobiographical"
data are so scanty and so obviously chosen (or invented) for tactical
purposes that there is no ready answer to the larger question.
The book defends his views on art, attacks his enemies, "the
dogmatists," invokes a number of routine Russian myths in his own
support and aims finally, one must suppose, at advancing his own cause.
Its effects were to be immediate, as Khrushchev recognized when he
denounced it.

The tactical questions loom larger, and invite speculation about
Evtushenko's motives in publishing it, and in publishing it as he did,
in a Paris weekly. Although it was no doubt meant to be overheard
back home, it was addressed to the West. Having chosen to publish it in
L'Express, he knew that it would not be brought out at home, and
that it meant some personal danger to himself. It is safe to assume that
he felt that everything he stood for was endangered by the sensational
speculations about him in the Western press. It was better, perhaps,
to risk personal trouble at home in order to save others from a crack-
down brought on by continuous scandal abroad. There might have
been two other considerations: to give his Western audience an authori-
tative version of himself and of his views; to maintain continuous
access to the West, principally to create a source of intelligent and well
informed support. Thus the first thing to communicate was the
special nature of his loyalty to the Revolution: it is unequivocal and

=== Page 120 ===
438
RUFUS MATHEWSON
entirely Leninist. Once he had discovered the Stalinist fraud, it meant
going back to the true faith, and then forward to its realization
in the name of the Truth and the People. The declaration of faith
is banal enough, but the point is for us to understand that is is one
of the rules of the game. This is not to accuse Evtushenko of insincerity.
It is part of our responsibility to realize that in a world without guar-
anteed rights of any kind, the human intelligence is engaged in a total
war the moment it asserts the right to exist. Not to be strategic would
be to surrender a priori, on purist grounds. That Evtushenko is involved
in this battle, we may not doubt.
Armed against the strategems, then, but never really certain what
Evtushenko's final commitments are, the reader may try to identify
the myths Evtushenko has invoked to justify himself in the East and
to explain himself in the West.
The poet as a public figure has a special history in Russia. He has
often been cast as culture-hero, or divine literatus speaking to multitudes,
or a martyr to the Philistines, or as some combination of the three.
Pushkin's fineness as a man, his gallantry, his wit, his style, the breadth
of his concerns constituted as much of a reproach to the thuggish regime
of Nicholas I as his "civic" verse. The man and his work were fused
in a special way. Lermontov's defiant Byronic pose contained implicit
criticism of the Tsarist world, and invited a mood of non-political
dissent. Mayakovsky played the poet in a more complex way, affirming
revolutionary values with one harsh, declamatory voice, while he sup-
pressed another, more personal voice, at fatal cost to himself. Evtu-
shenko is not the poet any of these men were, but he deliberately
associates himself with this "tradition." That is why we are so much
aware of the poet performing his poetry.
The Autobiography then traces the development of the public poet.
He was a fairly rough, tough kid, from a Siberian village, who chose
between poetry and soccer, learned the craft from the inevitable kindly
mentors. He abandoned the early "private" work when the full horror
of the Stalinist deviations-primarily ethical-from Leninism became
clear to him, adopted the harsh rhetoric of the early revolutionary
poets, and embarked finally on a militant campaign for the truth
and against the falsifiers. The briefest comparison will show that the
only quality he shares with his greater forebears is his vulnerability:
the career of the public poet in Russia is dangerous indeed. Arrest,
suicide, or death by violence, obloquy or exile, are all on the historical
record. Whatever kind of poet we decide he is, or however genuine
the new public personality he has made for himself, we must not fail

=== Page 121 ===
BOOKS
439
to see him as a man who has accepted the gravest risks in the name
of his cause.
The myth of the people's virtue complements the myth of the
public poet. Evtushenko tells us that the people are kind, patient,
devoted to the truth and to the Revolution. They were misled and
mistreated by Stalin and his followers, and they fell into confusion after
Stalin's death. It was the poet's obligation to articulate the masses'
doubts and point the way back to the truth. This traditional radical
belief in the narof is documented repeatedly in Evtushenko's narrative;
while he waits for the editor's decision to publish Babi Yar, the old
printer who has set the poem (provisionally, in the event it was ac-
cepted) comes out of the composing room with words of encourage-
ment and a bottle of vodka; an ex-convict takes responsibility in a crisis,
and shames a Stalinist bureaucrat; Evtushenko's immense, responsive
audiences of ordinary people validate his poetic role as truthseeker
and illuminator of the people's spirituality. This is time-honored myth-
ology from the Russian radical past which has been sanctified in Soviet
rhetoric for decades. With these respectable credentials he draws up
his inventory of Stalinist evil, which includes every variety of dehuman-
ization; and speaks impressively for his vision of a more humane world,
better attuned to the needs and capacities of simple men.
There is very little about poetry itself, no detailed talk of the
craft, only a few swift references to the work of his contemporaries.
At one point he associates himself with the wider world of poetry:
"I was intoxicated by Walt Whitman's immense reach, the turbulence
of Rimbaud, the luxuriance of Verhaeren, Baudelaire's naked sense of
the tragic, Verlaine's witchcraft, Rilke's subtlety, T. S. Eliot's hallucinat-
ing visions, and the healthy, peasant wisdom of Robert Frost." But
future students of poetry will look in vain for the living influence of
these men on Evtushenko's own work. He has chosen a much smaller,
more topical and more urgent use of his talent, as he has told us.
And it must be pointed out that his brief invocation of the European
world's art is a central part of the assault on Stalinist bigotry and
chauvinism. The pages are peppered with names-Hamsun, Freud,
St. Exupéry, Mann, Nietzche, Hemingway. Let the Western reader
understand that the new Soviet generation is not barbarian; let the
Soviet eavesdropper understand that these names are indispensable to
any participant in modern culture. The same urgent message is con-
veyed in his passionate defense of the modern sculptor Neizvestnyi and
the modern painter Vassiliev.

=== Page 122 ===
440

RUFUS MATHEWSON

This book, one might conclude, is shaped by strategy, which makes
it full of intellectual banality and political piety—a work of little
intrinsic interest to the student of modern culture. In this sense, the
rebel would seem to be tainted by the world he would transform.
But if one sees Evtushenko in relation to the situation in Russia, it is
possible to read the book through the euphemisms, as it were, as a
daring polemic, a personal statement by a courageous, embattled and
fragile man. There is no place where literature—as exemplified by a
militant few—is engaged more fully in the cause of humanism. The
record of Evtushenko's collisions with the cultural bosses—the time-
serving editors, the poet-bureaucrats of the Writers' Union—not only
testifies to his courage, but also indicates the terms of the cultural war.
It should be remembered, too, that one of the cruellest risks he runs
is estrangement from the purists of his own group, who may denounce
him as a bad poet, a crowd-pleaser, an international clown. If he is
able to maintain his public position and to endure as a person and
to grow as a poet, he will at least have served the cause he stands for.

Rufus Mathewson

PR

Series: No. 4

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& MID CULT

DWIGHT MACDONALD'S inquiry into "popular
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$1.00 plus 10¢ handling charge.

=== Page 123 ===
BOOKS
441
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL

SAINT GENET. By Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated by Bernard Frechtman.
George Braziller. $8.50.

It is hard to get over one's exasperation with Sartre for this
cancer of a book, grotesquely verbose, its cargo of brilliant ideas borne
aloft by a tone of viscous solemnity and by ghastly repetitiveness. One
knows that the book began as an introductory essay to the collected
edition of Genet's works published by Gallimard—some fifty pages,
perhaps—and grew to its present length, whereupon it was issued in
1952 as a separate volume, the first, of the Collected Genet. Who has
read all of Saint Genet in French, who will read it through in English,
I don't know. Familiarity with Genet's writings in prose, most as yet
untranslated, is surely essential. Even more important, the reader must
come equipped with sympathy for Sartre's way of explicating a text
without guidelines. Sartre breaks every rule of decorum established for
the critic; this is criticism by immersion. The book simply plunges into
Genet; there is little discernible organization to Sartre's argument;
nothing is made easy or clear. One should perhaps be grateful that
Sartre stops after six hundred and twenty-five pages. The indefatigable
act of literary and philosophical disembowelment which he practices on
Genet could just as well have gone on for a thousand pages. Yet,
Sartre's exasperating book is worth all one's effort of attention. Saint
Genet is not truly one of the great, mad books; it's too long and too
academic in vocabulary for that. But it is crammed with stunning and
profound ideas.

What made the book grow and grow is that Sartre, the philosopher,
could not help (however reverentially) upstaging Genet, the poet.
What began as an act of critical homage and recipe for the bourgeois
literary public's "good use of Genet" turned into something much
grander. Sartre's enterprise is really to exhibit his own philosophical
style—compounded of the phenomenological tradition from Descartes
through Husserl and Heidegger, plus a liberal admixture of Freud and
revisionist Marxism—while writing about a specific figure. Sartre gives
his enterprise the unfortunate name of "existential psychoanalysis,"
but never mind about that. In this instance, the individual whose acts
are made to yield the value of Sartre's philosophical vocabulary is the
foundling-homosexual-whore-writer-thief, Genet. In a previous effort at
"existential psychoanalysis," published in 1947 and kept to a more
digestible length, the individual was Baudelaire. In this earlier essay,

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442 SUSAN SONTAG
Sartre was much more concerned with specifically psychological issues:
Baudelaire's relation to his mother, his mistresses, etc. The present study
of Genet is more philosophical because, to put it bluntly, Sartre admires
Genet in a way that he does not admire Baudelaire. It would seem
that, according to Sartre, Genet deserves something more than per-
ceptive psychologizing. He merits philosophical diagnosis.

Please note Sartre's dilemma, because it accounts for the length-
and the breathlessness-of the book. All thought, as Sartre knows,
universalizes. Sartre wants to be concrete. He wants to catch Genet,
not simply to exercise his own tireless intellectual facility. But he cannot.
His enterprise is fundamentally impossible. He cannot catch the real
Genet; he is always slipping back into categories of Thief, Homosexual,
Free Lucid Individual. Somewhere Sartre knows this, and it torments
him. The length, and the inexorable tone, of Saint Genet are really the
product of intellectual agony.

The agony comes from the philosopher's commitment to impose
meaning upon action. The key notion of existentialism-liberty-reveals
itself in Saint Genet, even more clearly than in Being and Nothingness,
as a compulsion to assign meaning, a refusal to let the world alone.
According to Sartre's phenomenology of action, to act is to change the
world. Man, haunted by the world, acts. He acts in order to modify
the world in view of an end, an ideal. An act is therefore intentional,
not accidental. An accident is not to be counted as an act. Neither the
gestures of personality nor the works of the artist are simply to be
experienced. They must be understood, they must be interpreted as
modifications of the world. Thus, throughout Saint Genet, Sartre
continually moralizes. He moralizes upon the acts of Genet. And since
Sartre's book was written at a time when Genet was chiefly a writer of
prose narratives (among the plays, only the first two, The Maids and
Deathwatch, had been written), and since these narratives are all
autobiographical and written in the first person, Sartre need not
separate the personal from the literary act. Although Sartre occasionally
uses some item which comes from his own friendship with Genet, it is
almost entirely the man revealed by his books of which Sartre speaks.
It is a monstrous figure, real and surreal at the same time, all of
whose acts are seen by Sartre as meaningful, intentional. This is what
gives Saint Genet a quality that is clotted and ghostly. The name
"Genet" repeated thousands of times throughout the book never seems to
be the name of a real person. It is the name given to an infinitely
complex process of philosophical transfiguration.
Given all these ulterior intellectual motives, it is surprising how

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BOOKS 443
well Sartre's enterprise serves Genet. This is because Genet himself, in
his writings, is notably and explicitly involved in the enterprise of self-
transfiguration. Crime, sexual and social degradation, above all murder,
are understood by Genet as occasions for glory. It did not take much
ingenuity on Sartre's part to propose that Genet's writings are an
extended treatise on abjection-conceived as a spiritual method. The
"sanctity" of Genet, created by an onanistic meditation upon his own
degradation and the imaginative annihilation of the world, is the explicit
subject of his prose works. What remained for Sartre was to draw out
the implications of what is explicit in Genet. Genet has probably never
read Descartes, Hegel, or Husserl. But Sartre is right, entirely right, in
finding a relation in Genet to the ideas of Descartes, Hegel, and
Husserl. As Sartre brilliantly observes: "Abjection is a methodical
conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoché: it establishes
the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without,
in the manner of the divine understanding. The superiority of this
method to the other two lies in its being lived in pain and pride. It
therefore does not lead to the transcendental and universal consciousness
of Husserl, the formal and abstract thinking of the Stoics, or the sub-
stantial cogito of Descartes, but to an individual existence at its highest
degree of tension and lucidity."
As I have said, the only work of Sartre's comparable to Saint Genet
is the dazzling essay on Baudelaire. Baudelaire is analyzed as a man in
revolt whose life is continually lived in bad faith. His freedom is not
creative, rebellious though it may have been, because it never finds
its own set of values. Throughout his life, the profligate Baudelaire
needed bourgeois morality to condemn him. Genet is the true revolu-
tionist. In Genet, freedom is won for freedom's sake. Genet's triumph,
his "sanctity," is that he breaks through the social framework against
unbelievable odds to found his own morality. Sartre shows us Genet
making a lucid, coherent system out of le mal. Unlike Baudelaire, Genet
is free of self-deception. Genet lives evil for evil's sake.
Saint Genet is a book about the dialectic of freedom, and is, formally
at least, set in the Hegelian mold. What Sartre wants to show is how
Genet, by means of action and reflection, has spent his whole life
attaining the lucid free act. Cast from his birth in the role of the
Other, the outcast, Genet chose himself. This original choice is as-
serted through three different metamorphoses-the criminal, the aes-
thete, the writer. Each one is necessary to fulfill freedom's demand
for a push beyond the self. Each new level of freedom carries with it a
new knowledge of the self. Thus the whole discussion of Genet may be

=== Page 126 ===
444 SUSAN SONTAG

read as a dark travesty on Hegel's analysis of the relations between self
and other. Sartre speaks of the works of Genet as being, each one of
them, small editions of The Phenomenology of Mind. Absurd, as it
sounds, Sartre is correct. But it is also true that all of Sartre's writings
as well are versions, editions, commentaries, satires on Hegel's great
book. This is the bizarre point of connection between Sartre and
Genet; two more different human beings it would be hard to imagine!
In Genet, Sartre has found his ideal subject. To be sure, he has
drowned in him. Nevertheless, Saint Genet is a marvellous book, full of
truths about moral language and moral choice. (Take, as only one
instance, the insight that "Evil is the systematic substitution of the
abstract for the concrete.") And the analyses of Genet's narratives and
plays are consistently perceptive. On Genet's most daring book, Funeral
Rites, Sartre is particularly striking. And he is certainly capable of
appraisal, as well as explication, as in the entirely just comment that
"The style of Our Lady of the Flowers, which is a dream poem, a poem
of futility, is very slightly marred by a kind of onanistic complacency.
It does not have the spirited tone of the worlds that follow." Sartre
does say many foolish, superfluous things in Saint Genet. But everything
true and interesting that can be said about Genet is in this book as well.
It is also a key book for the understanding of Sartre at his best.
After Being and Nothingness, Sartre stood at the cross-roads. He could
move from philosophy and psychology to an ethics. The other choice
would be from philosophy and psychology to a politics, a theory of group
action and history. As everyone knows, and many deplore, Sartre has
chosen the second path; and the result is the Critique of Dialectical
Reason, published in 1960. Saint Genet is his complex gesture in the
direction he did not go.
Of all the philosophers in the Hegelian tradition (and I include
Heidegger), Sartre is the man who has understood the dialectic
between self and other in Hegel's Phenomenology in the most interesting
and usable fashion. But Sartre is not simply Hegel with knowledge
of the flesh, any more than he deserves to be written off as a French
disciple of Heidegger. Sartre's great book, Being and Nothingness, is
heavily indebted to the language and problems of Hegel, Husserl, and
Heidegger, to be sure. But it has a fundamentally different intention
from theirs. Sartre's work is not contemplative, but is moved by a great
psychological urgency. His pre-war novel, Nausea, really supplies the
key to all his work. There is stated the fundamental problem of the
world in its repulsive, slimy, vacuous or obtrusively
substantial thereness-the problem which moves all of Sartre's writings.

=== Page 127 ===
BOOKS 445

Being and Nothingness is an attempt to develop a language to cope
with, to record the gestures of a consciousness tormented by disgust.
This disgust, this experience of the superfluity of things and of moral
values, is simultaneously a psychological crisis and a metaphysical
problem.

Sartre's solution is nothing if not impertinent. Corresponding to
the primitive rite of anthropophagy, the eating of human beings, is
the philosophical rite of cosmophagy, the eating of the world. The
hallmark of the philosophical tradition to which Sartre is heir starts
with consciousness as the sole given. Sartre's solution to the anguish
of consciousness confronted by the brute reality of things is cosmophagy,
the devouring of the world by consciousness. More exactly, consciousness
is understood as both world-constituting and world-devouring. All rela-
tions-especially, in the most brilliant passages in Being and Nothingness,
the erotic-are analyzed as gestures of consciousness, appropriations of
the other in the interminable self-definition of the self.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre reveals himself as a psychologist
of the first rank-worthy to rank with Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and
Freud. And the chief interest of the Baudelaire essay is in the acuteness
and originality of his insights into Baudelaire's psychology, as revealed
in his poems, journals, and letters. What makes Saint Genet even more
interesting than the Baudelaire essay (though, at the same time, more
unmanageable as well) is that, through thinking about Genet, Sartre has
gone beyond the notion of action as a mode of psychological self-
conservation. Through Genet, Sartre has glimpsed something of the
autonomy of the aesthetic. More exactly, he has understood the con-
nection between the aesthetic dimension and freedom, long ago and
beautifully argued by Kant. The artist who is the subject of Saint Genet
is not psychologized away. Genet's works are interpreted in terms of a
saving ritual, a ceremony of consciousness. That this ceremony is,
au fond, onanistic, is curiously apt. According to European philosophy
since Descartes, world-creating has been the principal activity of con-
sciousness. It's perhaps only just that world-creating be seen now as
world-procreating, as masturbation.

Sartre correctly describes Genet's most spiritually ambitious book,
Funeral Rites, as "a tremendous effort of transsubstantiation." Genet
relates how he transformed the whole world into the corpse of his
dead lover, Jean Decarnin, and this young corpse into his own penis.
"The Marquis de Sade dreamt of extinguishing the fires of Etna with
his sperm," Sartre observes. "Genet's arrogant madness goes further:
he jerks off the Universe." Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all

=== Page 128 ===
446 SUSAN SONTAG
philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very
sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again. It is a
rather good description, anyway, of Sartre's own phenomenology of
consciousness. And, certainly, it is a perfectly fair description of what
Genet is about.
Susan Sontag
THE DRUMMER OF DANZIG
THE TIN DRUM. By Günter Grass. Translated by Ralph Manheim.
Pantheon. $6.95.
From time to time we must re-examine the meaning of the
concepts "classical" and "romantic," which, like the works of Homer or
Dante, need to be retranslated or, in this case, redefined for every age.
As we look at twentieth-century fiction, we see one kind of writing
whose ideal is omission, whose unit is the vignette which yearns to
compress itself into an aphorism. This is our classicism. And there is
another writing whose aim is inclusion, whose basic form is the catalogue
striving to heighten itself into a prose poem. This is our romanticism.
To draw examples from France, where they have a way of being more
exemplary, there is the classicism of Gide, Radiguet, Camus confronting
the romanticism of, say, Proust, Montherlant, and Genet. The greater
writers try to bridge the gap: Gide had to write The Counterfeiters; the
work of Proust is shot through with maxims.
In The Tin Drum, Günter Grass has written a novel without equal
so far in post-war Germany-let no one mention in the same breath
the lucubrations of an Uwe Johnson. Grass's book is a major romantic
novel which, in its carefully designed structure and economical use of
a welter of incidents, approaches classicism.
Duality runs through the book. Even the provenance of The Tin
Drum is dual, just as its hero, Oskar Matzerath, has two putative fathers.
For the novel derives, first, from a French tradition-Grass lived for a
long time in Paris-represented by writers like Jarry, Apollinaire
(particularly the Apollinaire of Les Onze mille verges), and Céline,
writers in whom furibund sexuality and Rabelaisian humor, sadism and
stylistic experimentation and innovation, proceeded pari passu. There

=== Page 129 ===
BOOKS 447
is in Günter Grass a great, metaphysical anger. But the anger comes at
us in trappings of humor, eroticism, absurdity, poker-facedness-it is,
in short, a Mardi-Gras anger—and is not readily recognizable for what
it is. But its impact on sensitive readers is all the greater for that.
While adopting this French orientation, The Tin Drum manages to
improve on its models. Explaining German romanticism to French
readers, Heine wrote: “A French madness is nowhere near so mad as a
German one; for in the latter there is, as Polonius would say, method.
With unrivaled pedantry, with terrifying conscientiousness, with thorough-
ness such as a French lunatic cannot even conceive of, this German
frenzy was practiced.” The Tin Drum is also nourished by German
romanticism. Oskar is the obverse of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Klein Zaches,
another mischievous dwarf. Zaches has the magic gift of receiving the
reward due any great action performed by anyone in his presence;
conversely, Oskar has genuine talents of sorts, but they are sinister, and,
directly or indirectly, lead those around him to disaster. The stealing
of the Good complements the palming off of Evil. But whereas in
Klein Zaches justice triumphs, in The Tin Drum injustice goes its
merry way. It does not exactly triumph—there are no more triumphs
in our day, not even triumphs of injustice—but it does go on.
The Tin Drum is the story of Oskar Matzerath, born in the
Twenties, whose mother was a Danzig woman, and whose father was
either her German husband or her Polish lover. The infant is gifted
with an adult brain at birth, and resolves not to grow up to be a
shopkeeper like the elder Matzerath. Aged three, Oskar throws himself
down some stairs and arrests his growth; he refuses to go to school or talk
properly but becomes a fiendish artist on the toy drums his mother
keeps him supplied with. When a new drum is not forthcoming, he
discovers that he can shout glass to pieces even at great distances, which
proves a useful method of petty blackmail and, later, of other mischief-
making. As Oskar grows older, he becomes the cause of the deaths of
his mother and both presumptive fathers, and of several other people
to boot. Not so much the cause of death as its catalyst, and who can
assess the responsibility of a catalyst? So Oskar gets away with murder.
The story covers the rise of Nazism, the war, the collapse of
Germany, but all only as reflected in Oskar’s existence. He has many
picaresque and demonic adventures: he becomes an “artiste” entertain-
ing troops in Normandy, a “reincarnation” of Jesus who leads a gang
of likable JD’s into destruction, his brother’s father if not his keeper
(by having a child by his stepmother), and so forth. After the war, he
sees fit to grow a little, but in so doing develops a hump. He is relocated

=== Page 130 ===
448 JOHN SIMON
to Düsseldorf, where he becomes by turns carver of funeral monuments,
nude model for crazy artists, drummer in a jazz trio, and, finally, a
famous and rich concert-drummer who, in solo recitals throughout
Germany, drums elderly people back into their youth-a kind of faith
healer, in short. Accused, at last, of the one crime he did not commit,
he is found guilty of murder but reprieved to a mental institution.
Though he finds happiness there, it looks as if he will soon be released.
And then what? He is thirty, and he is afraid.
Such an outline does no justice whatever to the plot, let alone to
the work of art. Günter Grass is also a poet, painter, sculptor, stage
designer, dramatist, literary critic, and genuine eccentric; all these
occupations have helped him fill his long novel with a splendid mélange
adultère de tout. Grass calls himself a realist, but this is true only to
the extent that he can describe with equal verisimilitude plain things like
the contents of a grocery, more abstruse things such as the work of a
stone-carver or waiter in a ferocious harbor canteen, and fantastic things
like minor miracles. Always, however, the romantic poet is eager to
take over. Thus we read of the child Oskar, in a garret, disturbed in
his drumming by noises from the courtyard: “A hundred carpet-beating
females can storm the very heavens, can blunt the wing tips of young
swallows; with a few strokes, they tumbled the tiny temple that Oskar
had drummed into the April air.” The world is too much with
Oskar, but the expression is not that of the worldly realist. Consider
Oskar’s words about how his mother, after four days’ painful vomiting
and dying, gave up “that bit of breath which everyone must cough up
in order to obtain his death certificate.” Whereupon, Oskar goes on,
“we all breathed easy again . . .”1
The novel is distinguished by its blend of dreary reality and spec-
tacular fantasy, of wit and toughness, of lyricism and amorality. If
Grass’s vision is realistic, it is the realism of someone who does not allow
for optical illusions, who does not know or does not care to know the
laws of causality, who has no visual or moral perspective: a sharp
observer, but an observer from Mars. Thus Oskar watches a neighbor
woman carrying a carpet rolled up and slung across her shoulder
1. Ralph Manheim, the translator, renders this as “the bit of breath which
each of us must give up if he is to be honored with a death certificate. We all
sighed with relief. . . .” This loses not only Oskar’s tone of almost innocent
callousness, but also the terrible yet pregnant play on “bit of breath” and
“breathed.” Since Mr. Manheim’s translation is persistently inept, I am
obliged to make up my own versions.

=== Page 131 ===
BOOKS 449
"exactly as she might have carried a drunken man; but her man was
no longer living." And thus Oskar wonders upon seeing the toy soldiers
abandoned in Danzig by a little Polish escapee, "Perhaps he had
stuffed a few uhlans into his trouser pocket that they might later, during
the battle for the fortress of Modlin, reinforce the Polish cavalry."
Thus, too, Oskar notes that at his father's funeral "it decidedly smelled
of dead Matzerath."

The salient feature is irony, but an irony which, for all that it is
immense, is not savage. It is indifferent rather than angry, and the
reader's own indignation must rush in to fill the moral vacuum left by
the protagonist's nonchalance. Grass is a master of all ironies: simple,
complex, multilateral. Simple: "... films in which Maria Schell, as a
nurse, wept, and Borshe, as a chief surgeon close upon a most difficult
operation, played Beethoven sonatas through the French windows and
displayed his sense of responsibility." Complex-because it can do
double duty, as when it not only lets the absurdity of a situation dawn on
us slowly, but also affords a gruesome insight into Oskar's non-human
reaction to a severed ring finger which he picks up with a collector's
zeal: "Oskar . . . realized that the inside of the finger was marked
high up to the third joint with lines attesting to its diligence, deter-
mination, and ambitious perseverance." (The translation completely
misses the horrible, matter-of-fact disregard of reality, couched in a
syntactical construction that treats the dead finger as a living being;
Manheim translates: "this had been a hard-working finger with a
relentless sense of duty.") And multilateral irony-when Oskar's tiny
son, already somewhat taller than his father, strikes Oskar down and
makes him muse: "Could he, too, express childlike affection such as
is supposedly worth striving for between fathers and sons, only in
homicide?" Note that the homicidal scene takes place at Matzerath
Senior's funeral, caused by Oskar, hence the "too," i.e., filial hatred
as something basic and inherited, viewed by Oskar as "affection" but
of a "childlike" sort, a term suited to "sons" but here, as a zeugma,
referring also to the feelings of "fathers." Yet in the face of all this,
love is still supposed to be "worth striving for."

In a perceptive essay, Hans Magnus Enzensberger has examined
Grass's style and found in it everything from syntactic ballets to imita-
tions of the Litany, from rondos and fugatos to the language of case
histories, from legal jargon to underworld slang, from dialect to
gibberish. To this list should be added the technique of film montage,
with all kinds of superimposition and cross-cutting, and certain devices
of parody (e.g., the history of Danzig told as a cabaret monologue) also

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450
JOHN SIMON

such stratagems as describing something that, it turns out, did not
happen, then blithely going on to what did; or enumerating several pos-
sibilities of how something might have been; or getting at an important
point only by way of the longest verbal retards. Add to this anticlimaxes
and non sequiturs, and you begin to have an image of Grass's style.
But then, out of nowhere, a whole prose poem, or a mere lyrical cadenza:
"Stillness, maybe a fly, the clock as usual, very softly the radio." (Which
Manheim prosifies into: "It was quiet, maybe the buzzing of a fly,
the clock as usual, the radio turned very low.")
What makes The Tin Drum spellbinding, however, is something
beyond story and style; it is the hauntedness of its author, and the
personal myths he creates, full of urgency and driving power. There
are a number of continually recurring motifs in Grass's work. Thus the
play Ten Minutes to Buffalo deals with a fantastic trip to Buffalo, in
which the destination is not reached. In The Tin Drum, Oskar's arsonist
grandfather may or may not have escaped to Buffalo; Oskar himself tries
to escape there, but never makes it. Another play, The Wicked Cooks,
displays a horde of viciously intriguing ladle-wielders. These same cooks
with their ladles recur in a poem in Triangle of Rails (Gleisdreieck),
Grass's volume of verse. In The Tin Drum, the unloved and killed father
is a passionate cook, and Oskar's final bogey, the only fear he cannot

THE STRUGGLE OF THE MODERN

by Stephen Spender

Shelley wrote that poetry should be both center and circum-
ference of knowledge. In his new book, Mr. Spender applies
Shelley's statement to modern literature in an attempt to
reassert the relationship of literature to modern life. He dis-
cusses, mainly in autobiographical terms, books that he has
read and pictures that he has looked at, recollecting and
commenting on the characteristics which bear some relation-
ship to the problems of a specifically modern art.
"Mr. Spender's best book of criticism. To read it carefully is,
for anyone of my generation, exceedingly helpful. I do not
see how anyone could read it without learning a great
deal."-John Wain in The Observer.
"It is a thoughtful, provocative, and valuable work." -The
Economist.
$5.00

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY 4

=== Page 133 ===
BOOKS
451
shake, is "die Schwarze Köchin," a black female cook, whom Manheim
foolishly turns into "the Black Witch," just so as to rhyme with "pitch"!
From the garb of cooks it is not far to that of nurses and nuns.
Grass has publicly stated that nuns fascinate him; his private obsession
with them is manifest in his fantasy world. As a painter, he has exhibited
whole series of paintings of nuns, which is exactly what the painter
Lankes does in The Tin Drum. Compulsively, almost all of Oskar's
passions are for nuns-or nurses. The nurse is the secular replica of
the nun, and her uniform is the photographic positive of the nun's
negative. She, too, wears a cross, albeit a red one, and, in German,
she, too, is called "Schwester." Nuns are the subject of a poem sequence
in Triangle of Rails that reiterates, almost verbatim, certain passages of
The Tin Drum. In the novel, nuns and nurses are repeatedly adored,
longed for, made love to unsuccessfully, assaulted, raped, shot, deferred
to, exalted.

Other obsessive motifs include the firebug, doves and seagulls,
physical malformation. Now various commentators-including the blurb
writer-have perceived Oskar as a symbol of the alienated artist, of
guilty Germany, of corrupt mankind, to say nothing of diverse religious
allegories. Some of these identifications may be in order, but they beg
the underlying issue: Grass's unrelenting need to write the biography of
his unconscious. Which is, of course, both the most and the least
respectable reason for writing: it accounts for the best of Goethe, and
for all of Sade.

This is not the time or place for an analysis of Grass's personal
mythology, even if I were competent to undertake it. But something
can be cautiously hinted at, something to which the polarity nun-nurse
points, and which brings us back to the problem of duality with which
we began. For The Tin Drum is fundamentally about duality. Its very
narration shuttles, at the drop of a comma, between present and past,
even as the narrator, sometimes within the same sentence, shifts from
"I" to "he, Oskar." Oskar has two presumptive fathers: the solid
burgher and amateur cook, Matzerath, who could "express sentiments
only in soups," and the dreamy, dandified, sentimental Bronski-Ger-
many and Poland, West and East, action and idea. Oskar's mother is
hopelessly partitioned between two men; Matzerath is caught in the
cross fire of scowls exchanged by the two pictures in his bedroom:
Beethoven and Hitler, genius and madman. Oskar's two favorite books
-almost his only ones-are the Dionysianly orgiastic memoirs of Ras-
putin, and Goethe's Apollonianly transfigured Elective Affinities. And,
above all, the plot thrashes about between two poles. There is Oskar's

=== Page 134 ===
452
JOHN SIMON
insistent striving backward into the womb: as a boy, he keeps trying
to hide under his grandmother's skirts; as a young adult, he still shuts
himself into the clothes cupboard of the nurse he covets; at thirty, he
finds the insane asylum's bed insufficiently crib-like. But there is also
life moving forward and pushing Oskar before it: out of every asylum,
lunatic or otherwise, and, ultimately, into death.
It is here that the couple, Nurse and Nun, becomes relevant. The
Nurse stands for the return to the womb: Oskar cherishes a youthful
picture of his mother as an auxiliary nurse; throughout the various
maladies of his later life, nurses take care of him; often they hover
over him while he enters a coma that is like the dark of the womb.
At the other extreme stands the Nun, the black sister who succors the
dying and prays for the dead. Oskar, significantly, craves both the
Nurse who stands for earthiness (she is presumed to be of loose morality),
and the Nun, immaculate Bride of Christ who points to the Beyond.
Our tragedy is that we fail in both directions: life can neither
retreat into the embryo nor pass on through death. The main nurse in
the novel cannot be possessed by an Oskar suddenly struck with im-
potence; the principal nun is, with Oskar's help, raped by someone else.
The nurse is subsequently murdered; the nun, apparently, commits
suicide. Fulfillment is not to be had. Oskar's friend, Herbert Truczinski,
tries to copulate with a wooden figurehead in the shape of a naked
girl, which would bridge the gap between transient flesh and enduring
wood. He dies in the attempt. Oskar interpoliates his Rasputin with
his Goethe, but the resulting mixture is a trick and delusion: life knows
no idyll in which "Ottilie docilely strolls on Rasputin's arm through
the gardens of Central Germany, while Goethe sits in a sleigh through the
side of some dissolutely aristocratic Olga, as they glide along through
wintry St. Petersburg." Indeed, in the end, even Goethe becomes
a bogey for Oskar and merges with "the Black Cook": in death, to be
sure, there is fusion, but what avails fusion then?
It is to be deplored that The Tin Drum comes to English readers
diminished by Ralph Manheim's translation: in length, by well over
a hundred pages; in quality, inestimably. Much that was either too
elaborate or obscene, has been flattened out, abridged, or omitted. On almost every page constructions, jokes, mean-
ings are weakened, disregarded, or missed. None of which, however, has
kept the translation from being extolled by literary and academic
reviewers alike.
This is profoundly regrettable, because The Tin Drum, with its
linguistic superabundance, its mythopoeic nature, its uncannily loving

=== Page 135 ===
BOOKS 453
and palpable evocation of a city as it was but never again will be, its
exploration of sex both bitter and humorous, its scatology, its dwelling
on the father-son relationship while doing true obeisance to the eternal
feminine, its religious coloring, its esoteric lore, its inextricable blend
of reality and hallucination, its split between sensuality and spirituality,
its wealth of magnificently grotesque invention is a German approxima-
tion of you guessed it-Ulysses. Approximation only, not equivalent;
but a spectacular achievement all the same. The Tin Drum pursues,
dazzles, sinks its claws into the mind. Whether it can also ambush
the future remains to be seen.
John Simon

JUNG AND FREUD

MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS. By C. G. Jung. Translated by
Richard and Clara Winston. Pantheon. $7.50.

I

C. G. Jung, who viewed autobiographies with suspicion, con-
sented to the publication of his own upon condition that it appear post-
humously and not as part of his collected works. Edited and in part
transcribed by Aniela Jaffe from Jung's conversation, Memories, Dreams,
Reflections will be of interest not only to those curious to test the pro-
fessional quality of Jung's self-awareness but also, I believe, to anyone
concerned with the relations between psychoanalysis and literature-
between, that is, the kinds of experience that each means to foster. One
finds in the book few dates, little account of outward circumstance, none
of the paraphernalia of straightforward public reminiscence; this is a
wanderjahre of the spirit, whose theme is the inner self-realization denied
by our utilitarian society. One must return to the works of the romantic
artists, to Wordsworth's Prelude or to Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit,
to encounter a similar autobiographical intention.
The Jungian therapy proceeds from a theoretical affirmation of the
cognitive value of man's fantasy-life, despite its lack of immediate ac-
quaintance with reality. Jung has written elsewhere: "We only under-
stand that thinking which is a mere equation, and from which nothing
comes out but what we have put in. That is the working of the intellect.
But beyond that there is a thinking in primordial images—in symbols

=== Page 136 ===
454
ALVIN C. KIBEL
which are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in him
from earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still
make up the groundwork of the human psyche." By engaging powers of
mind neglected in a utilitarian culture, Jung hopes to challenge the
very ground of our experience, to make possible a new and more valuable
mode of personal being. Memories, Dreams, Reflections charts a repre-
sentative destiny, and appropriately recalls certain romantic literary per-
formances: for the task of public self-transformation, of responding to
one's inward life in the name of "nature truly experienced" (Jung's
phrase), was explicitly the lot of romantic poets, and a concern with
the legitimacy of the culturally accepted "rational" self has been a mark
of the literary imagination ever since.

By the standards of heroic autobiography, however, of personal testi-
mony to the cogency of a mode of experience, Memories, Dreams, Re-
flections is not an impressive performance; it will do little to bring an
unrest into our consciousness of being. I do not mean that Jung fails to
realize the disquieting beauty, the transformation of experience into the
stuff of a new art; that is the achievement of his romantic predecessors.
One need not demand of the visionary that he work out the conflict be-
tween his imaginative responses and cultural reality within the limits of
responsible form. It is his claim, after all, to be a significant phenomenon,
not necessarily an accomplished witness, and a good deal of the literature
of the past hundred and fifty years itself convinces us not by its precision
but by the daemonic quality of its experience. Such writing, however,
must remain free of cliché, of the accommodation between event and
expression that indicates a failure to confront one's history directly: its
lack of formal awareness must be complemented by an authentic sense
of the irreducibility of personal fact. Just here Jung arouses suspicion:
his manner, even in translation, is unfailingly and variously derivative,
a conglomerate of sonorous romanticisms and easy homilies, of meta-
physical borrowings and spiritual exhortations. One is continually dis-
concerted by a tendency to rhetorical bombast ("Like flames suddenly
flaring up, these thoughts darted through my mind"), by a substitution
of the language of melodrama for that of precise thought. ("Wherever
the psyche is set violently oscillating by a numerous experience, there is
a danger that the thread by which one hangs may be torn. Should that
happen, one man tumbles on to an absolute affirmation, another into an
equally absolute negation.") Jung's failure to either avoid the literary or
create a style of his own leaves the impression that Jung has never really
looked at his experience, that he has not permitted anything to work
upon him beyond the limits of the ordinary. One begins to suspect,

=== Page 137 ===
BOOKS 455
despite his testimony to the contrary, that Jung cannot release his grasp
of the commonplace, that he is incapable of risk, so immediately and
derivati\u00adely is the meaning of his available experience to him. Jung
emerges from his visionary experience to caution us that we must learn
to take the good with the bad, success with failure-how much more
interesting, how human, to be capable of mistakes! I would argue that
Jung's style-really his utter lack of it-is indicative of the movement
of his thought, which endlessly substitutes traditional moral categories
and hypostatized attitudes for the promised realities of visionary ex-\u00ad
perience.

For an understanding of the clinical validity of Jung's position
there is nothing to be learned from this judgment; the vulgarity-if I
may call it that-of his conveyed experience, however, should give pause
to students of literature who have praised his theories because they seem
to support a kind of literary awareness. Ever since the romantic period,
a premise of literary thought has been that certain criticisms of society
can be made only through the agency of mental powers that operate
independently of rational thought. We may speak in this respect of a
tradition of visionary dissent, meaning by the phrase that currency of
opinion which values imaginative constructions because they express
losses and disaffections in modern life that reason cannot articulate. It
is not too much to say that every major literary figure of the past cen-\u00ad
tury has been involved, in one way or another, in some such assertion;
and yet it is equally true that the tradition still lacks an adequate aesthe-\u00ad
tic, a theory that accounts for the primacy of the imagination without
insulting our sense of fact. Where Freud has been of no help, Jung has
offered to fill the gap, to bridge the distance between our literary ex-\u00ad
perience and our other kinds of experience. Indeed, he has extended his
services to aesthetics quite openly, by distinguishing between the \"psy-\u00ad
chological\" artist who raises the materials of ordinary experience to
intensity, and the \"visionary\" artist who exploits critical powers that are
uniquely the property of art. For this reason, Jung's theories have re-\u00ad
ceived currency outside professional circles chiefly at the instigation of
those concerned with literature. Yet it seems to me that any association
between Jung's theories and those of literary criticism can have only a
reactionary and cheapening effect upon the visionary enterprise. A
literary judgment of the memoirs of a professed scientist should not, of
course, influence the reception of his ideas; but the form of Jung's auto-\u00ad
biography suggests that the caliber of his performance reflects the value
of his theories to literature.

=== Page 138 ===
456 II ALVIN C. KIBEL
Freudian insights into the nature of the literary process have not
been assimilated by criticism with either pleasure or regularity. No one
can doubt that Freud's respect for the creative artist was real and in-
tense; and yet, both in his general and his specific observations, Freud
seems to deny art any cognitive function, any role in the business of
coming to terms with reality. The situation is all the more remarkable
when we reflect that, of all modern thinkers, Freud had come closest to
justifying the autonomy of the artistic imagination. The existence of
unconscious thoughts, of a second, "hidden" set of psychic con-
tents ranged against those long familiar to empirical psychology, led
Freud to argue the existence of a second psychic mechanism for the
working-up of these thoughts to expression—one that corresponded to
the rational faculty in the conscious sphere but operated upon principles
distinct from those of grammar and logic. (Freud's epistemology is inno-
cent of the current, vexed dispute concerning the propriety of distinguish-
ing between a primary content or datum and its elaboration in a medium
of expression.) The burden of Freud's Traumdeutung was to trace the
workings of this second mechanism in its major instances, particularly in

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=== Page 139 ===
BOOKS 457
fantasy and dreams, and to defend the coherence of its function against
those who would judge its products by the standards of conscious rea-
soning. \"This peculiar dream-work,\" Freud wrote, \"is much farther re-
moved from the pattern of waking thought than has been supposed by
even the most decided depreciators of the psychic activity in dream-
formation. It is not so much that it is more negligent, more incorrect,
more forgetful, more incomplete than waking thought; it is something
altogether different, qualitatively, from waking thought, and cannot
therefore be compared with it.\"
As many students of his work were quick to realize, Freud had
legitimized by this argument the claims of imaginative expression to a
functional autonomy independent of the strictures of reason: not merely
dreams and reveries but the \"higher\" enterprises of art seemed about
to receive their psychological justification. That Freud himself did not
supply this justification is now a commonplace of intellectual history;
the devices of imagistic expression remain distinct in his view from those
of grammar and logic but only because they communicate repressed
material-psychic contents incompatible with the organization of a
mature ego. Freud's speculations concerning such devices reflect his
general conviction that the unconscious is primarily a source of archaic
impulses, of energies that have not yet been, or cannot be, fully con-
verted to the service of reason and civilization. Whatever value Freud
assigns the dream-work, as harmlessly releasing energies that might other-
wise imperil the ego, there can be no doubt that on his view anyone
proposing to take its products seriously is already on the way to mental
illness, has succumbed to forces destructive of his proper humanity.
The literary critic faced with this conclusion is in for a bad time.
On the one hand, he wishes to accept Freud's argument that the sym-
bols of art are the sole means whereby a complex of feelings and asso-
ciations can be communicated; on the other, he wishes to repudiate the
notion that such complexes invariably possess a compulsive, under-
ground character. The usual solution means impaling oneself on the
horns of dilemma-distinguishing, in spite of Freud, between mere re-
flexive fantasy (\"uninformed imagination,\" as Yeats called it) and the
highly deliberative products of the poetic activity, and thus rejecting
whatever insights psychoanalysis has to offer. Precisely here Jung con-
tends for importance as a theoretician of culture: it is his claim to have
completed the validation of the imaginative life that Freud initiated and
left in abeyance, by reformulating the psychoanalytic conception of the
unconscious, its occasions, its mechanisms, its function. Jung offers, in
other words, an account of how fantasy works in general that would

=== Page 140 ===
458 ALVIN C. KIBEL

justify the romantic poet's yearning for a life of sensations rather than
thoughts; for him, genuine literature is the mature refinement of a more
basic process in which the self is nourished by psychic powers beyond the
reach of consciousness. According to Jung, Freud's "reductive" view of
fantasy resulted from the over-stringent rationalism that governed his
choice of a clinical standard by which to measure neurotic behavior.
Jung's intention is to return psychoanalytic theory upon the path of its
inner development by questioning whether the so-called "normative"
ego was not, in fact, responsible for the incompatibility between itself
and its unconscious promptings-whether a more generous relation be-
tween the evident and the hidden self might not be possible.

Jung's quarrel with Freud may be said to hinge upon his revalua-
tion of the nature of dreams. As we have seen, the phenomena of
dreams pointed for Freud to the existence of an unresolved conflict be-
tween the primal energies of the psyche and the demands of civilization;
the dream is a facade concealing impulses that menace the self. For
Jung, on the contrary, dreams indeed reveal in the neurotic the presence
of psychic components incompatible with a mature consciousness, but the
dream is not in itself a neurotic phenomenon and may, in normative in-
stances, become a vehicle of energies valuable to civilized life.

I was never able to agree with Freud that the dream is a
"facade" behind which its meaning lies hidden-a meaning
already known, but maliciously, so to speak, withheld from con-
sciousness. To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbors
no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can,
just as a plant grows or an animal seeks its food as best it can.

At this point we gain an opportunity to judge the character of Jung's
relation to the tradition of visionary dissent. That "nature harbors no
intention to deceive" contradicts not only Freudian psychology but the
entire movement of nineteenth-century thought of which Jung's system
purports to be the inheritor. True enough, it was an ability of the roman-
tic imagination to conceive nature normatively; "what man has made
of man" appeared as the condition of exile from a stream of general
tendency in the organic world. Yet nature, to which the visionary poet
might return from time to time for spiritual refreshment, was not with-
out its terrors-a famous passage in Dichtung und Wahrheit reminds us
how Goethe found therein something which manifested itself only in
contradictions, something which often betrayed a malicious pleasure
and to which he gave the name Daemonic. The notion that nature is
beneficent, that its processes support the mature self, actually culminates
in the social vision of the eighteenth century, against which the roman-

=== Page 141 ===
BOOKS 459

tic writers must be set in reaction: the latter see man characteristically
as self-divided, yearning for the innocence and primal simplicity of
nature and yet aware that nature is will-less, blind, incapable of moral
satisfactions. The contradictory romantic perception is perfectly drama-
tized by Wordsworth, with his sense of the beauty and the terror, the
resuscitating calm and the awful barrenness, of the natural landscape;
it is exemplified by the movement of Schiller's thought when he writes:
"It happens with us, at least in certain moral dispositions, to curse our
prerogative, this free will, which exposes us to so many combats with
ourselves, to so many anxieties and errors, and to wish to exchange it
for the condition of beings destitute of reason, for that fatal existence
that no longer admits of any choice, but which is so calm in its uni-
formity. . . ."1

My point is that one may discern in romantic literature, as a corre-
lative to its sense of the primacy of the imagination, a conviction that
man has cut himself off from nature simply by being man, that certain
unnatural difficulties attend the cultivation of the human spirit even in
its most vital and most generous forms. Although subsequent thought
has moved away from the romantic ideal, it has done so only at the
promptings of the romantic experience itself. That nature yields no bene-
fits to man except as he successfully resists her, that man must distort
nature cruelly in order to make his psychic energies available for the
purposes of civilization-this testimony may be read throughout the
nineteenth century, in the works of Spencer and the social Darwinians,
in the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, in the post-romantic
doctrines of aestheticism and symbolism, which see the artist sacrificed on
the altar of his art, creating impersonal beauty by a process that entails
his becoming ugly, grotesque, an aberration. If we are to grasp the
spiritual import of this literature, we must recognize that the word
"spiritual" can apply to more than religious inten ons, that it has refer-
ence to certain moral and aesthetic conditions whose satisfaction dis-
tinguishes humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom. It was with
this larger sense of the word in mind that Hegel argued for an
ideal state in which the wounds of the spirit would heal without leaving
scars; and it is the conveyed experience of what we have termed vision-
ary dissent that in actuality the wounds of the spirit are everlasting, that
even worthiest goals of civilization require irredeemable suffering as a
precondition of their accomplishment. (A classic instance is provided
by the fate of Dostoyevsky's characters, whose salvation depends upon

1. On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.

=== Page 142 ===
460 ALVIN C. KIBEL
whether they learn that suffering rather than pleasure is the source of
human vitality.) One may guess at the affinity between this position and
an esteem for the power of imaginative expression; for the task of
qualifying by doubt the most enlightened and reasonable projects of
society is not easily within the province of enlightenment and reason.
That the aims of this attitude are not frivolous, that the power of
fantasy to move us beyond reason need not culminate in an empty ges-
ture-these are provided by the practical issue of Freudian, not Jungian,
therapy. Freud's psychological speculations run in the direct line of vi-
sionary dissent from the first. The idea of an unconscious, of thought-
processes that occur beneath the level of self-awareness, was not novel to
Freud, whose unique contribution lay rather in the recognition that this
function is complicated by an irreconcilable conflict between the native
propensities of the psyche and the requirements of civilization. The
Freudian unconscious consists largely of repressed contents, of material
that culture will allow only indirect expression, whose continual striving
for immediate release is an indication of the profound discontinuity be-
tween nature and society. Throughout his career, Freud never ceased to
lay emphasis upon his conviction that the same deflections of energy
responsible for the great achievements of culture are responsible as well
for the disturbances of the neurotic, that the mentally ill have succumbed
to a conflict from which we all suffer. When we speak of Freud, we
must remark upon the notorious ambiguity of his sentiments concerning
the mechanisms of sublimation, of the conversion of organic into social
energies. For, on the one hand, the biological processes from which our
social energies derive are, according to Freud, indifferent to spiritual
demands; on the other, the appropriation of these processes to any
spiritual task presupposes repression and makes enjoyment of the social
product difficult if not impossible. Nothing is more marked in Freud
than his commitment to science and to those civilized values of discipline
and order upon which the scientific enterprise rests; at the same time we
must trace a growing suspicion on his part that these values may be self-
defeating, that the preconditions of their accomplishment are such as to
require a qualification in our attachment to them. The aim of practical
analysis, as Freud eventually announced it in his New Introductory
Lectures, was not simply to transform what was hitherto brute psychic
energy into civilizing power (". . . so to extend the ego's organization
that it can take over new portions of the id"), but simultaneously to
relax our commitment to the need for this transformation ("to strength-
en the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its
field of vision . . ."). This return of Freud upon himself, this reawaken-

=== Page 143 ===
BOOKS 461

ing in a post-romantic context of the romantic notion that the psyche
has legitimate claims apart from the demands of civilization, imparts to
Freud's system the quality of adventure and distinguishes it from mere
abstract schematizing, from the sort of intellectual performance that is
finally a juggling of categories.
In Jung's system, on the contrary, the connection between spiritual-
ity and the theory of repression is severed; and with it the connection
between the existence of civilization and a universal propensity to mental
illness. In addition to impulses that may be finally incompatible with
the mature ego and so require repression, Jung identified another un-
conscious element, our relation to which is primary in determining the
incidence of neurosis. The difference between these two elements may
be illuminated by Jung's insistence that whereas the first group are di-
rected towards certain fixed objects and therefore become associated with
determine images and ideas, the second group resists such association.
Their medium of articulation, so to speak, is archetypal, not ideational—
that is, a play of pure form manifesting itself differently at every moment
of life, which is yet "determined," according to Jung, not because it
gravitates to certain objects or gives experience a characteristic shape,
but because it always and inevitably compensates for the limitations of
conscious attitudes: if the latter is extravert, it will be introvert; if con-

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=== Page 144 ===
462
ALVIN C. KIBEL
sciousness tends toward masculine and aggressive postures, the uncon-
scious will express a feminine and passive outlook, and so on. For Jung
this aspect of the unconscious is evidently a treasure-house of spiritual
energies to which consciousness may accommodate without irreparable
damage simply by liberalizing its character, forgoing a narrow preoccu-
pation with its immediate concerns. The life-task of the individual may
be said to lie in regularizing the passage of dispositions from this portion
of the unconscious to the conscious mind, tempering his eager pursuit of
ego-satisfactions by an awareness that the unconscious must be satisfied
too, that psychic health requires the free development of whatever facul-
ties are unused in conscious life simply to balance the self. It is tempting
to read into Jung an assertion that the immoral, the perverse, the un-
civilized and daemonic, are the normal, unconscious complements of a
civilized consciousness; but in fact Jung is saying nothing of the kind.
The unconscious, indeed, is a perfect source of liberal and humanitarian
sentiments, causing trouble only when the ego loses its suppleness and
becomes stern and uncompromising in the pursuit of its local aims. The
result is psychic imbalance, neurosis. "The unconscious itself," Jung has
written, "does not harbor explosive materials, but it may become ex-
plosive owing to the repressions exercised by a self-sufficient, or cowardly,
conscious attitude."

Jung's defection from the Freudian ranks, then, comes down to
this: Whereas for Freud the difference between the neurotic and the
normal was ineluctably one of "degree," Jung manages by a redefinition of
the term "unconscious," to argue for an absolute difference in kind. Like
many of the post-Freudians, Jung has insisted upon the cultural sources
of our inner conflicts only because he wishes to convince us that the fault
does not lie in the human condition itself, that all is well with our
metaphysical situation. In this light, Jung's acceptance by the literary
mind reveals an interesting irony: his regard for the informing power
of fantasy supports a qualitative distinction between health and neurosis,
between a natural spirituality and one that contravenes nature, that it
has been the tendency of our most compelling literary fantasies to deny.
Repeatedly in the literature of the last hundred and fifty years we are
moved to take a position outside civilization itself and to come to an
accommodation between its demands and those of the primordial psyche.
Those who would deny the possibility of finding such a position may do
so, of course, with every show of logic, but they will have to dismiss as
meaningless the kinds of speculation of which Freud's Civilization and
its Discontents is a sample-dismiss, too, the dynamics of Freud's term-
inology, which, whether we like it or not, articulates the only account of

=== Page 145 ===
BOOKS
463
man's psychic life adequate to the modern experience of it. I would
argue that Jung's "analytic psychology" succeeds with its adherents pre-
cisely because it effects such a dismissal: the terms of psychoanalysis, in
Jung's employment, lose their historical associations and settle down com-
fortably within the province of respectable humanitarian philosophy.
The voice of fantasy adopts once more the accents of reason, of a pru-
dential liberalism.
Alvin C. Kibel

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=== Page 151 ===
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=== Page 153 ===
CORRESPONDENCE

SIRS:

I simply cannot understand how
Miss Susan Sontag can say that the
thesis of my Metatheatre is "absolutely
right" and then go on to attack my
thesis so thoroughly that were she
even partly right, I, on every salient
issue, would be absolutely wrong.

I shall restate my thesis briefly:
tragedy, I claimed, is an impossible
form for the skeptical modern, to
whom all implacable values are false;
tragedy requires the support of implacable values. But, argues Miss Sontag:

What are the implacable values of
Homer? Honor, status, personal
courage-the values of an aristo-
cratic military class? But this is
not what the Iliad is about. Simone
Weil seems to me entirely right
when she argues that the Iliad-as
pure an example of the tragic vision
as one can find-is about the empti-
ness and arbitrariness of the world,
the ultimate meaninglessness of all
moral values, and the terrifying
rule of death and inhuman force.
. . Tragedy is a vision of nihilism,
a heroic or enobling vision of
nihilism.

Now if the judgments expressed by
Miss Sontag here are correct, then the
conception of tragedy set forth in my
book must be completely wrong. For
what point would there be in asserting
the difficulty of tragedy for the modern
dramatist if the tragic vision implied
nothing more than nihilism, a view
of the world as governed by inhuman
forces obdurate to moral feeling? Surely
this view is the view of any number
of modern writers, and I fail to under-
stand why they cannot produce tragedy
if meaninglessness is what tragedy is
about. Let us forget the moderns for
a moment. Why does Miss Sontag
agree with me that Shakespeare was
unable to write tragedy successfully-

and that his only true tragedy was
Macbeth-if to succeed in tragedy all
that is necessary by way of values is
a nihilistic view of life-however en-
nobled? Incidentally, what could such
a view be ennobled by? Certainly there
was plenty of nihilism in Shakespeare,
as Wyndham Lewis pointed out in
The Lion and the Fox. Why then, in
trying to write tragedy again and
again, did Shakespeare succeed only
once?

The fact is that Miss Sontag is
wrong both about Homer and about
Simone Weil's interpretation of Homer.
The Greek poet is not often purely
tragic. He is that, though, when he
can embrace in the same admiring
contemplation both Achilles, wrathful
against Hector, and Hector, against
whom Achilles' wrath is fatally ex-
ercised: Achilles is the most perfect
expression of implacability in all of
literature. Such is Homer's vision that,
despite our modern sensibilities, we are
able to participate in Achilles' wrath,
even as we sympathize with Hector's
lucid courage. Now, I should like to
see a work by some modern poet or
dramatist in which so implacable a
figure as Achilles is invested with
nobility. I can imagine, though, any
number of modern poets or dramatists
able to make Hector sympathetic-
Giraudoux did just that in La Guerre
de Troie N'Aura Pas Lieu. And surely
it is not because his vision was nihilistic
that Homer was able to make Achilles
sympathetic. The fact is that far from
being a work of nihilism, the Iliad was
practically the Bible of the Greeks,
and the basis of Greek religion. Nor
did Simone Weil ever call Homer a
nihilist. If anything, she overstressed
the moral order of the Homeric world.
For in her fine, sensitive, but I think
tendentious interpretation of the Iliad,
Simone Weil makes the world Homer
described much more moral than

=== Page 154 ===
472

Homer thought it was, or even could
have wanted it to be. Why, according
to Simone Weil, do the characters in
the Iliad suffer? Very simply, because
they overestimate their powers. This
they are tragically induced to do by
having achieved some success in a
prior struggle. Heartbreak, defeat, and
death in the Iliad follow from a sin
against measure. Now what has such
a conception of the world to do with
nihilism?

Miss Sontag, still arguing against
my thesis, writes: "The tragedy of
Oedipus is not caused by the fact that
he, or his audience, believed in im-
plicable values." Let us see. I assume
that Oedipus and the audience for
Sophocles' play believed in the gods;
and the gods in that play are presented
as bent on afflicting the people of
Thebes with plague because a single
crime has gone undetected: Oedipus's
accidental murder of his father, Laius.
What more would Miss Sontag like in
the way of implicability? Apparently,
though, she thinks Oedipus should not
have punished himself for his deed.
Why was he so implacable? The fact
is, though, that he was. This is a
difficulty for Miss Sontag, and her
way of meeting it is to confuse her
own, that is, modern viewpoint, with
the Greek view. Miss Sontag asserts
that Oedipus was innocent; but to the
Greeks, a man who killed another,
even by accident, was not innocent;
his crime, however inadvertent, called
for expiation. By the way, had Oedipus
in the first of Sophocles' plays about
him-not in the second play when
Oedipus has already paid, and in full,
for his deed-considered himself in-
nocent, he would not have exiled and
blinded himself. But then there would
have been no tragedy. Evidently, if
Sophocles had held the views of Miss
Sontag, he could not have written his
play. One does not have to like the

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=== Page 155 ===
CORRESPONDENCE
way the Greeks thought about life;
but why assert they thought as we do?
I also do not understand why Miss
Sontag is so opposed to the judgments
of Bertold Brecht and of his plays I
made in the two pieces devoted to him
in my book. Apparently Miss Sontag
is in agreement with the position I
took that the main form of serious
play in our time is what I have called
the metaplay; in fact, throughout her
review Miss Sontag refers to the meta-
play as if it were a dramatic form
whose existence and importance has
to be taken for granted. But Brecht is
perhaps the most important of recent
dramatists to have written serious plays.
What kind of plays did Brecht write?
According to Miss Sontag, Brecht wrote
"didactic plays." But didactic plays
would have to express some moral
message clear enough to be recogniz-
able. Now the testimony of most serious
critics of Brecht is that his plays are
morally ambiguous, and ambiguous in
the extreme. As a matter of fact, my
effort in the longer of the two pieces
I devoted to Brecht was to show some
clear content in his plays. Other critics
deny that there is any.

Miss Sontag remarks that there are
no more "sturdy exponents" of im-
placable values today than the Com-
munists. And Brecht was a Communist.
But I did not neglect to show that the
dramatist's one effort to express Com-
munist policy as an implacable value-
I am referring to his play The Measures
Taken-was put down. By whom?-
by the Communists. The fact is too
well known for Miss Sontag to have
ignored it; she should have tried to
explain it differently than I did.

Miss Sontag asserts that I spoiled
my analysis of Brecht's work by inter-
preting that work in terms of "callow
cold-war platitudes." Of such "callow
cold-war platitudes" Miss Sontag cites
only one: I asserted that Communists
473
are against the individual. This asser-
tion, says Miss Sontag, is nonsense.
But then apparently forgetting she
said this, Miss Sontag goes on to ex-
plain why the Communists are against
the individual. Her explanation is that
this is not due to Marxist theory-I
never said it was-but to the cultural
conditions of those countries in which
the Communists happen to be in power.
Now this surely is a false explanation
for the anti-individualism of the Com-
munists, and an explanation hardly fair
to the cultural traditions of Russia,
Poland, and Germany. But in any
case, even assuming it to be a good
explanation, one wonders about the
reason for explaining a fact when one
has just said that to point to that fact
is nonsense. Why explain what does
not exist?

It will be seen that Miss Sontag,
though very much for my ideas, is also
very much against them. And this has
puzzled me. Looking for an explana-
tion, I have come up with one which
makes some sense, at least to me. No
doubt Miss Sontag has read the very
fine essay on tragedy by Gabriel Marcel
in which the French philosopher makes
the point that tragedy introduces us
into a special order. This he designates
the order of "for and against." What
is this order and what has it to do with
tragedy? In tragedy, says Marcel, one
is forced to be against the hero to the
very degree and in the same sense
that one is for him. I think Marcel's
idea a valuable one; moreover, it is
perfectly consistent with the conception
of tragedy I developed in my book,
and it is of course very remote from
any such claptrap as that tragedy
springs from a nihilistic vision of a
world obdurate to moral values. In any
case, it struck me that Miss Sontag
in reviewing my book may have tried
to introduce into her review the very
tragic mechanism she argues for and

=== Page 156 ===
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against in her review. I suggest that
she has tried to be for my theory and
against it, and against it to the very
degree and in the same sense that she
is for it. The trouble is that you cannot
get a tragic experience into a book
review, not even when that review
happens to be about a book about
tragedy.
Lionel Abel

SIRS:
Mr. Abel is very distressed because,
although I praised his book lavishly
(rating it as of far greater interest
than any recent book in English on the
theatre) and concurred with his main
thesis, I still devoted a large part of
my review to points where I felt he
had overstated or misstated his case.
My experience of his book he deems
“tragic." I am tempted to say, in
return, that I find his experience of
my review comic.

According to Mr. Abel, where I
agree with him, I am right; where
I qualify or question his position I am
writing claptrap. This will surprise
no one, since Mr. Abel goes to the
rather curious lengths of stating in his
preface that he has written this book
because he believes what he says in
it to be true. He is correct in thinking
that I do not believe everything he
says in his book to be true.
The only proper answer to Mr.
Abel's letter and its truncated and
garbled version of some points I raised
in my review would be for me to
restate them again, whole. But since
anyone who cares to can read the
review, I will just note, briefly: I
did not say that "the tragic vision
implied nothing more than nihilism."
I don't see why his contention (surely
open to question) that Brecht is "the
most important of recent dramatists to
have written serious plays" means that
Brecht must be a meta-dramatist like

=== Page 158 ===
476

Pirandello, Genet, etc., because Mr.
Abel has discerned (and I agree with
him) that the typical modern form
of theatre is the metaplay. And I
stand by my criticism of Mr. Abel's talk
about tragedy "believing in" the in-
dividual and in "moral experience."
Mr. Abel is correct in denying the gift
of tragedy, with few exceptions, to all
cultures except the Greek. But as I
said in my review, the Greeks did not
enjoy the concept of individuality in
the modern sense. It is precisely the
metaplay which arises out of the con-
cern with individuality.
Susan Sontag

EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Peter Selz has
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piece on Pop Art in the last issue of
PR. His own title was "The Flaccid
Art."

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=== Page 160 ===
INDEX TO VOLUME XXX

NOTE TO SUBSCRIBERS: There has been a confusion in our numbering.
The Summer issue should have been Number 2, so the contents of the
Summer issue are indexed here under "2". This issue, which will be the
last for 1963, is number 3. Subscribers will receive all the issues to which
they are entitled. Their subscriptions will be advanced one issue.

Issue Page

ADAMS, ROBERT M.
(br) Raise High the Roof Beam, by J. D. Salinger;
The Second Stone, by Leslie A. Fiedler;
Another Country, by James Baldwin;
Young Crankshaw, by Cecil Hemley.............................................. 1 128

ABEL, LIONEL
(br) Naked Lunch. By William S. Burroughs.......................................... 1 109
The Aesthetics of Evil............................................................................. 2 211

BAZELON, DAVID T.
(br) On the Prevention of War. By John Strachey................................... 2 268

BELL, DANIEL
The Alphabet of Justice.......................................................................... 3 417

BEWLEY, MARIUS
(br) The End and the Beginning, by Robinson Jeffers;
Water Street, by James Merrill;...................................................................
Absent and Present, by Chester Kallman.................................................. 1 140
(br) Selected Poems, by Denis Devlin;......................................................
Stand Up, Friend, With Me, by Edward Field.......................................... 2 306

BRUSTEIN, ROBERT
Brecht Against Brecht............................................................................. 1 29

CARGILL, OSCAR
(br) The New Romantics: A Reappraisal of the New Criticism.
By Richard Foster.................................................................................... 1 138

COSER, LEWIS
(br) Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. By Richard Hofstadter........... 2 276

DICKSTEIN, MORRIS
(br) Nickel Miseries. By Ivan Gold............................................................. 2 289

DUPEE, F. W.
(br) Morte d'Urban. By J. F. Powers......................................................... 1 113

ELLISON, RALPH
It Always Breaks Out.............................................................................. 1 13

ELLMANN, RICHARD
Romantic Pantomime in Oscar Wilde.................................................... 3 342

=== Page 161 ===
479
Issue Page
EPSTEIN, JASON
(br) The Dyer's Hand. By W. H. Auden 2 281
FERRY, DAVID
Seen Through a Window (poem) 3 388
Several Voices (poem) 3 389
FIELD, ANDREW
(br) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. By Alexander Solzhenitsyn 2 297
FRIEDENBERG, DANIEL M.
(br) Castro's Revolution: Myths and Realities. By Theodore Draper 1 133
GOLL, IVAN
The Closing of the Waves 1 57
Lackawanna Mannahatta (poem) 1 58
GROSSMAN, ALLEN
The Recluse (poem) 2 206
HARRINGTON, MICHAEL
(br) The Paper Economy. By David T. Bazelon 2 285
HECHT, ANTHONY
Birdwatchers of America (poem) 1 59
HOWE, IRVING
Leon Trotsky: The Costs of History 3 356
JARRELL, RANDALL
Three Bills (poem) 3 387
KAEL, PAULINE
Movie Chronicle: Body and Soul 2 231
KERMODE, FRANK
The House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven English Novelists-
Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene, Angus Wilson, Ivy Compton-Burnett,
C. P. Snow, John Wain, Muriel Spark 1 61
KIBEL, ALVIN C.
(br) Memories, Dreams, Reflections. By C. G. Jung 3 453
KINNAIRD, JOHN
(br) William Hazlitt. By Herschel Baker 2 302
KUNITZ, STANLEY
The Mound-Builders (poem) 2 202
LABEDZ, LEOPOLD
The Soviet Chill 1 99
LARNER, JEREMY
V. By Thomas Pynchon 2 273
LESSING, DORIS
A Letter from Home 2 192
LICHTHEIM, GEORGE
Power and Ideology 2 241
The Future of Socialism 1 83

=== Page 162 ===
480
Issue Page
MARCUSE, HERBERT
(br) Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study. By George Lichtheim ... 2 300
MACINNES, COLIN
London Letter .................................................. 3 430
MATHEWSON, RUFUS
(br) People and Life. By Ilya Ehrenburg .................................. I 117
(br) A Precocious Autobiography. By Evgeny Evtushenko ............ 3 437
MILLER, JONATHAN
The Sick White Negro ............................................ I 149
MORAVIA, ALBERTO
Images of Africa ............................................... 3 390
ROETHKE, THEODORE
The Geranium (poem) ...................................... I 55
Otto (poem) ......................................................... I 56
SABA, UMBERTO
Woman (poem) ............................................... 2 204
SELZ, PETER
On Pop Art ...................................................... 2 313
SIMON, JOHN
(br) The Tin Drum. by Günter Grass ............................... 3 446
SONTAG, SUSAN
(br) Metatheatre. By Lionel Abel ...................................... I 122
(br) The Age of Suspicion. By Nathalie Sarraute ..................... 2 260
(br) Saint Genet. By Jean-Paul Sartre ................................. 3 441
SPENDER, STEPHEN
(br) The Fire Net Time. By James Baldwin ........................ 2 256
STERN, RICHARD
Teeth ..................................................................... 3 327
TRILLING, LIONEL
The Fate of Pleasure ................................................ 2 167
VIGEE, CLAUDE
Nothing Is Ever Lost (poem) ..................................... I 60
WRONG, DENNIS H.
(br) The Conservative Enemy, by C. A. R. Crosland; ................... 2 292
Power, Politics and People, by C. Wright Mills ........................

=== Page 163 ===
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