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PARTISAN REVIEW
Volume IX, No. 6 1942
November-December

© Trustees of Boston University

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PARTISAN REVIEW
VOLUME IX, No. 6 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER, 1942

THE MUSIC OF POETRY 450 T. S. Eliot

ELLEN TERHUNE 466 Edmund Wilson

POLITICAL NOTES 476 Dwight Macdonald

ON THE DECLINE OF NATURALISM 483 Philip Rahv

LONDON LETTER 494 George Orwell

POLICE SERGEANT MALONE AND THE SIX
DEAD DRINKERS 499 Horace Gregory

FILM CHRONICLE: THE EISENSTEIN
TRAGEDY 502 Dwight Macdonald

BOOKS
The Spiritual Underground 529 William Phillips
Poets, English and American 532 Clement Greenberg
Button, Button 537 Robert Penn Warren
Miss Rukeyser's Marine Poem 540 Weldon Kees
Portrait of an Historian 540 Melvin J. Lasky

LETTERS 543

Editors: CLEMENT GREENBERG, DWIGHT MACDONALD, GEORGE L. K.
MORRIS, WILLIAM PHILLIPS, PHILIP RAHV. Business Manager: NANCY
MACDONALD.

The articles in PARTISAN REVIEW, whether written by editors or contributors, represent
the point of view of the individual author, and not necessarily of the editors.

PARTISAN REVIEW is published at 45 Astor Place, New York, N. Y.

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opes. Copyright November, 1942, by PARTISAN REVIEW. Entered as second-class matter, January 20,
1940, at the post office at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879.

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The Music of Poetry
T. S. Eliot

I
DEBATED with myself for some time before electing, for this
occasion, to talk about the subject the nature of which is vaguely
indicated by my title. Circumstance and conscience conspire, in
these times, to direct our attention to matters of a wider scope
and perhaps of more general interest. It seems almost impertinent,
even as a man of letters, to concern oneself with a purely literary
subject: I find myself tempted to the opposite impertinence of
talking about matters beyond my range. Even within my own
field, there seem to be questions of greater urgency and relevance:
the place of literature in culture, the place of culture itself in
the society of the future, and all the educational problems implicit
in the cultivation of letters. There are many problems of literature
and the arts which lead towards political, sociological and religious
speculation; and the question which is in every mind the ques
tion of the condition of society after the war, of its limitations,
necessities and possibilities, of its inevitable or of its desirable
change this insistent question might suggest, as a more suitable
subject for a formal address on a distinguished foundation, some
discussion of the place of literature in a changing world.
If I have resisted this temptation, it is for two reasons, the
second of which supports the first. At a time when everyone is
interested in the phenomena of change, and when any reflexions
on these phenomena, whether analytical or constructive, may com
mand attention if only by stimulating controversy and eliciting
contradictory opinion, there is a particular need to consider, now
and then, problems which only seem unimportant, because they
are no more important now than they always have been and always
will be. The prime interest of a practitioner of verse like myself
must be in the immediate future; not that we regard the future
with either hope or fear, or are moved by either the aspiration

*The third W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture delivered in the University of Glasgow, February 24, 1942.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

450

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THE MUSIC OF POETRY 451
or despair of excelling dead masters, but simply because our first
concern is always the perennial question, what is to be done next?
what direction is unexplored? what is there to be done immediately
before us, which has not been done already, once and for all, as
well as it can be done? When absorbed in these investigations, the
poet is no more concerned with the social consequences than is
the scientist in his laboratory-though without the context of the
use to society, neither the writer nor the scientist could have the
conviction which sustains him. This concern with the future re-
quires a concern with the past also: for in order to know what
there is to be done we need a pretty accurate knowledge of what
has been done already; and this again leads to examination of
those principles and conditions which hold good always, to dis-
tinguish them from those which only held good for one or another
group of our predecessors.
If my subject is justifiable by its permanence, it is also the
more fitting on a foundation designed to perpetuate the memory
of W. P. Ker. I never met Ker: it is a cause of regret to me that
I missed the one opportunity offered me, which came only a few
weeks before his last journey to Switzerland. But I found myself
asking the question: what would Ker prefer me to talk about,
supposing that he could appraise my abilities and my limitations?
Not a subject requiring a parade of learning, certainly; for he
would be the first to detect, and the most qualified to denounce,
such an imposture. I can think of no other great scholar who
would have been more certain to perceive both the difference and
the relation between his area and mine, and to condemn any
trespass from one area to the other. He was a great scholar who
was also a great humanist, who was always aware that the end
of scholarship is understanding, and that this enjoyment is gusto disciplined
by taste. He was remarkable, not only for the comprehensiveness
and accuracy of his knowledge of mediaeval and modern European
literature, a knowledge with a firm basis of Latin and Greek,
but for his ability to enjoy the most diverse species of it, and
for the intuition, fortified by a great memory, which enabled
him to detect analogies or relationships which few other men,
even as learned as he, would have noticed. Each compartment
of his learning was at the disposal of every other: a line of

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modern verse could take him back to Iceland or Provence, or the
rhythm of a popular Spanish ballad could evoke half a dozen
modern comparisons. I recently read again the posthumous vol-
ume of lectures collected under the title of Form and Style in
Poetry-mostly lecture notes, but Ker always wrote, and must
have spoken, well. It is a book from which the poet, as much as
the scholar and the general reader, can profit. I think it is worth
while, before proceeding to conjectures of my own as to what
we mean, or ought to mean, or can mean, when we say that a
poem is musical or unmusical, to emphasize the difference be-
tween the approach of the scholar and that of the writer of verse.

The poet, when he talks or writes about poetry, has peculiar
qualifications and peculiar limitations: if we allow for the latter
we can better appreciate the former-a caution which I recom-
mend to poets themselves as well as to the readers of what they
say about poetry. I can never re-read any of my own prose writ-
ings without acute embarrassment: I shirk the task, and conse-
quently may not take account of all the assertions to which I have
at one time or another committed myself; I may often repeat what
I have said before, and I may equally well contradict myself.
But I believe that the critical writings of poets, of which in the
past there have been some very distinguished examples, owe a
great deal of their interest to the fact that at the back of the poet's
mind, if not as his ostensible purpose, he is always trying to de-
fend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind
that he wants to write. Especially when he is young, and actively
engaged in battling for the kind of poetry which he practises, he
sees the poetry of the past in relation to his own: and his gratitude
to those dead poets from whom he has learned, as well as as his
indifference to those whose aims have been alien to his own, may
be exaggerated. He is not so much a judge as an advocate. His
knowledge even is likely to be partial: for his studies will have
led him to concentrate on certain authors to the neglect of others.
When he theorizes about poetic creation, he is likely to be gen-
eralizing one type of experience; when he ventures into aesthetics,
he is likely to be less, rather than more competent than the philo-
sopher; and he may do best merely to report, for the information
of the philosopher, the data of his own introspection. What he
writes about poetry, in short, must be assessed in relation to the

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THE MUSIC OF POETRY
453

poetry he writes. We must return to the scholar for ascertainment
of facts, and to the more detached critic for impartial judgement.
The critic, certainly, should be something of a scholar, and the
scholar something of a critic. Ker, whose attention was devoted
mainly to the literature of the past, and to problems of historical
relationship, must be put in the category of scholars; but he had
in a high degree the sense of value, the humane taste, the under-
standing of critical canons and the ability to apply them, without
which the scholar's contribution can be only indirect.
There is another, more particular respect in which the
scholar's and the practitioner's acquaintance with versification dif-
fer. Here, perhaps, I should be prudent to speak only of myself.
I have never been able to retain the names of feet and metres, or to
pay the proper respect to the accepted rules of scansion. At
school, I enjoyed very much reciting Homer or Virgil-in my own
fashion. Perhaps I had some instinctive suspicion that nobody
really knew how Greek ought to be pronounced, or what inter-
weaving of Greek and native rhythms the Roman ear might appre-
ciate in Virgil; perhaps I had only an instinct of protective lazi-
ness. But certainly, when it came to applying rules of scansion to
English verse, with its very different stresses and variable syl-
labic values, I wanted to know why one line was good and another
bad; and this, scansion could not tell me. The only way to learn
of English verse seemed to be by assimila-
to manipulate any kind
tion and imitation, by becoming so engrossed in the work of a
particular poet that one could produce a recognisable derivative.
This is not to say that I consider the analytical study of metric,
which sound so extraordinarily different
of the abstract forms
when handled by different poets, to be an utter waste of time.
It is only that a study of anatomy will not teach you how to make
a hen lay eggs. I do not recommend any other way of beginning
the study of Greek or Latin verse than with the aid of those rules
of scansion which were established by grammarians after most of
the poetry had been written: but if we could revive those languages
sufficiently to be able to speak and hear them as the authors did,
we could regard the rules with indifference. We have to learn
a dead language by an artificial method, and we have to approach
its versification by an artificial method, and our methods of teach-
ing have to be applied to pupils most of whom have only a moder-

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ate gift for language. Even in approaching the poetry of our own
language, we may find the classification of metres, of lines with
different numbers of syllables and stresses in different places,
useful at a preliminary stage, as a simplified map of a compli-
cated territory: but it is only the study, not of poetry but of
poems, that can train our ear. It is not from rules, or by cold-
blooded imitation indeed, but by a deeper imitation that is achieved
by analysis of style. When we imitated Shelley, it was not so
much from a desire to write as he did, as from an invasion of the
adolescent self by Shelley, which made Shelley's way, for the
time, the only way in which to write.

The practice of English versification has, no doubt, been
affected by awareness of the rules of prosody: it is a matter for
the historical scholar to determine the influence of Latin upon
those great innovators Wyatt and Surrey. The great grammarian
Otto Jespersen has maintained that the structure of English gram-
mar has been misunderstood in our attempts to make it conform
to the categories of Latin—as in the supposed 'subjunctive'. In
the history of versification, the question whether poets have mis-
understood the rhythms of the language in imitating foreign
models does not arise: we must accept the practices of great poets
of the past, because they are practices upon which our ear has
been trained and must be trained. I believe that a number of
foreign influences have gone to enrich the range and variety of
English verse. Some classical scholars hold the view—this is a
matter beyond my competence—that the native measure of Latin
poetry was accentual rather than syllabic, that it was overlaid by
the influence of a very different language—Greek—and that it
reverted to something approximating to its early form, in poems
such as the Pervigilium Veneris and the Christian hymns. If so,
I cannot help suspecting that to the cultivated audience of the age
of Virgil, part of the pleasure in the poetry arose from the pres-
ence in it of two metrical schemes in a kind of counterpoint: even
though the audience may not necessarily have been able to analyse
the experience. Similarly, it may be possible that the beauty of
some English poetry is due to the presence of more than one
metrical structure in it. Deliberate attempts to devise English
metres on Latin models are usually very frigid. Among the most
successful are a few exercises by Campion, in his brief but too

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THE MUSIC OF POETRY 455

little read treatise on metrics; among the most eminent failures,
in my opinion, are the experiments of Robert Bridges-I would
give all his ingenious inventions for his earlier and more tra-
ditional lyrics. But when a poet has so thoroughly absorbed Latin
poetry that its movement informs his verse without deliberate
artifice-as with Milton and in some of Tennyson's poems-the
result can be among the great triumphs of English versification.
What I think we have, in English poetry, is a kind of amalgam
of systems of divers sources (though I do not like to use the word
'system', for it has a suggestion of conscious invention rather
than growth): an amalgam like the amalgam of races, and indeed
partly due to racial origins. The rhythms of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic,
Norman French, of Middle English and Scots, have all made their
mark upon English poetry, together with the rhythms of Latin,
and, at various periods, of French, Italian and Spanish. As with
human beings in a composite race, different strains may be dom-
inant in different individuals, even in members of the same family,
so one or another element in the poetic compound may be more
congenial to one or another poet or to one or another period. The
kind of poetry we get is determined, from time to time, by the
influence of one or another contemporary literature in a foreign
language; or by circumstances which make one period of our own
past more sympathetic than another; or by the prevailing emphases
in education. But there is one law of nature more powerful than
any of these varying currents, or influences from abroad or from
the past: the law that poetry must not stray too far from the
ordinary everyday language which we use and hear. Whether
poetry is accentual or syllabic, rhymed or rhymeless, formal or
free, it cannot afford to lose its contact with the changing language
of common intercourse.
It may appear strange, that when I profess to be talking
about the 'music' of poetry, I put such emphasis upon conversa-
tion. But I would remind you, first, that the music of poetry is
not something which exists apart from the meaning. Otherwise,
we could have poetry of great musical beauty which made no
sense, and I have never come across such poetry. The apparent
exceptions only show a difference of degree: there are poems in
which we are moved by the music and take the sense for granted,
just as there are poems in which we attend to the sense and are

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moved by the music without noticing it. Take an apparently ex-
treme example-the nonsense verse of Edward Lear. His non-
sense is not vacuity of sense: it is a parody of sense, and that is
the sense of it. The Jumblies is a poem of adventure, and of
nostalgia for the romance of foreign voyage and exploration; The
Yongy-Bongy-Bo and The Dong with a Luminous Nose are poems
of unrequited passion-'blues' in fact. We enjoy the music, which
is of a high order, and we enjoy the feeling of irresponsibility
towards the sense. Or take a poem of another type, the Blue Closet
of William Morris. It is a delightful poem, though I cannot
explain what it means and I doubt whether the author could have
explained it. It has an effect somewhat like that of a rune or
charm, but runes and charms are very practical formulae designed
to produce definite results, such as as getting a cow out of a bog. But
its obvious intention (and I think the author succeeds) is to pro-
duce the effect of a dream. It is not necessary, in order to enjoy
the poem, to know what the dream means; but human beings have
an unshakable belief that dreams mean something: they used to
believe-and many still believe-that dreams disclose the secrets
of the future; the orthodox modern faith is that they reveal the
secrets-or at least the more horrid ones-of the past. It is a
commonplace to observe that the meaning of a poem may wholly
escape paraphrase. It is not quite so commonplace to observe that
the meaning of a poem may be something larger than its author's
conscious purpose, and something remote from its origins. One
of the most obscure of modern poets was the French writer
Stephane Mallarmé, of whom the French sometimes say that his
language is so peculiar that it can be understood only by for-
eigners. The late Roger Fry, and his friend Charles Mauron,
published an English translation with notes to unriddle the mean-
ings: when I learn that a difficult sonnet was inspired by seeing
a painting on the ceiling reflected on the polished top of a table,
or by seeing the light reflected from the foam on a glass of beer,
I can only say that this may be a correct embryology, but it is
not the meaning. If we are moved by a poem, it has meant some-
thing, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved,
then it is, as poetry, meaningless. We can be deeply stirred by
hearing the recitation of a poem in a language of which we under-
stand no word; but if we are then told that the poem is gibberish

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THE MUSIC OF POETRY 457
and has no meaning, we shall consider that we have been deluded
—this was no poem, it was merely an imitation of instrumental
music. If, as we are aware, only a part of the meaning can be
conveyed by paraphrase, that is because the poet is occupied with
frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though mean-
ings still exist. A poem may appear to mean very different things
to different readers, and all of these meanings may be different
from what the author thought he meant. For instance, the author
may have been writing some peculiar personal experience, which
he saw quite unrelated to anything outside; yet for the reader the
poem may become the expression of a general situation, as well
as of some private experience of his own. The reader's interpre-
tation may differ from the author's and be equally valid—it may
even be better. There may be much more in a poem than the
author was aware of. The different interpretations may all be
partial formulations of one thing; the ambiguities may be due to
the fact that the poem means more, not less, than ordinary speech
can communicate.

So, while poetry attempts to convey something beyond what
can be conveyed in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one
person talking to another; and this is just as true if you sing it,
for singing is another way of talking. The immediacy of poetry
to conversation is not a matter on which we can lay down exact
laws. Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to
announce itself as, a return to common speech. That is the revo-
lution which Wordsworth announced in his prefaces, and he was
right; but the same revolution had been carried out a century
before by Oldham, Waller, Denham and Dryden; and the same
revolution was due again something over a century later. The
followers of a revolution develop the new poetic idiom in one
direction or another; they polish or perfect it; meanwhile the
spoken language goes on changing, and the poetic idiom goes out
of date. Perhaps we do not realise how natural the speech of
Dryden must have sounded to the most sensitive of his contem-
poraries. No poetry, of course, is ever exactly the same speech
that the poet talks and hears: but it has to be in such a relation
to the speech of his time that the listener or reader can say 'that
is how I should talk if I could talk poetry.' This is the reason
why the best contemporary can give us a feeling of excitement

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and a sense of fulfilment different from any sentiment aroused
by even very much greater poetry of a past age.

The music of poetry, then, must be a music latent in the
common speech of its time. And that means also that it must be
latent in the common speech of the poet's place. It would not be
to my present purpose to inveigh against the ubiquity of standard-
ised, or 'B.B.C.' English. If we all came to talk alike there would
no longer be any point in our not writing alike: but until that
time comes—and I hope it may be long postponed—it is the poet's
business to use the speech which he finds about him, that with
which he is most familiar. I shall always remember the impres-
sion of W. B. Yeats reading poetry aloud. To hear him read his
own works was to be made to recognise how much the Irish way
of speech is needed to bring out the beauties of Irish poetry: to
hear Yeats reading William Blake was an experience of a dif-
ferent kind, more astonishing than satisfying. Of course, we do
not want the poet merely to reproduce exactly the conversational
idiom of himself, his family, his friends and his particular dis-
trict: but what he finds there is the material out of which he
must make his poetry. He must, like the sculptor, be faithful to
the material in which he works; it is out of sounds that he has
heard that he must make his melody and harmony.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all poetry
ought to be melodious, or that melody is more than one of the
components of the music of words. Some poetry is meant to be
sung; most poetry, in modern times, is meant to be spoken—and
there are many other things to be spoken of besides the murmur
of innumerable bees or the moan of doves in immemorial elms.
Dissonance, even cacophany, has its place: just as, in a poem of
any length, there must be transitions between passages of greater
and less intensity, to give rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential
to the musical structure of the whole; and the passages of less
intensity will be, in relation to the level on which the total poem
operates, prosaic—so that, in the sense implied by that context,
it may be said that no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless
he is a master of the prosaic.'

'This is the complementary doctrine to that of the 'touchstone' line or passage
of Matthew Arnold: this test of the greatness of a poet is the way he writes his
less intense, but structurally vital, matter.

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THE MUSIC OF POETRY 459

What matters, in short, is the whole poem: and if the whole
poem need not be, and often should not be, wholly melodious, it
follows that a poem is not made only out of 'beautiful words.' I
doubt whether, from the point of view of sound alone, any word
is more or less beautiful than another within its own language,
for the question whether some languages are not more beautiful
than others is quite another question. The ugly words are the
words not fitted for the company in which they find themselves;
there are words which are ugly because of rawness or because of
antiquation; there are words which are ugly because of foreign-
ness or ill-breeding (e.g. television): but I do not believe that
any word well-established in its own language is either beautiful
or ugly. The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of inter-
section: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately
preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its con-
text; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning
in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other
contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association. Not all words,
obviously, are equally rich and well-connected: it is part of the
business of the poet to dispose the richer among the poorer, at the
right points, and we cannot afford to load a poem too heavily with
the former for it is only at certain moments that a word can be
made to insinuate the whole history of a language and a civilisa-
tion. This is an 'allusiveness' which is not the fashion or eccen-
tricity of a peculiar type of poetry; but an allusiveness which is
in the nature of words, and which is equally the concern of every
kind of poet. My purpose here is to insist that a 'musical poem'
is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical
pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it,
and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one. And if you
object that it is only the pure sound, apart from the sense, to which
the adjective 'musical' can be rightly applied, I can only reaffirm
my previous assertion that the sound of a poem is as much an
abstraction from the poem as is the sense.

The history of blank verse illustrates two interesting and
related points: the dependence upon speech and the striking dif-
ference, in what is prosodically the same form, between dramatic
blank verse and blank verse employed for epical, philosophical,
meditative and idyllic purposes. The dependence of verse upon

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speech is much more direct in dramatic poetry than in any other.
In most kinds of poetry, the necessity for its reminding us of
contemporary speech is reduced by the latitude allowed for per-
sonal idiosyncrasy: a poem by Gerard Hopkins, for instance, may
sound pretty remote from the way in which you and I express our-
selves—or rather, from the way in which our fathers and grand-
fathers expressed themselves: but Hopkins does give the impres-
sion that his poetry has the necessary fidelity to his way of
thinking and talking to himself. But in dramatic verse the poet
is speaking in one character after another, through the medium
of a company of actors trained by a producer, and of different
actors and different producers at different times: his idiom must
be comprehensive of all the voices, but present at a deeper level
than is necessary when the poet speaks only for himself. Some of
Shakespeare's later verse is very elaborate and peculiar: but it
remains the language, not of one person, but of a world of persons.
It is based upon the speech of three hundred years ago, yet when
we hear it well rendered we can forget the distance of time—as
is brought home to us most patently in one of those plays, of which
Hamlet is the chief, which can fittingly be produced in modern

dress. By the time of Otway dramatic blank verse has become
artificial and at best reminiscent; and when we get to the verse
plays by nineteenth century poets, of which the greatest is prob-
ably The Cenci, it is difficult to preserve any illusion of reality.
Nearly all the greater poets of the last century tried their hands
at verse plays. These plays, which few people read more than
once, are treated with respect as fine poetry; and their insipidity
is usually attributed to the fact that the authors, though great
poets, were amateurs in the theatre. But even if the poets had had
greater natural gifts for the theatre, or had toiled to acquire the
craft, their plays would have been just as ineffective, unless their
theatrical talent and experience had shown them the necessity for
a different kind of versification. It is not primarily lack of plot,
or lack of action and suspense, or imperfect realization of charac-
ter, or lack of anything of what is called 'theatre,' that makes
these plays so lifeless: it is primarily that their rhythm of speech
is something that we cannot associate with any human being except
a poetry reciter.

Even under the powerful manipulation of Dryden dramatic

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blank verse shows a grave deterioration. There are splendid pas-
sages in All for Love; yet Dryden's characters talk more naturally
at times in the heroic plays which he wrote in rhymed couplets,
than they do in what would seem the more natural form of blank
verse-though less naturally in English than the characters of
Corneille and Racine in French. The causes for the rise and de-
cline of any form of art are always complex, and we can always
trace a number of contributory causes, while there seems to re-
main some deeper cause incapable of formulation: I should not
care to advance any one reason why prose came to supersede verse
in the theatre. But I feel sure that one reason why blank verse
cannot be employed now in the drama is that so much non-dramatic
poetry, and great non-dramatic poetry, has been written in it in
the last three hundred years. Our minds are saturated in these
non-dramatic works in what is formally the same kind of verse.
If we can imagine, as a flight of fancy, Milton coming before
Shakespeare, Shakespeare would have had to discover quite a
different medium from that which he used and perfected. Milton
handled blank verse in a way which no one has ever approached
or ever will approach: and in so doing did more than anyone or
anything else to make it impossible for the drama: though we
may also believe that dramatic blank verse had exhausted its
resources, and had no future in any event. Indeed, Milton almost
made blank verse impossible for any purpose for a couple of
generations. It was the precursors of Wordsworth - Thomson,
Young, Cowper-who made the first efforts to rescue it from the
degradation to which the eighteenth-century imitators of Milton
had reduced it. There is much, and varied, fine blank verse in
the nineteenth century: the nearest to colloquial speech is that
of Browning-but, significantly, in his monologues rather than
in his plays.

To make a generalization like this is not to imply any judge-
ment of the relative stature of poets. It merely calls attention to
the profound difference between dramatic and all other kinds of
verse: a difference in the music, which is a difference in the
relation to the current spoken language. It leads to my next point:
which is that the task of the poet will differ, not only according
to his personal constitution, but according to the period in which
he finds himself. At some periods, the task is to explore the

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musical possibilities of an established convention of the relation
of the idiom of verse to that of speech; at other periods, the task
is to catch up with the changes in colloquial speech, which are
fundamentally changes in thought and sensibility. This cyclical
movement also has a very great influence upon our critical judge-
ment. At a time like ours, when a refreshment of poetic diction
similar to that brought about by Wordsworth has been called for
(whether it has been satisfactorily accomplished or not) we are
inclined, in our judgements upon the past, to exaggerate the im-
portance of the innovators at the expense of the reputation of the
developers: which might account for what will seem, surely, to
a later age, our undue adulation of Donne and depreciation of
Milton.

I have said enough, I think, to make clear that I do not believe
that the task of the poet is primarily and always to effect a revo-
lution in language. It would not be desirable, even if it were
possible, to live in a state of perpetual revolution: the craving
for continual novelty of diction and metric is as unwholesome as
the obstinate adherence to the idiom of our grandfathers. There
are times for exploration and times for the development of the
territory acquired. The poet who did most for the English language
is Shakespeare: and he carried out, in one short lifetime, the
task of two poets. I have attempted to indicate his dual achieve-
ment elsewhere: I can only say here, briefly, that the development
of Shakespeare's verse can be roughly divided into two periods.
During the first, he was slowly adapting his form to colloquial
speech: so that by the time he wrote Antony and Cleopatra he
had devised a medium in which everything that any dramatic
character might have to say, whether high or low, 'poetical' or
'prosaic,' could be said with naturalness and beauty. Having got
to this point, he began to elaborate. The first period of the poet
who began with Venus and Adonis, but who had already, in Love's
Labour's Lost, begun to see what he had to do is from artificiality
to simplicity, from stiffness to suppleness. The later plays move
from simplicity towards elaboration. He is occupied with the
other task of the poet doing the work of two poets in one lifetime
—that of experimenting to see how elaborate, how complicated,
the music could be made without losing touch with colloquial
speech altogether, and without his characters ceasing to be human

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THE MUSIC OF POETRY 463
beings. This is the poet of Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, Pericles,
and The Tempest. Of those whose exploration took them in this
one direction only, Milton is the greatest master. We may think
that Milton, in exploring the orchestral music of language, some-
times ceases to talk a social idiom at all; we may think that
Wordsworth, in attempting to recover the social idiom, sometimes
oversteps the mark and becomes pedestrian: but it is often true
that only by going too far can we find out how far we can go;
though one has to be a very great poet to justify such perilous
adventures.
So far, I have spoken only of versification and not of poetic
structure; and it is time for a reminder that the music of verse
is not a line by line matter, but a question of the whole poem.
Only with this in mind can we approach the vexed question of
formal pattern and free verse. In the plays of Shakespeare a
musical design can be discovered in particular scenes, and in his
more perfect plays as wholes. It is a music of imagery as well as
sound: Mr. Wilson Knight has shown in his examination of several
of the plays, how much the use of recurrent imagery, and dom-
inant imagery, throughout one play, has to do with the total effect.
A play of Shakespeare is a very complex musical structure; the
more easily grasped structure is that of forms such as the sonnet,
the formal ode, the ballade, the villanelle, rondeau or sestina.
It is sometimes assumed that modern poetry has done away with
forms like these. I have seen signs of a return to them; and indeed
I believe that the tendency to return to set, and even elaborate
patterns is permanent, as permanent as the need for a refrain or
a chorus to a popular song. Some forms are more appropriate
to some languages than to others, and all are more appropriate
to some periods than to others. At one stage the stanza is a right
and natural formalization of speech into pattern. But the stanza
-and the more elaborate it is, the more rules to be observed in
its proper execution, the more surely this happens-tends to
become fixed to the idiom of the moment of its perfection. It
quickly loses contact with the changing colloquial speech, being
possessed by the mental outlook of a past generation; it becomes
discredited when employed solely by those writers who, having
no impulse to form within them, have recourse to pouring their
liquid sentiment into a ready-made mould in which they vainly

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464 PARTISAN REVIEW

hope that it will set. In a perfect sonnet, what you admire is not
so much the author's skill in adapting himself to the pattern as
the skill and power with which he makes the pattern comply with
what he has to say. Without this fitness, which is contingent upon
period as well as individual genius, the rest is at best virtuosity:
and where the musical element is the only element, that also
vanishes. Elaborate forms return: but there have to be periods
during which they are laid aside.

As for 'free verse,' I expressed my view twenty-five years ago
by saying that no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good
job. No one has better cause to know than I, that a great deal of
bad prose has been written under the name of free verse: though
whether its authors wrote bad prose or bad verse, or bad verse in
one style or in another, seems to me a matter of indifference. But
only a bad poet could welcome free verse as a liberation from
form. It was a revolt against dead form, and a preparation for
new form or for renewal of the old; it was an insistence upon
the inner unity which is unique to every poem, against the outer
unity which is typical. The poem comes before the form, in the
sense that a form grows out of of the attempt of somebody to say
something; just as a system of prosody is only a formulation of
the identities in the rhythms of a succession of poets influenced
by each other.

Forms have to be broken and remade: but I believe that any
language, so long as it remains the same language, imposes its
laws and restrictions and permits its own license, dictates its own
speech rhythms and sound patterns. And a language is always
changing; its developments in vocabulary, in syntax, pronuncia-
tion and intonation-even, in the long run, its deterioration-
must be accepted by the poet and made the best of. He in turn
has the privilege of contributing to the development and main-
taining the quality, the capacity of the language to express a wide
range, and subtle gradation, of feeling and emotion; his task is
both to respond to change and make it conscious, and to battle
against degradation below the standards which he has learnt from
the past. The liberties that he may take are for the sake of order.

At what stage contemporary verse now finds itself, I must
leave you to judge for yourselves. I suppose that it will be agreed
that if the work of the last twenty years is worthy of being classi-

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THE MUSIC OF POETRY 465
fied at all, it is as belonging to a period of search for a proper
modern colloquial idiom. We have still a good way to go in the
invention of a verse medium for the theatre; a medium in which
we shall be able to hear the speech of contemporary human beings,
in which dramatic characters can express the purest poetry without
high-falutin and in which they can convey the most commonplace
message without absurdity. But when we reach a point at which
the poetic idiom can be stabilised, then a period of musical elabo-
ration can follow. I think that a poet may gain much from the
study of music: how much technical knowledge of musical form
is desirable I do not know, for I have not that technical knowledge
myself. But I believe that the properties in which music concerns
the poet most nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of
structure. I think that it might be possible for a poet to work too
closely to musical analogies: the result might be an effect of
artificiality; but I know that a poem, or a passage of a poem,
may tend to realise itself first as a particular rhythm before it
reaches expression in words, and that this rhythm may bring to
birth the idea and the image; and I do not believe that this is an
experience peculiar to myself. The use of recurrent themes is
as natural to poetry as to music. There are possibilities for verse
which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by differ-
ent groups of instruments; there are possibilities of transitions
in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony
or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement
of subject-matter. It is in the concert room, rather than in the
opera house, that the germ of a poem may be quickened. More
than this I cannot say, but must leave the matter here to those
who have had a musical education. But I would remind you again
of the two tasks of poetry, the two directions in which language
must at different times be worked: so that however far it may
go in musical elaboration, we must expect a time to come when
poetry will have again to be recalled to speech. The same prob-
lems arise, and always in new forms; and poetry has always before
it, as F. S. Oliver said of politics, an 'endless adventure.'

=== Page 19 ===
Ellen Terhune

Edmund Wilson

I

I
ALWAYS FELT, when I went to the Terhune house, that I was get-
ting back into the past—or rather, perhaps, that an atmosphere
which had first been established at the beginning of the eighties,
when the house in which she lived had been built, had been pre-
served there as a vital medium down into the nineteen twenties.
Most of the places in Hecate County seemed either newer or older
—modern households or old-fashioned farms; but the moment I
entered the gate in the high green picket-fence, which was matted
with honeysuckle in summer, and caught sight of the white obelisk
of the windmill, dismantled though it was of its sails, towering
behind the trees, I felt that I had come back into something which
had definitely vanished with the War but which was perfectly
familiar from my childhood.
There was a drive, always covered with gravel, that swept
around in a beautiful curve and brought you up under a big porte-
cochère, which reminded you of horses with fly-nets, and shiny and
black closed carriages; and the house, which was yellow and cov-
ered with shingles that overlapped with rounded ends like scales,
was an impressive though rather formless mass of cupolas with
fool's-cap tops, dormers with diamond panes, balconies with little
white railings, and porches with Ionian columns, all pointing in
different directions. It had been built or bought by Ellen Terhune's
grandfather, a brilliant and highly successful doctor. Dr. Bristead,
even in that period when doctors were more "humanistic" and had
wider interests than now, had been a man of remarkable cultiva-
tion, and the house was richly lined with the evidences of his pas-
times, his studies and his travels. One saw, among many other
things in the downstairs rooms, signed photographs of or framed
letters from Theodore Roosevelt, Kipling, Pierre Loti, Mark
Twain, Adelina Patti, Paderewski, Mechnikov and Pasteur, all of
whom had been patients or correspondents of his; a statue of Hebe

466

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ELLEN TERHUNE
467
by Canova, a couple of Corots and a Sisley; a hookah, which Ellen
told me he had sometimes used to smoke; a group of Chinese
gongs, with which dinner was still announced; a regal set of carved
ivory chessmen, brought back from a trip to the Orient, which had
elephants instead of bishops; an Australian bushman's boom-
erang; a Stradivarius and an eighteenth-century clavichord.
The Bristeads had been especially musical. The doctor had
mastered several instruments; and he had organized a family trio
in which he had played the cello, his daughter the violin and Mrs.
Bristead the piano. Later, when the doctor's wife had died and his
daughter had come with Ellen to live with them, they had had the
trio again, with Ellen, at the age of twelve, taking over the cello.
When her mother had died a few years later and she was living
there alone with her grandfather, they had played an immense
amount of music; they had gone right through Beethoven and
Brahms, whom her grandfather had ended by detesting; had then
escaped backward into the eighteenth century, with Ellen's learning
Boccherini's cello sonatas and the doctor's getting special transcrip-
tions made of Pergolesi's trios for violins and bass; and had from
there, in obedience to one of Dr. Bristead's peculiarly indomitable
manias, gone right back through the history of music. Ellen had
been obliged to retrace the elegance and restraint of Corelli at an
age when she told me she would very much rather have been pound-
ing Schubert and Schumann on the piano; and the doctor had had
a small organ installed and relentlessly insisted on their decipher-
ing the intricate masses of Palestrina, thence exploring mediæval
motets, troubadour songs and Gregorian chants, and, finally experi-
menting with ancient Greek modes.
Ellen had thus had the advantage of an exceptional musical
training, and she had begun to compose early. By the time she got
out of the Conservatoire, where she had started in at eighteen, she
was producing work of real merit. She had been influenced in
Paris by Debussy; but, working with the whole-tone scale, she had
developed an impressionism distinctly her own. She was, in fact,
probably the first woman composer who had ever contributed to
music anything of authentic value. It is strange that, though women
have excelled as novelists and lyric poets, and though there are a
few women painters of interest, there should be no important
music by women. That is, unless Ellen Terhune is an exception,

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468 PARTISAN REVIEW

and I have always thought her work first-rate, though it somehow
seems incommensurable with masculine work of even the same
school. It would be foolish to compare her with Chaminade, with
whom she has nothing in common; but, on the other hand, even
Ravel and Debussy were builders on a bigger scale than Ellen. Her
talent in the best of her work, her songs and piano pieces, is as
personal as Georgia O'Keefe's pictures or Marianne Moore's
poems: a woman's sharp and ready reactions to people and things
encountered and a woman's emotions of quick challenge, of a kind
of dark resigned despair or of a clear and rapt exaltation.

I called on Ellen one afternoon in the summer of 1926. It
was August and I had assumed she was in Maine, where she usually
went at that time of year; but I ran into her one day at the post
office and she asked me to come to see her. I was delighted, because
I always liked to talk to her-her comment on the musical world
was wonderful-and, though some considered her arrogant and
forbidding, I found her personality sympathetic. It would be espe-
cially a relief to get away from the Hecate County summer life,
which had involved a great many parties with people who were only
made tolerable by summer sports and drinking. I went to see her
that same afternoon.

But I found her much disturbed and distressed. She had
three highballs in rapid succession, which I had never known her
to do before, and which made me a little disappointed, as it asso-
ciated her to my mind with the summer people, great publishers of
their emotions over drinks, so that her house seemed less the haven
I had hoped for.

It turned out that Ellen like everyone else was going through
a domestic crisis. She had married a man somewhat younger than
herself, the conductor Sigismund Soblianski. He had genuinely
admired her abilities, had done more perhaps than anyone else to
have her work performed; and he had profoundly respected her
character as only the matriarchal Jew can respect the austerity of a
woman who is set firmly on her own moral base; but the fact that
she was also an artist-she had married too late to have children,
which might have done something to fuse them-had stimulated a
fatal competition. Sigismund, before he married, had worked
rather seriously at composing, but Ellen was so much better than
he was, that he must have become ashamed of his productions, for

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ELLEN TERHUNE
469
he ceased to write anything at all. Instead, he had begun to develop
a hair-raising professional exhibitionism. A brilliant and resource-
ful musician with a special gift for dramatizing effects, he had
gradually come to abandon the playing of new or native music,
which, partly at the instance of Ellen, he had originally attempted
to encourage, and to go in for great quantities of Chaikovsky and
Strauss, Sibelius, Beethoven and Wagner, overcoloring and over-
acting, and posing to a public who adored him while the serious
magicians gave him up.

It was a long time, however, since Ellen and he had seemed
to be living together-though I did still run into him sometimes
in the country. He had always had his rehearsals in town and
Ellen did not like the city; and he had had during the last two or
three years a whole series of love affairs which everybody knew
about and which Ellen appeared to accept. He had even adopted
the practice of bringing out his protegée of the moment-serious-
minded little Russian dancer or black-eyed Hungarian violinist-
to spend the day with Ellen; but this, though she took it coolly, I
am sure Ellen did not like. The truth was, I always thought, that
they were still much involved with one another, and that Sigismund
did such things in a kind of defiance of Ellen for making him
feel second-rate.

But he now, she told me, wanted a divorce: he wanted to get
married again. And I could see that Ellen was profoundly upset-
though she ascribed her reluctance to the fear that he was making
a fool of himself. The woman that he proposed to marry was a
much and long publicized actress, and Ellen was inclined to believe
that Sigismund's interest in her was merely a part of his own self-
publicizing. Frances Fielding was one of those figures who took
the place, during the twenties and thirties, of the old-fashioned
male matinée idol. She was adored by a following mainly femi-
nine, and she was supposed not to care much about men. But in
her pictures and plays she was invariably subdued, at the end of
much high-spirited rebellion, by a stubborn and combative lover;
and it was obvious that there would be for the public a wonderful
double story about Frances' at last meeting her fate at the same
time that Sigismund Soblianski had found a creature as dashing
as himself. It was particularly disturbing to Ellen, who had tole-
rated the little protegées, because she herself was the type of the

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470 PARTISAN REVIEW

independent "career women" of an earlier generation and was in
some sense losing to a competitor.
"I always thought she was hard as nails," she said, "but she
does have a certain-shall I say, style and brilliance?—I can't
bear to call it glamor. They're both what the Russians call 'fire-
birds,' I suppose-they like to show their plumage in an atmos-
phere of bright lights and admiration. They're only able really
to express themselves by creating for themselves characters that
are two-thirds fictitious. And I don't shine in that way. I'm natu-
rally quiet and drab. I can't bear to go to night-clubs and places,
and I long ago ceased to enjoy staying up all night over musical
suppers where people get intoxicated and take off Chaliapin and
play Viennese waltzes. I'd rather be home in bed reading. I don't
like to travel the way Sigismund does, and I hate triumphant tours.
I'd rather stay right here with my house and my piano and my
furniture and my settled habits. Sigismund is younger than I am
and he's temperamentally quite different. I suppose I was always
a wet blanket on him, and I can't blame him if he wants somebody
gayer. Only I'd like him to have somebody who would be good for
him. I can't imagine she really cares about him. I'm afraid he'll
end up in Hollywood."
She was, of course, not really drab, but there was something
in her that didn't give. As I looked around the room, I reflected
that, though Sigismund had spent much of his time here during
the early years of their marriage, though the house had been sup-
posed to be their house, he had left little or no imprint upon it.
Dr. Bristead and his daughter and Ellen-both Ellen and her
mother were only children-had assembled the things in that room.
The low couch on which I was sitting was comfortable but there
was something rather stale about it. It had been ministering for
too many years to the comfort of too much the same people; the
upholstery and the cushions had become almost as personal as a
bed, and the pattern of flowers was faded. The effect of the whole
room, in fact, seemed somehow a little tinged by the yellow of
the discoloring photographs; and, though there were peonies, white
and crimson, and gladiolas, orange-pink, and beautiful old cali-
nets and tip-top tables, the room had never quite been purged of
the bad taste of preceding generations; and the delicate crepuscular
Corots were thrown into further shadow by larger canvasses, also

=== Page 24 ===
ELLEN TERHUNE
471
French, of picturesque Moorish scenes that made patches of rather
messy color. Still there was something about it I liked, and I was
glad it had remained the same.
And now Ellen was telling me about her girlhood. She had
been terribly homely, she said, and she had always had an awful
time at dances: she always knew that if a boy asked her to dance,
it was only because his mother had made him. "I was a sight," she
said. "I had crooked teeth and my head was too big for my body.
Even Mother was discouraged about me." She was certainly not
bad-looking now and she could never have been so homely as she
imagined; but she was short and did have rather a large square
head on a neck that was a little too small for it-physically, she
resembled the doctor-and I could see that, with her precocious
intelligence, she might not have been a belle at dances. But her
magnificent agate-green eyes must at any age have been arresting:
they seemed to concentrate the light of the intellect as a powerful
lens does the sun, and in this intellectual character they suggested
the eyes of a remarkable man; yet they were also extremely femi
nine and responded to everything that met them as the eyes of men
seldom do. The rest of Ellen's face was neither so striking nor so
mobile: her mouth was small and her nose a little owl-like, and her
face with its square jawbones was too broad for them. But the
effect of her eyes was mesmeric.
She involved you in her concentration, and as she went on
describing her childhood, I was forced to see it all as she did. Her
parents should never have married, she said-though I tried to
point out that it was silly to imply that she should never have
existed. They had never had anything in common. Her father,
before his marriage, had been a man about town and a sportsman
-she showed me a photograph with a handsome mustache, hair
amiably parted in the middle, and some kind of small chrysanthe
mum in the buttonhole. He had done a great deal of drinking, and
they had belonged, in the first years of their marriage, to a rich
and rather fast set. He had had no intellectual or artistic tastes,
and for her mother, brought up by Dr. Bristead, this life must have
been deeply uncongenial, even, she thought, disgusting. Ellen's
father, a Wall Street man with a seat on the Stock Exchange, had
been ruined, the year before Ellen was born, by the crash of 1884;
and after that he had always done badly. They had gone to live

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PARTISAN REVIEW
with Ellen's grandfather, and her father was always in town. Some
times he was brought home in very bad shape-which she grad
ually learned was due to drinking-and had to stay in bed for
weeks. He had killed himself when Ellen was eleven in a cheap
little New York hotel of which he had been ashamed to let her
mother know the address.
Those tragedies of the turn of the century! I thought; it was
one thing to die or be broken for a political ideal or a social order
as had happened to both Southerners and Northerners in the years
of the Civil War; but to die, to be crushed, to be shattered, through
the overpowering progress of big business, through the unre
strained greed of speculation, seemed hard on those men and
women whom we remember as gentle and bright and who look at us,
in such photographs as those which Ellen produced from a drawer,
with the American friendliness and candor.
She could hardly remember anything amiable in the relations
between her father and mother. Her mother had studied violin and
had wanted a professional career; her marrying Ellen's father had
put an end to this, and she had never forgiven him for it. She
would complain that she had given up her music and then been left
without resources for the social life in which he had involved her.
"She might have had," said Ellen, "a quite different life. Techni
cally, she was very good. I don't think she was meant for mar
riage." They had used to have long dreadful controlled quarrels,
which Ellen would sometimes overhear: her mother's cold voice
would go on and on, pretending to appeal to him in a reasonable
way-What was she to think? What was she to expect? when he
didn't keep his promises or use ordinary judgment, etc. He would
be sorry, try to reassure her about his conduct and prospects for
the future. It was heartbreaking, Ellen said: though not at all
intellectual, he had really been a lovable man, and he had a sort
of distinction of feeling quite different from her mother's emphatic
dignity. After he had lost his money, he would never borrow from
friends-though there were plenty who would have been glad to
help him. But he had never had to work before, and he had never
in his career as a ladies' man been up against anyone like Ellen's
mother. "It must have been wretched beyond words," she said.
"You say that I ought to be glad I came out of it-but, even assum
ing that I'm worth anything, how does that make it better for

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ELLEN TERHUNE
473
Mother and Father, who died without getting what they wanted
themselves when I was still an ugly little girl?"
"They must have been happier than you think," I said. "All
married people have those conversations, and then they go to bed
and forget it."-"There was something about Mother that chilled
people," she went on, disregarding my attempt to be helpful and
forcing me to follow her vision of the unrelieved hopelessness of
her parents' situation.-"She was sensitive on her musical side, but
I suppose what she presented to Father was a surface of solid
whalebone. And I do the same thing! I know it. I chill people
and put them in the wrong. That's what I did with Sigismund. He
always said I made him feel guilty. But it's really because I
always feel guilty. Mother made me feel guilty, too. I feel that
I oughtn't to make claims on people, that I oughtn't to expect them
to care about me. I behave as if I took this for granted, and then
I reproach them for neglecting me. I know myself very well!"
"You can't still think you're not goodlooking," I said. "It
isn't merely a question of that: Mother had a special and distress-
ing reason for not liking the way I looked. It seems Mother had a
terribly bad time when I was born on account of my head's being
so big, and I don't think she ever really recovered from it. I sup-
pose it was really what she died of. She used to talk about it some-
times in my presence. She may have thought I didn't understand,
but she must have wanted people to pity her for having produced
such a little monstrosity, and I think she also wanted me to feel
that she had suffered and sacrificed herself for me." She was casual
enough in tone; she was not herself laying it on; but, under the
compulsion of her serious eyes, I felt the pain of the situation
penetrate me and pin me to the spot. "I imagine, though, that she
didn't exaggerate," she relentlessly and steadily went on. "I'm
not sure I can't remember it myself. I've been subject all my life
to peculiar spells where I think that I can't move or do anything.-
I get it when I'm nervously exhausted," she explained in reply to
my question, "and sometimes in my sleep. It's a perfectly horrible
feeling-it's a kind of overpowering inertia that seems all to be
located in my head-it's as if I were weighed down by a millstone,
as if my head were a great stone ball. I suppose, though, that it's
only an intensified form of a tendency I have all the time-I'm
really a very inert person. I think my difficulties in getting born

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474 PARTISAN REVIEW

may have made it more difficult for me to live. I hate so to move
or make serious changes. That's one reason I'm so tiresome for
Sigismund." "I've always thought of you, Ellen," I said, "as a
very dynamic person." "Some of the most dynamic people," she
insisted, "can't move at all, you know. They try to make up by a lot
of loud talking and rushing around from place to place for their
fear that they're really static." "You don't do that," I assured her.
"No: I sit like a fire hydrant—that can always be tapped for cold
water.—I've been trying to face my immobility lately and to do
something with it in music. I've always been a little bit scared by
these states that I was telling you about, and I thought it might be
a good thing to take hold of them and deliberately exploit them—
to try to put them outside myself."
I was afraid that she had been suffering from them lately:
there were circles about her eyes, and her face, even for her,
seemed pale. I thought the drinks were making her run on in a
way that was not characteristic of her and that I probably oughtn't
to encourage, and I was glad to shift the conversation from her
parents to her artistic problems. "What are you working on now?"
I asked. "I've been trying to do a sonata," she said, "just an old-
fashioned sonata." I asked her whether any of it were in shape to
play. "I've been having rather a struggle with it," she said, "but
I'll play you the part I mean." She put out her cigarette, and we
went into the next room to the piano.
There were no leaves to turn—she had it in her head—and I
sat in a low carved armchair which reminded me vaguely of
Abbotsford, and contemplated the curious shape of a seventeenth-
century tromba marina hung on the opposite wall. This obsolete
instrument, which the doctor had acquired and even learned to
play, producing, as Ellen had told me, rather creaking and eerie
results, looked more like an oar or a cricket-bat than a kind of
violin and, lacking the violin's curves, seemed anomalous and
ungainly. It seemed to me now all wrong; and so did Ellen's
music. This piece, which she said was the second movement, began
with a four-note theme that sounded simple and conventional
enough, and I was prepared for something genuinely classic; but
the theme was not given the development one expects in the sonata
form nor did it even fit the kind of variation that one finds in a
passacaglia. She did not even retard or speed it up: she simply

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ELLEN TERHUNE
475
played it over and over. It was as if she did not know what to do
with it, and the listener was constantly subjected to the embarrass-
ment of fearing that the pianist had got stuck like a phonograph
that stutters. There was at moments a suggestion of a second theme
that seemed to play about the first in a flimsy and trivial manner,
but it would fade off in atmospheric chords and leave the field to
the original four notes, as boring and inexpressive as ever. It was
like a perverse child, compelled to practise on a summer day, and
deliberately annoying the household. At the end, the ghost of a
second theme limped off and dropped away in irremediable spe-
ciousness and impotence, and we were back with the same con-
founded phrase, which was never satisfactorily resolved, but simply
repeated eight times at precisely the same loudness and tempo.
It sounded a little insane; I felt more worried about Ellen
than before. I sat constrained, almost scared, when she stopped,
and did not know what to say. Of course it was rather remark-
able to have carried off this monotony musically if she had done
so, of which I was not very sure; and this was the line that I took
with her. I saw that she was vibrating with tension, that the music
had excited her in a way which seemed to be almost unbearable for
her and was rather embarrassing for me. She was perspiring in
the August heat, and I began to perspire, too. "I'm afraid you're
not well," I said.
I remembered with uneasiness that she had sometimes been
subject to a kind of epileptic seizure, which was preceded by ner-
vous headaches. I had seen her in one of these fits one evening
when I had taken her to a concert where a concerto of hers was to
be done and where Sigismund had to conduct. She had usually
played her own things; but she was not a very accomplished pianist,
and on this occasion Sigismund had believed that it would be bet-
ter to get a pianist who was accustomed to playing with orchestra.
This performer had, however, not much liked the piece and had
been antagonized by Sigismund's vehement coaching, and, in spite
of a house packed with friends and admirers, who gave it the ex-
pected ovation, Ellen knew that it had not been right. I do not
think, as a matter of fact, that it was one of her good pieces, and I
imagine that the dutiful applause made her feel worse about it.

(Continued on page 507)

=== Page 29 ===
Political Notes

Dwight Macdonald

ROOSEVELT'S
CONSERVATIVE
WAR
I have seen little comment on an increasingly obvious
phenomenon in this war: the de-politicalization of
President Roosevelt's conduct of the war. He has
not made any inspirational speeches about world
democracy for a long time, leaving the field to Wallace and Willkie; his
silence on India has been profound. On the home front, he also seems to be
in retirement as a political leader. On the three major domestic issues of
the last few months-the poll-tax fight in Congress; the successful raid by
the farm bloc, with business backing, on the Administration's price-control
legislation; and the reactionary new tax bill, which rejects the Treasury's
proposals all down the line-Roosevelt had nothing to say publicly. The
manpower muddle is steadily growing worse, with Administration leaders
contradicting each other (and themselves) daily.* The light vote in the
Congressional elections is an index to the apathy of the electorate, and the
unexpectedly large gains scored by the Republicans show the dissatisfaction
with Roosevelt of those who did vote. A Republican vote was largely a
protest vote, since there were no real issues, the Republicans being unable
and the Administration unwilling to create any.
The man in the street may be coming to realize what is apparently
still a mystery to the liberal weeklies: that the New Deal has been dead
for a long time. The Roosevelt Administration is not fascistic, or even
developing with any speed in that direction: like the Churchill govern-
ment, it finds its chief mass base in the labor movement; civil liberties
have been preserved to a remarkable degree. Nor is it progressive or
liberal or reformist, as it was between 1933 and 1936. It is not fighting
the totalitarian war many radicals and isolationists expected it to before
Pearl Harbor, and it is not fighting the "people's war" Wallace and the
liberals are still trying to believe in. It is fighting a conservative war,
which means (1) an inefficient war (relative to either a fascist or a
socialist war regime), and thus a bloody, lengthy and exhausting struggle;
and (2) a lack of inspiriting, or even sensible, war aims (from the view-
point of the common man, that is; monopoly capitalism finds the Roose-
velt-Churchill war aims sensible enough). By "conservative" I mean
that Roosevelt's policy since 1937 has been to maintain the status quo
as much as possible by mediating between existing class and group
interests, rather than taking any "line" of his own. Since big business
is much the strongest group in our society, and growing stronger as a
result of the production demands of the war, this means letting big

* For a detailed and unsparing critique of faulty planning in manpower and war
production, see the newly issued Sixth Interim Report of the Select Committee
Investigating National Defense Migration (House Report No. 2889). Obtainable free
from Representative John H. Tolan, chairman of the Committee.
476

=== Page 30 ===
POLITICAL NOTES
477

business, and its close allies in the top military bureaucracy, more and
more run the war. A certain balance, however, is always kept, so that
the more extreme policies of the army-big business group are blocked
by Roosevelt, as with his shelving early in the war of the famous "M-Day
Plan." The farmers, the middle class, the labor movement are also part
of the status quo, after all, and exert their own pressures. But the general
drift has been to the right in the country since 1937 and in England
since the Churchill-Labor government took power in 1940.

THE WILLKIE The so to speak natural, organic opposition to the con-
ADVENTURE servative war policies of Churchill and Roosevelt would
be expected to come from what the British call the "lib-
labs" (liberal-labor). But the liblabs in both England and this country
have been the most loyal supporters of these policies, and the working
class, still the one social group with broad enough interests and a suffi-
cient capacity for organization to lead any movement for revolutionary
progressive change, has allowed its leaders to integrate the trade unions
into the structure of these conservative governments.*

In the absence of this "organic" opposition, a kind of political
vacuum arises, into which rush all kinds of adventurers, hoping to exploit
the widespread uneasiness and dissatisfaction with the conservative war
policies of Roosevelt-Churchill. England last summer saw the reactionary
press lord, Beaverbrook, playing a mysterious game against the Churchill
government which involved his papers joining the British Communists
in putting on joint demonstrations for a Second Front. Analogous, but
even more paradoxical, is the quickening Willkie opposition to Roosevelt's
war policy, much the most interesting political tendency in recent months.
Like Beaverbrook, Willkie is a Second Front enthusiast and a great
admirer of Stalin, but where Beaverbrook's game goes no farther than pro-
moting the Second Front, Willkie's only begins there.

In my article, "The (American) People's Century," last summer, I
described the curious kind of liberalistic "neo-imperialist" line developed
since 1940 by Willkie and Henry Luce (publisher of Time, Life, Fortune,
and of Clare Boothe Brokaw Luce). Since then, Willkie has made his
Chungking speech, which echoed Wallace's "mankind-is-on-the-march"
speech; and he has delivered a "Report to the American People" on his
world travels which is much the boldest criticism, from a liberal view-
point, of Roosevelt's war policies to be expressed by any important
American politician. The Luce papers have printed the most sympathetic
material on the Indian Congress to appear outside the Trotskyist and

* Our own labor leaders have abdicated even more completely than their British
colleagues. It is true that in England the conservatives (Tories) are in power, but
they have had to admit labor into their government as a junior partner. Our own
conservatives (Republicans) are not in power, but neither is the labor movement,
which has not for one moment to date-including the Hillman comedy-been per-
mitted to hold any important position in the war apparatus. Roosevelt has, further-
more, turned the Army and Navy cabinet posts over to Republicans, and put the
top production, price and manpower posts into conservative hands.

=== Page 31 ===
478 PARTISAN REVIEW

Socialist press; they have begun to criticise the present Administration
and to build up Willkie; and Life has published its famous "Open Letter
to the People of England" demanding that England make it clear she
is not fighting to preserve her Empire.

Until Willkie delivered his report on his trip, one possible explanation
for his liberal actions of the past year was that Roosevelt was grooming
him either to succeed Hull as Secretary of State or to succeed himself in
the White House in 1944. This may have been true, but Willkie's report
on his world travels, with its caustic revelations of the inadequacy of
American aid to Russia and China, its criticism of "our government's
wishy-washy attitude towards the problems of India," its demand for a
Pacific Charter, its attack on the State Department's policies and repre-
sentatives, its denunciation of censorship, and its suggestion that "the
whip lash of public opinion" be applied to "men with great power" who
"like to live free of criticism," i.e., to Roosevelt-all this means that
Willkie has decided his political future lies not in cooperating with
Roosevelt but rather in opposing him from the left-in fact, in playing
the same role vis-a-vis Roosevelt today that Roosevelt himself played
before Pearl Harbor vis-a-vis the conservative, business-as-usual isola-
tionists. As a short-range maneuver, Willkie's break was masterly: it
put Roosevelt in the comic predicament of either defending his war policies
by taking issue, as a conservative, with Willkie's liberalistic criticisms,
or else of failing to reply to the challenge. He chose the second alternative.

From a longer perspective, the Luce-Willkie adventure is extremely
hazardous. They seem to have in mind a postwar world in which the
old colonial imperialism will disappear, opening a free field to this
country, as the most powerfully industrialized, to exploit the world market
by relatively peaceful trading methods such as England used in the first
half of the nineteenth century. The rise of independent nations in China,
India and the Near East would stimulate the industrialization of those
regions and provide rich markets for American goods. The underlying
assumption is that there is still a future for liberal capitalism, and that
these Asiatic revolutions can be contained within bourgeois limits, so
that the rise of bourgeois national states in Europe in the last century
will be paralleled in this century by a cycle of Asiatic bourgeois national
revolutions, and with the same invigorating effects on the world market.

The difficulty, if not the impossibility, of this program today is
shown in the explosive nature of the materials Luce-Willkie must use to
build their new world. They understand that the first step is the breaking
of the British stranglehold on India, so that the native bourgeoisie behind
Gandhi can begin to develop that country's rich resources. They also
understand that Chiang Kai Chek is their man in China. But the masses
who follow Gandhi and the socialistic Nehru may just as easily flow in
a collectivist direction, once British rule is shattered, as in a bourgeois
one; and the Chinese Communists have shown at least as great a capacity

=== Page 32 ===
POLITICAL NOTES
479

for growth as has Chiang's dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.* A revolution
today, as Roosevelt and Churchill realize, is likely to take much more
drastic forms, whether for good or ill, than Willkie reckons on. If it
were just a question of the United States and the Eastern nations, the
development Willkie and Luce hope for might be theoretically possible.
But there are also Russia, England and the European continent to be
considered, decisive areas in which some kind of collectivism, whether
socialist or totalitarian, seems the most likely perspective. As Hitler's
pre-war exploits on the world market showed, a total economy forces
other nations to imitate it or to lose out; and Luce-Willkie and their
Republican friends presumably do not intend to lose out.

NAZI In the last issue, C. Wright Mills and J. R. Stanwell, in
ECONOMICS reviewing Neumann's Behemoth and Sweezy's The Struc-
AGAIN ture of the Nazi Economy, argued that these books pre-
sent data disproving the contention advanced previously
in PARTISAN REVIEW by James Burnham and myself that Germany is
no longer a capitalist nation, but must be described by some such term as
"bureaucratic collectivism." I should like here to submit those books to
a more critical scrutiny than Mills and Stanwell did.

The points which Miss Sweezy establishes in her book-with admir-
able conscientiousness, I agree with Stanwell-neither prove nor disprove
that Germany is still capitalist. The Nazis have not extended nationaliza-
tion because it is more opportune for them to maintain private property
forms while giving them a non-capitalist content through State control;
the famous "reprivatization" of former State enterprises took place
mostly in 1936 and later, i.e., after the Nazis had consolidated their grip
on the economy, and thus shows precisely this indifference to the formal
aspect of property relations. That wages have been held down and that
inequalities of income have increased under the Nazis proves that this is
an exploitative society, not that it is capitalist. That big business has
grown bigger at the expense of little business merely indicates (1) that
the war economy can be more efficiently organized that way, and (2) that
the big bourgeoisie are the favored allies of the Nazis. That the petty
bourgeoisie (artisans, shopkeepers, white collar workers) have been
crushed and largely proletarianized, this shows the demagogic nature of
Hitler's "middle-class revolution" but not the survival of capitalist rela-

*The same dangers beset Willkie's domestic liberalism. He has spoken out much
more boldly for the Negroes, for example, than Roosevelt ever did in his most liberal
period. Possibly he recognizes that the South is a colonial area within our own
borders, whose population is kept in poverty and whose resources are only partially
developed by a comprador native ruling class acting for absentee Northern capital.
Freeing the Negro from this imperialistic exploitation is the first step towards relaxing
the stifling grip of absentee capital. But the "Negro Question" is at least as explosive
today as the "Indian Question," and Willkie's policy is daringly adventuristic here
too. Roosevelt cautiously remains silent on both issues, perhaps because he is a more
responsible bourgeois politician than Willkie, perhaps simply-a factor always to be
taken into account-because he is in office while Willkie is not.

=== Page 33 ===
480

PARTISAN REVIEW

tions. That profits, as Miss Sweezy conclusively shows, have risen sharply under the Nazis has only a formal significance if the State controls the properties producing them and the disposal of the profits themselves- as completely as has been the case since 1936.

Neumann's Behemoth is much more ambitious than Miss Sweezy's monograph, being, in fact, the most complete and scholarly description of Nazi society that yet exists in English. (Though I think Mills over rates it; to redress the balance, one should read Karl Korsch's review in the current New Essays.) "Totalitarian monopoly capitalism" is Neumann's not very enlightening term for the Nazi system, which he describes as "a private capitalistic economy regimented by the totalitarian state." His case for its capitalist nature rests mostly on two conten tions (1) that the control of the economy remains with the great trusts and cartels; (2) that labor is still "free" in the sense in which Marx distinguished capitalist free labor from feudal and slave labor.

(1) Neumann shows that the "imposing edifice of German business organization-trusts, cartels, trade associations-has been carried over from Weimar with little change, and that, within this structure, private capitalists still run things. But that monopoly capitalism has managed to preserve a considerable degree of autonomy and (unlike other classes) can to some extent defend its interests even against the Nazi State- this is not decisive, for the same could be said of the Army. The real point is what class or group at the top makes the general policy decisions which organized business carries out, and it is just at this crucial point that Neumann gives up the fight. "The chief organ of the war economy is Goering," he writes on p. 247, adding that "the two most important agencies of the whole war economy" are the Four Year Plan Office and the Ministry of Economics. These are military-political, not business, agencies, whose personnel consists of State bureaucrats, Party leaders, and military officers. They are headed respectively by Goering and by Funk, also a Party man.*

(2) Neumann agrees with Marx and Weber that "free labor dis tinguishes capitalism from any previous economic system." His idea of what constitutes the freedom of labor is, however, very limited: "a clear distinction between labor and leisure time, which introduces the element of calculability and predictability into labor relations." (As against the feudal contract which "was a contract of faith, involving the whole

* In 1937 Funk succeeded Dr. Schacht as Economics Minister, and in 1939 he displaced him as President of the Reichsbank. These were significant shifts, since Schacht was the leading spokesman for private business, and yet Neumann barely mentions them. In a book of over 500 pages, Neumann devotes only one brief paragraph to the whole development of Nazi economy from the "Schacht Period" of 1934-5 through the inauguration of the Second Four Year Plan in 1936, and he actually fails even to mention that the business community hacked Schacht and was in general opposed to the Plan. It was in the years 1935-7 that the transition from monopoly capitalism to bureaucratic collectivism took place in Germany, and yet Neumann fails even to note the existence of a serious conflict between business and the Party in those years. A major weakness of his book is its failure to give any sense of historical development.

=== Page 34 ===
POLITICAL NOTES

481
personality of the worker without distinguishing between labor and
leisure.") Even granting this definition, it would seem that "calculability"
and "predictability" are not very opposite terms for working-class life
under Hitler, and that the German worker has his life pretty well organ-
ized for him outside the factory, in fact that the tendency of the Nazi
(as of the Soviet) system is precisely to obliterate the distinction between
work and leisure. Propaganda speeches, parades, mass rallies, Strength
Through Joy activities, Winter-Aid collections-these bombard him in
his off-duty hours; nor does he escape a factory-like discipline when he
quits work for his "private" life. But in any case, Neumann's definition
seems much too narrow. Labor in Germany is simply forced labor, the
wages, hours and working conditions of which are determined by the
State and not by any employer-employee relationship. That labor market
which Marx saw as the heart of capitalist labor relations has not existed
since 1936, and the worker is as firmly attached to his job as the feudal
serf was to his lord's estate. Indeed, Neumann himself, after describing
the various State controls over labor, concludes, most confusingly: "We
may thus say, briefly, that the worker does not enjoy any freedom."
Why Mills and Stanwell are so triumphant on the basis of these two
books I cannot understand. Miss Sweezy's book has no theoretical pre-
tensions, and Dr. Neumann's is confused and contradictory on the theoreti-
cal level. Nor do the reviewers shed much light, for all their polemical
heat. Stanwell thinks that to say the State in Germany can solve its
capitalist economic problems quite easily, is to say that "economic laws
have been suspended by political edict"-but obviously bureaucratic col-
lectivism has its own economic laws and contradictions which do not
yield so easily to political treatment. Mills is under the impression that
the proponents of the non-capitalist theory are not aware that free com-
petition has been displaced by monopoly; this is not true, as he can find
out by reading pp. 208-212 of my article in P. R. for May-June, 1941.
Nor do they illuminate the basic question: what is capitalism?
Stanwell offers no definition at all. Mills sees "private property in the
means of production" as the "major institution" of capitalism. But
private property was also the basis of the Roman slave economy, and so
cannot be the distinguishing mark of the capitalist system. I should say
the best brief definition occurs on p. 385 of the last volume of Marx's
Capital: "The capitalist mode of production is conditioned on production
for exchange, commerce on a large scale." I also follow Marx in his
view that capitalism is distinguished from all other forms of class societies
* Cf. L. Hamburger's excellent pamphlet, How Nazi Germany Has Mobilized and
Controlled Labor (Brookings Institution, 1940). "The colonus of the later Roman
empire," writes Hamburger, "the serf of the Middle Ages, was considered part of
the estate of his squire or lord. He was attached to, fixed on, the estate; he had no
right to move away. He was, in the language of feudal law, glebae adscriptus.
Similarly the German worker was now becoming attached to, fixed on, his job-
glebae adscriptus, if it happened to be an agricultural one, or factoriae adscriptus
(if one may say so) if it happened to be an industrial one."

=== Page 35 ===
482 PARTISAN REVIEW

—slavery, feudalism, and, I should now add, the bureaucratic collectivisms
of Russia and Germany—by the existence of “free” labor, and the produc-
tion of commodities, those “queer things” compounded of use-value and
exchange-value. (A good non-Marxist definition of capitalism is Charles
A. Beard’s: “a system of production, involving social relationships, in
which the primary object is the gain of profit through exchange.”) Pro-
duction for the market, in a word, seems generally agreed upon as the
distinguishing characteristic of capitalism. Perhaps Mills or Stanwell
can suggest a better definition.

It is true that at present England and America do not conform to this
definition of capitalism (though the distance between them and Germany
is still great). The State now controls, formally at least, wages, prices,
profits, working conditions; the needs of war and not the demands of
the market primarily determine production. The real question, however,
is whether the old social classes and institutions which are based on the
capitalist market are surviving intact enough to push the economy back
on the capitalist track after the war. In both England and America, as
I have noted above, conservative governments are in power which base
themselves primarily on the trade unions (job market) and big business
(commodity market), and which preserve as much as possible the old
social structure. In Germany, however, the Nazis have smashed the old
bourgeois institutions and have atomized the old social classes. The very
completeness of the victory German big business scored over the rest of
society when the Nazis took power has led, historically, to its defeat
by the Frankenstein monster it called to its aid. By 1936 German big
business stood triumphant over the wreckage of the middle class and the
proletariat, and yet in the fall of that year it was itself pushed aside by
Goering and the Nazi-Army creators of the Second Four Rear Plan.

The capitalist market survived through the period of monopoly
capitalism because simultaneously with the rise of monopolies there rose
also reformist trade unions and a growing middle class as a counter-
balance. This balance has been so completely destroyed in Germany
that what—as yet—in this country is simply a temporary “war economy,”
in Germany is a permanent change so long as the Nazis retain power.

=== Page 36 ===
On the Decline of Naturalism
Philip Rahv

QUITE A FEW PROTESTS have been aired in recent years against
the sway of the naturalist method in fiction. It is charged that
this method treats material in a manner so flat and external as to
inhibit the search for value and meaning, and that in any case,
whatever its past record, it is now exhausted. Dissimilar as they
are, both the work of Franz Kafka and the works of the surrealist
school are frequently cited as examples of release from the rou-
tines of naturalist realism, from its endless bookkeeping of exist-
ence. Supporting this indictment are mostly those writers of the
younger group who are devoted to experimentation and who look
to symbolism, the fable, and the myth.

The younger writers are stirred by the ambition to create a
new type of imaginative prose into which the recognizably real
enters as one component rather than as the total substance. They
want to break the novel of its objective habits; some want to intro-
duce into it philosophical ideas; others are not so much drawn
to expressing ideas as to expressing the motley strivings of the
inner self - dreams, visions, and fantasies. Manifestly the
failure of the political movement in the literature of the past
decade has resulted in a revival of religio-esthetic attitudes. The
young men of letters are once again watching their own image in
the mirror and listening to inner promptings. Theirs is a program
calling for the adoption of techniques of planned derangement as
a means of cracking open the certified structure of reality and
turning loose its latent energies. And surely one cannot dispose
of such a program merely by uncovering the element of mystifi-
cation in it. For the truth is that the artist of the avant-garde has
never hesitated to lay hold of the instruments of mystification
when it suited his purpose, especially in an age such as ours, when
the life about him belies more and more the rational ideals of the
cultural tradition.

It has been remarked that in the long run the issue between
naturalism and its opponents resolves itself into a philosophical
dispute concerning the nature of reality. Obviously those who

483

=== Page 37 ===
484 PARTISAN REVIEW

reject naturalism in philosophy will also object to its namesake
in literature. But it seems to me that when faced with a problem
such as that of naturalist fiction, the critic will do well not to mix
in ontological maneuvers. From the standpoint of critical method
it is impermissible to replace a concrete literary analysis with
arguments derived from some general theory of the real. For it
is plainly a case of the critic not being able to afford metaphysical
commitments if he is to apply himself without preconceived ideas
to the works of art that constitute his material. The art-object
is from first to last the one certain datum at his disposal; and in
succumbing to metaphysical leanings—either of the spiritualist
or materialist variety—he runs the risk of freezing his insights
in some kind of ideational schema the relevance of which to the
task in hand is hardly more than speculative. The act of critical

evaluation is best performed in a state of ideal aloofness from
abstract systems. Its practitioner is not concerned with making
up his mind about the ultimate character of reality but with
observing and measuring its actual proportions and combinations
within a given form. The presence of the real affects him directly,
with an immediate force contingent upon the degree of interest,
concreteness, and intensity in the impression of life conveyed by
the literary artist. The philosopher can take such impressions or
leave them, but luckily the critic has no such choice.
Imaginative writing cannot include fixed and systematic
definitions of reality without violating its own existential character.
Yet in any imaginative effort that which we mean by the real
remains the basic criterion of viability, the crucial test of rele-
vance, even if its specific features can hardly be determined in
advance but must be felt anew in each given instance. And so
far as the medium of fiction is concerned, one cannot but agree
with Henry James that it gains its “air of reality”—which he
considers to be its “supreme virtue”—through “its immense and
exquisite correspondence with life.” Note that James's formula-
tion allows both for analogical and realistic techniques of repre-
sentation. He speaks not of copies or reports or transcripts of
life but of relations of equivalence, of a “correspondence” which
he identifies with the “illusion of life.” The ability to produce
this illusion he regards as the storyteller's inalienable gift, “the
merit on which all other merits . . . helplessly and submissively

=== Page 38 ===
DECLINE OF NATURALISM
485

depend." This insight is of an elementary nature and scarcely
peculiar to James alone, but it seems that its truth has been lost
on some of our recent catch-as-catch-can innovators in the writing
of fiction.

It is intrinsically from this point of view that one can criticise
the imitations of Kafka that have been turning up of late (in the
little magazines and in the New Directions annuals) as being
one-sided and even inept. Perhaps Kafka is too idiosyncratic a
genius to serve as a model for others, but still it is easy to see
where his imitators go wrong. It is necessary to say to them: To
know how to take apart the recognizable world is not enough,
is in fact merely a way of letting oneself go and of striving for
originality at all costs. But originality of this sort is nothing
more than a professional mannerism of the avant-garde. The
genuine innovator is always trying to make us actually experience
his creative contradictions. He therefore employs means that are
subtler and more complex: at the very same time that he takes the
world apart he puts it together again. For to proceed otherwise
is to dissipate rather than alter our sense of reality, to weaken
and compromise rather than change in any significant fashion our
feeling of relatedness to the world. After all, what impressed us
most in Kafka is precisely this power of his to achieve a simul-
taneity of contrary effects, to fit the known into the unknown, the
actual into the mythic and vice versa, to combine within one
framework a conscientiously empirical account of the visibly real
with a dreamlike and magical dissolution of it. In this paradox
lies the pathos of his approach to human existence.

A modern poetess has written that the power of the visible
derives from the invisible; but the reverse of this formula is also
true. Thus the visible and the invisible might be said to stand to
each other in an ironic relation of inner dependence and of mutual
skepticism mixed with solicitude. It is a superb form of double-
talk; and if we are accustomed to its exclusion from naturalistic
writing, it is all the more disappointing to find that the newly-
evolved 'fantastic' style of the experimentalists likewise excludes
it. But there is another consideration, of a more formal nature.
It seems to me a profound error to conceive of reality as merely
a species of material that the fiction-writer can either use or dis-
pense with as he sees fit. It is a species of material, of course, and

=== Page 39 ===
486 PARTISAN REVIEW

something else besides: it also functions as the discipline of fiction,
much in the same sense that syllabic structure functions as the
discipline of verse. This seeming identity of the formal and
substantial means of narrative-prose is due, I think, to the alto
gether free and open character of the medium, which prevents it
from developing such distinctly technical controls as poetry has
acquired. Hence even the dream, when told in a story, must par
take of some of the qualities of the real.

Whereas the surrealist represents man as immured in dreams,
the naturalist represents him in a continuous waking state of
prosaic daily living, in effect as never dreaming. But both the
surrealist and the naturalist go to extremes in simplifying the
human condition. J. M. Synge once said that the artist displays
at once the difficulty and the triumph of his art when picturing
the dreamer leaning out to reality or the man of real life lifted
out of it. "In all the poets," he wrote, and this test is by no means
limited to poetry alone, "the greatest have both these elements,
that is they are supremely engrossed with life, and yet with the
wildness of their fancy they are always passing out of what is
simple and plain."

The old egocentric formula, "Man's fate is his character"
has been altered by the novelists of the naturalist school to read,
"Man's fate is his environment." (Zola, the organizer and cham
pion of the school, drew his ideas from physiology and medicine,
but in later years his disciples cast the natural sciences aside in
favor of the social sciences.) To the naturalist, human behavior
is a function of its social environment; the individual is the live
register of its qualities; he exists in it as animals exist in nature.*

* Balzac, to whom naturalism is enormously indebted, explains in his preface to
the Comédie Humaine that the idea of that work came to him in consequence of a
"comparison between the human and animal kingdoms." "Does not society," he asks,
"make of man, in accordance with the environment in which he lives and moves, as
many different kinds of man as there are different zoological species? . . . There
have, therefore, existed and always will exist social species, just as there are zoological
species."

Zola argues along the same lines: "All things hang together: it is necessary to
start from the determination of inanimate bodies in order to arrive at the determina
tion of living beings; and since savants like Claude Bernard demonstrate now that
fixed laws govern the human body, we can easily proclaim . . . the hour in which the
laws of thought and passion will be formulated in their turn. A like determination
will explain in an easy or the easy way all the brain of man. . . . We have experi
mental chemistry and medicine and physiology, and later on an experimental novel.
It is an inevitable evolution." (The Experimental Novel)

=== Page 40 ===
DECLINE OF NATURALISM
487
Due to this emphasis the naturalist mode has evolved historically
in two main directions. On the one hand it has tended towards
passive documentation (milieu-panoramas, local-color stories,
reportorial studies of a given region or industry, etc.), and on
the other towards the exposure of socio-economic conditions (muckraking). American fiction of the past decade teems with examples
of both tendencies, usually in combination. The work of James
T. Farrell, for instance, is mostly a genre-record, the material of
which is in its very nature operative in producing social feeling,
while such novels as The Grapes of Wrath and Native Son are
"exposé"-literature, as is the greater part of the fiction of social
protest. Dos Passos' triology, U. S. A., is thoroughly political in
intention but has the tone and gloss of the methodical genrepainter in the page by page texture of its prose.
I know of no hard and fast rules that can be used to distinguish the naturalist method from the methods of realism generally. It is certainly incorrect to say that the difference is marked
by the relative density of detail. Henry James observes in his
essay The Art of Fiction that it is above all "solidity of specification" that makes for the illusion of life the air of reality in
a novel; and the truth of this dictum is borne out by the practice
of the foremost modern innovators in this medium, such as Proust,
Joyce, and Kafka. It is not, then, primarily the means employed
to establish verisimilitude that fix the naturalist imprint upon a
work of fiction. A more conclusive test, to my mind, is its treatment of the relation of character to background. I would classify
as naturalistic that type of realism in which the individual is
portrayed not merely as subordinate to his background but as
-that type of realism, in other words, in
wholly determined by it
which the environment displaces its inhabitants in the role of the
hero. Theodore Dreiser, for example, comes as close as any
American writer to plotting the careers of his characters strictly
within a determinative process. The financier Frank Cowperwood
masters his world and emerges as its hero, while the "little man"
Clyde Griffiths is the victim whom it grinds to pieces; yet hero
and victim alike are essentially implements of environmental force,
the carriers of its contradictions upon whom it stamps success
or failure not entirely at will, to be sure, for people are marked

=== Page 41 ===
488 PARTISAN REVIEW

biologically from birth—but with sufficient autonomy to shape
their fate.

In such a closed world there is patently no room for the singular,
the unique, for anything in fact which cannot be represented
plausibly as the product of a particular social and historical com-
plex. Of necessity the naturalist must deal with experience almost
exclusively in terms of the broadly typical. He analyses characters
in such a way as to reduce them to standard types. His method of
construction is accretive and enumerative rather than analytical or
narrational; and this is so because the quantitative development
of themes, the massing of detail and specification, serves his pur-
pose best. He builds his structures out of literal fact and precisely
documented circumstance, thus severely limiting the variety of
creative means at the disposal of the artist.

This quasi-scientific approach not only permits but, in theory
at least, actually prescribes a neutral attitude in the sphere of
values. In practice, however, most naturalists are not sufficiently
detached or logical to stay put in such an ultra-objective position.
Their detractors are wrong in denying them a moral content; the
most that can be said is that theirs is strictly functional morality,
bare of any elements of gratuity or transcendence and devoid of
the sense of personal freedom.* Clearly such a perspective allows
for very little self-awareness on the part of characters. It also
removes the possibility of a tragic resolution of experience. The
world of naturalist fiction is much too big, too inert, too hardened
by social habit and material necessity, to allow for that tenacious
self-assertion of the human by means of which tragedy justifies
and ennobles its protagonists. The only grandeur naturalism
knows is the grandeur of its own methodological achievement in
making available a vast inventory of minutely described phe-
nomena, in assembling an enormous quantity of data and arranging
them in a rough figuration of reality. Les Rougon-Macquart stands
to this day as the most imposing monument to this achievement.

But in the main it is the pure naturalist—that monstrous
offspring of the logic of a method—that I have been describing
here. Actually no such literary animal exists. Life always triumphs
over methods, over formulas and theories. There is scarcely a

* Chekhov remarks in one of his stories that "the sense of personal freedom is the
chief constituent of creative genius."

=== Page 42 ===
DECLINE OF NATURALISM 489

single novelist of any importance wearing the badge of naturalism
who is all of a piece, who fails to compensate in some way for
what we miss in his fundamental conception. Let us call the roll
of the leading names among the French and American naturalists
and see wherein each is saved.
The Goncourts, it is true, come off rather badly, but even so,
to quote a French critic, they manage "to escape from the crude
painting of the naked truth by their impressionistic mobility" and,
one might add, by their mobile intelligence. Zola's case does not
rest solely on our judgment of his naturalist dogmas. There are
entire volumes by him-the best, I think, is Germinal-and parts
of volumes besides, in which his naturalism, fed by an epic imagi-
nation, takes on a mythic cast. Thomas Mann associates him with
Wagner in a common drive toward an epic mythicism:

They belong together. The kinship of spirit, method, and aims is
most striking. This lies not only in the ambition to achieve size,
the propensity to the grandiose and the lavish; nor is it the Homeric
leitmotiv alone that is common to them; it is first and foremost a
special kind of naturalism, which develops into the mythical. . .
In Zola's epic ... the characters themselves are raised up to a plane
above that of every day. And is that Astarte of the Second Empire,
called Nana, not symbol and myth?" (The Sufferings and Greatness
of Richard Wagner).

Zola's prose, though not controlled by an artistic conscience, over-
comes our resistance through sheer positiveness and expressive
energy-qualities engendered by his novelistic ardor and avidity
for recreating life in all its multiple forms.* As for Huysmans,
even in his naturalist period he was more concerned with style
than with subject-matter. Maupassant is a naturalist mainly by
alliance, i.e. by virtue of his official membership in the School of
Médan; actually he follows a line of his own, which takes off
from naturalism never to return to it. There are few militant
naturalists among latter-day French writers. Jules Romains is
sometimes spoken of as one, but the truth is that he is an epigone
of all literary doctrines, including his own. Dreiser is still un-
surpassed so far as American naturalism goes, though just at
present he may well be the least readable. He has traits that
make for survival-a Balzacian grip on the machinery of money

* Moreover, it should be evident that Zola's many faults are not rectified but
merely inverted in much of the writing-so languidly allusive and decorative-of the
literary generations that turned their backs on him.

=== Page 43 ===
490
PARTISAN REVIEW
and power; a prosiness so primary in texture that if taken in bulk
it affects us as a kind of poetry of the commonplace and ill-
favored; and an emphatic eroticism which is the real climate of
existence in his fictions-Eros hovering over the shambles. Sin-
clair Lewis was never a novelist in the proper sense that Zola and
Dreiser are novelists, and, given his gift for exhaustive reporting,
naturalism did him more good than harm by providing him with
a ready literary technique. In Farrell's chronicles there is an
underlying moral code which, despite his explicit rejection of the
Church, seems to me indisputably orthodox and Catholic; and his
Studs Lonigan-a product of those unsightly urban neighbor-
hoods where youth prowls and fights to live up to the folk-ideal
of the "regular guy"-is no mere character but an archetype, an
eponymous hero of the street-myths that prevail in our big cities.
The naturalism of Dos Passos is most completely manifested in
U. S. A., tagged by the critics as a "collective" novel recording
the "decline of our business civilization." But what distinguishes
Dos Passos from other novelists of the same political animus is
a sense of justice so pure as to be almost instinctive, as well as a
deeply elegiac feeling for the intimate features of American life
and for its precipitant moments. Also, U. S. A. is one of the very
few naturalist novels in which there is a controlled use of language,
in which a major effect is produced by the interplay between
story and style. It is necessary to add, however, that the
faults of Dos Passos' work have been obscured by its vivid con-
temporaneity and vital political appeal. In the future, I think,
it will be seen more clearly than now that it dramatizes social
symptoms rather than lives and that it fails to preserve the integrity
of personal experience.*

It is not hard to demonstrate the weakness of the naturalist
method by abstracting it, first, from the uses to which individual
authors put it and, second, from its function in the history of

*I do not quite see on what grounds some critics and literary historians include
such writers as Faulkner, Hemingway, and Caldwell in the naturalist school. I
should think that Faulkner is exempted by his prodigious inventiveness and fantastic
humor. Hemingway is a realist on one level, in his attempts to catch the real
thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion"; but he is also
subjective, given to self-portraiture and to playing games with his ego; there is very
little study of background in his work, a minimum of documentation. Caldwell is a
novelist of rural abandon-and comedy. His Tobacco Road is a sociological area
only in patches; most of it is exotic landscape.

=== Page 44 ===
DECLINE OF NATURALISM 491
modern literature. The traditionalist critics judge it much too
one-sidedly in professing to see in its rise nothing but spiritual
loss-an invasion of the arcanum of art by uncouth scientific ideas.
The point is that this scientific bias of naturalism was historically
productive of contradictory results. Its effect was certainly de-
pressive insofar as it brought mechanistic notions and procedures
into writing. But it should be kept in mind that it also enlivened
and, in fact, revolutionized writing by liquidating the last assets
of "romance" in fiction and by purging it once and for all of the
idealism of the "beautiful lie"-of the long-standing inhibitions
against dealing with the underside of life, with those inescapable
day-by-day actualities traditionally regarded as too "sordid" and
"ugly" for inclusion within an esthetic framework. If it were
not for the service thus rendered in vastly increasing the store of
literary material, it is doubtful whether such works as Ulysses
and even Remembrance of Things Past could have been written.
This is not clearly understood in the English speaking countries,
where naturalism, never quite forming itself into a "movement,"
was at most only an extreme emphasis in the general onset of
realistic fiction and drama. One must study, rather, the Continental
writers of the last quarter of the 19th Century in order to grasp
its historical role. In discussing the German naturalist school of
the 1880's, the historian Hans Naumann has this to say, for
instance:

Generally it can be said that to its early exponents the doctrine
of naturalism held quite as many diverse and confusing meanings
as the doctrine of expressionism seemed to hold in the period just
past. Imaginative writers who at bottom were pure idealists
united with the dry-as-dust advocates of a philistine natural-
scientific program on the one hand and with the shameless ex-
ploiters of erotic themes on the other. All met under the banner
of naturalism-friends today and enemies tomorrow. . . . But
there was an element of historical necessity in all this. The fact
is that the time had come for an assault, executed with glowing
enthusiasm, against the epigones . . . that it was finally possible
to fling aside with disdain and anger the pretty falsehoods of life
and art (Die Deutsche Dichtung der Gegenwart, Stuttgart, 1930,
p. 144).

And he adds that the naturalism of certain writers consisted simply

=== Page 45 ===
492 PARTISAN REVIEW

in their "speaking honestly of things that had heretofore been
suppressed."

But to establish the historical credit of naturalism is not to
refute the charges that have been brought against it in recent years.
For whatever its past accomplishments, it cannot be denied that
its present condition is one of utter debility. What was once a
means of treating material truthfully has been turned, through a
long process of depreciation, into a mere convention of truthful-
ness, devoid of any significant or even clearly definable literary
purpose or design. The spirit of discovery has withdrawn from
naturalism; it has now become the common denominator of
realism, available in like measure to the producers of literature
and to the producers of kitsch. One might sum up the objections
to it simply by saying that it is no longer possible to use this
method without taking reality for granted. This means that it
has lost the power to cope with the ever-growing element of
the problematical in modern life, which is precisely the element
that is magnetizing the imagination of the true artists of our epoch.
Such artists are no longer content merely to question particular
habits or situations or even institutions; it is reality itself which
they bring into question. Reality to them is like that "open
wound" of which Kierkegaard speaks in his Journals: "A healthy
open wound; sometimes it is healthier to keep a wound open;
sometimes it is worse when it closes."

There are also certain long-range factors that make for the
decline of naturalism. One such factor is the growth of psycho-
logical science and, particularly, of psychoanalysis. Through the
influence of psychology literature recovers its inwardness, devis-
ing such forms as the interior monologue, which combines the
naturalistic in its minute description of the mental process with
the anti-naturalistic in its disclosure of the subjective and the
irrational. Still another factor is the tendency of naturalism, as
Thomas Mann observes in his remarks on Zola, to turn into the
mythic through sheer immersion in the typical. This dialectical
negation of the typical is apparent in a work like Ulysses, where
"the myth of the Odyssey," to quote from Harry Levin's study
of Joyce, "is superimposed upon the map of Dublin" because

=== Page 46 ===
DECLINE OF NATURALISM 493

only a myth could "lend shape or meaning to a slice of life so
broad and banal." And from a social-historical point of view this
much can be said, that naturalism cannot hope to survive the world
of 19th century science and industry of which it is the product.
For what is the crisis of reality in contemporary art if not at
bottom the crisis of the dissolution of this familiar world? Natur-
alism, which exhausted itself in taking an inventory of this world
while it was still relatively stable, cannot possibly do justice to
the phenomena of its disruption.
One must protest, however, against the easy assumption of
some avant-gardist writers that to finish with naturalism is the
same as finishing with the principle of realism generally. It is
one thing to dissect the real, to penetrate beneath its faceless
surface and transpose it into terms of symbol and image; but the
attempt to be done with it altogether is sheer regression or escape.
Of the principle of realism it can be said that it is the most valuable
acquisition of the modern mind. It has taught literature how to
take in, how to grasp and encompass, the ordinary facts of human
existence; and I mean this in the simplest sense conceivable. Least
of all can the novelist dispense with it, as his medium knows
of no other principle of coherence. In Gide's Les Faux-Mon-
nayeurs there is a famous passage in which the novelist Edouard
enumerates the faults of the naturalist school. "The great
defect of that school is that it always cuts a slice of life in
the same direction: in time, lengthwise. Why not in breadth?
Or in depth? As for me, I should like not to cut at all. Please
understand: I should like to put everything into my novel." "But
I thought," his interlocutor remarks, "that you want to abandon
reality." Yes, replies Edouard, "my novelist wants to abandon
it; but I shall continually bring him back to it. In fact that will
be the subject; the struggle between the facts presented by reality
and the ideal reality."

=== Page 47 ===
London Letter

Dear Editors:

I write this letter at a moment when it is almost certain to be over-
taken and swamped by events. We are still in the same state of frozen
crisis as we were three months ago. Cripps is still enigmatically in office,
gradually losing credit with the Left but believed by many to be waiting
his moment to leave the Government and proclaim a revolutionary policy.
Such a development as there has been is definitely in a reactionary direc-
tion. Many people besides myself have noticed an all-round increase in
blimpishness, a drive against giving the war an anti-Fascist colour, a
general shedding of the phony radicalism of the past two years. The
India business twitched the masks off many faces, including Lord Rother-
mere's. This seems to violate the principle that every regime moves to
the Left in moments of disaster, and vice versa, for one could hardly
describe the last six months as triumphant. But something or other
appears to have made the blimps feel much more sure of themselves.

There are a few minor political happenings to record. Sir Richard
Acland's fairly radical Forward March group (a sort of Christian
Socialism) has amalgamated with Priestley's somewhat less radical 1941
Committee and the movement is calling itself Commonwealth. I believe
the amalgamation happened somewhat against Acland's will. They have
now been joined by Tom Wintringham, a useful demagogue, but I don't
think these people should be taken seriously, though they have won one
by-election. Trotskyism has at last got itself into the news owing to the
threatened prosecution of a weekly paper, the Socialist Appeal. I believe
this is still running, though in danger of suppression. I managed to get
hold of one copy of it—the usual stuff, but not a bad paper. The group
responsible for it are said to number 500. The Rothermere press is
especially active in chasing the Trotskyists. The Sunday Dispatch de-
nounces Trotskyism in almost exactly the terms used by the orthodox
Communists. The Sunday Dispatch is one of the very worst of the gutter
papers (murders, 'chorus girls' legs and the Union Jack) and belongs to
the press which before the war outdid all others in kow-towing to Fascism,
describing Hitler as late as the early months of 1939 as "a great gentle-
man." The Daily Worker has been de-suppressed and is to reappear on
September 7th. This was the necessary sequel to lifting the ban on the
Communist press in India. Communist literature at the moment is chiefly
concerned with urging the opening of a second front, but pamphlets are
also issued attacking all M.P.'s of whatever party who vote against the
Government. The anti-Trotskyist pamphlets now being issued are barely
distinguishable from those of the Spanish civil war period, but go some-
what further in mendacity. The Indian issue makes a certain amount of

494

=== Page 48 ===
LONDON LETTER
495
stir here, but less than one would expect because all the big newspapers
have conspired to misrepresent it and the Indian intellectuals in this
country go out of their way to antagonize those likeliest to help them.
The Vansittart controversy rumbles on in books, pamphlets, correspond-
ence columns and the monthly reviews. "Independent" candidates, some
of them plain mountebanks, tour the country, fighting by-elections. Sev-
eral of them have a distinct Fascist tinge. Nevertheless there is no sign
of any Fascist mass movement emerging.
That seems to me the whole of the political news. It has been in
my mind for some time past that you might be interested to hear some-
thing about the minor social changes occurring in this country-what
one might call the mechanical results of war. The price of nearly every-
thing is controlled, and controlled rather low, which leads to black
marketing of luxury foods, but this is perhaps less damaging to morale
than the shameless profiteering that went on last time. The interesting
point is whether the food restrictions are affecting public health and in
what direction they are altering the national diet. A certain number of
people with small fixed incomes-Old Age Pensioners are the extreme
instance are now in desperate financial straits, and the allowances paid
to soldiers' wives are wretched enough, but as a whole the purchasing
power of the working class has increased. My own opinion is that on
average people are better nourished than they used to be. Against this is
the increase in tuberculosis, which may have a number of causes but
must be due in some cases to malnutrition. But though it is difficult to
be sure with no standard of comparison, I can't help feeling that people
in London have better complexions than they used to, and are more active,
and that one sees less grossly fat people. English working people before
the war, even when very highly paid, lived on the most unwholesome diet
it is possible to imagine, and the rationing necessarily forces them back
to simpler food. It is strange to learn, for instance, that with an adult
milk ration of three pints a week, milk consumption has actually increased
since the war. The most sensational drop has been in the consumption
of sugar and tea. Plenty of people in England before the war ate several
pounds of sugar a week. Two ounces of tea is a miserable ration by
English standards, though alleviated by the fact that small children who
don't drink tea draw their ration. The endlessly stewing teapot was one
of the bases of English life in the era of the dole, and though I miss the
tea myself I have no doubt we are better without it. The wheatmeal
bread is also an improvement, though working people don't as a rule
like it.

War and consequent abandonment of imports tend to reduce use to
the natural diet of these islands, that is, oatmeal, herrings, milk, potatoes,
green vegetables and apples, which is healthy if rather dull. I am not
certain how much of our own food we are now producing, but it would
be of the order of 60 or 70 percent. Six million extra acres have been
ploughed in England since the war, and nine million in Great Britain

=== Page 49 ===
496 PARTISAN REVIEW

as a whole. After the war Britain must necessarily become more of an
agricultural country, because, however the war ends, many markets will
have disappeared owing to industrialization in India, Australia, etc. In
that case we shall have to return to a diet resembling that of our ancestors,
and perhaps these war years are not a bad preparation. The fact that
owing to evacuations, hundreds of thousands of town-born children are
now growing up in the country may help to make the return to an agri-
cultural way of life easier.
The clothes rationing is now beginning to take effect in a general
shabbiness. I had expected it to accentuate class differences, because it
is a thoroughly undemocratic measure, hardly affecting well-to-do people
who have large stocks of clothes already. Also, the rationing only regu-
lates the number of garments you can buy and has nothing to do with
the price, so that you give up the same number of coupons for a hundred-
guinea mink coat and a thirty-shilling waterproof. However, it now seems
rather "the thing" for people not in uniform to look shabby. Evening dress
has practically disappeared so far as men are concerned. Corduroy
trousers and, in women, bare legs are on the increase. There hasn't yet
been what one could call a revolutionary change in clothing, but there
may be one owing to the sheer necessity of cutting down wastage of cloth.
The Board of Trade tinkers with the problem by, for example, suppressing
the turn-ups of trouser ends, but is already contemplating putting everyone
into battledress. The quality of cloth is deteriorating, though less than
I had expected. Cosmetics are becoming scarce. Cigarettes have lost their
cellophane and greaseproof wrappings and are sold in cheap paper
packets or loose. Writing paper gets more and more like toilet paper
while toilet paper resembles sheet tin. Crockery is somewhat scarce and
a hideous white "utility" hardware, the sort of thing you would expect
to see in prison, is being produced. All articles which are not controlled,
for instance furniture, linen, clocks, tools, rocket to fantastic prices.
Now that the basic petrol ration has stopped private cars are very much
rarer on the roads. In the country many people are taking to pony traps
again. In London there are no conveyances, except very occasional taxis,
after midnight. It is becoming a common practice when you dine at
anybody else's house to sleep there. What with the air raids and fire-
watching people are so used to sleeping out of their beds that they can
kip down anywhere. The fuel shortage hasn't yet made itself felt, but
it is going to do so about January. For long past the coal owners have
been successfully sabotaging the attempts to introduce fuel rationing, and
it is considered that this winter we shall be 25 million tons of coal short.
Buildings everywhere are growing very shabby, not only from air raid
damage but from lack of repairs. Plaster peeling off, windows patched
with linen or cardboard, empty shops in every street. Regency London
is becoming almost ruinous. The beautiful but flimsy houses, no longer
lived in, are falling to pieces with damp and neglect. On the other hand
the parks are improved out of recognition by the removal of the railings

=== Page 50 ===
LONDON LETTER
497
for scrap iron. As a rule these have gone from the gardens in the
squares as well, but in places the rich and powerful manage to cling
to their railings and keep the populace out. Generally speaking, where
there is money, there are railings.
One periodical reminder that things have changed in England since
the war is the arrival of American magazines, with their enormous bulk,
sleek paper and riot of brilliantly-coloured adverts urging you to spend
your money on trash. English adverts of before the war were no doubt
less colourful and enterprising than the American ones, but their mental
atmosphere was similar, and the sight of a full-page ad on shiny paper
gives one the sensation of stepping back into 1939. Periodicals probably
give up to advertisements as great a proportion of their dwindled bulk
as before, but the total amount of advertisement is far smaller and the
government ads constantly gain on the commercial ones. Everywhere
there are enormous hoardings standing empty. In the Tube stations you
can see an interesting evolutionary process at work, the commercial ads
growing smaller and smaller (some of them only about 1 ft. by 2 ft.)
and the official ones steadily replacing them. This, however, only reflects
the dwindling of internal trade and does not point to any deep change
of outlook. An extraordinary feature of the time is advertisements for
products which no longer exist. To give just one example: the word
IRON in large letters, with underneath it an impressive picture of a
tank, and underneath that a little essay on the importance of collecting
scrap iron for salvage; at the bottom, in tiny print, a reminder that after
the war Iron Jelloids will be on sale as before. This throws a sort of
sidelight on the strange fact, recently reported by the Mass Observers
and confirmed by my own limited experience, that many factory workers
are actually afraid of the war ending, because they foresee a prompt
return to the old conditions, with three million unemployed, etc. The
idea that whatever happens old-style capitalism is doomed and we are in
much more danger of forced labour than of unemployment, hasn't reached
the masses except as a vague notion that "things will be different." The
advertisements that seem to have been least changed by the war are those
for theatres and patent medicines. Certain drugs are unobtainable, but
the British have lost none of their old enthusiasm for medicine-taking,
and the consumption of aspirin, phenacetin, etc., has no doubt increased.
All pubs without exception sell aspirins, and various new proprietary
drugs have appeared. One is named Blitz, the lightning pick-me-up.
Once again I may have seemed to talk to you about very trivial
things, but these minor changes in our habits, all tending towards a more
equal way of life and a lessened reliance on imported luxuries, could
have their importance in the difficult transition period which must occur
if Britain becomes a Socialist country. We are growing gradually used
to conditions that would once have seemed intolerable and getting to
the mentality which both Socialists and capitalists
did their best to inculcate in times of peace. Since the introduction of

=== Page 51 ===
498 PARTISAN REVIEW

Socialism is almost certain to mean a drop in the standard of living
during the first few years, perhaps this is just as well. But of course
the changes in our food and clothes have no meaning unless there is a
structural change as well. For many of the same processes occurred
during the last war as are occurring now. Then too food was short and
money plentiful, agriculture revived, women in vast numbers moved into
industry, trade union membership swelled, government interference with
private life increased, and the class system was shaken up because of the
need for great numbers of officers. But there had been no real shift of
power and in 1919 we went back to "normal" with startling speed. I
cannot believe that the same thing will happen this time, but I cannot
say either that I see concrete evidence that it won't happen. At present
the only insurance against it seems to me to lie in what one might call
the mechanics of the situation. Old-style capitalism can't win the war,
and the events of the past three years suggest that we can't develop a
native version of Fascism. Therefore, now as two years ago, one can
predict the future in the form of an "either-or": either we introduce
Socialism, or we lose the war. The strange, perhaps disquieting fact is
that it was as easy to make this prophecy in 1940 as it is now, and yet
the essential situation has barely altered. We have been two years on the
burning deck and somehow the magazine never explodes.

There are now many American soldiers in the streets. They wear
on their faces a look of settled discontent. I don't know how far this
may be the normal expression of the American countenance, as against
the English countenance, which is mild, vague and rather worried. In
the Home Guard we have orders to be punctilious about saluting the
officers, which I'm afraid I don't do and which they don't seem to expect.
I believe some of the provincial towns have been almost taken over by
the American troops. There is already a lot of jealousy, and sooner or
later something will have to be done about the differences in pay. An
American private gets five times as much as an English one, which has
its effect on the girls. Also, working-class girls probably find it rather
thrilling to hear the accent they are so used to in the movies emerging
from a living face. I don't think the foreign troops here can complain
about the way the women have treated them. The Poles have already
done their bit towards solving our birth-rate problem.

Yours ever

GEORGE ORWELL
London, England
August 29, 1942

=== Page 52 ===
Police Sergeant Malone and the
Six Dead Drinkers

Horace Gregory

My last job was the case of The Six Dead Drinkers:
It has given me dreams and my work is less efficient,
It has shown me the will of death and I am impatient
At the lack of will among those who choose to die,
Even ill-health is a palpable excuse;
I should have dropped the case.

The men were found in a hotel linen closet,
The sixth with a three-inch rope around his neck,
A college student who pretended to be dead,
A fool who whispered
That all youth dies, that he did not wish to live:
His breathing corpse was sent to the Polyclinic
Where they brought him to and washed his hands and feet
And offered him the rewards of war and love.

I wrote the first report: it was "heart-failure,"
Body intact and clean, no stains are visible
On wall or street or floor—
And the victim (if he chooses the occasion)
May wear a judge's gown, or a dinner jacket,
Or the tonneau of a State Department car—
After the police and the Mayor are photographed
Newsmen are always glad to be satisfied.

If it had been a series of gas-house disappearances
Or a run of phone-booth murders,
Or an Islip heiress who had lost her dog
I would have let
The Fairview psychiatrist reclaim the bodies,
For he had said what no one should forget:

"These men are not quite gone,

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They have merely sunk or drifted past their prime:
Each body is a little overweight,
Regular exercise would have done it no great harm;
There is alcoholic content in its blood,
This one is deaf, the other is half-blind,
Another has a scar on its right side
And still another lacks an index finger
Which is sad, but each can be beautifully repaired,
Therapy works wonders for such common ills.
They could weave baskets, or model images in clay,
Dye wool, or trace a pattern on a loom,
Or even kalsomine the clinic walls—
Each could be salvaged and each one could earn
A minimum of fifty cents a day."

But I had my way; I restored them as they were,
Each in the closet as though sitting in a bar,
Friendly, about to speak:
One looked like a school teacher with a glass eye,
Another like a teller in a bank,
Another like a sailor, reefed and spent
On an East River barge, one like a millionaire
Who had been reported missing for a week;
And the last with his smile rolled upward to the ceiling
Might have been a Correspondent in the First World War.

Like one possessed, I sat down among them to hear them talk,
The door closed quietly and the night was dark:
I felt the cold, stilled air against my face,
I knew the danger, I knew how deeply
Sleep flows among the dead, how straight, how far
The unseen distance falls, my body shaking
And held upon a narrow ledge,
my limbs were shadows.

I awoke to throbbing airdromes in the sky,
The nurse above me said:
"You must lie quiet,
You have been telling me secrets for days, for hours,

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POLICE SERGEANT MALONE 501
Throat scorched, lips black and your tongue burning;
You have told them all, there is nothing more to say."

But even as I woke, I could not stop:
There were years more to tell
Of misspent childhoods in the sun at Santa Fe,
Or ten days with a duchess on the Matterhorn,
Or minute views of the Louvre from Eiffel Tower,
Bomb-scares in Jermyn Street, tear-gas in Wilhelmstrasse,
Male sleeping beauty contests at Marseille—
All, all were there,
Even to the least detail,
Memories of girls with the India Ocean in their eyes,
And night-breathing oleander in dark hair,
Words flowing from the lips that could not keep still—
Were there five men in that place, or six, or seven
Whispering my life, or theirs?
I did not know,
I knew only that a phosphorescent, blue-lighted river
Coursed through my veins, that I must talk as if forever
Of everything I had done, or hoped to do.

It was no wonder my recovery was slow,
That I enlisted to begin my life again, to leave the city.
I have heard artillery encourages silence among men—
If they sing, dance, shout or whisper, it does not matter,
The guns speak for them and the sirens blow—
The service leaves no mysteries unsolved;
I have volunteered,
and I am wild to go.

=== Page 55 ===
Film Chronicle:
The Eisenstein Tragedy

W
AS IT ONLY a dozen years ago that, with pious excitement, we went
to "little" movie houses—the very term has disappeared—to see the new
films from Russia? Is it so short a time since many of us were writing
on the cinema as the great modern art form, the machine art whose
technique was most in harmony with the dynamism of the machine age,
the art that most powerfully affected such peculiarly modern areas as
Freud's subconscious and Pavlov's reflexes, the only art that could some-
times bridge the gap between serious creation and mass taste, so that Birth
of a Nation, Chaplin's comedies, Potemkin and a few other films might
be said to have been the only works of our time that have been both
popular and great? Our enthusiasm was not misplaced, our theories
were not unfounded. And yet the wonderful possibilities that lay before
the cinema ten years ago have withered into the slick banality of Holly-
wood and the crude banality of the post-1930 Soviet cinema. The poten-
tialities, which really existed, which, for that matter, still exist and in
even richer profusion, simply were not realized, and the cinema gave up
its own idiom and technique to become once more what it was before
Griffith: a mechanical device for recording stage plays. Like so much
else in the last decade, it crept back into the womb, into unconsciousness.
It has been many years now since, anywhere in the world, a film has been
made which, esthetically speaking, is cinema at all.

These depressing reflections are suggested by Eisenstein's new book.*
Dull and platitudinous, it reads more like a conscientious and not too
inspired Ph.D. thesis than like the work of the creator of October and
Potemkin. The only valuable part of the book is the Appendices, which
reprint some Eisenstein scenarios and articles and give a bibliography
of his writings, films, and unrealized projects.

I think The Film Sense may best be understood as an attempt by its
author to adopt the protective coloration of official Stalinist culture.
This explains the platitudes: the distinguishing mark of "an emotionally
exciting work" is that it causes "inner creative excitement in the spec-
tator" (p. 35); "the technique of creation recreates a life process, con-
ditioned only by those special circumstances required by art" (p. 43);
repetition "may well perform two functions"—(1) "to facilitate the
creation of an organic whole," (2) to develop "mounting intensity"
(p. 95); etc. It also accounts for the citations from Walt Whitman, Sir
Joshua Reynolds, Lewis Carroll, Pliny the Elder and practically everybody

** "The Film Sense," Harcourt, Brace. $3.

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else that strew the pages, apparently to show that Eisenstein has the
authority of all past culture on his side. (Time was when that would
have worried him!) And it also accounts for the ghastly "official" style
in which the book seems to have been written-possibly Mr. Jay Leyda,
the translator, is here partly responsible-so very different from the
expressionist fireworks of Eisenstein's earlier writing. In fact, I would
almost venture to say that Eisenstein has modelled his prose on Stalin's;
there is the characteristic turgidity; the lingering over the obvious; even
the familiar catechism form-isn't this a perfect echo: "What was the
distortion in our attitude at that time to this indisputable phenomenon?
The error lay... etc."

Above all, this hypothesis accounts for the remarkable change in
Eisenstein's conception of montage. "There was a period in Soviet
cinema," he begins his book, "when montage was proclaimed 'everything.'
Now we are at the close of a period during which montage has been
regarded as 'nothing.' Regarding montage as neither nothing nor every-
thing, I consider it opportune at this juncture to recall that montage
is just as indispensable a component of film production as any other
element of film effectiveness." Thus montage, once the distinguishing
principle of the Eisenstein school, has become simply one among many
technical devices. Eisenstein has furthermore broadened his definition
of montage until the term now merely describes any relation of elements
in art. He has converted his old battlecry into a platitude. We are told
that the "basic aim and function" of montage is "connected and sequential
exposition of the theme, the material, the plot, the action... the simple
matter of telling a connected story." This, he frankly remarks, is, of
one really immune to challenge"-as indeed
all aspects of montage, "the
it is, since not even a Soviet commissar would deny the ne
nected story." This is a complete reversal of Eisenstein's former theory.
In his article, "The Cinematographic Principle and Japanese Culture,"
in transition for Spring-Summer, 1930, Eisenstein denouced the idea
that montage is "a junction of elements" as "a most pernicious method
of analysis." He continued: "By what then is characterised montage...?
By collision. ... By conflict. By collision. . . From the co
given factors arises a concept. Linkage is, in my interpreton, only a
possible special case.... Thus, montage is conflict. The basis of every
art is always conflict."

Eisenstein gives no explanation for this reversal, in fact does not
mention that a reversal has taken place. Soviet culture doesn't build
on the past, any more than Stalinist politics do. The Party line, in art
as in politics, changes overnight into a flat contradiction of yesterday's
line, so that the present is related to the past only as good is to evil, or
black to white; the past is simply scrapped, buried, forgotten. Soviet
artists have no tradition; they must wipe off the past, as one wipes off
a blackboard, the day the line changes. They are unable to learn from

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504 PARTISAN REVIEW

the past, and their culture is shallow and undeveloped since it is con-
stantly uprooted.

Eisenstein's change of mind about montage has nothing to do with
esthetic theory; it is simply an adaptation to the political pressures which
have crushed all Soviet art in the last decade, and whose impact on the
cinema I described in a series of articles in PARTISAN REVIEW several
years ago. The outlawry of "formalism," i.e. avant-garde experiment, in
favor of "social realism" was partly an expression of the Philistine taste
of the new-rich Stalinist bureaucracy, partly a move to harness art to
the immediate service of mass propaganda (cf. Stalin's famous directive
to Soviet composers to produce tunes the people can whistle on their
way to work). In the triumph of the "linkage" over the "conflict" concept
of montage these factors are involved - "linkage" is the Hollywood
method, after all and also another principle. The cinema is a dramatic
art form, and dramatic structure depends largely on the tension created
by conflict; but there cannot be conflict in a totalitarian state, since there
is only one principle, one set of values authorized to be publicly expressed.
I suggest, somewhat tentatively, that there is an intrinsically revolutionary
quality to the conflict-montage of Eisenstein's October (1927), while the
linkage-montage of Alexander Nevsky (1938), which robs it of any
dramatic interest and makes it a static kind of masque or pageant, is in
itself counter-revolutionary.

The grandeurs and the miseries of the modern artist find high ex-
pression in Eisenstein's career. In the decade following the October
revolution, his three great films-Potemkin, October and Old and New-
were perhaps the supreme expression of the remarkable flowering of
avant-garde art in the springtime of the new society. By 1929 the Stalinist
bureaucracy had consolidated its hold on the State apparatus, and the
great period of creativity in the arts was over. That year Eisenstein got
permission to travel abroad. Whatever hopes he may have had of finding
a more congenial milieu in the capitalist world-his difficulties with Stalin
had begun as early as 1927, when he was forced to eliminate Trotsky's
figure from all scenes of October - were frustrated with remarkable
thoroughness. In Paris the police forbade the showing of Old and New
to a private audience at the Sorbonne. He travelled on to Hollywood,
where Paramount put him under a six-month contract with much publicity,
and frustrated his attempts to make any movies. There followed the
tragicomedy of the Mexican film he made for a group of liberals headed
by Upton Sinclair, which ended in Sinclair's asserting his property rights
in the unedited film (which he later turned over to a Hollywood hack
to chop into shorts) and Eisenstein returning empty-handed to Russia.
The first indication many of us had as to what was going on in the Soviet
cinema was the failure of Amkino to back up Eisenstein's efforts to get
his Mexican film-said by many who saw the raw material to be poten-
tially his greatest achievement-out of the hands of Sinclair.

I am told that when Eisenstein returned to Russia he was a beaten
man, disillusioned with both the capitalist and the new Stalinist world.

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FILM CHRONICLE
505
These followed a long and heartbreaking series of unrealized projects:
a cinematization of Marx's Capital, of the careers of Ivar Kreuger and
Sir Basil Zaharoff; of Vandercook's Black Majesty, the Hart-Kaufman
comedy, Once in a Lifetime, Malraux's La Condition Humaine; a comedy
called MMM; a big historical film covering four centuries of Moscow's
history; above all, the humiliating treatment of the only project that
got beyond the scenario stage, his half-completed film on peasant life,
Bezhin Meadow, which was branded "formalist" and officially suppressed
in 1937. The only projects Eisenstein has been able to realize since
Old and New (1929) are Alexander Nevsky (1938) and the present book.
Although in this book, Eisenstein analyzes Nevsky as though it were a
masterwork, devoting many pages to the technical strategy of a tiny
section, the film has always seemed to me empty and boring. It is a
slow-paced historical pageant, devoid of any content other than a poster
like kind of patriotism, and quite conventional in its cinematic technique.
I think it may be referred to the same strategy of cultural camouflage
that produced the book: a patriotic pageant is about as "safe" an art
work as it is possible to create in Russia these days. Eisenstein's next
film is also to be a historical one, based on Ivan the Terrible. It is
immensely significant that the one project Eisenstein was able to complete
in the last decade is Nevsky, while all the rest, dealing with themes in
which there is contemporary life, came to nothing. Back to the womb.
Eisenstein's career has been a tragedy without a hero. He has fore
sworn his most cherished esthetic theories when they met with official
disfavor; viz., his abject behavior when his "formalist" heresy was
attacked at the 1935 Film Conference (PARTISAN REVIEW, Aug.-Sept.,
1938, pp. 42-5); his confessional article, "The Mistakes of Bezhin Lug"
(International Literature, No. 8, 1937); his use of big-name "stars" in
Nevsky, and his acceptance as collaborators in that film of D. Vassilev,
the leading "social realist" director, and Teleshiva of the Moscow Art
Theatre. (In the twenties he wouldn't have wiped his feet on the Moscow
Art Theatre.) He has also issued from time to time the kind of political
statements required of Stalinist intellectuals, and with a grossness border
ing on the cynical. Examples are "My Subject is Patriotism" (Inter
national Literature, No. 2, 1939) and the preface to the present volume,
in which he envisions "the definitive rise of an art of the cinema" as a
result of Anglo-Soviet-American victory in the present war, and in which
he writes: "I have long been tied to America both by a deep love and by
the great tradition of film-art. Now these feelings are heightened by the
warm friendship in which our people are together delivering powerful
blows to the scourge of darkness, blood and savagery, in the fight for the
ideals of mankind, culture, humanity and light." So excessive, indeed,
MOSCOW, Feb. 18 (UP): Sergei Eisenstein, one of the most prominent Soviet
film directors, today launched a Soviet-German cultural cooperation program over
the Comintern Radio Station. Broadcasting especially to Germany, Mr. Eisenstein
said that friendly Russian-German relations established last year formed a solid base
"for increased cultural cooperation between the two great peoples."-N. Y. Times,
Feb. 19, 1940.

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506 PARTISAN REVIEW

has been Eisenstein's capitulation to the demands of the Stalinist bureauc-
racy that a friend of mine thinks he is satirizing Stalinist culture by
wholly conforming to it. He cites the case of Ernst Jünger, whose Auf
den Marmorklippen we reviewed in July-August, who several years ago
satirized the Nazi blood-and-race ideology by publishing, in Germany,
a work carrying it to extreme conclusions. This theory is psychologically
possible, from what I know of Eisenstein's personality. Two considera-
tions, however, seem to make it unlikely: (1) Eisenstein's failure to
produce anything of interest in the last decade (which argues that he
made a sincere, opportunist effort to conform); (2) the fact that this
mode of behavior, fantastic to our eyes, is the norm in the Soviet Union
today, as was shown in the Moscow trials and in the esthetic capitulations
of artists like Pudovkin and Shostakovich.

There is a modern sentimentality about the artist and intellectual which
pictures him as a Prometheus defying the gods of totalitarianism in the
name of Art and Culture. Such defiances are not unknown, but they are
generally delivered from a safe distance-California is an ideal location.
When, as in Russia, the artist-intellectual has remained within the totali-
tarian borders, he has reacted pretty much as Eisenstein has, submitting
in esthetic as well as political matters. About the only heroes in the
tragedy of Stalinist culture were Mayakovsky and Yessenin, who in-
stinctively chose suicide to creative death. The Nazi order is by now old
and extensive enough for some further evidence to begin to appear. Braque
has accepted a high artistic post in occupied France, and Vlaminck, de
Segonzac, and Derain are reported to have toured Germany on a "cultural
mission." Pour la Victoire for Sept. 26 quotes from Marcel Deat's Paris
paper, L'Oeuvre, a recent announcement that Louis Aragon (together
with his old Stalinist comrade-in-arms, Marcel Cachin-and Prince Ed-
mond Bonaparte) has joined the Deat-Doriot fascist party. In an interview
in the N. Y. Herald-Tribune of Aug. 16, Dr. John Altmann revealed that
the greatest of German film directors, G. W. Pabst, famous for the anti-war
films, Westfront, 1918 and Kameradschaft, and for his wonderful cinema-
tization of Brecht's Dreigroschenoper, edited the Nazi documentary terror-
film, Victory in the West. According to Pic for Aug. 18, Pabst was
secretly working for Abetz while he was in Paris before the war, ostensibly
an artist-refugee from Nazism. Such reversals cannot but shock us, just
as a book like The Film Sense is shocking coming from Eisenstein. But
I think we had better get used to such shocks; there are probably more
unheroic tragedies to come.

DWIGHT MACDONALD

=== Page 60 ===
Ellen Terhune

(Continued from Page 475)

At any rate, she withdrew to the ladies' room and stayed there so long that
I became uneasy. I found her rigid on a couch, with a worried attend-
ant bending over her and trying to get her to speak. As soon as the
concert was finished, Sigismund and I took her back to the hotel. He told
me that she had had such fits before, and that they sometimes lasted
rather long. On this occasion, however, she came to and got into a cab,
though I did not hear her speak again.
I was afraid now that she might be working up to another seizure
of the kind. But she smiled and tried to reassure me. "It makes me
nervous to play that thing," she said. "I wish I could get it finished.
The last part has been driving me crazy, and even this part isn't right
yet. I can see you're thoroughly depressed by it." "Oh, no," I said
untruthfully. "I think it's extremely interesting." She smiled at the con-
ventional evasion, and I disliked having to talk so to Ellen.
I asked her before I left whether there were somebody in the house,
and she told me that there was. I didn't like to remind her of the concert:
she was the kind of self-managing woman that it is hard to do anything
for. I told her that she must let me know if there was any way I could
help her; and she apologized for talking so much about herself - "but
you're one of the few people I can talk to. Out here you're the only one -
I don't really know any more even who the people are who live here,
though we used to know everybody."
It was all pretty awful, I thought, as I walked along the drive toward
the gate, between the lawns which the late sun was gilding and the mag-
nificent collection of trees (a true collection planted by the doctor and
including many curiosities and rarities), with the vision of Ellen's wide
sweating forehead under her none-to-abundant brown hair and of her
eyes which I had thought in the last moments of my visit were getting
a little out of touch with me till they had come again to responsive life
at the moment of our parting. She did not know even who lived here,
she had said; and there had been a few seconds just now when I had been
talking about her music and she had seemed to stumble in replying and
to stare and go into herself when I had not been quite sure she knew me.
I turned my mind, I confess, with a certain self-indulgence, to a
party I was going to that evening: one of those gatherings where great
quantities of tan-backed girls and scarlet-faced men, with highballs
fizzing in their hands, lift laughing and strident voices among glass-
topped cocktail tables and lamps that give indirect lighting.

II

I dropped in on her again in September when I came back from a
short summer trip. I noticed that Ellen's place showed signs of restoration
and refreshment. The honeysuckle on the fence had been trimmed, and

507

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508                                       PARTISAN REVIEW

the name on the gates, "Vallombroso," had evidently been recently re-
painted. I had the impression that the trees and the shrubbery had also
been recently pruned; and the sails had been put back on the windmill,
which was turning in a chilly wind that came up suddenly as I entered the
driveway.

Ellen herself I found rejuvenated in a most surprising way. She
no longer had rings under her eyes, and she displayed a kind of nervous
vitality which I thought at first was overwrought but which I presently
came to feel as natural. The rather recessive attitude which had grown
on her with her alienation from Sigismund seemed to have given way
to a readiness to meet and taste life. It seemed to me that the definite
break with him, which I noticed she never mentioned, had had the effect
of releasing her to revert to her own personality, which, I thought, must
have suffered and shrunk in the course of her relationship with Sigi-
mund; and it seemed to be a symbol of this that she had completely
changed her style of dressing and her way of doing her hair. The last
time I had seen her she had been wearing the short skirt of 1926, and
she had at one time had a bob, which had made her head a little too
mannish; but now she had been letting her hair grow, and, parting it in the
middle and brushing it over her ears, had coiled it at the back of her
head and stuck a comb at an angle behind it, and she was wearing a
white shirtwaist with full sleeves and a long green-plaid skirt, which were
old-fashioned but very becoming to her. She looked somehow smarter
than she had before. I complimented her on her appearance, but said
nothing about the antiquity of the costume. I thought at first that she
had got it out of some trunk and that it must be at least twenty years
old; but as I looked at it, it seemed to me new, and I concluded that
she had had it made to order. It was an affectation, of course, perhaps a
self-conscious protest against Sigismund; but I rather enjoyed it for
the emphasis it gave to the non-fashionable character of her work: it was
a joke on the cult of jazz and the professional lost generation that one
of the most original American artists should have the aspect of a period
piece.

My relation with Ellen today seemed somehow a little less intimate.
She was not alienated as I had felt her to be at the end of my last visit,
as if she were losing the outside world; but it was as if her perceptions
were dimmed by the vividness of her musical interests. She looked at
me for a moment when I first appeared as if she were not quite sure
that she recognized me, replying rather formally to my greeting; and
at one point she seemed to assume that I had personally known Dr. Bris-
rosches. She was more obviously excited about her music than I had ever seen
her before and talked as if she had been composing with a new gust of
creative energy. She told me about playing some piano pieces — a
suite which she had just written — at the invitation of Arthur Whiting,
at a concert given in his studio, at which the Schirmers and the Dam-
rosches had been present, and on a program with d'Indy and Loeffler.
Though she always maintained the attitude of the advanced and self-

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ELLEN TERHUNE
509
confident woman who is not afraid of conventions and who knows that
she can compete with men in fields which they have largely monopolized,
she was obviously gratified by this; and I was at first a little puzzled
at her pleasure in recognition from so relatively antiquated a quarter;
but I felt that she was perhaps, as sometimes happens, falling back for
reassurance in her new personal loneliness on appreciation of her work
from anywhere and by anybody. “Well, that makes you a classic!”—I
smiled. “They don’t really approve of me at all,” she replied. “They
think I’m a freak like Carrie Nation. Arthur Whiting made one of his
sly jokes about my being more masculine than Debussy. But Whiting
at least is no fool. Some of the people there are still sure that Debussy
is a lunatic, and they think that my use of the whole-tone scale has some-
thing to do with Max Nordau’s Degeneration—and that the whole thing’s
mixed up with woman suffrage. I don’t know why American musicians
have to be such a lot of old women!”
Yet she seemed to me herself today unmistakably and agreeably
feminine. The very outspokenness and challenge to men which the women
of that generation had cultivated when they set out on professional careers
characterized her as a woman more vividly than the sexually neutralized
role of the business-girl or bar-companion did the women of my own
generation; and she had also a pretty keen instinct to make her attractive-
ness felt: she talked with a certain flashing play with her proud and
arresting eyes. So she must have looked, I imagined, in the days when
she had been wholly independent and after her grandfather’s death.
By this time our old understanding had completely been re-estab-
lished, and she was letting herself go. She was very amusing and ruthless
about the older American composers—the fancy dress costumes from
Italy and France and the mythological insipidities which played so large
a part in their work: the reveries at Carcassonne and the tone-poems on
Pippa Passes, the Icaruses and Daphnes and Psyches, the sarabands of
satyrs and nymphs. “David Emery Nickerson’s Semiramis,” she said, “is
simply Mrs. Wentworth of Boston. In the first part you see her in her
Brookline house surrounded by obedient Nubians; in the second, she has a
conversation with David Emery Nickerson and he reads her some sonnets
by Rossetti; in the third, she regrets that she can never be married to
David Emery Nickerson and goes in for social work.”
I was rather surprised, however, when she told me that the pieces
of her own that she had played at Whiting’s concert had titles which
seemed to connect them with the impressionism of an earlier period
and which did not seem characteristic of the harder and more formal
style in which she had lately been working. They were Gulls off the Coast
and, The Lighthouse, and The Island Cemetery—the products,
she said, of her vacation. I forebore to ask about the sonata which had
seemed to worry her so. She had evidently been to Nantucket since the
time I had seen her in August, and managed to come back refreshed.
I begged her to play her new suite and she consented with a frank-

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510 PARTISAN REVIEW ness and grace which seemed youthful and contrasted with the professional matter-of-factness, that matter-of-factness of the middle-aged artist that has almost become grim, with which she had taken me into her workshop before. We went again into the adjoining music-room, where the cellos and violins, even the old dark cracked box of the clavichord, looked ripe in the September light, which made things inside seem the ruddier for the turn for the colder without. It was pleasant to watch Ellen's straight back, her sure and energetic features, as she took command of the key board. And the pieces were lucid and lovely at moments even thrilling. They did seem to me a lapse into the past: they were so much like other things she had written in a vein I thought she had put behind her. But then, why shouldn't she escape into the past? It was better than going to pieces. I noticed, however, in the last one an insistent reiterated phrase which recalled the obsessive monotony of the movement from the sonata she had played me. "I like the one about the cemetery particularly," I said, wanting to reassure her after our rather painful conversation in connection with the other piece. "I think you've handled that heavy recurrent effect perfectly successfully there." "It returns to solemnity and deadness," she said, playing the last bars again. "I wanted to give the effect of the whole thing being anchored by the graveyard. In a place like that, it's the dead, the men who have died at sea, that give life its price, its seriousness. You feel them under the ground, just lying there and never moving. The cemetery doesn't speak aloud, but everybody knows what it means. Even the lighthouse implies the cemetery and the gulls can fly around above the graves, they can fly ever so high up above them but the gulls are just light irresponsible spirits that haven't anything to lose from the sea-the thing that's really serious is the human dead, and the living who are pledged to the dead. The islanders who are dead are lying there like the part of the island that's submerged-all the part that's above water is based on them.-You see I've got suggestions of the same effect in the other pieces, too." She showed me how the flight of the gulls would fall back into the shadow of the earth and how the graveyard returned a deep echo to the pealing of the Lisbon bell. "Are you sure that that belongs with the gulls and the bell?" I felt that it tarnished the clearness. "No: it doesn't belong with them, of course: it's supposed not to belong but it has to be there just the same, oh, I know it: it's flat, flat, flat!" she said suddenly, flinging over the leaf and getting up from the piano. "It's the David Emery Nickerson in all of us or should I say, 'the Mrs. Wentworth of Brookline?" She smiled and was amusing again. She had said it as the French would say, "C'est plat, plat, plat!" and I had noticed during our conversation an addiction to French gestures and phrases. She had had toute une histoire over a manuscript she had sent to a music competition, and she had shrugged over the inefficiency of the old fuddiduds who made the awards. There was a certain fluidity and elegance that might have been brought back from Paris about her

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hair and the green silk bow that she wore in her starched white collar
and that softened the squareness of her face. That was one curious
thing. I reflected as I was walking away from the house, about the effect
on American artists of studying abroad. They got in Europe a kind of
inoculation with the cultures of alien races which might give them the
illusion for a time that they were part of European culture, that, carried
along by its current, they had actually been merged in its waters. But
in ninety-nine cases this had never affected in any at all vital way the
native American base. If this base had no principle of growth of its own,
the inoculation simply wore off and left something that was flat, flat, flat.
I found that I was thinking of Ellen as if she had just come back
from Paris. In her case, of course, when France had worn off, she had
had a base that sent up shoots. Yet there was something about those
iterated phrases, like a child's repeated sentence or the insurmountab
image of a mad person, that wasn't right, wasn't good.

I thought about Ellen often; I hoped she wasn't herself going mad.
I tried to call her a few weeks later, and they told me the phone was out
of order.

I walked over that afternoon. The trees of Vallombrosa were quite
transformed with reds that were blazing or paling, full orange and
lemon-yellow, made richer by a slight autumn mist; and they were so
much in advance of the trees outside, which were only beginning to turn,
that I wondered whether the doctor's rare species were particularly sen-
sitive to frost.

When I had almost reached the house, a girl on a bicycle shot by me,
coasting along the drive. She looked toward me when she had set her
bicycle against the latticed base of the piazza, and I felt that she expected
me to speak to her. But something in her face disconcerted me, and instead
of inquiring for Mrs. Soblianski, I asked-perhaps because Sigismund
seemed now so remote from that house in the presence of what I took to
be a relative and because at the same time it was incorrect to refer to
Ellen as "Miss"-whether "Mrs. Terhune" were at home. "Mrs. Terhune
is in the city," said the girl. She had green eyes that reminded me of
Ellen's and a rather pale indoor face. She wore a bang over her forehead
and short hair fluffed out behind, and she had on a white dress with a
long skirt and long sleeves and an enormous folded-over collar that com-
pletely enveloped her shoulders. I had been startled to note as she rode
by me that she was wearing long black stockings. Just the wrong thing
for bike-riding-what an archaizing family they were! (I assumed this
was some cousin of Ellen's): it made me a little impatient.

"Won't you come in?" she said, as I stood searching her face rather
queerly. It was a serious intelligent face, and her manner was so mature
her age, though she could not have been more
that it was difficult to tell
than thirteen or fourteen. I replied that I wouldn't come in but would
sit down on the porch for a moment. There were a pair of white wicker-

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backed rockers, and we sat down in them side by side. "How has Mrs.
Terhune been?" I inquired, realizing I had said it again. "She had
to go to the hospital," said the girl. "Grandfather took her up today."
I was startled and troubled to hear it; I hoped it wasn't anything serious.
"Grandfather says it isn't serious." I was glad that there had been some-
one to take care of her. "She may have to have a slight operation-they
won't be able to decide for a few days." She had a reasonable and earnest
tone and the language of an experienced head nurse; but I saw that she
was distressed and keyed-up: she had a nervous little trick like a tie of
tossing her bang aside. I wondered about the operation and asked for
the name of the hospital, which turned out to be, not, as I expected, the
Neurological Institute or anything of the sort, but a gynecological place.
I didn't want to inquire further and presently remarked on the beauty
of the trees. She explained to me the different species, of which she knew
all the Latin names, with the same peculiar poise and precision, which
masked an uncomfortable tenseness. "Haven't you been doing a lot to the
place lately?" I asked. She thought a moment and tossed her bang:
"We've planted a new copper beech. It was almost the only thing we
didn't have. I hope it gets to be as gorgeous as the ones on the place
across the road. They look as if they were made of bronze. You could
play them on the cello." She did not smile and was not trying to be
clever: that was the way they evidently talked in that family. "We have a
new birdhouse, too." "Have you really?"-I expressed an interest. "It's
a summer hotel for martins. Would you like to see it?" she asked.
She led me by steps down a terrace that smelt rankly of grass in the
autumn damp and past large symmetrical maples that had dropped their
leaves in round golden rugs, to a cluster of cedars and firs where I did
not remember to have been. I noticed that Sigismund's studio, which
ought to have been visible from there, had been taken down since summer.
There was not a trace of it left; and I was shocked at the thought that
Ellen had had it removed out of bitterness. I was amused, when we came
to the birdhouse, to see that it had been designed in the same ornamental
and obsolete style as the big house itself. There were three stories per-
forated by windows and numerous cupolas and towers. The young cousin
explained to me about purple martins, which, she said, were really steel-
blue and opened and shut like scissors. She talked about other birds, too,
and I saw that she not only knew their habits and names, but had a kind
of poetic perception of their qualities. It occurred to me that Ellen in
her girlhood must have perceived things with the same personal vividness.
She had once composed, I remembered, a whole suite of little pieces on
objects and creatures about the place: the cupola, the stained-glass window,
the garden, the pedigreed collie-and yes, there had been a birdhouse.
There was a squirrel-cage not far away, and I went over to see what
was in it. It was built around the trunk of an oak and had one of those
wheels that they spin. When we came up, a squirrel was madly spinning
it. I have always disliked these wheels, which I regard as an imposture on

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513

the squirrels. "Do you think they like to do that?" I asked. "I don't
know," the girl seriously answered. "They don't have to go in there, you
know. But I suppose it must be rather discouraging for them when they
stop and the wheel begins to carry them back. It always makes them start
working again even when they must be tired. They're afraid of going
backwards, I guess. Yes: I don't think that can be at all pleasant." She
gave her bang a twitch. "Some people are sorry they were born, but
everybody has a right to their lives, don't you think they have? People
just have to go ahead and live."
I thought I caught an echo here of old plays by Bernard Shaw or
other writings of the live-your-own-life era, which she had got hold of and
which had made an impression on her. But it reminded me also of Ellen
and her talk about her mother and father. The girl, of course, was right:
you did have to go ahead and live. I felt a little disgusted by Ellen's
attempt to undo her own past by having Sigismund's studio removed.
After all, he had studied and composed there in the most creditable phase
of his career. They had worked together, been something together, even
though they had later pulled apart. And now she had struck it out as if
it had never been.
As we were watching, the squirrel in the cage stopped running against
its treadmill. But it did not behave as the girl had described: it allowed
itself to be carried around tail-first for several revolutions, then darted
out of the wheel and began rushing up and down and from one corner
of the cage to the other, as if it were trying to find a breach.
"Do you like them in cages like that," I asked as we were walking
away, "or running around wild?" "When they're wild," she readily
replied, "they aren't really any more free than they are when they're kept
in cages, if you take the different conditions into account. They can only
live in certain places where they can get certain kinds of things to eat,
lots of nuts and things and they're safer than they are outside, because
they're protected from the red squirrels. The red squirrels bite the gray
squirrels and try to drive them out." She was a formidable little pedant-
perhaps a little prig. She could never have been much with other children.
It was appalling to think of the figure she would cut among boys and
girls of her own age in that outlandish dress and black stockings and
with those metal bands on her teeth. I felt, in fact, a certain nervous self-
consciousness involved with her precocious complacency.
"I shouldn't mind living in a cage," she went on, "if I was sure I'd
get out someday. I am in a sort of cage out here." These shifts of hers
disconcerted me, and I didn't know how to reply. "Young people often
feel they're caged," I said in a tone of lightness and kindness but with a
feeling that I was being sententious. "But, as you say, they find the way
out." "Grandfather doesn't want me to go away to school, because he
says that he and the governess can teach me a great deal better, and when
I went to school in New York last winter it did make it rather embarrassing

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PARTISAN REVIEW
because I was so far ahead of all the other girls. But I think that there
are other reasons for a girl's going away to school." "Yes, of course there
are," I assented-I found myself siding against her grandfather. "I wish
you would tell Grandfather that," she said in her sedate way. She evi-
dently assumed I was a friend of her family, or was it merely that we
had somehow established a sympathetic understanding? "I will if the
occasion presents itself," I found myself replying. "Oh, please do! won't
you?" It might help," she became for a moment quite girlish; then
returned to her judicious tone: "Of course, if anything happened to
Mother, I'd have to stay here with Grandfather. I shouldn't be justified
in going away."
We had reached the front steps, and I said goodbye. She invited me
to come again in her most mature manner and hoped, with a twitch of her
bang, that her mother would soon be back. I hoped-getting the name
right with an effort, as if I were obliged to struggle with some false con-
ception that bulked in my mind without my being able to see it-I hoped
that Miss Terhune would soon be better. The effect of this on the girl was
baffling for a moment and yet gave me a queer sort of qualm as if I knew
I had committed an indiscretion. She suddenly seemed embarrassed, but
she handled it with her usual self-possession: "Oh, I'm not really sick.
Mother worries about me, but Grandfather says it's not important. It's
silly, of course, to have fainting-fits, but I'm not really sick at all!" I saw
that she had taken my remark to herself: she must be some sort of niece
of Ellen's father. "Well, I hope," I said, "that everybody's better."
As I left her alone on the steps, with the darkened house behind her,
in that countryside of deserted residences, the colors of the trees fading
in the day-end and the thickening mist, I was visited by a doubt, a pang,
by a feeling almost dolorous that lingered, as if I almost knew something
about her which I could not remember to have learned, as if I wanted to
save her from something. Though I had never quite recognized the fact
in the past, I could see now that that house was an unhappy one. I thought
of the girl mounting the steps, passing the chairs in which nobody sat,
swinging open the large front door with its panelling of varnished oak
and its upper and lower parts that were separate-going back into that
lampless interior, so full of an American past which seemed to me even
at its best so cluttered, middle-class and banal. I had left the place so
quiet and dark that it seemed to me even improbable that anyone would
come to ring the gongs and summon her in to dinner.

III.
When the summer people in a place like Hecate County go away after
the first of September, the people who stay on through the winter are
more thrown in on themselves and on each other. New contours of the
community emerge; one distinguishes a new scale of values. One gradu-
ally becomes interested in neighbors whom it had not occurred to one to

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515

think interesting at the time when there was more going on; and one
broods on other people much more.
I brooded a good deal on Ellen. I sent flowers and a note to the
hospital, but I never had any reply. Her phone was still out of order, and
I thought I ought to call at the house and find out how she was doing;
but for days I was restrained by some instinctive reluctance which would
take me into town or to some other neighbor's house when I had set out
with the intention of going there.
This reluctance was due to an unpleasant reaction which I had had
after my last two visits. One of the symptoms of certain neurotic states
is the irrational drop of morale, the depression that may suddenly descend
on us and absolutely flatten us out, from some stimulus that seems irrele-
vant or trifling-a passing sarcasm in conversation directed at someone
else, a child ducking a cat in the gutter, a memory drifting into the head
of something clumsy one did in one's childhood. I had had a touch of
this at one time, and I found that my visits to Ellen's renewed it. This was
only, I told myself, vicarious: I was merely being affected accidentally
by things that in reality were experienced by others; but it was enough
to give me disagreeable sinkings, living as I then did alone, in the evening
or even the next afternoon after I had been to Vallombrosa. It was a
revival of my old morbidity; but it took a peculiar turn. I would feel
suddenly after lunch or dinner that living in the country was hopeless,
that I had no communication with other people, and that nothing I was
doing meant anything; yet on the other hand I could not see any hope
in living in the city or traveling: I knew what human beings were-they
might be more or less picturesque in their various environments and
climates, and to the young this was a source of excitement; but to me, in
my middle thirties, it was desolatingly, incontrovertibly evident that
people under any conditions were the same pathetic freaks, and why should
I go to the trouble of moving about among them in order to observe
the shapes which their defects and distortions could take?
I had had something like this feeling before, though the emphasis
on deformity, I believed, was new: but in the past it had led to an impulse
which was vaguely and remotely suicidal. Now the impulse was directed
toward an act that would be absolutely immediate and definite: to go back
to Ellen's house. This seemed a good deal less serious than suicide; yet
there was something about it that scared me. For one thing, it presented
itself to me as a compulsion imposed from outside myself as to which
I had not even the option of yielding on my own terms; and, for another,
I felt that in revisiting that house, I was getting into something very
queer which I didn't know how to handle. I did my best to resist this
compulsion, and I did not allow myself to go till the impulse was no
longer felt as morbid and I could put it to myself that I was merely
dropping in to inquire about the illness of a friend. Nevertheless, I went:
I could only choose one way.
I did, however, semi-consciously, make a point of going early in the

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afternoon so that I should not have to be there at nightfall. I offset
my shrinking in this respect by insisting to myself that the day itself was
overcast and dull. But when I entered the gates of Vallombrosa, the sky
became suddenly clear. I looked up: it was almost cloudless; before me
the thinning branches and the angles of the slate-covered roof were distinct
and a little bleak in the emptied October light; and I recognized, against
my intelligence, that each of my last entrances there had been marked by
some discontinuity of weather or of the appearance of things on the
grounds.

        Discomfited, I became self-conscious: like an explorer in an unknown
terrain, I scanned the place carefully for changes, without, I told myself,
noticing any; then I dropped my eyes to the driveway, where I saw that
it had recently been raining there, though that had not been the case
outside. There were hoof-marks of horses in the muddy gravel, and what
looked like the sharp narrow tracks of a carriage.

        I rang the bell and saw as I waited a croquet-set in a long wooden
box which I had not noticed before. I felt a little dizzy for a moment,
but told myself it was perfectly natural that the visiting girl cousin should
have brought it out.—Then a brisk and definite step; an accurate hand on
the latch; the door opened, and I found myself confronted with a woman.
I had never seen—the mother of the girl, no doubt. She bore some resemb-
lance to Ellen: her long nose was a little beakish and her jawbones some-
what stood out; but she was blonder and rather taller, and, though she,
too, had the squarish shoulders, she was not so chunky as Ellen; her
eyes, though they were green, were bluish and did not have the intelli-
gence and animation of Ellen's.

        "Oh, how do you do," she said in a cordial but formal manner, as if,
though she did not know me, she knew about me and had expected my
visit. I came into the familiar hallway. "Won't you leave your coat and
hat here?" she said. I noticed, as I was taking the n off, that she gave a
sharp glance at my clothes—the glance of a woman who is certain that
she knows what is correct and what is not, who is severely and unremit-
tingly critical of everyone with whom she has to do and who is not in
the habit of hesitating to make her disapproval felt. But any surprise she
may have felt at the unconventionality of my clothes could have been
nothing to the shock I received when she turned to lead me into the living-
room. She was wearing a kind of bustle, a built-out ruffle at the back of
her skirt that looked like one of the ruffle-like crests on that elaborate
and poisonous jellyfish called the Portuguese man-of-war. She had also
a jacket buttoned closely in front, with two little tails that stuck out above
the ruffle; and on her dress, which was silk and mauve, were several
fringes of lace; at the bottom of the skirt, at the throat and on the sleeves
that came just beyond her elbows. It must have been the kind of thing
that was in fashion in the middle of the eighties; but the dress was so
handsome and so naturally worn that it did not seem obsolete. Her hair
was done up high toward the back of her head, and she was wearing black
onyx earrings.

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517

The smell of the living-room, though this had been different before,
seemed curiously natural, too. It emanated from the fumes of a hot coal-
grate red-glowing in the white marble fireplace, from the stuff of the
garnet curtains muffling the windows with valances and loops, and from
the pinkish flowered thick-napped carpeting which I told myself was
not really suffocating but which caused me to say to myself, "Brussels
carpet" at the moment before I sat down. But I had been at first so stunned
by the whole situation that I had not been able to look at things calmly,
and I now subsided into it in a way that seemed to be depriving me of the
power to examine them consciously and closely.
"It was kind of you to come," she said. "My father was extremely
sorry that he had to go to town. He had word this morning that Mr.
Schroeder's condition was worse. It's such a tragedy, isn't it? He was
deceived by the people he trusted, and my father says the shock has almost
killed him." "Yes: I'm sorry not to see your father," I fell readily into
replying. "He told me to tell you you would hear from him, she pur-
sued, going on at once to what was evidently the business before us. "I
don't know how far he has described to you my symptoms" . . . "Not in
any great detail," I answered.
I told myself, suddenly relieved at hitting on a solution for the
strange situation, that the woman was obviously insane and that she was
going to tell me about voices and about people who were working against
her as they had against Mr. Schroeder. But, instead, she began giving me
a very precise, a positively clinical, chronicle of fainting-fits, spells of
nausea and convulsive internal pains. I presently grasped that she was
pregnant and, in my rather lightheaded embarrassment, I was about to ask
her whether she were the mother of the girl I had seen the other day but
I'pulled myself up at the realization that such a question would be out
of character with the role I was allowing myself to assume-since the
physician I was supposed to be would undoubtedly know about her child-
ren and would probably not have been here the other day. The question,
in fact, was impossible; I found that I was powerless to put it-I was
powerless to say or do anything that would violate the logic of the scene.
And now, with a beating of the heart, but inevitably and by clear recogni-
tion, I sank into the consciousness that the woman before me was Ellen's
unfortunate mother and that her father was old Dr. Bristead; and I knew-
it had been Ellen herself in her girlhood whom
I had seen on my previous visit: Ellen when she was still in her girlhood
and just before her mother's death; and that the Ellen I had met on the
visit before had been Ellen at some time in her twenties when she had just
come back from Paris. And now here was her mother, a young woman,
just before Ellen's birth. As this picture became plain in my mind, I
stiffened and sat perfectly still. I was kept tense by the anxiety to follow
her, to say something that played in with the story. The queer thing was
that it had now become impossible for me to set myself right with Time,
because whenever I summoned to mind the sequence of events in that

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PARTISAN REVIEW

house, it seemed to me perfectly normal: looking out on my series of
glimpses from the point of my visit today, the first picture I saw was of
Ellen as a girl, and the next was of Ellen as a young woman; further on
she was middle-aged—and wasn't this the natural sequence? I beheld
her growing older, didn't I? I had a feeling of unreality, yet I couldn't
see it any other way. Giddily and intently I listened, inquiring, when
it seemed necessary for me to say something: "Did your father prescribe
anything for that?" or "How often have you been having these attacks?"
But she needed no prompting to talk. I got the impression that she
was rather hypochondriac and was gloating over the tale of her symptoms.
She was not at all restrained by the prudery which might have gone with
the upholstery of her costume: she was the daughter of an enlightened
doctor and she had been taught not to shrink from such matters. Though
she was dignified and restrained in the extreme, the very patient objec-
tivity and exactitude with which she described her disorders somehow
made demands on the bearer for astonishment and commiseration, and
I found myself evincing in my expression and tone a graver and graver
concern. "I dare say," she continued, "that my condition has been aggra-
vated by the domestic situation—I suppose my father told you about it."
"A little," I replied; I was remembering what Ellen had told me about
her parents. "I don't know," she went on with pretended detachment but
deadly masochistic hatefulness, "whether a normal parturition is possible
under circumstances of that kind: continual scenes that are deeply dis-
turbing and the uncertainty every night as to whether my husband is
coming home." "Can't you stay down here?" I suggested. "I don't want to
stay longer than two or three days: I'm afraid of what might happen to
him without me. When one thinks how even men of fine character like
Mr. Schroeder and General Grant—I don't mean that my husband isn't
a man of fine character, but he is unstable and a little irresponsible—but
when one thinks how even men like that have been ruined and humiliated!"
She now went on to tell me in detail about a physical examination
which had been given her by her regular obstetrician and which had
disclosed certain structural conditions that he was afraid might make
childbirth difficult. "What does your father say about it?" I asked. "He
tells me that he doesn't think it's serious, but he wished to consult you."
The idea was somehow conveyed to me that she wanted to be advised that
it would be dangerous for her to have a baby—not, I thought, that she
wouldn't go through with it but she wanted to make her husband suffer
by continual complaint and reproach. I felt that I must bite off the inter-
view and escape from that horrible house. Ellen's mother's cold eye and
her reasonable smile which masked the morbidity of her pregnancy were
exercising over me an influence that I had to struggle to break.
"Everything is so uncertain, isn't it?" Mrs. Terhune was saying—
"with all these dreadful disasters. One doesn't know what kind of world
one is bringing one's children into. People lose all their resources over
night, and one doesn't want a child not to have the things that one has

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had oneself.” I answered shortly, got up brusquely, and said that she
must come to my office: I would give her an examination there. She
seemed puzzled and a little displeased as if she had imagined that this
was what I had called for, and suggested that the sooner I could examine
her the better, as she felt that her condition was becoming more acute.
“I’ll phone you tomorrow,” I said—then feared I had slipped in my
role; they had certainly had telephones then—or now, but had they talked
about “phoning” then? I was frightened a moment, then fortified by the
thought that my instinct had kept me straight—I was still in the actual
world. I almost smiled at the joke; but the woman would not allow me.
She looked at me a moment seriously, as if she were a trifle dismayed and
even not quite sure what I meant; and I saw that she thought I had spoken
of some unfamiliar clinical technique. I seized the moment to shake hands
with her reassuringly and get out of the house and away.
All the way down the drive, however, I had the illusion that her
insistence was attached to me, lengthening like a rubber band, whose pull
I felt growing stiffer as it was thinner and thinner drawn out. At the gate
I hoped the pull would snap, but I awaited the moment with a fear that
it might not after all bring relief: it was as if I were cheating on some
perverse obligation, leaving unfinished some ugly task. Whatever I was
leaving behind me—and I did not quite know what it was—I was definitely
involved in that thing.

I woke up in the night in a panic: a seizure of horror and disgust
which had projected itself in a nightmare. I had thought I was in the
hallway of Ellen’s house, struggling with the tromba marina, which I was
trying to carry upstairs. It would catch in the mahogany-stained ban-
isters in such a way that it was difficult to extricate or it would get
between my legs and cause me to fall on all fours on the heavily-carpeted
stairs. And this was all bound up in some way with the naked Canova
Hebe, which I had noted the day before in the hallway, though Ellen had
always kept it in a museum-like reception room. The statue in the dream
had represented some ideal of nineteenth-century womanhood, symmetrical,
smooth and chaste, to which my clumsy mishaps with the obsolete instru-
ments were somehow an impious affront. But then the thing took a sinister
turn. I had had the bow of the tromba marina and I was trying to do something
damaging to a modern violin: instead of using it to draw forth music, I
was jabbing it into the f-holes; I was compelled to do this, but whenever
I did, Mrs. Terhune would shriek in a way that I felt was purposely
exaggerated—it was all, as a matter of fact, prearranged—and yet which
convicted me of hideous guilt.

I turned on the light to make sure that that woman was not with
me there, and as I looked at my green-stained woodwork and my rough-
finished plaster walls, whose leaded folding windows opened right on the
trees and the grass, I knew that a realization had been pushing to the
surface in my sleep. In that loneliness of the woods surrounding my

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520 PARTISAN REVIEW

house, the meaning pressed in on me with the night. What the woman
really wanted me to do was to declare her unfit to have a baby and to
recommend a legal abortion. She wanted to spite her husband, the child
that was to be, life itself. But why? I couldn't understand her. Was she
human or a specter of nightmare? She was real in the sense that I had
seen her, with her horrible handsome mauve dress and her shallow and
cruel eyes, and that I could not get her out of my head; but in the dream
there was somebody behind her, she emanated from somebody else—there
had been once when I had seen her in her bedroom just before she started
screaming, and the eyes had been bright green, full of intellect, and full
not of hypocritical agony but of fixed and unforgiving condemnation.
And now I saw it absolutely clearly: this apparition came from
Ellen. It was Ellen who had made of her mother this monster, who was
forcing her to get rid of her baby, who was destroying her own existence
before it had come out of the womb! And she was somehow forcing me
to abet her . . . I got myself to sleep with a book just as the windows
were unblotting from night.
And when I woke up, I was no longer so sure. The sun was quite
brilliant and bracing: it sent a long pane of light across my breakfast and
brought out the whites and yellows of my eggs with their sparkling of
salt and pepper; I talked to the soft-spoken colored maid about the movie
she had seen the night before; and I stood outside for a moment and
was delighted by the deep-orange zinnias, the pom-pom clusters of little
lemon marigolds, the scarlet big daisies of cosmos on high and spidery
stems that still were bright at the end of October. I decided that my
explanation of my visit of the day before had been simply a part of the
nightmare. What I had seen was not a woman of the eighties but a con-
temporary relation of Ellen's, completely insane no doubt but an actual
human being, and I must not allow myself to be led by her into getting
insane myself. I expelled the whole thing from my mind; read the papers,
wrote several letters, and contemplated a trip to the city. I needed the
city, I felt.
But when I went for a walk that afternoon, the sun had gone out for
the day and the whole thing came back on me again. I saw the situation
precisely as I had seen it in the middle of the night, and I could not see
it in any other way—I could not get outside it. And I now felt not merely
an irrational pull toward the house where Ellen lived; I had a fear it
would come to find me—that the past might have its gangsters, too, who
would wait for you and meet you on the autumn roads where so little
traffic passed. And I presently turned and came home and lay on a couch
and brooded.
Yet I could not go to town, I now told myself: there was something
I could not leave unfinished. I had to see it finished, and I had to do my
best to see that it was finished as it should be. Precisely what this meant
I did not know—except that it imposed upon me a duty to stand up to the
Terhunes and their house. I must not be afraid to go out, I must not be

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ELLEN TERHUNE
521
afraid to pass the place; I must even be not afraid to go back there, but
I must not go back in response to that pull which was itself a fear.
All the rest of the week and the week following, then, I went out for
my walk every day, and I several times glanced in at Vallombrosa, where
I could not see that anything was changed-though I believe I did not
look very closely. I still had my bad moments at night after the painful
importunings of dreams and during stretches of those solitary strolls which
had now become daily trails. But by the end of the second week I was
imagining that the pressure was lighter. I had had two untormented
nights, and I set out on Saturday afternoon with something like ease and
indifference.
I walked first along a little back road that ran parallel with the
regular motor-road on which the Terhune house faced-a road that lay
back of their place with a neighbor's estate between them and it; then I
turned down a hedge-lined lane that connected with the larger road, real-
izing as I did so that I had lately never taken these lanes. I heard some-
thing drive in behind me and drew over close to the hedge, but it was
stopped in front of me: I looked up and saw a lady in a varnished yellow
phaeton, who seemed to be speaking to me. "Oh, how do you do," I
replied with an instinctive familiarity that preceded conscious recognition.
"You should have let us know you were coming today," she said as she
reached down her gloved hand. She was slimmer and brisker and trimmer
than when I had seen her before. She was wearing a tight dress of a
brown-and-green plaid, with a beautiful hour-glass waist and no bustle
or ruffle to encumber the skirt, and a pretty little straw bonnet, which was
tied under her chin with a big green bow.
I got in at her invitation, as if it were a matter of course, and she
drove on sitting up very straight between the gracefully scrolling wicker
fenders and behind the slim long-lashed whip that stood upright in its
socket. I was occupied for the first few minutes in fitting my story to my
role: there was a passage in the conversation where we almost lost con-
nections when I had to explain that I had walked instead of having them
meet me at the train because I enjoyed walking, then found out that the
train only stopped at a place eight or nine miles away: I was forced to
confess, laughing nervously, that I had had only been boasting before, that a
farmer had brought me part way. And I did not notice at first that we were
driving through a landscape that seemed totally new to me. We had
turned out of the lane to the right through a gate I had not known was
there, and now were trotting along a driveway which should have led to
the house next-door to the Bristeads; but there was no house there; instead,
the drive curved around through a wide expanse of lawn that was not
anywhere broken by a hedge or a fence. We approached a new-looking
yellow house and drew up under a porte-cochere. I realized suddenly and
queerly that we were back at the Terhune house. I said that I hadn't
known about this driveway that connected with the other road. "Yes: the

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522
PARTISAN REVIEW
drive runs right through the place," she replied. I grasped that the place
next door was still a part of the Bristead estate: the doctor would later
sell it. I had entered into the domain of the Bristeads as soon as I had
turned into the lane.
"I don't know why Jerry didn't see me," she said when she had waited
hardly a second. "Would you mind going to the house and getting Rosa
to call him?-I think he's getting very lax," she said as I climbed down.
I walked into the house. Should I bolt? No, I couldn't. I passed reso-
lutely through the hallway-conscious, as I passed the Hebe, that I did not
give it a thought. But when I got to the door to the kitchen, I knew there
would be nobody there. I opened it, however, and looked in. There were
a big black coal-range with a stovepipe, a bare clean wooden floor, a
double row of copper pots and pans hanging along the wall. I called out,
"Hello . . . Rosa . . ."; but nobody answered. I ought now, I said to
myself, to go out the back door to the stable; but I had a half-dreamlike
instinct that I should not find anyone there either; and my sense that I
was not going to go there was filled out by a voice from the hallway which
told me that the coachman had come.
I joined her. She was taking off her bonnet. "Well, the styles in men's
clothes astonish me," she said, as I took off my overcoat. "Is that really
what they're wearing now?" "I'm perhaps a little eccentric," I said. "I
get to town so seldom," she continued, as we went into the living-room,
"that I don't know anything that's going on. And I believe that the young
men I see are rather conservative about their clothes."
The atmosphere, I felt, was relaxed. The room seemed to be largely
unchanged. There were the curtains, the grate with its coals, the tables
with low-hanging covers, the ornaments on a whatnot in the corner. I
noticed a large bronze gas chandelier with shades of pattern-frosted glass.
I must have scrutinized these objects rather curiously because she glanced
toward a group of swords and sabers, hung up in a design on the wall, at
which she evidently thought I was looking, and exclaimed, "Those are
oriental weapons. I don't think they have any place here-but Papa
considers them decorative. I tell him he ought to build a small armoury.-
Do sit down."
I questioned her for a moment about the various kinds of swords;
but she wasn't quite sure what they were and was obviously impatient
with them. There was something she wanted to get on to. "I should like
to talk to you quite frankly about something," she began as soon as we
were seated, "and I wish you would advise me frankly. You're the closest
friend now that we have-though it's been such a long time since we've
seen you." I was, then, an old family friend. "I have no brothers or
uncles to turn to as most women have-I have nobody in the world but
Papa, and you know how prejudiced he is about so many things, and how
obstinately he sticks to his prejudices. I know that I can say that to you
because you know that I love and admire him more than anyone else in
the world-but-well, you know how sure he is about everything."

=== Page 76 ===
ELLEN TERHUNE
523
nodded and smiled in concurrence. "Well, I'd like to put my problem
before you if you don't mind being plunged into family problems the
very minute you arrive. I know it's not a very cheerful welcome, but I
think that if I'm going to talk about it, I'd better do it before Papa gets
back. You know that he doesn't give people much chance to express
opinions different from his own. Well, here is my problem quite baldly.
A young man has asked me to marry him"And your father doesn't
approve of him," I put in, a little more at ease in the new situation than
I had been in the role of physician. "And Papa doesn't approve of him
at all. In fact, he's violently opposed to my marrying him and you
know how he is when he's opposed to anything. He's even making it
difficult now for Fred to come to the house." The young man, then-I
half-felt I had known it already was Ellen's father, Fred Terhune, and
this was Ellen's mother, younger than when I had seen her before and
not yet decided about marrying him.
"Why does he object to this young man?" I asked. "It's simply
that he's in Wall Street," she answered. "I think that his attitude is very
unreasonable. The financiers have done so much for this country and it's
ridiculous to pretend that they're not as good as our best-Mr. Morgan,
for example, who has just as much taste as Papa and is making such a
wonderful collection. It isn't as if he were in business! Fred's family
are Terhune Brothers, the bankers, and his position is perfectly unexcep
tionable. I am sure that his character is sound. He was a little wild in his
younger days, but now he wants a home and an ordered life. That's hard
for Papa to understand, because Papa has always been occupied with
intellectual things, and he can't understand that a man whom he regards
as a mere man of fashion can be a proper person to marry. I really think
he'd rather I married a musician someone preferably who played the
cello, so that we could have a family trio." I was aware of the prejudice
against "business" on the part of the professional classes that had lasted in
the United States till long after our national life had been actually dom
inated by business men; but this prejudice was not generally extended to
bankers, and I put down the doctor's opposition to distrust of the particu
lar young man or to some special and personal crankiness. But she went
on to indicate another cause which I guessed to be fundamental. "Of
course, I understand, too, that Papa has been lonely since Mama's death,
and that he doesn't want to have me leave. But, after all, Papa has so many
resources his work and his music and his collections and his chess and
I can't go on like this forever. He doesn't understand that if I don't get
married now, I may be left alone myself. And Fred needs me, too-he's
told me so with all the feeling of which anyone is capable and I can see
that his bachelor life is beginning to do him harm. Now please tell me
frankly and sincerely what you think I ought to do. Shall I just go ahead
and marry Fred in spite of Papa's opposition? I feel that he's perfectly
capable of refusing to give me anything and never having anything to do

=== Page 77 ===
524 PARTISAN REVIEW

with me again. But if I do as he wants, I’ll feel that I’m betraying Fred’s
love and trust in me. Now how would you advise me to act?”

This, then, was an earlier turning-point, a moment to determine the
future; and again there was the curious effort to thrust the decision on me.

This plea of Miss Bristead’s, who I gathered was now in her lateish
twenties, reminded me of Ellen’s appeal at the time I had seen her in her
girlhood, that I should put in a word with her grandfather to have her
sent away to school. And I had now a very clear conviction of something
that I had only felt without figuring to myself before: that Dr. Bristead
was an egregious old egoist, selfish in his relations with his family and
oppressive in his opinionated omniscience. Ellen, too, would want to get
away, and she would have sympathized with her mother. I sympathized
with her, certainly, myself. Miss Bristead had a genuine distinction, she
was handsome in her glamorless way; above all, as she leaned forward
in her smart dress that reminded me of Ellen’s plaid skirt when she
had just come back from Paris, and threw out her very well-shaped hands
that might have been reproduced in china for those vases that hold single
flowers—above all, she was an eager young woman who wanted to escape
from that house and marry an urgent suitor. Besides, there was a certain
authority, a certain force of assertion that she commanded and to which
I felt myself yielding. Why shouldn’t she, I asked myself, be bored with
ministering to her father’s hobbies? Why shouldn’t she want to live in
the city? Why shouldn’t she yearn for and why shouldn’t she share in
that codified social life for which she was obviously well adapted and
of which her father had undoubtedly skimped her? Why shouldn’t she
marry Fred? He was doing no one any good in his present situation of
man-about-town past his prime. He could at least give her an independent
position, help her to found a family. It was as if I could not foresee the
future.

“I dare say you ought to marry him,” I replied to her request for
advice. “I do wish you would tell Papa that!”—she was grateful to me
for telling her to do the thing that she wanted to do at the same time
that she must have been fairly sure that I should follow the lead she had
given. “If anyone could persuade him, you could. I don’t want to do
anything without his consent—it would be so distressing for everybody!”
“I’ll try,” I said, smiling.

She looked away toward the adjoining music-room, the door into
which was open, but which I could not see from where I sat, as if she had
just heard somebody enter it. Then she was turning to me again as if to
go on talking when someone began to play the piano—ringing out, as I
imagined at random, the Don Juan theme from Strauss, which had not been
quite accurately remembered. Miss Bristead looked up as if uncertain how
to deal with the situation; but the music went on consecutively, developing
and playing with the theme. We saw that it was an organized piece. “Oh,
yes: do play it, dear!”—she looked toward the music-room. “This is your
new composition, isn’t it? I want so very much to hear it!” She leaned

=== Page 78 ===
ELLEN TERHUNE

525

over and said to me in a lowered voice, which was, however, hardly low
enough: "Our guest is playing something of her own. I hope you don't
mind. It may not be very wonderful, and I don't think the middle of the
afternoon is the ideal time to listen to music, do you?-but I don't want
to stop her now that she's started. I wasn't sure whether she'd be here this
afternoon and I hope she won't be in your way."

I nodded and gestured with my hand so that she would be still and
I could listen to the music. It was amusing and very adroit. The composer
had taken an echo of the blare of the Don Juan theme and subjected it to
all kinds of transformations. After stating it at first in its full exultation,
she had gone on to break its pace and to reduce it to a wavering whimper.
Against this appeared a steadier theme, sober, distinct and insistent, which
began by going along with Don Juan in a fairly orderly manner but
ended by getting at odds with him in a jagged amalgamation that seemed
to be jamming the whole movement. Miss Bristead gave me a look of
ironic disapproving amazement when these cacophonies began to sound.
She had listened before that rather thoughtfully, as if she did not know
quite how to take it, with her cheek leaned against her straight fingers and
her face partly turned toward the door; but now as the music appeared
to her to be getting more and more insane, she gave a little laugh in my
direction as if it were supposed to be funny, then resumed this pensive
attitude, politely and pleasantly smiling. Don Juan had the last word of
the contest that went on in the music, but in a triumph that was frankly
trashy. The whole thing had reminded me of Sigismund, who so loved
to exploit the Strauss tone-poem, identifying himself with the hero and
bringing down the house. "I don't know what you want to do to our
ears," said Miss Bristead in the direction of the doorway. "That sounds
as if it might be called Cat on the Keyboard-that little divertissement."

There was no answer from the other room: after a moment the piano
began again. Miss Bristead faintly raised her eyebrows at the pianist's
bizarre rudeness and again became silent. And now, almost without
astonishment, I recognized the slow movement of the sonata that Ellen
had played me in August. I heard unmistakably that theme-that sullen
immovable impediment-which had worried me so at the time and of
which I had felt a premonition in the music of Ellen's youth. I looked
up toward the door, and Miss Bristead shot me a glance and threw out
her hands in a gesture of "I give it up!" How horrible Ellen's harmonies
must sound to her mother, I reflected: they must be forty or fifty years
beyond her. I smiled faintly and nodded curtly and thereafter kept clear
of her eye. I listened to the music with interest. It was not now so thud-
ding and stunning: she had found out now how to vary it so that one did
not fear seriously any longer that the piece had simply stopped, and had
kept the effect of monotony. Daring and disconcerting though it was,
I saw that it would be ultimately successful. Certainly Ellen was an
admirable musician!

=== Page 79 ===
526 PARTISAN REVIEW

When again there was a pause of a moment, Miss Bristead sat and
looked at her lap. But quickly she returned to the charge: "I suppose,"
she said humorously to the doorway," that the first section represented
Baby when he was just beginning to bang and that the second is called
Five-Finger Exercises."

The piano picked up when the space had been made. I listened for
this movement with excitement. It began with the theme of obstruction
again, and, though this was now sharpened and speeded-up, I was at first
rather disappointed. In a moment, I was almost terrified. The four-notes
which had not let her move, now in their way became hysterically insis-
tent. The thing seemed to be getting out of hand and began to sound
absolutely hellish, a shrieking of desperation; and the horror of the
nightmare came back on me. Miss Bristead got up and coughed slightly
and went out through the door into the hall as if she had to speak to
the maid but at the same time desired definitely to indicate that she was
done with the music. I continued to listen, and there crept upon me a
freezing apprehension like that of those days when I had dreaded to come
to the house: the piano seemed to be carrying me, like the panic of my
dreams, to some bad unintelligible goal. The awful accelerated movement
had passed from the negative of inertia to a frenzied destructive denial.
But now it met a new kind of theme which it seemed itself to have produced
and which was lifted like the human cry in the slow movement of Beet-
hoven's last string quartet, shuddering and terror-stricken at first as it
thrilled from the sinister harping that was beginning to tear like a beast
at a carcase, then rising to a plangency, to a clarity, that, passing the
conventional limits of this sort of affirmation in music, began to assail
one's attention more recklessly, more compellingly, more triumphantly,
just as the diabolic yapping of the other theme, becoming fiercer and
fiercer, had forced itself beyond all limits. This cry, itself now reiterated,
not only wrecked the bounds of the conventional, it even seemed to escape
from the probable—anguished, appealing, pitying, recognizing all human
discrepancy, debasement, self-disgust and self-accusal of the individual
who knows his own nature and who yet cannot undo what he is; but
reaching by the voice of music out of the brooding of deformity in soli-
tude to speak to other beings of their solitudes and of the universal human
fate, declaring by its certainty of pain how much our nature wrongs us.
The voice broke away: for that moment, becoming at once more complex
and more ordered, it had been with a life of its own—something
that shone and resounded and yet had a solid wholeness, something that
had left all deformity behind and that nothing now could ever violate.

Miss Bristead came back into the room just as the final statement was
struck, pulling up perhaps a little short of the development one might
have expected and yet perfectly making its point. "That was immensely
interesting!" she said to the person in the music-room. "It must be very
exhausting playing such violent music." She sat down beside me on the

=== Page 80 ===
ELLEN TERHUNE
527
couch and remarked in her inadequately lowered voice: “I don't think
our friend in the next room has discovered the use of the soft pedal yet—
as well as a number of other things! . . . I don't think she's entirely
normal—one can see it from her oversized head.”
I realized then that it was not only in technique that Ellen's music
was beyond Miss Bristead: musically trained though she was, she had no
real feeling for music whatever. Ellen had been mistaken in her notion
that her mother's marriage had shut her off from a musical career: Miss
Bristead was conventional and worldly, she could not conceivably be
anything else. And now Ellen, surmounting her own despair, had come
back all the way through the years to justify her, to let her know her
sympathy, to show her that something fine had come out of her, something
that might make all that—the coldness, the sickness, the quarreling, the
bad birth and the ugly changeling—something that might make all that
right. I wanted to tell Ellen that she had triumphed, that she had written
a great piece of music. I wanted to assure her, confronted as we were by
her mother's Gorgon-like incomprehension, that I at least understood
and applauded.
“I liked it very much,” I said, and got up quickly and went into the
music-room. But Ellen had already escaped. There was nobody there:
I looked around. Everything seemed perfectly familiar, unexpectedly and
yet reassuringly: the mask of Beethoven, the old violins, Ellen's silver-
framed photograph of Debussy. But the room, rather queerly, was much
darker than the one from which I had come.
I had an impulse to go after Ellen and call to her that I was there.
I was eager to see her again. But I knew it would be better to return
to Miss Bristead and ask her to make Ellen come in. I went back, then,
into the living-room; but it was empty: Miss Bristead had gone out again.
This room had darkened, too—the weather must suddenly have clouded.
I turned on the electric lamp on the little round table by the couch, and
saw that the mahogany of the surface was dimmed by a film of dust. There
was a pile of current magazines, current for 1926. I picked two or three
of them up and noted the dates on the covers. Then I looked about the
room. There it was just as I had seen it in August. All the shades were
drawn. I picked up from another table a vase of faded flowers and stirred
up a foul stink: they were gladiolas withered to a crisp yellow thinness.
The house had been shut up in a hurry: the gladiolas had been forgotten.
I found my hat and coat in the hall, but the big front door was fast
locked. I came back to the living-room, opened one of the front windows,
and stepped out on to the dark porch, where I saw that it was raining.
I did not fear that Miss Bristead would come back—I knew there was
nobody there.
The next day I read in the paper that Ellen Terhune was dead. She
had gone, it turned out, to the city the night of my visit in August. She

=== Page 81 ===
528 PARTISAN REVIEW

had taken a little suite-registering under her maiden name-in a little
old hotel in the West Fifties which was frequented by musical people
and where you could have a piano in your room. She had apparently made
efforts to compose during the first two or three weeks she was there; but
later she would be found by the chambermaid lying on the couch or the
bed in what seemed to be a kind of stupor, and the management became
aware that she was never going out and not eating. They decided that
she was suffering from the sleeping sickness and got a doctor in. But
Ellen became piercingly wideawake, explained that she had come there
for a rest and did not want to be annoyed, and sent the doctor about his
business.

She now reassured them by directing that a breakfast with two pots of
coffee should be brought to her every, morning; and she was heard playing
the piano again, pounding the same thing over and over in a way that
made them fear she had gone crazy. At night she would go out into the
town.

One day, however, she had. not got up but had stayed in bed till
afternoon, and the maid had not been able to do the rooms. It was the
day of my last call in the country, and at what must have been just
the hour when I was listening to the playing of the sonata, the maid heard
the piano and went in. She had started work on the bedroom when Ellen
stopped and came in and put on her things to go out. She was tense and
her hands, which had been straining at the keys, could not adjust them-
selves to handling her hat and coat, and the chambermaid tried to help
her; but Ellen paid no attention.

She went out quickly and rang for the elevator. On the way down,
the elevator boy said, he had stopped and gone back up a floor to get a
passenger who had rung after they passed, and Ellen had "bawled him
out," telling him he must never go back once he had passed a floor. This
had so flustered the boy, who was new and inexpert with the old-fashioned
elevator, that he had made the situation worse by stopping below the door
and then jerking the elevator up just as the passenger was stepping down.
Then, in an effort to make up for his delay, on the assumption that Ellen
was in a hurry, he had shot suddenly down in a drop which the passenger
who had just entered said afterwards had given him an unpleasant shock.
It must have shocked Ellen, too, for she was pale when they reached the
bottom, and clung to the elevator door before she walked out. The boy
was worried and tried to help her; but she stepped out by herself into
the lobby, and there fell dead. It was said that she had a bad heart.

=== Page 82 ===
Books
THE SPIRITUAL UNDERGROUND

The Seed Beneath The Snow. By Ignazio Silone. Harpers. $2.75.

Ignazio Silone invokes the Zeitgeist in all his works. Whereas most
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the social and moral problems of the day. This is not to deny the resources
of his talent, but his chief interest for us does lie, it seems to me, in the
fact that he has given a literary status to the crises of our time.

What other novels have cut so deeply into the cross-currents of faith
and scepticism that marked the deterioration of the socialist ideal? Even
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merely raced over the surface of events. And how many other novelists
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demand of the time for a more complete revolutionary personality in
left-wing fiction. Bread and Wine, however, took as its starting point
the conflict between belief and conscience in those disillusioned socialists
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found lacking in socialist practice—or was it socialist theory, too? His
discovery of the Kingdom of Heaven at the close of the novel seemed
at the time to be no more than a symbol of irresolution.

Now, in The Seed beneath the Snow, a spiritually and historically
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man's natural, indestructible, moral self. The narrative, largely static,
revolves chiefly about Spina's efforts to reestablish himself in his native
community. All that seems to have remained of his Marxist philosophy
is its ideal of brotherhood, which he conceives to be the rightful heritage
of the momentarily beaten and shell-shocked peasantry. And in a counter-
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life at the same time that he moves about the countryside hiding from
the police.

At first, Spina tests his new faith in a series of dialogues with his
grandmother, who is a noble vestige of Christian good will. Gradually
529

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530 PARTISAN REVIEW

he feels his way toward a spiritual rapport with those "little people,"
whose friendliness and rural wisdom he regards as the real humanist
underground in fascist Italy. And, carrying these symbols of renewal
and renunciation to the end, Spina purges himself of his doctrinal
burdens through the sacrificial act of giving himself up to the police
to save his friend Infante, a truly Rousseauan figure of the earth. Thus
Silone, ever uneasy about the uses to which the revolutionary intelligence
has been put, has finally dissolved it in a primitive Christianity of suffer
ing and good deeds.

Naturally, Silone has been berated by the more orthodox Left for
subjecting "social problems to a purely moral analysis." And, from a
strictly logical point of view, it is true that Silone's moral optimism,
based on a bit-by-bit restitution of the human essence, can scarcely be
considered a program for revitalizing the socialist movement. Nor are
we convinced by Silone's reply to his critics (in a recent issue of The
New Republic), that since the failure of socialism is moral rather than
material, our great task is that of spiritual purification. For this is
merely a religious paraphrase of those democratic, humanist, aims to
which every socialist who has taken stock of recent events is committed.
The fact is that the socialist movement is little more than an organized
memory of its past hopes; and while the sheer hypnotic repetition of
classic doctrine certainly dooms it to complete inertia, Silone's exercise
of the moral imagination cannot be said to be any more fruitful. It
contains no positive historical meaning. True enough, Silone has held
on to his socialist faith, but the trouble is that it lacks the will to action.
If we cannot warm up to Silone's spiritual vision, it is not because we
have at hand a more acceptable solution. In this sense, Silone has actually
put the mirror once more to those radical intellectuals who have largely
given up Marxism as a system of thinking, yet still cling to its optimism
of progress. What we balk at is the installation of such tribal deities as
nature, essential goodness, homely wisdom as the new motive forces of
history, with the inevitable substitution of religious instinct for social
intelligence.

And it is this moral schematism, it seems to me, that is responsible
for the weaknesses of the novel. I do not mean to discount those superior
qualities of irony that are to be found here as well as in his earlier
work, nor the unusual charm and folk-pathos that is given to the sullen,
homespun characters. His sketches of the village functionaries are mas
terful: these bewildered, pompous creatures drift from scene to scene,
vying with each other in "oratory," that odd mixture of rationalization
and nonsense that has become a national profession, partly to baffle the
common peasantry, partly to stiffen their own self-esteem. But, on the
whole, the novel cannot hold the weight of its allegory. Too little happens
outside of Spina's spiritual excursions. Hence it is talky, lacking in
dramatic clash and suspense. And Silone's moral fervor produces a

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cloying, hygienic atmosphere, with the right people doing the right things,
as, for example, Spina's rectitude in his relation with his lover, Faustina,
because he believes her to be the mistress of a friend. Similarly, the
literal execution of the symbolism of good and evil leads to such in-
genuous, idyllic scenes as that in Simone's hut, where Spina, the deaf-
and-dumb Infante, the old, loyal, Simone, a worn out donkey, and a
starved dog-all warm themselves over the fires of mutual trust and
friendship.

As a result, Silone's basically tragic theme is lost in the vagaries
of the good life. There is no struggle to speak of within Spina, while
the conflict between him and the brute forces of fascist society is really
more picaresque than tragic. Nor does the denouement strike us as any-
thing but foolish heroics, for Spina's giving himself up to the police is
too accidental to suggest any tragic inexorability. And, surely, Silone
did not mean to imply that the hope of man is to be found in the bruised
psyche of the half-conscious Infante?

Silone's difficulty-there were signs of it in Bread and Wine-lies,
I think, in his attempt to project his own conflicts into one of the most
backward regions imaginable. For once the crisis of belief is removed
from the consciousness that produced it, it loses its psychological as well
as its social meaning. How can one expect to reproduce the tensions
of moral or intellectual frustration in the almost instinctual life of the
oppressed Italian village? As a matter of fact, Silone has not even
attempted to do, and this I take to be the real failure of the novel, for
the resolution of Silone's problem has actually been made prior to the
development of the novel. The characters merely re-enact the religious
synthesis Silone has reached: Spina, with some awareness, the others,
blindly.

From a creative point of view, there is some aptness in the fact that
Silone's new faith is given fictional representation in the ingrown,
dreamy life of the peasantry. Practically speaking, Silone's philosophy
reduces itself in the course of the novel to a kind of itinerant preaching,
and the still uncorrupted, credulous folk of the Italian provinces form
for Spina an almost inexhaustible supply of saveable souls. But, at the
same time, it seems to me that Silone's seemingly obsessive interest in
rural life explains, in large measure, his religious turn. For one thing,
the dispersed and elemental nature of peasant existence has always made
it a breeding ground for every conceivable variety of mystification. And
it is evident that for Silone immersion in the pieties of the country
actually amounts to a repudiation of city culture. His present distrust-
of social theories has been cast in the image
of peasant stoicism. If one looks behind Silone's new faith, one can
discern the immemorial passivity of the village, with its instinctive faith
in the great mysteries of life and death and salvation.

WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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Blood for a Stranger. By Randall Jarrell. Harcourt, Brace. $2.00.
The Second World. By R. P. Blackmur. The Cummington Press. $2.50.
Lyra: An Anthology of New Lyric. Edited by Alex Comfort & Robert
Greacen. The Grey Walls Press, Billericay, Essex. 5/-.
Three New Poets. By Roy McFadden, Alex Comfort & Iran Serraillier. The
Grey Walls Press. 2/6.
Ruins and Visions. By Stephen Spender. Random House. $2.00.
Randall Jarrell has the talents, the sensitivity, the wisdom and almost
everything else that the good fairy can give. He is one of the most intelli-
gent persons writing English at the moment. There is some very profound
poetry in this book of his, in the literal sense of that word. But like
Fred Astaire, another very gifted American, he seems to have a blank
personality. He is swallowed up by his gifts. His writing, critical and
poetic, for all its brilliance, lacks a core. I think it is an American
middle-class failing—in which we as the most rationalized human products
of industrialism come close to the insect kingdom—to be too much at
the disposal of our respective trades and in the face of vocational training
not to maintain enough the claims of what only seems extraneous. This
is quite different from craftsman's humility, which lies in subordinating
personal interests to the object being created, not in surrendering the
totality of oneself to a professional role. You give up being a friend,
a lover, a gossip, an attractive person, the life of the party, in order to
be that much more poet, actor, boxer, doctor, businessman. Instead of
completing yourself by work you mutilate yourself. (In their impatience
with all this, some American writers—Miller, Saroyan, Patchen—go to
the opposite extreme and distend themselves by swallowing their pro-
fessional roles in their personalities.) And for relaxation there is shop-
talk; which led Henry James to complain that he could get no material
for his art from "down town" New York, from the masculine world of
work, that it was to be found only among women in this country.

As discerned through his writing, Jarrell seems to be too much writer
and too little anything else. Certainly he writes about himself a good
deal, but it is as the abstraction of himself, as fuel for poetry, himself
converted into something that has no further relation to himself except
as professional poet. The paradox is that he appears to be very conscious
of the problem—which is one reason, perhaps, for the conspicuousness
of his shortcomings with respect to it. But more fundamental is his
lack of temperament; and temperament alone, in the absence of every-
thing else, suffices to give a center, a direction and unity to an individual's
work. For lack of it, Jarrell is too easily distracted, is provoked by his
own fluency, is at the mercy of every idea that strikes him. Although
his single poems are naturally less open to this than his poetry as a
whole, even within them the reader is sometimes exasperated by sudden,
unjustifiable changes of direction from stanza to stanza and line to line.
Add Jarrell's unimmediate, unsigned style, through which other poetry,
notably Auden's and Yeats's, seems to have been strained and deprived

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of savor, and the unity of which is given only negatively by the absence
of a personal sensibility—add all this to the poet’s uncertain ear, and it
becomes inevitable that his book of poems should as a whole be hard
reading in spite of its many single excellences. Is it that Jarrell assents
to his faculty for making even the most concrete, vivid words—of which
blood is perhaps the least vivid example—take on an abstract flavor,
because this gives words greater potentialities of connection, like oxygen
atoms? Is it that blood donated for strangers should have only the most
general properties of blood, because then it can be transfused into any-
body’s veins regardless of blood-type? Maybe so, maybe Jarrell is on
the way to a great kind of abstract poetry. There are some very good
abstract poems in his book. But personal wisdom—wisdom about oneself
and one’s relation to others—out of which more than anything else Jarrell
strives in his plight to realize his most ambitious poetry, needs for that
to be fortified by much more substantial hints as to the problems offered
by the poet’s own specific personality. For the rest, Jarrell has understood
his own case in concept. “The Winter’s Tale” is a poem about those “Who
made virtue and poetry and understanding/ The prohibited reserves of
the expert, of workers/ Specialized as the ant-soldier . . .” and about “The
substitutes of the geometer for existence.”
R. P. Blackmur has improved considerably as a poet, but his per-
sonality is almost as blank as Randall Jarrell’s, and he is much more
a victim of good taste. If Jarrell is without savor, Blackmur is without
flavor. His poems have no foreground existence, but transpire backstage
behind a gauze of literature and Yeats. But his style does have its
academic distinction in spite of the mechanical and monotonous regularity
with which he divides lines; and four of the nine poems in this thin book
are quite successful in their Yeatsian way (repeating also the Yeatsian
themes of youth and age): “The Second World,” “Missa Vocis,” “For
Comfort and For Size” and “The Dead Ride Fast.” Yet I suspect Black-
mur’s good poems of having the same relation to genuinely good poems
that waxen images have to living beings: they only look the same, the
animating principle is missing. It is very difficult for contemporaries to
point out just wherein it is missing, for Blackmur is too sophisticated
with the best taste and usage of the time. But now and then the orifice
through which the soul escapes the body can be detected:
“There is disorder, like heavy breathing in the next room,
Like people making way when no one comes.”
All the appurtenances of good poetry are here, but they are only appurten-
ances: “heavy breathing in the next room” and “making way when no
one comes” obnubilate the disorder, are falsely portentous. Blackmur
is after the intensity of pure poetry, but he contrives it instead of
creating it out of a necessity in himself other than his ambition as a poet.
One generation of English poets now follows hard on the heels of
another, the members of this latest one likewise closing ranks to form

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PARTISAN REVIEW
a mutual admiration society, but even more vocal and more aggressive
against opposition. What an amount of back-slapping and acclaiming
goes on among them! Meanwhile it is mostly to the good, for young
writers are more helped than hindered by mutual admiration. Lyra
anthologizes the work of what looks to be their important majority.
Abandoning the positions won by Auden's so-called classicist movement,
they are in retreat towards a purer and more personal poetry, are all for
neater verse, traditional simplicities, descriptions, emotions in the presence
of nature, intimate events and their own love affairs-hetero-sexual at
last. In divesting themselves of the conventions of modernism in order
to attain a more naked honesty, some of them have not only become "new
romantics," but have often mistaken for no conventions at all any ante-
dating Eliot:
"Kiss me before all breaks. Let me touch your dress.
If we must die, then let it be of love,
And set the whole world trembling as we kiss."
But whether their poetry is good or bad, and for all their easy sentiment,
their know-nothingism and their reversionary aesthetics, these young
poets are serious in a way their American contemporaries too frequently
are not. For them poetry is not quite so exclusively a trade or profession,
but also a means of completing and realizing themselves. They may in
some instances be even greater careerists than their American fellows,
but they are concerned with their poetry as persons, not just as writers;
they try to connect it with everything else about which they are con-
cerned; they are superior to literature in that at least they seem interested
in more than achieving it; they want from their own work satisfactions
beyond those of success. In their resolve to be sincere they are not afraid
to write naively and unfashionably. As a result their verse, regardless
of its quality, manages to have a great amount of existence (Spinoza
notwithstanding). It may be little, but it is not tenuous poetry. Not
even Francis Scarfe's three howling lines above.
Unlike some English poets of the preceding generation, a good many
of those in Lyra are better than they appear to be. However, the best
of them are very uneven, to judge from evidence in other publications
besides this one. Perhaps they think that honesty requires the publication
of their worst as well as their finest poems. G. S. Fraser, poised and
quietly powerful, is the least uneven of the lot, and perhaps the best,
though he has not the occasional brilliance of some of the others. Nicholas
Moore, whose "Little Black Box" is one of the most original poems of
our age, doing better in twenty-nine lines what otherwise only a novel
can do, is quite bad when he is not good. Henry Treece alternates between
flashes of fire and splashes of water. Wrey Gardiner, Charles Davey and
especially Emanuel Litvinoff are promising. Right now I should say that
Anne Ridler is the most consistently successful and original of the poets
in the book, though she seems rather limited. Like not a few poetesses
since Emily Dickinson, she deliberately bends her verse towards prose

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BOOKS 535
by suppressing the beat. As for the rest of the anthology, some is fair,
some is mediocre, and quite a lot is bad. Exception should be made for
Alex Comfort, who along with the other two of Three New Poets is also
represented in Lyra. Comfort has the self-confidence and the sense of
what he can and cannot do that usually belongs only to older poets. He
creates superb sound effects, and elegiac gravity, the prevailing tone of
so much poetry nowadays, receives new shading in his verse:
"Strange that in me the shadow
moving the substance speaks: strange that such air
pulls the blue sinew, whom the blood maintains
whom the heart's coming slight defection
shall spill, speaks now and holds
time like a permanent stone, its cold weight judging."
This is the materialist (the poet is a medical student) approaching from
a new direction. No virtuoso of punch lines, Comfort, like Moore, Lit-
vinoff and lately Spender, depends for effect on the total unfurling of the
poem. He has a good chance of becoming a large and serious writer.
Roy McFadden's poetry is slight, and has little beyond its honesty and
grace. Honesty is always rewarded in some measure, and McFadden
does get off a good passage now and then. Ian Serraillier is also
honest, and has a certain originality of language and versification,
but he seems even slighter than McFadden because he restricts his subject-
matter more. He has a timidity about going beyond the sense-world;
within it he describes well:
"And the clouds that pace restless over Llewelyn,
for ever racing but for ever still
like runners painted on a vase, shall hold
their strange stationary course until,
time and the mountains melting, they from the sun
drop to the level world and freely run."
To have shown that it is still possible to write convincingly such nice
derivative verse is a kind of triumph, and these young Englishmen are
certainly increasing poetry, yet the tendency they embody is regrettable
in so much as it surrenders too many positions and goes back too far
in the sole endeavor to be honest. These poets are not ambitious enough.
They avoid the most difficult, which is usually the most important. If
they insist on poetry's being pure again, can they not proceed beyond
Audens, instead of short of him, and try, as perhaps Barker is doing,
to conquer for pure poetry the areas which the previous generation
opened up in its flight from it? Their disillusionment with socialist
revivalism and everything else public is not excuse enough for the kind
of obscurantism into which these poets fall. Most of their American
contemporaries are at least willing to know more then they do. Herbert
Read's preface to Lyra forms a reply possibly to these objections. He
terms these new poets "pacifists in the poetic sense," and asserts that the
reconstruction they are undertaking requires their poetry to be "projected

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536 PARTISAN REVIEW

away from the immediate struggle into the new world which has to be
created out of the ruins of our civilization." And he also says, "By the
end of the Spanish Civil War, the poetry of action had fought in the last
ditch." Well, in the face of those two threatening phrases, "poetry of
action" and "war poetry," I still insist on countering with little poetry.

Having made my objections, let me say that I share the premonitions
of a poetic renaissance which Herbert Read gets from the work of these
new English poets. Much talent is abroad among them, talent enough
to defy all remonstrances.

On the strength of this second collection of his poems to be published
in this country Stephen Spender is already a great poet. At least ten to
twelve of his lyrics will not be forgotten, among them in this book
"Exiles From Their Land, History Their Domicile," "The Past Values,"
"Darkness and Light," "The Human Situation," "The Double Shame,"
"A Wild Race," "Winter and Summer," "In a Garden," "The Ambitious
Son" and there are some others as great or almost as great.

Since his first book Spender has become less measured and poised,
although he has taken more to rhyme, assonance and set forms. He is
much closer to the Lyra poets than either he or they seem to recognize.
In his "Foreword" he says: "The violence of the times we are living in,
the necessity of sweeping and general and immediate action, tend to
dwarf the experience of the individual, and to make his immediate en-
vironment and occupations perhaps something that he is even ashamed
of. For this reason, in my most recent poems, I have deliberately turned
back to a kind of writing which is more personal, and I have included
within my subjects weakness and fantasy and illusion." (I tend to doubt
the deliberateness of this turning.) Spender's work is uneven for the
same reason that operates in the case of Moore, Comfort and the others:
the determination to write as one must rather than as one would, and to
publish all. With respect to Spender it could be wished though, that there
was a little less sincerity and a little more honesty. So much of his
latest poetry being a personal confession, Spender's excess of sincerity
is to state not only the weaknesses on which he has acted, but also the
strengths or rather powers of feeling on which he did not act. (But
you are what you do and not altogether what you feel and know.) It
makes a lot of his poetry pleurnicherie, exhibitionist self-pity, inflated
pathos; especially when he interrupts himself to cry "I too am moved
by this!" as if he would be writing a poem if he wasn't. Many otherwise
successful poems are spoiled by over-intimacy, usually towards their
close. Also, Spender is seduced by his own eloquence, by his grace and
ease of language, into repetition, wordiness and obscurity. His knack-
and gift-like Rilke's, of protracting images sometimes runs away with
him, and leads him, like Shelley, from the definite to the vague instead
of the other way about, too often ending up among flowers, suns and
summers, or else snow and ice.

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Yet Spender's great poems redeem any number of his bad ones, and
the very process of introspection and surrender to himself which occasions
his failures is the same one which, pushed a step further, turns out lyrics
of an intensity and of such intimate yet universal truth as no one except
Yeats has lately equalled, and which like the latter's seem past all style

and manner. Some are constructed from but an image, others have the
rigorous articulation of a theorem. Spender's own shortcomings are
turned to account, there being set up a beautiful contrast between his
softness as a person and his anonymous toughness as an expert, utterly
serious poet. He goes beyond solipsism and self-indulgence to discover
himself as he exists in the medium of his art; and the very reluctance
with which he reduces his enormous demands upon language as self-
expression helps produce the great verse.
Ambitious Spender, in spite of his own disavowal, is an eminent
type of the poet who strains for completeness. He tries to make as much
of the world as he can relevant in his poetry, wanting to include history,
but only after he has passed them through
politics, even economics;
personal. Perhaps he insists too much on the
himself and made them
poetry to be discovered now in the forces which
There is more
in his own soul, and Spender's poem on
produced Napoleon than
it is moving—and most of Spender's bad
is bad, even though
Napoleon
poems are moving, which only increases the momentary irritation—be-
cause he makes Napoleon an avatar of himself. Spender as teacher of
is in a false position; but so have been more than one important
history
contemporary poet: Eliot as legislator, Yeats as nationalist agitator, Auden
as theologian. It is almost a sign of their importance as poets. Nothing
characterizes the unimportant poet today as much as his willingness to
stay inside his professional role.

CLEMENT GREENBERG

BUTTON, BUTTON

The Company She Keeps. By Mary McCarthy. Simon and Schuster. $2.50.
The Company She Keeps is a shrewd, witty, malicious, original, and
often brilliantly written book, which is called “a novel in six parts," but
which might more accurately be called a heroine in six parts. Miss
McCarthy states the theme in the Foreword: "When did you have it last?'
the author adjures the distracted heroine, who is fumbling in her spiritual
pocketbook for a missing object, for the ordinary indispensable self that
has somehow got mislaid.” The problem of the book is to put the Humpty-
Dumpty back together again, to assemble the six selves of the heroine,
Margaret Sargent, to define the true Florimel in the midst of the imposters.
In Part I, we see the self of the heroine as she moves through an
“extramarital courtship.” The deceptions necessary afford an opportunity
for the exercise of the heroine's dramatic capacity, in which she delights.
But the very self she plays, is a divided self. She “loves” her husband, and

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PARTISAN REVIEW
she “got no fun, she told The Young Man, out of putting horns on her
darling's head....” When she finally tells her husband that she is to leave
him, she discovers the real climax of their relationship. After this she
must act out the pattern, moving through it under the twin pressures of
society's expectations and her own not understood compulsions.
The next four sections come, from different angles, at the problem
laid down in Part I. In Part II, Margaret Sargent works as a secretary to
a shady art dealer, a Mr. Sheer, who is full of tricks and disguises. It is
not the story of Mr. Sheer's rise which is the subject of this section, but his
peculiarly ambivalent attitude toward success; he is, in an oblique fashion,
a sort of alter ego to the heroine. Or perhaps more accurately, Mr. Sheer's
problem is a variation of the heroine's problem. Part III presents the
Pullman romance of the heroine with a minor capitalist, “the man in the
Brooks Brothers shirt,” to whom she dramatizes herself as the bohemian
radical, but from whom, also, she expects some definition of herself. But
the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt has his own problems of definition.
Part IV shows her as a guest at a party of the “genial host,” a man who
loves to bring people together, who has, as it were, no self except the frag-
ments of selves he can pilfer from others. Part V, “Portrait of the Intel-
lectual as a Yale Man,” shows the effect of Margaret Sargent, violent
Trotskyist, on the “intellectual.” Her incorruptible, logical, coherent,
fearless political self is set over against his confusion, a confusion result-
ing from the struggle between his two selves—the self of an editor of The
Liberal and the self of the “Yale man.”
In Part VI, we see her, now the wife of a successful architect, lying
on the couch in the office of a psychoanalyst, who has defined a kind of
unity of self for her, who interprets her present condition in terms of
childhood conflict and estrangement. But she cannot accept this easy way
to unity: “Oh my God ... do not let them take this away from me. If
the flesh must be blind, let the spirit see. Preserve me in disunity.” So, by
her repudiation, the Self defined by the psychoanalyst becomes simply
another self.
The repudiation would imply that the resolution of the book is not
intended in merely clinical terms. And if the resolution had been attempted
in such terms, it would scarcely be acceptable. For the clinical case, as
pure case (action reduced to automatism, the factors of character's choice
and of author's judgment upon such choice removed), can scarcely be of
fictional interest except in so far as the clinical case achieves a symbolic
extension into contexts which, though perhaps involving the factors which
make choice and judgment impossible in the clinical case, permit a margin
of choice and judgment. (One might cite The Magic Mountain, The Ameri-
can Tragedy or certain items from the so-called decadent Jacobean tragedy
as involving examples of such symbolic extension.) In other words, Mar-
garet Sargent, when she prays to be preserved in disunity, is praying that
she may not become an automaton, no matter how well “adjusted.” She is
praying to keep, even though ruinously, the disunity as a symbol of poten-

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tial decision; that is, the idea that a decision is possible is necessary if one
is to be human ("merely human," for the last words of the book are: "she
did not believe in God") even though the price paid for holding that idea
may be destruction. The conclusion then would seem to be a somewhat
more modest version of the lines,

O God of our flesh, return us to your wrath,
Let us be evil could we enter in
Your grace, and fatten on the stony path!

But perhaps this interpretation does not reckon with the Foreword:
"For the search is not conclusive: there is no deciding which of these per-
sonalities is the 'real' one; the home address of the self, like that of the
soul, is not to be found in the book." But how serious, or how coy, is this
disclaimer? At what level are we to take it? Does it merely apply to
Margaret Sargent, the "case," or are we to take it in its extensions? But
can it be said to apply to the Margaret Sargent who speaks the last lines of
the book? For if that Margaret Sargent asks to be preserved in disunity,
she is affirming the value of the quest for "moral identity," and if there is
a "quest" there must be a "quester." And this quester is another self pre-
sumably, different from the six selves previously described—a kind of
Over-self, should one say, who survives all the transformations and masks.
If the book does not give the address of this self, it seems, as has been
indicated a paragraph back, to express, nevertheless, some faith in its
existence. But the Foreword may be denying faith in the existence of
that self—or is it?—who, after all, may be taken to be the leading, though
un-named, character in this novel, as in all novels. There seems to be
some difficulty here in resolving an irony, an ambiguity.

Perhaps if this leading character had been named, the book would
have had a greater degree of unity in the ordinary fictional sense. But if
that leading character had been named, the irony implicit in the method
might have appeared more edged, more central. As matters stand, it may
be that the basic unity is one of tone—a dry, analytical, satirical tone which
is maintained with rarely flagging expertness from beginning to end. The
satire, the analysis, is applied impartially to the heroine and to the various
worlds through which she passes—the world of Mr. Sheer, of the man in
the Brooks Brothers shirt, of the genial host, of the intellectual as Yale
man, of the psychoanalyst. Those worlds are left in tatters, and the reader
is certainly inclined to say, "And a damned good thing, too." But on
second thought the reader may be inclined, without surrendering any of
his satisfaction in the destruction accomplished, to ask a question about
the origin of the blast which did the job. What are the premises of the
satire? What are the standards implicit here? Does the satire originate
merely from a lively distaste for fraud and imposture? If so, by what
norms are these to be determined? Or does it originate from a vigorous
appetite for breakage? Does one have a sense of the terms on which the
author would pick up the pieces and put them back together again? Per-
haps here the reader is left with the sense of an ambiguity similar to that

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540 PARTISAN REVIEW

which may be felt about the resolution of the problem of the book. And
perhaps the two ambiguities are not unrelated to each other.

I do not wish to conclude this comment on The Company She Keeps
without saying that I admired and enjoyed the book. If I have been in-
clined to ask questions of the book, I wish this fact to be taken as an
index to the basic seriousness and value which I believe is in Miss
McCarthy's work. And I hope that the questions have been worthy of the
book.
ROBERT PENN WARREN

MISS RUKEYSER'S MARINE POEM

Wake Island. By Muriel Rukeyser. Doubleday, Doran. $1.00.
There's one thing you can say about Muriel: she's not lazy.
WELDON KEES

PORTRAIT OF AN HISTORIAN

As Lord Acton Says. By F. E. Lally. Remington Ward, $3.00.
What makes a great Historian? Readers and writers of history
would probably agree that the qualities of greatness embrace (1) style,
(2) scholarship, (3) thesis. Certainly it is style which has put the stamp
of a classic on Edward Gibbon's celebrated Decline and Fall; his research
was eclectic, his argument overwhelmingly rationalistic in bias; but having
“shrunk with terror from the modern history of England”, as he confessed,
Gibbon embraced “a safer theme”, and found that “middle tone, the genu-
ine style” which he somehow knew would give him historic importance.
Again, of a work like Charles Beard's memorable Economic Interpretation
of the Constitution it is undeniably its sharp and provocative thesis which
has made it an intellectual monument; its writing is plain, matter-of-fact,
its scholarship consisted largely of the glossing of known texts (aided
by lucky discoveries among Washington garbage of original Founding
Father papers). And what gives distinction to a performance like M. I.
Rostovtzev's formidable study of The Roman Empire is not its style or
thesis (it can hardly be said to have much of either), but its simply
remarkable reconstruction of the past in all its vital detail from hitherto
mute historical sources, sticks and stones and bones.

The case of Lord Acton is something else again. Here is a strange
and brilliant man, with a still stranger career—for here is an indisputably
great historian who never wrote a book! When, after Acton's death in
1902 (which cut short his editing of the Cambridge Modern History), a
critic wandered into his amazing library, now a kind of museum piece
in Cambridge, he found hundreds of shelves of English, Irish, Scottish,
German, French and Russian history, Italian manuscripts, Greek and Latin
classics, Church documents and Pipe Rolls, all with annotations indicating
a colossal industry, and for him it was “the most pathetic sight of wasted
labour that ever met human eyes”, a monument to lost learning. Acton,

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BOOKS
541
it is true, wrote nothing which can be called a book; innumerable essays
and reviews, yes, but not a single volume of his own. "He won an immense
reputation," ran one flippant obituary, "by doing nothing". Yet Acton
lived and by force of personality and drama of intellectual life achieved
for himself a curious historical greatness.
Acton is indeed a complex and difficult figure-a liberal and yet not
a democrat, a Catholic and yet not an authoritarian, a 19th Century
Englishman yet not a narrow nationalist and provincial but a truly cosmo-
politan scholar. Mr. Lally's book, I am afraid, does not help us very
much, but we must in all truth be grateful for a complete bibliography,
and for some biographical details not available in such standard sketches
as G. P. Gooch's (in History and Historians) or in those brief popular
portraits which merely fill in around his famous aphorism about power
corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely. Acton was an
Englishman, born in Italy, of a German mother, and educated in Rome,
Berne, Paris and Munich. Unlike most scientific historians, he had a
lively career as a journalist; and his weekly pieces were all character-
istically informed by his deep knowledge and play of mind. The Vatican,
unfortunately, put an end to that. The Church censured him, suppressed
him, continually tripped him up, and each time, of course, Acton picked
himself up off the floor, obsequious and apologetic. It is a shameful story,
and one of the key controversies in the ultimate victory of the Popes (Pius
IX, Leo XIII, Pius X) over the modern-minded religious avant-garde,
inaugurating Neo-scholasticism. The Pope, in fact, was probably the
villain in the story of Acton's sterility, a loss to historical literature more
regrettable in many ways than the void of the lost books of Livy or
Polybius.

It was in 1880 that Acton started his encyclopedic, 50,000 page history
of liberty, his exhaustive treatise on human freedom. Suddenly, dramatic-
ally, after four solid years of work, he abandoned the project, never to
return or speak of it. Why? The mystery has prompted many theories
and hypotheses. Some say that he couldn't understand the French Revo-
lution, and its historical intricacies broke his intellectual spirit. Others
that he was depressed by his discovery that the writing of a universal
history of freedom for the greatest part "would be a history of the thing
that was not!" Still others that Acton was caught in the morass of his
own infinite scholarship, his incessant note-taking and cross-referencing
and sticking endless slips of paper into innumerable books and files of
pigeon-holes, cabinets, compartments and big black boxes. Arnold Toyn-
bee argues that it was the misapplied industrial ideals of the exploitation
of raw materials and the division of labor that paralyzed his individual
creative effort and turned him to collaborative writing: "The association
of his name with the Cambridge Modern History is an enduring monument
to Industrialism's victory over an historian of heroic build." But the most
convincing explanation involves the Church. Not that Acton was an inno-
cent, or a pliant tool. He showed a fine kind of independence as an Oppo-

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542 PARTISAN REVIEW

sitionist, fighting hard for years to stop the affirmation of the Doctrine of
Papal Infallibility, although with the Vatican decree of 1870 he failed
utterly. Acton was indeed a man attached to "the true scientific spirit and
the disinterested love of truth", but he was also a devout Catholic with
a peculiar loyalty to the Vatican. And his work, heading as it was right
square for the top place on the Catholic Index, would probably (and he
no doubt felt this deeply) have ripped apart the Roman Church in Eng-
land. Acton's was simply a case of intellectual suicide.
It is this pathetic contradiction which makes Acton so interesting,
and even exciting, an historian. If Acton found "no thread through history
except the idea of progress towards more perfect and assured freedom and
the divine right of free men", he also found the persecution of the Inquisi-
tion "a true and effective guardian of the morality of the people" (with a
logic reminiscent of modern apologists for purge-minded totalitarianisms).
If he subscribed to the idea that "truth is the only merit that gives dignity
and worth to history" he subscribed too to the vicious Catholic myths of
the happy Middle Ages and the satanic, evil Reformation. The pages of
his collected writings are, to be sure, crowded with shrewd, wise and
realistic historical comment. Acton observed the machine-like character
of the state, which was "not fitted on society like a glove, but rather
compressing it, like a thumbscrew, not growing out of society, like its
skin, but put on it from without, like a mould into which society is forced
to pour itself", even going on to say, "But clearly the state could never
grow out of society as its expression and fruit, unless society were organ-
ized and distributed into distinct classes and corporations"; the idea of
supermen and hero-worship he hated, and Carlyle was for him "the most
detestable of historians"; and of "ruling and leading spirits" he remarked
sharply, "the better we know them, the worse they appear". But by and
large the historian who reacted so violently against the social-equalitarian
tradition of the French Revolution, and who believed that "the possessors
of better knowledge will always have to contend against the ignorant
masses of mankind" has been lost in the shuffling advances of modern
social theory and science.
What remains, however, of Lord Acton is his magnificent vision of
History. The study of historical art and science was for him a kind of
spiritual process, the basis of all real insight into the present, a school
and guide to life: "to perfect his mind and open windows in every direc-
tion, to raise him to the level of his age so that he may know the forces
that had made our world what it is and still reign over it, to guard against
surprises and the constant sources of error within, to give force and full-
ness and clearness and sincerity and independence and elevation and
generosity and serenity to his mind, that he may know the method and
law of the process by which error is conquered and truth is won ... "
And more than that, what also remains is a vivifying spectacle of a great
scholar in action. It used to be said of him that however much you knew
about anything Acton was certain to know more. A colleague claimed

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LETTERS
that “to be with Acton was like being with the cultivated mind of Europe.”
When he would speak of his history of freedom, as James Bryce testifies,
“it was as if the whole landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by
a burst of sunlight”. And Gooch has gone so far as to say of him that very
few moderns indeed “came so near mastering the whole range of human
knowledge”. If (as the frontispiece quotation from Euripides has it)
“blessed are those who comprehend the instruction of history”, no less
“blessed” surely are those who comprehend the instruction of historians,
and in Lord Acton’s biography there are lessons for all.
MELVIN J. LASKY
Letters
LETTER FROM THE ARMY
Dear Editors:
I am now studying at the Link Trainer
School, the hardest goddam school in the
Army Air Force Technical Training Com-
mand, and have at the most one hour of
leisure out of a day beginning at 4:00
A.M. and ending at 9:00 P.M.
I am delighted beyond measure with
the Air Corps and am happier than I’ve
been for years. What most impresses me
about the Army, and particularly the Air
Force, is the extreme pains they take to
find out the work you are best fitted for,
and the intelligent and considerate ap-
proach they take to the problem of pre-
paring you for that work.
Another revelation is the extreme de-
cency, charm, and comradeliness (is there
such a word?) of the average soldier.
Among themselves, soldiers are courteous
and considerate to a remarkable degree.
If you want to lie on your bunk and
read Shakespeare, your neighbors try not
to disturb you or else start up a discus-
sion about the character of Macbeth. My
barracks is teeming with arguments over
pragmatism, Richard Strauss, and whom
did Mary Queen of Scots really love.
We very decidedly do not discuss poli-
tics, the national scene, or the inter-
national scene; in other words, in my
experience, the average soldier is abso-
lutely lacking in political consciousness.
Neither does he have any conception of
what the war is about or what we are
fighting for. His attitude is quite simply
that we must lick the Axis, and we’re the
guys who have to do it, so let’s be for
doing it. We cheer and boo at the right
places in pep talks (I’ve heard two in
543
two months), but the atmosphere is very
much that of a high school football pep
talk. Morale, on the other hand, to use
a word I heartily dislike, is very high
indeed, at least in the Air Corps. We
gripe at every opportunity, but under-
neath we’re so goddam proud of being
in the Air Corps we could burst.
Yours,
EX-CONTRIBUTOR
CHANUTE FIELD, ILL.
ON THE LAST ISSUE
Sirs:
This particular issue prompts me to
write you, to come out of anonymity, as
it were. Your prose is always of the
highest order and were it only that,
I’d have nothing to say. In passing,
though, I thought Serge simple and in-
telligent and quite the right antidote to
Max Eastman, Inc. Silone is always a
deep pleasure. I could not understand
Maritain and so I thank Rosenberg for
his clarified opposition which caused me
to see the implications of Maritain’s
piece. (Could it have been a bad, that
is clever, translation?)
It is the poetry that prompts me to
write what must be, somehow, meaning-
less, less paper to you. For the first time I
thought each poem good (three poems,
three good ones). You have always been
uneven there, and so one was tempted
not to have faith in your poetry judg-
ment. This issue’s poetry makes me
think that perhaps the mss. received
aren’t always the best. But Breit’s The
Son of God is a courageous, terrible and
wonderfully moving poem. It is by far
one of the best things I’ve seen.
Yours,
JOSEPH MCGREW
Los ANGELES, CALIF.

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544

ERRATA
Sirs:
It is always a pleasure to receive PAR-
TISAN REVIEW, and refreshing reading in
these days. Your periodical is becoming
a favorite with literary-minded under-
graduates, and is exercising a healthy in-
fluence even on academic wits. Lionel
Trilling's "The Sense of the Past" was re-
markable and worth pondering over by
many of us. The last issue has also some
excellent reading-matter. It is too bad
that, in a review so keenly and broad-
mindedly interested in foreign letters,
quotations or titles in foreign languages
should not be the object of more care;
e.g., p. 330, every one knows that the
"Cornich" should be the "Corniche"; that
(line 3), the "Roucas blanc" is perfect
French and not Provencal; that the in-
habitants of Marseille (p. 332) are the
"Marseillais" and not the "Marseillants"
(!!); that (p. 313) "costume d'interieur"
never had a final "e"; that "oeuvres" (p.
313) should be feminine; etc.
Miss Allanah Harper's article is, at
times, incredibly naive, as when she re-
marks how odd Hamlet, or any English
poetry, sounds when turned into French,
not realizing that the same is true of any
French poetry translated into English. It
is ridiculous to claim that, in 1929, no
one had heard in France of Virginia
Woolf, E. M. Forster, Eliot and Lawrence.
Bibliographies of translations and arti-
cles on those writers, and a glance at the
files of the Nouvelle Revue Française,
Navire d'Argent, Revue Anglo-Ameri-
caine, etc., would prove the contrary. As
to Donne in France, Miss Harper took
that excellent leg-puller, Fargue, too seri-
ously. There had been at least 100 allu-
sions to Donne in France before 1929, he
had been lectured upon at the Sorbonne,
studied by schoolboys and students for
advanced English exams; at least one
thesis in French had appeared on him,
and dozens of articles.
It is also amusing to see Miss Harper,
presumably a "leftist," so fascinated by
pseudo-aristocratic salons, duchesses, prin-
cesses and ladies of the Armament Ring.
There were other aspects of France to be
looked at, if one went for it.

HENRI M. PEYRE
NEW HAVEN, Conn.

PARTISAN REVIEW

REPLY
Sirs:
I did not say, "how odd Hamlet, or
any English poetry, sounds when turned
into French," but "it is agony to read
any French translation of Shakespeare,
including Gide's," and went on to quote
a line from Gide's Hamlet to illustrate
my point that Elisabethan English is
unsuited to modern French. Some English
poetry does not sound at all odd in
French, and the same is true of some
French poetry in English. It is obvious
that the style of some poets or periods is
more translatable than others. Racine, for
instance is almost untranslatable into Eng-
lish; Rimbaud is not. The German early
nineteenth century translation of Shakes-
peare is a masterpiece.
I am sure that M. Peyre knows about
every single thesis written on Eliot, Lawr-
ence and Virginia Woolf by a hundred
pedagogues at a dozen seats of learning.
I do not. All I know is that, at the time,
these writers were not known to the
educated and intelligent public, including
writers as well as readers.
Fargue was not pulling my leg. His
remark on Donne, which I quoted is the
resumé of a number of conversations
on the subject. Fargue was very excited
about his discovery, not having been
lectured to at the Sorbonne studying
"for advanced English exams," indeed,
not knowing any English at all, he had
missed hearing about Donne and the
"hundred allusions" to him in France.
The names of La Rochefoucauld and
Polignac are hardly pseudo-aristocratic
ones. (There have been at least ten thou-
sand allusions to them for students of
French history courses.) The salons that
were good enough for Paul Valéry, André
Gide, Léon Paul Fargue, Jules Super-
vielle, Léon Blum etc, were good enough
for me.
In his hunt for mine and the P. R.'s
spelling mistakes and printer's errors, M.
Peyre did not discover the one mistake
which makes me hang my head in shame
I spelt the name of the famous Abbé
Mugnier, Meunier, which is unpardon-
able; and I am glad to have this oppor-
tunity for correcting it.

ALLANAH HARPER
PALISADES, N. Y.