=== Page 1 === PARTISAN REVIEW SPRING, 1955 ANDRÉ MALRAUX Replies to 13 Questions ROBERT PENN WARREN To a Little Girl: Five Poems CLEMENT GREENBERG "American-Type" Painting MARY MCCARTHY Shaw at the Phoenix SONYA RUDIKOFF Among the Angelic Orders (a story) MICHAEL HAMBURGER Heinrich von Kleist Reviews by G. S. Fraser, Horace Gregory, Elizabeth Hardwick, Irving Howe, William S. Poster THE OPPENHEIMER CASE: AN EXCHANGE Hans Meyerhoff and Diana Trilling 2 $1.00 === Page 2 === DOUBLEDAY ANCHOR BOOKS With the publication of six new ANCHOR Books, Doubleday announces two major innovations: the first entirely original work commissioned by ANCHOR BOOKS, and the first two in a series of Anchor anthologies inaugurating a collection of major, seldom anthologized, modern plays. FOUR STAGES OF RENAISSANCE STYLE Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400-1700 By Wylie Sypher A new departure in modern criticism, bridging the fields of art history and literary criticism, that re-interprets the great works of the Renaissance with special reference to Mannerism and The Baroque. With 32 pages of illustrations. An Anchor Original. A45 $1.25 THE MODERN THEATRE Edited by Eric Bentley The first two volumes of a new series of important modern plays, many in new translation. Volume 1 Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, Cavalleria Rusti- cana by Giovanni Verga, Woman of Paris by Henry Becque, The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht, Electra by Jean Giraudoux. An Anchor Original. A48a 95¢ Volume II Fanta sio by Alfred de Musset, The Diary of a Scoundrel by Alexander Ostrovsky, La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler, Purgatory by W. B. Yeats, Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht. An Anchor Original. A48b 95¢ THE EXPLORERS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1492-1806 By John Bartlet Brobner The definitive account of the men who opened the American continent-from Columbus to Lewis and Clark. Maps, 400 pages. A44 $1.25 GROWTH AND STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE By Otto Jespersen A brief and brilliant summary of the history, growth and character of the English language by its greatest modern student. A46 95¢ THE HOUSE BY THE MEDLAR TREE By Giovanni Verga Translated by Eric Mosbacher. The major work by one of Europe's greatest modern novelists. "There is no doubt that this is one of the great novels." -The New Yorker. A47 85¢ See the entire Anchor Book line at your bookseller's DOUBLEDAY • Unanimously acclaimed as "a literary event of the first order"... The Private Diaries of Stendhal, edited and translated by Robert Sage. $7.50 === Page 3 === IMPORTANT SPRING BOOKS The Selected Letters of ANTON CHEKHOV These sparkling and informative letters reveal a little-known side of the great dramatist's personality— his humor. This, together with his keen awareness of his milieu and his never-failing realism, contributes to their great charm. Many of the letters have never before been pub- lished in English. Translated by Sidonie K. Lederer. $4.00 Edited by LILLIAN HELLMAN The CHILDREN OF LIGHT This timely novel about an election campaign in a small Ohio city brilliantly dramatizes the plight of liberal-minded people whose decency renders them vulnerable to dema- gogues. "Mr. Sykes writes of the world we live in . . . with remark- able poise and understanding." - N. Y. Times. "Talented novelist Sykes has written a striking book." -Time. $3.50 By GERALD SYKES BOTTEGHE OSCURE XVI Latest edition of the celebrated in- ternational review. $2.50 Coming in May: Selections from BOTTEGHE OSCURE The finest of its prose and poetry in one important volume. Selections originally in Italian and French have been translated into English for the first time. $5.00 Ed. by MARGUERITE CAETANI FARRAR, STRAUS & CUDAHY Publishers of the best-selling HADRIAN'S MEMOIRS 101 Fifth Ave., New York 3, N. Y. Dannie Abse ASH ON A YOUNG MAN'S SLEEVE Angus Wilson calls this humor- ous, sensitive first novel: "Ac- curately remembered, imagina- tively told . . . a clever, moving evocation." The Saturday Re- view finds it: "all quite fresh and written with honest gusto." $3.00 Czeslaw Milosz THE SEIZURE OF POWER Winner of the Prix Littéraire Européen, this is the distinguished first novel of one of the leading anti-Communist writers in Europe. "A vast story of a war and a civil war . . . gripping scenes of military ac- tion alternate with sections of purest poetry. . . ." -IGNAZIO Silone. $3.50 Isaac Babel THE COLLECTED STORIES With an Introduc- tion by Lionel Trilling. Edited and translated by Walter Mori- son. Isaac Babel wrote with a classic simplicity and power that belongs to the great tradition of Russian fiction. Here, for the first time in English, is the whole body of his work. "He was a genius who spoke with a new inflection and expressed a folk life that had roots in the deepest soil of Russian experi- ence." -Commentary. $5.00 J. A. Pitt-Rivers THE PEOPLE OF THE SIERRA In this brilliant study of Alcalá in modern Spain, the eminent British an- thropologist examines the cus- toms, religion, bullfights, magi- cal practices, and the people— the smugglers, bandits, gypsies and witches, as well as the leaders of society. "I could not set it down..."-CARLETON S. Coon. $4.00 At your bookstore, or CRITERION BOOKS, INC. 100 Fifth Avenue, New York 11 === Page 4 === YALE BOOKS CONTRIBTORS TRAGIC THEMES IN WESTERN LITERATURE Edited with an introduction by Cleanth Brooks Seven essays ranging in subject from Sophocles to T. S. Eliot, renewing our perception of the masterpieces with which they deal and demonstrating the "ultimate oneness of man." Contribu- tors include Bernard Knox, Chauncey B. Tinker, Henri Peyre, Maynard Mack, and Louis Martz. $2.75 THE SPANISH BACKGROUND OF AMERICAN LITERATURE Stanley T. Williams The first com- plete definition of one of the great Continental influences upon American literature from the seventeenth century to the present day, featuring the "Span- ish biographies" of eight men of let- ters: Irving, Ticknor, Prescott, Bryant, Longfellow, Howell, Harte, and Howells. Illustrated Two Volumes $10.00 DRYDEN AND THE ART OF TRANSLATION William Frost An examination on three levels of Dryden's nondramatic verse: as poetry, as representations of their originals, and as part of the literature of the English Augustan age. $3.50 GERMAN LITERARY INFLUENCES ON THE AMERICAN TRANCENDENTALISTS, 1810-40 Stanley M. Vogel German scholarship among the Transcendentalists them- selves forms the major part of this study of their profound debt to German literature, language, criticism, and phil- osophy. $4.00 AT YOUR BOOKSTORE YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN 7 CONN ANDRE MALRAUX's most recent work to appear in English is the monumental Voices of Silence, pub- lished here in 1953. SONYA RUDIKOFF, who lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, is a frequent contributor of reviews and art criticism to PR and other maga- zines. MICHAEL HAMBURGER, a well- known critic and the translator of Hölderlin, Kleist, and other Ger- man writers, lives in London. ISAAC BABEL, one of the greatest modern short-story writers, is pre- sumed to have died in Russia in the 1930s, a victim of the Great Purge. HANS MEYERHOFF teaches phil- osophy at the University of South- ern California. MARY MCCARTHY is now abroad working on a new novel, to appear in the fall of this year. ELIZABETH HARDWICK's second novel, The Simple Truth, was pub- lished this winter. G. S. FRASER is a Scottish poet and critic, who writes regularly for The New Statesman and other periodicals in London. WILLIAM S. POSTER has published fiction and criticism in PR, Com- mentary and elsewhere. We are sorry to tell our readers of the loss of one of our most valued contributors, Robert Warshow, who died in New York City on March 18, 1955, after a brief ill- ness. Robert Warshow was thirty-seven; he was on the staff of Commentary, and had been writing for PR since 1946. === Page 5 === New poems by W. H. Auden THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES $3.00 at all bookstores. RANDOM HOUSE, N. Y. Here are twenty-eight new poems, written during the last four years. They reaffirm W. H. Auden's lyrical eloquence and his virtuosity. LIONEL TRILLING'S most provocative work of criticism - "bound to be one of the significant volumes of 1955." -HOWARD MUMFORD JONES, Saturday Review In this warm and lively book, Lionel Trilling is concerned with that most personal subject of all-the human self-and he ranges from Keats to Henry James, from Anna Karenina to George Orwell, to show the various forms the self assumes in literature. Even more than his widely-read The Liberal Imagination, these nine essays will delight and fascinate with their surprising in- sights, their refreshing point of view. "No other American critic has the power Trilling has of discerning and elucidating the difficult relations between general ideas, moral ideas, abstract ideas, and the concreteness of literature." -NEWTON ARVIN $3.50 The OPPOSING SELF Nine Essays in Criticism -THE VIKING PRESS, 18 E. 48th St., N. Y. 17 === Page 6 === PR PARTISAN REVIEW EDITORS: William Phillips, Philip Rahv ASSOCIATE EDITOR: William Barrett ADVERTISING AND BUSINESS MANAGER: Barbara Greenfeld ADVISORY BOARD: Allan D. Dowling, Sidney Hook, James Johnson Sweeney, Lionel Trilling PARTISAN REVIEW is published quarterly by the Foundation for Cultural Projects, Inc. at 513 Sixth Ave., New York 11, N. Y. Subscriptions: $4 a year, $6.50 for two years, foreign subscriptions, including Canada, $4.50 a year, $7.50 for two years. All payments from foreign countries must be made by U.S. money orders or checks payable in U.S. currency or with $0.75 added for collection charges. Single copy: $1.00. Manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. Copyright 1955, by PARTISAN REVIEW. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office at New York, N. Y. under the act of March 3, 1879. === Page 7 === SPRING, 1955 VOLUME XXII, NUMBER 2 CONTENTS REPLIES TO 13 QUESTIONS, André Malraux 157 TO A LITTLE GIRL, ONE YEAR OLD, IN RUINED FORTRESS, Robert Penn Warren 171 "AMERICAN-TYPE" PAINTING, Clement Greenberg 179 AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS, Sonya Rudikoff 197 HEINRICH VON KLEIST: AN INTRODUCTION, Michael Hamburger 222 DI GRASSO, Isaac Babel 234 THE OPPENHEIMER CASE: AN EXCHANGE, Hans Meyerhoff and Diana Trilling 238 THEATER CHRONICLE, Mary McCarthy 252 GEORGE ELIOT'S HUSBAND, Elizabeth Hardwick 260 BOOKS THE AESTHETE AND THE SENSATIONALIST, G. S. Fraser 265 THE EXPENSE OF SHREWDNESS, Irving Howe 272 FICTION CHRONICLE, William S. Poster 275 LEOPARDI IN SOLITUDE, Horace Gregory 283 === Page 8 === GROVE PRESS announces an important new series of paperbound editions Evergreen Books Printed directly from the plates of the expensive hardbound editions $1 and up Here are the first 10 titles: EARTH. The great, suppressed novel by EMILE ZOLA. "His greatest novel, the col- mination of his genius." -from the Preface by Angus Wilson. (Hardbound, $3.75) Evergreen Edition, $1.75 IMMORTALITY. By Ashley MONTAGU. A distinguished anthropologist examines one of mankind's oldest, most persistent beliefs. (Hardbound, $2.50) Evergreen Edition, $1 JAPANESE LITERATURE: An Introduction for Western Readers. By DONALD KEENE. The only definitive modern study. (Hard- bound, $2.50) Evergreen Edition, $1.00 FLAUBERT. A biography by PHILIP SPENCER. "By far the best work in English on Flau- bert's life." - N. Y. Times. (Hardbound, $3.75) Evergreen Edition, $1.25 THE CONFIDENCE-MAN. A novel by HER- MAN MELVILLE. "It is a pleasure to have this remarkable book back in print in an American edition." -Lionel Trilling. (Hard- bound, $2.25) Evergreen Edition, $1.25 THE MARQUIS DE SADE. By SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, author of The Second Sex. With selections from his writings. (Hardbound, $2.75) Evergreen Edition, $1.45 THE SACRED FOUNT. The novel by HENRY JAMES that Edmund Wilson calls "mysti- fying, even maddening." With an Introduc- tion by Leon Edel. (Hardbound, $2.75) Evergreen Edition, $1.45 COUNT D'ORGEL. A novel by RAYMOND RADIGUET, author of Devil in the Flesh. "This is Radiguet's masterpiece." -Time. (Hardbound, $2) Evergreen Edition, $1.25 SELECTED WRITINGS OF THE INGEN- IOUS MRS. APHRA BEHN. Bawdy, clever short novels by the famed Restoration author. (Hardbound, $3.00) Evergreen Edition, $1.50 THE VERSE IN ENGLISH OF RICHARD CRASHAW. 17th-century poems expressing a profound religious faith. (Hardbound, $2.75) Evergreen Edition, $1.25 At all bookstores, EVERGREEN BOOKS A division of GROVE PRESS, 795 Broadway, New York 3 === Page 9 === AAKCOAAKCO SELECTED POEMS by RANDALL JARRELL Mr. Jarrell's own selection from his four earlier books of poetry-104 poems in all, a number of them revised and two new. $4.00 at your bookstore ALFRED A. KNOPF, Publisher AAKCOAAKCO A distinguished account of the state of modern fiction in one of its most fascinating aspects THE Psychological Novel By LEON EDEL Author of Henry James This intellectually exciting study by an eminent critic does for the stream of con- sciousness novel what Percy Lubbock's Craft of Fiction did for the Jamesian novel and what E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel did for the traditional novel. $3.00 At all bookstores J. B. LIPPINCOTT CO. Philadelphia Poets and critics praise the achievement of THE SALT GARDEN the latest collection of verse by one of our most distinguished younger poets Howard Nemerey "There are some astonishingly strong and memorable poems which come to life at unexpected places in this volume; where, for example, is there better modern verse of its length than in 'I Only Am Escaped Alone To Tell Thee?" - JOHN CROWE RANSOM "These appealingly contemplative poems - and obviously they were done by an expert - proceed by the use of an imagery that is at once brainy and moodily sensitive. Mr. Nemerev is always alert to subtle- ties of attitude. He is my idea of a highly civilized writer." -KENNETH BURKE AN ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS BOOK $3.00 at all bookstores LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY BOSTON 6, MASS. === Page 10 === SCULPTURE MAY JOSE DE RIVERA JUNE SIDNEY GORDIN GRACE BORGENICHT GALLERY 61 EAST 57 NEW YORK contemporary paintings STABLE GALLERY 924 7th Ave. (at 58th St.) New York, N. Y. CI 6-3323 TIBOR DE NAGY GALLERY April JANE FREILICHER May ROBERT GOODNOUGH Publishers of Semicolon, a literary newsletter. 206 E. 53 Street PL 9-1621 TANAGER GALLERY 90 East 10th Street New York, N. Y. non-profit gallery in its third year of exhibiting contemporary painting and sculpture. recent paintings by riopelle thru april 9 modern french paintings april 11-30 PIERRE MATISSE GALLERY 41 e. 57 st., n. y. ANNE RYAN MEMORIAL SHOW April MAUD MORGAN May BETTY PARSONS GALLERY • 15 East 57 FIRST AMERICAN SHOWING FAUSTO PIRANDELLO Paintings catherine viviano 42 e. 57 st. through Apr. 16 NEW BOOKS, NEW AUTHORS... Dr. George Forell: FAITH ACTIVE IN LOVE A pioneering study of Luther's social ethics. $3.75 Frank McCullough: STRIKE! A report on conflict between a Stalinist union and shortsighted management. $3.50 At your bookstore, or order directly from: THE AMERICAN PRESS, Inc. 489 Fifth Ave. New York 17, N. Y. (THE AMERICAN PRESS is the only selective cooperative publisher in the country today. If your work is of literary merit, send it for evaluation to MR. CRAWFORD. === Page 11 === the hans hofmann school of fine arts 52 west 8th street new york city phone gramercy 7-3491 provincetown, mass. june 13 - september 2 summer session personally conducted by mr. hofmann MANCHESTER GUARDIAN WEEKLY Thursday DECEMBER 23 1954 Vol. 71 No. 36 AIR EDITION 15 Cents NEW FREE TRIAL OFFER!!! ENJOY 4 WEEKS OF THIS WORLD-FAMOUS NEWSPAPER AT OUR RISK! You can sharpen your understanding of the present-day scene by reading a newspaper that gives you a fresh viewpoint on inter- national affairs. The American Association of University Women, in a recent letter to its branches, wrote "Indispensable' is a relentless word, but if you give the Manchester Guardian a chance it will become an indispensable re- source for your thinking." The great opinion makers of the greatest nations temper their judgment by what they read in The Guardian. It is one of those rare publications which offers clear, un- biased thinking on today's criti- cal issues. The Guardian is justly famed for its sincere, out- spoken journalism, its lucid editorial style, its willingness to face the facts and be guided by them alone, rather than to succumb to mob hysteria or special interests. Mail this coupon today and learn why more and more Americans have become regular readers of The Guardian Weekly Air Edition- ARRIVES IN NEW YORK ON DAY OF PUBLICATION! "The most literate and entertaining newspaper in the English language." (Saturday Review, 8-8-53) GENERAL REPORTS SPECIAL POLITICAL ARTICLES SUPERB EDITORIALS MUSIC, ART & DRAMA SECTIONS BRILLIANT DISPATCHES BY ALISTAIR COOKE SPECIAL LITERARY ARTICLES CROSS WORD PUZZLE LOW'S FAMOUS CARTOONS AND MANY OTHER FASCINATING FEATURES! MAIL COUPON FOR SPECIAL FREE OFFER! THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN 53 East 51st St., New York 22, N. Y. PR1 Please enter my subscription to the Man- chester Guardian Weekly Air Edition, as checked below. If not satisfied after seeing the first four issues, I may cancel and get a full refund. 1 year, $7 16-week trial, $2 Payment enclosed Please bill me later Name Address === Page 12 === THE SCHOOL OF LETTERS INDIANA UNIVERSITY Summer 1955 Courses on the graduate level in the theory and practice of Literary Criticism Including work toward advanced degrees in Criticism, English Literature, and Comparative Literature SENIOR FELLOWS JOHN CROWE RANSOM LIONEL TRILLING AUSTIN WARREN PHILIP RAHV ALLEN TATE Courses to be given during the Summer of 1955: Richard Chase, Examples of the American Novel. Francis Fergusson, Modern Poetry of the Theatre. Philip Blair Rice, Aesthetics of Literature. Newton P. Stallknecht, The Theory and Practice of Poetry in Wordsworth's Earlier Work. Allen Tate, Dante and Poe. Harold Whitehall, Language and Literature. Address enquiries to Newton P. Stallknecht, Director, The School of Letters, English Building, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. PERSPECTIVES U.S.A. 11 The Age of the Frontier Time is the Mercy of Eternity Prospects in the Arts and Sciences Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric Technics and the Future of Western Civilization The Film Sense and the Painting Sense Three Players of a Summer Game The Painting of John Marin A City By Seasons WALTER PRESCOTT WEBB KENNETH REXROTH J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER RICHARD WEAVER LEWIS MUMFORD PARKER TYLER TENNESSEE WILLIAMS JAMES THRALL SOBY BRENDAN GILL Book Reviews JAMES LYONS CLEMENT GREENBERG PATRICK F. QUINN 9 John Marin Reproductions 28 Film Illustrations Published by Intercultural Publications Inc., 477 Madison Avenue, N. Y. 22. Address subscription orders to Paragon Mailing Service, 1 Lefferts Avenue, Brooklyn 25, N. Y. $1.50 per issue available May 1955 $5.00 per year === Page 13 === AIKEN ARENDT AUDEN AUERBACH BABEL BALDWIN BARKER BARRETT BARZUN BELLOW THE NEW SCHWARTZ BERRYMAN BISHOP BLACKMUR PARTISAN SHAPIRO BOWLES BURNHAM CAMUS CHASE READER SIMPSON CHIAROMONTE CLARK CONNOLLY 1945-1953 SPENDER edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv DAVIS DOWLING FIEDLER A Companion Volume to The Partisan Reader: 1934-44 STAFFORD FITZGERALD GREENBERG GREGORY "For twenty years Partisan Review has carried a large and important part of the intellectual traffic between America and Western Eu- rope. It has always had the authority which is the reward of the positive and civilized mind. . . . This can be seen by anyone who looks at 'The New Partisan Reader.'" HARDWICK HAUSER HOOK HOWE JARRELL JUNGER KAUFMANN KAZIN KLONSKY LANGGASSER LOGAN LOWELL MCCARTHY MALRAUX MARCUSE MILOSZ ORTEGA y GASSET ORWELL PHILLIPS PRITCHETT RAHV RANSOM REED ROETHKE ROSENFELD SCHAPIRO SCHLESINGER STEVENS -V. S. PRITCHETT, New York Times Book Review This 640-page anthology contains the best work pub- lished in Partisan Review since 1945, some of the finest writing of the modern period: 12 stories, major es- says and shorter pieces by 40 writers, and a large sec- tion of poetry. SWEENEY VAN GHENT WARSHOW WATKINS WISEMAN L TRILLING The New Partisan Reader retail price $6.00 One year of PR regular price $4.00 SPECIAL COMBINATION OFFER both for $8.25 name street city zone. state... TATE D TRILLING The New Partisan Reader is also available at the special price of $4.25 in combination with a two- year subscription. PARTISAN REVIEW, 513 Sixth Ave., New York 11 Published by Harcourt, Brace & Co. === Page 14 === BOLLINGEN SERIES 1955 XXX PAPERS FROM THE ERANOS YEARBOOKS Vol. 2: THE MYSTERIES Translated by Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull. Thirteen distin- guished scholars discuss various religious manifestations that may be characterized as "mysteries." 6" x 9", 600 pages. $5.00 XXXIX THE ART OF INDIAN ASIA: Its Mythology and Transformations By Heinrich Zimmer. Completed and edited by Joseph Campbell. A comprehensive study of Indian art and its sources. With 662 pho- tographs by Eliot Elisofon and others. 9" x 12", 450 pages of text. Two volumes, boxed. $19.50 XL EGYPTIAN RELIGIOUS TEXTS AND REPRESENTATIONS Vol. 2: THE SHRINES OF TUT-ANKH-AMON Translated with introductions by Alexandre Piankoff. Edited by N. Rambova. The first translation of the texts inscribed on the four gold- en- encrusted shrines that enclose the sarcophagus of Tut-Ankh-Amon. 9½" x 12", 160 pages, 62 plates, 3 color plates. $17.50 XLI CHAPMAN'S HOMER Edited with introductions by Allardyce Nicoll. Two-volume edition of the George Chapman translations. Vol. 1: The Iliad. Vol. 2: The Odyssey and the Lesser Homerica. 6½" x 9½", 1600 pages, 2 vols., boxed. $10.00 XLVII THE GREAT MOTHER By Erich Neumann. Translated by Ralph Manheim. An analysis of a primordial image which finds expression in early man's myth, ritual, and art, and in modern man's dreams, fantasies, and creative work. 8" x 10", 400 pages, 246 plates. $7.50 DISTRIBUTED BY PANTHEON BOOKS, INC., 333 SIXTH AVE., N. Y. 14 For detailed catalogue write to Bollingen Series, 140 E. 62 St., N. Y. 21 === Page 15 === André Malraux REPLIES TO 13 QUESTIONS* To what extent will the American influence be a factor in Europe in the years ahead? I am not thinking here of Eastern Europe, that is another side of the question. It is clear that the entire Slavic world will be part of the Russian world. But I believe that the metamorphosis of France will be oriented toward the Atlantic. Even a France in which Com- munism plays an important part. Politics plays an important role in culture, but in unpredictable and not very rational ways. I know that France is afraid of the "American" influence; but the question is not really one of influence. As everyone knows, not only does in- fluence have a double meaning (Greek influence on Rome, Persian on the Arabs); but more important, a new culture is not the sum total of those that preceded it, it is their metamorphosis. There is something which, in a rather subtle way, serves as an area of agree- ment between the America of the eastern seaboard, England, France and Portugal (and extending to the European democracies, even when the latter are "racially" partly germanic: Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Scandinavia). The Atlantic element is something quite different from the Anglo-Saxon element. Portugal figures in the At- lantic culture, Spain in a much less direct way. South America is beginning to come into the constellation. What do you call a culture? It isn't easy to improvise that kind of definition. Let's say: the incarnation of a system of values; and more modestly, a coinciding of sensibilities. * This is a composite of several interviews with Malraux, the full text of which was recently published in the French magazine Preuves. === Page 16 === 158 PARTISAN REVIEW Do you not believe that English sensibility is closer today to French sensibility than to American? I do. We were shown this rather strikingly by the War. But what does England bring to us in art? English art, like London taxis, all looks alike. D. H. Lawrence, except for his puritanism, could pass for a French novelist, and almost of the nineteenth century. You un- derstand that I am not talking about influence, but of convergence: what I mean is that what Hemingway, Caldwell and Steinbeck are looking for is closer to what the French writers of 1940 were looking for, before they had read them, than to a single British novelist. And this obsession with the “fundamental” man which is the mark of contemporary American literature has no doubt been strengthened by the War—unless the opposite reaction proves so violent that a litera- ture of delicacy and imagination makes its appearance. But I believe that we may expect both. Isn’t there something primitive in the particular character of Ameri- can literature to which you refer? It might seem that way, but I don’t think so. Many cultured Americans consider their present-day literature decadent. To them, the great period of American literature is the nineteenth century, the period of Poe, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman. Heming- way has something in common with the primitives, but he is not a follower of theirs. But it is not so much that: as I see it, the essential characteristic of present-day American literature is that it is the only literature which is not the work of intellectuals. I am neither approv- ing nor disapproving; I am stating a fact. (It is my conviction that the great effort of this literature is going to be its attempt to intel- lectualize itself without losing its direct contact.) The writers I met in the United States reminded me very little of the European writer. They have neither his relative historical culture nor his fondness for ideas (which in the United States is the prerogative of the professor). Rather they made me think of our painters: they have the same in- difference toward nearly everything except food and drink, the same precise and certain knowledge of the technique of their fellow artists both past and present, the same love of change, the same picturesque manner of dress, and even sometimes the same physical appear- ance. . . . === Page 17 === REPLIES TO 13 QUESTIONS 159 One may or may not like the style of the American army, but it is plain that it will be the model of the twentieth-century army. It is an army possessing neither style nor etiquette, an army of me- chanics—incidentally a victorious one—in which soldiers and officers say: "We are not military, we are mobilized citizens." But one can- not say of it that it is only because it furnishes their uniforms that the armies of the Allied nations resemble it. It does not furnish them to the British. But the battle-dress and the American jacket belong to the same family: by comparison, the officer of the Wehrmacht looked like an officer of the Empire. At the time when she was the most powerful, Germany was wholly without influence on the sensibility of the countries she occu- pied. Neither courage nor discipline are specifically German values; and nowhere was German fashion, the German press, the German magazine photograph or the German film dominant. All this is pro- foundly annoying to Occidental Europe. The tragic cinema of the en- tire world still looks to the finest Russian films, but does anyone look to the German films, even the best of them? Whereas in everything that has been created or developed since the First World War America has left its mark: in the street décor, the house-front with the picture window, the automobile, and above all the moving-picture of course. The influence of the United States is not the big question. What is important is that the civilization in formation is bound up with the entire world. Obviously the last War was the first true world war. Not only does the moving-picture make itself felt—more or less— everywhere, but since the period between the two Wars the art of the entire world has been converging upon each one of us. We are becoming the heirs of the world just as we are of our own fathers, though not in the same way. In this domain, the role of the United States is important and superficial. The Metropolitan Museum is doubtless the first museum in which the sculpture of the great periods of China, India and the Occident are exhibited analogically. Where, before, could a Tang Bodhisattva have been seen side by side with a Gothic virgin? The Occident, too, has now been touched by the planetary heri- tage, but not altogether in the same way. America is a civilization without soil; for that reason, rationalistic. For her the various arts === Page 18 === 160 PARTISAN REVIEW are "propositions." For Europe, above all for France—her painting still holds first place in the world—what is needed is an integration in accordance with ever living molds; she needs help in bringing about another successful delivery. You will notice that something of the sort has already taken place when, for the first time, painters may see facing one another in a museum a Raphael and a Rembrandt. The result has not been a conciliation, an eclecticism, which would not make much sense: it has been romanticism. The art still to be born will be as different from what gave it birth as Delacroix is from Rembrandt, Raphael and Rubens. And I believe that the Atlantic civilization will be just as different, and in the same way, from all that it is to come out of. This goes even for the United States. Does this point of view imply that French politics vis-à-vis America will have a fixed orientation? Certainly not. Problems of civilization are posed in terms of destiny. Problems of politics are quite different. Napoleon said that destiny was politics; but he saw that this left quite some leeway. Greece would surely not have benefited Mediterranean civilization by being more subservient to Rome. Sasanian Persia played an im- mense role in the elaboration of Byzantine civilization, a role she as- surely would not have played had she made herself submit to Byzan- tium. Rousseau, stubbornly asserting that he was a citizen of Geneva, had more of an effect on France than if he had called himself a Frenchman. Hitler more than anyone else would have hastened the birth of the Atlantic civilization: that was not precisely what he was aiming at. Like the ways of the Almighty, the ways of destiny are intricate! Our greatest effectiveness can be insured by our greatest determination to be free. What will be France's role in literature? As you know, all prophecies, as soon as one tries to make them specific, lead to the ridiculous. . . . But I have been struck by this: the four French writers whose work is wholly posterior to 1916 and who have the largest audience abroad: Bernanos, Giono, Montherlant and myself, are all related to what might be called the heroic tradition of France, the tradition of Corneille. In 1930, when I maintained that this tradition, in which I regard Pascal as a major link, was at least === Page 19 === REPLIES TO 13 QUESTIONS 161 as constant and profound as the other, I met with cries of paradox. But that this is so is becoming more and more apparent. And I am not sure that French literature will not owe its place in the new world above all to its Pascalian accent (philosophy, religion, destiny), which is not without some echo in America. However, there is another strain in French literature, the one that runs through Montaigne, Molière, La Bruyère, Chamfort, Stendhal, etc., the people who can't be taken in, who insist on knowing what they are talking about. The dream rectifiers . . . the moralists, after all. Notice that there are no real moralists except in France and England. The English and the French are the only ones who have made any serious judgments about women. The Russians, who have created fiction's dominating women, have writ- ten nothing important on the subject of women. Stendhal wrote La Chartreuse, and De l'Amour, Tolstoi created Anna Karenina and Natasha, but he is the great Tolstoi in fiction only. Look at what Goethe and Nietzsche wrote about women, when they talked about them “directly.” We have not seen the last of the moralists, I be- lieve. This twofold human effort, on the one hand to bring about man's participation in a privileged part of himself—or in what surpasses him—and, on the other, to reduce to a minimum the part played by the element of comédie natural to the human condition- this twofold effort is, in the ethical realm, the very hallmark of the new human type. One feels it trying to take form while Europe goes from convulsion to convulsion. There have been quite a few who have allowed themselves to dream about a new humanism; perhaps this should be taken as one of the first signs of it. A remark of mine made in 1940 received favorable mention on the radio: “May victory belong to those who fought the war without liking it!” It may be that a kind of lucid madness, though fraternal, was the form of human grandeur which at that moment was trying to find itself. In L'Espoir and in your lecture at the Sorbonne, you seek to discern the equality of man as it reveals itself in the various cultures and civil- izations. But cultures and civilizations, as you have shown, change form. What is the future of ours? === Page 20 === 162 PARTISAN REVIEW The interview with André Breton published in Figaro Lit- téraire, the lecture by Picasso at the Sorbonne, seem to me to be symptoms which, at the least, give cause for reflection. It isn't that they have moved from the left to the right, not at all. Picasso didn't go to the Sorbonne, the Sorbonne came to him; not any more than André Breton went to Figaro Littéraire. The Picasso painting re- produced at the Sorbonne, and the statements made by Breton in the Littéraire, could have appeared in the most advanced periodicals of the year 1935, and do not imply the slightest compromise. The fact is, and this is new, that what used to be called right, in art, has ceased to exist. It might be said that somewhat the same thing is happening in politics, although it isn't altogether the same. The traditional Right has scarcely any strength left in depth; the Right which styled itself Center-from Poincaré to certain Radical ministers-no longer makes its weight felt; and the political Left seems to be victorious in the same way that the literary left is. I say, "seems to be." But a powerful wave of polarization has been unleashed throughout Eu- rope, and despite appearances and tripartisms (and notwithstand- ing that the notions of right and left as they existed before the War have been entirely brushed aside), this polarization continues in the whole of Occidental Europe. But in art I see no beginnings of polarization. Instead I see indications of the disappearance of the polarization that began when the great artists, the first ones unconsciously, their successors con- sciously, became the accusers. There are no more "poètes maudits." The voice of Nietzsche has today lost its most characteristic accent, because those whom Nietzsche would accuse would be prepared in advance to admit that he was right, or pretend to do so. . . . Now, bear in mind that what was called the rupture between the artist and society (but which was really something very dif- ferent, namely the necessity on the part of the artist to create his genius against the values of the world in which he lived), goes back quite a way. Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, Racine were still admired, perhaps less, perhaps more than some, but still admired. Rembrandt's old age marks the beginning of l'art maudit. In literature the revolt begins with Rousseau, with whom ethical predication becomes a function of literature. The Savoyard Vicar can be taken as just another heresiarch; but the question whether === Page 21 === REPLIES TO 13 QUESTIONS 163 a heresy aiming to found itself on reason doesn't become separated from those that preceded it, still remains. But what is new is that fiction (hence literary talent) has now become the means whereby the heresy expresses itself. In his attempt to substitute ethics for re- ligion, the structure of which has become greatly weakened, Rous- seau at the same time also substitutes it for politics. But in place of the system of values that he attacks he has another—that of the individual—and his political system, which is democracy. In the middle of the nineteenth century, all this changes. Baudelaire does not become the successor of Hugo as Hugo succeeded Rousseau. In the seventeenth century, the arts had converged toward a com- mon aesthetic, but painters, poets and musicians rarely knew one another. Later, although the arts diverged from each other, artists did come to know one another, and no one else. In their closed society, art took the place of ethics. It was man's raison d'être, at one and the same time his justification and the means of expressing a quasi permanent accusation against the world. In the seventeenth century, the player of ninepins Malherbe, though indifferent toward the State and the Church, did not revolt against them. Baudelaire (except occasionally) is likewise indifferent, but he is not subservient. Since the Liberation the thébaïde has triumphed. But it is some- what surprised at its victory, uncomfortable at not finding an enemy with a church instead of a thébaïde. That is why it has been using every means, even the most elementary ones, to rid itself of its soli- tude. The whole problem of modern culture is to find out how it can do this. Needless to say, I do not think for one moment that we are going to return to a communion of cathedrals with Rimbaud or Picasso cast in the role of woodcarver of Chartres. The triumphant left has in no sense "replaced" the right which it has vanquished: what it has done is to impose "another function" of art. I do not believe in a new Middle Ages in art. Not in America any more than in Russia, and not in Russia any more than in America. Soviet culture, in Russia, to all indications is a rationalistic one. Speaking of rationalism, in the last century it has often manifested itself in judging or explaining works of art as resulting from the artist's social or physical condition. === Page 22 === 164 PARTISAN REVIEW I do not believe that the "conditioning philosophies" as applied to art really lead anywhere. It is obvious that the determination of which Marxism and psychoanalysis were the successors (I am think- ing only of their relation to art), and the aesthetic to which they were opposed as well, had reached a point where a change of per- spective was much to be desired. (Moreover, the reader always hopes that he will be able to understand a little about how a great work "came about.") But, in the end, the value of these theories is ex- clusively negative: obviously the work of Balzac would not exist in the form in which we know it if the French Revolution had not brought the bourgeoisie to power, but it is just as obvious that it would not have existed either if the mother of Balzac had died during pregnancy. It is unlikely that "The Conscience" of Victor Hugo would exist if Hugo had not had that "obsession of the eye," which is well known to psychoanalysts and fairly common; but it is just as obvious that there are quite a good many people who have this obsession, that quite a few of them have written poems, and that no one but Victor Hugo wrote "The Conscience." What interests us chiefly is the quality of the poem. So long as a work of art is approached from a sociological point of view, so long as one is interested above all in the history of art, a philosophy such as Marxism contributes a great deal; but the moment the essential problem becomes one of quality, the theories that art is conditioned do not solve much of anything. Let us say, if you like, that at best they explain the dead but do not explain life. All poetry implies the destruction of the relationship between things that seems obvious to us in favor of particular relationships imposed by the poet. His means of imposing these particular relation- ships is, of course, the metaphor. Obviously, the domain of meta- phors at the disposal of the poet may be circumscribed. I am not saying that a military civilization (the Assyrian, for example) will create metaphors in the style of Déroulède,1 but I do say that the system of metaphors by which a poet of such a civilization expresses himself cuts across feelings and sensations in which war plays a large role, and the role of a value. The metaphors of military civilizations are not the "rational" expression of military values; the metaphors 1 A nineteenth-century French poet who wrote a volume of poems about war entitled Chants du soldat.-TRANSLATOR === Page 23 === REPLIES TO 13 QUESTIONS 165 of pastoral civilizations are not the "rational" expression of pastoral values. It is the poet's genius which discovers the metaphors that mo- bilize, in the person who hears them, the feelings related to his civilization, without their being a rational expression of it. And it is precisely this discovery that interests us. It takes form within the "conditioning," but breaks through it precisely in the degree to which it becomes art. What is likely to lead us astray is that there are in man feelings that are eternal, though falling within particular forms of civiliza- tions whose vast domains of metaphors are, after all, classifiable: feelings which derive from the night, the seasons, death, blood (the whole great cosmic and biological domain). It is their permanence that we find in the Hindu writers as well as in Homer, in the Chinese and in the moderns, whenever the latter appeal to the feelings. It is that, too, which we find in the tragic film, where we have the il- lusion of a permanence of metaphor toward which all poetry con- verges, whereas the truth is that this cosmic domain reaches its full strength only when incarnated in metaphors peculiar to each civiliza- tion. I remember, in Spain, seeing one of our wounded flyers come back in a pursuit plane covered with blood. The plane was hidden away under some olive trees. The next morning, drops of dew spangled the newly dried blood of the fuselage, blood tinted every drop, and it seemed that the resurrection of the dew had brought with it the wound in its eternal cycle. The return of day took on its full measure of pathos, because it was incarnated at once in the earth, in the plane and in the blood. It was this incarnation that gave the spectacle such a startling accent; it is by a succession of similar incarnations, discovered by the poet, that poetry lives. Now, a philosophy of conditioning is perhaps able to show us what the poet cannot incarnate, but it does not reveal to us any- thing that is essential in his act of incarnation. Your example is drawn from the eternal myths. But, as you have said, there is also Europe and the modern world. It isn't so easy to find out what we think about Europe. The different European nations, except (and even then) in the face === Page 24 === 166 PARTISAN REVIEW of exceptional danger, feel their differences infinitely more than their points of resemblance. What made us believe in Europe is, above all, Christianity. But Christianity was something quite dif- ferent. It was in no degree a rational notion, something in the order of a federalism: it was an identity of passions. But the idea of federalism, which may very well have a political value, obviously does not have a cultural value. We are under the impression, or the illusion, that an American culture is in process of creation; that a Soviet culture is in process of creation; and that something called Europe (dying or not, that is the whole question) still carries considerable weight. The absence of a past might be considered, for America as well as for Russia, as a strength, in certain spheres. The demand that the proletariat inherit the world, as it is making itself heard in Russia; the absence of tradition in America, but also of cultural prejudices; the fact that the latter is a civilization in which the land plays no part-a civilization of towns and cities-are not negative realities. But, in our time, when reproduction is gradually placing within the possession of everyone an imaginary museum embracing the entire world, the perspectives of this imaginary museum continue to be imposed by Occidental Europe, that is, by France. There is no reason why the plastic heritage of the world must be envisaged in the form of a conflict of cultures. I have said that, since 1940, an Atlantic culture was in forma- tion. But I do not believe that this culture is fundamentally Ameri- can. I believe, even, that certain of its values will not be American at all, in the sense that we speak of American values nowadays. I believe that if a Communist culture were established in Europe, a certain number of its values would not be Russian; and that Rus- sian music will make its weight felt in the Atlantic culture whatever happens, just as the American film will make its weight felt in the Communist culture, whatever happens. We see a certain number of American values and Soviet values quite clearly because they are new, but what are the European values, not to be found among the others, which seem to you still to exist along- side them? === Page 25 === REPLIES TO 13 QUESTIONS 167 Since an interview ought to be clear, I am going to use a symbol, at the risk of being somewhat blunt. My answer is, Michel- angelo. A great deal has been said about the dehumanization of art and the return to barbarity. Assuredly, the savage arts have made their entrance into our domain. But if we draw up a list of the painters who owe their resurrection to our last fifty years, we find among them El Greco, Vermeer, Piero della Francesca, Dumesnil de La Tour. It isn't only the fetish that we have revived, but one of the greatest styles of the Occident as well. The universe created by Cézanne is not a universe of fetishes. What is more, even though the influence of Michelangelo and Rembrandt is nil in painting today, both still exist for us as high cultural values. What our resuscitated painters have in common, to some extent, with the figures of Chartres, Rembrandt and Michel- angelo, what the two last-named expressed in the highest degree, has no equivalent, either in America or in the Soviet Union. And whether we call it the will to transcendence or by some other name, we know exactly what they stand for as soon as we think of them. A word of warning. I am not saying that I want our painters to make pseudo-Rembrandts and our sculptors pseudo-Michelangelos! The values we are talking about here obviously are only expressed by a series of metamorphoses. The successor to the sculptors of Chartres is Rembrandt, and I don't know any more than you do who may be the successor to Rembrandt. The only one who does, perhaps, is the artist himself. Let us sum up: under the heading of culture, I see nothing that might be opposed to Europe which has already outdistanced it. I am not suggesting that we live on our Michelangelo capital. I am saying that the heroic and tragic resonance of Europe is not dead and that Europe's role is to conquer a new incarnation. Recently it was said that there were no "cultures" but only one single civilization that would perpetuate itself by progressing from its origin. This is word-juggling. Even if there were but one civilization, Egyptian culture would not be Chinese culture. It is clear that the question of our civilization has been raised, but it seems obvious to me that to look upon it the way we look upon all vanished cultures (Egyptian or Roman, for example) is 2 Refers to a statement made by Ilya Ehrenbourg. === Page 26 === 168 PARTISAN REVIEW not altogether acceptable. Because there is a fundamental difference between our culture and all the cultures which have preceded it: namely, that for us these cultures exist, whereas for them each one was the negation of the one preceding it. It is possible that, in claiming for ourselves the heritage of the world, we are not claiming anything but the heritage of a succession of metamorphoses; but what is certain is that we are the first to make this claim. As to knowing whether there is a civilization, I have been putting this question to myself for a number of years. As it is not solved, obviously, by a simple belief in progress, the question becomes one of knowing what this civilization is which transcends cultures; it is a matter of establishing the notion of man. A mere detail! Beyond a doubt, the most important task confronting con- temporary thought. . . . We have used the term “America” as a synonym of the United States. But what about Latin America (which is becoming less Latin and more “Indio”): does she not take a part in the new Occidental civilization? You are right when you speak about the powerful Indian appeal. If you see a statue of Guatemozin in Mexico but none of Cortés, and if Mexico is using her Indian blood to reinvigorate herself, it is because the Aztecs are a past for the Mexicans even more than antiquity was for the Italian Renaissance. Mexico exalts its martyrs in order that it may exalt its heroes. But her contemp- orary fresco painters owe more to Gauguin and Picasso than to the Aztec sculptors, whatever they may say. And throughout the whole of Latin America, just as in the Near East, nationalisms notwith- standing, in the cultural domain France once again exists. She is not sufficiently aware of this, because for so long a time she remained the theoretician. And, to be sure, the France of 1954 is not the France which restored its meaning to the word liberty! But the cultural domain is not the ideological domain. And if many people think that France is dead in the former, it is because they forget that in the cultural domain works count more than theories. Among our philosophers none has as much influence as Heidegger, but Freiburg-in-Breisgau has far fewer philosophers than Paris. For Paris still signifies for the world what Florence signified for Eu- === Page 27 === REPLIES TO 13 QUESTIONS 169 rope. Because she symbolizes the universe of art. Her artists are not the greatest in all the arts, but all the arts meet and unite in her. Except architecture. Despite Le Corbusier, despite Prouvé. French architecture is hidden away in portfolios, and its most grandiose achievement will soon be the capital of Punjab. ... But that would take us too far afield. Has Russia proposed any works or furnished any models to the other Slavic peoples? For that matter, what is the meaning of the "Russian World" now that Russia is cutting herself off from her own culture? Has there ever been a Russian culture? In speaking of Poland and Rumania I am speaking of the Russian world. Their annexa- tion has been accomplished-to the Communist world. I am not familiar with Rumanian affairs, but I believe I do know the mean- ing of the Polish Resistance. It will never forget the passivity of the Red Army before Warsaw. But Russia is not attempting to annex Poland by Slavism but through Communism. Russian Communism often seems to me the means Russia has hit upon of becoming a true nation. I believe that a nation is something more than "the memory of great deeds accomplished together and the will to achieve still more," as Renan says. I believe that a nation implies the ex- altation of particular values which, rightly or wrongly, unite those who form a part of it. I believe that every old nation regards itself as ranking above all others by virtue of one attribute, whether it be strength or wisdom, grandeur or freedom. Russia was keenly con- scious of her genius, and had quite a nice inferiority complex. Com- munism has enabled the latter to undergo a brilliant transformation. But the role once played by the past in the great nations of Europe (from which what we call culture is inseparable) seems to me now to be played in Russia-as in the United States-by the future. Soviet propaganda claims everything for itself: Russia invented the Archimedes Principle and Euclidean geometry. Good enough. But her claims to Aeschylus, Giotto and the cathedrals are milder. The Soviet Republics publish the classics as a "scientific" under- taking: as a subheading of history. There is a Russian genius, but Russia has no culture in the sense that the great Occidental nations have it, because the Occidental cultures are bound up with a myth of antiquity, which has never played a great role in Russia. The === Page 28 === 170 PARTISAN REVIEW Occident, what you call here the culture area, is coextensive with the Latin church. Russia has Byzantium as an ancestor, but from Peter the Great to Stalin her orientation has been counter to By- zantium; and even the anti-Occidentals-even Dostoevsky-do not link themselves with Byzantium as do the Occidentals with Greece and Rome. The only way Russia can "come to terms" with that part of the Slavic world which is Catholic in culture is to annex it—and she knows it. There is of course no specific American culture any more than there is a Russian culture. But the American culture is that of an Occidental nation, no more (and no less) different from French culture, or German culture, and with the same cultural ancestors as the countries of Europe. As to Germany, does she not now have some influence on European culture? Heidegger's influence is due to the vigor with which he has restated the problem of Being in its relation to the problem of History. This must be taken as a phenomenon of our time, another manifestation of which we see in the discovery of what true Hindu thought is. But since you find it amusing to cite some of my ex- prophecies, allow me to make one more: the principal problem of the end of the century will be the religious problem-in a form as unlike any that we now know as Christianity was from the religions of antiquity-but it will not be the problem of Being. (Translated from the French by Frances A. Lippman) === Page 29 === Robert Penn Warren TO A LITTLE GIRL, ONE YEAR OLD, IN RUINED FORTRESS I To a place of ruined stone we brought you, and sea-reaches. Rocca: fortress, hawk-heel, lion-paw, set on a hill. A hill, no. Sea-cliff, and crag-cocked, the embrasures commanding the beaches, Range easy, with most fastidious mathematic and skill. Philippus me fecit: he of Spain, the black-browed, the anguished, For whom nothing prospered, though he loved God. His arms, great scutcheon of stone, once at drawbridge, have now languished Long in the moat, under garbage; at moat-brink, rosemary with blue, thistle with gold bloom, nod. Sun-blaze and cloud tatter, it is the sirocco, the dust swirl is swirled Over the bay-face, mounts air like gold gauze whirled; it traverses the blaze-blue of water. We have brought you where the geometry of a military rigor survives its own ruined world, And sun regilds your gilt hair, in the midst of your laughter. Rosemary, thistle, clutch stone. Far hangs Giannutri in blue air. Far to that blueness the heart aches, And on the exposed approaches the last gold of gorse-bloom, in the sirocco, shakes. === Page 30 === II White goose by palm tree, palm ragged, among stones the white oleander, And the she-goat, brown, under pink oleander, waits. I do not think that anything in the world will move, not goat, not gander. Goat-droppings are fresh in the hot dust; not yet the beetle; the sun beats, And under blue shadow of mountain, over blue-braiding sea-shadow, The gull hangs white; whiter than white against mountain-mass, The gull extends motionless on the shelf of air, on substance of shadow. The gull, at an eye-blink, will, into the astonishing statement of sun, pass. All night, next door, the defective child cried; now squats in the dust where the lizard goes. The wife of the gobbo sits under vine leaves, she suffers, her eyes glare. The engaged ones sit in the privacy of bemusement, heads bent, the classic pose. And the beetle will work, the gull comment the irrelevant anguish of air. But in the moment of your laughter let the molecular dance of the stone-dark glimmer like joy in the stone’s dream, And in that instant of possibility, let gobbo, gobbo’s wife, and us, and all, take hands and sing: redeem, redeem! III The child next door is defective because the mother, Seven brats already in that purlieu of dirt, Took a pill, or did something to herself she thought would not hurt, But it did, and no good, for there came this monstrous other. === Page 31 === The sister is twelve. Is beautiful like a saint. Sits with the monster all day with pure love, calm eyes. Has taught it a trick, to make ciao, Italian-wise. It crooks hand in that greeting. She smiles her smile without taint. I come, and her triptych beauty and joy stir hate -Is it hate?-in my heart. Fool, doesn't she know that the process Is not that joyous or simple, to bless, or unbless, The malfeasance of nature or the filth of fate? Can it bind or loose, that beauty in that kind, Beauty of benediction? I trust our hope to prevail That heart-joy in beauty be truth before beauty fail And be gathered like air in the ruck of the world's wind! I think of your goldness, of joy, how empires grind, stars are hurled. I smile stiff, saying ciao, saying ciao, and think: this is the world. IV Above the beach, the vineyard Terrace breaks to the seaward Drop, where the cliffs fail To a clutter of manganese shale. Some is purple, some powdery-pale. But the black lava chunks stand oft The lava will withstand The sea's beat, or insinuant hand, And protect our patch of sand. It is late. The path from the beach Crawls up. I take you. We reach The vineyard, and at that path-angle The hedge obtrudes a tangle Of leaf and green bulge and a wrangle Bee-drowsy and blowsy with white bloom, === Page 32 === Scarcely giving the passerby room. We know that the blossomy mass Will brush our heads as we pass, And under our feet there's blue clover And the blue stars of malva all over. We approach, but before we get there, If no breeze stirs that green lair, The scent and sun-honey of air Is too sweet comfortably to bear. I carry you up the hill. In my arms you are sweet and still. We approach your special place, And I am watching your face To see the sweet puzzlement grow, And then recognition glow. Recognition explodes in delight. You leap like spray, or like light. Despite my arm's tightness, You leap in gold-glitter and brightness. You leap like a fish-flash in bright air, And laugh with joy for the bloom there. Yes, this is the spot, and hour, For you to demand your flower. When we first came this way Up from the beach, that day That seems now so long ago, We moved bemused and slow In the season's pulse and flow. Bemused with sea, and slow With June heat and perfume, We paused here, and plucked you a bloom. So here you always demand Your flower to hold in your hand, And the flower must be white, For you have your own ways to compell Observance of this ritual. === Page 33 === You hold it, and sing with delight, And your mother, for our own delight, Picks one of the blue flowers there, To put in your yellow hair. That done, we go on our way Up the hill, toward the end of the day. But the season has thinned out. At the bay-edge below, the shout Of a late bather reaches our ear, But it comes to the vineyard here By more than distance thinned. The bay is in shadow, the wind Nags the shore to white. The mountain prepares the night. By the vineyard we have found No bloom worthily white, And the few that we have found Not disintegrated to the ground Are by season and sea-salt browned. We give the best one to you. It is ruined, but will have to do. Somewhat better the blue blossoms fare. We find one for your hair, And you sing as though human need Were not for perfection. We proceed Past floss-borne or sloughed-off seed, Past curled leaf and dry pod, And the blue blossom will nod With your head's drowsy gold nod. Let all seasons pace their power, As this has to this hour. Let season and season devise Their possibilities. Let the future re-assess All past joy, and past distress, Till we know Time's deep intent. === Page 34 === And the last integument Of the past shall be rent To show how all things bent Their energies to that hour When you first demanded your flower. And in that image let Both past and future forget, In clasped communal ease, Their brute identities. The path lifts up ahead To the rocca, supper, bed. We move in the mountain's shade. But the mountain is at our back. Ahead, climbs the coast-cliff track. The valley between is dim. Ahead, on the cliff-rim, The rocca clasps its height. It accepts the incipient night. Just once we look back. On sunset, a white gull is black. It hangs over the mountain crest. It hangs on the saffron west. It makes its outcry. It slides down the sky. East now, it catches the light. Its black has gone again white. Over the rocca's height It gleams in the last light. It has sunk from our sight. Beyond the cliff is night. It sank on unruffled wing. We hear the sea rustling. You will hear it all night, darling. === Page 35 === V It rained toward day. The morning came sad and white With silver of sea-sadness and defection of season. Our joys and convictions are sure, but in that wan light We moved—your mother and I—in muteness of spirit past logical reason. Now sun, afternoon, and again summer-glitter on sea. As you to a bauble, the heart leaps. The heart unlocks Joy, though we know, shamefaced, the heart’s weather should not be Merely a reflex to solstice, or sport of an aggrieved equinox. No, the heart should be steadfast: I know that. And I sit in the late-sunny lee of the watch-house, At the fortress-point, you on my knee, and the late White butterflies over gold thistle conduct their ritual carouse. In whisperless carnival, in vehemence of gossamer, Pale ghosts of pale passions of air, the white wings weave. In tingle and tangle of arabesque, they mount light, pair by pair, As though that tall light were eternal, not merely the summer’s reprieve. You leap on my knee, you exclaim at the sun-stung gyration. And the upper air stirs, as though the vast stillness of sky Had stirred in its sunlit sleep and made suspiration, A luxurious languor of breath, as after love, there is a sigh. But enough, for the highest sun-scintillant pair are gone Seaward, past rampart and cliff borne, over blue sea-gleam. Close to my chair, to a thistle, one butterfly sinks now, flight done. On gold bloom of thistle, white wings pulse under the sky’s dream. The sky’s dream is enormous, I lift up my eyes. In sunlight a tatter of mist clings high on the mountain-mass. === Page 36 === The mountain is under the sky, and the gray scarps there rise Past paths where on their appointed occasions men will pass. Past grain-patch, last apron of vineyard, last terrace of olive, Past chestnut, past cork-grove, where the last carts can go, Past camp of the charcoal-maker, where coals glow in the black hive, The gray scarps rise up. Above them is that place I know. The pines are there, they are large, a deep recess, Shelf above scarp, enclave of rock, a glade Benched and withdrawn in the mountain-mass, under the peak's duress. We came there—your mother and I—and rested in that severe shade. Pine-blackness mist-tangled, the peak black above: the glade gives On the empty threshold of air, the hawk-hung delight Of distance unspooled and bright space spilled—ah, the heart thrives! We stood in that shade and saw sea and land lift in far light. Now the butterflies dance, time-tattered and disarrayed. I watch them. I think how above that scarp's far sunlit wall Mist threads in silence the darkness of boughs, and in that shade Condensed moisture gathers at a needle-tip. It glitters, will fall. I cannot interpret for you this collocation Of memories. You will live your own life, and contrive The language of your own heart, but let that conversation, In the last analysis, be always of whatever truth you would live. For fire flames but in the heart of a colder fire. All voice is but echo to a soundless voice. Height is not deprivation of valley, nor defect of desire, But may define, if you are fortunate, that joy in which all your joys should rejoice. === Page 37 === Clement Greenberg “AMERICAN-TYPE” PAINTING The latest abstract painting offends many people, among whom are more than a few who accept the abstract in art in principle. New painting (sculpture is a different question) still provokes scandal when little that is new in literature or even music appears to do so any longer. This may be explained by the very slowness of painting’s evolution as a modernist art. Though it started on its “modernization” earlier perhaps than the other arts, it has turned out to have a greater number of expendable conventions imbedded in it, or these at least have proven harder to isolate and detach. As long as such conven- tions survive and can be isolated they continue to be attacked, in all the arts that intend to survive in modern society. This process has come to a stop in literature because literature has fewer conventions to expend before it begins to deny its own essence, which lies in the communication of conceptual meanings. The expendable conventions in music, on the other hand, would seem to have been isolated much sooner, which is why the process of modernization has slowed down, if not stopped, there. (I simplify drastically. And it is understood, I hope, that tradition is not dismantled by the avant-garde for sheer revolutionary effect, but in order to maintain the level and vitality of art under the steadily changing circumstances of the last hundred years—and that the dismantling has its own continuity and tradition.) That is, the avant-garde survives in painting because painting has not yet reached the point of modernization where its discarding of inherited convention must stop lest it cease to be viable as art. Nowhere do these conventions seem to go on being attacked as they are today in this country, and the commotion about a certain kind of American abstract art is a sign of that. It is practiced by a group of painters who came to notice in New York about a dozen years === Page 38 === 180 PARTISAN REVIEW ago, and have since become known as the “abstract expressionists," or less widely, as “action” painters. (I think Robert Coates of the New Yorker coined the first term, which is not altogether accurate. Harold Rosenberg, in Art News, concocted the second, but restricted it by implication to but three or four of the artists the public knows under the first term. In London, the kind of art in question is some- times called “American-type painting.") Abstract expressionism is the first phenomenon in American art to draw a standing protest, and the first to be deplored seriously, and frequently, abroad. But it is also the first on its scale to win the serious attention, then the respect, and finally the emulation of a considerable section of the Parisian avant-garde, which admires in abstract expressionism precisely what causes it to be deplored elsewhere. Paris, whatever else it may have lost, is still quick to sense the genuinely “advanced"—though most of the abstract expressionists did not set out to be “advanced”; they set out to paint good pictures, and they “advance” in pursuit of qual- ities analogous to those they admire in the art of the past. Their paintings startle because, to the uninitiated eye, they ap- pear to rely so much on accident, whim, and haphazard effects. An ungoverned spontaneity seems to be at play, intent only on registering immediate impulse, and the result seems to be nothing more than a welter of blurs, blotches, and scrawls—"oleaginous” and “amor- phous," as one British critic described it. All this is seeming. There is good and bad in abstract expressionism, and once one can tell the difference he discovers that the good owes its realization to a severer discipline than can be found elsewhere in contemporary painting; only it makes factors explicit that previous disciplines left implicit, and leaves implicit many that they did not. To produce important art it is necessary as a rule to digest the major art of the preceding period, or periods. This is as true today as ever. One great advantage the American abstract expressionists enjoyed in the beginning was that they had already digested Klee and Miró—this, ten years before either master became a serious influence in Paris. Another was that the example of Matisse was kept alive in New York by Hans Hofmann and Milton Avery at a time when young painters abroad tended to overlook him. Picasso, Léger, and Mondrian were much in the foreground then, especially Picasso, but === Page 39 === ''AMERICAN-TYPE'' PAINTING 181 they did not block either the way or the view. Of particular impor- tance was the fact that a large number of Kandinsky's early abstract paintings could be seen in New York in what is now the Solomon Guggenheim Museum. As a result of all this, a generation of Ameri- can artists could start their careers fully abreast of their times and with an artistic culture that was not provincial. Perhaps it was the first time that this happened. But I doubt whether it would have been possible without the opportunities for unconstrained work that the WPA Art Project gave most of them in the late '30s. Nor do I think any one of them could have gotten off the ground as well as he did without the small but relatively sophisticated audience for adventurous art provided by the students of Hans Hofmann. What turned out to be another advantage was this country's distance from the war and, as immediately impor- tant as anything else, the presence in it during the war years of Eu- ropean artists like Mondrian, Masson, Léger, Chagall, Ernst, and Lipchitz, along with a number of European critics, dealers, and col- lectors. Their proximity and attention gave the young abstract-ex- pressionist painters self-confidence and a sense of being in the center of art. And in New York they could measure themselves against Eu- rope with more benefit to themselves than they ever could have done as expatriates in Paris. The justification for the term, "abstract expressionist," lies in the fact that most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian, or Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art. But they all started from French painting, got their fundamental sense of style from it, and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art, and of the general direction in which it had to go in their time. Picasso was very much on their minds, especially the Picasso of the early and middle '30s, and the first problem they had to face, if they were going to say what they had to say, was how to loosen up the rather strictly demarcated illusion of shallow depth he had been working within, in his more ambitious pictures, since he closed his "synthetic" Cubist period. With this went that canon of drawing in faire, more or less simple lines and curves that Cubism imposed and which had dominated almost all abstract art since 1920. They === Page 40 === 182 PARTISAN REVIEW had to free themselves from this too. Such problems were not attacked by program (there has been very little that is programmatic about abstract expressionism) but rather run up against simultaneously by a number of young painters most of whom had their first shows at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery in 1943 or 1944. The Picasso of the '30s —whom they followed in reproductions in the Cahiers d'Art even more than in flesh-and-blood paintings—challenged and incited as well as taught them. Not fully abstract itself, his art in that period suggested to them new possibilities of expression for abstract and quasi-abstract painting as nothing else did, not even Klee's enormous- ly inventive and fertile but equally unrealized 1930-1940 phase. I say equally unrealized, because Picasso caught so few of the hares he started in the '30s—which may have served, however, to make his effect on certain younger artists even more stimulating. To break away from an overpowering precedent, the young ar- tist usually looks for an alternative one. The late Arshile Gorky sub- mitted himself to Miró in order to break free of Picasso, and in the process did a number of pictures we now see have independent virtues, although at the time—the late '30s—they seemed too derivative. But the 1910-1918 Kandinsky was even more of a liberator and during the first war years stimulated Gorky to a greater originality. A short while later André Breton's personal encouragement began to inspire him with a confidence he had hitherto lacked, but again he submitted his art to an influence, this time that of Matta y Echaurren, a Chilean painter much younger than himself. Matta was, and per- haps still is, an inventive draughtsman, and in some ways a daring painter, but an inveterately flashy and superficial one. It took Gorky's more solid craft, profounder culture as a painter, and more selfless devotion to art to make many of Matta's ideas look substantial. In the last four or five years of his life he so transmuted these ideas, and discovered so much more in himself in the way of feeling to add to them, that their derivation became conspicuously beside the point. Gorky found his own way to ease the pressure of Picassoid space, and learned to float flat shapes on a melting, indeterminate ground with a difficult stability quite unlike anything in Miró. Yet he remained a late Cubist to the end, a votary of French taste, an orthodox easel painter, a virtuoso of line, and a tinter, not a colorist. He is, I think, === Page 41 === "AMERICAN-TYPE" PAINTING 183 one of the greatest artists we have had in this country. His art was largely unappreciated in his lifetime, but a few years after his tragic death in 1948, at the age of forty-four, it was invoked and imitated by younger painters in New York who wanted to save elegance and traditional draughtsmanship for abstract painting. However, Gorky finished rather than began something, and finished it so well that anybody who follows him is condemned to academicism. Willem de Kooning was a mature artist long before his first show in 1948. His culture is similar to Gorky's (to whom he was close) and he, too, is a draughtsman before anything else, perhaps an even more gifted one than Gorky and certainly more inventive. Ambition is as much a problem for him as it was for his dead friend, but in the in- verse sense, for he has both the advantages and the liabilities—which may be greater of an aspiration larger and more sophisticated, up to a certain point, than that of any other living artist I know of except Picasso. On the face of it, de Kooning proposes a synthesis of mod- ernism and tradition, and a larger control over the means of abstract painting that would render it capable of statements in a grand style equivalent to that of the past. The disembodied contours of Michel- angelo's and Rubens's nude figure compositions haunt his abstract pictures, yet the dragged off-whites, grays, and blacks by which they are inserted in a shallow illusion of depth—which de Kooning, no more than any other painter of the time, can deepen without risk of second-hand effect-bring the Picasso of the early '30s persistently to mind. But there are even more essential resemblances, though they have little to do with imitation on de Kooning's part. He, too, hankers after terribilità, prompted by a similar kind of culture and by a sim- ilar nostalgia for tradition. No more than Picasso can he tear himself away from the human figure, and from the modeling of it for which his gifts for line and shading so richly equip him. And it would seem that there was even more Luciferian pride behind de Kooning's am- bition: were he to realize it, all other ambitious painting would have to stop for a while because he would have set its forward as well as backward limits for a generation to come. If de Kooning's art has found a readier acceptance than most other forms of abstract expressionism, it is because his need to include the past as well as forestall the future reassures most of us. And in any case, he remains a late Cubist. And then there is his powerful, === Page 42 === 184 PARTISAN REVIEW sinuous Ingresque line. When he left outright abstraction several years ago to attack the female form with a fury greater than Picasso's in the late '30s and the '40s, the results baffled and shocked collectors, yet the methods by which these savage dissections were carried out were patently Cubist. De Kooning is, in fact, the only painter I am aware of at this moment who continues Cubism without repeating it. In certain of his latest "Women," which are smaller than the pre- ceding ones, the brilliance of the success achieved demonstrates what resources that tradition has left when used by an artist of genius. But de Kooning has still to spread the full measure of that genius on canvas. Hans Hofmann is the most remarkable phenomenon in the ab- stract expressionist "school" (it is not really a school) and one of its few members who can already be referred to as a "master." Known as a teacher here and abroad, he did not begin showing until 1943, when he was in his early sixties, and only shortly after his painting had become definitely abstract. Since then he has developed as one of a group whose next oldest member is at least twenty years younger. It was only natural that he should have been the maturest from the start. But his prematureness rather than matureness has obscured the fact that by 1947 he stated and won successful pictures from ideas whose later and more single-minded exploitation by others was to con- stitute their main claim to originality. When I myself not so long ago complained in print that Hofmann was failing to realize his true potentialities, it was because I had not caught up with him. Renewed acquaintance with some of his earlier work and his own increasing frequency and sureness of success have enlightened me as to that. Hofmann's pictures in many instances strain to pass beyond the easel convention even as they cling to it, doing many things which that convention resists. By tradition, convention, and habit we expect pictorial structure to be presented in contrasts of dark and light, or value. Hofmann, who started from Matisse, the Fauves, and Kan- dinsky as much as from Picasso, will juxtapose high, shrill colors whose uniform warmth and brightness do not so much obscure value contrasts as render them dissonant. Or when they are made more obvious, it will be by jarring color contrasts that are equally disso- nant. It is much the same with his design and drawing: a sudden === Page 43 === "AMERICAN-TYPE" PAINTING 185 razor-edged line will upset all our notions of the permissible, or else thick gobs of paint, without support of edge or shape, will cry out against pictorial sense. When Hofmann fails it is either by forcing such things, or by striving for too obvious and pat a unity, as if to reassure the spectator. Like Klee, he works in a variety of manners without seeming to consolidate his art in any one of them. He is willing, moreover, to accept his bad pictures in order to get in posi- tion for the good ones, which speaks for his self-confidence. Many people are put off by the difficulty of his art-especially museum di- rectors and curators—without realizing it is the difficulty of it that puts them off, not what they think is its bad taste. The difficult in art usually announces itself with less sprightliness. Looked at longer, however, the sprightliness gives way to calm and to a noble and im- passive intensity. Hofmann's art is very much easel painting in the end, with the concentration and the relative abundance of incident and relation that belong classically to that genre. Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell have likewise gotten less appreciation than they deserve. Not at all alike in their painting, I couple them for the moment because they both stay closer to late Cubism, without belonging to it, than the painters yet to be discussed. Though one might think that all the abstract expressionists start off from inspired impulse, Motherwell stands out among them by reason of his dependence on it, and by his lack of real facility. Although he paints in terms of the simplified, quasi-geometric design sponsored by Picasso and Matisse and prefers, though not always, clear, simple color contrasts within a rather restricted gamut, he is less of a late Cubist than de Kooning. Motherwell has a promising kind of chaos in him but, again, it is not the kind popularly ascribed to abstract expres- sionism. His early collages, in a kind of explosive Cubism analogous to de Kooning's, have with time acquired a profound and original unity, and between 1947 and 1951 or so he painted several fairly large pictures that I think are among the masterpieces of abstract ex- pressionism: some of these, in broad vertical stripes, with ocher played off against flat blacks and whites, bear witness to how well decora- tion can transcend itself in the easel painting of our day. But Mother- well has at the same time painted some of the feeblest pictures done by a leading abstract expressionist, and an accumulation of these over === Page 44 === 186 PARTISAN REVIEW the last three or four years has obscured his real worth. Gottlieb is likewise a very uneven artist, but a much more solid and accomplished one than is generally supposed. He seems to me to be capable of a greater range of controlled effects than any other abstract expressionist, and it is only owing to some lack of nerve or necessary presumptuousness that he has not made this plainer to the public, which accuses him of staying too close to the grid plans of Klee or Torrès-Garcia, the Uruguayan painter. Over the years Gott- lieb has, in his sober, pedestrian way, become one of the surest crafts- men in contemporary painting, one who can place a flat, uneven sil- houette, that most difficult of all things to adjust to the rectangle, with a rightness beyond the capacity of ostensibly stronger painters. Some of his best work, like the "landscapes" and "seascapes" he showed in 1953, tends to be too difficult for eyes trained on late Cubism. On the other hand, his 1954 pictures, the first in which he let himself be tempted to a display of virtuosity and which stayed within late Cubism, were liked better by the public than anything he had shown before. The zigzags of Gottlieb's course in recent years, which saw him become a colorist and a painterly painter (if anything, too much of one) between his departures from and returns to Cub- ism, have made his development a very interesting one to watch. Right now he seems one of the least tired of all the abstract expres- sionists. Jackson Pollock was at first almost as much a late Cubist and a hard and fast easel-painter as any of the abstract expressionists I have mentioned. He compounded hints from Picasso's calligraphy in the early '30s with suggestions from Hofmann, Masson, and Mexi- can painting, especially Siqueiros, and began with a kind of picture in murky, sulphurous colors that startled people less by the novelty of its means than by the force and originality of the feeling behind it. Within a notion of shallow space generalized from the practice of Miró and Masson as well as of Picasso, and with some guidance from the early Kandinsky, he devised a language of baroque shapes and calligraphy that twisted this space to its own measure and vehemence. Pollock remained close to Cubism until at least 1946, and the early greatness of his art can be taken as a fulfilment of things that Picasso had not brought beyond a state of promise in his 1932-1940 period. Though he cannot build with color, Pollock has an instinct for bold === Page 45 === "AMERICAN-TYPE'' PAINTING 187 oppositions of dark and light, and the capacity to bind the canvas rectangle and assert its ambiguous flatness and quite unambiguous shape as a single and whole image concentrating into one the several images distributed over it. Going further in this direction, he went beyond late Cubism in the end. Mark Tobey is credited, especially in Paris, with being the first painter to arrive at "all-over" design, covering the picture surface with an even, largely undifferentiated system of uniform motifs that cause the result to look as though it could be continued indefinitely beyond the frame like a wallpaper pattern. Tobey had shown the first examples of his "white writing" in New York in 1944, but Pollock had not seen any of these, even in reproduction, when in the summer of 1946 he did a series of "all-over" paintings executed with dabs of buttery paint. Several of these were masterpieces of clarity. A short while later he began working with skeins of enamel paint and blotches that he opened up and laced, interlaced, and unlaced with a breadth and power remote from anything suggested by Tobey's rather limited cabinet art. One of the unconscious motives for Pollock's "all-over" departure was the desire to achieve a more immediate, denser, and more decorative impact than his late Cubist manner had permitted. At the same time, however, he wanted to control the oscillation be- tween an emphatic physical surface and the suggestion of depth be- neath it as lucidly and tensely and evenly as Picasso and Braque had controlled a somewhat similar movement with the open facets and pointillist flecks of color of their 1909-1913 Cubist pictures. ("Ana- lytical" Cubism is always somewhere in the back of Pollock's mind.) Having achieved this kind of control, he found himself straddled be- tween the easel picture and something else hard to define, and in the last two or three years he has pulled back. Tobey's "all-over" pictures never aroused the protest that Pol- lock's did. Along with Barnett Newman's paintings, they are still considered the reductio ad absurdum of abstract expressionism and modern art in general. Though Pollock is a famous name now, his art has not been fundamentally accepted where one would expect it to be. Few of his fellow artists can yet tell the difference between his good and his bad work-or at least not in New York. His most recent show, in 1954, was the first to contain pictures that were forced, pumped, dressed up, but it got more acceptance than any === Page 46 === 188 PARTISAN REVIEW of his previous exhibitions had-for one thing, because it made clear what an accomplished craftsman he had become, and how pleasingly he could use color now that he was not sure of what he wanted to say with it. (Even so, there were still two or three remarkable paint- ings present.) His 1951 exhibition, on the other hand, which in- cluded four or five huge canvases of monumental perfection and re- mains the peak of his achievement so far, was the one received most coldly of all. Many of the abstract expressionists have at times drained the color from their pictures and worked in black, white, and gray alone. Gorky was the first of them to do so, in paintings like "The Diary of a Seducer" of 1945-which happens to be, in my opinion, his master- piece. But it was left to Franz Kline, whose first show was in 1951, to work with black and white exclusively in a succession of can- vases with blank white grounds bearing a single large calligraphic image in black. That these pictures were big was no cause for sur- prise: the abstract expressionists were being compelled to do huge canvases by the fact that they had increasingly renounced an illusion of depth within which they could develop pictorial incident without crowding; the flattening surfaces of their canvases compelled them to move along the picture plane laterally and seek in its sheer physical size the space necessary for the telling of their kind of pictorial story. However, Kline's unmistakable allusions to Chinese and Japan- ese calligraphy encouraged the cant, already started by Tobey's ex- ample, about a general Oriental influence on American abstract paint- ing. Yet none of the leading abstract expressionists except Kline has shown more than a cursory interest in Oriental art, and it is easy to demonstrate that the roots of their art lie almost entirely within Western tradition. The fact that Far Eastern calligraphy is stripped and abstract-because it involves writing-does not suffice to make the resemblances to it in abstract expressionism more than a case of convergence. It is as though this country's possession of a Pacific coast offered a handy received idea with which to account for the otherwise inexplicable fact that it is now producing a body of art that some people regard as original. The abstract-expressionist emphasis on black and white has to do in any event with something more crucial to Western than Ori- === Page 47 === "AMERICAN-TYPE'' PAINTING 189 ental pictorial art. It represents one of those exaggerations or apoth- coses which betray a fear for their objects. Value contrast, the oppo- sition and modulation of dark and light, has been the basis of West- ern pictorial art, its chief means, much more important than perspec- tive, to a convincing illusion of depth and volume; and it has also been its chief agent of structure and unity. This is why the old masters almost always laid in their darks and lights—their shading— first. The eye automatically orients itself by the value contrasts in dealing with an object that is presented to it as a picture, and in the absence of such contrasts it tends to feel almost, if not quite as much, at loss as in the absence of a recognizable image. Impressionism's muffling of dark and light contrasts in response to the effect of the glare of the sky caused it to be criticized for that lack of "form" and "structure" which Cézanne tried to supply with his substitute con- trasts of warm and cool color (these remained nonetheless contrasts of dark and light, as we can see from monochrome photographs of his paintings). Black and white is the extreme statement of value contrast, and to harp on it as many of the abstract expressionists do —and not only abstract expressionists—seems to me to be an effort to preserve by extreme measures a technical resource whose capacity to yield convincing form and unity is nearing exhaustion. The American abstract expressionists have been given good cause for this feeling by a development in their own midst. It is, I think, the most radical of all developments in the painting of the last two decades, and has no counterpart in Paris (unless in the late work of Masson and Tal Coat), as so many other things in American abstract expressionism have had since 1944. This development involves a more consistent and radical suppression of value contrasts than seen so far in abstract art. We can realize now, from this point of view, how con- servative Cubism was in its resumption of Cézanne's effort to save the convention of dark and light. By their parody of the way the old masters shaded, the Cubists may have discredited value contrast as a means to an illusion of depth and volume, but they rescued it from the Impressionists, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the Fauves as a means to structure and form. Mondrian, a Cubist at heart, remained as dependent on contrasts of dark and light as any academic painter until his very last paintings, "Broadway Boogie" and "Victory Boogie"—which happen to be failures. Until quite recently the con- === Page 48 === 190 PARTISAN REVIEW vention was taken for granted in even the most doctrinaire abstract art, and the later Kandinsky, though he helped ruin his pictures by his insensitivity to the effects of value contrast, never questioned it in principle. Malevich’s prophetic venture in “white on white” was looked on as an experimental quirk (it was very much an experiment and, like almost all experiments in art, it failed aesthetically). The late Monet, whose suppression of values had been the most con- sistently radical to be seen in painting until a short while ago, was pointed to as a warning, and the fin-de-siècle muffling of contrasts in much of Bonnard’s and Vuillard’s art caused it to be deprecated by the avant-garde for many years. The same factor even had a part in the under-rating of Pissarro. Recently, however, some of the late Monets began to assume a unity and power they had never had before. This expansion of sensi- bility has coincided with the emergence of Clyfford Still as one of the most important and original painters of our time—perhaps the most original of all painters under fifty-five, if not the best. As the Cubists resumed Cézanne, Still has resumed Monet—and Pissarro. His paintings were the first abstract pictures I ever saw that contained almost no allusion to Cubism. (Kandinsky’s relations with it from first to last became very apparent by contrast.) Still’s first show, at Peggy Guggenheim’s in 1944, was made up predominantly of pictures in the vein of an abstract symbolism with certain “primitive” and Surrealist overtones that were in the air at that time, and of which Gottlieb’s “pictographs” represented one version. I was put off by slack, willful silhouettes that seemed to disregard every consideration of plane or frame. Still’s second show, in 1948, was in a different manner, that of his maturity, but I was still put off, and even out- raged, by what I took to be a profound lack of sensitivity and disci- pline. The few large vertically divided areas that made up this typical picture seemed arbitrary in shape and edge, and the color too hot and dry, stifled by the lack of value contrasts. It was only two years ago, when I first saw a 1948 painting of Still’s in isolation, that I got a first intimation of pleasure from his art; subsequently, as I was able to see still others in isolation, that intimation grew more definite. (Until one became familiar with them his pictures fought each other when side by side.) I was impressed as never before by how estrang- ing and upsetting genuine originality in art can be, and how the === Page 49 === "AMERICAN-TYPE" PAINTING 191 greater its pressure on taste, the more stubbornly taste will resist ad- justing to it. Turner was actually the first painter to break with the European tradition of value painting. In the atmospheric pictures of his last phase he bunched value intervals together at the lighter end of the color scale for effects more picturesque than anything else. For the sake of these, the public soon forgave him his dissolution of form- besides, clouds and steam, mist, water, and light were not expected to have definite shape or form as long as they retained depth, which they did in Turner's pictures; what we today take for a daring ab- stractness on Turner's part was accepted then as another feat of naturalism. That Monet's close-valued painting won a similar ac- ceptance strikes me as not being accidental. Of course, iridescent colors appeal to popular taste, which is often willing to take them in exchange for verisimilitude, but those of Monet's pictures in which he muddied-and flattened-form with dark color, as in some of his "Lily Pads," were almost as popular. Can it be suggested that the public's appetite for close-valued painting as manifested in both Turner's and Monet's cases, and in that of late Impressionism in gen- eral, meant the emergence of a new kind of taste which, though run- ning counter to the high traditions of our art and possessed by people with little grasp of these, yet expressed a genuine underground change in European sensibility? If so, it would clear up the paradox that lies in the fact that an art like the late Monet's, which in its time pleased banal taste and still makes most of the avant-garde shudder, should suddenly stand forth as more advanced in some respects than Cubism. I don't know how much conscious attention Still has paid to Monet or Impressionism, but his independent and uncompromising art likewise has an affiliation with popular taste, though not by any means enough to make it acceptable to it. Still's is the first really Whitmanesque kind of painting we have had, not only because it makes large, loose gestures, or because it breaks the hold of value con- trast as Whitman's verse line broke the equally traditional hold of meter; but just as much because, as Whitman's poetry assimilated, with varying success, large quantities of stale journalistic and orat- ical prose, so Still's painting is infused with that stale, prosaic kind of painting to which Barnett Newman has given the name of "buck- eye." Though little attention has been paid to it in print, "buckeye" === Page 50 === 192 PARTISAN REVIEW is probably the most widely practiced and homogeneous kind of paint- ing seen in the Western world today. I seem to detect its beginnings in Old Crome's oils and the Barbizon School, but it has spread only since the popularization of Impressionism. "Buckeye" painting is not "primitive," nor is it the same thing as "Sunday painting." Its prac- titioners can draw with a certain amount of academic correctness, but their command of shading, and of dark and light values in general, is not sufficient to control their color—either because they are simply inept in this department, or because they are naively intent on a more vivid naturalism of color than the studio-born principles of value contrast will allow. "Buckeye" painters, as far as I am aware, do landscapes exclusively and work more or less directly from nature. By piling dry paint—though not exactly in impasto—they try to cap- ture the brilliance of daylight, and the process of painting becomes a race between hot shadows and hot lights whose invariable outcome is a livid, dry, sour picture with a warm, brittle surface that intensifies the acid fire of the generally predominating reds, browns, greens, and yellows. "Buckeye" landscapes can be seen in Greenwich Village res- taurants (Eddie's Aurora on West Fourth Street used to collect them), Sixth Avenue picture stores (there is one near Eighth Street) and in the Washington Square outdoor shows. I understand that they are produced abundantly in Europe too. Though I can see why it is easy to stumble into "buckeye" effects, I cannot understand fully why they should be so universal and so uniform, or the kind of paint- ing culture behind them. Still, at any rate, is the first to have put "buckeye" effects into serious art. These are visible in the frayed dead-leaf edges that wander down the margins or across the middle of so many of his canvases, in the uniformly dark heat of his color, and in a dry, crusty paint surface (like any "buckeye" painter, Still seems to have no faith in diluted or thin pigments). Such things can spoil his pictures, or make them weird in an unrefreshing way, but when he is able to succeed with, or in spite of them, it represents the conquest by high art of one more area of experience, and its liberation from Kitsch. Still's art has a special importance at this time because it shows abstract painting a way out of its own academicism. An indirect sign of this importance is the fact that he is almost the only abstract ex- pressionist to "make" a school; by this I mean that a few of the many === Page 51 === "'AMERICAN-TYPE' PAINTING 193 artists he has stimulated or influenced have not been condemned by that to imitate him, but have been able to establish strong and inde- pendent styles of their own. Barnett Newman, who is one of these artists, has replaced Pol- lock as the enfant terrible of abstract expressionism. He rules vertical bands of dimly contrasting color or value on warm flat backgrounds- and that's all. But he is not in the least related to Mondrian or any- one else in the geometrical abstract school. Though Still led the way in opening the picture down the middle and in bringing large, unin- terrupted areas of uniform color into subtle and yet spectacular op- position, Newman studied late Impressionism for himself, and has drawn its consequences more radically. The powers of color he em- ploys to make a picture are conceived with an ultimate strictness: color is to function as hue and nothing else, and contrasts are to be sought with the least possible help of differences in value, saturation, or warmth. The easel picture will hardly survive such an approach, and Newman's huge, calmly and evenly burning canvases amount to the most direct attack upon it so far. And it is all the more effective an attack because the art behind it is deep and honest, and carries a feeling for color without its like in recent painting. Mark Rothko's art is a little less aggressive in this respect. He, too, was stimulated by Still's example. The three or four massive, horizontal strata of flat color that compose his typical picture allow the spectator to think of landscape—which may be why his decorative simplicity seems to meet less resistance. Within a range predominantly warm like New- man's and Still's, he too is a brilliant, original colorist; like Newman, he soaks his pigment into the canvas, getting a dyer's effect, and does not apply it as a discrete covering layer in Still's manner. Of the three painters—all of whom started, incidentally, as "symbolists"—Roth- ko is the only one who seems to relate to any part of French art since Impressionism, and his ability to insinuate contrasts of value and warmth into oppositions of pure color makes me think of Matisse, who held on to value contrasts in something of the same way. This, too, may account for the public's readier acceptance of his art, but takes nothing away from it. Rothko's big vertical pictures, with their incandescent color and their bold and simple sensuousness—or rather their firm sensuousness—are among the largest gems of abstract ex- pressionism. === Page 52 === 194 PARTISAN REVIEW A concomitant of the fact that Still, Newman, and Rothko sup- press value contrasts and favor warm hues is the more emphatic flat- ness of their paintings. Because it is not broken by sharp differences of value or by more than a few incidents of drawing or design, color breathes from the canvas with an enveloping effect, which is intensi- fied by the largeness itself of the picture. The spectator tends to react to this more in terms of décor or environment than in those usually associated with a picture hung upon a wall. The crucial issue raised by the work of these three artists is where the pictorial stops and dec- oration begins. In effect, their art asserts decorative elements and ideas in a pictorial context. (Whether this has anything to do with the artiness that afflicts all three of them at times, I don't know. But artiness is the great liability of the Still school.) Rothko and especially Newman are more exposed than Still to the charge of being decorators by their preference for rectilinear draw- ing. This sets them apart from Still in another way, too. By liberating abstract painting from value contrasts, Still also liberated it, as Pol- lock had not, from the quasi-geometrical, faired drawing which Cub- ism had found to be the surest way to prevent the edges of forms from breaking through a picture surface that had been tautened, and there- fore made exceedingly sensitive, by the shrinking of the illusion of depth underneath it. As Cézanne was the first to discover, the safest way to proceed in the face of this liability was to echo the rectangular shape of the surface itself with vertical and horizontal lines and with curves whose chords were definitely vertical or horizontal. After the Cubists, and Klee, Mondrian, Miró, and others had exploited this insight it became a cliché, however, and led to the kind of late Cub- ist academicism that used to fill the exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists group, and which can still be seen in much of re- cent French abstract painting. Still's service was to show us how the contours of a shape could be made less conspicuous, and there- fore less dangerous to the “integrity” of the flat surface, by narrow- ing the value contrast its color made with that of the shapes or areas adjacent to it. Not only does this keep colors from "jumping," as the old masters well knew, but it gives the artist greater liberty in draw- ing—liberty almost to the point of insensitivity, as in Still's own case. The early Kandinsky was the one abstract painter before Still to have some glimpse of this, but it was only a glimpse. Pollock has had more of a glimpse, independently of Still or Kandinsky, but has not === Page 53 === We couldn't transcribe this content due to usage restrictions. === Page 54 === 196 PARTISAN REVIEW to mention a lack of a sense of proportion. But can I suggest it? I do not make allowances for American art that I do not make for any other kind. At the Biennale in Venice this year, I saw how de Kooning's exhibition put to shame, not only that of his neighbor in the American pavilion, Ben Shahn, but that of every other painter present in his generation or under. The general impression still is that an art of high distinction has as much chance of coming out of America as a great wine. Literature—yes; we now know that we have produced some great writing because the English and French have told us so. They have even exaggerated, at least about Whitman and Poe. What I hope for is a just appreciation abroad, not an ex- aggeration, of the merits of "American-type" painting. Only then, I suspect, will American collectors begin to take it seriously. In the meantime they will go on buying the pallid French equivalent of it they find in the art of Riopelle, De Stael, Soulages, and their like. The imported article is handsomer, no doubt, but the handsomeness is too obvious to have staying power. . . . "Advanced" art—which is the same thing as ambitious art to- day-persists insofar as it tests society's capacity for high art. This it does by testing the limits of the inherited forms and genres, and of the medium itself, and it is what the Impressionists, the post-Im- pressionists, the Fauves, the Cubists, and Mondrian did in their time. If the testing seems more radical in the case of the new American abstract painting, it is because it comes at a later stage. The limits of the easel picture are in greater danger of being destroyed because several generations of great artists have already worked to expand them. But if they are destroyed this will not necessarily mean the extinction of pictorial art as such. Painting may be on its way toward a new kind of genre, but perhaps not an unprecedented one—since we are now able to look at, and enjoy, Persian carpets as pictures— and what we now consider to be merely decorative may become cap- able of holding our eyes and moving us much as the easel picture does. Meanwhile there is no such thing as an aberration in art: there is just the good and the bad, the realized and the unrealized. Often there is but the distance of a hair's breadth between the two-at first glance. And sometimes there seems—at first glance—to be no more distance than that between a great work of art and one which is not art at all. This is one of the points made by modern art. === Page 55 === Sonya Rudikoff AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS "Do you think I'll be home by eleven?" Gretchen Weiss asked again. She was hanging on to a strap in the subway, coming home from a lecture, and she leaned over to shout at Sheila who was sitting down. Her friend Sheila Fairfield nodded remotely. It was difficult—theosophy made Sheila hard to talk to. Right now, poor Gretchen, sixteen years old, felt shut out from her friend's spiritual life. Of course, Sheila had no mother, and lived alone. "You must be home by eleven dear!" Gretchen mimicked a law-giver whose explicit name needed no spoken reality. "Honestly! You'd think I was a child!" And she indicated her contempt for this gross misconception. For some reason she roused the bland, smiling, grown-up twenty-year-old Sheila. The younger girl was encouraged to proceed, which she did, righteously swaying as the train racketed uptown. "She only lets me go to the lectures because I go with you. She's afraid I'll meet— Oh, as if I couldn't discriminate! Anyhow, she doesn't know anything about theosophy—what kind of people would go. I mean, nobody who just wanted to pick up girls would sit through a lecture about Madame Blavatsky, would they?" she ap- pealed. She need not have been so concerned, poor angry Gretchen, for she was not yet in very great danger. "I know," the older girl agreed. "It's a shame that some people don't understand philosophy. If they have no spiritual life themselves, they don't allow it to others," Sheila added in her mild way. She never seemed to be talking about herself or about anyone she knew. "Oh, Sheila. Exactly!—Not that I ever expect to see Simeon and Melvin, really, but could my mother complain? Why they didn't even want to take us home! If anything could be more wholesome === Page 56 === 198 PARTISAN REVIEW than having orangeade in a drugstore—!" And Gretchen shook her head triumphantly, as if she had proved her case against the unseen antagonist. "Although I do think we'll see them again," Sheila remarked. "You know, Simeon lives at International House. And he was telling me about Buddhism. I really think it might be an interesting exper- ience to know him." "Buddhism!" Gretchen marveled, and practically fell in her friend's lap. "Yes," Sheila replied modestly. "Some of his friends are Bud- dhists, and they've taught him about it. He's thinking of going into it more seriously." Gretchen thrilled. Of course, Sheila could always do what she liked. "Oh, Sheila, really, you're so mature! I was being all itchy, and here you went and talked about Buddhism!" "But, surely, Gretchen," her friend explained, "surely your mother wants you to know congenial people. How else can you de- velop? or grow?" The train shook violently on Sheila's favorite word, like the motion of something growing, and it made her words seem alive. They were to Gretchen, at any rate. "She doesn't know what growth means!" Gretchen exploded. "Or even development! Or anything! She doesn't want me to grow! -I'm afraid to tell you this, Sheila, but I wasn't listening to every- thing they said tonight, you know, about Karma and the spirit. But I was thinking of something else, I was having these thoughts—" "Oh, about what?" To Sheila, thinking was like discovering the North Pole, a really adventurous thing. She always gleamed at any mention of this activity. "Oh, you know, how I don't really understand. And how dif- ficult it is, when you're a sensitive person, to feel you do understand. And then, not. Like the spirit and the infinite, and yet being in the material world. Do you know what I mean? Sometimes I really do understand it, I mean, I feel as if I were living in the infinite and seeing the world differently. As if I weren't a part of the world, do you know what I mean?" "Mmm," Sheila nodded proudly, recognizing the fruits of her own evangelism. "Yes, of course. What else were you thinking?" "Oh, how when you're in this different world, you see every- === Page 57 === AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS 199 thing and it's all clear, and you wish you could explain it. But they wouldn't listen to you, and they interrupt, and you know. So then you fight with them. But if they understood, you wouldn't have to fight, do you see what I mean?” “Mmm, as if you were looking at the world through a telescope,” Sheila supplied. “But then they break the telescope. Then the infinite disappears, until you get in touch again.” “Yes, yes,” Gretchen quivered excitedly, although this was not quite what she meant. Still, who else even could begin to under- stand? Sometimes she really felt that Sheila was almost the only person she could talk to. “But how to hold on to it and keep them from breaking it.” They were really moving in quite different directions. “I know. Like with my parents. Sometimes I sit there and they're reading or something, and I can see exactly what they're like. I mean, as if they were an X-ray. But they don't feel it at all. They have no idea. —Do you think everyone has a soul, Sheila? I don't know—about my mother especially.” “Everybody can't be in touch with their soul,” Sheila informed her. “Some people have no gift for it. The waves of the unseen go right past.” “Everything I say goes right past them, I know that,” said Gretchen, descending quickly from the metaphysical. “They're really very sweet to me,” Sheila said smoothly. “Per- haps you can show them—you know, how to receive their messages. It would be a pity if they grew older without getting in touch. Per- haps the next time I come for dinner—” “Oh, would you? I know they'd listen to you! Mother thinks you're the best friend I've ever had, she'd listen, and so would Daddy. Of course, he really does understand a little. He thinks you're so— so—oh, you know how he says it—‘straightforward, honest, direct, serious, mature, forthright'—that's real praise from him,” smiled Gretchen, conferring this great honor on her friend. The train unfortunately was slowing down just then and Sheila had to interrupt. “It's my stop,” she said and got up from her seat. She smiled at Gretchen. “Oh, dear, just as I was telling you—” The younger girl looked at her watch. “I'll get out with you. I don't care if I am late.” === Page 58 === 200 PARTISAN REVIEW They went to the door and waited for it to open. Then they stepped out onto the platform, two nice-looking bright young girls, as if they were stepping into the future. Sheila took her friend's arm. "I'm so glad. We haven't talked in so long." She smiled again at Gretchen, with an intimation of ownership. Gretchen agreed, there never is enough time. They walked down the platform arm in arm. The stale smell and the windy echoes were not noticed by these two young theosophists as they went toward the stairs. Gretchen turned to see if anyone were following them. She couldn't be sure about the intentions of those two bedraggled men at the end of the platform. She said nothing to Sheila, who was talking about messages, but opened her purse and took out her glasses which she put on. Gretchen lived on 93rd Street with her parents, and Sheila Fair- field lived alone in a furnished room on 89th Street. It was their habit to share the distance in between. One week Gretchen got off at 86th Street, the next week Sheila stayed on until 96th. This was the third time in succession that Gretchen had gotten off at 86th Street. They came out on the street and walked up Central Park West. Sheila was saying that if Melvin and Simeon did telephone, perhaps Gretchen would like to go somewhere and talk about Buddhism or education or "ideas." "You can do whatever you like," Gretchen observed, biting her lip. Sheila just hesitated. "So can you, Gretchen, you're free to make choices and grow. You can be in touch just as much as I can," she ended rather sententiously. She looked straight ahead as they walked close to the apartment houses. Her friend broke in impatiently. "Oh, I don't mean that, Sheila, you know what I mean! Nobody tells you what to do, or anything. Nobody minds if you do what you want." Sheila nodded. It was not a very dark night, but as they crossed 87th Street, Gretchen thought her friend stumbled. Was Sheila mind- ing because nobody minded? The only thing, then, was to make it seem a small, mean, annoying thing to have a mother. "Honestly. As I was saying. She minds everything. Nobody really cares, they just order me around, nobody leaves me alone." But === Page 59 === AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS 201 Gretchen spoke with a slightly synthetic quality, as of a speech al- ready rehearsed. The older girl tossed her long blond hair and smiled into her friend’s face. “Who, if I cried,” she said heroically, “if I cried, who would hear me among the angelic orders?” It was as if she spoke to the world, and her words did not require an answer. She strode on across 88th Street, Gretchen marching with her. “If I cried, who would hear me among the angelic orders,” she repeated. It was very clear that someone would hear her. Gretchen’s eyes began to tear. “Oh, Sheila! I don’t know—of course! I always think I’m alone, or it’s only my own troubles! As if nothing could be done!” Her friend, in reply, squeezed her arm. Both girls were tre- mendously moved by their brave affirmation, and they said nothing as they walked the last block. Just before they parted, Sheila stopped and spoke. “I’ll always listen to you, Gretchen, whatever you want to say.” Gretchen took it as the pledge of eternal friendship that it was. Sheila held her friend’s two hands and they looked sternly and yet with kindness at each other. “I trust you completely,” Gretchen said. “You’re the best friend I have.” She was reluctant to go and thought of asking Sheila to stay overnight in the guest room at 93rd Street. Sheila dropped her hands and started to turn away. “Remember,” Sheila said. “I’ll always listen, I’ll always hear you if you cry out to me.” She nodded and turned down 89th Street toward Columbus Avenue. It occurred to Gretchen Weiss—her name was Margaret or would be—that now she really was late. When she burst into her parents’ apartment, a short ritualistic fight with her mother broke out. It was not more serious because Gretchen had been with Sheila, and Mrs. Weiss, in those days, was trying to encourage and nourish the friendship. At sixteen Gretchen could go in several directions, and Mrs. Weiss still saw the future with some variety. Gretchen was a painter —oh, perhaps not much of a one just now, she was still at the High School of Music and Art. She also took piano lessons and went to === Page 60 === 202 PARTISAN REVIEW theosophy lectures, and modern dance classes. But she painted more than she did those other things. Now she had started going to Hof- mann’s, and in her conversations about the future she more often outlined for herself the life of a painter than anything else. Mrs. Weiss was not entirely pleased with the implications of this career, although publicly she gave her modified approval. The last year had convinced her that the future was not far off. Gretchen’s boyfriend, Byron Kahn, for instance, was a painter. Fortunately, Mrs. Weiss thought, he had gone away the previous summer, and this was when Gretchen met her nice new friend Sheila Fairfield, when they were both counselors at a settlement house camp. During the fall and winter, Mrs. Weiss had reason to believe that Byron was no longer so much in question. Gretchen spent more of her Saturdays with Sheila now, and Byron came to 93rd Street less often than before. Sheila Fairfield, blond, thin, and earnest, appeared to Mrs. Weiss as the type of wholesome friend of good character that her daughter had previously avoided, so she always welcomed this new friend for dinner or to take Gretchen to lectures or for walks in the Park. Sheila’s lonely situation—poor, motherless girl, all alone—recommended her even more to Mrs. Weiss, who privately hoped that her daughter might begin to appreciate those numerous advantages previously scorned. Mrs. Weiss’s hopes were in a sense fulfilled. Gretchen did begin to emulate her wholesome friend. But Mrs. Weiss did not realize that Gretchen made her own choice of qualities or circumstances to emu- late: like Sheila, she planned to leave home when she finished high school and live in a furnished room. Mrs. Weiss did not know either that Gretchen’s boyfriend Byron, and her relation with him, was a constant source of fascination for Sheila Fairfield, and that Gretchen’s “advantages” counted for so much less than Gretchen’s sophistication. The High School of Music and Art might not seem to everyone the mark of the elect, but it worked as more of an advantage than any other, for Sheila had gone to an obscure and awful school in the Bronx—this was before she left home, when she still lived with her terrible father and quite wicked grandmother. Gretchen had had the whole story from her. The report was, of course, properly edited for Mrs. Weiss. But Gretchen did not plan to emulate her friend completely. For example, she liked her own name well enough not === Page 61 === AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS 203 to change it. But Sheila Fairfield was such a good name for a dress designer, which was what that blond thin girl wanted to be. So when the terrible father and wicked grandmother finally allowed Sadie Schoenfeld to graduate from Wadleigh, she became, as she liked to say, a new person entirely-she "grew" a great deal-and the new name was not the least part of her new identity. Of course, for Mrs. Weiss, different motives were adduced-Sheila's dead mother, and so on. Sheila worked in a photographic place for thirty dollars a week. She paid six dollars for her room and put the rest of her money into little budget envelopes, every single week. It was another of her habits which so pleased Mrs. Weiss, who had already spent a considerable sum buying different kinds of budget envelopes for her daughter, and none of them was used. The room on 89th Street was drab and a little pitiful to Gretchen when she thought of her own nice room- but here at least one could breathe the air of freedom. It was a bright neat place, though, and the light falling across the flowered couch cover-Sheila's bed-revealed all day long the precious tree outside. Like a girl in a Katherine Mansfield story, Sheila loved this room because of the tree, and like such a girl, she thought a jar of pussy willows transformed a furnished room into a salon. Sheila was what people called "a very creative person." Under the window Sheila's bookshelf invited attention after one had seen the tree. And, in fact, Sheila told Gretchen that every evening after she had watched the tree-at sunset, naturally-she was moved, by an unknown force, to take something and read. As St. Augustine said, "Take and read." There was a lot to choose from-Rilke, The Prophet, all the theosophy pamphlets, Ouspensky, Sight Without Glasses, Isis Unveiled, all the little Blue Books on science and electricity. And now, added to the collection, the little varnished walnut given by Simeon, which opened to reveal inside it a tiny booklet, "Buddhism in a Nutshell." Sheila often read aloud to Gretchen. She also sometimes made silver jewelry, and her dress designs, and also drawings of the tree and pictures of her ideas. The drawings? Well, it was the only thing they didn't al- ways agree about, the only uncertain part of their friendship. But such disagreements were minor, compared with how delightful Gret- chen thought it was to have long blond hair like Sheila, or a delicate, thin, quick grace. Sheila often looked as if she had just come from === Page 62 === 204 partisan review an accident where no one was hurt, and Gretchen hoped to imitate this earnest, tense, breathless excitement. She herself was more stolid, more disorganized, and yet more explosive. She had dark, curly hair, a dark olive face (which required the services of an expensive derma- tologist), was plump, had just recently stopped wearing braces, and usually felt enormous next to her blond graceful friend. She felt especially so the next Saturday afternoon when they stood in front of the Museum in the lovely sunshine. Most people would grant that Sheila’s clothes were a little—oh, tacky, old- fashioned, perhaps. But Sheila herself—for, clothes, after all were just material things—she was closer to the infinite order. It was often remarked of her that she resembled an old German drawing of some young maiden; the same comparison could hardly be made of Gretchen. The younger girl, the future painter, was wearing her Guatemalan jacket and her black cotton skirt and espadrilles. She carried a woven satchel brought from Mexico by Byron’s aunt and bearing the legend “Es Propiedad de Margarita,” and presumably she should have liked the way she looked. But she had forgotten to wear the ankh pendant, and Sheila, wearing hers, looked for it with a surprised and silently reproachful stare. It was enough to make Gretchen feel bad. But the day was marvelous, and Gretchen expected to have a good time. Finally, Melvin and Simeon came, and they weren’t too awful. Simeon shook hands and Melvin nodded pleasantly. They were so different, really, from the way Gretchen remembered them, that she didn't know yet whether she liked them very much. Simeon was pale and sallow, and had that sickly kind of attractiveness which some girls like. Melvin was large and dark and looked as if he played tennis. Without anyone’s saying a word, it was quickly settled that Sheila be with Simeon and Gretchen with Melvin. “Gretchen, don’t you think it’s such a lovely day,” Sheila said brightly, as if continuing a conversation. “Mmm,” Gretchen cooperated. “Too nice to go inside. But we have to, don’t we.” “Well, we have been outside all morning—practically,” Sheila smiled. This was conspiratorial enough, so Melvin asked, “Where have === Page 63 === AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS 205 you girls been?" and Simeon waited for the answer. Sheila and Gretchen looked at each other. "To the zoo!" they answered gaily together. "The zoo!" It was too absurd. Simeon seemed to approve but Melvin looked almost angry. "Oh, we love to go to the zoo," explained Sheila. "The animals are so wonderfully human. Gretchen just adores the lions, and she loves the hyenas, don't you," and of course Gretchen nodded. "But I thought," Melvin wondered, "I thought people went to see the seals mainly-grownups, I mean. Or the monkeys." "Oh!" chorused the girls. "Not the seals! Never the seals!" "Seals are so stupid, they have no souls," Sheila specified. "They're so uninteresting, really, I mean, anybody knows that." "Don't you see, they simply perform," Gretchen elaborated. "They have no real integrity, not like the lions. And as for the monkeys-!" Melvin frowned and seemed unacquainted with these ideas, so their whole point of view had to be explained. Of course, Gretchen and Sheila had talked about it all morning, but they loved to perform for outsiders. And they didn't expect anyone to understand, really. Simeon, however, said something about the ideas in the East, totems, the belief in animal spirits, Egypt, and so on. Melvin simply looked from one to the other. Plainly, he'd never known anyone like them. At least, it was plain to Gretchen. He said he didn't like most ani- mals, except for dogs. Then Sheila took it up and explained how dogs had no spiritual depths, they were almost as bad as seals. Poor Melvin didn't seem to agree. "Gretchen must go inside the Museum," Sheila announced pres- ently. "Gretchen is a painter and she has to see pictures all the time." But she didn't look so silly as she sounded. Anyhow, silly or not, they all complied and began moving to the door. "Where are you going to college," Melvin asked before letting Gretchen go ahead of him. "Not going. When I finish Music and Art I'll leave and take a place somewhere. How can I go to college if I want to be a painter?" Then she whirled inside the Museum. Melvin considered this and then followed her. He was studying Education at Brooklyn College so he said to her when he got inside, === Page 64 === 206 PARTISAN REVIEW "You could go to a progressive college." Both of them blinked in the sudden darkness. "I don't want to go to any school. I hate it. Besides, if I went away I couldn't go to the galleries," Gretchen flashed at him. It quite settled him for the moment. He was left with the choice of saying nothing or arguing with her. For the present he said nothing and this made poor Gretchen feel foolish. Then Simeon and Sheila came up behind them, and Gretchen's foolish feeling dissolved into a com- panionable smile. First they all went to the Sienese rooms, where the two theo- sophists found their favorite pictures and made the proper obeisances. Then after a while all four of them sat down in another room. They stayed upstairs for an hour or more, discussing the new arrangements and whether that red brocade was a good color. It was when they were looking at the Daddi, of St. Catherine's marriage, and Sheila was trying to explain symbolic marriage to Melvin-it was then that Gretchen thought of the ankh again. She spoke of it to Sheila who insisted that they all go down to see it. Melvin did not know what the ankh was, but the two girls promised that it was worth seeing, so they led the way down to the Egyptian rooms, full of elaborate girlish mystery. Finally, they found it, the enchanting blue faience object. Sheila and Gretchen stood in front of the glass case, summoning their old attitudes of reverence. The ankh was another symbol of their friend- ship. They had come upon it one day and it seemed to mean every- thing-this strange cross made thousands of years ago by people who had enslaved their ancestors. But they never thought of that. For them the ankh was life and immortality and many other things, much more than life, all the meanings that were thick and never articulated, but expressed in the brilliant bluish-green. There it was. Sheila had made ankh pendants for each of them, Gretchen put the ankh at the bottom of all her pictures, like Whistler's butterfly, and Sheila even embroidered the ankh on handkerchiefs. She also had gotten some clay and made a little ankh which she painted blue. It occupied a place of honor on her bookshelf and it never failed to move them. "Ah, yes," Simeon said, as if recognizing something familiar. "The old Egyptian symbol for life." He lived at International House and could be expected to know such things. === Page 65 === AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS 207 But Melvin didn't like it at all. "I don't see anything very much in that. I mean, it's simply the genetic symbol for the female- heredity-Mendel-" he elaborated. "Genetics!" Sheila snorted lightly. She looked at Melvin with pity for his lack of the finer comprehensions. She almost made Gret- chen feel responsible-Simeon, after all, had said nothing silly like that. "But you don't understand. It's not that at all-it has nothing to do with-" But Gretchen trailed off. She had never thought of that connection before. The dark young man was looking at the ankh and not liking what they made of it at all. She had not thought someone of their own generation could be so remote from them, from her and Sheila. But, indeed, age is not the only barrier to perfect communion. "No, the symbol had priority, even if the Egyptians used it for a different purpose," said Simeon the peacemaker. "Besides, you know, Egyptian science was highly developed." It was as if he were mediating between the sexes. Melvin looked blankly at them. "That was astronomy anyhow. But those old symbols-but I don't see what difference it makes to you. You're not Egyptians, I'm not Egyptian." He was very serious about it. Evidently he had not encountered any folk-dance group or any myth and ritual people at Brooklyn College. Gretchen and Sheila looked at each other. Did he think they were Egyptians? Or that they thought they were? "But," Sheila started radiantly, "it has nothing to do with be- ing Egyptian. It's a symbol of life. I'm alive, you're alive-" and so she explained symbolism to him in her gentle evangelical way, helped out by the cosmopolitan Simeon. They got rather far from genetics. Gretchen looked hard at the ankh, turning slightly away from her friend's dispute, squinting in order to get a better view of that object in the glass case. She was trying to remember all the things they used to say about the ankh. But it said nothing to her, it was simply itself. Gretchen of course was not an Egyptian, but she had never thought that mattered. Then neither had she ever thought that sex mattered-for the ankh, that is. And now she was naturally con- fused. Which was it, life or sex? It had to be one or the other, she === Page 66 === 208 PARTISAN REVIEW thought, for her mental life was made up of such dichotomies. But if it were simply sex and the genetic symbol, then she and Sheila— weren't they a little teeny bit, oh, foolish, or irrelevant, or something? Had their perceptions failed, weren't they in touch? Or if it were life and immortality and all those other things, then what had that to do with sex? Which was it? The ankh said nothing, and it was the first time Gretchen felt she could not communicate with it. That summer was a lovely one, even in New York. The city can have a dusty, charming kind of ease, in spite of the heat: evenings are tremulous, and poignant; and especially for girls of Gretchen's age, the feeling of being bare-armed and bare-legged and wearing light, fresh, starched cotton dresses, is so much a part of the sum- mer's quality that it demands notice. Gretchen was very sunburnt— that, too, was part of the whole feeling—and her hair was cut very short and generally she looked much better than she had during the winter. She had tried to dye a blond streak in her hair, but it wasn't at all successful. It turned out to be a strange lion-color, instead of the pale silvery yellow she had intended, and for a painter to be so wrong on color—! But Byron thought it rather original nevertheless, and after a while the children at the day camp where Gretchen taught arts and crafts stopped teasing their counselor. By the end of the summer it was no longer quite so noticeable, and as it faded more Gretchen began to be actually pleased with the effect. Girls of sixteen—or seventeen: Gretchen had had a birthday— have moods, as everyone knows. They are by turns delighted with themselves or horrified; and often one feeling produces the other. It is not to be expected that they always know why they are in a certain mood, why the feeling of delight with one's self can so easily change to that horror, and be a horror at that very delight. Indeed, the mood is that much more poignant if one can connect it with nothing at all. To know the reason for it is in a sense to be deprived of a surrender to it; one is practically forced to do something about the reason, and not luxuriate in the abandon of an unknown feeling. And to do something is more difficult. Gretchen would have been unique, even unnatural, had she not felt the poetry of moods. And she had not learned what it was possible to do if one did know their reasons. === Page 67 === AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS 209 For instance, one day at the end of the summer-or really, it was close upon autumn, she wore stockings and a suit-this girl found herself suddenly in a mood of a gradually severe depression. But she could not abandon herself to it. The weather was brilliant, she walked in the Park and looked at foliage, made notes in her mind and got impressions, but to herself she was drab and sad, and furthermore- which was worse-not sufficiently sad. At Sheila's place, later in the afternoon, she sat in a low chair by the window. She had said very little ever since her arrival there. Sheila had been washing her hair, and now she came near the window to dry it. She tossed the heavy mass of fine pale hair, rolling it into a towel, flinging her head up and down. Finally she threw the towel on the couch and, standing in front of Gretchen, combed her shining clean hair into a fluffy collar around her shoulders, a gleaming hood or fichu, like Una or some other heroine. Sheila's face was pink from the hot water, and, as always, quite breathlessly young. One would easily have thought her a child if one looked only at her rather strange, eager eyes. Although the weather was really cool and gave definite promise of autumn, Sheila was still wearing one of her light rose-printed voile dresses and white sandals. She sat down on the couch, her flowered dress blending into the chintzy cover and only her pale arms and golden hair rising out of the faded figured mass. To Gretchen, it seemed briefly like an intricate "working" Matisse composition-the girl in the flowered dress on a flowered cover, a shuttered window throwing its slats of light on the floor. But it was not exotic, and was more dusty and windblown, like a picture left out of doors all summer. And Sheila of course was like a breath or a breeze, without a body, like a pure spirit of maiden- liness. Sheila finally spoke. "You seem very quiet today, Gretchen. I suppose you're very far away-perhaps you don't want to talk- about your thoughts. Of course, I can understand that." She sat there and spoke in her gentle, tender way, all the while her hand moving, never stopping, as she combed and combed her pale hair, like someone in a fairy tale, possessed. Gretchen started, as if guilty to be caught in her own thoughts. "No, I mean-yes. The thing is, you see," she said leaning forward, "I'm afraid I'm going to have-a baby. And I don't know what to === Page 68 === 210 PARTISAN REVIEW do." As she said it, she felt all at once ten years older than Sheila. And she was struck with the futility of having said anything at all. To tell Sheila everything would be like making a confession of faith at a theosophy meeting. But the part of it that mattered could never be told to Sheila. That part was a different world. Perhaps Gretchen was wrong in the first place ever to have thought of Sheila, but they were friends of a sort. "Ah!" Sheila breathed softly. "You sense something-you've had an intimation-a sense of-" She was all breathing spirit. Clearly, what Gretchen might tell was of a coarse, defiling, base actuality. "I can't tell you about it-" Gretchen began to say irritably, but Sheila nodded with all her understanding. At that moment Gretchen saw how she could tell Sheila and yet not tell her. Sheila was the only one who would not ask practical questions. "Well, I didn't actually-um-I mean, not really, do you know what I mean? And I'm sure it's really nothing, but I'm still worried. I'm afraid, I don't know what I'd do. I mean, I don't think it really is-that I really am-but, what if it were true?" "Oh, you mustn't have any fears-you could come and live with me. We'd take care of the baby together!" Sheila offered hap- pily, her face lighting up. For Sheila the idea of a baby was truly an idea, and part of new growth or any kind of growth, and also rebirth and the immortal spirit. "But my life-my paintings. And when my mother finds out-" Poor Gretchen mumbled. The whole thing was suddenly so tangible. It was her own self that was involved, an idea inside her body. She felt as if her young life were over, and that a part of her had died. "I couldn't possibly have an abortion," she went on, desperately practical. "But I couldn't have the baby-" and when she said the word again, it seemed so terribly real. "Oh, no, an abortion would be terribly wrong," was Sheila's opinion. "But it would be so interesting to have the baby. For you, I mean." She stopped to think about it. Then she said suddenly, "Re- member the ankh! And life. That's the only thing that matters." It was a poor consolation. Gretchen nodded as in the old days, but as if she were reassuring a child while thinking of something very serious. She continued to sit sullenly in her chair. This was the second time the ankh had said nothing to her. === Page 69 === AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS 211 Sheila continued, "And don't you remember what Rilke says— 'Every angel is terrible'—and. But you can meet the angel with the ankh." This too was a poor choice. "Rilke," Gretchen said. She was reminded of her mother (Mrs. Weiss had asked to see the Duino Elegies) and it seemed that that old fighting life with her mother was faraway and flat, now, like a puppet-show. Sheila tried again. "Maybe you'll have an angel-" She was, after all, trying to be helpful, but it was hardly sur- prising that Gretchen took a different view and was full of irritable gestures. "Oh, Sheila"—wearily-"I-it has nothing to do with an- gels," she corrected her friend. Then stopped. "If I have a baby, it probably won't even be human. It will probably be some monster- a lion," she said with a silly laugh. "A lion!" Sheila exclaimed. "That would be wonderful! The lion, the King of the Jungle! Lion, lion, burning bright—" "I think that was a tiger," Gretchen interrupted sullenly. It was quite clear that Gretchen was rather alone in this. The eternal friendship seemed unequal to all demands and the "best friend" not a savior of any kind. That was deception indeed. Gretchen rose from the chair almost melodramatically, as if showing the heavy accretions, the different circumstances, the weight, in short, of her new maturity. But she said something more: "I didn't tell Byron, though. I thought I'd wait. It's only a week—" "Of course. He wouldn't understand, really. But I do," Sheila said tenderly, seeming quite unaware that this understanding might leave something to be desired. "It really has nothing to do with him— I mean, it's such a pure thing, it's too much of an ideal. Of course, you haven't said very much about it—but I can understand." She showed only the greatest respect for the whole situation. Gretchen stood up clumsily, pulling down her skirt, acting her imagined part in the weary matronly future. In front of her, Sheila shone delicate and golden as a myth. Gretchen stared at her friend in a kind of angry confusion. She had never been able to imagine Sheila growing old. "I'll call you," Sheila said. "All right-I don't know. I have to go," and the younger girl turned toward the door. It seemed to her, this farewell, heavy and === Page 70 === 212 PARTISAN REVIEW momentous, and it was. One might suppose that the feeling was not lost on Sheila. For, necessarily, everything would change after this— depending on what finally happened. In a week when Sheila called, everything was more definite and the mood quite gone. Gretchen was eager to inform her solicitous friend that they had imagined the worst all too quickly; the truth was much more simple. She reminded Sheila that this was the same depression that occurred for her all the time, regularly, and that this time it had lasted longer and must have affected her body. Sheila of course could easily grant the power of mind and spirit over the body and the material world. Then, in a silly giggle, Gretchen said, “Yes, the lion has come.” It was a happy invention indeed, and made for some continuity with their old talks. Afterward Sheila named the lion “Aum,” but Gretchen could never remember where the name came from—was it Rilke? or the theosophists? or perhaps The Prophet. Anyway, the lion had an existence and became real—more than any possible god-child, for Sheila. And, in fact, the lion was really more Sheila’s than Gretchen’s. “How is Aum?” Sheila would ask repeatedly, and she would really mean a question about the spiritual life. Gretchen might say, “Oh, he’s gone to St. Germain-des-Prés” or would mention a dozen other modern places. She always kept him far from home, however, but only because she couldn’t account for him otherwise. Sheila’s version of Aum’s adventures were more seri- ous: she had him go to India, to the Adriatic where Duino was sup- posed to be, to Egypt where he found a real ankh near the Cheops ship. Sheila’s Aum returned and made communications to Sheila in the privacy of her room, near the window with the tree; and he would climb down the tree when he left. Compared to Gretchen’s lion—the original, as it were—Aum was decidedly more spiritual and intent on the higher, deeper life. One might expect that he would take up residence at International House. There was no question about his sex. Still, he was an earnest of their friendship. Like many friendships, intense and significant, which, when they stop meaning what they once meant, mean nothing at all, Gretchen’s friendship with Sheila became, with the turning of a hair, ridiculous and insupportable. === Page 71 === AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS 213 When Gretchen graduated the next year from the High School of Music and Art, she moved out of her parents' apartment and rented a cold-water flat on Gouverneur Street. There was a terrible irony in this for Mrs. Weiss-whose parents, when they first came to America, as hopeful immigrants, came to Gouverneur Street. Mrs. Weiss consequently found the whole situation of her daughter im- possible to consider. Mrs. Weiss dimly connected Sheila with her daughter's new existence the cold-water flat but an enlargement of the furnished room-and she would have been surprised had she known how little Sheila was a part of it. For, although Sheila wrote many thoughtful letters to Gouverneur Street-there was no tele- phone-Gretchen saw her rarely. Questions about the ankh went un- answered, fragments from The Prophet produced no response. Once Gretchen invited Sheila down for dinner and tried to explain her new self, but Sheila couldn't understand it-or she could, only if she could bring in Rilke and Madame Blavatsky, and Gretchen didn't want them brought in any more. Sheila took some of her own drawings with her, she wore the ankh, she was as radiant, as gentle as ever, but poor Gretchen had begun to feel superior and pitied her old friend Sheila, as one does in such circumstances. Uneasily, Gretchen tried to be nice and at the same time honest. Of course, it didn't work, so she compromised by being cold and nervous. And then Sheila's drawings, it will be allowed, made things quite impossible. For Gretchen, remember, was a painter, and just at this time she couldn't stand anything she didn't like. Gretchen's own paintings hung on the walls of her dry dusty place, refusing to be ignored. And Sheila's drawings of the lion and of the unseen forces embarrassed Gretchen more than anything her old friend said. The difference between the kind of drawings Sheila did-and she was proud of her own work-and the paintings Gretchen worked on, was so enormous, so manifold, so-nothing that Sheila said or did could make up for it. Sheila, as one might imagine, made tight little sur- realist sketches, coloring them and giving them each a severe moni- tory name. To Gretchen, those drawings were strange, thin grotesques, made up of uneasy lines and unmoving figures. They were stiff, they were graceless, they were full of some mysterious unpleasant inten- tion-but they were so bad! That was how they seemed to Gretchen who was just then working very hard at still-life, on moving planes, === Page 72 === 214 PARTISAN REVIEW on space. Her lemons, her apples, and pitchers, and plates, her planes and moving space and push and pull could not arouse in Sheila any of the enthusiasm that the older girl felt for her own sketches of Rilke struggling with the angels, or Madame Blavatsky and Kahlil Gibran meeting in the unseen world. They were always at an impasse now, these two former friends. Sheila asked about the lion in the old intimate way, or talked about Buddhism as revealed by Simeon and disputed by Melvin. Gretchen would become cold with embarrassment and then would act too friendly. So it was just as well when they stopped seeing each other altogether. There was absolutely nothing to talk about. Near Columbia there are many pleasant streets and large nice- looking houses. There are also many unpleasant ones. About a year after the events narrated, Gretchen Weiss walked up from the Drive one warm bright afternoon and came to 114th Street. She crossed Broadway and then stopped further on in front of a tenement house which bore the number Sheila had given her. For, Sheila had called one day, suddenly, after a year, had tele- phoned at Gretchen's parents' one day when Gretchen was there. It really was a surprise. “Sheila! How strange to hear your voice after all this time!” “And yours, Gretchen! I-have you moved? I wrote to you— and got no answer. And I was just thinking about you so I thought I'd ask your mother—and how are you, my old friend?” “Oh, fine,” Gretchen replied. “I haven't moved, I'm just visiting my mother. She isn't well.” “Oh,” said the old Sheila. “I'm so sorry to hear that.—I've been well-of course, so much has happened—” “Mmm,” said Gretchen uncertainly. She didn't know how much she wanted to hear. “Are you still on 89th Street?” “Oh, no,” Sheila answered. “I'm pregnant, you see. I'm going to have a baby. Of course, I forgot. You didn't know I was married. It was in January-we decided very suddenly- Of course, you don't know whom I married, but I'm sure you can guess.” And when Gretchen professed her inability to guess, Sheila informed her that it was, of course, Melvin (of course?), who was getting his M.A. at Columbia. They were living on 114th Street, and Sheila wanted to === Page 73 === AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS 215 see her old friend. "I'm doing some new things, you might be rather interested," Sheila said shyly, as if she couldn't presume too much interest. "I had a dream about you, that's why I called." So Gretchen, out of some paradox of obligation and desire, agreed to visit her. One might have thought she would refuse, but curiously, she didn't. It was a rather dirty street she found herself in. She hesitated and then went up the steps to the hall. It was the sort of house where one expects bells to be out of order, and the names above the bells to reveal the character of the house or be absent entirely. It took Gretchen a minute to find Fairfield-Dubin written in over a scratched- out Dunlap. She took off a fresh white glove before ringing the bell. This one answered and Gretchen went inside. It was also the sort of house where the hall light is out, the tile floor grimy, and the air smelling of disinfectant and garbage. The hall is of course crowded with baby carriages. Gretchen climbed the four flights to Sheila's apartment, trying not to feel any feelings. She herself lived in a place that was equally drab-Gouverneur Street-but she was not married, and she felt that made a difference. At the door Sheila was full of quiet happy welcome-and terribly pregnant. As with many very thin women, pregnancy seemed unna- tural for her. She swayed down the hall, Gretchen following, and into the narrow living room. Sheila sat down awkwardly in a maple chair and pulled a footstool under her legs. "I'm having trouble with my legs," she apologized, indicating her selfishness in taking the only footstool. "I have to have injections, for this vein trouble. Tall people always have it. You probably will, you're nearly as tall as I am." Her steady smile included Gretchen in her own situation. Gretchen lit a cigarette and the motions of do- ing so allowed her to hide her own intimations. "Of course," Sheila continued, "if I weren't going to the clinic, the expense would be terrible. As it is-" And then she recounted very briefly the story of her life since the two girls were last together. It was not a pleasant tale nor an especially unpleasant one. The marriage of Sheila and Melvin was inexplicable; his family opposed it, he had to work at night for extra money, they had no place to go, and of course Sheila still saw nothing of her father or her grandmother. She started the story with a smile === Page 74 === 216 PARTISAN REVIEW and ended in a quietly depressed tone, yet she seemed to be telling someone else's story, to be speaking about people she didn't know. "And what about your lectures, your reading," Gretchen in- quired, conscious of some cruelty in doing so. "Yes, all of that has been so valuable to me.-But I have several new projects, that's why I called. One of them is dreams." "Dreams?" "Yes, I keep them in a notebook I write. Then I interpret them. I'm planning to write about it, in a book," Sheila explained modestly. "You see, when I telephoned you, I dreamed of you the night before. Oh, it was so interesting!" and Sheila broke into her old tone of radiant excitement. She had dreamed of a letter from an old friend, but the letter was written on rose petals sewn together. Instead of the postman, two girls brought it to the door. Before she could read the letter, she lost it. Then later she found it again, and the rose opened and inside it was a pearl, and the whole letter was just one word which she couldn't remember, but in the dream the word meant "Perfect Love." After telling the dream, Sheila went inside to get her notebook. She came back and gave it to Gretchen to read. The dream went on for several pages, and meanwhile Sheila settled herself into the chair again. "You see," she began, "you are my old friend and I have lost touch with you. I don't go to my meetings, and Melvin-um-he has other interests, you know. But I still have alive in me and especially now when I have two lives-well, anyhow, I need this fuller expres- sion. So I started to write my dream book. I also think I could make money from it, which would help." Gretchen appeared to be listening intently. "You see, you are the old friend and the rose is nature, be- cause you're a painter and your paintings are about the natural world. But it's not a whole, not yet, because you don't paint the spirit. Now I'm not a painter, but I drew the spirit, in those drawings. Well, the two girls, you see, are messengers from the spirit. Now your name is Margaret, which means pearl. Then I lose the letter- your friendship, but then I find it again. The rose becomes a pearl and nature and spirit are joined. Then the one word means unity and love and perfect harmony, if we get in touch again together. So you see how the dream told me I should find you and see you again." === Page 75 === AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS 217 Sheila finished her exposition with a proud smile. On the notebook's cover was the old ankh, and on the table one of the old water-colors of the lion. The name at the bottom of it was "Aum." Poor Gretchen felt cold and trapped by these images. Like the representation in a dream, when its images are no longer symbolic only, and one has the feeling that accompanies the event- Gretchen wanted to say something or shriek, but it was impossible. "So that's what the dream means," she remarked, trying to arrange her face. She lit another cigarette conveniently. "Yes," said the interpreter. "It was a message to me, and prob- ably, really, a prophecy. Now let me see-" She looked in the dream book and then at Gretchen. "That was last Wednesday, the day be- fore I called you. Now you must have had a dream that night with a message for me and I picked up the waves of it. Oh, this will be marvelous!" "Um-let me see." Gretchen spoke as if fumbling with her memory. "Um-last Wednesday. Oh, yes. I dreamed I was living in a new modern house done by a Viennese architect named Talcott Schoenfeld, who was somehow an old friend from Scarsdale although much older than me, a friend of my parents. Then-we-went to the theater and this architect knew all the actors, and we went back- stage-" and Gretchen faltered again, slightly. Then "-I was-it seemed I had a baby on the stage and the audience hissed and they rang down the curtain.-Now what message do you find in this?" She turned and saw that Sheila's eyes were closed. It was her old attitude of deep concentration, of trying to get in touch with forces. Sheila opened her eyes. "Very interesting. Very. Because it is the message, it's what I thought. I guess I still am in touch with the waves. I thought I'd lost it a little." Sheila looked very tired. "I don't understand," Gretchen said stubbornly. "Don't you? It's so clear," Sheila explained. "You've lost touch then. Really-you see-the new house is your new life but it's con- nected with me even if we don't see each other, because my name used to be Schoenfeld, I don't remember if I ever told you. And the architect is an old friend, and then Vienna signifies Rilke. And the architect is doing creative work-my dream work, and my other work which I'll tell you about. We go to the play, which is the world, we become friends again, like the old days, so you share my baby the === Page 76 === 218 PARTISAN REVIEW way I shared your lion. But of course the world interferes, so they attack us and think they can banish us. But we can protect each other in the world of the spirit, if we can be friends. You were sending me this message and I received it.” Gretchen took another cigarette. “How do you—how do you decide on those particular meanings, Sheila,” she asked cautiously, hiding her face in the lighting of match and cigarette. Her former friend did not reply, so she repeated her question and amplified it: “Do you use a dream dictionary, or free associations, or how do you do it? And how can you be sure what it means? How do you know?” “Oh, no,” Sheila said a little wildly. “Not a dream dictionary. That’s too mechanical—that a bird means death or anything like that. It doesn’t give the real message.—You know how I remove my- self and get in touch. And then the meaning comes to me. I suppose there are associations, like pearl because your name is Margaret—" “I don’t mean that,” Gretchen broke in. “I mean, what you think of when you think of architects or pearls or roses, not what they signify but what comes to your mind. To complete the dream.” “But Gretchen!” Sheila was amazed. “The dream is already complete. It’s like a message in a foreign language, you have to know the language in order to interpret it.—Of course, I admit, that is often difficult for people who don’t have the gift for getting in touch.” Her tone described the difference between awareness and lack of it. “Oh, no,” Gretchen answered coldly. “I don’t think that’s right. Dreams aren’t prophetic, dreams aren’t like that. Now, if you dreamed you were going to die when you have your baby, that wouldn’t be a prophecy. It wouldn’t really happen—” “But of course they’re prophecies—or messages, or directions, or predictions of some kind—I know this is true.” “Oh, no,” Gretchen repeated, as before. “No, they’re psycho- logical; they’re fears or things you’re afraid will happen, or some kind of wish changed into another form—” but she could not seem to continue with that. Instead she asked accusingly, “How do you know you’re right?” “Well, you simply know. You simply see it. Some people can’t, I know. And—besides, the other things confirm it, the voices, for instance.” “What voices?” === Page 77 === AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS 219 "The ones I hear. Surely I must have told you-? Perhaps not. Well, I'm in touch there too, they send me messages, whenever I'm confused or uncertain, and then they come and tell me," Sheila ex- plained reasonably. She reached over to pick up the notebook and turned to the back pages. "Here, look, here are their messages. I write them down. This is the other project I was telling you about. Here let me read it to you?" Gretchen agreed. "Um. You know at first I couldn't understand. They were try- ing to get through to me for a long time before I heard them. And it took me weeks to figure out what they were saying. Here's one- one of the early ones. 'We will harken and hear you, having once heard or cried to us, you will hear us. For you are selected, chosen, you so happily-waiting one, trustingly child, dear little girl, wait Be patient.'—and then they go away, sometimes in a funny way that I can't understand, like they will say, 'Ally-oop' or something silly like that." Gretchen was all silence. Sheila turned the pages of her book and went on: "Lately I begin to distinguish several voices and different personalities. Um-let me see-here's one that shows it.-'Wait again, hear oh hear. Be patient. We will protect you, you will be well, all will be well, we will save you, help you, be with you'— and then this other voice comes in: 'Of course. I'll help you. But you must obey. And do what I say. You're very wrong. Why didn't you tell me before. I'm not sure I can help unless you obey. I know what is best. I do it for your own good.'—Now, see how different they are. One of them gentle and soft and kind, and the other sort of protecting, and knowing everything and wanting obedience. Some- times they don't agree. Sometimes they give very specific directions and sometimes I have to interpret it all. Or hints which sound silly or even meaningless until I figure them out. I never know what they'll say. I just wait for them to come." After a few moments, Gretchen asked, "What does Melvin say?" "Well, he's more interested in psychology, you know. But they said they'd send him some messages. He says he'll give me his opinion then." "Doesn't he believe in it-in them?" Gretchen corrected herself. === Page 78 === 220 PARTISAN REVIEW "How can he, they don't speak to him," Sheila explained. "But I think he's getting interested. He told some people at Columbia about them, some people who want me to come to their office, I think, and help with some experiments or something." Sheila stopped talking, but then made a last try: "You know, Gretchen, they might have some messages for you, to help with your painting. Even if you can't get in touch with them yourself, I know it's hard, perhaps I could-um-relay your requests-" "OH, NO!" Then Gretchen went on more politely, "Don't bother, thanks, really. It's not necessary. I mean-I don't think they'd be interested in the work I'm doing." The rest of the visit was no less uncomfortable and their talk faded out. Every few minutes Gretchen said she had to go and Sheila wished she wouldn't. Finally Melvin came in. After he'd sat down with them, he noticed Sheila's notebook in her lap, and open. He looked at it curiously. Melvin appeared very much the same as when they first knew him. He still had that initial grimace of suspicion. "So she's been telling you about the voices, too?" He turned to Gretchen. He was still quite nice-looking. It was odd to think of his choosing Sheila. "I don't really know," Gretchen said blandly. "As Sheila says, I've lost touch. I-she says you've arranged for her to contact some people-" "Yes. -I made an appointment for you. I hope you'll go. I mean-it would be worth going. They're anxious to see you." "Oh, I'm so glad! I love to tell someone who's interested. And if I can help with their experiments-Do they want to see my draw- ings, too? Or my dreams?" "I think," said Melvin cautiously, "I think it's mainly the voices." But Sheila died giving birth to her baby. If she had lived or been alive to say so, she would have said that Gretchen had had an intuition, a presentiment, a message. The doctors did everything they could, but it was a cerebral hemorrhage, and there was only time for Sheila to insist that they save the baby. Of course, the little girl was named for her. And Mrs. Dubin would take the baby, although she never liked Sheila. Melvin said to Gretchen afterward, "You know, I think she'd === Page 79 === AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS 221 like you to have her books, her notebooks, and all those other things. Perhaps you could do something with them. I—I don’t know. I keep feeling I should have listened to those voices, or paid more at- tention, or something.” “But you didn’t hear them, how could you. Besides, it wouldn’t have saved her. This was something else, it had nothing to do with the voices.” “Do you remember, she used to say something about angels—” Melvin seemed quite unaware of the difference in Gretchen’s feeling. “It was from Rilke, something I thought was silly. But you know— she was—Well, I wonder what she meant, she didn’t mean the angels in heaven—still—” He was unprepared for the event and the vo- cabulary equally. “You should save everything for the baby—” and at this men- tion of the dead Sheila’s link with the future, Gretchen began to cry again. Sheila said so little from beyond the grave. It made one cry, as Gretchen cried now, terribly. And it was terrible to be patted by Melvin. The baby being alive made Sheila seem so much more dead. She really was dead. And being dead was more real for her than when she was alive. It was a dishonor to Sheila to pretend a belief in her now, a loyalty never expressed. But to deny it was a greater dishonor, more despicable. For Gretchen it was all terrible. Nothing she could feel was right. And, suddenly, worst of all, like a gleam of the future—a presentiment, an intuition—she had a feeling that Melvin would ask her to marry him and be a mother to the baby. He did later, but fortunately it was too near Sheila’s death for that. === Page 80 === Michael Hamburger HEINRICH VON KLEIST: AN INTRODUCTION That complex and belated phenomenon, the German li- terary Renaissance, can be roughly divided into two phases. The earlier phase was one of humanistic Enlightenment, though of an Enlightenment threatened from the start by the Powers of Darkness. Goethe began by releasing the chthonic powers in Werther and in his early dithyrambic verse, but spent the rest of his life in the strenu- ous and multiple endeavor to overcome them; hence his horror of the tragic, the incongruous redemption of Faust in Part II and his attitude of cold reserve toward the most gifted writers of the second phase, Höderlin and Kleist. This second phase was a tragic one. Both Höderlin and Kleist started out with a set of enlightened ideals inherited from their humanistic predecessors, especially from Schiller's cult of liberty, friendship, classical beauty and pantheistic joy; but just as Höderlin's juvenile rhapsodies on his favorite abstractions gave place to his mature odes, elegies and 'hymns'—lyrical poems that are tragedies in miniature, moving from thesis and antithesis to syn- thesis on the plane of tragic joy, of a joy purged by conflict and suffering—so Kleist's most vital energies were not released till the so-called Kant crisis of 1801 which, at the age of 23, left him be- wildered, aimless, disillusioned and desperate—at the mercy of the chthonic powers. To say that his early phase of enlightened idealism had been unproductive is an understatement; his desire to believe in the panacea of Reason, with its concomitant benefits of Truth, Virtue and Happiness, had prevented him from even beginning to discover his true gifts and his true vocation. Another year went by before— to his own astonishment—he found himself at work on his first tragedy. In the meantime he had considered almost every possible profession open to a man of his rank and supposed talents; imagina- tive literature was not one of them. === Page 81 === HEINRICH VON KLEIST 223 Even now, and till the very end of his life, Kleist persisted in regarding himself as a man of action and never quite overcame the conviction that “it is better to act than to think.” What he did not know was that his proper field of action was literature; and that only literature could liberate him from the false antimony between action and thought. This lack of self-knowledge accounts for the long sequence of resolutions, ambitions and “life plans” by which he tried to exorcise his own daemon, and their invariable failure: his broken engagement to Wilhelmine von Zenge, his abortive attempts to settle down as a teacher, farmer, civil servant, soldier, publisher and editor; his wanderings around Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland and Italy, his fantastic plan to take part in Napoleon's projected invasion of England in order to die an honorable death; and, soon after, his threat to assassinate Napoleon in the cause of German nationalism. As he grew older, his plans to act became more, not less implausible, until he could think of only one act that was both possible and suffi- ciently decisive to qualify as a “great deed”: this was the act of suicide. Hölderlin too considered himself doomed to destruction; but be- cause he felt himself to be a mere “vessel” for divine truths and because such vessels must be broken once they have served their purpose. Kleist, being neither priest nor seer, was even denied the comfort of immolation; all he knew was that the plane of action permitted no realization of his passions, ambitions and fantasies. It will be impossible here to investigate all the causes—ideologi- cal, political and social—that gave a tragic turn to the second phase of the German literary Renaissance; nor even to show in detail how these causes affected Kleist's life and work. He was born in 1777 of a Prussian family distinguished mainly by a long line of dis- tinguished military men. Kleist himself joined the Prussian Royal Guards at the age of fourteen, saw active service in the following year and was commissioned in 1797. He had become an orphan in 1793. Of his six brothers and sisters, it was his half-sister Ulrike, three years older than himself, who became his life-long friend, sup- port and confidante; about the others he wrote at the end of his life that they had ceased to look upon him as anything “but a use- less member of society, no longer worthy of any sympathy.” The reason has already been indicated. After resigning his commission in === Page 82 === 224 PARTISAN REVIEW 1798, so as to be able to devote all his time to scientific and philo- sophic studies, Kleist engaged in a series of fruitless enterprises in- terrupted by nervous breakdowns—which, in turn, were followed by long periods of physical illness—and terminated only by his suicide at the age of thirty-four. His resignation from the army might have been forgiven him if he had attained prominence as a scholar or scientist; but after the Kant crisis he put away his textbooks in dis- gust. At the time when he was expected to serve his country in a military or administrative capacity he spent his time abroad and de- scribed himself as "a man who has no political opinions at all"; when his country adopted a policy of appeasement toward Napoleon, Kleist flared up into a patriotism so extreme as to embarrass the Prussian government, who suppressed his newspaper and deprived him of his main source of income. Even his suicide was as scandalous as possible, for it involved a pact with a married woman suffering from cancer, Henriette Vogel, whom Kleist shot before shooting him- self. His last literary work was the Litany of Death, an ecstatic love poem in free verse addressed to Henriette, the only woman in his life who had proved capable of ‘absolute’ devotion. Politically, Kleist’s whole life was overshadowed by the Napo- leonic wars, in which he took an active part as an adolescent, and a vicarious part in his last years—as the author of brilliant and formid- able tracts. In early manhood he had rebelled against his inherited function in the Prussian State, having no other desire than to be in- dependent and unprivileged, a citizen of the world. Once he had broken away, his experiences taught him that in the Prussian State there was no place for any virtues or talents but the military and administrative ones—not, at least, for a member of his class. To be independent was to be an outsider, if not an outlaw. The difference between German and English literature of the period can hardly be understood without considering that the German writers as such had simply no status in society; this is one reason why many of them strike us as so peculiarly modern. For a time Kleist took refuge in a generous cosmopolitanism not unlike Goethe’s; but Kleist’s cosmpol- itanism proved a poor substitute for the sense of security enjoyed by those who feel that they belong to a powerful, or at least to an inde- pendent, nation; and it did not stand up to the test which Goethe’s alone was able to pass: the defeat and invasion of his country by a === Page 83 === HEINRICH VON KLEIST 225 foreign power. Kleist's sense of isolation within the Prussian State eventually brought about a complete reversal of his former attitude: it caused him to seek compensation in extreme nationalism. Unlike Goethe, whose all-embracing philosophy of permanence within change was proof against every form of fanaticism, Kleist became a reaction- ary. In the same way, Kleist's disillusionment with the various ra- tionalistic and idealistic philosophies that were the current substitutes for a religious creed precipitated a violent reaction in favor of the mysterious, the monstrous and the chaotic. True, after the Kant crisis he almost became a Catholic convert, though as a Lutheran by birth, upbringing and mentality, he had previously expressed the strongest antipathy to the ritual and influence of the Catholic Church. This conversion would have been in keeping with the spirit of the age, for—as many of Kleist's contemporaries, especially the Roman- tics, discovered—Roman Catholicism could accommodate and recon- cile all those violent antinomies which were to tear Kleist piecemeal, much as Penthesilea and her hounds dismember Achilles in his tragedy. But there was something in Kleist that forbade him to com- mit himself to any discipline but that of Art. His attitude remained that of a man who never ceases to look for absolute values, both moral and metaphysical, but insists on looking for them in dark and uncharted places. It is the attitude summed up by Sylvester in Kleist's first tragedy, Die Familie Schroffenstein: I must have light, Though it were Hell itself I fetch it from- except that these words do not reveal Kleist's predilection for Hell. His moral perversity can be traced back to an early conflict between the two moral codes which he was brought up to observe like any well-mannered tightrope-walker of his class but confused by growing giddy: the Protestant's reliance on his own conscience and the Prus- sian officer's unquestioning loyalty to a secular authority. Most of Kleist's works derive their moral tension from a conflict between two incompatible codes; many of them arrive at a state of deadlock that can be broken only by a frantic plunge into one extreme or the other. This plunge could consist in the complete defiance of secular authority on the part of an individual conscious of being in the right, === Page 84 === 226 PARTISAN REVIEW as in Kleist's great story Michael Kohlhaas, or, conversely, in the com- plete subordination of the individual's conscience to a national cause, as in his patriotic drama Die Hermannsschlacht. In this play Kleist came close to the neat division between private and public morality which has been a characteristic of German political thinking ever since Hegel, Fichte and Treitschke took advantage of the eclipse of rationalism to establish an idolatrous cult of the State. Until his very last works, absolutism and anarchy were the only fixed points that Kleist could see; in between them there was only a vague flux. II Several years after Kleist's death Goethe told Eckermann that Kleist had appalled him "like one afflicted with an incurable disease." From his own very different premises Kleist arrived at the same conclusion about himself: in his last note to his half-sister, dated "on the morning of my death," he told her: "The truth is that there was no help for me on earth." Of all the experiments that were his life, only one, his writing, had succeeded; and even this one success was not confirmed by the kind of outward response that might still have mended his self-esteem, by persuading him that his literary works had penetrated into the realm of "action." Goethe, it is true, had once staged Kleist's comedy Der Zerbrochene Krug at Weimar; but he had also informed Kleist of his displeasure at "young men of wit and talent who are waiting for a theater that is yet to come." Kleist never forgot this judgment, to which he replied with a caustic epigram. Even later critics of Kleist, from Grillparzer and Hebbel in the nineteenth century to Gundolf in the twentieth, did not succeed in disengaging Kleist's great qualities as a writer from their own reac- tions to his person. In 1827, sixteen years after Kleist's death, Carlyle mentioned him in passing as "a noble-minded and ill-fated man of genius, whom the mismanagement of a too impetuous heart has since driven to suicide before the world has sufficiently reaped the bright promise of his early years." The notice is favorable, but somewhat misleading with respect to Kleist's works. However, there is little point in tracing all the misunderstandings that constitute the progress of a writer's reputation, especially as such histories always imply that === Page 85 === HEINRICH VON KLEIST 227 error and prejudice have at last been miraculously dispelled. Perhaps it is more useful to state that Kleist has come to be recognized as a writer of the first rank; that a French adaptation of his last drama, Friedrich Prinz von Homburg, recently proved that his work can be highly appreciated outside Germany; and that a French critic has paid him the fashionable compliment of considering the same play in the light of existential philosophy. This last, of course, means nothing more than that Kleist was one of the many writers of past centuries who at one time in their lives reached the point at which Existentialism proper begins, the point where “the strange institu- tion that is this world”—to use Kleist’s words—ceases to tally with any of the systems designed to explain it. Kleist’s “incurable disease” has become so widespread that— with the possible exception of Die Hermannsschlacht—our apprecia- tion of his works is not likely to be disturbed by nonliterary con- siderations. It does not follow that we can disregard the metaphysical and moral basis of his works for the sake of that purely aesthetic sphere in which so many writers and critics of our time would like to have their being; but we should have less difficulty than Kleist’s earlier critics in accepting this basis and moving on to a different perspective of Kleist’s art. His seven completed plays and eight long stories need little support from his biographv. Kleist’s outstanding gift as a writer was the powerful imagination that made it unneces- sary for him to draw on his immediate experiences and circum- stances. “When I shut my eyes,” he wrote to his fiancée, “I can im- agine anything I please”; and in another letter to her he described his earliest imaginative experiences which, significantly, took the form of aural hallucinations, the ability to hear whole works of music performed by nonexistent orchestras in which Kleist could clearly distinguish each separate instrument. Just because of this uncommon faculty of self-projection, Kleist’s own problems and obsessions are always perceptible beneath the surface of his dialogue and narrative, like the figured bass in a musical composition. The analogy is Kleist’s. A few months before his death he wrote of his intention to put aside his literary work and devote himself to two of his earlier pursuits, to science and music. Of the latter he writes: I regard this art as the root or rather—to put it more scientifically— as the algebraic formula of all the other arts; and just as we already === Page 86 === 228 PARTISAN REVIEW have a poet [Goethe] . . . who has based all his ideas about his art on colors, so I, from early youth, have based all my general ideas about the art of literature on tones. I believe that the figured bass holds implications of the utmost importance and relevance to the art of literature. In Kleist's own case—and what critical generalizations by an imaginative writer are not, in fact, insights into his own practice, or deductions made from such insights?-the figured bass corresponds to the irrational obsessions to which we can trace the genesis of all his works. On these constant figures-supplied to him, because out- side the scope of his intellect and his will—all his comic and tragic inventions are based. While it is more rewarding in the long run to concentrate on the skill with which Kleist developed and varied the given scheme, it is impossible to do justice to this skill without un- dertaking detailed analyses of more than one of his works. In the present essay, therefore, all I can hope to do is to shed a little light on Kleist's premises and compulsions, the figured bass of his work. The “incurable disease” which Goethe had in mind was a con- fusion of all the faculties brought about by disorientation; but it must be mentioned at once that like his state of chronic indecision, this confusion ceased at the moment when Kleist committed his imagina- tion and intellect to a literary work. It is present as the metaphysical kernel of his works, but the works themselves are brilliantly organ- ized. From this state of confusion misdirected passions broke loose, only to dash themselves to pieces. On the emotional and erotic plane, Kleist's instability amounted to nothing less than a confusion of the male and female principles, a perpetual struggle between his mas- culine will and a feminine hysteria-like the amorous combat be- tween Achilles and the Amazon in his Penthesilea. A Freudian ex- planation may suggest itself when we read the following confession- addressed to his friend von PFUEL who later became a general and Prussian Minister for War: "Often, when at Thun you stepped into the lake in my presence, I contemplated your beautiful body with feelings that were truly girlish”; and, in the same letter: "You re- stored the age of the Greeks in my heart, I could have slept with you, dear boy, so entirely my soul embraced you." But when Kleist concludes: "I shall never marry, so you must be a wife to me, be my children and my grandchildren," we know that he has only been indulging in one of his countless imaginative experiments. His mo- === Page 87 === HEINRICH VON KLEIST 229 mentary aberration has turned into a patent absurdity. The fact is that Kleist's erotic instability was not the cause, but one of the symptoms of his general disorientation. It was this dis- orientation which bred the emotional possibilities and impossibilities of which I have given examples. Many more could be adduced from his works. The crowning irony of Kleist's career is that his last play and his last story point to a resolution of the metaphysical, moral and emotional dilemma to which all his personal failures were due. His literary works were always at least one stage ahead of his personal development; and he did not live to catch up with Friedrich Prinz von Homburg and Der Zweikampf. It was not till these last works that Kleist was able to represent a love relationship free from con- fusion and excess. The love between Homburg and Natalie is as far removed from the mixture of sensuality, heroism and cannibalism in Penthesilea as from the self-obliterating, abject devotion of Käthchen von Heilbronn (whom Kleist, in one of his rare comments on his own works, described as the minus corresponding to Penthesilea's plus, "the reverse side of Penthesilea, her other pole, a creature as mighty by virtue of submission as the other by virtue of action"). The greater maturity of Homburg on the erotic plane is exactly parallel with the difference between the 'happy ending' of Käthchen von Heilbronn and the real transformation that takes place in Hom- burg, a transcendence of tragedy comparable to that in Shakespeare's later plays. This transformation is a moral one. The Freudian, of course, would argue that the moral change proceeds from the erotic, —but in Kleist's case at least—they would be wrong. The hero of Kleist's last story, Friedrich von Trota, differs from Kleist's earlier characters in the quality of his faith; and this, once more, leads to a difference in the quality of his love. As in earlier works, everything conspires to undermine the hero's faith; even the judgment of God seems to be against him, for it is the guilty man who is absolved in the trial by combat. This is the most emphatic statement of a theme that recurs throughout Kleist's works. His char- acters may be virtuous or even heroic, but their virtues and their hero- ism have no place in any order above or outside them. They are hopelessly disorientated in "the strange institution that is this world." Error and, more often than not, the very impossibility of dis- covering the truth assume a metaphysical significance in Kleist's === Page 88 === 230 PARTISAN REVIEW works; they are the Purgatory through which all his characters must pass and from which the tragic ones do not emerge. Even his first play, Die Familie Schroffenstein, was a tragedy of errors. In comic situations the sinister enigma may give place to a paradox that can be unraveled by ingenuity; this is the case in Der Zerbrochene Krug. Sometimes, as in Die Marquise von O., the events themselves finally offer a solution; in the weaker works, such as Käthchen, a deus ex machina is required. There are many variations: Das Erdbeben in Chile begins with a deus ex machina, the earthquake, but this only serves to sharpen the tragic irony of the denouement. In Amphitryon, Kleist's admirable adaptation of Molière's comedy, we see the given enigma deepen into a mystery; the error, which was a mere pretext for social comedy in Molière, strikes such deep roots in Kleist's Alc- mene, her perplexity is so much increased by her deeper response to Jupiter's divinity, that the play hangs on the verge of tragedy. The question of truth and error is intimately bound up with the excessive passions which destroy Kleist's characters. These ex- cesses result from the disorientation which occurs when error has wholly obscured the truth. In many cases, as in Michael Kohlhaas, the error manifests itself as injustice; but injustice is a suppression of truth on the ethical plane. The resulting disorientation is funda- mentally the same. If there is no absolute truth, the individual can accept no authority but that of his own impulses: these impulses may proceed from his conscience, from his senses or from his intellect; but all three are isolated, autonomous and exposed to all the dangers of a conflict with incalculable and merciless powers. Kleist was one of the first German writers to face—or at least to suffer—the full implications of those peculiarly modern processes, the isolation of the individual consciousness and the fragmentation of reality into islands of pure subjectivity on the one hand, mere me- chanistic phenomena on the other. (These processes, in our own time, have culminated in the nihilism of such German writers as G. E. Winckler—who wrote about the "affliction of thinking"—and Gottfried Benn, whose anti-humanism is based on his unwillingness to admit any point of contact between the fantasies generated by an isolated ego and a society which is only of statistical interest.) That is why Kleist was inclined to judge his own art in terms of a conflict between reality and imagination—or, in other words, between the === Page 89 === HEINRICH VON KLEIST 231 individual and his environment. The peculiar tautness of his blank verse and narrative prose was the result of this tension, of his strenu- ous endeavor to impose the curb of plausibility on the anarchic pro- ducts of his imagination. “The truth is,” he wrote to a friend, “that I like what I imagine, not what I succeed in putting down on paper. If I were good for anything else, I should take it up with all my heart: my only reason for writing is that I can’t help it.” And again: “Every first impulse, all that is involuntary, is beautiful; and every- thing is crooked and cramped as soon as it understands itself.” This is the dichotomy which he elaborated in his two most important es- says, psychologically in the essay On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts during Speech, philosophically and theologically in that On the Puppet Theater.* Yet the vitalism and anti-rationalism which these essays pro- pound were counterbalanced by Kleist’s inflexible control over his artistic media. A single instance of this control, his ingenious use of metaphor and simile, will have to suffice. The entire significance of Kleist’s story Die Marquise von O. could be shown to hinge on a few crucial metaphors and similes—“god” and “angel” on the one hand, “devil” and “dog” on the other—while the hero-villain’s deep- est motive is conveyed in a seemingly irrelevant passage of sustained allegory, his childhood reminiscence of the swan on his uncle’s estate. Kleist’s use of imagery is one of the means by which he achieved his astonishing economy and concentration of style; not only by the careful placing of significant images, but—more important still—by the rigid avoidance of insignificant ones, he learned to compress into a single sentence what other writers would have spread over whole paragraphs of analysis and exposition. Kleist knew very well that spontaneity is not enough. In con- nection with his project to attempt a second version of Robert Guis- kard in 1808 (he had destroyed the first draft of this tragedy, which was to be his masterpiece, during one of his crises, as he later de- stroyed his only full-length novel and his autobiography), he wrote: “The material—to use the popular terms—is still monstrous; but in art everything depends on form, and everything that has a shape is my province.” One of his last letters is an account of the struggle * PR, January-February, 1947. === Page 90 === 232 PARTISAN REVIEW involved in taming his "monstrous" fantasies; it is the intensity of this struggle that justifies the analogy of music, of a mathematical structure raised on a basis of unreason. Kleist's best works are like products of the successful collaboration between a maniac and a mathematician. That is why Kafka could learn from Kleist to illu- minate nightmare with a daytime lucidity; not to explain his para- doxes, but to render them; and, however outrageous his visions, to preserve the outward assurance of a somnambulist. Kleist could theorize as well as any critic who knows from his own experience what he is talking about; but he left his theories be- hind as soon as he started work on a story or a play. Here all his thought was dramatic, preceded and precipitated by action. How- ever carefully, even painfully, executed, his works create the illusion that the author leaped before he looked. In his stories, Kleist plunged straight into the action, skillfully regulating its speed, but rarely stop- ping to moralize, analyze or reflect. This is the opening of one of them: In M., an important town in Northern Italy, the widowed Mar- chioness of O., a lady of excellent reputation and the mother of several well-bred children, announced in the newspaper that for reasons un- known to her she found herself in an interesting condition, that the father of the child she was about to bear should present himself and that, out of considerations for her family, she was resolved to marry him. The long sentence, with its wealth of subsidiary clauses, is typi- cal of Kleist's narrative style, designed to convey as much detailed information as possible without interrupting the flow of action. For the same reason he preferred reported speech, which can be packed into similar sentences. In this way the reader is swept on from shock to shock, with no time to formulate his objections. The dramas demand a little more exposition; but Kleist reduces it to a minimum by avoiding explanatory soliloquies—still the rule in his time—and by an extraordinary capacity for reproducing the very processes of thought in his dialogue. We do not need to be told about Homburg's state of mind; as soon as he appears, his manner conveys the precise state of almost trance-like distraction which Kleist wished to convey. Both his plays and stories are singularly lacking in passages of 'poetic' abandonment; in the plays there is a single dominant tension, never relaxed by irrelevant emotions, in the stories === Page 91 === HEINRICH VON KLEIST 233 a single current of action, never broken by digression or comment. The lyrical moment does not matter; and Kleist's short poems are by far the weakest part of his work. Kleist belonged to no literary school. His personal contacts with his contemporaries, the Romantics, had little or no effect on his work, though he shared some of their extravagances and some of their ideals, notably nationalism. (And, from Goethe's point of view, Romanticism too was reactionary.) Kleist attributed the decline of European drama to the demands of women for moral and edifying themes, proposing that women should be excluded from theaters as in ancient Greece or confined to theaters of their own. It is true that Kleist was at his worst when he consciously compromised with the taste of his public, as in the case of Käthchen; but his own variety of heroism owes much more to his age and country than he was aware. While it was easier for him than for his humanistic predeces- sors, Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, to arouse the tragic emotions, he was at least as far as they were from renewing the religious and cul- tural function of Greek tragedy. His distinction is that he treated bar- barous subjects with a hard precision which is that of the scientific intellect, disciplined to record phenomena with a steady hand, a cold eye; yet the experiments he recorded were those of passion itself, of passion endured in a social and metaphysical void. His excellence as an artist is unmistakably modern in character: perfect control of the means to an uncontrollable end. === Page 92 === Isaac Babel DI GRASSO A Tale of Odessa I was fourteen, and of the undauntable fellowship of dealers in theater tickets. My boss was a tricky customer with a per- manently screwed-up eye and enormous silky handlebars; Nick Schwarz was his name. I came under his sway in that unhappy year when the Italian Opera flopped in Odessa. Taking a lead from the critics on the local paper, our impresario decided not to import An- selmi and Tito-Ruffo as guest artistes but to make do with a good stock company. For this he was sorely punished; he went bankrupt, and we with him. We were promised Chaliapin to straighten out our affairs, but Chaliapin wanted three thousand a performance; so in- stead we had the Sicilian tragedian Di Grasso with his troupe. They arrived at the hotel in peasant carts crammed with children, cats, cages in which Italian birds hopped and skipped. Casting an eye over this gypsy crew, Nick Schwarz opined: “Children, this stuff won’t sell.” When he had settled in, the tragedian made his way to the mar- ket with a bag. In the evening he arrived at the theater with another bag. Hardly fifty people had turned up. We tried selling tickets at half price, but there were no takers. That evening they staged a Sicilian folk-drama, a tale as com- monplace as the change from night to day and vice versa. The daughter of a rich peasant pledges her troth to a shepherd. She is faithful to him till one day there drives out from the city a young slicker in a velvet waistcoat. Passing the time of day with the new arrival, the maiden giggled in all the wrong places and fell silent * This story, which has never before been translated into English, will appear in The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, to be published this year by Criterion Books. === Page 93 === DI GRASSO 235 when she shouldn't have. As he listened to them, the shepherd twisted his head this way and that like a startled bird; during the whole of the first act he kept flattening himself against walls, dashing off somewhere, his pants flapping, and on his return gazing wildly about. “This stuff stinks,” said Nick Schwarz in the intermission. “Only place it might go down is some dump like Kremenchug." The intermission was designed to give the maiden time to grow ripe for betrayal. In the second act we just couldn't recognize her: she behaved insultingly, her thoughts were clearly elsewhere, and she lost no time in handing the shepherd back his ring. Thereupon he led her over to a poverty-stricken but brightly painted image of the Holy Virgin, and said in his Sicilian patois: "Signora" (in a low voice, turning away), "the Holy Virgin desires you to give me a hearing. To Giovanni, the fellow from the city, the Holy Virgin will grant as many women as he can cope with; but I need none save you. The Virgin Mary, our stainless intercessor, will tell you exactly the same thing if you ask Her." The maiden stood with her back to the painted wooden image; as she listened she kept impatiently tapping her foot. In the third act Giovanni, the city slicker, met his fate. He was having a shave at the village barber's, his powerful male legs thrust out all over the front of the stage; beneath the Sicilian sun the pleats in his waistcoat gleamed. The scene represented a village fair. In a far corner stood the shepherd; silent he stood there amidst the care- free crowd. First he hung his head; then he raised it, and beneath the weight of his attentive and burning gaze Giovanni started stirring and fidgeting in his barber chair, till pushing the barber aside he leaped to his feet. In a voice shaking with passion he demanded that the policeman should remove from the village square all persons of a gloomy and suspicious aspect. The shepherd—the part was played by Di Grasso himself—stood there lost in thought; then he gave a smile, soared into the air, sailed across the stage, plunged down on Giovanni's shoulders and having bitten through the latter's throat began, growling and squinting, to suck blood from the wound. Gio- vanni collapsed, and the curtain, falling noiselessly and full of menace, hid from us killed and killer. Waiting for no more, we dashed to the box-office in Theater Lane, which was to open next day, Nick Schwarz beating the rest by a short neck. Came the dawn, and with === Page 94 === 236 PARTISAN REVIEW it the Odessa News informed the few people who had been at the theater that they had seen the most remarkable actor of the century. On this visit Di Grasso played King Lear, Othello, Civil Death, Turgenev's The Parasite, confirming with every word and every ges- ture that there is more justice in outbursts of noble passion than in all the joyless rules that run the world. Tickets for these shows were snapped up at five time face value. Scouting round for ticket-brokers, would-be purchasers found them at the inn, yelling their heads off, purple, vomiting a harmless sacrilege. A pink and dusty sultriness was injected into Theater Lane. Shopkeepers in felt slippers bore green bottles of wine and barrels of olives out onto the pavement. In tubs outside the shops macaroni seethed in foaming water, and the steam from it melted in the distant skies. Old women in men's boots dealt in seashells and souvenirs, pur- suing hesitant purchasers with loud cries. Moneyed Jews with beards parted down the middle and combed to either side would drive up to the Northern Hotel and tap discreetly on the doors of fat women with raven hair and little mustaches, Di Grasso's actresses. All were happy in Theater Lane; all, that is, save for one person. I was that person. In those days catastrophe was approaching me; at any mo- ment my father might miss the watch I had taken without his per- mission and pawned to Nick Schwarz. Having had the gold turnip long enough to get used to it, and being a man who replaced tea as his morning drink by Bessarabian wine, Nick Schwarz, even with his money back, could still not bring himself to return the watch to me. Such was his character. And my father's character differed in no wise from his. Hemmed in by these two characters, I sorrowfully watched other people enjoying themselves. Nothing remained for me but to run away to Constantinople. I had made all the arrangements with the second engineer of the S.S. Duke of Kent; but before em- barking on the deep I decided to say good-by to Di Grasso. For the last time he was playing the shepherd who is swung aloft by an in- comprehensible power. In the audience were all the Italian colony, with the bald but shapely consul at their head; there were fidgety Greeks and bearded students with their gaze fastened fanatically upon some point invisible to all other mortals; there was the long- armed Utochkin. Nick Schwarz had even brought his Mrs., in a === Page 95 === DI GRASSO 237 violet shawl with a fringe; a woman with all the makings of a grenadier she was, a figure stretching right out to the steppes, and with a sleepy little crumpled face at the far end. When the curtain fell this face was drenched in tears. "Now you see what love means," she said to Nick as they were leaving the theater. Stomping ponderously, Madame Schwarz moved along Langeron Street; tears rolled from her fishlike eyes, and the shawl with the fringe shuddered on her obese shoulders. Dragging her mannish soles, rocking her head, she reckoned up, in a voice that made the street re-echo, the women who got on well with their husbands. " 'Ducky' they're called by their husbands; 'sweetiepie' they're called..." The cowed Nick walked along by his wife, quietly blowing on his silky mustaches. From force of habit I followed on behind, sob- bing. During a momentary pause Madame Schwarz heard my sobs and turned round. "See here," she said to her husband, her fish-eyes agoggle, "may I not die a beautiful death if you don't give the lad his watch back!" Nick froze, mouth agape; then came to and, giving me a vicious pinch, thrust the watch at me sideways. "What can I expect of him," the coarse and tear-muffled voice of Madame Schwarz wailed disconsolately as it moved off into the distance; "what can I expect but beastliness today and beastliness to- morrow? I ask you, how long is a woman supposed to put up with it?" They reached the corner and turned into Pushkin Street. I stood there clutching the watch, alone; and suddenly, with a distinctness such as I had never before experienced, I saw the columns of the Municipal Building soaring up into the heights, the gas-lit foliage of the boulevard, Pushkin's bronze head touched by the dim gleam of the moon; saw for the first time the things surrounding me as they really were: frozen in silence and ineffably beautiful. (Translated from the Russian by Walter Morison) === Page 96 === THE OPPENHEIMER CASE: AN EXCHANGE THROUGH THE LIBERAL LOOKING GLASS-DARKLY Recently we have had two reports by liberal critics on the Oppenheimer case: one by Joseph and Stewart Alsop in Harper's Mag- azine (October 1954), the other by Diana Trilling in Partisan Review (November-December 1954).1 Both reports agree that Oppenheimer got a bad deal, and that the deal he got involves two separate issues: (1) the military-political struggle over the H-bomb; (2) the personal charges against Dr. Oppenheimer. Yet both reports differ sharply as regards the meaning they assign to these issues; and this difference leads to surprising and disturbing consequences in these reports which are pre- sumably written from the same critical perspective of the liberal tradi- tion. The Alsop brothers take a firm and unequivocal line. They con- sider the personal charges a decoy hiding the real issue; and they set out, first, to prove this point. "In the Oppenheimer case layer after layer of false appearances, of chaff dressed up to look like corn, of petty matters artificially inflated must be painstakingly got rid of be- fore what is really serious can be reached." The second and concluding part of their essay then deals with these serious matters and their im- plications for the American scene of today: with the conduct of the AEC and Admiral Strauss, with the responsibility of the government, with the operations of the security system, with fair evidence and fair trial, with the problem of loyalty in our age, and the threat to freedom. Having drawn these lines clearly they can also make perfectly clear what is the political and moral platform from which they are writing. They can invoke the shades of Zola: "We Accuse!" They can appro- priate his plea on behalf of Dreyfus-"still the symbol of one of our 1 For summary comments on several other articles by liberal critics, see the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. X, no. 10 (December 1954), pp. 387- 88. For the purpose of this comparison, I have chosen the article by the Alsop brothers, not because I think theirs is the most definitive analysis, but because it provides the most striking contrast to the review appearing in PR. (The Alsops have now brought out an expanded version of their original article in book form: Joseph and Stewart Alsop, We Accuse, Simon & Schuster, 1954.) === Page 97 === THE OPPENHEIMER CASE 239 era's rare triumphs of the liberal spirit over organized injustice." And in the name of this liberal spirit they can condemn the action against Dr. Oppenheimer as a "shocking miscarriage of justice," which "dis- honored and disgraced the high traditions of American freedom." Now emotive language like this may be overly dramatic and not fitting for the pages of PR. But this is as little to the point as the question of whether the Alsop brothers are right or wrong. What I wish to show is how differently the critic in PR proceeds in her pre- sentation of the case, and what are the conse- quences. Mrs. Trilling sets out, first, to discuss Oppenheimer's opposition to the H-bomb and then deals, in the longer, concluding part of her article, with the personal charges. In other words, she accepts (while the Alsop brothers reverse) the official order of separating the thought-crime from the personal charges. She does say that they are "intimately connected"; and at one point she admits that Oppenheimer "was reinvestigated because he rep- resented a way of thinking and even of being which was antipathetic to a dominant faction and because the political climate of our times had prepared an appropriate ground for his defeat." But if Mrs. Trill- ing thinks the political climate of our times is relevant to this case, or why it is, she has nothing more to say about it in the entire article. She has nothing more to say about what it means that this political climate provided an appropriate ground for Oppenheimer's defeat. She does not assign any significance to these contemporary problems looming in the background. She does say that the final AEC report by Admiral Strauss "evaded the very issue" of Oppenheimer's opposition to the H-bomb; but she does not say what this evasion means. In other words, she herself evades any issue which might possibly be of current interest. As far as her analysis is concerned, it is as if we were not dealing with any contemporary problem at all. Thus her only comments on the report by the Gray Board are that "public reaction . . . was intensely unfavorable" and that "liberal senti- ment was outraged," because a man seemed to be condemned for his opinions. Was he? Mrs. Trilling does not, or will not, say. Was liberal sentiment justifiably outraged by what looked like punishment for a thought-crime? Or does Mrs. Trilling's phrasing imply that she really believes liberal sentiment, once again, indulged in liberal sentimentality? The Alsop brothers print excerpts from this re- penheimer's "loyalty," "high degree of discretion" and the public debt owed to him for "loyal and magnificent service." The Board then de- clared Dr. Oppenheimer a security risk; and the Alsop brothers ask the naive question, what standards of security and justice were employed === Page 98 === 240 PARTISAN REVIEW in this ruling. Mrs. Trilling does not ask any questions. To say that a man deserves the thanks of the fatherland and to humiliate him in the same breath-is that absurd or not? Mrs. Trilling does not, or will not, say. Again, it is the Alsop brothers who cite the striking comment by the physicist Leo Szilard (not a friend of Oppenheimer's): "Unfor- tunately for all of us, [Gray and Morgan] are as good men as they come, and if they are affected by the general insanity which is more and more creeping up on us, who can be counted on to be immune?" Who indeed? This is the first criticism to be made of Mrs. Trilling's analysis: that she evades or avoids any reference to anything that might possibly have any meaning for the liberal culture of our times. The second criticism, I think, is more serious: to wit, insofar as she discovers any significance in the case, this refers exclusively to the personal charges, which formed the basis of the verdict by Admiral Strauss, and in such a way as to implicate the liberal tradition itself in these charges. In other words, this meaning does not reflect, in any way, upon the prose- cution and what it stands for in the social and political climate of to- day, but only upon the record of liberal thought and action in the re- cent past. Now I submit that, regardless of whether the Alsop brothers are right or wrong, this is a remarkable reading of the case by a liberal critic. It is instructive to see how this peculiar meaning is imputed to the case by Mrs. Trilling's treatment of the personal charges. The crucial test is the incident involving Oppenheimer and Chevalier in 1943.2 It will be recalled that, in this incident, Oppenheimer stands as a self- admitted liar. He did turn down a suggestion made to him by Chevalier to transmit scientific information to the Soviet Union saying "this sounds very wrong to me." And he did, on his own initiative, notify the security officer at Berkeley about Chevalier's contact—a Communist union official named Elten ton. So far, so good. But he did not name Chevalier himself, a close personal friend of the Oppenheimers. And to conceal the identity of Chevalier, he told a series of lies. And that, of course, looks bad. It must be added, however, that he was in this state of sin for a short time only, because he made a full confession within a few months. Nevertheless, this incident needs to be explained, because it is the 2 There are four personal charges referring to the year 1943. But since this is not another review of the case as a whole, I only mention the Chevalier incident. The transcript, incidentally, makes perfectly clear that this was the crucial test of Oppenheimer's character. === Page 99 === THE OPPENHEIMER CASE 241 basis for the final verdict against Oppenheimer. And to this task both liberal critics addressed themselves—but with such fundamental differ- ence that the unsophisticated reader must feel bewildered at the spec- tacle of these two species of liberal criticism. Both critics adopt the same (and legitimate) method: first, they provide some background material which they believe is relevant, though not part of the official transcript; next, they inquire into Dr. Oppenheimer's motives for be- having as he did. Nothing provides a better clue to the different readings of the case than the choice of the background material. The Alsop brothers recall the personal pressure upon Dr. Oppenheimer. In 1943, the pro- ject at Los Alamos was still in its initial, most hectic stages. More im- portantly, they invite us to consider the political climate of 1943. They cite Time Magazine, which "was then criticizing the choice of Charles E. Bohlen to accompany Cordell Hull on a mission to Moscow on the ground that Bohlen was full of stuffy prejudices against the noble Rus- sians." In short, they try to remind us that solid and respectable conser- vative forces, in this country and abroad, showed an overwhelmingly favorable attitude toward the USSR during the war. Mrs. Trilling's background material looks quite different. She in- vites us to consider "the liberal culture of the time." Her point—and only point—is to cite "the dominant liberal sentiment from the White House down" as relevant material for explaining Oppenheimer's be- havior. The implication is that, since this liberal culture consisted in a flirtation with Communism and the Soviet Union, why should Dr. Oppenheimer not have thought he was doing right by his Communist associates when he protected them against security investigations? Mrs. Trilling uses much stronger language: "Our current acute relations with Russia . . . would very likely never have reached their present point of crisis had not so much of the energy of liberalism been directed, in the very period in which Dr. Oppenheimer failed to report Chevalier, to persuading the American people that Russia was our great ally in- stead of the enemy of democracy and peace . . ." That's going pretty far in distributing causal and moral responsibility. But does it make sense? Of course not. It is a terrible simplification of history. It is ab- surd to blame, in causal or moral terms, American liberal thought in the '40s for our "current acute relations with Russia." It is even more absurd to suggest that, in 1943, "the dominant liberal sentiment from the White House down" should have exposed Russia as the enemy of democracy and peace. It would have been political suicide to do so. I have news for Mrs. Trilling: we had other enemies then. And if === Page 100 === 242 PARTISAN REVIEW Churchill (not to mention Eisenhower and De Gaulle)—if Churchill writing in the '50's can hail the “Grand Alliance" as a triumph of diplomacy and as an indispensable precondition for victory, and if he can afford to label the break-up of this wartime alliance a "tragedy" surely, some other factors beside fellow-traveling liberals were respon- sible for the dominant pro-Soviet attitudes during the war, and for the acute relations with the USSR since. How can one explain such a blackout of the simplest and most banal historical facts? How else— except by assuming that the vision of this species of liberalism is blurred and blinded by an excess of “self-criticism”? This compulsive urge for self-incrimination leads to dubious criti- cal practices. Out of the almost 1,000 pages of the transcript, Mrs. Trilling cites one section from the testimony of Colonel Lansdale, a conservative Cleveland lawyer, then security officer at Los Alamos. The Colonel tells about the difficulties he encountered in highest gov- ernment quarters because he "dared to stop the commissioning of a group of 15 or 20 undoubted Communists," about the vilification and frustrations he suffered because of the "blind, naive attitude of Mrs. Roosevelt and those around her in the White House." Now this is just what Mrs. Trilling wants us to know; for she continues: "Indeed, be- tween the lines of the record one reads the strained embarrassment of all of Colonel Lansdale's listeners as they have such a bitter dose of historical truth forced upon them." Does one, indeed? One does not read anything of the kind if one reads the transcript and not Mrs. Tril- ling's expurgated edition of it. For if one reads the record, he discovers that the Colonel is citing Mrs. Roosevelt—and General McNary (pre- sumably not a blind, naive liberal he!)-in order to make an altogether different point. He is not really concerned with the political climate of 1943, but he is protesting against the political atmosphere of today. The section cited by Mrs. Trilling occurs in the following context: MR. ROBB: Do you have any predisposition of feeling that you want to defend Dr. Oppenheimer here? . . . . COL. LAnSDALE: I do feel strongly at least to the extent of my knowl- edge that he is loyal. I am extremely concerned by the current hysteria of the times of which this seems to be a manifestation. MR. ROBB: You think this inquiry is a manifestation of hysteria? COL. LAnSDALE: I think . . . . MR. ROBB: Yes or no? COL. LAnSDALE: I won't answer that question "yes" or "no" . . . I think that the hysteria of the times over Communism is extremely dan- gerous. I can only illustrate it by another dangerous attitude which was going on in 1943 when we were worrying about Dr. Oppenheimer's loyalty . . . . === Page 101 === THE OPPENHEIMER CASE 243 Here follows the section quoted by Mrs Trilling. It is lifted out of context because she cuts out this prelude and she again deletes, by a few dots, the conclusion in which the Colonel repeats his warning against present dangers. Why this careful job of editing the evidence? Why this suppression of relevant testimony throwing an entirely different light upon the issue at stake? Does the liberal critic find the Colonel's main point embarrassing and/or irrelevant? For if there is any "strained embarrassment" among his listeners, it refers to the Colonel's outburst against the present hysteria (for which he is duly rebuked by Messrs. Robb and Gray), not to his revelations about 1943 which do not seem to come as a surprise to anybody. What a monstrous and absurd shift in the scale of values: the conservative lawyer raises the issue of free- dom in the current political climate and the liberal intellectual exer- cising her critical conscience suppresses this very issue to achieve the effect of blackening the liberal record of the past. Surely, this is one way of reducing liberalism to absurdity. So much for the background. Mrs. Trilling uses the same method, with the same result of damning the liberal tradition, for an explana- tion of Oppenheimer's motives. The Alsop brothers accept the official version that Oppenheimer lied in the Chevalier incident in order to protect a close personal friend (and possibly his wife and brother). They accept this version, not only because Oppenheimer says so, but because no other motive is suggested by anybody throughout the pro- longed proceedings. And some of the people who testified presumably have known Oppenheimer as well as anybody has outside the circle of his own family. Now this theory of motivation may be true or false. I don't know. What I do know is that Mrs. Trilling's analysis of motives proceeds on such flimsy evidence and is so far-fetched and wildly speculative that it is certainly misleading and that its cumulative effect is only to implicate the liberal tradition still more deeply in guilty involvement with the Communist movement. She constructs a theory of motivation on the basis of one hypothesis: Oppenheimer's behavior in the four charges relating to 1943 can be explained, if we assume that he was still much more strongly committed to "the movement" than he realized himself, then or now. Mrs. Trilling does say that "obviously Oppenheimer would have wanted to protect his friend and himself," but that it does not follow that this "was his only or even major concern." Correct! Only Mrs. Trilling does not mean what she says; for the next sentence takes back what she has just conceded: "It is my opinion that it was not loyalty to a friend === Page 102 === 244 PARTISAN REVIEW which Dr. Oppenheimer put above loyalty to his country, but loyalty to that amorphous but compelling entity called 'the movement." Now her position is quite different. Whereas the critical scales looked fairly evenly balanced in the first statement, they are completely upset and unbalanced in the following sentence. And if Mrs. Trilling still thinks that the personal factors carry some (or any) weight with her, she never says so again. Her analysis of the personal charges proceeds en- tirely on the basis of imputing to Dr. Oppenheimer certain inarticulate, secret, or unconscious sympathies with the Communist movement. Mrs. Trilling takes the same line in her criticism of Oppenheimer's defense. He and his lawyers failed to make clear that his inaccuracies and lies can be explained if we admit that "sympathy . . . with both the Communist movement and the Soviet Union remained with him far longer than he now realizes." And the defense should have brought this out into the open as an instance of the general commitment to Com- munism and the Soviet Union on the part of the liberal culture of the age. Instead, Oppenheimer's lawyers (old-fashioned civil liberties fuddy- duddies) conducted what Mrs. Trilling calls a "typical liberal-progres- sive defense." By this she means that they were unwilling to disclose the full (and presumably damning) record "of the evolving relationship, over the last two decades, between the typical liberalism of our time and the Soviet Union." To put it in simpler language, Oppenheimer should have said: "Look, it was much worse than I thought it was; I was much more deeply and guiltily committed than I thought I was; still I deserve to be cleared and forgiven because, you see, the whole liberal culture of which I was a part was so much worse than anybody knew it was." You think this is a peculiar line for a liberal critic; you wonder why? Surprisingly enough because Mrs. Trilling thinks it would have strength- ened-rather than weakened-the defense. "If Dr. Oppenheimer and his lawyers had fully comprehended these historical facts, the outcome of his hearings, at least so far as the hearings of the Gray Board are concerned, might have been very different." The criticism expresses so- licitude. Unfortunately, it is a solicitude that rests on a serious non sequitur. The findings of the Gray Board were not concerned with Oppenheimer's political involvements in 1943 or before. These were not "controlling." Instead, the Gray Board was concerned with Oppen- heimer's "continuing conduct and associations" (for which the evidence is so feeble as to be practically non-existent) and with his opposition to the H-bomb. The Gray Board did complain about a lack of candor on the part of Dr. Oppenheimer; but this complaint, again, referred, === Page 103 === THE OPPENHEIMER CASE 245 not to his politics in 1943, but to his exposition of his attitude toward the H-bomb. The Gray Board, in fact, went out of its way to make a sympathetic reconstruction of the political atmosphere in 1943. Thus, who would have profited from this line? Who would have profited from the admission that Dr. Oppenheimer, in 1943, was still more deeply involved in Communism than he thought he was and that he lied, not out of loyalty to a friend-Mrs. Trilling says in the most revealing clause: "this would not have been so important to him?"- but out of loyalty to "the movement"? Obviously, the people who, un- like Messrs. Gray and Morgan, convicted him on these personal charges. Mr. Robb, prosecutor and counsel for Fulton Lewis, Jr., would have had a field day with these admissions. And Admiral Strauss would not have failed to bite at such attractive bait. What more could they ask for but this support by an eminent liberal critic? And does it really make sense to assume, as Mrs. Trilling does, that the prosecution needed further enlightenment on Oppenheimer or on the degree of liberal culpability during this period? It must be re- membered that Oppenheimer submitted to constant, searching investi- gations, that he was kept under continuous and close surveillance by special agents, and that the prosecution had at its disposal the complete FBI file. The files must be bulging with material not known even to Mrs. Trilling. No, if Mr. Robb knows what Fulton Lewis, Jr., knows about the Roosevelt era, there is little that the defense (or Mrs. Trilling) could have told him, and if the prosecution did not have anything else on the defendant than what he freely admitted, there is at least a strong presumption that there was no more. But this presumption is not enough for Mrs. Trilling. There "must have been" more, as she keeps repeating. And she discovers what she is looking for by a psychological analysis in depth. It is depth psychol- ogy which discloses the "slow stages" by which a radicalized intellectual- ism which explains why Oppenheimer could think he was loyal to a friend when, in fact or in "theory," he was loyal to the movement. It is difficult to come to grips with this psychological hypothesis. In the first place, I have no personal experience of this weaning pro- cess. In the second place the hypothesis is so stated as to be practically unassailable. The alleged Communist sympathies in 1943 are hedged by equivocal phrases like: "however ambiguous or however uncon- scious," or, "in whatever attenuated form." With such semantic protec- tion, the critic can't go wrong; for "in whatever attenuated form" ob- viously goes all the way. There is always that doubt. A more thorough === Page 104 === 246 PARTISAN REVIEW chemical analysis may always reveal further impurities in the well. And if this kind of chemistry is applied to our unconscious motivation—and what does the critic know about Oppenheimer's "unconscious?"- where do we begin and where do we end? It is a bottomless pit in all our lives; and something can always be dredged up, if we dig long enough, which throws a different and less favorable light upon our actions than we thought they had. The procedure, therefore, is quite safe; but is it relevant? Does it still say anything? Does it openly say: Oppenheimer still had Communist sympathies when he said he didn't. No, because it only says that he had them unconsciously. Does it say: he did not have these sympathies? No, because he may still have them unconsciously to the nth degree of dilution. The method is so safe as to be meaningless. Unfortunately, the same method is used in order to catch the whole liberal tradition in guilty involvement with "the movement." After Mrs. Trilling has put forth her thesis that it was not loyalty to a friend, but loyalty to the Communist movement which motivated Op- penheimer in the Chevalier incident, she qualifies this statement-and confuses the whole issue-by identifying the Communist movement with something that looks like it, but is quite different: namely, "the radical spirit," or "the good part of his (Oppenheimer's) past which first brought him to Communism," or the "idealistic aspect of his for- mer radicalism." Now loyalty to the Communist movement is one thing; loyalty to the good part of one's past is something else again. To the unsophisticated reader, the former sounds incriminating; the latter, praiseworthy. But Mrs. Trilling's presentation moves blithely from one concept to the other as if they were one and the same. Are they? Do we, as liberals, no longer distinguish between loyalty to the movement and loyalty to one's idealistic self? And if we do, why this equivocation; worse: why having made this false identification, does the critic only refer to Communism and the Soviet Union for the rest of her article? Is it perhaps because the "idealistic aspect" of Oppenheimer's self- and by implication the whole idealistic component of liberalism-is to be subtly tainted by this equivocation with the Communist movement? The Alsop brothers must be naive not to have seen these implica- tions. They must be naive in thinking that anything of current interest is at stake. They must be naive in protesting against organized injustice or pleading for a defense of freedom. That's for the readers of Harper's. For PR readers, the conclusions are quite different: We are told, first, that the case must have been quite an experience and education for Dr. Oppenheimer. By all means, let's have more experience and edu- === Page 105 === THE OPPENHEIMER CASE 247 cation for everybody. Next, we are told that, if Dr. Oppenheimer was not a security risk in the past, he is obviously less so now. To have taken the clearance away from him now seems to Mrs. Trilling “at best to be tragic ineptitude.” And at worst? Why not say so? Yet even this mild concession to the present meaning of the case is immediately with- drawn in the following sentence, the last of the long article, in which Mrs. Trilling sums up her findings in the truly remarkable words: “In effect, it [the verdict] constitutes a projection upon Dr. Oppenheimer of the punishment we perhaps owe to ourselves for having once been so careless with our nation's security.” Once more depth psychology is invoked to shift the scene from the present to the past. It wasn't Ad- miral Strauss that did him in, after all; it was all of us. Oppenheimer wasn't a victim of a struggle over power and strategy; he was a victim of our own guilt feelings. We made him a scapegoat. Who is we? Everybody? The liberals? Mrs. Trilling doesn't say; but it isn't hard to guess from the general tenor of her article. Once more depth psychology is invoked to give the whole case a fatal twist and distortion: to transfer (if I may use a psychological term) the causal, political, and moral responsibility for this case from the present enemies of freedom to the collective consciousness of the liberal movement. Surely, there is some- thing wrong with this species of the liberal conscience and imagination. In a postscript Mrs. Trilling adds that she may have done "poor justice to the case in all its complexity of context and implication.” But the question is not that she has made her own selection: any critic would have had to do so to deal with the enormous mass of material. Nor is the question whether Oppenheimer is a “culture hero," as she puts it, or not. I have other culture heroes. Dr. Oppenheimer is obviously a man of great complexity and great eminence, who has rendered out- standing service to his government and the security of this country. For this service, one administration, in 1946, awarded him the Medal of Merit; in 1954, another administration purged him from its ranks either because he was guilty of a thought-crime or because, under our security and loyalty system, a man is never “cleared," the trial, as in Kafka, is always pending, is only postponed, but never settled in favor of the defendant. But these remarks are beside the point. I did not take issue with Mrs. Trilling's article because her reading of the Oppenheimer case differs from that of the Alsop brothers or my own. I took issue with it because it represents a species of liberal criticism which leads to the following odd and perverse conclusions: The case has no significance for any contemporary issue, whether political, ideological, or moral. The === Page 106 === 248 PARTISAN REVIEW “political climate of our times” is taken for granted requiring no anal- ysis and no protest. Instead, the case is treated, by various highly du- bious critical devices, as if its only significance lay in the mistakes com- mitted by the “liberal culture” of the ’30s and ’40s. Now it may be naive to think that there is a grand liberal tradition (including Zola) whose function was to raise its voice against organized injustice. But liberalism is surely reduced to absurdity if any attack upon the liberal tradition only finds an advocate sustaining and deepening it within the ranks of liberal critics. That is unworthy and undignified. It is also false; for it is based upon a historical reconstruction of our age—the so-called background material and theory of motivation in Mrs. Trill- ing’s article—which is completely one-sided, unbalanced, and distorted. It is impossible here to defend this claim; but perhaps it is high time for some competent student of our society (without guilt feelings) to redress the historical balance in order to do justice, if not to Dr. Oppen- heimer, at least to the liberal record and cause. Hans Meyerhoff A REJOINDER TO MR. MEYERHOFF I think I must rely upon PR readers’ memory of my article, and upon Mr. Meyerhoff’s style in controversy, to answer many of the imputations of his letter. Only by reprinting my article in its entirety could I put back into coherent sequence my argument which Mr. Meyerhoff shuffles around with such polemical fervor or refute his statement that I treated Dr. Oppenheimer’s case as if its sole signifi- cance lay in the mistakes committed by the liberal culture of the ’30s and ’40s. But it is of course the fact that I gave any credence or space at all to Dr. Oppenheimer’s Communist past or to the culture which supported it that bothers Mr. Meyerhoff. It is Mr. Meyerhoff’s opinion that were I faithful to the liberal cause and tradition, I should have used the Oppenheimer case only as an occasion for attack upon our present-day political culture. This, as I read it, is the central matter of his communication and what I shall address myself to very briefly. Since Mr. Meyerhoff introduces the Alsops as the ideal of liberalism of which I fall so far short, I too shall cite them. I do not believe that either Dr. Oppenheimer or liberalism is served by the way in which the Alsops treat Dr. Oppenheimer’s Communist history. I consider it disrespectful to Dr. Oppenheimer as an individual and disastrous to his defense to skip over his period of close Communist connection as === Page 107 === THE OPPENHEIMER CASE 249 if it had about the moral, political and intellectual significance of his excursion into Sanskrit. What is even more important, I consider it an evasion of truth, and I regard such evasions of truth as incompatible with liberalism. Will Mr. Meyerhoff recall that Dr Oppenheimer's period of Communist sympathy survived the Russian purges and the Nazi pact and that his ties were sufficiently intimate for him to make substantial contributions to various radical causes directly through Communist Party representatives? Will Mr. Meyerhoff also recall that it was as late as January 1948 that Dr. Oppenheimer reported the revelation, which had come to him only in the previous year or year and a half, of the true nature of the Soviet Union? When we take into account that Dr. Oppenheimer was in charge of this country's most secret military operations, is his Communist history the negligible fact that the Alsops would make it out to be? I think that Dr. Oppenheimer has now broken with this past and that he is no longer a security risk. But whatever his present freedom from Communist involvement and however complex the situation which inspired his recent reinvestigation-and I tried in my article to show that the case involves a myriad professional and personal entanglements as well as large moral-political considerations-surely Dr. Oppen- heimer's past and its surrounding culture are of the greatest possible relevance to our present understanding of the case. It should have been clear to Mr. Meyerhoff, but I emphasize it here again, that I do not examine this past in order to ask punishment for it. It is my opinion that Dr. Oppenheimer should not now be punished for his past. I nevertheless adduce this past because it is to this past that the final specific charges against him have reference. Had Dr. Oppen- heimer not once been sympathetic to Communism, there would have been no Oppenheimer case. How, then, can one understand the Oppen- heimer case without understanding as fully as possible the nature and extent of this sympathy and its source in its contemporary culture? Several of the charges on which clearance was denied Dr. Oppenheimer rest upon discrepancies in his testimony which have never been re- solved. In my article I undertook-successfully or unsuccessfully it is for others to judge-to explain these discrepancies in terms of Dr. Oppenheimer's evolving relation with the Communist Party. This rela- tion is a fact in Dr. Oppenheimer's personal history, not an artifact of my creation. To blink this fact, as Mr. Meyerhoff would have me do, would be not merely to blink reality but to leave these charges totally unanswered. It would also mean leaving the historical truth for the reactionary forces in our society to deal with for their own purposes, === Page 108 === 250 PARTISAN REVIEW which include the wish to punish Dr. Oppenheimer for his past mis- takes and the wish to discredit liberalism. But I do not have to turn to the Alsops to find my readiest example of an evasion of truth for the sake of expediency; or for the sake of liberalism, as Mr. Meyerhoff would call it. Mr. Meyerhoff provides a striking instance in his own communication, in his summary of the Chevalier-Elten ton incident. This pressing matter is simply not as Mr. Meyerhoff reports it. I do not believe that either Dr. Oppenheimer or liberalism is served by the inaccuracy in which Mr. Meyerhoff indulges in his eagerness to give Dr. Oppenheimer a real liberal defense as op- posed to my illicit brand. Dr. Oppenheimer did not merely suppress Chevalier's identity and name Elten ton. And when he finally revealed Chevalier's name, he did not confess to the lies he had told in protecting his friend. What he did do was suppress both Chevalier's part in the affair and his own. He named Elten ton but he told the security people that Elten ton's intermediary had approached three people and that the intermediary had spoken of microfilm and contact with the Soviet con- sulate. And even after he was forced to disclose Chevalier's identity, he never corrected the rest of his story, he never confessed to these lies, until the Gray Board hearings. This is the truth of this incident, and very inconvenient for those of us who come to Dr. Oppenheimer's de- fense. But I do not share Mr. Meyerhoff's political morality which ap- parently dictates that a defender of Dr. Oppenheimer, if she would qualify as a liberal, must hide such inconvenient truths. There is much I could wish to say on the general and very im- portant subject of truth and liberalism. I could wish to point out the large part which evasion of truth has played in the discrediting of lib- eralism as a vital cultural and political force in the modern world- and specifically the evasion of truth about Communism. I could wish to argue the political inexpediency—as demonstrated in the history of the last decades—of evading truth in the supposed interest of expediency. But such ventures must wait another occasion. But I do want to say just a word on Mr. Meyerhoff's charge that I betray the liberal respon- sibility by paying such small attention to the political climate of our own time. It would no doubt have been pious of me and have won Mr. Meyerhoff's pious approval if, instead of trying to reach a rational and uncompromised understanding of Dr. Oppenheimer's complex situation, I had treated the decision against Dr. Oppenheimer as a manifestation of McCarthyism. But the annoying fact is that while I share Mr. Meyer- hoff's opposition to McCarthyism and while I happen to think that it === Page 109 === THE OPPENHEIMER CASE 251 is entirely unlikely that, were it not for our present political temper, the matter of Dr. Oppenheimer's clearance would have again been raised at this time, I do not think the final decision against Dr. Oppen- heimer can easily be written off as a manifestation of McCarthyism. Indeed, to hold such a view seems to me to be a dangerous oversimplifi- cation. I suppose we can take it for granted that McCarthyism was pleased by the final decision not to grant clearance to Dr. Oppenheimer. But this does not mean that the case against Dr. Oppenheimer closed on nothing but an appeal to the base sentiments of the reactionary ele- ments in our society. On the contrary, such is the force of probity and decency which still persists in American life, and this despite the upsurge of a reactionary spirit and our properly alarmed response to it, that there is a most notable difference between the charges first formulated against Dr. Oppenheimer and the charges on which he was finally judged to be a security risk. The final charges, as I have said, point straight to the testimony—to the evidence against Dr. Oppenheimer, as such evidence applies to security regulations in the matter of character and associations. They do not point to the mere fact that Dr. Oppen- heimer was once a fellow-traveler and should therefore be punished. I do not myself believe that the judgment which was arrived at on the basis of this evidence against Dr. Oppenheimer was a correct one. But I do think it is important to keep it in mind, in these perilous days, that not all errors of judgment, or judgments which we consider erroneous, are a response to vicious political motive—Mr. Meyerhoff should be reminded that there are not a inconsiderable number of conscientious, thoughtful men and women, as firm in their opposition to McCarthyism as he is, who on the basis of the evidence agree with the Atomic Energy Commission that Dr. Oppenheimer does not meet the tests of a good security risk. Surely this opinion does not rule them out of the liberal camp. But perhaps Mr. Meyerhoff believes it does, for the line of his at- tack upon me—his representation of a monolithic liberal attitude which permits no divergence of approach or emphasis even in a case as com- plicated as Dr. Oppenheimer's—certainly seems to me to warrant the assumption that Mr. Meyerhoff is in the business of issuing passports to the good opinion of liberalism, according to his own definition of the nature and outcome of the intellectual process. It is a strange posi- tion to allow oneself to be carried to by the fervor of one's decencies, where one apes the custom of the enemy of liberalism in order to assert the liberal responsibility. Diana Trilling === Page 110 === THEATER CHRONICLE SHAW AT THE PHOENIX THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA, Bernard Shaw. Phoenix Theater. The Phoenix Theater production of The Doctor's Dilemma had a cast of veterans: Geraldine Fitzgerald, Shepperd Strudwick, Fred- eric Worlock, Roddy McDowall, Philip Bourneut. Mr. Worlock, the eldest of the group, was celebrating his fiftieth anniversary in the theater; Mr. McDowall, probably the youngest, has been acting since he was eight years old. On the average, this cast had twenty years' stage experience. They had been seen in Shaw and Shakespeare and Ibsen and Sophocles, in the movies and on television. They still represent, in a curious, petrified way, the younger element-the serious element- in the commercial theater. Their very names on a playbill are an an- nouncement of honorable intentions on the part of the producer. But the chief thing that struck me, watching them in The Doctor's Dilem- ma, was a sort of wonder: whatever made most of these people want to go on the stage? And what keeps them there, undiscouraged, year after year? One is tempted to think of a conspiracy, like the medical conspiracy described by Shaw in the play-a plot against the public, schemed up by quack actors, quack directors, quack critics. The old words of dispraise-ham, hack-will not do for these performers. "Amateur" is wrong, for they are paid for what they do, and they lack, moreover, the one quality that makes amateur performances attractive: a certain zeal for acting, even if misguided. Whatever else may be said about him, the amateur actor is always acting, with might and main. But these professionals are not only without talent, for the most part, but without the slightest desire to impersonate anyone or anything. They could not, one feels, get up a charade or play Santa Claus. If they wish to impersonate anything, it is to impersonate actors. Hence this produc- tion, which had no relation to miming, was at the same time intensely stagey. It made me think of the movie of Julius Caesar, where all the busts of Caesar used in the décor repeated in a mirrored infinity Louis Calhern's double chins. This is a play about doctors. There are six of them in the cast, each, as pinned down by Shaw, a collector's specimen of his type: fools, by === Page 111 === THEATER CHRONICLE 253 and large, or charlatans, each with his panacea or trademark, except for the old doctor, who has lost his belief in medicine. They illustrate the pathology of medicine, like so many blisters and carbuncles, for Shaw treats doctoring as a disease. Yet the actors playing these "doc- tors" felt, apparently, that they had done their duty when they put on a false mustache or whitened their hair with cornstarch and spoke in a gruff voice. There was not an attempt, even a feeble one, to suggest the actual practice of medicine or the habits and mannerisms of live doctors—the way they rub their hands, for instance, their bustle in entering a room, the style they have of listening, with the head slightly cocked. To study a real doctor or doctors would be repugnant to actors of this sort. They want to have nothing to do with real life. Once I talked with a "younger" actor who had just been cast in Detective Story. He was worried about his characterization. "Well," I said, "I suppose you can go around to the police station and spend a little time with the detectives there." He was horrified by the proposal. That, he cried, would be imitation. True acting, he explained, came from within yourself. He did not want to know how live detectives looked and dressed and walked. It might introduce an impure element. Assuming he was right, assuming that acting can be achieved by the armchair method, by sheer introspection, even here the veterans of The Doctor's Dilemma failed to put themselves the questions that any amateur would ask: how would I react, for instance, if someone gave me some drawings to look at and they turned out to be rather good? The way Shepperd Strudwick does it, playing the great Sir Colenso Ridgeon, is to take young Dubedat's drawings to a window and give a violent start, as if a horse had kicked him, but meaning merely, "This fellow has talent." When the other doctors, his colleagues, examine the artist's work in a later scene, they go through the same routine: picture held at arm's length, galvanic start, picture passed on, to next colleague, repeat. Sir Colenso has been established as an art-connoisseur, but what sort of doctors are these others supposed to be, to know art so well that they are electrified by a single glance at a drawing? No one asked this question; it was left for the audience to speculate about. Throughout the play, in fact, the burden of questioning was on the audience. What sort of man did Shepperd Strudwick imagine Sir Colenso to be? It was impossible even to guess. He played by fits and starts, seeking desperately for his laughs, alternately boyish and elderly, vacillating and decisive; he had evidently never taken a temperature, felt a pulse, or stood at a bedside. Yet he was supposed to be a great doctor. Or was he? The audience never knew. Among the lesser doctors, === Page 112 === 254 PARTISAN REVIEW the only one who was recognizable as a man was Frederic Worlock, as Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington. He played the ignorant old impostor as a thespian, which at least was close to Shaw's idea. Bright-cheeked Roddy McDowall, playing the artist, Dubedat, was right in his early scenes. He gave very well the feline, animal alertness that Dubedat's impudence needs to make his demands bearable. But he lost hold of the part in the death scene, where Dubedat delivers his artistic credo: "I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt. . . ." As this scene was played and directed, it was a sentimental apotheosis of the artist- figure. Mr. McDowall, spotlit, was rapt as he pronounced his exordium, as if he were about to be floated off on invisible wires to a stage heaven. But the point of this scene, as I understood it, should have been different. The religion of art was not sympathetic to Shaw. And Dube- dat is amusing himself, even on his deathbed. When he recites his artist's creed, he is mocking the moralists grouped around him; it is partly exal- tation and partly naughtiness and teasing. Dubedat is not the hero; there is no hero. The real daring of this play, in fact, is that no one is heroic and nothing is sentimentalized, not even death. Dubedat dies, so to speak, baldly and matter-of-factly, surrounded by his medical chorus. It is not an emotional moment. It carries a shock because of the lack of emo- tion. "Was that death?" inquires the artist's widow, almost curiously. Death is a sort of anti-climax, a disappointment. One is tempted to echo the widow. "Is that all?" "All this fuss about that?" Dubedat's funeral is promptly spoken by the quack who killed him: old Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, who mouths a pastiche of Shakespeare and keeps reiterating, "He died well." There is a good deal of irony in this, but no tragedy. And the death scene becomes pure comedy when the young widow appears, dressed in a white evening gown and flashing with jewelry, this being her interpretation of her husband's injunction not to mourn for him. Jennifer, the artist's widow, is a fool. She is the perennial wife of the Great Man-ardent, admiring, uncomprehending. She believes she understands her husband and sets her love for him, like a défi, against the whole world of philistines. But she does not understand her husband any more than the philistines do; she is taken in by him, so that she makes him into a noble, sentimental lie. This greed for punishment, this craving to admire, can satisfy itself only in one way: the wife must become the widow. Jennifer does not directly cause Dubedat's death, but she, as they say, asks for it, by her tenacity in pursuing the great Sir Colenso Ridgeon, whose medical powers she === Page 113 === THEATER CHRONICLE 255 believes in with the same hero-worship she gives her artist-husband. She thrusts herself in Sir Colenso's way, to get him to save Dubedat's life, at the expense of other lives, mere ordinary ones, which appear to Jennifer much less valuable. But she thus furnishes Ridgeon with a motive for killing her husband; Ridgeon has fallen in love with her, though she is too blind to see it. Sir Colenso does not do the deed himself; he behaves with professional correctness and turns the patient over to Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, who kills in all the innocent fervor of his medical quackery. But once Dubedat is dead, Jennifer really enters into her element. If there is an apotheosis in the play, it is that of Jennifer, in the final scene, in a red gown and furs and feathers, in the art gallery, where Dubedat's pictures are being shown and the memorial volume about him, "The Story of A King of Men. By his Wife," is stacked, ready for sale. She finally owns Dubedat, who was unfaithful to her in his lifetime; his pictures at last are making money; and she has a new husband. Her devotion to Dubedat has paid off; her hero has not disappointed her. The real fool, it appears, is the clever Sir Colenso, who is left empty-handed for his pains. He has killed Dubedat for nothing. Very little of this was hinted in the performance. Neither Geral- dine Fitzgerald nor the director appeared to realize that a type-the artist's wife-is being presented with a certain comic sharpness. In Miss Fitzgerald's performance, Jennifer's metamorphosis as the widow is bewildering. But for Shaw, though he is charmed by his heroine, the widow exists larvaily in the figure of the ardent wife. Sir Colenso per- ceives this; that is why he can kill her husband without remorse. He is doing her a good turn by removing Dubedat with all his shabby frailties from the scene and leaving only "a beautiful memory." Shaw calls this play a tragedy, which I take to be a jest. It is a very dry comedy, a little sour and chilling. The first act is a classical satire on the medical profession, which is seen to be composed of char- latans, naive quacks, or unbelievers. The conclusion appears to be ni- hilistic: nothing is known in medicine; fads succeed each other in eternal cycles; patients are cured by accident or by being given the wrong medicine, through the doctor's carelessness. Sir Colenso, with his new discovery for "buttering" the disease germs sounds as big a booby as his colleagues. Only the old doctor, Sir Patrick, who has re- tired from practice, dares to speak the truth, which is that they are all bunglers and murderers. The second act presents the doctor's dilemma. Sir Colenso's cure for tuberculosis is still in its early stages, so that he can take only a === Page 114 === 256 PARTISAN REVIEW limited number of patients. He has room for one more. Given two lives, Dubedat's and that of a colleague, Blenkinsop, a poor general practi- tioner, which should he save? Which is worth more to humanity, that of the gifted artist, who is also a bad man, dishonest, sponging, fickle, or that of the plain man, who is good, hard-working and selfless? If there is a choice of a world of good pictures and bad people or a world of bad pictures and good people, which would you elect? Shaw evades the question, as he so often does his own queries. He changes the subject. In fact, it would seem that he had changed it once already, for the premise of the second act is not the same as that of the first. If all doctors are bunglers, then a discussion between a doctor and his colleagues as to which life is to be saved becomes ludicrous, for they are incapable of saving any. Indeed, on the first act's premise, the life they chose to save would be the one they would lose and vice versa. But Shaw shrinks from his own logic. He believes in Sir Colenso's opsonin discovery. The preface leaves no doubt of this. It is an additional irony, which Shaw himself only half-foresaw at the time he was writing the preface (several years after the play), that opsonin was merely another medical fad, now remembered, if at all, because Shaw pinned his faith in it when he wrote The Doctor's Dilemma. Other fads succeeded it, and there is still no cure for tuberculosis—according to the latest bulletins, the antibiotics are only effecting a temporary cure. The old doctor, Sir Patrick, was right, when said he had known seven men with cures for tuberculosis and yet people still kept dying of it. But in any case, the ethical dilemma presented by the second act is brushed aside in the third. Sir Colenso decides, but not on the basis of which life is worth more to humanity. He chooses to save Blenkinsop because he has fallen in love with Dubedat's wife. Other things being equal, Blenkinsop, the citizen, balancing Dubedat, the artist, self-interest swings the scale. Dubedat is condemned to death, at the hands of Bloom- field Bonington. A new movement of the plot begins, in which Sir Colenso will get his come-uppance. This starts in the fourth act, where Sir Colenso's fall is complete, in the final scene in the art gallery, where he learns that Jennifer has remarried. Moreover, his character has de- teriorated. Being a murderer has made Sir Colenso something of a sar- donic humorist. He now stands outside the eminent physician and smiles bitterly on him, as a licensed murderer. He is a better doctor and a worse man than his colleagues, because he can kill or cure deliberately, while they do it through inadvertence. The doctor's dilemma appears in a revised form, as the patient's dilemma: which would you rather have === Page 115 === THEATER CHRONICLE 257 kill you, the doctor who does it on purpose or the one who does not know any better? Behind the wit of the play, in the Chinese box of the plot, there is a somewhat enigmatic conception of the destiny of the superior man. Dubedat and Ridgeon, the two supermen of the cast, combine between them most of the crimes and vices of humanity. The others, except for Sir Patrick, are only fools. Shaw's plays are said to be actor-proof, but this is not true. This performance demonstrated only that laughs will come from an audience, no matter what the actors do. The plays are mined with laughs, and the actors cannot help detonating them as they stumble through the text. But the audience, half the time at Shaw revivals, does not know why it is laughing; underneath its amusement, it is puzzled and wary. The quicksilver of Shaw's temperament makes his plays elusive and even dissatisfying, unless the director and the actors take a firm line with them, as they did last year with Misalliance. It was not altogether Mr. Strudwick's fault that the part of Sir Colenso appeared to be a cipher. How is the actor to reconcile the ingenuous enthusiast of the first act with the diabolical Paracelsus of the later ones? He will have to find a way to impose his own authority on the character, to make it behave. Shaw's characters are often refractory; they step out of themselves to make speeches, to make a dramatic reversal, or merely to make a joke. And Shaw himself keeps popping out of them, like a Jack-in-the-box. In this play, he is in Sir Patrick Cullen, in Schutzmacher, the Jewish doctor, in Ridgeon, and in Dubedat. This does not matter in the smaller roles, but in the case of Dubedat, it presents the actor with a poser. Is Dubedat a great artist, as the doctors and his wife are convinced? Or is he a "great artist" in the same sense that they are "eminent physi- cians"? That is, is he a bit of a hoax, not only in his personal dealings, but in his role of the genius? Shaw's greatest limitation was that he regarded himself as a com- pletely rational man—indeed, often, as the only rational man in a world of fools and lunatics. His optimism, such as it was, was a scientific and rational optimism: he looked forward to a day not when people would be better (he was too rational to expect that) but when they would be more sensible, that is, when there would be more people like himself. He had a diversity of opinions but only one simple idea: equal distribution of money. He recognized the existence of other problems, but these problems amused his mind without really engaging it. He stated them wittily as dilemmas or paradoxes. A dilemma or a paradox is eternal. When Shaw looked at the cosmos under the aspect of eternity, === Page 116 === 258 PARTISAN REVIEW he was a pessimist. He saw warring antinomies, doomed to everlasting strife, men against women, youth against age, intelligence against stu- pidity, the few against the many, the artist against the citizen. And the difficulty between them was a failure of communication, that is, of ra- tionality: you could never get a woman to look at things from a man's point of view. But if rationality fails and must fail forever (except in the matter of money), the alternative is despair or a kind of nihilistic relativism, in which everyone is right, from his own point of view, and these points of view are isolated, each revolving on its axis in inter- planetary space. Shaw was personally a generous man, chivalrous, quick with sym- pathy and the kind of understanding known as feminine. He was always able to put himself in another person's place. In his letters, he appears to know his friends-Chesterton, Mrs. Pat Campbell, Florence Farr, the Irish actress-better than they know themselves. He gives them advice continually, sensitive, wise advice, the advice they would give themselves if they had Shaw's intelligence and clearsightedness. Yet this very clair- voyance becomes a source of despair to him. He sees and they do not. He tells them and they will not listen. It is the same with the public. The tragedy of a rational man is that the world is deaf. The result of this isolation was that Shaw became a crank. His passion to simplify got the better of him, and he peddled panaceas: equal distribution of money as the sole immediate social remedy, vege- tarianism, anti-vivisectionism, anti-vaccinationism, phonetic spelling. He himself came to prescribe like the chorus of physicians in The Doctor's Dilemma. "Stimulate the phagocytes," says Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bon- ington. "The nuciform sac," says Cutler Walpole. "Greengages," cries poor Blenkinsop. "Don't eat meat or take stimulants and you will live to my age," twinkles Bernard Shaw. He played the barker for his remedies very early in life, as soon, he says, as his critics convinced him that he would not get a hearing unless he practiced the art of self-advertising. In this respect, he was a deliberate charlatan like Dr. Schutzmacher, with his country practice, who put up a sign: "Cure Guaranteed." The charlatanism was only a decoy, but was Shaw himself snared by it? It is hard to be sure. He called himself a socialist all his life, but his political infatuations in the '20s and '30s make one wonder whether he had privately lost faith in the single, simple, easily digestible idea to which he had reduced socialist theory. And did he really think that he was an improvement, in many ways, on Shakespeare, thanks to a law of progress in art? In the end, did he believe in anything? Including Bernard Shaw? As an old man, === Page 117 === THEATER CHRONICLE he grew selfish, and his private sympathies dried up; he did not like to be bothered. When he died, he left his house at Ayot St. Lawrence for a museum, but it has had to be closed down since so few paying visitors came to see it. There is something about Shaw that compels one's admiration and at the same time elicits pity. He was a world figure, the most gifted and original playwright of his day, the best English playwright since Congreve. His plays "entertain." They also provoke thought. But he ought to have been better. He missed greatness while playing the great man. The sudden deflation of his fame, after his death, like the air go- ing out of a tire, was both unjust and inevitable. He was one of those gods of his period, like the "Copeys" and "Kitties" of the seminar room, whose function was to disturb and subvert the youth of the middle classes. But the "educational" side of Shaw is dated, like health clothing. The sensible, spare, schoolmasterish, whiskered figure in knickerbockers no longer has the power to terrorize with a conundrum or a paradox. His own mystifications misled him. He took his intelligence and common sense for genius, even while he knew better; indeed, he depreciated genius when he discovered he had what passed for it. "Is this all?" he appears to say to himself in bewilderment, like Jennifer at the death of Dubedat. "Is this all there is to it?" Mary McCarthy 259 === Page 118 === Elizabeth Hardwick GEORGE ELIOT'S HUSBAND She was melancholy, head-achy, with a slow, disciplined, hard-won, aching genius that bore down upon her with a wondrous and exhausting force, like a great love affair in middle age. Driven, worn-out, dedicated, George Eliot needed unusual care and constant encouragement; indeed she could not even begin her great career until the great person appeared to help her. Strange that it should always be said of this woman of bold strength that she “was not fitted to stand alone.” She waited for help, standing in the wings, ailing, thinking and feeling—speechless. She was homely, even ugly, and perhaps that ac- counted for some of her thoroughness and quiet determination; she was afraid of failure and rebuff. She suffered. Who can doubt that she was profoundly passionate and romantic? You cannot read her books or study her personal history, search for her character and temperament, without feeling her passionate nature immediately. It was agony not to be able to appeal in a simple, feminine way. Her countenance quite spontaneously brought to mind—the horse. Virginia Woolf speaks of George Eliot's “expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power” and Henry James felt himself nearly in love with the “great, horse-faced, blue-stocking.” If she did not appeal, she impressed over- whelmingly. Her genius, her splendid power of mind, yes, but there is something powerfully affecting about her too, the fact that it was this particular woman who had the genius and the mind. When she died Lord Acton said, “It seems to me as if the sun had gone out. You can- not imagine how much I loved her.” Nothing was easy. It was always unremitting effort, “raising herself with groans and struggles.” Sometimes it seems that she is at the mercy of her intelligence; she is not an argumentative woman and likes peace and affection about her. Still she had to learn German, was compelled by an inner demon to suffer through a decision about going to church with her father; she must read Spinoza, must make up her mind about difficult matters. In an almost helpless way she cared about philosophy, politics, moral issues as other women care about clothes while often wish- ing they needn't. Again Virginia Woolf: “the culture, the philosophy, === Page 119 === GEORGE ELIOT'S HUSBAND 261 the fame and the influence were all built upon a very humble founda- tion-she was the grand-daughter of a carpenter." A great deal of the drama of this bewitching life can be found in Professor Gordon Haight's edition of the first three volumes of George Eliot's Letters. Haight's massive scholarship, his long and brilliant work could hardly be surpassed. George Eliot's fame was immense; her books sold well and she made money; she was a distinguished public figure; her image and spirit were enobbling without being cold or for the few. She was solid and reassur- ing, of a dignity as large and splendidly detailed as her solid, deep, dig- nified novels. It is easy to think of Queen Victoria and some people who cherish George Eliot seem to want us to think of the old, puffy-cheeked Queen. This novelist's history has always contained an instructive moral possibility. She is seen as the supreme cultural fact demonstrating the value of sober living, earnestness, and the brisk attention to matters at hand of a reliable man with a family business. Serene, brilliant, re- sponsible: there she stands in her paradoxically plain grandeur. As one grows older this industrious, slowly developing soul becomes dear for a secret reason-for having published her first story at the age of thirty- eight. Still, too much is made of the respectability of a great lover. Her most daring act, the most violent assertion of self, was not the "mar- riage" with Lewes, but her marriage eighteen months after Lewes' death to Mr. Cross, "one many years her junior and totally unknown and obscure." Cross was probably a mistake; in all his public appearances he is firmly on the dull side. (It is astounding to learn in Haight that this man lived on until 1924-a strange old coot for the Jazz Age.) George Eliot was obviously strongly impulsive, but then many of the Victorians were troubled in spirit and indulge in habits. Even the familiar Dickens had his love problems, Tennyson had an illegitimate child. George Eliot was certainly not Queen Victoria. She was pre-eminently an artist, with all the irregularity of temperament and determination to do as she pleased common among such personal- ities. She and her husband, Lewes not Cross, are inconceivable as any- thing except what they were, two writers, brilliant and utterly literary. They led the literary life from morning to midnight, working, reading, correcting proofs, traveling, entertaining, receiving and writing letters, planning literary projects, worrying, doubting their powers, experiencing a delicious hypochondria. The Brownings, the Webbs, the Garnetts, the 1 The George Eliot Letters, Volumes 1-3. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. Yale. $20.00. === Page 120 === 262 PARTISAN REVIEW Carlyles, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield-the literary couple, that peculiar English domestic manu- facture, useful no doubt in a country with difficult winters. The damp window outside and within, before the bright fire at tea-time, we can see these high-strung men and women clinging together, their inky fingers touching. No "partnership" was more fantastic than that of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. Heroic, slightly grotesque, nearly the last thing one can imagine is that these two creatures would become a public institution. Edmund Gosse describes the great pair driving home in a victoria. "The man, prematurely ageing, was hirsute, rugged, satyr-like, gazing vivaciously to left and right; this was George Henry Lewes. His companion was a large, thickset sybil, dreamy and immo- bile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of the Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense ostrich feather; this was George Eliot. The contrast between the solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the headgear had something pathetic and provincial about it." Her husband: George Henry Lewes. He was witty, lively, theatrical, industrious, a very conspicuous figure in London intellectual life. Lewes sometimes went about lecturing, liked to produce and act in his own plays, and was successful as an important editor. As a literary man he displayed the same animation and variety for which he was known in the drawing rooms of his friends. To give but the slimmest idea of his production one can mention farces by the titles of Give a Dog a Bad Name and The Cozy Corner, a novel called Rose, Blanche and Violet, a large undertaking like the Biographical History of Philosophy, separate lives of Robespierre and Goethe, books on the drama, innumerable ar- ticles on literature and philosophy—this husband knew all about the pains of a life of composition. Leslie Stephen speaks of Lewes as "one of the most brilliant of the literary celebrities of the time." Lewes was not exactly the person a match-maker would seize upon as a suitable husband for George Eliot. There is a marked strain of recklessness and indiscretion in his charm; he was, as a temperament, extremely informal-Jane Carlyle called him "the Ape" and found him "the most amusing little fellow in the world." Lewes was not a hand- some man, indeed he was "the ugliest man in London," according to Douglas Jerrold. George Eliot herself was somewhat put off by his un- important appearance and had prejudice in that direction to overcome before she could entirely accept him. The impression he made was an odd one, well enough perhaps for literary circles but not up to snuff for conventional social life. "He had long hair and his dress was an un- === Page 121 === GEORGE ELIOT'S HUSBAND 263 lovely compromise between morning and evening costume, combining the less pleasing points of both." Some idea of the relaxed standards of Lewes' circle when he was living with his first wife may be found in the following anecdote from Jane Carlyle: "It is Julia Paulet who has taken his [Lewes'] soul captive!! he raves about her 'dark, luxurious eyes' and 'smooth, firm flesh'!—his wife asked 'how did he know? had he been feeling it?'" This wife, Agnes, was beautiful, intelligent, and free-spirited in a literal and alarming way. To her children by Lewes she added two by Thornton Hunt, the son of Leigh Hunt. Lewes endured this fantastic intrusion for some time with a remarkable lack of rancor. Even after his "elopement" with George Eliot good relations were kept up on all sides. Henry James in his first visit to them found George Eliot in a state of great anxiety because one of Lewes' sons had been injured in an accident. She herself paid Agnes' allowance after Lewes died. The attitudes of everyone indicate a generous, unconventional spirit of the sort we are accustomed to find among artists and writers but would not demand of the "respectable" and especially not where matters of such overwhelming emotional charge are concerned. Still it was all very ir- regular and strange. Looking back at Lewes' pacific behavior, his en- durance of suffering and humiliation, we can see a sort of prefiguration of the unusual position in which he later found himself. He was bright and sympathetic and yet there is an infinite longing in his lavish, humble love. As a husband Lewes discovered his wife's genius, or rather he "uncovered" it as one may, peeling off the surface inch by inch, uncover a splendid painting beneath. All this he did with excitement and delight, as if it were his own greatness he had come upon. The most haunting fact ever recorded about this odd man is from Charlotte Brontë: "the aspect of Lewes's face almost moves me to tears; it is so wonderfully like Emily's. . . ." Perhaps what Charlotte Brontë saw in "the Ape" was his wild and tender uniqueness, his inexplicable nature. Suppose George Eliot had not become a famous novelist: what then would have happened to this marriage in which it was Lewes' role to guide, encourage, protect the most celebrated woman in England? Probably it would have been the same, although on a less grand and public stage; instead of the novelist, Lewes would have protected the diffident translator and essayist, soothed the tired editor. There is no doubt he was profoundly respectful of his chosen lady; he understood everything pained and precious in her nature, saw that striking union of dutifulness and imagination. They had, after all, been introduced by Herbert Spencer. This grand alliance did not fail to irritate many people. A rival === Page 122 === 264 PARTISAN REVIEW novelist, Eliza Linton, was furious about it. She thought their airs were impossible, their solemn importance not to be endured. Mrs. Linton had met George Eliot before the latter was famous and she says about her: "I will candidly confess my short-sighted prejudices with respect to this to-be-celebrated person. She was known to be learned, industrious, thoughtful, noteworthy; but she was not yet the Great Genius of her age, nor a philosopher bracketed with Plato and Kant, nor was her per- sonality held to be superior to the law of the land. . . . She was essen- tially underbred and provincial. . . ." Poor Mrs. Linton had reason to complain. She was not only a rival novelist but, you might say, a rival divorcee. "There were people who worshipped those two, who cut me because I separated from Linton. . . ." Envy and outrage make Mrs. Linton slyly fascinating. (One needn't fear corruption because of the impossibility of anyone succeeding in making George Eliot look foolish and small.) And sometimes Mrs. Lin- ton sums it up perfectly. She writes, "... she had the devotion of a man whose love had in it that element of adoration and self-suppression which is dearest of all to a woman like George Eliot, at once jealous and de- pendent, demanding exclusive devotion and needing incessant care- but ready to give all she had in return." Also it is Mrs. Linton who has left us George Eliot gravely announcing, "I should not think of allow- ing George to stay away a night from me." Leslie Stephen thinks George Eliot's powers were diminished by Lewes' efforts to shield her from criticism, to keep her in a cozy nest of approval and encouragement. But Stephen's opinion is based upon his belief that her later novels are inferior to the earlier ones. Stephen didn't much like Middlemarch, nor did Edmund Gosse—both preferred the early work. It is hard to feel either of these men had anything more than respect for George Eliot. They were formidable, learned figures, great personages themselves. Something in the Warwickshire novelist fails to attract them. They seem put off by the grandness of her reputation—it makes them uneasy, even somewhat jealous. Gosse says "we are sheep that look up to George Eliot and are not fed by her ponderous moral aphorisms and didactic ethical influence." It is Gosse's opinion that Middlemarch is "mechanical," it is "unimaginative satire" and "genius misapplied." Astonishing that the truest lovers of this "ponderous" and "ethical" writer are the baroque aesthetes Proust and Henry James. And always the strange lover, Lewes, like someone from Dostoevsky taking over duties at the Priory, their house. Before his connection with George Eliot, Lewes had been mad about Jane Austen. === Page 123 === BOOKS THE AESTHETE AND THE SENSATIONALIST POEMS, 1923-1954. By E. E. Cummings. Harcourt, Brace. $6.75. THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS. Alfred A. Knopf. $7.50. Here are two beautiful books, to handle and look at, and books, for their contents, that anybody who cares about modern poetry will want to possess. The sight of them is also a little unnerving; what they demand of the reviewer is not a progress report but an attempt at a total judgment, a final placing. It is like a party, after the visitors have left: set it out of your world, in my shabby autumnal Chelsea. "How very amusing Mr. Cummings was!" "Yes, and so direct and touching, too." "I couldn't quite follow all the jokes—that peculiar dia- lect, is it Bronx?" "And he does go on a bit about sex, doesn't he-about the machinery of it, I mean?" "Oh, that's the 1920s, my dear. Rather charmingly old-world, in its way." "Yes, of course, but isn't he rather sentimental sometimes?" "Oh, I would say mainly very innocent and sincere. What are his politics, do you think?" "Oh, what we would call an old-fashioned Tory-anarchist. American politics are so very difficult; they do that in a kind of radical tone of voice." "Yes, but didn't you get the impression that he has mixed feelings about Jews—mixed feel- ings about Negroes, possibly-and then, of course, one must take it for granted most Americans don't like us." "Oh, I think you're quite wrong. There's a natural tendency toward emotional impatience and violence, but nothing Fascist. Fundamentally, he's an anarchist and a pacifist." "Is that why he seems to hate so many people?" "Oh, yes, he believes in love. Don't you remember what a lot he had to say about love? That must make you hate a lot of people. And he's very much of an individual, a kind of metropolitan Thoreau, and so he dislikes ordinary, conventional people-you do remember your Tocqueville, and all that, about America, the extraordinary pressure of the urge to social con- formity on the American with ideas?" "I thought he was lively, but to some extent he did seem to be saying the same thing over and over again." "I think poor Aunt Nelly was quite embarrassed by that anec- dote, lively as it was, about the girls in the whorehouse. Though, of === Page 124 === 266 PARTISAN REVIEW course, she’s very broad-minded.” “It was a little anatomical, I did think.” “But what about Mr. Stevens?” “Much more cultured, certainly. I must say when Americans go in for culture they go in for it regardless of time, trouble, and expense.” “I found it hard sometimes to catch his drift. He’s rather shut up in himself, would you say?” “I don’t know; we had a long conversation, over there in the corner, about the nature of poetry—I don’t know if I could quite summarize the upshot for you, but it seemed very deep at the time.” “Oh, deep, he is deep!” “I thought he talked wonderfully about painting and landscape and music and things, though, mind you, I found it hard to pin him down.” “I thought sometimes of a remote Chinese hermit-sage in his mountain hut, and then I thought, it would be a very natty hut, wouldn’t it? I think Mr. Cummings has been a bit more battered by life.” “What a good thing they can’t hear us. They are right, really, to dislike us on the whole. We are cats. . . . ” Mr. Cummings and Mr. Stevens have, in fact, for an English reader, an extra-poetic fascination—for the light they throw on the roots of American culture—that might easily, for us, deflect discussion of them into the kind of gossipy guesswork, in twittering bird-like voices, I have parodied above. Roughly, of course, we find ourselves fitting Mr. Cum- mings into a tough and native, Mr. Stevens into a cosmopolitan and sophisticated American tradition. Mr. Cummings has a crude and force- ful directness which it would be hard to match in a contemporary Eng- lish poet; Mr. Stevens a conscious refinement which it would be equally hard to match. It is, however, an Alexandrian rather than an Attic re- finement. Mr. Robert Graves is an English poet (an early and late ad- mired of Cummings) who shares Cummings’s cult of what, in a large and loose sense, can be called romantic love; but in his passionate pro- priety and fastidiousness of diction he is quite unlike Mr. Cummings, and yet equally, when one looks for counterbalancing resemblances, un- like Mr. Stevens. Mr. Graves is an Atticizing writer, he wants words and phrases to be apt, discretly so, rather than showy; color and show- iness are indispensable instruments for Mr. Stevens, his language is opulent, recherché, queen of its own mode; every poem might have stepped long-legged and starry-eyed, with tempting shadows on its thighs, wearing this year’s lightest and most expensive girdle, from a poetry fashion magazine, an aesthetic equivalent of Vogue. There are American poets—Mr. Robert Frost is one—of whom it can be claimed (as Bagehot claimed for Wordsworth, as against Tennyson and Brow- ning) that they use language classically. Bagehot, who tagged the epithet “grotesque” onto Browning and the epithet “ornate” onto Tennyson === Page 125 === BOOKS 267 might have used these respectively for Mr. Cummings and Mr. Stevens. It would be fairer to describe Mr. Cummings's use of language as sen- sationalist (and therefore occasionally sentimental, occasionally brutal); and Mr. Stevens's use of language as aesthetic (and therefore occasionally precious, occasionally vacuous). Thus, these are two very good and important poets, but judging them by the very highest standards (Chau- cer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Blake, Yeats, say) one is forced to point out that some element of human experience or range within it traditionally thought of as central, is left out. Mr. Cum- mings and Mr. Stevens do not fulfill Matthew Arnold's function for the poet of strengthening and uplifting the heart; the very genuine stim- ulation they offer us is mixed with temptations to evasiveness and relax- ing, to various kinds of self-flattery. And that comes out in the off- center language. What does Mr. Cummings leave out? For one thing (and this may appear a rash statement, for Mr. Cummings, in his more lyrical poems, might be thought to write about almost nothing else), the complex per- sonal relationships of men and women. What Mr. Cummings seems to me to substitute for this fine traditional theme is, firstly, a celebration of the sexual appetites and achievements of the hearty male animal; and, secondly, the celebration of a kind of mystical attitude toward life in general that may indeed spring from a happy and stable relationship between a man and woman, but need not always do so, and is something quite different as a theme. Mr. Cummings's love poetry is, in a bad sense, impersonal; and I would connect this impersonality of the love poetry with a general characteristic of the poetry as a whole, its steadily sustained youthful strident energy, of which the dark shadow is its al- most complete failure to mature. Mr. Cummings wrote in 1923 as well as he does now, and not very differently. The marks of permanent adol- escence in his work are many. Let me list some: (1) an almost entirely uncritical devotion to parents, lovers, and a few chosen friends com- bined with an attitude of suspicion and dislike toward "outsiders"; (2) a general tendency to think of all political and economic activities as in the main a sinister conspiracy against the young; (3) a whole-hearted universalistic pacifism, deeply emotional, not argued out, combined with a natural violent irascibility: (4) the instinctive generosity of youth (always side emotionally with the rioters against the police) combined with an equally deeply rooted provincial intolerance (unless I am obtuse in finding this intolerance in the dialect parodies and in some of the references to people with Jewish or German names): (5) the violent capacity of the young for disgust (recurrent references to drunkenness, === Page 126 === 268 PARTISAN REVIEW vomit, and so on) which can itself, uncriticized, become disgusting: (6) a youthful, not very well-balanced religiousness, a "reverence for life" combined with a youthful refusal to accept death as a fact ("No young man thinks that he will ever die. . ."), leading, of course, to a morbid preoccupation with death: (7) indecency, scatology, even here and there something that strikes me as very like pornography-physical frus- tration leading to emotional frustration, and making even physical ful- fillment finally emotionally frustrating, and final emotional fulfillment the object of a kind of private religion. To sum all this up: Mr. Cum- mings's sense of life is the "lyrical" rather than the "tragic" or "comic" sense. The poet who has not learned to accept "society," "others," the idea of the City in some sense, will never become sufficiently mature for tragedy or comedy. Mr. Cummings's satire is an aggressive-defensive maneuver on behalf of his small private corner in a for him still un- sullied Garden of Eden; salesmen, politicians, generals, the late Presi- dent Harding and the late S. S. Van Dine must keep out. Some such drastic preliminary "limiting judgment" is necessary if we are to do justice to Mr. Cummings's achievement within his limits. Part of that achievement is readability. Poems, 1923-1954 is a volume of 468 pages and can be read straight through like an American novel of the 1920s, or a volume of essays by Mencken. It is, indeed, of Mencken, Scott Fitzgerald, early Dos Passos that I think when I read Cummings and not-except for turns and tricks, and moods, that some- times remind me of Pound-of other poets. If Mr. Cummings were a less raw and vulnerable, a more balanced and integrated person his poems would not be such a magnificent documentation of the stresses of the American scene. Some of them have value, perhaps, merely as documentation: yooxwiddupoimnuntwaiv un duyyookusnpnruddur givusuhtoonundup- hugnting (anglicè: youse with the permanent wave and the yuke or somethin' or other give us a tune on the ****ing thing!) Others, like the deliciously funny epitaph on President Harding (a foot- note to Mencken's essay), call up in us a tolerant nostalgia for the simpler stupidities of yesterday: ...if he wouldn't have eaten them Yapanese Craps somebody might hardly never not have been unsorry, perhaps As a clown, Cummings can make us laugh aloud. But he is at his best === Page 127 === BOOKS 269 (as in some of the war poems, the one about the conscientious-objector conscript, the one about the Yale boy marching off to war, and "My sweet old etcetera”) as an angry and tender clown. Angry and tender clowning begins to pivot over to lyricism in some of the poems about whores: what begin as half-mockery, should i entirely ask of god why on the alert neck of this brittle whore delicately wobbles an improbably distinct face, end with intense sinister and pathetic dramatization, or why her tiniest whispered invitation is like a clock striking in a dark house. The anger is never purged from even the most purely lyrical poems: with their recurrent theme that love, love is the only real thing and damn-damn and hate and torture any evidence to the contrary. The finest explicit statement of this is the long, very beautiful poem be- ginning, my father moved through dooms of love, and ending magnificently, in a noble, almost “metaphysical” paradox: and nothing quite so least as truth -i say though hate were why men breathe- because my father lived his soul love is the whole and more than all The later lyricism is gentler, the “real world”-so, crudely and inade- quately in both directions to call it-held more safely at a distance: o by the by has anybody seen little you-i who stood on a green hill and threw his wish at blue... So what shall one say, on the whole? There is some of the matter of life here; there is an extraordinary technical dexterity; there is an urbane wit of a very savagely effective sort; a disturbing gift for evoking sexual situations below head-level; one of the most notable tal- ents for direct and simple lyrical utterance of this century: and, over and above all these, there is something which, however narrow and cal- === Page 128 === 270 PARTISAN REVIEW low, has been held to obstinately enough to deserve the honorary title of "a philosophy of life." It is the philosophy, say, of the adolescent who wants the moon down out of the sky, but wants it to stay up there and shine on him, too. But far deeper even than this there is the fact that Mr. Cummings's comparative undevelopment as a civilized human be- ing does not, any more than the wrong-headed, peevish, or illogical re- marks he makes prevent one from feeling that in some way he is in close direct touch—in a way that the rest of us, the denizens of the "unreal city" are not—with a source and justification of being. His silliness in a sense is locally traditional, it is in the line of Thoreau's silliness or Emerson's, and carries with it its counterbalance of raw in- sight. In an orthodox age, like the early seventeenth century, the in- sight would have been chastened and civilized by a social background; it has had to fight grimly to maintain its right to existence against a social background that seemed to make nonsense of it. That accounts for the stridencies. But a tough, temperamental consistency holds Mr. Cummings's book together; and lust, disgust, high-jinks, and despair do not manage to crowd out the impression that love and joy, precariously defended, are what this poet understands most profoundly. There are no stridencies in Mr. Stevens. And to the question about what is the central thing lacking the answer might be, in his case, just that "matter of life" which is there, for all his faults, in the work of Mr. Cummings. And, indeed, again, the crude and obvious thing to say about Mr. Stevens—yet like many crude and obvious things, the cen- trally just one—is that, not having wanted to cope with that "matter of life," he has tried to substitute for it a "matter of mind." His poems, to continue on this crude level, are about perception and reflection on perception. They are about what the mind can make of experience, not about experience as raw. They become more and more not only reflec- tive but self-reflective, poems about what the poem is, poems in which the poet asks himself what he is doing, and in answering is still writing the same poem, and so indefinitely can or indeed has to extend his an- swer. Thus, many of Mr. Stevens's later poems are like commentaries on themselves that could be added to forever, section by section, like ex- panding bookcases. Something of a similar sort is true of earlier and shorter poems; there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, but there might be fifteen, or twenty, or any number. What the mind picks out from perceptual experience is always one of many possible aspects, and one of many possible ways of presenting that aspect, and about the choosing of the aspect, and the choosing of the mode, there must === Page 129 === BOOKS 271 always be something arbitrary. The whole tone of polite irony, of urbane mystification that pervades Mr. Stevens’s work stems, I think, from this central predicament of the reflective aesthete who, philosophically, is a kind of pragmatic solipsist. The world, for Mr. Stevens, that the poet lives in is the world that he chooses to shape by the arbitrary emphases of a detached attention—an attention not itself shaped by the compul- sions, for instance, of hunger or love. We feel continually, in reading Mr. Stevens, that his actual gifts are comparable with those of the very greatest poets (we do not feel this, about Mr. Cummings, when reading him). Probably no modern poet has a more supple, rich, commanding, and evocative vocabulary; within certain limits—Mr. Stevens would be incapable of achieving the changes of pace, and the suddenings, slacken- ings and concentrations, of “The Waste Land” or “Ash Wednesday”— few modern poets are more notable masters of rhythm; very few con- temporary poets, again, combine as Mr. Stevens does the three appar- ently disparate gifts of evoking impressions with imagistic vividness, shaping long poems with musical care, and pursuing through a long poem a single, very abstruse, metaphysical argument. Yet in one’s heart one does not quite think that he is a “great” poet in the sense that, say, Yeats and Eliot are “great” poets. What is it that one misses? Partly, or perhaps mainly, the whole area of life that lies between detached aesthetic perception and philosophical reflection on it; and, as a chief corollary to that, the urgency of ordinary human passion, the sense of commitment and the moment of final concentration. In one crude hu- man sense, Mr. Stevens’s enormous talents are being exploited a little frivolously; in all one’s continuing pleasure and admiration, while read- ing him, there is the sense all the time of a lack of the highest tension. It would be impertinent to illustrate the merits of such a distinguished and famous writer by quotation; but here and there Mr. Stevens does seem to me to show an awareness of this lack, in his work, of human grasp, of human contact: I cannot bring a world quite round, Although I patch it as I can. I sing a hero’s head, large eye And bearded bronze, but not a man, Although I patch him as I can And reach through him almost to man, If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are, === Page 130 === 272 PARTISAN REVIEW Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar. A society gets the poets it deserves, and America has obviously deserved very well to get a poet of the painful, raw honesty of Mr. Cummings and such a first-rate artist in verse, and profoundly interesting reflective poet, as Mr. Stevens. The gaps that one finds in them are gaps also which (in England today, as much as in America) one finds in oneself. It is not enough to "plunge into" life or enough, aesthetically and intel- lectually, to "transcend" it. Saying that, is not saying that anybody else could, set in the perspective of these two poets, have done better. Only a more humane society than we have seen for a long time or are likely to see soon will prove a proper stamping ground for the fully humanist poet. G. S. Fraser THE EXPENSE OF SHREWDNESS THE LITERARY SITUATION. By Malcolm Cowley. Viking. $3.75. It is not easy to say exactly what this book is about, since it has neither the unity a disciplined theme might provide nor the re- laxed discursiveness of a collection of essays. The title is attractive but unfortunate; in the nature of things, if not of Malcolm Cowley, it promises far more than it can deliver. Half of the book consists of an informal, impressionistic account of American literature as a business, written from a point of view that seems largely to acquiesce in the idea of literature as a business. Nonetheless, this is the better part of the book, since it allows a certain play for one of Cowley's genuine gifts, a half- absorbed, half-mocking disclosure of facts and anecdotes concerning the extra-literary side of literary life. Cowley knows how the domestic habits of American writers have changed during the past few decades; he is sensitive to the problems writers face in making their livings; he can be informative-as well as maddeningly evasive on the subject of pocket-books. This sort of literary-sociological gossip, always livelier when the subject of conversation at a cocktail party than when exposed to the test of print, cannot honestly be said to be uninteresting; almost all === Page 131 === BOOKS 273 gossip is interesting. Yet it is also disturbing—and not because the literary world is too exalted or pure to bear analysis in the terms of commerce. The trouble is rather in the tone with which Cowley treats American literature as business, a tone of resignation so good-natured as to melt into positive acceptance. This is partly the result of that breakdown of values which sometimes goes under the name of being worldlywise, partly of reliance on a genial, almost homespun manner that doesn't come off. One finds it hard to believe in Cowley as a simple fellow. The other half of the book consists of a series of pieces dealing with “trends” in contemporary American writing. These pieces may have had some value when they first appeared in the magazines, but in a book they seem slight and poorly joined. Cowley is shrewd enough to announce at the very beginning that his book “isn't a collection of critical essays.” True enough as this may be, it doesn't quite free him from the critical obligation. For these “trend” articles, which brush lightly over the New Criticism, war novels, the “new fiction” and re- cent naturalistic novels must, and do, advance critical statements and implications. But if one asks what Cowley is getting at, what his purpose is in publishing the book, one is perplexed. He takes a few pokes at a curiously anonymous group whom he calls “the critics,” as well as at another imaginary group called, even more loosely, the writers of “new fiction”; yet one cannot help feeling that something is being withheld, some premise or emotion or attitude. No critic is likely to be this cagy—and at times he can be as cagy as Calvin Coolidge—unless some block, known or unknown to him, prevents him from making explicit and developing with a certain rigor and fullness the underlying point of view from which he examines the “literary situation.” Ever since Cowley ceased editing The New Republic book section, his work has lacked focus and betrayed a sense of drift. He has become a highly accomplished literary journalist, the perfect man for giving middlebrow readers the low-down on highbrows. He has also shown himself capable, if only in his essay on Faulkner, of writing first-rate criticism. In this essay his gift for locating the atmosphere, the unique weather and landscape of a writer, shows to considerable advantage. But his other essays have bogged down in popular biography, the one on Hemingway in near idolatry, and those on Hawthorne and Whitman in barren speculations about narcissism and homosexuality. Meanwhile, his style has become smoother, cozier, softer; his writing seldom achieves any sharp edge or strong feeling. === Page 132 === 274 PARTISAN REVIEW In the present book many of his individual remarks-his com- plaints about the symbol mania of certain critics, his feeling that some of the younger novelists have transformed technique into a subject matter-are very sensible. But sensible only if removed from their am- biguous context, a tone so condescending and "amused" that one wishes to retreat from one's formal agreement and stand instead with those whom Cowley attacks. Sometimes his tone is even more ques- tionable, as when he says, a little pettishly, that critics torture them- selves to be more ingenious than other critics" or that critics "publish their findings [on Conan Doyle's influence on T. S. Eliot] in the lit- erary reviews and hope for better faculty posts next autumn." No doubt; critics being human and having children like everyone else. But can one seriously assume that the trouble with much contemporary criticism is due to a desire for promotions rather than to a deep, thoroughly sin- cere commitment to a critical method which leads, most of the time, to dreariness? The Literary Situation suffers from too many omissions: neither poetry nor politics makes an appearance, literature being here pretty much fiction and the very latest fiction at that. Cowley's claim that the New Critics have fathered "a new fiction" similar in kind and spirit to their own work is extremely far-fetched, if only because no critics, new or old, exert that degree of influence over American writers. And his mind is so cluttered with "trends" that he never gets down to ana- lyzing or evaluating or even appreciating a single book or a single body of work in its own right. When he does venture a literary judgment it isn't very reassuring: Mikhail Sholokhov's The Silent Don, he tells us, "is the novel of our time that comes closest to being another War and Peace." Yes, in the way Norman Rosten comes closest to being another Vergil. In the end, one feels that Cowley depends too much on a careful knowingness, a measured shrewdness. Of deep conviction and motivat- ing passion, of anger or satiric thrust, of fiery enthusiasm The Literary Situation offers very little. One is frequently being tipped off, as it were, that much remains up Cowley's sleeve and if only he cared to reveal it. . . After awhile, however, one ceases to care whether there is a sleeve. Irving Howe === Page 133 === BOOKS 275 FICTION CHRONICLE THE SIMPLE TRUTH. By Elizabeth Hardwick. Harcourt, Brace. $3.50. OUT WENT THE CANDLE. By Harvey Swados. Viking. $3.95. THE BLACK PRINCE. By Shirley Ann Grau. Alfred A. Knopf. $3.50. ONE ARM AND OTHER STORIES. By Tennessee Williams. New Direc- tions. $4.50. ALL MEN ARE MORTAL. By Simone de Beauvoir. World. $5.00. THE VAGABOND. By Colette. Farrar, Straus and Young. $3.00. Miss Hardwick's second novel deals with a murder of the kind that has made scores of headlines during the past decade, the principals being more or less ordinary American citizens. In this instance, Rudy Peck, a student at a Midwestern college, is accused of strangling his girl. The case itself is dealt with by Miss Hardwick in considerable detail. But two university people, Joseph Parks, a twenty-eight year old student, and Anita Mitchell, a faculty wife, emerge as the major char- acters of the novel when they become obsessed by the trial, attending each session and discussing it with friends, spouses and, finally, each other. Taken together, this group composes into a well-drawn picture of the state of mind of the youngish, well-educated and economically secure class that forms about universities and apparently withers comfortably and unhappily into middle age. The essential paradox of the class, Miss Hardwick seems to be saying, and a prime cause of its early inanition, is that, having inherited the highly individualistic or apocalyptic ideals of the previous generation of intellectuals, it cannot endure to be what it absolutely must be—namely, a class. Hence, a pathetic search for some form of individuality, a search that seems hopeless as the class is large, quick to purchase the same articles, read the same books, and think the same thoughts. This unappeasable craving for distinction drives some of its mem- bers to ridiculous lengths. Thus Parks, Miss Hardwick's fattish, rather feminine protagonist has chosen to inherit the last generation's sympathy for victims of social oppression at a time when the number of such victims is rapidly dwindling and few, if any, active groups are espousing their cause: "He could sometimes regret that the labor unions were so successful they did not need the services of bright, enthusiastic, chari- table persons like himself. Communists, Trotskyists, conservative ex- Communists, pacifists—how he envied them all, this man of a later day. His times were out of joint—poor Parks growing up in environ- === Page 134 === 276 PARTISAN REVIEW ments in which it was difficult even to find some one to give old clothes to." Parks becomes a partisan of the suspected student because Rudy comes from a poor family and there is reason to believe the girl's rich parents were discouraging his suit. Mrs. Mitchell, an extravagant Jungian, looks upon Rudy as a scapegoat about to be sacrificed to so- ciety's collective guilt. Both ache happily at the prospect of a conviction which will give them a grievance against society and are thoroughly discomposed when a jury of undistinguished Iowa citizens acquits him. "It seems," Mrs. Mitchell complains, "that even farmers, women and typical citizens have all sorts of modern ideas without even knowing they have them . . ." Put together shrewdly and logically, Parks and Mrs. Mitchell never grow much fictional flesh on their skeletons primarily because Miss Hardwick's sense of social pressures, weights and norms seems markedly inferior to her knowledge of social trends and the movement of ideas. Thus, it is obvious, I think, that as great a departure from the norm as is involved in their obsession with Rudy, can only be justified if the two are shown to be much more unusual than they are, driven by specific internal forces great enough to offset the pressure to display exactly the same interest as every other member of the group. But this is not done. Indeed, if it were, the narrative could not be as badly split as it is, for we are actually given two distinct subjects, neither subordinated, and with only a superficial relation. If the central interest of the novel is the trial, then no such extensive treatment of the minds of the Parks-Mitchell circle is necessary or relevant and vice versa. The trial itself is described in a lackadaisical, uncertain manner that is only partially redeemed by a sudden flare of insight or a brilliant impression. Harvey Swados' first novel is a well-written, ambitious auscultation of the body of a Jewish family that consists of Herman Felton, a domi- neering, war-rich industrialist, his part-German wife, a blonde, ad- venturous daughter and a dour, tough-minded son. All the well-known, portentous sounds of family life are heard in booming, muffled con- cert as the narrative wanders from Englewood, New Jersey, to New York, Washington, London, Italy, Africa, Florida and the island of Curaçao. Mother is a bonbon-eating nonentity. Betsy admires her fa- ther excessively and incestuously while Morrow hates him because he tries to dominate him and buy his affection. After Betsy has been in and out of numerous colleges, love affairs and marriages and Morrow has been wounded, decorated, and saved from two court martials by === Page 135 === BOOKS 277 his father, relations suddenly shift. Betsy turns against Mr. Felton as a government investigation of his war profits is beginning. Morrow, after some prodding by Joe Burley, Betsy's former friend, interrupts his post- war Zionist activities to go back and help his father whom he now sees in a different light. Burley and Morrow gather sympathetically about the stricken Mr. Felton who is hiding in Curaçao. Just as, throughout, we are notified that the Feltons are headed for perdition (a term that is practically meaningless because Mr. Swados never indicates values that would make either "perdition" or salvation a possibility), we are now vaguely assured that if Mr. Felton goes back to face the music, some kind of redemption will take place. Indeed, it will even have an uplifting effect on Betsy, though the mechanics of this operation are beyond all con- jecture. After probably the only passage of really poor dialogue in the book ("That's conscience speaking, pop," said Morrow. "It's hard to hear when you've got your steel earmuffs on"), Mr. Felton consents to go, leaving the reader to wonder why this should be considered vir- tuous in a novel in which there is absolutely nothing to put us on the side of good government or bad government, and which frequently de- scribes corruption without ever condemning or condoning it. From this confusion Mr. Swados proceeds directly to chaos by having Burley re- flect, at the very end, that now he was ready for "whatever the world flect, at the very end, that now he was ready for "whatever the world held in store for all those, who like himself, would never grant that they had come into the world too late." Nothing that has taken place, as far as I can see, would enable the reader to know what this shadowy horde is too late for. Mr. Swados has a natural aptitude for representing ordinary, idio- syncratic people in a fashion that is especially notable when individuals who are not basically unconventional are driven to behave as though they were. In fact, the care and skill with which such situations are treated frequently carries him to a bold, original exploration of such social phenomena as Jewish-Christian relations, sex, business and bu- reaucracy. But what Out Went the Candle lacks completely is a point of view, located anywhere, which would give it continuity and consistency. Miss Hardwick's people behave in a way that is in accord with their minds but not their characters. The behavior of the Feltons is nearly always authentically, colorfully characteristic but their minds and values are simply indeterminate, left to fluctuate wildly from scene to scene. Since the family drama of perdition and regeneration remains putative, stated but never explained or evoked, the narrative disintegrates as the members separate and engage in disparate activities. === Page 136 === 278 PARTISAN REVIEW In Miss Grau's first book of short stories, the problems that be- devil both Miss Hardwick and Mr. Swados seem to have been, if not solved, completely, bypassed. Observation and a brilliant, untrammeled imagination seem to furnish her with a passport to any environment and enable her to emerge with enough material for her needs. Con- sidering her youth and probable background, the varied subject matter of The Black Prince and the sureness of treatment are astonishing. Most of the stories are about Southern colored people as they move about within their own enclosed world and the protagonists are fre- quently exceptionally rough males. The stories about whites are some- what less striking feats of projection but something of the same ability is required to give us a first-person story of a seventeen-year-old boy losing his grandfather, an intimate picture of a divorced man visiting his three-year-old daughter or the machinations of a family group plot- ting over a contested will. It is only to be expected that such great and easy variety will be achieved at a price and the price here is that of a certain literary primi- tivism, a pre-epistemologic kind of creation in which no effort is made to disentangle the mode of perception from the thing perceived and play one against the other or bring the two things into harmony. Conse- quently, the events frequently have an odd, slow, bodiless kind of per- ception as if they took place under water, the medium being nothing less than the temperament of the author, which, because no attempt is made to suit the style to the action and the author is often emotionally remote from the life, is constantly interposed between the reader and the characters. Thus, in the opening story, a convict is released from jail and Miss Grau follows him through a series of adventures. He wrests a skiff from two adolescent boys, meets a friend of the man he killed and tries to return to a woman whose three adolescent daughters (one of them his own) bombard him with rocks. It is all represented in full, detailed fashion with none of the tricks or ellipses which fiction writers frequently have recourse to in dealing with a world of which they have little experience. But the characters are unmodeled, seen in the flat, have no self-consciousness and cannot generate any suspense because they have nothing toward which to develop and not enough internal life to make us share their anticipations. The picturesque events are described with fluent accuracy, but two-dimensionally and as re- fracted through a very feminine, exaggeratedly youthful and simple style. The result is a study in mismated effects—a little like a Seurat painting where the sturdy figures of the bourgeoisie are glimpsed through a dreamy pointillist haze—valid and refreshing enough in one === Page 137 === BOOKS 279 story but begetting serious distortions and privations as it is repeated and begins to form an image of an environment. In "Joshua," however, the story of a twelve-year-old boy and his companion fishing in a lonely bayou, Miss Grau's perspective and style are exactly right, creat- ing a continuous enchantment of mood and atmosphere that is am- plified rather than shut out by the juvenile consciousness. At their best Miss Grau's stories bend sharply toward the values of painting or poetry. By a natural reaction to a society so little uni- fied by any moral scheme that writers like Miss Hardwick and Swados who make any effort at evaluation have to steer laboriously past the splintering wrecks of a score of sunken ideologies, Miss Grau has de- veloped a personal narrative method that never discloses any emo- tional or intellectual relation between the author and society at all. Her talent is new and striking but there is considerable ambivalence about its development and all that has had to be ignored to permit it to function so freely. One Arm is a re-issue of a volume of Mr. Williams' short stories originally published in an expensive, limited edition in 1948. The interval has only emphasized the fundamentally Victorian nature of the au- thor's temperament and outlook. The influences, assimilated and un- assimilated, in Mr. Williams' work are legion: Wilde, Forster, Law- rence, Saroyan and first, last and foremost, Maugham. It is from Maugham that he seems to have inherited the simple, dualistic view of society as a kind of petrified crust of money, sham morality and total repression underneath which, boiling and bubbling, are the wild un- socialized forces of Life, Sex, Art, Passion, Poverty, Immorality and Truth. The Maugham story, with rare exceptions, is based on an absolutely mechanical, invariant formula. Move quietly about on the social crust and then let a grotesque passion break out of such an unlikely quarter that it seems like the most ghastly, super-potent kind of atavism. Once you get the swing of it and if you have the genteel adolescent's lurid view of sex and passion, the possibilities are endless. Using the same formula, Williams, where Maugham brings you face to face with Neanderthal man, prefers to rub your head gently in the primeval slime. The title story, for example, is about a young, one-armed male, who was the delight of a large section of homosexual America before he got arrested for murder. A Lutheran minister sees his picture and is drawn to visit him by what he thinks is a divinely fostered, over- powering urge. There are some complications but anyone who has heard === Page 138 === 280 PARTISAN REVIEW of "Rain" should guess a good deal of what is to come. In another story, the aging daughter of a minister starts smoking, dyes her hair and heads for the fleshpots of New Orleans. After managing a rather feeble shock through having her visited by a family friend who finds her (as the narrator in The Moon and Sixpence found Strickland) thriving and unrepentant, Mr. Williams runs out of realistic gas and unhesitatingly switches to abrupt, clumsy fantasy. In the notorious "Desire and the Black Masseur," an innocuous little clerk finds his true masochistic love in the person of a huge, colored masseur; it is a nice critical problem to decide whether the ensuing romance is more comic or sickening. "The Poet," a ripe mixture of diverse influences, is a fan- tasy celebrating the bardic life that is neatly calculated to make anyone who has perpetrated a rhyme go into the used car business. Maugham's fiction, if sufficiently analyzed, will always reveal itself to be on the side of Victorian middle-class respectability rather than the values it is supposed to espouse but actually exploits. The same, in less extenuating circumstances, is true of Williams' work. The only genuinely felt story in the volume, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," which later becomes The Glass Menagerie, is a pretty, tinkling little bit of sen- timent that reveals more of his true sensibility than all the bogus, blood- and-guts writing derived from an ideology of sexual revolt, artistic anarchy and maudlin humanitarianism, that is, apparently, popular precisely because it lacks all contemporary significance and bite. The virtue of French existentialism has always appeared to me to re- side in its operational rather than its rational power, not in its merit as a philosophic system per se. From this point of view there are no more ex- emplary manifestations of the school than the novels of Simone de Beau- voir. The intellectual scheme of She Came to Stay, for example, is patently sophomoric. The most elementary kind of confusion between ontology and psychology prevails; characters are hacked out to fit crude preconceptions and the most perplexing dilemmas of life are flattened out by ponderous slogans. Nevertheless it accumulates unusual inten- sity and significance as it moves within its conceptual framework to dramatize urgent, contemporary, human problems. It would probably be simplest to say that Madame de Beauvoir's talents lie where they are not supposed to, that is, in her power of in- tuition, her passion and her courageous exploration of the murkier labyrinths of consciousness, but this is not altogether true. It is the ideology that releases and organizes the intuitive apprehensions which in turn, reinforce, to some degree, the abstractions. === Page 139 === BOOKS 281 These processes are all at work, heightened, in what seems to me, Madame de Beauvoir's most impressive work to date. The story con- cerns Regina, an actress, who suffers from all the existential maladies that afflicted Francoise in She Came to Stay. Her ego cannot tolerate for an instant that anyone else should enjoy love or esteem. She can- not bear the thought that some day she will die and naturally, this notion constantly crosses her mind. Finally she meets Fosca who has been made immortal by swallowing an elixir. Most of the familiar existentialist concepts and tropes turn up in Fosca's narration as he takes us from the wars between the Italian city-states to the approxi- mate present. No effort is made to establish Fosca's compulsory immor- ality with any degree of plausibility. Madame de Beauvoir gives us an allegory not of the inevitable agony of human life but of a specific, quasi-pathologic horror, a state of being which, like existentialism itself, is dependent on a local culture with a width of human reference that is wholly indeterminate at present. But this horror, whatever its content, is imaginatively realized in many of the pages of All men Are Mortal. The horror rises like a sick- ening odor from Fosca's metamorphoses. Nor are we dealing with a mere venture into the macabre, for even if such horror can be traced to a perversion of the conditions of human existence, it is a perversion which is sunk deep into the structure of Western civilization. Con- sciously or unconsciously, everything in this work, its compulsiveness, the monotony, gruesome exaggeration, repetitiveness and occasional po- etry of the historic pageant, contribute to its single emotion. Indeed, it is amazing just how perfectly the existentialist system seems to con- tain and unify all Madame de Beauvoir's feelings for human relation- ships. For Fosca, with his perpetual recoil from love to indifference, his hatred of death and fear of life, his desire to run the universe and his despair when it is refractory to his will, is surely a legitimate emodi- ment of the European male intellectual as apprehended by a French- man engaged in a somewhat tardy feminist rebellion. The Vagabond is among Colette's purest compositions, a novel from which nearly everything has been removed but the one life-process which she was probably the first to bring into literature; the endless, secret, intimate welling-up of feminine feeling, stirred and released by the smallest objects, the minutest tremor, to the same extent as it is by the big or grand, always poetic and ultimate as it reveals little of the nature of the object and its humdrum connection with the rest of the external world, but attracts and uses things, places, people and scenes only to foster and maintain that magically pulsing flow as if that and === Page 140 === 282 PARTISAN REVIEW that alone were the true end of feminine life and to it all else were tributary. As Colette obliquely reminds us when she discusses the in- domitable slum-women of Paris, it is the need to maintain this delicate, passive process that is the source of the essential female ruthlessness, her whim of iron and, as Madame de Beauvoir in The Second Sex fails to mention either through insensitivity or tactics, her unbreakable shield in the war of the sexes. It is an interim period in that war, a temporary lull filled with the bitter memories and pungent smoke of the last battle that this semi- autobiographical work opens upon. Renée, the narrator, has just freed herself from a marriage to a libertine of monstrous proportions and is busy making a new life for herself as a music-hall performer. With ex- quisite sensitivity she evokes not the world about her but what that world starts to life in her, sensations, feelings, musings, which transmute themselves almost spontaneously into verbal felicities of a slight but high order, so that, as in Proust, the words and the milieu seem to be interlocked, born of each other, and possessed of a kind of self-renewing personal charm. The crux of the story is her struggle to decide between marriage and independence and her final aching acceptance of the life of the inviolate wanderer she chooses to be. The wistful elegance of Colette's style mitigates but does not ex- tinguish the great pain and torment behind the story, the pain not merely of an irrevocable, desperate choice but a sense that a long- cherished tradition of French femininity is coming to a bitter end. Colette's work (especially in this poignant, faultlessly-written volume), graceful, dedicated to the feminine sensibility with incredible exclusive- ness, is probably best understood as the last harvest of that tradition, one which had (considering the status of women elsewhere) even then lasted past its time. In the work of Madame de Beauvoir we get the awkward strength, breadth and hit-or-miss violence of a talent that tries, not only to capture the present, but, very much in accord with the law of combined development, to be in the van of the invasion of the future. William S. Poster === Page 141 === BOOKS 283 LEOPARDI IN SOLITUDE LEOFARDI. By Iris Origo. British Book Centre. $6.00. Why is it that in the present-one almost says "American"— half-century, the poetry, the life of Giacomo Leopardi, the Italian poet, born in the very small city of Recanati, a few miles inland from the Adriatic, who died, age thirty-nine, in 1837, have a particular, a poig- nant affinity to us? How do these bones and dust, relics and words in fragmentary translation, all so definitely Italian, romantic in their feel- ing, more than half classical in accent, still stir to life at a transatlantic distance? What is their meaning? A clue to answering these questions may be found in Iris Origo's second and revised edition of her biography of Leopardi, which has the air of being a life work and is one of the best lives of a poet written in the twentieth century; it is that rare book: a work of scholarship that is a work of art. Beyond Iris Origo's researches it is unlikely that further meaningful documents concerning Leopardi will be unearthed; in the best sense of the term she has written the definitive life which she has subtitled "A Study in Solitude." It is the poet in solitude that she presents, and placing them behind him, she also provides the details of his environment, the characters of his father and mother, the Palazzo Leopardi in Recanati where he was born and where he was held, bound by ties of illness and attachments of parental love, hate and indifference, until he was twenty-four. However far he ventured to escape, whether to Rome, Florence, Pisa, or at last to Naples, he remained the semi- clerical nobleman and child of provincial Recanati, always in need of parental care, ill to the point of deformity, often pedantic in conversa- tion, never at ease in urban society-and because of his unpressed clothes, his unwashed linen-he was an embarrassment whenever he ap- proached a woman. As in his life, so in his poetry his excuses for being were fought out alone: within him were the conflicts of the will-to-death against the instinct to survive his illnesses; sexual passion without fulfillment against images of vicarious love; the delights of learning, even to the pedantry of exact scholarship, against the impulse to write a poem and create within it a vision of the world. The will to break through the net of parental attachments, (which included his father's desire to make him a priest) was placed against the need for personal care-and to these were added the fears of ridicule, the conflicts of being an Italian nationalist and an individualist who leaned in favor of republicanism. All these combined to make him the classless figure of a poet, an aristo- === Page 142 === 284 PARTISAN REVIEW crat by birth, unable to assume aristocratic privileges, an unfrocked priest and a scholar without a chair at a university. These are some few of the reasons his position has its parallels to the position of the poet today—and none are more significant than his failures at practical politics, his split between clericalism and the will not to dress as a priest, between scholarly research and the actual writing of poetry. All the con- temporary conflicts of his position are in the facts of his biography— and the only optimistic conclusion that can be drawn from them is that they inspired poems that are alive today. The best of his poems are as untranslatable into English as the best of Keats's and the early Words- worth's are into Italian; he is like neither, but if one speaks of poetry that is unquestionably poetry and is unstrained in its utterance, such is the poetry that Leopardi wrote. In other words, in another language (which makes all the difference in the world) and with an undertone of irony inappropriate to Wordsworth, he expressed something that can be called in English “the still sad music of humanity.” The tenuous na- ture of being on earth, the continued duel between life and death are among his themes. His poems to the moon recall (to English readers) “Bright star! would I were as steadfast as thou art,” but his vicarious images of love—girls seen from the study windows of the Palazzo Re- canati—these are completely unlike anything in English. The nearest approach in English to Leopardi's Italian is Ezra Pound's translation of his Sopra il Ritratto di una Bella Donna: Scolpito nel Monumento Sepolcrale Della Medesima. The undercurrents of Leo- pardi's irony which seem so modern are distinctly heard: Such wast thou, Who art now But buried dust and rusted skeleton. Above the bones and mire, Motionless, placed in vain, Mute mirror of the flight of speeding years, Sole guard of grief Sole guard of memory Standeth this image of the beauty sped. O glance, when thou wast still as thou art now, How hast thou set the fire A-tremble in men's veins; O lip curved high To mind me of some urn of full delight, O throat girt round of old with swift desire, O palms of Love, that in your wonted ways Not once but many a day === Page 143 === NEW DIRECTIONS Books for Spring Charles Baudelaire FLOWERS OF EVIL, An Anthology of Translations. For this centenary edition, Marthiel and Jackson Mathews have chosen the best translation for each of the 163 poems. The com- plete and definitive bilingual edition. $6.00 James Joyce STEPHEN HERO. A new edition incorporating recently discovered sections of the manuscript, with a preface by John Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. $4.00 Federico SELECTED POEMS. Garcic Lorca A wide choice from all of Lorca's poetry, designed to present every aspect of his achievement. Includes the great Elegy on the Death of a Bullfighter. New Classics Series. $1.75 Kenneth Rexroth 100 JAPANESE POEMS. Kenneth Rexroth has translated 100 poems to illustrate the whole range of Japanese verse. A handsome gift volume, designed and printed by Dr. Hans Mardersteig. Slipcase. $3.50 Enid Starkie PETRUS BOREL, The Lycanthrope. Dr. Starkie paints the incredible age in which this extravagant romantic poet lived as she vividly narrates the course of his career from the early sensational successes in Paris to his last years of failure in Algeria. Illustrated. $5.00 Dylan Thomas ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE, and other stories. A new collection of 20 short stories, plus the long chapters of the picaresque novel Thomas did not live to complete. $3.50 Tennessee Williams CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF The text of the play will be published about six weeks following the Broadway opening. $3.00 NEW DIRECTIONS, 333 Sixth Avenue, New York 14, N. Y. === Page 144 === 286 PARTISAN REVIEW Felt hands turn ice a-sudden, touching ye, That ye were once! of all the grace ye had That which remaineth now Shameful, most sad Finds 'neath this rock fit mould, fit resting place! It is to be regretted that Pound did not translate a number of Leo- pardi's poems; had he done so the impossible would have been almost achieved. The illness that Leopardi suffered was scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, a disease which made its first appearance during his adolescence, and the disease was allowed to run its course through the peculiarities of parental neglect and indulgence. Conte Monaldo Leopardi, the boy's father, a provincial nobleman in command of the Papal city of Re- canati, nearly lost a fortune which was narrowly retrieved by his wife who was as miserly as she was pious, so pious that she believed her children, soon after birth, would be better off in heaven. Conte Monaldo found refuge from his wife by collecting indiscriminately a large library into which he led the small Giacomo, dressed as an infant abbé in a cloak that swept the ground, a costume which he wore until his nine- teenth year; it cloaked his deformity, and the boy, locked up in his father's library, being precocious read beyond his years and seemed to prepare himself for the priesthood. Actually the father wished to hold the boy as his companion, to have him read the books which neither his own gentle mind nor intimidated spirit could understand. When the imprisoned boy heard the name of Giordani dropped by a visitor to his father's library, he wrote letters at once to the one writer in Italy whom Byron respected. This action began Leopardi's career; Giordani visited him at Recanati and inspired him to write in the cause of a united Italy. Although the elder writer helped Leopardi pub- lish poems he could not free him from attachments at home; nor could he, spirited orator that he was, reform the miserly habits of the boy's parents, nor could he create more than a fog of horror in the mind of Conte Monaldo. Leopardi's escape from Recanati became in his short life a long series of indecisive, and at last, bitterly won battles. A five- month visit to Rome in the care of an uncle ended in failure; his hope was a clerkship in philology at the Papal Court; but he could not bend his pride to wear the short cape of a Papal servant, nor could the hunchback, grown conscious of his deformity, force himself to smile at those who patronized him. He returned home for two years, then drifted by means of ill-paying tutoring assignments to Bologna and Milan, to Florence and Pisa, and on a return to Florence met Ranieri, his savior, his "liberator," a handsome young Neapolitan of liberal persuasion, who === Page 145 === BACK ISSUES OF PR now available at reduced prices-30c each (regular price 60c) Any four of the following for $1.00 22 OCTOBER 1949: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Causes of the Civil War; Louis Martin-Chauffier-Proust and the Double "I"; Angus Wilson- O'Hara in Samarra. 23 NOVEMBER 1949: Albert Camus-Between Yes and No; Saul Bellow- From the Life of Augie March; Elizabeth Hardwick-Elizabeth Bowen's Fiction; Clement Greenberg-Our Period Style. 24 DECEMBER 1949: José Ortega y Gasset-In Search of Goethe from With- in; Allen Tate-Our Cousin, Mr. Poe; Leslie A. Fiedler-Montana, or the End of Jean Jacques Rousseau. 25 JANUARY 1950: Arthur Mizener-Scott Fitzgerald; James Burnham- The Suicidal Mania of American Business; Alfred Kazin-On Melville as Scripture. 30 JULY-AUGUST 1950: Marcel Aymé-Crossing Paris (a story); Geoffrey Gorer-The Erotic Myth of America; Raymond Aron-Politics and the French Intellectuals. 31 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1950: Randall Jarrell-The Profession of Poetry; Hollis Alpert-Philadelphia: Plans and Pigeons; Erich Auerbach-The World of Rabelais. 32 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1950: Marie Bonaparte-Poe and "The Black Cat"; Saul Bellow-The Trip to Galena (a story); George Barker, Horace Gregory, Robert Lowell-Three long poems. 33 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1951: Arthur Koestler-The Age of Longing (a story); Harvey Breit-Sense of Faulkner; Randall Jarrell-The Obscurity of the Poet; Delmore Schwartz-The Grapes of Crisis. 34 MARCH-APRIL 1951: James Agee-The Morning Watch (a short novel); Sidney Hook-Philosophy and/or Agony; Stephen Spender-Reflections on the Literary Life. 35 MAY-JUNE 1951: Elizabeth Hardwick-A Florentine Conference (a story); William Barrett-Fitzgerald and America; Erich Auerbach-Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert. 36 JULY-AUGUST 1951: Andre Gide-Two Declarations; Diana Trilling- A Communist and His Ideals; Eleanor Clark-The Fountains of Rome; Louis Auchincloss-Edith Wharton and Her New Yorks. 38 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1951: Saul Bellow-The Einhorns (a story); William Barrett-American Fiction and American Values; Raymond Aron -The Leninist Myth of Imperialism. ALSO: All bi-monthly issues for 1952, with exception of January-February. All bi-monthly issues for 1953. PARTISAN REVIEW, 513 Sixth Avenue, New York 11, N. Y. I enclose for the following back issues (insert numbers below) NAME STREET CITY ZONE STATE === Page 146 === 288 PARTISAN REVIEW as Iris Origo writes had "a generosity greater than his means and... more enthusiasm than intelligence." In Ranieri Leopardi found his pa- tron, and through him the last shadow of a vicarious love affair. He led his patron into a flirtation with Fanny Targioni, the fluttering sen- sual wife of a Florentine doctor and botanist; to her Leopardi was il mio gobbetto; to him she was the Aspasia of one of his last poems. Her not unkindly name for him, since she was both thoughtless and insensi- tive, was among the horrors that drove him from Recanati where, when- ever he stepped out of doors, children ran at him crying "il gobbo." So far as his life ran its course, none of Leopardi's conflicts were resolved-only the care of his patron increased the number of years he was kept alive, and his patron's gifts of pocket money to him were as erratic as Ranieri's own income. The last glimpses that we are given of Leopardi are of a hunchbacked, slender figure in a faded blue frock coat eating ices and sweet cakes. A doctor had forbidden the sweets, but the ices cooled Leopardi's feverish throat, and the sweets, like a child's desire for them grown to adult passion, were his last great need. In one of his last letters was the phrase, "if I were a poet." Only his poems in their posthumous survival were to clear away that doubt. Horace Gregory A Tamiment Institute Forum: IS CO-EXISTENCE POSSIBLE? Chairman: SEN. RICHARD L. NEUBERGER Democrat of Oregon Panelists: DR. GERHART NIEMEYER Consultant, Council on Foreign Relations; formerly Planning Ad- visor, Bureau of United Nations Affairs, Dept. of State DR. ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. Professor of History, Harvard University DR. HARRY SCHWARTZ Soviet Affairs Specialist, The New York Times MR. BERTRAM D. WOLFE Author, Three Who Made a Revo- lution; formerly Chief, Ideologi- cal Advisory Staff, Voice of America At the auditorium of the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd St., N. Y. Thursday, April 14, 8:30 p.m. Ad- mission: $1. Mail ticket orders to THE TAMIMENT INSTITUTE 7 East 15th Street, New York 3 LIBERAL PRESS, INC. printers of PARTISAN REVIEW • 80 FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK 3, N. Y. === Page 147 === binger harvest F orce and freedom pous-seau and romanticism WAY Youth PLAYWRIGHT AS THINKER The philosophy of MODERN ART creative intuition in art. MYSTICISM MERIDIAN BOOKS published by NOONDAY PRESS the NEW series of soft cover books for the serious reader Meridian Books are sewn-bound for durability M1 Abinger Harvest by E. M. 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