=== Page 1 === PARTISAN REVIEW SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER, 1950 WILLIAM BARRETT World War III: The Ideological Conflict ERICH AUERBACH The World in Pantagruel's Mouth SIDNEY HOOK Berlin Congress RANDALL JARRELL The Profession of Poetry NICOLA CHIAROMONTE Paris Letter HOLLIS ALPERT Philadelphia: Plans and Pigeons BERNARD MALAMUD The First Seven Years (a story) REVIEWS by Isaiah Berlin, Richard Chase, John Clive, Leslie A. Fiedler, Joseph Frank, Hans Meyerhoff, Philip Rahv 7 60c === Page 2 === about a provocative book: Andreas: HENRY JAMES and the EXPANDING HORIZON “... provocative introduction ... suggestive interpretation. He presents in a convincing way a compact, logical development of the thesis ... the reader is forced to recognize the cogency of the argument as it is developed, and to admire the beautiful struc- ture of the author's thought. He has given us a well organized guide to reading James and has stimu- lated our thinking.” —Lee E. Cannon, Christian Century “... notable contribution to our understanding ... an ex- tremely sensible interpretation of The Turn of the Screw.” — Albert Frank Gegenheimer, Arizona Quarterly “... his findings ... are after all downright discoveries.” — John Lucas, Furioso “... he [Andreas] belongs to the minority that has read at length. ... it has nevertheless not pre- vented Mr. Andreas from coming nearer to the heart of the novelist's work than most of the “intuitive” critics ...” — Leon Edel, Amer- ican Literature “Mr. Andreas is an amateur critic of rare perspicuity and judgment. ...” — Nineteenth-Century Fiction “His book, as this summary sug- gests, is unmitigated trash ... “The synopses themselves ... are almost obscenely inept ... “A series of reductive plot synopses ... organized into schematic, slipshod, and meaningless cate- gories ... “The height of something is prob- ably reached in Andreas' mon- strous exaggeration of Edmund Wilson's cockeyed reading of The Turn of the Screw ... “Even if Andreas had understood the plots and paraphrased them well, he would be no nearer James's serious concerns ... “An incompetent and ridiculous work.” —Stanley Edgar Hyman, Hudson Review an opinion about this compact and controversial little book is fast becoming mandatory in literary and critical groups. Have you formed yours yet? order your copy today published by UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS SEATTLE 5, WASHINGTON available at all bookstores === Page 3 === ● James Agee Hannah Arendt ● Newton Arvin ● W. H. Auden ● A. J. Ayer William Barrett ● R. P. Blackmur George Boas ● Robert Gorham Davis John Dewey ● Allan Dowling James T. Farrell ● Robert Graves Clement Greenberg ● Sidney Hook RELIGION and the INTELLECTUALS Irving Howe Alfred Kazin Paul Kecskemeti Dwight Macdonald Jacques Maritain Marianne Moore Henry Bamford Parkes William Phillips Philip Rahv I. A. Richards Isaac Rosenfeld Meyer Schapiro Allen Tate Paul Tillich 29 leading writers, philosophers and theologians examine the new trend toward religion in this symposium which has been reprinted and discussed all over America and Europe. When Religion and the Intellectuals first ap- peared this year in four consecutive issues of PR, it aroused so much interest that we have now made the entire series available in a handsome, 140-page paper- bound book. PR Series Number 3 80 Cents Please send me copies of Religion and the Intellectuals I enclose NAME STREET CITY ZONE STATE PARTISAN REVIEW 30 West 12th Street, N. Y. C. === Page 4 === THE NEW AMERICAN EDITION OF Everyman's Library EPD THESE beautifully printed master- pieces of the world's greatest litera- ture, philosophy and history sell for only $1.25 apiece. Colorful cloth bind- ings, stamped in gold, with heavy cellophane jackets, they are books designed to be permanently used in your library. Published this fall MOBY-DICK By Herman Melville. Introduction by Sherman Paul, Ph.D. GREAT EXPECTATIONS By Charles Dickens. Introduction by G. K. Chesterton THE WORLD OF WASHINGTON IRVING By Van Wyck Brooks. SELECTED WRITINGS By St. Thomas Aquinas. Selected and edited by The Rev. Father D'Arcy THE HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR By Thucydides. Translated and with an Introduction by Richard Crawley Published last spring THE CONFESSIONS OF ST. AUGUSTINE Translated, with Preface & Notes by Dr. E. B. Pusey OF THE NATURE OF THINGS By Lucretius. Metrical translation by William Ellery Leonard NEW ENGLAND: INDIAN SUMMER By Van Wyck Brooks. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT AND DISCOURSES By Jean Jacques Rousseau. With an Introduction by G. D. H. Cole THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO Translated, with an Introduction by Dr. A. D. Lindsay PRIDE AND PREJUDICE By Jane Austen. With an Introduction by R. Brimley Johnson UTILITARIANISM, LIBERTY AND REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT By John Stuart Mill. With an Introduction by Dr. A. D. Lindsay PLAYS AND POEMS By Christopher Marlowe. With an Introduction by Edward Thomas THE ETHICS OF ARISTOTLE Translated by D. P. Chase. Edited with Notes and an Introduction by Prof. J. A. Smith LEVIATHAN By Thomas Hobbes. With an Introduction by Dr. A. D. Lindsay E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY, Inc. CONTRIBUTORS BERNARD MALAMUD is a young writer who lives in Oregon. "The First Seven Years" is one of his first published stories. ERICH AUERBACH, who spent last year at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, will teach next year at Yale. KATHERINE HOSKINS' last book of verse was published by the Cummington Press. HOLLIS ALPERT is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. RANDALL JARRELL'S new book of verse will be published in the fall by Harcourt, Brace. RICHARD CHASE's latest book is a critical study of Herman Mel- ville. LESLIE A. FIEDLER teaches at Mon- tana State University. ISAIAH BERLIN, who was formerly on the staff of the British Embassy in Washington, is now teaching History at New College, Oxford. JOHN CLIVE teaches History at Harvard. LAURETTE SEJOURNE, the widow of Victor Serge, is now living in Mexico. === Page 5 === JOHN STEPHAN PAINTINGS September 26 - October 14 BETTY PARSONS GALLERY - 15 East 57 Street The Novel of VIOLENCE in America: 1920-1950 by W. M. FROHOCK Critically appraises the important novels of Dos Passos, Wolf, Farrell, Cain, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Caldwell and Hemingway. "... a cheerfully challenging discus- sion."-N. Y. Times "... written with uncommon zest."- Saturday Review of Literature 8 full-page portrait drawings 224 pages $3.75 UNIVERSITY PRESS IN DALLAS Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas HOW TO GET YOUR BOOK PUBLISHED ... Our basic policy is to encourage new writers. If you are looking for a publisher of your book (or pam- phlet), learn how we can help you. Send us your manuscript or write today for Free Booklets PA. VANTAGE PRESS, Inc. 35 So. 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Manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. Copyright September-October, 1950, by PARTISAN REVIEW. Reentered as second-class matter, May 19, 1950, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. === Page 7 === SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER, 1950 VOLUME XVII, NUMBER 7 CONTENTS WORLD WAR III: IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT, William Barrett 651 THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS, Bernard Malamud 661 THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH, Erich Auerbach 672 FILIAL, Katherine Hoskins 695 AND NO AMENDS, R. P. Blackmur 696 PHILADELPHIA: PLANS AND PIGEONS, Hollis Alpert 697 PARIS LETTER, Nicola Chiaromonte 707 THE BERLIN CONGRESS FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM, Sidney Hook 715 A NEW GOLIATH, William Burford 723 THE PROFESSION OF POETRY, Randall Jarrell 724 BOOKS MELVILLE AND HIS CRITICS, Philip Rahv 732 RHETORIC OF RHETORIC, Richard Chase 736 ON TWO FRONTIERS, Leslie A. Fiedler 739 RITUAL AND THE DRAMA, Joseph Frank 743 THE ENERGY OF PASTERNAK, Isaiah Berlin 748 EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS, Hans Meyerhoff 752 THE EDUCATION OF ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, John Clive 755 VARIETY THE BONES OF CUATEMOC, Laurette Sejourné 761 === Page 8 === NEW YORK'S NEW CENTER FOR THE ARTS The CHILTERN LIBRARY now only $1.50 each ON ART & SOCIALISM by William Morris RODERICK HUDSON by Henry James THE COMEDIES of William Congreve TEN SHORT STORIES by Henry James TALES OF GOOD & EVIL by Nicolai Gogol WASHINGTON SQUARE by Henry James THRU FRANCE and ITALY by Smollett THE AMERICAN by Henry James THE LAKE POETS by Thomas De Quincey ...a book sampling Nash · THE UNFORTUNATE TRAVELLER with Michael Ayrton drawings Sitwell, Sacheverell · SPAIN Beljame · MEN OF LETTERS IN THE XVIII CENTURY Barrault · REFLEXIONS SUR LE THEATRE James · THE REVERBERATORS Neider (ed) · SHORT NOVELS OF THE MASTERS Kafka · Joyce · Melville · James · etc. BEN NICHOLSON HENRY MOORE L'ART OFFICIEL, GREVY A LEBRUN FROM SICKERT TO 1948 A complete list of Chiltern Library will be mailed to you upon request ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE BOOK OF JOB Engraved by William Blake with philosophic interpretation by S. 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KIRGO'S BOOKS-by-MAIL, 266 Bleecker St., N.Y.C. 14, WA 9-4136 *** Contemporary Poetry-Prose Criticism OUT OF PRINT & 1st EDITIONS Large stock of scarce back issues of Little Mags: Little Review - Broom - Dial - early Partisan, etc. CAMBRIDGE BOOKSHOP 5600 HOLLYWOOD BLVD. Hollywood 28, Calif. Tel. GL. 3087 === Page 11 === COURSES IN LITERATURE Beginning October 9th AN APPROACH TO SHAKESPEARE Dr. John H. H. Lyon, Professor Emeritus Columbia University A SURVEY OF GREEK LITERATURE Dr. Moses Hadas, Associate Professor of Greek and Latin Columbia University. MODERN AMERICAN NOVELISTS Lloyd Morris, Author of "William James: The Message of a Modern Mind", "The Rebellious Puritan", "Postscript to Yesterday", "Not So Long Ago" and other works. 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Truman's prompt decision to send American troops came as a surprise to most people, and almost overnight a lot of political dis- cussions became obsolete. ( A few days before the North Korean attack a lady editor was still telling us "America must learn to get along with Russia.") More important than Truman's action itself was the immediate and almost universal popular approval of it. It looks as if isolationism as a stage in American history has definitely been passed: in their own way and in their own terms the American people know they cannot avoid the international role to which their national existence commits them. After the new Draft went into effect, I heard one teenager, due to be inducted the next day, tell a friend at a dance: "And we have to leave all this to go fight those Russians." In a political sense these words are more accurate than the evasive and complicated analyses put forward by some journalists: the people know, if their political commentators do not, that Russia and the United States are now locked in a struggle for the world. However, this world conflict is not yet world war. The third world war will not have begun until Russian soldiers, rather than the satellite shock troops, have been committed. Thus the Korean affair, while banish- ing much confusion, still leaves the world in an ambiguous No Man's Land between peace and war. Of course, by the time these words come off the press, this further uncertainty too may have been clari- fied: the Americans in Korea may have been thrust into the sea, and the third world war may have started in some other place. Nobody can predict exactly what is going to happen next, nor where. At the moment, however, Russia enjoys too many advantages in === Page 14 === 652 PARTISAN REVIEW its present situation to push immediately for a world war. For the first time in history possession of the Eurasian heartland becomes as formidable as the geographer MacKinder prophesied. From this central fortress Russia can push East, West, or South into Iran, thus distributing American strength thinly all over the globe in battles against satellite troops, while the Red Army itself is held back for the eventual main assault. In the meantime America is becoming half mobilized for war, and the momentum will probably continue until the whole nation is on a war footing-but without a full-scale war on its hands. If the world conflict does not pass for some years into the world war, the U.S. will thus find itself in a situation new in its history: full mobilization without being fully at war; or, if you simplify a little: full mobilization in peace-time. Such mobilization will place a considerable strain on an economy already suffering from inflation. Probably the economy can absorb the strain, but the human burdens may be such as to drive the American people back to some mood of compromise. But there will be more serious dangers than the deprivation of consumer goods: the weight of regimented and centralized authority over such a protracted period, without the presence of a real war, may change the whole quality of American political life, and it will require energy and vigilance to see that there is no loss of basic liberties. When the world conflict becomes the world war, our fates will rest pretty largely in the hands of the military. Until then some political discussion is still relevant, though its area has already been considerably narrowed by military events. In this intervening period the chief problem of politics becomes the diplomatic and propaganda war (they are now, in fact, inseparable). At last the authorities seem to be waking up to realize how badly the U.S. has been beaten so far in the battle of ideas. "We haven't told our story well enough," General Smith put it mildly to a congressional hearing, and Eisen- hower insisted to the same hearing that America's most potent weapon was not its A-bomb but its T-bomb (T for truth). We have also been hearing lately about a new organization, Radio Free Europe, organized by American businessmen to broadcast to the European countries under Russian domination. Here if anywhere is a chance for private initiative to prove its superiority: unlike the official "Voice of America" the new organization need not restrict itself to the === Page 15 === COMMENT 653 pallid language of diplomatese and may therefore strike some harder blows. But the U.S. is not going to get anywhere in this war of ideas unless it succeeds in obtaining some better intellectual grasp of the basis of its propaganda. No doubt there is a formidable body of truth on America's side, but truth these days prevails little against slogans, and the most powerful slogans are on Russia's side. The slogans of Marxism* work best in a disordered society, which is now the condition of most Asiatic countries. Marxism once held that the revolution would come as the last stroke of inevitable evolution in the most advanced indus- trial countries. But this is one more bit of Marxist theory that our Marxist century has disproved: Communist revolutions have arrived in the most industrially backward nations-Russia in 1917, China in 1949-precisely because a more pauperized and politically backward proletariat is more easily reduced to political submission. The Asiatic level of society begins to appear as the typical situation in which Communism can come to power. Unfortunately it is also a situation where American values fight at a distinct disadvantage. In the Asiatic countries where the great masses exist in incredible poverty, where social stability has crumbled or is crumbling, and where the habits and feelings of self-government are unknown, the values of a liberal civilization do not apply and probably would not even be understood. Into this social chaos Com- munist propaganda and organization enter very easily. The propa- ganda could not succeed without the organization; but on the other hand the organization also needs the propaganda to recruit (under the threatening presence of the organization, to be sure) consider- able mass support for itself. Communism cannot be expected to solve the problem of poverty in Asia: after thirty years of absolute rule in Russia, disposing of immense resources of population and raw materials, it has lowered the standard of living below the Czarist regime's in 1913; but Communism does bring its own solution of the problem of social stability: for the few million Chinese who become * By Marxism here it might be claimed that I really mean Leninism. The dis- tinction would be important in a discussion of the history of ideas; in politics it is pedantic, or, worse than pedantic, confusing. The only politically effective form of Marxism now in existence is Leninism (or Stalinism), and this is therefore the only form of Marxism with which political discussion can significantly deal. This shall be the meaning I attach to Marxism throughout this discussion. === Page 16 === 654 PARTISAN REVIEW ardent Communists, the problem of their poverty will be solved, and the rest of the population will be held so tightly in the grip of the police that their starvation will not bring any social disruption. Liberal journalists like Max Lerner lament the fact, apropos of the military superiority of the North over the South Koreans, that Russian Communism can get people to fight its battles in Asia, while the U.S. has been unable so far to launch any dynamic move- ments for democracy. But this is just what one should expect. A democratic regime cannot be imposed in the way in which the oc- cupying Red Army sets up its own puppet dictatorships. Democracy is real only as it is an organic growth from a whole society: the political virtues necessary for it require the habits and discipline of self-government, and, above all, a certain level of prosperity. Behind this lament by liberals breathes the old hankering after the wave of the future. However: mass enthusiasm for a movement is no proof of its political value; Hitler commanded an enthusiasm from the German masses beyond that evoked anywhere by any Communist regime; and presumably one doesn't wait to espouse liberal values until one is sure they are the winning side. A lament of this kind betrays another victory of Marxist propa- ganda over the liberal mind in America. The light of present events hardly reveals the last fifteen years as a shining chapter in the history of American liberalism. Almost throughout, it is a record of bad faith and bad conscience. In their fatal historical encounter with Marxism American liberals succumbed to a fundamental duplicity: they never committed themselves explicitly for or against Marxism, even during the radical thirties; hence they were never compelled to bring the parts of the Marxist system into confrontation with facts, nor even to examine the way in which Marxism conflicted with the liberal ideals they were supposed to have espoused; the result is that American liberalism, crypto-Stalinist in the thirties, remains crypto-Marxist in the fifties, the outlines of its ideological allegiances perpetually blur- red. Naturally there follows the ritual substitution of demagogic phrases for social realities-particularly to sustain some uncriticized illusions about "masses" and "mass movements." Neither in the ancient nor the modern world does history show that all mass revolts were such as to benefit either humanity at large or the masses them- selves. A revolt in the name of the masses may not be a revolt of the === Page 17 === COMMENT 655 masses at all. The mass revolts in modern times have never been sim- ple and spontaneous uprisings of the whole population, despite the mystique propagated by Marxism on this point. (The mystique is expressed nowhere more eloquently, because he sincerely believed in it, than in Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, a book which is not so much an account of historical fact as a vast expansion of a poetical metaphor.) The reality has been something different: a crumbling of the accepted social order, vast unrest among the masses, and then a tightly organized group able to enlist an effective minor- ity in its fight for power, and thus eventually to impose its discipline upon the disorder of society. Abstractly speaking, such societies ought to be left to take their historical course, evolving toward whatever forms they are capable of. However, since Russian Communism is compelled, through the momentum of its own dictatorship, to con- quer what remains of liberal civilization and therefore exploits these disorders all over the world, the U.S. is compelled in turn to embark upon international action to halt the tide. Can the U.S. hope to launch an opposing tide of its own in Asia? What Communism has to offer the Asiatics are not any specific proposals to solve the economic and political problems of these coun- tries, but much more powerful incitements to human passions: its apocalyptic visions of redemption and revenge. The first propaganda leaflets dropped by the North Koreans upon American troops blamed the "monopoly capitalists" for the war. Under other circumstances this might have been funny. What genuine knowledge of monopoly capitalists can we expect from a North Korean peasant? Capitalism has no more been the cause of his poverty (or that of the Chinese) than Communism would be its cure. The "monopoly capitalists" are the imaginary devils that the Communist religion can summon up for hatred and exorcism by the Korean peasant. Scientific method- in politics as elsewhere is piecemeal, analytic, and tentative: social questions approached in this way, far from enkindling the imagination or passions, are likely to prove as dry as income tax returns. To put it paradoxically: the political values America has to offer are superior precisely to the degree that they are unable to command the kind of passions aroused by Communism. This is no consolation, however: America might win a logical victory and suffer an historical defeat. In history, as Hegel observed (and it was a point which Marx, === Page 18 === 656 PARTISAN REVIEW borrowing from him, turned to demagogic use), ideas are effective only as they operate through human passions. It would be bad enough if America had only to deal with an Asia in chaos, but the situation is infinitely worsened by the fact that much of Europe tends toward the Asiatic level. Six years of war and then its destructive aftermath have produced a human chaos in central Europe: populations uprooted, driven into exile, shot by the Hitler or Stalin terror. The survivors are driven to seek above every- thing else a place for themselves in any regime that promises stability. Many refugees from Poland and Eastern Germany, unable to find any place or employment for themselves in the West, have already gone back to the East. There, if they keep their mouths shut, they may wind up in a labor camp for non-politicals, where they may at least have a subsistence ration. The whirlwind sown in the center of Europe—first by Hitler, but prolonged by the entering Red Army— does not leave behind it a climate favorable to the liberal political structures we would like to see there. Turning to Western Europe, we find that the war has left there a more subtle, though no less real, social disorder, which the Marshall Plan has not yet been able to establish a stable enough prosperity to cure. If a country like France is non-Communist today, it is not out of any intellectual conviction about the nature of Communism, but out of deep traditional habits, passions, and prejudices of the French, the most bourgeois of all peoples. Left to her intellectuals, France would long since have gone over to Communism. In our last issue Raymond Aron presented a dismal picture of the French trahison des clercs in relation to Communism. What has America to tell these intellectuals? That there are forced-labor camps in Russia, that indi- vidual and political liberties are non-existent, that economic inequal- ities are frozen there to a degree unknown in the West, etc., etc.? All this information has been in the hands of French intellectuals for some time—the point is that they refuse to draw the conclusions from it. Many things prevent them: opportunism, the proximity of the Red Army, resentment of American wealth, the disbelief in the French nation itself through the defeat in the war. Not the least reason, however, is the fact that Marxism has been the unquestioned climate of opinion in which intellectuals have existed now for many years. Thus Russian propaganda inherits the work achieved by genera- === Page 19 === COMMENT 657 tions of socialists and Marxists, among whom, alas, must be counted many well-intentioned enemies of the Bolsheviks. Ironically enough (though the irony is grim), the appeal of Communism for the Western intellectual is not very different from what it is for the Korean peas- ant: literary men and literary intellectuals are attracted to Commu- nism precisely by its great black and white simplifications of history. Somewhere in the background of the Western intellectual's mind, of course, there moves the vague feeling that Marxism has also been established as a science, though he himself has never tested its scientific claims. Far from being confined to the economic question, this per- vasive climate positively produces a disgust with all the values of bourgeois civilization. Decades of Marxism have persuaded the intel- ligentsia that the values of legality, due process, judicial freedom- the values that the great bourgeois revolutions conquered from des- potic monarchs-are only "formal" freedoms, empty "abstractions," and therefore trivial and unimportant. What if the last three decades demonstrate, as clearly as one could want, that political power takes precedence over economic power; that it is the Marxist view which is really abstract, being unable to account for the course of history since the Russian Revolution; and, finally, that political liberty now reveals itself as the most concrete and real value in a society? It would take nothing less than a major revolution of mind to get the European intelligentsia thinking along these lines. The historic process here cannot be restricted to economic and political sectors alone. In Western Europe we witness nothing less than the decline of a whole civilization, in the course of which all the older values become one by one devalued. As good an illustration as any is the career of a writer like Sartre. The most brilliant and energetic intellectual of his generation, Sartre is also one of its most typical products. Purely as a literary man, he illustrates this new and complex moment of French civilization: willing to settle for a litera- ture that is not very far from propaganda and that discards the stan- dards of the high literature developed during the bourgeois period, he is part of the general process of abnegation of past values. The exponent of a philosophy that sets him at odds with Marxism, he nevertheless exists so completely in the Marxist epoch that when he comes to look at social facts he sees them through the crudest of Marxist blinkers. If we remember that we are dealing here with a man === Page 20 === 658 PARTISAN REVIEW who has come before the public principally as the exponent of a philosophy that Communism must attack and does, and who is there fore often engaged in polemic with the Communists, we are able to attach all the more weight to our point that in this period of European civilization the intellectual is a person of new human allegiances. Against these new and mediocre allegiances, André Malraux has felt that what is needed is nothing less than to resuscitate the concept of Man, of which Communism, in his view, is a denial. Everything in his history that makes man a superior and interesting animal, his complex individuality, his spiritual heroism and conflicts—all are negated by the humanity represented by the crass and routinized commissars of the East, the "new Neanderthal men," as Koestler once called them. This is hardly a negligible point. From one's personal contacts with Communists one remembers those moments of recoil when one glimpsed the human substance behind their political ration alizations; and when one then saw quite clearly that the very achieve ment of their society, all obstacles overcome, would be an appalling break with the civilization of the past. This is the background for understanding the recent purges of the arts in the Soviet Union. Those purges were not at all the gratuitous comedy that some Americans have thought, but an act of self-defense organic to a society which must aspire toward human (though not technological nor administrative) mediocrity, and for which art is dangerous as soon as it awakens any complex feelings about human life. But we notice about Malraux's effort: first, that it is an idea for the consumption of intellectuals only, and, second, that the idea does not seem to have made much head way among French intellectuals. The East has its own conception of the hero (Hero of the Soviet Union), and the West cannot be roused to remember what it once thought was heroic. In their French context, the values Malraux talks about seem already to ring a little strangely with the overtones of an individualism belonging to another epoch. All of the foregoing adds up to a pretty desperate picture of America's resources in the propaganda war. But the situation, though desperate, need not be hopeless. Nobody fights on the assumption of hopelessness, and the U.S. has already committed itself to fight in the third world conflict. Besides history is full of flukes—like the Russian Revolution, as Lenin himself knew; and there happen also to be some psychological chinks in the armor of Communism. === Page 21 === COMMENT 659 Unfortunately the chief weaknesses exist for the peoples who already lie in the grip of Communism and who know what a Com- munist regime is really like but who are held down so tightly by the police that they can do nothing about it. Nevertheless these people constitute a danger to the enemy behind his lines. Czechoslovakia, a country which had a middle class and strong traditions of liberty, is probably the most fertile field for Western propaganda. But so far very little has been done and time is running out, for the Communists are rapidly liquidating those elements of the population that carry the liberal traditions, and the younger generation coming to maturity may very soon have no notion at all of Western values. Here, Amer- ica's T-bomb may very well prove a dud so long as the Communists are in a position to document their lies to produce some mass credulity. Instead, the West will have to work upon all the sources of emotion— nationalistic, local, humanitarian and religious* feelings—that still attach the Czech to his humanity of the past. But propaganda also * It is perhaps worth noting that this does not in the least commit me to either side of the controversy in our last issue between Messrs. Van den Haag and Hook on the subject of organized religion. My discussion has nothing to do with such ambitious questions as the necessity of myth, the will to believe, etc. I simply note the fact that as the ordinary man becomes detached from church member- ship he loses one more barrier between himself and the featureless masses, the human ciphers which totalitarian dictators need as their material. But I place no exclusive emphasis upon church membership (and note that I do not speak of The Church); the point would hold also of membership, say, in a democratic trade union with some patriotic attachment to its country that is, of membership in any group that fostered the feeling of being an individual person and a citizen, rather than the mass feeling of anonymity. My view here is that of Schumpeter (Capitalism, Democracy, and Socialism): capitalist civilization declines, not through failure in economic performance, but through undermining the institu- tions that shore up its society. Or, more starkly: Capitalism defeats itself through the excess of its own rationality by destroying the non-rational emotions that attach men to their social group. I am pretty sure that Hook knows that the American soldiers in Korea are not fighting because they have traversed his rational arguments about Communism; they fight out of certain feelings— of patriotism, corps loyalty, and perhaps also hatred of Communism, of which by the way they may know very little beyond what is contained in phrases like "Godless Russia." It may also be worth emphasizing that the appeal to religious freedom should be only one of the weapons in this battle. Good use can also be made of non- Communist radical groups. A friend of mine suggested, in jest, to an American official that the U.S. ought to give a million dollars to David Rousset's R.D.R. movement in France. The suggestion was a very practical one, though never taken seriously. Groups for which the words "socialism" and "revolution" still have tremendous emotional charges might be useful allies in detaching members from the C.P., who may discover that they can find such emotional outlets in an organ- ization that is not tied to the Kremlin. === Page 22 === 660 PARTISAN REVIEW demands an organizational base behind it. If the West were to pro- ceed in Russian fashion here, it would build a Czech army of re- sistance directly across the border on German soil, and broadcast to Czechoslovakia from this base. But the West is bound by habits of legality to which Russia does not subscribe, and probably will not be this daring. The form of legality is something that the West cannot properly abandon, and it may very well be that legality itself may in time prove to carry some power in this struggle, particularly if the United Nations begins to count for more; but victories in war are the prize for risks taken, and if propaganda is a part of the total conflict, the West can no more fight a hedgehog battle here than it could in the purely military area of the war. Is it conceivable, for example, that the U.S. may soon begin broadcasts to the Ukrainians openly fomenting them to national insurrection? Similar considerations apply to Formosa, which might become an effective base for a propa- ganda attack upon the Chinese mainland. Even if there were no other reasons, this would be sufficient to justify the holding of For- mosa at all costs. In the last analysis the West has only one slogan for its counter- crusade: “No Slavery!” Formerly this would have been considered good enough to galvanize men's emotions for battle. But we live in a world where liberal values have become an expendable luxury, and where the U.S. already begins to be isolated from the other nations by its great wealth. Let us not forget that Henry Wallace once described this as the Century of the Common Man; from the opposite pole of the spirit Ortega y Gasset called it the century of the massman; but the two phrases may come to be a description of the same thing: the historical epoch in which the word “liberty” no longer resounds to human ears. Depending on one's values, this may or may not seem a measure of how far the present epoch falls, in its human quality, below the highest levels of bourgeois civilization. In any case, it hap- pens to be the epoch in which the West now finds itself at bay. William Barrett (The questions raised in Mr. Barrett's Comment will be the subject of further discussion in subsequent issues.) === Page 23 === Bernard Malamud THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS Feld, the shoemaker, felt annoyed that his assistant, Sobel, was so insensitive to his reverie that he would not for a minute cease his fanatic pounding at the other bench. He gave him a look but Sobel's bald head was bent over the last as he worked and he didn't notice. The shoemaker shrugged and continued to peer through the partly frosted window at the near-sighted haze of falling February snow. Neither the shifting white blur outside, nor the sudden deep remembrance of the snowy Polish village where he had wasted his youth could turn his thoughts from Max the college boy (a constant visitor to the mind since early that morning when Feld saw him trudging through snowdrifts on his way to school) whom he so much respected because of the sacrifices he had made through- out all these years—in winter or direst heat—to further his education. An old wish returned to haunt the shoemaker: that he had had a son instead of a daughter, but this blew away in the snow for Feld, if anything, was a realist. Yet he could not help but contrast the dili- gence of the boy, who was a peddler's son, with Miriam's uncon- cern for an education. True, she was always with a book in her hand, yet when the opportunity arose for a college education, she had said no she would rather find a job. He had begged her to go, pointing out how many fathers could not afford to send their children to college, but she said she preferred to be independent. As for education, what was it, she asked, but books, which Sobel, who diligently read the classics, would as usual advise her on. Her answer greatly grieved her father. A figure emerged from the snow and the door opened. At the counter the man withdrew from a wet paper bag a pair of old shoes === Page 24 === 662 PARTISAN REVIEW for repair. Who he was the shoemaker for a moment had no idea, then his heart trembled a little as he realized, before he had thoroughly discerned the face, that Max himself was standing there, embarras- sedly explaining what he wanted done to the shoes. Though Feld listened with all his heart, he could not hear a word, for the oppor- tunity that had burst upon him, was deafening. He couldn't recall exactly when the thought had occurred to him, because it was clear he had more than once considered suggest- ing to the boy that he go out with Miriam. But he had not dared speak for if Max said no, how would he face him again? Or suppose Miriam, who harped so often on independence, blew up and shouted at him for his meddling? Still, the chance was too good to let by: all it meant was an introduction. They might long ago have become friends had they happened to meet somewhere, therefore was it not his duty—an obligation—to bring them together, nothing more, a harmless connivance to replace an accidental encounter in the subway or a mutual friend's introduction in the street? Just let him once see and talk with her and he would for sure be interested. As for Miriam, what possible harm for a working girl in an office, who met only loud-mouthed salesmen and illiterate shipping clerks, to make the acquaintance of a fine scholarly boy? Maybe he would awaken in her a desire to go to college; if not—the shoemaker's mind at last came to grips with the truth—let her marry an educated man and live a better life. When Max finished describing what he wanted done to the shoes, Feld marked them, both with enormous holes in the soles which he pretended not to notice, with large white-chalk x's, and the rubber heels, thinned to the nails, he marked with o's, though it troubled him that he might have mixed up the letters. Max inquired the price and the shoemaker cleared his throat and asked the boy, above Sobel's insistent hammering, would he please step through the side door there into the hall. Though obviously surprised, Max did as the shoemaker requested and Feld went in after him. For a minute they were both silent, because Sobel had stopped banging, and it seemed they under- stood neither was to say anything until the noise began again. When it did, loudly, the shoemaker quickly explained to Max why he had asked to talk to him. "Ever since you was in high school a student," he said, in the === Page 25 === THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS 663 dimly-lit hallway, "I watched you in the morning go to the subway to school, and I said always to myself, this is a fine boy that he wants so much an education." "Thanks," said Max, nervously alert. He was tall and grotesquely thin, with sharply cut features, particularly a beak-like nose. He was wearing a loose, long, slushy overcoat that came down to his ankles, looking like a rug draped oved his bony shoulders, and a wet, old brown hat, as battered as the shoes he had brought in. "I am a business man," the shoemaker abruptly said to conceal his embarrassment, "so I will explain you right away why I talk to you. I have a girl, my daughter Miriam she is nineteen a very nice girl and also so pretty that everybody looks on her when she passes by in the street. She is smart, always with a book, and I thought to myself that a boy like you, an educated boy-I thought maybe you will be interested sometime to meet a girl like this." He laughed a bit when he finished and was tempted to say more but had the good sense not to. Max stared down like a hawk. For an uncomfortable second he was silent, then he asked, "Did you say nineteen?" "Yes." "Would it be all right to inquire if you have a picture of her?" "Just a minute." The shoemaker went into the store and hastily returned with a snapshot that Max held close to the light. "She's okay," he said. Feld waited. "And is she sensible-not the flighty type?" "She is very sensible." After another pause, Max said it was all right with him if he met her. "Here is my telephone," said the shoemaker, hurriedly handing him a slip of paper. "Call her up. She comes home from work six o'clock." Max folded the paper and tucked it away into his worn leather wallet. "About the shoes," he said. "How much did you say they will cost me?" "Don't worry about the price." "I just like to have an idea." === Page 26 === 664 PARTISAN REVIEW “A dollar—dollar fifty. A dollar fifty,” the shoemaker said. At once he felt bad, for he usually charged two twenty-five for this kind of job. Either he should have asked the regular price or done the work for nothing. Later, as he entered the store, he was startled by a violent clang- ing and looked up to see Sobel pounding with all his strength upon the naked last. It broke, the iron banging against the floor and hitting with a thump against the wall, but before the enraged shoemaker could cry out, the assistant had torn his hat and coat from the hook and rushed out into the snow. So Feld, who had looked forward to anticipating how it would go with his daughter and Max, instead had a great worry on his mind. Without his temperamental assistant he was a lost man, espe- cially since it was years now that he had carried the store alone. The shoemaker had for an age suffered from a heart condition that threat- ened collapse if he dared exert himself; and five years ago, after an attack, it had appeared as though he would have either to sacrifice his business upon the auction block and live on a pittance thereafter, or put himself at the mercy of some unscrupulous employee who would in the end probably ruin him. But just at the moment of his darkest despair, this Polish refugee, Sobel, appeared one night from the street and begged for work. He was a stocky man, poorly dressed, with a bald head that had once been blond, a severely plain face and soft blue eyes prone to tears over the sad books he read, a young man but old—no one would have guessed thirty. Though he confessed he knew nothing of shoemaking, he said he was apt and would work for a very little if Feld taught him the trade. Thinking that with, after all, a landsman, he would have less to fear than with a complete stranger, Feld took him on and within six weeks the refugee rebuilt as good a shoe as he, and not long thereafter expertly ran the business for the thoroughly relieved shoemaker. Feld could trust him with anything and did, frequently going home after an hour at the store and leaving all the money in the till, knowing Sobel would guard every cent of it. The amazing thing was that he demanded so little. His wants were few; in money he was not interested—in nothing but books it seemed—which he one by one lent to Miriam, together with his profuse, queer written com- === Page 27 === THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS ments, manufactured during his lonely rooming house evenings, thick pads of commentary which the shoemaker peered at and twitched his shoulders over as his daughter, from her fourteenth year, read page by sanctified page, as if the word of God were inscribed thereon. To protect Sobel, Feld himself had to see that he received more than he asked for. Yet his conscience bothered him for not insisting that the assistant accept a greater sum than he was getting, though Feld had honestly told him he could earn a handsome salary if he worked else- where, or maybe opened a place of his own. But the assistant an- swered, somewhat ungraciously, that he was not interested in going elsewhere, and though Feld frequently asked himself what keeps him here? why does he stay? he finally answered it that the man, no doubt because of his experiences as a refugee, was afraid of the world. After the incident with the broken last, angered by Sobel's be- havior, the shoemaker decided to let him stew for a week in the room- ing house, although his own strength was taxed dangerously and the business suffered. However, after several sharp and nagging warnings from both his wife and daughter, he went finally in search of Sobel, as he had done once before, quite recently, when over some fancied slight-Feld had merely asked him not to give Miriam so many books to read because her eyes were strained and bloodshot-the assistant had left the place in a huff, an incident which, as usual, came to noth- ing for he had returned in a few days and taken his seat at the bench without an explanation. But this time, after Feld had plodded through the snow to Sobel's house-he had thought of sending Miriam but the idea became repugnant to him-the burly landlady at the door informed him in a nasal voice that Sobel was not at home, and though Feld knew this was a nasty lie, for where had the refugee to go? still for some reason he was not completely sure of-it may have been the cold and his fatigue-he decided not to insist on seeing him. Instead he went home and hired a new assistant. Having settled the matter, though not entirely to his satisfaction, for he had much more to do than before and so, for example, could no longer lie late in bed mornings because he had to get up and open the store for the new assistant, a thin dark man with an irritating rasp as he worked, whom he would not entrust with the key as he had Sobel. Furthermore, this one, though able to do a fair repair job, knew nothing of grades of leather or prices, so Feld had to make his === Page 28 === 666 PARTISAN REVIEW own purchases; and every night at closing time it was necessary to count the money in the till and lock up. However, he was not dis- satisfied, for he lived much in his thoughts of Max and Miriam. The college boy had called her and they had arranged a meeting for this coming Friday night. The shoemaker would personally have preferred Saturday, which he felt would make it a date of the first magnitude, but he learned Friday was Miriam's choice, so he said nothing. The day of the week did not matter. What mattered was the aftermath. Would they like each other and want to be friends? He sighed at all he would have to pass before he knew for sure. Often he was tempted to talk to Miriam about the boy to ask whether she thought she would like his type--he had told her only that he liked Max and had suggested he call her--but the one time he tried she snapped at him--justly--how should she know? At last Friday came. Feld was not feeling particularly well so he stayed in bed, and Mrs. Feld thought it better to remain with him in the bedroom when Max called. Miriam received the boy, and her parents could hear their voices, his throaty one, as they talked. Just before leaving, Miriam brought Max to the bedroom door and he stood there a minute, a tall, somewhat hunched figure wearing a thick, droopy suit, and apparently at ease as he greeted the shoemaker and his wife, which was surely a good sign. And Miriam, although she had worked all day, looked fresh and pretty. She was a large- framed girl with a well-shaped body, and she had a fine open face and soft hair. They made, Feld thought, a first-class couple. Miriam returned after 11:30. Her mother was already asleep but the shoemaker got out of bed and after locating his flannel bath- robe went into the kitchen, where Miriam, to his surprise, sat at the table, reading. "So where did you go?" Feld asked pleasantly. "For a walk," she said, not looking up. "I advised him," Feld said, clearing his throat, "he shouldn't spend much money." "I didn't care." The shoemaker boiled up some water for tea and sat down at the table with a cupful and a thick slice of lemon. "So how," he sighed after a sip, "did you enjoy?" "It was all right." === Page 29 === THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS 667 He was silent. She must have sensed his disappointment for she added, "You can't really tell much after the first time." "You will see him again?" Turning a page, she said that Max had asked for another date. "For when?" "Saturday." "So what did you say?" "What did I say?" she asked, delaying for a moment-"I said yes." Afterwards she inquired about Sobel, and Feld, without exactly knowing why, said the assistant had got another job. Miriam said nothing more and began to read. The shoemaker's conscience did not trouble him; he was content with the Saturday date. During the week, by placing here and there a deft question, he managed to get from Miriam some information about Max. It sur- prised him to learn that the boy was not studying to be either a doctor or lawyer but was taking a business course leading to a degree in ac- countancy. Feld was a little disappointed because he thought of ac- countants as bookkeepers and would have preferred "a higher pro- fession." However, it was not long before he had investigated the subject and discovered that Certified Public Accountants were highly respected people, so he was thoroughly content as Saturday ap- proached. But because Saturday was a busy day, he was much in the store and therefore did not see Max when he came to call for Miriam. From his wife he learned there had been nothing especially revealing about their meeting. Max had rung the bell and Miriam got her coat and left with him-nothing more. Feld did not probe, for his wife was not particularly observant. Instead, he waited up for Miriam with a newspaper on his lap, which he scarcely looked at so lost was he in thinking of the future. He awoke to find her in the room with him, tiredly removing her hat. Greeting her, he was sud- denly inexplicably afraid to ask her anything about the evening. But nothing he was at last forced to inquire how she had enjoyed herself. Miriam begun something non-committal but apparently changed her mind, for she said after a moment, "I was bored." When Feld had sufficiently recovered from his anguished disap- === Page 30 === 668 PARTISAN REVIEW pointment to ask why, she answered without hesitation, “Because he’s nothing more than a materialist.” “What means this word?” “He has no soul.” He considered her statement for a long time but then asked, “So will you see him again?” “He didn’t ask.” “Suppose he will ask?” “I won’t see him.” He did not argue; however, as the days went by he prayed she would change her mind. He hoped the boy would telephone because he was sure there was more to him than Miriam, with her inexperi- enced eye, could discern. But Max didn’t call. As a matter of fact he took a different route to school, no longer passing the shoemaker’s store, and Feld was deeply hurt. Then one afternoon Max appeared and asked for his shoes. The shoemaker took them down from the shelf where he had placed them apart from the other pairs. He had done the work himself and the soles and heels were well-built and firm. The shoes had been highly polished and somehow looked better than brand new. Max’s adam’s apple went up once when he saw them and his eyes shone. “How much?” he asked, without directly looking at the shoe- maker. “Like I told you before,” Feld answered sadly. “One dollar fifty cents.” Max handed him two crumpled bills and received in return a newly-minted silver half dollar. He left. Miriam had not been mentioned. That night the shoe- maker discovered that his new assistant had been all the while stealing from him and he suffered a heart attack. Though the attack was mild, he lay in bed for a week. Miriam spoke of going for Sobel, but sick as he was Feld rose in wrath against the idea. Yet in his heart he knew there was no other way, and the first weary day back in the shop thoroughly convinced him, so that night after supper he dragged himself to Sobel’s rooming house. He toiled up the stairs and at the top knocked at the door. Sobel opened it and the shoemaker entered. The room was small and === Page 31 === THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS poverty-stricken, with a single window facing the street. It contained a narrow cot, a table and several stacks of books piled haphazardly around on the floor along the wall, which made him think how queer Sobel was, to be uneducated and read so much. He had once asked him, Sobel, why you read so much? and the assistant could not answer him. Did you ever study in a college somewhere? he asked, but Sobel shook his head. He read, he said, to know. But to know what, the shoemaker demanded, and to know, why? Sobel never explained, which proved he read much because he was queer. Feld sat down to recover his breath. The assistant was resting on his bed with his heavy back to the wall. His shirt and trousers were clean, and his stubby fingers, away from the shoemaker's bench, were strangely pallid. His face was thin, indicating he had lost weight, and pale, as if he had been shut in this room since the day he had bolted from the store. "So when you will come back to work?" Feld asked the assistant. To the shoemaker's surprise, Sobel burst out, "Never." Jumping up, he strode over to the window that looked out upon the miserable street. "Why should I come back?" he cried. "I will raise your wages." "Who cares about wages!" The shoemaker, knowing he did not care, was at a loss for what to say. "What do you want from me, Sobel?" "Nothing." "I always treated you like you was my own son." Sobel vehemently denied it. "And why you look for strange boys in the street they should go with Miriam? Why you never think of me?" The shoemaker felt his hands and feet go freezing cold. His voice became so hoarse he couldn't speak. At last he cleared it and croaked, "So what has my daughter to do with a shoemaker thirty-five years old who works for me?" "Why do you think I worked so long for you?" Sobel cried out. "For the stingy wages I sacrificed five years of my life so you should have to eat and drink and where to sleep?" "Then for what?" shouted the shoemaker. "For Miriam," he blurted-"for her." 669 === Page 32 === 670 PARTISAN REVIEW The shoemaker was struck dumb. After a time he managed to say, “I pay wages in cash, Sobel,” and again lapsed into silence. Though he felt hot with excitement, his mind was cold and clear, and he had to admit to himself he had sensed all along that Sobel felt this way. He had never so much as thought it consciously but he had felt it and was afraid. “Miriam knows?” he muttered hoarsely. “She knows.” “You told her?” “No.” “Then how does she know?” “How does she know?” Sobel said, “because she knows. She knows who I am and what is in my heart.” Feld had a sudden insight. In some devious way, with his books and commentary, Sobel had given Miriam to understand that he loved her. The shoemaker felt a terrible anger at him for his deceit. “Sobel, you are crazy,” he said bitterly. “She will never marry a man so old and ugly like you.” Sobel turned red with rage. He cursed the shoemaker, but then, though he trembled to hold it back, his eyes filled with tears and he broke into long sobs. With his back to Feld, he stood at the window, fists clenched, and his shoulders shook with his choked sobbing. Watching him, the shoemaker's anger diminished. His teeth rose on edge with pity for the man and his eyes grew moist. How strange and sad that a refugee, a grown man, bald and old with his miseries, who had by the skin of his teeth escaped Hitler's incinerators, should fall in love, when he had got to America, with a girl less than half his age. Day after day, for five long years he had sat at his bench cutting and hammering away, waiting for the girl to become a woman, unable ever to ease his heart with speech, knowing no protest but desperation. “Ugly I didn't mean,” he said half aloud. Then he realized that what he had called ugly was not Sobel but Miriam's life if she married him. He felt for his daughter a strange and gripping sorrow, as if she were already Sobel's bride, the wife, after all, of a shoemaker, and had in her life no more than her mother. And all his dreams for her—why he had slaved and destroyed === Page 33 === THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS his heart with anxiety and labor—all these dreams of a better life were dead. The room was quiet. Sobel was standing by the window reading, and it was curious that when he read he looked young. "She is only nineteen," Feld sighed brokenly. "This is too young yet to get married. Don't ask her anything for two years more, till she is twenty-one, then you can talk to her." Sobel did not answer. Feld rose and left. He went slowly down the stairs but once outside, though it was freezing cold and the crisp falling snow whitened the street, he walked with a stronger stride. But the next morning, when the shoemaker arrived heavy-hearted to open the store, he saw he needn't have come, for his assistant was already seated at the last, pounding leather for his love. 671 === Page 34 === Erich Auerbach THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH* In the thirty-second chapter of his Second Book (which, however, was the first written and published) Rabelais tells how Pan- tagruel's army, during the campaign against the people of the Almy- rodes (the "Salties"), is surprised on the road by a downpour; how Pantagruel orders them to press close together, he can see above the clouds that it is only a brief shower; and meanwhile he will provide them with shelter. Whereupon he puts out his tongue (seulement à demi), and covers them as a hen cover her chicks. Only the writer himself (je, qui vous fais ces tant veritables contes), who had already taken cover elsewhere, and now emerges from it, finds no room left under the tongue-roof:** Doncques, le mieulx que je peuz, montay par dessus, et cheminay bien deux lieues sus sa langue tant que entray dedans sa bouche. Mais, ô Dieux et Deesses, que veiz je là? Jupiter me confonde de sa fouldre trisuique si j'en mens. Je y cheminoys comme l'on faict en Sophie à Constantinople, et y veiz de grans rochiers comme les monts des Dannoys, je croys que c'estoient ses dentz, et de grands prez, de grandes forestz, de fortes et grosses villes, non moins grandes que Lyon ou Poictiers. Le premier que y trouvay, ce fut un homme qui plantoit des choulx. Dont tout esbahy luy demanday: "Mon amy, que fais tu icy? — Je plante, dist'il, des choux. — Et à quoy ny comment, dis-je? — Ha, Monsieur, dist'il, Chacun ne peut avoir des couillons aussi pesant q'un mortier, et ne pouvons estre tous riches. Je gaigne ainsi ma vie, et les porte vendre au marché en la cité qui est icy derriere.—Jesus, dis-je, il y a icy un nouveau monde?— Certes, dist-il, n'est mie nouveau, mais l'on dist bien que hors d'icy y a une * This is Chapter XI of Mimesis, the first chapter of which, "The Scar of Ulysses," appeared in our issue of May-June, 1950. ** A translation of the following passage appears at the end of the article. === Page 35 === THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH 673 terre neufve ou ilz ont et soleil et lune et tout plein de belles be- soignes; mais cestuy cy est plus ancien.—Voire mais, dis-je, comment à nom ceste ville où tu portes vendre tes choulx? Elle a dist, il, nom Aspharage, et sont christians, gens de bien, et vous feront grande chere." Bref, je deliberay d'y aller. Or, en mon chemin, je trouvay un compagnon qui tendoit aux pigeons, auquel je demanday: "Mon amy, d'ont vous viennent ces pigeons icy?–Cyre, dist il, ils viennent de l'aultre monde." Lors je pensay que, quand Pantagruel basloit, les pigeons à pleines volées entroyent dedans sa gorge, pensans que feust un colombier. Puis entray en la ville, laquelle je trouvay belle, bien forte et en bel air; mais à l'entrée les portiers me demanderent mon bulletin, de quoy je fuz fort esbahy, et leur demanday: "Messieurs, y a il icy dangier de peste?-O, Seigneur, dirent ilz, l'on se meurt icy auprès tant que le charriot court par les rues.—Vray Dieu, dis je, et où?" A quoy me dirent que c'estoit en Laryngues et Pharyngues, qui sont deux grosses villes telles que Rouen et Nantes, riches et bien marchandes, et la cause de la peste a esté pour une puante et infecte exhalation qui est sortie des abysmes des puis n'a gueres, dont ilz sont mors plus de vingt et deux cens soixante mille et seize personnes depuis huict jours. Lors je pensé et calculé, et trouvé que c'estoit une puante halaine qui estoit venue de l'estomach de Pantagruel alors qu'il mangea tant d'aillade, comme nous avons dict dessus. De là partant, passay entre les rochiers, qui estoient ses dentz, et feis tant que je montay sus une, et là trouvay les plus beaux lieux du monde, beaux grands jeux de paulme, belles galeries, belles prairies, force vignes et une infinité de cassines à mode italicque, par les champs pleins de delices, et là demouray bien quatre moys, et ne feis oncques telle chere pour lors. Puis descendis par les dentz du derrière pour venir aux baulières; mais en passant je fuz destroussé des brigans par une grande forest que est vers la partie des aureilles. Puis trouvay une petite bourgade a la devallée, j'ay oublié son nom, ou je feiz encore meilleure chere que jamais, et gaingnay quelque peu d'argent pour vivre. Sçavez-vous comment? A dormir; car l'on loue les gens à journée pour dormir, et gaingnent cinq et six sols par jour; mais ceulx qui ronflent bien fort gaingnent bien sept solz et demy. At contois aux senateurs comment on m'avoit destroussé par la valée, lesquelz me dirent que pour tout vray les gens de delà estoient mal vivans et brigans de nature, à quoy je cogneu que, ainsi comme nous avons les contrées de deçà et delà les montz, aussi ont ilz deçà et delà les dentz; mais il fait beaucoup meilleur deçà, et y a meilleur air. === Page 36 === 674 PARTISAN REVIEW Là commençay penser qu'il est bien vray ce que l'on dit que la moytié du monde ne sçait comment l'autre vit, veu qu'nul avoit encores escrit de ce pais là, auquel sont plus de XXV royaulmes habitez, sans les desers et un gros bras de mer, mais j'en ai composé un grand livre intitulé l'Histoire des Gorgias, car ainsi les ay-je nommez parce qu'ilz demourent en la gorge de mon maistre Pantagruel. Finablement vou- luz retourner, et passant par sa barbe, me gettay sur ses epaulles, et de là me devallé en terre et tumbé devant luy. Quand il me apperceut, il me demandas: "D'ont viens tu, Alcofrybas? - Je luy responds: De vostre gorge, Monsieur. - Et depuis quand y es tu, dist il? — Despuis, dis je, que vous alliez contre les Almyrodes. - Il y a, dist il, plus de six mois. Et de quoy vivois tu? Que beuvoys tu?-Je responds: Seigneur, de mesme vous, et des plus frians morceauls qui passoient par vostre gorge j'en prenois le barraige. - Voire mais, dist il, où chioys tu? - En vostre gorge, Monsieur, dis-je. - Ha, ha, tu es gentil compaignon, dist il. Nous avons, avecques l'ayde de Dieu, conquesté tout le pays des Dipsodes; je te donne la chatellenie de Salmigondin. - Grand mercy, dis je, Monsieur. Vous me faictes de bien plus que n'ay deservy envers vous." Rabelais did not himself invent the theme of this comic ad- venture. In the chapbook of the Giant Gargantua (I use a reprint of a copy preserved in Dresden, from W. Weigand's edition of Regis' translation of Rabelais, 3rd ed., Berlin, 1923, Vol. II, pp. 398 ff.; cf. also note 7 in Abel Lefranc's critical edition, IV, 330), we are told how the 2,943 armed men who were to strangle Gargantua in his sleep wandered into his open mouth, mistaking the teeth for great cliffs, and how later, when he quenched his thirst after sleeping, all but three of them were drowned, the three saving themselves in a hollow tooth. In a later passage of the chapbook Gargantua gives fifty prisoners temporary quarters in a hollow tooth; they even find an indoor tennis court there, a jeu de paume, to keep them amused. (Rabelais uses the hollow tooth in another passage, in the thirty- eighth chapter of the First Book, where Gargantua swallows six pil- grims and a head of lettuce.) Aside from these French sources, Rabelais has in mind, in connection with our passage, an ancient author whom he highly esteemed, Lucian, who in his "True History" (I, 30 ff.) tells of a sea monster which swallows a ship with all its crew; in its maw they find woods, mountains, and lakes, in which === Page 37 === THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH 675 live various half-animal creatures as well as two human beings, father and son, who had been swallowed twenty-seven years earlier after a shipwreck; they too plant cabbages and have built a shrine to Poseidon. Rabelais, in his way, has combined these two prototypes, taking from the chapbook the giant's mouth, which despite its im- mense dimensions, has not entirely lost the characteristics of a mouth, and placing within it Lucian's picture of a landscape and a society; indeed, he goes even further than Lucian (twenty-five kingdoms with large cities, whereas in Lucian it is only a matter of some thousand fabulous beings), though he takes little pains to reconcile the two themes: the presumable size of a mouth that is densely populated bears no relation to the speed of the return journey; still less the fact that, after he gets back, the giant notices him and speaks to him; and least of all does the information Alcofrybas gives concerning his diet and defecations during his stay inside the mouth correspond with the highly developed agricultural and domestic life which he found there whether he has simply forgotten it or is deliberately not men- tioning it. Apparently the conversation with the giant, which closes the scene, serves no purpose but that of giving a comical characteriza- tion of the kind-hearted Pantagruel, who shows a lively interest in the bodily welfare of his friend, particularly in his being supplied with plenty of good drink, and who good-humoredly rewards his undaunted admission concerning his defecations with the gift of a chatelleny-although our honest Alcofrybas had, so to speak, found himself a cushy job for the duration of the war. The way in which the recipient of the gift expresses his thanks (I have done nothing to deserve it) is in this case no mere form of speech but accords perfectly with the circumstances. Despite his recollections of literary prototypes, Rabelais has gone entirely his own way in constructing the world inside the giant's mouth. Alcofrybas finds no fabulous half-animal beings, no little handful of men painfully adapting themselves to their surroundings, but a fully developed society and economy, in which everything goes on just as it does at home in France. At first he is astonished that human beings live there at all; yet what surprises him most of all is that things are not somehow strange and different, but just like things in the world he knows. It begins with his very first encounter: he is not as amazed to find a man here (he has already seen the === Page 38 === 676 PARTISAN REVIEW cities from a distance) as he is to find him quietly planting cabbages, as if they were both in Touraine. So he asks him, "tout esbahy": Friend, what are you doing here? and receives a complacent, tongue-in-cheek answer such as he might well have got from a Tourangeau peasant too, of the type which many of Rabelais' char- acters often represent themselves to be: Je plante, dist-il, des choulx. It reminds me of a small boy's remark which I once overheard; he was using the telephone for the first time, so that his grandmother, who lived in another town, could hear his voice; and, asked, "And what are you doing, lad?" proudly and factually answered, "I'm tele- phoning." Here the case is slightly different: the peasant is not only naive and limited, he also has the rather reserved humor which is extremely French and particularly characteristic of Rabelais. He has a very good notion that the stranger is from that other world of which he has heard rumors; but he pretends to notice nothing and answers the second question, which is also purely an exclamation of astonishment (approximately: But why? How come?), as naively as he had the first, with a juicy peasant figure of speech which signifies that he is not rich; he earns his living from his cabbages, which he sells in the neighboring city. Now at last the visitor begins to grasp the situation: Jesus, he exclaims, this is an entirely new world! No, it is not new, says the peasant, but people say there's a new land out there where they have a sun and moon and all sorts of fine things; but this land here is older.-The fellow talks of the "new world" as people in Touraine or anywhere in Western or Central Europe might have spoken of the then newly discovered lands, of America or India; but he is cunning enough to suspect that the stranger is an inhabitant of that other world, for he reassures him as to the people in the city: They are good Christians and will not treat you badly; whereby he of course assumes, and in this case he is right, that the designation "good Christians" will serve as a reassuring guarantee for the stranger too. In short, this inhabitant of the outskirts of Aspharage behaves just as his congener in Touraine would have done; and things continue in the same fashion, frequently interrupted by grotesque explanations, which likewise maintain no sort of proportion; for when Pantagruel opens his mouth, which contains so many kingdoms and cities, the dimensions of the opening ought not to be easily confused with a pigeon-house. But the theme "everything just as at home" persists === Page 39 === THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH 677 unaltered. When, at the city gate, Alcofrybas is asked for his health certificate, because the plague is rampant in the great cities of the northern France during the years 1532 and 1533 (cf. A. Lefranc's Introduction to his critical edition, p. xxxi); the fine mountain landscape of the teeth is a picture of the Western European agricultural countryside, and the country houses are built in the Italian style, which was beginning to become the fashion in France too at that period; and in the village where Alcofrybas spends the last days of his stay in Pantagruel's mouth, the situation, except for the grotesque method of earning money by sleeping, at five to six sous per diem, with an extra bonus for powerful snorers (a recollection of the traditional Land of Cockaigne), is thoroughly European; when the senators condole with him for having been robbed on his way through the mountain forest, they give him to understand that the people "over yonder" are uncultured barbarians who do not know how to live, whence he infers that in Pantagruel's maw there are countries on this side and on the other side of the teeth, as at home this side and the other side of the mountains. Whereas Lucian produces what is in all essentials a fantasy of travel and adventure, and the chapbook puts all the emphasis on the grotesqueness of enlarged dimensions, Rabelais maintains a con- stant interplay of different locales, different themes, and different stylistic levels. While Alcofrybas, the Abstractor of Quintessences, is making his journey of discovery through Pantagruel's mouth, Panta- gruel and his army continue the war against the Almyrodes and Dipsodes; and in the journey of discovery itself, at least three dif- ferent categories of experiences are mingled. The framework is pro- vided by the grotesque theme of gigantic dimensions, which is never for a moment left out of sight and is constantly recalled by ever-new and absurd comic conceits; by the pigeons that fly into the giant's mouth when he yawns, by the explanation of the plague as the result of Pantagruel's eating garlic and the poisonous vapors which rise from his stomach afterwards, by the transformation of the teeth into a mountain landscape, by the manner of the return journey, and by the closing conversation. Meanwhile there is developed an entirely dif- ferent, entirely new, and, at the period, highly "live" theme-the === Page 40 === 678 PARTISAN REVIEW theme of the discovery of a new world, with all the astonishment, the widening horizons and alteration of the world picture, which follows upon such a discovery. This is one of the great motifs of the Renais- sance and of the two following centuries, one of the themes which served as levers toward political, religious, economic, and philosophical revolution. It constantly reappears—whether writers place an action in that still new and half-unknown world, because there they can con- struct a purer and more primitive milieu than the European, which provides them with an effective and at the same time a piquantly sur- reptitious method of criticizing things at home; or whether they in- troduce an inhabitant of those strange lands into the European world and let their criticism of the established order in Europe arise out of his naive astonishment and his general reaction to what he sees; in either case the theme has a revolutionary force which shakes the es- tablished order, sets it in a broader context, and thus makes it a relative thing. In our passage, Rabelais only lets the theme begin to sound, he does not develop it; Alcofrybas' astonishment at sight of the first inhabitant of the mouth belongs in this category of experiences, and above all the reflection that he makes at the end of his journey— Then it became clear to me how right people are when they say: One half the world does not know how the other half lives. Rabelais im- mediately buries the theme under grotesque jokes, so that in the episode as a whole it is not dominant. But we must not forget that Rabelais first calls the country of his giants Utopia, by a name which he borrowed from Thomas More's book, which had appeared six- teen years earlier, and that More—to whom, of all his contempor- aries, Rabelais perhaps owed the most—was one of the first to use the theme of a distant country in the way described above, as an example for reform. It is not only the name: the country of Gargantua and Pantagruel, with its political, religious, and educational forms, not only is called, it is Utopia; a distant, still hardly discovered land, lying, like More's Utopia, somewhere in the East, although to be sure it sometimes seems that it can be found in the heart of France. We will return to this. So much for the second of the themes contained in our passage; it cannot develop freely there, partly because the grotesque joking of the first theme perpetually thwarts it, partly because it is immediately intercepted and paralyzed by the third: the theme "tout comme chez === Page 41 === THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH nous." The most astonishing and most ridiculous thing about this Gorgiasian world is precisely that it is not entirely different from ours but on the contrary resembles it in the minutest detail-superior to ours in that it knows of our world whereas we know nothing of it, but otherwise exactly like it. Thus Rabelais gives himself the oppor- tunity to exchange the roles-that is, to have the cabbage-planting peasant appear as a native European who receives the stranger from the other world with European naiveté; above all, he affords himself the possibility of developing a realistic scene of everyday life-thus introducing a third theme which is entirely incompatible with the two others (the grotesque farcicality of the giants, and the discovery of a new world) and which stands in deliberately absurd contrast to them; so that the whole machinery of huge dimensions and of the daring voyage of discovery seems to have been set in motion only to bring us a peasant of Touraine engaged in planting cabbages. Just as the locales and the themes change, so the styles change too; the predominant style is that which corresponds to the grotesque central theme the grotesque-comic and popular style, and that in its most energetic form, in which the most forceful expressions appear. Beside it, and mingled with it, there is matter-of-fact narrative, philosophical ideas flash out, and amid all the grotesque machinery rises the terrible picture of mortals suffering from the plague, in which the dead are taken from the houses by cartloads. This sort of mixture of styles was not invented by Rabelais; he of course adapted it to his temperament and his purpose, but, paradoxically, it stems from Late Medieval preaching, in which the Christian tradition exaggerated the mixture of styles to the utmost: these sermons are at the same time popular in the crudest way, realistic in an animalistic way, and in their figurative Biblical interpretation. From the spirit of Late Medieval preaching, and above all from the at- mosphere which surrounded the popular (in both the good and bad sense) mendicant orders, the Humanists took this mixture of styles, especially for their anti-ecclesiastical, polemical, and satirical writings; from the same spring, Rabelais, who had been a Franciscan in his youth, drew it "more pure" than anyone else; he had studied that form of life and form of expression at the source and had made it his own in his peculiar way; he can no longer do without it; much as he hated the mendicant orders, their flavorful and earthy style, 679 === Page 42 === 680 PARTISAN REVIEW graphic to the point of ludicrousness, was exactly suited to his tem- perament and his purpose, and no one ever got so much out of it as he. This filiation was pointed out, for the benefit of those to whom it had not earlier been obvious, by E. Gilson in his fine essay "Rab- elais franciscain" (in Les Idées et les lettres, Paris, 1932, pp. 197 ff.); we shall return to this question of style, too, later. The passage which we have been discussing is a comparatively simple one. The interplay of locales, themes, and stylistic levels is comparatively easy to observe, and its analysis demands no elaborate research. Other passages are far more complex-those, for example, in which Rabelais gives full vent to his erudition, his countless allusions to contemporary events and persons, and his hurricane word-forma- tions. Our analysis has permitted us, with little effort, to recognize an essential principle of his manner of seeing and comprehending the world: the principle of the promiscuous intermingling of the categories of event, experience, and erudition, as well as of dimensions and styles. Examples, both from the work as a whole and from sections of it, can be multiplied at will. Abel Lefranc has shown that the events of Book I, especially the war against Picrochole, take place on the few square miles of the region which lies around La Devinière, an estate belonging to Rabelais' father's family; and even to one who does not or did not know this in detail, the place names and certain homely local happenings indicate a provincial and circumscribed setting. At the same time armies of hundreds of thousands appear, and giants, in whose hair cannon-balls stick like lice, take part in the battles; arms and victuals are enumerated in quantities which a great kingdom could not have brought together in those days; the number of soldiers alone who enter the vineyard of the monastery of Seuillé and are there cut down by Frère Jean is given as 13,622, women and small children not included. The theme of gigantic dimensions serves Rab- elais for perspectivistic effects of contrast, which upset the reader's balance in an insidiously humorous way; he is perpetually flung back and forth between provincially piquant and homely forms of existence, gigantic and grotesquely extra-normal events, and Utopian-humani- tarian ideas; he is never permitted to come to rest on a familiar level of events. The forcefully realistic or obscene elements, too, are made to seethe like an intellectual whirlpool by the tempo of the presenta- tion and the ceaseless succession of allusions; the storms of laughter === Page 43 === THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH 681 which such passages evoke break through all the ideas of order and decency which were in force at the time. If one reads such a short text as, for example, the exhortation by Friar Jean des Entommeures in Book I, chapter 42, one finds two robust jokes in it. The first is in regard to the charm which protects against heavy artillery: Frère Jean does not merely say that he does not believe in it, he effortlessly changes the level of observation, places himself on that of the church, which enforces the belief as a condition of divine aid, and, from that point of view, says: the charm will not help me because I do not believe a word of it. The second joke is in regard to the effect of a monk's frock. Frère Jean begins with the threat that he will drape his frock over any man who shows himself a coward. Naturally one's first thought is that this is intended as a punishment and a dis- grace; any man so clad would be forthwith dispossessed of the qualities of a proper man. But no, in a twinkling, he changes the viewpoint: the frock is medicine for unmanly men; they become men as soon as they have it on; by this he means that deprivation enforced by vows and the monastic life, particularly increases the virile capaci- ties both of courage and sexual potency; and he concludes his ex- hortation with the anecdote of the Sieur de Meurles' "feeble-reined" greyhound, which was wrapped in a monk's frock; from that moment no fox or hare escaped him and he served all the bitches in the neigh- borhood, though previously he had been among the "frigidis et male- ficiatis" (this is the title of a decretal). Or again, read the long- drawn-out account of the things which serve for wiping the posterior, to which the young Gargantua treats us in Book I, chapter 13: what a wealth of improvisation! We find poems and syllogisms, medicine, zoology, and botany, contemporary satire and costume lore; finally the delight which the intestines share with the whole body when the act referred to is performed with the neck of a young, live, well- downed gosling, is connected with the bliss of the heroes and demi- gods in the Elysian fields, and Grandgousier compares the wit which his son had displayed on this occasion with that of the young Alex- ander in Plutarch's well-known anecdote which tells how he alone recognized the cause of a horse's wildness, namely its fear of its own shadow. Let us consider a few selected passages from the later Books. In Book III, chapter 31, the physician Rondibilis, consulted by Panurge === Page 44 === 682 PARTISAN REVIEW in connection with his plan of marrying, sets forth the methods of allaying the all-too-powerful sex urge; First, immoderate wine-drink- ing; secondly, certain medicaments; thirdly, steady physical labor; fourthly, eager study. Each of these four methods is expounded over several pages with a superabundance of medical and humanistic erudition through which enumerations, quotations, and anecdotes shower down like rain. Fifthly, Rondibilis goes on, the sexual act itself.... Stop, says Panurge, that's what I was waiting for, that's the method for me, I leave the others to anyone who wants to use them. Yes, says Frère Jean, who has been listening, Brother Scyllino, Prior of Saint Victor's near Marseille, had a name for that method, he called it mortifying the flesh.... The whole thing is a wild joke, but Rabelais has filled it with his succession of ever-changing con- ceits which purposely confuse the distinctions between styles and disciplines. It is the same with the grotesque defense of Judge Bridoye (chs. 39-42 of the same Book), who carefully prepared his cases, postponed them again and again, and then decided them by a cast of the dice; and who nevertheless for forty years pronounced nothing but wise and just judgments. In his speech, senile drivel is mixed with subtly ironic wisdom, the most wonderful anecdotes are told, the whole of legal terminology is poured out on the reader in a grotesque cascade of words, every obvious or absurd opinion is supported by a welter of comical quotations from Roman Law and the glossarists; it is a fireworks display of wit, of juridical and human experience, of contemporary satire and contemporary manners and morals, an edu- cation in laughter, in rapid shifts between a multiplicity of viewpoints. As a last example, let us take the scene on board ship, when Panurge bargains with the sheepmonger Dindenaull over a wether (Book IV, chs. 6-8). This is perhaps the most effective scene between two char- acters in Rabelais. The owner of the flock of sheep, the merchant Din- denault from the Saintonge, is a choleric and pompous person, but at the same time he is endowed with the crafty, idiomatic, and subtle wit which is natural to almost all of Rabelais' personages. At their very first encounter he has fooled the Eulenspiegel Panurge to the top of his bent; and, but for the intervention of the ship's captain and Pantagruel, they would have come to blows. Later, ap- parently reconciled, as they sit with the others, drinking wine, Panurge again asks him to sell him one of his sheep. Then, for page === Page 45 === THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH 683 after page, Dindenault cries up his wares, meanwhile reverting even more markedly to the insulting tone he had first taken with Panurge, whom, with a mixture of suspicion, impertinence, joviality, and con- descension, he treats as a fool or a swindler wholly unworthy of such fine wares. Panurge, on the other hand, now remains calm and polite, merely repeating his request for a sheep. Finally, at the urging of the by-standers, Dindenault names an exorbitant price; when Panurge warns him that many a man has fared ill from trying to get rich too fast, Dindenault flies into a rage and begins cursing him. Very well, says Panurge; then counts out the money, chooses a fine fat wether, and while Dindenault is still reviling him, he suddenly throws the wether into the sea. The whole flock jumps overboard after it; the despairing Dindenault tries in vain to hold them back; a powerful ram drags him overboard, and he drowns in the same situation in which Ulysses once fled from Polyphemus' cave; his shepherds and herdsmen are pulled overboard in the same fashion. Panurge picks up a long oar and pushes away those who are trying to swim back to the ship, meanwhile treating the drowning men to a splendid oration on the joys of eternal life and the miseries of life in this world. So the joke ends grimly, and even rather frighteningly, if one considers the intensity of the ever-cheerful Pantagruel's urge for vengeance. Yet it remains a joke, which Rabelais has, as usual, stuffed with the most various and grotesque erudition, this time on the subject of sheep— their wool, their hides, their intestines, their flesh, and all their other parts—and adorned as usual with mythology, medicine, and strange alchemical lore. Yet, this time, the center of interest does not lie in the multifarious outpouring of the ideas which come to Dindenault in his praise of sheep, it lies in the copious portrait which he gives of his own character, and which accounts for the manner of his end; he is taken in and he perishes because he cannot adjust himself, cannot change himself, but instead, in his blind folly and vaingloriousness, runs straight forward, like Picrochole or the écolier limousin, his one- track mind incapable of registering his surroundings; it does not oc- cur to him that Panurge may be sharper than himself, that he might sacrifice his money for revenge. Thick-headedness, inability to ad- just, one-track arrogance which blinds a man to the complexity of the real situation, are depravity to Rabelais. This is the form of stupidity he mocks and pursues. === Page 46 === 684 PARTISAN REVIEW Almost all the elements which are united in Rabelais' style are known from the later Middle Ages. The coarse jokes, the animalistic concept of the human body, the lack of modesty and reserve in sexual matters, the mixture of such realism with a satiric or didactic content, the immense fund of unwieldy and sometimes abstruse erudition, the employment of allegorical figures in the later Books— all these and much else are to be found in the later Middle Ages, and one might be tempted to think that the only new thing in Rabelais is the degree to which he exaggerates them and the extraordinary way in which he mingles them. But this would be to miss the essence of the matter: the way in which these elements are exaggerated and intertwined produces an entirely new mixture, and Rabelais' pur- pose, as is well known, is diametrically opposed to medieval ways of thinking; and this in turn gives the individual elements a different meaning. Late medieval works are confined within a definite frame, socially, geographically, cosmologically, religiously, and ethically: they present but one aspect of things at a time; where they have to deal with a multiplicity of things and aspects, they attempt to force them into the definite frame of a general order. But Rabelais' entire effort is bent upon playing with things and with the multiplicity of their possible aspects, upon tempting the reader out of his cus- tomary and definite way of regarding things by showing him phen- omena in utter confusion, upon tempting him out into the great ocean of the world in which he can swim freely, though it be at his own peril. In my opinion, many critics miss the essential point when they make Rabelais' divorce from Christian dogma the decisive factor in interpreting him. True, he is no longer a believer, in the ecclesiastical sense; but he is very far from taking a stand upon some definite form of disbelief, like a rationalist of later times. Nor is it permissible to draw any too far-reaching conclusions from his satire on Christian subjects, for the Middle Ages already offer examples of this which are not essentially different from Rabelais' blasphemous joking. The revolutionary thing about his way of thinking is not his opposition to Christianity but the freedom of vision, feeling, and thought which his perpetual playing with things produces, and which invites the reader to deal directly with the world and its wealth of phenomena. On one point, to be sure, Rabelais takes a stand, and it is a stand which is === Page 47 === THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH 605 basically anti-Christian; for him, the man who follows his nature is good, and natural life, be it of men or things, is good; we should not even need the express confirmation of this conviction which he gives us in the constitution of his Abbey of Thélème, for it speaks from every line of his work. Consenteanous with this is the fact that his animalistic treatment of mankind no longer has for its keynote, as does the corresponding realism of the declining Middle Ages, the wretchedness and perishableness of the body and of earthly things in general; in Rabelais, animalistic realism has acquired a new meaning, diametrically opposed to medieval animalistic realism-that of the vitalistic-dynamic triumph of the physical body and its functions. In Rabelais, there is no longer any Original Sin or any Last Judgment, and thus no metaphysical fear of death. As a part of nature, man rejoices in his breathing life, his bodily functions, and his intellectual powers, and, like Nature's other creatures, he suffers natural dis- solution. The breathing life of men and nature calls forth all Rabelais' love, his thirst for knowledge and his power of verbal representation; it makes him a poet, for he is a poet, and indeed a lyric poet, even though he lacks sentiment. It is triumphant earthly life which calls forth his realistic and super-realistic mimesis. And that is completely anti-Christian, just as it is so opposed to the range of ideas which the animalistic realism of the later Middle Ages arouses in us, that it is precisely in the medieval traits of his style that his alienation from the Middle Ages is most strikingly displayed; their purpose and func- tion have changed completely. This rise of man to wholeness in the natural world, this triumph of the animal and the physical, offers us the opportunity to remark in more detail how ambiguous and therefore subject to misconstruc- tion is the word individualism, which is often, and certainly not un- justifiably, used in connection with the Renaissance. There is no doubt that, in Rabelais' view of the world, in which all possibilities are open, which plays with every aspect, man is freer in his thinking, in realizing his instincts and his wishes, than he was before. But is he therefore more individualistic? It is not easy to say. At least he is less closely confined to his own idiosyncrasy, he is more protean, more inclined to slip into someone else's shoes; and his general, super- individual traits, especially his animal and instinctive traits, are greatly emphasized. Rabelais has created very strongly marked and === Page 48 === 686 PARTISAN REVIEW unmistakable characters, but he is not always inclined to keep them unmistakable; they begin to change, and suddenly another personage peers out of them, as the situation or the author's whim demands. What a change in Pantagruel and Panurge during the course of the book! And even at a given moment, Rabelais is not much concerned with the unity of a character, when he mingles complacent cunning, wit, and humanism, with an elementally pitiless cruelty which is perpetually flickering in the background. If we compare the grotesque underworld of Book II, chapter 30 (in which he turns his personages' earthly situations and characters topsy-turvy), with Dante's other- world, we see how summarily Rabelais deals with human individual- ity; he delights in tumbling it over. Actually the unity which char- acterized the Christian idea of the cosmos, together with the Christian idea of the personal preservation of terrestrial beings before the divine judgment, led to a very strong concept of the indestructible permanence of the individual. (It is most strongly evident in Dante, but can also be seen elsewhere.) And this was first endangered when Christian unity and Christian immortality no longer dominated the European concept of the universe. The description of the underworld referred to above is also in- spired by a dialogue of Lucian's (Menippus seu Necyomantia), but Rabelais carries the joke much further-indeed, far beyond the limits of discretion and taste. His humanistic relation to ancient literature is shown in his remarkable knowledge of the authors who furnish him with themes, quotations, anecdotes, examples, and comparisons; in his thought upon political, philosophical, and educational ques- tions, which, like that of the other humanists, is under the influence of ancient ideas; and particularly in his view of man, freed as it is from the Christian and social frame of reference which characterized the Middle Ages. Yet his indebtedness to Antiquity does not imprison him within the confines of antique concepts; to him, Antiquity means liberation and a broadening of horizons, not in any sense a new limitation or servitude; nothing is more foreign to him than the ancient separation of styles, which in Italy even in his own time, and soon after in France, led to purism and "classicism." In Rabelais there is no aesthetic proportion; everything goes with everything. Ordinary reality is set within the most improbable fantasy, the coarsest jokes are filled with erudition, moral and philosophical enlightenment === Page 49 === THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH 687 flows out of obscene words and stories. All this is far more character- istic of the later Middle Ages than of Antiquity-at least in Anti- quity "laughing truth-telling" had never known such a wide swing of the pendulum to either side; for that, the late medieval mixture of styles was necessary. Yet Rabelais' style is not merely the Middle Ages monstrously exaggerated. When, like a late medieval preacher, he mingles a formless plethora of erudition with coarse vulgarity, the erudition no longer has the function of supporting some doctrine of dogma or ethics by authority-instead, it furthers the grotesque game which either makes the momentary subject matter appear ridiculous and meaningless, or at least puts in question the degree of seriousness with which it is asserted. His popular appeal too is different from that of the Middle Ages. Undoubtedly Rabelais appeals to the people because an uneducated public-so far as it understands his language -can always be vastly amused by his stories. But those to whom his work is really addressed are members of an intellectual elite, not the people. The preachers addressed the people; their lively sermons were intended for direct delivery. Rabelais' work was meant to be printed, in other words to be read, and that, in the sixteenth century, still meant that it was addressed to a very small minority; and even in the small minority, it is not the same stratum as that for which the chapbooks were intended. Rabelais himself expressed his opinion on the level of style of his work, and in doing so he cited not a medieval but an antique example, namely Socrates. The text is one of the finest and ripest in his work, the Prologue to "Gargantua," that is, to the First Book, which, how- ever, as we mentioned before, was not written and published until after the second. Beuveurs tres illustres, et vous, Verolez tres précieux -car à vous, non a aultres, sont dediez mes escriptz-thus begins the celebrated text, which, in its polyphonic richness, in its announce- ment of the various themes of the work, can be compared to a musical overture. Few if any authors ever before addressed their readers in this fashion, and the Prologue becomes even more of a prodigy through the sudden appearance of a subject, which, after such a begin- ning is the last thing one expects: Alcibiades ou dialoge de Platon intitulé Le Bancquet, louant son precepteur Socrates, sans controverse prince des philosophes, entre aultres parolles le dict estre semblable === Page 50 === 688 PARTISAN REVIEW es Silenes. . . . For the platonizing mystics of the Renaissance, for the libertins spirituels in Italy, Germany, and France, Plato's Sym- posium was almost a sacred scripture; and it is something from the Symposium that he has a mind to tell the "illustrious drinkers and thrice-precious pockified blades," as Urquhart drolly translates it; with the very first sentence he sets the tone, that of the most prodigious and unrestrained mixture of genres. There immediately follows an insolent and grotesque paraphrase of the passage in which Alcibiades compares Socrates with the figures of Silenus within which there are little images of the gods: for, like the Sileni, he is outwardly re- pulsive, ridiculous, boorish, poor, awkward, a grotesque figure and a mere vulgar buffoon (this part of the comparison, which, in Plato, Alcibiades only briefly suggests, Rabelais sets forth at length); but within him there were the most wonderful treasures: superhuman in- sight, amazing virtue, unconquerable courage, invariable content, perfect firmness, incredible scorn for all those things for which men lie awake and run and bestir themselves and fight and travel. And what—Rabelais in effect goes on—did I mean to accomplish by this Prologue? That you, when you read all the pleasant titles of my writings (there follows a parade of grotesque book titles), will not suppose that there is nothing in them but jests and stuff for laughter and mockery. You must not so quickly draw conclusions from mere outward appearances. The habit does not make the monk. You must open the book and carefully consider what is in it; you will see that the contents are worth far more than the container promised, that the subjects are nowhere near so foolish as the title suggests. And even if, in the literal sense of the contents, you still find enough stuff for laughter of the sort that the title promises, you must not be satisfied with only that: you must probe deeper. Have you ever seen a dog who has found a marrow bone? Then you must have observed how devoutly he guards it, how fervently he seizes it, how prudently he approaches it, with what affection he breaks it open, how diligently he sucks it. Why does he do all this, what does he expect as his reward for so much trouble? Only a little marrow. But indeed that little is the most precious and perfect nourishment. Like him, you must have a keen nose to smell these goodly books (ces beaulx livres de haulte gresse), to perceive and value their contents; then, by sedulous reading and frequent meditation, you must break the bone and suck the mar- === Page 51 === THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH row, which contains the substance-or the things which I intend by my Pythagorean symbols-in the sure hope that by so reading you will gain intelligence and courage; for you will find in it a far finer taste and a more abstruse teaching, which will reveal deep secrets to you touching both our religion and our political and economic life. In the closing sentences of the Prologue, to be sure, he turns all profound interpretation into comedy again, but there can be no doubt that, with his example of Socrates, his comparison of the reader to the dog who breaks open the bone, and his designating his work as "livres de haute gresse," he meant to indicate a purpose which lay close to his heart. The comparison of Socrates to the figures of Silenus (to which Xenophon too refers) appears to have made a great impression on the Renaissance (Erasmus includes it in his Adagia, and this is perhaps Rabelais' direct source); it offers a concept of Socrates' personality and style which seems to give the authority of the most impressive figure among the Greek philosophers to the mixture of genres which was a legacy of the Middle Ages. Montaigne as his star witness for the same point at the beginning of the twelfth Essay of his Third Book; the tone of the passage is quite different from Rabelais', but the subject under dis- cussion is the same-the mixture of styles: "Socrates maketh his soul to move with a natural and common motion. Thus saith a plain country man, and thus a simple woman. He never hath other people in his mouth than coach-makers, joiners, cobblers, and masons. They are inductions and similitudes drawn from the most vulgar and known actions of men: every one under- stands him. Under so base a form we should never have chosen the noble worthiness and brightness of his admirable conceptions. (Florio's translation) To what extent Montaigne or even Rabelais are right in calling Socrates to witness when they declared their liking for a strong and may here be left out of consideration; it is enough for us that a "Socratic" style meant to them something free and un- trammelled, something close to ordinary life, and indeed, for Rabelais, buffoonery (ridicule en son maintien, le nez pointu, le regard d'un taureau, le visage d'un fol Toujours === Page 52 === 690 PARTISAN REVIEW riant, toujours beuvant d'autant à un chascun, tousjours se guabelant ...), in which at the same time divine wisdom and perfect virtue are concealed. It is as much a style of life as a literary style; it is, as in Socrates (and in Montaigne too), the expression of the man. As a level of style, this mixture was particularly suitable for Rabelais. First, on purely practical grounds, it permitted him to touch upon things that shocked the reactionary authorities of the time, to display them in a twilight between jest and earnest, which, in case of neces- sity, made it easier for him to avoid full responsibility. Secondly, it was thoroughly consonant with his temperament-out of which, despite the earlier tradition, which was present in his mind, it arose as an absolutely characteristic phenomenon. And above all, it precisely served his purpose, namely, a productive irony which confuses the customary aspects and proportions of things, which makes the real appear in the super-real, wisdom in folly, rebellion in a cheerful and flavorful acceptance of life; which, through the play of possibilities, cast a dawning light on the possibility of freedom. I consider it a mis- take to probe Rabelais' hidden meaning that is, the marrow of the bone-for some definite and clearly delimited doctrine; the thing which lies concealed in his work, yet which is conveyed in a thousand ways, is an intellectual attitude, which he himself calls Pantagruelism; a grasp of life which takes in the spiritual and the sensual simultane- ously, which allows none of life's possibilities to escape. To describe it more in detail is not a wise undertaking... for one would im- mediately find oneself forced to compete with Rabelais; he himself is constantly describing it, and he can do it better than we can. I wish to add but one thing-namely, that the intoxication of his multi- farious play never degenerates into formless ravings and thus into something inimical to life; wildly as the storm sometimes rages in his book, every line, every word, is strictly under control. The riches of his style are not without their limits; the grotesque framework in itself excludes deep feeling and high tragedy; and it is not probable that he could have attained to them. Hence it might be doubted whether he has rightfully been given a place in our study, since what we are tracing is the combination of the commonplace with tragic seriousness. Certainly, no one can deny him the former, since he constantly makes it appear in the setting of his super-real world, and, in describing it, becomes a poet. That, among many other things, === Page 53 === THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH 691 he was a lyric poet, a polyphonic poet of real situations, has often been remarked and numerous passages have been quoted to demon- strate it-for example, the wonderful sentence at the end of Book I, chapter 4, which describes the dance on the lawn. We shall not deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting, at least one example of his lyrical- commonplace polyphony, namely the poem of the sheep, which he slips into the brief moment between the bargaining scene and the unexpected throwing of the ram into the sea, while Dindenauld, stupid and unsuspecting, is shamelessly belaboring Panurge with broad witticisms (end of Bk. IV, ch. 7): Panurge, ayant payé le marchant, choisit de tout le troupeau un beau et grand mouton, et l'emportait cryant et bellant, oyans tous les aultres et ensemblemment bellans et regardans quelle part on menoit leur compaignon." The short sentence, with its many participles, is a picture and a poem. Then tone and theme change: Ce pendant le marchant disoit à ses moutonniers: "O qu'il a bien sceû choisir, le challant! Il se y entend, le paillard! Vrayement, le bon vrayement, je le reservois pour le seigneur de Cancale, comme bien congnoissant son naturel. Car, de sa nature, il est tout joyeulx et esbaudy quand il tient une espaule de mouton en main bien seante et advenente, comme une raquette gauchiere, et, avecques un cousteau bien tranchant, Dieu sçait comment il s'en escrime!" This presentation of the Sieur de Cancale's character provides an entirely different but no less striking picture, to the highest degree concrete and amusing, and at the same time fitting in perfectly, be- cause the broad description of someone unknown to the entire au- dience, and of his relations with the speaker, clearly indicates Din- denault's crude and at the same time witty bumptiousness (vraye- ment, le bon vrayement). Then the ram is thrown into the sea, and immediately the lyrical theme "criant et bellant" is heard again (beginning of Chapter 8): Soubdain, je ne sçay comment, le cas feut subit, je ne eus loisir le consyderer, Panurge, sans aultre chose dire, jette en pleine mer son === Page 54 === 692 PARTISAN REVIEW mouton criant et bellant. Tous les aultres moutons, crians et bellans en pareille intonation, commencerent soy jecter et saulter en mer après, à la file. La foulle estoit à qui premier y saulteroit après leur compaignon. Possible n'esoit les en garder,' and now a sudden excur- sion into grotesque erudition: comme vous scavez estre du mouton le naturel, tous jours suyvre le premier, quelque part qu'il aille. Aussi le dict Aristoteles lib. IX, de Histo. animal., estre le plus sot et inepte animant du monde." So much for the commonplace. But the seriousness lies in the joy of discovery-pregnant with all possibilities, ready to try every ex- periment, whether in the realm of reality or super-reality-which was characteristic of his time, the first half of the century of the Renais- sance, and which no one has so translated into terms of the senses as Rabelais with the language which he created for his book. That is why it is possible to call his mixture of styles, his Socratic buffoonery, high style. He himself found a charming phrase for the high style of his book, which is itself an example of that style. It is taken from the art of fattening stock, we have already quoted it above: ces beaulx livres de haulte gresse-"these goodly and well-fleshed books." (Translated from the German by Willard R. Trask) 'Then, as well as I could, I got upon it, and went along full two leagues upon his tongue, and so long marched, that at last I came into his mouth. But, oh gods and goddesses, what did I see there! Jupiter confound me with his trisulk lightning if I lie! I walked there as they do in Sophie, at Constantinople, and saw there great rocks, like the mountains in Denmark-I believe that those were his teeth. I saw also fair meadows, large forests, great and strong cities, not a jot less than Lyons or Poictiers. The first person I met there was a man planting cabbages, whereat being very much amazed, I asked him, My friend, what dost thou make here? I plant cabbages, said he. But how, and wherewith, said I? Ha, Sir, said he, everyone cannot have his ballocks as heavy as a mortar, neither can we be all rich. Thus do I get my living, and carry them to the market to sell in the city which is here behind. Jesus! said I, is there here a new world? Sure, said he, it is never a jot new, but it is commonly reported, that, without this, there is a new earth, whereof the inhabitants enjoy the light of a sun and moon, and that it is full of very good commodities; but yet this is more ancient than that. Yea, but, said I, what is the name of that city, whither thou carriest thy cabbages to sell? It is called Aspharage, said he, and all the indwellers are Christians, very honest men, and will make you good cheer. To be brief, I resolved to go thither. Now, in my way, I met with a fellow that was lying in wait to catch pigeons, of whom I asked, My friend, from whence come these pigeons? Sir, said he, they come from the other world. Then I thought, that, === Page 55 === THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH 693 when Pantagruel yawned, the pigeons went into his mouth in whole flocks, think- ing that it had been a pigeon-house. Then I went into the city, which I found fair, very strong, and seated in a good air; but at my entry the guard demanded of me my pass or ticket. Whereas I was much astonished, and asked them, My masters, is there any danger of the plague here? O Lord, said they, they die hard by here so fast, that the cart runs about the streets. Good God, said I, and where? Whereunto they answered, that it was in Larynx and Pharynx, which are two great cities, such as Rouen and Nantes, rich and of great trading. And the cause of the plague was by a stink- ing and infectious exhalation, which lately vapoured out of the depths of the wells, whereof there have died above two and twenty hundred and threescore persons within this seven-night. Then I considered, cal- culated, and found, that it was an unsavoury breathing, which came out of Pantagruel's stomach, when he did eat so much garlic, as we have aforesaid. Parting from thence, I passed amongst the rocks, which were his teeth, and never left walking, till I got up on one of them; and there I found the pleasantest places in the world, great large tennis-courts, fair galleries, sweet meadows, store of vines, and an infinite number of banqueting summer outhouses in the fields, after the Italian fashion, full of pleasure and delight, where I stayed full four months, and never made better cheer in my life as then. After that I went down by the hinder teeth to come to the chaps. But in the way I was robbed by thieves in a great forest, that is in the territory towards the ears. Then, going on downward, I fell upon a pretty petty village-truly I have forgot the name of it -where I was yet merrier than ever, and got some certain money to live by. For there they hire men by the day to sleep, and they get by it fivepence or sixpence a day, but they that can snore hard get at least ninepence. How I had been robbed in the valley, I informed the senators, who told me, that, in very truth, the people of that side were bad livers, and naturally thievish, whereby I perceived well, that as we have with us countries and mountains, so have they there countries be-hither and beyond the teeth. But it is far better living on this side, and the air is purer. There I began to think, that it is very true, which is commonly said, that one half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth; seeing none before myself had ever written of that country, wherein are above five and twenty kingdoms in- habited, besides deserts, and a great arm of the sea. Concerning which, I have composed a great book intituled The History of the Gorgians, for so I have named them because they dwell in the gorge of my master Pantagruel. At last I was willing to return, and, passing by his beard, I cast myself upon his shoulders, and from thence slid down to the ground, and fell before him. As soon as I was perceived by him, he asked me, Whence comest thou, Alcofrybas? I answered him, Out of your mouth, my lord! And how long hast thou been there? said he. Since the time, said I, that you went against the Almyrodes. That is more than six months ago, said he. And wherewith didst thou live? What didst thou drink? I answered, My lord, of the same that you did, and of the daintiest morsels that passed through your throat I took toll. Yea, but, said he, where didst thou shite? In your throat, my lord, said I. Ha, ha, thou art a merry fellow, said he. We have with the help of God conquered all the land of the Dipsodes; I will give thee the Lairdship of Salmigondin. Grammercy, my lord, said I, you gratify me beyond all that I have deserved of you. (Urquhart's translation, revised.) ² Panurge, having paid the merchant, chose out of all the flock a fine topping ram; and as he was hauling it along, crying out and bleating, all the rest, hearing and bleating in concert, stared to see whither their brother ram should be carried. (Motteux's translation, revised.) === Page 56 === 694 PARTISAN REVIEW a Meanwhile the merchant was saying to his shepherds: Ah! how well the knave could choose him out a ram; the whoreson has skill in cattle. Truly, aye really and truly, I reserved that very one for the Lord of Cancale, well knowing his disposition: for he is by nature overjoyed and all agog when he holds a good-sized handsome shoulder of mutton, like a left-handed racket, in one hand, with a good sharp carver in the other; God wot how he fences with it then! (Ibid.) b On a sudden, you would wonder how the thing was so soon done; for my part I cannot tell you, for I had not leisure to mind it; Panurge, without any further tittle-tattle, throws you his ram overboard into the middle of the sea, crying and bleating. Upon this all the other sheep in the ship, crying and bleating in the same tone, made all the haste they could to leap and plunge into the sea after him, one behind t’other, and great was the throng who should leap in first after their leader. It was impossible to hinder them: c for you know that it is the nature of sheep always to follow the first, where- soever it goes; which makes Aristotle, lib. 9 De Hist. Animal., mark them for the most silly and foolish animals in the world. (Ibid.) === Page 57 === Katherine Hoskins FILIAL Who raced with Cain, played dolls with Abel, Romped with John and his applauded Cousin, Eve's beloved, violable Child, Christ's half and younger sister, Who's happily to father wed Now seeks her childhood's mother. Behind the dim humane illusion, She yearns for Mary's tender hands And kindness tutored by frustration; She yearns for giant Eve's smooth wheat- Gold pillow belly undulant In summer smelling heat. The avid girl would grow long ears To hear the mother words that mother's Long forgot, in deep arrears Before the baby brain could jell One liquid sweetness from another, Yet every echo held. May ears grow quick and quivering! For if the patricidal tread Of Time's young sons, who've freshly ringed And hacked his proudest trees of thought And ground their daddy's bones for bread Should drown out her resort; === Page 58 === 696 PARTISAN REVIEW This high born child will whore it in the wheat With common cannibals and eat Her mother's tender gobbets neat- ly spiked on hate, a tasty stew, And fragrant with all the bitterly sweet Herbs her childhood knew. R. P. Blackmur AND NO AMENDS Because you, like another, have demanded flesh in the ghost, hope in the host; although you, like one other, are beach-stranded, and anhungered and lost, in unappeasable need, oh, die not in this place of most you I have made. There are no idols here, no hope delayed, only longing and grace. Even these are uncopeable friends, they devour their old selves: self-defeating and self-repeating, the self toasting self, in longing, in grace: and no amends. Oh, die not in this place. Here diminishes only, with unspeakable longing, unbeseechable grace. === Page 59 === CROSS-COUNTRY PHILADELPHIA: PLANS AND PIGEONS For a long time there was a rumor floating around New York that Philadelphia did not exist. When you mentioned it to certain metropolitan people, Struthers Burt reported in Philadelphia: Holy Experiment, "they thought someone was pulling their leg." He exploded the rumor (gave incontrovertible proof, in fact), but it has always seemed hard to believe that a big city so near would make so little noise. On the other hand, Philadelphians know of the existence of New York, though a great many of them do not consider it even a good place to visit. "So it has more movies," one Philadelphia lady told me during my last visit there, "but we have television too-three stations." And when she went on to further assess the values of her home place she was undoubtedly right in assuming that the nerves are not worn so edgy here, and the lights (an inadequate number of them) are never likely to induce a fever. As for myself, I am one of those who always have the feeling after that ninety minute ride from Pennsylvania Station in New York that I have entered a distinctly different world. The tensions loosen, you hear your footsteps striking the pavement, and suddenly you are in no particular hurry to get where you are going. There is time, much time: the afternoon and evening stretch before you, but not invitingly, and lethargically you move towards your appointments. There is no before- hand savor to the meetings, for it does not seem to matter much whether I should happen to meet an old acquaintance my shock of recognition (now that I have long left the city) is always greater than his. A quiet hello and things, you discover, are much the same. I have felt a wonder on passing through the large, quiet, marble hall that is the new (in a Philadelphia sense) 30th Street Station, as I waited for the trolley to take me to the center of town where, perched on City Hall, William Penn stands eternally dreaming, his arms out- stretched in what must by now be hopeless pride. Here was America's third largest city, an enormous and variegated manufacturing center (television sets, incredible quantities of false teeth, stainless steel pull- === Page 60 === 698 PARTISAN REVIEW man cars), an important fresh water port, an immigration headquarters, the dwelling place of more than two million people, the focus of an area servicing three million more-and looking no more lively than Coney Island on a cold winter day. I remembered, thinking of my friend's greeting and the old chestnut it called to mind, that Philadelphia has been called the biggest provincial village in the world( rather it is a collection of such villages), and I could not help but feel that an un- kind fate had come upon the city that was once America's first and greatest metropolis, as well as its first capital. Was it New York loom- ing just over the horizon which sent a chill shadow over this city? One is forced, for explanation, to invent private theories. Do Philadelphians suffer from a kind of native malady which induces dull- ness and a certain apathy, a mass vitamin deficiency perhaps, one of the sort whose need in spiritual nutrition has not yet been established? Because, though time has indeed darkened this city, there is a dinginess to it that years alone cannot account for. (Think of the brightness and color of far, far older European cities.) Your trolley will travel on and on through a drab, red brick sameness, through noisome slums that have spread like a creeping fungus. The trolley has no name; all too often it goes to much the same sort of place it has come from. To live here is like imperceptibly sinking in quicksand; it requires all one's energies to remain stationary. As far back as 1903 Lincoln Steffens gave Philadelphia its most familiar characterization - "corrupt and contented"- and few have bothered to quarrel with the term since. Professor Cornelius Weygandt perhaps, and it is proudly that he writes, "The true Philadelphian is a Republican by birthright... and would no more think of changing his party than he would his religion." And it is undoubtedly at the of Philadelphia we must look to blame for much of "Republican" kind the current state of affairs. For corruption of the kind Steffens meant has, year by year, increased the mouldiness of the city. The Republicans got a stranglehold on City Hall around the time it was built (an architectural mistake that can never be rectified) in the 1870's, and not even the popularity of Roosevelt could get them to release it. The ward-heelers and the "true blue-bloods" formed an unholy alliance in the time of Senator Penrose: the Pennsylvania Railroad is in the brother- hood somewhere, and so are the notorious Pews of the Sun Oil Com- pany. The only satisfaction left to them is that they remain in control of a diseased and shoddy city, one that has degenerated into material for a series of bad vaudeville jokes. Struthers Burt has also reported that Philadelphia mothers used to have their children add to their === Page 61 === CROSS-COUNTRY 699 prayers, "And, O dear God, please bless the PRR, the Girard Trust Company, and the Republican Party." It would seem that, up until this most recent election, when reform elements won some minor municipal seats, it was a remarkably efficacious prayer. But it is also true that now and then someone in Philadelphia will seem to obtain a dose of the peculiar missing vitamin. A publisher, J. David Stern, was infused with it during New Deal days and he made The Philadelphia Record into a forceful newspaper, only to fight the strike of its employees by ceasing publication. And of late there has been Richardson Dilworth, a lawyer who began crusading for a change in municipal political habits when he ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 1947 and who succeeded when he tried for the office of city treasurer in the relatively unimportant 1949 elections. He whipped up street corner rallies as one of his techniques, and from the twenty minute talks he delivered nightly to the good-sized crowds (for something in his clean- cut appearance and sincere manner appealed to them) I was able to get a quick summary of the local scandals Philadelphians know nearly as well as they know the names of the players on the local ball clubs. Here they were again: the "drones" in City Hall who padded the city payrolls while spending leisurely afternoons at the Camden race track on the other side of the Delaware; the machine politicians who have organized numbers and slot machine rackets on a ward to ward basis; the water tax racket (reduced bills to manufacturers in return for "gifts" to the collectors); the need for the 22,000 municipal employees to kick back to the Republican campaign fund in order to keep their jobs. It wasn't necessary for Dilworth to repeat himself at each meet- ing; the list of these scandals offered him a seemingly endless variety of material. The homeliest and perhaps most effective touch was the one about the firemen having to supply their own toilet paper for the firehouses. The crowds listened to them like children hearing a story told many times before: Dilworth's appeal resulted more, it was said, from his entertainment value (there is a masochistic satisfaction to be gained from hearing one's home place derided) than from his edifying ability. The reform elements were actually helped by the Republican newspapers, which showed no hesitation in spreading the scandals over its pages. With the folding of the Record the opposition voice was lost, and the Bulletin and the Inquirer (afternoon and morning papers respectively nearly everyone reads both of them) felt called upon to fill the need for it by means of their own columns. What has been called === Page 62 === 700 PARTISAN REVIEW the homogeneous quality of the city is shared by its newspapers, for they almost never contradict each other. A third paper called The Daily News exists. It it made up largely of syndicated columns and the U. S. Treasury Report—thus gaining much of its circulation from numbers players. Dilworth's darts did manage to stir the huge Republican jellyfish, enough to cause it to put up a purer slate of candidates than usual, and for the machine bosses (Sheriff Austin Meehan is the most notorious of these, though hardly a rival to the colorful Vare brothers of the twenties) to sling all the mud they could dig up at the crusading lawyer. The Sheriff enabled Dilworth to reach his high point of enter- tainment value when he challenged him to a debate in the sacrosanct Academy of Music. The hall was packed and the largest radio and television audience in the city's history learned about a divorce action Dilworth had been involved in during the prohibition era. However, a newspaperman told me, "civic indignation reached its peak around that time." That it was civic indignation which caused the defeat of the machine in November is clear enough, mild-mannered though it may be. It is perhaps in response to it that a rather note- worthy phenomenon has come into being in Philadelphia: planning. Even the officials seem to notice that while the city's progress is certainly slow it is not at all sure, and so two planning organizations were formed to draft plans and make recommendations for municipal improvement. One is called The Redevelopment Authority; the other The City Planning Commission. A third and unofficial organization, The Citizen's Council of City Planning, now exists, evidently to check on the planning being done by the other two. The progress reports put out by these planning outfits make in- teresting reading, though I should think that any Philadelphian who read them with care would make plans, were it possible, to move elsewhere. One learns, through the Redevelopment Authority report, of the immense blight that has fallen upon many of the city areas. Pilot plans show ten of these areas selected for reclamation, and the report states about them: "The city has definitely selected certain territories as the likeliest spots in which to commence real work." It is, of course, a typically Philadelphian kind of sentence: you see the anonymous author's awareness of past indecisions and failures (note the use of the word definitely and the rather pathetic need to qualify work with real); you see him trying to assume the mask of certainty as he treads out into the unknown; and a native stuffiness shows up in the choice of === Page 63 === CROSS-COUNTRY 701 commence for begin. One wonders why it was not written, "The city has decided to begin work on the following territories. . . ." But nothing in Philadelphia is as simple as that. For decisions have been made before and work has begun before. When the Delaware River bridge was built in the early twenties Philadelphia made a bargain with Camden at the other end. Each was to improve its own approaches to the bridge. Camden, one fifteenth the size of its neighbor, kept its word long ago, but Philadelphia has never managed to do the same. How long ago was the project for removing the "Chinese Wall" decided upon? The Chinese Wall is an ugly escarpment that runs along a considerable stretch of Market Street, the city's busiest, allowing PRR trains to run overground to Broad Street. Tunnels bored through it for cross-town traffic are dank, dark and slimy, favorite spots for mugging. Still the escarpment stands, the central city's most prominent eyesore. At one time Philadelphia was to have a modern, high speed subway system-the "Els"-meandering for mile upon mile between West Philadelphia and Frankford and were to come down; Locust Street was to have a subway. Six million dollars was invested in digging, five years of work, then abrupt abandonment. No one now ever expects the tracks of even that one subway to be laid, the trains to run. Nevertheless the planners carry on, and perhaps their quiet per- severance is one of the few remaining remnants of the Quaker Spirit which once hovered over William Penn's country town. The express highways to eliminate transportation bottlenecks have not been started, but "plans are being considered." There is a nice plan for suitably enshrining the clump of historic buildings (Independence Hall, et al.) on lower Chestnut Street, next to the plant of the Curtis Publishing Company, in what is to be known as Independence Mall. This plan ties in with the bridge approach improvement, and it is ready. An- other is for air pollution control-the fine soft coal soot mingling with the dampish air gives Philadelphia a distinctly regional weather, too hot and muggy in summer, wet and cold in winter. The sinuses become troubled. There is the sorely needed one for improving the garbage collections, and yes, that old hardy perennial for negating the most notorious of its evils, the drinking water. This turned bad over fifty years ago, and while it no longer kills people, one of the planning reports did notice that "during the year a period of unusually bad taste in the city water brought a number of queries . . . as to the status of the water program." The manufacturing plants that line the Delaware and Schuylkill === Page 64 === 702 PARTISAN REVIEW Rivers (between them lies much of the city proper) have poured in- credible amounts of waste and sewage into them which, then, chemically treated and diluted, flow through the water pipes. The patience with which Philadelphians thus drink their sewage system (although the high per capita beer consumption shows some attempt at escape) is a tribute to their character and at the same time another symptom of the malaise. “It’s not so much the lack of funds,” Dilworth told me, “as the way they do things around here.” So, what the plans amount to for the relatively uncomplaining residents (kept regularly informed of them not only by the reports, but by the Bulletin and Inquirer) is a kind of municipal dream. These “comprehensive studies” being made to attack a problem, these continual “steps in the right direction” are the fantasy expressions of “the bright, clean city” that supposedly is just around the corner. The target date is 1954, says Mayor Samuels, but no one has ever paid much attention to him. Thus the dream is like the kind a perpetually sick patient will have of someday getting well. The doctors keep assuring him that the cure has been found, that treatment will soon begin—and meanwhile the patient lies soberly in bed, feeling vaguely depressed. But the planners, cheerful as they are, have have found themselves unable to create plans for what is most pressingly needed. “Housing re- mains still the number one problem of Philadelphia,” a report mentions, and just about lets it go at that. Understandably, for where to begin to transform the slums that vein through this city of homes? They are said to be the worst and most extensive city slums in the country, and a look over them from one of the very few penthouses is depressing confirmation. “The outlander is told,” remarks Dr. Weygandt, “if he would visualize Philadelphia, to see acres on acres of small houses of red brick, with the streets on which they are built running at right angles to each other. Of four rooms, of six rooms, such two-story houses line literally miles on miles of our streets.” What is not mentioned, is that a good many of these are of the band-box type, hovels some of them, and at last count 19,000 still using outdoor privies. “Small, nar- row, sunless, jerry-built. . . .” Struthers Burt calls them, and mentions how every now and then some of them fall down, killing their in- habitants. Unlike New York, which Philadelphia has at least rivalled in sium creation, there is a stagnant, hopeless quality to the squalor, al- though it is a moot question as to whether the railway tenements of the === Page 65 === CROSS-COUNTRY 703 larger city are the more terrible living quarters. Nor do housing projects rise appreciably from these sprawling, crime-breeding areas. Philadelphia was offered funds for housing improvement during New Deal times, but the Republican old guard would have none of the Democratic socialistic gold; and these days private investment perhaps sensibly will not trust the competence of the city administrators. The outward sprawl of the city began with the consolidation of many small communities into the metropolis in 1854. And with the convenient "Main Line" (to Chicago) tracks the PRR laid to the west, the "three hundred" owners of the city were able to develop a sort of myopia towards the place from which they extracted their fortunes. They moved west, but not very far. They built their large houses of English and Colonial design in and near the small communities on either side of the tracks (both sides good), and used the exceptionally good commuter service the railroad provided them for egress to and exit from the city. Thus: the "Main Line," synonymous with Phila- delphia society and old trust fund money and leisurely living. Ardmore, St. David's, Bryn Mawr, and Wayne-these have a meaning for Phila- delphians, for here and in places like them, the aristocracy lives. I heard someone say that for these commuters the fountains in Logan Circle are turned on, as they begin to emerge from the large and handsome Suburban Station, and stop at ten o'clock when all of them are in. Add the names of Chestnut Hill, and Cynwyd, and Haverford. Think of horse-breeding and debutantes and the fox-hunt. From these communities, from this set (with the exception of a hardy few who still inhabit the Rittenhouse Square area of the central city) come those who may attend the august Assembly balls. The Nouveaux-riches, and even some members of the middling classes, have managed to join their company out in that fertile rolling country (twenty electrified minutes to the heart of the city) but they cannot go to the Assembly or ride the white horses of the First City Troop. Here children are taught to sit a horse before they attend the kindergarten of "select" private schools. It was from this section that Philip Barry drew dubious inspiration for "The Philadelphia Story" and it was against its shibboleths and ingrained ways that poor Kitty Foyle ran afoul, thereafter to nurse memories and the child that had been impregnated in her by this particular variety of blue blood. This aristocracy, though its members still do much of the behind the scene running of the city, and are important in state affairs too, has tended to run a bit to seed. The Main Line never got café society like New York, or reached the cultured status of the Boston Brahmins. === Page 66 === 704 PARTISAN REVIEW Perhaps it became more ingrained because it had nothing to show. Its money is rigidly administered by trust funds (a Philadelphia invention), which do not allow of the kind of speculation that can make rich people richer and sometimes poorer. And it is money that is saddled by taxes. The newer Philadelphia tycoons thus have names which bear no resemblance to the Biddles and the Drexels which, for the outside world, were so long identified with Philadelphia power and money. However, these people still pursue their polite, vaguely snobbish, almost English ways. They shop in Wanamaker's and Strawbridge's and in Bailey, Banks and Biddle on narrow Chestnut Street—a street that is by no means Fifth Avenue, but quietly luxurious nevertheless. And, should you think them lacking in social consciousness, note the fact that it was a group of Main Line subdebs who recently went down to City Hall and began sweeping its musty corridors with actual and symbolic brooms. Some Main Liners like to think that the "real" Philadelphia has moved out to where they are. In a partial sense they are right, for the above mentioned exodus has taken some of the middle class out to the environs, and also some of those who labor in the ship yards, the Budd works, the Philco, Bendix and RCA plants. It is as though there were a general gasping for air (unlike New York, where residents grouch about the crowding, but stay firmly, even sentimentally attached to their warrens) and not even the Negroes—who make up a high 13% of the population—can be contained in the squalid areas that fenced them in before the war. There is an undercurrent of resentment towards this continuing encroachment upon "white" territory, and while no violence has broken out over it, a real tension exists. Philadelphia is a city that has a little of the south in it, and a bitter transit strike was fought over the policy of hiring Negroes for motormen and conductor jobs. To get back to Dr. Weygandt, we may use him for our authority on old Philadelphia and its ways. "My Philadelphia is to be found here and there," he writes. "You see it at ... the concerts of The Phila- delphia Orchestra, most pure and unadulterated at the flower shows in Convention Hall." I have never browsed through a flower show at Convention Hall, but I think he is right when he goes on to mention the fact that it is "in the country towns within an hour by car from the city that you will today meet most folks that have still Philadelphia ways." You will find the last of the Quakers in communities like Haverford, and the Pennsylvania Dutch (Philadelphia variety) out === Page 67 === CROSS-COUNTRY 705 around Doylestown in Bucks County. The old time Germantown fam- ilies have gone on to Chestnut Hill, after the PRR laid out another of its convenient spurs for them. But there is still some of the past hanging over the city itself. Rit- tenhouse Square is not what it used to be, but Delancey Place still has its pastel shuttered houses with the white stone steps, and some of the old streets like Camac and Mole and Appletree have been refurbished to look not new, but old. What Bohemia there is tends to cling to nar- row mews like Ringold Place, and the homosexuals wander nearby in Rittenhouse Square and further downtown in Washington Square. There are still drug stores called apothecaries which show no interest in soda fountains and telephone booths. Here and there are islands of the old city: Leary's book store and the Mercantile Library are practically next door to the one relatively modern piece of architecture, the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society on Market Street. And, of course, City Hall still rears monstrously. "It's so awful, it's lovely," a Phila- delphian said to me. "I wouldn't mind it staying there if it wasn't such a traffic hazard." The arts sicken and suffer in Philadelphia, except musically. The huge, Greek-style Parkway museum does almost nothing to encourage native talent, although a fine Matisse show was held last year. The Barnes hoard is as inaccessible as ever in Merion; and the collectors (some important ones) prefer to buy their paintings in New York. Thus, that is where the Philadelphia artist must sooner or later go, if he wants to be heard of. The exodus of talent in all artistic fields has been going on for many years, for Philadelphia represents only dullness and sterility to the stubbornly creative soul. But the orchestra patrons have always been staunch, and for the first time in history a city appropria- tion came forth for it this year. It is still respectable for Philadelphia adolescents to stand in line for hours on Saturday evenings, with their dates, in the hope of gaining gallery seats. The line is constantly menaced by pigeon droppings, for the city ordnance against feeding the plague of these birds that like so much to roost and eliminate on and around the Academy of Music has had little effect to date. No one has taken to Ormandy as they once did to Stowkowski, but there is no denying the fact that The Philadelphia Orchestra makes some of the world's finest musical sounds. I was walking one bright, hopeful day with a young lady and on that quiet Philadelphia street a pigeon wandered lazily across our path. "Pigeon," she said, bending down, "do you have a message for me?" === Page 68 === PARTISAN REVIEW 706 And it struck me how much we needed one to buoy us up. But at that time there were none of those plans to offer us the possibility of a brave new city world. Fantasy or not, the plans are on paper now. Someday there will be no more Chinese Wall, someday the Parkway museum will get its interior finished up, and the tap water will be as sparkling as champagne. The garbage will be collected promptly and, perhaps, it will be Richardson Dilworth sitting as top dog in City Hall, the corridors not needing subdebs to sweep them clean—and the new mayor will put lights in the Broad Street subway passages, so that no more rapes will occur in them. And toilet paper in the firehouses. Hollis Alpert === Page 69 === PARIS LETTER Literary news. I have just received a letter from an Italian friend of mine, a well-known novelist. It begins: “Literary life is getting paler and more precarious every day. The question is in order: 'For whom, or rather, for what civilization are we writing?'” And it goes on: “I am suffering from an attack of war jitters, these days. What depresses me most is the thought not so much of the A-Bomb, the weapons, and violent death, as of the cowardice, the informing, the famine, the uni- versal fear, the desperate social experiments, the persecutions, the in- tolerance, and the propaganda. These are things I know only too well, and they make me sick to my stomach. The beauty of it is that it will all be done in the name of human progress. “I don't know whether war will come this summer,” continues my literary friend, “but when I see in the papers articles which make fun of panicky bourgeois people who are withdrawing their money from the banks, and making ready to escape by plane, motorboat or car, I, who am not doing anything of the kind, am tempted to say that those people are not so wrong after all. The question today is not to make a heroic show, but rather to protect oneself from a catastrophe which, as we have learnt just a few years ago, has a tendency to spare those who have been able to take some protective measures. These are ugly thoughts, I know, but after all everything happens as if all that History, the modern world, and the modern State, wanted from us were our physical life. As for our reason, our moral consent, our persuasion, who on earth cares for them? Hence, although I might not approve of them, I certainly do understand the people whose first reaction to the present crisis is to run away, like frightened animals.” I shall not comment on this letter. I just give it as the latest piece of news that has reached me from the literary world. Then there was the remark by a French poet on his return from a trip to Florence. “My strongest feeling there,” said the poet, “was that even if the city itself with all its buildings, its statues, and its paintings were annihilated those were by no means fundamental realities, and it would not be too difficult for man to create something just as stately === Page 70 === PARTISAN REVIEW 708 as long as those hills, those olive trees and cypresses, that sky and that light continued to be there." There is nothing very remarkable about such a thought, except that it should be uttered as an attempt to dispel the fear that has come to stay with us. It struck me as being the exact reverse of Keats's celebrated exclamation, and far more melancholy, since it meant resigning oneself not to destruction so much as to the inarticulate. Because, certainly, the light of Attica, Mount Olympus and the plain of Thessaly is still there, but the Greek people have not yet been granted by history a chance to reweave anything like the fabric of the social life in an Attic borough of the sixth century B.C. Which is where the Parthenon sprang from, and not the sun. But I think I know the trend of thought that led this French poet to rate the Tuscan landscape so high as to attribute to it an almost divine power of self-sufficiency and creation. Nature in Italy is essentially un- romantic and reassuring, a constant and all-pervading suggestion that the only enigma about life is how to harmonize the rhythm of one's per- sonal existence with that of nature, and that to create without effort, if not without pain, is man's plain task. The elements are all there at hand, from the soil to the aptitudes and forms of the body, from the light and the colors, to the functions of animal life. Piero della Francesca's is the light of early spring mastered once and for all, made into an element of pure form. But it is, after all, only a pale reflection of the sky anyone can see, just before dawn over the Tusean Appennines. Which is the same sky that shines over the most thankless toil and allots a moment of joy even to the most miserable. Hence flows naturally the seemingly reas- suring thought that all traces of Piero's invention might disappear but the source of his and of myriads of possible figurations-the light-will last forever. Animal fear is a reflex. And looking to nature for a reassurance against the apocalyptic solicitations of our time is a form of reverie. Generally speaking what we have come to expect from the contemporary intellectual is not the nerve to offer total answers and all-comprehensive perspectives. Only the fanatics and the lunatics still seem to have the courage to make such attempts. Having gone through the experience of fanaticism and having found it deceptive, Raymond Abellio has frankly chosen lunacy. Intellectual lunacy, of course; that is, a kind of sullen overbidding on ideas. This speculation is consigned to two novels (Heureux les pacifiques and Les yeux d'Ezechiel sont ouverts) and a theoretical essay, all pub- lished by Gallimard. Which is probably the most significant fact about Abellio as a social phenomenon. Before the war his books would have === Page 71 === PARIS LETTER 709 been refused not only by Gallimard but by most publishers in France. Today not only are they published but they are best-sellers (Abellio's second novel has sold forty thousand copies). In addition to this, they have been favorably reviewed by authoritative critics like André Rous- seaux of Le Figaro Littéraire and Emile Henriot (of the Académie Fran- çaise) of Le Monde. A much better critic than these two, André Fonatine, also of Le Monde, while insisting that Abellio's ideas cannot be taken seriously has nevertheless devoted two columns to the demonstration. Abellio starts from the postulate that since the only truth modern man can obtain is in deciphering historical destiny, since all world-his- torical systems built by modern man have been found both faulty and catastrophic in essence, something better than world historical systems has to be found. And what can be better than prophecy, the divination and announcement of God's true design which is, finally, the essence of all world historical speculation? As for catastrophe, men of M. Abellio's temper are not going to find consolation in messianic hopes; on the contrary, they brace themselves with the thought that catastrophe, anni- hilation, a new Flood shall and must come. In fact, the role of the prophet sage today is not to warn men and call on them to repent, but rather to smoothe the path before the Four Horsemen, to act literally as the agent provocateur of universal disintegration. Hence, for example, Abellio regards the present struggle between capitalism and Communism as just a skirmish between two equally blind instruments of Fate (with a slight advantage in favor of the Communists insofar as they are more consistently nihilistic than their adversaries, hence more in accord with present-day entropy). To take sides in such a struggle is for Abellio a crude kind of stupidity reserved for the masses and for individuals whose souls are irremediably plebeian. Except, of course, in case one acts in utter disbelief, keeping in mind the superior aim of cosmic defeatism. Such an aim, however, is best served by Abellio's own brand of sages and saints, who, it goes without saying, are rather on the Nietzschean, or, as their inventor chooses to say, the "Luciferian" side. What Abellio's books lack is not talent, but simply sense and taste. His novels can best be described as a mixture of Dekobra and Malraux. As for his "system" of prophecy, it is Nietzsche, plus the Bible, plus an indigestion of esoteric literature. Why, then, are serious critics discussing such a writer? Why am I myself reporting his apparition? Perhaps simply because in a world where the boundaries between sense and nonsense, ordered thought and frenzy, are becoming thinner and thinner, it would not be "objective" to neglect such a phenomenon. In addition to this, and sociologically most revealing, there is === Page 72 === 710 PARTISAN REVIEW Abellio's biographical background. His real name is Georges Soules. He was a student at the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Normale, the best school in France and one where nonsense is hardly encouraged. But he is also a graduate of the two main world historical schools of our time. He apparently took part in the Spanish war as a Communist and came back from it a Trotskyist with a solid hatred of the Stalinist hierarchy. In 1940 he became a fascist of the fanatic cagoulard-techno- cratic-synarchist variety. Finally, disappointed with the shabbiness of French fascism (and presumably also with its impending defeat) during the last part of the war, he founded a "socialist revolutionary" movement of his own. Having fled from France after the liberation he now lives in Belgium as an exile. Such a succession of choices that are nothing if not extreme is cer- tainly impressive. Their intellectual outcome is "prophecy." Abellio's prophetism, one might add, signifies little else than a perverse refusal to shed anything of his past, an obstinate attempt to prove that he was right all the way. It would surely be incongruous, having talked about Abellio, not to say something about Camus' latest works, the play Les Justes and Actuelles a collection of editorials written in Combat from 1944 to 1947 plus a few topical articles published after the author of The Plague had given up militant journalism. After all is said about the weakness of Les Justes as a play, it remains a piece of literary work that commands respect, and a stage production that is moving if not really dramatic. In any case it has been running for six solid months in spite of the lukewarm reception it got from the critics. As you know by now, Les Justes is a play about the assassination of the Grand Duke Serge by the socialist revolutionary Kalyaev, or rather about Kalyaev's refusal in spite of the terrific pressure of the conspiracy to throw the bomb the first time because the Grand Duke's children were in the carriage (Hence the remark of some spectators: "Five acts about whether or not one should kill little children"). It con- sists of five barely connected scenes about what kind of murderer one should be once murder has become imperative a delicate and pas- sionate one, or a fanatic and ruthless one. What made the Parisians applaud Les Justes and burst into tears at some of its scenes was not the debate about the Revolution which is present only in a few sketchy sentences, but the reminder of the Re- sistance which it obviously contains. Those years of terror and revolt are not forgotten in France. There were, in those days, people who went === Page 73 === PARIS LETTER out to kill and be killed, and were not murderers or candidates for mar- tyrdom. Least of all were they ready to make violence itself fit into an ideological system with the consequences left to the leader to draw. What did they kill and get killed for then? Justice? The Fatherland? Human Happiness? A United Europe? Today knowing what we know and living in the kind of world we are living in it seems that the only respect- ful answer we can give to such a question is that those men and women died not for any capital letter but as free individuals possessed of a sense of human dignity that could not be stifled by fear or prudence and hence they could not but revolt against humiliation. Camus' Kalyaev is one of those people. More accurately stated, he stands for the idea of the fullblooded individual, capable of love, of joy, of intense natural impulses, and who is a terrorist in addition, out of moral necessity. He does not accept the inhumanity of his mission, but suffers it as an unbearable strain whose unfailing retribution will be death. (Les Justes has as an epigraph the verse "O love! O life! Not life but love in death!" from Romeo and Juliet). Kalyaev's antagonist is Stepan, a kind of passionate forerunner of the Stalinist, who stands for the thesis that the individual should indeed accept the inhuman, and, in the name of the Idea, consider himself simply a spare part in the machinery of fate. Bearing, as it does, on the question whether or not Kalyaev should have thrown his bomb on the children, which is, of course, no sooner stated than solved, the opposition remains episodic and lateral. It is pathetic, but not dramatic, simply because the issue is obviously not the central one. In his effort to bring the conflict down to what appears to him solid ground: individual conscience and a painfully specific choice, Camus necessarily loses sight of the problem which the action itself, and its heroes, raise at every moment, namely the problem of the ultimate val- idity of the terrorists' moral universe, of the eschatological hope out of which their plight is born: the Revolution. Since this, which is the core of the matter, is left untouched, what we have in the end is simply a sort of funeral commemoration of les justes, the pure of heart, those ancient characters who (unlike the bureaucratic executioners of our time) knew the boundaries of the human, and abided by them. A moving performance, but not a convincing one. It still remains that those who criticize Camus for the weakness of his intellectual position overlook the fact that what this remarkable writer aims at is not cogent demonstration so much as an artful mobil- ization of the emotional power contained in the western concepts of 711 === Page 74 === 712 PARTISAN REVIEW the "human" and of the "individual." What makes Camus' discourse so appealing in spite of its gaps is that he does not speak in terms of any established pattern of ideas, such as "humanism," Christianity, or existentialism. His language is that of a neophyte, a recent convert from nihilism who would rediscover by himself, step by step, the elementary norms of humanity. Lucid disillusionment and insistence on hope are so consistently paired, in what he says, that it is difficult to weigh the one against the other. He pleads the case of the "human" by the skin of his teeth, as it were. Hence the terseness of his statements, even when their scope is not clear. Hence, also, Camus' hold on his readers. A serious analysis of the article, interviews, and public speeches, collected in Actuelles would require little less than a history of France from 1944 to 1948, the years during which Camus played an outstanding role in French social life, if not directly in French politics, as an editor of Combat, exercising an influence that cannot be evaluated in terms of political effectiveness. What Camus and his friends wanted to accom- plish by their journalistic activity was, in a time of yellow press, pre- fabricated public opinion, and mass politics, to give an example of "critical journalism," that is of a journalism aimed at the individual reader and his reason rather than at the "public," which would hence try to satisfy all the requirements of a truly cultural enterprise, from good writing to objective reporting and dignified argument. In this, the founders of the original Combat (the paper that continues to carry its masthead has no longer anything in common with it), certainly succeeded. One has to go far back in the history of French journalism to find a newspaper of a comparable level. This, however, did not prevent the effort from being shortlived, not on account of financial difficulties so much, as of the intrinsically exceptional nature of the attempt itself. The "critical" position taken by Camus, the journalist, implied either that the critical attitude itself, that is the rejection of present political alternatives in the name of cultural and human values, could become a powerful movement of opinion, and eventually provoke a liberal revolution, and this was, of course, contradictory; or (more likely) that the situation was hopeless, and criticism had to be kept up indefinitely, as a kind of stoic defiance to the course of contemporary history, and this was impossible. Camus' political message is aptly condensed in the quotation from Nietzsche that opens Actuelles: "It is better to perish than to hate and to fear; it is better to perish twice than to make oneself hated and feared. Such shall be one day the highest maxim of all politically organized society." The restoration of individual nobility does not, of course, constitute === Page 75 === PARIS LETTER a political stand. But who could deny that the appeal itself is in order? The effectiveness of Camus' intervention in public matters is not in his answers, but in the tone of his protest, and in the fact that the issues he takes up: violence, bureaucratic tyranny, the deadliness of modern ideologies, are all to the point. Hence, even though we may be disap- pointed by his conclusions, we cannot help being the accomplices of his yearning. And who is giving the correct answers, anyway? In a public speech, in which he pleaded against the notion of the "artiste engagé" and in favor of that of the artist as "the witness for freedom," Camus said, among other things: "There is no life without persuasion. Contemporary history, however, knows only intimidation. Men live, and cannot but live, by the idea that they have something in common in the name of which they can eventually always recognize each other. But we have discovered that there are men that cannot be persuaded. ... He who wants to dominate is deaf. Confronted by him, one can only fight or die. That is why men today live in terror. . . . It is not astonishing that these terrorized silhouettes, whose entire life is summarized in a police filing card, can be treated like anonymous ab- stractions. . . . All this is logical. If one wants to unify the whole world in the name of a theory, one is bound to make the world as fleshless, as blind, and as deaf, as the theory itself. . . . Everything that makes for the dignity of art opposes such a world, and rejects it. Art, by the mere fact of its existence, denies the conquests of ideology. . . . The artist distinguishes whereas the conqueror levels. The artist lives and creates on the level of the flesh, and of passion; he knows that nothing is simple, and that the other man exists. For the conqueror, the other man is simply an obstacle, his world is a world of masters and slaves, the very world in which we are living. ... And that is why it is futile and derisive to ask us for justification and commitment." These are the main themes of Camus' protest, and they surely ex- plain why we cannot expect logical developments from him, but only a halting succession of impassioned appeals. If, now, one were to look for a writer who is authentically non- committed to the questions of our time, and entirely free from any anguish, one should surely mention Marcel Aymé, whose latest play, Clérambard, has been the greatest success of the season. His answer to the absurdity of our world is farce unlimited, and no morality. Clérambard is the story of a ruined nobleman, who (unlike so many middle class people in France, who have simply resigned themselves to economic ruin), has found a bold answer to his extreme situation. He has transformed the castle of his ancestors into a slave State of his own. === Page 76 === 714 PARTISAN REVIEW His inherited sadism finds its outlet in two exclusive passions: killing all the animals that come into his sight, and keeping his whole family bent over knitting machines from dawn to sunset. The family, the neighbors, the local priest have been asking for mercy, and preaching Christian virtues to him. All in vain. Until, one day, Saint Francis in person appears to him, and hands him a copy of the Little Flowers. Reading of Saint Francis, Count Clérambard undergoes absolute conversion. No work any more, no concern for the future, and mercy even for flies, spiders and fleas. Pure Franciscanism is now the inflexible law. The whole family must now take the open road, preaching poverty and meekness, and living by charity. Resistance to such a strong character is impossible, but there is a lot of frightened objection by the family, and a determined effort on the part of the parish priest to introduce a sceptical note into such frenzy. But all doubt is overcome when, evoked by Clérambard, Saint Francis makes himself visible to the assembled family. Not to the priest, however, who is left to his positivistic bewilderment. The farce, of course, has no particular meaning, and it would be absurd to ask oneself whether Aymé sides with Clérambard or with the priest. He sides with the most comical, naturally, and this is up to the spectator to decide on. Yet, after the first performance of the play, François Mauriac, that jansénistic champion of Western civilization, wrote a sulphurous article denouncing Aymé's frivolous impiety, and threatening him with the same hell where Voltaire, Rousseau, and Anatole France, are burning. Marcel Aymé could have retorted with one of his stories, which is about Paradise during a certain war, when all the worst characters were admitted, pro- vided they wore uniforms, and the crowd was so big that there was not a single place left for a true believer. Nicola Chiaromonte === Page 77 === Sidney Hook THE BERLIN CONGRESS FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM The Congress for Cultural Freedom which met in Berlin from June 25th to June 30th was an exciting affair. The news of the invasion of Korea broke just before the first session when it seemed uncertain whether the Russians would march in Germany too, in which event every delegate would have been a prisoner of the M.V.A. in a few hours. West Berlin, defenseless in an iron ring of Soviet armour, remained outwardly calm. Nor was there any overt sign of nervousness or anxiety among the Congress members. On the contrary. The militant tone taken toward the Soviet version of culture, the appeal of Professor Ernst Reuter, the elected Mayor of Great Berlin and an active participant in the sessions, to the peoples of the satellite countries to support the program of the Congress, the Message of Solidarity sent by Western intellectuals to their confrères in the East, indicated that the Korean events, if anything, had given a fillup to the spirit of the delegates. Theodore Plivier, author of Stalingrad who had broken with the Communists and was hiding out from them in Stuttgart, had originally recorded his message to the Congress on tape. As soon as he learned of the invasion of Korea, he flew to Berlin in order to emphasize by a public appearance his denunciation of the Soviet practice of "total unfreedom." A security watch had to be placed on him as on several other delegates from satellite countries to circumvent attempts at kidnapping. To discuss cultural freedom in Berlin might cost something. It was clear to almost all the delegates that in the nature of the case this was no ordinary meeting of a learned society in a city like Lausanne but also a political affirmation. The analytic quality of some of the discussions left something to be desired. But considering the atmosphere and the fact that the ses- sions were held before audiences that ran sometimes to thousands, many of the presented papers, and at times the discussions, were extremely good. More than a hundred delegates from twenty different countries === Page 78 === 716 PARTISAN REVIEW were present. Among the French were Jules Romains, David Rousset, Henri Frenay, and André Philip; among the Germans, Alfred Weber, Eugen Kogon, Carlo Schmid; Denis de Rougemont and F. Bondy from Switzerland; Haakon Lie from Norway; Charles Plisnier from Belgium; Silone, Lombardi, Spinelli from Italy; Herbert Read, A. J. Ayer, J. Amery, Trevor-Roper from England; and a sizeable contingent from the United States including H. J. Muller, the geneticist, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Burnham, Farrell, George Schuyler. The outstanding figure at the Congress was Arthur Koestler, mainly because of the provocative char- acter of his speeches, partly because of his linguistic abilities, and partly because he was so cordially detested by some of the English delegates, one of whom (Trevor-Roper) has since denounced the Congress as a plot concocted by war-mongering "rootless European ex-Communists" abetted by their American allies. Several dramatic incidents highlighted the sessions. Hans Thirring, the Austrian theoretical physicist now turned psychologist, had been invited to attend the Congress and had presented a paper which was a criticism of the foreign policy of the Western powers. Previously he had courageously criticized the position of the Soviet Union at a Communist Peace Conference in Vienna. His paper had already been distributed to the press and delegates. When his turn came to speak, he withdrew his paper, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," because two of its as- sumptions had become untenable as a result of the Korea incident, viz., that Soviet political aggression would not develop into military aggres- sion, and that the United Nations was an effective instrument in pre- venting military outbreaks. At the same session Professor Nachtsheim of the Free University of Berlin gave an account of the fate of science in the Universities of the East and described the recent evolution of the famous Deutsche Academie der Wissenschaft, originally founded by Leibniz. On the oc- casion of Stalin's seventieth birthday, a telegram was sent to him in the name of the membership of the society which hailed him in the most fawning and Byzantine way for his scientific achievements. As soon as Professor Nachtsheim disclosed this fact, Alfred Weber, the famous Heidelberg sociologist, demanded the floor and announced his imme- diate resignation from the Academy. Weber in the opening plenary session had delivered a searching critique of the German failure to develop an in- digenous liberalism. Before a vast audience that overflowed into the streets, Weber concluded his eloquent and shrewd appraisal of the Ger- man past with a "nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa." (I had heard Weber twenty-two years ago at Heidelberg where every one of his lectures === Page 79 === BERLIN CONGRESS 717 was like an act of parturition. In Berlin he spoke with unwonted fluency. He was one of the few remaining links with the culture of the Weimar Republic.) At a subsequent session, after a particularly lively give and take, a student who had secretly traveled from the University of Leipzig to listen to the discussion asked for permission to address the Congress. He described briefly the enforced uniformity of belief which was officially imposed on students in the East, his delight at witnessing the free ex- change of opinion, and declared his intention never to return to East Germany. The Congress wound up with a mass meeting in the Summergarden of the Funkturm before an audience of 15,000 at which the Manifesto of Freedom and Message to the East were read. Among the speakers was Boris Nicolaevsky who spoke of peace and freedom to the Russian people over the heads of their government. II. West Berlin of course is not West Germany. It is not stuffy, self- pitying or conservative. Although predominantly Social-Democratic, the Social-Democratic party there is not a conventional one based on fixed economic dogmas. Despite its programmatic differences with the other two major parties, it recognizes that the basic issue which unites them all is whether freedom is to survive. And islanded in the Soviet sea, everyone knows what freedom is. The material situation in Berlin had vastly improved over the period of 1948 when I was last there at the height of the blockade. But the spirit was the same—the toughness, sense of humor, bitterness towards everything Nazi and disdain towards every- thing Communist, not Russian. These people believe that they suffer a common oppression with the Russian masses at the hands of the men in the Kremlin. If there is a democratic center in Germany, it is here. Its leaders are anti-Nazis, who spent the Hitler period either in prison or in exile, and are free of any German nationalist taint. Without them the West could not have held Berlin. Their lives will be immediately forfeit if the Soviets march. For many months a Communist whispering cam- paign had circulated the rumor that the West would withdraw from Berlin. It was finally scotched by the U.S. action in Korea. The thousands of people who crowded the sessions of the Congress were the vanguard of the democratic resistance of West Berlin. One could not forget their presence for a moment, and the points they punctuated with their ap- plause showed they were listening intelligently. With few exceptions, === Page 80 === 718 PARTISAN REVIEW about which more later, all the delegates realized that Mayor Reuter's opening remarks "We greet you as fellow fighters in the cause of freedom" was no mere rhetoric. The people of West Berlin were part of the Congress. III. Since almost every delegate presented a paper, I can give an account only of those that precipitated general discussion. There was a brace of papers by Koestler around which a good deal of the discussion crystal- lized. The first was on "Two Methods of Action." Its basic thesis was that at certain times and in respect to certain crucial issues, instead of saying "Neither-Nor" and looking for other viable alternatives, we must recognize an "Either-Or" and take one stand or another. It was obviously directed against the type of intellectual who today says "I am neither a Communist nor an anti-Communist" just as fifteen years ago he said "I am neither a Nazi nor an anti-Nazi." Partly because his formulations were literary rather than pointedly political, he was criticized sharply for oversimplification. Lombardi suggested that to demand a Yes or No answer was itself to fall victim to a totalitarian mentality. Some other participants seemed to be under the impression that Koestler was denying the validity of any other type of approach, that he was saying our choice was always between white and black-"our side" being white-something that Koestler has always denied. The choice between Hitler and the democracies, he once said, is inescapable but it is a choice between a lie and a half-truth. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, who refused to attend the Congress even to defend their point of view there, were quite aware of French and American injustices to Negroes when they supported the Resistance to Hitler. But they can see no justice in the Western defense against Communist aggression because the Negroes have not yet won equality of treatment. One might have generalized Koestler's position and shown that the recognition of the possibility of many alternatives always proceeds on the assumption that, in respect to some value or goal or method, a choice of the either-or type is involved. For example, either you are looking for the truth in science or you are not. There are no two ways about it. But once you have decided to look for the truth, then any particular truth may lie on a scale in which there are so many alternatives that it is absurd to have to choose between particular contraries (as distinct from formal contradictories). In the face of a totalitarian threat either you decide to oppose or appease; but having decided to oppose, the alternative may not be either this method of opposition or its contrary. === Page 81 === BERLIN CONGRESS 719 The very title of Koestler's second paper—“The False Dilemma”— indicated how far he was from universalizing dilemmatic situations. He denied that the choice between "Left" and "Right" was any longer cognitively meaningful because of their varying emotive effects. He denied that we are confronted by a genuine choice between capitalism and socialism, not as conceptual structures, but as historical movements. He claimed that on a number of vital issues, the so-called capitalist op- ponents of socialism have adopted a more socialist policy than the exist- ing socialist parties. He showed that the non-socialist governments of France, Italy and Germany are in some respects more “internationalist” than Socialist Britain. He criticized England for creating obstacles to European unity and drove his point home by quoting from the Labor Party statement "No Socialist government in Europe could submit to the authority of a body whose policies were decided by an anti-Socialist majority.” This criticism was unfortunate because it was misinterpreted, despite Koestler's warnings, as an attack on socialism and an apology for capital- ism instead of a plea for the abandonment of the antithesis. Koestler also overlooked the fact that greater equality had been produced in England under a Socialist regime than elsewhere. To an audience rapidly growing restive, Koestler then went on to assert that insofar as domestic freedom, civil rights and even economics were concerned there is no relevant difference between Capitalist United States and Socialist Britain. "The alternative is no longer nationalization or private economy in the abstract: the real problem is to find the proper balance of State ownership, control, planning, and free enterprise. And this is an empirical question.” He concluded by summing up the present conflict between Communism and democracy as “total tyranny against relative freedom.” Except for the unfortunate historical references to England, which provoked Mr. Trevor-Roper to fury, there was little in what Koestler said that had not been previously said in this country by Corey, Niebuhr, myself, and sometimes even Norman Thomas. But Koestler can recite the truths of the multiplication table in a way to make some people indignant with him. He also overlooked the fact that although all large terms have been kidnapped by the enemies of freedom, one could still justify his- torically the use of the phrase “democratic socialism” for the economic set-up he advocated. The discussion was quite heated and, up to the point that a Herr Grimme spoke, on a high plane. Haakon Lie replied to Koestler and reminded him that he had neglected to take the achievements of Scan- === Page 82 === 720 PARTISAN REVIEW dinavian socialism into account. He was pursuing this fruitful line of argument when he suddenly veered to emphasize (against the claims of Communist propaganda) that the American working class enjoyed more rights and privileges and a higher standard of living and degree of par- ticipation in economic life than the workers in any European country— which left Koestler grinning like a Cheshire cat. Mayor Reuter also re- joined with a reference to the goals and activity of the Berlin socialist movement. Spinelli took the floor and needled Koestler about not em- phasizing sufficiently the dependence of political freedom on economic security. Several of the discussion speakers, since Koestler had not advo- cated specific social reforms in his speech, charged him with overlooking their importance as a method of combating Communism and positively contributing to a free society. Then a Herr Grimme arose, a parson of sorts with a voice like a foghorn, to argue that all these concrete questions were basically religious. He spoke with an eloquent emptiness and became concrete only at the end when he he descended to personalities and made some contemptuous remark about Koestler being a “political convert” who now was fervently opposing what once he had fervently supported, thus showing he had never surrendered his dialectical materialism. The reference to his former Communism left Koestler unmoved as it did Mayor Reuter, another political convert from way back. But it aroused Franz Borkenau. His delivery left a great deal to be desired for he was obviously nettled. He forcefully defended the political con- verts from Communism, of which he was proud to be one, and asserted that because of their experience in the Communist movement, they under- stood the enemy better than most others, that Communism made all truly human existence impossible, and that its leaders were prepared “to go to the end” in forcing their program upon the world. Borkenau would have been more effective if he had not been so overwrought and had repeated what Plisnier said earlier at the Congress in explaining the conversions of the few “old Bolsheviks” present: “It is not because we surrendered our revolutionary ideas that we left the Communist move- ment but because we were and remain revolutionists devoted to the welfare of mankind who realize that not all means are justified in the struggle, that bloody and dirty hands infect with mortal disease the new society we wish to see born.” In the course of his remarks Borkenau told his audience that despite all their doubts and criticisms of the United States, each one of them knew that in his heart he was glad to get the news that the United States, instead of appeasing Stalin, had come to the defense of the South === Page 83 === BERLIN CONGRESS 721 Koreans. The applause was tumultuous. Of this applause Trevor-Roper, who hates all ex-Communists and regards Togliatti as a “humanist,” in a garbled report to the Manchester Guardian wrote: “It was an echo of Hitler's Nuremberg” —unconsciously revealing his own judgment of American foreign policy. Burnham's paper, in his customary provocative style, drove home with relentless logic the absurdity of contemporary pacifism and the self- defeating character of the position that a Europe, devoted to the ideals of freedom and human welfare, could remain neutral in the crusade of the Kremlin for world power. Burnham asserted that he was not opposed "under any and all circumstances” to the use of atomic bombs. “I am against those bombs, now stored or to be stored, in Siberia which are designed for the destruction of Paris, London, Rome, New York and of Western civilization generally. I am, yesterday and today at any rate, for those bombs made in Los Alamos, Hanford and Oak Ridge and guarded I know not where, which for five years have defended—have been the sole defense of — the liberties of Western Europe.” To which André Philip replied, with the approval of the audience, that when atom bombs fall, they do not distinguish between friend and foe, enemy or lover of freedom—a proposition which, of course, is true for all bombs, not merely atomic ones. Philip called for the economic unification of Europe as soon as possible, and compared Europe to a sick man kept alive by American penicillin against the pathogenic bac- teria with which the Soviet Union was infecting him. Because Burnham had not mentioned what measures on the domestic front had to be taken to build up the immunity of the patient, Philip and some others assumed, with little logical justification, that he did not regard them as necessary. Kogon underscored Philip’s position by saying that the Soviet Union would not attack the West if Europe became, with American help, an economically healthy, federated, socialized community. Mayor Reuter and Melvin Lasky closed the discussions by pointing out that the two approaches —a strong military defense and a strong welfare economy — were complementary to each other. The panel on “Art, Artists and Freedom” was jammed, the papers were interesting and had varied viewpoints but there was no opposition to the positions taken by Silone, Robert Montgomery, de Rougement, Herbert Read, Borghese, Nabokov, Schuyler and others. The session terminated with a denunciation of Franco and Spanish totalitarianism by a Basque priest. It is hard to estimate the achievements of the Congress because many of its projects have yet to be realized. === Page 84 === 722 PARTISAN REVIEW The first great achievement is to have held the Congress in Berlin and to have strengthened the feeling of solidarity with those still struggling for freedom under conditions hard to imagine by Western intellectuals. The second is to have created a nucleus for a Western community of intellectuals who will have no truck with "neutrality" in the struggle for freedom either at home or abroad. Its Manifesto of Freedom expresses the least common denominator of democratic faith for individuals who differ about specific political and economic programs. Its Message to the East brings assurance to intellectuals beyond the Iron Curtain that they are not forgotten, that the conflict of our time as seen by their colleagues on this side, is not a conflict between East and West but between free thought and enslavement. An international committee of twenty-five, under an executive com- mittee of five: Silone, Koestler, Rousset, Schmid and Brown, plans to organize the Congress on a permanent basis to do, among other things, the following: 1. Issue a series of White Books, along the lines proposed by Silone, giving a documented picture of the Writer, Artist and Scientist in coun- tries behind the Iron Curtain. 2. Organize aid for those intellectuals who escape from totalitarian countries. 3. Inaugurate a special series of radio talks "Dialogues Across the Curtain" consisting of open letters to the Communist leaders of cultural fronts in satellite countries. 4. Aid in the establishment of a university center, somewhere in Europe, for exiled Eastern professors and students. A half dozen other projects of a practical kind have been outlined whose fulfillment depends upon the extent to which intellectuals of the West rally to the call of the Congress. The weaknesses of the Congress are obvious. It is not yet sufficiently representative. More literary men and scientists must be drawn into the struggle for freedom. It must concern itself not only with the main danger to free culture from the Communist East but also to the dangers in the imperfectly free cultures of the democratic West. Without ceasing to be political in the basic Aristotelian sense, its work must be more analytical. It must dramatize its existence until not only the intellectuals of the world become aware of it but the statesmen of the free countries whose policies on cultural matters the Congress should evaluate in an independent and critical spirit. === Page 85 === William Burford A NEW GOLIATH The giant stares around the sky and finds No one, nothing, not a face above him Smiling sure stature of some greater Greatness. The time is sunshine, and This means no mastery. No man under The sun is taller than he. And the sun Itself is just the right size in its distance To be said to be the equal of his eye. It rises lower than his sleep, and sets Below his supper. In between it is his eye. There is another view, though, of the world Than this Goliath's, another in-between Of moon and star, moonlight and starlight, Higher by a darkness than the sun, more Mortal traveller who slides, kinglike, Out of his day; not fading, stationary As the little man, into the welcome Reign of dawn. Oh night, you fatal interlude Whose each star is a stone that throws Down giants, kindness comes from your sling. The severed head of the terrible Philistine Wears not anguish, but a smile. He found, like one who looks for love Up in the sky, love at his feet; And he bent his forehead to the accurate Stone. His is the age-old tale of those Who lose their heads from love. Go, Goliath, Down through legend such a man. You step On cloth of stars that is your turban too. Your eye and greatest jewel is now your wound. === Page 86 === Randall Jarrell THE PROFESSION OF POETRY* What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who "held the mirror up to nature" would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art's fluctuating and idiosyn- cratic threshhold of attention--the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on--is as much of a signature as anything in it. In Marshall Schacht's poems this threshhold is a curve drawn with a compass: its outlines, the outlines of everything else, have the reasonable (and, in the end, maddening to the reader) simplification and conven- tionalization of a Grant Wood tree, of old bars of soap; they are not the silhouette of the artist, but of the procedure by which the artist found it easy to write the poem. Someone praises these poems by speaking of their "deceptive simplicity": it is this deceived and conscious "simplicity" of form and content which serves Mr. Schacht for a style--that is, instead of a style--so that he reminds one of those carefully humble, awkward, sincere persons, full of hesitations, wells, and you know, half jeune fille, half Grandma Moses, whose lives are one long moral victory over their suffering and inattentive friends. These poems seem to me the equivalent of the paintings of amateurs, of the musical performances of doctors who one evening a week play in quartets; nobody dreams of comparing their performances with those of Klee or Lehmann, so why should I compare Mr. Schacht's poems with Rilke's? (I suppose this is what the dust-jacket's critic means when he says, in the style of Atticus, that "without this kind of poetry there can be no general diffusion of literary culture in any society.") I, like any society, don't enjoy this kind of poetry except in an occasional faint cotton-candy way; but I am bothered not so much by the limitations *Fingerboard. By Marshall Schacht. Twayne. $2.25. A Fountain in Kentucky. By John Frederick Nims. Sloane. $2.75. Guide to the Ruins. By Howard Nemerov. Random House. $2.50. Welcome to the Castle. By Alfred Hayes. Harper. $2.50. Kaire. By E. E. Cummings. Oxford. $2.50. The Collected Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg. Schocken. $3.50. Poems. By Wilfred Owen. New Directions. $1.50. === Page 87 === THE PROFESSION OF POETRY 725 these poems set up into a style—any style is as much what you can't say as what you can—as by the sensibility they limit, which thinks that "the minor thrush" is "cause enough for major sunsets," or which writes: I also note Tom's greatest novel said That he wished to be remembered with the dead Who thought and loved no more than he in bed. John Frederick Nims's first book of poems depressed me because it made me feel that poetry is a profession to be learned like any other— that bees, if they could read, would make the best poets; I felt as I had felt when a most distinguished critic said to me, after I had asked him what he thought of one of Mann's books: "Well, you know, the fact is, I've never really got up on Mann. I've always meant to." Mr. Nims used to write fairly synthetic, extraordinarily concenrated adapta- tions of those Audenesque poems of Shapiro's which give a rapid, almost blatantly effective description of the more obvious features of an Amer- ican scene; he would crowd so many effects into every line that reading a stanza was like having one's mouth stuffed with pennies—and the individuality, the fresh animal ease, that Shapiro would have given it. In A Fountain in Kentucky Mr. Nims has improved a great deal: these poems are mild and human and bear- able, compared to the old; but they are all spoiled by the common- placeness, the moderately effective approximation, the undistinguished essential anonymity that spoil the work of most of the younger American poets. One never feels, "How like Mr. Nims," "Who else in the world would have thought of that," or any of the other silly exclamations that go along with a good line. One feels, instead: this is the sort of thing a man says to write poems; that adjective does pretty well—pretty well. And the I of the poems (as it usually is with the youngish American poets of whom I am speaking) is that composite photograph, that insti- tutional lay-figure, that poet in the street, which conceals beyond any possibility of revelation the features of the living being, the poor unpro- fessional animal that feeds and obeys (and unto please what end) the industrious typewriter-like double that turns out the poems. Which of you by taking thought can add a line to a poem? one wants to ask this I; and one can imagine the rightfully puzzled answer: Why, I thought of every word of it. When one turns to Howard Nemerov's Guide to the Ruins, it is what one doesn't find that makes Mr. Nemerov seem, immediately, a more intelligent and individual poet—most of Mr. Nims's standard pro- === Page 88 === 726 PARTISAN REVIEW fessional effects have been replaced by a dry plainness and hardness, a "classical" stiffness and severity. Now if Odysseus tried to swim ashore to the Sirens, it wasn't for the stretchèd metre of an antique song, but for something that sounded as he must have said to his men afterwards a lot like Alban Berg; and, too, Mr. Nemerov's "classicism" is just as much of a learned bedside manner (modeled, as different poems show, on Empson, Ransom, and Tate) as is Mr. Nims's mechanical ginger- bread. But at least it isn't the sort of manner that stupefies the patient before he can even hear the prescription; and it is, at times, thin enough to seem a morning mist, fairly easily burned off. This book-very much a second book-shows an often vexing wit; half the poems have the decided-upon look of exercises-are possessed, if at all, by worked-out formulae of hypothetical demons; and many of them might be given the name that John Berryman-a better poet with whom Mr. Nemerov has something in common-gave to some of his: the Nervous Songs. But the book is here and there sharp enough, dry enough, and serious enough-shows, too, enough gift for organization-to make one inter- ested in Mr. Nemerov's future poems. He knows very well that the poet, as Goethe says, is someone who takes risks (and today most intellectuals take no risks at all-are, from the cradle, critics); but he thinks romantic and old-fashioned, couldn't believe, or hasn't heard of something else Goethe said: that the poet is essentially naive. Alfred Hayes is unusual because he is interested in people-most contemporary poets think them one of the causes of words-and because he has a rare ill-brokered talent for thinking up ingenious, immediately effective ideas for poems (so that one can identify his best poem merely by saying: "Oh, you know, it's that poem in A Little Treasury of Modern Verse that's a conceit about pigs in a slaughter-house"). These ideas usually are worked out well enough-which is to say, not really well enough at all-in a rhetoric that is frighteningly near to becoming, or that long ago became, vulgarly effective in the way that Death of a Salesman or good radio sketches or imitation Hemingway stories are effective. Mr. Hayes's poems about Italy, which are poorer than his others, are unusually influenced-just as his stories are usually influenced -by Hemingway; and he is influenced, both usually and overwhelm- ingly, by various periods of Auden - for instance, "In the Days of the Recruiting Stations" is thoroughly like "Which Side Am I Supposed to be On," and his poem about Heine at Paris is an amusingly faithful imitation of "Voltaire at Ferney," even down to cadences; because the last line of Auden's first stanza is The white alps glittered. It was summer. He was very great, the last line of Mr. Hayes's first === Page 89 === THE PROFESSION OF POETRY 727 stanza is Marx was in England; Gautier was his friend; Goethe was dead. This seems to suggest that there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it. (Although the disciple's semi-colons are, logically, an improvement on the original periods, they strip from the line its lucid atmosphere of Beatrix Potter; Mr. Hayes has not truly understood it, one is ready to feel: and then one looks at his Goethe is dead-that superb reproduction, on another plane, of the pure state- ment of He was very great-and decides that for a moment he did not merely understand, but was, that line.) Yet in spite of all his influences-there are several others-Mr. Hayes is in some sense a fairly individual poet; in spite of all his rhetoric he is in some sense an attractive poet. For he isn't interested in putting on a slick professional performance, in showing off a learned collection of juggler's tricks; it was not of Mr. Hayes, but of hundreds of other poets, that I thought when I read, in my Handbook of American Birds: "Starling's are noisy at all seasons, and the song is a jumble of squeaks, rattles, wheezes, loud whistles, and imitations (often excellent) of other birds." Mr. Hayes wants to move and terrify people with what has moved and terrified him in this world-so that you respect him even when, as usually happens, two things go wrong with his procedure: when he does what he does in too crude and direct and reliable a way; and when what he has seen and been moved by, the emotional and intel- lectual climates of the poems, so badly lack personal distortion, the unconscious individuality which at once signs and guarantees, that the poem seems to represent faithfully and immediately a fairly common type or group, but without ever speaking-as the best poems do-for the poet and everybody. "Jael," one of the most interesting of his poems, is in- tended to be grand and monumental, and to a surprising extent it suc- ceeds; but when one compares it to the best-known poem on a similar subject, Ransom's "Judith of Bethulia," one sees that in "Judith" the language itself links to the peculiarity of the past the peculiarity of the poet, and gives to the florid, Venetian, Marriage-at-Cana tableau an equivocal, particular truth that is wanting in the generalized astronomical finality of "Joel." It seems to me that Mr. Hayes can write better poems than those he usually tries to write; as a naturally effective writer, he ought to despise effectiveness, and to try for individuality, exactness, complication. At present he is like some friend, serious, sympathetic, rather gifted, who six days out of the week speaks and thinks and feels in such heartfelt clichés that he finally seems to you the myth made flesh, a generalized, breathing, statistical reality. === Page 90 === 728 PARTISAN REVIEW During the early '20's E. E. Cummings's reputation was at its highest point: at one moment, a sort of false dawn, he was more imitated, better regarded, than Eliot himself. But as people came to demand that poets, and the very chairs they sat in, be socially conscious, Mr. Cummings slowly came to seem an irrelevant and unaccountable anachronism. when poets read his verse, as it pushed on into the heart of that last undiscovered continent, e. e. cummings, they thought of this moral im- possibility, this living fossil, with a sort of awed revulsion. Later, as the fortunes of unengaged art improved, as novels by E. M. Forster replaced novels about strikes, as Mr. Cummings approached a certain age-that age at which literary survivors come to the king's row, and are accepted as Fathers of the Tribe-most of his reputation returned, and he now seems one more dean of American poets. He had a sort of underground popularity even during the darkest '30's-many a good party-member had a guilty taste for Cummings or Sherlock Holmes; I think that he will remain popular for a long time, for several reasons. He is one of the most individual poets who ever lived-and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings's poems are loved because they are full of sentimentality, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence-they are the popular songs of American intellectuals. (I hope the reader won't think this a joke, but will seriously consider the similarities between the two.) That the poems are extravagantly, professedly modernist, experimental, avant- garde, is an additional attraction: the reader of modern poetry-espe- cially the inexperienced or unwilling reader-feels toward them the same gratitude that the gallery-goer feels when, his eyes blurred with corridors of analytical cubism, he comes into a little room full of the Pink and Blue periods of Picasso. Even the poems' difficulties are of an undemand- ing, unaccusing sort-that of puzzles: a poem that looks like the ruins of a type-casting establishment will not elicit from the editors of the Saturday Review of Literature a fraction of the indignation with which they see, in Eliot, some random quotation from Pausanias. Rilke, in his wonderful "Archaic Statue of Apollo," ends his descrip- tion of the statue, the poem itself, by saying without transition or ex- planation: You must change your life. He needs no explanation. We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life-in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and of that different world to which the work of art alone gives us access-unwillingly accuses our lives. But Mr. Cummings's poems say to us something very different: that we and the poet are so superior to === Page 91 === THE PROFESSION OF POETRY 729 the fools and pedants and reformers of the world that our only obliga- tion is to condemn them, to draw apart into rapture—the reader is asked to wash his hands of them, and to become part of the sanctimonious anarchic ecstasy of the poem. The poet has made a separate peace; sitting among the lakes and flowers of a Swiss summer, he complacently dismisses the fools killing each other below, people who have never even realized that love is enough. I have heard only once his recording of his poem about the soldier from New York City who is killed by steel from the Sixth Avenue Elevated; but I shall never forget the firm superiority, the confident rejection of the voice as it said that you and I told him, Christ told him, Socrates told him, and he wouldn't listen; but part of the old Sixth Avenue Elevated, in a Japanese shell—that made him listen. ... Yes, Christ and Socrates did tell him (though it is odd to see that old soldier Socrates in this particular connection), and he didn't listen; but they told you and me and Mr. Cummings this and many other things, and we listened to few and lived by fewer. In the triumph of his poems there is one thing lacking, that slave who whispers: You too are mortal. But usually Mr. Cummings is moral about not being conventionally moral; he resembles a student of ethics who, after reading that some tribes feed the old and others eat them, decides that it is all right to do anything anywhere, that the self-expression of the knowing superior is the one true key to ethics—and from then on he looks with pharisaical impatience at those not elect, weak spirits caught in the bloody toils of morality. The poems' relation to "Nature" is impressive in its purity and delight, but depressing in its affinity to that of picture-postcards; and Love, in the poems, is so disastrously neo-primitive, has been swept so fantastically clean of complication or pain or moral significance, that it seems a kind of ecstatic chocolate soda which is at once a sin—to the world—and a final good—to us happy few. For such poems Stendhal and Proust (and anyone who was ever in love, one is tempted to say) have lived and died in vain. One is bewildered by the complacency with which the poet accepts himself and his, and rejects or doesn't even notice the existence of the rest of the world. One of his poems lives along the line like Pope's spider, but hides at the heart of its sensitivity a satisfied inaccessibility to experience—for experience is, after all, what is different from oneself. He has hidden his talent under a flower, and there it has gone on reproducing, by parthenogenesis, poem after poem after poem. Because of this his poems are, year after year, the same poems; the only true changes are technical changes, ingenious discoveries exhaustively exploited. He is like a painter who has on every canvas charming and char- === Page 92 === 730 PARTISAN REVIEW acteristic patches, colors that are a pleasure in themselves, but who has never once managed to paint a good picture. For I can't think of a single poem of his that can be called, in the most serious meaning of the phrase, a good poem. When one asks people to name one they seem oddly at a loss, and finally mention poems like My father moved through dooms of shall or Anyone lived in a pretty how town—attractive poems which are spoiled both by filling-in, the automatic repetition of tech- nical novelties (as if you wrote a poem by discovering a novel formula and repeating it a dozen times), and by the willing shallowness of the attitude which produces them, that Renascence of Wonder of our own day. (And something as wonderfully promising as The Enormous Room is the most distressing disappointment of all—as though one could read The House of the Dead only in an adaptation by Paul Goodman and Kenneth Patchen.) Even Mr. Cummings's delectable freshness and innocence have come to seem professionally surprising in the way that, say, Mistinguette's legs are: how much care and avoidance, what cloistral resolution, have been necessary to preserve intact this stock in trade! Yet how wonderfully individual, characteristic, original, all his poems are. (Thinking how extraordinarily true to himself he has been, how false to every other man, one is forced to remember how far from "self- expression" great poems are—what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent.) And Mr. Cummings's poems are full of perceptions pure as those in dreams, effects of wonderful delicacy and exactness; many a flower of rank sentiment twinkles at one such dewy petals that one gobbles it up like a cow. In fact, as soon as the reader lowers the demands he makes on art—pretends that it is, at best, no more than a delightful or ecstatic or ingenious diversion—the best poems become a thorough pleasure. For Mr. Cummings is a fine poet in the sense in which Swinburne is one; but in the sense in which we call Hardy and Yeats and Proust and Chekhov poets, great poets, he is hardly a poet at all. Marshal Zhdanov said, delighting me: There is a great big hole in the foundations of Soviet music; well, there is a great big moral vacuum at the heart of E. E. Cummings's poetry. As Louise Bogan has written, with summary truth: "It is this deletion of the tragic that makes Cummings's joy childish and his anger petulant." What delights and amuses and disgusts us he has represented; but all that is heart-breaking in the world, the pity and helplessness and love that were called, once, the tears of things, the heart of heartlessness—these hardly exist for him. It seems many years too late to review the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg or Wilfred Owen; but I should like to express my surprise at the common === Page 93 === THE PROFESSION OF POETRY judgment that thinks both interesting "war poets," with Owen, of course, rather the better of the two. Rosenberg surely was a poet of no merit whatsoever; and Owen—in spite of passages lush as Brooke, of touching haste and inexperience, of a compulsive eagerness to push home all his points, to make his readers see beyond possibility of misunder- standing what the war was—surely was a poet in the true sense of the word, someone who has shown to us one of those worlds which, after we have been shown it, we call the real world. The best criticism of Owen I have ever read was Yvor Winters' review in an old Hound and Horn; it is worth looking up. One does not get a fair idea of Owen from anthologies, which always include a number of bad and sentimental poems, omit some of the best ones, and, naturally, are unable to do anything with the good passages of mediocre ones. He was occasionally a good poet—and would, surely, have become a better; I should like to finish this review by quoting lines I have often remembered, a stanza from "Exposure" and the last stanza of "The Send-Off": Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there; For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs; Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed,— We turn back to our dying. *** Shall they return to beatings of great bells In wild train-loads? A few, a few, too few for drums and yells, May creep back, silent, to still village wells Up half-known roads. 731 === Page 94 === BOOKS MELVILLE AND HIS CRITICS HERMAN MELVILLE. By Newton Arvin. The American Men of Letters Series. William Sloane Associates. $3.50. This latest book on Melville is, to my mind, the finest critical biography of an American author that we have had in a long time. It is also the best book Newton Arvin has written; he transcends in it the limitations of tone and method manifest in his works on Hawthorne and Whitman. Here he is in complete possession of his subject and uninhibited by ideological preconceptions. He treats text and context with equal authority, combining in a masterly way the traditional resources of literary criticism with a flexible and entirely apposite use of the insights provided by the newer psychological disciplines. The result is a critical interpretation so just and clear that it may well become the classic study of Melville in our literature. Melville has of late nearly eclipsed Henry James as the much-favored object of critical inquiry. A few of the new studies devoted to him are welcome contributions to scholarship; but some of the others, in which a critical approach is attempted, are of dubious value, since what is dis- played in them is less insight into Melville than an addiction to the more aberrant tendencies of the contemporary literary mind. There is the new pedantry of myth, for instance, which is well on its way to converting a valid though by no means inexhaustible cultural interest into a pretentious and up-to-date version of the kind of source-and-parallel hunting now rapidly going out of fashion in the more alert academic circles. That there is a genuine mythic element in Melville is hardly open to doubt. But the myth-happy critics blow it up to vast proportions, laboring gratuitously, and in a mode of erudition peculiarly arid, to interpose be- tween us and the reality of Melville a talmudic elaboration of mythology portentous to the point of stupefaction. Not quite so one-sided yet unsatisfactory on the whole is the tra- ditionalist approach to Melville. The traditionalists make what they can of him with their means, and their means are well adapted to eliminate the major contradictions in him. But these contradictions are really of an immigitable nature. At once creative and frustrating, agonisingly personal yet deeply expressive of national and universal culture, they are at the very core of Melville's modernity and the symbolic fate of his genius. Now a Melville relieved of his contradictions is, of course, a Melville === Page 95 === MELVILLE AND HIS CRITICS 733 removed from the shifting and perilous terrain of history and safely com- mitted to a transcendent realm where, ceasing to be fallible and alive, no longer desperately striving for illumination in a siege of darkness, he is canonised as an exalted witness to metaphysical faith and aesthetic order. The traditionalist aesthetic, with its profound revulsion from histori- cism and psychology and its inner drive toward standards of the norma- tive-classicist type, cannot accept the real Melville or sustain him without doing violence to itself. Hence it constructs an ideal figure who is but a ghost of the man of whom Hawthorne wrote that he could neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief, reasoning endlessly about "everything that lies beyond human ken" even as he despaired of immortality and "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated." Hawthorne, who was so frequently made inaccessible by the cold clarity of his nature, was moved by Melville's passion and believed in his integrity. None would now deny that integrity, but what is it, actually, if not the integrity of his riven and dissonant consciousness? This consciousness is inseparable from his art an art which, in transforming the business of whaling into a fiery hunt ("wonder ye at the fiery hunt?") makes us see the artist in the image of those sea-captains of whom he said in Moby Dick that though they sailed anonymously out of Nantucket they yet became "as great and greater than your Cooke and your Krusenstern, for in their suc- corless emptyhandedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors." Conrad's dictum, "In the destructive element immerse," comes to much the same thing. These "heathenish sharked waters" compose an ele- ment situated on the other side of the planet from the inland lakes of traditionalism. Arvin, who in his present phase is perhaps freer of confining alle- giances than most critics, is able to lay hold of the contradictions in Melville and to disclose their psychodynamic meaning without any squea- mishness or failure in sympathy. There is no separation of man and artist in this critical portrait but an integration of the two which enforces the understanding of both in their organic unity. Eschewing all stress on biographical and historical facts for their own sake, and so controlling his account of the man Melville, of his background and character, as to enable the reader to see more clearly into his art, Arvin demonstrates anew the relevance of the biographical mode to the job of criticism when it is properly utilized and not made an end in itself. Equally credible is Arvin's use of the Freudian psychology. It is brought to bear upon Melville's experience with a maturity of judgment and power of modula- tion rarely found in literary contexts, where the amateurish shuffling === Page 96 === PARTISAN REVIEW 734 of the formulas of neurosis is still the rule rather than the exception. In spite of long and intensive discussion, the issue of psychoanalysis in its application to literature remains unsettled, arousing hostile distrust in some quarters and excessive confidence in others. From this standpoint Arvin's book might be taken as a practical experiment, offering concrete evidence which neither the friends nor the enemies of the psychoanalytic method can afford to overlook. All of Melville's work, including the poems, are minutely examined in this study, resulting in a valuation that differs considerably from accepted judgments. Thus "Benito Cereno" is pulled down from its high place in the canon and shown to be basically lacking in the imaginative quality conventionally attributed to it. "An artistic miscarriage, with moments of undeniable power," Arvin calls it in a passage of exhaustive analysis, which lays bare the story's defective moral structure as well as the relative poverty of its technical devices and verbal texture. In his judgment of The Confidence Man, however, Arvin restores the negative estimate of it commonly accepted until it was recently challenged by an ambitious ideological approach which put a load of interpretation upon the book which it cannot carry. The Confidence Man is a narrative which Arvin finds even more disappointing than Israel Potter, and that precisely because its "ideal" intention is such that had it been realized it might have become a "vaster, more animated, and of course more modern Ship of Fools, or even an American Gulliver." There is a wonderful felicity in the Western river- scene that Melville conceived for it and the richest meaning in its theme, the exposure of "contemporary shams, and particularly the quackeries of a false humanitarianism, an insensate optimism." This, in fact, was the most pertinent of all subjects in Melville's age. But The Confidence Man was never really written. It is a worse book than Pierre, I think. Though Pierre is a failure, and even a failure of a peculiarly monstrous kind, it still exercises a certain appeal, a certain power of evocation, because it is full of passion and swarms with unconscious life. Not so The Confi- dence Man, which, except for its opening pages, strictly enforces the lesson that in art nothing speaks to our mind which does not simul- taneously engage our senses: that is the supreme lesson, and one which criticism fails to heed only at the risk of utter irrelevance. And the reason, obviously, that this disputed work of Melville's remains, as Arvin says, "a tantalizing scenario for a book that never came into being," is that it is scarcely all a living narrative. "One is alleged to be on a steamboat descending the greatest of American rivers, but sensuously, pictorially, kinesthetically . . . the river does not flow and the boat does not move === Page 97 === MELVILLE AND HIS CRITICS 735 ahead." As a fiction the book is "meager and monotonous . . . all but motionless . . . a series of conversations rather than an action . . . which keep recurring to the same theme too compulsively, with too few varia- tions, to be anything but unendurably repetitious." Arvin pursues his analysis to the ultimate conclusion that this work is "one of the most completely nihilistic, morally and metaphysically," of American books, suffering from a "fatal want of moral chiaroscuro," Melville's Timon of Athens without a Flavius. Its actual effect is more of tameness than of terror, since what "it expresses, except at rare moments, is not a passion of bitterness but a dull despondency of mistrust and disbelief." Melville wrote it in a state of morbid suspiciousness when he had lost the vision of tragic grandeur that makes Moby Dick the chief masterpiece of Amer- ican letters. The most richly assimilative of his critical tasks Arvin undertakes in his comprehensive scrutiny of that masterpiece. Varied resources of literary and philosophical investigation are pressed into service in an unflagging effort to grasp, to understand, to bring to light. The analysis is conducted on the four levels of the literal, the psychological, the moral, and the mythic; and it is so comprehensive an analysis that it would be impossible to do it justice in a brief résumé. Suffice it to say that it yields a reading of Moby Dick summing up the best that we have learned about it at the same time that it establishes some wholly new relations of meaning and a sharper perception of the coherence of its parts in the unity of imaginative possession. The Shakespearean influence on Melville has been sufficiently charted by scholars like Olson and Matthiessen, and on that score Arvin has little to add that is newly suggestive. Of more original value is his examination of Melville's problem in seeking to discover the proper form for his narratives. Melville, as Arvin sees it, was working in isolation from the central currents of European writing, an isolation from which he both lost and gained. As Pierre shows, he floundered in attempting to adopt as his own the typical novelistic forms developed by his contem- poraries in Europe. The passages in Arvin's study dealing with this prob- lem and the solutions that Melville came upon, are of far more than technical importance. It is an aspect of the national literary experience that indirectly but significantly connects certain elementary considera- tions of manner and technique with the higher considerations of form and value. Philip Rahv === Page 98 === 736 PARTISAN REVIEW RHETORIC OF RHETORIC A RHETORIC OF MOTIVES. By Kenneth Burke. Prentice-Hall. $5.00. This is the second volume of Mr. Burke's proposed trilogy on the meaning of meaning, an ambitious and recondite inquiry purporting to examine the relationship of words to human motives. The first volume, A Grammar of Motives, appeared in 1945, the third, A Symbolic of Mo- tives, is forthcoming. This trilogy already exerts a good deal of influence in our intellectual life. The Rhetoric indicates that the trilogy will be a prime handbook for those who now join in the abandonment of our naturalist and humanist inheritance in favor of the charismatic glamor of ultimate politics and ultimate metaphysics. If we mean by "semantics" a discipline for investigating the relation of words to non-verbal reality with a minimum of metaphysical bias and with the intent of clarifying our scrutiny of the function of words, then Mr. Burke is hardly a semanticist at all, or, to put it another way, he is so much more than a semanticist that his semantic becomes hopelessly obscured in the wilderness of its own uncontrolled extensions. A Grammar of Motives, as Mr. Isaac Rosenfeld said in a brilliant account of the book (Kenyon Review, Spring 1946), was not a Grammar at all but, among other things, "another bit of philosophy, a substance metaphysics." A Rhetoric of Motives is less a Rhetoric than what might be called a substance metapolitics. It is a vast and centerless farrago which, besides categorizing linguistics in the five terms of Scene, Act, Agent, Agency, and Purpose, draws attitudes of linguistic analysis from Marx, Bentham, Carlyle, Veblen, and Empson, and, from the whole, attempts to evolve a universal "purification" of language with the help of the "ultimate vocabulary" of Marxist dialectic and of the anagogic method of the medieval writers. One will be disappointed if one expects from Mr. Burke as rhetori- cian a firm and adequate idea of politics and such an idea surely must be implied by (though not confused with) any responsible investigation of rhetoric. The book carries a very heavy charge of political implication, but the author, like so many of his admirers and so much of the modern world, is beyond politics. He has no idea of man as a social animal, no idea of the state, no idea of democratic, socialist, or even aristocratic institutions, and no idea, in any concrete form, of either the philosophy or the rhetoric of politics. He has "purified" politics and political man out of existence. A small example, or "anecdote," as Mr. Burke would say, may get us to the central issues. Our author discusses at some length the === Page 99 === RHETORIC OF RHETORIC meaning of the story of Abraham and Isaac. He rejects the interpreta- tion of psychoanalysis as not ultimate enough. Mr. Burke throws up his hands at the brutality of psychoanalysis, which, he believes, unwittingly sanctions parricide and infanticide. Psychoanalysis would impute to Abraham a covert desire to kill Isaac. But such an interpretation is unacceptable; it leaves us in the slaughterous "Barnyard" of the bourgeois world, which Mr. Burke is accustomed to identify as the "parliamentary wrangle" and whose motive is competitive murder. Father and son being "consubstantial," says Burke, we see that Abraham's motive was not to kill Isaac but to perform the "dramatistic" ritual of vicariously killing himself. "For the so-called 'desire to kill' a certain person is much more properly analysable as a desire to transform the principle which that person represents." Every aggressive act, in short, may best be seen as beginning in ideology or in man's incorrigible delight in creating symbols and becomes reflexive, in the sense that as an aggressor you are really only using your victim as a device for purging or transforming a prin- ciple or "trait" within yourself. Thus, on Mr. Burke's own implicit assumption that the extensions of linguistic method are reality, are human events translated into a ghostly dumb show. From any conceivable naturalistic point of view one would begin with the fact of intended murder and its motives, and one would regard the mythical and ritual components of the Abraham-Isaac story in ascending order as "rationalization," as tragic artistic treatments of the human fact of infanticide, and finally as attempts to grasp philosophically the meaning of the act. But with Mr. Burke the play's the thing. Nobody has ever taken so literally the idea that all the world's a stage. Behind every human event there lurks man's natural desire to perform symbolic acts. The most delightful of symbolic acts is sacrifice-that is, self- sacrifice. And nothing is so striking in this book as the assumption that man is a self-immolating creature and that the great dramatic act of the individual is self-immolation in the name of a transcendent hierarchy. We arrive at an "ultimate" rhetoric by discerning, first, that a "positive" order of language is too reductive and can deal only with tangible things, and, second, that a "dialectic" order, while more general, winds up in the "parliamentary wrangle" and that instead of a confused clash of conflicting principles, we need principles of principles. To those who still refer to "parliaments" with emotions other than contempt or pity, this might mean that we need to clarify our thinking and seek for common grounds, or at worst, act from mere superior power while at the same time trying not to annihilate the whole possibility of "parliaments." But to Mr. Burke, it means taking a "leap" to the "universal ground of === Page 100 === 738 PARTISAN REVIEW human motives." This ground is mystically felt when we look "socioana- gogically" at history, social stratification, or literature, wherein we discern dramatistically bodied forth the ultimate mystery of life, the mystery of "hierarchy." Thus in the perfection of the "ultimate design . . . each tiny act shares in the meaning of the total act." And thus we achieve the ultimate language which may help us toward universal clarity and the "purification of war." One may remark that for a writer so given to ultimate vocabularies, Mr. Burke is extraordinarily sensitive to the vicissitudes of ideology. In A Grammar of Motives, written during the war years, he accepted war as of man's essence (man "has the motives of combat in his very essence"), and he spoke of the enormous unwieldiness of war "as an anecdote" due to its being "more of a confusion than a form." Yet in A Rhetoric of Motives, which makes its commitment to the Wallace movement, he writes that war is a "perversion" of peace. He finds less confusion in the phenomenon of war now that the perceptions of rhetorical method show that the United States is the perverter of an otherwise potentially peaceful world. In the Grammar he spoke of the "great dialectic interchange still to be completed." In the Rhetoric the dialectic interchange is being sabotaged by the Marshall Plan, which— though it does not presume to understand Russian policy—the rhetorical method easily perceives to be nothing but the "sinister" stratagem of capitalist imperialism. In this age of Communist rhetoric such a pro- cedure is indefensible. Mr. Burke repeatedly disavows any didactic intent. He tells us that this is a linguistic study and should not be taken as indicative of his views in other areas. But these disclaimers are preposterous. No linguistic study can be made to bear one tenth the weight of Mr. Burke's ideology and metaphysics and still remain intelligible as a linguistic study. Equally unconvincing is Mr. Burke's departure from the reductive biases of "scientism," since the alternative—"dramatism"—becomes his warrant for abandoning the admonishments of scientific method on the one hand and accepting on the other that most frivolous and dangerous of modern myths, the myth of total rationalization. As for "scientism" the reader will find its essence in Mr. Burke's proposal to "hire a batch of poets," give them the task of imagining the various modes of the final extinction of life, and then categorize the citizenry as personality types according to their responses to the different modes. This is what Mr. Burke calls "our 'neotragic' school of ethnic classification" and is apparently offered as a joke. And also unconvinching are Mr. Burke's attacks on technology and === Page 101 === RHETORIC OF RHETORIC 739 bureaucratization, since his thought so plainly issues from the intellectual mystique of these phenomena-a mystique which in our time has evolved into a secular religion philosophically supported by the rags and tatters of western thought thrown together in an obscure jargoning dissonance entirely bereft of emotional innerness, rational tact, and humane purpose. Richard Chase ON TWO FRONTIERS THE PLENIPOTENTIARIES. By H. J. Kaplan. Harpers. $3.00. WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME. By Robert Penn Warren. Random House. $4.50. While it is possible to read both The Plenipotentiaries and World Enough and Time with an awareness only of their peculiar de- fects and virtues, as if they were the sole representatives of their kinds, the authors have obviously intended for us to be conscious of the tradi- tions to which they belong. The title of H. J. Kaplan's book alludes, of course, to Henry James' Ambassadors, and via James' earlier novels on the same theme back to a prototype in Hawthorne's Marble Faun. R. P. Warren's novel, calling itself "Romantic" in a subtitle and echoing the very phrases of a mid-Nineteenth Century popular novelist, W. Gil- more Simms ("in the first green and gristle of his youth"), refers us the long dull way back to Cooper's The Prairie. Chance has paired for us at the midpoint of our own century, the most recent instances of the two basic fictional treatments of the American myth: the novel of the International Theme, and the romance of the West. Both Kaplan's book and Warren's are Frontier novels. The myth of America has traditionally come to literary consciousness on its two frontiers: at its western margin, where the trapper or settler pursuing innocence confronts the polar experience of nature, and on its eastern border where the artist or expatriate fleeing innocence confronts the polar experience of civilization. The confrontation of the Ultimate Wilderness and the Ultimate City, of the West and of Europe, have both been treated, with crass or complicated sentimentality, as ways of salvation: Natty Bumppo is saved by an endless westering, Lambert Strether by the eastward passage. Understandably enough, the former experience has become the subject par excellence of the "popular" novel, the latter of the "high- brow" novel. To attempt either of these forms today is, therefore, to run into certain clichés of anticipation that may defeat understanding === Page 102 === 740 PARTISAN REVIEW on the part of the reader, where they do not victimize the writer himself. We expect of Mr. Kaplan's "International" novel, for instance, a concern with sensibility at the expense of plot, a sophistication of in- tent, and a certain air of addressing those already in the know. This we do, indeed, discover and the seed of the book's structure is appropriately enough the form of the "Paris Letter" in a literary review. The novel's cynical narrator, the long-term expatriate, Phineas Strauss, who writes such letters for a living, obliquely tells us as much; and we are prepared to believe that it is precisely in terms of such a chatty form that the veteran expatriate might experience the European experience of his more naive compatriots abroad. Indeed, the book's more unqualified successes are all essentially epistolatory: either detachable anecdotes, like Tony's comic interview with the Gide-ean Great Man, or detachable witty essays on the Outsider as Ambassador, or the light of the Ile de France, or our endemic vice of tinkering (bricolage to Phineas), all with the special savor of the conversationalist who knows his own charm and feels obliged to satisfy his own exacting standards of the amusing. Though there is no reason why a European letter to the Partisan Review should be less tractable novelistically than, say, Pamela's epistles to her mother, Mr. Kaplan does not quite bring it off. Certain basic fictional strategies, and especially the novel's necessary bourgeois "thick- ness" are lost in the resolve to sit back and dazzle us with good talk. Quite deliberately, but in the end unfortunately, the persons of the fic- tion remain "material," do not ever become characters. There is not enough density of specification in the portrayal of Tony and Pat, Mr. Kaplan's Innocents Abroad, who do not know they are innocent, to sustain dramatically the main irony of the book, which is that those who are Outsiders in America are in fact Plenipotentiaries abroad, with Full Powers to represent everything they believe they are not. Despised at home, they are wanted in Europe, but at a price: radicals, they stand for the Marshall plan; artists, they represent military policy; emancipated, they stand for Puritanism; hard and disenchanted, the naiveté and beauty of youth. These things they must stand for for the sake of the Europeans, who since the terror need desperately to exploit, to feed on the myth they have been imposing on us for two hundred years. And what they expect, we somehow are, in a sense we had not suspected, sociologists or advanced artists or founders of Little Reviews though we may be. But the previous roles of Tony and Pat and Boggs as Outsiders, the very meaning of Outsidedness is not sufficiently documented by Mr. Kaplan === Page 103 === ON TWO FRONTIERS 741 (who apparently assumes that those who will choose to read him will have been already sufficiently briefed in such matters) to give the proper tension to the novel's original and witty insight. The unexpected element in The Plenipotentiaries is its gaiety. The tradition to which it belongs is an anti-tragic one, whether in Hawthorne or James or Hemingway, but the triumphs of the earlier books were more stoical and melancholy, the difficult triumphs of realized humans over impotence and the fear of experience. Mr. Kaplan's victories, in a book where no rich living being is projected, are victories of style, the gaiety of language triumphing over the resistance of his material. If Mr. Kaplan suffers a little by invoking comparisons with Henry James, Mr. Warren is victimized by calling up the presence of Thomas B. Costain. The novel of our other Frontier necessarily turns back to the past, and the past has become in our literature the property of the egregiously sentimental and hackneyed "historical novel." Indeed, the quasi-historical romance scarcely exists any longer as a novel, its book form representing a half-archaic transitional form on the way to be- coming a movie. Having chosen a "historical" subject, Mr. Warren must endure the rewards and punishments proper to that form. In automatic reflexes, the Literary Guild has damned World Enough and Time by selecting it, and the New Yorker, in its middlebrow insecurity, has blasted the book as bristling with busty heroines (an error of fact), coon-skin caps and dialect "thick as b'ar grease." In both reactions there is the platitudinous assumption that non-urban retrospective books cannot be really serious or sound; and many more or less sophisti- cated readers seem to be so busy looking over their shoulders to see what MGM is going to do about it, that they do not really read the book. When they do, they will discover, that for a conventional Romance, World Enough and Time is distressingly slow in getting started, full of irrelevant poetry and philosophy, and worst of all, not "true to facts." Mr. Warren's contempt for the recorded "truth" about the Jere- boam O. Beauchamp case, which is the donné of his book, should give the game away; for the lumpen Frontier Romance, having lost long since any grasp of fictional truth, attempts to justify its falsities of lan- guage and sentiment by referring to certain officially verifiable facts; there is no more indefatigable researcher than the best-selling hack. Mr. Warren's recent assertion that his book is not at all an "historical novel" means, I suppose, simply that its locus of truth is in the imagination and not in recorded "fact." Nevertheless, it is one of Warren's ironies, in a book essentially ironic despite its machinery of period costume and its romantic fable === Page 104 === PARTISAN REVIEW 742 of a lover who murders the seducer of the woman he marries, to use the appearances of historical research (in a way already hinted at in the Cass Masters episode of All The King's Men) as a device for attaining a double point of view and for realizing formally the leading theme of the ambiguity of the past. Far from being a conventional, popular novel, World Enough and Time is a polysemous fiction in the Dante-an sense, with a literal fable (the freeing of the imprisoned Princess by the slaying of the Dragon) capable of philosophic extension without the loss of its narrative appeal. It is typically modern in that the cement of its interconnectedness is not faith but irony; author and protagonist alike are able to realize that the Princess may be a neurotic girl and the Dragon a gentle father, but they realize too the uses of assuming Princesses and Dragons. Of the many levels of meaning in Mr. Warren's book, political and metaphysical, I can treat here only one: its critique of the American myth of the West as Innocence, and of the basic tenets of Romanticism, pantheism and the Noble Savage, which sustain that myth. It is Mr. Warren's tour de force to have achieved this critique inside of a form universally assumed to be based on the naive acceptance of all he subtly challenges. Whereas Mr. Kaplan's ironies do not challenge the traditional civilized sentimentality of the "International Theme" (everyone is successfully saved from innocence; Tony learns wisdom, and Pat charm), Mr. Warren's irony undercuts utterly the beautiful lie of James Fenimore Cooper. All through his attempts to substitute for, or impose on life itself a sentimental dream of life, Jeremiah Beaumont has presupposed the existence of a paradisal West as a final refuge; until finally (in Warren's completest departure from Fact), he escapes hang- ing and flees to that essential wilderness, where, before his own murder and the suicide of his withered and despised beloved, he finds what has all along waited in the ultimate womb of time: no noble and immaculate Natty Bumppo, but a humped monster, dying in sensuality and filth, la Grand Bosse, river pirate and nightmare, the visible shape of original sin and the grandfather of us all. "Gammer and gaffer we're all his gang- sters." Simply to know this, is a tragic illumination; and, indeed, World Enough and Time represents the triumph of the tragic vision America has habitually denied over the anti-tragic myth of the West by which it has sentimentally lived. From the most decadent of popular forms, the dregs of contrived melodrama, Warren has rescued an archetypal story, the long dishonored devices of reversal and recognition, and redeemed them to their authentic tragic uses. === Page 105 === ON TWO FRONTIERS 743 If his rhetoric seems sometimes strained, sometimes shrill, it is al- ways honest and moving, the language of a man with a vision of existence that justifies rhetoric. The minor failures of the book are the marks of excesses of ambition, the occasional inability to do justice to all its im- mensely complex significances. To honor at once symbol and plot, the felt richness of character in action and the complex metaphysics of the human situation is to at- tempt gallantly to heal the breach between our two audiences and our two literatures. H. J. Kaplan, the contributor to little magazines, work- ing in the Jamesian tradition is the serious artist a little too relaxedly at home; but Robert Penn Warren, avant garde critic and poet, venturing into the territory of Cooper and Simms and A. B. Guthrie is the serious artist in disguise among the enemy. His real victories must com- pensate him for being called traitor by the less astute in his own camp. Leslie A. Fiedler RITUAL AND THE DRAMA THE IDEA OF A THEATER. By Francis Fergusson. Princeton University Press. $3.75. Francis Fergusson, in his profoundly meditated and richly suggestive book, The Idea of a Theater, has made a brilliant contribution both to modern literary criticism in general and to the aesthetic of the drama in particular. To modern criticism, Mr. Fergusson has given a series of penetrating studies of great plays—Oedipus Rex, Bérénice, Hamlet, Tristan und Isolde—which combine aesthetic analysis and his- torical insight in an exemplary fashion. To the aesthetic of the drama, Mr. Fergusson has given a notable renovation of some key concepts and a bold theory of tragic form—a theory that re-interprets Aristotle in the light of what we now know about the ritual origins of Greek tragedy, and which unites Jane Harrison's anthropology with such diverse influ- ences as the Stanislavsky method and Thomas Aquinas' concept of analo- gy. Taking his theory of tragic form as a point of reference, Mr. Fergus- son uses it to assess the great theaters of the Western tradition and to throw the problems of the modern theater in an illuminating perspective. Like Aristotle, Mr. Fergusson goes to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to illustrate the nature of tragedy, though he is mainly concerned with a level of meaning—the level of ritual—that Aristotle could take for granted in his Greek hearers. Aristotle describes tragedy generally as "an imitation, not of men but of an action," and then, without bothering to === Page 106 === 744 PARTISAN REVIEW define the word "action," goes on to discuss the mechanics of plotting; but what Aristotle meant by "action," Mr. Fergusson believes, is "not the event of the story but the focus or aim of psychic life from which the events ... proceed." What, then, is the "focus or aim of psychic life" in Greek tragedy, and particularly in Oedipus Rex? The answer, accord- ing to Mr. Fergusson, can be found in the ritual origins of Greek tragedy. This ritual, an outgrowth of primitive vegetation ceremonies, celebrated in dance and song the struggle, death and rebirth of the year-god; the pattern of the ritual moved in a three-fold rhythm determined by the structure of this experience; and the "action" of Greek tragedy is an "imitation" of the emotional structure of the ritual experience, or more precisely, of the "prerational image of human nature and destiny which the ritual conveyed." In dramatizing the myth of Oedipus, Mr. Fergusson explains, So- phocles cast it in the form of this ancient ritual, so that the play as a whole, and each incident within the play, moves in the "tragic rhythm"- the sequence of "Purpose, Passion (or Suffering) and Perception" which is the "substance or spiritual content of the play," and, at the same time, of the ritual experience. Closely analyzing the play from this point of view, Mr. Fergusson shows how Oedipus, in his relation to the city of Thebes, took on many of the attributes originally possessed by the year- god; and to a Greek audience, equipped by their whole culture with a "ritual expectancy," the quest for the slayer of Laius was felt, on a level below the incidents of the plot, as involving the "welfare of the City" and as "imitating and celebrating the mystery of human nature and destiny." In the French classic theater of Corneille and Racine, as in the late Romantic theater of Wagner, this totality is sacrificed to one of its aspects. Purpose or Reason is the dominant mode of experience in Racine's Bérénice; Passion or Suffering is the dominant mode of Tristan und Isolde: in both, the action of the play "imitates" this single mode of experience, rather than, as in Sophocles, moving through a succession of modes of moral change. Only in Shakespeare's Hamlet do we find a theater which, like that of the Greeks, encompasses the full range of the "tragic rhythm." The most influential modern interpretation of Hamlet is that of T. S. Eliot in the Sacred Wood, where Eliot accepts J. M. Robertson's thesis that "the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son toward a guilty mother." On this basis, both Eliot and Robertson con- clude that Hamlet is an artistic failure, marred by undigested remnants of the original Hamlet-story that have no rationally explicable rela- === Page 107 === RITUAL AND THE DRAMA 745 tion to the main theme. Mr. Fergusson, it seems to me, is entirely right in his criticism of this view, which treats Hamlet as if it were a late nineteenth-century problem play amenable to resolution in neat, con- ceptual terms. Starting from J. Dover Wilson's reminder that Hamlet was a prince, who lost a throne as well as a father, Mr. Fergusson works out an interpretation of Hamlet as a ritual drama similar in nature to Oedipus but filled with an ironic complexity alien to Sophocles. Like Oedipus, it is the order of the state which is at stake in Hamlet, and ultimately, the order of the cosmos itself as symbolized by the stage. The function of the court ceremonies in Hamlet, Mr. Fergusson acutely points out, is "to serve to focus attention on the Danish body politic and its hidden malady: they are ceremonious invocations of the well- being of society, and religious or secular devices for securing it." All the divergent plot-lines are linked "by analogy" with this central theme of the play, united not by any abstract idea but by the connection still felt in Elizabethan times between the health of the state and the order of the cosmos; though Hamlet himself—and this is the heart of his personal tragedy—has begun to doubt the traditional cosmos without having any new faith to take its place. From this perspective, Mr. Fergusson is able to synthesize the leading modern theories about Hamlet into a re- markably comprehensive and convincing unity focussed around his own conception of ritual drama. By this time, Mr. Fergusson's own "ideal" of a theater should be fairly clear. It is a theater like that of Sophocles and Shakespeare: re- flecting a unified culture and cosmos in which the action "imitated" by the drama is based on the ritual sense of life and human destiny formu- lated by the tragic rhythm. Measured by this ideal, of course, the modern drama is a chaos of "partial perspectives," each imposing a different convention on a reality no longer shaped by a traditional intuition of human destiny. In the last great theater, that of modern realism, the "publicly accepted scene of human life was that of the Philistine bourgeoisie"; Ibsen and Chekhov created their theater within this "publicly accepted scene." Nonetheless, they managed to get beneath the superficial machinery of the well-made play—a degeneration of Racine's theater of Reason—to capture "not a concatenation of events but a movement of the psyche." In the theater of modern realism, however, "the anagoge is lacking"—there is no larger world of meaning into which the tragedy opens, as Oedipus opens into a recognition of the mysterious justice of the gods, or as Hamlet opens into the arrival of Fortinbras which restores the state and the cosmos. Yet the theater of Chekhov in particular, Mr. Fergusson asserts, captured those "moments === Page 108 === 746 PARTISAN REVIEW in his characters' lives, between their rationalized efforts, when they sense their situation and destiny most directly"; it was from this theater that Stanislavsky developed a method of acting whose aim was precisely to "imitate" the movement of the psyche prior to rational formulation; and in so doing, modern realism returned drama to its ancient root, the histrionic sensibility. The book concludes with a series of short, incisively phrased sec- tions on modern playwrights—Shaw, Pirandello, Jean Cocteau, André Obey, T. S. Eliot—who have attempted to "escape realistic limitations." It is regrettable that Mr. Fergusson did not give more space to these moderns, especially to Cocteau's The Infernal Machine and Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. Cocteau's effort to accept modern rationalism, and to work back from it to "reveal the moral and anagogical reality," is extraordinarily interesting as Mr. Fergusson sets it forth; and Eliot is so rarely analyzed in dramatic terms that a longer study would have been of great value. The intuition of reality in Murder in the Cathedral, Mr. Fergusson remarks, is of a supernatural reality revealed finitely only in terms of theological paradox; the play has a ritual framework, but is based on this concept rather than on the direct perception of moral change as something taking place in time. In reading Mr. Fergusson's book, it is well to keep in mind that his great theaters of the past are all ideal constructions, highly stylized versions of the available historical material. Within each of the great theaters there was, certainly, a good deal of actual diversity: Mr. Fer- gusson himself draws a careful distinction between Sophocles and Euri- pides, though the latter presumably shared the Greek "idea of a theater." Similarly, Wagner did not stop writing after Tristan und Isolde, whose intuition of reality, Mr. Fergusson notes, Wagner later renounced; and while Racine is labelled the dramatist of the theater of Reason, Mr. Fer- gusson concedes that in Phèdre he successfully portrays "the dissolution of the rationalized moral being in passion and suffering." In choosing to write about Bérénice, of course, Mr. Fergusson picked the play where Racine's characteristic conflict of Reason and Passion is resolved without any real fight;—the play, in other words, that is the most finished exam- ple of the ideal extreme to which the French classic theater was tending. The various "ideas of a theater" are all such ideal extremes, Platonic "ideas" in a literal sense; they coincide neither with the actual variety of plays written at any specific time, nor even with the totality of a single playwright's production; but they are no less useful, as categories of historical understanding, because the reality they define only rarely actualizes them in a pure form. === Page 109 === RITUAL AND THE DRAMA 747 The chief weakness of Mr. Fergusson's work, in my opinion, is his use of the categories Realism-Idealism, which cut across the properly his- torical categories (Racine and Wagner have opposite "ideas of a theater" but both are classed as Idealist, while Sophocles and Shakespeare-as well as Dante, who is used as a constant point of reference-are called Realist). Sometimes, Mr. Fergusson speaks of the "univocal sense of form" in the Idealist theaters and contrasts this with the "analogical sense of form" among the Realists; here the distinction merely means that the Idealists isolate one or another aspect of the "tragic rhythm" and make this the principle of their dramaturgy, rather than, as the Realists do, employing a succession of moral modes analogically related to each other. Sometimes, however, Mr. Fergusson speaks of Idealist dramaturgy as, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, "a form or rhythm imposed upon the world of action"; while "the Realists of all kinds do not so much impose as discern a form of action." The distinction here is transferred from aesthetic to ontological grounds, with the Realists (Mr. Fergusson uses the term in the sense given it in medieval philosophy) imitating a reality felt as objectively existent, not a subjective creation of the indi- vidual playwright. But if this is the point of the distinction, then Mr. Fergusson runs into trouble in applying it so broadly. Racine's theater of Reason, Mr. Fergusson himself writes, "was a public institution with stage, actors, audience and general support and comprehension"; nor would Mr. Fergusson deny, apparently, that the moral values of Racine's theater were felt as objectively real by Racine and his audience. Racine can thus hardly be called Idealist in the second and more important meaning that Mr. Fergusson gives this term. Again, Mr. Fergusson agrees with Denis de Rougemont that the Tristan und Isolde myth "does reawaken to life . . . ancient sources buried in our culture, just as it taps obscure sources in the individual psyche." To this extent, then, we may surely say that Wagner "discerned" a form of action in the myth and did not simply impose one. And while Mr. Fergusson identifies the Realist theaters with those cultures that had a "naturally formed and centrally placed mirror of man and society," and speaks of the modern theater as irremediably Idealist;-we also find him saying that Chekhov and Ibsen "rediscover some of the ancient sense of drama as the imitation of action" and "cannot be grasped at all on . . . Idealist principles." The more one tries to pin this distinction down, the more elusive it becomes. Fortunately, it has only an auxiliary status in the book. A final word should be said on some of the historical assumptions that dominate Mr. Fergusson's critical thinking. Like T. S. Eliot and the New Critics, whose influence he acknowledges, Mr. Fergusson is haunted === Page 110 === 748 PARTISAN REVIEW by the ideal of a cultural unity that he sees embodied in Dante, Sophocles and Shakespeare. Now Mr. Fergusson agrees that the cultural unity he admires is "a kind of more-than-individual natural growth"; we do not know how we can get it, he says, and it is plainly beyond the power of any single writer to create such a culture. Yet this does not prevent Mr. Fergusson from measuring the modern theater against a standard which, by definition, is unattainable for any modern artist. As Mr. Fergusson explains, he uses this standard "so that we may learn to recog- nize and appreciate the fragmentary perspectives we do have; collecting the pieces, keeping the idea alive, in the tentative, fallible and suggestive light of analogy." Nobody would deny the importance of this task, and Mr. Fergusson has performed it superbly; certainly it would be unfair to tax him with not having done more. And still, we cannot help asking- not particularly of Mr. Fergusson, but of modern criticism in general- whether the best way to "recognize and appreciate the fragmentary per- spectives we do have" is continually to emphasize how far they fall short (and must fall short) of an ideal we do not know how to achieve? My point is simply that we must make the best of the art we have, and we are unjust to ourselves if we view it only in this negative focus. Our cultural life, at present, has reached a stage where we would do well to heed Nietzsche's warning against "monumental" history, which ideal- izes and deifies the past; this could easily degenerate, he foresaw, into a life-destroying fixation whose slogan is: "Let the dead bury the living." Actually, Mr. Fergusson brings up the possibility of an alternative atti- tude in his remark that "the centerless diversity of our theater may be interpreted as wealth." And elsewhere, while commenting that the free- dom of modern art may have been bought at too high a price, he is compelled to praise modern art's "freedom to respond, directly, and without premeditation, to any and every human experience." If these aspects of the modern theater had been kept in the foreground, perhaps the atmosphere of gloom and helpless pessimism that hangs over Mr. Fergusson's concluding pages might have been alleviated. Joseph Frank THE ENERGY OF PASTERNAK BORIS PASTERNAK: SELECTED WRITINGS. Direction 9. New Directions. $1.50. Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890. His father was a well-known painter, his mother a musician. He published his earliest poems during the First World War towards the end of the === Page 111 === THE ENERGY OF PASTERNAK renaissance of Russian poetry which began in the nineties and ended with the death of Yesenin. By 1919 Pasternak's poetry began to be read beyond the literary coteries of Moscow and Petrograd and today, at the age of 60, he is recognized as a poet of genius upon the quality of which no serious critic has ventured to cast any doubt. Although attention was drawn to his work by D. S. Mirsky, who admired his gifts and wrote about him with great understanding (in English) in the twenties, it was not until recent events stimulated a new wave of interest in Russia that any systematic translation of his work into English was attempted. Verse translations by Professor C. M. Bowra and by Miss Babette Deutsch (which form the last section of this book), -in particular the former-convey something of the heavily charged and twisting rhythms, the tormented yet luminous vision of the original; in particular, of the depth and unity of his world in which men, things, relationships, emotions, ideas, sensations, situations are conceived within a kind of universal biological category. Within this orbit the force of nature flows with a violent almost self-conscious energy, at many inter- penetrating levels; sometimes it flows in rich, enormous overwhelming waves of feeling moving freely and in many dimensions. Sometimes the stream is arrested or compressed into narrow defiles, in which it forms knots and gathers into violently condensed globules of extreme in- tensity; Pasternak's verse is in the first place a vehicle of metaphysical emotion which melts the barriers between personal experience and "brute" creation. The poet himself remarked somewhere that poetry or art is the natural object informed by, or seen under, the aspect of energy-the all pervasive vis vivida whose flow, at times broken and intermittent, is the world of things and persons, forces and states, acts and sensations. To attempt to give more precise significance to this kind of vision may be perilous and foolish, save by discrimination from what it is not: it is neither a pathetic fallacy whereby human experience is projected into inanimate objects, nor yet is it the inversion of this, to be found, for example, in the novels of Virginia Woolf, where the fixed structure of human beings and material objects is dissolved into the life and the properties of the shifting patterns of the data of the inner and the outer senses, sounds, smells, colors, real, imagined, and recollected. There is, on the contrary, a sense of unity induced by the sense of the pervasive- ness of cosmic categories, (perhaps derived from the poet's neo-Kantian days in Marburg) which integrate all the orders of creation into a single, biologically and physiologically, emotionally and intellectually, interrelated universe; this world in which clouds and flowers, the earth === Page 112 === PARTISAN REVIEW 750 and the sky, the actively burning rays of the sun and the cold moun- tain water and the shape of a sound or a human limb or a continent, or a half articulated movement-physical or mental-and the stresses and pressures of inanimate objects and of human sensations, emotions, per- ceptions, images, and passions, all penetrate one another and strain against one another, both act and suffer; the words communicate this by means of a kind of violent and unexpected modulation to which Pas- ternak is as prone as Donne or Hopkins. Nor is this a consciously bold device or technical method of juxtaposing opposites to secure a spark or an explosion; it conveys a directly experienced vision, of a single world-wide, world-long system of tensions and stresses, a perpetual ebb and flow of energy, rising to a climax in the painful frustration, but, in the end, triumphant agony of individual centers of consciousness- the life of personalities, solid men and women, vis-a-vis solid material objects. Both persons and things are related to each other by real and not symbolic relationships, heightened and transfigured by an extreme concentration of vision which reveals the inner outline-the permanent bony structure-and does not transmute them into elements of an other worldly language, or become attenuated into a succession of vaguely relevant emotions of verbal patterns. As always with great poetry, these systems of tensions resolve themselves at their greatest height into passages of noble simplicity and repose, moments of serenity and harmony towards which the discords inevitably tend, and in terms of which alone they acquire their significance and purpose. Pasternak grew up during the symbolist phase of Russian poetry, when problems of philosophy and theology dominated the thoughts of some among his most gifted contemporaries. He originally set out to be a composer, was a pupil of Scriabin, but became a poet profoundly in- fluenced by Andrey Byely and the other writers of the Moscow circle. Between 1915 and 1924 he composed half a dozen short stories, and in 1930 his autobiography appeared. The stories, to be properly as- sessed, must be understood in the historical context of his life. His prose is of that painfully over-elaborated and euphuistic kind in which the maximum and sometimes more is squeezed out of every word; and owes much to the precious, sometimes unsuccessful, at other times dazzlingly brilliant technical method of Byely, a great innovator of language, who before Joyce invented new methods of using words, and generated a world of his own, filled with the fitful memories of half understood German metaphysics, choc a bloc with treasured mysteries drawn from Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Wagner, French and Belgian sym- bolist poets, the anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner-a queer amalgam === Page 113 === THE ENERGY OF PASTERNAK of profound inspiration, insight, and astonishing flights of imaginative virtuosity, in which moments of tranquility, beauty and innocence mingle with mere neurosis, extravagance, hysteria, genuine madness, and at times a particularly false and irritating aesthetic exhibitionism. The prose style which Pasternak created during the period of literary and spiritual turmoil, is, to say the least, not easy to convey into another language, and it is almost at its most obscure and artificial in his autobiography, which he called Safe Conduct. Hence the translator, Mrs. Beatrice Scott, was clearly most courageous to have attempted it at all; courageous or blind, for, more often than not, she gives the impression of having surrendered the resources of the English language without a struggle to the untranslatable Russian original, and we get strange collocations of words which leave the reader perplexed. Nor do Pasternak's stories fare better in Mr. Robert Payne's render- ings. And although the heroic martyrdom of these translators may entitle them to our respect, the author remains unlucky. The selection of stories seems open to question. "The Childhood of Lüvers" is a mas- terpiece and well worth inclusion, but "Aerial Ways" and "Letters from Tula" are so intimately connected with a particular period and manner and literary atmosphere that their value to the untutored reader without an apparatus of commentary may be doubted. The editing is slovenly to a degree; Mr. Schimansky's references to his introductory essay pub- lished in the original English edition are left intact in his Preface, al- though the essay in question has been omitted from the American compilation. Of the two-score or so translations of the author's poetry, five at least are somewhat surprisingly given in the versions both of Professor Bowra and Miss Deutsch-as if the translations had been independently chosen and carelessly allowed to overlap. And why does the second part of "Lüvers" appear as a completely separate story under the title, "The Stranger," (this is only a chapter-heading in the original and is given quite correctly in the English edition)? Nevertheless one should not cavil too much; everything which throws light upon the creative activities of an artist of rare genius about whom too little is known (and all facts are valuable) is to be welcomed. Mr. Lindsay Drummond (who has published these works in England), and the editors of New Directions, as well as Mr. Schimansky, have per- formed a service to literature by this act of homage to a noble poet and one of the few men of authentic genius of our time. Isaiah Berlin === Page 114 === 752 PARTISAN REVIEW EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS BAUDELAIRE. By Jean-Paul Sartre. New Directions. $2.50. Originally written as an introduction to a French collection of Baudelaire's private journals, diaries, and letters, this essay is now published, in a fine translation by Martin Turnell, as a separate study and as an exercise in what M. Sartre calls "existential psychoanalysis." In design and execution it reminds one of the "Portrait of an Antisemite." Both portraits are constructed in accordance with precise metaphysical measurements. There is the basic axiom: the "free choice" made by the individual when confronted with the irreconcilable existential dilem- ma between "existence" and "being"; to be a rock, in the case of the antisemite, "to exist for himself as he was for others," in the case of Baudelaire. The rest is a matter of deducing or filling in the particular, empirical details. Thus Baudelaire's "life is simply (sic!) the story of the failure of this attempt." This presentation lends to the essay a striking coherence and clarity; all the material assembled fits into a neat system internally consistent and necessary. Thus what, at first, appears arbitrary and accidental, hence cruel and undeserved—Baudelaire's mother and stepfather, his mulatto mistress, his syphilis, the struggle with poverty, the condemna- tion and unsavory publicity of his poems, the rebuff of the Academy, the premature and horrible death—all this when seen within the context of the original "choice," as Sartre sees it, was necessary and deserved. Similarly Baudelaire's personality—his dandyism, his Manichean obses- sion with evil, sin, guilt, and atonement, the desire to inspire horror and disgust, the laziness, ennui, and fear of solitude, the desperate attempts to work out simple bourgeois precepts for "hygiene, conduct, and morality," the sado-masochistic concept of love, the cult of volupté, the intellectual lucidity, the hatred of nature (except for stones, precious metals, perfumes, the sea, ships, and cats), the love for the big city, the rejection of urban technology and urban masses, the fantasies about exotic travels, the inability to undertake any real journey—all these per- plexing and contradictory aspects of Baudelaire's personality M. Sartre has assembled and presented, with great skill, as consequences of and exhibits for the existentialist thesis. In doing this, he has also made, as Mr. Turnell points out in a perceptive introduction, a number of points highly original and provoca- tive. Nevertheless, I think that, in the long run, despite these genuine insights, the neat, sharp outlines of this portrait are both deceptive and deficient. The essay is, in fact, less satisfactory than the "Portrait of === Page 115 === EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS 753 an Antisemite"; and this for a good reason: The portrait of the Anti- semite was an exercise in literary typology: it constructed an abstract, ideal type of a man. This was quite legitimate-sociological analysis constantly operates with "ideal types"-and quite instructive because of the novelty in approach and perspective. Since it was an abstraction it did not matter that there was no individual antisemite who corre- sponded precisely to Sartre's description. It was sufficient that the por- trait added a new dimension to the complex phenomenon of antisemitism as we encounter it, to varying shades and degrees, in individual anti- semites. In the case of Baudelaire, however, the situation is exactly reversed. The task is not to construct an ideal type but a unique indivi- dual. And for this task, I think, the existential blueprint is much less instructive: It does not lead to an understanding of Baudelaire's powers as a poet; nor is it an original study in the psychopathology of an in- dividual; nor does it lead to an understanding of what Baudelaire thought or felt. M. Sartre anticipates the criticism that he is not concerned with the aesthetic dimension of Baudelaire's work. Perhaps he would admit with Freud (although otherwise scornful of ordinary psychoanalysis) that, "unfortunately, before the creative artist, analysis must lay down its arms." Yet even if we disregard this aspect of Baudelaire, the essay raises other points of doubt. For what does the metaphysical category of the "free choice" really tell us about the structure of the individual per- sonality? In what sense does it "elucidate the immediate and concrete categories" of his existence, as Sartre wrote in L'Etre at Le Néant? In Baudelaire's case, the "choice" was made during early childhood when he was confronted with the individuality ("singularity") of his mother and General Aupick, his stepfather. It was then that he chose a "non- authentic" form of existence, i.e., his failure as a human being and partial success as a writer. However, this choice is not to be confused with an ordinary Oedipus situation: * according to Sartre, it is an "a priori choice which is entirely unmotivated" and "appears as an absolute event." Now does this really enable us to see the existential situation of the individual in a new light; does it provide a new insight into the perplexing complexity of Baudelaire's personality? I doubt it. An "a priori, entirely unmotivated, absolute choice" at childhood is a mystifying * René Laforgue, in a Freudian study called The Defeat of Baudelaire, places the genesis of the Oedipus situation prior to the second marriage of Baudelaire's mother and suggests that Baudelaire may even have loved General Aupick un- consciously-an interpretation which Sartre, without giving the source, calls an "idiocy." === Page 116 === 754 PARTISAN REVIEW concept. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that when he turns to the detailed analysis of Baudelaire, M. Sartre makes extensive use of prac- tically every theoretical concept developed by ordinary psychoanalysis: defense mechanisms, wish-fulfilment, projection, displacement, regression, sado-masochism, narcissism, etc. Thus as far as the substance of the portrait is concerned, existential analysis simply appropriates a familiar terminology without adding anything except a rather mystifying meta- physical thesis. But, in addition to these points of doubt, the existential analysis, I think, also fails when we try to use it for an understanding of Baude- laire's significance as a man and writer. Sartre subordinates all the major themes of Baudelaire (dandyism, evil, sexuality, art, beauty and horror, the past and memory, progress, nature and the city, etc.) to the original thesis of the "free choice." Thus instead of using the complexity of Baudelaire's inner life and poetic creations for the purpose of disclosing "existential categories" relevant to the social, historical, or human situation in general, he is, strangely enough, only interested in Baudelaire as an "object" lesson and exhibit for a metaphysical theory. After a while, I think, this tour de force wears rather thin and seriously distorts, not only the picture of Baudelaire as an individual, but, what is even more important, any understanding of what he thought and felt. In the end, it is difficult to see not only how Baudelaire wrote beautiful poetry, but how he ever thought, felt, or said anything worth listening to and what it was. In addition to the formal magic of the poetry, in addition to per- sonal suffering and failure, surely, there is something in Baudelaire's life and works which has been profoundly significant in human or even philosophical terms. But whatever it is, the existential analysis fails to disclose it or make it intelligible. "Baudelaire never believed completely in anything he thought or felt, in any of his sufferings or in any of his gritty (grinçantes) voluptés." Even allowing for the qualification of "com- pletely," this is strong medicine; and after taking it, one involuntarily reaches for a copy of the Fleurs du Mal to read at least Le Balcon, Harmonie du Soir, or L'Invitation au Voyage and to discover that Sartre's statement simply does not contribute anything to an understanding of volupté or any other Baudelaircan concept. (This is particularly surpris- ing, because, in these poems alone, there are at least two ideas, the concept of the body as pure flesh or pure pleasure, and the idea of nothingness, which M. Sartre, in another context, has taken quite seriously.) Sensibility, or, as Valéry also called it, volupté poétique, combined in Baudelaire with an extraordinary sense of critical intelligence or === Page 117 === EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS 755 intellectual lucidity. This is partly the reason why he does not strictly belong to any literary period or movement. This is also the reason why the themes, sentiments, and ideas suggested by his life and work have evoked such a profound response. Why this should be the case and what is the significance of these themes for an "existential" situation trans- cending the limited perspective of Baudelaire's original "choice" is, un- fortunately, not treated in Sartre's essay. Yet, strangely enough, this is exactly what one might have expected from a philosophical (rather than a purely psychoanalytic) portrait in literature. Hans Meyerhoff THE EDUCATION OF ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE THE RECOLLECTIONS OF ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE. Edited by J. P. Mayer. Columbia University Press. $5.00. In the late summer of 1850 the English economist Nassau Senior visited his friend Alex de Tocqueville at the latter's ancestral mansion in Normandy. In the journal he kept of this visit he noted the presence of Tocqueville's father, a "fine old man" of seventy-eight whose hair had turned grey during the Terror of the first French Revolution, when he was barely saved from trial and certain execution by the fall of Robespierre. The old Count recalled that "the disagreeable time in every day was about half-past three," when those selected for trial were summoned from prison. For this reason he accustomed himself to sleep each afternoon between three and four. The anecdote is doubly significant: it evokes a psychological atmosphere heavily charged with noblesse oblige, and it reminds us that by the middle of the nineteenth century there were still eyewitnesses to lend additional vitality to a powerful revolutionary tradition. The revolutionary heritage of modern French history and the aristocratic heritage of Alexis de Tocqueville provide the counterpoint for his Recollections, the complete text of which has now appeared for the first time in an English translation. At the time of Senior's visit Tocqueville had just finished setting down the first part of what he re- solved would be: ". . . a mirror in which I will amuse myself in con- templating my contemporaries and myself, not a picture painted for the public." It was a mirror that came to reflect nine months of the French revolutionary period of 1848-1849: the four months beginning in February, 1848, which saw the proclamation of the Second Re- === Page 118 === 756 PARTISAN REVIEW public, the establishment of a provisional government, the election and deliberations of the Constituent Assembly, and the bloody "June days" when the bourgeois Republicans who had begun the Revolution defeated the insurgent Paris workers who had wanted to make it social as well as political; and the five months beginning in June, 1849, during which Tocqueville served as Foreign Minister in a cabinet dismissed by the President in October of that year because it refused to make itself subservient to his wishes. The President was Louis Bonaparte, Victor Hugo's Napoléon le Petit, who had been overwhelmingly elected in December, 1848, by that universal suffrage which seemed to so many the infallible guarantee of democracy. Tocqueville who had not actively helped to bring about the Revolution, but did his best to support the Republic once it was proclaimed, had no illusions about universal suffrage. He predicted the coup d'état of Louis-Napoleon and the eventual ruin of the Second Republic just as he had predicted the outbreak of the Revolution it- self. Like Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire, he recognized the social ele- ments in the revolutionary process he described. The middle class had achieved its triumphs in 1789 and 1830 and had monotonously con- solidated them during the July Monarchy. In 1848 the turn of the working classes seemed to have arrived.-"Socialism will always remain the essential characteristic and the most redoubtable remembrance of the Revolution of February. The Republic will only appear to the on- looker to have come upon the scene as a means, not as an end." Tocqueville wrote this late in 1850. A little more than two years earlier, in September of 1848, the Constituent Assembly, made up for the most part of moderate Republicans, had debated the critical issue of incorporating the "Right to Work" demanded by the Left into the new Constitution. In his speech opposing this demand Tocqueville had explicitly denied what he was to assert in the Recollections, maintain- ing-on that occasion-that the character of the February Revolution was neither socialist nor social, but political, and that one must have the courage to say so. He himself, whose honesty in self-analysis verges on the painful, would have been the first to admit the discrepancy. As an active participant in the political events of the Revolution, he saw his duty in saving the Republic from socialism. If this could be done by denying the social character of the Revolution, he was willing to try. But when, in the Recollections, he came to probe into the deeper mean- ing of the events through which he had lived he felt free not only to emphasize the importance of socialist currents in the Revolution, but to envisage the possibility of their eventual success. Like his spiritual === Page 119 === ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 757 kinsmen, Jacob Burckhardt and Henry Adams, Tocqueville devoted a great deal of effort to predicting what he could not but detest. His political career during the Revolution exemplifies that tragic irony which keynotes the Recollections. Fear of socialism with its "tyranny of equality" drove him who was perhaps the most "enlightened" conservative of the century into the Party of Order. There were few, if any, in that camp who shared either his selfless passion for liberty and justice or his clearsighted awareness of the dangers that lay ahead. None knew better than he that the successful quelling of the workers' risings was all too likely to prove a Pyrrhic victory. None was less con- vinced than he that 1848 constituted the end of the revolutionary process that had begun in 1789. And not even Marx was more con- temptuous than Tocqueville of the claptrap employed by Republicans of all shades to recreate the atmosphere of that first great revolution. His wit is never more mordant than when he is describing the procession of secretly armed Deputies to the "Feast of Concord," there to be bom- barded with bouquets by three hundred young girls dressed in white "who wore their virginal costume in so virile a fashion that they might have been taken for boys dressed up as girls"; or when he notices the single Deputy who obeyed the decree of the Provisional Government which suggested that the representatives wear the costume of the mem- bers of the National Convention of 1792-1795, "especially the white waistcoat with turn-down collar in which Robespierre was always represented on the stage." Tocqueville's contempt for these antics is part of a theme sounded more than once in the Recollections: that history does not repeat it- self, and that those who act as if it did do so at their peril. But the problem of Tocqueville's views on this matter is not so easily solved. One may discover three Tocquevilles in the Recollections, and three Weltanschauungen corresponding to them. Their constant interweaving produces a tension which permeates the book and lends it its classic stature. There is first Tocqueville the sociologist, the author of Democracy in America, who has long foreseen that the inevitable transition to the age of the masses would be attended by such disturbances as the Revolution of 1848. For him there are no surprises and no mysteries. To each event he wearily reacts with an "I told you so," for the processes of history proceed according to plan. The second Tocqueville is the politician: as a Deputy in both the old and the new legislative as- semblies and in the Constituent Assembly that intervenes, later as Foreign Minister, he refuses to be overwhelmed by any ineluctable === Page 120 === 758 PARTISAN REVIEW laws or movements and fight with tireless tenacity for his “middle way.” The third Tocqueville is the curious human animal who looks into his brain and heart to seek there the secret springs of his thoughts and actions: for him the destinies of the world proceed as the con- trary result of the intentions that produce them; for him neither events nor persons (including himself) are ever what they appear to be; and for him the unpredictable passions and sentiments of men are the only reality. It is this last Tocqueville who gives the Recollections an astringent melancholy and a bitter humour. A supremely able observer, aristocrat by birth and temperament, impatient of mediocrity and sham, records a period of revolution marked by nothing more than by platitudes and histrionics. Like a lepidopterist he is forever out to catch new specimens for his collection: his victims are human, his net is the fine network of his intelligence, and the labels under the mounted specimens all read alike genus vanitas. He may, at times, be hyper-critical; that, after all, is the privilege of the moralist. But he is always incisive and never dull: whether he comments on the rhetorical style of Louis-Philippe—“Jean-Jacques with a touch of nineteenth century kitchenmaid”—, on the peculiar gait of Lamennais who “glided through the crowd with an awkward, modest air, as though he were leaving the sacristy,”—on George Sand’s affair with Mérimée, conducted, he hears, “in accordance with Aristotle’s rules of time and place,”—or on his own psychological insecurity whose source he finds not in modesty but in “a great pride . . . as restless and disquieted as the mind itself.” John Clive Note: It has been the recent policy of PR not to review books by editors and advisory editors. Readers will be interested, however, to know of the publication of The Liberal Imagination, by Lionel Trilling, Viking Press, $3.50, and of the forthcoming book of poems by Delmore Schwartz, Vaude- ville For A Princess, New Directions, $2.75. === Page 121 === BACK ISSUES OF PR now available at reduced prices--30c each (regular price 60c) Any four of the following for $1.00 5 MAY 1948: Jean-Paul Sartre--For Whom Does One Write?; Philip Rahv --Disillusionment and Socialism; Josephine Herbst--Miss Porter and Miss Stein. 9 SEPTEMBER 1948: Jean Stafford--The Bleeding Heart; Hans Meyerhoff-- A Parable of Simple Humanity; James Burnham--Camus and De Beauvoir. 10 OCTOBER 1948: V. S. Pritchett--The Future of English Fiction; Mario Praz --Hemingway in Italy; Elizabeth Hardwick--Faulkner and the South Today. 12 DECEMBER 1948: Tennessee Williams--Rubio y Morena; Lionel Trilling-- Art and Fortune; Stephen Spender--The Life of Literature II. 14 FEBRUARY 1949: Delmore Schwartz--The Literary Dictatorship of T. S. Eliot; Stephen Spender--The Life of Literature IV; Oliver Evans-- James's Air of Evil. 15 MARCH 1949: Cyril Connolly--London Letter; Sidney Hook--On the Battlefield of Philosophy; William Phillips--Sleep No More (a story). 16 APRIL 1949: William Barrett--A Prize for Ezra Pound; John Berryman-- The Poetry of Ezra Pound; Eleanor Clark--The World of Jean Genet. 17 MAY 1949: The Question of the Pound Award: 8 opinions by Auden, Davis, Greenberg, Howe, Orwell, Shapiro, Tate, Barrett; Philip Toynbee-- The Novels of Henry Green. 19 JULY 1949: Philip Rahv--Orwell's 1984; J. F. Powers--St. Paul, Home of the Saints; Robert Gorham Davis--Culture, Religion and Mr. Eliot. 20 AUGUST 1949: José Ortega y Gasset--On Point of View in the Arts; Leslie A. Fiedler--The Fear of Innocence (a story). 22 OCTOBER 1949: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.--The Causes of the Civil War; Louis Martin--Chouffon--Proust and the Double "I"; Angus Wilson-- Two Stories; Irving Howe--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; Delmore Schwartz--Views of a Second Violinist. 25 JANUARY 1950: Arthur Mizener--Scott Fitzgerald; James Burnham-- The Suicidal Mania of American Business; Alfred Kazin--On Melville as Scripture. PARTISAN REVIEW, 30 West 12 Street, New York 11, N. Y. I enclose for the following back issues (insert numbers below) NAME STREET CITY ZONE STATE === Page 122 === MAGABOOK SHOP 168 West Fourth Street, New York City 14, WAtkins 4-5043 T. S. ELIOT-SELECTED POEMS (Paper) ALDOUS HUXLEY-AFTER MANY A SUMMER. Reduced from 4.00 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS-ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD-MR. NORRIS CHANGES TRAINS. Red. from 2.50 HENRY JAMES-AMERICAN SCENE. Reduced from 5.00 HENRY JAMES-SCENIC ART. Reduced from 4.50 BERTRAND RUSSELL-WHICH WAY TO PEACE. Reduced from 2.50 CHARLES WILLIAMS-PLACE OF THE LION. Reduced from 2.00 S. KIERKEGAARD-CONSIDER THE LILLIES. Reduced from 2.50 EDITH SITWELL-ENGLISH ECCENTRICS. Reduced from 3.50 EZRA POUND-A SELECTION OF POEMS ELIZABETH BOWEN To the North The Demon Lover House in Paris Death of the Heart Last September The Cat Jumps JOYCE CARY An American Visitor Aissa Saved African Witch Charley is my Darling House of Children Mr. Johnson To Be a Pilgrim Herself Surprised The Horses Mouth A Fearful Joy Castle Corner DOSTOEVSKY An Honest Thief Insulted and Injured House of the Dead Gentle Creature White Nights E. M. FORSTER England's Pleasant Land Abinger Harvest Where Angels Fear to Tread Aspects of the Novel Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson CHRISTOPHER FRY Lady's Not for Burning A Boy With a Cart Firstborn Phoenix Too Frequent Venus Observed A Ring Around the Moon GRAHAM GREENE Ministry of Fear Power and the Glory It's A Battlefield Stamboul Train A Gun for Sale England Made Me Journey Without Maps D. H. 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Reduced from 2.75 Please Make Checks Payable to Abraham Brook Send for Our Fall Catalogue .50 1.25 2.00 1.75 2.00 1.50 1.00 1.50 1.50 2.25 1.25 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 2.00 2.00 2.25 2.25 2.25 2.00 2.50 2.50 3.00 2.50 2.00 2.00 2.00 2.00 2.00 1.00 1.50 1.50 1.50 1.75 2.50 1.25 1.50 1.50 1.50 1.50 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 2.00 2.00 1.75 1.75 .75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.75 1.25 1.25 1.00 2.00 1.00 === Page 123 === 761 VARIETY Laurette Sejourné THE BONES OF CUATEMOC The bones were found last fall in the state of Guerrero. On Sep- tember 27, Eulalia Guzman, Di- rector of Historical Archives, un- earthed, under the altar of the church in the little town of Ich- cateopan, a copper plate bearing the inscription: S. E. COATE- MOC. She had gotten a hint from a document that had turned up in the town a little earlier. Con- tinuing to dig, she next brought up some human bones that had been placed in a hole cut into the rock. Everybody was sure that Señora Guzman had found the remains of Cuatemoc, the last king of the Aztecs, precisely as the document -which was signed, "Motolinia," and bore a sixteenth-century date- had indicated. There was a veritable explosion of emotion in the town. Excite- ment approached delirium. People wept and kissed each other in the streets. The church bells rang out widely to spread the great news to the countryside. Eulalia Guzman, at the head of a joyous procession, marched through the streets car- rying a Mexican flag. It was a great victory. The legendary last Aztec king had been delivered from the shadow of oblivion in which his bones had rested for more than four centuries. It had all begun the preceding February (1949), when the local priest, speaking from his pulpit, had told his flock that the bones of Cuatemoc were preserved in their church. He had the information from the last recipient of a "liv- ing letter," as those documents are called that are handed down from one generation to another. In- structed in a dream, this man revealed the secret to his priest, who made it public. When the news reached the Na- tional Institute of Anthropology in Mexico City, Señora Guzman was sent to Ichcateopan to investigate on the spot. The documents she first brought back were examined by archaeologists and pronounced false-that is, not dating from the sixteenth century. Returning to the village to make new inquiries, she ran across an oral tradition, bearing likewise on the secret of Cuatemoc, which a dozen old peo- ple, all aged eighty or more, had been jealously guarding. Finally, she turned up a document which revealed that Cuatemoc's bones were buried under the altar of the church. The discovery made a sensation throughout Mexico. A number of eminent scientists and politicians went to Ichcateopan. The Gov- ernor of Guerrero ordered all the === Page 124 === 762 church bells in the state to be rung, and three thousand churches tolled out the glory of the Aztec king. Señora Guzman was show- ered with congratulations from every part of the country, those from women's organizations being especially enthusiastic. The Order of Cuatemoc was instituted, and the archaeologist was at once dec- orated with it. A few days later, Ichcateopan, a town of some two thousand inhabitants, was named the state capital for a day; over seventeen thousand people travelled to the "Sanctuary of the Nation"; among the day's ceremonies was the celebration of a high mass in memory of Cuatemoc. Señora Guz- man was missed at these festivities. They looked everywhere for her; at last a close friend of hers ex- plained that, in her modesty, she had disappeared so that Cuatemoc could receive the people's undivided homage. An unbelievable number of speeches were made. A deputy declared that "Cuate- moc represents the human dignity of the Mexican people," and a Senator was of the opinion that at Ichcateopan "has arisen the highest pinnacle of the glory of our nation." In Mexico City, forty thousand school children brought flowers to decorate the statue of Cuatemoc, and a Government rep- resentative informed them that "the Aztecs were a mightier race than their conquerors." A few days later, the Senate voted to erect a monument to the king, and approved the founda- tion of a National Committee to Honor Cuatemoc. The monument is to be raised on a mountain peak as the only place "fitting for the greatness of Cuatemoc." Re- presentatives of every province will assemble to deposit there a handful of the earth of their native vil- lages. There is talk of founding a provincial college, but the citi- zens of Ichcateopan ask only that they be given electricity, a water system, and a school. A popular belief has material- ized, no one quite knows from where, that eight people will doubt the authenticity of the bones and will consequently die. Already two are believed to have fulfilled the prophecy: Father Cuevas, an aged and eminent historian, and the young scholar, Salvador Toscano, Secretary of the National Institute of Anthropology, who died in an airplane accident the day after the discovery. Cuatemoc The Spaniards entered Tenoch- titlan without fighting and took Montezuma prisoner in the most courteous possible way. All would have gone smoothly had it not been for the brutal act of one of the captains of Cortez, committed in the absence of his commander. This man, Pedro de Alvarado, === Page 125 === 763 greedy for their precious jewels, butchered the entire aristocracy of the city while they were assembled for a great religious ceremony. The citizens rose against the Conquist- adores, Montezuma was killed in the fighting, and his successor, Guitlahuac, finally drove the Span- iards out of Tenochtitlan. Later, Cortez laid siege to the city, using a fleet of boats he had had spe- cially constructed. Since the city was surrounded by water, this fleet was able to cut it off from the mainland. Guitlahuae died of smallpox, and his successor, Cuate- moc, took over the defense. The siege lasted ninety-three days, both sides fighting with desperate fero- city. Famine and disease decimated the besieged population. Forty cap- tured Spaniards were sacrificed on the altar of Huitzilopochtli. According to the old chronicles, Cuatemoc was only twenty-five at the time of the siege. He was tall, very handsome, and his bravery astonished the Spaniards. ("Cua- temoc" means "Falling Eagle," an Aztec metaphor for the setting sun —a fitting name for the king who was dated to preside over the death of his civilization.) After the fall of Tenochtitlan, he said to Cortez: "I have failed to defend my city and my reign. I am in your power. Take this dagger and kill me." When Cortez offered him freedom, he refused it, but asked mercy for his people. Put to the torture to force him to reveal the hiding-place of the treasure of the Aztecs, he maintained a stoic sil- ence. He rebuked an Aztec noble who was being tortured with him and who cried out unrestrainedly: "And I? Am I lying on a bed of roses?" They were, at that moment, burning the soles of his feet. Forced to make an expedition into the south, Cortez took along Cuatemoc and other nobles lest they try to lead an uprising in his absence. The journey was horribly painful for every one. At last, deep in the tropical forest, Cortez, either really believing or pretending to be- lieve that Cuatemoc was conspiring against him, had his soldiers hang the king and all his nobles. To the very end, according to the chronic- lers, Cuatemoc behaved with dig- nity and nobility. He was hung from a tree in the forest of Chiapas, a long distance from where his alleged bones were found. What, then, had happened? It appears that the king's mother had been born near Ichcateopan, and that—according to a widely- accepted story, at least—some faithful subjects had carried the body of their king to that town. The sufferings of this journey, which lasted several months, are recounted in great detail. It is easy to see how such a belief arose when one sees the devotion that even today is aroused by the last of the Aztec kings. But precisely be- cause of this devotion, his remains have been claimed by several === Page 126 === 764 towns widely distant from each other. Each is certain that it, and it alone, has the treasure. Doubts On October 20 last, a few weeks after Eulalia Guzman's first dis- covery, the newspapers carried a story that spread consternation throughout Mexico. It was to this effect: The National Institute of An- thropology had sent to Ichcateopan a commission of experts, each of the highest scientific standing. After a careful examination of the bones, they stated that they came from five different skeletons: two chil- dren, two adult males, and one adult female. The historian, J. Zavala, Director of the Museum of National History, after an equal- ly thorough examination of the documents, stated that they were definitely not from the sixteenth century. These findings aroused general indignation. The scholars, whose professional reputations had up to now been impeccable, were criti- cized and ridiculed. Their find- ings were pooh-poohed, and their good faith was questioned. "Even if the remains were false, the scholars should have kept quiet," wrote one passionate contributor to the capital's most important re- view. "If their faith was not strong enough to believe in the people's truth, at least they might have had the decency not to give the lie to it. Unhappily, scholars are not poets— they are merely . . . scholars. By their statements, scientifically base- less and motivated only by preju- dice and professional jealousy, the signers of this report have drawn on their heads the contempt of the Mexican public." Another writer is even more explicit. "Yes," he writes, "Yes, the bones of Cuate- moc are authentic. It is the Mex- ican people themselves who insist on it!" The president of the Republic announces that homage to Cuate- moc will nevertheless continue to be rendered, and the governor of Guerrero, exasperated by the un- cooperative attitude of the scholars, declares that the official bones of Cuatemoc now repose in Ichcateo- pan. He also threatens to appeal to foreign scholars, and calls on the governors of the other states to declare themselves for or against the authenticity of the bones. Spaniard and Mexican The dispute about the bones has simply revived, with unexpected violence, an old quarrel in Mex- ican cultural life, that between the "Hispanidizers" and the "Mex- icanizers." The Hispanidizers are the des- cendants of the Conquistadores, with only a slight admixture of Indian blood. Until the agrarian revolution ("Agrarismo") impov- === Page 127 === 765 erished them by dividing up their great estates, they held a landed monopoly that made them the country's ruling class. Today they are a social aristocracy without political power. Often educated in the universities of Paris, London, and Madrid, they have adopted European culture as the base of their own culture. They have no moral or cultural links with the Indians who form the mass of the population, and they tend to be Catholic, conservative, and anti- nationalist. The Mexicanizers are chiefly in- tellectuals of the small-bourgeois class, often with Indian family backgrounds. They are usually of the left, but, oddly enough, it is they who are the ardent national- ists and patriots. They reject every- thing that is not "indigenous," and search in the pre-Spanish past for their national traditions. The original discoverer of the bones, Eulalia Guzman, is herself a good specimen of this group: Indian by race, of a poor rural family, she devoted herself passionately to the study of Aztec art and religion. Hatred for the Spanish invaders has been the organizing principle of her scholarship; she compares them to the Nazis, and denounces Cortez as vehemently as if she were writing of some contemporary political figure. One of the big dailies printed her photo with the caption: "EULALIA GUZMAN, VICTIM OF THE DEFENDERS OF FOREIGN PIRATES THAT ARE NOW EN- TRENCHED IN THE LEADERSHIP OF THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF AN- THROPOLOGY." Among the documents that were found at Ichcateopan, one in par- ticular may be the clue to the whole affair. A certain Florentino Flores, the grandfather of the man who first revealed the secret to the priest, kept a kind of journal from 1880 to 1914. Judging from these jottings, Don Florentino was a man of great vitality and brilliance. He lived all his life in Ichcateopan, and spent his time collecting the folklore and legends of the region, which he loved deeply. Endowed with a flair for history and a sensibility about the past that were quite remarkable, Don Florentino discovered in the cult of Cuatemoc a firm base for his own racial and patriotic prejudices. "Cuatemoc," he wrote, "was the bravest young man of his age. While he was a prisoner, he was denounced, and the vile and scoundrelly Cortez had him hung along with other Mexican nobles. . No torture could make him reveal the secret of the nation. He was the king of the secret and will be the secret of eternity." He added, perceptively: "History is made by the conqueror, not by the conquered. The revelation of this secret would mean a frightful scandal, for they never wanted any- thing known about the young king." And one notes with sur- === Page 128 === 766 prise that he indicates the year 1950 as the date of the "battle of wild beasts" that is to rage about the revealed secret. There is also this suggestive passage: "I want only one thing: that in God's good time, the enemies of our last king shall know that he was not lost, nor devoured by wild animals, but was entombed like a true gentle- man and the king of our Mexican nation. Even though their history is silent about our beloved king, he is nonetheless with us, his dust and his ashes are the very honor of our Fatherland." Is it not possible that this ardent patriot might have acted to real- ize, himself, the dream that haunted his whole life? Ichcateopan I was recently commissioned by the National Institute of Anthro- pology to go to Ichcateopan to ob- serve the ceremonies on the Day of the Dead. One arrives in the town after three hours driving up a road cut out of the rock that is just wide enough for a car. The last twenty kilometers are little more than a goat's path that goes straight up the side of the mountain; it takes two hours to negotiate this dis- tance. Apparently bottomless pre- cipices line the road, and on some turns the rear wheels of the car seem to hang in the air. One of the proofs of the authenticity of the bones, I was told, is that not one of the many thousands of pil- grims to their shrine has had an accident on this road. The town itself has the secret and withdrawn air that one might expect in such an isolated place. It was All Saints' Night, and they had begun already to cele- brate the Day of the Dead. The streets were stirring. In the moon- light I made out little figures moving about in graceful evolu- tions: those in white were men, those in black, women. I approached one of those splashes of golden light that were the only illumination in the streets, and I found myself in front of a room, opened wide to the street, in which they had constructed the Offering for the soul of a dead relative. At the door of the house, a path had been made of yellow- orange petals to guide the soul to the altar set up in its honor. On the altar, a glass of consecrated wine, a glass of holy water, and a glass filled with flour, flanked by rolls baked in the forms of domes- tic animals like horses and dogs. At the foot of the altar, a square of moss decorated with flower- petal designs, on which friends will place their memorial offerings. These are little baskets covered with richly embroidered napkins and containing bread, fruit or flow- ers. At dawn tomorrow, after the departure of the soul, each will come to reclaim his basket, whose === Page 129 === 767 spiritual substance only will have been carried away by the soul. All the decorations of altar and room are white, the color of mourning for adults. Bright colors are for mourning for children. Black is not used at all. An extra candle is always lit for those un- known souls who, forgotten by their near ones, have trouble find- ing the path from this earth. The soul which is not remembered by any living person exists in obscur- ity. These candles are to light the way of such forgotten spirits. The town orchestra goes from house to house playing solemn airs. Yesterday, the day on which children's souls arrived, the or- chestra played popular songs all night, couples danced gaily before the altar. A child dying without sin becomes an angel and his happy eyes need not be saddened by a display of grief. The church bells will ring al- most continuously until dawn. This is to call the souls and guide them back to their own village. The motifs are infinitely varied and light as filigree work. Before dawn, everybody meets at the cemetery where the souls also gather to begin their return journey to- gether. I visited the cemetery the fol- lowing day, under a bright sun. Not a single large monument, not a tree. All the tombs are of white- washed brick, topped with a simple wooden cross. This is rather cur- ious in a town whose most striking feature is that its streets are paved with gleaming white marble. One also notices, in this austere place, that not a single name appears anywhere. It is anonymity, total and definitive. Almost as soon as I arrived in the town, I was approached by a man who asked me if I had come to visit the tomb of their king and if I too thought that the people of Ichcateopan were liars. The same question, in al- most the same words, was put to me several times later on. I de- cided, after surprising a look that passed between two men in a little restaurant where I was dining when I tried feebly to justify the report of the scholars, that it was wiser not to discuss the question. I was impressed by the religious devotion I found at the church. Its nave is divided in two by a white curtain that creates a Catho- lic area and a pagan area. On one side of the curtain, in the sha- dows, a priest in the confessional and some kneeling women. On the other, a blaze of light, music, and heaps of flowers offered to the soul of the Aztec king. Also, on an altar, the usual glasses of wine and water as well as a fine big horse made of bread. An orchestra played loudly some slow and grave melody. In the sanctuary, behind an iron railing, two glass caskets con- tain the famous bones. Soldiers === Page 130 === 768 with bayonets mount guard over them. On the next morning, when the mass for the dead celebrates the memory of the Aztec king, I will see the white curtain let down to the floor and the church for the moment resume its normal aspect. After the mass, the curtain will once more be pulled up. In this polemic, it is clear, Cuate- moc serves as a rallying point for a will toward national consciousness, and a movement to rehabilitate a race that for centuries was kept in slavery. Interestingly enough, the personage who has thus been made into a patriotic symbol is a de- feated warrior who never won a military victory. In a period when brute force alone seems to guide our destiny, it is good to find a people who are capable of making a national hero out of one whose greatness consists quite simply in his affirming, in the face of his triumphant conquerors, his hu- man dignity. (Translated from the French by Dwight Macdonald) LIBERAL PRESS, INC. printers of PARTISAN REVIEW . 80 FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK 3, N. Y. We specialise in first editions and out-of-print books by modern English authors, and probably have in stock, or can obtain what you require. Auden, Isherwood, Greene, Spender, Gill, Koestler, Joyce, Sitwell, are but a few of the authors of which we have extensive, if not complete, stocks. May we send you our lists, and re- ceive your "wants" lists? BERNARD HANISON - Books 57 St. Martin's Lane, London, W.C.2 England THE GOTHAM BOOK MART 41 WEST 47th ST., NEW YORK 19, N. Y. FASTER! FASTER! New English Novel by Patrick Bair 3.00 NEWS OF THE WORLD, New Poems by George Barker 2.25 THE WORLD'S BEST, Selections from 105 great living authors, edt. by Whit Burnett 5.00 SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN SOCIETY by Alex Comfort 2.75 THE BOY WITH A CART. By Christopher Fry 1.75 All other FRY plays in stock. PARADE'S END. The four Tiet- jens Novels by F. M. 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