The Arts At Mid-Century

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI PUBLIC LIBRARY

3 1148 00903 6583

DATE DUE

Demco, Inc. 38-293

THE ARTS AT MID-CENTURY

\The Arts at Mid-Century/

EDITED BY ROBERT RICHMAN

91

HORIZON PRESS NEW YORK

1954

Copyright 1954 by Horizon Press Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 54-7896

Manufactured in the United States of America

by H. Wolff, New York

Designed by Marshall Lee

Contents

ix Preface

SOME GENERAL ESSAYS

3 Stephen Spender / THE NEW ORTHODOXIES

24 John Crowe Ransom / AN AGE OF CRITICISM

28 Archibald MacLeish /THE MUSES' STERNER LAWS

36 Francis Biddle / THE BLUR OF MEDIOCRITY

45 Allen Tate / MORAL ACTION IN ART

50 John Crowe Ransom / SYMBOLISM: AMERICAN

STYLE

59 Robert Evett / PROGRESS IN MUSIC
70 Herbert Read / PRIMITIVE ART AND MODERN MAN
77 Robert Richman / THE MASTERS OF THE TWEN
TIETH CENTURY

THE ARTS IN FRANCE

93 Henri Peyre / THE FRENCH NOVEL AT MID-CENTURY

97 Wallace Fowlie / MID-CENTURY FRENCH POETRY

103 Herbert Read / THE CHALLENGE OF BOIMONDAU

109 Joseph Frank / AN EXISTENTIALIST IN THE UNDER
WORLD

115 Kermit Lansner / RECENT FRENCH PAINTING

120 Norman Demuth / MUSIC IN FRANCE

126 William Becker / FRENCH THEATRE: THE

NATIONAL GENIUS

131 Parker Tyler / THE FRENCH FILM

THE ARTS IN ITALY

137 Mark Schorer / THE FICTION OF GIOVANNI VERGA

146 Paolo Milano / SILONE THE FAITHFUL

150 Nicola Chiaromonte / AMBIGUITIES IN ITALIAN

LITERATURE

159 Kermit Lansner / ITALIAN PAINTING
165 Eric Bentley/THE ITALIAN THEATRE
172 Parker Tyler / ITALIAN FILMS

THE ARTS IN GERMANY

179 Joseph Frank / AN IMPENITENT PRUSSIAN
185 Ray B. West, Jr. / THE GERMAN NOVEL AT MID-
CENTURY
190 Joseph Frank /THE "DOUBLE LIFE" OF GOTTFRIED

BENN
196 William Becker /THE POSITION OF BERTOLT

BRECHT
203 Parker Tyler / THE GERMAN FILM

THE ARTS IN ENGLAND

209 Elizabeth Bo wen / ENGLISH FICTION AT MID-
CENTURY

214 Kathleen Raine / ENGLISH POETRY AT MID-
CENTURY

221 Stephen Spender / ENGLISH PAINTING IN THE

FIFTIES

227 Norman Demuth / MUSIC IN ENGLAND

233 William Becker / ENGLISH THEATRE: A BUDDING

TRADITIONALISM

237 Parker Tyler /THE BRITISH FILM: PHONETICS,
Fumed Oak, AND FUN

THE ARTS IN THE UNITED STATES

243 Malcolm Cowley / AMERICAN NOVELS SINCE THE

WAR
251 Arthur Mizener / AMERICAN POETRY IN THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY

257 Delmore Schwartz / RECENT LITERARY CRITICISM
262 Kenneth Rexroth / THE YOUNGER GENERATION

AND ITS BOOKS

269 Robert Richman / AMERICAN PAINTING AND SCULP
TURE AT MID-CENTURY

283 Robert Evett / EUTERPE IN CHAINS

289 Eric Bentley / GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROADWAY

294 Parker Tyler / THE AMERICAN FILM: TRENDS IN

THE FIFTIES

301 Notes on the Contributors

IX

Preface

Let us admit at once that these forty-one essays, as would
any collection of essays discussing the contemporary arts
in any age, run the gauntlet between two hazardous
conditions. The first is that there are far too many works
of art made in any one decade to treat them with any
thoroughness or definition. It is sobering to recall that
each new generation has had to make its own definitive
judgment of Homer.

The second hazard is that when one looks at his con
temporaries to explain, to evaluate and to judge, one is
tempting both Fate and History, both of whom stand by
eager to dash any critic's decisions to havoc. Perhaps Vir
ginia Woolf knew best: she confessed that she did not
care to read her contemporaries and the reason could
have been, as she had earlier said, that in judging a lit
erary work in English, one must ultimately compare it
to Shakespeare.

Even in the face of this, to accept silence at the risk
of making an error is foreign to the critical mind, in a
manner not unlike that in which the creative spirit
would never flinch at the risk of error. No other single
attitude marks the true spirit of the twentieth century
arts than that very wish to risk, to invent, and to ignore
the pastness of traditions and customs in all art. Thus a
good critic would be reluctant to seek this easy unemploy-

PREFACE

ment, especially when the first half of this century was
such an abundant age of art. The fifties and the sixties,
it is tempting to predict, will witness an even greater
growth of even better criticism; and this does not, in the
least, mean that creation in the arts will stop while criti
cism grows. In a great age of art, creation and scrutiny
are more often twins than cousins.

Of the twenty-six contributors to this volume, more
than twenty have distinguished themselves with their
own art. And as each was willing to look into the past
and present decades of this century, so too each would
admit at once the long reach and the narrow grasp.
Surely none claims to be definitive in his manner nor
comprehensive in his survey. The most obvious of gaps
are showing: architecture has not been treated in any of
the countries under view, nor have the everyday arts
allied to it. Nor has the dance. The Hispanic arts (in
Europe and in the Latin Americas) and the Scandinavian
arts have been neglected. And the contemporary arts on
the continents of Asia and of Africa are for the most part
unknown on this side of the Atlantic; though the paint
ings of Munakata and of Okada and the pottery of
Hamada all of Japan, and the work of the dancers and
the craftsmen of India, and the best of the fiction and
the poetry of the Union of South Africa, as well as of
Canada, New Zealand and Australia, indicate enticingly
that another symposium on The Arts at Mid-Century,
and still another, should be held.

These countries and these continents promise much
in the arts; but on the remaining geography of the earth,
life itself and the arts are in danger of extermination,
for not only have the two World Wars but, between
them, Fascism and Communism have put the mind and
spirit of a third of the world into solitary dungeons and
into chains. There, the arts are stillborn, or unborn, or
unknown. It is astounding that this the worst century of

PREFACE XI

wars should have been companion to this the best cen
tury of art.

The turn of the half century seemed to call for at least
a partial summing-up: the smell of autumn and maturity
in the arts was in the air; adolescence was gratefully
though wistfully passed by. In the main the arts of the
twentieth century were being accepted in the home, in
the museums, and in the universities. At last, what was
shocking and modern in the arts at 1913 was respectable
and curricular at the mid-century.

With many more exceptions than one would like to
mention or to admit, the most obvious and direct impact
of the literature, music, painting and sculpture, theatre
and films of most of Europe upon America and of Amer
ica upon Europe, since 1900, has been that of the arts in
France, Italy, pre-Hitler Germany, England and the
United States. Thus in August of 1953, the editors of
the New Republic, having arbitrarily delimited the field
to these countries, commissioned these critics and these
specialists either native or "naturalized" to discuss
many of the arts in these countries and to consider, at
greater length, some of the general issues in the arts at
this exciting stage of civilization.

The rest is for the reader to enjoy. And there remains
for my part the occasion to give my warmest thanks to all
the contributors; to Michael Straight, the editor of the
New Republic, and Gilbert Harrison, its publisher; and
to Robert Evett, whose guidance and assistance have ac
tually been those of co-editor.

ROBERT RICHMAN

Washington, 1954

SOME GENERAL ESSAYS

Stephen Spender

THE NEW ORTHODOXIES

Shortly before she died, Gertrude Stein is supposed to
have asked: "What is the answer?" After this she lay
silent for some minutes. Then suddenly, raising herself
up in bed, she asked: "What is the question?" Then she
died. If this story be true, Miss Stein, on her death-bed,
epitomized in these two questions the literary and aes
thetic movement which began in the 18505 when Baude
laire noted in his journal that modern civilization
created nothing to justify the continuation of life.
Baudelaire, in his attempt to achieve a Christian exist
ence by entering the universe of the Divine Comedy
through the gateway of his own damnation, sought an
answer to nineteenth century materialism. But if we
judge his life and work as answer, today we find Baude
laire's satanism absurd and the flowers of evil faded.

Even his insistence on being the poet pursued by
furies, the albatross mocked by the hearties, is meretri
cious. Yet these histrionics do not challenge his position
of a supremely great primal modern poet. Why? The
reason lies not in the answer but in the question: "how
can modern man, with his fallen nature, his classic past,
and his role in eternity, live a significant spiritual life
within the materialism of modern civilization?"

The reason why we can respect the satanism, the al
batross and the yearning for damnation, is because they

Some General Essays 4

all serve to re-state the problem to pose the question.
They remind us over and over again, like a hundred
variations on one theme, that man has to interpret the
life of his soul into the language of the modern city.

The greatness of the modern movement lies perhaps
in the fact that after the answer there comes the
question. Today there is a reaction from the great indi
vidualist visionaries and a trend toward the new ortho
doxies partly because, considered as answers, their sys
tems seem inadequate. Rilke's angels, for example, are
unsatisfactory spiritual machines invented to cope with
material machines. We can't quite believe that above
the human landscape of modern life where the genitals
of money breed more money and all values are sold at
a fare, there stand these objectified projections of the
Rilkean poetic task, converting the currency of external
things into the symbols of the inner imagination. Shelley
thought the poets were the unacknowledged legislators
of mankind; Rilke thought that poetry was a kind of
Bourse or Exchange in which material values were con
verted into spiritual ones.

He had fallen into a variety of the Shelleyan fallacy
exploded by T. S. Eliot. Yet some form of this fallacy
seems inevitable if the poet thinks of himself as isolated
communicator of values in a time when they are decay
ing within the substance of civilization, one who has by
himself to relate spiritual existence to modern circum
stances, when the institutions and symbols of religion
have proved incapable of such convertibility. Although
poetry cannot be a substitute for religion the poetic func
tion tends to become a substitute for defective spiritual
institutions.

Yet the task of creating substitute spiritual institutions
out of the poems of individual poets, the novels of a few
extraordinary novelists who exposed their sensibilities
to the whole condition of man in their time, produces
inevitably a crisis of communication. Religious symbols

THE NEW ORTHODOXIES 5

are familiar to us and in a community brought up on the
Bible there is no tremendous difficulty in interpreting
them, though meanings may well be clouded or dense or
hard. But for a writer to assume the kind of task that
Mallarm or Joyce or Rilke assumed, of re-experiencing
everything as though it had never been experienced be
fore, and then expressing it not in terms with which
traditions and education have made us familiar but in
new ones minted out of his separate sensibility, puts a
tremendous burden on both writer and reader. Values
have to be created by the total submission of poetic sen
sibilities to contemporary reality or by the pursuit within
subjective life of images and ideas which can be lived
and defended against that reality. In the end, though, as
the task of individual re-experiencing and re-creating
grows, it becomes progressively more difficult for the
reader to understand the significance of the writer's sym
bols and language, without his having experienced the
whole process of the writer's experiencing and invent
ing of his terms.

With Joyce a time came when, to all intents and pur
poses, he invented a new language. And the difficulty is
that in making new words from their derivations in a
dozen different languages, and in using myths taken
from the cultures of as many nations, he inevitably chose
those sources according to the arbitrary principle of
what struck his fancy when, in the course of his journey-
ings, he came up against them. He was a fanatical tradi
tionalist working within no tradition and having to
invent one of his own. The understanding of Joyce really
implies a special understanding of all the mythology
which accumulated in his mind above his private plan
of an exile's map of Dublin and its environs. He is in
himself a culture and a country with myths and dialects
derived from his memories.

So the tremendous attempt of the visionary writers to
create works which were substitute spiritual institutions,

Some General Essays 6

was justified not by these novels and poems providing
answers to the gap in modern spiritual life but in their
stating the questions which were not being answered,
measuring as it were, the dimensions of the gap, drawing
attention to the absence of values. Poetry could not be
come a substitute for religion but it could draw or create
a picture of the absence of religion and describe the
modern human situations to which the religions no
longer seemed to apply. It could create what Mallarm
called an "absence," and the symbols of the symbolists
which seemed to symbolize nothing, could indicate holes
in the structure of society where tremendous symbols
which once existed within the ritual of living had dis
appeared.

Nor did the modern movement attack the world in
which we live only in the work of the isolated individ
ualists, the great lonely geniuses who stand above the
landscape, utterly devoted to receiving impressions and
translating them into their own terms. It was in a real
sense a movement. That is to say there was an idea, that
the human imagination could, through art, digest and
transform every manifestation of modern life, even (and
perhaps especially) the ugliest, the aesthetically least ap
petizing. It was a tour de -force of the spirit to humanize
what was most mechanical, to desire what was most hate
ful; just as Parisians loved the Eiffel Tower because, be
ing a purely scientific demonstration of the utmost that
could be achieved in steel construction, their hearts
transformed it into a specially cherished toy. Guillaume
Apollinaire turned even the Western Front into his
private Eiffel Tower.

Thus besides the achievements of the great giants of
literature, there was room within modernism for an at
tack on our industrialized civilization by lesser writers
who simply had the sense of belonging to such a general
movement. Apollinaire is essentially a cavalier who does
not pretend to be a general, a twentieth century Don

THE NEW ORTHODOXIES

Quixote armed with a machine gun who charges into the
terrible No Man's Land of the Western Front as though
the enemy defenses were windmills, and who with his
gaiety, imagination and his love of women, suddenly
makes us realize (as indeed Lawrence was to do some
times) that if we had the courage of our mere humanity,
chivalry can be thought of in terms of a modern gaiety
of mind and body.

If the greatest modernists improvised substitute spir
itual institutions in their immensely complex works, the
lesser ones explored the possibilities of an empirical day-
to-day humanism, measuring their spirits, minds and
bodies, against all that is anti-spiritual, anti-intelligent
and anti-sensual in the modern world, and conquering
stupidity with a light-hearted avarice for life. In the
world of individualist vision there are direct links be
tween the most responsible activities and the least re
sponsible, between the greatest seriousness and the
utmost silliness, between, let's say, James Joyce's experi
ments and those of Gertrude Stein. For what modern
ism really does is assert the independence and strength
of humanity; and at times it does this by gigantic efforts
of absorbing a modern experience and improving an
almost arbitrarily invented intellectual system to en
close and penetrate at every point this material; at other
times by cocking a snook or making a rude noise.

There is no use lamenting over the end of this move
ment. The reasons for the decline, partly political and
social, also lie partly within literature itself. As we have
seen, the deeper the writers of the individual vision
penetrated into contemporary reality, the greater the
difficulty of communication with the reader. Several
works have been written during the first half of this cen
tury which should terminate not with FINIS or THE
END but with the warning DEAD END.

The deeper reasons, though, for the collapse lie within
society. For ultimately the single uniting clause of faith

Some General Essays 8

of the whole movement lay in the hope that the individ
ual could create his own values and so find his personal
solution for his confrontation with the modern world.
Paris or London was looked on as a bundle of images
striking into his mind through his sensibility. What he
must do was develop this sensibility, order these impres
sions and create his own harmonious inner world. The
greatest writer would be he who received and trans
formed the greatest number of impressions and ordered
them within the special inner world of his special
vision.

Such a concept of the task of literature is with modi
fications and variations common to all the visionary
writers, the modern seers. It breaks down at three
points. Firstly, as I have said, the symbols become too
complex, the reader cannot follow them. Secondly, the
ordering of the impressions requires a religion or philos
ophy. If the writer invents his own system as most of
these writers have done or, if, like Baudelaire he inter
prets in his own way the religion he was born into
there inevitably comes a time when he has to meet the
criticism of already existing systems. He may have re
jected current beliefs for seemingly good reasons, but
all the same, the beliefs he improvises for himself may
be less satisfactory than the traditional ones even though
he be justified in attacking contemporary institutions.

Thirdly, society today forces us to take sides in certain
social conflicts. In the latter part of the nineteenth cen
tury and at the beginning of this, people of aesthetic
sensibility could regard themselves as the only civilized
beings in a world whose values were becoming totally
materialist. To the extent that they cared for values of
their art which they created they opposed the society in
which they lived. Some of them became ecstatic saints of
the cult of their art, caring so little for the contemporary
world that they expected nothing whatever from it
neither remuneration nor recognition.

THE NEW ORTHODOXIES 9

Today, to be against the society in which we live is to
be for another kind of society. "He who is not with us
is against us," is the motto of all societies in the 19505.
Rightly so, because weakness and opposition make them
need complete support. It follows then that the oppo
nent of his society is not just for himself and his own
vision: he is forced into the position of being a sub
versive, a social or political opponent. Hence we intel
ligently read politics into all attitudes: which means that
individualist vision has become a delusion.

Roughly speaking, today there are three orthodoxies
which influence writing and to some extent all the arts:
Unstated Criterion; Communist Doctrine; Christian
Theology. The first of the new orthodoxies is so vague
that perhaps it is hardly correct to call it an orthodoxy
at all. However it is an unstated criterion to which many
people attempt to conform in the democraciesespecially
in England and it is powerful. By orthodoxy here I sim
ply mean conformity with the pervading presence of
authority which demands the "responsibility" of the
artist. In England this authority is some governmental
body like the BBC or the British Council or the Arts
Council which patronizes writers and artists. On the
whole these authorities are rather enlightened. They do
not consciously attempt to dictate to those who receive
their benefits what they should think or write; they do
not lay down rules.

All the same the authorities are themselves responsible
to a public they are liable to be bothered by questions
in Parliament, for example and they expect those who
benefit to show a proper sense of this. Also these public
authorities do have a certain taste. It might be de
fined best, I think, as Committee taste; and, to go into the
matter a little further, Committee taste is a nice compro
mise between what is conservative and what is advanced.
What is advanced might further be defined as that which
was most advanced at the moment when the committee

Some General Essays 10

first met and which will remain advanced so long as it
goes on meeting, though this may be tempered a little
by the opinion of independent critics occasionally pene
trating into the consultations of the committee. Thus it
happens that a certain modern style in the arts in Eng
land has suddenly acquired the qualities of that which is
academic. Here I am thinking, it is true, not so much of
writing as of painting and music. Publishing remains
independent, whereas the patrons of the painters and
the musicians are, more and more, simply government
agencies. But it is also to some degree true of writers,
since writers are only in exceptional cases supported by
publishers. Whereas the Arts Council or the BBC buys
a painting or commissions a work of music, they employ
writers who cannot live by writing their books.

In America, the parallel development which has led to
this first kind of orthodoxy is the employment of poets
by universities. The universities no more than the cor
responding agencies in Englandare not of course to be
blamed: they are to be congratulated. They havelike
the English organizations saved the writers at the time
of the collapse of private patronage and of a general
crisis in publishing. Their action is only the last stage
in a process which begins with politics and economics.

Nevertheless the result of the entry of the poets into
the universities has been a tendency of the modern move
ment to become academic in American poetry just as
modern art has become academic in England. It may
seem at present difficult to reconcile academicism with
modernism. In a few years time, I fear it will be only too
easy to do so. In any case, as I have pointed out, the
fact that the spirit of modern art was anti-academic, does
not make it, once it has been accepted, any the less a
highly suitable (because highly complex) subject for
academic study.

In America, though, it is in criticism, much more than
in poetry, that one can point to this tendency: and the

THE NEW ORTHODOXIES

fact that a good deal of this criticism is written by poets
is also revealing. There are one or two points I want to
make about a tendency of criticism to develop a kind of
orthodoxy. The first thing to note is that it assumes that
the writing of poetry is a highly intellectual process of
tying up a bundle of experiences and ideas into a poem
which can then be untied again by a highly intellectual
process. It analyzes and elucidates and it shows very little
interest in the relation of literature to life: indeed it is
probably rather vulgar to mention that there could be
such a relationship. It establishes certain works as sacred
texts and then proceeds to examine, analyze and gen
erally probe them, looking always for myths, symbols,
influences, Freudian explanations, and so on.

If you judge a novel primarily by its rootedness in a
great many other literary works, the myth or myths it
refers to or contains, the presence within it of material
capable of Freudian or Jungian dissection, you may over
look the simplest yet most difficult of all questions about
it, whether it creates an experience of life. When certain
modern critics elucidate works they presuppose the pres
ence of such a complexity of elements to be the necessary
condition of art, that the criticism tends to overburden
the work of art itself. Students might be puzzled to
answer the question why it is that frequently a sophis
ticated critic, with his grasp of the complexities that
naturally condition poetry, is not able to write poems
better than those of the comparatively simple-minded
poets. The answer may be that the shock of art is lost
when it is absorbed into a complicated machinery of
exigesis.

Twenty years ago T. S. Eliot was being denounced
by dons for a drunken Bolshevik. Today he is accepted,
partly perhaps because we have become familiar with
his kind of sensibility (and this is a distinct gain) but
partly because no one who can be the object of so many
university theses could possibly be regarded as a drunken

Some General Essays 12

Bolshevik. Yet although the words "drunken Bolshevik"
were and are inexact, sometimes I wonder whether a
hundred volumes explaining the mythology of The
Waste Land haven't done more to weaken the impact of
that poem than calling Eliot rude names has done.
Name-calling is a reaction which at least has a certain
immediacy, whereas to go into poetry equipped with a
contemporary critic's weapons of analysis is like going
into a Shelleyan garden of sensitive plants in an armored
car.

I do not mean that criticism should be less lax and
attentive. But I think that it should be concerned with
other things than intellectual analysis, things which
perhaps require more attention, as certainly they re
quire more judgment. It should be concerned with de
ciding what is a poet's relationship to life; for example,
Dylan Thomas wrote lines, some good and some bad.
He was also a rhetorical writer: but what is his rhetoric
about? The analysis of the quality of the poet's feeling
for life is more significant than that of the influences that
enter into his poetry, and it is also less harmful.

There is a tendency for criticism today to become
interlocked in a kind of vicious mental circle with
creativity. The critic labels those which are the intellec
tual elements supposed to enter into the poem. I think
it difficult to deny that poets especially young ones-
are influenced by the conscious wish to put these guaran
teed substances into their poems. Thus we get a process
of qualities being extracted from poems which have
been written and fitted into those which are being
written. A kind of synthetic poetry is produced which is
difficult to distinguish from real poetry, and this further
complicates the role of modern criticism as a pervading
authority.

Over a large part of the world the dominating ortho
doxy is Marxist, which regards the writer as one who has

THE NEW ORTHODOXIES 13

to interpret into the terms of his particular medium the
supposedly beneficial and absolutely necessary decrees
of a Communist society. In effect the writer is simply
asked to be a propagandist. But if he is a Communist he
does not think of himself as such, because he believes
that the party theoreticians have superior insight into
the historic forces which have to be controlled in order
to fulfill the Communist destiny, and does not believe
that he has any truth of his own that should conflict with
it. He asks to be "disciplined" by a "truth" which the
Party directors know better than himself.

The very presence in the world of such an orthodoxy
tends to produce its opposite, a counter-orthodoxy. For
one effect of totalitarianism is to make us distrust indi
vidualism, not only because the individual feels weak in
the face of such a machine of organized mass activity but
because dictatorship itself rests on the will of one su
preme individual, and therefore reveals to us the fallacy
of putting trust in the authority of an unchallenged hu
man being. Civilized men could almost accept the idea
of Rimbaud as demi-god, but when it was changed to
Hitler or Stalin, they remembered that men cannot be
divine.

Modern life, at the beginning of the second half of
the twentieth century, offers us a picture which seems
almost to surpass the darkest prophecies of Baudelaire.
Half the world has fallen under the control of these
tyrants the secret of whose strength is that they are able
to convince those whom they rule that their lives are
the objects of an inevitable development of history, and
that the only right and wrong is that which serves or
opposes the purpose of that history imposed by their
terrible wills.

All contemporary attitudes actually are related to a
choice. Either you choose these historians who have con
verted sedentary philosophy into the science of their
will, or you are against them. But even if you are against

Some General Essays 14

them, you may be serving their purposes by making it
easier for them to conquer wider and wider areas of
mental life.

In Europe today and perhaps everywhere it is no
longer possible to create a world of individual values
which has the power of such a position a hundred years
ago, surrounded as it was then by a kind of vacuum
within which it floated and which was contained by an
outer wall of the individualist passion of bourgeois so
ciety. Such was the world of poetic vision miraculously
contained within, and yet marvellously isolated from,
the materialism of the nineteenth century which began
with the Romantics, and whose richness and variety
flowered in such different talents as Keats, Rimbaud,
Rilke, and E. M. Forster in his early novels. Given the
outer wall of a materialist society whose values these
writers criticized or rejected, the individualist geniuses
could plant towers to last the whole of their spiritual life
in the minds of perceptive readers.

But the outer wall could not last. When the fabric of
bourgeois society began to collapse then the individ
ualist visionaries who had been hostile to it could only
participate in that collapse; could become nihilistic, or
rejoice like Yeats in the destruction; or perhaps, like
the poets of the 19305 could rally to the hope of a better
society.

Today though, to rejoice like Yeats in the destruction
which has largely been achieved, or to prophesy The
Waste Land which has been largely fulfilled becomes
a pallid mockery. In his book The Captive Mind (in
which he analyzes the effects of the total organization of
thought into the central ideology of Moscow, in con
temporary Eastern Europe), the Polish poet Czeslaw
Milosz comments on the unreality of The Waste Land,
after he had experienced the destruction of Warsaw.
Poets may prophesy the apocalypse, but their poems
seem but imitations when it occurs.

THE NEW ORTHODOXIES 1 J

One may feel that to speak too indulgently of death
in these days, and to denigrate the values of living, is an
occupation where one may find oneself in strange com
pany. Do not the Marxist intellectuals of Eastern Europe
also point out that life as it is lived today is a thing of
little value? Everyone has to die, so if a few million die
prematurely in order that the purpose of history may
be accomplished, does it matter?

Despair seems better than the kinds of dogmatic ortho
doxy which offer us deep truths about life and death,
but take our minds off the real problems. The despair
of 1984, even if it offers us no way out, at least keeps our
minds open to the fact that what happens in the world
of those who are living matters immensely, and shows
us that when we forget this, our forgetfulness may be
moral complicity in gas chambers and the destruction of
freedoms. It reminds us too that while there is any
avenue of spiritual or physical self-expression in life-
even when it is reduced to the lowest social terms or to
depravity there is hope that man will revolt.

Since the modern world is enormously complex, to
accept ethical and social responsibilities is difficult. For
example, to improve social conditions implies a great
measure of centralization, which in turn may lead us to
discover another truth which Herbert Read draws atten
tion to:

All attempts by authoritarian regimes to find a place for the
artist in the modern industrial system have only turned the
artist into a kind of clown, a jester whose role is to amuse
the industrial worker in his off time (decorate the canteen)
or keep his mind off disturbing problems. All attempts of
the State to find a place for the artist . . . have merely
created a type of lifeless academicism which has no relevance
to the desires and aspirations of the people at large.

The writers who now live under Communism look
for something to the West. For what? They do not quite

Some General Essays 16

know themselves. Milosz says that among the things they
do not seek is to "relinquish the feeling of responsibility
for what the public gets from editors and producers.
. . . The intellectual . . . makes distinctions between
what is worthy of his respect in the West" and what is
not.

For what, then? They look surely to the West for
writers who understand that situation already existing
within the West which tempted the Eastern writers into
accepting Communism, in the hope that the Western
writers will use their freedom to discover a statement of
the problem which is not Communist. Most of what they
see in the West, however, is negative. Even that which
appears to us to be written to oppose the dictatorship
by historical philosophers, from over there may seem
merely a confirmation of their worst fears that we do
not understand, that xve are potential victims, that we
are decadent. Or perhaps we appear to be occupied in
setting up shrines inside the belly of the whale.

The third new orthodoxy is religious, and Christian,
for the most part either Catholic or Anglican. This third
development is far the most striking in literature today.
It is so, for several reasons. One is that against the back
ground of totalitarianism, many writers have turned
again to Christian truths which are more profound and
more accessible than those which the individualist vi
sionaries tried to work out for themselves. Christianity
criticizes both the personal authority of extreme indi
vidualism which produced the personal disasters of so
many poets and artists, and the public authority of dic
tators supposedly superhuman. It warns us that the indi
vidual who listens to his inner voice is listening only to
himself and that this self is a fallen self; and of the evil
of absolute power. Both these warnings are reinforced
by a whole series of modern disasters.

There are other reasons for the return to some form

THE NEW ORTHODOXIES IJ

of Christian orthodoxy. One reason is that what was best
in the individualist vision of the great French writers at
the turn of the century was already Catholic, even if
these writers had forsaken the Church, so that those who
follow after are likely to turn back to what was the
starting point of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud.
Another, and most important, reason is that the indi
vidual needs the spiritual authority of the Church to
strengthen him against the increasing secular authority
of the State.

Nevertheless these reasons are largely negative. They
are the results of the failures of the individualist vision
aries to stand alone. And they do not answer the ques
tions of Baudelaire, made a hundred years ago, with
which I opened this inquiry:

What, under Heaven, has this world henceforth to do? Even
supposing that it continued materially to exist, would this
existence be worthy of the name of the Historical Diction
ary? As a new example, as fresh victims of the inexorable
moral laws, we shall perish by that which we have believed
to be our means of existence. ... I appeal to every think
ing man to show me what remains of Life. As for religion I
believe it useless to speak of it or to search for its relics. . . .

The question which comes after the answer that any
new orthodoxy can give is whether this religion when
expressed in literature answers or indeed even asks the
first question: "What has this world to do?" An answer
which treats this question as irrelevant is also treating
the most significant development of literature during
the past hundred years as irrelevant. And, indeed, that
is perhaps what, in spite of its having been turned into
objects of academic study, has happened, or is happen
ing among us. Baudelaire and other writers felt that the
greatness of the past the Bible and classical antiquity
let us say had ceased to be applicable to the present.
One could only look back on the past, one could not

Some General Essays 18

integrate it into the life of the present. And, indeed, to
live in the present was, as the nineteenth century ended,
more and more to recognize the necessity of sacrificing
the past altogether, cutting oneself off from its roots,
immersing oneself in the present or even as in Futurism
the idea of the future.

But the aim of certain writers James Joyce, Henry
James, Rilke and T. S. Eliot might be stated as that of
opening up the past so that it flows over the present, by
stating the present in terms of the past. To explain
Joyce's attitude to the past we can only describe him as
a revolutionary traditionalist. He seeks not just to ex
tend a weakening tradition of past conventions and
forms into the present, but to reach back into a remote
past, understand and concretize its values and interpret
them into a present situation, even if the present is made
to appear incredibly sordid and lost as the result of such
a comparison. He throws the past into the present like a
bomb. His novel Ulysses is a military operation of this
kind in which we feel that there has been a confronta
tion of a whole imagined past with a whole imagined
present, and the effect is explosive. Much the same con
frontation takes place in the opening of the Fire Sermon
in Eliot's The Waste Land. The theme of D. H. Law
rence is also confrontation, only of a different and more
primitive past: the past, continuing into the present, of
nature, instinct and primitive society, not the intensely
imagined past of the literary mind.

What is noticeable in all these is the very dynamic
relation of the past to the present when the writer's
sense of modern values is brought into relation with his
sense of past ones. The rejection of orthodox Chris
tianity in modern literature was due to the fact that
these writers felt that no such confrontation of the most
living past and the most materialist present took place
within contemporary Christianity of the Churches. For
this reason, when writers return to the Church, we have

THE NEW ORTHODOXIES 19

to ask whether their orthodoxy realizes such a confronta
tion, or whether it is a partial retreat from the present
into the past, better, wiser, profounder perhaps than
much that has gone before, but perhaps also an abandon
ment of the problem faced by literature a hundred years
ago.

Eliot's orthodoxy seems not to have given him a view
of life which includes history. He separates life sharply
into tradition and existence, death and life, with the
rider added that the dead, because they belong to or are
gathered into the past are more living than the living,
who are pretty well dead. Edward and Lavinia in The
Cocktail Party might be described as life partially resur
rected compared with the death-in-life view of The Hol
low Men but still with the mould and mildew of the
grave hanging to their wedding garments.

In the Four Quartets, by envisioning the religious pat
tern within our lives, Eliot has immensely strengthened
our faith in the reality of spiritual life. Yet even here,
his concept of tradition is of an already completed pat
tern, outside life although existing within our conscious
ness and behavior. Life seems to consist of the living
who are little more than ghosts and the spirit and
achievements of the dead. In relation to the dead, the
living are slightly unreal, at a disadvantage on the exis
tential plane. One asks oneself whether to him "life" was
ever real, or rather whether anything happened within
time to create the pattern of existence which is now out
side our time. Or did history happen outside history?

He is, of course, right in thinking that our true great
ness lies in our traditions. But our traditions are living,
not by being outside life, but according to our capacity
to create them in terms of our contemporary existence.
That this may be achieved requires surely that life
should not be at such a spiritual disadvantage compared
with the past and the dead. Life should be capable of
meeting death on equal terms, otherwise we fall into

Some General Essays 2O

death-worship. In the Renaissance men worshipped an
tiquity, but they also translated it into their architecture
and their statues.

Moreover, life goes on, with all its manifestations
which we cannot escape from. If we allow our spiritual
lives to be captured by past manifestations, to the exclu
sion of present ones, then the unredeemed, ugly, and
uncultivated modern world will gradually cover us over.
The life of the spirit may be outside time, but change
nevertheless takes place, and unless we can capture the
changing appearances of things with our imaginations,
then we will be ghosts living outside the world. We
should imagine the past as intensely as we do the present,
and we should transform the past into the material of
the present.

After all, the writer in English who came nearest to
understanding this was D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence saw
that the view of tradition which turns us into shadows
pursuing the stronger and clearer contours of another
shadow-kingdom the achievements of the dead can
only withdraw us from life into a world of interior
cerebration. He realized the significance of the dead hav
ing once been alive and of the fact that they created their
values out of their lives, out of living, not from a rejec
tion of life. He saw also that what is most traditional in
us is not death but precisely life.

Life does, after all, offer us the possibility of choosing
to live; and within our own lives even more than within
works of art, is the past: the lives of our parents and
forefathers, physically and consciously and instinctively
existing within our blood. The past as it exists in our
physical and spiritual selves is not a separate entity, a
pattern outside us, a shrine, a museum. It is ourselves.
Tradition is nature as well as myth, religion and art. It is
also the universe outside ourselves, still almost un
touched by the traces of our history and civilization. And
it is nature in ourselves which, with the best or the worst

THE NEW ORTHODOXIES 21

will, we can do little to alter, but we may fulfill. The
relationships between individual values potential in the
existence of all human beings, and capable of imposing
their pattern on the forms of a new society, remain un
developed though in the writers of this new orthodoxy.

The most important division of our time is between
what Milosz, in The Captive Mind, calls the New Faith
of Communism which is based on an idea of "historical
merit and guilt/' and the remnants of a Christianity
"based on a concept of individual merit and guilt/*
Communism analyzes the conflicts in modern society
which produce poverty, crises of overproduction and
war, and whose symptoms are found in every aspect of
human thought and behavior. It offers a solution for
these conflicts which consists in adapting all human
activities to the social goal of Communism. Control of
history by the Communist philosophy becomes the sole
purpose of government and of being governed. Every
thing is judged by this, what serves these ends is right,
and all that does not serve them, wrong. Communism
rests on an initial, buried decision on the side of justice
by those who then cease to be just, much as some Chris
tian orthodoxy rests on the idea of Original Sin,

The Christian concept of "individual merit and guilt"
is, by its implications, the only one that has the power to
withstand the idea of "historical merit and guilt/' to in
volve the individual in responsibility for what happens
to his neighbor, and to be the clear concept around
which the idea of a just society, answering the Commu
nist thesis of history, might emerge. Such a concept of
Christianity holds the conscience of each accountable
for the suffering inflicted by society which happens to
his neighbor. At the same time it analyzes and exposes
the actions of any Christian apologists for Communist
methods, like Hewlett Johnson, the Dean of Canterbury,
who slowly transforms their God into History. Finally,
through drawing attention to the responsibility of the

Some General Essays 22

individual who can incur merit or guilt it puts Christian
action back into history.

This, though, is exactly what the new Christian ortho
dox writers neglect to do. They are concerned with
proving theology to themselves, experiencing timeless-
ness, demonstrating the greatness of the past tradition
and comparing it with the wretchedness of the present,
denigrating the values of living. They evoke the idea
of guilt not to prove to modern man his responsibility
towards the martyrs (many of whom are Liberals and
Jews whom the orthodox do not always approve of) but
to draw his attention to the fact that he is fallen, and
to make him increasingly preoccupied with his sins.
None of this is finally inconsistent with the concept of
the responsibility of every man to his neighbor, but in
fact it serves to produce a mood of metaphysical intro
spection where each person examines his experience to
prove that he has faith, is sinful, or has a sense of time-
lessness. The emphasis is on the inner world of isolated
experience, now no longer visionary or nihilistic, but
Christian, and yet still isolated from society. It is the
orthodoxy of the convert preoccupied with his con
version.

Yet for people in the West who still live in compara
tive freedom, and where writers can receive honor for
writing what they believe, to use their freedom in order
to describe death as preferable to life seems a dubious
use of their position. In the first place it perhaps shows
too little awareness of the fate of the millions who have
experienced a horrible death, and in the second place it
fits in too well with the plans of tyrants who are only
too glad to give the bourgeois the death he prefers to
life. Of course where there are the conditions which pre
vail today in so much of the world life cannot seem very
attractive. All the same, if the Western writer has any
responsibility it is surely to attach value to the idea of

THE NEW ORTHODOXIES

life within a pattern of society where men respect the
existence of their neighbors.

Probably I shall be accused of writing that Christianity
should become political. What I am trying to suggest is
the reverse: that politics should be Christian. This,
though, can only happen if the Christian accepts his
responsibility within time and history. Such a responsi
bility would tell him that Marxism has been more suc
cessful than most philosophies in stating the problem
of social justice within an industrial society, but that it
has fallen into a fatal error where it disregards the rights
of the individual every separate individual in ruth
lessly supporting a supposedly just because * 'scientific"
process of history. The answer to Marxism is to accept
the challenge of the necessity of world-wide social
change, but at the same time to regard the individual
with Christian charity and justice.

John Crowe Ransom

AN AGE OF CRITIC ISM

The advent of literary genius is unaccountable. The
creators appear unheralded, like men coming from the
sea. Thereupon, and at once, appear the critics, who are
tame creatures of the land, to escort them and mediate
for them with their public. There is little mystery about
the critics, and the public scarcely expects to see form
ing for them in turn an escort composed of critics of
the critics. The critic springs up like the member of any
other profession, because he is needed in the economy
of things, to cope with the novel utterances of the crea
tors, and assimilate them into the permanent sense which
the race has of its literature. A good deal is done by the
critic if he does this. Though he has no existence in
dependently of the creative artist, yet ideally he is for
midable, he is possessed of quick sensibility and capable
of powerful conviction. By this standard today we have
critics of unusual quality. There is also an extraordinary
quantity of them, but that is not an accident. Perhaps a
fine artist will give employment to half a dozen critics,
depending on his felt human importance, and the public
difficulty in receiving his innovation. But in the half-
century just finished we have witnessed a furious burst
of creative activity, and many artists so far ahead of their
public, yet causing such a passion of teased interest, that

AN AGE OF CRITICISM 25

they employed critics for a whole generation before the
public could have comfortable possession.

By and large, the critics have made slow work, not
quick work, of such artists as Proust and Mann and
Kafka, Conrad and Ford, Joyce, Robinson and Frost,
Yeats and Eliot, Lawrence and Forster, Dreiser and
Anderson, Hemingway and Faulkner, Auden and Dylan
Thomas, Shaw and O'Neill and Christopher Fry. (I call
names casually, not as trying for a best list.) Evidently
the period is not quite finished, nor are the critics fin
ished with the period. But the great surge from the
deep seems about to have spent itself at the moment
when it is survived by its best and most numerous com
pany of critics, who are left lingering on the strand.
Shall we say that they were called into professional
existence in force exceeding the occasion? Are they the
casualties of an occupation which is only "seasonable 1 '?
Or is it their cue now to, turn and attack each other to
see who is strong enough to take the lean livelihood
which is left?

But of course not; these are absurd ideas. For what is
it that actually happens? The literature produced in our
desperate half -century was both ingenuous and sophisti
cated, but either way it was almost discontinuous with
the literature to which we were accustomed. Only by
hard work did the collective critical intelligence master
and define it; by straining the existing sense of literature
to accommodate it. And unquestionably there were
strains which most critics thought they could not make
in the name of literature, works which they refused to
canonize. But now a reverse operation is proceeding.
The illumination cast by the new is turned backward
upon the old, and some of the old literature alters ap
preciably in that light. Our age has to use literature in
terms of its own urgencies. Succeeding ages are certain to
reject many of our prepossessions, yet some of them may
prove to be final; our literature has appealed to human

Some General Essays 26

interests unusually immediate, radical and vital. How
ever that may be the older literary works are under
busy reconsideration by the critics, and some of them
prove sturdier than we knew while others lose sub
stance. In our American literature the modern critics
confer new life upon Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville,
and James, and find desiccation in other writers once
fully as reputable. Among the giants of British literature
the critics make displacements too; in the fictions, of
course, and in the anthology of lyric poetry. So our
critics still find a great deal of work to occupy them. If
it is not with current production, it is in administering
the ancient literary estate which has been inherited;
that is, in taking the fresh look at it, to keep it liquid *
and usable.

But many critics grow in the range of their intel
lectual interest, and some are brilliantly equipped. They
do not stop with applying their modern perceptions to
the re-study of the older literature. They plunge into
literary theory. They generalize, for example, about the
structural techniques of fiction, or the diction and tropol
ogy of poetry. This is a study which the philosophers
would bring under logic. Yet that is no stopping-place.
From there they are led into the metaphysics of litera
ture, and discuss its curious manifestations in terms of
a reality-principle. In literature we are in a world of
fantasy and imagination. What is the human purpose
which drives us there, and what is the reality of these
constructions? These questions occupied Coleridge, who
perhaps is first in the line of modern critics. It was out
of entire familiarity with these questions that Matthew
Arnold declared that poetry dealt in the same fluid
existences as did religion, but escaped the dangerous
commitments of religion. But Arnold did not engage in
formal philosophy, nor did he have the modern phi
losophy of the unconscious. Discussion of this sort is
probably the intellectual limit of our criticism, or of

AN AGE OF CRITICISM 2J

any criticism. In this area the moderns are in the act of
writing their versions of literary aesthetics. It is too soon
to tell what it will be worth, but not to say that at a
certain point in the growth of a critic it becomes im
perative.

So here is criticism, on its modern scale, with its
spirited personnel, in its variety and in the unevenness
of its intellectual levels. It is tempting to draw a long
bow and say that it is a new event which the whole
course of literature has been preparing. Professional
criticism as we have it could hardly have come into
existence till the art of writing had developed, and then
the art of printing, and then the technique of mass-pro
ducing the books, with its corollary of universal educa
tion; and not even then till a spectacular creative out
burst could start it off. In our talk about the advent of
the creative artist there is usually a pretty figuration,
and something of an anachronism. What are we going
to do in actual practice with the utterance that "To
have great poets there must be great audiences too"?
Being Walt Whitman's, it is the utterance of a very late
oracle, and it is a romantic figuration, still coveting for
literature the primitive, the oral, occasion. The age when
everything is printed, and everybody can read, is the
age of literature meant for the eye, and the study; and
though a true work of literature, in prose or verse, is
indubitably meant for the ear too, it is for the ear of
the imagination responding to the eye, and it is physi
cally sonorous only in the final act of authentication. It
is therefore quite feasible to have the poet both come
and go before the audience appears. It is the critics who
will find and prepare the audiences who are simply the
readers finding them first among the veteran readers
in their private leisures; and if the critics are ever to
find the audiences "en masse," as Whitman required,
then it will be later: it will be in the schoolroom.

Archibald MacLeish

THE MUSES 7 STERNER LAWS

In the thirties the war in Spain posed a question which
many Americans found it difficult to answer: the ques
tion of the responsibility of artists and poets in the face
of the corruption of human values, the perversion of
human intelligence and the enslavement of the human
mind involved in the rise of the police state. Today that
question is, if anything, more urgent than it was in the
thirties. The police state, though checked in most of
Europe, flourishes in Spain, from which it has spread
into South America, and rages in Russia from which it
has overrun all eastern Europe and the vast extent of
China, with the result that civilization has been re
placed by police governments in a great part of the
earth and individual freedom of mind and conscience,
without which civilization as we have known it is im
possible, is really secure only in a shrinking area center
ing politically and economically around our own repub
lic.

More menacing still, the kind of mentality which in
flicted the police state on other peoples has made its ap
pearance in American public life and even in the Con
gress of the United States, revealing itself in the demand,
familiar in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, that the
State should extend its controls to the intellectual and
moral life of its citizens: to matters of opinion and belief.

THE MUSES' STERNER LAWS 29

Artists and poets who were able to satisfy themselves be
fore the second World War that they had no responsibil
ity for the sickness of the world find themselves today
facing inquisition into their private lives conducted in
the name, at least, of the government of the United
States. And the whole problem is raised anew.

If it is to be discussed anew and more effectively than
it was in the thirties one point should be made at the
outset: nailed to the iron door. The question of the re
lation of any artist to the time he lives in is a question
not for his time but for his art to answer. Whatever duty
he owes as artist he owes only because he is artist. If his
art requires nothing of him in relation to his time, his
time, in so far as he is artist, requires nothing. A despotic
government many compel him to think one thing rather
than another, to substitute for his own convictions the
assertions of the regime, but the moment he accepts
that compulsion he is no longer an artist: he is a func
tionary of the state.

What ought to be discussed, therefore, is not a sup
posed conflict of responsibilities, the one owed to a
man's art, the other to society. What ought to be dis
cussed is the obligation of art. Does art, by its nature,
impose on those who serve it a duty of any kind with
reference to the public world of happening and event?
Or is the nature of art such that the artist, the poet, is
freed from any such duty even from the duty acknowl
edged by the generality of other men? To put it in
literary terms, are those critics right who, pursuing their
reasons back through the mirrors of Mallarme, discover
loyalty to the art of poetry in loyalty to the inward self
alone? Or was Dante right, and Tu Fu and Shakespeare,
to whom loyalty to the art of poetry was loyalty not
only to the inward experience of the self within the self
but to the outward experience of the self within the
time?

The literary generation in which a man lives may

Some General Essays 30

change the fashion of his answer to that question but it
will not change the question. To Coleridge the responsi
bility of the poet for the world of happening and event
"the close connection of poetic genius with the love of
liberty and genuine reformation" was taken for granted.
But Coleridge's reasons were reasons which derived from
his conception of the art itself, for to Coleridge "truth
operative and by effects continually alive" was "the
mistress of poets." With us, though we live in an age not
unlike Coleridge's in which liberty is under attack from
the same quarters and under very much the same pre
texts, the close connection of poetic genius with the
love of liberty and of genuine reformation is not taken
for granted. Far from it. But the reasons are neverthe
less reasons which derive from the art as we see the art.
For we believe with Andreyev that life, in the modern
world, has "gone within/' We believe in consequence
that the world of poetry is a world within. And in the
world within, the crisis of liberty, the agony of a civiliza
tion, though they may throw shadows on the roof of the
cave, throw shadows only.

It is, in other words, our modern conception of the
proper place of poetry which creates the peculiar mod
ern problem of "the responsibility of the poet." Why
we choose to shut poetry up within the inward cave in
a time in which the outward world is a world vast, tragic
and enveloping to such a point that no human being
can ignore its presence or escape its consequences is a
question for the psychologists. They may perhaps in
form us why we have agreed that our arts may not
participate in the encounters of our lives at a point in
our history when the encounters of our lives are most
desparate. The question for the rest of us is simpler
though still difficult enough. The question for the rest
of us is whether this modern conception of the limits of
the art of poetry is well considered.

THE MUSES STERNER LAWS 31

It is not, needless to say, an escapist conception: a new
aestheticism. Our generation has been pretty well per
suaded by critics like I. A. Richards and by philosophers
like Suzanne Langer that the arts are instruments of
understanding and that what they enable us to under
stand is our human lives and the world of feeling and
of sense in which we live them. We accept the necessary
and organic relation between life and art and are even
ready, for the most part, to include within the proper
concern of the arts the reflection, in the private cave, of
the world of public and even political experience.

We agree that what a poet, an artist, feels and may
therefore, in the Aristotelian sense, "imitate" in his art
may include his sense of the sorry world he lives in.
But when we come to the consequence of feeling even
the consequence of feeling in the art itself the modern
barrier erects itself. To feel as poet is not, in our vocab
ulary, to feel as participant, even though the emotion
felt is that savage indignation in the face of injustice
and cruelty which moved Swift to unforgettable utter
ance. The poet with us, the artist with us, must not
be enlisted in any cause even the cause of human liberty
even the cause of man. Which, perhaps, is why Yeats
ended his version of the epitaph for the great Dean
with those passionate and angry words:

Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

World-besotted we may not be, but neither are we
capable of the imitation of Swift. Our conception of the
art of poetry forbids it, The duty of the poet, as we see

Some General Essays 32,

it, is to live within the cave and feel whatever moves
there: not to judge or choose; above all, not to judge or
choose in such a way as to affect the world outside.

But are we wise this is the question we should con
siderare we wise to see the poet's duty so? Is it only
to feel that matters in the art of poetry? Was Shaw right
for once when he announced that "the main thing in
determining the artistic quality of a book is not the
opinions it propagates but the fact that the writer has
opinions"? Is it truly unimportant in the art of letters
what opinions you hold so long as you hold opinions:
unimportant in the art of poetry what feelings you have
if only you have feelings? Would Tu Fu have been the
poet he was if the long- misery of his later years, the
starvation in the villages, the conscription of the chil
dren, the millions dead, had filled him with a gloating,
leering satisfaction? Would Dante be revered as a poet
if the few images of human virtue he met in his life-time
were jealously plunged into the pit of his hell?

The truth, of course, is that we are mistaken in our
first assumption. What the art of poetry demands of
those who truly practice it is not merely feeling but a
kind of feeling. Poetry like any other art exists within
and by virtue of the human condition. Its ineradicable
postulate is man. A poet, an artist, must not only be
capable of feeling, he must be capable of feeling as a
man: of feeling as Keats felt, whom Professor Lionel
Trilling has finely called the last image of health in the
long sickness of Europe. The poet's labor is to bring his
experience of life, his whole experience, to focus and
understanding but to human focus, to human under
standing. That "universal" of Aristotle's which poetry
"tends to express" and without which it is not poetry
but something else is a human universal. Indeed the
central thought of Aristotle's doctrine is precisely that.
As Butcher paraphrases it, "imitative art in its highest
form, namely poetry, is an expression of the universal

THE MUSES' STERNER LAWS 33

element in human life." Understanding of that fact is
a precondition of the practice and the criticism of every
art and above all the art of poetry. A material impossi
bilityAristotle again may exist in terms of art but not
a moral, a human, improbabilitya violation of human
expectation and understanding. It is only in its relation
to "the universal element in human life" that a work
of art exists as a work of art. Unless its truth is human
truth it has none.

The implications for our generation are obvious.
Loyalty to the art of poetry cannot be taken to justify
a refusal of the human world of tragedy and choice. On
the contrary it is precisely loyalty to the art of poetry
which most ineluctably imposes the acceptance of that
world upon us. For though no external power, neither
government nor institution, state or church, may justly
tell a poet WHAT he is to feel, his art itself will tell
him HOW he is to feel. He is to feel as man. And to
feel as man is to accept the consequences of feeling. As
Swift accepted them. As Milton accepted them.

Whatever in the world of happening and event affects
the universal human element affects the poet in his
quality as poet. He can no more be indifferent to those
evils which destroy the common humanity than he can
be indifferent to human destiny itself, for human destiny
is here in issue. Slavery above all that worst of slaveries
which constrains the minds and consciences of men
against their wills the slavery which police governments
have imposed in other countries and which the police
mentality seems intent on imposing here slavery is a
disaster about which those who feel as men can feel in
one way only. And, feeling so, they have no choice, as
men or poets either, but to accept the responsibility
their passion has imposed. Tu Fu's art did not compel
him to write bitterly, and at the risk of his life, of the
conscription of the little boys. Tu Fu's art required him
to live his life awake and the rest followed. He was

Some General Essays 34

unable, being poet, to escape the vision of "the bones
behind those weeping eyes/'

It is true enough that a poet, an artist, serves his art
and not a cause. He goes his own way with his own will
beside him and his own truth to find. But on the great
issue, on the issue of man, his truth and the truth of
history are one. Or, if you prefer it that way, his truth
becomes the truth of history. This, I think, is what Yeats
is saying in that curious poem addressed to the men of
the nineties, the men of the aesthetic revolt, in which,
after years of devotion to the Irish Nationalist cause,
and at a time when he was writing political poems which
Dowson and Lionel Johnson would have damned, he
affirms his constant loyalty to his art.

I have kept faith, though faith was tried,
To that rock-born, rock-wandering foot . . .

What Yeats is saying in The Grey Rock is that "the
Muses' sterner laws" demand something more than the
Muses' stricter regulations, so religiously observed by
his companions of the nineties and the Cheshire Cheese.
The Muses' stricter regulations the drawn blinds, the
denial of any passion that has more life in it than death
all this had been well enough for those gifted creatures
who "met their ends when young" and for Yeats young
with them. But now the world has changed. Which is
to say that Yeats is older. And poetry, which had once
been that mirror of the Lady of Shalott which cracked
from side to side if you turned your head to look at the
actual water-lily, the actual plume, has become, by mere
necessity, a way of knowing and understanding and fac
ing whatever a man is obliged to know and understand
and face, from that cold heaven of Normandy, cold
heaven of despair, to the petty, bitter, degrading
squabble with official Dublin over Hugh Lane's pictures;
from "that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea" to

THE MUSES' STERNER LAWS 35

the ghosts of Casement and Parnell and all the indigna
tion at the heart.

Dowson and Johnson and the men of the nineties had
been loyal to the rock-born, rock-wandering foot in what
they had not done: they had "kept the Muses' sterner
laws": they had never given loud service to a cause that
they might have a troop of friends. But Yeats, though
he had served many causes, the cause of Ireland among
them, had been loyal also. For the Muses' sterner laws
are not merely the laws of exclusion. They include as
well. And it is in what they include that they are stern
est. They tell the Muses' servants not only what they
must forego, but what they must accept as well, if they
are to be admitted to that excellent discipline. What
they must accept is a whole life, the outward as well
as in the inward, "that dead young soldier in his blood"
as well as "the pale unsatisfied ones" appearing and dis
appearing to the mind's sight in the blue depths of the
sky.

Francis Biddle

THE BLUR OF MEDIOCRITY

Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind "a. prolonged
essay in definitionsexamines the philosophy of British
and American conservatives for the last century and a
half, from Burke to Santayana. He lists half a dozen prin
ciples of conservative thinking: belief that a divine in
tent rules society; affection for variety as distinguished
from uniformity; conviction that civilized society re
quires orders and classes; persuasion that property and
freedom are inseparable; faith in prescription (the cus
tomary right growing out of agreements of many gener
ations), tradition, and "sound prejudice"; and a dis
trust of change and innovation.

These attitudes are found in greater or less degree in
these conservatives: Burke, with his uncalculated loyalty
to the past, and his hatred of abstractions, who so greatly
influenced John Randolph of Roanoke; John Adams,
the truest of the Federalists, who too put practical con
siderations above theory; the Romantics Walter Scott
and Coleridge; John C. Calhoun, who, before Lord
Acton's famous aphorism, had written that "irrespon
sible power is inconsistent with liberty, and must cor
rupt those who exercise it"; Macaulay, Fenimore Cooper,
"belligerently American, unsparingly critical of Amer
icanism"; the New Englanders, fighting a losing battle
for the place of sin in the universe; J. Q. Adams, who,
like a true New Englander, felt that "his relationship

THE BLUR OF MEDIOCRITY

37

to the Omnipotent was a matter of contract"; Orestes
Brownson who finally embraced Roman Catholicism
when he came to realize that Protestantism could not
sustain liberty, because "it is itself subject to popular
control"; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who impressed upon
an already skeptical nation the dogma of original sin
and the devil within us. So different in temperament
were their English contemporaries, Disraeli, with his
"baroque imagination/' Cardinal Newman, with his in
sistence on authority as against private judgment true
liberty was to live within the "compass of God's ordi
nances"; J. F. Stephens, who believed that force, not
discussion, bound men together; Sir Henry Maine, the
great legal historian and scholar.

Finally, by the beginning of the First World War, it
was surprising that a bored and luxurious society, with
great wealth and great poverty, without true leisure or
"modest private security/' could produce the most sub
stantial body of philosophic and literary criticism in
American history. Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More,
and George Santayana are representative of this group:
Babbitt, who insisted that in our time the task of the
humanist was to remind society of its spiritual reality;
More, deeply conscious of the decay of humanistic in
tellectual discipline; Santayana, "a blend of aesthetic
Catholicism with skepticism" and his "cosmic urbanity,"
who was convinced that liberty and prosperity could not
be enjoyed at the same time.

Disregard of conservative principles, steadily increas
ing since the French Revolution, has brought about, ac
cording to Mr. Kirk, the present "consumptive society,
so near suicide . . . the conflagration of unchecked will
and appetite." His picture of American society is not
attractive:

A society dominated by hazy sentimentality and concrete
appetite, waking to knowledge of its own awful strength,

Some General Essays 3&

ready to patronize or to lord it over the rest of the world,
afraid of responsibility, impatient of admonition . . .

Its contribution to the future civilization is "cheap
ness, the cheapest music, and the cheapest comic-books
and the cheapest morality that can be provided."
Tocqueville's famous prophecy has, he believes, come
about ' 'an innumerable multitude of men, all equal
and all alike incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty
and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives."
This is the picture, I believe, of America today in the
minds of many Europeans, to whom the difference be
tween such a levelling economic imperialism, as they
think it to be, and the military imperialism of Russia,
offers no choice to insure the humanist culture of the
West, and results in negativism. It is not a true picture.
Yet there are elements of truth in it which cannot be dis
regarded.

Tocqueville's prophetic insight, his rare combination
of an aristocratic instinct for quality with a sensitive
understanding of the wretched condition of most human
beings gave him an objectiveness in approaching this
new adventure in democracy, which was still held in
contempt by most Europeans, which raised the scope of
his understanding criticism to a level which other phi
losophers of American society have never reached. Kirk
calls him "the best friend democracy ever has had, and
democracy's most candid and judicious critic." Lord
Acton said of him that he was always wise and right,
and "as just as Aristides." The tyranny which Tocque-
ville dreaded, the new tyranny of the democratic process,
was the rule of mediocrity, under which men are kept
in perpetual childhood, which "gives to all their pas
sions a sort of family likeness" (Lord Bryce was to find
the same likeness a half a century later). The "virtuous
materialism" thus established enervates rather than cor
rupts the soul.

THE BLUR OF MEDIOCRITY

39

Tocqueville accepts the growth of democratic institu
tions as inevitable, ordained by a divine Providence.
Yet the despotism innate in democratic power must be
resisted, and its causes understood: the tendencies to
over-simplify, to centralize and to standardize.

When we examine the content of most conservative
thinking, the vagueness of its substance and the confu
sion of its ideal emerge with greater emphasis, set against
this extraordinary Frenchman's analysis. Put very simply,
most of other conservative thought dates. Take, for
example, Mr. Kirk's summary of conservative principles.
The assertion that conservatives believe that divine guid
ance must rule a civilized society implies that liberals
are excluded from sharing such a faith, and indicates
that those who would preserve the society which they
have enjoyed, in most cases as members of a privileged
group, assume that God is on their side without taking
the trouble to discover whether they are on his. They
distrust the skeptical, in essence the critical approach
which the liberal welcomes, because it challenges the
authority which the conservative admires as long as it
is exercised by members of his own class. But the
liberal does not reject faith in divine guidance but
believes that faith is a matter of individual judgment,
and has no place in a democratic state of which an
essence, culled from the bitter experience of religious
wars, is that State and Church should function each in
its sphere, and that what is God's should not be rendered
to Caesar at least the American essence. For even if
belief in divine intent rules societywhich may be
doubted in the contemporary world the discovery of
that intent remains a human task, necessarily involving
human disagreement.

Nor do I believe that affection for variety as distin
guished from uniformity is an attribute confined to the
conservative heart. The marrow of the liberal faith, of
the individualism which Mr. Kirk so dislikes, was the

Some General Essays 4

freeing of the individual from the bondage of authority
and misery which had been his usual lot without much
variance along the generations. That at least was the
ideal of the men who fought the Revolution and wrote
the Constitution, even if their successors have not
achieved a closer reality. * 'Those who won our inde
pendence," wrote Mr. Justice Brandeis a quarter of a
century ago, "believed that the final end of the state was
to keep men free to develop their faculties; and that in
its government the deliberative forces should prevail
over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end
and as a means."

The conviction that civilized society requires orders
and classes I am disposed to leave to the conservative. It
really comes down to a preference. And in contrasting
the present state of American society with, let us say
the England between the outburst of the Terror in Paris
in 1792 and the first Reform Bill in 1832, the England
that Burke did so much to preserve and to restrict, it
must be remembered that the scales will tip in the direc
tion of the individual making the comparison. Is it a
better world for the workingman, for the vast class of
the people, even if it is streaked with vulgarity and
mediocrity, than the world of the Middle Ages, of
Chartres Cathedral, of the Virgin, not the Virgin of
Henry Adams but of the peasant who created the glory
of Her image because the life that would come with Her
in Paradise would forever replace the thin, grovelling
human life that was his on earth?

I cannot put our world against any other period and
say flatly men were then happier, the essence of life was
richer and more beautiful. But such a reflection need
not deter one from recognizing the tendencies toward
uniformity and mechanism which threaten us today.
And even if they result from the levelling processes of
modern society, the equalitarianism which Mr. Kirk so
generously detests, I am not prepared to admit that the

THE BLUR OF MEDIOCRITY

4 1

extreme poverty and extreme riches of an earlier world,
the very basis of the class society which Mr. Kirk's Con
servative would have us restore, is a price worth paying.

I suppose all this is a matter of degree and of the
choice at any given time and place; so that other princi
ples of the conservative, which can be grouped together,
faith in prescription and tradition and a distrust of
change, could be more easily defended in contemporary
America, for instance, than in Egypt or India, where
tradition has stood still for many thousand years, and
the ancient glories have long ago departed, while the
conservative traditions ineluctably remain.

The men whom Mr. Kirk discusses are an extraor
dinarily diversified and interesting group. Yet some
times their dish of conservative thought tastes curiously
flat, without much spice or variety. The eighteenth cen
tury philosophy of a class society, built on a world which
has long since disappeared, against the background of a
secured leisure and an accepted hierarchy, dates like
some smooth performance of Candida or The Cherry
Orchard. It has the nostalgic unreality of so much of
contemporary American intellectual conservatism, of
T. S. Eliot, that "partisan of a graded society," of Allen
Tate, of Peter Viereck, who seem to have little to offer
to nourish or cultivate the wasteland which surrounds
them.

They can see the forces of an unlimited industrialism
at work in a civilization caught in a mechanical spin;
but they can suggest no substitute of philosophy or of
symbols, blaming democracy for men's sins against the
spirit, hating the "barbarian nomads," as Eliot calls
them, largely because they have ventured to overrun
those preserves which in the world they would like to re
construct were reserved for the elite. Unless you blame
democracy for the discovery of modern power, to equate
it with the destructiveness of that power is like thumb
ing your nose at the Universe because you don't like it.

Some General Essays 42

This confusion becomes more evident when we con
sider the development of political conservatism in the
United States. It has become identified with the busi
ness interests and, as Babbitt shrewdly pointed out, aims
to conserve property for its own sake, and not like
Burke as a support of personal liberty. The identifica
tion of business man and political conservative has long
since become so complete that it is hard to remember
any conservative statesman in the true sense since John
Randolph or John Quincy Adams. And the business
mind, cautious of speculative thought, suspicious of
political change, disliking theory, is by no means con
servative where business is concerned, but notoriously
daring and imaginative.

So that if the mad rush of the modern world, uproot
ing the long established traditions and prescriptions of a
settled society, was what Burke and Randolph recognized
as the threat of their times and how much more today
paradoxically the Conservative, the American business
man, is responsible for it, developing and encouraging
speed and change without the control of any moral
standard or political principle. Conservative leadership
in terms of those restraints has disappeared from Ameri
can public life, as can readily be seen if we compare the
late Senator Taft to J. Q. Adams.

Of course the conservative instinct, now particularly
needed, has not disappeared, nor have those symbols
which, better than any definition, express its soundness
and its depth; the symbol, for instance, of the land, par
ticularly in the South, where for so many men a relation
to the land is no longer possible. Yet the needs and the
faith to which the symbols gave content have changed,
some disappearing, many not yet readjusted; but the
symbols have not altered and so have become unreal
and can no longer move men to sacrifice.

A purpose to which the conservative the instinctive
yet thoughtful conservative is particularly fitted, is to

THE BLUR OF MEDIOCRITY 43

recreate those symbols which reflect his own faith. This
was strikingly illustrated by the way in which Americans
reacted to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The
Queen was far more than a token of royal prerogative,
indeed she was not that except in the outer trappings:
she was the link with a splendid past, a bridge between
the tradition of a thousand years and the new world of
shattering readjustment; she held her people together
and stirred their pride and love and sense of humility
as no words could have done. Property seems to be the
only symbol which American conservatives of the twen
tieth century can offer a spiritually hungry people-
property, raised to the dry religion of free enterprise as
the only way of life.

If the conservatism of the eighteenth and nineteenth
century dates when it is applied to the United States
of the Reconstruction and two World Wars, it has a
core of human common sense that liberals of today
would often benefit by following: that change for the
sake of change has no virtue; that gratifying a "moral' '
impulse by unloading it into a law is an example of that
sort of mischief (I have in mind, of course, the Prohi
bition Act, but it would not be unfair to apply the ap
proach to most regulatory statutes, carefully weighing
their workability before becoming too enthusiastic);
that the roots of men run deep and far and must not too
readily be cut; that the unrestrained play of the free
market may be no longer useful to all aspects of our
American World (in its name do we have to turn over
the immense educational and cultural resources of tele
vision to exploitation by that market, as we have turned
over radio?); and that better democracy is today more
important than more democracy.

The end of the true conservative as well as the liberal
should be the development of human beings. I do not
think Burke would question that end, much as he hated
the idea of absolute individual liberty. The contempo-

Some General Essays 44

rary liberal should also know something more of the
past, particularly of his own past; and if he cannot be
moved by the theological acceptance of original sin, he
can certainly accept the healthy reality of evil, now
clothed in the psychological garment of the ego and the
id, that source of instinctive if uncurbed energy, and
realize, unlike Emerson, that evil is a very potent factor,
without abandoning any more modern theory as to its
nature and causes. And the liberal can afford even more
than the conservative to go back to some of the beliefs
of his eighteenth century progenitors caution and a
shaft of skepticism should temper his too easy enthusi
asms in a world which remains irrational even while he
must seek to make it follow reason; and both liberal
and conservative may come to realize that freedom does
not mean irresponsibility; and to insist that a striving
for equality of opportunity need not conduce uniform
ity.

45

Allen Tate

MORAL ACTION IN ART

It may be said at once that art being a form of conduct,
it must necessarily have moral implications, but that
its end is not the inculcation of morality. Its end is to
be art, just as the end of man is not morality but the
complete man. Beyond these commonplaces nobody
seems to know much about the relation of art and
morals, though I dare say other persons have expressed
them more searchingly. What we must be vigilant about
is the delusion that the relation of art to morals is a
"problem/' and a problem that can be solved. Art is
not a branch of mathematics; it has no problems. It has
mysteries; they are of an order somewhat inferior to the
mysteries of religion, but they are no less permanent.

What we are confronted with in a work of literature,
and I suppose also in the other arts, is human action
translated into being morals moving towards meta
physics. And that is why we get into trouble when we
try to get our ethics from works of the imagination. Even
if all men could agree on the moral soundness and depth
of a given poem, it would still be dangerous to appeal
to it as a sufficient guide to conduct. Action as it appears
in a poem has been given another kind of reality which
is no longer in motion, though it may seem to move:
it has arrived at the reality of being, the end for which
the poem exists. If we imitate its action, we are imitating

Some General Essays 4^

an imitation, as some persons are said to have been,
when, after reading The Divine Comedy a few months,
they decide to enter the Roman Catholic Church.

The further any abstractions about art get away from
poems and other works of art, the more useless they
become in what I take to be the primary purpose in
discussing poems, paintings, sculptures, and buildings;
and that is, to enrich our understanding of the enormous
varieties of being that the arts provide, and that, with
out the arts, no one man would be capable unaided of
discovering.

What I shall undertake, therefore, is a comparison of
two short passages of poetry, the one written early in the
fourteenth century, the other about twenty-five years
ago. Both passages deal with the same thing the submis
sion of the individual will to another will, and both
affirm the necessity of submission. But the passages are
very different in scope. In the earlier lines the individual
will is related to the entire universe of being; in the
later, one human will wishes to be absorbed into another
human will. The passages are by Dante and Hart Crane.

It is usually convenient to make one's point by show
ing that some other writer tried but failed to make it;
for this purpose, Matthew Arnold is always ready at
hand. I suppose Arnold's touchstones have done more
harm to the right reading of poetry than any device ever
resorted to by a critic. For the touchstones are the short
est conceivable way of wringing all the being out of
poetry and making it look like moral action. For years
I had been puzzled by Arnold's use, as one of his touch
stones, of the famous line by Dante: "E la sua voluntade
e nostra pace." I not only didn't agree that the will of
God is our peace; I didn't think that the line was poetry.
Now that I do agree that our peace is in the will of God,
I still don't think that the line taken alone is poetry.
After I had read Dante I was more puzzled than ever
by Arnold's failure to quote the entire terzina of which

MORAL ACTION IN ART AJ

"His will is our peace" is the first line. I could only
surmise that Arnold shied away from it because the
wonderful richness and complexity of the full image
had so blinded him that he could no longer see it. Here
is the complete terzina in Binyon's translation:

And in His will is perfected our peace;
It is the sea whereunto moveth all
That it creates and nature makes increase.

I don't want to get trapped into the so-called problem
of poetry and belief, because I should never get out of
the trap. What I do want to emphasize again is the
standing menace of under-reading, of which not only
Arnold but all the rest of us are constantly guilty. The
great image of the will of God as the creative sea extends
our experience into a mode of being that we had not
enjoyed before, however humbly we may have accepted
the doctrine of submission. Are we to conclude that
the image of the sea so beguiles us that we slip into be
lieving in submission? I think not. Which came first to
Dante's mind, the doctrine of submission or the image
of the sea?

There is no way of finding out. But this much can
be said: the doctrine of submission as such cannot be
poetry because it is in motion; it has not reached any
one of several possible ends. One end might be, for re
ligious persons, contemplative prayer. But as poetry it
has got to reach another sort of end altogether; it must
have to come to rest in a particular mode of being, and
one of those modes is Dante's creating and receiving
ocean, a figure of incalculable depth and richness. May
one just imagine, assuming that we think of poetry as
an inculcation of morality, a simple and very literal man
who, having read Piccarda's speech, goes as fast as he can
to the sea and jumps into it because he thinks that is
the way to be at one with the will of God?

Some General Essays 4^

Some lines from Hart Crane, a simple and literal man,
present the gradual advance of intoxication in a series
of very brilliant images. (The poem is called 'The Wine
Menagerie.") Through alcohol the poet arrives at a
certain intensity of vision in which he feels that Self has
been liberated from the self. This is the stanza:

New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons
Build freedom up about me and distil
This competence to travel in a tear
Sparkling alone, within another's will.

R. P. Blackrnur has written one of his fullest and
best essays on these lines. I am about to engage in an
under-reading but in self-defense I should plead that
Crane makes it inevitable. We must not be deceived by
the complex imagery, for Crane has under-written his
poem. Before I go further I wish to give my hand away.
I have a strong impression that most modern poetry,
however complicated the imagery, is under-written. It
is under-written because it leaves out the horse, and tries
to use magic to make the cart move. It is half-poetry. It
is sometimes called the poetry of sensibility.

The only thresholds and the only anatomies that we
are likely to know are those that God has already given
us, if we have the wit and grace to find them; and the
magic of sensibility will not produce new ones. I am not
being pious about this matter. I am trying to discern an
objective distinction. There is a radical obscurity in
Crane's lines because magic itself is obscure. It is not a
"formulable essence," and in so far as it is an "opera
tion" at all it attempts to violate natural law. With
Crane, we are not concerned with natural magic; Crane
is using propitiatory magic, merely material means for
spiritual ends: the mere intensity of sensation disguised
as a spiritual good. Baudelaire and Yeats knew some
thing about this, Baudelaire through hashish, Yeats

MORAL ACTION IN ART 49

through Madame Blavatsky; and both knew in the end
that it was no good. If the other will in which Crane
wishes to travel is like his, it would scarcely be worth
the trouble to travel in it. What we have here, of course,
from another point of view, is the standard romantic
self-pity (the tear), and not the submission of the will
but its destruction. Crane, like most men today, was a
self-made angel trying to cheat the condition of man.

One of his conditions is his rational condition. It
seems that in nothing that man makes can he afford to
ignore it. Dante knew all about self-destruction; Crane
put forth images of self-destruction under the illusion
that they were images of an intenser spiritual life. An
art so ignorant of what it is doing may often achieve
great power in the eyes of those who can see around it:
Crane's poem is powerful. But it is an art that in the
long run will destroy itself; as Crane destroyed himself,
for his suicide was his last act of magic. I am not repudi
ating my praise of Crane. He was probably as great a
poet as a magician can be.

John Crowe Ransom

SYMBOLISM: AMERICAN STYLE

The prudent and pious reader is embarrassed if you
say: Symbolism. He knows that nowadays he will have
to reckon with it but there is no clear-cut description
in what he can read about it in advance. He is apprehen
sive of not making the response to it that is expected
because the advance notices do not seem to connect the
symbolic effects with his own familiar needs. Perhaps
the truth is that a bold symbolism, if and when it really
stirs the soul and casts a new light over life, is one of the
varieties of religious experience, though an apocalyptic
one, not an orthodox. It is not easily imposed upon the
common reader even if he is used to literature, for it
goes beyond the conventional range of literary experi
ence, which he thinks has been sufficient for his needs.
Perhaps there is a dialectical need for it, to fill a gap and
complete a series of literary effects. But he will ask if
literature, with its scrupulous feeling for reality, must
submit to as many forms as there are theoretical pos
sibilities.

Suppose we take from the confusion of symbolic doc
trine a few of the aims that have been professed, and
look at them a moment singly, even if there may be
some overlapping. We shall find that in every one
there is a departure from the literary canon; that is,

SYMBOLISM: AMERICAN STYLE 51

from the familiar canon which for convenience we
would call the Aristotelian.

I. It is said that the symbolic art-work intends to have
its existence purely in language, and must on that level
satisfy the reader if he can receive it, not permitting the
usual ulterior "meanings" which obtain in common lan
guage. Though language is generally regarded as a mere
"medium" of experience, it is a medium which is said
sometimes to escape from control and realize a life of its
own. But language is exclusively a human activity, and
even this kind of language will come within human ex
perience, and in fact for greater honor it is said to make
the human experience especially "humane" or human
istic. It meets with resistance from the old-fashioned
reader, whose interest is likely to be in language of
another and easier kind. How do words remain words
and yet repudiate their function as "signs"? The answer
would be: When they become symbols. But that seems
circular. For what are symbols?

II. The symbolist promises to perform an act of free
or absolute creativity, and realize an art strictly for art's
sake. He will therefore abandon the usual preoccupa
tions of writers, and their readers; such as their concern
about the success of the animal life, or even the higher
life which is involved with morality, and social and reli
gious adaptations. But this does not seem intelligible, or
possible. How can he forget his passionate attachments?
And what, for that matter, can a free creation be? Hav
ing no determinate form nor direction it aims only at
freedom how would it achieve any character at all, and
miss being nonsense and whimsy? And what would ever
push it into action in the first place?

III. A third version. The symbolist would like to heal
the ill-famed split between the subject of knowledge
and the object; the one that Descartes is said to have
brought about, or at least to have published and forced
upon the modern consciousness, which has been troubled

Some General Essays 5 2

ever since by the ambiguousness of knowledge and the
impossibility of absolute truth. When language manages
to make no reference to the fixed objects after having
made too much to them under the "imitation" theory
of the complacent eighteenth century writers and to
make none to the feelings of the subject-after referring
to them too much in the period of the Romantic revolt
then the hateful dualism may be said to be extin
guished at last; by artists who in the temporal succession
are the post-Romantics. But surely symbolism must start
with existing words, and these are the signs of their ob
jects, and indirectly of the feelings caused by the objects.
How will the words be made to dissociate themselves
from the sense of the objects and the responses to the
objects which are the feelings? And why should they
do so?

IV. We will try one other version. The words of the
symbolic work are, indeed, those which have served as
the names of the objects, and they continue to do so. But
now the objects are not held in their old relations to
one another; they assume new relations. These must be
other than logical relations. But they are said to be very
powerful relations, so that the symbolic work has "unity"
to an astonishing and perhaps mystical degree. A new
and tighter world, though having somewhat the same
original constituents, replaces the old world. And per
haps this version seems more credible, and more in
triguing. Thus it is said that a highly favored relation
will be that of paradox, the relation which holds oppo-
sites together. All the same, we are likely to fear that
the trick will turn out to be on the specious side, and
grow tiresome; for we will look for the new logic which
really reconciles the opposites, as the old logic scarcely
allowed, and we shall be disappointed if we find them
only juxtaposed physically! Can it be claimed that if
they are held together long enough their opposition will
be "resolved"?

SYMBOLISM: AMERICAN STYLE 53

These are some of the smartest descriptions of the
symbolic language. But, in less challenging forms, sym
bolism has long been coming into repute with liberal
intellectuals; it rates a good deal better than as merely
a latest extravagance of language or avant-garde effect.
Able philosophers have risen to its defense, such as
Santayana, and Whitehead. Perhaps symbolic may be
said to have become, in its most modest usage, the adjec
tive which describes all those languages that are not
logical and scientific yet are intensely humanistic. More
recently, at least in this country where his work had to
wait for translation, there has been the German Cassirer,
along with his able champion, our Mrs. Langer. Gas-
sir er's "symbolic philosophy" takes very high ground,
and Mrs. Langer writes a book about "Philosophy in a
New Key/' and now another which might be said to
begin upon the study of art as "Aesthetics in a New
Key/' A sobriety attaches to the profession of philosophy,
however, which is likely sooner or later to tame symbol
ism, and lop off its pretensions sadly if it has any.

And what of symbolism in action, as it works in litera
ture? After all, it would seem indecent if we stopped
with a theoretical presentation, especially if we have
followed up every theory with a theoretical counter-
punch and knock-out. Symbolists did actually succeed
upon the Romantics, as the authentic post-Romantics,
and very shortly. The interesting thing is that they were
our own highly original American writers, not only
theorists but creative artists too. They anticipated the
French Symbolistes later in their century, and the full-
scale arrival of symbolism nearly everywhere in this cen
tury. They filled a period of literary history with which
we can scarcely have had a good acquaintance, since it
was not well studied. But now we may find it written up
to the length of a remarkable book, which is sympathetic
yet sophisticated and critical too: Symbolism and Ameri
can Literature, by Charles Feidelson, Jr. (Chicago, 1953)-

Some General Essays 54

The present essay is deeply Indebted to Mr. Feidelson's
book. It is a very important literary history, and he is
the master of a knowing and fascinating dialectic.

Emerson was the great originator of symbolic theory;
after the German idealists, of course, though he seems to
have been an original, and to have sprung from his own
national background. Emerson used all the symbolic
advertisements which I have noted, and more, in his re
iterative yet fertile style. He was reinforced by Thoreau,
Alcott, and others. The creative writers of eminence
were Whitman, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville.

Among these, Walt Whitman was the rugged and im
perturbable one. He had a fine though not fastidious
literary instrument at his command. It enabled him to
represent himself engagingly as " tramping a perpetual
journey" across the length and breadth of the then
United States, encountering the ever-fresh New World
scenery, and the "natural persons" whom he loved and
miraculously became for the moment before he moved
on. But he never stopped. The logic for this kind of com
position is that of an eternal serial or cataloguing proc
ess; he defied loudly the ancient stopping-places to
which the old kind of poetry might have tempted him,
with its stuffy dogmas, respectabilities, and fulfilments.
Yet he is zealous at declaiming "the word en masse" and
the words "American" and "democratic," and in spite
of his magnificence Mr. Feidelson has to dismiss him in
this poetic aspect as a corrupted symbolist, in fact a
sociologist.

The best symbolic achievement of Whitman's, says
Mr. Feidelson, is "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloomed." It is the poem where Lincoln's coffin goes
on the train from Washington to Springfield, mourned
wherever it passes through the teeming American scene.
The key-symbols are the lilac which stands for the new
birth in the spring of the year, the drooping star which
stands for death, and the bird whose song embraces

SYMBOLISM: AMERICAN STYLE 55

birth and death indifferently, and so inspires the poet
that he becomes the bird; and now his vocation is a
proper and symbolic song, in which death and life are
indistinguishable. I think Mr. Feidelson might have
been a little more resistant here. Is not this disposition
of death a little easy? Poets in older modes might have
coveted for the occasion such dramatic properties as
lilac and star and bird. (Hardy might have said of the
dead man, "He was a man who used to notice such
things.") But are we to find consolation in a verbal
equation?

We obtain acute judgments of the achievement of
Hawthorne (who was a timid symbolist), of Poe (who
was one perversely and in defiance of his logical theory
of composition), and of Melville. In Melville's Pierre
we find a well-furnished and most substantial anticipa
tion of Gide's curious and intricate play of symbols in
The Counterfeiters. But Mo by Dick is the great master
piece, and I fancy that the interpretation which Mr.
Feidelson has for it is novel, and pretty final too. This is
a symbolic work whose symbolism is about the symbolic
passion itself, and its final vanity; for even as a symbolist
Melville carried his critical habit about with him. (Mel
ville and Mr. Feidelson are alike perhaps in having an
attachment to symbolism which drives them towards but
not quite to the act of "intellectual suicide/') Ahab
voyaging over the seas is the type of all symbolists, and
the White Whale which he pursues is that final heavenly
yet inhuman Vision of Truth that symbolism seeks. But
in the event, the whale destroys his pursuer. The ship
and crew vanish beneath the dark waters, which have
not yielded up their secret. Only Ishmael, the sympa
thetic but not quite committed companion and reporter
of the voyage, is tossed up alive, perhaps to make other
voyages if he dares. But it is not without significance, I
should think, to notice that the naturalistic plot of
Moby Dick is in the straightest narrative style (i. e., an-

Some General Essays 5^

swering to the logic of a real action), punctuated only
by stops for the heavy symbolic comment of the reporter
or the author. It was on that understanding alone that I
gave it my own first reading when I was young. But if it
had not worked I should wonder who would read Moby
Dick even when old. Savage as he is, the whale is more
comfortable for the reader than the ineffable symbolic
Absolute which he stands for and the reader is supposed
to yearn for.

A symbolic work appears to have its existence partly
in "literature proper" and partly out of it. One may
easily suppose that it aspires to exist entirely out of it.

Coleridge's ideas about poetry will come to mind at
this point. They are both old and modern. Coleridge is
counted on rather heavily by some symbolists because
he regarded the poet as a creator next only to God, and
did not stint himself in paying tribute to the power of
the Secondary Imagination. I think they may not always
be aware of the stern restriction which he imposed upon
the imagination even at full flight.

In that most famed and involuted sentence of Chap
ter XIV in the Biographia Literaria he represents the
power of the imagination as "first put in action by the
will and understanding, and retained under their irre-
missive, though gentle and unnoticed, control"; then
as revealing itself in "the balance or reconciliation of
opposite or discordant qualities"; and after this begin
ning, names at least ten different pairs of opposites; one
for example being of "judgment ever awake and steady
self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or
vehement," while another pairing "still subordinates
art to nature." I believe it is accurate to say that the
understanding (to us, the faculty of logical order) is
responsible for one of the terms in every pairing, and
keeps ever awake and in its duty, in order to be ready to
restrain the imagination if it tries to be free.

Yet Coleridge was thinking of "poetry," not symbol-

SYMBOLISM: AMERICAN STYLE 57

ism, whose emergence into history was waiting upon its
agents, the Americans. I should like now to offer another
consideration, which seems to find something essentially
symbolic in the language of literature itself, especially
and spectacularly in poetry. Symbolism has trouble de
fining itself, but so does poetry. What is that strange je
ne sais quoi which distinguishes poetry forever from
prose, and is grasped instantly by some intuition, though
few if any of us can rationalize it, or render it by logical
definition? Throughout the history of poetic theory the
closest critics have been content to define it negatively,
by what it is not. That is to say, poetry is virtually repre
sented as arising when the prose shakes itself freer and
looser by a series of transformations which can all be
isolated and identified, but only as specific breaches in
the prose logic. Nor has anybody yet spoken with author
ity to tell us what is the hidden use that makes us cherish
the resultant with so much passion. The breaches are
quite demonstrable; they are the poetic "figures" or
tropes. But so beneficent is the positive and creative
power which they generate that they have been licensed
or authorized since poetry began. Reputable philoso
phers and scholars have categorized and listed them, first
the Greeks, then the Romans adding to the list, then
the workers in the modern European languages; until
there had been reared a monument of industry, a list
running in Shakespeare's time to several hundreds of
entries. All that is pretty well gone by, in our time; the
poets being so experienced in their tradition that they
can tell for themselves, without consulting the Rhetorics,
what is permissive in this art; or, if this is what they
want to know, what is not permissive.

The bolder and more positive-looking tropes are such
as synecdoche, metaphor, paradox, prosopopoeia (or
personification). With them it is as if the logical sign of
the prose were replaced by a new sign, which could
easily be called a symbol, the magical agent itself. Per-

Some General Essays 58

haps these particular symbols are specially easy to con
strue, but they may be according to the type of all
symbols that are really practicable. The new sign or
symbol contains in its total meaning the old sign, plus
something new and foreign which frees the language
and makes it swell with meaning. It will never get back
into its tight logic again; the modern apologist of poetry
is sure of that, and declares it incessantly. The symbol
will not give up its increment of meaning. The logician
can find the logic of the structure beneath the centrif
ugal and Gothic detail, still working if he looks for it;
provided the law of Coleridge is still being adhered to.
But the je ne sais quoi is there too. This is the "divine
part" by which the humanism of our species insists upon
being complicated. And the difference between the com
plete symbolist and the ordinary poet is that the sym
bolist is capable of losing himself in his expansive
symbols, but the poet is trained by his tradition to keep
them under control.

In his postscript Mr. Feidelson offers this summation:
"Symbolism is humanism but a critical humanism." I
take it that this will hold for Melville and the most intel
ligent symbolists. They must symbolize. But they are
prepared to find in symbolism the locus of " error, confu
sion, darkness"; so they will watch out. We could not
ask for a fairer judgment than that.

59

Robert Evett

PROGRESS IN MUSIC

If western music were, like most of the other arts, sup
ported by a really long tradition, the issue of present and
future progress in music would perhaps be less impor
tant. If, for instance, there were extensive musical pieces
dating back to the time of Euripides, or even going back
a thousand years, music as we know it would seem less
new. The fact is that only a few fragments have survived
the Greco-Roman era. Even the music of the Middle
Ages, which can be reconstructed and performed, was
left by its composers in such a vague and fragmentary
form that the authenticity of its modern interpretations
can never finally be proved.

The supreme accomplishment of the Middle Ages in
music was the development of a notation, a system of
committing sounds and rhythms to the page in writing;
all music composed before the perfection of this system
is at least partially lost. The development of large, elabo
rate forms has been predicated on the notational system,
which was usable as early as 1400, but very cumber
some. Refinements in style and technique followed re
finements of notation consistently, but the earliest really
sophisticated styles are not much more than four hun
dred years old. Because of this, music is the infant of the
arts, a recent arrival, hundreds of years behind litera
ture, painting, sculpture and architecture. The classical

Some General Essays 60

period of music is not Greco-Roman antiquity: it is the
late eighteenth century, and Mozart is its Virgil.

The lack of a long tradition seems to make musicians,
especially composers, inordinately jittery about the fu
ture. Music is alone among the arts in that its relatively
brief history has, in the main, been one of clear and
obvious progress. Some musicians feel that the progress
reached its zenith in the music of the High Baroque,
especially in the work of J. S. Bach, and that subsequent
changes have been less progressive in character. Others
trace an unbroken line of progress from the Gregorian
Chant to the present day, and see that line continuing,
unchecked and at the same greatly accelerated speed,
into an apparently unlimited future.

We are accustomed to using the word "progress" am
biguously, applying it to either general or personal im
provement. To recognize progress in the development of
an individual talent is easy; it is more difficult to rec
ognize in music generally. To accept trend as a phenome
non in and of itself progressive is to follow Hegel into
that curious (and rosy) view of evolution which con
siders practically everything a step in the right direction,
and which puts all artists at the mercy of historical
processes. Arnold Schoenberg, who tended to think of
music history as a general onward-and-upward move
ment, felt that progress was a divinely inspired thing,
that the composer who set his own taste higher than the
gift of God would end up, like Jonah, inside the
whale; Schoenberg preferred to prophesy at the gates of
Nineveh.

I suppose that the first criterion of progress is some
kind of recognizable improvement. The word "recogniz
able" here is, of course, dangerous, since not everyone
is capable of recognizing a change for the better. How
ever, change is easily discernible, and few would be
naive enough to assert that a chronological accident had
made the music of Rossini or Weber superior to that of

PROGRESS IN MUSIC 6l

Mozart or J. S. Bach. The comparison, of course, is un
fair at the outset, since Weber and Rossini were not com
posers of the first rank. The worth of the historical view
of progress must be tested by comparing the output of
the best composers of different periods.

This issue is generally side-stepped. We like to say
that we like Beethoven and Mozart equally in different
ways, that Mozart is subtle where Beethoven is sublime,
and so on. There is certainly no question that, in his
major work, Beethoven introduced a kind of passion and
grandeur not to be found in earlier music; at the same
time, he introduced a kind of coarseness, an obviousness,
an element of the gross, which music could have done
without very nicely, and which had to supersede the
subtleties of the eighteenth century if the new style were
to have the effect for which it was intended. Beethoven's
achievement, while not the first of its kind in music, is
a superb illustration of the composer-^ wfl-Shiva, destroy
ing as he creates.

Since Beethoven's time, the destruction of the past has
become a part of the working process of those musicians
who feel that they are helping things along to make
progress in music in a progressive way. Wagner and
Liszt, for instance, expanded harmonic language while
making a frontal attack on form. Schoenberg, whose
work was aimed, at least in part, on the destruction of a
whole system of harmonic and melodic conventions
while building up another system of tonal relationships,
frequently relied on the most rigid of antique forms. If
the evolution from Liszt through Schoenberg is progress
in the Hegelian sense, it is a strange brand, since it goes
backwards and forwards at the same time.

In that these composers and, especially during the past
fifty years, a great many others, have added enormously
to the technical resources of music (and, in some in
stances, actually extended the aesthetic frontiers of the
art) they have provided that recognizable improvement

Some General Essays 62

which, in spite of the destructive element in their work,
could be used to support the historical view. In that their
innovations have, in many instances proved to be only an
embaras de richesse, impeding their work, the innova
tions would tend to seem actually regressive. The most
pathetic example of this auto-frustration is probably that
of Schoenberg, whose heart, as he constantly reminded
us, was off in Verklaerte Nacht a-chasing the deer, while
his head was contriving a system to put an end to all such
nonsense. The compromise at which he finally arrived,
of writing alternately in old and new styles, was one
man's tragedy. But his thinking, brilliant and logical as
it was, has provoked a catastrophe in the musical art and
in the work of dozens of smaller composers. Schoenberg's
metaphysics relieves the composer of personal respon
sibility; it makes him a vessel through which the music
simply flows, whether he likes it or not.

It is not Schoenberg's technique which makes this
true. Such composers as Alban Berg and Luigi Dallapic-
cola, to whom Schoenberg's method is subject to their
own personal wills, have found their personalities in
Schoenberg's technique. Schoenberg himself did not
wish to have his method imitated by people who did not
understand it, and, unfortunately, this irresponsible imi
tation is epidemic in the world at present. However,
without the onward-and-upward view, composers would
not feel the need indeed, moral responsibilityfor
adopting styles and methods developed by others, styles
which they themselves find abstruse.

The act of musical creation is one of the most per
sonal, private occupations that a human being can un
dertake. The kind of music anyone writes, or whether
he writes at all is, finally, his own business. To assume, as
Schoenberg did, that change in musical method is
divinely dictated, is to make God party to some out
rageous practical joke. To assume that historical proc
esses inexorably dictate change is to dispose, once and

PROGRESS IN MUSIC 63

for all, of the spiritual nature of music, reducing it to a
mechanical operation.

I would suggest that any real progress in music is a
private matter, something that evolves in a lively musical
mind and constitutes a development of the resources of
that mind. Personal advancement takes on general sig
nificance only insofar as it becomes part of the experi
ence of the musical community, stimulating and shaping
the thought of other minds. Because of this, a respon
sible composer will find or assimilate into his technique
only those elements which he needs for his work; and
these elements may as well be drawn from the past per
haps the remote past as the present. A revaluation of
the past can inaugurate a tremendous personal evolu
tion.

Paul Hindemith, a composer who totally rejects the
notion of progress as an historical process, gives particu
larly eloquent testimony to the case of progress as a per
sonal and private affair. Hindemith's early music sounds
like Brahms, and not like very good Brahms, but the
elements of his own style are there. Between the end of
the first World War and 19212, the main elements of
Hindemith's style crystallized. From that date until the
early thirties, that style was in a process of continuous
refinement, as Hindemith assimilated the methods,
minus the manners, of the past.

The perfected style, as we find it in Mathis der Maler,
has not changed noticeably in twenty years, and it will
never change, because Hindemith knows exactly what
he is doing and why. A composer as solidly rooted as
Hindemith has no more need to change style than Bach
or Mozart would. Hindemith is eclectic in the literal
and best sense of the word, since his knowledge of the
past is so exhaustive that every successful technique ever
employed is part of his equipment.

Bela Bartok was eclectic, too, in a rather more limited
way. His major influences were Beethoven, Liszt, and

Some General Essays 64

the folk musicians of the Balkans. It is probably the folk
music which sustained his equilibrium during the Cen
tral European musical upheavals of thirty years ago.
Again, his evolution was a personal one. It produced a
rich, distinguished style, impossible to imitate, but with
only a few technical eccentricities (most of them har
monic and rhythmic) which could be of use to other
musicians.

To list the composers, from Debussy to Peter Mennin,
who have built personal styles on a careful analysis of
existing music with a view to preserving existing tradi
tions, is to account for the stylistic richness of this cen
tury so far. The lack of a common practice in twentieth
century music can be considered a weakness, and in that
it encourages charlatanry, it is. But the lack of stylistic
orthodoxy encourages the maximum development of the
lively mind. Exponents of the historical view of progress
feel that our great stylists are outside the mainstream of
the art, have divorced music from its mission and its
meaning, and are a thoroughly pernicious crew. The
stylists tend to believe that the road from Beethoven to
Wagner to Schoenberg leads straight to hell. This re
minds one, of course, of the old Brahms-Wagner feud,
which Wagner seems to have won. At present, there are
two camps, armed, neither of which is willing to yield.
On the matter of progress, however, there seems to be
one point of agreement, which is that progress, whatever
it may really be, can not come out of a literal imitation
of antique styles.

In The New Year Letter, Mr. Auden reminds us that
every aesthetic discipline carries with it a sin, peculiar
to it, to which its exponents are especially prone. The
composer whose predilections are conservative is con
stantly in danger of losing himself in the past; of losing
himself so completely that his own development never
occurs. One of the delights of a pre-perfected style is that
it poses no real problems to the composer; if he follows

PROGRESS IN MUSIC 65

the simple instructions on the label, he is bound to con-
feet something fairly palatable.

If eclectic composers, like Hindemith and Bartok, may
be considered progressive in that they have adopted the
techniques of the past but developed personal styles from
those techniques, what is the position of a man like
Stravinsky? During the past thirty years, Stravinsky has
worked in several distinct styles, most of them clearly
appropriated from the eighteenth century. But Stravin
sky never sounds like an eighteenth century composer.
In a work like The Rake's Progress, Stravinsky ap
proaches the style of Mozart so closely that at times one
chord progression, or even one note could produce a
completely antique effect. Yet the dryness of the scoring,
the slight alternations of harmonic and rhythmic usages
produce a sound which is peculiarly, recognizably Stra-
vinskian and of our century.

Aaron Copland's music poses the same problem.
Three works, written within a few years of each other
El Salon Mexico, the Piano Sonata, and Appalachian
Spring are totally different in materials and effect, but
they are all obviously the work of the same composer.
Again, there is a harmonic and rhythmic consistency
which Copland brings to his material by which he is able
to transform that material into his own. Stylistically,
Copland and Stravinsky seem to be skating on the thin
nest possible ice. They have helped to give the word
"eclecticism" a pejorative meaning, which is perhaps un
fair. To be more conservative is surely to succumb to
that sin peculiar to eclecticism, but to have drawn style
from style, as they have is to have established personality
and to have progressed in the personal sense.

Anonymity is an abyss into which it is very easy to fall,
and one of the easiest ways to do this is to imitate cur
rently fashionable styles. For the past twenty years, there
has been a large, miraculously growing body of Ameri
can composers, conservatory trained, passionately con-

Some General Essays 66

servative, and motivated solely by the desire to conform
to existing fashion. These are the composers who are not
embarrassed to write like Stravinsky one year, Hinde-
mith the next, Bartok the next, and Schoenberg the next.
In most instances, their work is technically very good,
but badly timed and otherwise undistinguished. A com
poser who has no convictions of his own serves only one
function, which is to get in the way. Our best young
composers, men like Robert Palmer, David Diamond
and William Schuman, have suffered professionally from
their refusal to join the noisy crowd on the bandwagon,
and even better established men, notably Roy Harris
and Walter Piston, have been hurt for the same reason.
If there is any single phenomenon impeding a general
progress in music, it is the effect of fashion on musical
style.

Compared with the fashionable imitators, those few
real innovators working at present deserve our respect.
But there is a sin peculiar to their discipline, too: the
assertion of individuality at the expense of standards.

For many years, most of the important experimental
work in America has been carried on in New York by
the composers associated with John Cage. This work, at
its outset, was distinguished by a revaluation of Occi
dental standards. Cage hoped to introduce certain Ori
ental values into our conception of music. This involved
experimentation with percussion, rhythm, and form.

In effect, this experimentation has produced two dif
ferent sets of results. Lou Harrison and Alan Hovhaness
have adjusted the rich, percussive sonorities to the tradi
tions of the West. Cage himself and Morton Feldman
have almost finally divorced themselves from Western
traditions. Cage has written music in which radios are
the performing instruments, so that the composer has
no control over the sounds produced. Feldman has com
posed pieces on graph paper, in which no notes are writ-

PROGRESS IN MUSIC 67

ten, so that the performer makes up the music as he goes
along.

The fact that his music has, conceptually, some rela
tion to the improvisatory practices of India, does not, in
itself, constitute an improvement in Western music. One
suspects that, because it is less controlled, it is inferior
to the Indian original. The fact that Western music can
be written down accurately has made its evolution a
special thing, and if the element of control is removed,
everything peculiarly Western about the music is de
stroyed, even if familiar instruments are used. And West
ern standards cannot be imposed on a music which dis
regards its basis. While it would be unfair to suspect
Feldman's sincerity, one can only assume that what
standards he has are of his own making, and that no mat
ter how elaborate his rationale is, he has arrived at a
musical anarchy. A composer to whom originality and
innovation supersede purely musical values must be
guilty of husbanding his own talent badly.

The total accomplishment of musical innovation in
the twentieth century has been depressingly small. The
Italian Futurism of forty years ago has disappeared, al
most without a trace. Atonality, as it was thought of forty
years ago, has proven to be little more than an extension
of Romanticism. Its best apologists not only employ the
forms of the past, they constantly compare their music
with that of the past, assuring the listener that, once the
difficulties of idiom are surmounted, the music will have
much the same effect as that of Beethoven or Brahms, as
if that in itself is desirable. One might point out that, if
the effect is to be the same, the evolution of an elaborate
new technique is scarcely necessary. And, if the aesthetic
standard is to remain the same, there is no reason to
assume that technical change constitutes general prog
ress.

Inversely, real technical innovations, such as the split-

Some General Essays 68

ting up of the gamut into quarter-tones or the evolution
of a music without notes, innovations which strike at the
root of the Western aesthetic, are not progressive if one
assumes that Western music as such is capable of further
development. Real and important as these innovations
are to their creators, their general application is terribly
limited by the contexts in which they must occur.

If great changes of technique or style are generally so
ineffectual against the broad, traditional aesthetic stand
ards of music, one may well wonder why anyone bothers
to tamper with common practice or to alter existing
methods in any way.

The most valid reason is surely that of purely private
need, the need of becoming oneself musically. As he
develops, any lively composer will, sooner or later, come
face to face with a blank wall, a dead end into which his
technique and his preconceptions have led him. Until
he has reached this point in his career, no matter how
brilliantly or rapidly he has advanced, he cannot have
attained that individuality which distinguishes him from
everybody else. He must either find his way out of this
situation or relax into oblivion and anonymity.

It is at this point that he must develop what Hinde-
mith calls ''the crown and glory of technique," which is
style, and no matter whose shoulders he is standing on,
what influences have gone into his style, what new tech
nical resources it may require for its realization, or what
thinking has conditioned his choice, the result will be a
new sound, called modern not because its component
parts are original in themselves, but because they have
been regulated to fit the needs of a single, special indi
vidual. Having arrived at this happy condition of being
himself, he will show what the theologian calls "the out
ward signs of an inward grace/' not because he has been
given this grace, but because he has had the courage to
fight for it, to conjure it out of his own mind, spirit, ex
perience and imagination.

PROGRESS IN MUSIC 69

Frequently, a generous composer, with missionary in
stincts and abundant good will, will attempt to lead
other composers, especially young or unformed ones,
through the whole process of development, including
the last stage. The unfortunate thing about this is that
lively people are difficult to lead. Like horses, they must
be broken before they can be made to submit to the
will of the master, and once this is realized, there is no
further hope for them. I suspect that people of real
talent have been destroyed by overzealous teaching, but
the small number which survives the process of indoc
trination is heartening.

A gifted composer must, ultimately, find himself
through his own resolution. This is why musical prog
ress, in the general sense, has only a superficial meaning
and might better be called a change in common practice,
based on the idioms and techniques of some powerful
figure and enjoyed by a coterie of composers who have
not yet been able to assert their individual wills on what
they know. Real progress is a private affair, concerning
only the individual composer and his art.

7

Herbert Read

PRIMITIVE ART AND MODERN MAN

The relations between primitive and modern art are as
old as the Eiffel Tower exactly, for the Eiffel Tower
was built to commemorate the Universal Exhibition of
1889, and at that exhibition there were numerous an
thropological objects which attracted the attention of the
artists of Paris, above all, of Gauguin. "It is great," said
Gauguin. "In the Java village there are Hindoo dances.
All the art of India can be seen there, and it is exactly
like the photos I have. I go there again on Thursday as
I have an appointment with a mulatto girl." Van Gogh
wrote to Emile Bernard:

There is something I am very sorry to have missed at the
Exposition, that is the collection of dwellings of all the
races. ... So could you, since you have seen it, give me an
impression of it, and especially a sketch with the colors of
the primitive Egyptian dwelling. ... In one of the illus
trated papers I saw a sketch of ancient Mexican dwellings,
they too seem to have been primitive and very beautiful.
Oh, if only one knew about those times and could paint the
people of those days who lived in such dwellingsthat
would be just as beautiful as Millet: I don't say as far as
color is concerned, but in character, as something significant,
as some.thing in which one has a solid faith.

This is eighteen years before Picasso painted Les
demoiselles d Avignon, and note what Van Gogh is say-

PRIMITIVE ART AND MODERN MAN 71

ing (and what Gauguin and Emile Bernard were think
ing at this time) namely, that primitive art is beautiful,
and that it is beautiful because it is primitive that be
cause it is primitive it has something which is sig
nificant, something in which one can have a solid faith.

Until that time, and indeed till long after that time,
anthropologists and ethnologists had been completely
blind to the aesthetic appeal of the objects which they
piled up in rich confusion in their museums. Their
favorite epithet for the description of such objects,
throughout the nineteenth century, is "crude/' and
"crude" I suspect they remain for most anthropologists,
who are not accustomed to give any scientific status at all
to aesthetic values. Frobenius, towards the end of the
nineteenth century, was probably the first anthropologist
to use the word "art" in connection with primitive peo
ples, and he did not lay much stress on it,

Robert Lowie, as late as 1925, is probably the first
anthropologist to recognize, in his own words, that "the
aesthetic impulse is one of the irreducible components
of the human mind ... a potent agency from the very
beginnings of human existence," though he quotes
Jochelson, whose work is unknown to me, as having
previously admitted this fact. But what I wish to empha
size is that the whole of this revaluation of primitive art
its very recognition as art was due to artists, and not
to scholars and scientists, who, in spite of their more
intimate knowledge of the material in question, re
mained obstinately purblind to its aesthetic qualities.

All this is matter of fact, and perhaps not very impor
tant. What is more interesting and debatable is the mo
tive underlying the recognition of the aesthetic value of
primitive art more than sixty years ago. Why did artists
in 1889 find primitive art not merely beautiful, but also
significant "something in which one has a solid faith?"
That, I take it, is the real problem.

I think there is little doubt that the answer to this

Some General Essays 7 2

question lies in the artist's revolt, conscious or uncon
scious, against the industrial civilization which, by the
third quarter of the nineteenth century, had become
such a hideous reality. In the case of Van Gogh and
Gauguin, European civilization was a "dismal swamp,"
corrupt beyond redemption. Gauguin deliberately
turned his back on it, and went to Tahiti to seek the
primitive reality. To a certain extent he found it, and
this is how he describes it:

A delight distilled from some indescribable sacred horror
which I glimpse of far off things. The odor of an antique
joy which I am breathing in the present. Animal shapes of
a statuesque rigidity: indescribably antique, august, and
religious in the rhythm of their gesture, in their singular
immobility. In the dreaming eyes is the overcast surface of
an unfathomable enigma.

In the case of Van Gogh the reaction was less conscious,
more introverted, and the end was madness. From the
asylum in St. R6my he wrote of his horror of life, but he
also wrote that he considered the artist's duty was to
think, not to dream, and he said of Bernard's and Gau
guin's paintings: "the thing about them is that they are
a sort of dream or nightmare that they are erudite
enough you can see that it is someone who is mad on
the primitives ..." and that gave him "a painful feel
ing of collapse instead of progress." But his own concen
tration on the visual was an escape from the civilization
around him as he said himself: "it is really at bot
tom fairly true that a painter as man is too much ab
sorbed by what his eyes see, and is not sufficiently master
of the rest of his life."

Van Gogh died just after 1889 which I have given as
the year in which the relations between primitive and
modern art began, so he does not really come into ques
tion. But Van Gogh is the father of that movement
known as Expressionism, and the Expressionists were to

PRIMITIVE ART AND MODERN MAN 73

become, twenty years later, the most consistent repre
sentatives of a primitive style in modern art. By a primi
tive style I mean a mode of expression more or less
directly influenced by primitive prototypes. Emil Nolde,
like Gauguin before him, actually visited the South Seas,
and there was the direct impact on other Expressionists,
such as Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein and Kirchner, of
Frobenius's publications, and of Carl Einstein's Neger-
plastik, published in Leipzig in 1915.

To return to France: I would like to suggest that there
was no break in development between the discovery of
primitive art in 1889 and its direct translation into
cubism from 1907 onwards. Gauguin went on painting
until 1903, and his works, of course, gained in influence
after his death. By 1904 we know that Vlaminck was
taking an interest in primitive art, and Vlaminck in
fected Derain with his enthusiasm, and Derain infected
Matisse. Both Matisse and Derain began to collect Negro
sculpture before 1907. Then came Les demoiselles
d f Avignon and a series of paintings, by Picasso, Braque,
Derain and others, which grew increasingly geometrical
in style, and finally, in other hands, emerged as cubism:
cubism analytical and synthetic, and then abstract and
uncontaminated by any representational element.

Meanwhile another development was taking place
which was to have its repercussions on modern art.
About the same time that Gauguin was discovering
primitive art, Freud was discovering the unconscious. I
have no documentary evidence of the first contact be
tween art and psychoanalysis, but I suspect that it took
place in Munich between 1908 and 1910. There is some
research to be done on this question, but I think it
would establish that both Kandinsky and Klee had some
knowledge of psychoanalysis before 1910, and certainly
the group of artists who assembled in Zurich on the out
break of war in 1914 and established the Dada group
were familiar with some of Freud's ideas. This group

Some General Essays 74

was presently taken up by a trained psychiatrist, Andre*
Breton, and from the interpretation of primitive art,
psychoanalysis, the poetry of Rimbaud and Lautrea-
mont, post-Hegelian philosophy and I know not what
else, the movement known as Surrealism was born.

The surrealists from the beginning took a serious and
indeed a scientific interest in all forms of primitive art,
and in Paris at any rate there was a close understanding
between the surrealist artists, the psychoanalysts, and the
anthropologists. The general effect of this was to reveal
a common basis, in the unconscious, for those irrational
forms of art in which the contemporary, no less than the
primitive man, felt impelled to express himself.

These historical considerations are perhaps unduly
pedantic, but the scope and complexity of the relations
between modern art and primitive art are not fully ap
preciated. I hope I have shown that it has not been a
superficial flirtation; that on the contrary there has
grown up, over a period of sixty years, an intimate con
nection which, on the one hand, has led to a revaluation
of ethnological material, a great portion of which has
now been rescued from the scientific lumber-room and
elevated to a worthy place among the creative achieve
ments of mankind; and on the other hand has given to
the modern artist a new mode of expression which he
finds in accordance with his emotional or spiritual needs.
And that brings me to my last point.

I might be criticised for using the word "Angst"
(anguish) in this context, and for suggesting that the
similarities which exist between certain types of primi
tive art and certain types of modern art are due to a
common psychological condition. Let me try to make
my meaning clear. It seems to me beyond doubt that
the trend of modern art away from representational
realism and towards some degree of abstraction or sym
bolism is but a reflection of those philosophical and
religious trends which, themselves no doubt determined

PRIMITIVE ART AND MODERN MAN 75

or at any rate intimately related to economic trends,
have led mankind into a state of religious unbelief, of
psychological imbalance, and social unrest. If there is
one word which succinctly defines the universal condi
tion of mankind today, it is the word insecurity mental
insecurity, social insecurity, metaphysical insecurity.

I am not going to suggest that the same or a similar
word can be used to characterize primitive man. This
term is far too inclusive for our purposes, and we need
some classification of primitive races before we can
venture to generalise about their metaphysical character
istics. But there exists that general division to which I
have already referred that between primitive races
whose art is naturalistic, and primitive races whose art
is geometrical or symbolic. It is roughly, as I have said,
the distinction between paleolithic art and neolithic art,
between what is usually called bushman art and what is
usually called Negro art. At this point I would quite
sincerely ask for the anthropologist's guidance, because
it does seem to me that we lack any thorough correla
tion of types of religion and types of art. I am assuming,
however, that such a correlation would reveal a parallel
between religions of fear, terror, propitiation and retri
bution to which would correspond arts of symbolic or
geometric tendency; and between religions of ritual and
sympathetic magic based on a belief in the beneficence
of nature and the gods to which would correspond a
naturalistic or representational art.

If such a correspondence does in fact show itself
throughout the history of mankind, then it is very easy to
explain the return of the modern artist to forms of art
similar to those we call "primitive." The reason lies in
mankind's return to a "primitive" state of mind. To call
the state of mind of a contemporary existentialist "prim
itive" is perhaps paradoxical; but when the existentialist
(and we must remember that he represents the up-to-
date Christian theologist as well as the up-to-date atheist

Some General Essays 76

philosopher) when the existentialist begins to talk
about the anguish or uneasiness which overcomes him
when he faces up to the problem of man's cosmic pre
dicament, he is merely using elaborate linguistic signs
to describe the same feelings which overcome primitive
men, but which they can only express in emotive sym
bols. Similarly, the modern artist, not being an adept in
philosophical verbalization, is reduced to expressing
himself in concrete symbols that is to say, in works of
art that are the objective correlate of his inner emotional
tensions. Modern man, and the modern artist in particu
lar, is no mere eclectic monkey, trying to imitate for
his occasional amusement the artifacts of primitive races;
on the contrary, he is, spiritually speaking, in a tough
spot himself. The more honest he is with himself, the
more resolutely he rejects traditional forms and worn
counters of expression, and the more nearly, and the
more unconsciously, he finds himself expressing himself
in a manner which bears a real and no longer superficial
resemblance to so-called "primitive" art.

77

Robert Richman

THE MASTERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

It is perhaps one of the main paradoxes, and certainly
the most interesting one in the modern art movement,
that the basic aim of its leaders was to destroy the master
piece theory and along with it the concept of the master
in their attempt to refocus attention both of the artist
and of the critical audience onto the work of art itself.
Yet few if any periods in history are marked with more
"masters" in any given fifty years, or few gave more
adoration to its masters. All of them helped to form
the modern theories as they worked at their art; and
some few of them, instead of courting notoriety as
Picasso has done, actually have tried and preferred to
let the work of art and not their special personality be
shown and known. To name some of these, without any
attempt to evaluate their order or merit Cezanne,
Braque, Gabo, Henry Moore, Picasso, Mondrian, Yeats,
Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, Hindemith, Bartok,
Stravinsky, Schoenberg and his school, Frank Lloyd
Wright and Le Corbusier.

It is more important to place these artists in their
age, in relation to one another, in relation to the springs
of art from which they stream, rather than to see them
individually or to pass judgment on the excellence and
value of their single or several works; for, to begin
with, in no age in the history of art in so short a period

Some General Essays 7&

as half a century has the interrelatedness o the several
arts been so actual, so inherent, or so importantly
marked by a conscious theory of art, not even in the
Renaissance, nor in Byzantium. Though this interre
latedness did signify two great periods of art the Sung
Dynasty of China of the ninth to twelfth centuries and
the Middle Ages of Western Europe from the late tenth
through the thirteenth centuries. In these two great
epochs of art, however, roughly 300 years were afforded
the slow evolution of Sung or Mediaeval art, whereas less
than fifty years were consumed in the swift revolt of
Modern art.

In fact, it is precisely these two periods the Sung and
the Mediaeval to which most of the twentieth century
masters turned for part of their theory and a portion of
their craft and technique. It is easy to see in modern
literature in the English language, the turn to the Mid
dle Ages for theory and practice (Eliot and Joyce to
Dante and the Scholastics; Yeats to Byzantium); but it
is easier to trace, in the visual and manual arts in Eng
land, the return under the aegis of Ruskin and Morris
to the Pre-Raphaelites. It is noteworthy that Paul Hinde-
mith and Bela Bartok have turned to the Gregorian
Chant and to folk music; and that Hindemith especially
has gone back there by the way of Scholasticism. Re
cently Mr. Hindemith was converted to Roman Cathol
icism in a way reminiscent of Mr. Eliot's conversion to
Anglo-Catholicism. Each seemed in the analysis of aes
thetic problems to confront religion, as Mr. Eliot with
letters did in The Sacred Wood then so Mr. Hindemith
with music did in A Composer's World. And by this
I do not mean to imply a parallel.

Whereas Yeats' use of the Ideal he called Byzantium
is explicitly stated in two of his poems "Byzantium"
and "Sailing to Byzantium" and underlies A Vision,
the use Naum Gabo, the Constructivist sculptor, has
made of Byzantium in his work is hidden in his blood-

THE MASTERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 79

stream and suggests that certain of his constructed
sculptures were born from the impingement upon his
senses of the Russian Icons which he saw almost daily
in his boyhood and youth, and from the architecture of
the village in inner Eastern Russia, where he was born.
Since admittedly great artists do not borrow from the
art of others or other civilizations, but rather take from
it, one may not expect to find their admissions; and I
would tend to doubt any direct admission on the grounds
that Shakespeare did not know when he stole from Mon
taigne, specifically because he was more attuned to
fusing words and images into poetry than he was to the
study of influences of the French essayists on the English
poets in the Age of Elizabeth I.

Equally indirect yet also equally important has been
the influence of the Chinese, largely the Sung of
scroll paintings, of drawings, and of pottery upon the
work of Cezanne, Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Moore
and Bernard Leach, the English potter. The Sung artists
believed that a work of art should grow from the inside,
the germ evolving into the large finished form or, as
Mr. Wright demands, that a house should grow organ
ically from the nucleus out to the finished landscape
surrounding the home. Sung artists also placed primary
emphasis upon the excellence of the execution of a
work of art not in the restrictive and polished formal
manner but in the manner of the way in which the
brush strokes showed not only a skill in control but
a spirit of freedom as well. And the final ideal of the
Sung artists was that the materials should delimit the
form.

It is in pottery, one of the absolutes of abstract art,
and in England, that the modern movement in the arts
has had a continuity from the days of William Morris;
and it is in the crafts and again in England that the
influence of the Middle Ages and the influence of the
Sung Dynasties meet. The descent is from the theories

Some General Essays 80

of Ruskin the philosopher, through Morris the designer,
to Edward Johnston the letterer, to Eric Gill the stone
mason, to Bernard Leach and the late T. S. Haile
the potters. These theories have come full circle in
the writings of Herbert Read, who bespeaks Ruskin, the
Middle Ages, and the Sung, and whose theories helped
to shape the present generation of designers and archi
tects in England, especially the town planners who try
to make the new England of the International style blend
into the old England of Tudor and Georgian houses,
as in the works of Lionel Brett, the architect and plan
ner.

All these Sung influences were deep, and hidden, and
major (they merged in the early igsos with the Mediae
val or echoed it); these influences had to do with the way
a man held his pen to paper, his chisel to stone, or his
hand to the clay; not only this but how his materials
were treated with simple respect and allowed to take
shape organically, as dew forms on the branch of a tree,
rather than for the materials to be poured into some
mold or pattern which had been handed down from
the Renaissance without so much as a question being
asked by maker or by user whether or not the design
of the water pump on the farm, for instance, or the
bathtub in a fashionable Fifth Avenue home, or the
legs of a very old Singer sewing machine really did have
to look like Renaissance grillwork found on the gate
of a late sixteenth century Italian formal garden. The
concept that form follows function, materials express
form, and line follows formso peculiarly the property
of architectural theory since the days of Louis Sullivan's
Kindergarten Chats^ these men in England were learn
ing daily. And they had allowed their fingers to memo
rize the lesson and to turn the theory into their daily
involuntary habits of execution be it the chair of Morris,
the lettering of Johnston, the stone carving of Gill, or
the bowls of Leach.

THE MASTERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

8l

Moreover, these influences have shown up persistently
and beautifully in the best of modern architects in
America, especially in their use of native materials,
where Frank Lloyd Wright stands with his mantle on
his shoulders apart from and beyond the movement. The
Sung ideal imprinted itself forever in Wright's conscious
ness when he lived in Japan in the early part of the
century and learned the importance of materials and
techniques to a concept of form, both as they were
united in the native module architecture of Japan, which
he was to take in the special and privileged way artists
must have and was to make into his own, and from the
Sung standard as Buddhist Japan had altered and theo
rized upon it. Moreover a literary and ethical tradition
influenced Wright's architecture: the Sung ideals and
standards were known and used by Emerson, Thoreau
and Whitman: and from their Easternized writings
Wright obtained much for his theory and sermons on
architecture. In more than one sense, then, Wright is
surely Emerson's self-reliant and transcendentally Ideal
Man turned practicing architect.

The most salutary of all the uses of the past seems to
me to be that which Cezanne made of the Sung stand
ard: it shows itself most subtilely and most beautifully
in those late landscapes which occupied Cezanne so
much of his time from 1890 to his death in 1906. One
thinks of "La Montagne Sainte-Victoire" and "La Mon-
tagne Sainte-Victoire, vue du chemin des lauves" in
which his stroke is calligraphic and the color areas es
sentially make of the landscape a new and real creation
on the canvas a created work of painterly art in which
nature is not represented but transformed. And the
combinations of colors and strokes evoke that sense of
imminence behind the visible in nature which the Sung
painters made to be synonymous with God. The latter
of these two paintings of Cezanne provides the actual
link between the "new realism" and "analytic cubism"

Some General Essays 82

in that long progression from Manet through Seurat
to Cezanne and Gauguin to Braque, even though to look
at a Manet on one wall of the gallery and then at a
Braque on another would never indicate a lineal descent
and certainly not in a mere 30 years. But surely too
Cezanne handed on the tradition of French classical
painting to the generation who followed him improved,
brightened, and not diminished by the use of Sung
methods. And his brush was picked up by Braque, who
uses it in the classical manner for a more organic ab
stract art.

To determine the manner in which the master made
use of his tradition had been the occupation ordinarily
of the philosophersof Aristotle discussing Sophocles'
use of Homer. But the twentieth century masters have
themselves primarily been discussing the manner of
using their traditions. In an age such as ours when the
major artists were in open revolt against the machine
age and the mechanization of life it forced upon us, or
when these artists are involved in another variety of
open revolt against the authority of national, monarchial
or totalitarian governments and regimes, or when the
artists themselves are revolting against their immediate
forebears as Yeats threw off the Lord Tennyson the
problem of the artist using his tradition is an intricate
one.

In the main, there has been a most conscious use of
the Mediaeval tradition, with an emphasis on the doc
trine of economy which in art pronounces that the least
means shall be used to achieve the greatest end. In the
work of Eliot and Hindemith where they connect with
the past there seems to be a continuous system of roots,
some deep, some near the topsoil yet ever growing far
down and back into the past. For Eliot, the main roots
go to Dante, the legends of the Holy Grail, Spenser,
Shakespeare, Donne, Dryden, Coleridge, Arnold, and
James root by root through the succession of centuries

THE MASTERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY j

from the thirteenth to the twentieth; for Hindemith,
the roots are in Gregorian Chant, Orlandus Lassus,
Josquin des Pres, J. S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Men
delssohn, Brahms and Max Reger. If Eliot and Hinde
mith make use of the bone structure and the nervous
system of the tradition of European literature or music,
Stravinsky and Picasso and the Surrealists took the
voluptuous flesh and senses from that tradition of music
and painting. One can distinguish this tendency largely
in their attitude towards form, as a contrived surface.

The Surrealist painters could take over a Bosch land
scape and his gnomic colony without having any more
than a mild surface likeness to Bosch; the mystic cult
of flesh worshippers which barbed Bosch into his half
real, half ritualistic Millennium triptych was not the
motivation nor the purpose of the Surrealists who copied
him. Again the better approach in Surrealism was that
of the painter Yves Tanguy, whose imagery was per
sonal but whose methods stemmed from his own French
tradition of classical painting-no copy here of Bosch
or Breughel or Grunewald. The eclecticism of the poorer
Surrealists was merely to use Bosch molds instead of
Corot molds; and even though it is evidence of better
taste to prefer Bosch to Corot, the Surrealists were still
pouring plaster into molds and only the molds were
different. This is the exact opposite of the Sung standard.

In music, it is especially in his neo-classicism that
Stravinsky does parallel the Surrealistic. Stravinsky's
writing is full of little ideas and mannerisms taken from
Pergolesi, reshaped in the prefabricated molds of Mozart,
as in The Rake's Progress, and dressed with smartly
dissonant harmony and sensitive orchestration. In his
non-classical work, Stravinsky creates synthetic primitive
music as in The Rite of Spring, synthetic Mediaeval
music as in his Mass which is based on Mauchault's Mass,
synthetic Baroque as in the Septet, and synthetic Roman
ticism as in Appolon Musagete. In all of these facets of

Some General Essays 4

Stravinsky's work, the primary accomplishment and
unifying element is his concern with surface.

Bartok used primitive rhythms as the foundation of
his new and exciting idiom and often of his form, the
primitive influences having been assimilated and re-
expressed in a music that is integrally primitive in
rhythm, autogenetic in line, and thus modern in form
and idiom. Picasso on the other hand was equally adroit
and expert in painting as though he were an African
Primitive, or ancient Altamira muralist in a cave in
Paris, or a Degas with elongations and a blue palette; or
a Catalonian painter; or a Hellenic linear draftsman; or
a Cubist or a Surrealist. To list these is not to denigrate
Picasso; it is merely to show one use of the past, and I
think an inferior eclecticism. But in his great Guernica,
all of his various styles and technics were fused into an
essentially integrated style and form. The same is true
to lesser degrees in his other better works; yet he can
turn back to mimicry at once when he is confronted
with pottery and unashamedly will decorate a jug as
though it were a painter's canvas even if the shape were
that of a water bag. However, in more recent years
Picasso, in the presence of the ancient tradition of pot
tery at Vallauris in France, has come to understand
form in pottery, to respect it, and to submit his person
ality to the artifact, all of which is to the credit of this
vital and enigmatic master.

We are back again to pottery and the utensils and the
furniture, and the house, and the implements of living,
as it were, man's everyday art. It is one of the most sig
nificant merits of the age to show that the concern for
a better poetry or a better music is meaningless unless
those who make and design the "everyday art" have
similar aims and similar standards. Thus Morris and
Ruskin and Alvar Aalto, the Finnish furniture designer,
and James Prestini, who turns wooden bowls on his
lathe, are brothers in kind in this revival of the Medi-

THE MASTERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 85

aeval and Sung standards treatment of materials and
respect for organic forms both in architecture and poetry,
knives and forks, monuments and murals, pots and
pans, or tragedy. It was once so in Sung China. And it
must always be that this single standard cannot be laid
on by hands from above, nor achieved by a legislation
nor by any other prescriptive order either from the
heads of church or state. It comes from artists working
with a singleness of purpose on the lowest level and a
single aesthetic for judgment on the highest.

In the best of the art of the past, the singleness of pur
pose and the single standard of aesthetics for utensils or
for poetry was the product not of an academy's rules nor
any other such prescription: it flowered from a central
philosophy where the oneness was to be chosen from,
freely by the fortunate artist as he might have chosen
his next breath. The important condition for the artist
was that a unity existed between his religion, his gov
ernment, his philosophy and his aesthetics.

Although in the twentieth century there is not the
unity of these four as it would seem there was in the
Greece of Plato, or in the Christian Middle Ages of
Aquinas, there is today a unity of a special kind: it is in
the very philosophic investigations themselves trying to
establish what is reality? how does the ideal differ from
the real? or the real from the actual? The philosophic
systems of Whitehead and Maritain who oppose those of
the positivists and their herald, Wittgenstein, seem to
have a more direct influence on the major artists today,
who also seek to find the answers to such questions as
what is real? what is art? what is form? what is illusion
in a line, a word, a color, or a shape? In short, what is
the bird Brancusi liberated from the cold stone?

The revolutionary change in all design related to
architecture and town planning art in industry, in ob
jects for everyday use, and in advertising lay-out and
graphic design is everywhere apparent. School children

Some General Essays 86

recognize and usually like the International style in
jet planes as well as in the United Nations Secretariat
Building. Much of this is the result of the influence of
Mondrian, the painter, and Naum Gabo, the constructi-
vist sculptor. Only a comparison of one of Mondrian's
late compositions in primary colors with the flat painter
ly facade of a Le Corbusier building in Paris or of The
Column, 1923 by Gabo or his Spheric Theme, igjj
with the industrial architecture of the nuclear fission
plants is needed to see their influence. But in a rec
iprocity, unobtainable by agreements yet special to the
realm of art, Mondrian and Gabo were also influenced
and refined by the best architects and designers it is
as though their own ideas were rayed out to architecture
and refined in the process of being reflected back into
their special genius. The same interplay exists between
geometric abstract painting and sculpture and the well-
designed fork we eat with.

This concern for dignity and economy of form, and
for cleanliness of line, motivated the "geometric abstract
art" of Mondrian and Gabo, Le Corbusier and the de
signers who work in the International style. As a corol
lary, there was another type of artist who mixed a deep
concern for his materials with a respect for the organic
growth of form in art; and Henry Moore, the English
sculptor, as much as Frank Lloyd Wright, or Cezanne, or
Braque is the master who has evolved another theory
of abstract art it is an "organic abstract art/* In one of
the finest uses of the Sung standard, Moore abstracts
the form from his materials in a manner that is the
direct opposite from the contrived surfaces of Stravinsky.
The particular shape of Moore's Reclining Figure, 1946
was determined by allowing the form to evolve out of
the large elm log on the pattern of the grain lines of
the wood; with modifications and adjustments to chalk
on paper, even Moore's drawings have a special grain
in their evolution of form.

THE MASTERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 87

Of all arts, literature was the most introspective in
the half century for indeed there was not only the search
for the proper form in poetry or fiction, for the central
language, or for the words and rhythms of common
speech; but there was a constant and evergrowing written
record a body of critical essays, theories, diaries and
confessions laid before us.

In all of the other arts, there has been a real preoccu
pation with a theory of art, but it has not rubbed off
onto the practice of that art: theorists of architecture
or of painting or of music are far outnumbered by the
architects, the painters and the composers per se. In the
literature written in English this century beginning
with Henry James and with the exception of Yeats and
Hardy continuing through Eliot and Joyce, who wove
his theory into his fiction, it has been the custom among
the first rank of authors in America and in England
to compound their creative roles with critical roles.

Of more than unusual interest, and uniqueness other
wise, is the fact that in one artist the three characteristic
concerns of all artists in the twentieth century were
made carnate. Henry James was perpetually concerned
with what he called "the central authority 5 *; that is to
say, through whom is the fiction to flow out of the story
(the illusion) and into the conscious experience of the
reader (the reality)? a debate, as it were, with the whole
tradition of the novel. This debate with slight variations
of terms and conditions appropriate and special each to
his art, Hindemith, Cezanne, Eliot and Gabo each has
held on other platforms. In the age of James, no other
artist had a more pervading nor more conscientious sense
of the role and the responsibility of the artist. None has
ever probed further the remote caves and reaches of
language as the materials of his art. And all this at a most
unlikely time in the history of the arts: in the very
teeth of Zola and the naturalistic novel; of Pater or
Wilde and art for art's sake; of Howells and the Back

Some General Essays 88

Bay Brahmins; of Hardy and the determinists; and the
prophets and priests of the New Science.

The influence of James must surely be felt, even if
only by indirection, by whatever literate artist addresses
himself to his art. James did not allow his criticism to
interfere with his writing of fiction. Nor has Eliot, who
under the influence of James, it seems to me, wrote that
very special essay "Tradition and The Individual Tal
ent." Eliot has been concerned with language and form
really more than with questions of belief; he has al
ways sought to write the most economical line approxi
mating the language of the best in everyday speech. And
with The Wasteland, Ash Wednesday and The Four
Quartets, Mr. Eliot has shown concern with the music
of each line in these long poems and the same concern
for the music of the whole poem: each line seems to
generate from the line before and evolve into the next;
all lines then relate to each other and to the whole which
approximates the form of music itself. Eliot thus broke
the back of the English stanza. In his experiment both
with the language of speech and with the autogenetic
form, Mr. Eliot is facing two of the stalwart antagonists
in the tradition of all literature: to keep a conscious con
trol over the language and to force it into a formal con
trivance as variegated as the Four Quartets. He does
this in some of the most singing lines in poetry in Eng
lishall this in the metaphysical wrestle with the ques
tion of what is reality.

But the real "intolerable wrestle with words and
meanings" was not Eliot's but James Joyce's. He took
the whole of tradition as his province the historic and
the primordial, the conscious and the unconscious. And
all in an attempt to do this: not only to make form equal
idea in literature; not only to make materials equal
form; but to make materials be idea. He had hoped,
in the major but lovely failure of the twentieth century
Finnegans Wake to let structure conform to the imag-

THE MASTERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 89

mative patterns, the rational patterns, and the biological
patterns which inhere in the mind consciousness itself,
association, recall, memory, reverie; in short he tried to
extract out of the very word conform the root word
form, so that neither the extraction nor the word would
be noticed, so that the reality we read is coidentical with
the reality of Joyce's being as he was actually writing
Finnegans Wake and by substitution with the reality of
Mankind.

THE ARTS IN FRANCE

93

Henri Peyre

THE FRENCH NOVEt AT M I D - C E N T U R Y

There have been few periods when the novel in France
was richer than it is today, and the age of Proust, Mau-
riac, Martin du Card, after World War I, was perhaps
one of them, but there have been many eras when the
estate of fiction was much lower. There is much that is
significant and even more that is promising in the crop
which has matured since 1940. The difficulty is to avoid
strings of names and titles and at the same time not to
remain too vague in one's generalizations.

World War II and its climate of tragedy and of an
guish threw a number of writers, alive or dead, among
the uninfluentials. Their works are museum pieces for
the young. Duhamel, Romains, Morand, Maurois are
among those. Gide is admired for much more than his
fiction. Proust towers above the French novel of the
century. Next to him, Mauriac, another Nobel prize
winner, is respected; but he, like Montherlant, has
turned to the drama or that favorite French art-form,
the moralist's essay. Among the writers who have had a
public since 1930, four are intensely alive today. Mal-
raux, whose novels were prophetic and helped mold, if
not events, at least the significance they have assumed
for us; Bernanos, to whom the world was a spiritual
struggle between saints and sinners, God's grace and
Satan's wiles; Giono, who forsook his former manner of

The Arts in France 94

a pagan poet and of a preacher of natural life and has
become a less ambitious story-teller; Julien Green,
whose Moira is one of the good novels of violence of the
last few years. He, too, seems at present to have been
lured to the stage.

A few other novelists, whose audience had gathered
very slowly before World War II and who are all over
fifty years old, have enjoyed a recrudescence of activity
and of fame: Bosco, the author of somewhat artificial,
but poetically written, stories of mystery set among
Southern French peasants, and Jouhandeau, who has far
more stark power and has portrayed, in the ruthless
manner of an incisive Catholic, the shabby comedy of
little towns and the bitter sorrows of married life.
Marcel Aym and Queneau are the masters of laughter
in modern French letters: the first often spoils his gift
for story-telling and his fertile inventiveness through a
somewhat cheap facility which he seems unable to resist;
the second is a humorous and brilliant renovator of the
French language.

The younger generation, including the writers now in
their twenties, thirties or forties, can only be judged on
its promise and a limited achievement, for the war years
and the economic difficulties which they left in their
wake delayed the maturing of the new talents. A few
events impressed these novelists unforgettably and ex
plain their moods, their tone and their hopes: the abject
defeat of France in 1940 and her sense of bitter isola
tion, individual and national; the guilt complex gnaw
ing at the French today, as a consequence of the col
laboration with the conqueror which a number of
writers accepted; the spiritual anguish and the moral
dilemma which preceded the decision of those who
joined the Resistance and faced the prospect of torture
and slow death. Lastly, the French have lived in a state
of inflation, hence of insecurity and lack of faith in their
future, ever since 1918, and these conditions are re-

THE FRENCH NOVEL AT MID-CENTURY 95

fleeted in. the mirror of their fiction, for the reader who
can interpret them aright.

There are twenty or thirty novelists under fifty who
count, and no one can say as yet which of them will rise
markedly in stature. Three are well known in this coun
try: Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus. The first
two are very important novelists, in spite of some limita
tions which critics have ruthlessly exaggerated.

Next to these, a group of novelists haunted by meta
physical unrest, eager to portray and to cure human
misery, could be, conveniently but rather artificially,
formed. Genet, the inmate of prisons and the singer of
evil and of homosexuality, is the most gifted; Blanchot
is the most profound, a sort of Mallarman creator of
fiction; Beckett has been acclaimed as a combination of
Joyce and Kafka, and not unworthily of either. Abellio
and Rebatet, former collaborators with Germany, have
written inordinately long, confused volumes which,
however, impose upon the reader their own universe.
Gadenne, Marcel Schneider and Henri Thomas are, in
our opinion, among the lesser-known ones, the most
earnest, most imaginative and most promising of these
novelists of inquietude, solitude, and anguish.

A second group should be made up of the story-tellers,
who write vividly, sketch characters and contrive a plot
with skill and joy, eschew ideas and repress emotions
under an incisive and ironical manner which is the tone
of the new post-war generation. They have hailed Sten
dhal and, even more, Laclos, as their models. The most
gifted of these novelists are: Nimier and 'Gary, both are
picaresque; Bazin (Viper in the Fist), Dutourd (A Dog's
Head), Vailland (prole de jeu) } and Cabanis (L'Age in-
graf), more analytical and incisive; Brincourt (The Para
dise below the Stairs and especially La Farandole), more
lucidly intimate and tender.

Two other groups at least should be mentioned. Con
temporary France, for the first time, has a large number

The Arts in France 96

of very gifted women-novelists, ranging from Marguerite
Yourcenar (Memoires d'Hadrieri), Marguerite Duras
(The Sea Wall) to Dominique Rolin, Violette Leduc,
and the youngest of them all, Fran^oise Mallet, whose
The Illusionist, written at twenty, was an amazing first
novel, only rivalled by the d6but, at nineteen, of the
author of The Awakening, J. B. Rossi. North African
writers have suddenly brought an original note to
French literature, a note of impetuous vigor, a less re
fined and less introspective but more buoyant and even
more moral talent: Camus is the best-known of them,
followed closely by Robins (Cela s'appelle I'aurore is one
of the very good recent novels), Mammeri, Mouloudji,
Merle, Jules Roy, and a promising newcomer from
Tunisia, Memmi (La Statue de sel).

To all these novelists, the technique of fiction, once
dear to successors of Flaubert, Henry James and Joyce,
seems to offer little of interest. They have ably assimi
lated the lessons of Joyce, Kafka, Dos Passos, and Faulk
ner. Content is their concern: they are obsessed by
man's solitude, the inadequacy of all communication
and of language, life's absurdity. Yet they are not ni
hilists, not even pessimists, Three phrases might sum
up their common and intense preoccupation: to de
nounce bad faith and build only upon sincerity and
authenticity; to explode the delusions and conventions
of romantic and bourgeois love and accept eroticism or
sex as a basis for a new ethics and a truer companionship
between the sexes; to reach out to other men, revaluate
fraternity and our responsibility to help save the world,
through literature. They echo Camus' motto: "We re
fuse to despair of men/'

97

Wallace Fowlie

MID-CENTURY FRENCH POETRY

At the turn of the mid-century, French poetry is still
fully engaged in one of the richest periods of its long
history. Its roots are essentially in symbolism and in
the achievements of poetry between Les Fleurs du Mai
of Baudelaire (1857) and the death of Mallarme (1898).
Especially in France the creative spirit has always been
fully conscious of its heritage, of its belonging to the
past, of its role destined to continue and perfect a
tradition.

During the past fifty years, the youngest and the oldest
poets have been proud of the fact that the art of poetry
has enjoyed an extraordinary prestige. The wealth of
modern French poetry and its high quality have jealously
preserved this prestige. More than the novel and more
than drama, poetry has continued to renew itself. Only
perhaps the realm of literary criticism has been pro
ductive to a similar degree, and the most vital books
of criticism have considered the problems of poetry and
poets.

The half-century has been dominated by four major
writers, all born around 1870, and who have reached
now the status of classical writers. Two of these are
prose writers: Proust and Gide; and two are poets:
Val6ry and Claudel. Their common background was
symbolism. They were initiated into literature by the

The Arts in France 98

stimulation, the achievements and the manifestoes of
symbolism. Each reacted to symbolism in his own way
and according to his own purposes. They are the most
illustrious members of the oldest generation still writing.
The combined influences of Mallarm6 and Rimbaud
have proved more permanent and more vital than any
others in the twentieth century.

The word "purity/' a concept with which modern
poetry is permeated, is associated primarily with Mal-
larm, with the doctrine he expounded on Tuesday
evenings for so many years (1880-1898) in his apartment
on the rue de Rome. There his most brilliant disciple,
Paul Val&y (1871-1945) listened in his early twenties to
Mallarm's conversations on poetry. The leading sym
bols of Mallarm's purity: his virgin princess H&rodiade;
his faun, more interested in his own ecstasy than in the
nymphs; his swan caught in the ice of the lake all reap
pear, changed but fully recognizable, in the leading sym
bols of Val^ry's poetry: his Narcissus, the contempla
tion of self pushed to its mortal extreme; his Jeune
Parque and his marine cemetery.

La Jeune Parque, which may well be Val&y's great
est poern, composed during the war years (1914-1917),
reflects in no way the event of the war. This poem, with
the major poems of Mallarm, with Les Illuminations
of Rimbaud and the early prose pieces of Gide, treat so
pervasively the theme of solitude and detachment that
they create a new mythology of poetic purity and human
absence. It is poetry anxious to live alone for itself and
by itself. It is poetry of exile, written outside of the
social sphere. It bears no relationship to a society or to
a world which might be comparable to the bond between
the tragedies of Racine and the monarchy of Louis XIV.

After writing his poetry of exile, Rimbaud lived in
exile in the deserts and cities and mountainous regions
of Abyssinia. The same need for voyage and solitude
was felt by Paul Claudel, who has always claimed Rim-

MID-CENTURY FRENCH POETRY 99

baud as his master in poetry, as the writer who revealed
to him the presence of the supernatural in the world.
Rimbaud's greatest ambition was to move beyond litera
ture and poetry, and this has been realized to some de
gree by Claudel, whose vocation as poet has always been
subordinated to his role as apologist of Catholicism. The
entire universe is the site of the Christian drama for
Claudel. The form of his verset is reminiscent of the
rhythms in Les Illuminations. He continues Rimbaud's
Dionysian turbulence, whereas Valry, in his more chas
tened, more classical style, represents, with Mallarm6,
the Apollonian tradition.

The second generation of poets were those men born
at the end of the century. On the whole, they partici
pated in the experience of World War I much more
directly than the generation of Valery and Claudel. This
group of writers, particularly in the years after the war,
demonstrated a changed attitude toward the role and
the activity of the writer. The poet was for them a far
less exalted being than he had been for Mallarm and
Rimbaud. The excessive intellectualism and aestheti-
cism of the late symbolist period were drastically modi
fied and diminished.

The experience of the war and the rise of the cinema
were only two of the many new forces which were shap
ing the younger poets at that time. Surrealism was the
most significant literary movement in France between
symbolism and existentialism. Its leading spirit and
theorist was Andr Breton who even since World War
II has made attempts to revive surrealism as an organized
movement. But most of the poets who at one time or
another adhered to the tenets of surrealism are today
writing poetry that is no longer strictly surrealist.

Breton and Benjamin P6ret have remained closest to
the beliefs and practices of orthodox surrealism. Pret
took part in the Civil War in Spain, and has been living
in Mexico since 1952. He was perhaps the best satirist

The Arts in France 100

of the group, the closest spiritual descendant of Alfred
Jarry, whose Ubu-Roi, of 1896, was a major text for the
surrealists. Some of the purest of the surrealist poets
have died: Crevel, whose suicide was interpreted as an
act of heroism; Desnos, a victim of a German concentra
tion camp; Artaud, who spent the last nine years of his
life in an insane asylum; Paul Eluard who appears to
day a greater Resistance poet than Aragon.

The miracle of Eluard's work is the extremes it con
tains and the ease with which he moves from one ex
treme to the other, from the poet's solitude, from his
deep and secret intimacy, to his sense of communion
with everyone, to his civic hope. His solitude is his
generosity. His sense of the collective comes from what
is most individual in him. He is the poet of love, in one
of its highest forms, love which will not allow a man
to remain within himself.

Several important poets who wrote during the decade
of surrealism and have continued to write since that
time, had no formal connection with any literary school.
Jouve in recent years has grown into a poet of great in
fluence. His universe of catastrophe is described in
poetry of a lofty Christian inspiration. Since 1940, St-
John Perse has lived in the United States where he
wrote Exile j one of the profoundest statements on the
war. Jean Cocteau has written poetry intermittently
throughout his career. He remains one of the most gifted
poets of his generation, even if the signal success in his
other genres: theatre, cinema, criticism, has somewhat
detracted from his position of poet.

Henri Michaux has enlarged the domain of poetry.
The character he has created, Plume, is the type of
innocent who never escapes the violence and the cruelty
of the world. He is innocent but he is tormented by a
sense of guilt. A comparison of Plume with the char
acters of Kafka has often been pointed out, but there is
a greater struggle in the Kafka characters than in Plume

MID-CENTURY FRENCH POETRY 1O1

who accepts whatever happens to him as part of his fate.

Prevert is probably the most widely read of the French
poets today. But more important than his poetry is his
writing for the cinema. Les Visiteurs du Soir and Les
Enfants du Paradis are two of his outstanding successes.
Ren Char, born in 1906, is one of the best poets of
the south. He first allied himself with surrealism and
has always retained in his subsequent poetry the boldness
and profusion of imagery one associates with surrealism.
He was maquis captain in Provence at the end of the
war and has written movingly in his poetry of his war
experience.

The third and youngest generation of poets writing in
France at the turn of the mid-century is more dramat
ically allied with action, with the war and the Resist
ance, than the poets of the other two generations. Sartre
defined the new literature as being "engaged," and this
term applies to the poetry of this generation so directly
concerned with actual circumstances and events. The
greatness of Jouve (who chronologically belongs to the
previous generation) brilliantly illustrates this use of
the immediate event in poetry. Pierre Emmanuel has
written generously of his admiration for Jouve and of
the influence which Jouve's poetry has had on his own.
One of Emmanuel's noteworthy achievements is the
vigor he has given to poetry of a well-defined subject
matter. His mingling, for example, of the Orpheus
theme with the redemptive power of Christ is in one of
his early works, where the mystery of man is not sepa
rated from the mystery of the exterior world.

The ambition of this youngest generation has been,
in general, to recall the poet to reality, after the long
experimentation of poetry with language, with the sym
bol, with the hieratic role of the poet. The new writer
has felt a greater desire for communication, for im
mediate communication with the reader. On the whole,
he is less subjective than the earlier poets. He appro-

The Arts in France 102

priates the common basis of world events and world
problems for his verse.

Existentialism, as a literary movement, has not de
veloped any poets, with the possible exception of Francis
Ponge, on whose work Sartre himself has written a long
essay. Ponge's first important publication was in 1942,
Le Parti Pris des Choses, a work of great rigor and
objectivity, and one completely lacking in any subjec
tive lyricism. Although Raymond Queneau, born in
1903, has written principally and prolifically in the
domain of the novel, he is also a poet. His central pre
occupation with language, with what he considers a
needed revolution in language, places him centrally
among the poets. His influence is wide, exceeded only
by the more massive influence of a writer like Sartre.
By advocating the reintegration of the vitality of spoken
language, each book of his is a "stylistic exercise." In
the freedom of composition he practices, he is often
reminiscent of surrealism with which he was in fact at
first associated.

These, then, are some of the most representative of
the three generations of French poets writing in the
early fifties. During the tragic years of the war and the
German occupation of France, the poets reached a larger
audience than usual At the grave moments of history,
humanity is wont to turn to its poets in order to re
consider man's fate, to understand more profoundly the
relationship of man with the universe, and to enjoy the
poetic word as the expression of the ideas by which men
live. There are signs in it of impatience and haste, but its
poetry has in common with the poetry of the two pre
ceding generations the visible influence and even domi
nation of the same gods of modern French poetry: Rim
baud and Apollinaire, especially, and then the less
visible but always present influence and examples of
Baudelaire and Mallarm.

103

Herbert Read

THE CHALLENGE OF BOIMONDAU

From time to time during the last several years there
has been news of a new "communitarian" movement in
France founded by Marcel Barbu; but it has usually
been rumours of difficulties and dissensions, and we
have lacked the evidence for any proper discussion of
the subject. Now the community itself has published a
handsome illustrated volume of 150 pages which gives
the story of the foundation of Boimondau, its history
year by year, and all the relevant facts about its constitu
tion, organization, membership and production. It seems
to me to be a document of the greatest significance.

Boimondau is a word made up from the first syllables
of the words Boitiers Montres du Dauphine, the Watch-
case makers of Dauphine, which is the industry carried
on by the community in the town of Valence. The com
munity was founded in 1940 by a small manufacturer,
Marcel Barbu, who had established a factory in Besan-
<:on and tried without success to run it on co-operative
lines. Having failed as a benevolent capitalist, he closed
down his factory and went to Valence, resolved to build
from the ground upwards. He went out into the streets
to recruit fellow-workers^ men who were to share his
responsibilities from the beginning. They soon had a
small workshop going, and in spite of the war it pros
pered. But Barbu, who is described as a "messianic" fig-

The Aits in France 104

ure, soon got into trouble with the Germans, and at the
beginning of 1943 the whole factory had to go under
ground. Barbu fled to Paris, where he was soon arrested;
but the headquarters of the community was transferred
to a farm in the district known as the Vercors, where a
"collective" was established. There the community re
mained, suffering considerable privations, until the Lib
eration. From April 1943 it was led by Marcel Mermoz,
a comrade who had spent more than three years in prison
and concentration camp.

Mermoz obviously acquired a strong personal ascend
ancy over the group, and when the factory was reassem
bled in Valence after the war, Mermoz was made "chef."
Barbu in due course returned from the concentration
camp, to find himself replaced. As a matter of fact, it
was not entirely a question of personalities: a principle
had always been involved, but never decisively settled
until Mermoz took matters in hand. The messianic
Barbu wanted a "movement," with headquarters in
Paris, nationwide propaganda, even political candidates.
Mermoz and the majority preferred the local ''cell," be
lieving that trust and the necessary self-sacrifice could
only be established face to face. If they were successful,
other workers could benefit by their experience. They
took as a motto a sentence from St. Exup^ry: "Force-les
de batir une tour, et tu changeras en frres: mais si tu
veux qu'ils se haissent, jette-leur du grain." (Make them
build a tower, and you will change them into brothers;
throw corn to them, if you wish them to hate one an
other.) Barbu retired from the community, but unfortu
nately they could not agree on terms of compensation.
Barbu sued the community for 10 million francs, but
the case seems to have been settled out of court for a sum
of about 8 million. It is only fair to add that with his
money Barbu founded another communitarian experi
ment, "la dit Donguy-Herrnann."

THE CHALLENGE OF BOIMONDAU 105

A worse crisis came in 1947. The franc \tais devalued
and the Boimondau factory was suddenly faced with a
complete breakdown of their sales organization. They
had no financial reserves, and the banks naturally re
fused to make them a loan. They still had their farm and
some of them were able to work on a subsistence basis
there; but the majority were out-of-work, with no un
employment pay, for more than four months. There was
only one deserter. At the end of the year of 1951 the
community had one of the most up-to-date factories in
the world, with an annual production of half-a-million
watchcases. They now subscribe to "la Securite Sociale"
and "les Allocations Familiales," and with this form of
assurance believe that they can survive any future eco
nomic crises.

Meanwhile the communitarian idea has been spread
ing in France and Switzerland and there are now about
eighty communities of various sizes adhering to a Fd-
6ration des Communaut^s de Travail, with headquarters
in Paris. A periodical, Communaute, serves as an organ
of information, but propaganda, in the political sense,
is foreign to the movement. They believe in deeds, not
words; in example, not conversion.

The foundation deed of the Boimondau community
is a long document of thirty-six articles: it was drawn up
and accepted at the beginning of 1944. Most of the
articles would be found in the rules of any co-operative
undertaking. I shall only draw attention to certain orig
inal features in the Boimondau organization.

In the first place, there is no community living. The
workers live a normal family life wherever they can find
accommodation in the town of Valence. But all the
families in a district are organized into a district group,
and there is a joint council of district groups. There are
two other groupings by professional grades, and by
social activities. All three groups elect representatives to

The Arts in France 106

the General Council; the General Council elects a man
agement committee and a tribunal, and appoints a "chef
de communaut^" and an assistant or adjutant.

The community does not regard its members as merely
"workers": every aspect of their lives is a community con
cerntheir health, education, amusement, and above all
their morale.

There is a General Assembly of the whole community,
whose decisions must be unanimous, but its power is
purely legislative: it has no executive function. Execu
tive power rests with the chief, elected for a period of
three years by the Assembly.

All the members of the community, husbands, wives
and children, are entitled to a share of the proceeds of
the community's activities: it is recognized that each
member of the community has a social function as well
as a professional function, and each function is duly re
warded. It is specifically laid down in the articles of asso
ciation that each "compagnon" (the name given to a
member on admission) shall take an active part in the
social and intellectual life of the community. Com
panions should make an effort to adapt their private
lives to the moral sense of the community at large. Reli
gious beliefs are encouraged, including a belief in dis
belief. All production is held in common, and can only
be sold either for reinvestment in production or on dis
solution of the community. There are no private shares
in the capital of the community.

Details of the earnings of the individual members of
the community have not been published, but there is
no question of equal pay, except in the case of identical
professional and social services. Since intellectual attain
ments and a wide variety of social functions are allotted
points for pay, there must be quite a large divergence in
receipts, but this does not seem to have given rise to any
trouble. Trouble, indeed, is anticipated and settled by

THE CHALLENGE OF BOIMONDAU 107

the machinery of the General Council; and there is al
ways the Tribunal to adjust quarrels.

Two characteristics of the Boimondau community
would seem to be in conflict with the traditional prin
ciples of co-operative communities: the hierarchical
organization (particularly the vesting of final authority
in an individual) and unequal "pay." Pay is not, of
course, the right word for what is in effect a division of
profits, but that is not the point. These communitarians
believe that "equal pay" would be very unequal justice.
A community is responsible for the well-being of all its
members, and the fact that the community does not live
under one roof, sharing food and other necessities and
amenities, by no means relieves the community from full
responsibility. Allowances must be made for children,
and the mother who looks after her children at home is
serving the community as much as the woman who
works in the factory. But Boimondau goes much further
than such obvious adjustments for service: it rewards
"social values." If a companion learns a foreign lan
guage, the community as a whole is so much the richer,
and that "value" must be rewarded; and if he can play
football for the community, that too is a value and
should be rewarded. Musical gifts, ability to teach eco
nomics or philosophy, to work a cinema projector or
organize a dance all these are community services with
their appropriate awards; the more freely such serv
ices are recognized and rewarded, the stronger and hap
pier the community will be. Anyone can improve his or
her position by becoming a more useful member of the
community; and it is the community itself that decides
the relative value of the various social services.

As for the appointment of a "boss," and of the vari
ous "chefs" (chefs de sections, chefs de groupes, chefs
d'quipes, chefs de foyers) that seems to the logical
French mind to be required not only by day-to-day work-

The Arts in France 108

shop efficiency, but also by the full enjoyment of life. If
one of these units does not like its chef, it is a simple
matter to get rid of him; the chef of the community it
self can always be replaced at the end of his three years'
period of service (a minimum period to ensure con
tinuity of policy).

Critics (particularly from the left) will be eager to
point out that a community like Boimondau, competing
with its products in a capitalist market, dependent on
banks and insurance companies for its tokens of ex
change and economic security, is far from being the
realization of a new social order. But that is not the
point. Unless we remain satisfied with Utopian aspira
tions (or believe that we already live in the best of all
possible worlds) we must ask: what are the immediate
and practical steps towards a better society? In other
words, is Boimondau, and the other communities in
France and Switzerland which it represents, a step in a
new direction, away from totalitarianism no less than
from capitalism? Perhaps only time can show, but there
is an unusual air of confidence about the Boimondau
community. Their ideal is "faire des hommes" to make
human beings and they know that their worst danger
is the success that would threaten them with 'Tem-
bourgeoisement. "

log

Joseph Frank

AN EXISTENTIALIST IN T H E U N D E R W O R L D

Jean-Paul Sartre's monstrous treatise running close to
six hundred pages, and titled Saint Genet, comedien et
martyr is certainly one of the strangest books ever to
be written by a reputable philosopher. Kant, it is true,
once wrote a short book on Swedenborg but only, as
he jokingly remarked, because someone had persuaded
him to purchase a complete edition of Swedenborg's
works, and he decided not to let the investment of time
and money go to waste. Moreover, Kant's purpose was
to show that Swedenborg's delineation of the geogra
phy of the supernatural was as the title of his book
proclaimed the dreams of a spirit-seer. Jean-Paul Sar
tre's book is about a far more outlandish figure than
Swedenborg: Jean Genet, ex-jailbird and self-confessed
thief, pederast, prostitute and stoolpigeon. Genet's sump
tuously obscene celebrations of Evil, in a prose whose
preciosity recalls Proust and Giraudoux, have made
him, since the end of the Second World War, the rage
of Parisian literary circles. And Sartre's intensely, some
times comically serious discussion of Genet is a dazzling
display of dialectic, ending with what Sartre calls "a
request that Jean Genet be well treated/'

How can we explain Sartre's choice of so strange a
subject? It would be a simple matter to allude to his
taste for paradox, which, in truth, runs riot in the pres-

The Arts in France no

ent book. One might also refer to Sartre's personal
friendship for Genet, and his admiration for a literary
talent which developed under impossibly adverse con
ditions. Nor should it be forgotten that, at least since
the advent of Surrealism, it has become a French literary
fashion to revere a figure like the Marquis de Sade and
to recommend the total liberation of the instincts as
the recovery of man's true liberty. None of these ex
planations, however, nor all of them together, seem to
me entirely adequate. The truth is that Sartre has been
preoccupied in recent years with the problems of an
Existentialist ethics; and in the figure of Genet, he found
a pretext for developing certain ideas on Good and Evil
that have not hitherto found expression in his theoreti
cal writings.

Despite the book's huge bulk, and Sartre's jaw-break
ing vocabulary, his basic idea about Genet is very simple.
Genet's work is a gigantic glorification of vice and crime,
a willful inversion of all normal ethical standards. Sartre
believes that Genet, as a child, was caught in an innocent
boyhood theft; this was a traumatic experience that de
termined his life. Choosing to accept the role assigned
him by society, Genet assumed this burden of guilt and
turned it into a positive mission. "I was a thief" Sartre
imagines Genet saying to himself"/ will be The Thief;
it's my profession of faith, it will be my martyrdom."

Once this choice was made, Sartre proceeds to unravel
its implications by "existential psychoanalysis." This
specially patented Sartrian method assumes that every
aspect of a life, down to the minutest detail, is symboli
cally linked with the choice an existant makes among
his own possibilities; even "the world" of the existant
surges into consciousness as a structure of meanings de
termined by this choice of himself. And this leads Sartre
into a veritable delirium of symbol hunting, an orgy
of psychic code-deciphering that makes Freud look like
a neophyte and Jung like an amateur. It is difficult, in

AN EXISTENTIALIST IN THE UNDERWORLD 111

a brief quotation, to give any adequate idea of Sartre's
grotesquely far-fetched interpretations. But some notion
may perhaps be derived from his remark that Genet is
a passive pederast because "surprised while stealing
from behind, it is his back which blossoms when he
steals, it is with his back that he awaits the discovery
and catastrophe." Similarly, if Genet uses argot, Sartre
breathlessly interpolates: "To speak argot is to choose
Evil, that is, to know being and truth but to refuse them
for the sake of non-truth . . . that is, to choose the rela
tive, parasitism, failure."

The consequence of these analyses, which unhappily
take up most of the book, is to dissolve all the motives
for Genet's actions into a symbolic repetition, in one
form or another, of his original crisis. Sartre always con
centrates on the meaning of Genet's acts in this symbolic
framework, and, as a rule, carefully avoids considering
them from any other perspective. "In reality" Sartre
writes, in an incautious moment, "Genet steals because
he is a thief and because he has no other means of exist
ence; in the imaginary, he steals to make himself a thief."
By interpreting Genet's crimes as if they were only per
formed for purposes of "the imaginary," Sartre skillfully
glosses over their more sordid results. And whatever their
effects, their ultimate cause is not located in Genet him
self (a subject who, according to Sartre's ontology, exer
cises his liberty with every action and at every moment);
the trauma of his childhood experience is always to
blame.

"If, in this whole affair, we wish to find the true guilty
parties," Sartre argues, "let us turn toward the decent
people and ask by what strange cruelty they made a child
a scapegoat." By implication, therefore, Genet is com
pletely absolved of any responsibility for his misdeeds; he
is the victim of an inescapable determinism. This is in
deed a strange conclusion for a philosopher who, in
L'Etre et le Neant, argued that liberty is synonymous

The Arts in France 112

with the pour-soi (or human consciousness). A writer in
the new Nouvelle revue frangaise recently remarked
that "Sartre has a philosophy where liberty has never
played so large a role, and a politics where it has never
played such a small one." The same might be said of
Sartre's philosophy and his notion of moral respon
sibility.

For Sartre's whole conception of Evil, as developed in
Saint Genet, shifts moral responsibility from the wrong
doer to Society. The original ethical sin, according to
Sartre, is the splitting of Good and Evil; this is caused by
the "disquietude" of the spirit, which is in a state of
"permanent revolution/* "But this disquietude terrifies
us: we try to suppress it by checking the spirit in its
course and expelling its mainspring of negativity/' We
identify Good with what is already; Evil with change;
and we project this Evil, which is part of our liberty
(another term for spirit), on those outcast groups and
individuals who then symbolize and objectify all our
temptations. To recover true liberty we must arrive at a
"synthesis of Good and Evil"; and on this ground, Sartre
passionately pleads with us to "listen to the voice of
Genet, our next-of-kin, our brother." But if "Evil is
projection," as Sartre argues, then clearly it is Les Justes
(the decent citizens) who are responsible for its exist
ence; not the criminal but the judge is guilty.

Since Sartre's conception of Evil is totally social, it is
no surprise to have him tell us that "the abstract separa
tion of these two concepts [i.e., Good and Evil] simply
expresses the alienation of man." Sartre always uses the
word "alienation" in a Marxist sense, and when this
alienation is removed by the classless society, presumably
the miraculous synthesis of Good and Evil will also be
accomplished. But what is to become of the "disqui
etude" of the spirit? Will man cease to be afflicted with
the angoisse before his own liberty that is at the center
of Sartre's Existentialism? Certainly this would seem to

AN EXISTENTIALIST IN THE UNDERWORLD 115

be implied. In the ideal order, Sartre himself admits,
"the prescriptions of ethics would become social re
flexes." And so the happy, unalienated worker can then
take his place in the ranks of those whom Sartre, in La
Nausee, politely calls les salaudsthe stinkers; those who
conceal from themselves the fundamental contingency
and absurdity of all moral duties and of existence itself.
Sartre is thus caught once again, as he has been increas
ingly in recent years, between his Marxist sympathies
and his Existentialist convictions, between the vision of
a just and stable society and his view of the spirit and
human liberty as negation and disquietude. On the
plane of theory, these two facets of Sartre's thought exist
as an unresolved antagonism. On the plane of practice,
however, Sartre has provided himself with a neat little
escape hatch.

In a revealing footnote, where Sartre emerges for a
moment from behind his Hegelian armor, he states
bluntly that "this synthesis [of Good and Evil], in the
present historical situation, is not realizable. Thus every
morality which does not explicitly declare itself impos
sible today contributes to the mystification and the alien
ation of mankind." And, a few sentences later, he makes
these ominous remarks:

Action must give itself ethical norms in this climate of
insurmountable impossibility. It is in this perspective, for
example, that we must envisage the problem of violence
or the relation between means and ends. For a conscious
ness that would live this agony (dechirement) and finds
itself, at the same time, forced to will and decide, all the
splendid revolts, all the cries of refusal, all the virtuous
indignations, would appear like outmoded rhetoric.

These sentences go a long way to explain Sartre's pres
ent collaboration with the Stalinists (or is it Malen-
kovists?). He conscientiously suffers his dechirement
over their immoral actions, but indefatigably reassures

The Arts in France 114

himself that, at the present time, all morality is impos
sible anyhow. Naturally, he continues to belabor all
opponents of the Communists as despicable violators
of human dignity. And when someone like Albert
Camus dares to protest against Communist atrocities,
he dismisses this as "out-moded rhetoric/' After all, was
it not Sartre who argued that one of the primary ontolog-
ical structures of the human consciousness was mauvaise
foil

Kermit Lansner

RECENT FRENCH PAINTING

The dominance of abstraction, in all its forms, is the
most striking feature of recent French painting.

At the moment, the most consistent painters are those
who have made a program of abstraction. The younger
ones are involved in its philosophy and contentious
about its logic. They have no truck with subject matter
and regard painting as a spiritual pursuit which consists
in the arrangement of forms and colors. This group is
the nearest thing to a movement in Paris today, although
it has none of the searching originality which distin
guished the major movements of modern art.

The work- of these painters, if we can imagine some
ideal canvas which will sum it all up, is flat and neat.
The straight line and ruled curve are everywhere in
evidence, bounding, geometrical forms. Occasionally the
clean organic shapes which Arp often uses appear. There
is little expressiveness of line and no cultivation of the
riches of material so dear to the French tradition. The
best of this painting is impressively monumental, and
several of the painters have begun to work large in
preparation, I suspect, for the decoration of public walls.
Although the aesthetic of abstraction implies an un
limited range of possibilities for new ideas, any large
exhibition of this painting seems remarkably uniform,
as if it were the product of communal enterprise. Mag-

The Arts in France ll6

nelli, a Florentine, is the strongest painter who works in
this style; Fillet, Dewasne, Vasarely, Poliakoff and Dey-
rolle are a few of the others who follow this program of
abstraction.

Although the work derives from Cubism, it owes
much to other abstract styles which are foreign to
France. Consequently there has been a healthy renewal
of interest in such painters as Kandinsky, Mondrian,
Malevitch and Klee. Of the work of the modern French
masters, the large canvases which Leger painted in the
twenties are most closely related to the paintings of this
group.

A great fluidity and delicacy can be found in the art
of Hartung and Schneider. They both handle space in
Cubist fashion, but their inspiration is more emotional
and their execution more spontaneous. They use a
variety of generalized calligraphic motifs, some like frag
ments of penmanship exercises which were once com
mon in grade schools, brushed on with softness and pre
cision. Their color is suave and luminous and they have
been able to paint small pictures which combine the
suggestion of carefully constructed space with a personal
immediacy which is lacking in the more formal abstrac
tionists. This is a subtle art of organized transience.

Holding the center of French painting is a fairly large
group of painters who have veered to neither of the poles
of abstraction. They remain deeply involved in the
French tradition and still retain their attachment to the
subject, attenuated as it may be, as well as their passion
for fine painting. Most of these men have been known
for some time as they worked through the influences of
Picasso and Matisse. They stand now as the first names
in French painting behind the aging masters, having
attained, these past few years, to some firmness of style
which promises to persist. There is nothing radical
about their work to eyes which are accustomed to mod-

RECENT FRENCH PAINTING

ern painting. It has a substance and finish which results
from the attempt to combine abstraction with impres
sionism. In particular, these painters have concentrated
upon the creation of light through color. Their designs
are carefully fragmented; small areas of color are juxta
posed to create the illusion of intense light. Abstraction
is used as one approach among several and these painters
have not been put off by the charge that they are illogical
in combining traditions.

Bazaine constructs his paintings as if they were mo
saics; brilliant bits of color are arranged in larger pat
terns of vigorous rhythms. Manessier and Singier paint
pictures of haunting luminosity in which volume and
composition in depth are sacrificed to the delights of
color and paint. Esteve and Le Moal must be mentioned,
while Pignon, long regarded as one of the most promis
ing painters, remains closer to the subject which he
paints with a strong sense of composition.

Well into middle-age, Tal Coat has passed through
the usual influences. Now, painting in Cezanne's own
country, he has reduced its technique to the barest indi
cations of color and stroke. It is hard to believe that he
can long remain in his present style which attempts to
abstract the essence of landscape by the mere suggestion
of mountains, trees and rivers. His paintings have sev
eral overtones. They are reminiscent of some of the
watercolors of Cezanne and of fragments of Chinese
landscape painting; and were they not tied to the sub
ject, of the lyrical improvisations which Kandinsky
painted around 1911. Masson, who has been a minor vir
tuoso during the past thirty years has also turned to
nature; his figures, and landscapes are seen through a
diaphanous haze of Renoir colors.

I have only spoken of an art which is calm and
ordered, however diverse it may be. There has been
little in French painting since 1945 which is comparable

The Arts in France "8

in spirit to the extremity, violence and anguish which
have characterized much of the literature of contem
porary France. Though the influence of Picasso can be
seen at every turn, it is primarily his techniques of con
struction or certain mannerisms which have been fol
lowed and rarely the powerful expression of his later
styles. There are a few small signs that a painting of
extremes is beginning to attract attention in Paris.

During the past few years there have been several
shows of work which has little precedent in the French
tradition. No catch-all phrase can suggest the different
manifestations of this painting; no aesthetic has been
developed for it. At the moment it includes the work of
Dubuffet, vehement images related to the art of children
and the insane, laid on with great thickness of matter
and paint, as well as the work of a young painter like
Riopelle. At first glance his paintings seem to be similar
to those of Jackson Pollock. But they are not made up
of a maze of lines of high, glistening color, but of a pro
fusion of strokes and daubs, earthy encrustations which
cover the canvas from side to side, rising and falling
upon the surface as they form into many smaller pat
terns. Other painters have used Klee-like motifs; some
have used the canvas as a stop for a vehement gesture in
paint.

This kind of painting defies both the tradition of
craftsmanship and the ordered arrangement of the ab
stract artists who are primarily interested in the con
struction of the picture. It is too early to predict what
influence this type of expressionism will have upon
French art.

Most of the painters I have mentioned are in their
forties and fifties. They were born under the sign of
Cubism and grew up in the shadow of the masters who
created the major style of modern art. Picasso, Braque,
Leger, Delaunay and the others were in their early
thirties when they painted some of their most impres-

RECENT FRENCH PAINTING 11Q

sive pictures. When we compare the age of artistic ma
turity of these two generations it is evident how long and
difficult has been the struggle of the younger men to
achieve the confidence of style. Small wonder that there
is little which is strikingly new about their work.

Norman Demuth

MUSIC IN FRANCE

It is characteristic of the French composers born late in
the last century that they have moved with the times.
Consequently, Marcel Dupr and Claude Delvincourt
are as up-to-date as could be desired. The former has
excelled in organ music of an individual character,
while the latter has to his credit, Lucifer, a Mystre (to
text by Ren Dumesnil) which, with Honegger's Jeanne
d'Arc au bucker and Milhaud's Bolivar, ranks as one of
France's greatest dramatic works. Delvincourt is Direc
tor of the Paris Conservatoire and a man of inspiring
energy and enthusiasm. Severely wounded in the 1914
War, when he lost an eye and suffered other injuries, he
played an heroic part in the Resistance Movement dur
ing the last war, when he spirited away to the Maquis all
the students leaving the Conservatoire who were ear
marked for slave camps in Germany; this he did right
under the eyes of the Gestapo. He was a hunted man for
some long time. Such heroism on the part of a musician
can make other musicians feel proud, and at the same
time, humble.

Similar musical enterprise can be found in the light-
hearted works of Jacques Ibert whose Diane de Poitiers
and Escales are achieved with the acme of polish and re
finement. If one wishes that Ibert would be a little more
serious sometimes, that wish is qualified by the thought

MUSIC IN FRANCE 121

of the wit that would be missed. At the other end of the
scale, the somewhat austere approach of Georges Migot
exercises a restraining influence, for Migot concentrates
mainly upon alia capella choral works of some magni
tude.

Wit is also found in the works of Jean Rivier whose
musical blade is one of the finest steel and polished to a
dazzling brilliance. Rivier is a composer whose music is
not particularly serious, but is impelled from a serious
point of view. His Symphonies, however, are serious
works, direct and harmonically acid. Impelled by coun
terpoint, his symphonic and chamber music is highly
and skillfully developed. His Ouverture pour un don
quichotte reveals a thematic spontaneity which is aston
ishing in its variety. Rivier is a man of strong views and
detests superficiality on the one hand and too much
emphasis on musical construction on the other.

Opra-comique has benefited from the works of Mar
cel Delannoy and Edmond Bondeville. The former has
also composed a magnificent Symphony and two enjoy
able Concertos. His first opera-comique, Le Poirier de
Mis&re, was on a sinister and cynical subject, but Ginevra
and Puck are true to type. Delannoy has widened the
vista of opra-comique in various ways. He is a master of
lyricism and his works have all the stuff of opera in them.
Bondeville in his two works L'Ecole des Maris and
Madame Bovary reveals a mind not so concerned with
any new expressions as with the desire to provide first-
class lyrical entertainment. He is Director of the Opra,
and, as in the case of Delvincourt, administrative duties
interfere with his leisure for composition.

Last among the group is Henri Martelli who adopts a
classical approach to twentieth-century problems. Im
pelled by pure polyphony, his music is well-wrought and
sensible. His Wind Trio and Sonata for Two Pianos ex
press elegance in terms of counterpoint. Martelli eschews
sensuousness, but his music is not in any way repelling

The Arts in France 122

and players can find much to interest them, and to enjoy.

Whatever direct influence Debussy, Faur, and Ravel
once exercised on young French thought has long since
gone by the board. The French aesthetic is now sturdy
and more cosmopolitan, although it maintains its essen
tial qualities. The counteracting influences were Stra
vinsky and "Les Six," these being counteracted in turn
by Albert Roussel, who, emanating from Vincent d'Indy,
brought French symphonic thought to its present high
state of excellence and removed all flippant tendencies
from the generality of French thinking. D'Indy estab
lished the classical formal concept and Roussel, the
technique. This came about very quickly. Today the
Conservatoire students all reveal Roussel's uncompro
mising approach to harmony and his clarity in counter
point. French music is no longer necessarily "delicieux"
and its symphonic concept can take its place with that
from any other country so far regarded as "superior."
In many respects France still expresses le dernier cri.

Selection is invidious and space limited, but one
would single out in the first place Henri Barraud, Henri
Tomasi, and Tony Aubin. The first is head of the music
department of the French Radio and the second a con
ductor of some note. Aubin is an isolated figure as he is
almost the only one to show direct ancestry from Franck.
He conducts the Radio orchestra and teaches at the Con
servatoire. His Symphonic romantique and Scherzo, La
chasse infernale show that he is endowed with a well-
developed symphonic sense. All three are hampered to a
certain extent by their routine tasks but they probably
work better as a result.

Next one would point to Pierre Capdi&ville for his
radio-drama La Tragedie de Peregrinus. He was a pupil
of Vincent d'Indy and the integrity of his Second Sym
phony emphasizes his pupilage. Manuel Rosenthal, one
of the few pupils of Ravel, bears no traces of his musical

MUSIC IN FRANCE

12 3

ancestry in his works. Frangois d'Assise and Jeanne d'Arc
are written upon an altogether different aesthetic. Henri
Sauguet is remembered by his extremely lengthy opera
La Chartreuse de Parme over which he spent seven years,
so it is said. Unfortunately, these seven years were among
his formative ones and it is possible to follow Sauguet's
development as the opera progresses. He is more
worthily represented by the ballet Les Forains and the
Symphonie expiatoire. The facetious composer of the
era is still Jean Frangaix whose music is superficial and
facile; but it is fair to say that he has many admirers. His
oratorio L 'Apocalypse de Saint Jean proved that he is
not suited to large forms, but there will always be a
place for works like the ballets Beach, Le Roi nu, and
for orchestration such as he made of Boccherini in
Scuolo di ballo, even if that place is not one of great
importance.

It is not unkind to say that one musician, at any rate,
finds Jean Martinon more acceptable as a conductor
than as a composer. Martinon is sometimes confused
with Jean Martenent, one of the few French composers
influenced by Bartok. Martenent works upon a large can
vas and thus does not make things any easier for himself.
His Orphee, in three movements, reveals the surprising
fact that there is much in common between the French
and Hungarian gouts.

Andr Jolivet and Olivier Messiaen headed the group
"La jeune France," the name being taken from Berlioz.
Jolivet has written the first Concerto for Ondes Martenot
and Orchestra, in which he portrays the gradual emer
gence of sound from chaos to cosmos, and to the final
silence of the spheres. This is as may be; the work is a
full-scale concerto and one finely contrived.

To dismiss Messiaen in the few lines available is well-
nigh impossible if justice is to be done him. He is one of
the few living composers about whom a book could be

The Arts in France 124

written with no fear that it would be out-of-date before
publication. Not that Messiaen is by any means at the
end of his tether, but he has already covered more
ground and shown himself to be more original than any
other French composer. There is, therefore, already
enough material to fill a book.

One has often regretted that music today does not
often arouse the old frenzies of anger and enthusiasm.
Messiaen proves the exception, for even though his
aesthetic and style have become recognized, performance
is reminiscent of the scenes which were regular events
in the twenties.

Messiaen has created his own musical language and has
perpetuated it in a book. It is not systematic, for it is in
no sense arbitrary, but it is a specialized technique and
as such demands the consideration of all musicians. He
is a mystic, devoutly religious, and a lover of nature-
over and over again he takes his impulses from bird-
songs. At first glance his works appear too rarified, but
realization comes as a revelation, and once one has fallen
beneath the spell, one never goes back. His harmony is
all perfectly logical and reasonable, although the congre
gations at La Trinit6 felt otherwise at one time Mes
siaen has been organist at that church for many years.
The Turangalila Symphony, in ten movements (an in
terval is allowed after the fifth), caused a riot when first
performed in France. Two performances by the BBC
and a study of the work convinced me that this will
prove to be the greatest work since Le Sacre and Woz-
zeck, greater, in fact, than the former.

This is an utterly inadequate summary of Messiaen' s
work. Suffice it to repeat that he is the most original com
poser now living. His technique is so far from being
systematic that it allows full play to all emotions.

The French have always been fond of coteries from
the days of the Lullyistes v. Ramoneours to the present
time. "Les Six" have long since attained their object.

MUSIC IN FRANCE 12 5

Milhaud and Honegger are now household names; the
former continues to pour out music in a ceaseless stream,
much of it extremely fine.

"La Jeune France/' already referred to, had the fur
therance of new music in the true sense of the term as
its main aim. Today there are the "Dod^caphonistes"
or followers of Schoenbergian systematic composition.
They are presided over by Rene Leibowitz. Many of the
original members have disavowed the aims and objects,
but those remaining include Paul Dessau, Pierre Bou-
lez, and Antoine Dukamel. Serge Nigg, the most distin
guished of the band apart from its president, separated
himself from the others quite recently, as he discovered
that Schoenberg was divorced from humanity.

Then there are the "Progressistes" who follow the
cultural philosophies of the USSR in which music must
have social significance and be comprehensible to one
and all at the first hearing.

"La Zodiaque" is a coterie founded to combat all
other coteries. It disavows all systems, fashions, and, in
fact, all the "-isms" and "-alities" that have ever existed.
The members include Maurice Ghana, Stanislas Skro-
catchevski, Sergei di Castro, Pierre de la Forest Divonne,
and Alain Bermat. Finally, this is the group devoted to
"Musique concrete'* who concern themselves with sonor
ities. The principal advocates are Pierre Schaeffer and
Pierre Henry. The system is extremely complicated and
to this writer utterly useless.

It would not do to ignore two members of what is
known as "L'Ecole de Paris/' Tibor Harsanyi and Mar
cel Mihalovici. The former is the more immediately
approachable of the two, but this does not imply that his
music is easy to assimilate. His Concertstiick'for Piano
and Orchestra is outstanding. Mihalovici has composed
many magnificent works which are heard all over the
Continent, except in England.

William Becker

FRENCH THEATRE: THE NATIONAL GENIUS

The American interest in French theatre has usually re
volvedespecially since the war on a desire to be in
touch with new plays. Immediately after the Second
World War France seemed to be the only country in the
world making a reasonably significant contribution to
dramatic literature. Today, one can no longer satisfy
quite such a selfish desire, for the French theatre has
reassumed a traditional existence in which new plays are
both less prominent and less necessary. The present
visitor will find a brilliant theatrical activity but one
which must be loved more for its own sake than for what
it might export to Broadway.

Consider just the established major talents of the post
war period. Anouilh is now apparently dedicated to
writing the same one play over and over in various
forms of fancy dress. Montherlant has not written a new
play in many years, though his older plays are revived
and strike one as more stiffly untheatrical than ever.
Sartre, since his wholehearted commitment to the CP,
no longer belongs to the ranks of responsible intellec
tuals. Camus has still not fulfilled his early dramatic
promise. Obey's very real theatrical genius is being dis
sipated in the increasingly unreal and perfunctory
mythicism of his material. And Cocteau seems simply to
have evaporated into his own shimmering emptiness.

FRENCH THEATRE: THE NATIONAL GENIUS 127

One must, of course, realize that judgments so severe
as these can only be made from within the French con
text: any other country would rightfully be prostrate
with gratitude to have such a roster of names writing
anything at all. But French theatre, like French cuisine,
tempts one to assume the gourmet's finickiness with his
appetite; and both can be plentifully satisfied by the
fare at the Com^die Fran^aise alone.

If one is inclined to be harsh with the established
talents, one generally learns from the French themselves
to be enthusiastic over the newest ones. Nevertheless,
during a recent visit, I found the only two new plays
that were attracting serious attention to be pretty poor
stuff. Both were first plays by well-known novelists
whom the French regard as deeply serieux. And oddly
enough, neither author is a native Frenchman, though
both write in French. Julien Green is of American
origin, and his play, called South, suffers (like his novel
Moira) from a thoroughly unreal perception of the
American background against which it is set. In France
where few people know or understand the issues of the
Civil War, South has been a major success: the French
like to think that Green perceives life "purely" and for
them an American setting is as abstract or indifferent as
anywhere. To an American, such indifference, especially
to a fact as rich in reality as the Civil War, is not only
impossible, but quite undesirable; and Green's "pure
vision" seems a preposterous irrelevance. Yet South did
not seem to me more false than Samuel Beckett's Wait-
ing for Godot. Beckett is an Irishman whose exile in
France has led some people to compare him to Joyce; a
not less invalid analogy would place Waiting for Godot
alongside Kafka's The Castle, for Godot is never identi
fied and never arrives. The play is not just plain bad;
but with its tedious and fancy metaphysical dialogue, it
is faux b on which is, perhaps, worse.

But if Henry James was right in supposing theatre to

The Arts in France 128

be the most characteristic expression of the French
national genius, it is only proper that the subsidized
national theatres should represent that genius most com-
pellingly. (I speak now of the dramatic theatres, for the
Opera is poor, its ballet intolerable, and the Opra
Comique a public disgrace.) There are now three such
theatres: the two salles of the Comdie Frangaise and the
recently formed Theatre National Populaire which plays
at the Palais de Chaillot. The TNP is not yet in a class
with the Comedie: it is too new, too exclusively the
projection of a single personality, and too much beset
by internal difficulties. It has been the center of much
public criticism; and one begins to sense that the very
thing which made the TNP possible the forceful genius
of its founder and leader, Jean Vilar will probably pre
vent it from surviving in its present form. The company,
I gather, has never been good throughout, and recently
a sizable group of the leading performers has quit. This
internal dissension was apparently political: Vilar is
deeply identified with the Communists (he directed
Danton's Death with Robespierre, played by himself, as
the pure hero, and converted Danton into an epicene
bourgeois decadent, whose mouthings about revolution
ary ideals were meant to be taken as hollow irony). The
public criticism, however, seems mainly chauvinistic:
Vilar is one of those rare Frenchmen with an under
standing of German theatre and literature (Giraudoux
was another), and of the nine plays presented during its
first few seasons, the three most successful were by
Brecht, Kleist, and Buchner, whereas the one Moliere
was generally considered to be badly staged and per
formed. One now hears it argued that the TNP is
neither national nor popular (it was created partially as
an experiment in taking the classics to working-class dis
tricts, and plays a good deal of the time in town halls
outside Paris). The criticism is probably true, but misses
the real point which is that Paris theatre has always been

FRENCH THEATRE: THE NATIONAL GENIUS 12Q

deficient in giving expression to foreign dramatic litera
tures, and that only such a distinct departure as Vilar has
provided could serve a venture of this kind. It would
have been idle and also impossible to compete with the
Com^die. Thus it is quite useful that conditionsthe
unwieldy Chaillot platform-stage, the uneven company,
the necessity of touring have forced Vilar to adopt a
style as distinct from the Comedie's as his repertoire. It
is a style, much like Tyrone Guthrie's, based on a spec-
tacularity of stage grouping and movement: Vilar is
fond of large processions, of a stage full of moving actors
constantly forming themselves into new patterns, of a
hammy pictorial dramatism at the climaxes the sort of
directorial touch which is often less effective for being
so evidently a directorial touch.

If the TNP is essentially a director's theatre, the
Com6die is the very apotheosis of an actor's theatre. No
other institution of the kind in France or England can
rival it, not Stratford, nor the Old Vic, nor in fact any
of the private companies now at work, with the possible
exception of Jean-Louis Barrault's. I recently saw more
than twenty plays at the Comdie, and only one small
curtain-raiser seemed to me mishandled. One realizes
in watching the Com^die troupe how much Barrault's
style owes to his training there; for the mimeticism
which he has made internationally famous is actually
one of the greatest current glories of the Comdie as
well. One sees also that there is a kind of gimmickry
about Barrault's miming, that it remains extrinsic and
unassimilated, whereas at the Comdie, mimetic con
trol is a discipline more than a device, and is meant to
contribute richness to a balanced style, not to create
special shock effects like the highly self-conscious man
nerisms of Barrault. In the end, one is likely to find that
the Comedie's more subtle and integrated way, while
less startling, is actually more finished, and will wear
better. As a traditional theatre, the Comdie is not sub-

The Arts in France 1 30

ject to great variations in its repertoire; but one should
note that the current style and the current repertoire do
amount to a reciprocal process of discovery, for both
rely heavily on the great Latin tradition of comedy and
performance: some of the best productions in the present
repertoire, for example, are of plays by Feydeau, Musset,
Marivaux, and Pirandello. And it is entirely right that
the greatest benefit from this process should accrue to
the works of Moliere. One is not ever likely to see
Molire more brilliantly represented than in the Com6-
die presentations of Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, and Le
Bourgeois gentilhomme. Nor, in fact, is there richer
theatre to be had.

Parker Tyler

THE FRENCH FILM

To consider the French film is to consider, by and large,
our most sophisticated cinema and by "sophistication"
I mean all that the word implies: the French can get
away with a technical sloppiness or cheapness by sheer
lan and the kind of impudence and laissez-faire that
comes from consciously careless superiority. Gerard
Philipe, an actor of exceptional charm under any flag
(his most distinguished film role was the hero of Ra-
diguet's The Devil in the Flesh) acts in Racine at the
Comdie Franchise, as does Jean Marais, also a film star.
One detects in Philipe's semi-grotesque barker, who in
troduces and supposedly relates the fables of The Seven
Deadly Sins, an authority that comes of a width of profes
sional as well as of private and social experience. I sup
pose it will not sound pretentious to say that cinematic
techniques and literary sources notwithstanding, the
chief ornament of the French film is the French face
with its deep and dauntless look into all the places of
human nature.

The Italian contributions to The Seven Deadly Sins
("Avarice and Anger," combined, and "Envy") are curi
ously unsophisticated, whereas even the "Sloth" of the
French, a little fantasy almost betise in its tricky obvious
ness, has a knowing air that RossellinFs rendering of
Colette's shrewd vignette, "Envy," misses. One might

The Arts in Fiance 132

call it style, except that style is the most difficult element
of a film work to achieve, more so than in other arts, and
for this reason its problem discourages serious commerce
with artistic premises in films. It is as though the French
start by assuming this handicap, and since no one ex
cept perhaps, sometimes, Cocteau and Renoir strives
for style, a certain style appears from the conscious lack
of effort toward it. Maybe, indeed, this is the specific
definition of French sophistication. The short-short
verve of "Gluttony," its point like a pinprick of the in
telligence, the easy and open, yet quite dry, sentiment
of "Pride/' and the Zolaesque lyricism (yes!) of "Lust"
are all done with the Devil's knowledge of mankind. Yet
as we know from the Eighth or Unknown Sin tacked on
at the end, the Devil is no longer to be taken so seriously
as the traditional conception of sin demands. The
Eighth Sin, if you please, is "belief in evil appearances."
It is typical French blague and a joyous commentary on
evil itself as an ethical "style." The whole film is obvi
ously without relation to evil except indirectly.

Gerard Philipe also plays the hero of Fanfan the
Tulip; a kind of folk hero temperamentally allied to
D'Artagnan and the medieval figure of the Fool. The
work is something of a spoof on romantic adventure cos
tume-films and as such must any audience with brains
take it; Yet, were Fanfan not a certain assertion of vola
tile spirits, it would be intolerably corny and coarse. The
nation of Moli&re persists in loving self-interested, sim
ple-minded scoundrels and in this creamy little piece we
have a subjective fantasy of Sganarelle's. Perhaps the
only vulgarity is unthinking repetition but the French
are far too amused not to be amusing. Their euthanasia-
based crime film, Justice Is Done,, turned into a complex
trial film, brilliantly put together, and though there was
something un-French in the piously accented concern
for "justice" via the jury's verdict, it was simply more
sensible than any trial film I know about.

THE FRENCH FILM

Something far from sensible, as art, and only para
doxically so as social observation, was the climax given
the film Forbidden Games, about which I wrote on an
occasion when I did not know how radically the novel's
ending had been changed for the screen. In the novel,
the little boy is killed by falling off the church roof
while trying to steal a cross big enough to suit a cow's
grave. The little girl then successfully completes the
theft and, burying the little boy's corpse, plants the cross
at the head of his grave. Such a climax makes aesthetic
consonance with the preceding development of the
story. The film's ending, on the other hand, is a piece of
"interested" arbitrariness. Could the French makers
have been thinking of the mass audiences of Britain and
America? I complained of the film's moral pessimism,
which wrought sentimentality out of its archetypal
tragic drama. I now complain of its perversity and of
what may be also the avarice of its makers. Avarice may
not be a deadly sin in France but perhaps, there as else
where, it is a deadly virtue.

Cocteau's "myth movies," the last of which was the
full-scale philosophic statement of Orpheus, have dis
tilled a kind of perfume of modern techniques in litera
ture, theatre, and film. The Strange Ones had as its
theme the first sprouts of theatricalism in the adoles
cent: the rank, dramatized narcissism of a race of aes
thetes whose one "action-plot" is incest. The art of this
film is dominated by the love-death legend conceived as
a playground in which the aesthete consorts with his
bourgeois neighbors also condemned to the ghosts that
Freud made flesh. Cocteau's quasi-Surrealist style, born
of promiscuous wit rather than artistic necessity, made it
easy to render the bourgeois tempest-in-a-teacup, The
Storm Within, valid and moving. The gypsy picturesque-
ness that crept into that movie's matriarch is not face
tious but a perfectly sound social observation. It was just

The Arts in France

high blague (and part of the incorrigibly sincere and
desperate tenderness of modern French sensibility) for
Cocteau to have declaimed at the end that his gypsy
"has no home on earth," so "the caravan moves on!" Of
course, he means the White Goddess in her contem
porary diurnal aspect. This is first-rate mythifying. It
is much better than the total effect of Orpheus, where
Cocteau encased his sophisticated modern magic in the
popular happy-ending formula of the mass art. So doing,
he parodied his own play. Perhaps Cocteau's game of
wits with a commercial art has led him to overestimate
his prowess. Orpheus contained a bad misstep. It was a
fine-art boner. Perhaps in Paris one can successfully con
ceal the old-fashioned devices of ghoulish melodramas,
of which the "mystery house" is one and the "merciless
vampire" another, because the French themselves possess
an ironic dimension on such things, having absorbed
Eugene Sue and the Grand Guignol into the cultural
consciousness. But in sheer objectivity, Orpheus was an
attempt to substitute sophistication wholesale for art
retail. The Seven Deadly Sins is a kind of chamber art,
and there sophistication is, as it should be, modestly
retail.

THE ARTS IN ITALY

Mark Schorer

THE FICTION OF GIOVANNI VERGA

In 1 840 Giovanni Verga was born into a Catanian family
of the upper-middle class with at least legendary aris
tocratic antecedents in a dim and distant Castile. As a
boy he spent the summers in the southern village of
Vizzini, where his father had another house, and as much
of the winters as were made difficult in Catania by po
litical upheaval or the plague. The division between the
city and the village, between the borghesi and the con-
tadini, was to be the great division in his literary career,
as it was in his early life. At fifteen he knew that he was
to be a writer, and when his schooling was finished and
his father was ready to send him to the university for the
nearly conventional degree in law, the boy proposed
that the money be used instead to subsidize the publica
tions of his completed "romanzo storico" called / car
bonari della montagna. All legends of the fathers of
literary men to the contrary, this folly was pursued in
four volumes. Yet it was a folly that committed Verga to
his splendid fate: he found himself a published writer,
and after his father died in 1863, he promptly removed
himself to the north of Italy, where all stylish writers
lived. Florence and Milan took their toll and paid their
price for fifteen years as the young Verga moved into his
first and false literary success.

In the period between 1867 and 1876 he published a

The Arts in Italy *3 8

series of books with precisely suggestive titles: Una pec-
catrice, Storia di una capinem, Eva, Tigre re ale, Eros,
Primavera ed altri contiail works that one might ex
pect from a highly gifted young Sicilian who was trying
to be a smart north Italian writer in the somewhat inert
years after the Unification. These are novels of northern
manners, of sexual intrigue in a world of fatal females
and icy dandies as Verga observed them. It is interesting
to note that the early hero, a young Sicilian drawn in
the image of Verga, gradually gives way to the northern
gallant, freddo e duro. Always reticent about his per
sonal affairs, Verga yet permits us to speculate on the
probability that this transformation developed to a de
gree in himself. There is the evidence of at least three
stories written in his maturity and published in the vol
umes otherwise devoted to Sicilian peasants: "Caprice*'
and "The How, When, and Wherefore" in the Caval-
leria volume, and "Over the Sea" in the Little Novels.
These stories return in a softened, reminiscent mood to
intrigues between ladies of fashion and a Verga-like
hero, indeed, in two of them, to Verga himself, Verga
referring to his own stories of Sicily, and thereby bridg
ing that chasm between the high and the low that was
presently to be positively leapt across in the career itself.
In the early work, he attempted to write in Tuscan,
and the attempt, for all the popularity that some of these
novels achieved, was a failure: the style as much a mat
ter of the outsider listening and reading, as the situa
tions were of the outsider looking neither more sharply
nor fully than an outsider could. At any rate, he was no
more satisfied with the attempt at literary migration
than we may assume that he was with thd attempt at
social migration, for suddenly, in 1874, as if in imagina
tive exasperation with the manner that he had developed
and the matter that he was still to exploit, he burst out
with Neddaj the true promise. This Sicilian Tess, with
its abrupt shift in subject matter, expelled at a blow

THE FICTION OF GIOVANNI VERGA 139

every affectation of syntax and figure that he had culti
vated, and the story, told swiftly and baldly and with a
certain brutality, takes its stylistic color from the dia
logue of its peasant characters. Yet two more works in
the old manner were to follow, and then, in 1 876, after
the beginning of the author's own return to Catania,
four years of silence, and then the revolutionary triumph
in the Cavalleria volume of 1880, which brings to its ful
ness every promise of Nedda in new style, new method,
new subject, and which was to alter the history of Italian
fiction.

Verga left an account of the origin of the style:

It is a simple story. I had published some of my early
novels. They went well: I was preparing others. One day, I
don't know how, there came into my hands a sort of broad
sheet, a manuscript moderately ungrammatical and a-syn-
tactical, in which a sea captain succinctly told of some
vicissitudes overcome by his ship. Seaman's talk, without an
unnecessary phrase, short. It struck me, and I reread it: it
was what I was looking for, without exactly having known
it. Sometimes, you know, a sign, an indication, is enough. It
was a revelation.

The essence of the new method, which is a certain kind
of objectivity, is touched upon if not adequately ac
counted for in a prelude to the story of "Gramigna's
Lover":

I believe that the triumph of the novel, that most complete
and most human of all works of art, will be reached when
the affinity and the cohesion of all its parts will be so com
plete that the process of the creation will remain a mystery
. . . the hand of the artist will remain absolutely invisible,
and the novel will have the effect of real happening, and the
work of art will seem to have made itself, to have matured
and come forth spontaneously like a natural event, without
preserving any point of contact with its author; so that it
may not show in any of its living forms any imprint of the
mind which visioned it, any trace of the lips that murmured

The Arts in Italy 140

the first words, like the fiat of the Creator; let it stand by
itself, in the single fact that it is as it must be and has to be,
palpitating with life and immutable as a bronze statue,
whose creator has had the divine courage to eclipse himself
and to disappear in his immortal work.

And for the third point, the new subject, and the new
subject not only in the general sense of the Sicilian peas
ant, but of the particular special interpretation that
Verga was to throw over the life of that figure, "Ca
price," another story in this volume of 1880, gives us the
first clue:

When one of those little beings, either more weak, or more
incautious, or more egoistic than the others, tries to detach
himself from the group, in order to follow the allure of the
unknown, or out of desire to better himself, or out of curi
osity to know the world, then the world of sharks, such as it
is, swallows him, and his kin along with him.

This is a clue that is to open an incipient theory of social
history outlined in the introduction to / Malavoglia,
Verga's greatest work, published in 1881.

After that came the Little Novels, then Mastro-don
Gesualdo, and on these four volumes Verga's reputation
rests, for as there was little of final importance before
1880, so there was even less after 1888. Years of effort
went into a story of Sicilian aristocratic life, La Duchessa
de Leyra, which was meant to continue the novel series
and of which nothing came. The work that he brought
to completion is minor. Mostly there was silence, twenty
years of it, until he died in 1922, immortal, and in a
sense, unknown.

For the drama of Verga's literary career finds no cor
ollary in the sluggish history of his reputation. Neither
in Italy itself nor in Europe at large nor in the United
States has there at any time been one of those rushes of
renewed interest that are the commonplaces of nearly

THE FICTION OF GIOVANNI VERGA 141

all great literary reputations. In Italy Verga is safely
canonized in every literary history of whatever com
plexion as the greatest Italian writer of fiction after
Manzoni, and is respectfully permitted to slumber in
that greatness; yet one may surely wonder whether the
neo-realism of the post-war Italian novelists, whose work
is among the most important in present-day Europe,
would have been even possible without the example of
this early master of nineteenth century versimo. In
France, he is regarded as an imitator of Zola and, in at
least one late work, II marito di Elena, of Flaubert. In
the United States, when he is remembered at all, and
with even less justification in fact, he is taken for the
librettist of Mascagni's opera, Cavalleria rusticana. D. H.
Lawrence, who has done more than any other one man
to bring the works of Verga to us, is in part responsible
for this final indignity, since he wrote in the preface to
his translation of the volume that contains this story,
"Everybody knows, of course, that Verga made a dram
atized version of Cavalleria rusticana, and that this
dramatized version is the libretto of the ever-popular
little opera of the same name." Four years after the pub
lication of his superb story, Verga adapted it to the stage
in a slightly sentimentalized version; and six years after
that, two others (Targioni-Tozzetti and Menasci by
name) carried the vulgarization on to the point at which
we have it now in Mascagni's opera. Yet of the five trans
lated volumes that have been published in the United
States, three are by Lawrence: Mastro-don Gesualdo in
1923; Little Novels of Sicily (Novelle rusticane) in 1925;
and Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (Vita dei
campi) in 1928. To the group has been added Eric Mos-
bacher's badly needed new translation of I Malavoglia,
under the title The House by the Medlar Tree. This
supersedes the only previous translation into English,
made under the same title in 1890 by Mary A. Craig. One
may say this even though Mr. Mosbacher saw fit to cut

The Arts in Italy M 2

Verga's text, without any indication that he did so, by
at least a hundred pages. The motive would seem to
have been manufacturing economy only, for the portions
that have been deleted seem generally to involve sub
sidiary characters, and the central story of the decline of
the Malavoglia fortunes remains. I something has then
been lost in social richness and coherence, Mr. Mos-
bacher gains enormously in stylistic fidelity over Mrs.
Craig, who did only a little cutting but whose transla
tion is genteel and tepid, quite false to the downright
original. It was in an introduction to the Craig version
that the novel was honored by the praise of William
Dean Howells, who called it "without reserve . . . one
of the most perfect pieces of literature that I know."

Howells continues: "This poet, as I must call the
author" and so must we has two great classes of char
acters in The House by the Medlar Tree: the products
"of conscience and order/' and the "children of dis
order." Among the second he numbers the unheroic
hero whom he calls "the merely weak . . . poor 'Ntoni
Malavoglia/' ". . . goodness brings not pleasure, not
happiness, but it brings peace and rest to the soul, and
lightens all burdens; the trial and the sorrow go on for
good and evil alike; only, those who choose the evil
have no peace/' This is Howells' attempt to bring this
dark, this quite non-Christian novel, nearer to those
"smiling aspects of life," which he himself preferred in
fiction, than it can legitimately be brought. For Verga's
view of human experience is at once more desperate and
more analytical than Howells' comment suggests, and
this view is made clear enough in Verga's own introduc
tion to this novel, a rare statement from the novelist
which, unfortunately, no translator has yet seen fit to
publish with the book that it illuminates.

It is at least an apparent irony that Verga's two tragic
novels should be founded on a theory of progress; but
the irony evaporates when we understand that his novels

THE FICTION OF GIOVANNI VERGA 145

and he projected five at various social levels were to
be concerned with the victims of progress, the con
quered, and that the whole series was to appear under
the collective title, I vinti.

Human society is a river that begins with low, deny
ing springs and ends in a great, fulfilling torrent. At
every point in this stream, some individuals feel that it
would be desirable to be farther upstream, and the fric
tion of their efforts to get there causes the whole to swell.
The incessant wave that the total effort creates drowns
many of the very individuals who are making it, and they
are tossed lifeless i vintion the shore. Verga makes the
corollary in class structure quite explicitly: at the bot
tom, the simplest material needs (Medlar Tree); next,
money (Mastro-don Gesualdo); next, social power (La
Duchessa) i next, political power; finally, total domina
tion. At every stage, some individuals grow uncomfort
able within the limits of that stage, they begin to yearn
for some undefined move, begin to feel ff la vaga bramosla
dell'ignoto, I'accorgersi che non si sta bene, o che si
potrebbe star meglio." And the first to feel these im
pulses are destroyed. It is a mark of Verga's modernity
that, while he was still charmed by the idea of progress,
he wished to write of it as "II cammino fatale/' and it is
surely a part of his greatness that, while he wished
merely to observe, he made true tragedies out of this
fatal modern idea.

The House by the Medlar Tree has two heroes, an old
grandfather who knows only "the religion of the family"
and tries to keep the oysters on the rock, and a young
grandson who, still wishing to preserve that ideal but
being "more egoistic than the others," has been touched
by the vague desire for the unknown, the beyond, and
hopes to make the oyster-life better. He brings about the
devastation wrought by the sharks of the world, and is
himself destroyed, and in his destruction, ruins most of
his family. At every stage, he who wishes more for his

The Aits in Italy 144

family is at the center, and at each stage he loses them
more: first their boat, then their house, then pride, at
last all but the name: ill-will And with that only, an
other grandson is left to fight his way up the stream.

All around the story of the Malavoglias is the closely
woven life of the town of Aci-Trezza, a fishing village
just north of Catania, lying under Etna, and in the
minor characters Verga presents his several other stages
in life's stream: in the corrupt priest, the political drug
gist, the rich landlord, the miserly entrepreneur, every
scheming wife and daughter, the sad sharpies: each
moved by his kind and degree of ambition, each drown
ing someone and all really drowned. And these are the
people who figure in the separate episodes of the Little
Novels of Sicily. The situations, in fact, echo the sub
sidiary situations of the novel, and nearly all of the char
acters seem to have their prototypes in the larger work.
This is not to suggest that these stories do not have their
own integrity, each its own, and the integrity of each
really pointed by Lawrence's superb translations; it is
only to suggest that when Verga came back to write of
Sicilians, he wrote out of a whole imaginative experi
ence.

Imagination is compulsive. It accepts a subject, even
an interpretation of a subject, and it finds that a style is
decreed. Or it finds the style that it wants and is then
able to explore the subject that it most needs. The young
Verga, a Sicilian trying to imitate Florentines, becomes
an Italian who thinks in Sicilian. The young migrant,
both sentimental and moralistic, becomes sensuous and
moral when he finally confronts what he knows (nor
merely believes) to be la verita which is only to say that
which he does know. The objectivity on which he prides
himself is in fact a deeper assertion of the personality of
the author than any he has been able to assert before:
the true pity that lies in the observation itself, not in the
comment, not in the colored word. And how it shines

THE FICTION OF GIOVANNI VERGA 145

in this work of the early eighties! As we read of these
people who do not know what history is, even their own
(no notion of the battles in which their sons are killed,
no notion of that greater Italy of which in 1863 and
1864 they are already a part); who do not know that
those very faraglioni outside their harbor, among which
their boats are destroyed in storms, have for generations
been said to be the rocks that the blinded Polyphemus
hurled at Odysseus; who accept without question or
wonder the Homeric sunrises in which they live and
cannot question the sunset toward which they aspire
since they do not know what that sunset is as we read
of all this ignorance, we know where we are: in the midst
of our own.

Howells may have found some peace here; but it is
hard to find today. What an American writer today can
find here is an apparent loosening up of the forms of
fiction through a certain kind of concentration which is
in fact that sense of responsibility to meaning that de
crees a form. What an American reader can find here,
as Howells pointed out, is the full quality of a different
life from his, but lived within the same truths although
different truths from those that he saw. Even the tourists
in frivolous Taormina, looking a few miles south to
Verga's faraglioni even the tourist who does not know
what armies fought at Syracuse or what people built
the temples at Agrigento, who has not read Verga, or
Homer either, must feel that, under the golden air, lies
an island, labor a people heavy with an ancient fate.
This is Verga's great evocation--* vinti, i vinti!

146

Paolo Milano

S ILONE THE FAITHFUL

A foreigner in Italy, if he is interested in literature, will
soon discover that Ignazio Silone is better known and
more honored abroad than in his own country. After his
first surprise, he may find this fact not too hard to ex
plainat least superficially. After all, Silone lived in
exile for a very long time, and, though he has been back
in Rome since 1944, his novel, A Handful of Black
berries, is the first book he has published since his home
coming. Besides, haven't Italian literati been more than
a little envious of Silone's world-wide fame? And wasn't
his political stand, as an anti-Communist socialist, bound
to be unpopular in his country?

True as this all may be, it is far from essential. Silone's
position today is a very meaningful but a solitary one,
not only at home but in the world, and as much in litera
ture as in politics. The following remarks may serve to
explain this situation.

Silone believes in politics. Both in principle and in
practice; after the war, he actually sat as a deputy in the
Italian Parliament. His is a rare attitude among the
writers of today, who, everywhere, are either "estranged"
or "engaged." Either they have withdrawn deliberately
from public life, watching over their own "metaphys
ical" privacy, or, in a kind of voluntary rush into self-
abasement, they are ready to pursue alien aims. Silone,

SILONE THE FAITHFUL 147

on the contrary, is neither alienated nor committed. He
does not think in the least, as a Marxist would that
politics should rule over literature; no, he is convinced
that politics should be so directed as to make literature
free, because a certain kind of political life is the premise
of all art. In our society, the writer's freedom, if it isn't
to become an illusion, must be earned, even in the hard,
most unpleasant way. If nothing more, the writer's con
cern with and for society should be a reflex of self-de
fense and a form of his love for the independence of his
quest.

Silone is also a socialist and surely a socialist novelist
in the 19508 is an almost anachronistic figure. He does,
however, take the long view of socialism. He considers
socialism the modern form of Christianity, the present
expression of man's eternal hunger for justice, which, as
Christianity once did, can look forward to centuries in
the future. Retreats, heresies, successful distortions and
temporal compromises may well have the upper hand
for long periods; yet, inevitably, the deep-rooted motive,
the living thread will always reappear. Russian Com
munism, viewed in Silone's historical perspective, may
well prove to have been an immense, ill-taken detour.

Finally, strictly as a novelist, Silone refuses to be "lit
erary." Not only does he dislike psychological or experi
mental writing, believing, as he does, in plain commu
nication; but he also feels that a narrator should respect
and adopt the ancient modes of the popular mind, for
there lie the roots of human discourse.

In a way, and this is not the least of his wonderful
peculiarities, Silone has been writing the same book
again and again for years, much as a painter portrays the
same landscape for a lifetime. Silone's novels, his few
stories and his non-fictional work betray a compact and
stubborn unity of inspiration. Back in the thirties, Fon-
tamara, his first novel, was little less than a revelation.
The impact of Fascism on an Abbruzzean village was

The Arts in Italy

shown to be, on the surface, the insertion of an ex
traneous body, though, substantially, a more violent
form of an immemorial oppression. The figure of the
cafone made its appearance in literature. The cafone is
the destitute peasant, of Italy and of everywhere, whom
the Powers constantly exploit and History by-passes con
stantly. Two-thirds of mankind, the "absent" majority,
were distinctly visible in the microcosm of Fontamara.
But the book was no political tract: irony, a heavy peas
ant irony, kept the representation on balance and the
vital spirits alive.

Silone's next two novels (Bread and Wine and The
Seed Beneath the Snow) offer a variation of the essential
conflict. Here, the day-by-day calvary of peasant life sets
the background against which not Fascism but profes
sional anti-Fascism is to be measured the emptiness of
its party-lines, of its underground networks below and
of its slogans from above. The hope kept alive by the
insulted and the injured, against violence on one side
and abstraction on the other, rests on an almost Tol-
stoyan covenant between simple friends. Here politics
turns evangelical again, and the seed is ripening in new
catacombs.

A Handful of Blackberries takes us back once more
to a familiar village in the Abbruzzi but in 1946, in the
troubled times that followed the end of the war. The
Great Deceiver, now, is the Communist Party, with its
bureaucracy, its emphasis on obedience and its distrust
of the peasantry's moral instinct and of its political
spontaneity. Since the cafoni are right but they are
steeped in their folk-ways and dreams, and the Party is
wrong but ruthlessly "modern," A Handful of Black
berries is a satire rather than a drama. Neither realistic
nor symbolic, it is not even a novel in the ordinary sense
of the term, it is a long apologue. Its characters are few
and exemplary; their size is heightened and their vicis
situdes are told in a leisurely, proverbial manner. The

SILONE THE FAITHFUL 149

subplot, for instance, (the love-story of a Communist
functionary who breaks with the Party and of a displaced
Jewish girl who stands courageously by him), is literally
a romance, and has its moments of sheer melodrama. As
the ancient humor of its long-winded talks remind us at
every step, here is a folk-tale. It should be read and
enjoyed accordingly.

Since Silone first began to write, quite a few things
have happened in literature and in history. In Italy, sev
eral writers have appeared, (I am thinking less of the
"neo-realists" as of such original talents as Carlo Levi
and Elio Vittorini), who could tread on new ground be
cause Silone had first broken it for them. He was the
earliest to step "beyond Eboli."

On the world-stage, the cafoni have made themselves
felt lately, from Indo-China to Morocco and from Kenya
to Venezuela. On the other hand, the East-German riots
against the Russian occupants have recently made an
old prediction of Silone sound very pointed. Fifteen
years ago, he wrote that the day might dawn when the
workers themselves would discover that "Marxism is the
opiate of the people/'

Silone can wait. If his fellow-Italians are slow in grant
ing him plenary recognition, time is on his side. And the
foreign reader would be ill-advised if he took a cavalier
view of A Handful of Blackberries, dismissing the book,
nostalgically perhaps, as a belated echo of those "popu
list" novels so eagerly acclaimed in the thirties.

Silone is now at work, and a return to Silone may
well be in the cards. One thing is certain: such a swing
of the pendulum could not possibly be a purely literary
affair.

150

Nicola Chiaromonte

AMBIGUITIES IN ITALIAN LITERATURE

In the farthest and most resplendent regions of the
South, there operates a hidden Ministry for the defense
of Nature against Reason: a maternal genius of unlim
ited power to whose jealous and unremitting care is
entrusted the sleep in which those people are sunk.
Should such a defense relax for a moment, should the
sweet and cold voices of Reason be heard by the sleepers,
Nature would be thunderstruck. This incompatibility of
two forces which are equally great and, contrary to the
optimist's view, unreconcilable; this frightfully secret
defense of the territory of Nature, with its songs, its sor
rows, and its dumb innocence; this, not the ruthlessness
of History ... is the cause of the conditions in which
this land lies, of the pitiful defeat in which the expedi
tions sent out here by human reason invariably end.
Here, thought can only be the slave of Nature, and its
gazer. A critical examination is no sooner attempted, no
sooner does a tendency take shape to correct the celestial
conformation of these regions, to see water in the sea,
chemical compounds in the volcanoes, insides in man,
than death swiftly comes to the offender. . . . The im
mobility of these regions has been attributed to other
causes, but they are not the true ones. It is Nature that
regulates the life and organizes the sufferings of these
people. Here economic disaster has no other cause. The

AMBIGUITIES IN ITALIAN LITERATURE 151

long succession of kings and viceroys, the unconquer
able array of priests, the multiplication of churches like
amusement parks and of hospitals and prisons as well,
stem from this. Here where Nature, once the mother of
ecstasies, has taken refuge, Human Reason, everything
in reason that is dangerous for Nature's Empire, is
doomed.

This passage, I translated from a successful and sig
nificant book, // mare non bagna Napoli (The Sea does
Not Touch Naples') by Anne Maria Ortese, which re
ceived a Viareggio Prize. Miss Ortese's remarks about the
struggle between Nature and Reason in the South could
well apply to the moral and cultural situation of Italy as
a whole. If Nature is taken to include the common de
nominator of social, religious, and cultural beliefs by
which, statistically speaking, the majority of the individ
uals in a community finally abide, and if by Reason one
does not intend only theoretical thought and practical
enterprise, but, more generally, the principle of con
sistency in life and thought, then the war between the
two, with Nature winning most of the battles, is cer
tainly not a peculiarity of Southern dereliction and
inertia. It dominates the Italian scene, and it is particu
larly visible in the narrative literature of today, when
practically everybody claims to be a "realist," that is to
convey a definite experience rather than a literary mood.

In Italy, literary traditionalism is, of course, part of
nature. To the sensibility of most Italian readers and
critics, an accomplished literary form still is the most
convincing proof that the writer is dealing with reality.
Hence, for example, in Miss Ortese's book, the critics
have highly praised the two short stories, while tending
to dismiss the straightforward descriptions of Neapolitan
life which constitute the real merit of the volume. The
joke is that the short stories (one about a poor short
sighted little girl who puts on a pair of glasses for the
first time, and sees a world which, as her aunt puts it

The Arts in Italy 1 5 2

"one had better not see/' the other about a melancholy
spinster who on Christmas day, nurtures for a moment
the hope of getting married, but cannot quite get ex
cited about it, and finally dismisses it) are nice pieces of
writing, while the descriptions are often-marred by "neo-
realistic" emphasis, which does not prevent the short
stories from being sentimental anecdotes, while the
journalistic accounts are pieces of passionate and force
ful writing.

Speaking of the struggle between nature and reason,
a case in point is the excellent novel by Giese Rimanelli,
Tiro al piccione (Pigeon-shooting was the term used by
the partisans during the war to designate their ambushes
against the Fascist Black Brigade, whose insignia was
the Roman eagle: the "pigeon"). This is the first good
literary account of the Resistance war seen from the
Fascist camp. It tells without any fuss the story of a
seventeen-year-old boy who, in 1943, sees in the German
trucks that roll north through his home town going
north just a chance to escape from the family, an uneasy
love affair, and tedium. In the north, he ends up by
enlisting in the Black Brigades; not because he believes
in the Fascist cause, but just because there is little else
to be done. Ambushes, massacres, cold-blooded killing,
terrorism, plus a love affair with an army nurse, are
what the young man gets in the way of "sentimental
education" and "reason."

He is in a constant state of disgust, and yet he goes on,
simply because he has found a couple of comrades there,
and killing (or being killed) on one side seems to him
very much the same as killing (or being killed) on the
other. What is revolting to him is "nature/* not an idea:
the inhumanity and senselessness of a fratricidal strug
gle into whose causes he does not care to inquire. What
irritates him about the Fascists is their incapacity to see
that they are defeated anyway, so that their cruelty be
comes doubly senseless. On the other hand, what makes

AMBIGUITIES IN ITALIAN LITERATURE 153

him suspect that the partisans' cause makes some sense
is the fact that they are obviously on the winning side.
This is as far as his reason goes. As for his nature, it tells
him that making love is better than killing, friendship
more satisfying than enmity, peace more desirable than
war; above all, that all men have a mother, hence the
mothers' point of view is the only universal one.

These, and especially the last one, are classic tenets of
Italian "natural" morality. In ordinary times, they
might not mean much; but in moments of upheaval and
mechanized ferocity, they appear as the most precious
heritage of "nature" precisely. When everything else is
shattered, they remain, and they are effective, people
actually abide by them. It is to this morality that Rima-
nelli's here finally surrenders when, after the Fascist
rout, he goes back into the folds of the familythe
prodigal son, which is as it should be.

The reader, however, feels somewhat frustrated, as if
all that had happened in the meantime had been a bad
dream rather than a tragic experience. Artistically speak
ing, the young man who, one night blindly decided to
take his life into his own hands, was real, a hero of our
time. The prodigal son returned home is just "normal."
What next? There are signs in the book, that the young
man is drifting in the direction of the Communist reli
gion. But one knows that, in any case, this is a secondary
issue, since the real catharsis of the drama has already
occurred the moment the harassed hero has embraced
his mother and sat at the family table.

Together with Miss Ortese's book on Naples, the
jury of the Viareggio Prize brought to the attention of
the reading public an account of the retreat from Russia,
II sergente nella neve (The Sergeant in the Snow) by
Mario Rigoni Stern. It is the real story, told in the first
person, of the endurance, the sufferings, the calm cour
age, of a sergeant of the Alpine troops and his comrades
from the moment of the Russian counter-offensive on

The Arts in Italy ^4

the Don, which broke their lines, to their arrival to
safety after a month of terrible marching through the
frozen steppe and several desperate battles to break
through encirclement by the Russians. An extremely
honest document: Sergeant Rigoni, his soldiers and offi
cers are very attractive individuals, in addition to being
sturdy and courageous soldiers.

The book is also a straightforward testimony in favor
of Italian "natural" morality and humaneness. Rigoni
has great sympathy for the Russian people; he under
stands that he is waging an unjust war on them, does
not like it, but, of course, has no choice but to perform
his duty as scrupulously as he can. The march, the suffer
ing, the sticking together as the army disintegrates, the
hopeless battles, are all parts of a job that has to be done.
Inhumanity isn't.

What happened to Rigoni in the Russian village of
Nikolaievka could have happened in precisely that way
only to an Italian. Rigoni and the remnants of his bat
talion had been fighting the whole day, and it had been
a massacre. Only twenty of them were left, with no am
munition. The Russians were all around them. To try
to get some food, Rigoni knocked at the door of an izba.
The door opened. Inside sitting at a table there were
Russian soldiers, eating; women were serving them. The
Russians were armed; Rigoni was armed too. He re
mained on the doorstep, frozen; then he announced in
Russian that he was hungry. One of the women gave
him a plate of soup. He ate, said "Thanks," and turned
about to leave. The Russians did not budge. The woman
who had served him took him to the door. Near the
door, Rigoni noticed some beehives: he asked the
woman for some honey to take to his comrades. The
woman gave it to him and the Italian invader left. 'Tor
once," he comments, "circumstances had led men to act
just like men."

Natural morality, which war, and history in general,

AMBIGUITIES IN ITALIAN LITERATURE 155

violate for their own abstract motives, had asserted itself.
To an Italian, such occurrences are the equivalent of a
religious revelation, in fact they are even more convinc
ing. However, he knows that while they are both the
expression of an eternal truth, they are also exceptional.
Real life is absurdly impervious to "natural" morality.
For Sergeant Rigoni the unfortunate soldier of the Rus
sian campaign, reality seems to have been limited by two
orders of facts: one was his battalion, kept together by
the peculiarly strong esprit de corps which characterizes
Italian Alpine troops. This meant that particular job of
war that had to be done by him and his comrades. The
other dominant fact was nostalgia for the native moun
tain village. The rest, war in general, its causes, the ideo
logical conflicts connected with it, and even the Italian
army at large, were just abstractions to be best ignored.

This finally makes of his book, for all his honesty and
realism, a piece of regional, if not sectional, literature.
In fact, the reactions and the behavior of a Neapolitan
infantryman would have been very different from
Rigoni's. The natural morality, however, would have
been very much the same although felt and practiced in
a different fashion. The Neapolitan, that is, might have
been sloppy, hysterical and cowardly, whereas Rigoni
was efficient, level-headed, and courageous. But to him,
too, war would have been just a violation of the natural
order and inquiry into its causes a matter for highbrows;
moral problems would have ended with the distinction
between the "humans" and the "inhumans," and reason
would have been either a question of practical expedi
ency and ability, or else a scholastic notion.

Such a human and yet subtly disappointing (as if we
were denied the whole truth), limitation of the intellec
tual and moral horizon, and of "reality" itself can be
noticed even in a sophisticated writer like Mario To-
bino. He is the author of several books, among them a
long story on life under Fascism, Bandiera Nera (Black

The Arts in Italy *5 6

Flag). He has also written an excellent volume of mem
oirs about the war in Lybia, in which he participated as
a Medical Corps officer. There Lieutenant Tobino had
some bitter experiences of the weaknesses of the Italian
character, and he does not mince his words in denounc
ing them.

As a civilian, he is a psychiatrist, in charge of the wom
en's section of an important insane asylum near Lucca.
In Le libere donne di Magliano (The Free Women of
Magliano) , Tobino recounts in the form of a loose jour
nal his experiences with his patients, or rather he de
scribes a number of them one by one, not as diseased
individuals, but as strange, and sometimes quite touch
ing, characters. Particularly successful is the portrait of
one of these women, Leila, who had waited on him with
passionate care for ten years, in relative freedom, and
one day was sent back to her cell because it was discov
ered that she was hoarding in a crazy way all sorts of
things, including money. Questioning the justice of the
decision, Doctor Tobino gives his own interpretation of
Leila's character, as motivated by an unbounded need
for devotion. As long as she could show one of the doc
tors her exclusive love by serving him, she behaved quite
sanely. Her troubles, the mania for hoarding and even
stealing, started with the arrival to the asylum of a
woman doctor in whom she saw a rival. At that moment,
Tobino maintains, she was left without a God to serve,
and she started stealing, and giving the money she stole
to her brother. Human sympathy is what we all need,
and humility in the face of what we do not understand;
then, even madness can appear "natural." Could there
be a nicer attitude for the harassed director of an insane
asylum? Certainly not. Yet, in some way, for a writer
and an intellectual who contemplates the monsters of
madness, the appeal to sympathy, and the ability to de
scribe the insane as "character," do not seem to be ade
quate answers to the problem.

AMBIGUITIES IN ITALIAN LITERATURE 157

If realism is the ability to render things as they are,
without any literary embellishment, morality, or cathar
sis, then the most realistic piece of writing that has
appeared recently in Italy is a non-literary document
published by the magazine Nuovi Argomenti, edited by
Alberto Moravia and Albert Carocci: the Memoriale
dal carcere (Memoirs from Jail) by Saverio Montalto. It
is the story of a man who killed his sister and wounded
his wife and his brother-in-law, written by the man him
self not for a literary magazine but for the judge of in
struction. The man was a Sicilian town clerk, whose
sister was seduced and then unwillingly married by a
local small-time Don Juan. From that moment the night
mare that will lead to crime begins for Montalto. The
acquired family starts torturing him as the inferior
creature who succeeded in insinuating himself in a
sphere where he does not belong. Not content with
moral torture, they extort money from him, force him
into debt and fearful subjection.

This is not enough: they coerce him to marry into
the family, so that he can be more completely at their
mercy. At the same time, his sister is continually beaten
up by her husband, and treated as a servant by the rest
of the family. Until, with an anguishing fatality that
the reader senses from the beginning, crime comes, an
outburst. The merciless narrowness of Italian provincial
life has never been rendered with such raw power as in
this attempt by a murderer to reconstruct the atmos
phere, rather than the motives, of his crime.

Neither a realist nor a surrealist, Tommaso Landolfi
occupies a place by himself in contemporary Italian lit
erature. He is a self-conscious, extremely literary writer,
yet there is. simplicity as well as truth in his pages, since
he is motivated not by literature but by an authentic
mood. The mood is a despondency so complete that it
takes up a romantic tinge. Despondency, the total in
ability to see any purpose in life, is, of course, contra-

The Arts in Italy *5 8

dieted by the very fact that one goes on living. It is the
consciousness of this fact that is the source of Landolfi's
special kind of irony. His novel La biere du pecheur is
a kind of aimless rambling, from descriptions of weary
love affairs to a couple of first rate accounts of the
author's only real passion, gambling.

Gambling is to Landolfi the most senseless, devilish,
sinful passion of all. That is why it is also the most irre
sistible and significant. Yet, if it were made to seem
serious, it would lose its true meaning, which is aimless
automatism and conscious self-deception. In this, gam
bling is the symbol of all other passions, including love,
and life itself; dreary and comical at the same time.

Other narrative books have appeared recently in Italy
that would deserve some attention. Those that have
been chosen here should, however, give the reader a suf
ficient idea of the complexities, and the limitations, of
the "realistic" trend that dominates contemporary Ital
ian narration.

Kermit Lansner

ITALIAN PAINTING

From the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of this
century, there was little in Italian art which can now
hold our close attention. It does not compare nor does
the work of any of the other European countries with
the painting and sculpture of France; either in its in
tensity, intelligence or imagination. Nineteenth century
Italian art was unadventurous and provincial; at its best
(among the Macchiaioli of Florence) it was rarely more
than pleasant.

In that remarkable burst of invention which touched
all of Europe about fifty years ago, Italian painting came
to life again. The discoveries of the Parisian painters,
beginning with the Fauves, now seems entirely natural
in light of the continuous tradition behind them. Much
stranger and more dramatic was the sudden develop
ment of new art movements in other countries. Italy,
in particular, oppressed by memories of the past, cov
ered with monuments of former glories, politically im
mature, seems to have lacked at that time any of those
characteristic signs of modernity which were well de
veloped in France. Suddenly she moved into the van
guard of experiment in art. Futurism, looked at now,
seems to have been a summary achieved in one bold
step of those many things we mean when we speak of
the modern spirit. It was one of the first of Italy's pecul-

The Arts in Italy l6

iarly modern experiments Fascism being another. I
mention them together not because there was any real
sympathy between the two, but because the garish, if
superficial, melodrama of both now seem so outdated.
The pictures of the Futurists are familiar enough al
though they are not shown as frequently as those of other
schools. But the 1949 show of Italian art at the Museum
of Modern Art, the comprehensive retrospective at the
Venice Biennale some years ago and, recently, several
smaller exhibitions in New York of works by Balla,
Severini, Russolo, Carrd and Boccioni remind us again
of the importance of their art. The central dogma in the
program of the Futurists was the glorification of motion:
"Everything is moving, everything is running, every
thing is whirling . . . moving forms are multiplied,
deformed like vibrations through the space in which
they pass." This controlling idea was applied to subject
matter drawn from the most contemporary aspects of
their environment. The Futurists had little use for the
standard themes which were always present in the works
of other painters although these served, in fact, as
vehicles for the most revolutionary discoveries of new
forms by the greatest among them. Thus the peculiarly
modern subjects: factories, automobiles, trains, mecha
nized war. They also had the idea of changing the spec
tator's point of perception, thus affecting his psycho
logical relationship with the picture. They wanted to
"place the spectator at the center of the painting" which
would become a "synthesis of what one sees and what
one remembers." This intention was one aspect of the
larger doctrine of simultaneity which was developed.
Each of these ideas was present in the other schools of
modern art in one degree or another, but none com
bined them so skillfully as the Futurists nor expressed
their doctrine so forcefully. The influence of the group
is still felt although it was never as strong as that of the
Cubists and other French artists.

ITALIAN PAINTING l6l

By 1915, a little more than five years after it began, the
movement was finished. Boccioni, to my mind the most
gifted both in painting and sculpture, died in 1916
while the others returned to more conservative styles
and never again, with the exception of Carrd, achieved
the success of their Futurist works. They remained fine
painters but were no longer important ones. Many ex
planations have been offered for the sudden dwindling
of the Futurists. It seems probable that this fate was
inherent in the program of the group itself and the
demands they made upon the resources of painting.

Besides the Futurists there was another group com
posed mainly of three painters which was of equal im
portance in modern art. The Metaphysical School was
Italian in origin and fulfillment, though its influence
can be noted in the atmosphere of innumerable works
by mediocre artists who followed. The obsession with
motion so characteristic of the Futurists is absent from
the paintings of the metaphysicals. De Chirico's can
vases are bathed in a mysterious silence which is
strangely eloquent. Although this painting relies for its
emotional effect upon the combination of perception
and memory or association it uses other means than
the flamboyant skills of the Futurists. Yet, like their
work, it has a modern patina upon a modern substance.
It is an art immediately felt as contemporary, but not
fully integral to our immediate concerns, even slightly
deviant from the strongest current of recent art itself.
It is expressive of the longings of the modern spirit
rather than of an immediate reality.

Morandi, who lives in Bologna, is far less known than
De Chirico or Carrd but he is now regarded by many as
Italy's foremost painter. Driven by a passion for plastic
perfection, Morandi works a very small area which he
has cultivated for thirty years. A few jugs, vases, bowls
are painted and repainted. His work has the silence of
the metaphysical school, but the strong serenity is his

The Arts in Italy l62

own. One knows that he is a contemporary but feels
that he might have painted these same still-lifes at any
time; and this very absence of the modern flair which
distinguishes the other painters seems to have allowed
him to continue in the same spirit for years like
Cezanne whom he admires.

The decline of invention in Italian painting coincides
with the rise of Fascism. The older, famous painters,
driven by their personal needs, returned to less adven
turous styles, the younger ones were unable to generate
new ideas. It seems likely that this diminution in power
would have happened in any case, but political restric
tions reinforced the decline. Sympathetic contact with
other countries was discouraged and artistic energies
which could only flourish by concentration upon the
problems of art were often led off into irrelevant en
thusiasms.

The most conservative tendencies of the period were
embodied in the group called the Novecento. Although
some among them became the official artists of the day,
it would be a derogatory simplification to assume that
their program was decisive in Italy. The Novecento was
not a coherent movement. In fact it was only a loosely
connected association of artists whose common bond was
a distaste, or an inability, for the unsettling advanced
art of the century. Whatever the more permanent effects
of Fascism upon painting and sculpture, it did not
smother them completely nor, until late in the game,
attempt to exercise a thoroughly rigid control. During
the twenties and thirties there were many painters,
some of whom have been treated to retrospectives and
reconsiderations in an attempt to work out a continuity
in Italian art; and their styles were as various as their
notions of what painting might be. But they looked to
the past. Precedent was found in the long tradition of
Italian art and, in several instances, in the local dialects
of the regions from which they came. The best work of

ITALIAN PAINTING

the period had little of the bombast of Fascism; the im
perial pretensions o the government do not appear in
the still-lifes and landscapes of Tosi, the lonely figure of
Casorati or the quiet glimpses of city and family life
which Rosai painted. Scipioni, co-founder with Mafai
of a "Roman School" in the late twenties, used an ex-
pressionistic, rhetorical style, but it is personal and
romantic rather than public.

What is missing in all these painters is either the in
spiration of new ideas or the original fusion of old ones.
Campigli, in Paris, managed to develop a charming but
repetitive style based on various models from antiquity,
but de Pisis, working in the same city, did not go farther
than a great facility with the techniques of the Im
pressionists. Only Magnelli continued to break new
ground, though his work has little felicity about it.

Since the end of the war, Italian painters have felt
the full force of the major achievements of the art of this
century. At the successive Biennales each country has
hung, in number, the best works of its artists. These
were eagerly studied and assimilated. The vigor of the
Italians who had continued to work for many years
without benefit of the most original ideas of the time
flourished in their attempt to catch up with the rest of
Europe. It is a sign of the living pertinence of modern
art that it immediately held these men who had been
isolated for so long. Painting in Italy during the past
decade seems then like a hurried recapitulation of
styles which have been long familiar to most of us. The
central idea of abstraction, deeper and more inclusive
than it had been in the days of the Futurists, dominated
a number of subsidiary styles and even the reactions to
it seemed like echoes of movements which had taken
place in Paris twenty years before. Again Picasso domi
nated everyone. Influences from his more recent and
even from his older periods inspired painters of widely
diverse purpose and talent,

The Arts in Italy l6 4

Combined with the tendency towards abstraction was
a reluctance to put aside the powers of painting as social
commentary. The enthusiasm which the younger Italians
had for left-wing politics kept many of them tied to
the subject, although the direction of their adopted
styles could have easily led them to non-objective paint
ing. The tension of subject and technique is seen in
the painting of Guttuso, a young painter famous beyond
his achievement, who uses a roughly simplified cubism,
brash colors and images of workers and peasants. This
is a fairly common synthesis. Others, like Birolli, Pizzi-
nato and Cagli, have adopted the most obvious manner
isms of the middle-generation French painters: the
swinging curve (a cubist shorthand) and broken color
areas. But change is so rapid (Pizzinato, for example, is
now extremely realistic) that we must regard much of
this painting as experimentation with a wealth of new
suggestions. It is this fluidity which makes it so difficult
to write about the work without photographs to illus
trate my points and with few examples of the paintings
available.

Recently there has been a turn on the part of some
painters towards a more non-objective art. Afro, one of
the most gifted, has moved to warmly colored, fluid
canvases with only the slightest reference to the world;
and other painters have taken up the suggestions of
the latest French and American art (the 1950 Biennale
showed de Kooning, Pollock and Gorky) to join an
international style which is still being shaped.

I have spoken only of painting, and of that rather
sketchily, in these few pages, although it is in sculpture
that Italy has produced its most consistently successful
artists. Marini is the most widely known among the
sculptors, but others, Martini, Manzu, Greco have joined
him to revive an art in which Italy was long pre-emi
nent.

i6 5

Eric Bentley

THE ITALIAN THEATRE

In the first of a series of lectures organized by the Uni
versity Fascist Youth in 1935, Pirandello called the Ital
ian theatre "the first and most important theatre of the
world.'' Yet in the previous year, at a world theatre con
ference in Rome (the Convegno Volta), the chief Italian
spokesman, Silvio D'Amico, had, in effect, appealed to
Mussolini to rescue this theatre from disaster. D'Amico
quoted the American reporter Richard Watts as having
said that the Duce had provided his country with great
theatre by speaking from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia.
If theatre could help the state in this way, D'Amico
argued, couldn't the state help the theatre with larger
subsidies?

The contrast between the speeches of Pirandello and
D'Amico dramatizes, I think, the contrast baffling at
first to the foreigner in Italian theatre then or now: a
contrast between what the brochures tell you and what
you actually find, between what is professed by French
students of commedia dell'arte and what you really see
in Rome and Milan, between what the Italian theatre
magazines blazon in print and what their editors con
fess in private. Here is a theatre which trumpets its own
glories to the world and yet has been discussing for gen
erations the question "Esiste un teatro italiano?" ("Does
an Italian theatre exist?'*)

The Arts in Italy 166

If the contrast I am talking about were merely that
between a product as advertised and a product in itself
as it really is, it would be of too simple a nature to re
quire discussion. The fact is that the splendeurs are as
real as the miseres, Pirandello's claim as well-founded as
D'Amico's demand. This is both the best and the worst
theatre in the world.

THE WORST

Go to the average show by the average professional
company, and you will find the standards of production
lower than English repertory or American summer
stock. The scenery is ragged, old-fashioned, and in poor
taste. There seems to have been no director at all. The
acting subsists on leftovers of Victorian style; no won
der the film directors prefer people off the street.

Sometimes a company of considerable pretensions is
no better. No American college dare present so feeble
a representation of Murder in the Cathedral as was
offered in Rome and throughout Italy by the grand old
man of the Italian stage, Ruggero Ruggeri (d. 1953).
Seeing this chorus I was reminded of what an Italian
conductor told me about singers. "All our singers are
soloists," he said, "Italians can't sing together." What
ever degree of collaboration existed among the members
of the Eliot chorus might have been established by a
one-minute conference before the performance started.
Again: no production at all. Just Ruggeri standing stage
center where he could see and hear the prompter. Sitting
in the front rows you got the whole thing twice: once in
the prompter's loud whisper, once in Ruggeri's quiet
falsetto.

I don't mean that there was no distinction in Rug
geri's acting or, say, in that of Emma Gramatica when
she appeared in equally shabby productions of Piran
dello and D'Annunzio a couple of years ago. It is only

THE ITALIAN THEATRE 167

that the undoubted distinction is beset by a mediocrity
that would be tolerated in no other country. And that
there is a conspiracy of silence about it in the press. The
critics either don't see it or won't risk hurting anyone's
feelings.

One should perhaps include theatre criticism as
among the worst features of Italian theatre. I have no
idea whether any of it is, in a strict and legal sense, cor
rupt, as it is in some parts of Europe. My impression is
that, on the contrary, it is deprived of all intellectual
interests by a misguided good will which makes of the
critic an assistant to the press agent. He is so busy en
couraging every bad performance of every bad play that
he removes the incentive to serious effort. It may be that
Silvio D'Amico still a central figure in Rome is a par
tial exception to the rule, as was his Milanese opposite
number Renato Simoni (d. 1952). And the critic of
Unita can be counted on for the communist brand of
social criticism. (The keenest theatre criticism I know
of in Italy was that of Antonio Gramsci and Piero Go-
betti a generation ago; if there is nothing of the sort to
day, the rise of fascism and the degradation of Stalinism
are responsible.) But the rule holds.

THE BEST

When Pirandello called the Italian theatre the best he
was boasting in the familiar manner of his Duce, whose
"sacred renewal" of Italian life his lecture invokes. But
he was also referring to the archetypal character of
earlier Italian achievements in the theatre, most notably
the commedia dell'arte. The Mussolini regime was not
disposed to acknowledge where that sort of tradition
most conspicuously survives today namely, in the dia
lect theatre. Yet, for all the government's opposition to
dialect, some of the greatest names of the fascist era are
those of dialect artists: Angelo Musco the Sicilian (Gio-

The Arts in Italy 168

vanni Grasso belongs primarily in the previous era),
Petrolini the Roman comedian, and the three De Filip-
pos. Only the De Filippos have survived into the present
Demo-Christian era one of them was a DC candidate
at the recent election but this is more than mere sur
vival, for it was in the years following the fall of Mus
solini that the greatest of them, Eduardo, came into his
own as a playwright. The latest edition of D'Amico's
history of drama is subtitled "From Aeschylus to Ed
uardo De Filippo." (D'Amico plays the same chronicler's
part in Italy that Allardyce Nicoll has played in Eng
land, John Gassner in America, Joseph Gregor in
Austria.)

Whatever his relation to Aeschylus, Eduardo is one
of the great artists of the contemporary theatre. Gordon
Craig finds him the greatest living actor. He is certainly
the leading Italian playwright. True, there are still
those who would grant such a title only to a writer of the
literary Italian language ("lingua"). Eduardo is nothing
if not Neapolitan, yet, at that, his plays are not purely
dialectal; he tends now to keep the pure dialect for the
lower-class characters. His plays are toured all over
Italy. One of them was the chief modern Italian exhibit
at a Venice festival. Another has been a hit in transla
tionin Paris. This last is Filumena Marturano> the
tragi-comedy of a Neapolitan prostitute; if one has to
suggest an analogue in our tradition, it must be O'Casey.
It is not for the present writer to predict whether such
a play could ever succeed on our stage as he is already
at work on an American version.

The last play of Eduardo's that I saw was Fear Num
ber One which is a comical treatment of our fear of the
third world war. That and its predecessor The Big
Magic showed Eduardo becoming increasingly reflective
and even intellectual and therefore (for an Italian)
Pirandellian. As played by himself, his sister Titina, and
his admirable troupe, these plays continued to fascinate

THE ITALIAN THEATRE 169

me, but whether the trend toward intellectuality is the
right one for this author I would doubt. More probably,
it is exactly analogous to Chaplin's later drift a credit
to an artist's earnestness but no boon to his art.

In the dynasty of the Neapolitan stage, De Filippo is
the immediate heir of another Eduardo, the great Scar-
petta, last of the Pulcinellas, favorite of Benedetto Croce.
Gossip has it that De Filippo's best scenes are lifted from
the Mss. in the older Eduardo's trunk. Which is a story
that ought to be true if it isn't. The roots of Eduardo are
in Neapolitan fun and fantasy. Any branching out into
world culture, modern philosophy, or the Aeschylean
empyrean is likely to be papier-mach6.

I add a warning to Americans: do not judge Eduardo
by his films (Napoli Milionaria, Filumena Marturand),
much less by other people's films in which he appears
(Assunta Spina, Seven Deadly Sins, and a couple of dozen
others). We have seen the talent of American actors
somehow evaporate before the camera's eye, and just
that happens to Eduardo's genius. Even on the stage, his
style is elusive. He is the opposite of "Italianate." Noth
ing operatic here. The tone is low, the gesture by Ital
ian standards understated. Then again, there is a great
deal to learn before one can appreciate him. The Italian
stage does not have an Oriental "gesturology," but vari
ous provinces, and Naples in particular, have what
amounts to a system of gestures with accepted meanings.

The Teatro di Eduardo is perhaps all that is left of the
greatness of dialect theatre. But since the war there have
been notable achievements in lingua. Here, I believe,
the outstanding personality is not a playwright (though
some would nominate Ugo Betti [d. 1953]) but a direc
tor: Luchino Visconti. The closest American analogue
is Elia Kazan. Both Visconti and Kazan are, in a loose
and perhaps also in a strict sense, decadent. They trans
fer to the stage their own frenetic nervosity; Visconti
even tends to a certain surrealistic deliquescence. Like

The Arts in Italy 170

Kazan, he is saved from experimental mess by sheer
showmanship. It may be that his great contribution has
nothing to do with a particular style but consists in the
fact that he is a craftsman and a perfectionist. Having a
good deal of money has doubtless helped; he is one of
the Viscontis and a duke. His production of Death of a
Salesman a. play that has pursued me from country to
country was the only one anywhere to match Kazan's;
for a man who had never touched American soil an
amazing feat of sympathetic imagination. As for his
range, it is wider than the American director's has as
yet shown itself to be. He is as much at home with
Shakespeare and Alfieri as with Williams.

NEITHER BEST NOR WORST

Though Italian theatre tends to be pushed to the ex
tremes of good and bad, it would be folly to pretend it
has no middling middle. Many of the famous spettacoli
all'aperto belong there, though the grandeur of a Higher
Impresario may seem to raise them higher. Then again,
the rashness of trying to rival God if every prospect
pleases and only man is vile can put a show in the lower
category.

Highest in the middle category I would put the Pic
colo Teatro di Milano and next underneath it the
Piccolo Teatro di Roma. Here, no doubt, the real
achievement was to create a repertory, as against a tour
ing, theatre at all. I am told that I was not lucky in my
choice of shows. Certainly I saw much that was com
petent or interesting without being first-rate. I also saw
one show at each theatre which belongs in the highest
category. The Raven in Milan and Six Characters in
Search of an Author in Rome.

THE OUTLO OK

The Italian theatre is government-subsidized, and by
now the cumbersome governmental apparatus, upset

THE ITALIAN THEATRE 171

by the war, is working again. And there are three lavish
magazines wholly devoted to theatre (as against the US's
one): // Dramma, Teatro-Scenario, and Sipario.

The question is whether it can be done this way, "it"
being The Thing We All Want To Do in the theatre
now; I hesitate to define it; like God, "it" has earned its
vagueness. One's fear is that too much of the effort has
been concentrated on the return to normalcy (i.e. 1939).
On the other hand, there is no way of guaranteeing the
appearance of young Salvinis and Duses, Pirandellos and
Petrolinis. I am left with the classic conclusion of fresh
man theme and ladies* club lecture: Time Will Tell.

Two recent books are to be recommended: Ritorno
alia censura by Vitaliano Brancati and Spettacolo del
secolo by Vito Pandolfii. The Italian Society of Authors
in New York would like to inform readers that the do
ings of the Italian theatre are annually recorded in an
Annuario del teatro italiano and also, now, in an Al-
manacco dello spettacolo italiano. The Communist critic
Luciano Lucignani is editing a review of theatre under
the title Arena.

1 7 2

Parker Tyler

ITALIAN FILMS

The vitality of post-war Italian films takes up the great
impulse o Bicycle Thief, which came in 1949, and am
plifies it to the level of a permanent revival. In regard to
merit among films, one should be careful before rushing
into print. What is good can momentarily seem better
than it is because of its automatic contrast with the dis
heartening omnipresent average. But the good peasant
blood of Two Cents Worth of Hope, a distinguished
genre comedy that appeared in 1953, has withstood the
test of elapsed time. Now there are two items that define
themselves as veritable peaks: Strange Deception and
Times Gone By; also, an efflorescence of Anna Magnani:
a revival in herself.

The metaphor of the life-blood is very worthy of the
Italian revival, whose first impetus followed the war.
"Life-blood" expresses the valual saturation of Curzio
Malaparte's Strange Deception, which, without previous
experience in the medium, the Italian novelist wrote
and directed with amazing art, literally contributing his
own music to what is a phenomenally "musical" treat
ment of motion pictures. Sound at the core and pure in
flesh, the work in its full finesse can be appreciated only
by lengthy analysis or actual experience of it. The hero,
returning to his Tuscan village after ten years in a Rus
sian prison camp, is in perfect health; as played by Raf

ITALIAN FILMS 173

Vallone, he is indeed the image o peasant dignity and
natural nobility: the pure thinking earth that Prome
theus fashioned.

Yet, with peace restored, Bruno has come home to kill.
The man he wishes to kill is the unknown-to-him be
trayer of his younger brother, caught and shot by the
Germans for being a Partisan. Thus, Bruno and this is
Malaparte's distinctive insight returns not as the mortal
avenger whom Electra took in her arms, nor as those
prized murderers who stalked the Elizabethan and
French neo-Classic stages, but as their opposite: a kind of
Frankenstein's monster, a dreaded alien. Everybody
knows the "Judas"; no one, not even Bruno's own
parents, will identify him. The reasons are beautifully
unfolded by Malaparte as Bruno wanders over his vil
lage. Hidden behind the very air now breathed by the
townsfolk is the imminence of that violence which they
are striving to believe has been exiled by God's will and
the world's. Branded with the sign of the killer, Bruno's
spectre sullies the Feast of the Virgin and taints the
ritual wine-pressing. This atmosphere, created very re
markably, is all the more eloquent in the medium of
photography which reveals the light of day and every
thing in it so literally and starkly.

All Bruno's human relations of family, love, and
friendship have become involved in his fatal quest. The
traditional Game of the Cross, in which the sexton, car
rying a large cross, satirically dares someone to be cruci
fied there, fulfills a symbolic function in the action. It is
the dilemma and trap of Orestes, oriented to Christian
sacrifice and forgiveness rather than to Classic nemesis
and its Eumenidean balance. A saintly friend of Bruno,
a kind of dens ex machina, arises to work out the climax
of his vendetta. The irony is profoundly imagined and
poetically executed. Possibly Strange Deception is to be
considered a morally controversial work but its impact
seems powerful enough to provide a catharsis for ideol-

The Arts in Italy

ogy as well as for pity and terror. Bruno is spared his last,
worst crime by a curious dislocation of his avenging
thrust. His final tremendous cry against the fate of the
innocent, who bear the chief burden of guilt, pierces to
the marrow and induces "classical" tears.

The six episodes of Times Gone By with a framing
story, a balletic introduction, and a revue-like song num
berruns from strict folk comedy to post-Ibsen domestic
tragedy. Perhaps the most happily contrived of all "om
nibus' ' films, its grace consists mostly in a forthright
grasp of costume-feeling and a perished sense of man
ners, portrayed, as a rule, with nostalgic satire and a re
freshing elegance. Therefore the formula elements and
the conventional sentiment are materially toned down.
Clinching the high rank of this film in the Italian revival
is the final episode, a broad comedy called The Trial of
Phryne. It is a brilliant instance of revamping a literary
legend to re-illustrate modern life and restore natural
vigor to a hale "paganism." That the natural vigor here
is both sexual and esthetic may be suggested to those
who recall that Phryne is that criminal beauty whose
conviction before the ancient Athenian court, the
Areopagus, was avoided by the inspired wit of her law
yer, who simply tore off her robe before the judges. The
sight of her naked physical perfections exonerated her
without more ado. Dealing with the town where, a self-
confessed poisoner of her mother-in-law but as beautiful
as she is simple-minded, this short film is masterly in
spirit and execution. The director of Bicycle Thief, Vit-
torio de Sica, is a tour-de-force as "Phryne's" lawyer, and
Gina Lollobrigida brings as much intuitive Tightness as
visible loveliness to the role of "Phryne."

Anna Magnani is the only supreme actor-component
of the Italian revival. Already seen here in Open City,
The Miracle, and others, she has starred also in Bellis-
sima and Volcano. She is curiously "right" for film pan
tomime, and for a screen actress, her range is to be

ITALIAN FILMS 175

termed immense. She can tower and she can subside, and
with infallible timing. Always the true weight is there:
hers both individually and as a sex. Unfortunately, her
vehicles are of uneven merit, internally and by compari
son with each other. Her role in Volcano oddly recalls
Sadie Thompson, to whose traditional image Miss Mag-
nani's first get-up bears a chilling resemblance. A sort of
universal vulgarity spoils Volcano, the melodramatic
tale of a forcibly retired streetwalker's innate nobility.
But Volcano, like Bellissima, should be seen as a Mag-
nani document. The latter gives the actress a superb
opportunity to do her stuff and as such is the classic "star
vehicle." C. Zavattini's story is ingeniously plausible as
a portrait of the common people while its narrow range
puts too much weight on the theme of a mother's obses
sion that her tiny daughter win a contest for a movie
contract. The amusing action becomes anticlimactically
tragic when the mother witnesses the impolite merri
ment caused by her child's screen test, intended to be
serious; then, when the child wins the contest for being
a laugh-getter, the mother declines the realization of her
dream on the grounds that her daughter's success is in
consistent with human dignity. It is a provocative theme,
explored interestingly but superficially. However, con
sidering the way Hollywood would have presented it,
one can do nothing but send up a prayer of thanks for
Italy and Magnani.

THE ARTS IN GERMANY

Joseph Frank

AN IMPENITENT PRUSSIAN

The name of Ernst Juenger is likely to be known to
American readers, if it is known at all, as that of the
author of Die Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs)
a novel published inside Germany in 1939 that was un
mistakably directed against the Hitler regime. Before
that time, however, Juenger had been perhaps the most
influential talent among those who paved the way for
an acceptance of Nazism among the German intelligent
sia. And, since the end of the war, Juenger has again
emerged as the most authoritative voice among the
writers of the "inner emigration," i.e., those who claimed
to have spiritually emigrated from Hitler's Germany
without having done so in fact.

In recent years, Juenger has published two major
works which, German critics agree, are among the most
important products of their post-war literature. One is
a huge diary of Juenger's war experiences and reflec
tions entitled Strahlungen. Juenger spent most of the
war in Paris, attached to the staff of General Speidel; and
his book gives an eerie glimpse into the fantastic, hot
house world of the anti-Nazi Prussian High Command
in France aristocratic, cultured, connoisseurs of French
civilization, discussing Rimbaud and La Rochefoucauld
in the Crillon and the Ritz while the Gestapo did its
bloody work in the cellars off the Place de la Concorde.

The Arts in Germany l8

Many of Juenger's friends from this period were later
implicated in the unsuccessful bomb plot against Hit
ler; and Juenger's own opposition to Nazism, as Die
Marmorklippen had already made clear, was rooted in
this aristocratic conservatism.

Juenger's other book, Heliopolis (the title is the name
of a fictitious state), is a massive allegorical novel of the
future, his most ambitious creative work up to the pres
ent time. Set in the same imaginary Mediterranean
landscape as Die Marmorklippen, it is written with all
the kaleidoscopic brilliance of a writer who has nothing
further to learn from the incantatory rhythms and fairy
tale suggestiveness of the German Romantics. The novel
is, indeed, composed in the German Romantic tradition
loosely constructed, filled with philosophical disquisi
tion and interpolated fragments, depending for its effects
more on the relationship of certain key poetic symbols
than on any dramatic narrative.

What there is of a narrative bears a striking resem
blance to the secret struggle for power inside Germany
after Hitler's accession. Two figures are engaged in this
subterranean warfare: the Prokonsul and the Landvogt.
The first, an hereditary aristocrat, controls the profes
sional Army; the second, a demagogic upstart, whips
up the mob with a gang of unscrupulous criminals.
Caught in the center are the "Parsees," a highly civilized
Oriental minority on whom the mob wreaks its fury
with the Landvogt's instigation and approval.

The chief protagonist is a young officer on the Pro-
konsul's staff, Lucius de Geer; a scion of the Burgenland,
the seat of the old nobility, where "everything was still
in good order" and where there "was still room for
honorable, yes, even for princely existence." Like Ernst
Juenger, Lucius keeps a diary of philosophical annota
tions (all of Juenger's books before Die Marmorklippen
were either diaries or highly personal essays); and he is
an intimate of the small group of painters, poets and

AN IMPENITENT PRUSSIAN l8l

philosophers whom the Prokonsul, like an Italian prince
of the Renaissance, entertains at his court. It is during
a Platonic symposium among this group that the theme
of Heliopolis first receives a clear enunciation.

"The Wise Men of all times and places" says Serner,
the philosopher, "are all agreed that Happiness cannot
be obtained through the Door of Desire or in the cur
rent of the world." And the writer, Ortner, reads a self-
contained short story a variation on the Faust theme,
and one of the finest things in the book about a man
who, after a mysterious eye operation, sees through the
surface of the world to its hidden mechanisms. He ob
tains unlimited power; but this inhuman knowledge
makes joy impossible and life meaningless. And he
finally begs Dr. Fancy, the Mephistophelian eye special
ist, to restore him to the degree of blindness befitting
the human condition.

This narrative is clearly intended to symbolize the
spiritual dilemma of man in Heliopolis, and to indicate
the direction in which it may be resolved. All parties
are engaged in a pitiless struggle for power, made even
more crucial because science has solved all its problems
(and Heliopolis, as a result, occasionally takes on a faint
air of science-fiction). "Mankind had become fully cal
culable . . . But just as a new light casts new shadows,
so had the extremes of organization produced a new
consciousness of what was mysterious and inviolable."
At the conclusion of the novel, therefore, Lucius de Geer
quits the service of the Prokonsul and flies off on a rocket
ship to the "cosmic residences/* convinced that all hu
man concerns can no longer be sacrificed to the struggle
for power. Some day, he believes, mankind will realize
the nihilism of sheer power, and will then recall as its
ruler a quasi-divine figure (The Regent), "who unites
Power and Love."

This tenderness for what is "mysterious and inviola
ble" in man, and this antipathy to power, strike a new

The Arts in Germany l8a

note in Juenger's work; or rather, make explicit a note
only faintly struck in Die Marmorklippen. For up to
this latter book Juenger had glorified power in all its
forms, and had ruthlessly insisted on the suppression of
the individual to make way for the type-the inter
changeable anyonymity whose life would be totally
defined by his specific function in furthering the will-to-
power. (The completest statement of this theme was
given in a semi-sociological book, Die Arbeiter, pub
lished in 1932: a work taken, at the time, as the most
powerful intellectual apologia for Nazism). Juenger still
thinks Die Arbeit er contains a valid diagnosis of what
is happening to modern man, and he has pictured the
completion of the process in Heliopolis; but he is no
longer able to regard it with the same approval as in the
past. Man can no longer surrender to the will-to-power
as an end in itself. But what principle does Juenger
offer to replace it?

The answer given in Heliopolis is both theological
and political, and the implications of the second cast a
somewhat dubious light on the first. Pater Foelix, a
Christian hermit, teaches Lucius a doctrine of suffering,
sacrifice and love; and he is primarily responsible for
Lucius' realization that power alone is not enough
"greatness cannot exist without goodness, without sym
pathy, without love." On the theological level, then,
Juenger implies that power itself is evil. But Pater
Foelix, who tends an apiary, also likes to dabble in
political theory; and he holds up the inalterable caste
system of the beehive as an image of the ideal state.
"The power of love" he tells Lucius, "lives in the bee
hive completely undifferentiated"; each caste is happy
to sacrifice itself for the whole; and this is an exemplar
for the human state, "if we see the ideal of the State as
the elevation of order to a pure relationship of love."
On the political level, not power per se but power with
out "love" is the source of trouble.

AN IMPENITENT PRUSSIAN 183

Just what this means in practice may be seen from the
description of the political situation in Heliopolis. The
Prokonsul incarnates all the ruling-class virtues, and is
quite willing to exercise power justly; but the irrespon
sible "Demos" refuses to recognize his lawful sovereignty
and prefers to follow the siren-song of the Landvogt,
who skillfully exploits its basest instincts. The cata
strophic rise of the Landvogt, we are told, is directly
attributable to the "theoreticians and Utopians . . .
who busied themselves with the happiness and future of
mankind"; they are the culprits who presumably de
stroyed the feudal equilibrium of "love." And the resto
ration of "love" can only come from the voluntary
acceptance by the "Demos" of its old feudal bonds
(metamorphosed, to be sure, into a transcendental prin
ciple of justice).

Juenger's ideal, in other words, is a feudal Paradise
which, like the style and structure of his novel, is also in
the German Romantic tradition. One thinks of Novalis
and his very similar glorification of a poetically colored
Middle Ages; and one remembers that this day-dream
was invented by the German spirit to exorcise the trauma
of the French Revolution. In truth, there is as little
room for genuine individual freedom in Juenger's new
feudalism as there was in the relentless mechanization
of Die Arbeiter. Juenger has substituted a terminology
of love for that of force; but in both instances the indi
vidual is lost in the function, i.e., his caste-status.

Juenger's aristocratic distaste for the "Demos" mani
fests itself all through the book, not only by specific
animadversions but also by the unpleasantly self-con
scious condescension with which he depicts all his lower-
class characters. And except when he is rhapsodizing
over the mythical feudal stability of the Burgenland, or
celebrating the knightly virtues of the Prokonsul, Heli-
opolis lacks any note of personal passion, any echo of the
torments and the sorrow of which we hear so much and

The Arts in Germany 184

feel so little. Juenger writes from a great distance, from
the council-chambers of the mighty from, as it were, the
Crillon and the Ritz; not even the Landvogt arouses any
indignation, only well-bred contempt. And one cannot
help contrasting Juenger in this respect with Dostoevsky
a writer whose name he invokes himself, no doubt be
cause the latter was also a political reactionary and a
Christian. Dostoevsky's works, however, are totally pene
trated with a humanity that wells up spontaneously from
the brotherhood of man in Christ; and, whatever his
political opinions, it is impossible not to respect the
emotional depth of Dostoevsky's involvement with the
insulted and the injured. There is a good deal of talk
about Christianity in Heliopolis, and Pater Foelix's in
fluence on Lucius is once described as the triumph of
Christ over Socrates; but Juenger's Christianity, if such
it can be called, has far more in common with the Teu
tonic Knights than with the New Testament.

In the next-to-last chapter of Heliopolis, a character
supposedly possessed of supernatural wisdom remarks
to Lucius: "We know your situation it is that of the
conservative spirit which tried to use revolutionary
means, and failed/' The irrelevance of this comment in
the context of the book makes it all the more revealing;
for Juenger, the impenitent admirer of the Prussian
aristocracy, has indeed written their elegy or at least the
elegy of their attempt to use the destructive dynamism
of Nazism for their own ends. Heliopolis, I think,
springs far more from a feeling of political impotence
and failure than from any profound emotional trans
formation on the part of its author. And the best proof,
to my mind, is that the book lacks precisely those emo
tions which, in all the great religions, have always been
considered the pre-requisite for any deep-seated spiritual
conversion. I am referring, of course, to the emotions of
humility and repentance.

i8 5

Ray B. West Jr.

THE GERMAN NOVEL AT MID-CENTURY

We were sitting in an apartment in the Russian sector
of Vienna. In the rooms above dwelt a Russian general
and a Communist official. Present were a poet, a novelist,
a publisher, and our hostess and her husband. Our host
ess' husband, an attorney, had just returned from six
years' imprisonment in Russia. At one point in the con
versation, talk turned to the days of German occupation
and to the "official litterateurs" sent out by the Nazis to
propagate the party line young men who had recently
published novels and verse celebrating the Aryan virtues.

"Where are these novelists and poets now?" I asked.

My Austrian friends shrugged.

"Who can say," our host said. "They just disap
peared."

"So many have disappeared," the novelist said. "In the
19308 it was the socialists, in the 19405 the Nazis. What
can we say of ourselves? From what do we derive?' '

"In a way, it's remarkable to have six people in one
room who can talk about such things," the poet said.
"In Vienna in Germany there are too many mem
ories."

About the same time Alfred Andersch, a member of
Werner Richter's Gruppe 47, was writing about German
authors in the Frankfurter Hefte. "Maybe we have lost
ten years," he said. "In that case it is just our destiny that

Tie Arts in Germany 1 86

we have lost them. In art one cannot make up for what
has been missed." He continued, "It is impossible to ex
press afterwards in a creative work the situation of for
eign writers during the years 1933 to 1945. The poems
Eliot wrote in those years/' he said, "cannot be relived
by us. In our art there will be expressed just this: that
we read them too late."

In 1948 Athena of Berlin sent its readers a question
naire, asking what authors best represented Germany.
Hermann Hesse led with sixteen percent of the votes.
Following were Thomas Mann, Melchior Vischer, and
Ernst Wiechert with fourteen percent. Among the re
mainder, in approximately the order listed, were Jochem
Thiem, Werner Bergengruen, Hans Carossa, Rudolf
Alexander, Carl Zuckmeyer, Bertolt Brecht, Erich Kaest-
ner, Alfred Doeblin, Ernst Juenger, Heinrich Mann,
Frank Thiess, and Elizabeth Langgasser.

This list represents a generation that has almost
passed from the contemporary scene. The best works of
these authors antedate Hitler. At least two of them who
might have served as a bridge between pre-Nazi Ger
many and the present have died: Ernst Wiechert and
Elizabeth Langgasser.

It would be interesting to see the results of a similar
questionnaire today, but it is doubtful that there would,
even yet, be many young novelists on it. For a foreigner
to say who the few might be would be presumptive and
extremely risky. One must live longer than a year or two
in a literary atmosphere before he can trust himself not
to fall for fads or the promotion of cliques and literary
reviews. It is not only that the proper emphasis will
escape him; he is likely to confuse novelty with quality
and there is always novelty in a foreign literature. One
must, however, risk certain generalizations, and mine
would be as follows:

At first Franz Kafka's expression of the modern world

THE GERMAN NOVEL AT MID-CENTURY 187

as chaotic and accidental seemed to appeal to a genera
tion which had experienced the terror and destruction
of war. The result was such novels as Hermann Kosack's
The City Beyond the River and Ernst Kreuder's Those
Who Cannot Be Found. But the Kafka vogue was wan
ing elsewhere by the time the young Germans rediscov
ered him. Kafka represents the end of an era, not the
beginning. Young novelists still felt the need for expla
nation, but not as an end in itself. Their chief problem,
especially in Germany, was reconstruction; and so they
sought desperately for solutions.

Naturally, a generation who had known nothing but
war had but a single subject. Kurt Ihlenfeld's Winter
Thunder which won a Berlin prize, portrayed the last
days before the fall of Breslau. George Glaser's Secret
and Power told the story of a young German Communist
who fled to France before the Nazis and became a
French soldier and citizen. Bruno Werner's The Slave-
ship recounted events from the burning of the Reichs
tag to the fall of Berlin. Albert Goes's Unquiet Night
had as protagonist a chaplain experiencing the atrocities
of war. Hans Richter's The Vanquished dealt with the
defeat in Italy. Fritz Habeck's The Boat Comes After
Midnight examined the disillusion of a German soldier
in occupied France.

Novelists of a somewhat older, middle generation,
such as Juenger, Thiess, Wiechert, and Langgasser, at
tempted to discover what had happened to their country.
Novelists of this youngest generation, who had known
less of the concentration camps than they did of the
Hitler-Jugend and the army (even though most of them
were classified as "politically unreliable"), examined
themselves. When they looked beyond themselves, they
did not so much return to the great figures of their own
country, as they turned to France (and traditional Ca
tholicism) or to America (and the primitive energy of

The Arts in Germany 188

Hemingway, Dos Passes, and Steinbeck). The only fresh
note and for an American it can often become an excit
ing one exists in a heightened sense of Europe's desper
ate need for moral and political reform.

After the first war the arts in Germany became ex
perimental. When I first visited Germany in 1927 the
younger literary generation was the avant-garde. Ex
pressionism had become Bauhaus; Bauhaus had become
surrealism. The tone since the second war has been very
different. The first postwar period was one of rebellion
against standards of the Hohenzollern-Hapsburg eras,
anti-political (except for the Communists) and uncon
ventional. In the second postwar period there has come
a heightened respect for convention and a recognition
of Europe's plight between America and Russia.

Take, for instance, two novels, Otto Rombach's Gor-
dean and the Riches of Life and Fritz Habeck's The
Dance of the Seven Devils. Both utilize historical settings
to project problems of contemporary Europe, Rombach's
work being concerned with the wars with the Hugue
nots, Habeck's with the Hundred Years War. Both
novels consider the rights and obligations of the indi
vidual caught between powerful impersonal forces. As
a reflection of the problems facing any European, Ha
beck's work is particularly effective. Technically, its
picaresque and romantic surface may not represent a
final solution to the problem of monotony in much of
the pseudo-realistic war fiction, but it is a method which
combines the traditional and the novel. It represents at
least one means of expressing aesthetic and political
awareness, qualities which must be central in any sig
nificant work dealing with contemporary Europe.

Much could be and has been written about the
political attitudes of present-day Germany, but perhaps
the most hopeful single thing to be noted, in respect to
young German writers, is the absence of a strong, tradi
tional nationalism. The young German novelist tends

THE GERMAN NOVEL AT MID-CENTURY

to think of himself as a European as much as a German;
although, to be sure, it is often the attitude of the prodi
gal son who has returned only recently to the bosom of
an upset family.

Joseph Frank

THE "DOUBLE LIFE" OF GOTTFRIED BENN

One of the most striking phenomena of German post
war literature is the sudden rise to prominence of Gott
fried Benn. By no means a new or undiscovered writer,
Benn published his first book a volume of brutal, Ex
pressionist poems called Morgue in 1912, and he has
been known ever since, to a small circle of readers, as a
mordant satirist who can rise on occasion to heights of
dissonant lyricism. At present, he is considered the great
est German poet since Rilke; but, curiously enough, it is
not his poetry that has catapulted him into notoriety.

Since the end of the war, Benn has published a series
of prose works of indistinct genre, somewhere between
the dialogue, the novel and the personal essay. All are
written in a raucous, highly individual style, filled with
straight-from-the-shoulder slang and a cynical, hard
bitten eloquence. It is these works which have brought
Benn to the attention of a wider audience, and evidently
have struck an emotional chord that has a profound
resonance in the German reading public. Among these
works Benn has included a species of spiritual auto
biography, published in 1950 under the title Doppel-
leben (Double Life). And this book reveals a good deal,
not only about Benn himself, but about the state of
mind that has found in Benn's recent publications an
echo of its own obsessions.

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF GOTTFRIED BENN 19 1

The first part of the book, a series of fragments called
Lebensweg eines Intellektualisten (Autobiography of an
Intellectual), was written in 1934 under the impact of
Hitler's accession to power. Despite the title, these frag
ments contain very little trace of any connected nar
rative structure; but they all focus on the spiritual
dilemma of Benn and his literary generation. What was
this dilemma? Quite simply, the fate of having come to
maturity in a cultural climate created by Nietzsche an
atmosphere totally haunted by the opposition between
Nature and Spirit (Leben and Geist}. Nietzsche had un
dermined all principles of value, both religious and
metaphysical, and no creation of Spirit remained viable
to order the chaos of life. Or rather, only one such prin
ciple remained: Art. Art, Nietzsche had written, was
"the final metaphysical activity within European nihil
ism"; and Benn's generation, the generation of Stefan
George and Thomas Mann, had dedicated itself to this
activity with selfless devotion.

Benn's fragments are a violent vindication of this
metaphysical aestheticism contemptuously called Intel-
lektualismus by its opponents as a valid and inevitable
expression of the crisis of modern culture. He refers with
savage scorn to the German bourgeois taste for the sen
timental and the idyllic, for "forget-me-nots and apple-
cookies"; and these thrusts may be taken as a riposte
against the Nazi charge of Kulturbolschevismus. Regret
fully, Benn records that "the new youth, who enter the
scene under Hitler's star," will not understand the ideals
of his generation; they are separated from their elders
by the width of the abyss between Art and Might. But,
in saying farewell to his past, Benn looks to the future
with hope rather than despair.

For, it seems, another principle has been found to give
Form and Order to the chaos of Life: the principle of
Race. "There are two Laws that today, in Europe,"
Benn wrote in 1934, "have raised their heads in defiance

The Arts in Germany 192

of Life: Race and Art." Both are in the service of the
same cause, "the maintenance of Order, the conquest of
Form against the European degeneration." And though
Benn, in a powerful concluding tirade, again identifies
himself with "the formula of Art," it is clear that the
Hitler-Jugend, in their own way, are sacrificing at the
same exalted altar of the Spirit.

In 1950, Benn collected a second group of fragments
published under the title that gives the book its name.
These contain some extremely vivid descriptions of life
in a German Army barracks while the Third Reich was
crumbling into ruins. They also include a running tor
rent of invective against the "toy-soldier clowns and
toilet heroes" who led to their doom "a mystical totality
of fools, a pre-logical collectivity of the weak-minded-
something very Germanic, no doubt, and only compre
hensible from this ethnological point of view." Perhaps
only the Nazis themselves have managed to equal the
ingenious abuse that Benn heaps on their deluded fol
lowers; and he admits that his earlier complaisance for
Nazism was a tragic error. Yet he continues to maintain
(and this, too, is comprehensible only from an ethno
logical point of view) that his mistake, and presumably
the mistake of the German people, was inevitable and
even admirable.

In a fragment called "Shadows of the Past," Benn com
ments on his famous exchange of letters with Klaus
Mann in 1933 an exchange published at the time as
Benn's "Answer to the Literary Emigres." The younger
Mann, an ardent admirer of Benn's work, could not
believe that the intransigent, avant-garde Expressionist
would rally to the Nazi cause. Benn's slashing reply,
however, filled with venomous insinuations, left no
doubt that he upheld the will of the Herrenvolk. Cer
tain passages of this reply, Benn admits, he would no
longer write today, or at least not in so "romantic" a

THE * DOUBLE LIFE OF GOTTFRIED BENN 193

tone of ' 'unpleasant exaltation"; but he reprints a long
section whose reasoning he still supports.

Stripped of its bedazzling rhetoric, Benn's argument
reduces itself to the contention that History, indeed
social action of any kind, "proceeds not democratically
but through Might"; and this places the intellectual in
an insoluble quandary. "Killing animals is Might. Exe
cuting criminals is Might. Every traffic-cop is Might.
Every Organization is Might." How is the poor intellec
tual to choose between conflicting Mights? Certainly
not, Benn answers, by any process of ratiocination.
"When things are mulled over too long, they fall into
the void. Just so with this matter of Might and Spirit,
Order and Chaos, State and Freedom. One must hang
on to something, otherwise one also tumbles."

And so, presumably, one joins the "mystical totality of
fools," one follows the "toy-soldier clowns and toilet-
heroes" with a delicious shudder of abandonment only
describable by that untranslatable German word Schick-
salsrausch (intoxication with destiny). And one preens
oneself, as Benn does, with the affirmation that "natu
rally, this conception of History is not that of the En
lightenment nor humanistic but metaphysical, and my
conception of Man even more so."

Klaus Mann and the other literary emigres, Benn now
concedes, may have correctly diagnosed the diabolic
evil of Nazism; they may have been more far-sighted
than those who espoused the regime; but there are more
important things than such superficial acumen. "Always
to know everything, always to be right, that alone is not
greatness. To err, and nonetheless to continue to believe
in one's inner voice: that is Man. And his glory begins
beyond defeat or victory. The glory, namely, of having
assumed his lot, whatever moiraone can, naturally,
also say chance and occasion have assigned him/' Here,
then, we have man's true glory; and every German who,

The Arts in Germany *94

like Gottfried Benn, gladly accepted the dictates of Hit-
lerian moira has a rightful claim to his modicum.

Today, Gottfried Benn has become the apostle of
what he calls Doppelleben 11 ^ conscious splitting up of
personality." In another of his recent works, a dialogue
called Drei alte Maenner (Three Old Men), he writes:
"We lived somewhat differently than what we were, we
wrote differently than we thought, we thought differ
ently than we anticipated, and what remains is differ
ent from what we once had/' This is the "situation
1950" as Benn sees it, an absolute split between life and
spirit, between action and thought; and his only message
is to live this disruption to the hilt.

In the symbolic protagonist of his short novel, Der
Ptolemaer, Benn has pictured this schizophrenic salva
tion. The Ptolemaer works in a beauty-parlor, but, while
occupied with the most mundane tasks, bemuses his
Spirit with intoxicatingly exotic hallucinations. "I work
over the ladies/' Benn has his mouthpiece report, "but
inside me is a wine-harvest and I feel extraordinarily
well as a result, in any case much better than in earlier
periods of my life when I did not possess this inner tech
nique; when, as ordinarily occurs in Life, I suffered."

In the world of Benn's Ptolemaer ', nobody is respon
sible for what occurs in the realm of praxis because Life
is a meaningless chaos. The self-induced hallucinations
of the spirit are, quite literally, the only reality; and to
cultivate these is the only morality. "Make no fuss about
going along with persuasions, world-viewers and syn
theses to all points of the compass" Benn advises, "if jobs
and pocket-books require it; but keep your head free,
there must always be some empty space for the images
. . . this is his [the Ptolemaer's] morality." It is also the
morality of Benn's earlier metaphysical aestheticism,
monstrously adapted for the masses into the theory of
Doppelleben.

After this, it is of little use for Benn to assure us that

THE "DOUBLE LIFE" OF GOTTFRIED BENN 195

personally he has never acted out of opportunism. Benn
himself, it is true, received nothing from the Nazis in
exchange for his support except harassment both as a
writer and as a practicing physician. He never belonged
to the Nazi Party, and in 1935, to escape further diffi
culty, he joined the German Army and placed himself
under the protection of powerful friends on the General
Staff. It was at this time that he coined his famous
phrase, which, as he reports, made the rounds of the
High Command until 1945: "The Army is the aristo
cratic form of emigration/ '

But it is only the final inconsistency in this incredibly
muddled book that a ferociously honest man should
crown his life's work with an apologia for opportunism
as a metaphysic For what is Doppelleben if not a gigan
tic philosophy of opportunism? And one can well un
derstand its appeal to a people desperately trying to
convince themselves that, whatever the horrible con
sequences of their actions, the secret shrine of their
Spirit had remained unsullied. No doubt the "inner
technique" of Doppelleben has been of invaluable aid
in this respect. Like the Ptolemaer, Benn's admirers no
longer "suffer" from the complete disparity between
their actions and their ideals.

German critics have praised these late works of Gott
fried Benn as the most profound expression in German
literature of the spiritual catastrophe of modern man.
To a foreign reader, they suggest, far more plausibly, the
spiritual catastrophe of the modern German.

196

William Becker

THE POSITION OF BERTOLT BRECHT

By far the most remarkable individual working today in
the German theatre-one might well say, in the theatre
anywhere-is Bertolt Brecht. He is the only living play
wright whom one can justifiably rank among the master
spirits of modern dramaturgy: Ibsen, Strindberg, Tche-
kov, Shaw, Pirandello, and Lorca. He is, in addition, a
lyric poet of extraordinary gifts, and, as the French say,
an homme de theatre in the fullest sense. I suspect, in
fact, that posterity will attach a much greater importance
to the general theatrical aesthetic which he has formu
lated in his theoretical writings, and demonstrated in his
stage work of the past few years, than to his plays as such.
Today, a young playwright, seeking a way to repossess
the great classical tradition of comedy from Aristoph
anes to Ben Jonson on the one hand and the Corn-
media dell'arte on the other could scarcely be better
served than by submitting himself to the influence of
Brecht's ideas. That few young playwrights have actually
done so is one of the less urgent, but no less real, mis
fortunes of the Cold War. For Brecht has worked since
returning to Germany from exile in America, under the
Communist regime in East Berlin.

This has made the most ordinary information about
him and his work very difficult to come by. In the ugly
atmosphere of Berlin, where all standards except polit-

THE POSITION OF BERTOLT BRECHT

197

ical ones have largely disappeared, cultural affairs have
been absorbed into the general ebb and flow of political
hostility, and cultural reportage thereby reduced to a
minor division of the propaganda facilities. I was told
that neither Werner Krauss nor Berthold Viertel (who
has since died) would be well received in Berlin Krauss
because of his former Nazi connections, Viertel because
of his left-wing background. Yet Krauss was the leading
actor under Viertel at the Burgtheater in Viennaand
the Burgtheater is one of the best theatres in Europe. My
informant proudly spoke of Berlin's fine political aware
ness. The same sort of awareness makes it likely that
one will hear about Brecht either that he has been sup
pressed by the Party, and is about to be purged, or else
that he has become a Party hack like the poet Johannes
R. Becher, and is now beneath consideration. Both views
were offered to me in Berlin; neither bore much relation
to the truth. Some of what one hears is, of course, wish
ful thinking; more of it is malicious gossip concocted by
those caterpillar opportunists of cultural journalism
whom the general situation tends to attract. Almost
none of it tells us anything significant about how Brecht
has really fared under the East German regime.

One fact is frequently cited to exemplify Brecht's
supposed deterioration that he has not written a new
play since his return. Actually the point which is not
even true: Brecht has written a play about the 1871 Paris
insurrection called The Days of the Commune which,
reputedly, the Party thought too defeatist to be staged
is quite irrelevant.

When Brecht left America, he had in hand at least half
a dozen plays, written in exile, which he had never been
able to stage. Among them were Mother Courage, Pun-
tila, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Good Woman of
Sezuan, and Galileo. By the time he arrived in Berlin
(there was an interim period in Switzerland), he also had
on paper the fundamental principles of his new anti-

The Arts in Germany 198

Aristotelian theory of theatrical alienation, and they
were largely untried in practice. What was needed was
not more writing and thought, but some practical test
ing of these principles, and an opportunity to construct
a permanent working theatre around them. These aims
have been substantially fulfilled: Brecht's Berliner En
semble is one of the three or four really formidable
achievements of the post-war European theatre. (Anyone
who wants to know how formidable has only to consult
the huge volume of photographs and notes on all phases
of theatrical art, published in Dresden, 1952, under the
title Theaterarbeit: 6 Auffuhrungen des Berliner En
sembles.) It should also be mentioned that Brecht's lit
erary talents have by no means been idle: almost every
Berliner Ensemble production has involved textual re
visions, or, not uncommonly, full Brechtian adaptation.

But what about Brecht and the regime? It is a com
plex and difficult question, and not one about which
even the most scrupulous journalist can speak with much
confidence. Yet some facts became apparent to me when
I visited the Berliner Ensemble during a brief stay in
Berlin immediately prior to the June riots of 1953, and
it may be helpful to set them down for the record.

There can be no denying that, from an economic
point of view, the authorities have treated Brecht su
perbly. There are now nearly sixty actors at his disposal
in the Berliner Ensemble, all paid by the State at un
usually handsome rates by current Berlin standards.
Every actor has two months vacation a year with pay.
Brecht himself lives in a fine suburban house on the
Weissensee, and also keeps a country place within a few
hours of Berlin. Furthermore, Brecht's frequent travels
in Western Europe indicate that he has had liberal ac
cess to Western currencies: it has even been rumored
that he received a substantial part of his State income
in dollars.

The working facilities of the group are equally gen-

THE POSITION OF BERTOLT BRECHT 199

erous. Directly across a large plaza from the Deutsches
Theater, a bombed-out ruin has been converted with
State money into the artistic headquarters of the En
semble. Here are housed a sizable library, several spa
cious work areas, and a main rehearsal studio which is
actually a small auditorium, excellently equipped, under
the supervision of Helene Weigel (the company's lead
ing actress and Brecht's wife), with basic stage lighting,
functional drapes, directors' and prompters' desks, and
several hundred seats all of the best modern design. I
had never seen similar rehearsal facilities in any profes
sional theatre; and I was reminded, more than anything
else, of the lavish conditions in some American univer
sity drama departments. A few blocks away are the En
semble's well-appointed and fully staffed business offices,
looking much like the normal producer's offices in New
York.

The chief difficulty up to the present time has been
that the Berliner Ensemble has not had a theatre of its
own. It has shared the Deutsches Theater with that
theatre's resident company, and this has meant limited
runs for not more than three or four productions a year.
Consequently, I was told, the actors have at times grown
lazy from enforced idleness, and few of them could be
got to attend regularly the special classes in fencing and
dancing which were offered to occupy them. The situa
tion was presumably remedied, and Brecht's program
made more ambitious, when the Ensemble took over
in January of 1954 the Theater-am-SchifiEbauerdamm,
where Brecht started with The Three Penny Opera in
the mid-twenties.

On the whole, I found a unique spirit in the Berliner
Ensemble people. For one thing, they were young. For
another, they inclined to be people of rather more gen
eral culture than one is accustomed to find in the the
atre: many of them spoke several languages and most
seemed to be intellectually involved in their work. They

The Arts in Germany 200

seemed to be largely without the usual affectations and
crude vanities. Nor did I find any evident political fer
vor: I was told that politics plays little or no part in the
normal course of the theatre work; and in general, I felt
that Brecht's people spoke in a more honest and relaxed
way about politics than most of the people I talked to
in the West. About a quarter of the actors actually live
in the West, and have continued to do so even while
pressure was brought by the Eastern authorities to per
suade them to move. It was said of Brecht himself that
he keeps his politics to himself, insists that the focus of
theatre work should be theatre, and is exceedingly defer
ential to those members of the company whom he knows
not to share his own views.

Thus the advantages which Brecht derives from his
commitment to the East are quite plain: the kind of
operation most vital to this stage in his career has been
made possible. But it would be foolish to pretend that
he has not paid a price, even a heavy one. He has been
under more or less constant attack by the Party critics
recently, and two productions Urfaust and his own
opera, The Trial of LuculluSj with music by Paul Des
sauhad to be withdrawn presumably not to be pro
duced again. Perhaps even more important have been
certain political quarrels at the top levels of the Berliner
Ensemble which resulted in the loss of some of Brecht's
best people to the West. Erich Engel, his chief director,
has gone; Caspar Neher and Teo Otto, two Western de
signers of real genius who collaborated on some of the
Ensemble's most outstanding productions, no longer
work in the East; the principal actor in Der Hofmeister
went back to Switzerland, and the production had to be
withdrawn from the repertory for lack of a replacement;
Therese Giehse and Leonard Steckel, both brilliant per
formers who had starring roles in the repertory, are at
work solely in the West. This has left Brecht strapped
for performers of star-quality, especially male onesa

THE POSITION OF BERTOLT BRECHT 2O1

limitation that operates with special severity against
his own plays, inasmuch as one of Brecht's seldom-noted
but most distinctive qualities as a playwright has been
his faculty for creating great individual roles in the clas
sical tradition. His Galileo (in which Charles Laughton
starred here) remains unproduced in Germany for want
of an actor of sufficient stature; in the West, Brecht
might have had Fritz Kortner.

Nor can Brecht's work claim much of a following in
the East. It has, on the whole, been too highbrow for the
ordinary public, and too "formalistic" for the Party in
tellectuals. The Berliner Ensemble stands rather apart
from the rest of East Berlin's theatre. I am told that
Brecht is inclined to protest the blank artlessness of that
"Socialist-Realist" kitsch which the Party critics promote
(though he uses a similar vocabulary in talking about
his own work), and it is perhaps significant that, while
he ordinarily directs or oversees every Ensemble produc
tion, and notes the fact publicly in the program, he re
mained entirely aloof from the one play of this kind
which the Ensemble has performed a work about Soviet
electrification projects called The Chimes of the Krem-
lin by an important Russian Stalin-Prize winner, N. F.
Pogodin. Especially since the June riots, Brecht has
reputedly stepped up his attacks on the Kunstkommis-
sion which controls artistic affairs in the East and estab
lishes the Party line; but his larger point that Brechtian
Epic theatre is actually more appropriate to a Socialist
society than is Soviet-type Socialist Realism seems to
have made little headway either with the authorities
or with other playwrights and directors.

It seems likely, in fact, that Brecht might have com
manded a larger following in the Western zones (which
are pretty much without any vital forces in their post
war theatre) and perhaps wielded a greater influence;
for his political position, as rendered through his plays
and theory, has not fundamentally altered since the

The Arts in Germany 202

days when The Three Penny Opera was the greatest
popular success in modern German theatre history. Prob
ably Brecht had this in mind when after the war he
cagily chose to become, not an East German, but an
Austrian, citizen a status which permitted him to travel
and produce his plays in the Western zones, and thus to
"ignore" (as he presumably intended) the division of
Germany. In the West he would unquestionably have
been intellectually freer, but he might also-in a coun
try where most theatre is State supported and controlled
have found it economically impossible to work. One
must remember that it was the American authorities
who put obstacles in the way of his settling in Munich
in 1948, and more or less forced his acceptance of the
original East German offer. But for us, the important
point which usually is missed in all the talk about
Brecht's "position/' is that one cannot demonstrate any
necessary connection between Brecht's political position
and his aesthetic one, that Brecht is not, by any sensible
definition of the term, a "Communist playwright." That
one may deplore his political commitment, and still
profitably learn what he has to teach about theatre,
seems an obvious thing to say. Yet since no one appar
ently is learning, and so many are inclined to deplore, it
may also be necessary to say it.

20 3

Parker Tyler

THE GERMAN FILM

When Cocteau made his version of the story o Tristan
and Isolde, The Eternal Return, it did not occur to him
that the myth was other than literary; i.e., that the "re
turn" could be more than something in the imagination
of an artist whose reconstitution of the Celtic myth was
intrinsically a way of flattering modern society. Hence,
The Eternal Return held all kinds of exotic and sym
bolic touches and fundamentally was parallel to Hamlet
in modern and Love's Labour's Lost in Edwardian dress.
This was because Cocteau was uninterested in the Wag-
nerian will-to-power that makes the contemporary Ger
man film, Marriage in the Shadows, a boomerang on the
aesthetics of Hitlerism.

Modern emphasis on psychology puts the love-death
tradition in the light of a kind of fantasy emanating
from virtually pathological states of love. It is a sort of
will-to-eroticism without objective necessity. However
authentic poetically and instinctively, this ignores the
importance of the circumstantial factor of external moti
vation and objective events. After all, the Oedipus-com
plex is an abstraction from a plot of human actions.
Wagner derived a music of emotion from the plot of the
love-death, a music that in a sense is misleading because
it is the music of a power to act under whatever circum
stances. The lover is a "great actor" for whom love re
mains the greatest action.

The Arts in Germany 2O 4

A German-made equivalent of The Eternal Return,
but dealing with the Romeoand-Juliet pattern, involved
actors who play the Shakespearian tragedy. Marriage in
the Shadows opens with two actors playing a love-death
in a costume play in Berlin. The time is just before Hit
ler's triumph. The actress is a Jew and after the persecu
tion begins, the actor marries her when she is forced
apart from her fiance because the latter becomes a Nazi
official. The actor's proposal of marriage is technically
precipitated by the sentiment of chivalry since a mixed
marriage theoretically will protect the actress from per
secution so long as she remains in retirement. Later,
there are moments of stress when the husband accuses
his wife of having submitted to a "marriage of con
venience." But the time finally comes when, in opti
mistic mood, she at last appears in public with her
husband, now a famous movie star, at one of his pre-
mires. The Secretary of State, introduced to her, learns
she is a Jew, and personally affronted by the contact,
starts deportation proceedings against her. The couple
then, just as they seem to have out-weathered the long
terror and to be truly in love, are compelled to commit
suicide to preserve their union.

Not a memorable film artistically, Marriage in the
Shadows handles its final sequence with an impressive
finesse. Does part of this finesse come from consciousness
of the large dramatic pattern? Eroticism, in any case, is
not the factor emphasized. This film is far from being
the free-floating, "psychological-aesthetic" fantasy that
The Eternal Return is. It is securely within actual con
temporary society and thus supplies a dramatic control
and plausibility less mechanical than is apparent in the
mythically isolated tradition of the love-death for which
Wagner's opera, willy-nilly, is largely responsible and
which preserves the personal ritual at the expense of the
social context.

The vendetta animating Marriage in the Shadows is

THE GERMAN FILM

20 5

the vendetta not of Romeo and Juliet, but of The Mer
chant of Venice, and raised to the political level, where
in this case it is tragic. In Shakespeare's tragedy, the
political force is apparently in favor of the lovers, en
joining peace between their houses. Such it is also cum
brous and too latein the Orestes trilogy. But as Romeo
and Juliet is once removed from the internal family feud
of Orestes to the clan feud, so Marriage in the Shadows
is once removed from the clan feud of Romeo and Juliet
to the "race" feud. But the basic economic motif re
mains a constant and here is thrust to the foreground.
Thrones and palaces are as much "commodities"
throughout the ages as are daughters, husbands, and
lovers; so are professions, and at the climax of the film,
the two actors have both been cast out of theirs. Incest
is a strictly internal attack on the family, though it may
of course be influenced by external factors such as Hit-
lerism, which was partly an external attack on all phases
of family economy, spiritual and material.

The irony of the film is also constant and especially,
paradoxically "poetic." For the mythical, sublimative
blessing of the Wagnerian will-to-eroticism, which is the
specific act of the love-death, was made available to Ger
mans exactly by Hitler's persecution of German Jews
that is, available to such mixed marriages as that of the
Jewish actress and the "Aryan" actor in Marriage in the
Shadows (purported, by the way, to be founded on a
factual case). The ancient Celtic sin of love at last be
came Jewishly motivated in its German transposition.
Hitler thus was an unconscious director, rather than a
conscious participant, of the actual counterpart of the
love-death whose form he admired on the operatic stage.
Which was inevitable, because he had no true apprecia
tion of the erotic department of the will-to-power.

THE ARTS IN ENGLAND

209

Elizabeth Bowen

ENGLISH FICTION AT MID-CENTURY

In general, something is expected of, or at, the turn of a
century. A term of time by being demarcated acquires
character, which, as such, makes itself evident as it ma
tures. So a century halfway along its course may be
considered due to declare maturity, to have reached
culmination-point, to make seen the fruition of its in
herent ideas. The twentieth century's development, how
ever, has been in some directions so violently forced, in
others so notably arrested as to seem hardly to be a de
velopment at all, or at least to be difficult to recognize
if it is one. In European countries, certainly, life and art
are still seeking their footing in their actual time both
have the stigmata of an over-long drawn-out adoles
cence.

The mid-century call for an exhibition may therefore
be said to have taken us by surprise, and found us un
ready, in disarray. As to art, it is not that there is nothing
to show; the difficulty is rather in presentation arrange
ment, classification and rating order. Individually, no
potential exhibit is not expressive: now, however, is
each so to be placed as to bring out its relationship with
the others? For the warrant for and point of an exhibi
tion must be its overall significance and expressiveness.
In this case, one is tempted to ask, of what?

In England if one may press the display analogy fur-

The Arts in England

ther there would be particular difficulty in arranging
the fiction stall. The novel, onward from 1914, has in
different ways reflected the sense of flux. The cracking
and splintering of the social mould during and after the
first World War accounted for a shift, as to the subject,
from outer to inner from man as a public being, in pub
lic play, to man as a seat of isolated and in the main suf
fering private sensibility. For the greater part of the
inter-war years, subjectivity hazed over the English
novel; there was disposition to follow the stream of con
sciousness "from caverns measureless to man down to a
sunless sea." With this went, it may now be felt, a mis
use or perversion of some influences the overheated for-
or-against reaction to D. H. Lawrence, the attempted
segregation of Henry James and Proust from their beau
monde, of Tolstoi, Tchekov and Turgeniev from their
thriving social-sensuous universe, of Thomas Hardy
from his Wessex exuberance.

The intellectually respectable English novel for some
time concentrated upon, insisted upon the victim-hero
whether at school, in love or at large in the jungle
which by overgrowing the ruins of fixed society suc
ceeded to what that used to be. There was almost a con
vention of disillusionment. The forte of the novelist was
analysis. The alternative to the analytical was the caustic
the iconoclastic novel of ideas: for this, the still young
Aldous Huxley gave the prototype.

The English inter-war novel, it seems now, was some
what "out" in its concept of what makes tragedy. It did
not finally diagnose the modern uneasiness dislocation.
Dorothy Richardson (still owed full recognition) and
Virginia Woolf did best, in their stress on the interplay
between consciousness and the exterior world; but these
two delicate novelists of the senses cannot be called, in
their last implication, tragic. The salutary value of the
exterior, the comfortable sanity of the concrete came to
be realised only when the approach of the second World

ENGLISH FICTION AT MID-CENTURY 211

War forced one to envisage wholesale destruction. The
obliteration of man's surroundings, streets and houses,
tables and chairs sent up, for him, their psychological
worth. Up to now, consciousness had been a sheltered
product: its interest as consciousness diminished now
that, at any moment, the physical shelter could be gone.

The second World War halted already-working novel
ists, and for obvious reasons produced few new ones.
Few reputations, however, actually foundered (as had
happened between 1914 and 1918). Graham Greene, for
instance, and Evelyn Waugh, having begun to be prom-
inent during the thirties, emerged from the war years to
become still more so. It is they who have headed the
novel's trend towards what might be called moral drama.
Independent participants in this move have been Joyce
Gary and, in his very different way, L. P. Hartley: both
of these were writing before the war, but it would seem
that the ensuing decade has given them special focus.
Drama involves plot, action; on whatever plane, in
whatever sphere into the present picture, therefore,
comes the intellectually-written adventure story, of
which Hammond Innes is one exponent. P. H. Newby
like, again, Joyce Gary is a dramatiser of character;
both write about extroverts, domestic or social buc
caneers. And one-man character-drama was epitomised
in V. S. Pritchett's Mr. Beluncleupon which followed
the almost simultaneously written Mr. Nicholas of
Thomas Hinde.

Those two novels, in each the father viewed by the
son, link up with yet another development: family
drama-as, indeed, does the L. P. Hartley Eustace and
Hilda trilogy. This field, the English seldom desert for
long. In the I. Cornpton Burnett masterpieces, the
dialogue keeps shifting veil after veil from obsessions or
passions bred by the blood-tie. But the main run of
family novels now show a blend of pleasure in idiosyn
crasy with a far more adverse regard for the institution

The Arts in England

the Rosamond Lehmann and Elizabeth Taylor novels
exemplify this. Indeed, the attitude to institutions as in
stitutions is more clement than it was, say, twenty-five
years ago. A sort of aesthetic neo-conservatism may be
found to have set in.

That, maybe, is helping to reinstate the social drama
novel, which, having suffered eclipse in the twenties,
began to make its way back, thanks to Evelyn Waugh,
under the guise of burlesque or satire. A pre-iggg
sequence of Anthony Powell novels made merry at the
expense of coteries: this admirable writer's return, after
twelve years' silence, has lately given us the more mel
low, retrospective A Question of Upbringing and A
Buyer's Market. Society, as it now provides material,
might be described as the pattern formed by any fre-
quentation of persons by one another through affinity or
in pursuit of pleasure dance, cocktail or week-end party,
but equally the gathering in the pub or attendance at
dog racing come under this. Henry Greene, outstanding
social novelist and, like I. Compton Burnett, dialogue-
expert, illustrates this necessary versatility: his mise en
scene varies from the Mayfair drawing-room to the castle
servants' hall, from the girls' school to the fire station.
William Sansom has moved from firemen stories and
Kafka allegory to the study of the upper or lower subur
ban rock pool. Nigel Balchin, master of hard-built plot,
personalities the office and the laboratory.

Jocelyn Brooke is to be watched as a roving talent
with, as yet, no special territory he has, if anything, a
semi-hostile addiction to type, as shown by his Passing of
a Hero. Rex Warner continues to combine tautness with
poetic distinction. Philip Toynbee is, of the younger
group, probably the most interesting to his fellow-novel
ists: his A Garden by the Sea has been a controversial
high point. Thomas Hinde and Emma Smith, who im
pacted with The Far Cry, seem so far to have no serious
rivals among their young contemporaries.

ENGLISH FICTION AT MID-CENTURY

213

At the moment, it is the political novel which is in
eclipse. The ideological novel also is infrequent. As a
general verdict, it might be fair to say that English fic
tion at present is at its most English: as an export, its
value should rightly reside in that. A good deal may be
felt to be germinating during this phase of apparent
self-regard. What will have come of this, say, in ten years'
time? Ideally, the exhibition should not open before
then.

Kathleen Raine

ENGLISH POETRY AT MID-CENTURY

Perhaps in retrospect the early nineteen-fifties will be
seen to have an importance in the history of English
poetry that is at present not apparent. Writing as one
of the poets involved in this time I would say that never
has the sense of the overwhelming power of the forces
of evil flooding the world and sweeping away the good
(I mean in our own society, not at the other side of the
planet) been more heavy to bear and hard to overcome.
It is small wonder that many poets are silent the wonder
is that any can write at all. Yet there are in all things
periods of growth and periods of decline, and a poetry
proper to the autumn of Magnus Annus as to its spring.
English poetry at present is passing through a period
comparable perhaps to the late seventeenth century,
when Vaughan, Herbert and Traherne withdrawn each
into his own rural solitude, sheltered a living quintes
sence.

Whatever of value is being written at the present
time, it is not being written in London, where the
shadow falls most heavily. David Gascoyne, a visionary
poet highly sensitive to the spiritual atmosphere of the
world, is silent; as is Stephen Spender, who gave ex
pression to the moral conscience of his generation in the
thirties. It is observable that poets who can tend to

ENGLISH POETRY AT MID-CENTURY 215

move away from London. It is a centrifugal period:
Herbert Read is living in Yorkshire, Edwin Muir in
Scotland, Vernon Watkins and (as did Dylan Thomas)
in Wales, Robert Graves in Spain, Roy Campbell in
Portugal, George Barker in a country cottage. It is true
that the young still come to London to seek their for
tune: but poetry written "to be sold and sold quickly"
to the BBC and elsewhere tends to degenerate into
''features/' nor is the competitive scramble calculated to
ensure the survival of the wise, the sensitive, or the
deeply feeling.

Two poets Louis MacNeice and W. R. Rodgers
have made a serious attempt to make broadcasting a
medium for their poetry. Someone had to make the
attempt: and Louis MacNeice is certainly the best writer
(with the possible exception of the late Dylan Thomas)
of verse for broadcasting Nine Burnt Offerings are
longish poems, written to be spoken "on the air/' Louis
MacNeice is a classical scholar, an admirable translator,
and is incapable of vulgarity in the use of words. His
poems are pleasing to the ear, always humane and never
silly: they are popular poetry of a certain kind at its
best. Yet, to write public poetry that touches upon great
ness demands something more than the throwing open
of one's private world to forty million listeners.

With the best will in the world this kind of public-
private relationship is tinged with unreality even when
(as with MacNeice) it stops short of commercialism. A
great sense of national glory gives a kind of validity to
the poetry of Kipling or Mayakovsky, as to Churchill's
speeches; or poets like Burns or Lorca, immersed in the
life of a people, may be the mouthpiece of a race. In
any case we should write for those we love and respect.
Better for a poet to write for the eye of Ezra Pound
alone than to make the public his critic. There is a
lowering of standard in Louis MacNeice's latest work,
as compared with his best poems, a verbal diffuseness,

The Arts in England 216

and a diffuseness of feeling also. The poems that sounded
well "on the air" do not improve on rereading.

W. R. Rodgers* Europa and the Bull, a poem almost
devoid of meaning, made a great impression when broad
cast, because of the sound of the words, an effect almost
purely auditory, and obtained by the free use of alliter
ation and anacrusis, in the manner of Thomas.

BBC poetry is only one manifestation of a great social
change that has taken place in the last twenty-five years
in England. There is no longer a dominant cultured
minority that is the arbiter of literary taste and the
custodian of the language. The Bloomsbury of Virginia
Woolf was the last manifestation of a taste, language,
and subtlety of feeling possible only among people
reared in a tradition long perfected:

A spot whereon the founders lived and died
Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees
Or gardens rich in memory glorified.

The poetry of Edith Sitwell is one last dry fine leaf
upon that ancestral tree, "All that great glory spent";
we may think it just that an educated aristocracy (and
the Universities already begin to reflect the change)
should have given place to a half-educated democracy,
but we cannot blind ourselves to the fact that the price
paid for the many advantages of public education on a
mass scale is the advent of a lower form of culture at
least for the time being. Above, the discipline of lan
guage and subtle thought of the educated minority is
undermined: below, the deep roots of local tradition,
folklore, and the richness of rustic speech, have gone.
Memory atrophies as literacy takes its place: and the
cultural heritage of the people, preserved for centuries
in Wales, Ireland, the Highlands, and here and there in
England a tradition in which, as Yeats says, human
events were "long steeped in the heart" has given place,

ENGLISH POETRY AT MID-CENTURY

21 7

within living memory, to the ephemeral newspaper and
the wireless voices. Industrialism has produced a new
kind of human being, and in a society so dedicated to
the pursuit of the temporal, poetry, whose theme is the
eternal, must find roothold in the stoniest ground, surely,
that history has ever known. In America perhaps in
Russia and in China there may be something humanly
inspiring in the idea of Progress. But in England, we
are aware of losing more than we gain by the transition
imaginatively, that is. Improved social conditions for
the working class may not be too dearly bought at the
price of culture and a language destroyed. Who can
judge these things?

Poetry, at any rate, seems to flourish best where the
past has not yet been completely obliterated, in Ireland,
Wales, Scotland, and (among the young) in Oxford and
Cambridge. A volume of poems by Ewart Milne, an
Irishman, has just been published by Peter Russell that
has the panache of eloquence and the myth-making gift
of the tradition of Irish story telling. Patric Galvin,
another Irish poet, has brought out the first number of
a magazine Chanticleer. From Wales, besides Thomas
and Vernon Watkins, comes good work by Lynette
Roberts and Keidrich Rhys whose cadence and imagery
bears the stamp of the language spoken by people, not
emitted from machines. The late Dylan Thomas' Col
lected Poems, one of the two best volumes of verse pub
lished in the fifties is a poetry untouched by the ma
chine. His rhetoric is a distillation of the speech of men
in their houses and their fields, not the taught language
of the schools or the inhuman language emitted by wire
less sets and newspapers, now alas the language of an
inhuman gabble.

The other notable volume comes from Scotland-
Edwin Muir's Collected Poems, which, like the Thomas
volume, contains new work as well as old. Like Yeats,
Edwin Muir has reached a late maturity, and since the

The Aits in England z 1 8

publication of the Collected Poems many fine new poems
have appeared in The Listener and elsewhere. Muir
writes in English, not in the fine vernacular made fash
ionable once more by Hugh Macdiarmid (who enjoys
nation-wide fame in Scotland, a proof that there poetry
is still a language understood by the people). Edwin
Muir's imagery is drawn from a pastoral North, remote
as memory and timeless as Eden. W. S. Graham, a
younger poet, also writes in English, but, like Dylan
Thomas, the vitality of his language and imagery de
rives from the life and speech of non-industrialized peo
ple. His long poem, The Night Fishing, first published
in Botteghe Oscure has not yet appeared in book form.
There are, I understand, other forthcoming poems by
this poet. Sidney Goodsir Smith, another Scots poet,
whose collection, So Late into the- Night, was published
early this year, writes in the Scots language (called "lal-
lans" in the English papers) that lends its delicacy of
feeling and fierceness of both scorn and passion to his
fine lyrics. Tom Scott's translations of Villon into Scots
are outstandingly good; similar translations of Bau
delaire have not yet appeared in book form.

In England itself no poetry is being written as fine
as that coming from Wales and Ireland. The Laughing
Hyaena by D. J. Enwright, a poet who has spent much
time in Cairo and was until recently teaching at Bir
mingham University, is an attempt to come to grips with
the human landscape of the industrial city, and as a
landscapist he is very fine at times, clear and incisive in
his use of imagery, with an underlying intellectual
toughness. C. Day Lewis has built for himself an Ivory
Tower from the literary style and the sentiments of
Thomas Hardy (a retreat into the pre-industrial past);
and a younger poet, John Heath-Stubbs, writes out of a
preoccupation with literature for its own sake rather
than from the richness of long experience. At his best,

ENGLISH POETRY AT MID-CENTURY 2 19

Heath-Stubbs is elegantly witty; at his worst, bookish.

There is some promise among the young both of
Oxford and Cambridge. In Oxford, a group of young
poets led by Martin Seymour Smith have sent them
selves to school to learn from Robert Graves nor could
any better master of style be found (Graves' own latest
book, Poems and Satires, slight as it is, is a model of
English verse in the middle style). The Fantasy Poets, a
series of pamphlets published in Oxford, represent the
work of this group, and a volume by their best poet,
Elizabeth Jennings, has just been awarded an Arts Coun
cil prize for the best first book of verse published in
the last two and a half years. Miss Jennings greatly ad
mires Edwin Muir: but, like Anne Ridler, she speaks
with a personal voice of personal things love, child
hood, and delicate observations of scenes and people.
In some ways it is easier for women not to lose their
contact with permanent values, than for men, more
implicated in the public and historic changes of the
time. Anne Ridler's last book, The Golden Bird, con
tains a verse-play written for broadcasting, suffering
from the diffuseness usual in such works, but besides this
some lovely intimate poems in her more private, and
truer, voice. At Cambridge, the leading poet is Thorn
Gunn, whose first book is also about to be published by
the Fantasy Poets. He is probably a stronger poet, both
in intellect and in passion, than Miss Jennings; but both
are to be watched.

No one who has seen the available material will blame
G. S. Eraser's anthology, Springtime, very much for
being a very dull and uninspired collection. A few poets
are better than the rest besides the two poets just men
tioned, John Hall and Thomas Blackburn stand out,
(the former of the school of Muir, the latter a poetic
disciple of the painter Francis Bacon). John Wain (also
included in Springtime) is the leading spirit of a group

The Arts in England 220

of young poets who have chosen William Empson as
their model. Wain's work, however derivative, shows, if
not taste or imagination, energy and attack.

Innumerable little magazines come and go. The best
of them is Nine in which Peter Russell attempts to
maintain a standard of style and taste worthy of Ezra
Pound; and Poetry and Poverty, edited by Dannie Abse,
who is among those most troubled by the poverty of the
poetry. John Lehmann's New Soundings on the BBC
and the monthly poetry readings at the London Institute
of Contemporary Arts have failed to discover hidden
talent of a high order.

There is no sign of any flowering of young talent com
parable with that of the thirties, or with the time of
Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse that used to publish
Dylan Thomas and David Gascoyne or even Tambi-
muttu's wartime magazine Poetry London. Stephen
Spender's new magazine Encounter seems in its first
number to owe more to the past than to the present.

Nevertheless, with Dylan Thomas, Edwin Muir and
Robert Graves writing their best work, the period could
not be called sterile. George Barker is also at work on
a long poem, not yet published. A True Confession is
George Barker's last published poem; it contained some
of his best flights of eloquence. Passages of his new un
published poem promise no less.

221

Stephen Spender

ENGLISH PAINTING IN THE FIFTIES

The present state of English painting is comparable to
that of contemporary English poetry. In both arts, the
middle-aged practitioners continue to hold the advan
tage of doing work that is "new," according to the
vocabulary of modernism. Graham Sutherland and Fran
cis Bacon hold positions in painting, parallel to that of
W. H. Auden in poetry. One looks to them for new de
velopments in every stage of their art and their age seems
only to have added power to their perpetual youth.

At the same time, there is a suspicion that perhaps we
are misled through a confusion of vocabulary into ex
pecting novelty of the young. Simply because, since
about 1870, the young artist in Europe has always pro
duced the new and the unexpected, we tend to identify
innovations with youth, and feel that when they are
lacking the young are without talent, or are prematurely
aged and exhausted. But today the young start produc
ing work which we expect from the old.

Recently, at the Royal College of Art in London, I
inquired why the students give little support to an
organization called the ICA (Institute of Contemporary
Arts), which supports exhibitions and discussions about
"advanced" art. The answer was that they were not in
terested in avant-garde, movements which they regarded
as old-fashioned. And the puzzling truth is that the

The Arts in England 222

young regard as new just that kind of realism which an
older generation regard as dated. To judge from recent
exhibitions of student work several students who have
been to Italy have come back with canvases of workers
with thick wrists and fingers like carrots, sitting at the
tables of grimy restaurants and eating vermicelli.

Yet despite a few examples of a rather crude realism
to suggest that there is just a reaction towards the Zo-
laesque would be an over-simplification. The painter
who above all dominates their imagination, is Francis
Bacon. Painters are hypnotized by the vision of their
more magnetic contemporaries to a degree which always
rather amazes me. If Picasso paints leeks, the other
painters don't paint carrots, but leeks and only leeks in
exactly Picasso's way; and several young English painters
now enclose their images in rectangles painted in white
lines, suggesting a glass case or prison bars, in exactly
the way that Bacon does.

So there is not, on the whole, a direct return to real
ism, but an attempt to relate a great many things which
seem a far cry from realism back to observed facts. A
recent exhibition labelled "realist painting" contained
many abstract and fantastic works which seemed a far
cry from any direct form of realism. Yet one can see the
point of young artists, who have developed along the
lines of modern painting, feeling that they are arriving
at so many dead ends, and trying to find their way back
to the realistic image. If they can do this without aban
doning what they have discovered in impressionism,
post-impressionism, surrealism, et cetera, their work is
apt to be more interesting than that of the social realists.

The young painters, like the young poets, are in
search of a touchstone which will at once relate them
to the problems of their art and to the realities of their
time. They respect their elders and to some extent fol
low them, but find that their work started off with a
confident relation to another time: to the ideological

ENGLISH PAINTING IN THE FIFTIES

223

passion of the iggos, to the apocalyptic violence of the
war, or to a religious revival which also had its aesthetic
roots in the thirties and forties. No young poet or painter
of the fifties has the same confident and contemporary
relation to the fifties as Auden and Sutherland had to
the thirties, Dylan Thomas and Francis Bacon to the
forties.

Meanwhile the older artists are to some extent explor
ing the same problems as the younger ones. Their suc
cesses and failures at least show what appear to be fertile
or infertile veins of development.

Shortly before the war, there was a very influential
group of painters called the "Euston Road Group," led
by William Coldstream, Graham Bell and Victor Pas-
more. The name was derived from the road where was
situated their joint studio and art school. All these
painters used a French impressionistic technique to por
tray people, landscapes, objects. They reacted against
surrealism, abstraction, fantastic and poetic painting.

Yet in spite of their return to reality which seems so
parallel to what is going on now, the Euston Road school
led to nothing. Coldstream, highly respected, has evolved
into an academic figure. He is head of the Slade School
of Art. Graham Bell, perhaps the most vital member of
the group, was killed in the war. Lawrence Cowing, also
a very talented painter, has taken to teaching and writ
ing. Victor Pasmore has renounced impressionism and
been through nearly all the modernist movements which
the Euston Road Group renounced.

The poetic painters whose early work was perhaps a
reaction from Coldstream and his group Sutherland,
Piper, John Craxton, Keith Vaughan and John Minton
have survived better, perhaps for two reasons. The first
reason may well be that they are really poetic in the
sense of being deeply interested in poetry. It is their
strength and their weakness that they are "literary."
Their weakness because I doubt whether the greatest

The Arts in England 224

achievements in imaginative painting can be made by
painters who are largely concerned with trying to visu
alize and paint either what is a poetic image, or the kind
of objects and scenes which are the subject matter of
poetry (Piper's churchyards, mossy stones, remote moun
tains and lakes, et cetera). But it is also their strength
because even if it does not lead to the greatest work,
much good English painting has had connections with
poetry: Blake, Palmer, the pre-Raphaelites in their
earliest lyrical phase, for example.

The second reason why these poetic painters still have
such a strong position is that, in spite of their being
more "modern" and therefore seeming more obviously
a "movement" committed to go in a certain direction,
than the Euston Road Group, they have shown much
more variety and flexibility. In the work of a painter
like Sutherland, a pendulum seems always to be swing
ing between his dreamlike imagination and his re
searches into the real appearance of objects. When in
doubt or in search of renewed inspiration, he turns back
to objects. Most of his paintings are indeed variations on
a theme, or stages of metamorphosis, in which a real
object a tree trunk, a country lane, a Welsh hillside, the
crucifixion, Lord Beaverbrook or Mr. Maugham are in
process of turning from real objects into obsessive dream
symbols.

The English appear to have great poetic imagination
in literature, but easily exhausted poetic imagination in
painting. Why this is so, cannot be discussed here, but
it remains fairly true that it is fatal for the English
artist to become over-attached to the visualized poetic
pattern. Two examples of this danger are the work of
Ben Nicholson, an excellent painter, who has not been
able to get out of the rut of his simple yet poetic abstract
forms (mostly squares and circles), and that of John
Piper who, after having been stuck in abstractionism
(before the war), was knocked off it by the fires and

ENGLISH PAINTING IN THE FIFTIES 22 5

bombings and became one of the best war painters; after
which he contrasted scenes of fire and bomb-damage,
with the passionate quietness of his paintings of houses,
churches, gravestones. But now Piper runs the danger
of fixing his country scenes into rigid patterns which
really conceal a return to his pre-war dry abstractions.
Piper is a clear example of a painter who needs to drink
at the fountain of real experience of nature, if he is not
to lapse into a very parched abstractionism.

As with contemporary English poetry, it would be easy
to generalize about painting by drawing attention to the
dearth of outstanding major talents. Only Francis Bacon,
with his vital, energetic and decisive depictions of faces
which seem caught in the flash of an instantaneous ex
posure, and Graham Sutherland are today outstanding.
Lucien Freud, an extraordinary painter and figure, be
longs more to a German than an English tradition. But
as with poetry, if one is dissatisfied with a facile gen
eralization, one goes on to become deeply interested in
contemporary English painting. Some of the painters
who can least easily be classified, are among the most
interesting. There is, for instance, Keith Vaughari, who
has developed the least explored side of C6zanne his
manner of painting nudesand whose landscapes are
very satisfying. There are the very rare and intensely
concentrated water colours of David Jones, a Catholic
mystic who will, in his books and paintings, probably
interest posterity far more than he attracts attention
today.

During the present century, both in painting and
poetry, a demand has been created for perpetual experi
ment and innovation. As was perhaps inevitable, the
time has come when the most serious work can no longer
satisfy this demand with the inevitable result that there
is a sense of disappointment. There is even a danger that
this disappointment affects the artists themselves. They
may know that to work seriously they cannot go on in

The Arts in England 226

directions already explored; they have to look around
them at things, and go back to earlier stages of modern
painting. But they may find it as disconcerting to do so,
as we do to see them grouped as "realists" and the like.
But the best response to the present situation is not to
expect sensational results but to pay close attention to
what is really a very interesting stage of development.
Close attention will soon discover many painters whose
work can be greatly appreciated.

Norman Demuth

MUSIC IN ENGLAND

The musical situation in England is dominated by the
universally revered figure of Ralph Vaughan Williams,
who continues in the flood of creative activity, each work
in succession revealing some new facet of that funda
mentally English idiom which he re-discovered and re
stored as a common language in his Pastoral Symphony,,
composed in 1922. From him stems a school of com
posers whose style is English as distinct from British and
who have been influenced by no other culture. The
other veterans, Joseph Holbrooke and Rutland Bough-
ton (both born in 1878) and Cyril Scott and John Ire
land (both born in 1879) rarely appear with new works.
Holbrooke has announced that he will compose no
more, having contributed an enormous number of works
of all sizes to the repertoire, including three monu
mental operas; it was he who first championed the cause
of the native composer in the early part of the century.
Boughton nearly found an English expression in his
Arthurian operas, but they came too soon and national
operatic potentialities had not become realised. Scott
in the first decade of the century was using harmonies
hitherto unthought of in this country. By the twenties
every composer was writing them. It is not generally
realised that modern music owes a tremendous debt to

The Arts in England 228

this composer, and that it was he who set music rolling
here towards a complete emancipation from traditional
academicism.

Ireland, however, is a little different. His piano pieces,
sonatas, songs, and his choral work These Things Shall
Be are frequently performed and his influence exercises
itself indirectly and quietly. His style has thinned out,
but the old vigour, freshness, and poetry remain. He has
always been an imaginative composer.

Imagination of another kind is the guiding factor in
the work of Sir Arnold Bax. His symphonies and sym
phonic poems are impelled by picturesque Celtic folk
lore. Although at one time rated as exceedingly difficult,
they now offer no insuperable difficulties to either per
formers or listeners. This charge of difficulty dies hard
in England, and it is too often offered as an excuse for
neglect. Bax has a following, but no followers; this is a
pity, for English music could do with a leaven of his
poetic imagination and picturesque writing.

The English School includes such names as Arm
strong Gibbs, Gordon Jacob, and Herbert Ho wells
among the older, and Gerald Finzi, Edmund Rubbra,
and Michael Tippett among the younger. Armstrong
Gibbs has composed innumerable songs of fine quality,
and his Symphony for voices and orchestra, Odysseus, is
a magnificent work. His chamber music is worthy to
rank with all comers. Gibbs' technique adds strength
to the dangerous tendency of the English idiom to be
flaccid and vague. Gordon Jacob's music is intensely
scholarly in the best sense. It is rather over-breezy, but
is well-balanced. His powers to move his listeners are
not as great as those of Herbert Howells, whose Hymnus
Paradisi is one of the loveliest things of the century. His
organ Psalm-Preludes and Rhapsodies are fine original
works; they trace their technique from their composer's
teacher, Stanford, but their language is strikingly indi-

MUSIC IN ENGLAND 22Q

vidual. Howells' Rhapsodic Quintet is as fresh today
as when it was written (1919) because, like all his other
works, it lacks mannerisms.

Of the three younger composers, Edmund Rubbra is
a natural symphonist with all the stuff of symphonic
continuity and musical scholarship behind it. His works
have a strength and stability which is absent from those
of Michael Tippett, whose basic polyphony has no
sinews and consequently lacks stamina. Tippett's Con
certo for Double String Orchestra and Symphony in A
have made an impression in certain quarters, but he
is more likely to live with Child of Our Time, which is
finely written, and is an outstanding landmark in the
English choral tradition. The art of Gerald pinzi is alto
gether smaller and consequently has a more limited
public; Finzi's settings of Shakespeare and Hardy add a
great deal to English song. Of these composers, it is he
who most nearly approaches the Vaughan Williams
aesthetic.

The composers who do not subscribe to a self-con
sciously English idiom and are, therefore, "British" are
headed by Sir Arthur Bliss, whose opera The Olympians
was the first native work to be produced after the war at
Covent Garden. Many unkind things were said about it
by the quidnuncs, but the public liked its honesty and
sincerity. These characterise all Bliss* music, and his
personality.

Opinion varies as to whether the example of Sir Wil
liam Walton or that of Benjamin Britten leads the
younger generation. Walton is much the elder of the
two, but his catalogue is infinitely smaller; he takes his
time over each work and is not in a hurry for it to be
performed. He constantly revises his scores, but this
should not give the impression that he is uncertain in
his touch; it simply means that he prefers other ways of
saying things. It is significant that none of his works has

The Arts in England 230

fallen into neglect, and each one makes regular and fre
quent appearances. Those who have heard what he has
completed of his opera are loud in their praises of it,
suggesting that it may prove to be the great opera of
the century in English.

Opinion on Benjamin Britten falls into three cate
goriesthose who think that everything he writes is a
masterpiece, those who see little merit in his music and
consider its value grossly exaggerated, and, more reason
ably, those who take the middle course, regretting the
operas, except Peter Grimes, but admiring the com
poser's undoubted gifts in the smaller realms of choral
and chamber music. It is felt by some that Britten wrote
himself out operatically with Peter Grimes and that the
later operas strive after some kind of new expression but
fail to find it. Britten has extraordinary facility.

Arnold Cooke is one of the few English pupils of
Hindemith. His style is solid and workmanlike, clas
sically impelled, and often inspiring. Similar strength
is found in Alan Rawsthorne who shows a curious
affinity with Roussel; of this he is probably quite un
conscious.

Alan Bush, though once a tough nut to crack, has
simplified his style so that his music is now immediately
approachable. His Nottingham Symphony is most open-
handed and attractive, provided one forgets the early
works such as the Concert Piece for cello and piano and
the String Quartet, Dialectic.

Direct foreign influence has been felt by three com
posers of widely divergent points of view Alec Rowley,
Lennox Berkeley, and Humphrey Searle. Rowley, the
oldest of the three, and Berkeley absorbed the Gallic
qualities of lightness and clarity. Of the two, Berkeley
is the more advanced and perhaps the more personal. In
his Put Away the Flutes and Gold Coast Customs, Searle
shows that he had found the secret of superimposing
emotional feeling upon an otherwise arid system of pure

MUSIC IN ENGLAND 2 -j

mathematics. Few English composers practice such com
position.

Most young composers today begin where others have
left off, and it is almost the rule now that a newcomer
should herald his arrival with a symphony; this usually
leads post-haste to a second such work and this, impelled
by a mind that has had no time to re-stock and re-fuel
itself, is more often than not below the standard of the
first. The symphonies of Peter Racine Fricker have sub
stance, are extremely powerful, and are well thought
out; but they are uniformly gloomy and pessimistic.
There is nothing wrong in this outlook if the composer
really believes it, but it sometimes happens that depres
sion is mistaken for profundity. Similar works by John
Gardner, Richard Arnel, Daniel Jones, William Words
worth, and William Alwyn (an expert film composer
and considerably older than the others) adopt a different
attitude and if they do not say anything particularly new
(one particularly over-emotionalised work puts the clock
back considerably, but is none the less popular for that)
they are well-varied. Gardner and Jones are the most
advanced there are few signs that the young English
composers have any wish to ruffle the placid waters of
English music-making, although the music of Malcolm
Arnold suggests that here is a slightly turbulent spirit.

Operas are composed by the score, but few are chosen.
Arthur Benjamin's A Tale of Two Cities contained all
the stuff of opera and was dramatically well-pointed.
Benjamin allows the singers to sing. Alan Bush had to
go to Germany for the production of his Wat Tyler. In
spite of competitions and the commissioning of operas
from composers, nothing permanent has appeared so
far, and the question arises as to the value of these prizes
and commissions when no arrangements are made for
production. It is to be feared that realization of and
admiration for British Opera are paper- and lip-service
only.

The Arts in England 232

Of the foreigners who have become British subjects,
Roberto Gerhard has a pretty knack in opera and Egon
Wellesz is a real scholar as well as being a composer of
the highest integrity.

The Composers' Guild of Great Britain works strenu
ously to promote the cause of native composers in a
perfectly and necessarily objective manner, receiving
sympathetic co-operation from orchestras and per
formers. The situation is intensely active and music is
pouring out in quantities as never before. The race for
fame and survival promises to continue indefinitely.
However, it is time that England produced the really
great universal work that will rank in importance with
Le Sacre du Printemps, Wozzeck and Oliver Messiaen's
Turangalila Symphony.

William Becker

ENGLISH THEATRE: A BUDDING TRADITIONALISM

The single outstanding development of the post-war
period in British theatre has been the tentative emer
gence of what may yet prove to be a fully operative
traditionalism. Such an observation is likely to surprise
some Americans. For one often hears in this country,
both from Anglophiles and from apologists for Broad
way, that the supposed superiority of the British theatre
to our own is entirely due to British "traditions." But
the fact is that England's theatrical culture is still much
less "traditional" (in a functional sense) than, say,
France's or Germany's: it operates, on the whole, much
like ours, with precious few opportunities for workers
in the theatre to feel themselves part of an enabling the
atrical continuum. Nothing in England, until Stratford,
could even have borne comparison to a really traditional
theatre like the Comdie Fran<jaise. And it is important
to remember that Stratford had only a token existence
before its post-war reformation suddenly brought it into
international prominence, and that even the Old Vic
before the war had a purely national reputation and
was only intermittently successful.

Today the achievements of the post-war period look
considerable, though the situation remains tentative
and unstable especially at the Old Vic, whose history
over the past few years has reaffirmed the evident fact

The Arts in England 2 34

that institutions, at least until they become the agencies
of a traditional discipline, are no better than the people
who run them. Two years ago in a fantastic tangle of
malice, stupidity, and opportunism all woven into com
plex intrigues of truly Machiavellian proportions the
Old Vic was nearly destroyed. An interfering Board of
Governors, animated by the genteel Philistianism of its
Chairman, Viscount Esher-according to reports circu
lated at the time was ultimately at fault; but the show
down was precipitated by a bureaucrat named Llew
ellyn Rees, with the result that everybody of purpose
and talent resigned, and the Vic was left in the hands of
a young director named Hugh Hunt. In the process, a
long-term plan, devised by the triumvirate of brilliant
and dedicated men who were forced out George De-
vine, Glen Byam Shaw, and Michel St. Denis-and in
volving a national theatre, a school, an experimental
theatre, and a traveling company, was abandoned. With
it temporarily went all hope of an organic development
which could ultimately have assured a traditional exist
ence to the Old Vic's operations. Meanwhile recent sea
sons, under the directionless guidance of Hunt, have
been disastrous. The Henry VII, for example, was a run
down recast version of a production originally done by
Tyrone Guthrie for Stratford. Its general atmosphere
of orphaned poverty seemed to depict the Old Vic's
present condition with perfect accuracy. It had the in
cidental effect of reducing the grandiose groupings and
hammy timing of the Guthrie style to an absurd sham
bles: since the Vic stage is a good deal smaller than Strat
ford's, the actors found themselves stumbling over the
set and each other at all the most characteristic Guthrie
moments, and one realized, as one seldom can when the
Guthrie spectacle works, what a hollow and precariously
superficial thing it actually is.

The Old Vic has undergone a reorganization: Hugh
Hunt has been replaced by Michael Benthall, a director

ENGLISH THEATRE: A BUDDING TRADITIONALISM 235

of taste and ability, though occasionally given in the
past to heavy-handedness and over-decoration; and it has
been announced that, during the next five years, the
company will perform all of Shakespeare's plays in turn,
on a single stationary set. That, at least, sounds like the
kind of groundwork on which a traditional theatre
might be erected; and one only regrets that so com
pletely a fresh start became necessary at all. The function
of an institution is to turn history into tradition; Mr.
Hunt's administration presided over the reversal of that
process.

Stratford is an entirely different story. Privately sup
ported and unhampered by professional committee-
sitters, it has developed steadily into an institution of
the very first rank. It owes this development largely
to the administrative genius of its Director, Anthony
Quayle, who, after John Gielgud, is probably the most
valuable single individual now at work in the British
theatre. Quayle' s combination of talents is rare, but it
is also an imperative one for the sort of post he holds.
For Quayle is fundamentally art-, not bureau-, directed
(to paraphrase a fashionable sociological distinction):
he is a gifted and extraordinarily versatile actor as well
as a perceptive stage-director, and he owes his adminis
trative success largely to his special faculty for knowing
just how and when to use everyone of superior theatrical
talent in England. Stratford, unlike the Cornedie Fran-
<jaise, is broadly eclectic: the individual productions
have varied greatly in quality and tone, and one cannot
speak of a ''Stratford style." Yet the recent ones, even
at their least inspired, have all seemed to share a clarity
of statement and a sensible respect for the text and
these, of course, may be the first indications of that in
herent discipline which is the hall-mark of genuine
tradition.

What I saw of a recent season at Stratford (Marius
Goring in Richard III, Michael Redgrave in The Mer-

The Arts in England 236

chant of Venice, and Redgrave and Peggy Ashcroft in
Anthony and Cleopatra) did not impress me in any
thing like the degree that the season of 1951 did. The
1951 productions of the historical tetralogy (Richard II
through Henry V), directed by Quayle, with their con
summate attention to the meaning of the action in its
total political context, were unquestionably the best
Shakespeare productions I have ever seen. Nonetheless,
there were deep satisfactions to be had on this occasion,
too. For me, the greatest were Harry Andrews* per
formancesas The Merchant, as Enobarbus in Anthony,
as Buckingham in Richard IIL Andrews is one of the
few actors who can truthfully be called a product of
Stratford: over the past several seasons, he has developed
from a quite ordinary talent into one of the most useful
Shakespearean actors in England. Such a development
is obviously the chief thing that a functioning tradition
can promote; and Harry Andrews' career may be a more
generally hopeful sign than anyone yet realizes. So
powerful a stage personality has he become that Marius
Goring' s competent but uninspired performance as
Richard II was thrown quite out of perspective, so that
the play often seemed to be more about a king-maker
than a king. And the superiority of Andrews' Stratford
Enobarbus to the performance he gave in that role for
the Oliviers two years ago was surely no accident. So
long as Stratford cannot or will not maintain a single
permanent company like the Comdie Fran^aise, a
career like Harry Andrews' is likely to remain excep
tional, and the fullest traditionalism not likely to be
achieved. Meanwhile, however, it would be ungrateful
to carp: Stratford is far and away the best English-
speaking theatre that exists.

Parker Tyler

BRITISH FILM: PHONETICS, FUMED OAK, AND FUN

England made Breaking Through the Sound Barrier, as
good a scientific thriller as modern filmic times have pro
duced. Is it a coincidence that it has to do with the
dynamics of sound? Perhaps not. The fusion of effective
diction with an optimistic version of reality seems the
peculiar documentary-fictitious realm in which Great
Britain excels all other nations. During the thirties, it
was Britain which gave most imagination, technical skill
and seriousness of purpose to the Documentary Film,
and the impetus of that period of full activity is still felt.
Cavalcade, In Which We Serve, and This Happy Breed,
were epic-sized films from England, stating with an ob
vious desire not to overstate the historic patriotism of
a people. The element of an imaginative or fictitious art
there emerged as of lesser importance in favor of what
might be termed The Record. A full-fledged fiction is
more or less "off the record" in England; that is, not to
be taken too seriously. For example, The Importance of
Being Earnest, a film received with much gratitude from
the epicures of high comedy, has the elegance, airiness,
and hieratic assurance of a court masque.

There are, however, two ways to take the highly styl
ized humors of The Importance: hermetically and not so
hermetically. If the life of joy and fancy can be expressed
completely by Gilbert and Sullivan, Wilde's great baga-

The Arts in England 238

telle should seem but a rather esoteric nuance of that
very tuneful philosophy. Like Patience, it proves spe
cifically that the English have a faculty for heavenly fun
with a perfect talent for self-portraiture. But in the mod
ern world (and what can remind us better that we are
in the modern world than the three films mentioned
above?), The Importance becomes a socially delimited
conceit. Noel Coward's trio, Tonight at 8:30, came along
to prove that an equal linguistic and phonetic com
petence, several rungs down on the social ladder, reveals
the other side of the comic coin; which is to say that the
faculty cited above is equally utile for horrible fun.

It is the second part of Coward's film, Fumed Oak,
that exhibits this repellent triumph. Could any other
nation, indeed, find a truth so horrible productive of so
much amusement and so permissive of an objective craft
to render it? Coward has been as tireless among lower
middle-class cliches, unconverted by wit and imagina
tion, as Wilde among upper-class cliches, converted by
wit and imagination. The imaginative element in
Fumed, Oak is the moral revolt of a middle-aged floor
walker who takes unholy joy, before chucking every
thing and leaving for the South Seas, in telling off
brutally his family of threewife, mother-in-law, and
daughterbecause for seventeen years he has been per
secuted by their phonetic powers. His unforeseen foren-
sics effectually quells them, making the better part of the
piece one long curtain-line and producing in the hearer
a sort of goose-flesh of mirth. Fumed Oak might be called
a paradigm of what may suddenly happen to the vulgar
and the vulgate if nothing has happened to them for
seventeen years. Of course, a war may "happen" and
serve the same purpose as the middle-aged floorwalker's
long-nourished vision of freedom in Noa-Noa Land.
(At any rate, the "sound barrier" is brokenl)

A Queen Is Crowned, aside from cheering, marching
music, and the documentary convention of oral com-

THE BRITISH FILM 2 ng

mentary, is notable for its phonetic austerity and verbal
sparseness. Its main event is the most solemn public
spectacle of our time and properly prodigious in a nation
which produced such a court satire as The Mikado and
such a vision of the Peers as that in lolanthe. The Coro
nation, however, is The Record. The modern English
temper has followed its documentary bent by also pro
ducing on film a court romance about the first Elizabeth
of England, featuring her speculative ("off the record")
romance with Admiral Thomas Seymour. This is Young
Bess, an officially lavish and perfectly mediocre item,
whose high distinction remains, alone, a full-fledged dic
tion.

Do Americans tend to overstress the aesthetic, not to
say also the social, importance of British speech? It
would be natural in a nation whose parent stem is chiefly
England, from which its social standards, its manners
of all kinds, largely derive. The beauty of that speech
achieves a dominant, however "insular," place in Shake
spearean films as though it were one of Prospero's magics.
British film productions of Shakespeare have seemed to
this witness to leave much to be desired. British accent
and British diction almost, but not quite, saved the
American-made Julius Caesar from artistic mediocrity.
The case is that, in international films, the only prime
excellence of England, artistically speaking, is the craft
of speech. This is true despite such superlative and steady
film performers as Laurence Olivier, Margaret Ruther
ford, and Alec Guinness. As I mean ''performers" rather
than actors, I mean "personalities" rather than artists.

Phonetics all to one side, the meat of an art is the
whole conception. The retreat of a set of stage-film
actors in America, led by Charles Laughton, to "drama
quartets" may be interpreted as a revolt against the bore
dom imposed by inferior material on actors with British
speech standards. Quite natural, of course; and quite
natural that the voice should be the instrument on which

The Arts in England 240

predominant reliance is placed: vocality in a decent set
ting. There is no vocal institution to retreat to in
America, such as Racine and Corneille in France, for
Shakespeare is not an institution on our own stage. I
have heard a great deal of Olivier's voice, both in Ameri
can and English films. Capable of humorous as well as
pathetic inflections, that voice has often been a pleasure
to listen to; it has even made me inattentive to what was
being said. Sir Laurence's speaking of the narration for
A Queen Is Crowned was in every way satisfactory. It
was more than satisfactory when he gave vent to his final
"God Save the Queen!" These words were said with the
fervor of a living knight. They were not shouted or
choked-up; they were not ' 'emotional." They were dra
matically articulated speech and clearly above the com
monplace level to which the camera was rigorously lim
ited here as a representative agent. People found moving
images in A Queen Is Crowned but I think that these
must have been entirely connotative and not due to any
cunning of the plastic imagination, either in the cere
mony itself or the way it was photographed. The Coro
nation was an occasion when actions, as words, were
strictly prescribed, their force not being subject to modes
of representation and hence not being "aesthetic."

THE ARTS IN THE UNITED STATES

243

Malcolm Cowley

AMERICAN NOVELS SINCE THE WAR

An essay as short as this, dealing with a subject as broad
as postwar American fiction, has to be a sort of aerial
survey, not critical but topographical Looking down as
if from a slow observation plane, we examine the jum
bled landscape to learn what it reveals. We can scarcely
see the people, let alone hearing them talk, but at least
we can see their fields, their roads ; and where these con
verge in groups of houses, each different from any other
group.

The largest of the groups is composed of novels about
the armed services in World War II. There are now so
many of the novels, by such a varied company of authors,
that one can find, if not a published book, then at least
a manuscript about every arm and rank of all the serv
ices in every theatre of operations and in every major
battle from Pearl Harbor to Okinawa not to mention
other novels about occupation troops, prisoners of war,
soldiers and sailors on leave, and patients in psychiatric
hospitals. It is as if a commission in Washington had
summoned a meeting of all the novelists and had given
each of them the task of writing one volume about a
single phase of the conflict. And it is as if the chairman
of the commission had said, "Some of you can be orig
inal, to lend variety to the undertaking, but we expect
the rest of you to use the same methods and approxi-

The Arts in the United States 244

mately the same style, so that the volumes will fit to
gether into a vast collective history of the war."

Many of the novels are so much alike that dialogues
and episodes could be transposed from one to another
without a change except in names. There are indeed a
few individualists among the authors: notably there is
James Jones, who is the only one to write about the
Army as an institution and a permanent way of life;
there is Norman Mailer, who has a political sense that is
rare among writers of his generation; and there is the
late John Home Burns, with the strained but persuasive
lyricism that he achieved in The Gallery, and never
achieved again; but these and a few others are excep
tions. Most of the authors write like contributors to a
symposium. Although the sameness of their novels is
their great defect as separate works, it is also a virtue of
the undertaking as a whole. Together the novels form a
production of lasting value, one that may well be richer
and more complete than the contemporary account we
possess of any nation's part in any other war.

Even in a topographical survey I should make two
other remarks about the second-war novels. The first is
that, on the average, they are better written than all but
a few of the war novels produced in the 19205. Fictional
methods, and especially the technique of presenting
"what really happened in action" to borrow a phrase
from Hemingwayhave been refined during the last
quarter-century, and young writers have been quicker
to learn the methods. A second remark is that in general
the sense of historical perspective has to be supplied by
readers of the novels as a group, since it is singularly
lacking in most of the individual novelists.

Most of them write as if they were immersed in the
war and as if, instead of being an exterior event to de
scribe, it had become an inner condition of their lives.
Their state of mind is expressed by one of the two prin
cipal characters in Point of Honor, by M. L. Kadish, a

AMERICAN NOVELS SINCE THE WAR 245

thoughtful and neglected novel about the fighting in
Italy. The character is Sergeant Holloway, who goes
into action with a battery of howitzers. As the guns fire,
"Holloway eases into a kind of peace. Now he lives com
pact within the space of action. He can eye the present
the way he saw a small snake eye a bird's nest once be
fore the war,"

Many of the novels give us just such a narrow-focused,
intent and snake's-eye picture of the fighting. Even when
the novelist, in imagination, soars over the battlefront,
his picture is lacking in perspective. Lieutenant Evans,
the other hero of Point of Honor, is an artillery observer
in a Piper Cub who muses as the battle unrolls beneath
him. "Had he thought once that the war had an issue?
Anti-fascism, perhaps? Under aerial observation, war
sheds issues. War was Fact, Thing-in-Itself, Existence
sheer beyond argument; it spoke from the Rapido and
beyond. 1 AM THAT I AM/ it declared to you. 1
AM MY OWN JUSTIFICATION/ " In general the
novelists do not presume to judge the war. They do not
think much about its causes or consequences and, unlike
the novelists of the other war, they do not rebel against
it. Their heroes accept the war as they would an earth
quake and try to do their best in the circumstances.

A second group of postwar novelists includes the
authors of what might be called the "new" fiction, to
correspond with the new criticism. Like almost all the
influential critics, many of the novelists are employed
by universities, usually in the department of English.
They listen to the critics, perhaps too intently, and try
to win their grudging approval. Both critics and novel
ists are more interested in problems of structure and
texture than they are in subject matter or ideas. If there
are ideas in the novels they are seldom directly expressed
and the social subject matter is nearly non-existent.

The new fiction represents the extreme point of a
reaction from "social realism" as practised in the 19305.

The Arts in the United States 246

The new fictionists-I am thinking of young men and
women like Frederick Buechner, Jean Stafford, Truman
Capote, Robie Macauley and Paul Bowles, to mention
a few of the more talented are determined not to deal
with public issues or social environments. Instead they
try to give their stories a permanent human value by
writing about the moral dilemmas of individuals, usu
ally in isolated situations where the dilemmas can be
studied like specimens in a laboratory.

Favorite settings are plantation houses on the point of
collapse, abandoned summer hotels, decaying villages
in Georgia or East Texas, lonely ranches in Colorado
and the international colony in Rome or Tangier.
Favorite themes are the initiation of a pre-adolescent
boy or girl into the knowledge of sex or evil (as in Other
Voices, Other Rooms and The Mountain Lion), an
adulterous love affair as seen through the eyes of a child
(as in how many novels), a wise old woman's death and
its effect on her family, and a young woman's flight from
reality into the womblike comfort of drugs, nympho-
mania or catatonic dementia (as in The Sheltering Sky).
Women are likely to play the more active roles in the
stories; the heroes are dummies or victims. There are
scores of novels, published or in manuscript, that de
scribe the ruin of a sensitive and truly artistic young
man by his possessive mother.

It would not be accurate to say that the new fiction
never presents a political idea. One that has been dra
matically suggested in many novels, including some but
not all of those with a Southern background, is the fool
ishness of racial prejudice. Another common idea is the
weakness and cowardice of liberals and still another,
expressed in terms of character,, is the selfishness of re
formers. Some of the novelists like to hint that their
sentiments are conservative and often they depict very
old men and women admiringly, as if to demonstrate

AMERICAN" NOVELS SINCE THE WAR 247

that the past, with its simple codes of conduct, is better
than the present.

The fact remains that most of the ideas to be deduced
from the new fiction are moral rather than political or
social. Usually they can be translated into statements
of a highly generalized type: for example, "Evil is in the
human heart" which is the hidden thesis of many
"new" novels "Ripeness is all," "Little children, love
one another!" for the novelists like to use the words
"love," "good" and "compassion" and very simply,
"Mother was to blame."

Another large group of postwar fiction is composed
of naturalists if we give a broad meaning to the term
and apply it to any novelist who is primarily interested
in his subject matter. The naturalists like to write about
a community or a social environment. Some of their
postwar subjects are a small city with its interwoven
lives (Sironia, Texas), a Midwestern county over the
years (Raintree County), the Chicago slums (Knock at
Any Door), the motion-picture business (What Makes
Sammy Run), a boys 5 military school (End as a Man)
and the younger generation on the Pacific Coast (Corpus
of Joe Bailey).

The central themes of such novels are usually quite
simple. In some the protagonist we can't often call him
a hero is warped by his environment, tempted into
crime, and ends in the electric chair. In others he suc
ceeds in business because of faults that keep him from
being truly human. In still others he fights false social
standards and achieves a sort of emotional maturity.
Since the novelist is interested in the mechanism of
social success or failure, and since he deals at length with
many other characters who cross the path of the hero-
victim-villain, he ends by writing a very long book. If
a manuscript comes to a publisher's office in a single
neat folder, it is likely to be new-fictional. If it arrives in

The Arts in the United States 248

a suitcase or a wooden packing box, it is either historical
or naturalistic.

As a group the naturalists are more interested in the
exterior drama of events than they are in achieving psy
chological depth. They pay comparatively little atten
tion to the inner structure and texture of their novels.
In their huge manuscripts a few of the episodes will
be grotesquely swollen, and the editorial reader will
blue-pencil them, while other episodes will be lacking in
detail. The style is likely to be conventional or pedes
trian. Frank N orris not Dreiser was the grandfather of
most of the present-day naturalists and he often ex
pressed his contempt for careful writing. "What pleased
me most in your review of McTeague" he said in a let
ter to Isaac Marcosson, "was 'disdaining all pretensions
to style/ It is precisely what I try most to avoid. I detest
'fine writing/ 'rhetoric/ 'elegant English' tommyrot.
Who cares for fine style! Tell your yarn and let your style
go to the devil. We don't want literature, we want life/'
Yet Norris' novels are full of "fine writing" in the bad
sense and usually end with a deep-purple passage.

Most of the present-day naturalists have followed
Norris, both in his contempt for elegant English and in
his failure to see that he sometimes wrote with bogus
elegance. There are others, however, who show a sense
of respect for the sound, the color and the infinite pos
sibilities of the English language. While retaining the
naturalistic interest in subject matter, they have tried to
get beneath the surface of events and to present their
characters as felt persons, not as observed specimens.
Sometimes they transform the naturalistic story into a
tone poem of anger or longing or mystery or degrada
tion.

At this point I am describing what is really another
group of postwar novels, smaller in number and harder
to define than the three preceding groups, but perhaps
no less important. Indeed it seems to me that novels like

AMERICAN NOVELS SINCE THE WAR 240

The Man with the Golden Arm, by Nelson Algren, The
In-visible Man, by Ralph Ellison, Lie Down in Dark-
ness, by William Styron for its last two chapters and
recently The Adventures of Angle March, by Saul Bel
low, represent the most hopeful tendency now to be
found in American fiction. The work of such novelists
has faults, easy to discern, but these are the price they
pay for taking chances that the new fictionists have re
fused to take. They deal with human characters, in
volved in human dilemmas, but don't make the mistake
of presenting them as if they were divorced from society.

There are other good novels in all the classifications
I have been trying to map as if from a distance. That is
the weakness of a topographical or taxonomic survey:
it indicates the sort of qualities, usually weaknesses, that
are common to a group, but not the more important
qualities that make a novel survive as a separate work
of art.

Take for example The Member of the Wedding, by
Carson McCullers. From the standpoint of our survey it
belongs to the genus New Fiction, species Southern,
variety Coming to Knowledge of Pre-adolescent Girl (or
rite de passage) and thus can be filed away with half a
dozen books by other writers. What the survey does not
reveal is that it is written with an intensity of feeling
and a Tightness of language that the others fail to
achieve; it has the power over the reader of a perfectly
spoken incantation. Or take a rather neglected novel by
Harriette Arnow, Hunter's Horn. This time the genus
is Naturalism (with symbolic overtones), the species Hill
billy, the variety Obsessive Pursuit of a Wild Animal.
Once again the survey does not reveal the special quality
of the novel, which is partly the poetry of earth, partly
the sense of a community and partly a sort of in-feeling
for the characters that makes it better than any other
novel about the Kentucky hill people since Elizabeth
Madox Roberts' The Time of Man.

The Arts in the United States 250

The postwar period in American fiction has not pro
duced any novels that the future is likely to call great-
only the future is entitled to speak of greatness but it
has produced many works, famous or neglected, that are
unique in their species and deserve to be read for years
to come. The faults of the period are easy to indicate,
even at the end of this very brief survey. Most of the
authors not only war novelists but new fictionists and
naturalists as well have shown a peculiar lack of the
historical sense; they can write "time passed," but they
rarely give us the feeling of experienced time. They
have been generally timid in their choice of subjects
and characters and wanting in deep convictions.

As justification for timidity they can plead the dangers
of this age, which has not been friendly to experiments
in living or thinking. Yet the age has produced funda
mental changes in the American character without pro
ducing equal changes in the novels, most of which are
traditional in their form, as in their sense of life. The
novelists are serious, skillful and perceptive, but one
feels that most of them are without a definite direction
not stumbling, or not enough, but walking briskly,
heads erect, eyes forward, within fences that mark the
limit of their explorations. If they learn that the fences
can be climbed, as I believe they will, we may enter a
new period in American writing.

2J1

Arthur Mi^ener

AMERICAN POETRY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The poetry of any age is distinguishable if it is by the
constellation of attitudes and ideas which constitutes its
particular sensibility and by the rhetoric with which it
defines this sensibility. It is always dangerous to discuss
the poetry of an age. Poems, if not always written by
fools like the gentlemen who said they were, are written
by men whose art it is to be particular.

The most remarkable characteristic of American po
etry in the twentieth century is a wry, depreciatory hon
esty. Ezra Pound described its style in a sentence which
illustrates the style well. "Poetry," he said, "ought to be
at least as well written as prose." Perhaps only in the
poetry of Hart Crane, with its romantic rhetoric ("The
sea's green crying towers a-sway, Beyond/And King
doms/naked in the/trembling heart"), and of Wallace
Stevens, with its rhetoric of elegance ("Soon with a noise
like tambourines. /Came her attendant Byzantines"), is
this attitude a minor element.

The shift to it begins with Robert Frost. Professional
New Englander though Frost is, however, he was first
recognized in England. T. S. Eliot, though much in
fluenced by The Big River and Cape Ann, is as much a
British as an American poet. Contrariwise, Auden, who
is Yorkshire enough, is also the bard of Forty-Second
Street. These examples are not meant to suggest that

The Arts in the United States 252

American and British poetry cannot be distinguished;
there ar$ clearly American qualities in all American
poetry, from Pound's mock yawp to Eliot's English ac
cent. But though many of these distinguishing character
istics are far from superficial, the profound qualities of
our poetry are common to American and British poetry
and, except for convenience, it would be foolish to treat
them separately.

The characteristic depreciatory honesty of the age is
very striking in Frost. He makes his most serious asser
tions in a homely, conversational manner, as if he felt
he could authenticate his insights only by making the
minimum claims for them, and none for himself. The
laconic, country-bred New Englander who speaks in al
most all his poems provides the anticlimaxes which are
characteristic of his best poems, such as "The Most of
It," where the speaker cried out that life wanted "not its
own love back in copy speech /But counter-love, original
response"; and then a great buck swam across the lake,

Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,

And landed like a waterfall,

And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,

And forced the underbrush and that was all.

This same attitude comes out in the very American
poetry of William Carlos Williams and Pound, showing
itself in the homeliness of their subjects and in the slight
touch of comic exaggeration in their manner, as in Wil
liams' directions for a funeral:

For heaven's sake though see to the driverl . . .

up there unceremoniously

dragging our friend out to his own dignity!

Bring him down bring him down!

Low and inconspicuous! I'd not have him ride

on the wagon at all damn him

the undertaker's understrapper!

AMERICAN POETRY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 253

In a quite different way it is the unwobbling pivot which
steadies Pound's most serious passages, in which

we have heard the fauns chiding Proteus

in the smell of hay under the olive-trees,
And the frogs singing against the fauns in the half-
light.

In such passages Pound's verse is as lovely as any in the
twentieth century, but its grave and responsible elo
quence comes from a cool precision rather than an ex
travagance of rhetoric.

But much the most influential of the early poets of the
age has been T. S. Eliot, despite his rather forbidding
intellectual-puritan temper. ("How unpleasant/' he
once wrote himself, "to meet Mr. Eliot: /With his fea
tures of clerical cut, /And his brow so grim/and his
mouth so prim. . . .") The source of Mr. Eliot's influ
ence is his awareness of our profound sense of inade
quacy and his ironic self-possession in the face of this
knowledge. If, after such knowledge, there is no forgive
ness, still, nothing is to be gained by ignoring it or giv
ing way to hysteria. From Prufrock, obsessed by the
absurdity of his heart, anxious not to forget that he is
Osric rather than Hamlet, sure that he has no right to
make a tragedy of his inability to hear mermaids singing,
to the graver, less youthfully self-conscious voice of the
age's greatest poem, Four Quartets, Mr. Eliot has known
how to speak to that part of our nature we do not even
know we have which underlies our opinions and even
our beliefs. That special power is evident in the simplest
phrases of the Quartets:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that

the river

Is a strong brown god. . . .

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger. . . .

The Arts in the United States 2 54

Each in his own way, the poets who succeeded this first
group have shown a similar attitude. The profoundly
strange and original poetry of Allen Tate, for example,
is full of it:

This is the day His hour of life draws near,
Let me get ready from head to foot for it
Most handily with eyes to pick this year
For small feed to reward a feathered wit.

It is in the nicely shaded control of feeling in John Ran
som's poetry:

There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study
Astonishes us all.

It is in the deeply serious, wry primness of Marianne
Moore, with whom New England is not a dramatic pose
but a passion of the mind:

'No water so still as the

dead fountains of Versailles/ No swan
with swart blind look askance
and gondeliering legs, so fine

as the chintz-china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.

The middle generation of twentieth century poets was
not so fortunate as the first. Whatever may have been
the ultimate causes of its difficulties, it suffered from the
widespread attempt to imitate Yeats' Persona, which ill
fits the boy from Providence or Kansas City; and, as
Randall Jarrell has remarked, the influence of the late
Dylan Thomas came close to corrupting a whole genera-

AMERICAN POETRY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

tion (it is still at work in so good a poet as James Mer
rill). In any event, only a few poets stand out in this
generation: Mr. Jarrell himself, Robert Lowell, Del-
more Schwartz.

Of these the most gifted and the most troubled is Mr.
Lowell, who has recently been struggling to escape from
the excessive metaphysical complication of his own
thought into some kind of direct, narrative poetry, per
haps like Frost's, as if, after the range of metaphor in
Lord Weary's Castle, he found this the best way to his
meaning. Occasionally his gift comes clear, as in the
beautiful "Falling Asleep over the Aeneid," and then he
is the best poet of his age in America. A similar develop
ment, this time in a modification of Auden's influence,
is at work in Mr. Jarreirs latest work, for example, in
"Money." "Money" is ironic about the rich man who
speaks it, but it is also ironic about the easy way we are
all ironic about such people. *Td talk down money if I
hadn't any/' the old man says.

But in a way the most interesting of these poets is
Delmore Schwartz, in whose work the period style was
first firmly established. Its harmonious blending of
effects from such different poets as Pound, Eliot, Yeats
and Auden to name only the predominant influences-
is a very considerable achievement. It allows Mr.
Schwartz to create his own voice within the range of a
familiar voice, as did the best of the Elizabethan son
neteers and of the eighteenth-century couplet writers:

Let these romantic critics go elsewhere,
Elsewhere pretend that happiness is not like this.
Do we not have, in fine, depression and war
Certain each generation? Who would want more?
O what unsated heart would ask for more?

This style, at once conventional and personal, is
widely possessed in the latest generation of poets. It is

The Arts in the United States 256

elegantly practiced by Richard Wilbur, whose Tom
Swift

worked at none but wit's expense
Putting dirigibles together
Out in the yard in quiet weather,
Whistling beyond Tom Sawyer's fence.

It is funny and a little frightening in Reed Whitte-
more's Paul Revere:

Is it one if by land, two if by sea?
Or two if by land? Or what?

The great virtue of an established, period style of this
kind is that it makes for a very high level of general per
formance. If the latest generation of twentieth century
American poets has produced no poets-as-heroes, as did
the first generation, it has produced a surprisingly large
number of good poems by a surprisingly large number of
writers, as any reader can see who will look through the
excellent volume of New Poems by American Poets re
cently edited by Rolfe Humphries.

257

Delmore Schwartz

RECENT LITERARY CRITICISM

Since the war, literary criticism in America has become
an active and flourishing industry to so great extent that
it has provoked an antagonism which I think ought to
be examined and illustrated.

I remember a famous American poet, and a truly great
one, beginning a reading of his poetry by speaking of the
present state of criticism, poetry, and the criticism of
poetry. Some poets, he said, write for other poets, some
poets write for the critics, some critics write poetry be
cause they are critics of poetry, some critics write poetry
for other critics, and finally some critics write criticism
for other critics. His audience was overjoyed. As they
laughed, a flashlight photographer lightened the scene
near the platform, directing his camera at the poet, who
looked more guilty than startled. One cannot be sure but
he seemed to look as if he had been caught in the act
of saying what he did say.

A literary critic expressed the same antagonism when
he was asked about a piece of abstract sculpture in his
living room by the electrician who had come to repair
the wiring in his apartment. "What does it mean?" the
electrician wanted to know. "Do you like girls?" the
critic replied. The electrician admitted that he did. "Do
you ask what a pretty girl means?" the critic said then.

The Arts in the United States 258

The electrician made his departure. The important
point is that he remained dissatisfied.

Then there is the antipathy which Randall Jarrell has
expressed with characteristic eloquence in his recent
book, Poetry and the Age: this is, he says, an age of criti
cism: "there has never been an age when so much good
criticism was writtenor so much bad/' And when you
examine the leading literary reviews, "each of these con
tains several poems, and a piece of fiction sometimes two
pieces; the rest is criticism ... I am talking as a reader
of the criticism of the last few years and am assuming
its merits and services, which are great. . . . The maga
zines which enjoy attacking them are almost ludicrously
inferior to them. But, I think, they print far too much
criticism and far too much that is attractive to critics
and lovers of criticism than it is to poets and fiction-
writers. . . . Some of this criticism is as good as anyone
could wish: several of the best critics alive print most
of their work in such magazines as these. Some more of
this criticism is intelligent and useful it sounds as if
it had been written by a reader for readers, by a human
being. But a great deal of this criticism might just as
well have been written by a syndicate of encyclopedias
for an International Business Machine. It is not only bad
or mediocre, it is dull; it is, often, an astonishingly
graceless, joyless, humorless, long-winded, niggling,
blinkered, methodical, self-important, cliche-ridden,
prestige-obsessed, almost autonomous criticism."

Mr. Jarrell's description is precise, or at any rate, my
own feelings are so much akin to his that it seems pre
cise to me. But perhaps our own feelings are not im
portant when measured against the state of literacy in
America and the endless necessity for the training of an
educated class. The state of affairs which Mr. Jarrell de
scribes has come into being through the new union be
tween literary criticism and the teaching of English.
Some of the criticism to which Mr. Jarrell objects is

RECENT LITERARY CRITICISM

259

produced by overworked instructors who must earn
academic promotion by publication: in the past, most
of them would have published scholarly papers in the
scholarly journals; but now, although academic stand
ards of scholarship remain unaltered, the teacher's worth
is increased, from the point of view of a university, if he
functions as both a critic and a scholar. Consequently
there has been a rapprochement between scholarship
and criticism instead of the senseless separation which
existed for far too long. The teacher has been drawn
toward criticism and the critic toward scholarship in a
way which cannot but be good for both criticism and
scholarship.

But more important by far, the practice of criticism
has increased because of a definite social and cultural
need. Much of the criticism which distresses Mr. Jarrell
is given over almost entirely to an analysis and interpre
tation of the meanings of the literary object, which is
certainly a one-sided and limited kind of criticism at
best. But at worst it has helped to create and to keep
alive a consciousness of literature at a higher and more
serious level than at any time since the Civil War. The
proof of this is that if it is an age of criticism, it is also
an age of the reprint. For the ascendancy of the New
Criticism has been accompanied by an important re
lated phenomenon, the literary revival, which has re
stored the living as well as the dead. There have been
valuable books and collections of essays about Faulkner,
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats, among
others, a fact which must be connected with the state of
affairs twenty years back when it was extremely difficult
for a critic to get a book of criticism published at all.
The literary revival has resurrected James, given the
novels of Faulkner and Fitzgerald the attention of which
they were deprived by the concerns of criticism during
the depression; and classic American literature has estab
lished itself clearly and fully. We have only to think of

The Arts in the United States 260

Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain to see there
has been a real advance: the gulf between the present
and the past which existed in virtually every other
period has been greatly diminished, and this has come
about chiefly because so many critics are teachers. Faulk
ner is perhaps the best example of how genuine the
progress has been: in any other literary period, he might
have suffered the fate of Melville after the writing of
Moby Dick.

Nevertheless Mr. Jarrell's judgment is just in itself.
It would certainly be very nice if all the critics in ques
tion wrote well, in a lucid style, free of cant, jargon, and
preciosity; if their analysis of the meaning of poetry
were balanced by a sense of the being of poetry, and a
historical sense of literature; if they were more often
able to recognize that a method which developed out of
the analysis of lyric poetry cannot be directly translated
to the criticism of fiction and the drama; and if more of
them shared the social and moral values of Van Wyck
Brooks and Edmund Wilson, instead of those of T. S.
Eliot. It is easier to criticize the New Criticism than to
shoot fish in a barrel; and it ought to be criticized; at the
same time, in criticizing it, one ought to remember a
fact which Mr. Jarrell cites elsewhere in his book, in
his essay on the obscurity of the poet and the indifference
to poetry in America: "One of our universities recently
made a survey of the reading habits of the American
public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Ameri
cans read, during a year, no book at all." It is within this
context, from the point of view of the sociology of litera
ture, that the recent growth of criticism must be esti
mated. It is true enough that the most one can say,
adopting this point of view, is: better than nothing.

It is better than nothing in this sense: if on the one
hand it is now often necessary, because of the New Criti
cism, to insist that Moby Dick is about a white whale
and whaling, whatever its more elevated and profound

RECENT LITERARY CRITICISM 261

meanings may be, on the other hand Moby Dick was not
mentioned at all during the first seventy years after
it was published. In a like way, as the poems of Emily
Dickinson were not published during her lifetime, so
Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost suffered
for twenty years from the lack of understanding and
recognition which Emily Dickinson would have exper
ienced if she had been published. For the time being at
least, the New Criticism has diminished the kind of
deafness and darkness with which these poets were con
fronted.

The consolations of a historical perspective can be
overestimated. Yet, going back twenty-five years, one has
only to read the pronouncements of H. L. Mencken on
the art of poetry as a pack of lies, the avant-garde as a
pack of poseurs and pretenders, the puerility of Thor-
stein Veblen and John Dewey and the nobility of war
to see that the supposed glory of the first postwar period
is mostly a nostalgia for exuberance. And if one goes
back fifty years to the time of Howells, George Wood-
berry, Hamilton W. Mabie, Henry Van Dyke, and Bar
ret Wendell, one comes upon a literary scene which was
an appalling gentleman's club inhabited by a host of
genteel mediocrities most of whom were devoted to im
personating that familiar ghost who has haunted Ameri
can literature since the time of Washington Irving, the
imaginary Englishman.

Although in the ancient past, Sisyphus was con
demned by the gods to roll a rock to the top of a moun
tain, today Sisyphus is a literary critic. Every time he
finishes a book review, he has to begin a new one: his
task, being the task of criticism is endless and with
out termination. But now as the imaginary Englishman
returns dressed in the tunic of the new conservatism and
as the howling Comanches of mass culture whoop it up
on the TV screen, Sisyphus cannot help but see the new
critic's love of literature in a redeeming light.

262

Kenneth Rexroth

THE YOUNGER GENERATION AND ITS BOOKS

Right now we're in one of those cyclic crescendos of
fret about the younger generation, several decibles above
the fret about Clara Bow. Much of this is just the eternal
worry of the old as the young discover the secrets of
life. There is a brief transition period of human life
a penumbra, alas all too narrowbetween the discovery
of the Truth and the acceptance of the Social Lie. Those
humans who are living in it always frighten those who
have outgrown it.

It is in music that those who have entered the brief
span of comparative wisdom known as youth have
spoken most clearly. The music of Gillespie, Parker,
Young, and Tristano, Brubeck, Mulligan is the specific
idiom which speaks of, for, to, and by the young. This
is the clear unmistakable, insistent voice of rejection.
You cannot begin to understand what is going on until
you realize that all over the world "Fouilles-tu 1'Oiseau?"
has taken the place of "Soviets partout."

The descent from music to literature for them is a
drop of several qualitative levels. Ask your younger
brothers, nephews, sons, "Does Norman Mailer speak
for you?" The answer will be, "No, I don't recognize
anybody I know in that book/' It is necessary to remem
ber that there are three distinct age groups of writers:
the one that began to publish during the war even I

THE YOUNGER GENERATION AND ITS BOOKS 263

belong to this one, so does Kenneth Patchen, so does
Nelson Algren, and so does Henry Miller, old enough
to be everybody's grandfather; the group that began to
write during the war and published immediately after
wards, of whom Mailer is a good example; beginning
to breathe down all our necks is a group that has had to
take the wars, not twice in a lifetime, but twice in child
hood and youth. These are the boys nobody wants to
face.

There are several spurious youth running around
whom it would be well to challenge. The literature of
the International Set, the denizens of Tangiers and the
suburbs of Florence Paul Bowles and Truman Capote
is thriller-diller stuff on the lowest level, comic books
for the vulgar. I don't know anyone under thirty who
reads them. Like Michael Arlen in another epoch, their
audience is shop girls and housemaids who save their
nickels to subscribe to the more expensive flapper fash
ion magazines.

Secondly, there's plain money-writingsome of it on
a fairly high level and, because of the rough house de
mand of the pocket book audience, able to get away
with a degree of social criticism unknown in earlier
popular literature. Jones is the type, and the science
fiction writers although some o the latter are begin
ning to move over into the pseudo-sophisticated slick
magazines, for example, Ray Bradbury.

I think that the nature of popular fiction, the never-
ceasing demand for dames overthrown by force and
violence, makes it the most socially significant writing,
aesthetics to the contrary, taking place. The genealogy
runs Hemingway-Hammett-Cain-Chandler-Horace Mc
Coy, with Henry Miller in left field, a mixed metaphor
which will cover the blood on the scanties school and
the Brooklyn boy approach direct. Possibly Farrell,
Algren, and other Chicago realists had a hand in it too;
but they are altogether too elegiac in pace for the prose

The Arts in the United States 264

which now rules the roost in front of the local drug
store. The secret of this kind of writing is that it isn't
buying anything and it isn't selling anything; and it
hasn't since it first began to appear in the pages of
Black Mask where the style was deliberately and con
sciously developed before the war.

Two recent books are outstanding examples of this
style and they interest me more than any of the others in
this article Manchester's City of Anger and Handel's
Flee The Angry Strangers. There are all sorts of things
wrong with them, Manchester's cast is an enormous col
lection of Harry Stack Sullivan case histories, rather than
people or even archetypal caricatures of the Dickens
order. I should imagine that it was Dickens he was aim
ing at. In spite of thinness of characterization, his huge
web of "interpersonal relations," to use the fashionable
term, does catch up and hold something of the living or
living-dead reality of the city of anger, the city Bunyan's
Pilgrim fled from, the city waiting for the Bomb, the city
where we all live.

Mandel's relationship to the metier is certainly rather
remote. I imagine the cats in the village bars get up
when he sits down. The book, especially in the opening
chapters, sounds like a collaboration of Little Joe Gould,
Maxwell Bodenheim, and a collegiate imitator of Damon
Runyon. But he learns by doing, and the latter half of
the book is probably as true a picture of the totally
alienated as you're likely to get.

Chester Himes is another writer on the pocket book
level. He is possibly more vulgar than Ralph Ellison,
but he is more convincing, and both of them present the
same picture of Negro total rejection. I would say that
Himes is more popular with Negroes because of his
confident and simple identification with his material.
Most Negroes I know find too much extraneous worry
in Ellison and are suspicious of his ambition.

THE YOUNGER GENERATION AND ITS BOOKS 265

There is an intermediate group which includes Bour-
jaily, Burns, Merle Miller; still young, they are not quite
money writers, super slicks, or avant-garde. It may well
be that one of these people and there are several more
than those I've named will crawl up to the head of the
track in the next ten years.

I'm not sure where to put Salinger, His Catcher In
the Rye, a re-take of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of
Paradise., concerns the adolescent problems of a prep
school youth. I don't know any prep school youth, and
I don't know anybody who does. But in spite of this
specialization, Salinger does get across the same indict
ment: for youth, even some rich youth, this is a world
of strangers, going about their lethal, clandestine, and
wrathful business, all of them enemies.

With young Roman Catholic writers, rejection is
absolute and it is very assured. J. F. Powers is, in my
opinion, the best short story writer to come up in many
years. His work is a cunning blend of Farrell, Bernanos,
and the most savage whimsy of the New Yorker , ortho
dox but self-critical and eminently humane. Merton I
find a trifle over-decorative, but he is certainly a con
siderable poet. My own taste runs more to the rougher,
more direct poetry of Brother Antoninus, OP, for
merly William Everson.

Last, there is the world of the quarterlies, for better
or worse. The young people I know condemn all of it
as "school teacher literature." Art with a capital "A"
has become polite, or at the best "social worker art" in
the eyes of the disaffiliated. I'm inclined to agree, but
I'm also inclined to make a few exceptions. Writers like
Saul Bellow, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwicke, Mary
McCarthy, Eleanor Clark are such. Pre-war versions
of the forgotten the highbrow writers are Harold
Frederick, David Graham Phillips, Robert Herrick, or
Edith Wharton, none as good as Mrs. E. L. Voynich,

The Arts in the United States 266

This is the world o haut cuisine presided over by E. M.
Forster and Virginia Woolf. It can safely be left to the
classrooms nobody among these young strangers cares
anything about it.

Of course these writers are not very young. They were
all formed by the transition of the American academic
intellectual from the 414 International to the European
Defense Community. You can hardly expect a youth who
sat out the Korean war to read these authors even if the
GI bill pays him to sit in a classroom and listen to it.

There has, of course, been a continuous production of
books by the younger generation of Southern writers, but
it is easier to name bad ones than good ones. The only
good ones that occur to me are The Heart Is A Lonely
Hunter, Reflections In A Golden Eye, and Lie Down In
Darkness. These are essentially reworkings of Faulkner.
The great danger, and a danger to which Carson Mc-
Cullers may already have succumbed, is that she and
William Styron will have graduated to swimming pools
and yachts before they have learned how to write.

This is the great danger all around. I cannot agree
with Aldridge's After The Lost Generation that novels
by and large perform the social function of a constant
symbolic criticism of values. With few exceptions in
the history of literature, novels have been written for
the immature. Aristotle was right tragedy must deal
with the problems of adults. A real mastery of fictional
dramaturgy comes late, and if Hollywood is there with
a checkbook before you reach the age of 25, your goose
is cooked. Where would Joseph Conrad have been, pray
tell, if someone had handed him a check for $100,000 for
Almayer's Folly')

I suppose I should write something about poetry.
Since I write poetry myself, I guess I'm less tolerant.
It seems to me something terrible has gone wrong with
poetry. After the generation of Hollywood, the Com-

THE YOUNGER GENERATION AND ITS BOOKS 267

munist Party, the WPA, and Time magazine, poetry
was never able to raise its head again. The poet the
young read is Kenneth Patchen, not themselves, except
as a sort of duty.

There are a few poets in the quarterlies who have
come up since the war. Probably the best are Richard
Wilbur, Jean Garrigue, Ruth Herschberger, Paul Good
man, Theodore Roethke, Robert Duncan. The only
young poet who shares the total rejection of the novelists
and musicians is Philip Lamantia. James Laughlin puts
him in what he still calls New Directions whenever he
can get something, and Lamantia turns up periodically
in such magazines as Horizon, Tiger's Eye, Portfolio,
Botteghe Oscure. He is the one young American poet
included in all European collections o American verse.

Theoretically there should be a large popular poetic
literature taking off from Fearing, Patchen, Sandburg,
and the better, if there were any, proletarian poets, and
saying the same things that the pocket book writers say.
Alas, there are only academic exercises, wearily tapped
out on the typewriter to add grace to the final accolade
of a teaching fellowship in English in a small college.

There is a sort of poetic underworld in the mimeo
graphed little magazines. Curiously enough the editors
of these publications seem to write better than most of
their contributors, unless they are other editors. I have
the feeling that in each case the editor starts a poetry
magazine in hopes that out of the mail will drop some
thing really good, the kind of poem he himself has
always wanted to write. One of the curious things about
post war poetry is that a hero of the young is the author
of the longest hymn of hate in literature, Ezra Pound.

Older than most of the contributors to these mimeo
graphed publications is Charles Olson, and, I suspect
for this reason alone, he is probably the best known.
Robert Creeley, Richard Emerson, Fred Eckman, Gil

The Arts in the United States 268

Orlovitz are the best of the younger people. Eckman
and Emerson edit the magazine printed, not mimeo
graphedcalled the Golden Goose. I know them well,
and I know they try to find and print the poetry the
young are waiting to see.

269

Robert Richman

AMERICAN PAINTING AND SCULPTURE

If it can be said that American letters and American
architecture are no longer those of a Colonial culture
and have had a major influence on the literature and
architecture of Europe, it must also be said that the in
fluence in painting and sculpture has been that of Eu
rope upon America. And on many levels: we are at the
stage in these visual arts when a Colony seeks its cultural
independence and having broken from the mother cul
ture can walk along with the significant artists of Eu
rope that influenced the Americans many of whom like
Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Braque and Moore remained
in Europe, and those who among others emigrated to
America Gabo, Mondrian, Duchamp, Tanguy, Chagall
and Steinberg.

The decade of the 19505 in American painting will
surely be landmarked by the influence of three native
painters whose work has been revalued at the event of
their deaths: of John Marin in October of 1953, who
stands in the highest order of our artists; of Arthur Dove
in 1946; of Marsden Hartley in 1943, more rugged, less
lyric than Marin and less mystic than Dove, more som
ber in color and less aerial; all of whom have had a pro
found and generative influence on the young painters
and still loom large as America's three Internationalists,
who are gathered together in our memory as being that

The Arts in the United States 270

generation of artists who broke from the naive imitation
of European styles with the eloquent encouragement of
Ryder before them pointing the way. As Melville, Henry
James and Edward Arlington Robinson were to Ameri
can letters, Marin, Dove and Hartley seem to be to our
painting, along with one other Lyonel Feininger-
whose painting in a very special way is the unique com
bination of the European version of geometric abstract
painting which he helped to form, while he taught at
the Bauhaus, and of the indigenous art of America from
which he springs.

These are the senior native painters and it would seem
that theirs has been the most formative modern tradi
tion rising up from the American continent to shape its
contemporary painting. The middle generation of the
native born-Stuart Davis, Georgia O'Keefe, Mark To-
bey and Karl Knaths and the next generation of I. Rice
Periera, Loren Maclver and Willem de Kooning have
each made original variations upon this modern tradi
tion shaped by the senior painters and born out of the
abstract art of modem Europe. There are other forma
tive influences also: that of the pre-Colombian art of
the Toltecs, the Aztecs and the Mayas; of the pottery of
the Arizona Indians and the Navajo sand paintings;
of American folk art as it was rediscovered by the WPA
artists who illustrated it for the Index of American De
sign; and of the International style in our architecture,
parkways, contour-plowed fields, industrial arts and
graphic design. In naming these climates of influence
on contemporary American painting and sculpture, I
imply in the best artists only those relationships of the
winds in erosion to the rocks. The conditions of paint
ing in our milieu are not simple: no Titian works in
the studio of Giorgione.

The condition of sculpture has not been as compli
cated. The senior sculptors are the American-born
Alexander Calder; the Russian-Americans Naum Gabo,

AMERICAN PAINTING AND SCULPTURE 27 1

the Constructivist and Archipenko, the Cubist; and the
younger Isamu Noguchi American-born of Japanese
parents. These artists all seem to be in the prime of their
creative lives; and especially Gabo, who for me sym
bolizes the really modern artist at work in America be
cause he is both explorer and first resident citizen of
constructivism a land of art he helped to discover, like
Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Cezanne, Braque, or Paul
Hindemith, each one of whom has not only been an
explorer, each has been a first settler as well, even to the
point of financing his own Massachusetts Bay Company,
without the protection of the British Fleet.

There is one artist unique in the 1950$ whose works
resemble the position of the works of Paul Klee held
in their relationship to the tradition of painting and
drawing. Moreover like Klee's work, his cannot be
copied or used. I refer of course to the Rumanian- Amer
ican, Saul Steinberg, whose work is as matchless for the
humor and ease of his drawing as for the penetration of
his vision into man.

This argument does not seek to run aground on the
issue of national roots those of Europe, Asia, South or
North America and surely not for reasons of chauvin
ism. All the same, this is the age in which, for the first
time, American artists did not have to go to a Rome or
Paris of Art. The European painters were instead com
ing to America to live; and they brought their works,
their easels and their influences with them. The Trans
atlantic passage of influences in the visual arts began
with the International Exhibition of Modern Art in
1913 at the Armory in New York City; it became a two-
way exchange, as indeed the travel of the artists them
selves was to become two-way. Here in the visual arts,
then, in America, there is a new international or it
could be a post-nationalspirit in painting, sculpture
and architecture quite like the spirit of Europe in the
Age of Erasmus, which was pre-national, with the Latin

The Arts in the United States 272

language for Intellectual and cultural intercourse, ex
cept that the geography and population of the new
internationalism has no boundaries and there are no
language boundaries in this Paris-Rome-Berlin-New
York-Chicago axis of art. In the presence of this spirit,
the early Marin, Dove and Hartley with good reason
called themselves "The Internationalists/'

Since there have been fewer sculptors at work than
painters, it is easier to see the finest work and the more
direct trends in this decade. The work of Naum Gabo is
becoming more and more well-known in America. In
the eight years he has been living and working in New
England four miles on one arm of a triangle from Alex
ander Calder and four miles on the other from Yves
Tanguy, the Surrealist painter Gabo's work has taken
its place rightfully in the major private and museum
collections of the world. His sculpture stands, in my
opinion, as the finest of its genrea formal geometric
abstract art as pure as a theorem, as graceful as a gen
eralization in philosophy, and in its reach one of the
highest flights of the creative spirit, as the best fugues
and poems are.

Spontaneity is Calder's major achievement and con
tribution to another genre that of organic abstract
sculpture. That is not to say casualness, for his sculptures
have the order, the pattern and the passion of a leafs
right to move on its twig, the twig on its branch, the
branch on its trunk, down to the very roots. Calder re
minds one of Brancusi and Moore in that he too
"shared credit with his materials"; and in his mechan
ical organization alone he resembles the Russian Con-
structivists. The best of Calder's work intertwines botany
with engineering, behaving as a plant behaves In the
wind, with a choreography among the leaves that one
usually associates with a school of very small fish. These
are joyous procedures and high achievement.

To Gabo and to Calder, the work of Isamu Noguchi

AMERICAN PAINTING AND SCULPTURE 273

must be compared as that of a peer with his peers. With
those sculptures we call the Constructivist or geometric
abstract work, and the Realist (in Cezanne's sense) or
organic abstract work, it is essential to compare the third
type, or the Symbolic in the work of Noguchi. All three
are types of abstract art: Calder's art progresses by ab
stracting from the visible forms in Nature, and proceeds
by synthesis; Gabo's art progresses by abstracting from
the conceptual laws upon which Nature operates in
visibly, and proceeds by analysis; Noguchi's art pro
gresses, as rites and rituals do, by abstracting from the
elemental emotional experiences of man what Freud
called the "primitive" or racial experiences. And No
guchi's procedure is mimesis, that of a Western man (he
apprenticed to Brancusi) and of the Oriental craftsman
the Sung caligrapher or potter who lets the form auto-
genetically evolve out of the materials. This is at the
opposite pole from the Constructivists who as a mirror to
their concept create their images and construct them
with materials. Their concepts of space and motion
differ not in kind among these three types of abstract
sculpture, but in degree and emphasis. Each derives from
the new physics.

Of the younger generation, the work of Richard Lip-
pold looms best, certainly most considered and sound in
its use of the tradition of Gabo, Calder and Noguchi
whose work he has assimilated in the best sense and from
which he has made original departures to achieve his
own style and idiom. His sense of form stems from the
Constructivists and from music, which gives his work
one aspect of lyricism, the other aspect of which seems
to be like Calder's use of Nature, particularly of snow-
flakes. From Noguchi he employs a variation of sym
bolism; Lippold has taken one facet the surface instead
of the core of the ritual, not unlike the manner in which
a poetic image works. Other younger sculptors have
made an even less satisfactory use of symbolism than has

The Arts in the United States 274

Noguchi. And their use of materials differs from the
Brancusi, Moore and Noguchi techniques in which the
artist "shared credit with his materials/' In the works of
David Hare, Mary Gallery, Herbert Ferber, Theodore
Roszak and David Smith are reflected these and the in
fluence of Giacometti, Moore, Arp, Lipschitz, Zorach,
or the Surrealists. The influences of Rodin and Matisse
and of Malliol's idealizations of the nude body in either
the underweight variations of Lehmbruck or the over
weight variations of Lachaise are on the wane.

It seems important that Gabo, Noguchi and Calder
have turned back the concerted campaign in the twen
ties, thirties and forties, of the International stylists in
architecture especially by those trained in the Bauhaus
in Germany and in the New Bauhaus in Chicago and
the designers of industrial art to capture painting and
sculpture, to colonize and to exploit them into decora
tion, the subdivision, of what was then reverently called
Design. What actually happened was more in accord
with historic precedent: these sculptors influenced the
architects and they in turn influenced the former in a
reciprocal manner. Many of Gabo's works, particularly
his models, were monuments that were married to archi
tecture and engineering, and as such they exerted influ
ence upon the International style in architecture and
in industrial art. Noguchi has actually influenced the
design of furniture not only indirectly by his sculpture
in which he has been the vehicle for transmuting the
methods of Brancusi's use of materials but directly by
the tables and lamps, and by the stage sets for the dance
theatre of Martha Graham and of Erick Hawkins, which
he has designed and executed. These sets are high peaks
in scenic art and have had salutary effect on the work
of the Abstract-Expressionists. Calder's influence has
quietly and happily been absorbed by such designers as
Charles Eames, who in designing his well known chairs
learned from the "leaves and branches" o Calder.

AMERICAN PAINTING AND SCULPTURE 275

The painters have had far greater difficulty in with
standing the stylistic invasions of the Bauhaus designers
and the architects of the International Style and the
Abstract-Imitators (the naive copists of Mondrian and
Malevich). Even though the best of the paintersas did
the best of the sculptoi~s repelled them, the infiltration
devastated much professional painting and nearly all
amateur painting in the forties and fifties. "Abstract
Art for Abstract Art's sake" is now a popular movement.
It is the mode for not only the Sunday painters but for
most of the lesser weekday painters the tenth to the
third-rate ones. Even the second order of painters seems
to be united with them in their fallacy. And it is the
historic fallacy of the right to revolt in art for the wrong
reason. Amid the many strands of influence from the
turn of the century to date and among the many trends
in style, the second and third generation painters are
now poised at their crucial phase of history at what, as
it were, is the phase of their articles of confederation.

The contestants have literally though loosely drawn
camps not as the French did in Dadaism complete with
a group, a manifesto, and an agreed aim. And the fac
tions in American painting have been many. The princi
pals are embittered partisans and they paint for a small
though partisan set of critics and audience. The factions
which come the closest to a working majority in this
Chamber of Painterly Deputies are two: the reactionary
Right is the Geometric Abstract painting of the Post-
Cubist and Constructivist movement (this movement is
the one which is imitated by that group of naive copists
who comprise nearly a popular front of the Sunday and
the Lesser Weekday painters); and the radical Left is
called the Abstract-Expressionist movement epitomized
by Jackson Pollock which demands a freedom of form
and of symbol and in this condition has an affinity with,
and prompts a revival of, romantic painting. Arranged
between these two opponent movements in contem-

The Arts in the United States 276

porary painting in America is the snarled multitude of
vestigal and chthonic though minority movements.

The roots of the snarl reach to 1908 when a group of
American painters formed "The Eight" of which John
Sloane is its memorable artist; but another of "The
Eight" was to be the cause of a greater influence: it was
Arthur Davies who was the guiding force in organizing
the famous 1913 Armory Show comprised of 1600 pieces
of the new art mostly from Europe. Surely never has so
concentrated a revolutionary influence from a foreign
culture been dropped so abruptly in the midst of a native
culture with so profound a cataclysm all nearly within
a week-end. Evolving out of that exhibition was a group
of American artists Marin, Joseph Stella, Hartley,
Feininger and Dove, who, though heavily under the in
fluence of the new art of Europe, were near enough in
age to the advent of the Fauves and of the Cubists so
that they grew and flourished simultaneously with Ma
tisse, Picasso, Braque, Klee and Kandinsky.

Marin, Dove, Alfred Maurer and Hartley, and other
Americans also called "The Internationalists," worked
predominantly in either geometric abstraction or organic
abstraction. These artists and their descendants were to
encounter the second unique influence nearly thirty
years later, when Mondrian, Duchamp, Gabo, and Gro-
pius, Albers and Moholy-Nagy teachers from the Bau-
haus and the Surrealists, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst and
William Hayter among others moved from Europe to
America and made their homes. An exhibition in 1913
and an European emigration in the thirtiesin which,
for the first time in American history, artists came West
from Europe were to intensify the normal change in
styles of art, all with sudden speed.

The impulse and regeneration of the second wave
from Europe helped bring to a close the movements of
Regionalism and Social Realism which had their birth
largely in reaction to the first wave of twentieth century

AMERICAN PAINTING AND SCULPTURE 277

European Art. A violent reaction to the 1913 Armory
Show, which gave courage and affirmation to the Inter
nationalist painters in America was to be expected: it
came seventeen years later after the World War, the
Russian Revolution and the Great Depression. But the
delay merely built up the pressure of the reaction; and
for the first time, before or since roughly the years be
tween the Depression and the Appeasement at Munich
American painters grouped together on one agreed
theme: to destroy the Abstract Art of the International
ists in America, and, in general, that type of influence
from European art. There were actually two of these
reactionary groups: one was Regionalism Edward Hop
per, Charles Burchfield, Grant Wood among others who
were anti-abstract and pro-romantic in their preferences
of art; the other was Social Realism Ben Shahn, Wil
liam Cropper, Jack Levine among others who espoused
the Marxian theory of art in which the subject matter
differed from that of abstract art ex officio.

Both the Regionalists and the Social Realists were
doubly effective for in many instances they worked for
a single patron, the WP/V, and painted the "American
Scene'' or the "American Suffering" prolifically and
profitably. What is now obvious, but was then befogged,
is that Regionalist and Social Realist painters, either of
the first order or the second, were reacting against the
whole of the European tradition in the modern move
ment begun by Cezanne, though they assumed that they
were revolting only against an ill-advised group of
Americans, the Internationalist painters whom the 1913
Armory Show had degraded. Although Hopper and
Burchfield outgrew the confines of Regionalism, as
Charles Sheeler and Niles Spencer did, the second order
in this movement perpetuated the mistake and ignoring
the real tradition of painting in the West became fanatic
or monastic disciples of realism like John Curry, Thomas
Benton and, later, Grant Wood.

The Arts in the United States 2? 8

Near the end of the thirties Marin, Hartley, Dove and
Georgia O'Keefe; Feininger, May Ray, Stuart Davis and
Karl Knaths the list is incomplete had established an
important belief: it was that the tradition of painting in
America was one of a continuous evolution out of and
with the art of Europe; and that the adjectives Ameri
can or European could not properly be used to restrict
painting that was essentially Western. This new idea also
attracted the generation of Willem de Kooning, Loren
Maclver, I. Rice Periera, Morris Graves and Robert
Motherwell, in whom with variations on their senior
generation in American painting, abstract art the or
ganic and the geometricwas to move into its second
phase in America; because whereas the energetic output
of the Regionalists and the Social Realists waned, so too
did their influence on the younger first rank painters
who were attracted to the symbolic and the abstract in
art.

Before the imminent outbreak of World War II, the
artists and intellectuals of Europe came in exodus to
America; the event paralleled the Armory Show of 1913
which was held in the shadow of an earlier war. In the
forties, this influence of the artists themselves though
slower, was to become as profoundly deep as that of the
Armory Show. Most of these artists who came were in
dividually at work within the strict confines of doc
trinaire schools either of geometric abstract art or of the
Surrealistic or of the fantastic, et cetera. The important
ones were Mondrian (the de Stijls), Gabo (the Construc-
tivists), Archipenko (the Cubists) and Lger, and a
group of artist-teachers Ozenfant (the French Purists)
and Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Albers (from the Bau-
haus). Then there was Duchamp (Futurist), Tanguy
(Surrealist) and Chagall (Imagist). There were other
emigrant artists who were ministers of similar schools
of European painting; but the influences coming from
Europe in the work of Klee, of Braque, of Picasso, of

AMERICAN PAINTING AND SCULPTURE 279

Henry Moore and of Miro were more vital and forma
tive than those of the lesser emigrant artists. Cezanne,
too, was now being discovered directly by the younger
Americans, and no longer by way of the Cubists and the
Constructivists.

Throughout the thirties and the forties other strands
of influence were being formed, like the important one
by Mark Tobey, O'Keefe and, later, Morris Graves who
among others made of their American and European
sources a direct fusion with calligraphy from Oriental
art. And other influences on the painters were those in
directly of pre-Colombian artifacts, of prehistoric Ari
zona Indian pottery decorated in amazingly modern
conventionalized design, or of Navajo sand paintings.
These pre-Colombian influences and the Oriental, the
younger generation of American painters have inter
woven with the works of Klee and Miro. Such as William
Baziotes, Robert Motherwell and Theodore Stamos in
a manner similar to the Expressionists for they use a less
contrived idea have revitalized organic abstract art in
the fifties with their special use of mythic and primor
dial symbols. They paint freer, more biomorphic forms
than the geometric abstract group Davis, Knaths, Pe-
riera and Bradley Tomlin; but all these abstract painters,
the organic and the geometric, have made a proper and
salutary use of the native twentieth century tradition of
Marin, Dove, Hartley and Feininger; of the American-
European tradition of Gabo, Mondrian and Duchamp;
and of the European tradition of Cezanne, Braque,
Moore and Klee, who though leaders were also indi
vidually greater than the movements they led.

It is nearly commonplace to say that since 1940 the
tendency to abstract has had major emphasis among the
best artists in America; that, as movements, Social Real
ism and Regionalism have become decadent; that Sur
realism, as a movement, has blended into the genre
called the Symbolic Abstract; and that with this genre,

The Arts in the United States 280

the Geometric Abstract and the Organic Abstract are
each moving from their experimental into their classic
phases, which is to say in another way that these three
variations of abstract art have merged with the dominant
tradition of Western painting in America. Here innova
tions and gains are consolidated as they were in all classic
periods of artin Byzantium, in the Middle Ages, in
Sung China, or in Greece.

There is yet a fourth development in America that
called Abstract-Expressionism which is marked mainly
by the work of Jackson Pollock, Frederick Kiesler, Mark
Rothko, Edward Corbett and Clyfford Still. It is a vari
ant breaking from the Symbolic Abstract a far left
revolutionary movement which marks the beginning,
roughly at 1950, of the third wave of our abstract art.
Paralleling this, though by no means related to it nor
deriving from it, is the formation of a Popular Academy
of "abstract" art by miraculous conversions of that
multitude of amateur painters who ten years ago were
transfixing upon their canvases instead "The Connecti
cut Hills at Dusk," or "A Nude of Academe," or "A Still
Life with Digitalis."

All the same the Abstract-Expressionists may share a
common aesthetic error with the Popular Academy: they
too seem to have lost sight of the reasons for the revolt
that began modern painting. These Expressionists
though high professional talents do not demand of them
selves what Cezanne demanded preciseness of vision and
integrity of form. Upon these two postulates, and upon
a new philosophic theory of reality, modern art was
founded and must for its growth depend, with each artist
engaging the three vision, form, reality-at first hand
and intimately. Pollock cannot use extrusion and dripu-
lation merely because Cezanne adapted Poussin's realiza
tions of Nature and varied Seurat's use of pointillism
color architecture. For his methods Pollock must have
the reasons for use that Cezanne had for his: any work

AMERICAN PAINTING AND SCULPTURE 281

of visual art must come from the direct encounter with
precise vision and with the search for an integrity of
form by which to create that new reality, the work of
art. Cezanne differs from Poussin not because he took up
where Poussin left off: rather, Cezanne looked more
deeply into the same problems of vision, of form, and of
reality, where his forebears began.

The Abstract-Expressionists must look deeply into
these and not just at the problems solved by Cezanne,
Braque, or Miro, if they are to enrich the traditions of
Western painting by giving it their shape and direction
in the next half-century. They cannot proceed by ab
stracting from abstraction that is, from the body of
twentieth century abstract painting and sculpture. To do
this bodes deterioration of the movement into anarchy.
Indeed the loss of precise vision is revealed by their
lack of an integral or evolved form, for, as it were, paint
ings of Pollock (Number 7, 1950 and Number 30, 1950}
or Frederick Kiesler's (Galaxy) "endless painting" (the
term is his) or the work of Still, reminiscent of relief
maps in black and white, very nearly could have been
formed without material damage by extending or cut
ting the length or the width a few inches. Corbett and
Rothko have more formal sense. Of the movement as a
whole it must be said that experimental though it is, the
Abstract-Expressionists are trying to cope with the ever-
present struggle to weave the figurative with the abstract.
Indeed Pollock's work in 1953, Ocean Greyness and
Greyed Rainbow show this change.

Juan Gris wrote in his notebooks in 1924: "painting
for me is like a fabric, all of a piece and uniform, with
one set of threads as the representational, aesthetic ele
ment, and the cross-threads as the technical, architectural
or abstract element; and if one set is lacking the fabric
does not exist." In the past forty years there have been
in America many attempts to separate the threads, either
to keep the two apart or to let them reunite in new

The Arts in the United State 282

combinations. The novelty of the union in Abstract-
Expression is not enough; but in the very latest works
in each of the other three types of abstract painting and
sculpture, the best artists have made some and announce
other such tapestries.

Robert Evett

EUTERPE IN CHAINS

Until the early part of the twentieth century, the fine
art music of the United States was imitation European
music, always behind the European fashion, and usually
intrinsically poor as well because of the academic spirit
which motivated it. Composers born just after 1870
Arthur Farwell, Carl Ruggles and especially Charles
Ives are generally thought to have broken the silver
cord with the parent culture, and it is true that Ives
wrote an experimental music which in many ways antici
pated certain European radical innovations. Farwell's
music has already been forgotten, and Ives and Ruggles
are easier to admire in the abstract than they are to
listen to. None of these composers founded a school;
Ives, in particular, owes his fame to the work of younger
men in his behalf. In retrospect, the Ives chic of the
thirties and early forties seems to have been little more
than a gracious gesture from a younger generation to
ward an older man who had, in some ways, anticipated
the rhythmic and tonal developments of the twentieth
century.

Perhaps the golden decade of American composition
was that of the thirties. At that time, a group of young
composers appeared whose work compared favorably
with the best of their European contemporaries. Of
these, Roy Harris and Aaron Copland were by far the

The Arts in the United States 284

most fortunate in their relations with the public. In their
early days they were unified by an identity of purpose
with Walter Piston, Quincy Porter, Roger Sessions,
Virgil Thomson, and the Mexican, Carlos Chavez. They
were flanked on the left by experimenters Edgard
Varse, Ruth Crawford, and Henry Cowell. On the
right, there were Randall Thompson, Ernst Bacon, Otto
Luening and Douglas Moore. Howard Hanson, though
not motivated toward a modern style, was generous in
his assistance of many of the others. Wallingford Rieg-
ger, whose stature has not yet been fully revealed to the
public, was evolving his style slowly.

These composers worked under optimum conditions.
Their music was sufficiently novel to shock at least part
of the public out of its apathy: they had the support of
at least one superb critic, Paul Rosenfeld, and the sym
pathetic interest of several less erudite reviewers; they
were among the first to enjoy the financial support of
the Guggenheim foundation, of Yaddo and the Mac-
Dowell colony; many of them were championed by a
superb European virtuoso, Serge Koussevitsky, whose
authority was sufficient to provoke the emulation of
other conductors. Yaddo, the League of Composers, and
the International Society for Contemporary Music en
couraged their production of chamber music; Copland
and Sessions organized their own concert series. In Cali
fornia, Henry Cowell and others published new scores
on a subscription basis. The Modern Music magazine,
which expired in 1946, served as an invaluable forum
for the exchange of ideas. Commercial recording com
panies and publishers, dance groups and motion pic
ture companies began to commission works. Academic
institutions began to show preference for the younger
composers, with the result that, as the 1929 depression
began, there were few unemployed modern composers
in the United States. The world was being very, very
kind.

EUTERPE IN CHAINS 285

As these young composers matured, their individual
developments pointed up serious discrepancies in their
basic aims. Piston became the champion of post-classical
tradition while Sessions developed a rather abstruse
radical style. Copland began to specialize in light, cheer
ful music while Harris aimed at monumentality of de
sign and concept.

The growing breach, based as it was on style, de
veloped into a really serious rivalry for the few perform
ances that mattered. Koussevitsky and Mrs. Elizabeth
Sprague Coolidge offered not only performances but
really handsome fees which everybody wanted. Every
performance by the Boston Symphony, the New York
Philharmonic, or by Mrs. Coolidge's chamber groups at
the Library of Congress meant an enormous increase in
prestige.

A certain equilibrium was maintained as long as most
of these composers lived in or near the city of New York.
At first, "near" meant that Princeton and Boston were
not too remote, but gradually, Piston, who took a chair
at Harvard, proved to be too far away, and Sessions and
Harris, at Princeton, began to lose out. The desire for
a better living took Harris farther away from New York,
and Sessions to the University of California, where he
virtually disappeared. Chavez went back to Mexico City
and he, too was talked about less and less in the United
States. Quincy Porter, at Yale, lost out even more. This
left, in New York, only Aaron Copland and Virgil
Thomson of the first-generation moderns who had
started out so auspiciously. Varse, who was also there,
stopped writing for a long time. Cowell, Riegger, Moore,
Luening and Randall Thompson moved to that city,
though Thompson's involvement with it has been casual,
but none of them has been able to really get all of his
chestnuts out of the fire.

While the careers of these first-generation moderns
were expanding and contracting, a second generation

The Arts in the United States 286

was growing up, largely under the tutelage of the older
men. Most of the younger composers took teaching posi
tions outside New York, and a strange kind of parochial
ism began to develop. Gifted young men, like Halsey
Stevens and John Edmunds of San Francisco, Cecil Ef-
finger of Colorado, Robert Palmer and Hunter Johnson
began to lose access to the performances in New York
from which they could be expected to get some prestige
not only the orchestral performances, which have al
ways been a luxury, but the chamber music perform
ances which were once thought to be their right. The
most celebrated of these composers are William Schuman
and David Diamond, who stayed in New York.

When Roy Harris left New York, he had grand visions
of the future of music in the United States, in which the
virtuoso tradition would become a thing of the past,
and in which every town with a good composer or two
in it would become a little Athens. The plain fact is
that provincial cities were and are over-aware of their
subservience to New York; Hollywood and Washington,
both world capitals in other fields, are not cordial to
their resident composers. The late Ruth Crawford had
to live in Washington for almost a generation before her
work was honored by a performance by the symphony
orchestra of that city. There are at least three other fine
composers there: Esther Williamson, Robert Parris and
the Reverend Russell Woollen, who have never been
performed by the National Symphony, or by any other
large orchestra.

This situation is paralleled all over the country. Most
of Vincent Persichetti's enormous orchestral output has
never been heard in his native Philadelphia, nor any
place else. Even the Boston composers, Lukas Foss,
Harold Shapero, and Irving Fine, are relatively neg
lected, but they are well-off when compared with How
ard Boatwright and David Krehenbuell in New Haven.
Because of the sorry state of affairs in the provinces,

EUTERPE IN CHAINS 287

most of the youngest American generation look on leav
ing New York with horror, and will do so only if the
big foundations guarantee them a temporary living. Ac
tually, most of them have no place to go, as the teaching
jobs which lured their seniors away are full; there are
virtually no vacancies to be had for which their train
ing would qualify them. New York is glutted with com
posers who are afraid to leave, unemployed, or barely
employed. They operate addressograph machines, they
work at Brentano's and Howard Johnson's, and a few
lucky ones, like Alan Hovhaness and Ben Weber either
teach an instrument or act as copyists and autographers.
In less than thirty years time, the American musical
scene has been turned from a desert into a slum. Like
all slums, this one has its gangs, its group wars and
private murders; such order as it has is maintained by
the moral equivalent of a corrupt police force.

This situation is the result of an overproduction of
composers, and the overproduction is the result of a
generous intention. In a nation where most intellectuals
live by wages, intellectual education takes on the col
oration of vocational training. As a consequence, any
advanced training has a professional intention, and in
music, where even amateur standing can be reached only
with deadly intensity, all training is for a professional
end. Academic standards for training in composition
are so loose that it is virtually impossible to establish
and maintain high standards. The result is that a young
person with neither talent nor fortitude can be gradu
ated from schools as a bona-fide composer; he can, in
fact, pay several thousand dollars in return for certifi
cation as a composer. It shouldn't take a ouija-board to
show that talent in musical composition cannot be
bought and sold. In a period when style is undergoing
considerable change, however, it can take more than
that to recognize talent.

After the supply and the demand have been regulated

The Arts in the United States 288

by proper training, the first half-century of real Ameri
can composition will provide a field for study rather like
that of the baroque era. Some composers will be lost
altogether, others will have proven to be the Bachs and
Vivaldis of their time.

At present, so much is being written and so many
manuscripts are inaccessible that a proper evaluation of
what has been done is impossible. As candidates for a
later, probably posthumous, evaluation, one may list
Roy Harris, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, William
Schuman, Robert Palmer and Lou Harrison; some of
these will surely have to yield to persons less known.

The ugliest single phenomenon of American compo
sition is the system of decades by which it is measured.
One says, for instance, that the twenties was the decade
of dissonant counterpoint, the thirties the decade of
fugue writing, the forties the decade of Mozartian light
ness, the fifties the decade of post-expressionism, and so
on. Nobody but the music historian wants this, primarily
because no composer is confined to ten years of creative
effort.

Since 1940, the only composers who have made names
for themselves in the United States have been the ultra-
conservatives, like Gian-Carlo Menotti and Samuel Bar
ber, and those radicals who are to the left of Schoenberg,
notably John Cage and Morton Feldman. These com
posers represent neither the direction of music in gen
eral, nor that of its phase in the United States.

The problem of American composers is not to surpass
the Europeans, either in radicalism or in reaction, but to
remain part of Western culture, arriving simultaneously
with Europe at superficial qualities of technique and
style while allowing individual personalities to develop.
The only composers who don't know this are those en
joying a vogue at the present,

Eric Bentley

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROADWAY

The profoundest analyst of American culture, Tocque-
ville, suggested that democracy was not conducive to
democratic art. And the twentieth century, without
removing any of the obstacles to theatre which the
French critic listed, has added a few more, notably the
movies in its second decade, radio in its third, and TV
in its fiftfi. This being so, the surprising fact is not that
the theatre is harassed but that it exists at all. Nowhere
have the substitutes for theatre been so developed and
accepted as in America. Yet there is still an American
theatre. Why?

One thing we have learned is that in the present phase
of history one medium's gain is not always the other's
loss: the phonograph record has enlarged, not depleted,
the audience at symphony concerts. The theatre affords,
perhaps, no precise analogy to this famous triumph in
the musical field. The old "road'' theatre was largely
wiped out by the movies; the Broadway public is very
small compared with the movie and TV public. None
theless, the spread of community and university theatres
goes some way toward replacing the road companies.
And, in New York there is a wide response to almost
any good play when it has a good or even just a glossy
production. In short, the idea that the theatre is dying

The Arts in the United States 290

like certain churches because the public has lost in
terest and is busy elsewhere is simply not true.

Professionally, the theatre retains the primacy which
many of us believe to be its natural right; it is by virtue
of no empty traditionalism that the theatre page (or
column) precedes movies, radio and TV in the papers
or takes precedence over them in a magazine like the
New Republic. The three newer arts remain to a re
markable extent parasites: they draw talent from the
theatre, not vice versa. When we hear of a movie actor
appearing on the stage, we find either that he was stage-
trained or that he is no good. There is of course the third
possibility: that he has had stage training and is no good;
he had to go to Hollywood.

We are reminded that, in the early days of film, an
actor had to come from the stage, there being nowhere
else for him to come from. Isn't it possible, we are asked,
for some other medium to become the main source ot
supply? It is possible, we have to reply, but there is no
sign of its happening. On the contrary, one has only to
attend a few TV rehearsals to see how utterly TV pro
ducers depend upon a technique of acting that could
never have been acquired nor even, perhaps, main
tainedunder the conditions they impose. Some of these
conditions could be changed, though they probably
won't be. Others seem to be inherent. The stage alone
offers the actor full play allows him to give a perform
ance in an unbroken curve and places him in direct
emotional contact with his audience. That is why real
actors are dissatisfied with the substitutes.

The theatre exists. The snag is that it does not exist
spaciously and variously enough to satisfy any of those
who have its interests at heart. The producer's point of
view has been that entertainment the public doesn't
pay for, the country can do without. There is common
sense in this; and, even in art, the businessman is far less

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROADWAY 2Q1

of a fool than other people. A show doesn't get to be
a hit without meeting standards of showmanship. There
is more fun, more craftsmanship, even more art in the
average commercial show than in the average serious
play. The serious play as currently known to Broadway
is a bore and an imposition. The cry of pain that goes
up when reviewers pan these plays is emitted either by
interested parties or disinterested muddleheads. Why
should a businessman invest in anything other than, say,
South Pacific, when South Pacific has the artistic as well
as the economic edge? The nest of serious theatre has
been fouled by a foolish subintelligentsia.

Yet we must convince our prospective investor-
there is a need for a non-commercial, or less commercial,
theatre. In part that need derives precisely from the
theatre's primacy among the arts of entertainment: in
order to make money in radio, movies and TV, invest
it in actors, invest it in theatre. Then again, the com
mercial theatre itself needs a non-commercial division.
I believe I am uncovering no secret when I say that
the impetus toward the creation of a professional ex
perimental theatre at Columbia University is coming,
not from "serious playwrights," but from the author and
the composer of South Pacific, Rodgers and Hammer-
stein. They know that workers in the theatre need a
training ground, and that there is a public if not always
a large and wealthy one for other shows besides South
Pacific. I do not mean that the audience for a non-com
mercial show must always be small and poverty-stricken.
The box-office of a small art theatre often has occasion
to rob the rich. And perhaps the strongest of all argu
ments in favor of a subsidy for theatre is that it opens
the doors to millions who would otherwise never pass
through them; by subsidy, we can lower the prices and
admit the people who otherwise take their dollar to the
movies. Hence, the subsidized theatre, far from being

The Arts in the United States 29 2

an attempt to force something down "the public's
throat, is a democratic institution, signalizing a refusal
to limit the audience to the well-to-do. Yet it is not a
threat to the commercial theatre. In Paris, commercial
and subsidized houses live side by side in reasonable
amity. And one notes that, artistically, they do each
other a lot of good.

It may be thought that in invoking the European idea
of subsidy I have wandered too far from the situation in
America. Here we have yet to repeal the entertainment
tax; and even when that step has been taken, we shall
perhaps have to forego the word Subsidy (like the word
Socialism) so as not to antagonize such cultural isola
tionists as might otherwise be our best friends. But the
economics of theatre in America already includes much
besides business enterprise. Help for the non-commer
cial effort is coming from at least three very rich sources:
individual philanthropists, local communities (which
may mean philanthropists in a group), and the state
legislatures. By philanthropists I mean men who are in
vesting money with very little hope of getting it back
(let alone with interest) in productions which they hap
pen to like. The community theatre, though not yet as
successful, perhaps, as English repertory, has its rec
ognized triumphs in Dallas, Cleveland, Pasadena and not
a few other cities. The state legislatures, whatever they
may think of Socialism in general or Subsidy in particu
lar, pour money into the theatres of the state universi
ties which in Wisconsin, say, or Indianaare among the
chief theatres of the region.

In short, the fact that money does not come to our
non-commercial theatre in the European way, should
not delude us into believing that it cannot come at all.
Under the Eisenhower Administration, it may be vain to
talk of a federal theatre in the sense of a Comddie Amtri-
caine but it is not vain to recall that our actual Federal
Theatre of the thirties was no such thing but rather a

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROADWAY 293

brilliant improvisation of a characteristically American
sort a triumphant piece of private enterprise in the
public domain. The American way, I take it, is to seize
your chances as they come up, for America is a country
where you believe most of the time that they will
come up.

294

Parker Tyler

THE AMERICAN FILM: TRENDS IN THE FIFTIES

There are certainly two aspects of human spectacle in
which American movies are incomparable: the floor-
show and the gun-battle. It is to be noted, in any sum
mation of trends in American films, that these two spec
tacles have an historic and related status, a status origi
nating with the growth of show-business in America. An
alternative to the gun-battleone just as much relished
and just as elegantly done in American movies is the
fist-fight, both amateur and professional. A famous film
of the teens, later remade, was The Spoilers, which set
the standard for that sort of thing in movies over the
world. During the forties, a Technicolor Western ap
peared in which it was flatly indicated that the grudge
fight between hero and villain in the Old West was far
from being the edifying moral event many have sup
posed, and instead was a kind of gambling show, pro
moted by bettors who regarded the two warriors much
as they would two bears drawing blood, perhaps life,
from each other. In other words, the fist fight was the
masculine contribution to the floor show, then as now,
on platform or off, consisting of girls.

After mid-century, the knightly ethics of the lethal
gun-battle have given way before the pressure of com
mon-sense and humanitarian criticism, and if now the
gun-battle survives in the higher film brackets, it does

THE AMERICAN FILM: TRENDS IN THE FIFTIES 295

so as the form of competition that certain sports are
today: a benign superstructure of the brute impulse to
kill. Jennifer Jones as a female gun-battler was an anti
climax a few years ago when even the habitues deemed
her role excessively bloodthirsty. After all, she was a
girl. It was no coincidence that in High Noon a formal
sense dominated the visual style to a degree conspicuous
in a Western. The fact is that glamor was removed from
the two-man gun-battle which is the film's crisis, so that
the event becomes the mere routine of the sheriff doing
a single-handed job on the notorious outlaw: uppermost
in feeling is the stark formalism of it all. In High Noon,
a social element is emphasized by the defection of the
law-abiding group, which is cowardly. The catch is that
the townspeople, in terms of moral prejudice, prefer
(for whatever reasons) to be the spectators of the event.
It was too bad that they couldn't get it by Television.
But the usual show is at least what the customers in the
movie house get. The man in the audience and the
townspeople of the film represent two forms of "innocent
bystanding" that are curiously akin in the light of total
morality.

Humanely, our century which has already killed
more than any other century assumes that killing is
morally hideous; even the execution of the criminal can
bring little moral edification. Yet the spectacle of killing
(which the 3-D's make "thrice" real) continues to have
its floor-show appeal as well as its automatic docu
mentary or "newsy" calibre. Cease Fire is a three dimen
sional perspective on the Korean fighting, while Red
Garters focusses on the traditional two-man gun-battle
as a floor-show burlesque of any illusion that the West
erns keep ancient chivalry alive. Why the term, "floor-
show'"? it signifies the intimate element, the aesthetic
relationship most easily fusing spectator, in our time,
with spectacle. "Ringside seats" indicates exactly what
I mean.

The Arts in the United States 296

Deep thinkers in these subjects are faced with a para
dox: every other little boy in the street has Gene Autry
or Roy Rogers or Bill Boyd for his gun-toting hero,
and yet the heroism of saving a lovely woman from
being scalped or raped and pegging the dirty villain for
a fareyouwell is presumably as morally dead as histor
ically outdated. Lately, the movies have not been be
hindhand in focussing on the little boy of indeterminate
age as the reservoir of chivalric myth. The chief popular
knight-errant in the American second quarter of the
century has been the Lone Ranger. In the documenta-
rily and humanely slanted Little Fugitive, there is a
mock killing played as a trick on a little boy to make him
believe he is his big brother's murderer. In lone flight,
the little "killer" unintentionally lands in Coney Island,
which to him is the most available land of real ad
venture. But his ideal of the cowboy has been explicitly
derived from Television movies. Ostensibly it is all
perfectly harmless, everything ending happily, but the
image of Coney Island as an outdoor floor-show involv
ing let's-pretend Wild West stuff is the impression that
survives of this miniature odyssey.

The mock death of the big brother is emblematic of
the mock death rendered in theatrical make-believe it
self. On the pure level of fantasy, there is bound to be
a fusing ambiguity. Is art, even as in the plebian movies,
primarily a land of wish-fulfilment behavior where
honorable murder is the old-wives' tale of a dead-and-
gone culture? Shane, the runner-up to High Noon in
terms of scrupulous production, tells the story of a good-
bad hero through the eyes of a little boy who worships
him. A less distinguished Western recently allowed a
little boy to believe, for quite a spell, that his own dad
was no hero but a low-down, murdering horse-thief. In
deed, the eyes of the young must judge these matters;
must judge, in short, what constitutes the "heroism" of
killing. Not long ago, Audie Murphy, of all people,

THE AMERICAN FILM: TRENDS IN THE FIFTIES 297

played the role of a professional killer with "virtue";
that is, one who follows a code of fair fighting (and who
reforms, of course, at the picture's close). Movies do
not hesitate to play up such moral ambiguities. The
audience, no less than the film-makers, cannot be blind
to the indirect commentary on war that is involved in
these mid-century entertainments. "Is the modern sol
dier a hero?" is the blunt if obfuscated proposition.
Peculiarly enough, this is much like the question asked
by Hamlet of the tragedy of blood. Does honor consist,
that is to say, exactly and entirely of demanding blood
for blood, life for life? and who, precisely, is the corpse?
Perhaps his virtue is in doubt.

In Red Garters^ filmed entirely with backgrounds
equivalent to stage-sets of the musical-comedy genre,
the cowboy hero arrives on the frankly artificial scene to
avenge the death of his brother. Every element of the
standard Western is deliberately present with a special
spoof-it-out-of-countenance accent embodied in frequent
songs and dances. So one may ask whether Red Garters,
having absolutely everything that Oklahoma has, isn't
making a euphemistic joke of the contemporary reality
behind the cowboy charade. It is interesting that a great
effort is made in the film to reveal the absurdity of the
chivalric duelling tradition. Both participants here,
woVked on by the humanitarianly inspired heroine, de
liberately fire to miss. Meanwhile a self-confessed coward
shoots from ambush to kill one of them, but fortunately
the heroine has had the foresight to place blanks in the
skunk's guns (etc.). If one conforms with the apparent
wish of this and other movies to consider all the world
a floor-show, questions are not in order. But if any re
lation to reality is meant, one may ask all the questions
admissible to a courtroom concerning motives in this
"illegal" duel.

Re the soldier as knight errant, The Knights of the
Round Table and King of the Khyber Rifles, two of the

The Arts in the United States 298

more or less classic Romantic vintage, have gained a
new transfusion of charm from the ambitious dimensions
of CinemaScope and they announce that the spectacle
is Definitely Revived by the g-D's. The diagnostician of
trends inevitably must remark that nothing recent or
current hints of any diminution of confidence in film
makers that some refabrication of a mouldy old stereo
won't do very nicely for the time being, especially if it
has the con-man's Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe. Envy of
Television might seem enough to make Hollywood pro
ducers take supreme risks but a look at Television itself
explains why envy is not enough. There is nothing in
Television that hasn't been in the movies by which I
mean all kinds of floor-shows.

Glancing to one side at the artistically serious efforts
of film-makers to present classics or near-classics, there
springs to view Orson Welles 1 example of simonizing
Shakespeare for the mobile camera, Othello: a brilliantly
skillful and inevitably and aridly impertinent piece of
work, igss's Julius Caesar was an emulation of the
British productions of Henry V and Hamlet, but cannot
be said to have solved the problem of transferring
Shakespeare to the screen any better than did its models,
and in some respects it falls below its models. A pre
tentious kind of art-film has reached the fiction genre.
Huston's Moulin Rouge had some superlatively succ*ess-
ful atmosphere but the treatment of its hero, Toulouse-
Lautrec, while apparently it heralds similar exploita
tions, leaves out almost everything to be desired of a
film about a great artist.

Othello, in English, was produced as a sort of inter
national enterprise. Economic factors, indeed, have made
American enterprises on foreign soil attractive to both
actor and producer. Bing Crosby surprised by coming
forward with Little Boy Lost. Made in France and re
leased by Paramount, it is a remarkable example of
disciplining the glamor ego down to sensible size. Bing

THE AMERICAN FILM: TRENDS IN THE FIFTIES 299

is nothing if not sincerely modest in it and plays a
beautiful foil for a mesmeric child actor, Christian Four-
cade. There have been many child heroes in the latest
decade of film, and if any promising or aesthetically
hopeful trend exists in American movies, it is the
humane dignity and care and chaste sentiment which
a child's presence has the faculty of conferring on or at
least awakening in his handlers. As obvious as Little
Boy Lost is, it profits by its contact with France and
French actors and never overflows into vulgar senti
ment. If the Western hero is about to be revaluated in
America (though one scarcely dare hope for anything
so epoch-making) perhaps it is sound to start with a
small boy's hero-worshipping (as in Shane) subjected to
the laws of a child's direct observation. If little Christian
Fourcade can render Crosby sober and serious, perhaps
some other little boy can laugh Roy Rogers and col
leagues off the wide-open Western screens. Which sug
gests that the broad tongue-in-cheek fantasy of Red
Garters is not altogether without interest, especially as
it has a conscious grasp of the underlying ritualism of
the chivalric duel and its negative component in mod
ern life.

One must account for two impulses in human tem
perament regarding the taking of life by man: that of
the young soldier, Zossima, in The Brothers Karamazov,,
who repudiates the ritual duel as wanton killing, and
that of Ilusha, the little boy in the same novel, who so
passionately wants to avenge his father's humiliating
chastisement by Dmitri Karamazov that he throws a
stone at Dmitri's saintly brother, Alyosha (a "Karama
zov"), and bites his hand. Personal and family honor is
the sole content of the ritual duel. Only blood can wash
away a moral stain. As Zossima understood, every in
stance of the ritual duel is a direct challenge to the ade
quacy of Christ's sacrifice. Modern wars, however, make
all Christian scruples into metaphysical and individual-

The Arts in the United States 3

istic issues. It is to the mortal verve of Ilusha, the "nat
ural boy/' to which we must look for predictions about
the ethical status of human killing. Many might agree
that Jesus is no competitor of Roy Rogers as a mythical
hero without relinquishing the faith of socialist thinkers
in the power of reason. But the history of reason as
collaborator with human and aesthetic emotion, begin
ning with the French revolution and its revision of neo-
Classic tragedy, does not inspire confidence in its con
trolling power, unless as a mere discipline of the static
ideal of patriotism. But in the latter case, it must be
remarked that there is no dividend in tragedy, which is
the prime interest of the aesthetic motive.

The cynicism of High Noon, if this film be con
sidered in the light of Corneille's Horatii, is that brother
betrays brother in the family of just society. One seems
to read a vague parable of propaganda for the United
Nations, with the United States as a possible "lone
sheriff" pitted against a certain deadly "menace" while
the rest of the world neutrally looks on. But this in
terpretation, however formally plausible, makes High
Noon a fantasy difficult for reason to justify. The United
States in the international field can hardly justify the
small boy's faith in the Lone Ranger simply because it
will probably not be necessary for it to do so. Never
theless, the longevity of the Lone Ranger as a fantasy-
hero seems unlimited. One is constrained to wait with
out much hope for the unique child who, parallel with
the one who perceived that the emperor really wasn't
wearing any clothes, perceives that the Lone Ranger is
something hanging in a dressing-room.

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

33

WILLIAM BECKER isthe drama critic for the Hudson
Review and a contributor to the New Republic and other
periodicals. His experience in European theatre as actor and
critic stems from his travels in Europe while he was a Rhodes
Scholar at Oxford University.

ERIC BENTLEY is the drama critic of the New Republic.
He has directed in leading theatres of Europe and America.
He is the author of four books the latest is In Search of
Theatre and the editor of six. He lectures on Elizabethan
drama at Columbia University.

FRANCIS BIDDLE is the author of several books: .on
law, on civil liberties, a novel, a biography, and essays. He is
at present writing his memoirs, which will cover among
others his years as Attorney General of the United States
and as president of the Americans for Democratic Action.

ELIZABETH BOWEN, the Anglo-Irish lady of letters,
is well-known on both sides of the Atlantic for her novels
among others The Last September and The Heat of the
Day; for her short stories; for her essays and her astute criti
cism. At present she is writing a new novel.

NICOLA CHIAROMONTE has lived in the United
States, France, and Italy, where he is now drama critic of
II Mondo, the Italian weekly. He contributes to the Partisan
Review and the New Republic, among others, writing on
European and American letters and politics.

Notes on the Contributors 304

MALCOLM COWLEY was literary editor of the New
Republic in the thirties and is equally well-known for his
book, Exile's Return, which is a literary odyssey o the twen
ties. He is an editor of The Viking Press.

NORMAN DEMUTH is professor of composition at the
Royal Academy of Music in London, He is a prolific com
poser and the author of books on music theory and of music
criticism, primarily concerned with contemporary work.

ROBERT E v E T T is the music critic of the New Republic.
He is the composer of considerable chamber music and a
recently published choral cycle, The Mask of Cain.

WALLACE FOWLIE isan authority on modern French
literature, and the author of books on Rimbaud and Mal-
larme*, among others. He is a member of the faculty of Ben-
nington College.

JOSEPH FRANK has contributed criticism to leading
American and European periodicals, both from Paris, where
he held a Fulbright Fellowship, and from the University of
Chicago, where he holds a Rockefeller Fellowship.

KERMIT LANSNER, formerly on the staff of The Ken-
yon Review, a member of the faculty of Kenyon College, then
a Fulbright Fellow in France, is on the editorial staff of Art
News.

ARCHIBALD MACLEisH is Boylston Professor of Lit
erature at Harvard University. His collected poems have
received the Bollingen Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the
National Book Award, Under Roosevelt's administration, he
was Assistant Secretary of State, then Librarian of Congress.

PAOLO MILANO has been living and teaching in the
United States since 1939. He has published critical works on
European and American literature and is a member of the
faculty of Queens College.

ARTHUR MIZENER is the author of Far Side of Para
disea, critical study of F. Scott Fitzgerald contributes regu
larly to the literary quarterlies and to the New Republic. He
is professor of English literature at Cornell University.

Notes on the Contributors 2 O r

HENRI p E Y R E is a professor o French literature at Yale.
He has published numerous books of criticism, both in the
United States and France. His latest book is The French
Novel (Oxford University Press, 1954).

KATHLEEN RAINE isa poet, her most recent collections
of verse being The Pythoness and The Year One. She is
writing a book on Blake. Her criticism appears regularly in
the New Republic, and the New Statesman and Nation in
England.

JOHN CROWE RANSOM isthe editor of The Kenyon
Review. In addition to his many books of poems, which
received the Bollingen Award, and of criticism, he is the
author of a perennially controversial volume, The New Criti
cism, and of The World's Body.

HERBERT READ, author of over two dozen books poe
try, fiction, autobiography, aesthetics, and criticism of litera
ture and the visual artswas knighted in 1953. He is president
of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. In 1953-54
he gave the Norton lectures at Harvard and the Mellon lec
tures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

KENNETH REXROTH, poet, playwright and critic, is
the author of many books, among them: The Art of Worldly
Wisdom and The Phoenix and The Tortoise. He is an editor
of Perspectives USA .

ROBERT RICHMAN, literary editor of the New Republic
(1952-54), is director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts
in Washington. The editor of The Arts at Mid-Century, he
is writing a book of criticism of the several arts and is prepar
ing a volume of his poetry, which has appeared in the literary
magazines.

MARK. SCHORER isa novelist and a critic of modern
literature. He, has edited several anthologies and published
novels and a collection of his own stories, The State of Mind.
His latest novel is The Wars of Love.

DELMORE SCHWARTZ is equally prolific as a poet and
a critic, especially of poetry. He is an editor of the Partisan

Notes on the Contributors 306

Review. Among his books are: Vaudeville for a Princess and
The World Is a Wedding.

STEPHEN SPENDER is the author of several books of
poetry, fiction and literary criticism. He has also written
extensively on social problems; his recent book, Learning
Laughter, is about Israel. He is the editor of Encounter.

ALLEN TATE is the author of many volumes fiction,
biography, poetry and criticism. His recent book, The For
lorn Demon, is a set of critical essays. He is professor of liter
ature at the University of Minnesota,

PARKER TYLER has lectured and written extensively on
motion pictures since he published The Hollywood Hallu
cination. He is a poet and a playwright as well.

RAY B. WEST, JR. isan editor of the Western Review
and a member of the faculty of the University of Iowa. His
criticism appears regularly in American periodicals.

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