BOOKS
61
look, is as clearly shown as in Agnes Smedley's
Chinese Destinies,
in the
murder of Kyo, the philosopher's son, for associating with Communists.
The devotion of the Communists, now in touch with the Comintern,
disciplined, no longer the dupe of bourgeois nationalism and Confucian
traditions, is of course the very heart of . the book. But Malraux
IS
t"t)
sensitive, too Marxian a novelist, to make his book even by inferenct
a tract for Communism. He places old China dialectically in contrast
to the new in the careful account of the relationship between Gisors and
his son Kyo. Gisors, the representative of old liberal China, teacher and
phylosopher, is openminded about Communism through love of his son.
But his own formed point of view dominates him. The stench of humalJ
injustice and human suffering about him he generalizes into a universal
rule, and has recourse to opium as
it
wilful controlled escape from the
insoluble eternal problem. The problem for the intelligent man is to dull .
the edge of reality without denying its nature. And yet, when, after his
son's murder, Kyo's widow decides to go to Moscow to study, Gisors,
through the magnetism of his son's personality still existing for him, be–
comes conscious of the new possibility. He will not deny what this new
generation so firmly believes. Man's destiny may be rather in the new
interpretation of reality united with the new discipline, beyond the reach
and need for opium.
EDWIN
BERRY
BURGUM
NO FOCUS
THE
LAST
PIO:-<EERS,
by Melvin P. Levy, Alfred
H.
King, New York,
York , $2.50.
SECOND SIGHT,
by Cliftoll Cuthbert,
PVillialll
Godwin, New York, $2.00.
Neither of these novels can be considered in the category of revolu·
tionary literature. Both of them have, as have numerous bourgeois novels
that are not intentionally fascist in scheme, revolutionary potentialities
which the authors, either through lack of understanding, experience, or
possibly courage, have not developed.
In this respect,
Second Sight
is the less developed of the two, being
more limited in its pote:1tialities by the narrow scope of the author 's
materials.
It
is the psychological study of a young intellectual trying to
stabilize himself emotionally by means of a love affair with a woman
who is older than himself. For a while Stanton loses himself in her, but
as awareness returns so docs his despair. Lovemaking is not enough,
neither are the illusions he works hard to create. In presenting Stanton's
struggle, Cuthbert frequently achieves a Proustian ievel of sensitiveness,
but we think of his subtleties as the superfluous products of
:l
nimble
mind; there is nothing in the novel to give them substance. Just as Stanton
