BOOKS
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that in his book always he makes clear his sense of oneness with those who
toil with their hands and that again and again he climbs frantically onto
the laps of the rulers and the rich only to be ultimately repelled by their
coldness and thinness and their remoteness from the realities that make
this land so cruelly and terribly lovely to him.
It is easy, and doubtless justifiable within limits, to apply the psycho–
analytic thesis to Wolfe's hunger and frustration. Much that is fruitful
and enlightening would be discovered thereby. But it would not be the
whole story. It would not be the last and most important chapter of the
story. There is something else: the world today, this country today,
and the place of the artist in it. It is unnecessary, here, to point the moral.
Can't Wolfe see it? Doesn't he realize where his wanderings must lead
him if he is to find the strength that will give him certitude? Isn't· he
aware that he must stay with the masses who gave birth to him and fed
him and not seek to escape into a corrupt and alien atmosphere and that
his own struggle must be translated into the common struggle for a world
in which viciousness and defeat are accidents and not inherent in the
fabric? Is he attempting to evade it? Doesn't he see that if he goes to
his "father" he will be enabled to resolve the personal and secret conflicts
that lure him back to the father of his flesh and that coufuse and hurt
him?
If
he doesn't, he will never grow up, never get the discipline that
he needs above all else, never heal, never get outside himself-because he is
an
artist and cannot become "sophisticated." He will continue to wallow
in his adolescent phantasies and to weave wonder and magic around the
dry and the obvious. He will go on like a schoolgirl weeping over meaning–
less little tragedies. He will go on looking at men and women and ·seeing
gods and devils and the winds of chance, instead of men and women.
BERNARD SMITH
SYMBOLS OF SURVIVAt
CHORUS FOR SURVIVAL,
by Horace Gregory. Covici Frie·de. $2.00.
There can be no question, I believe, that Horace Gregory's talent is
one of the most original and intense to be found anywhere in 20th century
literature, and I believe a thorough objectivity has been the peculiar essence
of this talent, an objectivity in which the author does not hover "above"
his material in that fake detachment that is today so well exposed, but in
which he projects himself into people and events, to speak from within
them in their own convincing accents, their own terms, the rhythms of
their particular lives.
As
Edgar Lee Masters, for example, described the
inhabitants of Spoon River, but always in the same key and tempo, Gregory
went far beyond him by presenting-not describ:ng but actually presenting
-men, women, and situations in language that adapted itself to the
essential characteristics of each.
