60
benighted naturalists; and among the
signs and portents of new departures in
prose he lists the short stories of Eleanor
Clark and Delmore Schwartz. To Mr.
Baker's sparse list one might add other
items of recent date that tend to con-
firm this change of literary purpose. In
their essay, "Literature in a Political
Decade"
(New Letters in America),
William Phillips and Philip Rahv ex-
coriated the perennial devices that
American fiction adopts as substitutes
for consciousness and imagination. In
the PARTISANREVIEW for December,
1937, William Troy, reviewing a reo
issue of
Germinal
under the significant
title "The Symbolism of Zola," at·
tempted the difficult feat of rescuing
the father of naturalism from the en-
gulfing sands of his own system. And
not long ago the
New Masses
opened its
pages to a controversy--occasioned by
Granville Hicks' alarm over the inroads
that pessimism is making among the
youger writers-which showed that in
that camp too the virus of anti-natural·
PARTISAN REVIEW
for the cause. MacNeice's own awareness that life "is incorrigibly plural,"
his deeper immersion in its complexities, his more unchecked reliance
on
the evidence of his senses, at times result in a vague softness. He does not
have anything like the extraordinary range of technical dexterity with
which Auden seemingly can take up or burlesque almost any kind of
tradition from Skelton to Tennyson and Kipling. But MacNeice's control
is far more matured, he rarely indulges in thin
tours de force
or slipshod
virtuosity. And if the measurement is not by "promise," by brilliant pas-
sages standing out from obscurity, but by whole poems, which can be
tested line for line and re-read with accruing satisfaction, MacNeice's
performance so far is ahead of that of his contemporaries.
F. O.
MATTHIESSEN
RISPOSTES
Is Naturalism Exhausted?
Writing about the contemporary
short story in the winter number of
The Southern Review,
Mr. Howard
Baker has made explicit, in terms of
an assault on naturalism, some of the
dissatisfaction with the current state
of American fiction which has of late
been stirring the critical air. It was to
be expected that this dissatisfaction
should take the shape of a revolt against
the sway of the naturalist method.
Manifestly the revival of some form
of symbolism ( or its extension into
some new form) is burgeoning in the
younger generation. In this connection
one hears the name of Franz Kafka
pronounced with awe in various circles
as a possible. source of fresh inspiration.
And, in truth, more than any other
European writer who has recently come
to the attention of Americans, Kafka
suggests the rich potentialities of the
fable and of symbolic conceptions. Mr.
Baker likewise professes to see the
genius of Kafka contending with the
