56
PARTISAN REVIEW
us feel bright, meeting us with knowledge, but rather do they browbeat
us by making us feel stupid even before their rude erudition. They deal
with such open or closed secrets as compel a dislocation of the hierarchy
of governing and subordinate clauses which would be the envy of a
Statler Hotel after-dinner speaker, did they not contrive a more offensive
tone of snob superiority. This taste is so alien to Rukeyser's purpose that
she is a least offender but her least, nonetheless, harms her work. Particu-
larly when it goes telegraphic and lets the subject, object, verb be taken
for granted, or at any rate, omitted. Such methods rise under the accepted
canon of culture of a ruling class, but, where the purpose be to win
adherents from across classes to an unaccepted canon, they do only for
subjects (love, death, etc.) where stores of reference are available to
anyone. Rukeyser's exquisite
Night Music,
from private reference, reaches
bold revolutionary conclusion. Here is a poem no capitalist would write.
The Cruise
in 18 pages of nice evocations of the
Flying Dutchman
and
the
Hunting of the Snark
leaves undone what is done in one page of the
third movement of
Night Music.
Philistines unsnubbed would dismiss the poem as obscure. That is
because it recognizes mysteries and wrestles with them, which is a dif-
'ferent matter from willful mystification, although indistinguishable to
persons who have stultified their interior references. Poets need care
little if they be called obscure by Philistines. One political use of poetry is
to single out the body of the elect, but if poetry actually is obscure it
fails; and in our age, when economic contradictions are charged with
many meanings and society is confronted with a choice of futures,
obscurity is a natural characteristic of literature which wise writers must
work against, and most especially in social Fevolutionary subject matter.
All things long pursued lead through that door. Leave the timid their
obscurity. Confront communication. It devolves upon us to rediscover
clarity. Revolutionary writing in the snob style does not reach a proper
audience. We can find examples in no academic bourgeois decay, but in
experimental masters of all rising classes that struggled through the
centuries for mastery.
JOHN WHEELWRIGHT
NO MORE SWANS
A SOUTHERN HARVEST.
Edited by Robert Penn Warren. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co. $2.50.
In Mr. Warren's introduction to this collection of short stories from
the South one feels immediately a defensive attitude, as if the "Renais-
sance" which he describes, when forced to appear outside its special
meeting-place, were not quite sure of its values. What is a Southern
writer, he asks? what is the meaning of this Renaissance? The answen,
