60
PARTISAN REVIEW
The closing essay in the book in which Mr. Empson deals with
Alice in Wonderland
as an example of the 19th century "shift onto the
child... of the obscure tradition of pastoral" shows better than any of
the other essays the skill and tact with which he handles his material. I
suppose no reader of
Alice
is wholly unaware of its Freudian implica–
tions; yet there are few enough people who would have the courage to
risk the obvious dangers of making a Freudian analysis of the book.
And this is just what Mr. Empson succeeds in doing without ever
exaggerating this aspect of
Alice
(which has its full share of concealed
political and moral satire too) and without ever saying any of the foolish
things psycho-analysts seem so incapable of avoiding when they deal with
literature.
It is not easy to think of a book of criticism in this decade to put
beside Mr. Empson's. Not only is its method the critical elaboration
most useful for our day but its practical criticism is richer and more
pertinent than that of any book which comes to mind. Mr. Empson's
manner is deceptive and sometimes annoying but the reader's reward
for bearing with him will more than repay the effort it may cost him.
ARTHUR MIZENER
VERSE AND PROSE: 1937
NEW DIRECTIONS, 1937.
Edited by James Laughlin IV. New Direc–
tions: Norfolk, Conn. $2.50.
In a fine burst of magnanimity James Laughlin IV begins his second
edition of
New Directions
with a eulogy of a competitor. Comparing
Gregory's
New Letters
to his own collection, he writes, it "happens to
be
better backed and more ably edited ... I cannot say enough in praise
of
Horace Gregory's
New Letters in America."
But it also happens that
Laughlin's offering of prose and poetry is more lively and readable.
His
authors are concerned less directly with social problems, more with ex·
perimental writing. This fact, of course, does not account for their merits.
It only helps to distinguish the two books.
Seventeen years after it was performed in Paris by the Swedish Ballet,
Cocteau's
Les Maries de la Tour EifJel,
appears here in translation
by
Dudley Fitts. Its buffoonery is so good-humored and reasonable that it is
hard to see why it once caused a public tantrum. Maybe French audiences
feel it a patriotic duty to throw a fit- as they did for
Hernani,
Antoine's
Theatre Libre, and still do for any new music-merely to advertise that
France has a serious interest in the arts and can recognize or create an
historic occasion. Already it is true that
Les Maries,
like the fables
of
La Fontaine or
Zadig,
exhales a minor historic smell. The Fitts transla·
tion preserves perfectly the Cocteau qualities: the guilelessness,
the
slightly oracular tone.
In a note at the end of Henry Miller's "Walking Up and Down
in
