114
PARTISAN REVIEW
point of view the book is cold, because the author has not come near
enough his hero. The things that Waldo Frank understands and describes,
the exaltation of the Cominunist movement of the twenties, the intellectual
excitement it generated, the human values it revived, are all left out of the
Dos Passos novel; and, as a result, the terrible drop at the end is not
keenly felt because the reader has never been allowed to experience the lift
that must have preceded it. The method, limiting the material to the facts
of sensation and behavior, has excluded all the intangibles of adult life.
The style, with long, gobbled, average-man's sentences running down at
the end, its naive, You-know-me-Al habit of indirect discourse, has become
an iron corset that has constricted the voice-production of the author until
he can only talk baby talk.
The hostility to human dignity that expresses itself in the style comes
out also in the attitude toward the characters. Unlike Waldo Frank, who is,
if anything, too gullible, Dos Passos refuses in general to take his people
seriously. Simple workers he does handle with reverence and gentleness,
and the section devoted to Harlan, Kentucky is a small working-class epic.
But an intellectual, to Dos Passos, is always a phony, and he packs the
intellectual scene of the twenties with a group of harsh and repulsive
caricatures. In contrast to these ferocious types, Glenn Spotswood has a
certain primitive innocence, but their world is his world and their values
are, for a time at least, his values; so that by turning the intellectuals of
the twenties into a gang of vaudeville performers, Dos Passos reduces his
hero to the status of a stooge.
'The meanings of Dos Passos's novel are in the skeleton, not in the
tissue. The reader must be able to supply the data that has been withheld
if he is to understand what there is that is tragic and important in the story
the author is telling.
MARY McCARTHY
SIN AND EXPIATION
THE FAMILY REUNION. By T. S. Eliot. Harcourt, Brace.
$1.50.
The work of few poets shows the intense continuity which we have
learned to expect in the work of T. S. Eliot. It was to be predicted that
The Family Reunion
would contain a recapitulation of the symbols
which
dominate Eliot's earlier poetry. They are here: the purposeless people
moving in a ring ("in an overcrowded desert, jostled by ghosts") of
Tilt
Waste Land;
the "hellish, sweet smell" that accompanies the apprehensioo
of the supernatural from
Murder in the Cathedral;
the purgatorial
flame
of
Ash Wednesday.
But most of all, perhaps, the play is illuminated
by
that rather dry and not sufficiently appreciated poem,
Burnt Norton;
and
in one sense, at least, the play may be said to be a restatement of
BUTIII
Norton
in terms of drama.
