116
PARTISAN REVIEW
thus allow Harry's experience to grow out of the family history, as they
allow his crisis to grow legitimately out of the rather boring normality of
a family reunion.
By the same token, the choruses are natural: the characters do not
strike a pose as they begin their choruses. They are merely speaking aloud
(by conversation) their unspoken thoughts in the awkward silences which
occur as they wait for dinner. I have not seen the play performed, but my
feeling is that it would gain from being acted, and this, again, is further
testimony to the fact that Eliot has conscientiously subordinated every
detail to the total effect of the play as a play.
A review so brief as this cannot hope to penetrate very far into the
more interesting problems of organization which the play raises. Perhaps
it is more important to try to say a further word about the reader's prob–
lem of belief. The play obviously has something to say to people who can–
not accept Eliot's metaphysic. It would be folly to argue that his meta–
physic is of no importance in this play in which it finds, perhaps, its most
explicit statement. But it is also folly to prejudge the play as representing
an intolerable narrowness of interest by narrowing our own interests in
advance. For the reader who is likely to
be
troubled by this problem, one
may suggest some such approach to the play as the following. Eliot has
not lost touch with the realities. The desiccation, the fatuousness, the
deadening complacency of the British upper classes are revealed in this
play quite as mercilessly as Auden reveals them. Harry's vision of a
dif.
ferent world is certainly not Auden's vision, but he occupies a position
with relation to society basically similar to that occupied by Auden's char–
acters. (Auden's "converted" characters have their problem of communica–
tion too, and their problem of expiation.) There will be time enough, and
ro'om enough outside the play, to argue the relative truth of the two
visions. Suffice it to say here that Eliot, with a dramatic consistency and
integrity which rarely lapses, has exploited the dramatic values inherent
'in the situation. And it is ultimately by a test which takes this dramatic
integrity into account that his play will have to be appraised.
CLEANTH BROOKS
REPORT FROM THE SOUTH
THESE ARE OUR LIVES. As Told by th£ People and Written by Members
of th£ Federal Writers' Project of
eM
Works Progress Administration in
North Carolina, Tennessee,
and
Georgia. University of North Carolina
Press.
$2.00.
This book is the best possible answer to the campaign now going on
in Congress to destroy the Federal Writers Project. I can think of no bet–
ter use for Federal funds than to subsidize the sort of literary rediscover-
