LETTERS
267
In contrast to the perfectionist who is concerned with himself to the
exclusion of the world, Miller includes the whole cosmos in himself, at a
certain risk to himself, if not to the cosmos. He excludes nothing. Miller
believes that life is art, and Nabokov believes that art is life. I prefer
Miller because there is a sediment of real understanding in the stream of
his vaticination, and I have a good deal more respect for him because he
is honest- he says he is dishonest. Whereas Miller announces the fact that
he is destroying the world, Nabokov pretends to create it. And unlike
Nabokov, Miller's writing is indigenous; it is part of his own cultural
tradition. There are two essential moods in American writing: emotion
set free through personal confession, for example, Whitman and Melville;
and emotion submerged and frustrated, Hawthorne, for instance. Miller
belongs to the first. "Immediately I heard my own voice I was enchanted:
the fact that it was a separate, distinct, unique voice sustained me." The
discovery of the self obliterates the world and its eternal enmity, and
assumes a cosmic importance that carries with it a propulsion to regene·
rate mankind. The hard-earned victory must be proclaimed so that others
may be freed from the world. Since one cannot know and believe at the
same time, facts do not exist, nor the processes by which they become
knowledge and entail responsibility. There are solutions, of course. "I
lived out the social problem by dying" is certainly a solution. Man is
good ; it is Utopia or nothing. "We stand at the threshold of a new way of
life in which MAN is about to be realized.... I believe it absolutely. I
know it to be so from my own experience." There is no limit to what
Miller believes-"! believe everything"-no limit to what he wants, and
no limit to himself or to his writing- "A process which appears more and
more inexhaustible as I go on."
The scene of Janet Lewis's short novel is laid in France, near
Toulouse, in the second half of the sixteenth century. The story, based on
historical sources, is psychological-the distraction of a wife who believes
that the husband who returned to her after an absence of eight years, is
not her husband, but an imposter. The reconstruction of the life and feel–
ing of the time is a difficult task well done, but hardly worth doing at all.
It
does not quite come off; the life it materializes is too spectral. There
are also shortcomings, not too important, where it appears the author had
no source to guide her. However, the lack of pretentiousness in this book
was restorative.
H. P. LAZARUS
Letters
PARODY AND STYLE
Sirs :
Mr. Jarrell's parody of Miss Moore's
verse in your January-February issue sug–
gests to me this question: Could you per–
suade Miss Moore to comment on it, with
particular attention to the technique of
style?
If
she would do this, and analyti-
cally enough, we should have a valuable
exposition of just how she accomplishes
her special effects.
The idea occurred to me because when
I read the parody it seemed to me that
it looked like Miss Moore's work but' did
not
so~nd
like it, the sound effects being
all wrong. I could not myself explain
just why, but wondered
if
she herself
would not be able to anatomize the prob–
lem. I suspect that it rests primarily on
