346
PARTISAN REVIEW
Mr. Mann, a great deal of the time, is
a.
wonderfully funny writer; hill
there is something wonderfully humorless about his methodical and re–
morseless extravagance--the reader, blind and bleeding in these graceless
toils, finds it hard to remember that the machine which is destroying him
is, after all, funny.
Half the stories are heavily influenced by Kafka, who by now hu
become a non-naturalistic convention at everyone's disposal; used badly
enough, it is as dreary and unimaginative as naturalism. Roger Rough–
ton's plausible and disquieting death-journey is the best of these stories;
Miss Eustis and Mr. Gedanken come next, probably. Wright Morris's
prose is plain honest neo-primitive stuff, mildly successful; Ben Field's
story is as naturalistic as a can of angle-worms; Paul Goodman's stories
are witty, indulgent, trivial essays; Julien Gracq's
Chateau
d'
Argol
is
Ulalume
+
Hegel (all uninverted)
+
The Castle of Otranto,
done rather
nicely-but why? The Swiss de Rougement's fables are pleasanter
tlllll
his armchair metaphor-mongering about society, which finds a
summllll
bonum
in-surprise, surprise--Switzerland, that "combination of a resort
hotel and a safety-deposit vault." Eve Merriam's parables are pleasaut;
her scenario for a socially-conscious animated cartoon is almost
the
crudest piece of writing I've ever seen.
Augment of the Novel
is third-rate Pound-prejudice, idiosyncrasy,
and reminiscence have almost wrestled free from the protean intelligeace
that has always burdened them.
Symbols in Portugal
is a sur-realii1
amusingly fantastic psychoanalysis. Mr. Calas writes that "what we
caD
solutions of genious are in their essence paranoiac"; so here.
Andre
Breton's
Fata Morgana
is Art's answer to nonsense-syllables. Clareuee
John Laughlin's
Poems of Desolation
are photographs of window-dllll–
mies and black lace shawls in graveyards: these represent "the impa
reached in sexual relationships by western civilization," etc.
Harry
Thornton Moore, "our leading authority on poetry recordings," especially
admires Welles' recording of
Macbeth
because "the cauldron hisses
wlwa
the baboon's blood is poured in, and the toads and snakes that are dropJ*
in can be heard to plop."
Hugh McDiarmid does better in Scots:
The Divided Bird,
a conflllill
of genres such as you rarely see, reads like the
Critique of Pracdtll
Reason
put into excruciating verse by some Erasmus Darwin of the
diJ.
But it is, if not refreshingly different, at least different from
A
Iilllt
Anthology of Contemporary Poetry,
half the poets of which are for.,
reasonable purposes indistinguishable (even their friends have
JJij.
named them Comme Ci, Comme Ca). Hugh Chisholm reads like the •
plete files of
New Verse;
Mr. Brinnin is a competent, faintly
Amen.
version of this fashion; aand Mr. Kees, in spite of some good touche.,
i
lost there too. Miss Young has a couple of interesting awkwardly
wrillll
poems; Miss Miles is manner-a clever one--carried to the point,..
the returns almost stop coming in at all. Mr. Ford is nice words
