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PARTISAN REVIEW
rhetoric and apparatus of literary criticism to tell us we mustn't overlook
the possibilities of a genuine, popular art which is the movies and that it
bears some relationship to the Elizabethan drama. But he goes neither to
the early Russian film (which was vigorous, experimental, original) nor
to the French "psychological" film for his example. He goes to Holly·
wood, takes the
"Gr~at
McGinty," a run-of-the-mill film whose only claim
to distinction was a certain "wickedness."
Horizon,
PARTISAN REVIEW'S English brother, brings out a valuable
issue for it carries the concluding "Imaginary Interviews" of Andre Gide.
A second reading of this seemingly pedestrian interview reveals a great
deay of "smuggled" information. The suppressed remarks become bril·
liant understatements and Gide is revealed through the talks as a man of
exquisite insight and as one of the most remarkable critics of our age.
There is also in it-one hesitates to say it-a humanness that is warming
and heartening; and a sombreness seems to have settled on Gide, a grief,
which has the effect of everlastingness. Koestler's "The Yogi and the
Commissar" is an effort at breaking up the patterns of social behavior
through a spectroscope, one end of which is the Yogi (ultra-violet) and
the other end the Commissar (infra-red). It is a crude but surprisingly
effective instrument. There are some witty remarks _about contemporary
physics. His tentative conclusion, though, is an error. He states that the
pendulum swinging from rationalistic to romantic periods and back (.from
waking to sleep) does not contradict the conception of dialectics. But he
allows for no third, or uniting, principle and so where is your dialectics?
Spender admonishes the critic who criticizes poetry for what it is not and
then proceeds to criticize poetry for what it is-but the demonstration is
a sort of leaning over backwards with the ear delicately appreciative. I
thought this rather funny though, on Alan Hodge: "he is particularly
good on the weather."
Part of Katherine Anne Porter's study of Cotton Mather is featured
by
Accent.
This remarkable writer never goes beyond herself (which is a
good part of her sureness and clarity) and her sights are flawless and
fierce. She sees objects and people with alarming objectivity and never
coldly. Cotton Mather and his family are right up the alley. Kenneth
Burke on Marianne Moore is just. He says, "Without this initial substan·
tiality the 'feined inconsequence of manner' would lead to inconsequence
pure and simple."
It
is good to read about Miss Moore's substantiality. It
is good not to read about the inconsequence of manner as the real inno–
vation, or as the main attribute, for Miss Moore is more, much more.
Antioch Review
carries a vigorous, more or less orthodox, attack on
Neo-Thomism. Perhaps it is lacking in subtlety but Mr. Fries makes up
for that by presenting the case with a good deal of matter of factness and
sound thinking.
Retort,
from what I can make out of it, is a sort of pacifist, back-to–
the-land, or back-to-the-small-community-unit, movement. Harry Paxto71
Howard in his piece "Marxism vs. Socialism" writes that the meaning of
