BOOKS
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Yet Spender's great poems redeem any number of his bad ones, and
the very process of introspection and surrender to himself which occasions
his failures is the same one which, pushed a step further, turns out lyrics
of an intensity and of such intimate yet universal truth as no one except
Yeats has lately equalled, and which like the latter's seem past all style
and manner. Some are constructed from but an image, others have the
rigorous articulation of a theorem. Spender's own shortcomings are
turned to account, there being set up a beautiful contrast between his
softness as a person and his anonymous toughness as an expert, utterly
serious poet. He goes beyond solipsism and self-indulgence to discover
himself as he exists in. the medium of his art; and the very reluctance
with which he reduces his enormous demands upon language as self·
expression helps produce the great verse.
Ambitious Spender, in spite of his own disavowal, is an eminent
type of the poet who strains for completeness. He tries to make as much
of the world as he can relevant in his poetry, wanting to include history,
politics, even economics; but only after he has passed them through
himself and made them personal. Perhaps he insists too much · on the
personal. There is more poetry to be discovered now in the forces which
produced Napoleon than in his own soul, and Spender's poem on
Napoleon is bad, even though it is moving-and most of Spender's bad
poems are moving, which only increases the momentary irritation-he·
cause he makes Napoleon an avatar of himself. Spender as teacher of
history is in a false position; but so have been more than one important
contemporary poet: Eliot as legislator, Yeats as nationalist agitator, Auden
as theologian. It is almost a sign of their importance as poets. Nothing
characterizes the unimportant poet today as much as his willingness to
stay inside his professional role.
CLEMENT GREENBERG
BUTTON, BUTTON
The Company She Keeps. By Mary McCarthy. Simon and Schuster. $2.50.
The Company She Keeps
is a shrewd, witty, malicious, original, and
often brilliantly written book, which is called "a novel in six parts," but
which might more accurately be called a heroine in six parts. Miss
McCarthy states the theme in the Foreword: "'When did you have it last?'
the author adjures the distracted heroine, who is fumbling in her spiritual
pocketbook for a missing object, for the ordinary indispensable self that
has somehow got mislaid." The problem of the book is to put the Humpty–
Dumpty ba{!k together again, to assemble the six selves of the heroine,
Margaret Sargent, to define the true Florimel in the midst of the imposters.
In Part I, we see the self of the heroine as she moves through an
"extramarital courtship." The deceptions necessary afford an opportunity
for the exercise of the heroine's dramatic capacity, in which she delights.
But the very self she plays, is a divided self. She "loves" her husband, and
