118
PARTISAN REVIEW
assure ourselves by concluding that
Mr. Davies surely knows that a
shield
is
an aegis, and has allowed
himself the little tautology, in the
exuberance of his enjoyment of his
official position, as a mere rhetoric-
al flourish. But then we come to
the
as I have predicted to you two
years ago.
The tense here is incor–
rect: it should be
as
I
predicted to
you two years ago.
We conclude
that Mr. Davies does not know
this, but that, even though he does
not know it, the instinct of his
genius has guided him to hit upon
the perfect deviation which, by
adding to the solemnity of the tone
at the same time as to the absurdity
of the writing, will lead the way
to the final effect. And what an
effect it is! The sentence never
comes to a conclusion. It is a new
sort of aposiopesis-an aposiopesis
with a full-stop at the end. Yet the
grammatical impossibility has with
wonderful art been half-concealed.
He has first given us one adverbial
clause beginning with
under con–
ditions 'where,
which completes it–
self in the logical way, and he now
starts another clause like it:
and
under conditions where.
Having
just seen the preceding one
brought off, the mind is prepared
to supply the necessary fulfilment
of the second. But this second
clause is never completed. Mr.
Davies, by a rare stroke of art, '
starts another subordinate clause,
even though there be,
etc., and at
the end of the clause he stops. For
a moment we cannot believe it.
The use of the subjunctive here,
even though there be,
is another of
his fine manipulations to give us
confidence in the structure of his
thought. We find it very hard
to
believe that a man who can use
the subjunctive in this noble tradi–
tional way would be capable of
leaving his sentence with one end
sticking out in the air, like the rope
in the Indian rope trick. And yet
Mr. Davies
has
left it so, and we
can only accept and wonder, just
as we can only accept and wonder
at his giving the public his word
for the authenticity of all the
testimony quoted from the trials in
his film, which contained a con–
fession by Tukhachevsky imagined
and written by Hollywood, at his
flying back from Moscow on
his
second mission with the advertise–
ment
Mission to Moscow
painted
in large yellow letters in English
and Russian on his plane, and at
his watching with gratification in
the company of Stalin and his
retinue, while this film was shown
in the Kremlin.
Let me finally quote a passage
less distinguished by brilliance of
language than by the felicity with
which it mirrors the qualities of
the man himself. Mr. Davies is re–
porting an interview with a re–
presentative of the Soviet Foreign
Office, at which the trade agree–
ment and the debts were discussed:
He stated that they were hav–
ing difficulty, in connection with
guaranteeing
$40,000,000
of
purchases in the United States.
...
I stated quite frankly, how–
ever, that while, personally, I
made these admissions to him
a
and against in.terest," that
[sic]
quite as frankly I had absolute–
ly no tolerance for a position
that would haggle over an in-
