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PARTISAN REVIEW
not-wholly-in-sympathy being al–
lowed to broadcast on any subject.
. . . But if we can't ask you to
broadcast I must have your word
that you will treat the matter in
strict confidence." I told him that
he could blacklist me, but I was
damned if I'd hush it up for him.
The way in which youngsters
straight from college are impound–
ed to write scripts (I met one a few
days ago, tremendously proud to
be a producer, and struggling with
a whitewashing script about the
Boer War) makes me think that I
am not the first person to get what
I believe you call the bum's rush.
The number of people who are
willing to touch propagandist work
with a bargepole, except for Eric
Linklater, Louis MacNeice, and
your Mr. Robert Sherwood (whose
There Shall Be No Night
is run–
ning here, transferred arbitrarily
from Finland to Greece in defer–
ence to Russia) and others of the
genus Congressional Librarian is
pretty small.
As
Cummings put it,
"A Salesman is an It that stinks
Excuse me. . . . " MacNeice and
Linklater appear sincere, though
their work has suffered. I won't
vouch for the rest. A man called
Skinner has just written a long
poem, calling Churchill "Stern foe
of Hitler and of Platitude," which
is
being acclaimed by the Pogrom
Party-perhaps it represents the
new literature.
ALEx CoMFORT
A Victorian Novel
I
T IS
characteristic of the more ro–
bust Victorian novelists that they
let their scenes and creatures get
out of hand. The obvious formal
considerations came last for such
a writer as Trollope, and he was
always ready to sacrifice the plan-
ned shape of a work, a loose thing
at best, to the resistances and de–
flections he met in the writing of
it.
As
with Dickens, a character
that insisted strongly enough could
snatch more than its allotted space
from his pen. Thus, by the curious
vitality one of its 'Personae arro–
gates to himself, Trollope's
The
American Senator
ascends into a
realm the author may not have
planned to enter. It becomes one
of the most interesting novels in
English, and that it has received
so little recognition as such can
only be blamed on its deficiencies
of form, rocked as it is from side
to side by three intermittent narra–
tives which barely connect with
each other in any but a thematic
sense-and that sense hard to dis–
cern.
The primary and serious narra–
tive is the halting romance-halt–
ing, because it takes place, so to
speak, in Purgatory-of Reginald
Morton and Mary Masters, a Vic–
torian set piece only partly re–
deemed by its incidentals. Regi–
nald is a studious recluse, son of
gentry, embittered for some inade–
quate reason, chaste, intense, pipe–
smoking, Byronic-proud: a Bronte
type whom Trollope
is
not suffi–
ciently interested in to rescue from
what was already fictional desue–
tude. Reginald walks through his
part like a dummy. Larry Twenty–
man, a mildly prosperous young
farmer,
is
desperately in love with
Mary, daughter of the town lawyer
and compendium of the negative
virtues. She prefers Reginald, who
is much more romantic, in spite of
being forty. For it was improbable.
in Trollope's time that anyone un–
der the upper middle class should
appear romantic unless he or she
were a criminal. But as a character
in fiction Larry has all the vitality
his rival lacks. He does not have
