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PARTISAN REVIEW
lution to be sincere: he would put down whatever he happened to think
and feel, regardless of how it would look to a second person. He is well
aware-as some reviewers have failed to realize-that certain of his
reactions are priggish. And if many of his generalizations sound jejune,
it is because the efforts of an amateur at philosophy to lift himself above
an unpleasant situation by making philosophy out of it cannot but result
in the jejune. He should be excused when he writes: "To say of life
that it is the breast of a young girl, pointed toward the sky. That you
have the right to be inebriated with life, to the ultimate ecstasy." He also
writes: "I don't give a rap for 'accumulated experience.' This lost time
will never, never, be regained."
An
intellectual with subversive notions, you are put into mobile
confinement together with a conglomeration of males under the assump–
tion that ·the purpose of the confinement transcends all personal conside–
rations.
If
the assumption is not acted on, brute force admonishes. Since
you are cynical about the end being served by the confinement, you find
that everything that happens to you and that you do in your official
capacity as an inmate is irrelevant when not repugnant.
It
is worse for
you than for the others because your vocation is a personal concern,
you have sacrificed in order to make it so, while the others have allowed
themselves to be at the disposal of the necessity of making a living.
This is not snobbery. All of us are paying for our failure to be revo–
lutionary and socialist, to take our live in our own hands. The war
itself is one of the forms of that payment. But at the same time your
principles make you liable to certain exalted sentiments : solidarity with
your fellow men, the sharing of their fate, etc., etc. Malaquais found
himself in an engineers' battalion along with a bunch of peasants whose
conduct startled
him
into a new realization of how abject, dirty, and
trivial human beings could be. There were also the ignominious details
of routine and the incompetence and posturing of those in authority.
You believe in the dignity of man and in his capacity to control his own
fate. "That nothing, nothing, not man nor beast nor god, should be able
to dispose of your life, except yourself." Your own life has been a
struggle to make yourself do in the first place only what is relevant to
yourself as the particular human being you are. You
try
to be conscious,
to put yourself beyond the mercy of the petty detail, you don't fight for
your place in line or quarrel as to whose turn it is to sweep the floor.
But all around you you see men refuting every claim you make for them:
insentient, foul, rude, servile, petty and obtrusive. Soon, your most
anxious concern becomes to save yourself from the community of degra–
dation and drabness which every person and every circumstance try to
foist on you. You are willing to go through the same hardships-but
only alone, for the mass of your fellow soldiers seem to vitiate every
purpose you extract from the hardships. Contemplating them, smelling
and hearing them, you fall into the sentimentality, perhaps true, of
