350
PARTISAN REVIEW
might be worse," "It is worse elsewhere," "It cannot be other than it is,"
"This is the lesser evil, hence it is good."
As a novel, the faults of
Dangling Man
come mainly from the fact
that it is somewhat too linear in its movement and contained within too
small an orbit. Thus, in seeking to keep Joseph's frame of mind con–
stantly in the foreground, Bellow brushes over a number of dramatic
possibilities, particularly those inherent in Joseph's marriage relation
and his rejection of financial success. The narrative is perhaps too spare
in its use of detail and background. And the use of the journal as a form
blocks off the interesting shift of perspective that could be gained by
presenting Joseph through the eyes of some person of the preceding
generation. But, given Bellow's choice of a diary for conveying a larger
social pattern, these limitations were perhaps, hardly to be avoided, and
this small book is an important effort to describe the situation of the
younger generation.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
MODERN ESSAYS
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES.
By Horace Gregory. Harcourt, Brace.
$2.00.
I
T Is A NICE
question whether to review the book this appears to be,
or the book Mr. Gregory says it is. The book it appears to be is an
assemblage of discursive book reviews and occasional pieces about "poetry
and the lives of men who wrote it," many of them instructive and per–
ceptive. The book its author says it is is a series of Essays on Beliefs in
Poetry, all of them presumably cutting the facets of a central theme
which has something to do with poetry as "reflections of life," something
to do with poetry as self-knowledge, and something to do with "morality
as a humane art." Without the preface I should not have guessed that
it dealt with such general matters.
If
one were asked only to comment on the magazine pieces, one
could acknowledge without embarrassment their considerable merits.
The best of the fifteen essays here reprinted, it seems to me, are of two
main kinds: those which, because they deal with relatively unfamiliar
material, will be genuinely informative to most readers ; and those which,
because they use comparisons as conversational gambits, can startle the
reader into odd perceptions. The first kind r'equires a talent often at–
tempted by the heavy tools of researchers, but usually missed for lack
of discrimination as to what unfamiliar material is worth unearthing.
Mr. Gregory works with more delicate instruments: his sharpest tool in
the essays on Landor's elegies, on John Clare, and on Thomas Lovell
Beddoes is an eye for genuinely alive and individual poetry to quote. In
particular the essay on Beddoes, whose occasion was evidently a review
of two scholarly volumes by Dr. H. W. Donner, rescues both Donner
