254
PARTISAN REVIEW
ship, and their literary analogue can be equally depressing. At best you
feel yourself inside a giant clock, observing every quiver of the wheels
and springs, but unable to see the simple resultant motion of the hands.
The scenes get cluttered up, and dramatic focus is almost impossible to
maintain. In fact,
The Power House
is at times unreadable; which, all
to its credit, does not make it one bit less worth reading.
In
Apartment in Athens
Glenway Wescott takes quite a fall from
Pilgrim Hawk,
losing all the personal intensity and authenticity that dis–
tinguished his writing in the earlier novel. The present book's failure
to come to life suggests that Greece, our common cultural Eden, has
become, for Americans, at any rate, a country as foreign and irrelevant
as Patagonia. Wescott's Athens is an anachronism, and the Parthenon,
of which he gives us a glimpse to establish the glory that was Greece, a
ruined bank building. Thus based on a faded notion of antiquity,
Wescott's Greeks are incapable of doing anything to resist their present
humiliation beyond reciting the old lessons of esthetic harmony. The
Greeks of today, however, find not so much a means of consolation in
their ancient culture, as a source of perpetual scorn for barbarians.
They are the most scornful people on earth, as they have a right to be–
if they are the curators of the museum, the rest of mankind are no
better than tourists. But Helianos, in whose apartment the action takes
place, is presented as a reasonable (and inoffensive) man, without salt,
pepper or bitterness, whose whole response to Kalter, the German officer
quartered in his house, is governed by the Socratic maxim
gnothi seauton
and the Aristotelian virtue of moderation. All of which is as remote
from the present realities of Greek life as Pericles is from King George.
If
Wescott's Greeks are pedantic, his Germans are conceived in
terms of popular
Volkerkunde.
Captain Kalter begins as a typical Prus–
sian, bullying his hosts. After thoroughly intimidating them, he makes
a trip to Germany, where he learns that his whole family has been
killed, and returns a chastened man. But Kalter is incapable of genuine
sorrow or remorse-his kindliness proves to be a trap for the Helianos
family, and even in suicide the German strives to do them in. That
some German officers (or all of them) run true to this formula, does
not make it any the less a formula. And if Wescott is careful to include
enough variables to make even his Nazis seem human, he is still writing
by equation. The moral on the right hand side of the equation is: never
trust a German, and this time lick 'em for keeps. Helianos declares as
much in a letter from prison, in which he also urges his cousin Petros,
active in the underground, to go to America and deliver this message,
presumably at War Bond rallies. One can understand an American
author's having difficulty with Greek and German character, and resort–
ing to formula to solve his problem. But his complete lack of cultural
curiosity prepares the way for his uncritical acceptance of Allied war
