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PARTISAN REVIEW
dom, humanity and the new science of society, socialism, the rational
order. I dare say Miss Young's research was extensive. The life in both
utopias is well documented, particularly Robert Owen's, whose English
background, furthermore, is fully covered. All the essentials of an his–
torical account are to be found in the book : the facts, characters, ideolo–
gies, atmospheres, the mysticism and the enthusiasm, the crucial events,
and of course the social forces and movements without which a history
reads like a mere succession of stills. And yet the most important thing
of all is missing-the simple sense of history, of time passing and past,
•accumulated and running out. Everything is concentrated into an ever–
present moment, a bright eternal now. The pitch of sensibility is raised
to the puint where only the actual experiencing subject could feel so
much, undergo such a long series of fresh &ensations and be so dazzled by
it all. There is no time for generalization, for detachment reached after
an assortment of the facts; no time to stop elaborating the texture and
find the pattern of the threads. Analysis, social com:rnentary, evaluation,
one's personal position must all be sublimated to the literary act, em–
bodied and rendered in the text, as in a naturalistic novel. Insight is
indispensable, but there is no single, natural place for it; it must there–
fore be maintained at every point along the way, with the result that it
becomes a strained virtue whose effect is lost through dispersal. There
is no real intellectual climax in the book.
The same method of elaboration of irrelevancies interferes with the
development of
Angel in the Forest
as a literary work. Thus the scene in
which Father Rapp castrates and thereby kills his son for breaking the
rule of celibacy is set down in a paragraph that has no more weight than
the writing which describes the hop-fields along the river. It is done in
the same manner, one style prevailing everywhere-a cataloguing of
rhythmical units: "Nakedness, a howling, a grovelling, a mute repen–
tance as the body learns its master, self-mastery.... Unfortunately,"
continues the paragraph, "this was no mere flogging but emasculation,
and the victim died, crying like a stuck pig-somewhere in the neighbor–
hood of the piggery." An elaborate understatement, lost among its kind.
The feeling for literature is there, and all the credentials of writing.
But it is a literary method made up completely of writing-good writing,
certainly; original, the images clearly struck, the irony and the wit im–
plicit in the words and the words well chosen; and yet it is a literature
of sensibility, without drama and without structure, a porridge of highly
polished rice.
I do not want to appear to be condemning this method entirely.
Its imaginative intention is of the very highest, and it is all to Marguerite
Young's credit as a poet to have seen that her two utopias call for its
application. After all the social studies have been made there remains
something compelling to sheer poetic speculation in the old story of rea–
son failing, unreason winning out. We may even find a pathetic charm
