20
PARTISAN REVIEW
beck or Marquand; on the other hand, an occasional genius breaking
through this wall here and there, at ever more costly price in personal
conflict, anguish, and difficulty. Modern poetry already provides us
its own and extreme version of this exacerbating split; think of the
extremity of personal difficulty required to produce the authentic
poetry of our time: the depth of anguish which secreted the few
poems of Eliot; and Yeats, we remember, had to struggle through
a long life of political unrest, personal heartbreak, see the friends
and poets of his youth die off or kill themselves, before he came into
his own and could produce poems capable of convincing us that this
poetry was not merely a kind of "solemn game."
Some of the more internal difficulties that beset the pursuit of
literature are being very much discussed in France by writers like
Maurice Blanchot and Brice Parain. Blanchot finishes one essay, in
which he has explored certain aspects of anxiety, silence, and expres–
sion, with the devastating remark, "It is enough that literature should
continue .to seem possible," though the reader by the time he has
waded through Blanchot's rarefactions to that point may very well
have lost the conviction that even the possibility remained. These
French researches are of a quite special character, continuing the
tradition of Mallarme-or, rather, attempting to see the aesthetic
problems of Mallarme from the human anguish of Pascal.
(As
the
burdens of civilization become heavier and we see existence itself with
fewer illusions, we have come perhaps to share Pascal's attitude
toward poetry: a vanity, a "solemn game"; at any rate, we seem to
demand more of the modern writer before we take him very seriously.)
These difficulties are extreme and we need not share them in that
form: after the rigors to which Mallarme submitted poetry in his
search for a
uzangage authentique"
no wonder silence should appear as
the only and haunting possibility of speech. After Mallarme, poetry
had to swing back toward the language of what he calls
((universe[
reportage,"
and Eliot's poetry has shown us that this language, suit–
ably charged and concentrated, can be the vehicle of very great
poetry. Blanchot's difficulties persist but in another form (especially
in a commercial culture) . Not silence but garrulousness ("unauthentic
chatter," as Heidegger would say) may be the threat confronting the
writer; but always and everywhere the difficulty of securing authen–
ticity.
The difficulties we face in America- a society which turns, as
Van Wyck Brooks says, its most gifted men into crackpots-are
obviously of a much more external and violent kind than in France.
