88
PARTISAN REVIEW
"... we will continue to believe that although a man may have to
compromise with Russia he can never compromise with truth."
"There's only one thing you can say for the German war-the men
who fought and won it knew, in a
gen~ral
sort of way, what it was all
about.... Allied soldiers had a hunch that they disliked the idea behind
the word
'Heil.'
They preferred the word 'Hi'-it was shorter and
cleaner."
"Read the men with the short first names: Walt Whitman, John
Donne, Manny Kant, Abe Lincoln, Tom Paine, Al Einstein."
The purpose of this writing is not to say anything about democracy
or the nature of the war or the possibility of permanent peace, but only
to arouse certain familiar responses in the liberal middle-class reader.
Thus the word "amusing" appears in a context where it is totally with–
out meaning, but it is a word associated with the
New Yorker
attitude
and by this association it gives a certain modishness to a sentence that
has nothing illuminating to say. In the same way, and for the same
reason, a department-store advertisement might say: "Come and see our
amusing nightgowns." Again, the sentence about the short first names
is literal nonsense, but the liberal middle-class reader can recognize at
once that the man who wrote it has the right feelings: anti-discrimina–
tion, pro-New Deal, anti-State Department, etc. And there is the face–
tiousness of the "Manny Kant" and "AI Einstein," to keep one from be–
ing taken in, even by one's own side. In this humane and yet knowing at–
mosphere, history and destruction and one's own helplessness become small
and simple and somehow peaceful, like life back home on the farm: the
short
first names, the mustard on the hot dog, the
hunch
about the nature
of fascism, the simple and clear relationships between the range of our
planes and the range of our thoughts, between the little word
"Heil"
and
the little word "Hi." History may kill you, it is true, but you have taken
the right attitude, you will have been intelligent and humane and suit–
ably melancholy to the end.
RoBERT WARSHOW
TASTE AND HISTORY
A HISTORY oF AMERICAN PoETRY, 1900-1940.
By Horace Gregory and
Marya .(aturenska. Harcourt, Brace.
$4.00.
T
HE FORM of taste that informs this book is a palpable thing, and to
describe that form is perhaps as good a way as any of describing the
book. The reader, indeed, may imagine taking shape somewhere in the
authors' penumbra around its 500 pages what is almost a Model Modern
American Poem. Probably that poem would be in a fairly strict tradi–
tional form, though it might have its individual nuances of imperfect
rhyme or modulated meter. But it should have a metrical brilliance
