330
the tradition that starts, perhaps,
in Henry James and enters the
crime milieu in Nora of
The Thin
Man,
but is omnipresent in such
creatures as the wooden young
lady in
All the King's Men,
and
Isabel Bolton's final hypostatization
as the "European" paragon of
Do
I Wake or Sleep.
The Girl is Mar–
lowe's greatest challenge and his
greatest conquest; to her, like
Hamlet to his mother, Marlowe
"must
be
cruel, only to
be
kind"–
the therapy of harshness which
Marx also prescribes for our bour–
geois ills.
A comparison of Marlowe's state
of mind and that of the follower
of Marx would be suggestive. Both
have the attitude of a Jewish pro–
phet toward a bad world: both
are proximately tough to counter
a degenerate laissez-faire that has
learned to use sham-morality bril–
liantly, but both are ultimately
tender and apocalyptic. I don't
claim to find any political sophisti–
cation in Chandler: I merely sug–
gest the implications of his theory
of man, which he would doubtless
deny. Leftism in general, insofar
as it has popular attributes in
America, seems to have settled tqn–
porarily on the
PM
level of per–
vasive general "concern" mixed
with a folksy, sexy assertion of
man's finiteness and dependence on
nature. It's a mixture too usually
dismissed by the exacerbated in–
tellectual who, however, welcomes
the image of Marlowe as a sign of
"vitality" in the movies.
R.
w.
FLINT
PARTISAN REVIEW
A
Distinguished
Debut ...
SHEILA ALEXANDER,
one of the
most gifted of new American
poets,
has turned to another medium ...
and the result is a courageous,
in–
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revealing tales ever told of a
wo–
man's inner life, WALK WITH A
SEPARATE PRIDE is an intel–
lectual and emotional adventure
of the highest order.
"Sheila Alexander h33 written a book
that
is
original, intelligent, sensitive.
The qualities it possesses are rare
enough in current fiction, and
they
are the more remarkable in a fint
novel by a young writer. Sheila Alex–
ander proves here • . • that she
baa
the true novelist's
gifts."
-Robert
p,,.,.
Warr"'
Cffu/k
wilAu
,Sepurole
Pride
hy
SHEilA A.LEXANDER
$2.50
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