424
PARTISAN REVIEW
his "fakery" (Mr. Thompson's word for poetry), then he is his own
audience: he is very often surrounded by "mocks and mirrors." Some–
times he is a lonely and lost boy trying to attract attention with his
cleverness; sometimes he is a sort of broken-down prince or damask
duke strongly reminiscent of John Barrymore in the last phase. The
emotions in these poems are jealousy, loneliness, the sense of injured
vanity, the suspicion (shared by Miss Dorothy Parker and all children
above the age of one) that to love is to be
b~trayed.
Thompson's style
at its worst is razzle-dazzle, swank, and an apocalypse, or at least a slug
of desperate gin,
in
every line.
But at its best Thompson's style has positive dash and splendor.
He can manage a grave elegiac tone with severe skill: see "The Moment
of the Rose" and the sonnets to his dead father. Thompson is poten–
tially a first-rate poet, and that is why one's feelings about him are so
contradictory. He inspires the greatest contempt and exasperation and
sadness; but then one feels admiration, sympathy, and belief. But he is
no Byron, not yet at least. For· the American poet who steps upon the
world scene it seems to be still a long, long struggle to transcend per–
versity, heartlessness, and meaningless violence.
RicHARD CHASE
"TO SO LITTLE SPACE"
FABULous VoYAGER: JAMES JoYcE's ULYSSES.
By Richard M. Kain.
University of Chicago.
$4.
THE PoRTABLE JAMES JoYCE.
With an introduction and notes by Harry
Levin. Viking.
$2.50.
jAMES JoYCE: THE LAsT JouRNEY.
By Leon Edel. Gotham Book Mart,
New York.
$2.50.
A
T LAST Joyce has achieved the embalming chambers of the graduate
schools, and the event can only leave some of us with a rather
mixed state of feeling. Of course one refers to those of a certain age,
whose life-span has coincided with Joyce's own rise from almost uni–
versal scorn and neglect to something rapidly approaching apotheosis;
who perhaps read the
Portrait
in high school underneath the teacher's
nose, who hoard among their possessions the musty red-covered issue of
the
Little Review
in which the first episode of
Ulysses
appeared in 1918,
and who welcomed each installment of the
Wake
like another leaf from ·
the great tree
Y
gdrasil.
It
would be in the worst possible taste to speak
more particularly of the fortunate ones who glimpsed
~
darkly linear
figure at the Voltaire or in the Rue de l'Odeon or even lieard him burst
into an aria of Rossini or a half-dozen lyrics from "Chamber Music."
