540
PARTISAN REVIEW
Hardy "was a poet, but not enough of a poet to invent or discover an
appropriate form for his individual feeling." Mr. Tindall states this
baldly, but does not justify it by quotation. (Incidentally, the appear–
ance and nonappearance of quotation in this 386-page book is really
remarkable. When a quotation is applied to an author, it is rarely from
one of his own works--oh, no, Mr. Eliot said this and Mr. Yeats said
that about Hardy, who is not allowed to speak for himself.) Mr. Tindall
does not mention the
Satires of Circumstance
or the other poems where
Hardy describes English provincial life with an aptness and sureness
which is not consistent with the lack of an appropriate form.
I could go on picking at random throughout the book, and at
nearly every
sortis Tindalliana
I would find a foolishness which would
equal or surpass those I have quoted, but there does not seem to be
much point in doing so. This is a fat overgrown bedbug, parasitic upon
the things of which it treats and unconcerned with the quality of the
blood of the host upon which it gorges itself. It has nothing whatever to
do with literature, and its only use will be to provide the earnest degree–
seeking student with neat phrases with which to sum up modern British
writing-wrongly.
RuTHVEN ToDD
THE NovEL AND THE WoRLD's DILEMMA.
By Edwin Berry Bureum.
Oxford.
$3.75.
T
HE AMERICAN literary section of the NKVD has recently dressed it–
self in double-breasted pin-striped suits and come out into ·the genteel
open again. We have, for instance, the new fancy quarterly,
Mainstream.
And we have Edwin Berry Burgum.
Who
will
read this book? I mean,
besides
the core of the faithful
and those few strollers-in who find themselves in a bookstore and ima–
gine they ought to read something sometime about the novel or the
world. Well, I am afraid that there is a sizeable group of middle–
brows-people not vitally interested in either modern literature or modern
politics-who are determined to improve themselves by reading just this
sort of book. And their effort will, as a matter of fact, pay them back
in coin that they well know how to spend. For the chief result of reading
The Novel and the World's Dilemma
will be the strengthening of their
conviction that the only thing worth reading, anyway, is
PM.
Because
what Mr. Burgum does is to take fifteen great, near-great, and question–
able writers and show how most of them didn't quite manage to end up
on the side of democracy. Or, to put it straight, the book is a careful
accounting of how the major novelists of the twentieth century and of
the United States failed to join the
CP.
(I would like to take time out at this point to compliment Mr.
Burgum. He is the cleverest Stalinist I have ever read. He commits
very few of the obvious crude blunders so typical of Stalinist "literary
