THE PASSION AND THE TASK
whole process from the experience to the emotion, from the emotion
to at least its partial recreation and weighed significance, its action is
the creative act itself. The prose, in its fitting of syntactical rhythm to
blended thought and feeling, is of a kind rarely to be found in English
since the seventeenth century. It is prose
doing
the thing about which
it is talking. Lastly, it should give the lie forever to those who would
still deny that James was unable to scrape the depths.
If
nothing has here been said of the practical aspect of the notes,
their inestimable
utility
to students or writers of fiction, it is because
the editors do such a superb job in this regard. Taken together
~ith
James's Prefaces, they constitute the best manual of the art of fiction in
existence. Messrs. Murdock and Matthiessen help make this claim pos–
sible by their intelligent and tactful arrangement, selection, and com–
mentaries.
William Troy
PROVINCIAL
THE LAST OF THE PROVINCIALS. The Americon Novel, 1915-1925.
By
Moxwell Geismor. Houghton Mifflin. $3.50.
Mr. Geismar's prose is so interesting and curious that it's
not easy to attend to what he is trying to say with it.
It
is all dots and
dashes and capitalizations, the flashiest parts of old metaphors and new
jargons, glamour and confusion, insinuating questions, high-classifica–
tions, illogic and ingrammar, a sort of belligerent reverie. "The young
literary lions of the Foetal School" (he writes) "-E. E. Cummings,
Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot among them-were cutting capers around
the seniors of the Hypoendocrinal School-the Mores, Matthews, and
Van Dykes" and so on, and he calls Fitzgerald "Scott" four times at
the bottom of one page, producing an effect absolutely cozy. At the
same time he is extremely vague and hesitating: "In one sense ... al–
most ... of some interest" is typical, and "in a way it is a rather curious
gain" and "a,lmost come as something of a shock"; "It is interesting"
is his favorite phrase, "curious" his favorite word, everything is "inter–
esting" or "curious" to Mr. Geismar.
The present volume consists of five seventy-page studies, with little
reference back and forth, and with the most indifferent major transi–
tions I have noticed for years ("As you'll see, though," "In her own
379
