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Mme Bespaloff's essay, a series of brief meditations on leading
figures and aspects of the
Iliad,
endeavors to re-state the Homeric view
of life in modem terms. Hector is seen as a symbol of self-respect;
Achilles, self-love; Helen, the ambivalence of beauty; and comparisons
are made between the
Weltanschauungen
of Homer and Tolstoy, Homer
and the Hebrew prophets, Homer and Christian ethics, etc. There are
some penetrating observations about Homer, but none of them are re–
markably original; what is new in Mme Bespaloff's treatment is a ten–
dency to compare and even equate ideas which apparently exist in the
same context for her, whether or not they are logically or historically
comparable. This leads to fuzziness, and sometimes to guff. Some of
her associative suggestions are well formulated: "In the Bible, God is
master of Becoming; in the
Iliad,
Becoming, or
Fatum,
if you wish, is
master of the Gods." "For what the Greek, in all piety, asks of his gods
is not love but good will." But she frequently goes off the deep end,
e.g., in stating that glory, for the Homeric warrior, is "the same thing
that Christians saw in the Redemption, a promise of immortality outside
and beyond history, in the supreme detachment of poetry." This is worse
than vague; it's bunk. Glory was no more outside or beyond history for
a Greek warrior than his dinner, and it had nothing whatever to do with
Redemption. Mme Bespaloff indulges excessively in this pseudo-thinking,
a process of cloaking several subjects of discourse in a thick mist which
may lead the unwary or uninformed to mistake blurred outlines for new
insights. Her essay is far inferior to Simone Weil's
The Iliad: Poem of
Force,
which can be had for a tenth of the money, and is also excel–
lently translated by Mary McCarthy. Mme Bespaloff's fantasies, however,
are preceded by a long "introduction" by Hermann Broch, author of
The Sleepwalkers;
this increases the book's value as well as its size
and price. Entitled "The Style of the Mythical Age," it has little to do
with Homer or Mme Bespaloff, but says some interesting things about
myth, Kafka, and the modem temper.
Since Virginia Woolf's
The Moment
was greeted in this country
by an outburst of pedestrianism, published as a lead review in the most
influential of the Sunday literary supplements, there is probably little
anyone can do now to rescue it from oblivion. But it should not
be
overlooked by such innocent souls as still risk ostracism by reading books
for mere enjoyment, because it contains many things on the level of
The Common Reader,
with which it was linked in Mrs. Trilling's con–
demnation of Mrs. Woolf for being aristocratic and refined. Like
The
Death of the Moth,
its predecessor,
The Moment
is made up of essays,
sketches, and reviews previously uncollected, some not previously pub-
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