PARTISAN REVIEW
never ceased to fill me with love and grief. To me it seems as if this
loyalty might atone for my having fled in horror from my country's
guilt." Thus the final indictment is leveled not only at the accused, but
also at the heart and conscience of the judge. And the man who is here
passing judgment on Germany (obviously in the name of the author)
again expresses a sense of sorrow, failure, and guilt rather than a "Faus–
tian" myth or a pontifical knowledge of what is right or wrong.
It remains to say that this discussion neglects the rich texture of a
work whose construction-similar to the music it describes--carries to an
extreme the traditional form of the novel with which Mr. Mann started
as a writer. There are brilliant portraits of members of that segment of
pre-Nazi, German society, the intellectual and artistic elite of the bour–
geoisie, which Mr. Mann knows best and with which he has always
dealt expertly. There are long sections of the book when these por–
traits of the theologians at Halle or the artists and intellectuals in the
Munich
salons-variations
on the theme of a sick, doomed society–
completely dominate the progress of the work to the exclusion of the
central figure. But in the biography of Leverklihn, too, there are episodes
-such as his encounter with the diseased woman (drawn from the
Nietzsche correspondence), his dialogue with the devil, or his dramatic
final collapse-which raise the work far above the level of musical or
social theory and give it the stature of a unique artistic achievement.
Hans Meyerhoff
THE PROGRESSIVE HAWTHORNE
THE PORTABLE HAWTHORNE. Edited by Malcolm Cowley. Viking. $2.00.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: THE AMERICAN YEARS. By Robert Cant–
well. Rinehort
&
Company. $6.00.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. By Randoll Stewart. Yole Press. $4.00.
Our thin, self-lacerating, and discontinuous culture auto–
matically produces such uneasy collaborations as this one between Mr.
Cowley, the hard-working scribe and oddly impressionable cultural
sounding-board, and the publishing industry with its concept of the
"Portable." The Hawthorne who emerges has had such a bad fall
between stools, or cliches, that he appears almost as shattered and giddy
as we-but this is appearance contrary to reality.
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