1146
PARTISAN REVIEW
arrive at and sustain a faith which will justify his perversity. Meanwhile,
he lacks the ultimate faith to which he has committed himself, and be–
cause he is always slipping and falling down in his pursuit of it, he must
grasp at anything that will steady him. He takes hold with greater force
than a writer who has a matter well in hand; and so he clutches at scene,
word,
~onologue,
everything is pressed to the limit, and dramatic
ef–
fectiveness is implicit in the very pressure of the act of writing. But
is it worth it? Mere fiction cannot justify this deliberate poverty of
spirit, a bore, a nuisance, and ultimately a vicious thing.
But Hesse's invasion of the Castle, as a mere stroke of imagination,
even if it fails, Moravia's single creation of a real woman of flesh, have
a greater dramatic potential than Bernanos' fever and delirium. Health,
naturalism, the joy of love, the preservation of secular culture, these
small and still very shy little devotions to enlightenment shall have to
provide the dominant movement of fiction if drama is to mean a real ad–
venture, not a crack-up, of spirit. The road, let us say, has been opened to
the Castle. The way is long (even if one does simply walk in, as with
Hesse), and who knows what can happen on the way? And picture the
excitement-it will be the greatest dramatic moment in literature--if
one finds on opening the door that Adriana has already moved in and
lies there waiting on her sacred couch.
Isaac Rosenfeld
AN EMANCIPATOR FREES HIMSELF
THE FRUITS OF THE EARTH. By
Andre Gide. Alfred Knopf.
$3.00.
It is extraordinary that one of Gide's most influential works,
Les Nourritures Terrestres,
first published in 1897, and its pendant,
Les
Nouvelles Nourritures,
conceived about 1916 and published in 1935,
should not reach American readers until 1949. The fact that they have
finally done so is matter for rejoicing, for these little books are strikingly
different from anything else by Gide which is so far available in English,
except possibly some of
The Immoralist
and a few rhapsodic passages of
the
Journal.
Manuals of joy, of self-abandonment, of intoxication with
life, they are the least literary, least self-conscious, most spontaneous
things he has done. His claim to the continuing attention of the next
century or so might well be based most firmly on
Th e. Fruits of the Earth
and the
Journal,
for these books,
al~ost
alone among his output, are
completely successful in their line.
