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PARTISAN REVIEW
the omnipresence of God, is what prevents it from seeming as remote
from our hard-boiled agc as do some other formulations of the aesthetic
attitude, more elegant and elaborate than Gide's but close to it in time
and spirit, such as those of Ruskin, Pater, Wilde and the early Proust.
The timeless liveliness of the 1897 volume can be traced uitimately–
as is the case with all of Gide's books-to its dissatisfaction with the
experiences it embodies. You feel at the end of it that only a beginning
has been made, that the poet-for Gide is a poet here, or as close as he
ever came to being one-has exhausted the possibilities, for him, of this
phase and is moving on to another.
Passer outre,
to go beyond, is a cen–
tral phrase of his writing. But here the dissatisfaction is pristine, the
discontent has the bloom of youth on it; and it carries more conviction,
for that reason, than the relatively serene disquiet of
The N ew Fruits
forty years after.
Dorothy Bussy's translation of these books, in which Gide's prose
is at its most sinuous, reflects that quality, and the spare, nervous virility
which underlies it, with a sensitivity to French nuances and English
cadence which is absolutely faultless. This triumph of a cruelly demand–
ing and seldom appreciated craft matches the many miracles of thought
and language here performed by a master of the art of writing.
Frank Jones
POETRY CHRONICLE
THE EDGE OF BEING . By Stephen Spender. Rondom House. $2.50.
THANATOPSIS. By Herbert Cohoon. The Tiger's Eye. New York. $4.00.
In his latest poetry, Stephen Spender still seems to be trying
to Inake the same complex of emotions and ideas with which he began
some fifteen years ago come alive, despite the fact that, on the whole, it
is less able to absorb contemporary experience than it was then. There
are some changes. Marx has been eased out of the old Lawrence-Freud–
Marx synthesis and a kind of ectoplasmic religiosity substituted with no
indication of how the transition was accomplished. The atmosphere of
historic salvation through a biologic and spiritual rebirth is still present,
but failure-instead of anticipated triumph-is now so much in the
foreground that most of the finely rhapsodic, if rather adolescent, effects
have disappeared. The effort to unite lyric fervor with a metaphysics of
life, love and identity continues with a marked increase in emotive
power while the discriminations have become, for the most part, con–
fused echoes of former perceptions:
