758.
PARTISAN REVIEW
To
reread
Michaux's book might mean to convert his vivacious flow
of novelties, with their unfailing authentic ring, into the parade of a
dilettante's good times in Marco-Polo Land. How marvelous the descrip–
tions of all the "unknown" fish; how vervy the reference to "Mr. Ele–
phant" on his way to make love; how priceless the epithet of "eunuch"
for the generic lion of Chinese art-and there never was such a delight–
ful portrait of "the" weeping willow!
Is
all this to prove that Asiatic
humanity is not merely on a par with European humanity but can teach
it a few things? Michaux asserts we would also have a lot to learn from
a "miners' civilization" or even a "Tennessee Valley civilization." He
suggests that the Chinese can teach us the pacific virtue, the Hindus a
more sincere love for Jesus Christ. While he is unable to entirely conceal
that he is for a controlled world-for even, as he explicitly says, a
"science" of "how to make civilizations"-Michaux's propaganda for
Asiatic elements tends to end up as a drug on the civilizations market.
Surely there is a benevolent fallacy to his somewhat too calisthenic display
of taste and sensibility. In drive, it is a little too close to the unconscious
Stalinism of many left-thinking liberals who feel that all one has to do
to make the white men rush to establish a world confederacy, like ants
to a honey pile, is to prove that the brown, the yellow, and the black
men have faults, contradictions, and absurdities "just like us," besides
some of the rarest virtues in the world.
As for Michaux's basic aesthetics, it seems something of a sophisti–
cation. Huysmans' hero, Des Esseintes, and Rimbaud's hallucinations
seem more
proper
expressions of the Western capacities for, first, artifi–
cializing nature
(cf.
Michaux on Chinese craftsmanship) and, second,
the evocation of violently married opposites, such as Michaux instances
in his discovery of Hindu prayer that it is "a rape." Michaux's minor
epic, as witty and highly readable as it is, seems aesthetically out of date
as a serious document, and ambiguous in social message to the point of
unpardonable political naivete.
Parker Tyler
REVOLUTION AND DICTATORSHIP
THREE WHO MADE A REVOLUTION: A BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY.
By Bertrllm D. Wolfe. Dill l Press. $5.00.
I welcome the publication of Mr. Wolfe's book not only
be–
cause it is an extremely well written and richly documented biography
of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, but also because it represents what I con-
