952
PARTISAN REVIEW
ends. There is probably no other living English writer who, page for page,
can afford to be as simple as she. The fact that this simplicity is stilted is
beside the point. She is perfectly at ease on stilts, and could keep her
balance nowhere else.
Each sentence in this novel is an epigram or is meant to be, and
the whole book is a series of conversations in which these sentences are
exchanged. It is an autistic language not meant to resemble much of
living speech, and making no claim to a major style; it is even austere
and, in its disregard for usual cadences, naive. This naivete saves it
from being unreadably sophisticated, and as the conversations run their
course there is a further surprise in the number of impressions, char–
acterizations, turns of action and bursts of chilly fun that come through,
where none would be expected. Minor art could not be smaller or more
successful.
It is impossible to think of Ivy Compton-Burnett switching tradi–
tions in middle career. Her tradition, the comedy of English manners,
is inexhaustible at the rate she draws on it. She is supposed to be acid,
malicious, merciless, wicked-which, to those who take these manners
seriously, she may well be (her whole substance is the naughty hypo–
thetical, "What
if
people really were so outspoken?") ; but as her work
is deliberately scaled to the tea party, only cups and saucers can get hurt.
Two Worlds and Their Ways
is about something (parents, relations,
servants, governesses, children who cheat at school, illegitimacy, stolen
earrings) but it needn't be.
Isaac Rosenfeld
PERMUTATIONS OF A MYTH
THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES.
By
Joseph Campbell. Pantheon
Books. $4.00.
It is not altogether clear to whom this work is being addressed;
much of it will undoubtedly appear rather elementary to professionals
in the various fields on which it depends for its method. It will offend
those professional anthropologists who maintain that nobody can pos–
sibly know anything about human society without having spent a few
months in the New Guinea bush. And in its consistent reliance on Freud
and Jung it will enrage the psychoanalysts who believe that nobody can
understand anything about the individual psyche without a degree in
medicine. What damnation it will bring down on Mr. Campbell's head
for its theological digressions from someone like Monsignor Fulton Sheen
