112
PARTISAN REVIEW
C. Virgil Gheorghiu's grade A stinker,
The Twenty-fifth HouT,
when it is not simply inane, is the most vicious thing in its underhanded
allegiance to totalitarianism since Curzio Malaparte's
K aputt.
The
following is a fair example of the writing:
"You can't stay here," went on the old man [to Susanna, the girl
friend of his son, Jon, who has brought her to his home].
"If
you do,
Aristitza will strangle you or split your head open.... Then, if Jon
found out he'd kill his mother, and that would be a great sin."
This Jon is a stupid Rumanian peasant who is sent to a concentra–
tion camp when the local police sergeant, desiring Susanna, makes out
a false report that Jon is a Jew. He goes through all the concentration
camps of Europe, nowhere running across one Jew who is anything but
a louse. As for the Nazis, they are, like all other Europeans, brutalized
by modern technology, but they don't try to take advantage of you.
Machinery is the real villain of our time. The mechanical slaves,
the buttons and gadgets that do our work for us, have revolted and im–
posed their own conditions of life on the masters, with the result that
the individual man counts for nothing. This is the theme of the novel,
to the extent that it has one. But I have never seen a more mechanical
treatment of a theme. The two erudite characters, Father Koruga, the
Orthodox priest, and his son Traian, the novelist (evidently Gheorghiu
himself; he, too, is writing a novel called the
Trwenty-fifth HouT,
and
it seems to be every bit as bad as this one) go about, in and out of
concentration camps and cattle cars, quoting page after page of Eliot,
Auden, Lewis Mumford, Count Keyserling, F. S. C. Northrop, and W.
Burnett Easton, Jr., by permission of the copyright owners, and St.
Thomas, and several other authorities in the public domain. This docu–
mentation is supposed to show that the state of the world is precisely
what Traian-Gheorghiu says it is. It is a much more convincing dem–
onstration that he has no ideas of his own. He does not need any, for
he picks things up very fast. Anti-Semitism, for instance.
It is a relief to turn from this noxious gasbag to a man like William
Carlos Williams. You get from him in
Make Light of It
(a collection
of stories written over a period of some forty years) the feeling,
primarily, of a man. There is no pretentiousness, not a single syllable has
been faked.
It
is not even the poet or the physician who comes through
(though most of the stories are written from the G.P.'s point of view).
There is nothing but a plain humanity, of which a man must have a
tremendous store to be able to present it so bare. It is this quality
