10
PARTISAN REVIEW
words). A quotation from Berryman's book will show one basis in
reality for the attitudes which these authors bring forward as keys
to their work:
The approaching television of baseball.
The King approaching Quebec. Cotton down.
Skirts up. Four persons sho,t. Advertisements.
Twenty-six policemen are decorated.
Mother's Day repercussions. A film star
Hopes marriage will preserve him from his fans.
News of one day, one afternoon, one time.
If it were possible to take these things
Quite seriously, I believe they might
Curry disorder in the strongest brain,
Immobilize the most resilient will,
Stop trains, break up the city's food supply,
And perfectly demoralize the nation.
Berryman's poem was written in 1939, which means that his lines
were prophetic: F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of his nervous break–
down in
The Crack-Up
has just gone into a new edition and Budd
Schulberg's novel about him,
The Disenchanted,
is a best seller which
contains such remarks as "Nothing fails like success" and "You never
get a second chance. There is only one chance."
DAISY MILLER HAS BECOME CYNICAL
The beautiful innocence and goodness of the American
girl
which fascinated Henry James so much and inspired the creation of
such characters as Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer has always been
an important part of the American credo. It is embodied
in
the legal
principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty-which does
not hold in Mediterranean nations-and it may have much to do with
the disbelief, before and after two trials, in the guilt of Alger Hiss.
But the truly glamorous modern heroine begins with cynicism and
self-doubt as we can see in the fiction of Mary McCarthy, Carson
McCullers, and Jean Stafford. Starting with the habit of distrust,
she rapidly arrives at a seduction on a Pullman, a desire to know all
the four-letter words, or a marriage which is contracted with the
