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PARTISAN REVIEW
with that Socratic dialogue which the humanist supposes to be eternally
and universally carried on in the heart of human darkness.
The superiority of Fromm to his revisionist colleagues is to be seen
in his wide intellectual culture, his genuine sense of the anguish and
poverty of the neurotic personality and of its powerful impulse to
"escape."
It
is all the more regrettable tha t in seeking to revise a body
of doctrine which is admittedly too narrow, he has closed down the
universe of discourse into that vague and dim centrality to which liberal
humanism is prone. The Freudian terminology may be narrow, but
what of the universe Freud opened up to our contemplation?
It
is at
least possible to distinguish therein between mind and body, ego and id,
God and nature, religion and nonreligion, incest and political reaction,
sexuality and nonsexuality. There is no doubt that the anthropologist,
the philosopher, the literary critic, and the post-Freudian analyst
will
continue to find it necessary to revise Freud. But Dr. Fromm's new book
is another piece of evidence in support of one's conviction that if psy–
choanalytic theory is to pass successfully through its present state of
general confusion, it will have to do so as a continued extension of the
more severely naturalistic parts of Enlightenment philosophy.
Richard Chase
THE VALUE OF TASTE
CLASSICS AND COMMERC IALS.
By
Edmund Wilson. Farrar, Straus. $5.
Though it can be taken merely as a pleasant collection of
reviews,
Classics and Commercials
is most profitably read as a chapter
in Edmund Wilson's intellectual history; specifically, as an effort to
test once again, this time against the writing of the past decade, a
literary commitment first reached in the twenties. Wilson's book makes
clear that for him the twenties were the great and exciting years, and
on them he has lavished that nostalgia which gravely vibrates through
all his recent work. What strikes a younger person as so remarkable is
not, as might be supposed, that anyone should feel strongly enough
about a moment of recent life to wish to romanticize it, but that when
one does look into the literary milieu of the twenties one becomes con–
vinced that, nostalgia aside, there
really
was in it something of the free–
dom, the generosity and high humor for which its lost children yearn.
Wilson's particular commitment was to a search for independence in
career and disinterested excellence in taste, and that search led him
through some strange, battering journeys, from the interior of Axel's
castle to the very gates of the Finland station; but, at whatever cost,
