578
PARTISAN REVIEW
pen to suit the author's love of his own virtuosity. Moreover, ljoth
authors owe something to Joyce; how much they owe is not at all clear,
since it is possible that they are inspired not by Joyce's literary example,
powerful as it is, but by the same attitudes toward modern experience which
compelled Joyce to the writing of
Finnegans Wake.
It was Cyril Connol–
ly who remarked that Joyce was both a mandarin writer and a master
of the colloquial; but this formulation is misleading, since it suggests
an alternation of method and attitude, and not that unity of style which,
in Joyce, as in Desani and O'Brien, must be termed the idiom of the
lowbrow highbrow. It is significant that the effort to unite all the rich–
ness of intellect and learning with the common speech of the people–
the most important kind of effort possible in modern literature–
should be exemplified anew by two authors who on the surface seem
so distant from each other: they are as distant as Ireland is from India;
their common ground is the English Language; and perhaps to have
the same language in common is the best annihilation of distance and
separation. Both books have serious faults; both try to be
too
funny,
too
witty,
too
allusive, and
too
learned, so that, committed in so many
directions at once, they possess no inherent logic of narrative structure,
no necessary movement and conclusion, and thus might stop anywhere
or continue endlessly. Yet the tendency of both books
to
restore to fic–
tion and to prose style the great riches of poetry and comedy is
promising and cheering and delightful. The promise is that if literature
must rush headlong to extremes, the extreme of naturalism ("the
curtain will now descend for seven days to indicate the passage of a
week," as Ring Lardner said), and
the
extreme of lyrical and epic sub–
jectivity ("I rose up one maypole morning and saw in my glass how
nobody loves me but you. Ugh. Ugh," as Joyce wrote), then at least
we may possess both extremes, and each overemphasis will help to
correct the excesses and limitations of the other.
Many passages in Carlo Levi's
The Watch
have a wonderful
eloquence, vividness, and vigor. Yet the book does not make a whole,
and the reader finds himself in the middle of it making a fresh start
again and again. This is partly due to the subject, which is panoramic
and includes all of Italy soon after the second World War; and it is
partly due to Levi's attitude toward his subject. He writes in the first
person and in his own literal being as an Italian, a painter, and an
author. But he holds back and refuses to involve himself
in
the subjectiv-
