718
PARTISAN REVIEW
novel, with the exception of Gregory, are types rather than persons: the
noble duke, the suffering lady, the faithful vassal, the garrulous maid,
the princes of the Church, the rough fisherman, etc. Finally, the very
form and style of the novel seem to me to weigh against reading too
much meaning into it.
It
is written with Mann's characteristic irony,
detachment, and sophisticated playfulness. And in this novel, I feel, this
mood is more than a stylistic technique; it carries over to the content
itself. Thus I like to think that Mr. Mann relaxed and amused himself
after the writing of a great and serious work like
Doctor Faustus;
and
.that this is, if not the only, the primary meaning of this allegory of
The Holy Sinner.
Despite its elaborate apparatus of medieval lore and
Christian legend, it is, as it were, in the nature of a Satyr play after
the tragedy of
Doctor Faustus.
There is more than one obvious connection between these two
novels: both deal with the same theme--evil, sin, and magic;
Doctor
Faustus
already reached into the medieval sources dominating
The
Holy Sinner;
in both of them the author is removed from his book by
the interposition of official story-tellers (both of them, again, quite alike
in spirit and temperament); and both novels close, significantly or not,
with the same gesture of prayer.
Hans Meyerhoff
DREISER AND ANDERSON
THEODORE DREISER.
By
F. O. Motthiessen. Sioone. $3 .50.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON .
By
Irving Howe. Sioone. $3.50.
These two biographies make a good pair. For one thing,
Dreiser and Anderson had careers that ask for comparison. For another,
the contrast between Matthiessen's biographical method and Mr.
Howe's emphasizes the extent to which the once well-behaved muse of
biography has been helling around.
Anderson, to be sure, hardly belongs in Dreiser's class as a writer;
as Lionel Trilling suggested when he reviewed the Viking Portable
Anderson, it is hard now to make any sort of case for Anderson. His
work was a legend of its author, and, as Mr. Howe says, "at precisely
those points where it jarred the most intimate and sensitive nerves of
memory, the legend was least under control." This weakness was re–
enforced by Anderson's romantic dream of the writer as a man who
could avoid the pain of daily living and by the heady faddism of the
Chicago writers among whom he first worked. Beside this kind of thing,
Dreiser's honesty of observation, whatever his other faults, is magnifi–
cent.
