2#
PARTISAN REVIEW
and elegiac is also necessary, although in this Mr. Kronenberger may
be once or twice a little deficient, as in his otherwise excellent remarb
on Millamant, who "dwindles into a wife" in
The Way of the
World,
and on the
H eartbreak House
of Shaw. But on the whole a fine suf–
ficiency is what characterizes
The Thread of Laughter.
Richard Chase
A LITERARY SELF·PORTRAIT
THE DAYS BEFORE. By Katherine Anne Porter. Harcourt, Brace. $4.00.
Dr. Johnson once spoke of the biographical part of literature
as what he loved most. Unfashionable as this attitude is, there is much
to be said for it, especially when you are concerned with someone like
Dr. Johnson or Miss Porter who lives (though sometimes, to be sure,
with considerable license) within a defined code of manners. A fme
mind does not, doubtless, produce its masterpieces over morning coffee,
at cocktails, or during the drinking of too many dishes of tea with
Mrs.
Thrale. But it is nonetheless itself on such occasions, and there
is
a
kind of understanding to be had from watching it work informally
which cannot be had otherwise.
The Days Belore
is not, I hasten
to
add, biographical; it is a collection of occasional pieces written during
the thirty years of Miss Porter's literary career. But these occasional
pieces show her mind at work as informally as anyone who has not
drunk morning coffee or cocktails with her is ever likely to see it. The
book's value for us is what we can learn about a fine mind on such
occasions.
This one is, I think, a very feminine mind, almost a blue-stocking
mind, what the eighteenth century would have called an elegant
mind. And what the eighteenth century would have called it is worth
trying to estimate because it is, in many of its most deeply rooted
habits--even, I suspect, in its "romantic" habits-a mind formed by
the tradition of the Enlightenment. Miss Porter loves a society which
is genuinely domestic, where grace is a homely virtue and freedom
the
display of independence, even of eccentricity, within the discipline of
established domestic manners. She is only partly joking when
she
speaks of the kind of error which can lead downward to "infidelity,
lying, eavesdropping, gambling, drinking, and finally to procrastination
and incivility"; and she quotes with decided approval Eudora Welty's
remark that "the people and things I love are of a true and human
world and there is no clutter about them.... I would not understand
