112
PARTISAN REVIEW
in which the pagan speaker characterizes his unostentatiously-perhaps
unstably-Christian friend and describes the difficulty of attending the
Orthodox funeral rites, rigidly separating pagan from Christian as
the departed friend did not.
Dramatic objectivity disappears only when Cavafy thinks on the
'great tradition' of H ellenism. All save Greeks are barbarians. Yet even
then he lacks spread-eagle patriotism, national or racial arrogance. His
Hellenism is not a willed, a self-determined state but a culture-a subtler
version of Winston Churchill's grandiose, sometimes 'hammy,' celebra–
tion of Anglicity and its empire. It is never Matthew Arnold's abstract
"culture" abstractly opposed to Anarchy.
Your verses must be written, Rafael,
So that they hold, you know, some of our life,
So that th e rhythm and every phrase may tell
An Alexandrian is writing of an Alexandrian.
("For Ammones, Who Died.
I
love the Church .
..
The Church of all the Greeks, and when
I
enter in,
With smoky fragrance the incenses,
Liturgical harmony and cadences,
The priests and th eir majestic presences .
To the great honors of our race my thoughts return,
The glory of our Byzantine achievement.
III
610")
("In Church" )
I have not mentioned Cavafy's most showy pieces, though-invok–
ing the protection of
praeteritio-I
should like to name the early and
Audenesque and brilliant poem, "Waiting for the Barbarians." 'Re–
strained' and 'subtle' are the epithets befitting his best work, in which
sophistication and simplicity lie, uninternecinely, together.
Austin Warren
ADVENTURE IN AMERICA
THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH. By Saul Bellow. Viking . $4.50.
Saul Bellow's new novel is a new kind of book. The only
other American novels to which it can be compared with any profit
are
Hu ckleberry Finn
and
U.S.A.,
and it is superior to the first by
virtue of the complexity of its subject matter and to the second by
virtue of a realized unity of composition. In all three books, the real
