800 l( S
115
does not want to be dominated and he does not want to dominate any–
one else : this is a free country, and to dominate or to be dominated is
to be cut off from the reality of experience and of human beings in
America, however else it may be in a hierarchical society. Augie is
precisely like the veterans of the last war who once the war was over
wanted to get out of the army because no matter how high your rank,
there was always someone else to boss you around: freedom is existence,
as America is adventure. Since America began as an adventure, Augie
is right to conclude as he does:
Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe
you can come to them in this immediate
terra incognita
that spreads out
in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus,
too, thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in
chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.
Thus, by hoping for the best and being prepared for the worst, Augie
proves that there is an America, a country in which anything might
happen, wonderful or awful, but a guy has a fighting chance to be
himself, find out things for himself, and find out what's what. For the
first time in fiction America's social mobility has been transformed into
a spiritual energy which is not doomed to flight, renunciation, exile,
denunciation, the agonized hyper-intelligence of Henry James, or the
hysterical cheering of Walter Whitman.
Delmore Schwartz
FORSTER'S INDIA
THE HILL OF DEVI.
By
E. M. Forster. Harcourt. Brace. $4.00.
The Hill of Devi
is E. M. Forster's account-composed mainly
of letters written to people in England-of his two trips to the Indian
state of Dewas Senior; the first, in 1912-13, ended quickly; the second
was longer and took place in 1921 when Forster was employed as Private
Secretary to the ruler, His Highness Sir Tukoji Rao III, K.C.I.E., the
Maharajah of Dewas Senior. The book is chiefly occupied with descrip–
tions of the daily life of the Court of the Maharajah, the way the little,
anomalous state was ruled and misruled, bankrupted and finally ruined ;
it also follows the rapid degeneration in the fortunes of the Maharajah
himself, concluding with his flight from his Palace to Pondicherry, where
he exiled himself and died.
Dewas Senior was "an amazing little state, which can have no
parallel, eX'cept in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera." The royal family was
Rajput and Maratha, split in the middle of the eighteenth century into
