212
PARTISAN REVIEW
barely hinted personal tragedy, and to the change of season (real and
mythical at once) that open and close the poem.
We have come somehow to believe that bombast and melodrama
are hopelessly corrupted, that these shrill, honorable means are in
themselves despicable. But we need them to complete our sense of our–
selves, to do justice to the absurdity of terror, its failure to be well–
behaved. That Warren has handled them with skill and poignancy in
a time of careful and genteel poets, that he has made for perhaps the
first time in a hundred years a successful long poem of them (Faulkner
has, of course, exploited them dazzlingly in the novel), must
be
said first
of all. It is because no one else has been making this point, that I have
foregone for its sake comments on the philosophical implications of the
poem (the notion of a natural Fall and a natural Virtue, and of the
glory born of their confrontation), or the handling of character and
narrative (which have been sufficiently applauded), in order to praise
the skill and courage with which Warren has pursued a difficult, im–
probable, heartbreaking rhetoric.
Leslie A. Fiedler
FICTION CH IRONICLE
COUSIN BAZILIO. By
E~o
de Queiroz. Noondoy Press. $4.00.
THE MASK OF INNOCENCE. By
Fron~ois
Mourioc. Forror. Strous
&
Young. $3 .00.
THE JOKER. By Jeon Moloquois. Doubledoy. $3.95.
THE FACE OF TIME. By Jomes T. Forrell. Vonguord. $3.75.
THE PRESENT AND THE PAST. By Ivy Compton·Burnett. Messner. $3 .50.
Ec;a de Queiroz, I learn from the introduction to
Cousi1l
Bazilio,
was a Portuguese novelist and sort of diplomatic expatriate
who died in 1900 in Paris.
Cousin Bazilio
was first published in 1878
and shows the strong influence of nineteenth-century French realism,
e pecially Flaubert. Like
Madame Bovary)
it is a tale of adultery; when
we discover its middle-class heroine, Luiza, reading romances early in
the story, we quite know what to expect. Like
Madame Bovary)
too, it
is a study of the
moeurs de province)
though the province, in this case,
is a city, Lisbon, and not the countryside.
Cousin Bazilio)
however, is no mere pastiche, but a first-rate novel.
To set it alongside
Madame Bovary--for
ninety-nine novels out of a
hundred a killing comparison- is only to illuminate its distinctive qual–
ities, though it does not approach the greatness of the French novel.
