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PARTISAN REVIEW
form of wild or impotent thrusts at the devils in power. (They are often
brilliant, too---especially the "Letter from a Civilian"; and the one
called "In Jugular Vein" ends with that grim invention "Decay along
with me/ The worst is yet to be.") Mr. Connolly does not, in these
"Comments" at least, analyze the cultural decline that provokes his
despair, except in the most rudimentary way. Thus, the cumulative effect
of his prophetic, doomful choruses never calls forth a really deep insight
or act. He is too impassioned to
note
the decline of culture as Eliot does,
and usually too impatient for anything but racy poignant metaphors
(like "the great marquee of European civilization in whose yellow
light we all grew up"). But perhaps it is a great deal to ask that a
man make friends with the abyss on whose edge he totters.
And it would be better to drop this convenient fiction of the close–
ness and immediacy of the recent past. The mood of our own periodicals
after the war was rather different, and surely the feeling about culture
today in America is not at all the same. There are good reasons why
this should be so, and we would do the British and ourselves an
in–
justice
if
we pretended not to recognize it. In this country we have
known fairly continuous prosperity since 1939, when
Horizon's
first
issue appeared; and, since 1944, the date of Mr. Connolly's first selec–
tion, we have known abundance, development, and a continuous rise
in the standard of living; the power of our policies is felt universally.
We have also known the war, but surely no American needs to be told
how his knowledge of the war differs from the European experience of
it, nor should there be any doubt about the postwar periods. Then, our
cultural situation shows a parallel prosperity; there is a great deal of
activity-whether or not it should be called "vitality," as it often is
called, raises another question. But even if it is possible to see this
cultural
prosperity as a false one (for it is not so real, so deep, so sound
as we might think), the fact of its existence here is fairly obvious; the
situation is truly different in England.
When Cyril Connolly complained of restrictions and austerity, he
published his complaints in the only Western country where, even today,
food and coal are still rationed, seven years after the war, and where
the yearly allowance for travel abroad was raised recently from twenty–
five to forty pounds.
Picture Post
does not take Edith Sitwell for a walk
in Regents' Park as
Life
takes Marianne Moore to the zoo. The British
may stilI publish more new titles than we do, but even the comparative
prices of Mr. Connolly's book provide an instructive cultural example:
in America the $3.50 will represent between 1/15 and 1/20 of an or–
dinary weekly salary (not to speak of extraordinary ones); but the
