426
PARTISAN REVIEW
structor at a progressive college falsely claims to be a Communist when
the president (author of a pamphlet, "The Witch Hunt in Our Uni–
versities") notifies him that his contract will not be renewed, causing
his colleagues to rally to the defense of academic freedom so that in the
end it is the hapless president and not the instructor who is forced to
leave-shows a highly amusing grasp of doctrinaire liberalism. (The
main trouble with the
Groves of Academe
is that the conception goes
in one direction and the execution in another: the clever person who
sees through the hoax is scored off with harsh irony, apparently because
he is clever, whereas the liberal victims, whom the plot would seem to
be aiming at, are treated with considerable tenderness.) Mr. Jarrell, I
am afraid, lacks this kind of satiric understanding of the liberal ideology.
In the end he forgives Benton its absurdities, for he has no other
grounds for mocking it, and absurdity is a fault that the charitable and
loving-as opposed to the malignant and unloving Gertrude Johnsons–
can easily forgive. There is more than a touch of unction here. "I felt
that I had misjudged Benton, somehow-for if I had misjudged Miss
Rasmussen so [the absurd sculptress-in-residence who specializes in
welding "root-systems of alfalfa plants," but suddenly produces an
inspired work], why not the rest of Benton? ..." This is the moral of
the book, but it rings false. How does Mr. Jarrell know that Miss Ras–
mussen's piece of sculpture is great? He just looks at it and knows.
But we know that the perception of greatness comes harder than that.
In the same way, the lovingkindness with which the author accepts
Benton and the world at the end, in studied contrast with Gertrude
Johnson's ina:bility to love, strikes one as complacent and false. Love,
too, comes harder than that. It isn't there just because Mr. Jarrell, who
knows the right thing to say, says it's there.
Martin Greenberg
GOD'S
COUNTRY AND
MR.
KRONENBERGER
GOD'S COUNTRY AND MINE. By Jo cq'ues Borzun. Little, Brown. $5.00.
COMPANY MANNERS. By Louis Kronenberger. Babbs, Merrill. $3.00.
It is hard to imagine two books which are at once more alike
and more different. The diff::rence is obvious enough: it is that Mr.
Barzun thinks the state of American culture pretty good and Mr. Kronen–
berger thinks it terrible. But the similarity is almost equally plain: it is
that they are manifestly describing the
same
American culture, and that
they approach
this
culture from much the same background and presup-
