280
PARTISAN REVIEW
of "Rain" should guess a good deal of what is to come.
In
another
story, the aging daughter of a minister starts smoking, dyes her hair
and heads for the fleshpots of New Orleans. After managing a rather
feeble shock through having her visited by a family friend who finds
her (as the narrator in
The M oon and Sixpence
found Strickland)
thriving and unrepentant, Mr. Williams runs out of realistic gas and
unhesitatingly switches to abrupt, clumsy fantasy.
In
the notorious
"Desire and the Black Masseur," an innocuous little clerk finds his true
masochistic love in the person of a huge, colored masseur; it is a nice
critical problem to decide whether the ensuing romance is more comic
or sickening. "The Poet," a ripe mixture of diverse influences, is a fan–
tasy celebrating the bardic life that is neatly calculated to make anyone
who has perpetrated a rhyme go into the used car business.
Maugham's fiction, if sufficiently analyzed, will always reveal itself
to be on the side of Victorian middle-class respectability rather than
the values it is supposed to espouse but actually exploits. The same,
in less extenuating circumstances, is true of Williams' work. The only
genuinely felt story in the volume, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," which
later becomes
The Glass M enagerie,
is a pretty, tinkling little bit of sen–
timent that reveals more of his true sensibility than all the bogus, blood–
and-guts writing derived from an ideology of sexual revolt, artistic
anarchy and maudlin humanitarianism, that is, apparently, popular
precisely because it lacks all contemporary significance and bite.
The virtue of French existentialism has always appeared to me to re–
side in its operational rather than its rational power, not in its merit as a
philosophic system
per se.
From this point of view there are no more ex–
emplary manifestations of the school than the novels of Simone de Beau–
voir. The intellectual scheme of
She Came to Stay,
for example, is
patently sophomoric. The most elementary kind of confusion between
ontology and psychology prevails; characters are hacked out to fit crude
preconceptions and the most perplexing dilemmas of life are flattened
out by ponderous slogans. Nevertheless it accumulates unusual inten–
sity and significance as it moves within its conceptual framework to
dramatize urgent, contemporary, human problems.
It would probably be simplest to say that Madame de Beauvoir's
talents lie where they are not supposed to, that is, in her power of in–
tuition, her passion and her courageous exploration of the murkier
labyrinths of consciousness, but this is not altogether true.
It
is the
ideology that releases and organizes the intuitive apprehensions which
in turn, reinforce, to some degree, the a:bstractions.
