552
PARTISAN REVIEW
Surely Lionel Trilling is right about this passage, and Eliot's play
in general, when he observes how little of "the sentiment of Being" it
has. The last act of
The Cocktail Parry,
in which all those well-bred
people sit around congratulating themselves because dear old Celia has
been satisfactorily crucified on an ant-hill, strikes me as being a really
unpardonable display of unction and cruel genteel hauteur (the first
time that Eliot has allowed himself such a display). It passes under–
standing that anyone can find the participants "mature and likeable
people"-until we recall that a
totally
equable and conunon-sense view
such as Mr. Fraser's produces moral distortions just like any other
total view.
How to sum up one's feelings about Mr. Fraser's complex, re–
sourceful, and usable book? Well, to corne right out with it, after you
have said all the good things and thought a whole lot more and after
you have pointed out one or two bad things, the fact remains that by
all the standards we have been appealing to in the modern development
of literature it
is
a rather inert, even a retrogressive book by an author
who too often wants to find the most admirable way of being content
with the second-rate. Let us provisionally grant that this may be a tra–
ditionally mysterious English way to greatness. Still, it is up to us all
to decide whether the historical situation is so desperate as to justify
Mr. Fraser's guarded and prudent view of the writer and his world.
I don't think it is.
Richard Chase
WAY BEYOND INNOCENCE
AN END TO INNOCENCE. By
Leslie
A.
Fiedler. Beocon Press.
$3.50.
Leslie -Fiedler's essays, collected in a volume he has called
An End to Innocence,
are so vividly and ruthlessly argued that the
reading of them gives some of the pained enjoyment and partisan ex–
citement of a good sports event. These works create in the mind a feel–
ing of agitation and nervous responsiveness. As you go along, you ex–
perience not only your own ideas upon the various topics, but simul–
taneously you imagine the effect these arguments and opinions will have
upon other readers. We believe, as we are perhaps too likely to do, that
others will be shocked where we are amused, recalcitrant or sentimental
where we are realistic and easily convinced by the author's views. In any
case, there at your elbow is that character from farce, the Professor of
