144
PARTISAN REVIEW
say of the nightmarish little sex-box Mouche, or the wooden redemptress
Rosario of the comforting pubic regions? There's a stagy sourness here,
an impatience with the demands of his art. The book, however, is at
least interesting and superbly translated by Harriet de Onis. It won
France's
Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger.
James Baldwin's second novel shows an increase in the powers he
demonstrated in
Go Tell It on the Mountain
and in his essays,
Notes
of a Native Son;
notably his ability to work in a swift, dense, saturated
medium like a Poe or a Maupassant. Baldwin leads us no further out
of the pit than the others, but at least he holds his hell
in gran' dispitto,
molding it with great force and economy. I wish he had taken bigger
artistic chances in
Giovanni's Room.
Moral chances he takes in abun–
dance, but having done so falls prey to an itch for documentation that
muffles his best effects. Baldwin's postwar Paris, though a mere handful
of snapshots, is still the best we have had from an English-speaking
writer, the least cliche-ridden.
Giovanni's Room
is certainly, bitterness,
perversion and all, a compelling book, unmistakably alive. Details he
handles frugally and extremely well. Perhaps it's too easy to ask the
impossible, that he take his baleful material a little more for granted.
I'm sorry he had to pay homage to Fitzgerald and introduce the girl
Rella, a symbol that only Fitzgerald could have brought alive. "I can
see her, very elegant, tense, and glittering, surrounded by the light
which fills the salon of the ocean liner, drinking rather too fast, and
laughing, and watching the men." Well, Rella doesn't amount to much.
She exists mainly to be repudiated; the process is too long and banal,
a stunt good but not good enough. So the book is at cross purposes
with itself, distracted by the expectations that homosexuality is expected
to arouse, too willing to throw the reader the sop of a tepid heterosexual
tragedy.
With Bellow we return to the high, dazzling plateau of well-earned
success, where misery, joy, and love join hands and dance like crazy.
The title story of
Seize the Day
is one of the best things PR has had
the luck to publish. What is one to say these days to anything so unlikely
as a brilliantly original story? Bellow is as erudite as Wilson and Car–
pentier. His Wilhelm and Tamkin awake a dozen memories of pure–
hearted literary fools and sinister, subversive Chillingworths. Somehow
he has turned all this to advantage. The story is as wonderful a
portrait of upper-Broadway New York as the first half of
Augie March
was of Chicago. Chicago was richer in physical contrasts-who since
Joyce has rendered the physical city better than Bellow?-but New
York is more coherent and invites a deeper thought. Whatever I find
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