2'6
PARTISAN REVIEW
laboration with mind is generally thought to have a profound effect
on individual destinies. The tendency to attribute everything that hap–
pens in the heavens, from flying saucers to Florida's cold wave, to
science and the bomb ("Why don't they stop," said an old lady on the
bus behind me the other day, "they don't know what they're doing")
accounts for the extreme ways in which the scientist is regarded
in
our culture: either as a protective savior or as a destructive blunderer.
It is little wonder that America exalts the physician (and the football
player) and ignores the physicist. These issues, the issues of the great
debate over scientific education and basic research, assert themselves
crudely through the unwieldy monster and the Mad Doctor. The films
suggest that the academic scientist, in exploring new areas, has laid
the human race open to devastation either by human or interplanetary
enemies-the doctor's madness, then, is merely a suitable way of ex–
pressing a conviction that the scientist's idle curiosity has shaken itself
loose from prudence or principle. There is obviously a sensitive moral
problem involved here, one which needs more articulate treatment than
the covert and superstitious way it is handled in horror movies. That
the problem is touched there at all is evidence of how profoundly it
has
stirred the American psyche.
Robert Brustein
New
Borzoi
Books
of
uncomlnon
interest
Allil0
THE OrlEN SEA
And Other Poems
By WILLIAM MEREDITH
"Meredith is an expert writer ... His intelligent
poems, unlike most poems, have a character
behind them, one that is solitary, gray, dignified
and
'Spanish'."-Robert Lowell
$3.50
THlE rOWlER
Of lffilACKNlE§§
Hawthorne, Poe, Melville
By HARRY LEVIN
A searching reinterpretation of the classic
American masters of fiction -maintaining that
the characteristic mode of American writing
is
not the realistic novel, but the imaginative,
symbolic romance.
$4.00
ALFRED A. KNOPF,
Publisher
