144
PARTISAN REVIEW
I,it,was,that,saw,
God,dancing,on,phosphorescent,toes,
Among,the,strawberries,
which one does not even have to be an admirer of the poetry of
Gregory Corso to appreciate. But any real progress that might have
survived Mr. Villa's (admittedly underivative) typographical aberration
is swamped in further indulgence in what charity could at best charac–
terize as eccentricity.
John Hollander
A WORLD THAT NEVER MADE HIM
CHILD OF OUR TIME. By Michel del Cllstillo. Knopf. $3.75.
Oxford University Press. London. 30s.
Anyone who has ever had the experience of reading nothing
but newspapers and current magazines for an extended period of time
begins, at some point, to feel that it's all up with the human spirit–
the endless deluge of facts, the incessant reiteration of crisis, the dead
weight of material circumstances begin to seem simply too much to bear.
The office of journalism is the recording of these facts, and it analyzes
and discusses them with the general intention of accommodation-it tries
to tell us how we are to live with what has recently happened, how, as
we like to say, we are to adjust ourselves to the ever-changing and ever–
demanding external world. In our time, novels have more and more
tended to define life in this journalistic way, to conceive of our internal
identity as being perpetually formed and reformed under the pressure
of large cultural and political events. No group of novels represents this
tendency more plainly than those which have been written in the last
few years about young people and often by young people-e.g. Franc;oise
Sagan and all her imitators and successors.
The characters in such books are awfully knowing and consciously
self-possessed and speak in a wearily epigrammatic style. They have
learned to lisp their numbers by reading translations of Haiku instead
of
Mother Goose; Bonjour Tristesse
has been their
Little Women
and
The Catcher in the Rye
their
Water Babies.
They are the wise and
tired virgins; and they are obsessed with age, their own "old" age. They
are young people for whom life has been too much since they were in
their cradles, and they pass from childhood directly into premature
senility.
;.., _ .
.J.~
