BOO KS
503
ful revolt fortunately reminds us that, all kidding aside, we need to find
some compromise between banality and the loss of freedom.
The language of these plays is lofty and pure. It reflects the com–
plaint Camus once lodged against our time : "For the dialogue we have
substituted the communique." The dramatist sets out to remedy this
situation, but his dialogue tends to become, especially in
The Just As–
sassins
and
State of Siege,
a formal exchange of weighty remarks which
too clearly expose the dramatist's designs on us. Hardly anyone else in
the modern theater lectures us quite so directly.
If
Arthur Miller con–
ceives of the dramatist as a public speaker, he indicates some embarrass–
ment at this role. In
The Crucible,
he conceals his public speaking in the
awkwardness of his adaptation of seventeenth-century speech. Elsewhere,
his tongue-tied orators salt their remarks with reminders of their semi–
literacy : "Nobody dast blame this man." But Camus addresses us
in
the
most elevated language he can write. The result has its merits as oratory
and as dialectic, but it is deficient as drama.
The defect of Camus's plays bring to mind the virtues of his fiction,
in which the method of narration always keeps us from colliding too
abruptly with his themes and, above all, his ideas. This rationale surely
underlies the impersonality of
The Stranger
and
The Plague,
as well as
the highly subjective narration of
The Fall
and "The Renegade." The
danger of becoming a pamphleteer in fiction must have been clear to
Camus and must have compelled him to use technique as a shield for
his ideas. But, in his plays, collisions are head-on; except
in
Caligula,
we miss the theater's equivalents for the sophisticated method of his fic–
tion.
Henry Popkin
POETRY CHRONICLE
HEART'S NEEDLE. By W. D. Snodgr"ss. Alfred A. Knopf. $3 .75.
THE SENSE OF MOVEMENT. By Thorn Gunn. The University of Chic"go
Press. $2,75.
OF THE FESTIVITY. By Wil\i"m Dickey. Y"le University Press. $3.50.
W. D. Snodgrass may very well have written, in
Heart's
Needle,
the strongest first book of poems in fifteen years. I set this date
to the appearance of Robert Lowell's
Land of Unlikeness;
it is inter–
esting, and perhaps characteristic of two rapidly shifting eras, that while
Lowell's book had found a unique and personal tone of voice which
nobody else seemed then even faintly interested in reaching, Snodgrass
