608
RICHARD WILBUR
then claim that it has, through the example, proved something greater.
Not that art must always
be
slave to logic; but engaged
art,
to
the
extent that it presents a specific political position, must limit its claims
to what it has rationally demonstrated, if it is to serve as a valid social
force and not degenerate into an intellectual style of demagoguery.
But however we may reject Sartre's pretension of making the story
of a torturer "answer for the century," for the West, and for France,
the intellectual drama and brooding guilt of this complex and powerful
play will persist. We are not all torturers- not yet, at least-but to say
that we are not as guilty as Frantz leaves us still guilty and still to
be
judged by the future, even
if
that future is one we have destroyed.
No one will emerge from this play feeling absolved. Perhaps for just
a brief moment Sartre may make us realize that we actually are respon–
sible for our lives.
Richard Wilbur
THE FIGURE IN THE ROSE-RED GOWN
SHIP OF FOOLS. By Kotherine Anne Porter. Little, Brown and Compony.
$6.50.
Having for years endured something like the fate of a good
poet, that is, much neglect from the book industry and its public, much
praise from the best critics, Katherine Anne Porter must now, it seems,
endure the opposite. Those twenty-two stories that came from thirty
years or so of writing-"I have written and destroyed manuscripts quite
literally by the trunkload"--earned respect almost as much for the
unexploited devotion and restraint of their author as for their artistry.
Edmund Wilson expressed this in his review of
The Leaning Tower
in
1944. The language of these few stories, he wrote, was "of a purity
and precision almost unique in contemporary American fiction," and
he concluded by quoting, in tribute to her, her own credo of the artist
who must, despite neglect and the world's disorder, work on alone to
perfect his small objects. Today,
Ship of Fools,
a novel of almost five
hundred pages, inspires its publishers to buy large spaces for hysterical,
strangely old-fashioned advertisements conveying the most damning
information. "AN ASTOUNDING RECORD. SHIP OF FOOLS
be–
came the nation's #1 best seller more quickly than any other novel in
a decade. SHIP OF FOOLS has been purchased for a record sum for
a major motion picture production by Stanley Kramer. SHIP OF
