110
WILLIAM ABRAHAMS
ultra
of womanly beauty. This spring, Libby could hardly wait
for the first pussy willows for those picnics to start again.
Miss McCarthy's mastery of the intonations and vocabulary of what
one might call "educated-banal" is a remarkable
tour de force,
sustained
as it is for almost four hundred pages. Only very rarely does she
falter in her discipline: then the
author
enters, and one hears: "Libby's
red open mouth, continually gabbling, was like a running wound in the
middle of her empty face." Or, describing Norine: "Her eyes, which
were a light golden brown, were habitually narrowed, and her hand–
some blowzy face had a plethoric look, as though darkened by clots
of thought." At such moments one is forcibly reminded of what has
been sacrified to obtain the virtuoso style-that-is-no-style of
The Group.
William Abrahams
POETRY AND TRUTH
FINAL SOLUTIONS. Poems by Frederick Seidel. Rendom House. New
York. $3.75.
POEMS 2. By Alen DUgM. Yllie University Press. $3 .50.
NEW POEMS. By Robert Grllves. DoubledllY, New York. $2.95.
Mr. Seidel lives between two w,orlds. The burden of Jewish–
ness, or of the past itself, encroaches on the blander, more liberal future.
Both past and present are unreal to him, the past an abstract fate, the
present an abstract freedom. Born too late to identify actively with what
happened to his people, he cannot any better identify with the "Greek"
culture of Harvard. Even Harlem is preferable to Harvard, at least the
exotic Harlem he imagines. But there is no "final s,olution": his problem
(and the so-called Jewish question) is simply that of consciousness
in
extremis.
Because a poet lives this, it affects speech in its essence. His dis–
turbance reaches into the activity of signification itself. It is not, however,
easy to tell whether the disturbance is the poet's own or that of his
personae. Many of the poems in this volume are dramatic monologues,
but others are simply indirect monologues. There is, in any case, a flow
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