280
FREDERICK C. CREWS
We should therefore not be too surprised, when we tum to
Love's Body,
to find that Brown has abandoned propositional argu–
ment for visionary sayings-sayings which aspire to profundity yet
also to childlike freedom from literal-minded intellectualism. "Wis–
dom is in wit, in fooling, most excellent fooling; in play, and not in
heavy puritanical seriousness. In levity, not gravity. My yoke is easy,
my burden
is
light." Throughout
Love's Body
Brown
is
playing with
words: punning, chasing true and false etymologies, self-consciously
relaxing his rational guard. The phrases that get themselves uttered
are full of surprises ("a king is an erection of the body politic") and
no less full of preciosity: "the shellfishness of selfishness." Any reader
of
Love's Body
will find sentences that strike him as sharply true
and others that seem not to go beyond the late
A.
A. Brill's notorious
view of poetry as a chewing and sucking of beautiful words. Like
Emerson-and those who have read Brown's Columbia Phi Beta
Kappa address of 1960, "Apocalypse,"
will
remember that the iden–
tification with Emerson is deep and acknowledged-Brown now dis–
dains transitional logic in favor of quotable, detachable sentences.
As
reviewers have noted, the influence of Marshall McLuhan
is
also
prominent; like McLuhan, Brown seems to waver between scholarship
and showmanship. The orphic tone, the pregnant silences, the pom–
pous footnotes, the "empty words, corresponding to the void in
things"-all have an onstage air. Bravely, Brown has tried to redeem
the latent promise of
Life Against Death
and offer us polymorphous
perversity epitomized in prose. However successful one may judge the
effort to be, it remains an effort, a strained performance.
Brown has not altogether abandoned the rational facade of his
body mysticism. One can even detect a tacit shifting from less defensi–
ble to more defensible ground, specifically from late-Freudian instinct
theory to Kleinian fantasy theory. Melanie Klein's ideas about the
early months of infancy are, of course, widely mistrusted, and
evidence to confirm or disconfirm them is hard to come by; but they
have a whole school of child analysis behind them, and in general
they pose less of an outrage to scientific respectability than do Eros
and Thanatos, which Brown now scarcely mentions. This is not to
say, though, that he has become an empiricist. The work most
frequently cited remains Ferenczi's
Thalassa,
which Brown still pre–
tends to regard as a textbook of evolution; and he has by no means
foresworn his habit of making a scrapbook of all psychoanalytic utter-
