PARTISAN REVIEW
127
yet to write about the experience in such a way that it adds no single
significant cultural detail to the instruction we take from -- say -- the
movie
Cabaret.
Only less momentous is Mrs. Tillich's capacity to have
been associated, as the wife of the eminent German-American theolo–
gian, Paul Tillich, with some of the best minds of our century and yet
write like this :
Although Carl's breath was foul, nobody minded. Lotte and I loved
his spiritual being. When he described to us in detail his sexual
relationship with another girl, whom we knew, we drank it in as the
message of one poet to anoi:her. Carl read us innumerable poems of
cosmic import. He put one of my poetic images into one of them,
on the assumption that I would be proud to give
him
something of
my
imagination. I was. Once, I wrote twelve poems about a cosmic
couple and their individuation. Carl read it and sighed -- he could
never finish anything.
The passage is typical.
As to the sex life of Hannah Tillich apart from her marriage to Paul
or Paulus, as he apparently was called, or of Paulus apart from Hannah,
or of the two of them together, Mrs. Tillich would have us know (what
other purpose has her book, indeed?) that it was most untheologically
varied, orgiastic, sub lime, and sordid; among its features she includes her
husband's practice, at least in h is late years, of projecting on a screen in
his home large pictu res of naked girls being whipped on the Cross.
Perhaps with the appearance of Mr. Nicolson's
Portrait of a Marriage
and
Mrs. Tillich's
From Time to Time
a new category of nonfiction has been
born : confessions on behalf of someone else, preferably perverse and
dead.
If
so, may we be lucky enough to be given our revelations, as in the
Nicolson instance, unembellished by poetical aspiration and specious
sensibility.
Diana Trilling
In homage to the celebrated film by Luis Buf\uel, the
Royal Film Archive of Brussels has created the L'Age
d'Or Prize, amounting to 100.000 BF. This Prize Is to be
given each year to a fictional film whose Inventive and
cinematographic qualities show evidence of a free–
thinking and subversive spirit, comparable, for our time,
with Buf\uel's In 1930.
Royal Film Archive of Belgium
Palals des Beaux-Arts / Ravenstein 23 / 1000 Brussels
