12
PARTISAN REVIEW
was I the first to think that
The Naked and the Dead
was a good novel
in spite of its style?) I would be obliged in my turn to pick up
Malaquais' literary precepts, live with them , wrestle with their intent,
and even absorb one or two while hearing Gide's example cited so
repeatedly during debates on style that I came to feel at last as if I knew
him, or at least knew something of his taste and how his strictures were
formed.
There was nothing slavish about Malaquais, least of all his mind .
He was an intellectual sultan , still is , and so my ongoing education in
the niceties of good writing was not a simple concert of homage to
Gide-Malaquais had for his old employer the comfortable respect we
offer a writer whose virtues are prominent but whose lacks are clear in
our estimate. After any harangue by Malaquais designed to reduce my
truculence toward elegance, severity, and restraint (whiCh virtues were
elevated through all of my friend's dialectic in order to purify the
quality of
surprise
in one 's work-a traditional Gallic presentation
under the very shadow of the great literary chef, Andre G ., himself) ,
my mentor was also perfectly capable of saying in aside, "Of course
when it comes to an analysis ofhistory , Gide is like a school boy . He has
every gift for seizing the paradox of a character-he is virtually the first
to comprehend that character
is
paradox-but give him a social context
and he will lose all instinct for the dialectic ."
On reflection, it was true . Gide did not live with dialectic. His
mind was singularly particular just where Malaquais' was marvelously
abstract. Malaquais had the most powerful ability to move from any
particular offered him into the Leviathan ofhis general theory-he was
not a Marxist for nothing! - and trying to argue in his presence was
analogous to being drawn with one's brain along a magnetic field of
the intellect. Willynilly was one's mind reoriented along one Polish
Frenchman 's poles. Nothing vulgar or bullying about it. Malaquais
loathed formula , propaganda, or any variety of thinking which
deprived a situation of its nuance. So he was capable of advancing a
new thesis, anticipating your objections , stating them with clarity (like
Freud disarming 'his critics) and then would overtake his own verifica–
tion of your position in the return swing of his dialectic. He would do
this with such power that when he argued, the veins in his forehead
would throb as though to demonstrate that the human head was
obliged to be the natural site if not the very phallus ofMind. Malaquais
