BOOKS
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letters that do not expose the insufficiency of Victorian society by asserting a
violent individuality, but which rather incessantly compliment that society by
connecting and connecting its chosen members. This he did patiently and
well, increasing and blending the sphere of his correspondence . To his family
and friends James offered, then, not only a wealth of introductions, but as
well the reflected harmony of his well-balanced sentences, the copious wealth
ofhis easy wit, his temperate manner. The selfand the world so described is in
fact an idealized picture ofVictorian life: a dance of comprehended functions
in slow time. Everyone was no doubt pleased to get a letter signed, very truly
yours, Henry James.
NEIL SCHMITZ
THE LIVES OF THE POETS
THREE ON THE TOWER: THE LIVES AND WORKS OF EZRA POUND,
T.S. ELIOT, AND WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS. By Louis Simpson.
William Morrow and Company. $12.50.
Louis Simpson has found in one of William James's essays in
Pragmatism
the title of his new book . "Our spirit," James reports, "shut
within this courtyard of sense-experience, is always saying
to
the intellect
upon the tower: 'Watchman, tell us of the night, if it aught of promise
bear.' " I assume the title is ironic: Simpson's chosen watchmen are not
embodiments of the intellect in his account of them, and they have little
to
report; they cannot recite "the story of the night."
It
is not clear who has
appointed them to their posts or what qualifications they have produced for
employment.
Three on the Tower
is biocriticism rather than criticism; it
deals with the lives and works of Pound, Eliot, and Williams on the assump–
tion that the relation between a life and a work is simple : the life issues in
the work, the work is adequately explained by the life . Yeats thought that
the human intellect was forced to choose between two perfections-perfec–
tion of the life and perfection of the work-and he found the choice appal–
ling . He wanted both
I
and, and had
to
settle for either
I
or. Eliot thought
that it was necessary
to
distinguish between the man who suffered and the
