138
PARTISAN REVIEW
Communists may all be true, and the aims set forth in the statement of
policy are wholly admirable . The
Lion
wishes to support 'His Majesty
the King , his heirs and Religion.' These are cardinal points . We would
only suggest that the British Lion might very well uphold these things
without dressing itself up in an Italian collar. It is not our business
to
criticize fascism, as an Italian regime for Italians, a product of the Italian
mind. But is
The British Lion
prepared
to
accept
Ie jascisme integral?
What of the fascist ideas of political representation, which may be ex–
cellent, but which hardly square with 'the present Constitution' which
the
Lion
is sworn
to
defend?
It
seems unfortunate that a nationalist
organization should have had
to
go abroad for its name and its symbol.
This comes in
The Criterion,
February 1928, Vol. VII, No . ii, pp. 97-98.
Eliot is twisting that lion's tale, not feeding the beast or extracting thorns
from its foot. I have quoted the whole passage and made a fuss about
Simpson's sentence because many readers are likely to take his word for the
sitl)ation without going to the source , and the effect is bound to be mis–
leading. What Eliot thought of fascism is a long story, and it has been well
told now by William Chase, but the gist is that Eliot thought it an Italian
invention for Italians, deplorable when exported to countries with entirely
different histories and traditions ; intellectually, fascism was rubbish;
"humbug" was Eliot's word for it . To revert to Simpson's Eliot : it ends , I
am sorry to report, with a nauseating page in which Simpson ascribes to
Eliot on a Caribbean beach a
monologue interieur
about clouds, shadows,
and Valerie splashing about in the water.
There is no Caribbean stuff in the chapter on Williams . But none of
these men, according to the rhetoric of Simpson's book, should be hired to
look out from a watchtower. They were all, in different degrees, silly like us;
generously foolish and naive about art, priggishly foolish about religion,
pretty slaphappy about experience. Simpson is himself a celebrated poet,
and therefore he may not find the ways of imagination as strange as I do . He
and I would agree that there is some relation between
The Waste Land
and
Eliot's unhappy marriage . Our difference is that he thinks you can make a
safe biocritical leap from the marriage to the poem and that the more you
know about the marriage the safer the leap becomes; while I think that the
gap between the marriage and the poem is always absolute , and that by
definition it stays absolute no matter how much you learn about the mar–
riage . Simpson is on more intimate terms with the imagination than I am,
but the danger of that intimacy is that he reduces the poem to the marriage ,
as if the imagination merely took dictation from the facts of the case.
This has become a more quarrelsome review than I had anticipated . A
last word: Simpson encourages the reader to think that these three watch–
men were pretty ordinary fellows. I think they were extraordinary cases of
the ordinary , and most extraordinary in one respect : their poetic imagin–
ations.
DENIS DONOGHUE
