476
PARTISAN REVIEW
His poetry is not our main concern here, except in one respect. I have
noticed-have painfully wrestled with the same disease in myself-that
modern writers of the European Left whose talents, interests, and energies
are both "artistic" and intellectual, who oscillate between fiction, poetry,
or drama on the one hand, and the political-ideological essay on the other,
do tend
to
banish all artistry, all humor, indeed all humility from the harsh,
flat, remorselessly rationalist prose by which they expose the scandalous dis–
parity between the real and the ideal. Sartre, it is true, brought an artist's
insights and recognizable human smells to the pages of
Saint Genet
and
Being and Nothingness,
but Brecht, the modern German writer with the
most profound impact on Enzensberger, hurried from the quick, physical,
colloquial atmosphere of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm
to
his study,
where he indulged in the relaxation of confiding to his notebook dry and
categorical dogmas that no actress could possibly absorb and yet remain
sane. (As he knew.)
This is Enzensberger's problem, too: a prose in search of a truly human
future, but without a truly human phrase. The theoretician keeps the poet
at arm's length; instead of "he lolls in the supermarket/under the plastic
sun / the white patches on his face /are rage, not consumption" (the opening
lines of' .portrait of a house detective") the essayist Enzensberger writes:
Or:
The conuadictions which the ecological ideologies attempt to suppress
in their global rhetoric emerge all the more shatply the more one takes
their prognoses and demands at their face value .
The proposition concerning the nonsirnultaneity of the simultaneous is
realized by uaining the clientele to become a vanguatd.
Words which bear, roughly, the same relationship to the people sweating
behind their iron mask as chess pieces do
to
real peons and adventurers on
horseback.
Despite his immense intelligence and-my prejudices announce–
generally impeccable political judgment, this challengingly gifted poet
seems
to share the general Left Continental horror of acknowledging that a
question of taste, in poetry as well as food, is quite liable to be just a
ques–
tion of taste.
In
his essay "Poetry and Politics," for example, he cites several
examples of sickeningly sycophantic poetry from the time of Plato to Johannes
Becher's eulogy to Stalin, then hurries
to
insist: "The root of the scandal
does not lie where it is usually sought: it lies neither in the person of him
