Vol. 46 No. 3 1979 - page 470

470
PARTISAN REVIEW
after their collaboration took hold, the composer courted the writer
with the desperation of one who knows his very creativity is at stake.
The correspondence also gives us a glimpse of Zweig's depression and
his fantasied resolution through rescue and world peace. In 1934,
having completed work on
The Silent Woman,
at Strauss' urging,
Zweig sent him a plot, which was set in a German fortress under siege
during the Thirty Years'War. When all hope is lost the commander and
his loyal wife prepare to die together in a "heroic-tragic mood" but are
saved by the arrival of word of the Peace of
West~halia.
In 1942 no
rescuing message came when Zweig and his wife killed themselves in
Brazilian exile, a fitting symbolic end
to
what Gershom Scholem has
called the nondialogue of Germans and Jews in German culture.
PETER
LOEWENBERG
THE VOICES OF DICKEY
THE ZODIAC. By James Dickey.
Doubleday and Company. $6.00.
James Dickey's
The Zodiac
is a poem about the obsessions
of a ruined man's poetry. As Dickey tells us in an introductory note, it
is based on a poem of the same title by Hendrik Marsman, who was
killed by a torpedo in the North Atlantic in 1940.
It
is not, however, a
translation, but an original poem. Its twelve sections tell of a drunk,
perhaps dying Dutch poet who returns to Amsterdam and "tries
desperately to relate himself, by means of stars, to the universe."
But I want to come back with the secret
with the poem
That links up my balls and the strange, silent words
Of God his scrambled zoo and my own words
The poem's twelve parts cover a night of fairly benign delirium, the
lost, because starless, time of daylight during which the poet pays a
visit to his boyhood home, and a night that includes an unavailing
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