294
PARTISAN REVIEW
There are some things wrong with
The Eighth Sin.
The stereo–
typed Mordecai, elderly spreader of Yiddish ("All else fell before
Mordecai's will. ... The French launderer had a sign:
shmatte
in by
12:00, out by 6:00."), is more like a bit than a characterization. And the
ending of the book scuttles its own seriousness at the last moment,
allowing a two-ton coincidence to sink its subtlety. Yet the intelligence
behind this novel is alive and impressive. There is a range of reference
and breadth of perception which gives a rich texture to Benoit's
complex thought processes and offers serious readers the air they
deserve
to
breathe. Like
A Family Album, The Eighth Sin
has a design,
a chapter apiece assigned
to
the seven deadly sins, but unlike
A Family
Album,
the design in this case is so fully absorbed by the story that we
digest it rather than refer to it as a frame; it is a sophisticated, natural,
and important scheme.
The Eighth Sin
is about important things, and
the author not only respects his subject but is equal to it. He is a writer
in whom thought, feeling, wit, and conscience are highly evolved, the
only writer of these four who combines a passion for exactness of
language with the passion to bear witness to the truth.
LYNN LURIA-SUKENICK
TWO WOMEN
ELEANOR MARX. By Yvonne Kapp.
Pantheon. Volume I, $10. Volume
II, $17.95.
THE DIARY OF VIRGINIA WOOLF. Volume I: 1915-1 919. Edited by
Anne Olivier Bell.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $12.95.
A MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS. By George Spater and Ian Parsons.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $12.95.
Virginia Woolf liked to juxtapose pairs of figures in her
critical essays: Maria Edgeworth and Laetitia Pilkington, Mary Woll–
stonecraft and Dorothy Wordsworth. What would she have made of the
parallels between her own life and that of a woman as different in her
origins, temperament, and achievement as Eleanor Marx? Though they
walked the same London stre.ets and knew some of the same people–
Shaw, Beatrice Webb, Edward and Constance Garnett-it comes as a
surprise to learn that one life sketch could serve for either.
