300
PARTISAN REVIEW
Webbs and Shaw. Inescapably, as Kapp admits, her chief interest lies in
her name and heritage. It also lies in her personal tragedy, in the
exemplary nature of her struggles and aspirations.
It
is the same
pattern we find in the lives of other emancipated women fifty and one
hundred years earlier-Charlotte Bronte, Mary Wollstonecraft-the
soul-destroying struggle to find work, the determination to be useful,
the longing for artistic fulfillment, the bitter and probably unresolv–
able conflict between love and work. Her pamphlets and speeches are
not really memorable; the letters have pathos without telling us a great
deal about the writer. But the story is a highly interesting one, and well
deserves the close, loving scrutiny that Kapp devotes to it.
JUDITH CHERNAIK
MOSTLY MUSIC
CURRENT CONVICTIONS.
By
Robert Craft.
Alfred
A.
Knopf. $12.50.
Finishing Robert Craft's most recent book, one is inspired
to ask the simple question-"What is a Book?"-much in the spirit of
Tolstoy's "What is Art," out of uneasiness with what one has just been
through. Like any group of essays which have appeared elsewhere (all
but two in Craft's
Current Convictions
were published in
The New
York Review of Books
between 1974 and 1976), the logic of the book
and the coherence of the essays one to another require resolution if the
essays
qua
book are to be readable or useful as a whole or in part.
Ostensibly, Craft's new volume is about music and composers, mostly
about opera, for the first half deals with Mozart, his operas, Wagner,
Verdi, and Richard Strauss. All but the last third is devoted to
nonoperatic composers-Ravel, Liszt, Schoenberg, and Ives. The end
of the book has no thread, and is a potpourri of essays, about Craft's
watching Mary Hartman, Craft's journey
to
Walt Disney World,
Craft's hernia operation, Craft's corrections of Eliot's punctuation,
Craft's view of the concept of time, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann,
Edvard Munch, and Hegel. In short, this book is either for music lovers
or Robert Craft devotees.
The discussion of Mozart, with which the book starts is typical of
the problems with Craft's writing about music. Perhaps as a result of
