780
PARTISAN REVIEW
have been drawn more to the great Russian and European novelists
than to the English writers, and, as I wrote in a 1949
Commentary
symposium,
The Jewish Writer and the English Literary Tradition,
the
Holocaust forced us to recognize that the Anglo-Saxon literary tradi–
tion was not necessarily our own . We belong to the larger Western
tradition .
William Phillips has edited
Partisan Review
since its inception . H is
memoir,
A Partisan View,
has recently been published by Stein and Day.
Muriel Spark
ON LOVE
There are many types of love. In ancient Greece from
whence all ideas flow, there were seven main words for love. Mater–
nal love is like, but not the same as, love of country or love between
friends . And love of fellow men and women , which the old Bible
called charity , is also something akin to these but different .
What I'm writing about here is exclusively the love we mean
when we are "in love"; and it includes a certain amount of passion
and desire, a certain amount of madness while it lasts . Its main
feature is that you cannot argue about it . The most unlikely people
may fall in love with each other; their friends, amazed, look for the
reason . This is useless; there is no reason . The lovers themselves
may try to explain it: "her beautiful eyes," "his lovely manners, his
brains," and so on . But these claims never fit the case comprehen–
sively . For love is inexplicable . It is something like poetry. Cer–
tainly, you can analyze it and expound its various senses and inten-
