290
PARTISAN REVIEW
the Communist Party, but unlike those whose break has been com–
plete, he is still a Marxist and, despite his mild criticism of the Soviet
Union, can scarcely be considered an anticommunist.
Octavio Paz is in a different realm. He is not only an enor–
mously gifted poet, but also one of the few surviving men ofletters–
a dying breed excellently described in John Gross's book,
The Rise
and Fall of the Man of Letters
-
with a universal mind and a disdain for
fashionable thinking.
His new book is a collection of essays dealing with a number of
central historical and political subjects .
It
does not include any liter–
ary essays, though Paz is a superb critic. There are essays on Europe,
on America, which he calls the imperial democracy, on the Soviet
Union, which he refers to as the totalitarian empire, and several
essays on Latin America. All of them are marked not only by an
awareness and sophistication about the political state of the world,
and a kind of surgical objectivity, but also by what might be called a
melancholy and lofty wisdom. He reminds one of such men ofletters
as Orwell and Trilling, in his ability to grasp the essence of cultural
history and to transcend political details by reaching for those gen–
eralizations that illuminate the life of a whole country and an entire
epoch. Surrounded as we are by platitudes and generalities and the
warped messages of intellectual propagandists, it somewhat tempers
one's pessimism and despair about the state of cultural life to find
someone of Paz's stature still among us.
At the very least, Paz's humanism and his clarity about the
totalitarian menace is refreshing. He has no illusions and spreads no
false hopes about the Soviet Union, or Cuba, or Nicaragua. But he
also lifts the discussion to a more panoramic view of the contempo–
rary world.
Thus, in comparing Russia and America, he goes beyond the
obvious differences between a brutal police state and a democracy.
He sees the Soviet Union as essentially a static society (quoting Cas–
toriadis's characterization of it as bureaucratic stasis) and has little
hope of a peaceful transformation. On the other hand, his view of
America as a land of perpetual change is quite suggestive, summing
up as it does the faults and the virtues of American society, both in
its cultural life and in its foreign policy. And while he counters the
anti-American myths about this country, he is not reticent, and is
quite perceptive, in noting the weakness of our shifting actions in in–
ternational affairs and in pointing to the abysmal effects of the media
