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PARTISAN REVIEW
memoirs she worked at on and off for years. For getting at the buried
past, Bogan relies heavily on visual recall as if focusing on her
mother's hands peeling an apple will presumably evoke a corre–
sponding emotion. But the prose pieces (posthumously edited by
Ruth Limmer, in 1980, as
Journey Around
My
Room)
lack the magic of
that cup of tea that turned out to hold all Combray. The obsessive
attention to the look of remembered things ends up feeling not only
forcedly literary and derivative but, however elegant, like a kind of
avoidance: despite concentration on appearances, the essential emo–
tion still proves evanescent.
When Bogan's
The Blue Estuaries: Poems
1923-1968 was reissued
in 1977, Adrienne Rich hoped that we would "take a fresh look at
[Bogan] against the remarkable tradition of female poetry in Amer–
ica." Such a look is one that on the whole Elizabeth Frank doesn't
take in this book. Given some of the factitious constructs of female
tradition recently posited, Frank's choice isn't wholly regrettable;
certainly her sensible, low-key manner is refreshing. Yet one wants
to know more about this hooded woman. Bogan's deepest silences
seem to emanate from, to surround or shield her sexual core. There
are a few tantalizing clues: Bogan's remark that women wrote poetry
with their ovaries and hence dried up at forty is one, and her early
poem "Women," written as ifby an alien observer of the female sex if
not the human race, is another. Do these fragmentary reflections
lead us toward or away from the center of Bogan's sense of what it
meant to be a writer who was also a woman? This biography, at any
rate, does not tell us; perhaps none could . The image that stays with
me is that of the swan, its eyes in hiding, and, in "The Mark," of the
slow apples falling "unbidden, not at call" -like Bogan's precious,
recalcitrant poems?
RACHEL HADAS
THE POLITICS OF TASTE
DISTINCTION. A SOCIAL CRITIQUE OF THE JUDGEMENT OF TASTE.
By Pierre Bourdleu. Harvard University Press. $29.50.
Philosophers and sociologists have different modes of ex–
plicating human behavior. Their perspectives seem to contradict one
