496
PARTISAN REVIEW
"more light! more light!" and fearful blackness, that structure his
vision and correspond to Merrill's thoroughgoing dualism.
What enables Merrill and Hecht to keep circling their beloved
themes is that sense of creative leisure, of unhurried and unforced
aesthetic contemplation, that the Roman poets called
otium.
Leisure
translates into pleasure: write about only what you care about. And
although the monuments Howard Moss has chosen to write about
clearly mean pleasure for him, the sense of happy serendipitousness,
of a match of temperaments between writer and subject that
distinguishes
Obbligati
and
Recitative,
is absent from
Minor Monuments.
Too much space in the collection is devoted to reviews of
biographies-surely an approach too far removed from the text,
though the genre can be transcended, as in Merrill's essay on
Cavafy, Hecht's on Lowell, or indeed Moss's on Whitman. But it's
where there is no prior agenda to evaluate or retell that Moss is at his
wonderfully acute and sensitive best as a reader, as in the essays on
"Three Sisters" and
Anna Karenina.
Talking of temperaments, an underlying bleakness surfaces in
the subtitles of some of these pieces: "A Pinched Existence," "Go–
ing to Pieces," "Good Poems, Sad Lives," "No Safe Harbor."
Supremely sane and sensible, Moss is sometimes rather sad himself.
I came to miss the exuberance of Merrill's airy ironies or Hecht's
organ-toned invective: Moss is never nasty, but has a mildly ir–
ritating habit of taking away with one hand what he's been giving
(and will finish his essay by continuing to bestow) by the armful. He
describes Cavafy's accomplishment, then begins a new paragraph,
"But that accomplishment seems to me peculiarly patchy," only
to
return to praise. Auden is called "one of the five or six supremely in–
telligent people on earth." Next paragraph: "But in spite of his
brilliance, something always seemed to me
to
be missing."
I'm doomed
to
repeat that observation: despite Moss's flawless
style, vast intelligence, and perspicacious readings , something seems
to be missing from these pieces. Possibly-writing under unotiose
conditions of assignment and deadline-Moss has been forced to
adhere to an uninspiring "conscientious thoroughness along pro–
jected lines of logic. " This phrase is from the penultimate paragraph
of one of the gems of poets' prose in America, Robert Frost's "The
Figure a Poem Makes ." I imagine Moss, Merrill, and Hecht would
be unanimous in their wish to give Frost the last word:
Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the
