96
PARTISAN REVIEW
proaching the reality of ideas and facts, such independence of judg–
ment, such clarity of perception? Gombrowicz's intellectual bold–
ness, so striking in his
Diary
and still unmatched after more than
three decades, is the boldness of someone who has fought and won a
relentless battle. He himself preferred to define it as a battle for
literary "prominence." But in his case prominence was merely an
outward sign for something more essential: the writer's ultimate
right to speak and be heard . The right that is due to the writer only
when his mind stops at nothing in questioning the world's and its
own self-delusions.
