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PARTISAN REVIEW
novels into an experience of substances as diverse as gauzy fabric
(the swirls and loops of Morrison's prose), an enamelled ornament
(Tournier's meticulous calligraphy), or a cubist composition (Mat–
hews's infallibly crisp placement). But these are matters of surface;
the difficult substance beneath, relatively homogeneous and unde–
niably tragic, is perhaps most beautifully expressed near the close of
Cigarettes,
as the narrator ponders the relation of the past to the
present:
I was only beginning to learn that the dead stay everlastingly
present among us, taking the form of palpable vacancies that
only disappear when, as we must, we take them into ourselves.
We take the dead inside us; we fill their void with our own sub–
stance; we become them . The living dead do not belong to a race
of fantasy, they constitute the inhabitants of our earth. The
longer we live, the more numerous the inviting holes death
opens in our lives and the more we add to the death inside us ,
until at last we embody nothing else. And when we in turn die ,
those who survive embody us, the whole of us, our individual
selves and the crowd of dead men and women we have carried
within us.
For
dead
read, at times,
truth
or simply
past-and
there you have the
essence beautifully and variously captured by these four works of fic–
tion. The novel is alive and well and living in Paris-and in Rome,
and Saratoga, and New York, and Cincinnati, and wherever our
memories take us.
RACHEL HADAS
THE OTHER WEST INDIAN POET
X/SELF. By Edward Brathwaite. Oxford University Press. $9.95.
Edward Brathwaite is the
other
West Indian poet.
Throughout the English-speaking Caribbean, the poetic activity of a
generation has been shaped by two masters: Brathwaite and his ex–
act contemporary Derek Walcott. In North America, however, Wal–
cott is familiar (one anthology even adopts him as a "New York
poet"), while Brathwaite's name is hardly known outside Black Stud–
ies circles. Yet
X/Self
completes his second poetic trilogy, and he has
