BOOKS
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reactionary crankiness, on the whole, of her later years. The imaginer
of Lily Bart and the Bunner sisters-the unsparing anatomizer of old
New York and "new money," of aristocratic Europe and Gilded-Age
America-is also capable here of exchanging complaints about the
reliability of servants, of condescending unbearably to the socialism
of a fifty-year-old Upton Sinclair, and of crooning to Kenneth
Clark's wife, at the height of the Great Depression, that "if the old
plutocratic times would only return, how thrilling it would be to
subvention some scholarly young man to do a book on Renaissance
glass . . .
!"
The Scribner's selection forces us to acknowledge, along–
side the heroically self-created Wharton, a Wharton most of us would
prefer to overlook, and that can have only a salutary effect on our
understanding of the many contradictions and anomalies of her char–
acter. Both volumes help enhance an ongoing Wharton resurgence
that discloses to us-as in the case of so many other lately reclaimed
writers among women-a figure far more complex and mercurial
than the one familiar to us from decades of patronizing reductions.
FREDERICK WEGENER
A Polish Intellectual
MY CENTURY. THE ODYSSEY OF A POLISH INTELLECTUAL.
By
Aleksander Wat. With a Foreword
by
Czeslaw Milosz. Translated
by
Richard Lourie. University of California Press. $45.00.
WITH THE SKIN. POEMS OF ALEKSANDER WAT. Translated and
edited
by
Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan. The Ecco Press. $17.95.
More than twenty years after his death, Aleksander Wat looms large not
merely as one of the most important Polish poets of this century but as
an author who still has an exceptionally urgent message to convey. His
life, which coincided with the first two-thirds of our century (1900-
1967), is a study in contrasts.
It
included such disparate experiences as a
childhood spent devouring books in a well-to-do Jewish family in War–
saw and an old age spent in exile; early prominence as an outrageous
Futurist poet and later expertise in the semantics of communism; a posi–
tion as a fellow-traveler in the 1930s and time served in numerous Soviet
prisons in the 1940s; years of brilliance as a poet, editor, and translator,
and years of prolonged attacks of unbearable physical pain, which finally
pushed him to suicide.
The farther we are from Wafs death, the more light the beacon of
