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PARTISAN REVIEW
ficult to locate in the apparatus, which becomes strangely bloated in the
treatment of this passage. The rejected text, which included the first de–
scription of Mario's mother, is worth seeking out, especially since it has
never before appeared in print.
"Human nature," Santayana writes in this passage, "is engaged in an
elaborate suicide. To be simple, sane, and humble is to be a blackleg in
the great trades union of strivers and busybodies who are sworn to make
an artificial organism of everything. Now you, Vanny, dare to live, no
matter on what level, as if living were the most natural thing in the
world." The "strivers and busybodies" effectively impose a model of
identity that places a premium on an isolating and morally aggrandizing
commitment to duty and work, whereas Jim Darnley, Mario (Vanny)
Van de Weyer, and Oliver Alden, the latter in aspiration but not, sadly,
in actual fact, reflect an alternative model of identity, one that seeks to
open the self to less constrained and compulsory qualities of experience.
The Last Puritan
is full of lessons on the trials and triumphs - alas, mostly
the former - of daring to live "as if living were the most natural thing in
the world," and this critical edition provides a rich and definitive textual
environment in which to learn them.
JONATHAN LEVIN
