486
PARTISAN REVIEW
version of Eliot? He is impressed with Eliot's gift for poetic compression,
his capacity for making an art of anti-Semitism. Has Julius succumbed,
despite the vigor of his attack, to what Primo Levi in a quite different con–
text characterizes as "the lechery of aestheticism." Julius's regard for Eliot
makes the reader question the moral indignation that animates the book.
Whether or not you believe Julius's account, the logic of his exposition is
that Eliot must be condemned and rejected. Perhaps the gesture of respect
at the end reflects a realization that he has gone too far.
Genius does not exempt a poet from scrutiny of the moral and polit–
ical character of his work, but it requires a less tendentious judgment than
the one Julius provides.
EUGENE GOODHEART
Possessed
By
Love
LOVE, AGAIN.
By
Doris
Lessing.
HarperCollins. $24.00
The title of Doris Lessing's latest novel refers, most apparently,
to
her
heroine's reluctant re-experience of emotions she had thought, at sixty–
five, to have put well behind her. Sarah Durham finds that she can stiJ I burn
with desire, writhe with sexual jealousy, grieve at love's frustration-and
no less than when she was young. She is not ready for the acquiescence of
Colette's Lea who lets herself go gently into loveless age in
The Last of
Cheri.
The title also refers ,
I
think,
to
Lessing's latest novel itself as
nOllel,
that literary form which includes so much besides a love story but often
seems to express the whole of human destiny by means of a "romance"–
a word with cognates in other languages (German or French
Roman)
that
mean what we do by the word "novel." Novelists must, it seems, always
write about love, however much other subjects, other kinds of human
experience, claim their primacy. Yet, after all her own efforts in previous
books to show how sexual passion is woven into the web of social experi–
ences, Lessing submits in her latest to the tunnel vision of the
love-possessed. She has laid aside her habitual concern-in nearly twenty
long fictions-to find a total vision of human history through either real–
ist chronicle or prophetic fantasy.
Sarah Durham's very time of life puts her beyond the struggles of
youth and early maturity when sex involves the challenges of marriage and
