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PARTISAN REVIEW
style and in its conclusions, it stands in a paradoxical relation to
Hannah Arendt's
The Origins of Totalitarianism.
From the latter book,
impassioned and lyrical, emerges a picture of nightmarish police
efficiency, applied to utterly diabolic and wild ends; from the former,
we get a picture of barely averted chaos, struggling with realistic ends
such as production and rearmament. Dr. Mead's interdisciplinary analysis
in terms of social structure and motivation may tend to over-interpret
Soviet officialdom as, not "just like us," but as understandably different
-too understandably; whereas Dr. Arendt's more mystical insistence
on the savagery of the society may slightly overestimate the power of
men permanently to transform their victims into beasts: the relatively
undestroyed humanity of major elements in the Soviet population is
for me the most encouraging conclusion of the Mead book. Thus, in
spite of mutual suspicion and ceaseless fear of betrayal precisely by those
who are most close to one, friendship seems not wholly to have perished
but even at times to appear as a defense against the terror. Yet, how
long, one wonders, can the long-suffering Russians hold out
in
the face
of the psychological warfare their leaders and police have conducted
against them for a generation?
David Riesman
THE POETRY OF HORACE GREGORY
SELECTED POEMS OF HORACE GREGORY. Viking . $3.00.
Horace Gregory's poetry has changed a lot in the twenty
years or more represented in this selection. There were always a
number of different strains in it, hard to reconcile; because of his
professional skill the variations in quality from the very best to the
poems which seem to me not so good may not appear to be as
extreme as they really are, and this may be deluding when you come
to assess it all; and the selection isn't big enough.
There are forty-six poems, about half of them new; many of the
new ones are very good, but there ought to be more from his other
books, though probably not from
Chelsea Rooming House
(
1930) .
Like everyone but Eliot he had a terrible time with the modem city.
New York
is
horrible and something apocalyptic ought to happen to
it, as it's always happening to the items of a city in poems; but in
America at least, and so far, the cities just go on, getting worse all the
time, and people keep right on living in them. Cummings handled
the low-life part of it better, with his affinity and contempt for it,
like the
Daily News.
Revisions show that Mr. Gregory has recognized
