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PARTISAN REVIEW
symbolism, parody, tragi-comedy, burlesque and lyric prose, or, like
several others, to take the kind of elegiac attitude toward the present,
or toward childhood, which organizes both criticism and creative work
under a guiding and tempering idea. Our Alexandrian fate is merely
dismal
if
we think only of Bentley and Rhymer, but fairly cheerful
if
we think of Mr. Jarrell. As he shows so well in his criticism, it can be
an exhilarating as well as an exhausting position. But it is in their
criticism itself rather than by broad appeals
ad hominem,
that critics will
persuade their readers to read the minor masterpieces and to practice the
humane virtues.
R. W. Flint
FICTION CHRONICLE
THE IDOLS AND THE PREY. By John Goodwin. Horpers. $3 .50.
THE BOLD SABOTEURS. By Chondler Brossord. Forror, Strous ond Young.
$3 .50.
THE SLEEPING BEAUTY. By Elizobeth Toylor. Viking. $3 .00.
THE CATALANS. By Potrick O'Brion. Horcourt, Broce. $3 .50.
THE SISTERS MATERASSI. By Aldo Polozzeschi. Doubledoy. $3 .50.
For several decades it has been fashionable for novelists to
discern metaphysical import and matter for fiction in the spectacle of
effete Westerners-almost infallibly of Anglo-Saxon origin-disintegrat–
ing, or, rarely, finding salvation amid exotic and primitive surroundings.
Of late the novels of the neo-primitive school have lacked variety, as if
imagination had failed or the fictional possibilities of the material had
been temporarily exhausted. Its classics are
South Wind
and
The Plumed
Serpent:
ironic amusement at the shifts to which Western Man can
be reduced when confronted by a civilization incomprehensible to him
but some way or other better, or an apocalypse in which the good life
to be secured within that civilization is figured forth. All that the imita–
tors of Lawrence and Douglas have done with these patterns is t.o re–
move any possibility of the good life and to create meaningless violence
as a chief source of local color.
The novels and short stories of Paul Bowles demonstrate the point,
and so does
The Idols and the Prey,
a skillfully contrived mechanism
which shunts a few ripely unpleasant Americans resident in Haiti along
to material ruin. (Their spiritual ruin is complete when the novel
opens.)
It
is never clear, eX'cept that general wreckage is now
de rigueur
in such fiction, why Boyd, the central figure, must contrive his own de–
struction and that of his friends. He makes it happen, effortlessly and
predictably, and accompanied by appropriate primitive goings-on. All
