64 Notes & Topics
WallaceStevens. Simply,this is a different, non-
empiricist way of thinking about poetry; and
as for the "unbalancing commitmentto ... an
obsession", its there right enough,but perhaps
"obsession" is just another word for "working
hypothesis". The trouble with us empiricists
is that we have our hypotheses too, which may
be our obsessions, but we cant formulate them,
even to ourselves; which makes them all the
more"distorted and distorting".
Wenever bore each other so much,British and
Americans, as whenwe play the "generations"
ame.Whereashere the thirties, the forties, the
~ fties are almost universally the only critical
categories for discussing contemporaries,in the
States this seems to be peculiar to NewYork,
if not to Partisan l~eview. Lookingat the last
section of Rosenbergs book, announced as
"chapters on recent American intellectual
history", and seeing nameslike Leslie Fiedler
and Sidney Hook, familiar pawns of the
enerations game,myheart sank. But surprising-
~y , out of this domesticin-fighting comethe best
things of all, and the things most immediately
applicable to our owncase. Rosenbergplays the
generations gameonly to showthat it hasnt any
rules, and that what it produces, in Fiedler and
others, is "position-taking writing" and "not
poetry, not fiction, not literary nor philosophical
appreciation, not individual insights." Not
drama, either. Werememberthe careful pattern
of the generations in The Entertainer, and all
that guff in Look Badein Anger about howthere
are no causes left to die for. Andthen there is
Declaration, or those insulting and trivial
speculations about provincial scholarship-
holders whomarry above their station. Some-
times its true that the British experiencediffers
instructively: when Rosenberg, attacking one
okay name after another, moves from Dwight
Macdonaldto the sociologists, and says of David
Riesman and William H. Whyte, "Evoking the
sinister concept of man as a tool and as an
object, the new writing does so in an oddly
disembodied and unpainful way", we may
reflect that our best-selling sociology(The Uses
o[ Literacy) is all too embodiedand painful,
personal guilts and yearnings producing what is
neither usefully clinical nor with the alternative
persuasiveness of creative imagination.
We may as well agree with Marcus that
neither American nor British society has "a
centre of cultural intelligence and sanity". But
what follows? Surely, that we shouldnt pretend
to what we havent got; that moderation and
urbanity and commonconsent and the common
reader are the worst shamsof all; that since
what weve got is a free-for-all, lets makeit
really free for all. The extravagant and extreme
are our best security, for they will soonestcancel
each other out. If obsessions is all we have, at
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least lets not teach them camouflage. In this
way iconoclasm will tread on the heels of
eulogy, and the balance right itself all the
sooner. Rosenberg is a very good thing --
especially for us. (Andso is Kenner.)
Donald Daoie
Ulysses in Nighttown
U LYSSES IN NIGHTTOWN, dramatised
by" Marjorie Barkentin, conceived and
directed by Burge.ss Meredith, is the best thing
Londonhas seen since the theatre started gutting
books. Whywerent the possibilities spotted
before? It is true that Nighttownis the least
readable part of the shocking grammarians
monstrosity, but this is largely because it was
written in dramatic form, held up by a mass of
stage directions, and dizzying in its invention.
The real blame for the failure to see a play
in it lies with academicliterary criticism. Once
an avant garde religion, Ulysses became an
industry for exegesists in the universities. By
now every detail of Blooms Dublin day has
been correlated with the Ulysses myth, every
whiff of meaninghas been caught. The cardinal
fact that it is a comic drama imbuedwith the
comic writers overwhelmingfeeling for orgy
and meaninglessness, has been more and more
forgotten. The very tedium of Ulysses belongs
to comictechnique -- slow narration, a minute-
ness which makes small things disproportion-
ately and absurdly large, the breaking down
of action into gesture. People becomegrotesques
and giants whentheir mindsand bodies are gone
over with a toothcomb. More important (and.
more interesting, since we knowJoyces eager
love of the theatre and opera) is the theatrical
style. It is visual and oral, as theatre alwaysis.
The prose is dressed up, the people appear
changing masksand disguises (an old theatrical
game), characters soliloquise, hold the floor and
live in a continual state of quick change and~
dramatic surprise. Ulysses is theatre, through
and through.
This is what Mr. Burgess Meredith and Miss
Marjorie Barkentin have cleverly extracted. My"
only criticism of their successis that in following
the fantasy of Nighttown,they have not allowed
our eye to catch sight of what haunted Joyce-
in Trieste -- the memoryof some dirty b~ick
wall or Dublin doorway.I suppose the dustbin,.
whichis the first thing one sees whenthe curtain
goes up, is meantto stand for this. But dustbins:
are portable. I missedthe sight of a dirty city,
rooted in poverty to the ground; it existed only
in words. This is a minor point. For Joyces.
Dublinis half-figmentof fin-de-sigcle romantic--
 Notes &Topics
ism, half-Post Office Directory; it is not the
Dublin of Sean OCasey. Mr. Merediths pro-
duction caught something indispensable to
Joyce -- the literary illusions of the period,
taste at the point of vulgarity as it passes out.
This sensibility to what Joyce requires would
have led to no morethan an interesting dramatic
experiment, if Mr. Meredith had not hit upon
Zero Mostel to play Bloom.In Mostel a clown
of genius entered the outsize and deplorable
body of the middle-aged advertising agent and
cuckold. Mostelgaveus a creature of bloated del-
icacy, vulgar, sad, furtive, a bodyhalf full of
wind, pigs trotters and Guinness,yet saggingon
tired city feet and dragging a soul about with
him -- no, not a soul, a pain. The voice had
gone croaking softly into ruin, the mind was
left with only the dignity of bewilderment. As
a mime, Mostel was wonderful in invention. He
had eyes, brows, cheeks, fingers, feet and even
belly so quick to assumea passing thought, that
he was the comic disaster itself. Fie was the
very figure of plausibility past its peak. His
gabbling was startling; and his handling of
Joyces telegraphese and pedantries was that of
an astonished connoisseur fishing the half-
rememberedout of the dustbin of his ownmind.
Mostel was the clown of mood, half hope and
half reluctance; he was never mannered; he
entirely avoided the temptation to be fey or to
be spiritual. His body was the common burden,
the smarmed,baldinghair was a protest in itself.
He was as solid as Billy Bennett used to be, but
bedevilled by memoryand defeated love which
were beyondBennetts powers.
Bloomenacting ~ his guilt-and-triumph-fanta-
sies dominatesthe wholeof the first act. It is
morecoherent than the second whereone notices
the difficulties of ballet-like movement on the
small stage. Stephen dominates the second act,
and Bloom,except whenhe is in the grip of the
flagellating witch, steps apart to becomethe
protective spectator. Stephenis a far less inter-
esting character than Bloom,a guilty aesthete, a
very trying poet of the period, revived by a
grammariansbitter and masochistic jokes. Alan
Badel gave us this, but caught something else
that Joyce really brings out too, if one can
survive the poeticising: the nervousvitality, the
conceit, the swaggerof Stephen. He also caught
the mixture of cynicism and obduracy in
Stephens guilt and the flashiness of Stephens
horror. (I must say that Stephens mother
crawling out of the grave after him was most
unmoving;I took it as vulgar melodrama.) He
lookedlonely and (occasionally) as if, wildly,
did not care. That wasgood. Because,of course,
he didnt. Andat the final curtain whenBloom
stepped forward to protect Stephen as he lay
knocked out on the ground, one was satisfied
that Bloomwas protecting a real sad, silly
youngster and not some Yeatsian abstraction
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65
like "the artist as a young man". With these
two characters soundly established, Mr. Burgess
Meredith has to fit in the phantasmagoria. A
large cast had to flash in and out, vividl~r, witha
wit of appearanceand motion, and all the actors
and actresses must be praised for their turns.
Paddy Stones Blazes Boylan; Robert Bernals
Lynch, talking out of the gutter of his nasty
mind; the lady-like accusers played by Sally
Travers, Jill Lelford and Pauline Flanagan; and
again Pauline Flanagansinsidious MollyBloom,
oozing sexual contentment, were notable. But
all were. The costumes in the second act were
perfection in their slatternly, cheapluxury; I am
uncertain about the coloured rags and tatters of
the street scene in the first act. Here I thought
I was back in literary Connemara,but perhaps
that is a bookish comment. I am sure that
Joyces stream of self-consciousness,his sense of
the mindas a stage, his sense of extent and lack
of depth, found a quintessential expression in
this play which, because of Zero Mostel, almost
stands on its ownfeet without the book.
V.S. Pritcbett
Adenauer, and the Others
O x anyone who has been following German
Fpolitics from the birth of the Btmdesrepublik
in ~949to the present, it takes someconsiderable
mental effort to think of Bonnwith any other
Chancellor but Konrad Adenauer. If this is a
sign of anaemic imagination, then the anaemia
is in Bonnspolitical life itself. Tenyears of the
Adenauer era have gone by, and they have
producedso few surprises that the less use the
imaginationis put to the easier it is to foretell
developments.
I doubt if the historic achievementof Konrad
Adenaueris in any waylessened if one asserts
that he was never a manof brilliant conceptions.
It is only necessaryto listen to his speeches(I
would not recommendthem for reading) to
realise that his viewof the worldis as limited as
his vocabulary. Few great statesmen have
excelled the present GermanChancellor in this
respect, and Germanysintelligentsia has always
taken this rather badly. Nodoubt the realities
of world politics are incomp,arably richer and
moresubtle. The intellectuals error has been in
their assumption that this amountsto evidence
against their Chancellors political accomplish-
ment. During his lifetime, or certainly in the
eriod of his governmentaloffice, he maynot
~ ave had morethan half-a-dozen ideas; perhaps
less. But what matter, if someof these happened
to be just the right ones?
Theprincipal qualities of a statesmanare less