forced to finance a quarter of its welfareand medicald burdens. The meanersouthern states have been to their ownpoor, the more of them migrated to NewYork and other northern havens. Someof the municipal unions made their owncontributions to the city's decline byextracting during the Lindsay yearsridiculously large pension benefits, suchas the policeman's option to retire after20 years' service on half his final year'sincome, including overtime. As heappears here, Lindsay was an extrdordi-narily maladroit mayor who showeredfar more benefits upon the municipalunions than their great friend RobertWiigner ever dreamed of during his ownthree terms of office.

For average New Yorkers, argue theauthors, life would probably have gonesomewhat better if the city had declaredformal bankruptcy two years ago. Areasonably enlightened federal iudgewould have been more concerned aboutthe preservation of vital public servicesthan The Municipal Assistance Boardand the Emergency Financial ControlBoard have demonstrated themselves tobe. As anyone who lives in and lovesNew York (like this distressed reviewer)will readily testify, our streets havebecome dirtier and more dangerous,firemen take longer to reach burningbuildings, public school classes havegrown larger, pot holes are deeper andmore numerous, libraries are seldomopen, parks are seldom cleaned, waitingtime in emergency rooms has becomeinterminable, and the promising experi-ment of open admissions in the CityUniversity has come to an untimely end.

The fiscal strategy imposed upon thecity by Ford is a no-win affair. As cityservices shrink and the amenities ofurban life disappear, so also does the taxbase which large corporations and richpeople take with them as they flee tomore salubrious climes. Nor is muchmore help coming these days from theCarter White House, When the Presi-dent postponed welfare reform to l̂ ^Sland junked three quarters of his |anuaryjob stimulation program, he struck twowounding blows at the city's chances ofrevival.

After so many calamities, does anyhope remain? Newfield and DuBruloffer a sensible list of suggestions. Howmany of them are politically feasible inthe current conservative political cli-mate is dubious. At the federal level, fullemployment policies, tax reforms togenerate extra revenues for urbanprograms, federal supervision of wet-fare, and universal health insurance

would help enormously both to reducecity costs and enlarge city tax receipts. Afederally funded urban bank wouldrelease New York from the thrall of thebig private banks. For good measure theauthors advocate rebuilding railroadsand restoring the port of New York,placing Consolidated Edison undermunicipal authority and prohibitingredlining by statute. Rent control shouldbe retained to prevent the flight of theremaining middle class as well as toprotect low-income tenants from land-lord extortion. The authors are instriking agreement with Harvard'slames Wilson on the handling of crime.They and he stress the need to appre-hend and convict larger numbers ofviolent criminals and sentence them tolong jail terms.

Parts of this angry philiipic werewritten at different times and for varied

audiences. Some unevenness and repeti-tion are inevitable. Newfield and DuBrulprobably underestimate the strength ofunderlying economic and demographicforces which favor the sunbelt and hurtolder industrial sections. Minor caveatsaside, I recommend Tlic Ahn^^f at Powerwarmly, for. damn it, their major point ispersuasive. Identifiable human beingsand insensitive national policies havevery nearly destroyed New York. If it isto be renewed, other human beingsmust do the job. Newfield and DuBrulhave supplied them with a useful agen-da.

Robert Lekachman

Rabvrt L-knchniari is Distinguished Pro-fessor of Economics at Herbert H.Lehman College (CUNY) and authoramong other books of Ecorwmisls al Bay.

Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climateby Harold Bloom(Cornell University Press; $17.50)

Harold Bloom is so ingenious in hisspeculations, and so urgently responsiveto his texts, it seemed fitting to startthings by an epigraph adapted fromGilbert and Sullivan's opera. The Piratesof Pettzance:

When vocabulary duty's to be done—To he done.

Till' reivewer's hi Is not a happy one.

For Bloom does indeed keep uswatching every word, what with hishighly organized lore concerning the"post-Wordsworthian crisis-poem" andthe developments of the Emerson-Whitman "American Sublime," alongwith his statements of indebtedness toKabbalism, Nietzsche and Freud.

The present volume, in bringing thisequipment to bear upon the poetry ofWallace Stevens, opens and closes withhelpful summarizations of Bloom'stheories. The 12 intervening chapterscomment on particular poems by Ste-vens in a detailed way that may not makethis the ideal text for a reader moreinterested in an overall characteriza-tion of Stevens's work than in close step-by-step exegesis. But Bloom's proceduredoes produce many expert interweav-ings which pay off handsomely when hisdiscussion of Stevens (who complainedof poems when "They do not make thevisible a little hard/To see") culminates in

Bloom's formula, "No more involuntaryTranscendentalist ever existed than theStevens of the final phase, but the textunder consideration is wildly indubita-bly Transcendentalist." The more close-ly we have followed Bloom's analyses inthe preceding chapters, the betterequipped we are to appreciate thepoignancy of the last poems where thepoet, nearing his end, undergoes a turnthat might be called the craftsman'sequivalent of a death-bed confession.

This over-all situation which Bloom isdealing with is in its barest simplicityreducible to this:

In one sense a poet, like each of us,could be called a kind of "Soilpsist."Whatever his relations to other peoplemay be, his pleasures and pains, hisimmediate sensations, are his and no oneelse's. They are grounded in his natureas a sheerly physiological organism, his"animality" that separates him as anindividual from all other animals, hu-man or nonhuman.

His poetry, on the other hand, isgrounded in a public, or social medium,involving the vast structure of "Identifi-cations" that he acquires through lan-guage. This universe includes not justhis personal relations (beginning withmembers of his family as he emergesfrom infancy, and gradually widening),but also extending to his increasing

The New Repuhlii

knowledge in all its aspects (history,government, geology, geography, as-troin)my, etc. —a fantastically complexnetwork of information available only toour kind of creature ('human"), so muchof whose experience of "reality" isshaped by thf (.imimunicativf medium,language, which the poet shares with hisfellows generally and which he adapts tohis particular purposes as a poet.

Such localized vocation, or "Election,"involves his personality as a compositeof these two quite different realms, therealm of speechless physiological motionand the realm of linguistic (or moregenerally symbolic) action, "Symbolic" isa better word than "linguistic" ur"verbal" for contrasting these tworealms in the most general sense, sincethere are also the "languages" of othertraditional symbol-systems such aspainting, music, sculpture. But ]. L.

Austin's word "speech acts" would servefor present purposes.

Whereas the poet's medium does nothave the immediacy of bodily sensation,he tries (by such resources as imagery)to give the illusion that it does. His waysof drawing upon the language of thetribe will involve him in various coope-rative and competitive relationships toother poets. His hopes that his poemsmay survive him impinge upon theironic fact that they can't "die" becausethey never "lived" in the first place, astested by the sensations of the body. Buthe AS a body will die—and on the occasionof such destiny—conscious stock-takingas a "crisis-poem," thoughts along thatline will turn up, along with less radicalkinds of death such as loss of love, or ofprofessional competence.

To these three moments (the realm ofimmediate sensation, or physiological

Wnllncr Steven? bit Diii'nl b

motion; the realm of symbolic action;the poetic personality that is a compositeof the two) add the fact that by the"form" of any good poem is really meanta "transformation"—and Bloom is inthere, in a big way, ever on the alert for"Crossings t.>f Election," "Crossings ofSolipsism," and "Crossings of Identifica-tion." The only trouble is that Bloomworks into these three momentsthrtiugh actual examples, which neverhave the schematic simplicity of ourdisembodied outline.

True, it does seem to me that Ste-ven s's persistent "reductive" concernwith what he called a "First Idea" was avaliant self-defeating attempt to re-ci>ver, or discover and convey (by an actof "re-imagining") the sense of an objectas it would be if approached through avision prior to speech and (hus"heyond"speech, in the prime realm of physiologi-cal speechlessness. But in any case.Bloom's necessarily complicated studyof the three "crossings" is furthercomplicated by an adroit theory ofrhetorical "tropes," the application ofwhich leads in turn to tropes atoptropes. In Hegelian style we could classthe three "moments" of our over-simplified outline thus: nonsymbolicmotion would be the thesis, symbolicaction the antithesis, and the poet in his"poethood" would be the synthesis. Butthe issue in its particularities gets us intoconsiderations of this sort:

"A poem begins because there is anabsence. An image must be given, for abeginning, and so that absence ironicallyis called a presence" Freud figures herebecause, according to Lionel Trilling, "itwas left to Freud to discover how, in ascientific age, we still feel and think infigurative formulations, and to create,what psychoanalysis is, a science oftropes, of metaphore and its variants,synecdoche and metonymy." And wecan add to such insight now "by tracingthe derivation of Freud's formulations,from ancient rhetoric through thetransitional discipline of associationistpsychology. But I wish that Freud hadused the ancient names, as well as theold notions, so that we could call areaction formation what rhetorically itis. An illusion or simple irony, irony as afigure of speech-" Where Stevens says ofcolors that they "Repeated themselves,"the expression "requires to be read as itsopposite, 'failed to repeat themselves.'. . . To get started, his lyric had to saythe exact opposite of what it meant."Bloom is discussing here a poem inwhich "the striding night tropes upon atrope, in a metaleptic reversal, raising

26 The New Ri-fu

the poem's final lines to an almostapocalyptic pitch of rhetoricity, ofexcessive v^'ord-consciousness (a "text'se q u i v a l e n t of h u m a n self-consciousness)." Where de Man says "toput into question," his formula equals"to undergo the process of rhetoricalsubstitution by, as he says, 'the word,'logos in the sense of meaning , . , .Rhetoric, considered as a system oftropes, yields such ore readily to analysisthan does rhetoric considered as persua-sion, for persuasion, in poetry, takes usinto a realm that also includes the lie."And we read one poet rather thananother because "We believe the lies wewant to believe because they help us tosurvive,"

1 could go on citing many many more

passages that variously illustrate thedexterity of the truly daedalian range inwhich Bloom develops his intricateapplication of rhetorical devices for hisanalysis of the "post-Wordsworthiancrisis-poem" And I should note that,with regard to his step-by-step analysisof particular poems, one exceptionallygratifying reward of his method is theinsight derived from the tracing of keywords through the whole body ofStevens's work.

Kenneth Burke

Kenneth Burke has just received theAmerican Academy of Arts and Science'sfirst Academy Award for HumanisticStudies,

The Other One by Colettetranslated by Roger Senhouse and Elizabeth Tait(Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $]0; paper, $2,05)

The Blue Lantern by Colettetranslated by Roger Senhouse(Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $10; paper, $2,99)

In the eccentric volume of reminiscencesand speculation Colette published in1932, The Pure ami the Impure (originallytitled CfsP/fli'si'rs , , , .) there is a passagein which Colette speaks of the childhidden in the heart of every professionalwriter: "a child obstinately infatuatedwith technique, flaunting the tricks andwiles of his trade," One of the character-istics of Colette's writing has alwaysbeen its seductive nature. Her style,even in translation, is a curious achieve-ment: sensuous, yet analytical, elliptical,allusive, 'poetic,'and yet extraordinarilyfrank. If she was concerned with theatri-cal personalities and with certain flam-boyant members of the Parisian demi-monde it was perhaps as a consequence ofher recognition of the writer's kinsbipwith such 'professionals'. She did notimagine herself superior to her subjects,she did not set herself apart from themin judgment; except for passages in theconcluding pages of her masterpiece.The Last of Ch/rie, in which one canglimpse a political and social world outthere, beyond the airless, claustrophobic,and doomed world of Ch^rie's narcis-sism, there is remarkably little sense inColette of a moral dimension that mightdeal with her characters rigorously orcruelly. If men commit suicide in Co-

lette's work—like Cherie, like Michel ofDuo. like one of the unfortunate homo-sexuals of The Pure and the Impure—it isnever because they realize their useless-ness as human beings, but only becauseof thwarted love. And even then it is not'love' that destroys so much as themelancholy recognition of love's illusorynature.

That Colette should have identifiedwith imposture of various types is notsurprising. Married to the manic Willy, aself-proclaimed literary genius who wasunfortunately unable to write, and whohired a stable of 'secretaries' to write hisbooks for him, she became a writer(according to her own account) onlybecause her husband was pressed formoney; she was his most talented 'ghost'and it was to be many years before shecould claim her own books—producing,after Willy's death, the original school-girl's notebooks in which she wrote theClaudine novels. Would she have be-come a writer otherwise?—would shehave become 'Colette' had there been no'Willy'? Still more astonishing is herdefense of her father, another self-proclaimed writer who wrote nothing atall. In Earthly Paradise Colette speakskindly of him as a born writer who leftlittle work behind; in fact it was dis-

covered after his death that the dozenvolumes of his 'writing'—each contain-ing as many as 300 pages—were com-posed of entirely blank pages, beautiful,thick, carefully trimmed papers. Thiswas the "spiritual legacy," Coletteclaims, which she drew upon when shebegan to write under her husband'sguidance.

The Other One, originally published in1929 (as La Seconde). is not so striking anaccomplishment as The End of Ch/rie (of1926) nor has it the sensuous yetcuriously elegiac beauty of The RipeningSeed He Bl/ en herhe of 1Q23); yet it is aconsiderable achievement nevertheless.Light, deft; rueful rather than ironic.The Other One explores the shiftingnetwork of relationships that constitutea household dominated by a successfulParisian playwright named Farou. Hehas been married for more than a decadeto a handsome, plump, rather lazywoman named Fanny who has allowedhim any number of casual mistressesand who has not seemed to mind hisinfidelities; but when it is revealed toFanny (by her teenaged stepson) thathe is having a love affair with the youngwoman who lives with them as hissecretary, and Fanny's intimate compan-

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