Image and Idea
by . New Directions, $3.00.
Mr. Rahv, one of the editors of the literary magazine Partisan Review and a critic who each year increases in stature, has put together fourteen essays on literary themes, all of them readable and most of them successful. As a matter of fact, aside from the opening piece, called “Paleface and Redskin,”which is a reworking of the old theme (Henry James is paleface, Walt Whitman redskin), the essays, in varying degrees, carry Mr. Rahv’s trade-mark: fresh insight, cogent and persuasive argument, logical conclusion, provocative implication.
The essays deal with, among others, Henry James, Hawthorne, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, and, in the realm of the living, Henry Miller, Koestler, and DeVoto. An example of Mr. Rahv at his best is his Dostoevsky essay, in which he explains why The Possessed, of all Dostoevsky’s novels, is closest to us today, and in which Mr. Rahv’s political sagacity is happily wedded to his literary talents.