A Soft Word to the Wise

...The true aphorist, however, consults himself first and last, and his audience is there only in the role of confidant or, often, slightly uncomfortable eavesdropper...

...So it was cut out...

...Chazal is one of the greatest explorers of sensual experience, yet, incomprehensibly, the editors have skipped almost all of this and what is left is not very exciting...

...Aphorisms must be neat, but the world I have seen and suffered has often tended to be nightmarishly untidy...

...For it is necessary, in our high-pressure day, to point out that an aphorism is not a command or a moralistic injunction, but rather a confidence murmured in our ear by someone who has taken the trouble to give abstract and rigorous form to an exquisitely personal insight or experience...

...In many cases the present-day writer mistakes a reflection of public concern and prejudice for his unique expression...

...It is true that the best recorders and critics of this madhouse are not famed for their aphoristic talents...

...They call it a "personal selection," which would seem a superfluous warning, since all anthologies must by their very nature be at least that...

...Paul Valéry, who seemed to think in aphorisms, once made a poignant remark about the relations between soul and body...

...I would say no, because of its delicately intimate nature...

...The human animal in his extremes of fervor and absurdity is gently but resolutely ignored, much as vulgar or too flamboyant remarks are ignored on such proper social occasions...

...There is also a subtle balance between public expression and private emotion required by the aphorism, which seems to be beyond the grasp of most of our writers today...

...Nobody can say that he does not try to write aphoristically, but the required balance has been disastrously tipped in too public a direction...

...This exclusion is exercised even in what they have given us...

...I can only hope so...

...I must confess that I have a nostalgic sympathy with this view, though certain great gaps and failings in my personal history make it impossible for me to be more than a distant camp-follower of it...

...For sternly ideological reasons...

...I take this, however, as an announcement of a consonance of opinion on the broad nature of things, thus permitting so personal a book to be the product of a collaboration...

...The same slicing and pruning is applied to such brilliant discoveries as Malcom de Chazal, the French Catholic mystic, and Cesare Pavese, the Italian novelist...

...True, human tragedy, despair and vaulting possibility are also allowed to take part in the polite proceedings, but only at a decent remove and in their very best party clothes...

...Can an aphorism be edited...

...An oldfashioned pleasure, and Auden and Kronenberger take a proper polemical delight in reviving it...

...The editors liked and printed the first part, which shows Valéry as a shrewd psychologist, but disliked the conclusion, which carries a hint of Valéry's magnificent, nihilistic sense of man's soaring possibilities...

...in the meantime, though, we are all slogging through the muck of an industrial madhouse...

...Yet, though one may applaud the editors' unwillingness to be apocalyptically fashionable and to go along with the noisy mob, one may still deplore the prim certainty which excludes so much of the brawl going on around us...

...Too unruly, and too much a reflection of the times...

...For instance, in this sense Norman Mailer is the perfect example of a failed aphorist...

...Among their contemporaries, the editors have not had to work hard to exclude, for sloppy writing and aphoristic verve do not go together, and we are engulfed in sloppiness...

...It is Auden's and Kronenberger's book and they can do what they wish within its confines, but the reader deserves to be alerted...

...Reviewed by RAYMOND ROSENTHAL Contributor, "Partisan Review," "Commentary," New York "Times Book Review" I found this anthology a delightful book, a vast field for prolonged browsing, and for the pleasurable emotions of amusement, approval, indignation and even, sometimes, of enlightenment or secret satisfaction at seeming to know more than was whispered to mc by its strict sentences...

...These are the qualities, I am sure, which attract W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, the compilers of this excellent book...

...What kind of world pleases Auden and Kronenberger...

...In fact Valéry, as seen here, shrinks in size to a remarkable literary critic and adept social commentator, while his entire visionary side is sternly discarded...

...But even if Céline, Beckett and Genet were as pointed and eloquent as Chesterton, Pavese and Chazal, I know that Auden and Kronenberger would not let them into their party...

...He is a propagandist, therefore, and, as this anthology amply illustrates by contrast and exclusion, the most plangent and generic speech is usually the dullest...

...It is indeed the most intimate form of meditative literature, and only the anecdote in the hands of a master such as Tolstoy can rival it...

...Pavese, though more fully presented, comes out lopsided nevertheless, and here again it is his ecstatic and fervently religious aspect which is slighted...

...It is a rather formal, muted place, a sort of eternal tea party at which the pleasure is preferably mild and the small human failings are the chief subject of conversation...

...Perhaps in the long run they will be proved right...

...The great good place might well turn out to be the suave and elegant world Auden and Kronenberger offer for our enjoyment and instruction...