Books in Brief

The Cloud of Unknowing, translated by Ira Progoff (Julian Press, $4.00). In the fourteenth century, an English monk wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. This was a do-it-yourself manual for those who sought to find identity with God. This descriptive is not used facetiously, for the book’s purpose was to show a way divorced of any intercession by organized religion or special prayer. The deliberately anonymous author went far beyond adumbration of that delicate process whereby the initiate can attain an experience of God. He promised realization of the mystical belief that the eye which sees God is by its very nature the eye with which God sees us. This is perhaps heretical, for if man attains perfection by perfect unity with God he ceases to be man. Though Ira Progoff has made an excellent “translation” of the text— he skilfully replaces ancient vocabulary with one more contemporary to our thinking—he blurs this theological problem. In his introduction, he easily transposes the “state of unknowing” to the “subconscious” so dear to our times. Dr. Progoff is a depth psychologist— and a good one if the plaudits of Ashley Montagu, Harry A. Over-street, and Aldous Huxley have value. This may be guilt by approbation, but Progoff’s subtitle— “revealing the dynamics of the inner life from a particular historical and religious point of view”—and his comparisons with Zen Buddhism are more reliable indices. He forgets that the experience of God is not a substitute for the analyst’s couch, a school for adjustment, or a blueprint for the Throne of Heaven. r. de toledano

Five Pens in Hand, by Robert Graves (Doubleday, $4.50). I am sure there is no living writer of comparable originality and invention who is one-quarter as productive as Robert Graves, and I am sure, too, that Mr. Graves would be the last man to disagree with me. In fact, the only note that gnaws (and only faintly) in this new collection of his verse, reviews, stories, essays and lectures, is the frequency with which he reminds the reader of just that. Having defiantly exiled himself from London and all its cliques and claques over twenty-five years ago, he now makes so persistent a point of reminding us of his triumphant survival that I wondered if, along with his many virtues, he hasn’t been cultivating a small vineyard of sour grapes as well. If so, he is still the winner, and his pique is only the Achilles tendon of a really heroic image his writing continues to reveal: if he is not quite the eighth wonder of the Mediterranean world, he is at least the Colossus of Majorca, and certainly the last survivor of an otherwise extinct species—the poet with an entirely, gallantly free lance.

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The Cloud of Unknowing, translated by Ira Progoff (Julian Press, $4.00). In the fourteenth century, an English monk wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. This was a do-it-yourself manual for those who sought to find identity with God. This descriptive is not used facetiously, for the book’s purpose was to show a way divorced of any intercession by organized religion or special prayer. The deliberately anonymous author went far beyond adumbration of that delicate process whereby the initiate can attain an experience of God. He promised realization of the mystical belief that the eye which sees God is by its very nature the eye with which God sees us. This is perhaps heretical, for if man attains perfection by perfect unity with God he ceases to be man. Though Ira Progoff has made an excellent “translation” of the text— he skilfully replaces ancient vocabulary with one more contemporary to our thinking—he blurs this theological problem. In his introduction, he easily transposes the “state of unknowing” to the “subconscious” so dear to our times. Dr. Progoff is a depth psychologist— and a good one if the plaudits of Ashley Montagu, Harry A. Over-street, and Aldous Huxley have value. This may be guilt by approbation, but Progoff’s subtitle— “revealing the dynamics of the inner life from a particular historical and religious point of view”—and his comparisons with Zen Buddhism are more reliable indices. He forgets that the experience of God is not a substitute for the analyst’s couch, a school for adjustment, or a blueprint for the Throne of Heaven. r. de toledano

Five Pens in Hand, by Robert Graves (Doubleday, $4.50). I am sure there is no living writer of comparable originality and invention who is one-quarter as productive as Robert Graves, and I am sure, too, that Mr. Graves would be the last man to disagree with me. In fact, the only note that gnaws (and only faintly) in this new collection of his verse, reviews, stories, essays and lectures, is the frequency with which he reminds the reader of just that. Having defiantly exiled himself from London and all its cliques and claques over twenty-five years ago, he now makes so persistent a point of reminding us of his triumphant survival that I wondered if, along with his many virtues, he hasn’t been cultivating a small vineyard of sour grapes as well. If so, he is still the winner, and his pique is only the Achilles tendon of a really heroic image his writing continues to reveal: if he is not quite the eighth wonder of the Mediterranean world, he is at least the Colossus of Majorca, and certainly the last survivor of an otherwise extinct species—the poet with an entirely, gallantly free lance.