A Sort of Columbus

T. S. Eliot once ascribed a “peculiar honesty” to the greatest poetry, which, he added, “in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying.” Shakespeare’s plays are quick with this quality, and though it is usually so discreetly buried among easier virtues that it can pass unnoticed, it will sometimes, in a single peremptory line, demand acknowledgment.

Coup de Grace, by Marguerite Yourcenar (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, $3) is a lean, short, unprettied novel which offers, and in turn demands, some of the same “peculiar honesty.” Its story is so thoroughly unpleasant that the first time I read it, I tried to persuade myself that the resentment I felt must originate in some flaw in Miss Your cenar’s art, or understanding. Then I reread it, and had to admit that the only flaws were in the human condition, which can produce, on the one hand, an encounter as mutually hopeless and destructive as the one Coup de Grace describes, and on the other, an inclination to flinch as fearful as my own.

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Robert Phelps

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T. S. Eliot once ascribed a “peculiar honesty” to the greatest poetry, which, he added, “in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying.” Shakespeare’s plays are quick with this quality, and though it is usually so discreetly buried among easier virtues that it can pass unnoticed, it will sometimes, in a single peremptory line, demand acknowledgment.

Coup de Grace, by Marguerite Yourcenar (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, $3) is a lean, short, unprettied novel which offers, and in turn demands, some of the same “peculiar honesty.” Its story is so thoroughly unpleasant that the first time I read it, I tried to persuade myself that the resentment I felt must originate in some flaw in Miss Your cenar’s art, or understanding. Then I reread it, and had to admit that the only flaws were in the human condition, which can produce, on the one hand, an encounter as mutually hopeless and destructive as the one Coup de Grace describes, and on the other, an inclination to flinch as fearful as my own.