Volume 3, Number 12 · January 28, 1965
Strangelove
By Irving Singer
Dramatic personages
by Denis de Rougemont, translated by Richard Howard
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 170 pp., $4.50
Love Declared: Essays on the Myths of Love
by Denis de Rougemont, translated by Richard Howard
Beacon, 235 pp., $1.75 (paperback) (paper)
It is now twenty-five years since the first edition of Love in the Western World appeared. Most of the essays in Dramatic Personages precede it; the ones in Love Declared are quite recent. Taken together, the three books make a representative triptych of De Rougemont's achievement. Literary figures interest De Rougemont less for their ideas than for the inner tensions revealed by the way in which they express ideas. In these tensions he hopes to find the identity of a person. This is the author as neither thinker nor particular individual, but somehow the two determining one another. Dramatic Personages consists of readable but minor essays on Goethe, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Luther, Calvin, Gide, and T. E. Lawrence. In each man De Rougemont seeks the 'incarnation of a thought in a life or of a vocation in an individual.'
Review, 2450 words
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