Times Literary Supplement,1 17 APRIL 1948
Anthony Powell (1905–2000), novelist – famous particularly for the series A Dance to the Music of Time – and friend of Orwell’s, was one of the principal reviewers for the Times Literary Supplement at this time. In George Orwell: A Life, Bernard Crick states that Powell had steered Nineteen Eighty-Four for review ‘into comprehending hands’ – those of Julian Symons (p. 563), and he probably thought Orwell would enjoy reviewing Spearhead. Orwell’s review was published anonymously as was then the custom of the TLS.
The exchange of literary intelligence between country and country is still far from brisk, even where there is no political obstruction. Only the other day a critic in a French weekly review could remark that, so far as he was aware, the United States had not produced any new writers since 1939. We ourselves, not being dependent on translations, are able to be a little better informed, but even so it is a fact that most of the younger American writers are only known to this country because of stray contributions to magazines. Few of them have yet appeared here in book form. Spearhead, Mr. James Laughlin’s anthology of recent American prose and verse, is therefore useful, although, as he admits himself, it is not fully representative.
An anthology of this kind is not, of course, intended to give a picture of the American literary scene as a whole. Mr. Laughlin has explicitly confined himself to experimental and ‘non-commercial’ writing, and most of the contents are drawn from such magazines as the Kenyon Review and the Partisan Review, or from his own annual miscellany, New Directions. Even so, the selection is less interesting than it might have been, since it consists almost entirely of ‘creative’ writing—that is, poems and stories—while much of the best and liveliest American writing of the past ten years has been done by literary critics and political essayists. An anthology based mainly on the ‘little reviews’ ought not to leave out Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Clement Greenberg and Nicola Chiaramonte: one might also have expected to find Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow. However, this book does introduce to the English reader a number of young writers who are less known here than they deserve to be—for example, Paul Goodman, Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell. There are also, of course, contributions from various ‘established’ writers (William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Henry Miller and others), and even from such veterans as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.
One fact this book brings out is that American literary intellectuals are still very much on the defensive. There is evidently much more feeling that the writer is a hunted heretic and that ‘avant garde’ literature, as it is rather solemnly called, is totally different from popular literature, than exists in England. But one cannot help noticing, while reading Mr. Laughlin’s introduction and then the items that follow it, that this feeling of isolation is largely unjustified. To begin with, the ‘avant garde’ and the ‘commercial’ obviously overlap, and are even difficult to distinguish from one another. A number of the stories in this book, notably those of Jack Jones, Robert Lowry and Tennessee Williams, would fit easily into dozens of big-circulation magazines. But in addition, it is doubtful whether American literature during the past ten or fifteen years has the ‘experimental’ character that Mr Laughlin claims for it. During that period literature has extended its subject matter, no doubt, but there has been little or no technical innovation. There has also been surprisingly little interest in prose as such, and an all-round tolerance of ugly and slovenly writing. Even in verse it could probably be shown that there has been no real innovator since Auden, or even since Eliot, to whom Auden and his associates admittedly owed a great deal.
No English prose-writer in the immediate past has played with words as Joyce did, nor on the other hand has anyone made a deliberate attempt to simplify language as Hemingway did. As for the sort of cadenced ‘poetic’ prose that used to be written by, for instance, Conrad, Lawrence or Forster, no one nowadays attempts anything of the kind. The most recent writer of intentionally rhythmical prose is Henry Miller, whose first book was published in 1935, when he was already not a young man. A striking thing about the prose-writers in Mr. Laughlin’s collection is how like one another they all are in manner, except when they drop into dialect. The Anarchist Paul Goodman, for instance, certainly has unusual subject-matter for his stories, but his manner of approach is conservative enough. So also with the stories—again, unusual in theme—by H. J. Kaplan and John Berryman. No one to-day could produce a book of parodies corresponding to Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland: the differences between one writer and another, at any rate the surface differences, are not great enough. It is true, however, that the contemporary lack of interest in the technique of prose has its good side, in that a writer who is not expected to have a ‘style’ is not tempted to practise affectations. This reflection is forced on one by the most noticeably mannered writer in the collection, Djuna Barnes, who seems to have been disastrously influenced by Rabelais, or possibly by Joyce.
The verse in this anthology is very uneven, and a better selection would have been possible. Randall Jarrell, for instance, is represented by five poems, including the excellent ‘Camp in the Prussian Forest’; but his tiny masterpiece, ‘The Ball Turret Gunner,’ which ends with the memorable line, ‘When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose,’ is not there. Perhaps the best poem in the book is by E. E. Cummings. He is an irritating writer, partly because of his largely meaningless typographical tricks, partly because his restless bad temper soon provokes a counter-reaction in the reader, but he has a gift for telling phrases (for instance, his often-quoted description of Soviet Russia—‘Vicariously childlike kingdom of slogan’), and, at his best, for neat, rapidly moving verse. In this collection he is at the top of his form in a short poem in praise of Olaf, a conscientious objector, which has slightly the air of being a pastiche of Struwwelpeter. Olaf’s barely printable punishments at the hands of the military are first described, and then:—
Our president, being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon, where he died
Christ (of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see; and Olaf, too
preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me; more blond than you.2
Throughout this anthology the best poems, almost without exception, are the ones that rhyme and scan in a more or less regular manner. Much of the ‘free’ verse is simply prose arranged in lines of arbitrary length, or sometimes in highly elaborate patterns, with the initial word moving this way and that across the page, apparently on the theory that a visual effect is the same thing as a musical rhythm. If one takes passages of this so-called verse and rearranges them as prose, it becomes actually indistinguishable from prose, except, in some cases, by its subject-matter. A couple of examples will be enough:
It was an icy day. We buried the cat, then took her box and set match to it in the back yard. Those fleas that escaped earth and fire died by the cold. (William Carlos Williams.)
The old guy put down his beer. Son, he said (and a girl came over to the table where we were: asked us by Jack Christ to buy her a drink). Son, I am going to tell you something the like of which nobody ever was told. (Kenneth Patchen.)
Kenneth Rexroth’s long poem, ‘The Phoenix and the Tortoise,’ which again looks like prose if rearranged as prose, is perhaps in a different category. Such a passage as this, for instance:—
The institution is a device
For providing molecular
Process with delusive credentials.
‘Value is the reflection
Of satisfied appetite,
The formal aspect of the tension
Generated by resolution
Of fact.’ Over-specialization,
Proliferation, gigantism.
is not verse in the ordinary sense, but this is probably due not to sheer slovenliness but to the notion, perhaps derived from Ezra Pound or from translations of Chinese poems, that poetry can consist of lapidary statements without any rhythmical quality. The weakness of this method of writing is that it sacrifices not only the musical appeal of verse but also its mnemonic function. It is precisely the fact of having recognizable rhythms, and usually rhyme as well, that makes it possible for verse, unlike prose, to exist apart from the printed page. An enormous amount of ‘free’ verse has been produced during the past thirty or forty years, but only so much of it has survived, in the sense of being remembered by heart, as contained cadences of a kind impossible in prose. The chief reason, at any rate in England and America, for breaking away from conventional verse-forms was that the English language is exceptionally poor in rhymes; a deficiency already obvious to the poet of the nineties who wrote:—
From Austin back to Chaucer,
My wearied eyes I shove,
But never came across a
New word to rhyme with love.
This shortcoming naturally had a cumulative effect, and by the Georgian period it had led to an unbearable staleness and artificiality. The way out was through the total or partial abandonment of rhyme, or through double rhymes and the use of colloquial words which would previously have been considered undignified, but which allowed the stock of available rhymes to be extended. This, however, did not do away with the need for rhythm but, if anything, increased it. Indeed, successful rhymeless poems—for example, Auden’s Spain, or many passages in Eliot’s work—tend to be written in strongly accented, non-iambic metres. Recently, as one can see even in this anthology, there has been a tendency to return to traditional stanza forms, usually with a touch of raggedness that is a legacy from ‘free’ verse. Karl Shapiro, for instance, is very successful in handling what is really an adaptation of the popular ballad, as in his poem ‘Fireworks’:—
In the garden of pleistoscene flowers we wander like Alice
Where seed sends a stalk in the heavens and pops from a pod
A Blue blossom that hangs in the distance and opens its chalice
And falls in the dust of itself and goes out with a nod.
How the hairy tarantulas crawl in the soft of the ether
Where showers of lilies explode in the jungle of creepers;
How the rockets of sperm hurtle up to the moon and beneath her
Deploy for the eggs of the astral and sorrowful sleepers!
Of the short stories in this anthology perhaps the best is John Berryman’s ‘The Imaginary Jew’; it describes a young man who goes to a political meeting, full of generous sentiments and disgusted by antisemitism, and then suddenly gains a much deeper insight into the Jewish problem through the accident of being mistaken for a Jew himself. Paul Goodman’s story, ‘A Ceremonial,’ which supposedly takes place ‘not long after the establishment among us of reasonable institutions’—that is, after the Anarchist revolution—is a spirited attempt to describe happiness, a feat which no writer has ever quite accomplished. H. J. Kaplan’s longish story, ‘The Mohammedans,’ is the kind of which one feels inclined to say that it shows great talent but one is not certain what it is about. Georg Mann’s satire on Communism, ‘Azef Wischmeier, the Bolshevik Bureaucrat,’ would have been funny if it had been a dozen pages long instead of nearly fifty. There is a long extract from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn. Like all of its author’s earlier writings, it contains some fine passages, but it would have been better to pick a chapter from the less exagéré Tropic of Cancer, which remains Miller’s masterpiece, and which is still a very rare book, so successfully has it been hunted down by the police of all countries.
Apart from the written pieces, the anthology includes two sets of fairly good but not outstanding photographs. One set, taken by Walker Evans, accompanies a piece of ‘reportage’ on the southern cotton farmers by James Agee.3 The other set, by Wright Morris, consists of photographs of buildings, mostly ruinous, each accompanied by a long caption in the form of a sort of prose poem. These captions are nothing very much in themselves, but the idea is a good one and might be profitably followed up. The other chief curiosity of the book is a collection, compiled by Mr. Laughlin, of the poems of Samuel Greenberg, a Jewish youth, son of very poor parents, who died about 1918, aged less than twenty. They are queer poems, full of misspellings and neologisms, and sometimes more like growing embryos than completed writings, but they show considerable power. Mr. Laughlin demonstrates by parallel quotations that Hart Crane lifted numerous lines from Greenberg without acknowledgment.
All in all, this book is useful, in that it introduces about forty American writers, of whom more than half are unknown or barely known in England; but it would have been a good deal better if it had been compiled expressly for an English audience. Actually it is a book designed for America, evidently imported into this country in sheets (Henry Miller’s favourite verb has been laboriously blacked out by hand, over a stretch of fifty pages), and it is likely to give English readers a somewhat lopsided impression. It should be repeated that where American writing particularly excels at this moment is in literary criticism and in political and sociological essays. This, no doubt, is largely because in the United States there is more money, more paper and more spare time. The magazines are fatter, the ‘angels’ are richer, and, above all, the intelligentsia, in spite of its sense of grievance, is numerous enough to constitute a public in itself. Long, serious controversies, of a kind extinct in England, can still happen; and, for instance, the battles that raged round the question of ‘supporting’ the late war, or round the ideas of James Burnham or Van Wyck Brooks, produced material that would have been better worth reprinting, and more representative, than much of the contents of Spearhead. Moreover, the book suffers from the fact that it is neither uncompromisingly ‘highbrow,’ nor, on the other hand, is it a cross-section of current American literature. It leaves out several of the best living American writers on the ground that they are not avant garde, while at the same time it includes Kay Boyle and William Saroyan. It also—but perhaps this is unavoidable in any bulky anthology compiled from contemporary work—includes one or two pieces of sheer rubbish. The editors of the Falcon Press are to be congratulated for their enterprise, but another time they would do better to choose their material for themselves and to cast the net more widely.