proved equally so.
BOOKS
the harder the wind blows the
taller
i
am
63
Cummings's taste is more difficult to defend; indeed, it is often
quite indefensible. The retention of, for example, 43, "it may not always
be so; and i say ... ", is certainly a triumph more of courage than of
prudence, though one cannot but admire the honest temerity of a recolte
that is truly a collection, and not a selection; and in 47, "notice the
convulsed orange inch of moon . . . ", the bathos of the last line is all
too characteristic. These are not merely youthful lapses: examples could
be multiplied from the poems, and the Introduction's self-identification
with the aging Renoir faintly and frailly stinks. Yet the basic antithesis
of today is less that of good
v
bad ' taste than that of taste
v
no-taste.
Cummings, like the Italians, has, admirably,
a lot of
taste; it is merely
regrettable that some of it is bad. But the bad is quite compensated for
by a complete absence of the fashionable "perfect gray."
The accusation of undue limitation of subject, however, begins, by
1938, to carry much more weight. True enough, spring, love and death
are large and universal subjects; but to make them a complete universe
of discourse begins to suggest, after some sixteen years, a certain lack
of sensibility, imagination, and courage. Especially in the bulk of a col–
lected volume, there becomes apparent a cloying quality, a monotony
of mere lusciousness, however spectacularly successful. It is yet somewhat
early to assume, however, that Cummings's interests will never as con–
sciously expand beyond this frame as they have to date been deliberately
confined within it. One's
Collected Poems
often signalize the termination
of a period.
If
at his present age he does not break through this eggshell
into the world, he will remain, regrettably, a magnificent but minor
singer; it is not impertinent to hope, however, that his present maturity
will produce, with the impact of broader (and, after all, somewhat more
interesting) experience upon this alert, sinewed and lusty talent, some
further and deeper conclusion, beyond love-is-enough.
SHERRY MANGAN
ODYSSEY IN A CIRCLE
JOURNEYS BETWEEN WARS: Odyssey of a Novelist.
By John Dos
Passos. Harcourt, Brace. $3.00.
For twenty years, between books, John Dos Passos has gone voyag–
ing, shuttling, tramping in the Old World. He has been drawn mainly
to the most picturesque and backward countries, the countries literally
old, or else his notebooks are fullest of them. That which is picturesque
and most unlike industrial places is what he has here recorded with
special detail: Spain, the Orient, Mexico, the provincial U.S.S.R. These
