BOOKS
121
DIRECTIONS-NEW OR OLD?
NEW DIRECTIONS,
1938.
Edited by james Laughlin IV. New
Directions, Norfolk, Conn.
$2.50.
It is not supposed to be good form to look gift horses in the
mouth. And the annual
New Directions
is certainly a gift horse to
those interested in writing, providing, as it does, a place where one
can read the newest work of "writers whose interest in problems of
technique places their work beyond the commercial market." To
quote further from the editor's Preface: "I conceive of the collection
as a sort of exhibition gallery in which innovations in prose and poetry
can
be
put on view." To provide such a gallery is a public service
which it is to be hoped Mr. Laughlin will continue to render. But it
must be said, quite bluntly, that this year's show is most disappointing.
This is a big book-just
how
big I don't know, since, for some
reason not clear to me, the pages are not numbered. But these hand–
somely-printed, wide-margined pages, as one goes through them, yield
alarmingly little pleasure. James Higgins' unassuming, low-keyed
sketches of life in a Catholic boys' school come off very well-though,
considering Joyce's
Portrait
anl
Dubliners,
thex can hardly be called
experimental. Eleanor Clark's
Hurry, Hurry!
~
as effective here as
when it appeared in
Partisan Review.
Hugh Davies'
Petron
achieves
poetic intensity-though it also raises the question of what bounds, if
any, should be set, in this kind of surrealist writing, to the exploita–
tion of the sadistic and the gruesome. Where shall we
fix
the frontier
between literature and psychoanalysis? Finally, there is another of
those oddly amusing stories of Montagu O'Reilly, which use the
stilted prose and floridly vulgar values of the old-fashioned paper-back
novel to convey the business and social life of the big bourgeoisie.
This
one is quite funny and also manages to suggest, in a cockeyed
way, the atmosphere of the Chicago business world of the nineties.
But this is really all that can be said for
New Directions,
1938.
The rest-except for a few poems---seemed to me neither successful
nor particularly experimental. John Strauss contributeS a crude and
banal "proletarian" story, Ruth Lechlitner a radio play which is
warmed-over MacLeish, Louis Zukovsky a poem which I estimate is
over fifty pages long and which, to say the least, doesn't seem to
justify its length, William Saroyan-some William Saroyan, and
Harry
Thornton Moore a neatly written story whose ''point" escaped
me completely-to run through the longer contributions.
If
Mr.
Laughlin's editorial criteria are as catholic as he says they are, one
must assume that the fault lies not with his editing but with creative
writing at the moment. It may be just an off year. (The 1937 volume
as much more interesting.) Or it may be some deeper blight. Future
es of
New Directions
should give us the answer.
DwiGHT
MACDONALD.
