90
PARTISAN REVIEW
Directed by Tambimuttu, its critical line is an anti-highbrow, Life-ah-it-is–
so-simple affair.
It
is a pity that there will probably not be room for three
verse-periodicals.
New Verse
is the home-platform of Auden and his
group;
Twentieth Century Verse
has attracted most of the post-Auden
poets and has a lively style of its own; and
Poetry,
in spite of the feeble–
ness of its critical standards, clearly has a popularising technique which
will gain a larger and less sectarian audience.
Of the remaining periodicals
Purpose
is the only general quarterly,
but as I am connected with it editorially I refrain from comment on its
performance. That leaves
Seven
and
Wales,
both of which belong mainly
to the youngest group of writers.
Seven
is still uncertain in its direction,
but it inclines to tlirt with surrealism in its later English phase, represented
by Dylan Thomas and the Paris group headed by Henry Mi11er. Lawrence
lJurreH, appearing from under Miller's wing, published his
Black Book
in
the early winter and enjoyed a pronounced critical success; one of the
principal contributors to
:,even,
he must be reckoned the most considerable
newcomer outside the Oxford-and-Cambridge-New Verse-Bloomsbury
tradition.
Briefly, the last two years have brought considerable changes in the
highbrow press. The full-scale quarterly, surveying the whole range of
cultural activity, drawing its contributors and its readers from a public
world of educated persons, and edited by a man of national repute, is a
thing of the past; in its place we have groupist pamphleteering, more
ephemeral, more informal, smaller in scale, more dependent upon coterie
support, and edited by men who have scarcely reached the age of thirty.
Even
New Verse
has largely completed its crusade and now lives as a use–
ful but no longer essential platform for Auden and a magisterial bench on
which Mr. Grigson can amuse himself by playing censor to not very dan–
gerous follies. So far the youngest arrivals have made no stir, and after
five or six years Dylan Thomas and George Barker still hold the "Promis–
ing" ticket in default of successors. Since Mr. Auden went to Buckingham
Palace it has been difficult to maintain the illusion of pioneering excite–
ment, and Parisian exporters of experimentalist novelties are going out
of business. The revolutions of the 'twenties have been dexterously ab–
sorbed, and Bloomsbury in the bigness of its heart is writing passionate
slogans for the War Office. With some important exceptions, English intel–
lectuals are pursuing an uncritical and almost hysterical anti-fascism,
allying themselves in a muddle of motives with the superficially identical
anti-fascisms of hitherto hostile sections, in the belief that the germs of
political injustice are bred in Germany and must be fumigated before
Hitler can bring the infection into the hygienic sanctity of the English
home. It is sad to reflect that Bloomsbury's bleeding heart pumps up senti–
ments of such high moral tone, only for Bloomsbury's headpiece to convert
them into a fog of confused and muddled thought.
DESMOND HAWKINS
