THE DIAL: A RETROSPECT
53
Fragment"; Paul Valery's
"An
Evening with M Teste"; Mary Butts'
"Speed the Plow''; D. H. Lawrence's sketches, "Rex," and "Adolph." I
recall the aplomb of "Thus to Revisit," by Ford Madox Ford and the
instructively mannerless manner of W. C. Blum's pages on Rimhaud; the
photograph of Rimbaud as a child, reproduced next the translation of
A Season in Hell;
and Julien Benda's statement in
Belphegor,
"the prob–
lem of art is to discipline emotion without losing it." There was the con–
tinually surprising work of E. E. Cummings; William Carlos Williams'
dangerous brio; the exciting unconformity of the "Bantams in Pine
Woods" group of poems by Wallace Stevens. Thomas Mann's "German
Letter" was, in effect, a commentary on his fiction, as Ezra Pound's "Paris
Letter'' and T. S. Eliot's "London Letter" italicized their poetry. I recall
the strong look of H. D.'s "Helios" on the page, and my grateful scep–
ticism
in
receiving her suggestion that I offer work also.
Among the pictures, as intensives on the text, were three verdure–
tapestry-like woodcuts by Galanis; Rousseau's lion among lotuses; "The
Philosophers" by Stuart Davis; Adolph Dehn's "Viennese Coffee House";
and Kunioyshi's curious "Heifer"-the forehead with a star on it of sep·
arate whorled strokes like propeller-fins; Earnest Fiene; Charles Sheeler,
Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O'Keefe, and Max Weber, and Carl
Sprinchorn and the Zorachs and Bertram Hartman; Wyndham Lewis,
Brancusi, Lachaist, Elie Nadelman, Picasso and de Chirico, Cocteau line
drawings, and Seurat's "Circus."
Such titles as "Sense and Insensibility," "Engineering with Words,"
"The American Shyness"; and the advertising-especially some lines
"Against the Faux Bon" and "technique" in lieu of "genius,"-seemed to
say, "We like to do this and can do it better than anyone else could"; and
I was self-warned to remain remote from so much rightness; finding also
in
Alyse Gregory's delicately terse and lethal honesty, something apart
from the stodgy world of causal routine.
There was for us of the staff, whatever the impression outside, a con–
stant atmosphere of excited triumph; and from Editor or Publisher, a
natural firework of little parenthetic wit too good to print.
In analysing D. H. Lawrence's social logic, one usually disagrees with
him, but I remember the start of pleasure with which I came on his evoca–
tion of violets, in the introduction to his
Pansies:
"Pensees, like pansies,
have their roots in the earth, and in
th~
perfume there stirs still the faint
grim scent of under-earth. Certainly in pansy-scent and in violet-scent it
is
so; the blue of the morning mingled with the corrosive smoulder of the
ground." As typical of the unaccommodating poetic intensity of W.
B.
Yeats, was the article on "The Death of Synge": "Synge was the rushing
up of buried fire, an explosion of all that had been denied or refused, a
furious impartiality, indifferent turbulent sorrow. Like Burns' his work
was to say all that people did not want to have said."
And there were our at times elusive foreign correspondents: as com–
menting from Germany, Thomas Mann; Italy, Raffaello Piccoli; Madrid,
