BOOKS
345
IN ALL DIRECTIONS
New
Directions,
1941.
New Directions, Norfolk, Conn.
$3.50
When I finished
New Directions
I felt angry and amused and help–
less. It is a sort of encyclopedic contradiction in red sackcloth:
The Boyg
Rides
Again,
they might have called it.
It
commences with seven pages of
Notes on Contributors, written by an anonymous Goody Two-Shoes who
rattles like Mr. Laughlin-nobody else errs with the same aura of opti–
mistic benevolence. The Notes announce, among other things, that Kafka's
famous parable from
The Trial
has never before been translated into
English, and then
print
it (Knopf's suit for infringement of copyright
should be instructive); kill off Roger Roughton in the Spanish revolu–
tion; and explain that the Italian government, by putting pressure on
"close dependents," is forcing the unwilling Ezra Pound to broadcast
fascist propaganda. (I suppose Major Douglas got him to advocate Social
Credit by kidnapping Homer Shakespeare Pound.) But these are nothing;
as
Kipling says, "It was the tone, man! the tone!"
Brecht's long play is an episodic thieves' pastoral which presents the
Thirty Years' War in terms of a wandering sutler: "Tilly's victory at
Leipsic costs Mother Courage four officers' shirts." Mother Courage (the
part
is obviously intended for Hattie MacDonald) has a son named Swiss–
cheese:
the whole play's soul is contracted into that name. The play is a
kind of anti-historical romance, a
Mother Horse-Sense's Progress;
the
methodical collision of history and horse-sense resulted, so far as I was
concerned, in the complete triumph of history.
Mother Courage
tastes like
araw potato: good, but crude and simple and special case; and I feel like
Feuerbach, when it comes to living on potatoes. But even potatoes show
to a little advantage by Delmore Schwartz's
Paris and
Helen-self-con–
lcious, self-indulgent, a literary and embarrassing failure. No character
does anything without lengthily explaining what he is doing, preferably
in
some famous writer's words; the Dramatist then explains why the
character has done it, and what it all means, and why the famous writer's
language is better than
his
could ever be; then the Producer does a little
commenting of his own; and the Audience does I don't know what-the
author has unaccountably forgotten to say. This is not complex, just dif–
f~~~e-the
literary equivalent of washing your hands fifty times a day; it
ia
a commentary on a commentary on a commentary. It is a real grief to
Bee
so good a writer (the most promising extensive poet of the time)
wasted on this; his essay on modern poetry, later in the book, is sensible
and
interesting.
Paris and Helen
is dedicated to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer;
Universal would have done.
Georg Karl Friedrich Mann's
Azefj Wiscluneier, the Bolshevik Bureau–
CI'IIl
reads like a James Joyce-S. J. Perelman parody of the Encyclopedia
Brittanica;
its
108 pages are a Russian Joke to end all Russian Jokes.
