BOOKS
347
words and words. Nicholas Moore is Thomas-and-water. John Berryman's
Five Political Poems
have lots of Yeats, lots of general politics, a 1939
reissue of
1938,
and a parody of Lord Randall that-but nothing can
make me believe that Mr. Berryman wrote this himself, and is not just
shielding someone. There is an unpublished section of
The Ghost in the
Underblows;
it is exactly like the published sections. For all I can
remember of either (I've read both), it
is
one of the published sections.
Mr. Fisher is like the gold in sea water: . valuable, hut in impracticable
concentrations. Poetry seems hardly congenial to Mr. Hivnor and Mr.
Hays; with Mr. Kaufman congeniality reaches absolute zero. Mr. Laugh·
lin's
What the Pencil Writes
is a modest appealing appraisal. Paul Wren
seems unformed, inexperienced, hut rather promising. F. T. Prince is
represented by five monologues of a Zulu chief; their style is consistent,
delicate, fairly original, distinguished by some charmingly innocent
alliteration and some surprisingly awkward rhythms; and how can one
resist a writer who makes a chief say that he has "called my regiments
Decoys,/ Slashes, Gluttons, or else Bees/ Ambushes, Mountains, the Blue
Haze"? Rider Haggard was never like this.
I don't know what to say about all the Russian poems. The trans·
lations seem reasonably bad; most of the poems are crude but alive, the
productions of a culture that still takes poetry for granted, as a necessity.
The critical essays are fairly interesting as information. I was charmed
by
a quotation about a hero who "stepped out of his little tent,/ He
washed
his fair face/ With spring water cold,/ His face he wiped with a
little towel./
As
he played on his birch-bark horn,/ The whole people
beard him." Guess who? Lenin.
New Directions
is a reviewer's nightmare; it's enough punishment to
read it all, without writing about it too.
It
is a queer mediocre hodge·
podge
in
which a few nice and a good many awful things are smothered.
i:e
Petit Chose, in my high school, was always insisting that everything
have a
raison d'etre;
New
Directions
doesn't-or rather, it has one that
was
dead and unburied ten years ago, like Hoover. Nowadays, seeing
people being conscientiously experimental together has the brown period
1111ell of the Masonic ceremonies in
War
and
Peace;
even Mr. Laughlin
md the few Constant Experimenters know that something has happened to
experiment-so
New
Directions,
especially the experimental sections, gets
more conventional every year. (In such matters, it is the first step that
counts.) What use is it now, anyway? Maybe Mr. Laughlin could make
amagazine out of it; seeing 200 pages four times a year, instead of 800
once, might be bearable quantitatively. Qualitatively I don't know. I sit
here with it; it weighs down my lap, it makes my head ache. Think who
writes
it,
who prints it, what it is: what a symbol! Yes, nature is witty.
RANDALL JARRELL
