NEW ROADS, NEW ROUTES
B: Oh, blessed generation! May you conquer our confusions by
sheer ignorance, like Parsifal. I hoped you might enlighten me; I'm
still in the dark about that term, in spite of reading forty writers labeled
experimental by their tireless champion and anthologist, James Laughlin.
The reason you found me looking so dreamy is that this collection,
called
Spearhead,*
has brought to mind the extraordinary talents and
achievements of four writers who were
enfants terribles
in my youth–
Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, and William Carlos
Williams. It also contains work done by thirty-six other Americans,
mostly younger, during what its editor calls the "decade of the fascist
wars"; and if literature develops by experiment, as he claims, why do I
feel that the best things in the book are by four people who matured
before anyone heard of a fascist? Why do the other thirty-six, by com–
parison, induce claustrophobia? Of course, some of their work is ex–
perimental in the merest way, a compound of hesitancy and bravado,
but
S: Doesn't the editor define the term?
B: Well, he tries to suggest the nature of experimental writing
by contrasting it with "conservative traditionalism" and "the middle
road." Writers of these two types may contribute something new to litera–
ture, he says, and experimentalists are not necessarily better writers
than middle-roaders, or even as good: they are important because they
try to go beyond the technical limits within which the others are content
to work. He instances Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Wallace
Stevens as middle-roaders, but cites W. C. Williams and E. E. Cummings
as "experimentalists to the marrow," who have "taken a different
track," "driven all their lives toward new idioms and new metrics,"
and "spearheaded the forward movement of the larger body of WQrkers
in literature."
S: Time-marches ON! Excuse me.
B: Oh, don't apologize; that's the very note. Straight out of
science fiction. Limits, basic forms, experiment, advance, body of work–
ers. . . . Behold the writer in his laboratory, brooding over the parts
of speech! For years he fiddles with retorts, trying out endless mixtures
of ambiguities, rhyme-schemes, connotations, denotations, detonations,
until at last he stumbles on a new direction and isolates a new element!
S: Steady, old head. First you say this book moves you to tears
by reprinting your old bold loves; now you say it's all a fraud . What's
wrong with you today?
*
An anthology, recently published by New Directions, of ten years of experi–
mental writing in America.
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