76
PARTISAN REVIEW
average article in our magazines gives any subject whatsoever the same
coat of easy, automatic, "human" interest; every year
Harper's Mag–
azine
sounds more like
Life
and the
Saturday Evening Post.
Goethe
said, "The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing";
Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received
was a letter in which one of his readers said: "I read your novel without
having to look up a single word in the dictionary." These writers, plain–
ly, lived in different worlds.
Since the animal organism thinks, truly reasons, only when it
is
required to, thoughtfulness is gradually disappearing among readers; and
popular writing has left nothing to the imagination for so long now
that imagination too has begun to atrophy. All the works of the past
are beginning to seem to the ordinary reader flat and dull, because they
do not supply the reader's respons; along with that to which he responds.
Boys who have read only a few books in their lives, but a great many
CorrllC
books, will tell one, so vividly that it is easy to sympathize: "I
don't like books because they don't really show you things; they're too
slow; you have to do all the work yourself." When, in a few years, one
talks to boys who have read only a few comic books, but have looked
at a great many television programs-what will
they
say?
On this subject of the obscurity of the poet, of the new world that
is taking the place of the old, I have written you a poem-an obscure
one. I once encountered, in a book, a house that had a formal garden,
an English garden, a kitchen garden, and a cutting garden; through
these gardens gentlemen walked in silk stockings, their calves padded
like those of Mephistopheles; and I made that cutting garden, those
padded calves, my symbols for the past. For the present and the future
I had so many symbols I didn't know what to do: they came into the
poem without knocking, judged it, and did not leave when they had
judged; but the one that summed them all up- that had, for me, the
sound of the Last Morning of judgment-was a slogan from a wine
advertisement, one that I used to see every day in the New York
subways. My poem is called
The Times Worsen:
If sixteen shadows flapping on the line
All sleek with bluing-a Last Morning's wash–
Whistle, «Now that was thoughty, Mrs. Bean,"
I tell myself, I try:
A dream, a dream.
But my plaid spectacles are matt as gouache;
When, Sundays, I have finished all the funnies,
I have not finished all the funnies. Men
