272
PARTISAN REVIEW
Say that it
is
the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
A society gets the poets it deserves, and America has obviously deserved
very well to get a poet of the painful, raw honesty of Mr. Cummings
and such a first-rate artist in verse, and profoundly interesting reflective
poet, as Mr. Stevens. The gaps that one finds in them are gaps also
which (in England today, as much as in America) one finds in oneself.
It
is
not enough to "plunge into" life or enough, aesthetically and intel–
lectually, to "transcend" it. Saying that, is not saying that anybody else
could, set in the perspective of these two poets, have done better. Only
a more humane society than we have seen for a long time or are likely
to see soon will prove a proper stamping ground for the fully humanist
poet.
G. S.
Fraser
THE EXPENSE OF SHREWDNESS
THE LITERARY SITUATION. By Malcolm Cowley. Viking'. $3.75.
It is not easy to say exactly what this book is about, since
it has neither the unity a disciplined theme might provide nor the re–
laxed discursiveness of a collection of essays. The title is attractive but
unfortunate; in the nature of things, if not of Malcolm Cowley, it
promises far more than it can deliver. Half of the book consists of an
informal, impressionistic account of American literature as a business,
written from a point of view that seems largely to acquiesce in the idea
of literature as a business. Nonetheless, this is the better part of the book,
since it allows a certain play for one of Cowley's genuine gifts, a half–
absorbed, half-mocking disclosure of facts and anecdotes concerning
the extra-literary side of literary life. Cowley knows how the domestic
habits of American writers have changed during the past few decades;
he
is
sensitive to the problems writers face in making their livings; he
can be informative-as well as maddeningly evasive-on the subject
of pocket-books.
This sort of literary-sociological gossip, always livelier when the
subject of conversation at a cocktail party than when exposed to the
test of print, cannot honestly be said to be uninteresting; almost all
