462
PARTISAN REVIEW
Christopher Logue. Logue is a kind of Allen Ginsberg at an earlier
stage of development-his imagery is predominantly anal-whose mas–
ter is not Whitman but Brecht. He imitates Brecht, however, at a sig–
nificant remove: it is one thing to sound like Brecht and quite another
to sound like Brecht in translation; much as I admire the work of Pro–
fessor Eric Bentley, I see no reason why he should be set up as a model
of poetic style. Like Ginsberg, Logue belongs, as Doctor Leavis said
of the Sitwells, "more to the history of publicity than to the history
of poetry." Like Ginsberg, too, he is a useful safety valve for the guilt
feelings of the YOWlger Establishment. Chelsea is full of young men
and women who have moved from Oxford and Cambridge into rather
plush jobs in advertizing, publishing and the administrative reaches of
the Civil Service. They are the British equivalent of the yOWlg Madison
Avenue executives. But they find it hard to reconcile Oxbridge humani–
tarian individualism with the sleazier intricacies of London business. So
they vote Labour and anxiously follow "the latest thing" in art. Their
Mecca is the Royal Court Theatre, which is nicely poised, in Sloane
Square, between smart-set Belgravia and socialite-bohemian Chelsea.
Admittedly, the Royal Court has done excellent work in putting on and
making financial successes of new and at first not obviously money–
making plays: John 'Osborne's, Beckett's, Brecht's, Ionesco's, and so
on. But it has, WlfortWlately, become a kind of young Establishment
fetish. The audience is always flush with a terrible, pleased air of being
in the know. Their criterion is not the quality of the work, but the de–
gree to which it appears advanced and to which it attacks the Estab–
lishment. Logue gauged this feeling peculiarly well when he staged an
amusing anti-Establishment playlet preceded by a poetry-jazz reading.
The reaction to the latter was typical: the reviewers almost Wlanimously
congratulated Logue on thinking up the idea of reading verse to jazz.
Originality, apparently, begins only at the Royal Court. No doubt the
San Francisco jazzmen and poets will be glad to hear that the medium
they have been experimenting with for so long has at last been officially
invented.
I cite this otherwise trivial case merely as an exemple of the fashion
machine at work. What is depressing about it is the basic similarity of
criteria between the Old Hacks' Brigade and the young Debutante–
Intellectuals of Chelsea. Neither are interested in value, in originality,
in significance, in the depth and range of experience; they are inter–
ested only in fashion-appeal and useful slogans. Translated into poetry,
this means a new craze for what might
be
called First-Sight Verse,
work that yields up its meaning on first glance, like a novel, and which
