“New” Writing, Old and New
The Little Review Anthology.
Edited by Margaret Anderson.
Hermitage House. 383 pp. $3.95.
New Directions 14.
New Directions. 408 pp. $5.00.
New World Writing.
Second Mentor Selection.
New American Library. 351 pp. 50 cents.
Discovery.
Edited by John W. Aldridge and Vance Bourjaily.
Pocket Books. 288 pp. 50 cents.
These four anthologies of “new” writing appeared within the space of little more than a month. Three of them report on what is going on in American literature at this moment: the latest New Directions anthology, ND 14; the second edition of New World Writing, a pocket book published by the New American Library; and a competitor of the latter entitled Discovery. Set off against them and harking back to the past is The Little Review Anthology, a selection of pieces from what was one of the most vivacious and courageous of all American little magazines.
An entire generation of young writers who pay homage to Joyce, Eliot, and Pound hardly know that these men published much of their early work in the Little Review, and that this magazine gathered within its pages some of the best experimental writing of the second and third decades of our century. But a literary magazine, history tells us, is in the end like a literary critic: it should be content to merge with time, leaving nothing but a memory, if it has fathered good work and given its editors the sense of doing something significant. The Little Review did that.
As one leafs through its pages, it becomes very clear how different from today was the outlook and temper of the 20’s so far as “advance-guard” life and work was concerned. Above all, there is the Review’s editor, Margaret Anderson; one is convinced that she summed up in herself the feelings of many other enlightened young women of the time. She is feminist, strongminded, and expresses herself with a candor which is bracing in comparison with the small bickering voices of many of today’s bluestockings. And these qualities were reflected in her magazine.
Much has been left out of her anthology by Miss Anderson because it has since been republished elsewhere, and what we are given is mostly criticism, correspondence, some poetry, and a few pieces of fiction—things she liked personally, apart from their abiding value. Taken together, these items give us the spirit of an era vividly, and it is precisely this “spirit” that throws the present into such contrast: can one imagine, for example, a questionnaire in one of our current literary magazines which asks its most celebrated contributors: “Why do you go on living?” Indeed not. Such a question, audacious yet serious, would be met by hard suspicion in an era in which the majority of enlightened artists and intellectuals are so preoccupied with guilt and self-doubt that the mere asking would bruise the ego. Today’s questions, and answers too, must be clothed in more general terms to do justice to the human beings we have become. Any probing personal question is taken as a personal attack, because in the light of what we know, which is enormous, we are all deficient unto ourselves. It is this self-protective quality and intellectual caution which is healthfully absent from the Little Review anthology. Bertrand Russell, in answer to the questionnaire of the 20’s, tells the reader that he hates himself; Margaret Anderson says she is looking forward (and she means it!) to a nervous breakdown; William Carlos Williams says that he goes on living “because I have an enjoyable body for my pleasure”; Emma Goldman, who emerges from this book as an incorruptible human being, says she would not want to change places with another human being “because dull people do not attract me, and interesting ones are probably just as uncomfortable in their skins as I am in mine.”
In a larger sense, the creative work of the 20’s partook of the same uninhibited individualism. Of course, to our present way of thinking there is much “youthfulness” and often an unreal theatricality in all its devil-may-care; existence is much grimmer today for the majority of thinking and feeling people, and the kind of daring or boldness which captures our imaginations is one that takes our more complex reality into account and makes its bid in relation to it. But it is impossible to go through this anthology without sensing the adventurousness and sheer aliveness of the bulk of the contributions as compared with the truly pale cast of the thought—a pained gray—one finds in a high-level little magazine today.
Yet much as we appreciate the “liveliness” of the Hemingway-Cummings-Crane generation, it does us no good to condemn a present that must be dealt with and, in art, mastered. The only immediate reason for being concerned with our past is to learn from it, and it is obvious that the human and hence the literary needs of this period are radically different from the 20’s in this respect: our mental burden being graver, more sinister, we must try to illuminate our experience; the earlier writers, in the broadest sense, were more concerned with rendering theirs.
There is, however, one simple thing I believe we can learn from The Little Review Anthology that seems to have been forgotten by our period: that is, if a piece of writing, no matter what, is so interesting that the eye is greedy to get to the next word, it means that we are undergoing an experience which is important to us, even if the reason is hidden from sight. And almost all of the pieces Miss Anderson has reprinted are interesting in this basic sense. The reason we want to read them is simple—perhaps it even contains a moral: these writers were not afraid to really express themselves; they do not edit out of their work ideas their friends may not care for, and they do not aspire to any of the highbrow rewards—“status,” teaching jobs, fellowships—which keep so many of our writers today walking a tightrope too narrow to bear the weight of their own personalities, much less their joy in writing itself. In the 20’s intellectual life was not yet institutionalized, and calling a spade a bloody shovel in print would not cost you your Fulbright.
It was Ezra Pound, in one of his excellent little critical treatises, who pointed out that one of the first purposes of writing was “to make glad the heart of man,” and Pound does just that in his contributions to the anthology. Can we for the moment try to forget about Pound’s anti-Semitism? For when Pound writes about literature he “speaks not as the scribes, but with Authority,” and he sets the tempo of the entire Little Review Anthology just as he set it for many of his fellow artists during the 20’s.
Ironically enough, Emma Goldman furnishes Pound’s only competition for individual honors in this collection. In two pieces of writing—one, a letter from prison; the other, her answer to the before-mentioned questionnaire—she reveals a temperament in which the senses of justice and charity are held in equal balance, and her spirit rises from these pages as I imagine her figure rose above her contemporaries.
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All during the 1940’s New Directions was the only hospitable anthology in the country for genuinely experimental or offbeat work; much in it may have been of uncertain quality, but much was also the genuine article. In recent years, however, the publication seems to have lost its raison dêtre. As it became “internationalalized”—with contributions from all over the world, and a bewildering variety of them that buffeted the mind from one mood to another—it became more and more diffused and pointless. The present number contains several good stories, articles, and interesting poems, but each item seems almost to cancel out the other—as if written at opposite ends of the earth and put together in one volume to prove the delights of incongruity. For example, in ND 14 there is an article on education by Robert Maynard Hutchins, ex-president of the University of Chicago, along with some surrealist verse. Both verse and essay suffer because of their proximity as do two of the most “mature” and finished short stories in the collection—by Delmore Schwartz and John Heffron Porter—because of the presence of some of the wilder pieces.
Other symptoms of this lack of even a minimal unity could be cited, but they all seem to point to one thing: namely, that the original impetus for publishing these anthologies seems to have been lost and they have become more reflexive than purposive acts. The “new” in this French avant-garde sense is no longer what it was—no longer fills the reader with anticipation, and no longer perpetuates a relevant attitude. History and human need now ask for a new leading image. At the risk of seeming ungrateful to a publication which held a special place in the modern movement in American writing, the facts clearly say that its real life lies in the past.
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New World Writing is an attempt to publish what might be called a mass-circulation little magazine, and is therefore in an unnatural position to begin with. It has to find good work which is at the same time “entertaining” and has sales value—a tall order. Thus in its second issue we see an attempt to ring the cash register by the inclusion of big literary names in what was to have been a snow-white publishing venture: James Jones, Norman Mailer, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and—celebrated man of letters that he is—Pablo Picasso, represented by a surrealist play which is about as pertinent to the demands of an average reader as an old shoe. Jones’s and Mailer’s stories are inferior for them. Mr. Auden’s essay on fairy tales is entertaining and provocative, but could as easily have appeared in Harper’s or the Atlantic Monthly; it contains nothing urgent, new, or of dramatic enough importance to justify its presence in a publication that prides itself on offering fresh literary eggs to the public. In fact, as regards the celebrities, only the excerpt from Dylan Thomas’s queer, often dementedly funny novel, entitled Adventures in the Skin Trade, seems to fit in with New World Writing’s prospectus. While not to this reviewer’s personal taste, it has the literary imagination that one would assume to be the ticket of admission to a book like this.
There are good pieces in the book by James Baldwin, Conrad Alvaro, Herbert Gold (one wishes he would use fewer words; there is such a thing as self-defeating brilliance), Leonard Bishop, and that Mr. Quicksilver of young American writers, Calder Willingham. But the lack of clear purpose as to what should be printed, what standards the editors should maintain and strive for, is as apparent as in the current New Directions. In its introduction, New World Writing explicitly dedicates itself to a broad hospitality towards a variety of writing, and appears to think this is not only an adequate statement of its aims, but is to be applauded. Yet only on the basis of genuine convictions and principles can an anthology be put out that will have unity and purpose, and give dignity—it’s only a small amount one looks for these days!—to the whole notion of what significant writing is. The unevenness of this second number is only a symptom; the real disappointment lies in the absence one discerns of a sense of direction—with real goals, sighted, needed.
Discovery, published by Pocket Books as a competitor to New World Writing and edited by the young critic John Aldridge and a young novelist, Vance Bourjaily, is more interesting than either New Directions or New World Writing. It suffers from a cheap format and an amount of both bad and pretentious writing, but it reflects more closely than the other two anthologies what a new generation of American writers is up to. It is restricted to Americans, and has a more positive point of view because both of its editors are themselves involved in defining the attitudes of this new generation. Even when one finds their credo “brassy,” it is a relief to see that they have certain convictions and that they have invested so much of themselves in putting out their book. That this kind of seriousness of effort can determine how writers will respond is demonstrated by one fact: Norman Mailer turns up with a much more authentic piece of work—a story of the war which once again shows his somewhat Dreiserian gifts of patient understanding and inclusiveness—than the slick, unfelt story by which he is represented in New World Writing. If Discovery gave us nothing else but the impression of a genuine interest in new American writing for its own sake—and it gives more than that—it would be worthwhile.
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The best work in Discovery is in short stories—apart from Mailer’s—by Julia Savarese, Arnold Grisman, Hortense Calisher, Chandler Brossard, Marguerite Young, and William Styron. Four impress us especially: Calisher, Young, Brossard, and Styron. Miss Calisher writes a New Yorker type of story, conventional in form and concerned with middle-class misery, but her perceptions strike one as being unusually mature and unsentimental, and have the painful conviction of the truth. Brossard has a tendency to monotone in his writing—he writes JO naturally that it often wants a little art and shaping—but this is more than redeemed by a bitter charm and honesty. His contribution is the first chapter from a long fictional work, The Bold Saboteurs, and concerns the “garbage-can” adventures of a young, uprooted boy in Washington, D.C. The only way to describe this combination of terror and humor is to say that at its best it has the salty anarchism of Mark Twain plus an unforgiving contemporary anger.
Marguerite Young is an excellent writer of the English language—exact, finished, and a pleasure to read; her story “The Hangman’s Tale” is excerpted from what appears to be a highly involved novel. But the story itself, on the face of it a parable on Christian morality, is not self-contained enough for its meaning to be entirely clear—at least not to this reviewer. The most completely rewarding piece of imaginative prose in the whole collection is by William Styron, who contributes a long novelette that rises above “life” to the stature of art as it illuminates the frustrating experiences of civilians recalled to the army. There are definite flaws in Styron’s work—an “arty” and distracting infatuation with words, and the tail-end of Faulkner’s influence—but it is extraordinary to find a young author, barely in his late twenties, with such wise understanding, and with the ability to create fictional life on a level with the broadness of his concern. To use a phrase of Irving Howe’s, there is, even if not always pure, the “voice of love” in Styron’s story—how sweet it sounds you must experience for yourself.
Note: AS this review goes to press, a third issue of New World Writing has appeared; space prevents a complete discussion of the book, but it seems just to say that all the sins which follow from a lack of direction are even more evident in this collection than in the second one. What we have here is a grab-bag—the sort of thing that inspires a newspaper reviewer to haul out “rich and varied fare” from his bag of clichés, and equally the sort of thing which will cause any even mildly serious reviewer to see waste and confusion. Once again there are good isolated pieces—the first chapter from Evan S. Connell Jr.’s novel, for instance—but by far the bad pieces outweigh the good. More significant than the words “good” or “bad” in this context is the single word “purpose,” and in my opinion the editors of this collection would do well to ponder the implications of that idea far below sea-level. Otherwise, they will continue to put out a book that may still get good press notices but will leave the people whose respect they want to earn cold and not at home.
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