Talking & Doing

Published in the U. S. are one literary annual and one semi-annual of proved vitality. They are New Directions in Prose & Poetry, published by New Directions in Norfolk, Conn., and Twice A Year, a Semi-Annual Journal of Literature, The Arts and Civil Liberties, published by Twice A Year in Manhattan. Each is a subsidized enterprise, each is edited by its own patron, and each claims a more independent policy, a purer concern with pure literature, than professional publishing can show. Readers in the autumn of 1939 could look to them for such nonconformist stuff as The Dial and The Little Review used to print in the years before Depression.

In October the fourth annual New Directions anthology came out with its usual preface by its rich (steel), shrewd 25-year-old editor, James Laughlin IV, who puts it together in a remodeled barn on his uncle's Connecticut estate. "We are drifting into an era of journalese," warned Publisher Laughlin. "Let us oppose the principle of destruction with the principle of creation." Readers found a few contributions (notably a peasant tragedy by the late, great Spanish Poet Federico Garcia Lorca, a passage about a prostitute-waif from The Black Book by the English Writer Lawrence Durrell) that seemed creative indeed, many more that seemed fashionably frantic in technique as in content. A section on "American design" was atrociously badly designed. Question: does editorship of such a publication demand merely a generous ear, or also an exacting one?

New Directions has more than one string to its bow and last fortnight produced three redeeming books:

P: A new translation, fully competent, lucid and unpretentious, of the French Poet Rimbaud's famed Season in Hell. Translator Delmore Schwartz kept in English all that dispassionate English can keep of Rimbaud's poetry--everything, that is, but the essential harshness and resonance of the original.

P: A book of short stories and poems, The World I Breathe, introducing to the generality of U. S. readers a young Welsh writer named Dylan Thomas whose druidical Welshness is probably without modern parallel. Greatly gifted, enormously mannered, his Merlinesque-magic dream stories were best when least diffuse, distinguished often by fine endings.

P: Solider stuff: a dollar reprint of William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain. Even for readers who turn up their collars at Williams' sprinkling verses, this book of prose sketches on episodes from American history, first published in 1925 and long out of print, should be a revelation in rich and searching imagination.

Miller. Last year it was reported that New Directions was about to publish Tropic of Cancer, by the inexhaustible

U. S. Expatriate Henry Miller (TIME, Nov. 21, 1938). It did not do so. The book had been published in Paris in 1934 and was considered by severe critics to be, even in its fantasies, of extraordinary documentary power. It was also known to a number of readers as a piece of uproarious pornography. Rather than invite another legal battle like that over Joyce's Ulysses, Publisher Laughlin last month brought out The Cosmological Eye, a book of more or less castrated selections from Miller's writing. By doing this much, New Directions called attention to Miller's latest long book, Tropic of Capricorn, published in Paris this year.

Tropic of Cancer was a dizzying personal record of sexual adventure, straycat poverty and street wanderings in Paris, formless and plotless in any classical sense, savagely anti-artistic. Its end-of-the-rope eloquence was, however, apprentice work compared with Tropic of Capricorn, which deals with Miller's jobholding and job-avoiding life in Manhattan and Brooklyn before he went to Paris. Written in a naked language not of literature but of a man's talking, unquotable except by the page, Tropic of Capricorn would mean plenty to countless men-in-the-street. The "dithyrambic prose" which excited avant-garde blurbists in Tropic of Cancer--and which was frequently tiresome--has been kept in hand by a new sense of structure --a better interplay of narrative and reminiscence.

Nearest approach in The Cosmological Eye to Miller's cumulative power is a nightmare section building up to a bloody, fecund millennium in which a menagerie breaks loose, animals, vegetables and Indians run wild, and there are "no pale white faces, thanks be to Christ!" For the rest, its often funny short pieces are as mild compared to the two novels as they are wild, and fresh, relative to the bulk--and much of the best--of U. S. writing.

Twice to Once. First published in autumn 1938, Twice A Year has established itself as a distinguished periodical, more original in essence if less "experimental" in a literary way than the New Directions annual. Combining autumn 1939 and spring 1940 in a fat third number, the current Twice A Year temporarily assumes annual status. It is edited, designed, published and supported by a calm, brown-eyed, well brought up Philadelphian named Dorothy Norman who takes literature and liberalism both together and equally seriously.

In its first number Twice A Year published 34 pages of moderately pithy pontification by Alfred Stieglitz; a gustier and guttier five-page blast on aesthetics by e. e. cummings; some subtle war-time letters (1914-19) of the great German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke; excerpts from Andre Malraux and Franz Kafka among others; the studied, furious oration in which individualist Henry David Thoreau in 1859 defended individualist John Brown. Its "Civil Liberties Section" contained Roger Baldwin's On Being a Conscientious Objector (1918-1913)--plus the judge's decision that in 1918 sent Baldwin to jail.

Twice A Year'?, succeeding issues have been rich in unpublished, forgotten or unavailable documents like these. Its latest issue includes a prophetic piece written by Heine in 1834 ("There will be played a drama in Germany compared to which the French revolution will seem but an innocent idyll"); a Civil Liberties review of the year 1939 commending 23 actions, condemning 25;. a 38-page analysis of Mussolini's foreign policy by Gaetano Salvemini ranking as the calmest, hence deadliest deflation of post-war diplomacy yet in print.

By tone, price ($2), format and program, Twice A Year seems limited to an upper-crust liberal audience, and its quota of contemporary creative work is a bit less "free" than its documentary content. Yet in everything it prints it conveys a sense of the seriousness of writing which few U. S. journals attempt to match and which is pretty well indicated by Editor

Norman's touchstone for documentary contributions: "Someone who talks about the thing must be someone who would do the thing."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.