Page Eight PERSPECTIVES CONCERNING THE YOUNG by Williard Maas, Farrar and Rine- hart, N.Y. THE FIVE-FOLD MESH by Ben Belitt, Knopf, N.Y. THE CARNIVAL by Frederic Pro- kosoh, Harpers, N.Y. A GLAD DAY by Kay Boyle, New Directions, Norwalk, Conn. Modern poetry, which for years has suffered the limp slings and indifferent arrows of the reading public, has begun to show, even in this country, a facade strong and arresting. It becomes increas- ingly difficult for the common reader to pass by the collective house of words that the young American poets have built without giving a very considerable part of his attention to its color, dimension, and purpose. In the four new volumes under consideration and so cursorily noted here, the properties of poetry as practiced in this harassed decade are served and defined. In THE FIVE-FOLD MESH, Ben Be- litt has, in his own words, "uggested a discipline of integration, rather than a series of isolated poetic comments." His success in this direction marks his book with emphasis among the uncorrelated and hybrid volumes so freely issued in recent years. The growth of the man as poet is traced here, from the loose beauty of In childhood, body wept to feel The innocent anguish in the heel, The impetus of blood and bone To work some wonder of their own, Some plaintive festival, intent To burst its gorged integument, To rise in rays, to spring ajar In feathers like a pointed star to the rational and brusque, illusionless maturity of What have we lived by? The gentler Greece becomes A classroom quarrel for contentious scholars, And still the imemmorial errors linger; The tradesman closes shop to dream of drums, And hourly, through the clash of silver dollars, Nurses an anguish in his trigger-finger In a short sequence of twenty-five poems, Belitt has written a contem- porary statement marked with the steeled anguish of the sensitive and contemplative man in a hard-knuckled era whose spirit is no part of him. His book is the severest and most selective of those mentioned here and certainly one of the most accomplished in recent years. < Willard Maas belongs in the company of Horace Gregory, Muriel Rukeyser, and Kenneth Fearing, though the fierce apostrophes and surgical comments of these compatriots is not found in CON- CERNING THE YOUNG. Rather, he is- the rebel with a new dignity and strength, with a nostalgia that invades his simplest poem likesnoke. With him, tenderness without sentimentality comes back to American poetry. He invokes the dignity of what we might have been in the same sentences in which he makes active protest of what we are, And whatever our hearts spoke We shall remember now As the moon curdles red and the hills Are lost with the springs bright boughs, And the naked trees in the dark Cry out with dreams before we awake With machineguns mounted on the window sills. (It must be noticed how, at this point, Belitt and Maas speak identically. They have a common enemy whose agent is very real and workable firearms.) The leafage of a Swinburne and the spiked tree of an Auden combine in the poetry of Frederic Prokosch to produce a most effervescent sort of poetic bush. Mr. Prokosch can swoon with the inver- tebracy of a portrait by Rosetti and in the next breath diagnose the known world beneath fingers relentless and skeletal. He seems the romantic stranger in a world gone, one minute, into fiery, celebrations over its own existence, and the next, into dark, nostalgic keening over the reaches of its sad geography. His talent is facile to the point of slick- ness, though, often in THE CARNIVAL a line, a verse, will stand out like bone through flesh. He will grow when, and if, like Ben Belitt, he learns to practice a "discipline of integration" All her public life, Kay Boyle has been a marginal sort of woman whose artis- try, in the novel and the short story, has built up an American reputation from her various Continental homes, that amounts very nearly to devotion. Now, with A GLAD DAY, she joins, the poets with a collection of loosely cadenced, un- rhymed anecdotes, comments, and mar- ginalia of many kinds. It is very clearly the book of a prose-poet; the few at- tempts in the volume that might fit a general poetic conception are checked and broken. There is magic, though, ,in her Irish rhythms, so evident in her short stories, and considerable structural strength in the longer poems, notably, "A Communication to Nancy Cunard" which is the storyof the Scottsboro boys, if Miss Boyle would relent and give the reader keys td so much that is cryp- tic, oblique, or just beyond the limits of, logic, her book, like so many others of its genre, might give the abnormal its only excusable artistic function of illu- minating the commonplace. Lacking these, A GLAD DAY is but another note on the margin of a never-written epic. - JOHN MALCOLM BRINNINc "WE'LL TO THE WOODs No MORE," by Edouard Dujardin, translated by Stuart Gilbert. P New Directions, Norwalk, Conn. The interest in this book lies almost wholly in the fact that it was written in 1888, that it was- the first book even written entirely in stream of conscious- ness, that its author not only used this technique but used it self-consciously, even wrote a monograph on it, and most important, that James Joyce by his own confession had read the book even before' he wrote A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and was strongly influenced by it. The stream of consciousness (or in- terior monologue) Dujardin defines in his monograph as follows: "The interior monologue - in its nature on the order of poetry -is that unheard and un- spoken speech by which a character ex- presses his inmost thoughts --those lying nearest the unconscious- with- out regard to logical organization - that is, in their orginal state - by means of direct sentences reduced to the syntacti- cal minimum, and in such a way as to give the impression of reproducing the thoughts just as they come in the mind." In the bold-faced phrase is the key to the defect in Dujardin's style, a defect which, in spite of his originality, makes We'll To The Woods No More read like a somewhat inept imitation of Joyce. For Dujardin, still influenced by tra- ditional restrictions, failed to break away from the syntactical sentence, and could not achieve the modern writer's disdain for immediate intelligibility. And therefore he includes in his interior monologue factual descriptions of the movements of the hero and the people about him, which Joyce would have omitted on both technical and psycho- logical grounds. For example: "What a bore he is! Always giving one the slip like that! We are under the arcade now; walking past the shop windows; in the crowd. Better walk on the road. No, too many carriages. Bit of a crush here, but it can't be helped. A women in front; tall, slim, heavily scented; shapely figure she has, flashing red hair; wonder what her face is like; handsome, probably. Cha- vainne is speaking." And more generally, Joyce restricts his stream of conscious- ness to those elements which the char- acter himself would have verbalized, while Dujardin, less consistent, frequent- ly verbalizes elements of which his char- acter would have had only sensuous awareness. Thus on the whole Dujardin's stream of consciousness technique stands as the half-way mark between the tra- ditional narrational technique and the highly accurate psychological interior monologue of James Joyce. Nevertheless, one can hardly minimize the remarkable orginality of Dujardin and the tremendous effect - which his writings had on Joyce. For even aside from the general idea of the technique, Dujardin's work is strongly suggestive of Joyce in many particular passages.. Dujardin: ". . . cold on the hand the water is; my head down in the water, brrr! Fine sensation that, one's head down down in cool splashing water that gurgles slippery sliding all over it; one's ears buzzing, full of water, eyes closed first, then open in the greeness. skin tingling all over; sort of a thrill it gives one, almost like a caress." Joyce: "Enjoy a bath now: clean. trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream. This is my body. "He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs rip- rippled over and sustained, buoyed light- ly upward, lemonyellow . . ." Dujardin anticipates Joyce also in his use of recurrent themes, in the kind of associations which he uses (from a cold wash to the seashore), in the use of snatches of songs and of puns (Louise -Louis). Apart from its technique and histori- cal importance, We'll To The Woods No More isa French novelette, charming and unimportant. -BERNARD FRIEDMAN and HARVEY SWADOS nta gn The big literary event in Ann Arbor this month (aside from the lecture of our native Thomas Mann, Dr. Lloyd Douglas) was the opening of John Brinnin's Bookroom on State Street. I hope no one will object to my giving the place a free plug, but I must say a few words about the Bookroom. It has a whole group of magazines that you can't get anyplace else in town: Poetry, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, International Literature, tran- sition, Science and Society, New Masses. Incidentally, New Masses has been publishing two Ann Arbor poets quite regularly: John Brinnin and Norman Rosten. Everybody who was here list year fondly remembers Norman, his poems, his plays, and his corduroy pants. While we're still with the Bookroom, I must note a few more of its fine fea- tures. It is carrying the complete Faber & Faber list (British publishers), the complete New Directions list (New Di- rections is an interesting new publish- ing house), and it has a rental library of the new novels and the new poetry, which is a real innovation. The Book- room is also featuring a series of lec- tures on poetry by Kimon Friar, poet and critic. Mr. Friar's first three lec- tures have really been good, and those he will give during the next several months will probably be even better. For those of you who have been writ- ing stories and don't know where to send them-aside from PERSPEC- TIVES -I am told that two new maga- zines will be coming out shortly; one is exclusively for college student writ- ers, and will be called Campus. They want stories, articles, poetry, with liter- ary quality. The other one is The New Anvil and "crude vigor will be preferred to polished banality." Some of you may remember the old Anvil, edited by the same man, Jack Conroy, author of The Disinherited. Anvil published half a dozen well-known writers at a time when nobody else would publish them. If you want the addresses of these magazines, get in touch with me. It looks as tnough there is ging to be a good crop of books this season. Hem- ingway's new book is on sale in town already. It has his new play and every story he ever wrote. Looks like a good buy. Knopf is bringing out President Benes' They Gave Us A Country in No- vember. Dos Passos will be in print again with Adventures of a Young Mans That genius Saroyan (according to Sa- royan) is back again with What To Do With Tigers, and Millen Brand (The Outward Room) has a new novel about a group of veteransin a soldiers' home, The Heroes. Malraux's new novel -L'Espoir,.is coming out in English this fall as Mans Hope. T. S. Eliot will have a new verse play out soon, The Family Reunion, and Kenneth Fearing is hav- ing a new volume of verse published, Dead Reckoning. These look good too: Robert Brif- fault's Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Felix Frankfurter's Mr. Jus- tice Holmes and the Supreme Court, six volumes of the letters of Ralph Wal- do Emerson, The Chinese Fight For Freedom by Anna Louise Strong, George Seldes' Lords of the Press, Heinrich Mann's, Henry, King of France, Art Young: His Life And Times, Whitman, by Newton Arvin, and Josephine Herbst's new novel, The Rope of Gold. One more announcement: PERSPEC- TIVES wants to know what you think of the magazine as a whole, or of any individual features. So we will print all letters which have something to say about the things PERSPECTIVES is trying to do. HARVEY SWADOS Thanks are due to the Bookroom and Wahr's for the loan of books reviewed in this issue. CHAD WALSH is a graduate of the University of Virginia, suh. Studying here for his Master's Degree in French. -Aims to write poetry that is not highbrow. MARITTA WOLFF won a fiction award in last spring's Hopwood Contests. She is a junior from Grass Lake, majoring in English Composition. SEYMOUR HOROWITZ is biting his nails over a novel. He is a graduate student in English and hails from Buffalo. CARL GULDBERG specializes in quick line drawings in pen and ink. Comes from Suttons Bay and is a major in Architecture. DENNIS FLANAGAN writes occasional short stories on evenings he isn't night- editing the Daily and has contributed a story to each issue of Perspectives. He is unmarried. ELLIOTT MARANISS almost started a second civil war when several Southern students were aroused by his Daily editorials on the South. A junior from Brook- lyn, he takes deep interest in social problems. CHRISTINE NAGEL is an art "find" arousing Artist Jean Paul Slusser's en- thusiasm. A major in architecture, she is a member of Alpha Alpha Gamma, Women's Honorary Architectural Society, and won a Jane Higbee award. RALPH HEIKKINEN'S chief interest is football-he's a varsity guard-and his creative writing is a hobby. "Hike" plans to enter law school. CHARLES MILLER was a holder of a scholarship this summer at the Play- house in the Hills in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Is a transfer student from Northwestern. PENELOPE PEARL, althougn from Baltimore, writes entertainingly about Cape Cod. Attended Barnard College and Harvard Summer School. This is her senior year, and she is majoring in psychology. 0 HAROLD PODOLSKY does interpretative work in linoleum blocks. Is a senior and a Detroiter.