Books: 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:

¶ 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.

¶ 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.

¶ 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