The Press: The Unhappy Writers

"Many times we have wanted to fold the magazine up; it is hard to remain seated on the low hummocks of satire and humor in the midst of grim events. A satirist at breakfast may get a firm grip on his day's work . . . only to have the whole thing drop out from under him when his eye reaches the casualty list."

The professionally light-hearted New Yorker, which last week made this admission, has fallen more & more often in recent weeks into an uneasy, self-conscious mood. The New Yorker has not been alone. A wartime schizophrenia has touched all U.S. magazines trading in fiction and frills. And last week, in the April Harper's, Poet-Anthologist Oscar Williams culled from his correspondence with poets a summary of the wartime writer's dilemma—"a kind of Gallup poll of the soul." No writer was particularly happy in his work. Samples of unease:

Mark Van Doren, Pulitzer Prize poet: "War could be beautiful to Homer and Shakespeare because it could be tragic. It has ceased to be that. ... I suspect any war poet now who says he knows what the current calamity means—including the one who says it means nothing at all."

Geoffrey Grigson, editor of England's New Verse magazine: "Nothing new has happened in this war. Men have been tortured, women have been murdered, explosives have exploded. . . . That helps one, not to be indifferent, which is impossible, but not to be taken in ... by the lewd rhetoric of a war. . . . In this country, the Black Militia of the Pen ask where the war poets are; and they only mean, where are the thumps on the tub, the morale poems. . . ."

E. E. Cummings, author of World War I's bitter novel The Enormous Room: "Why don't our poets and painters and composers and so forth glorify the war effort? Are they Good Americans or are they not? . . . When I was a boy, Good Americans were—believe it or don't—adoring the Japanese and loathing the Russians. . . . When you confuse art with propaganda, you confuse an act of God with something which can be turned on and off like the hot water faucet."

Sergeant Selden Rodman, editor-on-leave of Common Sense, now stationed in Washington, D.C.: "All serious war poetry is antiwar poetry. . . . Some of the best war poetry has been written by poets who have never been near a battlefield—witness Thomas Hardy, Rilke, Rimbaud. But . . . almost all the poetry glorifying war has [also] been written by people who have never been near a battlefield."