The Editor of

**View**

1 East 53rd St.
New York City

the modern magazine of the arts

presents

*your* *résumé* . . .

For two years *View* has been the testing ground for what is fresh and extraordinary in the fields of art and ideas. Growing steadily in scope and size, from a tabloid of six pages to the current number of sixty pages with over 40 reproductions, *View* has evolved into something other than just a "little" magazine. . . More and more art institutions, libraries and individual readers depend upon *View* to bring them regularly what is alive and experimental in the art and literature of the time.

It is not only our native painters and poets who find a sympathetic audience through *View*. What effect is America having upon the work of outstanding European artists and writers who are playing so impressive a role in our midst? *View*'s close association with them makes possible the presentation of their newest work before it becomes news. For example, there are special issues devoted to the painters Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Pavel Tchelitchew, prepared with the cooperation of connoisseur-critics such as James Thrall Soby, André Breton, James Johnson Sweeney, Sidney Janis, Julien Levy, and Lincoln Kirstein; these numbers, fully documented and illustrated, are invaluable additions to the growing literature on contemporary art.

In addition to the work of such well known collaborators, *View* has launched, and will continue to search for, artists who may be little publicized at the moment, but who are sure to leave their mark on modern culture. Why wait until they're popular?

and . . .

... a program for the 3rd Series

* *View* functions as an integrating medium for vital but separate creative tendencies everywhere. Thus, the new generation of poets in Great Britain — most of whom are in the R.A. but with whom we are in constant touch — will continue to published in our pages; communiqués from avant-garde groups in unoccupied countries from Egypt to the Latin Americas will merge in *View*, carrying a consolidated and inspiring message around the world.

* *View* stands for the imaginative view in everything. As St. Karl Jay Shapiro (author of the recently acclaimed volume of verse, "Person, Place and Thing"), said: "View is the imaginative publication Pre run across so far..."

* *View* anticipates the further collaboration of the following artists and writers, most of whom have already contributed to the magazine's success:

Lionel ABEL

Xavier ABRIL

Jorge Carrera ANDRADE

John BAYLISS

Kennedy BLANCHARD

Alain BOSQUET

André BRETON

Leonora CARRINGTON

Roger CAILLOIS

Hugh CHISHOLM

Joseph CORNELL

Max ERNST

James T. FARRELL

Leonor FINI

Preston FORRESTER

John B. L. GOODWIN

H. R. HAYS

Georges HENEIN

Frida KAHLO

Leon KOCHNITSKY

Helen LEVITT

Julien LEVY

* Pierre MABILLE

* Conroy MADDOX

* Hanani MELLER

* Robert MELVILLE

* Joan MIRO

* Nicholas MOORE

* Montagu O'REILLY

* Benjamin PERET

* Bern PORTER

* Paul Eaton REEVE

* Toni del RENZIO

* Winett de ROKHA

* Kay SAGE

* Florine STETTHEIMER

* Wallace STEVENS

* Virgil THOMSON

* Henry TREECE

* Alva N. TURNER

* Peter WELLS

* William Carlos WILLIAMS

* George WOODCOCK

* and others...

of four numbers appearing in April, June, October and December, 1943, there will be original covers designed by Man Ray, Kurt Seligmann, André Masson and Pavel Tchelitchew. No. 1 begins a new format, 9 x 12, and a partial list of the contents follows:

* DREAM OF MOBILE by HENRY MILLER

* NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE by EDITH SITWELL

* THE FIVE MAJOR TERMS by KENNETH BURKE

* CHILDREN'S PAGE by ALEXANDER CALDER

* WITHIN GOOD AND EVIL by NICOLAS CALAS

* PHOTOGRAPHY IS NOT ART by MAN RAY

* THE IVORY TOWER OF JUDO by PARKER TYLER

* PAGE FROM A NOTEBOOK by ANDRÉ MASSON

* ALBRIGHT: COMPULSIVE PAINTER by HARRIET & SIDNEY JANIS

* MAN INTO BEAST by KURT SELIGMANN

* * *

Each number will be a typographical delight, with many reproductions of paintings, drawings and photographs.

* * *

We also take pleasure in announcing new departments, to be permanent features of *View*:

* MODERN MUSIC : PAUL BOWLES

* THEATRE SURVEY : MARY MCCARTHY

* REVIEW OF REVIEWS : RANDALL JARRELL

* ART SHOWS : HILARY ARM

* BOOK VIEWS : HAROLD ROSENBERG

MAGAZINE VIEW BARRED

Winter Issue Non-Mailable, Says
Postoffice Department

The Postoffice Department has
notified the editorial board of
View, quarterly magazine of art
and literary criticism, news and
biography, that the publication's
winter issue, currently on sale, has
been ruled non-mailable under
Postal Regulation 598, the section
under which second-class mailing
privileges were denied to the
privileges were denied to the
editor.

"We hold that the barring from the mail of the winter issue of View is unjustifiable for several reasons, and have sent a protest to Washington," Mr. Ford said. "Most of our circulation is among artists, art collectors, critics, galleries, museums, and universities and colleges. We have not been informed what item or items of the contents of the current issue have been found objectionable. If it is the Picasso nude—the work of an internationally acclaimed artist—we fail to understand the Postoffice Department's action.

NY TIMES

Jan 1 1944

NEWS Jan 1, 1944

Bar Winter Issue
Of Art Magazine

The Winter issue of View, an art
publication which in this case ap-
parently viewed too much, has
been banned from the mails, the
Post Office Department yesterday
informed Charles Henri Ford, edi-
tor.

Ford, palpably annoyed, said he
could think of nothing objection-
able in the magazine and couldn't
imagine what the Post Office had
in mind, except possibly "the Pi-
casso nude—the work of an inter-
nationally acclaimed artist."

The publication, which describes
itself as a "quarterly magazine of
art and literary criticism, news and
biography," was banned under
Postal Regulation 598, the section
under which second-class mailing
privileges were denied to Esquire
magazine on Thursday.

Protest to Washington.

"We hold that the barring from the mail of the Winter issue of View is unjustifiable for several reasons, and have sent a protest to Washington," Ford said. "Most of our circulation is among artists, art collectors, critics, galleries, museums, and universities and colleges.

"We have not been informed
what item or items of the contents
of the current issue have been
found objectionable. If it is the
Picasso nude—the work of an in-
ternationally acclaimed artist—we
fail to understand the Post Office
Department's action."

The magazine circulates 5,000
copies, half on news stands and
half by mail to subscribers.

TIME (Jan 10)

THE PRESS

Esquire Banned

For two years Frank C. Walker's Post
Office Department has had a perfect bat-
ting average against magazines it cited, or
simply scanned, as obscene: 23 cited;
39 put to the purity test; 62 second-class
mail (cheaper rate) privileges revoked or
denied. Last week sharp-nosed Postmaster
General Walker, setting himself up as the
No. 1 judge of what the U.S. public should
read and of what it should be denied, per-
sonally turned thumbs down on Esquire.

His one-man ruling was not given on the
obscenity grounds covered by his court's

ganization for Decent Literature, came a
statement: "Esquire not even on our dis-
approved list for a year . . . no collusion,
no correspondence. . . . As far as I know
he doesn't think of me in connection with
this Esquire business."

Smut v. Fun. The *Esquire* case had gone well beyond the original issue of smut v. good, clean fun and was taking on a serious aspect for the U.S. press. Said New York's *Daily News*: "The next logical step [of the Administration] will be to go after publications printing things deemed politically obscene, meaning unfavorable to the Administration. . . . The press had better stand up and fight . . . or it will cease to be a free press."

Banned from the mails at week's end, without a hearing, was the magazine *View*, slick 75¢ quarterly devoted almost entirely to art with a capital A. The objected-to material: reproductions of 1) surrealist nudes by Leon Kelley, 2) Picasso's *Le Minotaure* (in a Manhattan gallery's advertisement), Poet-Editor Charles Henri Ford stood up to fight.

NEWSWEEK

JANUARY 10, 1944

FOURTH ESTATE

Speechless Esquire

Setting himself up on the next to last
day of the year for the nomination as
Washington's No. 1 Anthony Comstock
of 1943, Postmaster General Frank C.
Walker, crusader for "clean" magazines,
last week ordered the second-class mail-
ing privileges of Esquire magazine re-
voked effective Feb. 28. Instead of
penalizing the magazine for its original
alleged sins, "obscenity, lewdness, and
lasciviousness," Walker produced this
new reason: Esquire isn't "originated and
published for the dissemination of in-
formation of a public character or de-
voted to literature, the sciences, arts, or
some special industry."

Walker's own panel of Post Office
judges in a 2-1 opinion had recommended
that Esquire be deemed morally fit to
travel second-class—after they had lis-
tened to 38 witnesses and had thumbed
through 2,500 pages of testimony (News-
week, Nov. 8, 1943). Thus the Post-
master General's disregard of the board's
opinion brought from David Smart, Es-
quire's dapper, vitriolic publisher: "This
leaves me speechless." But a decision that
will cost the magazine a prohibitive
$500,000 more per year in postage and
might conceivably put it completely out
of business, did not leave Smart speech-
less long. He directed Esquire attorneys
to seek a District of Columbia court
order to enjoin the Post Office on the
grounds that Walker's decision was com-
pletely "abrigatory and capricious. He
sets up his own judge and jury and then
overrides it . . ." and he promised that
Esky would take the case to the Supreme
Court, if necessary.

Almost in the same breath, the Post
Office Department barred from the mails
the December issue of View (circulation,
5,000), quarterly literary and art publica-
tion devoted to the esthetic study of
revolutionary groups in the art world.
View's young editor, Charles Henri Ford,
who also writes blank verse, said in a
choked voice: "We wonder if it's the
reproduction of Picasso's 'Le Minotaure'
that bothers them. If so, we'll try to con-
vince the Post Office that it's art, not
obscenity, and if necessary inform them
who Picasso is."

PRINT, Vol. III, No. 3 (1943)

View THE NEW QUARTERLY OF POETS AND PAINTERS

*has presented the 2nd Series of four numbers:*

No. 1 (April 1942): Special issue on Max Ernst

No. 2 (May 1942): Tanguy-Tchelitchew number

No. 3 (October 1942): A variety of essays by Roger Caillois (Vertigo); Nicolas Calas (The New Prometheus); Parker Tyler (The Endless Island)

No. 4 (January 1943): Americana Fantastica

Each number is elaborately illustrated and with a specially designed cover. A limited quantity of the 2nd Series, in slip-case, obtainable at $1.75, post-paid. (Not sold separately.) Contributors include: Andre Breton, Sidney Janis, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, James Thrall Soby, Lincoln Kirstein, James Johnson Sweeney. Reproductions of the work of Ernst, Tanguy, Tchelitchew, Hanani, Seligmann, Masson, Eilshemius, Stettheimer, Eakins and many others.

*Subscriptions are being accepted for the 3rd Series*
**FOUR NUMBERS $1.00**

Manuscripts and photographs invited by the editor

CHARLES HENRI FORD · 1 East 53rd St., New York City
Parker Tyler · Assistant Editor

Distributor: GOTHAM BOOK MART, 51 West 47th Street, New York City

View

1 East 53rd St.
New York City

CHARLES HENRI FORD, Editor

PARKER TYLER, Assistant Editor

**** DEPARTMENTS ******

HILARY ARM: Art
PAUL BOWLS: Music
MARY MCCARTHY: Theatre
HAROLD ROSENBERG: Books
PARKER TYLER: Film

WALES, Jan. 1944

View

SOME VIEWS ON

... the most imaginative publication I've run across so far."—KARL SHAPIRO.

"If Charles Henri Ford can be persuaded to continued editing VIEW, it is reasonably sure there will be 'results'. The latest issue [9-10] of this publication is so completely stylized from beginning to end, that it becomes clear that the younger group of poets and painters, no matter what happens, will cling to their 'biens'."—HENRY MCBRIDE, N. Y. Sun.

"I am too old to understand VIEW."—CARL VAN VECHTEN.

With 11-12, Volume I of VIEW is complete. Many requests for back numbers must go unfilled but the Gotham Book Mart, 51 West 47th St., New York City, can still supply the following, at 20¢ the copy:

**9-10** features: THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD by Pierre Mabille

"ENCHANTED WANDERER" by Joseph Cornell

EVERY MAN HIS OWN PRIVATE DETECTIVE (reportage of The Maltese Falcon, film) by Parker Tyler

NOSTRADAMUS AGAINST THE GODS (An Assertion of the Active Principle of Prophecy) by Hilary Arm

REMARKS ON THE POLYMORPHIC IMAGE by John B. L. Goodwin

A FEW WORDS OF ADVICE TO BEGGARS by Clark Mills

Reproductions of paintings and drawings by Pavel Tchelitchew, Giorgio di Chirico, Leonor Fini

Photographs ... Poems and stories by Manuel Moreno Jimeno, Nicholas Moore, Forrest Anderson, Rosamel del Valle.

**11-12:** THE POLITICS OF SPIRIT by Lionel Abel

PICASSO IN THE LIGHT OF CHIRICO (Mutations of the Bull-Fight) by Robert Melville

MAGIC CIRCLES by Kurt Seligmann (fully illustrated)

A NIGHT WITH JUPITER by Henry Miller

THE CAT THAT CAME BACK: Poem by Alva N. Turner, accompanied by a letter from the author, a letter from W. C. Williams and a reproduction of a painting by Gertrude Cato

THE SISTERS, a short story by Leonora Carrington

THE FOURTH DIMENSION OF ROMANCE (a consideration of Julien Gracq's Chateau d'Argol) by Parker Tyler

TOWARDS THE UNKNOWN: A symposium by W. C. Williams, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, Harold Rosenberg, Lee Ver Duft

Reproductions of the work of Max Ernst and Picasso; drawings

Poems and prose-poems by Nicolas Calas, Robert Duncan, Randall Jarrell, Lawrence Durrell, Conroy Maddox

VIEW's second volume will consist of four numbers in an improved format: 32 pages each, 7½ x 10½, stapled, selling for 35¢ a copy on the magazine stands. Assure yourself of a complete set by subscribing at the continued rate of one dollar.

View

360 East 55th St.

New York City

FURIOSO, Vol. II, No. 1, 1943

The magazine *View* announces that it is entering the book-publishing field with four forthcoming volumes of poetry. They are *Young Cherry Trees Protected Against the Hares*, by André Breton (in English translation); *Anti-Angel* by Lionel Abel; *First Poems* by Philip Lamantia; and a volume to be chosen from book manuscripts submitted before April 31, 1944. Only the work of poets who have had no previous volume of verse in English will be considered. Judges will be Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, editors of *View*, and John Peale Bishop. The poet whose manuscript is chosen will receive one hundred dollars in advance royalties. The series will be available at the advance subscription price of twelve dollars. The Breton volume will have a cover designed by Marcel Duchamp, the Lamantia volume a cover by Max Ernst, and the others by artists as yet unannounced. Inquiries and manuscripts may be addressed to View, Inc., 1 E. 53rd St., New York 22.

POETRY (Chicago) Feb. 1944

Attractions in the Galleries

t g

The Maitland F. Griggs be-
quest of early Italian paintings
to the Metropolitan Museum,
now shown in Gallery 15, makes
as appropriate a Christmas show
as could be desired. The note is
emphasized by the installation,
which is chapel-like and helped
out by greens.

All the paintings are small and
most of them no more defini-
tively attributed than to such
medieval workshops as those of
Fra Filippo Lippi, Simone Mar-
tini and Masolini, but for all that
they decorate the little gallery
handsomely and will provide se-
rious students of the early days
in Italy with plenty of confirma-
tory research material. The little
panels, no doubt intended for
small private chapels, are not
stamped with greatness of man-
ner but the unhesitating clarity
of the compositions, due to the
authentic spirituality of the art-
ists, is something to be grateful
for.

The watercolors of Katherine
Sturgis in the Kraushaar Gallery
are simplified almost to the ex-
tent of being Chinese but there is
no conscious affectionation of orien-
talism in them and most of us
can accept them as native to Vir-
ginia and Vermont, where they
were painted. The mist on a dis-
tant hill or a remote rain storm
come easily to this artist and her
decorative instinct is pronounced.

In the A. C. A. Gallery the
peasant art of David Buriuk is
shown. Like newcomers to
this land, Mr. Buriuk is but a
visitor here and thinks in terms
of the Russia he left years ago.
It is curious that this should be
so, but psychologists find it ra-
tional. Such pictures as the
studies of life on Tompkins
Square and at Martha's Vineyard
are not half so attractive as the
imaginative children "On the
Dnieper's Shores." This is rough-
hewn painting, but it has the
sparkle of something the artist
liked doing.

The cutest art gallery in town
is also the newest one, the one
attached to the offices of View,
Inc., 1 East 53d street; but keen
students of the latest movements
are advised to go to the show as
early in the morning as possible,
for twelve visitors at one time
might crowd the rooms unduly
and interfere with study. The
artists in this first display are
attached to the review, and like
the writers for it, are advanced
to an almost alarming degree.
They include Tchelitchew, whose
cover design is a bold announce-
ment of a new way of focusing
the eyeball upon vegetable
growths rather than human be-
ings; and others are Edward Mel-
carth, Andre Masson, Sandy Cal-
der, Yves, Tanguy, Cadmus, Ha-
nani, Kurt Seligman and Kay
Sage.

In the Bonestell Galleries new
paintings by Nura are shown. As
heretofore the topics concern
children, but the discussion seems
to be addressed to adults. There
is a massiveness to Nura's chil-
dren that adults might like.
Adults like to think that children
will stay that way. Children
themselves don't care to stay put.

H. McB.

Dec. 24, 1943

N.Y.SUN

CUE, Jan. 1, 1944

Art Galleries

BURIUK, DAVID—A fiery Russian Revolu-
tionist is now a mellowed American artist
with 50 years of painting history behind
him, and 40 paintings of this year upon the
walls. Buriuk courageously fought his way
to attention in this country with a palette
knife loaded with heavy paint. But he has
his milder moments and sometimes glazes
as gently as a burgher. A.C.A., 63 E. 57.
Thru Jan. 8.

FASHIONS OF THE FRENCH COURT—A
large and rare collection of contemporarily
colored 17th and 18th century costume
prints of the fashions worn at the courts of
the Louis XIV, XV and XVI. Styles for
coffures, bonnets, negligees; widow's weeds,
garden sports, masquerades; and formal
court apparel, are no less elaborate than
those for ballrooms and drama of the
day. At *Morgan Library*, 29 E. 36th. Daily
(ex. Sun. and New Year's) 9-5. Thru Feb.
Free.

GUY, JAMES—A surrealist who used riddles
as the superstructure of his pictures, has
been changed by employment in an airplane
factory. Cobwes are swept away and big
industrial forms take their place. His ab-
stractions are made of cogs and ramps, cir-
cular saws and welding sparks. He makes
symphonies of energies. *Ferargil*, 63 E. 57.
Thru Jan. 15.

HAUCKE, FREDERICK—This year's show
represents a great development for the art-
ist whose venous nudes and plant forms
have repelled and confused more often than
persuaded. He "exteriorizes his insights"
now, in more understandable terms and they
become, at once, more beautiful and more
communicative. *Perls*, 32 E. 58. Jan. 3-29.

MARTIN, FLETCHER—Life Magazine's Dec
24 cover is here in person, along with Mar-
tin's paintings made from sketches done in
Bizerte, Casablanca, Tunis, and on Hill
609. Many of his live drawings are
shown and a few not-war paintings. Mid-
town, 605 Madison at 55th. Thru Jan. 20.

PARIS—Reconstruction of Paris in pictures by
some of the finest names in French art as
well as popular-style boulevard painters
Sentimentally, it's a ringer; for quality, it's
tops in instances of celebrated canvases by
Renoir, Depine, van Gogh, Manet, Berman,
and La Motte. Coordinating Council of
French Relief, Madison Ave. at 50th. Thru
Jan. 9. Adm. 55c.

PUMA, FERNANDO—Called a mystic by his
admirers; entrepreneur by the artists he for-
wards; this gallery director-artist is more
interested in textures than in conventions
His palette knife paintings on canvas,
parchment and hollow tile, are without
much form or color. What virtue lies in
them, is found in the lightsome forms of
circus performers—when they do appear.
Puma Galleries, 108 W. 57. Thru Jan. 8.

VIEW—A gallery to match the publication
was opened this month and shows drawings
by the surrealists most often noted in the
specializing pages of this bi-monthly maga-
zine. You may often get first view here of
new tendencies in the art of such artists as
Tchelitchew, Masson, Lipshitz, Cadmus,
Tanguy and Kelley. View, 1 East 53rd
Show is stet 'til March.

ART NEWS, Jan. 1-14,1944

THE PASSING SHOWS

IN A MEDLEY of French Impres-
sionist pictures from Manet through
Renoir, at Durand-Ruel's, Pissarro
is the star. There are several land-
scapes by André, three Monets, three
Sisleys, a Maufra, a Cassatt, a pair
of little still-life studies by Renoir
and two exceptional, "uncharacteris-
tic" canvases by Boudin. Yet it so
happens that Pissarro takes the show.
The quality of his paintings leads
the miscellany, two of his works
especially: *Towing Horses*, a canal
landscape with the lovely, half-ro-
matic flavor of early Impressionism
upon it, and *Spring*, a poetic view of
fields and trees in which the delicate,
refined drawing is excellently suited
to the Pointillist method of coloring.
(Prices not quoted.)

VIEW, our fantast competitor,
has just opened a sunny penthouse
gallery one door off Fifth Avenue
where, amid the cosy dishevelment
dear to the Surrealist, a group of
drawings and small paintings are
currently displayed. Noted especially
were one of Tchelitchew's most
delicate anatomical probings, *The
Flower of Sight*; two strong com-
positions by Kay Sage; and draw-
ings on colored paper by the bril-
liant Rico Lebrun of whom we are
soon to hear more. (Prices $25 to
$500.)

Direction, Spring 1943

Why Wait Until
They're Popular?

Today's discoveries in the field of art and ideas
are presented NOW in *View*.

americana fantastica
iconography
the morphological image
magic realists
metaphor in painting
poetry as prophecy
the surromantic
dream worlds

*View* prints the evidence—you give the answer!

And, too, there are illustrated feature articles on
Movies and Magazines, Books, Broadway and the Blues
—but the point of *View* is different. . . .

The 3rd Series, appearing from April to October in a
new format, 9 x 12, with, as usual, cover drawings de-
signed originally for *View* by outstanding modern
artists, will include the following contributors: Paul
Bowles, André Breton, Kenneth Burke, Roger Caillois,
Nicolas Calas, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Max
Ernst, Sidney Janis, Julien Levy, André Masson, Robert
Melville, Henry Miller, Nicholas Moore, Montagu
O'Reilly, Man Ray, Harold Rosenberg, Kurt Selig-
mann, Edith Sitwell, Pavel Tchelitchew, Henry Treece,
Peter Wells, William Carlos Williams, George Wood-
cock and others.

35c a copy or send one dollar for the four numbers of
the 3rd Series to View, 1 East 53rd St., New York, N.Y.

Volume I is out of print; the 2nd Series (4 numbers in slip case) is already a collector's item and still obtainable from Gotham Book Mart, 51 West 47th St., N. Y. C. ($1.75).

THE CHIMERIA

View

AN INDEX TO

2nd Series, No. 4 (AMERICANA FANTASTICA, January 1943)

Parker Tyler: *Americana Fantastica*

Joseph Cornell: *The Crystal Cage*

Alva N. Turner: *A Manuscript Found in an Iceberg*

Hugh Chisholm: *Extraordinary Portable Machine Useful for the Purpose of Extracting Blood from Stones*

Charles Henri Ford: *Ballet for Tamara Toumanova*

Kennedy Blanchard: *Whippoorwill Girl*

Virgil Thomson: *Portrait of Florine Stettheimer*

Reproductions of the work of Thomas Eakins, George Platt Lynes, Helen Levitt, Florine Stettheimer, Kay Sage; and other features...

Send $1.00 for the next 4 numbers (Series 3) to:
View, 360 E. 55, New York

charles henri ford, editor
parker tyler, asst. editor

$2 a year, 50¢ a copy
4 issues a year

1 east 53, new york 22

View

The current issue, October 1943,
features articles and reproductions
focussed on the Narcissus myth. *View*
Magazine presents in word and picture
what is happening on the art and literary
fronts. No reader of *Books Abroad* will want
to miss it.

Among the distinguished artists and writers who con-
tribute regularly to *View* are: Kenneth Burke, Nicolas
Calas, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, E. E. Cummings,
Sidney Janis, André Masson, Henry Miller, Man Ray, Edith
Sitwell, Kurt Seligmann, Pavel Tchelitchew, and others in the
international vanguard.

Books Abroad, Autumn 1943

MARYLAND QUARTERLY, No. 1, 1944

● **Editor:**
Charles Henri Ford

Assistant Editor:
Parker Tyler

● In the December issue: art, elegance, and revolutionary ideas, a combination found only in VIEW. Among the 48 pages

of illustrated features are:

APES, WARRIORS, AND PROPHETS by
Nicolas Calas

IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA by Raymond
Roussel

DEAD EYE DICK RIDES AGAIN by Clay
Perry

SOCRATES AND THE MASTER POET
by C. G. Wallis

THEY CANNOT STOP DEATH, poem
by Joe Massey

Also NEW YORK LETTER, the fantastic CHILDREN'S PAGE, VIEW LISTENS, and a Complete Index to the 3rd Series, concluded with this issue.

Cover in full color by TCHELITCHEW

"View is...

too small and appears too infrequently. I, for one, need its gut-walioping at least once a month."

CPL. SAMUEL D. MORFORD

U.S. Army

[Cpl. Morford will be pleased to find that No. 4 of our 3rd Series is the biggest to date and will continue to grow in the super deluxe direction in 1944.]

●
This
Issue
75¢

View, Inc.

1 East 53 Street
New York 22
New York
$2 a Year
Four Issues

METRONOME

News of the Month

'New Jazz' Concert Lives Up To Name; Stars Shine

By Leonard Feather

IF YOU'VE BECOME a little sick
and tired of the jazz concert idea
as perpetrated by Condon's cohorts
at Carnegie Hall or on the air,
nothing could give you a better pick-
me-up than a visit to the next con-
cert of "The New Jazz" at Times
Hall. If the second one even ap-
proaches the first in the quality of
its music you will be well rewarded.

Presented by *View Magazine*, an
arty quarterly, and directed and
emceed by Barry Ulanov, this con-
cert on December 20 had just about
everything the Condon shows lack.
Most of the artists were men who
have never appeared with Condon
and who, like Red Norvo, would
refuse to if asked, because they feel
about that just the way METRONOME
does.

Instead of sloppy announcing and a deliberate effort to impress the

audience that nobody knew who
would play what next, there was a
definite program with intelligent
notes in the leaflet and lucid an-
nouncements on the stage. Instead
of a bare, vast setting, there was a
neat, pleasantly designed backdrop.

Most important of all, instead of
the vastness of a typical concert hall
of the kind that usually scares jazz-
men and makes them stiff and re-
strained at these concerts, there was
a hall seating 500 people in which
everyone could see and hear per-
fectly, the artists felt at one with the
audience and everyone played his
best instead of his worst.

Moreover, the audience, instead of
yammering for *Jazz Me Blues*, was
intelligent, attentive, and enthusi-
astic at the right times. The list
of patrons and sponsors for the affair
ranged from Mrs. Vincent Astor, two
princesses and a marquise to Vera
Zorina and Gypsy Rose Lee, and it

seemed that most of the audience
comprised people who had heard
little jazz of this kind and were giv-
ing it their unbiased attention.

Barney Bigard and his band
opened the show. All their special-
ties were featured, such as *Poon-
Tang, Lull At Dawn, Rose Room,
Bojangles*, all of which you've heard
if you've ever caught Barney's bunch
at the Onyx. His clarinet was never
more inspired; Joe Thomas' trumpet
was a model of good taste and re-
straint; Cyril Haines played better
piano than I'd ever heard him play,
and Billy Taylor's bass was fine.
Only Stan Levy's often overload
drums kept this unit one step
from perfection.

Erroll Garner, the amazing young
pianist from Pittsburgh, gave a
series of brilliantly original com-
positions in which the elements of
jazz were allied with a profound
understanding of music at large.

Garner reminded me occasionally of
Walter Gross and other pianists who
try to combine jazz with a classical
approach, but he has the added ad-
vantage of a beat. There's no way
to give you any idea of what Garner
does and you'll simply have to catch
him and watch for his record album,
for he is clearly one of the most
astonishing musicians of the year.

The Stuff Smith Trio did *Perdido*,
*Bugle Call Rag* and two pretty num-
bers. Stuff was superb, unpredict-
able, intensely rhythmic as ever, and
although one could have wished for
more of his great pianist Jimmy
Jones there was little to complain
about in his part of the show.

Pearl Bailey got things jumping
rapidly after the intermission with
her lacronic delivery of *San Fernando
Valley* and the *St. Louis Blues*. The
combination of an attractive girl, a
beautiful gown, a fine voice, a sense

(Continued on page 27)

JANUARY, 1945

Trio seen here was one of the sparkling features of the New Jazz concert reviewed below. Stuff Smith (violin), Jimmy Jones (piano) and John Levy (bass), seen above, all agreed that this was the most successful small band jazz concert they'd ever taken part in or witnessed.

'New Jazz' Lives Up to Name
At First 'View' Concert

(Continued from page 9)

of humor, witty lyrics and the most
graceful pair of hands in the world
made Pearl something unique in show
business. She is a movie bet if ever
I saw one.

Don Byas then appeared for three
tenor solos, playing even better than
on the records you've heard lately,
with some truly great moments in
*Stardust*.

Next Stuff Smith came back, to-
gether with the white Chicago
pianist Robert Crum, for two long,
mostly out-of-tempo improvisations.
This, to me, was the only dull spot
of the entire evening. It was the
kind of thing two musicians love to
play for their own delectation in
their own home, just rambling along
any way they like without any pre-
tense at form or development, but
put on a concert stage it just doesn't
turn out. Stuff had some moments
of brilliance, but Crum, a frustrated
classical pianist, seemed out of place.

The last item consisted of Red
Norvo's band, specially reunited for
the occasion, with the added attrac-
tion of Teddy Wilson at the piano.
It was wonderful to hear these great
youngsters together again—clarinet-
ist Aaron Sachs, guitarist Remo
Palmieri, bassist Clyde Lombardi,

drummer Specs Powell—and need-
less to say their job on *Seven Come
Eleven, I Surrender Dear* and *Flying
Home* was superlative. Seldom has
any group of musicians collaborated
and synchronized more perfectly.

METRONOME and its writers have
often been accused of supporting
"riff" or "jump" music in opposition
to Dixieland jazz, or of rooting for
big bands as opposed to small bands.
That these accusations are absurd
was amply demonstrated by the
nature of this concert, which re-
flected my own musical tastes just as
clearly as those of my colleague who
staged it. The proportion of time
devoted to riffing was infinitesimal;
there were no big bands, and there
was a vast amount of sheer impro-
visation. In fact, the only difference
between this music and the kind
championed by our opponents was
that it lived up to the title of the
concert, "The New Jazz." It was
modern music, conceived by mature
musical minds who are concerned
with making progress in jazz rather
than keeping it in a 1922 *Jazz Me
Blues* rut. If we're crazy to feel that
way, then Red Norvo, Barney Bigard
and the rest of them must be crazy
too.

Publishers Weekly

June 9, 1945

The New Leader May 30, 1945

► VIEW, THE MODERN MAGAZINE, announces a series of books which are intended to be absolutely modern in format and content. The first volume to be released is "Poems for Painters," by Charles Henri Ford, which is issued in a 9 x 12 format, paper-bound, with a cover drawing by Tangy and sixteen half-tone reproductions of the work of Duchamp, Fini, Francés, Tangy and Tehelichew. The newstand edition sells for $1 and there are 500 copies numbered and signed for $2.

Other *View* Editions in the series of de
luxe collector's items at popular prices are
"Young Cherry Trees Secured Against
Hares," by André Breton, and "Once the
Soft Silken Damage Done," an anthology
of short stories which have appeared in
*View*. They are scheduled for publication
in the near future. In preparation for sum-
mer release are two volumes of poetry, one
by Lionel Abel, and the other by Philip
Lamantia; and two brochures: "Human
Anatomy as the Expanding Universe:
Tehelichew's New Phase," by Parker Ty-
ler, and "Homage to Max Jacob," edited by
Leon Kochitzky, the French poet whose
name is allied with Cubism and other mod-
ern movements.

Ford, Charles Henri

Po-Art

Poems for painters, no p. il F (View al-
bums, I) c. [N.Y. 92], View Editions, I E.
53 St. pap., 100; numbered signed ed., 2.00
Five poems inspired by the modern painters Du-
champ, Leonor Fini, Francés, Yves Tangy, and
Tehelichew. The first book in a new series of mod-
erate creative writing and art, a projected indus-
ishing project of *View* magazine.

Pro, a Review by RALPH DE TOLEDANO

Wars I Have Seen is a slight book
and as such hindered in its mission by
the vast bulk of Gertrude Stein's repu-
tation. It is not a book I would recom-
mend to John Gunther's public, avid for
the fact and the statistic, or to the
sickly coterie which takes its nose out
of *these* only to snort away some of *th*
Caitís coarser coobyds. I commend it
rather to those who love France and
have been bewildered by black-and-white
journalese which has painted it as a

A Weird Booklet of

Poems for Painters

With "Poems for Painters" (View
Inc., 1 East 32d street, New York;
$3), the publishers of View magazine
begin a projected series of "view
albumns." "Intended to be 'absolutely
modern.'" It is a 16-page pamphlet
with 16 half-tone reproductions of
the work of five contemporary artists,
with a poem devoted to each. The
artists are Marcel Duchamp, Leonor
Fini, Esleban Francis, Yves Tan-
guay and Pavel Tehelichew and the
poet is Charles Henri Ford.
The pictures vary in style from
the academic of Tehelichew to the
weirdly symbolical (7) of Francés,
but the poems are consistently 'eb-
solutely modern' (unless that term
be a misnomer for a revival of an
extravagant vagueness that enjoyed
a certain popularity some years ago,
but lapsed into innumerable desuetude).
Mr Ford's accuracy as interpreter,
will be a matter of difference of
admirer as saying of Mr Ford's
poems, "They give me always a
shock of delight and of revelation."
The uninflated reader of the selec-
tions in this pamphlet will be sure
to get the shock. The delight or the
revelation is less certain. "O," ac-
companying the picture by Mr Fran-
cés and the only one of the poems
printed for the first time, is in the
form of an acrostic, the initials of
the first lines reading, "Of magic
and the sense of grandeur." Here are
"The sense" lines:—
"The Septemberists of a new carnality
holds with numerological im-
ages
Eruptive as religion, evocative as
touch
Stupors of the most omnivorous
colors
Envelop holders of crime in the
name of country
Now comes the promise of an in-
definable sickness
Sweet as the vision of a child plot-
ting murder.
Epochs of aoyory dissolve like charley
horses."
B. S.
SPRINGFIELD SUNDAY
UNION - REPUBLICAN
SPRINGFIELD, MASS.
JUN 3 - 1945

NEW YORK, N. Y.

SUN

MAY 26 1945

In the May issue of View
Leon Kochitzky reports that he
"overheard a charming woman
murmur I feel as if I were in
Sing Sing' as she walked through
one of the largest rooms of Piet
Mondrian's exhibition at the Mu-
seum of Modern Art." This is
nothing for the Mondrian en-
thusiasts to be alarmed about.
In reality it was a sensitive and
clever remark. My guess is that
the "charming woman" was
Muriel Draper.

SPRINGFIELD, MASS.
UNION - REPUBLICAN

JUN 3 - 1945

Modern Music Jan-Febr 1945

THE TORRID ZONE

Symphony Orchestra gave a performance over WNYC of Samuel Barber's Concerto For Violin And Orchestra. The slight, innocuous materials of this piece and their subsequent treatment, naive and politely cute at best, hardly make up a concerto in any normal sense of the word. The work seems more like a three part bagatelle, neatly scored throughout with intelligent musicianship in a conventional sort of way, and especially well managed in the slow movement which has a fine cadence, suave in sonority and comparatively fresh in quality.

It was interesting to hear the radio premiere (N.B.C.) of Lionel Barrymore's *Praeludium and Fugue*, performed by the Indianapolis Orchestra under Fabien Sevitsky, to whom the work is dedicated. It is better than a mere academic and conventional exercise, and has many moments of real harmonic and contrapuntal beauty. I've heard much weaker music by men like Hadley and Cadman.

WNYC is currently presenting an entertaining series called "Behind the

Scenes in Music." The programs, under the auspices of the National Orchestral Association, are actual broadcasts of unprepared rehearsals of contemporary works. Leon Barzin conducts and succeeds in maintaining an amusing line of chatter with both the orchestra and composer guests who are often present to discuss their compositions. Already represented have been Arthur Kreutz, Frederick Hart, Victor Young, Irwin Heilner, Joseph Wagner, Henry Cowell and Quincy Porter, whose *Music For Strings* was by far the best piece done on the series to date.

WQXR offered an unusually attractive program of songs for tenor voice and piano, featuring the gifted singer Romolo De Spirito. Arthur Berger's *Crazy Jane At The Day Of Judgment* is a sensitive and apt setting for the Yeats poem and a musically gratifying piece of rare distinction. Theodore Chanler was represented by his *I Rise When You Enter*. This light piece has an undeniable charm, but hardly exposes that fine composer's best gifts.

THE TORRID ZONE

BY MERCURE

WHAT with the list of patrons for View's concert of "the new jazz" including Mrs. Vincent Astor and the Marquis de Cuevas, and the sponsors (a subtle distinction) including Kirk Askew, Marcel Duchamp and Gypsy Rose Lee, this reporter rushed over to Times Hall to see what was simmering. The lights were already low, the music mellow; for Barney

Bigard and his four-piece band were in the mood, a familiar one, it is true, and seemed ideal musicians for the intimate hall. But soon it became clear that something was wrong, for after Bigard left the stage the program went to pieces. The new jazz apparently had caught up with Debussy, for that was as far as the heavy-handed and formless "mood-pictures" of Errol Garner,

140

MERCURE

new piano "find," went. We were then
given samples of current night-club
styles. Stuff Smith's fiddle sounded very
much the way it did ten years ago. His
tight little tone, produced by short
bows, on top of the strings, is pleasant
enough but limited, especially if you
shut your eyes and can't see Stuff's
funny faces when he makes a glissando.
Also an act is Pearl Bailey, who puts
her songs over with her hands instead,
with nonchalant gestures that are amus-
ing and give a new sophistication to
the melody. After the intermission
came the feature, improvisations by
Robert Crum and Stuff to demonstrate
the happy marriage of a classical style
with jazz. Mr. Crum, the pianist "with
a classical background" sat down at the
piano, looking like a young and dis-
gruntled Beethoven and led off with
thirty-six bars of the purest Handel,
and was then joined by Stuff, whose
fiddle had unaccountably gone Zigeuner
on him. The bright spot in the impro-
visation was a bitonal clash of per-
sonalities, for towards the end Mr.
Crum seemed to prefer the dominant,
while Stuff got stuck somehow in the
tonic. But neither would yield, and so
the piece ended in a most peculiar way.
I would not be going on at such length
about this concert were it not for the
pretense and fancy program notes.
"Fugue in swing . . . a series of delib-
erations, first canonic, then less rigor-
ously formal . . . offer a provocative
answer as they extend the resources of
the improviser to those of all music."
However, the audience (in which pa-
trons were conspicuously absent) seemed
to love it all. Why not? But I was
not the only one to wish for something
a little more intense. *View's* conception

of the "new jazz," as demonstrated by
this concert, is a return to Victorian
salon-music.

Whenever I get ruffled over jazz
downtown, on 52nd Street, Carnegie
Hall or the Village, I make straight
for the Apollo Theatre or the Savoy
Ballroom, just to convince myself once
more that there is some connection be-
tween jazz and motor-impulse. It is
true that you can hear some pretty
empty-sounding bands at the Apollo,
and that at times famous stars don't
seem to show to best advantage. But
the audience response is natural and
terrific, and the whole dubious and chi-
chi esthetics of jazz is forgotten in the
witnessing of what gets across and what
doesn't. People stood in line in the
rain for the length of two blocks wait-
ing to get in to hear the King Cole
Trio, superb and up-to-the-minute
young musicians who really know what
jazz is all about. Lips Page, whose
trumpet I would go far to hear, ap-
peared with his new band, which, alas,
seemed to have little quality. But then
I heard it in the afternoon, and the dif-
ference between day and evening per-
formances in this theatre can be sur-
prising. It has been a bright season at
the Apollo, with Billie Holiday, Ella
Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Jimmie
Lunceford following one after the other.

Josh White's plaintive voice, his clear
diction, and his beautiful and restrained
guitar playing combine to make the
Asch album of songs by this folk-blues
artist one of the events of the season.
The success of one song, *One Meat
Ball*, has been a sensation. Here White
gives a tricky intonation to the sad lit-
tle verse about the little man with a
menu in his hand and only fifteen cents.

RMR receives many exchanges, and
we wish to note especially the recent
interesting issues of Meanjin Papers
(Brisbane, Aust.), Circle, Experi-
ment, Interim, Workshop (Jalisco,
Mex.) in addition to the standard lit-
tle magazines like Accent, Kenyon
Review, Partisan Review, etc. Circle
clearly has made the greatest strides, appear-
ing first in a mimeograpphed format
and now in a very handsome and in
some respects spectacular printed
format. The View influence is an appar-
ent and not disavowed.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW

March 1945

BAUHAUS DISCIPLE HEADS HARVARD DEPARTMENT

The leader of the Bauhaus school, a man who recommended Professor
Chermayeff to the Brooklyn College authorities, is now chairman of the
Department of Architecture at Harvard University—Professor Walter
Gropius. Of the present chairman of the Brooklyn College department,
Gropius wrote that "I consider him particularly fit to build up a new Art
Department as he is most able in many branches of architecture and art,
and has, besides his own rare abilities as an architect and artist, a definite
and clear opinion about the educational side of the job."

President Gideonse pointed out that the New York Museum of
Modern Art has published a book on the Bauhaus and its influence which
clearly recognizes it as one of the most creative influences in our time.
"There is nothing German or communist about Bauhaus."

Dr. Gideonse also scotched the notion that national labels should be
applied to academic subjects, in commenting on the objection that mem-
bers of the Department of Design are all not native-born Americans.
"There is no American tradition of Design any more than there is an
American tradition of Mathematics; there is simply poor mathematics or
good mathematics—good design or poor design," he observed. "The
notion that national labels should be applied to academic subjects is a
typical fascist idea—remember 'German physics'—to which I should think
no newspaper would wish to lend its support."

CHERMAYEFF HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It was pointed out that Professor Chermayeff, educated in England,
Germany and Austria, came to Brooklyn College with recommendations
from many leading people in the field of art and design, most of them
associated with universities of high rank.

A scholarship student at Harrow, Chermayeff won, but on account of
World War I did not take up, an honor entrance to Cambridge University.
A fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects he also holds bronze,
silver and gold medals from the Royal Drawing Society. In addition to
lecturing and teaching experience at such institutions as Cambridge, Man-
chester, Harvard, Michigan and California, Chermayeff hold member-
ships in numerous professional organizations and has published a num-
ber of articles. He is a member of the International Housing Associa-
tion, California Planning and Housing Association, Society of Industrial
Artists, and the Design and Industry Association.

Brooklyn College Vanguard

Publication of the students of the day session of Brooklyn College, Campus Road and Bedford
avenue, Brooklyn, N. Y. Published weekly by the Vanguard Governing Board.

VOL. XXV - No. 9

Monday, April 3, 1944

Mildred Strum

Editor-in-Chief

Beverly Shapiro

Business Manager

ISSUE EDITORS: Vicki Werosub, Jerry Kaufer, Rita Boskin

September 1945

POETRY: *A Magazine of Verse*

Mr. Ford's is a world in which objects and ideas flow easily in and out of each other, a world of pure quality and contourless. He still uses the orthodox surrealist technique of joining the incongruous and reconciling the disparate. His verse is a pretty complete replica of Tchelitchew's painting, except for the fact that the latter handles his medium with much greater brilliance. Basically, however, the concepts of art are identical in poet and painter: in both we find the same curious metamorphism, with the puzzle as logical result (vide Ford's acrostic, O); the same delight in playful dexterity leading to surfaces both smooth and stunning; and, one is tempted to think, the same disregard for structural solidity.

Devotees of surrealism may be enchanted by lines like these:

> She beat me over the head with a lung

or

> Your second breast wrangles with a young bat's brother

or

> If he looks through the evening's windows upside down
> Glue a smile on his back, on his knee a frown

yet, although I admit them to be clever, startling, and mildly amusing, I believe that their true interest lies in the manner in which Ford has adapted the iconography of Chirico, Tchelichew and Dali to his verbal phantasies; and this interest is neuropathic rather than esthetic.

However, I do not mean to imply that Ford is devoid of either imagination or verbal power. He has considerable charm, too, and in some of his lines the vowel play, joined to a certain *finesse* of thought, is memorable:

> And the lasso of love has the ghost of a chance

> There's no place to sleep in this bed, Tanguy

342

The Plain and the Stratosphere

Yet he is unable or, more likely, unwilling to sustain either
melody or power: his poems fall apart for lack of a center.

Saying that they have no center is equivalent to saying that
man, as a thinking and willing being, is absent from Ford's
poetry. His passion, like the passion of the juggler, is genuine,
his perception accurate:

Oh your tricks are as real as a clock striking four

but both the passion and the perception are wasted on imagi-
native toys. By working his sleights of hand in the sweat of his
brow, Ford shows his accompliceship with a world which labors
with frantic effort toward puerile ends.

Francis C. Golfing

IRONIST'S VADE MECUM

*A Winter's Journey*, by Richard Hart. Contemporary Poetry,
Baltimore.

Mr. Hart's peripatetic journey begins in the Enoch Pratt Free
Library of Baltimore, where he presides. The climate in which it
is undertaken is of the emotions, and in its course there is dis-
played, not ostentatiously, the sort of cockeyed erudition one may
find in Pound, of whom, I hasten to add, can be found no other
echoes in this book.

In the course of the expedition the reader is granted glimpses
of the Hudson Tube, the grave of Pocahontas at Windsor, the
old wall at Bremen, as well as of *A Tom Cat in a Blizzard*, and
its possible sequel, *A Mother With Young Kittens*. Quite apart
from these descriptive pieces stand a number of subjects iron-
ically treated: *Repartee*, which concerns the encounter in Para-
dise between St. Patrick and Lamia; Peeping Tom's psychic ad-
venture with Lady Godiva; and *Where Were We at the World's*

THE ORIGINAL
ROMEIKE
PRESS CLIPPINGS

220 W. 19th ST., NEW YORK
Tel. Chelsea 3-8860

Circ. (12,800)

This Clipping From
THE ART DIGEST
NEW YORK, N. Y.

MAY 15 1945

Evelyn Marie Stuart Says:

It is humiliating, after trying all these years to define modernism, to have its proponents come forth with the exact definition—one so apt that you regret not having thought of it yourself. In an article on Marcel Duchamp in *View* magazine, the heading "Anti-Artist" comes like a lightning flash of inspiration. It is further elucidated in the text by the pronouncement "to Duchamp the brush, the canvas and the artist's dexterity of hand are anethema." Well, that is what we had been vaguely conscious of all along, but perhaps too timid to put it into words. What we really object to is the inclusion of the anti-artists in exhibitions of art, the awarding of prizes to same, and the teaching of theories in art schools. It is time to erect Anti-Art Museums, endow schools to protect anti-artists against training, to give art-haters a chance to attend exhibitions of anti-art. Anti-art is the expression of emptiness and boredom on the part of people who have no ideas, and not sufficient energy to acquire the necessary skill to express adequately their vacuity of thought. It is negative and non-functional, but freedom of speech demands that it be given a place where its natural audience may derive from it whatever they can. The most confirmed conservatives cannot object to anti-art in its proper place and called by its proper name. To call it art and exhibit it in art museums is the apotheosis of speciousness.

220 W. 19th St., NEW YORK 11, N.Y.
Tel. Chelsea 3-8860

Circ. (D 123,658) (S 213,683)

This Clipping From
BUFFALO, N. Y.
COURIER-EXPRESS

MAY 27 1945

Poems for Painters, by Charles Henri Ford; View Editions.

Verses in the modernist manner to go with paintings by Duchamp, Fini, Frances, Tanguy and Tchelitchew.

Lady Lovett's Chatter, by Mart

POEMS FOR PAINTERS, by Charles Henri Ford (View). The painters are Marcel Duchamp, Leonor Fini, Esteban Francis, Yves Tanguy, and Pavel Tchelitchew. Mr. Ford's poems are now strongly influenced by Paul Eluard's brand of Surrealism. Edith Sitwell has said of them, "They give me always a shock of delight and revelation." This large pamphlet, whose typography was designed by Parker Tyler, contains sixteen halftone reproductions on heavy paper. New Yorker 7/7/45

This Clipping From

JUN 1 - 1945

I'LL TAKE A PARK BENCH: As the balmy whips of a belated Spring are wafted, with subtle rebukes of a past that could have been a future, exuding gentle hints of uninhibited nature, across the southwest corner of Lexington and 59th, somehow one's thoughts turn to things that are just not there. And on the wings of that gentle breeze there arrives a little brochure called *Poems for Painters*, by Charles Henri Ford, editor of *View*, and we sadly decide that sanity is rather relative. Take for example the following verse from Mr. Ford's *There's No Place to Sleep in This Bed, Tanguy*:

"The storks like elbows had a fit of falling
She beat me over the head with a lung
Somewhere a voice is calling Picasso
And the lasso of love has the ghost of a chance."

Let us await those kind men in the white coats.

This Clipping From

JUN 1 - 1945

Evelyn Marie Stuart Says:

To shallow minds anything obscure is metaphysical, and anything you can not understand full of meaning. Only that of which we are ignorant is mysterious. Physics—not metaphysics—have raised us from the brute and the kind of art Marcel Duchamp practices, and these half-educated people applaud, should accompany life in the tree tops. Even their use of words is faulty at times. Charles Henri Ford, editor of *View*, refers to "rectangular disks," ignoring the fact that if it isn't circular it isn't a disk. They talk of non-representational things as pictures, when a picture is definitely a *representation* of an object or scene and has no other definition or meaning. They also use aesthetics to apply to ugly things when Aesthetics is defined as "the study of beauty." They also use "rhythm" to connote motion. It has no such meaning. Rhythm "is the repetition at stated intervals of an element or elements in a work of art," and the "purpose of rhythm is symmetry." These are dictionary definitions, yet our cultured ignorami persist in ignoring them and applying the word rhythmic to asymmetrical things. And yet, at least the protagonists of Duchamp are honest enough to call him an "Anti-Artist," even though those rectangular disks get in one's hair.

This Clipping From

SPRINGFIELD, MASS.
MORNING UNION

JUN 3 - 1945

A Weird Booklet of
'Poems for Painters'

With "Poems for Painters" (View, Inc., 1 East 53d street, New York, N.Y.) $2), the publishers of View magazine begin a projected series of "view albums," "intended to be 'absolutely modern.'" It is a 16-page pamphlet with 16 half-tone reproductions of the work of five contemporary artists, with a poem devoted to each. The artists are Marcel Duchamp, Leonor Fini, Esteban Francis, Yves Tanguy and Pavel Tchelitchew and the poet is Charles Henri Ford.

The pictures vary in style from the academic of Tchelitchew to the weirdly symbolical (?) of Frances, but the poems are consistently "absolutely modern" (unless that term be a misnomer for a revival of an extravagant vagueness that enjoyed a certain popularity some years ago, but lapsed into innocuous desuetude).

Mr. Ford's accuracy as interpreter, will be a matter of difference of opinion. The publishers quote an admirer as saying of Mr. Ford's poems, "They give me always a shock of delight and of revelation." The uninitiated reader of the selections in this pamphlet will be sure to get the shock. The delight or the revelation is less certain. "O," accompanying the picture by Mr. Frances and the only one of the poems printed for the first time, is in the form of an acrostic, the initials of the first lines reading, "Of magic and the sense of grandeur." Here are the "The sense" lines:—

"The Septembrists of a new carnality
Hold hands with numerological im-
ages
Eruptive as religion, evocative as
touch

Envelop beholders of crime in the
name of country

Epochs of agony dissolve like charley
horses." R. S. B.

This Clipping From

NEW YORK
NEW YORK CITY

JUL 7 1945

ANNOUNCING VIEW EDITIONS

The editors of *View*, The Modern Magazine, have the pleasure to announce that the much anticipated project of publishing a series of books which are intended to be "absolutely modern" in format and content will be shortly realized.

The first item is POEMS FOR PAINTERS by Charles Henri Ford, "They give me always a shock of delight and of revelation," says Edith Sitwell of Mr. Ford's poems. Admirers of his work will not want to miss this new collection: five poems inspired by the contemporary painters Marcel Duchamp, Leonor Fini, Esteban Frances, Yves Tanguy, and Pavel Tchelitchew.

Handsomely designed and printed, with typography by Parker Tyler, this is the first in a series of View Albums, an innovation in the publishing world - de luxe collector's items at popular prices. Format 9 x 12, cover drawing by Tanguy, extra-heavy coated paper, with sixteen half-tone reproductions of the work of the artists. Newsstand edition, $1.00; 500 copies numbered and signed, $2.00.

## Other View Editions to Be Released Spring 1945

YOUNG CHERRY TREES SECURED AGAINST HARES. By Andre Breton. The poetry of Andre Breton is as incendiary as the program of surrealism of which the author is chief organizer. This is his first collection to appear in English and is presented with both French and English texts. The translations are by the poet and critic Edouard Roditi. The cover has been especially designed by Marcel Duchamp. There will be a limited signed edition with a frontispiece and hand-colored drawings by Arshile Gorky. De Luxe edition, $30.00; Regular bound edition, $3.75.

ONCE THE SOFT SILKEN DAMAGE DONE And Other Fantastic Stories. An anthology of the best short stories to appear in *View*. Henry Miller, Leonora Carrington, Paul Bowles, Giorgio di Chirico, Raymond Roussel, Paul Childs, Montagu O'Reilly and other writers of unusual talent are included. There will be many black and white drawings and decorations throughout the volume. Regular bound edition $2.50; newsstand edition, $1.00.

## In Preparation for Summer 1945

Two first books of poetry, one by Lionel Abel, well known translator, critic and essayist; the other by Philip Lamantia, seventeen-year-old surrealist poet of San Francisco.

### VIEW ALBUMS

From time to time View Editions will release brochures of special interest. Each will be presented with a new cover design and unusual typography. Price, $1.00. Scheduled are:

HUMAN ANATOMY AS THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE: TCHELITCHEW'S NEW PHASE. By Parker Tyler. A comprehensive study and analysis of the great modern Russian's newest work. Fully illustrated with plates showing the new, translucent "anatomical" paintings. Mr. Tyler has collaborated in the past with Tchelitchew on a book of words and pictures called Yesterday's Children.

HOMAGE TO MAX JACOB. Edited by Leon Kochnitzky. Introducing to American readers the great French poet whose name and figure is allied with Cubism and other modern movements. Max Jacob was a Jew, a Catholic convert, who was martyred by the Nazis. There will be selections from his poetry and prose, reproduction of his drawings, a portrait by Picasso, and other special material.

galleries

prising to note how
and solidity he gets
"motif" so squarely
wrought backgrounds.
for instance in the
and Landscape" is
rough to eat.

ken, the American
who has always been
leader of the native
 suddenly acquired a
obust and free way
and his new group of
the Frank K. M. Rehn
ests that the latter
career is going to be
impressive than the
always supposing of
he is now in mid-
ing honest, and not
for tricks he occa-
ses to smooth over
ness of execution, and
and simple compos-
ition be his meat. The
"The Dam" in the
w is much his best;
s his future line.

e rare occasions for
originals by Aubrey
s now current in the
d, and as it has been
since such an oppor-
sible public will nearly
of the chance. The
the artist's uncertainty
style is always a fresh
time encountered

f Arshile Gorky insist
new paintings now
the Julian Levy Gallery
in independence in his
w painting-but the argu-
ment being debated. Mr.
Mr. Abstract, which means
of our public is with
lengthy panegyric by
aton in the catalogue
some converts. In the
no exceptions are
the Gorky color nor
in handling the pig-
eted.

deliver into the ab-
 Earl Knuths who is now
 the New Circle Gal-
 new pictures profit by
 d style that has been
 recommended-the best of
 the "Bennington
 H. McA.

View

The Modern Magazine

presents in its
Winter Issue:

$1 per copy

• COVER IN COLOR BY ESTEBAN FRANCES
A B AND C ON LAUTREAMONT BY LIONEL ABEL

• TIE THE GORDIAN KNOT AGAIN! BY DENIS DE ROUGEMONT

RUTH ROSES AND REVOLVERS BY MAN RAY

• HEBDOMEROS BY GIORGIO DI CHIRICO
LINE AND SPACE OF THE IMAGINATION BY STAN-

LEY WILLIAM HAYTER

• MICROCOSMOLOGICAL CHART OF MAN BY KURT SELIGMANN

SALUTS BY JEAN HELION

• FULL MARGIN BY ANDRE BRETON
ON THE DIGNITY OF MAN BY PICO DELLA

MIRANDOLA

• BOOKS VIEWS BY PAUL GOODMAN, MARIUS BEW-
LEY, NICOLAS CALAS

ART REVIEWS BY LEON KOCHNITZKY AND ERNEST HARMS

• JAZZ OF THIS QUARTER BY BARRY ULANOV
PATHOS BY SIEGFRIED REINHARDT

• REPRODUCTIONS OF THE WORK OF GUSTAVE DORE,
OSSIP ZADKINE, MAN RAY, EUGENE BERMAN, VIP,
MARK ROTHKO, ESTEBAN FRANCES, A. M. VEDO-
VELLI, LOUISE NEVELSON, JOHN TUNNARD, ALEX-
ANDER CALDER, KAY SAGE, DAVID HARE, STANLEY
WILLIAM HAYTER, JOAN MIRO AND PAUL KLEE

Charles Henri Ford, Editor

Parker Tyler, Asst. Editor

John Myers, Mng. Editor

$3.50 a year

One East 53rd Street
New York 22, N. Y.

“Il faut être absolument moderne”—Rimbaud.

Briarcliff Quarterly, April 1945

COSY SURREALISM

'Old-Fashioned' Is the Word for Dali
—Modernists—A Kollwitz Memorial

By EDWARD ALDEN JEWELL

MORE or less quiescent for some time, Surrealism has come back with a resounding bang. It has without much warning swept to dominance, at least temporary, in the affairs of the local exhibition world. The effluent focus at the moment is Salvador Dali, whose first one-man show in several seasons moved into the Bignou last week.

Another glamorous event, however, had forerun this unexampled emergence from the strictness of the Dalian "seclusion." For on Thursday night of the preceding week the delightful little Hugo Gallery opened to an invited throng that quite swamped the small elevator. Mme. Victor Hugo, its sponsor and director, received, and, in an atmosphere of salonesque informality, preview guests (the public thereafter) realized that when View Magazine provides a show, as has been the case upon this opening occasion, it combs metropolis and hinterland for the best available talent.

The Hugo Gallery, recommended to all who want to keep au courant with the activities of the surrealist branch of the avant-garde, makes its bow in East Fifty-fifth Street (No. 26) with a divertissement called "The Fantastic in Modern Art," presented by View, of which Charles Henri Ford is editor (and having cited Mr. Ford, it will be convenient at this point to mention as well that "A Night With Jupiter," a book of fantastic stories, has just been published under his editorship by View Editions and is distributed by the Vanguard Press ($3).

The New Dali Show

As Salvador Dali taught us some years ago in his "Secret Life" (p. 2 of the Prologue),

we know today that form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter—the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space choking it on all sides, pressing and squeezing it out producing the swellings that burst from its life to the exact limits of the rigorous contours of its own originality of reaction. How many times matter endowed with a too-absolute impulse is annihilated; whereas another bit of matter, which tries to do only what it can and is better adapted to the pleasure of molding itself by contracting in its own way before the tyrannical impact of space, is able to invent its own original form of life.

Come to think of it, in the passage just quoted Señor Dali without question adumbrated the atomic bomb, upon which likewise he comments in paint in one of the eleven new pictures at the Bignou. To tell the truth, I am rather glad I thought of that in the nick of

his brush has in no way grown tarnished.

On the technical side he can be as trompe-l'oeil as Harnett, as sensouirly poetic as Eotticelli, depending upon the mood. "The Basket of Bread" and the "Galarina" are gems of minute observation. His ants are as convincing as a marginal fly by Petrus Christus or Crivelli. Of particular loveliness, in diaphanous understatement and overtone, are "The Broken Bridge and the Dream" and a canvas called "The Flight, the Temptation, the Love, the Broken Wings."

Dali does not always compose a picture well. The atomic bomb one, for instance, is quite devoid of elements relating to design. But his skill in handling minutiae could be matched alone by the pavonine superlative of what he styles the "heraldic hierarchy of his nobility."

The former is patent, the latter self-straited.

THE NEW YORK TIMES,

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1945.

Fantastic Art

One group-show this week is devoted to a common theme—the fantastic in modern art. This event marks the opening of a new exhibition place—the Hugo gallery, at 26 East Fifty-fifth Street—which is presided over by Mme. Victoria Hugo and Alexander Iolas, and where the work of virtually all of the prominent surrealists is grouped together. Various shades of fantasy are shown, not simply the biological mysteries of Tchitchew, and the scary primitivism of Max Ernst; but the lulling neo-romantic mysteries of Berman, Chagall and others. It should not be understood that the sponsors will be exclusively devoted to fantastic art in their exhibitions; talented artists in all fields of modern adventure will be included in the program. With the fantastic pictures, which are altogether mature, the gallery gets off to a good start.

NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE,

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1945

SOME COMMENTS FROM OUR READERS

"The most courageous magazine being published during this war."

EDITH SITWELL

"Full of amazing and amusing material."

Direction

"In the pages of *View*, surrealism loses its ism and retains its super-reality."

NAPIER TOWNE

"Most esthetically satisfying magazine since the old days of *The Dial* and *The Seven Arts*."

MRS. PATERSON MCCAN
Hood River, Ore.

"... sumptuous ... the detaining tower with the many patterns of wrought-iron railing should empower one to break all fetters. ..."

MARIANNE MOORE

"On n'a pas vu depuis le *Minotaure* pareil déplacement de richesses et de trouvailles."

ALAIN BOSQUET

In projecting a newer, larger and still more adventurous magazine, we call upon lovers of art and liberty to give us their support — by subscribing, or by extending their subscriptions now, by subscribing for friends, and by sending copies to those in our armed forces, with whom, as we know from their letters, *View* has “double strength.”

Use the coupon below, mail it to us today, help create "the impossible magazine of the arts that no one could have dreamed!" (William Carlos Williams)

**View** edited by Charles Henri Ford
Assistant editor, Parker Tyler

35¢ a copy; one dollar for four numbers

GOTHAM BOOK MART, 51 W. 47 St., N.Y.C.

I enclose ______ dollar(s) for the 4 numbers of the 3rd Series to be sent to:

Name

Address

Please send also to the following:

Name

Address

The Editor of

View

1 East 53rd St.

New York City

presents

a *rêsumé* . . .

* For two years *View* has been the testing ground for what is fresh and extraordinary in the fields of art and ideas. Growing steadily in scope and size, from a tabloid of six pages to the current number of sixty pages with over 40 reproductions, *View* has evolved into something other than just a "little" magazine. . . More and more art institutions, libraries and individual readers depend upon *View* to bring them regularly what is alive and experimental in the art and literature of the time.

* It is not only our native painters and poets who find a sympathetic audience through *View*. What effect is America having upon the work of outstanding European artists and writers who are playing so impressive a role in our midst? *View*'s close association with them makes possible the presentation of their newest work before it becomes news. For example, there are special issues devoted to the painters Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Pavel Tchelitchew, prepared with the cooperation of connoisseur-critics such as James Thrall Soby, André Breton, James Johnson Sweeney, Sidney Janis, Julien Levy, and Lincoln Kirstein; these numbers, fully documented and illustrated, are invaluable additions to the growing literature on contemporary art.

* In addition to the work of such well known collaborators, *View* has launched, and will continue to search for, artists who may be little publicized at the moment, but who are sure to leave their mark on modern culture. Why wait until they're popular?

and . . .

Name

Address

* In addition to the work of such well known connoisseurs of the modern art, *View* has launched, and will continue to search for, artists who may be little publicized at the moment, but who are sure to leave their mark on modern culture. Why wait until they're popular?

and...

... a program

* *View* functions as an integrating medium for vital but scattered creative tendencies everywhere. Thus, the new generation of poets in Great Britain — most of whom are in the R.A.F. but with whom we are in constant touch — will continue to be published in our pages; communiqués from avant-garde groups in unoccupied countries from Egypt to the Latin Americas will merge in *View*, carrying a consolidated and inspiring message around the world.

* *View* stands for the imaginative view in everything. As Sgt. Karl Jay Shapiro (author of the recently acclaimed volume of verse, "Person, Place and Thing"), said: "*View* is the most imaginative publication I've run across so far. ..."

<table><tr><td>Lionel ABEL</td><td>Pierre MABILLE</td></tr><tr><td>Xavier ABRIL</td><td>Conroy MADDOX</td></tr><tr><td>Jorge Carrera ANDRADE</td><td>Hanani MELLER</td></tr><tr><td>John BAYLISS</td><td>Robert MELVILLE</td></tr><tr><td>Kennedy BLANCHARD</td><td>Joan MIRO</td></tr><tr><td>Alain BOSQUET</td><td>Nicholas MOORE</td></tr><tr><td>André BRETON</td><td>Montagu O'REILLY</td></tr><tr><td>Leonora CARRINGTON</td><td>Benjamin PERET</td></tr><tr><td>Roger CAILLOIS</td><td>Bern PORTER</td></tr><tr><td>Hugh CHISHOLM</td><td>Paul Eaton REEVE</td></tr><tr><td>Joseph CORNELL</td><td>Toni del RENZIO</td></tr><tr><td>Max ERNST</td><td>Winett de ROKHA</td></tr><tr><td>James T. FARRELL</td><td>Kay SAGE</td></tr><tr><td>Leonor FINI</td><td>Florine STETTHEIMER</td></tr><tr><td>Preston FORRESTER</td><td>Wallace STEVENS</td></tr><tr><td>John B. L. GOODWIN</td><td>Virgil THOMSON</td></tr><tr><td>H. R. HAYS</td><td>Henry TREECE</td></tr><tr><td>Georges HENEIN</td><td>Alva N. TURNER</td></tr><tr><td>Frida KAHLO</td><td>Peter WELLS</td></tr><tr><td>Leon KOCHNITSKY</td><td>William Carlos WILLIAMS</td></tr><tr><td>Helen LEVITT</td><td>George WOODCOCK</td></tr><tr><td>Julien LEVY</td><td>and others...</td></tr></table>

for the 3rd Series

* DREAM OF MOBILE *by* HENRY MILLER

* NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE *by* EDITH SITWELL

* THE FIVE MAJOR TERMS *by* KENNETH BURKE

* CHILDREN'S PAGE *by* ALEXANDER CALDER

* WITHIN GOOD AND EVIL *by* NICOLAS CALAS

* PHOTOGRAPHY IS NOT ART *by* MAN RAY

* THE IVORY TOWER OF JUDO *by* PARKER TYLER

* PAGE FROM A NOTEBOOK *by* ANDRÉ MASSON

* ALBRIGHT: COMPULSIVE PAINTER *by* HARRIET & SIDNEY JANIS

* MAN INTO BEAST *by* KURT SELIGMANN

* * *

* * *

* MODERN MUSIC : PAUL BOWLES

* ART SHOWS : HILARY ARM

CHARLES HENRI FORD, the editor of this volume, has shown that silence can be as ambiguous as speech. Because he has limited his editorial activity to the selecting of fifteen stories from *View*, and has written no word of introduction to explain his principle of selection, he has left unanswered the question that his text also fails to answer: "What is a fantastic story?" Unless we are to assume that a fantastic story is anything that appears in *View*, the present collection stretches any possible definition almost beyond the point of meaningfulness. For example, Henry Miller's title story, which relates how the author fell through a skylight and barely missed his death on the night that Jupiter was supposed to exercise its most baneful influence upon him, is fantastic only if you suppose that astrology is fantastic. But if astrology seems fantastic to you, then, most likely, you won't believe in it, and you will ascribe Mr. Miller's mishap, not to Jupiter, but to coincidence. There are, of course, fantastic coincidences, but the fantastic story, as I understand it, strives to set up necessary, although il-

logical, relationships among events, rather than accidental ones—it follows what the surrealists call a dream-logic in which the apparently free juxtaposition of images is actually controlled by an undeclared system of meanings, a desired effect and a dominant tone. These three elements, which are constants in surrealism, govern the definition of the fantastic; for which reason only interior accidents are properly fantastic. The accidents that occur in the external world are, by definition, uncontrolled, and therefore irrel- evant.

I go to this length only to show that the meaning of "fantastic," far from being an obvious thing, is really one of the more difficult problems of surrealism. A simpler approach would be to list the specific claims to fantasy that these stories put forth. Thus, Miguel Asturias' "Tatuana" is patterned after folk-myth; Clay Perry's "Dead-Eye Dick Rides Again" is a parody of the Western story; "Dark Sugar," by Paul Childs, is fantastic mainly in its syntax and its poetic use of jive, etc. The painter di Chirico's "Heb- domeros," in my opinion, comes closest to following the "true" fantastic pattern, while Leo Poch's "The Water- melons" has nothing fantastic in it and Ramon J. Sender's "The Buzzard," a parable of war and a strictly moral story, seems to me diametrically opposed to the fantastic, at least as the surrealists interpret it.

It should be clear that the surrealists' activity is more in the nature of a quest for the fantastic than an achieved method of creating it. Fantasy is their blue bird and their golden fleece, the prize of experience for which the world is well lost—wherein they disregard Coleridge's warning albatross and his distinction, pertinent to their case, be-

tween fancy and imagination. The surrealist objective is certainly imaginative, but the means nearly always are fanciful. The rigor and purity essential to surrealism, as to any esthetic, the statement of which might well be regarded as the editor's highest duty, are all too frequently relaxed in favor of a catch-all modernism that promotes sensation in its most vulgar terms. The prize of experience, poor bird, is stuffed with worthless or irrelevant things—often among them the quaint typography and engravings, reproduced in this volume, that decorate the pages of *View*—and is served to the public piping hot, with one eye open to its commercial chances.

But some aspects of surrealist activity, especially those which occur in the work of imaginative writers generally, have proved to be quite rewarding. Two such examples offered in the present volume are the selection from Raymond Roussel's novel, *Impressions of Africa*, and Henry Miller's second contribution, "Dream of Mobile." Neither is strictly surrealist; both deal with actual geographical entities and elements of real experience. For this reason they attain a richer texture than that which is available in typical fantastic writing. "Dream of Mobile," more complete in itself than the selection from Mr. Roussel's novel, is concerned primarily with the idea of imagination. Henry Miller states that he has never visited Mobile, Alabama. His picture of it is entirely imaginary, and, of course, it resembles Henry Miller more than any habitable city. But it reveals Miller's understanding of the imaginative response itself and his insight, excellent whenever unclouded, into the evocative uses of reality. Imagining a natural object takes the place of presenting it. This is a generalization in which narrative and dramatic values are subsumed rarer than expressed; it is nevertheless a legitimate one because Miller's respect for the natural as such prevents his play upon it from becoming completely arbitrary. A tension is built up between the demands of actuality and the ventures of mind which in the end saves and enriches the object. It is such a capacity for understanding the imaginative value of nature as nature that has always constituted the greatness and the correctness of the romantic impulse. The deviations of this impulse, and their deliberate exploitation in surrealism, have resulted from the false evaluation of dream as the only true imaginative work, and the false assumption that an artificial sleep is more productive of dreams than a real one.
ISAAC ROSENFELD

NEW REPUBLIC

## Magic Molehill

*A Night with Jupiter and Other Fantastic Stories, edited by Charles Henri Ford. New York: A View Edition; The Vanguard Press. 128 pages. $3.*

**FANTASTIC ART**—A collection, put together by the editors of *View*, which includes works by such artists as Berman, Calder, Ernst, and Tchelit-chew: Hugo, 26 E. 55. Weekdays 10 A.M. to 5:30 P.M.; through Dec. 15.

**FRENCH-CHÉRÉAIRE**—A collection of French and English short stories and poems.

**FANTASTIC ART**—A collection, put together by the editors of *View*, which includes works by such artists as Berman, Calder, Ernst, and Tchelit-chew: Hugo, 26 E. 55. Weekdays 10 A.M. to 5:30 P.M.; through Sat., Dec. 15.

COPY

EXTRAIT DE L'HEBD. LE JOUR (MONTREAL)

ECRIT PAR MAXIMILIAN RUDWIN

View (novembre 1945), la revue mensuelle de haut luxe et d'une belle tenue litteraire et artistique, qui place en exergue sur sa page de titre le mot célebre de Rimbaud "Il faut être absolument moderne", presente au sommaire de la matiere touchant aux choses françaises. Wallace Fowlie nous entretient du poete Max Jacob, dont nous avons parle ici même le 26 avril dernier, Leon Kochnitzky de l'Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes presente un article sur le peintre français Georges Rouault. Ce numero presente aussi un essai de Francis Ponge intitule "Une nouvelle introduction au caillou" et traduit des Lettres françaises (Buenos Aires). La chronique litteraire contient des comptes rendus de livres de Jules Romains et de Charles Peguy.

Dans le numero de decembre 1945, notons tout d'abord la couverture peinte en couleurs eclatantes par Andre Masson avant sa rentree en France et puis les "Visions du comte de Permission" (Bluet d'Archeres, 1942-1946), le conte "Elle m'a reveille et je l'ai assassinee" de Jean Ferry et "Yves Tanguy du Miroir des Merveilles" de Rene Renne et Claude Serbanne. Nous souhaitons que l'action de cette revue de luxe puisse se developper et s'ameliorer encore dans l'interet des relations culturelles de la France et des Etats-Unis.

MAR. 4-11, 1946

MKR: art weekly

CONFERENCE

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

"Nouvelles Tendances
du Theatre Francais"
auspices
VIEW MAGAZINE

Carnegie Chamber Music Hall
154 West 57th St.

Tues. March 5 at 3 p. m.

Adm. $1.20, tax included

Tickets in advance from

View, 1 East 53. PL 3-7522

11 E. 57th New York, N. Y.

FRANCE-AMERIQUE

17 March, 1946

THÉÂTRE
NÉ DE LA
GUERRE

"Nouvelles tendances du théâtre français," tel fut le titre de la brillante conférence que M. Jean Paul Sartre fit sous les auspices du magazine américain "View", devant un auditoire nombreux et choisi.

S'appuyant sur l'œuvre de Jean Anouilh, de Simone de Beauvoir et d'Albert Camus, il résuma les tendances actuelles de notre théâtre d'après-guerre, devenu un "théâtre d'austérité," en contraste avec le "théâtre de luxe" de 1939. Le metteur en scène est un "metteur en place." L'auteur n'étudie pas des "caractères," mais des "situations" et les réactions d'un homme libre engagé dans le monde en face d'une situation déterminée. Chez chacun de ces auteurs, il y a toujours le drame d'un choix sur le plan de la morale, et généralement un conflit de systèmes. Leur but est d'établir une unité entre les spectateurs, tout en les tenant à distance, de présenter les problèmes comme des mythes, d'où leur prédilection pour les sujets anti-ques. Le langage commun, plat, de chaque jour, dont ils se servent se traduit par une stricte économie de mots; ce qui rend la traduction difficile, mais donne cette impression de recul qui a été recherchée.

Théâtre de situations et de choix libre, théâtre de catastrophes, pièces brèves où les trois unités sont respectées et où le nombre de personnages correspond au nombre de conflits soulevés.

Ces nouvelles tendances du théâtre français tiennent aux conditions sociales. Résultat de l'occupation; nécessité de l'économie qui se fait sentir jusque dans les phénomènes littéraires.

"Huis clos," dont le conférencier est l'auteur et auquel il ne fit qu'une modeste allusion, est aussi une pièce caractéristique du genre. Elle obtint à Paris un succès égal à celui d'"Antigone" d'Anouilh. Elle doit être représentée à Broadway, à la fin de cette année. Souhaitons à M. J. P. Sartre d'être mieux compris par les Américains que ne le fut son confrère.
J. G.

880

CAHIERS DU SUD

COURRIER D'AILLEURS

ANGLETERRE. — Après que le *London Bulletin*, dirigé par E.-L.-T. Mesens, ait cessé de paraître, la remarquable revue d'art *Counterpoint* (1) a groupé les représentants de l'avant-garde anglaise. A côté d'études de Peter Goffin, Dennis Senat, à côté des phantasmes de Paul Nash, des cosmogones de Bryan Wynter et des dynamiques gratiittis de Cecil Collins, l'on trouve de nombreuses œuvres d'Eileen Agar, femme peintre se rattachant au surréalisme par des compositions semi-abstraites d'une complexe force agressive : lumineux tourbillons végétaux où se dessine en filigrane la présence troublante de silhouettes humaines. Les œuvres d'Agar semblent uniquement subir le mouvement que leur impose la vie organique, sans que le peintre parvienne (ni même ne tente) à s'appesantir sur soi-même. Prenant l'imagination à la source de la vie, il devient le plus objectivement possible une machine à transcription de l'Univer sel dont les réseaux aboutissent à lui. Illogique, ne tendant pas à la construction, suivant le canon traditionnel, de chefs-d'œuvres, la peinture d'Eileen Agar dégage une intense poésie, un sentiment de liberté totale : *L'ordre complique la vie*.

Kurt Schwitters, fondateur de Merz, qui fut parallèlement à Dada l'un des mouvements de libération spirituelle nés au cours de la première guerre, vit retiré dans le Westmorland, à l'écart de l'activité artistique anglaise. Esprit d'une merveilleuse agilité, il n'a cessé depuis trente ans d'aborder avec un même bonheur les plus divers domaines de l'art : peinture, poésie, sculpture, etc... Une exposition générale de ses œuvres a eu lieu en décembre 1944 à la Modern Art Gallery.

ETATS-UNIS. — Dans un numéro du grand magazine moderne *View*, au-dessous d'un épigraphe de Paul Eluard : « *Toi, ma patiente ma patience ma parente...* », Man Ray, qui vit maintenant à Hollywood, écrit : « Paris Day 1944 — Je vous avais juré de ne plus peindre un seul tableau, de ne plus photographier une jolie femme ni faire l'amour avec jusqu'au jour de la libération de Paris. Aujourd'hui, je ferai les trois. »

A la revue *VVV*, fondée par André Breton, a succédé en importance *View* (2) que dirige le poète Charles-Henri Ford. *View*

(1) Directeur Conrad Senat, 8-9 Broad Street, Oxford.

(2) *View*, 1 East 53rd Street, New-York, 22, N. Y.

882

CAHİERS DU SUD

et auxquels répondent en note plus intime les vers d'Ivan Goll, qui, sans prétendre à la vertu incantatoire de Milosz, nous lait pénétrer au seuil des mêmes arcanes de rituels ésolériques : « Absent du monde — Voici la porte sur l'abime — la porte sur la nuit — que tu cherches partout — ce l'attends ; écoute l'appel des sources démentes... » Dans un numéro spécial sur la magie et la poésie, nous remarquons un article de Pierre Mabille : Neuf par 4 et 5, et surtout une Présentation du Tarot par Denis de Rougemont, d'une exceptionnelle importance.

Charles-Henri Ford, après avoir publié *The Overturned Lake*, vient de faire paraître une plaquette, *Poems for Painters*, groupant cinq très beaux textes dédiés à Marcel Duchamp, Leonor Fini, Esteban Frances, Tanguy et Pavel Tchelitchefi. Nous ne pouvons résister au plaisir de citer, ici, la fin de *Flag of Ecs-tasy*, poème à Duchamp dont le mouvement n'est pas sans rappeler celui de Liberté d'Eluard, avec plus de violence contenue toutefois :

« Over a stactometer for the tears of France — Over unma-nageable hermaphrodites — Over the rattlesnake sexlessness of art-lovers — Over the shithouse enigmas of art-haters — Over the sun's lascivious serum — Over the sewage of the moon — Over the saints of debauchery — Over criminals made of gold — Over the princes of delirium — Over the paupers of peace — Over signs foretelling the end of the world — Over signs foretel-ling the beginning of a world — Like one of those tender strips of flesh — On their side of the vertebral column — Marçels wave. »

Parker Tyler, chargé de la critique littéraire de nombreuses revues, vient de publier presque coup sur coup trois importants ouvrages : *The Granite Butterfly, Yesterday's Children* (sur 30 dessins de Tchelitchefi) et *Hollywood Hallucination*. La poésie de Tyler, plus secrète que celle de Ford, touche profondément. Les mots semblent y retrouver leur innocence originelle et être « éclairés par le dedans ». La présentation objective d'événements d'ordre personnel — comme c'est le cas dans *The Granite Butterfly* — pourrait faire songer à du Michaux éclairé çà et là de fulgurantes images.

L'effervescence dans les arts plastiques est plus grande en-core. Expositions sur expositions se succèdent. Citons en passant Peter Miller, usant d'un rapide graphisme non sans attache avec celui de Klee et des fresques rupestres ; Walter Quirt, aux couleurs miraculeuses, ordonnateur d'un univers clair et sans inquiétude ; Steve Wheeler, dont la vision chaotique charrie les débris d'un univers mécanisé ; Gertrude Cato, aux naïves et insolites imageries, etc... L'art américain a perdu récemment en Florine Stettheimer l'un de ses représentants les plus doués. En marge de Dufy, Chagall et Rousseau, Stettheimer avait su se créer un clair univers où les bouleversements d'un monde « civilisé » ne trouvaient plus que de faibles échos.

Aux côtés de ces peintres nouveaux qui montent, le génie des pionniers de l'art moderne ne cesse de s'affirmer de façon retentissante. Ce n'est pas sans un sentiment de honte que l'on découvre les nouvelles œuvres de Pavel Tchelitchefi, œuvres qui le rangent d'emblée parmi les plus grands peintres de ce temps — alors qu'il reste peu connu en France. Ses toiles irra-

LES LIVRES

883

diantes s'ouvrent sur un univers jusque là *impensable*. C'est un esprit lucide, clairvoyant, projetant sur les êtres et les choses un rejet de sa conscience supérieure. Peinture-poésie où la science, l'humain et l'universel se rejoignent, à l'échelle de la Poésie-Pensee de Milosz et de certains romantiques allemands — Novalis et Joachim d'Arnim entre autres.

Eugène Berman, dont les nocturnes et plus tard les paysages désoles apparaissent comme de troublantes préfigurations de la guerre, vit à Los Angeles. Ses dernières compositions se répartissent curieusement en deux catégories bien distinctes, l'une précise, définitive, où l'éclatante lumière de Californie accuse les formes et intensifie les couleurs, l'autre antiplastique en quel-que sorte, présentant une œuvre rapide formée de lambeaux de toiles froissées, de ficelles, etc... exprimant ainsi par des voies détournées l'instabilité de la vie moderne et ses infinies possibilités de renouvellement.

A Los-Angeles également est fixé Lorser Feitelson. Nous reviendrons dans un prochain numéro sur l'activité qu'il déploie en tant que chef de file des Post-Surréalistes.

S.-W. Hayter, émigré de Paris à Londres, puis à New-York, dirige maintenant à la New-School for Social Research, *L'Atelier* 17. Hayter est, comme Masson, un surréaliste dissident. Son œuvre procède des bases automatiques du subconscient sans pour cela se réclamer de l'orïsisme. Les principaux problèmes qu'il cherche à résoudre sont l'incorporation de l'objet dans l'espace-temps et celui de la ligne. La ligne de Hayter ne cherche pas à emprisonner, à condenser la totalité d'un objet (Matisse) ; c'est une ligne en soi, toujours libre et dynamique se suffisant à elle-même et n'ayant recours qu'occasionnellement au soutien de la couleur. Chez Hayter d'ailleurs, les problèmes techniques, prédominent de plus en plus ; ses œuvres d'antan le montraient assez proche d'un Masson, sans toutefois atteindre à l'amertume cynique du peintre français. Dans celles d'aujourd'hui, malgré un graphisme pathétique, l'homme s'abstrait du peintre. Hayter libère une ou plusieurs des arabesques de l'objet qui les retenait captives, mais cette délivrance de l'objet n'est jamais totale, il s'attache à l'arabesque et en freine le mouvement, tel un fil attaché à la patte d'un oiseau. L'intégration de l'objet dans l'espace-temps découle donc en partie de cette recherche instinctive de la ligne en soi ; du même coup, les problèmes techniques passent au second plan et laissent place à l'inspiration pure, traduite avant tout par un graphisme automatique.

A la même Ecole de Recherche Sociale, l'on trouve le peintre d'art abstrait Hans Jelinek et Stuart Davis, oscillant entre les deux pôles abstrait et figuratif. D'ailleurs, bien d'autres écoles d'art moderne, constituées sur le modèle de la célèbre Bauhaus, ont ouvert leurs portes à New-York depuis 1940. Nous reviendrons dans une autre chronique sur celle dirigée par Amédée Ozenfant et sur celle de Hans Hofmann, peintre non-figuratif dont les réalisations tendues marquent la renaissance de l'« esprit d'agression » qui se manifesta en Europe vers 1920, avec Klee, Arp, Kandinsky, etc... et d'où sortit l'un des plus troublants visages de l'art de ce temps.

884

CAHIERS DU SUD

HAITI. — Depuis le début décembre, André Breton sé-
journe à Port-au-Prince ; il a prononcé diverses conférences
sur la peinture et la littérature surrealiste et se rendra, courant
mars, à la Martinique. Son retour en France est prévu pour
les environs de mai.

BELGIQUE. — Depuis 1943, René Magritte produit des œuvres résolument nouvelles, d'une technique impressionniste. Ce n'est plus comme précédemment par la mise en présence sur un même plan d'objets d'apparence inconciliable que Magritte fait naître un sentiment d'insolite ou d'absurdité chez le spectateur, mais par l'emploi arbitraire de tons inadéquats à l'intérieur d'un même objet (La Danse 1944 représente par exemple une femme nue dont les membres sont diversement teintés : jambe bleue, bras vert, poitrine violette, etc... tenant un oiseau). Comme le dit Paul Nougé dans un remarquable essai : « Avec Magritte, le problème de la lumière semble devoir trouver une solution éclatante ».

En marge du surréalisme, à l'image de notre époque, Paul Delvaux a substitué à ses caractéristiques femmes dévêtues, des squelettes et d'inquiétants personnages en complet vestons noirs, de même qu'un metteur en scène américain symbolisa jadis la mort par un mystérieux inconnu en trench-coat. *La Ville In quiète* (1942) est une vaste composition, où plus de 300 personnages sont en proie à un mal étrange, à une terreur panique qui les pétrile. Trop peu connu en France, l'art de Delvaux entre peu à peu dans un état définitif, par un seul mot : la grandeur, avec tout ce que cela peut parlois comporter d'inhumain, de douloureusement désert. Une très attachante étude sur Delvaux, par René Gaffé, est par ailleurs récemment parue (Edition La Boëtie, Bruxelles).

AUTRICHE. — Un des chefs de file de l'Ecole Transitiviste séjourne actuellement en Autriche. On ignore sans doute que le Transitivisme, qui se présente comme une sorte d'« Armée du Salut » de la littérature, poursuit des buts moraux sous les houlettes spirituelles de Paul Claudel et Bernanos. Au point de vue esthétique, il se veut un trait d'union « entre tout ce qui a été et tout ce qui pourra être ». Comme on le voit, le programme transitiviste laisse le champ libre à l'imagination...

SUISSE. — La ville de Zurich célébrera-t-elle le 30ᵉ anni-
versaire de la naissance formelle de Dada ? Nous nous permettons

LES LIVRES

885

d'en douter. Pourtant, c'est le 8 février 1916, qu'entouré d'Arp,
Hugo Ball et quelques autres, Tristan Tzara, par l'intermédiaire
d'un couteau glissé entre les pages d'un dictionnaire, trouva ce
mot, définition nouvelle d'un état d'esprit toujours présent. Aujour-
d'hui, la littérature et l'art ont lentement regagné le terrain que
Dada, d'un seul coup, leur avait fait disparaître sous les pieds.
D'aucuns sourient avec condescendance en attendant prononcer
ce mot et affirment que Dada est depuis longtemps dépassé.
Pourtant, Dada est aujourd'hui partout, sauf du côté des litté-
rateurs et des artistes, et ce n'est pas un mal. Comme l'avait
prophétisé Georges Hugnet, historiographe officiel du mouvement,
« Dada était plus qu'un nouveau mal du siècle, Dada est le mal
du monde ». Mort hier dans le domaine de la pensée, Dada est
aujourd'hui partout présent dans le domaine de la vie.

FRANCE. — A Paris, un groupe de jeunes peintres — Dewasne, Schneider, Deyrolle, Atlan — s'inscrit en réaction directe contre le néo-plasticisme. Ils veulent adjoindre, à une non-figuration absolue, des sentiments poétiques exprimés uniquement par le langage pictural — frôlant ainsi ce que l'on appelle parfois un peu péiorativement « l'effusion pure ». Dewasne représente l'aile droite, rigide et technique de ce groupe, alors qu'Atlan en serait l'aile gauche, plus spontané et laisant appel aux ressources inconscientes du spectateur. En opposition diamétrale avec ces jeunes peintres. Serge Poliakoff n'a cessé, durant ces dernières années, d'épurer son langage plastique sous l'influence de Mondrian, tout en usant de l'hérétique « ligne courbe » chère à Domela. Poliakoff sait rendre les vibrations de l'univers par quelques cercles concentriques soutenus de couleurs pures, tourbillons sans fin dont le peintre ne retient que l'essentiel.

Très près du Surréalisme, nous trouvons Félix Labisse, sur
qui vient de paraître une monographie préfacée par Desnos.
L'œuvre de Labisse, d'un extrême pathétique — parfois même
théâtrale — est déchirée par les themes inélectables de l'amour
et de la mort. Son œuvre n'est pas sans rappeler celle de Dali
par sa facture et un érotisme physique expaspéré mais, esprit
plus lucide. Labisse parvient à nous donner d'inquiétantes équi-
valences plastiques de son inquiétude face à quelques-uns des
plus angoissants problèmes qui se proposent à l'homme.

Les cristallisations de Jacques Herold nous font aborder les
principes fondamentaux de la peinture surréaliste. Elles mon-
trent d'une éclatante façon la primauté dans l'art surréaliste
des méthodes objectives (grattage, frottage, décalcomanie, fu-
mage, etc...) sur les méthodes purement subjectives et volon-
taires des « figuratifs ». Chez Herold, les forme aiguës que l'on
rencontre dans ses œuvres récentes (L'Arbre, Floraison, etc...),
telles les failles du cristal ou les réseaux de givre parcourant
l'eau des diamants, produisent chez le spectateur, comme jadis
ses personnages écorchés, un véritable sentiment d'angoisse
physique.

Breton, André

Po

Young cherry trees secured against hares; Jeunes cerisiers garantis contre les lievres; tr. [from the French] by Eduard Roditi; il. by Arshile Gorky. no p. O c. N.Y., View Editions bds., 3.75

The original French and the English translations are on facing pages.

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

# The Revolving Bookstand

## Experiment and Post-Experiment

### Louise Bogan

*A Season in Hell (Une Saison en Eufuer),* by Arthur Rimbaud. A new English translation by Louise Varèse, with a Rimbaud chronology prepared by H. Creekmore. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions. $1.00.

*Prose Poems from The Illuminations*, by Arthur Rimbaud. Translated by Louise Varèse. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions. $1.50.

*Guillaume Apollinaire: Choix de Poésies*, with an introduction by C. M. Bowra. London: Horizon. 10s. 6d.

*Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares (Jeunes Cerisiers Garantis contre les Lièvres)*, by André Breton. Translated by Edouard Roditi, with a cover by Marcel Duchamp and illustrations by Arshile Gorky. New York, London and Paris: View Editions: A. Zwemmer. $3.75.

*New Directions: No. 9*, edited by James Laughlin. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions. $3.75.

*The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein*, edited and with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten. New York: Random House. $3.50.

*Esthétique du Mal*, by Wallace Stevens. Cummington, Massachusetts: The Cummington Press. $5.00.

*The Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas*, with an introduction by John L. Sweeney. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions. $3.50.

*The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden*. New York: Random House. $3.75.

*Lord Weary's Castle*, by Robert Lowell. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. $2.50.

Two questions come to mind as one examines the state of literature in general and of poetry in particular in this period just after the end of a war. New attitudes, new energy and new material will soon appear, one can predict with some certainty. While waiting for their appearance it is important to cast appraising glances upon the sort of poetry that has recently been published. Is it true, for example, that we are even now in "an epoch of great spiritual renewal at the brink of the decline of a world"? And is it also true that literary experiment, as it has existed in France since Rimbaud, and in England and America for the last thirty-five years or more, is now at a point of exhaustion, capable only of repetition, emptiness and dullness?

Let us examine the second of these questions. It is necessary to look back to the source of literary experiment: France in the early nineteenth century, where, because of continued social and political ferments that were suppressed in post-Napoleonic England, literary activity moved rapidly and threw up developments with vitality and speed. The history of modern poetry, it has become clear, goes back to Baudelaire. Later, poetry in France developed along two lines. First, a continuing revolt against the milieu of industrialism and materialist pressures went on; second, various insurrections and revolts occurred within the art of poetry itself. These two lines frequently intersect, but it is possible to divide them off in a rough way. Many of the prejudices existing at present concerning the state of modern poetry arise from a confusion of these two lines of development, or from a tendency to confuse

◎ For the past fifteen years LOUISE BOGAN has been poetry reviewer for the *New Yorker* and has written criticism for the *New Republic*, the *Nation*, *Partisan Review*, *Poetry* and other journals. Miss Bogan has published four books of verse since 1923. In 1944 she became a fellow in American letters of the Library of Congress, and held the position there of consultant in poetry in English during 1945-46.

237

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

what went on in France with what went on
in England.

Little innovation in English poetry appears after Keats. Tennyson obscured many issues by succumbing early to the demands of the English middle class upon the poet; he became a mouthpiece for the rather shoddy ideals and aspirations of his society. In France, Flaubert and Baudelaire, both born by ironic chance in 1821, the year of Keats's death, were never for a moment taken in by the situation in which they found themselves, or by the demands of a bourgeois public eager at once for "inspiration" and moral reassurance. The line from Baudelaire through the Symbolists to the finest poets writing in French and English today is well defined, when the picture is kept large and all but the most pertinent detail of a literary and historical kind eliminated.

Baudelaire came upon the French literary
scene when the shift from those humane
values which had operated in Europe since
the Renaissance, and from strong held-over
medieval values which ran beneath these, to
the utilitarianism resulting from civil and
religious changes, was more or less complete.
The arts were no longer closely connected
with the everyday life of simple people.
Poetry, once rooted in the reality about it in
song, ballad, adage, proverb, as well as in
religious observance and civil ritual, had
become detached from this ground, and had
begun to exist almost exclusively on the
printed page. Soon a new public was de-
manding secular reassurances, and, more
particularly, secular excitements, to take the
place of those which rationalism, the ma-
chine and the routine life of the citizen had
abolished.

The early French Romantic poets took
over the role of colorful rebel, and even of
prophet, with enthusiasm. Flaubert and
Baudelaire set their critical and formal cor-
rectives not so much against Romantic
exuberance as against the social hypocrisies
and the cheap demands for excitement and
amusement from a public which, turning its
eyes away from the ugly facts of an industrial
and urban way of life, indulged in day-
dreams and fantasies of a degenerate and
debilitating kind. Flaubert did great service
by dissecting this situation in *Madame*

Bovary and L'Éducation Sentimentale. Baudelaire in his great and moving poems first described a modern city in all its hideous detail and drew the attention of his reader not only to the squalor of his surroundings but to his spiritual poverty. In "Mon Coeur mis à Nu" he set down his conviction concerning the age in which he lived with the utmost succinctness: "La vraie civilization n'est pas dans le gaz, ni dans la vapeur, ni dans les tables tournantes. Elle est dans la dimunition du péché originel." And he felt, as Enid Starkie points out, "that there was something profoundly barren and unsatisfying on the spiritual plane in laying so much emphasis on the pursuit of happiness, on the inherent right of man to happiness, on the value of such happiness, could it even be obtained."

Technically Baudelaire's poetry was written in a form so classic that it often recalls the high seventeenth-century classicism of Racine and Corneille. His contribution to poetic expression lay in the realms of feeling and of tone, rather than that of form; he lowered with exquisite tact the classic pitch so that contemporary emotions and everyday surroundings might be described. While keeping his own emotions sincere and intense, he cooled and chided the heated rhetoric of Romanticism. It has only recently become evident how valuable his contribution to art and to life was; and he is rapidly assuming first rank in that new literary hagiography that has formed of recent years in the modern consciousness. ("Romanticism is spilt religion," wrote T. E. Hulme rather bitterly, in a wider connection, just before the 1914-1918 war. It is interesting, certainly, to watch the modern attempt to produce "saints" in a variety of fields.)

Rimbaud is the first crucial figure in
whom the revolts against nineteenth-century
moral and literary values manifest them-
selves. The revolt within the art itself begins
and branches out from him, since, in his last
work, *Une Saison en Enfer*, written in 1873
at the age of nineteen, he was the innovator
of *vers libre*. Rimbaud, after flinging himself
against his society in the most savage way,
ended by totally repudiating and abandoning
it for good. He pursued his revolutionary
course, literary and moral, to logical ends.

238

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY

Breton, André

Po

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239

THE REVOLVING BOOKSTAND

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silence and flight. His poetry, long acknowl-
edged as the poetry of a master, tied and
twisted as it is to his shocking (according to
all conventional standards) life, has taken
on special authority; his work and his history
have affected persons and movements widely
divergent in character: Paul Claudel has
claimed him for the Catholic tradition, and
the Surrealists at one time named him an
"ancestor." Une Saison en Enfer and the
prose poems from *Les Illuminations* have
recently been published in a new translation
by Louise Varèse with a Rimbaud chronology
based on the work of Enid Starkie appended
to both books.

French literature from 1885 on, as Albert Thibaudet points out, began to split into "normal literature" and literature of the "avant-garde." "The Symbolist revolution," Thibaudet goes on to say, "the last up to the present, may turn out to be the absolute last, since it has incorporated the motif of chronic revolution into the normal state of literature." This avant-gardism — the line of revolt and change within the poetic art itself — has come to be known as the "experimental" line, and is the line which now seems to have played itself out in all languages. A certain amount of tension was kept in French experimentalism by the continued outcropping of form and meaning in major experimental poets. Mallarmé, up to "Un Coup de Dés," kept his form intact while endeavoring to make his content approach "the condition of music." Valéry, Mallarmé's disciple, insisted on form to an almost mathematical extent. The French Symbolists in general had no quarrel with form; they returned to it at the demands of their emotion. They hoped to loosen and extend form so that it could encompass any material they wished to deal with. And this they managed to do, with far-reaching results; for foreign writers as diversely impelled and gifted as Rilke, Yeats, Stefan George, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot profited from their experiments. It fell to the Dadaists and Surrealists to attack form finally and exhaustively. Because a ground swell of emotional intensity did not run beneath their experiments, these last soon were reduced to writing as a sort of play or game, and this play was never able to pull

Breton, André

Po

Young cherry trees secured against hares;
Jeunes cerisiers garantis contre les livres; tr.
[from the French] by Eduard Roditi; il. by
Arshile Gorky. no p. O c. N.Y., View Editions
bds., 3.75

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241

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

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itself above a certain school-boy level. The fact that many charlatans and *blagueurs*, as well as genuine poets, were experimentalists, has helped to obscure the worth and befog the direction of experimental poetry.

Before we try to estimate the worth of current experimental productions, we should examine the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire (de Kostrowitski), born in 1880 in Rome of a Polish mother, educated in Monaco and in Nice, and after continental travel, for many years a resident of Paris, up to his death of a war wound in 1918. A selection from Apollinaire's poetry in the original French was recently published in England with a sympathetic and scholarly introduction in English by C. M. Bowra. Apollinaire was a true poetic innovator. His technical innovations have been widely imitated; the work of Louis Aragon, which made a falsely original impression during the War, is deeply in debted to him. Apollinaire brought in a new attitude of the poet toward his environment. He neither rebelled against nor repudiate it; he absorbed it. He worked in the atmosphere of his time, as a member of a group of writers and artists which included Picasso, Picabia, André Salmon, Max Jacob and André Derain; and he knew and admired Alfred Jarry, the author of the anti-bourgeois (and anti-human) play, *Ubu-Roi*.

Apollinaire invented the word "surrealism to describe his play *Les Mamelles de Tirésias* produced in 1917. His two books of poems *Alcools* (1913) and *Calligrammes* (1918), use all of the "avant-garde" tricks of the time alone with some new ones — the use of typographical design, for example, so that a poem about rain proceeds down the page in long vertical lines. He did hack research work in the Bibliothèque Nationale, thereby acquiring a sort of factitious erudition, which he used to enliven his writing.

He might easily have turned out a glib and mocking versifier of a third- or fourth-rate order; he was saved from this by the original purity and genuineness of his talent, by his real intelligence, of an imaginative, inquisitive kind, and by his temperament, which was both gay and charming. He was not afraid to express the more tender sort of emotion; his love poems are delightful. His chief

AURORA
DAWN

By Herman Wouk

Imagine that an elegant and witty 18th-century novelist, cleverly disguised in a Brooks Bros. suit, has smugled himself into Radio City and observed, with raised brow and tongue in cheek, the events leading up to the great Aurora Dawn riot.

Neither this nor anything else we can say will give you more than an inkling of the sheer delight contained in the new mock-heroic romance by a surprising new novelist. $2.75 at your bookseller's.

GENTLEMAN'S
AGREEMENT

By Laura Z. Hobson

This new novel about antisemitism is *not* concerned with lunatic-fringe hoodlums who beat children and desecrate synagogues. Instead it is about (and for) those polite Americans who wring their hands over such outrages—and yet achieve the same results in a subtler, more “gentlemanly” way in their business and social lives. Charles Jackson, author of *The Lost Weekend* says, “I am simply unable to get it out of my mind. It is brilliantly thought out.” $2.75 at your bookseller's.

SIMON AND SCHUSTER, Publishers

243

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Beacon Flashes
from The Beacon Press—35 Beacon St., Boston, Mass.

Is it true what they say
about liberals? *

Liberals are taking such a beating nowadays, they'll have to be cautious of becoming masochistic. ● Evidence: A few weeks ago, a national radio network gave time on the air to perhaps the most violent attack of its kind heard on a coast-to-coast hookup. ● The object of the attack: liberals, and especially religious liberals. *Time* magazine devoted nearly a

full page to excerpts,
commending the pro-
gram as "a message to
all who call themselves
Christians." Conclusion:
"We are witnessing the
death of Historical Lib-
eralism." ● We suggest
that you do not sell lib-
eralism short before you
read *VOICES OF LIBERAL-
ISM: I*, the first of an
annual compendium of
forceful messages in the
fields of liberalism and
religious liberalism. It
isn't earth-shaking, but

it is a beginning—a 204-page beginning that we think you'll find worth $2. ● We have just shown a copy to Pierre van Paasen. The celebrated author of *DAYS OF OUR YEARS, EARTH COULD BE FAIR*, etc., became almost embarrassingly enthusiastic: "This book is a banner for the American people. Here is a prophetic word that needs to be spoken in our day if Voltaire's *INFAME*, the darkness that wants to be darkness, is not to hold sway. These are messages for the hour of crisis through which America and the world are passing." ● Duncan Howlett, Dana McLean Greeley, Curtis W. Reese, Everett Moore Baker, and John Haynes Holmes are among the 17 authors included in this book.

contribution, we are beginning to realize, was
his real affection for the peculiar world which
surrounded him. He broke through the stiff
reserve of the modern poet in relation to his
world, and showed the manner by which the
poet can work with the facts of his surround-
ings without recourse to that face-saving
irony which we find even in the sensitive
Laforgue and the early Eliot. This break-
through has just begun to influence modern
poetry; through a study of Apollinaire's
methods and attitudes poetry in the future
will learn more ease and be able to enlarge
its power and its function. Apollinaire's sense
of the pathos of life, and of the singular
juxtapositions of spirit and reality is always
deep and striking:

Je connais gens de toutes sortes
Ils n'égalent pas leurs destins
Indécis comme feuilles mortes
Leurs yeux sont feux mal s'éteint
Leurs cœurs bougent comme leurs portes

Apollinaire marks a point where pure ex-
perimentation intersects the humane poetic
line of all times and all countries. To ignore
its direction into further richness, and it
possibilities of extension and deepening in
general, is to be left on the comparatively
sterile path of verbalism-as-such. This less-
path has been chosen by the surrealists; it
sterility is becoming more evident as time
goes on. The work of André Breton, for
many years the "leader" of the surrealism
movement, exemplifies surrealism's present
dilemma. Originally founded on a serious
endeavor to plumb the depths of the subcon-
scious and to enrich the conscious thereby,
surrealism early hardened into a formula
backed up by a set of rules of the harshest
kind. These rules produced, however, only
artificial and adolescent results. Surrealists
imitated the writing of the insane, indulged
in automatic writing and hypnotism, and
finally took to the dull chances of parlot
paper games. Breton has a rhetorical gift.
Beyond this verbal power, which often be-
comes incantatory in the manner of church
ritual, his work is singularly empty. *Jeune
Cerisiers Garantis contre les Lièvres* ("Young
Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares") con-
tains poems written from 1923 through 1944.
It is remarkable that some spiritual or in-

*Good memory? It's the same head we used in this column three months ago, when we announced THE FAITH OF AN UNRENT LIBERAL ($1.50), by A. Powell Davies (recommended by the Book-of-the-Month Club) and Beyond DOUBT ($2), by Kenneth L. Patton. The "New York Times" observed: "Mr. Patton sees things clearly."

Breton, André
Po
Young cherry trees secured against hares; Jeunes cerisiers garantis contre les lievres; tr. [from the French] by Eduard Roditi; il, by Arshile Gorky. no p. O c. N.Y., View Editions bds., 3.75

THE

DARK

SIDE

OF THE

MOON

ANONYMOUS
WITH A PREFACE BY

I. S. ELIOT

The incredible story of what really happened in Poland during the Russian occupation 1939-45.

"A year ago, this would have seemed to be a book
only about Poland: it is now a book about one instance of a general
problem . . . the survival of the civilization of Western Europe." —T. S. ELIOT

"Criticism . . . would be irrelevant to the vividness, the power and the unquestionable truth of a work which has the character of a masterpiece of documentary cinema." —Time and Tide
$2.75

AT ALL BOOKSTORES

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, N.Y.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

244

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

OXFORD BOOKS

KEATS
AND THE
DAEMON KING

by Werner W. Beyer

A fascinating piece of literary detective work that traces the remarkable influence of the gifted German author, C. M. Wieland, on Keats' mind. It also sheds new and startling light on Keats' life and thought, on his poetic ideas, symbolism and daemonology. Its fresh data explains obscure passages in twenty-five poems and gives a key for at least three major poems — *Endymion*, *The Eve of St. Agnes* and *Lamia*. Finally, KEATS AND THE DAEMON KING enables us to watch the metamorphosis of specific ideas into true poetry. $4.00

A SAINTSBURY
MISCELLANY

With a Preface by
Augustus Muir

This collection of Saintsbury's writings reflects the wide diversity of his interests — ranging from studies of the English poets to *The Qualities of Wine*. A personal study of Saintsbury by his friend, the late Oliver Elton, and a group of portraits by Sir Herbert Grier son and others introduce the essays.

$3.50

At all bookstores

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

114 Fifth Ave., N. Y. 11

tellectual element could not make itself felt over such a period of time; but, as it turns out, the last poems are exactly like the first.

A certain patriotism, at least, has been inserted into the work of Paul Éluard, a poet who once was closely associated with Breton. James Laughlin, in *New Directions: No. 9*—the “annual exhibition gallery of new and divergent literary trends” that he has published for ten years—presents a selection from Éluard’s later work. Éluard is distinctly gifted, in a small and delicate lyric way, but his endowment, in spite of his sincere enthusiasm, is far too frail to carry the weight of authority which has been assigned to him. It is interesting and unexpected, by the way, to read James Laughlin’s remark in his introduction to this newest yearly collection that “the experimental vein of the prewar years may well be exhausted.”

At this particular moment, when “the revolution of the word” seems to have outlived its reason for being, we can look back upon the work of the American woman who helped to clear the air of Victorian stylisms. Gertrude Stein detached word from hampering connotative accretions. Her *Selected Writings*, edited with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, appeared shortly after Miss Stein’s recent death. This volume gathers together for the first time the early and late writings, in prose and “free verse” of a woman who was a true literary pioneer. Gertrude Stein worked with lapidarian care with the color, weight and density of words. Polishing them free of sentiment’s film and the dust of “literature” alike, she arranged them in abstract patterns. Her methods in detaching language from meaning combined wit and shrewdness. The “free verse” of “Tender Buttons” (1914) and of her plays can be read with pleasure derived from her ingenuity and her hardness of outline. In spite of many indications to the contrary—a sort of enlargement and petrification of the ego becomes occasionally unpleasantly apparent in her work—she was never silly or inhuman, and the value of her influence upon modern prose as well as upon modern poetry is incontestable.

Wallace Stevens is another American es-

Breton, André Po
Young, cherry trees secured against hares; Jeunes cerisiers garantis contre les livres; tr. [from the French] by Eduard Roditi; il. by Arshile Gorky. no p. O c. N.Y., View Editions bds., 3.75

ILLINOIS BOOKS

Milton's Poems in Facsimile

The Illinois Facsimile Edition of the Poetical Works of John Milton, edited and annotated by Professor Harris F. Fletcher, in four volumes, 8½ x 11 inches. Limited edition, 550 numbered copies — $20 the volume.

I. POEMS, &c. UPON SEVERAL OCCASIONS, 1673

POEMS, BOTH ENGLISH AND LATIN, 1645

With Fugitive Printings, Manuscript Copies, and Their Collations. 466 pages, 1943.

II. THE FIRST EDITION OF PARADISE LOST

With the Plans and Lists of Epic Subjects from the Trinity College Manuscript, the Manuscript of Book I, with Transcriptions and Collations. 634 pages, 1945.

III. THE SECOND EDITION OF PARADISE LOST

Approximately 500 pages, in press (1947).

IV. THE 1671 EDITION OF PARADISE REGAINED
SAMSON AGONISTES

Approximately 350 pages (in press, 1947 or early 1948).

Shaksperean Studies

Three important works by Professor Thomas W. Baldwin on the education and the literary and dramatic art of William Shakspere.

1. WILLIAM SHAKSPERE'S PETTY SCHOOL

Primary education of Shakspere's time as reflected in his plays.
240 pages, $4.50 (1943).

2. WILLIAM SHAKSPERE'S SMALL LATINE AND LESSE GREEKE

Grammar-school education in the fifteenth century. "Whether or not Shakspere ever spent a single day in petty or grammar school, nonetheless petty and grammar school were a powerful shaping influence on him. . . . How much of himself did Shakspere realize from them?"
Two volumes, 1550 pages, $15.75 (1944).

3. SHAKSPERE'S FIVE-ACT STRUCTURE

Shakspere's early plays on the background of Renaissance theories of five-act structure from 1470.
866 pages, $20 (1947).

Milton and Ovid

MILTON AND THE RENAISSANCE OVID, by Davis P. Harding. 105 pages, cloth, $2, paper, $1.50 (1946).

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Urbana, Illinois

247

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Chapel Hill

presents:

MEANING AND TRUTH
IN THE ARTS

by John Hospers

A brilliant study of the application of the terms "meaning" and "truth" to the major arts of music, painting and literature.

$4.00

THE REVIVAL
OF REALISM

by James K. Feibleman

A provocative discussion of the occasional resurgence of the philosophy of realism through the ages and its present revival in philosophy, history, science, semantics and psychology.

Coming March 15 • $4.00

GERMAN
LABOR COURTS

by Frieda Wunderlich

A lucid, thoroughly documented discussion of the historical development of German labor law up to 1925, an analysis of the system as it operated between that date and 1933, and an account of the changes made under Nazism.

$3.50

AT BOOKSTORES

THE UNIVERSITY OF
NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL • N.C.

O, wie spurlos zeträte ein Engel ihnen den Trostmarkt, den die Kirche begrenzt, ihre fertig gekaufte: reinlich und zu und enttäuscht wie ein Postamt am Sonntag. . . .

And it is Baudelaire, among others, who is invoked by Eliot at the end of *The Waste Land*. Baudelaire clung to the sense of Otherness: of some Reality which the teachings of scientific positivism cannot explain. For him, the philosophic substitution of the goodness of man for the goodness of God, was never valid or binding.

The possible transcendence of the evils of the modern world and of the eternal evil in the heart of man, through grace and suffering, is the theme which informs the two major poetic works of the last few years. T. S. Eliot's *Four Quartets*, since it appeared in an American edition in 1943, cannot be dealt with here. Its light falls so strongly upon the period, however, that it must at least be mentioned. Eliot, long a convert to the Anglican Church, in these four complicated and moving poems exposes his personal religious emotion more completely than (remembering his earlier objectivity) one would think possible. Peace and grace are to be reached "not in movement":

> But in abstention from movement, while the world moves
> In appetency, on its metalled ways
> Of time past and time future . . .

and the poems rise to a climax of joy at their end. A like joy shows in W. H. Auden's *Collected Poems*. Auden writes a prayer for the voice of Man:

> . . . O teach us to outgrow our madness.
> Ruffle the perfect manners of the frozen heart,
> And once again compel it to be awkward and alive.
> To all it suffered once a weeping witness.

Clear from the head the masses of impressive rubbish;
Rally the lost and trembling forces of the will,
Gather them up and let them loose upon the earth

250

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

is proud to announce the publication of

D. C. SOMERVELL'S
one-volume abridgement of
A STUDY OF
HISTORY

By ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE

From the reviews of the original publication of
A STUDY OF HISTORY

"The position of Professor Toynbee's book is, to say the least of it, not less than was that of Edward Gibbon's in 1776."
— SIR JOHN SQUIRE, in the *London Mercury*

"After reading it carefully no good historian will ever be able to see things through the same spectacles as before."
— GILBERT MURRAY, in *The Observer*

"This is one of the important works of our generation. . . . It is philosophy of history, metaphysics, even theology, not narrative history. It is a work of extraordinary scope and erudition."
— CRANE BRINTON, in *The Yale Review*

$5.00 at all bookstores

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

114 Fifth Avenue, New York

251

THE NATION

July 12, 1947

Hares and Trappists

A MAN IN THE DIVIDED SEA.
By Thomas Merton. New Directions.
$2.50.

YOUNG CHERRY TREES SECURED
AGAINST HARES. By André Breton. View Editions. $3.75.

THE best thing Mr. Merton does is to communicate the complete satisfaction of the very simple but, for the believer, wonderfully significant life of the Trappist monk; a special, almost allegorical, feeling for nature seems to be a part of this life. For instance, The Trappist Abbey: Matins:

When the full fields begin to smell of
sunrise

And the valleys sing in their sleep,

The pilgrim moon pours over the solemn
darkness

Her waterfalls of silence,

And then departs, up the long avenue of
trees.

But Mr. Merton realizes such feelings
only occasionally, for there is a clash be-
tween them and his characteristic style.

This style seems to be based on a de-
light in the decorative elaboration of
comparisons, a delight which frequently
leads to the abuse of the simile, as in
Holy Communion:

For Grace moves, like the wind,

The armies of the wheat our secret hero!

And Faith sits in our hearts like fire,

And makes them smile like suns.

These capitalized abstractions grow
no more precise for being qualified by
a succession of similes which, taken sep-
arately, are clichés and, taken together,
chaotic. Frequently, too, Mr. Merton al-
lows himself to detail the obvious as-
pects of the vehicle of a metaphor
which has, in the first instance, only
the slightest support of meaning. This
is from a poem on the Annunciation:

Speech of an angel shines in the waters of
her thought like diamonds.

Rides like a sunburst on the hillsides of
her heart,

And is brought home like harvests,

Hid in her house, and stored

Like the sweet summer's riches in our
peaceful barns.

The effect of such obvious and, for the
most part, merely verbal ingenuity is to
raise the question of the quality of the
poet's feelings for the Communion or
the Annunciation; yet it is clear from
some other poems where Mr. Merton
has subdued these stylish tricks that his
religious feelings are finer and deeper
than such obvious and muddled figures
suggest. At its best this style lends
itself to songs and highly fanciful
and sensuous description—for example,
"Ariadne"—not, except on very special
occasions, to what appears to be Mr.
Merton's very real faith.

The claim of his publishers is that "le témoignage d'André Breton s'impose comme gage de la tradition classique des Surréalistes, d'une imagination qui ne transige pas et d'une constance morale qui ne fait jamais défaut." This may well be true; the juror on whom only a fragment here and there, and one poem, have imposed themselves can hardly say. There is a kind of brilliance of phrase in these poems which is often impressive, but

Je prends mon bien dans les failles du roc
là où la mer

Précipite ses globes des chevaux montés
des chiens qui hurlent...

There are places into which it is not
always easy to follow Mr. Breton's
understanding.
ARTHUR MIZENER

YOUNG CHERRY TREES SECURED AGAINST HARES. By Andre Breton. View Editions. $3.75.

This book, with such a forbidding title, is Andre Breton's first collec-

tion of verse between his arrival in America in 1941 and his departure for Paris again in 1946. Actually the title is the most forbidding aspect of the book (plus the greatly inflated price), and it turns out to be a very pleasant and engaging book by the international leader of the Surrealists.

What I like about Breton and many of the foreign surrealists is that they do not seem to feel they must continually work at white heat and offer up a fused mass or various impressions and perceptions, a feeling which, I think, damages much of American surrealist work. In these poems are a number of apparently disparate impressions which begin to coalesce around an engaging, critical, and rather wry and bitter point of view

The French text of Breton faces an English translation by Edouard Roditi, who is an accomplished worker with French literature.

— Alan Swallow.

415 LEXINGTON AVENUE, NEW YORK 17

for intellectual and esthetic enjoyment it's **View**
edited by Charles Henri Ford

## art

View's covers, all specially designed, are noted for their brilliance and originality. No other magazine can boast such an array of cover-artists, internationally known and distinguished in the fields of painting, sculpture, or theatre: Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Estéban Francés, Jean Hélion, Wifredo Lam, Fernand Léger, André Masson, Kurt Seligmann, Pavel Tchelitchew, John Tunnard.

## & literature

View, first in art, is also in the advance-guard of literature. Among the writers who have contributed poems, stories, articles are: Eric Bentley, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, Kenneth Burke, Roger Caillois, Albert Camus, E. E. Cummings, Denis de Rougemont, James T. Farrell, Wallace Fowlie, Jean Genêt, André Gide, Randall Jarrell, Henry Miller, Jean-Paul Sartre, Meyer Schapiro, Ramon J. Sender, Edith Sitwell, Wallace Stevens, James Johnson Sweeney, Parker Tyler, William Carlos Williams.

Special Introductory Offer: Send $1.00 for current number or $3.50 for a year's subscription and receive free Poems for Painters by Charles Henri Ford. (Mention this ad.)

Published quarterly, October, December, March, and May. Make checks payable to:

View, Inc., 1 East 53rd St., New York 22, N. Y.

Dobsons
London England
Spring 1947

## A NIGHT WITH JUPITER
AND OTHER FANTASTIC STORIES

### Edited by Charles Henri Ford

EACH of these modern stories has its unique and irresistible charm. The range of locale and fancy is from deepest Chicago to an impossible but fascinating Africa, from a dream vision of Mobile, Alabama to the psychic life of a buzzard.

Among the authors included are Henry Miller, Ramon J. Sender, Raymond Roussel, Giorgio di Chirico, Paul Bowles, Leonora Carrington, and Montagu O'Reilly. Profusely illustrated with line-drawings by such famous contemporary artists as Alexander Calder, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Yves Tanguy.

'Cosmopolitan, curious, ultra-contemporary writing which ranges from the weird to the baroque . . . from the astrological, the satanic, the legendary, to present-day parody. Surrealist for the most part, strange, and sometimes suggestive, this book is by and for the esoteric.'

'Mr Ford is the one genius we have had as an editor in our time.' — Edith Sitwell.

Medium 8vo Illustrated
Catalogue Nr 609/R

8s 6d net

## ETATS-UNIS.

VIEW (New-York). Printemps 1947. — Cette revue surréaliste de grand luxe, consacrée à l'art et à la littérature, comporte un excellent essai de Parker Tyler: « L'anatomie humaine, un univers qui s'épanouit », illustré d'une étonnante reproduction de Tchelitchew, que suit une étude de Marius Bewley: « La Mort en Amérique »; puis « Les Chiens musiciens », par Paul Goodman; « La Musique est dangereuse », par Paul Nougé; des poèmes, enfin, dont certains attachants, de Russell Atkins, Joë Massey, Andrew Demarest, Anne Rush.

10

AUFBAU

# Abkehr vom Luxus-Theater

## Jean-Paul Sartre über die französische Bühne

Im geistigen Leben des heutigen Frankreich ist Jean-Paul Sartre ohne jeden Zweifel eine der stärksten schöpferischen Potenzen. Wie man auch im Einzelnen zu seinen dramatischen Werken oder zu seiner philosophischen Lehre vom Existentialismus stehen mag — niemand kann verkennen, dass das junge Frankreich den Einfluss der Gedankenwelt Sartres und seiner Schule in mannigfachen literarischen und künstlerischen Ausser rungen kräftig reflektiert.

Die Originalität seiner Anschauungen über die geistige Erneuerung des zeitgenössischen französischen Theaters insbesondere offenbarte sich allen denen, die gekommen waren, den Dramatiker Sartre über die neuen Tendenzen der französischen Bühne im Kammermusiksaal der Carnegie Hall sprechen zu hören. Man vernahm keine leicht an der Oberfläche tändelnde "causerie", sondern eine bei aller Eleganz und Geschliffenheit der Sprache an das Herz der Dinge rührende Analyse der neuen Strömungen, die jetzt unter Führung von Sartre selbst und anderen Dramatikern wie Jean Anouilh, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir und anderen die französische Bühne zu erobern suchen.

Man muss der neuen Zeitschrift "View" Dank wissen, dass sie dem geistig interessierten Publikum New Yorks Gelegenheit gegeben hat, sich mit der neuen Richtung des modernen französischen Theaters durch Sartres ausserordentlich geistvolle Ausführungen — Sartre ist ein blendender Redner, der anderthalb Stunden völlig freisprach — vertraut zu machen.

Anknüpfend an die New Yorker Aufführung der "Antigone" von Jean Anouilh und ihre zwiespältige Aufnahme durch die Kritik, erklärte Sartre sie sozusagen aus einer falschen optischen Einstellung, die das Stück nach den zünftigen Regeln amerikanischen Theaters heurteilt habe, ohne es als ein Paradigma der neuen französischen Schule zu erkennen. Bis 1939, so legte der Dramatiker-Philosoph dar, sei das Theater, in Frankreich ein Luxus-Theater gewesen. In diesem "théâtre de luxe" der Gémier, Antoine, Gaston Baty, Charles Dullin u. a., war der Regisseur die dominierende Personlichkeit. Das Luxus-Theater war bestimmt durch Prunk der Dekorationen, durch scharfe Betonung und Herausstellung der handelnden Charaktere, durch Erzeugung von Illusion und — last, but not

least — durch einen wortreichen Dialog.

Von diesem Luxus-Theater, das Sartre dann prägnanter als "théâtre de caractères" kennzeichnete, vollzieht das Theater Sartres und seiner Schule eine bewusste Abkehr und Umschwenkung zu einem "strengen und sparsamen Theater der Situationen". Nicht mehr soll die Bühne Charaktere behandeln, sondern Situationen. Es soll die Reaktion eines Menschen gegenüber einer gegebenen Situation zeigen. Denn, so sagt Sartre, es gibt keine menschliche Natur, die immer und unter allen Umsständen gleich handelt, sondern das Wesentliche ist und bleibt die "condition humaine". Das wahr Drama des Menschen vollzieht sich nur in seiner Berührung mit der Welt. So gesehen, ist die "Antigone" Anouilhs kein Charakter-Drama, sondern das Drama einer freien Wahl zwischen Leben und Tod.

Das Situations-Theater will auch ein moralisches Theater sein, im Sinne der Schaubühne Schillers. Das bedingt zugleich die bewusste Rücksicht zu einer Tragödie, die erfüllt ist, von dem Pathos der Griechen oder eines Corneille. Wir wollen zurück zur antiken Konzeption eines Schicksal-Theaters, betonte Sartre.

Die Werke für eine solche Bühne müssen kurz und leidenschaftlich sein, mit wenigen Personen auskommen, sich in karg bemessener Zeit abrollen. Sartre fordert hier nichts anderes, als was die Dramaturgie der* klassischen französischen Tragödie die Lehre von den drei Einheiten nannte. Aber er geht noch einen Schritt weiter. Seine Bühne will auch eine grössere Einheit zwischen Bühne

und Zuschauerraum, indem das Theater wieder wie einst in der Antike zur feierlichen Zeremonie wird, die den Zuschauer in die Vorgänge auf der Szene einbezieht und ihn dennoch in Distanz hält. Und das neue französische Theater verlangt schliesslich die strikteste Oekonomie der Worte in einem nicht geschraubten, auf Kothurnen wandelnden Stil, sondern in der Sprache des Alltags.

Richard Dyck.

## Conférence de J.-P. Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre fera sous les auspices de la Revue "View" une conférence intitulée : "Nouvelles tendances du Théâtre français", le mardi 5 mars, à 3 h. au Carnegie Chambers Hall, 154 Ouest 57ème rue.

FRANCE-AMÉRIQUE
MAR 3 1946

CARNEGIE CHAMBER MUSIC HALL, TUES., 3 P. M.
View presents
**JEAN-PAUL SARTRE**
Lecture: Nouvelles Tendances du Théâtre Français
Tickets from View, 1 East 53 PL 3-7522

LES REVUES

View (New-York). N° 6, janvier 1946.

Mentionnons un article brillant d'Edith Sitwell : Some notes of Shakespeare.

My life : Two Excerpts, par Marc Chagall, texte accompagné d'un délicieux autoportrait.

The Phoenix as narcissus, par Léon Kochnitzky.

Martial Music ? un article haineux sur Louis Aragon, poète de la Résistance française, par Parker Tyler, qui dit entre autres :

Ce livre est une brillante et prosaïque collaboration en vue d'exalter un traître de la poésie moderne, Louis Aragon. Naïvement, Waldo Frank, relatant quelques souvenirs personnels avant la conversion d'Aragon à la banalité, admet que ce poète, alors même qu'il était un nouveau flambeau surréaliste, montrait des signes de juteux patriotisme, exprimant son plus vulgaire accent dans cette phrase : « la belle France ».

La vérité est que tant qu'Aragon reste un surréaliste, c'est-à-dire un poète capable d'invention originale, il est possible de le lire sans dégoût.

Les vingt-cinq poèmes imprimés ici attestent qu'Aragon apporta sa contribution littéraire à la France pendant la seconde guerre mondiale en convertissant la tradition de la poésie française en une sorte de « ration alimentaire » pour l'armée, un « concentré » de mélange d'effets de Villon à Rimbaud et du prénommé Aragon, ainsi qu'un assortiment considérable de clichés anonymes.

De ces vingt-cinq poèmes un seul, peut-être, « Elsa au Mi-
roir », reste pur de toute vulgarité, mauvais goût ou cocarde en
papier crèpe.

Sans commentaire.

Unlike our great-grand-
parents, we enter school
potential adults and leave as
little children, many of us
doomed to perpetual adoles-
cence. Obviously, this is a
bad thing, but some artists
who enjoy this state—incom-
plete beings that they are—
have sufficient skill to pour
forth their work year after
year upon a market composed
of clients of the same mental
age as themselves. This
magazine is full of such work,
for surrealism exists to-day as
yesterday. But it is no longer
regarded as the ultimate end
of art—rather the beginning.

View. Edited by Charles
Henri Ford, at 360, East
55th Street, New York.
7¼in. x 10¾in., 32 p.p.
Illustrated. Quarterly, 35
cents.

E XPENSIVELY printed on beautiful art paper with numerous illustrations and a coloured cover, this magazine contains reproductions and criticism of surrealist paintings, and expositions on surrealism and art as interpreted by the surrealists throughout the world. The magazine contains book notices as well as work by poets who, by rights, ought not to be in such surroundings, since they are, at best, no more than obscurantists.

But perhaps this magazine
is going through a phase and
is about to mature. If so, it
will be a great loss to the
surrealists, for this publication
is an important one of its
kind. However, whatever its
creed, it will always be
interesting and anything is
preferable to the ghoulishly
analytical and clinical X-ray
type of drawings so typical of
surrealism, which illustrate
the pages.

EVERYMAN

MARCH/APRIL, 1947

Sunday, April 14, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. FILM PROGRAM: "A NOUS LA LIBERTE"

A brilliant social satire on prison life vs. factory assembly lines, the French equivalent to Chaplin's "Modern Times." Directed by René Claire.

Sunday April 21, one performance 9:00
SURREALIST PUPPET SHOWS BY JOHN MYERS

A new approach to an ancient dramatic form: unique puppet shows produced by writer John Myers, which restore the magic and insolence of Punch and Judy in the guise of 20th century surrealism. Actors designed by painter Kurt Seligmann, incidental music and songs by Paul Bowles. Two plays, one by Jean Bowles, the other by poet Charles Henri Ford, VIEW magazine editor.

OUTLINES

"VIEW" (View, Inc., New York, $3.50 per annum.)

"Il faut être absolument moderne" is the admonition of Rimbaud adopted by the publishers of this determinedly avant-garde review. Unfortunately a conscious attempt to be "absolutely modern" is liable to defeat its own ends, and nothing dates more quickly than the experiment that does not come off. One recalls old numbers of "Transition" which sandwiched excerpts from Joyce's "Work in Progress" between Eugene Jolas' enterprises but unfortunate verbal manipulations; and the peculiar "poems" such as that beginning (and, in the main, continuing and ending) with the line "Bim Bam Bim-Bim," or the "Fragment from the Universal Poem" which consisted of words scattered haphazardly over a folding page of considerable size. In a land where one must derive most of one's magazine humour from Punch, such novelties were not unwelcome, and "Transition," stimulating and irritating in its day, has a certain old-world charm now. But one suspects that old-world charm is not the aim of the thirteen men who in editorial and advisory capacities control the policy of "View".

Actually, as one would expect where such names as Aaron Copland, James Johnson Sweeney, Marcel Duchamp, Chirico, and Man Ray figure among the contributors, there is much of unusual interest in "View". Particularly welcome in recent issues have been Robert Melville's outstanding essay "Three Moves in the Big Game" and the first English translation of Pico della Mirandola's "Oratio Elegantissima de Dignitate Hominis". It is the more unfortunate that there is so much balderdash both in content and layout of the magazine. A violent preciosity is too often the effect produced. The familiar old Dada theory that it doesn't matter how you strike so long as you strike hard seems to be at work, and the issue which arrived at this office "damaged by immersion in sea water" and completely illegible achieved a surrealist effect that other issues seem to have sought for in vain.

"View" could be a very valuable organ for experimental work but there should be a keener editorial discrimination between genuine experiment and phoney provincial "modernity". And several dreary pages show the unwisdom of publishing stories and articles merely because their authors are distinguished in other spheres.

SCOTTISH ARTS & LETTERS (GLASGOW)

SPRING 1946

ers. People like the movie-illustrated edi-
tions, he said.

Along with this optimistic atmosphere of better business and new business was the paradoxical opinion expressed by some book people that the very small bookshop is on its way out, on the West Coast and in the Far West in general. It has been reported that double and even triple rents have been demanded, which can be paid by other specialty shops but which small independent bookstores can not afford. There is even a demand for "Closing Out Sale" signs in Hollywood, where several small stores are shutting up shop entirely and the same condition is reported from such widely separated spots as Denver and Oklahoma City. The Satyr Book Shop is moving from its 18-year-old location next to the Brown Derby on Vine Street in Hollywood to a store on Hollywood Boulevard. The London Book Shop has closed down entirely. On the other hand, Jose Schnaider has recently opened the Hispano American Book Shop at 827 W. Sixth Street in Los Angeles, where he deals in new books printed in Mexico, Spain, Argentina and Chile.

And the title most in demand everywhere
is still "Forever Amber."

FRENCH WRITERS BRING
NEW INFLUENCES TO U.S.A.

In spite of wartime demoralization and material disruption, the culture and literary thought of France continue to be felt deeply in this country. Recent visitors from France are bringing to us the new expressions of French thinking, while the writing which played so great a part in the Resistance Movement is widely discussed in American periodicals and is beginning to be reproduced.

One of the most vigorous young spokesmen of the cultural resistance is Vercors (who uses his real name, Jean Bruller, only in his rôle as an artist). Vercors has just left for France, having toured the United States since January 15, giving talks in French to groups of the Alliance Française. He is known, of course, as co-founder of the underground publishing house, Editions de Minuit, and as author of the novelette, "Le Silence de la Mer," published underground by Minuit, and in America by

Macmillan (in English) and Pantheon (in French). (Vercors tells us, by the way, the correct title is in the singular—"*Le Silence*," not "*Les Silences*.") Pantheon has just issued a new story, in French, by Vercors, "La Marche à l'Etoile."

Editions de Minuit, Vercors told us the other day, is continuing to publish books which express a rationalist, vigorously democratic viewpoint.

The effect of Minuit's publications will become more apparent if, as is hoped, they become generally available in this country in imported, reprinted or translated editions. Already, Americans have made their acquaintance through the wartime works of Louis Aragon, notably by way of "Aragon, Poet of the French Resistance," which Hannah Josephson and Malcolm Cowley edited, with excellent translations, for late 1945 publication by Duell, Sloan & Pear. Editions de la Maison Française has issued two volumes of Aragon's war poetry. "Crève-Coeur," and "Les Yeux d'Elsa."

Just now the complex philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus are getting wide attention in literary circles. Both were important writers for the Resistance. Sartre, the "existentialist," has just concluded a tour of the U.S.A., interspersed with lectures. These lectures, while they have not caused the fisticuffs and riots which his scholarly discourses provoke in France, have stirred a ferment reflected in such varied publications as *Time*, the *New Yorker*, the *Nation*, *Partisan Review* and the advance-guard literary monthly, *View*.

A related view of man's place in the uni-
verse is now being presented to American
writers by Sartre's friend and literary rival,
Albert Camus, who arrived in this country
March 24. Knopf will bring out his novel,
"The Stranger," in April. Justin O'Brien had
an article about him in the March 24 *Herald*
*Tribune Weekly Book Review*. The pres-
ence here of Camus will coincide with pub-
lication by *View* of a number devoted en-
tirely to French Resistance writing and pub-
lishing. Aspects of French wartime think-
ing will also be taken up in a special num-
ber of the quarterly, *Partisan Review*, later
this year. Specimens of recent French writ-
ing are given, mostly in English, in the cur-
rent *Briarcliff Quarterly*. Camus will lecture
in the East during April (see page 1965).

1944

APR. 6, 1946

Publishers' Weekly

VIEW

THE MODERN MAGAZINE

Editor
CHARLES HENRI FORD

Offices
1 East 53rd Street New York
N.Y.

Scottish Distributors
WILLIAM MACLELLAN
240 Hope Street, Glasgow

PRICE
2/6
ALL BOOKSELLERS

For intellectual and
estetic enjoyment
it's
**View**
edited by Charles Henri Ford

## art
VIEW'S covers, all specially designed in color, are noted for their brilliance and originality. No other magazine can boast such an array of cover-artists, internationally known and distinguished in the fields of painting, sculpture, or ballet: Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Esteban Francés, Jean Hélion, Wifredo Lam, Fernand Léger, André Masson, Isamu Noguchi, Man Ray, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, Pavel Tchelitchew, John Tunnard, and others.

## & literature
VIEW, first in art, is also in the advance-guard of literature. Among the writers contributing poems, stories, articles, are: Eric Bentley, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, Kenneth Burke, Roger Caillot, Albert Camus, E. E. Cummings, Denis de Rougemont, James T. Farrell, Wallace Fowlie, Jean Genêt, André Gide, Randall Jarrell, Henry Miller, Jean-Paul Sartre, Meyer Schapiro, Ramon J. Sender, Edith Sitwell, Wallace Stevens, James Johnson Sweeney, Parker Tyler, William Carlos Williams, and others.

Special Introductory Offer to Readers of BELGIUM: Send $1.00 for current number, or $3.50 for a year's subscription, and receive free Poems for Painters by Charles Henri Ford. (Mention this ad.)

Published Quarterly, October, December, March and May

Make checks payable to

VIEW, INC., 1 East 53rd Street, New York 22, N. Y.

DEC. 1946

BELGIUM

LIGHTS ON
IN EUROPE!

For several years many Americans have wondered what European intellectuals and artists have been thinking and creating. Now at last some of this activity will be available.

## View takes

pleasure in announcing an all ITALIAN issue for February, with work by such painters and writers as Leonor Fini, Mario Praz, Fabrizio Clerici, Stanislaw Lepri, Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi, and others.

FRANCE also has given birth to many new literary and artistic reputations during the period of the War. The March-April issue will be a big double number featuring the latest French trends and ideas.

## SUBSCRIBE NOW!

Published monthly eight times a year. Original cover designs in full color. Edited by Charles Henri Ford. Subscriptions $3.50; Canada $3.75; Foreign $4.00.

VIEW One, East 53rd St.

New York 22

THE CALL