Crosby, Raymond Ellsworth Larsson, William Carlos Williams, Laura Riding, Emily Coleman, Lawrence Vail, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Conrad Aiken, John Dos Passos.

and
MANY
OTHERS

(Details of Publication to be Announced Soon)

NEW REVIEW PUBLICATIONS

(from "L'Image Impardonable"
of Alain Bosquet)

The need to have you

It is midnight, hour that kills
great flesh and images,
bubbles show on our palms
to break open like flowers,
in us the groaning leper
attains the rain and the rainbow,
all things prepare for north winds:
our ranged eyelid,
our fingers that resemble obelisks
and our spinal columns
cartilage on cartilage
blooming with bites.
You are the sister of misfortunes,
you are the friend of distress
and at the bottom of your shoulders
are sparrows, caravans,
great faces become
marsh spiders,
but among your stars
you transfigure the sonata,
tall plumage, the water-color,
such a poem as moves,
an ocean for your birds,
a happy man like me,
too rich to express himself
and, under your curse
that lives to make me more mad,
a body, a criminal hide,
a body that will no more be fooled,
a body that will not live after itself.

E. M. FORSTER

"Of all living English novelists E. M. Forster has withstood most notably the weathering of time and the tricks of fashion. He is classic." — Clifton Fadiman.

A Forster Revival

Mr. Fadiman's judgment of Forster is typical of the opinion of leading critics here and abroad. E. M. Forster is one modern writer whose best books seem certainly destined to be a permanent and influential part of English literature. But here in the U.S.A. his work is far too little known; only one of Forster's novels—the great *Passage To India* (Modern Library)—is being widely read. Yet his earlier books are equally fine and have gone into many editions in England. Feeling that one of Forster's books is worth, roughly, about two hundred of the common commercial product, New Directions has joined with Alfred A. Knopf, Forster's original American publisher, to make four of them available in new editions, these being: *The Longest Journey*, *A Room With a View*, *Howards End* and *Where Angels Fear to Tread*. At the same time New Directions is publishing an exceptionally good critical study of Forster by Lionel Trilling in its "Makers of Modern Literature" Series. This is an ideal introduction which gives the basis for a profound appreciation of Forster's work. Please see within this leaflet for further description of these books.

Opinions About E. M. Forster

"I think that E. M. Forster is one of the three of four top-rank novelists and essayists of this generation. His style, his sensibility, and his deeply liberal philosophy are the rarest of treasures right now." — Irwin Edman.

"Forster has many of the instincts and aptitudes of the pure artist—an exquisite prose style, an acute sense of comedy, a power of creating characters in a few strokes which live in an atmosphere of their own; but he is at the same time highly conscious of a message . . . his message is addressed to the soul." — Virginia Woolf.

"In the novels of Forster there is great wisdom and magnanimity; he is deep. He is also one of the finest technicians in the modern English novel has had, as I see it. On both counts he deserves the close study of our own artists, and it is needless to say that he should be providing delight to our own readers." — John Crowe Ransom.

## Other Opinions

"E. M. Forster is not the greatest novelist I have ever read, but he is the most readable. One gets involved in his narrative as easily as in gossip with a neighbor over the fence: one word, as they say, leads to another, and, before you quite realize what has happened, you have been asked in to dinner and have stayed the night.

"Forster's narrative method is a very artful kind of syncopation, which misses the obvious downbeats and stresses of normal storytelling, and creates its big scenes by omitting them altogether. He is therefore one of the pioneers of movie-drama, although he has never worked in a film studio in his life.

"In Forster's early novels, the scene is, in each case, reduced to the smallest possible dimensions, a minimum of properties are employed, and the actors seem to have been told not to raise their voices above conversation pitch. The nature and scope of the inner conflict is, on the other hand, titanic. In a seemingly trivial squabble over the luncheon table, the rights of man are at stake: a schoolgirl's feeble protest to her aunt defends the freedom and integrity of the human soul. "Everything matters; every trifle is of cosmic importance" — that is the faith in which these slight, chatty, passionate, wise and unforgettable books are written. That is why — though they come to us with the costumes and accents of thirty years ago — they appear so vivid, so urgent, so utterly undated, today." — Christopher Isherwood

"The hardest task in modern criticism is to find out who were the innovators, who really started something. I think it is clear that Forster did, that novels like *The Longest Journey* and *Howards End* established a point of view, a technique, and an attitude to the reader that were to be followed by psychological novelists for another thirty years." — Cyril Connolly

"Forster's plots have a lithe and graceful movement, as insinuating in their darting charm as Jane Austen's, barbed by wit and comment, and filled with characters who have the art of springing into quick and familiar animation with their first speeches.

"As time goes on these books persist and cut deeper into the memory. Of the English novelists who made their mark between Hardy's retirement and the war he is the only one, except for Conrad and Lawrence, who survives as an intimate force among the younger talents of the present decade." — Morton D. Zabel

"There is nobody quite like Mr. E. M. Forster except Jack Frost. His novels are richly imaginative, wildly and strangely beautiful." — Rebecca West

"Those who only know Mr. E. M. Forster as the author of *Passage to India* may be misled into thinking that his primary concern is with Social Problems. Nothing could be further from the truth: in fact, his unsympathetic characters are precisely those nurses and schoolmasters who want to reform others. Differences of class, nationality, color, interest him, not in themselves, but in the test that they offer to the individual. They are like the witches and dragons in fairy stories whom only the true Prince can overcome, and by whom the selfish and cowardly are destroyed. To me, the peculiar quality of his books lies in the contrast between the triviality of their objective incidents — things that would earn at most a few lines in the social column of a local paper — and their immense subjective significance to the actors involved. The Powers of the Air hover over the vicarage tea-table; a discussion between two ladies in a third-class railway carriage is attended by Lucifer, Son of the Morning. In an age when so many artists identify importance with news value, tragedy with physical violence, this is refreshing. Mr. E. M. Forster is my favorite living English novelist." — W. H. Auden

## The Books

### A ROOM WITH A VIEW

There is something of the flavor and insight of Henry James in this charming, deftly etched portrait of a sensitive girl who comes dangerously close to marrying the wrong man. (*The New Classics*, $1.00)

### THE LONGEST JOURNEY

Forster's most unconventional novel is one of his most rewarding. Here appearance and reality fight their old battle again in the story of a young man trapped in the maze of modern English life. (*The New Classics*, $1.00)

### HOWARDS END

Lionel Trilling considers this the finest of Forster's books and describes it as "a novel about England's fate." Its real subject is the class struggle — not the pro-letariat versus capitalism — but the interior struggle of England's decisive middle class. (*Knopf Alblabooks*, $2.50)

### WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD

Here Forster chooses a theme dear to D. H. Lawrence, the eternal conflict between instinct and convention as it is touched off by the misalliance of a rich English girl and a provincial Italian. (*Knopf Alblabooks*, $2.50)

E. M. Forster

A CRITICAL GUIDEBOOK BY LIONEL TRILLING
$1.50

Mr. Trilling's study is a concise critical guidebook. It tells the reader or the student what he must know about Forster — his background and biography, his methods and objectives — in order to have a fully rounded appreciation of his books. Mr. Trilling begins with a general summary of Forster's work and intellectual position, relating them to the traditions of the past and to the problems of the present. He then devotes a chapter to Forster's life and one to the recurrent themes which dominate his writing. There follow detailed analyses of the five novels, *Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room With A View, Howards End and A Passage To India*, and of Forster's most important critical and political essays. Mr. Trilling is particularly interested in Forster as a moralist and as both an exponent and a critic of liberalism.

Lionel Trilling is Assistant Professor of English at Columbia University and the author of a very widely read life of Matthew Arnold. He contributes frequently to *The Nation*, *The New Republic*, *The Partisan Review*, and *The Kenyon Review*, of which he is an advisory editor.

Published by New Directions

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So sounds grass, and if it is sun or no sun
Sun on bur, or a noise in the ear's burr
A long sleep, and a full stillness.
It is Light. Circles
star.

Bur,
Sum,
If they ask, it is you
Never with wilfulness,

A high fire fills a trench.
Sum, Egypt was a Sum, knows you as
Trench mortar and pyramids.

Sum, you are constructed, as of the tides, of your voice,
Water has this constancy, illness nothing,
By cheek bones
As of two as of many in the hills of Teruel

The guns of the loyal arms
Leaving the hands hanging from branches in snow,
River bottoms
And their shores where river bottoms were.

Catullus viii

Miserable Catullus, stop being foolish
And admit it's over,

The sun shone on you those days

When your girl had you

When you gave it to her

like nobody else ever will.

Everywhere together then, always at it

And you liked it and she can't say

she didn't

Yes, those days glowed.

Now she doesn't want it: why

should you, washed out

Want to. Don't trail her,

Don't eat yourself up alive,

Show some spunk, stand up

and take it.

So long, girl. Catullus

can take it.

He won't bother you, he won't

be bothered:

But you'll be, nights.

What do you want to live for?

Whom will you see?

Who'll say you're pretty?

Who'll give it to you now?

Whose name will you have?

Kiss what guy? bite whose

lips?

Come on, Catullus, you can

take it.

37

1892 - 1941

To be moved comes of want, the want be complete
as understanding. Cast, the statue rests, stopped:
a bronze - not "Grief" - the drapery should take in
body and head. The working eyes discarded.

Characterless lips, straight nose, sight, form no clue
(are none too great sculpture) to portrait or you.
At the seat of government, but a cab's jaunt
from the evergreens raised about the statue,

people count, climb the steps of the Capitol.
Shrubs, close to hands, that age at the visitor's
curved bench derive no clue from its smooth stone or
its simplicity or animal foot ends.

Nor shows the headstone back of the figure's seat
more than a blank emblem of two wreaths entwined,
bare in Eighteen Ninety Two, of our country.
Dark forearm not draped, hand modelled to the chin:

a lady of Nineteen Forty One met by
chance, asked where you could be found, took us three here,
left quickly, said, "The two of them lie there"

(I am one alive while two see here with me)

under the circle of purposeful gravel
feet must skirt or cross to come near the figure
over the gravel as on no other plot, in
"the cemetery known as Rock Creek": the name

gravel, those under. "One's instinct abhors time."

"One oak fool box":-- the pun
Retrieved from past days
Will soon be quicker than the thronged
Waiting room of the terminal in the dimout
In time of war,
When three trains leave within
a minute of each other
For the same place:--
Here simmer the stray words of friends,
Guise of an agitation of electrical storms,
The accelerated impulse and emotion
of events
Under the immense vault with
extinguished bulbs,
In the granite columns
That derive unwieldy acanthus:--
The pun born of an oak file,
Of an aimless card index where there
was peace:--
Dooley said:-- and not so damned mute --
When the story of a great battle is written,
They'll print the killed,
The wounded, the missing,
And the seriously disturbed:--
As if some ancient head
Or its plaster cast,
Colorless water,
Said:--
If number, measure and weighing
Be taken away from any art,
That which remains will not be much:--
At least nothing like an
Appreciation of dawn
After the sixth day of work in one week:--
Or of snow melting from trees
If it falls with a sound of leaves.

Because Tarzan triumphs

See Tarzan the He-man

Go to sleep with his boy in jungle corral

And chimpanzee, the best man, delouse

By the bed, hear that movie house giggle!

Clean, healthy,

Tarzan gives up his bed

One hell of a lush couch -

Thru with women: that girl

With her hair down in the world

Can take care of herself

In his bed.

"Tarzan, boy's mother," he says fondly slapping

The boy's slick rear, and

Reared by the jungle

He beats a man's breasts on his chest.

"He likes swimming," the boy pricks the princess

"Swim with him!"

- Cupid, your thighs do play Cupid, boy,

She won't get far

If she wants his thighs

Instead of high morals.

"She says you're an isolationist, Tarzan!"

Thwarted, the boy dawdles on the syllable *Tar*:

"A what! Boy?"

- Wait till he finds out the goon!

You'll *have* to see how they do it

The evening prices go up when you get down.

"Nazi!" Tarzan says cloyly

"Nazi," Tarzan says

And lures some more celluloid to the lion's maw:

And all this earth's problems are solved.

Man, you have seen

A rain of dried green peas does not stick to a screen,

A non-stop reflector

(Not black like sheets of the sleepless bed).

But an heroic

Which excretes and laughs.