wrote to a friend: "You should not <u>MAKE</u> hother about the <u>Irish Times</u> review; we have no critical press in this country.... For twenty years I never sent a book for review <u>in</u> Ireland knowing that any review here would be an attack." In the same way a Southern writer would understand the <u>MADE</u> normality and the <u>consequent</u> need for Southern writers working in terms of groups, and <u>MAKE</u> <u>AND</u> <u>BY</u> <u>AND</u> <u>AND</u> <u>MAKE</u> would be able to understand the attacks on "coterie literature."

JOSEPH CONRAD AND HIS CIRCLE. By Jessie Conrad. New York:

E. P. Dutton & Co. $3.75.

Here the disappointed critic finds not an author in
his study but a wife, very domestic, in the kitchen. Mrs.
Conrad's record of her years of marriage is a masterpiece of
triviality, ~~but her British accent~~ The accent is British,
the logic female. She was patient Griselda, nothing less, to
the great man, as she never fails to let you know. At the same
time she was his mother. That was why she married him-- he
needed a mother. ~~But if we may credit Mrs. Conrad's account
of his whimsicalities and illnesses, he did. Conrad had a
Polish temperament, he had the gout, his manners were abrupt.
But Jessie loved him; she typed his manuscripts(until the very
type-bars flew apart with her vigor) and put them away to be
sold afterwards for large sums (to collectors, not publishers);
she eyed with suspicion such literati as F.M.H., but she loved
the good Galsworthys; she was lame, and they went to Capri;
she suffered, he suffered, it was a hard life, but she is proud
of it. It is a talkative book, revealing mainly Mrs. Conrad,
who always remembers the wrong things: the bare springs of the
nuptial bed, how the various houses were arranged, who called
and when, the cute things the children said. We rarely see
Conrad the artist, nor do we see much of his circle, except as
callers who appear when somebody is in the bathtub or who
invade the kitchen, like F.M.H. and put half-washed, greasy
panama hats in the oven to dry out just when Mrs. Conrad's
good British roast is cooking.

SEVENTEEN POEMS

"If you are in a spherical universe...
you ought to see...what was in the position now occupied by your head."
--A.S. Eddington

## I: If Time Destroys

### 1:

A river on a river God contrived:
Into such flowing Space He gave Time's flood
That drops the minute as an heavy silt.
No flower tarnishes that delta-land
So wet with Time, but near its shore the ebb
Tide shows a brother's face, where shallows drift
The ivory scarp of Galatea's breast:
And now her eyes flash in the instant when
Their blue defines the bright wave spinning there.
Who ploughs Time's plain, no potsherd will he find
In a dead hand; for if he drive the share
Too deep, Orestes will unsheath his sword.

### 2:

Unquiet stranger on the dusty hearth,
Sealy and lean visitor of the Past,
Your path must thread by relics of a ruin:

(1)

This pediment of stone supporting sky.
And when roofs cave and beams and rooftrees sag
Under no Heaven's weight, and fall in last
Fatigue of oaken splinters, when brick walls
Resist no more the garden of the weed;
Embers will you inherit for your kind.
This hearth will warm again with flame of sun,
And green objective eyes will blink, again
At watch upon the flight of transient flies.

3:

Still beating near the Enemys' bloody hand
Is our live Heart, beating with no dismay
Against the knife obsidian and crude.
The Heart still beats. Again Assassins drive
The futile wound into the vigorous Heart,
Warm in the wan flesh we give -- our cry
Of sacrifice disturbs their favorite park.
Tonight let Murderers go by Route 30,
By the eroded land of starving swine,
While now we have a bed to hold our sleep.
Thus let assassins flee with coin. Tonight
The westward-grind of motors -- streamlined steel
Running away -- we hear in sleep. Who dare
Not sleep now seek the rusting crewless ships.

4:

Or Spain or France?

A voice dried from a pit:

(2)

it was a man: and other men like grey
erustaceans of the mud were heard among
their Brothers who were soon and sure to die:
and night grew wide with starry shells and glint
of fire-steel: and out of the barrage
came cries as from a child in restive sleep:
and sounds of wakeful men calling for Sleep
who slept at last too well in difficult
terrain:

or in such fields is murder tried
under another name: and heroes die
and go under another name: and men
die often and alone: and they are gone:
or shaping pyramids such lowly died:
or in the Roman Legions died unknown:
or in the trireme or the galley died
the ancient lowly and the slave: and they
are gone:

and from the Sea and over Earth
their voice is loud again on pitted ground:
now Brothers walk like Owners of the fields.

## II: If Brothers Die

### 1:

Home from the wet and fractured earth,
Out of the bruised quiescent soil,
Comes the man who in each rough hand
Has felt his work's intrinsic birth.

(3.)