The Editor in France

called Shakespeare Press, otherwise Miss Sylvia Beach. In Miss Beach's office I met Mr. Joyce—a younger man than I had thought him, a personality full of fire. And I had café-talks with John Rodker and Robert McAlmon, poets English and American who are publishers as well, the one of *éditions de luxe* of certain long-hidden classics, the other of experiments in verse or prose by unknown and otherwise long-to-be-hidden moderns.

A café evening full of color in my memory began with a dinner of four in a little restaurant round the corner from the Boulevard Montparnasse, Robert McAlmon and the David O'Neils (he the St. Louis poet) being the other three. The café had been discovered as a rendezvous but a fortnight before, and to it certain Bohemian groups, especially the American group, had flitted from their other haunts. Ezra Pound came in, and his neighbor R. C. Dunning, a poet whom we published years ago, and Jane Heap with some friends—she hopes to continue *The Little Review* in Paris—and the Lawrence Vails, and Tristan Tzara the original dada-ist, and other Frenchmen whose names are lost in my unserviceable memory. And there was talk and laughter, and a few songs by a new young *prima* or *seconda donna*, and much gayety of spirit. Perhaps a great deal of this gayety and color aforesaid was due to the presence of Mina Loy. I may never have fallen very hard for this lady's poetry, but her personality is quite irresistible. Beauty ever-young which has survived four babies, and charm which will survive a century

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POETRY: *A Magazine of Verse*

if she lives that long, are sustained by a gayety that
seems the worldly-wise conquest of many despairs—all
expressed in a voice which, as someone said of Masefield's
is "rich with all the sorrows of the world." Yes, poetry is
in this lady whether she writes it or not—to those who
know her it matters little, probably, that the Contact
Press, otherwise Robert McAlmon, has just issued *Lunar
Baedeker*, her book of verse.

I saw too little of French poets in Paris, but I must not
close this reminiscent ramble without recording a tea-
time talk with one of the best of them, Paul Valéry, whom
*The Dial* has been publishing of late in translation; or
without an admiring reference to the remarkable trans-
lations of certain English classics by Charles-Marie
Garnier, whose French version of Shakespeare's sonnets,
for example, is an amazing achievement in art and scholar-
ship.

And M. Catel, in a Paris letter which comes in oppor-
tunely, will follow me with a discussion of present ten-
dencies in French poetry.

H. M.

LITERATURE OF REPOSE

I have been waiting for something to illuminate the
road we are traveling. It is not a dusky path; on the
contrary, we are whirled through a gorgeous park where
the flowers emit a light and the lights are fragrant, and
the vista in front of us unfolds its serpentine crowd. Who

[96]

## Literature of Repose

have compared him to a dancer—he is a mechanic proud
of his work. But now he wants to create in the world
of eternity where the tools are stripped of their earthly
elements. Valéry gives us in *Eupalinos* his personal
*esthétique*: this world is that of “exact forces, and elab-
orate illusions.” Art is a dream, but a dream of “august
laws.” Dance and architecture represent the purest
forms of human art, dance with its arabesque, architecture
with its solidity. There is something Greek in the con-
ception and expression of Valéry’s thought. Indeed an
art where the bodily sensation has no part in the birth
of the poem, the melody, or the statue, is an art which
tries to forget romanticism and the Renaissance. Of
architecture and music this is what Valéry has to say:

To impart to the stone, to communicate to the air, intelligible forms;
to borrow but little of natural objects, to imitate the least possible, such
is the character common to both arts.

The whole book is a masterpiece of beautiful language.
Indeed Romains, Cocteau, Valéry, may believe they have
made no advance on Socrates or Malherbe—at least the
French language has gained with them a few additional
chords. Compared to the realism of American literature
of our days, our classicism, which is also a kind of realism,
seems to be more like music: not imitative of the sounds
and colors of nature, but through a harmony of its own
conveying the sensation of an idealized universe.

If, indeed, ours is to be a classic age, it is and can only
be in that sense. Its truth is still the Cartesian truth of the

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POETRY: *A Magazine of Verse*

Mostly, her utterance is a condescension from a spirit
too burdened with experience to relax the ironic tension
of her grasp upon it. The load being too heavy to talk
about, she carries it as she may

In this factitious chamber of death,

making gay little satiric *moues* at us as she passes, and
giving forth sardonic little cries. If, having experienced,
whether actually or imaginatively, too much of life to
endure it, one can't be a saint, like Teresa of exalted
memory, it may be that this lady's cynical acceptance of
flitting inexplicable pains and raptures is but the shadowed
under-side of the saint's ecstatic sensuality.

Shedding our petty pruderies
From slit eyes,
We sidle up
To Nature
—that irate pornographist.

In my opinion this poet's style, like that of many
another radical, dilutes instead of concentrates. The
poem *Parturition*, for example, has lines of tragic intensity
in the realization of physical pain:

I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony.
Incidentally with the exhaustion of control
I reach the summit,
And gradually subside into anticipation of
Repose
Which never comes.

But the poem is descriptive, explanatory, philosophic—
in short, prose, which no amount of radical empiricism, in

[102]

CHANSON GAIE
BY SCOFIELD THAYER

Tell me not the heart tells wrong,
For I would tremble all day long,
Tremble and break in a Flower of Song.

Tremble and kiss the Rose's bed,
Tremble and touch the Sun's great head,
Tremble and break, and Sing instead.

Tremble over the Moon's bright hair,
Waste my tears on the valleys there,
And touch at breakfast Stars and Air.

Take that wild and sunken thing
With the twisted head and the blemished wing
And make it Madrigals to Sing.

I tremble the heart as it were a Tree.
I blow it wide with Minstrelsy.
I cry the rooted Morning Free.

I ask what of it, So Song Be?

MINA LOY

BY YVOR WINTERS

MR SACHEVERELL SITWELL once wrote a very long poem, two lines of which stay in my memory:

> "My natural clumsiness was my only bar to progress
> Until I conquered it by calculation."

As I go through such of Miss Loy's poems as I possess, this seems to describe her. If she has not actually conquered the clumsiness which one can scarcely help feeling in her writings, she has, from time to time, overcome it; and these occasional advantages have resulted in momentous poems. Or perhaps it is not clumsiness, but the inherently unyielding quality of her material that causes this embarrassment. She moves like one walking through granite instead of air, and when she achieves a moment of beauty it strikes one cold.

More intent on the gutter and its horrors than any of the group with which she was allied, and more intensely cerebral, perhaps, than any save one of them, her work ordinarily presents that broken, unemotional, and occasionally witty observation of undeniable facts that one came to regard as the rather uninviting norm of Others poetry. (Let me hasten to explain that I do not wish to appear to disparage Others, but norms, which are useful only as definite places from which to escape. Others seems to me the most interesting single group manifestation that has yet

occurred in American verse.) Her unsuccessful work is easier to imitate than that of any of the three other outstanding members of her set—Miss Moore, Dr Williams, and Mr Stevens—and beyond a doubt has been more imitated. Rhythmically, it is elementary, whereas the metres of Miss Moore and Dr Williams are infinitely varied and difficult, and those of Mr Stevens are at least infinitely subtle. Emotionally, Dr Williams is no farther from what one might regard as some sort of common denominator than Miss Loy, and he has covered—and opened to poetry—vastly more

YVOR WINTERS

territory, so that the likelihood of his becoming the chief prophet
of my own or some future generation is probably greater. Already,
in fact, he is something of this nature, as the Dada movement has
added to the principles that he has at one time or another stated,
indicated, or practised, nothing save a few minor vices. Of all
contemporary poets, he is, I should say, the closest in spirit to
Miss Loy. Miss Moore, on the other hand, as a point of departure,
is unthinkable—like Henry James, she is not a point of departure
at all, but a terminus. Her work suggests nothing that she herself
has not carried to its logical and utmost bounds. And Mr Stevens,
with his ethereal perversity, inhabits a region upon which one
feels it would be a pity to encroach.

And yet I think that few poets of my own generation would
deny that these writers as a group are more sympathetic, as well
as more encouraging, than either the Vorticists or the Mid-Ameri-
cans. Their advantage over the professional backwoodsmen con-
sists in part, perhaps, in superior intellectual equipment, but mainly,
I suspect, in a larger portion of simple common-sense—they have
refused from the very beginning to consider themselves in any way
related to Shawnee Indians or potato-beetles, and have passed
unscathed through a period of unlimited sentimentality. Their
advantage over the Vorticists consists not so much in their having
superior brains, but in their having used their own brains exclu-
sively. Had their own brains been unequal to the task, this would
have been but little advantage, as Mr Pound, Mr Eliot, and H.D.
are formidable rivals, and, it seems to me, genuinely great poets,
but the courage of the Others group appears, by this time, to have
been pretty thoroughly justified. It was a hard-headed courage,
and little repaid by adulation, and is nearly as admirable as its
poetic outcome. One can find little in contemporary poetry of a
similar sturdiness except in the work of Messrs Hardy and
Robinson.

Of the four Mr Stevens and Miss Moore deserve the least com-
passion for their struggle, if compassion is to be meted out—one
suspects that they always knew they could do it; and Dr Williams,
hurling himself at the whole world with the passion of the former
bantam-weight champion who bore his name, has achieved a blind-
ing technique and magnificent prose and poetry by sheer excess
of nervous power. And indeed compassion is scarcely the proper

498

MINA LOY

offering to bring Miss Loy—one feels timorous in bringing anything. She attacked the dirty commonplace with the doggedness of a weight-lifter. Nearly any one might have written her worst poems, and innumerable small fry have written poems as good. Her success, if the least dazzling of the four, is not the least impressive, and is by all odds the most astounding. Using an unexciting method, and writing of the drabbest of material, she has written seven or eight of the most brilliant and unshakably solid satirical poems of our time, and at least two non-satirical pieces that possess for me a beauty that is unspeakably moving and profound. Satires like The Black Virginity and the piece on D'Annunzio need give little if any ground before the best of Pope or Dryden, and poems like Der Blinde Junge and the Apology of Genius need, in my judgement, yield ground to no one. And then there is the host of half-achieved but fascinating poems like Lunar Baedecker. One cons them—with the author's pardon—as one might a rosary, and is thankful if the string doesn't break, but most of the beads are at the very least spectacular:

“Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete”

They are images that have frozen into epigrams. It is this movement from deadly stasis to stasis, slow and heavy, that, when unified and organized, gives to her poetry its ominous grandeur, like that of a stone idol become animate and horribly aware:

“Lepers of the moon . . .
unknowing
How perturbing lights
our spirit

YVOR WINTERS

499

on the passion of Man
until you turn on us your smooth fool's faces
like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries

In the raw caverns of the Increate
we forge the dusk of Chaos
to that imperious jewelry of the Universe
—the Beautiful . . . ”

Such an apology is in itself a proof of genius—and of a genius
that rises from a level of emotion and attitude which is as nearly
common human territory as one can ever expect to find in a poet.
Mr Rodker once said that she wrote of the SOUL (in four capital
letters, unless my memory betrays me) but the word doesn't mean
much, no matter how one spells it. One might substitute the
subconscious (which Mr Rodker doubtless meant) but this word
is nearly as frayed. Whatever tag one fastens to it, and regard-
less of what happens to her emotion in passing through her brain
(which, being a good brain, is responsible for her being a good
poet) one can scarcely help sensing at bottom a strange feeling
for the most subterranean of human reactions, of a padding animal
resentment, and of a laughter that is curiously physical. This
habitation of some variety of common ground, although it may
have no intrinsic aesthetic virtue, places her beside Dr Williams
as one of the two living poets who have the most, perhaps, to
offer the younger American writers—they present us with a solid
foundation in place of Whitman's badly aligned corner-stones, a
foundation which is likely to be employed, I suspect, for a genera-
tion or two, by the more talented writers of this country, or by a
rather large part of them. This suggested development is not a
call to salvation, nor even a dogmatic prediction, but simply a
speculation. If it materializes, Emily Dickinson will have been
its only forerunner.

WINTER

BY MAX ROBIN

A RUSSIAN winter. Hooded and booted, with mitts on his hands and a *shuba* atop of a *polushubok*, the driver sits deep in his sleigh. The frost stings; the sun shines and the glare of the snow is enchanting; but it is cold, fiercely cold, and the sting of the frost is increasing.

It is much better during a snowfall. The wooden sleigh sails through the snow, sails through the drifting snow. You are not cold. The flakes circle, flutter, and float. A far-spreading silence enfolds you, a silence with which you soon merge and dissolve. Till, at length, fatigued with a pleasant contentment, you sink into oblivion. You want to ride and ride and ride.

But the blizzard—oh, the merciless blizzard! The housewife back from the shed with an armful of wood, moans “Cold—cold!” as she blows into her hollowed hands. While here and there it is asked:

“What does one do in the field now?”

Yes, what does one do in the field? One perishes, most likely. The snowstorm rages, never giving quarter. The hapless wayfarer has been flung out of his course. And he sees not a sign of habitation. A stump rising, a pole. What u, emitting, howling enmity, an enmity for all that lives and dares to intrude at this time. What has become of the steppe—so friendly, although it can be gloomy, in the spring and summer? The steppe is mad, madly destructive—but what glorious madness!

Envy the little hut, with its fire. Envy the folk on the sto
and in bed. A hovel, a home . . . Hold to it, that a blizzard like
this may not overtake you on the road. . . .

Flaming cheeks, red noses, the beard hoary with frost; the boots
stiff and the fingers inflexible, the mouth shut, the tongue immov-
able. And still there is life, warm and palpitating, inside this layer
of clothes, beneath this frozen, crusted surface. . . .

They are building fires in the market-place, large fires, scattered