Books: Perfume

TRIVIAL BREATH — Elinor Wylie— Knopf ($2.50).

The most distinguished one-time victim of Elinor Wylie’s fascinations predicts of her work that it will sicken and die of its own perfume. For all its vengeful malice the prophecy is certainly justified by so cloying a title as Trivial Breath, and further substantiated by much that follows the title. Mistress of euphuistic words, she is carried away by their glamor, too easily seduced from reason. An occasional poem “makes sense,” but the sense sounds affected. Sorrow is, for instance, one of the emotions the poet rather fancies, and so she mentions it prettily, knowingly.

This sorrow, which seemed heavier than a shovelful of loam,

Was gone like water like a web of delicate frost;

It was silent and vanishing like smoke; it was scattered like foam;

Though my mind should desire to preserve it, nevertheless it is lost.

Appropriate is her supposed method of procedure: she mulls phrases for days on end, setting them first to paper in neat and final typewritten form— but not until her hair is freshly coiffed, her face “arranged.”

Poetry is dangerous metier for so gifted a juggler. In saner prose she has twice acquired merit: Jennifer Lorn is exquisitely humorous for its very artificiality; The Orphan Angel, good narrative for all the beauty of its imaginative flights.