Books: Food for Light Thought

THIS MY LETTER—Sara Henderson Hay —Knopf ($2.00).

IN AMERICAN—John V. A. Weaver—Knopf ($3.50).

COLLECTED POEMS—Robert P. Tristram Coffin—Macmillan ($3.00).

HUNTSMAN, WHAT QUARRY?—Edna St. Vincent Mil lay—Harper ($2.00).

LINES AT INTERSECTION — Josephine Miles—Macmillan—($ 1.60).

Busy people drop in at country-clubs, bridge-teas or corner saloons in hope of finding relaxation and entertainment. When busy men and women pick up general magazines they do so for much the same reasons. Editors of these magazines try to sell the public their own private blend of diverting stories, entertaining skits and topically informative articles. And most of them feel that the recipe is bettered by the addition of discreet dashes of something more unconventional, personal, exciting—verse.

Editors who give their magazines a fillip of “poetry” do so with a weather eye on the height of their own and their subscribers’ brows. Low-brow verse gets published in low-brow magazines and highbrow verse in high-brow magazines. But whether high-or lowbrowed, the “poems” published in magazines all answer, in general, one description. Magazine-verse, like the magazines it appears in, is thoughtfully written to be lightly read. However well done, it makes no more than temporary sense to its readers—to whom it gives only a momentary breather from the real business of their lives.

Natural Sham. A typical compilation of 1939 magazine-verse is Sara Henderson Hay’s This My Letter. Its author herself is typical of the many Americans who are harassed by an almost total lack of disadvantages. She has: a genteel Southern education, a husband (Raymond Holden, verse-writing novelist and Book-of-the-Month Club editor), an imaginary small son (who, in This My Letter, is good for 14 sonnets), a home in the metropolis (with a farm in the offing), a poetry-prize (for her first book, Field of Honor, now in its third edition), an entree to radio studios, lecture platforms and the pages of some 25 periodicals (from the American Girl to the Atlantic Monthly)—all crowned with a face (see cut) that would take some women to Hollywood.

Hay writes her verse—as a considerable public will also read it—as a breather from sitting pretty. No cynic but a broad-minded wincer at spiritual unhappiness, Hay tries to reconcile religious reverence for life’s possibilities with lay disappointment in its facts:

This fact is borne upon me plain:

We cannot meet and talk, my friend,

As strict identities, as twain

Who speak their minds, and comprehend.

Not I to you, or you to me

As two—but three confronting three.

I am that self I wish to show,

(Which is the natural human sham.)

I am, as well, that self you know,

And last, the self I really am.

So, intricately joined, the three

Compose my triple entity.

In her lyrics, Hay tries to show up the “human sham” by making candid modern mention of it. But since her verses proclaim the sham “natural” they merely give publicity to what they set out to expose.

“A Bullet Has Went.” The poetical effusions of the late John V. A. Weaver, husband of Actress Peggy Wood, are first-class examples of lowbrowed magazine verse. As such they have the large yet limited historical interest of having been almost entirely written in the no-browed vernacular that H. L. Mencken, dean of U. S. critical horse-doctors, has long plugged as the right speech of real Americans.

In 1919 Critic Mencken, whose ability to write at a canter while thinking at a trot made him a popular literary spectacle, first published his ambitious philological work, The American Language. Weaver, a young journalist who read it enthusiastically, put it to the proof. He sent Mencken, then editing the Smart Set magazine, a piece entitled Elegie Americaine. Excerpt:

Oh God! I don’t see how I ever stand it!

He was so big and strong! He was a darb!

The swellest dresser, with them nifty shirts

That fold down, and them lovely nobby shoes,

And always all his clothes would be one color,

Like green socks with green ties, and a green hat,

And everything. . . . We never had no words

Or hardly none. . . . And now to think that mouth

I useta kiss is bitin’ into dirt,

And through them curls I useta smooth a bullet

Has went . . .

I wisht it would of killed me, too.

Editor Mencken printed it. Weaver received $11.25. Year and a half later, Weaver published a book of verse written in the same lingo, which went through seven printings in its first year. Weaver followed this smash hit with three books of verse; but their novelty progressively dwindled, and so did their popular appeal.

Weaver’s lyrics and conversation-pieces are, almost without exception, expressions of the helplessness of ordinary citizens to handle bad breaks in their lives. His “vernacular” mimics the point-blank way Americans have of admitting helplessness; but it fails to register the optimism Americans normally extract from feeling 100% free to be honest about their helplessness.

Countrified. Weaver’s citified verse offers the general public food for self-pity. The countrified verse of Maine-coast-man Robert P. Tristram Coffin offers it food for self-satisfaction. Those who read verse because they have an appetite for such food will enjoy reading Coffin’s Collected Poems. Into the book Coffin has put some 250 lyrics and ballads, previously published in eight books and in 46 low, high-and medium-browed magazines; and he gives them a dramatic send-off with a 13-page preface in which he modestly blesses himself for being a good poet, his audience for being good listeners, poetry for being beneficent magic, and the world for being a wonderful world.

Probably the most wonderful thing in the world, to Coffin, is his being alive in his native State of Maine. There he summers on either of two farms, coastal or freshwater, winters as an English professor at Bowdoin in Brunswick. In all his books Coffin tries to bear witness that poetry, or at least his kind of poetry, begins at home. “Poetry,” to Coffin, “is saying the best one can about life.” In his early work Coffin tried to say his best about life by loading his lines with mythological, chivalric, floral and religious references. But he soon came under the influence of Robert Frost (TIME, May 15), whose work helped him to see “poetry in common speech and people and in usual sights.”

The best of his Collected Poems are products of quiet observation and loud appreciation.

Cows are coming home in Maine

Through juniper and bayberry.

And half the world is lacy fir,

And half the world is sea.

Along the stonewalls and the dusk The cow-paths come up very steep, The cowbells mingle with the bells That ring on reefs out on the deep. . . .

Under the nighthawks, high and strange, Through beauty which is almost pain, Through wild juniper by the sea, The cows are coming home in Maine. Such lines, like the rest of Coffin’s better verse, will make readers feel that they are being offered complimentary tickets to a prettier world than their daily one. Unfortunately these tickets give admission to no world, but only to the Maine-strewn inside of Coffin’s curly head.

Old Champion. Edna St. Vincent Millay was born a native-daughter of Maine, but she early began to crow like a child of the universe. At 19 she had already written Renascence, a long poem on cosmic possibilities that put contemporary poetry-scouts in a dither of great expectations. When Millay settled down in Greenwich Village, after graduating from Vassar in 1917, she was widely accepted by literary professionals as the most fascinating prodigy in America.

It did not take long for the magazine-reading public to hear about the young Greenwich Villager who let her hair flow to her shoulders when others chopped theirs off at the nape. Her unforgettable name, unconventional personality and well-educated way with words constituted a triple threat against critical judgment; and nothing that anybody could say for or against her work could help or hinder her being popularly acclaimed the champion U. S. poetess of the day.

Since Renascence (1917) Millay has published 14 books of verse that have in one way or another kept her title intact. Though she has shown an increasing disillusionment with the world, the world has refused to be disillusioned with her. She can say that life, which she once felt was a flame, is really a frost, and be thanked for the pains of saying so.

In Huntsman, What Quarry?, her latest book, Millay presents the public with a selection from the lyrics she has been working on for several years. There are not many of them, nor is there anything particularly new about them. Millay still maintains her stoic enthusiasm for disappointed and disgusted love!

Not dead of wounds, not borne

Home to the village on a litter of branches, torn

By splendid claws and the talk all night of the villagers,

But stung to death by gnats

Lies Love.

What swamp I sweated through for all

these years

Is at length plain to me. She continues to write lines that resound with echoes of Sappho and Shakespeare: Now that the west is washed of clouds

and clear The sun gone under and his beams laid by,

You, that require a quarter of the sky To shine alone in: prick the dusk, appear, Beautiful Venus! The dense atmosphere Cannot diffuse your rays, you blaze so high,

Lighting with loveliness a crisp and dry Cold evening in the autumn of the year.

Millay can still give the public glimmerings of heaven, as Weaver gave them shadowings of hell, and Coffin gives them lantern-slides of his native never-never land. For those glimmerings her readers are loyally grateful, even though Millay’s is a built-up heaven, which she has used almost exclusively for high-diving into hell.

Other Guy. There is neither high-climbing nor high-diving in the work of Josephine Miles, a 27-year-old Calif ornian whose first book, Lines at Intersection, contains some of the most expert magazine-verse being written today. Meticulously modern, Miles’s work is too meticulous to be popular, and it has been previously published only in the higher-browed magazines.

In the precision of its language her work puts Hay’s on the sidelines, Millay’s in the shade and Weaver’s and Coffin’s in the sticks.

Miles differs from most magazine-verse writers by getting poetical effects without doing any poetical high-binding. Her verse is a non-diffracting mirror in which readers can see their usual world, reflected in the clear light of Josephine Miles’s day. They will not see their own selves reflected, but only some familiar other guy.

The hosiery salesman walking up the hill Holds out for mercy and receives it not, Perceiving at the top against his will How flat the blocks ahead are and how hot.

In neo-Spanish neatness of design There is a long perspective of arch and edge Of roof and step and little out of line.

These doors will close to his toe one like the rest, The cool interiors be black to his sight, No eager discourse on what silk is best Will sound in his ears right.

How shall a man proceed among the noises Of scooters, rakes and babies on the lawn When the sober Spanish doors and the cool voices Reject all small familiars but their own? Such lines give readers the pleasant sen sation of cutting an optical melon: of seeing something clearly without having had to waste energy in being curious to see it.

Miles’s verse, at its best, accepts the world as meaningless, and discourages any effort that might sap the self-possession needed by those who just want to be sane in a meaningless world.

Lines at Intersection, as poetical psychiatrics, is up to the human minute. No more than magazine-verse as a whole is it up to the human occasion.