Books: Talking Pictures

LAND OF THE FREE—Archibald MacLeish—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Some time after the Great Depression, Poet Archibald MacLeish, growing more and more shocked by contemporary U. S. social and economic conditions, decided that his poetry had better get busy and do something about them. To carry out this decision, which seemed to necessitate writing poems about matters of immediate popular concern, Poet MacLeish began to top-work his poetry on to popular art forms. First sizable sprout to grow from this top-working was Panic (1935), a graft of lyric poetry on the drama. This verse-play depicted a scene from the currently-expected crack-up of what Communists call Capitalism, capitalists call civilization. Most of those who saw Panic agreed that it was more theatrics than theatre, felt that it only confirmed the general rule that verse-plays should be read, not seen—but also felt that in it Verse-Playwright MacLeish had made some good, if confused, topical points.

Next product of Poet MacLeish’s top-working was a radio-play-poem, The Fall of the City, broadcast in 1937. A radio-studio innovation, it presented Fascism as a spook-in-armor, stalking in on and taking control of a nation paralyzed by inertia, fear and propaganda. Few listeners-in agreed on the poetic merits of what the rather wild air waves had been saying, but most did agree that if Fascism should come to the U. S. it would come as a man, not a spook, agreed also that in The Fall of the City Radio-Play-Poet MacLeish had made some good, if eerie, topical points.

Latest socio-poetic graft that Poet MacLeish has produced is Land of the Free, in which he top-works his poetry on to the art form of the news-picture magazine. In this book, 88 photographs of U. S. landscape and people (taken independently of Poet MacLeish, and mostly for the Resettlement Administration) are “illustrated” by a running verse commentary in which Poet MacLeish says his say about a sweet land whose liberty, for many of its inhabitants, went sour.

What these inhabitants look like, what their share of the U. S. has become, is recorded with indelible indifference by the heartbreaking or horrifying photographs in Land of the Free. They show piercingly characteristic, dead-beat scenes from all over the U. S., with a heavy preponderance from below the Mason-Dixon line. Consequently some may feel that Poet MacLeish’s selection doesn’t fight fair with All-American self-gratulation, that too many of its blows land below the Bible-belt. Most people, however, will agree that these superbly taken, brilliantly presented photographs are the most excoriating testimonial yet published to the gutting that U. S. citizens have given the American continent, and that the continent is giving back to U. S. citizens.

The “soundtrack” of verse accompanying these photographs sometimes runs close to the story they tell, sometimes veers off in its own direction. No photograph in the collection really matches up with Poet MacLeish’s main proposition:

Maybe the liberty we thought we had

Was room to be left to ourselves to have

liberty. . . . or its revolutionary corollary:

We wonder if the liberty is done: . . .

Or if there’s something different men can dream

Or if there’s something different men can mean by

Liberty. . . .

Or if there’s liberty a man can mean that’s

Men: not land.

At this point Poet MacLeish’s verse-commentary develops such an intense poetical potential that its accompanying photographs seem limp beside it. But, next page,

Poetographer MacLeish drops that potential like a hot potato:

We wonder—We don’t know—We’re asking.

Beside its case-hardened picture, this soft-boiled conclusion seems not only limp but incompatible.

Contemplators of Land of the Free will probably rate it above Panic and The Fall of the City, But they will feel both worried and baffled. The bafflement they can blame on a hybrid art form that at least is earnestly ambitious, at worst is a humorless bollix. The worry they can blame on Poet MacLeish’s extraordinary ability to hit topical points straight on the head with whatever instrument happens to come to hand. The conclusion they will probably draw is that Archibald MacLeish is so much of a poet that even his bad books make good points.