"Some of His Work Was Gold'

From a dusty, thoroughly disorganized Houston bookstore I bought a copy of Turnstile One: A Literary Miscellany (Turnstile Press, 1948), edited by V.S. Pritchett. Much of its literary quality shames today's readers and writers. It collects poems, stories, essays and reviews published between 1931 and 1948 in England’s New Statesman and Nation. I browsed in a library copy years ago, mostly drawn by Pritchett’s name, but now I have read all the pieces that looked interesting. "Our more modest aim," Pritchett writes in his foreword, "is to entertain." Here is a poem by the novelist and non-poet E.M. Forster, “Landor at Sea” (1938): 

“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;

Reason I loved, and, next to Reason, Doubt;

I warmed both hands before the fire of life;

And put it out.”

 

Some readers will recognize the epigram as a snide attempt to parody Landor’s best-known poem, “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher”:

 

“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:

I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks; and I am ready to depart.”

 

Forster’s poem reflects the then-fashionable Marxist-fading-to-sentimental-Fabian-Leftist blush present in some of the pieces collected in Turnstile One. That same year, Forster wrote in his essay “What I Believe”: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Forster’s self-congratulatory soft-headedness could have been expressed last week.

 

Collected in Turnstile One are poems by Auden, MacNeice, Walter de la Mare, Roy Campbell and John Betjeman, as well as Henry Reed’s well-known “Naming of Parts.” There’s a Pritchett short story, “The Invader,” one by Elizabeth Bowen, "Unwelcome Idea,” and stories by Chekhov (“A Fishy Affaire,” translated by the great Irish essayist Hubert Butler) and Mikhail Zoshchenko.

 

Best of all are the essays and reviews. Here’s a passage from a wrong-headed piece by Rebecca West on Kipling: “Some of his work was gold; and the rest was faery gold,” she writes. West acknowledges the greatness of Kim but adds “[A]ll his life long Kipling was a better poet than he was a prose writer, though an unequal one.”

 

David Garnett writes of Charles Montague Doughty’s largely unread poetry, as opposed to his masterpiece in prose, Travels in Arabia Deserta. The latter, he writes, is “told in a personal style, with so rich a vocabulary that the book which is difficult at first, gains with every re-reading. . . . The individual word was all-important to Doughty.”

 

Desmond MacCarthy takes on Chekhov’s work for the stage: “To watch a Chekhov play is to recapture one’s youth, that most uncomfortable yet enviable time when there was intensity even in moments of lassitude, when self-torture did not seem vain, when hope alternately lit up and took the shine out of the present, and when time at once seemed endless and yet impossible to fill worthily.”

 

There’s also an essay on the wonderful novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, “An Austere Fiction,” by the music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor: “Though she could never become a best-seller, there must be many people (particularly among those who do not much care for modern novels in general) who, if they knew of her, would cheerfully undertake the continuous intellectual exercise of reading her books for the sake of the continuous intellectual exhilaration—and something more—which is its reward.” Shawe-Taylor adds, emphasizing the role of a book review as a public service: “It is to them, and not to the convinced Compton-Burnett fans, that this review is addressed.”

 

The copy of Turnstile One I bought is inscribed with a fountain pen on the front end-paper:

 

“To Dora and Franz

with love

from

Ljuba and Erich.

December, 1951”