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 interestingy. "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”
No comments:
Post a Comment