CHAOS IN WRITING
Shaplen, Robert
Chaos in Writing Reviewed by ROBERT SHAPLEN .YEW DIRECTIONS 10. Edited by James Laughlin. New York: New Directions. 512 pages. Illustrated. $4.50. one READS THE NEW DIRECTIONS' annual...
...But on the whole, the poetry stands out with much less distinction than the prose in this volume...
...The reasons are threefold and evident: literary trends are measured, not jii years but in decades...
...Flobsrl Shaplen ;i tho author ol "Corner of the World" to be published in May by Knopf...
...Nemerov does not glory in crucifixion as Mr...
...are printed not only in English translation but also in the original language...
...Unless tiie visiting lady's object was suffering, there was no way of satisfying her demand...
...fo . THIS REVIEWER, the prize of the collection is indubitably "The Prostitute, her story" in Isaac Rosenfeld's "Alpha and Omega...
...By F. R. Leavis...
...Everything was "scientifically" explained: the murder of General Mikhailovitch as well as the annexation of vast territories...
...I sincerely believe that they are...
...the selection inevitably mirrors the tastes of the selector, as well as the temper of the age...
...And, as annually, the omens are uncertain, the cards contradictory and the stars clouded...
...Anyone who wants to see college instruction in "English" transcend the philological, textual and pedantic Mill hud ammunition here...
...The opening selection in the volume, "America the Beautiful" by Mary McCarthy, begins as follows: "A visiting existentialist wanted recently to be taken to dinner at a really American place...
...171 pages...
...and these are activated by a laudable dynamism, freshness and vigorous awareness of the contemporary scene and its problems...
...Are they insuperable...
...The last selection ('The Mortgaged Heart" by Carson McCullers) ends: "While Time, the endless idiot, runs screaming round the world...
...Miss McCarthy is below her usual high standard...
...German, the romance tongues (including Provencal), Old Norse, and of course English in its different periods...
...The domestic policies of the Balkan states are reviewed with skill and knowledge, and the factual presentation of certain crucial problems, like Macedonia and Albania, is most informative...
...In between are poems from Peru, France and Italy, and by fourteen of the younger American poets, stories by (among others) Rosenfeld, Windham, Fiedler, Nemerov, Bowles, Paul Goodman and the ubiquitous Rooert Pa> few essays, and a stark group of photographs of the ruins of Munich...
...Shaw may be disappointed to find his own work excluded, although he has surely himself provided the necessary criticisms...
...Evelyn Waugh is snappishly amusing on Hollywood...
...It should be noted that in almost all cases the selection...
...Of the dozens of anthologies that pour from the presses every season, few show more than the desire of a publisher to tap a new market or to provide a heterogeneous volume in which there will he something for everybody with the price of the book in his pocket...
...A lover of men and of their literate expressions at their best has produced this study...
...The general reader may be perplexed to find Shakespeare in Elizabethan spelling or to discover that the Glossary does not quite meet his needs in the reading of Chaucer and Burns...
...As far back as 1945, during a lecture tour in California, Dr...
...Neic York...
...What seems obvious to us today was not so obvious back in the days of the San Francisco Conference...
...Obviously the line had to be drawn somewhere in such an enterprise...
...Balkan Politics" presents the problems and points out vividly where the trouble zones are...
...This.book does doth...
...exponent and enricher of the humane tradition...
...It is a pity that the gratitude this year must be slightly tempered by irritation at an introduction which, instead of discussing the selections Or, perhaps more important, the omissions, provides a sort of pep talk on culture...
...Collected and edited by Huntington Cairns...
...Joseph Roucek never belonged to this array of learned but naive scholars...
...God knows, no one who read it there could possibly have forgotten its rather horrible impact...
...The problem is to produce specialists who are in touch with a humane centre, and to produce a center forj them to be in touch with...
...Therefore, let no one be dismayed that the modern Scandinavian or the Slavic languages are unrepresented...
...The criti* eisms, by the way, are almost all brief, since the purpose of the volume is to present the original materials, which range from Homer to Joyce...
...This fact alone should make it a kind of landmark in publishing history...
...Is ( scapism the answer to a world without hope, or is it the time to face l eality a/id to search for the meaning of meaning...
...The detailed methods described are primarily of interest to the college teacher...
...Ordway Tead is President of the Board of Education in New York City...
...Where this was not enough, Freud and his libido was invoked, to say nothing about semantics...
...This proposal, natural enough in a tourist, disclosed a situation thoroughly unnatural...
...a great amount of literature was written between 1944 and 1947, which tried to convince public opinion that the crux of our difficulties with the Soviet Union was the fact that we simply did not understand Stalin and his good and justified intentions...
...George W. Stewart, Publisher, Inc...
...The upshot of this whole statement is at once so right, so elevated and so practical that I commend it warmly to all Americans who want college education in America to be vastly better than it is...
...One wonders whether this story is good, and Tennessee Williams' • "Desire and the Black Masseur" is bad, because Mr...
...firm land is, not yet in sight...
...The few anthologies that try to supply the needs of the reader rather thin the publisher assemble materials which arccither otherwise difficult or expensive to obtain, or which in their arrangement are productive of some new insight...
...The serious reader is annually indebted to James Laughlin for his summary of a year's creative effort...
...Balkan Checkerboard Reviewed by FEUKS GROSS BALKAN POLITICS: International Relations in No-Man's Land...
...The principle of (Selection has baeq„.a simple one: in the words of the pieface...
...Now, this far-sighted observer of the Balkan scene has given us his "Balkan Politics," a volume which possesses the basic qualities of its author: a wealth of infoi niolioii and a realistic approach...
...If proper emphasis had been put on the solution of the Halkan problem, the Western Powers would have been now in a better position to counter the moves of the Soviet Union, and, perhaps, the chances of peace would have been much stronger...
...In general, it must be reported that the dove returns leafless to the ark...
...itsli espeiience and outlook, this .••(..••!.,.< i col time lias much...
...3.50...
...As for the rest, Howard Nemerov's "The Amateurs" richly deserved reprinting for those who missed it in Furioso...
...Price $2.75...
...This work presents selection of prose and poetry that have been held by competent critics to touch, in one way or another, the limits of art" - that is to say...
...A Humane Center" Reviewed by ORDWAY TEAD EDUCATION AND THE UNIVERSITY, A Sketch for an "English School...
...the scattershot of so monumental an anthology (512 pages, 55 contributors) bungs (iown birds of every species...
...The author is primarily concerned v/ith making the study of literature a culturally significant experience - - not in any retrospective sense but as fulfilling the ideas of tho university as ii clarifier...
...298 pages...
...The person who reads French muy be disappointed to find Proust represented only in C. K. Scott-MoncriefT's English Yet these are only minor flaws in an anthology that presents a vast and Varied body of selections...
...Its essential function involves ihe production of both- though to say The educated man' is perhaps misleading...
...There will be— as there happily are- specialists who will be classifiable equally as 'educated men...
...but this center is not best conceived as a standard 'educated man.' There will be 'educated men' with various stresses, various tendencies towards specialization...
...a. A- ..•!, ,.n i-dti atoi This is in- ;.oi i...
...But this is a small petulant quibble...
...Roucek sees the struggle for political power clearly and intelligently, and he explains Soviet expansion in the Balkans boldly...
...Edward Fiess '•* doing fjraduala work at Yale...
...The author reminds us of the centuries of Turkish rule in the Balkans and of the conflicting interests of Russia, Austria, Germany and Italy in this region, and he points out that the tragedy of the Balkans is a common responsibility of the Great Powers as well as of the Balkan peoples...
...Stanford University Press...
...OF THE CRITICS of two thouasnd years, the great, the near-great, and the obscure (like Alexander Dyce and Charles Cowden Clarke) have all been represented...
...in general terms hut i/imuA' t.' . i s|.I'ii upon humane studies is in line with the notable l enaissance of interest in an approach through the humanities in American i olleges today...
...Painstaking care and catholic taste are everywhere in evidence...
...And what implements were used to explain all that...
...In general, how is the literary weather and from which direction does the wind blow...
...We have not," says the author, "to debate whether it is to produce specialists or the 'educated man' that the university should < xist...
...Rosenfeld's...
...The languages from which the selections in this book of almost 1,400 pages have been drawn include Greek, Latin...
...From Homer to Joyce Reviewed by EDWARD FIESS THE LIMITS OF ART: Poetry and Prose Chosen by Ancient and Modern Critics...
...Besides wit and style, it has a full-bloodedness that is consoling in a collection where even intensity occasionally seems anemic...
...The discussion, tor example, of "literary studies," of ' how to teach reading" and of "mass civilization and minority culture" are illuminating and invested with the ex( ilemenl and contagion of the great teacher...
...The fWcignpoetry sections are a valuable contribution, and Renato Poggioli"s editorship alone would invest the Italian "Anthology" with importance...
...It is an important book for all those who wish to understand the political checkerboard which is the Balkans...
...one READS THE NEW DIRECTIONS' annual anthology less for the selections than for .signs and portents...
...I have attempted to show some of the disabilities under which Hollywood works...
...Washington, Bollingcn Scries Pantheon Books, 1948...
...although deriving from a •inroll m i oi '.re...
...The great significance of the Balkans in international politics was largely underestimated by the Western Allies during the last war...
...As might be expected, critics who have been especially oracular, like Saintsbury, or especially ecstatic, like Swinburne, occur frequently, but the total number of selections makes this fact insignificant...
...Feliks Gross is a Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College...
...Williams seems to in cannibalis...
...Chaos without is reflected in chaos within, and the literary renascence remains, as usual, just around the corner...
...This polylingual anthology must have been a proofreader's nightmare...
...and strength goes out from him...
...Let us rest on the gratitude for the consistent endeavor, for the hope it provides, and for a book which contains even one story as gpod as Mr...
...Roucek warned of the dangers which are presently upon us...
...Does Kafka wax and Sartre wane...
...the limits of art is an anthology based on an original idea...
...For what he sees in the ministry of higher education is "the active function of human . intelligence" playing upon the cultural tradition, "amid the . material pressures and dehumanizing complications orthe modern world," to supply a center and spiritual focus where a mature sense of values can be applied to the problems of civilization...
...selections that have earned superlative praise for various reasons...
...6.50...
...Were there many more embarked upon university instruction who believed as this author does, the quality of education would need to concern us less...
...By Joseph S. Roucek...
...Social anthropology and social psychology...
Vol. 32 • March 1949 • No. 11
