The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Company of Colorful Men It sometimes seems to me that most of our books and magazines have been written by Univac or some other mechanical gadget. It is easy...
...The secret, of course, is the barely concealed unity...
...We are likely to get something warm and original...
...In this book he is concerned with French music and musicians of the 19th century...
...The second volume is The Literary Clej (Calder, London, 25 shillings) by Edward Lockspeiser...
...Perhaps he will write about it some day...
...He is a jolly fellow, bursting with English-ness and dripping good humor wherever he goes...
...The whole world and all of history are Mr...
...His thin book of prose poetry, with delectable drawings by Ben Shahn, is called, for no very apparent reason, The Sorrows of Priapus (New Directions, $6.50...
...But the best thing about these letters is that they give us a group of human beings who have not been flattened out by educational and propagandist^ steamrollers...
...It is a fine thing for most of us to live for an hour or two with such men...
...Though our author is a musical enthusiast, he is also conscious of the incidental lessons in European history he is imparting...
...The Mayans communicate with Asiatic words...
...The first part of this close-packed masterpiece is about the gods and writers of Greece, Israel and Rome...
...These rivers," he proclaims, "are immense legends and would cure us of many ills, did we know them, for all nature is our corpus, and once we relinquish a part of the earth, we lose, in some way, the use of our hands, feet, loins and spirit...
...This highly desirable process seemed to proceed more naturally and actively in the 19th century than it does now precisely because governments and diplomats had not discovered its usefulness...
...In his introduction, Mr...
...The darkest and most shattering rituals of the strangest gods are familiar to him...
...When he is in this country he does not allow his deep feeling for classical music to interfere with enthusiastic excursions into the world of American jazz...
...It is a terrific book, a book about the world, the whole world as it stretches in time and space, and about man's experience with it...
...And the glories of the world, which through the years become commonplace and stale to most of us, they exalt in glowing terms, unashamed of exaggeration...
...Dahlberg's domain...
...The swift and pungent references to mist-blurred customs, sayings and rites follow one another so rapidly that the reader must go over many a passage again and again in order to be sure that he has squeezed out most of the meaning...
...Never before were we invited to read so many articles by famous personalities as told to a ghost writer...
...I suspect that he is really thinking about leading his readers into a deeper understanding of the musical works of the letter-writers...
...When he begins to use words, he is almost certain to reveal himself with a special sensitivity...
...The writing in the highest-priced spots is done by teams of authors rather than by any daring and rule-defying individual...
...He speaks of the small worlds inhabited by most of these men of genius, of the walls which formerly shut the French from the Italians and the Germans, and of the personal relations here and there which were beginning to punch holes into this isolation...
...His imagination springs lightly from primitive to modern, from Occident to Orient...
...The second part of this earth-challenging composition takes its chief inspiration from the myths and customs of the pre-Columbian Mexicans and Mayans...
...There is no "ancient" history...
...The English departments of our colleges set the standard...
...Madison Avenue continues the process by connecting its style of composition with all the delectable and desirable products for which it makes the sales talks on television and in the slick magazines...
...Lockspeiser explains that he is publishing the letters of some eight or ten French composers "in the hope of providing a key to some aspects of their personalities...
...Again, the author's knowledge of this impressive chapter in human life is overpowering...
...It is easy to think of reasons why we all putter along with about the same ways and words...
...The secret of the writing game seems to be to wipe out any smell of personality...
...The first of them is Edward Dahlberg...
...It makes no difference in what' medium an artist expresses himself professionally...
...Each one of them speaks his own piece, denounces his enemies, praises his friends, and fights hotly for the art forms he loves...
...Dahlberg is trying to give back to us what is really our own from way back...
...Columbus, Ulysses and La Salle are very close to him...
...Long ago I became conscious of the fact that I derived from the, letters of Italian Renaissance painters a deeper understanding of the great movements of their day than from any other source...
...He has directed the BBC Music Department and is now conducting orchestras and writing music...
...Nations are children everywhere, and the rituals in all countries are very much the same, for they are tributary rivers of the great stream, Ocean, the father of Earth...
...This is a negative sort of introduction to the two men I am presenting in this little space...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 24
