VERSE

Heaven's Lonely Place

Distinguished ladies and gentlemen met in a Manhattan theatre last fortnight to pay a U. S. poet the almost archaic compliment of hearing his newest work and appraising it. They were Poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay, Kermit Roosevelt, Mr. & Mrs. Thomas W. Lament, Dr. & Mrs. William Lyon Phelps, Dr. & Mrs. Henry Seidel Canby and many another including Critic Carl Van Doren whose position with the Literary Guild of America made him a sort of esthetic promoter of the evening, and Mrs. August Belmont (stage name: Eleanor Robson), who read aloud for all. The poet was Edwin Arlington Robinson, of a darkling and somewhat chilly New England, singing the two Isolts and

Tristram, the loud accredited strong warrior,

Tristram, the learned Nimrod among hunters,

Tristram, the loved of women, the harp-player,

Tristram, the doom of his prophetic mother. . . .*

The Poem. Judged worthy of the attention of the members of the Literary Guild this month, the poem, 4,000 lines long, begins and ends with small Isolt of Brittany, whose hands are made to seem more fabulously white than ever set off against the shadowed course of events at a frowning castle across the channel in Cornwall. There Tristram, "orgulous and full of fate," is discovered lamenting the irony of the wedding he has blindly arranged for his gaunt-armed Uncle Mark, a "man-shaped goat" with a salacious eye. Having awakened late to its meaning for him, Tristram has a name upon his lips that becomes a cry, a despairing exultation: "Isolt, Isolt of Ireland!"

He and that dark lady of love cling together on a parapet above foam-spread rocks. The poet makes a marvel of their love, putting it beyond time and space, above life.

Mark's lizard-like son, Andred, steals upon them; then Mark himself. After a baleful interview; seeing that time, after all, favors Isolt and himself; and fearful of changing life's irony into death's futility, Tristram leaves Cornwall on pain of being burned before the lady's forcibly opened eyes.

He revisits Brittany, subdues its horrid Griffon, and, seeing "the still white fire of her necessity," learns to "lavish the comfort of kind lies" on the other Isolt, a child with grey eyes.

When Gawaine comes for him from King Arthur, he leaves her looking off to sea at a ship that will never return, at white birds flying.

Of his sojourn at Lancelot's castle, Joyous Gard, with the dark Isolt, and of her recapture by King Mark, and Mark's defeat by her pale steadfastness, and Tristram's last visit to her, when they are slain by crawling Andred without Mark's command, so that the world is emptied for everyone, bringing the tragic peace that Isolt the darker had predicted -- enough is told to trouble the reader greatly though the sense sometimes becomes so rarefied that one welcomes the voice of King Howel, kind father of Isolt the whiter, saying: "You are not going on always with a ghost for company until you die."

This ghostliness is what, if anything, marks Poet Robinson's limitation. He has written exquisitely of high romance. His lines, flexibly austere, trace out the action sharply and whip passion to its perfect pitch. But then, often, the simple words are tortured and strained deviously to sustain ecstasy, in bodiless comparative discussions of ecstasy itself. Then the lines ache like tendons not strong enough to keep a soaring hawk aloft, needing a gust of action, a wingbeat of refreshed emotion to lift the poem again.

That there are enough such gusts and wing-beats and enough effortless soaring to make the poem great despite its faltering, goes without saying. For the philosophical content it is enough to quote:

Who knows there may not be a lonely place

In heaven for souls that are ashamed and sorry

For fearing hell? . . .

The Poet. Edwin Arlington Robinson -- lean, stooping figure, dark mustache, dreamer's forehead, thinker's mouth, soft hat, cane, shuns women and public speaking -- came to fame in 1905 when Theodore Roosevelt, then President, reviewed The Children of the Night, which Mr. Robinson had written in a barn at Gardiner, Me. Mr. Roosevelt secured him a position in the New York Customs House. He is now employed by Ledoux & Co. (ores) in John Street, Manhattan. On his 50th birthday (1919) a symposium of authors acclaimed him in the New York Times as greatest living U. S. poet. Twice since then, for Collected Poems (1921) and The Man Who Died Twice (1924), judges have deemed his poetry worthy of Pulitzer Prizes.

FICTION

Methodical

MARCHING ON--James Boyd-- Scribner's ($2.50). Jimmy Eraser, son of a Georgia landowner and grandson of the hero of Author Boyd's loud-beaten Drums, hears tales from his uncle of the past glory of their clan. He sees one day the enameled fields and the mansions of Cape Fear, where rich planters raise rice. He goes home unable to forget the beauty of opulent places, still less able to forget the hushed charm of a girl's voice. He falls in love with Stewart Prevost before he sees her. When friendship prompts her to offer him some money with which to get a start in life, he sees in this a reminder of the difference in their stations. So he goes away to work. Then, there is the Civil War into which Jimmy jumps with gusto and out of which he emerges embittered. But the Civil War kills Stewart's father, crumbles Southern castes, gives Jimmy his victory.

Author Boyd has been at pains to produce correct atmosphere by inserting many anecdotes, invented or culled from the pages of musty newspapers. His pains are apparent. In minor characters, in tumble-down witticisms, he never relaxes his tenacious insistence on bare, unpolished prose. Judiciously he inserts pathos, romance, irony, etc. All the qualities present in Drums are more than ever present in Marching On. Drums was a moving, methodical, historical fiction; this is a better.

Parisian Prospero

EAST INDIA AND COMPANY--Paul Morand--A. & C.Boni ($2.50). Perhaps when a Parisian sophisticate visits the Orient he is able to discover there an array of feminine beauty equal to that discovered in Paris, and an aroma of sophistication as pungently delicate as that with which he perfumes his handkerchiefs and his prose. If this is true, the short stories in this book are more than infinitely trivial, infinitely graceful potboilers.

Of the ladies, the most intriguing is Diane. "People were quite ready to describe her as stupid, but her mouth was so red that everything she said seemed intelligent to me." Other stories concern a Chinese curio hunt in which one of the most remarkable curios is a lady's virtue; a treasure hunt which comes near to being a civil war; a horse of Genghis Khan.

In all his work, Author Morand allows readers to see him, a suave and casual Prospero, waving a wand which resembles a swagger stick. He wishes readers to understand how little effort it has caused him to be referred to as the polished Parisian diplomat, as the brilliant, the famed, the witty author of Ouvert la Nuit, Ferme la Nuit and many a shorter turn in the smartest smart-charts.

* TRISTRAM--Edwin Arlington Robinson-- Macmillan ($1.75).