The Unhappy Writers

"Many times we have wanted to fold the magazine up; it is hard to remain seated on the low hummocks of satire and humor in the midst of grim events. A satirist at breakfast may get a firm grip on his day's work . . . only to have the whole thing drop out from under him when his eye reaches the casualty list."

The professionally light-hearted New Yorker, which last week made this admission, has fallen more & more often in recent weeks into an uneasy, self-conscious mood. The New Yorker has not been alone. A wartime schizophrenia has touched all U.S. magazines trading in fiction and frills. And last week, in the April Harper's, Poet-Anthologist Oscar Williams culled from his correspondence with poets a summary of the wartime writer's dilemma--"a kind of Gallup poll of the soul." No writer was particularly happy in his work. Samples of unease:

Mark Van Doren, Pulitzer Prize poet: "War could be beautiful to Homer and Shakespeare because it could be tragic. It has ceased to be that. ... I suspect any war poet now who says he knows what the current calamity means--including the one who says it means nothing at all."

Geoffrey Grigson, editor of England's New Verse magazine: "Nothing new has happened in this war. Men have been tortured, women have been murdered, explosives have exploded. . . . That helps one, not to be indifferent, which is impossible, but not to be taken in ... by the lewd rhetoric of a war. . . . In this country, the Black Militia of the Pen ask where the war poets are; and they only mean, where are the thumps on the tub, the morale poems. . . ."

E. E. Cummings, author of World War I's bitter novel The Enormous Room: "Why don't our poets and painters and composers and so forth glorify the war effort? Are they Good Americans or are they not? . . . When I was a boy, Good Americans were--believe it or don't--adoring the Japanese and loathing the Russians. . . . When you confuse art with propaganda, you confuse an act of God with something which can be turned on and off like the hot water faucet."

Sergeant Selden Rodman, editor-on-leave of Common Sense, now stationed in Washington, D.C.: "All serious war poetry is antiwar poetry. . . . Some of the best war poetry has been written by poets who have never been near a battlefield--witness Thomas Hardy, Rilke, Rimbaud. But . . . almost all the poetry glorifying war has [also] been written by people who have never been near a battlefield."

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