Free Wheels in the Groove

SPEARHEAD (604 pp.) -- Edited by James Laughlin--New Directions ($5).

For the past decade, James Laughlin IV, rebellious great-grandson of the co-founder of Jones & Laughlin Steel, has subsidized a publishing house (New Directions) that has scorned the usual commercial limitations of the U.S. book business. Ready to face financial losses, Laughlin has put out cheap reprints of modern classics (e.g., Alain-Fournier's The Wanderer), little-known but excellent European books and works by young American writers which no other publisher would take a chance on.

Now Publisher Laughlin has pieced and pasted together a decade's representative pieces from his experimenters. Among Spearhead's contributors: E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams--both now established off-center poets; Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, dithyrambling Henry Miller, William Saroyan, High Priestess Gertrude Stein, plus a host of others known only in isolated literary circles.

No Compromise. What accomplishment can these experimentalists show? Spearhead writers are generally distinguished by devotion to what they consider standards of great art. In love with words, scorning the cheap and obvious, aiming for goals that often seem peculiar and are always unpopular, they have resigned themselves to a precarious existence on the outskirts of the U.S. literary world.

Some have created work that may have more lasting value than some of their more successful contemporaries': John Wheelwright's granite-honest poems of moral and spiritual struggle; William Carlos Williams' angular free verse written between his rounds as a New Jersey physician. For most of Spearhead's contributors, however, experimentalism has become an end in itself, a sort of perpetual and meaningless joy ride.

Predictable Ruts. Significantly, the best of Spearhead's younger writers are turning away from technical experiments. In John Berryman's fine story, The Imaginary Jew, in Delmore Schwartz's poetic probing of the Oedipus complex ("the child must carry his fathers on his back"), and in Randall Jarrell's savage war poetry, verbal high jinks are replaced by untortured statement and controlled emotion.

Some never-say-die spearheaders continue to bore the air along their accustomed lines--and with unhappy results. Two pages of Henry Miller's exhibitionist prose, a dozen lines of Kenneth Patchen's apocalyptic "self-expression" verse are all a reader needs to know forever the school of professional literary bohemianism. The shrill, barren exercises in surrealist freewheeling, the turgid moralizing of those poets who have retired to philosophical hermitages, and the vulgarity of the psychoanarchists--all these are dead letters in 1947.

Much of what began as a wild, free upswell of talent, testing new forms and themes, has settled into an orthodox and predictable rut. These spearheaders did add a kind of undisciplined virility to U.S. letters, but most of them now seem to be acquiring literary paunches.

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