First Person Singular

THERE is something in a landlubber that loves a slow boat and placid water. Canal boats, scows, a wreck that has been shelved on some sandbar — these appeal to A. P. Herbert, Robert Nathan, and me; and if I am any judge, we are all three landlubbers who prefer the sea smooth — and at a distance.Robert Nathan spends his summers on Cape Cod, and his new and very short novel The Sea-Gull Cry (Knopf, $2.00) is laid on the sandbars off Truro and Provincetown. Mr. Nathan is valuable as a poet, not as a mariner, and there are lovely descriptive passages in this story — the Cape under sun and fog, the blueberry patch, the sail home from Provincetown under full moon. But here is little of the enchantment which we remember in Portrait of Jennie, and none of that stern compassion which ennobled his Road of Ages. This is a grim year in which to expect any creative writer to measure up to his best work. It is enough, then, to say that this is a plaintive tale which ruffles the surface of our emotions with its momentary picture of an inhibited pedagogue and a lonely, lovely Polish exile.

E. B. White began to write for the New Yorker: he acquired the habit of the essayist, and I suspect it was this intense concentration on self which finally turned him away from Manhattan and toward that salt farm on the Maine Coast where today he vegetates to his heart’s content. One Man’s Meat (Harpers, $2.50) is a collection of forty-five short papers written since July, 1938 — “a book in celebration of life in a period of violent death.”

I must say that I find Mr. White’s mind a pleasant one to explore. It is as casual as it is friendly, full of odd contrasts and jackdaw fancies. It has a dry, Chablis sense of exaggeration (the dog with the stone, for instance); it has the delightful knack of pairing irreconeilables in sentences that make you snort — as in the Trailer Park where, says Mr. White, “Neighborliness pervaded the streets, and the faint memory of fried eggs.” Mr. White is very happy in his bucolic beatitude, but I find it hard to believe that his house and his life are always as equable as he says. There is monotony in One Man’s Meat — and a limitation which I wish Mr. White would break through. Rage in print is one of the finest things a man can write — doesn’t Mr. White ever get mad? The emotion with which De Quincey spoke of the actor and Lamb of his Dream Children is still glowing, whereas Mr. White does not yet care to show us how deeply he feels.

Perhaps because he is exactly my age, it was my first thought that Stephen Vincent Benét is too young a writer to appear today in his Selected Works (Farrar & Rinehart, $5.00). When Steve was at Yale, we at Cambridge used to refer to him as one of the “Browning or Bust” School. It was a brilliant group: Archibald MacLeish had made literature respectable as Chairman of the Yale Lit, and after him came Farrar, Benét, Thornton Wilder, Phil Barry, Charles Walker, Phelps Putnam, Walter Millis. Their work as it appeared in the Yale Lit and S4N made us envious. Whether Browning or Morris exerted the most influence on Benét the Younger I was not close enough to tell. But watching him write his way to recognition, first with his lyrics, then with his autobiographic school-and-college novel (“one of the required projects in those days”), then with his first short stories, and remembering the time he devoted to the research and writing of John Brown’s Body, I am impressed by the persistence with which he concentrated on American themes and by the enlarging vision with which he wrote.

The poet has always been present in Benét, but over the years it is his superb narrative gift which has gained him his following. To specify his originality, I should put first his ability to develop the narrative poem in those long, loose fiveor six-beat lines which Davenport speaks of, lines which supply the suppleness, the strength, and the variation which a long poem must have. Secondly, I think he has infused his short stories—The Devil and Daniel Webster, A Tooth for Paul Revere, Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer, and even All Around the Town — with a kind of fourth-dimensional magic and that note of nobility which was not often heard in the Long Armistice. Finally, I salute him for his prescience of the coming war. In poems like his Ode to the Austrian Socialists and Nightmare at Noon he spoke out with the cold steel anger of a man aroused. It braces the spirit to read (or reread) Benét today.