On a vast scale, in infinite variety of detail, the Movies show
“The very age and body of the time its form and pressure.”
May not the unforeseen, amazing, ultimate result be to recoil in horror from the image there presented? The Movies represent the quest of joy aborted. Perhaps their true purpose is to bring bitter, but salutary knowledge.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
By Witter Bynner
While poets have been placed by the critics in this or that category and have lent themselves more or less to the indignity, Maxwell Bodenheim has continued as he began, a poet of disturbing originality. Whether you like him or not, you cannot evade him. Let him once touch you and a perfume is upon you, pungent and yet faint, offensive and yet delicate, of the street and yet exotic. It is as if Pierian springs bubbled crystalline from the nearest sewer, forcing from you a puzzled and troubled enjoyment. It is as if a diamond leered or a rose exhaled sulphur or a humming-bird lanced your self-respect. It is a drunken thief’s hand, still deft, in the poetic treasury; nuances pouring Niagaran; sensibilities crowding in masquerade; madness mocking sanity; ideas dancing nude through confetti; a falsetto growl; a whispered song; a rainbow in the loose:—and yet, all the while a human eye watching the incredible kaleidoscope, an eye that sees and makes you see likewise, good and evil, beauty and pain, opposing and commingling their designs. Historically Bodenheim’s work is likely to share with Donald Evans’ very different “Sonnets from the Patagonian” the distinction of having initiated in American poetry for better or worse the season and influence of fantastic impressionism. Evans has now become almost orthodox, his green orchid is put away; but Bodenheim still wears in his lapel the coloured ghost of a butterfly-wing whose veinings mock at human progress.
ON THE ART OF FICTION
By Willa Cather
One is sometimes asked about the “obstacles” that confront young writers who are trying to do good work. I should say the greatest obstacles that writers today have to get over, are the dazzling journalistic successes of twenty years ago, stories that surprised and delighted by their sharp photographic detail and that were really nothing more than lively pieces of reporting. The whole aim of that school of writing was novelty—never a very important thing in art. They gave us, altogether, poor standards—taught us to multiply our ideas instead of to condense them. They tried to make a story out of every theme that occurred to them and to get returns on every situation that suggested itself. They got returns, of a kind. But their work, when one looks back on it, now that the novelty upon which they counted so much is gone, is journalistic and thin. The especial merit of a good reportorial story is that it shall be intensely interesting and pertinent today and shall have lost its point by tomorrow.