The 40s: The Story of a Decade (100 page)

APRIL 19, 1947

I
t is always interesting to see which way the wind is blowing in Paris. This year, as always, American buyers over there have been cautious about abandoning veteran designers, but they also have suffered their usual schoolgirl crushes on talented newcomers. The hero of one season can be the dullard of the next in this uncertain world, but no one can say fashion designers hold a franchise on
that
particular complaint. At Bergdorf (to get this discussion down to cases), where a lot of new French clothes are being shown to the custom trade, Balenciaga is the old tried-and-true party and the new darling is Christian Dior, who has got away to such a fine start that he must tremble at the thought of what will be expected of him next season. Balenciaga leads off with a black wool day dress that has sloping shoulders, long, slender sleeves, a deep tuck around the bodice to give the effect of a bolero, and a jabot down the front of the longish, slender skirt. He follows that up with a greenish-blue wool topcoat that is extraordinary—the draped back falls in deep folds and then curves in behind the knees, and the wrapped front has a much shorter hemline. Next, he tosses in a more conventional suit of navy wool, which has a straight skirt and a rather long, fitted jacket, made slightly hippy by three tiered flaps on each side at the waist. And so forth.

Dior ripostes with a nice black wool afternoon dress that has folds over the shoulders and a big black velvet bow across the base of the square neck; the skirt, which comes to within ten inches of the floor, achieves fullness with a pleated back panel. For daytime, he takes a navy wool dress, adds a conventional belt and a tiny white piqué collar with ends that knot at the throat, and uses very full pleating below the hips. Another excellent day dress by Dior is a slickly fitted black crêpe affair that buttons down the back almost to the hem and has a high, round neck. A little mustard shantung gilet, tying in back, can be worn over it; taken straight, it’s our old friend the “good, basic black.” When Dior gets eccentric, however, he does it thoroughly. Listen carefully; this won’t take long. An evening dress of a purplish tie silk has a black sash wrapped a little above the waist of a top that is all loose folds, and the skirt is wide at the hips but looks hobbled at the ankles in front. The back of the skirt,
which is floor-length, has a free-swinging panel that begins fairly far up. The model walks, the panel sways, the legs are revealed to a truly startling extent. No comment.

The Bergdorf show, as a whole, provides healthy competition for American designers, but not enough to make them despairingly turn tail and abandon the delights of custom designing for the safe-and-sane refuge of ready-to-wear.

AUGUST 21, 1948

C
ustom has established the right of every generation to shock the one preceding it, if possible, but this is not always as easy as it looks. The plight of the current college girl, attempting to startle parents who survived the Scott Fitzgerald era, is a case in point, and pitiable indeed. In recent years, the young things have been trying to assert themselves by running around in attire resembling that of underprivileged serfs under the Hapsburgs, but their elders have taken it all with discouraging calm, and present indications are that the whole act has therefore lost its savor. Certainly the college clothes being shown right now are considerably less bulky and bedraggled than they have been for some time.

Not that there aren’t still some eccentricities. These occur, mostly, where you’d least expect them—in pants. Knickerbockers, gone underground these several years, are with us again, presumably to the delight of girls who have to find comfort in the notion that
any
leg is enhanced by wearing them. Macy has some that are only moderately full, and come in green, red, or gray corduroy, with notched waistbands and zippers down the backs; $9.34. The same shop has plaid wool plus fours, with elastic across the back of the waist and a fastening down one hip; $8.94. Bonwit Teller show Calfeze, which are slacks that end a few inches above the ankle, cost $14.95, and are made of corduroy in colors like cinnamon, sage, cypress green, and deep mauve. Altman, even more unorthodox, is presenting Spat-slacks—tapering slacks of rainbow tweed that wind up looking like spats over the instep and are held there by a
strap under the arch; $22.95. Believing that most women should stick to skirts and that even the rare ones with Hepburn figures shouldn’t venture beyond conventional slacks, I can’t say that I thrill to such innovations, but on the other hand my readers can’t say that they are not kept informed on vital issues.

As to other vital issues, the news is good. Skirts tend to be flat over the hips, with fullness front and back; collars are cut to be worn either very high or thrown open so that they lie wide on the shoulders; Victorian styles continue. Lots of calico and quilting are to be found, and also fabrics that resemble baranduki (Russian for chipmunk) and ocelot fur. Ensembles are everywhere, and the beloved classic gray flannels and sweaters are on hand as usual. The highlights that follow are generally on the gay side and should suit gadabout working girls as well as campus belles.

T
he poems in
The New Yorker
have a relationship to the page something like that of the cartoons, breaking the even, downward drift of the prose and suggesting, as the cartoons do, a distinct set of conventions for capturing reality. In the first part of the twentieth century, those conventions were completely overhauled, in ways that we are still sorting out. By around 1940, the modernism of Pound and Eliot had been mostly absorbed, though both of them very arguably had their best work before them: Pound’s
Pisan Cantos
of 1948 and Eliot’s
Four Quartets
, first published as a book in 1943. Yeats had died in 1939 after an astounding late period. The branch modernisms, exemplified by Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and others, were misunderstood, if they were known at all (Frost was considered a lightweight; it would be years before his tragic vision was acknowledged); W. H. Auden, who called the decade “the age of anxiety,” though deeply impressed by Eliot, had struck the new tone of engaged sophistication with a Marxist edge. Various homegrown avant-gardes were devised, all of them cool to the touch, each one isolating this or that strain of modernism; George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, and others founded the Objectivist Press in the early thirties, taking the innovations of William Carlos Williams (“No ideas but in things!”) to their farthest frontier. Upstarts had begun to stir: Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop were writing the poems that went into their first books, to be published in 1944 and 1946, respectively.

That’s a lot of activity to keep track of, but readers of
The New Yorker
were spared the trouble for most of the thirties, when light and occasional verse by the likes of Phyllis McGinley and Virginia Woods Bellamy filled its pages. Ogden Nash and E. B. White, whose later work appears in our selections here, were frequent standouts among the legions of wags whose poems appealed to
The New Yorker
reader’s taste and refinement, like the ads that ran alongside them for gin or haberdashery.
Serious poems had no friend in Harold Ross, who had fought Katherine White for years over whether poetry, as opposed to verse, ought to run in his magazine. It was always an uphill battle, as Ben Yagoda writes in
About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made
, and Ross nearly cut poetry entirely in 1937. He backed down in response to a memo from White, but he effectively washed his hands of poetry by delegating it to others, first to William Maxwell and then, in 1939, to Charles A. (Cap) Pierce, who became the magazine’s first designated poetry editor, serving until Howard Moss took over in 1950.

The poems we include here were all published under Pierce, who did three crucial things: he made it right with great poets the magazine had neglected or ignored, like William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes; he found poems that had something to say about the war; and he made discoveries, Elizabeth Bishop foremost among them. Bishop contributed eight poems in the forties, half of them before she had published a book. That fact alone locates
The New Yorker
near the center of American poetry in the decade.