The 40s: The Story of a Decade (101 page)
Read The 40s: The Story of a Decade Online
Authors: The New Yorker Magazine
By 1940, the war was an incontrovertible fact, and, surprisingly, as Yagoda argues, the poems in the magazine took the lead in facing it. The war crops up even in poems nominally about other things. In a piece of old-fashioned embroidery, E. B. White’s “Home Song,” we come suddenly upon “the soldier’s destination / The sick man’s ward, the wife’s plantation.” The poem deepens in ways that its significant surface charm belies. In Randall Jarrell’s little verse fable, “The Blind Sheep,” the sheep, when he hears from the surgeon owl that the world “goes as it went ere you were blinded,” decides he’d rather stay blind than “witness that enormity” of worldly strife and suffering. Almost a year before Pearl Harbor,
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ran Louis MacNeice’s “Barroom Matins,” whose final stanzas shatter us by their untelegraphed directness. The poem concludes:
Die the soldiers, die the Jews,
And all the breadless homeless queues.
Give us this day our daily news.
Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen” mentions “the war” only once, but the entire poem (among Auden’s most famous and most anthologized) functions as a protest against the forces that make “Modern Man” just a number, his death, as MacNeice puts it, “a drop of water in the sea / A
journalist’s commodity.” Poetry, Pound once wrote, is “news that stays news”; as such, it casts a skeptical eye on “our daily news.” (That rhyme with “Jews” is astounding: MacNeice seems to have divined, before the magazine’s political columnists, where the persecution of Jews was headed.)
These poems measure their own power against the sham claims and rhetoric of institutions, a comparison that is always implicit in poems but breaks to the surface in times of conflict. Langston Hughes’s “Sunday-Morning Prophecy” undermines that thieving preacher by its own setting up of his sermon like a piece of theatre. Howard Nemerov pits poetry’s means of education against “The Triumph of Education,” which, bursting one bubble after another, makes reasonable, modern robots out of the young. Everywhere in these poems we find attacks on the dulling, abstracting, and standardizing forces of modern life, which signals (in Malcolm Cowley’s poem) “The End of the World” not by bombing cities but by stifling romantic love:
Not havoc from the skies, death underfoot,
The farmhouse gutted, or the massacred city,
But the very nice couple retired on their savings,
The weeded garden, the loveless bed.
Against this backdrop, poems that take pains with observation or measure precisely the fluctuations of mood seem anything but slight. They offer what Frost said all poems offer: “small stays against confusion.” This is precisely what Richard Wilbur gives in an early poem, “Year’s End,” when he describes “the death of ferns” and other flora and sounds of winter: “Barrages of applause / Come muffled from a buried radio.” Cowley’s “The End of the World” has become, in Wilbur’s elegant poem, plural and renewable: “the sudden ends of time” brought annually by wind and snow.
Wilbur was a great describer at a time when precise description played a role in proving anew what John Keats called “the holiness of the Heart’s affections.”
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began, in the forties, a relationship with another great describer that lasted her entire life: Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop’s poems are, it would seem, all description; readers of the magazine could find in her the same kind of demonstrably “good writing” they found in the prose. Meticulous, apt, vivid, Bishop would seem to suggest that to be great, poems needed to exemplify only these traits. Who can
forget the “big fish tubs…lined with layers of beautiful herring scales” in “At the Fishhouses” or, in “The Bight,” the water “the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.” But in these poems the details always give way to humor, to tenderness, to wonder. Her poems calmly wait for the enchantment to strike, as when, in “At the Fishhouses,” the old fisherman first “accepts a Lucky Strike,” then delivers one, disclosing, between the lines, that “He was a friend of my grandfather.” Or the way that, in “The Bight” (to which Bishop appended the subtitle “On My Birthday”), the envelopes on her writing desk magically turn into “little white boats…piled up / against each other,” resembling, amazingly, “torn-open, unanswered letters.” It is as though things have to be laundered in the imagination to become fully real. This is precisely the trade practiced in her own “Bight,” the sublime “activity” that Bishop, staring down another year, labels, unforgettably, “awful but cheerful.” Bishop’s birthday gift to herself was also a sublime gift to the magazine and its readers.
Home is the place where the queer things are:
Hope and compassion and objets d’art.
Home is the centre of mind and of liver,
Under the hill and beside the river.
Home is the strangest of common places,
Drenched with the light of familiar faces.
Here are the leavings of last night’s table,
Gloom and gaiety, stoop and gable.
Home is the proving ground of sanity,
Brick and ember, love and vanity,
Paper and string and the carpet sweeper,
And the still form of the late sleeper.
Book and clock, and a plant to water,
Mother of Jesus, son and daughter.
Home is the ink and the dream and the well;
Home is the incompatibles’ hell.
Home is the depot of coming and going,
The last kiss, the first snowing.
Home is the soldier’s destination,
The sick man’s ward, the wife’s plantation.
Home is the place where the queer things are:
Hope and compassion and objets d’art.
Home is the pattern and shell of slumber,
Home is a gleam and a telephone number.
Ever at home are the mice in hiding,
Dust and trash, and the truth abiding.
Dark is the secret of home’s hall
closet—
Home’s a disorderly safe deposit.
Home is the part of our life that’s arable,
Home is a pledge, a plan, and a parable.
Ever before us is home’s immensity,
Always within us its sheer intensity.
—E. B. White
February 5, 1944
TO
SOCIAL SECURITY ACCOUNT NUMBER 067–01–9818
THIS MARBLE MONUMENT IS ERECTED BY THE STATE
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the war, till the day he retired
He worked in one factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors, Inc.,
Yet was neither a scab nor odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues
(Our report on his Union says it was sound),
And our Social Psychology workers found
He was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day,
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And a certificate shows that he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both
Producer’s Research
and
High Grade Living
declare
He was fully sensible to the advantage of the Installment Plan,
And had everything necessary to the Modern
Man—
A victrola, a radio, a car, and a frigidaire.
Our investigators into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which, our eugenist says, was the right number for a parent of his generation,
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd;
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
—W. H. Auden
January 6, 1940
