ENTER "ENCOUNTER"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 752, 11 December 1953, Page 15

ENTER "ENCOUNTER"

London, November 6 Sits appearance last month of the new monthly, Encounter, may be the end of an oddly unfocused period in English letters. It is only in their absence that one perceives how important were periodicals such as Horizon and New Writing in bringing together separate strands and giving people the feeling of living in a definite time with its own ideas and styles of literature. The rather leisurely quarterlies such as The Adelphi and The Cornhill could not service this function, nor could Mandrake, Poetry and Poverty, and the like, which have the material difficulties that ' are the lot of "little magazines."’ Poetry Quarterly, the best known of these little magazines, closed down this summer, its editor remarking that "it was more than a little probable that the writing of good English poetry has moved westwards and the future is in the United States and the new Dominions, . ." Part of the trouble is that poetry is now practically unsaleable in England. Incredible though it sounds, it was stated editorially by The Times Literary Supplement on October 23 that "A new book of poems, particularly by a young writer, may at the present time be very well reviewed and yet faij to sell 100 copies." The Times Literary Supplement went on to recommend an Arts Council’ plan -which sounds to me pretty much a forlorn hope-under which subscribers should engage themselves to purchase a series of volumes to be chosen by a Poetry Book League. The BBC Third Programme has endeavoured to provide writers with some sort of platform through its radio magazines which are programmes of rather less than an hour containing poetry and prose. But unlike the short sequence of poems-for which, it seems to me, the radio is as natural a medium as the printed page-the literary magazine does not transplant easily into the air. So far the editors of these progrdmmes have had difficulty in getting the prose contributions that wil] give the listener a rest from the high degree of attention needed for the poetry, and,yet not be flat or banal. In the current series of First Reading it appears that the editor may be going to fall back on parodies and impressions of foreign travel to give his readers air, at all costs, between their bouts with the poets. These difficulties in publication have tended to create- probably quite ‘wrongly -the impression of a literary vacuum. So does a rather unreal controversy connected with them that is still

echoing in the reviews. Some months ago Mr. John Wain, the editor of an earlier series of First Reading, was reproached by Mr, Hugh Massingham in The New Statesman and Nation with the poor standard of his programmes. A brisk counter attack developed. It was suggested that a new generation of writers had sprung upmany of them teach-

ers in universities outside London -and that Mr. Wain was being attacked because by putting their work forward in the Third Programme he had challenged "the accepted standards of the literary world of the weekend reviews." It is curious that this argument still continues to draw comment because it is hard to see any difference of literary principle between the participants, As Mr. Donald Davie points out in the November Twentieth Century the work of the "provincials,’ insofar as it has been put before the public, shows "the same false urbanity, the same indiscriminate overplaying of the ironical tone" as that of their "metropolitan" predecessors. Encounter, of which two glossy, illustrated issues have appeared (priced at only 2/6) is a development as novel in its way as the radio magazine. For it arises from the willingness of its sponsors, the Congress for Cultural Free-dom-drawing in their turn strong support from American anti-Communism-to give a shot in the arm to European culture by braving publishing costs and establishing an international monthly in London. In some ways the result is oddly reminiscent of New Writing in the Spanish War days. There are, once again, Spender (who is a joint editor with the American Irving Kristol), Day Lewis, Auden, Isherwood, Koestler, and there are, once again, the onslaughts on totalitarianism. There is even the flavour of an earlier era stil] in the extracts from Virginia Woolf’s diary and Yeats’s letters. However, the reader who falls to dreaming of time past will be jolted back into the fifties by Leslie A. Fiedler’s "Postscript to the Rosenberg Case." This is extremely able in its analysis of Communist humbug but has a ruthlessness of tone toward the unfortunate Rosenbergs that has offended a number of reviewers here. ; The attitude of the other reviews toward Encounter has been, on the whole, a blend of the grateful and the disconcerted. Much of the unease arises from its "negative liberalism," to quote the phrase which The Times Literary Supplement uses to describe "a liberalism whose main positive feature, at least, | appears to be a hatred and fear of Com-. munism." Another positive feature of Encounter, however, is its genuinely international character. This leads to some effective juxtapositions; the two brilliant. short stories in the first issue by Dazai_ Osamu, a Japanese who drowned himself in 1948, fit very well next to Isherwood’s sketch of that "great, unhappy, fascinating man," Ernst Toller. And the main article in the second issue, "Montaigne or. the Art of Being Truthful," by the Swiss, Herbert Luthy, ex-

presses an attitude that could hardly be bettered as a _ starting point for a review -or for anything else. "Every time of disorder," he writes, "is also a time of disordered minds who know all about God and the world, the cause of things and their background, the meaning of history and the destiny of man-all about everything except themselves." |

Hubert

Witheford