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On his parable-play, The Agony of Little Nations: "The only nation, little or big, s the nation of the human body, with the luman spirit in it, and the only agony of hat nation is the agony known to that spirit. . . . Politics is never going to improve the condition of the human body or relieve the agony of the human spirit. War is not going to do these things. ... I am convinced in my heait that neither Mr. Churchill nor Mr. Roosevelt, nor any of their allies or enemies, is anything xcepting a human failure."
Saroyan writes like a fancy diver. Like a diver, he can never revise his act in midair. His best impulses have an extraordinary daring, purity and liveliness. But sometimes they fail to come off, or are brought off only by a fake twist. Like some comedians and jazz musicians, Saroyan is creating a warm and genuine popular art. The question is whether fancy diving can ever become sustained and serious flight.
On the Skids
The so-called "little magazines," whose existence is precarious enough in peacetime, are among the first literary victims of war. With them is silenced a measure of priceless individualism: the quiet, scrupulous use of the creative or critical mind.
England's New Statesman & Nation, Life & Letters, Today and Horizon, which was threatened last summer (TIME, July 14), are almost alone in the world. In the U.S. the Southern Review's death was announced soon after Pearl Harbor (TIME, Feb. 2). By last week two others, The Kenyan Review and Partisan Review, were on the skids and were asking, not too hopefully, for help.
The Kenyan Review, at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, is a three-year-old literary magazine edited by able, fractious Critic-Poet John Crowe Ransom. Better at poetry than at fiction, better at criticism than either, it was until lately supported in part by the college, in part "by annual personal pledges from about ten close friends of the college." Needed: $2,500 per year.
Partisan Review (TIME, May 27, 1940) devotes more space to various hues & cries of semi-Trotskyism than interests most lovers of letters. But in the rest of its pages it maintains the most exacting cultural standards since Hound & Horn died in 1934. Among its contributors: Andre Gide, Edmund Wilson, T. S. Eliot. Needed: $1,500.
Such magazines are often just as trivial, academic or bumptious as those which pay their own way. But they also give superior, non-commercial work almost the only chance it has to be printed.