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Familiar Tunes. Publisher Laughlin's name writers are more readable, though all of them pluck away predictably at familiar tunes. Playwright Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire) explores more horror south of the Mason-Dixon line in the story of a frigid, middle-aged writer's passion for a horsy Mexican girl, also contributes some frank blank verse titled Counsel about Paris whorehouses. Expatriate Novelist Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer) writes his way around his subject (Rimbaud) and plunges defiantly into his own thrice-told life and hard times. Most engaging poet: William Carlos Williams, who keeps his verse free and his imagery fresh.
The annual's think-piece, by British Man-about-Letters Stephen Spender, mourns The Situation of the American Writer, finds that "the lack of a middle-sized reading public, independent of Book Clubs and capable of choosing for itself, is the main cause of the extraordinary situation by which talent [in America] is less capable of supporting itself for what it is, and to do what it wants to do, than in most European countries." Critic Spender might also have noted that the kind of haphazard judgment displayed fore & aft of his essay is a questionable boon either to serious literary innovators or their determined handful of readers.
* As a great-grandson of James Laughlin, co-founder of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.